Searchable compilation of Press Conference Transcripts (non-COVID-related subjects deleted)
New York City Mayor de Blasio 2020-02-26 to 2020-11-30
Includes Also Brian Lehrer Show Transcripts and Q&A

2020-02-26 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: On behalf of the City of New York, I want to respond to the Centers for Disease Control warning that was issued yesterday and I want to commend the CDC for acknowledging the reality and saying very clearly that it's not a question of if, but when the coronavirus affects the United States in a much more profound manner. I welcome that acknowledgement by the CDC and the federal government. I will say very plainly that on January 24th with my colleagues, I made the same exact statement about the City of New York. So, it has been clear for weeks now that was not a question of if, but when it is important that the federal government is accepting that reality and acting more aggressively and I'm going to talk about things I think need to be done additionally by our federal partners to address this crisis.

No one should take the coronavirus situation lightly. In fact, I think the problem we're seeing in many countries of the world is that there was not an aggressive approach and there was not transparency and there was not a willingness to fully acknowledge the danger. Here in New York City, we took the exact opposite approach. We acknowledged it from day one in a very open manner that allowed us to communicate with our people about what they needed to do. I want to thank New Yorkers. New Yorkers heard the instructions that were offered by our public health officials and they acted on them and our focus right now is on addressing this crisis and ending it, but when the story is told later, New Yorkers will prove that they once again showed strength and resiliency by following through and doing exactly what they need to do to protect themselves and their families and their neighbors. That's part of why we have the situation in this city that we have today, which is clearly better than many other places.

The precautions that were put in place back in January, including in our public health system, our schools, working with our federal colleagues at the airports, have had a very positive effect even against the backdrop of a major, major crisis. So, first information that I want to update you on, on the City of New York – as of this hour, there are no confirmed cases of coronavirus in the City of New York. Every single potential case that was tested came back negative and that is a very good thing. That does not reduce our vigilance one iota. We're in a state of high vigilance, high readiness – all elements of the City government to address this crisis.

We all ask ourselves the question after seeing the CDC guidance yesterday, what would we be able to do if this became a much deeper crisis? What kind of capacity could the city of New York bring to bear immediately want to give you a couple of updates? Right now we have 1200 hospital beds that we can make available immediately for any individual who is in the testing process or who tests positive and needs isolation in a hospital setting, 1200 beds that can be brought online immediately. That is a very, very substantial capacity given what we're seeing playing out even in some of the countries that are dealing with this crisis in a much deeper manner. Already our public health officials have distributed 1.5 million masks in the City of New York. That is a very good start, but we need more. We have requests out for an additional minimum of 300,000 surgical masks to guarantee that these arrive in New York City promptly. We will need federal assistance, so I'm calling on the federal government to help us and all other localities to get the masks we need. Working with the private sector providers.

Now, we need the CDC to help us to help ourselves. Not just New York City, but cities all over the country. We have very advanced laboratory facilities as a part of our Department of Health. Other cities do as well. These facilities are being under-utilized by the CDC. We've made this point now for weeks and weeks. There has been an honest effort between CDC and city, state to try and speed up our ability to do this local testing, but more can and should be done immediately. As our Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot and I were talking about, what's the simplest way to explain this? It's obviously technical. It's obviously complex, how the testing occurs, so I'm going to use very plain simple human English. Right now the CDC posture is they are letting perfect be the enemy of good. We believe that if they would empower local laboratories, we could work with them to do high quality testing faster. That will allow us to keep staying ahead of the situation. We want to be their partners, but we need more flexibility. We also call upon the CDC to add to its testing regimen for travelers. Right now it is too narrowly focused on travelers coming out of China. We think that has to be expanded to any traveler coming from a country that's seen a major surge in cases. We think that needs to be expanded to any country that now has a travel warning attached to it by the United States government. So, I am urging the CDC and the federal government to add the testing protocol upon entry for visitors from Hong Kong, Iran, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. If these steps are taken, I believe it will help us to respond more quickly. It will help all of us to identify cases more effectively and really limit the spread of this epidemic.

Before I close, I'll note some of those who are with me and we will turn your questions, but before I do, thank you. The most important information that has been provided on this situation was the information that was provided by all of us a month ago and I want to go back to it. I know everyone rightfully is trying to get new information, deal with new realities, but stay with the basics first. If someone has the symptoms and a nexus to one of the countries deeply affected, meaning they were there themselves or they are living in the same home as someone who was there or in constant contact with someone who was there and they have any of those identifiable symptoms they need to get to health care immediately. That is what has been working in New York City. We did have a number of people who matched that definition and they consistently went and got health care quickly. They were therefore isolated from everyone else productively. The testing happened quickly. The testing came back negative. So, the real simple basics, if you have symptoms that seem like a flu and there's any possibility of a nexus to travel to those countries or anyone who's been to those countries that's close to you in your life, get to a doctor immediately. Now, a very fair question. What if someone doesn't speak English? What if someone doesn't have a primary care doctor? What if someone is not able themselves, physical disability or some other reason, to navigate the process? All that is necessary is for someone to call 3-1-1. The person themselves or anybody in their lives can call 3-1-1 and if they cannot get to a doctor immediately we will get a doctor to them. It's as simple as that. There is no filter here. There's no delay. Anybody needs help, just has to pick up the phone and they will get help. And the classic obvious advice, better safe than sorry; if you may have it, if you're worried you might have it, act like you do have it. Do not delay. Do not explain it away. Do not hesitate. Better safe than sorry.

Finally, and I'll offer a couple of sentences in Spanish, but just to say New Yorkers, I have often said, do not scare easily, do not get intimidated, do not panic. We've been up against many, many things. We've been up against global health crises, terror attacks, the greatest terror attack in the history of this country against our people. We've been up against any number of crises. New Yorkers are very, very consistent. They're tough, resolute. They help each other. They know how to deal with pretty much anything. So I'm going to ask everyone who is listening to me right now and all my colleagues in the media, this is not the time to sow panic. This is the time to share information and help people understand this can be dealt with. The places that have the problem are the places that did not deal with reality, that were not honest and open, that did not help people understand what to do, that did not make help available easily. We're doing the exact opposite here in New York City. We have the greatest public health capacity of anywhere in this country and we're using it. So there is not a single reason for panic. There's a reason for people to focus and follow through on the basics and if we do that, we will all be safe.

In Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

As I said, want to thank my colleagues who have been at the forefront of addressing this crisis. Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, Dr. Raul Perea-Henze; Deputy Mayor for Operations Laura Anglin; Dr. Oxiris Barbot, our Health Commissioner; Deanne Criswell, our Emergency Management Commissioner; Lorraine Cortez-Vasquez, our Aging Commissioner. Representing the DOE, Chief Operating Officer Ursulina Ramirez; Dr. Machelle Allen, Senior VP, Chief Medical Officer at New York City Health and Hospitals. I want to thank everyone who's here from FDNY, OMB, all the other agencies that are involved in addressing the response. Also want to thank our elected officials who are here and have been very, very supportive and are spreading important information. Manhattan Borough President, Gale Brewer, the chair of the Committee on Aging in the City Council, Council Member, Margaret Chin, chair of Committee on Health, Council Member Mark Levine, Chair of the Committee on Hospitals, Council Member Carlina Rivera. Thank you to all for your partnership as we address this crisis.

With that turn to questions from the media. Yes?

Question: Mr. Mayor, you talked about wanting more flexibility from the federal government in terms of he believes local labs to out. Can you just say like what is that flexibility, what don't you have now? What do you need to do that?

Mayor: Dr. Perea-Henze, Dr. Barbot will speak to that.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So, right now, there is a test that they are finalizing and the very last step is what's limiting our ability to do that test here in the city. And we would like the CDC to allow us to partner with them on finalizing that last step so that we can make that test widely available and get results as quickly as possible for New Yorkers.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I'm going to give you my editorial comment and my health colleagues can – I think the CDC is trying very hard to address this crisis. I give them credit for that. I think the phrase I used earlier, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We believe in a crisis of this magnitude that decentralizing the approach and helping localities that have vast capacity, this is the finest public health apparatus in America right here, you know, get the ball to the Department of Health, right? You know, just focus on where you can get more capacity to speed up the response. So I would argue it is a matter of them being a little more creative, little more flexible to help us do the most we can do. There's real work that has to be done between them, but I think it's been held a little too close. So then a little bit too much business as usual. And this is not a business as usual situation. Yeah.

Question: I wanted to ask about the masks, because I saw earlier this week the OEM that put in an order for additional masks, was it a company in New Jersey. Could you explain a little bit of the federal government's role in this? Is it just delivering them? Are they a hindrance in that or is it true that they haven’t—

Mayor: I’m going to start and turn to Deanne. Again, I'll be the guy who gives the simple, hopefully common sense answers and my colleagues will give them more erudite answers. The problem right now, and you're seeing it around the world is everyone's competing for masks. So the government actually has to step in. This is what a government supposed to do and make sure that they are maximally produced and distributed quickly. So we need 300,000. If normal private sector channels are going to get them to us promptly, that's great. But I don't feel confident of that in this environment, so I'm asking the federal government to actually step in and create some coordination here and some command and control to make sure these masks get where they need to be.

Do you want to add?

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Office of Emergency Management: Yeah, the only thing that I would add to that is yes we did put in the request for masks, but everybody's putting in requests. So there's just a long waiting list and the only way to fulfill that is by the federal government. They have means where they can enact the Defense Production Act and get people to produce these more quickly.

Mayor: I want you to expand on that just for a second. Deanne was a senior official at FEMA, so she understands what the federal government is capable of doing. Could you speak to how that works?

Commissioner Criswell: Yeah. The Defense Production Act allows the federal government to authorize or enforce manufacturers to produce things in a priority and move things down below that priority levels so that way they can prioritize producing the personal protective equipment that we need for this crisis and put other things that are more routine down at a lower level of priority.

Mayor: Literally they have to, in an emergency, the private company has to change what it is doing. You want to finish?

Question: [Inaudible] these masks are for? Are they for health care responders, are they for first responders?

Commissioner Criswell: The masks would be for our health care professionals and our first responders.

Mayor: Hold on, hold on, let it get around a little bit.

Question: For schools, what advice are you giving schools?

Mayor: We've now done two rounds of information to parents and obviously to the school personnel. We're doing another one today. Stay on the basics here. Anyone with symptoms and that nexus needs to get care immediately. Again, and I credit everyone – and I gave you guys an editorial view earlier about help us not – help us avoid panic and help us get out information in the earlier weeks. One of the good things that happened is you all spread that common-sense information and people actually listened. So, thank you. The fact is that we've seen – Raul, seven tested cases?

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: Seven total –

Mayor: Seven total now in over a month, almost five weeks, all negative, which means people are doing what they're supposed to be doing. So, we want keep telling parents, keep telling school personnel – get tested immediately. That is the ballgame. So, we're continuing to pump out that message.

Question: Just a follow-up – are there nurses in schools or is it teachers that are observing children or administrators observing children?

Mayor: Again, I want to start in the home. The most important thing is the people, and the people have been responding. So, I want to just – I understand everyone's going to think about what can the government do, what can officials do, but I want to – this is a grassroots solution first. We also have an amazing grassroots health care world in New York City – nonprofit organizations community-based clinics, everyone's in this together, a great deal coordination. Every New Yorker needs to take responsibility. So, if you have a symptom and you have that nexus, if your child does, act. Now, of course, the instruction to our educators, and I'll start and if our chief operating officer wants to add anything, jump in – to all educators, to school personnel of all kinds, to medical personnel in schools, nurses in schools – if they see a child with symptoms, of course, they're going to immediately investigate whether that's [inaudible] nexus, of course they're going to immediately get them to further care. That's the instruction we're giving.

Who has not gone? Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: To convince?

Question: To convince the immigrant communities.

Mayor: Again, we are very satisfied so far that immigrant communities are seeking help. We've had – every community, of course, matters, every community has been being communicated with. A lot of this has revolved obviously in the early weeks around the Chinese community. There's been tremendous communication, tremendous leadership by Chinese community leaders, elected officials like Margaret Chin and many others, community-based leaders – everyone's doing exactly what we need them to do to make sure people know what to do. The follow through is obvious, the facts on the ground after five weeks show that everyone's actually doing what they’re supposed to do. We want them to keep doing it.

Go ahead.

Question: A little more clarity [inaudible] cpartner with the CDC to do in terms of the test. Is it developing the test with the final –

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: Let me just make it very, very simple. Right now, they're waiting to do all the steps before they send us the testing. What we are asking for is for them to send us what they have so we can partner with to finish the testing.

Question: So you would help develop the test?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: Absolutely.

Mayor: We can be their pure partners. They're acting a little too siloed, if you will. They're keeping everything close in the CDC, but they can't do it as fast as we need. We should be empowered, deputized to simply be their partners to do the testing.

Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: I would clarify that the test has already been developed. They're finalizing validation steps and we want to be partners in that final validation step.

Mayor: Can you say just –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I'm sorry. Hold on. Hold on – dude, dude, dude, excuse me. I said hold on a moment, could you respect that? That's really not cool. This is a very serious matter. Could you help everyone understand what a validation step is? It's not a word that most people are used to.

Commissioner Barbot: It means that there are specific procedures in place to make sure that every time that test is run, you can be assured of the same level of accuracy so that it's replicable.

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead.

Question: Are you saying you don't have the test here.

Commissioner Barbot: Correct. We don't have the authorization to do the test here. We have to rely on the CDC.

Question: So, just a quick follow-up on that. Do you have the operation authorization to do the first few steps of the test or none of the test?

Commissioner Barbot: No. So, we had initially gotten the go-ahead to run the test, and then there were issues found on the third and final step, and so CDC found that there were issues with a third batch – third component of the complete assay that needed to be run. And so, that's the part that needs to be rerun and that's the part that's holding up our ability to run it here locally.

Question: An element of the test itself?

Mayor: I'm going to stop the questioning on this narrow point. Hold on, hold on. We will do a follow-up immediately after this – technical briefing to make sure everyone understands. We should not ask every – you know, I understand that the will for clear information, but this is not going to be productive to keep trying to drill down on something until we can make it exactly plain. Let's talk about other matters. You will get that answer very quickly. Who has not gone? Hold on. Who has not gone?

Question: Mayor, is New York City putting up people who are self-quarantined [inaudible] are being tested for coronavirus up at hotels?

Mayor: Anyone that needs to be quarantined, we'll quarantine.

Question: Is there anybody in that hotel right now?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: We have capacity to have people in quarantine. We started by having three, the last one left yesterday I believe. And so, right now, there are zero people in quarantine.

Question: [Inaudible] in the hospitals.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: They were in the hospital and the hotel for observation.

Question: Which hotel?

Mayor: Again, we're not going to get into that.

Go ahead. Back there.

Question: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: We are not recommending the use of masks. There's a place in a time to use masks. We recommend individuals who may be symptomatic and seeking medical care to wear masks so that when they go to the doctor's office and they end up having either the flu or coronavirus, they don't inadvertently infect other people. But for everyday New Yorkers, there's no need to use a mask. We need to remember what we know works and what works is washing your hands frequently, covering your mouth and your nose when you cough and you sneeze, and remembering, as the Mayor said, if you've traveled to China and now more broadly to countries that have community person-to-person spread and you're feeling symptomatic to call your doctor.

Mayor: Who has not gone?

Question: Do you see any relevance with this experience connected to the ongoing debate for universal health care?

Mayor: I don't want to get into a bigger policy discussion. The obvious matter is, the more health care people get, the less likelihood that something like this gets out of hand. But that's a discussion for another day.

Go ahead.

Question: Thank you, sir. The President yesterday says the coronavirus situation nationally is under control and it will go away and the $2.5 billion [inaudible] should be enough. He’s going to make additional comments later today. Is there any message you feel the federal government needs to know based on our experience?

Mayor: Yeah. I think the honest assessment I would give you is, the federal government's been kind of a mixed bag on this. There are some things I think they've done very, very well. I think they were smart to act at the airports, originally, they were smart to do the travel restrictions. I think it was not smart to suggest there was an end in sight to a disease that literally we still know – medical science does not understand this disease. They literally don't understand it, it’s so new. They don't have a cure. They don't have a vaccine. It is not particularly responsible to suggest there's an end date to a brand new global health crisis. So, that's not helpful. I think having – and again, you know, I can disagree with the President on politics, but, in a moment like this, we are all wearing the same uniform. We all have to address this crisis. So, I think the administration did some very good things, but I think they're sending a lot of mixed messages and they should stop. They should just get a one page. It should be, this is going to be with us for a long time until further notice. We all have to work together. Localities have to be empowered. Localities, ultimately, have to be reimbursed or they're not going to be able to do this – we’re going to run out of money real quick. We should be much more stringent on the travel restrictions in light of the realities we see in the countries I mentioned. The CDC should play a more aggressive role in terms of stepping in where there are gaps, clearly things like the mask situation needs federal – and with FEMA, et cetera – it needs federal intervention at this point. So, I think we have a mixed bag. On the money issue, it's a no brainer. We're dealing with an unprecedented global health crisis. If the minority leader in the Senate, who I have tremendous respect for, is saying – who knows a whole lot about the federal government over decades and decades – and if he's saying $8 billion, no one should be skimping at a moment like this. Get the money going so we can solve the problem. I'd say that the administration would be better served to maximize rather than minimize in the middle of a crisis.

Go ahead.

Question: Question for you, Mr. Mayor. I need clarification on the number of hospital beds. You said that you have 1,200 –

Mayor: Correct.

Question: Now, is this 1,200 additional hospital beds to what already exists?

Mayor: 1,200 that if needed can be used to address coronavirus without compromising our other health care services. Meaning, we can work strategically with our vast public health system and our private partners to free up 1,200 beds in the event of an emergency. We can do that.

Question: [Inaudible] still take care of other people –

Mayor: That's absolutely the right question. I thank you for the question. That's exactly the question – great minds think alike, I asked the exact same question. We obviously do not want to rob Peter to pay Paul. It is a well-known fact, there's been a surplus of hospital beds over recent decades in New York City, so this is not entirely a newsflash. But the point is, when we say we're going to maximize and coordinate how beds are used, you know, prioritize the greatest need, really be agile about how we use them, that's a number we can get to in real time.

Question: Mr. Mayor, if those 1,200 beds fill up, what’s your plan then?

Mayor: We are – at this point, we have zero need in New York City. It's a little hard to articulate to you that I am deadly serious about a global health catastrophe, while simultaneously able to tell you that it has not existed in New York City at this hour, although I'm 100 percent certain you will see it. But I don't need to go from zero to 1,200 in a minute. We've got a long time to ramp up if we ever had anything like that. So, the capacity we have right now is outstanding given the challenge we're facing right now.

Commissioner Barbot: If I could just sort of add that, at this point in time, even though we are hearing most about the number of individuals that have died and the number of individuals that have been severely ill in China, what we are seeing in other transmission in other countries leads us to believe that in other countries the severity is not as bad as we're seeing in China. So, as the Mayor said, we've got capacity and we are prepared for the worst-case scenario, but all indications are that it is a milder illness outside of China.

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] call to increase travel restrictions?

Mayor: Yeah. Again, when the first restrictions came out, I thought they were right, and they helped – it’s part of why we don't have a bigger crisis here. But now we know in the case of these countries, it's just a fact at this point that, you know, they had, each and every one of them with all due respect, an opportunity to hopefully avert this, or maybe it matters we're beyond, you know, their reach. But in the case of Hong Kong, Iran, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, it just stands to reason that anyone coming in needs to be screened and if they have symptoms, they need to be quarantined. It's very straightforward at this point.

Okay, anyone who has not gone then we'll go to people who have gone. Not gone – not gone – not gone – Rich?

Question: So, Mr. Mayor, you touched on it briefly. I'm just wondering, you know, is New York lucky or good here? I mean, how is it possible that –

Mayor: New Yorkers are good. This is really the story, I'm not making this up. It's a very cynical world right now and, you know, bad news travels a lot faster than good news, but people are actually listening and paying attention. Rich, you remember – it's a bad parallel, but I think it stands to reason. When we had the worst blizzard in our history, we told everyone stay off the road, they actually stayed off the road. When we had Ebola, which was horrifying, frightening as all hell, we told people, you know, they could go about their business. They went about their business. New Yorkers are extraordinary. So, I think we're good. I also think we have the best public health capacity of any city in America.

Commissioner Barbot: If I could just add to that, please. I want to just be mindful of the fact that viruses don't respect borders. And while we've been good at delaying, as we have said from the very beginning, it is inevitable that we will have someone who has coronavirus. It will also be likely that we may have a limited amount of community person-to-person spread, and that's why we need New Yorkers to lean in to the messages that we've been giving from day-one in terms of the importance of washing their hands frequently, covering their mouth and their nose when they cough or sneeze, and, if they've traveled to one of these countries and they're feeling symptomatic, to reach out to their provider.

Mayor: Anyone who’s not gone? Yes?

Question: Thanks. Actually, I was hoping to do an off-topic about the sanctuary –

Mayor: We're not doing any off-topics right now. Anyone is not gone – not gone – last call. Come on, guys, real simple – Yoav?

Question: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. I'm just wondering how the coordination's going with this State. You know, when the Ebola crisis came out, there was, I guess, some miscommunication and some surprises. Is everything going smoothly?

Mayor: Yeah, I think the coordination with the State is good. I think the – look, our health officials constantly are communicating on many, many, many fronts, and, right now, we're unified in the approach.

Katie?

Question: I wanted to go back to the hospital – you know, the 12,000 beds that could be made available. I think I asked this back in January, but –

Mayor: 1,200 –

Question: 1,200 [inaudible]

Mayor: That's a difference. Did everyone else – wait, show of hands, who heard 1,200? Just make sure I wasn't crazy. Okay.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Well, I thought I said – did I say 12,000?

Unknown: No –

Mayor: Okay, thank you. The jury has spoken. Go ahead. 1,200 –

Question: Back to the question – so, of those beds that are available, are they centralized to one public hospital? Is that the plan?

Mayor: They’re all over our public and private hospital system? I want to thank for joining us and for his efforts helping us to spread the information and protect people – our Public Advocate, Jumaane Williams. Thank you very much for being here. Go ahead. Did you get your answer?

Question: Well, I'm just curious, is there some – and maybe Dr. Barbot could explain a little bit further, is there – would there be a need to kind of quarantine within the quarantine to maybe keep it to one hospital or one hospital –

Mayor: I'm going to start and pass to her. Again, you want every bed in an event emergency you can get, you want them to be all over, because people are all over. We have a lot of capacity, but you can speak to the specifics.

Commissioner Barbot: So, I want to just start by reminding folks that coronavirus causes a spectrum of illness that can be anywhere similar to the common cold, to really bad pneumonia. All of our hospitals are proficient in treating patients that may present with those symptoms so that the level of isolation that would be needed is in those 1,200 beds spread throughout the system, because the reality is we can't predict where it is that someone will present. And so, the important thing is to have care closest to them that meets their needs.

Mayor: And it's also to your question, an important, I think, clarification – it's not Ebola. You know, this is something that is still not understood, but it's somewhere on that spectrum, as we said, common cold to SARS, et cetera. It's not Ebola. With Ebola – and I remember vividly, and the heroic actions of people of Bellevue – you know, you had to lock down every single step in the process. This was like, death right away if you do something wrong. This is not that, thank God, as we know it at this moment. We take it very seriously, but you can have people in different hospital settings, properly isolated, possibly properly treated, and we want the – I think the real key here is we want people get the health care real quick, so we want decentralization in this case.

Go ahead.

Question: I'm wondering if you have a price tag associated with a response. I think –

Mayor: No, we do not, but we will.

Question: [Inaudible] said earlier today that the Counterterrorism Unit will be involved in response. Why is that? Is there any –

Mayor: It's a precaution we would always take in a crisis, that if we need the folks who are at the NYPD. I mean, look, we have a highly trained group of officers for dealing with crisis. If we need them for any situation, there'll be available, but there's not a particular role yet.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: If I may, Mr. Mayor. lt's worth reminding ourselves that when we started this situation, the Mayor convened a tabletop exercise and Deanne may want to comment on this, but we have a city-wide readiness mechanism that we've activated a month ago – five weeks ago. So, every element of the City government is already on high alert.

Question: Governor Cuomo had a press conference earlier today where he mentioned that they have a number of masks. Are they going to coordinate with you if you need them at all?

Mayor: We're certainly in constant communication coordination. I want to be fair to the other, you know, 10 million or so people in the state who don't live in New York City – that the Governor has to think about the whole state and that's fair. But we're all going to work together. I think the important point is to keep that supply coming in. The City and State don't produce masks. The private sector produces masks and that's where we need the federal government to step in.

Question: So, in terms of the masks, you guys are asking the feds to facilitate the production of more masks and not pay for the masks themselves or both?

Mayor: I'll start and you guys can jump in. In a crisis, we're not worried about who pays upfront. We’re worried about who pays ultimately. So, a lot of a lot of FEMA activity, for example, is you pay and you get reimbursed.

Question: So, the idea is that you'd figure out who would for these masks –

Mayor: The federal government in an international health crisis should maximally cover the needs of localities. This is – anything that is beyond our borders affecting us, the right and fair thing to do is to not take localities that have inherently limited resources and make them pay for it when the federal government does not have limited resources. By the way, there's a lot of places in the country, again, could not pay for it – just couldn't. So, it's get the material where it needs to be. If it has to be on a reimbursement basis, that's fine, but the federal government needs to step up.

Question: The Governor requested the Legislature approve $40 million for the emergency response. Does that number seem adequate for what the City needs?

Mayor: I think it's too early to tell. I think, you know, right now, thank God with everyone's help, this is a contained situation. If it gets more extensive, it's going to cost a lot more. But I think it's the right step to get the Legislature into gear to start putting funding forward.

Go ahead.

Question: You mentioned no recommendation for wearing a mask. Do you recommend that the average person buy masks? Which masks should they buy? And is there any concern over price gouging?

Commissioner Barbot: So, at this point in time, there's no recommendation for an every-day New Yorker to buy a mask. The situation, as I said earlier, there's a place in a time for using masks and they should use the guidance from their individual providers about the most appropriate situations. But we're not asking New Yorkers to go out and buy masks.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: And just remember this, the mask is when someone has the symptoms – it’s to protect others. The mask is not to protect yourself. So, I think it's a common mistake.

Question: So, just in regard to the testing, without going into the nuts and bolts, is the issue of time then? How much of a difference in time would there be in the return of a test if you were able to do it here locally as opposed to Atlanta?

Mayor: And they'll answer, I just want to, again, give you the common-sense answer. If it even improved things by hours, it's worth it, because if you ended up in a situation of real high volume, you want every possible advantage you can get. But help define hours [inaudible] kind of thing.

Go ahead.

Question: The 1.5 million masks – those have been distributed to like nurses and healthcare professionals. Have any of those been distributed to like citizens, non-health care people. And in terms of the RFP or the request for the 300,000, there was no price tag on that at all. You guys have no idea how much this would cost?

Mayor: We’ll come back to you on – I mean, you can give now, but, again, everyone, I'm just going to do a blanket rule. We're not here to talk about money. This is a rolling situation. We're going to front the money we have to, we're going to expect the highest level of reimbursement. That's what happened with Ebola. That's what happened in other crises. This is not a budget discussion. So, you can ask all day long, we're just not doing budget numbers here. But go ahead. It's just not – you could ask, but I'm trying to tell you if you ask, if this is going on for days and days and days and you guys keep asking budget, we're going to constantly tell you we don't have the numbers and it's not what we're focused on. So, this is not the topic. The topic is protecting people's health.

Go ahead.

Commissioner Criswell: Yeah. The only thing that I would add is we're asking the federal government to prioritize the production of personal protection equipment. We have existing contracts in place to purchase this equipment. We just need the material to be there to purchase. Right? It's on a, it's on an as needed basis. Right now we're just asking for the n95 masks.

Mayor: Okay. We're going to shut down in a minute, guys.

Question: [Inaudible] assurances can you give people on public transportation where there's large numbers of people together?

Mayor: Right now, for five weeks we've got, you know, six million riders a day in the subways, and we have zero cases that tested positive. So, there's all the reassurance you need, but this is, again, every single New Yorker is part of addressing this crisis. If you yourself, any individual thinks they have symptoms, you have to do the responsible thing and act. You cannot hesitate. If a loved one sees someone with symptoms, they have to make them get medical care, a parent with a child, whatever it is. So I, you know, this is not the nanny state. This is every human being can do something here. And if everyone steps up, we're going to be fine. I really believe that we'll have cases, but we're going to be fine. So far, for five weeks in one of the largest cities on the earth, we have not a single case because people are actually doing their job and I want to commend all New Yorkers for that. Let's keep it that way.

Last call
Question: Mt. Sinai released a statement [inaudible] their doctors have developed a way of identifying coronavirus through CT scans of the chest. Have you worked at all with them or you – is that another possible way of identifying the virus?

Commissioner Barbot: So, the use of CT scans has been used in China, but that's not a scalable model to test folks.

Mayor: It's a good thing, but it doesn't solve our problem. Last call – Yoav.

Question: Just as far as kind of worst case scenarios, how far do you go in your planning such as the potential for the federal government to seek school closures and things like that? Do you kind of map that all, is that all already kind of—

Mayor: When you tabletop, you're always trying to do worst case scenarios. Now, that's a big, big jump from where we are now. So, I think the – you know, the comments – and I've done a lot of tabletops on a lot of different crises. I think what we would do more normally, would say you go from zero cases to 10 cases, 20 cases, a hundred cases, not shut down your school system. If you had a situation, a particular school, you could deal with that school individually. We don't have anything like that right now, but the fact is everyone starting up that chain of scenarios higher and higher, getting ready. And I wanted you to know about the hospital beds in particular to help you all understand the extent to which we are going to be going in our planning. So, you go from zero cases over five weeks to 1,200 live cases is an extraordinary progression. And we're saying we could do that tomorrow if we had to. So, we'll look at every scenario, but I want to just strike that balance as I close and say, the people in New York City, the health professionals, everyone's doing things right. Let's keep it that way. We can keep this thing really contained. If we do that, we need a hell of a lot more help from the federal government so we can get there together.

Thank you, everyone.

2020-02-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Statement from Mayor de Blasio:

"Today, the FDA approved our application to develop our own test for the Coronavirus. That is not the only good news: after asking the CDC for weeks, they have finally sent us new kits that will allow us to run the CDC's test locally. This means we will soon, within the coming week, have the ability to get results back in a matter of hours, not days. Quick detection is vital to stopping the spread of the virus, and this development will help the experts do their job to protect New Yorkers."

Statement from Health Commissioner Barbot:

"We are pleased to learn our advocacy efforts on behalf of New Yorkers have paid off and that we will soon be able to test for COVID-19 here in New York City. Having tests available will significantly reduce the amount of time we have to wait to know whether someone has the virus that causes COVID-19. This is a big step and one that was possible through our strong partnership with the State Health Laboratory."

2020-03-01 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Statement from Mayor de Blasio:

"From the beginning, we have said it was a matter of when, not if there would be a positive case of coronavirus in New York. Now our first case has been confirmed. The patient contracted the virus during recent travel and is isolated in her home under close monitoring. Our health authorities have been in a state of high alert for weeks, and are fully prepared to respond. We will continue to ensure New Yorkers have the facts and resources they need to protect themselves.”

Statement from Health Commissioner Barbot:

“While we hoped this moment wouldn’t come, it was something we prepared for. Our disease detectives have already identified close contacts of the patient, who may have been exposed, and will take appropriate measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Despite this development, New Yorkers remain at low risk for contracting COVID-19. As we confront this emerging outbreak, we need to separate facts from fear, and guard against stigma and panic."

2020-03-02 NYS Gov. Cuomo / NYC Mayor de Blasio

Governor Andrew Cuomo: Good morning. Thank you all for being here. Let me first introduce who’s here and then I’ll make some opening comments, and then I’ll turn it over to Mayor de Blasio. To my far right, Dr. Ken Davis from – President and CEO of Mt. Sinai Health Systems. Dr. David Reich from Mount Sinai Hospital Systems; also, Ken Raske who is the President and CEO of the Greater New York Hospital Association, I want to thank him for all his good work; our State Health Commissioner Dr. Zucker, this good gentleman you know; Bea Grause, who is the President of the Health Association of New York State – HANYS; Dr. Steven Corwin, who is the President of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Joe Lhota, Executive Vice President from NYU Langone Medical Center, but at one time he had a really important job –

[Laughter]

And we have Dr. Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Health Department. The – first, we’re going to speak about the situation that was reported last night with a person who tested positive for the coronavirus. That woman is a health care worker, she’s 39 years old, she had been working in Iran and came back on Tuesday to New York. She did not take any public transportation. As she was a health care worker, she was very aware of the situation and the potential for this situation. We don’t believe that she was contagious when she was on the plane, or when she took a private car from the airport to her residence. But out of an abundance of caution we will be contacting the people who were on the flight with her from Iran to New York. And the driver of that car service. We’ll be contacting and following up with them as the facts dictate. The health care worker also was with her spouse. He was also a health care worker. So they were both aware of the situation. Her husband is being tested also, but we are assuming that he would be positive in the circumstances, and he has been following the same protocols that she has been following. The testing was done at Mount Sinai. Again, since they were health care workers, they’ve contacted Mount Sinai before that they were coming in and they took all precautions necessary. They are at home, at their home, she – the health care worker has manifested some respiratory illnesses, but her condition is mild, so she’s at home, and she’s not even hospitalized, even though she has tested positive for the virus, her spouse is with her.

In general, there is no doubt that there will be more cases where we find people who test positive. We said early on, it wasn’t a question of if, but when. This is New York, we’re a gateway to the world. You see all these cases around the world, around the country, of course we’re going to have it here. And that’s why the whole challenge is about containment of the number of people who become exposed and who become infected. Our challenge now is to test as many people as you can. You’re not going to eliminate the spread but you can limit the spread. And testing is very important, and that’s why the CDC, the federal government’s now allowing us to test is a very big deal, and will make – have a dramatic effect on how quickly we can mobilize and respond. We are coordinating with private hospitals, private labs around the state. We want to get our testing capacity as high as possible. I said to the people around this table that I would like to have a goal of one thousand tests per day, capacity, within one week, because again, the more testing the better. Once you can test and find a person who’s positive, than you can isolate that person so they don’t infect additional people.

We’ll be moving a piece of emergency legislation on the stateside that will authorize an additional 40 million for additional staff, additional equipment. I want to make sure that the health care system has everything it needs. We’re going to be instituting new cleaning protocols in our schools, on public transportation, et cetera, where they will use a disinfectant. Many will use bleach, which is a good protocol in the flu season anyway. So, if people smell – if it smells like bleach when you get on a bus or when a child goes to school, it’s not bad cologne or perfume, it is bleach. And again, we’re going to be focusing on our facilities that treat our senior citizens, debilitated people, or immune-compromised people, because those are the people who are most likely most affected by this virus.

My last point is this. Late last night, my daughter called me, and I could hear in her voice that she was anxious. She had seen on the news that a person tested positive. And my daughter said “what’s this” and I could hear in her voice she was nervous, and my daughter said don’t tell me to relax, tell me why I should be relaxed. Which is a very big difference there. So, I want to make sure I tell the people of New York what I told my daughter – in this situation, the facts defeat fear, because the reality is reassuring. It is deep breath time. This – first of all, this is not our first rodeo with this time of situation in New York. In 1968, we had the Honk Kong flu. In 2009, we had the Swine flu, where we actually closed like 100 schools in New York State. Avian flu, Ebola, SARS, MERS, measles, right? So, we have gone through this before. When you look at the reality here, about 80 percent of the people who are infected with the coronavirus self-resolve. They have symptoms, the symptoms are similar to what you would have with the normal flu, and for most people, they treat themselves, over 80 percent, and the virus resolves that way. About 20 percent get ill. The mortality rate is estimated to be about 1.4 percent. 1.4 percent, what does that mean? The normal flu mortality rate is about 0.6 percent, and the CDC says 1.4, but they’re extrapolating from what we know from countries around the world. First, even on the 1.4 percent, again that is – tends to be people who are debilitated, senior-citizens, many of whom have an underlying illness – that tends to be the people who are vulnerable to this. Good news, children do not appear as vulnerable to this virus. Less vulnerable than to the normal flu. So, that is good news, but 1.4 percent, that’s extrapolating from China and other countries. 80 percent, it’ll resolve on their own. The woman who has now tested positive, she’s at home, she’s not even in a hospital, so the perspective here is important. And the facts, once you know the facts, once you know the reality, it is reassuring, and we should relax, because that’s what’s dictated by the reality of the situation. I get the emotion, I understand, I understand the anxiety. I’m a native-born New Yorker, we live with anxiety. But the facts don’t back it up here. Also, we’re extrapolating from what happened in China and other countries – we have the best health care system in the world here. And excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers – I speak for the Mayor also on this one – we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York. So, when you’re saying, what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries. We are fully coordinated, we are fully mobilized. This is all about mobilization of a public health system – getting the testing done, getting the information out, and then having the health care resources to treat people who are going to need help. Again that is going to be primarily senior citizens, people who are debilitated, and we are going to have a special effort for our nursing homes, et cetera – congregate facilities where senior citizens are being treated.

And I can’t thank our partners enough. Everybody is doing exactly what we need to do. We have been ahead of this from day one. It was a big break when the federal government allowed us to do our testing because now we are actually in control of the system ourselves. And as New Yorkers, we like control.

[Laughter]

So, with that, let me turn it over to the good Mayor of the City of New York.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you very much, Governor. And Governor, first of all, a compliment to your daughter. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. She is asking the tough isocratic questions that I know you’re known for and I think it’s a really great vignette to use to help everyone understand what’s going on. And particularly – look, as a parent I want to say I know parents all over the city have been deeply concerned. I really want you to heed the points that the Governor just made. This is a disease we’re learning about, the international medical community is learning about. But so far, it does not seem to be a disease that focuses on our kids – in fact, the opposite. But the point – the vignette with your daughter, that in fact the facts are reassuring. All New Yorkers should really pay attention to this.

We have a lot of information now, information that is actually showing us things that should give us more reason to stay calm and go about our lives. Also, if I have one difference with the Governor’s remarks it’s that we don’t think we have the best health care system in the country or in the world, we know we do, and it’s a credit to everyone here and I want to thank each and every one of you and all the professionals who work with you in –

Governor Cuomo: [Inaudible] credit to us, no?

[Laughter]

Mayor: [Inaudible] take it. But in the private, in the voluntary hospitals, our nonprofit health care providers, and our public health care system, there is literally no parallel on Earth. So, there’s a lot of places for New Yorkers to turn for help and I want to emphasize today how important it is to turn for that help, to go get that help the second you think you might need it. So, the facts, in fact, show us that this is a situation that can be managed but bluntly what has been the advantage here in New York – we’ve kind of been the anti-China in this sense – has been to say from the beginning, it’s coming here, it’s a real thing, everyone get ready for it, to be transparent, to be open about it from day one.

And the coordination between the City and State, as is always the case on these issues of health care, has been consistent and strong from the beginning. I want to thank you and your team, Governor, for that. So, the fact is we have told New Yorkers from the beginning, get ready, here it comes, we’re going to all be able to deal with it together. By the way, crucially important – the message to New Yorkers from the beginning has been, this is something we all can handle together, go about your lives, go about your business. People are doing that consistently. New Yorkers do not scare easily, do not intimidate easily. Second, we’ve said if you have the symptoms and have any nexus to the nation’s where the issue is profound at this point, go get health care.

Guess what? People have been doing that. The reason it’s taken all this time to get the first case – I fundamentally believe it’s a matter of common sense – is that people have been heeding the warnings, going and getting tested, going and getting checked on, and that’s helped us to stay ahead of it. Now, we need to keep doing that. Obviously, if you have the symptoms and you have a nexus to the nations that are suffering the most, whether it’s you yourself who travelled or a family member or loved one or someone you’re in close, close contact with, go get help. Get to a medical facility, get to a doctor immediately. It’s crucial to understand – and this is again an evolving situation. I’m briefed constantly by our health care professionals. No one is saying they know everything about coronavirus yet, but we do know a lot.

But this is not, so far, something that you get through casual contact. There has to be some prolonged exposure. And I think it’s really important to get that information out to all New Yorkers. People need to be aware of their patterns. If you’ve had contact with someone who may have had a nexus to one of those countries, that’s an important indicator. Act on it. Listen, there was some question earlier about – in the last few days – about whether you go directly to health care or you place a call first. Here’s the bottom line – don’t hesitate to get to a doctor or a health care facility. If you can call first and let them know that you’re coming and let them know your symptoms, that’s ideal and helpful but the most important thing is not to hesitate. We all know a lot of people – and particularly New Yorkers – tend to shrug things off, tend to say, ‘I’ll get to it when I get it or my schedule is so busy, I’ve got something else I have to do.’ That’s not the way to think about this. If you have the symptoms, if there’s any possibility it may be this disease, get to health care right away.

I want to also say that the case here that the Governor described is an example of the work that is done and we all know this, we remember when we all went through Ebola together and other situations. And I appreciate the Governor’s point – we have been down this road as a city, as a state many times before. We have disease detectives at the New York City Department of Health. The New York City Health Department is renowned all over the world, one of the great public health agencies on Earth. Disease detectives who literally track back everyone’s interactions if they contract a disease, do the work to figure out who they’ve come in contact with. As the Governor said, in this case this individual has only one person they’ve been in prolonged contact with, that’s their husband. That capacity has been honed over years. So, if we have other cases, we’re going to be able to do very fine tuned work to know who those individuals come in contact with, and do the kind of follow-up we need.

Finally, the key point about having the ability to do our own testing – the City and State are working together with the Wadsworth Lab, the state lab. They’ve been fantastic, we’ve been able to get a lot done. We’re going to be able to do so much more now starting this week. The city’s capacity will be up and running for the testing as of Friday. That means results will come in hours, not days. This is going to be a much better situation for all of us. In addition, we’re initiating this week an early detection system. We’re working with a number of hospital systems to bring together information gleaned from thousands of health care professionals as they are having appointments with individual patients and there are cases that have relevance here – respiratory diseases. The information coming from those visits is going to be pooled to watch for any trends, to watch for any areas where we need to do additional outreach or work at the neighborhood level.

This is very much a grassroots reality, how you address something like this. It’s making sure the information flows right down into each neighborhood, into each household, it’s making sure that we have people out there giving people accurate information. It’s making sure if someone needs help they can get it. And I want to emphasize to all New Yorkers – there are people in this city who right now feel they need to get to a doctor but don’t know how, they don’t have their own doctor, they don’t know if they can pay for it, they don’t happen to speak English, they don’t have a way to get to the doctor, they may be disabled. Whatever it is, call 3-1-1. Here’s a simple message. If you think you need care, if you are worried you have the symptoms of coronavirus and you don’t know where to turn, pick up the phone, call 3-1-1. We will help you get to the health care you need. If we need to send someone to you, we will send someone to you. But no one should hesitate. The best thing you can do for yourself and your family and all fellow New Yorkers is get to health care immediately if you think you have that need.

So, with that – and I’ll just conclude with the basics. Remember, everyone, as our Health Commissioner Dr. Barbot likes to constantly remind us, cover your mouth when you cough and sneeze. It’s amazing that that may be the single most valuable thing people can do to address this challenge. Just the basics – wash your hands frequently. If you think you may be sick, act like you are sick, and do something about it. These are really basic rules. If people follow those rules – and I think New Yorkers have been up to date – it will make all the difference in the world. So, following those simple precautions will help us a lot.

And again thank you to Dr. Barbot, our Health Commissioner, Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze of Health and Human Services, and our whole team that’s been working with the State to prepare for this day. And now, we will all be working together to address this challenge.

Governor Cuomo: Well said. Questions?

Question: Governor, can you [inaudible] to a patient zero or is it possible multiple [inaudible] were affected and can ever spring up simultaneously perhaps [inaudible] –

Governor Cuomo: Patient zero is called China, right? And beyond that, China does the tracking. Community spread is going to be real, right? Thus far we've had – you can trace it back to an individual or someone who came from overseas, but we're seeing already on the west coast that there's then community spread where you lose the causal connection along the way. And we believe that's going to happen here. So, we will have more cases, we will have community spread – that is inevitable. And we're in this cycle – well, did anyone test positive – did anyone test positive? I've been saying for weeks people are going to test positive – not just one or two or three or five, there will be many who test positive. That's a false bar that we've set. And you will have community spread where people test positive and you can't track it back to any one causal length. The testing and increasing the testing capacity – and that's why we just had a conversation about how aggressive can we be to ramp up the testing because these institutions can also do testing where they get the test – the approved test – but they have the laboratories to do it. We want 1,000 tests per day. Test as many as you can and then isolate those people so you reduce the spread. But that's all this is about, is reducing the spread, not eliminating the spread. And then you say, well, so the virus will spread. Yes, it will spread, like, by the way, the flu spreads every year. And then you get in to talk about the consequences, which is 80 percent of the people who get this virus will just self-resolve – they'll think they have the flu and they have the symptoms and then it self-resolves.

Question: What precautions are being taken where this woman lives, whether it's an apartment building or in her neighborhood, anything like that?

Governor Cuomo: Well, first, this is a trained health care professional. Obviously, in this environment she was very aware of the possibilities so she did, textbook, everything right. Her spouse, also a health care worker was with her – again, textbook, everything, right? They have basically been in a controlled circumstance. We don't believe she was contagious when she was exposed to other people, because remember the contagion comes from the sneezing, the coughing, et cetera, in an isolated setting. We don't believe she was contagious on the airplane or in the car. Out of an abundance of caution, the “disease detectives” that the Mayor referred to – we're going to contact the people on the plane and the private car driver. But those were really, to the best of our knowledge, the only possible exposure.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: I’d like to add to that – what the Governor mentioned. Because of the fact that this New Yorker took early action, and we know that there's currently no indication that it's easy to transmit by casual contact, there's no need to do any special anything in the community. We want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives, ride the subway, take the bus, go see your neighbors. The important thing, as both the Mayor and the Governor have said, we want New Yorkers to lean even more into frequent hand washing and covering their mouths and their noses. And if you can't get to a water source, make alcohol-based hand sanitizer your new best friend.

Question: [Inaudible]

Governor Cuomo: You raise a good issue. And it's something we, when we talk about being prepared, and we knew this was coming four weeks, which was actually an advantage, having the right supplies, the right masks, the right protective gear, the right training is something we've been working on with the entire hospital system. We started weeks ago in terms of having the equipment and having the training. It has worked very, very well. If any doesn't have the right equipment, they should let us know ASAP and we will get it to them because we have it. And I'm going to refer it to Mr. Ken Raske, who represents the hospitals and who has been working with us on this.

President Kenneth Raske, Greater New York Hospital Association: Well, thank you, Governor. It's a great question. Protecting the health care workers is our primary concern, obviously, within the health care community and having the right equipment is essential in that obligation. And I have to tell you, and it's represented here at this table with the Governor, the Mayor, and our respective Commissioners who are outstanding health department officials – we work hand-in-glove with them in terms of getting whatever supplies that are necessary to the places that are needed. In both cases, both the City and the State, there are stockpiles of stuff – medical equipment, medical paraphernalia and stuff like that that we can draw down. The federal government has one too, and all of which are tap-able in terms of this. But the coordination effort is done in our case through our office of institutions that are running into shortages of this, that, or the next thing. And we will do the best that we possibly can to contact Commissioner Zucker, our commissioner of health in the City, and we will get those supplies to them ASAP.

Governor Cuomo: Also, one general point – there is no mystery to how this is – how contagious this is or how it transfers, right? This transfers like the common flu. So, for health care workers, yeah, you take the right precautions, but it's not like we're dealing with something that we haven't dealt with before. Actually, we've dealt with worse, right? The Ebola Virus, that was really a much more difficult, more frightening situation than this.

Question: Governor, now that the CDC has given the go-ahead for this testing to go forward, are you satisfied that you've gotten everything that you need from the federal government to handle the epidemic?

Governor Cuomo: Have we gotten everything we need from the federal government? No. No, no, no, no – on many levels. On this specific level, we have the testing, but the – I spoke to Vice President Pence, he's heading the President's task force. They're going to be doing a supplemental appropriation. This is going to be expensive for the State, for the City, and we are – I understand the relationship to the federal government, I understand our responsibility, but this is a significant financial burden. We have no issue with the administration, the management and doing the job, but the financial consequences are highly relevant. And at a minimum, we would expect the federal government to help with that.

Question: Mr. Mayor, is New York City’s public laboratory currently testing or not –

Mayor: As I said, as of Friday. This coming Friday.

Question: This coming Friday, okay. And so, what is our current [inaudible] what is the current capacity and was there delay testing this woman because of the [inaudible] –

Governor Cuomo: There is no – we can – our current capacity is several hundred, so we have much more capacity than tests that are being requested. The City lab will come online, the Mayor said, on Friday. The people around this table, they also have laboratories and the State is going to give them the approved test and they will then operate that test. So, we've set an initial goal of 1,000 test per day capacity all combined and then we'll see where we go from there.

Question: The Mayor said earlier that it was a matter of hours [inaudible] give us like a tic-toc of – for someone who gets tested, how that test is done, exactly how long that takes. And also, should this, God forbid, get worse, are there hospital beds set aside in the city for people?

Mayor: As I've said publicly days ago, 1,200 beds are right now identified and can be used in the city without interfering with other health care activities. So, we have that in reserve. Now, I want to emphasize the Governor's point earlier. Right now, we are nowhere near that kind of need. Yes, we do expect communities spread and, yes, we have to be ready for anything, but I want to emphasize that, one, you've got a disease that for the vast majority of people manifests as something that they can handle just by, you know, waiting it out and taking some basic steps. It is obviously dangerous to a small percentage of people, we take that very, very seriously. But I want us to put it in perspective, the Governor's point about Ebola is well taken. I remember I was sitting here during the Ebola crisis. That was a disease that, you know, once it hit, if you got it, you were in grievous danger no matter who the hell you were. This is a whole different reality. But I think the other point to recognize here is that we have the ability to address this. If all of these messages get out of the kinds of things people need to do, the basic precautions, getting to a doctor if you have the symptoms, all of us now being able to test quickly, we have the capacity to keep this contained. If God forbid, it spread, spread, spread, the fact that this hour we have 1,200 beds ready right this moment should be very reassuring to New Yorkers.

Question: [Inaudible]

Governor Cuomo: Several hours – the test itself takes several hours to conduct. But within about 12 hours the results are turned around from start to finish. 

Question: [Inaudible] it’s faster than before.

Governor Cuomo: Yes, because we’re doing it ourselves.

Mayor: We’re not sending it to Atlanta.

Question: When does the State testing start?

Governor Cuomo: It has started, it’s ongoing. The State did this test.

Question: [Inaudible] when did she arrive? On what flight did she take?

Governor Cuomo: We can get you the specifics, she arrived on Tuesday. Our best information is she was not contagious on the flight. Out of an abundance of caution, we're going to be contacting the people who are on that flight. And took a private car to her residence, she was with her spouse. We're testing the spouse who's also a health care worker. We assume the spouse will be positive, okay? So, that's our operating assumption. He has been following the same protocols. They were tested at Mount Sinai and we got the results last night.

Let's do one more –

Question: [Inaudible] a hospital?

Governor Cuomo: Because she doesn't need a hospital. Because she doesn't need a hospital, and that is the point here. Somebody used an expression, this is like the flu on steroids, okay? 80 percent of the people if when infected with a coronavirus will self-treat and self-resolve. They'll think they have the flu because it's the same type of symptoms. About 20 percent will get ill, and, again, as the Mayor said, I've said, everyone on this table has said, the people who are in danger – “most danger” immune compromised, debilitated people, senior citizens, like the normal flu. And those are the people who we have to focus on and concentrate. The good news here, the normal flu also does children – this virus does not seem to affect children. So, this is good news. And the case that tested positive should be an affirmation. She's positive and she's home, because she doesn't need to be in a hospital.

Mayor: Alright, thank you.

Governor Cuomo: Okay. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you.

2020-03-02 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you, everyone, for being here. We just finished an exercise with our emergency response teams. Heads of all major city agencies were here to run through scenarios related to the coronavirus. This is a process that we undertake on a regular basis on a variety of different fronts. We do a counter-terrorism tabletop exercises, we do a tabletop exercises around major weather events. This is something the City does on a regular basis led by our colleagues here at Emergency Management. Today, we ran a scenario involving a quickly escalating a coronavirus spread and all agencies participated in determining their actions to address the situation. We are going to continue to do a number of these exercises of greater and greater levels of difficulty and challenge in the coming days to prepare. I want to remind everyone, a number of you were here back on January 24th, and now it's March already.

So, on January 24th was the first time that I said on behalf of the City of New York that it was not a question of if, but when we would have a coronavirus case test positive here in New York City. So, in that is the good news that the City of New York now for almost seven weeks has been in a state of high readiness and preparation. The confirmed case we received last night since we anticipated it is something that was handled properly, as you heard this morning. And I want to certainly commend the health care worker who is the individual with the disease for having done everything right in that situation.

I want to thank all of the members of my administration who are here, all their agencies that are working hard to address this issue and get ahead of it to inform the public, to inform their employees of all the things we have to do. And also want to thank the many, many elected officials and community leaders, community organizations that we have been working with constantly. And I want to say again, New Yorkers are really doing the right thing here and all of the organizations and leaders are doing the right thing. There's not been a single moment of denial over these last six or seven weeks. Everyone is taking it seriously. Everyone has spread the word of what people need to do. New Yorkers are clearly responding when they have symptoms, they’re are acting on it, which is exactly what we want. We want people getting to health care. When in doubt, get to health care, go to your individual doctor, go to a community clinic, go to Urgent Care, go to whatever you can, but get to health care. And again, anyone who is unclear about where to turn or how to get to the health care they need can 3-1-1.

We do know, because our Department of Health has been down this road many times, has the ability to track the exact interactions that anyone has had with who contracts the disease. We do know from the disease detectives at the Department of Health that the individual in question had very, very limited contact with others, only serious contact with her husband who we are waiting the test results on, and handled her visits to the hospital exactly right with the prior notice and all things were handled properly there. We also have now, today – literally, today, for the first time an advantage we have not had over the last six or seven weeks, which is the ability to test here in New York City. Literally this morning, based on the information we had at the beginning of the day, we thought it would take until Friday and we wanted to be cautious in guaranteeing when testing would begin here in New York City. I'm pleased to tell you now, it will begin later on today. So, we will be up and running with testing through our Health Department later on today. That testing will take a matter of hours for each individual case. So, we're basically saying on any given day, we'll know the same day whether someone tests positive or not.

Right now, we have two outstanding cases we're awaiting –

Unknown: [Inaudible]

Mayor: One – I'm sorry, one outstanding case we're waiting results on. I mentioned earlier, I want to reiterate that we're launching this week an early detection system. This is a structure through the Department of Health, working with hospital systems to constantly glean information from patient visits. So, we're talking about thousands of health care professionals encountering thousands and thousands of patients each week. We'll be getting a constant flow of information from that system, indicating if there's any trend lines that need to be addressed. And obviously, if any individual is found through that process, who needs coronavirus testing, they will get it.

The bottom line, as always, is we will remain in a state of high vigilance. We don't have a timeline for this crisis. I think people should assume it will be with us for months and we're going to be in a high state of readiness as long as it is here. But what we do know for sure is that those basic precautions really, really matter. It's stunning that we have a global health care crisis and the best way to address it individually is to wash your hands, to use hand sanitizer, to cover your mouth when you cough and sneeze – those basics really, really matter here – and to be quick to come forward if you have symptoms. And look, right now, that means particularly if you have a nexus to travel to the countries have been most affected, whether that means you, yourself or someone you've been in close contact with has been in one of those countries recently. But we know community spread is likely, so even if you don't have that nexus, but you have the symptoms, it's important to get to health care right away. We'd rather have many people quickly find out they do not have coronavirus than people holding back who might have it and not getting the health care they need and maximizing the chance of a dangerous spread.

Again, any questions whatsoever – please, everyone in the media spread this news – if people have questions that call 3-1-1. There's no one out there – if they can't reach their own health care provider, they don't have one, there's no one who should suffer in silence. Any questions, any concerns, call 3-1-1.

With that, let me just say a few words in Spanish before turning to my colleagues.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, thank you again to all my colleagues and all the agencies, all their personnel for all they're doing. And I want you now to hear from our Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Good afternoon. As the Mayor has said, we have our first individual that has been confirmed to have the coronavirus. This is has been anticipated because we know that viruses don't respect borders. And the patient is doing well clinically and has received the proper isolation protocol in their home. We will be continuing to monitor the individual for the next 14 days on a daily basis. And we have, through our disease detectives, done all of the necessary tracing of potential contacts that the individual may have come in contact with and we're pleased to report that there is only one additional individual who was a contact with prolonged exposure. And so, those individuals are currently, as I mentioned, under the proper level of isolation.

The other thing I want to just note is that with the ability to do on-site testing here in the city, we will be obviously increasing the capacity of our testing. But before I get to that, I want to just sort of remind New Yorkers that hearing this news of our first case, even though it was anticipated could create a bit of anxiety for folks. And I want to just remind individuals that we are encouraging New Yorkers to go about their every-day lives and to practice the precautions that the Mayor said with regards to hand-washing to regards to covering your nose and mouth when you sneeze or cough, and that if you are feeling ill and you have traveled to one of the countries that are now hotspots, if you will, across the globe, to call your doctor as quickly as possible – don't delay. And, at the end of the day, our risk remains low and our preparedness remains high. And in terms of the height of our preparedness with having city capacity to do our own lab testing, we are now going to be increasing the number of tests that we do. And one of the things that we will be kicking off today is in collaboration with three health systems – H + H, New York Presbyterian and NYU – we will be starting what we're calling an early detection system for individuals who could potentially have a coronavirus, because the idea is, as the Mayor have has already said before, we don't want people to go undetected. And this is an opportunity for us to take a deeper dive, leave no stone unturned in terms of identifying individuals who may have coronavirus. So, again, it's an opportunity for us to leave no stone unturned.

The other thing I want to remind New Yorkers is, we're in the middle of a very rough flu season. I don't want New Yorkers to be in a situation where they may develop flu-like symptoms and they go through the anxiety of wondering, do I have the flu or could I possibly have coronavirus? This is a reminder, it's not too late to get your flu vaccine. We've been looking at data across the city and I'm seeing roughly a 5 percent increase over last year in terms of the number of children that have received the flu vaccine, and that's good, but we can do better. And with regards to adults on an average annual basis, less than half of New Yorkers get immunized against the flu. This is a time where you don't want to be caught in a situation, again, thinking, do I have the flu or could I possibly have coronavirus? The other thing I want to remind New Yorkers, and, again, we are in a scenario where the risk to New Yorkers remains low. Our preparedness is high. We want New Yorkers to be prepared. So, you know, this is not the time to sort of delay on filling your prescriptions. We want to make sure that if you've got a prescription that needs to be refilled, you do it sooner rather than later.

And then lastly, I want to also sort of draw special attention to the fact that what we have learned from the experience we're seeing across the globe is that 80 percent of the individuals who do develop coronavirus, COVID-19 have very mild symptoms. And that those who tend to have severe symptoms are the elderly and those with chronic underlying diseases. And so, this is an opportunity for us to remind the seniors that we have in our lives that if they are feeling symptomatic, and, by all means, if they've had a connection to travel, they should reach out to their doctors. But even without that connection to travel, we want to make sure that all of these routes are open and that there is no delay in care for them. And then lastly to remind individuals in terms of having a chronic underlying illness. These can include asthma, diabetes, heart disease, but it also incorporates those individuals who may be smokers. So we want the folks who fall into these categories to pay special attention. And again, if you've got meds that need to be refilled, this is the time to do it.

I guess the last thing that I will say is that the messages that we've been giving in terms of hand-washing continue to apply. You know, this might be an opportunity to make alcohol-based hand sanitizer your new best friend if you don't have easy ongoing access to a water supply. And it may also be an opportunity to start practicing fist bumps, handshakes or elbow handshakes.

So, thank you very much. We can model that.

Mayor: There you go. All right.

[Laughter]

We modeled good behavior. Thank you, doctor. Our Emergency Management Commissioner, Deanne Criswell.

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Office of Emergency Management: All right, thank you Mr. Mayor. You know, as you've heard today, we do have this first case of coronavirus, but this is something that we have prepared for and the city is ready to tackle this virus head on. New York City Emergency Management, along with the Department of Health has been working very closely since this first hit the scene in early January and we're working with our State and federal partners in all of our preparedness efforts as well as in response to this first confirmed case. Today's tabletop exercise really brought together all of our leading experts across the city as well as the officials from a dozen City agencies and our partners such as MTA and the Port Authority to continue our planning – planning that has been ongoing long before this even arrived – and continue our response to prevent the spread of this virus. As the Mayor stated, these efforts are going to continue and we will be having escalating exercises that increasing complexity as the weeks go on.

Building off the work that has been ongoing for some time now we also will be working to improve and expand on our long history of pandemic planning that New York City has already done. We have established several inter-agency crisis planning working groups. They started meeting yesterday – or, last week and they will be focusing on containing the spread of the virus in the future. Plans are also in place for City agencies to maintain essential services, continuity of operations. What do we need to do to make sure our workforce can come to work and what do we do if they can't? Emergency Management and the Health Department have also conducted multiple calls with our private sector partners to address any concerns about the potential impacts of this virus. Additionally, we have engaged close to 800 organizations that are the City's partners in preparedness that focus on supporting organizations in preparing their employees, services, and facilities for emergencies.

One of the big questions that we've had continually through this as our impacts to the supply chain, and so we have also been closely monitoring those impacts across the city. Right now, we've been tracking any resource concerns from City agencies, and, as of right now we have not received any concerns about current disruptions to the supply chain, but we are monitoring this very closely. Because we do have concerns over this, New York City Emergency Management is working very closely with the Department of Health, as well as our State and federal officials to prioritize and coordinate the distribution of those high priority commodities, such as N95 masks that we've heard so much about an additional personal protective equipment. We also have a direct line of communication with our state and federal partners, so as we find that we may be reaching critical levels of our resources we can reach out to them to make sure New York City has what it needs. People should also go about – and as you've heard – in closing here, people should go about their daily lives, remembering that the precautions that you would take during cold and flu season are the precautions that we would expect you to take today. As we continue to work through this first case and potentially future cases, the City is going to continue to work together to enhance our existing plans to make sure we're monitoring our stockpile and making sure that New Yorkers have what they need in order to respond to this.

Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner. Finally, want us to hear from the Speaker of City Council. I want to thank Speaker Johnson and the whole City Council for partnership during this crisis. Also, a reminder, he used to be Chair of the Health Committee, so this is something he knows about and cares about a lot, how we all have to work together to address a situation like this. Speaker Cory Johnson –

[…]

Mayor: Thank you very much, Speaker. And amplifying that point, discrimination is illegal in New York City. So, people who practice discrimination – there's a number of potential sanctions and consequences. And I want to really emphasize that we mean business. I'm very disturbed, as the Speaker is, with some of the specific discrimination that's been directed towards the Chinese community. It's unacceptable and we will use every tool we have to stop it.

With that, I want to take questions on this topic. Yes?

Question: The Health Commissioner [inaudible] why do you believe that? And a second question is the low infection rate a function of low testing rates? With more testing, do you expect there to be an increase in the number of diagnosis [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: So, there's a lot in there. Let me just unpack that. The risk to New Yorkers remains low because we only have one case and there is no indication that casual contact was a driver of ongoing person-to-person transmission. The other thing is that we have been focused on ensuring that we are in close communication with all of our health care providers so that when they see individuals who have traveled to any of the affected countries, they're incorporating a travel history into that history and physical. And then lastly, you know, we've been fighting long and hard, led by the Mayor's advocacy, to make sure that we have the testing capacity here in the city. So, even though we hadn't had the capacity here in the city, you know, it didn't delay diagnosing folks. But now, with the increase in person-to-person transmission that we're seeing in Washington State, California, Oregon – I think, you know, it's to be expected that we will have person-to-person transmission here. And so, all of our efforts are directed at cutting that off as quickly as possible.

Did I get all your questions?

Question: The second question is, is the low infection rate of function of low testing and since you’re going to be testing more [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: I think that the low numbers are a result of a number of different things that include the travel restrictions that took place, that include all of the protective measures that we have put in place. I wouldn't ascribe it to low testing.

Mayor: I want to thank also Council Members Steve Levin and Ydanis Rodriguez for joining us. Thank you very much. Go ahead.

Question: Your administration has been working to connect immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants to care. How does that kind of play into this when we're looking at public charge? We’re looking at ICE coming to hospitals. How are you addressing immigrants who might be too afraid to be able [inaudible] facility?

Mayor: First of all, thank you – excellent and very important question. Please, everyone, report the truth – we do not ask documentation status in our public hospitals and clinics. We never have. We never will. Folks who need health care should be absolutely comfortable coming to get it. In fact, we are trying to ensure that they have ongoing health care – any undocumented New Yorker has ongoing health care through our guaranteed health care plan through NYC Care. And I think, you know, without getting into the bigger issues of the day, this is an object lesson. As a nation, as a city, would we be more comfortable with folks who happen to be undocumented having regular health care and having their needs addressed quickly and well – isn't that better for all of us, for our families too, and our neighborhoods too? Or, do we think it's somehow better, more moral, more practical to have hundreds of thousands of people with nowhere to turn for health care? That's what it comes down to. So, for anyone who contests why we provide health care to undocumented people, it's not only the morally right thing to do, it is absolutely the practical right thing to do because exactly in cases like this it maximizes the chance that people will get care when they need it and we can deal with a crisis before it gets out of control.

Question: [Inaudible] specifically, like any sort of like specific actions?

Mayor: Sure, a huge amount of outreach. My conscience is here, come over here Bitta. A huge amount of outreach is being done right now through community organizations, community based health care providers, et cetera, with a constant message to people that if you have symptoms get to health care and that it will be available to you regardless of your status, regardless of your availability – ability to pay, I should say. And that's why, again, the central message, whoever you are, call 3-1-1 if you're not sure what to do. Our Immigrant Affairs Commissioner, Bitta Mostofi –

Commissioner Bitta Mostofi, Office of Immigrant Affairs: Thank you. And, of course, I underscore everything that the Mayor said and would just add, in terms of what we've been doing to respond to public charge and to this particular crisis. We have a large network of community providers that we work with. We partner with community-based organizations to do specific engagement around NYC Care in communities and ensuring that people are connected to that service and know what's available. We've also trained our legal services providers on connection to NYC Care and, of course, have had a wide – city-wide systematic response to public charge with that same messaging. We don't care about your immigration status, we don't care about what language you speak, we want to make sure you get the care that you need and that you're informed to do so. We're taking additional steps with the particularly impacted communities that we work with who may have some of the travel history as well.

Mayor: Gloria – hold on, Gloria?

Question: I think the last time we were here we talked about how – the difficulty of testing for the virus. What has changed since and can you walk us through what this testing looks like that will become available [inaudible] –

Mayor: Can I just make sure we're all speaking the same language? When we were first here, we didn't have the ability to test ourselves. So, that's what you get into, right?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Right. Okay, go ahead. And obviously, Deputy Mayor, join in whenever.

Commissioner Barbot: So, the easy answer is, the CDC shipped us the reagents that they needed to and we're doing the same test that they were doing, but just doing it here.

Question: What does the test look like? If someone's showing symptoms and they want to come in and be tested, what should they expect?

Commissioner Barbot: So, the procedure is when you go to your doctor, you present symptoms. They'll do a nasal swab, they'll test for the 26 most common viruses that may be accounting for your symptoms, because, remember, the likelihood of you having the flu is way higher than the likelihood of you having coronavirus. And so, we want to rule that out first. Then, we would take a similar sample – that swab – and send it to the public health lab for it to be run. So, there's no blood work that needs to be done, nothing separate to what is currently done with regards to nasal swabs.

Mayor: Katie?

Question: This is a two-part question. There's a private school here in the city that has – is asking students who traveled to some of the affected countries over the February break to self-quarantine for 14 days. [Inaudible] would the Department of Education consider that for students who may travel during February break, or then even in the future, the upcoming spring break? And then the second part I guess is the admissions and that if it becomes an issue when you consider, especially for specialized schools, would you consider not using the attendance just to encourage people to actually stay home?

Mayor: Fair questions. I think we're going to do this, as with everything in life, in stages. We – the exact reason we have this exercise today is to start running different scenarios, and, again, there'll be higher and higher levels of difficulty in the coming days. Right now, how we would address school attendance issues and admissions and all, that's over the horizon and we're not there yet. We’re obviously going to take into account aberrant realities if we get there. The question of whether the kids who had traveled overseas should be handled differently. I think it's a fair question. That's an assessment we'll make in the next day or two. We have obviously not done that yet, but I think it is a fair question and we'll come back to you on that.

Go ahead.

Question: Can you talk about what is being done specifically at the city school? I know that they - you talked about at this point about your safe – cleaning protocols [inaudible].

Mayor: Look, I'll start and if the Chancellor wants to jump in, feel free. I want to emphasize that, again every time I attempt as a non-doctor to talk about coronavirus, I'll acknowledge not only am I a non-doctor, even the doctors don't fully understand coronavirus. It is a new thing in the human experience. We do see so far noticeable dynamic that does not seem to affect children in a meaningful way. So that's a very good sign. But you know, we will not make an assumption, we have to see more play out, but so far so good on that front. The guidance to the schools has been to intensify cleaning efforts. The guidance to all school personnel is to look out for children with symptoms and advise their families to get care, but obviously for our personnel as well, if they have symptoms to make sure they get care.

But what you're going to see on all these fronts is we're going to keep amplifying those messages and keep ensuring that there's follow through because the real difference here, I think there's a common sense point that it bears saying publicly that the difference between finding someone the first day that it might be clear they have coronavirus and testing them and getting them the help they need and isolating them versus, you know, the third day, the fifth day. Obviously the more someone's out there, the more they could be in a position to expose others. Again, from what we know right now, it takes prolonged contact to transmit the disease, but the perfect world is find everyone the first available day and isolate them. So we want all of our city employees to be a part of that, that if they themselves or anyone they come across might need that testing, that we're getting that done at the first available moment. Chancellor do you want to add anything?

Chancellor Carranza: So I want to emphasize what the Mayor has said is absolutely true. What we've been focusing on is working very closely with the Department of Health. In fact, we've backpacked home already a letter by Dr. Barbot that gives very specific guidance to parents. Since January we have issued guidance to all of our facilities crews in terms of cleaning protocols, we've also sent guidance with principals on what protocols they should be aware of. We've also communicated directly with parents through backpack letters – electronic communication. And we've also worked with our nurses, our school nurses, following protocols at Department of Health has developed. So we want to over communicate and again, we want to emphasize if a child is sick, do not worry about admissions and all of those things. If the child is sick, stay home and get some attention. If our employees are sick, we want them to stay home, get some medical attention as well. And we will continue to work very, very closely with the Department of Health.

Question: You mentioned - actually the city's official Twitter account mentioned cleaning protocols for public transportation. What would that look like for subways or buses? What does mean in actuality?

Mayor: Again, I think everyone's familiar with the fact that the subways and buses are run by the State of New York, but the fact is that the basics here apply and other experts can speak to it more eloquently than me, but it means thorough, consistent cleaning. It’s the, you know, I'm going to make it really simple to the point that Dr. Barbot has said about alcohol based hand sanitizer for people. It's using, as the Governor said earlier, using cleaning agents, using bleach, et cetera on public facilities. So, that's just going to be done very systematically. I want to defer to the MTA about how they're doing it in their case. But that's the basic concept.

Question: Yes, I was wondering when the Chancellor if schools are requiring the parents to advise schools if they travel abroad at anytime [inaudible] having a family member visiting one of the affected countries [inaudible]?

Chancellor Carranza: [Chancellor Carranza speaks in Spanish].

I just want to reemphasize that we're working very closely with the Department of Health under the leadership of Dr. Barbot. We do not have that specific guidance in place yet. I want to reemphasize there is one case so far but our guidance is all focused around having a heightened sense of alert, having a heightened sense of being – monitoring what's happening with our students and as time goes and circumstances change, we're constantly revisiting what that looks like.

Question: Right, you said earlier that New Yorkers are doing the right thing here, that there hasn’t been a single moment of denial and then New Yorkers are responding, I guess my question is how do we know that and which are the communities that are at risk for failing to respond or distrusting you and how do you reach those people? And is there a -

Mayor: Okay, wait, wait, dude, this is becoming a 12 part question. Henry, Henry, respectfully, Henry, Henry, Henry, please. When I'm asking you guys – when I'm saying you're asking so many things, I can't follow it and answer it. It would really be dignified and decent and human, if you'd recognize - I'm speaking to you as a human being who's trying to communicate. If I can't follow your question, I can't answer your question. When I ask you to separate your questions and I loyally come back to you for the rest of your question, it is to get you a good answer. Please work with me.

Question: You said that New Yorkers are responding and that there is no denial.

Mayor: Correct.

Question: How do we know this?

Mayor: Facts. Outcomes. Product. That's how I'm judging. We've gone this whole way with consistent reporting of people going and getting health care, coming in with their symptoms, not holding back. The folks who came in for testing previously, those folks came forward. So now our grand total since day one of people under investigation is –

Commissioner Barbot: 11.

Mayor: 11. Those 11 folks didn't hold back. They came forward. We have seen extraordinary outreach efforts. I've seen with my own eyes in communities. I particularly commend all of our colleagues in community organizations, in Asian communities who have done a great job getting the word out, demystifying, telling people where they can get care. The proof is simply in the pudding here, Henry. We have seen a tremendous amount of information flowing. We have seen people responding to the information doing what we have asked them to do. I'm not saying it's perfect by any stretch of the imagination. What I'm saying is when there's public messaging and then you see follow through on the public messaging, that's very, very affirming that New Yorkers are taking it seriously and further that when we specifically offer guidance you see it being spread intensely by lots and lots of other sources. So I'm very satisfied by what I see. Go ahead.

Question: Which are the communities that would be at risk for resisting this mess?

Mayor: I don’t see resistance. That's my point. I literally do this for a living. I pay attention to communities and what they're going through and I've been doing it my entire life. I talked to community leaders, I talked to elected officials. I'm listening for denial. I'm listening for resistance. I'm listening for disconnect. I'm not seeing any. I'm sure there's some somewhere, but if we thought there was a systematic problem, we would want to be all over it. So in other words, your question's a great question, if we saw it, we would be doubling down, but we're not seeing it. We're not seeing a place where there's some pushback or minimization or resistance.

Unknown: Last two.

Mayor: No we'll do a few more.

Question: Commissioner Barbot mentioned an early detection system. Can she elaborate a little more about what that means and how it works?

Commissioner Barbot: So the early detections system builds on our existing flu monitoring systems so that when a patient goes to a doctor and they have symptoms consistent with flu and the provider does a flu test, then those samples will also be tested for coronavirus.

Question: Can you, I’m sorry, can [inaudible] can you talk about whether that system will have [inaudible] places that [inaudible] talk about, including hospitals to make sure you separate people from the rest of the population of the hospitals. If you could talk about it in Spanish too about the system?

Commissioner Barbot: So the early detection system that we're talking about has only to do with the lab samples. It's not a part of the overall process that happens in hospitals.

[Commissioner Barbot speaks in Spanish].

Question: In terms of the early detection system, the Governor mentioned [inaudible]. Is that part of this?

Mayor: No, the early detection effort is city-based. I think the Governor is absolutely right to aspire to that level of testing and it looks like the stars are aligning. We want to have maximum testing capacity, but he was referring to the State's testing capacity as well as the city. So the point is we want to keep maximizing that for everyone

Question: Just a follow up, [inaudible] I know you’ve been very critical of the CDC and the federal government’s response, I wonder if Dr. Barbot can tell us a little bit about when the city first got warning signs about the virus and if she could talk from a medical perspective about the federal response?

Mayor: Absolutely.

Commissioner Barbot: So coronavirus activity picked up in China in late December and I think that we're – there are many outlets through which we pay attention to what's going on in the world. We have sort of the graduate level of disease detectives that are on the lookout for what's happening globally. So we were already paying attention. I don't have the exact dates that the CDC first contacted us, but I think the point is here that we don't necessarily wait for CDC to sound the alarm. We're always looking out for what's happening globally, especially being an international city.

Question: A couple of sets of clarifying questions. The flu tests, are those done in the hospitals and then if they test negative for flu, does it go to the public health facility for additional tests? Can you sort of walk through the logistics of that a little bit more?

Commissioner Barbot: That's correct.

Question: And those tests are done at Bellevue or they're done in Long Island city or where are they at?

Commissioner Barbot: At the Public Health Lab is where we do the coronavirus testing and that's on First Avenue.

Question: All right. Secondly, with regard to the case of coronavirus, can you provide any more details about the timeline she got back in the country on Tuesday? When did she go to Mount Sinai for the testing and how long did it take to get the test results back? And do we know exactly how she got back from Iran? Did she come back from London or Paris or is – there aren't any nonstop flights between here and there?

Mayor: I don't know if we have all that, that last part, but do we have the part about the –

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So we do actually just the details - I'm sorry, I’m Demetre Daskalakis, the Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control at the Department of Health. The individual that you're talking about landed as you said around Tuesday asymptomatic for several days, became symptomatic and sought care on Saturday. Testing was done and we got results on Sunday.

Mayor: Who has not gone, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah.

Question: If you would, this was a question I was going to ask you earlier. Can you talk a little bit more about the disease detectives? Who are they and how does this process -

Mayor: Do they have a cape?

[Laughter]

Question: What challenges might be facing them –

Commissioner Barbot: So no joke. I think these folks are the unsung heroes of public health because they do their work behind the scenes. And they are Health Department staff that have been trained in the most sensitive interview techniques to be able to get clinical information that sometimes can be very sensitive, get that information from people who are - who have a particular illness that we want to make sure that no one else has. And so these were the same detectives that we deployed when we had measles. These were the same detectives that we deploy, you know, when we've got any kind of outbreak. And so they're very well versed and toggling between things that may be incredibly sensitive. And, you know, we feel good about their ability to get important actionable information from patients that we're trying to treat.

Question: [Inaudible].

Mayor: Hold on, hold on. Guys, just time out. We’re going to finish you and then going to anyone who was not gone and then we'll go to anybody else a little bit longer.

Question: If this expands as we were anticipating and hoping not, what's the greater challenge for the detectives, the disease detectives?

Commissioner Barbot: So I think the best way to answer that is during the measles outbreak, we track down over 20,000 people.

Mayor: Right, just volume.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah.

Question: The one case pending [inaudible] is that the husband? The spouse –

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Okay, so if the turnaround is pretty quickly [inaudible].

Mayor: The Governor said and I agree with him. We expect that there'll be a positive.

Question: Do you know how soon we can expect those results?

Mayor: Today we think, tomorrow, hopefully later today.

Mayor: Thank you. Way back. Yup.

Question: I wonder whether there's any thought about some kind of enhanced screening or protocols of nursing homes and assisted livings in light of the situation going on in [inaudible].

Mayor: Yes. I'll start and if any of my colleagues or Aging Commissioner wants to speak or anyone else. The Governor indicated earlier, there will definitely be a focus on assisted living, nursing homes, senior centers, there's obviously a strong nexus there. So a lot information has flown already, but we're going to be doing constant work with each of those institutions to make sure if there's any kind of follow-up, any kind of assistance they need, that they will get it. Anyone want to add anything there. Not from there. Not from there. Come on, dude. You've been, you've done this for a while. You got to get to the microphone.

Commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, Department for the Aging: I just want to remind everyone that the nursing homes and assisted living facilities are under the jurisdiction of the state.

Mayor: You didn’t say who you were.

Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez, Department for the Aging: I'm sorry, I am Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez. I'm the Commissioner for the Department for the Aging. The other thing is that we have been giving information to the older adult centers that we have throughout the city as well as to the workers that work in those facilities.

Mayor: Okay. Who has not gone? First call. Not gone at all? Nolan, your hands up, you've gone. Who? Who? You haven't gone. Good.

Question: What do you guys - what's the plan for the population of street homeless who already very, very not interested in authority and how can you even like make sure that those people will get care if they're already like, you know, not trying to like -

Mayor: Right, good question. The two - it fits actually with two things we do already. And I'll start and Steve, if you feel free, jump in. One is because we are now, unlike in the past, we're in an incessant outreach effort through HOME-STAT. If our outreach workers who really get to know each individual on the streets, I mean that's the whole concept is really getting to build a personal relationship. If they see someone with symptoms, obviously they're going to know to act on that. And second is, you know, we have the code blue concept during, for example, a blizzard. Obviously if we think anyone is in physical danger, we have the ability to bring them in willingly or unwillingly. Now this is, as you've heard, this is a disease that manifests different ways and for a lot of people it is like having the flu and nothing worse. But if someone had, for example, obvious medical conditions already and vulnerability and had symptoms that would be the kind of situation I'm extrapolating. I don't know if this a scenario you've dealt with before and I'm looking to Jim as well, but I think this is a case where if someone had clear medical distress and symptoms consistent with coronavirus, that we would want to be aggressive about bringing them in to help.

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: I think you're quite right that we do encounter individuals who do not want to on the first interaction accept services. But that doesn't mean we don't know who they are. And one of the important new tools that we've developed over the last several years is the by-name list which enables our outreach teams to actually, as the Mayor said, meet people where they are. And so part of evaluating what their needs are - are going to be taking into account whether we're seeing any potential concerns in this area. And if we see that we will be very aggressive in making sure that people get the help that they need so that we all can be safe.

Mayor: All right. Last call and anyone who has not gone at all.

Question: All right. You spoke last week [inaudible].

Mayor: We had an extensive conversation about masks during the tabletop exercise. It comes down this way. Our current stockpile is strong, but in an escalating crisis, we would absolutely need federal assistance. We have an outstanding request, as you know, for 300,000 masks. The federal government is finally playing a more decisive role. And I think they're right to try and figure out where the need is greatest first. But, so I'd say right now in New York City is good today, but we might need help very soon if we had a bigger situation. Okay. Last chance I'm going to do this one more time. Anyone who was not gone at all, not gone at all. Yes.

Question: Has there been any discussion in expanding the list of countries from which people are [inaudible] China [inaudible] JFK?

Mayor: Again, I want to be careful on this one because I'm not the perfect expert on all this. We've called for a very aggressive approach. In terms of screening, I think it's more than that already. Go ahead Raul.

Deputy Mayor Dr. Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Service: Right now the travel restrictions are four countries, China, Iran, Italy and South Korea. Japan has a lower level of restrictions and Hong Kong follows. We expect that in the coming weeks we'll probably going to see this number of countries increase.

Questions: So those are people coming into the country. All of those flights, anyone coming –

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: The U.S. has actually plays advisory, very strong advisories for travel back and forth from those four countries. Basically saying restrict to only essential travel.

Mayor: And again, on the further on, that would be for the federal government. Okay. Now guys, we're going to do a few more. We're not going to go on forever here – so, go ahead.

Question: Dr. Barbot actually, one of the things that's really unique about – there’s 86 cases in the U.S. but in Manhattan where this case is, population density, people live on top of each other. You mentioned earlier at the Governor's press conference [inaudible] about casual contact, so there isn't an immediate concern, but at some point when we expect more cases, people living in apartment buildings, what is the risk – people start wondering, if someone in my neighbor in my building has coronavirus, what are the concerns if you live in a building with ventilation, apartments, common space, things like that that are unique, especially to the [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: You know, I think the important thing to remember is that this is not an illness that can be easily spread through casual contact. We want New Yorkers to go about their everyday lives, use the subway, take the bus, et cetera. The other thing that we have working in our favor here is that we have been very aggressive in identifying potential cases and not necessarily waiting for the final test results before doing all of the contact tracing that needed to be done to ensure that if indeed someone did turn out to be positive, we would have already done that important legwork with regards to limiting the mobility of potential contacts. So, all of that put together puts us in a really strong position. Now that to say, in spite of those efforts and you know what I said before, viruses don't respect borders. So, we do anticipate seeing additional cases, but we will treat each of them as aggressively as we have these.

Question: In the case of the woman who tested –

Mayor: Hold on, I'm sorry, I'm just going to stop you for one second. To clarify on your question, because I think this is, I got this earlier when I was on the radio. You're the doctor for New York City. Here's the question. Can I get it through the ventilation system based on what we know today?

Commissioner Barbot: On what we know today? No.

Mayor: No. So, there’s a simple answer.

Question: Just to follow up just because I, this is something people are asking. This woman is somewhere in Manhattan isolated in her home. When the disease detectives are identifying others who may have been in contact you know, the plane, you mentioned the car that that's not necessarily prolonged, was her building, you know, people in common space. Is that something that was identified? Where those people notified?

Mayor: I don’t think that qualifies as prolonged?

Commissioner Barbot: No. That's casual at best. So, no.

Mayor: So, let me try and you'll – here, you stay here for a second and then you're going to assess whether what I say – As a layman, I'm going try this. I believe it means you're in the same apartment with someone. You're like prolonged contact, you're breathing the same air for like a meaningful amount of time or you're working really closely with someone at work over hours, days, not, you know, I was in a car with someone for a half an hour or an hour. I was on a subway. I walked through the lobby. No, you actually have to be in regular contact in a meaningful way.

Commissioner Barbot: Correct.

Mayor: Correct. Okay, go ahead. Yeah.

Question: Commissioner could you please say that in Spanish?

[Commissioner Barbot speaks in Spanish]

Question: There was a man in Miami who thought he had coronavirus. He went to the hospital, insisted he get a flu test just to make sure and rule it out. He wound up having the flu. They made him, the hospital charged him like $3,000 to get that test done. So what I wanted to know was for people who, you know, with ACA going up to the Supreme Court, there’s concern –

Mayor: You're blending here. What's your bottom-line question?

Question: My bottom-line question is, what are you doing with the hospitals to ensure that the cost isn’t being shifted onto the people?

Mayor: I think this is a, I'm going to try and Oxiris or Raul, Mitch, anyone who wants to get in this. Look, if anyone comes to one of our facilities, everyone understands the ground rules. You know, we're going to get people care no matter what. If people have insurance, we're going to use their insurance. But no one's being turned away. No one's being gouged. So if anyone is in doubt, they can always go to a public health care facility. But in terms of regular health care, I don't know about that case. I think it's fair to say that the, the healthcare community in the city, and you saw a lot of people at the press conference earlier, Greater New York Hospital Association, they're not trying to gouge people in the middle of a crisis. Someone comes in for a test, they're going to be treated the way they would for any other tests. So it's a valid concern, but I don't see the health care community here doing something immoral like that.

Question: Just a quick follow up since you are working with two other hospitals beyond Health + Hospitals. What, how'd you come to that conclusion to work with New York Presbyterian [inaudible] and are there other hospitals that are coming into the mix?

Commissioner Barbot: So that constellation of hospitals gives us a fairly comprehensive footprint of the city, and we will continue working with other hospital systems to bring them on board as well.

Mayor: Gloria?

Question: Mr. Mayor, if I may. Commissioner –

[Reporter speaks in Spanish]

[Commissioner Barbot speaks in Spanish]

[Commissioner Cortez-Vasquez speaks in Spanish]

Question: What day did the infected woman become symptomatic? Is her husband currently symptomatic?

Mayor: Saturday.

Question: Okay. The second, would people sharing the same subway air be at risk and how would the disease detective track them down?

Mayor: I'm going to try again as the layman and I'm looking to the doctor to grade me. No sharing subway air is not close contact. So, again, enclosed spaces –

Question: If you were on a subway car for an hour you wouldn’t –

Mayor: Again, we’re going by what we know. You’ve got to have prolonged contact with someone that would typically align to, for example, a family member in an apartment, not open context for a limited period of time. That’s what we know today.

Question: So, the doctor mentioned that smoking is actually one of the preexisting conditions. Is vaping also in that category, if you're vaping electronic cigarettes or marijuana use? Like, is that something that's also going to make you more predisposed to get this?

Commissioner Barbot: So, before I answer that, I want to go back to the question about the subway air. This is not transmitted like measles where, you know, someone with measles is in the room, 10 people who come into that room an hour after that person left can get measles. This is totally different, right? This is, someone is ill and they have symptoms having prolonged exposure to – not to be too graphic, but their secretions. So, it's a very different scenario. In terms of the question that you just asked me, can you, I'm sorry, can you ask me one more time?

Mayor: Vaping –

Commissioner Barbot: Vaping, oh yeah – you know, it's unclear. And the risk factor of smoking is the same risk factor that we call out when we advise individuals about the flu.

Mayor: But can I bring you back? I'm going add to the question, what do we say if someone is vaping, they should beware even though we don't know, it's unclear, but does it add caution or not?

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely. That's a good idea to add caution. Yes.

Question: For everyone has been reading about it in the papers and knows that there's worldwide concern about the spread of this disease, can you explain to me a little bit how you guys make the determination that self-quarantine at home is sufficient and how do you make sure people are actually respecting self-quarantine?

Unknown: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Right, fair questions. I'll start, and, Oxiris, join in. Okay, so, as the non-doctor, my understanding is this is the global health standard that given that this behaves for the vast majority of people somewhere in the neighborhood of like a flu, it's understandable that the way you deal with that as you ride it out and that the self-quarantine is the right way to ride it out without infecting other people. So, we're not making that up, we're basing it on the global standard. On the question of other folks, it's an excellent question. And, again, as we're saying about the husband in the case we already have where it's likely he will test positive. Yes, if the rest of your family stays there, there is the risk of them contracting the disease, which means we would like to see the rest of the family not be in the same place with the person who quarantining. And that could be done – by the way, you can do that within a single home or a single apartment. You can create separation. Either – doctor, or anyone wants speak to that?

Commissioner Barbot: I think what the Mayor said was right on in terms of the appropriate level of isolation depends on the apartment situation. I want to also just add that we have been working very closely with our sister agencies, the Office of Tenant Protections, the Commission on Human Rights. And we haven't come up against these issues yet, but we are, as the Mayor said before, deploying all City agencies to contribute so that there isn't anyone who has any hesitation about coming forward. We will do anything and everything possible to make appropriate home isolation be as minimally painful as it is. Because, you know, the reality of it is that any of us would have challenges staying in our apartments for 14 days. And so, as part of our response, we're looking at the mental health needs of individuals, we're looking at a whole host of areas that we can provide support to make it as easy as possible for them to follow the instructions.

Question: [Inaudible] taking care of themselves –

Mayor: So, wait, let me go back on the previous and then we'll follow-up on your question. So, to all my colleagues and just want to give an order of the day here – 3-1-1 is central to this whole reality. If folks don't know how to properly self-quarantine, I want to make sure they can get that information through 3-1-1. If a family doesn't have a context where they can create separation and we need to find a way to find other family members a place temporarily, you should be able to do that through 3-1-1. Whatever the outstanding issue, I want to make sure – so, I'm saying this both to tell New Yorkers, call 3-1-1, but I'm also telling the rest of the government, make sure 3-1-1 is up to this capacity immediately and whatever we have to add in terms of personnel or training or follow-through mechanisms, we need to do that immediately because the best way to see this through is if people can very easily get the support and facilitation they need. Now, your question?

Question: I was just wondering about [inaudible] the couple that's been [inaudible]?

Mayor: Right. I want to – again, I think guys – I want to – just listen carefully on the part about what it is and what it isn't. So, this couple is in their 30s, they happen to be health care professionals. If you had the flu, you yourself had the flu. We wouldn't have a nurse there with you to see you through the flu. You would stay home and take some meds and you’d get through it. So, the people who are in danger are the folks with those underlying medical conditions. For those folks, obviously, we're talking about in some cases a higher level support, but in a lot of cases being in a hospital setting, obviously. So, I think to really help people – anyone who's worried has every right to be worried. Anyone who's scared of this could turn into something much bigger, has every right to be. But what we know essentially is, the vast majority of people on earth who get this, they have it, they get through it, it's over. For a much, much smaller number of people, it is a greater danger, a greater problem. For a very small number of people, it can be fatal. We take that very, very seriously. So, I think it's fair to say, if you're in home isolation, it means you're dealing with the lesser version and you can see it through on your own if you need to.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Yeah. And Chief Monahan, Chief Sudnik participated, if either of you want to come forward, feel free. Chief Monahan is very shy, he may not want to speak.

[Laughter]

He's a – we're trying to get him to go one of those courses to be able to feel comfortable in public. The – what there has been information given out to all our first responders. They are taking additional precautions already. And there is, right now, all the equipment we need to accommodate. But as we said, over the horizon, in a bigger crisis, we're going to need more equipment, but we have what we need now.

Chief of Department Terence Monahan, NYPD: All right. We have a stockpile of masks, disinfectant gloves that we gave out to all our PSA transit housing facilities. They're out there. We've given some protocol and conditions to our personnel when they respond to jobs, working with the Fire Department, EMS, if it's a sick job, a potential for coronavirus, our personnel will wait outside, EMS will respond, they will go up and we will provide whatever assistance that EMS needs.

Chief of Department John Sudnik, FDNY: So, as a matter of protocol, our EMT’s, our paramedics, our firefighters already follow universal precautions. So, they're already trained and equipped to deal with any exposure that they would have for anybody, including people with the flu. Right now, we have a response protocol where if somebody calls 9-1-1 and reports either a fever or a cough and they have traveled to one of the countries that we're talking about that are the at-risk countries, our EMT’s, our paramedics, our firefighters will be notified that it's a potential fever, cough, travel incident and they would take additional precautions, and that includes wearing N95 respirators wearing gowns, if necessary, and eye protection.

Mayor: Okay. We’re going to do two or three more and be done. Yes, Jeff?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: That’s the only one. It's the only one right now. Again, we predict a positive on that.

Yes?

Question: Can you give a sense of how much it costs for each test?

Mayor: I'll certainly have – anyone who has the answer – but again, I'm going to have a blanket answer on everything cost, going forward. The President of the United States said in his press conference that not only states but localities would be reimbursed. Take him at his word, glad to hear him say it proactively. We are going to do whatever it takes to protect New Yorkers. That will be an ever-changing situation. So, anytime we can give you a cost update, a cost estimate, we will. But bluntly, we're in the middle of dealing with things, we're not totaling up the dollar figures each day. When we get to the end of line, we'll go for the appropriate federal reimbursement.

Question: Health care professional is kind of a wonky term. Can you give us any more idea of what they do? Are they surgeons? Are they –

Mayor: That’s all I’ve got for you right now. Go ahead, last call –

Question: Just wondering [inaudible] showed symptoms Saturday and was tested Saturday?

Mayor: That’s what we understand, right?

Unknown: That’s correct.

Mayor: Yes and yes.

Okay. Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-03 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everybody. We’re going to give you an update on the latest news on coronavirus and just we’ll say that I think we’re going to be doing updates regularly, going forward. Sometimes I will lead them, sometimes my colleagues will, but we predict we will be getting regular flow of information in the coming days. Obviously, this is a crisis that will be with us, I think it’s fair to say not for weeks but for months and we want to make sure we’re providing as much information as possible.

So, just to say to everyone upfront, what we can tell you, we will tell you. There are some details today that we are holding back pending notification of individuals and family members that we have to be careful about. Obviously there are confidentiality issues. We are trying to balance that with the need to give you prompt, accurate information, so the rule today will be when we can give you something very specific, we will, if we are not yet able to do that, we’re going to try and do that within the matter of hours filling any outstanding blanks. And again, we’ll call briefings whenever necessary.

So, obviously from the beginning the message has been it’s not a question of if, but when. And that was true of coronavirus coming here to New York City, having cases and obviously is true now, as we discussed yesterday when the Governor and I had our press conference that we would go from a situation based on travel being the crucial nexus to something beyond that being the community spread. We’re obviously starting to see that in other parts of the United States and we believe that we’re now seeing that here in the New York metropolitan area.

With the good news, of course, is that everyone has seen this coming and has been preparing all along for this exact situation. The – I’ll say upfront, I’m going to go into the specifics here, I do think it’s important to keep reminding people upfront that as much as coronavirus has caused tremendous concern and for good reason, the manifestation of it for the vast majority of people ends up feeling like what most healthy people go through when they have the flue or a cold. For the vast majority of people it is something you ride out with some basic medications, it resolves, and you’re able to go back to your life. That does not mean for a moment we take it lightly, we obviously understand for a much smaller number of people it can be very, very serious threat and we obviously want to contain the spread but I want to always start by saying for the vast majority of people who even do end up contracting coronavirus, the impact will be limited.

So what we have – you know some of this already, I’ll fill in a few more blanks perhaps, we have a New York State resident diagnosed. He is a man in his 50’s from Westchester County, works in Manhattan at a small law firm in Midtown. Had repertory issues off and on for the last month but they became much more severe in the last few days. Was originally hospitalized in Westchester County, now hospitalized at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and in serious condition. So this individual that you have been hearing about is the new nexus to some particular activity. He is the first patient who required hospitalization in New York City since the coronavirus issue began. He is the first patient to be seriously ill and obviously we’re very concerned because what appears to be previous repertory condition which creates more danger.

What we know at this moment, there is always more investigation being done, but it appears to be no recent travel nexus. So this appears to be an example of community spread. Also talking about this individual’s family. Two sons with a connection to New York City. And again, I will be broad and vague where I have to be and we will get your information very shortly, but both sons are isolated at their home in Westchester County. Both are being tested, one as I think you know now, is a student at SAR Academy in Riverdale and that young man has no symptoms at this point. The second student goes to a university in New York City and does have symptoms and we will have more to say obviously on that front when the tests come back.

Giving you an overview to just put this in context and reminding you of the overall situation in New York City. At this moment, separate from these individuals, we have ten individuals who have been tested previously, eight came back negative, one came back positive – that’s the health care worker we talked about yesterday who had been to Iran – one pending, that is the health care workers husband, we will have that result later today. So that’s the overall trajectory for New York City. All of this makes clear why we needed local testing all along and as of yesterday we finally were able to start testing locally, it’s going to make a world of difference in our ability to address this very, very quickly, and just in the nick of time given what we’re now seeing.

The work of the famous detectives is underway. City Health Department is doing that work obviously coordinating closely with the State Health Department. In the case of the individual from Westchester County, that family as I said isolated at home being tested, those tests are being done by Westchester County working with the State lab. In the case of each of the institutions, our Health Department has been working closely with SAR Academy, with the local university in question, with the small law firm in question. Department of Health officials at each site working with the leadership of each organization, specifically identifying any cases, any specific situations where there was prolonged contact between the individual in question and other people at that organization.

So again, want to come back to this point, occasional contact, glancing contact, temporary contact, it does not, from everything we know about coronavirus, lead to transmission. It needs to be prolonged, you know, if not intimate, at least prolonged, constant contact. In the case of the small law firm, there are seven people who work at the firm who have been identified by the Department of Health as worthy of follow up. That testing will proceed. Others who did not have that direct contact have been given broad precautions and guidance and that same process is now undergoing with SAR Academy and with the university. We believe as early as today, no later than tomorrow, we will have the map of each individual that came in contact with the members of this family in a more substantial way through each of these organizations. And again there will be appropriate follow up with each of them, very hands on, very specific to follow up in each case.

So – excuse me – I’ll conclude and I’ll do a little quick Spanish. Again, it does not necessarily – what’s the word I’m looking for – when you see something coming and it manifests the way that was expected, that doesn’t make it necessarily better, but at least it is what we expected. We have been preparing for this. We have the capacity to address it. We’re moving on it very aggressively. Everyone in each institution is cooperating. I continue to tell all New Yorkers to go on with your lives, go on with your business, we are going to be in a very high information environment. I think information is helpful to the people of this city, it’s clarifying, it’s comforting, we’re going to be providing a lot of information. Right now, again, we have a very isolated situation. People should continue going about their lives. Anyone, however, who thinks that they might have the symptoms, particularly if they have a nexus to someone who has traveled to one of the more affected countries, again, simple way to address call 3-1-1. If you have a health care provider, immediately get your health care provider, call them at first if you can, get to them immediately, doctor, urgent care, whatever it happens to be, get to a health care provider if you need that. If you have any questions or needs call 3-1-1. If you’re not sure what to do, call 3-1-1. If you don’t have a way to get there call 3-1-1. That is the go to. In Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

I want to note, joined by Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Dr. Raul Perea-Henze; our Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot; our Emergency Management Commissioner Deanne Criswell; CEO of Health + Hospitals Dr. Mitch Katz; Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control at the Department of Health Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. And with that, I will turn to your questions about this update.

Yes?

Question: I know that MTA is wiping down subways and services, can you talk a little bit about what’s being done with City owned and run public buildings?

Mayor: Yeah, we are going to be following that protocol, starting with the schools, where a new protocol has been issued. The whole idea here is just intensify our sanitary efforts. You know, it’s common sense, it’s straight forward. So all City facilities will get extra consistent cleaning. We want to tighten up those protocols. I think that will be helpful. Yes?

Question: How did this Westchester patient get to his job in New York City and are you tracking his tracks? Like did he take MetroNorth, or the subway?

Mayor: Again, what we are tracking is the prolonged contact. And I get the – I am sure I am going to get this question a lot of times. It’s a perfectly valid question but I want people to understand, I am always going to answer the same way. From what we understand, and I am the first to say, the global medical community does not understand everything about coronavirus, but from what we do understand, you cannot contract it through casual contact so the subway is not the issue. The issue of the train is not the issue. The issue is prolonged, consistent contact. As you might have first and foremost in a home. That is the number one area of concern. If someone is in a home setting with someone who has the illness. And so I am going to, I was using an analogy with my colleagues earlier, trying as the layman to get really clear so I am going to use the analogy with you guys too. Here’s home, here’s subway okay? Home is the issue, home is the problem. Where you are in constant, regular, intense contact with other people, breathing the same air, the same bodily fluids around, like that’s the issue. Subway is the other extreme, limited contact in a more open space, short period of time. Subways is not our problem right now. Home is our problem. In between you have some variables. For example, if you are in a law firm and you are someone working on a case with that lawyer and you are in their office incessantly, sitting right next to them, hours upon hours, that’s more like home then like subway. So that’s what the disease detectives are going to trace. Not did you walk by someone in the hallway, not where you on the bus with someone. But did you have regular, prolonged contact which inevitably means you bring down the number of people who are of concern and you can follow up on those people very systematically. That’s what we are tracking right now.

Question: So you are not going to say how he would travel to work, you are choosing –

Mayor: We will track everything but it’s not pertinent from what we understand strategically right now. It’s not pertinent to how we figure out who we need to get to, to make sure that they get testing and support. Go ahead.

Question: Is CUNY recalling students studying abroad or suspending any travel?

Mayor: Again?

Question: Is CUNY suspending any travel for students or recalling any students who are currently abroad?

Mayor: The City of New York does not run CUNY, the State does. So you would have to ask the State and the CUNY leadership. Again I think it’s advisable if you are talking about the areas that are specifically experiencing the crisis the most.

Question: If the virus can only be transmitted by regular, prolonged contact, what’s the point of wiping down the subway and wiping down schools?

Mayor: Abundance of caution. Go ahead Gloria.

Question: Mr. Mayor I think you mentioned this person does not have a travel connection?

Mayor: Correct. Traveled but not to one of the affected countries.

Question: Okay, where did he travel to and –

Mayor: To the best of my understanding, traveled to Israel, but we are still getting more information.

Question: And are you saying which university one of the –

Mayor: No I am not yet.

Question: Okay. And then my other question –

Mayor: But I will shortly.

Question: Okay. There was a question about – I understand really making this point about you are not going to get it if this person, if you happen to share a train car with this person, but you are focusing right now on home, family, staff that he, coworkers?

Mayor: Not just coworkers, I want to clarify. Coworkers who had consistent, prolonged contact. I am going to take you to the NY1 newsroom. And I don’t wish any ill upon you Gloria. The person – if you sit next to someone and you are talking to them all day long and God forbid you contract it. I want to know about the person you sit next to all day long. I don’t want to necessarily talk about the person who you know, is 50 feet away on the other side of the newsroom. From what we understand today. The issue is who could really be in enough contact to have a likelihood of transmission.

Question: And if I could just ask about the travel thing, because most of the cases we have seen so far –

Mayor: Yes.

Question: You said that you think this is the beginning of community spread?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: What does that mean in terms – since he did not come from a place where the outbreak is more significant, what does that mean?

Mayor: Well obviously Washington State, and I feel horrible for what they are going through right now. We are seeing community spread. I mean this is part of the reality. I still think the basic rules of engagement are the same. The more people who get to health care quickly, the more people who if they need more serious treatment, they will get it. Or if they just need to be isolated, they will get isolated. Or if it turns out it’s not coronavirus, they will know that. So job one is just get people assessed, get people help. And that’s how you keep some handle on this. Clearly because of specific dynamics as I understand it in Washington State, some of that didn’t happen for a variety of reasons and that’s part of why we are seeing the problems we are seeing. So when you have the ability to track, then we identify people, we follow up with those people very, very specifically. But, look there’s a point obviously, if it continues to grow and grow and grow where that gets very hard to do. But right now where we can still deal with sort of a finite reality we are going to fully use our capacity to follow each case through. Jeff.

Question: What’s being done at the New York university where the son attended? It seems like that would be a place where you know, if he’s moving about a lot, going to classes, talking to people there, could be a wide number of people?

Mayor: Again, I would argue the other way around. So we have been in touch with the president of that university. We are coordinated, DOH is onsite. We will be giving you more information very shortly. I would put it this way, we want to know and again I will just try – I’m going to be the interpreter here. I’ve got great experts around me, if I say something that misses the mark, I know they will assist me and jump in. I will think of my own college experience. It’s not the kid I went to you know, political science class with who was sitting three rows back. That’s not the issue. If again if I am consistently close, if I am in study group every day with someone that’s pertinent. If I have a romantic relationship with someone that's pertinent. If I have a roommate that’s pertinent. It’s not the vast majority of people that a student would come across.

Question: I wanted to ask you to outline, I know the DOE is going to release some updated travel restrictions or guidance for the upcoming spring break. Could you just let us know what that is?

Mayor: I don’t have that but will have that shortly. But yes, we are going to get some clarity out on that.

Question: Is there anything that you can say about the genetic sequencing of this test? Like I know that when they were tested in Washington they were able to compare it with earlier tests that suggested this circulation for multiple weeks. Do we know anything more about where this strain of the virus –

Mayor: And you have now exhausted my knowledge base. Who wants to jump in?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: The short answer to that is no not yet.

Question: So, yesterday there was some questions about whether schools would continue to take attendance into account in admission decisions in middle and high schools. [Inaudible] created some tension –

Mayor: Again, we are just – Adam, I am not saying this to be difficult. You asked it yesterday, we are dealing with other – I’m sorry someone asked it yesterday. You look so similar, I am sorry. I will get to that, that’s not where we are at right now.

Question: The DOE put out guidance today, they tweeted that coronavirus related absences will not impact current applications to middle and high school.

Mayor: Right.

Question: I’m just wondering how that’s possible given that –

Mayor: Okay, again respectfully, I am trying to be real with you. This is not where we are at right now. I will happily get you an answer. We are dealing with much more central things then admissions issues right now.

Question: Just a second schools question?

Mayor: Sure.

Question: CDC officials have asked parents to ask districts about whether there are plans for remote learning in the event that one or more schools will have to close. Is that something that the DOE is prepared to do?

Mayor: I think we are not there yet either because the model we are working on right now does not involve school closures. But we will look at everything if we end up in that situation. We are doing this in stages. Right now, we are dealing with what we have. We are doing as you saw yesterday, more and more scenarios, getting us out over the horizon. But I do not want people assuming outcomes right now. Right now we have a situation where we are continuing with the work of the City, continuing with the work of our schools, we are not doing alternatives until we have to. Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, in terms of a timeline for the Westchester case, do you know when he went to the hospital in Westchester, when he was moved to NewYork-Presbyterian and this may be further a fields but you might know also, we’ve heard that he traveled to Miami. Do you know the dates of the departure and return for that trip?

Mayor: My understanding is he did travel to Miami. Demetre on when realized sick, when went to the hospital in Westchester, when went to the hospital in New York City?

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: First became ill – I’m Demetre Daskalakis, Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control, Department of Health. He first became ill on the 22nd of February. He then ultimately was admitted on the 27th and then was transferred from the hospital in Westchester to Columbia yesterday.

Question: Do you have the dates for his travel to Miami?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: I can say early February.

Question: [Inaudible]?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: February.

Mayor: Yoav?

Question: Mr. Mayor I know, the City doesn’t want people panicking and seeking a test where it is not needed. But for the folks who have a legitimate reason to believe they might need to be tested, what should those folks do?

Mayor: So thank God we now have the testing capacity. Again it was a long time coming but we have substantial testing capacity and we are building it out as we go. Folks should get to health care and if they get to health care, and a health care provider says yeah, you need a test, we are going to get them a test. So it’s fine for someone to say I am worried I may have it. Particularly, very important Yoav, and please everyone, if they have been to an affected area they need to say that, first words out of their mouth. First words out of their mouth, I have been to fill in the blank place, and I have these symptoms. They will go to the front of the line, I assure you. And the assumption will be that they will be tested. But remember the first thing that is down is to test for the more traditional, if you will diseases. If that’s a match, if you know immediately you’ve got one of the more, the things we’ve known previously. Well that answers itself. If it turns out that you don’t, we are going to get you tested. Who hasn’t gone yet? Anna?

Question: Mr. Mayor, you have repeatedly said that folks who don’t have preexisting conditions and who aren’t necessarily older, don’t really have something to worry about. But the folks that have those, actually includes you, I believe you said recently you have asthma.

Mayor: Yup.

Question: And there’s also thousands –

Mayor: Mild asthma, but yes asthma.

Question: There’s also thousands of people who smoke cigarettes, which the Commissioner said. So, what do you say to people who have those conditions, like how do you reassure them since they are the ones at risk?

Mayor: So, I will happily accept that status to make the point, is take it seriously. Don’t ignore the symptoms. Now I have not traveled to the affected areas so you know, I think if I were someone who had my exact profile, and had traveled to the affected areas or had close contact with someone who did, and I started to show the slightest symptoms I would get to health care immediately. But remember, Anna, the vast majority even of those people come through okay. So the reassurance is 80 percent plus of those who have been affected experience something like a cold or normal flu. They deal with it, they come out the other side, they go about their lives. For the 20 percent, the vast majority of the 20 percent, even if they need more advanced care, still come out of it and go on with their lives. For a much smaller percentage, there’s a profound danger, absolutely. But like everything else in life, the faster you act, the better off you will be. So the moment you have symptoms, go get help. Which maximizes the chance that your situation could be addressed well, but also maximizes the chance that if God forbid you have it, it doesn’t spread to other people.

Question: Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Yes?

Question: Mr. Mayor at the beginning of this press conference you mentioned that certain notifications were not made yet so you couldn’t give us –

Mayor: Correct.

Question: Are those notifications about positive results, hospitalizations or fatality?

Mayor: No, Lisa, nothing as dramatic as that. It’s simply when we are dealing with organizations and institutions before we say publically they have some things they have to do to get ready internally to be able to explain to their own people what’s going on, get their personnel in place, it’s just good practice to be coordinated. But again, I think there will be a very brief delay before we can fill in those blanks for you. You will – well ahead of your deadline, you will know what they are. Go ahead.

Question: Quick question, concerning the schools in Riverdale, two private Jewish schools that are closed. Has the Department of Health been in contact with them and just, what kind of guidance are schools getting in terms of – I know you said there will be some other information coming out but those schools are closed now. Where they told –

Mayor: No.

Question: They made that decision? Are people being tested?

Mayor: No, very good question. So, they made their own decision to close. It was not our guidance. Our guidance would be, all things being equal, keep going while we identify the specifics. Remember in the case of the student at SAR, that student has not had symptoms at this moment. So everyone, the urgency and the concern is real and honest. We all feel it but you know, facts do matter so you have a student at this moment, no symptoms whatsoever. I would certainly never say to close the school. If they would choose to as private institution that’s their choice obviously. Health Department has been there throughout the morning, contact with the principal. We are dealing with the heads of each organization, we are dealing on the ground with the folks who work there. We are doing that mapping to figure out who needs follow up.

Yes?

Question: Mr. Mayor, should people be concerned about medical bills and what if they are undocumented, how's the process for them?

Mayor: So, again, in a moment like this, the last thing people should worry about is the financial. Clearly, if someone has insurance, they have insurance. If they don't have insurance, we've said our public health system will always take care of people and we've made that very clear that includes undocumented people. So, if someone does not know where to turn because they don't have insurance or they may be undocumented, but they are fearful that they have the condition, they can reach out to 3-1-1 and get a location to go to, they can go to any New York City public hospital or clinic.

Yes?

Question: Because in Asia we already see some patients without any symptoms. So, do you think the public should be concerned about that?

Mayor: We see patients – what?

Question: Without symptoms – they are [inaudible].

Mayor: Right, and what’s your question then?

Question: So, should [inaudible] worry about that or does the City take any precautions or measures?

Mayor: I'll start and my colleagues will answer. Look, again, we are – when dealing with a situation that is evolving and where we don't have perfect information, we want to where we can be very specific, we're going to be very specific. So, so far we have situations that are allowing us to be very specific. We know exactly who we're trying to find and what we need to do with them and we're going to keep doing that. If we see something evolve that requires a bigger response, we'll be ready to do it. And this is a good moment for me to make clear we are not – I don't think at this hour of this day we're anywhere near an emergency declaration, but obviously things could change. In the event that there's a need for emergency declaration, I have the ability as mayor to order institutions to be closed, to order public spaces to be closed and cleared, to restrict vehicle access to initiate curfews, to modify labor contracts. There's a whole host of things I can do if we get to that point. But we are not there based on what we're seeing. So, we're going to take this literally day by day, hour by hour, and see how it evolves.

Question: So, I just want to make sure we're clear on the number of pending cases, because the –

Mayor: The number of?

Question: Pending cases. A [inaudible] earlier this morning said there were five.

Mayor: Okay. I’m going to – I checked this and my colleagues will confirm. Separate from the individuals we're talking about here, okay, up to that point, 10 had been tested – eight negative; one positive, the health care worker went to Iran, female; one pending, the health care worker husband of the woman who went to Iran and we will have that result today. Can you all confirm that's accurate?

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: Yes.

Question: [Inaudible] earlier there was five on the DOHMH [inaudible] –

Commissioner Barbot: It should be only one pending. Yeah. Sometimes we have technical glitches, so I think that was just it. Yeah, it's one pending.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead.

Question: I just want to follow up with Dr. Daskalakis. When you had mentioned that the individual from Westchester went to [inaudible] hospital and then was transferred to Presby, was there a reason for that? Is there, like, do the City hospitals have some like greater capacity for treating this? Like, why move somebody? It seems like –

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Great question. My understanding is it's actually he required a higher level of care and required different specialty sort of assistance. So, that was the reason for the transfer.

Question: Was he tested and was this just today that he [inaudible] –

Mayor: I think we said that again. Say it again, the [inaudible]

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Question: Mr. Mayor, we talked about tax being important. The Westchester County Executive and a parent at the school said that the student – there is actually a daughter, a ninth grader –

Mayor: I'm sorry, at the – at SAR?

Question: At SAR, yeah.

Mayor: Okay. I'm happy to be corrected if I’m wrong. I've been told all morning it's a son.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: My understanding is it's a male.

Mayor: We’ll confirm that.

Question: The woman who was most recently diagnosed, the health care worker – get from her home to Mount Sinai. Did she take an ambulance? Did she take a car?

Mayor: We talked about this previously – private car?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Private car – private vehicle.

Question: [Inaudible] got the hospital?

Mayor: Yep.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Question: You mentioned there were being new procedures in place for cleaning schools. I'm just wondering if you could say how they're different from the previous –

Mayor: We'll get that out today. It'll just be more intense cleaning and we'll get that out to you today.

Go ahead –

Question: Thank you. Mr. Mayor, I think you said earlier that this man had been having respiratory symptoms on and off for about a month. With that said, when do you think he actually contracted this? Is it possible –

Mayor: I don't think we know that, right? I mean, that's – we don't know that. I think – but I do think there's an object lesson. I don't know this individual and I mean this only as an example to everyone. At this moment in history, if you have the symptoms, go get medical care immediately. I think anyone who delays endangers themselves and others.

Commissioner Barbot: So, I just want to add, as the Mayor announced yesterday, we now have put in place an early detection system where we have loosened the criteria by which someone gets tested. And this – and in this particular situation, it's an exact example of having an individual who has severe pneumonia with no underlying reason for that pneumonia and us wanting to rule out potential COVID-19. So, it's an example of how the systems that we're putting in place to make sure that we're not missing people are starting to bear fruit already.

Question: In Washington State, when the severe cases developed, it later emerged that there were – they suspect hundreds or more who had not severe cases of illness. Is that what you think has happened here?

Mayor: I don't think we have that indication right now. Again, I'm going to go by common sense and the medical professionals can jump in. I think in Washington State, it appears – again, I'll try this, so listen carefully and correct as needed. It appears there was a real nexus that was missed that unfortunately – and talk about a place where there could be intimate contact and an ongoing prolonged contact. We don't see that so far. I mean, we're obviously looking, but I don't think we have a parallel to that.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So, we detect severe cases because they come to health care. And so, the concern about community transmission, which is why we're having this conversation is that there are less symptomatic people who are potentially in the community who could potentially transmit. So, I think we have not demonstrated that, but that is the assumption under which we are working.

Mayor: Okay, Jeff?

Question: About the university student, again, if he was showing symptoms though, would that cause any more alarm than the situation you described where, you know, people don't have to be as concerned if he was already showing symptoms?

Mayor: Well, I'll start and say again. I think if a university student anywhere in this city just had normal flu-like symptoms and no nexus to travel and no family member who had traveled, et cetera, et cetera, you wouldn't – and again, healthy, no preexisting conditions – that's exactly someone who in the vast majority cases would come through fine. I think knowing that a family member has tested positive obviously changes everything. But I would say to everyone at this point, even if you're in the categories that are probably the strongest and the safest, if you have these symptoms, get to health care, if there's something about your situation that causes that provider to believe you need to be tested, you should get tested.

Question: Is the city concerned now as more cases begin to come out about being – the system being overwhelmed at this point with people being afraid, going in for testing, what's the capacity?

Mayor: We've talked about this a lot. The capacity obviously is vast. This is the biggest public health care network anywhere in the country by very, very – you know, by a huge degree. We talked about previously, if we ended up in a situation where we have to isolate people, we told you guys this days ago, we have 1,200 beds we can make available without compromising our other health care services. We have – Mitch, how many total hospitals and clinics do you have?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health and Hospitals: We have 11 acute care hospitals, five skilled nursing facilities, and 60 other outpatient sites of care.

Mayor: Right. And that's just H + H. So, we have immense capacity. To your underlying question of whether there is a strain created if lots of people suddenly come in and obviously the vast majority of them, thank God, will not have coronavirus – of course it creates a challenge, but we've made a strategic decision to say to people we'd rather you come in. It only takes so long to assess someone, and this would be a good – I'm going to turn to Demetre and say that that test for things that are not coronavirus, what's the timeline on that? Just to – what is it? Tell people to understand that.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So, there's rapid viral panels that use a similar technology to what we're using with a coronavirus test. It looks for genetic material of the 26 most common viruses or bacteria that can cause respiratory illness. Of course, influenza is in there, RSV is in there, there's the list you'd expect – there are a couple of coronaviruses that are not this coronavirus that are also detected by that. Turnaround time depends on the lab. Places like H + H can often turn it around within two hours. Other places that use contract labs, there's also the transport time.

Mayor: Just tell – literally, what does the doctor do? You're in the doctor's office, you have symptoms, what does the doctor do?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: The doctor will stick in an unpleasant swab in your nose and twist it and then send it to the laboratory to do molecular testing.

Mayor: That was awfully graphic.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: It is true. I deliver. It is a swab.

Mayor: But that is job-one. I mean, again, I'm going to try and be the every-man narrator here and the professionals will always correct me. Job-one is if you have the symptoms and you're with a health care professional, they want to see if it's just one of the many, many other things it typically is. And if you take that sample and then you find out hopefully in a matter of hours it is, for example – what would be the most common hits for normal diseases today?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Today? Influenza.

Mayor: Right? So, if you find out it is the flu – again, I'm going to be painfully systematic and common sensical here and the doctors will help me. You go through that, comes back, it’s the flu, by definition you do not have coronavirus – true statement?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Mayor: Okay.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: That's what I'm trying to get to, so let's talk about it.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Not seen in any volume in the reports of coronavirus. So, usually, at least, and also by our guidance from public health, that we're seeing another diagnosis then stops the evaluation.

Mayor: So, again, I'm going to pull that back and take Anna's question and work it through. We are not – we don't have perfect knowledge. Everyone – the entire medical community globally would agree, we do not have perfect knowledge of coronavirus. Now, I'm listening to you guys and I'm listening to the wonderful accent of Anthony Fauci – if you get a hit for pneumonia, for all intents and purposes, it means you don't have coronavirus. Maybe there's some perverse, exceptional case, but for all intents and purposes, if it's pneumonia, you don't have coronavirus. True?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: That is true.

Mayor: Okay. And could you give us another example of a typical disease it might be that's not coronavirus?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: It's a long name, I am sorry – Respiratory syncytial virus – very common in the community. RSV, usually people think about in kids, but it happens in adults as well.

Mayor: What do we call it? What do we think it is? A cough? I mean, what are we thinking?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: It's a cough. It's a cold.

Mayor: Okay, so a cold. There we go. So, to finish through this point, that initial test, which is not complex to give and comes back pretty quickly, if it rules out coronavirus, that's wonderful, and that's one less person we have to wonder about and that person moves on, takes care of themselves – next. So, we want people coming in when a medical provider thinks, nope, I want a coronavirus test on this, then we go get the test

Question: I want to go back to the school questions, because, you know, a lot of people obviously have questions about the DOE policy. Are they hammering that out? Why didn't someone from the DOE come here because, I know you say later on, but you know –

Mayor: What specific question are you looking at?

Question: The updated travel advisory, if it’s going to affect admissions and if there's anything more on –

Mayor: Again, this is just a perfectly fair question, it’s just everyone has to understand, having been through these things, we're trying to do what we think are the most important things first. We're going to get to those things quickly, but right now it is taking care of the things that are about basic health and staying ahead of all of that. We will have answers for you in the course of the day.

Question: The test – just going back to the scenario where we're testing, if the test comes back negative for all the common illnesses, is it an automatic kickoff to the Health Department to test for COVID as a precaution or does the health care provider have to request that? I mean, I've seeing emails from family practitioners who are like, if you don't have severe illness, stay at home. We don't have the capacity to take everyone in with a sniffle right now.

Mayor: Well that's is a true statement on one level, except you varied the scenario there by saying they tested and found it wasn't all the typical things. Look, again, as we build out our testing capacity, we want to test more people who need it. So, I would argue if someone comes in and we have found that we can't identify it as one of the other things and now we know community spread is a possibility, we're going to be testing whenever possible. Abundance of caution.

Question: [Inaudible] family practitioners to be requesting the testing and all this?

Mayor: I want more opportunity to define what's going on. That's good for everyone. But again, I want to put the horse before the cart. We have a really easy test to figure out if it's all the things it usually is, and, again, doctors, I think we would generally find by giving that really easy test, it will usually be the things that usually is, right? The vast majority of the time. So, okay.

Question: Mr. Mayor, with regards to the symptoms, earlier, the Westchester County Executive held a press conference that if you feel like you have the symptoms, don't go to the Urgent Care, don't go to the hospital because you could spread it. Earlier, you said you should go to –

Mayor: I have a very strong view. We've all worked this through in the public health folks will be the first to say that they are worried about too many patients coming in and they are worried about making sure there's good protocols when someone goes for health care, but we made a strategic decision to say to people get to health care, because it's too hard for people to understand – and I don't blame them, in the most diverse city on earth, hundreds of languages, people dealing with busy lives and schedules and challenges. We want one simple message, get to health care. We're – the Deputy Mayor will jump in a second – we will sort it out. So, you got a private doctor? That's great. Urgent Care? That's great. Hospital is not the first-go, to go to something simpler than a hospital whenever humanly possible. Call ahead when you can to maximize the protocols. But I know too many people, myself included, who hesitate when we're sick, come up with some reason not to go get help. Oh, you know, I'll do it tomorrow. Oh, you know, I'll do it when I have a chance. That's not what we should be doing in this situation. I want people getting into health care. We have a massive health care apparatus. We can handle it. One message, this is – whatever Westchester wants to do is up to Westchester. This is the New York City message. Deputy Mayor?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: The Mayor said it yesterday and he just repeated it, you know, 20 minutes ago, the key point here is the nexus. Where you have to start is, if you have symptoms and if you travel to any of these affected countries, or you are in close contact with anyone who has, that's where you really want to go. When anybody's says don't come because you're going to overwhelm, hopefully he means for the others that don't have that strong nexus.

Mayor: That’s a very important point. If you have the symptoms and you have a nexus to travel to the affected countries there is – you're not only wrong to hesitate, you could be putting other people in danger. You just need to get to health care immediately.

Lisa?

Question: Can we just get some clarity on prevention and cleaning? Because you say the subways obviously are getting cleaned with bleach – you can't use bleach in a lot of homes if you have small children or people with breathing issues or asthma. In terms of prevention, maybe the medical experts can give us some help with [inaudible] close quarters –

Mayor: I’m turning to Dr. Barbot because her line yesterday was a very good one about your new best friends, so I think you should repeat it.

Commissioner Barbot: So, everything that we have talked about before in terms of prevention still hold. So, it's the basic messages of hand-washing, covering your mouth in your nose when you cough, and if you're not close to a water source then you should by all means use alcohol-based hand sanitizers. In terms of the cleaning for homes, for institutions, I think it's always good practice to use thorough cleaning. But we don't want people to have a false sense of security that if that cleaning is done, it absolves them of the responsibility to continue washing their hands.

Mayor: Right. Okay, we'll do a few more. And, again, guys, there's going to be more updates from whatever combination of us later in the day. So, just to say this is not the last you're going to hear of us.

Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] conversations with the TLC about you know, keeping Ubers and taxis sanitized. I know that casual contact is not what's going to drive this, but since we are doing that with subways and buses, is there anything you guys are doing with regards to –

Mayor: So, we'll have update on that. Basically, every agency has been charged with figuring out what they have to do here not only for those that they serve in the public, but for their own employees as well. All of that – there's been guidance given out, agencies are developing those plans, putting them in action. I don't have the TLC guidance in front of me but we'll get that to you.

Go ahead.

Question: We were talking about colleges and we know college dorms are petri dishes for variety –

Mayor: That is a true statement.

Question: And I was curious, Dr. Barbot, are you working with any of like the on-campus clinics for students coming in and thinking that might have mono, they might have the flu, they might have coronavirus, and using those results or early detection or is that just not included in that process?

Commissioner Barbot: So, right now we're starting, as we said yesterday, with three major hospital systems, including H + H and then we'll be working to include all of them. The thing to note here that we haven't yet talked about is that the private sector is also working on having access to testing. And so, we anticipate that that will also come online soon, which will increase the City's capacity to do testing even more.

Question: You might send a result to the public health laboratories versus, like, I talked to Northwell yesterday and they're hoping to get online within like the next week or so. And so, I'm kind of curious, like, how does that work from the City standpoint in saying, okay, we're going to send this out to a private lab versus the State lab, versus the City lab.

Commissioner Barbot: Well, first and foremost, we want providers to send them to us now because we have the capacity. But once providers – commercial labs get their capacity, or academic labs, we want there to be as easy a road to getting tested, to the Mayor's point, as possible.

Mayor: Easy and fast. Okay. Guys, we're wrapping up. I got three – Julia?

Question: It's Columbia Presbyterian on 168th Street where the Westchester case –

Mayor: Correct. Go ahead.

Question: In terms of the disease detectives, do they ever track something like flu and can they – is there a threshold where there's so many cases that they can't possibly keep trying to track all the millions of contacts?

Deputy Commissioner Barbot: Flu is a good example. So, when a disease is rare and it is a public health consequence, they can pursue. When a disease, even like the flu, is not rare, then it becomes not possible to do that same level. So, for instance, we do not track every flu case in New York City. We do close surveillance of the flu cases and we know what's happening in the city sort of really day-by-day for influenza.

Mayor: Okay, we're finishing. One, two, done – go.

Question: The City’s testing capacity came online yesterday, do you know how many people have been tested?

Mayor: Do we have that or we’ll get back to them?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: We will ultimately update on the website. A person under investigation equals a test, so we haven't updated yet.

Question: Just want to get clarity on the two sons. I know one is showing symptoms. You said they're both isolated and the other one isn't. Is this going to be like the health care worker and the husband, that you're expecting [inaudible] one that's not symptomatic you have to eventually become symptomatic?

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, I mean, I think those details will become more evident as the day goes on, but we will work with the family to keep them together as much as possible. Yeah.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Yeah. As I said, they're there at the home in Westchester – the mom and the two sons. Okay.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Yes. Yes. That's all we know of.

Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-04 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Everyone, we're obviously have been gleaning a lot of information. Apologies for the delay, we had to get everything from the State. And I know they were putting information out, but we've had some additional things we wanted to track down before coming, before we give you an update. Okay. So, starting at the beginning, we all have been predicting that these cases would come to New York City and that we would see a number of them and that we would see community spread. We are seeing all these things. That being said, we also are seeing a very consistent pattern – I'll go over the numbers with you – that when we test people who are the kinds of individuals that it makes sense to focus on a test, we're finding the vast majority of cases that we're getting a negative back. So, that’s not to minimize the severity of this crisis and the global nature of the crisis, it is to say that we're going to do as much appropriate testing as we can, because I think it will help us to continue to inform all of you and the people in New York City as to what's going on, obviously allow us to follow up on cases most effectively. And as we are doing this testing, we're getting some results that are generally good for all of us. That being said, obviously, for anyone who does have this disease we want to make sure they get all the support they need and all the help they need and obviously protect against others getting it. So, we're going to keep updating regularly on the results of our testing so you get the overall picture.

Let me begin. And first, I want to just note everyone who’s here – Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze; Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Chancellor Richard Carranza; the First Deputy Commissioner for Emergency Management Andy D’Amora; Dr. Mitch Katz, CEO of Health and Hospitals; and Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the Deputy Commissioner of Health. And then I want to thank Council Members Mark Levine and Steve Levin for being here and for all you’re doing working with us. Oh, I’m sorry, I did not have you on my list and I did not look up far enough – I know see you – Council Member Inez Barron. Thank you all, all of the Council Members who have been working with us intensely to get information out to the community and make sure people are getting the help they need. So, thank you all very, very much.

So, let's start with the cases that connect Westchester County in New York City. We have the lawyer from Westchester, you all are very up to date on his situation. We're hearing from the State his condition is hopefully a little bit better. We're hopeful on that front, but obviously not out of the woods. Want to just make sure everyone knows, because, as I said, we're going to be adding specificity whenever we can. In some cases, as I said yesterday, we might have to hold a little bit until notifications are made and people are ready for specifics. But now, we can tell you the law firm in question is Lewis and Garbuz – that's G-A-R-B-U-Z – 60 East 42nd Street by Grand Central. We'll go through the family first and then talk about the employees of the law firm. The family members, the wife, son and daughter of the lawyer – the family from Westchester – the wife, son and daughter have all tested positive.

This is not surprising. They are all in isolation at their home in Westchester, which is where they need to be. I'll go one by one. In the case of the wife, she actually works at the law firm. She is asymptomatic, she tested positive but is asymptomatic. Let me – then I'm going to talk about each of the three and then I'm going to double back to the law firm itself. In the case of the daughter, who is 13 years old, and I apologize, we did have the gender wrong yesterday, so apologize for that. The –

Unknown: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Maybe you can give me a better age. I have 13. What do you have?

Unknown: 14 –

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: 14 is correct.

Mayor: I'm sorry, that might be my inaccuracy – writing it down. 14 years old, a student at SAR Academy in Riverdale, asymptomatic. The son, Yeshiva University undergrad, 20 years old, had symptoms, apparently is getting better, was last on the campus on February 27th. Department of Health disease detectives have been following up on his connection to the campus. They have two individuals that meet the standard – the New York City Department of Health standard for the kind of close contact that would be pertinent here in the case of coronavirus – one is a roommate, the other is a close friend. Those are the only two. Those two individuals are being tested or have been tested. We're waiting for the results at Bellevue. And we are – right now, the disease detectives are mapping their contacts proactively even before we get the result of the test. Now, again, I want to use this example – I'm the layman, the experts are around me, but I'm going to keep trying to make things real simple. The disease detectives, who are very, very proficient at what they do, who worked with us in the Ebola crisis and many other really challenging situations, they've interviewed that student at Yeshiva, looking for the level of specificity and the close contacts that would reach the level where someone needs to be followed up on. They found two people that meet that standard. So, undoubtedly, the student was in classrooms and activities with all sorts of people, but two only reach the standard that require follow-up, and that follow-up is happening. It's not – and I'll keep emphasizing, it is not, for example, you walk by someone in the hallway or you sit in a classroom with them. It is, you know, if you are – a roommate is an obvious example or if you're, for example, in a study group that meets every day and you're in constant direct contact in a small enclosed area, just to give you an example. So that's Yeshiva – we're working very closely with the leadership at Yeshiva University – great cooperation, and they, I think, are pleased that Department of Health is taking a very aggressive effort to ensure that we're tracking each situation.

At the law firm – the same standard, using our disease detectives, we have seven coworkers, one intern that are the people of interest here. So again, husband and wife both work there – in addition, seven employees, one intern for those individuals, five being tested as we speak in the City, one tested in New Jersey, two more we are confirming the location of their test. We'll have more on that later on today.

Okay. Let me go over the overall numbers. And again, these numbers will keep moving, so we'll do our best to clarify them at any given point in time. From the beginning, and I'm going by those in New York City who have a completed test result, that's the standard I'm going to be using here – 16 individuals under investigation from the beginning have tested negative. So, 16 – and I'm going to have to just check one fact here – 16 have tested negative, one particular – a very particular case is the husband of the health worker who was in Iran is a negative, but we're going to treat as a positive. So, I want to make very clear on that – that one we were waiting for the final answer on officially has come back a negative, but we are requiring the same exact quarantine, the same exact follow through as if it was a positive in that case.

I’m going to give you some agency updates, but first say that we are now in a series of daily tabletop exercises at OEM. We'll be going over there a little bit after this, continuing to run different scenarios so that – at these tabletop exercises, so we basically have all pertinent city agencies around same table. We go through evermore challenging scenarios to identify everything, supply chain, personnel, what we would do to compensate for different situations if we had to do closures, that type of thing. So, that effort is ongoing and will continue to prepare us for any eventuality. Again, we will constantly give you updates as we get them on a variety of fronts, sometimes me, sometimes my colleagues. Let me give you some updates on agencies, and this is in response to some of the questions the other day. Department of Consumer Worker Protection formally declared as a regulatory act that there is a shortage of face masks in New York City, which means that they can prevent stores from price gouging. Any store that is found to be price gouging will be fined. If anyone sees what they think is price gouging around a surgical masks, please call 3-1-1 and report it right away. Taxi and Limousine Commission has provided guidance to 200,000 drivers and operators on a daily cleaning protocols for their vehicles. And a reminder on top of that, of course, that drivers need to recognize the same health standards as everyone, if they have symptoms that they need to immediately not put themselves in proximity of people. Also, reminding all that discrimination against passengers is illegal and anyone who feels they’ve been a victim of discrimination should call 3-1-1. Department of Education, canceling all trips or study abroad programs to China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, Japan. In addition, cleaning protocols have been sent to all schools, CDC approved cleaning supplies have been provided in all 1,800 schools. Deep cleaning will be required two times a week. Guidance has been sent to all principals and health personnel in schools on what to do in the case of a suspected a coronavirus case in a school, whether it be a student or a school personnel. The simple protocol for a student would be to, of course, immediately isolate them, ensure they have a face mask and ensure that they are picked up by a parent or guardian and taken to a doctor right away.

There's a question – a couple of things came up the other day. Again, I'll always tell you when I think some things are not what we're doing first compared to other things, but we do have answers on them. Attendance – the question about attendance and admissions – attendance will be frozen as a factor in admissions for the foreseeable future so as not to allow any impact of this crisis to negatively affect the admissions process. That said, the Chancellor and I just talked about his attendance situation. He has been monitoring daily and hourly. It is unchanged. Very important for people to know that – school attendance has not moved one iota as result of what's going on here. I want to thank parents and students for continuing to go about their lives, even against this challenging backdrop. Further later today, the Department of Education will issue guidance, there have been some issues that have to be worked through including a contractual issues. We will issue guidance later today to all school personnel if they have traveled to any of the affected areas in recent weeks. This is an area we have to clarify and that guidance we're – we have some quick legal work to do and some work to do with the unions, but that guidance will go out by the end of the day and be communicated to all personnel this afternoon or this evening before anyone has to travel to school tomorrow. So, we will get that done and we'll update you on that later on when we get that out.

With that, I think those are the basics. I want to just again – I will say just a couple of words in Spanish, but want to keep coming back over and over again, the most important guidance to New Yorkers – we’ll keep saying it, can't say it enough times. Again, this is a disease – I think it's a little perplexing for everyone. For the vast majority of people, even if you had it, if you contracted it, it would feel like a common cold or a typical case of the flu. For some other people, it could be a real danger, but that is a small minority of those who even were to contract it. The best way to prevent is the basics – washing hands, covering your mouth when you cough and sneeze, using hand sanitizer. And I think one of the things the doctors have said that I want to repeat it is, even though it's not the typical time of year to get a flu shot, if you haven't yet gotten a flu shot, it's helpful. So, reminding – oh, and by the way, flu shots are very readily available in medical offices, pharmacies, et cetera. So, for folks looking for something productive to do in light of this very challenging crisis, real simple thing – if you and your loved ones have not gotten the flu shot, please go get it. That's a simple thing you can do right now.

Again, if you have symptoms and you believe it might be coronavirus because of travel, your life and your family loved ones or for any reason, get to medical help right away, your doctor, Urgent Care, whatever it may be, get to help. If you're not sure how to get to help, where to get to, how to pay for it, call 3-1-1. No one should hesitate. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's take questions.

Katie?

Question: I'm going to ask you about the neighbor in Westchester who drove him to the hospital and then is now testing positive for coronavirus. I know that this was in Westchester, this is not a New York City issue, but have the Department of Health have its disease detectives seeing if this neighbor has any connection in New York City. And I know for Dr. Barbot, if you want to maybe address that, I know we've been told that you can't patch coronavirus within unless there was like super close contact. But it is a little concerning that you could be driving someone and it can happen. So, if you want to speak to that And Mayor, if you want to speak to the neighbor, any New York City connection at all?

Mayor: So, I'll make a point to begin, and then over to the doctors. We are – I mean, these diseases detectives do extraordinary work. We're actually going to be bringing on more of them very quickly or training existing personnel to be able to do the work very quickly. So, we're going to increase our capacity rapidly. Anytime where we can look for a nexus, we want to. I think you make a good point, in the case of someone in Westchester who works in the city that we want to know everything we can know. His wife who is also employed at the law firm has been interviewed, looking for any connection to the city so far. My understanding is, the patient himself up to now was not in a position to be interviewed just health wise, but the wife has been able to work to sort of track everything. I don't know if we know about the person who drove him and whether that's something we need to follow up on or not.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So, I'll start and then Dr. Daskalakis can give more detail. I think it's important for New Yorkers to know that the degree of collaboration between the City Health Department, the Westchester Health Department, and the State Health Department is really unprecedented. And I think it's a testament to the Mayor's leadership, to the Governor's leadership that there's no ambiguity about what the job is in terms of keeping New Yorkers safe. And so, we've been working very closely. I would say that almost on a daily basis I have communications with Dr. Zucker and Dr. Daskalakis has communication with his counterpart at the State. So, we're working very closely to make sure that we identify individuals as quickly as possible and get them to the appropriate level of care. I don't know if you want to add details about the neighbor.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Just one comment, which is that we work very closely – disease detectives – the disease detective across borders to make sure that we identify all appropriate contacts and we're in the process of doing that.

Question: [Inaudible] is he drove – he or she, the neighbor drove this coronavirus patient to the hospital. So, we are always are on subways, we're in close contact. Do you have any information from the State on if there were other factors at play?

Commissioner Barbot: So, there's no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who's potentially sick is a risk factor, because, again, it goes back to the issue of casual contact.

Question: So, then how did the neighbor – if they're connecting the act of driving to the hospital with him getting sick. So, I think that kind of is counter –

Mayor: No, it's a fair point. I think, just to make it simple that Dr. Barbot is making the broad point and, I think, rightfully, the broad point, because that's what the medical science keeps telling us. If someone got sick from – we don't know the whole story – I mean, I think it gets to your question – we don't know if he was spending a lot of time with a him otherwise or with someone else, but we need to know. We need to know, because if there's a nexus to New York City, we need to know. And again, I think the point about the disease detectives are kindred people working with each other. We will follow up and make clear with the Westchester personnel, if they know something we need to know, we need it; if we need to do a separate interview, we will certainly do it.

Question: Yes, Mr. Mayor, as you know, of course, you are also an employer of over 300,000 people and as we know throughout the world, civil servants are on the front line of this kind of [inaudible] challenge. There is a controversy developing within the TWU Local 100 about the question of wearing masks in the subway environment for protracted periods of time. At this point, management has lined up saying that that is not effective, but there is already – there's occupational evidence that being in the subway for 12 hours a day and more isn't healthy even without coronavirus. [Inaudible] be solved. The NYPD [inaudible] had a story, and I believed them, about buying thousands of masks. Where is the civil service supposed to be on this in terms of being free to keep themselves safe and public?

Mayor: Okay, so, let me do my best here. TWU Local 100, we clearly care about them, we need them. They're very, very important people to this city. We don't manage them. The City of New York doesn't manage them, so I just want to be mindful, I don't want to speak about the management by another agency. You need to ask them. But on the bigger question, which is a very fair question – I think we saw images from around the world that told us that people are supposed to wear masks and somehow that's helpful. I believe our professionals here who say, no, it's the other way around. It's not that you wear the masks to stop from getting, it is that you wear the mask if you have it to stop from spreading it. And if you are a health care provider who is in constant contact, that obviously qualifies under the definition we're giving of someone who has very regular contact with people. We want whatever level of protection necessary for the contact. So again, what we're going to do – I want to just warn everyone, I think we're going to be together for not weeks but months talking about this. I'm always going to try and put things in very simple terms that I believe are true. And if any of these four doctors hear something that needs clarification – that means you too Mitch –

[Laughter]

These millennials, they're always looking at their screens.

[Laughter]

If any of these four doctors hear something that they think needs clarification, they will jump in. If none of the panel of four exceptional leaders in public health say I'm wrong, I think you can bank on it. So, here we go. If you have this disease, wearing a mask helps you to not spread it to others.

Unknown: Correct.

Mayor: Okay. If you are a health care professional, coming in contact with folks on a regular basis who may have the disease, the proper mask helps protect the health care professional.

Unknown: Correct.

Mayor: Those are the two reasons for masks. It is not a general – I'll use the word prophylactic – no one laugh – it is not a general prophylactic for every-day people trying to ward off the disease.

Unknown: Correct.

Mayor: Okay. Of course –

Question: [Inaudible] brave first responders, World Trade Center survivors [inaudible] initial research [inaudible] folks that are dealing with World Trade Center health issues, may be back on the job but have immune issues – this may be a little bit of a complication. It that something the doctors could talk about how they should be guiding, because many of them –

Mayor: If someone has got a compromised health dynamic and might be in the presence of this disease, who wants to speak to that? I think that should be handled very specifically, right?

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah. I would encourage them to talk to their individual physician. I would encourage them that, if they are thinking about traveling to one of the affected countries, that they rethink it and don't do it. And that if they have come in contact with someone who has traveled to one of the affected countries in the last 14 days, that then they should contact their provider.

Mayor: But I would go further to your occupational point, which is if we've got folks who are compromised, I think our managers need to make adjustments in how people are working if they think there's any potential vulnerabilities. So, I think this is obviously the health care [inaudible] – I’m look in the Mitch, first and foremost – and Mitch, you're quick on your feet, I'm sure you can speak to this. If in this environment, one of your employees says, I have a compromised system, what should I do? Give us your best on how you're going to guide.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: You're absolutely right, Mr. Mayor. We would make job adjustments and I think that that's what's appropriate. You have to tailor it to the person's circumstance.

Mayor: So, Bob, I think you'll get the word out, I'm sure. If individual employees have a concern who might come in regular contact with patients, they should come forward to their supervisors at H + H, obviously EMT’s would be another good example. We will give guidance, the team will follow up to make sure that those requests and concerns will be received positively.

Go ahead –

Question: Mr. Mayor, is it safe to say that coronavirus is contagious essentially in the same way in common cold and flu are?

Mayor: I think that's – I was about to say – well, you guys, this would help, I want you to answer, but the difference between this and measles, which you talked about the other day – help everyone know the difference of sort of infect-ability, if you will.

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely. And what we know currently from what's been seen across the globe is that one individual who's symptomatic with coronavirus can infect up to 2.5 people, and so that is equivalent to a really bad flu season.

Mayor: But do the comparison I said – like what’s an easy to contract – super fast contracting kind of situation, versus it takes more, just give some examples.

Commissioner Barbot: As opposed to measles, which is airborne, meaning that if a person with measles was in the room right now, two hours ago –

Mayor: You and me, right now.

Commissioner Barbot: Right. You had measles, you came into the room, you left – two hours later, if I was unvaccinated, I would be at high risk for contracting measles –

Mayor: Because it’s in the air.

Commissioner Barbot: Because it's in the air. As opposed to an individual, let's say, God forbid – I would never wish this on you – you've got coronavirus –

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner.

[Laughter]

Commissioner Barbot: You're in the room, you go out for that same period of time – I, being a good health commissioner have been washing my hands religiously, but I touched the microphone. If I don't wash my hands on a regular basis, then there's a very, very, very, very small – and probably a microphone would not be the best example – maybe a handle – an extraordinarily small technical risk. But the reality is for every-day living there's no indication that casual contact, being in a room with someone, using the subway is going to any way, shape or form increased the risk to every-day New Yorkers. We want to really emphasize the risk to New Yorkers remains low.

Mayor: And to both of you, the cold and flu parallel – and I think would be helpful, I'm just going to take a moment here to clarify to everyone where the cold and the traditional normal flu are on the spectrum of diseases, family of diseases with coronavirus and whether the way you contract is similar or not.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So, biologically and epidemiologically, the coronavirus acts a lot like the influenza virus. So, I think it's exactly on the same end of the spectrum.

Mayor: And again, just over-communication – how do you contract the flu?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So, contract track the flu usually from droplets. So, it usually is direct contact with someone coughing or sneezing. As Barbot said, hand hygiene is important because there is the possibility of touching something and potentially getting the flu, but it's less common than the droplets. I just wanted to add a comparison for measles, about nine in 10 people who are exposed to measles who are unvaccinated will get the measles. So, way less in a coronavirus-influenza world.

Question: [Inaudible]

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: It's what Dr. Barbot said that about two people – so, it's about 20 percent.

Question: [Inaudible] one other question. New York States said that it is following the CDC guidelines, New York City going to expand those guidelines and test more people.

Mayor: Yeah, you start and I'll jump in.

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: The Health Department already sent a health alert notice this morning, matching the CDC criteria.

Question: [Inaudible]

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: Yes, our health department. Vice President Pence actually opened the lid even more last night. So, we are trying to make sure we understand exactly what the repercussions will be. But more than likely, the Mayor has said, we err on the side of extra caution. We want people to come forth and get treatment and tested if needed.

Mayor: Yeah, let me follow up on that. So –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Hold on, let me – when I'm saying let me follow up, let me follow up, and then we will happily take your question. The big story here, and I’ve really been thinking about this a lot and we've had endless meetings about it – but the big story here is what a difference it would have been if in the very beginning the decision had been to decentralize the testing and maximize the ability of all localities to do that. Because what I'm seeing here is, now that we finally have it – and we're, you know, on day-three of having testing capacity – it gives us much more strategic ability to address the situation, you know, to the CDC guidance and beyond, which is where I want to be, I want to be beyond. That, you know, when – and these is not just, you know, random, but when there's a strategic reason to test someone, we need to be able to test them and we're building out that capacity rapidly. Given the trajectory of this disease, and I think our colleagues in Washington State would be the first to say this – if that capacity have been up and running two weeks ago, three weeks ago, four weeks ago, this would be an entirely different situation. I'm hoping and praying it's just in time to stay ahead of this, but my directive is that we are going to expand the criteria for testing. We're going be testing more people than the CDC would specifically suggest. Obviously, we have to keep building up our capacities. And we talked about yesterday, we want other labs to come online and that's going to help. But my strategic approach is, every time we can disqualify a person, which is so far what the batting average says, you know, the disqualification rate is pretty high, that's helpful to everyone. And when we can clarify, that someone has it, that we know what to do and we can maximize the chance there it won't be a spread. So, we're leaning into testing.

Go ahead.

Question: I just wanted to ask how Vice President –

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: Original CDC guidelines were Hubei Province, very, very strict. Then rest of China. Then the CDC changed guidelines for the new countries, South Korea, Italy, Iran, Japan. So they're very slowly expanding. What we are seeing here is that if, because of the community spread now beginning, the nexus to the countries is important but it's not the only way. So as the Mayor keeps challenging us to do, we're going to be leaning forward to try to find more people out faster.

Question: [Inaudible] Vice President [inaudible]?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: He's beginning to say, we need to test more. We cannot restrict only to the countries because it's already here.

Mayor: Right. Gloria?

Question: Mr. Mayor – I wanted some clarity on when and how we got to the schools guidance specifically there's some reporting about a teacher who is showing symptoms and has been self-isolated.

Mayor: Right.

Question: What, where are you on that? What, what do we know about who that teacher has been in contact with, the kids he might've been in contact with?

Mayor: I think it’s a she? Or is it a he?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: I think it’s a she.

Mayor: Okay. We'll confirm that. That look, the important thing is the teacher is self-quarantined and that is a very good thing. We are, as I said today, we will tighten up that guidance for sure. We have some work to do with that teacher and with the union. Right now the most important thing is that teacher is not in contact with students and won't be in contact with students until it's safe to be so. But we're going to look at that situation to see if there's any other follow up that we need to do in that school. We'll know more on that later today.

Question: [Inaudible]?

Mayor: Again, we'll speak to that later today. We're just, again, I want to – that's, and again, you'll understand folks, there will be times where I say we're not ready to say something until people who have been appraised and we've given the proper notification. Go ahead.

Question: I understand that we're not quite there yet, but when will the Department of Education begin planning for the eventuality that you might have to close a school or two? Maybe not the entire system? I'm not mistaking, I believe during H1N1, there were a couple schools that had to close. Are you planning for remote learning at the time?

Mayor: I'll start and then over to the Chancellor. We spoke about this and it's going to be one of the additional elements of the tabletops. We have right now the basic capacity, if we had to close the school to provide remote learning, we have more work to do to get it to the level we would like it to be. But it is an already existing capacity.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So we're working very diligently with our department partners in the city, especially the Department of Health around contingency plans should we ever get to that point. I think we all agree that closing schools is probably the last option because of the, just the myriad of issues that creates for not only students, parents, teachers, et cetera. So that's a one – it's on the spectrum of a last resort. But we have contingency plans already developed for if we need to get there, how we get there. What are the triggers, et cetera. We're continuing to revise them and as the Mayor mentioned, we have our tabletop exercises where we're kind of kicking the tires on those as well.

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead.

Question: Back to the Westchester attorney. I know we said yesterday that he first became ill on February 22nd. I'm wondering if you can determine when he contracted it based on that date. And have a couple other questions but maybe start –

Mayor: Go ahead, start with that.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So it's hard to say exactly when he contracted. We know that the incubation period for this ranges from a couple of days to maximum 14, the average is about five. So somewhere in that timeframe before he became ill was his exposure. So maximum 14 days, but potentially as little as two to five.

Question: We still don't know like exactly where or how he contracted it?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: We do not have a source for incident infection.

Question: Okay. And I know we went over this yesterday and there was kind of a refusal to say whether he had taken the subway or even Metro-North. Can we say whether he did that? Is there a reason that you're not saying whether he did that?

Mayor: Again, it's not a refusal, it's just not the way we approach this strategically. The fact is we trace where there is a specific danger to an individual and we follow up on that danger. We just, we're just, this is what this Department of Health does. We believe it's the right strategic approach. It's something that's been worked on many, many times. It is not simply based on taking mass transit. That's just the reality.

Question: Because what I think people are concerned about is that they hear that he was in this car with this [inaudible] he's in this car with this neighbor. So you're an enclosed space like a subway.

Mayor: Well no a car and a subway are not entirely the same. But go on. Go on.

Question: [Inaudible]

Question: The subway is worse.

Mayor: No, I would disagree. Go on.

Question: They are both enclosed spaces. I'm just saying this is generally what the public is concerned about. And we don't know how he may have contracted it, the neighbor, otherwise. So –

Mayor: But again, I understand why people want maximum information, but I also want us all to be careful here of what we know and what we don't know. And when we start worrying about the things that we don't know the wrong way, I think it only creates confusion for people. So what we have is, okay, we've got a case of someone who knew him obviously. We need to find out, I think very valid question, where did that come from? If we learn something new, by the way, I want no sacred cows. If it turns out it happened in the car, we need to know that. But it could also be any number of other things. So they think getting a clean answer out to the world is good. But we don't go by if he took Metro-North or he took a subway or whatever else we're going to tell you that. So what does that – and I'm saying this not to be difficult. I'm saying it to be sort of a communicative. So if he took Metro-North, are we telling people therefore don't go on Metro-North, it just doesn't follow. We have standards this city has been working on for a long time of what constitutes the kind of contact that would be pertinent. That's what we're going to work on. That's what we are going to speak to. If we start telling people a bunch of information, we actually think will be misleading. I don't think we're doing anyone a service. Go ahead.

Question: The teacher, has she been tested at this point?

Mayor: We need her to be tested.

Question: And there's a plan to test her or?

Mayor: There is a plan to test her.

Question: Okay. And is that going to happen today or?

Mayor: I think it's probably more like tomorrow.

Question: And in terms of her students, is there any examination of whether those students have come down with any issues at all?

Mayor: I don’t think we have any evidence of that.

Chancellor Carranza: We don't have any evidence of any symptoms with any students.

Mayor: Any student. Let me just clarify. It's a very important point. I'm glad you asked the question. Richard and I just went through that question earlier. So remember it's 1,800 schools, 1.1 million kids and schools have all been asked to report back if they have a situation. And at this moment we don't have a single report.

Question: Follow up question on a different topic.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead.

Question: The lawyer, his building? When did a City Health officials –

Mayor: Work, the law firm? Go ahead.

Question: When did City Health authorities contact the building management there and what guidance was given to the building management?

Mayor: I'll start and pass it out. Again, the question is not the building management. The question is who was in close contact with him in that building and obviously with his wife as well. That mapping has been done. That's the seven employees and one intern.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Otherwise, from the perspective of just maintenance, which I think is what you're asking. The guidance is routine cleaning. There's no – it's unnecessary to do any further terminal cleaning or, or more than just routine.

Commissioner Barbot: And so –

Question: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: Sorry. We were – the same day we found out that the individual was positive, that morning we were there before any other employees waiting for them at the door to make sure that they were aware that we were now conducting an investigation to rule out a potential close contacts. So we were in touch with the Director of Human Resources. No one came to work that day. They are all able to work remotely. So it was a very aggressive response as soon as we found out.

Question: Is there another parent at the SAR Academy? He was tested positive.

Mayor: Is there, are you asking?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: I don't have in New York City, another parent from the SAR Academy testing positive. Do you know of one outside New York City?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Do not.

Mayor: We do not at this moment. Okay. Anyone hasn't gone? Yes.

Question: Thank you. What is the current testing capacity of the city lab in terms of number per day?

Mayor: I think we're in right now, dozens and we need to get to hundreds quickly. Yeah.

Question: So because community spread is definitely an issue now. So is the City considering canceling any mass gathering events?

Mayor: No. Again, we talked about this a little bit yesterday. I have under my executive powers the ability to cancel mass gatherings. That would be triggered by very specific developments. We are certainly not there yet.

Question: Two questions. Like the teacher who self-quarantined, how many other school personnel do you know that might be in self-quarantine right now? And also we're three weeks after the first suspected case in New York City. Why isn't there a protocol yet for suspected cases involving school personnel?

Mayor: I think the first point we want to confirm any other employees who are in self-quarantine, I want to make sure that we give you accurate information. So I think we will have that if not today, tomorrow. If there are any, I think it's a very small number at this point. On the second point, I think the initial focus on China was there and was right. I think we would all say now there should have been a faster adjustment for the additional countries. We're going to get that fixed today.

Question: One of the issues I imagine is teachers are limited to ten sick days per year. Is that one of the issues that you're working out? Are they [inaudible]?

Mayor: Yeah, that's not going to be an issue in this case. We'll work with that.

Question: Is the City doing any work with private hospitals to make sure that they are prepared and equipped to take on the coronavirus? You know, Staten Island is the only borough with no public hospital. What are you doing there and also does it –

Mayor: Wait, can we just stay on that and we'll come back to you? Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: So we have a very robust network of both public and nonpublic health systems that we meet with on a regular basis during this outbreak. When we activated we are on regular calls with Greater New York. We're on regular calls with Health + Hospitals to make sure that they are up to date on proper protocols for identifying patients, communicating with us about patients that need to be tested for coronavirus. We query them on a regular basis to make sure that their supplies are up to date. Beyond that, we have a health alert network where we send out written guidance to thousands of providers across the city who may not be connected to a health care system but may be in solo independent practices. And then beyond that, Dr. Daskalakis in collaboration with our State partners has been on webinars for health care providers. And the last call that he was on, there were over 3,000 doctors participating all across the city.

Mayor: Go ahead, your follow up.

Question: Do you have estimate of like resources that you're giving to public hospitals, like masks and gloves, testing kits?

Mayor: Again, let me I understand the import of the question. Let me cut through it. Right now in this environment, I think there's been extraordinary coordination between State, City, Greater New York Hospital Association, everyone. There's no question that what people need, they're going to get. So if we control it, we're going to make sure people get it. We have raised the important point about the federal government's role in distributing certain types of masks. That requires federal action. We don't control that supply, but the things that we can control, we'll work with every single health care facility. So if the question is, if there's something needed on Staten Island and we have it, will they get it? The answer is yes. If there's a specific, that any of the health care providers on Staten Island feel they have a need for, they should raise it immediately to my colleagues. Go ahead.

Question: For Yeshiva University students who don't live on campus, are they being sent home. And is there any concern that they could spread the virus?

Mayor: I'll start and I don't know. I know Dean Fuleihan has been in regular touch with the President of Yeshiva University, so maybe want to see if he wants to do a guest appearance. But my understanding is their impulse here is to not do a prolonged closure. They did some very short term closure to address the immediate situation. But that they will be up and running. I don't want to speak for them, but that's certainly been their instinct as I understand it. We agree with that.

Question: Two questions. Do you have anything on five NYPD officers who had self-quarantined because of the coronavirus?

Mayor: Yeah, I understand just that. That there are five. We're going make sure they get tested. And we're coordinated with PD on that.

Question: Do you know where they had traveled, if they had –

Mayor: I don't have that right now. We'll get that to you.

Question: Do you know anything about the disease detectives? I know you mentioned before that you were going to bring on more. Is there any sort of timeline or how many you are going to bring?

Mayor: Fast. That's a great question. I've given the order and the resources are there and I know our good colleague, Dr. Katz is going to help make some of his folks available. Let's get you, we can get you an answer on that one later on today. Go ahead.

Question: So as you know, there are a lot of people that are buying mask and they are [inaudible] enough equipment. Knowing the fact that – is the City ready to take care of this massive, if there is a massive outbreak because knowing the fact that most of the, even the ventilators are made in China and they are shut down. So are we ready, have enough hospital beds in the city?

Mayor: So you asked a couple of different things. Again, I want to differentiate on the masks and I'll start and then the health care folks will jump in. Two crucial purposes of the masks again, stop someone who already is affected from spreading it. And for our medical personnel and any first responders who are dealing with folks who are sick. In that context, we have a very substantial supply right now. Our colleagues can speak to that. On the question of, I think it's a very important question, not just what do we have right now in New York City or what could we get from the federal government, but what if fundamental supplies are disrupted because global supply chains are disrupted? That puts a premium on what we have in stock and how long it will last us. Start with Mitch in terms of, because they do the direct health care provision.
I think we've said the other day in the meeting that Health + Hospitals is in strong shape for any short terms scenarios. I think there's a question, obviously over long term with something like ventilators, you can speak to that.

President Katz: On ventilators, New York City is in good shape. And based on the, even the most dire predictions of percentages of people who will have serious illness with this, we will be fine. And that’s because all hospitals, including ours, have the most current ventilators that we use every day. And we also keep stores of ventilators that were previous generations that can be made to use an emergency.

Mayor: On masks, I think we would say our supply right now is sufficient. In a more extensive crisis, we would need help from the federal government.

President Katz: Right. So we're set as all the hospitals are, but if there were influx of hundreds of patients, it would require using the stockpiles. But that's why you have stockpiles though. The whole point of the State and the federal government keeping reserves is for exactly this emergency.

Mayor: Back on Yeshiva for a moment. Hold on. Dean, I'm going to summarize it and if you have anything to add, I mentioned that you've been in touch with a President Berman I think it is? That their impulse is not to stay closed for long. They did some temporary closures just to address the issue and then they plan to reopen and that we agree with that strategy. Is that a fair assessment?

First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan: Yes. Right now they have closed the Morningside Heights campus through Friday, but they – I'm sorry. They've closed classes. They have not closed the campus.

Mayor: Classes themselves. They've canceled classes.

First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan: Correct. The dorms remain open, food service remains open. They've only closed classes. The rest of their campuses are remain open.

Mayor: Okay. We're going to finish here and then we'll go back over this side. Go ahead.

Question: Are all New York City public hospitals equipped with negative pressure rooms and mechanical ventilation devices to contain the coronavirus and –

Mayor: Okay. Stay there first. Go ahead.

President Katz: Yes.

Mayor: Go ahead. Next one.

Question Okay. Question for you Mr. Mayor, what, what do you think about the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus so far? And are you concerned that the outbreak is being politicized?

Mayor: I don't want to politicize the outbreak and I don't think that's been the response to it by and large. I think the honest, and I'm saying this as a practitioner, the honest response here is the federal government was out of position for a long time. They just weren't ahead of this. They weren't providing us what we needed. I, you know, we're talking about six weeks or more ago, you know, I said, we need – we need to do local testing. I said it publicly, we sent letters, folks here talked to officials at the CDC. I'm sure we weren't the only locality. So I think it's very frustrating to think about six weeks ago localities were saying empower us to do this testing and then we can stay ahead of this. I strongly believe, I'm not a medical expert but as a leader in government that if Washington State had had the capacity to do local testing, the trajectory out there would have been different.

So I think the central story here is the federal government waited a hell of a long time to act and – there was some denialism about the extent of the problem. And we're all paying for it now. That said, I agreed with the travel restrictions. I'm glad they were in place and I'm glad they're acting now because they clearly have moved intensely in the last few days. But I want them to stay ahead of it, not always play from behind. And I want to stop any talk that this is going to be over anytime soon. It's not going to be over anytime soon. So we're actually better off – people appreciate real talk. Assume this is going to be with us for a long time and maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised at some point. Okay. Who has not gone on this side? Not gone, let me give you a chance.

Question: So first question, can you give us a total number of people who you are aware of who are self-quarantining? And as a follow-up, can you talk a little bit about what that process should be? Because you're in New York City, lots of people live with each other and other people and family, roommates, et cetera. So what should that process actually look –?

Mayor: I'm going, I start and frame it. You can, we talked about this the other day and I restate it, you can self-quarantine in a home, in an apartment. There is a way to do that. Now, a lot of our homes, apartments are pretty damn small, so some - they'll be harder in some cases depending on the number of people, but there is a way to do that properly and I think we'll describe that to just to be vivid about it. In terms of what I'm seeing is relatively few examples that have been reported to us of self-quarantine. There are well may be any number of folks out there doing it and that's great. But in terms of our constant tracking, we're not seeing a huge number of people formally reporting through our channels – self-quarantine – that I know about. But you guys can correct if you know better?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: The mayor is totally right in the numbers and we're tracking almost each one of them. There is another group, however, if you may remember the guidelines from the CDC said if you are coming back from [inaudible] you have to go and get tested and all that. And then there's the other group that if you are coming from mainland China you were going to go to self-quarantine and we have about 2,000 of those people regularly being monitored by DOH at all times. We started with about 7,000 and of course now that the trips are diminishing, but we're still very closely monitoring that group.

Mayor: Describe how to quarantine, including if you're in a multi-room apartment?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So in a multi-room apartment, the guidance is to try to stay in one bedroom if possible. Try if possible to use a separate bathroom facility if not hygiene with the bathroom facility to make sure that it's wiped down. Otherwise the guidance is outside of the apartment, which is to minimize any departure from the apartment and if necessary to wear a mask.

Mayor: Can you just one more step Dimitri, if you're in an apartment you're going to come in - as you just said - you're going to have to go over to the bathroom or people are to pass you food. Can you sort of clarify how to do it in a way that would not create the kind of exposure or prolonged exposure for if you're the person bringing someone the food, why are you going to be okay?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So most delivery of food in that way wouldn't involve any amount of prolonged close contact. So it would not be something that would make us very concerned. Of course, I'll echo Dr. Barbot’s previous comment that everyone should make alcohol based hand sanitizer their best friend. So there's no harm in sanitizing your hands after that. But ultimately it's not a high risk exposure.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Hi, yes, there's some scientists in Washington State who actually use – who’ve actually sequenced the genes of the coronavirus cases there and in doing so have been able to come up with an estimate how long it's been circulating in the state and also to some extent how many cases might not have been diagnosed. Are there any plans to do similar genetic sequencing in New York State to get a sense of how long it might've been circulating here and an estimate of how many undiagnosed cases there might be?

Commissioner Barbot: At this point we're not there. We will be having conversations with the State to see what’s the right time to do that.

Mayor: Folks haven't gone first please? Anyone?

Question: So you've told us you're going to ramp up the instructions for teachers about what to do if they're sick but we've also been hearing from teachers who are concerned about lots of coughing kids in their classrooms. So what's the advice for them?

Mayor: Again, the guidance to principals and assistant principals and health personnel in schools and obviously on down to the teachers is if you've got a case where there's a specific nexus we want to know about it. Look, this time of year, a kid with a cough, per se, is not telling us a whole lot. But a kid with a cough who has traveled overseas to an affected country or whose family member who lives in the same home with them has – then we obviously want immediate follow-up. So I would just say we're all finding our way step by step through this, but I think the underlying reality, I keep having to come to this is this, you know, this is like the anti-Ebola, right? This is not – you know, if it touches you for a moment, you're going to die. This is something very, very different. This is a disease that for the vast majority of people will have a very mild impact. Even for the vast majority of those who have a tougher experience, they're still going to come out the other end. They're going to be okay.

The reason I think if it were not for – and this is said very, very seriously – if it were not for the fatalities, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion at all, right? So what is really driving this is not here's a disease, kind of like the flu. It is, here's the disease, kind of like the flu that can lead to fatalities that we don't understand enough, that doesn't have a vaccine, that doesn't have a cure. That's what's really going on here. So if a child, and again we are seeing this does not appear to affect young people much or even if it affects them, it is very, very mild. That's what we're seeing so far. A child with the sniffles, we have to not overreact, but a child with symptoms and that travel nexus, we want to get that child immediately to health care.

Question: But who will know? You know, do teachers are they expected to know the travel plans of their kids?

Mayor: Teachers know a huge amount about their kids. Parent coordinators know a huge amount about the kids and families. You would – it would be pretty natural to know if someone's sick. It's a very simple dialogue. Have you traveled recently? Has anyone in your family traveled recently? And if so, and that's again, principal and Chancellor jump on in that the folks who run the school, the schools are finite. I mean, the vast majority of our schools are not huge. We have some huge ones, but most are a pretty manageable size. If a teacher comes in to the principal and says, hey, I got a kid who, you know, his aunt just got back from China three weeks ago and he seems to have the symptoms, they're going to act on that right away.

Chancellor Carranza: Absolutely. And just a reminder, we're still in cold and flu season in general, so you know, they're sniffly noses and sneezing is not uncommon. But a teacher myself,
I always had that that a big bottle of disinfectant to all the time. So we encourage teachers to do that. But if a teacher notices that a student just doesn't look well, the protocol calls for the teacher to bring that student to the attention of a nurse or the principal or the designee, at which point that person will do an assessment, ask those specific questions, ask the student to wear a mask only for protective purposes. We will call a parent and a guardian to come and pick up the student and then the instruction is for the parent and guardian to get a medical care and we can facilitate and help make that happen. And then, we've also as part of our protocol are requiring nurses or principals or any situation like that to be reported to us so that we can then report that to the Department of Health. And then there's follow-up that happens with the student.

Mayor: Guys. I've got about 10 more minutes. So let's give folks our second round. Bob?

Question: Yeah, I know the doctor had said his background with this. I didn't see him [inaudible] any references to the Department of Homeless Services. We know as a matter of fact that we're only as healthy as those people with the least and humble circumstance. How do you deal with this issue that there are people out there that [inaudible] has significant health issues?

Mayor: We spoke about this yesterday. I'll reiterate the fact that we're deep into the HOME-STAT strategy, which is very, very specialized to each individual. Means our outreach workers are aware – broadly, not every single person – but a very, very high percentage of folks on the street. We know who they are there, their general health private profile, we're in a lot of touch with them. If someone exhibits the symptoms who's homeless, they'll be immediately offered care depending on their willingness to accept or not and what specifically is going on. If they're not willing to accept care and they're deemed someone who needs care for the good of everyone, we have the ability legally to require them to come in.

Question: As a follow up, if I may ask you? To what degree is the universal health care that's provided for use for Health and Human Services – HHA - helpful to being able to do with signs? Isn't there a very proactive thing –

Mayor: Profoundly. And then I'll let Mitch advertise, but the, if people know they have access to healthcare, they know it's a readily available. It's a supportive and compassionate and free. The chances of them coming in when they have a problem are greatly intensified and that's how we stop a small problem from turning into a big problem. Mitch?

President Katz: This is a great example of why NYC Care needs to exist and should exist throughout our country. Immigrants should have no fear about coming forward for care.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Could you just outline if you have any cleaning protocol for the City’s correctional facilities? It's not on the briefing and I don't know what the Department of Correction is doing to –

Mayor: Yeah, they have very intense protocol around inmates ensuring that if there's any possibility that they get them to health care immediately. I think the clean protocol and Dean, this is your turf, I think for every agency that clean protocols gone out?

First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan: Correct. Correct. We're doing it citywide. We'll get you the details.

Mayor: Yes?

Question: Mr. Mayor, I think that also we have heard that the New York Law School suspended classes today because they also have a student who made contact with the lawyer and self-reported it to the school. Do you have enough data on New York Law School specifically?

Mayor: I don't, and again, we're happy to work with them. Coming into contact - we'd need to know a lot more about that before we would suggest a closure of the school, but again, they have a right to do whatever they choose to do but we'll follow up with them right away.

Question: I know there is a concern about whether or not a countrywide there are enough testing kits available. Do you have numbers of how many kits are available in the city? And do you know yet how many people have been tested?

Mayor: So again, I gave you the update on the negatives –

Question: Right.

Mayor: And I gave you - obviously know the positives. So that's everyone. We're with new people coming in now. We have what we need right now. Right? We have what we need. If we see a meaningful uptick in the coming days, but we need to keep expanding capacity. We're working on that right now. We're also looking forward to private labs having the capacity, which I think we hope is fairly soon. So we are right now we can do dozens, as I said, we'd like to get to hundreds. Right? So we're nowhere near needing dozens in a single day right now. But we have that ability right now. I want us to be in the very short term, meaning you know, next week I'd like to see us having the capacity to do hundreds in a single day. Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, do you find yourself washing your hands more frequently these days? Now having the handset and sanitize here around you. And you - would it be useful for you or do you think it would be useful for you to take the subway more frequently now to express confidence in the assessment?

Mayor: That's a great point. I've partly because I'm in constant contact with people I learned a while ago, it’s a smart idea to wash your hands regularly and use hand sanitizer. So that really hasn't changed. I'm doing it the way I was, but I accept the point happily. I'll go out in the subway and bring you all with me to a show people that – because by the way, I mean everywhere I've been going to be clear, I think New Yorkers are going about their lives. Again, we do not intimidate easily. Every place I've been in the normal course of life in the last few days, I don't see major changes. I told you fact, largest school system in the country today versus the same day a year ago, you know, no change in attendance. So I think New Yorkers are going about their life, but I'm happy to be an agent of positive reinforcement and go out in the subway. Yeah, go ahead – I'm sorry. Finish.

Question: As a follow up, and you heard that Italy has closed all of its schools from pre-K all the way through universities until the 15th of March?

Mayor: I had not and I'm sorry to hear that for Italy's sake and for those kids’ sake. But I think this is an object lesson. The - look national government's pretty much across the board have been behind the curve on this. Right? I mean, I don't want to put down any one government. It's been all of them. China, Italy, United States of America, South Korea, Iran, I mean look at this wonderful global coalition of, they've all been equally screwed up and localities have to deal with this stuff. National governments don't. You know, they often can make our lives a lot easier or a lot worse, but we have to bear the brunt. So I think what you're seeing at the local level here in a lot of other places is we are doing the things to actually try and stay ahead of this, but it's very sad to know that this whole scenario could have been better if national governments had been more active in the beginning.

Question: How does the city do enforcement of quarantines? I guess in New York we only have the case of the health care worker.

Mayor: Right? I mean I would just start and say on a common sense level where we're not hearing – and that we would always listen for – we're not hearing a lot of people resisting quarantine or misunderstanding why it's in their interest in everyone else's interest. I think we had such a situation, we – I'm very happy to be creative about being assertive about it and we obviously have a tremendous ability to do that if we need to. But I think to date we have not had an instance, at least I have not heard of, where someone's trying to violate quarantine and we need enforcement.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: That's correct.

Commissioner Barbot: So we check on them daily and then we do random checks to make sure that, you know, they're not cheating.

Question: That’s DOHMH?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes.

Question: Okay, and then are there guidelines for the self-quarantine suggestions that the doctor was on your website or something?

Mayor: Go ahead.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: We do have guidelines for self-quarantine. They're not available on the website but we do provide them to individuals who are on quarantine.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, you said you expect this to be around for months, but to the health professionals, do you expect the trajectory of this just to follow the cold and flu season?

Commissioner Barbot: There's nothing at this point that gives us any indication about when it's going to stop. I think one of the challenges is that when you have a novel virus where people haven't been previously exposed and developed natural immunity, it's difficult to project where and when it's going to end. You know, and I'll go back to H1N1 where I was actually the Medical Director of the public schools here in New York City and that outbreak started in April and went deep into the summer, which is not typically what you would expect in flu season. So, you know, I think the reality is that we take every opportunity to learn from what other jurisdictions are experiencing and that our preparedness remains high.

Mayor: Okay, last call. We're going to have to shut down in just a minute. So I'm going to take these two - three. I'm sorry. And we'll be done. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] you suggest [inaudible] get the flu shot, where they should get the shot? I called several like CVS and Walgreens last week. They are all out of the flu shot. So what should [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: So two things on that. One is I want to be clear that we are asking people to get the flu shot, not because we think it's a treatment for COVID-19 but because we don't want them to be in a situation where they may develop symptoms, have the anxiety of thinking, do I have COVID-19 when it's an actuality the flu. The other thing I would say is if they go to a CVS where they don't have flu vaccines, they can call 3-1-1 or they can go on our website and we have a flu tracker where they can find the location nearest to them.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: So the MTA is going to be disinfecting the trains and the buses every three days [inaudible] does the city plan to do the same for the Staten Island ferry?

Mayor: Yes, of course.

Question: But when do you plan to?

Mayor: I think that guidance has already gone out and looking to Dean, I don't know if you would know, but we will get you an answer. Do you know off hand or we get? We'll confirm it back to you.

Question: For the folks that already have the virus, what's their day to day look like? Are they in touch with somebody from the city? Can somebody come visit them personally? Are they're getting tested every day? What's that like?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So the individuals who are isolated because they have a COVID-19 are contacted daily by our staff to make sure that they're clinically doing well. They're offered wraparound services if necessary. And then also as you heard, we do come by unannounced just to make sure they're complying to their isolation.

Question: Who exactly is coming?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: The disease detectives are the ones who do the main contact. So again, that, that power force, the people who do both contact tracing as well as follow up, they sort their cases and follow them through. And then we have other staff including health police that will do spot checks.

Mayor: Okay. Thanks, everyone. We'll get you more updates soon.

2020-03-05 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: …a number of different areas. What I’m going to try to do in each briefing is create as much continuity with the previous briefing as possible. And as I said, I think we are going to be doing a lot of these for the weeks to come. So, let me start with, yesterday we talked in detail about the family from Westchester and the law firm, Lewis and Garbuz, where both the mother and father of that family worked. In addition to the mother and father, eight other individuals at the law firm – seven employees want to intern – four residents of New York City, four residents of areas outside New York City all have been tested. Here is what we know so far – for the four New York City residents, the tests have all come back negative. For the one resident beyond the couple of themselves from Westchester County, the test has come back negative. We have three more tests pending. We will have those results today and we'll publish them as soon as we have them.

And everything's very dynamic, as everyone is seeing, so these numbers can move at any given moment. But as of this moment, I've got – obviously, we'll talk about the four confirmed cases, the four cases that tested positive, but now the number of negative cases is 26. We have 26 tests completed, have come back negative. We have two new cases confirmed this morning in New York City, a man in his forties, a woman in her eighties. Both are critically ill at this moment. Both did have substantial preexisting conditions. In the case of the man, respiratory issues related to smoking and vaping; in the case of the woman specific illnesses related to her advanced age. One is at a hospital in Brooklyn, one is at a hospital in Manhattan. Again, we're going to try always to define what we are able to tell you, what we're not yet able to tell you. Obviously, there's a confidentiality issue here that we have to be sensitive to. These are voluntary hospitals, not public hospitals.

Okay. Now this gets into the issue of community spread, which we're very, very concerned about obviously. And this is kind of defining a changing reality. So, today, we're going to be talking about some strategic differences even compared to yesterday now that we have more evidence of community spread. So, in the case of these two individuals, neither one had a connection to the areas affected in other parts of the world. So, there no travel nexus. Neither one connected to any of the other cases we've seen. Our disease detectives are working with their families right away on mapping their contacts. And we'll have more to say on that shortly and we'll obviously be following up with any close contacts. The community spread issue – we are seeking a guidance from the World Health Organization and from the CDC now that it's clearly established as a phenomenon here. We are trying every day to get a better understanding of this still new disease. We are not getting all the answers we would like, but, to be fair, the entire medical community around the world is trying to get clear answers and clear facts. What we do know is when you have a community spread dynamic, you have to assume it could be anywhere in the city. So, we are going to work on an assumption of the intense vigilance. We're going to update our approaches as we get more information. A phrase I've just learned – transmissibility is sort of the amount or the ease with which this is transmitted. World Health Organization continues to say this disease is less transmittable than the flu. But again, we are watching carefully. A community-spread dynamic suggests it will be more pervasive and that worries us obviously in terms of how easy it might be for someone to come in contact. Again, goes back to what people can do. And this is the consistent part, because it is affirming as we use the example yesterday of the measles – it is not a disease that the substances hang in the air and if you come into a room where they've been present that it's easy to contract. We know that is not the case. What we're concerned about is direct contact with fluids. And so, that's the area where people can do all the smart basics, the hand washing, the alcohol-based hand sanitizer – thank you, Commissioner, you've gotten that in my brain. Obviously, covering your mouth when you cough and sneeze – all those basics really matter.

Notwithstanding our real concern about the situation, the overall numbers still remain, in a sense, very favorable. We have only four confirmed cases. Obviously, out of 8.6 million people, we have 26 tests that have come back negative. I want to note, I should've said this up front for continuity – the two Yeshiva students who the disease detectives identified from the first Yeshiva – so, that is the roommate and the best friend of the student from Westchester – both have been tested, both came back negative. So, they're in that negative number of 26. So, again, by the numbers, we remain in a strong situation. The community-spread dynamic is unpredictable and worrisome, so we're watching carefully. And I want to alert everyone, each day we may tell you we're finding something new about how this disease is acting in general, how it's acting here in New York City, so our level of concern is rising for sure. That said, the big picture point, I'll keep saying it, we do know this for a fact, over 80 percent of the folks who get it have very mild symptoms, very mild experience, and the vast majority of folks even who have more serious outcomes still end up seeing it through. So, it comes back to – I'm making really clear, we believe in a containment strategy. We understand there are limits to that at a certain point, but that is the strategy we're using. We believe in a strategy that focuses on identification and testing. We believe deeply in the work of the disease detectives and we will be introducing you to some of them soon so you can get to see the real human beings who do this important work. But finding everyone who needs a test and getting them a test as quickly as possible and isolating them when they need to be isolated is the smart strategy.

We have a directive for all New Yorkers, and I'm first going to talk about all New Yorkers and then let's specifically talk about City workers. For all New Yorkers, if you had returned from one of the five countries I'll indicate, we're asking you to isolate yourself for 14 days as a precaution. Any New Yorker coming back from any of these countries – China, Iran, Italy, South Korea, all on the current CDC list. Japan should be on that list we believe. So, from the point of view of New York City, if you're coming back from Japan, you should isolate for 14 days. And obviously if you have symptoms, then you need to get to care and testing. Now, this is a brand-new thing I'm going to introduce to you today. Thanks to our Health Commissioner, this order is being issued as we speak – the Commissioner's Order. And this refers to City workers, specifically first responders, health care workers and educators. So, this'll be up online momentarily. Under this order, the Commissioner has the ability to determine case by case specific actions. And if the Commissioner determines that anyone fits the criteria and is a risk, they can be required to get a coronavirus test. Right now, I can tell you, anyone who has traveled to one of the affected countries and has symptoms will be required and the broad assumption has to be that those who have symptoms alone, except for a particular extenuating circumstances, anyone who has symptoms will be required to get tested and we will act in accordance to that test in terms of if and when they can return to work. Anyone who refuses testing must comply with a quarantine and there will be specific employment consequences if they refuse testing. We'll get you the details on that.

I want to also emphasize – again, I think we're in a very dynamic crisis, which I have said to you guys I believe will be months if we're lucky. This is the first Commissioner's Order, I doubt it will be the last. You will see evolving actions. This one refers only to city workers – obviously, the Commissioner has a power and I have the power to do things related to the general public as well. So this is – we're going to take each step as needed. We'd love it if we don't have to take a lot more steps, but we are prepared to do a lot more the moment we need to.

Consistent with the topic of City workers, an update related to schools. So, we have three teachers who have recently come back from Italy. I'm going to give you a lot of detail on one and then there's two more where I can give you a little detail, but we will have more specific as soon as certain notifications have been made. First teacher, it was part of a high school trip at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, 3787 Bedford Avenue – 44 students and this teacher plus six other staff members went to Italy. My understanding is to one of the affected areas of Italy and that's important here. Obviously, countries are experiencing this crisis but there are areas of particular concern. Came back on February 23rd. The teacher was symptomatic, the teacher has been tested, the teacher tests negative. We are assessing all the other staff and students on the trip. At this moment, we have none with symptoms and we believe we have a low-risk situation, especially given that we're getting close to the 14-day mark, but they are being carefully assessed. If anyone needs testing, they will get it.

This is a good example of a situation I want to clarify about. We've been talking a lot about how to talk to parents. And I'll say this – and at any point now or in the back and forth my health colleagues will jump in – but the basic guidance to parents who are very, very concerned right now is, if your children are healthy, at this moment, there's very, very little to be concerned about. If your children have serious respiratory diseases or a compromised immune system, we want you to be extra vigilant and we want, in that case, we obviously want to make sure our schools are aware of those particular students. So, looking to the Chancellor and the Health Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner that we obviously have the ability with school records and school health facilities, something you used to do, to understand school-by-school who those students are. We're going to have particular sensitivity around those students, but, at this moment, because there's not a single symptomatic student anywhere in New York City public schools that we know of, we're not taking an additional action. But that, just the human guidance to parents – and I'm saying this as a parent – based on what our public health officials are saying is only if your student has a serious respiratory problem or have compromised immune system is there an immediate threat. Otherwise, as everyone is seeing, this disease disproportionately affects older folks and folks with a serious preexisting conditions, but, obviously, overwhelmingly it's been adults.

Two other teachers – in this case, they both returned from a vacation in Italy over the winter break. So again, we're getting close to the 14-day point. We will have more information shortly. Both are being tested today. We'll have the results on that shortly and then we'll talk about pending notification, the specific schools and any other follow up. But again, those teachers just went themselves personally on vacation, not with students or other staff.

I want to give you a couple of agency updates. Department of Correction – all housing units, day rooms and common spaces are now being cleaned once per day. Shower areas are being cleaned three times per day. Transport buses are being cleaned and sanitized daily. Staten Island ferry – every ferry, each boat will get a deep clean every 72 hours minimum, often more than that, more frequently than that. Terminals will be consistently clean, constantly clean. DOT crews are also handing out material on the ferry to educate customers as to the facts on the virus. Those – I obviously gave you some other agency updates yesterday. Those are some of the things that are happening in our government, but I want to emphasize we need from another government, the federal government. This is a still the case. Even though there was a little progress last few days, it's still not what we need. We need the ability to test as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. We cannot do that without help from the federal government, period. The CDC has finally broadened the criteria, which is good, but we do not have the physical capacity. We need the FDA to speed up approval of the test developed by private companies. We just need this to be a consistent effort by the federal government. It has not been. The goal has to be the decentralized testing as quickly as possible and maximize our ability to do what we need to do.

One other piece of news, literally coming in just before I came out here from New Jersey, but related to us. We have one new case in New Jersey that has a significant nexus to New York City. We don't have the details yet. Our health authorities are speaking to the New Jersey health authorities. I will be speaking to the Lieutenant Governor who's in the role of Acting Governor, because Governor Murphy has been in surgery. So, Acting Governor Sheila Oliver, I'll be speaking to her later on today. We will get you an update as soon as we have more of the details. We're going to have our disease detectives engaged with the health authorities in New Jersey to track what that nexus is. So, we know there's a case and we know there's a nexus, but we don't have the details on that. Hopefully we'll have that in a matter of hours.

A few quick words in Spanish and then I'd like to have the Speakers of the City Council, Corey Johnson, say a few words before we open up to questions.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I’d like to turn to Speaker Johnson.

[…]

Mayor: Thank you, Speaker. I couldn't agree with you more and thank you for that rightfully passionate statement. Yeah, we're just not – I want to amplify, we're not going to accept any discrimination. There are real consequences. Some forms of discrimination are illegal and you will feel the consequences of it. But also, if anyone's paying attention, this disease is now in, I think, 79 countries of the world, so it is unfortunately affecting people of all backgrounds, all nations. We have no time for discrimination. I also want to thank the Speaker, I appreciate the hearing he's having. I also want to thank them for riding the subway and want to inform you all that I'll be going from City Hall to OEM by subway, and you will all be welcome to join, anyone who wants to come along a little bit later on this afternoon.

Go ahead, Katie.

Question: So, the CDC added Italy to a level three non-essential travel warning a week ago. I want to know why [inaudible] and if they did, I’d be happy to be wrong – why didn't DOE proactively go and see what schools had trips to Italy, and the other countries, South Korea, Japan. We're just now finding out that 50 people from a school traveled to Italy for February break, one had symptoms, and I just want to know if that was done, let me know, and if it wasn't, why not?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: So, again, you said it was added a week ago. These trips were in February. So, as the information was coming to us where we're going back and finding out where are students going, where were these trips planned for? A large agency, lots of groups moving. The good news is, going forward, we have very, very clear protocols. We now have an inventory of all of these trips, even trips to non-designated countries. We're sharing those trips with our partners in the Department of Health to make sure that there's nothing brewing that they know of that we don't know of. So, going forward, we have tight controls.

Question: Did you not have inventory before and could you let me know if there were other trips made during February break?

Chancellor Carranza: We can get that information to you. But again, we are going back and there are some trips, quite frankly, that – even our unofficial trips, they’re paid for by parent organizations, they’re paid for by a church-related organization. So, we're trying to get an inventory of everything and everywhere and we're in the active process of that. We've been doing that for about a week as well.

Question: With all due respect, I know teachers who probably can't go to like the Hall of Science without notifying their district. I'm just trying to clarify, you mean the Department of Education wouldn't know if a school sanctioned DOE trip with 50 people –

Chancellor Carranza: That’s not what I’m saying. What I'm saying is that there were a lot of trips, there was a lot of information. CDC was changing and giving different guidance. We were working through the Department of Health as well – a lot of moving parts.

Mayor: Right. Richard, let me just, for everyone's sake. I use to know when I was a parent, I don't know what this year the exact dates of winter break were. If we could give that, I don't know if you have at your fingertips, but we can get the exact dates of winter break, I think it will help to answer the point that's being raised here. But the bottom line is, we're going to inventory everything now and go back and look if there's anything we need to follow up on specifically.

Question: [Inaudible] point was that they shouldn’t have traveled –

Mayor: Again, I would just – I’ve been very clear, we’re going to inventory everything and we're going to be very transparent about it.

Question: I just want to clarify two points. The first, the two new cases in New York City, the man and his [inaudible] is there any connection between the two of them?

Mayor: No.

Question: No. And can you clarify –

Mayor: I’m double-checking – no. No.

Question: And are there three confirmed cases in New York City, or four –

Mayor: Four if you include the guy from Westchester who worked in New York City, lived in Westchester but isn't in New York City hospitals. So, we're calling that in New York City for the sake of abundance of inclusion.

Question: [Inaudible] he’s in Westchester.

Mayor: Correct.

Question: About the lawyer, his wife, do we know if his wife had traveled to Israel?

Mayor: We know he traveled to Israel. I don't know if we know his wife's traveled to Israel.

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: I'm not aware of her travel itinerary. We do know that he traveled to Israel, but way before he got –

Mayor: But she is – again, I'm trying to – there's so many cases I'm trying to make sense – she's asymptomatic?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Question: I have two questions. One is – yesterday, you said there'd be an update to the protocol regarding staff who show symptoms of school.

Mayor: When you say staff – I’m sorry –

Questions: Teachers –

Mayor: Teachers. Yeah, that’s the Commissioner’s Order.

Question: Okay. So that is how you're dealing with [inaudible]. Also, the teacher who you said today had been tested, it was negative. Is that the same one that we talked about at yesterdays –

Mayor: Yes, I believe it's the same. Let me think – I'm trying to keep my continuity tight. I'll say it again just to make sure we're all over-communicating. James Madison High – there’s a teacher who went on an official school trip with students over there – again, tested negative. We'll have the other two teachers results today.

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor, can I amplify?

Mayor: Please.

Chancellor Carranza: There was additional guidance and protocols that were sent to all 152,000 employees in the DOE today with very specific instructions. We've also updated our guidance to all principals about how to work with students, how to work with other staff members if they are presenting. So, there's been updated guidance as well.

Question: [Inaudible] ask the DOE press office to share that? [Inaudible]

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely – just went out.

Question: [Inaudible]

Chancellor Carranza: Sure, say that again?

Question: [Inaudible]

[Chancellor Carranza speaks in Spanish]

Question: Just a few questions wrapped up under the quarantine headline. There are 1,000 people quarantined in New York State. I wondered how many in New York City? Are any of those involuntary? And do we – how many mental health – I'm sorry, how many Department of Health staffers do we have to check in on them? And are you worried about a shortage of staffers to check in on the [inaudible]?

Mayor: The last point – the last point I was saying, we're obviously in a crisis. The message to the Department of Health is that whatever staffing they need, if they need to hire new, if they need to gently borrow from a Health and Hospitals, which has been wonderful about offering personnel, or from any other agency, there's not going to be a staffing shortage. That will be whatever they need, whenever they need it. As to the quarantine numbers and whether there's any involuntary –

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: I'll start and then Dr. Daskalakis can add anything that I’ve missed. With regards to individuals that are returning from the involved countries. The guidance from CDC and we, along with our state partners and various jurisdictions across the country, are taking the approach of providing them information when they get off the planes, giving them our phone number, what symptoms to look out for, and then we reach out to them on a daily basis to make sure that they are not developing symptoms. It's what we call voluntary home isolation. And so, they have a phone number to call us if and when they develop symptoms. There haven't been any individuals in that group that have reached out to us thus far. And then, we have individuals who are in mandatory quarantine and I'll let Dr. Daskalakis speak to that.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Currently, individuals who are under mandatory quarantine really fall into two categories – individuals who are – actually, three – individuals who have active COVID-19 disease. So, they're in isolation. There are also individuals who are close contacts of a COVID-19 case. Those are also individuals who are on quarantine. Then additionally, it is a dwindling population of individuals returning from Wuhan, China. So, currently, there is no one who meets that criteria.

Question: And what’s the universe? How many people are in quarantine, mandatory versus voluntary?

Mayor: If there’s any – let me pause you guys. It’s a very, very fair question. If you are 100 percent sure you have all the up-to-date facts, give them. If not, we should get back shortly.

Commissioner Barbot: So, we have the two individual – sorry, we have the two individuals that we have identified earlier as having a travel nexus to Iran.

Mayor: If there's any – let me pause you guys. It's a very, very fair question. If you are 100 percent sure you have all the up to date facts, give them, if not, we should get back shortly.

Commissioner Barbot: So we have the two individual – sorry – we have the two individuals that we have identified earlier as having a travel nexus to Iran. And in addition to that we have a number that changes on a daily basis in terms of returning passengers from the five affected countries, China, Italy, Iran, South Korea, and now Japan. And so that's a fluid number that we can get back to you on. I think - yeah, we'll get back to you on that correct number.

Question: I’m just sorry, one last follow up. How often are those unannounced spot checks that you mentioned yesterday?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: During the period of quarantine? They're done a couple of times a week.

Question: Is there a nexus with the 42-year-old man in Nassau County who was diagnosed with COVID in New York City? [Inaudible].

Mayor: I have not heard – haven't heard on that one. If there is a nexus, do we know anything yet?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Which person in in Westchester?

Question: [Inaudible], in Long Island, in Nassau County. The Governor today said that there was a 42-year-old man who tested positive and you're looking to see if there's a nexus or you know that there is [inaudible]?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: We’ll have to follow up. Usually what will happen is they will reach out to our disease detectives to have a conversation. So I'm sure that those are happening. But we'll follow up,

Question: Can someone on the panel clarify how many tests New York City has, if you're running low and also the type of test if it's the one developed in Albany or if it’s a CDC test?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So currently we have enough tests to test around a thousand people. The test that we're currently using is the kit that was shipped by the Centers for Disease Control. We have not brought the New York State - New York City Cooperative Test onboard yet.

Question: What is the nexus between the New Jersey case and New York City –

Mayor: That’s what we’re waiting to find out. So we do believe from the initial information, there will be, for example, someone who works here, you know, that's kind of thing. But it's really, literally was breaking before I came in here. So we know enough to say, we assume it's someone who's been in New York City a lot and there may be that kind of contact. We've got to get our disease detectives connecting with the New Jersey health officials and map that quickly.

Question: Do we know anything about their travel [inaudible]?

Mayor: We don't know anything yet, but we'll know more in the next few hours. Go ahead, Rich.

Question: So I may have missed this but the two teachers who came back from vacation, were they in a school when the decision was made to test them or have they not been back into the school building or did they voluntarily say, you know, we ought to be tested? What happened?

Mayor: Richard, correct me. I think both have been home for a period of time –

Chancellor Carranza: They have been at home. Yes, correct.

Mayor: So the whole time since they got back? So just let me do this fact point is we're going to really always try and shower you guys with facts. Winter break, Saturday, February 15th to Sunday, February 23rd, I did math, 11 full days, including today, since then, not including February 23rd, which would be the day they either were traveling back or they were already back. But if you want, the cleanest interpretation has been at least 11 days for anyone who was overseas on winter break. Maybe more in some cases. So in this case or these two cases, Richard, did they go, did they stay home since to the best your understanding or do we need to confirm that?

Chancellor Carranza: So the best of my recollection, they were in school for one day, did not feel well, went home and have not been back in school since.

Mayor: Okay. We're going to confirm that. We'll get you the exact details on that and we'll get you the results on their tests. Erin?

Question: Can we get some more clarity on the Commissioner's orders? So this is – you can order testing under what circumstances?

Mayor: Can I just confirm too colleagues? Is it online yet? When we'll be online momentarily? Okay. Go ahead. I'm sorry, Erin.

Question: What are the circumstances under which you can order a city employee to take a test?

Mayor: I’ll start and the Commissioner will get into more it. It begins with if they have been to one of the countries, they're experiencing the crisis within the timeframe, and especially if they are symptomatic. But again, it gives the Commissioner the right to make that determination. Simply being symptomatic is sufficient. You and this – I’m just going to leave it on.

Commissioner Barbot: That's absolutely right, Mr. Mayor.

Question: Okay. If they refuse to do that, you said they will be quarantined. Is that a mandatory quarantine?

Commissioner Barbot: Mandatory quarantine.

Question: Okay. And you said they would face discipline. Is that termination or at the type of discipline specified?

Mayor: It depends on the employee. But the point is there – we want to be very clear, look, I come at this with a positive spirit. I think everyone would want to follow the Commissioner's orders in the name of their own health, their family's health, and the people they serve and come contact with. But I'm just trying to be very straightforward from the beginning. This is not optional. This is required.

Question: Is there a response to [inaudible]. Have there been city workers who have not wanted to take the test?

Mayor: This is - given the severity of what we're talking about here, the situation we're facing, we want to be very clear from the beginning that it's not optional. So we're just, I'm a believer that if you make clear as consequences, it helps to people to understand.

Question: And then finally, is there a reason to city workers specifically as opposed to this applying to anyone? Especially with the authority you have.

Mayor: The city workers in this case, the healthcare workers, obviously I think that says it speaks for itself. These are folks who we need and we need them to be healthy – and if they are in contact with other people, we cannot take a risk if they might spread disease. First responders, exactly the same point. Educators, additional sensitivity cause they come in contact with children even though again this is not a disease that seems to focus if you will on children. Those three areas to us just made total sense to delineate. We have the option of going further into the general public in different ways, if we need to. It’s something we're going to assess day to day, hour to hour. Go ahead. Ashley, did you have? No? Yes.

Question: I wanted to ask. We have a lot of larger events coming up. It's getting warmer. What's the threshold for deciding whether or not to cancel those events? And a follow up question, there are in the city like the South Bronx where their high rates of childhood asthma and do you have specific plans for areas like that?

Mayor: The first point this is something we're asking ourselves regularly. We're watching and again I think to be very clear, the last 24 hours have changed the dynamic with the first community spread. So previously we went quite a while where the only the only impact we were feeling was directly related to travel or even for quite a while we weren't feeling any impact. Right? So now with communities spread being established, it will be a constant discussion of whether we need to start canceling events. We are not there yet today just based on what we're seeing, the limits we're seeing, the numbers on the testing and the high rate of negatives. We're not there. It is a constant conversation and this is the group right here that will be making that decision together.

Question: [Inaudible]?

Mayor: There’s not a formal rubric that – I mean we're talking about a lot of factors but I will ask the question, is there a, a model rubric from either CDC or World Health Organization?

Commissioner Barbot: There isn't. Generally we take into consideration the severity of the illness along with how far wide it has spread.

Question: So would there be like parameters, let's say indoor events as opposed to outdoors activities –

Mayor: Again, I want to clarify in theory, yes. But I want us to – I don't want a respectfully – I don't want to see reporting that says we're planning on closing events when we're not. We're not planning that yet. If we get to that point, we're going to specify to the maximum extent possible what sorts of things we're concerned about and what we are not, but we're certainly not there yet. Your other question was about asthma. I mentioned that we are concerned for sure. I'm someone who has mild asthma but for folks who have severe asthma, especially in particularly kids with severe asthma, we have a real concern there. Again, we do not have a single a nexus to the schools vis-a-vis kids at this point. We don't have a single symptomatic kid we know of, but we are watching very carefully. If we saw something else in schools, the ability to identify any kid with severe asthma and I think that's a case where we would say if we see a school situation, we're concerned about, we want to get those kids isolated from that situation very quickly. That's just my common sense answer. But would you guys like to add?

Commissioner Barbot: What I would add is that this is, as we have said in a previous press conference, a good time for individuals who have chronic underlying diseases to make sure that they're up to date on their refills and not to take for granted that, you know, they can go to the pharmacy next week or the week after. Want to make sure that in the event that someone is symptomatic and they haven't gotten their flu shot or I want to – I need to get my daily plugin, it's still not too late - that they have the medication that they need at their disposal. And one of the things that we've also been talking about is not only individuals, let's say that child with asthma, but especially older individuals who have chronic underlying diseases. We want to make sure that they are up to date with, you know, their doctor's phone numbers so that they have the easiest possible access to care.

Mayor: Can I do two things on that? One, would you remind people that that a site, you can go to the find out where you can get a flu shot?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, you can go to our website nyc.gov/health and there is a flu tracker on there and it'll tell you, or you can go – call 3-1-1 to get the pharmacy nearest you or the nearest H + H facility to you that where you can get immunization.

Mayor: I want to come back on the prescription point too. I want to make this a little vivid for everyone. So I think everyone understands here we are encouraging calm and we're encouraging people to do the things they can do. But here's something where I want people to feel a little more urgency, which is on the prescriptions. A very, very different reality but I remember vividly in the days after Hurricane Sandy because of the disruption that occurred, pharmacies were closed. People could not get meds they needed. We're not in that kind of situation, but we all can imagine a crisis in which there's basic disruption of supply chain. That's not hard to imagine in this case at some point. So please all New Yorkers get your prescriptions filled now. Protect yourself, protect your family, do not hesitate. Get them while you can get them. That's just smart for everyone. I hope we never get to a point where it's a consideration, but everything that people lay in now is in their interests. Go ahead.

Question: So how are you addressing a small business concerns? You know, we talked about Chinatown, but I'm hearing that restaurants were let's say, groups or organizations that have been scheduling events, you know, large dinners that they're canceling on the restaurants. And so this has been happening –

Mayor: Yeah, Juliet. I mean, I want to be clear about the sort of the serenity prayer here. What we can control and what we can't. And when what we're doing that I think is helping is telling people the facts very transparently and reminding people that, you know, life is going on in New York City. And I've been plenty of places in the city in the last few days where life looks pretty normal, actually. School attendance, we just, Richard and I just discussed this today in New York City school attendance is higher than it was the same day a year ago. So New Yorkers, all of you have to obviously report a lot of information, including information that causes people some concern. New Yorkers are pretty tough, pretty resilient. They're generally going about their business. Some organizations, you're absolutely right, are making choices, some travel related changes, et cetera. But I think the best thing we can all do is remind people, keep going about your lives, you know, keep going out and patronizing those businesses. We'll tell you the second we think you should change your behavior. You're - and again, we're constantly communicating here, but right now go about your business, Erin.

Question: For Chancellor Carranza, there's been some requests to provide on private schools with sanitation materials so they can do the deep cleaning or disinfectants is, is that anything you planned to do?

Mayor: So our approach to this is we are here to serve the children in New York City. All children. So we are working with our nonpublic schools. Our charter schools, our early community-based, early education centers. They're getting all of the guidance that we're providing to the Department of Education. They're getting the same guidance. We have liaison is working with them. We are also providing cleaning supplies to all of those organizations and networks as well. And we are just considering them all part of the children of New York City. So we are working very closely with them.

Question: Yes. Two questions. First is do the two cases today, are those New York City residents or are they being treated in New York City?

Mayor: Residents.

Commissioner Barbot: Residents.

Mayor: Residents, and being treated in New York City. Oh, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Question: What is being done to address the homeless population who may not have as much access –

Mayor: [Inaudible] different times, so a lot of your colleagues have heard this. I'll reiterate again. We have an extensive outreach initiative, which has nothing to do with coronavirus. It's been going on for three years. But the positive outcome of that is that the vast majority of our street homeless folks, we have very specific information on our outreach workers, know them pretty personally know if there's particular challenges that might be pertinent here, are talking to them as the maximum stand possible regularly. If anyone has symptoms, we're going to make healthcare available. If they have symptoms that indicate an immediate danger and they're not acting on it themselves, we have the power to have them come involuntarily and get treatment.

Question: Thanks. Will the police be bringing in the homeless population –

Mayor: If necessary, yes, but what I don't think we have a single instance of that yet, but we have that power and ready to use it.

Question: As far as the Madison students or any others who have been on school trips, have they been asked to quarantine? Are they doing that?

Mayor: The Madison students right now are asymptomatic. The staff is asymptomatic and they're almost at the end of the 14 days as well. So I think we have a little unusual situation there where the information flowed when it did. But I'll check with our doctors here. I think at this point it wouldn't be a time to start a quarantine unless we saw something problematic.

Commissioner Barbot: That’s correct.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Commissioner Barbot: No need for it.

Mayor: Yes.

Question: In terms of the city's messaging for people who do develop symptoms, I know you've been saying people should go to their doctors, but a lot of doctor's offices are saying that they don't – they're not equipped to handle coronavirus and they should go to the ER, but then ERs are saying that people should not go unless they need urgent care, so what can you clarify –

Mayor: So, I think we have a little unusual situation there where the information flowed when it did. But I'll check with our doctors here, I think at this point it wouldn't be a time to start a quarantine unless we saw something problematic.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Commissioner Barbot: That’s correct. No need for it.

Question: In terms of the City's messaging for people who do develop symptoms, I know you've been saying people should go to their doctors, but a lot of doctor's offices are saying that they don't – they're not equipped to handle coronavirus and they should go to the ER, but then ERs are saying that people should not go unless they need urgent care. So, what –

Mayor: I want to pause you for a moment, respectfully. I don't know who these people are who are saying what and I don't know how widespread it is. Our message is abundantly clear – get to health care. If you call your doctor and your doctor says, I can't see you, which I would question that doctor's approach to begin with, but then, yeah, you go to Urgent Care, you go to go to a Health and Hospitals clinic or hospital. Go to health care wherever it is readily available. If you can't find it, call 3-1-1, which we've said incessantly, we'll tell you where to go. So, your default is, come to one of our facilities immediately.

Question: Regarding – I just want to clarify, you were saying that you can test 1,000 people. Does this mean, heaven forbid, we get to a point where there are a 1,000 [inaudible] who need testing, at that point there's no longer the availability to do testing. And related to that, federal funding – Mr. Mayor, you were talking about the need for the federal government and step in to ensure we've got enough funding for tests. Can you maybe tie –

Mayor: Funding – I actually feel better about the funding than I do about the testing. The, you know, Congress is acting, which is great and I really want to commend Senator Schumer who immediately noted how extensive this crisis was and raised the bar on the federal funding request. The President said days ago in his remarks that there would be reimbursement to localities. So, that part actually has been much more coherent than in some other situations. The test capacity, right now, we need to get to the point where we can do hundreds a day, every day, maybe even more at some point, and we're not there yet. We are not – now, you've seen the numbers develop. I mean, right now, you know, with four positive and 26 negative from the beginning of this crisis, we're still in a – we want to stay there – we're in a very, very minimal dynamic at this moment, but we know it could move very quickly. We've seen that – not anywhere, we've seen that in advanced industrialized nations like Italy and South Korea where the numbers jumped in a matter of days. So, we've got to get to more testing capacity. We can't do that alone. We need the federal government.

Commissioner Barbot: What I would add is that we're also partnering with our academic and commercial labs and our understanding is that we will have some commercial lab capacity starting next week. And so that'll help a lot.

Question: [Inaudible] about mandatory isolation. I assume this is just – maybe, I shouldn't assume, but I assume it's just a term. It's not like you're – has anyone refuse to be isolated?

Commissioner Barbot: So, it depends on the individuals that we're talking about. You know, Dr. Daskalakis referred to how we monitor individuals that are on mandatory home isolation where we do random checks to make sure that they're being compliant and that the level of monitoring that we do really has to do with level of risk. And so, there are, for example, individuals who may be returning from one of the affected countries where they are perfectly asymptomatic. We are asking them to be on home isolation. That doesn't mean they can't go out if they are asymptomatic. It does mean that we want them to minimize outdoor exposure. And the minute they have any kind of symptoms, cough, no matter how mild it is, a temperature, or feeling unwell, we want them to call us or their provider to get them to treatment as early as possible and get them tested. I mean, one of the things that Mayor has been really clear about is we want to make sure that New Yorkers who need a task get tested as soon as possible.

Mayor: But I think, just following through the question, I don't think we have an instance of someone refusing mandatory or voluntary. I think that – because remember, before it ever became an issue for New York City, there have been weeks of people being pretty damn scared by what they were seeing, particularly in China. My sense here is we have a high level of adherence, a high level of interest in following the rules right now.

Go ahead.

Question: Is the city helping out folks financially who are on this mandatory 14 day – or, recommended 14-day isolation?

Mayor: That's not part of what we do to the best of my knowledge.

Commissioner Barbot: So, we are working with our sister agencies to make sure that we put in place what we call wraparound services, which include, you know, if someone is having mental health issues, if someone is have having housing issues, we have measures in place in case someone does end up needing financial support. Honestly, we haven't come to that situation yet.

Question: What kind of financial support do you think agencies might be able to provide?

Commissioner Barbot: So we are working for example, with our Department of Social Services to determine like for example, we've already helped people enroll in insurance, right? So that's one way to help them financially. And our DSS partners are also working with us to figure out all the different ways that New Yorkers might need help.

Mayor: Right, but not income replacement if that's an issue. I just want to be really clear because I think sometimes I understand the questions, but there's the assumption that the City government does what the State government does, federal government does, charitable organizations, et cetera, et cetera, all wrapped in one. There are limits.

Question: [Inaudible].

Mayor: No, I know. What I'm saying – I think a lot of times just over many, many situations, there's sometimes a little bit of drift of what the City can and should do. Absolutely we are going to help people. Absolutely we're going to look for every service that we can provide, some of which has financial ramification. Income is their own reality. Hopefully employers are going to be sensitive.

Question: It’s been said that dogs and cats, your pets cannot catch this virus. Can they carry and other animals like mice, rats and pigeons, can they carry this and give it to humans?

Commissioner Barbot: I'm going to defer to Dr. Daskalakis on that one.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: We think that – we know that pets are fine. There are mixed data.

Mayor: Did you say fine? I couldn’t hear you.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: They're fine. They are safe. So I think there's always data about shedding and identifying viruses. But so far nothing convincing that would make us concerned about our furry friends, so I think our cats and dogs are fine.

Mayor: Finish up on this side and I'll go back over to that side. Go ahead.

Question: Sorry, just to be clear about the students who traveled to Italy, not just the Madison students, but any students who've come back in the last 14 days. No one is showing symptoms –

Mayor: There’s 1.1 million public school students. We don't have a single one we know of anywhere. Any kind of student who is showing a symptom.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: No, I just want to make sure you're hearing this first point. Anybody, if we get any more information about nexus, we want to know it and act on it immediately. But just wanted you to hear the overall point. Did you get – what was, did you have another question?

Question: I just want to make sure no students have been asked to quarantine.

Mayor: No, go ahead.

Question: Okay. So I just talked to many small business owners in Chinatown [inaudible]. They are very thankful for the Mayor and Corey Johnson comimg to Chinatown to have dinner to promote business. But what else? The City or the City Council can do, like financial aid or you know, give them some – the sales, to reduce the sales credit or something sales taxes reduced maybe? Any possible way to help?

Mayor: I think there's clearly we're very concerned about these small businesses and we're concerned about small businesses beyond that are starting to feel the effect around the city. We don't have an easy answer right now. I want to keep encouraging people to go out and live their lives and patronize those businesses. But we're certainly going to look at anything that we can do that would be helpful.

Question: [Inaudible] I am sorry if I'm making you repeat yourself. I know at the beginning you said that the numbers looked really good. I mean, pretty good.

Mayor: Wait, because I want to make sure we are speaking the same language? Do you mean the overall testing numbers?

Question: Correct.

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Can you just, I just wanted you to put those in a little more context of how slowly this is spreading or if we should still expect to see some, some exponential –

Mayor: I think until 48 hours ago, if you just were gone by the numbers you would feel very, very good. I think the last 48 hours are sobering. You know, community spread is an entirely different ballgame and I don't want people to assume, I don't want people to overreact because this is going to be a day to day, hour to hour thing, which is why we're trying to constantly update you when we have information. Community spread is different. It makes it a lot harder for us to control the situation. That said, even though we now know it exists in New York City as a phenomenon, it is still striking that, you know, of a city of 8.6 million people in a crisis that’s been going on for six weeks or more. You know, four people who are positive and 26 who are negative. And we do have a handful of pending tests as well. But you know, that's striking in comparison to what you've seen some other places and I do think it is because people are heading the guidance, they're getting to care. We have obviously the most extensive health care apparatus anywhere on Earth. That's all helping us. But we're all very sober right now about what tomorrow could bring or the day after that.

Commissioner Barbot: I don't think any of us would be surprised to have more individuals identified who show no nexus to travel to the affected areas. And that's why it's really important for New Yorkers to take measures now that we hope they've been taking to heart. And those are very simple. It's washing your hands frequently, covering your mouth and your nose when you cough or you sneeze. And you know, I don't think I've made, I've sort of gone deep enough into why that's so important. Right? And the reason why we want people to wash their hands frequently because that's the way in which the virus can be introduced into your mouth, to your eyes. And those are the areas that are the easiest entry points for the virus. And so to the degree that New Yorkers, as I've said earlier, make alcohol based hand sanitizers. They're best friends if they don't have easy access to, you know, water sources. That's how they're going to keep themselves, their kids, their families and their communities, the safest. But again, we are in a situation where we are doing everything we can as the Mayor said to contain. However, we would not be surprised to see other cases of community transmission.

Mayor: Just to note what, we'll take some more, but I know the Speaker has a hearing starting at 3:30 and everyone here has to be a part of it, myself excluded. So, or almost everyone I think. So we're going to take some more but we need to wrap relatively soon. So it will be the last one on this side. Then we're going over all the way to the left and we'll take questions over there.

Question: I just want to clarify, the folks who are urging to self-isolate who had been to those five countries, is that you're asking, or you're telling them?

Mayor: Which category are you talking about here?

Question: Folks who have been to those five countries?

Mayor: Not the city employees? Overall?

Question: Overall, you're saying you're urging them or you're saying half to self-isolate and we're going to track if you do.

Commissioner Barbot: We are urging them to self-isolate.

Question: I know you said for now Mr. Mayor, people are doing the strict adherence to the rules, but I think we all know that there are folks who don't follow the rules. So what are the consequences if you're supposed to quarantine and you don't, are there fines? Will the police get involved? What are the consequences here?

Mayor: So let's just go over the basic protocols that exist in a case like this. And obviously again, I think a good way to think of this is we are climbing a ladder right now where we do see very good results on a voluntary level and we do see good overall dynamics in the city. But we, you know, this is indicative, so you saw communities spread in the last 24 hours or so. You now see a Commissioner's order. I'm indicating there could be a lot more coming behind this. We're going to get more and more mandatory as needed. But today, let's clarify where we are. And then clarify the kind of history that is existed around previous quarantines.

Commissioner Barbot: So as we've said earlier, there hasn't been anyone on mandatory quarantine that has tried to, the term of art is elope. And you know, I think it's important to note. I think it's important to note that as the Department of Health, we have taken every measure possible to make it as easy as possible for these individuals to remain in quarantine. Above and beyond that, because we communicate with them on a regular basis, on a daily basis for those that are in mandatory quarantine, we develop a relationship with these individuals. And so it hasn't come to that, but if we were in a different scenario, you know, the powers that we have could include you know, the police powers that we have. No one wants it to come to that. And so that's why we take the investment and the time to put in those supportive services.

Mayor: Yes, Ashley?

Question: Two questions, first with the two people who – two current patients, most recent patients, a 40-something-year-old man and 80-something-year-old woman, I think to some people it might be pretty worrisome that you all haven't identified the source of their infection. I'm wondering if you all have any hypotheses that you are evaluating or any kind of reasonable suspects and that I'd like to ask the question after that.

Mayor: So I'm going to start as the layman here. I want to caution, your question's fair, but I think it's and I don't say this disrespectfully, I think it's two days late. I think community spread, if I'm understanding the doctors, you can't any longer find the specific origin. This is the whole reality. We started with a crisis where presumably the only way you could get this disease is someone came specifically from China. Then it turned into someone came from China, South Korea, Italy, et cetera. Now it's past all that. It's just out in our communities to some extent and we are not in the practice of being able to say, here's where you go back to the origin point. What we would do at a case like that with those two individuals we're doing right now is say, okay, who are the people that you had enough direct contact with? And that's the disease detective work, which we talked about a lot yesterday. You know, to reasonably have a possibility of having spread this. The object lesson is the Westchester family where the father manifested and therefore there was the mother and the two kids. That was a very, very obvious universe. The other obvious universe was the law firm. So what I think will happen from now on is not a search for the origin but a search person by person for their network that we then need to follow up on to make sure if they need testing they get testing.

Question: [Inaudible] you had to kind of look at that for the two of those individuals?

Mayor: No we said it’s, literally breaking them. It's, you know, this is only in the last hours. And so the disease detectives are working with them and their families right now or their families really because both of them are intensive care to map those contacts. And then just so I want to go back to the Yeshiva example cause it's the live other good example. The student from the Westchester family, undergrad at Yeshiva. The disease detectives identified who are those people we need to follow up on. Two people, in fact, roommate, best friend got to them. They've gotten tested, they came back negative, repeat, repeat, repeat with every new case, that's what we're doing now.

Question: On to that second question. What's your advice to people who can't afford to take the time off? Either their employees won't allow them, they can't afford to lose the days at work. What's your advice to them?

Mayor: Look, if anyone is sensitive to how much people struggle to make a living and how even a loss of a day's pay can be very, very problematic. But this is beyond anything we normally deal with. The last time, remember there was a pandemic of this nature it was 11 years ago. This one is still, you know, this disease is still not fully understood. That is a fact. No cure, no vaccine. We cannot play around. So even if it means economic suffering, people cannot take a chance with this disease. If you're told to stay home you just have to stay home for yourself and for your family. For the good of everybody.

Question: I just wanted to confirm that the total universe of staffers at the school who have self-isolated or self-quarantined is the three teachers of whom traveled to Italy?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: I have two questions. This first one is in terms of the lawyer, I know it was said to you that he had gone to Israel a few days prior. Does that mean there’s a nexus there? Is there a search for a nexus there?

Mayor: We don’t think so. I'll start and you guys will jump in. We don't think it’s based on Israel. We think it's based on community, which is the first instance of community spread.

Commissioner Barbot: Right. His travel to Israel was in January, which is way beyond the incubation period.

Question: And the other question I had was about the disease detectives. You guys could go into a little bit of detail as to what that doorknob looks like? You know, are they checking temperature for instance. How long is their interaction with them? Whether it's –

Mayor: I'm sorry to interrupt. This is someone, they're talking to someone who we already have a concern about and they're talking about them to figure out who are the other people in their world that we next need to get to?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So they are called disease detectives because it's what, it's exactly what they do. It's they investigate, they will interview either the primary individual who has a disease to identify what their, what their motion is. They will also talk if they cannot speak to that primary person, to family and friends who are identified. They look at institutions where the individual has been and don't just say where have they been, but track them. So for instance, for school, they'll look at what a class schedules are and also see if we can identify seating scenarios depending on who was around, if they were on a and others sort of meetings again, they do the same things. So it's really, it's very intensive. And also always evolving. So, you know, we'll, I think the Mayor described it exactly, that you identify one person, you tell their friends, their friends tell their friends and you get more and more sort of information about the circle of folks that you need to be concerned about or potentially not concerned about depending on exposure.

Question: And how about the folks that have already had a positive coronavirus [inaudible] the days when a detective goes to their house. What's the protocol there?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: It's actually more than just spot visits. So for the individuals who are admitted to the hospital, the answer is very straight forward. They're continuously monitored. So that's very straightforward. It's the individuals who are on home isolation. We do spot checks to make sure they're complying to their mandatory quarantine. But additionally we reach out to them daily to make sure that they're feeling well and that their needs are addressed. And so we really are in effect case managing them from a distance and then also spot checking them to make sure that they're compliant.

Question: And how have they progressed to today? Like has – I know you said that they're checking in daily, so are they better or from the first case – are they better today as –

Mayor: So again, reminding you – and again, I'll make sure I'm articulating a lot, but I want everyone also listen carefully because the lawyer we said yesterday, the lawyer is already getting better. Thank God. Not entirely out of the woods, but getting better. The Yeshiva student better.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Mayor: Right. The health worker who was in Iran better.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Mayor: So, you know, again, this is this, as we're learning this disease that there is, you know, some, it's not just a one way street, right? We are seeing people come through it and get better and we're done with and we're moving on to other people now. We've got two folks in particular now though, we're worried about. The two new ones today, but the previous two actually are doing very well right now.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I’ll just let that one in because I think it’s important. Doctors, what does better mean?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: So, for the two individuals in home isolation, there’s not a lot of difference between sick and better at the moment –

Mayor: Just clarify – you mean husband and wife who came back from Iran.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Husband and wife – correct.

Mayor: One is, again – careful, one is a positive, one is a negative we’re treating as a positive.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: That is correct.

Mayor: So their status right now – their health?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: For a lack of a better word, they’re doing fabulously well.

Mayor: Okay. The lawyer, what exactly can you tell us?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: We can tell you that he is still in the intensive care unit, but that he’s stable, doing better.

Mayor: Let me go to the last two. Rich and then Erin – go ahead.

Question: So, the two teachers that came back from vacation from Italy are now being tested, they went into school one day, they didn’t feel well –

Mayor: We’re going to confirm if it was one day or more, but it was a limited period of time for sure. They had been out of school for a period of time and we’re going to get you – so, I want to do – on them – is wrap it all in a bow, get the test results, get the school, all the facts, but I’m going to give you that. We also, as I said, we have some notifications to do. We’ll get that to you either later on today or tomorrow.

Go ahead –

Question: [Inaudible] can you clarify, does the paid sick law apply if you are recommended isolation, if you’re not just sick?

Mayor: Certainly, it would count under the five days, for sure. Right? I mean, that’s a no-brainer.

Question: And as far as the guidance to travelers, that’s a new guidance today that everyone coming from those countries [inaudible] and could you just list the countries again [inaudible] –

Mayor: Sure, absolutely. We track the CDC on China, Iran, Italy, South Korea. We disagree with the CDC on Japan. It is on our list, we think Japan should be treated the same as the other four. We think they should put it on their list too.

Okay. And we will see you again soon.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Again, nexus to New York, but we are waiting to get more details on what that means. We will have that to you as soon as we have it.

Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-06 NYC Mayor de Blasio Brian Lehrer

Brian Lehrer: It’s the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. And we begin as we usually do on Fridays with our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our phones are open at 2-1-2-4-3-3-WNYC. That's 2-1-2-4-3-3-9-6-9-2. Or you can tweet a question. Just use the hashtag #AskTheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian.

Lehrer: So, today, I'm going to begin by asking you questions about the coronavirus for the first stretch and then we'll take phone calls on that or anything from our listeners. So any updates on the number of cases this morning?

Mayor: Yeah, let me give you the latest. We have one new case. This is a man in his 50’s. When I say new case, just listen to the whole narrative. A man in his 50’s who lives in Manhattan, he has mild symptoms at this moment. We're testing his family and the disease detectives are following up on his contact. So he has tested positive. He is associated with, in some way and we'll get the details later on, with the lawyer who lives in Westchester County and worked at a law firm in Midtown. But again, so when Brian, I've been doing this obviously with a lot your colleagues in the media, really important to hear the exact reality. This man in his 50’s has tested positive but has very mild symptoms, which is a very good sign. We'll know more shortly on his family and any other close contacts.

Lehrer: I saw the stat yesterday that more than 2,700 people in New York City are being quarantined or self-quarantined and aggressively monitored. Can you explain how the number got that big?

Mayor: Well, remember there have been the different guidances given out by the CDC, by the Health Department now for weeks and weeks. And that's particularly related to folks who traveled. And what we're finding so far and we're going to constantly update the community on this, is that people are taking that quarantine very seriously. But remember you go into quarantine, whether you have symptoms or not based on the travel guidance out of an abundance of caution. And what we are seeing in the vast majority of cases of course, is that people, you know, go those two weeks, stay out of circulation, don't evince symptoms and get back to their lives. If they do evince symptoms, if they are in any way symptomatic, we then go and test them right away.

Lehrer: What does self – what does the term aggressively monitored mean?

Mayor: It means checking in with them regularly. First of all, when anyone goes into quarantine and we know about it we're giving them guidance up front on what to do, how to approach the quarantine, what approach they should take to their health, how to deal with anybody else in their life. And to know where to call with our Health Department if they have symptoms. Because then we want to act right away. But we also have contact information, reach out regularly, check on them to see if they need anything, to confirm that they are abiding by the quarantine. I think it's important, Brian, there's a lot of concern out there obviously, but I do think people need to recognize this.

Now this is about, you know, I remember my first press conference was January 24th. And on January 24th we said this thing is coming to New York City. It is not a matter of if but when and we need testing capacity from the federal government. That's six weeks ago. People for six weeks in this country have been bombarded with information about coronavirus. In fact, really even beyond the impact of the disease, people have been really, really put on high, high, high alert.

So I think what we're finding, we'll keep checking this – that people who are quarantined are taking it pretty damn seriously because they've been told so many times by believable sources that this really matters and that they will put themselves and others in danger if they don't abide by the quarantine. What I'm seeing so far is that people are taking that real seriously because they're convinced that they have to.

Lehrer: You announced two new cases yesterday, I believe a man in his 40’s and a woman in her 80’s, now in intensive care units in Manhattan and Brooklyn hospitals. But you were uncertain how they became infected because neither had traveled to a known effected area or had exposure to other known patients, like you said, the man in his 50’s who you're announcing today had a connection to the New Rochelle lawyer. So do you know any more about those two people today? We've heard quickly about the New Rochelle attorney’s links to a number of people, but not so far in these two cases announced yesterday.

Mayor: Well, first of all, later on today, I'll be holding a press availability where we're going to give full updates on every case. So I will have more to say in a few hours, but on the general point, look, we've been saying our health experts have been saying community spread now means, which is only this week we've experienced it. That you will not always be able to trace it back to a specific origin. Once it's out in the community. People can and will contract coronavirus and we will not be able to know the origin. We will be able to know who they have been in close contact with so that we can go and follow up.

I want to use the Yeshiva University example. The young man, the student at Yeshiva University, the son of the Westchester lawyer. He tested positive. He had very mild symptoms. He's doing great, but our disease detectives from the Department of Health found two close contacts. A roommate and a close friend went to those folks, tested them. They both tested negative. So we're going to be constantly doing that. Looking for every opportunity to look for who needs more help, who needs to be brought in for testing? Who needs a medical support? That process so far is going well, but that's a different matter than knowing exactly where the origin was. We're not, bluntly, if we can find it, we want to know it of course. If we can't, it doesn't change our basic strategy.

Lehrer: About the New Rochelle attorney who works near Grand Central. I read that reporters were asking if he traveled on Metro-North because a neighbor told the Daily News that he had, but the City or the State have not confirmed or denied this. Can you now?

Mayor: I can't, but I keep saying, we're going to keep explaining to the people in the city, the latest understanding of how the disease is transmitted. We're going to constantly update the understanding of that. Because this is a literally new disease in the world. It's been around essentially for three months. We are getting – the international medical community is trying to understand it all the time. Obviously trying to get to a vaccine and a cure.

But the reason I say that, Brian, is we'll tell you what we understand about transmission. We'll constantly update it. The one thing that's clear is if he traveled on Metro-North based on the information we have now that's not overly telling, it's not overly indicative. Because you know, if someone's on the same train car as another person, that does not, from what we know so far, create a dynamic where you have an opportunity to catch this disease. It's just a different reality. What we're seeing – look at what we're seeing so far. It's people in close contact. And again, we'll keep updating that. But what we've seen so far, facts on the ground, it is people in close contact. And so if we get information about where someone traveled, great. But what I am concerned is Brian, so what then what then do people extrapolate out of it? If this man took Metro-North a week ago, for example, or two weeks ago, I'm not sure what that tells us that's usable. If we find something usable, we will tell people.

Lehrer: And I guess especially if you're not having a lot of other random people show up coronavirus positive just from having been on any kind of public transportation, which so far I guess we're not.

Mayor: No, we're doing more and more testing and when I give the update later day, you'll see, and I know all your colleagues in the media are listening, you will see more test results than you've seen in previous days because we said where we're going with a containment strategy. We're going with a maximum testing strategy and so we have greater numbers today than we've had any previous day. We'll have the final update again in a few hours. But here's what I want to really emphasize that this is very important for your listeners. We all understand, I hope we all understand what coronavirus is and isn't. It can be very serious for a person with a compromised immune system with a serious respiratory problem, you know, with other medical challenges. But overwhelmingly what we're seeing is for younger folks, for healthier folks, it is a quickly passing, mild disease.

No one should underestimate it. No one should underestimate the fact that you, for example, if the Yeshiva university young man came out fine, but we want to be sensitive to in any case, you know, if he was in contact with other people who might be more compromised, that's exactly what disease detectives look for. That's a real issue. But for most people, 80 percent of people who get coronavirus experience it somewhat like a cold or flu. 20 percent experience more serious reality, but overwhelmingly come through okay. It clearly can be fatal for folks who are already compromised. We take that very, very seriously.

But here's the other point about what we're seeing with the approach. If you have the symptoms – so, first of all, if you've traveled to the areas that are most effected or people in your life that you're close to have traveled to those areas, and you have those cold and flu type symptoms, get to a doctor immediately. If you don't know where to get doctor, call 3-1-1, we’ll tell you where to go. You can go to one of our public hospitals or clinics. Then what happens, Brian – I think it's important for people understand – as you go in, the doctor checks the symptoms, if it confirms those are the symptoms that might correlate to coronavirus, they give you a test that I believe it's called BioFire is one of the phrases for the test that immediately identifies, I think it's 29 more common diseases in that family and if you have one of those 29 it's not coronavirus. If you don't have one of those 29, then there's a good question, okay, of course, especially if there's a travel nexus and you don't have one of those other more typical diseases, we want you tested immediately for coronavirus.

Lehrer: Let me follow up on that in a couple of ways. One, you just said something that you said on last week's show that wound up confusing people. When you said get to a doctor if you think you have the symptoms, a lot of other people seem to say don't just show up at a doctor's office because you might be contagious. At least call ahead before you go and don't just show up. Unless you're really in emergency condition. What's the –

Mayor: This is deadly serious stuff.

Lehrer: Absolutely.

Mayor: I don’t mean to overstate. When you say I'm confusing people, I'm going to take a little offense to that. I am the ultimate voice here taking the information from our health authorities and giving the people in New York City one message. So let me give it again. And what I said was the guidance, period. I'm sorry to be heavy on your brother –

Lehrer: It’s alright.

Mayor: But this is the way it is. Get to a doctor. Of course we prefer, and I want you to hear this very important nuance. If you can call first, inform the doctor of your situation so they can be prepared. If you can actually get through to the right person, of course, we prefer that. That is the optimal situation. Please, if you can do that, do that. But here's why the guidance does not end with that. A lot of us have had the experience of trying to get through to a doctor's office.
We can't get through it. We can't get through to the right person. The person we talked to doesn't have the right information because you know, the doctor's busy, whatever it may be. I don't want someone sitting around and waiting, you know, an hour, two hours, six hours, a day, two days because they can't get to the right person. If you don't know where to call, if you can't get through to the right person, just get to health care. This is the decision that we came to with our public health experts. That it is a much better bet to get the health care.

The minute you arrive here is really clear guidance. If you arrive at any place, a doctor's office, a clinic, an urgent care, an emergency room, the first words out of your mouth have to be, I'm here because I'm concerned I may have coronavirus because I have these symptoms and especially if there's a travel nexus immediately identified. I traveled to one of the countries, my spouse traveled to one of the countries, my child did, whatever it is, put that information up front. They will know immediately what to do to isolate you in that situation but do not hesitate to get the care because what we're trying to do – this is a containment strategy that depends on very rapidly getting people to evaluation and testing so we can rule out people, which is most folks so far, and then rule in the folks who need to be immediately acted on. If you go to a medical facility and you announce your situation, they will know how to properly isolate you, put a mask on you, whatever they need to do. But if you don't go and get care, to me, that's a much more problematic scenario because then someone is making their own decisions out there, potentially coming in contact with a lot of people. That's what I will not – that's what I do not accept as a good course of action. I want people getting in front of professionals.

Lehrer: Here's a question from a listener via Twitter who came back from Japan and says, got back from Japan 10 days ago, but can't be tested as I have no symptoms. This might be justified - they write – but I'd like to know why. It sounds like this person is seeking a test because of simply having been in Japan but has no symptoms. What would you tell them?

Mayor: Okay, and this one sort of - again anyone who needs information can call 3-1-1, just want to clarify that. Anyone that needs a test can call 3-1-1 and get literally told, here's exactly where you go. And again, assuming they do meet the criteria for a test, but certainly anyone can get to health care by via 3-1-1. The basic guidance on travel is once you have been, again, and I'm going to say a really important asterisk here because we don't fully understand this disease, the guidance could change every day. I hope it won't, but it could. So when I'm doing what has been a daily briefing this week, my public health experts are some of the finest in the country, we'll constantly update if some of the facts, some of the specific strategies are changing, we will give people exactly what we know.

But here's what we know as of now, if you come back from one of the affected countries and you self-quarantine, and you've been back over 14 days, and you have no symptoms, then you're in the clear. If it has not manifested within 14 days, and you haven't been in contact with new people, and that's crucial. If your version of quarantine is you're coming in contact with a whole bunch of new people, that's a different discussion in a community spread dynamic. But let's say a real quarantine, literally isolate yourself from anyone else. You go through your 14 days, then you're in the clear because there's no source that has caused you to manifest the disease. And if that hasn't happened in 14 days based on what we know today, it's not going to happen.

Lehrer: Why have so few people been tested? I gather the city says it has the capacity to test a thousand people, but only about four dozen have been conducted so far from what I've read?

Mayor: So it's an excellent question. So remember we pleaded with the CDC to give us independent testing capacity. Previously, literally the test had to either go to Atlanta which is ludicrous or eventually the State lab was up and running, but that's still not, you know, here in the city and available to us the way we want. Only as of Monday afternoon this week were we able to do our own independent testing. So that's point one. We had a cumbersome system. Now we're in a heavy testing mode, a containment mode. You're going to see what the report later today, the numbers will jump up meaningfully. They're going to keep jumping up. We're trying to expand our testing capacity rapidly. We need support from the federal government to do that. When we get where we want to go, which is where we can do hundreds of people in a day, that's going to give me a lot more comfort that as we're telling people get to health care and we're identifying cases and are getting the test that we're going to have a much better sense of what's happening out there and how to address it.

So I expect Brian, just based on the testing capacity we have right now, that you're going to see a regular increase in the number of people being tested. When we get more capacity, we can do even more. But it really depends on, this is a participatory dynamic, if you will, it depends on people coming forward, getting the health care, particularly of again, that travel nexus is still really matters, it’s still a really intense predictor in this case, even with community spread. We got to get people to come in so then we can test everyone who should be tested.

Lehrer: I want to ask you about some measures that Seattle and King County there are taking with 31 cases as of yesterday. Not that many more than here. They're recommending –

Mayor: I’m sorry, I just want to clarify, we have right now, we're at six cases. They are at 31 - five - I'm sorry, five cases. There are 31.

Lehrer: Okay.

Mayor: I think it is and we're a city about that, I think something like 10 times larger than them, but go on.

Lehrer: Right. But including Westchester, I think it's 22 –

Mayor: Yeah, when you do metropolitan area, I hear you. Yeah.

Lehrer: And they're recommending in general, in the King County - which Seattle metropolitan area - that people not gather in groups of more than 10 if unnecessary. That people over 60, even if healthy and pregnant women, stay home as much as possible. That people work from home as much as possible. Later in the show, we'll talk to a Seattle reporter about how far this is going in the real world, but what are you advising or having now to think about advising regarding workplaces and theaters and other institutions where people gather suspending usual activities to whatever degree?

Mayor: We’re asking ourselves the question every day. And when I say ourselves, I mean some of the leading public health experts in the country and some of the leading emergency management experts in the country. Look, I have – it's not just a matter of guidance. I have emergency powers I could invoked where we can actually shut things down [inaudible] if we need to. I don't do that, wouldn't do that lightly, obviously. But here's the challenge, Brian – we were watching daily, hourly, the trajectory here. It's not the same as Washington State. I really want to emphasize that, Washington State had a situation where in a particular facility things got out of control and it took a long time to get a handle on it. And I don't blame them, they didn't have the kind of testing capacity that we've all been trying to get from the federal government. And obviously we're dealing with a new situation. The advance of the disease, there is, I think, patently different from what we're seeing here. Again, a much smaller area and it jumped up very quickly and I don't blame them for being very, very cautious. I'm watching for that moment where the experts and I come to a conclusion that it's smart to do that type of thing. I don't see it now. I see still very isolated cases and I see people coming through overwhelmingly, it doesn't mean everyone's going to come – very worried about the woman in her 80s, for example. But the lawyer from Westchester originally was in tough shape, has been getting better. We're getting a lot of negative tests, including from even family members of people who have it, live under the same roof. I'm trying to strike that balance, because, you know, there's a whole lot riding on this – there's everybody's lives, their livelihoods, and I really am sensitive to that. People, you know, have to pay the bills, and our entire economy – nothing's as important as health and safety. But I'm watching the numbers, I'm watching the trend line here and I don't think it's the moment to take that kind of action. That could be changed tomorrow, that could be changed next week, but, based on what we see now, Brian, here's the most important thing, and this is the irony – the solution, if you will, and every public health expert I've talked to says this – the solution is the basics. If you have symptoms, immediately get to health care. Wash your hands all the time, use alcohol-based hand sanitizer all the time, cough into your elbow or sneeze into your elbow – really basic stuff. If you think you're coming down with something, get away from other people. And again, everyone can be responsible here. If you think you're coming down with these kinds of symptoms and you don't know what it is yet, don't go out into the world. Don't go to work. Don't get on the subway. I know that's not a perfect reality, Brian, where everyone's going to hear my voice and do what I say, but I think more – this has been surround sound coverage of this crisis. More and more people are getting the message. Don't take a chance with your life or anyone else's life. Those people should stay home. So, Brian, I don't think it's about shutting down all workplaces or movie theaters and all, I think it's about people who may be vulnerable or people who may have symptoms acting accordingly. And I would say with parents, and I want to offer this proactively – as a parent, because parents have been asking this question – as of now, and we'll update people constantly. But as of now, we do not see this disease affecting children in a meaningful way, except – the one thing to be careful for is a child who has a compromised immune system or a child who has serious respiratory issues. There, we want parents to be very vigilant, obviously keep them away from anyone who has any kind of symptoms in that whole family. And with those children, we're going to put every school on alert to know exactly who those children are. And if we see anything that worries us, we might give a specific instruction about those children. But here's another example, Brian, we have 1.1 million school kids, as of last night – I'll check again today – but, as of last night, we did not have a single symptomatic child in our entire school system. So, you know, this is going to be day-to-day, hour-to-hour. I think the media and the public are seeing were constantly updating people. We want to be very transparent. But if we get to a point of something, a more serious action, you'll know about it right away. But I do not believe we’e here.

Lehrer: So, last question from me, for now, and then we'll get to a few phone calls in our remaining time. About schools – despite claims I've read that the DOE is providing supplies to all the schools, we continue to hear of bathrooms without basics like soap and towels, and custodians who have to squeeze extra cleaning into their existing hours. Can you guarantee that all schools will have what they need by a certain date and are following the cleaning protocols?

Mayor: Yeah, I first of all, it would be a service to me and to the people of New York City, if anyone knows of such a situation, I want to hear about it. So, call 3-1-1 and report any school facility that doesn't have soap and towels and we will, you know, we will rain holy hell on that school, with all due respect to them, because that's unacceptable. It's unacceptable anytime, it's especially unacceptable in this environment. Brian, I'm going to say it was very bluntly, this is not the 1970s – our school system has the resources to provide every school with towels and soap, and does. If any school is not making sure – I would put this on all school personnel to step up – if any school is not ensuring those things are present, they have a problem and we're going to deal with them. But it's not for lack of supplies. In fact, the Chancellor made clear yesterday that we are supplying – if a private school, religious school, charter school, any kind of school needs supplies, we have them, we'll get them to them. And the cleaning supplies are not mysterious, they are basic cleaning supplies, disinfectant supplies. No school in New York City should lack them. If they need them, all that to do is call the Department of Education, they'll get them. If someone sees something's not happening, please report it to 3-1-1 or call WNYC, as people often do. And, Brian, we’ll welcome your team alerting us to anything you hear.

Lehrer: And we definitely will. And thank you for that offer. Carlton in Harlem, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Carlton.

Question: Hey, good morning. Good morning, Mayor de Blasio. I just wanted to ask the Mayor to grant me and a group of people who live in HDFC a meeting to discuss the solution – these solutions to the crisis that HDFCs are facing right now. Are you still there?

Lehrer: We’re here.

Mayor: Yes. The answer is yes. This one – I'm glad you called Carlton, this one bugging me. It is a complex subject matter. This is – Brian, these buildings – this goes back, literally to, I mentioned, the 70s. This goes back to the 70s. This goes back to the bad old days and the “Bronx is burning” and everything else where a bunch of buildings were abandoned by their landlords and the tenants hung on and the City stepped in in many cases to provide support. And it's a complex set of dynamics around the status of these buildings here, but here's the bottom line – we want to do right by the people live in the buildings, we want to keep those buildings affordable, we want it to be in good shape. We need everyone to participate. There are some ground rules, but each building is different, just to make it more interesting. So, I would like to meet with representatives of that community with my housing officials, because I think we still need to improve our response to the situation.

Lehrer: Here's a listener question via Twitter. [Inaudible] writes, a young black man in Canarsie was brutally taken down by six cops, none of whom told him why he was being detained, nor did the plainclothes police officer identified himself when he stopped the young man. Mr. Mayor, I don't know if you've seen that video that's going around.

Mayor: I have, I spoke to it. Brian, I spoke to this at some detail, as did the Police Commissioner at our press conference yesterday. So, again, I'm saying this lovingly – your team would do well to inform you of that. But let me speak to it. It's –

Lehrer: By the way, I knew that, but a lot of our listeners did not hear the news conference and are concerned about this. Go ahead –

Mayor: I’m saying I said in the press conference I had seen the video. So, let me clarify. I'm not – what I saw, I do not like and is not what we're supposed to be doing here in New York City. It's not what our police officers are supposed to be doing. Now, that being said, and I want people to hear me clearly, because it's very important to also to understand the perspective of our officers. We're actually all in this together. Our officers, our community members – were all actually in one city together, trying to keep it safe. The officers were responding to a shots-fired alert. That is a different dynamic than every-day. My understanding of the narrative is this, the officers were responding in the community, looking for a shooter, see two men in a park, approached them and they both run. Once you have two people running from police officers, that raises additional concern. The officers chase after them, the one officer gets the one individual you see on the video. I don't like how it ends, because it's not what we're trying to aspire to. We're trying to always deescalate and get things right. I don't know, I don't think anyone knows the exact dialogue, Brian, because the video, to the best of my understanding, doesn't clearly – you can't clearly hear everything that's transpiring. There's an investigation going on. We're going to look at exactly how the officers handled it. But I do want to emphasize, if it's a shots-fired dynamic, that means that that officer does not know if the individual has a weapon on them or not. That's a different reality than an every-day situation. So, I want to see a better protocol, but I also want to emphasize that we have to strike a balance here. Anyone who is asked by a police officer to stop should stop, anyone who's asked by a police officer to answer a questions should answer the question, and if a police officer says, I'm going to put you under arrest, you're not supposed to struggle, you're supposed to agree with it. If there's a difference, we'll sort out the difference later. We have a legal system. So, this is an imperfect situation all around. But the last part especially, that, to me, is not the situation we want to see in the city and we're going to take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Lehrer: And on one additional crime and policing story before we run out of time, and I know you addressed this yesterday too, but for this audience, and if there's any further development – I see crime stats went up meaningfully in February as they had in January, and the debate is deepening over whether the new bail reform law has anything to do with it. Public defenders, as you know, are questioning whether the NYPD is maybe even giving the most aggressive possible tabulation of the numbers with a possible political agenda of discrediting the new law. An example that they use is that NYPD stats show that a 65 percent increase in car theft has taken place this year, but the public defenders say their caseload of such cases is actually down 9 percent. So, what can you say to the spike and the bail reform debate?

Mayor: I think the public defenders should be ashamed of themselves. And I made the point of the press conference yesterday, they're in good company now with Ray Kelly, who at one point tried to challenge – when Bill Bratton was commissioner, tried to challenge NYPD statistics for his own agenda, was quickly proven wrong, and then never said it again. This is ridiculous the NYPD – you can agree or disagree with any given policy, but the NYPD has been extraordinarily transparent via CompStat, including putting out all sorts of information that isn't convenient to put out, but is the truth on a regular basis and explaining it and answering to it. We're talking about a 20 percent increase in major index crimes – we saw it in January, we saw it in February. This is not small stuff. We’ve had, you know, 25 years overall, Brian, of steady decline. Particularly the last six years, I'm proud to say, we've had very consistent decline. How do you have a 20 percent increase for two full months out of the blue? We’ve go to be honest about this. So, there's always – I'm happy to say, there's never a single, single factor that answers everything. I'm fine with that. But let's be honest, the statistics are real. The statistics are truthful. Something has changed. A good part of it is related to the new law. The new law, as I have said and the Commissioner said, is the right thing to do. And we supported it. I supported it in the main. I think there were in the wording that need to be corrected and I really do believe based on what the Governor said, based on what the State Senate majority has said that you're going to see some work done by April 1st with the State budget to improve on that law. The intended law was good. A lot of the law is providing crucial reforms we needed. There's a few things that need to be improved.

Lehrer: Thank you, as always, Mr. Mayor. Talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.

2020-03-06 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Okay we have updates for you. First of all what you heard from the Governor earlier I want to emphasize here in the city. Obviously, this is this a new reality of community spread. So the fact is, even compared to a few days ago, we have a very different reality. When we began the week, our focus was on people who had traveled to effected countries overseas and those who had come in contact with people who traveled to those countries. What's happened in just the last few days is the initiation of community spread, meaning that these cases now are coming from within our communities in an untraceable fashion. That's going to lead to a series of changes.

So starting now, I'm going to offer some specific things that are starting to change in our approach. You'll hear more in the coming days. But let me first start with the overall numbers at this hour. At this point, still five confirmed cases of coronavirus, five individuals in New York City. We have an update on testing that will show a big jump in numbers compared to yesterday. This is the beginning of numbers starting to expand rapidly. So we have 47 negative now. That's about double where we were yesterday. And that's good. The number of negative tests continues to be strong. We have 40 outstanding tests at this moment. Now these numbers are very dynamic as new cases are being discovered, but right now that's the pertinent scorecard and we'll keep giving you updates as we get more information.

The community spread means we're going to have to determine some new strategies and it means it's going to be particularly dynamic. As we get more information, we're going to constantly update because sometimes we will learn something and it changes the approach and we want people to understand it in real time. What we have now that we didn't have as well, is our own information. So when we started dealing with this crisis, we were dependent on information from the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control and the broader medical literature. Now over these last days, we've started to get direct information from our own disease detectives and they have every day more and more information to work from. And we also are working, of course, very closely with the State Health Department and the cluster in Westchester is crucially providing us a lot of information. We of course, wish there were no cases at all. But when we see more and more cases, we actually learn from them and it helps us to understand how what's going on with this disease and how to address it.

A reminder to everyone, this is a brand new disease. The global medical community is still trying to understand it. There are still things that we just don't understand about this disease and again, it is a disease with no cure at this moment and no vaccine. So it is clear that we will learn by doing, our health professionals will learn by doing and get a better sense of this. We know one thing now from experience for sure, community spread means a greater ease with which this disease can be transmitted because it's just in more places. Even compared to a week ago, the likelihood of being in a place where someone had been infected by coronavirus was less than it is now. It has grown in the last week, so there's a volume issue here. There's just more places where more New Yorkers might come in contact with someone because the disease has been spreading out in the community. Now I remind you over the vast majority of people, they experienced very mild symptoms and have no lasting impact from this disease. There are people who may have it, don't even realize they have it. We've certainly seen that in some of the cases already. One of the children in the Westchester family had almost no manifestation of the disease. But the fact is it has spread substantially.

The other thing, and this is going to be a little graphic, so forgive me, but you will certainly understand what I'm saying. How it transmits from people to people. We've said from the beginning, it is not like the measles and I've asked our health professionals to be really clear and specific about this. Everything we know about this kind of disease, because it is part of a family of diseases is you're never going to have a situation where it becomes an airborne disease. Meaning it hangs in the air like measles does, like some other diseases do and can be contracted hours later after its presence in a room, for example. That is not coronavirus. What it is, is something that transmits through bodily fluids, but not all bodily fluids. So again, forgive the bluntness – a sneeze, a cough, if you spit and remember sometimes people spit inadvertently just talking energetically. That's how it can transmit, but not just that. It actually has to get into your body, which means basically your mouth, your nose, your eyes. Hands can also be the path.

If something's on your hand and you often, all of us have, we're touching our mouth, we're touching our nose, we're touching our eyes. People do it all the time. They don't even realize they're doing it. That's how it gets into you. It cannot just be any place else on your body or any place else in the air. It has to get directly into you. So the point being you kind of need a direct hit because it doesn't just hang in the air. It's also important to know, I’m sure people will have common sense questions. What if someone sneezed on a countertop? The disease doesn't last long, literally minutes and it's gone. I asked earlier, what if someone sneezed into someone's drinking water? It doesn't transmit through anything you ingest. What if someone sneezed on your soup? It does not transmit through something you ingest. It has to have come in mouth, nose, eyes, through directly breathing it in, directly breathing in someone sneeze or cough or spit. Or it gets on your hand, hand there to your body, but really soon thereafter because it doesn't stay alive very long in the open air. So just to make sure we are abundantly clear about what they call transmissibility.

So I'm going to go into some of the specific cases in a moment, but in light of the community spread, here is where we start to give some new guidance. And again, this is not yet invoking emergency powers and I hope we don't get to that point. This is guidance right now. We'll be very explicit day after day with any changes and if we ever get to the point of needing to use emergency powers. So I'm going to separate the guidance into two categories. Folks who are well and folks who have symptoms. And again, the symptoms are the symptoms you would normally associate with a common cold or flu.

If you're well and you don't have any symptoms, it's just go about the basic precautions. Wash your hands, use alcohol based hand sanitizer. Try not to be touching all the parts of your face that allow in the disease. Avoid handshakes. So I'm someone who shakes a lot of hands all day. Our Health Commissioner saying she would really prefer people tap elbows, not do handshakes while we get through this part of it. And be vigilant about symptoms. If you do get symptoms, if you get a fever, if you get a cough, if you get a sore throat, don't assume it's nothing. Assume it's something in this atmosphere.

Again, community spread has caused us to want to up the ante on our guidance to New Yorkers. So in light of that, if you do have the symptoms, if you have a fever, if you have a cough, if you have a runny nose, if you have congestion, stay home. Simple voluntary point, just do the smart thing. Stay home, don't go to work, don't go to school, don't go out on the town, don't go to a restaurant, don't go to a theater, just stay home. If it is the normal kind of sicknesses we have this time of year, as everyone knows over a few days that passes by and then you can go back about your life. If it turns out it's something more serious than obviously we want to get you help, but in the first instance, just a simple symptoms and nothing else. Stay home. Obviously the parents, the same guidance for your kids if your kids are sick, and we've said consistently and it still remains true, this disease again seems to be much more prevalent in the older folks than in kids. But if your kids are sick, just abundance of a caution. Keep them home. Alert your doctor as soon as you're sick. Again, if there's no extenuating circumstances like a travel nexus or other things that – or preexisting conditions, it was just an average healthy person having these kind of diseases we typically have this time of year. That's those kinds of symptoms. Call your doctor, let the doctor know what's going on. Give it a day or two. If you're getting well, that's great. If you're not getting well, we want you in.

We're going to talk about testing and the expansion of testing that has occurred. And the good news is for folks who are going to need testing, we have more capacity. Again, alerting your doctor immediately to everything. I want emphasize this folks, if you have travel history, if people in your family have travel history, that's still pertinent here. Even though the community spread is the new powerful reality we're dealing with, there's still that travel nexus, that's important. Also, preexisting conditions, crucially important – respiratory problems, heart disease, immune system problems. The doctor needs to know exactly what they're dealing with. And in the case of preexisting conditions, that's a case where probably they're going to want you to get tested right away. So as to the testing – we now have substantial new testing that has come online through the private sector. That is changing the numbers rapidly. So we've said in the course this week we could do dozens of tests in a day. As of now that is turning into hundreds of tests a day as we speak. We want to get up to thousands of tests per day capacity. We're on the way there, but what would help us immensely, and this is still where we need help from the federal government. We need the FDA to approve testing that is faster and more efficient than that, which is currently available. They have the capacity to do that. We've obviously made that request. So the number of tests we can perform is getting, those numbers are getting better. But the speed and efficiency of the test is still not what we want it to be. We need the FDA to help us. The faster we can get turnaround on results, the more we can do to address the situation.

Let me do an update on some of the individual cases. So, I talked about this morning, we have a man in Manhattan. And this directly relates to the original Westchester case. The gentleman who works at the law firm in Midtown, lives in New Rochelle. This is a direct nexus to that case via New Rochelle. The man in question is 51 years old. From what we know, no preexisting conditions, lives on the Upper West side, mildly symptomatic at this point and isolated at home. Married, his wife is 47 years old, has three daughters, ages eight, 10 and 11. All are mildly symptomatic. Essentially showing the kind of symptoms associated with a cold. All tested today. We're going to have the results later on. And the disease detectives have interviewed the families – the family members I should say, to clarify any contacts that they need to trace. And obviously we'll have that information ready and then we'll judge accordingly related to the test results.

Another case, which I think has been talked about publicly, and this spans a New York and New Jersey. 32-year-old health care worker, at Hackensack University Medical Center, in isolation, in stable condition. This individual has an apartment in Midtown, Manhattan that is his primary residence and also an apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The health officials in New Jersey have been working with us very closely and obviously with New York State Health officials as well. The disease detectives have done the interview in this case. I'm going to give you some of the information. There's some other pieces we're still confirming. We'll have more for you at the next briefing. He worked on February 29th, seeing patients while symptomatic. But also while wearing a mask and gloves, saw ten patients but then went for care the next day. All patients had been identified and monitored. None are symptomatic. So none of those ten patients are symptomatic at this point. And this has obviously been a number of days since then. So that's a very good sign that so much time has passed. We are tracing any other contacts now. We'll have an update on that tomorrow.

Finally I'll just give you some quick Spanish in a moment, But one more update. The teachers that we talked about previously. So yesterday we talked about a teacher from James Madison High School, Brooklyn tested negative. That was the teacher went on the trip to Italy. 44 kids, and six other staff, still none have any symptoms. And again, we're almost at the two week mark. There were two other teachers who were on their own personal vacations over the winter break. One is a teacher and I will, let me say the most important part first. Both tested both negative. The second and third teachers both tested, both negative. One teaches at PS 369 in Brooklyn. One teaches at PS 130 in Lower Manhattan. So as soon as those teachers, who do not have coronavirus, but have been just generally sick, as soon as they are fully well, they'll all return to the classroom. But none of those teachers have coronavirus.

So to conclude, just a few words in Spanish,

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

So that's the update. My colleagues are with me. Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Deputy Mayor Laura Anglin, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, our Health Commissioner, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, our Deputy Health Commissioner, Chancellor Richard Carranza, our Emergency Management Commissioner Deanne Criswell. And we are ready for questions.

Question: Thank you. I actually have two if you don’t mind. The first would be probably for Dr. Barbot, actually. I'm wondering, there’s obviously, you know, community spread is here. A lot of people are concerned about kind of how widespread this might be. And I guess, I'm wondering if you have a sense for how widespread the asymptomatic group might be? Like if you were to swab this room, would you expect to see it? Would you expect to see flu if you were to swab this whole room? Like, I mean what you try to – can you put this in context?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: I think right now as the Mayor has said, we are pivoting into what we're seeing with regards to person to person spread in the community. And so what that means is that New Yorkers are probably more likely to contract, or less likely to have contracted coronavirus from someone that had a travel nexus than from someone who had contact with an individual who had the disease. And so we're not at this point looking for asymptomatic – excuse me, because the literature, the experience from other countries doesn't bear out that those are the individuals that are responsible for this explosive growth across the globe.

Question: [Inaudible] transmitted as easily as somebody who is symptomatic or?

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, I think the science is still out, but there's nothing convincing that would lead us to believe that going after asymptomatic individuals would give any fruitful information. We're focused on ensuring that New Yorkers get the message that if they are sick, if they have symptoms of a, cold-like symptoms, they've traveled, we want them to reach out to the doctors. Even if they haven't traveled, we want them to have a lower threshold of staying home when they're sick. Because as we pivot into this new, early phase where we're having community transmission, one of the most effective ways to nip that in the bud is if people really take to heart the advice. Stay home if you're sick, don't go to work. As the city's doctor, what I'm asking them to do is to have a lower threshold. You know, we have a habit of wanting to power through if you've got a cough, a scratchy throat. I'm saying don't. Do us all a favor. Stay home. Stay home for 24 to 48 hours. And if you're not feeling better, make sure that you've reached out to your doctor. We've now increased the availability of testing. As the Mayor said, you know, we have commercial tests online. And so the important thing to note is if you're sick, stay home. If you're sick for more than two days, reach out to your doctor, ask for the test if you think you've got concerns.

Question: Thank you. My other question was, and this is really more I guess for you Mr. Mayor. You know, you see Wall Street firms are now splitting up their trading operations. They're putting personnel kind of elsewhere so they don’t all get sick at the same time. Have you had that conversation in terms of city government, in terms of a continuity of government? I mean you're all sort of standing here. If this gets that widespread, what did you do?

Mayor: Look, I think this is the kind of thing we're going to start scenarioing. In fact, yesterday we had one of our exercises where we talked about what the impact would be on the total number of city employees who will be available to us at any given point in time? So we're starting to run those scenarios. We have not yet gotten to the point of saying we want to split up people in different locations. But you know, we're going to put everything on the table and decide what makes sense. The community spread dynamic requires us to consider any and all possibilities. You know, if this really started to ramp up intensely, we would definitely need the ability to make sure we had enough personnel at all times. Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, there was a –

Commissioner Barbot: Yesterday, I issued a commissioner’s order ordering that first responders, educators, health care workers who are from the City, stay home if they're sick. And so that is our way of ensuring that A.) Those individuals that are in the closest contact with people who may be at risk for other reasons who may be sick, don't transmit the illness. And it's also a way of protecting our workforce because the work of the City has to continue. And so in that same vein, what we're asking is for businesses to look at ways in which they can help support workers heading this advice. So, for example, if they've got options for telecommuting or using video conferencing, we want them to be looking at the possibility of putting those things into place.

Question: Both Gap and a WeWork office had employees who tested positive and shut down their workplaces in Manhattan. Or are those the 40-year-old and 50-year-old man or are those additional cases?

Mayor: I don't know those specific ones. You're saying here in the city, had cases that tested positive. Those are not in the numbers I have. So I want to make sure we're saying the same thing. I don't know where they live. Do you know this one or not?

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: If they are not New York City residents you are going to hear about them from another jurisdiction.

Mayor: Let's confirm and get that back to you.

Question: So I have two quick questions. The first is if you can give an update on the quarantine number? I know it was about 2,700 yesterday. And the second is, I know Governor Cuomo said he's not concerned about the number of tests, but you and your administration is concerned. So is there a disconnect between the concern of the available tests?

Mayor: I think we're saying – we're talking about two different categories. I watched some of the Governor's press conference and I saw the exchange. On the pure numerical level, we've seen a really great improvement in this week. Went from, you know, literally Monday morning we could not do our own testing, to Monday afternoon we could do our own testing but not the numbers we were hoping to get to. Now the private capacity is coming online as we speak. That's revolutionizing the situation. Hundreds of tests per day will be possible, on the way to thousands. Good news. The bad news is a test takes too long compared to where we want it to be. And we want the fastest, most efficient test and that requires FDA to approve the next step of evolution, if you will, and allow those faster, better tests. We need that to happen. We made that very clear to FDA. We're waiting for answer.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I think it's the same as this morning. A 2,773 is the number I have. Yes.

Question: Do you see any more schools in the city closing down out of precaution?

Mayor: You know, we're constantly monitoring for any instance of a teacher, a student, a staff member with symptoms that links back to this. We're not finding any others at this moment. So no, we're continuing, but that's something people should keep in – You know, I'm asking all parents, constantly keep aware of the latest news because if we get to a point where we have to make any kinds of closures, we'll get that out immediately. But at this point, thank God we're not seeing it in the school system.

Question: Kind of, you know, looking at the strain of the virus, that the multiple people have had and if they're connected, do they get it from the same, or do we know anything about the sequencing of the disease at this point?

Commissioner Barbot: So through the work of our disease detectives, we have established clear what we call epidemiological connections, which means that we have been able to determine instances where a symptomatic individual who was positive transmitted to another individual. And so when we talk about community spread, I think it's important to note that now what we're seeing is contact spreading the illness to other contacts. And that puts us in a different situation that we're going to be paying very close attention to.

Question: [Inaudible] in Washington within a few days we knew that, there were estimates that the disease had been circulating for six weeks. Did we have any kind of estimate for how, like when it came here?

Commissioner Barbot: To date we do not have that estimate.

Mayor: Who has not gone? Way back.

Question: Regarding the MTA and their approach, you have a comment on the cleaning of the trains and the buses and the stations? And does their approach need to change now that we're in this space?

Mayor: I mean my understanding is they're intensifying their cleaning efforts and that's right. But again, I want to, you know, we're constantly trying to get really, really clear if there's any new information about this disease and I want to be clear, the entire global medical community is trying to get more information, get around, you know, this is a, this is going to change potentially, literally day by day even. But as of today in terms of cleaning and everything else. It doesn't get transmitted hanging in the air. It would only get transmitted in a surface and kind of a perfect storm where you instantly touched it and touched your mouth. You know it’s a very rare dynamic. The thing to be concerned about is person to person, close contact, you know, liquid fluid going from one person into another person. Sorry for the bluntness. That is how it gets transmitted. So I think of the MTA, which I have every reason to assume is happening is doing intensified regular cleaning. That's good. But I think that you know, the heart of the matter here is something that's much more about the experience people have as individuals rather than in a big open space.

Question: Yes, please, the Commissioner [inaudible] you know, talk about the transmission in Spanish, please?

Mayor: Sure.

Question: Thank you. You know the body fluids and everything?

Mayor: Sure. You can ask it in Spanish.

[Laughter]

[Commissioner Barbot speaks in Spanish:]

Mayor: Who has not gone, one call on that. Okay, let's go around again.

Question: Thanks Mr. Mayor. As we're sitting here, Amtrak put out a statement that they're pulling down three Acela trips a day because of reduced demand. Airlines are fighting service, you know, I mean everybody knows what's going on with the economy. Where are we headed here in New York? And based on this that you guys are saying that it's, it has to be [inaudible] from person to person. That it's not, you know, sitting around on the subway pole necessarily. What do you say to New Yorkers and to people who might think about visiting New York as these numbers grow and presumably will continue?

Mayor: Look, I think first of all, there's just no place in America that’s better able to handle a situation like this than New York City. We have the strongest health care system anywhere in the country by far. We have the strongest public health capacity. I really believe New Yorkers are heading these warnings and acting accordingly. I just continue to see people doing the right thing and I appreciate that very, very much. So, I also would tell you the vast majority places I'm going in the city, I'm seeing people going about their business. Which I think is also New Yorkers are, if I may editorialize particularly resilient and tough and tend to keep going through all sorts of things. Now I agree with the Commissioner. We want people to be tough as they always are, but recognize that if they're sick it's smart to stay home. But I'm going to be going out around the city like normal. I think people should. I think people who want to visit this is damn good place to visit. But those companies that are making decisions based on reduced demand, that's just common sense, right? I mean if people aren't showing up, then you're going to alter your behavior. I think that the thing I want, I want all this energy to go into action. So the cleaning your hands, the alcohol based hand sanitizer, the new cool way of greeting people. There's your example. You know, being smart, if you happen to be sick. Filling your prescriptions now, which we mentioned yesterday is a really smart thing to do. Just get that done. I think that's a smart thing to do.

The where's it going? Look, we are now going to do – we're running scenarios that are the total shutdown scenarios and everything in between. But we also are going to be really specific. Like we have to see evidence of something that causes us to want to get to that point. And I'm still not seeing that, you know, we have a slew of new tests here. Obviously a huge number of them came back negative. That's great. You know, the teachers came back negative. That's great. But it's going to be a day to day, hour to hour thing. Go ahead.

Question: I'm going to need you to clarify. I know you said that the coronavirus can only lasts a few minutes on surfaces, but the World Health Organization and Governor Cuomo had actually said that it could survive on some surfaces for a few hours or several, several days. Could you?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Very often when new viruses are identified there are studies that are done in laboratories that don't actually look like real life conditions. So we think like other coronaviruses and cold viruses, this one also has a life on surfaces that's short. Not as long as quoted by the WHO.

Question: [Inaudible]?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: In the lab –

Mayor: Apples and oranges.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Apples and oranges. So in the laboratory I can make anything live long in the laboratory.

Mayor: I'm not saying you can get it from apples.

[Laughter]

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: No apples, no apples, no apples!

Mayor: I’m going to work with you. A laboratory is a rarefied environment?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Mayor: So you're saying it's easier for something to survive there as opposed to the rough and tumble of the outside world where there's air circulating and all sort of stuff happening. So let's just describe, let's go to the positive version. If I were to sneeze on my kitchen counter or my desk, how long is it going to survive on that surface?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: On the order of minutes.

Question: Ten minutes?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: On the order of minutes.

Mayor: Right, but you've got to give some –

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: 10 minutes seems long.

Mayor: So what’s typical?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Somewhere – a couple of minutes. Two, three minutes. That’s like a typical coronavirus.

Mayor: So the two, three minutes and then it's inactive. That's your typical experience?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Mayor: Okay. And we, look, we try – I’m going to editorialize and I want you to work with me and modify. One, we're dealing with something where there's no one on Earth who has all the facts about this disease. Two, we really respect the World Health Organization. We really respect the CDC, but I want to kind of take you to, we especially appreciate our own local expertise. Particularly when it's based on our own experience. So I mentioned that the disease detectives are bringing back our own information, not someone else's study, but what they're seeing. So Demetre the go-to-guy on what happens with diseases. So the New York City understanding is on a surface, it's a few minutes.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: All of our scientific advisors within the Department of Health agree that it's on the order of minutes.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: I have two questions Mr. Mayor, I'm going to ask what I think is the easier one first. We have confirmed that a hardware store in the Garment District is selling two liter bottles of Purell for $109.

Mayor: I would like to have the name and address of that hardware store. I know our Department of Consumer Affairs would like to pay them a visit immediately.

Question: And why is that? Can you just explain why?

Mayor: I mean price gouging, they put out the guidance disallowing price gouging. So you know, I don't have the guidance in front of me, but that sure sounds like it would be a hit. So I would – you've sometimes had brought up other individual cases, which I appreciate. This is one where we'd like the information and our team will follow up immediately.

Question: And then secondly, the Westchester attorney because he has so many cases associated with him. I know early on he was in critical condition so you couldn't get information directly from him. Now he's in stable condition. Have you learned any more about where he might have contracted the virus?

Mayor: And let's confirm he has been getting better, but has he been better enough to interview?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: The answer is he's not better enough to interview, though he is getting much better. So we're very reassured by that. But not quite ready for interviews.

Mayor: In terms of the question, from his family or other sources, do we have a sense of the origin point of him where he contracted it?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: We think he's part of the larger Westchester cluster that we're hearing about.

Question: [Inaudible]?

Mayor: Not from travel as far as we know.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: No, oh yeah, absolutely not. No travel. There's no travel nexus that would indicate this is from a travel related infection.

Question: Several of the health care workers that were in contact with the Westchester lawyer have now confirmed to have the virus. And there's the health care worker in Manhattan. We obviously have a patchwork of different facilities that treat people. We have family doctors, we have urgent care centers and we have private hospitals. I know that there's protocol at the City hospitals that people come in and get like a respiratory thing right away.

Mayor: A mask. Not a respiratory thing. A mask. We're going to put out a press release, every time we're going to refer to it as a respiratory thing just to see if you're catching. Go ahead.

Question So what there – is there a common guidance going out to all these different places? How are we going to make sure that health care workers are not exposed to this?

Mayor: Yes, distinctly yes. Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, so all providers are trained on universal precautions, knowing when to use gloves, mask. Beyond that, we have sent numerous bulletins to the health care community to ensure that they are fully up to date on the requirements, the recommendations for the use of masks, for gloves, for gowns as needed. Additionally, we have held several webinars with physicians. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis did one earlier this week where 3,000 doctors participated in this webinar. We did it in collaboration with State partners. Beyond that, as part of our ongoing emergency preparedness work, we do secret shoppers at hospitals where we send folks who show up with scenarios of a novel respiratory virus to make sure that unannounced, institutions are taking the proper precautions. And if they're not, we take it as an opportunity to reeducate them. Because one of the things that we are critically focused on is ensuring that all of our health care workers have the equipment that they need and that they know how to use it consistently and effectively.

Question: What do you have to say to those who may be experiencing the symptoms and they're afraid to go to the doctor because of the bill, medical bill, even with insurance or even worse, with no insurance?

Mayor: Very, very important question. And I want to emphasize again. This is a city that now is guaranteeing health care for everyone who needs it, including undocumented people, regardless of ability to pay. And anyone who's not sure what to do or is confused because I don't have insurance or they're not sure where to go. Call 3-1-1, which can speak to them in multiple languages. And they will be told the best facility to turn to. And again, everything will be, if people are unable to pay, we're still going to treat them. If they're able to pay, we'll work with that. If they have insurance, great. If they don't have insurance, we're still going to treat them. Okay. Last call. See if there is anything else.

Question: Thank you. I just wanted to nail down the lawyer, the New Rochelle guy. So it sounds like, I just want to, what I heard was he's not the one, you know, he acquired it from someone.

Mayor: He acquired it from someone somewhere. But, but not as far as we can – we have no, it was his travel, because of the timing and everything. And we have no evidence it was from someone else's travel in his life. But as you heard, we still will, we'll learn more. We've interviewed his wife but we haven't interviewed him. So you know, there is more to learn. But community spread is community spread. There's a certain point where it's just out there and the travel nexus is in the past.

Question: Yes, my question is I think you had said that you think it was somewhere in that New Rochelle cluster. Is it, do you think it's somebody who's already been identified as a patient?

Mayor: We don’t know. We just don’t know.

Question: Okay.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: I really have nothing to add to that. So I think this is the point of, of what community transmission can look like. So though not the most satisfying answer, there'll be answers where the index patient, the first patient is unknown.

Mayor: And I want to note, I mean obviously travel is going to become less and less of a nexus just because fewer and fewer people are traveling. But when we get this interview done, if something new comes up, we will absolutely put it out. Yes.

Question: Just two more quick questions. The New Jersey man, I believe he got it at a conference in Manhattan on March 3rd?

Mayor: I don't think we know – do we know he got at the conference or we didn't, or we're not at that level of specificity? Please come on over.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: I can confirm that he was symptomatic before the conference.

Mayor: Okay, so he didn't get it at the conference?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Correct.

Question: [Inaudible] where it was?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: I don't want to comment on that right now. We're investigating. So it's we want to not compromise our investigation.

Mayor: Right. We will, the ground rule is the same. Very fair question. Our job is to one, lock down facts. In some cases, again, there's notification issues. But I'm going to say to our communications team to keep a running list of specific questions and our job is to fill in the blank as quickly as possible, hopefully as early as tomorrow.

Question: Are either of the AIPAC attendees who tested positive in New York City –

Mayor: We don’t have evidence they're in New York City but we don't have –. In other words, no one has said they are from New York City. No one's alerted us that. That doesn't mean they aren't from New York City. We just don't have that.

Question: I have a question for Chancellor Carranza. So there are some students in the public school system who go to internships in nursing homes and other facilities. Is there any plan from the DOE to dial that back or to kind of remove some of those programs? Especially [inaudible] programs?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: No plans at the moment to do away with those programs. But we have provided guidance around just common sense at this point. And the guidance is really based on the Department of Health. If they are presenting or they're sick or there's somebody at that place that is sick, there's an issue. Just common sense. And again, as a situation and circumstances warrant, we'll adjust.

Mayor: I want to emphasize to that question. We're watching every single day. We keep coming back with the same basic fact. Can it afflict a young person? It can, but it seems to be with very, very limited impact. The central question I want to make sure, and we should make sure this is in all our guidance, the students who need to be treated differently and with deference are if they have preexisting conditions, and those would include a compromised immune system, a severe respiratory problem, or severe heart problem. Those students, I want us to set a higher bar and I would not take chances on them being out and about, unless absolutely necessary. Yes.

Question: Is there anything more you can say about the two people that were diagnosed yesterday? If there's any indication where they got it or any of their contact tracing, if they rode subways or if they were in public gatherings? The 83-year-old woman and the man in his forties, and also their condition. If we have any update on that?

Mayor: So, Demetre, do you have condition? Okay. And I don't think we have more on if you know, more on origins.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: The 40-year-old male has been discharged and is isolating now at home. The more elderly patient is doing better but continues to be in critical condition.

Mayor: And do we have anything on origin in these cases?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: We do not have an identified origin for either case. We have done appropriate contact tracing and close contacts are being are being handled appropriately.

Mayor: We'll have an update on that.

Question: Mr. Mayor. The Governor had said four cases in New York City. And you're saying five, was he just not updated?

Mayor: I can't speak for him. We're all getting constant flowing information. So you know, I'm, I want to emphasize and we're working very, very closely with the State. There's one, ever-changing details. Two, we have interesting situations like the New Jersey health care worker. Literally the health officials are trying to determine whether to call that a New Jersey case or a New York case that has not yet been determined. It has been determined? Okay, well as of an hour ago, it hadn't been determined. Okay. New Jersey gets that one. Okay. Breaking news. Thank you. So that's New Jersey.

We're five with the addition now earlier today of the 51-year-old man from the Upper West Side, that's five.

Commissioner Barbot: [Inaudible] Westchester.

Mayor: Right. Thank you. That's where the other confusion is. The individual lives on the Upper West Side but contracted it in New Rochelle. So that's where these are very valid, you know, you could count one way, you could count another way. Last call.

Question: We talked about this a little bit a couple of days ago, but now that we have over 2,700 people in home isolation, can you just walk us through the do's and don'ts of what you should, should or should not do? You know, can you go down and do your laundry if you live in an apartment building? Can you, you know, should you go out and walk your dog? Can you take a food delivery at your apartment door or that sort of thing?

Mayor: I am going to start with a little bit of common sense. And then Demetre jump in on the specifics. Look, an asymptomatic person who is in voluntary quarantine, out of abundance of caution. I mean, obviously our expectation in the vast majority of cases is they're just going to ride it out and they will have run out the time limit. And then we know they're fine. I will state the common sense reality for everyone. Maximum isolation possible. A person can stay in their apartment, can get, you know, if they're able food deliveries or friends or relatives can bring them food, whatever it is. They should minimize any contact with anyone else. Abundance of caution. So I think that's the standard. That doesn't mean you can't, you know, get a little fresh air for a minute, but you should, to the maximum extent possible, avoid contact with other people. Have I gotten my medical degree? Thank you. Okay. This was the moment where I got my medical degree. Okay. We will certainly be updating you regularly. There's a lot more to follow up on from today. We'll get that to you tomorrow and let's keep going. Thanks everyone.

2020-03-08 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Okay. We have a lot of information for you here. So, this is going to take a while to go over and then we'll take your questions.

I want to start a couple of things. First of all, the information we're going to provide today is based on the latest information that we have here through our public health agencies and we are constantly assessing what we're experiencing here in New York City. This is again another reason to appreciate the work of our disease detectives at the Department of Health who are not only working on specific cases and helping to address the specific individuals, but they're also gathering a huge amount of new information. This is basically research that's happening right here in New York City, giving us direct knowledge of how this disease is acting so that we can make the best strategic judgements. There is a lot of information out there in the global health community, national health community, but everyone understands there's still a lot that is not understood about this disease. Again, this is a disease that this moment does not have a cure, does not have a vaccine.

So, the fact is the ability to constantly gather new information and understand the way the disease acts in real world conditions is crucial. We talked about this yesterday is a real difference between real world conditions and the laboratory. So, we are getting more and more information and it is affecting our understanding and therefore our strategies. You'll hear those updates as we go along. Also want to emphasize this of course is an ever-changing situation. There are times we get guidance from the World Health Organization, from the CDC, State Health Department, obviously our own health officials. Sometimes there are areas where there is not clear guidance or there's different guidance different levels of government. We're constantly assessing, refining. So, this is an ever-changing situation. We will update you constantly. You will see variations. We'll try and identify those variations of why they're happening, but you should expect it. You should expect changes in information, changes in approach as we go along. Therefore, the things we say in many cases are preliminary because the information about the disease is preliminary. We hope over time to get a much deeper understanding, but we can say some things with you know, a high level of certainty based on actual experience. So far, and I'm going to repeat today and probably several other times in coming days, what we understand about what is called transmissibility, which is literally the process through which the disease goes from one person to another because there's still a lot of misunderstanding out there and a lot of mythology out there.

So, I'm going to put it again in very plain graphic terms because I think New Yorkers, we are blunt and straightforward people. People want to hear the truth about this stuff. And the way I try to explain it as sort of what it is versus what it's not. So, what it's not is a disease like some that hang in the air for a prolonged period of time, that you can come into a room hours later after someone has been there with the disease and you have a danger of contracting disease. That is not what we're talking about here. This is a disease that requires a very direct level of contact. The question of surfaces has come up a lot. The best understanding of our public health officials is that this is a disease that does not live long on a surface. Certainly, on most surfaces like metal, plastic you know, a desk, a kitchen counter, a subway pole. It's only a matter of minutes before the disease dies, the virus dies in the open air.

If it got on a part of the human body that's not the mouth, the nose, the eyes, might live a little bit longer, but still a very limited period of time and the only way it can become active and affect you is if it gets into the mouth, the nose, the eyes. If the disease got on your leg, but nowhere else, you don't get infected. We talked yesterday about if somehow it got someone's sneezed over some soup they were serving you and then you drank the soup, you're not going to get infected. Same thing with a glass of water. It has to be direct fluid from one person right into you, which means a cough, a sneeze right at you that you received directly into your mouth, your nose, your eyes, or potentially onto your hand and then immediately onto your mouth, nose, eyes.

A lot of us and I am one of them, often touch our face. It's kind of a normal human reaction, normal human habit. You want to try to do that less nowadays in addition to all the other precautions to washing hands and the alcohol-based sanitizer. It's great to try and reduce that contact between your hand and your face, but if it doesn't get into those parts of your face, it doesn't get in. That's what we understand at this point

And when we talk about the close contact, we've seen this in cases. Again, we understand if someone sneezed right at you, they coughed right at you. They did not do this like they're supposed to. You're supposed to cover your mouth, your mouth. When you cough or sneeze into your elbow, someone does sneeze or cough right at you. Yes, direct hit. That's a real problem. If you're deep in conversation with someone right up next to you and they're vehemently talking and some spit comes out and it gets right into you, that's a problem. It is not a problem. If someone is 10 feet away and they sneeze, it's not going to reach all the way over to you. But if it's close to you, that's where the problem occurs and that's where we want to be mindful of. So those are just basic points I want to say upfront.

The other thing I really want to emphasize, and I've been working with our health officials on this because there's been a lot of misunderstanding and we really want to get right to people – who's vulnerable and who's essentially not now. I'm going to say on this one again, I'm going to use the – I'm the layman here. I've been talking to these public health officials now for days and days and days. I'm trying to composite the information, make it simple and clear for New Yorkers to use. I'll put an asterisk on and say, there are always exceptional cases. So, I'm not saying I'm giving you, you know a perfect rule that affects every single time, but this is the basic rule, overwhelmingly consistent rule based on what we have seen globally from this disease. So, I want to start with who is most vulnerable – it’s abundantly clear, who is most vulnerable to contract coronavirus. It is people who have preexisting serious conditions and are over the age of 50, and those preexisting conditions, and our team has really been working to get this definition clear for everyone because we think it's helpful if it's very, very clear. So, the preexisting conditions in question are heart disease, lung disease, cancer, immune system vulnerability and I – diabetes, thank you. And diabetes, those five I'll do it again. Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, compromised immune system and diabetes, those five preexisting conditions. And then one other thing we could call a factor is not a preexisting condition but it is a factor that we are concerned about and we've seen already – if you are a smoker or a vaper that does make you more vulnerable. And we'll say it probably several times today and in the days to come, if you are a smoker or vaper, this is a very good time to stop that habit and we will help you.

Our Health Department and our colleagues in the state have a lot they can offer people who want to quit smoking or want to quit vaping. If you can do that, if you want to do that, please do that now. It is a very good time to take that vulnerability off the table. Call 3-1-1 if you need help. So, for folks who have one of those five preexisting conditions, or God forbid more than one, even more, for folks who have that reality that they’re smokers or vapers, they're in particular danger. And if they're over 50 that is the category where we're seeing the biggest problems by far. That's where the real danger is. Those are the folks, God forbid anyone passes away, but overwhelmingly the folks in greatest danger, the folks we have the greatest concern about whether they will still be alive at the end of this is the folks who are in that category.

Okay. The next category to think about is folks who have those preexisting conditions but are under 50 years old, so the preexisting condition is a deep concern at any age, but a much deeper concern that if you're over 50 years old. The next category is a healthy person over 50. Now, a healthy person over 50 in most cases is going to do fine, but there is somewhat more vulnerability if you're over 50 and then the last category, thank God, is the biggest category of New Yorkers under 50 years old does not have one of those five preexisting conditions or smoking and vaping. That's the single biggest category of people and for those people, by and large, if you contract coronavirus, you're under 50 you don't have those preexisting conditions, you will generally experience it the same way you do a common cold or flu and there'll be unpleasant, but you'll be okay in the end.

We see very consistently with children, again, this is not a perfect rule, but it has been a consistent reality. Children who do not have preexisting conditions, their general experience again will be that of something like a common cold or flu. So, I want to reassure parents on that point, but I also want to say to parents who do have children with those preexisting conditions that we want you to be very vigilant. Make sure that you do not come in contact with folks who have symptoms. And obviously if any child who does have those symptoms develop, we want to be very careful to get them care right away. But I want to be clear about where there is some good news. And the good news is for the vast majority of New Yorkers, they are in the less vulnerable categories.

Okay, let's go over numbers. But first, one other thing that was going to be constant flow of information in lots of different forms for folks who want to get connected to information, you can text the word COVID – C-O-V-I-D to 6-9-2-6-9-2, and you will get regular updates from the city.

Let's go over numbers. As of yesterday, we had 12 positive cases since the beginning of this crisis. There is one new one and I'm going to say up front we are gathering information on this new case. We need a little more time to get all the facts a 100% clear. So, we'll have an update on the new case later on today. I can only tell you, tell you in New York City, in the Bronx, but I want to get all the facts straight before we give you a more. So, 12 as of yesterday plus one, 13 as of today, seven new cases since Friday. Negative tests, we are now at 146 tests that have come back negative and that is 60 new tests since yesterday.

So we'll keep giving you those updates as long as we can. Now, the numbers – I'll just finish it and say we also have 76 tests outstanding that we're waiting for results on that we'll know by the end of the day. I'll go over specific cases in a little bit. Our goal is to keep giving you the numbers and the case breakdowns as long as we can. There well could be a point where the number of cases gets so large that becomes impractical to be able to give you that level of detail. We'll keep giving you updates as much as possible.

I think it's fair to say, you know, right now for a crisis that's been going on six weeks or more in this city, we're at 13 positive cases. I think we could well be at a hundred cases or hundreds of cases over the next two or three weeks. We have to be prepared for that reality, so we're going to – today I'm going to give guidance and updates, but as we end up in a situation where there are more and more cases, again, we'll be able to give updates but maybe not as fine tune in real time. It's also important to say that our public health apparatus is already planning on the assumption that we will be at hundreds of cases soon and is ready for that reality and we'll talk about that as well.

Fundamental change has occurred in the last few days. This was overwhelmingly until this week a problem related to travel and there still are travel cases coming in the last few days, in the last 24, 48 hours. Several of those new cases we have one that's related to travel to Italy, one related to travel, a Chile, one related to travel to Egypt, so it's not that the travel issue is entirely over but what is coming up now unfortunately is the community spread reality and that's where you're going to see much greater numerical growth.

There are things that we can do to address community spreads, so I think that the way to think about this is phase one was travel essentially and there were very specific strategies we could use to address something that was being brought in by travel. We're going into phase two now where the dominant reality is community spread and we're going to have instructions of how to deal with that. You'll get guidance today and the guidance will be constantly updated. But finishing on travel because it is still pertinent, we had canceled school trips to five effected countries. We are now taking the next step and we're banning school international trips across the board, out of abundance of caution. Also, for our City workforce, there will be no non-essential international travel at this point

We're going to put some other actions into place. Again, this is a lot of different pieces. They won't flow in perfect order, but bear with me, a lot of concern has been raised about our small businesses, many of which are really hurting right now are seeing fewer customers. I'm going to just tell people we're going to give you guidance every single day. We'll update it. I am still going out to small businesses. I am saying to my fellow New Yorkers, unless you have particular vulnerabilities or you have symptoms, I believe you can go about your life continue to patronize our small businesses and I urge you to, but we have to provide some relief for the businesses that are hurting right now. So, we have two forms of relief we're going to implement right away
For businesses under 100 employees that can document a decrease in sales of up to 25 percent, they will be eligible for no interest loans and those loans will be up to the dollar figure or $75,000. So, we will be able to get money in their hands to tide them over. The details of that initiative we’ll put out, this is something we've just got approved. We just finished the process on. We'll get you further details on it in the course of the day. For our smallest small businesses under five employees, a lot of mom and pop stores, neighborhood-based stores under five employees, we will offer grants of up to $6,000 to help them retain employees. That's a literal, a direct cash grant to very small stores that are at a point where they may have to lay someone off. We'll get some money in their hands as a grant to help them keep people employed. And any business under five employees that suffering immediate crisis because of what's going on can call 3-1-1 and they will get help getting that assistance.

In the schools, again, emphasizing children in general at low risk, but children with those preexisting conditions, we are very vigilant about, we want parents to be vigilant as well.

We're going to add 85 nurses in the course of the week to ensure that every school building will have a nurse on call, on duty during the school day, remembering that some buildings have one school in them and some buildings have multiple schools in them. Every building will have a nurse and that will be implemented in the course of the week.

Continuing with the guidance, we want to provide people and remembering again that real clear distinct difference, preexisting conditions, especially above the age of 50. So, the issue here is to think in terms of symptoms. And the particular concern would be if someone had a fever plus either cough or shortness of breath. So, we're going to keep providing more pinpoint information. If you have fever plus cough or shortness of breath, we are particularly concerned and then much more concern if that's accompanied by those preexisting conditions. And again, our Health Commissioner will go into more detail. Crucial point, if you're not in a high-risk category. Again, that biggest high-risk, I mean, excuse me. The biggest category of people, low-risk, biggest low-risk category under 50. No preexisting conditions, particularly for folks in that category. If you've got symptoms, first thing to do is to alert your health care professional. If your symptoms are moderate, you can stay home. If they improve that says everything. If they don't improve, we want to get you in. We want to get you tested.

There's been a lot of questions about public events. This is going to be a question we're going to ask ourselves every single day and update you every single day. Based on the information we have today we are not, not altering our stance on public events. But we are making clear people, I think it's straightforward and obvious, but it bears being said in a straightforward fashion. If you are sick, you shouldn't be going to a public event. If you are sick, you shouldn't be going to work. If you're sick, you shouldn't be going on the subway. Now, if you are not sick, but you're in that particularly vulnerable category, over 50, preexisting conditions, you should avoid unnecessary public activity. There are some things someone may have to do, but you should avoid unnecessary public activity. We'll go over the basics every single time. Commissioner, will say it again. Wash your hands. Use alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Dan Nigro is going to be my test model. Come forward with your elbow. Let me see your elbow. You can do this. 

[Mayor de Blasio, Fire Commissioner Nigro tap elbows:]

Okay, do it again, Dan. That's our new handshake, until further notice. And just be very aware of symptoms. Don't ignore them. Don't explain them away. We have a couple of things we want people to make adjustments on and for some people and some employers this will be something they can do readily, for others more challenging. But this is guidance and it's pretty much common-sense guidance at this point. For employers, if you can institute telecommuting or more telecommuting, you should. So if that, if you have the kind of work where telecommuting is a possibility or if you're using it now and think you can use it more, we'd like to see you do that. See how much of that you can do. The more the better. Employers who can stagger their work times, that would be very helpful. Right now, at the height of rush hour, obviously people, we've all experienced it, we've all been the sardines in the subway. We're in super close proximity. We'd like to open that up a little more. And one of the good ways to do it is to stagger work hours. So any employer who is in the possibility of staggering work hours, that's helpful. If people typically come in at 9:00 am and they can come in instead at 10:00 am that helps. Or if you have different people that can come in at different hours a little more, that helps.

And then everybody, of course, following the basic rule, if you're sick, stay home. If you become sick at work, get out of the workplace. If it's mild, go home. If it's more serious, get to health care. Remember we have a Paid Sick Leave law in this city that grants people five days annually. And as you’ll hear from Dr. Barbot, typically the symptoms we're talking about here manifest and give us a clear sense of direction within two or three days. So the Paid Sick Leave is there to give people the opportunity to be home in just these kinds of situations. 

If you are traveling by subway and the train that comes up is all packed and you can possibly wait for the next train in the hopes it might be less packed. Please do, very common-sense measure. Something a lot of us do anyway. If you have the option of walking to work or taking a bike to work, please do. Buses can be very crowded, probably pound for pound, a little less crowded than a lot of subways. If a bus is a less crowded option and you can use that. Please do.

In terms of the guidance to health care providers. Obviously we're making very clear that we are now in this next phase, this phase two which is where community spread will be where the vast majority of cases are coming from, not travel. Specific guidance is being given to providers, to max extent possible to have health care professional meeting patients as they enter health care facilities or just outside, I should say the health care facility. The Commissioner will clarify to make sure that if they need a mask put on them, that that happens or they need to be handled in a particular fashion, that happens. 

In terms of the federal government. We've made multiple appeals. And I think, yes, here we go. This is the letter we've sent to the FDA. This is one of many communications we've sent to the federal government asking for help on testing. This relates to the issue of automated testing that would allow us to do not only hundreds, but potentially thousands of tests in a single day and get same day results. Can't do it without FDA approval. We've asked for days now, we are awaiting that approval. We need that approval. It's one of the best things the federal government could do to help us. Everyone knows this has been a really persistent problem. The federal government has been slow and elusive on all questions of testing. But this is one where they could finally get it right. FDA approval would make all the difference in the world for us. 

Also we're putting out in this kind of — summarizes a lot of what I've said. We're putting out this simple flyer. You'll see it a lot. The basic rules that I've outlined here. We're going to be doing an advertising campaign to get the word out on this as well. 

Okay. I’m going to go through some numbers and some cases. The number of folks in mandatory isolation has gone up to 19. They get a daily call to check on them. They get unannounced visits, in person twice a week. If they violate the standards of the quarantine, they will be fined and they will find a police officer at their door on a regular basis. And that will either be NYPD or the Health Department police. Again, I'm saying that out of abundance of caution, I think overwhelmingly we are seeing people are honoring quarantine. They have like everybody else, heard weeks and weeks of warnings about coronavirus. We don't find a lot of people taking quarantine lightly so far. Thank God. The voluntary isolation number has gone down substantially and that is related to the fact that we are getting fewer and fewer travel cases and people have gone through the full 14 days. But of course, that number will continue to change. You'll see fewer and fewer travel cases. You will start to see more community spread related cases. But as of today, in voluntary isolation, 2,176. They are now getting a regular communication pattern. In the beginning, they're provided information including a robo-call and a text on how to approach the quarantine and what to do if they develop symptoms. They get repeated texts and constant requests to know if their condition has changed. What to do if it does. If they need immediate assistance, we're going to be continuing to deepen that communication. We'll have more to say on that.

A couple of updates on some other issues that come up. On schools -- in addition to our traditional public schools, we have made clear to charter schools, religious schools, private schools that if they need any additional cleaning supplies, they will be delivered tomorrow. And we have requests. And we have requests from 132 Catholic schools, 59 Jewish schools and one charter organization. Which means multiple schools and those deliveries will be made tomorrow. In our traditional public schools, the mandate is abundantly clear and obvious. Every bathroom has to have soap and towels in abundance. Sinks have to be working and school personnel will be held responsible for that being kept consistent. Officials of the DOE will be spot checking schools on a regular basis.

We had one case that was particularly notable of price gouging, a hardware store known as Scheman & Grant in Midtown. They have been fined. What they did was unacceptable. We're using them as an example. The inspectors have been on site. The case has been referred to the Attorney General as well. Any price gouging, we want reported immediately to 3-1-1 so we can act on it. And just saying to all store owners, absolutely unacceptable. Come on, this is a crisis. Help your fellow New Yorker, this is not a time to try and profit. And we'll be giving plenty of messages to people in different elements of the business community about how to be responsible at this moment. 

As I said, we have seven new cases since Friday. One of which you will get the update on later, which is the Bronx case. The information we're providing you is what we have and it always keeps evolving. So, it's preliminary, but we'll give you updates as we get more. The family on the Upper West Side – the father had tested positive, age 51. This is a family that has a nexus to that cluster in Westchester County. Of the family members, the mom of the family and one daughter, mom's 47, the daughter's 11, tested positive. None of them have preexisting conditions to the best of our knowledge, the dad or the mom or the daughter. All had been symptomatic. All are doing well now. Isolated at home. Two other daughters, ages eight and 10 have tested negative. No other close contacts per the work of the disease detectives. We have, and again, I'm just going to, we'll try and keep this a little bit of a numerical order. Those were cases six and seven. Positive tests. 

Case eight — the Uber driver in Far Rockaway, 33 year-old-man. He is an Uber driver. He is not a TLC Uber driver. He works on Long Island so he's not under TLC jurisdiction. Had pneumonia related to coronavirus. Now in stable condition at the hospital in Far Rockaway. Family has been contacted by the disease detectives. All family members in isolation. All family members, asymptomatic. That is his wife. Three children, mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, all asymptomatic, all in isolation at home. The hospital in Far Rockaway, St John's Episcopal, they have a situation there were 41 staff members, and this is again one of these abundance of caution situations, that may have experienced exposure. They're all now in voluntary isolation, being monitored regularly. None symptomatic at this point. The hospital has been provided with support to have additional resources and personnel. And at this point reports normal operations.

Cases nine and ten — two women who went on a cruise to Egypt. So here's travel now coming back as a factor. Two women from Brooklyn, they are 66 and 71 years old. No preexisting conditions. Returned to New York City, February 20, so that's now over two weeks ago, they were symptomatic. They did the right thing. They immediately isolated themselves at home. They are now asymptomatic and still at home. No close contacts who require follow-up. Those are cases again, nine and ten.

Case 11 — 39-year-old man from Brooklyn who was in the affected area of Italy, came back March 2nd. Symptoms manifested March 3rd, in serious condition in a voluntary or private hospital in Manhattan. Does have preexisting conditions. Serious condition now as I said. One close contact, business associate tested negative and is an isolation.

Case 12 — 58-year-old male returned from Chile. Apparently contracted coronavirus during a lunch with a confirmed coronavirus patient in Chile. Lives in Manhattan. I need a reality check because I don't have this much fine tuning. Hypertension, Dr. Barbot is in the group of preexisting conditions or not? Okay. So does not have one of the preexisting conditions. Was in a hospital in Manhattan, has been discharged doing well now at home. No close contacts to follow up. So that's the cases to date. We'll get you more on the Bronx case later. 

Just some other follow-up from ones we've reported earlier. The Westchester family, all doing well now. And then the employees at the law firm, Lewis and Garbuz. Four New York City resident coworkers, all negative as we've said before. The four non-New York City coworkers – we have one Westchester coworker negative, one New Jersey coworker positive, two remaining coworkers, one from Westchester, one from Nassau, both asymptomatic. And then another piece of news because we had talked before about the health care worker from New Jersey who had seen patients in New York City. 32-year-old male, specific information we want to give you now. He saw 11 patients while symptomatic, but he did wear a mask and gloves during that which is important and lessen the chance of transmission. 11 patients. All 11 are asymptomatic now. It's been a week. That's a good sign. And they have all been carefully monitored and will continue to be. We are working with the State Health Department on this right now and we believe we have a low-risk situation. But it is important to confirm that this occurred at a nursing home, specifically in Brooklyn at 2266 Cropsey Avenue. The King David Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation. The health care worker from New Jersey also attended a small medical conference at the Westin Hotel in Midtown. Based on the follow-up of our disease detectives, the attendees are all asymptomatic. Also, his family is asymptomatic.

A couple more points and then I'll turn to my colleagues. We reported a man in his 40’s who was a smoker and vaper. He was hospitalized. He has been discharged, now at home, mild symptoms. Has a partner, the partner’s under mandatory isolation, is a symptomatic, is the only contact of interest to our disease detectives. The last of the previous cases, this is the one we're most worried about right now. This is the woman in her 80’s, it is not going to come as a surprise to anyone. We're really concerned for her. She is hospitalized and continues to be in very serious condition. So, we are hoping and praying for her. There was a report in the media about an employee of the Gap. Best of our understanding that report was erroneous, came up Friday. We have followed up with the company. The individual to the best of our understanding, not from New York City and does not have coronavirus. So, any company that is, has concerns and wants to connect with the City to report information or has rumors that are not accurate and wants to help us dispel them, please reach out. And there's a specific place to go online. The wordspublicprivate@oem.nyc.gov, publicprivate@oem.nyc.gov. And Deanne, let's make sure if they call 3-1-1. That gets routed as well. 

Finally, I'm going to say a few words in Spanish and I want you to hear from three of my colleagues.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let me turn next to our Health Commissioner. Want to thank her and her extraordinary team at the Department of Health. They've been working very, very hard these last days. Want her to give you an update, Dr. Barbot – and I want her to be taller. Okay, there we go. Do it again. Look at that smile. Okay. There, that's much better. You could be the spokesperson for elbow bumping.

[Laughter]

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: That and alcohol-based hand sanitizers are going to be my – good afternoon. First of all, let me start off by acknowledging that there may be many New Yorkers who are feeling frightened or sad because of all of this information that's coming at them. Every day we hear about new cases worldwide. We are, in the city, sharing information on a real time basis. And so, I want to just acknowledge that there may be some New Yorkers out there that are having those feelings. I want to encourage them to call NYC Well. It's an important resource that – I think that especially at this point in time can provide valuable supports.

The other thing I want to say is that fear is no excuse for propagating stigma. This is not a time for us to be buying into false information on the internet. I want to encourage New Yorkers to visit our website at nyc.gov/health for all the best information on COVID-19. They can also visit cdc.gov. The best way to guard against fear, against stigma is by having the correct information.
And so we are very much committed to transparency.

The other thing I want to just emphasize that I think the Mayor touched on is that this is a situation that is evolving on an everyday basis. We've been learning almost every day something new about how this virus behaves. And I anticipate that over the coming weeks we will continue to learn more information about this virus. And so that's why it's so important to have the information, but also to know that this is, for the foreseeable future – at least for the next couple of months – something that the Health Department will need the support of everyday New Yorkers in order to really turn the tide.

Last thing I want to say is – and just to really reemphasize that we are marshaling all of our resources, but we need New Yorkers to do their part. In that vein, I have talked about what I want New Yorkers to do. As the city's doctor, I need to make sure that if someone is sick with fever and cough, or fever and shortness of breath, they do not go to work. Beyond that, I want to make sure that New Yorkers are also paying that same advice to their children. If your child is sick with fever and a cough, fever and shortness of breath, do not send them to school. That's baseline advice. But especially important here during the COVID-19 season. There are things that we can do and that we are doing. And then there are new things that we want folks to do.

So for example, we want people to continue washing their hands often covering their mouths and their nose when they cough and if they don't feel well, call the doctor. And I'll say more about that in a moment. But there are other things that over the course of the last few days we have been changing advice on. And the first thing you'll notice is we said don't shake hands anymore but do the elbow bump. And that's a way in which we can minimize the risk of transmission. The other thing I will say is that none of these measures that we are recommending are effective in isolation. We need to do all of them at the same time. So, the frequent cleaning of surfaces, the frequent cleaning of hands, the covering of your mouth, for the foreseeable future the elbows, not going to work. So that's – I want New Yorkers to get used to the fact that that's our new normal for the next couple of weeks.

The additional thing that I will say is – and let me just sort of reemphasize what the Mayor said in terms of the folks that we are especially concerned about. And it's those individuals with chronic underlying diseases, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, an immune compromised system –

Mayor: Did you get lung disease?

Commissioner Barbot: Chronic lung disease, cancer, diabetes, immuno-compromised, heart disease.

Mayor: You get them.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, I got them. And so – and being over the age of 50. If you are sick, don't go to work. Call your doctor if you're not better in two to three days. We want you to make sure that you access care quickly. The other thing I want to emphasize is that beyond the individuals with these chronic illnesses, there are other individuals that we are particularly concerned about and that is the elderly. So, we want to make sure that individuals who are symptomatic and who may have a loved one in a long-term care facility, in a nursing home, don't go visit them. If you are symptomatic, the best thing you can do for your loved one who's in a nursing home, in a long-term care facility is don't go visit them until you are better. The other thing is if you've got, you know, a grandparent that you haven't seen in a while and you want to take the kids to go see them and they are symptomatic, don't even do that.

We want to make sure that elderly folks who have chronic underlying illnesses, we do everything that we can together as a community not to increase their risk. The other thing I will say is again to emphasize to the Mayor is if you're sick and your company has a telecommuting policy, we want you to take advantage of that. This is a great time – well, it's always a great time to stop smoking, to stop vaping, but this is especially a great time. And I want to remind New Yorkers that they can call NYC Quits – 8-6-6-NYC-QUITS – and they will be provided support.

The next thing that I want to talk about is the importance of our health care delivery partners. And so we are communicating with thousands of doctors across the city. Tomorrow, we will be issuing additional guidance about what we want them to be aware of. And so first and foremost we want them to be aware that there is now COVID-19 testing available at commercial labs and how it is that they can go about accessing. We want them to prioritize patients in their practices who have chronic diseases, are over 50, and are symptomatic for that testing. We want to especially remind them of the importance of infection control. And this is one where, again, we don't want to take anything for granted.

When you call your doctor, tell them about your symptoms. We – the best practices for them – they want to see you in the office to make sure as soon as you walk in and you've got those symptoms to put a mask on you. Right? Because the – I have said in the past, there's a place and time for the use of simple surgical masks and that is when someone is symptomatic and they're going to a health care facility, so that they don't potentially infect other people. The other thing is we want to make sure that the – all hospital facilities, all outpatient centers have all of the supplies that they need. We reach out to them on a regular basis. But again, ensuring that we leave no stone unturned.

And the other thing is I'm hearing more and more that medical practices are putting in place what we're calling electronic visits. So, if you can do over the web, if you can do FaceTime, that also is a measure that can help all of us in this shift that we're taking. The measures that we are emphasizing are so that we reduce the number of potential cases but also reduce the potential harm to New Yorkers. And that's why it's so important for us that all New Yorkers are a part of this response to COVID-19. Thank you very much.

Mayor: The Commissioner made a really important point. I just want to say, anyone who is worried, anyone who's afraid, it's very, very normal. It's a confusing situation. It's a situation where people are being bombarded with information that – if, you know, that doesn't make you worried, I don’t know what would. So, it's really natural to be concerned and it is an ever-changing situation. So, there's that uncertainty. The Commissioner made a really good point. If folks are feeling anxiety, they're feeling stress, if they're worried, and they don't have a mental health practitioner that they turn to normally you can call 8-8-8-NYC-WELL. You get a trained counselor 24 hours a day who can talk it through with you. If you need ongoing mental health services, they can help you get to it. So very normal and natural to be deeply, deeply concerned in a crisis. Don't suffer in silence if you need mental health support and you need someone trained to talk to – 8-8-8-NYC-WELL. Now I want to turn to our Commissioner for Emergency Management. I want to thank her team, which has also been doing an amazing job coordinating so much around the city, and they are hosting us here for our many strategy meetings, tabletop exercises, et cetera. Commissioner Deanne Criswell.

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Office of Emergency Management: Thank you, Mayor. Good afternoon, everybody. Yeah, I just wanted to take a minute to update everybody on what is happening here in our Emergency Operation Center. And so, for several weeks now we have convened more than a dozen interagency task forces that have comprised personnel from agencies across the city as well as some of our partner agencies to look at those impacts that we may expect from COVID-19. One of those key task forces that I want to talk about has been focusing on our continuity of operations and our continuity of government plans. So, New York City's agencies provide key services to millions of New Yorkers every day, and we want to make sure that that work can continue uninterrupted and that all City agencies have their plans updated and in place. All City agencies have always had a continuity of operations plan. And so, what we have been doing over the last several weeks is really fine tuning those plans so they specifically address the impacts that we may expect from COVID-19. For example, City agencies are now putting processes in place that can support essential functions through telework, scheduling adjustments including staggering work shifts as well as the possibility of cross training if we see a reduction in personnel.

Our remaining task forces that we have here are also tailoring City response plans to meet the unique need of COVID-19 response. Some of these task forces are working upstairs right now in our Emergency Operations Center and they include health care and 9-1-1, New York City health and worker safety, special populations and homelessness, transportation, and education. These task forces will continue to support this response as long as needed.

We're also sharing information and guidance to our cultural institutions and our tourism partners, our faith-based community, to decrease the COVID-19 exposure and limit disruption to their services. As our senior New Yorkers, as you've heard today, are especially vulnerable to the effects of this virus, we are also working very closely with the Department for the Aging and our other human service partners to ensure our senior centers, adult care centers, nursing homes, receive up to date guidance on how to limit the spread of the disease.

One other thing that we have done here at the Emergency Operations Center is activated our Logistics Center. They're working closely with the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, our city, state, and federal partners, our private sector partners, and they are tracking and prioritizing any resource requests that we get. We are also keeping a close eye on the global supply chain and monitoring any potential impacts that New York may see. During emergencies, New Yorkers always help their fellow New Yorkers and COVID-19 is no different. We all have a role to play in keeping our city safe and healthy by staying home when sick, covering your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze, and we want to be able to show – we want to make sure that we can connect with New Yorkers and give you the vital information that you need as this progresses.

So, as you heard the Mayor say, we are launching today a Notify NYC that is specific for COVID-19. We want you to text COVID – C-O-V-I-D to 6-9-2-6-9-2. Again, that's COVID – C-O-V-I-D – to 6-9-2-6-9-2, and we will be pushing out important information as this progresses. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner. Finally, I want you to hear from Dr. Mitch Katz, CEO of Health + Hospitals. Want to say, by way of preface, right now our team at all of our Health + Hospitals facilities are doing their job. They're not only dealing with this, they're dealing with all the other health care needs of the people of this city. But the important point to recognize is the capacity we have. We have the biggest public health system in America by far. Dr. Katz and his team are doing a great job preparing. We've already talked to you about how many beds we have available if we need them, but Dr. Katz is going to further explain, in addition, to broad guidance he'll give, he's going to explain the point of how we would respond as needs intensify around Coronavirus, how we can reduce some of the other work that's being done to free up staff, to free up capacity to address this crisis while without compromising health care. And that is a pre-planned protocol that Health + Hospitals has in place. We want you to understand it. Dr. Katz.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, NYC Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This is a moment when New York City can be proud that it has always maintained a robust public hospital system. We have 11 acute care hospitals. We have 60 other outpatient sites where we're able to provide care. Today we are seeing people who have symptoms suggestive of COVID-19, people who have cough and fever or shortness of breath and fever, and we are able to see them in our facilities. We are able through our commercial lab to test those people who turn out not to have influenza or another cause.

As the Mayor spoke, we've spent the last several weeks preparing all of our facilities so that if there is an influx of tens of patients, if there's an influx of hundreds of patients, we are prepared to do that. The way that you do it is by having protocols that first look at who is in the hospital for some other reason, who can be cared for at home, and you rapidly discharge them.
You cancel elective surgeries – this is not a moment where we will be doing elective gallbladder removals, doing hernia repairs, important surgeries – surgeries that have major impacts to the quality of people's lives. But we can do them, we can reschedule them for after this outbreak.

During the time of the outbreak, if we are having tens or hundreds of new patients, those patients will be rapidly discharged. Outpatient services will be canceled and we will pull all of our doctors and nurses into our inpatient areas so that we can provide adequate care to all those who need it. Every single hospital has a plan of where that care would be provided if there are hundreds of more patients. In some cases, it's a cafeteria. In some cases, it's an auditorium. In some cases, we have tents that are specially made for creating clinical areas in parking lots.
Each hospital knows exactly what it would do depending upon how many patients we have. We have enough supplies and we have access to those supplies. We watch them every day. I participated in a call about face masks, about antibiotics, about fluids, and we are prepared if this pandemic gets much worse in New York City. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. Dr. Katz. Okay. Covered a lot. Thank you for your patience everyone. Let's take questions. My colleagues will come up to help answer.

Question: Mayor, have you spoken to President Trump or Vice President Pence, who is leading the coronavirus response?

Mayor: No, our team has been in touch with federal officials. We've continued to make clear, you know, we obviously have a lot of capacity to deal with this situation. We're working very closely with the state. That's a crucial partner here. What we need from the federal government is very straightforward and it's been the case for weeks and weeks. We need help with the testing. If they will take care of that part of the equation, we can take care of our share, for sure.

Question: You haven't had any thought – I know you're holding firm on public gatherings in the city, but next weekend is a half marathon –

Mayor: We're assessing that. We're talking to the folks who are running the half marathon. That's a decision we're going to make pretty soon. We'll make it with them. We obviously want to give prior notice, but we're not there yet.

Question: Can you give us details on the testing, your capacity, how many tests you've done to date, what your [inaudible] capacity is –

Mayor: Sure.

Question: [Inaudible] you’re using, whether it's CDC, local, state labs –

Mayor: I'm going to start, my colleagues can jump in. So right now, in terms of – our public health labs have been going nonstop and luckily just as they were reaching capacity, the private labs have come online. What we want to see is faster testing. So, in terms of pure numbers with the private labs now we are well ahead of the level of testing that we need numerically, but not in terms of speed. We want a lot faster than we can get with the current protocol. But to give you the overall numbers, and I don't have the math in front of me, but it's easy enough to do. We have, you know, 13 positive cases, 146 negative cases, and 76 pending tests since the beginning. So, we're pushing up towards almost 250. But we've been able obviously to get all those done. The pendings we'll have in the course of the day. We need to be – right now we can handle hundreds of tests in the day, but not as fast as we want. Our goal is to get that FDA approval to be able to do hundreds of tests same-day, ultimately thousands of tests same-day. That's where we need to get to. Did you have another part of your question? I'm sorry.

Question: How long do you think it would take to get – how long do you think would take you to get to hundreds [inaudible] –

Mayor: If we got FDA approval, what I'm told is, it would be a day or two before we'd be up to hundreds that could be same-day. Yes, sir.

Question: [Inaudible] public schools also ask for [inaudible] and get a nurse in their building?

Mayor: If a nonpublic school needs medical assistance, we're going to work to get them help. We have just – the first thing we had to do, of course, was account for the public schools. We're happy to work with any nonpublic school to see what we can get them. Obviously, we're trying to draw in whatever capacity is out there in the community, but any nonpublic school that needs help should immediately communicate with the DOE. Yeah.

Question: Another question, tomorrow evening Purim begins?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Is it safe for people who have no symptoms to visit parents and grandparents?

Mayor: Yeah. The point is – and the Commissioner can jump in – yeah, if no one has symptoms, neither the visitors nor the people being visited, yes.

Question: Two questions. One for you. So, we're now at 13 cases.

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: Will there be a point where you will consider closing schools? [Inaudible] we get to that point? If so, what number are you –

Mayor: So, look, the important point here I'm going to keep emphasizing, literally each day we're getting new information and we're dealing with a disease that's not fully understood. So, it's a very unusual situation. We're going to everyday ask ourselves the whole set of questions about what we should do. But I will say definitively, everything we've seen so far, this is a disease that for a healthy child presents minimal risk. We do have a concern about children who have one of those five pre-existing conditions. We want to take special care with them. So, the schools is not the place we'd be looking first in terms of trying to address this problem. Obviously, I'm saying this as a parent as well. I think parents want to see the schools keep going so long as it's safe, want to see their kids getting educated. And we do have a tremendous interest in avoiding the disruption of this city unless there's a very specific reason to act otherwise.

Question: [Inaudible] specific like number of cases where you say, okay, maybe we should?

Mayor: It's not as simple as that. It's very much about the combination of what we're seeing in terms of the numbers and what we're seeing in terms of the constant flow of information about the disease. The point Dr. Barbot has made over the last few days, her disease detectives are literally gaining new information in real world conditions. You know, a lot of what we're getting out there from the guidance is based on other places. And I assure you the dynamics in China and Italy, South Korea are different than here. But also, a lot of it is theoretical. It's academic research, et cetera. This is the real world, frontline New York City, no place like it on Earth. And our public health officials are getting real world information about how things are playing out here. We're talking about it every single day and making adjustments.

So, there is no simple algorithm. When we get to the point where we think anything needs to be adjusted, we will. Now, what I have found is New Yorkers are really doing a fine job of listening to guidance. So, we're telling people now if you're sick, don't go to work, don't go to school, make adjustments if you can. If you can telecommute, do it. If you can do different staggered work hours and take the subway at a different hour, do it. If you don't need to take the subway, you don't have to. That's great. I guarantee you, a lot of people are going to make those adjustments and that's going to put us in a stronger position.

Question: The two ladies in Brooklyn that were in Egypt on the cruise ship, were they on the cruise ship that is currently under quarantine in Egypt or a different cruise ship?

Mayor: I don't know if we know that. Do we know that? Anyone? We’ll confirm that back.

Question: The Uber driver who is hospitalized in Far Rockaway, can you tell us where he drove on Long Island and whether any of his passengers are being screened for symptoms?

Mayor: We – all I understand is Long Island registered and did all his driving on Long Island. We can see if we have more than that. So, this is important to understand about car services, taxis, Uber's et cetera. So basically, again, remembering that you need that kind of direct hit for transmission. Obviously, anyone who is a driver has every reason to be concerned and vigilant, but you would need, you know, that cough or sneeze to get right into you. We don't have an indication of any customer being affected, but we're certainly going to be looking at that. But we are giving guidance to TLC drivers, not only about continually keeping their vehicles clean and sanitized, but also this is really simple and really important, this is what our doctor said immediately when they started talking about drivers, open your windows. The circulation of air. And I know that's not always possible but whenever possible, if you're a professional driver, keep your windows open, the circulation of air literally disrupts the possibility that that projection of a cough or sneeze might get to the driver. It's a simple, important step that they can take. Let me come over to this side. Yes?

Question: There were reports that there was an Asian man in Brooklyn who was stabbed in a suspected coronavirus hate crime. And I was wondering if you could provide any more information on that and if it is being investigated as –

Mayor: I need to get more on that. I don't have – we've heard some, obviously, some very unacceptable instances of discrimination and hate speech, all of which is inappropriate, a lot of which is illegal, and we're going to follow up on, but I don't have that specific connection you're talking to. Let us confirm that.

Question: You mentioned that we could see hundreds more cases in the next few weeks. Is there a tipping point where the capacity for say disease detectives or something to that effect – is there a tipping point where the number of cases just overwhelms City resources and if so, when do you anticipate that might –

Mayor: I would say there are a couple of different pieces. In terms of the work of disease detectives, we're going to use them in different ways depending on what we're dealing with. [Inaudible] health professionals that right now they're doing the thing we need the most because we are able to trace and we have a finite number of cases. As you see, so far the contacts have been limited in each case and the precision has been intense and the follow-up has been quick and that's a great thing. We want to keep doing that. If we get to a point where we need to shift all health professionals towards direct service of folks who have contracted the disease, we'll make that shift. That's a day-to-day decision. That's something that would be, as you see, a major uptick.

But in terms of the overall capacity of the system, you know, as we talked about days ago, we have 1,200 beds that we can activate readily. We can go farther than that if we take additional measures. We have the biggest public health capacity in America. We have a lot of voluntary hospitals, nonprofit organizations helping us. We got a lot of capacity and what Mitch said has not really been introduced into the equation. I want to emphasize it. There's so much that happens in a hospital every day that if it had to wait, could wait. I mean, I was just in a hospital getting arthroscopic surgery a few weeks ago. You know, if we're in the middle of a really intense challenge around coronavirus, we're not going to be doing arthroscopic surgeries. People like me are just going to limp a little more for a while. Right? So, there's a lot that can be opened up where our existing facility – all of our existing capacity then gets turned to this challenge. And there's just no place in America that has anywhere near this much medical capacity. So just the fact that you'll turn off a lot of non-essential things and turn all that talent and capacity to a crisis, should give New Yorkers a lot of confidence that, you know, even with hundreds of cases we'd be able to handle it.

Question: Mayor, is the test a blood test [inaudible] –

Mayor: I’m sorry?

Question: Is the test and blood test or something –

Commissioner Barbot: So, the test is essentially putting a medical grade Q-tip up a person's nose, swishing it around, taking it out, and then putting it into a medium. So, it's not blood, it's something that's very easily done. And we also take oral swabs.

Question: [Inaudible] go to their primary care doctor, will their primary care doctor test them there at the office or do you have to go somewhere else to get tested?

Commissioner Barbot: So right now, with the commercial labs being able to do the testing, providers will have the opportunity to do the test and to send it directly to a lab. They can visit the websites of the various labs to know sort of the nitty gritty. The important thing here though is that we still want providers to go through the history and ensure that there are the symptoms of fever and cough or fever and shortness of breath. We're not encouraging asymptomatic New Yorkers to go to their doctors and ask for the test.

Mayor: And can you – I'm sorry, just let me help you with this on terms of like news you can use. Talk about BioFire as the first step too.

Commissioner Barbot: So, BioFire as we've been saying all along is a very simple test that's also done through the nose and nasal swab that can help rule out the 26 most common viruses that can account for someone's cold-like symptoms. So, there's a whole range of them. If that tested negative and the person is symptomatic, then we would go to the COVID-19 tests.

Mayor: And if it is positive [inaudible] –

Commissioner Barbot: And if it’s positive, then that explains the person's symptoms.

Mayor: And you don't need to do –

Commissioner Barbot: You don't need to do the COVID-19.

Mayor: I’m your coach.

Commissioner Barbot: Thank you.

[Laughter]

Question: [Inaudible] question, the transmission facts that that were given earlier, are those agreed upon science with the CDC, the WHO?

Commissioner Barbot: Say more about what you mean by transmission facts.

Mayor: The spitting, the coughing, the sneezing, the –

Question: Right, that it only lives for two minutes on certain services, all of that stuff.

Commissioner Barbot: Correct. So, we are learning about how this virus is transmitted on an everyday basis and to give you a very concrete example, initially we thought it was just prolonged household contact that was the biggest risk factor. With the work that the disease detectives have done and documented how it's being transmitted in the community, we are adjusting that guidance, right. It's not just prolonged household contact, it's the very graphic description that the Mayor has given. And so that's one. What has not changed is that it's only by droplet spread. This is not like measles where if you come into a room where someone with measles was there an hour ago and they left, it's still hanging in the air and if you haven't been vaccinated against the measles, you can get it. So, this is by droplet spread.

Mayor: Direct.

Commissioner Barbot: Direct.

Mayor: Can I add one thing just to clarify the surface point, because this came up on Friday. We had a different interpretation on surface life. Then I think the WHO when we were – and Dimitri spoke to this – we were pretty clear about that. We do have a different interpretation.

Commissioner Barbot: Right, the other thing to note is that the – this is a brand-new strain of a known family of viruses. And so, some of the guidance is based on how those other strains within that family behave. And so, there's no scientific studies that I'm aware of that have studied this new strain to get exactly, you know, is it 10 minutes, is it 20 minutes. But from our best-informed scientific information, from learning, from scientific partners around the world, in real world situations it's a few minutes, anywhere from like two to three minutes, a little bit more, a little bit less. But I think that's an area that still needs further scientific investigation.

Mayor: Hold on, let me do that one. I'll come back to you. Go ahead back there.

Question: I wanted to get more information on the FDNY order regarding [inaudible] calls and Commissioner Nigro, feel free, if you would like to speak as well. Why was that order made and when might that be taken off the table? Some might see this as resources coming off the table when they're needed most.

Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro: Well, I think as you've heard, this is not a situation that's likely to end tomorrow or the end of next week. So, an agency's biggest resource, most important resource is their people. And so, we have trained medical personnel, EMTs – all of the calls to 9-1-1 are say – well over 90 percent result in a transport. All those transports are done by our EMTs and paramedics and ambulances. So, our firefighters are still going to the most serious calls of cardiac arrest, of choking, of major traumas, but we've taken them off some other call types that are less likely to be life threatening in order to play this game – play the long game. So if it was a sports analogy, we'd say if you use all your resources in the first half, you're likely to lose the game in the second half. The Fire Department can't afford to lose a game. You know, we've transported folks with measles and tuberculosis and Ebola quite successfully. Our people are highly trained and highly skilled. So, I think the department is being prudent, being proactive and we'll see how – as you've heard, each and every day we learn something else and we'll review everything on a daily basis.

Question: All of the EMS unions have said they are stretched thin, that it's essentially not fair for firefighters to be taken off the job when there could be a lot more activity –

Commissioner Nigro: Well, I think we have to keep in mind the EMS unions are perhaps not as happy as they may be in their plight lately. You've heard that before this came out and that may play into what they're saying publicly.

Question: Has there been any discussion about maybe putting some of the work on subway trains aside because particularly on trains like the L which don't run regularly on the weekend, they are packed to capacity, like multiple –

Mayor: When you say work you mean like track repair and stuff like that?

Question: Yeah, like to make trains, you know, come more frequently and not be as crowded?

Mayor: I think that's a great question. Obviously, I will say this for the record, we don't run the MTA but I think it's a great conversation for us to have with the MTA as to whether in this environment there are maintenance efforts that could be delayed to keep more frequency, I think is a fair question. Now obviously if the maintenance is to keep the trains running and you might lose capacity without the maintenance, what we want – you know, we want to play the long game there too a bit, but it's a great question. We will pursue that and have an answer on that tomorrow. Go ahead.

Question: Commissioner. I wondered if you could say some words in Spanish –

[Question is asked in Spanish]

Commissioner Barbot: [Speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: Is it [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: [Speaks in Spanish]

Question: Sorry another question – 

[Question is asked in Spanish]

Commissioner Barbot: [Speaks in Spanish]

Question: [Speaks in Spanish]

Commissioner Barbot: [Speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: So, everyone just – I think we've covered almost everything that Oxiris has said previously in English except just to clarify that, you know, we're in this for months. We don't have the exact number of months for you yet, but months is the way to think about this. We'll be at this for a while. Okay. Let me see if there's anything else before we close down. There will be regular updates obviously.

Question: There's a lack of hand sanitizer around the city. You cannot find any hand sanitizer or any supplies like this. 

Mayor: Well, I'll tell you something. I've been in a lot of places where I see hand sanitizer out. I agree there's less and less in the stores, but I think a lot of people have stowed it away and are rationing it out. We certainly want to make sure that working with the private sector, working with the federal government, that we continue to see that supply. So that's something we'll be following up on, working with the State, working with the federal government. It's still being produced out there and we're one of the places that needs it more than most. So, we want to work to see the supply come in. And this is the point about the federal government again. I learned this a long time ago, you know, no one should have the assumption in mind that the federal government actually comes to the ground and helps in a crisis except for the most dire emergencies when the military is mobilized. Basically, the federal government provides financing and provides logistical support. So, we've been asking — and then, you know, legal approvals, things like that. We've been asking for approval on the testing incessantly. It's really troubling that that hasn't come. But the other thing we've talked about is the supply of masks. And now I think hand sanitizer is another great example. This is where the federal government needs to step up. They can ensure that the supply that's available in the country is appropriately distributed to where the need is greatest. I think pure math tells us we're one of the places that needs help compared to a lot of their places in the country that thank God, don't have cases. So I'd like to see the federal government step up, help us get the masks we need, help us get the hand sanitizer we need. Those are simple steps and if they would do those things and just stay out of the way otherwise we would be able to handle this situation.

Question: So is that what you would personally want to say to Vice President Pence or President Trump or anyone from the federal government?

Mayor: Yeah, but I want to, it's great — I mean I'm happy to talk to any of them and we are scheduling a call with the Health and Human Services Secretary. But again, I think this stuff has been said so many times, so many ways. It's just time for them to do it. I don't think this is mysterious stuff. We've been talking about the need for masks for weeks. It's just time for them to create a distribution structure and enough of a command and control that these things get to where they need it.

Question: Are you hopeful?

Mayor: I'm hopeful that here, we can handle a lot because we have a lot of talent and we have extraordinarily strong agencies and the best medical capacity any place in the country. We are just legendary hospitals, both public and private. And I think New Yorkers are listening and I think they're making the right adjustments. So I am hopeful about what we're doing. I am confused about what the federal government is doing and am I hopeful they will get their act together? I'd like some more evidence. I will quote as I often do, Ronald Reagan and say trust, but verify. I would like to see some evidence. So how about the FDA approval? If they could get that done today, tomorrow, that would be a real sign of progress. A few more and then we'll shut down for today and get you more tomorrow. Go ahead.

Question: Going back to the, sort of expecting hundreds of cases in the coming weeks. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? Meaning is that based on some specific modeling that you have? Say hundreds, we're talking about obviously positive cases. Weeks, we're talking about three weeks, four weeks, eight weeks?

Mayor: Yes. So I would say the best guest today, but ask me again tomorrow, is in the next two to three weeks, we'll be at at least a hundred cases since day one. So we're at 13 today that's played out over the last week or two. That you know, that pace is going to pick up because of community spread. So if we were guessing right now based on, and I say guess, based on, you know, a lot of data and modeling, we would say we'll get the case number 100 somewhere in the next two to three weeks. But again, we're watching every day. We might change that estimate up or down each day, but at some point it could easily be hundreds of cases. And that's daunting except against the backdrop of all the capacity that we've just outlined to you. And a reminder -- so let's go back to these overall facts. This has really been pretty consistent, that 80 percent of the cases result in very mild symptoms, 20 percent more serious. But of that the vast majority, even if it's a more serious challenge, it still ends with the resolving of the disease and people going back to their normal life. For a very small number, very tragically, it can be fatal, but that's a very small number still. So given what we can tell you right now, the vast majority of our cases are going to be people who come through fine with limited impact. And that breaking out into categories, I really asked you all to share it, that the number one largest population category in New York City, under 50-year-old people who don't have one of those five preexisting conditions. For those folks with very few exceptions, it's going to be a very mild experience. So that's where we think when you add all those facts together, we have the capacity to handle this crisis. Last call.

Question: You've mentioned the military, they do a lot of research of [inaudible] stuff. Do they know anything about this virus? And also, can they rule out that there's nothing [inaudible] with any terrorism?

Mayor: I can't answer those questions effectively. I doubt my colleagues can too. If the military has research, I want to believe, you know, meaning that would be helpful in addressing it. I would assume the federal government would bring that into play. I don't think they would hold it back. I have not heard anyone suggest that this is anything but an organic disease that developed as we've seen in the past. And I think its history is pretty well documented. So I have no reason to believe it's anything but unfortunately something that derived in nature.

Question: This is concerning the 11 patients from the Brooklyn nursing home, how are they being monitored and are they in voluntary isolation?

Mayor: I, we can get you more. They are being monitored. They're all asymptomatic. It's been a week. They're certainly being watched carefully. Want to speak to it Doctor?

Commissioner Barbot: So they are all in private rooms and being monitored daily. So they're in the appropriate level of isolation.

Mayor: Last call? Yes.

Question: So you just mentioned there’s two types of tests [inaudible] virus [inaudible] is it possible the person get the flu or coronavirus [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: To our knowledge, that hasn't been studied enough and we don't have a good indication that that's commonly occurring. And so our guidance, the guidance that the World Health Organization and others have been giving is that if the BioFire is positive, that is the definitive diagnosis. However, I will add, you know that we always want doctors to practice good clinical judgment and if someone does have influenza and they're not getting better, then certainly that would be a situation where we would want them to contact us and have more in depth conversation. But again, it's not to my knowledge, something that has been seen in the literature.

Mayor: Respectfully, I think that a little restating there might be helpful to everyone. Your general view, if you get a, if you've got a positive on the BioFire, which is the other more traditional, if you'll forgive the phrase, more traditional known diseases. If you've got a positive on the BioFire, what does that generally mean?

Commissioner Barbot: Positive BioFire means you have one of the 26 viruses that it's counting for the symptoms that you have.

Mayor: And not coronavirus?

Commissioner Barbot: Not coronavirus. 

Mayor: Based on what we know now.

Commissioner Barbot: Yes. 

Mayor: Yup.

Question: Just a little more color on small businesses. In order to introduce these grants and loan programs, they must be hurting pretty bad. What have you heard from small businesses in terms of what they may go -

Mayor: Gregg or James? Who wants to speak to that? 

Commissioner Gregg Bishop, Small Business Services: And so first I just want to encourage New Yorkers to support our small businesses. We've heard from mainly restaurants, catering halls, et cetera, sales declines of 40 to anywhere up to 80 percent. We're getting inquiries now from small businesses about what to do with their employees. So, these two programs will adjust that. 

Mayor: Okay. Last call.

Question: Could you elaborate on the smoking and vaping, does that also include the medical marijuana patients?

Commissioner Barbot: It's always – well, let me start there. Smoking and vaping are always major concerns. If someone is taking medical marijuana by vaping, I think we would want to look more into that. But if they're taking it through other measures, then I don't think that that would be a situation.

Question: So, you don't think that that would be a factor?

Commissioner Barbot: Vaping and smoking combustible cigarettes are the major factors.

Question: The 80-year-old woman, she's the one in the most serious condition. Is there anything you can tell us about her? Was that transmitted through travel or through the community? 

Mayor: Yeah. We don't have the profile in front of us. We'll get that to you quickly, but that's, yeah, that's the patient we're most concerned about right now. Okay. Everybody, we will get you more updates tomorrow. Thank you very much.

2020-03-09 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: We have a lot of information for you today. I'm going to go into a lot of detail and we'll of course take questions, but let me start with what I think is really the bigger picture here because what's on everyone's mind is how do we all together get through this crisis, how do we get through coronavirus, when are things going to be normal again, how are we going to make sure everyone's okay? That's what's on everyone's mind. There's a lot of fear out there. There's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of confusion, and people are looking to the government on all levels for answers. So I want to speak to the overall situation and I want to be the first to say we've seen some things that are really dissatisfying. Certainly a lot of people would say all over this country that we haven't gotten the answers we would have liked to have seen from our federal government.

But that being said, I think there's a bigger truth about the coronavirus and what we're experiencing here, which is that ultimately the people will be the solution. All of you. And I want to speak to all my fellow New Yorkers – you will ultimately be the solution to this crisis. So our job in government is to lead, it's our job to make sure that everything that needs to be put in place is there, that the answers to people's concerns and questions are there, that we do everything in our power to protect people and to see us through. But ultimately we're talking about something that's going to reach into every part of our community. And we're seeing that all over the world. This kind of crisis is not solved from on high. This kind of crisis is solved at the grassroots by the people. So our job is to help the people, to help people know what they need to do to support them, protect them, really give them the tools.

I want to empower the people of this city to be part of the solution here because that's the only way we're going to get out of this. Now, I have seen New Yorkers respond to this in a very, very powerful way. You know, there are places around the world and certainly even around this country where you see people radically changing their lives, where you see some panic starting to set in. You don't see that in New York City. New Yorkers are strong and resilient. New Yorkers, overwhelmingly, are going about their lives, taking smart precautions, making some adjustments, but going about your lives. New Yorkers are also listening and we are tough people. We're opinionated people, but New Yorkers do listen and we found that in other crises where we've put out guidance and people have really paid attention to it and followed it. I've been watching this for weeks and weeks and I believe New Yorkers have heard the importance of taking precautions, taking seriously if they have symptoms, reaching out to doctors, following through on the orders of their doctors.

We see a lot of evidence that people are really doing that, see a lot of evidence that people who are in quarantine are honoring those quarantines. We see a lot of evidence that people are changing their basic habits in a way that really will affect the trajectory of this whole crisis. You know, we talk about washing your hands, we talk about hand sanitizer, you've got all these basic rules right up here on this board. People are doing it. You see it all over. You see people using hand sanitizer all the time. You see people tapping elbows. You see folks taking the smart precautions that are going to make a world of difference. Talked a lot about making smart adjustments if someone in your life is sick or if you yourself are sick.

And I keep saying it, this is one of the big difference makers. Everyone can be a part of this. If you are sick, if you have those cold or flu-like symptoms, stay home. If your child's sick, don't send your child to school. Really basic stuff. If you're someone with vulnerabilities and we've talked about that, we'll go over it again, but certainly that means folks with pre-existing serious medical conditions, and particularly if they're over 50 years old, you don't want to visit folks who are sick. Even if you love your grandchildren, for example, you don't want to go see your grandchildren if they happen to be sick. Even with a common cold, you just don't want to do it, and so there are so many things that people can do that actually will determine the whole trajectory of this crisis.

This is a disease that came from far away and we don't fully understand all of it. The medical community is still trying to understand it and this was not something any of us bargained for, but even with those realities, that doesn't mean we will ever be defeated and certainly New Yorkers never accept defeat. We have to feel that we have the power to overcome this. And in fact it is something that everyone can participate in. So in all of our updates to the people of New York City, we're not just going to tell you what the government is doing, we're going to tell you what you can do. And I think people are listening. I think people are acting. I think it's making a world of difference. And if we keep it, we're going to see this to its completion, and get back to normalcy in this city.

It's going to take time. It's going to be a long battle, undoubtedly – months – but I am convinced we can do it. So with that, I want to just give you updates and I will say – you'll forgive me, I'm going to always give you some qualifiers besides the fact that we're still learning more about the disease, and you know what we talked about yesterday, our disease detectives, our Department of Health is getting first hand new information through practice, through actual work with patients. We're learning things that are now becoming part of how we approach this disease. We listened to the CDC, we listened to the World Health Organization, but we believe what we see in front of our eyes more than anything else. So our health officials are experiencing the reality of this disease in our neighborhoods. Making adjustments to our strategy and tactics accordingly. That's ultimately what is most important to us.

The evidence that we are seeing with our own eyes, the cases in our own city. We're getting a lot more information all the time and a lot of the time I'll be giving you updates on individual cases or new developments, but I won't have all the details because they're coming in. So I'll just consistently say to you when I have a complete picture, I'll tell you that. When I have a partial picture, I'll tell you that. When we're not yet able, as you saw last week, to give you some specifics because people have not been fully notified or prepared for it to be public information, we'll tell you that. But the goal is to constantly give you as many details as we can, as specifically as we can, as quickly as we can.

Also a reminder, all New Yorkers who want regular information updates can text the word COVID – C-O-V-I-D to 6-9-2-6-9-2. We just set this up recently. Text COVID – C-O-V-I-D to 6-9-2-6-9-2. Already 20,000 New Yorkers have signed up. We encourage people who want regular updates to do that.

Okay, so we're going to do some of the basics again because that's just something that people just constantly need to hear and I will dare say I've been watching as everyone has a lot of coverage and I'm not sure these basic facts are coming through as often as they should, so I'm going to make it my business to just always hit these notes. What the disease is, what it isn't. This is not a disease you can contract simply by being in some large open space where someone previously was who had the disease. There are diseases – take this room, measles. If someone with measles was in this room an hour ago, you could still contract it now or later. That's not the reality with coronavirus. Coronavirus is not something that hangs in the air. It is – requires, and I'm going to be graphic, forgive me, requires literally the transmission of fluids.

It has to go from someone who is infected to another person directly into their mouth, their nose, or their eyes. How does that happen? A sneeze that gets right on you. A cough that gets right on you. Someone's talking right up close to you and inadvertently spits a little bit while they're talking and then it has to get right into your mouth, nose, or eyes, not it got on your arm. That's not an issue. Not it was in the air over here. It has to get right into you. It is true, if somehow you get it immediately on your hand and you immediately take your hand to your mouth or your nose, your eyes, that is a way it can be transmitted, but a fact that our disease detectives are seeing is that this disease does not last long on surfaces, literally a matter of minutes. So there's understandably a lot of concern and we want to answer the concern, but there's also some mythology out there that's making the disease something it's not. This just takes a certain amount of intimacy and closeness, if you will, for it to be transmitted.

The other thing to come back to is who's vulnerable and who's not. Look, you've seen the numbers and we – our hearts go out to every family who has lost a loved one all over the world. But still what we're seeing as a matter of percentages, the vast majority of people who even do contract coronavirus have a very mild experience, very similar to just having a typical cold or flu. Even those who have more serious medical problems come through it overwhelmingly. So the fact is we can't miss the forest for the trees about this disease.

Who's most vulnerable? Folks with five pre-existing conditions – lung disease, heart disease, cancer, compromised immune system, and diabetes. Those five pre-existing conditions are the single most important indicators that someone who did contract coronavirus might be in danger of a very bad medical outcome especially if you have the combination of those five – one or more of those five pre-existing conditions and you're over 50, that's the group we're most concerned about. That's where we're seeing the biggest problems and God forbid, but the facts have proven it, that's essentially where we're seeing people who lose their life in that category. We are concerned about folks who are under 50 and have pre-existing conditions, but their chances are certainly better. We're concerned about people who are over 50 and have no pre-existing conditions, but their chances are definitely better. And the biggest single category of New Yorkers and Americans is also the category that is safest, that is people under 50 who do not have one of those five pre-existing conditions. An important additional fact is even though it is not a pre-existing condition, we do know that smoking and vaping makes it easier for the disease to have more negative impact on a person's body.

It's not the same thing as a pre-existing condition, but it is an important factor in the equation as well, but for the vast majority of New Yorkers under 50, healthy, even if you were to contract this disease, you will probably have a very limited experience with it, very limited impact on your health, similar to what you have with a cold or flu in any typical season. After a period of days you will be able to resume your normal life. Children in our experience, and I say as a parent and I know there's so much anxiety among parents all over this city, children in general have not been afflicted by this disease and even when they have, have had very, very limited symptoms and very few dangers, but the exception again is children with one of those five preexisting conditions and, again, smoking and vaping is a real issue.

Younger people are always going to have a more resiliency health wise, but we do want to note those are the areas of concern, but for a healthy child, the chance of a negative impact, thank God, is limited and that's going to be very important as we talk about schools later on. That is in the front of our mind. The first concern here obviously is health and safety for all New Yorkers. Everyone knows how deeply we care about children. Thank God we're dealing with a crisis where they – from what we know, healthy children are amongst the least vulnerable in this equation, the safest in this equation.

Okay. Bringing all these pieces together, we want people to take this information and act on it. Again, we want to empower all New Yorkers. So, if you're one of the categories where you're most vulnerable and you start to get symptoms that, again, are similar to cold or flu symptoms, we want you to call your doctor immediately and depending on the severity of those symptoms, we may want you to get to a facility immediately. Folks in that top vulnerability area, pre-existing conditions one or more and over 50, we are very concerned about you. We want you immediately – never brush it off, don't explain it away, get on the phone to your doctor. If you're really doing poorly, we want to get you the health care immediately. Anyone who feels like they have those cold or flu like symptoms, stay home immediately. If you start to experience them at work, go home. If you start to experience that at school, go home. Don't wait until the end of work. Don't wait until the end of the school day. Go home.

If you experience them in the morning right before you're about to go to work or school, stay home. This is so crucial to how we all get through this. Look, New Yorkers are very tough, legendarily the hardest working people in America. Every single person in this room has worked through sickness. I guarantee it. I don't even need to take a poll. It's a running joke pre-coronavirus at City Hall how many people would come to work sick because they thought it was their obligation to keep working no matter what. And I would usually give people a wonderful lecture about, thank you for your diligence and your devotion to public service and now you're making everyone else sick, right. That was in a more normal time, but it's true, obviously, as we're dealing with this crisis. New Yorkers – tough people, we want to keep going. This is a time to listen to your body.

So, if you're starting to get sick, stay home, do everybody a favor and stay home. It makes a crucial difference in this equation. If you're starting to get sick, don't go on the subway, don't go on a bus. If you have to get to health care, you have no other choice in the world, we understand. But remember, if you need to get to health care and you need help, you can call 3-1-1, if you need an ambulance, we'll get you an ambulance. I want as a general rule, if you're feeling sick, stay away from mass transit because we don't want you spreading it to other people. We want everyone to get through this and again, the vast majority of people, even if it is coronavirus, will have a very mild limited experience a matter of days and then it will be over.

We're going to give you updates every single day on the number of cases and that tells you a lot. We're also going to tell you about individual cases, the human reality, but we're going to show you the whole picture, which is not just how many new cases we have and not just how many times we got a negative on a test as well as a positive, but we're also going to start to tell you starting tomorrow some of the stories of people who got well and are starting to resume their lives because I want to emphasize that testing positive for coronavirus for most people, that is just a very brief period of their life and then it's over and then people go back to their lives. I want us to give you real life examples so you can start to – everyone can start to understand that.

As of today, and this is an update even since this morning, obviously an ever-changing situation and we receive regular updates from the state with information that's adding to what we have. So right now, New York City, 20 confirmed cases of coronavirus – 20 test positives. That is eight new since yesterday. If you include the one case that I mentioned yesterday in the Bronx that we didn't have the full details on, we'll give them to you now. Twenty new, that's eight since yesterday. Four come from the state from their briefing earlier. Two – from that four, two more in the Bronx that relate directly to that Westchester cluster. Two more in Manhattan and one has been publicized – the head of the Port Authority, Rick Cotton, who's a very good public servant and he is modeling good behavior. He immediately went home and isolated himself, which is exactly what everyone should do and he's working from home.

So there's 20 positive tests. Again, we're doing this from day one, from the very first time we got a positive test. But we're going to start to show you now that the – essentially the numbers that come off the board, we're going to start to show you that, the ones that are resolved. But I also think it's important to get the negative test results. We now have 205 tests that came out negative, which is great. 59 new since yesterday. So the rate of testing is really increasing rapidly. We have 86 pending tests right now, but again, the negative tests tell you some things. It does not tell you everything. Some of the people tested were in one situation. Now there's other situations. Certainly I'm happy to see only one out of 10 tests is coming back positive, but that's just one piece of information.

We have now 24 people in mandatory quarantine and they're being very closely monitored. In voluntary isolation, I'll give you the updated number and that number continues to go down for now, it could easily go back up again, but now that number is 2,019 – 2-0-19 – 2,019. Obviously we're seeing fewer cases related to travel. We are seeing cases more and more related to community spread. Yesterday I explained that we were beginning what we're essentially calling a phase two where we're giving people specific guidance that will have more impact on their lives, more impact on their workplaces. This is guidance. These are not mandates. We have the option of moving to mandates if we get to that point. But right now this is guidance and I believe people will take it seriously and will do their best to implement.

So again, for private employers – every employer is different. I want to emphasize this. Every employer is different. We want our employers to keep going. We want our businesses to continue to do their work. People need paychecks, they need a livelihood. We understand that for some employers because of the nature of the work, they have many more limitations on what they could do than others. Others have more flexibility. It all depends on the employer, but we all agree we want our businesses to keep going. So for a business that can allow more employees to telecommute, we want you to do that. If you can do it, it's a good thing to do. Why? Because we simply want to reduce the number of people on mass transit just to open up some more space. And this is really crucial. The challenge, which is more a New York City challenge than almost any place else in the country, particularly for the subways, particularly for rush hour, is people just packed like sardines.

We've all experienced it and in that atmosphere, as I told you, that direct transmission is just really, really close and a little too easy for someone to accidentally cough or sneeze and not cover it in time. We'd like to open up that space, so we're trying to get it that we – if there's folks who do not need to be on that train because they could work from home, that's helpful. If an employer says, no, we just can't do that, we can't effectively run our business that way, fine, understood. But if you can create some flexibility or even some days in the week for some employees, some more telecommuting is helpful. And then staggering hours is very helpful. For employers that usually have their employees all come in at one time, if you can mix that up, particularly get that away from the harder rush hour, very helpful. If you have a business where people typically all come in at eight o'clock or nine o'clock and you can get some of them to come in at 10:00 am and work later, that really helps us. So we're looking for either or both of those accommodations from employers to the maximum extent they can.

For everyone – remember, you're in a city that if you are sick and you need to stay home, this is a city, thank God, that has paid sick leave and typically, and obviously Dr. Barbot will speak to this, it only takes a few days to see where your symptoms are going if you have cold or flu-like symptoms. Paid sick days is five days per year. So it can cover that eventuality. Important to recognize this as something you can use so you don't have to worry about missing pay if you end up being sick. I mentioned earlier particularly for folks who are vulnerable, don't put yourself in the presence of people you know to have symptoms. But I also want to note for all New Yorkers, you know, even while we're being careful and cautious, we say in every challenge, every crisis, a heat wave, a blizzard, a hurricane, we always say, look out for your fellow New Yorkers, look out for your neighbors. If there's someone who is in your apartment building or on your block who has medical challenges or a senior that has trouble getting around, check on them.

Someone may need some food delivered. Do the things that neighbors do and if you're concerned to make sure it's safe, there are obvious ways to address that. If someone's not well, but they need food and they're your neighbor, you can bring food to their door, you can leave it right outside the door and ring the doorbell. There's still ways to help people, even if you need to keep a little distance, and we talked about in previous gatherings, folks have said, how do you do self-quarantine? Not always easy in a city where people live in apartments and small spaces, but even staying in one room, your family is in the other rooms, people can deliver you food, what you need. There's ways to do these things. Again, everyone has a role to play to help each other, but in a way that can stay – can be safe for everyone.

Okay. I mentioned some other basics. If you have a way to get to work that is not a subway train in rush hour, that's great. If you can walk to work, if you can bike to work, that's helpful in this environment. I said a very common sense thing. I'm going to reiterate it. It's something we all deal with all the time. If the train that arrives is really, really packed and you can wait for the next one, that's smart. Do so. We understand that doesn't always mean the next one is not packed, but we've all had the experience of, we see a train that's just too packed, we'll take our chances on the next one or the one after that. If you can do that, that's smart. We just want to spread people out as much as we can.

Now here's a new one which came up – we were constantly having meetings over here and really interesting information comes up in these meetings. Dr. Barbot can speak to the details of this, but we talked about hand sanitizer, what it can do and what it can't do. Hand sanitizer is fantastic for insuring in the rare dynamics where somehow someone coughed right onto your hand, sneezed right onto your hand, it was on your hand, you didn't want to put it to your mouth, nose, eyes – hand sanitizer immediately kills the virus. You don't have the problem. But we started talking about what if people misinterpreted. Because there's 8.6 million of us, everyone's got a different understanding. Do not put hand sanitizer in your mouth. Sounds silly, but you know what, we want to make sure everyone understands. Don't put it in your nose. God forbid, don't put it in your eyes. Dr. Barbot will explain that not only are you going to sting a lot, but it actually makes it harder for your normal body defenses to function. And the doctor will say it more eloquently than me.

Some updates and some of these will be from yesterday and some will be new ones. So, no non-essential international travel for City employees. No public school international trips through the end of the school year. Nurses being added this week to every public school building. Again, that may be multiple schools in a building, but there will be a nurse that will cover all the schools in the building. All public schools will have nurses this week that don't have them currently. And every school is being supplied as well as those other nonpublic schools that ask for supplies and there'll be regular spot checks to ensure all bathrooms in the schools have plenty of soap and paper towels.

Reiterating for small business – two new initiatives for businesses up to a hundred employees, we will make available zero interest loans up to $75,000 if they have experienced a decrease of sales 25 percent or more in recent weeks. For businesses with fewer than five employees, these are the mom-and-pop stores, neighborhood stores, we will do direct grants up to 40 percent of payroll costs. That's to help them continue to employ their employees even if they're seeing a downturn. Additional actions for senior citizens – we have outreach teams going to each of our over 600 senior centers to ensure that every one of them is observing the best health practices, checking all seniors who come in to the center, make sure if anyone is sick, God forbid, they're immediately isolated and gotten back to their home or if they need medical care to their medical care. But we're going to protect our senior centers to make sure that they are functioning well and they are a place only for folks who do not have any symptoms.

Related to the homeless – our outreach workers are now working on a systematic effort to go through all of their contacts with homeless individuals, reach them all, check on their health, see if there's any sign of symptoms, follow up where there is, get them health care. We'll have updates on the numbers related to that shortly.

In terms of our Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, we're giving designations to items that are available for purchase by consumers that we want to stop price gouging on. We have already done that with N95 masks. We're adding hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes to that list. This means that from this point on any stores that charge exorbitant prices for those items will be fined. We need, of course, anyone who sees that happening to call 3-1-1 immediately and report it, and if you see it, take a photo that's helpful.

Fines up to $500 per incident, any case of price gouging. So we're starting with the N95 masks, the hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes. Let me just say to business owners, and I think this is a very small minority of business owners, but don't even think about price gouging in the middle of this crisis. It's absolutely immoral, it's unfair to your fellow New Yorkers. They will not forget. By the way, if you do something like that and you're going to see a lot of customers not come back, but on top of that we will fining you and we'll keep fining you until you stop.

On the federal side. I don't know how many days we're going to go on where we keep pleading with the federal government, documenting to the federal government. I've been saying this here in these press conferences, I've been saying it on local television, national television, it's the simplest thing in the world. Approve the automated tests. The FDA needs to approve the automated tests. Right now we're bringing you back results every day. We could be bringing you back a lot more results a lot more quickly from these tests. If we had them automated, the FDA could do that in a stroke of a pen and help not only in New York City, but cities and towns and counties all over America. They should do that immediately.

Okay. A little bit more. And then we'll hear from our Health Commissioner and Speaker Corey Johnson and then we'll take questions. New cases. Okay, on the eight new cases – so we're going to start with the one we talked about initially yesterday, but we're waiting on the final details. Here are the details. And this is case number 13 – seven-year-old girl in the Bronx. She attends Westchester Torah Academy, which has been closed since March 3rd, directly related to the Westchester cluster. No pre-existing conditions, no nexus to travel. She is doing well. Minimal symptoms. She's quarantined at her home right now with her family. And her mom, her dad, her two sisters have all tested negative. And that is again – this is what our disease detectives do. Tracing those contacts, they're still looking to see if there's any other contacts that need follow-up, but those are obviously the most important.

Case number 14 – we have a 68-year-old man in Brooklyn, had symptoms, ended up being admitted to the hospital. He has traveled, so we're not sure 100 percent of the origin here, but most notably, and we're very concerned about this, has both diabetes and heart disease, so this is someone we're very concerned about. Critical condition, but stable in ICU in a private hospital in Brooklyn. We've tracked close contacts. A girlfriend who has symptoms and is being tested is in mandatory quarantine, a son also in mandatory quarantine. We have three other family members in voluntary isolation who do not live with the patient. That's that group as far as we know right now. And again, as these detectives do their work, oftentimes we get to a very finite number of contacts. Sometimes we find a few additional, but typically it's only been a few additional.

Case number 15 is a 22-year-old man in Brooklyn, had symptoms, ended up being transported by EMS to a private hospital in Brooklyn. Stable but remains hospitalized. Had some recent travel, but again, not to one of the places where – these last two cases both had travel but not to one of the nations where we have had the bigger outbreaks. Why is a 22-year-old man stable but hospitalized at this point? The one factor we know of is he has a vaper. So, we don't know of any pre-existing conditions, but we do think the fact that he is a vaper is affecting this situation. Two close contacts, lives with his mom and sister who are both quarantined.

Case 16 – and this is of the city residents. I want to remind people, we're going to – these cases are New York City residents. There are other people we've already talked about and we'll continue to talk about who don't live in New York City but have a connection in New York City. This is about city residents and case 16 is going to be the last one I have a detailed profile on. As I said, we've gotten some new ones recently. We will get you more details on each of those as we get them. Case 16 is a 75-year-old man in Queens, had fever, then developed pneumonia, had shortness of breath, there's a lot of activity here, ended up in the ICU, has a pre-existing condition of diabetes and now this individual is really in trouble, this 75-year-old man in Queens, critically ill at a private hospital in Queens. This is someone we're very, very worried about. In terms of contacts. His wife is asymptomatic and will be quarantined and we are waiting to know more on other contacts.

So those – that is the 16th case. We have an update on a Westchester County resident, part of the Westchester cluster, but important here because he is also a City employee. We'll have more details on this as we are able – we have more specifics we have to put together and notifications we have to do. So this one's going to be very broad, but a City employee who was in a City office last week but only for three hours was not symptomatic at the time, still not symptomatic – in quarantine now. So we'll have more to say on that. All family, all other family members negative.

There was one other point from yesterday that came up that we've done the follow-up on. There was a concern yesterday about an Asian man wearing a mask and the concern was that there was a physical altercation. The question was, was it being investigated as a hate crime. From the NYPD, we have an update that the NYPD based on their investigation believes it was an interpersonal dispute, not a hate crime. They're not at this point investigating it as a hate crime.

Okay. We are now going to– I'm going to say a few sentences in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I want to bring forward our Health Commissioner. She has been working nonstop and I hope she will get some sleep. It's been long, long hours. Want to thank you and your team, Dr. Oxiris Barbot. And you'll explain hand sanitizer, where it shouldn't go?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes.

Mayor: Okay.

Commissioner Barbot: So as the Mayor has outlined, we are in a new phase of this outbreak. And before I go into details about that new phase, I just want to acknowledge and emphasize that we are delivering a lot of information to New Yorkers. New Yorkers are hearing every day about new cases all over the world. They're hearing about an increasing death toll from this virus and so I want to just take a moment to say these times, it's normal and it's to be anticipated that some people may be frightened, some people may be sad and I want to remind New Yorkers that NYC Well is a resource during these times. If you are feeling – well, let me go back there. There are a whole host of potential responses to this. Some people may be in denial and say, oh, it's never going to happen to me. I'm just going to go about my daily life and I'm not going to listen to anything. There are other people who may get angry. Why is this happening here? There are some people that might say, well, you know, I'll wash my hands often but I'm still going to go to work because I have that important meeting. And as long as I wash my hands, everything should be fine. And then there are folks who will be maybe depressed and say, you know, the world is going to come to an end and I'm just going to stay home and I'm not going to do anything. What we want people to understand is that A, there are resources, NYC Well and B, that the best way for all of us to respond to this is by having accurate information. I want New Yorkers to know nyc.gov/health is the best place, our website, to get the most accurate up to date information. You can also get it at cdc.gov. They have ample information.

But I still want to be clear that lack of information is no excuse for spreading stigma. It's no excuse for spreading hate. Fear is not an excuse to do that and we want to allay people's fears. We want to acknowledge that we're all in a new reality, but I want to just sort of start with that. There's no room for stigma and fear in this.

The other thing that I want to sort of emphasize as I say that we're in a new phase. When we say that we are in a new phase, there are a number of things that we have learned through the course of our investigation. One is initially we thought that the main risk factor was travel. We know that that is no longer the case. We know that the virus is here in our community and we are taking measures to address that.

The other thing is from the work that we have done, we have also been able to document that it's not just prolonged household contact, as we initially thought. That we have evidence that there are other types of interactions that can occur that can transmit the virus and where people can become ill. And I think, you know, the Westchester cluster will go down in history as one of those classic situations where we have learned a lot. And so when we have person to person spread in a community, the things that we need to do change. And so I want to make sure that as New Yorkers we are all aware of the changes that need to take place. And I also want to emphasize something that the Mayor said earlier that we are in a phase where, because of the fact that this is a novel virus, meaning that no one has ever been exposed to this virus before, anywhere in the world. And so none of us, literally none of us, is immune. And it's important to note that we all have a role to play in addressing this outbreak. And so in that I want to be clear that while we are marshaling all of our public health resources, all of our health care delivery system resources, each one of us has a role to play.

First and foremost, I have been very clear that as the city's doctor, I need people to stay home when they are sick. And the symptoms that we are specifically concerned about are fever and cough, or fever and shortness of breath. And especially in individuals who have the five chronic illnesses that the Mayor spoke about. Which I will repeat – heart disease, cancer, diabetes, chronic lung disease, and having an immunocompromised system, along with the fact that if you, you have any one of those and you are over 50, we want you to take, have a lower threshold for staying home if you're sick. And having a lower threshold that if you stay home for 24, 48 hours and you're still not getting better to reach out to your doctor.

Now what happens when you're at the doctor because this question has come up a number of times. You have those symptoms, you reach out to your doctor. We want you to let your doctor know ahead of time that you have these symptoms so that your doctor can be ready to meet you or someone in your doctor's office, with a mask. Because the best use of a mask is to help symptomatic people that we still don't know whether or not they may have the infection, not transmit it to others. So your doctor's office or when you're at the clinic or at the hospital. That's what we want all of them to do. The second thing is that there's a very simple task that we have been talking about from the beginning. BioFire. First thing they will do, or among one of the first things that they will do is test you with BioFire. And that's to rule out any one of the 26 most common viruses that can be accounting for your symptoms. BioFire is positive. Stop, do not pass go. Provide appropriate treatment, send you home until you're better. 72 hours, 24 to 72 hours after your symptoms resolve, go back to work. That's it.

Mayor: And you don't have coronavirus.

Commissioner Barbot: And you don't have coronavirus. Now, different scenario. You've got those same symptoms. You go to the doctor, he or she does the BioFire test. It's negative. She or he in their clinical judgment thinks that you are sick enough to have the coronavirus test. They do the test. One of the things that now has changed is that we have commercial labs on board and so they send off the test. In the meantime they should be telling you to stay home until you get those results. Very important. Stay home until you get those results, minimize your outside interaction. Results come back negative, your symptoms resolve, go about going back to work, sending your kids to school, et cetera.

Your symptoms are positive. Let's go through that scenario. We have within the individuals that have thus far tested positive, a wide variety of individuals. And I just want to emphasize something that both the Mayor and I have been saying on a number of occasions. By and large, the vast majority, 80 percent of people will have mild symptoms, won't even have to go to the hospital. But they will have to go through coronavirus because again, none of us are immune. And so you stay home until your symptoms are resolved, 72 hours after those symptoms are resolved and then you can go back to work. You can go back to school.

If on the other end we have individuals who are more severely affected by coronavirus, and we have had a certain subset of individuals that have ended up in the hospital. Some of them have already been discharged and are doing well in their homes and they will continue to complete the isolation period. And then we have unfortunately, a certain subset of New Yorkers as you have heard, that are severely affected. They are in the intensive care unit. And we are working closely with hospitals. We're monitoring the situation closely, but the unfortunate reality is that while many, many, many people may end up getting COVID-19, there will be a certain number of individuals that will succumb to this virus. And so that's why it's so important that we pay attention and that we adhere to the recommendations of frequent hand washing, covering your mouth and your nose when you cough or sneeze. And definitely don't go to work if you're sick. Don't send your kids to school if they are sick. Because what we are now trying to do in this next phase of the outbreak is to reduce the number of individuals that are affected and to reduce the number of individuals who have bad outcomes as a result of the virus.

The next thing that I will say is that we are focusing intensively on communicating with our provider community. And just today you know, we have issued what we call a health alert. And this goes out to thousands of doctors in our city. And what we want providers to be up to date on is the fact that now commercial labs are doing these tests. We want them to be diligent about prioritizing individuals who present with symptoms and have chronic underlying diseases and are over 50, to make sure that those individuals are sick. We're focusing on folks who are symptomatic. We're not looking for everyday New Yorkers who have no symptoms to look for the test. It's not the best use of our resources. We are also making sure that our health care providers are up to date on ensuring proper infection control in their offices. Because as we transition to this next phase of the outbreak, it's critical that we maintain the resources of our health care workers. And so the same guidance goes to them. If they are sick, most definitely they need to stay home. Because we need them to get better soon and beyond that we need to make sure that there are no infections spread in hospitals. That's why it's critical that we get this message out.

Same goes for their medical staff, their receptionist, their nurse, anybody in that office. And also advising them that if they can, to do more of what I've heard is happening, which is tele-visits. Using FaceTime, using other vehicles through which they can interact with their patients on a face to face basis, but not necessarily have them in their offices. Beyond that, we want to make sure that the message goes out to individuals with chronic illnesses, that this is not the time to put off refilling your medications. That if you have a refill to do, make sure that you're up to date on that refill.

Beyond that, I want to just sort of re-emphasize as the Mayor has been saying. Oh, the last thing about the hand sanitizers, which I forgot. Yes. And you know, I learned the lesson that the Mayor was trying to sort of illustrate when I was a pediatrician in clinical practice where I took for granted that if I gave a parent antibiotics for their kid's ear infection that they were going to give it to them in their mouth and that they weren't going to put it in their ear. And so I think as health care providers, as public communicators, we can't, especially in this time, we can't take for granted that people will automatically understand what we are advising them to do. So very important that New Yorkers are very clear on the fact that alcohol based hand sanitizer, it goes on the hands. It doesn't go in the eyes, it doesn't go in the nose, it doesn't go in the mouth, it doesn't go anywhere else but the hands. And I haven't given this level of detail before, but I will now, we specifically want people to use at least 60 percent alcohol based hand sanitizer. And you know, many people ask me, well what about antibacterial soap? It looks just like alcohol based hand sanitizer. We don't want people to be using antibacterial soap for two reasons. We're dealing with a virus. Antibacterial soap isn't going to do anything about that.
The other thing is antibacterial soap will diminish the normal healthy bacteria that we all have and need on our hands. So I hope that clarifies it.

And the last thing that I really want to emphasize is that we are in this for a long period of time. We think our best guess is going to be sometime in September, but there is no indication of how long ongoing transmission will persist. And that's why it's important for New Yorkers to be prepared now that we don't have a lot of cases because it's inevitable that we will have more and more cases and we need New Yorkers to be prepared.

Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, doctor. Before I call up the Speaker, just want to thank Councilmembers Steve Levin for joining us, and thank you – you've been very actively involved in your district and beyond trying to address this challenge and thank you for that. Now we've been working very, very closely with the Speaker and his team and sharing information constantly and thank you for the hearing you held the other day, which I think helped get a lot more information out.

Speaker Cory Johnson –

[…]

Mayor: Thank you very much, Okay, we are going to take questions. Yes.

Question: Yes. The discovery that the Health Department made about the longevity of the virus on surfaces that it dies after two or three minutes seems very important and it's been kind of understated. It would seem like an override the need to do, say, deep cleaning of arenas or subways or buses. I was wondering if the Commissioner or where you could talk about one, why it's been underplayed or if it's been underplayed. And two, what's the science behind this new theory?

Mayor: Sure, I'll do the broad part and the Commissioner will do the science and the part from her agency. Look, I want to emphasize again, there are studies, there are academic studies, there are global and national organizations providing the information they have. But you know, the old saying, God bless the child who's got his own or her own. This is the New York City Health Department, which is widely regarded as one of the best, strongest health organizations in America actually working with real patients here in real conditions in New York City. You know the reality in China, the reality in Italy, the reality in South Korea, they're all going to be different factors. All information is valuable, but the information that we're gleaning from our own direct experience is the most valuable to us. When you're talking about something where there's literally no one who has all the facts and that is a true statement.

So what we want people to understand is what we are seeing as the truth. It has been said from this podium many times, so I don't think there's any issue about downplaying. There is a dissonance in other parts of the medical community on the question of how long it exists on a surface. But we're giving the best information we have because we don't – we're very concerned about people having an impression that is not consistent with what we're seeing. The fact is – on your bigger question, which is a good one, so what is the purpose of the cleaning? Look, I think the cleaning is an abundance of caution concept. This is where and again, Commissioner, you'll forgive me, I'm always trying my damnedest to put things into simple, plain English and you can always refine or dare I say correct if I say anything that wasn't as good as it should be, but I think in the public mind there's still the assumption like diseases that hang in the air and we're using measles as an example. Commissioner, could you throw me another one? What's another example of a disease? Chicken pox. There are diseases we're all very familiar with that have like long shelf life, hang in the air, really easy to contract and it's not surprising that people are having trouble understanding the difference that we're trying to demystify may clear that there's clearly a higher bar for the transmission of this disease based on everything that we are seeing. We're a city of 8.6 million people. We've had community spread now for a substantial period of time. We're still at 20 cases that says something and the Westchester cluster is clearly the number one generator. I'm not saying we do not expect many more cases. We do, but transmissibility is not a layup to put it in my own term. It obviously, you know, take some effort if you will. The cleaning is just good practice. Everyone benefits from more cleaning. But I do think there is a bit of a fault line and I think some people think, well if you clean something that means that the disease that was there yesterday won't be there the next day when in fact transmissibility is a much more immediate thing. But I would never discourage more cleaning. I think it's reassuring to the public. I think it's just good health practice. And we are still learning. We think we're seeing real facts that are consistent but we are still learning. And so why not be even more cautious on that front?

Commissioner Barbot: Just to add to what the Mayor said because I think, you know, he nailed it. This is a novel virus that we're still learning a lot about and there is still science that's coming out and you will find in the literature that in a lab setting you can have the virus live up to a couple of hours but in everyday world scenarios what we're learning from our partners from around the globe is that typically it's in a range of minutes. Now as we learn more, that range of minutes may shift to the right or to the left, but I think focusing on the number of minutes is the wrong place to focus because we don't want new Yorkers to have a false sense of security that if a surface was cleaned two hours ago, that that then relieves them of having to keep their hands clean because this is an approach – I think of it as a layered approach. Every layer of precaution that we add helps us as a society, as a city, change our collective behaviors. It's always good as the Mayor says, you know, frequent cleaning of surfaces is always a good baseline practice. Frequent cleaning of hands is also a good baseline practices because there are other viruses and bacteria that cause other illnesses that benefit from frequent hand washing. Staying home when you're sick is a good general practice. But in this special situation, it's even more critical that we do that. So it's not just do this or do that. It's layering the approach.

Mayor: I'm going to do some on this side and then I'll go to that side. Go ahead.

Question: Does the city have any plans to cancel the upcoming St. Patrick's Parade in Manhattan? Today, Ireland announced that it's going to be canceling its St. Patrick's Parade, which draws about 500,000 people. The Manhattan parade brings about 2.1 million.

Mayor: Sure. No, we do not have a plan to cancel the parade at this point. This gets back to the trends, and this is a phrase I only learned the last few days, transmissibility, the how you actually get this disease. So we – look, we're all working nonstop trying to not only take in a lot information, analyze it, but test it against real life experience, make adjustments in our strategy. There's a group of folks here who we're constantly communicating, but one of the things I think is a fault line and it's an important distinction is the larger gatherings, the argument for canceling larger gatherings is a lot of people, and in principle you might have that many more people who have been exposed to disease in the presence of that may more people have not been. But when you think about the transmissibility, one of the things that's holding us back from wanting to go down that path is that it doesn't really fit with what we're understanding of about transmission. As Dr. Barbot said, what we thought originally clearly was true, we see transmission in the home as the leading element and transmission from people who had really continuous, intense proximity, close physical proximity. Because again, if I were to sneeze right now, it can only reach, you know, maybe some of you, it can't reach all of you, right? It just can't and it needs that direct connection. So that's where it doesn't entirely fit to say, let's cancel a bigger event. Now we're going to watch that day to day, hour to hour. At a certain point we may say the numbers are telling us something different, but there's another piece of this equation which is really important and everyone knows I've been at this now for more than six years. I'm always going to put health and safety first, but that does not negate the fact that people's livelihoods also matter. I am very resistant to take actions that we're not certain would be helpful, but that would cause people to lose their livelihoods. And that's a lot of people. There's a lot of people in this town. If they lost a week's pay or even a day's pay, it would be a big problem for them. There's a lot of parents that don't have a place for their child if the schools are closed. There's just a lot of human reality. There's a lot of businesses that might not survive if they didn't still have customers for a period of time. So there's a balance that has to be struck and, and you know, I'm watching how different places are handling it and I'm not sure the balance is always being struck everywhere, so.

Question: What would need to happen in order for the City to make that kind of call to cancel—

Mayor: Going to be day to day, hour to hour, it's a lot of factors. Clearly we're going to watch the progression, how quickly this disease progresses. And a number of other factors are going to tell us. All options on the table. We've talked about in some of the previous press conferences. I have a lot of different emergency powers I could invoke. We do not believe this is the day to do that, but it will be a day to day thing. I also want to thank Council Member Robert Cornegy for joining us. Thank you, you've also been actively involved in efforts to get the right information out to the community and to support and reassure your community. Thank you so much for that.

Okay. I'm going to stay on this side a little bit more and I'm coming to that side. Okay. Yes sir.

Question: Thank you, Mayor. Ford from PIX 11 News. Can you talk a little more about the seven- year-old girl who contracted coronavirus? Certainly we've been hearing plenty of information from you all that children tend not to be subject. Can you say how this case fits in with the overall picture?

Mayor: I'll start, and I'll always give you what I got, and Commissioner, jump in anytime you want to. If I see you moving this way, it means you want to jump in. So that – remember in the case of the original Westchester nexus that we found was through the lawyer worked at the firm and Midtown had two kids, one 14, so high school age one college age. You know, both came through this very, very smoothly. So now we have, and the family and Upper West Side, the same thing. Their kids, we're seeing if my memory serves, I think at least one tested positive. I think one or more tested negative, we can go back and give you all the details. But the same thing we're seeing so far early on early, but kids who don't have those five preexisting conditions are tending to have a very mild experience and then it's over and they go back to their lives. So the seven-year-old at this moment, exactly consistent with that pattern is not struggling, is having a mild case of something very similar to a cold or flu. And from everything we see will be fine.

[Inaudible] exhaust this side, come to that side. So you guys just chill for a little bit. We're going right to you. We take lots of questions and in please anyone who's gone just hold back. I'm going to do a round of everyone and then if there's still seconds needed, we'll do as long as we can take it. Go ahead.

Question: Beyond putting out this advice at these press conferences on that we should be staggering sort of the time we show up to work. What more could we be doing to make that a reality?

Mayor: We're going to – look, I think respecting that businesses, again, are trying to keep going and I really value that and this is, I would have felt that regardless of what we saw from the stock market this morning, I value it even more given what we saw from the stock market. I think we have to look, it's a real challenge, but we have to see coronavirus for what it is and what it isn't. And we cannot lose sight of everything else in our society simultaneously. People need a livelihood to pay the rent, to get food, to get medicine. We have to be really mindful of that. So our economy right now, although broadly strong, is going through a real shock and we don't want to inadvertently exacerbate that. We do want to take care of health and safety. So we want to make clear and I think employers are listening, employees are listening, people are listening. This is a really clear, important predicate. We're watching to see the level of adherence to instruction. We've been watching for seven weeks. People are paying attention because, and you guys deserve a share of the credit. They're getting wall to wall concern and warnings and information and they're heeding the advice overwhelmingly. We have clear metrics. We're watching the quarantines, we're watching what people are doing in terms of their habits. We see a lot of actions being taken by people conforming with the guidance. So we're saying employers loosen up if you can. I'm sure a lot will. We're saying to people, make some adjustments in your life. I'm sure they will. If at any point we don't think it's enough, we can be more stringent. Very quickly.

Question: Can you say about the Port Authority Executive Director, Rick Cotton? Do you know when he started showing symptoms?

Mayor: No, I don't have any details. We'll get them. I know Rick well, he's a good guy. I'm sorry he's going through it, but he did exactly the right thing. He got away from work. He's working from home, but we'll get you more details as we have it.

Question: Have you spoken to him?

Mayor: I have not.

Question: The US Department of Health says the country as a whole may only have half a number of intensive care beds that it needs. How are we, where do we stand on that?

Mayor: So as again, I'll start and if Mitch wants to jump in or Oxiris, we announced I think it's now a couple of weeks ago that we have a 1,200 bed, effectively a 1,200 bed reserve that we could put in play very quickly as Mitch described yesterday. In terms of the vast health and hospital system, we can immediately cancel a wide range of elective activities and open up capacity. So, you know, we have a right now and you know, knock on wood and we're all saying it's going to get worse before it gets better. But we have a handful of people hospitalized in New York City right now against a 1,200 bed reserve. We're in very strong shape right now. But we're also being vigilant.

Question: Are those high intensive care—

Mayor: No, not all intensive care. So you want to speak to intensive care capacity.

President Katz: Intensive care is all about staffing and equipment and I can make at Health and Hospitals any bed into an intensive care bed, including a bed in an operating room that's not being used, because we've canceled all our elective surgeries. So that we can take care of people. I can turn a lunchroom into an intensive care unit. What's important about intensive care and is relevant to this disease, is being able to provide people the level of oxygen, whether it's through a nasal cannula, which are those the little prongs in your nose, a face mask, all the way to intubation and the ventilator. And I can do that in any space, as can any hospital.

Mayor: Okay, I saw a way back and anyone's gone, you're not going to go now. You're going to go on a second round after all your colleagues have a chance. That's really fair and egalitarian. Yes.

Question: Thank you Mr. Mayor, for Univision. I was wondering if Dr. Barbot could say a few words kind of [inaudible] into what you're talking about, the decision of closing our schools to give some peace to parents, as far as what they can do to protect their children at schools.

[The reporter speaks in Spanish]

[Commissioner Barbot speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: Okay. This side, a few more and then we'll go switch to the other side. Jeff.

Question: Mr. Mayor, you've said a few times that you can't, you're not likely to catch this on the subway for example, but then you also are telling employers to stagger times so that the subways can be less crowded. So can you explain that again? Yeah,

Mayor: Absolutely, so again – it is an excellent question, but there's actually a real logic pattern here. So Jeff, again Dr. Barbot, Dr. Perea Hense, Dr. Katz, if I sneeze now, what's my chance of hitting Jeff right there? Who asked the question? Okay, so, okay. We have three leading public health officials. Very quick on the draw there. That ain't happening to you, Jeff. This is important because the space and the proximity issues are real crucial here. What we're saying is, you know, a kid walking through the hallway at school, a kid in the classroom you know, going to a sports event, getting on a bus or subway, those are not per se conducive environments. Where things get conducive is where you get very close to people who then happen to cough or sneeze or spit right at the three parts of your body that can take this in or right onto your hand that you then decide to bring to your face really, really quickly.

So that's what we understand at this moment. So what we want is not that people don't take the subway, we'd like to avoid the classic rush hour packed like sardines situation. So common sense way to do that is some folks who don't need to be on the subway, you'd have an option, the walk, you can take a bike, whatever. Great. If you don't need to be obviously 8:00 am, you know, prime time. If you could instead go at 9:30 or something like that where it's a little more open. That's good. So we're trying to ask and we, again, we expect a lot of support for employers on this because everyone wants to get through this. So it's in the interest. It's not only employers are wanting to help, but it's in their interest to get through this – staggering hours is going to help us spread people out, reduce that intensive proximity, make it less likely there'll be a spread. That's what we're – and obviously reducing number of people, if more people telecommute, fewer people on the subway. Same concept. Please, hold on one second.

Commissioner Barbot: So I just want to add to what the mayor said and just be clear that we're not saying that there's a particular place where there is zero risk, right? So I think we just need to be sort of clear about that. Unless you know you're hermetically sealed in your apartment, there is no place that's going to be zero risk and there's a graduation of risk, if you will. But the important part – and when we learn about new scenarios that provide risk as we learn through our investigations that it wasn't just prolonged households contact, that we now have other outside situations that provide that risk, we will share that with New Yorkers. So, the important thing, and I can't stress it enough, is that the adherence to those layers of prevention that we all do individually will provide that layer of support and having that social distancing is yet one more of those layers.

Mayor: And finishing the follow-through, there's no such thing as no risk in the world. No such thing as no risk if you're driving a car or walking down the street or anything else. But the fact is, we know definitively that if you are under 50 and don't have those preexisting conditions, even if you were to contract it, your experience with it's going to be very mild. What we are very concerned about, and this is why we're sort of saying, you know, we want people who if you have one of those five or more than one of those five pre-existing conditions, particularly over 50, we want you to be really mindful. Do not go near anyone you know to be sick, for example. Someone in that category should be thoughtful about situations they put themselves in. That's a person I would say, if you've got to get on the train, really, please do try to avoid the rush hour. So, we think these gradations make a big difference and sort of the guidance makes a big difference and people are going to honor it.

Question: Any plan to change the ultimate side parking, for example? And a follow-up question, what do you know that we don't that you're encouraging people not to put hand sanitizer in your mouth?

Mayor: Excellent question. Because when you're in, like, interminable meetings, thinking of every conceivable possibility, things come up you wouldn't have thought of it before. And we were having a discussion about the value of hand sanitizer and that it really was to try and avoid the secondary transmission. And then that led to the question of if everyone's being sort of – hand sanitizer is the new, you know, American idol, and that people might misinterpret and think, oh, if someone sneezed on you, like, say someone literally just accidentally sneezed on you, they tried to stop it in time, they didn't, and it got in your nose or out in your mouth – someone might think, oh, if I put hand sanitizer on it, it's going to fix it immediately, when, in fact, it's actually a really bad thing to do. So, we just out of abundance of caution wanted to get that out. Alternate side – there's no changed plan right now, but we're going to look at everything again day by day.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: That's a situation – and I'm – you know, I was a public-school parent. I've spent a lot of my life working on public school issues. So, what I believe is the right approach is we would be very pinpoint in our approach. If we found a positive case, we would be doing a temporary shutdown. That's a case where a re-cleaning of the school is valuable. And we would want to reopen as quickly as possible, but having isolated the individual with that case and done the disease detective work to see if there's any close contacts who need to be followed up on. And we would certainly make sure we followed up with the parents of any kids who might have one of the five preexisting conditions. And that's obviously a pretty small number of kids and we know who they are because our schools have enough medical records on kids to know something like that. But generally, it would be a brief shutdown or re-cleaning and that disease detective work about where there were close, close contacts. And now we're going to this side –

Question: I have a follow up on schools. First of all, the Governor said today that if there was any case in a school where either a staff member or student had tested positive, the school would be closed for 24 hours and there would be a reassessment. So, I have a three-part question. One, how do you feel about that policy? But two, can you address the concerns [inaudible] one, of parents who have no place to send their kids; and two, the number of kids – I think it's like three quarters – who get their meals in school and, if you were to close the school, may have no food?

Mayor: Marcia, this is very, very much on my mind. And I agree with the Governor's approach. In fact, our teams have been talking intensely over the last 24-48 hours on this very matter. So, a lot of these issues that are coming up around the State, there's close consultation going on between the State and City on how to approach them. Think what the Governor is doing is the right way to approach it. But the point is very consistent with your, your other questions. We want sort of pinpoint accuracy. We want to make sure that a school is closed only for the period of time it needs to be, because there are so many parents who depend on that school. We want our kids to get educated. You're right, there's a lot of people depend on not just for the kids to be in a safe place and to get their education, but also to get their meals. So, we want to keep those closures minimal. Children who need alternatives, we're going to work on that. Obviously, we are going to see any other way – and we have other ways of getting meals to folks, if that's one of the things that we can do. But my hope and prayer here is because we are not seeing a lot of transmission to children. And obviously everyone's getting the word about what to do. So, for example, if a staff member is sick, all they have to do is stay home for the substantial period of time it takes to see if they have ongoing symptoms and that school does not have a problem in that case. If someone does not manifest the symptoms, they're not going to have to be tested. If they don't – if they are tested and they come back negative, either of those cases you don't have a problem. That's obviously generally what we're seeing. We're not seeing this in the schools. So, I'm going to be hopeful, but my goal is to have minimal disruption of our schools.

Please –

Question: Given the fact that you're asking people who may be symptomatic to stay home, do you have any procedures in place to provide extra teachers or a substitute teachers for people who may decide to err on the side of caution and not go to school [inaudible]?

Mayor: So, we have our traditional approach to bringing in substitute teachers or personnel already in the school stepping in. Now, as of just a few days ago – a very important point – I asked the Chancellor repeatedly how attendance was looking. Attendance was absolutely consistent, in fact a little better than the same days last year. So, we're not seeing an attendance problem with kids, not having a problem that I know of so far with staff. But if we had a number of folks out, we do have a reliable reserve of substitute teachers. We do have staff in schools who can step in and play other roles. We would look to how to ramp that up if we needed to on a bigger level.

Question: [Inaudible] follow-up on that and that and then I have a separate question. To follow-up on that, are you doing any preparations for remote learning if, you know, that there did needs to be shut downs. And, in particular, in that case, how would you deal with kids who don't have broadband access?

Mayor: So, we are doing preparations, but again, that's not going to be our preference for a lot of reasons. That doesn't solve the issues we just talked about, about parents not having necessarily a good place for their child and not necessarily kids getting all the same meals. That's a fallback we are working to get ready. We have some of that capacity right now, but that's not our preference. Our preference is obviously do everything we can to avoid any shutdown. But if we had them, they would be very brief.

Question: Is the lack of internet, sort of, part of the reason that's not your preference?

Mayor: No, for the other reasons first and foremost, because, again, that starts with where does the parent send the child or take the child? A lot of workplaces you can't. I mean, some – look, I think there's a lot of people in professional roles who are used to a certain amount of flexibility nowadays where you could bring your kid to work. A lot of other places that's just not possible. A lot of parents are dealing with multiple kids going different places. It's really, we want to avoid the dislocation for so many reasons. We are working to have remote-learning capacity for, you know, a really intense scenario, but it's something we'd like to avoid.

Question: [Inaudible] question was about the testing. When Dr. Barbot described a pretty seamless process where you go and you get tested for the other viruses and if you don't have that, you'll get the coronavirus test. But there've been numerous reports that people who do have the symptoms and have traveled or have exposure in other ways who aren't able to get the test, they get turned away because they're not sick enough or they're getting a run around in one way or another. What do you say to these people and is the City doing anything to make sure that health care institutions are actually, you know, testing people appropriately?

Mayor: I will start and I'm sure Dr. Barbot will jump in. So, remember that you – this very day, an hour a week ago, we did not have testing in New York City. This is really important – this thing that was moving like a freight train, you know, we're really – a lot is changing quickly. So, we did not have our own independent testing capacity. Remember, it was very, very recently the tests were being sent down to Atlanta. And we had to wait for them the results to come back. As of Monday, late Monday, at last we our own testing capacity at the New York City Public Health Lab. As of later on Friday, we got the ability for a private labs to start coming into play and ramping up. That's helping to address that issue, because some of that issue was there just wasn't testing to be had. But now, if we can get the automated testing with the FDA approval, you're talking about an actual abundant amount of testing that's going to help sort out the issue. Now, the doctor will certainly tell you we still want prioritization, and why don't you speak to that?

Commissioner Barbot: The other thing I'll add to what the Mayor said, because he got it just right, is that in addition to that cascade, the guidance for who to test has also been changing. Initially, it was just individuals with a travel nexus to a particular part of China and then that increased. And so, it's been a moving target since the beginning. I think the important thing to note now is the capacity for the commercial labs to do testing did come online Friday, but they didn't start submitting samples until today. So, it has been a process of, I would have to say, fits and starts with regards to, you know, what originally happened with the CDC test kits that had issues with them. But the important thing to note now is that once we have established that there is what we call widespread community transmission, where travel is no longer the main risk factor, and now that we have established that the vast majority of people do have a mild course – 80 percent of them – there will soon come a time when we'll say, only if you're really, really sick do we want you to get tested because there'll be so much COVID-19 out there and most people will recover within a couple of days. So, where we are right now, we want more people to be tested, but we also want to keep in mind that as more people do become effected by COVID-19, it may make more sense for them to stay home, recuperate and go back to their regular lives once they fully recuperate and they may never get tested. So, we just need to be prepared for that reality.

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: Oh, sorry. And then for the priority groups – thank you very much – right now, we are prioritizing, as the Mayor said earlier, individuals who are symptomatic – fever and cough, fever and shortness of breath, are over 50 – and, or have the chronic underlying illnesses. Additionally, if there is someone who is in intensive care and has a pneumonia of unknown etiology, then those would – or, unknown underlying cause, sorry, I use [inaudible] words there – then we will test those individuals. But the important thing to note is that, as of today, it should be much easier for every-day medical providers to offer those tests through their offices, through commercial labs such as Lab Quest – Lab Corp rather, or Quest, which they already normally use.

Question: [Inaudible] test people then who have the symptoms and have some form of potential exposure but are under 50 without the underlying condition?

Question: We're asking medical providers to use their clinical judgment about whether or not someone has already tested negative through the BioFire and if their symptoms and the rest of their history gives them an indication that they should be tested.

Mayor: Yeah, I want to try some more – again, we're all dealing with a mysterious situation here and everyone's concerned, but the numbers, they're really speaking powerfully to us. If you're under 50 and you don't have the five preexisting conditions, and throwing in if you're not a smoker or a vaper – bless you – you know, the chances are just so overwhelming that you're going to have only a mild form of this, that that really has to be taken into account. But to the point that Dr. Barbot made, you're still in touch with your health care provider, and if something unusual is in the mix, you know, and the health care provider says, no, there's something going on here, I want that test for a specific reason, of course. But I think that the challenge here, which is really – I don't know, I'm not watching every TV show or reading every article, but I think the notion that this overwhelmingly for most people is very, very similar to a cold or flu, period, is still not fully getting through because of all the fear about the spread around the world and obviously the pain of the most extreme cases. We've got to help people to understand that for most people the impact is minimal. We want to help the folks who are most vulnerable first. So that's where the, you know, the sense – there is some sense of triage eventually. As Dr. Barbot said, we went from almost no local testing to now starting to have a substantial amount, but the number of cases is likely to go up intensely as well. At a certain point, the prioritization becomes ever more important.

Question: [Inaudible] didn't you order just a few days ago that City workers we traveled had to get tested? And now it sounds like you're saying they wouldn't even be eligible for testing.

Mayor: Which specific – which piece are you talking about?

Question: [Inaudible] educators and first responders –

Mayor: Right, but it's not just travel, it's folks who we think need to be tested. It's across the board. If there's a specific reason per the Health Commissioner – it gives the Health Commissioner absolute latitude to determine in any specific case if someone needs to be tested in those categories, it is broad because it obviously enclosed community spread.

Hold on a sec. Yoav?

Question: Mr. Mayor, on the school the school closure policy that Cuomo announced today, I just – I'm trying to understand what the purpose of a 24 hour closure would be given that that the City doesn't think the virus kind of lingers on surfaces. Is it just for deep cleaning? And if so – I guess I'm trying to understand what that 24-hour closure –

Mayor: Yeah, look, it's a regrouping opportunity, obviously. We are – I'm a parent, I understand that parents are going to be really concerned. I'm going to say, you know, a thousand times and I hope all of you will amplify how much consistent experience is saying to us that children are not in danger unless they have those preexisting conditions, God forbid. But nonetheless, many, many parents will only get some of that information or they'll just be so scared for the kids, which is absolutely a basic human instinct that they're going to be, you know, really worried if they hear there's a case in a school. So, I think the – this is sort of a common sense measure – a timeout. We're going to give people a lot of information. We're going to do the cleaning, which is abundance of caution, also, I think, reassuring to people. We're going to have the disease detectives identify if there are particular close contacts. Again, it's not that the kid walked down the hallway and there were – bless you – there were 20 kids in the hallway. It's, was the child working very closely intensely with a teacher or a tutor? You know, did the child have a best friend that they, you know, they're always together and you know, constantly really close to each other? Those are the kinds of things we're going to be looking for. So, I take that as a 24-hour kind of timeout where we get the information out, we do some of the work we have to do, and then any kid who needs to stay home who's identified by the disease detectives, we do that. Obviously, if there are children in the school who have those preexisting conditions, we want to alert parents so they can make their own choice. That might be, again, an abundance-of-caution dynamic for parents to say, let's hold kids back for a little period of time. That's the kind of thing that I think makes sense during that timeframe.

Anna?

Question: Do you guys have an estimate for the number of people considered the most vulnerable folks over 50 those with those five underlying conditions? Do you have an estimate of how many said residence?

Mayor: Of total New Yorkers? Yeah, it's a great question and I don't think we have at our fingertips, but we can have it by tomorrow.

Go ahead.

Question: You had mentioned a city employee from Westchester who had no symptoms and still has no symptoms, but still got tested. Why did that City employee get tested? Are City employees required to be tested?

Mayor: So, let me separate those two concepts. And again, the executive order – the Commissioner's order, I'm sorry, is online. So, anyone who wants to look at the provisions of it, it's there. Connection to the Westchester nexus – that's what – the first words out of my mouth about that case, connection to the Westchester nexus, which has been obviously the core reality of this whole trajectory in the last week or two. So, that's why the individual was tested. The Commissioner's order says, first responders, health care professionals, educators – that's where the Commissioner retains the right to order testing.

Question: [Inaudible] clarification. So, the State guidance that Cuomo talked about today does apply to New York City schools as well?

Mayor: Yes, we all worked together on it and we think it's good guidance.

Question: [Inaudible] 20 cases in New York City, does that include the Westchester attorney and I think –

Mayor: Again, I'm going to – guys, I'll try really hard to be consistent about the ground rules of the information for everyone's benefit. New York City residents – the numbers I'm going to give you are always New York City residents. As I said, we had the New Jersey guy who had been in New York City. We've had obviously the Westchester folks. But what our coin of the realm is going to be, New York City residents.

Question: And do you know of the 20, how many people are in the hospital currently? I counted five, but I just want to see –

Mayor: I want to get you an up-to-date count, because we have these four new cases we're still getting all the details on it. There has there have been more out of the hospital than in the hospital, that much I can say. And again, we're going to start telling you about the people who are no longer of concern from the original set of cases. We'll start giving you more on that, but want to make sure that the – oh, this is a technicality [inaudible] let's get that straight and come back on that. The – but again, most people, not hospitalized.

Question: Can I ask just one – also clarification on the testing. So, we know we've only had this capacity to test here for a week, but there was so much confusion before I heard from a lot of doctors and health care providers, they don't know how to get the test where they were [inaudible] on calling the Health Department, couldn't get through, just had the person go home and self-isolate. So, when a person tests negative for the BioFire, they can now conduct the test themselves and they've been given that guidance. Can you just explain that a little –

Mayor: Yeah, I mean, you – some journalists were here for other settings, other gatherings and others weren't. Explain the simplicity of the actual taking of the test.

Commissioner Barbot: Sure. So the health alert that went out today to all providers clearly lays out what providers can do in order to order that particular test through a commercial lab. And the – and most physician offices have those capabilities. In terms of the actual test, as I have described before, it's the equivalent of having a Q-tip up your nose kind of probably further than you would feel comfortable with, swish it around, put it into a liquid medium, and then run it through an analyzer.

Mayor: I think it was yesterday, the Commissioner used the now priceless phrase, a medical grade Q-tip, which sounds to me suspiciously like a regular Q-tip. Okay. Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, just to be clear on the Department of Health website, you are now counting the Westchester lawyer as a New York City case, is that no longer – has that changed?

Mayor: I think you are right. And that's – Freddi was also raising the point with what we're trying to do and it's getting – it's a fair point. That one was the origin for a lot of stuff. We're trying to do it based on residents because otherwise it's going to get kind of crazy if, for example, the guy in New Jersey was in here, we have people from Long Island who were in here. So, we're trying to do it based on residence. But I will let me accept humbly that our definition may be a little gray there and by tomorrow I'd like to get us 100 percent tight that it's going to be residents and if we vary from that, it'll be an asterisk and we'll clarify it.

Question: My actual question for you and I have a follow-up for Dr. Barbot. There've been a couple public employees who have tested positive and forgive me if this is in the Commissioner's order, but what exactly does the City tell workers who have come in contact with a person who has tested positive or think they may have been in contact? What is the directive there?

Mayor: The Commissioner can jump in. Every agency has been giving guidance to its employees on obviously all the precautions to take and, to the best of my understanding, on what to do in that scenario, and each agency has created its own guidance based on what the Health Department has told them.

Commissioner Barbot: So, the guidance to City workers is the same as the guidance to any New Yorker. And our disease detectives during the course of their contact tracing as it's called will determine with the individual who has been identified as a case who their close contacts are. And those close contacts may range from household contacts to individuals that spent a prolonged amount of time with him or her during their infectious period. So, that then translates into making decisions about who should be tested in addition to the index case and who doesn't need to be tested. And so, that guidance is the same for City workers as it is for City residents.

Question: So, does that person who thinks they have come in contact with someone who tested positive, did they tell their supervisor and then self-isolate? Like what is the immediate – what are the immediate steps?

Commissioner Barbot: That, let's say, contact tree, if you will, originates from the individual who has been diagnosed with COVID-19. And so, based on his or her history of who they came in contact with, what type of contact, how long the contact was, would then be the genesis for them determining who in addition to test.

Question: So, the individual employee who's saying that their wife has positive, they don't then tell their workplace like, you know, Department of Sanitation, oh, by the way, my wife has positive, what should I do?

Commissioner Barbot: So, what – that's a different scenario, right? Because the index case is not the City worker, it's the workers spouse. And so, in that situation, the same thing holds. The index case, we look up their close contacts, which would be their partner. And then, if that index case was positive, the partner, whether or not they were positive or negative on the test would be treated in isolation – they would be isolated for 14 days. And so, we would then take additional history to determine whether or not there were any additional close contacts.

Question: And then you said that it's not just prolonged –

Mayor: Hold on one second. Don't go away – continue. Just want to add on that, so – and I think it's fair to say we should go back over all the guidance. I think that's a very important scenario – family member makes sure – I think it's self-evident that if a City employee had a family member in their home test positive that yes, that is something their supervisor should know. But the point I think that Dr. Barbot is making is, every case is being watched like a hawk right now by New York City and New York State. The disease detectives are making immediate contact. You know, even in an instance where somehow the supervisor didn't know, the Health Department's going to know. But I do think to your question, it is very smart for supervisors to be alerted immediately in those cases because we just want more information than we should make that clear in the guidance.

Question: [Inaudible] you said it's not just the prolonged household contact as we initially thought, but other types of interactions. Could you just spell out what other types of interactions?

Mayor: So, they have ranged from close proximity and extended face-to-face contact as would happen in, let's say, a lunch or an interview type of scenario. And so, that we have seen in more than one case. And so, that's why we are alerting New Yorkers that it's not just prolonged household contact. It can be prolonged contact that can be constituted by what I just described.

Mayor: Let me be more graphic. Well, we have case that we think we understand pretty well. Two people deep in conversation for a half-hour, animated conversation. The best thinking of the medical personnel is that in animated conversation sometimes people project some saliva and that may have been the contact. Obviously, another option is someone sneezed or coughed, like looking right at the person they were deep in conversation with. So, that's the evolution – that is still close proximity and you need that direct hit with the exception, again, of right to the hand, right to the face in fast proximity, because otherwise the virus just wouldn't live that long. But we do think this is an area of concern. It's not people in the stadium, it's not people in the big open area or a conference and all, it's people close up to each other, deeply engaging each other to the point that the inadvertent spitting that comes with a conversation sometimes, or a sneeze or a cough directly goes at the other person in close proximity.

Question: [Inaudible] which case that was?

Mayor: I've got to get back to you on which one that was. Okay. Who has not gone? Not gone – Courtney?

Question: So I know you want to get away probably from these extreme measures, but obviously over the weekend we saw what happened in Northern Italy. And I imagine you and your administration are sitting around every day and talking about, and doing tabletop exercises in those scenarios. In any way are you talking about that kind of scenario in which New York City could potentially be –

Mayor: Yeah, but I, you know, I was asked the question earlier on CNN and then I saw a lot of reporting said, you know, like we're thinking of a citywide quarantine. That's just not accurate. I want to be clear. We are obliged to scenario everything. So I know headlines are headlines. I know a lot of you are not responsible for the headlines. But you know, let's be clear here. We're far from that at this moment based on the facts before us. I mean we've been talking about this, the first press conference on this was January 24th in this building. And today we're at 20 cases, most of whom have not been hospitalized. And even among the hospitalized, we have some that are coming through fine. So I just have to put it in perspective. I think – I feel deep pain for Italy. Obviously I feel emotionally very connected to Italy. They were playing from behind from day one. I mean they had a major outbreak before they even could start to imagine something was happening. They never had a day where they were ahead of the action because it just was suddenly upon them. We had a long time to prepare. We have the best hospital network anywhere in America, I would argue anywhere in the world. Right here we have the most health care professionals. We've been messaging to New Yorkers for weeks and weeks. They appear to be really consistently abiding by the messages overwhelmingly. So I think we're in a much, much stronger position than some of the places. Obviously the ultimate example, China was playing wildly from behind and then didn't tell people what was going on. But here we've had time to really get ready and handle this in stages. That said, we talked about this yesterday, we'll be at a hundred cases relatively soon. And then, you know, we'll be at hundreds of cases relatively soon in a matter of weeks, based on what we know now. But that's, you know, every single day we're reassessing that trajectory. And so we're table-topping everything you name it. We're basing it on everything we know from previous you know, natural disasters and every other kind of situation, getting ready for different eventualities. But the school answer is very indicative here. Some places like Italy are doing mass school closures. That's not on the menu here. Is there a theoretical scenario where that could happen? Of course, but is it anywhere near to where we are now? No

Question: And just a quick a follow up. And I imagine it's the same answer as the St. Patrick's Day parade, but there is a Brooklyn half marathon coming up on the 20th, maybe. I assume that's still on?

Mayor: It is still on. We're in conversation with them. You know, we're going to make our best judgment very shortly on that. Now again, you know, because obviously we want to give people guidance at this point. I don't see a reason to cancel. That could change at any point, but right now I don't see a reason to cancel. Okay. Is there anyone who has not gone in the first round? All right, let's do a few second round. Go.

Question: Is there – are you looking ahead to maybe take over a hotel or something if you need to enforce some sort –

Mayor: If we need to we can.

Question: Yeah, on that question. You said you have 1,200 beds in HHC. I mean that doesn't really actually sound like that many beds as a reserve, given the current rate of transmission. I mean, at what point does the City, will the City face like serious strains to its capacity?

President Katz: Remember that Health + Hospitals represents about 20 percent of the inpatient capabilities. So you have five times more in terms of capability. There is a lot of space in hospitals including for emergency preparation. Our hospitals have tents that would allow us to turn a parking lot into an intensive care unit. So, when you look at the numbers and consider what the Mayor has said, that the vast majority of people actually do not need to be in the hospital. 80 percent of people are going to be fine. Only about 20 percent of people might have symptoms serious enough to be in the hospital. And it's even a much smaller number, perhaps four or five percent that actually would require intensive care or intubation. There is enough capacity to handle that in New York City.

Question: Commissioner, you'd mentioned that you thought virus might be with us until I think September. Can you walk us through the modeling or predictions [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: You know, it's our best estimate based on experience from what we're seeing abroad in China. Our learnings from what happened in H1N1, which was the last time you know, that kind of a virus presented itself. So there isn't something that we can necessarily, you know, hang our hats on if you will, but it's our best informed estimate of how long the transmission will take.

Mayor: Yeah. And look, we're going to constantly give people updates as we receive them. But I think the Commissioner is absolutely right to give folks a sense, you know, this is not going to be quick. We'll be at this for months, but we'll update as we go along.

Question: You mentioned that the 68-year-old, 22 and 75-year-old men who tested positive for the coronavirus were being treated at private hospitals. Is there a reason why they opted to go to private hospitals and not –

Mayor: I don't know. In each case, I mean we've seen people go to public hospitals, we've seen them go to private. Again, we want to respect confidentiality, give you broad profiles, but I don't know the specifics in this.

Question: Also what's happening to the 2,000 plus, people who are at home in self-quarantine?

Mayor: Again, as we've talked about in previous press conferences, so there's a check-in system for those folks. The mandatory quarantine folks get a very regular, they get a daily call, they get spot checks in person. The voluntary get information updated to them and you know, they're constantly asked if they want to make contact and get more guidance. Or if they need help, they can connect readily and get help. We're, again, I'm happy with what I'm seeing with the voluntary, that people seem to be following it through and coming out of it well. But we're going to intensify the outreach to the voluntary just out of abundance of caution and anyone who needs additional help, will get it.

Question: I know you mentioned that tomorrow you'd have more details about people that have gotten over the virus, but for right now, can you explain the progression in health for some of these folks? Like are they, are these folks that we're going to talk about tomorrow, are they back to work now or are they completely fine? Is it just like coming – like recovering from the flu?

Mayor: Yeah, you're going to see different people in different situations. But the real –and what the Commissioner – and this is, I think the crucial thing for people to hear is, how many days, and again think about typical cold and flu dynamics. So for the folks who are not having a more serious experience, how many days until people typically feel better and the standard you hold for knowing that people can go back to work?

Commissioner Barbot: So you know, the range of days that someone will be symptomatic varies. But what we understand from what we understand, the vast majority of folks will become symptomatic within about five to six days of being exposed. And the range of symptoms can include, as I have mentioned, fever and cough, fever, or fever and shortness of breath. You know, there have been reports of other potential symptoms, but the vast majority of folks who will become ill because of exposure to COVID-19 will develop those symptoms. You know, how long individuals remain ill is something that I can't answer because everybody's different. Everybody's got different – I think we're still learning. You know, we've got folks who present with very, very mild symptoms and they may clear their symptoms in two or three days. Where, and it goes back to what we're learning from real world experience here in New York City. And then we have other individuals who present in severe condition who require intensive care support and their care may last longer than the average individual.

Mayor: Let me give you a lifeline on just one piece of this. You stay where you are. I think the cases we're talking about in this specific question are the folks who go through sort of the simpler recovery and go back about their lives. I think helping people understand the range from symptoms manifesting, typical range of how long until you are a quote unquote, well. And then how long until a doctor, like you would say you have evidence that it's okay for someone to go back into the workforce, for example.

Commissioner Barbot: So typically it's a couple of days of being sick. And what we are advising is that once a person no longer has a fever, then they can return to work after three days.

Question: Has anybody gone back to work after recovering from the coronavirus?

Mayor: We'll give you those tomorrow.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, we'll give you those details –

Mayor: And again, some people are still in the quarantine situation. Even if they are well. We'll explain that to you. But the point is we are starting to see a phenomenon of people coming out of it. And that's an important piece of the equation too.

Question: In a letter that the Deputy Mayor wrote to the federal government, it said that we received two test kits. Do you know how that compares to other cities and states? And also I'm curious, what is our, what's left? Like how many samples are left and how many people do you think that New York City can test before we run out of tests?

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: The original request generated those two test kits. Each one can do about a thousand tests.

Question: How many people, that's like 600 people?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: That's about 600 people. You know, considering that many times you actually do two tests per person. Now with the new commercial labs coming online, that just expands our capacity significantly, threefold.

Question: They get their own kits then?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: They get their own kits.

Question: Okay, I understand.

Mayor: Okay, last call.

Question: Do they each get one? Do we know? We don't know?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: They're working with the FDA to actually allow them to get their own reagents and their own testing, so they don't have to go back and get kits from CDC.

Question: And we get more test kits, so public health laboratories can do more testing? What is the –

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: We are getting more kits from CDC. But the honest truth is that our public health lab is set up for more research now that the commercial labs and HHC and all the other voluntaries are open. The expansion is where a lot of the tests are going to be.

Mayor: But, but still hindered by the lack of the automation, which is what we're waiting on the FDA for. Anna.

Question: So I apologize if this has come up previously, but is there any indication that this can be sexually transmitted other than like the close facial contact? It might happen during a sex act?

Commissioner Barbot: I haven't seen any scientific studies that are looking at whether you can find it in semen or in vaginal fluids. But I suspect that with time that will become available. But certainly as you alluded to, the close contact that one would have would clearly be an increased risk.

Mayor: Can you, while you're there, talk about, because this came up. I mentioned that people –we are talking to each other all day long and coming up with all sorts of interesting questions. So
In food, in your soup, in your entree, in the water, in the beer, just talk about whether any of those things are transmission vehicles?

Commissioner Barbot: So this virus, if ingested the acidity of the stomach will denature it. And that's sort of the most succinct answer.

Mayor: Yes, that's a no?

Commissioner Barbot: That's a no.

Mayor: Last, very last call. Erin, two more. You – Erin and then you.

Question: Just a technical point. For the preexisting conditions, are you classifying asthma as a lung disease that should cause people to be extra concerned?

Mayor: Severe asthma, you can clarify it. Severe asthma is more of an issue. But what is your definition?

Commissioner Barbot: Typically when we say chronic lung disease, and Dr. Katz can help me out. We're talking about things like emphysema.

President Katz: Emphysema, chronic bronchitis.

Question: So that's a no?

Mayor: But can I ask a clarifying –

Commissioner Barbot: Although I will add –

Mayor: Yeah, let's, can we do everything you put in that category, but what you do feel about severe asthma interplay with this? If anything.

Commissioner Barbot: And again, Dr. Katz, if someone has severe asthma that they have had for a long time and they need to take steroids for it or they may have other complicating, you know, conditions. Those are the kinds of factors that a clinician would take into consideration when evaluating their individual patients.

President Katz: I would agree that asthma is a highly variable disease. So sometimes what it means is a young person where the bronchioles or the breathing tubes are just more reactive. But many times if people have had asthma for a very long time, it accompanies by that time some harm within the lungs. And so –

Mayor: Just list, Mitch, the lung diseases that would categorize here.

President Katz: So certainly emphysema, chronic bronchitis, people who have rheumatological diseases that are associated with restrictive lung function, which means that the lungs don't expand normally. As well as people who have obstructive disease, which means that the air does not move in smoothly. People who have suffered from exposures. So we do very much worry about people from the World Trade Center incidents. This is New York right? Where we have a number of people who may be suffering from lung dysfunction due to their exposure. So, it's basically that people, when your lung function and structure are not normal, your risk is greater.

Mayor: Okay, last call.

Question: I know last week you mentioned an increase in the number of disease detectives and added resources. At this point, do you know how many, in terms of number, disease detectives you've added, how much more personnel there is to handle this?

Mayor: I think we will have that firm number tomorrow. We're still doing a little bit of work on that. I think we'll have that tomorrow. Thanks everyone. Go ahead, Marcia. Yeah.

Question: Are there any conditions under which you would consider closing New York City?

Mayor: Again, what I said earlier and I'm going to just need people to not take me out of context. We're going to look at any scenario, but that's not a scenario I could see happening anytime soon. Our goal here is to keep the city running. Our goal is to make sure that kids go to school, people go to work, while supporting the folks who do need a health care. That's what's happening right now. I want to see us do that for a long time. Meanwhile, a lot of very smart people led by our Emergency Management Commissioner are playing out and scenarioing, war gaming all sorts of scenarios. But none of those are over the horizon right now.

Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, first thing I want to say is – I want to thank these extraordinary people who work here at Bellevue.

[Applause]

This is a world-renowned institution that does so much good every single day. This is a place where – I say this with tremendous respect to all of you – you, day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out, you handle whatever's thrown at you and you're doing an amazing job. I remember vividly the days I got to spend with some of you during the Ebola crisis, there was no place better in America to handle that challenge. And you did it beautifully and you're playing a crucial role right now helping us address coronavirus. One of the very first people came to be tested in all of New York City, came right here and, thank God, that was a negative back when – seems like a long time ago – it was only weeks ago. But we are depending on all of you and all your colleagues in Health and Hospitals, and I can safely say we are in very good hands with all of you. Let's thank them again.

[Applause]

Also, this group is exceptionally good at the elbow bump. I think you guys can go out and teach all of New York City how to do that. I want to start up on our update today. We've got some new information, but I wanted to say something really clear to all New Yorkers. Every single day, we're going to give you new information. Every single day, we're going to give you what we have that we can tell you that's clear and helpful. But every single day we're to tell you we're also receiving a lot of new information from our own experiences here in the city, from national sources, international sources, and everyday we're trying to understand the exact right approach to take the information changes day to day. We get new interpretations all the time. We get new strategies all the time. We're going to constantly update people, but you should assume a changing dynamic. This a – you know, we've dealt with a lot of things but I think we can all say with coronavirus we have rarely seen a situation that started with people not even understanding the disease to begin with because it was brand new – that's been the whole international community, medical community. And then, we've all had to learn by doing and our understanding of the best approaches keeps evolving. So, you will hear change because the information is changing. But we are still in the middle of a fight right now. We have to, every single day, do the best we can with the information we have and the resources we have. So, we'll tell you what we're doing, why we're doing it, and then as information changes we'll provide those updates. The fact is, everything is inherently preliminary at this point because, again, the information about the disease continues to evolve. It helps us to have our own experience here in New York City, our own work from our Department of Health and Health and Hospitals, our disease detectives giving us new information all the time. But there's a lot more out there that we are trying to glean and work with.

The crucial point I made yesterday, and I'll keep saying it, New Yorkers are going to be able to have a really big impact on this crisis by your own actions. So, the government is here to protect you, protect your health. We're going to do everything we know how to do. We're going to throw in every resource we got, but this one is participatory. This one is for everybody to be a part of the solution. The government cannot solve this alone. It has to be in every family, on every block, in every workplace. Everyone has to participate from those basic things, washing your hands, hand sanitizer, covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze onto the kinds of decisions we make in our life, starting with being very sensitive to the vulnerable people. We have seen this over and over again. It's very consistent all over the world. People over 50 with the preexisting conditions, that's the number-one problem. Either people like that in your life, support them, be really careful, watch out for them. We need New Yorkers to watch out for their fellow New Yorkers, which New Yorkers are very, very good about. But if someone in your life is vulnerable, be careful – another great example I'm giving, and I think it's a real life example – grandparents who want to visit their grandchildren, we all understand that that's normally fantastic, but if a grandchild is sick, the grandparents should not be visiting with them now. If the grandparent wants to visit their son or daughter, but the son or daughter is sick, this is not the right time for that. So, we really want to be clear about those common sense measures. The folks who are vulnerable need to take precautions. We need to support them as they take those precautions. We've talked about employers being as flexible as possible where you can have some telecommuting. We like that. We need that. Where you can't, we understand. Where you can stagger work hours – that helps. Everybody can participate. Literally every single person that'd be part of ending this crisis. So, we'll keep giving information and we'll keep updating people every step of the way.

Now, folks want information, they want accurate information. Want to remind you, you can go on our website, nyc.gov/coronavirus – nyc.gov/coronavirus – and you can text COVID to 692-692 – that's COVID to 692-692. I think it was yesterday we said 20,000 people have done that. Now, 60,000 people have done that. It's a really good way to keep informed. We're going to give a quick presentation, then you'll hear from – I'll give a presentation – you'll hear from the CEO of our Health and Hospitals, Dr. Mitch Katz, you'll hear from the Speaker of City Council Corey Johnson. I want to thank for their partnership and the good work they're doing Borough President Manhattan, Gale Brewer, thank you very much; Council Member Steve Levin of Brooklyn, thank you very much for all you're doing working with us. Let's give them a round of applause to thank them

[Applause]

Okay, so as we said, we're now in what we are simply calling phase two, and that means more and more guidance to New Yorkers of things that we want you to adjust in your life. I gave the example of employers staggering work hours and allowing telecommuting where they can. Again, those who are self-employed, those who have the ability to make those decisions yourself, we want you trying to – if you're going to have to use subways, use it on off hours. To the maximum extent possible, avoid the rush hour. If you can telecommute yourself, we prefer that right now. We need people to be mindful. We have a real concerned about the super packed subway cars, particularly in rush hour. If you don't need to be on one of those, please avoid them. Even means letting a few trains pass until one's less crowded. And then there's the really basic, but very, very important things – you know, a lot of people get sick and they power through it. A show of hands – even these health care providers – you ever been sick and powered through? Raise your hand. Raise your hand. Okay, stop doing that.

[Laughter]

So, what we need to do, all of us, is if we're sick, we need to take it seriously. We need to talk to our doctor. We need to stay home if we're sick. Health care workers, obviously we depend on you, so the best way is for the health care – and Mitch will speak to this – health care worker's sick, they get to be evaluated by health care professionals, and if they shouldn't be at work, they shouldn't be at work. If they can be, that's great or with whatever precautions, and I want you to go in detail about that. But for the rest of everybody else, if you've got those cold and flu symptoms, don't go to work, consult with your doctor, make sure you're well before you get in the presence of lots of other people and, God forbid, do not go near someone in that vulnerable group over 50 with the preexisting conditions.

Okay, I'm going to state it just so we're consistent – over 50 preexisting conditions, that means heart disease, lung disease, cancer, diabetes, and a weakened immune system. Those five areas – we've also said not a condition, but a factor – smoking and vaping. Smoking and vaping do not help, in fact, they make it harder for someone to handle coronavirus for folks who have the preexisting conditions and are over 50 be very, very mindful of who you're coming in contact with. We want you to adjust your routines mindfully and if you do have symptoms, that group of people needs to get to care immediately.

Okay. Now, update on numbers. We have a very rapidly evolving situation on the numbers of cases and we're obviously concerned when we see more cases, but there's a piece of this that actually is in its own way good news, which is the testing capacity is coming online more and more. We still are waiting for that formal confirmation from the FDA that we've been talking about. We're hopeful but we still want it to be 110 percent formal. We haven't gotten that yet, but the private labs that started up on Friday are now really ramping up. So, we are starting to get more and more test results back. They are coming in so intensely now that being able to give you the detailed case breakdown, we're not in that position to do that at this moment, because so many new cases are coming forward. We will of course when we can give you updates on particularly pertinent cases and again, what we have been doing historically – there was a good question yesterday – I want to just clear this up for all the cases we've given you up to date –the ones with detailed profiles were all New York City residents, but one exception, the original lawyer from Westchester County, and the reason he was counted among the city cases was he was diagnosed hospitalized in New York City and remains in New York City. That was the one aberration. But now, with the private lab results coming in very, very rapidly, we're adjusting our approach, because we don't get the profiles on each case as quickly as we were because of the sheer numbers. So, again, we won't be giving across the board individual profiles. We will be giving them in particular cases. And we are happy to be getting more and more test results because it allows us again to ensure that people are getting the care they need, people are isolated that need to be isolated, and folks who are negative can go on with their life.

As of 12 noon – so, I gave a report yesterday and then this morning we had a different report. Now, we have another update as of 12 noon, working with the State of New York, the number now for confirmed cases in New York City is now 36 – 36, that is 16 new since yesterday and 11 new even since this morning at 7:00 AM when I last spoke about this. I said yesterday, we're going to start to talk to you about people who have their cases resolved. The first two that we will get information on, but they are not yet fully through the process, are the two health care workers who had been in Iran. They are now asymptomatic. They're going through a first of two tests that will lead to them coming out of quarantine. We're waiting for the results soon on the first test and it will take a second in short order thereafter, if both those come back negative, they will be out of quarantine hopefully as early as the end of this week. So, those are the first two that we will report on. As other people come out, we're going to give you those updates.

Now, as of – this is – I want everyone to hear a carefully, this is a different time frame because this is the last information we have. As of 10:00 am, before some of the newer information came in on cases, so this is probably dated by now – actually, is dated by now, but at least it's somewhat helpful information. As of 10:00 am, the number of negative cases for New York City was 258 – that was 57 new since yesterday. The number of pending tests, 195. So now, what you're seeing is we're talking about – and this is what we've been projecting – we'll be doing hundreds of tests a day and that's where the numbers are getting – moving so rapidly that we won't be able to do the individual cases the same way, again, with some exceptions.

In mandatory quarantine, 30 people right now. In voluntary isolation, 1,980. So, this is the context of community spread, which has only been with us since the latter part of last week and intensive testing, which has really only been with us the last few days. Now, we're going to see a very different trajectory in terms of the information flow and the numbers and we're going to keep giving updates every day.

Okay. A few quick updates in terms of the city. An issue that has been getting a lot of attention, rightfully so, around the country, around the world is cruise ships. So, the cruise ship terminals in Red Hook and the West Side of Manhattan, those are licensed via the Economic Development Corporation. They are run by a private entity called NY Cruise. We are following the guidance of the CDC and saying to all New Yorkers, this is not the time to take a cruise. I just want to start with that. Obviously, the cruise ships have been a real focal point for problems while our nation gets ahead of this crisis. This is not a great time to take a cruise, but if people do choose to take a cruise specific actions are being taken. The two terminals are being thoroughly cleaned throughout and health care workers will be on site if anyone is leaving on a cruise for additional screening during boarding. Anyone who attempts to get on a cruise and it has a temperature of over one 100.4 – 100.4 will not be allowed on a cruise ship. So, that's outgoing and that's trying to guide our fellow New Yorkers on how to handle this situation and protecting all the fellow passengers. The obvious other question is the incoming, and on the outgoing, I don't have in front of me, but I'm going to turn to my team and say we should check with EDC on the outgoing cruises – we have the incoming, let's get the outgoing dates. For incoming cruises, the next incoming cruise to the Manhattan terminal on the West Side will be Sunday, March 15th that cruise will be met by Department of Health Officials. And the same standard of 100.4 degrees will be implemented in this case, meaning folks who are coming off that cruise with that temperature will either, if they're from New York City, depending on their overall health, they will either will be allowed to go home into self-isolation or will be taken to a hospital depending on their health. If they are not from New York City, they'll be taken to a hospital or other health care facility right away. That Sunday, March 15th – this coming Sunday. The next incoming cruise to the Red Hook terminal in Brooklyn is April 9th, so we won't be seeing much there anytime soon.

On the issues related to the federal government, I mentioned that we still are waiting for the formal approval on the automated testing. Again, we keep seeing promising signs and some movement, but we do not have the fully confirmed formal approval. We need that right away. We've also talked about the N95 masks, which are particularly important for keeping our health care workers and our first responders safe. We definitely need more of these masks. The State, to their great credit, has kept their reserve. They gave us 120,000 new N95 masks. That's crucial. I want to thank the State for doing that, but we will certainly need more and we'll need them soon. We're sending a specific request today to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for 300,000 more N95 masks, specifically for our Health and Hospitals personnel who need them and for our first responders. That supply, in addition to the 120,000 from the State, the 300,000 more we're requesting from the federal government, we could get that soon, that will take us through the coming months. Related to our disease detectives, we are working right now to double the number of disease detectives. One element of that will be training all school nurses to do this work, to do the initial screening. We'll have an update shortly on the exact timeline on the doubling and the protocols we'll use, going forward. But the – one of the most immediate things we'll do is get all of these very effective school nurses into this work immediately. That's going to help us speed up the process.

An important note for all New Yorkers – obviously, there's information out there about coronavirus and there's misinformation and there's confusion. One area that should be crystal clear is that it is absolutely crucial for everyone to keep giving blood. There is no danger in giving blood, but we must maintain our supply. At this moment, our supply is okay, but we're concerned. We have seen some workplace blood drives canceled. That is a worrisome sign. So, we will be working to make sure that as many as possible blood drives continue. We're encouraging all New Yorkers who can to give blood. I'll be doing that myself in the coming days. And a thank you to all New Yorkers who have been giving blood and everyone who works to keep our supply strong. But there is no health risk related to coronavirus in the process of giving blood.

One more update. Yesterday, we talked about later in the day an emergency medical technician who works for the Fire Department tested positive for coronavirus. The information we have at this moment is that that was passed along by a flight attendant who is this individual's girlfriend who had been traveling to an affected area. As a result of this diagnosis, five fellow EMT are in self-quarantine. They are all asymptomatic. The EMT in the timespan that's pertinent here treated 11 patients, but as – when treating these patients wore protective gear. The Department of Health and the FDNY will be reaching these patients today to follow up and do the normal diagnostic work. But the good news is they are identified and the other good news is that the EMT wore protective gear, but we're still going to treat each case obviously very seriously.

Okay. Just very few sentences in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

And that is a thank you to all New Yorkers who really have been following the guidance in so many ways and helping us to address the situation here in New York City. Now, to talk about the capacity of our Health and Hospitals facilities and all the personnel, like these good people here, who will be part of fighting off this virus here in this city. We want to turn to CEO of Health and Hospitals, Dr. Mitch Katz.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health and Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you for having this at Bellevue. Bellevue is the longest running public hospital in the United States. Established prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Bellevue was a leader in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Bellevue was there to provide care with compassion without fear, to provide the very best of care. Also, in the Ebola outbreak, this hospital was the only hospital in New York State to successfully take care of somebody with Ebola who fully recovered and to do that without any other infections occurring to health care personnel. This is a hospital that knows how and knows how to do it with compassion, with love, with competence. It's also a public hospital, which means that people who are undocumented, people without insurance, they know that they can come here, they can come to Bellevue, they don't have to worry that they're going to get a bill that they can't pay, that they're going to be treated as unwelcome. With all of the negative anti-immigrant spirit coming out of Washington, how great that that's not true in New York City, it's not true at Bellevue, and I'm so grateful to you, Mr. Mayor to the City Council for always maintaining that.

We are prepared at Bellevue. We are prepared at the other 10 acute care hospitals of Health and Hospitals. We are prepared at our other 60 outpatient sites. We have known for several weeks that it is likely that we would reach a point where there would be many people seeking our services because of respiratory disease. As the Mayor has explained, 80 percent of people who contract this virus will have little or minimal symptoms, but 20 percent will need healthcare services, and probably about 5 percent of those people will need intensive services such as a breathing tube and a ventilator machine. We are prepared for that. We have been practicing – Bellevue in all our acute care hospitals have plans. Now, those of you in the press may say, well, wait a minute, we've been hearing that hospitals are crowded.

We've been hearing that ICU's, are crowded already – how could you possibly be prepared to take on additional people? And the answer is that in an emergency you change how you operate. You don't continue to operate in the same standard. So, we are prepared at Bellevue and all of our hospitals that were we to have many patients with respiratory distress, we would rapidly discharge those patients who are in the hospital now and do not need to be in the hospital, because they can be safely cared for at home. We would cancel all elective surgeries, so there is a lot of incredibly valuable work that a hospital like this does – we remove gallbladders, we fix hernias, we fix bones, we do arthroscopy, we do bariatric surgery – all very worthwhile. All that stops in an emergency. We have outpatient clinics, Health and Hospitals does 1.1 million outpatient visits a year. In an emergency, we will be canceling our outpatient surgeries. We will be canceling our outpatient visits and we will be directing all our great physicians and nurses and technicians and physician assistants and nurse practitioners and pharmacists to our inpatient areas. We know we're in every hospital. If we needed to set up intensive care beds, someone thoughtfully asked the other day, well, but do you have enough intensive care bed? An intensive care bed is defined by the great nurse who is caring for the patient is not a physical space. If you give me a great nurse as I have in Bellevue, I can turn any space into an intensive care space. What matters is the staffing. What matters is having the appropriate equipment. We have at Health and Hospitals 376 negative pressure rooms. If we needed to double up negative pressure rooms, not something we would ever do in regular practice, where the overwhelming likelihood is you'd have two patients with different diseases – of course they would not go in the negative pressure room together. In the case where we suddenly have many people who've tested positive of COVID-19, we would be able to double up existing spaces. We have practiced on our masks. We have practice on our gowns. We know the different levels of protective equipment that are necessary. We have implemented that in all of our settings. We very much appreciate the efforts on having more testing. That would make a huge difference for us and we greatly appreciate the efforts that you, Mr. Mayor, and the City Council have made to make that happen so that we know who is sick, who is not sick, and that will allow us to take care of people. We are 30,000 employees strong. We will all be taking care of those patients. If we have a large number, Mr. Mayor, Mr. President of the City Council – we are ready. We are prepared.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much. Mitch, an energetic report as always. Thank you very, very much. And now, I want to thank again for his partnership and the great work he and all the members of Council are doing and spreading good information and helpful information and helping to make sure that folks all over the city get to the help they need – Speaker Corey Johnson.

[…]

Mayor: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. We'll do questions and I'll start on this side. Again, let me do my simple ground rule up front – I'll start on this side, I'll go to that side. Everyone, one round first for everyone and then if there's anything real pertinent, we'll come back on it.

Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, the [inaudible] told people to not wear masks because masks cannot protect you from being infected, only can prevent sick people from infecting other people, but at the same time you said that medical personnel's need [inaudible] people sneezing to your face. So can you explain the rational of [inaudible]?

Mayor: I will start and then our health professionals can go into more detail. One of the things that is clear about health personnel is that they are constantly exposed to people and the difference, I would say, between – from what we've seen so far, and again, everything, this is preliminary based on the knowledge we have of this disease from only weeks of everyone even knowing it existed and trying to constantly update our knowledge. But there is a real difference between the interaction the people, every day people, have with others versus when a health professional sees many, many patients in a day in much more intimate dynamics. So I think this is a fundamental, qualitative difference, but take it from there.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So it's incredibly important –

Mayor: Is yours on? Yes, okay.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, it's important for us to first and foremost protect our health care workforce. And it is imperative that they have the equipment that is needed in order to ensure that when they are seeing patients that are potentially symptomatic with COVID-19 that they are protected. Because if we, as we anticipate, have more individuals diagnosed with COVID-19, and we have health care workers that are also affected, it then starts affecting the capacity of the health care system, and so that's why it is one of our central areas of focus. And then secondly, with regards to the utility of masks for everyday New Yorkers that are not symptomatic, the concern is that it provides a false sense of security.

The most important and central way to minimize your risk, because, you know, we need to be realistic here, there is no zero risk situation unless you hermetically seal yourself in your apartment- the most effective way is to have diligent hand hygiene practice, which means washing your hands often, thoroughly. And if you're not close to a water source to use alcohol based hand sanitizer. And so for everyday New Yorkers, we don't recommend the use of mask of surgical masks. The one situation where mask would be useful is if someone is known to a health care provider to be coming in because they're ill, then we are recommending to health care workers that they meet that person outside of the office or as soon as they come into the office and place a mask on them so that they don't then infect other individuals.

Mayor: Okay. Yes?

Question: The nurses [inaudible] couple of questions about resources. One beyond n95-respirators, I think [inaudible] could be, maybe not now, but there could be shortages of [inaudible] gowns and the regular surgical masks, [inaudible]. That's one question, is that something, do you [inaudible]?

President Katz: The, the surgical mask, we have a very, very large cache and are not, not at all an issue. And the gowns the same. So those are not – we're, as the Mayor's appropriately called for, it's in the n-95 masks where we want to make sure that it's not that we have enough for today, but what the Mayor and the Speaker wanted to make sure is that we have enough to get us through September.

Question: The other question was [inaudible] is there a time [inaudible]?

Mayor: Take, what is our plan? What? I couldn't hear that.

Question: What's the plan if nurses and other health care workers have to start quarantining, what's the plan [inaudible]?

Mayor: So, just I'll start and pass it. Again, that's a standard procedure. Some of that will happen inevitably. Remember that, you know, we're going to take a whole host of precautions to keep our health care workers safe to begin with. If some end up having a quarantine, that will happen and then they'll come out of quarantine and we'd be back in the game. And we're going to clearly work to make sure that there's sufficient personnel at all times, including by adjusting away from those less necessary procedures. You want to add any –

President Katz: I think you've said it well.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead.

Question: Yeah, on the budget, I was wondering if you can say where you're thinking is now a potential adverse impact to virus on the economy and if you're contemplating budget cuts anticipating maybe even a recession coming?

Mayor: A couple of different things. I mean the immediate thing we're looking at working with the Council obviously is relief for small business. We announced a couple of initiatives that will be added into the budget. We'll look to see if there's other things that we need to do. In terms of revenue forecasting, we will do that as part of the budget process, which culminates in the next six weeks or so. So we'll have a lot more information. The stock market dynamic, deeply troubling, this morning seemed to be a little bit better obviously, but we got to see this play out. Clearly could have an impact on revenue in terms of the finance sector. We're very worried about our businesses and drop off in sales for them and obviously that has revenue ramifications in many ways. So yeah, it's very much in our mind, but it's too early to have a number, obviously. We will have to make adjustments accordingly, but that will be against the backdrop of where our revenue was in general. So in terms of cuts, it's too early to say because we have to see the overall revenue picture. All of that will be revealed when we do the Executive Budget.

Question: You suggested that people avoid rush hour subways [inaudible] biking and walking –

Mayor: Yes, if they can.

Question: Right, [inaudible] still afraid because of cars parked in bike lanes and just lack of protected bike lanes. Yesterday, Transportation Alternatives [inaudible] specific demands to make it safer. Are you [inaudible] immediately commit to any of those?

Mayor: I haven't seen them, I'll happily look at them. Look, we obviously have devoted a lot of police resources to clearing out bike lanes. We'll keep doing that. We're dealing with, you know, a crisis here with many, many elements. Whatever we can do to – that we deem appropriate to help make it easier, now we will, but I again would say for folks who have the option of walking to work, for folks that have the option of biking to work and feel good about their route, we appreciate that, it helps. But also for folks who ride the subway, if they can even vary the time off of rush hour, either the evening or the morning rush hour that helps. We know that's not everyone, but it helps to the extent people can do it.

Question: Would you bike to work one day to practice your own advice –

Mayor: I have some to do on my bike, but I think that'd be a great idea. Let me see if I can do that sometime soon.

Question: Wow.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, there's been some concern about inmates in city jails, on Rikers and other facilities. Any sense for whether there are protections in place? Any plan a part of the Department of Corrections?

Mayor: We've talked before about the fact that there's a constant screening going on. Everyone new comes in, if there's any health issue that we are concerned about in general and specifically coronavirus, they're immediately taken to health care facilities within corrections. And everyone's been instructed that if they see any symptoms to isolate the individual immediately. I'll check. I don't know if - I'm looking up and down the line to see if anyone knows different, but I don't think we have any reports of any instances of –

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: We do not.

Mayor: Not within Department of Corrections. Back there.

Question: Can you talk a little bit about the Staten Island EMT worker who tested –

Mayor: Say again? I'm sorry.

Question: Can you talk a little bit about the Staten Island EMT worker tested positive for the coronavirus. Did his girlfriend test positive too? You mentioned she's a flight attendant. Which country did she travel to and do they live together and can confirm –

Mayor: Yeah. I only have what I've given you and I want to be very careful. I'm looking to Freddi, I didn't say Staten Island, so I want to make sure we're all being very careful about our facts. The profile I gave her, the EMT did not include where he works or lives. Is there a Staten Island nexus?

Commissioner Barbot: We believe so.

Mayor: We believe so. Okay, so I just –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Again, respect the hospital. I want to make sure we're always giving you accurate information. Let's just confirm all that before we go any further. But that's, that's all the details I have.

Question: [Inaudible] the process of when a hospital learns that someone has tested positive for the coronavirus, what - who is alerted next up? Our reporters, when we tried to confirm this information, we reached out to the State, the State said to reach out to the City –

Mayor: Wait, wait, back, back up your question in a second. I want to make sure I understand. You're saying when someone is tests positive –

Question: Yeah, what's the protocol for alerting the public? When we found out about this case on Staten Island, we learned from a hospital sources –

Mayor: Okay I let me - I want to make sure – again, I don't mean to interrupt except I want to make sure we're really being clear about the consistent reality. We've been updating you guys essentially daily and I'm sure we will be for quite a while. We give you the numbers as we have them. If there's cases that we can give you a detailed profile on, we will, that's going to get harder with the numbers coming in. I will just ask people to, for simplicity, you know, because you know we're going to be constantly updating and we're making sure that as best humanly possible the information is confirmed. Sometimes an institution has information and I'm sure it's accurate a lot of the time, but it may not be exactly what we confirm. So we are trying to be the central clearing house information and put it out constantly, but that may not be going forward, those individual profiles simply because of volume. So whatever we can put out, we're going to put out, I think the simplest thing to make sure you're getting the whole story is to lean on these briefings and the other updates that our press office is putting out. Go ahead.

Question: A question for you, Mr. Mayor and a question for Dr. Barbot. For you, I'm wondering what our current testing capacity is if we are at capacity? And yesterday you essentially said that, you know, there's plenty of people who may have it who aren't going to get tested, but what we saw with the South Korea example that speaker Johnson pointed out is that aggressive testing really helped reduce the cases. So it seems like you said you're looking internationally –

Mayor: I want to make sure, I'm sorry to interrupt, I want make sure I'm whatever sentence you're quoting from. I want to make sure it wasn't a misunderstanding. We've been talking about aggressive testing for weeks and weeks and wanting to test everyone who should be tested. I think we all agree there are people out there who may have symptoms we never hear about, including folks who have very mild cases, but I want everyone tested who should be tested. That's absolutely why we've been clamoring for more and more testing. So I don't, again, I don't know what you're referring to. Bring it up when you have it. A message of the city has been 100 percent clear, people who should be tested, and we need that testing capacity so we can do it. Volume, we're now around hundreds a day. We need that capacity to get up to thousands a day. Hopefully, again, this FDA approval is going to come presently and that's going to allow us to do that with the automated testing.

Question: So you're capacity is hundreds and you're [inaudible].

Mayor: Hundreds, hundreds. It's Public Health Lab, H + H, private labs, everyone together, hundreds per day is the capacity, currently. The turnaround time is slower than we want. The number we can get to is less than we want, that's why we want the FDA approval.

Question: Just for Dr. Barbot, several positive cases have done health care workers. Are you looking at doing more widespread testing as a precaution of city health care workers?

Commissioner Barbot: So when we have a positive health care worker, we work very closely with the State to ensure that we are monitoring the health care workers and ensuring that they go through the appropriate quarantine timeframe. The testing for health care workers is the same as it would be for everyday New Yorkers, right? We test people who are symptomatic. We don't test people who are asymptomatic. If someone has had an exposure that we are concerned about, then we do that testing.

Question: Given that there in such a vulnerable position treating patients, is there no consideration being given to just across the board testing health care workers?

Commissioner Barbot: That's why we quarantine people who may have had questionable contacts. Again, if someone is asymptomatic and we test them, we don't want to have a false sense of security that they're actually negative. That's why we want to align testing with symptoms.

Question: Following up on that NYU Langone told Politico that the City Health Department is turning away patients from testing. And so I wanted to get a sense of how you're determining who gets tested and what capacity you're at for testing.

Mayor: Yeah, again, we always - I want to get back to our basics that we've talked about several times. I don't know who said what at NYU Langone and we always welcome getting that information and being able to check it against our reality. So I'm glad you're raising it. The City Public Health Lab, who said previously has limited capacity that only started up a week ago Monday to be clear, because that was when we finally got the federal approval. The H + H has substantial capacity working with the private labs. That's where the real numbers are as those private labs. So if there was an instance where the city health lab did not have capacity at any given moment and we were diverting to other labs that would be normal. But I don't know what NYU Langone is saying. I'd like to hear a very specific instance so we can respond to it.

Question: [Inaudible] Story, but to also follow up the New York Times had an opinion piece of a woman who went to three emergency departments to try to get tested for coronavirus and was told, sorry you're not hitting qualifications for testing. So Dr. Barbot can you kind of explain what the triaging process looks like? Do you have to have certain amount of symptoms plus saying, oh you came from this a geographic spot to actually get tested ahead of somebody else. What does that process and how do we prevent people from coming in and then they can't get tested? Come back and they're possibly sheds the disease up to six days or seven days.

Commissioner Barbot: So I think it's important to first sort of level set and realize that the testing criteria have been evolving by CDC. You know, initially it was a very specific part of China travel, then it broadened, and so I think it's illustrative of the fact that this is a rapidly evolving situation and guidance for testing has been changing as we learn more and more. Recently there has been a loosening of those testing guidelines so that we are now focusing on testing symptomatic individuals and there's no longer that threshold of having to have a travel connection. And so it's unfortunate that New Yorkers who had been previously, you know, trying to get tested went through that. And you know, and I think it's a real thing. I've heard the same thing and it's very concerning, and so that's why we tighten up all of our possible connections with health care delivery systems so that they are on top of all of the new developments. So recently, today is what, Tuesday, Wednesday, I can't –

Mayor: Tuesday.

Commissioner Barbot: So yesterday we issued a HAN, a health alert, to all doctors making sure that they were aware of changes that have taken place and how they can order labs directly from commercial labs.

Question: Mayor, so just to compliment the last question, are we at maximum testing capacity as is right now?

Mayor: Right now we have the capacity to keep up because I mean you're seeing these numbers evolve. We're getting hundreds of tests that we need to do and we have the ability to do hundreds of tests. What we don't have is the ability to get them in – back in real time and that's the problem. So every test that comes in is sent to a lab for testing and there is capacity, but the turnaround time is slower than we need it to be. And we need that capacity to keep jumping up because the number of cases will likely keep expanding. We want to get, you know, the – again, we're trying to give you as much information as we can get. It's just getting harder to get all of the information we'd like out quickly. But we're still seeing, you know, a lot of tests out pending. We're still seeing a lot of negative tests as I said, as of 10:00 am from day one, we had 258 negative tests. So, you know, we want as much testing as we can get done. One more step and I think we'll be at the point that will sustain us for a long period of time. Please.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze Sorry about that. We are in the hundreds as the Mayor is saying. The commercial labs will increase our capability into thousands, but also please make note of what the Mayor is emphasizing. We still need the FDA to approve the automated version of the testing as soon as possible because that's what is going to make the difference. That's what is going to get us to what the speaker is mentioning in South Korea. 10,000 a day.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: So, two questions. The first is I know you said you're looking at double the number of do disease detectives. Can you tell us what that number is or at now and what you would like that number to get to Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: Currently we're at 50.

Question: And you'd like to get it to a hundred?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes.

Mayor: Yeah, and to begin, we might go farther than that soon.

Question: And my second question is, I know you mentioned earlier that the doctor - the doctor, who had travel to Iran, who tested positive. They're going through separate tests. She and her husband, I guess is that –

Mayor: There's two, I'm going to use a layman's term, there's two checkout tests. So when you're coming out – you're a health care professional, these were obviously our first cases, so when you're a health care professional, you have to take two tests on the outbound that both come back negative. So they've taken the first test, we're waiting for the results, they get a negative, they take a second test, if they get negative, then they're cleared to go.

Question: And is there a plan I guess to retest some people who maybe had tested negative, especially if they had a long time exposure, like the wife of the Westchester attorney and then [inaudible] coworker, I'm sorry, Westchester attorney's coworkers. I mean, do you do follow-up tests in case it does show up after?

Mayor: What's the protocol on that?

Commissioner Barbot: Right now, as I mentioned, we want to align testing with symptoms because that's going to give you the highest probability of having a test that gives you the best information. There is no indication that once the incubation period is over, there's any need, and if the - especially if the person's asymptomatic that you need to do additional testing.

Mayor: Jeff.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how many actual test kits does the city have available and how many have you actually used at this point?

Mayor: Yeah the kit's thing, I think – no, not challenging your question, just for clarity – I think that kits is misleading. It is the capacity each kit allows for. So can - who can speak to the total capacity we got from day one and where we're at vis-à-vis that.

Commissioner Barbot: So each kit contains a thousand tests and we have two kits.

Mayor: So, that would be 2,000.

Commissioner Barbot: Yes.

Mayor: But our daily capacity in the Public Health Lab is physically limited?

Commissioner Barbot: Is physically limited. So currently we can do a samples for 60 people, which is 120 tests. And we are looking to expand that capacity to roughly 100 people a day.
Question: I want to clarify, so you said there's a slow turnaround for the testing, so how long does it take [inaudible] the automated tests—

Mayor: Automated test is hours. Existing tests or the public labs is days. I think we're talking about can be three or four days. Way back

Question: [Inaudible] Uber driver who tested positive. Have you guys done any researching on the riders and how they've been effected or whether or not they've come down with anything? The other question I wanted to ask is – there's a Pre-K teacher—

Mayor: Wait, actually, I'm sorry. It really helps me if you just stay on one topic at a time, I'm not going to go anywhere. So on the first one, so we're constantly monitoring and we're trying to support the drivers and certainly give them good guidance. And one of the things we talked about, this based on the healthcare professionals, that real simple thing of opening the windows is exceedingly helpful. Circulating the air. I don't think we have a case so far that we believe links to being in a car service as a passenger. So nothing that's come up that we know of. So in terms of survey, I mean obviously we're, we're looking across the entire city for anybody who may have symptoms and needs to be tested, but I don't think we're hearing anything particular from the TLC sector – anyone know different than that? No.

Question: You guys have gone through all of that, drivers, riders, and checked them out to make sure—

Mayor: No, of course we haven't gone through all drivers and riders and all that. Again, let's be clear what I'm saying. The, we have, you know, the city has almost 400,000 employees. The driver sector is huge. We're not calling each person and checking on them. We're going the other way around. We're trying to inform people what they should do if they have symptoms and then what to do if the symptoms are particularly problematic or they have those underlying conditions and the health care system, and Dr. Barbot, I think it would help if you explain, you get a constant flow of information from all elements of the healthcare system. I don't think we've really said that clearly enough to people how that works because that's the way we see each case. And we have a sense of what's going on. Could you speak to that?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Alright. Hold on. Just let me do this and we'll come back to that.

Commissioner Barbot: So we do, we, we have close collaboration and contact with all of our hospital partners so that if there are individuals that are of particular concern, we certainly get early alerts from them. And additionally we work very closely with all of our partners in the ambulatory sector. So we have a pretty well knit system whereby providers have access to physicians within the Health Department, through our provider access line to ask us questions about if they have doubts of who they should be testing, if they have results that may be concerning. And that is a system that is available to all physicians.

Mayor: [Inaudible] them, we'll come back to your question is more the automatic – the mandatory information sharing that physicians have to do in terms of certain cases. The way you get a flow of information, your early detection system. I hope people understand how much information is flowing to you all the time. And if you could make that a little bit clearer, it would help people.

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly. So there are ongoing surveillance systems that we have that are data-driven, where we look at what the influenza trends might be coming from hospitals. We look at what the visit types are through their emergency departments and we can view that on an hourly basis. So we have a fairly good temperature gauge of what may be happening in our emergency departments.

Mayor: So you're talking also about the individual driver.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Right. So what we know about the driver is the family contacts for sure, and we went over that the other day and everyone else is asymptomatic, at least as of the last report we had and they are in quarantine. In terms, again, this was a Nassau driver, so we're not in a position to track the Nassau contacts. I don't know what the latest is, if we've heard anything from the Nassau Health Department on that, if there's any news on that, but we can try and get that for you if we don't have it.

Commissioner Barbot: So my understanding is that we have not identified additional close contacts that would need to be evaluated.

Mayor: Right. And again, being in a car per se would not necessarily be the issue. Now you had another question?

Question: Yeah there was a teacher that teaches Pre-K who sent out a tweet saying that coworkers were being denied tests for the coronavirus. Have you heard about that or?

Mayor: No. And I'd like – look, we would welcome getting that information. We'll follow up with that teacher right away. But again, if someone was not symptomatic that we're not doing tests for folks who are not symptomatic. So we, we as much as I want that flow of information directly from people, and a lot of times every-day New Yorkers, everyday public servants will raise a concern that we're not seeing clearly enough and we need that information. If someone tweeted out, I just want a coronavirus test and are not symptomatic and they're getting turned away. That's right. They're not supposed to just walk up and get a test with no symptoms. So we need to know more about that.

Question: [Inaudible] tweet it said they had shortness of breath and high temperatures.

Mayor: Okay. So we need to know what happened specifically, and then we need that contact so we can follow up. You can just, if you hand that off to Freddie, we'll follow up and then we'll get you an answer. Who has not gone? Go ahead.

Question: The [inaudible] health care worker in New Jersey's most [inaudible] case is now hospitalized—

Mayor: Which one? I'm sorry. You said New Jersey?

Question: He was [inaudible] in New Jersey, asking to be transferred to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. Would you accept his request, what is the protocol?

Mayor: I don't know the protocol, that's a great question. What is the protocol?

President Katz: That would go doctor to doctor. Often we do transfer patients, especially if this is somebody who is at a hospital that does not have the capability of Mount Sinai. It would make sense that they would then take on that patient.

Mayor: Anyone not gone?

Question: What's the city doing in order to dispel fears and handle disinformation spreading in the city's homeless community?

Mayor: What, I'm sorry, for the last part. Of which community?

Question: About the homeless community?

Mayor: Right. We've spoken to this in a number of the press conferences, our outreach teams, which you know, we're already extensively connecting with the homeless are doing that very systematically and I'm waiting to get numbers back that we can share with you, but with the – there's an ongoing outreach function. Remember the street homeless is between 3,500 and 4,000 most of whom were in regular touch with through outreach workers. They're looking for folks who may have symptoms to get them to care, giving them information. If anyone's in grievous need, of course we can get them to care, whether it's voluntary or involuntary. But so far I have not heard of any cases or symptoms among the homeless that needed follow through. But we'll get you more on that as soon as we have it. Okay, anyone who has not gone, just want to try this once. Okay, round two. Go ahead.

Question: Just somewhat related to that, I know you spoke yesterday about your homeless outreach workers, you know, visiting up with the individuals that they know of. Is there anything specific being done to check in on the homeless who are frequently on the subways and related somewhat related state health officials said today that actually the virus can survive on metal and plastic for days, not minutes as your health officials have said, can explain that?

Mayor: Yeah, so two very different questions. On the homeless and subways. It's the same exact outreach effort that we've been doing now for months and it is social services and NYPD and the guidance has been given to everyone. If anyone is symptomatic we want to try and get them obviously immediately to care. I was briefed on the latest information coming in to state. What I am told, and I'm happy to confirm this is that there is a new study that suggests that, that the state is evaluating and we will evaluate too. That is a study that we have not seen previously. It's one study, we take it obviously every study seriously, but we have to evaluate that and as I understand it, the state is in the process of evaluating that as well. Go ahead.

Question: This is a question for the Mayor and the Speaker, are you allowing your staffers to telecommute?

Mayor: I can say for the city we're looking at and trying to act quickly on those who can. Now we are different from the private sector, obviously. We have a lot of areas of work in New York City government because we do public service. Bluntly, the private sector is there to make money and God bless them, but they're – you know, they have more flexibility in some cases than we have, but a very, very high percentage of city employees can only do their work by being out in the field or being at a government facility, but where we can find some space for telecommuting, we're going to try and do that quickly. That's the ongoing effort. We'll know more about that soon.

Speaker Johnson: We're looking into it. We haven't started it yet. We've been having conversations with DCAS, the city agency that makes decisions for agencies across the city on these types of things, in conjunction with the Mayor's Office, but we are looking into both telecommuting and also staggering work hours. Those are things that we're looking at. We don't have a final plan yet, but the last few days we have been trying to put a plan in place. We tried to look back and see what happened during Hurricane Sandy. What happened during 9-1-1, were there lessons to be learned as it related to government workers and measures that they took? And so, we're looking at the past to see if there are lessons to be learned that will inform a potential policy that we figure out towards the end of this week, I think.

Question: My assumption, please correct me up if I'm wrong, is that the Council staffers can do work remotely whereas like maybe some City agency workers wouldn't be able to do that. So, can you speak a little bit to what those roles would be and, like, the reason why, I guess, there's such a delay?

Speaker Johnson: It's complicated. So, it's complicated because when we talk about City Council staff, you have the district office staff who work in the members' offices who are dealing with primarily constituent and community-driven issues and complaints. And so, a lot of constituents are calling local Council members offices wanting to get information. So, if you didn't have folks actually at that telephone, you'd need to find a way to redirect those calls in an appropriate way where you're still being responsive to New Yorkers as their local elected official – that's number-one. Number-two is, the way we currently track complaints in the Council is through something called CouncilStat, and CouncilStat does not have the ability to be remotely accessed. It can only be accessed from 250 Broadway, the central offices, or the member offices for security reasons. If you have people work from home, you wouldn't have the ability to have the same access to case files or to log complaints in the same way. That's different than 250 Broadway where you have the folks that are working in the legislative budget, general counsel, administrative services, land-use divisions who are doing that work every single day. So, we have to take those things into consideration as make a decision like this. And those are some of the things that we're looking at right now.

Question: Can you just describe the process of when people who have been in quarantine and they're getting checked up on or having the tests, I mean, does the Department of Health – is there a protective measure that goes into that?

Mayor: You mean the mandatory?

Question: The mandatory, yeah.

Mayor: So just – I'll start and then to the Commissioner. So, the mandatory is a daily phone call and then the spot checks several times a week – and that spot check is in person.

Commissioner Barbot: Right, the spot checks are in person and we talked to the individual through the door.

Question: And the second question is [inaudible] that's coming into the West side of Manhattan on Sunday, you know, let's say a New York City resident gets off, is there any kind of checking to make sure, okay, you have a 100.4 or higher fever, you live in Brooklyn – but how they get home – you know, is there a concern of maybe someone says, I want to take the seven train home and [inaudible] been a concern that someone who may have it and who hasn't been tested –

Mayor: Yeah, it's a very good question. I think, you know, we are – this is sort of uncharted territory to us, greeting cruise ships. So, I think we're going to have to figure out the right way to do that. Obviously, anyone who needed medical care, you know, we have ambulances, but I think that's a very good question. If we got someone who it's appropriate for them to go home and isolate, we want to make sure they get home safely. Obviously, we'd like that to be as simple a procedure as possible. Maybe we – something we can do to facilitate that, but it's literally brand new, something we're dealing with today. So, unless you have another answer, I think we will get back with more detail tomorrow.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, I would say that we collaborate with the CDC and along with EMS to see if we need to transport anybody. So, we'll be playing, I think, for right now, a coordinating role along with CDC. More details to follow.

Question: [Inaudible] Mr. Mayor and Mr. Speaker. You know, today, you decided to cancel your State of the City speech, which attracts several hundred people you mentioned, and you guys still aren't – or, the Mayor still isn't saying whether he wants to cancel the St. Patrick's parade, which brings about 2.1 million people. Why did you decide to cancel, you know, your State of the City speech, and what do you personally think? Do you think the Sr. Patrick's Parade should be canceled?

Speaker Johnson: I'm not in the position to say that about the parade at this point, because, again, as you've heard from the Governor and the Mayor, the health commissioners and the top staff who are working with the Governor and the Mayor make these decisions on a day-to-day basis, given the most current information that they have, and we want to be honest with New Yorkers and say that we understand the fear and concern that are out there, but we don't want to induce panic by making rushed decisions way ahead of time. The Mayor and the Governor and their teams continue to talk and I'll let the Mayor answer that question on when would be the appropriate time to actually figure that out. As it relates to my State of the City, my State of the City is not a, sort of, necessary event. It's not something that has to happen on a certain day.
I've been excited about it and I've been working on it for a long time. I've been practicing the speech. I've been doing a tremendous amount of work in the last many weeks and months, but it's not really about that. It's about in this situation that we're in right now for events that are not entirely necessary that can be postponed, especially when I was going to have, I think, a significant number of people coming that have many of the underlying health issues that you've heard about every single day. And I didn't want to cut those people out of the event and I didn't want to in any way endanger them by having them come to the event. So, out of an abundance of precaution, and talking to some of the people who are at this table here, we made the decision to do this and I hope that at some point we can have it in the future, but it's out of an abundance of caution and on larger wide-scale events that you're talking about, public events like the St. Patrick's Day Parade, again, I want to hand it off to the Mayor. He is looking at this information every single day to make determinations like that.

Mayor: Exactly right. And so, let's just separate this into two concepts. Any organization, any business that is holding an event and makes a decision that they want to cancel the event for their own reasons, that's their right. But the question of the City's decision based on every – I agree with what the Speaker just said – every piece information we take in daily, hourly, all the work we're doing with the State, et cetera. We are not canceling any events until and unless we say we're canceling them, it's as simple as that. So, it's not – with real respect, your question suggested indecision. There's no indecision. We're not canceling events – that's today, at this hour. If at any point we decide to cancel some events, we'll tell you and we'll tell you why. If we cancel others, we'll tell you, we'll tell you why. But based on the information we have, we are not canceling events.

Anyone who has not gone in round two? Go ahead –

Question: I have a couple of questions. The first one was about the CUNY system. I know a lot of universities around the country are reacting [inaudible] at what point would you do something differently?

Mayor: We don't control the CUNY system, the State does. And again, we respect the State – is making a variety of decisions. We're working closely with them but they obviously have the right to make their own decisions. I would say with the private universities, we certainly want to make sure they are consulting with public health officials as they're making their deliberations. The fact is – and we've seen different things from different universities – most of them seem to be filing a pattern of they're actually keeping a lot of activities going, dorms open, et cetera, but going to distance learning because they feel they can do that easily. But the CUNY decision would have to be made by the State.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I don't think we have all those details now. And again, that's part of the reality of more and more cases and we're catching up on the profiles. That one's obviously high profile, so we'll make it a point to come back for the next briefing with the details on where that stands and the tracing of that case. Back there –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: There's no hostility. I don't understand that. And if there's any – again, a lot of you in the media who are talking to people who have concerns, we want to know who those – not in a negative way, you can do it very discreetly – we need to know who is misinformed or has a concern or needs help or needs information. If you'll flow them through to our press office, we'll follow up. There's no hostility – if a senior center wants to have people masks, that's their choice in a free country. We're not advising it –

Commissioner Barbot: Right.

Mayor: We don't believe – where we believe the masks are necessary are for folks who are constantly working with people in a health care setting, for example, on folks who are already sick to protect them from spreading. But it is a free country, if someone wants to wear a mask because it makes them feel better that's alright. Doctors, am I saying anything wrong here?

Commissioner Barbot: Nope, I agree.

President Katz: And people do wear masks on regular days before this.

Mayor: Yes, this is not the first time.

President Katz: So, if it makes someone feel better, we're not [inaudible].

Mayor: That's great. And there's no – there's not going to be any hostility. There's not going to be any negative consequences.

Speaker Johnson: Can I just say one thing, Mr. Mayor? I mean, if you're talking about hostility from the public, if you're talking about hostility from New Yorkers, then we have said at every single press conference over and over and over again, and there have been some incidences that have been put on social media of New Yorkers being attacked, discriminated against because they are Asian and wearing a mask in public. What you're hearing, I think, from the Mayor is, there's no hostility from anyone in government for them making those decisions. But for New Yorkers that may be discriminating against people, the Mayor will saying it, the Governor will keep saying it, the Health Commissioner will keep saying it, I will keep saying it – unacceptable, cut it out, you're making the situation worse in New York City by inciting more fear. We need to treat each other with respect. We need to take the precautions, but that does not mean discriminating at someone because they are Asian. It does not mean discriminate against someone because they may be Jewish. No discrimination. Let's go by the facts. Let's not go by fear. Let's go by science. No hostility towards anyone in New York City. It doesn't help anyone.

Mayor: Exactly. I want to thank the Speaker because he's been outspoken on this point and I appreciate it. Look, discrimination is illegal in New York City. Let's just go back to the beginning. A number of us have gone out into Asian communities to show solidarity, to remind people to keep going to communities and shop and participate in the life of the community. I'm going to keep doing that. You will see me out in the community more. But discrimination is illegal, it's immoral, and for any discrimination that violates our human rights laws, there will be consequences. For anything that constitutes a hate crime, there will be an NYPD investigation. So, I've heard people – I know people are very, very fearful and concerned in Asian communities in general, and particularly in the Chinese community. My message is abundantly clear – New York City stands with you. If there's any instance of a hate crime or discrimination we need it reported immediately. You can call 3-1-1 in terms of any discrimination. You can call the NYPD, obviously, or go to a police precinct, whatever makes sense. We want to get all of those reports so we can follow up to ensure there are consequences against the perpetrators.

Question: [Inaudible] one of the plans to replenish that [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: So, we will put in an order to the CDC. The one thing I will say is that with the increasing capacity of the commercial labs, you know, we are looking forward to having, as was said earlier, the capacity to do thousands of tests across the city.

Question: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: I think it's other companies that are also providing reagents. And so, I think all of us together. You know, initially we had thought that the CDC test was going be ready to go at a particular time and they had internal technical issues. You know, and so I'm sort of hedging my bets to be totally honest because it's not something that we control definitively, but we are certainly looking forward to receiving the next batch when we need it.

Mayor: And I think it just – I'm sorry to follow the question, just a prompt here. Look, at when we started out – again, remember, as recently as a week ago, Monday we didn't have any of this stuff and that was really, really problematic. Having it first be our public health lab, then expanding to the private labs, that was great, but the vast majority of the capacity is the private labs. We're working well with them. Again, the automation will be a whole much better situation. But I think, Commissioner, it's right to say, so long as between the public health lab, H + H, and the private labs, there's always capacity to do testing. It's fine either way, right? I mean, we can work with any and all of those pieces.

Commissioner Barbot: Exactly.

Question: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: No, they're still having their own test.

Question: [Inaudible]

President Katz: H + H alone has a thousand ventilators. And so, we represent about 20 percent of the inpatient volume. So, I would times it by five to have a rough estimate of what's available in the city itself.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: He just said that. He said, you can assume that since there are 20 percent of the health care system, just assume parity – 5,000 would be a good rough working number. We can check that. I would assume the voluntaries have at least as much resources that you have proportionally.

President Katz: Yes, absolutely. 

Mayor: We can verify, but I think 5,000 is a good working number now.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I just want to start and then pass to the Commissioner, saying, remember New York State – you know, we are a big part in New York State, obviously, 8.6 million people, but there's even more people outside in New York City in New York State, and the Wadsworth Lab plays a crucial role for the whole rest of the state. But go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, I mean, is your question if we have our own kits or if we share kits? I don't understand your question.

Question: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: Well, we have our independent kits and we can order independently from the CDC.

Mayor: Okay. We're going to finish up. Let's go this way through these last few.

Question: [Inaudible] St. Patrick's again [inaudible] from your office – did anyone of your office [inaudible] today [inaudible] –

Mayor: I'm sorry, I heard NYPD and OEM –

Question: Has your office met with NYPD [inaudible] –

Mayor: OEM – she is right there. Right there is OEM, but go on – what's the question about NYPD?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Let me just start and pass to you. Again, that NYPD is always going to look at the broader security concerns around St. Patrick's – logistics, et cetera, safety. This is, you know, the new fact – but that's every single year. The new factor here is on the health side of the equation, so we'll certainly be well coordinated, but that decision is going to be with the health care professionals, ultimately.

Commissioner Criswell: Yeah. The only thing that I'll add is, you know, we have representatives from all City agencies working in task forces every day at the Emergency Operations Center, looking at not just the St. Patrick's parade, but a variety of other things. And so, we're continually looking, working with the Health Department to determine what decisions we need to make.

Mayor: Okay. Final round over. I've got one, two, three, four and that'll be it. Go ahead.

Question: Michael Bloomberg launched a coronavirus response network for mayors. Will you be joining that?

Mayor: I don't know anything about it, but I'm happy to work with all my fellow mayors. I've been working with the U.S. Conference of Mayors, have been in regular touch with them. I think we're doing a conference call with mayors around the country on Friday. But if there's something else that will help us, we're happy to work with everyone.

Question: I was curious if Health and Hospitals cause any capacity for telemedicine, considering the current of the virus outbreak? Like, are there any plans in the works to have telehealth services to people who then you could kind of screen [inaudible] saying you might have coronavirus why don't you come on and then we're prepared for it?

President Katz: Yeah, so we actually have pretty good telemedicine, especially when you realize that in most cases for symptom review a regular telephone would work just fine. You don't generally need to see the person. So, we would mostly do voice, but we do have the ability to do a full telephonic evaluation.

Question: [Inaudible]

President Katz: Well, obviously, the phone is fully available. The telephonic right now is more limited.

Mayor: No, you said the phone and the telephonic –

President Katz: I'm sorry, the video is more –

Mayor: The video is more limited. The phone is very available. Okay. Who had last two? One –

Question: I wanted to get some clarity on, you mentioned that you're not testing people who are asymptomatic and self-quarantined – are you not doing that because there's not enough tests available? And another – my last question is, are you guys planning to do like a borough breakdown of coronavirus cases at any point?

Mayor: So, we were simply trying to get information out in aggregate over time. I'm sure we can do a borough breakdown as well. So, if you guys will follow up on that. On the – I think, Dr. Barbot, it would be helpful to just clarify again, we're going to have asymptomatic people who remain asymptomatic and if someone is asymptomatic through the entire reality, you know, that says a lot obviously. And our central concern is symptomatic people where – that's where the concern is about spreading the disease and obviously their own health needs because they're symptomatic. So, I think helping people understand why it is not our priority to test the asymptomatic – capacity is an issue, but it's much more about prioritization. We want to get to the folks who need the help first and not do a lot of extraneous testing compared to those in need.

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, Mr. Mayor. So, the priority is those individuals that are at greatest risk, so over 50 and have one of the five chronic underlying diseases that we mentioned – additionally, individuals who may be very sick and hospitalized. We are not recommending – we will not test asymptomatic people because they are not the ones that are responsible for spreading the illness.

Question: So, it has nothing to do with the fact that you guys don't have enough tests?

Mayor: It has to do with prioritizing the people we should be focused on. And again, we started with a very limited testing supply. We're now getting more and more. If we get the authorization on the automated, we'll have an abundant supply of testing, which is really what we want. But this is about testing the people who need to be tested. We don't want a situation where everyone in New York City says, I just want a coronavirus test despite the fact I show no symptoms whatsoever, have no nexus to travel, no nothing. It's much more pinpoint than that. And again, against the city of 8.6 million people, the numbers still remain very limited. We want to focus on the people who have a need.

Question: Two questions on the kids. You said you have – the number of kids you currently have. Does that mean your capacity as a thousand people to test? Is that accurate? And then, what's the order of priority for you guys? Is it more CDC tests? The automated tests –

Mayor: The automated. The automated is whole ballgame. That takes you from – that guarantees you're getting to thousands a day and quick turnaround. We need those two things.

Question: And then finally, Mr. Mayor, have you canceled any of your political travels on behalf –

Mayor: I have no political travel, so there's nothing to cancel.

Question: You haven't canceled any plans to go –

Mayor: I literally – listen to the actual answer. I had none scheduled, so there was none to cancel.

Okay, everybody we'll have more for you tomorrow. Thank you.

Question: Mayor, could you try to do these on time? I know it's like –

Mayor: We can't until we're ready. If there's constant – it's a fair question, but this is literally ever evolving. We're not coming out until we can answer every one of your questions. So, we – again guys, we're estimating the best start time, but, as you saw, the Governor's press conference brought out a lot of information right ahead. We can only do what we can only do. I'll ask Freddi to be conservative – the one time I'll ask you to be conservative in your timing, because we obviously don't want you waiting for no reason. But if we are getting breaking information and details, the last thing we want to do is come out and we can't answer your questions.

Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-11 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Welcome everybody. Thank you for being here. I am joined by Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services; our Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot, who you'll hear from in a moment; our Emergency Management Commissioner, Deanne Criswell; our Commissioner for Community Affairs, Marco Carrion; our Commissioner for Immigrant Affairs, Bitta Mostofi. Thank you.

Want to say at the outset, people all over New York City are depending on all of you and, the fact is, that's not anything new and I think everyone in this room knows that, that the work you do is for so many New Yorkers, many cases their first source of information, in many cases the source of information they trust the most, a place they turn to make sure they really know what's going on from people that they have faith in. And I want to thank you for what you do every day, but I also want to thank you for the work you've all been doing in the last few weeks. This is a complex situation dealing with a disease that's literally brand new to the world, just months old. A lot we're still trying to learn. Everyone's trying to learn about, you know, getting information out in this atmosphere is particularly important. And so thank you for all the work you've done to inform your communities. I think it's making a very big difference. So we've gathered together in different times when we've been challenged, when we've been at crisis. This one really is different. Thank you. Also want to thank you, I want to acknowledge and thank Dr. Mitchell Allen, the Chief Medical Officer for our Health and Hospitals system. Thank you for joining us. We have been up against many, many challenges as New Yorkers, but a still little understood disease facing the entire globe, challenging the entire globe, an ever shifting environment. This creates dynamics we really haven't faced before or certainly not in recent memory. And the fact that new information comes in literally by the hour and is effecting our approach and strategies adds to these dynamics. So, I just want everyone to understand that at the outset.

The scientific community is trying to understand this disease and there's new information coming up every day, including from our own health workers here in New York City. All levels of government are trying to come up with the right strategic decisions, but based on information that changes frequently. I do want to emphasize, I think the situation in the United States, America is by definition different than say Italy. And I think Italy is different than say South Korea. I think South Korea is different than say China, et cetera, et cetera. I think each nation is facing some particular dynamics and circumstances and although it's valuable to look at what we learned from other countries, it is not the whole story, the comparisons aren't inherently imperfect.

I do feel as New Yorkers, we even when dealing with a crisis, we are blessed to have some very, very key and distinct factors in our favor. And we have unquestionably the best healthcare system anywhere in the United States of America and that's both our private voluntary hospitals and nonprofit organizations, and clearly our Health and Hospitals corporation or public hospitals and clinics, we have just a lot more and a lot better healthcare available and a history of making healthcare available to people in a very universal fashion. And even more recently by guaranteeing health care for all New Yorkers, telling people health care will be available to them without any regard – bless you. You sneeze properly, you get up, you get a point. Little bit more to the elbow, but you were close there. The fact that we're not asking documentation status, I want to really emphasize that, anyone who comes for healthcare will not ask documentation status – we want everyone to get the help they need. We're not in our public healthcare system stymied by someone's ability to pay or not. We're going to give them care. People have insurance, we'll draw on that. If they can get insurance and they don't have it already, we'll get them on insurance. But we're not ever going to withhold health care from anyone who can't afford to pay for it. We're trying to demystify the process and get people help, as simply as calling 3-1-1or going online and finding out where they need to go. And again, always knowing that they can turn to our health and hospitals corporation.

So we do have that great advantage. A lot of health care, law quality, Harris County, very accessible healthcare and equal opportunity healthcare. We also have the advantage of New Yorkers. New Yorkers are, I think it's fair to say the most resilient people, certainly in America, maybe in the world. And the – I'm very, very impressed by how New Yorkers are handling this crisis, by how much they're listening for the guidance and acting on it, helping each other. We need that. I said the other day, and I'll emphasize this is not just a crisis that the government takes care of for you and we'll call you when it's over. That's not how this works. Everyone has to be a part of solving this. So those good common sense personal hygiene adjustments as we just saw make a difference. I'm watching out for those who are most vulnerable, the folks over 50 with those major preexisting conditions, you know, making sure that we're following the guidance every day for folks who need to be quarantined, honoring the quarantine. These are all really, really important things that really will affect the trajectory. And so far I think New Yorkers are really listening and really following through.

So there's a lot of reasons to feel that there's a much stronger hand to play here than has been seen elsewhere. I also would say watching particularly the example of Italy, and so many of you come from different communities in the city, so you appreciate where your ancestors come from. Well, my ancestors are from Italy and Italy had a crisis almost before they knew it was, you know, upon them. I mean, the speed with which that happened in such an unexpected manner, such a fast trajectory, very different than what we've experienced so far. Now we knock on wood and every day it has to be analyzed and assessed. But Dr. Barbot and I, and Dr. Perea-Henze and I, we got together on January 24th and had a press conference at OEM telling New Yorkers that this disease would eventually reach New York City. Not a matter of if, but when, and outlining on January 24th all the precautions and preparations that were in place, didn't have our first case Doctor, I think until, we said March 1st? So we had, you know, five weeks of preparation before even getting a single case as opposed to when I say this with great sorrow for Italy, you know, almost no preparation before they suddenly had a full blown crisis. We have to look at those differences and understand them. That does not mean we're out of the woods by any stretch. We have a long tough battle ahead. Dr. Barbot said, and I've commended her for it, her assessment as a professional is that this will be until September, could be less, could be more, but I want to just let that hang in the air for a moment. Six months. We could be at trying to get this under control and starting to resume some kind of normalcy. So when you put that into perspective of the amount of time we had to prepare, what we have to throw at this challenge against how long we will be working to resolve it. Again, I think we have strengths here that a lot of other places don't have.

Just a couple of other points. The fear out there, everyone knows it's real. The anxiety, the confusion. Dr. Barbot rightly has talked about, you know, not only the physical health dynamics, the mental health dynamics and reminder to everyone, there's a lot of very worried people, anyone can call 24 hours a day, 8-8-8-NYCWELL, and talk to a trained counselor. The anxiety is natural. It's normal. It's not like you on your TV and you get all the answers, right? It's normal – people would be worried even that it could get all the answers because it's a serious disease, but it's even worse when you can't get all the answers because no one has all the answers.

So there's a lot of fear. The best way to fight fear is with information is with a good guidance by all of us showing that we believe in each other and that we can get through this. That's what we're trying to do every day and always tell people what we know and what we don't know, and the fact that sometimes what we know will change. The guidance could very well change. The decisions could change with new information. I will say very quickly, I'm sure it'll come up in discussion, I have been reticent for sure and I'm in constant contact with my colleagues, reticent to take the kinds of actions that might cause a huge number of unintended consequences and other negative dynamics. Easy example, closing schools, and I appreciate the state and the partnership. We've had to determine the right way to address a situation in a school, not with a sledgehammer, if you will, but with a scalpel, not with a full closure of vast numbers of schools for long periods of time, but with a very pinpoint approach to addressing the specific school, the specific needs and then getting that school up and running. Why? Because families depend on those schools for a safe place for those kids. Many families have no alternative. They have no alternative in some cases as a place to get their children quality food and nutrition. By the way, families want to make sure their kids get educated. We all care about health and safety first, but the notion of losing months and months of our children's education should be very troubling to all of us. So we're trying to strike a balance. We can talk about this and many other veins. We're trying to strike a balance. Every day will be a new day in terms of assessing the information we have. So again, it goes back to giving people good information. We depend on you. Reassuring where we can reassure, being honest about what we do and don't know. Giving people guidance about how they can comport themselves and what the best things to do are.

Another very important message. We will not tolerate any discrimination. We will not tolerate any hate crimes. Right now we've seen particularly troubling instances of discrimination directed at Asian communities, particularly in Chinese community. This is unacceptable. We've talked openly and honestly about the fact that too many hate crimes go unreported. I am beseeching you all to tell the members of your communities that they are the victim of a hate crime, it must be reported to the NYPD so we can act on it, so we can find the perpetrators, so there will be consequences, so we can stop someone from doing it to another person. Any act of discrimination could very well be something that constitutes a breaking of the law of the city, which we have a very strong human rights law. So people are discriminated against in employment, in terms of their day to day lives, shopping, housing, anything, we want to know about it, we want to stop it. There's no discrimination. There are no hate crimes that are acceptable, but we have to tell people how crucial it is to report them. Anybody who wants to report such a crime or act to discrimination can call 3-1-1. And obviously that is available in many languages.

So, it's up to all of us to contribute to ending this crisis. Every New Yorker can help. And the information you spread really can empower people to do that. We want to get a lot of information out. This is a – guidance and safety tips, frequently asked questions. This is available now in 15 languages and by Friday it will be 23 languages, so this is all this, these two pages, very, very important basic information we want to get out there. Please get this around to all your communities. It will also be available at nyc.gov/coronavirus.

This is a flyer – Stop the Spread – very informative, basic flyer. A lot of great information here. This is available in seven languages and by Friday will be 23 languages. This happens to be an example of the Chinese, we'll get this around to everyone obviously, but you know here on one clear page is a lot of the most important things for people to know and including one of my personal favorites. If you're sick, don't go to work. If you're sick, don't send your – if your kid's sick, don't send your kid to school. Let's really do the basics here. That alone could have a huge positive consequence in terms of ending this crisis. That will be an advertising campaign, multimillion dollar public advertising campaign with the Stop the Spread message. Subway ads are already up in English, Spanish and Chinese. There'll be TV ads in English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin. Those will start Friday. There'll be TV next week, TV ads in starting next week, Korean, Russian, Hindi, Punjabi, Vietnamese and Japanese. And as I turned to Dr. Barbot simply to say obviously we're holding a press conference, we expect questions, but I also welcome information, insights about what you see in your communities, concerns that are being raised. So not just traditional questions where we're giving you an answer as a government, but we welcome your feedback. We welcome your observations as well.

With that, Dr. Barbot –

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So I want to start off where the Mayor also began to remind New Yorkers that we have an incredible resource here in the city, NYCWell, and I want to just remind folks of the phone number 8-8-8-NYCWELL. The reason why that's so important is because we recognize that when people hear new information that may sound scary and they're hearing every day of increasing numbers of individuals affected around the world, increasing number of individuals who are dying because of this illness, it may cause anxiety, depression of a variety of reactions and indeed, you know, they may be having family members that are affected in these countries. And so we want them to know that NYCWell is a resource that is available 24/7, any language, you can text as well. And so I've also been saying that anxiety and fear about this illness is not an excuse to spread hate and the best way that New Yorkers can contribute to having a more healthy city is by ensuring that they have all of the correct information. And so we encourage New Yorkers to take advantage of the resources that we have.

I want to just review and summarize what we are learning every day about this virus. When this first began, we were very clear that in what it means to be a novel virus is means that it's never existed before. No one in the world has ever been exposed to this. And so there are a lot of people who are not immune. And when we have that kind of a situation, it's natural that every day we will be learning new things. Initially we thought that this virus was transmitted by prolonged household contact, meaning that people who can track did the illness tended to be members of families or people who live together. And then as we learned more specifically here in the cluster that we have been investigating in Westchester, we are learning more every day. So now we know that it's not just household contacts, it's also people who have spent a significant amount of time together, which can range from having close conversation over a meal or in other situations that might make it easy to transmit the virus. And we may continue to learn more about how this virus behaves, but the important thing is that there are some very basic things that as the city's doctor, I want New Yorkers to always do and those are to wash your hands frequently, best to do it with soap and water, but if you're not close to a water source, to use alcohol based sanitizer. The other thing is that if you cough or sneeze, to do it into your sleeve, not into your hand, and most importantly, if you're sick, don't go to work, don't send your child to school.

What we are learning about this illness is that while people may present with symptoms of fever and cough, fever and shortness of breath, it's not like the flu. Sometimes you know when we get the flu, you're fine one day and the next day you feel like you got hit by a truck. What we're learning about this is that people generally present with mild symptoms, some cough, a little bit of fever, and they still go to work. We don't want them to do that anymore because while you are symptomatic, you can transmit the virus. We want people to stay home, stay home 48 hours. And if you're not feeling better, typically what we're seeing is people start developing shortness of breath. We want people to reach out to their doctors and let them know what the symptoms are. And then their doctor will make the clinical decision about whether they get the more common tests we've been talking about BioFire, that's positive, then they will give you the appropriate treatment, where if that's negative, then they will do the COVID-19 test. So that's the very sort of simple overview of what we've learned, what we recommending to New Yorkers. The other thing I want to say is that when you are sick, we are asking businesses to help support workers stay at home so that if businesses can implement working from home, ensuring that staff have an opportunity to do what they need to do, we want to encourage that. But again, we don't want folks to be going into work when they are sick. Additionally, I want to say that – I want to echo a very important point that the Mayor made, which is we are committed as a City to ensuring that individuals who need access to care have access to care. And that's why it's so important that we have NYC Care so that it's a guarantee for New Yorkers who may be feeling not only these symptoms but have any other medical needs and have access to care. And I want to remind the New Yorkers that we don't ask folks about their immigration status. We, if people are uninsured, we work with them to get them insured and that shouldn't be a reason not to access care.

The last thing I will say is that over the – I was going to say over the last few months, because it feels like it's been that long. But since the beginning of this outbreak, we have been reaching out to a number of different communities to ensure that not only are we putting things out on our website, not only are we doing these press conferences, but we are making ourselves available for meetings and communities to answer questions that individuals may have. And so we were, we are going to continue that. And as the mayor said, and as I have said before, we're in this for the long haul and we need all New Yorkers to do their part in slowing the spread of COVID-19.

Mayor: Thank you very much. Commissioner.

Mayor: Two other quick points before we open it up. One, I want to make sure I'm giving you the up to the minute information about the number of confirmed cases in New York City. This morning that was 46, now is an update to 53, so that's again, starting on March 1st until now, 53 confirmed cases. Also an hour or so ago I spoke to the chair of the St. Patrick's Parade Committee, Sean Lane. He and his colleagues are talking through the situation with the St. Patrick's Parade. We're also in close consultation with the State and the Governor's Office on this. First, I want to understand the intentions of the parade organizers. I know they are trying to very quickly decide if they think there is a context for them to continue or not. We're waiting to hear that back. But certainly the City and State are looking at the situation as well and I think we will have resolution on all of this today or tomorrow, either way, but trying to always do these decisions in consultation as much as possible with the organizations involved. Okay. With that. Want to take questions? We'll start on this side. Go ahead.

Question: New York 1 is reporting that this St. Patrick's parade has been called off –

Mayor: We are waiting for confirmation. We heard that too. But again, from the information I had in the last conversation that was not confirmed. So I want t -

Question: So what was the discussion that you've had with the parade –

Mayor: I don't want to get into details of a private discussion simply to say the, I think it was a very thoughtful conversation where clearly the folks who run the parade are very, very concerned for everyone's health and wellbeing. They obviously also have a tremendously beloved annual event that's been going on for hundreds of years literally and want to be very careful and smart about it. So we're all in consultation. If they have made that final decision as confirmed, well that will end the discussion. If there's more to be done, again between us and them and the State, I believe that all be resolved today or tomorrow.

Question: Did you and Commissioner Barbot personally tell the Parade organizers that you wanted this –

Mayor: I'm not going to go into a private conversation. We're weighing all the factors with them.

Question: Did you speak Commissioner Barbot –

Mayor: Again, that's all there is to say to it. Go ahead.

Question: You spoke about those who are uninsured, but there are people in the City and can't afford to stay at home.

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Because they are undocumented and they need the work. So what is this city planning on doing for those people?

Mayor: Well, I want to make sure I'm understanding your question. Right now, again, our goal is to be smart about the public health needs of this city, but also keep the city running as best possible. Keep people employed. We obviously care deeply about people's livelihoods. I'm very worried about, you know, there's literally millions of New Yorkers who if they lost, you know, even a week of pay would be in real tough shape. So we're trying to balance all those factors. But let me understand your specific question?

Question: Okay. That was the question because you spoke earlier about people feeling sick and having to stay home –

Mayor: Yes.

Question: But with some people, they cannot work remotely because of the type of job that they have. So that means that if they stay home because they [inaudible]

Mayor: Right.

Question: They might end up losing –

Mayor: Let's talk about that. It's a great question. So this is going to be a combination of Dr. Barbot talking about how long it normally takes to understand if someone is sick with coronavirus or not, but also paid sick days. So obviously for all New Yorkers with a very few exceptions, for the vast majority of New Yorkers, paid sick days means if your own company does not have a paid sick days policy or your union has not guaranteed you a paid sick day policy, we ensure that many other New Yorkers have such a policy. That's five days each year. That's really important here because that connects to how long it takes to figure out what's going on with someone. There's also real discussion going on at the State and federal level where we would need the help about, you know, trying to extend paid sick days, unemployment insurance, obviously want to see all of that done. But let's start right here at home. Doctor, help us understand what it normally takes to determine from symptoms, what's going on.

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly. So the average time that it takes for someone who has been exposed to COVID-19 to develop symptoms is anywhere around five to six days. It can be as short as two days. And so in that time, most people develop, as I mentioned before, fever and cough, or fever and shortness of breath. And so what we are advising New Yorkers to do is to stay home for the first 48 hours and if they're not getting better, to then reach out to their doctors. What we're also asking doctors to do is to implement things that such as telemedicine, so that instead of someone having to go into the office, they can be assessed either over the phone or through things like FaceTime or other video conferencing. The point being that a patient be assessed to determine whether or not their symptoms are getting better or whether they're getting worse enough so that they need to be seen in a health care facility.

Mayor: Anyone [inaudible] this row? Yep.

Question: Brooklyn Hospital Center. Are there any updates on those two cases, [inaudible] –

Mayor: In general now I'll start and if anyone has something specific to add, they will. So we said a couple of days ago that just the volume of cases is such that we're not going to be doing individual updates as we were able to do before with a much smaller volume. There will be some exceptions, obviously in particularly notable cases, for example, with public employees will be one of the areas where we'll try and get you more. But generally we're not going to be able to answer specific questions on specific cases. Go ahead.

Question: What is the testing situation? We're still hearing that people can't, there's not enough tests –

Mayor: I'll start and my colleagues will jump in. That's just not accurate. What I think we have here is there, there are people understandably just want the test, right? They don't even have symptoms, they want the test or they have very initial symptoms they want the test to. I don't blame anyone who feels that in this atmosphere, being bombarded by alarming stories. But the first thing and really want people to report this is okay, you feel symptoms, first, you know, don't go to work, don't send your kid to school, et cetera. If, and doctor, you'll - both doctors, you'll correct if you don't like anything.

You know, if your symptoms start to fade over a day or two, that's one thing. If your symptoms manifest and continue or get worse, that's another thing. Anything that seems like it's sustained, we want someone to get to medical care and get tested for the more traditional - I'm using my own term - more traditional diseases. Before we ever heard of coronavirus, there were lots of other diseases that would cause those kinds of symptoms. And there is a test called BioFire, which is very typically given by physicians that rules in or rules out. Is it 29? I keep losing this please.

Commissioner Barbot: 26.

Mayor: 26. I'm sorry – I said 29 – 26 common if you will diseases. If you have one of those diseases, you have one of those diseases. If you don't have one of those diseases and you have sustained symptoms consistent with coronavirus, then we want you tested for coronavirus. If you just came back from one of the countries and have symptoms, then one of the countries that were, you know, obviously a deeply affected and have symptoms, right? We want to get you tested. If you have a direct nexus to an existing coronavirus case and have symptoms, we want to get your test tested. But you know, if any one of us just woke up in the morning and said, jeez this seems really controversial, I'd like to get tested. That's not what we're going to accommodate right now. It's not for lack of testing capacity. It is I think intelligent prioritization. Anyone want to add?

 

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: Yes. Let me see if it's on.

Mayor: I will also say just one thing that the doctors have a rule with me. If I say anything that's a little off, they will jump in and correct.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: We certainly know that.

Mayor: You're not shy.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: So let's talk about the capacity. Right now the Public Health Lab here in New York City, which is one of the premier labs in the country can do up to 60 to 80 tests a day. You may all be aware of all the issues that we had where the CDC and the FDA and the federal government being slow and then sending us, you know, chemicals for the test that didn't work. The Mayor really was constantly asking and relieved – demanding that the federal government allowed us to do our testing here locally. Now we have that testing. As of today, two commercial labs, our online Quest and LabCorp, and also H + H that works with Northwell, and many other hospital labs are going to be online. I was on a call with the Governor's staff earlier today in which he announced that 28 more labs statewide would be now approved to do more testing.

We literally went, one by one, you know, and some can do 150, 200 like Columbia, Cornell Montefiore, Mount Sinai, and the expectation is that by the end of the week collectively we will all have around 5,000 – the capacity to do 5,000 tests a week. The public health lab here has two kits from the CDC. Each one of those kits can do a thousand tests each and they already put in for another order. As the commercial labs continued to expand their capacity, obviously that's where most of the testing will be done, not so much of the Public Health Lab. That was our first line of defense. And so hopefully in the coming days we will have the ability to test all of the categories that the Mayor just outlined very explicitly.

Mayor: Okay. Go on back. Yes.

Question: Today the CDC stopped [inaudible] Oversight Committee that they are trying to do with second type of test called surveillance testing in which you go out into the community itself and do proactive testing, and that's six communities around the United States so far are participating in that. Is New York City going to be participating in that?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: We just – go ahead. Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: So we are part of that six cities that were participating in surveillance and we've talked about earlier that our early detection system, and that's been one of the ways in which we have identified new cases.

Question: How does that work?

Commissioner Barbot: So we work with hospitals around the city and samples that have been previously collected. We then test for COVID-19.

Question: Have you found anything through the surveillance testing?

Commissioner Barbot: We have found positive COVID-19. I mean the reality is we've talked about the fact that there is a community transmission, widespread community transmission, and what that means is that currently where we are in the outbreak, a New Yorker is probably as likely, if not more likely to contract COVID-19 from someone who has not traveled than someone who has traveled.

Mayor: Okay. Excuse me. That's enough. I got to get to other people.

Question: Yeah. My name is Javier Castano from Queens Latino and this morning, I was distributing my paper and many people ask me this question is why [inaudible] universities or the school or the all chat classes that take place in a place in a room like this with 50 people. So what is developing?

Mayor: So first of all, each institution is making its own decision right now. And what I was seeing is a mix. Columbia University decided the other day to go to online classes because that's something they can do easily, but they were keeping dorms open and other activities open. So it's going to be, you know, each one will make its own decision while we're working with them to try and figure out, you know, what are the smart standards going forward? And it's obviously about what – again, this is, this is where people have to play a role if we're going to get through this. Its people being smart about if you yourself are sick, don't go to a gathering. Being very mindful of the folks who are older and have those preexisting conditions. But also trying to strike a balance because there is a profound danger if you just start shutting down everything, you're going to lose a lot of other things that we depend on in the dynamics of that, like people's livelihoods.

And when people don't have a livelihood, there's a lot of consequences to that too. So we're trying to strike a balance all the time. It's very clear from what we know that this is a disease that transmits in a particular way, not in every way. And I think if you look at some of the reporting out there, you would think, you know, you just have to look at someone with coronavirus and you'll get it or, you know, walk into a room someone was in a day before. So no it's very direct contact and then fluid transmission, we don't know everything. And you know, the doctor could tell me tomorrow that there's new research that tells us something new. But after all of us talking about it for six weeks straight, we really do believe this is, you know, very direct contact, fluid transmission is what is the essence of this. So we want decisions made carefully and when we get to a point of needing to give some very specific guidance beyond what we've given now we will, if we get to the point of needing to instill - or utilize very specific tangible emergency measures, we would do that. But right now it's day by day, case by case.

Question: Mr. Mayor –

Mayor: Only people have not gone please. I'm sorry. We're going to – we got lots of hands so that's all we're going to do today is one round per person. Go ahead –

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: Let me add something that I think all of you should, as the Mayor said, could help us with. Remind people that 80 to 90 percent of all of us could be touched and we are going to be okay. We may have mild symptoms, as the Mayor keeps saying, also remind everyone that we need to protect those most at risk and those are our seniors and people who have this preexisting conditions. Only one percent of the population that has been affected worldwide right now is in serious conditions. The average age, you know, in some – in China and some of the places is 81-years-old. We don't have that many cases, but please remind people that it's okay to try to live a normal life as much as possible with the precautions that we continue to address.

Mayor: Okay, this side. People have not gone go.

Question: Yes. I, I just wanted to ask about how long the virus lasts on surface as you understand it?

Mayor: Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: So there's a range. Laboratory studies have shown that the virus can survive for hours. Real world scenarios indicate that the virus may live anywhere from like two to five minutes. I think the real question should be how can New Yorkers best protect themselves? And that's, you know, the answer is going back to the basics of hand-washing and covering your mouth and your nose when you cough or you sneeze. I think having the additional information of the importance of just basic cleaning is also important. Part of what we haven't talked enough about is the behavioral changes that we as a society need to go through and to remind ourselves that every time we're are wiping a surface, every time we are washing our hands that it's not just about doing it for ourselves, but it's for doing it for our neighbors as well.

Question: Okay, and just to follow up on that though, because there was a study and it was published today according to the this news report today, that found that the viable virus could be detected up to three hours later in the air and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel. And I'm just wondering like if the City has been able to evaluate that study and draw that into what you all are recommending people because this study is saying it could be up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel.

Commissioner Barbot: So on a daily basis, we're looking at all studies that are coming out. You know, scientists across the world, they're studying all aspects of this. I think the important thing here to note is the difference between surviving in a laboratory setting and being able to actually transmit the virus in a way that it causes illness. And so I don't want New Yorkers to come away thinking that in any way, shape or form they have to worry more about one particular surface or another. The important thing is to focus on the fact that hand-washing, covering your mouth and your nose when you cough, is an appropriate way, not only in the beginning, but it will be an appropriate way in the middle, and it was always be an appropriate way to protect yourself and your family towards the end of the outbreak.

Mayor: Okay, we're going to finish this side, one per – one round each, go. 

Question: Okay. So a number of a dim sum parlors in Sunset Park, the Eater reported that, is there anything that the city can do to help those business and employees when they are close?

Mayor: Yeah, I mean the, the things we've put out there already that for businesses under a hundred employees we can do no interest loans of up to 75,000 for businesses have fewer than five employees. We can do direct grants up to 40 percent of their – I think its operating expenses is the basis I need to check that – but substantial direct grant. That's one thing we're looking for. Any other relief we can find. Look, we're also telling people to not avoid restaurants, not avoid you know, the normal things they would do. This does not transmit through food or drink. Again, I constantly am peppering the doctors with questions, common sense questions that they are adamant. All of our healthcare experts are adamant. You don't get this disease by eating food in a restaurant or you know, eating takeout or drinking something. It is neutralized in your digestive system.

You get it through cough, sneeze, or spit and you know, through people talking in spit coming out inadvertently for example. And it has to go directly into your mouth, nose, or eyes. So people should go out and continue to live life, should go out to restaurants, and obviously we don't want any discrimination. That's unacceptable. But for businesses that are hurting, we'll try and give them support. We're hoping that we'll see other federal support as well. And I'd hope they can hang on, because you know, this is, this is something that'll be with us, but it will be with us for a finite period of time. Go ahead.

Question: For relief for small businesses, March 15th, deadline for income tax for '19, will administration consider an extension without [inaudible]

Mayor: Yeah, we'll look at that. I have to get clear about how, what we do interrelates with the State, but we'll certainly going to see if there's a way to provide some relief there.

Question: To the degree that some businesses are being proactive and staggering employee schedules and doing the best they can to have [inaudible] is there a clinical medical basis for that kind of move? Is that a good idea?

Mayor: Yes –

Question: Secondly – and if you could explain why that is and make that clear. And then secondly, is the City planning on doing the same?

Mayor: So, I'll start and the doctors can jump in. Yes – the answer to the first question, yes. There's a basis, it's just trying to take away the dynamics where people are on in unusually close circumstances, like a crowded New York City subway car in rush hour where, you know, God forbid, someone coughs or sneezes and can't get their elbow up in time. You know, you could be right there in front of them. That's a real thing. We want to try and just create a little more space, a little more openness, staggering work hours, allowing more people to telecommute really, really helps. So, that's the basis. The doctors can give you a more elegant answer. We are looking at it for the city, but I said in several press conferences, we do have a different dynamic. We are here to serve people. We are not profit-making enterprise.
We have less flexibility because our people have to be where they have to be when they have to be, you know? We have to – our first responders, our teachers, our health experts, you know, our nurses, our doctors have to be where we need them. But to the extent with some of our employees, we can create more staggering or telecommuting, we will. We're still working out how to do that.

Just timeout before these two – just looking to the communications people, going to remind you all the importance of keeping a running list of concerns. For example, the potential of moving the tax date. I want us to quickly answer all we can answer today, tomorrow, consistently keep a running list of the answers we're providing to our colleagues in the media. Do you do want to add on the why of the staggering?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: I'll do a quick one. The main point is to avoid crowds where contagion transmission will be easier. So, by staggering time we're trying to diminish crowds and subways and buses and office settings, which will probably lead to less opportunities for transmission.

Mayor: And I think there's a particular concern about, sort of – there's close, and then there's super close. You know people on a crowded – really truly crowded in New York City subway car in rush hour are amongst the closest people to each other in the world, right? That we want – that's the kind of thing we want to open up. But we, again, don't want to go to the point without the hardest evidence of creating so much momentum for shutting things down that we undermine people's day to day lives, undermine how parents take care of their kids, undermine, you know, the availability of employees to take care of what needs, undermine the ability of people to pay for the things they need to pay for in their life. We're really trying to strike that balance. We think that staggering, that telecommuting can be very, very helpful in achieving that.

Okay. Finishing on this side, only people have not gone. I see two more. Go –

Question So, the World Health Organization is – already has updated [inaudible] to a pandemic. They are expected to recommend that governments around the world institute a quarantine. How far are we from that consideration?

Mayor: I can't give you a day or a projection. This is something we are taking in new information all the time. World Health Organization is one source, respect it – doctors, you can amend my layman's statement. I think we can say at this point in time we're looking at all the guidance, but with a bit of a trust-but-verify a worldview. I think we've been a little confused by our own federal government. You know, New York City, our health organizations have extraordinary capacity and extraordinary experience. So, you know, we are very, very mindful of first relying upon ourselves and our own people. But we're looking at CDC, NIH, WHO – all the guidance. But I find a lot of the media questions are about when – you know, when are we going to shut everything down? If I could be so plain. And that's not what we're trying to do. If we have to, we will. It's not what we are yearning to do. We want to try and do this very carefully and see if we can keep a lot of things running for the good of all while keeping people safe. We are not rushing with great joy to the notion of shutting everything down. Look what's happening in Italy right now. Folks, you know, we'll do whatever we have to do to keep people safe, but I am telling you it's going to take Italy not months but years to recover from that level of shutdown. I think we would all agree that's something we should not do lightly.

Last one on that side. Okay. I'll give you an opportunity and then we're going over here. Go ahead.

Question: As a community transmission increases, so is there any possibility the city is considering, you know, sharing information about the confirmed cases – where he or she have been, which train he or she took, which restaurant [inaudible] –

Mayor: No. I'll give you a straight forward no on that. One, we tried in the first weeks to be very transparent, to show people bluntly the opposite of what you saw in some other countries. There's been a direct correlation between countries that were secretive and not transparent with the media and the people, and the massive spread of the disease. We tried to be ultra-transparent about the specific details, the cases, the realities. But now, the number of cases are such that we cannot do that. We just can't accurately give you that kind of information, except, again, in cases that there's a broader public interest in that we understand it's important to provide as much detail as we can. But again – look, these two doctors, plus Dr. Barbot's deputy, Dr. Daskalakis, who is Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control, plus the head of our Health and Hospitals system, Dr. Mitch Katz, and his chief medical officer. They all are the people who are looking at all the information and providing advice on how we proceed. I have never had any of them say we need to tell people whether someone was on a subway car yesterday or a week ago, because that gives anybody any meaningful guidance, because we don't accept the notion that the disease hangs in the air like other diseases. And you two should really – I keep trying my best as a layman, but if it did, if it was a disease, like if you just walked into this room and someone had been here an hour ago who had coronavirus and it's just hanging in the air, we'd tell you, I assure you. It's just not how it works from our understanding. And if the surface issue was resolved and we – also, if we thought the surface issue was how you generally got it, we would tell you that. One, it's not resolved.
Our team thinks it's a very limited a shelf life in real conditions. And second, they just don't think that's generally how people are transmitting, because it takes a lot of steps to find the right service to touch and get it to your mouth or nose or ears really quick. Sorry – eyes, I should say – not ears – not ears. So, we're telling people what we understand, but I do see this consistent, like, what if – I remember this around the individual, the first lawyer from Westchester – the first case that was part of that cluster and people saying, did he take Metro North? And our answer would be, even if he did, we don't know he took Metro North, it has no bearing on anything, because if you took Metro North a week ago, it has no impact on anyone. If someone sat next to him and had a close conversation and contracted it, well, they'll know that for their own reasons. But telling people on Metro North be scared of Metro-North or telling people to be scared of the subways – I remind you all, we went through Ebola, and there were people who are scared because the one patient in the Ebola – and this is an absolutely, you know, Ebola makes, if I could be so cold, coronavirus look like a walk in the park. You know, this was really a high level of guarantee of death, unlike coronavirus. You know, the individual involved had taken the subway, there were people like shut down the subway, except the science didn't comport with that and we kept people going about their lives and we had one case and it was resolved favorably and it did not spread. So, we really have to strike that balance. So, that's me as a layman doing my damnedest. Now, let's let actual experts speak to you.

Commissioner Barbot: I think, Mr. Mayor, you captured it. The only other thing that I would say is that in the very beginning, it's important for us to do the types of in depth investigations that the Mayor was talking about because we wanted to learn whether or not the virus was here in the city or whether it was something that was still just being exported from other countries. And once we established that beyond the shadow of a doubt, the value of continuing to report on in essence the same story but a little variation on the theme doesn't add anything to what we're trying to do in terms of educating New Yorkers about their potential risk, educating New Yorkers about how they can protect themselves and educating New Yorkers about what we're doing as a city in collaboration with New Yorkers to ensure that we slow the spread of the outbreak.

Mayor: Okay. You are the last one on this side. Guys, one round only. I'm going to say it a hundred times – go.

Question: Do you think that the virus will impact things like the Queens Borough President primary election and the Census? And if so, how does the city –

Mayor: So, let's – those are two very different things. Very fair question. We've gotten some people concerned about the special election for borough president. I am really, really hesitant to change an election, ever, for anything. I think it's a very dangerous thing to do in a democracy. So, we'll look at it, but I would say, you know, we'll give it a very careful look. We'll talk to health care experts, we'll consider the dynamics. But right now, it is not my intention to change an existing election. The Census, we don't get to make that call. If the Census is on, it would be absolutely at our peril if we did not proceed with a full-bore effort and that's what we're doing right now. And the Census, by the way, is very individual. I mean it's, you know, people making sure individuals have followed through. The Census doesn't involve, like, calling people to a mass meeting, right? It's really about going out into communities and connecting with people briefly, one-on-one, making sure that they followed through. So, I've heard no suggestion that the Census would be delayed. It's something we should study to see if there is an argument for the federal government to do that in this environment, whether we're going to get an aberrant census and the dangers that could come with that. But until that decision is made and formal, we have to assume it's on and we have to continue our efforts. That would be my argument.

Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, you asked that we should provide information [inaudible] asking questions. The DOE announced recently that they're going to provide sanitizing supplies to private schools [inaudible] schools. One private school I spoke with 700 students said that they went down to pick up the supplies. They were given one bottle of bleach, one pack of paper towels, and three bars of soap.

Mayor: I need to know and my team needs to know exactly – you don't have to say it here, you can give it to us – that's unacceptable.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I need to know that, because that's not what we said we were going to do and not the intention, obviously, because the DOE is a massive operation. It has the resources to support these other schools in a time of crisis. If – and I want to say this about the whole government, if you all believed that before this crisis, the New York City government was operating perfectly, then I want to thank you for your faith in government and ask you about your naiveté. The – or about any institution, any institution of any kind, any business, any organization, anywhere. There's always going to be imperfections. That doesn't make it good, but it's just true. I'm in an atmospheric crisis, it gets harder, but the rules are the rules. We said we need to, and we will, help these organizations. If an organization is not getting the help it needs, I need to know about it, my team needs to know about it, and we'll fix it.

Please –

Question: [Inaudible] 80 to 90 percent of the city would be touched by the coronavirus –

Mayor: No, not at all.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: I said if 80 to 90 percent of us get touched, we will be okay.

Mayor: He was talking about the overall impact of the disease.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: We don't have that projection.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: So, look, again, I'll jump in and then my colleagues can. Guys, I understand, I really do, why you would like to be able to crystal ball the situation and be able to tell – you know, tell your readers and your listeners, your viewers exactly where this is going. If you do that, you'd be the first people to ever successfully – no one is certain. We've got to be comfortable with the fact that uncertainty is a part of life. But here's the certainty part, based on the entire experience of the disease, 80 percent or more of the folks who get it have minimal health impact; 20 percent have a more serious health impact, yet the vast majority of those will survive, will recover. There's a debate about the exact rate of fatality and we don't take that lightly. Even one more person dying is a tragedy, obviously, but we, you know, whatever that is, it is a very small percentage of those who get the disease. So, the Deputy Mayor's point is, whatever the ultimate number of people who do get in New York City, the vast majority are not only going to survive, the vast majority are going to have a very limited experience with a disease. And we've got to keep that in perspective here, and not turn it into something that's not, that's why I use the Ebola – when Ebola was bearing down on us, there was no gray. It was a truly consistently deadly disease. A huge percentage of the people who were affected ended up dead. This is not that. So, we can't tell you how many people can get it. We can tell you it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Anyone want to add or –

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: Just a quick one. This is not measles; it doesn't hang in the air. And I'm old enough to remember, this is not HIV, right? If you get it, you're going to die. The Mayor –

Mayor: HIV in the early years, just to make sure people fully understand – you were around. By the way, Dr. Perea-Henze was working for Health and Hospitals during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic when literally, you know, the city was trying to keep up with an overwhelming crisis and people were dying constantly. So, you do have real perspective.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: And we used to have this anxiety and we used to have these conversations and I can tell you, having been through both, this is much different. The Mayor just said it, you know, pretty accurately.

Question: Thank you. [Inaudible] channel community in New York city. Thank you so much Mr. Mayor, and your colleagues, for your work. I know you [inaudible] everything again, thank you. And I have a question about in the future. Now, that we have a controlled situation, but we don't know exactly what will happen, right? And what do you think – is there chance for the city to be closed in the future because we don't know exactly –

Mayor: So, this is – it's a fine question, but, again, gets to the – I understand everyone wants to both know exactly what's going to happen. We can't help you with that. And there's almost a desire I see in a lot of questions from not only here but other media, you know, tell us all the tools you have and when you're going to use them. And we're keep telling you, we are not going to do that because, one, it would be absolutely inaccurate and misleading. We know the emergency powers we have, I have tremendous emergency powers to shut down all sorts of things, but we are not using them until we are certain it's the right thing to do based on the evidence. Now again, I commend Dr. Barbot constantly for saying something that I think a lot of other people in government wouldn't say, but they should say, which is let's talk to you about how long will this war is going to go on, right? Because you know the famous – I'll use a bad analogy, but it makes the point – down through the ages, certainly in this country, you know, the famous promise, oh we're going to war and it'll be really brief. You know, for those of you who know your history, the phrase the boys will be home by Christmas, you know, or even more recently in presidential history, the mission accomplished in Iraq, right? What Dr. Barbot did, which I was fully supportive of, said the other day, based on her knowledge – September – six months – we will be at this for six months. We may tell you next week we think is going to be longer or maybe we'll catch some amazing lucky break and it's less. But I want people to start to see that. I think we owe people the – sort of to acclimate them and help them understand the battle ahead because everyone's got to be a part of it. So, think about – this is imperfect, but just take it as a working model. The next six months, we're going to be –

[Commissioner Barbot coughs]

Mayor: Did she do it right? Did you do it right?

[Laughter]

Commissioner Barbot: Perfectly.

Mayor: Okay, I'm watching you.

Commissioner Barbot: I'll do it again.

[Laughter]

Mayor: For the next six months, we're going to be dealing with this. We'd like to believe at the end of six months or so, we're sort of now coming out of it and starting to normalize. The numbers that Dr. Perea-Henze put forward about the 80 percent, the 20 percent, we really feel strongly, so you can project whatever number of people get this, you have a pretty clear chart of what's going to happen to those people. Our goal is to keep it a few people as possible. Meanwhile, you say, okay, what about the entire rest of civilization? Think about this for a moment, what about everything else we do? By the way, all of these people up here have to fight all the other diseases too. So, let's put this in perspective. Everything else we do in health care has to continue in the meantime, there's lots of other health care challenges. What we're doing about – I'm not making – you know what we do with heart disease, smoking, all sorts of other challenges. Our police still have to fight crime. We still have to stop traffic fatalities. Then there's a question of people's livelihoods. It is dangerous when people don't have a livelihood. It's dangerous when people cannot afford the rent, food medicine. So, the idea here is to try and balance all these factors even down to the fact that children missing their education is highly problematic. Children over the summer lose some ground in their education. Imagine if our schools were closed for months. What about all the parents who have no place for their kids? What about kids that don't get a meal? So, we're going to do this day by day, hour by hour, and if we make decisions, we're going to try and pinpoint them, which is I think against sort of, bluntly, the American discourse, which looks for you know, absolute certainty, simple, simple answers, yes or no, black or white total instant gratification. We are not near any of that. This is going to be nuanced and difficult and prolonged and we're going to get new information all the time and we're going to have to make smart decisions. But I have to protect the whole equation – 8.6 million people, the whole picture, not just the narrow question of what happens with coronavirus. I'm sorry for the long answer, but I hope that – I hope that answers some of your question.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I respect any school's decision. I do think there's a direct correlation between the schools that have chosen to go to distance learning and either the age of the students or the economic circumstance of the families. College students, if you go to distance learning, you're dealing with adults. You're not dealing with kids who may not have another place to go. You're not dealing with parents who don't have the ability to bring their child to work and desperately need to work, which is a whole lot of people in this town. So, adults, meaning anyone who goes to college, essentially, that's overwhelmingly going to be an adult – a different reality. And then for some private schools, I think they make their decisions for whatever their reasons, and I respect them, but they make their decisions with the expectation, I assume, that the parents have lots of resources and opportunities to address the issue, unlike our parents of 1.1 million kids, you know, a huge percentage of whom are working people, working class people, lower income people who have many fewer options. So, we have to put that into consideration. Also, there's no question that the quality of teaching in a classroom setting is going to be better and a follow-up on that, it's going to be better than in a distance setting. So, we're weighing all of that. The DOE is preparing options for online learning, but it is by far not our preference, and we don't see a context for it right now. And again, I need people to hear, we're watching obsessively, but we are not seeing this as a disease that afflicts children in an overwhelming fashion with the notable exception of a child has one of those five preexisting conditions. So, I would say to any parent in that situation, exercise tremendous caution.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: The seven-year-old girl did not have any of those preexisting conditions.

Question: [Inaudible] talk about, you know, the subway –

Mayor: Right, I hear you. I will turn to my colleagues and that's certainly going on the list of things that we will follow up on. And I don't think – I know that has not been on the list of things we're considering so far. I think it's an unfair suggestion, but it has not been on the list of things we're considering so far. There'll be some really substantial logistics to that one. But if you all want to offer –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Let's do both on this one. Start in English and then the crossover –

Commissioner Barbot: The most important thing is we have been emphasizing is that if New Yorkers are sick, if they have a fever, a cough, shortness of breath, stay home. We need to ensure that New Yorkers are clear about what their role in this is, right? It's not just about what public health does, it's not just about what the health care delivery system does, it's what we all can do together. And the first step starts with stay home, if you're sick. Like, I can't say it any more bluntly – as the City's doctor, just stay home if you're sick.

[Commissioner Barbot speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: I want to pick up just one point on that, which is a stay home if you're sick is – you don't need to go to the subway and have someone outside the subway with a one of those things they swipe over your forehead to tell you if you have a temperature, right?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: No question. But this is actually – I don't want to sound like I suddenly have lost track of the nature of human beings or New Yorkers, but I want to say something. We're talking about two months of essential total immersion for the people of this city being told to be scared of this disease. You know, I mean there's very few parallels. We like to put out all of our messages and our flyers and this has value, but you know, you cannot – you can't do anything in New York City or America right now without being bombarded with fear about coronavirus. So, I think when our health officials say, don't go to work if you're sick and check your temperature – one of the number one indicators, right? And I think doctors, it would be helpful to sort of really put a pinpoint on how much fever is crucial in this equation. I think there's a hell of a lot of people have a thermometer. If you don't have a thermometer, go buy a thermometer if you can. And I think that's, again, the vast majority of people. If you're not sure if you have a fever, take your temperature. Now, you could say, oh, you know, the government has to do that for me. I'm sorry. No, I'm trying to make clear. This isn't that kind of crisis. The government can do a lot. We cannot do it. All the people have to participate. So, you could say, well, what if someone is not responsive? How about their loved ones? How about their family members? How about their friends? Yeah, I'm sure there's some people who are like, oh, I'm okay, when you can tell they're not. Well, then other people need to say them – hey, you know what? You actually don't seem so okay. Take your temperature. And if you have a fever, stay home. It's a little change of behavior, of course, for a lot of people, but we all have to be a part of this. So, I'm going to keep telling you and I ask you to report it and I appreciate your reporting. If the answer is, I'm going to sit back and the government's going to come and take care of me, that is a misunderstanding of this crisis. Everyone needs to participate. Would you speak to fever?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, we're telling people at temperature of 100.4 or higher.

Mayor: But speak to fever as an indicator of how to act –

Commissioner Barbot: In any situation, if you've got a fever of 104 – 100.4 don't go to work.

Mayor: Say that again, I think there's –

Commissioner Barbot: 100.4.

Mayor: Strike what you heard a moment ago. Erase that. I'm going to neuralize you, for all of you Men in Black fans. Start over – doctor, what's that temperature?

Commissioner Barbot: 100.4.

Mayor: Just less than two degrees over normal.

Commissioner Barbot: There you go.

Mayor: 100.4.

Commissioner Barbot: Don't go to work, right, at any point. And especially in where we are now in terms of this pandemic, we want people to have a lower threshold for staying home. So, at any point, if someone has a fever of 100.4 and cough, fever – temperature of 100.4 and shortness of breath, don't go to work. Stay home. Stay home, and if after 48 hours you're not feeling better, then talk to your doctor. And they may say stay home an extra 24 hours or they may say, you've got a chronic underlying illness, I want to see you. We need the most important part to be, don't go to school, don't go to work.

Mayor: Can I just ask you, for everyone's sake – just fever, nothing else. I don't know if that's even normal, but try it on for size. I would think we care about that too.

Commissioner Barbot: Just fever, we want you to stay home because you may have something else, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have COVID-19.

Mayor: Right. But just fever alone against an abundance of caution – just fever, we want people to stay home.

Question: Good evening, everybody. Mr. Mayor, everybody –

Mayor: You're oratorically strong, I'm impressed.

Question: Thank you. Thank you very much. I used to be a homeless individual. I am now here because I'm trying to figure out, is New York City prepared to handle the homeless men, the women and the children the same way they are prepared to handle the individuals without the – you know, the medication and the insurance as those who are a little bit more privileged here in New York City within the five boroughs. And how do you – how could you elaborate this to all of us? Because I think it's an issue because myself being an ex-homeless individual, I created myself, and not looking to blow smoke up there, I want to just have everybody understand that when there's a will, there's a way, but you have to gather your strength, get yourself out of bed and be a strong individual. How does New York City [inaudible] –

Mayor: I got it. So, thank you. For folks in our shelter system, obviously we're ready to provide whatever health care support they need. For folks on the street, our outreach effort HOMESTAT is constantly working anyway, long before this crisis, three years, to connect with people deeply get to know them personally, find out what they need, help them, which is a perfect methodology that fits this moment. We didn't anticipate this moment, but it fits it where those relationships now get turned into also asking people if they're okay looking for people with symptoms, getting them help. Again, I think my experience says in this dynamic, homeless people are getting the same media and information the vast majority of other people are in many, many cases. If someone needs help, I think they'll readily come forward and accept it. If someone we think is a danger to themselves or others as per usual, we have the ability to act, but we will be out in force looking for people who need help. We are not seeing that as of yet. That's not where we're seeing the challenge. Okay. Thank you.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: It's a great question. Let me first say, with all due respect to that hospital, it is not part of our public hospital system. So, when I say we have been preparing since January 24th, let me affirm that means, first and foremost, the public sector, Health and Hospitals. That is Episcopal Hospital – that is not part of our public system. Immense guidance has been sent out. My colleagues will join in – immense guidance has been sent out regularly to hospitals about how to create the right protocols. Overwhelmingly, it has worked because you've not seen any other situation like we saw in that hospital. I think by definition there was a lapse and an unusual circumstance that led to it. That said, you know, the hospital – I know Dr. Barbot spoke with the head of the hospital immediately to make sure they had what they need. They could keep operating and they are. Those individuals, you know, before you know it, they'll be back out of quarantine and back on the playing field. But something imperfect happened there. It's the only case we've seen like that and there's a constant effort to ensure that the right protocols are used. Someone shows up, asks the right questions, treat them right away, put a mask on them if needed, isolate them if needed. And I think the vast majority of the health care community in New York City is doing, but you guys can affirm if you agree with that statement.

Commissioner Barbot: So, yes, since the – actually even before this outbreak on a regular basis, we train with hospitals to ensure that they are up to date on infection control procedures. We actually do what we call secret shopper visits through their emergencies departments to test them. And there are occasions when we do these tests where not every single person in that facility knows exactly what we do. We take those testing opportunities to retrain folks and make sure that they learn from that experience. And so, this was a situation, as the Mayor mentioned, where there was a clear lapse. And so, I spoke with the CEO. We are working in collaboration with the State to make sure that first and foremost, all of those health care workers are appropriately quarantined and that we ensure that that hospital is clear on protocols and has all of the equipment that it needs.

Question: [Inaudible] will the City cover the cost?

Mayor: So, yeah, this is not a new thing. I appreciate the question, but I mean this is pretty obvious from just the way we handle all things. First of all, there's a whole lot of people who are testing positive and are at home and seeing it through. So, there's not a guarantee you end up hospitalized. For those who are hospitalized, if they have insurance, we'll draw off the insurance. If they don't have insurance, they always have the option of being in a city facility and we're going to make sure they get the care they need no matter what. If we can put them on insurance, we'll put them on insurance. But there's – of course we're going to make sure that everyone gets care regardless of the ability to pay.

Okay. We're closing down. Last call. People who have not gone –

Question: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: So, as the Deputy Mayor said earlier, of the people who contract COVID-19, 80 percent of them will do well and they'll do well outside of the hospital. Some people may have very, very mild symptoms and then others will progress to more severe symptoms. The thing about this COVID-19 is that there is no vaccination and that there is no antibiotic. There's no antiviral therapy that has been approved to treat it. So, when we say that people will get the appropriate treatment, it means that if they are sick enough where they can't eat or they can't drink and they need to be in the hospital to receive intravenous fluids so that they don't become dehydrated, they will get that. If their pneumonia as a result of COVID-19 is severe enough that they have difficulty breathing and they may need oxygen, that they will receive it. So, it's those kinds of treatments that will be available.

Question: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: So, the people that present mild, you know, it's typically how you treat if you would get a cold or the flu at home. So, drinking lots of fluids, getting lots of rest, taking ibuprofen or acetaminophen for your fever. And the most important thing is not going out until your fever is completely gone.

Question: [Inaudible] should we avoid these large crowds, even though it may negatively impact these industries?

Mayor: Again, we are encouraging people to think about it in a more individual manner. If you are over 50 and you have those five preexisting conditions, you should take extra precautions for sure. Be very, very careful not to be in the presence of anyone sick and the example I use is a grandparent and grandchildren – if the grandchildren are sick, don't go visit them. You should be very, very careful about large gatherings. Folks who are in those particular vulnerability areas – bluntly, this is overwhelmingly the people we're losing – need to be extra careful. For everybody else to think about how to balance your life, and that means starting with your own situation – if you're sick, don't go out and put other people in danger and make sure that you are getting the care you need. If you are not sick, if you are not in the vulnerable category, you should be going about your life, but we want you to try and be mindful to avoid like the super crowded situations like the, you know, rush hour subway car. That's about it. You know, it's not quite all things in moderation, that would be too simplistic, but there are some of that. Try and strike some balance, because we are not trying to, at this moment, say, let's go to the extreme of shutting everything down, shutting down everyone's livelihoods, shutting down to everyone's way of life. If we get to that point or close to that point, we'll tell you case by case. But clearly, we are evaluating all the time – all the people up here are evaluating all the time. And if we get to the point where we think any particular type of activity needs to be suspended, we can do that voluntarily with the organizations, or we can mandate it depending on – you can – if we were there, you would know about it. We're doing this day by day, hour by hour. Okay.

Thank you everybody.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: We have covered it. Thank you.

2020-03-12 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: We have a lot of information to share with you. Obviously, things are moving very, very quickly when it comes to the coronavirus. I'm stating the obvious to everyone here. I don't think for most of us even who have been in public life a long time, we've seen a situation quite like this where we receive extraordinary new information on what now literally feels like an hourly basis. So, we are constantly making adjustments. We're also going to go over the numbers here, which are very sobering. We're seeing intense increases in the number of cases in the city. And I think we have to fully understand this as the shape of things to come.

So, we'll start with saying we're going to be giving regular updates, but expect major changes from day to day because we've now seen a pattern of such extraordinary information coming in. It's forcing very, very different decisions than we would've made typically not only here, obviously, all over the country. But the last 24 hours have been very, very sobering. Literally, yesterday, morning feels like a long time ago. We got a lot of information in the course of the day yesterday. A lot change then. Then, last night, it just seemed like the world turned upside down in the course of just a few hours. So, you know, I think what we are seeing is more and more of a consensus on how to act and everyone is moving as quickly as we can. That said, you're going to see differences, of course, between different parts of the country, what public sector and private sector does. And I'm going to try my best to explain the specific approach we're taking, but, again, it will be evolving literally daily and hourly, and we will update you constantly.

In light of several new developments – obviously the numbers that we now have seen over the last 24 hours here in New York City, what we're seeing nationally and internationally. The reality of community spread that's been with us over these last few days and the close working relationship between the city and state, the decisions that we are making together – and I spoke with Governor Cuomo at length earlier today about a specific set of decisions. And obviously, you heard his announcements earlier today, which he and I discussed in detail and which I agree with fully. In light of all those changing realities, it is time now to declare a state of emergency New York City. And I will explain what that means, the powers that are vested in me, what it will allow us to do going forward. I'll also emphasize that the declaration of state of emergency authorizes the use of the powers, but we will use them as needed. That doesn't mean everything will happen at once. And we're going to try and be very, very careful to give you accurate information about what the city is doing and why. There's already some very inaccurate information out there, which we'll speak to later on. But I want to ask all of you in the news media, if you're hearing things that are being attributed to the City of New York, please ask if it's true or not. We will confirm with you instantly. It's very important that the people of the city know what is really coming from the government and what is not. But now, again, it's time to sign this state of emergency declaration.

[Mayor de Blasio signs State of Emergency Declaration]

And continuing on the conversation with the Governor, again, I fully support, we are in total agreement on his decision related to large gatherings. So, we will be working with the state to enforce that new rule that relates obviously to anything where over 500 people would gather – parades, rallies, concerts, sports events, professional conferences, et cetera. And all of our largest venues will now no longer have gatherings until such time in this crisis as it's acceptable to do so again. And again, I unfortunately suspect that will be a number of months. So, places like Barclays, Madison Square Garden, Radio City will obviously will not be operating. As you heard, for most venues that will begin in five o'clock Friday. For Broadway, as I understand, it begins five o'clock tonight. Also agree with the decision for gatherings of under 500 people – this essentially refers to non-essential, non-workplace related dynamics. And we're talking about events, we're talking about restaurants, we're talking about bars. Gathering places under 500 people will be mandated to have occupancy levels at 50 percent or less of their legal occupancy. That will allow for space between people. That will allow for some effective opening up of those spaces. We understand, obviously – thank you – that some businesses will choose to work with these rules because they can make it work economically or they want to stay open for the long haul. Other businesses, I won't be surprised if they believe that's a situation where they'd rather close temporarily. It will be up to each business, but those are the rules that we will enforce from this point on.

Now, I want to say, and I know the Governor feels same way, these decisions that we're making, and the state and the city working closely together to make these decisions, we don't do any of this lightly. This is difficult stuff because we know it'll have a serious, serious impact on a number of businesses. Just talking about the over 500 people gatherings – I mean, that's – in this city, especially, a huge number of events, concerts, et cetera, that's really, really painful for the many, many people who work in that field, let alone so many New Yorkers and people all over the country who really look forward to these events, these concerts, these sports events. And it's really going to be a kind of a hole in our lives and it's painful. It's not something we would ever want to do, but it's something we have to do.

I am going to use every power that I have, everything we can find to support people, businesses and working people are going through this, obviously. The state and even more so the federal government have the greatest powers to provide that kind of relief and support. We're going to urge them to do that. But, you know, we understand that this is going to be a huge dislocation for so many people and it's painful. And it's obviously, as we've grappled with this crisis, our greatest concern has been how to balance all these factors and ensure that we could keep a functioning society and protect the elements of our society that are most crucial – our hospital system, our schools, our mass transit, all of this interconnects. And I can certainly say none of us wanted to take this action unless it was 100 percent necessary because the impact it'll have on the whole overall picture and clearly the human impact, which is going to be really extensive. And we talked in recent days about a projection that this crisis could easily be a six-month crisis. We all know it could be longer, but then the recovery from it could take a really extensive amount of time. So, going to this level is not done lightly, but it is the point where it's necessary.

I'm going to give you some other updates. Let me start with the overall numbers and I'll just double back to some other things. And again, these overall numbers are striking and troubling. We now, and even compared to this morning, we've seen a big jump. We now have 95 confirmed cases – that is 42 new since yesterday, so you can see the progression now. We do have just a small important procedural point. We are now going to define our cases as only New York City residents. So, we had some questioning that, rightfully so, the other day, we said we were including one person, the original Westchester lawyer and account. We've taken them out of the count from this point on. This will only be New York City residents. As of noon, and again, this is changing constantly – as of noon, the breakout we had, and I don't think this breakout correlates to the 95, so, forgive me, that this is not fully aligned. But as of noon, by residency, it was 25 people from Manhattan, 24 people from Brooklyn, 17 people from Queens, 10 people from the Bronx, and five people from Staten Island. And we'll try and keep you updated regularly on those borough breakdowns.

We have 29 people now in mandatory quarantine. That number continues to rise. We have 1,784 people in voluntary quarantine. It's a lot of bad news today. There's a lot of troubling news. There is one small piece of good news that we talked about the other day, and I'm not going to be specific to which individual, because we are getting some clearance on that, but we can say at least broadly that the first – we have the first case of someone coming out of mandatory quarantine and able to go back to their normal lives. So, even in the midst of the growth of this, we will see this. We met with employers here in the Blue Room earlier today. I'll talk about that in a moment. We talked about the deep fears about losing members of their workforce and the and the health dangers people face, but also the reminder that people will come through and we'll get back into the workforce and get back to being healthy. We'll talk about that in a moment.

So, a couple of pieces here. I keep giving you some agency updates as they arise. We're very concerned about people's loss of livelihood in the kind of situation we've just described, especially where a number of businesses will be cutting back or shutting down. We're worried about folks having trouble paying the rent. We want to emphasize, if anyone is facing eviction, we want to help them to avoid eviction. If it is a sheer legal matter, we will get them free legal help and people can call 3-1-1 if they need it. For folks who are now in a situation of distress, it will depend of course upon levels and other factors. But if someone is faced with eviction or unable to pay the rent, in some cases we can provide some short-term support through our human resources administration. We'll get you more details on that, but anyone who thinks that they need that help, they can go to nyc.gov/accesshra. And we'll get you more details on that.

We are concerned about people again who have less money because their employment has been compromised, running low on food for their families. Our Department of Social Services is activating emergency food contracts, working with nonprofit organizations, community-based organizations, and increase the amount of available food. We'll have more details on that in the next day or two.

And again, there's nothing that would be more important in terms of providing support and relief for people than federal action. We all understand in a national crisis, the federal government can provide a level of relief that state and local government simply can't. We need the federal government to move immediately with a huge stimulus program and a program of relief for working people – paid sick days, any number of measures that would help people through what could easily be a half year or more. The House of Representatives has put forward a stimulus plan that is very helpful and a very positive step. We need to see action by the House, Senate and the President as quickly as possible.

I want to give updates about our school system. And I'll talk about the school in the Bronx in just a moment. But first, overall, and this is absolutely essential to our strategy and something we are working very, very hard to continue to keep continuity on, I know the state feels the same way, we want our schools to remain open. We intend for our schools to remain open. That said, there are non-essential and non-instructional activities that we will alter. They'll either be moved online if they can be or they will be canceled, depends on each activity. So, that includes PSAL activities, athletic activities, games and practices, assemblies, parent teacher conferences, PTA meetings, and school plays and recitals.

And I will stay on the topic of schools and then double back. This morning, we have a potential – and please, everyone accurately note this, we do not have independent confirmation – we have a potential case of a student at a school contracting this disease, but it is self-confirmed. We do not have a medical provider or a testing agency that has independently verified that. That is not in any way doubting what the individuals are saying, it’s saying that we have to make a series of decisions and we need medical confirmation. We don't have it right now. We hope to have that confirmation in the next hour or two. Two schools – and the Chancellor’s here, and obviously we'll add in the Q & A – and Chancellor, make sure I described properly, if there's anything you need to correct me on, feel free. Two schools in the same building, the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology and South Bronx Prep. This is in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx. The school is at – or, the two schools are on the building at 360 East 145th Street. Again, this was a decision we made this morning a little after 7:00 am based on decisions – excuse me, based on information that had just come in and it was a tough decision because we did not have that confirmation, but out an abundance of caution determined that it was the right thing to do to close the school to work, to work to get that confirmation. If we were so lucky as to get a negative confirmation, that would be ideal. If we get a positive, it's quite clear the follow through. In the meantime, the full disinfection and cleanliness regimen is placed in the school today. The disease detectives from the Department of Health have been deployed to figure out any close contacts, as we said would be the case in any potential temporary school closure. We have checked the school and we'll keep double checking, but, as of now, there are no children in the school who reach what we call a tier one level of preexisting medical conditions – so, children who would be particularly vulnerable. We're double checking that. But as of this point, we do not have an indication of any children in the school having those particular preexisting conditions.

I want to talk for a moment about two things. The City workforce and then the private sector workforce on the city. We now intend to authorize 10 percent of the city workforce to work from home. The specific details are being determined. So, this is telecommuting. We believe that's a number we can hit in the short term, but it will take some real work. It's not the norm, obviously, for city employment. There's, as is obvious, a huge number of our employees who cannot telecommute, who we need at their posts, but we believe in short order we can have 10 percent telecommute. I am – want to confirm that number. I believe that is 34,000 but I want to check that –

Unknown: 35,000 –

Mayor: 35,000 – thank you, Commissioner. And then of the remaining 90 percent of the workforce, there are 20 percent we intend to put on staggered schedules. Again, understanding a lot of our folks not only play a crucial role but cannot be on staggered schedules, but others can. So, we in short order hope to put 20 percent on staggered work schedules even as they report to their normal work locations. And I wanted that – so, that's 20 percent of the remaining 90 percent – I want that number too – do you know –

Unknown: 70,000 –

Mayor: 70,000 – thank you, Commissioner. So, between those two categories, that's about a 100,000 City workers will either be in telecommuting or on a staggered schedule and getting them as much as possible away from the rush hour.

And again, our message to New York City businesses, as much as humanly possible, please authorize maximum telecommuting and or staggered schedules for your employees. I want to say, it's our impression so far from the information we're getting that business community is really honoring that, a lot of them are acting on that. The meeting we had here which was organized with the help of the New York City partnership and CEOs and business leaders of some of the most prominent businesses in New York City. Just going around the room and going [inaudible] each of them going through, with each of them what they are doing, we saw a very, very high level of adherence to the guidance to institute telecommuting. In fact, in the case of some of the companies, which had the ability, obviously, if it's a technology company, for example, more capacity to do that. We had companies that were literally at 100 percent telecommuting now. Other companies are going to have a much harder time and strike a balance. A great example, one of the great New York City iconic companies, Macy's, the CEO was here. Macy's is in a different situation where a lot of their workers obviously work in physical locations, but they are working with us to maximize any kind of adjustments they can make. So, I want to say I appreciate the high level of cooperation from the business community. I also want to note every business is different. Some can do a lot of – have a lot of flexibility. Others do not. They are all taking it seriously. They're all working with us. We do want to keep reminding any business that's not yet instituted maximum telecommuting and, or staggering or work hours that we need them to. But we, again, are sensitive to the fact that not every business can do that and that we are simultaneously extremely concerned to keep people employed, keep people from running out of their livelihood because that has a huge number of other ramifications. So, we're trying to strike that balance, but very, very pleased with the cooperation we're getting. And we're going to try and work with these businesses on any help they need as they proceed.

Hang on one second. Okay, a couple of other matters. There's been concerned about the special election scheduled for March 24th for borough president of Queens. We are analyzing those concerns but I want to be very, very clear that election will continue as scheduled. We are dealing with an unprecedented challenge, but I think it is a signature of a stable democracy that elections happened when scheduled. So, we very much want that election to happen on time so long as we believe it can happen effectively. However, want to urge all candidates and campaigns to alter their activity. Right now, we're reaching out to each campaign specifically – believe that door to door canvasing should be stopped immediately. And I want to note, and knowing a lot about campaigns over the years, campaigns have many, many ways to still be effective without door to door canvassing or rallies. Clearly, phone banking social media, email updates, digital ads, TV ads, radio ads – there are many, many ways, including some of the most effective ways to get the message out. So, I think it's fair to say, and that campaign that's been going on for a while, that the democratic process can continue here effectively and the campaigns do have other options for getting their message out. We do not need people going door to door canvassing and taking those risks. So, we will move forward. We have a lot to sort out of course about making the voting process as safe and effective as possible. But I do want to say, particularly with early voting, the voting process is being spread out. So, it's almost its own version of social distancing. I can say from the first day early voting I saw this – fewer people are congregating to vote. The voting process and early voting is very fast. And again, preserving our democracy is crucial. We'll talk about it in the Q & A, but we are more comfortable getting this done now than waiting. We have a related challenge, which is a huge challenge and something we really have to think through, which is the Census – was raised in the Q & A the other day. This is going to be a very, very complex matter and we have to see on the federal level there'll be any consideration of altering the Census, delaying it, extending it. But my fear right now is that there will not be any change from Washington and we’ll be put – in many places, we’ll be put in a really, really difficult spot. We're going to have to figure out if that is the case, some way to communicate with people to the maximum. It's almost impossible to engage the Census without some kind of in-person activity, but we can alter the nature of the in-person activity. We've got a lot of important work to do on that. So, that's an area of tremendous concern, going forward.

Last few points and I'll be the only speaker and we will go to Q & A right after my remarks. My colleagues obviously will jump in on the Q & A. There have been questions previously about the homeless. I've said we would come back with a specific update. We have now trained 550 outreach workers through HOMESTAT and the protocol for discussing coronavirus with homeless folks, giving them information, checking on their condition, making sure they get the help if they need it. As of today, and we'll get the exact timeline on this, but we have 764 homeless individuals on the street who had been engaged so far. At this moment, we have no known referrals, so no one that was exhibiting the symptoms or the specific dynamics that led to follow up health care activity. But we'll get more on that day by day.

Want to just say something simple about the President's remarks last night. And I think at this point, it's not worth wasting breath on everything that has happened over the last few weeks and all the missed opportunities. I think we can at least say that last night's remarks indicated that the President is now finally taking the situation seriously. The steps he outlined showed much more connection to reality than a lot of what we heard previously. But he was essentially silent on the single most important action that the federal government could take, certainly from the perspective of New York City, which is to get immediate approval for a huge expansion of our automated testing. This is a tool that would be immensely helpful in addressing all the concern you're hearing from New Yorkers. So many people who want to get tested that we cannot prioritize right now. Businesses that would like to test employees that can't right now because we have to focus on the folks who have the clearer symptoms and the folks who are in the greatest danger and the folks who have a nexus to travel or an existing positive case. We want to do wide-scale testing. We cannot do it without the federal government coming in. There has been talk of localities taking matters into their own hands. I believe that that is what's going to happen if we don't get this federal approval. And I think this is bluntly the last chance. I think if the President United States and the FDA do not give us approval, I don't blame any locality, any company, anyone who just decides to do whatever kind of testing they can at this point. And we will work with all of them.

Finally, I want to say, all of us have been talking to so many New Yorkers over the last days and we've been watching how people are responding to quarantines, how their businesses are following up on guidance, how our public servants are reacting to the crisis. And I'm very, very proud of New Yorkers right now. It's been extraordinary. We're dealing with the absolutely not only unforeseen, something on a level we have never seen in our lives. There is no precedent for this in U.S. history or New York City history. New Yorkers are handling this with tremendous strength and resiliency. People are stepping up, people are looking out for each other and their neighbors. We're going to need a whole lot more of that. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And I want to be clear about that, we will be at this for months and months. This is – I said earlier today, this is a battle we are going into – a long battle. It is the opposite of when you're told don't worry, it'll all be over soon. This will not be over soon. This is going to be a long, long battle. It's going to be a tough battle. We're going to lose some of our fellow New Yorkers – that, unfortunately it is inevitable, but we can fight back. There's a lot we can do to help each other, to support each other, to protect people. We will unquestionably overcome this. It will take time, but we will. The City will prevail in the end and the vast majority of people who are afflicted, thank God, will survive and will fully recover, but it is going to be a long, painful episode. The more that people are informed, the more they follow through on the guidance that we are trying to give them constantly, the more people support each other, the better off we will be. Anyone who needs information can go to nyc.gov/coronavirus or text the word COVID – C-O-V-I-D – to 692-692, or call 3-1-1. Any of those approaches will get you information.

A few words in Spanish and then we'll go to questions –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Okay. With that, let us turn to questions. And we'll go from this side to that side. Go ahead.

Question: Thank you. Since you just mentioned that this is going to get worse, what number of cases or other metrics would trigger a large-scale mass quarantine as we've seen in Italy and China? Could that happen in days?

Mayor: Look, I would say this. I think we can now say as we're on the verge of a hundred cases, I'm very sad to offer this prediction, I think we'll be at a thousand cases next week. We are modeling right now and war-gaming or table-topping, whatever word you want, different scenarios for different actions. We're going to be doing this nonstop. So, I just want to say to everyone here, who’s been extraordinary, I want to thank my colleagues. There's, you know, my colleagues up here are about to go through six months without a day off and they all understand what they just signed up for and they're all extraordinary public servants. We are going to be looking every single day at the numbers, at what we can learn from the rest of the world, at the various efforts to mitigate and decide what it means. I want to be very clear, and this is, again, an area of tremendous agreement with the state, there are three things we want to preserve at all costs – our schools, our mass transit, and, most importantly, our health care system, and all those pieces interconnect. So, right now, we want to try and, in a sense, as we are indicating with the state's actions, with my actions, we’re falling back to the next line of defense. And our goal is to, to the maximum extent possible, protect those three areas no matter what. We will scenario everything, absolutely everything. And we'll look at every model, every situation around the world. But I also want to emphasize, there's no two countries that are the same, this is an absolute fact. If you look at the different countries around the world that had a serious experience with coronavirus, there's no two that have the same exact trajectory. It has a lot to do with when people got information, how much transparency, how they reacted, what kind of health care was available – there's all sorts of factors, but we're going to be constantly drilling for every eventuality.

Yes?

Question: You had mentioned that it might come to a point where the city is going to move forward with testing and the mass [inaudible] automated testing. It seems like the most capacity is at the private hospitals. So have you been having conversations with the private hospitals to say like, this is kind of where we're at. Are you on board? Is that something that governors have to convince them to do? That seems like the questioning and Deputy Mayor, you're shaking your head no –

Mayor: Yeah, it's that point. It's that point we have – I don't know how many letters calls public please to the FDA. And again – last night would have been the perfect moment for the president to announce the FDA was giving that approval or he was, you know, ordering in what is becoming sort of a wartime situation that that approval be given. It's not, you can't do business as usual, but that, you know, that opportunity came and went and there's no new information today. So again, I think people are going to have to start taking matters in their own hands. We will work with those organizations to figure out the way forward.

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Yes, please. Deputy Mayor.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: Just on that point, precisely, I have a daily call with the President of Greater New York Hospital Association, Ken Raske, and we are completely coordinated. We're tracking number of beds available, number of ICU beds, number of all equipment and medical supplies, testing capabilities, and we do that every day – part of the H + H system and the voluntary hospitals.

Mayor: Thank you.

Question: That’s exactly what my question is, which is what is the capacity of the city? Can the city handled 500 cases a day, a thousand hospitalizations a day? At what point does the city get overwhelmed by the event?

Mayor: It's not the – It’s a great question. It's a powerful question, but I want to also make sure we're always clear about if we tried to give you that answer before we've completed the actual modeling and war gaming, we wouldn't be responsible. I can tell you the next milestone is a thousand cases and if you'll follow the very broad dynamic we've seen here and elsewhere of 80 percent are cases are – forgive my nonmedical phraseology – low-level impact. A lot of people don't go to the hospital, overwhelmingly don't go to the hospital can get well at home. 20 percent are more serious. A lot of those will be hospitalizations. Not necessarily all, let's just use that as a working model. So at a thousand cases we're adding 200 more people. Look, we have a huge, huge medical system here in the city. So putting 200 more people in. Yes, of course we can handle that.

And Mitch can speak to that as one of the people runs one of the biggest pieces. But – and as Mitch said so powerfully yesterday, there's a bunch of things that would be retrenched in a crisis that got deeper like ending elective surgeries and all. But it's an excellent question. What is that moment where we start to overtax the system? And I want Mitch to jump in with a reminder to what Mitch said yesterday, that he and other hospitals will create brand new capacity. They'll take a parking lot and put up a tent and turn into an ICU, they will turn a cafeteria into an ICU. I mean, this is again, we're getting into a situation where the only analogy is war, in a wartime dynamic, you turn all sorts of facilities into something else. You mobilize people, you change their roles, you do whatever it takes. Mitch.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health and Hospitals: One of the ways New York City is so lucky is because there is a very strong hospital system and Health + Hospital alone with its 11 hospitals, we are prepared to take literally hundreds of people who are sick. So again, when you go back to what the Mayor has said, that 80 percent of the cases are unlikely to need any hospital care. Only 20 percent of people will be sick, not all of whom will need hospital care. I believe certainly for the foreseeable future we will be fine.

Question: Do you have the ventilators, the respirators, the supportive equipment that you need for this kind of thing?

President Katz: Yes. So Health + Hospitals has a thousand ventilators. We estimate that across the city there are 5,000 ventilators. And again, if you remember that it's only likely 5 percent of people who would actually need ventilators. You get 20 times 5,000. We have a huge amount of capability. Also, remember people will get well, not people will not stay on ventilators. So as somebody – there will be new cases, but as the Mayor has also happily talked about, people do get over this infection and so everybody is not going to be sick at the same time.

Mayor: Rich.

Question: So Mr. Mayor, of the – there is 95 cases now that in the city, right? Do we know how many are in hospital? How many – do we have any sense of condition of the –

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: 22 are in hospitals. The rest are at home – isolation. A lot of them doing well.

Question: Mr. Mayor, you talked about an intense increase in cases, perhaps as many as a thousand by next week, we’re talking here about hospital capabilities. What is the point where the city says, you know what maybe you'd like not to get to 2000 and we're going to start to shut things down. We're going to start to shut down schools. And, and why is it that the Governor, who's the person who is shutting down parades and shutting down theaters when you're here in the city? –

Mayor: Again, there's been – again, listen to how this has progressed over just a few days. Governor and I have been talking, our teams have been talking. We truly – all of us believed and believe that we had to be certain before we started what is going to be – a lot of dominoes falling in terms of our society, the impact on people, the impact on people's livelihoods, all sorts of other consequences. And we had to be certain it was the right thing to do. We're all coordinated here, so we now believe these are the right steps to take now.

The danger, and I just disagree with the analysis, it will be an ongoing conversation obviously, but the danger of going to a full shutdown is it will degrade not only people's lives on a host of matters, including their health and safety and other ways. But it's unrealistic in some very powerful ways. For example, where do our children go? And if our children have nowhere to go, then their parents can't go to work. That includes a lot of parents we depend on, first responders, health care professionals, it’s a very slippery slope. If our transit system is not working, how will people get to those health care jobs? We can make some accommodation, but we shouldn't kid ourselves. So there's also – and the doctors can jump in on this very obvious point, there's nothing that says if you do these mass actions, it ends all your problems. The community spread has been established. You have to balance the negative impacts with the positive impacts. So that's what we're trying to do all the time, and the City and the State are coordinated on that.

Question: I appreciate the answer, just a quick follow-up on the issue of testing. You've had doctors interviewed on TV, so they're not, you know, people to shout on. They're putting their names to it.

Mayor: Yep.

Question: A former federal prosecutors saying every flu test has come back negative, but they're not giving me a test for this. What is – Weill Cornell and saying that emergency rooms are overflowing, I'm not there, I can't tell that, but we're – what is going on with respect to testing in this city? Where is the breakdown it seems in communication and action –

Mayor: I think there is a breakdown in understanding and we need to clean that up and clear it up. But I want to caution on the Weill Cornell point. First of all, I appreciate your straightforwardness. You're saying you've heard a report but you can't confirm it. I want to ask everyone please, because there's going to be so much misinformation in these next months, I ask you all, the people are depending on all of you. Please confirm things before you put out there. So for example, we've heard various people alleging that emergency rooms were overflowing. I've turned to Dr. Katz constantly say, what is your emergency room usage? As of yesterday, had only one of his emergency rooms that had any unusual uptick in activity. I mean, normal levels. I turned to the Chancellor a few days ago and said, what's going on with attendance, it was not only the same as the same day a year ago, it was higher.

We’ve got to separate the fact from fiction. So I don't know what's happening at Weill Cornell, the Deputy Mayor will find out right away, and report to you and report to me if they're experiencing a particular challenge. But again, Mitch, you can give today's update, as of yesterday you had one and only one that you thought was experiencing any kind of unusual size of usage –

President Katz: Our system is doing well and I think as the Deputy Mayor when he said 22 cases, I counted five are ours, which again is consistent with what I keep saying, the Health + Hospitals represents about 20 percent of the city's capability, and we're, we are doing well. I can address and agree, and we've talked among ourselves, there are confusing messages out there among physicians, people, right? Health + Hospitals is a government agency. We have an advantage, right? We're constantly able to send out messages. We've talked with the Department of Health and we - hey, here is the latest recommendation and it all gets pasted up and it gets acted on. Right? In medical practice, people have very diverse populations and every doctor is not sitting there waiting for the next report – oh from yesterday. The testing criteria has changed.

I can tell you that at the Health + Hospital facilities we are following exactly what the Mayor had described that we're not testing people who are well, but we are testing people who have symptoms of fever and cough or fever and shortness of breath. We are testing them first to see if they have a flu or influenza or some other explanation and those who are not. We are sending for COVID testing and we have capability, but I certainly agree with the stories and I've heard them myself of person goes to X physician office, gets told something completely different. As the Mayor said, you can help us by getting out the message of what's true. 

Mayor: And I'm going to go through, hold on –

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Let me add to that –

Mayor: Hold on, hold on one sec. We're going to Deputy Mayor wanted to jump in and then the Commissioner, but I'm going to go through the exact prioritization and then who's not getting the tests. I want to be super communicative with you and why that FDA approval or whatever alternative we come up with is the hinge here, the pivot to being able to answer the concerns and make it more widespread, but first Deputy Mayor and then the Commissioner.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: As of this morning in my call with Ken Raske, the only increase in cases in the voluntary hospitals including Weill Cornell is for people who are asymptomatic but worried. Now if you actually see the picture of right now, I don't want to escape this, 95 cases, 22 in hospitals is exactly what the Mayor has been telling all of us, right? 80 percent would be okay, 20 percent go to hospitals and out of that 20 percent, 1 percent will be severe cases in ICUs. So they're spread across all the different levels of services.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: So on the testing issue, I think at the very beginning there was certainly a lot of confusion. Some of it was because of the strict criteria that the CDC had put in place in terms of requiring a certain amount of travel in order to authorize the tests. But as of this Monday, we released the health alert that goes out to thousands of doctors clarifying how it is that they go about ordering from the commercial labs. And we hope that that will start to clarify some of the confusion that there was earlier. And in addition to being able to get the tests from H + H and from the voluntary hospitals, there are places like City MD that is offering the test as well.

Mayor: So just coming back on the overall situation here again, so the history is really important. The point the commissioner made first we were getting a very narrow interpretation from CDC. Then of course we couldn't do our own tests. It was not until, it seems like a century ago, but it was 10 days ago that we first were able to do our own tests. It was Friday, so six days ago that the private labs were doing their own tests. But we need to be clearer and I'll certainly take that on all of us about the prioritization schema, until we get the FDA approval or something, another way to get to automated testing. What we've said is there's hundreds of tests that can be done a day. That is a true statement. It also takes too long. That's another true statement. Turnaround time, even with the private labs, H + H, everyone on the playing field that can do what they can do. We still have tests that we wait three or four days for an individual result. Okay. But at least the tests are moving.

The problem is a lot of people, understandably, they're literally like, I don't have symptoms, I don’t have anything. I'm just scared about coronavirus. I want a coronavirus test. That's nothing wrong with someone feeling that. There are people have very mild, you know, initial symptoms, they want a coronavirus test. There's all sorts of people, I don't blame a single one of them, but with the amount we have, what we said is we have to follow the priorities. So the priorities are folks who have been exposed to someone with coronavirus, confirmed with coronavirus, folks who've come back from one of the impacted travel areas of the world to places where it's obviously prevalent, folks who are older and have those preexisting conditions and are immediately in danger in a way that others are not, and folks who have gone already through symptoms, the BioFire test have come back negative on the BioFire and now the very good chance that they could have coronavirus. Those folks all go to the front line and doctors, if there's anything that needs to be refined in my answer, please refine. But those folks all go to the top of the line. That takes up a lot of what we have. The person who just wants out of an abundant caution to get coronavirus test, we don't have that kind of capacity for.

The folks who were here from the business community earlier raised the point, it was an excellent point, they said if we've got someone in our company who has symptoms and you know, we'd like to rule them out so that we can tell everyone that's okay to keep working, you know, we'd like that ability. That wouldn't be a priority right now. We'd think that is a worthy concern, but we need the more widespread testing to be able to do that.

Question: Mayor, I’m hoping you can explain the executive order, particularly section two, where you say your direct agencies to provide all appropriate and necessary steps to preserve public safety and require all assistance available to protect the security, wellbeing and health of the residents, how is that different from the status quo?

Mayor: Sure, the – and I asked my – I need one document that I left in my office. There's a document from my General Counsel with the delineation of variety of examples of what the emergency - state of emergency entails. So let me get that in front of me to just give you live examples clearly is - the status quo is when, as Mayor, I can direct my agencies to do a whole host of things to protect the health and safety of New Yorkers. But the emergency order allows a much deeper intervention into the daily life.

Question: If I may just follow-up after [inaudible].

Mayor: Yeah, so for example, these are just some of the specific actions that can be taken. I want [inaudible] please. I'm going to be treating everyone with a real respect that I'm going to be very clear when I'm giving you examples. This is – none of these have been activated. They are – when they have been activated, I will indicate it. But this is the range of potential actions that can be involved by executive order under this state of emergency. So there's the ability to establish a curfew. There's the ability to regulate whether vehicles or individuals may enter or leave specific parts of the city. There is the ability to close down public transportation. There's the ability to order hospitals to postpone elective procedures, to ration supplies or impose restrictions on supplies and prices - and price gouging, I should say. The ability to suspend or limit alcohol use, firearms, explosives, flammable material and liquids. The ability to prohibit or restrict people from being on the streets and in public places. One that we've obviously already seen the state acted on and is consistent is the ability to regulate or close public spaces. There is the ability to create or designate emergency shelters, emergency medical shelters, and community based care centers. The ability to limit a maximum building occupancy. These are some of the examples. So they're very extensive capacity.

Question: To follow-up, at what point do you move from containment to mitigation. Are we there yet?

Mayor: We’ve been there.

Question: So the disease detectives have no more work?

Mayor: No, that's not – a good question and no, they do have work to do. In a matter of days it was clear and unfortunately I think the testing I'm not going to bemoan what's already too late. I think – I think if we had had early testing this could have been a very different trajectory. But again, this entire experience we've had with testing is 10 days old. And almost before we got started with it, we found that we were really struggling to maintain a containment stance. Now, you know, we saw community spread on Wednesday or Thursday, really start to establish, we see the growth. There's only the one true cluster I think at this point still that we know of in Westchester, but we still see this growth pattern is very, very troubling. So it's a mitigation mode, but the disease detectives still have real, real value and we want to keep augmenting their ranks because they still allow us case by case to achieve specific things. Anytime you know the pattern of contacts, you can follow up with the folks who most need to be followed up with, and then that helps speed action, follow through on their care, but also helps us to deal with other dynamics like what happens to everyone else who was not affected. So they're still very, very important work.

Question: Are they in touch with all 92 people in their [inaudible]?

Mayor: Let's check on the exact cause obviously this has been –

Question: [Inaudible].

Mayor: Yes, of course. That - wherever possible. Okay, go ahead.

Question: What at point would you, Mr. Mayor, and you, Chancellor Carranza, decide to shut down the schools? Is this option very much on the table at this point? And can you give us an update on the five different cases on Staten Island, you know, one is EMT worker –

Mayor: Right.

Question: Another one we hear from sources as a coach at St. Teresa School that may have been in contact with other students?

Mayor: Yeah. I cannot give you individual updates as we said you're right to point to those examples as – particularly the EMT – as someone who we would pull out and try and give an individual update because the ramifications.

Question: [Inaudible].

Mayor: Right. Well, we talked about that the other day. The point being where we can give some particularly pertinent updates, we will. But the problem is with these numbers, it's going to be harder and harder to do so. So cannot give you anything new beyond what I said the other day about the EMT. I'm not familiar with the situation with the coach. If we have information our City Hall press team will get it to you. But generally speaking in these briefings, unfortunately we've gotten to a point where we can't do much on individual cases.

On the schools, again, we are going to fight tooth and nail to protect our school system for many, many reasons. It is where our children are safe in the day and many parents have no alternative. It's where our kids – a lot of kids get their meals. It is the pivot for a lot of people we need to get to work to get to work that their kids have a place to be. A lot of them have no other choice. They cannot bring kid to work. They do not have a relative can take their kid and you could say, well, why don't we come up with an alternative location? Well, that creates the same exact problem. If a bunch of kids are congregated in a school or a daycare center or whatever it might be, if congregations the issue it would be true anywhere. So we are going to do our damnedest to keep the schools open. We are going to scenario everything, as I said, and I'm going to say it a few more times and I'm going to respect your intelligence that I don't need to say it a hundred times. We are scenario-ing absolutely every potential of what could happen to this city.

Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible]

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yeah. There's nothing else to add. The Mayor’s exactly – we were on the same page, exactly what the Mayor said.

Mayor: Go ahead, Jeff.

Question: A question for you, Mayor, and then to follow up on Dr. Katz's comments on testing. I heard you mention a six month timeline at least three times. What historical lessons have you learned from the Spanish Flu in 1918 in terms of social distancing, in the extent that you're using it now?

Commissioner Barbot: So I think the most important thing to note is that when we put social distancing in place, it is to slow the spread and to reduce the potential harm to people who may be at highest risk for bad outcomes.

Mayor: But is there – I think the question was more about the history.

Commissioner Barbot: So the lesson learned is putting in place the kind of measures that the Mayor is announcing, is a way to help slow the spread and reduce the harm to New Yorkers.

Question: And Dr. Katz, you mentioned testing. Is there any guidance that you want to offer to families about whether or not they should be giving their children medicine before they get to the clinic? Because as I understand it, personal experience, a doctor told me that unless the child is experiencing a fever in the office, that's one of the criteria for getting the test?

President Katz: No, that's not accurate. No good clinician would require that a child be forced to have a fever in order for it to be recorded. We believe when parents say my child has a fever and then I gave them some acetaminophen and it went away. We understand.

Mayor: Okay, just finishing this side first round. Okay. Going over here. Yes.

Question: There have been some calls to all the eviction proceedings in the city. I just want to know if the city going to step in to stop – I don’t know if the Deputy Mayor wants to discuss that because there are seven people who are facing eviction and things will only get progressively worse as the virus continues.

Mayor: Yeah, and I talked about and obviously the Deputy Mayor will add, but you know, we are clearly, for anyone that needs the legal help, we're going to do that for some people – we can't necessarily do it for everyone. But for some people who need the financial help, we can help. It is a very good question which we can follow up on and get back to you about other more extensive actions that we could legally take. But, Deputy Mayor, do you want to speak to that?

Deputy Mayor Laura Anglin, Operations: Yeah, we are in discussions with the court system about what we could do under different kinds of authority, where we have the capacity to stop anything we have, for example, NYCHA is not executing any warrants of eviction right now. We are a really ramping up and making sure that we are providing lawyers where we can provide lawyers to tenants. And as the Mayor said, we have some assistance available for people on under certain circumstances.

Question: In terms of some of the rumors floating around about a city shut down, of those natures. Have you had any sort of just even conversations with the Governor about how that would actually play out if necessary? Talked about gaming out these exercises. Have you had any conversations with the Governor and the secondly—

Mayor: Can I just stay on that and you'll definitely get the next one. So again, what I want to make the ground rules since we will be doing a lot of briefings and then when we're not doing a briefing, our press office will be putting out a lot of information regularly. Obviously we'll put out information on Twitter, et cetera. If we don't say it, please don't assume it because there has been misinformation out there and if anyone, you know, it's not coming from our mouths, my mouth or these folks or our official Press Office or Twitter feed, don't believe it. But ask us and we'll give you a quick answer. The understanding I have, some of the stuff that we've seen out there today is really, really wrong. Really off base. My impression is some of it came from either leaked information or extrapolated information from scenario planning, not from actual decision making. The scenarios – I've been to a number of these different types of events. You know for example, NYPD does scenarios all the time where they talk about, you know, 10 different sites where there's an active shooter simultaneously, for example, if there was a terror attack, something like that. It's not real. It didn't happen. They're planning for the unexpected. They're trying to see what their capacity is. So we're going to run a number of scenarios, but no one should mistake those scenarios for something that's actually happening or being authorized, first of all.

To your question about the Governor, absolutely. We all are constantly comparing notes on the different things that we might do. There's been a high level of agreement, step-by-step. Everything that's been announced, City and State, has been talked about in advance. All the major actions and there's been a high level of agreement. The going forward scenarios, first we need to, I'm sure the state is doing the same. We need to feel that we've perfected them and believe in the projections and the right approach. That's part of why you do the exercises to test them. You're sort of pressure testing different scenarios. And then we're going to absolutely compare and see if we're all on the same page about how we would handle things. But it is very much a one day at a time, one hour at a time in terms of taking a newer information, making adjustments while simultaneously running scenarios that are really about weeks ahead and what we would do at that point.

Go ahead and get other part.

Question: Up to this point. You’ve talked to New Yorkers about remaining calm, optimistic, and today, you know, obviously your tone is a little different [inaudible] announcing something very serious. Do you – how do you feel, have you struck the right tone, the right balance up until this point, where now you're announcing this state of emergency?

Mayor: Sure. It's – this is, we're dealing with a great unknown here and we all understand that. My strong view is that people do really well when they're told the truth. They do really well when they're given the opportunity to be a part of the solution. And I certainly feel that strongly about New Yorkers. They don't want anything but the best blunt information we have. But you know, they also don't scare easily and they, you know, they don't want a panic. That's my view. And I don't think, I don't think panic is the right thing for any leader to do. I think based on the information that we've had over the last few days, tried to really be clear that this thing was ramping up and we were making adjustments. But I'm very, very concerned, as I've said before, that there is a bad scenario where folks in leadership ended up creating an atmosphere of panic, ended up creating an atmosphere where everyone went too far in terms of some of the steps that could be taken and therefore created huge unintended consequences and hasten the day when that last line of defense wouldn't work. And I think that's, again, this is, everyone has their own analysis, but this is mine. Protecting our ability to do the most basic stuff is absolutely crucial here. And that's not going to happen if people believe that the only choice is to panic. Right? So I think New Yorkers have received ever-changing information very, very well. I think we've sort of tried to do it in sequence as we knew things and they've, they've taken it in and made adjustments. They're going to make a lot more adjustments, but it is the strangest thing to deal with an ever-changing diet and is the ultimate moving target, you know, we don't have no day is like the previous day and that's extremely challenging. Okay.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I have two questions. The first, I just wanted to get a little bit more further clarification on the state of the testing, and I think there's a little confusion because there's swabbing on the front end and then there's the analysis on the backend. I'm talking about the backend testing. The Governor today actually said there is a shortage as far as that concern and I don't believe that that's something you have—

Mayor: I want to make sure we're speaking the same language. When you say the backhand, what do you mean?

Question: The analysis of the samples.

Mayor: Like the actual getting the results.

Question: Yes.

Mayor: Okay.

Question: Yeah. So I guess I'm just wondering is that what is determining the priority list? I guess? Are you limiting the criteria because at the moment you don't have the capacity to analyze every sale?

Mayor: I’ll try and start really, really top level. And then my colleagues will jump in. I don't want to mistake the delay in the results from the ability to get results. I mean it's perverse that you have to wait three or four days, but they do come in constantly and that's why you're seeing the numbers grow and grow. So I think with a capacity of, again, everyone will update and confirm this, but you know, we've said originally we could do dozens a day and then that advanced to a hundreds a day. But when you listen to all those priority areas that require support, that takes up the capacity quickly and understandable why a lot of people might ideally like a test but don't have those particular needs. Couldn't get one right away. I don't love it and no one loves it, but that's I end. At least there's a logic to it, you know? But I don't think it's about how long it takes for the results to get back. It's about how many physical tests you can do in a day versus what you could do if you have the automation. So that's my attempt as a layman.

Commissioner Barbot: And to build on that from a public health point of view, now that we have commercial testing available through hospitals, through ambulatory facilities like CityMD, the public health lab is prioritizing testing healthcare workers who may have been exposed, testing individuals who may be in critical condition and really reserving that capacity for the, for the sickest.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Hense: If I may also, you probably know the governor also approve 28 more labs to get started on fast approval for more testing, which we hope in the next 10 days will yield about 5,000 tests a day. I owe the Mayor the specific amount from those 5,000 that are going to be for the city itself, but we believe very, very slowly – but this is ramping up. So to your point we're going to have more capability to do more analysis.

Question: [Inaudible] one understanding is are you limiting in the criteria because you know you currently don't have the capacity to test all those all of those analyses at the moment or—

Deputy Mayor Perea-Hense: If I may, I think we are doing the criteria because those are the people who need it the most. Regardless of the amount of testing that we would have, those people will still have the priority lining that you heard.

Question: Just one other quick question. Is the Wall Street trading for going to be closed?

Mayor: Yeah, the CEO of the Stock Exchange was here for our meeting earlier and we are adamantly devoted to keeping the market going. That's absolutely crucial for not only the city, for the whole nation, and we talked about how to do that and how to do it with you know, the most minimal staffing necessary. So I believe there's a way to keep things moving smart and a safe way.

Question: I just wanted a little more clarification on the eviction question. You guys said that you were staying all evictions in NYCHA and you are working with the courts currently to what – help people who are having convictions from the private sector and have you guys considered at all putting moratorium on evictions altogether or at least forced evictions both in private and public?

Mayor: So I'll start and then pass to the Deputy Mayor again. We are exploring right now, under a state of emergency, how the state of emergency powers affect that particular equation. So we're, we want to do everything we can do, but we have to make sure we're on firm legal ground on that one. Do you want to add?

Deputy Mayor Anglin: We have suspended the execution of any warrants of eviction in NYCHA, except in very limited circumstances involving criminal activity in a NYCHA apartment.

Question: So to follow-up, is the city preparing for possibility in the increase of homelessness because of the evictions?

Mayor: It's a fair question. I think right now, given that we are taking the actions we're taking my hope is that would not be the case, and obviously, God forbid that happened to anyone we do have right to shelter in this city, we would find a way to accommodate them. But I think to your question, our, our goal here is to not only avert the kinds of evictions that would happen because people are losing their livelihood in this crisis, but actually frees up evictions as much as humanly possible, even ones that would have been proceeding regardless of this crisis. So hopefully we can stay ahead of it.

Question: I mean, you're talking about six months, you really have an idea of how long this is going to impact us?

Mayor: I'm confused by your question. We said our projection today is six months. What are you trying to say?

Question: I’m saying, where'd you come up with that calculation?

Mayor: It's, there's no one on earth who can give you a perfect number. This is based on and I'll let Dr. Barbot who's the author of the number and who I've been praising for it because I think it's real talk. I think it's being honest with New Yorkers about the duration came up with the number, I think I feel like three or four days ago based on, we started talking, we started in our strategic meetings saying let's talk, analyzing what we know and went around the room talking to people about what are you seeing, what would you put as your initial estimate? And Dr. Barbot very quickly said six months based on the growth pattern we're seeing and the time it would take to really come down off it. I mean what, what would be the end? The end would be when people are getting well and there's very few new cases and you know, life can start to resume normal. I think it could be six months. Obviously it could be more, but it's a lot that has to play out. Before we will get to that point.

Commissioner Barbot: And to add to that would say part of it is based on the experience we had during H1N1, which was the last time the world saw a pandemic as well as what we're learning from what's happening in China and other countries. And I just want to remind us that this is a novel virus, which means that none of us has ever been exposed to it and no one has immunity to it. And so while we go through that process, you know, to go back to something that the Mayor said earlier, 80% of us are going to hopefully have a very mild course. While 20% of us may have to have higher level of treatment either by going to a doctor or potentially going into a hospital. But the, the rationale for this taking that long, and again, it's our best estimate, is the fact that none of us have ever been exposed to it before.

Mayor: Way back

Question: Mr. Mayor, regarding the large group gatherings. I have two questions. One you said Madison Square Garden and Barclay Center could be closed for months?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: How long [inaudible]?

Mayor: This is for, you know, over 500 people. So they're never going to have an event in those places under 500 people. And we are estimating, this is our estimate. We're not putting, you know, this is not a binding commitment, but we're saying our estimate is this will go through September at six months. I think that's the right way to think about it right now.

Question: [Inaudible] for six months?]

Mayor: I do and I feel horrible for them. I mean, they're very, very important places in the city and lots of people work there and lots of people depend on what they do, but that's just the reality right now.

Question: The other question is, we're getting – Ubers are calling us concerned about weddings. The weekend is fast approaching, most weddings are under 500 people. What is the advice of the Health Department to people who may be attending a celebration like this young people all ages, what do they do?

Commissioner Barbot: So our recommendation would be the same as we would give individuals who are having those questions about work, about school. And it goes back to the really fundamental, if you are sick with fever and a cough or fever or shortness of breath, don't go. If you are an individual who is, who has one of the chronic underlying illnesses that we're most concerned about – heart disease, cancer, diabetes, immunocompromised, and chronic lung disease, then I would think twice. And especially if you're over 50, I would think twice about going.

Mayor: Let me, let me be the non-doctor and just say I would go a step further than the think twice. Just common sense from my point of view. And I know a wedding is a crucial, priceless, beautiful moment. So no one wants to miss it. But I'd say if you're someone with those preexisting conditions, and particularly if you're over 50, if you go to such a wedding, you should really keep your distance from people. You can be there and experience it, but try not to be too close to people is what I would argue just to be – an abundance of caution. It's painful, but I think it's better than taking a risk right now. And obviously, you know, if you're talking about gatherings of under 500 people, we're still saying we want those halls, those banquet halls, wherever it is to keep their capacity to 50 percent of what their legal limit is. So it's very sad if anyone has to change their guest list or their plan or do something different. But this is all about protecting people, protecting the couple themselves, protecting everyone there and people going to have to make those adjustments. Okay. Who has not gone? We're doing the first rounds of just reminding everyone. The ground rule is if you've gone hold back and we'll see, we can get to some others on a second round.

Question: Mr. Mayor, two questions if I may, because DCPI kept one up to you. You've talked about the importance of the frontline employees. What is the NYPD doing to assure that its officers are staying healthy?

Mayor: We can get you details of how each agency is doing that. But look, overall I'd say everyone is getting a lot of information from all of you and then from the guidance from their departments about the basics of staying healthy, including one of the most basic things, which is if you are feeling ill, stay home, it's really profoundly important. And what we know about, and NYPD officers are incredibly devoted to their job and they're going to, you know, always show up to protect other people. But we want them to be mindful. If they're not feeling well, stay back. You know, it only takes a few days in – I think it'd be really, really helpful to give people the truth of – from the second you start to feel not well to when you can determine you're actually starting to get better or you got a bigger problem on your hands, whatever that is. How many days do you think that is typically when we're talking about these kinds of symptoms?

Commissioner Barbot: Usually what the trajectory is, people will become symptomatic as early as two days from being exposed.

Mayor: Not even saying coronavirus. I'm saying just generally the cold, flu, et cetera thing, I just, how long—

Commissioner Barbot: Three days.

Mayor: Right? So that's, I mean at the point being we're not, for folks to know if they're getting well of whatever is going on or to not getting well is a very small number of days and we just want people to exercise that caution.

Question: I spoke to your former Health Commissioner this morning, Dr. Mary Bassett. She said that she was very worried that it doesn't look like New York City has prepared. Her predecessor Tom Friedan shared the same concerns. I'm just wondering if you feel like, you know, late yesterday you weren't even saying that they should cancel the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Did you wait long too long to enact these serious measures at all?

Mayor: We have been, every day, every hour, assessing and making decisions. Look, you're a very intelligent person. The parade was canceled well before it happened. We were all working to be very, very careful about that decision. This, this parade has gone on since before the United States of America was a country, not a minor matter, an outdoor event, different from an indoor event. But the more we looked at it, the less comfortable we got given everything we're seeing. I don't blame anyone in the world for being really careful about that decision. But the parade, you know, the cancellation of the parade had to happen in time for people to not show up. So there was time on the clock. The same with the half marathon. We're all very conscious of that clock. You guys, and I don't mean disrespect, you guys are a little more energetic about reporting on this thing or that thing. We are watching a whole bunch of elements and really quite aware of what it means to cancel something and when the actual event is, as long as the cancellation happens, inappropriate timeline. So we're perfectly comfortable that those decisions were made the right way in the right time. The bigger decisions have been really open with you all. There is a real price to pay and we try to balance that price because what we see is a lot of danger in overreach and trying to strike that balance. And we think at this point – and the state and the city got to the same conclusion on the same timeline, that this was the time to now take it to the next level and then we can escalate that very rapidly if we need to. I don't know what are – both of those are folks – Mary worked for me for a number of years; Tom is someone I know for a long time – they both know how to reach me. If they have something to want to say, they're more than welcome to call. Oxiris was Mary's deputy – more than welcome to offer their concerns. I don't know what they're talking about and I don't know if they understand the details of what we're doing or what we've been doing all of these weeks. So, we're very confident that we're taking every step instantly when is needed to be taken.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: The actual need to take specific actions. You know, when the Governor and I talked and we got to the point of feeling that we were going to do the kinds of things that would take that kind of intervention, even though the State was going to go out with its actions first, it's quite clear we're now in that vein where we're going to be limiting events and taking very physical actions. Until we were sure that, it was not time to declare it because I didn't need to use those specific powers. Now, it's time.

Question: [Inaudible]

[Chancellor Carranza speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: Okay, we're going to finish this one. I want to get my ground rule check here –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Hold on. I see you. Last call on anyone for round one who has not yet gone, and then on round two we're going to do a few, we're not going to be able to do forever.

Question: [Inaudible] I guess, first of all, out of the 2,000 tests the city got from CDC, how many are now left?

Commissioner Barbot: We'll have to get back to you with that exact number.

Question: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: I don’t.

Question: And on the RNA extraction kit component of the tests, can you say which manufacturers have not been able to send the extraction kits to labs that are developing the tests?

Mayor: Wow, this is getting deep, dude.

[Laughter]

And I was going to say, if this is your natural knowledge, we need to know more about you, why you know this.

Question: [Inaudible] is there a timeframe on how long it will take until they can meet the demands?

Commissioner Barbot: We'll have to get back to you on the details of the manufacturers.

Question: Is the city considering using sort of rudimentary testing procedures like the ones China resorted to, like mobile CT scans and fever scans, if the CDC approved testing and it doesn't come through in time?

Commissioner Barbot: We haven't discussed that, but I think, right now, given all the conversation about testing capacity, we could start the conversations, but it hasn't been a primary part of the conversations that we've had.

Mayor: Yeah, I think, look, that's a good question. And I'd say there is a – I'll give you my own imperfect mathematical equation – there's a direct correlation between the unwillingness of the federal government to approve the automated testing. The fact that we really are running out of time here, have been running out of time, and we have to find any and all creative solutions. So, that specific option has not been fully vetted by us, but we're going to look at a lot of different ways to proceed if we don't have anywhere near the testing capacity we should have, we’ve got to be as creative as we can be.

Question: Will the same thing go for – there's alternative tests and not FDA approved [inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: Again, we'll have to get back to you on that detail.

Mayor: Everything's being looked at. Okay, who has not gone at all. Okay. We're going to start at this side again. Let's see if we can do not too many and we'll try and be quick. Go ahead.

Question: What was the closure or the restriction on [inaudible] enforced?

Mayor: As anything would be enforced. I mean we'll figure out the departments, but the natural ones that think about – the Police Department, Fire Department, Buildings, Health – we’ve got to sort it out, obviously, it's a few hours old, but there will be an enforcement mechanisms. There's fines involved. We'll be very vigorous.

Question: [Inaudible] what advice would you give New Yorkers who are considering going on dates?

[Laughter]

Mayor: Okay, you've got range. Okay.

[Laughter]

Mayor: I do not know the answer on disinfecting Citi Bikes. I don't know if anyone else knows. We will get back to you, it's a good question. We'll get back to you on that one. Look, this is kind of – it's a fun question, but it's also a real question. It gets to the heart of the matter. I think it is dangerous to stop living life. You know, this is a crisis, but it is a crisis that will one day end and, you know, we're going to lose some people and that's horrible, but the vast majority of people even who are affected are going to live and recover and then a whole lot of people will not be affected. I mean, every nation in the world that is still a factual matter. It does not – every single human being gets it and we understand the real numbers around what happens to those who do. So, we’ve got to keep living life. People, you know, cannot get to a point of hopelessness. I do think it's fine to have a social life, but you got to exercise some smart rules, right? If you're sick, don't go on a date. If the date is sick, don't go on the date. People should probably over communicate about things like that, right? Hi, are you sick today? And I do – look, I think people are being, in the scheme of things, you know, we're all humans, we're not perfect, but people have been pretty damn responsible. They understand this is serious stuff. So, the other thing is, you know, with a date, you know, you might keep a little more distance than you might have before, right? That's okay. I saw one thing the other day that said a date didn't end that great and they did not kiss each other on the cheek or anything at the end of the day. I think it was wise, especially if it didn't go well. But people are going to – people are still going be people. How do we be smart about it, right? That's the way I would say it.

Okay. Yes?

Question: I'm wondering, are the disease detectives maxing out on their capacity to keep up with these cases and track [inaudible]?

Mayor: We're doubling the number as we speak and we're going to keep augmenting.

Question: Is the city keeping track of how many people you guys have turned away from testing? If not, why?

Mayor: We don't – I mean, again, why don't you – the vast majority of the health work that's done in New York City is not us. So, I want you to just be careful with your question when you say that you guys – it's doctors, doctor offices, clinics, Urgent Care, private hospitals, nonprofits, none of that is us. Then there’s Health + Hospitals, that's actually us.

President Katz: In someone's record we would. Any patient who comes in, we open up a record and we would document what we recommended for that patient.

Question: Do you have a number or estimate?

President Katz: No, I don't.

Question: And also, is City Hall planning to close?

Mayor: No.

Question: [Inaudible] gatherings of 500 or less [inaudible] how does the city plan to handle Times Square, Bryant Park in the spring time when the weather warms up?

Mayor: Sure. So, let me start as the layman and then the experts will jump in. I mean, outdoor and indoor is different. We're still trying to understand this disease. But, you know, define – it's I think a definitional matter that outdoor and indoor is different. You know, circulating air makes a difference.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: No question. No question. I mean, it's a very fair question, but I'm saying – I just want to start by saying we would take a different view of anything outdoor. But you're right that we have to try and figure out without the kind of – indoor is defined, right? If you got a venue, you know how big it is, it has entrances. It's like, you know, you can actually enforce that. Outdoors all over the city, that is a much more challenging matter. Although, you're right, there are some places that'll focal point. We got to figure that one out. That's – to me, that's like a real higher-level challenge. But I do think, again, I don't know many situations where people have gotten most of two months of nonstop warnings. And if that wasn't enough, the last few days probably have really done it for a lot of people. So, I do think there's a consciousness when we see it manifesting in people's activities and behavior to be more careful and to do some things differently. We’ve got to think about what we can do about outdoor venues like that. But I do think the people themselves are already acting in many ways.

Y'all want to add? Anyone?

Commissioner Barbot: I think you got it.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: You just had it all.

Question: Just to the scientists on board here. Is there any indication that a change in temperature upward is going to in any way mitigate the spread of this disease?

Mayor: I'm sorry, Mr. President, what did you say?

[Laughter]

That was my homage to Trump saying it'll go away when the weather got warm. Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: We have had conversations with scientists in different institutions and given the fact that this is a novel virus that we've never seen before, it's hard to predict what temperature will do – ambient temperature will do with it. I should really say seasonal changes, not ambient temperatures, cause that might mean something different. So, there's no way to know, you know, what's going to happen when the spring comes, when the summer comes. We can't predict whether it's going to behave like influenza does – that typically it's got a very defined you know, September to March, April kind of trajectory.

Question: To the Mayor and the medical doctors, there have been a couple of articles in the past few days about Italy, for example, being overwhelmed, the health system, and today the Washington Post wrote about Iran building mass graves. How [inaudible] are you guys keeping up with these, sort of, international developments? And when you read something like that, it freaked me out. But how do you guys deal with that. Do you plan more? You know, how do you react to those sort of horrible –

Mayor: I'll start and my colleagues can jump. I mean, they're really, really troubling. I've read in particular number of accounts what's going on in Italy, including first person accounts – doctors and patients and all. It's very, very troubling. Now, I cannot emphasize enough, that they started so far behind. I mean, China started even farther behind because there was mass governmental denial of the obvious, but Italy just – you know, it was already established by the time they even had a sense that there was something to pay attention to. I mean that's my layman's interpretation. You know they were in full-blown crisis before they even braced for impact. As opposed to the United States, which, in general, and certainly at the state and local level has been preparing for this in a lot of ways and warning people. Again, January 24th was our first press conference on this – first case was March 1st. I mean, that's real, real different than Italy. I think Iran was the same thing. Iran went from no indication of anything to, like, a giant problem in a matter of days. They were not ready. Also, not transparent. South Korea that started in a particular religious institution and blew up, and I just don't think there's a parallel to – we had the benefit of seeing everyone's experienced, all of us, in getting ready. I also think that just objectively we have a much stronger health care system, not standing as to problems – we just do – and this city, especially, in this country. All that should give us a little more hope. But to your question, yeah, it's sobering as all hell when you read those reports and no one should take it lightly. And that's where I said to you guys, and I'm not happy to tell you, but, you know, if I can see a thousand cases by next week, you know, of course we are worried about where that takes us and how we deal with it. And that's why we're going to be planning for anything and everything.

Commissioner Barbot: Just to add to what the Mayor said, we have staff who, part of their job in this response is to make sure that they stay up to date with the scientific literature, because this is, as we've been saying, every day we're learning something new and we look at studies that are released. Additionally, we talk to scientists at the World Health Organization. We talk to public health practitioners in other cities to learn from what they're experiencing so we can integrate that into the longstanding plans that we've had. And so, you know, part of this – part of the role of public health is to anticipate a number of different potential scenarios and put measures in place that will help address the spread in the immediate period and in a situation like this, then, over time, reduce the speed of the spread and reduce the potential harm to those New Yorkers who are most vulnerable.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I would say a couple of things. And again, the doctors will jump in. I appreciate the question. I understand the question. Obviously, we're all humans. It was something happening in your neighborhood, you’d want to know. On the other hand, when we’re saying communities spread, just the assumption should be this is something that's going to reach into every corner of the city whether we like it or not. And I don't think it's particularly productive, meaning I don't know what you'd do with that information. I don't know how you change your life for what you think, unless there’s a – excuse me, an indication of a cluster. That's something we absolutely will talk about. We do not have that at this point. So, as you saw, from those numbers we’re spreading out over at 8.6 million people you know, 95 cases. So, what I would – what I would say to you, you can be guaranteed of is, if we see something actionable, if we see something that tells people something or that explains something that is strategic, if you will, like obviously with Westchester, knowing there was a cluster led to a whole lot of decisions and actions and people need to understand that we would do that in a heartbeat. But I think in terms of saying, oh, you know, we've got – let me do a real life example – you know, if the Brooklyn number is 24 for a borough of a 2.6 million people, you know, if I told you there – I'm not saying this is real, but I said though there's one in this neighborhood, one in another, two in that – I don't think it tells you much, but I think a cluster would.

Does anyone want to add, or – go ahead.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: If I may. I think there is another piece that the Mayor has spoken about before many times, it hasn't come up now, and that is we need your help with the stigma that this is generating. We hear of real serious consequences of people that have been singled out over the course of the past weeks. We are as transparent as we can be. The Mayor has been very forthcoming, but now we need your help in protecting those people because frankly we're changing their lives.

Question: [Inaudible]

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, absolutely. And we've identified all of our medically fragile students, all of our fragile students. And if they are participating in any kind of those programs, we've actually already stopped those internships.

Question: [Inaudible]

Chancellor Carranza: That's been in effect for at least the last 48 hours, but we can get some more verification for you.

Mayor: And we need to make sure every school is fully cognizant.

Question: I wanted to ask you about the school closures, a couple aspects of it we're trying to get clarity on. One is just kind of the timing between the fact that it looks like the DOE or whoever was notified by the student's family, that the student –

Mayor: Wait, wait, wait, are we talking about the Bronx?

Question: The Bronx, yeah. The student or their family notified officials before the city got the results from the state?

Mayor: No, no. I want to – I'll jump in because I know some of this. We don't have the confirmation from the state, that's why I said to you potential – very, very important. We don't have – we’ve got a self-report, which we were going to honor in the first instance – better safe than sorry – you know, abundance of caution. But we need to get that confirmation from the health authorities, from a medical source to determine the next course of action.

Question: [Inaudible] there appears to be a directive to school not to report cases directly to the Department of Health. And we just wanted to understand that, but because perhaps –

Mayor: Where are you getting that? I'm sorry.

Question: I believe there was a memo distributed to schools.

Mayor: I have not heard that.

Commissioner Barbot: We get the results directly from the labs that run the test. And so, there's no need to do that double reporting.

Question: Right. But in this case, for example, you did close the school because you learned from the student, and I guess if you're waiting for the state lab, doesn't that create some delay?

Mayor: Yeah, there's a real issue here and this gets back to the automated testing. It really does. It's a very fair question. If we had the automated testing, if you had thousands per day results in hours. That's what we need. We're fighting a war here without enough ammunition. So the - we did not have 7:00 – 7:30 this morning when I was informed and made the decision, we did not have the benefit of the confirmation from a medical professional, or from, you know, the State. So we had to work with imperfect information. You're absolutely right. Will this be a repetitive pattern is something we'd be very, very concerned about. But, you know, I want to believe one way or another, we're going to find a way to get to that automated testing and then that will change the entire equation.

Question: Right, but in the interim, does it make sense for schools to have a directive to not report cases or suspect the cases to the Health Department? If I'm understanding that –

Chancellor Carranza: There is no directive. There's guidance that we've given schools and as the Mayor has talked about with increasing numbers of people that are now coming out, what we don't want to do is inundate the Department of Health with all of these kinds of cases. We have ongoing, daily, almost hourly contact with the Department of Health. We have designated people that we work with. So for us to funnel that information to the Department of Health is much more structured. We're trying to put structure into place then having random array of people calling the Department of Health and then using their very limited resources to have people try to figure out is that valid or not. In this particular case, we had a trusted reporter. It was apparent that we said it sounds credible. A student, and as the Mayor has said, imperfect circumstances. And again, I think this really would bespeaks to the notion that we want to err on the side of caution and abundance of caution as we work through some of these imperfections.

Mayor: But I think the underlying point to your question is a very fair one. Even though I want to believe the automated testing will solve it and solve it soon, there is still a reality that we have to figure out how to get that information from the second it comes into our possession, to the right people to make the analysis. I don't think every report will be created equal – Uh huh. Okay. I don't think every report will be created equal. I think we're going to get information from people that some cases we may build verify much quicker, sometimes slower. I think, you know, we're going to have times where the timing will be different where we have more time to double check before we have to make the decision. So but you're – I think it's very fair to say, and we'll work on this wherever a report comes up, no matter how informal, we need it quickly, and we need, you know, all the pertinent people who need to analyze it to get it. Way back.

Question: If the Governor said this morning in New York State, the test was free, does that mean free, free? Or does that mean no copay free? Or does that mean we'll bill you later free. And also what are we doing to assuage the fears undocumented persons [inaudible]?

Mayor: Sure, we've said in many of these press conferences, I'll say it again, no one who is undocumented will be asked their documentation status. We don't do that as a City of New York. Health + Hospitals doesn't do that. We already last year said to undocumented New Yorkers, we're guaranteeing health care without any question about documentation status and to all New Yorkers that we want people to make sure they have health care, if they cannot afford it we're going to work with them. We're either going to help them get insurance getting NYC Care, pay what they can pay, but we're going to get them health care.

But on the issue of the test, look, anyone who has insurance and doctors, I think this is self-evident, if you have insurance, the test is covered by insurance.

President Katz: Correct.

Mayor: If you have no insurance, no nothing, we're going to make sure you got the test for free. On copays, I think there was an action on copays by the State, but I don't know. Does anyone know that one?

President Kat: I believe you're correct. They waive copays.

Mayor: We can check that. I think they waive - the State created a rule to waive copays, but you can check that.

Question: So if there’s no insurance than it is entirely free without that for New York.

Mayor: Correct.

Question: Mr. Mayor, or maybe not for you, but for Dr. Barbot, what is your advice to public school parents who have one of those serious underlying conditions and yet their kids are going to school?

Mayor: You mean the child has the underlying condition?

Question: No, the parent. A parent at home has an underlying condition and the kids going to school and potentially contracting coronavirus. What is the advice for those parents at home? Should they try to isolate from their kids? What are the best practices here?

Commissioner Barbot: So I think the most important thing is for parents to be vigilant about potential symptoms in their children. Cough, fever, cough, shortness of breath, and to have a low threshold for reaching out to their pediatricians to assess what could be accounting for those symptoms. At this point in time, I wouldn't recommend parents isolate themselves from their kids. I think at this point in time we need parents to spend more time with their kids. I'm sure that a lot of children out there are feeling anxious about what they may be hearing or seeing on TV, and we want to take this opportunity to remind parents that there are resources for them to share accurate information with their children and to assure them that there are things that we all can do to keep each other healthy.

Question: And then you said, you're not sure how many tests that he has right now. I think Politico reported 500. Is that not accurate? [Inaudible] well, I'm sorry, you don't have a more exact number on the current amount of tests?

Commissioner Barbot: So, we're running tests all day, so I don't have the latest figure –
Question: [Inaudible] capacity.

Mayor: You mean per day?

Question: No. How many tests could you do if you needed to do – if a thousand people [inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: Oh, so, we can do 60 a day. And we –

Mayor: And that’s a Public Health Lab –

Commissioner Barbot: The public – just the Public Health Lab and we are working to increase that to somewhere between a 100 and 120 per day. And then that adds to the capacity of the commercial labs where we anticipate that they can do thousands per day.

Mayor: Okay. We're the end of the line.

Question: Yeah, I wanted ask about some proposals kind of circulating in the Council. Brad Lander and Ritchie Torres are sort of forwarding a proposal in which you would order the NYPD to stop making low level arrests for violations or misdemeanor. The idea of being prevent the potential spread of the virus in jails, courts, and precincts. The other idea was to order the courts to consider releasing anyone in pretrial detention who's over 60, same justification. Have you thought of measures like that? Is that something that we could expect potentially under the emergency order?

Mayor: No, that's not on – let me first say, just let me break this into pieces. Is that something we're planning on right now? No. Is it something that's sort of a front burner issue we're adjudicating right now? No. Is perfectly fair things to talk about? The second one you know, there an argument obviously if there's a health specific danger, that's a very real issue. So we should talk about if we want to put any criteria in place around the health of an inmate, but in addition to what we have right now, but the first one, it, my immediate response, I'd be happy to talk to them about it, but my immediate response is no. That this is exactly an example of the fact that we cannot think coronavirus is the only thing happening in our lives and in our city right now.

You know, our police officers still have to fight crime every day. There's not like, there's some timeout the criminals take because of coronavirus. You know, people still need a livelihood, right? I mean, you go down the list. Children still need an education. Does that - the entire society has not gone from, there is no – we didn't even know what coronavirus was to now the only thing we can do is coronavirus. We just have to strike some balance. So I would not want to see the NYPD not arresting someone who deserves to be arrested because of coronavirus. That doesn't follow to me.

Okay. Everyone, thanks very much. We'll have more tomorrow.

2020-03-13 NYC Mayor de Blasio Brian Lehrer

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. As our world continues to change in this way that was unimaginable just a few weeks ago, even just a few days ago. I mean the world changed a lot yesterday afternoon with all the different closures and other announcements. So we're all living to various degrees in a state of shock this morning. And I just wanted to acknowledge that because I guess it's probably best to just say that out loud to each other to help us face whatever each of us is facing with this and to help us get through this together as a city, as a country, as a world. I hope everybody listening right now has a good private support system. We will keep trying to be part of your public support system and do best to provide information and community.

But not everything is different. And we begin as usual on Fridays with our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 2-1-2-4-3-3-WNYC, 2-1-2- 4-3-3-9-6-9-2 if you want to call in or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AskTheMayor. Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you very much Brian and Brian, I want to thank you for what you just said. I think it's really, really important that we acknowledge the shock we're all in. It literally seems to change hourly a lot of the time and we have not been through anything like this. And people are fearful, they're anxious, they're confused, they have every right to be. And I think it's really important that people have places like your show to turn to for accurate information and you know, a real dialogue. I really want to emphasize to people there’s a lot of anxiety and fear out there. First of all, listen to the actual official sources of information that can give you facts. For example, there was a ridiculous rumor yesterday that all of Manhattan had been quarantined. That was patently false. People who want to get the truth can go to our website, nyc.gov/coronavirus, can go – can call 3-1-1 and get updates.

We also have a text, which I'll get that for you right now, what the number of people can text to get regular updates texted to them. They can watch obviously the, the City Hall Twitter feed and the Office of Emergency Management. They are constantly putting out refreshed information. So anyone who wants those text alerts and tens of thousands of New Yorkers have signed up for them. You text the word COVID, C-O-V-I-D again, C-O-V-I-D, to 6-9-2-6-9-2. And you'll get those sent to you. And the last thing, Brian, which is to people's feelings and emotions, which are real, that anyone who's really feeling worried and anxious besides trying to get good, usable information. If you just feel, you know, worried, depressed, confused in a way you want to talk to someone professional. Any New Yorker can call our helpline, 8-8-8-NYCWELL again, 8-8-8- NYCWELL, W-E-L-L, get a trained counselor 24/7. There's nothing wrong with asking for help in the middle of a pandemic obviously, and people want someone professional talk to it is available for free 24/7.

Lehrer: And those are all good places to start. Thank you for those. And before we get into policy questions around coronavirus, let me ask how you are? I don't envy you having to be faced with the incredibly difficult choices that you're having to make right now. How are you holding up?

Mayor: Brian it's, thank you for asking. I am really focused on listening to what New Yorkers are going through, but also making the right decisions for them. Never letting the fear or the panic in. And I want to say something very personal. I think it's true in my case, and I don't mean to overstate this, Brian, but it's just a human reality. I had the blessing and so did my wife, Chirlane. We happened to be brought up by parents who participated. Every single one of our parents participated in World War II, and we were told those stories throughout our upbringing. And I think when your entire worldview is shaped by people who went through something absolutely cataclysmic, that the entire society participated and everyone closed ranks and supported each other.

Lehrer: And the depression that led into that for all those years.

Mayor: My parents were absolutely children of the Depression. My parents both had any late in life at the age of 44. So I know we almost added, you know, skipped a generation, if you will. It is very much in my DNA, my worldview. I've heard stories that none of us in modern society could possibly imagine happening to us. And my dad came back, you know, a lieutenant in the US Army, fought for three years, came back, you know, having had half his leg blown off on Okinawa. You know, I think when those are the stories that you are taught from moment one in your life, it puts in perspective what pain and suffering is and how a society should deal with it. I think we're dealing with a very different reality in modern society and we have to sort of think about that deeply even more so as we deal up ahead with the challenge of global warming.

But I do think there are some basic rules that come from, you know, really listening to those who, you know, walk through hell and came back. Which is, you know, the number one thing is never let the panic in, never let people, anyone convince you to panic. There are so many things that should reassure us despite the fear, despite the real honest fear, the unknowns, the unknown is the biggest fear here Brian. We're dealing with a disease that no one ever heard because it didn't exist to medical science less than six months ago. And they still don't understand. And that's a very valid reason for fear. But there's a whole lot of facts, a whole lot of truth and experience that should be reassuring to us. And also this is a true statement. God forbid any of us has to deal with coronavirus, but if you had to – if you had to experience it, there is no place better on Earth to be than in New York City right now, with literally more doctors and nurses and medical professionals, the strongest public health apparatus in the nation by far. Huge, huge number of hospital beds and a lot of dedicated medical professionals, first responders, people are going to be at their posts no matter what to protect everyone else.

So I understand the fear, but I also want people to keep in perspective, this is New York City. There is no place stronger and more resilient and we will come out of it. This is, you know, our Health Commissioner, I think very rightly reminded people that this could easily be six months or more, but it is finite. And we will come out the other side and we will, you know, the vast, vast majority of people are going to survive and recover fully. I'm very worried about older folks and folks with preexisting major, serious medical conditions and we want to protect every life. But we do need to keep in our minds. We're going to get through this and we'll going to come out the other side and we're going to move forward.

Lehrer: Let me deal with the most frequent question that we're getting. And that's about closing schools. Six States have done it. We're getting some calls for it and the Chancellor and you have some reasons against it. What you're thinking as of right now?

Mayor: Oh, not just some reasons, profound reasons. I really believe this. It begins with our children. We need our children to be safe. We need them to be in a place where, you know there's now a school nurse in every single school building. We need our children to be fed, which is a reality, bluntly in a city with lots of folks who have very few resources, a lot of folks who are poor, that our schools are a place where kids often get two nutritious meals in their day that they might not get otherwise. We need our first responders, our medical personnel to be able to depend on our schools for their children, for their own children so they can do the work to protect all of us. So they did not force to have to stay home because they have no other choice. And we also, by the way, you know, I, when people, when states, or any place else closes their schools is that for a week, a month? Is that the entire rest of the school year? Do you realize the impact that has on a child's education to lose half a school year, or a big chunk of the school year?

Lehrer: Well, the other side of that is it's just a few months.

Mayor: Well, but I would say in the life of a child and their intellectual development and everything else, it's a big deal. Now the question is, you know, what's safe, what's the right thing to do? And right now we have seen that this disease has a very consistent pattern around the world. This disease, its biggest impact in terms of truly negative consequences is on older people, folks 50 and over. Folks who have preexisting serious medical conditions. The children who have experienced this disease in this city who did not have a serious preexisting medical conditions came through very, very well, very quickly. So this is Brian, just to finish it, you know, we have a very strong philosophy and I've been talking constantly with the Governor and the heads of the different agencies that the line of defense we are holding here is to keep our health care system running, including the people we need to staff it, to keep our mass transit running, which is crucial for everything for making sure health care workers can get to work, first responders so that people still can work. We need people to keep working for their livelihood and our schools. A lot of other things we could do without, but those three things are absolutely crucial to preserve.

Lehrer: But before we go to the phones on what you just said, what’s safe? It's not just for the school children. It's also for the grownups who take care of the school children. And I want to play a clip of probably you agree, the most respected national leader on this right now, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This is a 60 second clip of him after he was asked on Morning Joe today on MSNBC to lay out how he would balance when and where to close schools.

Director Anthony Fauci, National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases: I think you need to do it proportionately. If you have a considerable amount or even the beginnings of community spread in your community, clearly you need to do very aggressive mitigation procedures. If you have less, you can start doing something. I mean, physical separation. A lot of crowds, don't do unnecessary travel. The kinds of things like telework, that's all fine. When it comes to the really, really forceful mitigation, should be a little bit more proportionate. But with regard to what you're saying, what the effect is, even though we know, because we have experience now with other countries, that children, although they get infected, they really – unlike influenza, they do not necessarily at all, get serious disease. In fact, if you look at the history of what we've seen, children do very well. The only problem is when they get infected, and schools can be a breeding ground for that. They go home and infect grandma or grandpa or a relative or someone who might be in a more vulnerable position. So that's the rationale for shutting schools.

Lehrer: So Mr. Mayor, I'm not advocating one thing or another, but Dr. Fauci seem to say without naming New York or any other city, that because we have community spread of the virus and you know, there's a need to protect the older parents and grandparents, which would imply separate the kids from each other. What would you say to that clip?

Mayor: I would say, first of all, we should not have an illusion that if you close schools, kids are not going to still be connecting with other kids and family members and you know, be out and around. I mean this, the notion that we're going to isolate every child from the rest of their family. I think is very suspect. I think in fact it puts tremendous strain on families.

Lehrer: Well not from the rest of their family, from other families, children more, right?

Mayor: Listen to where I'm going. It's got to put tremendous strain on families. If they can't have their kids in school, everything else is going to change in their lives. And do you really think kids are going to stay in their room or stay in their apartment for weeks and weeks or months on end and not come in contact with other kids and other people? It's unrealistic. So I think the reality we have is we need the adults – anyone who is an adult in our school system needs to practice the kind of common sense measures we've talked about. If they're truly themselves, if they are sick, not out of fear, but out of fact if they are sick, they should stay home until they are well. That is very, very important. If a parent, any child, sees that their child is sick in any way, hold your child home because most of the sicknesses that are traditional this time of year take a few days to clarify. Either something more serious or something that kids will get over or anybody would get over after a few days, typical cold, et cetera. If it's something more serious, we'll get them tested. But the fact is to say we are going to shut down everything and thus in the process create a huge amount of negative impact onto itself, let alone undermine all the people who we depend on to help keep the society running and protect everyone who then have to deal with their own children. There's a very slippery slope here and I've been blunt about it, Brian. So I heard exactly what Dr. Fauci said. And I'm heartened, especially by the point he made clearly that this disease has had minimal impact on kids, particularly healthy kids. But we have to balance each of the pieces right now in a very big complex equation. And I don't think it's as simple as saying, if you do something like close schools, it doesn't have a huge domino effect that then hurts a lot of other pieces of what we need to do.

Lehrer: Alexis in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Alexis.

Question: Hi.

Lehrer: Hi, Alexis. Are you a student?

Question: Yes.

Lehrer: What grade? What grade are you in? Can you say?

Question: I am in tenth, I am a sophomore.

Lehrer: Okay. Do you have a question for the Mayor?

Question: Yes. So my school, there's another school in the campus and there was a case of coronavirus yet we were still required to go to school. I didn't because my mom was scared that if I do go, I'll get infected. But they still made us go to school and they're not cleaning the school, they're not taking students out. And my worry is that if a student has a family member with respiratory issues or HIV or any other issues, that they might not show any symptoms and might not know that they have it and bring it back to their house. So what are doing, do you think you can close down with schools after hearing that?

Mayor: Alexis, just which school do you go to? I'm sorry.

Lehrer: Alexis, you want to say your school's name?

Question: Bronx Academy for Software Engineering.

Mayor: And which school did you say is connected to because that's not one of the ones obviously, that has the scare in the Bronx, which proved to be false. And I'll speak to that. Are you in the same building as those other two schools?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: You're in the same building as Laboratory School of Finance and Technology and South Bronx Preparatory?

Question: No. Crotona International High School. There was a staff who has the coronavirus and got tested and proved positive.

Mayor: Okay. Let me – Alexis, I want to respect your question but I want to confirm details before I – I'll talk about the broad answer but I want to confirm details because here's the problem we've had already. In the case of those two schools I mentioned in the Bronx, where on Thursday a parent, quote unquote self-confirmed, that her daughter had tested positive. When that was checked against the New York State health officials, it proved to be unfortunately false and the student in fact had tested negative. So that school was closed for day as a precaution has now reopened. The protocol in any school where there's a real positive is a full cleaning of the school. Isolation of course of the student themselves who tested positive, tracing of any other people in the school they had a close connection to because we know, and yet another study has come out from the World Health Organization confirming in tremendous detail that this is not an airborne disease. This is a direct contact transmission, by fluid disease. You have to be close to someone, that fluid has to go from one body to the next. So that's where we will trace the exact people that that student would have had direct contact with and those folks will be isolated from the school.

And you make a very good point about any student who has those very serious health issues. The Department of Education keeps a list of those students by school and we would immediately alert those parents. And I think I have abundance of caution, we would advise those parents to hold that student back for a period of time, just to be safe. But the fact is once there is a fully confirmed case that will be all those steps immediately. And the City and State are in total agreement on that, that one day full shutdown, the cleaning, the isolation of those who need to be isolated. But we need to also recognize that people are starting to suggest they have a positive when they don't. And we have to be very careful about balancing that.

Lehrer: Right. And in fairness in the interest of not freaking people out with rumors we can't confirm that because somebody called a talk show and said that they heard that somebody at a certain location is positive, that that's the case without you having heard of it, Mr. Mayor, that's an indication that it may or may not be the case and maybe it is the case and you just hadn't heard it yet, but just not –

Mayor: I'm sorry to jump in there. There's a need to confirm with the actual – the actual medical professionals who did the test and we get that through the either the state or through the city public health lab, whichever is the specific entry point. But you know, no one can be – replace the doctors right now, we have to hear back that we have a confirmed positive.

Lehrer: I see that City Council Councilman Mark Treyger sent an idea to the Education Department, which is closing most public schools and using the rest to serve at-risk students and families like those you were describing who need food aid or childcare, whose parents are health care workers, and kids with certain disabilities. Those were all on the Councilman's list. Have you seen that one yet?

Mayor: I haven't and I appreciate every constructive suggestion. And he's someone I respect a lot. But again, that's one piece of the equation. There are many, many other pieces. I just actually reviewed a number of them with you. The nutrition is one piece of it, but we're going to watch this every day. And one of the things I said in detail at the press conference yesterday, Brian, is – and it fits with how you opened – this situation is changing not daily but hourly. If conditions change, we'll make decisions accordingly. But I believe that everything I laid out to you, the extraordinary negative impact of taken out schools, all the multiplier effects, the fallacy, I really believe this, that kids at home in their neighborhood are going to be in perfect isolation which I just don't believe as a parent. I'm mean, I'm a parent of two kids. I saw how they acted if they stayed home for a day. I saw how restless they were.

We're talking about weeks, months. I mean, I just think we have to be honest, but the fact is we can make sure with common sense – and everyone's in this, I think there's another real challenge here which is we got to make sure people don't think they can just sit back in a crisis and let the government fix it for them. That's not how this one works. Everyone has to participate. So anyone who is sick has to stay home, which usually means only a matter of days. If your kid's sick, you'll hold your kid back. But everyone has to participate and that's why I get back to that, you know, greatest generation reference. I don't want people thinking it's just about, you know, looking out for number one and that's all there is to it.

We actually have to think as a community here and there has to be a sort of a social commitment. Everyone involved in solving a problem. This is much farther – much bigger than government alone can solve. And I obviously, I understand everyone has to look out for themselves in a natural way, look out for their families. I do that, too. Everyone should, but there's got to be a sense here that actually you can also participate in the bigger solution and protecting each other and looking out for people in your life who might need help. We got to get to – I think New Yorkers do that. I think New Yorkers did that after 9/11 in an amazing fashion for the whole world to see after Sandy. We got to think big here.

Lehrer: Shane in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Shane.

Question: Hi, Brian. Hi, Mr. mayor. Really appreciate the weekly shows that you do. They're very informative. The weekly Ask the Mayor is so informative. Mayor, thank you for all you're doing to keep us informed. I have a dog walking business that's been around for 12 years. We have a lot of dog walkers with us and we're in the service industry. We've experienced an enormous drop in business where people don't want people coming to their homes or people are not working from the office, so they don't need our services. And so my main question here is that there's no work for our employees and we don't have a budget that can support them while we're not working. So I'm wondering what kind of support from the City is going to be there or the State that you might've heard of to help our workers. Like they –

Lehrer: So you don't just work walk dogs yourself, you employ other people who also walk dogs. Is that correct?

Question: Yes –

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor –

Question: [Inaudible]

Lehrer: That’s [inaudible] –

Mayor: It sounds like you have a –again, everyone does things differently. Sounds like you have a formal business, right? An incorporated business?

Question: It's incorporated and we didn't want to do things the 1099 route with independent contractors. So our walkers are employees.

Mayor: Okay. In your case then there's two things that we can do immediately at the City level and then I'll talk about the bigger level. We announced a few days back one for the smallest businesses under five employees, we can get cash grants to maintain employment levels. They're not limitless, but they are substantial and they could be very helpful. Depending on the size of your company you might qualify. And then second for companies up to a hundred employees no interest loans, zero interest loans, up to $75,000 to tide people over, keep them moving. And you can find out about all of those things through 3-1-1 and how to apply. The bigger relief that I believe is coming quickly from the federal side – I hope so at least – it will be a combination of things, as I understand it, including things like extending unemployment insurance for anyone who really can't continue their work and other kinds of stimulus package that might help including down to small business.

That's my hope that they will aggressively shore up employment. Because I think one of the big things to be concerned about in this crisis and a balance that we have to strike is keeping small businesses alive so we don't lose them, keeping people employed so they have money for the rent, for food, for medicine, everything people still need. There's a real balance. I met yesterday with some of the biggest employers in New York City who are trying in every way they can, to their credit, to move to telecommuting or staggering work hours. So people are staggering them so that people don't have to be all in the subway in rush hour, that kind of thing. But everyone agreed, protecting employment and protecting people's livelihoods is really important. We can't forget this piece of the equation. So Shane, if you'll give your information to WNYC I'll have people follow up with you directly from our Small Businesses Services department, but anyone – any business owner listening can call 3-1-1, then we'll help in the ways that we can.

Lehrer: And I will say that Shane kind of represents a good number of the callers on our board this morning with small businesses or just people who find themselves out of work now. Here's another one like that. Listener on Twitter writes, “I’m a stagehand, out of work for a month or more, is the Mayor willing to work with the government to freeze rents and utilities? Our theater community lives paycheck to paycheck.”

Mayor: Yes, they do. And I know I've worked very closely with the stagehands’ union and their work is, you know, something that we all think of as sort of symbolic of our city and I can imagine how tough it's going to be for them now. So yeah, look, we're trying to figure out every way that we can, for example, to stop evictions from happening, freeze that situation. If there's anything else that we can freeze up or suspend in the way that people have to pay, if there's anything we can get our hands on that we can do like that we're going to, that's an ongoing work.

So absolutely, I think it's a combination of, the City can provide support of some kinds for small business. For everyday people anyone threatened with eviction should be calling 3-1-1. And we can provide, in many cases, a free lawyer to stop it. If folks, particularly if they're lower income, are unable to pay the rent there are times when we can get them some immediate financing, some immediate money to help pay the rent immediately to keep them in their apartment. But for the larger society, we're going to work with the real estate world, the landlords, everyone to try and get everyone to be truly socially conscious and not greedy and really cut people slack in the middle of this crisis. We’re going to trying to do that on many, many levels.

Lehrer: Winston in East Harlem, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Winston.

Question: Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have a quick question about the job search requirement for people who are getting cash assistance. So right now the guidance that I have been told is that we're still expected to report in person between 9:00 and 9:30 in order to maintain our EBT and cash assistance benefits. And I'm wondering if there's a work around for that during this health crisis. So I know that some people are able to do online job searches but that doesn't seem to be the predominant way that people are getting those. And then my second question, just as a follow up would be, you know, with people who are on food stamps, is there a way to maybe give them an advance so that people can have money to prepare? And I'm – not to be alarmist, but just are there considerations for that?

Mayor; Excellent, excellent questions and I'm going to answer them, but, Brian, I want to say this is another example of why your show is so valuable. This kind information directly from people and what they're experiencing helps me and everyone in the government to make the adjustments we have to make in the middle of a crisis. So, I want to thank you for that.

Lehrer: Yes.

Mayor: To the question. I think that's a great point about getting away from the in person interviews in this situation. We actually have been moving away in a lot of different areas. Food stamps, for example, SNAP program – we've been moving away from in person interviews to an automated system or call in. That's what we need to maximize now. In this case, I think your suggestion is right on. We'll follow up today. Please give your information to WNYC so we can make sure that we make the adjustments that we can for you.

But to the maximum extent possible, I'm going to instruct our agencies to start moving away from those in person interviews immediately. And if they can cancel them all together, that would be ideal. On the food stamp advance, it’s a great question as well. I don't know what the federal rules are, which govern the program, and if we are allowed to do that and if we can, I think it's a very thoughtful idea if we can help people get ahead of this a little bit and stock up, I think that's real smart. So we're going to see if that is possible. Maybe a little complicated because we have to get a federal sign off, but let's see if we can do that. But again, thank you. Excellent questions and we're going to follow up on all those.

Lehrer: We have time for one more caller. Alina in Manhattan. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Alina.

Question: Thank you so much for taking my call and thank you guys for your leadership and intelligence. I'm calling because I just am a person sort of going through it on the ground and trying to sort my way through and it's been pretty confusing and I just wanted to share that experience and to see if others had had the same and what I'm either getting wrong and what I can do or what we could change. So my boyfriend was asked to be quarantined because he worked in WeWork with the financial advisor of like patient zero in New Rochelle. And we were asked to quarantine ourselves. Nobody ever contacted us. I, after that, got symptoms. They got worse. I called my doctor, my doctor wasn't sure, but he had no tests. So he put me to a hotline with Weill Cornell.

They basically told me that they are asking people to just stay home if they have symptoms that are not critical. And the only way to get a test was to be critical. So I've been extremely diligent and my boyfriend's been extremely diligent, but I have two children who can't come home. I have an elderly mother that I can't see who's now showing symptoms. So I called her doctor, was on hold for an hour. Not sure what to do, short of trying to take her to the ER, but there are a lot of problems with going to the ER. You don't want to infect yourself if you're not sick. You don't want to get others sick. We don't have enough masks, we don't have enough gloves to be able to do that in a safe way. And then it's really unclear, even if you're guessing whether you have it or not. It's unclear what the time frame is. I know [inaudible] yesterday that said about two weeks from showing symptoms. But anyway, this is sort of what I'm going through on the ground and it doesn't seem like there's a particular test center, a place we can go to, just kind of get tested. And I'm worried that people are, you know – I was very careful, but I have other friends who are coughing and because they're not getting tested, they're just assuming they don't have it. So that's my experience. Sorry to be long winded.

Lehrer: Oh, and it's so complicated, Alina. I feel for you so much, Mr. Mayor, how can you help her?

I feel for you too, Alina – and I'm shocked actually that, you know, the Westchester case is the one true cluster. Like that's been the epicenter. There's nothing else like it. And if you're saying that your boyfriend was directly related to that case and no one gave you guidance on what to do, something's very wrong there because there's been a – I've seen in many, many cases a lot of follow up and taking very seriously that folks need to be given guidance and support. So I wanted to say, I don't know how on Earth that happened. I think it's absolutely unacceptable that you were left in that situation. I'm very, very sorry that happened to you. First of all, give your information to WNYC and we will absolutely have someone in authority follow up with you today who can really make sure that all the right follow ups happen for you, for your boyfriend, for your mom right away today.

Because this is unbelievable that you were left in that situation. I want to, though, speak to the bigger picture because I think everyone who will listen to that needs to hear what's supposed to happen and what we're trying to make happen for everyone. First of all, anytime you're – you have a private doctor or whatever health care facility you turn to regularly, that is of course the first place to turn. But if as Alina was saying, you're not getting satisfaction from that, you can't get through or you're not getting good answers you should call 3-1-1 and they can connect you to our Health + Hospital system, meaning our public hospitals and clinics, connect you to someone who can either give you a guidance over the phone or tell you where we need you to go to come in and see a doctor directly.

The goal here, Alina, is for folks who don't have an immediate direct connection like you have to someone who tested positive – what we want for the vast majority New Yorkers is if you start to feel sick, with the kind of classic cold and flu like symptoms get home, stay home, and if after a day or two it's, you know – if it's getting better that's great. If it's not getting better, it's getting worse, it's really important to alert your health care provider or if it can't reach one again through 3-1-1 alert our Health + Hospitals team. And then what happens typically is someone comes in to whether it’s a medical office, clinic, urgent care or a lot of people getting tested at urgent care for the first level. And the first level – we said this to people, and we really want people to hear this. There is a standard test that has been around for quite a while well before this outbreak, it's called BioFire is the name it goes by – and it is a test that immediately identifies if someone has one of 26 more typical diseases especially that we see around this season. If you go and get that test – if you were sick and it persists, you go in, you get that test and if it's one of those 26 things then it's not coronavirus. That's going to be true for a whole lot of people. If you take that test and it proves that it is not coming up positive on any of those 26, then we're going to want you to be tested for coronavirus. So there is a prioritization around people who have been exposed to other folks. Direct contact with someone who tested positive, we want them tested, we want folks tested who are coming back from one of the worst affected countries.

We want folks tested who have symptoms and are over 50 and have pre-existing conditions. That means cancer, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease, or a compromised immune system. And obviously again, someone who goes through that normal pattern, gives it a few days, disease persists whatever it is, goes and gets the test, it is not one of the 26 from BioFire. That's someone else, of course, we want tested.

And today for the first time, and Brian, this is breaking news as of this morning after us pleading with the federal government and the FDA for many, many weeks to authorize more testing, they finally this morning for one of the major testing companies also authorized automated testing, which means that we are on the pathway now as a city to be able to get thousands of tests done in the day and get the results back the same day. That's going to ramp up now. This is the first time we're finally going to be able to have the testing capacity to get to a lot more people, which we've been needing for a long, long time.

Lehrer: And that doesn't change what an individual does in terms of how to have contact with the medical profession if they think they may need a test?

Mayor: Given that – the basic answer is no, and I'll tell you why because given the fact that we are going to have a lot more testing but we're also going to have obviously more cases. We still want to keep that progression intact. If again, if you're someone who is over 50 with those preexisting conditions, those five areas I mentioned, we want to treat you very carefully. That's a whole different discussion. Or again, if you've been in direct contact with some of this already confirmed, tested positive or you just came back from one of the highly affected nations, those folks are going to go to the front of the line for obvious reasons. So we're going to do this in progression. The more testing capacity we have, the deeper we can go into the community obviously, but I want people to understand there's going to be a lot of people who will have symptoms this time of year and it will turn out to be something that resolves like it does for all of us.

You know, every year there's – often you'd get the cold, you get the flu, whatever, and it resolves quickly. For other people, if it's not resolving, they're going to find out if it's something that can be identified by a doctor, as not being coronavirus. And for those who it turns out it is coronavirus we know exactly what to do. For a lot of people – for about 80 percent of the people who even end up with that diagnosis they will be able to go home, stay in isolation, ride it out and fully recover. 80 percent is the consistent number we're seeing of folks who go through it with minimal impact, fully recover. 20 percent have a more serious impact. The vast majority of the 20 percent will come through. It'll be – they'll have a tough experience, but they're going to come through, they're going to fully recover. There's a small percentage who are in true danger, who we are very worried about we could lose, but that is overwhelmingly not only anyone over 50, over 50 is sort of the base, much more likely over 60, but even more likely over 70 over 80 years old and one or more of those five preexisting conditions. We know that's where the real danger is.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, thank you for staying over your usual time this morning to take some peoples – and I know you’re –

Mayor: [Inaudible] yeah, just one more very quick point – to anyone thinking about the parents, grandparents, if you are – everyone wants to visit with each other, that's normal. If anybody in your family is sick, make sure to not visit someone who is older and has one of those preexisting conditions. We have to give them space. Do not put anybody who even might be sick in direct presence with them. That's actually the dangerous thing that we have to have that kind of separation for a period of time here.

Lehrer: When should they visit people who are very elderly, even if they're not sick? I see there's a restriction in New York – and I'm sorry to throw on another follow up question, but I see there's now a restriction in New York from anybody visiting nursing homes.

Mayor: And that has to do with the fact that it is a congregate setting where unquestionably, you're going to have a lot of people who are much older, much more vulnerable and undoubtedly a high percentage of people who will have a major preexisting condition or a meaningful percentage of people have a preexisting condition. If you're talking about an older relative, first of all, if they do not have a preexisting condition, that's a much better situation meaning of those five areas I mentioned. Also if you're absolutely certain no one who would be visiting is sick at that point in time – and one very easy thing our Health Commissioner says, just take out a thermometer if it hits at 100.4 or above don't even think of visiting someone elderly or someone who has those preexisting conditions.

So you can just literally do that every day. If you want an extra measure of clarity. If you go – if you're above 100.4 so less than two degrees above normal you should exercise that caution. So folks can visit if they're convinced everyone is well and if they're, you know, if they know what's going on with the older person they're visiting. But it's just an abundance-of-caution reality, Brian. If you think someone might be sick, don't put them in the presence of an older person with those preexisting conditions.

Lehrer: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.

2020-03-13 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Okay. We have a lot to go over with you today. And, obviously, we all just finished watching the President's remarks and the President specifically declaring the national state of emergency. This confirms what we've been talking about, obviously, for weeks now that we needed the federal government to play a much more active role and hopefully this is a step in the right direction. I'm going to go into a number of things that the government is doing, but, again, want to first talk about New Yorkers and everyone's lives, every-day lives. I've talked to so many people these last days and there's obviously a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety, tremendous amount of confusion – who wouldn't be confused in this ever-changing situation? New Yorkers right now are hurting and they're looking for answers. But I also want to remind everybody, despite the anxiety and the confusion, New Yorkers are still New Yorkers. We are the toughest, most resilient people in this nation. And I see so much evidence of that as well. And I appreciate – I see so many people helping each other out, going the extra mile for their fellow New Yorkers. And this is what I think we'll see throughout this crisis, and I always will be honest with people, we're going to be at this for months and we're going to need people to do that, to be a part of the solution, to help us solve the overall situation, but also to really be there for each other. Now, I also want to say, even though New Yorkers are tough, if you're feeling scared, if you're feeling anxious, if you need help, there's nothing wrong with that and you have every right to get help and help is always there for you. I want to remind you, you can call 888-NYC-WELL, 24 hours a day, multiple languages, trained counselors. So, if you're feeling anxious, you're feeling depressed by everything going on, you need some help, we want to know there is some place to turn – 888-NYC-WELL.

Look, we've been getting so much news, so much changing all the time. This, again, this really feels like a crisis that changes almost by the hour. Most of the news we get isn't real good, a lot of it's really quite troubling. But there are still things happening that should give people some confidence and some hope. And I just want to take a moment to thank my colleagues here and all the people who work under their command. Each of these people represents many thousands more who work for them and I've a lot of them these last few weeks, and I'm going to be asking a lot more, but they have always risen to the challenge. I think it's hard for every-day people watching the news, getting their information wherever they get it online, et cetera, from the newspapers, it's hard to imagine what these people do and all of the thousands and thousands of people who work for them do, but I want to give you a window on it. They work extraordinarily hard and there are no boundaries to their work. There is no clocking in and clocking out, everyone here signed up for the 24/7 plan. And I will give you some evidence – last night, I was over at OEM till about 9:30. When I left OEM, it was filled with public servants who were manning their posts, dealing with everything that was happening. I continued emailing and calling these folks and some other folks till about 11:00 pm, and everyone was 110 percent on duty. And I sent an email this morning at 6:50 am to a group of people and instantaneously a number of them responded with specific information. So, you got people here are going to be working really, really hard and they all know we're going to be doing this for many, many months. As I said, no one's going to have a day off, everyone's going to be working very, very long days. There's no holidays. There's no weekends. It's just going to be continuous for all of us and that's what everyone here signed up for, but I want to honor them for that so New Yorkers can at least feel comfort that the entire team will be devoted throughout. And that's certainly the case of our first responders are healthcare professionals, so many public servants who are going to be there no matter what.

We obviously have the basics of the President's state of emergency. There are a lot of details that we need to get filled in, a lot of information we don't yet have about what it means. But, directionally, certainly a lot of good new initiatives in the President’s state of emergency that hopefully will help us in very tangible ways. Want to confirm also to all New Yorkers and clarify what our state of emergency here means, because I think, understandably, there's lots of questions. There's a Medium post that’s up now. I think we're changing the title to make it a little clearer, but it's up now, from me, just explaining some of the basics on the state of emergency for the city. That obviously is available. It's a Medium post, it's also been sent out our Twitter handle for the Mayor's Office, @NYCMayorsOffice, and mine, @NYCMayor. We're sending it out because we really want people to have an understanding of this. And the important thing to understand is state of emergency doesn't mean that every piece of our lives have changed overnight by the stroke of a pen, obviously. There were the rumors yesterday that I really – I can't say I'm ever shocked by anything, but I was troubled by them. The rumors of Manhattan being quarantined and everything being shut down, it bore no semblance to reality. But I have to tell you how many, many, many people – people I've known a long time were all bombarding me with emails and texts asking me if it was true. And people I would've thought would immediately not assume it's true and people obviously did not take the opportunity to go and look at the many information sources we have. I want to really reiterate to people, we have got to be sober and clearheaded in this crisis. It's not going away. It's going to be here a long time. Anytime you're not sure of something you hear – and I ask this, of course, of our colleagues in the media as well, they can obviously get to all of our colleagues for quick confirmations – but for every-day New Yorkers, you can go to nyc.gov/coronavirus. You can call 3-1-1. You can get our regular updates by text – again, text COVID – C-O-V-I-D – to 692-692. COVID, text that to 692-692. That number now, it's amazing – there's 220,000 people getting those updates now. It's almost a quarter-million people and the more people get them the better so good information is out there. For Spanish speakers by the way, they can text to COVID ESP – so, C-O-V-I-D E-S-P to 692-692 and get Spanish updates.

But once we heard that rumor yesterday, we immediately shot it down. It has no basis in fact at all. What our state of emergency means is that the city has the capacity to take actions including very intense actions to protect everyone and to address the crisis. As I said yesterday, and I say in the Medium post, right now, the most important piece of the equation is the limitations on gatherings. We did that in conjunction with the State. The State put out the rules, we’re absolutely unified on that. There are many, many other emergency powers that could be utilized depending on what we need. But we want people still to go on about their lives. We want people to rest assured that a lot is being done to protect them, a lot of public servants out there making sure things are working in this city. To the maximum extent possible, we want people going to work, earning their livelihood. So, I don't want any misunderstanding of what a state of emergency means in our case. And as we have to use any of these emergency powers, we're going to announce that in real time. We have a lot of powers in reserve right now. We'll announce when and if we need to use them.

So, in the months ahead, I've established the notion, there's three pillars to protecting this city and our longterm interests of our people and the health and safety of our people. And I've talked in terms of lines of defense and the line of defense that I want to defend with everything we've got, it’s got three pillars – our schools, our mass transit, and our health care system, and those three interrelate deeply. You take one out of the equation, it affects the others. My goal is to keep all three of those going as effectively as we can and the most important piece of that will be our health care system. And again, we will constantly update you on how we're handling each of these.

On our health care system, I want to start by saying that we are constantly working to understand coronavirus, the entire global medical community is. We have some of the best public health experts in the world right here in New York City and they're constantly consulting with other experts all over the country, all over the world. An interesting new study today, or yesterday, I should say – WHO study. This one is extraordinary. It is a study of 65,000 actual coronavirus cases in China – so, in other words, an extraordinarily in-depth extensive study. And there's a lot in it, but the thing I want to say, which was very important for us to see and confirmed exactly what Dr. Barbot has been saying, Dr. Katz has been saying, is that based on the latest evidence, this is not an airborne disease. This is a direct transmission by fluids kind of disease, not a disease that hangs in the air. So, this is the latest as of yesterday. Again, we'll constantly update you as we get new information, but when it comes to our health care system,
New Yorkers should understand, of course, we have real challenges ahead, but we also literally have the biggest, best public health system in America and the biggest best health care system overall of any city in America by far, and the talent pool doctors and nurses and technicians and all types of medical professionals and support staff – there's just no place in the country that has this level of talent all amassed in one place. And that means, of course, as we always say, physical health and mental health, we're going to need them all. We're going to need every single health care worker to be a part of the solution. We need to protect them. We need to make sure that their skills are used to the maximum. We need to find everyone who could be brought into our service, including former health care workers or people who want to come here to help. There's people we can help take on different roles and some of that's indicated in the Presidents specific announcements today. But we have to protect our health care system at all costs. And that is underlying all the decisions we're making. I will remind you at the same time that even if some of our health care workers, God forbid, they are exposed to this disease, the vast, vast majority – overwhelming majority will be treated and will come through and we'll be able to get back to their jobs. So, we're going to have times where some health care workers are offline or maybe they're in quarantine as a precaution, but they're also going to keep coming back online and we're going to constantly help people to get back on the playing field.

Then to the question of our schools – I will say at the outset that every new piece of information helps us in our decision making. There is no such thing as a perfect definitive piece of information, whether it's World Health Organization, or CDC, or NIH, or academic studies, or anything, each piece just helps us know a little more and gives us perspective. But as we discuss our schools, this is important information from the CDC today. This is – and this is online – guidelines from the CDC for considerations of school closure. This is a very thoughtful document that I think says better – I've been trying to talk about the unintended consequences and the many, many factors that go into the decision. I think the CDC has done a hell of a lot better than me at expressing how complex this reality is and how many consequences intended and unintended come out of school closure. So, I would urge everyone to read this thoroughly.

I know there is tremendous concern among parents, students, caregivers, teachers, principals, crossing guards, cafeteria workers, you name it, everyone's concerned. And there's a lot of anxiety. And I can tell you I know it because I spent years and years and years as a New York City public school parent – from the time each of my kids went into pre-K to the time they finished high school – 14 years each and they were three years apart. So, over 17 years I had that experience. I also happened to be a community school board member and worked with parents all over my part of Brooklyn. I understand the anxieties right now. I also understand that many, many parents want us to keep school open, depend on it, need it, don't have an option. And there's a lot of different statements out there and I'm sure you'll ask me about some of them. I urge you to take a look at this one from 1199 SIEU, literally single largest labor union in New York City talking about their workers, the people we depend on for our health care system and why they need our school system to be up and running. And it's quite clear in the statement, there’s are strong preference, which I agree with, is to keep our school system running and if, God forbid, it wasn't, we'd need some very substantial fallbacks to protect and support the children of our health care workers among many others, our first responders and many others.

So, I look at this through the lens of parents that I've known and as a parent myself, and I know there are many, many factors that have to be looked at here, but I'm also looking at this from the perspective of how we protect those three pillars I keep talking about – schools, transit and health care, how those pieces interrelate and they must be protected. And I look at it from the perspective of the real world, which we'll talk about. My strong belief is that if the schools weren't open, that children would end up going all over their buildings, their communities looking for something to do that you would not see a pristine quarantine situation. You'd see the real lives of kids play out. And that comes with some real challenges of its own. Been working closely with the Chancellor and his team, because, obviously, since we do want to keep schools open, we have to make an immense set of adjustments, and we can, and we will. So, for example, things we've said in the last few days, and we'll keep adding to them, canceled all non-essential and non-instructional activities, either canceled or moved online if they can be. We've canceled field trips, we're going to be canceling work that takes school officials from school to school, except for that that's most essential and make that virtual. In our school cafeterias where we can create some social distancing, a space between kids, we're going to do that. Where we don't have those physical possibilities, in many cases we will move breakfast and lunch into classrooms. We're going to rework gym, phys-ed to reduce the number of kids who are ever in close proximity and wherever we can move phys-ed activities outdoors, as the weather is getting warmer, we will do that.

So a variety of steps will be taken to support everyone in the school community. And we'll talk about it, I'm sure, but I spent about an hour with Michael Mulgrew at OEM earlier today, and we talked about a variety of specific actions we can take to support and reassure not only teachers, but all members of the school community. And even though we have some differences on the approach, we're gone to work together because it's okay to have differences on the big strategy. We're still going to work together every single day to make sure everyone's safe.

I do want to say, and I think some of this is public domain now, we're happy to be transparent about it. We're seeing obviously an impact on school attendance because of the really shocking global news that's come out in the last 24, 48 hours. And to give you a perspective, our attendance as of this Monday was 89 percent, which is pretty close to our typical average throughout this school year. It went down a little bit on Thursday to 85 percent. But really I think again we're seeing just extraordinary concern over just the last 24, 48 hours. So now, as of today we had 68 percent attendance. Obviously something very worrisome, but that's today – I think people are going to be acclimating to the new reality and that's going to change and affect how people think over time. A number of kids didn't come to school today and that's a concern but I also want to be very clear, we'll get you the exact number but well over 600,000 kids did come to school and again that's a huge number of young people and their families who are depending on us.

Now I want to talk about some specific cases or specific instances with schools. In each of these cases, one you'll see there is the tendency to apply abundance of caution here. You'll also see the consistent application of the new policy, which the State promulgated and we agree with fully about limiting school closure where there is a specific concern and the steps we will take to clean the schools, do the follow-up on the individual case, isolate people who need to be isolated, and then move forward.

So as of this morning we had one confirmed case of a positive coronavirus test that was in Staten Island. The student in this case was at the Richard Hungerford School, co-located within the New Dorp High School campus. For the record, there are a couple of other or several other Hungerford schools in other locations in Staten Island. The only one that was affected here was the one at New Dorp High School. Again, the student is in the Hungerford program, that D75, District 75 special education program, but it is connected [inaudible] separately to the New Dorp High School itself. Same building. So the entire school building was closed. Cleaning and disinfecting went on today. There'll be an evaluation of the building over the weekend. Disease detectives are talking to the student and their family. The plan right now is to reopen Monday.

We had a very different situation in Brooklyn, on the Brooklyn College campus. And I want to emphasize, and I say this collegially, the leadership of Brooklyn College and CUNY made this decision because this refers to one of our New York City public schools that's on that campus. But the decision was not made by the DOE in this instance. It was made for the entire campus by the Brooklyn College leadership and we respect that, we certainly honor that that was a decision they made to close their entire campus for the day. The individual in question is a self-reported case and we have not been able to confirm it yet by a college student, not a New York City public school student, a college student at Brooklyn College.

So we'll wait for more information on that. But at this moment based on the actions, the cleaning of the campus today, the fact it's not yet a confirmed case, but also if it were confirmed is the college student who, to the best of our knowledge, had no contact or no specific contact with the Brooklyn College Academy, our school. The intention now is to reopen on Monday.

Lastly Brooklyn Occupational Training Center on Avenue X in Brooklyn. That's a District 75 school as well. It serves medically fragile students. We have a teacher who self-reported a positive case that was confirmed later in the day. Again, that school – we're going through the protocol now. Because it's medically fragile students, we're going to double check and make sure before we reopen that one. So, there's still a question about what day that will reopen and we'll update you when we have that.

Let me go over the overall numbers now – as of 2:00 pm today, and this is based on a lot of new information we got from the State and their testing numbers that they're getting into us, now for New York City, 154 confirmed positive cases of coronavirus, that is 59 since we gathered last for the press conference yesterday. So 154 cases. I'm going to give you a borough breakdown, but again, you're going to see, sometimes, dissonance between the totals because the numbers are not always broken out in time for the latest updates. So, the last borough breakdown we had, and we'll keep giving you updates as we go along, 35 cases in Manhattan, 24 cases in Brooklyn, 26 cases in Queens, 13 cases in the Bronx and five cases in Staten Island. We have 29 people in mandatory quarantine, I believe that's the same as yesterday, in voluntary isolation, we have 1,747 people.

Couple more things on testing. We had very good news this morning. I spoke to – some of you may have seen, I spoke to the Health and Human Services Secretary Azar last night. A good conversation, very tangible. I appreciated his responsiveness and we will be in touch regularly as we go forward. This morning, the FDA formally approved for one company, for Roche, the faster automated testing. We need that to happen though still for other companies. So that is a very important step. It is not the same as all the companies being approved. We need that. It is not the same as us getting the test kits we need still to keep supplying our public health lab and others. I believe we will see progress on that, but we just need a constant uptick in federal testing capacity or federal support for our testing. Again, the president's remarks today are promising on that front, but we have to see the results.

And as this automated – this permission for the automated testing has now arrived, there will be some ramp up, but certainly it will sooner rather than later start to allow us to get much faster tests and more. That's some good news on the supply front. We are still very, very concerned that we're not seeing the progress on the federal side we need. Now, we did get some new guidance, which is helpful on masks and this is new guidance from the CDC and the WHO, which again gets back to the study I indicated that this disease is transmitted by droplets, by fluid, if you will. Liquid from one person has to get directly into another person, not airborne. And that suggests very clearly that there's more than one kind of mask that can be helpful here. The N95 masks are particularly valued, but they are not the only ones that prevent transmission.

So we certainly – our ideal is to get a substantial number of new N95 masks, but we are more confident now that surgical masks can achieve a lot of what we need for sure. Let me give you the numbers on N95 right now. Our citywide total supply is 503,000 and that is combining stockpiles that are available now at Health + Hospitals, FDNY, Department of Corrections, and other agencies. But we would like to add to that substantially. This is our ideal, is to have a much greater [inaudible] supply on the N95 masks. And we have asked the FDA for 2.2 million more. That is a new number, but we have only been approved so far for 76,000 and I'm looking to Deanne, that's approval but not delivery.

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Emergency Management: Correct.

Mayor: Okay, so, again, 503,000 in stock. Now we would like 2.2 million more. We have that request into the FDA, but now let's talk about what we do have, and this is very important because we will, based on our own experience but also the CDC and WHO guidance, we will treat the surgical masks as an acceptable replacement for the N95s. And now some actual good news in this world – in stock right now, 16 million surgical masks in the New York City supply
And in the next two weeks – and we actually believe this is happening, that this is coming specifically – 25 million more masks will be arriving.

There was misinformation today and we'll shoot down misinformation whenever we see it, that the NYPD was somehow being deprived of masks. We would never allow that. Spoke with Commissioner Shea this morning. Anything the NYPD needs, they will get. That is self-evident. That's always been the case. Delivery today to NYPD of 250,000 masks – and that supply will be augmented anytime the Commissioner says. I know the Commissioner spoke with the Health Commissioner, spoke with the Emergency Management Commissioner. Everyone is coordinated.
And the same will go for other agencies. What they need, they will get. Other supplies though – this is, so I gave you some relative good news.

This is not good news, which is the other supplies we need that we are not getting a clear answer for from the federal government. So right now, again, because the private market is not consistently producing supplies given what's going on, we are consistently asking the federal government to step in, ensure more production, use its emergency powers to ensure that any private company creating these medically crucial supplies goes to maximum production 24/7, rationing out the supplies to where they're needed around the country. We're not seeing any of this yet, honestly. And these are things that the United States has done in crises for decades. So it's absolutely perplexing why we're not getting a clear answer on this. We have requested 800,000 face shields, 95,000 surgical gowns, 600,000 pairs of surgical gloves, and we are waiting for answers on all that. We'll do our best to push the federal government to move on all of those.

Finally, a very important topic – evictions. This has come up a lot in the last few days. Rightfully, we know what's happening out there. A lot of people are losing their livelihoods. They're not going to be able to pay the rent. The help that would be there for people is not yet where it needs to be. So a lot of folks are really in a tough situation. The City already had said over the last few days, we would suspend all evictions in NYCHA and in any of the affordable housing we control. We've got good news – just a short while ago, that the court system, the State court system, has confirmed that they will suspend eviction actions through the courts. And then even more recently we got news from REBNY, from the Real Estate Board of New York, that their member organizations’ companies will suspend evictions for the next three months.

So I want to applaud the court system. I want to applaud REBNY. These are very important actions. That being said, if we see any evidence of anyone being evicted, we will step in any way we can, including free legal services. And there will also be cases where there is not necessarily an attempt to evict, but there is a problem because someone can't pay the rent. If we can provide direct support through the Human Resource Administration, we will. That's obviously for folks with real challenges in terms of their income and low-income. We will try and help directly in every way we can. Just in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

And I'll finish on that note in English as well. I just continue to be appreciative. I'm very appreciative of my fellow New Yorkers, they are really listening to the guidance they're receiving. They're acting on it. They're helping each other. I want to thank all New Yorkers for all you’re doing to help us get through this crisis. Okay, we’re going right to left today. Anyone on the right, Les?

Question: What about the idea that the City can control the marshals? So the courts stayed evictions for one week. What about the idea that the City can control marshals?

Mayor: You know something I don't know and I want to check with our team. I did not hear one week. I want that double checked to make sure – you can scream out if you know the answer.

Question: The courts have stalled the eviction proceedings for one week with the option to then renew, understood that they're going to renew and they have stopped actually issuing eviction warrants for longer.

Mayor: Right. We'll get you all the details, but that's our understanding. It is a more long-term action than that.

Question: There is, the oversight committee of DOI some talk of the city being able to have marshals not enforce evictions and for private –

Mayor: Yeah, we don't want people to evict it in the middle of a pandemic. So we'll follow up on that. Certainly with DOI, anything we can do to stop evictions at this point, including within our own power. We will. So I don't have all the details. We'll get you the specific answer, but that's absolutely the direction we're going in.

Question: Having heard your decision to keep the schools open. Is there a point at which you would think that was untenable?

Mayor: We absolutely – look, this whole experience we're about to go through are, or are going through, every day will be different. And we are processing an immense amount of information all the time. And it's a very complex equation. And again, when you look at the CDC guidance, I think you've got a real window on how complex the equation is. We're thinking about many pieces of it, including the impact on our kids, the impact on their nutrition, the impact on the families and the ability of the public health workforce and first responders to get to work. You know, I am absolutely convinced, and this is something I'll say out loud and if it turns out to be a different scenario and it changes, I'll tell you that too. But I think there is an illusion out there that you can shut down schools temporarily in the midst of a growing crisis. I think the sober, honest reality is if you shut down, you have to be ready for the possibility that that's it for the school year. That might be it for the calendar year. So I'm being real about the fact that I think is a very high bar to shut down. But of course if conditions change and information changes, our internal deliberations change, I reserve that right at any moment to go in a different direction if that's what I think is in the best interest of the city. Rich.

Question: So I was going to ask the same question, but I'll ask it a little bit differently here. How much pressure are you feeling from various angels, to close the schools? I mean, what are you hearing?

Mayor: Yeah, it's an excellent question, Rich. I got to tell you. And it's probably something that might be unusual to hear. So I’m going try my damnedest to articulate it. So in a crisis it’s not business as usual. And the question of pressure almost fades away. I have a very clear understanding of crisis. Whether it's things we went through in this city, obviously Ebola was a very powerful education for me and a really troubling moment for this city. I'm really glad it's not back. The issues we faced with terrorism. But you know, I remind people I spent four years in this building as a staffer in a time in our city's history, it was almost perennial crisis, the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic, riots. It's just, I'm just being very personal and, but trying to help people understand how I'm making decisions. I have experienced so much in the way a crisis that the concept does not scare me. It doesn't faze me. It is part of human life whether we like it or not. So in a funny way, I find like my whole system cools down in the middle of this because we are getting a ludicrous amount of incoming.

I mean, the amount of information we're taking in, we're all talking constantly. We're getting new information, we're trying to assess it. We're making constant decisions on ever changing world. You have to stay cool. If you start to panic, you're never going to be able to serve anyone. So, and I think my colleagues are doing the same thing. I give them a lot credit. Everyone you could, you would be impressed by these internal conversations. Once in a while they get heated, but generally not. People are all saying we better keep it together for the sake of 8.6 million people. So yeah, I'm not surprised. There's politics out there. There's people with constituencies. Of course. I'm never surprised when I see a bunch of people stake out their position. But they are not me. They don't have to make a decision for 8.6 million people. It's really easy to talk. And I don't mean that derogatorily, it's just reality. This is crunch time. Every decision matters.

So Rich, I'm aware, I'm listening. And by the way even having said all that, that doesn't mean you don't listen. It doesn't mean you shut yourself off. You actually have to listen at the same time while not getting overwhelmed by the noise, if you will, or critique. Critique is going to come with the territory. You got to stay cool. You got to listen, you got to consider alternative views. You got to constantly keep in mind the notion that you should critique your own assessment, critique your own assumptions. And people here have been doing a lot of that in a good, healthy way. But this is not a popularity contest, this is war. You know, I really feel like that. It's not literally a war, but the prism that I'm looking at this through is war. This is the kind of decision making that you have to make, you have to approach in a way that has nothing to do with everyday normal. And you have to do what you think is right for everyone. And it doesn't matter if it's popular or not. You have to do what you think is right. Back there.

Question: I was wondering if you've spoken with the Governor at all about potentially reopening the health care enrollment for people that are uninsured or underinsured?

Mayor: I have not, but I'm happy to. We want to do everything we can to support health care for people. So we'll do that and have a follow-up. Anyone else over here, going over here.

Question: One more crack at the schools question Mr. Mayor, then another question. You talked about attendance and it being at 68 percent, and that still means over 600,000 kids in schools. Do you have a threshold, a percentage attendance threshold under which you’d think that it wouldn't make sense to keep schools open?

Mayor: Not a hard and fast one. I'll tell you why. I think we're going to see an evolutionary pattern here. And again, maybe it is the blessing of having been through you know, a real myriad of experiences in public life that tells me, you know, this thing is going to be very different in a day, in a week, in a month. This whole reality. I think there's a shock right now. I think the last few days have an absolute shock to the system. You know in a way that if you look at, if coronavirus, so we were all together on January 24th, I mean I guess first news out of China was December, right? If you look at the entire trajectory from the first day, you heard the word coronavirus to today, the last 48 hours have been just unbelievable. So if people are reacting to that, that's kind of normal. But I want to see where things are in a week or two weeks.

I think it could be very different because I think at once that little bit of calm sets in and people have to actually – and look at the whole picture. I think a lot of them are going to want to preserve as much normalcy as they can. I think the practicalities also are going to come into play. That parents really want their kids educated. They want them to get those school breakfasts and lunches. They want to go on with their lives, but they obviously care first and foremost about their kids' safety. And we will show them the ways we're keeping their kids safe. So I think it's going to be different over the days ahead. And so that's why I wouldn't say, oh, it has to be this number. No, it has to be in my view, a sustained reality and it's going to interact with everything out there in the world.

There may be things that happen outside that are much more foundational in how we make the decision. But, I’m trying to, and I appreciate, and I know you're conscientious about the details. When I say to you day to day, hour to hour, I want you to feel that in your bones. I want you to understand and I threw in that reference to make a point. When I said earlier, the last traffic between all of us was 11:00 pm and it picked up at 6:50 am. I wish I could interpret to a civilian what this is like. But it's like being on a train on a track and the track never ends and there's no station and there's no Terminus and it's going to be going on and on and on and on. And that's what we do. A lot of us, this is just our lives. So I mean this is for some strange reason, our vocation. This is how we think.

So my point in that is, I mean I was talking to Dean Fuleihan off and on between like 9:00 pm and 11:00 pm and it was like the ever changing situations just in those two hours, right? So there may be a moment where I hear a set of information and say, okay, now I really want to look at this differently. And that could happen tomorrow at 6:00 am for all I know. Or it could happen Sunday. But it's that total and we are all thinking together. Chancellor and I are talking all –
everyone's talking and we're going to make those decisions based on the best information. Not going to make them precipitously. We're not going to make a decision that we think, wait a minute, that might be really different in 72 hours. But you know, sometimes you're going to say, yeah, I see something, but I'm not convinced it's going to sustain.

But it is constant and it will be constant. And Oxiris said six months, Governor said six to nine months. I think they're both right. I think, and that by the way, for everyone looking at the school year, I am saying, and I want you to take it in, And I said this to Michael Mulgrew in a very productive conversation. I said, you walk out, not the people. I'm not saying it individually. I'm saying we shut down this school system. We might not see it for the rest of the school year. We might not see the beginning of the new school year. And that weighs heavily on me.

Question: The New York City Correction Officers union has called on you to stop inmates from receiving visitors, noting that you know, the jails are very contained environment and all it takes is one person getting infected to spread it rapidly. What's your response?

Mayor: I think it’s a fair concern? I mean, we're looking at a lot of different pieces right now. I haven't seen their formal statement. I'm going to ask Deanne and Raul and Oxiris, and obviously Mitch in terms of the health care provision in the hospitals and all that, to all work with me on that question. I think it's a fair concern and something we need to make decisions about quickly. Go ahead.

Question: I had a question about the masks, but if I could quickly on schools. Obviously based on the attendance numbers, there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of parents who are keeping their kids home. Presumably they have concerns about safety and about the spread and maybe they have elderly grandparents at home. There any number of concerns they might have. Are you discouraging them from keeping their kids home? I mean, what's the message for –

Mayor: Your question's a great one because you sort of gave the different categories a bit there. I, look I'm a parent. I respect the choices of parents. By the way, that's true every day of the year. You know, parents can make whatever choice they think is right for their kids. If a parent, for example, as you said, if you had an elderly member of your family in your apartment with a preexisting conditions, I wouldn't just ask the question about this kid going to school. I would ask a whole lot of other questions and I'm sure my colleagues would join in, of like how do you protect that grandparent? In many, many ways, I'm not sure I would say necessarily that means don't send the kid to school, but you'd have to start from protecting your relative is huge. There's like a number one thing. But I want to make the equation complex for you. You know, what if the kid can stay home? What if the kid can't and there's no place else to go? What if the family has food, what have they don't? What if the kid's whole life revolves around school and now you're taking that away from them? What about the kids' education, especially if it may be, we can't provide anywhere near the quality of education for a long period of time? There are so many factors here. I think what happened in the last 24 hours was a sheer shock we're all feeling and the people sort of understandably reacted and there's nothing wrong with that, but I think there'll be a chance to sort of catch people. Everyone will have a chance to catch their breath and then we'll see what they feel.

But I'm sure there are some extenuating circumstances. I respect any choice. But if you said to me, what's my broad guidance to parents? Here's my broad guidance. And I've had this conversation with a bunch of parents today. Just people who I know, you know, who are parents. I said what – I ask people, what do you think would happen if you let a bunch of New York City school kids out for not a day, not a week, but three months? What's going to happen? And everyone says they're all going to go outside and find their friends or go over around their building or whatever. You think they're going to stay in isolation in their apartment? That's just not real. So you're going to have, all a recreation of social networks and if you're worried about community spread, there'll be plenty opportunity right there. What are people who are not working, going to do? Do you think they're going to stay in their apartment in isolation for a week? Sure. For a month? For three months? For six months? No. So that's where the equation, in fact, again, look at the CDC guidance. It gets right into that. It's like it literally points out do not expect children to stay in isolation.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: One more thing, I'm sorry. I apologize for the long answer. And the CDC guidance also points out children who are unsupervised creates a host of new challenges including health and safety challenges. Go ahead.

Question: On the masks – you're asking for 2.2 million in N95 – 25 million, sorry. There was another big number for those surgical masks. Are those, can you explain that? Are those just for health care workers?

Mayor: No, there are for a lot of people. So 2.2 million on the N95s is the request. We are getting, we believe, we'll believe it of course when we see it. Exactly. But you're pretty confident.

Commissioner Criswell: I'm pretty confident.

Mayor: 25 million more on the surgical masks. And then the other items I talked about.

Question: Just for health care workers?

Mayor: Health care workers, first responders, a whole host of people and patients, patients who need, and Mitch jump in. Patients who manifest symptoms and walk into one of Mitch’s facilities, explain does it help?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Right. Well as soon as someone comes into any of our health care facilities and has any symptoms which may just be like a runny nose, we put a mask on them immediately so that we can make sure that there's no transmission of disease, or even just inadvertent exposures that would cause people to worry that they should quarantine themselves.

Question: That provides some barrier. Why not encourage members of the public? I'm assuming that there's enough of them in stock?

Mayor: Okay. This is an excellent question. So I'm going to just, I’m going to pop the ball up and you spike it. Okay. So they, this has become – we've heard this over and over again. And I got educated by Dr. Barbot because I bluntly, you watched the initial outbreak and people seemed to putting on mask as a protective. But in fact it turns out not as simple as that. And the masks are for the folks who do the work and are going to get a lot of exposure potentially to a lot of different people and to prevent someone who has the disease from spreading it outward. So Dr. Barbot please explain.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Right. The Mayor got it just right. The indication for the use of a mask is if someone is symptomatic, meaning they have a cough, they're sneezing and we want to protect other people from becoming infected. And then additionally, as Dr. Katz said, for individuals who are symptomatic, haven't yet been diagnosed and are seeking care in a health care facility so that we don't run the risk of infecting other folks who are there for other reasons.

Mayor: Did that get you what you need?

Question: I think I’m still just understanding, if it is at least somewhat effective in preventing you from being transmitted to you. So I just want to understand even if it's just marginally effective, why, I mean you’re not discouraging people from wearing them?

Mayor: No.

Commissioner Barbot: No, certainly if someone chooses to wear a mask because they feel that much more secure, then by all means. But as a population measure, the most appropriate use of a mask is for someone who is symptomatic to avoid infecting other people. For folks who are not symptomatic. You know, the guidance that we have been given from the very beginning, which is frequent hand washing covering your mouth and your nose when you cough or you sneeze are the most effective and consistent ways in which we can minimize more New Yorkers being infected. And so I guess to round out the response, what we're talking about here is a layered approach to prevention, right? No single preventive measure in isolation is going to give the greatest protection. It is the hand washing, the covering of the nose and mouth, the staying home if you're sick. All of those sort of cumulative efforts are what are going to keep not only individuals, families and communities safe, but the, the city has a whole. And I think, you know, we need to be prepared for the fact that there will be many more individuals who become ill. And so the more that we become accustomed to being diligent and dare I say militant about hand washing? I think the better off we'll all be.

Mayor: And one more point here. I think the there’s something like, I get the common sense to Bobby's question. Like, well what could it hurt or does it help a little bit? Again, we’re not going to discourage anyone. If they have them that's great. But I'm also just thinking about, you know, you have a mask on, you're going to take it off some time. Right? You got take off when you eat, when you drink. You know, it's not like to me like a perfect separation from the world right there. But I think what’s interesting, because there's a common sense to Bobby's point, well it does help somehow. And it's really interesting the medical community is not even granting it that notion of, you know, we prefer it. I don't know if there's another sort of piece of analysis that you guys can offer or we can get back to Bobby. But there is sort of something there. It's a good question. Like why wouldn't the medical world say, you know, better than not?

Commissioner Barbot: Well, because I think it gives people a false sense of security. If you're not doing the other things – you know, I talked recently about, I saw someone with a mask who put it below their chin and started smoking. Right? I mean like, come on, lets be real.

Mayor: We need that photo.

Commissioner Barbot: So it really does go back to in order for something, anything to be most effective, we need to have it be consistent. And so I have spoken about this earlier, we're looking for a cultural change in the way in which we do hand washing. You know, I've been a part of public health for a number of years and I was with the schools when we were doing H1N1 and it was really at that time that we started teaching even our kids to do this. And over the course, you know, I've got a goddaughter who's now 16 but back in that time was in grammar school and I was surprised when one day, you know, she came home and she did this and I was like, it's working. And so you know, population behavioral change takes time and it takes practice. And so that's why I can't lean away from the fact that hand washing, covering your nose and your mouth are really the fundamental components of ensuring safety.

Question: I have another schools question if the Chancellor wants to chime in. I'm curious I know the student attendance was 68 percent. Do you know how many teacher absences there were? And I don't know – I know we spoke about earlier this week, you said there's a significant number of substitute teachers. I don't know if there was a noticeable dip. I'm sure, I've heard from multiple teachers who they live on the Island and their kids don't have school. The UFT is telling them, urging them to close schools. So what is the plan is for that? And my second is do you know how many UPK or 3K schools are housed in some of these schools, whether it’s private or Catholic that will now be closed?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: So in terms of the teacher attendance issue, there was a slight uptick in teacher absenteeism today. Again we don't have the exact percentage. We'll get it to you. Those numbers we get, we kind of solidify later in the day. But we can get you the specific numbers. I think it also relates to what the Mayor was talking about. There is a sense of shock currently about, you know, this new era that we're entering into. And in terms of the campuses that have been closed, I don't believe there has been any pre-K or UPKs in any of those campuses at this point.

Question: And is there a plan to, I mean, if it continues and there are more teacher absences, what's the plan then?

Mayor: I'm sorry, Richard, I’ll just jump in on the first part. Again, we are, kind of similar to the previous question, how are we going to handle different scenarios or what's the magic number? Again, we're not going to look at it by a day or two days. We're going to look at an overall pattern and we need to see where that pattern goes. But I want to emphasize we got a lot of very devoted educators and school staff who are showing up who are going to be there no matter what. We have – I understand it's a very fair point about folks who live in the suburbs and it emphasizes the point I'm making about the schools in general. If kids don't have a place to go to school, it encourages their parents to stay home. And if that's first responders and that health care professionals watch out. But I think with time what we're going to see is people will make the adjustments. I think a lot of people are going to want to get back to what they do, right? But so we're going to have to figure out also how to take whatever number we have on a given day and make it most effective. And if you need to bring in some people from other agencies to support in different ways, we can do that as well. Go ahead.

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: This is a mental health explanation, not a public health examination. In the last 36 hours you've seen the Governor declared a state of emergency. The President, the Mayor declares state of emergency for the city. The President declares a state of emergency for the nation and it's frightening. What would you think a lot of parents and children would do? Probably just trying to decompress, take a day off, long weekend and really kind of begin to reassess. What do we do now? I think, you know, you're hearing from both the Chancellor and the Mayor. I think we're all shocked because everything is going so fast and so big. Right. Right now, they're 421 cases in the State of New York. We have surpassed, we're now number one in the nation. The clustering in Westchester has really grown. So if you put it all together I can easily explain a lot of the mental health issues going on with children and their parents and particularly the seniors that we started saying from the beginning are so vulnerable.

Mayor: Amen. Go ahead, Richard.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so to get to the question, we've obviously been looking at different scenarios. We've had tabletop exercises where we look at what do we do if unfortunately, you know, our – all of our first responders get hit with this. So – but there's no magic number. Schools are different. They have different capacity. They had different numbers of students with the Mayor has said about, we've looked at how do we then maybe take some people from one place to another place, lots of different scenarios. So there's no magic number.

Question: [Inaudible] it's clear. Any - the Mayor many different agencies so let's just – using a hypothetical. If there's a school where there's 100 percent teacher absence or a very high number sub schedules overloading, you can't go all the subs. Are you pulling someone from the DOT or a City Hall –

Mayor: No, It wouldn't be - obviously, I mean respectful, you know we wouldn't do that. The question is we've got people in a variety of agencies who work with young people. It's just a common sense thing. There may be applicability from one agency to the next in a crisis. Remember, look, this is an emergency. We're going to be doing things we don't normally do. I also remind you in the emergency powers, if I have to suspend contractual dynamics, I have the right to do that. So we are going to figure out what's best for the people of our city and we're going to make the adjustments we have to make. But the reality here, I think everyone, I actually think every day New Yorkers are getting this. We left business as usual behind days ago. This is again your – you guys start thinking more like a war than like normal life. And we're going to be doing all sorts of different things to make things work. And we can't give you the exact template now because we just entered this reality. But we can say we want to make sure our kids are safe, we want make sure they're educated, we want make sure they get food, and if that means bringing some people in from different agencies to help at work, we'll do what we have to do.

Question: With all due respect, even that war time mentality this is when I'm speaking to every day New Yorkers, some who work in schools who have kids who are begging the school’s to shut down. If you're saying that this is an emergency, we're going to do things we don't normally do. Couldn't that same logic be applied to why you would go to school to [inaudible] –

Mayor: Couple of points. One, I'm sure you are finding the people want the school shut down and I would urge you to go talk to George Gresham's, you know a hundred or 200,000 members New York City, you’re going to find a lot of people who do not want them shut down. I've talked all these people, not only this situation but in previous crises. And I do feel – I absolutely respect your reporting – but I will tell you I've spent a real long time talking to parents in my life. I have a strong understanding a lot of what they're concerned about. You can go out and do your research. I think you're going to find a split for sure, but a hell of a lot people do not want them shut down. I think it will split economically, honestly, demographically, folks with fewer resources are going to be much more likely to want to see the schools keep up open. And a lot of people are worried about losing their own livelihood and they need their kid to be in a safe place so they can get to work and make whatever money they can make in an economy that's starting to shrink. There's a lot of real life stuff going on here. But to your question – it's not even, to me – I absolutely can take in the possibility of doing all sorts of additional things, the schools and far beyond because we're in the great unknown. There is nothing off the table to say the least, but right now, based on what we know, I think this is the right thing to do.

Question: Well Michal Mulgrew said that there are plans in place through OEM that contingency plans can be made to address a lot of the issues that you're bringing up in terms of closing schools, like what they did after Sandy with providing meals to students and a place for students who don’t, whose parents are, you know, single parents for them to go within the city –

Mayor: Sure.

Question: And he says he has plenty of volunteers lined up to staff those places. So I mean is that an option? He’s saying it is.

Mayor: I have great respect for Michael Mulgrew. We've worked together for many, many years. We had an hour long, very detailed, very productive, very positive meeting today whatever his public statements. I know him and I know what we talked about and the bottom line is any one of those solutions to some extent recreates the problem. You are congregating a bunch of people in the same place on any of those scenarios. And it does not solve a lot of the other problems. And I agree that there is a scenario – if you get to a scenario where you said we really don't have a choice anymore and we have to fall back, sort of strategically retreat. Yeah, there are things you would do that are better than nothing, but it is not an easy equation. Again, I'm going to really respect everyone's intelligence. Try reading through this and see if you feel very certain at the end of it because it's sobering about the unintended consequences.

But I don't need to know the exact alternative at this hour. We are constantly doing scenarios. We’re going to look at every – I mean Richard and his team have been looking at all sorts of permutations. We said to you guys a week or two ago, we're preparing distance learning opportunities, but we also know they're not as good as what we normally do. And again, great. So you have distance learning. You also have a huge number of kids unsupervised. It's not so clean suddenly. You have a huge number of kids who don't have a computer, like the dominoes start to fall pretty quickly when you actually run it as a real life scenario. But we'll look at everything.

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Yes, please.

Chancellor Carranza: Can I add one caveats. I think it's important in terms of context you remember that the percentage of attendance has been talked about and people are rightfully questioning, you know, why that percentage today? But consider the fact that the number of students in New York City that attended school today is significantly greater than if the second largest school district in America had 100 percent attendance. There's still more kids today that attended school in New York City. That's, that's who we are - that's who we're keeping the schools open for.

Mayor: Thank you.

Question: Mayor, regarding the jails, is there sufficient soap there, Are you considering relaxing prohibitions on inmates using hand sanitizer? And I have a second question [inaudible] –

Mayor: I’m always going to tell you when I literally don't know the answer, but we can get to the answer on the soap supplies. I know there has been a real focus on - we understand the dynamic of a jail. It's obviously a very vulnerable situation. We want to make sure that everything they have – everything they need to have. I will check again on soap. And what was your second question?

Question: Well the second part of that question was, are you considering the relaxing prohibition on alcohol based hand sanitizer in the jails? As I understand it correctly it’s contraband.

Mayor: That, I don't know if my colleagues know anything on this one. That's – that's a new one on me.

Question: Okay, the second question is what's the plan that perhaps the Commissioner can tell us this? If you, God forbid, or one of your team gets coronavirus.

Mayor: I'll give you my layman's version and then the experts will give you the medical version. I - look, I don't know how to say this to you guys anyway, but plainly if it happens, it happens. I'm not scared. I would go into isolation unless it was something where they told me I needed to be in a medical setting and I would do whatever the doctors told me to do and I'd constantly update you guys and I would run the city from wherever the hell I was. Would you like add?

Commissioner Barbot: That’s a great answer –

[Laughter]

Mayor: And I do want –

Question: Contingency plan?

Mayor: Well no, I want to - I want to just throw in that, yeah, well you'll get a much more elegant answer from our Emergency Management Commissioner, but I really am going to try my damnedest to communicate this. I think it's hard for anyone. I don't blame anyone who hasn't been in the life here to understand it, but I remember vividly maybe this will give you a little window.

I have this deep recall with a very, very complex conference call. A whole lot of people, Deputy Mayors, Commissioners, were on the call and we were making some very serious decisions. And the reason I remember it so vividly is it was 2014. It was July. It was after the tragedy of Eric Garner and as you may remember, a very long planned family trip that went on at that time to my grandparents’ home towns in Italy, and I was on that conference call after- from the van. We were just having left my grandmother's hometown. And the reason I say that to you is, you can put me anywhere and give me, you know, a device, any device, and I can run the City of New York from it. And I don't mean that with hubris. I mean that that's the way the world is right now. So as long as I can be on a conference call and I can send an email and we do it just all day long, all of us, and I get why the various times you guys have been understandably focused on official schedule and I get the meaning of that.

It's an entire – not a misunderstanding because you did something wrong. It's just misunderstand because you can lived the life. Official schedule and meetings are like the small part of it. It is the hundreds of phone calls and emails and everything that goes on nonstop between all us, all the time, where a whole lot of the decision making happens. So put me anywhere and give me a device and we can keep things running effectively and then there's all these other wonderful people and our First Deputy Mayor, Dean Fuleihan, our Chief of Staff, Emma Wolfe, everyone else who keeps things running all the time.

Question: In other words, would you guys, not to be – would you guys need to be quarantined? You all are very close to each other.

Mayor: Well there's a thing called reality. We could try and socially distance at the press conference, but the blue room really wouldn't allow too much of that.

Question: But seriously, if you got the – a chance you got the coronavirus, you all would need to be in quarantine, right?

Mayor: And we would keep leading.

Commissioner Criswell: But if - I'd like to just add to - every agency, every city agency has an established continuative operations plan and we do have a city wide continuity of government plan. So every department head, and then including the Mayor, has a line of succession of who would take their place if they couldn't perform those functions. We've really pulled those plans out and looked at them really closely as they relate specifically to coronavirus. And we've been testing those plans ever since we started with this – what? Back in January, the end of January with that that first press conference. So these plans have been available. The agencies exercise them annually and we've just really taken a hard look at them through this process.

Question: And it would be the First Deputy Mayor, Jumaane Williams?

Mayor: No, it's the First Deputy Mayor, obviously. I would be quite resident New York City, I assure you. I intend to be fully effective and awake at all times. But the – you know, there's also a very deep bench. I mean, we have a strong structure here. You know the Deputy Mayors, the Commissioners, all the staff here, these are folks who are running, you know, an extraordinarily complex organization. And I've learned to perform at very high level, and there's lots of depth here. If someone's out of commission, there's always someone else who could step up. But I think from watching the cases, and again I know anything could happen. I do not have one of the five preexisting conditions. That’s not the end of the discussion. But I don't. And as Dr. Barbot will attest, an incredibly healthy specimen, you know, so anything could happen. But I suspect for a lot of people it would be you're isolated and fully functional and just doing your work.

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely.

Question: Could you sort of update us on what's the hospital capacity and if you have sort of where the trajectory is going now, you're sort of worst case scenario, do you have the beds? And lastly, just the –

Mayor: Wait a minute, that's a lot right there. You'll get your next shot, don't worry. Just – I’m going to try this ground rule again. We're not going anywhere on your first round. I mean if you try and do 27 follow-ons I'll cut you off. But, but I'm saying it's, I'm beseeching you, I'm beseeching you. I'm trying to say to you all, I'm really going to try and communicate. We're going to be doing a lot of this together. It helps me to answer your question, to hear the first question and really give you an answer and then your follow-up or your second – I'm not trying to cut you off. If you say like two or three things, I can't keep it all straight enough to make sense. I'm trying to think about your first question immediately. So just help me by sequencing a little, because we have been consistently giving people time to ask their questions.

So your first question is about our healthcare system capacity. The initial estimate was 1,200 beds that we could make available immediately and again, remember a lot of people who need quarantine do not need to be in a hospital setting. A lot of people who even are – have contracted disease don't need to be in the hospital setting, but we could immediately put together 1,200 beds. We can go deeper through, and Mitch, I don't want to try and articulate more than – I don’t want to get more than I know about your specific turf, but you should talk about how you would progress into cancellations of electives and all that.

President Katz: Right, New York City is very lucky in that we are a hospital, health center-Mecca. People typically come from New Jersey and other areas to get outpatient procedures, to get second opinions. And what why that's relevant is all of that stops in a crisis. But the resource, the doctors and nurses who would do that kind of work, doesn't stop and they are available to then respond for patients with respiratory distress. We have, as the mayor said, identified 1,200 beds that we can use immediately. Every hospital knows where it would put additional people if they didn't fit into the usual space. We would rapidly discharge who have conditions that no longer require hospitalization. We would cancel elective surgeries, which would get us a great deal of resource, just as something no one outside of the medical facility would know, it – when you have surgery. There are two doctors in the room. An anesthesiologist is the third, two surgeon, an anesthesiologist, two nurses, the scrub nurse, and they're circulating – five highly trained people are necessary for one person having a 40-minute arthroscopy procedure. Right? And that's entirely right. But the point is, we're not going to be doing arthroscopy in this instance, all of those resources are going to be going to take care of our sickest people.

Question: Is 1,200 enough for your worst case scenario projections?

Mayor: Well, that's just – that doesn't even account for what he just said about how you could fall back and get deeper and deeper and open up more and more. Go ahead

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: I may actually sort of give you a little bigger picture. There are about 20,000 hospital beds in New York City. What we know about coronavirus is that 80 to 90% of those cases, the coronavirus cases do not need hospitalization. Right there, you just eliminated a whole bunch of cases. And we also know that only 6.1% require ICU treatment. So that's the universe that not only Mitch, but the voluntary hospitals are concentrated on. I’m working with the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, Ken Raske, every morning in trying to make sure that we coordinate all the healthcare resources for the city, and we are in constant communication to see how we can wrap it up.

Question: I guess I'm wondering like based on the percentages you just talked about, the percentage of people obviously it's a small one who need ICU care. Like it's, does the 20,000 beds match up to that smaller percentage?

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: You don't need the 20,000 beds. You only need to know that you have enough ICU beds for that 6.1%. What I cannot tell you is the 6.1% means X number of cases.

Mayor: Yeah, but I want to even take it farther, which is, and we talked about this over several press conferences. This is not static. I mean Mitch was very clear. And again, Mitch, how many hospitals, how many clinics?

President Katz: Just, Health + Hospitals alone has 11 hospitals, five skilled nursing facilities and 60 other sites of outpatient care.

Mayor: So that's one piece of the bigger picture. Mitch said, you need more ICUs. I'm going to build ICUs. He's going to convert the cafeteria to ICUs. He's going to put a tent in the parking lot, turned it into ICUs. We look again, it is it. When I say the, the analogy to war, I don't say it to romanticize or simplify. It's just true. We're going to do things we've never done before. If we need to keep expanding capacity, we're going to take everything we can get our hands on and do it. I'm worried about, you know, weeks and months down the line, anyone that isn't should really wake up. But that doesn't mean that we are in a state of panic. It doesn't mean we don't have the ability to throw a huge amount of resources at this and it's going to be constantly building up our capacity to meet the challenge and we're going to need help. I mean, the State's been fantastic. The State has constantly, when we're asking for help, they're providing it. There's tremendous cooperation. If the federal government actually would come into this, and I mentioned all the things, the testing, the masks, the supplies, if they would really go to maximum, would change the playing field entirely. But there is no place in America you would rather be right now, even though we have all these cases, we have the most hospitals, the most doctors that, you know, nurses, everything. We have the most of everything and we're going to use it all and then we're going to add to it. But there's still going to be a reality that, you know, we're watching every day. How much could this jump up and how big could it be on what timeline? And we're going to be clear as we know that, but we have, you know, an extraordinary foe and we also have a huge amount of ammunition, you know, and, and we have huge resources to throw at this battle. And that's what we have to understand here.

Question: Two questions, Mr. Mayor. The first is on the issue of ventilators. So this might be for Dr. Katz, but the chair of the Council’s Health Care Committee has been saying – I think the numbers were 1,000 at a H + H and then 5,000 citywide. I think the chair's question is how many of those are kind of typically being used for other patients, you know, I guess currently or on a typical day because you can't divert all 5,000 to coronavirus patients?

President Katz: No, of course not. But remember that each one of those surgeries is somebody who is on a ventilator, right? So when you cancel the elective surgeries you gain – those then become large numbers of ventilators that are available for patients who would have COVID-19.

Mayor: So I'm staying there one second. So I think the point is to redefine the dynamic. It's really important. Understand if you have – if you think of your 100% of your resources, but the way they're being used now only would free up a certain amount for a situation like this but you say no, wait, we're changing the definitions. We're changing the approach. So we have a much bigger bandwidth that we can then devote to this situation. That's one of the pluses here. Also, we are absolutely looking for more ventilators. We're trying to see if there's any way on the private market to get them. But I'm going to do everything I can to push the federal government. I also want to give a shout out to Senator Schumer who has been intervening on our behalf regularly, was very involved in helping us on this approval for the automated tests. The federal government right now, I mean the United States of America for God's sakes, you can't find the factories that produce ventilators or factories that produce something kindred enough to be converted. Why on earth is the federal government not treating this like a national mobilization? Whatever those factories are doing now, they're doing ventilators and they're not doing it on an eight hour shift. They're doing it 24 hours a day as you would in wartime to produce the huge number of ventilators we'd like to have ideally, and then get them where the need is greatest, which would be New York State, Washington State, a few other places. This is perverse that this isn't happening. I mean, it could have been happening weeks and weeks ago, but even if it started now you could, I don't, I'm not an expert on ventilator mass production, but I could sure as hell tell you they, someone builds them now. Right? So go get thousands of them produce quickly. If they could get them to us, even a matter of weeks, it would have a huge impact.

Question: Just a brief follow up on that. Do you have a target for how many of you're trying to procure?

Mayor: We’re working on – our ideal number, so I gave it to you with like the masks – we're working on our ideal ventilator number. And again, if once we see that we're going to go right at the federal government and trying to push this notion off them mobilizing industry to do this, we're again also trying to see if there's any private contracting that would work and what the capacity of that would be. But we don't have that number yet.

Question: And then just one other question was just you said a number of times that the city was in a better position than some of the other locales that have dealt with it because of the five week essentially head start. And I just wanted to get a sense for what you were able to accomplish during that time that you think has put the city on a better foot. Because even with that head start, you know, through no known fault of the city’s own, you know, the testing has been delayed. What, you know, where were you in a better position?

Mayor: Yeah, I get it. It’s a damn good question. I was on a call a few hours ago with the U.S. Conference of Mayors, mayors around the country and my colleague, Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle, gave a quick summary of what she's been going through. I felt real pain for her and everyone out there, because remember they had a huge outbreak that was – really overtaxed their system almost instantly and they're still trying to recover in so many ways. I mean, we went from that January 24th press conference to March 1st without a single case. What did that mean? A whole lot of people got educated. And, again, this is where – and I think I'm going to get an amen over here on this point – this is not just what can the government do for you, which absolutely it’s our obligation to do as much as possible for everyone, this is participatory. There's no way you solve a crisis like this with orders from the government or, you know, supplies from the government. This is about every single one of the 8.6 million people doing what they can do. Dr. Barbot said the words hand sanitizer so many times, I know it entered the – alcohol-based and sanitizer – like, I didn't know there was another kind, it's okay – it entered the consciousness of people. I think the massive incessant public information efforts by all the agencies, obviously by the media – we saw people changing their behavior in a lot of very tangible ways, that for sure helped. There was time to do the planning and preparing, that definitely helped. The testing as it was, at least we are able to get going with what we had effectively. And that wasn't right on the point of contact. I mean again, other places – and this was true in China, in Italy, in a different way in Seattle – you know they woke up to mid-crisis, right? I remember the first few cases it was like clockwork. The disease detectives went out there, they were tracing immediately. Remember, Yeshiva University, the Westchester lawyer? And they really put a ring around the situation to the maximum stand possible and controlled what they could control. That stuff has a multiplier effect. Look, we have a serious number but we also have 8.6 million people. And that number could jump up a lot, and I told you a thousand by next week is what I'm betting on and that's not a minor matter. I think if all this stuff hadn't been done, that number could be a hell of a lot higher right now. So, I can't – Yoav, I can't say the proof is in the pudding in some perfect way. I can say it is very meaningful to me that we are at this advanced a point in the trajectory, starting from Wuhan until now in a city of 8.6 million people and we're clocking in at 154 cases. You could have easily said for something that started in December, you should be at a much, much more advanced place. And that doesn't mean we aren't going someplace tough, but I think some of these things really did help.

Anyone hasn't gone – hasn't gone?

Question: On teachers and other staff members, if they're in high risk groups, what is the advice to them?

Mayor: We're going to codify – that's a real good question – we're going to codify that. If a teacher is over 50 and has those preexisting conditions, we want to protect them deeply and we're going to work with DOE, the union's going to make all sorts of provisions to help them. Anyone who we think there's a very direct and serious medical concern we're going to treat differently, but we have to codify that quickly. We'll get that done the next few days.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I don't know if I'd say before Monday. You're good, but you're not that good necessarily but –

Chancellor Carranza: No, but there is a heightened sense of urgency. There's also a process by which teachers can request accommodations and we've put out guidance about these particular five conditions that we – there's an email address and we're actually processing those as well.

Mayor: Right. So, that is a preexisting procedure. We're now going to put that on a very expedited footing and we'll have some devoted, dedicated personnel on that. Now, that's a really fair, serious issue that we are going to be all over.

Who has not gone – you've gone, who has not gone? You have not gone –

Question: Yes. Mr. Mayor, can do – and maybe the Chancellor can talk a little bit about the logistics of the distance learning in case of school shutdown. Like, how would you – or even with the declining attendance, you know, do you give students computers? Worksheets? How do you make sure they're learning? What do you do about [inaudible] et cetera? And then, secondly, could you talk about the logistics of why if we shut the system down, it may not open again?

Mayor: Sure. I'll do my overview and then you jump in on all of it. Your question raises a lot of the concerns organically. A lot of kids without computers, in theory you could get them computers, but then their kids – you know, are the parent's home and the parent's not home? Are they going to actually take care to log in when they have to log in? Are they going to follow up with the homework? How do you follow up on their follow-up? You know, like it gets squirrely. It's far inferior. Could you do something? Yeah, you could do something, but it's nowhere near the quality of what we do now. And I'm sorry – and this is a parent speaking – you know, again, a lot of people want to think of this as a day or a week or some people have said how about a two week pause? And I just don't believe that because I think we're going into a growing crisis, not a decreasing crisis. And I know that's counterintuitive – well, if it was growing, you know, shut down everything. To some extent it's true that we will shut down some more things except if they're mission critical. It's a very complex equation. And I said to you, you do not want, for example, our mass transit system to go down. You do not want our hospitals to be compromised. And there is that inner connection to the schools and the schools are providing so many layers of positive impact that I really want to protect them with everything we got. So, the reason I don't believe in short-term is I just don't think – I'm watching a crisis that's growing all the time and I think the human reality if you say to folks, we're going to pause, is there's a high, high likelihood that even if you say it's time to come back, the momentum's lost, there's tremendous concern has grown. I think it's very hard to restart. I don't think it's impossible. If I had no choice, maybe I'd try it. But I'm a really – I'm a realist about how these trajectories go and my argument is I would rather hold the line with something and keep it working rather than atrophy it and take my chances on that. And I do have to think about that interconnection of you take a risk of going down for a period of time, if that makes more likely you're not coming back up now what does that mean for a million kids, and I worry deeply about that. So, I wish I could articulate it better. I think it's everything from logistics to really the momentum that comes with keeping something running versus shutting it down. I think that's a real issue. The – sort of, the restart is not easy. There's a lot lost in translation there. Also, the psychology, the difference of keeping continuity versus losing that continuity. We all experienced that, right? If you go away on a trip, you feel like your life's different when you come back, right? If you do something different for a period of days, you can feel it in your immediate life. Now, this is that on steroids, which is another reason why we are all going to stay at our post no matter what, because that continuity – the continuity of information matters. But it's true for a kid too. If you take a kid out of their equation, something is going to happen and I think it's not going to be a good thing.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So, specifically to the question on distance learning. So, we have worked up a number of scenarios that really kick in right around day-three, going as far into the future as possible. What the Mayor has talked about in terms of the rigor and the comprehensive nature of distance learning kind of kicking in all of a sudden, it's problematic, especially for seniors. You can imagine what the Mayor's talked about. Let's say we go into June, then what happens to seniors that are on track to graduating?

Mayor: Meaning seniors in high school –

Chancellor Carranza: Seniors in high school. I'm sorry, seniors in high school. You know, so what does that [inaudible] for Regents exams? What does that [inaudible] for grade completion? So, it becomes very complex very quickly. Interwoven with that is we've already surveyed what is the penetration of WiFi and who has WiFi and connection to WiFi. And I will tell you with, you know, our student population almost 80 percent being students that qualify for poverty, we don't have a lot of penetration in terms of WiFi. So, then you have to ask, well, can you do this off of the cloud? Can people do this off of a smart phone? Can they do this off of the internet? Where could we get internet penetration? So, becomes very complex very quickly. What we do have in place is that we have the ability to go between five and 10 days right now with grade-level work, all of it available right now on our website. People can log on and see that. But also paper and pen copy because we understand that not everybody has WiFi. It becomes much more complicated when you go beyond that. So, it's complicated. We've scenario’ed, if that's even a term, different kinds of scenarios around this particular topic. But again, the best place for a student is in a classroom with a teacher, the well-trained teacher that is monitoring progress and is continuing to provide instruction.

Mayor: Okay. Anyone has not gone? Last chance – not gone before? And now, go –

Question: Just wondering, I've heard from some city employees that the work from home is not being implemented quickly. Where are you with that? They said that their managers are going to get back to you –

Mayor: Yeah, we did not promise you a rose garden on that one. This is a brand-new thing. We what we said yesterday – I'm as into instant gratification as anyone, but come on. We announced yesterday 10 percent of our workforce will go to telecommuting. We did not say we could just flick a switch and do that instantly. It's nowhere we've ever been before. This is a whole new world. So, it's going to take time. I don't think we have an exact date of how much will happen in each agency and when – it's a big endeavor. Remember, that's 30,000-35,000 employees. But we have to do it quickly and we will keep updating you as that develops. Do you want to add?

Commissioner Criswell: Yeah, I can add – we've been working with all of our agencies for the last two weeks as part of this continuity of operations planning process to help them really write a telework plan. It's not something that the City has done before. And so it will take some time to actually execute and implement it. But this is something we've been working very hard on over the last several weeks to figure out exactly what work can be done at home and then who can do it at home. Do we have the equipment to do it at home? And then if you can't do it at home, you know, how can we stagger those shifts so we can make sure we're keeping our distance within the workplace. And so as the Mayor said, it's – we've been really writing these plans over the last several weeks of physically implementing something that the City has never done before. And it will take us some time to actually get it fully operative –

Mayor: And then it has to work. And this is also, you know, anyone who is a student of wartime reality, it's like, this is again our civilian version of it, but in war you find that things fall apart really quickly. You know, plans fall apart when you think you have the perfect solution. And in real life it doesn't work it. We need these people to do their jobs. If we can make it work, great. With some of these cases, I'm sure we'll find, wait a minute, that doesn't work so well, we have to do something different because this city has to keep running. A lot of people are depending on our public servants. Yeah?

Question: In Italy, there are 17,000 cases and counting and there's a hierarchy, if you will, of which patients are prioritized in case of crisis. Do you guys have a similar hierarchy of who will be treated?

Mayor: No, we're nowhere near that. I’ll let the doctors, this is like – the Italy – I got to say again, I'm very proud of my ancestry, but that is a hot mess and it is because of – you know, they woke up to an extraordinary crisis. I mean it just hit them like a two-by-four. Again, guys, we had a lovely little press conference on January 24th we talked about all the preparations. We had five weeks to do something before we had a single case. They woke up out of nowhere, in the middle of a full blown crisis and it just – the projection of that was unbelievable and they just never had a day of rest, a chance to retrench. It was just like a tidal wave the whole time. So it's very hard to compare anything here to Italy. But no, we are nowhere near that. Please, Doctors.

President Katz: Correct. We will treat everybody who is ill.

Question: Yes. Just to follow up on the work from home question.

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: I mean telecommuting has been a thing for a while. Why didn’t the City have a policy in place for telecommuting?

Mayor: Well, telecommuting is a mixed bag. I mean it has virtues, but there's also a lot of virtues to being in the workplace and the collective reality of people working together and a lot of efficiency that goes with that. I mean, I'm not a management expert, I just manage a whole lot of things so I'm speaking from common sense. You know, I don't think telecommuting is the ideal. I think it is an option.

Commissioner Criswell: Yeah. I mean the thing that I would add to that is you know that the amount of collaboration that is able to happen when you're working together in a workplace is not replaceable, I think, by a lot of the teleworking options that are out there. And so telework is an option and it's one that we are now implementing. Some agencies have done this in limited fashions prior to this. I mean we're putting it in in greater force right now.

Question: [Inaudible] in place [inaudible] emergency, for example. I mean, why wasn’t there a policy set up for cases like this?

Commissioner Criswell: Yeah. I can't speak to why there wasn't one put in place prior to this, but we are writing the telework policy right now. It should be released later today. So we have more information that is going to go out to our employees, to our workforce.

Question: Besides 1199 and the UFT, did you consult with any other unions about keeping schools open, including the 32BJ and if so, what were their positions?

Mayor: You have to ask each of them their positions because I know members of my team had been talking to different people, but again, to me – and I did not directly consult with 1199. The only direct conversation I had with a union leader was with Michael Mulgrew. I'm speaking to Mark Cannizzaro later on today. But again, I will always listen to people's perspective, but the reasons I have for doing this are so deep-seeded and based on so many factors that I'm working from a very, very, you know, multilayered matrix. It wasn't about going to people and saying, well, okay, your one factor is going to decide it for me. I knew what I had to do based on everything I know.

Question: [Inaudible] back to school. On a different issue, the State ELA exams are coming up, I believe in less than a couple of weeks. And you know –

Mayor: Just to make matters more interesting.

Question: [Inaudible] some kind of disruption in the school right now with everything that's happening, no matter what perhaps attendance, but also adjusting to all these things. Is there any consideration being given to perhaps ask the State to delay those or anything?

Chancellor Carranza: So we are actively engaged in conversations both with the State Education Department and the Regents as are a number of my colleagues from other school systems across the State of New York. So there are active communications around that very issue.

Question: [Inaudible] specifically asking for a delay, do you have a position on that?

Chancellor Carranza Well, I think, you know, there's already been trauma inflicted as we've talked about, you know, just the very fact of what we're all dealing with, a pandemic. Throw into the mix the fact that you have interrupted learning time, throw into the mix we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow much less in a week. So I think there are conditions that could warrant some alternate thinking about when, where, and how much – and those are the conversations that we're having.

Mayor: And this answer. Sure. I appreciate the answer. It's also a reminder and I really want to try and communicate this well – as we're thinking about this stuff and these meetings would make your hair curl, there are so many factors, there's so much incoming. But everyone here could tell you their stories. And I think if you had a chance to look at that, you'd understand sort of the way we all think and try and make decisions. I mean, Deanne, I don't know everything about your history, but was a firefighter for many years, was a FEMA official. I mean you can think about this answer, but how many substantial disasters you have been present to address? If you know the answer off hand, you'll tell me.

Commissioner Criswell: I don't know the answer off –

Mayor: Would you say it's dozens?

Commissioner Criswell: Yes.

Mayor: Richard helped bring Houston back after Hurricane Harvey. In fact, when we were doing research on Richard, one of the things that really, really came through was throughout the Houston community, the appreciation for the leadership he showed and they were just laid waste. I mean they went through hell and the schools actually are actually coming back extraordinarily fast because of Richard's leadership. Raul as we said, was present at the beginning of the AIDS crisis here in New York City and one of the people in government trying – and we got actually very moving stories of him being one of the people in government trying to talk to the community of people with HIV and AIDS and try and work with them and hear them and make government work for them at a time when many other people were still in denial or unwilling to even engage the community.

Oxiris talked about H1N1, I'm sure you have many other stories of crisis that you went through.
Mitch, I know you were in the beginning of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco.

President Katz: Yes, Sir.

Mayor: Frontline of the crisis running their public health system. And then I've got a whole host of tales to tell including Ebola and Sandy and 9/11 and many others. I think everyone here has been in battle in a variety of ways and it's in our bloodstream. So when you ask even a question as simple as, should the test be canceled, which is a very good question, we're trying to process all of this all the time. And that is an interesting question. Some things it really does make sense to postpone or cancel. Other things would be really bad to postpone or cancel or have lots of negative experiences or outcomes. But I can at least say that everyone, certainly, you know, Dean Fuleihan is playing a crucial role and he's been through extraordinary times at the city and state level. Emma Wolfe has been through every challenge we've had in the last six years and played a crucial role.

You know, everyone has been to this movie in one form or another and is taking from our previous experiences and adapting them here on trying to, like, use that combined knowledge to make decision after decision after decision in real time. Last call?

Question: [Inaudible] how many are in –

Mayor: Of the what?

Question: Of the 154 cases how many are in the hospital?

Unknown: 21.

Question: 21. So that's less than yesterday?

Mayor: Wait, I think – no that's not, hold on. I think – I want to check.

Commissioner Barbot: 21 was in the ICU.

Mayor: The ICE is 21. Right.

Commissioner Barbot: 30 is in the hospital.

Mayor: Right. Sorry.

Question: And also do you guys have any kind of plan or chemically dependent New Yorkers who rely on methadone or suboxone programs in case the smaller private clinics start to close? I know that the city detoxes were set to close. Is that going to not happen or is there any plan for that?

President Katz: We would be able to supply the medications. We have a large number of waivered physicians. And as you know, the medicine itself is not at a detox center because there's not – it wouldn't be part of detox. Right. But it is available both through our pharmacies and through pharmacies in the community.

Mayor: And is it – I want to ask, thank you for your question. I want to ask are – do we see specific centers closing?

President Katz: I've not heard [inaudible].

Mayor: Are you seeing specific centers closing?

Question: No, I was just going – because I mean, well at least methadone is part of the – in some cases, some of the detox program. And I'm wondering how a lot of the private detoxes were weathering this, considering the virus and –

Mayor: No, it's a great question. I'm saying, do you –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: You have not heard of closures.

Question: [Inaudible] the impending closures of city detoxes, no, I haven't heard of clinics closing.

Mayor: Wait, slow your role –

President Katz: She doesn't mean methadone. She means the fact that Health + Hospitals moved from –

Mayor: That earlier policy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That – I want to –

President Katz: That’s not about methadone.

Mayor: That's a little apples-and-oranges on methadone and we should double check. But I don't hear any change in the approach so far out in the field.

President Katz: No.

Mayor: Okay, good. Thank you, everybody.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I don't know if we have it. Do you have it –

Unknown: [Inaudible]

Mayor: [Inaudible] okay, thank you.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: [Inaudible] confirm that.

Unknown: [Inaudible]

Question: [Inaudible]

Unknown: [Inaudible]

Mayor: [Inaudible] take steps [inaudible]. Thank you, everyone.

2020-03-14 NYC Mayor de Blasio

“Today, we are confirming our first death due to severe complications from COVID-19. The patient, an elderly woman with advanced emphysema, was admitted to the hospital last week as one of our first cases, and had been in critical condition ever since. We’ve known from the outset that these people are the most at risk in this pandemic, and today’s news is a sad confirmation of that reality. I want to thank the staff of Wyckoff Medical Center for their efforts to save this woman’s life, and all the medical professionals on the front lines protecting our most vulnerable.

“We all have a part to play here. I ask every New Yorker to do their part and take the necessary precautionary measures to protect the people most at risk.”

2020-03-14 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: To hear of the death, the first New Yorker to die related to coronavirus. This is a very painful moment. This is a moment we all knew would come. That doesn't make it any easier. I want to say at the outset our hearts go out to her family, our condolences to them, and we will do all we can to support this family in this really difficult moment.

I'm going to speak to this situation and some other updates, but want to say at the outset how grateful I am. And we'll talk about in a moment how grateful I am, how grateful all New Yorkers should be to Senator Schumer for the work he's done on our behalf. You'll hear from him in a moment. I'll give some updates. Senator Schumer will offer his remarks. We want to ask questions, then of Senator Schumer while he's here, he has to depart to some other things. And then I'll continue with our Health Commissioner, Dr. Barbot with updates and a Q & A. Also want to thank our Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, and our CEO of Health + Hospitals, Dr. Mitch Katz. But back to this very painful situation. I think people know by now, 82-year-old woman, who on top of what she went through with coronavirus, previously had been diagnosed with emphysema. And I know way too much about emphysema. My own father suffered from it. And she had been hospitalized for emphysema previously, recently, before then being later hospitalized for coronavirus. She went in the hospital last week, one of our first cases and has been in critical - was in critical condition ever since. So again, our hearts are with our family and we also have to offer thanks to the people, the good people, the staff, the team, the doctors, nurses that Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, who did all they could do to support her and help her.

Want to give the overview very quickly and obviously as we have been unfortunately having to predict the number of cases, continues to grow in New York City. As of 10:00 am today we are at 183 cases and that is 29 new since we gathered together late yesterday afternoon. So again, 183 cases now in New York City. We're going to give you more information as we get it and we solidify numbers on hospitalization levels because obviously this is crucial to what's going to happen going forward. The latest numbers we have, and this is now based on 6:00 pm last night, so this is a different number than the timeline on the 183, and I'll always try and differentiate for you. But as of 6:00 pm last night we had 30 people in New York City hospitalized related to coronavirus, 30. And of those 30, within those 30, 19 as of 6:00 pm last night were in the ICU. And we can say so far based on our experience, about 80 percent of our total hospitalized cases, so of those hospitalized approximately 80 percent are over 50 and-or have preexisting medical conditions. That five conditions we've talked about previously and we'll continue to get more information as we go along. But we are seeing and it's a sad, sad reality and we saw it play out in the death of this woman today. Undeniably those who are in the greatest danger are those who are older and particularly those who are substantially older folks in their seventies, eighties and those with those serious preexisting medical conditions. That is the community we are most concerned about and keeps playing out time and time again. That's where the most severe problem is.

Another update, I'm going to tell you what we have here and the actions being taken to address it. We have a -- and I'm going to give you some information. We did not have every detail yet and we are still doing some notifications and actions so this is purposely partial information until we have further confirmation. We have a new confirmed case member of the FDNY, from a firehouse in Brooklyn. The member worked from Sunday through Tuesday, went home on Tuesday with symptoms and we'll get you the exact details on that. Tested positive late yesterday. While on duty the firefighter did not respond, I'm going to say again, while on duty did not respond to any medical runs or treat any patients. As a matter of precaution, 31 members of that firehouse will be quarantined immediately. Those who had worked with the member directly and the member is now quarantined at home. Other members of the house who were not in direct contact will take over the operations of the house. It's being cleaned right now. The firehouse will be fully operational and up and running at full capacity by 6:00 pm. There are other fire resources in the immediate area that obviously can cover any need in the intervening time. I spoke directly to Commissioner Nigro who's confident of the coverage levels that are available.

And you know, we've been very clear about the fact this is going to go on for months, this crisis. We are very clear who is most vulnerable, those older folks with preexisting conditions. I want to just say something I think is now a moral imperative for all New Yorkers, which is to protect those older New Yorkers who have those preexisting conditions. To really think about those who are most vulnerable among us and take actions accordingly. That means in your own life, even though you want to visit your older relatives and they really cherish those visits. If you're sick, if anyone around you is sick, it's not the time to visit. But that doesn't mean don't stay in touch with them. Call them, get on FaceTime, whatever else. There are older relatives who need support and we don't want to leave them alone, but we have to be smart about never subjecting them to anyone who might be sick. And when you are visiting with someone older and or with preexisting conditions, all those basics, washing your hands, using the alcohol-based hand sanitizer, covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze, social distancing, even when you're visiting, keeping some distance, we really need that. They need it. And even down to the point of everything that is available in our stores. Want people to remember, of course people are stocking up, but there's older folks in your life, neighbors, folks you worship with, family members of course, who may be low on supplies, share with them. Because we can't have those folks go without the things they need. So, everyone's got to think of this. And I said to you all yesterday and other times we're going into a full crisis footing. This is a wartime dynamic. We have to think about helping each other in different ways and it will take the people to solve this crisis, not just the government. So, we have to look out for each other.

Okay. Just a quick few sentences in Spanish, and then I want to say something about the actions taken in Washington as a preface to introducing Senator Schumer

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

So, we've talked a lot about the problems we're seeing at the federal level. And I will note again what we are waiting for from the administration in Washington. But I have to start by commending Senator Schumer for his actions, which had been crucial. He has been constantly available, supporting the needs of New York City in New York State. He has intervened on numerous occasions on our behalf and obviously worked closely with Speaker Pelosi on the stimulus bill, which is a major step forward.

It is still astounding that the administration has not moved an aggressive program of testing. We are still waiting on FDA approvals for a number of companies. We are still waiting for direct support for testing. We are nowhere near where we need to be as a nation and I'm going to keep talking about the need to go on a wartime footing and nationalize or mobilize key industries. There is no reason on earth that the companies that produce ventilators are not on a urgent 24/7 production line right now to get ventilators produced on mass and distributed where they're needed in this country. There's no reason on Earth that there are not enough surgical masks in different parts of the United States or face guards or hand sanitizer. This all needs to be federalized in whatever way possible and production needs to be taken to maximum, immediately while we have a chance. And there's no inkling of that from the federal level.

So, the Congress, the House is acting and Senator Schumer is acting and we're waiting on the rest of the Senate. And I want to also note as astounding to me that the US Senate did not stay in session yesterday to be able to receive the action by the House and move immediately. I know Senator Schumer and I are united in that thought and that's not to say the least his doing that is Leader McConnell, but it just makes no sense. I mean this is, I think we've directed a lot of ire at the President and the federal agencies. But let's be fair, how on Earth did the US Senate go out of session in the middle of a national crisis and a global pandemic. That said the action the House took, and I know Senator Schumer was instrumental in, I believe the Senate will act on, parallels a lot of the things we've been calling for here and a lot of things we actually do here. Obviously, this is a city that now guarantees health care for all our people. I am heartened to see the legislation include free coronavirus testing, even for those who are uninsured. That is a major step forward. 14 days of paid sick leave, absolutely crucial, up to three months of paid emergency family and medical leave. These things that are finally happening that we need desperately, food security actions for students and vulnerable populations. We need all of this. I'll state the obvious for the future. These are policies we better put in place permanently, if we don't have paid sick leave nationally, if we don't have universal health care on a much more extensive level, good luck dealing with the epidemics and pandemics of the future and they are coming.

So, I hope this is a wake-up call to our nation that we need to go a lot farther. With that, I have to express profound thanks to Senator Schumer. We in New York City, I hope all 8.6 million New Yorkers know this. If this man were not here and was not taking care of us and watching out for us, not just on this issue, but on so many others, we would be in so worse shape, but he is indispensable. And he is a guy in his -- I'm going to say something, Senator, I think you should appreciate. His name originates from a word that is translated as guardian. And he has been our guardian in this crisis, he has stepped up in an extraordinary fashion. It's my honor to present to you the Minority Leader of the US Senate, Senator Chuck Schumer. And I will bump you right. There you go. That's right. Good.

Senator Charles Schumer: Well, thank you, Mayor. And thank you for the good and long work that you are doing as well as the hundreds of thousands of city workers who work for you in health care and first responding in all the other places where we need the help. So, what we passed last night or what the House passed last night is a lifeline. I'll get into the details in a minute. But we have a crisis in this country as seen by the unfortunate death last night. And I am really glad that Congress took action and our action was aimed at families, working people who were affected and need the help most desperately. And we passed the kinds of things that matter to them – free testing for the coronavirus. You do not want -- these are the six things – we do not want people who are – who might have it, but say the doctor will charge me a couple of hundred dollars. I'm not going to go and then walk around with it. We strengthened food assistance to both the elderly and the kids who were not in school for whatever reason. And that's their best meal and they can't get it. They are safeguarding the medical benefits. That's FMAP. I'll get to that in a minute. That's the real biggest benefit for New York directly. We enhance unemployment aid. If you're unemployed, all those poor people, you read about Broadway and Barclay's center, what are the people who collect the tickets or who clean the place up or who sell the food going to do? They don't have jobs, paid family leave, sick leave won't help them, but we've greatly expanded and made more flexible unemployment benefits so they can get them. And then there is paid leave, both family and sick leave. You get 14 days of sick leave, you get full pay and then you get another three months of family leave for yourself or if your kid’s home, if your spouse is sick or whatever else.

So those are good things. Very good things. Now, despite President Trump's downplaying the issue, pointing fingers of blame at all people like the press, calling it a hoax, tell the family of the woman who died that it's a hoax. And basically, just not stating the facts correctly. He was forced to go along with what Congress wanted. First the original bill, which dealt with the vaccines and getting our own health care agencies up and going [inaudible] remember, called for $2 billion. I called for $8.5 billion. The package we passed was $8.3 billion. Last Thursday, sorry, last Tuesday, I said he should declare an emergency so he can use FEMA and the dollars that FEMA has. He just said that yesterday. And maybe most importantly, these six things are what Nancy and I called for, Speaker Pelosi and I called for Saturday, last Sunday. And these are the six things in the bill.

No giveaways to oil companies or other things they were thinking of in the White House. So now, it was disgraceful that Leader McConnell left town last night. The Congress, the House was debating and voting. We could have had this done already, but he left. But now I am calling on Leader McConnell to move this package immediately when we return on Monday, as is. No new amendments to help some special interest. Nothing. Everyone's going to have a lot of good ideas. There's going to be a third package and a fourth package and a fifth package. But if we add things to this, has to go back to the House, back and forth. The people of New York and the people of America can't wait. So, Leader McConnell, let's get moving. Pass this package as is, ASAP. And I hope they'll do that.

Now, for New York. There are lots of benefits for New York, but none is bigger than what's called FMAP. And I have over the years I've been in the Senate used FMAP to channel money at times of need into state and local governments. And New York does better than just about anybody else because we have the large -- FMAP is Medicaid and we have the largest Medicaid population in the country. And traditionally the federal government pays 50 percent of Medicaid and the State government and the localities together pay 50 percent. In almost all states, it's only the state government. In New York and North Carolina, the locals have to pay. We have raised that amount to 56.2 percent. That's what the federal government will pay so the State and local share goes down concomitantly two 43.8 percent. That will mean $6.2 billion for New York on an annual basis. It's done quarterly. If you went to the quarter and still have the virus, you get it for the whole quarter so you can prorate it by one quarter. If you know, luckily enough, there is no coronavirus by the fourth quarter of next year, it'll be three quarters of the amount I give. And we divide the money between the State and the localities. New York City will get over $1 billion and that will be -- it will enable them, since it will help pay their Medicaid to use other dollars that might've had to go to Medicaid, to go to all the needs that you were talking about.

Mayor: [Inaudible]?

Senator Schumer: Well, I am a Brooklynite. We say next, when other people say this. 2020, fourth quarter of 2020. I always confuse that with my staff – this year, next year, this week, next week. I forgot who's right, which one is right and which one is wrong. Okay, so it’s fourth quarter of this year, 2020. The City gets a billion. The other counties and localities in the state get $400 million, the State gets $5.2 billion. There's a lot of money there. And it will be used to help our states and localities that are on the front line with all of their other expenses. It'll probably help the State review, solve some of their Medicaid problems that we've talked about previously as well. We used FMAP in 2003 when the fiscal, when there was a downturn and most notably, we used it very significantly and very successfully in 2008. And each time I wrote a provision into the law that localities could not be, they had to get a good share, a decent share of the money. And that's back in the law. And this time there's over $1 billion of employment benefits that go to the State. As I said, we loosened up unemployment, how quickly you can apply and under what conditions.

And then there's money in many other things. There's about $15 million from meals to seniors. There was money for all kinds of other things. And then there are all the things that we mentioned that go to New Yorkers, not to the city or state governments, that I mentioned before in terms of sick leave and in terms of paid leave, in terms of free testing, things like that. So this is really a lifesaver for New York during a difficult time, and that's what the federal government should do. So, I hope the -- I believe and hope the Senate will pass this quickly and then we will have to move on because there are other issues that we're going to have to deal with as well. This will not be the last coronavirus relief bill at all. Okay. I'll take questions on this subject if you have them. Yes.

Question: Me or Kate?

Senator Schumer: You.

Question: Okay. Not that you're describing is in the Senate bill you [inaudible] Monday or is it separate?

Senator Schumer: It's in the house bill and that's what sending – being sent to the Senate. Same bill.

Question: How much would Long Island get?

Senator Schumer: Long Island would get in the hundreds of millions I would think. Or the high tens of millions each county. They're the next two biggest counties in terms of Medicaid. I'll get you those numbers.

Question: My question is, I guess it's more for the Mayor or it’s about coronavirus –

Senator Schumer: We’ll do questions for me first because I’m –

Question: [Inaudible] some discrepancy on the number [inaudible] –

Mayor: Yeah. The Senator has to go onto other things –

Senator Schumer: Okay. Yes, ma'am?

Question: The free testing and hand soap [inaudible] is that already in [inaudible] –

Senator Schumer: That will take effect once this law is signed into law, but the president has said he will sign it.

Question: Have you been tested for coronavirus?

Senator Schumer: No, I have not been exposed.

Question: The family leave, can you just talk a little bit more about what that means and is it only if he gets sick with the coronavirus?

Senator Schumer: Yes. Yes.

Question: Okay.

Senator Schumer: We would have liked to have permanent family leave. That's a goal of mine. I know the Mayor agrees with that, but this was - and we originally, actually put seven days of paid sick leave as a requirement. Not family leave but sick leave. But the Republicans wouldn't go along with that but –

Question: [Inaudible] to get a confirmed. Like does it have to be a confirmed case of coronavirus since we're still at this period [inaudible]?

Senator Schumer: It doesn't have to be a confirmed - you have to show on family leave that you – if your child is home, if your loved one is home, if your parent is very sick, it would apply to all of them. And unlike most family leave where you get off but they can't fire you, here you get two-thirds pay. And by the way, one of the other advantages of this is it helps the economy because all these people who are out of work or not working might not have gotten paid and that would be a real crimp on the economy for all of us. They're going to have money in their pockets.

Question: What should be done to help the businesses that putting [inaudible] –

Senator Schumer: In this package is money for small business lending. We would like to get grants to small business. We couldn't get that through the Republican side, but we're going to try to get that in the next package.

Question: Dollar amount?

Senator Schumer: I think it's – I'll get you the number, I think it's in the tens of billions. It's either 30 or 50, I can't remember which one they ended up with. Okay. Yes?

Question: Is there any provision for part time workers or –

Senator Schumer: Yes, the part time workers would get paid their part-time salaries under both the sick leave and the paid family leave. Okay. Thank you, everybody and thank you, Mayor. Nice to see you all.

Mayor: Thank you.

Senator Schumer: [Inaudible] elbow bump.

Mayor: There you go. See? New habits. And Senator, thank you. You are allowed to do it, elbow bump, everyone is. Senator thank you, and thank you to Speaker Pelosi. Thank you to all the members of the house delegation.

Senator Schumer: Nancy Pelosi did a great job.

Mayor: She sure did.

Senator Schumer: [Inaudible] really proud.

Mayor: Amen. Thank you.

Senator Schumer: Used to [inaudible] 10 - 15 times a day the last week –

Mayor: God bless you. Thank you to Senator and again, Speaker Pelosi, an outstanding job. The members of our house delegation from New York really stepped up and you know, we have not been used to a lot functioning on the federal level in recent weeks. This is something that actually is progress and is moving, but we have to see the Senate move on it on Monday and the president sign it immediately. With that, I want to just turn to Dr. Barbot for a moment because she has some guidance to give New Yorkers because again, we have to constantly get the message out about how people should handle this situation.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you. So, as the Mayor said, today we are announcing our first death related to COVID-19 and it's a difficult moment for the City and especially for the individual's family and our hearts go out to this family. And we are committed to providing them ongoing support during this painful time. I think it's an opportunity for us to be clear that with this outbreak we should not be surprised if we see additional deaths. I think it's a reality that we have to be clear with New Yorkers about that all of our efforts clearly are directed at ensuring that we minimize harm to New Yorkers, especially those that have these chronic underlying illnesses, but that we can't predict the behavior of the virus in all individuals. And so that's why it's incumbent on all New Yorkers to change our behavior so that when we say, don't go to work if you're sick, don't send your kids to school if they're sick, it has implications beyond the individual, beyond the individual's family, beyond the individual’s community. It has implications for all of us.

So, we need to make sure that New Yorkers are clear that if they are having symptoms, they should stay home. They should contact their providers if they're not getting better and that in this situation it's important for us to be testing those that really need to be testing. The social isolation that we are putting in place is really only going to work if New Yorkers change their behavior. And I think the last thing that I want to say because I can't say it enough, is the importance of frequent, thorough, consistent hand-washing, as well as covering your hands – excuse me –covering your mouth and your nose when you cough or your sneeze. Ensuring that you've got alcohol-based hand sanitizer when you are not close to a water source, ensuring that you don't shake hands, and I think it's okay for us to remind one another to say, uh huh, not shaking hands, glad to do the elbow bump. People are getting creative. But the point is, now more than ever, it's important for us to change our behavior and I don't want that message to be lost because, you know, as I've said in the past, we're in this for the long haul. I think our best estimate is sometime in September. We are always hoping for it to be shorter. We can't predict if it's going to be longer. So, these are things that we need to put into place on a regular, ongoing basis. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Okay. Let us take some questions. Go ahead. Katie?

Question: I just wanted to ask, you said the number in New York City is 183 cases, but the state has it at 213, can you explain the discrepancy?

Mayor: Sure, if that – I have not seen the latest State – the State is getting results in obviously from a variety of labs and they have oftentimes information ahead of us and they share it with us and we update our numbers. So, at this point it's going to be a rolling basis. There's a lot of different sources of testing out there. We're going to update our numbers every time we confirm them. But honestly this is what we had at 10:00 am, it's not 10:00 am anymore.

Question: With all due respect before the press conference – I mean because we have put this out, this is being broadcast live on television in some cases, shouldn't that have been checked by [inaudible] or some of your team [inaudible] –

Mayor: Katie, again, with all due respect back, we're going to give the numbers that we have that we have confirmed as the latest. It's sometimes the State will have something that we have not yet confirmed, but let's be clear, if we update an hour later or two hours later, it's actually not changing anybody's lives. We're going to give the best information we have once we've confirmed it, but it's equal, bluntly, that we know we are in a crisis and I want you guys to have accurate information. We're not going to give you something until we're sure. This is the number as of 10:00 am. We're going to update it constantly.

Question: When did the woman pass away? What borough did she live in? Dr. Barbot?

Mayor: Yeah. I don't have the exact – do you have that? We don't we don't have that. We'll get you that as much as we can. Go ahead.

Question: What advice for New Yorkers who are HIV positive, are they in the category where –

Mayor: Oh, absolutely compromised immune system. Doctor or either one, whoever wants to jump in?

Commissioner Barbot: To the extent that individuals have the five underlying chronic illnesses that we have laid out and have additional diagnoses, they are certainly at risk. But HIV in and of itself with a well-controlled viral load - they don't have a standalone category. What we now know is that most individuals who are surviving with HIV are actually more likely to die from the leading causes of death that we all die from, which include heart disease, which is one of the major categories that we're concerned about. As one of the chronic illnesses that puts people at risk for COVID-19 bad outcomes. And let me just say again, to reemphasize, we've been saying that those that are at greatest risk are those with those five underlying illnesses and who may be above 50. But I also don't want us to lose sight of the fact that they're not the only ones that are at risk. This is a situation where every day we're learning more information and we're going to adjust our guidance as we learn more about what's happening here in New York City. But for now, that piece of information hasn't changed.

Mayor: [Inaudible] all get it right [inaudible] HIV/AIDs [inaudible] can we clarify the difference, sort of the spectrum, because I'm assuming – compromised immune disease [inaudible].

Commissioner Barbot: Nowadays, having HIV in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean that your system is immunocompromised. If you are well controlled, you're on the appropriate medications, you're controlling your viral load.

Mayor: But If not –

Commissioner Barbot: If not, then certainly. Yes.

Mayor: So that’s what we have to be clear. It’s a qualitative reality –

Commissioner Barbot: Correct.

Question: [Inaudible] press conference that you mentioned setting up drive-through testing centers. I know that's happening in New Rochelle. Can you talk about what sort of streamline testing?

Mayor: Sure.

Question: Are there going to be fever screening [inaudible] the way China is set up [inaudible] –

Mayor: So, we are discussing that literally today. The – look we saw in South Korea for example – every place is different. Let me be the first to say, and every scenario is different, but in South Korea, you know, very powerful results from an aggressive testing approach, that said that requires having the testing capacity. So, here's been the conundrum from day one and I think this is what the history is going to show at the end of this. If it – you know, I keep coming back to if our press conference was – first one was January 24th and we were calling for testing capacity then, you know, what a different world this would have been if the federal government in the first half of February had moved testing into as aggressive a stance as it could have been all over the country. I think we'd be having a very different reality because it would have allowed early on to do the testing, do the follow-up, isolate people, you know, do the tracing, all the things we needed to do.

There's a really fair argument that now we're in such an advanced place that testing can't play the same role it used to. But this – I would argue as a layman, the South Korea example proves that there is a strategic value that can be done, it can be achieved, if you have mass testing ability. So, we'd love to get to that point and we're on every possible source. I like the idea of the drive-throughs, if it’s done – and I think the State is doing this – on a prioritized basis. It's just a way of streamlining getting to the people who need it most. I would love even more to have the massive capacity to go deeper and deeper into the population, still prioritize, but much deeper into the population. So, if we can get the capacity levels up higher, I'd love to see the drive-throughs here as well.

Question: Okay. Just to clarify, is it still as a I think it was March 10th, the Health Department's protocol was each and every test had to be approved by the Department of Health. Like a health care provider has to call – call the hotline and say, can I do this test? Is that still the case now that [inaudible] labs come online?

Commissioner Barbot: So, I want to build on what the Mayor said with regards to testing. Now that the commercial labs are doing the testing, we are sending guidance to health care providers to really focus testing on those who need it. You know, at this point in time, having increasing testing capacity is really important for folks who are significantly sick and not getting better. There may be other jurisdictions where they're still not sure if they've got community-wide transmission and there is a different purpose for that. But in our situation, we know we've got widespread community transmission and so we need to focus, as the Mayor says, on testing people who are sick and not getting better.

Mayor: But the question was approval –

Commissioner Barbot: Oh you - they don't need our approval.

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: They used to. Yes, they used to.

Question: When did that change?

Commissioner Barbot: We can get back to you. But the reason why they needed our approval was because CDC was very strict on limiting who it was that was able to be tested and so CDC gave us very strict guidelines about who was eligible for testing. But now that's been lifted.

Mayor: Yeah, that's really, this is a strangest thing I think for all of us to recognize. It feels like we're going through months or years of history, but it's actually only days. I mean, so we're talking about it's less than two weeks that we had the ability to do any testing of our own here. And yeah, it was really tight in the beginning. I mean, that's the irony. You know, the need was so great and we needed flexibility and speed and creativity for the federal government. We had a super tight regimen restricting. That's obviously gone out the window and now there's finally movement. The FDA approval for Roche was a very good example that there's finally a recognition of the need to expand. But there's so much more to do. There's a bunch of laboratories that still need that FDA approval. There still should be many more tests made available directly from the federal government.

There's so much more to do to put this on a really strategic footing, and you know, I'd like to see the whole federal government involved. You know, I think FEMA is starting to get involved because of the state of emergency. That's good. It should have happened already. VA, we talked about yesterday, one of the points that Dr. Henze made, you know, the Veteran’s Administration could be a part of this too with their capacity, the military, there's a lot of pieces to the equation that need to be advanced if we're really going to do the kind of testing we need and get the kind of supplies and medical capacity we need. We need an actual full federal response and we're still not even close.

Question: What would it take for you to consider closing the schools?

Mayor: It's going to be a day by day examination of all the facts. The –I talked about the CDC guidance sound, don't know if you were here yesterday, but I urge you to take a look at that.
It expresses the sheer complexity that attends to this, particularly when you're talking about such a vast number of kids in such a densely packed city. The – and we're going to have further conversations internally today. The pure public health strategic consideration is straight forward about closing the maximum things you can close. On the other hand, there are very, very pertinent health and safety dynamics. When you close, you create a series of additional new problems in terms of health and safety. When you close, you potentially compromise the hospital system and the health care system by the impact it has on health care providers who would hold back and not go to work, stay with their families, stay with their kids. Let alone, of course, the impact on children's education, but I think a very sobering fact is hundreds of thousands of teenagers without adult supervision. I think that's not just about health. It is. It's about all the other impact that has on their life. It is about the impact on safety. You know, we just have to look at a whole picture. So, we're going to be doing that constantly. But I think we have a lot to balance. And I'm holding where we are right now.

Question: [Inaudible] policies in the state of emergency that you've enacted or considering –

Mayor: The first policy is what we ended up in an absolute agreement. And I heard that there might be some misunderstanding of this. I want to clarify. I can't even, someone's going to have to help me on which day was which because they're all blurring together. But when I was on a New Day on CNN - was that Thursday morning? You know, on Thursday morning and we obviously Wednesday night was a seismic night, right? We saw just a huge amount of movement just on Wednesday night in this country, in this world, in terms of changes in our society. On Thursday morning, we were still trying to find a way to keep certain institutions open on hopefully a more limited basis, but even within hours as we compared our options, and then I consulted with the Governor, and he and I compared options, we agreed that we had to move to a more aggressive restriction. People have to understand this stuff is not days anymore. It is hours.

So, there's absolute unity between the City and State on the specific strategies. We'd agreed together that there had to be that 500 or more-person limitation. We agreed that there should be an effort to reduce capacity by 50 percent for everything else, because we wanted to try that, and see what it would do and see if it would work rather than shut down everything, which I think again comes with real unintended consequences. And this was before we knew that there would be some federal relief and we're going to factor that into the equation, if we see it's real, bluntly. That people are getting some economic aid that's going to also affect the equation. But even just Thursday, that was not a given.

So, all of these pieces are moving. Obviously, the State and City are unified on how we handle a school that has experienced a contamination or I should say a case and how we decontaminate clean, et cetera, get a school up and running. This is a constantly evolving situation, but we do believe in keeping as you know, keeping the unity of the State and City strategies to really consistent. And that's something that Governor and I are both committed to, but that means also one day at a time. And if we're not sure we're ready to implement a strategy we hold to get more information.

Question: Isn’t it hard to make that argument when the two largest school systems outside of New York City, LA, and Chicago, and Illinois making the decisions for Chicago and the LA unified school district, making the decision to close schools, the largest making the decision not to.

Mayor: Right –

Question: But you can now model it off of those two places?

Mayor: We don't model off anyone else. I mean, I'm not saying that to be disrespectful to the question. I think New Yorkers would agree there is no place like this literally –

Question: We modeled the restaurant grading after California –

Mayor: That’s not the same thing my friend. Hold on, hold on everyone. We're coming around but we are actually calling on people. Work with me, over here still. We have particular conditions and we have to look at the whole picture. That is a day to day assessment. There's going to be differences of opinion. There's going to be new information. We’re going to make decisions based on the facts and based on all of the factors. And again, I refuse to belittle the impact this would have on our health care system, which is the thing we care about the most. Absolutely the most. But I also am not ignoring all those other factors because I know a lot about kids and families – whose phone please? Someone want to turn off their phone, please?
Come on dude. I know you're deep in your art there, but you got to pay attention. There are so many factors to consult. Please look at that CDC guidance. It gives you real sense of the complexity.

Question: The guidance says eight weeks is the recommendation because of community spread to seniors. And I can't, like –

Mayor: I hear you, I hear you. But we are factoring in everything. And here's the problem again, the CDC says this, I'm not praying at the altar. I appreciate it analytically. So what happens to those kids?

Question: Their home, their parents have the ability to make decisions if the announcement is made today?

Mayor: What happens to those kids? Just tell me over – let's assume we're talking the entire rest of the school year, which is a very good likelihood. Like are they going to do? What's a teenager going to do?

Question: I'm not an expert at that. And we know –

Mayor: I'd like your personal opinion.

Question: Parents make the decision.

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Ask their grandparents system and ask neighbors to step in. That's what we did in the Bronx. I was growing up with the issue of childcare –

Mayor: So, and I'm going to tell you what else happens, and I guarantee it, and I've talked to a number of other parents who agree and people who work in this field and agree it's not a day. It's not a day, it's not a week. My tremendous fear here is when we shut down, if we shut down, we will not see this school year again. So now we're saying kids are going to have these months and then the summer and then we don't know when schools come back. So what are they going to do? They are going to go out in their neighborhoods -- they are not staying indoors. They're not staying in isolation. Guarantee. Teenagers? Guarantee they're going to go out and create all sorts of new social networks, all sorts of opportunities for spread. Families are not going to stay in their apartments. They're going to start socializing or coming up with something because they just won't be able to resist it. And you're going to have another version of the problem. And then people say, oh, the health care workers, why not just have centers for their kids? Okay, so we're going to congregate a lot of people in those centers. It gets more complex. That doesn't mean at some point, I might not say at any point -- now I factored in all the equations and I've decided we've reached that tipping point, but I'm not there today.

Question: Parents we talked with them -- I'm sorry, teachers we were talking to yesterday, say that the students are distracted anyway, the teachers are on edge. Some of them saying that they want to, thinking about protesting and not even coming to school next week. What is your response to that? And another parent that we talked with also says, you know, we're doing these parent teacher conferences on FaceTime, but you know, you're keeping us away from teachers and from these buildings. But if we have it and we give it to our kids, they're going to go back into the school and give it to other kids and teachers anyways?

Mayor: So again, let's, I understand the questions fully but, but this is true of everything in our society. I think there's also being -- there's a bit of tunnel vision on this question. Dr. Barbot has said to us a thousand times in just two weeks if you're sick, stay home. That's true for whatever, because again, so the kid who even -- say you have no school, if everyone who feels that way got their wish, then be careful what you wish for. Now you have hundreds of thousands of teenagers trying to figure out what to do. We have to deal with them wherever they are. If they're sick, they have to stay home no matter what because again, what are they honestly going to do? They're going to go out and about. So, whatever's going on, you've got to keep your sick children home. If you're an adult, you got to stay home. There are some things that are rules no matter what. We need people to do that right now, no matter what. If there's real adherence to that, and I think people are taking this pretty damn seriously right now. Then the kids who do go to school so long as school is up, there are going to be kids who by and large, there's a consciousness that they are not going to school sick. If anyone gets sick, we're sending them home, et cetera, et cetera.

But for the teachers who don't want to participate, I would only say this to them. Right this minute, this is a fact in New York City -- first responders, yeah there’s a challenge out there, but they're showing up for duty to serve and protect people. Health care professionals are showing up. Sanitation workers are showing up. City workers are showing up for duty. Overwhelmingly teachers are showing up for duty. Everyone who works in school buildings, even with that drop-off from Thursday and Friday, Thursday we were very close to regular attendance. Friday, we had a big drop off. But as we said, over 600,000 maybe 700,000 kids got served. So, the teachers who feel differently, they have a right to protest all they want. And they know what their contractual rules are and they have to make a decision. But there are rules of employment and the folks who are showing up and doing their work are the vast majority. That is the fact.

Question: [Inaudible] businesses, we've got -- we're with Channel 11 and we’ve got about a dozen phone calls this morning. Workers at Macy's Herald Square saying that they did test positive and people just don't know what to do because they're just told to go home. Nothing’s [inaudible]. Are you aware of that and what should coworkers do if someone is tested at the workplace?

Mayor: Sure, I'll start and then various doctors may want to jump in. The CEO of Macy's was actually in this room. Again, I'm losing track of days. What day did we meet with the CEOs? Does anyone remember? Was that Wednesday or Thursday? We'll come back. Thursday? Okay. And raised similar points. Very good. We obviously, Macy's is such a crucial institution in this city. And this is why the testing tactically could be important. Boy would I have liked the testing in February, you know, the beginning of February where it could have played a huge strategic role, but it still plays absolutely a tactical role at minimum, that allows you to know enough to make the adjustments in a workplace, for example. So, I would love us to get to the day where we could get the testing so extensive that we could answer that kind of question. Obviously, if someone was sick in the workplace and had a negative test, it would tell everyone something very important. Someone is sick and had a positive test, we'd want to know who they were in direct contact with. Not, were they in the building at Harold Square, you know, on the first floor. That doesn't affect the eighth floor. You know, we want to know who they were in direct contact with. And those folks of course should be isolated. We need to get to that point. This is why we keep saying every hour and we keep pushing the federal government and trying to appeal at all levels of the federal government for more and more help on the testing because what you describe is what we want to go.

Now for here and now, and I'll segue into one of our doctors. Right now, I think the common sense is if someone's feeling sick and they are at home, don't go to work. And you feel sick at work, get out of the workplace immediately. And you don't assume just because someone felt sick, because remember you can feel sick from a lot of things, you can't go like, oh, someone felt sick, now the whole place has coronavirus. It has to be a process around it. We want people to get out of there immediately. And then from there, the normal testing and Dr. Barbot will go into greater detail. But to finish, typically we want to see if you have, I'm going to say it and you'll correct anything you don't agree with or you can refine, cold and flu type symptoms. Get home, isolate, gets better, that's great. Doesn't get better. Doctor's office or medical facility or Urgent Care, BioFire test. That's 26 more, in my words, typical diseases. You got one of them, you don't have coronavirus. You don't got one of them. Now we definitely want to test you. That's my simple progression. Doctor, will you refine? We'll come back to -- let's get this part right.

Commissioner Barbot: So, the advice in that situation would be as follows, because of the fact that we don't have diffuse access to rapid testing on site, right? We need people to make common sense judgements. And so, in that situation, if someone is diagnosed as having COVID-19 the first -

Mayor: Can I stop you? Could you go back first, to the person who is just sick, [inaudible]?

Commissioner Barbot: If the person is just sick? Go home, don't come to work.

Mayor: And then what is the regimen for figuring out what's going on with them and what it means for the rest of the workplace? So, what I reviewed, is that right? Or do you want to vary that anyway?

Commissioner Barbot: So, okay, let's start from the beginning. I work at Macy's and I have symptoms. I take myself out of circulation because Dr Barbot, as the City's doctor has said, and let me just clarify this here. Initially we were saying 24 to 48 hours. I'm now extending that because what we're learning is that many people do get better in that amount of time. So now I want New Yorkers to wait three or four days. If you're not better in three or four days, I want you to reach out to your doctor. Your doctor will then make the clinical decision to understand if you want to have a BioFire or if it's indicated to have BioFire, BioFire positive stop, do not pass go. Go back to work when you're fully asymptomatic. BioFire negative, your doctor makes a determination you need COVID-19 testing, COVOD-19 testing positive, go home, stay home for the 14 days.

In the meantime, your coworkers, because we know that there is a lag in the test turnaround time -- use good judgment, which means if you are symptomatic, we want people to self-monitor, right? What that means is that if I know that I didn't share utensils, that I wasn't, you know, holding hands with the individual that had you know, general contact in the office, then what I would do is monitor myself. Am I feeling like my throat is getting kind of raspy? Am I developing a little bit of a cough, a little bit of a fever and as I've been saying since the very beginning, have a low threshold for staying home, right? I stay home, I take Dr. Barbot’s advice. If I'm not better in three to four days, then I get tested. Because the reality is, as we've been saying, we have to assume that coronavirus is everywhere and 80 percent of the people are going to be having mild symptoms. And we want to reserve doctors, offices, emergency departments, we want to reserve testing for people that really need it.

Question: Yeah. So, this is more of an economic question. Obviously, you focused on the issue, but there's a tremendous economic impact. [Inaudible] the social distancing. I know you created a small business loan program. Businesses that I've talked to haven't been able to apply and it's just a survey online. Is the City doing enough to help small businesses? And are you worried about the effect that this is going to have on the City's economy?

Mayor: Hugely worried. Again, what we think of as a normal timeline, just I want everyone to erase your brains and neuralize yourself and you're now in a whole new world where the stuff that happen -- that used to happen over a month or a week now happens in a matter of hours. So this situation is changing so constantly it's almost impossible to make normal sense of. So now again, we're on that kind of wartime footing where we have to see things very differently. Two days ago, in terms of understanding the economy and small businesses in particular, you would say something different even then versus what you say today. We're obviously deeply concerned about what's happening in the stock market. We're deeply concerned about the overall trajectory of the economy, if we're going into a major recession overall. But then the other factor is what is the federal government going to do? They are the central actors economically in terms of the kind of relief they can provide, stimulus, et cetera.

What's happening in Washington now with the House is real progress. I would not say it is comprehensive, but it's real progress. Senator Schumer just told you there's more coming behind that. To the extent that deepens and deepens and deepens and you know, almost in the style of the New Deal really reaches deep into people's lives. Direct grants to small businesses, all that kind of thing. That's when I think we're at the point where you can really, really protect people and their livelihoods. I don't think we're there yet. So, we have to understand and is in my decision making, I worry about a tipping point and I think I've been clear about it. We are one part of the big national equation, but we're a very prominent, crucial part of it. And what I do not want to inadvertently exacerbate is that very slippery slope into a full-blown economic recession.

Again, we're just one part of the equation. But we have to be very smart about what this part of the equation does. Full blown recession is going to have ramifications far beyond the coronavirus. Coronavirus I take very, very seriously. Coronavirus is going to be over at a certain point and the vast majority of people are going to come through it. But if we have another Great Recession, which we are literally to this day still feeling the effects of the last one, we could be playing with that fire right now. I think people have to be sober about it. There's also a societal breakdown question, which is very much in my mind. And the public health folks are doing their damnedest here to bring all of their knowledge and all into the equation. But the equation has gotten much more complex in the last 48, 72 hours because now it's not just a question of public health. It is a question of the potential of fundamental societal of degradation. You're talking about simple things like businesses that will close and never come back. You're talking about the potential of a full-blown major recession. But you're also talking about dislocations that could be much deeper.

The object lesson is Italy where you're talking about things that will have years and years of effect, and people's lives that will never be the same in a much deeper kind of way. So we're trying to figure all that out. And what I don't want is those dominoes to fall so quickly that employment recedes drastically in New York City, that basic services are compromised. Remember you know, right now in Italy there's only pharmacies and grocery stores. That's pretty much it. And I'm not saying we're on that track because I think we are much better set up to address things in Italy, but I'm also a realist about how quickly things can change. And I think trying to hold the line at a higher level, again, my view, protecting the health care system, protecting the transit system, and to the extent we can I want to protect the schools. So all of these pieces come together and everyone's watching and people are taking cues from the decisions of government and the more radical our decisions, the more radical their behavior will be. So, these are things that we have to factor in.

To the small business question. I want to understand what's in the House bill. I think there sounds like there's some substantial small business relief. Our programs are brand new but we intend for them to act quickly. So, I want any information. If you can share it with our team, if you have cases, examples that can help us with quality control, those $75,000 – up to $75,000 zero interest loans, we want to get those – we are liquid, the City of New York is liquid right now. We want to get money in the hands of those businesses. The grants, which I think I'm right in saying, up to $6,000 direct dollar, direct grants, we want to get it to anyone who qualifies. If our system is not on a war footing itself, we need to fix that right now. It should be a fast, fast application turnaround.

Question: [Inaudible] this week [inaudible] –

Mayor: Again, we're trying to get, not surprisingly, on that full of war footing. I want to know what you're hearing and please share the specifics. I'll go with the team today to analyze what the turnaround time is. It has to be very fast. No question. Anyone who hasn't gone first?

Question: Well, I've also heard that there's been some employees who've been complaining that their employers are forcing them to go to work and they feel like if they don't show up to work, even if they're feeling sick, like they might lose their jobs. And I'm wondering if there's any way that the city can help these people understand that it's more important –

Mayor: Well, again, I'm going to ask everyone in the media, your questions always help us, but your specifics help us more. You don't have to shout out in front of a room, but I'd beseech you, if you know of specific cases, you can say it quietly to our press and communications team. We need to know these things so we can go at the individual situations and fix them. The messaging as – I mean, again, I had a number of the biggest employers in New York City in this room 48 hours ago, couldn't have been clearer. And to their credit, they agreed that sick people should stay home. They agree that anyone that got sick at work should go home. They agreed that they should maximally telecommute. We had one of them – MasterCard, they said they were close to a hundred percent telecommuting at that point, if I remember correctly. They agreed on staggered schedules. I don't hear a lot of folks in the private sector not getting the memo right now, it's pretty clear. But if someone doesn't get it, private sector especially – public sector, we have a reality of, we are here to protect and serve people so we need to stay at our post no matter what. But clearly even we're saying if you're sick, stay home. But if a private sector entity is telling someone, come in, even though you're sick, first of all, they're idiots. Second of all, they're doing something dangerous and we need to know about.

Question: In the same grain – I spoke to Uber drivers and yellow cabbies and they're saying, ‘there's no way, if I don't draw, I don't get paid, what do I do?’

Mayor: Correct. And that's where the – so again, separating the small businesses where for a number of them we have grants and loans that we can help with, much, much more important. The state I know is doing some important work. And the federal government's the ultimate. So everyone here is a mature adult. We understand the hierarchy, the cities – any city can do something, states can do more, federal government can do unimaginably big things because they print money, right? I mean it's just reality. And we saw it in the New Deal and we've seen it in other crises and wars and everything. The federal government, at this point, I mean, is there anyone who's seriously talking about debt or deficit anymore in general in the United States, let alone in the middle of a pandemic? No.

So, the federal government could do what the hell they want right now and they could provide massive relief to small businesses and employers. I think the legislation that we understand, the stimulus does some of it. What I want to know is, is it anywhere near what we need? And I'm heartened by the Senator's point that more is coming soon. That is the ideal way to address the situation. Folks who have not gone once – just want to do a last call. And now we will start around again, but hold on, I have an update. Hold on. Standby. Standby.

Okay. We have a – this is a one of our public schools. I. S. 27 on Staten Island. I had gotten a report on this before coming in, but it wasn't complete now we have more. We have a confirmed case of coronavirus, but is a student who, as I understand it, was not in school, I think, all of this last week. We're going to confirm that, but was not in school while symptomatic for sure. Did stay home, which is very good. The protocol that the City and State agreed on, is now in effect. So the cleaning will happen now. The contract tracing will happen immediately. And at this moment, that school I. S. 27 on Staten Island, we will reopen Monday. And the school community has been notified. Okay. Yes?

Question: [Inaudible] not in school all week.

Mayor: Not in school all week. This last week. Katie?

Question: So, I wanted to ask about closings, not schools but other City facilities and then the cleanliness as well [inaudible] I've received questions from people about senior centers. If the Department for the Aging [inaudible] senior centers because some facilities have been closed, some have stayed open. And then secondly, you know, City-run pools and gyms, I've heard people who say there aren’t appropriate cleaning supplies. Are there any kinds of plans to mitigate that? And then –

Mayor: Katie, you and I are going to be working together a lot. I think you know my – I beseech you, collegially, just one at a time and I'll give you answers to each, but just help me to be accurate.

So let me – I need to do a reality check. Doctors, because this is – I was literally getting these questions from people the other day. I want to make sure. The pool itself, which I think across the board is chlorinated in New York City – the pool itself, the water in the pool, I think I know the answer, but I'm going to ask the experts, can you can track coronavirus from the water in the pool? No is the answer. Okay. So, and we have also said not through drinking water or other beverages, not through eating food. But to Katie's question in a pool facility, a locker room, or whatever it is, you – of course, contact concerns, et cetera. So your question, I want to go back to your question is, is there sufficient cleanliness and should they be open?

Question: Yeah, I mean, perhaps more important are the senior centers. I didn't mean to reverse my questions, but is there going to be guidance for senior centers run by the Department for the Aging, even through contracts, but then also just generally what the cleaning is at a lot of these City facilities?

Mayor: Yeah, so the broad answer, and we can get more detail – every agency has been sent repeated guidance on heightened cleaning protocols everywhere, every agency, every kind of setting. So that I have confidence in. The follow through – we're all, again, mature adults here. We know that each institution, each setting, each location needs to be monitored to make sure they're really following through and we're going to make sure supervisors are doing that. But I don't have a doubt in the world about the basic guidance. I definitely want to know more about the follow through and the monitoring. We will get back to you on that.

On the question of senior centers themselves and equally on pools or rec centers – we're going to look at each and everything in turn, but there are some real questions here about, again, how much are we going to compress society and where does it take us? For a lot of seniors, they have literally nowhere to go. So now if you take senior centers out of the equation and if you take, you know, potentially pools and rec centers out of the equation, you have just taken a whole lot of life away from people. We’ve got to make that decision very soberly. I worry about that. I worry about it for people’s overall health. And by the way, meanwhile, and this is something we've all talked about while we're dealing with coronavirus, what about everything else health wise? Someone who's not getting more exercise, someone who doesn't have a social life, the impact on mental health. We got to think about all of this.

But these, you know what – we're also not going to be reticent to close things we need to close. With senior centers, we have very strict protocols about no one is sick is allowed to come in obviously. But we're going to look at every piece of that equation to see if we want to go even deeper and those decisions will be made quickly.

Question: [Inaudible] I realized that the city's three public library systems, you do not control that, the City provides substantial funding to. So the New York Public Library decided to close their facilities this week, but the Queens and Brooklyn Public Libraries have remained open. I've heard from a lot of people that say that's very confusing. I wanted to know if you provide guidance to these libraries. Some people say it gives a mixed message because you're suggesting social distancing, but then keeping these facilities open while realizing that they are very important [inaudible] –

Mayor: The mixed messaging challenge is a constant. And, again, where do you draw the line? It’s something we're talking about daily. Is there a mixed message and telling our public servants who need to protect us and serve us that we need them at work, when we're also saying social distancing? Of course, these are challenges, right? If you want to do Italy – and I don't – you could shut down everything in sight and then you're still going to need a certain amount of public servants, but we're not there. We want to strike a balance and we're trying to discern that balance every day. We've definitely talked with the library systems. The library systems, again, play a crucial role for young people, for seniors. They can practice social distancing like any place else. They can make modifications. But I think there is a massive fallacy in this discussion. As you keep closing, what do 8.6 million people do?

And this is real world. We want our young people to be safe. I don't think anyone wants to see a bunch of young people outside getting into other types of danger. So now what are you going to take away from them? If you take away their schools and you take away their recreation centers and you take away their life, where are they going to go? What are they going to do and where do you strike that balance? As opposed to the qualitative, which I think is the real question right now. So it's fine – no one's happy we don't have sports or theaters or you know, a lot of those things, but we can at least acknowledge those are less vital to human life than a lot of these other institutions. Less daily, if you will, less basic. I'm sad those things are gone, but we can deal with it.

But we have to figure out where that balance is. So today I say to the library systems that stayed open, I think they did the right thing. But they're obviously doing a lot of measures to make the adjustments. And it's almost like the – your first question follows your second question. You know, we're going to put everything else that's still surviving up on the board every day and say, are we holding or are we making a change and how far are we retrenching? How far are we retreating and where's that point we should not go past?

Question: [Inaudible] about the libraries closing, did you express any concern about that?

Mayor: Yeah, I disagree with it. But they had made the decision without consultation with us, which was a mistake in my view.

Question: You said we're not Italy. Are you confident we're not going to be there in two weeks as some projections have suggested? And can people still really be going to bars and clubs and venues with half capacity? Is that a responsible thing to be doing right now?

Mayor: Again, daily reality. The Governor and I have talked about this and we’re going to keep talking about it. We are reserving our rights in an ever-changing situation to take any standard and intensify it, you know, to go to deeper closures, whatever it may be. One day, I'd love to be able to stand before you and say we're going to be able to open things back up again. I don't think that's anytime soon. And that sobriety is affecting my decision making. When I talked about openly the schools yesterday – you know, I don't think there is such thing as temporary closure. So, it's fair to say every day we're going to be evaluating and we're going to come up here with adjustments. Private institutions are going to make their own decisions. When we decided – the Governor and I had a deep conversation about this 50 percent concept, and we did it – and I've talked about this in the past, I'm going to use this to make a parallel. History shows us that in crisis relatively few people have a perfect, absolutely tried and true plan. A lot of times you have to take your best understanding and then implement it and see what works and what doesn't work in real conditions. I often refer to the New Deal, which a lot of us put on a pedestal today. Some of it worked perfectly and brilliantly and other pieces of it were absolute failures instantly, and those things were done away with, and we don't even remember their names in history. But I assure you, I've read the history, there was a bunch of initiatives that did not work and they got rid of. We're going to try this. We think the 50 percent could be helpful in this sense. People still have some employment. Businesses don't have to fail. And I assure you, a failing business today, a number of them will never come back, and I don't like that one bit. People still have some place to go, but with distancing. But we knew – I knew, I'm sure the Governor knew that just that very limitation would cause some places to choose to shut down, and lo and behold, we see that. There have been bars and restaurants and companies that say, if I'm at a 50 percent limitation, I'm stopping right now. That's their choice. But I am not ready today at this hour to say, let's have a city with no bars, no restaurants, no rec centers, no libraries. I'm not there. And we will make that judgment every hour of every day. The other thing too factor in – the Italy question. I don't think there's anyone who knows that answer perfectly, but I will tell you a couple of things I think are just plain fact. The trajectories, very different – they were in – they went from nothing to full blown crisis with extraordinary speed.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Excuse me?

Question: [Inaudible] you’ve only conducted 2,000 tests –

Mayor: Again, I think you can – I'm very comfortable. I'm very comfortable. It's not just about the test, it's about everything that happened there and the speed and ferocity with which it happened, the concentration of it, the way it spread. Look, we're talking about the United States of America – look at the pattern. It's not the same pattern as Italy. That's just a fact. Also, bluntly, with all due respect to their health care system and their government, they don't have the capacity across Italy that we have in New York City. There's no parallel. There's no place in Italy that has the capacity in New York City. That is a fact. That does not mean we're not very sobered by what happened there. But in other European countries – so, let's compare modern industrialized countries – there's no two countries that had the exact same experience. That's also a fact. So, I'm going to argue to you that I think the level of preparation here was entirely different and the follow-through has been entirely different, but that does not mean we don't look at that with extraordinary concern. And we're going to have a discussion today and make decisions and another one tomorrow and the next day for the duration.

Okay. Few more and then we'll be done.

Question: [Inaudible] go back in schools. Your worst-case scenario is coming up in April, with a forced 10-day closure of schools because of the Easter break, spring break. This is your worst-case scenario in that kids are out of school, they don't have libraries to go to, they’re in the park –

Mayor: They do have libraries to go to right now, but go on.

Question: They don't have the public library to go –

Mayor: Again, did you hear – respectfully, I'm not trying to mess with you, I'm trying to get accurate. You just heard your colleagues say that Queens and Brooklyn are open right now. I want to make sure we’re –

Question: [Inaudible] that kids are out of school with very little things to do. Is there a consideration that schools would be closed after that break? Is that a pilot you're looking at?

Mayor: I'm not doing projections because it's not responsible. I'm telling you where we are today and I'm also being as honest as I can be that that could change tomorrow or next week, because it's based on information every single day and that's just not about schools. That's about everything – everything. And we're going to be making, you know, big strategic decisions and when they're the kind that the City and State should make together, there has been a real commitment of both governments to make those decisions together. So, this is not something I'm going to project to you. I agree with you, the vacation comes with its own dynamics. I would also say that is different because it's something people have experienced every single year and are used to, as opposed to something that jolts the very fabric of the school system.

Okay. Anything else?

Question: A couple of questions – most New York households do not have cars and the President is setting up drive-through testing, as is the State. Is there a counterpart program for folks who don't have cars to be tested? And I have just another question –

Mayor: Yeah. I mean, I would say the notion to me is not just surely drive-through, but centers where people can be tested, whether it's drive-through or something else. But again, boy that would be nice if we could have the tests, right, on a really mass scale and could still prioritize. And I think I'm getting this right, doctors, that even the Westchester center is on a priority basis and a reservation basis. And that's where we would begin, by definition, until such time if we were so blessed as to have truly pervasive testing.

Question: [Inaudible] enforcing capacity as far as the restaurants? Are there spot checks?

Mayor: Yeah. That's – again, this is so brand new, but the goal will be to mobilize whatever appropriate agencies to start doing that kind of – just the same way we enforce everything else. I think we have something going for us right now, which is ubiquitous information. I'm sure there are people who want to get really, really close to their fellow New Yorker and are not heeding the warnings. But I think there's a whole lot of other people who are hearing this idea of social distancing and acting on it. I've had almost no one in the last 48 hours offer a handshake. Like, literally – it's amazing to me. I've been in contact with a whole lot of people and everyone's doing this, or they're doing this, or they’re doing something. I think rapidly people are understanding that I think a lot of stuff is just happening, so that's one part of it, but we do need to enforce and we do need to put a coherent mechanism in place. And I don't want to see a bar where everyone's crowded up next to each other and we have to step into that case. So, we'll have more how we're going to do that over these next few days.

Please –

Question: For the doctors, are you suspicious of the low rates among young people? Is that because they’re asymptomatic and they have it? Are you worried [inaudible] if they are symptomatic?

Mayor: If they are asymptomatic –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: This gets to the [inaudible] question, what we feel about spread when you are asymptomatic.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah. So, I have been asked that question before in these press conferences and I think I've been clear to say that while it may be theoretically possible for people to spread while asymptomatic, they're certainly not the reason why we're seeing an explosion of people with COVID-19. We've been very clear to say that when people are symptomatic with fever and a cough, fever and shortness of breath is when they are most likely to be transmitting. And that's why we've been so clear that we don't want to test the asymptomatic people, right, because we're going to get potentially false negatives. And that's been the emphasis from the beginning.

Question: I was wondering, you know, we've gotten so much information about New Rochelle and we’re able to consider this and hotspot. Is there anything more you can say about specific neighborhoods in New York City? Give us any kind of specific –

Mayor: No, and that's a good thing. I did the breakout yesterday. It's obviously widely distributed. But there’s not – and I'm checking the doctors, because, again, what we said yesterday at 7:00 pm may be different than what we say today at this hour. The only cluster that I have heard of in the New York metropolitan area is Westchester. So, God bless us all, and we'd like to keep it that way. Widespread is a challenge, clusters are at deeper challenge, and, so far, it's only Westchester. But ask me in an hour.

Question: Do we know of the cases, the proportion of which are unrelated to community spread –

Mayor: What does that mean?

Question: Like, the 83-year-old woman was an isolated case and maybe then there was a chain of people that were tested around her. Like, how many individual people –

Mayor: I’m going to try and reinterpret and see if we're on the same page. So, travel – let me just go back to the beginning. Travel has – it's not – I would argue it hasn't entirely left the building, but it's basically it's community spread. And as you get deep in community spread, you cannot trace the origins. Right? So, you trace the contacts whenever you can and you isolate the contacts.

Question: [Inaudible] how many people – are you tracing their contacts?

Mayor: Everybody that we talk about when they have a confirmed case, we're tracing the contacts. We're trying to keep up, there's a lot of work to do. But the goal is, you know, obviously when you get it, as quickly as possible, you're tracing the contacts.

Question: [Inaudible] one of those is a case of community spread across the city.

Mayor: Again, I think – I'm really working with you, I think there's a definitional problem. And I'm going to try and the doctors are raring to get in.

[Laughter]

Unless you have – let me try this, doctors, you'll be my panel and experts – unless you have proof of a travel nexus, it is community spread, or you got it from someone already had it, but overwhelmingly they got it from community spread. So, it's almost like immaterial at this point. It's, all we need to know is – if someone has it, then we need to do the follow up. Is that a fair – simple – simple-ish – you can modify. You can add. You're allowed to add.

[Laughter]

Question: [Inaudible] presumably, some are husbands and wives, sons and daughters of people that were treated. How many unconnected cases are we talking about?

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: I got you –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: But you can't do the back tracing. But yeah, in essence –

Mayor: [Inaudible] I’m sorry [inaudible] what do you mean, you can’t do the back tracing?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: So, by definition, when we are investigating an outbreak, it is – we have clearer lines of transmission when we have fewer people who are affected. And so, I think the cleanest example is with measles. Because it's a reportable condition, you know, when the measles outbreak happened it was because we had someone who came in from the outside where clusters were happening internationally. An astute clinician alerted us to the fact and we were able to in essence jump on that, right, and track down – this person had dinner with that person, went to the store with that person. And given the transmissibility, meaning that it's got like a 90 percent attack rate, we have a pretty good idea of who was where, when, and who was at risk. The challenge with something like COVID-19, especially as you get more community transmission, is that, because of the fact that the travel nexus now is pretty much irrelevant, meaning, it doesn't matter if you've been to China, doesn't matter if you've been to Italy, it doesn't matter where you've been because it's in over 80 countries around the world, and because of the fact that we're having transmission from other places in the state, other places in the United States, that web, if you will, that family tree of the outbreak gets ever more complicated and so you can't trace back. And so, that's why as this outbreak matures, the work of the disease detectives then becomes even more important for those individuals that are very sick in the hospital. And that's where, you know, we're going to start seeing a pivot to focus on those that are very sick and especially protecting our health care workers.

Mayor: I don't want there to be gray about sort of back and forward. So, what I'm trying to define clearly is when you have communities spread, where it came from, where in someone's life they may have made that contact is less pertinent. But we still, whenever humanly possible, want to know who might be most vulnerable we need to follow up on. That is still true. Now, volume is going to be a giant challenge, to the point Dr. Barbot made, and there's obviously cases that you have, you know, greater concern and lesser concern depending on the specifics, but I just want to sort of say wherever an individual got it along the way is less important than who they came in contact with who might be now vulnerable that we need to connect with.

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: I think you said it all, but just to add – if you remember, at the beginning, we could trace the contacts back to the cluster in New Rochelle, because that became such a big hub that we could talk about the lawyer and some of the family and all of that. The way it looks right now is much more spread and we are constantly looking for any information that could lead to a cluster, which is what we want to avoid at all costs, because we don't want to have the situation that New Rochelle is having by just the explosion in one cluster.

Mayor: Last call and we are going to close down.

Question: Where’s the fire house in Brooklyn?

Mayor: We’re not saying the specific. Again, we're doing still some work on details and notifications. So, Brooklyn, details TBA, open again at six.

Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-15 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Let's get our team in in here. Okay. So, everyone knows on Thursday, I declared a state of emergency in New York City. At the time, I said this situation was going to get more difficult. It is quite clear – thank you – it is quite clear that this crisis is growing intensely. I spent much of the day with our public health team going over a variety of projections, going over information from the experiences of other parts of the world and details of what we've seen here in New York City. I am very, very concerned that we see a rapid spread of this disease and it is time to take more dramatic measures and I will tell you that the issue that's been on everyone's mind is our public schools. I was a public-school parent for the entire education of my children, pre-K through 12th grade for both of them. I know just how much our parents depend on our public schools. I know right now there are so many parents who do not necessarily have any other place for their children. There are so many parents who depend on our schools for meals for their children. There's so many public servants we depend on, our first responders, transit workers, health care workers who need their kids to be in school. So, for everyone who is wondering why this has been such a difficult decision, it’s because I know the full cost of shutting our schools, I know all of the negative ramifications of this decision and it's very painful. It's going to be very difficult for a lot of families.

And so, this is a decision that I have taken with no joy whatsoever, with a lot of pain, honestly, because it's something I could not in a million years have imagined having to do. But we are dealing with a challenge and a crisis that we have never seen in our lifetimes and is only just begun. So, I regret to have to announce that as of tomorrow, our public schools will be closed. In other words, to all parents who are hearing this now, there was no school tomorrow and we will be suspending our public schools until after the spring vacation. And I'm going to say this very precisely. We will make a first attempt to restart our schools on Monday, April 20th but I have to be honest that we're dealing with a lot of unknowns and a lot of challenges and we understand how difficult it will be to achieve that goal. But just so everyone has something to organize their thinking around. Our first attempt to reopen the public schools would be on Monday, April 20th. I have been very honest about the fact that there is a real possibility that by closing our schools now we may not have the opportunity to reopen them in this full school year. So, we may actually have to go out for the whole school year, which is just extraordinarily painful for our kids, for our parents, for our educators, for so many people. And the notion of a school year being disrupted in this fashion, I have no words for how horrible it is, but it has become necessary.

You're going to hear from the Chancellor in a moment and we're going to talk about the things we're going to do immediately to compensate for the loss of our public schools. And we will put a number of measures in place and we hope that they are effective and they help, but they will not by any stretch replace the full value of having our kids in school all day, and that’s just an honest statement.

The challenge, and I've said this as recently as this morning and again – I believe the facts unfortunately have given us no other choice, but there's three things that we have been trying to protect. Most importantly, our public health system, our hospital system, our clinics, everywhere that people go for health care and two things that feed that system, our public transit system and of course our schools. Now that we will not have our normal school schedule, kids in our normal school buildings, we are going to come up with a number of alternatives to try to as much as possible, still provide our kids with an education remotely and to provide a physical location for the children of those crucial public workers, those health care workers, transit workers, first responders. Those locations will be in various places around the five boroughs. We hope between the remote learning and the specialized sites for the children of essential workers that we can keep enough going to support our health care system, but it will not be easy. So starting tomorrow morning, again, as of now, school is canceled for tomorrow, canceled to at minimum Monday, April 20th, at maximum the entire 2019-2020 school year.

Remote learning will begin on Monday, March 23rd a week from tomorrow. Our colleagues in the Department of Education have in these last weeks been setting up a remote learning system. It has never been attempted by the City of New York on this scale to say the least, but they have been working on a wartime footing to prepare it. It will be up and running for children in grades K to 12 Monday, March 23rd, in a week. It is a system that will improve with each week and we'll certainly take time to make it as strong as it could be and needs to be. But it will begin and we'll be effective starting Monday, March 23rd. Over the next few days, teachers will be trained how to teach remotely. Again, this is going to be a kind of battlefield training. These are not ideal conditions. We're going to have to teach these teachers very quickly. And this is a point where I can say to all our educators, we need you. We need you. These children need you. These families need you. For so many of our educators, there'll be an opportunity to take the tools of your profession and use them in a new way to reach a lot of kids who are going to be dealing with really, really tough circumstances. Keep their education going, help those seniors to still graduate. We don't want to lose that.

For those teachers who will be a part of our learning centers for the children of essential workers, your work will not only be crucial in terms of supporting our children and their education. You will literally be in a position to help form the backbone of the system we need to keep our health care workers at their post. We cannot lose our health care workers; we cannot lose our health care facilities. So we need to make sure those children are taken care of so our health care workers feel the ability to be where we need them most. And we're going to be asking a lot of everyone in the health care field, long hours, tough conditions. So supporting their children becomes absolutely crucial.

Over the next five days, our school locations will be open for one function specifically related to kids, which will be grab-and-go meals on a transitional basis. So that is only for this coming week. At least it'll give some ability for families that need it to have that assurance. But again, these are not for kids to stay in the building, not to eat the meals in the building, to come to the building, get the meals, and take them home for any kids who need them. We're going to be doing a lot of work in the coming days on how to make sure food is readily available for kids at various locations around the city and in the days and weeks going forward. But we have more work to do on that front.

We will be working to supply technology for every child that needs it. This is, again the Chancellor's been very honest about this, an imperfect situation. We have a lot of kids of course who did not have a computer at home, a lot of kids who don't have connectivity. We're going to do our best to supply as much as we can to help those kids.

So, I'm going to give you some other updates and then we'll turn to the Chancellor, but to say the least, this is a very troubling moment. A moment where I am just distraught having to take this action. But I became convinced over the course of today there was no other choice. And now I'll tell you the overall numbers of cases and I think it makes part of the argument clearer.

Number of cases is obviously moving rapidly. Confirmed cases at this hour and that could change literally in a matter of hours, from New York City, we now have a number of confirmed cases for coronavirus of 329. And I'll remind you when we started this week with several dozen cases, we're now at 329.

A borough breakdown from numbers earlier in the day. They will not add up to 329 but it'll give you a flavor of the breakdown. 78 cases in Queens, 72 cases in Manhattan, 53 cases in Brooklyn, 21 cases in the Bronx and 16 cases in Staten Island. Yes, indeed. 78 cases in Queens, 72 cases in Manhattan, 53 cases in Brooklyn, 21 cases in the Bronx, 16 cases in Staten Island – that is ever changing. One of the worst things I have to tell you now is we are now at five total deaths in New York City. Again, it's recently as Friday afternoon. There were none. It's now five. You all know about the 82-year-old woman from Brooklyn who suffered from emphysema then was hospitalized related to coronavirus. We lost her. Now four more deaths reported related to coronavirus, a 79-year-old woman who did have preexisting conditions of heart failure and lung disease, a 78-year-old man who had multiple preexisting conditions, a 56-year-old man who had diabetes and a 53-year-old woman who had diabetes and heart disease. We feel horrible for these families. We grieve with them, they're in our thoughts and prayers and it is a reminder to everyone of how vulnerable that part of our population is that is older and has those preexisting conditions, we must protect them. Another reminder, anyone in your life who meets that standard, we have to isolate them from anyone who might be sick, even if it's their loved ones.

A number of other specific actions. I will tomorrow sign an executive order requiring all hospitals in New York City to cancel elective surgery in the coming days. This is one of the powers that exists under the state of emergency. We will work to word this specifically to allow the flexibility because some hospitals can continue over a period of a few days to close out some existing elective surgeries. Not all of them have to go to zero instantly, but they will all have to go to zero on elective surgeries soon. So that will be codified as an executive order and that will be a requirement of all hospitals. Obviously, our public health system is ready to do that immediately. We see several of our voluntary hospitals have started down that path, but everyone needs to do it is, it's absolutely that time. And even if a hospital at this moment does not have a demand related to coronavirus that requires in their eyes the cancellation of elective surgeries, that day is coming very, very soon. And we just have to make this a standard across the board.

We are canceling the special election for Queens Borough President that was scheduled for March 24th. Details will be provided soon on potential options for holding that election later. And other ways we might be able to approach that election. But we did not have those details yet. But there's been a lot of concern raised about the election day and the, all of the experiences, particularly the poll workers would have to have to make this work. And as we have seen more and more challenges, you know, this is another one is very painful, honestly, in a democratic society, the canceling of an election is such a rarity. It should be avoided at all costs. But in this case with the nature of this crisis, I've come to the decision that it's necessary.

We will be closing our senior centers, ending all programming there with the exception of activities related to food. We will turn them into feeding centers, again, focused on grab-and-go, meaning pickup of meals for those seniors for whom that works. They'll all primarily be locations for preparing and delivering meals to seniors’ homes. So instead of being a place for seniors to go to eat meals in the senior center, they'll become a dispensary to get quality meals out to seniors, whether it's by delivery or by pickup, but we will no longer have any programming in our senior centers.

Tonight, in all five boroughs. The FDNY, the New York City Sheriff's Office and the Department of Business will be cracking down on businesses that are not abiding by the 50% occupancy rule. In the first day there was warnings given, there was an attempt to educate, but now given the nature of the crisis, it's time for violations to be written. Those violations come with penalties and we are asking all businesses and that obviously largely means restaurants, bars, all businesses that have a number of people coming in and can become crowded. We can't afford those crowded spaces anymore. So, stay to the 50 percent level or you will be penalized. If you cannot make your business viable at the 50 percent level, we understand. We wish there was something we could do otherwise. And any business that feels they have to close the result, we understand that, we are not any more happy than you are. We'll try and be helpful in any way we can, but we cannot have bars and restaurants at over 50 percent capacity.

I will also say we are going to take a look at even going farther related to bars and restaurants. We have not made that decision yet. There've been a series of meetings today at City Hall and OEM. There's going to be more meetings this evening on additional topics, so in terms of the future of bars and restaurants, that is an ongoing discussion that will continue this evening.

There's also a discussion that will be solidified this evening on programs related to young people. I want to say very frankly, at the same time we are closing schools, I am tremendously concerned about what's going to happen with young people out in our communities without enough positive options, particularly teenagers, but we cannot have large congregations of young people in small spaces. One of the things we're going to be looking at is as the weather's getting warmer, can we convert some programming to outside? Is that an option that would allow us to continue some youth programming? That's something we're going to try and determine this evening.

Just finishing a few points and then to the Chancellor. The federal government – some progress, I don't want to say a little, there's been some real progress over the last few days. It’s nowhere near what we need. We still need more FDA approval for more companies to do the automated testing. We still need the Senate to pass the stimulus and then we'll need additional stimulus thereafter. Although there's been serious progress last few days on support for working people and a safety net as a strong beginning, but it's nowhere near what people are going to need for a crisis of this magnitude. So, we have to see more.

I am particularly concerned about medical supplies and all supplies needed in this city, but particularly medical supplies: ventilators, masks, face guard, sanitizer, everything that not only are we going to need in huge quantities, but Washington State will need, California will need, every part of this country that experiences this crisis right now. We've asked repeatedly and have no indication for the federal government that there has been an effort to in-effect nationalize the production process, meaning to ensure that these companies and factories that produce these goods are on a 24/7 basis until this crisis is over and that the goods are being distributed where they're needed most. This is a wartime approach. It is well known in the history of the country. We have not seen any efforts so far by the federal government in a meaningful way to do it and meanwhile this crisis is bearing down on us. We must have a consistent supply of these particularly crucial goods and we cannot guarantee that at this moment.

I'm going to emphasize something that Dr. Barbot said and in the Q-and- A, I'm sure she'll get into it further. In light of the growing number of cases, amending the guidance for the vast majority of people and Dr. Barbot can get into any exceptions or specifics, but for people who get sick with those symptoms, those what we would think were normally the seasonal kind of cold and flu-like symptoms: stay home, do not go to work. If your child is sick, do not send your child to any kind of program. Stay home. We're saying now three or four days is the timeframe to see the direction of the disease. If you're getting better, great. If you're not getting better at that point, then that's the time to call the doctor and discuss next steps. But remember, we are now going to be in a situation where our health care system is going to be increasingly stressed. We need people to recognize who will be the priority. Obviously, we've already said it, the folks who are in most danger, we have to protect first. Folks who may not be in any danger at all, we're going to ask them to wait and then if they need to get care, that makes sense, but first to wait and see it develop.

Before just a couple of words in Spanish and the Chancellor, look, I'll conclude with this. We've never been through anything like this. We're all trying to make sense of it. I've talked to so many New Yorkers. Everyone is confused. Everyone is in pain. Everyone feels like we're dealing with the great unknown because we are dealing with a great unknown. The only way we get through it is by supporting each other. The only way we get through it is by people actually following through on the information they're receiving and then backing each other up, supporting each other, looking out for each other. There's no other way. We got to take this more and more seriously with every passing day. It's tough. It's tough to get out of the patterns that we've lived our whole lives in, but something's changed and it's not going back. So I ask you, all New Yorkers, there's no place on earth where people are stronger, tougher, more resilient, and more compassionate. There is no place on earth better than New York City. We're going to need to show that right now. Everyone, step up. Look out for the people in your life because they're going to need you. A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, one person I want to speak now is our Schools Chancellor, and then we'll open up to questions. Chancellor Richard Carranza –

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This is a very sobering day for all of us and as the Mayor has been very clear from day-one, as circumstances continue to evolve, so does this city's response to the COVID-19 situation. And the situation continues to evolve. We've been monitoring this closely day by day, hour by hour, some cases minute by minute. And this weekend as the Mayor has announced, we've taken the sobering look at what is happening in our city, the rise in cases across the city and quite frankly, the sustainability of continuing public education in our school buildings for the time being in the way that we have educated children for years. So, the Mayor and I had been clear that any changes to the current model would be an extreme measure and a decision we considered the last resort. We are at the last resort.

So as a Mayor has announced effective tomorrow, school will not be in session in the traditional way that we've become accustomed to. Students come to school, parents drop students off, teachers, administrators, custodial staff, everybody comes to school. We want you to think of tomorrow as a snow day. So, everybody stays back. Our, and I want to thank Henry Garrido and his union members because our food and nutrition workers are going to come to their schools and they will be available to distribute in a grab-and-go methodology, breakfast and lunch for our students. So, for this next week you can go to your school, you won't go in, but you can grab food if you need the food.

So, on Monday, all school-based personnel will stay home. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week, we are asking our principals and our teachers to come to school. We will practice social distancing, of course, but it's going to be critical because we are going to be distributing, training, giving guidance on what the remote learning will look like over the next four weeks. What will be critical as well is that resources that teachers have, there'll be an opportunity for teachers to upload those resources as well. So, it's going to be important that for the next three days our teachers and principals are in school buildings. Students will not be in our school buildings. And then Friday will be another day of training for those who need it, virtually. As the Mayor has announced, on Monday the 23rd, we will launch into remote learning across the city. We feel confident that students will be able to continue to engage academically. It belies any logic to say it will be the same thing as a student in a classroom with the teacher.

But I have tremendous, tremendous faith in the teachers of New York City and the administrators of New York City, and I know that if there's any school system that can launch into remote learning on a moment's notice like we're about to do, it is the New York City Department of Education. I'm going to ask all parents, if you have not yet done so, please sign up for the New York City Schools Account. This is going to be critically important as we push information out, but also important for you to get resources to be able to support your students remote learning needs. We are pushing through all of our social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, and I will be amplifying that, the exact way of signing up for a New York Schools Account. It's not difficult but it's going to be critical. Additional guidance on what this will look like, all of the details, and the who, and the what, and the where, will be forthcoming over the course of this this week and in the coming weeks as well.

Also, on March 23rd, we will be opening several dozen regional enrichment centers across the city, in all of our boroughs, to serve the children of our city's first responders, including health care workers and to serve our most vulnerable student populations. That Monday we will also launch remote learning for grades K-12 and those resources if you want to preview, are available on our school – on our website as we speak. I also want to be clear about a few things and amplify what the Mayor has said. Breakfast and lunch will be available for any student who wants it. Starting tomorrow through April 8th, the first day of spring recess. We will also be in close communication regarding technology pickup locations for regional enrichment centers in the coming days. As I have mentioned in response to questions, we understand that there are students that may not have devices. We understand that there are students and families that may not have Wi-Fi connection at home. We are working with a number of partners. We estimate about 300,000 of our students are in need of devices. We have partners that has stepped up. The City of New York has stepped up and we believe we can actually get devices into the hands of our students who need them. We're going to also prioritize our students living in temporary housing, our students that are living in poverty, and students that do not have access to those resources.

As a Mayor has mentioned, this has been a very sobering 48 hours for both of us. We believe in strongly believe the best place for a child is in a school house with a well-trained, caring teacher. We know that our teachers believe their place is in a school house caring for their children. And as a teacher, I can tell you my kids were my kids. We're going to ask teachers to continue with that philosophy. They're still your students. You're just going to be helping them a little remotely now, we want to share families also that we're working to make this as a seamless of a transition as possible. We're not lowering our expectations. We're just changing the delivery of instruction. And we know that with our dedicated, and I would say passionate staff, our school staff, our teachers, custodians, administrators, and especially our school food workers who are going to continue to work during this time. We know that we will be serving our 1.1 million students. This is a time as the Mayor has said for us to be together as New Yorkers. Not physically, but philosophically. For sure. A few words in Spanish.

[Chancellor Carranza speaks in Spanish]

Mr. Mayor, I turn it back over to you, sir.

Mayor: Thank you, Chancellor. Okay. Questions? Yeah.

Question: Can you say more about enforcing the 50 percent capacity. Your people at the agencies are – when that's going to start? What the fines are? And maybe St. Patrick is upon us. How are you going to enforce this –

Mayor: It's – I mean, obviously look, this – to state the obvious, all of this has been painful. You know, St. Patrick's parade, something that's been around over 200 years, shutting down our school system for who knows how long this is. This is just painful, painful stuff. The fact is though, we have to enforce these rules, so it will be FDNY, it will be Department of Buildings, it will be the sheriff. The initial, as I understand it, the first violation is a fine of $400 and I’m going to confirm that and then it escalates with any future violation. Also, the authority in question will ensure, on the spot, that the audience if you will in the establishment is brought down to 50 percent. So they will not leave until they're under 50 percent, right then and there.

And again, this is a beginning. We announced this policy in accordance and agreement with the State. We have given people the chance to acclimate to it. They've been given warnings. Now the enforcement begins in earnest. If folks do not comply, we will just keep ramping up penalties. But we're also going to assess the bigger situation, as I said, with bars and restaurants, it may be necessary to go farther soon. And that's something we'll start to a conversation on in just a few hours.

Question: If someone is being intransigent, can there be arrests?

Mayor: Of course. I mean, this is, this is an emergency and anyone who was intransigent in the middle of a pandemic deserves to be arrested.

Question: Mr. Mayor, if you'll indulge me a couple of questions -

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: [Inaudible] you've said if you stick to staying home, what if you're not feeling symptoms? We know that asymptomatic people can have – share the virus. It's not clear to people – what are they – what do you do if you're not feeling sick? Do you also stay home?

Mayor: So, I'm going to start and pass to the health care experts. One, let's just as a good – very fair question, but I want to not negate the sort of the pillars of the guidance we're giving. If you do feel sick, stay home. You don't need to try and figure out what category it falls in. If you feel sick, stay home and your kids are sick, stay home. If you're sick, don't get with older relatives or sick relatives. Okay. And then I'm going to try and the doctors will jump in if they don't like anything they hear and they'll jump in anyway. What we see is transmission, certainly primarily coming from symptomatic people. Simple reason, I think you've told me Dr. Barbot, because it's symptomatic. People who are sneezing, who are coughing, it is through droplets. So, something has to happen. And that's much, much more likely to happen with symptomatic people. That does not negate your question. It just says the odds are really much more in favor of transmission from symptomatic people. Is that too laymen? Okay, come on up.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So, I want to broaden the response a little bit because we're talking about social distancing, which means creating physical distance between individuals. But I want to just sort of hit home the point that the Mayor and Chancellor Carranza have been saying in terms of while we may be asking New Yorkers to distance themselves physically, we're asking them to come together emotionally. This is a sober time for the city and it's an opportunity for New Yorkers to do as they have done historically and help one another. And so while it may be theoretically possible for someone who is asymptomatic to transmit the virus, there really is no indication that the asymptomatic people are responsible for this explosion worldwide. And that's why it's so important for people who are symptomatic to stay home. Every day we are learning more about how this virus behaves. And initially we took – we gave New Yorkers the advice to stay home for 24 to 48 hours. We're now learning more that in reality we've been saying 80 percent will have a mild course that's bearing itself out here in New York City and we feel comfortable saying if you're not better in three or four days, but you're not getting worse, than this is the time not to go to the doctors. Maybe you call them, but by all means, if you are not getting better, that's who we want to make sure reaches out to your doctor, gets access to care, because we're not asking people to stay home and suffer. We're just asking them to spend a little bit more time recuperating and if you're getting better than stay on that trajectory if you're not getting better than seek care.

Question: That’s interested, but if you are not sick should you stay home?

Commissioner Barbot: Well, in this situation, yeah. That's the reason why we're closing the schools. That's the reason why we're telling people not to go to work if they can telecommute, because we want people to have more distance from each other. Not because we think that asymptomatic people are spreading the virus, but because we want to reduce the number of New Yorkers that get infected, and as importantly, if not more importantly, we want to reduce the number of New Yorkers who are at risk for bad health outcomes such as needing to end up in the hospital, in the ICU, or God forbid dying because of this. And it's a real reality. And so it's incumbent on all of us to play our part and stay home.

Mayor: Let me amplify one piece. If you can stay home, and that's a crucial, I mean, again, this is why this school's decision is so painful. I know there are many parents who right now are scrambling trying to figure out what to do. I mean, obviously everyone's been paying attention and known that we were dealing with an incredibly difficult situation. But you know, there are some people in this town, if they are still going to work, they could bring their child to work. There are plenty of people in this town that that would never be allowed and there are a lot of people who still need a paycheck. Now, something has changed the last few days and I'm sure we will get questions along the way as sort of how thinking evolves, how strategy evolves.

I will say that Friday signified – Friday night really – signified a change because we were far from certain the federal government was going to get into a serious relief effort because it's been so slow and because of obvious partisan and philosophical issues in the Congress. The bill that passed the House was very substantial relief. It's shocking to me the Senate didn't stick around. I don't understand that for the life of me, but we presume they're going to pass it tomorrow. And Senator Schumer has said he believes there will be another package immediately behind it. That at least gives us a little more assurance that folks who now can't go to work anymore, will have some support. But that's not enough at this moment. I mean, you're hopeful it will come, but right now there's a lot of people who just can't yet say to themselves, I’m just not working. You know, they literally have bills to pay. They literally can't take the risk. So if you don't have to go to work, don't go to work. If you're sick, don't go to work. If you can telecommute, telecommute at minimum, if you can stagger hours away from rush hour, do obviously rush hour is getting reduced all the time, but do.

But I also want to be real about the fact there's a number of people who do have to go to work, including the ones we are requiring because of their call to duty to go to work. And they are doing an amazing job. Our health care workers, our first responders, our transit workers, and obviously we're going to need our educators in a different way now. So it's not as simple as like everyone can totally 100 percent stay home at this moment. But anyone who has the ability to should, and I'll give you one more and then I got to give to others.

Question: But this is all just following up on my first –

Mayor: Yeah, I'm sorry. You'll get another chance after one more. One more and then we're going to everyone else.

Question: Criminal justice system, right?

Mayor: Right.

Question: Rikers Island, the courts, if school's going to be closed. What about all the people in our jail?

Mayor: The folks in our jails are in our jails right now with a lot of specific precautions. There's definitely distancing initiatives going on. Very careful checks on health care. We'll have more to say on that. That's one of the areas that's going to come up next on the agenda, but I'm very concerned about it. But that doesn't mean we don't need a functioning jail system.

Question: One of your concerns in not closing schools last week was that not like you closed the school these kids are just going to stay in their house.

Mayor: Correct.

Question: You said they were going to gather –

Mayor: Yup.

Question: What can you do to stop that?

Mayor: We can't.

Question: How do you convince young people then you're not making a big deal out of –

Mayor: It’s – I'm not going to lie to my fellow New Yorkers. We're not going to convince teenagers to not gather if they're out of school for weeks on end. We are going to try and maximize distance learning, which the better we can make it and the more cooperation we get from parents who again, are going through amazing stress right now. You know, parents are going through so much at this moment, we're going to ask them to help us. And obviously Richard, jump in if you wish. The parents and family members, guardians, help us get kids connected to the distance learning and keep them connected.

But we have no illusion. We do not have the same control we have in a school building. We just don't. And I was very blunt about it. If you, you know, we're talking about initially weeks, it could be months. Anyone who believes those kids are patiently going to sit in their room, in their apartment and never go outside, just has never met a teenager. They eventually, whether it's during school hours or after school or weekends, they're going to go seek out their friends. They're going to create their social networks. There's going to be possibly a transmission. I'm sure. I think it's a factual statement. It's probably a better reality and being in a school building in some ways, but it's not pristine. And then we will have to have some kids in those learning centers for the children of our first responders, et cetera. So this is not a perfect equation. It's a very imperfect equation, but it became necessary. And we'll do, of course, we're going to do our best, if we see - all of our police officers and other public servants see congregations of young people, we're going to obviously try and reduce that space that out. If we see any nefarious activity, that's where the police will come in. But it's going to be a tremendous challenge when you're talk about so many kids in such a big city.

Question: Can I ask a couple questions if I have a chance to like –

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: A few things, [inaudible] really short. The first one is what’s the details about what socially remote learning might look like for parents that have no clue what that's going to mean. And the second thing is, you know, a lot of fifth eighth graders are waiting for their acceptance letters from middle schools and high schools, will the closure impact this for them.

Chancellor Carranza: So remote learning is exactly what it says. You're learning remotely from your home or wherever alternate location you are. So it looks – it's going to look different in different places. We currently have on our website, New York City Department of Education website, about 10 days’ worth of from K-12 of materials and assignments and activities that by grade level parents can access. Now again, we're flying the plane as we're building the plane. So the next steps are to translate those materials into a number of languages that's happening actively as we speak. But we know this is going to go beyond 10 days. So part of bringing our educators back on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, is to going to be to capture and populate that website and that platform with additional resources. We also know that there are a great number of our schools that already utilize Google platform, Google classroom.

So we're going to – and part of the training that'll happen these next few days – is schools that don't currently have a presence on Google classroom, they will get trained on how to use it, which allows teachers and to in a virtual way submit assignments to push information out. There's going to be a number of third-party partners that we have in our school system that already provide additional supplementary types of activities. So, all of those things will continue to be how we continue to build this remote learning platform for parents and for students, which is why it's really critical that we have all of our families on – signed up for that New York City Schools Accounts that they can get that information. This is going to continue to evolve over the course of the next few days, next few weeks. And we're committed to being very, very transparent about what's available and what's new. And I've got to tell you, I have tremendous, tremendous faith in the teachers that are in New York City who I've seen do some incredibly innovative things already. We want to capture that as well, so that's available to other students and families.

Your second question was about admissions letters. You know, we'll get back to you on that. I don't see why that's going to be affecting students because the central offices, we're going to continue to work. So, I don't see what that would be delayed, but we'll confirm that for you.

Question: On the national level, the top infectious disease expert is calling for – he wants a 14-day national shutdown. Do you think you're going to see a 14-day city shut down? What would happen?

Mayor: We're going to be making day to day, hour to hour decisions. I mean, right now this crisis is getting a lot worse very quickly. And we have been, as I said over the course of this day analyzing a whole lot more information and trying to assess where it's going. And it's certainly very, very sobering. So, I'm not ruling anything out, but the – I think the smart thing for New Yorkers to recognize, we’re going to make each announcement the second is ready. But I don't want to project something until we're sure, but everything, literally every option is on the table right now. Yeah.

Question: How do you protect these workers? I mean, I've talked to so many workers who are servers, you know, are in the service industry or [inaudible] workers and you know, they – some of them can apply for unemployment because they're not full time or you know, there's just no safety net for them when they're getting laid off because they're not eating at the restaurants. Have you been in talks with Senator Schumer, [inaudible], the State? I mean, there states, California now, Ohio, Illinois are shutting down bars and restaurants now. It's probably inevitable that that's going to happen. So what protections are going to be there –

Mayor: Senator Schumer and I have definitely talked about what needs to be in the next stimulus bill and this is exactly the kind of thing we've talked about. That it has to go much deeper into the workforce and provide a lot more income replacement for a lot longer. Look, this is the great unknown. We haven't seen something – I think doctors, you'll agree – we haven't seen something like this in the United States of America since the 1918. So, literally over a century. We're in a whole different reality than 1918. Thank God. We do have a lot of advantages compared to them. But on the other hand, we're dealing with the great unknown. We’re literally dealing with a disease that they still don't know entirely how it works. There's no cure, there's no vaccine.

So, we've got to recognize the sheer magnitude. But even though that's the, the only parallel you can find to this pandemic and the experience in America, there is a positive example of helping people in crisis across the board. And we actually lived it and a lot of people are walking around today who are part of it, and it was called the New Deal. It actually happened. Where the federal government determined that it would, in that instance, employ people outright and provide every conceivable form of financial support and it saved this country. This is a different situation physically, right? You know, you've got – you obviously have to make sure people get through the immediate crisis, but this is a crisis that will end. One of the things we talked about today is the fact that over time this disease will reach its high point and then we'll start to recede. It will end, but the financial, the economic, the human impact has only just begun and it will go long past the point where we say the immediate crisis with a disease is over. The federal government has the power to address that, to borrow some of the tools of the New Deal and use them in our time and they have the power to get ahead of the medical crisis by ensuring that the supplies we need are there. We are all talking about ventilators. We're here in the biggest thing in country. We, right now, are an Island. If we don't get help from the federal government to get those ventilators that we need going forward, we will simply run out. Right now, we have a strong supply and we're looking for any more we can get. But there's going to be a point where if we don't get help from the federal government, if we don't get help from the military, we will simply run out. There's still time to fix that.

Yeah?

Question: [Inaudible] The first is for Chancellor Carranza [inaudible] from home? Are they – are kids expected to be in front of a computer, you know, normal school hours? Are they going to get grades? Is attendance going to be taken? How much will it be like regular school?

Chancellor Carranza: It's not going to be like regular school. I mean, that's impossible to create those conditions, again, which is why I said it's going to look different in different places with different teachers, different subject areas, different grade levels, et cetera. What we want to be able to do is provide as much flexibility for our teachers and for our students to continue to be engaged intellectually over the course of however long this is going to last. I would ask people to think about what happens in the summer, and there's a term that we use called summer slide where you're not actively engaged and you start, you know, you start regressing a little bit on your skillset. No one would ever say that summer school is exactly like the traditional school year, but what it does is it prevents that summer slide. What we're trying to say is, instead of saying, we're not going to be in session for four weeks and figure it out, do what you’ve got do, we want to be able to provide resources and support. And our teachers are still working, they're just not working in the building. And provide the infrastructure so teachers can continue to connect with students, students can continue to connect with teachers. I would not be surprised – all the details about what's that going to look like will become much more clear after we have our teachers kind of weigh in with us.

Question: [Inaudible] you believe that it’s only theoretical that there [inaudible] asymptomatic transmission? Dr. Burke's at the White House said – I'll read the quote – “You don't want to say that the risk is low. We don't know how low the numbers are for people who are asymptomatic.” So, can you reconcile, you know, what you believe [inaudible] said yesterday?

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah. I believe what I said was that it is theoretically possible for someone who's asymptomatic to shed the virus, but they're not accounting for the explosion that we're seeing. It's the symptomatic people that are accounting for the spread, not just in the city, but worldwide.

Question: On the bars and restaurants, at last count, there were something like 27,000 restaurants in New York City. How much enforcement do you think can get done here? As an addendum, why isn't the NYPD helping with that?

Mayor: Oh, they will. This is literally – so, this is a policy that came out Thursday, with initial applicability data Friday, with explicit decision to educate and warn for the first 24 hours, and now enforcement will begin in earnest and NYPD will absolutely be a part of it. It's a huge task. Now, I think there are a lot of bar and restaurant owners and employees who have gotten the memo here because they see what we're all seeing nonstop who are not taking it lightly. I have definitely heard reports of bars and restaurants that have spaced out their tables and are doing the right thing. I think there are others that have simply closed because they didn't think they could keep going. I believe as enforcement ramps up and word spreads that it's serious, that will help lock things down further. But again, we have bigger decisions to make soon. But I don't think it's one way or another. I think, for sure, there's some places that are going to try not to do it, but there's a lot of places I think take it seriously.

Question: I have two questions. One is about the ferries. Observers are saying that the ferries are not being [inaudible] –

Mayor: Do you mean Staten Island or NYC Ferry?

Question: NYC Ferry –

Mayor: We’ll find out.

Question: Also, are you guys going to ramp up service since there is like an outdoor option on a ferry rather than [inaudible] like a subway or bus?

Mayor: Excellent question. On the first one, I'll check the cleaning schedule. I know EDC takes this very seriously and they're very efficient. On the second one – that's a very good point. And obviously the weather is supporting us now. I mean, we're literally on the verge of a formal spring and it's getting warmer. But I don't have an answer for you at this hour. It’s something we can come back to you on.

Question: [Inaudible] Cuomo this morning was talking about state [inaudible] closed stores in one state, people will come to New York from New Jersey and vice versa. So, Hoboken has enacted a curfew from 10:00 pm till 5:00 am are we worried at all that a lot of those people [inaudible] will come over?

Mayor: Thirsty Hoboken’ers – is that the category? Yeah. I don't know. I think, right now, we are going through such an intense, fast transformation, I think a lot of people are recognizing the dangers and so I don't expect people traveling long distances. I expect a lot of people to get their libations and go home. But that's just me thinking common sense. I think it becomes an interesting question as this all develops. But, right now, I'm not sure that those actions going to have a big impact on us.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Everything is on the table. Curfew is one of the emergency powers I have under the state of emergency. We have not made that decision, but everything's on the table.

Question: Mr. Mayor, one quick question and then a follow-up. With respect to the schools and teachers going into this new learning platform, some have already messaged us and said, is there a way for us to learn virtually ourselves – this virtual platform – so we're not exposed to other people? Just how would you address those concerns?

Mayor: It's a fair concern, but I think the reality is not as well as they need to. I mean, we've been talking about this – it’s a very fair question. We obviously worked it through. This is – again, this is a battlefield condition. We're asking people in three days to prepare to teach in an entirely different manner. I think in terms of the sheer efficacy and, you know, putting materials in their hand and one thing the other, we're going to be a much better shape coming into the building. But, of course, we're going to distance people and be respectful of that need. And there's no kids there, so it's a very different environment. And anyone who's sick of course should not come. Going forward, we'll do our best to keep updating virtually, but I think it's just an honest reality to teach people, many of whom will be the first time they've done it, it's hard to do all of that virtually. And, Richard, I'm just trying to summarize from our conversation. Right. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] you know, you were the mayor after Sandy, but you were the mayor during Ebola. Obviously, the idea of an infectious disease or virus in this city is not a new one. Was there not a plan in place ahead of time to say, okay, if we were in a situation like this, how do we shut down the schools to address the understandable concerns you've raised over the last week or so, which is lunches and then health care or essential workers not having [inaudible] –

Mayor: There's OEM – the Office of Emergency Management for a living does that kind of planning. Each agency has their version of that planning. But you have to be honest about the fact that it's very theoretical until you deal with the real thing. In the last weeks, all of that planning has advanced intensely in each agency. We would not be able to tell you that on Monday, March 23rd, we were going to have distance learning from 1 million kids if a lot of work had not been done already. We wouldn't be able to tell you we are going to be able to do, you know, tomorrow morning grab and go meals, breakfast and lunch if work had not been done. The same with the ability to set up alternative learning sites by Monday, the 23rd for the essential workers’ kids. So, there's a lot of planning. There's also a lot of concern that all of these things are so different than what we normally do, it will take time to get it to be as good as we want it to be and it will never be as good as everyone being in a classroom. That's just the truth.

Question: Mayor, can you describe your conversations with 1199 and what prompted the change of your position to close schools?

Mayor: My –

Question: What prompted your choice to close schools?

Mayor: Well, those are two very different topics. Let me, let me start with the bigger one. Look, it is – it kind of goes against everything I believe to take a decision that I know will have so many negative ramifications and I don't think I've sugarcoated them in any of these conversations over the last few days. You know, I was a public-school parent, I was a school board member. I mean, the notion of our public schools being closed, not for weeks, but potentially for months, and what's that's going to do to kids, the notion of a lot of kids unsupervised, the health and safety problems that come with that. I mean, I could go on and on. I have delineated it. It just was a very painful, difficult decision, but it became clear to me as we went through the projections that it was just necessary, as bad as the – in other words, you're now baking in a lot of negative impact, a lot of damage that's going to be done. But the threat was growing so intensely that we had to accept it. And it's – I think it's kind of rare that you sort of – you make a lot of decisions in this work, but where it's you know you're doing something that will cause so much harm, but unfortunately it's like a sacrifice that has to be done for a greater good. And we have never seen anything like this disease. Yeah, I went through Ebola. I went through a lot of things, never seen anything like this. So, it was really seeing the latest models – they're still being perfected, but just seeing where we were at this point, talking through the ramifications, and obviously appreciating that the DOE has been working constantly on these last days to try and get a fallback ready and they felt confident in the last 24 hours that they could provide a quality option. I needed to hear that. That was not so clear days ago, but it was clear this weekend. And the federal stimulus was also a part of my thinking. I thought a couple of days back to – you know, three, four days ago that there was a question of the panic it might induce. There's a question of the way it would have an impact on people's livelihoods if people couldn't go to work. But that now has changed. I mean, so many people increasingly can't go to work anyway and there's finally some federal support coming in and some safety net being built. So, that gave me at least a little solace that we had some more room to maneuver. Vis-a-vis 1199 – I mean, it's a union I think very, very highly, worked closely with over decades. We are depending on their members. They are crucial to the battle ahead. They're the health care workers that will keep our hospitals, our clinics going. You know, a few days ago they worry – they were tremendously worried about no school for their kids and then I think they looked at other factors and they came back and said they had changed their minds. They have every right to that, but that was not part of the decision. The decision was based on all the other things I said.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: No. I respect them. I spoke with George Gresham, I really respect him, but, no, this was many, many layers and many, many other factors that were really about a million kids and their families. That's how the decision was made. Okay. We're almost done. Let me see if there's anything else. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] foster care and other social service organizations sent you a letter expressing concern about mandatory face-to-face visits [inaudible] compromise people's health. What kind of guidance are you giving them and what should they all be doing?

Mayor: It's very fair question and this is exactly the next level of things we're going to start to deal with. Some of the questions that come up here – our Correction system, Social Services youth programs – we're going to start one by one dealing with each of those. Someone – I can't even remember which day is which anymore, Andrew, I think you'll forgive me, but I think it was Friday, someone called in to WNYC about in-person interviews for food stamps or for public assistance. We want to try and weed out everything we can weed out, anything that doesn't have to have to be in person really urgently we don't want to put people in that situation and we got to move quickly. On the other hand, we have to get people support. So, on that previous question about the food stamps and public assistance, we can't see that collapse. The foster kids are depending on us. We have to make sure we have a way of supporting them. But as much – doing as many things virtually as possible, streamlining as little a gathering as possible, that's what we're going to be working on.

Question: [Inaudible] I want to really getting some clarity because I don't have it and I don't think the folks and home have it –

Mayor: What don’t you have? You’re talking about the disease or the clarity?

Question: [Inaudible] not symptomatic –

[Laughter]

Question: I get you're saying don't go to work and if you can [inaudible] but what about all the other stuff? Having dinner with people going to a restaurant –

Mayor: If you’re not symptomatic?

Question: If you’re not symptomatic [inaudible] –

Mayor: So, let me – I'm going to start and I'll let the health care professionals jump in. I'm a human being. I respect that doctors have the perspective, that, sort of, pure medical perspective. It's just like the question earlier, what are teenagers going to do? I know what teenagers are going to do. I had teenagers. I know what – I was a teenager, you know?

Question: [Inaudible] follow the best practice?

Mayor: Right. And so, what I'm saying is, of course we want people to just continue to reduce what they do out in the world to as little as possible. If they don't need to go to work, don't go to work. If you don't need to go out and go to events or gatherings or need to go to a restaurant, the less the better. On the other hand, I'm trying to be real and, again, the doctors can come in and be tougher, but I'm trying to be real about the fact that some people, you know, may be seeing that long lost friend or relative is so important to them, you know, even if it's brief – I don't want to suggest we're at the point of saying literally no one can go outside. We may say that very, very soon. I think we're saying, avoid anything unnecessary. Just be really judicious about it, especially if you’re sick, stay home, and if someone else is sick, don’t go near them. So, I'm not telling you, you can never do anything fun. I am telling people, you know, reduce everything you can reduce. Now, again, doctors, you want to bring down a hammer, go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: I think we've been clear, and thank you for the opportunity to make it even clearer, that there isn't a situation where there is zero risk, unless someone is going to be hermetically sealing themselves in their apartment, given that we have community-wide transmission, there's no place that's going to be zero risk. What we want New Yorkers to do is to be smart, to be vigilant and to be diligent about the recommendations that we've made, which include consistent, thorough handwashing. If you're not near a water source to use alcohol-based hand sanitizer – you know, there can't be a press conference that goes by that I don't say that.

Mayor: [Inaudible] clearly does not know how to say hand sanitizer without saying alcohol-based [inaudible] –

[Laughter]

Commissioner Barbot: And that on top of that, you know, covering your mouth and your nose when you cough or sneeze. That, you need to be vigilant about developing symptoms such as fever and a cough, fever and shortness of breath. And that all of these preventive measures in and of themselves doing them in isolation isn't going to provide the maximal support, that all of these interventions together layered on top of one of each other are intended to not only help individuals lower their risk but also lower their risk to their neighbors, to their families, to their communities. And so, you know, this drastic step that we're taking in terms of closing the schools is sort of the ultimate in terms of that preventive measure.

Question: You said this morning you are not yet at the point of saying you want to shut down completely everything non-essential [inaudible]?

Mayor: We are – so, I respect to anyone who calls for anything, and I'd say to them, try being the person who has to make the decision and be accountable to 8.6 million people to get it right. The human ramification of each decision is being factored in very carefully. The viability of each decision – you know, the sort of big distance between theory and practice, trying to make sure what we decide is real and viable. We had to, in the last 24 hours, really get all of us into a point where we were certain based on the numbers, based on projections, based on other countries’ experiences that we needed to take these very radical steps right now. We're taking them instantly. There's definitely more coming, but we have to account for each – for example, in decision on of schools, and I been plaguing people throughout the week on this, all those other factors that I've talked about, all those negatives that come with closing the schools, I have been asking everyone to answer those as best they can and show me how they can mitigate at least some of the impact. I think the DOE did a great job. I think that between Monday and now, people like Chancellor Carranza and our Chief Operating Officer, Ursulina Ramirez – you know, they have not slept much and they have been forcing everyone to figure out alternatives in a whole new way. So, it's really been a you know, a mobilization, if you will. And I think the answer's got better about how we can address some of these situations. But everything – this is the honest blanket statement – you tell me a thing that might be used and I'm telling you it's on the table, and the second we're ready to use it, we’re going to tell you.

Question: Mr. Mayor, who ultimately came up with the decision? Was it yourself or –

Mayor: On the schools?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: That's me – mayoral accountability for education – obviously, working constantly with the Chancellor.

Question: In regards to the grab and go meals, is that all schools?

Mayor: Yes. Confirming all schools for five days only.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Tomorrow. What time, Ursulina?

Chief Operating Officer Ursulina Ramirez, Department of Education: [Inaudible] starting tomorrow, anyone 18 or under can show up to get a meal.

Mayor: And do you know the exact time they’ll start?

Chief Operating Officer Ramirez: When school starts, so 7:30.

Mayor: Depending on each school start time, okay. Yes.

Question: [Inaudible] police going to be breaking up groups of teenagers who were in assembly.

Mayor: What I said – again, let's be careful not to overstate it. So, if you've got a bunch of teenagers hanging out and really close up against each other, what our officers should do is go and say, hey, guys, you know, what's going on with coronavirus, spread out. That kind of thing. And that's important to get – in fact, what our officers do with neighborhood policing all the time is talk to young people. So, it's go in there, remind them what social distancing looks like, tell people spread out, be a little more careful, that kind of thing.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: We're going to – let's try the power of communication and persuasion. I think everyone knows what time it is.

Question: You've alluded several times and there are still ongoing discussions about the future of bars and restaurants –

Mayor: You’re very interested in bars and restaurants, I wonder if this is professional or otherwise –

[Laughter]

Really getting a feeling you have a more-than-professional interest here.

[Laughter]

Question: Would you say it's only a matter of time until we see more drastic –

Mayor: I'm not going to – again, I'm real clear, everything's on the table. The next set of decisions we're going to start in a matter of hours. We may have announcements tonight, we may have announcements tomorrow. Everything is on the table. If you love your neighborhood bar, go there now – under 50 percent occupancy because we don't know what the future holds. But be only there very briefly and socially distant, go ahead.

Question: This is for the Chancellor. One of kind of – be more specific about what we're doing to get hardware into the hands of kids who don't have the hardware to do distance learning. And then also the other question was since public schools are sometimes the first line of defense against child abuse, what does the child protection agency – like do you have any plans for ramping up resources for kids?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so I'll do the top lines and I'm going to ask our Chief Operating Officer to give some specifics. So we've surveyed and part of the next four days is also to get more concrete data as to who has connectivity, who does not have connectivity. We're working on a figure of about 300,000 of our students currently may not have those devices. So we need to verify that as well. We are working with some really large companies. Apple has really stepped up to the plate. I'll let Ursulina talk a little bit specifically about the numbers. T-Mobile has also stepped up. Verizon has also stepped up, Google has stepped up. So our big partners are really stepping up to help us make this a reality. In regards to the second question – absolutely, I'm working very closely with my fellow commissioners. We're in a whole different environment now. So we're working very closely about how do we continue to monitor, how do we continue to have a pulse, what are the escalation protocols? We'll have more details as we solidify those as well. But I'm going to ask our Chief Operating Officer to give a little more specificity on the device and connectivity question.

Chief Operating Officer Ramirez: Thank you so much, sir. So, we are working diligently with our private partners around devices. As the Chancellor mentioned, we've surveyed our principals to ask about what kind of devices our students have and what kind of connectivity that they think that they have. So as the Chancellor mentioned, we're working with Apple to supply 300,000 iPads to our students and we will be working on a distribution method over the next week. We are also working, as he mentioned, with T-Mobile to make sure that those devices are activated and students can use internet on those. In addition, we're working with other partners, as he mentioned, Verizon, Spectrum, and a host of people who have really stepped up to want to support our students. So, I thank them for that. So, you'll be hearing more from us over the next week around how we're going to be distributing those devices and what our expectations are for the devices.

Question: [Inaudible]

Chief Ramirez: We are purchasing the devices, the Apple devices. But obviously they're working with us on reasonable costs for the system.

Chancellor Carranza: So, I also want to just – yeah, just want to add to what Ms. Ramirez just said. So obviously we're purchasing them. We're not giving them away. So, they're being assigned to students to use. Obviously, they belong to the Department of Education, but we want students to have the devices that they need and serv – you know, mind because you've said we all wear the same uniform during this particular situation. I want to thank and give a shout out to our controller, Scott Stringer, who moved heaven and earth to allow us to be able purchase these in record time. And it's that kind of cooperation that makes a real time response possible.

Mayor: [Inaudible] that question over here. We'll do a few more and then we're done because we got a lot more to work on tonight. You had a question about child welfare?

Question: I did. Just how are we making sure that the children of physical abuse are safe as far as the burden of reducing the number of face-to-face visits and things like that, and if you don't have kids going in schools like [inaudible] are we handing out. Is there [inaudible] –

Mayor: There's usually – I mean I've worked on these issues a lot over the years. There's a lot of different nexus points out in the community historically where there are adults watching out for that kind of problem. Obviously, police are watching out for that kind of problem, health care professionals, a whole host of – and obviously some of that will continue. I think you're right that there's less information flowing if schools are not in session. But we have to figure out if there's some kind of information we want to get out or some kind of special effort. The work of child protection is one of those critical elements of what we do. It's very similar to what police or fire do in my book, different kinds of work, professionally, different kinds of skills, but in terms of protecting people's lives. So, we need that work to continue, but it will be a different approach going forward. Okay. Few more and I got to get out of here. Hold on, hold on. Dudes. I am pointing at people, let it happen.

Question: Thank you. Mr. Mayor, I have a question for Chancellor and I was hoping you can elaborate a little [inaudible] component. I know DOE has nine [inaudible] what about parents whose language is not nine top languages [inaudible] about parents whose languages don't fall within those?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so more, more guidance will be coming more information. We're literally building the plane and flying it right now. So, we are – we do have a whole team that's translating materials. Language translation in and of itself, we take very seriously on our website as well.

Mayor: We'll update which languages it is as we know along. Yes?

Question: Is the City doing anything to prepare for potential unrest –

Mayor: Unrest?

Question: Yeah, it's a very stressful time. What is the NYPD doing –

Mayor: The NYPD has that concept in its planning, I think, perennially, I don't see the context for that right now, but the point is that's the kind of thing NYPD is more than able to plan for in general. Yep.

Question: Super quick. One thing is – any thoughts on suspending alternate side parking. And do you have –

Mayor: We're looking at that. We are not there, but we're looking at it.

Question: I just want to verify if you were just joking about the neighborhood bar thing and just –

Mayor: I am allowed to joke still it’s – because again guys, I know we're in a crisis, but I'm still a human being. It was my way of saying I cannot guarantee if bars and restaurants are still going to be open in a few days. That's all I'm saying.

Question: I wanted to clarify that and I just want – it feels like you guys are stopping short of telling people who aren’t sick or aren't displaying symptoms to stay home and cut out non-essential –

Mayor: We're trying to be clear about, yes, cut out anything non-essential. That does not mean that people are not going to exercise their judgment if something is particularly precious to them or important. We still understand human beings are human beings, but I'll tell you something, I appreciate the precision of your question, but if people would just do the basics, we would be in a much stronger position. So, if every single New Yorker did not go to work or anywhere if they're sick, did not send our kid anywhere if there was sick, did not visit anyone else if they were sick, and did not do anything that they don't have to do in terms of their day to day life, like if they can telecommute, instead of going into the office telecommute – if we get those basics right, we're going to be a much stronger position. I am not yet at a draconian, perfect place of saying you cannot leave your door. I would like people to keep it to a minimum.

All right. Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Okay. As everyone understands, we are in an ever-changing situation. I have no example I can offer you of another situation where, for such a long period of time, we have seen just constant, constant changes. It seems to me we're in the middle of meetings and discussions and, you know, the world is different even in the middle of one meeting than where it started, on a regular basis. And this is going to be going on for quite a while. So, this is really uncharted territory.

What we're trying to do, of course, is constantly consult with people, have the best information and perspective and coordinate across a very, very broad spectrum of agencies while simultaneously working with folks at the national level, state level, regional level, et cetera. Yesterday – I said this this morning – I had the opportunity to speak directly to Dr. Anthony Fauci who I think everyone would agree has been one of the truly coherent voices on the national stage in this crisis, and obviously someone we honor for decades of serving this country effectively. So, I consider him one of the ultimate voices of truth. I also have to say as a New Yorker and a Brooklynite, I'm very, very proud of him and what he has done for this country and what he's doing right now. And we talked about the decision to close schools and then we talked about the things that have to happen next. And he strongly advised the actions related to the bars and restaurants. And then we took those actions later last evening. But also, we got into a conversation about how to guide people in their day to day lives in the crisis that will be with us for weeks and months. And I said to Dr. Fauci, we all agree that those over 50, with serious pre-existing conditions are the people overwhelmingly in danger here. These are the folks that, God forbid we might lose.

I said, what else would you say to guide people beyond that extraordinary danger that those individuals face, how do we create an understanding of people of who is in danger, and who has to take even more precautions? And he said that it's not over 50, healthy, but the area where he starts to get concerned just on an age level is over 70. So, I hope this is a helpful additional piece of information in terms of people trying to make sense of how to live and approach a crisis like this. And we'll certainly talk more about the details in the Q-and-A and my health colleagues will jump in when they come over, but over 50, pre-existing serious conditions – diabetes, lung disease, heart disease, cancer, compromised immune system. Those individuals are in the greatest danger by far. The people in your life, your family, your friends, your coworkers, the people you worship with in, those categories, your neighbors, those are the people we have to go – all of us – out of our way to protect, not let anyone sick near them, make sure they are staying in to the maximum extent possible. If they need food, and the only way they can get it is to go out themselves, let's see if one of us can get it for them. Someone in their life can get them food or get their prescriptions.

We're going to work as a City to try and figure out some bigger systems to make sure people get what they need. But everyone understands that this is an extraordinarily fast-moving crisis and we don't have that capacity today. But we do have New Yorkers, we have New Yorkers' heart and soul and conscience. We have New Yorkers' resilience and strength. You can help your fellow New Yorker. So please, for folks in that category, over 50, pre-existing major conditions, help them not have to go outside, help them get the things that they most need in any way you can. But again, the further guidance from Dr. Fauci, if you're over 70, even if you're healthy, even if you don't have one of those pre-existing conditions, exercise additional caution, don't go out unless you need to. Keep it to the essentials, limit your contact with other people. Everyone's going to have to interpret that for themselves. Obviously, it's a free country, but we are asking people to really be cautious and conservative in the way you interpret this reality if you're in one of those categories that's particularly endangered.

Now yesterday, everyone knows I was very, very troubled to have to close our schools. Our goal again is to reopen April 20 but I've been very honest that that is a goal that will be very difficult to achieve. What I want to clarify, because in some of the covers today, there still seemed to be some gray on this point – remote learning begins Monday, March 23rd. Distance learning, definite, starting Monday. I want to thank all of our leadership at the DOE who's making this happen with lightning speed. I want to thank our educators who are stepping up to meet this challenge. I especially want to thank four groups of workers who are the unsung heroes today, who today are at the front-line helping kids in those schools that are providing the breakfast and lunches on a to-go basis.

Want to thank our school custodians including those from Local 891, our school cleaners including those from Local 32BJ, our school food workers including those from DC37, and the firemen who keep – and this is meaning the folks who run these systems in the building, the fireman who keep the boilers and systems running, including those from Local 94. All of you, I want to thank you all for what you're doing, for your commitment to your city, to your fellow New Yorkers, and to the children of our city. Thank you. Because you're allowing all of them to have food they need today.

So there's a number of actions we're taking today, some of which were announced last night, others of which are new, all contained in an executive order. I'm going to summarize very broadly. Obviously, it will be made public immediately. But the business closures related to restaurants, bars, cafes – now adding other businesses consistent with the State's actions and we are obviously staying in close contact with the State and agree with the actions that the state has taken. The postponing of elective surgeries. And again, that is both in our public hospitals and in our voluntary hospitals. And we've set a 96-hour window for all of those to be shut down, obviously with the allowable exception of something that is life and death or something that it goes from optional to mandatory because of the nature of the health condition of the individual.

Because we need to avoid public gatherings to the maximum extent possible, we're suspending for the time being City Council hearings. We're suspending ULURP rules in terms of the land use process. That means that anything that was going to go through the land use process will simply be frozen in place. It does not mean there'll be an alternative decision making. It means that that application will just have to hold until we are able to get back to normal.

We are suspending visits to inmates at Department of Corrections facilities. And that starts Wednesday officially. But my understanding is there are no visits scheduled for today or tomorrow. So that effectively means there will be no visits from this point on. Obviously we're going to encourage alternatives, more phone calls, potentially video conferencing, et cetera.

We are suspending procurement rules to allow for faster procurement.

And as I noted yesterday, we are officially canceling the special election for borough president in Queens. So, all of this is included in the executive order, which I will now sign.

[Mayor de Blasio signs Executive Order]

This executive order takes effect immediately. As you heard – and again, we're in agreement with the State on all these actions – speeding up the closing on the restaurants, bars, cafes to 8:00 pm tonight. And again, they will be able to be open going forward for takeout and delivery under certain hours, conditions. Other businesses that will be closed – movie theaters, other types of theaters, museums, and cultural centers, concert venues, nightclubs, and commercial gyms. Obviously, we continue to say to all private business that it is crucial to allow telecommuting wherever humanly possible. So that is something we want to continue to emphasize. We've gotten a lot of cooperation from the business community. We want that to be as deep as possible. Anybody who can telecommute, should.

I also want to note there are a host of public recreation centers, youth programs, afterschool programs. These are all going to be shut down for inside activities. We are trying right now to determine if we can re-engineer some of those programs for outdoor activities with appropriate social distancing. Very, very concerned about our young people and what's going to happen to them over weeks and months, potentially. I think they have to have some kind of outlet, some kind of recreation. We're trying to see if we can figure out a model for doing that outdoors with proper supervision and proper social distancing, but we do not have that locked down now.

To working people in the city, and obviously to business owners, including small business owners. Everyone is immediately hurting very deeply. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of confusion. Immediately, we are seeing working people with much less money in their pockets and tremendous fear about what's going to happen next. There should be at least a little sense of relief that the House of Representatives acted on Friday, but it is not enough. We need more. Obviously, need action on a consistent, ongoing basis from the federal government and we will be fighting for that and working closely with our federal delegation, our senators, and our Congress members to achieve a much greater stimulus and relief package that really allows people the comfort of knowing that they will have some continuity in their lives. They'll be able to afford the basics no matter what their employment situation. They'll be able to stay in their homes and afford food, medicine, all the basics. We have to achieve that, we can only achieve that with federal support.

This is going to be very, very tough for all of us. There's no question about it. There's going to be a lot of sacrifice here, a lot of pain. I hate to say it, but it's true. Lives will continue to be lost. Our job is to try to help people in every way, reduce to the maximum extent possible, the number of lives that will be lost in this crisis. Help people get through it and help people get back on their feet, make sure people are getting the right information so they can make the right choices. And this is something that will evolve and change probably pretty much every hour of every day. And we will be constantly giving you updates. The overall numbers are sobering. As of this hour, and everyone knows that these numbers can change at any moment -- as of this hour, 463 confirmed cases in New York City.

The borough breakout again lags behind — it has not yet been fully cross referenced with the newest number which is that 463 number is from 11:00 am, so we do not have an exact cross-reference. The last best information we have from earlier this morning based on a smaller number of cases was here's the borough breakout — 118 in Queens, 111 in Manhattan, 62 in Brooklyn, 34 in the Bronx, 19 in Staten Island.

I am very, very sorry to say that we now have two additional deaths, or a total of seven people have passed away. The first is a 56-year-old man from the Bronx who worked as an investigator for the City government. This is something we are feeling all personally. One of our own, one of our colleagues in public service has been lost. Investigator for the Department of Correction. We have checked the log books for his work in recent days and to the best knowledge he did not visit the inside of a jail facility. He worked with one fellow employee closely. That individual has been – is self-quarantined. So, to our Department of Correction colleague who we've lost, our condolences to his family. Our hearts are with them. Our prayers are with them and we will do all we can to help them in this incredibly difficult time. We've also lost an 89-year-old man who returned from Italy about a week ago. And we grieve also with his family and loved ones as well. We see consistently that have keep losing people overwhelmingly in those same categories of those who are older, particularly much older, and those who are vulnerable because of preexisting disease.

Now what we are going to do to expand our capacity. We understand that this curve is moving rapidly. We're going to have to radically expand our health care facilities in New York City and capacity. Again, this is going to be a war basis in New York City. I do not believe the United States government is on a wartime basis right now, I think is painfully evident. If they were, we would already have immense support from federal agencies on the ground right now. I do see a beginning of federal support, but nowhere near what it should be at this point. So, we will do it ourselves to the maximum extent possible. And I've ordered all my colleagues to identify all spaces that can be converted immediately to medical use. We're going to start with those that are most obvious, that already are engaged in health care and either being underutilized or not utilized, and then we're going to go much farther. So, I think you have to think of this in a wartime worldview. You have to think of this as something where you're going to see a massive mobilization to save lives, to help people through their suffering with this disease. A lot of people who are hospitalized, the vast majority of people who are hospitalized will survive, but they'll go through a very difficult experience. Again, basically the numbers keep holding. About 80 percent of everyone who gets this disease does not require hospitalization, has a fairly mild experience. 20 percent have a much more serious experience. Overwhelmingly those folks need hospitalization. Ones who end up with the most serious problems in the ICU. And there is the category where we see ourselves losing people, particularly among the older folks with the preexisting conditions. What that says to us with this kind of steep increase in the number of cases is we're going to need massive medical capacity on a scale we've never seen in the history of New York City before.

So, we are going to be constantly building out medical facilities and creating them where they've never existed before and retrofitting facilities that have nothing to do with health care. We will turn them into hospitals so long as we can get the equipment and the personnel, we will keep building our capacity to meet the demand. We've had a lot of conversations internally about how we're going to achieve this. The personnel are the single most crucial element. Thank God we're in a city with a vast amount, number of health care personnel, but still nowhere near what we might eventually need. So, we're going to find many ways to take people who are in other appropriate parts of the health profession, help them maximize their ability to serve. Look for folks who may have retired recently who could come back. Students who could be appropriately credentialed to be brought in.

I predict and this, if it continues to be a situation where our area and others like Washington State are disproportionately suffering in the context of the whole nation, that we're going to ask the federal government to send in health care workers from other places to help. Clearly, we're going to ask for the military's medical units to come in, which are very effective. And that's a substantial amount of military personnel. We're going to need all of that to get through this and we'll have more to say on it as we go along.

Facilities that we are immediately bringing online and this is a combination of some public facilities, some private that we will in this instance, working with their owners. We will put them into public service and obviously we will compensate for it. And we're going to work the same with the voluntary hospitals to maximize their capacity. But I can report four new facilities, being brought online immediately – the Coler facility on Roosevelt Island, an H + H facility that was empty. It is being immediately brought back online. 350 beds. It will be ready in approximately a week's time. There is a recently built nursing home in Brooklyn that had not yet been occupied and again, we'll get you more details as the announcements are ready and final notifications and confirmations are achieved, but this is very likely coming online in the next two weeks. 600 beds. The Westchester Square Hospital in the Bronx has an available approximately 150 beds. And we believe again likely to come online in the next two weeks or so. The North Central Bronx Hospital, part of H + H, has two floors that are vacant with 120 beds. This will be activated immediately within a week's time or so. That gives us somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200, 1,300 beds that we can immediately say will be activated.

Then when it comes to existing Health + Hospitals facilities and voluntary hospital facilities, a three prong strategy - discharging patients on an expedited basis, obviously in a manner that is still healthy and appropriate, canceling the elective surgeries as is ordered in my executive order under our state of emergency, and building additional capacity within hospital buildings. The example Dr. Katz gave, turning a cafeteria into an ICU, turning a parking lot into an ICU with a tent. Those three strategies between our existing Health + Hospitals hospitals and the voluntary hospitals we believe will net us an additional 7,000 new usable beds. Meaning new because they will be available for the cause of fighting coronavirus. So, with that estimate, 7,000 beds capacity plus the 1,300 almost that we will bring into play from the other four new locations. That will take us to 8,200-8,300 and then we're going to keep going rapidly from there.

But this will be a race against time to create these facilities to get them up and running, to find the personnel and the equipment we need. We have no choice but to expand rapidly and be ready for anything. It would be - I think that my colleagues in health care would agree much better that the facilities are up and ready too early than too late. In terms of space for any individual who needs to isolate or quarantine and or for city workers who we need to keep in that kind of location rather than sending them home, we're getting additional hotel space immediately. We have identified and are acquiring space in five smaller hotels that will amount to 250 hotel rooms, but we'll be building out from that rapidly.

In terms of tents for medical use, the kinds of tents that could be used to set up a medical facility or an ICU, our Emergency Management team has already acquired 11 such temps with another 10 to 20 coming in the coming days and they're working out the distribution of those tents between public and private facilities.

We now have as a result of the President's state of emergency. Again, the real time here, everyone, is just staggering. We had the President's state of emergency just a few days ago, the Congressional vote, the House vote just a few days ago. Everything is really moving fast. But when the President signed the state of emergency that put FEMA into play. And this is crucial, we need FEMA to be part of the solution. Our Commissioner for Emergency Management, Deanne Criswell, was a former senior official at FEMA, understands exactly what capacity and resources they bring. So, this is a very important dynamic to have FEMA involved and they have immediately gotten to work with us. We will be standing up five drive through testing facilities across New York City, and again thank you to FEMA for working with our Office of Emergency Management and our Health Department to do that.

Just some other items I mentioned in our correction system that we will be suspending visits. I want to emphasize this is also the kind of decision that should never be made lightly for those who are incarcerated, it's something they will be lacking and missing greatly. We will come up with alternatives as I said, more phone calls, hopefully video conferencing, but it was absolutely necessary to protect the health of all those who are incarcerated and obviously very importantly our correction officers who we are depending on greatly at this moment. They have a very tough job, their job is crucial. We need to protect their health and wellbeing. That was a driving factor as well in making that decision.

We are announcing a new emergency rule from our Department of Consumer Worker Protection. I mentioned a few days ago specific actions that were being taken to delineate products that were becoming scarce and to institute anti-price gouging measures. We are taking a much deeper step now, an emergency rule banning price gouging on supplies needed to treat or prevent coronavirus. I'm going to list them for you. And so for all the folks out there who sell these items, we are deadly serious. You need to not only not price gouge, you need to understand you have an obligation to your fellow New Yorkers to make sure that people can get these crucial supplies. It is not time for profiteering. It is time to be a good citizen and help your fellow New Yorker. The items are thermometers, sanitizing wipes and or baby wipes, paper towels, latex gloves, face masks, fever reducers, cough suppressants, zinc oxide supplements, facial tissue, toilet paper, rubbing alcohol and Aloe Vera. And apparently, I did not know this, rubbing alcohol and Aloe Vera can be mixed together to create a version of hand sanitizer. So those two make the list. Retailers cannot increase the price of these items by more than 10 percent. That is the rule. And every time there was a violation, there'll be a $350 fine per instance. And that means it can add up very, very quickly if someone is violating that rule.

Turns to the supply chain. We have been studying carefully. I've asked our Emergency Management Commissioner to constantly reassess the supply chain and update me at this moment. The good news is on food and basic household goods that you would find in a supermarket, there has been actually a very intensive resupply in recent days. That's the good news. The bad news is stuff is being snapped up really, really quickly. I remind people we are going to work to ensure that the supply chain remains strong. We need our federal government to do that in a way that's far beyond what we can do. But while this is all proceeding, we need our fellow New Yorkers to look out for each other. If you're someone who's bought a lot of everything, God bless you. But if there's someone in your life, someone older, someone with one of those preexisting conditions, someone who has a disability that keeps them from getting out and getting supplies they need, either help them by getting what they need for them or share your supply enough to help them out. I know we are in a society where people have been taught too much just to look out for themselves. We're going to enter an entirely different human reality and societal reality. We're going into something that people in this generation have not experienced before, but in previous generations they knew way too well and everyone's going to have to figure out how to work together and share. So, if you have an overabundance and you see someone who doesn't have anything, please help them out.

A few other points. One related to that, we're very concerned about isolated New Yorkers, for the folks who have to stay home because they're vulnerable, for the folks who are in isolation for medical reasons, we want to help them out and communicate constantly with them. And this is whether it's someone who is a confirmed patient with coronavirus or just experiencing sickness but not yet confirmed, and certainly for folks who have to be very, very careful and stay in to the maximum extent. We are going to create what is being called an isolation app. Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has put this together. It will be up quickly. We'll provide guidance and nine languages. It will ask if individuals need anything and they'll get real time responses and also will give us good information on what challenges people are facing, where we're having particular problems across the city, et cetera. Finishing up obviously now with the action on the restaurants, bars, cafes that serve food. A crucial issue will be food deliveries. I got the question out of the day whether we would suspend enforcement on e-Bikes in terms of deliveries. The answer is yes. We are suspending that enforcement for the duration of this crisis.

Okay. Few more things and then we will start to take your questions. We're going to all of us up here, especially the health professionals, we're going to repeat ourselves a lot over the next weeks and probably months, so let's begin with the most important point, which is stay home as much as you can. That guidance might get a lot sharper at any point. I have been asked repeatedly, are we considering travel restrictions? Are we considering curfews? We are considering everything is the answer. Every option, every tool is on the table. We will decide in turn when we want to employ each, but right now the answer is simple. Stay home to the maximum extent possible. Protect yourself, protect your family. In general, the simple rule is when in doubt, stay home. If you're not sure you should do something, stay home. We're going to talk about some things that if you're healthy are still appropriate to do like getting food and medicine, but again, the simple guidance to all New Yorkers is if you're not sure you need to do it, stay home. If you have any option, then you don't have to go out, stay home. Limit your time outside your home or your apartment. When you go out, be mindful of social distancing and try and distance as best you can. Those are some very simple rules.

For folks who are sick, it's a stronger of stay home, stay home, don't even think about going out.
Try as best you can to get the people in your life to get that food for you, get those medicines for you, obviously there'll be deliveries. Do not accidentally put someone else in harm's way. If you must go out, if you're someone who is sick and there is literally no other way to get food or medicine, you can't find anyone else who will do it for you. You must go out. You should be out for as little time as possible. You should keep your distance. You should help people around you to know to keep their distance.

If you are sick with the symptoms, again, I keep using simple layman's terms. The doctors will always feel free to improve upon them but cold and flu like symptoms. Our guidance has changed the last few days. We are saying stay home for three to four days. If you're getting better after that time, that's fantastic. Stay home until you're well. If you're not getting better, call your doctor and act accordingly. Crucial piece of information. Do not go - now that this crisis has advanced, do not go to the emergency room unless it is actually an emergency. If you are in a absolute dangerous situation health wise right now, that's what the emergency room is still for. Otherwise, if you're just worried that you might be getting sick, I want to tell you more and more what you're going to see in emergency rooms. You're seeing it now all over the country as you will see officials of that healthcare facility outside screening and turning away people who do not need emergency care. So, the better way to do this is to not go in unless you absolutely have to. We cannot overwhelm our healthcare facilities. We have to make sure the folks who need help the most are getting the care.

Finally, just try and give some examples for the many, many New Yorkers who are not in those particularly vulnerable categories. You're not over 50 with the serious preexisting conditions. You're not over 70 and you're a healthy New Yorker and you're trying to figure out what to do. So, when in doubt you still stay home. But we understand that people need to stay healthy. We understand that people under any circumstance, if they have the ability to get a little fresh air and exercise, that's actually quite important to their health. We understand that people need groceries, they need medicines. In these instances, it's okay to take a walk, but practice social distancing. It's okay to go jogging, but practice social distancing. It's okay to walk your dog, but practice social distancing. If you don't need to go get groceries because someone else can get them for you, that's great. If you can get a delivery instead of going out, that's great, but I understand that there's so many people who are healthy who are trying to figure out what to do – some basic simple things like getting some exercise or getting some fresh air. I've spoken with all of our key health officials on this, everyone agrees that's acceptable if you keep it limited and you practice social distancing. That's where we are today. That could change tonight. That could change tomorrow, but that's where we are right now.

So, everyone understands this is going be a very difficult few months. It will definitely get worse. It will get a lot worse before it gets better. I don't take any joy in saying that, but people expect our leaders to talk straight with them. It will get a lot worse before it gets better. We understand that so many people are going to be affected by this. But again, the answer is not fear. The answer is not panic. The answer is not, I'm going to sit around and hope that someone else will save me or the government will take care of everything. The answer is for all of us to work together and support each other. The answer is for us to believe in each other, support each other, look out for each other and understand that everyone has a role to play. Everyone has a chance to do something really important for their fellow New Yorker and for someone in need.

Everyone has a chance to exercise personal responsibility, listen to the guidance and abide by it. But also, listen to the idea that even your city government, your federal government doesn't reach into every nook and cranny of our lives, but people do – our family does, our neighbors do, the people on our block do. And we saw this after Sandy, the people were helping each other before any government agency could arrive. And I was very moved by it when I went through neighborhoods and Brooklyn and Staten Island and saw the amazing things people were doing to support each other. We're going to need that again now and we're going to do everything we can as your city government, everything we could possibly imagine to do, we will expend every youth resource. We'll do things that have never been seen before in the history of New York City. But in the end, New Yorkers will play a crucial role in helping us get through this crisis and in helping us overcome this crisis. And I have absolute faith in my fellow New Yorkers that you are more than up to the challenge.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Okay, we covered a lot there. Let us open up now to your questions. My colleagues will join in as we go along.

Question: Mayor, so I just looked it up. Anthony Fauci is 79 years old.

Mayor: Yes, he is. 

Question: So, has he [inaudible] you in a sense if he is fearful about himself?

Mayor: No, he's been quite clear about that. He said, he was asked, has he been tested? He said, no, I'm not sick. I think he's exactly what we should be looking to as a role model. Amazing story – I was looking it up the other day and here's a kid who grew up in Brooklyn. His family had a pharmacy. He used to deliver, you know, the prescriptions to people's homes in Brooklyn. And boy, when he talks you know where he's from and what an admirable guy and someone we should be proud of, but he was quite clear. People need to take common sense precautions, especially those in greatest need. But right now, I think – look, Dr. Fauci is in the same situation we are in. We have to – all of us have to serve the public. We are not going to be able to look at things the same way everyone else does. On one level we are supposed to put ourselves in a harm's way, not to be reckless obviously, but we're supposed to stay in our post no matter what. Just like our first responders, our health workers. So, this is a situation where public servants are in a very different category than everyone else. We are supposed to do everything within our power. A number of us may get sick. That's the price of admission we're asking every day new Yorkers to really be cautious and careful. But we are holding ourselves to a different standard, a higher standard because we signed up for putting ourselves in harm's and that's fine. No one has a problem with that.

Question: Mayor de Blasio, given your own guidance that you just gave to new Yorkers about stay at home to the maximum extent possible, receive a lot of [inaudible] that you were going to the gym today.

Mayor: Sure.

Question: Do you want to explain your thoughts? And then if Dr. Barbot or a medical professional wants to weigh in on how safe that was?

Mayor: Absolutely. I knew in advance that it was a very socially distanced situation. There was almost no one there. I hadn't heard that information prior. I suspected that we were all going to be about to close them down and this week the last chance to get some exercise, I got no exercise whatsoever over the weekend I was in this building a huge percentage of the time. I need exercise to be able to stay healthy and make decisions. I'm going to figure out some new way to do it going forward. I did not for a moment think there was anything problematic because I knew the dynamics and again, I have to stay healthy so I could make the decisions for the people of the city.

Question: Other people [inaudible] you've asked people to make sacrifices. You're not the only person in New York that needs exercise to stay healthy, other people have found other ways to adapt. Do you think it was irresponsible for you –

Mayor: Now, you can ask a hundred different ways. I'm very comfortable. They're all closing down today anyway.

Question: [inaudible]

Mayor: Sure

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: I'm a practicing doctor. I support the Mayor's decision to get exercise today.

Question: I know some people who have already been laid off from their jobs, what steps should people in that situation [inaudible]?

Mayor: When they've been laid off? Look, this is something, you know that obviously there's actions being taken on unemployment insurance, for example, but we're going to need something much deeper from much deeper than that. From the federal level, we're going to need direct income replacement. So, I use the example earlier today about the new deal and it's a very different physical reality, but just play it out in your mind for a moment. Remember, as soon as the new deal, excuse me, as soon as the great depression hit a previously prosperous country with very low unemployment went in short order to 25 percent unemployment. My grandparents were among them and the stories I heard, they had a small business in the garment district and it was wiped out very quickly and the stories I heard from them, from my grandfather about the ways people came together to help each other and support each other were very, very powerful. Just everyday people helping each other survive. But then very soon after, once Franklin Roosevelt became president, these miraculous things started to happen like massive numbers of government jobs. Now, coronavirus is different because we can't create massive employment when people can't gather, obviously, but the notion is the same. The federal government did something unheard of. There was no precedent whatsoever for it. It was night and day from what had been known a year earlier even, and they created a massive infusion of money into people's pockets through government created jobs and it saved America literally saved America from falling apart. Right now, I'm asking this administration, this Congress, to create today's version of that replace people's incomes, not just unemployment insurance, which is nowhere near what people made, but replace their incomes to the maximum extent possible. I'm sure it may not be exactly the amount that everyone makes, but it has to be enough for people to afford the rent. Food, medicine, the basics. If we don't do that, you're going to see a tremendous amount of pain and a danger of a further collapse in this country. Let's be blunt. They have the money. They just did, you know, a trillion and a half, one point $5 trillion tax break for the wealthy a few years ago. Endless expenditures on the military with very little assessment of whether that's the best use of money. Endless Wars that are getting us nowhere, there's money, it's going to the wrong place, it should be going to the American people in a time of crisis. So, I take to heart what Senator Schumer said right here on Saturday that this bill is going to be followed by another bill. That next one needs to get to direct income replacement.

Yeah?

Question: Have there been higher up ranking Department of Health officials ready to resign in recent weeks over disagreements with you and your staff about [inaudible]?

Mayor: No.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I was – I don't know about the multiple press accounts. If someone wants to bring me specifics, I know nothing about that. I know people have had serious conversations, trying to make citizens decisions together. I know when someone comes up to me and says, I want to resign, that has not happened.

Question: Mayor on the expansion of hospital capacity can you –

Mayor: Just a little louder.

Question: The expansion of hospital beds. Are there other facilities that you're looking at? Are you looking at expanding beyond health care facilities?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Anything and everything, but it will be, look, anything health care related, obviously Erin, is better, because there are certain advantages to a facility. It was built for something like that. But we're going to look at anything and everything. Again, it will be very much related to the extent of the mobilization we can achieve depending on the personnel available, the equipment available and the federal presence. If the military will come in, in a big way, with their medical capacity that would help immensely. If we're able to get, if we get to this point, healthcare professionals from other parts of the country brought in on a systematic basis. So, look again, I don't understand what the federal government is doing. I cannot believe what I'm seeing should be a full national mobilization. Look, I've had my differences with certain decisions our military have made over the years. But I come from an army family. I would trust the Pentagon right now a hell of a lot more than the White House to figure out how to sort out this crisis and address it. I wish the President would just call up the Secretary of Defense and say, you take over, I don't know how to do this. But if we could put this on a war footing and you have states in the union that have very little presence of coronavirus, we need health care professionals here. So, those are my thoughts about the expansion. If we have the personnel, if we don't have the personnel, you can only expand so much. If we don't have the equipment, you can only expand so much. But if we have those things, we can keep expanding constantly into any and all types of appropriate buildings and creating what we need. It's never going to be perfect, but it's, again, these are battlefield conditions.

Question: [Inaudible]

Question: What type of response have you gotten to request for a military assistance?

Mayor: Nothing to speak of. FEMA, different from the military, obviously. FEMA is actually now truly engaged and I'm, I'm saying some of this is obviously strong opinion and other things I'm reporting to you are updates and my colleagues can jump in at any point and put more sharpness to it. But FEMA is now here. That is really good. That's really helpful. And we're engaging the veteran's administration and that's really helpful. But we're still, we have some more work to do to get to specifics. There's no military presence at this moment. There should be. We're one of the epicenters. I mean I don't check the morning state facts against each state, but I'm looking at my health collies I believe we are still the leading state in terms of cases. What do you got to do to get prioritized around here? This should be where, I think, Washington state has gone through a horrible experience. Absolutely horrible. But in terms of sheer number of cases, this should be where the first aid goes and I don't see it. Anyone else, I'm going to keep moving this way. Go.

Question: Oh, mindful of what you said about having everything on the table [inaudible]. Is there a threshold or a trigger for doing that?

Mayor: It's a constant conversation of what we think makes sense to do all things considered. This is how all the decisions have to be made. We have to factor, it's not one thing, it's everything and what it means, you know, obviously, look who wants to compromise the employment of everyone who works at bars and restaurants and cafes. That was not a lightly taken decision, but it was at least somewhat mitigated by the notion we could do take out and delivery, keep a certain amount of them employed and obviously a lot of people depend on them for their food and that's their reality, um. So that was where we struck, you know, a balance of how you figure out how to do something in a sensible manner. We're going to be looking at all of this. If you do a curfew. If you do travel restrictions, there are real ramifications, so we have to process that, and come to a decision quickly, but each in real time.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, you announced the new rule on price gouging.

Mayor: Yes.

Question: A couple things. What should people, what should New Yorkers do if they see price gouging? Um.

Mayor: Call 311

Question: Okay. The second thing is –

Mayor: I'm sorry to interrupt. Call 3-1-1 and be specific.

Question: Ok.

Mayor: I really urge people, a lot of times New Yorkers come up to me with a complaint or they call WNYC, whatever it is, it is very fair. I always say, please get us all the information you can get. If you go into a store and you say, you know, a store price gouge me, I want to know the name, the address, what item it was, take down the price, if you can take a photo, whatever they can get, the more the better.

Question: And then, do you know how many fines the city's issued in recent days on price gouging?

Mayor: I don't, but we can get that to you.

Question: Okay. and then, I'm Morgan correct [inaudible] from New Yorkers that they think we're cash strapped at this point, that they think 10 percent is just too much of a markup, are you considering lowering it? [Inaudible]

Mayor: I think we assume some variation is normal in a free enterprise economy and [inaudible] on a surface doesn't, you know, seem to be necessarily unfair. Your point is well taken though. If we, I think 10 percent is also consistent with the current legal guidance, but we'll reassess that in light of the emergency to see if we can go even farther.

Question: And then I have another quick question for Dr. Barbot.

Mayor: Sure.

Question: Dr. Barbot, off of Sally's question, there's been multiple reports that there's a toxic relationship between you and the Mayor, that there's a log jam in getting out guidance because the Mayor is micromanaging the process. Can you speak to those reports?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: I think it's been clear from the beginning that we are, and the Mayor has been very clear, we all wear the same uniform, we're all on the same team and we share the same goal of slowing the spread of COVID-19 and reducing the potential harm to New Yorkers. My team and I have been working 24/7 since this began and nothing has changed nor will anything change going into the future.

Question: Mr. Mayor just a couple of questions, just – Dr. Barbot, has she threatened to resign?

Mayor: I just answered the question like a minute ago.

Question: No, I asked her directly. 

Mayor: But you called on me. You said, Mr. Mayor.

Question: Mr. Mayor, can you ask Dr. Barbot if she has resigned?

Mayor: I don't understand your question. I was asked the question, has anyone resigned? No. Has anyone threatened to resign? No. Do you want to ask her if she's resigned or threatened to resign? Feel free, but ask her, don't ask me. I'm confused by your question.

Commissioner Barbot: I have no intentions of resigning. I'm very honored to have this position at this time in history and I am honored to be working with the Mayor closely, along with my colleagues to, again, ensure that we have one goal, which is to slow the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the harm to new Yorkers.

Question: So, you never threatened to resign? 

Commissioner Barbot: No.

Mayor: Guys, you can print what the hell you want in the middle of a crisis, but when we tell you it's false and we confirm to you, it's false it would be really, really nice if you would acknowledge it. This is a crisis. This is not personalities and games. This is a crisis. It did not happen. It just didn't. It's like the day a few months ago where someone said, I had a lunch with Eric Adams and we came up with a grand plan and we agreed. We had not even seen each other in person for months and yet it still went in the paper. I don't know what you guys think are the right standards, but I would hope you would raise them a bit in the middle of a crisis. We have been discussing decisions every single day. Does everyone agree on everything all the time? No. Are there different factors? Does health think the same way as education? Guess what? No. They have different imperatives and we have to make sense of them for example, but no one threatened to resign. Period. What else?

Question: Just a follow up.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: There was – you talked about over the weekend how you had to, you wanted to see the models and the paperwork and I've heard you've asked very detailed questions about those things. Can you talk a little bit about how you take advice from people like Dr. Barbot and Dr. Katz?

Mayor: The same way I take advice from the Police Commissioner, the Schools Chancellor, and every other leader of every agency. And if you think that a responsible elected official is supposed to just take whatever people say period and implement it without any discussion, without considering the impact on all the different pieces of the equation, guess what my friend-if I asked five different agency heads what they want to do about the same situation, I will get five different answers. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with that. Did Richard Carranza want to close schools? Of course not. Of course not. If he said, oh geez, yeah, shut him down, no big deal, I would not think that's a very devoted educator. He hated it. I hated it. But we have to think about the health considerations first while balancing all the other pieces of the equation. And there were public safety elements. I'm going to try to articulate how this works, but I'm also going to beseech you guys, you better start searching for truth, not scandal, not headlines, not clicks; truth. This is a crisis. Real decision makers have to factor in everything, everything because the ramifications of people's lives are that great. Unfortunately, on Sunday I had to do something which is really going to take away the chance for kids to get educated as well as they might have. It's going to take away a chance for a lot of kids to get meals. We're going to try our damnedest to find an alternative. There are many, many other points. These things are not easy.

Question: Circling back to the question from Friday about the potential of reopening health enrollment. I've spoken with a number of New Yorkers that have concerns associated with the potential loss of jobs and the various factors that might go into healthcare in this crisis. [Inaudible] or otherwise. Have you had that conversation with the Governor about reopening the health care enrollment period?

Mayor: I have not amidst all these other things. That's a great question. I will guarantee you'll get an answer very quickly.

Question: Hi. So –

Mayor: And everyone, we're doing first round for anyone who hasn't gone, we're going to go one round through and then we'll see if we do any other, depending on however long that takes. Go ahead.

Question: Senator Zellnor Myrie today called to suspend the detainment of people on technical parole violations to police, elderly, sick, and those [inaudible] released from prison to suspend arrest for low-level offenses, and basically things like that. Currently there is video conferencing, video visitation suspended at Rikers and –

Mayor: I'm losing you. Nothing wrong with your question, it's just a lot of pieces. Help me out with where you want to go here.

Question: What is the plan to actually implement some of the safety precautions by or allowing prisoners to communicate with outside people?

Mayor: Well, to increase the number for inmates in our correction system to increase the number of phone calls and to implement wherever possible video conferencing is the simple answer.

Question: Are any of these other measures that the Senator suggested, for instance, like releasing the elderly or not detaining people on technical parole violations? Are any of those going to be taken?

Mayor: It's a [inaudible]. Anything that might go in the humane category, someone who there might be an argument particularly with these healthcare dynamics to reconsider? That's a fair question. I don't have a firm answer for you. I think it's a fair thing for us to reassess and come back with an answer. That is a different question than how we are going to police. We still have to police consistent with what we do, historically. I am concerned that you have to, again, in real decision making by real people in real conditions, by serious people having to make decisions for 8.6 million New Yorkers-such as myself-you have to think about the ramifications for public safety. The healthcare crisis is extraordinary and is the first consideration, but we do still have to think about public safety because that also affects people's lives. It can literally mean life or death for people in a different way, let alone all the other forms of challenges that we have out there. So, we're not changing our basic public safety strategies in light of the situation right now. We will assess as we go along.

Question: How are you communicating to every single police officer the new rule on not enforcing violations on the E-bikes?

Mayor: The same way we do everything else. It will be guidance given in every precinct. It'll go out to every officer's device and the NYPD can get that kind of instruction out very quickly. Go ahead.

Question: A budget question. Scott Stringer today called for your preliminary budget to be cut by $1.4 billion because we may be entering a recession. I just wanted to get your reaction to that. Also, just on the Council side, you're not the Council members' boss, but what's your understanding of what they're doing? What would be your guidance to them on the budget process?

Mayor: Right now, I think both as a matter of statute and as a matter of trying to keep this city functioning, I intend to keep to the budget process on calendar. That might change at some point. I mean, we are, you know, a month or so out. I think we have a very real possibility of keeping it on track. So, until I feel otherwise, I'll stay there. I don't want to predict the number. I could be up or down. I mean we first of all have to look at the revenue we had before all of this hit and then we have to look at the revenue impact of this. And that's going to be ever changing. I think it's way too early to determine how we're going to adjust the budget.

Question: [Inaudible] your reference yesterday? 

Mayor: Which reference? I'm sorry. 

Question: Regarding the [inaudible] dynamic [inaudible] coronavirus [inaudible] can you expand upon that?

Mayor: So right now, and again, my colleagues in health care who I've been listening to every day and trying to glean information and use it in what I say to you. And they'll jump in if there's anything that they want to add or subtract. And obviously Commissioner Criswell in terms of who comes out of the federal government understands these issues as well. So, right now, we're dealing with, if you think between cities, states, et cetera, it's like every man or woman for themselves. There's almost no semblance of federal command and control, federal coordination, federal prioritization. We saw a glimmer with the state of emergency declaration by the President. We saw a glimmer with the action taken in the House. Those are steps forward undoubtedly. But the crisis, I mean if we all had a press conference on January 24th, which meant, you know, the thing had already been growing to the point that we finally said, we got to speak to this and we got to put some rules to this and we got to tell people where we're going.

I think it's fair to say the federal government has essentially had two months to put itself on a war footing, which means you look at every element of solving the problem. What are those elements? We need the hospital facilities, we need the testing, we need the personnel, we need the supplies. Ventilators are a great example. You know, we are struggling right now to increase the number of ventilators in New York City. We're having some success. But we're trying our best to find new ventilators and competing with all sorts of other localities. And yet our need is much greater than many other places. Why is it catch as catch can? Why is it, you know, survival of the fittest instead of the federal government says, hold it everyone. One, the following companies that produce ventilators, you're going on a 24/7 production line. Okay? These companies over here, you could be producing ventilators. Now you're producing ventilators. It's a state of emergency. Whatever it is to maximize the supply to a national level. And now here's, you know, we've got 100,000 units, okay, this many go to New York, this many go to Washington State. This many go to California, according to need. And that gets adjusted all the time. 

The military should be on the ground in the key impacted areas with their medical personnel. They have fantastic medical personnel, trained for emergencies. These are some of the people who deal best with a crisis. They're not here. I'm sure they would love to be here. And I said earlier, the idea of any member of the United States military working on that border wall right now, when we're in the middle of a pandemic is idiotic. They should all be relieved of that responsibility. And every one of them should be thrown in the effort to address coronavirus because I'm not just talking about medical personnel, the sheer logistics. The military is brilliant at moving material where it needs to go. And they should be mobilized to ensure that every -- we need ventilators, we need masks, face guards, right on down to more mundane things like hand sanitizer. So it's just left now up to -- not only is it left up to the private market, but the private market will be the first to tell you they're overwhelmed. I've been talking to some of the companies that we are depending on, and they are the first to say their supply chains are beginning to be disrupted. And there's no one in charge in Washington stepping in to fix it. It's, I don't think there's a precedent. I mean, look at many presidents of many different stripes. Do you believe John F. Kennedy would not have already mobilized this nation to address this or Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower? It's unbelievable.

Question: Yeah. Just talk about daycare centers. Should they be closed? And what percentage of the City's workforce is working remotely and have you maxed out on that percentage? 

Mayor: Yes, very, very sadly, daycare centers should be closed and we're working with them now on that. It's a very painful situation. Again, for folks who are those essential workers, the first responders, the transit workers, the health care workers. We're going to set up not only 3K to 12 education, we're going to find a way to also reach if they have even younger childcare needs because we need them freed up and able to do their jobs. But this is a work in progress to put that up to the level we need it to be really quickly. But that's the answer on the centers for sure. 

On the telecommuting. Our goal right now, let's again be very clear. All essential personnel cannot telecommute period. I mean first responders, health care workers, you know, there's so many people who cannot -- we need them at their post. For the folks who can, which will now in effect be the vast majority of educators except for those in the learning centers for the essential workers. You know, a lot of our educators will be telecommuting now and doing distance learning with their kids. And a lot of our personnel who are deemed non-essential but still play important roles will be. So, separate from the educators we were trying to get 10 percent of the workforce. And I believe we made real progress, but I don't have a specific number. We can get that for you.

Question: A follow up on that, on those are teachers who have expressed concern that they have to physically be there for the remote learning sessions. Why not just do those also remote? 

Mayor: I'll start and the Chancellor will jump in. We answered this yesterday, but I think you weren't here. Because we are asking them to do something they've never done before. The vast majority of them in their life. And on a total battlefield training basis, we're saying to a teacher who spent, in most cases their life traditionally teaching, we're going to give you three days to figure out how to do distance learning with us, with all the training we can give you. Then we need you in play on Monday because we're in a full mobilization and we cannot train them as well from afar. And we can't give them all the materials they need from afar. It's just the truth. They will not have kids in their presence. We will socially distance them while they're getting that training. But if we're going to serve a million kids by Monday with something that's never been done before on any scale in New York City, we need to train them effectively.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yes. To add to what the Mayor has said. What's important to understand is that every one of our buildings today was deep cleaned because there was no one there. So, the Mayor's thanks to our custodial staff is heartfelt. They were there cleaning our buildings. I'm going to reiterate what our Health Commissioner has said. If you're sick, we do not expect to see you there tomorrow or Wednesday or Thursday. If you're sick, stay home. There's processes for letting your principal know if you're sick. Those two things being taken into account, we have a vast array of educators that are prepared on different levels. We have some educators in some schools in the New York City Department of Education that have been doing distance learning, had been doing virtual learning, have been doing all different types of learning using Google classroom and different platforms that are very proficient. And yet we have other educators that have never even touched this kind of learning before. So the differentiation that we have to do to bring an 80,000 teacher workforce up to a minimal level, yet some that are already advanced, not bring them down, is just something you cannot do virtually right out of the gate. So we have to be in those classrooms with them in those schools. There are some teachers that are going to show us what they're doing. We're going to take what they're doing and wrap it into what we're going to provide for the rest of the teachers. But there are some teachers that have never even been in a Google classroom environment. We have to literally help them log in, create their profile, help them understand how they post things onto that platform, where you find resources. So, the variability is so much that it's impossible to do that in a virtual way. Now that being said, with these three days of training and teachers having the opportunity uninterrupted to be able to create materials and create different kinds of learning experiences, they will be ready and up and running and even more importantly, know who to call to get assistance when they hit the ground running on Monday. The other thing that I think is really important for New Yorkers to understand is this isn't a four-week vacation. This isn't a five-week vacation. Our teachers are working, they're working in a different environment. They are telecommuting to the greatest extent of that definition. So, we need to make sure they're prepared to be able to do that work.

Mayor: Okay, who's not gone over here?

Question: I want to ask about the homeless population? What's the City doing to help them out? [Inaudible] outreach workers are discouraged to give out sanitizer, [inaudible] things like that to encourage homeless people to go into the shelters. Is that different now [inaudible]?

Mayor: I don't know if I agree with that assumption at all. It's a fair question. But no, remember the strategy we use. the HOME-STAT strategy as a, you know, we're playing a long game. That's a whole strategic assumption is not hi, I know you're homeless, come with me. First contact, you know, you're going to suddenly want to just come in period. No, it is literally dozens or hundreds of conversations before a homeless person who's street homeless, permanently homeless, often agrees to come in. So, there's all sorts of instances of providing support. Not sort of saying, oh, we can't help you until you come in. No, no, that's not the ethic at all. I've talked to the outreach workers. They try to help people in the here and now. Even if they're not ready to come in. That would certainly be true now. The outreach workers have been trained on mass to go out and engage, look for people with symptoms, offer them a chance to get, which has happened in some cases so far. And I've heard it's all been voluntary so far. But we're trying to continue to deepen that because we're very concerned about homeless folks and getting anyone to health care who needs it. So, so far, I'm hearing there's a lot of outreach and it's having a good effect.

Question: On that point, is there anything being done at homeless shelters given that you have a lot of people living in close proximity? 

Mayor: Everyone, as far as I know, everyone in the government facilities, all the types of government facilities and then everyone that we contract with has been given the same guidance about constant cleaning, deep cleaning, social distancing. I can get you more on if there's specific guidance that's been given to shelters and how we're following up on it. Shelters by definition are going to be harder in some cases to deal with physically than others. But the basic approach, not only do we give them the guidance, I think the vast majority of people get it now and are trying to honor it for their own reasons too. So that's the approach, but I'll try and get you more on the specific numbers. Please.

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: Just to supplement what the Mayor just mentioned, we also have identified several locations for isolation rooms in case that people either have been exposed and need to be isolated or if they actually have the symptoms and they cannot be in a congregate setting.

Question: Okay. Just the one quick one. Do we know if street cleaning and enforcement or alternate side, tomorrow –

Mayor: Under discussion, it's a rolling list of agenda items and as we make each decision, we're announcing them. So that's still being discussed.

Question: I think maybe best for the Health Commissioner -- in terms of the overall numbers. 463 total positive cases. But there's been [inaudible] and obviously we have people who are showing symptoms but they're not in the risk and the high-risk category, they're staying home and not getting tested. So presumably the real number is much, much higher. So talk about what -- that must present a huge challenge for the Health Department just in tracking this and what is the real number? Are we assuming this is in the thousands?

Mayor: Can I just help the Health Commissioner before she begins. If we had a real perfect number, we'd be sharing it with you [inaudible]. And trying to do our damndest [inaudible] help share with the New Yorkers a sense of projection. But that's what we're still working on all the time all the time to get right. The last thing we want to do is be premature about that number.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, and to build on what the Mayor said, I think part of the, what we're learning about this illness is that people can present with the spectrum of symptoms. Typically, people will have fever and a cough, fever and shortness of breath, but they may also present with other symptoms that they may be very mild and so not even realize that they had COVID-19 and thought maybe I have a cold. And so, that's why as we have already documented that we have community transmission, which means that, as we speak, New Yorkers are more likely to contract COVID-19 from someone who's already in New York City than someone who's traveling in, our messaging is changing. So, that's why we're so focused on making sure that anybody who has those symptoms stay home, right? Because we want folks to realize that whether they have been in contact with someone who has been diagnosed or whether they have been in contact with someone who has symptoms, like maybe they had COVID-19, the important thing is if you're symptomatic, stay home. And especially if you are someone who is 50 and above with those five chronic conditions, we want you to be especially mindful of developing these symptoms and staying home early. The other thing that I will add is that as we've had been mentioning from the beginning, we are learning more as we go through this experience, learning more about how the virus behaves, learning more about what groups might be at potential risk. I think today you heard one of those fine cuts in terms of, yes, people who have chronic illnesses and are above 50, we're paying us especially close attention to them, but even folks who are older, 70 above, and may not have chronic illness, simply because of the of their age, they may be at even further risk. So, as we learn about more chronic conditions, as we learn about more situations that might transmit illness, we will share that with New Yorkers. But I think the important thing to note is that the guidance doesn't change, which means don't go to school, don't go to work. Now we want you to limit your outside exposure, right? It's something that we haven't necessarily talked about, but during this time of having the schools close, imploring people to work from home, we want New Yorkers to limit their outside exposure. If they don't have to go out, don't go out. But if they do have to go out, either because they have to get groceries, they have to do the laundry, they have to go get medications, we want them to be smart about it and to limit the time that they spend outdoors. I guess the last thing I will say, because it hasn't come up, but we've been having internal conversations about it – you know, we want – clearly people need to walk their dogs. Clearly for mental health purposes, people will want to be outdoors, get some fresh air, do some exercise. We want them to do it, but what we're seeing with regards to social distancing is the ideal is to be six feet apart from someone else, especially if you're not sure about whether or not they may have symptoms. It doesn't mean be six feet apart from a family member that you live with and doesn't have symptoms. Right. We want people to be smart about the facts. We want them to use their best judgment. This is a time where yes, we're at asking New Yorkers to have a physical distance, but certainly a time where we're asking New Yorkers to come together emotionally, spiritually, because we're going to be in this for the long haul and we need one another to get through this.

Mayor: Okay. Anyone who's not gone? Yes?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: To me, again, we've absolutely feel for them, but this is what the federal government is for. And to some extent the State government, the State has limitations too, obviously. This is just a nature of reality. The federal government prints money. The federal government has a limitless credit line and the federal government has been the place that is turned to in a national emergency to cover those costs. And by the way, in fairness to the administration, they said from the beginning they would cover the necessary reimbursements, which will be vast for cities and states. But on this matter, there needs – the money has to come from the federal government, because, you know, we would never be in a position to cover the amount of money it would take. I mean, we literally would not have the physical money to cover what it would take. We can't front that amount of money. And we're not – just aren't – we don't have it without taking away from everything else that people need us to do. But the federal government could do it in a heartbeat. So, that's just the reality.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: We're going to have to give you all those details when they solidify. We know there'll be five in New York city, FEMA working with Department of Health and OEM, but details to be announced. And again, by priority and reservation, not just anyone walks up or drives up.

Okay. Who has not gone at all? Okay. I'm going to do a few more – wait, someone who's not gone at all? I'm sorry, go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I don't have justified – or, what's the word I'm looking for? Consistent with the latest number I just gave on cases on waiting for those numbers to be checked so we can get that to you later in the day.

Question: And just related – and recognizing how quickly this has been moving, but we – the topic of a hospital bed and ventilators, you know, was asked about last week and there certainly wasn't kind of this crisis mentality and urgency –

Mayor: Right, and I agree.

Question: [Inaudible] wondering, I guess, what projections are you basing your current action?

Mayor: Yeah, there's that constant discussion and updating. Look, I remember I mentioned to a lot of you the World Health Organization study that came out Thursday, Friday – I'm not sure – the 65,000 cases in China, that was a really important new piece of information. Every day, the whole thing is changing, the understanding of what other countries did, what we're seeing in our own numbers, what we're seeing around the country. I wish – I think – I don't blame anyone for liking static, clear answers. This is kind of an American reality. We're used to instant gratification. We're used to certitude. We're used to things that we think are, you know, yes or no. This ain't that. This is a whole different reality. It changes constantly. There was no human being on earth who fully understands the coronavirus – that is a fact. And we're all trying to make sense of it constantly. So, projections are even changing, but what is clear is just our own number of cases. You can see immediately that thousand number that I told you we would hit this week, I was hoping and praying and I was wrong. There's no question, tragically, I was right. So, it is enough to tell us how much faster we're going to have to move up schedules and you know, that ventilator thing – we have a very substantial supply right now. I'm not worried about right now. I'm worried about, you know, a month from now.

Question: Well, I guess I just want to know as far as the projections, are you mostly relying on internal numbers? Are there specific external sources?

Mayor: It's a lot of different pieces. It is the – everything we're learning, most, especially from our own cases and our own experience. It's constant information from World Health Organization, CDC, research papers. I mean, the medical folks here are constantly being briefed. They're reading, you know, everything that's coming in. It's just ever-changing. We're even learning, of course, about other countries' experiences, which is ever-changing, and things that are working – you know, we've seen some places that are having some surprisingly good dynamics, some places are having horrible dynamics. It is daily, hourly.

Question: [Inaudible]

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So, we are solidifying those plans as we speak. We're working with our union partners as well. We're also working with other city agencies. We're looking at third-party support systems. We have a list of every one of those students. There are some things that you can provide via virtual reality. So, for example, speech therapy – we can provide that. Even some occupational therapy we can provide, but physical therapy, how do you do that? So, we're working to provide that kind of support for students and families. We are reaching out to every single one of those families. We've already started reaching out to them and we'll do that via their IEP. But it's going to be critically important. I want to remind all New York Department of Education families, you need to create your account on MySchools. That's critically important. That's how we're going to blast information. Go onto our website and there'll be a link there and it's really simply sign up, give us your information. You'll get real time information. Also look at our New York City schools Twitter account. We just tweeted how to do it in a link. I retweeted it and there's a link there as well. But we are actively working on those plans right now.

Mayor: Let me challenge you – I'm sorry, I'm going to challenge you at one point. For folks who are less computer savvy, and I don't know if you have this yet or you're about to put it together, but what about a human being struggling to figure out how to get their accounts [inaudible] –

Chancellor Carranza: They can call 3-1-1 and 3-1-1 will patch you right into our call center as well. Also, on the website, there's a phone number as well. People can call.

Question: You mentioned third parties. What would that necessarily [inaudible]?

Chancellor Carranza: There are different kinds of companies that provide mobile services like that. So, what we're trying to do, and the Mayor has given us very clear direction, there is nothing that is sacred. So, if you need to go and get a third party and augment what you have in your school system, do it. There is no excuse for not serving our students. So, we're taking that to heart and exploring every possibility.

Mayor: Okay, we're going to do a few more because we have a lot we have to get back to.

Yes?

Question: [Inaudible]

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So, they also are one of the groups of students that are referred to as our high-priority students – so, students with disabilities, students in temporary housing. So, we're prioritizing them in everything that we're doing. So, they're at the top of the list for devices. If they're homeless, chances are they probably don't have a device, chances are that they probably don't have internet connection or connectivity. So, as we're working with Spectrum and other providers, we're prioritizing internet and Wi-Fi connectivity for those students. In particular, we have 30,000 iPads that we have in our possession right now that are Wi-Fi equipped. The prioritization is for students that are in these kinds of most fragile – we call them our fragile students – most fragile circumstances. We are going to be receiving shipments every single week until we ramp up to 300,000 iPads that we will be distributing. Part of the work that'll happen in this week in our schools is actually getting an accounting of who are our students, because teachers and principals know who are the students that either don't have Wi-Fi or don't have devices, et cetera. So, we're trying to be very strategic, very, very specific about who those kids are and then prioritize them.

Mayor: Okay. We're going to have to go fast because we're running out of time.

Go –

Question: And FDNY fire marshal [inaudible] coronavirus the union just announced. Were you aware of that? Does that make account eight in the city?

Mayor: I want to – no disrespect to the union, I want to confirm everything before commenting. That's the first I'm hearing of that being confirmed, so let me make sure we do that.

Question: And I know you said you're working on the details for the drive through testing center, but can you give us any kind of flavor of what they look like in an urban area? We know what they look like in suburbia.

Mayor: No, it's brand new. It's just gotten agreed to. We'll get you as soon as we have it, but this is a moving situation. We just got the agreement to do it.

Question: News just broke about 10 minutes ago, six counties in California have a shelter-at-home order. Is that different from the strong advice that you and your [inaudible] –

Mayor: Again we're –

Question: Is that something that you're considering or talking about?

Mayor: We're looking at everything in anything and we're going to announce as we go along when we think the next step up the ladder is. So, some places are doing curfews – that's a new thing – the shelter in place. We're going to make decisions as we go along.

Question: [Inaudible] the Governor asked for contingency plan for daycare and, you know, the learning substitutes for schools [inaudible] 24 hours. Have you turned that in? Or is it going to be ready?

Mayor: We're looking at the details of what the State needs, but we've obviously announced clearly that on Monday there will be for the children of essential workers for the children of the folks we need to deal with this crisis. There will be that in place. We've obviously announced a distance learning plan, so, you know, a lot of pieces are already on the table. We're happy to go through all that with the State.

Question: Just to clarify –

Mayor: Okay, we've got to go fast, seriously, I have a lot of work to do. So, go fast please.

Question: The 1,200 beds, you've got Coler, you've said – is that a vacant –

Mayor: Coler was an active H + H facility. You want to jump in quick and explain?

President Katz: Because, as the Mayor has said, Coler was previously used as a hospital, it has all of the right ingredients such as hookups for water, hookups for oxygen, electricity. Likely we will use it to take patients who are not intensive care level but who need a hospitalization, put them there so that our active hospitals are able to take care of people with ICU conditions.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: [Inaudible] Central Bronx. There's a nursing home facility that's private that we are going to be able to contract with and take over. And then there's Westchester Square Hospital, 150 bed capacity. That's a voluntary hospital.

Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] How did it go today? How many kids showed up?

Mayor: I don't know if we have it already with just early in the day, but, if you have it, let's talk about it.

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, we had a little over 14,000 students that showed up and picked up a breakfast or lunch, or breakfast and lunch. I just want to remind everybody, this is the very first day, we made an announcement yesterday. So, if parents are still figuring out their situation, their circumstances, we're expecting that number to continue to increase over the course of the days and weeks.

Question: The NYPD's and enforcement, I guess it's going to be a short-lived rule at 50 percent capacity in bars and restaurants. You just get a sense of how that –

Mayor: There will be a lot of enforcement. I don't know about last night, I haven't gotten a report on that, but there'll be a lot tonight because we obviously need to make sure that people still respect the 50 percent up until the point they closed and then that they actually close. So, there'll be a lot of enforcement out there.

Question: [Inaudible] recommended today that people of 10 not gather in the same spot. Dr. Barbot was saying six feet of distance. How much of that is your administration adopting for its own workforce? You know, there's 30 or 40 of us here in this room.

Mayor: Yeah, I think this is the last time we'll be gathered. It's been great, but I think this is it. We're either going to go to a much bigger room where we can spread everyone out a whole lot and scream across the room at each other, or we'll just do everything through a conference call or some other form. But look, everyone's adapting in real-time. It's strange for all of us here. We're used to nonstop activity in this building. You know, all of us here for more than six years. It's really hard to suddenly turn all that off. But we're going to make major adjustments and we're trying to do that all throughout our workforce. It won't happen instantly, but that's, we're trying to get everyone to be.

Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Welcome everybody to our temporary home for these press briefings. And, again, we'll start with this and we probably are going to go to a calling system soon for obvious reasons. But for now, we are here and I have a number of updates to share. Let me start by saying, of course there was a lot of new information every day that's sobering – thank you – and troubling. But there's also a lot of people stepping up, a lot of people helping out a lot of people really coming to the defense of New York City and the people of New York City. And so, there is some good news and I'm happy to announce one piece of good news as we fight this virus and this challenge. Last night, Health + Hospitals, our public health care system reached an agreement with BioReference Libraries and BioReference Libraries, one of the largest testing companies in America.

This is an example of a real public private partnership at a time of tremendous need. This agreement will allow our public healthcare system to ensure that up to 5,000 coronavirus tests per day can be done. I want to say that again. We will have the capacity in our public health system, just our public hospitals and clinics to perform up to 5,000 coronavirus test per day. That capacity will start to come online on Thursday, it will ramp up in the coming days until we reach that daily total. This is a huge increase in testing capacity for the City of New York as a whole and specifically for Health + Hospitals. You're going to hear a little later on from Dr. John Cohen, who is someone I've known for a very long time and have tremendous admiration for the Executiveof BioReference laboratories. I want to thank you Dr. Cohen and your whole team for working so fast and so effectively with our team to come to an agreement and to put this testing capacity online.

So, I'll give a number of other updates and then you'll hear directly from Dr. Cohen and we will start the Q&A with questions specifically about testing and this agreement before we go to other matters related to coronavirus. Once the testing capacity is up, starting on Thursday, the tests can be processed in one to two days. So that's a strong turnaround time, and the focus will be, and we'll say this throughout on those who are currently hospitalized and who are medically in danger and those who are, in general, the most vulnerable, but we're going to be very careful about the prioritization of these tests. Even with this substantial new capacity, this will be a highly prioritized approach to testing. I want people to be very clear that our healthcare professionals are determining those priorities and we're going to stick to those priorities to ensure we can help those who truly need the testing most and to protect our entire healthcare system.

So, want that to be clear. We'll clarify more as we go through the Q-and-A. We're going to – I'm going to say, and I know my health care colleagues are going to say many reminders throughout this press conference that the guidance remains for those who are sick with the cold and flu type symptoms and only have mild or moderate symptoms. The guidance is to stay home, do not go to the emergency room or a clinic, and remember that there are those who are immediately in real danger, who need those facilities to be available to them. The goal for everyone is wait three or four days, if your symptoms improve, then you're good, if they don't or get worse, that's when you need to contact first by phone your healthcare provider. And this has evolved over the last few weeks as this crisis has deepens. So, this is what we need people to do. If you're sick, stay home, do not go to work, do not go out, do not come in contact with other people and then give it three or four days to see if it develops further. So, that's about the announcement today of the 5,000 test per day capacity going to Health + Hospitals.

I want to go to another update, very different one, but very much about how we have going forward, how we'll have the capacity, the medical capacity and all the capacity, logistical support that we need to protect New Yorkers in a growing crisis. About an hour ago, I spoke with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States armed forces General Mark Milley. We had a detailed conversation about the capacity that the armed forces could bring to bear to address a crisis like coronavirus and we went over details in terms of different options of what the military might be able to provide. I want to thank General Milley for his willingness to provide assistance and it is quite clear that our military in a high state of readiness and we agreed to continue to communicate and to work closely. So very, very much appreciate the update that I received from General Milley. And even though we are waiting for a lot to happen particularly decision making in Washington to happen it is comforting, it is definitely comforting to hear of the extraordinary capacity of the United States military and that the military isn't a high state of readiness to be able to provide support to not only New York, but other parts of the country as well.

Now, I want to talk about a question that's on everybody's mind, and that is the issue of shelter in place. This is a reality that is being talked about because this crisis continues to grow. We are all deeply concerned about the direction and the trajectory even as we get new information daily and hourly and we're trying to better understand the specific trajectory. It's quite clear this is a fast-growing crisis. In my view, I think the right guidance to give all New Yorkers is, even though a decision has not yet been made by the City or by the State, I think New Yorkers should be prepared right now for the possibility of a shelter in place order. It has not happened yet, but it is definitely a possibility at this point. I believe that decisions should be made in the next 48 hours and it's a very, very difficult decision.

I want to emphasize that it is difficult anywhere in the United States of America. It is particularly difficult in a city with such a large population so densely populated together. But I think the point is come with that decision does have to be made. We will be communicating closely with the State. Obviously, it's a decision we want to make in common. And I think it's just right to let people know that there is that possibility. To be clear, if that moment came, there are tremendously substantial challenges that would have to be met. And I don't take this lightly at all. Folks have to understand that, right now, with so many New Yorkers losing employment, losing paychecks, dealing with all sorts of stresses and strains, I'm hearing constantly from people who are tremendously worried about how they're going to make ends meet. And that scenario a shelter in place begs a lot of questions. What is going to happen with folks who have no money? How are they going to get food? How are they going to get medicines? How are we going to ensure in a dynamic like that, that supplies are sufficient for our population? What role does the government need to play to ensure that the proper distribution occurs and no one gets left out? There's a lot of unanswered questions and I dare say those are particularly difficult in a City as large as New York City, but I believe we have to quickly come to grips with those questions and determine different contingency plans while deciding if this is the right strategy to move forward with.

And that statement obviously connects with the update on the number of confirmed cases. Now we have information that is updated since the Governors earlier press conference today and you will see you that the numbers continue to grow rapidly. So as of this hour, and this is again our two hour changes now, as of this hour, the number of confirmed cases in New York City is 814, the sad reality, the prediction I made last week that we would hit a thousand cases this week is obviously about to come true and I'm very sorry to say that. Now, the borough breakdown I will give you now I believe, I think we can confirm this is directly connected to that 814 number. So, the borough breakdown as of this point 248 cases in Queens, 277 cases in Manhattan, 157 cases in Brooklyn, 96 cases in the Bronx, and 36 cases in Staten Island. And again, very sorry to say we have lost seven of our fellow New Yorkers to coronavirus.

We will need quickly support from the federal government. Everything I've talked about so far keeps coming back to the federal government. There's more of the federal government can do to help us expand testing. There is obviously much to the federal government could do to ensure that the military is brought to bear to the fullest extent to help New York City and other areas that have been hard hit by the coronavirus. There is so much the federal government can do to ensure that people have income. Right now, although there are some promising elements of the stimulus bill, there is nowhere near the kind of income replacement that people need in this kind of crisis. I mentioned earlier today the parallel to the new deal. We've got a crisis on the scale, obviously, on the trajectory of both the epidemic we saw in 1918, not the exact health trajectory that, as Dr. Cohen and I were discussing earlier, there was a lot less health care available to New York – I mean, to New Yorkers and Americans in general a century ago. But in terms of the sheer reach of this disease, the only parallel will be the 1918 influenza epidemic.

In terms of the economic dislocation, I think it's fair to say we are going to quickly surpass anything we saw in the Great Recession, and the only measure, the only comparison will be the Great Depression. Hopefully not as bad an overall impact, but I think in terms of the sheer reach, again, that will be the only comparison in the Great Depression. The federal government focused on creating jobs to put money in people's pockets. We can't do that now because there won't be scenarios where people can work in congregate settings. There's so many ways we cannot repeat the model of the Great Depression and the New Deal. It's going to take direct income support on a vast scale. And I have said very clearly, the federal government found a way to come up with vast amounts of money to bail out the banking industry a few years ago, to bail out the auto industry, vast amounts of money for a tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, even vaster amounts of money for endless wars that have yielded little for the people of this country. Clearly, the federal government knows how to spend money quickly and on a huge scale. It should be spent on the American people right now, working people who are suffering. They don't have that income replacement. They will not be able to afford food and medicine and the basics. We are sending today additional requests and there's been a nonstop stream of requests to the federal government.

Three letters going out today, one to the veterans administration and to HHS requesting that unused beds in veterans administration hospitals in New York City be freed up for the battle against coronavirus and requesting that medical supplies be expedited and delivered to New York City, including surgical masks of all the different kinds, surgical gowns, all the elements we need to protect our health care workers and allow them to do their work.

Sending out an additional letter to Secretary Azar, HHS, on specific medical supplies that had been provided, but are insufficient uh in previous shipments we've received. And we're sending a letter to the leadership of the United States House of Representative and the United States Senate imploring them to use their power to ensure that the military will be activated in this crisis and that aid will reach New York City and other parts of the country.

Some quick additional updates and announcements. In terms of food provided through our schools this week – this week, as we've said, all schools will be providing breakfast and lunch grab and go options at each school. Next week we will be opening up an enrichment centers, learning centers for uh children of essential workers that'll be providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We are also determining a methodology to provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner at additional pickup sites around the five boroughs for young people who need them. This will not, at this moment, be at every school. This will be a more concentrated approach, not exactly what we do during summer, but closer to that then to every school building. But there will be ongoing sources of food for students that who need them in a new form starting next week.

I'm going to go through different items. They don't necessarily all connect, but they're all pertinent. There's been questions previous last few days about our budget process update that we intend to continue the city budget process on schedule, according to the law, and our office of management and budget is continuing to do its work to prepare the budget on time. And you should know that the office of management and budget is working remotely already.

An update related to for-hire vehicles, and for this one I will be signing an executive order right now for for-hire vehicles. We want to protect drivers and we want to protect riders alike. This executive order will ban a ride shares and a pooling of customers. This has been done in agreement with a major for hire vehicle companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Via. And the rule will be a one individual customer per vehicle to of course create social distancing as best possible within the vehicle. This does not disallow a couple that is together already, and actually a real couple. I want to be clear with people, a married couple, for example, or people who live together, or a family that lives under the same roof. Those folks obviously have had deep exposure to each other. It's appropriate for them to share a vehicle but not people who don't know each other. So, we will formalize that now in this executive order.

Related to the health and human services field, we have a huge number of nonprofit workers who play a crucial role in providing health and human services to New Yorkers. They're almost 40,000 nonprofit workers who've been under contract with us. A vast majority right now are in a situation – or, I should not say a vast majority – a very large number of them are in a situation right now where their work places may be closed, but their work is still crucial and we have a variety of things we need them to do. So, for approximately uh 40,000 nonprofit workers already working under contract with New York city, we will designate them as essential workers.

Next topic is, one, there's been a tremendous amount of interest in alternate side parking. Starting tomorrow, Wednesday, March 18th and continuing through Tuesday, March 24th, we will suspend alternate side parking. This is for one week, for seven days. This will give us an opportunity to evaluate the impact and see if it's something we want to do on a longer term basis. I want to just to help all New Yorkers to know, these are discussions we have all day long trying to make the right decisions, doing it for a week to see how it goes, makes all the sense in the world. Doing it throughout a crisis that could easily reach months upon months is a bigger question mark because what our Sanitation Department does related to alternate side parking is actually to keep our streets clean, keep our neighborhoods clean. There is a real connection between clean streets, clean neighborhoods, and overall health care. So, we have to be smart about keeping the city as clean and sanitary as possible. But let's do this first suspension, see how it goes. We'll update you as it gets close to next Tuesday on what we're going to do next. But again, alternate side parking suspended tomorrow through, all day tomorrow, and all the way through Tuesday, March 24th, and then we'll get you an update.

In terms of the criminal justice system, there've been some very fair and important questions about what is going to be done differently. First of all, anyone who is arrested and has flu like symptoms uh will not be taken to a precinct, will not be taken to central booking. There will be a specific methodology limiting their contact with our first responders and using a video conference system uh to immediately provide for the workings of the criminal justice system and our first responders being trained in how to appropriately handle that kind of circumstance. That's if they have those symptoms.

Now, another question has been about the number of people in jail and will there be some alterations. We are evaluating right now working with the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and the NYPD, the number of people in our jail system who might be particularly high-risk in terms of vulnerability to the virus and another category of people – those who are incarcerated but are at low-risk of re-offending. We're going to evaluate those numbers and the details and determine if case-by-case any of those individuals should be taken out of our jail system. We don't have a final decision or final numbers, but that evaluation is happening today.

Question came up about business taxes. Here is the instruction – everyone, business owners – everyone should file their taxes on time as normal. We understand some people have obviously a hardship situation. If you have a hardship, you can apply for an extension and if you can prove that your business has been disrupted, we would waive any penalties that you might incur, but the request is that all business owners file taxes as normal to the maximum extent possible and indicate specifically and with a proof if there is a hardship.

It's very important to note that this crisis certainly puts a clear light on the fact that the city of New York does not have unlimited resources. We have a lot we need to cover and we do not have unlimited resources. We need the federal government to play a much bigger role and we don't see enough evidence of that yet. So, our concern is overall when we think about revenue, the impact, all this is happening of course, but we're also concerned we do not see that massive federal stimulus yet. And we do see a lot of volatility in the stock market. So, we are very concerned that we keep our revenue picture as strong as it can be in light of those realities.

Now, very important issue, everyone understands we're going to be massively building out our health care system. We're going to be creating a new health care capacity in our hospitals, but we're also going to be creating health care capacity where there's never been a hospital before because we're going to need this massive mobilization to be able to address this crisis in the weeks ahead. As our health care leaders have said, the physical space in many ways is the easy part. Getting the equipment and supplies, which we do not have enough of for the long haul, we must have federal support for that. But maybe even more challenging – the personnel, the glue of the health care system is the people, the experts, the medical professionals of all types. So, we're launching a citywide campaign and it will look and feel like a war time mobilization message. And the message will be simple; if you are a health care worker, you have any appropriate training, we need you and we need you right away. It's going to be crystal clear. This is so far from business-as-usual, there's no words for it. Anyone who brings health care skills to the equation, your city needs you now.

Now, couple of key categories – there are about 9,000 licensed and retired health care workers who are registered in what is called the Medical Reserve Corps. That corps is managed by our Department of Health. We're going to work to mobilize that corps immediately. It is on a voluntary basis, but we're going to ask all those who are part of our Medical Reserve Corps who can come forward to help, we need you now. Also, licensed workers who aren't in the Medical Reserve Corps can be added to it and that means a number of folks in health care right now could be people in private practice, for example, who are not connected to a larger institution – we are going to need you and we're asking you to sign up for the corps.

The website where you can sign-up is live today. Go to www.nyc.gov/HelpNowNYC. Again, nyc.gov/HelpNowNYC. We need everyone who's able to come forward.

Few more updates. We had enforcement activities this morning by the NYPD, FDNY, Department of Buildings, and the Sheriff's Office out at bars and restaurants to ensure they have closed their in-house dining and have converted to delivery and take- out. We have had a very high level of compliance. There were instances where warnings had to be given and reminders had to be given that initial, and this is initial information, said that was around ten percent of the cases, but overall high compliance and we believe that will only deepen up-ahead and that enforcement will continue so long as we see any lack of adherence.

Few final points, today at 6:00 pm there will be an alert sent to all New Yorkers with an appropriate device. Some of you will remember this has been the same approach that has taken place in the middle of a major weather events, blizzards and hurricanes, or major police activity. You will get a loud audio alert and a vibration. This is happening today at 6:00 pm. We'd like everyone in the media to please let all those who follow what you put out there know. This is to alert everyone to the fact that as we move forward this type of alert will be coming and that we want everyone who can to sign-up for the proactive information; there's still a lot of misinformation out there. So, one, what we're going to say today at 6:00 PM is how important it is to text C-O-V-I-D to 692-692. Or, if you're a Spanish speaker, C-O-V-I-D-E-S-P to 692-692." The more people who do that – and it's hundreds of thousands already – but the more people who do that, the better off we'll be in terms of ensuring that people are getting real accurate information quickly. But it's also a heads-up. The alert will send at six o'clock, which will be in both English and Spanish, is a heads-up to people that given the severity of crisis, they can expect those more serious alerts from time-to- time and to get ready for them.

Before I turn to Dr. Cohen and Dr. Katz, just a few reminders again, if you are sick - stay home. If anyone in your family is sick, they need to stay home. If you're sick, take those three or four days. If you don't get better, call a doctor. Do not go to the emergency room unless it is truly an urgent and immediate emergency. We have to protect the ability to help those who are in greatest danger and everyone has a role to play in that.

And again, the current rules in effect always potentially subject to change. We want as many people in general to stay home as possible. We want everyone who can telecommute to telecommute and when you're trying to figure out what's an appropriate activity or not, the general rule is stay home - when in doubt stay home. But there are exceptions, Dr. Barbot delineated them yesterday. Obviously, if you need to go out and get groceries, that makes sense. If you need to get to the pharmacy for medicine, that makes sense. If you need to get clean clothes, that makes sense. If you need to get some exercise or take your dog for a walk, that makes sense while you're doing all these things, practice social distancing. Keep three to six feet apart from everyone around you to the maximum extent feasible and when you don't need to be outside, get back home and those are simple rules and we'll keep updating people on them as we go along.

There's a big share of personal responsibility in all of this is not going to be easy. This is going to be a long battle, but New Yorkers are the toughest and the most resilient people in this nation. If any place can handle Corona virus, it's New York City. But I always say behind our tough exterior's beat hearts, gold. New Yorkers are very compassionate people. Look out for those in your life – seniors - look out particularly for those over 70, if they need food, if they need prescriptions, if they need help, let's be there for them. Look out for folks who have those preexisting conditions. If we help each other, we will get through this. I'm absolutely convinced if New Yorkers do what we did after Sandy after 9/11, so many other times, we will get through this, but we all have to do it together.

 A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that and I just want to thank you, Dr. Cohen and everyone at BioReference laboratories. I am I literally want to thank you on behalf of 8.6 million New Yorkers. You are the cavalry who has rode to the rescue here and we are eternally grateful. And Dr. Cohen, I'd love you had talked to everyone about the new capacity you're bringing online and the work we will all be doing together. Thank you.

Dr. Jon Cohen, BioReference: So, thank you, Mr. Mayor, first off for your leadership and the privilege actually to serve. I can assure you that the folks at BioReference I can tell you have been working 24/7 for literally the last ten days to get up to capacity for what we think is going to be needed and beyond. So first you know, we take this responsibility incredibly seriously and believe that the private sector is here to assist government and government agencies to combat this epidemic. Second, in particular supporting the Health + Hospital Corporation as the largest public health system in the country. And, of course, serving New York City, serving the most vulnerable and at risk populations in this city is something we think is incredibly important for the private sector to step up to and be part of. Third finally as a physician I take this personally. And what I mean by that is I want to make sure that every one of those front line physicians, nurses, health care workers that are actually putting their lives and their risk in the front to get these people done, to get these people healthy, have everything that they need and in our case, the testing ability and to bring that testing ability to them in the most timely fashion so that they can take care of their patients. We will, as we've stated, we have committed to testing 5,000 patients a day and as a result of that, we will ramp up for them as needed in the next couple of weeks.

Mayor: Doctor, thank you again. We really, really appreciate the collaboration and the partnership and we've got a long battle ahead, but it is great to have you and your colleagues on our side. I want to turn to Dr. Mitch Katz, CEO of Health + Hospitals. And obviously he will describe what this new testing will mean for all of the people who work in Health + Hospitals and their ability to serve people in greatest need. 

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Thank you Mr. Mayor and thanks to you and Dr. Cohen for providing us this capacity for testing. For people who need to better understand why this is so important —remember that not everybody who has respiratory distress has COVID-19. Some people may be suffering from heart disease with it worsening. Some people may have bacterial pneumonia. These are illnesses that typically affect hundreds of people every day at hospitals that we run. What we need to be able to figure out is which seriously ill people have COVID-19 and as quickly as we possibly can. This capacity will assure that we're able to test all seriously ill patients and equally important, it will cut in half the wait time to a final response. So, we will know for sure that the patient is COVID-19 positive or negative and that will greatly improve our clinical care. Let me just say though that while this capacity is wonderful, it is meant for people who are sick and need services at a hospital. The City is working extremely hard and the Mayor's done great efforts on being able shortly to massively expand capacity for testing people who are not symptomatic at other facilities that will be created in non-hospital spaces so that people can be tested in the safest place possible as quickly as possible.

But I'd like to ask all my fellow New Yorkers on behalf of their parents, on behalf of their grandparents, on behalf of people that they know, who have serious health conditions, that right now we need people who are asymptomatic to stay home. We need people with minimal symptoms in the first three days to stay home. We are preparing to take care of anyone who has serious symptoms, people whose symptoms have not gone away after three or four days. And that will all be helped if people who are currently without symptoms or with minimal symptoms will await the greater expansion of testing for them. Thank you. 

Mayor: Thank you Doctor. So just want to ask of our colleagues in the media, if you have specific questions about the testing announcement with BioReference and H + H, we can just get those questions up front. Dr. Cohen may have to leave at some point. So, I just want to give him an opportunity to answer anything you need from him while he's still here. Please.

Question: If it's not automated [inaudible] tested?

Dr. Cohen: So, the original CDC test, as you probably know, was manual and it was manual for the extraction of the virus, the RNA, and then was put on a platform. So, the platforms we're now running, we have four platforms that we've brought up. Each one of those platforms have essentially a slightly different, what we call recipe, but the end result is they all diagnose to a very high sensitivity and specificity, the coronavirus. Those platforms are all automated. And what that means is that when you get the sample, you can put the sample right onto the analyzer and then it takes it through the entire analysis.

Question: In a best-case scenario, what does this additional testing, 5,000 per day at city hospitals supposed to yield for us? Once we've had that kind of increase in data, why is that a good thing?

Mayor: Well, it's not just about the increase in data, it's about the ability for all of our health care professionals, at Health + Hospitals to actually do their job more effectively, to understand who needs what help and prioritize it. Dr. Katz is going to explain it, I'm sure more eloquently than I. But it is a sea change to go from having minimal capacity to have a reliable capacity daily which, we're talking about the entire Health + Hospitals system. The largest public health care network in the United States of America went from, you know, a very tenuous situation to now having its basic needs guaranteed for the foreseeable future. That's a huge deal. But Doctor, maybe you can make it a little bit more day to day. Explain the reality?

President Katz: Sure. Three things - we will cut the time it takes to get a result in half. Which is very important for me to be able to correctly manage patients with serious disease. It will ensure a sufficient capacity. So, right now, I have been able to get test results more in the three days or four days, now I'll be able to get in much shorter. But also, there was no guarantee as our numbers grew that that would be able to be continued under our current lab arrangements. And third, while this arrangement is just for Health + Hospitals, it really helps everyone because it means if I'm sending my specimens to Dr. Cohen's labs, it opens up capacity at the other commercial labs to be able to provide rapid responses for their hospitals. So the more labs that come online, the more help it is to everybody no matter who has what arrangements.

Question: A quick follow up Mayor. Since you were accurate or likely to be accurate about the 1000 cases probably as soon as tomorrow. Are we still in an exponential situation where by next week you're looking at 10,000 cases or even more?

Mayor: Look, we're certainly going to have thousands of cases next week. I don't want to give you an exact number yet, but you know, it's conceivable to be in the, you know, a number of thousands, so we'll get to a better guess. It's not that long. I can say it this way, it's not that long until we hit 10,000 cases. That is a true statement. Whether it's next week or some later period is not that far off. But that's why we are racing against time to set up the expanded medical capacity in this city and to ensure — coming to you — and to ensure that we have the testing capacity we need. I'm going to ask before going to the Deputy Mayor, I'm going to pass it back to Dr. Katz in a moment on a practical point, but I want to just make an obvious statement. New Yorkers are self-reliant. New Yorkers are resourceful. This is what we do. We have not been sitting around crying about the fact that the federal government never really showed up. Once we understood there was an opportunity to work directly with Dr. Cohen and his company we just went and did it. And we're going to do this all along. Look, I am praying our federal government will actually come into this crisis and help us. But I don't sit around as assuming that. We're going to build our own new health care capacity. We're going to recruit our own professionals. We're going to find our own supplies, whatever it takes. It would be a lot nicer if we didn't spend weeks and weeks, even now almost months, pleading with the federal government on testing only to get very mixed results. But here we are. So, from this point on we're going to be absolutely self-reliant. God bless the child that's got their own and maybe one day we'll be pleasantly surprised and the federal government shows up. But Dr. Katz, I think it would really help everyone, all of us lay people to hear you say the difference when you're in the middle of all the work you're doing, especially in a crisis, you have a patient, you get that test back. The difference for the health care professionals, if it's positive or negative, what it helps you do and adjust. Just help people vividly understand that. 

President Katz: Sure. So, I think the easiest way to think about it is that just because we're in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic doesn't mean that anyone has cured bacterial pneumonia, tuberculosis, congestive heart failure. We're doing our very best to keep people who are minimally symptomatic away from the hospitals, but we have people with serious respiratory diseases that are not COVID-19 and I need for any of those patients to be able to know whether I'm dealing with COVID-19 and I should treat it as COVID-19 or whether I'm dealing with a bacterial pneumonia or tuberculosis or someone with congestive heart failure because the treatments differ. It also affects our ability, right —the person with congestive heart failure needs to be kept as far away from possible from patients who have COVID-19. Right. And increasingly in our hospitals, we're now, because we have so many cases, we are dedicating wards to people who do have COVID-19. By having accurate testing, I can put those people who have serious respiratory diseases that are not COVID-19 as far away as possible and with different health care providers, then those people who have COVID-19.

Mayor: Deputy Mayor?

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: I think that was the first part of my response. You asked, I was going to try to answer your first question in two parts. One is the test is very important for the individual patient's management. Dr. Katz just explained all the details on why it's better if you know for sure. Also protects the health care workers. If you know for a fact that you have a COVID-19 positive patient, you protect yourself in a different way. The second utility, which is also as important, in order to understand how the epidemic is evolving, you want population-based numbers, you want to be able to collect, as much as you can of information and begin to plot it in a map across the city to be able to detect where the activity is surfacing, one way or another.

Mayor: So, I am staying on testing to see if there's anything else on testing and we'll go to other COVID-19 topics. On testing, Rich?

Question: So, the Doctor approached the City? Or the City approached the Doctor? How did it work?

Mayor: As soon as we heard, and again, Dr. Cohen and I have a long, a wonderful relationship. The second I heard that his company had capacity, I had his cell phone for many years. And I called him on his cell phone and to his great credit he was, he said, we want to help the City of New York. We have capacity now. We need to come to a deal as quickly as possible so we can get this up online, and immediately put our Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Melanie Hartzog, on the line with him and they struck a deal. And here we go. So, it was very, very fast. But it was great that we had the preexisting friendship and it was great that he was so ready, willing and able to help. Eric?

Question: Two things. Number one, when will it be up fully to 5,000 tests per day?

Mayor: So, I'll just start and say, Thursday will be the first day to receive. It will take some time to ramp up, but —

Dr. Cohen: We'll ramp up to the 5,000 as needed. We're predicting that's not going to be 5,000 on Thursday. It usually it'll be a couple of hundred — we'll see how it goes. We are prepared to do the 5,000 on Thursday, but I doubt that that's going to be the need for the first couple of days based on what we've seen today for the other hospitals.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Well, Erin, I'm going to jump in and then Mitch can be more exact. The numbers to question Andrew raised, you know, this is all about the numbers. If we're going to be next week, thousands of cases we're on a path to 10,000. The sheer demand is going to keep growing and obviously you have to test a lot of people. You don't only know in advance who's a positive. So I think it's fair to say over the next week, two weeks, that demand is going to grow intensely, but we can't give you the date yet. We'll keep you posted on that. Do you want to add? 

President Katz: So yes. The promise is that they have capacity to do it happily. Today, I don't have 5,000 people who may have COVID at my hospital per day. But by next week I might. And so it's not a ramp up in the sense of Dr. Cohen's lab having to ramp up. I don't yet have 5,000 people a day in the hospital who I think might have COVID-19.

Question: I guess related to that. I'm a little confused because you were saying a few days ago that anyone who has the correct symptoms, fever, cough, should be tested. Now you're saying you are going to be prioritizing, restricting even as it sounds like you're saying, you don't have 5,000 people to test. So why not just do all 5,000?

Mayor: Because everything is changing very, very rapidly. We're you know, even compared to last Friday, it's a whole other world. We are preparing for an onslaught and it's coming very, very fast and we have to prioritize and the testing capacity is going to be taken up very quickly is our prediction. And look, if we can continue to add more and more testing, we can then develop new rules. But right now, just like the point about why we have canceled elective surgeries, why we are building as we speak, new medical capacity, including the tents that are going to go up, the new buildings that are going to be acquired. We're in a period where we have very few days and weeks to prepare for a massive number of cases. So that's the entire focus right now. And we have to realize the extent of this crisis and be prepared to deal with people in greatest need consistently. And that's why that three to four days, that was also different, Erin. A couple of days back, our health care professionals were saying one to two days. That had to be changed. You're going to see change all the time. So every question is valid and I appreciate the question. I'm only going to remind everyone in the media and I would say it to all my fellow New Yorkers, if you say aha, you have a different answer today than a few days ago, that's often going to be the case because we are in a rapidly expanding crisis. If you say we said something a few days ago and we've changed it today and it actually doesn't make sense and we haven't explained it, then we have to explain it better. But there will be many times where, like, you're absolutely right. The message changed over the course of a few days because the reality has changed. Please go ahead. 

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: We are at – as we've been saying, the character of this outbreak is changing and with widespread community transmission where New Yorkers are more likely to get COVID-19 from their neighbor than they are from someone who has traveled. I think we're at a point in time where we need New Yorkers to pay attention to their symptoms, not so much whether they're being tested. Because we're at a point where we want people who have mild symptoms to stay home. Right? We've been telling folks, if you've got fever, cough, fever and shortness of breath, stay home. Stay home for three or four days. If you're not getting better, then reach out to your doctor. We are past the point and this builds on what Dr. Katz is saying. We need now the testing capacity to make treatment decisions for people who are hospitalized and not getting better. Whether or not someone who's at home, not feeling well, honestly, it doesn't matter if they get a test because I want them to stay home. I want them to stay home until they're better. If they're not better than I want them to call their doctors. Which is a change in messaging, right? Before we were saying stay home for three or four days. Now I'm telling you don't call your doctor at least for three or four days and having a test doesn't really matter because most people, 80 percent of people will have a mild course. Where this makes a difference and a critical difference, is for those people who do end up in the hospital and for those people especially who are in critical condition, we want to make sure that their doctors have all of the information that will give them the best course of action and help us minimize the potential risk for New Yorkers.

Mayor: On testing one more time, see if anyone has — go ahead.

Question: Did you, is there a cost figure of this? And is there a maximum capacity [inaudible]?

Mayor: On the cost — first of all, just we went over this earlier as we were preparing. When someone goes to H + H if they have insurance, you want to take it?

President Katz: If they have insurance, we'll bill the insurance. If they don't have insurance, they'll not be charged in any way for their test. 

Mayor: So, that's the personal reality. On the City budget reality. If it goes to insurance, then obviously we're not paying for it. If we have to pay for as a city, it would be eventually and heavy, heavy underlying eventually, federally reimbursable. So, this is something where we will front the money as much as it takes. This is — there is no outer limit here. As much as it takes but in terms of where capacity can go, we're going to work with Dr. Cohen to see if that 5,000 number can be intensified. What we're also doing simultaneously is looking for every other testing source that we could possibly get our hands on because we are very concerned about the overall trajectory here.

Question: [inaudible] maybe can you talk about what the scenario would look like in the city if you were doing 5,000 more tests a day – would that mean thousands more people would be in the hospital? You know, what would that scenario look like [inaudible] that many tests per day?

President Katz: We're certainly planning for a scenario where there could be thousands of patients in our hospital who are seriously ill. And as the Mayor has said, we're working very hard to expand capacity both at our physical hospitals and at other sites.

Mayor: Rich?

Question: [Inaudible] 14 that have come up so far. How many [inaudible] in the hospital?

Mayor: I have left my chart behind – do you have it? You can hand it to me.

Commissioner Barbot: 124

Mayor: Well, let's see if we – I'm sorry. We're confirming and obviously the doctor's ahead of me, but I want to make sure we all were working from the same timeline. Based on the 814, 124 in the hospital. Okay. On testing. I'm just going to do one more around if there's anything specific testing, then we'll open up to other coronavirus questions. Last call on testing. So, Dr. Cohen, if you want to stay, stay, if you can, and if not, we understand or if you get called away. Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: On the shelter in place. You just – to clarify you said sometime in the next 48 hours you'll decide whether you're going to –

Mayor: This is a decision that obviously we want to work with the State very carefully on. I believe based on the constant updates that I am getting that – and the numbers you're seeing before your very eyes – that the City and State should work together to resolve this issue within the next 48 hours and that all New Yorkers need to understand it is a possibility that this will have to be implemented. We have not made that decision. I don't want to speak for the Governor. I want to simply say I think it's gotten to the point where a decision has to be made very soon and we have to work together to determine a common strategy and our teams are talking to, and will be talking to get to that resolution.

Question: How concerned are you that even suggesting the possibility will make the next 48 hours a frenzy at grocery stores and other places.

Mayor: I think – first of all, we've seen a huge amount of stocking up. At this point, that's my polite phrase for it. I mean obviously people have gone out and constantly are clearing the shelves. I, of course, am concerned because I want to make sure that people as much as possible recognize how important it is to share with other people. And I know that's hard to get across, but especially thinking about the folks in your life, older folks, folks with disabilities, folks with serious medical needs, making sure they have everything they need and sharing what you have with them.

But I just think it's very important to be transparent and honest about what's going on. I think the time has come to make that decision. I don't think it's an easy decision. And I would say, you know, and I feel the State is grappling with the same things we are. Once you do something like that, you have cut off a lot of people's jobs, which I hate. I hate the notion a lot of people would lose their livelihood. And then I'm very worried about not only do they lose their livelihood, but then how do they afford food and medicine and all the basics. We can, you know, do a lot to stop evictions. So, God forbid someone can't pay the rent. If we can make sure there is no evictions, they can hang on and make it up later, you know, but food, you got to pay for food, you need food, right? You need medicine.

We have to create backup systems on the public side to help those who might end up in that situation. I will affirm to you, Andrew, federal government could have done all of this weeks ago where they had created income replacement or, you know, a major food relief program or any number of things – a supply program – so we could make sure people have their medicines. None of that's happened. We don't know if it ever will. So now we're put in a difficult situation of trying to create something we've never done before, but one of the most challenging parts of that decision and it gets a lot harder when you're talking about 8.6 million people concentrated in one place, is how do you ensure not only a consistent food supply, but it gets to everyone who needs it regardless of the ability to pay, how do you ensure that medicines, including prescription medicines, get to those who need them regardless of ability to pay? We have to figure out that part of the equation. We're not there yet. Go ahead.

Question: Would the shelter in place system be unprecedented for New York City? And can you talk about how it will be enforced, would the military be involved, and how would you ascertain that folks are indeed going out for groceries or other essentials?

Mayor: Your first question answers a bit of your second question. We've never been here before. I have never heard of anything like this in the history of New York City. We can all check our history and if anyone knows something jump on in. But we – a lot of us have been doing this work a while and never heard anything even close to this. We're going to have to create it from scratch, if we do it. To your second question, I would say I do not assume the military. One, they're not here – and again, they're extraordinary and I think we would all take heart to see the military involved more deeply, but they're not involved in that way at this point. And you can't assume, nor can you even assume where the need might be greatest in this crisis, that could shift radically.

So, what we would do if we got into that situation, we'd work with the State and we would use the NYPD, obviously. I think we have a lot of other agencies that could play a crucial role like the FDNY. And we would I think have to create some kind of monitoring system that made sense, that respected the fact that people still do need – even under the model in California right now, and I've read the specific ground rules of that model, it leaves leeway for going to the grocery store, going to the pharmacy, and other things. The model in Italy is stricter, as I understand it, but still leaves leeway for going to the grocery store and the pharmacy. Some kind of method for knowing if people are actually doing one of the things authorized or not. And a lot of presence out on the streets to enforce. But we would have to create that from scratch. Yeah?

Question: The Governor said that in order to do a shelter place [inaudible] sign off on it. So have you spoken with them or [inaudible] –

Mayor: As I said, this is a decision we would have to make with the State.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Variety of conversations at the staff level constantly. I look forward to talking to the Governor directly about it. But it's a very serious, complex decision.

Question: Mr. Mayor, have you yourself decided whether this is necessary [inaudible] –

Mayor: Not fully. I see the numbers escalating and I'm very concerned, but I also could not be more clear that the – what we would need to make it work and to compensate for the problems it would create, we do not hold that all in our hand right now. And again to the process of decision making, which is nowhere near as simple as I fear some people think it is, when you think about taking an action like this, upending people's lives, you have to feel you can somehow compensate for all the other things that occur and ensure that people are safe, are healthy, you know, have enough to eat. That's a lot of moving parts that at this hour we don't have all of the answers for. We'd have to feel we either have the answers or we believed we could get to them quickly enough. So, I am very sober about the extent of the crisis. I am very sober about what it's going to do to our health care capacity. I think we're in a race against time right now, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers that would make me fully comfortable about shelter in place.

Question: [Inaudible] Mr. Mayor or Chancellor Carranza [inaudible] –

Mayor: I couldn't hear the first part. I'm sorry.

Question: Today, President Trump announced [inaudible] sending a check [inaudible] if that happens [inaudible] what it's going to do for all the undocumented immigrants who work in the city, if there's going to be any economic relief for them because [inaudible] losing their job?

Mayor: Well, first of all, I'll say to the notion of the $1,000 check, although it's better than nothing, it's not going to last long. I don't think the idea here should be to send everyone $1,000 and feel that you're absolved by doing that. I think it's about the reality of people's lives. Folks already – so many working people in this city just in the last few weeks have lost thousands and thousands of dollars of income already, already. So, a one-time check of $1,000, who wouldn't take it, but that's not the same reality as being able to sustain a crisis that could be months and months. I would like to see a serious effort to bail out working people and support them with something that is much closer to income replacement.

But for undocumented folks obviously, look, they're going to bear a lot of the brunt of all this. Whatever shape the next steps take. A lot of undocumented people right now have lost their work, obviously, more will. What we do is what we always do. We provide help to everyone regardless. So, if people need food, doesn't matter documentation status, need health care it doesn't matter. We would try and provide support across the board and we're never going to ask people documentation status.

Question: Chancellor Carranza, today [inaudible] too many meals were just wasted. For example, in five different schools there were no kids picking up the meals. So is there any plan to [inaudible] trash because there wasn't kids picking up.

Chancellor Carranza: Well, the food should not be in the trash. We actually have food that is food-stable. In other words, it can be refrigerated. It can be used again. We also are working with the Mayor's Office and City agencies to get food that cannot be reused into the hands of local community-based organizations, other organizations that feed the poor and the hungry as well. So, if any food's being wasted, I need to know because that's not what should be happening. Yesterday I said that there were about 14,000 youngsters that availed themselves of a free breakfast and lunch. Today that number is 53,000. So, as I mentioned yesterday, we expect that as family situations become more and more stable, more and more of those children are going to be able to come in and avail themselves of lunch and breakfast as well. We expect that number to increase.

Mayor: Okay. Bobby?

Question: [Inaudible] shelter in place, obviously, you haven't developed the details, but you talked about [inaudible] pharmacy in general how would shelter in place be different from what people are? [Inaudible] –

Mayor: Sure. No. First of all I am going to – this something where a decision has not been made, needs to be made together with the State. We've never done it before. We've never even done anything close to it before. So this is, you know, trying to make sense of the situation as best we can. I think we've got initial interesting information from California, the way they set up their model, which is, you know, a step – definitely a step more strict than where people are right now. And I think Italy, from what I understand imperfectly, we're continuing to study, is a step even more strict than that. And the way I would say it is, right now, people are still going to work who are not just essential service workers. In a shelter in place scenario, to the best of my understanding, you know, you have to be a police officer, firefighter, health care worker, transit worker, or any number of people are determined to be essential to the continuance of society.
But if you're someone that works in retail, if you're someone that works in, you know, food service, all sorts of things, your work is going to be closed down unless it is being rerouted to an essential need. So the fact is, it's a much tighter reduction of the workforce and of the amount of people who are out and you have to have a reason to be out that aligns to being essential in terms of moving around from place to place. What I understand in the, again, this is only initial, the California model, what I'm seeing is they leave space for, you know, if you want to go out and get some exercise and you're socially distanced, you can do that. But that's not the same as, you know, going to work at your tech company, right? That's not the same as, you know, going to your little league game, right? All that stuff is gone. It is if you want to go out and get some air and exercise, you do it in a very limited way and you socially distance.

So it's taking some of the rules that we're encouraging people to follow now, making them tighter and reducing the workforce greatly and reducing travel greatly. And then the next step, again, I'm the layman and my colleagues can jump in, but the Italy version is even tighter still. As I understand it, beyond the essential service workers. Italy is basically, grocery store and pharmacy – and they have the ability for the police to stop you and confirm that you're going to one of those places and that you are supposed to be out on the street to do just that. So it's all about levels of restriction and enforcement. I don't know – is that in the ballpark?

Commissioner Barbot: Yep, you got it.

Mayor: Okay, he judges have spoken, go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] Councilman tested positive, just your quick reaction and have you had any contact with him recently?

Mayor: I have not at all. I'm sorry that he's going through this and, again, I'm hoping – I know Richie is a very, you know, he's a young, healthy guy. I'm hoping he comes through it very smoothly.

Question: [Inaudible] St. Patrick's Day parade held an event, I think it was early this morning [inaudible] few thousand people. Is that a bad idea?

Mayor: I think for a parade that's been part of the fabric of our life and this is an amazing statement to make for almost a quarter-of-a-millennium since before I believe the founding of the Republic. I understand they weren't – I spoke to Sean Lane, the chairman of the parade, they were in just pain and agony that this parade went off every year from its founding until now. And this is the first time in war and peace and anything else that's ever happened in history, the parade was shut down. I think there's a lot of pain. There's a lot of pain right down the Irish community that honors St. Patrick's, honors that parade. So I think what they wanted to do was do some small symbolic effort to keep continuity with all those hundreds of years of tradition. If they kept it to a few dozen people, I think that's honorable. They obviously stayed within the rules. Okay, who has not had a chance? Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] details. I think Dr. Katz said [inaudible] the City had 5,000 ventilators, he thought that that was sufficient. Is that number still right?

Mayor: We continue –

Question: [Inaudible] –

Mayor: Let's be clear about the word sufficient and timelines – and Dr. Katz will jump in – but based on what we knew then we thought it was a good number. We continued to check and we're checking every conceivable existing source of ventilators in the city to make sure where we're at. My understanding is that number approaches 5,000. I don't have an exact one for you, but we're still in that ballpark. We need more for where we are now and where we are going. So originally you know, we obviously hoped that it was not going to project the way it is now. The way it is now, we're going to need – there's a point coming when we're going to need more.

President Katz: I agree. I mean actually what I said was that we had – that Health + Hospitals has over 1,000 and we represent about 20 percent of the city in general. So I estimated for you that if you wanted a ballpark figure would be around 5,000.

Question: [Inaudible] city will need as the crisis continuous –

Mayor: We are going to need a whole lot of everything. There's your first estimate. I mean we – look, we're trying to figure it out. What I would say to you is constant expansion. I don't mean that to be flip or evasive. I mean that it's literally an unknowable number, first of all. And second of all, if we can get it, we want it. If we can get help from FEMA, if we get help from the United States military – anything we can get our hands on. We're the biggest city in the country. The numbers are growing rapidly. We're going to get our hands on every medical facility, every – if we can get, as we did the other day, a former nursing home, a nursing home that hasn't opened – anything like that, we're going to be looking at hotels, anything we can get our hands on for buildings, every form of equipment and supply, every professional who's willing to come into our service. We will need it all and it just has to constantly keep growing so we don't have an end point number yet. There's just – the answer is yes to everything we can get our hands on.

Question: [Inaudible] suspension on people moving apartments to [inaudible] and what would you say to people whose leases are up at the end of the month, because this has to be a hard time to find [inaudible] place.

Mayor: I'm a little confused by the question. What do you –

Question: [Inaudible] if you live somewhere and the lease ends at the end of the month [inaudible] would you recommend against that given, you know, concerns about spread?

Mayor: My colleagues can speak to this. I mean it's obviously a very individual dynamic. If your lease is ending and you have the opportunity to renew it and keep continuity, that would be ideal, obviously. I mean people have to deal with their individual circumstance, but I don't know, really, what guidance – have you got something? I welcome it.

Commissioner Barbot: So, the recommendation would be, what we've been saying, if the individuals who are doing the moving are asymptomatic and everybody's asymptomatic, then go about your life, minimize, you know, contact and exposure, and then do it as quickly as possible. But folks shouldn't stop doing the essential things in their lives. Right? We want people to continue with the essentials and if having a stable house, stable housing, I mean that's pretty essential. So we would – I would certainly encourage it, but I would want people to be diligent and vigilant. Right? Those are my two new favorite words. Diligent about hand-washing, covering your mouth and your nose when you cough you sneeze and being vigilant about whether or not you are developing symptoms of fever and a cough, even shortness of breath. I think that we are far enough in this outbreak where New Yorkers should assume that in some place, shape, or form they've already been exposed to COVID-19. And the important thing now is to be vigilant about whether or not they developed symptoms and if they do, to stay home. And if they haven't, then to double down on all of the preventive measures we've been saying, in terms of hand washing, covering hands, and cough, et cetera.

Question: [Inaudible] about the shelter in place, have your medical personnel here weighed in on whether they like that idea or not [inaudible] –

Mayor: First of all, thank you for calling them esteemed. It's a conversation we're going to be having starting today in detail, again, a parallel conversation with the State. But I'm saying as the person who manages the decision process, I think we have to come to that decision in the next 48 hours. So, we're going to get everyone to weigh in as we always do.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I'll let my colleagues – and, again, we're going to be in intensive conversations with the State today and tomorrow, and always respect the role of the State. And let me affirm, I think the State has handled this crisis very, very well and we've been working closely together, all of us, and we've been very aligned on the decisions. I don't hear the word quarantine as the exact equivalent of the words shelter in place. Shelter in place, to me, is a kind of way of life, if you will, and a more total strategy and quarantine suggests when you're dealing with a very specific, narrow area and who goes in and who goes out of that area. I think they're kind of two different things. I'm saying that as a layman, but, again, we respect the role of the State always. I just think it's decision time.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Louder, please.

Question: [Inaudible] get to leave the city?

Mayor: I am not an expert on something that we don't know enough about yet and something that we would have to determine the ground rules of. And, again, I'm going to say it, and I will really appreciate if it's reflected in coverage, because it's true – the actions we would have to take to compensate would be immense and that is a plan we don't have because it's never been done before and it's a lot we would have to work out very quickly. So, this is not a simple decision. This is a very, very tough decision. But how it would work and questions – very fair question like that, I don't have that answer right now because we have not even gotten to the decision of whether we think it's the right thing to do. As we look at it, we're going to try and figure out all those elements. We just – again, it's perfectly fair question, it's just you're asking a question about something we haven't even fully modeled yet.

Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] Dr. Barbot or Dr. Katz. [Inaudible] were they all hospitalized at the time of their death?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes.

Question: The second question is, for City employees [inaudible] they still don't understand their guidance and when they should come to work and things like [inaudible] waiting rooms are still really busy. [Inaudible]?

Mayor: Go ahead. I'm sorry, I thought you were asking someone else. My apology.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: My apology.

Question: So, I've heard from city employees who were still confused with their guidance about whether they should come to work and, in addition, places like the Department [inaudible] is still an open and trials are still going on. Will there be further guidance to say no more OATH hearings [inaudible]?

Mayor: Each thing is going to be – each issue is going to be addressed day by day. There are essential things, essential work still going on in different forms. There's things we might determine to be less essential that we would shut down. The first question was, who could telecommute and who could stagger hours, and that's been advanced substantially. But those examples you gave, to the best of my knowledge, are the kind of things you couldn't do with telecommuting. But I think it's a very fair question – are they now things are kind of arcane in light of this crisis or it could be delayed. You heard, of course yesterday in the executive order we delayed the land use process, for example. So, I think we're literally going piece by piece trying to identify what needs to be brought down next. Even if we're not doing shelter in place, we would constantly be trying to refine that. So, let us agree, we'll give you answers on those two by the next time we meet. Thank you.

Who hasn't gone? Go ahead.

Question: I have a few questions. One is, just a little more clarity on basic [inaudible] not sure what shelter in place, the difference between shelter in place and quarantine. Like, Scott Springer is calling for shelter in place. But the Governor is very adamant that [inaudible] –

Mayor: Again, I tried to answer that a moment ago. I respect – the concern is real, and it's just really, really simple – this is a decision that should be made with the State, it should be made the next 48 hours given the trajectory of this crisis. I don't want to be the guy who defines for anyone was the difference in quarantine and shelter in place, because we're still trying to learn what shelter in place could mean. And obviously, when the Governor says it, you should ask him what his interpretation is. But we – I don't think it's time to say this person likes this idea, this person likes that idea. It's time for the City decision makers to refine our thinking on whether we think it's the right thing to do and how on earth would we do it, and to align with our State colleagues on what they think and see if we can all come to a common vision

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I want to be clear, I have not heard the standards. I don't think we're suggesting – I have not heard of any wholesale release. I assume it's based on certain standards.

Question: [Inaudible] believe it's based on certain standards, but Eric Gonzalez this morning said that he's no longer going to prosecute low-level [inaudible] that would – or, things that wouldn't harm the public safety. So how long is it going to take our city to start assessing on the –

Mayor: The assessment is starting already – has started. That's a decision also I'd like in the next 48 hours – to know who – if we have people in our jail system who should not be there at this point in this crisis or don't need to be there or we have an alternative that makes sense. I want to get that resolved quickly.

Question: Sorry, one more. Ferries are currently serving alcohol and have been called – are currently serving alcohol [inaudible] advertising happy hour still. Is that something you guys –

Mayor: I don't think they're attempting to do anything inappropriate. I think they've been advertising happy hour all along is my understanding. But what is your question?

Question: My question is, basically, if we're closing bars and restaurants, what's going on [inaudible] service and the alcohol consumption –

Mayor: I think – I'm not – you're the first person to ask about that, so I'm just going to give you my commonsense answer. It's all takeout. So, by definition, it fits that model. And the ferries are still part of how people get around and we're still keeping our transportation network up. So, I don't hear a problem per se, but maybe I'm missing something.

Question: But I mean, people are on these fairies for a while, so isn't it creating a situation that's a little bit confusing since they're not on generally traditionally taking it out, they're [inaudible] sometimes 10 to 40 minutes.

Mayor: I appreciate it, and I think you're right that there should be a social distancing dynamic, but I think the core notion this – I mean, I've been on the ferries, it's not a seated restaurant, is not a seated bar. It's a takeout counter. So, I think – an excellent point would be as say, the ferries – we'll follow up – on our follow-up lists with EDC, need to practice social distance into maximum extent possible while getting people where they need to go. But I – at least hearing it on first blush, it sounds like takeout to me and therefore appropriate, but we'll check.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: On what?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I think it's something that – look, we have to look at everything in light of a crisis. The standard with the Rent Guidelines Board has now been established for seven years, unlike everything that came before. We actually look at the full cost to the entire equation, the costs that landlords deal with, the economic factors we take into account, tenants, we look at everything. And that has gotten us to the decisions that have been made over time, including two rent freezes. So, we would start with a proven formula. Whether that formula gets varied because of a global crisis is a great question. It's something, of course we have to consider, but we're not there. I think that's May – I'm not sure I'm right about that, but I feel like it's a ways off. So, excellent question. We'll come back.

Question: Have you heard about a cluster of about maybe a hundred positive coronavirus – positive tests in Williamsburg?

Mayor: If we had a cluster, I assure you, we would tell you. I asked this very day, we do not have any clusters in New York City.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: If we had a cluster in New York City, we would tell you. I asked right before coming out here – I'm not trying to be difficult with you – that's like a giant, giant, important question. I asked right before coming out here, confirming we have no clusters in New York City. Answer – yes. You can look at the people who are the people gave me the answer right here.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah. What I would add is we get results from the commercial labs on a continuous basis and we analyze those results on an ongoing basis. So, you know, as we've been saying all along, things change hour by hour and so as soon as we are, you know, concerned about any particular activity that is beyond what we would anticipate, we look more deeply into what's happening.

Mayor: I'm trying to interpret this note I was given, because it was on the other note. Price gouging – I want to make sure I get this right – I'll mention it proactively. On price gouging, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, 550 fines have been issued since yesterday. And is that dollar figure to the total of the fines? I'm interpreting Freddi's note here. Yes, $275,000 in fines since yesterday for stores that were price gouging on those basic items. I say, God bless the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. And I say to all those stores, you've got to be out of your mind to be price gouging in the middle of a pandemic.

Okay, we're going to wrap up. Thank you, everyone, and we'll have more for you soon.

2020-03-19 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everybody. We are obviously doing something very different today and something we haven't had to do previously, which is to have this update remotely and we're doing that to protect everyone and to show New Yorkers how important it is to practice social distancing. We're all getting used to this. We're all trying to make sense of it. I just want to say my fellow New Yorkers, anyone out there who's scared, anyone who is confused, anyone who feels like we're dealing with something we've never dealt with in our lives, you're right. This is in many ways the great unknown, but I'm also confident we can get through it and I'm going to talk about that in a moment. I'm confident we can overcome it. In fact, my confidence in New Yorkers, my confidence in all of the organizations in the city, the hospitals, health care providers, my confidence in the working people in New York City, and my confidence in our government couldn't be stronger. I'm going to talk honestly and bluntly about what we need from our federal government and how crucial that is in the equation.

City of New York is working constantly to protect our people, I know the State of New York's doing the same thing, and we are coordinated and share goals and strategies, but we all are waiting for federal help that still is not arriving and that is the central challenge. We have to talk bluntly about that and I will today, but to everyone who's dealing with this confusion and these challenges, I feel it. My family feels it just like you. We're all trying to make sense of a new reality. What I'm going to try and do every time I give you an update is tell you the blunt truth and I'm trying to do very hard to make sure I tell you what we exactly know and when we're not sure about something, we need to be clear about that too. It would be a mistake to tell you something certain if we're not certain, it would be a mistake to hold back things that you need to know and it certainly would be a mistake to sugar coat this very, very painful reality.

I think New Yorkers want real talk. I think New Yorkers like it straight and we're going to do that. So, I'll be talking about several things today that are really painful and troubling and I want everyone to understand that. I am not here to give you false reassurance. I have a lot of things I'll say that should cause you to be confident about what we can do in this city. Confident, particularly in the fact that we have the finest health care institutions, the finest doctors and nurses, and all the people that work in our health care facilities, the lab techs, everyone who works in our facilities. This is – there's literally no place on earth with a stronger and better health care sector than New York City. Nowhere on earth and we are going to ask of our colleagues in health care so much in these coming weeks, they are already heroes, but they're going to have to work in battlefield conditions, their strength, their courage, their resilience are all going to be needed. We're all going to be depending on them, just like we depend every day, not only on their work, but on our first responders and so many of our public servants. Everyone is going to be needed. Everyone needs to answer the call. Everyone needs to step up for the good of everyone else.

But despite my tremendous confidence in our people and our ability to serve them, I also have to be very clear about the extent of this crisis. It is unlike anything we have seen outside of wartime, with the possible exception of the Great Depression itself. It – we can make obvious and powerful painful parallels even to things like 9/11, the days and weeks after that. But this crisis is even more unknown in many ways because we don't understand the exact trajectory we're on and we know it will reach very deep into our communities. That is not a reason to be hopeless by any stretch. Because remember, every single piece of evidence we have continues to tell us that this is a disease that for 80 percent of those infected will have very little impact. So I want people to think about this. I'll tell you a lot of things that are tough and sobering, but I want you all to remember this side of the equation. There will be many New Yorkers who never get this disease and there will be many New Yorkers who get this disease, approximately 80 percent who get it and will feel very little and experience very little. But those 20 percent who experience a much tougher time with this disease, people in particular who are older and that means particularly folks over 50 and especially over 70 and it means those, of course with those serious preexisting conditions we talk about so often, lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and compromised immune system. For those people particularly at they're over 50 we're worried and we need them to take extraordinary measures. We need you to take extraordinary measures. If you're in that category of people, we need you to live differently and we need your families to adjust as well. You're going to hear from Dr. Barbot in a few minutes and she's going to talk to you as the city's doctor and give advice directly to New Yorkers in the light of a ever-growing crisis.

But I heard from a friend in Brooklyn from the Midwood community just yesterday and he said something I thought really captured it. He said, and they're very knit extended family over decades and decades of would've been unimaginable to keep his older parents away from their grandchildren. But he said, now he understands because of coronavirus and his older parents who have vulnerabilities of their own, they have to understand this is not the time to visit with their grandchildren because we just can't run that risk. It's time for getting on the phone with your loved ones. It's time for getting on FaceTime, but it's time to make adjustments that wouldn't have been imaginable in other situations, because we've never dealt with this situation before. This is literally unlike anything we have seen in our memory. It will not be the same as the 1918 flu epidemic because for one thing, the health care capacity of this city and this nation are tremendously better public health ability, the information flow, it's night and day compared to a 100 years ago. But in terms of the extent that's the only other parallel we can make in terms of recent health care history, it's going to be an epidemic, a pandemic that reaches deep into our communities. We got to be honest about that. We’ve got to make more changes in the way we live and we got to do things we wouldn't normally do.

I also want to emphasize this is a crisis that has an end point. As I said, it will play out in unpredictable ways and it'll play out for a period of time and that's what makes it different from some other things we've been through. It will go on for months, but it will not go on forever. At some point in the coming months, this crisis will start to abate and we'll be able to start the work of getting our lives back to normal and getting our city back to all the things about it that we love so much. But it will be months, so it will be a long battle. I don't think it serves anyone to be told, get ready for something easy. I think it is much better to tell people get ready for something difficult and something that'll go on for a long time, but also have confidence that we can get through it. And that's what I truly believe.

The numbers all go over with you today are nothing short of staggering, but they are not just numbers. I'll tell you the statistics that I have trouble even conceiving of myself, but I don't want you to think of them as statistics. I want you to think of them as your fellow New Yorkers, every number means another person has been affected by this disease and another family and that's what I feel watching a crisis that is really, really affecting the lives or our people, and putting a lot of people in danger. So, I'll tell you the honest truth and I'll go out of my way in the weeks ahead to always level with you. But I'll also tell you what we can do. And that's a lot. And I will be very honest about what we need our federal government to do because I have to be clear with you. We alone, even if we're the greatest city in the world and we are, we alone cannot solve this crisis. And I need people to hear that, not to create fear, but to level with people.

In the next few weeks with the extraordinary resources, New York City, we will fight this battle no matter what. But as we get into April, the farther we get into April, the more we will need the help of the federal government. It must arrive in time and there is time for that help to arrive but the federal government does not do all in its power immediately. It's as simple as this. There'll be a lot more people who get sick who didn't need to get sick and there'll be people who die who didn't need to die. It's as simple as that. So, we need to act now, and I know our federal government has the capacity. We have the finest military in the world, the largest by far, extraordinary resources, unlike the City or the State. And I always say it very bluntly, the federal government literally prints money. They can create any credit line they want to save the lives of Americans, but we're not seeing that, not even close at this point. So, I'll go into some very specific information now and then you'll hear from Dr. Barbot and then we'll open up to questions from the media and we'll be doing all of this remotely. It's the first time we're doing it. I want to just say to all my colleagues in the media, we'll try and get it right, but it may be a little difficult the first time, but please bear with us as we try and perfect this new system. This is something we'll be having to do for quite a while to keep everyone safe.

I've given you a framework to think about this situation with - and I'll be updating you regularly, but again, it will not be all bad news. It often will be tough information to hear, but not all this bad because in the middle of this fight we have the extraordinary heart and soul and spirit of New Yorkers and here's an example for you. Just on Tuesday I put out a call to retired health care workers and those who work in private health care offices to come forward and join up to serve in the fight against coronavirus. I ask people who have already given so much of their lives to others to step forward and to come out of retirement. I asked people who are earning a living and are not obligated to join public service and I asked them to join nonetheless in the name of all New Yorkers. That was Tuesday. Today, Thursday as of today, 1,746 health care professionals have stepped forward to augment the ranks of those already serving at the front line in our hospitals and clinics. That's something all new Yorkers should be very, very proud of and I am certain those numbers will grow.

This is going to be one of the most difficult moments in New York City history. I ask everyone who has health care training and who can help us to please step forward now and anyone who's willing to volunteer, please go to nyc.gov/helpnownyc, nyc.gov/helpnownyc, H-E-L-P-N-O-W-NYC. And I want to express my tremendous gratitude on behalf of 8.6 million New Yorkers, to all of you who have come forward and are ready to serve to protect all of us and what you are seeing from those retired health care workers and those private sector and health care workers you're seeing in many other ways. The extraordinary efforts of our colleagues in our public hospitals and clinics and all of those at the voluntary hospitals who are already doing so much. Our first responders, the envy of the nation, all that they are doing to protect us. Our social service workers who are helping people through all of the challenges they're confronting now. Our sanitation workers who are doing absolute crucial work to keep the city clean while we encounter a health care crisis.

On Monday, I talked about a very, valiant, noble group of workers. School cleaners and custodians and food service workers who went to school to make sure kids had meals even though school was not in session. Those workers showed up at their post to help our children and have enough food to eat. I want to thank our school safety agents and food service managers, including members of Teamsters 237 who have answered the call, stood up to help our children and those families who need food. I want to thank our school crossing guards who have been protecting our children who went to get food. We're going to keep talking from now on about all those who are standing up, unafraid, willing to fight, willing to help others. And I say unafraid, that's not to say they're not human beings, they're not worried like the rest of us, but I say unafraid because they showed up, they stood up, they did the right thing to help others and I thank all of you for that.

Again, all I ask of our federal government is to be as good as the people of the United States of America. Look at these everyday New Yorkers that I've mentioned to you and these are just the health care professionals and the public service workers who are all at their posts doing what is needed. There are thousands of stories every day and New Yorkers helping each other out. I've called on New Yorkers to help the people in your lives, your family, your neighbors, those you worship with, the folks that live on your block or in your building who might be disabled, might have a serious health condition or seniors who can't get around so well, to help them out. Help them with their groceries, help them get the medicines they need. We've been getting wonderful stories from all over the city, New Yorkers stepping up, making things happen right there where the need is greatest. There's so many people helping each other right now. Again, I've just asked our federal government to do its job, help all of us, and that's eventually going to be this whole country. It's New York City today. It's places like Seattle, but we certainly saw what happened in Westchester County. We see other places developing around the country, but make no mistake, it'll eventually be everywhere. So our federal government needs to right now go where the need is greatest and there is no place where the need is greatest in New York State and New York City.

Of course, I am heartened that the Congress passed an initial relief bill, but initial is the key word. It is a small beginning. It's far from what we need. I never look a gift horse in the mouth, but I can say with assurance that the first step taken by the Congress is just a small first step and we need a huge stimulus and relief bill immediately that puts money back in the pockets of people who have lost so much. It helps local governments to keep going and doing the work we do and it really, it responds to the reality on the ground, particularly in providing health care for so many people so quickly. Right now, the United States government is not even close to where it needs to be, but I do thank the House and the Senate for the action they took. I am very thankful to the United States military for sending the ship that we've all been waiting for, the USNS Comfort with just a 1,000-bed floating hospital. And will be crucial to our efforts in this city and state to protect people. 

The military, as I've said, I have no doubt in my mind stands ready to do all necessary to help their fellow Americans. I just wish they would get the order and they have not gotten that order.
President Trump, I will only say to the President, I don't understand and I think there are millions and tens of millions of Americans who don't understand what you are doing right now. You are not using the tools of your office. This is one of the greatest emergencies our nation has faced in generations. Every tool must be brought to bear. For some reason, you continue to hesitate. I said it not to be flip, but to note the historical parallel. President Trump right now, you are the Herbert Hoover of your generation. You are watching and waiting and missing every chance to be bold and to act to protect our nation.

Herbert Hoover, his successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, determined that our nation needed urgent and immediate action and created the New Deal and transformed the effort to help our people and saved our country, literally. President Trump is not doing that now for reasons that are absolutely inexplicably to the vast majority of us. But there is still time, not much, but there's still time. The President yesterday invoked the Defense Production Act. I have no idea why the President waited until March 18th to invoke the Defense Production Act, which has been used repeatedly in recent decades. Seems to me, given what we knew about this crisis, given that the City of New York held his first press conference to announce our steps on coronavirus on January 24th, I think the President could have invoked the Defense Production Act in February or even January. 

But he's finally done it and we know the history that that authorization allows for massive actions by the federal government to ensure that companies are producing needed goods and that they get to where they're needed most. However, the President has not ordered any of those subsequent actions, and this must change immediately. Through the Defense Production Act, the President can authorize the Department of Health and Human Services to order manufacturers to provide materials and services and to use their private facilities for manufacturing needed items. That has not happened. We have not seen the order from the President ensuring maximum 24/7 production of all items needed by our health care industry. And I would say it very plainly, every factory in America that can be converted to health care production, to the equipment and supplies that our valiant health care professionals need and they will need even more in the coming months. Every such factory should be ordered on a full production basis, on a level prioritized by the federal government. 

And then those goods must be distributed and it cannot be distributed in a business as usual manner because as I said here in New York City, we are two weeks or three weeks away from running out of the supplies we need most for our hospitals. The only way those supplies can be provided in time, is through the full mobilization of the United States military. At this point, there's never been a greater no-brainer in the history of the Republic. How on Earth is the finest military on Earth being left on the sidelines? That's what's happening right now and I guarantee you go interview our generals and our brave men and women who serve in the military, go interview the average American soldier and ask them if they stand ready to get the supplies needed to New York City and the other parts of this nation that are in such danger right now. I guarantee you two a one, they would tell you that is exactly why they are a part of our armed forces and they would not only await the order, they would welcome the order. But that order has not been given by our Commander-in-Chief and it is beyond comprehension. It is immoral that our President has not ordered our military to full mobilization because this is the great threat to our nation.

We have armed forces overseas who are protecting us against terrorism and foreign threats, but right now we have a domestic threat on a level we have never seen in decades. Our military is the only answer at this point. And if we expect those goods that are produced that we need for our hospitals to get there in time, there's only one organization that can guarantee that. And that is the United States military. When will President Trump give the order? That is my question. When will he give the order? Why is he hesitating? People are suffering now and they will be suffering so much more in the month of April. And the President gives himself an A grade and he congratulates himself and yet he will not act in the way we need it most. This is patently unacceptable.

Our military also, in addition to their extraordinary logistical capacity, our military has the ability to bring exceptional medical personnel directly to where the need is greatest. Our health care leadership here in the city has made clear that supplies and medical equipment are a deep concern. Physical capacity to build out an extraordinary amount of new health care abilities and beds is crucial. But the single most important factor is personnel. We're going to need all the people I've spoken about previously to do all they can do, but they can't do it alone. In our military, our extraordinary trained professionals are used to dealing with the most difficult circumstances and yet they are at their basis right now, all over this country. They are not at the front. The front is here in New York City. Let's be very clear. This is a different kind of war and the front is right here in New York City. How on Earth are some of the finest medical professionals in this nation who serve this nation, why have they not been activated and sent to New York City and New York State and California and Washington State where they could be helping right now? We need them. We need everything that the military can bring to bear.

I've sent two letters this week and I'll be sending many more. Trying to get action and letters are just a way of making a hundred percent clear what we're talking about. This letter to Secretary Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Secretary Robert Wilkie, Department of Veterans Affairs. This lays out very clearly our request that the Veterans Administration facilities in this city, all available beds, all available medical personnel in our Veterans Administration facilities be activated immediately to serve in the cause of fighting the coronavirus. We know for a fact that our Veterans Administration facilities have excess capacity and we know we're in the middle of a national crisis. I know again that the medical personnel in these facilities stand ready to help, but they need the order from these two secretaries so they can provide maximum support to New York City. And the same would be true everywhere in the country. I sent this letter to Secretary Azar of HHS delineating the supply requests again. And this is one of many requests we've made, but I'm doing it very publicly. We'll put this online for everyone to see. Here are the supplies that must be provided to New York City early in April for us to ensure that our health care system, public and private, can bear the brunt of the coronavirus crisis, and serve our people. We need three million N95 masks. We need 50 million surgical masks. We need 15,000 ventilators and 25 million each of the following items of personnel protective equipment, which are health care workers and first responders would use depending on the situation — surgical gowns, coveralls, gloves, face masks. We need these in great numbers. They may sound like daunting numbers at first, but given the extraordinary production capacity of this country, they are very much achievable. If our nation has put on a war footing and our President uses the powers he already has to coordinate and to prioritize through the private sector, the production we need. That's the kind of level of production we need, those specific supplies. We need to ensure that health care in New York City can continue on the level we need to fight this crisis. 

Our Senator – our senior Senator, Chuck Schumer, has put forth a powerful idea. He calls it a new Marshall Plan. It’s a Marshall Plan for our hospitals and I give him credit for this because he's using one of the great examples in American history, the Marshall Plan after World War II, which rebuilt, literally rebuilt the European continent that had been left in ruins after the war and re-established a thriving economy. The Marshall Plan, the original Marshall Plan made the United States the envy of the world and created tremendous gratitude for our nation all over the globe. And that was at a time when we had a lot less technology and many disadvantages just having come out of war ourselves. Senator Schumer's right, that's the right attitude, the right approach. A Marshall Plan for our hospitals for the entire nation would involve massive new investments to support state and local governments that already are doing so much to fight coronavirus. And that are struggling with the challenge in so many ways, to strengthen and build out our health care workforce. It would involve major investments in our strategic national stockpile and our Centers for Disease Control and it would allow for the large-scale infrastructure we need to fight this extended war. So, I want to thank Senator Schumer and I ask all the members of the House and Senate to include Senator Schumer's plan in the upcoming legislation you pass.

Now to the part of this update that I hate to give but I need to about the overall situation. And I will say we will attempt to give New Yorkers constant updates including ones we wish we didn't have to give and anyone who needs an update can go to nyc.gov/coronavirus. Anyone who needs specific information or has specific needs of course, can also call 3-1-1. We are seeing an explosion in the number of cases here in New York City. Now I will be clear that part of that is that we finally have more extensive testing going on. We have nowhere near the amount of testing that we should ideally have. We have nowhere near the amount of testing we should have had weeks and weeks ago to get ahead of this crisis. Nowhere near the amount of testing that a place like South Korea had. And they were able to use testing as a powerful part of a strategy to beat back the coronavirus. We're still far from where we should be, but we have a lot more testing than we used to have. And so it is natural that as you have more testing you will see numbers grow simply because the larger reality is being captured more effectively. But this number is nonetheless very, very painful. I'll tell you that the City of New York will be every day at 10:00 am and again at 6:00 pm putting together our numbers and providing updates as we are ready once they are confirmed. 

So, based on the update from 10:00 am today, which is different from the State’s update, which came from last night at midnight. So, this is, again, a different number than the State, the State had for the city — different number because it is a 10 hours difference. And this'll show you how fast this crisis is growing. At this point in New York City, based on a 10:00 am number 3,615 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in New York City. Again, each of those, a human being and a family represented and that number is undoubtedly gone up since 10:00 am. It's a painful, distressing number. I also have to report another even more painful number. There have been 22 deaths now in New York City directly related to the coronavirus. The breakout by borough — in Queens 980 cases, in Manhattan 976 cases, in Brooklyn 1,030 cases, in the Bronx 463 cases, in Staten Island 165 cases. I'm going to go through some specific issues before I turn to Dr. Barbot and I'll go quick here.

Unfortunately, we can report that we have the first instance of an inmate on Rikers Island testing positive. The inmate is individually in his early thirties. And thankfully at this moment health wise is doing okay. Is in isolation and has been moved to our communicable disease unit on Rikers Island, part of the health care apparatus on Rikers Island. This inmate was in a housing unit with other inmates. All had been checked for symptoms. Eight had been identified with symptoms and moved also to isolation in the communicable disease unit. Question came up several times last few days about those incarcerated and if there were instances where anyone should be released because of particular health vulnerabilities and because their status put them at low risk of re-offending or being any kind of threat. At this point this is an ongoing effort, it will keep growing as we review more cases, the cases are being reviewed by the NYPD and the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and as they reach agreement on an individual case, we start the process to release them. Forty inmates, forty inmates have been put on the list. We are awaiting sign-off - depending on the case - from the relevant District Attorney and/or the State of New York and we intend to begin releases as early as today once we have that sign-off, we will continue reviewing other cases.

An update on testing availability. As we said a few days ago, the health and hospital system has greatly increased its testing capacity. They're now 10 new sites at hospitals and these sites will have the ability to serve approximately 150 people per day. Eight, again, I'm going to emphasize throughout, I know we're going to get this question constantly and we'll keep reiterating - on a priority basis, on a reservation basis, until we have much, much greater testing capacity everything must be focused on those in greatest need and everything will be done on reservation basis. People that walk-up or drive-up without a reservation cannot be tested. We have to keep the priorities tight here, but we keep, we keep working every day to try and expand the amount of testing to reach as far as we can.

The 10 sites, again, will serve 150 people per day – approximately - initially. Again, in every case, we'll look to increase the numbers as much as we can. Eight are already open at Bellevue, Elmhurst, Harlem, Jacoby, Kings, Lincoln, Woodhall, and Queens hospitals. Two will open next week at Coney Island and Jacoby. There are seven new sites at Gotham clinics. Each can serve and test 50 to 75 people per day. All will be open this week and they include Belvis, Cumberland, East New York, Gouverneur, Morrisania, Sydenham, and Vanderbilt. Four new testing centers each will serve and test 100 people per day, approximately two are open at Coney Island and Jacoby, two coming up shortly at Kings County and Queens Hospital.

This is all separate from the State operated drive-through testing center in Staten Island and separate from the five new testing centers that are coming soon in coordination with FEMA that will be set-up in New York City. We'll have details on that as they get solidified. All appointment only, all prioritizing of the sickest and most vulnerable, remembering that 80% of all coronavirus cases will be mild – thank God for those who have them. And again, if you are younger than 50 and you don't have a preexisting condition, those are exactly the people who are coming through overwhelmingly pretty well through this challenge and we want those people – especially - if you get sick to stay home and wait three or four days to see if your symptoms get better or worse. Only if they get worse do you call the doctor at that point.

In terms of our businesses, I want to thank all the restaurant owners, bar owners, cafe owners, all the people work there. You've been put through so much these last days. I'm sorry for that, but this was something that had to be done for the good of the people in New York City. But there have been so many great instances of people who own these establishments working with the new rules, keeping those takeout and delivery options going, trying to take care of their workers and we understand what a strain that is. We understand there've been real layoffs and it's very, very sad, but thank you for everything you're trying to do to keep getting people food that need it and keep your businesses alive to the best of your ability.

I want a note for all those who doubted the ability of New Yorkers to deal with this new dynamic. Over the last few days, we have sent out the NYPD, the FDNY, Department of Buildings, and the Sheriff's office to enforce, to ensure that restaurants and bars that serve food were closing at the appropriate hour, that they were not allowing customers to dine-in. We have seen overwhelming compliance by those who own and work in these establishments. There have been as of yesterday I believe this number is 8,150 inspections that yielded only six violations. That's about as close to perfect as it gets in human life and I really want to thank everyone and thank these inspectors who are doing such important work to ensure everyone's safe by avoiding the social distancing that goes with what we used to know as social life only a few days ago. That helping people not continue the habits we used to have that unfortunately only led to the spread of this disease - these inspectors are doing such important work, I want to thank them all.

On telecommuting, the State issued the new guidance, which I approve of 100 percent, taking 75 percent the number of workers who should be out of their offices even for those businesses that continue in their physical locations. We are working with the State on a proper enforcement mechanism. To everyone, if you still are not yet telecommuting, you must, it's as simple as that, and we need every employer to understand that. And any employee who still has to go to a work site and is not an essential employee, please, if you have an idea of how you could telecommute or some alternative talk to your employer, we need people to be creative here. Anyone who believes that there is a problem with their work site that can be addressed call 311 and we will try and help. Our Department of Consumer and Worker Protection or our Commission on Human Rights can step in if someone is being kept at a work site that does not need to be and is a non-essential worker. We want to make sure that employers really get the message that everyone needs to be home who can be home.

And as to the city workforce, which is about 380,000 strong when you factor in all elements of the public sector at the city level. By Sunday, all nonessential personnel across all of our agencies will be working from home in some form or fashion or will be waiting for a specific assignment. Many of course can do telework. Some we're going to come up with a new way for them to work at home even if it doesn't exist right now. Some may be mobilized to address a food issues or other issues at the community level. The estimate at this point, and we'll have a better number for you by the beginning of next week, but the estimate is 250,000 city workers will be out of their traditional work sites and working from home unless they are given a very specific assignment in the field. As part of fighting this crisis that is approximately two thirds, two thirds of our workforce that no longer are working – or no longer will be working at their traditional work sites. You're going to see a lot of city offices are just shut down because we came up with an alternative and for all city workers with symptoms of coronavirus. As you're going through those three or four days waiting to see if you get better or worse as you're going through this entire process, we will not— take away sick time for anyone who has symptoms and is waiting for clarity about this disease. We will not— take that off your sick days.

Few last points, questions early in the week about food stamps and public assistance. Want to clarify; there are no more in person interviews for food stamps or public assistance. All of that has been converted to online and – phone interviews and processing. Very specific issue, this is something I have to say to people, and it's painful to say it, but I've gotten concerns raised by community leaders. We understand that people at this point cannot in general go to their house of worship. We understand how painful that is for people of all different faiths, what a pillar of their lives, their faith is, and how important their visit each week or more often to their house of worship is. But we are in a moment of tremendous danger and we have to deal with that reality. We have to protect each other. So, I know that clergy all over this city, and I've talked to clergy leaders. I had a call with members of our clergy leadership just a few days ago and there were unified across all faiths, led by Cardinal Dolan unified in recognizing that many, many people will have to forego traditional religious services and clergy had been leading the way and telling people to stay home who need to stay home and then reducing services or closing them down altogether where needed. But what we have heard in some communities is that in the absence of traditional services, some individuals are choosing to create home-based worship services. That per se might not be a danger except when it means in so many cases that large numbers of congregants are being crammed into a very small space, which immediately violates the concept of social distancing. The rule is to try and keep six feet apart or as close to that as humanly possible. Worshiping in a living room with numerous people immediately violates that idea and makes everyone vulnerable. I think something that unites all faiths is the desire to protect each other, uplift each other, respect each other. It is not helpful. It is not safe. It is not faithful to gather large numbers of people in a small space for informal services that would only serve to cause this disease to spread and you know who will then be in danger. Our seniors and those who already are dealing with serious healthcare conditions, I don't think there's any faith on earth that would condone that. So, please, to all of you who are doing this or considering doing it, please stop. Simply forego traditional services don't try and recreate them, if you feel you must do a service that needs to be just a small handful of people, socially distance, six feet per person apart or else you're creating a risk to all those involved.

Close with a reminder, thank God we see that for younger, healthier people, this is a disease that they can see through – and come out safely, overwhelmingly. So, let's keep the focus on those in need those who are most vulnerable and let's help them out. Anytime you can help your fellow New Yorker in need, I know a lot of people have been stocking up on groceries and all sorts of household goods. If you know someone who needs help, come on, don't keep it all for yourself. Share with your fellow New Yorker, that's how we're going to get through this. This will get worse before it gets better, we've all heard that phrase, but this is probably the most blunt example we're going to see in our lives of the notion that this is going to get worse before it gets better. We have to brace ourselves for that, but it will get better, it will get better in the end, and we will see it through

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I want to turn to our Health Commissioner, who I know has a message of real urgency and she'll say it in English and Spanish both. But remember Dr. Oxiris Barbot is the City's doctor. For those who have a doctor, she's also your doctor, for those who don't have a doctor she's your doctor. She is going to tell you now the truth you need to hear.

Dr. Barbot –

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you Mr. Mayor. And I actually, I want to start where you left off in terms of things will get worse before they get better. And actually, what I have been saying is that things will get worse before they get bad and how fast things get better will depend on all of us. This is a sober moment that we are in with regards to the City's health and as the City's doctor. I take pause when I look at the speed with which we are identifying new cases and I take further pause when I put that against precious resources that are quickly dwindling and I call upon all New Yorkers to take this seriously. This calls into action, our personal responsibility, our civic responsibility to ensure that we take every measure possible so that we minimize the potential risk and harm to New Yorkers. Those that are most vulnerable to this virus, those that are elderly, have underlying chronic illnesses and who otherwise would not be able to access care.

Over the course of the last several days, I have been conveying messages to New Yorkers about how they can protect themselves. Those messages hold true, ensuring that we are diligent about keeping up with hand hygiene, covering our mouths and our noses when we cough, and when we sneeze, but the reality is that at this point in the outbreak, we need to do more. We need to do more, if we are going to stay off the onslaught of potential cases that are facing the City and doing more means staying home. If you are not an essential worker, I need you to stay home. If you are developing symptoms, I need you to stay home and stay away from individuals who are at risk for bad outcomes such as those that are over 50 and have chronic illnesses such as those who may have disabilities and not be able to isolate themselves. I need you to ensure that you stay home and you don't worry about whether or not you have a test. I want you to think about you've already been exposed and having a test doesn't really make a difference. The important thing is that you stay home. You stay home for at least three to four days, and that if you're getting better to stay home for seven days or 72 hours after your fever has gone away and if you're not getting better after three or four days, that's when you should reach out to your doctor.

One of the most important ways in which we as new Yorkers have an opportunity to slow the spread of covert 19 is by staying home. Social distancing is the single most important tool that we have to reduce this potential onslaught of COVID-19 infections. It's the best chance that we have of ensuring that our health care delivery system isn't overrun with individuals who are coming to the emergency room or coming to the doctor's office because they're worried, and in reality they have maybe minimal symptoms. This is an opportunity for New Yorkers to step up and to stay home if they have no symptoms or minimal symptoms.

The best chance that we have to reduce the number of people who may ultimately die because of COVID-19 is if we take our personal responsibility in this seriously and if we all take that covenant seriously of civic responsibility to each other's health. There will be, as the mayor has said before, people who will succumb to this illness. But the reality is that if we don't protect our health care system, there will also be other people who die of other reasons because they haven't had the, didn't have the opportunity to access the vital health care that they need.

So this is as much about protecting our resources to treat COVID-19 as it is to protect those precious health care resources so that folks who may develop heart attacks, who may have ongoing needs for cancer treatment, can get secure ongoing access to those important healthcare services.

The last thing that I want to ensure that I share with New Yorkers is that as the city's doctor, my job is to make recommendations that may not be popular, and I don't take those recommendations lightly. I know that asking people to socially distance creates hardships. And as the mayor has said, has said, we are putting measures in place to try and reduce those hardships. But the reality is that unless we take those serious steps to socially distance ourselves for the foreseeable future, we may find ourselves in a place that overruns our health care delivery system and overruns other systems.

So, I need New Yorkers to take this opportunity to only get tested if they're not getting better. To look out for our elders and ensure that they have all the resources that they need to make it easy for them to stay home safely, and to only reach out to their doctors if they're not getting better.

And lastly, though we're asking people to socially distance, physically distance, this is a time for us to come together emotionally and spiritually. I want to remind New Yorkers that we have a tremendous resource in NYC Well. I encourage people to call or text, reach out to NYC Well. The news that people are hearing every day is sobering. And today, I hope it's clear that we are changing the tone. I am changing the tone and that may create anxiety. It may create feelings that individuals need help working through. This is the time to really access NYC Well.

I want to now just make some remarks in Espanol.

[Commissioner Barbot speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: Thank you very much, Commissioner. Okay, we are going to now turn to questions from the media. Want to emphasize to our colleagues in the media, please ask your question, if there's an obvious follow-up, I'll certainly take that, but want to try and get to every member of the media who has a question as we do, even when we're in person. So, I'll entertain a first question. I'll entertain a follow up if there is, but then we're going to aggressively move to the next person to get through everyone. And I know Olivia from our press office will be managing the flow of the questions. So, Olivia, please start the questions.

Olivia Lapeyrolerie: First up is Alejandra, from AM New York.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Speaker Johnson proposed a $12 billion relief plan for our city businesses and workers impacted by the pandemic. Can you share your thoughts on that?

Mayor: Could you repeat the specific figure? I couldn't hear you.

Question: $12 billion. 

Mayor: Yeah. The reality right now, we obviously — there's tremendous need for relief for our small businesses and working people, but that has to come from the federal government. Right now we have to be very mindful that our city government is paying for a lot of extraordinary expenses. And while dealing with real revenue challenges, we're going to keep serving New Yorkers no matter what. But those really big bailouts have to come from the federal government. And that's exactly what Senator Schumer's talking about right now. And he's one of the people leading the way. Federal government is a place that has that capacity. They need to do it.

Question: Thank you. 

Mayor:Thank you.

Lapeyrolerie: Next up is Alex Zimmerman, from Chalkbeat.

Mayor: And just say it a little louder. It's Allison?

Lapeyrolerie: Alex Zimmerman, from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Two quick questions. One is just I know the City had said that they -- that there are about 300,000 families who are in need of devices to access remote learning. I'm wondering whether the City thinks it will have all of those in family's hands by this coming Monday?

Mayor: Okay. We have a special chair, well distanced from me for some of our key leaders of this administration. Chancellor Carranza has now joined us and he will give you the answer.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: So, we're not going to have 300,000 devices by Monday. That's, we never said we would. We do have a plan for having those devices in the hands of our students in the coming weeks. There are 25,000 devices that will be distributed over the next week to families. We are in the process right now of collecting the survey results that teachers and principals have been sharing with families over the course of these last three days that they've been at their school sites. We are prioritizing students in public housing, students that are homeless, low-income, Title I students as priority to get those devices right off the bat. But we will, we are committed to having devices for all of our students. Also, important to understand that schools have laptop carts, schools have laptop computers. Many of the schools are assigning those assets that they have in their schools to the students as well. So, it's not just purely devices that are being purchased, but also schools are assigning devices that they have in their schools as well. The good news as well, is that while we are ready to go in remote learning mode there are a number of resources that are still in-your-hands kind of materials that families over the next few days we'll be picking up as well. So we're going to be transitioning in this way, but those devices will be here in a matter of weeks. 

Mayor: Stay there for a second. Alex, did you have another?

Question: Yeah, just a quick follow up on that. Do you know how many, what the gap will be on Monday? Like how many more you'll have to go by then or, or what the number currently is?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, we don't know that.

Mayor: But we'll keep updating as we get more information.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, we're getting information in real time. So we'll update as we get that information.

Question: And the second question was just I know in the past the City has been confirming positive cases on, you know, like there would be releases if a member of the school community had tested positive. It seems like that stopped and I'm just wondering, like why the City has stopped confirming positive cases given that there have been teachers in the school buildings for the last three days?

Mayor: Well, it's a couple of different things. I'll start and the Chancellor can jump in. I mean, first of all we said you guys, it seems like a century ago, but I think it was last week that we were not going to be able to go over individual cases the way we used to in any way, shape or form. And the number here is staggering obviously. There will be specific situations where we have information we think is crucial to share on a particular case. But I think that that will be a rarity, honestly. In terms of a school communities, well, obviously the vast majority of school buildings are shut down except for that food function this week. And that's going to be reset next weekend to something different where we still manage to get a lot of food out, but it will not be in a all school buildings. We're working on what that looks like. There will be a small number of specific learning centers for children of essential workers. And that's being engineered as we speak too. And everything's happening in real time because none of us have ever done any of this before. We're creating constantly. So I think the fact is that the reality of updating you has fundamentally changed. I think obviously two things. One, going forward as we have ongoing facilities like those learning centers for the children of essential workers, we are obviously going to be very mindful, if any person in that building gets sick, they're going to be immediately isolated and we’ll work in every way to make sure anyone else needs to be isolated will be. But we've entered such a different realm here. I think that Dr. Barbot should emphasize this, that we simply can't do what we used to do even just a week or two ago. But now what's been replaced by general rules for everyone to follow. And this is based on an assumption and it's a painful one for us all to understand, but that coronavirus is now widespread in our city. And so we have to approach it differently. So Doctor, just taking this example, if in one of our feeding stations or one of our learning centers, someone who worked there you know, was symptomatic or later tested positive, how we're going to approach that situation and how people have to kind of live by some general rules now that are different.

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely. So as I've said in previous press conferences, at this point in time with the degree of community spread that we have individuals who developed symptoms of fever and a cough, shortness of breath, sore throat should assume that they have been exposed to COVID-19. And they should take the appropriate measures of isolating themselves, staying home for seven days from the onset of symptoms. And if they have fever, to stay home three days after the fever is gone, whichever of those is longer. But the reality is that when on a daily basis we have new cases that are in the triple -- double digits and the triple digits it becomes, and I'll be blunt here, really meaningless to go through a case by case accounting. What's important here is ensuring that we focus on vulnerable populations, focusing on protecting the health care delivery system. And imploring New Yorkers to do the right thing, to stay home and to not overload our emergency departments. I think we need to be ready to see that kind of volume and to redirect our thinking away from individual cases and how it is that together as a city, we are protecting our health care workforce and we're protecting our most vulnerable.

Mayor: Thank you. Who's next Olivia?

Lapeyrolerie: Next is Andrew Siff, from NBC New York.

Mayor: Andrew. Andrew?

Question: Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me? Okay, Mayor. The question is about this San Francisco style, some call it a shelter-in-place, but I know you and the Governor have been having a little bit of a verbal disagreement about what to call it. The question is, if you're going to issue a directive or a recommendation or an urging that people stay at home, like they've done in San Francisco, why not do it right now? Why no -- why wait until Friday or Saturday or Sunday or Monday? What are you waiting for?

Mayor: Thank you Andrew. Let me try and lay out a couple of facts I think will make it clear. First of all we are working with the State of New York. I spoke to the Governor yesterday. I'm going to speak to him later on today. We need to be coordinated with the State of New York period. That's the right thing to do in terms of being effective for our people. That's the right thing to do according to the law. We will be coordinated with the State of New York and the State of New York has to make the ultimate decision here. I respect that. I respect the Governor. It doesn't matter if we've had disagreements along the way. Right now we're in a crisis together. And I would note that I actually think the Governor has handled this crisis very well. That I agree with the decisions that he’s made, that there's -- I cannot think literally of a major decision that I disagreed with.

So, in this instance, I think that definition really matters and I want to be clear and I think I thought it was understood and clearly it wasn't. That's on me, that when I first made this point, it was as we saw San Francisco make its announcement. It is there, a public health order and they use the phrase shelter-in-place, but with a variety of steps to ensure that essential services would continue. And that people could still get basic goods they needed, food, medicine, et cetera. I think that San Francisco model is a clear sort of humane, smart version of shelter-in-place that really keeps the essentials going but gets rid of everything non-essential. I think it's a smart approach. And anyone who's not clear on what it is or what it isn't, it's not hard to find. Just go on the City of San Francisco website and it's a couple of pages and you'll see exactly what they're doing.

But you know, for the City of New York and the State of New York, the decision has to be made by the Governor looking at all the factors. And I've given him a sense of what we're seeing and what I think we need here. But I also understand he has to think about the entire state. He has to think about the interconnection of the city to surrounding counties. There are real issues. So this is something -- he feels urgency. I feel urgency. It has to be decided quickly what additional steps will be taken. He did something I think, very good today by taking that level, the 75 percent for businesses to clear out their employees and get them home. And I know the Governor's taking a series of other actions to reduce nonessential activity, which I agree with. So that conversation will happen later on today and then I'll certainly have an update for people by tomorrow. Who's next, Olivia?

Lapeyrolerie: Up next is Brigid Bergin from WNYC.

Mayor: Brigid can you hear me? I don’t hear Brigid. Brigid can you hear us?

Lapeyrolerie: Brigid we can’t hear you so we’ll come back. 

Mayor: So we'll come back to Brigid.

Lapeyrolerie: Up next is Erin Durkin from Politico New York.

Mayor: Erin, can you hear me?

Question: Yes, I can. Can you hear me?

Mayor: There you go, loud and clear.

Question: Okay, great. I'm just wondering, is NYCHA Housing taking any particular steps to prevent the spread of coronavirus there? And are there any confirmed cases among NYCHA residents?

Mayor: On the question of confirmed cases -- I have not been told of a case among NYCHA residents, but I also want to note that with the numbers growing it's harder to specifically confirm exactly who is where, obviously. But I have not been told of anything among NYCHA residents. In terms of steps, I know I've spoken to the Chairman and the General Manager, they've done a lot of outreach you know, flyers and, and robocalls and electronic messages telling their residents how to approach this crisis. They have done lots of extra cleaning. Obviously, and we know this from Sandy in the years since Sandy and I know Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell is here, works with NYCHA to keep track of any residents who have particular medical needs, who need medicines, or who are incapacitated need help. So they're aware of who to check on and see if they need anything special. Those are the basics. But I can get you a more detailed update on NYCHA. I'm looking to Freddi. We can have that for you. Get you some of that later day and have more for you tomorrow as well. Is Brigid back or not? 

Lapeyrolerie: No, we're going to go to Gersh next and then we’ll come back to Brigid.

Mayor: Okay Gersh. 

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes indeed.

Question: I may be a journalist, but I first want to say, I hope you and your family and your team are well and safe.

Mayor: Thank you Gersh and you are — that's very much appreciated. I hope you and your family and all your colleagues are safe.

Question: Well who knows. Anyway, there has been —

Mayor: That was not reassuring. We hope you’re safe.

Question: But I have to be honest. Anyway, my team is separated, so that's fine. So last week when you urged New Yorkers to bike to work if they could, there has indeed been a huge surge in cycling. And now new NYPD statistics just released today showed that there has been a 43 percent increase in injuries to cyclists even as injuries to drivers and pedestrians are down by double digit percentages. And you know that cities around the globe are expanding their cycling networks during the crisis. Bogota, Columbia is adding 47 miles of new routes and you've been asked by Transportation Alternatives and by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer to provide those safe routes. When will you act on this?

Mayor: Well, the first I heard honestly – and Gersh, I think you understand, I know you have an area of particular focus. I respect that. I think you understand we're trying to address many, many issues simultaneously. The first time I actually heard it was from the Borough President late yesterday and I think it's an important proposal. So, we will get a sense quickly from our Department of Transportation of where we think there are areas that we can do that in real time. I think it's a very fair point. Wherever we can do a fast expansion, we will. I think there's going to be some obvious limits as we deal with so many other challenges in this crisis. But we want people biking who can. So, I'll have an answer for you on that tomorrow. 

Question: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. 

Mayor: Who's next? 

Lapeyrolerie: Gloria from NY1.

Question: Hello can you hear me? 

Mayor: Yes. Go ahead Gloria.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I wondered if your administration has done any follow up on the reports of a cluster over in Brooklyn as we see them numbers increasing there? And if you have any update or any new information, I know you noted in your remarks, your message to people about religious gatherings, but I'm wondering if part of the reason you did that is because you are seeing an increase in that kind of activity in that particular community? And if your health care officials have any update about the possibility of there being a cluster in that area?

Mayor: So first let me say, I spoke to some leaders. As I mentioned earlier in the week, I spoke to a broad range of faith leaders led by the Cardinal. Spoke yesterday to a number of leaders in the Jewish community who did note their real concern about those in-home crowded services. So I wanted to be very, very clear, but it's not just for the Jewish community, it's for all communities because anybody who in pursuit of their faith understandably wants to keep their services going. I fully understand that, but they can't do it in a way that's dangerous to themselves and others. So that's where I’m being very, very explicit. You cannot have those in-home gatherings that crowd people together. I've asked our Health Commissioner just in the last hour or so whether there are any, what we call clusters anywhere in New York City, the answer remains no. There are areas all over the city where we're seeing major increases. We can say -- the Commissioner and I both would be very quick to indicate if we thought someplace was going through an extraordinary situation. Commissioner will speak to why we think there is some particular focus in Brooklyn, particularly around borough park that is not indicative of a bigger problem than anywhere else but just a different dynamic. But no, right now we are seeing growth in the disease and with some consistency across the five boroughs and that part of Brooklyn is not any more endangered than anywhere else. So Commissioner, why don't you explain why we're seeing some of that concern?

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely. And as you said, and I want to emphasize, we are seeing widespread community transmission in all of our boroughs. And concerns about quote unquote clusters really at this point in the outbreak just indicate widespread transmission. When we have particular institutions that may be more aggressively testing individuals, we may see what we think of as quote unquote false signals. But this is an opportunity to remind New Yorkers that we need to have access to testing for the people that need it the most. People that are in hospitals and intensive care unit and not getting better. People who have been at home and getting worse and where their doctors feel that it is having a test result is necessary for their treatment plan. We are not recommending that there be widespread testing because again, when you've got widespread community transmission and you have symptoms, I want New Yorkers to assume that they've been exposed to COVID-19 and I want them to follow doctor's orders to stay home until they are better. Seven days or 72 hours after their fever is gone, whichever is longer.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Can I ask a follow up?

Mayor: Yeah, absolutely, go ahead.

Question: Thank you Mr. Mayor. I just — I wanted to -- you cite incredible numbers about what the City is going to be in need of 50 —you're talking about numbers in the millions, if the federal government does not step up and you're talking about two weeks timeline. With how — the speed that we're seeing things move at, how confident are you that the federal government will step up in the needed time and what are you going to do? What is the city going to do if the delays continue and we run out of these supplies in the next couple of days?

Mayor: It's not the next couple of days that we're worried about Gloria. I want, please I thought I was very precise and I want to say to my colleagues in the media, you have a sacred responsibility right now and even more so than last week, we are going into a full blown crisis such as we have not seen in generations. You have a sacred responsibility to ensure the information that you portray to the public is accurate. And I would ask you please to be very, very careful not to provide misinformation by accident. I said very clearly that for the month of March, we have the supplies that we need. The City has very strong reserves of the kind of supplies that I talked about. There are places where there may be shortages specifically and we're going to work to get those shortages addressed, but it's not because we don't have strong overall supplies to get through the immediate need. It is going into April that I'm worried about. I don't have a perfect day for you. We're assessing all the time, but it is a day, two weeks from now or three weeks from now where we must by then have had a very substantial resupply. I think the simple way to think about is the federal government has essentially two weeks to get us major resupply or the people in New York City are going to be in much greater danger.

Where do I have confidence? I have confidence in our State government and in Governor Cuomo. I have confidence in our National Guard here in New York state. I have confidence in the United States military. I mentioned two days ago I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff, General Milley, and we reviewed the kind of capacity that the military has to bring to bear in this crisis and what options they might have, and it is a very, very encouraging reality. But the military must be given the order to mobilize and that order has not been given. It's as simple as that. I – Gloria, I don't understand why on earth, I even have to say this sentence. I don't know. I don't think any president in American history would have hesitated to mobilize our military in this kind of crisis when we're not in war time in the sense of a threat to our shores. And we have such extraordinary military capacity available to us. And the crisis is growing intensely and there's a global pandemic. I don't think this is even close. So if our military is mobilized immediately, even elements of our military being mobilized immediately would make all the difference. And if with the Defense Production Act, those assembly lines, those production capacities are immediately activated, we could get a steady stream of supplies that will keep us moving forward.

There's clearly time, but there won't be time, you know, a week or two from now. And so if, and I had this conversation in detail with Senator Schumer earlier today, I went through the exact numbers with him. I understand how personally and deeply he feels his crisis he has put forward this Marshall Plan idea. The word is spreading. We'll ask our entire congressional delegation to fight like hell to get this done. But let's face it, the great irony, Gloria, the fate of New York City rests in the hands of one man, and he is a New Yorker, and right now he is betraying the city he comes from. We are the front line. We are going through more than almost any place else in the country. By pure numbers this state is going through the worst of any state. How on earth is the president sitting idly by and not activating the forces that could help us. So if he acts today, if acts tomorrow, if he acts in next few days, we can and should get what we need. If he refuses to act, we are going to have an extraordinarily difficult situation at some point in the first half of April.

Lapeyrolerie: Yeah, back to Brigid.

Mayor: Brigid, can you hear me? Brigid, Brigid, what's up with your phone?

Lapeyrolerie: We're going to go to Gwynne Hogan from WNYC.

Mayor: What did you say again, I’m sorry?

Lapeyrolerie: Gwynne Hogan from –

Mayor: Gwynne, can you hear me Gwynne?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Okay I got two questions. One just logistical. Can you give us a breakdown of how many cases are hospitalized? How many people are in the ICU and how that squares up with our current hospital capacity?

Mayor: Gwynne, I have a report that is helpful but not perfect, so just bear with me because the last confirmed numbers for hospitalization ICU where as of 5:00 pm yesterday. We're trying to get these numbers to tighten up. You can imagine there's so much of an information flow, we're trying to get everything aligned better. But as of 5:00 pm yesterday, when obviously the overall number of cases was, you know, substantially lesser we had 554 hospitalizations and 169 ICU cases. That was against the base of about, and I say it, you know, approximately about 2000 cases at that point. So, 554 hospitalizations of which 169 were in the ICU. We are going to try and constantly update those numbers and get them closer to real time as quickly as we can.

Question: Okay. And is there any update on increased hospital capacity at that point? Or how does that – what does that out of total hospital beds that we have emptied –

Mayor: The reality – Gwynne, as the executive order that I issued related to ending elective surgery, as that has been fully in effect in almost every hospital now has turned off their elective surgeries. There's just a few that are finishing up now, but basically elective surgeries have been ended across the city. That has opened up a lot of capacity. Early discharges as we talked about. The next phase of course will be building new health care capacity, those tents and other build-outs, but to handle the incoming that has been achievable because so much space, so much personnel and supplies were being devoted to elective surgery that that's not the case anymore. So the system is certainly able to make that adaptation. Dr. Katz told me about his visit to Elmhurst Hospital earlier today where he saw in a place where there's been a number of cases, but he saw the obvious positive impact of getting the elective surgeries out of the way and opening up a lot of space and capacity for the incoming coronavirus cases.

So that I think is our reality at this hour, today. We have to radically expand capacity in the next two weeks, and I think it's hard for us all to fully understand the exact trajectory and we are very careful about telling you what we know and what we can confirm versus what is speculative. But I think if people think about that two-week, three-week kind of dynamic and let's be conservative and just call it two weeks. For next two weeks we have in our hospital system a lot of capacity we can bring to get bear, a lot of adjustments. I'm looking at Dr. Katz right now. Anything he wants to add, he'll come up. And just the power of getting rid of the elective surgeries and getting the early discharges and surging in personnel is helping us immensely. Again, we do have a reserve of equipment and supplies, but after two weeks – just to finish – after two weeks that situation would be a lot harder. So we have to use these two weeks to build out all the capacity we can in hospitals and in new facilities really quickly and we'll get you updates on that over the next couple of days as that is all coming to bear and again desperately need that federal resupply while we're doing that.

Question: Great. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And just, just one question about enforcement. You mentioned that the NYPD was doing some enforcing. Is that of the closure of bars and large gatherings?

Mayor: Yes –

Question: You know, my question is really – it has to do with like all the stores that are open. There are toys stores open, there's clothing stores open, you know, in neighborhoods that I've seen, it's like business as usual except for restaurants and bars. I was just at a factory in Sunset Park where a bunch of workers who walked off the job because they're not reducing staff there and they don't have any personal protective gear and somebody has gotten sick at there. So I just, who is enforcing this at this point?

Mayor: So let's – you said several different things. I'll respond quickly. The restaurants, bars for example, as I said, NYPD, FDNY, Building, Sheriff, all participate in different ways. Lots of activity because it was so important to get it right in the first few days. Clearly, we're seeing tremendous adherence to the law. I think everyone understands how important it is. We'll keep an eye on that. But we have to do new enforcement in different ways all the time as the state is issuing new rules. And again, I agree with those rules. We're going to help enforce in every way we can, by the way. All those agencies have to do what they normally do too on top of that.

But to your point, I do think there's a lot of things still happening. That again, a week ago, I was certainly trying to see everything I could do to keep employment going and keep people having a livelihood and felt very, very deeply concerned about the dislocation that occurred. I feel that still, I feel humanly, you know, deep pain for the families that are running out of money, don't have a livelihood, but I'm even more worried about the lives that are on the line right now because a coronavirus and that's where I want to see us take every step we can take to limit anything non-essential and we will do all the enforcement in our power to make that come to life. So I think there's more that still can be done and that's what we're working on right now.

Question: Is the NYPD empowered to right now enforce the workings or the only 25 percent of – is it any business to staff? Can, it has to be, can be on site, is that factories –

Mayor: The State rule on the businesses, which was just issued by the State, updated the 75 percent. That specific enforcement mechanism, we're working with the State right now to figure out how State and the City can play their own different roles to support each other on enforcement. What NYPD has been doing is the kinds of things we already talked about, the restaurants and bars, and the other things related to immediate health and safety. And I think, you know, as this is going to change, I mean, I think everyone – look, New Yorkers are very, very realistic people. This situation is going to change. What we're talking about today is not going to be the same in two weeks or three weeks. The NYPD is going to be an extraordinary savior here. We need our men and women of the NYPD to adapt to this situation and help us through anything and everything we go through and I know they are the best in the nation. They'll answer the call, but we just have to understand it will change constantly as the rules change, as the realities change.

Lapeyrolerie: Excuse my pronunciation. Next up is Hansi Lo Wang from NPR. Hansi, you’re up.

Question: Thank you very much. Mayor, can you confirm report that 20 members of the NYPD have tested positive for COVID-19 and what is the city doing at this point to ensure that first responders are protected and not exposing the public to any potential a coronavirus infection, given that they are in the role of enforcing a lot of these new requirements?

Mayor: Yeah, we need our first responders. We need our health care workers. So many people are essential. I cannot confirm that number simply because I have not been given that update. I remind you there are 36,000 men and women in the NYPD. That’s just the uniform side. There's, you know, another, I think 15,000 or so on the civilian side. So they're part of our communities too. They're our fellow New Yorkers, so a lot of people will be infected by this disease. Thank God a lot of members NYPD overwhelmingly, of course, are younger, healthier folks who should not have too much of a challenge. But I'm not the belittling it. We are desperately concerned to protect them. That's why we need that protective equipment. We have given from our Health Department a lot to the NYPD. We're going to give them more of – constantly give them more because they need it, they deserve it, but we have to get that federal resupply.

So I would say that all the members and NYPD, all of the members of the FDNY, all the members of our Health and Hospital system, our voluntary hospitals. The city, and I know the State feels the same way, we will do everything we can to get every conceivable supply of protective equipment from anywhere in the nation that we can on the private market and get directly to you. But President Trump has to give the order for the federal government to get you what you deserve. So, I just ask everyone to join in – in issuing the call to the president to release the supplies that the federal government has already, to order the production of new supplies on an expedited basis and ensure that our military distributes them to New York City and other deeply affected areas. Immediately.

Question: I apologize for interrupting earlier, Mayor, how is your office keeping track of confirmed cases amongst NYPD ranks as well as the first responders, given that they do play a big role in how the city is responding to this crisis?

Mayor: It's exactly the same way. And again, the fact that I don't have the latest update is different from the question of how each agency handles the work. I've talked to our Police Commissioner, our Fire Commissioner even long before this crisis. I'm quite aware of what they do. These are a really large, sophisticated agencies with huge amount of personnel. They can always bring more personnel to bear by keeping people on a shift or by using overtime. They're very agile. They're very sophisticated. They have been through situations, the most horrifying situation you can imagine, 9/11, where our fire department, our police department suffered horrible losses and yet made immediate adjustments and kept the city safe. They are right now making adjustments day to day to ensure that everyone's protected. And remember for the vast majority, I'll say it and our Health Commissioner can add if she wishes, for the vast majority of our uniform service members, if they get sick, they will get well quickly because they are overwhelmingly younger, healthier people.

We are concerned for every one of them. I don't want to see a single one get sick. I am concerned for their families. I know they are. There may be some individuals who have particular conditions that make them more vulnerable, but the vast majority of our first responders are people who have, God forbid they got sick, they'll be out of commission for a limited period of time. Then they'll get well then, they'll be back at their post. And so that is something that our Fire Commissioner, our Police Commissioner understand and they'll make adjustments as they go along.

Commissioner Barbot: I think Mr. Mayor, you covered it all. I don't have anything else to add.

Mayor: I accept, okay. Thank you. Who's next?

Lapeyrolerie: Henry is up next.

Mayor: Henry –

Question: Hi, how are you doing? Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Henry, go ahead.

Question: I actually have two questions. Totally unrelated. But I want to go back first to Gloria's question about what is happening in Brooklyn. Because as you know, there's a history of some of these communities resisting public health measures, resisting inoculations for measles, and these are communities are intensely religious and very tightly knit. And it would seem to me that it's almost counterintuitive not to think that there's a cluster going on given the closeness of these communities and the history of skepticism that they have toward public health rules.

Mayor: It's a very fair and knowledgeable question, but I'm going to tell you a couple of things. One, I spoke with a number of community leaders who I know very well, and I think you know, Henry, I know the community deeply. I represented it in various ways over the years. Very directly. I heard things I never thought here in my life from leaders of the community who made very clear how many shuls have been shut down, how they were urging the shutdown of those remaining and how much agreement there was in so much of the community to do it. Because I think what we cannot ignore here, this is not the measles which was a very difficult time for all of us, and you know, we had to all work together with the community to fight it back. This is a global pandemic a disease that no one on earth fully understands, has no cure, no vaccine. The Jewish community and all communities have been affected by that understanding. So I think you're seeing things happening here that you would not see in normal situations.

I mentioned the example of the gentleman had told me he's keeping his parents away from their grandchildren on purpose and what never did that before in his life. I think a lot of people are waking up quickly to what Dr. Barobot said. I just hope everyone's listening to Dr. Barbot when she says we have to change what we're doing right now to protect ourselves and our families. So, I understand your question, but I'm telling you, and I've asked my own liaisons who worked with the community to confirm this. We are seeing things we have literally never seen before. Shuls closing, people only socializing with their own family, not with neighbors, not going to religious service with their neighbors. We're seeing things that are very, very different. And as to the facts about the numbers of cases, Dr. Barbot, I've asked her probably five times in the last week cause it's come up so many times, she pours over the numbers all the time. There is nothing happening at that part of Brooklyn that is meaningfully different than what is happening in parts of the rest of the city. It’s just a fact.

Question: Okay. My second question has to do with the fiscal impact on the city. The Comptroller’s come up with his estimate. Is that an accurate estimate? I think it was something like $1.4 billion or around there –

Mayor: It's way too early to make that assessment in an ever-changing situation. Say a few things. We intend to in about a month's time we will do the Executive Budget. We intend to keep it on time. We will have to of course account for what's probably very substantial changes in revenue and very new expenses. I also want to believe and I think even within the course of a month we might see a stimulus bill and a bail out for localities on a level we've never seen before in decades. We should see that. I don't know for sure if we will, but I think there's a lot of movement in that direction. So we need to look at the whole picture. I think we're going to have a tough time, Henry. I think we are having a very tough time. I think we will find a way and the big X-factor will be how much of federal support comes in directly to New Yorkers, money directly in their pockets and directly to localities and obviously then the reimbursement levels for localities after the fact. All of those issues need to be factored in and we'll do that through the budget process.

Question: Okay, have you made a request to the feds on this issue yet?

Mayor: We have made a request to the feds on everything that we need right now to ensure our hospitals operate and, and all those frontline needs, and we have a guarantee which has been stated in many different ways, including from the president to the nation that there would be reimbursement. In terms of immediate local support, we've been working with Senator Schumer on what will be included in that next stimulus and relief bill. So that's where I think we have an opportunity to get something done.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you.

Lapeyrolerie: We're going to go back to Brigid.

Mayor: Do I believe you?

Lapeyrolerie: Hopefully third time's a charm.

Question: Oh, hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah. Brigid, if you didn't want to ask a question, you should have just said so.

Question: Oh my goodness. Thank you. First of all, thank you so much for doing this virtually and thank you for your patience with both my tech challenges. I wanted to start by asking a follow up question related to Rikers Island. You said that the city had identified 40 cases, 40 inmates who could potentially be released. I'm wondering if you could give us a few more details about how you're identifying potential inmates for release? What's the criteria? And do you have an estimate for the number who could be potentially released or reviewed?

Mayor: It's literally individual by individual. So, that number will be after each case that's pertinent is gone through – we'll get to a point we say, okay, we reviewed all pertinent cases, here's our final number. And, of course, it could change over time, but the basic approach is the FDNY and Mayor's Office for Criminal Justice literally go through each and every case. It's 40 now, we certainly expect more. Those have to be signed off on by the relevant DA and/or the State depending on the situation, whether, for example, it's related to parole violation or some other situation. And the goal is to get releases starting today if those sign offs occur and then we'll keep updating you on the numbers. What we are looking for is – we, of course, don't want anyone to be older with preexisting conditions, but anyone who is older with preexisting conditions, we obviously would prefer to get out of the facility if we can. And we want to see those who are at low risk of offending. And obviously, we're talking about a more minor charges because we're talking about those awaiting trial at Rikers and those who have been held as a sentence which means less than a year sentence and for therefore lower-level offenses. This would not be the case, for example, if we thought someone was a threat to the community, a high risk of re-offending, a more serious charge. So, those are the ways we're looking at it.

Question: And then, separately –

Mayor: I’m sorry. I am told – forgive me, the acronyms overcome me sometimes. Freddi said, I said FDNY when I was supposed to say NYPD, my apology. I did not realize that. NYPD and Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice are doing that individual by individual review. Thank you, Freddi.

Question: Thank you, Freddi. And then, separately, as you talked about how the work – the City's workforce is going to scale back and that perhaps some City offices may just shutter, you know, do you have – can you tell us about, you know, which for people [inaudible] and, you know, want to find a file building permits or trying to go to the marriage bureau, can you tell us the places that made [inaudible] closed come Monday?

Mayor: Not yet, but that is a great question. Give me until tomorrow to answer that, because I think the way to think about it is, Bridget, that there's a whole bunch of people we need to be exactly where they are – that's police officers, firefighters, of course, EMT, train – well, transit workers are obviously mainly the State – but health care workers of all kinds. And there are some folks who will have to be in community locations, for example, when we set up education and childcare for essential workers’ kids, we will need all the people to staff that as necessary to make that a safe environment, an environment where there's education, where there's food, et cetera. So, we're going to delineate all of that, but what we've come up with is about 250,000 people who will end up working from home – or, again, we're going to – even if they don't know how to do it now, we'll create some new approach to it or some new assignment. I think what it means is anything that is not essential – that we don't need – if you’re not essential, we don't need it at all right now – or, not essential, it can be done remotely, we're going to do that. But in terms of the services that will be affected, we'll get that list for tomorrow. I've used the example earlier of something like food stamps and public assistance that'll go on, but it will go on remotely for both the applicant and for the government side – that'll all be done remotely. So, that's an example of something where the service will continue, but you won't need to go to any office or go to any in-person interview. But let's get you a list of everything that will continue, even if it's in a different form versus things that might be put on hold or disrupted until we get through the core of this crisis.

Lapeyrolerie: Up next is [inaudible] – yes, we can hear you.

Question: So, I want to ask you a question, Mr. Mayor. [Inaudible] agree and disagree between you and the Governor Cuomo [inaudible] safety, as the Mayor, what's your point of view of sealing of the city – New York City. At what level will this measure be necessary? Like why the [inaudible] Wuhan, China?

Mayor: What I think is – it's not about quote “sealing off.” I appreciate the question, I think it's really important. And I have to be mindful – and I'll do my damnedest to be thoughtful – again, the other day, when I talked about the San Francisco model of shelter in place, this was soon after San Francisco had announced what it was doing and called it shelter in place and it was a public health order. I honestly thought that that had spread so quickly as the most aggressive action of being taken in the country and obviously a major metropolitan area in our biggest state that I thought that was sort of well-known that that was happening and I was referring to that model and I should have been more explicit. I was not referring to closing borders. I was not referring to sealing off the city. I was not referring to closing the bridges. I never referred to any of that ever, nor when we went through the rumors last week where, you know, people were – I had some of the most sophisticated, educated knowledgeable people that I've known in my life calling me frantically saying, you know, what's this about the bridges being closed and all? And I said, there's no truth to it. We would tell you if something like that is happening, there's no reason for something like that happening. It's not happening. So, I repeat again – and I ask our colleagues in the media, I may be in articulate sometimes, I may be imperfect, and I will take full responsibility, and I will apologize anytime I do – but I want people to know if I give you information, you can always ask for clarification. We've had rather elaborate press conferences – they're long, they're detailed – and then, anytime you can't reach me, you can reach my whole team. If anyone heard me to say, we’re, closing the borders, I never said that. I never meant it. I never implied it. I don't say it now. I don't imply it now. I don't mean it now. I was talking about a model being used in a major American metropolitan area, which is a sharper, tighter version of restrictions – still humane, still allowing people to get what they need, but through the vision of – or, through the prism, I should say, the vehicle of a public health order. That's all I was talking about. Anything else would be in a very, very different kind of situation. And I want to say again, only the State of New York can make that decision and I respect that. And I'll be talking to the Governor again later today. And I also want to say with community spread – and again, if you want our health care professionals to speak to it, they can – community spread means that the notion of quote unquote closing off borders or closing bridges is a fallacy. Again, more educated people than I can fill in the blank. This disease is 50 States already. It is a global pandemic. You cannot seal off your community and expect it not to spread. It's something we all have to deal with. So, the better way to approach it is to deal with it, is to educate people, get people to really practice social distancing, prepare our health facilities and get our government, our federal government to do what it is there for. The federal government is supposed to protect the wellbeing of the people this country and, you know, the ultimate line of defense for all Americans and it's just not doing it now. It's not even close. That's where our energy should be. Not on a too much obsession with the ideas that are not even on the table. So, I hope that's clarifying.

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, if I may add in the vein of having crystal clear clarity about why it's so important for us to be aggressive on social distancing. The reason why we're calling for people to stay indoors is because when we have person-to-person spread in community, we want to reduce as much of the, I would say, firewood as possible from the fuel so that we end up reducing the amount of transit mission and reducing the amount of time that we have such a front load of cases. And so, when I call for, you know, more diligent social distancing, it's to remove people from the potential path of transmission and continuing that transmission because that is the most effective way that we have to stop ongoing community-wide transmission at the population level. It's critical.

Mayor: Okay. Who’s next?

Lapeyrolerie: Javier from Queens Latino. Javier, you’re up.

Question: Yes, I know that the City of New York is fighting the coronavirus for everyone, but what about the undocumented? They’re more afraid because they have a reason to be [inaudible] speak English, they don’t have the money, they don’t have family and friends here. I see people in the streets really, really afraid. What is the City going to do to help them?

Mayor: Javier, it's what we do for everyone and we always have. I mean, this is a city that, for decades, has not asked documentation status, has provided people with education for their kids and support in so many ways. And obviously, our police do not ask documentation status and we're going to continue. But everyone's afraid. I think we're all in this together. So, there is no one who needs help who's going to be turned away. You know, we've started a process in the city of guaranteed health care for all regardless of documentation status. I hate to say it because this is such a painful situation, but this pandemic is telling us even more clearly why we need a universal health care system in America and why it is just a fallacy to think that you can have a health care system that excludes 12 million people who happen to be undocumented and yet everyone else is going to be safe. I think this horrible situation with the coronavirus waking us up to the reality of a global world, the reality of health care today in an ever-changing environment. If you want to protect yourself and your family, you should protect the health care of your entire community and your entire nation. So, everyone will be served. And anyone undocumented, please spread the word. If they need help, they can call 3-1-1 in a host of languages and get guidance on what to do. If they need health care and that's confirmed by one of our doctors, because, again, if they're symptomatic, they should be like everyone – stay home and wait those three or four days and see if it gets better or worse. But if they need health care and it's confirmed, they will get it and they'll pay only what they can pay and if they can't pay anything, they won't pay anything. I don't know what more we can do in this city to – I mean it as, you know, a statement of philosophy. We couldn't be clearer that our fellow New Yorkers are our fellow human beings. We will be there for them.

Lapeyrolerie: Up next is Jennifer from the Associated Press.

Question: I was going to ask, now that testing has increased to the level it has, is there any thought being given to testing groups of people symptomatic or not, who might be a particular risk such as health care workers?

Mayor: Dr Barbot?

Mayor: There's no indication for testing asymptomatic people. And, you know, it gives me the opportunity to really highlight the point that for every unnecessary test that we do, for asymptomatic people, it also squanders limited resources of necessary gowns, gloves, masks. And so, for every one of those, we not only squander a test, but we squander all of the other critical personal protective equipment that is in short supply across the world. So, there's a double reason why we don't want to be testing asymptomatic people, even if they're health care workers. We have clear guidance that health care workers who are potentially exposed being vigilant for any potential symptoms that they may have. We actually issued a health alert to the tens of thousands of doctors that we have in this city and directed them to check their temperatures twice a day, to be vigilant about the symptoms they have,, and to stay home. So that advice is the same advice we give all New Yorkers. It's however more instructive in terms of actually taking their temperature twice a day.

Question: Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. Next?

Lapeyrolerie: Julia Marsh –

Question: I just wanted to say that I appreciate you recognizing the sacred responsibility that we in the press have. And in that vein, just before I get to my questions, I'd like to say – and I'm speaking for many in the press corps – we understand how busy you are, but we respectfully request that these briefings happening more timely manner as the delays are preventing dozens of frontline reporters even getting vital information to the public.

Mayor: Well, Julia, I respect that request, but there's two problems. The first is, we have an ever-changing situation. And we assess when we think we'll have the information we need and then a lot of times it changes, literally, while we're in the middle of preparing. So, I think we're going to do this – we're going to try to give you a very conservative time. And I'm going to say this with no disrespect, we're going to give a conservative time for when we begin. We catch information coming down from the federal government down from the State government and we have to make sense of it and we have to be ready and we have to be accurate. We'll give you a conservative start time. If you want to participate, participate. If you don't, you don't have to. But we cannot start until we had everything assembled and proper. And that's just the standard I'm going to hold. So, I hear you, but I have an obligation, 8.6 million people to get it exactly right. And I know there are many, many reporters who are ready to receive the information at whatever moment it is available. We'll do our damnedest to make it as early in the day as possible. But this – I have never seen a more ever-changing situation in my life. So, that's the ground rule. Respectfully, that's the ground rule. Take it or leave it.

Question: Okay. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And then I have a couple of quick follow-ups and then a question about the Veterans Administration. Dr. Barbot, on the Brooklyn cases, I'm wondering, were you trying to indicate that people in Borough Park and Williamsburg are getting tested who actually don't need to?

Commissioner Barbot: No, I'm saying that there are health care facilities that may be more vigorous in their outreach and we are encouraging providers – and we just sent out a health alert to doctors, reminding them that we want to reserve testing for individuals who are not getting better and who require hospitalization.

Mayor: Can I just friendly amendment that, because I want to make sure we're not miscommunicating. I thought Julia's question was, are there – does that particular testing location, for example, was it testing only priority people, according to your priorities? I don't think – I think the answer is no, unfortunately.

Commissioner Barbot: I have no way of confirming that and my concern is that they were not adhering to our guidance.

Mayor: Right. So, Julia, just to make sure we're all speaking the same language – and please, if you need to clarify, ask again – we know when we are seeing the priorities Dr. Barbot has laid out and Dr. Katz has laid out being followed. There's other times we're not sure they're being followed and that certainly raises a concern, because we need testing to be done on that same priority basis everywhere.

Question: Yeah. I just wondered if she thought that you're seeing – I mean, if you look at the breakdown and the borough of Brooklyn, 40 percent of the cases are in Williamsburg and Borough Park. So, I'm wondering if you thought that there were such a high number there just because more people were getting tested.

Commissioner Barbot: So, as I've said, we're seeing widespread community transmission. There are – we're hearing reports of parts of the Bronx where many of the clinics are being inundated with patients. We're seeing different hospitals across the city indicating increasing numbers of patients. And so, while there may be public reports about increasing testing in those neighborhoods, again, our data indicates that we have hotspots all over the place and that these places don't necessarily stand out above anybody else.

Question: Okay. And then, Mr. Mayor, Gwen Hogan asked you about stores that are still open. We also noticed numerous tourist gift shops in Little Italy and Chinatown, but it's my understanding that there's no directive that says those stores have to be closed. Is that correct?

Mayor: I am not kind of pretend to tell you I know every chapter and verse on everything that the State has put out in terms of how it relates to each industry and whether a gift shop, for example, fits under one rule or another. The team is obviously constantly updating what we're doing based on new State guidance. But I think it's absolutely right to say those are non-essential stores. And what I've seen is the State moving sort of sector by sector to tighten up, choosing areas that they believe are non-essential, shutting them down, obviously, limiting the number of people and workplaces – the 75 percent rule today. I think that's certainly the right thing to do.

Question: Right. And then, just lastly on the Department of Veterans Affairs, I think you said that you're confident that those professionals there are standing at the ready to help out. But if you look at this City's VA system right now, there are 393 vacancies, that includes 30 medical support assistants, 31 nurses and 25 medical officers. So, it seems like they themselves don't have enough medical personnel to run the system.

Mayor: Well, I would be the first to agree with you if you said there are still issues at the Veterans Administration that need to be addressed more holistically, but I also would be the first to say that we've known for a while there's excess capacity in Veterans Administration hospitals. So, I would just put the two and two together and say, if we know there's beds, we want the beds. If we know there's personnel, I would like to see, of course, the Veterans Administration work by the same rules the rest of the health care system has, which is that get rid of elective surgeries, do early discharges and open up as much space as possible. So, even if there's areas where they're short of personnel, I have no doubt they can still be extremely helpful in this effort.

Lapeyrolerie: Kyle Mazza –

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, hold on. We're just getting the volume up a little.

Question: Of course. Can you hear me now, Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Yes, indeed.

Question: Great. Thank you for taking my question and thanks for doing this press conference, especially virtually – very helpful for us. So, my question is, will you – are you trying to reach out to President Trump regarding the shortage of supplies that you are seeing? Have you spoken with his administration? I know Governor Cuomo has been in contact with President Trump when they do the governor video conferences, but have you?

Mayor: I reached out to Vice President Pence. His team was very responsive, but they referred me to me Secretary Azar. I am, of course, like everyone else, trying to remember which day was which, but I think it was four days ago I spoke to Secretary Azar, and that was about some of the issues. I will certainly be speaking to him again. I have spoken to Senator Schumer who has been, obviously, our greatest advocate in Washington. I know he is speaking to Vice President Pence. So, as I've told you all, I've spoken to Dr. Fauci. I've made him aware of the situation. I'm sure he will make others aware of it because this is his hometown and he is doing such amazing work for this nation. So, I'm certainly going to try again to reach Vice President Pence, who the President's put in charge of this effort. I'll certainly be talking to Secretary Azar again. But my hope is, the combination of the efforts of Senator Schumer, the efforts of Governor Cuomo, the efforts of other members of delegation, and just the sheer public demand, because, let's face it, the more that the President and Vice President and there cabinet hear from the people, from leaders of all sectors – business community, everyone – that this is an unacceptable situation. When you’re in the nation's largest city, and I'm telling you point blank that we have a real danger up ahead and we've codified it in letters to all, you know, top federal officials. I mean, there's a point at which you say, are people actually taking responsibility or not? So, I'm going to hope and pray that if we sound the alarm enough times someone will listen.

Question: Well, also, as a follow up, Trump also said, governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work. The federal government's not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping, you know, we're not a shipping clerk. But you also said earlier in your remarks that President Trump is betraying the city. So, I wanted to get your reaction first to what he said in his press briefing at the White House. And then I also want you to say, well, is it fair to say that given the crisis that we're seeing – from your side – that he is betraying New York City where he came from.

Mayor: It's abundantly clear to say he's betraying his hometown. And he, unfortunately, is letting down his entire nation. I have worked in the federal government, I understand the different responsibilities, but this is a time of crisis. And the greatest example in American history was a great New Yorker named Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression who ensured that the federal government would do things they had never done before to protect people and it saved our nation. That was a time that was much more shocking, if you will, when there was no roadmap in the least. There wasn't a kind of technology, communications, our government was very, very small at the time, and Franklin Roosevelt had the audacity to say we're going to build something entirely new to save this country. And now, we've got a president with a vast military, a massive government with literally endless resources effectively and he won’t use them. And no, mayors and governors cannot make supplies appear out of thin air. I mean, we have powers but not the kind of powers to get factories in other states to have produce something we need or to get it from another state to here in a manner that's prioritized and guaranteed. That's what we need. We've got two or three weeks for God's sakes. The only way you know that goods are going to be produced on a huge scale and gotten where they need to be is to use that war production act to the fullest – I'm sorry, Defense Production Act to the fullest and to ensure the United States military does the logistics. It’s only way you can guarantee at this point – you know, if the President acted two weeks, four weeks, six weeks ago when he could have, we might be having a different discussion. But wake up, we are really running out of time and the only way it works is if the federal government immediately uses all of its muscle to save this city and a lot of other places.

Lapeyrolerie: Katie Honan is up next.

Mayor: Katie, can you hear us?

Lapeyrolerie: Katie?

Mayor: Who's next?

Lapeyrolerie: Mark Morales, from CNN.

Question: How are you doing, Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Good, how are you?

Question: Good, good. So, I just wanted some clarification. The number – back to Borough Park and Williamsburg, in that area, the number that's being reported is more than a hundred. So, two questions. What's that number at now? And, if that's not a cluster then, then why isn't it a cluster? Is it – is it lower than that number?

Commissioner Barbot: So, citywide, as the Mayor mentioned, we've got above 3,000 people.
And it's to be expected that we would have high numbers in all of our neighborhoods. And so, when we talk about a cluster, it is a situation where we can trace it back to an originating source. When you've got widespread community transmission, it is impossible to draw back to a single source, because there are so many opportunities for individuals to have gotten infected.

Question: Gotcha. Okay. So then, what's the number for Borough Park and Williamsburg now?

Commissioner Barbot: You know, we'll have to get back to you on that.

Mayor: Right. Again, it's a hundred cases, which no one takes lightly, but against what at that hour was 3,615 overall for the city, over a thousand for Brooklyn. But we will get you more.

Lapeyrolerie: Mary Frost, from the Brooklyn Eagle.

Question: Good afternoon. Shall I ask the traditional question? Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Mary.

Question: Okay, great. This is a two-part question. The first is, we are hearing that younger people are actually being hospitalized in greater numbers than expected, even though they are not dying at the rate of older people. And related to that, a number of younger people are telling me that they feel compelled to work in the gig economy because they have student loans that apparently can't be deferred or they have all kinds of problems deferring them. Can you address these questions?

Mayor: Okay. On the younger people, I'll let Dr. Barbot speak to, -- we've talked about what we've seen globally and consistently about the impact on young people. No one has ever said there won't be some young people who don't go through a more serious situation, but overwhelmingly we've seen young people, healthy key word, healthy young people have very limited impact. I don't have a number in front of me for hospitalized out of that 554 as a 5 pm yesterday. I don't have a number in front of me of how many are under 18. But if you could speak to the larger situation?

Commissioner Barbot: So, we are looking at the data on a continuous basis. And by and large, the vast majority of people who have tested positive are above the age of 18. We are not seeing clinically anything that at this moment looks differently from what's being observed in other countries, which is that primarily the people who do end up hospitalized and who may have more severe cases tend to be older individuals and especially those with chronic underlying conditions.

Question: Excuse me. Well, this report is referring to the group between 18 and 46.

Commissioner Barbot: So again, the majority of individuals that we're seeing hospitalized with severe conditions tend to be individuals who are above that age. But that's not to say that we don't have people who are between 18 and 49 who have been hospitalized. But it's not out of proportion, again, at this point in the outbreak, in terms of what we're seeing, it doesn't seem to be out of proportion with what's being observed in other countries.

Question: Okay. Thank you. And can you can the Mayor, can you address something about the pressure that people in the gig economy are feeling from their student loans and debts?

Mayor: Oh, I think people in the gig economy are feeling this immense pressure. That gig economy is for so many people falling apart and they're going through a lot. Now I am not up to date on the federal or State actions on student loans. Obviously, that's not something the City regulates. My understanding is there's been some kind of relief or suspension around interest payments or something like that. I'm not, again, forgive me, I don't have all those details. But I, look at this point like everything else happening, we need extraordinary measures. This would be an ideal time to postpone all student debt in the middle of this kind of crisis because a huge number of people are in no position to pay it right now. We're talking about yesterday, I heard a federal official mentioned the possibility of 20 percent unemployment, 20 percent unemployment puts you damn close to where we were in the Great Depression — that’s the only time in our country's history, to the best of my knowledge where we've ever been at that level. You're going to have a vast number of people who cannot afford to pay for a lot of things, especially student loans. So that should be part of any kind of bailout package to suspend those payments. Give people a substantial grace period until they can get back on their feet and be in a position to pay again. Who's next?

Lapeyrolerie: Matt Chayes.

Mayor: Matt.

Question: Thanks for taking my questions. 

Mayor: Yes. 

Question: A couple of them. First, to what extent does the Governor's executive order yesterday limit what you can do and to what extent does it limit what you can do under the orders you've already signed? And then at the top of the call you listed certain very important, vital items that you're running out of masks, coveralls, ventilators, et cetera. Approximately how many of these items that you listed do have right now? Assuming the feds do come through with this wish list, how long will the supplies last? And finally, will Elon Musk be producing ventilators for the city? I know there's been some back and forth on Twitter?

Mayor: With Elon Musk we were very happy to receive his offer of help. We're trying to assess what it means and how quickly it could make an impact. And, you know, I'm holding out the, you know, the hopeful idea that he could do something that's important here. But we have not been able to confirm what it means yet specifically. We'll get to more on that when we know. On the question of a timeline. I think I spoke to it earlier in this session. I'll just say it again. We will be supplied through the month of March and into the beginning of April. A few days ago, I don't have all of it in front of me now, but a few days ago I delineated the kind of reserves we had in terms of masks and other capacity, other supplies. Again, we have, thank God, the biggest, best health care apparatus anywhere in the country. And we do have what we need to get through the next, at minimum two weeks, hopefully even three weeks or more.

But it is time to be blunt and honest that we must be resupplied. And so that's what I'm saying here today. I have been -- I'm being abundantly clear for the month of March, we have supplies. It will take us into the beginning of April. 

Question: And how long will that last if the feds come through? When will you need another restock? 

Mayor: Again, respectfully, Matt, I think I've said this numerous times. We need to be, I've said two weeks is the good working rule. It could be more like three. The federal government must activate its capacity immediately so that we can start to get those supplies within the next two weeks. We don't need everything simultaneously, but we need substantial resupply in the next two weeks, maximum three weeks. 

Lapeyrolerie: Last two, back to Katie. 

Mayor: Katie?

Question: Can you hear me now?

Mayor: Yes.

Question Thank you. Sorry. Thanks for the tech help to the WebEx team and to Olivia. My question is, I know you said that the numbers of patients are updated every day at 10 and six. It's now 6:44 pm. Do you have those updated numbers? Because the data we're working with is from 10:00 am and it's probably this point unfortunately really out of date.

Mayor: Yeah. When I say they're updated, Katie, that we have to, there's a lot of cross-checking that happens and so six o'clock is the time that they, as I understand that they sort of call timeout at six and then they have to do all the analysis to make sure it's right. If we have and I’ll turn to the team, if we have something ready for publishing now, I will happily do it. If we don't, we'll get it to you when we haven it. We're checking right now. No, it's not. It is not ready yet, is what we're getting. But when we do have it, we'll put it out.

Question: Thank you. And secondly, I know that you announced new testing facilities with a new drive through facilities and other boroughs. I know Queens has some of the highest numbers, but I don't know if they have the same level of testing capabilities as other boroughs?

Mayor: Well, let me clarify again. I explicitly did not use the word drive through because they're not drive through. So I want to be really, really clear about that. And I'm going to again, ask everyone, I'll try and be really precise. Sure. I'll be imperfect. But if you ever need clarification, please say so. On testing centers through H + H, 10 new sites at hospitals, those are not drive through. Each will serve 150 people per day with testing. Eight open already, Bellevue, Elmhurst, Harlem, Jacobi, Kings County, Lincoln, Woodhall, Queens Hospital. Two more open next week. Coney Island and Jacobi, none drive through. On the seven new sites of the Gotham clinics. These are also not drive through. Each will serve 50 or 75 people and those are all open, will be open this week, [inaudible] Cumberland, East New York, [inaudible] Morrisania [inaudible] Vanderbilt. Four new testing centers, a hundred people per day, two open Coney Island, Jacobi two coming up, Kings County, Queens Hospital, none drive through all everything I've just said by appointment. And prioritize testing only. The only drive throughs are the State operated one on Staten Island and the five that are coming in coordination with FEMA. But we don't have locations or start dates for those yet.

Question: That’s what I was asking about. Do we know when we'll get those locations and start dates yet?

Mayor: Just what I said, we don't have it yet and when we have it, we'll tell you.

Lapeyrolerie: Last but not least, Yoav.

Mayor: Yoav.

Question: Hi. Mr. Mayor. Two questions. One, I know you said there's no citywide shortages and there’s not expected to be for a few weeks, but are you hearing from individual hospitals about specific shortages, either of masks or ventilators? And if so, what is the City doing about those? And can you identify anyone, any that you might've heard from?

Mayor: I heard rumors, but then generally, and you know, again, we have the Health Commissioner here, CEO of Health + Hospitals here, Emergency Management Commissioner here. I think if anyone has different information they'll jump in. But we heard rumors we did some follow ups. I think there were some places that had either you know, they're getting worried about a shortage or they had some very particular thing they needed some quick infusion of. But the basic reality has been we have supplies and if health facilities need them, meaning hospitals we can get them where they need to go. But I am not seeing this as a major problem at this point. I am very concerned going forward, but I don't see it as a major problem at this point. Dr Katz you want to add or Dr. Barbot?

President Katz: I'd just like to validate what the Mayor has said. Health + Hospitals runs 11 hospitals and there have been moments when we've needed to move supplies from one hospital to another. There are also people who are sensibly worried that will we have enough supplies for two weeks from now? And as the Mayor has been very clear, that's why we need a restocking. So I want to assure people that yes, as of this moment we do have enough supplies and we're able to move supplies. And I know that's true of other hospitals. But also understand why people may not have that perception because they are looking at in their hospital how many of the N95 masks are there right now and thinking this is not enough. So I understand the concerns and I certainly appreciate the Mayor's call for help for us to get that restocking. But at the moment the hospitals have what they need.

Mayor: So, to both our doctors here. I think it'd be really helpful. I think it's a very important question -- let’s kind of demystify a little. If a voluntary hospital or an H + H facility needed suddenly more surgical mass or whatever it was. Just let's explain to our colleagues in the media how that request would be acted on. And who would they call and what happens next to make sure they get what they need. And obviously our Emergency Management Commissioner might want to chime in as well. Do either you want to start?

Commissioner Barbot: Sure. I'll start. So, we work closely with our State counterpart to ensure that we communicate with our hospitals on a regular basis and query them on where they are with regards to specific supplies related to masks, gowns, et cetera. And we ask them how long they think that the particular supplies will last and if they are anticipating a delivery so that if there are concerns about potential shortages, we then work with our partners at [inaudible] Office of Emergency Management and at the State to ensure that these hospitals get their supplies in a timely manner.

President Katz: Yes. And to demystify, as the Mayor has asked, all of our 11 hospitals have already been moving supplies and moving patients. So some of our hospitals have been more heavily affected such as Elmhurst than other hospitals. And we've responded as a system by moving supplies, staffing to Elmhurst to do that. And also moved other patients who didn't need to be at Elmhurst to other hospitals. So that's what hospital systems do to respond in a crisis like this.

Question: Okay. Thank you. And I did want to ask one other thing about the disease detectives. I'm curious if their role has changed now that the number of cases coming in is so high? You were planning to double the size of the team, but if they are still doing what they were doing, how do you decide which cases to investigate? And is that work even, you know, how useful is it at this point of widespread community spread?

Mayor: I'll start and pass to the Commissioner. We the number and we're going to continue adding. You know, we're in a different strategic context, but there are plenty of situations where that work is absolutely crucial. The Commissioner can give you a flavor of that.

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly. We've said before that as this outbreak matures, that the work of the disease detectives will focus to prioritize on identifying potential outbreaks amongst health care workers. Because again, the primary focus here is to ensure the capacity of the health care workforce. And then also to work to identify potential clusters in nursing home facilities, as well as, assisted living facilities.

Mayor: Okay. All right, everybody. Thank you. We appreciate – we're in a new world together here, but hopefully we made this work together today and we'll be giving you more updates shortly.

Thanks so much.

2020-03-09 NYC Mayor de Blasio Brian Lehrer

Brian Lehrer: And now we start as we usually do on Fridays with our weekly Ask the Mayor segment – my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 212-433-WNYC – 212-433-9692 – or, you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. And good morning, Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. And thank you and all the people you listed for all the work you're doing. It's very, very important that people get accurate information and it's very reassuring to New Yorkers to know they can turn to all of you. So, thanks to your whole team and, you know, we all need you. Appreciate what you're doing.

Lehrer: Thank you. I know you're calling on the President to use his powers under the Defense Production Act to help get us the millions of masks and thousands of respirators our health care system needs in very short order. What could happen under such a presidential order?

Mayor: So, the President has invoked the Defense Production Act and that allows him to mandate that industries produce what is needed for the national good. And factories, literally, that produce the goods we need have to do it on the highest production level, has to be prioritized for distribution to where the need is greatest. I mean, Brian, let's be very clear, right now, with the almost 4,000 cases confirmed coronavirus as of 6:00 pm yesterday in New York City, and 26 people who have passed away, we now have about 30 percent of the cases in the United States of America and about 70 percent of the cases in New York State, and New York State, unquestionably, is the leading state in this point in the nation for this problem. With the Defense Production Act, the President could simply say, okay, these industries are now going to produce at maximum these kinds of factories that produce something similar, are going to convert to produce, for example, the ventilators at maximum and then distribute them where they're needed most. And I think the best way to ensure that is to bring the United States military into the equation. They have the best logistical capacity. They also have a huge amount of medical personnel and supplies of their own. Now, Brian, what's happening right now is, all of that capacity is sitting at bases all over the United States, while, right now, we're at the front and other parts of the country are front where people are suffering and they're going to be dying more and more. And I don't mean to be too dramatic here, it's just a fact. It is a fact that a lot of people are going to die who don't need to die if this doesn't happen quickly. How on earth is our military not mobilized? I know the military would answer the call instantly and know what to do, but they are being left to their bases while people are suffering. It makes no sense.

Lehrer: So, what kind of response have you gotten from the White House?

Mayor: Of course, nothing. I'm sorry that I have to say of course. I reached out to Vice President Pence a few days back, he sent me to Secretary Azar of Health and Human Services who was receptive and helpful on the narrow question of getting us some testing approval for one company. But we've continually asked for supplies, they've sent us a very small amount. I'm going to try today again to talk to Pence, Azar, to talk to the VA Secretary Wilkie to activate the Veterans Administration's Hospitals and capacity in the city, which would also help a lot. But honestly – and I know Senator Schumer has been trying – everyone and anyone in the executive branch as well, I've talked to him about it. But we couldn't be clearer about what we're asking for. We've documented it. We've repeated it publicly, privately. You know, the Senate Minority leader has asked, I've asked as the leader of the nation's largest city. They're not responding and they're not responding either out of ignorance or they're not responding on purpose, which I think history is going to judge very harshly. You know, we're talking about, ironically, a New Yorker in the White House who right now is betraying New York City. We're talking about a president who is basically doing what Herbert Hoover did at the beginning of the Depression and minimizing the danger and refusing to use available federal action. And people are going to die and they shouldn't. They don't have to if we could get the support that we're asking for. We have two or three weeks before our hospitals at a point where they cannot provide the care they are capable of because they won't have the equipment and the supplies. That's how clear it is.

Lehrer: California's Governor Gavin Newsom has issued a statewide stay-at-home order, as I'm sure you know. Pennsylvania's governor ordered all non-essential businesses to temporarily close. How different are those things from what you're already asking of New Yorkers in the city and do you think we need to go further?

Mayor: We need to go to a shelter in place model. In California, they're calling it safe at home. What Governor Newsome did was exactly right, it's very similar to what San Francisco did earlier in the week. It is a public health order. It is an order to people who are non-essential industries to go home, stay home. That does not mean you can't go to the grocery store or the pharmacy. You have to, obviously – and this is accounted for in these orders – anyone who wants to understand it, I've seen the San Francisco website where they lay it out. It's very clear. It is balanced. People still can get food, medicine. People can still get outside, get some exercise, walk their dog, but they have to socially distance. And it's enforceable, it's a public health order. If people try to assemble, they'll be broken up. If people loiter on the street and aren't out there for a specific purpose, they'll be sent back home. So, it's enforceable. But I think I really believe this, Brian, if we have a clear order to our people to change their habits immediately, they've gotten plenty of education on the problem of this virus and what is starting to do, I think people are going to be receptive. We've seen that in many ways already, but they need an order and they need to be crystal clear – this is what you can do, this is what you can't do. And if you're not one of these essential industries, if you're not involved in a health care – you're not a healthcare provider or a first responder or someone who keeps, you know, electricity running or water running or basics, you should be home. You should shut your store if you – if you're involved in providing food to people, we need you. If you're selling, you know, items to tourists or if you're selling a regular old, you know, luxury goods or anything like that, there's no way in the world you should be open right now. So, we've got to have a sharp delineation. This is what's essential, this is what's not, everyone else get home. That's what California has done and I think it's the model that should be followed literally everywhere in the nation that's facing this threat, because it's the only way we know – and our public health leaders say this, Brian – it's the only way we know to slow down the speed of this spread of this disease. If we don't slow it down, our hospitals will simply not be able to handle the burden. And if we do slow it down, we give time for resupply and time to prepare more health care facilities.

Lehrer: So, why not just order that shelter in place right now, right here?

Mayor: The State of New York, under its emergency powers, has the right to make this decision. I respect that. I've said publicly, I think Governor Cuomo has made right decisions throughout this crisis and I’ve supported him in that. On this one, I think no one likes the idea. I don't blame him or me or anyone who would hesitate to do something this intense. But the time has come. It's his call. I respect him. We've been talking. But I think what California did will be the moment that people all over the country will say, now other states and cities must take on this model because, otherwise, if you wait too long it will not have the effect of slowing down this disease.

Lehrer: You know, I can't let go yet of this request or making of the President. I know we moved on to the next thing, which is what you can do and what the Governor can do. But what you're saying sounds so urgent with New York having 30 percent – I even saw on other news organizations 40 percent of the cases in the United States, I guess that's New York State – and if the military really has the capacity to be mobilized or it's the – maybe it's the private sector under this act that the President could order these things under to make thousands of respirators really fast. I don't know if there are plants in place where he can just order that to be done or make these, I think you said yesterday, millions of masks more than we have are going to be needed in a matter of weeks in the health care system. I can't let go of this yet. What's their reluctance?

Mayor: Brian, you know, look, all I can analyze at this point is that, one, for some perverse combination of sort of optical reasons, political reasons, denial, whatever it is, or just lack of leadership, lack of coherent professional leadership. And we know that over the months, you know, the, the team that started in the White House was a much more professional and stronger team. We miss people like General Kelly, for example, who I don't think would've had a doubt in his mind that it was time to mobilize the military. I think there's been a diminution of the capacity of the federal government in terms of the executive leadership. And I think there's denial and I think there's political considerations and there's just a lack of connection to reality. Of all the people you have thought who would want to activate the military, I would've thought Donald Trump would be that person. He has been just so evidently unwilling to pull the trigger and move the one force that could make a difference. I know this much about our military – they can move very fast and make a huge difference. They do it in wartime, of course, they could do it in peace time and they're the best shot we got. If you've got a factory in Ohio or Illinois that could produce a lot of mass or a lot of ventilators, I don't have a doubt in my mind the military could get them here and ensure the right prioritization. But on the Defense Production Act, clearly there are companies in America that produce these goods and there are companies that produce similar goods that could be converted on an urgent basis. And we don't need everything instantly, we need a steady supply to try to keep ahead of this crisis. And I would think any president in the history of this republic, seeing the nation's largest city, two of the largest States in California and New York, all deeply endangered, thousands of lives on the line, maybe tens of thousands of lives on the line – how on earth would that president not use the power they have as Commander in Chief? Why do you invoke – why does the President evoke that, the Defense Production Act and then not use it? It's in explicable. So, Brian, my view is, take everything to maximum right now to save lives. And it won't be a perfect, I know that, but if we knew that more and more supplies were coming on a steady basis, we could keep rationing, we could keep doing our best to get from day to day, because starting in the first or second week of April, we're just going to play and run out. If we got even some resupply even could buy a few more days so they could produce more. You know, we could keep going. But, right now, there's literally –literally, no response.

Lehrer: Maxine, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hello, Maxine.

Question: Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I am calling on behalf of [inaudible] USA, which is a viral testing lab and an immunology testing lab to tell you and the City of New York and America that we have available 500,000 tests virtually immediately. We can provide samples within two days and we have these blood serum tests with FDA approval already. So, they are fully, scientifically tested.

Lehrer: So, why isn't this happening, Maxine? Why do you have to call a radio show to talk to the Mayor?

Question: Brian, I have been attempting to get to the CDC. I have been attempting to get to the New York State Department of Health. I have spoken to my Congresswoman. The materials have been presented to them and I am calling you so that the Mayor can put me in contact with the appropriate people.

Lehrer: And I'm going to leave it there, because we have so many callers, except to say, Mr. Mayor, do you want to take our contact information?

Mayor: Of course. And, Maxine, if you'll give your information right now to WNYC, we're going to follow up instantly after this call and one of our top health officials will reach you directly.

Lehrer: Jack, in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Jack.

Question: Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good morning.

Question: Until the end of the call for social distancing, I'm calling on you, Mayor de Blasio and the Governor, to immediately place a moratorium on rent, mortgage and debt payments for individuals and small business, as well as putting in a long-lasting financial relief package for workers and families. When is this going to happen? Why haven't we seen it yet?

Mayor: Jack, thank you. Look, I think you're directionally right. I think we have to figure out how to do some kind of moratorium for both residents and small business. I'm going to find out if that's anything within the power of the City or if that can only be done with State law or State action, but I think it's the right thing to do. We have to obviously make sure when the smoke clears that the folks who own the buildings are going to somehow be whole and able to keep running their buildings. But, right now, people are suffering. People don't have income for food or medicine. So, I agree with you and we're going to try and figure it out. Jack, the reason everything is being figured out, it's hand to mouth right now and I don't think that's a surprise to anyone. We are trying to figure out each step and right now my most central concern is trying to build out our hospital capacity urgently and somehow find the supplies we need to keep health care going. That is my first concern. But not far behind is to try and make sure people have the resources to buy food and medicine. So, I will pursue the rent moratorium idea immediately and see if it's something the City can do or if we have to get the State to do it.

Lehrer: Sylvia, in Upper Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hi Sylvia.

Question: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I'm 73 and really trying to stay at home, but I do have to get out to get groceries. I live in Northern Manhattan. And my problem is that the big, the main grocery store in our neighborhood has absolutely no social spacing going on. It's nightmare in there. There’s panic buying going on. I took one foot, you know, one step into the store yesterday and told the guy standing guard who was doing nothing. you know, that this is not a safe place to buy groceries. You've got, you know – so is there anything that can be done to enforce – because the grocery stores are precious for those of us who can't buy food online, who can't afford to do that. So, is there any way to enforce grocery stores, you know, being safer about this?

Lehrer: Sylvia, thank you. And Mr. Mayor, I've heard this from a number of listeners and I wonder if you could even mandate something like appointment shopping at grocery stores so that they maintain six-foot distancing?

Mayor: There's been several ideas, whether it's appointment shopping or special times for seniors. Those are ideas we're working on right now. I think the important thing in this case with Sylvia, please give your information WNYC. I need that location. We'll send the NYPD over right away. And look as we move deeper into this crisis, and I do hope we very quickly get to a public health order for the social distancing and for the shelter-in-place, again, in the style of California. The NYPD is going to play a crucial role and other city agencies in enforcement. And look, I don't think it means a heavy, heavy hand. I think it means reminding people, educating people, warning people, and when necessary, saying guys, you got to create some distance here. We're going to open this up. Other people need to hold back so these shoppers can finish doing what they're doing and get out of here. And obviously we don't want to see the lines where people are tight. If we ever have lines, we want people spread out. Social distancing is pretty straight forward. You're trying to keep six feet away from anyone else. It's easier said than done in New York City obviously, but at least we know what the rule is. Six feet away from each other, as close as possible to that and we can enforce that. And the NYPD – no organization is better at enforcing and doing it in a smart way than NYPD. So I want this location. I will send the NYPD over there immediately, but we will also work to get them to recognize for neighborhood policing, any sites in their communities that are having a similar problem and get the PD to get present there and create more space.

Lehrer: Minnesota and Vermont, by the way, just classified grocery store workers as emergency workers, which gives them access to childcare. Here I believe it's just for health care, transit and first responders. Even in California, of course grocery stores are considered essential and they're being allowed to stay open. Would you consider doing what they're doing in Minnesota and Vermont with respect to childcare?

Mayor: Yeah. First of all, I do think obviously the folks who keep the grocery stores open, the pharmacies open, of course they are essential workers. We have to figure out quickly how much capacity we have in terms of the enrichment centers we're going to set up for the first responders, for the – we've said already, we're going to have them for sure for the children of first responders, health care workers, transit workers. And we're trying to figure out how much capacity we can get, how many we can cover. I think there's a very fair argument for the grocery workers as well, but we have to come up with a formalized list. We hope to have that as early as today and then we'll apply it. But Brian, and you know again, always trying to be honest. It depends on how many spaces we have, how many kids we can accommodate and trying to really somehow ration that properly.

Lehrer: Cindy, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi, Cindy.

Question: Hi. Can you hear me?

Lehrer: Can hear you.

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I'm a small business owner in Brooklyn, Beacon's Closet. We have four locations. We took the measure of closing last Friday because we're really high volume and we're concerned for our customers and our staff. Last week we filled out the interest survey that you have for the 75k, up to 75k low-interest loan. And I know that you opened the grants for the less than five businesses yesterday, but we still have no, there's still no application for that loan that you're offering. Can you tell me when that might be and why it's not available for us to fill out yet?

Mayor: Let me check. Is it Cindy, is that, am I getting the name right?

Question: Yes, that's right.

Mayor: Cindy, please give your information to WNYC. I am – I want to get that clear. I don't understand why on Earth that wouldn't be up. We announced that far enough ago that everything should be up and running. So, something's wrong and I want to fix it. And either the information is not being made available the way it should, or something has been dropped that we have to fix immediately. Because we obviously intend to get those loans and grants out there to try and help. Now, even since we announced that Cindy, the world has changed so radically that is fair to say the only way a lot of small businesses will get the relief they need is with a massive federal aid package. It's gone far, far beyond anything that the City could possibly do. But I at least want to follow through on the things we started. So, I will find out immediately what's going on with that. Give us your information and we'll make sure people follow up with you so you can start processing that immediately.

Lehrer: And a similar concern from a listener who says she's a now unemployed bartender, but the online site for unemployment benefits wasn't working as of yesterday. And she says she and her, some of her friends really need the money. Are you aware of problems with that site?

Mayor: I have heard that and I have to follow up, my best understanding that's run by the State, but we'll work with them immediately to see what will need to be done to get that to handle more volume. Clearly there's going to be massive need. I mean, Brian one, we’ll work on this immediately. And it sits a bigger problem. And I again, want to always be honest with New Yorkers, we're going to have more and more people who don't have money, just plain don’t have money, don't have a place to get money, need food, need medicine. That's what's going on here. It's going to get worse. We're going to do our damnedest as a city to figure out how to get food out there into communities, to people who need them across the city, every neighborhood. But it's a daunting situation. We've never had to do this before, obviously in our memory as a city. We're going to try and figure out a way to do that. In the meantime, what we need is the federal government to just flood the zone, to get money in the hands of people, to do maximum income replacement direct to people in the city and all over the country, to cancel student loan payments, to do everything that the federal government has in its power. The federal government prints money, literally. They can take on any amount of burden. And this is going to be one of the greatest national crises in generations. So that is the only way we're going to truly make people whole. But in the meantime, we're going to try and set up some very basic structures to at least try and make sure people have food to keep going. And we'll try and figure out anything we can do to help expedite things like unemployment benefits.

Lehrer: Let me come back to the grocery stores for a minute. We're getting a similar story now that they heard Sylvia in Upper Manhattan from somebody citing a particular Trader Joe's in Brooklyn. And your response to her was the first reference that I believe I've heard to using the police to enforce social distancing. Are you really prepared to use the police to enforce social distancing? And would it be better perhaps to start with some kind of an order that's grocery store specific?

Mayor: Again, the answer is yes. I am a realist, Brian, and we're talking about an ever-changing situation everyone's trying to make sense of. I think we need a public health order in the style of California that clarifies to everyone what they're supposed to do, what they're not supposed to do, who's essential, who's not. But then you still have the issue of people will under that order be allowed to go to the grocery store. If they are not properly distancing, and I urge people to recognize, is on all of us. I'll talk about the enforcement, but it's also a matter of every one of us taking responsibility. If you get too close to other people, you're running the risk of contracting the disease and then spreading it to your family. Or you're running the risk of giving the disease to someone else. That's just not what we should be doing right now. Everyone needs to be serious about what social distancing means. But, of course, we have the best enforcement entity on Earth, the NYPD. It's totally appropriate for them to again educate, warn, use the ability of someone in uniform to create some clarity and say, nope, that's too many people in one place, clear it out. We've been doing that already with the original order related to public gatherings in spaces, bars, restaurants, et cetera. NYPD officers, Fire Department personnel, others, Sheriff's Office, Buildings Department have gone out. They've had relatively few examples, but there's one example that was reported. For example, there was a wedding group that was supposed to be under 50 people and they tried to do 150. And you know, City officials arrived and sent everyone home. So we will use our enforcement powers. We don't want to have to be too draconian, but we must enforce all of these rules. I think it’s absolutely appropriate.

Lehrer: By the way, you mentioned that, you mentioned that wedding. One of our tweets from a listener says they tried to go get married, but the Marriage Bureau was closed. Is that deemed a nonessential service and closed in New York City?

Mayor: I'm going to confirm that. And Brian, you'll forgive me and to all your listeners, forgive me. The things are moving so fast that I'm getting updates all the time. It would not surprise me if it's closed because as I announced yesterday, we're sending home 250,000 City workers by Sunday. And that's going to be on a long-term basis. We have to clear everything out. So, anyone who did not have to be in their work location is going to work from home or work in an alternative capacity. So, I will confirm to you about the Marriage Bureau and see if my team can confirm it right now. But obviously, and it's painful because it's such an important moment in people's lives, but we're also dealing with a crisis that we've never seen before. So, if it is closed down, it doesn't surprise me, but I'll confirm it back to you.

Lehrer: Some people getting married are anticipating the health insurance benefits that are going to go to the uninsured spouse. Just saying there's a relevance there for some people.

Mayor: There is, there is. But we also have a broader reality that we must go to urgent social distancing. Brian, I want your listeners to understand why. If we don't slow down the growth of this disease, it will create a dynamic where our health care system cannot protect people and cannot save lives that could be saved. And the fact is unless we have much more intense social distancing, the disease will spread faster than it needs to. It's as simple as that. We have to do things we would never have thought of doing and it's a simple equation. If you don't get a lot more social distancing, like now, the disease will spread so fast that it will get to the point where our health care system cannot serve people properly. If we conversantly, actually do more serious social distancing, we'll slow down the growth of this disease meaningfully. And give ourselves a chance to get resupplied and keep our health system able to serve people. That is the choice right now.

Lehrer: We're going to run out of time soon. Question –

Mayor: And Brian, one other point, very important, I’m sorry. People who do not have insurance, it's a little moot at this point. If you don't have health insurance, our public hospitals and clinics are still going to serve you. We're in a wartime dynamic. Of course, I want people to have insurance if they can. But the most important thing is no one should think if they don't have insurance, they're not going to get served. So even if the reason someone's getting married is for insurance, I get it. But if you can't get served anywhere else, you will be served in our public facilities.

Lehrer: Glad you said that. Last question from a listener and then I'm going to try to close one with one if you have time. You announced that you'll release, this is via Twitter – listen writes, you announced you will release 40 people from Rikers. But Rikers is a fundamental public health crisis. And I will add from what I know that the Chief Physician there, Dr. Ross MacDonald, warns a storm is coming in those close quarters, please let as many out as you possibly can. So what's the status of that?

Mayor: I agree that we need to let as many out as we possibly can. And the structure we've set up for that is to determine with our Office of Criminal Justice and NYPD, anyone who can be released either because they have the pressing health dynamics that qualify them. And also of course they have to be someone that we believe we can responsibly release, you know, their offenses are minimal in the scheme of things. They are not someone we expect to re-offend, low-level offense, et cetera. So, we're working that through. 40 is the first group. It requires approval from the State and/or DAs. And then we'll look for anyone and everyone more. I'm very, very concerned about the situation. I will also tell you, this is fact, that because the number of people incarcerated is about half as what the number it was when I came into office, there's actually a lot of space available on Rikers and in our jail system to socially distance people and isolate people. We also have very strong health care provided by Health + Hospitals in our jail system. So, we understand the danger, but we have a lot of capacity to address it. We’re going to constantly see if there are more people that can be released, but we have to be smart about this equation. We still need our criminal justice system to function at this moment.

Lehrer: And I want to close –

Mayor: I am being told the Marriage Bureau closed, starting today. So, are they going to be working today or not? Let me clarify. They are not working today – closed. So, the Marriage Bureau, closed as of today. That is fact.

Lehrer: Until further notice

Mayor: Of course. But I think further notice – again, real talk for all New Yorkers, further notice is when we start to come out of this crisis, which on the trajectory we're on is many weeks away. It's certainly – the thing is going to get a lot worse in April, and I'm worried about whether May could even be worse than that. So, this is going to be a long battle. I've been trying to be very real with people about it.

Lehrer: And let me come back to close where you started because you've certainly got me on board with this, that if the game is – the essential game that is life and death is getting enough supplies like ventilators and masks into the health care system here where we have 30 to 40 percent of the cases in the country, and if the president really could make that happen to a large degree by invoking the Defense Production Act in the way that you're requesting – is there anything you can do to get other mayors and governors on board? They all have their interests for their own localities, but to lobby the president on behalf of this unique concentration in New York to do this for us.

Mayor: Of course, I've been working with the U. S. Conference of Mayors and I believe governors will be very helpful across the board. I mean, it's been noted that some of the Republican governors have been leaders in calling for more urgent action. So, we'll look for every colleague to weigh in. But to me, Brian, we have to be blunt. The president invoked the Defense Production Act and then – meaning he activated it and then gave no order to produce anything. So, there's something strange. Everyone understands the military could have been mobilized already, can be mobilized this moment. So, this is almost willful ignorance, willful betrayal of New York City by the president. I don't know if he's doing it on purpose. I don't know if he is – somehow thinks this is something he is – some revenge he's taking. I don't know what the hell is going on here, but it's so obvious.

So yes, we will look for anyone and everyone who can lobby the president and have an impact on – I'll call business leaders who have a relationship with them, everyone. But it's so far beyond anything that we could possibly logically follow. It is a pandemic, it is a global crisis – thousands of Americans infected and it's just begun. This is the tip of the iceberg – and a president who praises our military so often, rightfully so, not activating the military. You know, who is giving him his instructions? Where is he getting the idea that our military should stay at their bases in the middle of the biggest health care crisis we've seen in generations? I will try and get anyone and everyone to lobby, but I think it goes far beyond that.

Lehrer: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you.

2020-03-20 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, everyone, we've got a lot to cover today and I'll try and give you quick updates and then we're going to hear from our Police Commissioner and our School's Chancellor, then we'll open it up to media questions. We're going to talk today, of course, about the new measures taken by the State and going to talk about what is still not happening with the federal government and what we need from the federal government and obviously the overall situation in terms of what's happening with the people of this City.

I do want to start by saying that we had a very, very important announcement by Governor Cuomo. I want to thank him and commend him for the decision that he made. I think it is the right decision. It's going to be a new reality in this City and we have to understand that this is something that's absolutely necessary. I want to say to my fellow New Yorkers, none of us asked for the coronavirus to say the least. None of us expected the coronavirus. We are in a whole new dynamic. We're all learning every day how to make sense of it. And when I give you these briefings and just like my colleagues we’ll try and be as blunt and straightforward as we possibly can be, but some of the time the answer will be we don't know because we still don't know. There are so many things we're trying to sort out in a brand-new reality.

What I can say is a lot of the pieces are coming together to make sure that we do everything humanly possible to slow the spread of this disease, to give us a chance to prepare for the weeks ahead when we're going see a lot more cases and make sure our healthcare system will be as strong as it possibly can be. And that's why the Governor's decision was so important to make sure that all non-essential workers go home, that only people who are working are people who are doing something absolutely necessary for our City and our State. To make sure that people had some clear rules about what you can and cannot do. And we want to be clear about how we're going to enforce those rules. And you're going to hear from our Police Commissioner in a moment and clearly the NYPD is going to play a major role in enforcement along with other agencies that we depend on like the FDNY, the Sheriff's Office, many other agencies will be involved. But really, we want to emphasize from the beginning – I want to be clear that we're in a brand-new reality – we have not gone through something like this across our whole City in generations.

And our goal would be every single day to try what we think makes sense, to see how it goes, to listen to New Yorkers to best understand what's going to work and what doesn't. I constantly am listening for the feedback I'm getting. People are reaching me from all parts of the city, are giving me updates, I know my colleagues are too, and we're getting a real sense of what people need and how best we can serve them. But we are all trying to catch up with a new reality. So we will be enforcing the Governor's order, the Governor's order is the right thing to do to protect us all. And particularly to protect those who are most vulnerable, the folks over 50 with those preexisting health conditions and particularly folks over 70, even if they're pretty healthy, those are the people in most vulnerable - those are our loved ones, our friends, our neighbors, the people we worship with that we need to take care of.

So, acting on the State's order, we're going to do all we can to educate people to help them understand how to live with this new reality, how to work together, how to support each other. It's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to be perfect the first time, but we do know that we're going to be able to help people understand how to make it work and that we all have to make it work. We all have to do this together. So, you'll see folks from your city government led by the NYPD out there, reminding people, educating people, warning people to make sure we get this right.

So, let me go over a few other matters, starting again with the State order. Again, starts to take full effect on Sunday night at 8:00 pm, 100 percent of nonessential workers must stay home. But there are a number of industries and businesses that are essential – those that provide food, groceries, obviously food delivery, pharmacies, mass transit, healthcare, that's, those are the areas that of course will be protected – will keep going. But I think it's as simple as this. If you don't need to be out, you shouldn't be out, and if you can be home, you should be home. That's what it really comes down to. Especially for those folks most vulnerable, as I mentioned, you know, folks who at this moment are vulnerable to this disease, let's just think about it, we don't want them to take any chances whatsoever. If anyone in those categories wants to go outside for a little bit, I get it, but please, absolutely distance from anyone around you and as briefly as possible really, really limit the people who come in contact with you. No one should come in contact with anyone over 50 with those preexisting conditions or over 70 in general without checking first to see if you have a temperature, use a thermometer. If you have a temperature over a hundred, you should not be in contact with anyone in those vulnerable categories. People have to be really, really smart about it and always, always practice social distancing. That's six feet apart - wherever you are - except when you're right among your own family members, you go out for a walk, stay six feet apart from people. You go to the grocery store, stay six feet apart from people. Anything you're doing, keep to that rule. Does anyone think it's going to be perfect, no. But if you keep thinking all the time and acting all the time, you'll be able to protect yourself.

For folks who we know were planning gatherings, obviously we're quite clear and it's tough to say, there's so many gatherings we look forward to each year. Anything non-essential should not happen at this point, just has to be postponed. The core of this crisis will certainly go on for weeks, most likely months. If you have to postpone, you'll be postponing for a while, but it is the right thing to do to keep people safe. And I remind people that's true outside as well as inside, that six feet apart matters in either situation. We want to make sure people remember, even when you're doing those basic things, going to the grocery store, going to the pharmacy, you still need to keep six feet apart. And again, we're going to ask the NYPD and other agencies to keep an eye on places where people are getting a little too crowded and to go in and remind people to separate and spread out. I don't think most New Yorkers need a lot of reminding of what this pandemic means and the dangers it brings, but we're all human beings, we're social, we're used to being close together, especially in this City. I know the NYPD and others will do a great job of making sure we’re reminded to do the smart thing and the healthy thing and the safe thing.

Okay, let me now talk to you about the overall situation. And this is the part of each briefing that I really hate to give cause it's just astounding and it gets worse each time. But my job is to tell you the truth and my job is to tell you the facts that you need to know, so here we go. As of 10:00 am today we can confirm in New York City, 5,151 cases confirmed of Coronavirus and to give you perspective, that is now about one-third of all the coronavirus cases in the United States of America. It is about two-thirds of the cases in the State of New York. I hate to say this, but it's true, we are now the epicenter of the crisis right here in the nation's largest city. And we have so much we have to do.

The City, we are doing everything that we possibly can. People are giving us ideas every day. We're running with those ideas. We're trying to create new things to help people. We're, we're our public servants are doing an amazing job. A lot of people are coming forward from the private sector offering help from the philanthropic center - sector. They're so many people offering help from individuals like those amazing medical professionals who've come forward over 2000 of those retirees who have volunteered to come back to help. Business people big and small, offering to give anything they have to help this City. So many amazing positive stories and that reminds me just how good New Yorkers are and how much we're going to really find a way to get through this together.

So, the City government is doing everything it knows how, New Yorkers, businesses, nonprofit organizations, community groups, houses of worship – everyone's chipping in – State of New York, doing the right thing, the right policy to protect us all and taking a lot of the other right moves to be careful to make sure we all get through this. Everything makes sense until you get to the federal government. And I still can't understand it. Every day that I talk to you, I cannot understand what's going on here. There was another big press conference by the President and his key officials. They were talking about what is undoubtedly one of the biggest crises in this country in generations, one of the biggest threats to our national security in generations, and, yet, essentially, today, the President offered no new evidence of action. I don’t understand why he won’t do the single simplest thing that would help us and help this whole country mobilize our armed forces. We need their ability – their logistical ability, their operational ability, their extraordinary personnel, including their extraordinary medical personnel. We need them here, we need them now, it's as simple as that. And the orders still have not been given, the same with the Defense Production Act. We have been waiting and waiting. The President said today he would utilize it, but there's no specific evidence of that confirming to us any specific supplies or equipment being built manufactured— distributed. We have nothing yet to tell us when we're going to get help and we need it. Continue to appeal to our congressional delegation, which has been very supportive. I'm reaching out to cabinet secretaries. I'm reaching out to the Vice President, anyone who will listen. But we need the President's full authority utilize under Defense Production Act so that it will actually turn into thousands of ventilators, millions of surgical masks, all the things that New York needs.

And by the way, I've warned people in two or three weeks at this rate, we're going to run out, but that's the beginning of the crisis. Later in April, into May, it gets worse. So, we need the Federal Government to act. Senator Schumer to his credit is playing extraordinary role. He has offered this Marshall Plan for hospitals. That's exactly what we need to give our health care community what they need, the supplies, the equipment, everything they need. But listen, it also to his great credit, recognizes that States and Localities are right now bearing massive new expenses and are stressed in huge ways and we need the financial relief to so we can help our people and our people need money back in their pockets and the federal government can do that. So again, thank you to Senator Schumer for all you are doing. I want to give a number of updates about actions quickly that the City is taking. And then I'll turn to our police commissioner and then our School's Chancellor.

Let me just say, I mentioned earlier of the sheer number of cases, again, 5,151 – an astounding number – 29 people in this city have passed away because of coronavirus. We've lost 29 New Yorkers and that number is sure to keep growing very, very sadly. In terms of the boroughs, we have 1,406 cases this as again as of 10 am this morning. 1,406 cases in Queens— 1,518 cases in Brooklyn 1,304 – I'm sorry, 1,314 cases in Manhattan, 667 cases in the Bronx and 242 cases in Staten Island. Let me tell you about some of the things we're going to do. — Chancellor will go into more detail on the question of our enrichment centers. These are the new centers we've never had them before, this is a brand new thing. And I want to thank everyone at the Department Education. Everyone, our educators, our staff, our – senior leadership, everyone, these, these folks have been working nonstop to get this ready. This, these are the enrichment centers to provide education and to give a safe place to the kids have, are absolutely essential. Workers are our healthcare workers, our first responders, and our transit workers. We know we need all of those workers at the front where they're needed most and they need to have their kids someplace safe. So, they will open up on – Monday morning, there'll be 93 to begin, but we could well be adding more. A 76 of those will be a K to 12 education centers – 17 will be early childhood grades only. And these sites can handle well over 50,000 students. It's not going to be anywhere near that number to begin but it could grow much more as we go along and we want to be ready for anything.

The first group, of course again, is health care workers, first responders, transit workers, I've identified them before. All of them will be able to once confirmed, of course we'll be able to have the kids— go to these schools and centers during the school day. For the department education staff who will be working at the centers and the food— distribution locations, I'll be talking about those in a moment. Of course, their children as well we'll have that opportunity, for the frontline investigators and child protective workers in the Administration of Children's Services who protect kids against child abuse. The same for Department of Corrections essential staff, the same for Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration shelter staff and key contracted staff, the same and for sanitation essential staff. And that obviously means in case of corrections and sanitation, our frontline workers as well. So – we will be getting all the details out on the different categories of City workers and – other workers who qualified to have this opportunity for the kids. Those categories are not a final, meaning, we will reserve the right over the next few days into next week to add as we see what's going on, as we hear from additional folks what they need. I mentioned the feeding sites – we're going to be doing a lot of work in these next weeks and months on new ways of feeding New Yorkers. – In terms of feeding, in this case we mean grab and go meals. So this is not people sitting down, of course we're trying to enforce social distancing in every way we can. So, the grab and go meals would be for any young person under 18, whether they go to a public school or any other kind of school. 435 sites we'll be opening on Monday, they will serve breakfast, lunch and dinner. A young person can come and get all three meals at once or any combination – for limited hours and a day on the early part of the day. Details will all be posted – we've got – this is based on sites that were either part of our summer food program from last summer, about a hundred of those sites are being used here. A number of other sites where we see a very high level of kids who during the school year get school meals at a reduced rate or free because of their status economically. We're also to have a special initiative to get food to the homes of medically fragile students. Those are students who really need particular help the Department of Education is going to have a special plan for them. And we're working with Door Dash and we want to help them, excuse me, we want to thank them for their help in making this possible. Everyone who stepped up to make these feeding sites possible, I want to thank all of you. There are a lot of public servants, everyone out there I just want to say a lot of public servants who know it's a tough situation. There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of anxiety, but they're stepping forward anyway to help their fellow New Yorkers, and I want to commend all of them.

Some other quick updates – there’ve been real questions about the small business grants and loans that we announced over a week ago. Want to make sure we're clear about how that works and I want us to do a better job of keeping this information straight forward and clear for a small business folks who need them going forward. The grants for businesses with five or fewer employees who have lost 25 percent or more of revenue, that application has been online and live since last Tuesday – and we have now 466 applications, they will all be processed by Monday and money will go into people's bank accounts on Monday. For the businesses with fewer than a hundred employees, and those that also lost 25 percent or more of their revenue, there’s a huge demand for those loans. We are not going to be able to meet the full demand immediately. We'll do our best to reach as many as we can initially, that's about 400 businesses as well. Those businesses will be able to process their applications tomorrow, beginning tomorrow and the money, the loan money will be in their bank accounts by the end of this coming week. So that one we're still playing some catch up on, but we should have money in people's hands by the end of this coming week.

On our City Parks, this is another one that pains me again. I'm a parent, I love our parks for my own experiences with them, but also all of the time I spent with my kids in our parks. It pains me to tell you we have to cancel all field permits— we cannot allow any events, we cannot allow any team sports. And I'm someone who loves team sports in every form. And it really, I'm very sorry I have to tell you that. But, it's just unfortunately pretty much all team sports come with people getting in close proximity and that's how this disease spreads. So, we're not going to be able to allow any permits for that. We're going to urge everyone to exercise on their own and socially distance to the best of their abilities. And parents are going to have a tough time with this and kids are going to have a tough time with this and it's not going to be perfect. But do the best you can to live in this new reality. Again, is it going go on forever? No. It will be a certain number of weeks, a certain number of months. We don't know exactly what it will be, but it will not be forever, we know it will be finite. We know this crisis will end. So, it's – we had tough, tough adjustment, but we have to be clear about keeping people safe. There's been real good questions about bike lanes and bike usage, so it seems to be a real surge in bike usage, that's fantastic. We want to support that; we're going to begin by installing temporary bike lanes hopefully by the end of next week. First of all, in an area very, very important Second Avenue, Manhattan between 34th and 42nd street, a temporary bike lane. They're also on Smith Street and Brooklyn, part of Smith Street that does not have a bike lane. We'll put in a temporary one there. We’ll be looking for other areas all over the city that need them. Certainly, want to encourage people to use bikes as much as they can at this moment. And we'll have constant updates on that.

Now, when it comes to another way that people get around our ferries, we do have, unfortunately, we do have to reduce some of our ferry service because there simply isn't a ridership to you know, justify the kind of frequency we have now, and we have to be smart about that. Every resource right now has to be used best to fight coronavirus. Every part of the city government has to support every other part. So, we will have to reduce frequency because we just see many fewer people. Staten Island ferry ridership is down 70 percent compared to the same point last year. We will still have ferry service, but we need people to, of course, be smart about social distancing and they will have fewer trips. And so, we have to be really smart about keeping an eye on that, keeping that balance. It will not be a huge change. We'll be reducing weekday schedules from four to three boats during rush hours. So, you'll still have regular service, it'll just be somewhat less. And that will go into effect this Sunday at midnight. The same for New York city ferry. NYC ferry reductions will begin next week. We'll get the exact details. Obviously, we will be careful to protect the times that people need the ferry the most during morning and evening rush hour. But there will be reductions as service details to be announced.

So, concluding and then a few words in Spanish. Look, just to say, anyone out there is confused, you're not alone. If you feel afraid, you are not alone. If you're anxious, you're not alone. Everyone is – all of us are trying to make sense of this. But I'll tell you something – and I really, really believe it New Yorkers are so strong. There are other places in this country – and I love this whole country – but there are other places in this country this may be a particular shock to the system, but here New Yorkers have dealt with every single thing ever thrown at them, and we've had a lot thrown at us. We are a tough people by nature and that's something to be proud of. So, everyone, you know, lets depend on that. Let's believe in that. Let's believe in also the compassion in New Yorkers, that ability to help each other out no matter what. We've seen that time and time again. Let's depend on that again. Let's be there for each other. A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I'm going to turn to our Police Commissioner. I'll just say this, Commissioner Shea and I have been talking over these last days. This is going to be a new reality for the NYPD. There's no force on earth more effective, more capable than the NYPD. There's no group of professionals, more agile, more sophisticated than the men and women of the NYPD. But there's an added positive reality here. And Dermot Shea is one of the people that created neighborhood policing from scratch over these last six years to really connect our officers more deeply to their neighborhoods, to build personal relationships to really understand what was going on block by block, to get to know the people who run those grocery stores and those pharmacies that are so crucial right now. So, our officers, kind of, in a way had a head start on this crisis and with the neighborhood policing strategy. We'll have a real understanding of where they need to be to help educate people to help people remember to keep moving on and dealing with these new rules. So, the NYPD is going to be absolutely crucial in this crisis, but I am convinced they are more than ready to meet the moment.

With that, I turn you to our Police Commissioner Dermot Shea.

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll give you a brief overview of what we're seeing throughout the city as it relates to the Police Department. In terms of crime in the city, we've seen a downturn and then about the last week since as with dealing with this crisis, as you see crowds disappearing on streets and other areas, that has translated to a decrease in crime. We've also seen a decrease in calls to 911 for service throughout the city. With one notable exception, calls for service regarding sick patients and that has seen obviously an increase as expected.

I want to thank the public and all the other city agencies, some of whom are sitting here, for the cooperation that has really been seamless as we've all come together to deal with this crisis, really as one city. Men and women of the Police Department, uniform and civilian, the message to the public is they are out there, they are out there in force, and they are there to keep people safe. Whether it's at a school for kids to pick up lunches, whether it's traffic agents, expediting ambulances to get to a hospital, the men and women of the Police Department remain committed to being out there. There has been a toll to this. As we look at the Police Department’s sick, we've seen a notable increase the last four days picking up. That is something that we are watching closely, but I will tell you that at this point we remain very well resourced to handle any and all obstacles that come our way. But we are watching that closely.

As I sit here, the number is probably changing and it has changed throughout the last 24 hours. But we have at this point in time, 52 members of the NYPD that have tested positive for coronavirus. That ranges from civilian members to the executive level. The very good news is, only 1 out of 52 is hospitalized at this time and that's hospitalized with pneumonia like symptoms. So, our hearts and prayers go out to the members and their families with that respect.

What are we doing now? We are paying extremely close attention, as the Mayor said, to areas where people are gathering for good reason. Grocery stores are at the top of our list. Grocery stores, hospitals, the schools and the many facilities in the board of ed that will be open for both children and for picking up breakfast and lunch. So, that remains a focus point in the next period going forward. In terms of the grocery stores and the bars and the restaurants with these new orders of closings. Certainly the, the food establishments and the grocery stores remain open, but we also ask for continued cooperation in terms of just managing any volumes of people.
The good news is we consider about 500 locations that I would categorize as large establishments throughout New York City. We have been to them all and we have not seen any major problems. We have issued very few summonses to any establishments because of the level of cooperation that we've seen. so it's about education, it's about working with each other, and it's about the social distancing that Dr. Barbot has been preaching now, seems like years, but it's really about weeks. So, we will continue to work with the communities that we serve every day to keep continuing to spread that word. We ask for your continued cooperation at this time of certainly stress for all New Yorkers, but again, thank you for all the cooperation.

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner. I just want to thank you. Again, the men and women of the NYPD have been outstanding in this moment and really want to thank you for reminding people, again, this is one of the leading – I would argue, the preeminent public safety official in the United States of America. And what he's saying here is, that in fact, what the NYPD is finding, is the vast majority of New Yorkers are abiding by the new rules even before today, are being clear about their responsibilities to each other, the responsibilities to their community, and are listening to the constant information that they're getting about coronavirus and taking it seriously. So, I actually think as we go into this new phase with the new plan put forward by the state, that New Yorkers are going to adapt to it quickly, and the NYPD will be there to help. And if anyone needs a reminder, they'll get that reminder. If anyone needs to be reminded that you got to stick to the rules and keep moving along, the NYPD will do that. But I think new Yorkers are ready to listen, and their respect for the NYPD is great, and for all the other agencies that will help with the enforcement. So, thank you very, very much, Commissioner. Appreciate it. And we all share for you – with you, I'm sorry – the thoughts and prayers for your members who are ill, particularly the member who's hospitalized. And that's true for all of our public servants who are dealing with these challenges now and all their families.

I want to turn to our School's Chancellor now to give an update on what is starting Monday. And as he comes up, Chancellor, I have to commend you again and your team. You were asked to do something that's never been done in the history of New York City before, and you were asked to do it in a week's time. And I know it won't be perfect, but you and your team have really done an extraordinary job moving mountains here. And a lot of kids and families are going to benefit and a lot of kids are having, are getting food right now because of what you and your team have done.

Thank you. Please.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, I want to echo what the Mayor has talked about, what our Police Commissioner has talked about, what Dr. Barbot has talked about. This is a time to be aware and it's not a time to be panicked. It is a time to follow instructions. And I've been so inspired, Mr. Mayor as I've been out in the city looking at the professional development, but more importantly speaking virtually with many of my colleagues across the system. When you think about in a matter of days, the largest school system in America is going to completely switch its instructional delivery method in a matter of three, four days. That's unheard of and it's only possible because of the incredible educators that we have in our schools and leaders that lead as principals and the support team that we have in place. I've also – I'm also going to take just a moment here to say thank you to our custodians, our school safety agents, our school food and nutrition workers who have all shown up every day without fail to make sure that our students have what they need, whether it's food, but that we have clean facilities that are disinfected and deep cleaned every single day, and keeping our building safe and secure as well. I want to thank them. I haven't heard one complaint from them to say they don't want to come in, so I want to thank them for what they do.

Our school teachers and administrators as well. We're about to go into the very big unknown, but we're excited because there are many schools in New York City that have already had some version of virtual learning, distance learning, remote learning, but this is an opportunity for us to take this to scale. So I'm thankful that on Monday we will switch to a remote learning model where our students will continue to be able to get the instruction they need over the next few weeks, hopefully not months, but whatever the time period is we will be able to continue to have them engaged academically. It doesn't mean that there won't be hiccups, and Mr. Mayor, I appreciate that you have said we are in uncharted waters and there will be hiccups. But the good thing is that we all recognize that a good is not going to be the opposite of a perfect, and we're going to continue to work through those hiccups as we build this new –

Mayor: Perfect is the enemy of good.

Chancellor Carranza: Perfect is the enemy of good. Yes, sir. So, there will be hiccups, but we're going to keep the lines of communication open. But not only will students be transitioning to remote learning on Monday, but across the city, and you mentioned this, sir, 439 buildings will serve three meals a day to any student that wants one. No identification is required. No identifying what school you come from. If you show up, you will be able to get not only breakfast and lunch, but also dinner, all at one stop. Now you mentioned that these sites were specifically chosen. 100 of sites were chosen because they were high participation sites in summer of 2019 and the remaining sites are schools where more than 50 percent of the students are eligible for free and reduced lunch. So we're trying to be very strategic in terms of where we locate these sites. To find a site near you, it's very easy. Just search free meals on the DOE website, free meals, or you can call 3-1-1. Or starting Monday, you can text food, F-O-O-D, or comida, C-O-M-I-D-A to 8-7-7-8-7-7, that simple.

Mayor: Say the name of the DOE website.

Chancellor Carranza: It’s www.nycschools. So, please it's that simple. 3-1-1 or texting 8-7-7-8-7-7, food or comida. We're also opening 93 regional education enrichment centers serving up to 57,000 students whose parents are on the front lines serving our city, including first responders, health care workers, transit workers. We will also be serving the essential staff – other essential staff including sanitation workers, DHS and HRA, shelter staff, ACS staff, and obviously the DOE staff that are reporting to the regional enrichment centers and serving food all day. 76 will be K-12 centers in 17 will be early education childhood centers. And again, we want to thank our first responders and our essential workers for keeping our city going. Students at these educational enrichment centers will be there from 7:30 am until 6:00 pm and they will participate in remote learning with their school as well as any art or physical education activities that we have. I personally had been blown away by the fact that we have 2,000 volunteers that have thus far volunteered and signed up to staff these centers. We've also heard the call to expand the eligibility for these centers and we are evaluating in the coming days and weeks our capacity to be able to meet that need as well.

So, the work isn't going to be easy and it's probably not going to be flawless, but I am very proud of the work and the labor that my colleagues in the Department of Education have put into making sure with a compassionate heart that our 1.1 million students will be served for either weeks or months, but they will be served. We have a long road ahead, but I'm confident that together we will be able to make this a reality for all of our students.

Mayor: Thank you very much Chancellor. Now we will turn to Olivia who will be our moderator. Go ahead Olivia.

Olivia Lapeyrolerie: So, just a quick note at the top for folks, we want to get to as many people as possible, but in order to do that, we ask that you limit your questions to two max. And with that we're going turn it over to Yoav for the first question.

Mayor: I see have reverse the order here. Go ahead, Yoav.

Lapeyrolerie: Changing it up on a Friday.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Hi, so two questions. One we seem to be hearing about a surprising number of younger people who are hospitalized and even in the ICU and supposedly many of them do not have preconditions. I'm just wondering if your Health Department is seeing that and whether there's any consideration to changing the messaging so that perhaps some of the healthy young adults don't continue to think of themselves as very low risk personally?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So, let me start off by saying that from the beginning we have made clear that even though the individuals who are most at risk for bad outcomes are people above 50 with chronic underlying illnesses, we have also been saying that they're not the only ones who are at risk. That certainly we have had young people not only infected but also have been ill. We have not seen a large number of young people hospitalized, but the reality is that, and I just want to sort of take a pause here because we're in a somber moment in this outbreak, right? We've gone from a period of three weeks of having single digit cases to then having double digit daily cases to then having triple digit daily cases, and now we are in the thousands every day of new individuals infected with COVID-19.

So it's inevitable that there will be individuals infected with COVID-19 that represent the spectrum of New Yorkers from the young to the very old, and certainly the reason why I have such urgency with people staying in their homes is because every time New Yorkers go out unnecessarily, they are adding potential flame to the fire of spreading COVID-19, and my concern is that right now we are in the single digits, thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, single digits of people dying, reporting dying every day. But I wouldn't be surprised if we get to a day where we have double digits, new people dying every day. And so, it's incumbent on all of us, young and old and especially the young who may think that they are invincible to stay the heck indoors every time they go out unnecessarily, it puts others at risk.

So, thank you for that question because I want New Yorkers to be clear that no one, and I've said this before, it's an opportunity to really hammer home the point, no one literally is immune to this. This is a novel virus that we have never seen before and everyone is at risk for being infected. Thankfully what we've seen is that, yeah 80 percent of the people who do become infected do have mild courses. But the reality is that there are, and there have been, and there will be young people who have bad outcomes as a result of this. So, it's an incumbent on all of us to do our part, to take personal responsibility for our behavior, to be civically responsible, to stay indoors, especially if you have symptoms and to only go to the doctor if you're getting worse.

Question: Okay. Thank you. And one other question, I just want to get some clarity that there appears to be a kind of new directive from the Health Department that says “outpatient tech testing must not be encouraged, promoted or advertised”. And I'm just wondering because there was a kind of a drive through, I forget what you call it, a drive through testing site on Staten Island. I don't know if that was set up by the City or State, but given that directive would, would the administration like to see those drive through efforts stopped?

Commissioner Barbot: So, again, we have been clear that testing is best indicated for people who are symptomatic, have chronic underlying illnesses, and are not getting better. To the extent that health systems are using these types of testing sites to offload volume from their emergency departments, then that we think is okay. But we've been clear from the very beginning. We do not encourage and we actively discourage asymptomatic people from getting tested because it's squandering scarce resources, not only in terms of tests, but also in terms of the personal protective equipment that's required by health care workers when doing these tests, which include masks, gowns, gloves, all of which we will desperately need, as this epidemic continues. We are only at the very beginning, and so it's incumbent on us to protect those valuable resources, and testing asymptomatic people is a waste of time.

Mayor: Yeah. And so, Yoav, we – any testing center set up by the City or State is working on a priority basis and a reservation basis. That's the standard we're working with our two health commissioners, City and State, talk constantly. What we have all agreed to is on the, the testing centers we've announced around Health + Hospitals facilities, you call, you speak to a clinician, they determine if you need testing. If you're a priority person, you get a reservation. This is the way it's going to go for testing for the foreseeable future until and unless we have a really, really substantial supply of testing and we can have different standards. But that is clear. And I do think to make clear to folks that, you know, it 80 percent and this continues to be seen in the statistics, 80 percent of people have a mild experience. For those folks, if you stay home, if you are able to ride this out, you may never need to be tested. And we have to be clear that that is in an imperfect situation, that's a virtue if folks can, and we actually, bluntly, a lot of people already have – some of them didn't even know they were sick with anything special. I mean, we know this, that some people had this disease and had a very minimal impact from it and just wrote it out. Other people we know are tremendous danger. So we have to keep focused on where the need is greatest and that's how the testing programs will go. Go ahead, Olivia.

Lapeyrolerie: Matt Chayes, you’re up next.

Question: Thank you Olivia. Mr. Mayor, I know you're in close contact with the Governor and you've been working very closely together. But I'm looking for you to be specific about the extent to which his executive order that he signed on Wednesday limits which you as Mayor can do and also how it limits what you can do under the two orders you've already signed? And then I have a question for the Police Commissioner once you've answered that.

Mayor: Yeah, Matt, I think that we have done previously, it continues. The State to the best of my knowledge agrees with it. There's nothing changing on the actions we've taken so far. And the Governor's order is for the entire State, and I think as a very simple way to characterize it. It says that localities need to defer to the State, and if we want to do something specifically, we go to the state, we talk it through. If there's agreement, either the state's going to do it or we're going to do it, but it's going to be done with a common understanding. That makes sense to me in a time of crisis. So that's how we'll operate.

Question: Thank you very much. And for Commissioner Shea assuming your officers ask nicely and a person is not on an authorized outdoor excursion and is intransigent, what will the response be for failing to obey?

Commissioner Shea: There's a range of available methods that can be taken. You know, and ultimately summons and arrest is one of those options, but that's the last resort. And as I stated when I opened today, what we have been encountering from the beginning of this is overwhelmingly cooperation. When you look at the summonses that have been issued, when you look at the initial things that were put into place regarding these bars and restaurants, single digits in a city of 8.6 million people, and not only single digits, I think closer to two is I believe the last number I saw. So certainly, with anything that we put into place in New York City. There are many laws on the books, but we start with a conversation and we progressed from there. And by and large what we have gotten is cooperation and we anticipate more in the same.

Lapeyrolerie: Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, how are you Commissioner? I just had a couple of questions – actually two questions for the Police Commissioner. The first one is, is there going to be any plan to say going to a place like Prospect Park for instance, that just seems like it's very crowded and either kick people out of the park but to reduce how many people are there? And the other question I have is just the Department ha have anything like a pandemic plan in place and if it does, what are the elements and has that being implemented?

Mayor: Let me jump in on the first part because we are obviously putting together our approach. This action by the State is very new. Again, I agree with it fully, but it's a new reality we're going to acclimate to. I know Prospect Park like the back of my hand, spent, you know, decades around it. If you had – think of a very, very crowded Prospect Park the goal is not to kick people out. The goal is to get people to create some distance of some space from each other. There's already officers who patrol in Prospect Park. They'll go and say that people getting too close together spread out. And you know, find – there is lots of different parts of the park spread out, make sure you're safe. And we'll be doing that all over the city and wherever we can find opportunities to open up additional spaces. One of the things I want to make sure we're working on is school yards, for example. We want to maximize spaces for people, but the goal is not to kick anyone out who's, you know, getting some exercise. The goal is to space them out and to make sure that people don't linger too long, because the goal of course is once you've gotten your exercise to get back home. You can take the rest, Commissioner

Commissioner Shea: In terms of the second part of the question, when you talk about planning for a pandemic, that's what we do. We plan for large scale events. When you look at tabletop exercises, when you look at organizations such as the NYPD and how we plan with the Fire Department, EMS, Office of Emergency Management, all of the partners. And that's whether it's for a terrorist strike, whether it's a New York City Marathon or any other events. Certainly, this coronavirus that we're seeing now is a new page. But many of the things that we are seeing now are things that we have quite frankly planned for in terms of immediacy, in terms of going into hot zones and working with our partners, in terms of planning for longer term outages of water, food, electricity. So what – pulling this altogether, this is a very, very fluid situation that we're involved with. But as I said, whether it's patrol strength, switching to 12-hour tours, dealing with less resources, these are things that we plan for the worst on a daily basis. And I think that many, much of that planning is providing very useful today.

Mayor: Amen.

Lapeyrolerie: Thanks, Mark. Up next is Julia.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Kind of related to Yoav’s question, the City Health Department – maybe this is a question for Dr. Barbot, put out demographics that found most of the city's positive cases are men between the ages of 18 to 49. Can Dr. Barbot discuss why that is?

Commissioner Barbot: So, I think it's too early in the outbreak to make any informed opinions about what that might be. But it does sort of draw attention to the fact as we have said in the past, that we are encouraging those in that age group who are not symptomatic, not to be tested, and that we are encouraging folks who are mildly symptomatic to remain home. You know, I know that recently there have been reports where worldwide, it seems like men have worse outcomes than women. Again, I think it's premature to make any sort of inferences on what that might mean because especially here in New York City, we're only at the very, very, very beginning of this outbreak. And while for example, places like Italy, you may see that disparity, in places like Korea it's a 50-50 split. So, I think it's too early to tell.

Lapeyrolerie: Thanks. Julie, do you have an additional question or a follow up?

Question: I don’t. Thank you.

Lapeyrolerie: Thank you. Up next is Joe Anuta.

Mayor: Who is that?

Lapeyrolerie: Joe Anuta.

Mayor: Joe?

Lapeyrolerie: Joe you're up. Okay. We can't hear Joe. Joe, we'll come back to you. Jen. Jennifer from the AP is up next.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: Thank you Mr. Mayor. And this is actually a question for the Schools Chancellor. I was wondering if you could enlighten us a little bit more about the nuts and bolts of what the preparation for remote learning has entailed both technologically and then the teacher training, and in communications with families?

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, thank you. So, it's important to recognize that as I mentioned in my comments, there are a number of schools in the New York City Department of Education that are very, very far along this path, have been doing this for a while, have very sophisticated systems and structures and have really done a great job. We've been trying to capture those best practices as part of our ramp up as well. And then we have some schools that this is the first time they will ever try remote learning. So, we do have a differentiated group of colleagues out there. So in order to do that, what we've done is we've created tutorials for all of our teachers. We've vetted and curated lots of different virtual, not only learning sites but also activity sites. We're working with a number of partners, third-party partners that have great resources. Everything from being able to take virtual trips to do virtual treasure hunts, and then students get to write about it. They're all grade specific, they're grade aligned -- standards aligned. We have given guidance and we'll continue to give guidance to teachers around being able to, for example structure a learning day so that students have multiple opportunities to explore different content areas. A student in middle school or in high school for example, may have a math assignment, then if they are having difficulty with that math assignment, there's a hot link in their Google classroom where they can click and go to the Khan Academy and get a tutorial on how to solve for those issues. That's the kind of support that we're trying to provide for our teachers. And I have to say that a number of the things that we've been able to curate are coming right from our teachers as well. So, this has been a good discovery process for us.

For parents and for students, it is also a shift in the learning environment for them. So we're putting guidance out to parents in terms of what they can do. And parents can be as involved or not in terms of guiding what their children are doing in this environment. We're going to ask that parents do support us and make sure that they understand that we want students to participate in the remote learning activities. It's only going to benefit them. But we also recognize the fact that parents are under a lot of stress right now. And we know that there, there's multiple things happening in family dynamics. So, we understand that as well. But we just want to make sure that parents and students and teachers have what they need to be able to have robust learning that happens in the very near future. One last thing that I'll say is that we are also paying special attention to our vulnerable students. So, students with disabilities, our English language learner students, our students in – that are homeless. So, we have very specific plans that teachers in their schools are working on with those students. For example, students with disabilities – they're being reached out to, they've been reached out to this whole week and they're developing certain ways of working with those students. Some of them you would expect to be easier than others. For example, students that need speech therapy, you can do that in a virtual environment rather easily. But students that need physical therapy, it requires a whole other dynamic. So it's not a cookie cutter approach. And we're working through those issues right now. We also are addressing the device and the digital divide between our students. We have about 25,000 Wi-Fi enabled computers that we're starting to distribute on Monday and we'll continue to. We have others already planned and schools using their own stock of computers that usually stay in the school and they're assigning them to students to be able to take home. A lot of moving parts. And I know I gave you a lot of information but a very complex implementation. I'm really proud of our team.

Lapeyrolerie: Back to Joe. Oh, sorry, Jennifer, continue.

Question: Thanks for that. And following on that, I know that there have been some students who tried to pick up a device this week and were unable to, they ran out or what have you. What guidance are you giving them for what they should do until next week if they don’t have the equipment on Monday?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so I'm going to encourage all families to stay in close contact with their school because the school will have the most up to date information pertaining to their particular distribution. But – and remember devices are coming in all the time. But we also have more than two weeks’ worth of paper and pencil assignments and activities and packets that are available as well. Those will be available at the hubs that I spoke of where parents and students can come and pick up breakfast, lunch and dinner. They can also pick up assignments. So again, it's very simple, www.schools.nyc.gov. There is a link right on the homepage there that'll take you to home learning and it has lots of information. You can also call 3-1-1 and we'd be happy to help.

Lapeyrolerie: Up next is Jeff Mays. Then we're going to go back to Joe. Jeff?

Question: Yes. This is for the Commissioner. There have just been some calls for the NYPD to cut down on low level enforcement. And some district attorneys have said they will not prosecute such arrests. Does the NYPD plan to curb some of its enforcement activity or have you already begun to do that?

Commissioner Shea: So, if you look at where we are in New York City, we've dramatically cut our enforcement over really the last six years. I'm very comfortable where we are right now in terms of policing in this city. It continues to evolve. As I said before, the primary focus that I want to get out today is the men and women in the New York City Police Department are out there. They're out there to keep people safe. Whether you're a crime victim or whether you're a person dealing with this crisis, and we're going to continue to do that.

Question: But have you cut enforcement?

Commissioner Shea: I'm sorry?

Question: But have you caught enforcement?

Mayor: Not because I, just to clarify it. Not something different because of what's happened in the last few weeks?

Commissioner Shea: We have no intention of strategically cutting enforcement specifically related to this coronavirus. But as I said before, we have through precision policing exhibited what I like to think is the best policing model in this country for the last six years. And we'll continue to do that.

Mayor: Yeah. Jeff, I want to add to that. I think there's – we got two historical trends kind of coming together here and we got to understand that. Six years of nonstop adjustment, and I always remind people, the day Bill Bratton said to me, it was a very, a revelatory day for me learning from, you know, one of the great police leaders of our time. And he said, you know, arrest is just one tool. And obviously some years ago before this administration, arrest was overused and stops were overused. And what Bill Bratton said is we need to understand that arrests have a place, summonses have a place, warnings have a place. There are all different tools that police can use, but really what you need to do is treat police officers as the professionals they are. Train them, constantly support them, constantly give them discretion. And honestly, in the past, and the Commissioner knows much more than me. Went on the job in 1991 in the South Bronx in a tough, tough time. But in truth, for a long time, our officers were not given the respect to get the kind of training they deserved and the opportunity to use that training and that discretion. When you combine that with a constant devotion to reducing unnecessary arrest, reducing stops profoundly, turning to summons is more and warnings more while keeping people safe. And we do know, notwithstanding the last few months where we've had some aberrant realities. Overall, we're at the safest point in New York City since the 1950’s. That six-year trend was already highly established, deeply established before coronavirus became a major reality in our lives in the last few weeks. So, I would argue the adjustment already happened and there's not a lot of additional adjustment that needs to happen. Our police officers obviously focus now in this new reality starting Sunday, on educating and warning and helping people do the right thing. But we also have to keep people safe. And the Commissioner and I've talked a lot about the last few months and we saw some things we did not like that we have to address and we have to keep an eye on that. I'm heartened to hear that crime has gone down recently, obviously interconnected with the last few weeks. But Jeff, I'm just trying to put that all in perspective. I think we would argue that we got to a good balance point and we're not moving off that simply because of what we've seen in the last few weeks. We'll continue to watch if something changes. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. But I think we feel good about where we are.

Lapeyrolerie: Back to Joe.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah.

Question Okay, great. Hi Mr. Mayor. I have two questions for you. The first I don't know if you've seen, there's this new data analysis out there that says hospital visits will overwhelm capacity next week. I think that this gentleman Michael [inaudible] is predicting 3,000 visits by Tuesday, 8,000 by Friday in 15,000 early next week.

Mayor: I'm sorry to interrupt Joe, just to make sure we're speaking the same language. When you say visits, do you mean hospitalizations?

Question: Hospitalizations from a coronavirus, yes. And I'm curious if you could just give us an update? I know there are lots of plans to bring additional capacity online. Where are we today and sort of can you give any specifics about when we'll see some of the reserves brought online?

Mayor: I'll start and then pass to Dr. Katz. Joe, I've only a glancing sense of that particular production. There's a lot of projections that are being looked at right now. But what I've said over the last few days I think is the summation, the sort of simple version of the projections that we're seeing. Which is for the remainder of March, we believe our hospital system in its current state can handle what is obviously a very, very intense surge of cases. When, I mean our system, and again, Dr. Katz and Dr. Barbot will refine what I say as experts. But that our public system and our voluntary system having now shed a huge amount of activity with the end of elective surgery and ending people's hospital stays appropriately earlier where they could, they have a lot of capacity opened up. And they've obviously been preparing and we believe, you know, over this next week or two, we're prepared to handle that. I've been very blunt about the fact that after two weeks or three weeks, we get into a whole new reality. And that's where we not only need that expansion of space, but we need that expansion of supplies and equipment to start reaching us. We have, as you heard, you know, about 1,200 additional beds we're bringing on rapidly. Some of those will be as early as this coming week. A huge amount of space has been offered us in the hotel industry and others, Deanna Criswell is here, our Emergency Management Commissioner, her teams coordinating that. We are going to be literally bringing stuff online as quickly as we can. But I think it's safe to say that next week will be the beginning of new capacity and then it'll just be rolling over weeks and weeks. So as we get specific numbers, I think, you know, as we get into next week we'll be able to start putting some specific dates and numbers to it. But I do feel that next week for sure, our system has the capacity it needs. Dr. Katz?

President Katz: Well Health + Hospitals which runs 11 acute care hospitals, is very much dealing with the dynamic that you're speaking of and that the Mayor has spoken to. We have been able to open up capacity in the ways that the Mayor has spoken. We're also focused very much on COVID specific care for patients who have COVID, which allows us to provide that care much more efficiently. But I would certainly agree that our hospitals are seeing volumes of patients that they have never seen before. And it's extremely challenging. People are rising to meet that challenge, but it certainly is a difficult situation.

Mayor: Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: And Mr. Mayor, if I can add to what you and Dr. Katz have said. Part of the reason why it is so critical for us as New Yorkers to take social distancing really, really, really seriously is because that is our best chance at bending the curve and not overwhelming our health care system. Every time a New Yorker goes out unnecessarily, they risk being exposed. They risk becoming sick to the point of needing to go to the hospital. And we need New Yorkers to stay indoors because all of the measures that we've been talking about in terms of preparing hospitals, securing beds, all of that can be, I'm not going to say avoided because we're far enough along that it's going to be bad. And I've said that and we're preparing for bad. And you know, it doesn't really matter which models you look at, they're all pretty dire. But you know, the reality is that we as New Yorkers have a role to play in protecting our health care workforce. And to the extent that we can stay indoors, not go out unnecessarily will be the best chance that we have at protecting our health care system.

Question: And if I can just ask you a quick follow up question? Mr. Mayor we’ve heard you talk about your requests to the federal government for aid and supplies and --

Mayor: You there, Joe? What happened?

Question: Yeah, I had a quick follow up question?

Mayor Yeah, yeah, go ahead. We heard you and then we lost you. Continue.

Question: Okay. So, we've heard you talk about your request to the federal government for supplies and aid that really, you haven't been getting the response you want. The President said today at his press preference that he's not dealing with you, he's dealing with the Governor. I was wondering if I could get your reaction to that? And also, is it sufficient that the President is only communicating with the Governor of New York and not the Mayor of New York City?

Mayor: Look, his answer was bluntly irresponsible. And first of all, I don't care if it is the President or the Vice President or a cabinet secretary. I don't care who it is. If someone in the administration would tell us that we're going to get the supplies we need in time and would prove to us how that's going to work, I would have only praise and appreciation for them. That's never, ever happened. We haven't gotten a single response from anyone indicating that they have a serious plan to get supplies to New York City, the largest city in the nation, the frontline of this crisis, the place that's bearing the brunt. They just don't have a plan and they're not taking it seriously. So, his response, it was kind of childish really. You know, it was like, I'm taking my ball and going home.

I would think that a responsible president of the United States, and I've had the opportunity to work with previous presidents. None of them in a million years would have thought, you don't talk to the mayor of the nation's largest city when it's the epicenter of a global crisis and how it's affecting the United States of America. It's inconceivable regardless of political differences. Any previous president, you can list them all would have been on the phone talking about how to address this, would have taken our request seriously and personally. And of course, we all are working here in New York City, and any locality through the state, but the State hasn't gotten what is asking for either. So, you know, that answer was just literally an example of running away from the question. Because if he said, Oh, I've, you know what would have been a great answer? You know, I disagree with the Mayor and here's all the things we're doing for New York State, New York City, and you know, these supplies are going to get a 10 million mask next week and they're going to get 15,000 ventilators the week after. And here's how they're being provided. Here's how I'm using the Defense Production Act. Here's how I'm going to have the United States military ensure that these supplies arrive and these military medical personnel will be there in a week. That would've been a great answer. If he has that answer, you can give it. He doesn't need to give it to me. You can give it to anyone, I'll be happy. But he had no answer. That's the truth.

Lapeyrolerie: Henry is up next.

Question: Hello, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Okay. I want to go back to the situation that, or the question that Joe asked about hospital capacity. And I'm just, I'm wondering whether anyone keeps a current tally of the status of New York hospital bed availability, particularly ICU rooms, how many are available now and how many do you need? How many patients are being hospitalized, and what percentage of those people need an ICU?

Mayor: Yeah, Henry, the answer basically is yes and the reason I say basically is, talk about a moving target. I mean we have never experienced anything quite like this, but that's exactly what everyone at Emergency Management is doing, working closely with Health + Hospitals and the Department of Health.

Question: [Inaudible] on this.

Mayor: Well, Henry, again, the numbers move constantly and the projections are constantly updated to determine exactly the equation you put forward. What's your base of beds to begin with, how many are available, especially as a lot have been emptied out for ending elective surgeries and early discharges. How many are now being utilized, how many of your ICU versus non-ICU? This is what they're doing all day long and it helps, obviously, in the process of determining what we need next and how quickly we can get it online. So that's the exercise every single day, honestly.

Question: This is the question really, though, that we have is why don't – why not at 10:00 am every morning we get a status report that gives us the number of hospital rooms available, the number of patients overnight. The number of – what the percentage is of ICU demand of those patients so that the public really has a clear sense of what the City's needs are?

Mayor: I appreciate the question.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I appreciate the question Henry. I know it's a straight forward, honest question, but I want to think about that. We have, again, an ever-changing daily, hourly situation. Want to be careful that if we put that information out, it's done in a way that actually is clear and consistent. So that's a conversation I want to have internally before I make a specific commitment to you.

Lapeyrolerie: Gloria is up next. Gloria?

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Lapeyrolerie: Can you hear me?

Question: Yes, Mr. Mayor, I just want to ask you, I understand that this this new mandate the Governor put into place today will go into effect on Sunday and if you and the Commissioner could just give New Yorkers an idea of what they can expect come Sunday night what will it look like when they go –

Mayor: Which commissioner, Gloria?

Question: What will it look like when they go out there? How is the NYPD going to enforce this?

Mayor: There we go.

Question: We are still seeing groups of people gathering in the city's parks. I know you're encouraging people to get outside and get the exercise that they need. But we are seeing video and reports of dozens and dozens of people gathering in not what looks like a – not practicing social distancing. How is the NYPD going to enforce all this?

Mayor: Gloria, I – look I understand your question is honest but I want to just say to you this is something we're going to have to figure out how to do that we haven't done before. So I understand the urgency, but I also think people – and I absolutely want to stop social distancing, but I also think we have to be honest about, we're going to figure it out every single day. The reality is, well, I want to be careful, you said encouraging people to go out. I want people to get exercise, but then I want them to get back to their homes. So it's not – I want to be very clear. I know Dr. Barbot will energetically agree with me. It's fair that everyone needs a little bit of air and exercise. They need to walk their dog, go do that. But keep it to what you need and then get back home.

Whether that's the most fun way to live life or not, is not the question. Where in the middle of a crisis, we’re in the middle of a pandemic for God's sakes. Get some exercise, get back home. So it's not, it's not like hang out all day, it's not getting in big groups. And the fact that people are still doing it because they've been doing it their entire lives is not shocking. It's actually amazing, Gloria, that in just a course of days, people have had to stop going to work, stop going to restaurants and bars, stop going to houses of worship, stop doing movie theater. So many things they used to do, like literally every day they're shedding parts of their lives and reality. They know it will come back one day, but it's a big adjustment. So if people are gathering together, we're going to send the NYPD and other agencies out to say, ‘hey, you can't do that because it's a whole new situation here, split up, spread out, go home – if you need to exercise, exercise, that's it, get back home’. Go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Shea: This is an adjustment period clearly and you're going to continue to see that adjustment period evolve in the days to come. I can tell you that this afternoon with the executive staff we met on this topic via teleconference included in that was our Legal Bureau and we're going to be putting out the message to the cops because this is very fluid so that we have uniform – I'll use the word enforcement, but it's not enforcement. It's engagement throughout the city and they are going to be encountering, I'm sure, in a city of 8.6 million people in many countless neighborhoods throughout New York City, groups as people continue to adjust. You're going to – expect to see a continued high visibility policing throughout New York City and they're going to encounter groups at times. The groups are appearing to be smaller and smaller, but they're going to inform them of this order and they're going to politely ask them to disperse. I again, for the third time, I'm going to tell you that people are cooperating. This is what we are seeing all over. New Yorkers adapt like nobody else. Exercise is sometimes a fine line between a gathering, but what we can't have is large groups, gatherings. It goes against everything that we're trying to accomplish through this social distancing. So that's what you can expect to see. Will there be some bumps and learning curve, as we go forward? I'm sure they will, but I think that New Yorkers, together with the men and women of the New York City Police Department, will adapt as we do always, we’ll overcome and we'll get through this together.

Question: And Mr. Mayor, if I could follow up and ask you to provide – do you have an update on the situation at Rikers? How many people have been removed, are you still looking to let more people out? Do you have an update on how many inmates have tested positive there and what's the status of what the city's doing at the Rikers – at the correctional facilities to protect people there?

Mayor: So, nothing new to report on, number of inmates who may have been affected. I gave a report on that yesterday. I have not heard of any change in that. We're absolutely committed to protecting the health of our Corrections officers and our inmates and everyone who works in our Corrections system. And there's a very strong health system in place there. And there's also a lot more space than we used to have because our inmate population is literally half of what it was six years ago. So, we have an initial list of people who are being processed for release, but that requires DAs and/or State approval. We're still waiting on that. Another list is being developed as we speak. You'll see a number of additional names coming – or a number of additional people who will be released, but there's more work to be done. We're trying to do this quickly, but it has to be done very, very smartly. So it's absolutely on our minds. As soon as we have firm numbers on how many people will be released and how quickly, we will update you guys.

Lapeyrolerie: Gersh is up next. Gersh? Hello, Gersh?

Mayor: Gersh?

Question: Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Hello?

Mayor: Can you hear us?

Question: I can hear you. Yes. Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, man – how are you doing?

Question: I have two very quick questions and I'll ask them in order. The Governor's order today declared that car repair shops are essential businesses, but bike repair shops are not. Given the surge in cycling and also how much work the city's bike riding delivery workers are doing, do you think bike repair shops are essential?

Mayor: Well, it's a great question, Gersh. I want to talk to the State about that because you make a good point. But I want to make sure I understand how they're treating that and why. So I will pledge to you that we will raise it to the State this evening and have an answer for you tomorrow.

Question: Okay, good. This is – the second question is a little more complicated. So today you announced two specific locations for temporary bike lanes by the end of the week, with possibly more, but will the additional locations be announced before the end of the week or only after you and DOT review the first two, and perhaps there's other things you're planning, like closing some residential streets entirely to automobiles so people can socialize that at a distance.

Mayor: Okay. Just want to say first hold on. Practical note. Someone's got something that's dinging.

Lapeyrolerie: It’s Gersh’s phone.

Mayor: It's Gersh. Oh, that Gersh. Alright, I thought it was here in the room. There you go again, Gersh. So, on the question of new bike lanes, we intend to look very quickly and aggressively at what we can do more. So as soon as – there's no interrelationship of how one fits with another, every time we’re ready to announce another one, we’re going to announce it as soon as it's ready and implement it as quickly as possible. So that's straight forward. Again, we are in a brand-new reality, we're acclimating, but obviously we've said to the Department of Transportation, working with NYPD, we want to see an expansion quickly. Let's see how quickly we can do it and where we can do it. The other part of your question, Gersh, I was so distracted by your dinging bell, I lost track of the other part of your question. What is it?

Question: [Inaudible] it feels like a – it's a casino anyway.

Lapeyrolerie: Cut out a little [inaudible] Can you start again?

Question: Yeah. The question was simply, are you considering closing some residential streets as some cities have done so that people can socialize at a distance without cars going through?

Mayor: Yeah. Without overstating it, Gersh and I just want to – I'm going to put some brakes on you to make sure that your interpretation does not get too energetic here. Definitely interested in creating more spaces for people outdoors so we can have social distancing. I think we have some good models of, like, summer streets – is an interesting idea. That's something we'll look at right away. Obviously, school yards. And that's something that's going to be a real – a challenge in a different way because we don't have the same personnel at the schools we normally do, but I think there are ways we can deal with that. So, the question is going to be how can we create the right space, the right amount of space in different places so people have alternatives and they can keep some distance. That is not necessarily the same as closing residential streets. But it means making sure there's enough space and that'll be something that will constantly grow over the next few weeks.

Question: Yeah. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you.

Lapeyrolerie: Craig from the Post is up next. Craig?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Alright, great. Commissioner, what would you say to cops that are feeling that they're not getting enough specific info about the spread of the virus in the department and feel the supplies provided have been inadequate?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, I think that – as we're sitting here, another message went out from myself personally to the men and women of the Police Department. I think with any crisis, it's fluid. There's always things that we can learn. I think we've done a good job of trying to put out information that at times seems to be changing day by day, in terms of what we're seeing. So I think you can always learn from an experience in terms of one crisis and how you can learn and better prepare for the next one. I think we've done okay in this, to be honest with you, in terms of internally informing our members what's going on, meeting with the unions, but we're also being receptive and being honest and transparent about what can we do better. In terms of equipment that too is – I think that some of the big complaints that we're getting has been just the basics, making sure that a cleaner that calls in sick, that spot is filled in.

We've done a lot in the last couple of weeks and I'll just quickly recount for you in terms of readily ramping up and hiring a hundred extra cleaners. The first set are due to come online next week. And that's moved pretty significantly in terms of the normal course of action. That's in addition to the existing cleaners that we have. We've gotten several supplies – and I want to thank Dr. Barbot for helping us get equipment and OEM and many others in this room. So whether it's masks, surgical masks, or N95 masks or basic cleaning supplies, soap, dispensers, gloves, all of this – all of this is quite frankly in short supply not just to law enforcement, to health professionals. And the prioritization and the use of it – this is going to be an ongoing challenge, not just for law enforcement, but really everyone that needs it.

I think that we've done well. We've gotten it to the frontline people of the NYPD, those that need it the most. And it has been a challenge, but it's something that we're continuing to do and we strive to do everything that we can to make our members as safe as possible during this difficult time.

Mayor: And Craig, I want to add to that. I mean, obviously we've been – I've been real blunt about the supply challenges we're facing in the next two or three weeks. And I'm praying that, you know, our pleas will be heard in Washington and acted on, and I know others are stepping forward trying to help us out. But I'm very, very cognizant that we have to make sure the men and women of the NYPD are protected. Commissioner Shea and Commissioner Barbot and I spoke yesterday. We have another half-million surgical masks that are going to the NYPD immediately. We have real, real challenges with our supply, but we're going to make sure that the men and women in the NYPD are protected for sure.

Question: Thank you. Just one other question, Commissioner Shea, you had said that the growing number of officers calling out sick, is there a plan in place if it gets to a certain level? And if so, what's the breaking point for that?

Commissioner Shea: Well, I'm not going to get into breaking points here and I don't like to advertise ever to criminals where we have higher than ordinary levels. But it – this is something that I will tell you, that every morning I wake up, I look at the numbers, I have a conference call just the second I get into work with entire members of the executive staff that are now spread out throughout New York City but calling on a central call and going over. And the first thing I start with every day is how are our members, how many people are sick, where are they sick, what rank, where do we have clusters, if you will? We also plan for where is it at now, where can we project? And this is an imperfect science as we try to lay out a roadmap of where do we think we'll be a day, two days from now, a week from now? Certainly, I don't like what I see the last four days. We had been holding steady. We can, generally speaking, predict where we will be in terms of sick rates in the NYPD. The last four days, it is going up. So, in terms of a breaking point, I'm not going to give you a number. We absolutely plan for certain levels – what do we do when it gets to a certain level? And as I started today, I talked about we're in a good place, still manageable, in terms of balancing the needs of New York City in dealing with this crisis, but also dealing with – the world goes on – and I think that's a good thing that the world goes on. So, people call the police for the traditional reasons too, whether it's somebody injured, whether it's somebody that hasn't come home and I'm worried, or whether it's, unfortunately, there are people that will still prey on victims at times like this. So, balancing all of that, we have not had to go for example, to 12-hour tours and extend and throw out our existing duty chart, but we're prepared for the point when we have to if we have a need to really rapidly ramp up and put extra officers on the street. So, again, are we planning for it? Absolutely. Are we there yet? No.

Mayor: Yeah. I want to also question, sort of, a one part of what you're raising here, Craig, respectfully. I mean, this is a police department that went through 9/11. And in the immediate aftermath, after losing so many brothers and sisters in arms, you know, got back out there and protected this city. The same obviously for the FDNY – went through hell and managed to keep us safe. This is a police department that has 2,000 more officers on patrol than it did a few years ago. So, it's a stronger, a bigger department. It is unquestionably the most efficient it's been in its history. So, the men and women are being used to the maximum in the best ways. You've got more positions that were civilianized over the last six years, so more officers made available that way. I don't think the NYPD has a breaking point.
I really don't. I think the NYPD – 36,000 officers strong – has amazing ability to adapt and to deal with any circumstance. And I would add further, two points – one, you know, a typical NYPD officer is someone who in the scheme of things, in general, is on the younger side of life and obviously typically in very good shape. It also means that for a lot of folks who even do get sick, it will be for a limited period of time. And I want to take a time out on this point just to finish the answer. I have Dr. Barbot as my lifeline. I think Dr. Barbot, there's still confusion about from the moment you feel ill to the point that just in days – the little as, as much as – if you're a healthy younger person, an average officer in their 20s or 30s, let's say, who's healthy, God forbid they can track this disease. But what would be the typical timeframe they would be out of commission before they were well enough to get back to work.

Commissioner Barbot: So, Mr. Mayor, what we are now – have now moved towards is to say from the beginning of your symptoms, you've got like roughly seven days we think you should be able to be back at work. Or, if you've got fever, then three days after your fever is gone without having taken any Tylenol, Advil or anything like that, whichever one of those two is longest. So, typically a week for most people is usually the longest that they would be out of work.

Mayor: And Commissioner, just for everyone's benefit, you're feeling fine again, you're saying you don't take the Tylenol or anything because it actually masks the reality of fever and you want to be able to test. Is it true that the fever has gone away? When you feel well.

Commissioner Barbot: Exactly. We want to make sure that it’s – when we say it's no fever, it's like a true no fever, that there's nothing potentially masking and ongoing infection.

Mayor: So, seven days, or three days no medication, without fever, whichever is longest. So, to Craig's question – again, I think what that means, Craig, I'm just going to call that for definition purposes seven to 10 days. I think like every public servant who might be affected by this disease, as we know by the numbers, 80 percent are going to come out with that kind of experience. Seven to 10 days, it's not going to be pleasant. I don't wish it on anyone. I know people are going to be concerned for their families, but they're going to come out the other side and then get right back in the game. Now, the big question – I don't think we have 100 percent answer is, are you therefore immune thereafter? I think we think there's a possibility you're immune thereafter, but we don't know for sure.

Commissioner Barbot: That's exactly right. We don't know for sure.

Mayor: So, what we do know is once you've gone through the course of the disease, you've gone through the course of the disease and then you get back in the game, as will everyone.

Lapeyrolerie: Christina, from Chalkbeat, is up next.

Question: Thanks for your time. I want to ask about the regional enrichment centers and try to get some clarity around who can attend those. You've in the past said that they'd be open for the most vulnerable children [inaudible] specifically homeless students, medically fragile students. So, can you just provide a little more clarity on who can attend those?

Mayor: Well, I want – as I turn to the Chancellor, the focus has been in this crisis on supporting the children of essential workers. That has been the construct from the very beginning. And we know there are many children in need who we want to serve in a variety of ways. Obviously, in our shelters, we're trying to do special efforts to support kids in shelter as we were doing during the school year. And the distance learning, obviously, is being developed rapidly and we have a special effort for medically fragile kids. But the Chancellor will give you a deeper definition. But the central purpose, the reason we started up these enrichment centers was to support the effort to fight coronavirus and to support essential workers’ children.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, we've been really clear from the very beginning, if you have 1.1 million children that are not in school and their parents, their guardians, their adult caregivers are first responders that are critical to keeping the city running. You could, in one fell swoop, shut down the city and our response to this virus. So, as a Mayor has been very clear and hopefully we've been clear, the whole point of these regional enrichment centers is to provide a space so that first responders, essential workers, essentially keeping the city running, have a place that their children can be while they are serving the residents of New York City. We have put out the call, we have about 57,000, which by the way, is larger than most midsize school systems in America. And we've stood these up in a matter of days. And we have – we're trying to build more capacity as we go. We've said that – and I'm going to reiterate this here – this is for students whose parents are on the front lines right now – first responders, health care workers, transit workers, other essential staff, including sanitation workers, DHS, HRA, shelter staff, ACS staff. And, of course, the DOE staff, who are manning these service centers. That being said, we are working with all due diligence to try to build more capacity to add additional groups of students into these regional enrichment centers. We're working very hard to be able to do that. But to be able to do that, you need to have a facility, you need to be able to have volunteers that are going to come and volunteer to staff them, you have to have supervisors, there's a whole range of things that have to happen. So, I understand the wanting to know why and when and how many. We are continuing to work to build more capacity to it, but the intent has been clear from the very beginning.

Lapeyrolerie: [Inaudible] Bridget is up next.

Question: Two questions, first regarding [inaudible] remote learning that's going to start on Monday. Have you had any conversations with internet service providers? We've heard anecdotally from some families that are struggling to figure out how they're going to get internet access to be able to get online for some of that.

Chancellor Carranza: Yes. So, we've actually been in contact with several internet providers. They are offering to install internet services. Obviously, we're vetting that because we want to make sure that that's not just a backdoor way to, you know, hook people into longer term engagements. But, again, that information is also available on our website on home learning where you can actually connect with those providers directly – www.schools.nyc.gov. We, also, with the devices that we are purchasing, T-Mobile is installing chips that are Wi-Fi enabled, so every one of those devices will be Wi-Fi enabled. The other thing to understand about the resources that we have is that they're accessible through smart phones. And I haven't seen very many students that don't have a smart phone, so they can actually get access to many of these resources through their smartphone as well.

Question: Great. And just a quick follow up, if a family is having trouble getting the internet service they need, is there – who should they be in contact with?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, they can call 3-1-1 and they'll put them in touch with our hotline and somebody will be able to work – walk them through a series of different options.

Lapeyrolerie: Last question goes to Ashley from the Times.

Question: Hi, good evening. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Ashley.

Question: Okay? So, I have a few questions, actually, mainly for the Commissioner, but also for the Mayor –

Mayor: Ashley, which commissioner?

Question: The Police Commissioner, the one I cover. [Inaudible] we've been talking to police officers at work over the last week or so and we saw 12 officers respond to a bus job with no gloves, masks, or sanitizer. Officers who are conducting traffic stops are leaning into windows and exchanging documents with drivers without any protective equipment. And even you, Chief Shea – Commissioner Shea, excuse me, have spoken to roll calls where there were not 10 officers, but dozens. And these are the officers who the Mayor is putting in charge of them enforcing social distance in hopes of preventing and containing the spread of this virus. But how can they be expected to do that if they don't seem to know what that looks like looks like in their own job?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you for the question, Ashley. I'll start at the second one regarding the roll calls. I've been to too-many-to-count roll calls this week, a number of them, and they started out as you described, and, as the week went on, they ended in a very different place. So, I think that's a good thing, is we educate the people. One thing we have to do is put police officers on the street to keep people safe. We work within the environment that we work in. We have made changes. We have adapted. I could tell you that – whether it was yesterday or two days or three days ago, the days run together – but I turned out a number of traffic agents in Midtown that were taken into the streets and told them that we haven't forgot them too. They are part of the NYPD family. We thank them for what they're doing. But I actually talked to one group, which was divided into about eight groups. So, we are aware of that and where wherever possible we are making the changes, if you will, to practice spreading out. To the first part of your question about the seeing officers engaging people with masks or gloves not on, that could very well be a good thing, quite frankly. When not under any orders or direction to wear gloves when interacting with people, or to wear masks. Actually, it's pretty much the opposite. We're trying to conserve the use of these and use them where appropriate. And I think the medical professionals would tell us that, generally speaking, it's better to have the masks on the people that are sick as opposed to officers walking around in the street. But certainly, we're trying to educate our members, make sure that they have the masks if they need them and to use them appropriately.

Question: Even when they're working in close proximity, you don't think they should be wearing gloves and mask? I mean there's these traffic stops, you know, you're within a foot of the officer.

Mayor: Wait a minute, Ashley, we're going to bring another commissioner in because this is like – this is – everybody in public service who – yeah, everyone in public service who – well, first of all, everyone's being told to distance, which goes against everything we've ever done in our lives, especially in New Yorkers, we’re like the most closely packed people in America. We're all learning as we go along. But the point is, trying to remember to socially distance to maximum extent possible, to be mindful, to cover your mouth when you cough and sneeze. Let's have our Health Commissioner tell us when public servants are supposed to don masks and gloves and when they're not.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, but before I do, I have to just take this moment to say, Mr. Mayor, you and I have been together I think every day for the last, I don't know, eight weeks. But I want to give a special shout out to Commissioner Shea who is joining us at the dais now, but it's clear that he's been paying attention and I think he'll get my honorary master's in public health after this press conference.

Commissioner Shea: I'm going to put on the wall.

[Laughter]

Commissioner Barbot: And, you know, I think the important thing to note is just what the Commissioner said, that the guidance that we are giving to our first responders is the same guidance that we're giving to New Yorkers in that it is a layered approach. And so, obviously, first and foremost, good hand hygiene, covering your mouth and nose when you cough and you sneeze. Layering on top of that, ensuring that if you're not close to water source, using alcohol-based hand sanitizer, layering on top of that, ensuring that if you're sick you stay home, layering on top of that, that if you can to maintain a distance of at least six feet, at least three feet, and that there are very limited circumstances under which there is an indication for using a mask. You know, all along I've said there's a place in a time for using masks and as Commissioner Shea said, the time to use a mask is when someone is symptomatic, when they're coughing, when they're sneezing, and it's to ensure that that individual doesn't contaminate other folks. It gives people who are asymptomatic a false sense of security that if they wear this mask, they don't have to wash their hands, they don't have to cover their mouths and their noses when they cough or their sneeze. And I've also given the example of, you know, seeing New Yorkers on the corner who have a mass when in reality the mask is under their chin and they're talking and they're not really following those precautions. And so, the important thing is having a layered approach and knowing what the layers are in order to provide the maximal security.

Lapeyrolerie: That concludes the press conference. Thank you, everybody.

Mayor: Thanks, everyone.

2020-03-22 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Everybody we are coming to the end of a week that has changed our lives profoundly. The week before that I think we would have said was a week that changed our lives profoundly. And next week will be even more. So, we're dealing with something we've never dealt with before, none of us has experienced. We are all together trying to figure out how to deal with a new reality and that will be something we grapple with together for weeks and months to come. So, I just want to start by saying for everyone, it's important to recognize the distance we've had to travel in very, very little time. We've had to get used to things that were literally unimaginable and we didn't get months to get ready. We only had days to change our habits and our lives profoundly. Anyone out there who's confused, you are absolutely in the vast majority with the rest of us. We're all trying to make sense of so much new information, so many new challenges and trying to figure out the right way to do this together. I'll be talking today about clearer specific ideas about how we will work together within the new pause order from the State of New York. I'll be talking about the ways we're going to work together to get through the weeks and months ahead.

I want to be very clear about challenges. I think my job is to tell you the things that we're going to confront, including some things that are difficult to hear, but to brace New Yorkers for the reality. To get you all informed honestly about what we're dealing with, what we will deal with. But also, to remind you of our strengths, of all the help that people are giving each other, all the help our City government can and will give our State government can and will give. All the people who are stepping forward not only in New York City but all over the country, all over the world who want to help New York City right now and God bless them all. I'll talk about all of that today and in the days ahead. But really it is important to recognize the sheer extent of change. And to understand how challenging that is for all of us as human beings to make sense of so quickly. If anyone is feeling anxious or fearful that is entirely normal at this moment. And what's so important is to talk it through with each other and seek, you know, good and real and accurate information, which we will provide constantly. To support each other, listen to each other's concerns, see how we can help, particularly how we can help those in greatest need. And that's what New Yorkers do so well. We've seen it time and time again, after 9/11 after Sandy, so many times. When seniors needed help, folks with disabilities, folks who didn't have medicine, folks who couldn't get out of their apartment, time and time again every day, New Yorkers answered the call. And we're going to need that again. And we're going to be at this again for weeks and months.

But I'll tell you something, I really believe that even though we are the epicenter of this crisis, and I want to be real, real honest about that. We are now in New York City, the epicenter of this crisis in the United States of America. I'm not happy to tell you that and you're not happy to hear it. But I'll tell you something else, there is no place in the United States of America, no place on Earth, where there are stronger, tougher, more resilient people, where there is more spirit and compassion. This is the place where people can handle anything thrown at them. That's who New Yorkers are. That's who all of you are. And that gives me a lot of hope. And I've been real honest about the fact that I'm not satisfied by our nation's response to this crisis. I don't feel that there's been anywhere near the response that any place in this nation deserves, especially our nation's largest city with 8.6 million people on the front line. But I, at the same time as I'm deeply concerned and troubled and angry and frustrated at the lack of federal response, I am inspired by the response right here in New York City from everyday New Yorkers, from our public servants, from all the people who protect us and keep us healthy. So many good people who are stepping up. And I'm inspired because I believe if there's one place on Earth that has the ingenuity and the creativity and the sense of entrepreneurship to find a way to overcome this crisis with our own resources, that's right here.

Now, I want to be 100 percent clear that doesn't let the federal government off the hook in the least. I couldn't be angrier at the lack of response. I've been very plain about that. But you know what? If we're going to be left to fend for ourselves in New York City, in New York State, all I can at least say there are no people on Earth who are more creative and more able to create something out of even the most tough circumstances. No one's better than New Yorkers. We're going to find a way to do things we've never done before. And I've likened this situation to war many times because it is, that's just the reality. And we've only begun down this very difficult path. But I already see New Yorkers doing extraordinary things. I already see people volunteering to find the supplies we need to build the equipment we need to make things happen. Even when previously we would've thought it impossible. Isn't that the history of New York City in a nutshell? People making things happen even though they were told it was impossible. That is the story of New York and New Yorkers. So, we will do it again in our time right here, right now.

Let me turn to some specific updates and information I want to share with everyone. And I want to take a moment to really commend the people who are doing exceptional work right now, helping us all. Of course, our health care workers, God bless them. They have such a tough job at this moment. But they are showing up with energy and passion, protecting the lives of so many people. Our first responders, who we call – we need them every day, every year, and we need them even more now. And they are at their post doing their job brilliantly. Our transit workers we're depending on them to make sure that everyone else we need gets where they need to go. And thank you to all the transit workers for what you're doing. And then there's a lot of even more unsung heroes who really deserve notice at this moment. You know what? Maybe in the normal course of life, you don't stop to think about the man or woman that works in the grocery store or the pharmacy. The postal worker who brings you every day, things you depend on and you're going to depend on even more now. All the delivery workers, whether they're in the public sector or the private sector – the men and women who deliver food and are now working at so many food establishments, they're going through a tough time, but a lot of them are continuing to operate so they can help all of us. All those folks are answering the call in their own way. I want to thank all of you. We need all of you and you don't get the praise you deserve normally and you should get a whole lot of praise now because you, all of you are helping to keep this city running, keep it together and ensuring the people who need help the most are getting it. So thank you. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

I want to note and I want to ask everyone if you see, you know, this is a time I say it a lot, that you know, remember to thank people who do so much for us. You know, this coming week we're going to be dealing with a whole different reality. We've never been under this kind of order to pause our lives, change our ways. It's going to take getting used to. It's going to take adjustments. There'll be some trial and error for sure. But let's thank the people who are helping us, helping to make it work. If you see a first responder, a police officer, a firefighter, a EMT, thank them. Thank the transit workers, thank the health care workers, thank those educators who are going to be at those enrichment centers taking care of the children of those essential workers. And like I said, the postal worker on your block, the person that delivers a pizza to you, anybody you come across who's out there making it happen, please give them some extra gratitude because they deserve it.

Each day, I have a very unfortunate obligation to tell you the overall situation in terms of the number of cases. I remind you every case is a human being and a family. And the numbers, again, continue to be staggering. Confirmed New York City cases at this moment, this is based on information from 10:00 am today, 9,654 cases, an unbelievable number. We couldn't even imagine such a number just a week ago. We are on the verge right now of 10,000 cases in this city. We essentially at this point, and this has been a trend over recent days, we represent shockingly about a third of the cases in the entire United States of America. And about two thirds of the cases in the State of New York or even more. We'll constantly keep you updated, but I want people to just for a moment reflect on that fact. This is a crisis affecting our whole state, our whole nation. But it's a crisis affecting New York City far more than any place else just by the numbers. One third of the cases in the entire nation right here. We have lost 63 people to coronavirus in just a matter of weeks.

We're going to constantly update you, what we see within these facts to help people understand this disease better. And I remind you, it’s a disease that literally no expert on earth fully understands but we're trying to constantly confirm our understanding and update people. But here is a fact that's important. As of this moment in New York City and this information will be published in more detail shortly. There have been in the age group from birth to 44 years old, so New Yorkers from the first moments or life up to 44 years old. Within that group, there have been no deaths. And that is a very important fact confirming a lot of what we understood previously about this virus. The breakdown by borough – Brooklyn is 2,857 cases, Queens 2,715, Manhattan 2,072, the Bronx 1,411, and Staten Island 593. Another very important point. And again, information will be updated constantly and made public when we can. But we've talked a lot and I reflected a few days ago about a conversation I had with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is the leading national expert in this crisis and who we all are turning to for important information. He's also a proud son of Brooklyn, proud son of New York City.

He, days ago, said to me, we really need to educate people to the particular danger to those over 70 years old. Well, here's what we know in New York City. So far, 35 percent of our hospitalizations related to coronavirus have been for New Yorkers who are over 70, 35 percent, over a third. But you should also know that people over 70 constitute only about 10 percent of the population of New York City. So, what we're seeing is the over 70-year-olds represented among those hospitalized, over three times more than their proportion of the population. That really reminds us that that's the particular thing we need to focus on. Folks who are much older and particularly they have those preexisting conditions we've talked about so much. These are the folks in the greatest danger who we have to really move heaven and Earth to protect. Keeping them isolated and out of contact with other people to the maximum amount possible, supporting them, still giving them a lot of love and support -- phone calls, FaceTime, everything you can do to support your older loved ones, getting them the things they need. But keeping them out of contact with others to the maximum step possible to protect them. That's crucial.

I'm going to talk for a moment about a situation with the other levels of government, and it is if there were ever a tale of two cities, this is at -- the State of New York is doing so many wonderful things, so many of the right things to help people all over the state and certainly to help New York City. I commend Governor Cuomo and our legislative leaders in Albany, Speaker Heastie and Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins and so many people across the state government who are doing so much to help New York City right now. And on the federal side, it's almost exactly the opposite where we're seeing so little. That is not to say there are not good people in the federal government trying to help us. And Dr. Fauci is a great example and so many of the good men and women of FEMA are a great example, it's not one way or another. But when it comes to the decisions of government and the actions of government, really doing something tangible, we're seeing a lot of help from the State of New York and very little and in the way of evidence that the federal government understands that our nation's largest city is in the crosshairs and that the federal government's going to actually do something about it. I won't dwell. I've been perfectly clear. We need our armed forces and we need them now. And I'm very happy that we're getting the ship, the Comfort coming to New York soon. That's very, very helpful. That's a great example of what our armed forces could do, but they could do so much more if they were fully mobilized and we need them.

We need supplies on a vast scale for the city. We are very happy that FEMA is here. That could make a difference. But so far, we have no specifics on what supplies we will get when and we need them now. I have, again, to compare -- great appreciation for the announcement that Governor Cuomo made yesterday, a million more N95 masks coming to New York City soon. That's crucial. That's wonderful. But I have no such announcement from the President of the United States. In fact, he still has not fully utilized the Defense Production Act. He has not given orders to specific companies, to not only produce those items that are needed most starting with ventilators, but to ensure that they will be distributed to where the need is greatest here in New York and other key parts of the country. I believe that can't be done and won't be done unless and until our military is mobilized. And I don't know why on Earth the President hesitates at this point. I think you're seeing a human cry all over the country for our armed forces to be activated. The time is now.

Very quickly, and this has been put out publicly yesterday. I'll just give a brief overview, a number of personnel announcements. We are continuing to build out our team to deal with what is a wartime type of crisis. I want to thank for her extraordinary leadership, my Chief of Staff, Emma Wolfe and I announced yesterday that I will add to her title the designation of Deputy Mayor for Administration and that will put her second in the line of succession after our First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, both of them have been the paramount outstanding leaders of the day to day operations that are being run out of our Office of Emergency Management and other locations, coordinating all the work of all city agencies. We, all of us, even though we're working remotely from each other in many cases, we are talking constantly throughout the day. I am being given every hour, literally, it seems new decision to make and I'm determining the direction of the City's response. But I have extraordinary leaders to depend on to implement those decisions and to coordinate the work of all of our agencies. So, a tremendous thank you to First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, and now Deputy Mayor for Administration and Chief of Staff, Emma Wolfe.

I announced that we will have one of our most extraordinary public servants, our Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia will take on an additional title as our COVID-19 Food Czar. This is a brand-new concept and it reflects the reality of what we're dealing with today. We hope to get good news from Washington of some kind of true stimulus package that will actually reach the people of this city and this country with substantial direct support. Not token support, not one-time support, but deep ongoing support so folks can afford everything in their lives. We don't have that yet, however. I'm desperately concerned that a lot of New Yorkers are running out of money and that's the money they use to buy food among other crucial necessities. Commissioner Garcia and her new role will create a citywide network to ensure that food is available to those who cannot afford it. Food is available to seniors and vulnerable folks. Food is available to people who are working just a few weeks ago and no longer have any means of support. It's going to take a mobilization such as we've never seen before. She'll work with all of those agencies that currently do food relief, the Human Resources Administration, the Mayor's Office of Food Policy, obviously state agencies, Food Bank, soup kitchens, so many amazing nonprofit organizations. She'll work with all of them, but she's going to build something bigger and more comprehensive than we've ever seen in New York City. On the assumption that food will become much more of an issue going forward and that many people will have a strain that they have not experienced previously because of huge disruptions in their own income. So I want to thank Commissioner Garcia for taking on that role.

I've named Peter Hatch as our COVID- 19 Public Private Partnership Czar. He will work with private sector entities and philanthropic partners to create a brand-new network of support. There are so many wonderful offers of help coming in. We have to build that into a truly organized forceful effort to ensure that the maximum private and philanthropic help reaches those in greatest need and augments everything we're trying to do as a city. Peter Hatch has served previously as deputy, excuse me, as Chief of Staff to Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze. He will take on this new role as the public private partnership czar. Also coming back into city service my senior advisor for years, Gabrielle Fialkoff who played a crucial role activating many forms of support for the people of the city. She did an outstanding job over five years serving the people of this city and she's returning as a senior advisor. She will ensure that many of the organizations that previously she worked with to help in normal times will help even more now in these tough, tough times. And replacing Peter Hatch, in his role as Chief of Staff to the Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services will be Julie Bero who has worked in our Intergovernmental Affairs operation and thank her for taking on that new role.

Lastly, we're going to be doing something and I’m announcing this now, something we have not had to do in our recent memory in this city, which is to organize production here in New York City for vitally needed supplies and equipment. The notion of this city being left in so many ways on its own to deal with this crisis is deeply painful, but we don't take it lying down. We're going to fight for all the resources and support we deserve and need. But in the meantime, I've named Carl Rodriguez, who is currently Chief of Staff to Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development. Carl will additionally take on a role running our production capacity group. This will be leaders from different city agencies working with the private sector to determine the maximum extent possible quickly, tangibly, how we will produce ventilators right here in New York City. Surgical masks, hospital surgical gowns, anything and everything that we need. This is a no way letting the federal government off the hook. But it does say that if we can effectively produce something in New York City, even if it is not exactly the ideal we would want, but it's still usable, we will produce it here. I want to thank Carl for taking on this role in all those who will be working with him.

Quickly I'll talk about some other items and then turn to our Police Commissioner who will give you an update. On the question of parks, I spoke earlier with Governor Cuomo. We are fully aligned. We understand that we have a big and different and new challenge on our hands. Folks who are going to be home in a way that literally, it doesn't happen any time of the year, not even in summer, to have so many people home at once. So many families and so many children looking for some opportunity to get out of their homes, at least for a small portion of the day. Here's how we're going to do it. And I'm going to describe what we're going to do in the first week, starting Monday and throughout this coming week. And then we're going to judge the results accordingly. And we might then make some very different plans. And again, one of the things I want to emphasize, every single day instructions can change based on new circumstances because we are dealing with something that we've never dealt with before. We'll always try and give you clear and consistent information. But I'm also warning people it can change. If it changes, it changes for a reason and we'll certainly explain why.

So, on the parks -- we understand that under the Governor's pause order, which I entirely agree with, we need to ensure that if people want a little exercise in their day that they can do that the right way. It is absolutely normal and human to want to get outside, get a little bit of exercise. But I remind you, the pause is all about social distancing. It is all about protecting ourselves and our families and each other. When we say you can go out for some exercise, we are not saying you can linger. We're not saying you can make a day of it. We're saying, go out, get a minimum amount of exercise, get what you need, and then get back in the doors. Same with grocery shopping. Go get what you need. Get back inside. You got to go to the pharmacy, get what you need, get back inside. We will be enforcing this, but with an understanding for the challenges that people are facing for how new this is. And I'll talk about it. And then Commissioner Shea will talk about it. We'll enforce through education. We'll enforce through warnings. We'll enforce with having real conversations with people to help them understand what's going on. We're not going to be draconian. We're going to give people a chance to get used to this, but I guarantee you we will enforce this new reality. And I think the vast majority of New Yorkers will understand quickly and will act accordingly. So, folks will go to their parks. That's normal. You want to get outside for a little bit. You want to get some exercise, you want to go for a run, whatever it is, that's normal. You got a socially distance. You can't do it the way you're used to. You can't play team sports at this point. It's going to be unfortunately quite a while before that's possible again. There's no more gatherings. There's no more events. There's no more big barbecues. All that is gone for now. It's not gone forever. It's gone certainly for weeks, probably for months. At some point we'll be able to resume a more normal life, but for now, when you go to the park, you're going for your own exercise. Now, you might say, well, wait a minute, what if it's a parent going with their child and they live under the same roof? Of course, you're already living with someone under the same roof or a couple that lives together. Let's be clear, that's a different reality. People who live under the same roof and are already exposed to each other all day long and this is something that Governor and I explicitly discussed, they already have a different reality and they don't need to distance from each other because they're already in constant contact with each other. So, if a mom goes to the playground with her child, obviously she's already in constant contact with that child. That's different than if that child came in contact with a child from another family or that mom came in contact with a mom from a different family. That's the problem. Let's be clear, within the family, under one roof, that's one thing, but families mixing, people connecting who are not under the same roof, that's where we're going to see a spread of this disease that we can't have. That's where the social distancing rules come into effect, six feet apart, and we all want to be social, but we just can't the way we were. So you can go to the park, but only for a limited period of time. Families can stay together but don't mix with other families. If you're going on your own, stay on your own, keep six feet apart from everyone else. Go get your exercise. Get home.

In terms of playgrounds, this is a thorny issue, and I'm saying this as a parent, I used to take my kids to playgrounds around Prospect Park in Brooklyn constantly. I understand a lot about the culture of our playgrounds and the challenges that we deal with in normal times with all the kids who want to be on the playground. Here's what we're going to do for this next week, and I'm only saying this for this next week because we want to try it out. We're going to say to parents, look, here's the reality, if you're going to go on a playground, you have to take full responsibility for the situation. Full personal responsibility. Here are some of the realities. We cannot have overcrowding on a playground. If there are some people already on the playground and it’s starting to get to you can't keep six feet away from people who are not part of your family, don’t go on the playground. If our police, our parks enforcement officers or other enforcement agency see a playground that's starting to fill up, they're going to clear it out. If you go the playground, you need to keep your children away from children who are not part of your family. That's your responsibility. We will always do our best with city enforcement, but we can't be everywhere, obviously, you have to take responsibility. If you don't feel you can do it, don't go to the playground.

Some parents have said, will the playgrounds be cleaned and sanitized? The answer, just a real blunt, New York City answer is no. They never have been. They can't be in this situation. It would take a Herculean effort every five minutes, literally, that we simply can't do. If your kids go to a playground, you might want them to not be on certain types of equipment or any type of equipment. You might say, I don't want to go to a playground. I just want my kids to run around in an open area. You parents have to make that decision. Well what we're going to do is have playgrounds open to the maximum extent possible, monitored and enforced, but parents have to make their own choices for this next week as to what they feel is appropriate. I'm trying to give you real honest warnings. We'll put up signage, we'll constantly reiterate these rules and we'll see how it goes for a week.

If people are responsible about use of the playgrounds, and we believe it's a good outlet for kids who are only going to get in a short period of exercise each day, we'll keep them open. If we feel that they are not being handled properly. If we feel that people are taking advantage in the wrong way of the situation or not paying attention to the rules, or it's creating something that's just not supportable, we'll have to at that point strongly consider shutting them down. It's not something I want to do. I really don't want to do that. I'm saying that as a parent. So, we're going to see how this week goes and we have agreement with the State of New York that that is the approach we'll take. Tomorrow, I'm going to provide the State with a written plan delineating what I've just told you in broad stroke, and we'll work with the State each step of the way going forward to determine how best to handle a real sense of reality of our parks and playgrounds.

But again, a NYPD is going to be out there. If they see anything that looks like even the beginning of a gathering, they're going to say, break it up. They're going to say, you got to get your quick exercise individually and get home. The message couldn't be clearer. And Commissioner Shea will give you a sense of what he's experienced in recent days. But I can summarize it. New Yorkers are listening. They are following the guidance they're getting. And when police officer or other enforcement officer tells him to do something, overwhelmingly they are doing it. They all understand what time it is. So, I think we're going to see that we're going to find a way to make this work. Okay, very quickly, let me just note, hold on one second - oh, this is consistent with this point, to confirm just how much New Yorkers are adhering to rules. I want to give you an example. It's a very striking example for anyone who knows this town and has been here for any amount of your life, especially if you've been here a long time. I think you might find this striking. Yesterday in New York City, we sent out four agencies, NYPD, FDNY, Department of Buildings, and Sheriff’s Office to continue doing enforcement at bars, restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, any place that we needed to ensure people were not congregating. There were 13,000 inspections yesterday by those agencies. 13,000 inspections of which in only 11 instances was a violation given. One in a thousand – less than one in a thousand cases, was it even necessary to give a violation. I think that speaks volumes about what we are dealing with now.

A very important topic. There's been a lot of concern about our jail system. I'm going to be giving you constant updates. This is an area of tremendous concern, obviously. Talked about an initial group of inmates who were being reviewed for release. This will be an ongoing situation and a rapid one. I have been working closely with the Police Commissioner and other officials and obviously our correction leadership to determine the proper approach that is a humane and responsive to this crisis, but also constantly takes into effect – into account, I should say – public safety and obviously legal requirements. 23 inmates are being released today from our jail system. Those individuals are over 50 years old and low risk to re-offend. Some others we're awaiting a response from the State before they can be released. We are now starting immediate work on a group of 200 additional inmates who are being reviewed for release. We will have the update on what number within those 200 will be released. That update will be tomorrow. These are primarily individuals who have limited time remaining on their sentences on Rikers Island.

For all those who are concerned about this issue. I'm concerned. The Police Commissioner is concerned. The Health Commissioner is concerned. The Correction Commissioner's concerned. We're all trying to make sense of a very challenging situation in an appropriate way. We are looking at each individual case and some of the portrayal of the situation I think has left out some of the complexity. There are individuals who I think are obvious candidates for appropriate release. There are some other individuals with complex histories that raise other questions. We're going to strike that balance, but we will continually update, continually look at tranche after tranche of inmates for potential release in this crisis. This next group of 200, we will have an answer on by tomorrow. There is a very rigorous effort being made right now in our jail system to keep everyone healthy and safe. There's a lot of resources being applied for the safety of our officers and inmates alike. That effort will continue to intensify.

We have updates, I know some of them I believe have been announced about changes in testing locations. You can hear later on details from the Health Commissioner and from our Health + Hospitals CEO. There's been a closure of the site at Jacobi. We'll explain that, when we get to Q & A. Everything is being done specifically related to prioritization. That means ensuring that we get to those individual patients in greatest need, and we do everything we can to use our testing capacity, ease the burden on emergency rooms. Testing has been fully focused on priority needs. Structural needs to keep our health system going to reach those in greatest danger. It will be tightly organized according to that principle, and we can get into detail in the Q & A. Few other points quickly. For our health care workers, these are the people are, there are so many heroes in this city, and so many people are depending on, I think we can all agree there is no group of New Yorkers we are depending on more right now than our doctors, our nurses, our lab techs, every human being who works in our health care system is precious right now. These folks are doing heroic work. They're working exceedingly long hours. They are putting themselves at risk. We must support them in every way we can. A small but helpful thing we can do right now in light of the profound changes in this city, the fact that so much of the city is not operating the way it normally does, and the idea of commuting has been fundamentally changed and so many parts of our city are not seeing the kind of traffic, etc., that we're used to. We're going to do something temporarily in this crisis and grant parking permits to health care workers who we need to serve this city in this crisis. So, there'll be a process to determine who qualifies and we will begin with 10,000 permits for these heroic workers that we will start to distribute as early as tomorrow.

Related to how people get around. There's an excellent question in the last day or two on what is essential in terms of how people deal with this crisis? And the question that was asked to me is if car repair mechanic shops, automotive shops are being kept open, shouldn't bike repair shops be kept open? I thought it was a very good question. We in the city have compared notes with the State and we have agreement that yes, bike repair shops are essential at this time of crisis because more and more people are depend on their bicycles. So yes, we will instruct that bike repair shops will be treated as essential and if they are open all of our enforcement agents will know to respect that and allow them to keep doing their work that we all need.

Finally, before I give you a few words in Spanish just to say I don't think anyone will be surprised to know that since we're in a crisis, we really have to be careful for everything we need. Everything that's a basic need and know nothing is more basic when it comes to protecting people's health care than ensuring that there is a blood supply to serve all New Yorkers. Right now, our blood supply is sufficient, but a lot of the blood drives that happen throughout the year, particularly based in companies that we appreciate deeply, a lot of those have been canceled because the companies have had to shut down. Giving blood is essential. So we need New Yorkers to step forward. Go to any New York blood center site in the city. If you are going to give blood, everyone will know that that is an essential activity. Again, you go, you participate. Every one of us says thank you and then get back home, as with everything else. If you are ready and willing and able to give blood, please call (800) 933-2566, again, (800) 933-2566, or go to www.nybc.org, nybc.org. Everyone I've heard from so many New Yorkers who want to do something, who are looking to be helpful and you know, are frustrated by this crisis and want to help, here is a way that anyone who qualifies can help. So, we really, really appreciate that.

In Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio Speaks in Spanish]

With that, I want to turn to our Police Commissioner. I want to thank you, Commissioner, and all the men and women of the NYPD for absolutely outstanding work in this crisis. And I know together we're going to be figuring out how to do some new things. But I know you are up to the task as are the men and women who serve under your command. Commissioner Dermot Shea.

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: Thank you Mr. Mayor. As the Mayor said, it's been an interesting couple of weeks here, but I can tell you definitively that the men and women in the New York City Police Department, as well as all the other city agencies, certainly the health care workers across the board are rising to the challenge. And it's at a time like this when quite frankly, you see the best in people come out and we're seeing it day in and day out. The traditional crime that we put on the shoulders of the men and women in the New York City Police Department has not been forgotten, but there was so much more that they've picked up in the last couple of weeks. Just most recently in the last couple of days, we've begun surveying over 500 large supermarkets in New York City. Just yesterday in the last 24 hours between pharmacies and supermarkets, over 1600 visits by the men and women in the New York City Police Department and literally no issues. A couple of couple of discussions about overcrowding, but, overall, very well.

In the last 24 hours, over 5,500 bars and restaurants. And that's the story that you're continuing to see, cooperation by New Yorkers. Two arrests and out of 5,500, and that I believe is one incident in Queens. So by and large, we are seeing cooperation. We're seeing New Yorkers rise to the challenge throughout the city and all five boroughs. You're seeing tasks picked up by the men and women of the police department in reaching out to elderly people that may not be serviced by traditional means and working with elected officials, working with community partners, getting them food. So, I can tell you that I couldn't be more proud of what I've seen. To the parks, the Mayor mentioned the parks and in the last couple of days. It's an interesting dynamic now as we get through this time where we've been all stressed I think and all pent up inside and we are like no other city in the world, in a city of over 8 million people – a vertical city – and you saw yesterday people getting out exercising, which is a good thing. I can tell you that I hit the – in the last 48 hours, the East River Park, the West Side Highway, I personally saw a Riverside Park, Central Park, over 99 percent of what I saw is what you hope to see, New Yorkers coming out, parents with kids, responsibly getting the exercise that the Mayor have talked about. No, I did not see organized sports. The biggest thing I saw was a two on two pickup game. And I can tell you that the men and women now of the New York City Police Department are getting more and more involved in this as the Mayor said. Made calls yesterday with some of the borough and bureau commanders of the NYPD to just reinforce that messaging piece of this. We're all in this together, reinforce that positive message. As much as you want to get out, there's a responsible way to do it. And that's what we all need to hear and take part in.

So you'll expect to see police officers throughout the five boroughs, whether it's on a bicycle, probably on some scooters and some marked police cars, driving slowly through the parks and just broadcasting and speaking to people about that message. Enjoy, how you doing, get your exercise, and then the politely, get out of here. And I say that tongue in cheek. We are all in this together and, and it was really, it was heartwarming, I'm sure to see, Mr. Mayor you touched on it, people that are people that are behind closed doors all day, every day. That's not really what we're worried about when they're walking. A husband and wife holding hands in the park, taking a walk with their dog. That's not really what we're worried about, they’re together in the apartment anyway, but it's the large groups. I heard from some elected officials yesterday and throughout the city working on this. We got to we got to think, think long distance here. This is a long game. So those backyard parties, those DJs, I'm sorry DJs, I know how everyone is hurting here, but we can't be having parties with the large gatherings whether it's in backyards or anywhere else in New York City at this time right now. It's just too dangerous. So thank you. I'm sure we'll have some questions. But again, on behalf of all the men and women in the police department, thank you for all the kind words we are there for you and we're going to continue to be there for you.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much Commissioner. I think you laid it out very, very clearly. I think you said a very nice version of get out of here. I like that. And then we'll make sure the message spreads in in a very smart, fair, decent way. With that want to make sure that we now have an opportunity to take questions from the media on all the things we've talked about here and any other topics they would like to bring up. And let's turn to the media questions. Who's first?

Ann Cheng: Hi all. Just a quick note at the top, we ask that everyone limit their questions to no more than two, including follow-ups. This allows us to be fair and try to get to as many people as possible. We will start off today with Aaron from the Post.

Question: Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, indeed.

Question: So just wanted to go on to circle back on the issue of parks and people going outdoors to get their exercise and just want to see if there's any sort of understanding as far as what the cutoff would be? How much time is enough time? And also understanding that people have been pretty good about abiding by these rules as far as businesses goes, what the sort of potential enforcement or penalties might look like if you encounter anyone, particularly obstinate?

Mayor: I'll start and I'm sure the Commissioner has a view too. First thing I want to say is the NYPD every single day, and I would say this about Parks Enforcement and you know, depending on how this plays out, we could easily get other agencies involved as well. But the story that I think is missed, and I don't ever blame the media for telling the exceptional story or the dramatic story, but I would like us all to do a little bit more particularly a time of crisis to acknowledge what is exceptional and dramatic and unusual versus what is typical. When you hear the number of inspections were made and you only had 11 violations, as I mentioned earlier out of 13,000 inspections, that that really says something not just about store owners, but about what people in general are understanding about this crisis.

And I have seen it in many places I've been in recent days. I really think there's a deep understanding that something profound has changed and it has to be handled differently. And I have a lot of faith in New Yorkers. I have a lot of faith in everyday people. Will there be some individuals at 8.6 million people that don't get it? Of course. And our officers for time immemorial have had to deal with people who don't get it. People try and make their own rules. People who think they're smarter than anyone else, I assure you there's no one more worldly wise than the New York City Police Officer. There's no one understands the human condition better than in New York City Police Officer. And they are extraordinarily resourceful, our officers, so sometimes they use humor. Sometimes they use firmness. Sometimes they illustrate their point, whatever it is. I've seen it throughout my life. They know how to talk to people. They know how to talk to young people and old people. They know how to talk to every kind of person. They'll make clear what you got to do.

And I believe the vast, vast majority of New Yorkers will listen. We're not to the point yet of specific sanctions because we're starting down a road and we'll decide with the State if we need to get into sanctions more deeply. But I don't think that's going to be the case. I think the number of people who truly don't get it and try and stand apart is going to be limited. And I affirm, if someone really wants to disagree with a police officer and acts in a manner that's inappropriate and illegal will then they will be handled the same way as anyone else who obstructs the work of a police officer. But I don't think we're even talking about the level we might see of that in normal times because we're dealing with a crisis that's being felt in every inch of our city. I predict you're going to see a different reality in the word will spread. And I'll turn to the Commissioner to one more point.

How much time? Well, you know, we're going to work on this and I think it would be helpful to give people some guidance, but I just want to start with common sense. How much time does it take to exercise, folks who go for a jog in the morning, know how long they go for a jog. People go for a bike ride, know how long their bike ride is. People go for a walk, know how long the walk is. You know, if you're exercising now and you have a basic thing you do, for a lot of people, I'd say it's a half hour, 45 minutes, something like that. Go get in your exercise and get home or go do your exercise, go to the store and get home. The point is, maximize the get home part. Get only the most basic exercise – I understand you need to walk your dog, walk your dog, and then get home. Your kids understand you have young kids are going crazy inside. You need to get them outside for a while. Get them outside for a while. As soon as you get them through a little bit of real, you know, working off their steam, get them back home.

So, we'll give some guidelines, but this is also about personal responsibility. This is about common sense, which is what the vast majority of New Yorkers have. We're not going to allow gatherings. We're not going to allow loitering. We're not going to allow someone just to hang out. And you know, for a long period of time, if an officer sees you and you're sitting on a park bench, they're going to say, hey you know, you need to get home. And the person says, all, you know, I'm only going to be here for a few minutes, then I'm going home. Fine. If someone thinks they can hang around for a long period of time, I assure you that officer will remind them again energetically. But people just have to get it. We have to help ourselves and each other by taking seriously, you know, just what you need, nothing more and get home. Commissioner?

Commissioner Shea: I – as I hear this discussion, I'm thinking – and I laugh at the reputation that we have as New Yorkers of running around, running from one location to the other, bumping past each other, probably like no other city. I've seen the opposite in the last two weeks and I'm sure you have too, whether it's in parks or walking around. There's a forced politeness these days of allowing one to pass before you proceed down a path. And that's what I saw in the parks yesterday, and not universally, but you saw people giving each other that wide berth. In two weeks, we've learned to distance whether – it may not always be six feet, it may be three to four feet, but you're seeing this all over. And I saw it yesterday in every park that I visited. Not universally. Some issues – we will double down on the education piece.

And this, I'll tell you on a personal level, this hurt. The last thing you want to do is tell kids that they are doing everything we want them to ordinarily, but not under these extreme circumstances, get out of a park. But we have to, we'll continue to educate and again, I think the message here is you can find three or 10 or whatever it is, messages on Twitter. I was out there myself and saw it firsthand. By and large, there were no large organized sports, there were people getting out on a beautiful day in a really difficult situation. And we'll continue to monitor it. We'll step up the presence as well as the audio messages and the speaking. And again, this is probably the least of my concerns.

Commissioner Barbot: I want to just build on the –

Mayor: Please, Commissioner –

Commissioner Barbot: I just want to build on that to say, as the Mayor mentioned, we want New Yorkers to use good judgment in terms of time, but I want them to pay special attention to ensuring distance. This is about distance. This is not so much about time as it is about distance. And the longer – given the density of our city, the longer someone stays outside, the greater the risk of coming in contact with someone within that six feet perimeter. And so that's why, focus on distance, not so much on time.

Mayor: Right. I want to just – that's great. And I want to just put a point on that and then we'll keep going. I think Commissioner Barbot said something that's really good, common sense guidance. Yeah, if you stay out longer, your chances of bumping into someone, your chances of being put in a situation that's not the ideal, which is six feet apart, those chances increase. Where do you know you're not going to bump into someone or end up coming in contact with someone else who, God forbid, may have the disease at home, right? When you're at home, you know what you're dealing with. So, you get the exercise you need, keep it as tight as you can in terms of time. You go to the store – even if you go to the store, keep your time as tight as possible, observe that six-foot distancing, soon as you're done, get back home because that's the safe thing to do. And it's not going to be fun. It's not going to be easy, but it's also not going to be forever. And we want to keep people safe. Go ahead.

Question: Well, one more in that vein, Mr. Mayor. Governor Cuomo, this morning floated the ideas of potentially opening up some streets or I should say closing them to vehicular traffic and opening them up for people who want to get out, stretch their legs, get a little fresh air. Is that anything that's being considered. And thank you all for your time. I appreciate it.

Mayor: Thank you, Aaron. I spoke to the Governor about this and we had a great conversation and we're going to again. We're going to codify in the next 24 hours our approach here in New York City, share it with the State, with the Governor's team, and we'll take it from there. But we had a high level of agreement in the conversation earlier today. We're certainly going to consider over time the possibility of opening up some streets for recreation. But I want to caution, the first frame is the first frame here, which is we want people to get that exercise, get that time they need, but we also need to enforce it. And our ability to enforce directly correlates to knowing where we need to put our focus, our energy, and our officers. We know where that is right now in terms of our parks and playgrounds, because right now the NYPD patrols those areas, the parks enforcement patrols those areas. That is something that we can focus on, have a strategy for, and do the right way.

If we're going to expand, we're going to expand very purposefully. If we're going to look to have a street that's opened up for recreation, we're going to do that very smartly and carefully because we have to attach enforcement to it. It cannot be, oh, we're just going to close off some streets and leave it be. If we do that, I guarantee what will happen is a whole lot of people start to congregate. And again, because we're humans, we're social, it's natural, and people won't remember and they'll fall into – I see it all the time in the last few days, people start to reach out their hand to shake hands or start to want to hug someone they know and they stop themselves. Almost without exception, I find that sort of sudden stop. It's going to take us a long time to get used to it.

So, if your block – you know, if you put barriers at the end of your block, everyone's going to come out and hang out like it's normal. We can't have that. We got to do this in a systematic, careful fashion. So that's an idea that’s on the table. What I would say is, think of it this way, we're going to start with the parks and playgrounds we have that we know how to patrol, determine over the coming days if we need to expand that – and if so, how? – but most importantly, how do we enforce it, how do we keep eyes on it, how do we make sure it works? So, one stage at a time and we'll keep people updated as we do. Go ahead. Thank you.

Cheng: Next we have Alex from the Daily Beast.

Mayor: Go ahead, Alex.

Question: Hi. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: Okay, great. There's growing concern among a lot of gig economy workers, not delivery people, but freelancers in general. We've now passed a cycle of a single paycheck and some people are out of money. If someone is entirely out of money, let's say, and that goes everywhere from rent to food, what actions should they be taking?

Mayor: It's a very painful situation. I'm glad you raised it, Alex, because this is – I think the gig workers are facing some of the toughest dynamics here. Obviously, it depends on each individual. Anyone who, again, everyone's different, everyone has a different situation. Anyone who does have the opportunity to apply for unemployment insurance obviously should but we also know that system's overloaded. I'm not belittling that fact. We are hoping and praying that the Congress acts very quickly on a stimulus that is direct money into the pockets of working people, including gig economy workers. Obviously, there've been some other actions taken, which I'm happy about, including by the federal government, like limiting student loan repayments and actions that had been taken by the City and State to ward off evictions. All of those things help but we're going to have to do a lot more.

And again, the place where we need help the most is a federal government because the City is, you know, really struggling right now to cover needs with what we have and with our own resources and our revenue that's clearly declining rapidly. So, I think it is that stimulus bill and then it's the things we're going to try and do. God forbid there's a gig worker who, as you said, hasn't gotten that paycheck, is starting to struggle to find food. That's exactly why Kathryn Garcia has been named to this new position to create a food network, you know, a food distribution network to help people who honestly, maybe a few weeks ago, never in a million years would have thought of needing food and government support like that but now they will. So at least with no evictions at this moment hopefully people can pay the rent on time, but if they can't they won't be evicted right now.

And we're looking to find other ways to provide support and relief to ensure that people who don't have money are not forced to pay rent that they just can't afford. Hopefully we can ensure that there's a steady supply of food and that will at least get us a fair amount along the way. And I remind people, in terms of health care, there's going to be people who won't be able to afford medicine. We're going to try and work on that issue too. But anyone who really is dealing with a serious, serious health care issue, thank God for our public hospitals and clinics that will always back people up regardless of ability to pay.

Question: Thank you. And one more question. It's being reported right now that two dorms and 45 people incarcerated at Rikers are refusing to leave their dorms for work duties and meals, in protest. And I'm just curious, is there a way that you guys could be possibly, like, speeding up the release and relief of certain prisoners in our jail system?

Mayor: Yeah, we are absolutely going to move very fast now. We have to work through some legal issues that were complex issues as I said, involving DAs and the State. We have a clearer template. We were working on this literally past midnight. I was here in City Hall after midnight still on conference calls with people working this through because this stuff is very complex. But I am confident now that we have the ability to figure out what that right number is. I don't know the number yet. I want to be real with you and honest with you. And there are some people who clearly, we are not going to feel comfortable releasing. But we will steadily increase the number to the point that we believe is appropriate. I cannot confirm the report that you just gave. I've heard that but I have not heard it in a confirmed manner. So, we will get that information clarified. But suffice it to say, over the next few days those who can be released to the maximum extent possible, we're going to try and do that over the next few days. Go ahead.

Cheng: Next up, we've got Amanda from Politico.

Mayor: Go ahead, Amanda. Amanda?

Question: Can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: Hi, how are you? I have a question for you and Dr. Katz. So, I was hoping you could circle back to the Jacobi [inaudible] –

Mayor: Yes, Dr. Katz is not in the room, but through the miracle of technology, I think he can hear us. Dr. Katz, can you hear us? Dr. Katz? Paging Dr. Katz. Is there a doctor in the house? He's on? He just can't – he can't respond to me. Is that right? But he's talking on the line. Okay.

Cheng: Amanda, we'll come back to you.

Mayor: We'll be right back around. Okay. Who's next?

Cheng: We have Ashley from the New York Times.

Mayor: Go ahead, Ashley. Ashley –

Question: Good afternoon.

Mayor: There you go.

Question: The question I want to ask is for the Police Commissioner about exposure since officers are basically intensifying their role in the corona – in kind of making sure that everybody adheres to the rules. I'm wondering if you can give us raw numbers on people who are infected and out sick due to coronavirus inside the department and tell us how it is and how the NYPD tracks exposure.

Commissioner Shea: So yeah, actually I – at the beginning I had a little trouble hearing you, but I think I got the whole thing. The most current numbers that I have, and they are moving, is 98 members of the NYPD have tested positive for corona. Of the 98, 70 are on the uniform side, 28 are from the civilian side. It's important to know that in terms of how they contracted it, you know, the belief at this time, with very limited information obviously, is that it's not necessarily contracted at work, that some are contracted sick family members. We are New York. So as society contracts this disease and you know – so do we. In terms of the testing, the numbers are going up because the testing in the entire city is going up so that's not unexpected. In terms of sick rate, I'll stay away from exact numbers, but I can tell you that our normal – if you have a normal sick rate, and we do for the department, it's approaching about double that rate and we saw the numbers start to go up when this really took hold, roughly March 17th. I can tell you that we are still, what I would consider, in very good shape in terms of resources. But we plan for it literally every day. If I told you how many phone conferences I had in the last 24 hours, I'd be lying because I, literally – Terry Monahan is sick of hearing from me. Rodney Harrison, the entire executive staff –

Mayor: Let’s be clear. Terry Monahan is not sick. He's just sick of hearing you.

Commissioner Shea: Yes, that's right.

[Laughter]

So, we are not at the point where we're close to going to 12-hour tours. What we are doing though is planning for all eventualities and moving people from units that are less important right now to, you know, be ready for any and all eventuality. So, I think that we are in a good place still and the planning is literally ongoing hour by hour.

Mayor: The other thing I just, before Ashley follows on, I just want to say is, again, as we've heard from Dr. Barbot, a typical younger – and this is again, most PD officers, younger person, 20s, 30s, 40s, a healthy person, their experience with this disease will be something like seven to 10 days and it will not be a fun seven to 10 days. But at the end of that seven to 10 days, they will be right back in uniform, right back at their posts. So, this is a number that goes up but will have an element that starts to go right back down from that original group that got sick. A lot of them will come back online. We'll be going through this for weeks and months. I don't want any misimpression that a person who contracts coronavirus is not coming back to work. They are coming back to work in the vast majority of cases and soon. And we got to keep that in our calculations and in our planning. And obviously we're very happy that most people are going to have a mild experience.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, I can tell you Ashley – and if I miss one point, I'll circle back to you at the end – I can tell you that we've had people come back to work that had been put on quarantine and I am really looking forward to when those people that are out sick with this virus come back to work for the obvious reasons. But I think again, we're in good shape. Of the now 98, I think there's three that remain hospitalized. And that's including one that was discharged today. So that brings it to three. And that's with pneumonia-like symptoms. I think I mentioned that the other day. So, the vast, vast majority – 95 of 98 are recovering at home.

Question: But for those officers who had contact with the public, is the NYPD tracking that and are you telling members of the public that they've had contact with an officer who has now been confirmed to have COVID?

Commissioner Shea: You're talking post?

Question: Yeah, post – once the officer tests positive, are you going back and telling members of the public who they've interacted with in the course of doing their job that they have interacted with them? Do you have numbers on that?

Commissioner Shea: No, I don't. And we'll take a look at that with Legal. Obviously, you run into some HIPAA issues and things of that nature.

Mayor: I go beyond it and I'll pass to the Commissioner. I think we are at such an advanced stage in this crisis but for a very particular situation where we thought – where our health people thought it was important to do that follow through. I think the honest truth, Ashley, is we're in a new reality here where that generally is not going to be doable, nor is it necessarily going to make much sense – and I think the Commissioner is going to follow this [inaudible] – because of the sheer spread that we're experiencing overall.

Dr. Barbot: As I've been saying for the past couple of days, which feels like the past couple of weeks, we do have widespread community transmission. So that means that it's very likely that a large number of people are already exposed and there is no real way to track down, back to the point source. The other thing I want to just emphasize is that even though we are learning more and more about how this virus is transmitted, we still don't think that just casual contact passing someone in the street is going to infect folks, right. We're asking people to remain six feet apart because that's the general distance that a good, healthy, strong cough or sneeze has to get from one person to the other. And so, I just want to remind us of the basics. And it's not just passing someone in the street. It's not even limited contact. It goes back to those basics. And so while the tendency may be to want to let everybody know who it is that may – they may have contact with that may have had contact with yet another contact and you know, that kind of becomes irrelevant when we've got widespread community transmission. And that's why I have been so, dare I say, militant about having New Yorkers stay indoors.

Mayor: Amen. Okay. Who's up?

Cheng: Dr. Katz's issues have been resolved. Dr. Katz, can you hear us?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, NYC Health + Hospitals: Yeah, sorry. I could hear you always, but I had a technical problem.

Mayor: Alright.

President Katz: Thanks so much for the question. With Jacobi [inaudible] –

Mayor: Is Amanda – hold on, is Amanda back on the line? I'm sorry, Dr. Katz – is Amanda back?

Cheng: Yes.

Mayor: Okay.

President Katz: Amanda, we changed the method of testing from more of a walk-by or drive-by model at Jacobi. It will reopen tomorrow to relieve the emergency department. [Inaudible] the Mayor says that we need to focus our testing on those people who are most sick and help to decompress the emergency rooms where people are coming with mild symptoms. We need to focus our attention on those people who are [inaudible] –

Question: Dr. Katz, I hope you’re feeling okay and getting some sleep. Is this transition going to happen across all Health + Hospital facilities or are we starting with Jacobi [inaudible]?

President Katz: Thank you, Amanda. All of our hospitals will have a tent outside as a way to decompress our emergency rooms. Several of them already had it. I visited the tent that was at Elmhurst and the tent that was already at Lincoln. Jacobi had the other model and that's changing to the tent outside of the emergency room for this week coming.

Question: Okay, great. Thank you very much.

President Katz: Thank you.

Cheng: Thank you. We have Craig from the Post.

Question: [Inaudible] are you today? The unions have been calling for additional testing for Fire, EMS, and NYPD. I was wondering, since these are the guys on the front line, they're, you know, going in there and getting people out of parks, is there going to be any plans to maybe do expedited testing for them if they're considering that they have coronavirus since they're out in the streets?

Mayor: I'll start and my colleagues have joined in. Again, the entire testing system is based on the priority needs. There's a priority given, of course, to protecting our health care workers and our first responders, but that's done still according to the health care priorities overall. If someone is young and healthy and has symptoms, there's many, many cases where they're just going to ride it out and they're going to be well and they're going to come back. If after those three or four days, and we're not seeing them get better, that's a different discussion, but it's about a priority structure that – we have to remember that the testing has to be there to protect the people in greatest danger. You want to speak to that, Commissioner?

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly, I think to the extent that they fall into the prioritization categories of being over 50, having one of the chronic underlying illnesses, being sick, not getting better, and having their doctor determine that knowing that test status is going to change the course of therapy, then of course we would want to test them. But the basic message of if you're sick, stay home, stay home for at least seven days since your symptom onset or three days after your fever has gone away, whichever is longer, we'll continue to apply.

Mayor: Okay. Who's next?

Cheng: Next, we have Katie.

Question: Hi, can you hear me –

Mayor: I’m sorry, who is it?

Question: Can you hear me, Mayor?

Mayor: Yep, go ahead, Katie. How are you doing?

Question: I'm great. How are you? I'm calling to ask if the City discussed if there might be any changes to property taxes which are due in April?

Mayor: At this point, and we'll obviously be looking at everything, Katie, but we are in a really tough situation right now in this city and I need to be very plain with New Yorkers about this. In the Congress, as we speak, there is a real discussion going on. This is directly responsive to your question. There's a real discussion going on about relief for states, counties, and cities – direct relief to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars because right now all local governments are just hemorrhaging money and dealing with massive new challenges and plummeting revenue. An example – I believe this estimate is right from our OMB, when the president canceled, or postponed, I should say income tax payments that immediately took about $1.7 billion of revenue away from New York City at the height of the coronavirus crisis. That's a massive amount of money to have taken out of our hands just when we need it the most.

So, revenue is being stressed very, very deeply. Expenses are skyrocketing. We have a lot of tough choices ahead. I'll certainly consider all options, but it is not my instinct to take away other forms of revenue because we literally will not be able to pay for basic services. Now, if we get a massive direct federal stimulus, and I know Senator Schumer, Senator Gillibrand have been fighting for that very hard. I spoke to both of them yesterday. If we get that support, if it's really showing up quickly, that will affect our thinking, that will affect the equation. But I've heard in the course of today that unfortunately Republicans in the Senate are trying to remove any form of direct support for cities, states, and counties, which makes no sense in the middle of the biggest national crisis since the Great Depression, and that's going to hurt red states and blue states alike. It makes no sense. We need that support. We need the hundreds of billions for localities and for hospitals, also hundreds of billions to be able to keep everything going. We have no guarantees of if and when and how that's going to happen.

So, the answer to your question is certainly I'm not ready to say that today. I don't think that's something we're going to want to do, but we're going to look at everything.

Cheng: Next up we have Gersh.

Question: Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: I can.

Question: I promise you no unauthorized dinging today. I've turned off my notifications.

Mayor: Excellent.

Question: So, you mentioned 10,000 new placards for health care workers. And, as you know, most New Yorkers will completely agree on the need to help essential health care workers do their jobs. But doesn't this emergency order actually reveal how completely unnecessary the vast majority of the city's other 150,000 placards are? Because those, are after all, in most cases, just a job perk.

Mayor: Gersh, that's a fair question, but, honestly, not a question for today. We've talked plenty of times about the need to change the approach to placards. I believe that it not only needs to be fundamentally changed, it will be as we bring on automated enforcement systems and we're going to be very quick to take placards away from those who abuse. And I think we're going to have the greatest ability to know that next year or so that we've ever had in the history of city. But, right now, that's, bluntly, a secondary issue. This is about making sure that people who are desperately needed can get where they need to go. They're working very long hours. This is an emergency measure that we need to do. We'll deal with the rest of that when we get back to normalcy.

Question: All right. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you.

Cheng: Next, we have Jeff Mays.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask, the Governor painted a very different picture of what he saw yesterday in New York City when he drove around. He was very frustrated and talked about how there were a lot of people out, a lot of people in the parks, but that's very different than the picture that yourself and the Commissioner painted just now. What's the difference there? Why is the Governor of seeing one thing, but you guys are seeing something different?

Mayor: Well, look, first of all, people can be at different places at different times, Jeff, and see different things. I think there's a tremendous consistency in the sense that we all are looking for where we think there's a problem or lack of adherence. And when we see it, we don't like it, we're going to deal with it. And we all agree that's not most people. In fact, I think the Governor's frustration was directed at the few who were being disrespectful of others, not at the vast majority who are following the rules. But again, I spoke to the Governor today in detail and I'm confident that in that conversation we aligned fully. We're going to have a strong enforcement apparatus from the finest law enforcement organization in the world. And I am certain it's going to be very, very effective. And, you know, I think there's going to be a certain amount of pressure from fellow New Yorkers too. I think the point that you heard from my colleagues about people, like, literally – I think you said, cutting people a wide birth. And we were talking about the ways people are adjusting and changing. I'm seeing it 100 percent. Folks used to just walk by each other. They're now like, stopping, figuring out who goes first, you know, is there enough room to have your six feet – that's only going to deepen. We're about to really feel that change in our lives with this new rule in effect and so many people home. I think it's going to really jolt people's consciousness. And this is the beginning of the crisis. I've been blunt, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. So – Governor and I are aligned and we're going to say to anyone who's not getting the message, we're going to help them get the message. And then, obviously, I believe people will start to fall in line even more deeply.

Question: Just another follow-up. Do you know what's happening to the prisoners that are being released? Are they being monitored? Where they're going? And then quickly, have you still been in contact with federal officials? You mentioned earlier this week you've spoken to Dr. Fauci and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman. Have you had further conversations with federal officials?

Mayor: Yeah, I just want – I'll answer Jeff, but I want to, again, in the name of rationing as we do these calls, I think we're saying that people try and keep it to two areas and please try not to do multiple run on many, many topics at once, because I think we want to make sure it's fair to everyone else. I spoke to the Veterans Affairs Secretary yesterday. I am trying to reach Vice President Pence. I am trying to reach the FEMA director. I know my team has spoken to the FEMA director. This will be ongoing. I've spoken to Senator Schumer almost every day, spoke to Senator Gillibrand yesterday. This will be ongoing- spoken to Dr. Fauci a number of times. Again, what I'm looking for is the big answers on what will be delivered to us. On the question of folks who are released from our jail system, there will be monitoring for sure. There'll be individualized monitoring and follow-up and supervision. Who's next?

Cheng: Next step is Marina, from AP.

Question: Hello. I was wondering about the – what the conditions are at the local city hospitals? We're seeing some videos on social media of patients and masks lying on the floor because there are no beds. Is that real?

Mayor: Mitch, are you on the line still? Dr. Mitch Katz –

President Katz: Masks lying on the beds? I don’t understand that.

Question: We're seeing a video of patients on – we're seeing video of the social media of patients who are wearing masks, lying on the floor because there are no beds. Is that real? Is that fake?

Mayor: You mean the patients that – I'm sorry, Marina, just to clarify, you're patients who instead of being in a bed or a stretcher are on the floor?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: Okay. I have not heard that previously. Mitch, what have you heard?

President Katz: No, it is not true. There are no sick patients lying on the floor at any of our hospitals.

Mayor: And if you have details, Marina, we want them. If there's any place where something's not being done right, we want to know about it. There's definitely some real stress now on our public hospitals. I've been very blunt about the fact that the next 10 days are going to get harder and harder and we desperately need resupply. But we welcome from our colleagues in the media, if you have a specific situation, which might mean honestly there's something wrong in a particular place, a particular moment that needs to be addressed by management, please get us those specifics even if you want to do it confidentially so we can follow up and help people.

Question: And are you aware of any nursing homes who are experiencing any sort of high number of cases like the retirement community on Long Island? Are there any plans to test everyone who's working or a resident of a nursing home?

Mayor: I'll turn to Dr. Barbot. The primary regulation of nursing homes is by the State. And obviously, there's a lot of division of labor going on right now with so much to do. But Dr. Barbot does try and stay in regular touch with the State health commissioner, Dr. Zucker. On this question, are you hearing about any particular areas of concern with the city nursing homes?

Commissioner Barbot: So, we are in close coordination with the State – excuse me, close coordination with the State on nursing homes. And prior to the start of this – the upscale in this outbreak, we had actually sent out, a number of surgical masks to the nursing homes in anticipation of increasing cases. And to my knowledge, there aren't any ongoing outbreaks, but again things are moving very quickly. They're always in flux and my staff and the State staff are working closely to ensure that we are especially vigilant with nursing homes, long-term care facilities. The Governor has restricted access to those facilities, again, trying to minimize the number of individuals who may show up to them who are symptomatic.

Cheng: Next, we have Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Hey guys, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing?

Question: Good. So, I had a couple of questions. The first was in regards to the testing centers in Manhattan. Why were they canceled and what's the status of what FEMA is doing?

Mayor: So, let's see – I want to make sure we're getting the right person on this one. We're not talking about Health + Hospitals, you're talking about the work that we're now going to be doing with FEMA for testing. Is that right?

Question: Right, right. And the location that was going to be there in Manhattan.

Mayor: Right. So, I think that Deanne Criswell, I believe, is on the line, our Emergency Management Commissioner. Deanne, do you want to speak to – and, Deanne, I want to remind everyone served – she's done many things in her life, firefighter, air force officer, but also served at FEMA. So, she's quite familiar with how to coordinate with them. Deanne, can you speak to that situation?

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Office of Emergency Management: Yes, I absolutely can. So, FEMA did provide some testing equipment and personal protective equipment and we were originally going to set up five separate drive through sites. Right now, in an effort to utilize the limited resources that we have while still expanding the city's overall testing capacity, we are going to be co-locating these testing sites now with our Health + Hospitals location so we can maximize their use in those locations while making the best use of some of the personal protective equipment that is in really limited supply.

Mayor: Yeah, and, Mark, I want to emphasize we're, you know, it's so painful to think of the greatest city in the world with the greatest health care organizations, the greatest professionals on earth – I mean, we, we are so blessed, but if you don't have equipment and you don't have supplies, it's a whole different ballgame. And we all know that when we really needed the testing, when it could have been absolutely strategically crucial, we didn't have it. And now, we're at a point where we have to treat testing on a priority basis given this massive community spread. But even that has to now be thought about in terms of the supplies and the equipment needed, even just to keep the testing going as much as we want because the first obligation is to save human lives. And when we're having to wonder, are there going to be enough masks, for example, for medical personnel, first responders, for everyone who is at the front line saving lives, it gets more and more complex by the day, the considerations that all of our health care and emergency management professionals are making with, you know, no guarantees of resupply and supplies dwindling constantly. I said, originally, you know, I thought the thing we needed to worry about is the first or second week of April. I unfortunately can't say that anymore. Right now, even getting through the month of March is getting harder. Certainly, we expect tremendous difficulties in the first week of April if we don't get resupplied. So, everything is changing by the day in our calculations. And, you know, it all comes down to if we don't start to change that supply situation, we don't get the help we deserve, we're going to have to make even more challenging decisions.

Question: The other question I had was in regards to Rikers. It's about those two dormitories, about the inmates who were inside who are not going outside of their dormitory and I think there are the refusing meals. What's being done about that? What are the conditions there? And can you give more specifics as to the monitoring process of inmates when they're going to be released?

Mayor: We'll get you more on the monitoring. We are obviously creating this approach as we go along, but it's based on some of the other work that we do with supervise release. So, we'll get you details on that. In terms of the situation on Rikers, we again don't have confirmation of the specifics, so don't want to comment until we do have confirmation. Our job is to protect everyone. There's a lot of extraordinary professionals who provide correctional health on Rikers and other facilities. Obviously, our Corrections officers who protect everyone. And we, obviously – look, the one positive X factor here is compared to compared to six years ago, we literally have half the population in our jail system we had six years ago. We used to be around 11,000-plus and now we're between 5,000-5,500. And we do think we'll be in a position very soon to start acting on hundreds of releases. But this is being created very, very urgently and also in a way we've never had to do before. And so, there's a lot being worked through. We'll have more to say on all of that, you know, in the coming hours as we have more detail.

Cheng: Next we have Rosa –

Mayor: Who is it?

Cheng: Rosa, from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good.

Question: Good. So, I'm hearing from construction workers who don't understand why they're still building luxury condos and offices. They're cramming into an elevator to go up 50 stories to work on a luxury condo right now. And they want to know why the DOB is not shutting down sites, including sites with reported positive cases. Why should construction on these sites – these kind of sites – be continuing? Why aren't you instructing DOB to shut down building on sites like that?

Mayor: Rosa, we are working within the parameters of the State emergency order. This is something I know like every other piece of the equation that's being constantly assessed. And I care about the safety of those construction workers. And I want to be very clear, if any construction worker is sick, they should stay home. If anyone gets sick on the job, they need to get immediately home or if it's something urgent, of course, to care. But, right now, the State guidance – and this is true in California to the best of my understanding, it was certainly true in San Francisco, but the guidance was to continue that work because it is outdoors, because clearly any part of the economy can still allow people to have a livelihood that's so important as we see so many other people losing their livelihood, and because a lot of what is constructed obviously is crucial to our future. You and I would agree that luxury condos are not the priority in this city, but there's a lot of other things being worked on that are important because we will come out of this crisis and we will be playing the long game, as Commissioner Shea said. So, as I understand it, that is the State guidance at this moment, and I believe it is the same in California, but it's something we're going to monitor all the time, and if they're specific sites we don't think are safe for specific reasons, we always retain the right to act on those. If there's any particular site, you know of, we want to understand that so we can do follow up inspections right away.

Question: Yeah, I do. And I've passed them on to DOB. But just to follow up – I understand that the State does not make any differentiation between essential construction that, you know, [inaudible] infrastructure and things that are, you know, like I've referred to, the offices, the condos. I've talked to people who are outfitting corporate offices right now, like, that are – that are totally empty, the insides of them. I mean, do you personally think that there should be some differentiation here?

Mayor: Rosa, I want whatever's going to keep people safe and I'm also concerned simultaneously, obviously, that anyone who can keep making own living within the parameters of the State pause order, that still has value. So, I am moved by your question to say we need to look at any individual situation that might need to be treated differently. And I certainly think it's a very important conversation for us to have with the State about whether we want to think about differentiation by type of construction. But I'm not offering personal opinions in the middle of a crisis. I'm hearing your question. I think it's a fair question. Best way for us to handle this is to have a real conversation with the State and get us all aligned on how we want to handle this for this coming week. But Rosa, I'll say to you and all your colleagues, any rule, any approach, you know, could change by the week, by the day, depending on changing conditions.

Cheng: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Thanks for taking my question, Mayor. I just wanted to go back to the possibility of closing some streets to vehicular traffic. Are there any details under consideration at this time, like the number of blocks or which parts of the city would be involved that you can share at this time?

Mayor: You know, I think some people, I believe Speaker Johnson is one of them, has said, look at the model from the Summer Streets program and, you know, consider that as an option. I think that's a helpful of something to look at. But I want to emphasize, Shant, we are not acting yet on that. This is – I wish I could describe to you what we are all doing in terms of the day to day, hour to hour, constant decision making, constant adjustment. It feels like our lives are one endless conference call these last days. But I say that only to say this point, we are constantly making changes and updates. So, what I'm being blunt about is, here's how we're starting this coming week. We're starting this coming week with a focus on parks and playgrounds. That's where you go. And streets are open as normal. But we're going to see how that goes. We're going to see how enforcement goes. We're going to see how many people come out and how they handle it. If we think it's smart to open up some alternatives, we're only going to do that when we have a clear plan and we have clear enforcement in place. The last thing I want to do is create new places for people to congregate with no enforcement. That would be absolutely contradictory to the State order. So, one thing at a time, we do not have a specific plan for those streets yet. I want to affirm that there is no specific plan. There is no order that’s been given, but we are going to consider it.

Question: Got it. And just briefly, can you say who is kind of a scrutinizing everything right now? [Inaudible] who the players are?

Mayor: I mean, it's – since all of this is kind of run-and-gun, obviously, because we're dealing with an ever-changing crisis, we certainly – we’re going to work with the City Council. They've had a lot of good ideas, we want to hear them, and they understand their communities. We're going to work with DOT, of course. I think Parks obviously has a lot to say. But I'm going to really say, the Health Commissioner and Police Commissioner are going to be the first stops on that discussion, because why would we open those streets only if we thought it would not endanger people obviously. So, we have to solve for the negative first. If we think opening up more – or, I should say, closing off streets and opening up those spaces for recreation would create danger. We're not going to do it, plain and simple. We're not going to do it if we think it's going to be a net negative. If we think it might be a positive, we still need an enforcement mechanism. So, that's how we're going to start the discussion. You've heard some of the others who will be in it. But I am emphasizing, I want to be crystal clear, not happening unless I say it's happening and we're going to be working closely with the State to align strategies. So, I want to be really careful in a crisis that an idea is out there – if an idea is out there that I think is absolutely unworkable, I'll say, period, we're not doing that or we're not doing that, you know, in the foreseeable future. If an idea is a good and interesting idea, like this one, I'll say we're going to consider it. But I don't want people turning, we'll consider it, into, oh this is definitely going to happen, because a lot of stuff is not going to happen in this kind of environment or we may like an idea but may turn out to be not workable where we have really sharp health and safety imperatives that we have to meet. So, definitely will be considered, stay tuned, but not happening now.

Cheng: Next up, we have Shayna, from the Washington Post.

Question: Hi. So, recognizing that the strategy is to provide tests on a priority basis, has there been thought to testing frontline city workers – NYPD, FDNY, also, I guess, private EMS – who are non-symptomatic with the idea that you could take them out of circulation and avoid spreading the virus throughout the ranks?

Mayor: I think, again, I suspect what the Commissioner is about to say is community spread. And again, the whole reorientation we've had to go through with a changing reality with how pervasive this disease is becoming. But, Commissioner Barbot –

Commissioner Barbot: Right, so the recommendation would be the same. We're not going to be testing asymptomatic individuals, individuals who are symptomatic. We want to make sure that they take themselves out of – excuse me, out of circulation as quickly as possible. The reality is that the best way to avoid propagating the illness is to ensure that symptomatic individuals stay home, limit their outside contact to only the most essential activities. If they have someone who can go out for them to get food, medicine, et cetera, that's the best thing. Reminding individuals that 80 percent of the folks who do develop symptoms will have mild symptoms and that usually within about seven to 10 days, those symptoms will resolve. We want people to then come back to work seven days after onset of symptoms, three days after their fever has gone, whichever is longest. But the most important thing is for symptomatic individuals to stay out of circulation, whether or not they are first responders, because the reality is that when we've got widespread community transmission it's implicit that anybody you can come in contact with who is not one of your household members, you have to assume that they are symptomatic. And that's why we want to make sure that people stay at least six feet apart.

Mayor: Shayna, I'd also say, you know, we're still in a situation of tremendous scarcity with testing. If that situation changed profoundly, we'd look at again. I don't think it’ll ever have the same strategic impact it would have, you know, a month or more ago. But I think it's a common sense point, and the Commissioner can speak to this, that, you know, if you had endless testing capacity, you still have the challenge that a negative today could be a positive tomorrow. And it's, I think, the symptoms – at least, I believe, Commissioner – this is what our health care leadership believe – since the jury's still out on asymptomatic transfer, the symptomatic people are the folks that we know for sure there's a concern, much greater likelihood of spread, and that is dispositive. If someone's symptomatic, they’re symptomatic. I mean, that's something we know tangibly in a way that even testing might not give us the clearest picture. Is that – I'm trying as a layman.

Commissioner Barbot: Right. No, I think that's a good point. I think for the foreseeable future, I don't see a scenario where we get real-time results back. And so, any delay in someone taking themselves out of circulation then unnecessarily exposes other individuals to potentially contracting the illness.

Mayor: Whereas symptoms are visible and immediate and you know what you're dealing with – that kind of common sense.

Go ahead –

Cheng: Next, we have Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: Sydney with Gothamist. So, just going back to the releasing people from city jails that I know a few people have touched on here. You said that you're identifying – you've identified another 200 you hope to release. And so, I know that the Board of Correction has identified hundreds of people who are older than 50 with underlying health conditions in jail for technical reasons, but 551 of those are in DOC custody serving a city sentence of one year or lasts or under one year for low level offenses. And my understanding is that, you know, they've called on you as the Mayor to use your executive power to release those people. That's 551. So, where are you getting the 200 number from? And could you elaborate a little bit on how many people you hope to be able to release beyond those 200?

Mayor: Sydney, no. I'm going to be straight forward with you. We do not have a magic number at this point. This is something we've never dealt with before. And Commissioner Shea, First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan, his Chief of Staff Freya Riel, Liz Glazer, our Director of the Office of Criminal Justice – we're all trying to create a new approach here from scratch. We're all talking rapidly and constantly trying to figure this out. There is not a perfect target number. The Board of Corrections Letter gave one interpretation of reality. I respect the board, but I don't think it was most complete explanation of what's really going on. Within each of those categories, there are real variations and real differences from inmate to inmate in terms of criminal record and other factors. So, it's just not, bluntly, as that letter portrays. The group of 200 is the next pool, if you will, of people we are considering. I am not saying we're going to release X amount or Y amount. I'm saying we have 200 we're looking at right now that we're going to decide by tomorrow and then it's just going to be constantly rolling. But we have to do – I think it's a very complex equation because we need the right kind of monitoring and supervision. We have to make sure that's there. We need to ensure that the people we’re releasing we feel relative comfort are not likely to re-offend or do serious crimes, because we have to balance all of the factors here. And the health conditions of people, absolutely crucial factor. But there's a deep concern that we not create a situation that we are uncomfortable with in terms of the ability to know what the outcomes will be because you don't want to create a new problem trying to solve an original problem. And we have to take the public safety elements into account. It's very thorny. But one thing we know is we have to move quickly and we will.

Question: Okay. And so, just to follow up on that. The latest understanding I have is that there are 38 people who tested positive for the virus in city jails. That's a combination of staff and detainees. And so, I'm wondering, do you know the sense of the spread that is already existing in city jails? And do you know across which city jails that is? Is it beyond Rikers?

Mayor: I don't have that in front of me. I don't know if Commissioner Barbot knows if it's just Rikers or beyond Rikers. I think you've answered the point, obviously, numerically. We know the number of people who have tested positive. And we know, obviously, as with the whole city, they are going to be, some people have not yet shown symptoms but are positive. But we don't have a perfect model for this. We know it's an urgent matter, by definition. It just the nature of incarceration. So, this is – again, it's a tough, tough equation we have to work through very, very quickly. But we're all working together to get these answers and make decisions quickly, particularly for folks – anyone, we think there's a particular medical vulnerability that will be the front of the line.

Commissioner Barbot: We don't have information about whether it's Rikers or beyond, but we can get back to you on that

Cheng: Last up for today, we have Yoav.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask two questions about the testing priority. One of them is just based on the number of confirmed cases, the percentage of people under 50 who have been confirmed. It comprises 56 percent of the confirmations. I'm trying to understand, given the criteria for getting tested, how so many people under 50 would have even been tested at this point, because I thought the initial criteria was being over 50 with preconditions. And now, it's largely people who are either hospitalized or might require hospitalizations, if I got that correct. So, yeah, I guess, why would so many people under 50 have been tested at this point?

Mayor: I'll start and I'll turn to Commissioner Barbot. Yoav, I think, you know, you've seen it that in the course of the last few weeks, we've been rapidly evolving and changing from a situation where – it seems like a very quaint time long, long, long ago, but it's only a few weeks ago where we were still trying to get testing in when it could have had a more strategic impact. And, you know, we would talk about, you know, a handful of cases in a day. I think it's fair to say that the testing prioritization has changed radically over the last days in particular. And remember that a lot of folks early on were getting testing, you know, from different parts of our community without that prioritization. So, I think that's part of it. What we're seeing again on the difference between who's been tested versus who's been hospitalized is striking, that we – and obviously, who is in most danger in terms of, you know, preserving their lives. The fact that 35 percent of the hospitalizations are folks over 70, more than three times the representation of that group in the population. The fact that we've seen no deaths in people between zero and – you know, birth, I should say, and 44 years old. You know, it keeps confirming that we need to shift as much of our focus as humanly possible to protecting folks who are older and have those preexisting conditions. Now, I'll say it, and the Commissioner will say it better than me, there are people under 50 with preexisting conditions that we clearly are concerned about and that's a group of people that obviously there are situations where they absolutely need to be tested. But I think the answer is that where we started, you know, a few weeks ago versus where we are now, it's a much tighter prioritization now and I think as you see testing levels going forward, they will follow that prioritization more and more.

Commissioner Barbot: I think that's right, Mr. Mayor. We, through the course of the changing nature of this outbreak, have been adapting, if you will, to the changes that came down from the CDC in terms of testing recommendations. I think that there are a lot of people who in the early period were getting the message, get tested, get tested. We're trying to change not only provider behavior, but also New Yorker behavior and having people feel comfortable with the fact that as we are in a greater proportion of people having COVID-19, meaning widespread community transmission, that the importance of being tested goes down evermore, unless you are in one of those priority categories. And even though we've said, you know, greater than 50 with those five preexisting conditions, I think the reality is that there are many New Yorkers who may be less than 50 and have those chronic conditions. So, I think what we're seeing is a shift in changing behavior between New Yorkers, providers, and the available availability of testing. And so, my hope is – and we're trying to put measures in place that over time we will see an increase in testing of older individuals and a decrease in that younger age group. Though, certainly, it is up to provider discretion if they have patients they feel are not getting better, because, again, we don't want to completely discourage people from getting tested if indeed they are not getting better after three or four days of being home sick.

Question: Okay. Thank you. And just along the same lines real quickly, there was a photo by my colleague David Goodman – our colleague, I guess, I should say – outside of Elmhurst Hospital of people waiting to get tested at the tent, and it looks like there's a good 50 to 80 people there standing in line. And this was after the change that, that focused on testing the folks who are hospitalized or kind of severely ill who might require hospitalization. So, I guess my question is, am I to assume that everyone out there, you know, meets that criteria? And, if so, I guess I'm just wondering if that is the best method to test people who might be severely ill –

Mayor: Yoav, let me jump in on that, and then Dr. Katz, it's a very good question. I don't – you know, we're trying our damnedest to take an immense amount of information and make it clear and sometimes I think we don't fill in the blanks as well as we need to. So, I'm glad you raised this. But I think we've said it in press conferences, but not nailed it really, as clearly as it needs to be. Priority people – that means, you know, folks who were really worried about their fundamental health and their potential obviously have severe, severe ramifications. That's not, generally speaking, folks who are younger and healthier, but folks who could easily end up hospitalized or, God forbid, even in danger for their lives. That's one of the priorities for testing. But the other thing that we've said over recent press conferences is to relieve pressure on emergency rooms appropriately where people are coming in with specific situations that are worthy and need to be addressed and we're trying not to let the emergency room be overloaded. We have the folks outside of emergency rooms who are turning away folks who do not need to be there at all or diverting them to another location where they should be, but also the testing capacity to protect the emergency rooms, the ability to serve people who need it most. So, Mitch will speak to that. But I also want to note to Mitch and to everyone, you know, even in a situation like that where we're trying to make sure we're serving people, if the wrong kind of lines develop, and this is something Dermot and I have spoken about, we understand there will be lines some places in New York City if folks are waiting to go the grocery store or a pharmacy in some places or to get tested – lines needs social distancing. You know, we don't like lines at all. I think Dr. Barbot does not like any kind of line, but if you have a legitimate line, you know, we need social distancing in the line and there may be times when PD for example says about something – you know, we don't think this is a smart way to do this line and we want people to go away and come back later and there's different ways we'll deal with it. But for that specific situation, let's presume our friends at Health + Hospitals would be very careful to do line management. Mitch Katz, please explain for that line why other folks there are being tested and how that fits with keeping your emergency room going.

President Katz: Yes, sir. When we opened up the tent, we gave tremendous relief to the emergency department so that they could focus on the sickest patients. Those patients were previously coming forward, and, of course, everyone has to be assessed, because some people really do need to be emergency care, but the tent has allowed us to have them be – mild illness to be assessed in a different place, to not take up the emergency room time. I'll add that in that picture your colleague took, you'll notice that the people online are all wearing masks. And we put the – we give people who are standing on that line of masks to decrease the chance that they will cough or sneeze on anybody else. And of course, it's also much better for them to be on line in the outside with the free air than sitting in a waiting room in a closed hospital.

Mayor: Well said, Dr. Katz. With that, thank you, everyone. I hope we were able to share a lot of helpful information and we will see you tomorrow.

Thank you, everyone.

2020-03-23 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, everyone, we’re starting out a week that we've never seen before – anything like this before. This is going to be a very challenging week, a week where we're going to get used to doing things that are absolutely unprecedented in our lives. So, I think it's safe to say that as we woke up this morning, this Monday, looked very different than any Monday we've ever experienced.

I want to talk about what we all will be doing and will need to do to make these adjustments and to deal with our new reality. But I want to talk about against the painful backdrop of this surge of this disease, the fact that we're seeing milestones in the growth of this disease that are just absolutely staggering. Things we could not have imagined even a week or two ago, we've now passed by quite a bit – 10,000 cases of coronavirus here in New York City. We are as of this morning on the verge of having lost a hundred New Yorkers for a disease that would, most of us had never heard of a few months ago – that seemed to just have the smallest presence in our city just weeks ago – it now has become the dominant reality and we're all trying to make sense of that together. But, suffice it to say that we now – all of us – fully understand what we're up against and we are taking every conceivable action as a city working with the state government and now increasingly working with the federal government, to address this crisis, to try and every way we can to slow the growth of this disease, to help everyone in need, and to get through to the day when this will be part of our history, not the reality we're living. Right now, for so many people it’s just a day-to-day adjustment trying to figure out how to live with these new rules, trying to figure out how to adapt. For so many people trying to figure out how to get the basics of life even if you aren't being paid anymore, you don't have a job anymore - so much uncertainty, so much fear, so much anxiety. That's what I hear everywhere I go.

Look, what we all have to do is help each other. But we in government particularly have to help you to understand this new reality and help you navigate it, support you through it. And so, I'll talk about some of the big picture reality, but I'll also keep coming back to the day-to-day reality; how important it is for us all to stay home to the maximum extent possible. To really understand that what we do will affect the overall situation, not just for ourselves and our families, but for everyone else. And that social distancing is so important for all of us.

I will tell you again these very painful facts about the situation. Our city right now, confirmed cases as of the last count this morning already 12,339 New Yorkers have tested positive for COVID-19. I want people to understand that at this point we're about 60 percent of the cases in New York State are here in our City. About 35 percent of the cases in the entire country are here in this City. We are the epicenter of this crisis. No one wants that distinction. Not a single one of us, but it is true that we are the epicenter of this crisis and that's why we so desperately need help, particularly from our federal government to get through it. As I said, at this, as of this moment, 99 confirmed deaths related to Coronavirus. We know more are coming and that again, those are not statistics, those are human beings, those are friends, those are our loved ones. The breakout by borough, Queens has 3,621 cases, Brooklyn 3,494, Manhattan 2,572, the Bronx 1,829 and Staten Island 817. It's a very tough time, but it is not a time for people to give-up to say the least because this fight has just begun. It is not a time for hopelessness because we finally see things starting to happen and first and foremost New Yorkers are making things happen.

I had the opportunity today to be on Roosevelt Island visiting the Coler hospital facility and there – right this minute – new hospital beds are being created right now so that we will have additional capacity to handle this surge in coronavirus cases and to make sure that everyone else who needs hospital care for other diseases and challenges will have support as well. On Roosevelt Island at Coler, 100 new beds will be available this week, 240 will be available next week. It's just one example of many to come where we're finding new ways to create hospital space for those who need it. And of course, we heard great news today about the Javits Center and so happy to say the Army Corps of Engineers working with FEMA, working with the State of New York, all of us working together, setting up a new field hospital at the Javits Center. This was something absolutely crucial and we've been pushing for the federal government to bring in everything they have, every form of support and everyone knows the great work of the Army Corps of Engineers. This will mean a thousand new beds. That's going to be extraordinarily helpful.

I want to talk about supplies as well, which are absolutely crucial. Equipment and supplies we're going to need to get through not only this crisis over many weeks, but what we need to do to get through just the next days, just the next week or two. And I do want to say on a positive note, I had a long and detailed conversation last night with President Trump and Vice President Pence. And we got into real specifics about the challenges facing New York City. I emphasized to both the President and Vice President that we particularly in our public hospitals are dealing with honestly a day-to-day reality where we have to make sure that there'll be more and more equipment and supplies coming in to deal with a surging demand of people in need. I'm very pleased to say that conversation focused on ventilators - in particular - as the single most important, most urgently needed piece of equipment. And today we received the good news that 400 ventilators from the federal stockpile are arriving now to help New York City. That's going to make a huge difference. Now, our need for ventilators is in the thousands, but we're going to fight every day to stay ahead of this curve. We're going to literally be in a race against time, so even 400 ventilators is a huge step forward to help us get through this weekend into next. So, I'm very grateful the federal government has come through with this first-step.

I also had conversations today with Peter Navarro – several conversations – who the President deployed as the individual he's going to have focusing on specific supply requests from New York City. We've talked multiple times today. We've been texting back and forth and again, the focus that I made clear Mr. Navarro is ventilators, but other supplies as well are part of his purview. And again, we see very productive actions in the course of today.

I spoke with Defense Secretary Esper about an hour ago. Continue to emphasize how much we need the military’s help here in New York City. I want to thank the Secretary for the fact that the USNS Comfort is on its way soon to New York, obviously are so appreciative for the presence of the Army Corps of Engineers, but we are going to need so much more going forward and then when New York gets through our crisis the same help is going to be needed from the military all over the nation. So, it is my hope that that military role will continue to expand in the days ahead.

When it comes to supplies, we have been amassing supplies and ensuring that they get out immediately to public and private hospitals across the city and starting today we sent out supplies around the city in total 200,000 N95 masks for our hospitals, 2 million surgical masks and 70,000 face shields. Additional help is coming from both the federal government and the State government, that includes 430,000 more surgical masks, 170,000 more N95 masks, 175,000 pairs of gloves, 98,000 face shields and 72,000 surgical gowns. So, we'll be giving regular updates, but you can see these are substantial quantities. And yet, I think everyone knows we're going to need constantly to get a supply because the number of cases will keep growing and the number of medical personnel that we're going to need will keep expanding, number of facilities will keep expanding, so these numbers represent something good, which is the flow of supplies to where they're needed, but we're going to need a lot more where that came from. And we're going to focus on getting supplies from all over the country from obviously the federal, state government, any private sources we can find, any philanthropic sources and we're going to be manufacturing our own here in New York City, cause we're going to be at this for a while. We're going to need all of that to get through.

There are some companies that have really stepped up. I think it's really important to give credit where credit is due. So, I want to thank the ASO Corporation of Florida who has sent 600,000 vinyl gloves to New York City. I want to thank American Express for putting together 36,000 N95 masks. Merck Pharmaceuticals, sending half a million surgical masks and then companies here that are stepping up to produce right here in New York City; Boyce Technologies, Bednark Studio, MakerSpace, and Adafruit, all local companies that have agreed to help us by producing tens of thousands of face shields right here in New York City. All of this is going to make a difference. Every single one of these efforts matter. And this is how we save lives to make sure these supplies are always available to our brave and heroic health care workers. So, thank you to all of these companies for stepping-up.

I want to make clear as we all get into this new reality. We all have been told, I think very, very clearly to think about the difference between what's essential and what's not essential. At this point since we passed 8:00 pm last night, non-essential businesses, non-essential activities are a part of the past and that is going to be true for weeks to come. At this point since we passed 8:00 pm last night, non-essential businesses, non-essential activities are a part of the past, and that's going to be true for weeks to come. So, non-essential businesses closed down. The things we all used to think were normal. The things we used to do for leisure and fun, the things we used to spend time and money on, we're not doing that anymore, honestly. We're doing something different now. So essential businesses are what are allowed to be opened. Grocery stores, pharmacies, food establishments that provide delivery and take out, obviously, the kinds of businesses that we are going to depend on to get through this.

And another thing we have to recognize that’ll be different. We're used to – we’re New Yorkers, we're used to crowds, we're used to lines, we're used to being close together. Not anymore. We're not going to allow crowds to form. We're not going to allow lines where people are tightly packed next to each other. We're not going to allow any indoor space to get overcrowded. We're not going to allow outdoor spaces to get overcrowded. From this point on, everyone needs to understand social distancing. Six feet apart on every side. The obvious exception is when you're with the people who live under the same roof with you. The family, whatever the composition of your family, those you live with. Obviously, that's different because you're in close proximity all the time. And if you live with someone else, and you're out on the street, just the same way as you would be living together, close together, that's fine. We understand that. But for people who you do not live under the same roof with, you're going to have to practice the social distancing and we're going to help, the city of New York, all our agencies will be there to educate people, to remind people, to warn people, sometimes to step in and help people create more separation. We're going to be doing that very, very energetically from this point on.

And we've made clear that everyone we understand who has to go out for groceries or for medicines or for a little bit of exercise or walk the dog, that's okay. But for as little time as possible. And there are some people who should not go out. And those are the folks who are the most vulnerable, the folks who really have to avoid any other contact with other people. And that means, especially outside their family obviously, and that means folks over 70 and folks with those serious preexisting conditions, medical conditions.

So now, to the question of our parks and the places that we are used to going outside. We want to get some exercise, some recreation, as Commissioner Dermot Shea, and I said yesterday, we're going to focus in the first days on education and warnings and a lot of NYPD presence and also the presence of many other city agencies, obviously the parks department included. We're going to focus, we're going to have signage out to help people understand, lots of messages that you'll hear constantly letting people know how this is going to work, and you have to practice social distancing. And that if we see people in groups, we're going to break them up. If we see a place that's too crowded, we are going to get people to disperse.

And also, I want to say to my fellow New Yorkers, this week's going to be decisive. We want to see how this is going. We're going to work with the State of New York to figure out what the law, the rules I should say, will be for the longer term. This week is our chance to test different approaches. We need to make sure people will practice social distancing in our parks and playgrounds. And if we don't think it can be done, we're going to have to come up with tougher rules. So, it really is incumbent upon all New Yorkers to do your damndest to live by this new reality.

As our officers go around monitoring and enforcing, the more we see people practicing social distancing, the more we see people avoiding crowds and really greeting some space, the more we can allow folks the opportunity to use parks and playgrounds fully. If we see that we're just not seeing enough evidence that people are getting the message, we're going to be tougher about getting that message out and more enforcement. If that's still not working, we could easily get to the point soon where we say, you know what, we're not going to be allowed to be able to allow playgrounds to be open. I don't want to do that. I don't think a lot of New Yorkers want to see that happen. But the only way we keep playgrounds open is if people really honor the rules. Don't overcrowd them. We don't need family groups mixing with each other. We don't need kids playing with kids outside of their families. I know it's strange. I know it's difficult. I really do. But this is the reality we have to make sense of. So, if everyone is tough and strong as New Yorkers are, we can find a way to strike that balance.

What will not be allowed in parks at all is any larger gatherings, and no team sports activity, which again pains me as someone who loves sports and still plays team sports. It's just not going to be possible. Team sports, pretty much in every case, involves close contact. It does not allow for social distancing. So, this has to be something that we've just let go for now. But hopefully in the months ahead we can all get back to. We're also not going to allow barbecues, which obviously are social activities. We know that's going to be tough as the weather gets warmer. But again, that's just for the duration of this immediate crisis. And then when we get through it, we can go back to normal.

So, you will see a lot of enforcement, a lot of personnel. You'll see first and foremost the NYPD that is going to make this a high priority to be present around parks and playgrounds. But you're also going to see teams from the FDNY. You're going to see teams from the Sheriff's Office, from the Office of Special Enforcement, from the Department of Buildings, you’re going to see teams from the Sanitation Department, our Community Affairs Unit here at the Mayor's Office, our Office of Neighborhood Safety at the Mayor's Office. And of course, from the Department of Parks and Recreation, you're going to see in every case a lot of presence. And please, I’m going to state the obvious to my fellow New Yorkers, when an officer asks you to move along, move along, they ask you to disperse as part of the crowd, disperse. If they remind you that you've been out exercising, and it's time to go home, go home. We really need people to recognize our officers are simply telling us what we need to do to keep safe and to stop this disease from continuing its extraordinary growth. That's the whole mission will be to keep people safe now and in the future. So, please follow the instructions of our officers.

Some other updates. And I will go through different items quickly. And then we'll hear from the chancellor, and then open up to questions from the media. You know, I've been calling on the federal government and I talked to President Trump and Vice President Pence about this last night. I've mentioned, I talked about ventilators. I talked about the need for medical personnel, including from the armed forces. We went into detail about that.

But I also talked about the situation that our public and private hospitals are facing where right now they are dealing with huge new surges of cases and it's tremendously difficult for them and it's costing them so much in human terms, but also in financial terms. Public and private hospitals need help from the federal government. Cities, towns, counties, states all have been constantly stressed over these last weeks and we'll be much more stressed in the weeks ahead. Massive new expenses, plummeting revenue. I've made very clear, we've got to have help in the legislation as being discussed right now in Washington. Hundreds of billions of dollars we need for localities and States, hundreds of billions to help our hospitals get through this everywhere in the country. I'm hoping and praying we'll see that support from the federal government. We're certainly fighting hard and I know our senators and our house delegation are as well.

But while we're hoping that some relief may be coming, the size of the deficits ahead are huge. We again, you cannot have billions of dollars in new expenses while simultaneously losing billions of dollars in revenue without having a massive problem. So, knowing that we're going to have severe challenges with our city budget, I have instructed our office of management budget to initiate a peg program immediately. That means a mandatory initiative requiring city agencies to cut their spending. This is going to be a very difficult exercise. Given the backdrop of this crisis. I want to be very clear, we will not cut spending related to COVID 19 response. If it has anything to do directly with stopping the spread of coronavirus, of course, that's where we're going to prioritize spending. That's where a lot of our new spending is. But outside of that area, every agency will be asked to help. All in different ways. But the specific goals that will be given to each agency by the office of management budget will be obligatory. We have to make these cuts in light of an ever-worsening budget situation. And I say that with no joy, but I know it is time for us to do this. Looking ahead, just weeks until the next step in our budget process, the executive budget.

Another important topic, our jails. I'll be updating New Yorkers daily on this situation. We continue to ensure that there's additional healthcare capacity for our jail population. We continue to ensure that there's ample space for any inmates who need to be isolated. One thing we have, particularly on Rikers Island, is space because our jail population is less than half of what it was six years ago, thank God. Today, through the combination of efforts by the city and the district attorney's, 75 individuals have been released from our city jails. There are more being immediately reviewed that are under state jurisdiction, but in our city jails. We'll have an update on them shortly.

In the course of this evening, I will be given results of an effort by the Department of Corrections and NYPD and our Mayor's Office for Criminal Justice to review a list of approximately 200 inmates for potential release. From that list, a number will be determined, and we will make the decision this evening on what that exact number will be and then they will be released. Whatever that specific number of inmates, those individuals will be released tomorrow. Then starting in the morning, an additional group of between 100 and 200 will be reviewed quickly. We hope to make decisions on them very quickly. But I think to be safe, I would say those decisions will come Wednesday. But this process will be ongoing. It will be constant to determine what is the right number of people and who are the right people to release, and under what conditions to make sure everyone is safe, but also to make sure we look out for the health and wellbeing of all. So, we'll have constant updates on that.

Two more points, then I'm going to just give you a quick summary in Spanish. Been a lot of questions about city services that we normally expect and city offices that are normally open and obviously a lot has been suspended, a lot’s been altered. A lot of things we depend on aren't there right now. Anything you want to check on for City services or offices to know if they're open or if they're operational, you can go to nyc.gov. Right there on the homepage, you can click into a list and see exactly what is still available and what isn't. And anytime you have a question, you can always call 311— to get a clearer picture. I want to take one moment before I close to talk directly to New Yorkers with disabilities. I know there's tremendous concern in our disability community dealing with all the unknowns everyone else is dealing with, but needing to make sure that there'll be sensitivity and concern in our City government and all the institutions of our society – that there'll be information flowing and messages that will be helpful and necessary information for the community, that everything that we do takes into account all New Yorkers, including so many fellow New Yorkers who have a disability and who needs support at this moment. The fact is we are focused on making sure that every New Yorker gets the support they need during this crisis and anyone who has a specific concern and needs help can reach out to our Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities. And I want to thank Commissioner Victor Calise and his whole team in that office who do extraordinary work all the time, but have really risen to the occasion in this crisis. Anyone who needs more information or needs help can call 311 or visit nyc.gov/disability for more information and deaf New Yorkers specifically can connect through video phone at 646-396-5830, I'll say that number again, 646-396-5830.

Quickly in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I want to talk— I want turn to, I should say, our Chancellor. And Chancellor, you and your team, I know you have not gotten a lot of sleep these last days because you've been trying to recreate the nation's largest school system – virtually something that's never been done before on this scale. But I can tell from the smile on your face that you've had a good start today. So, really want to thank you and your team for the extraordinary effort. We look forward to your update. Chancellor Richard Carranza –

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thank you for your leadership in these very trying times. Just to give some context to what happened today in New York City, if you took all of the public schools in Los Angeles, you added all of the public schools in Chicago and you threw in the public schools in Boston. All of those schools today converted to a new way of learning and teaching in the— in America's largest City. We converted how students learn and how teachers teach with only days to be able to do that. So, I am here this evening to give thanks and kudos to our incredible educators, our leaders, our students, our parents who have taken on this challenge to make sure that students in this very difficult time period will continue to be engaged academically and we'll continue to be able to add to their knowledge base for however long we go.

Today is day one of a new reality for the 1.1 million students and families in New York City. And although these days are uncertain and, at times, frightening, we must all pay attention to the work of our administrators, staff, teachers and families. That's what's been the focus today, and what I saw today was nothing short of incredible teachers rising to the occasion, administrators rising to the occasion, parents rising to the occasion, students rising to the occasion. So, the two operative words as we go forward are flexibility and patients; those are the two words to keep in mind, flexibility and patience. We are literally flying the plane as we're building the plane. So, not everything is going to go 100as we plan, but that's okay because we'll figure it out together. There were thousands of teachers today that logged into their Google classrooms and they were recording welcome videos and lessons and getting to work with their students.

We had chat rooms where students and their teachers were reconnecting. I saw evidence of kindergarten teachers that sang songs with their students on a video classroom. A myriad of wonderful learning experiences were happening today across our City and we know that many families and students were going to schools.nyc.gov/learn-at-home to access the resources that we have available online not only for educators, but for students and for families. Teachers are making use of the professional learning opportunities that are being offered multiple times throughout the day and throughout the week. And I also want to acknowledge again our parents who we know are managing a myriad of challenges, not only working from home. Some folks are not working right now, but they're helping their children through remote learning opportunities. We promise to continue to work with you to give you the support that you need to help your students stay connected.

We also cannot talk about remote learning without acknowledging that there is a technology gap that exists among our school communities. And I want to start out by saying we are working quickly to make sure every family that needs a device gets a device. If you filled out the – remote learning device survey, I want to say thank you. If you have not yet filled it out, I want to say you need to fill it out and I'll give you the web address and the phone number, in just a minute where you can do that. You can expect if you've already filled out that survey to receive an email in the coming days on the next steps and if you haven't yet received a device, don't worry, you will receive a device. So far including school-based devices, we have handed out approximately 175,000 laptops, iPads and Chromebooks and we have New York become a little blasé when we think about the 1.1 million students, but 175,000 laptops, iPads and Chromebooks are bigger than most school systems in America. Yet, we've distributed that quantity of laptops, iPads and Chromebooks already and we are on pace to continue to distribute the 300,000 iPads to students in the coming weeks.

You'll also be happy to know that I have good news to report from day one of our 93 regional enrichment centers, our recs. About 4,500 students, children of first responders, healthcare workers, and other essential service providers were confirmed to start attending one of our recs as soon as today. Now these are the children of the men and women who are keeping New York City running and safe during this crisis. This is an important service to New Yorkers. Each one of these 4,500 students represents a family of a first responder or a critical care worker that does not need to worry about childcare and continue— can continue to support our city during this critical time. We also had Mr. Mayor and I'm very proud to tell you about 5,000 DOE employees and employees from the community-based organizations that we partner with that stepped up to volunteer to staff our regional – enrichment centers. That's 5,000 volunteers. I want to say to you, thank you, for your service to the children and to our City during this unprecedented time. I'm absolutely blown away by the dedication of our staff and our partners and the sheer number of people who have stepped up in a matter of weeks to ensure that on the front lines, our first responders to COVID-19 have the backup childcare they need to continue to serve the citizens of New York.

Our commitment is to make sure that every student who wants a meal can also get a meal and can continue to get a meal. And while we were serving breakfast and lunch today, we were serving three meals a day to the children of New York City. So, for – at 449 sites across the City in every borough, we served approximately 78,000 meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for anyone that wanted them. And through our partnership with Door Dash, we delivered 246 meals to our medically fragile students. So, we're serving all of our students in New York City. And as a reminder for anyone that needs a meal, it's very easy to find a site – go to schools.nyc.gov. on the homepage, you will be able to see a link where you'll be able to find information as to where these hubs sites are. Or you can text food – F-O-O-D – or comida – C-O-M-I-D-A – to 877-877, it's just that simple.

As we continue to say the situation and the situation continues to evolve, we'll continue to monitor all of these services day to day, hour by hour to make sure we're meeting the needs of our students. We know there's a lot of unknowns, but what we do know is that we have each other and we do know that if we work together, if we heed the call of our Mayor and all of our Commissioners that are asking us to maintain social distancing, that are asking us not to congregate, we know that we can, as New Yorkers, take this on and as we've done in our history. There's no challenge too big for us to take on.

Mayor: Well said, Chancellor. And thank you to your team. Thank you to all the educators. I want to say to all the educators who are out there making these enrichment centers work. Thank you to all the food service staff, the custodians to the crossing guards, everyone who's making sure that young people who are children of these essential workers are getting this support and everyone's making sure that those food distribution centers are working. Thank you to all of you. It makes a huge, huge difference. Okay. That concludes the opening remarks here. We're going to take questions from the media and I want to just say several of my colleagues from different agencies will be on the phone. So, we will bring them in audio if we get questions pertinent to them. And with that we'll take the first question.

Moderator: Yoav is up first.

Mayor: Go ahead, Yoav.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor [inaudible] for Dr. Barbot. I'm just wondering [inaudible] kind of science the city is following as far as whether the virus hangs in the air and how long it lives on surfaces. The reason I ask is because there seems to be different statements coming from Governor Cuomo and while it does tend to impact people's behavior, if they think something does kind of survive in the air for a little bit such as taking an Uber or Lyft, and also for kind of folks who rely on handrails to get up the stairs. You know, I had a concern about how long it lives on surfaces. So, has the City’s, kind of, science, on those two things changed in, you know, recently –

Mayor: Yoav, let me start and then let me also confirm, is Dr. Barbot hearing us?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah. Okay. So, let me, let me –

Commissioner Barbot: The science [inaudible] –

Mayor: Can she hear me? Oxiris, can you hear me okay?

Moderator: Dr. Barbot, can you hear the Mayor?

Commissioner Barbot: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Okay, does she have feedback?

Commissioner Barbot: [Inaudible] this virus is transmitted through what we call droplets, which means someone coughs, sneezes, and that droplet then makes contact with someone else's hand or mucus membrane such as the mouth, the eyes. And that's how it gets into the body. So that has not changed. This is not an airborne virus such as measles. This is a virus that's spread by droplets. The other thing is when we talked about this before, you know there are studies that have shown that you can make a virus live as long as you could possibly make it live under laboratory conditions, which is very different from what we see in real world scenarios. So I think the important thing is the [inaudible] to New Yorkers and how it applies to their everyday life is, it really shouldn't matter if a virus lives 10 minutes, two hours, two days because the important thing is the guidance that we're giving to New Yorkers hasn't changed, which is the importance of frequent hand washing, the importance of covering your mouth and your nose when you cough in your sneeze, and by all means if you're sick, stay home.

So, while there are studies that have indicated you could make the virus live long under laboratory conditions, the real-world consequences to New Yorkers is the importance of hand-washing. That's number one.

Question: Okay. Thank you. Unrelatedly another question is, you know, there's been quite a bit of focus on the Department of Correction, but a little bit less attention to the youth detention facilities and we understand that there are some staff who work with kids who have tested positive. Is there any kind of similar effort to get some of the youth out of detention like there is at the DOC?

Mayor: We're going to look at, obviously, every situation from a health lens. Huge difference immediately is what we've seen with this disease, the impact it has on older people versus younger people, on those who have those preexisting conditions versus those who are healthier. So, I think it's a very, very different dynamic immediately when you're talking about a youth facility. But we still want to be careful. We want to be mindful. So, you know, we are looking at and will look at it through a health lens, but I don't think it is the same level of challenge as what we're facing with the adult facilities.

Moderator: Sean is up next.

Question: Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. Just wanted to get a few more details on supplies. You originally called for 15,000 ventilators, [inaudible] N95 face masks and a bunch of other things. Did you get a specific commitment from either the president or Peter Navarro to help meet those goals? And do you still want the president to basically enforce the Defense Production Act?

Mayor: No. And yes. It's an excellent question. I appreciate both questions. Look, I appreciated that last night's conversation was a substantial conversation. We, literally – you know, the president and vice president went over the information they had, how they were dealing with things. We talked about a couple of different issues, but then I went to my agenda, which was ventilators, medical personnel, including getting military personnel with medical training here, and of course, the stimulus legislation needing to include funding for public and private hospitals as well as for localities and states. It was a very substantial conversation. I made clear that we were in immediate need, particularly in our public hospitals, and the president specifically designated Peter Navarro as one of the people who would do follow up. And he has been very, very focused today. I want to thank him – been calling up consistently directly with me multiple times in the day, lots of detail.

But what I would say is we appreciate every step forward. Every additional shipment literally could mean the difference between life and death for some New Yorkers, but we're nowhere near, of course, where we need to be. And my job is to fight for this city and to advocate for our people and make sure we get literally everything we need for a crisis that is really in its infancy at this point compared to where we're going. So, I am very happy to have the conversation moving forward and I'm very happy that something’s starting, but we're far from that larger goal of like really seeing the kind of equipment and supplies we need. And that is not any lack of appreciation on my part. I am truly appreciative, but I just know we're in it for the long haul.

And then on the question of the Defense Production Act – no, I fundamentally believe it needs to be fully activated to ensure that we'll have the kind of quantities you're talking about and producing ventilators is not a minor matter. It will take a national effort to ensure that the number of ventilators we need in New York and beyond – this disease is starting to grow in many other places. So that Defense Production Act should be used to the maximum right now for the good of all Americans. I just don't understand why it isn't being done. But right now, you know, there's – I know what my position is and the president still has not made that decision and I'm going to certainly keep pushing him to do so.

Moderator: Mark Morales from CNN is up next. Mark?

Question: Hi, everyone – how are you doing?

Mayor: Hey.

Question: So, I wanted to ask more about the incarcerated folks who were going to be leaving over the next couple of days and the ones that have already left. What is their process to be going – to be released as far as testing, whether or not they've contracted the virus while they were incarcerated? Like what measures, what steps are in place? How do you make sure that you're not releasing people into the population that have – that have this virus?

Mayor: I want to get you the exact answer because it's something that's being worked on by a task force of people between the Department of Corrections and NYPD and our Office of Criminal Justice. And I want to make sure I give you the exact specific facts and I don't have it at my fingertips here. So, we will make sure to get you that answer later on today. But clearly that's being considered and everything else is being considered – the health of the individual overall, the age, the health status overall, obviously on the public safety side what the nature of their offense has been and, you know, the likelihood of a recidivism, a lot of different things are being looked at in the equation. But it's a very good question. We will get you the details on that later on.

Moderator: Julia Marsh is up next. Julia?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Hi. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor on the 400 ventilators, when did you find out about New York getting those because this morning, you know, you were saying, we're a week away from running out.

Mayor: Yeah, in the course of the afternoon.

Question: Okay. And did you learn that from someone – from who in the federal government?

Mayor: I learned that almost simultaneously from my own team that got information simultaneously hearing it from Peter Navarro.

Question: Josh from WABC is up next – Josh?

Mayor: And I'm sorry, can I just, can we hold on with Josh? I assume Julia can still hear me. That 400, tremendously helpful and it's going to help us get through this week into next week, particularly in our public hospitals, but I don't want Julia or anyone else to imagine that, that is going to take us too far. Again, our request is for 15,000 to get us through April and May. So I want everyone to understand, you know, from now to the end of May, let's call it 10 weeks for a nice round number, 15,000 ventilators is what we think we need. So I'm very, very appreciative for the 400. That will buy us days for sure. But we have a much bigger need we have to fill. Go ahead. I'm sorry, Josh.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Okay. I'm not sure if you're aware, I think just while you've been speaking, the Governor of Florida announced that he’s either about to sign or has signed an executive order requiring anyone traveling from a New York area airport to Florida – that's like almost 200 flights a day – to self-isolate for 14 days. And I guess I'm wondering your reaction to that. Obviously, it reflects what you've said, that we're now the epicenter of this. Do you think that's – I mean, I'd love to hear what your reaction is – is that good policy, should we be doing something similar for people flying here from say, Seattle?

Mayor: I have to be honest with you, Josh, I have always had mixed feelings on travel restrictions. I think some have been intelligent, are intelligent – I think the initial restrictions, for example, related to travel from China when we were at the very beginning and we were hoping to be able to stop this disease from asserting in the United States, I think there was real logic to that. I think at this point, the truth is this disease is in all 50 States. You're going to see community spread eventually all over the nation. It's just a matter of how much we deal with it and try and get ahead of it. So, my sense is it’s a different reality when you already have this kind of spread around the country. I understand it. We are the epicenter.

But I think right now, an answer to your part about our city right now – you know, the challenge we have is not people coming in from outside. It's the fact that it's well – very much has asserted itself throughout the five boroughs. As to the Governor of Florida, look, I'm not sure it's the most enlightened approach. I understand it. I think for a lot of people in Florida, their connection to New York City is very, very deep. And I'm sure a lot of people in Florida are going to be put off by that. But I also have to be honest that I understand if any governor, any official who's trying to grapple with this moment. So, I can't give you an easy, you know, yes or no answer on that one.

Question: Thank you.

Moderator: So, we're going to go back to Julia who had a follow up question. Julia?

Question: Hi. Thanks so much. Mr. Mayor, I'm wondering what your response is to New York Presbyterian Hospitals not allowing partners in the delivery rooms.

Mayor: Yeah, I just heard about that a short while ago and I'd like to understand that better, Julia. I'm unclear what the rationale is. I have a lot of respect for that hospital system for sure. And obviously I understand it is in relationship to this crisis, but at the same time we're talking about an irreplaceable life moment. I mean, I – you know, the moment I was in the delivery room when my kids were born is sort of one of the most important moments in my life, for sure, unquestionably. So, I'm concerned about that because I think it means so much to people, but I'm not a doctor. I'd like to hear more from them on why they think that specifically is the right thing to do before I can give you a better comment.

Moderator: Jennifer, from the AP is up next.

Question: Thank you. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: This is actually a question for the Schools Chancellor. I wondered whether he has attendance figures for today and also on the device issues since I know that he included the school [inaudible] devices along with the ones the City ordered. What is the [inaudible] the need estimated to be for the additional devices?

Chancellor Carranza: I didn't get the last part of your question. What is the, what?

Question: Since, as you noted the schools have also given out some laptops [inaudible] how many more do you think you'd need all together for all the students to have what they need?

Chancellor Carranza: So first of all, with the attendance issue – so we are in the process this week, because this is a new normal, of developing guidance for all of our staff members out in the field and at home on what attendance will look like. Obviously, you don't go to first period, second period, you don't have the morning checking. So, we want to have attendance procedures that make sense. It could look like a myriad of things. When a teacher posts an assignment, when a student is able to then enter Google Classroom and access the assignment, that counts as engagement. That could be attendance. So, we're in the process of working through that along with the New York State Education Department. So, we'll have guidance throughout the course of this week that solidifies what that attendance looks like. That being said, we can't really tell you exactly what it looks like because we know that some schools are still collecting what they think is attendance from self-reporting from the field and then entering it. Again, all of this is in flux – and remember my two operating words, flexibility and patience.

Now, as it pertains to devices, we have done a survey. We've asked parents to submit their answers. We've extended the deadline for that survey. So, we're in the process of actually getting some concrete numbers as to what that gap is in terms of devices and devices that are in the hands of students. We hope to have a little bit more clarity as this week goes by. We do know that there are a number of schools that have actually assigned their in-school technology. So that looks like computer carts or iPad carts that usually stay in the school. Principals and teachers have started assigning those to students to take home so that they can have them for the duration of this stay at home order.

That being said, we also know – I retweeted a picture of a principal who knew of a student that did not have a device. The student's parent called the principal. The principal got in her car, went to the student's home with appropriate gear, and delivered a device to that student. Those are the kinds of unsung heroic acts that are happening across our city as we speak. So, again, as we have more definitive numbers, we will share those numbers. But the ballpark figure based on a number of analyses was that – the realm is around 300,000, and we hope that it's less than that. We are planning for 300,000 devices.

Moderator: Okay. Jeff Mays is up next.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask about the PEG program. Is the $1.3 billion, is that just the beginning of the cuts? You know, the Comptroller came out with an estimate today that there will be $4.8 billion to $6 billion in revenue lost. So, are you looking at further cuts or is this just the beginning?

Mayor: We're going to be – Jeff, it's a great question, but the fact is we're going to be determining that literally week by week as we go along. None of us have ever been through anything like this. The one thing I think I can say is when you really total up the impact of this crisis, it will far surpass the Great Recession, and it will look closer to the Great Depression in terms of the shock to the economy, certainly the shock to employment, but a radical negative impact on City and State budget. So, we're going to have to make a bunch of tough decisions. This is a first step. I'm certain there's going to be a lot of other things we're going to have to do over time, but this is a first step.

Moderator: Gersh is up next.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Hey, Gersh.

Question: So, you went through a lot of very important information, which I know we all appreciate, but I did not hear anything about Governor Cuomo’s demand that you come up with some sort of plan to ban cars on some streets to create more social distancing space. So is there a plan?

Mayor: I spoke to this yesterday in detail, Gersh, and nothing has changed between yesterday and today. I have talked about what I think makes sense to do as a first step. I've talked to the Governor about it. Our teams are going back and forth on details. We'll have a plan worked through in the course of the evening to get started with. But I've also said really clearly that how we start this week in this whole new reality is just the beginning and I'm reserving the right in the course of the week and the weeks ahead to say, hey, we might want to do more of something or less of something or something different. And that'll be an ongoing conversation with the Governor as well.

So, the first point, which I said I think real bluntly yesterday, is we need to determine how and where we can enforce this new reality effectively. And that begins with the places that people already do go to. And that any new places we create, even though it's meritorious in many ways, if we create them, we then have to ensure there's an enforcement mechanism to go with them. We already have that when it comes to parks, for example, we don't have that when it comes to new streets being designated separately. So that's going to be something we only consider one step at a time. And I understand again, respect absolutely advocacy journalism – you're looking at this from one prism and it's a good prism, but I'm looking at this through the prism of how do we enforce these challenging new rules and a whole new reality. That's what I care about first here, it’s getting that part right.

Question: Fair enough. I totally understand that, Mr. Mayor, just thought there might've been an update today. So, let me ask a second quick question, which is, you mentioned enforcement – there is incredible anecdotal evidence of lot of drivers speeding out there. Now, certainly the NYPD is aware of it. So, is there a plan to address it?

Mayor: Well, for sure, Gersh. It's not acceptable anytime and we are clearly not going to allow it going forward. There's a lot the NYPD is being asked to do right now and a lot of new things the NYPD is being asked to do, but we do not want a situation where people, because, you know, our lives have changed, they start doing things that are reckless and dangerous. NYPD has been brought into Vision Zero from the very beginning. We will be very tough on people who are speeding, for sure, and I'm going to certainly insist on continued enforcement on that front.

Moderator: Erin Durkin is up next. Erin?

Question: Hi, another question about the enforcement. You talked about police officers being out there, you know, dispersing groups of people, but is there – will there be ticketing, arrest or any other form of enforcement beyond just telling people to move along?

Mayor: Well, Erin, again, Commissioner Shea and I talked about this in detail. I think the Commissioner is on the line with us.

Moderator: Yes, he is.

Mayor: Yes, is. I'll start and then, Dermot, if you'll jump in. We spoke about this, Erin, yesterday in some detail. I think the fact is, the NYPD is very good at telling people the way things have to be. They're very good at educating. They're very good at warning. And this is different from almost any other situation we've been in, because there's near universal information being projected all the time by all of you in the media in a way that's very, very important, very helpful. So, I think folks aren't getting the message in so many intense ways that when an officer goes out there and says, hey, guys, you know, you're not six feet apart, you need to be – or, hey, sorry, this is a crowd, we can't have that. It's not like it's going to be a shock to people, I would argue. But no, at this point we were focused on the education, the warnings, the communication, the use of neighborhood policing, not the sanctions yet. It's a conversation we're having with the State right now, how and when and if we want to use sanctions. But our first impulse is to go out there and educate people and do what the NYPD does so well in terms of communicating. Dermot, why don't you jump in?

Commissioner Shea: Certainly, we'll use any and all laws available to us, but I would just caution everyone that no two incidents here are alike and we are always going to default to what the Mayor said. We want to gain cooperation with compliance. We want to educate people. We want to talk to people. And we want to – and that's what we've been seeing throughout New York City. Listen, this is a very important matter when you talk about social distancing, when you're talking about the spread of this disease, and whether it's the Mayor or Dr. Barbot, all up and down leaders – we are trying to spread the same message that we were all in this together and, really, looking to – I had calls with members of the City Council today, other elected officials throughout New York City, we all want the same thing here and we're all working together to spread that message that all New Yorkers seem to step up. It's literally a matter of life and death and we need to practice this social distancing. So, we expect for other compliance, but the shorter answer is we'll use whatever is in our toolbox to make sure that that happens.

Question: Okay. And then, the patrols that you're talking about, are those additional patrols that are being added over and above, you know, what's normal?

Commissioner Shea: Yes, absolutely. We met with – had a long conversation today with members of the executive team, including Dave [inaudible], who heads up our housing bureau; Fausto Pichardo, who’s the Chief of Patrol throughout New York City. So, what we're trying to do is boost up patrols and we are able to do it throughout New York City to locations that we think needs a little extra attention, and certainly public spaces and parks falls into that and this environment. And what we're looking to do is increase those patrols without having any negative impact on the day-to-day operations of the NYPD when people are encountering situations and 9-1-1. And right now, we can do both of those things. We are very well resourced. So, you can expect to see in the days to come throughout New York City members of the New York City Police Department in parks. Certainly, it's a cool day today, a little rainy, but as the weather warms up to the end of the week, you'll see increased patrols throughout the New York City parks. You’ll see marked police cars driving through. You’ll hear audio messages playing for people, just reminding them of the importance of social distancing. You know, it's all hands on deck. You'll see our community affairs officers in those parks as well. So, it's all hands on deck at the NYPD, but you will absolutely see an increase as we move forward.

Moderator: Christian, from Bloomberg is up next. Christian?

Question: Withdrawn – the Mayor answered my question earlier.

Moderator: Got it. Brigid is up next. Thank you. Brigid, you’re up next.

Question: Thanks. Hi, Mr. Mayor. Just a couple questions about elections. I know you've been dealing with more existential issues, but State lawmakers right now are considering some legislation that could potentially move the April presidential primary to June. Are you having conversations with the Governor and State lawmakers about moving the April presidential primary and what's your message to them?

Mayor: First, on a pure answer – no, because I've been dealing with more existential issues as you said. A second answer, I think there's two good alternatives. I think if there's some way to create a mail-in system, which some States have. And, you know, that's a big endeavor, I’m not the belittling the challenge, but if that's something that can be put together in the short-term as an alternative to in-person voting that would be appealing. If it can't be, I think you have to figure out a delay because I don't think it's realistic to have it in April under these conditions. So, we either need a new alternative or we need a delay. I haven't had the conversation, but I'd be supportive of either of those options.

Question: And are you hearing any concerns from the City Board of Election that their ability to both run an election and to get voters registered while this virus is still peaking?

Mayor: Again, I have not engaged them compared to all the other things we're doing. I haven't heard from them. Maybe my colleagues in the administration have. I am certain this – the first question, even before you get to registration is, can you do an in-person election in April under these conditions, which will only get worse between now and that election? I don't think it's realistic. So, I think if we're not talking about some new kind of voting system that can be used at least temporarily, maybe as part of, you know, a different future where there's more voting options, if you don't have an alternative, I think immediately that April is unrealistic and that immediately affects the registration – question two, obviously. I don't see how they could do what they normally do, you know, in this kind of environment, even in terms of registration. So, I think that's another, another reason why we got to figure out an alternative.

Moderator: Ashley, from the Times is up next. Ashley?

Question: I have two questions. My first is about enforcement for the Police Commissioner. My colleague who – media are essential workers during this time – was ticketed this morning for turning down the street that is trucks-only from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm. And it seems like, given the public health mandate to keep distance and the state of emergency, that that might be something unnecessary. So, I'm wondering if you have given any more thought or guidance to whether some enforcement is dismissible, especially given the new duties that the Police Department is taking on and also the hit it's taking from the spread of coronavirus?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, we exercise discretion at all times, whether it's during a crisis or not. The first part of the question – did you receive a summons? Is that what happened?

Question: No, of course not. I don't drive. But my colleague, received a ticket for turning down the street that's trucks-only from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm, and it just seems like, you know, they're – they're in close contact for the time that she's receiving that ticket. So I just wanted [inaudible] you give it any more thought or guidance about that.

Mayor: Yeah, Ashley, I want to just ask for both Dermot and I, are you saying a colleague in a regular car with press plates, is that what you're saying?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead, Dermot.

Commissioner Shea: I would just say, you know, if you listen to the questions for this press conference, two minutes ago, it was Gersh calling up about cars speeding. We handle and juggle a lot of balls. So, obviously, Ashley, there's always discretion in what we do in terms of – you know, during crisis. But we're also balancing the public safety needs and Vision Zero and other matters. So, beyond that, I won't comment on a summons that was written.

Mayor: Yeah. Let me make the broader point. Ashley. Obviously, you know, the media, playing a crucial role right now. People desperately need information. The information is changing constantly. This is one of the fastest-moving crises we've ever lived through. So, we want to make sure all of you in the media can, can do what you need to do and get where you need to go. We all need to be cognizant – absolutely considered essential workers at this point. Again, I'm not going to comment either on a specific incident, not knowing the details, but I do want to affirm that part of the equation. We have to make sure that you guys can continue to do your work.

Question: My second question [inaudible we've learned – my second question is just that we've learned that more than 2,000 police officers or civilian aids have called out sick, reporting, flu-like symptoms. So, I'm wondering, for the NYPD, what's the current caseload? I may have missed that earlier in the call. If you, the Police Commissioner had been tested, and whether the NYPD has a reserve corps of officers to call up if things get worse, as you did during 9/11?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, Ashley, we are – when you look at the numbers, we are definitely spiking someone on people reporting sick in the midst of this. And I want to just take a moment to thank everyone. I've literally been receiving calls from across the country, spoke to Charlie Beck today from the Chicago Police Department, and Buffalo Police Department, and many others offering their words of – you know, patting us on, if you will. We are, as I said many times, we are very well resourced. We have the greatest police department in the world and we have the ability to rise up to any and all occasions and we intend very much to do exactly that here.

Mayor: And Ashley, to the of testing – this has come up for different officials at different points. What our health commissioner has told us – and she's on the line – is, no one should get tested unless they're symptomatic. So, unless a Dermot is symptomatic and it hasn't mentioned it, there's no reason that he would have been tested. Dermot, are you symptomatic?

Commissioner Shea: Just overworked, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Just overworked – very funny. Okay, I'll take that as not symptomatic.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. Not symptomatic, feeling perfectly well. But my heart goes out to everyone in New York City. We'll get through this one.

Moderator: Alex, from Chalkbeat is up next. Alex?

Question: Hi, this is probably a question for the Chancellor. In just talking with some educators today, it sounds like there hasn't been a ton of clarity yet on whether – like, sort of, what the grading policies are for students and online coursework, like whether teachers should be grading this stuff, whether it's counts as credit? Like, has the DOE come up with a framework for thinking about that yet?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so really good question. As I mentioned, right up top – flexibility, patience. We cannot obviously put a traditional classroom schedule in a virtual environment and then expect to have the same processes, including grading. We also have talked about there being a gap in terms of how many students have technology – they have the device or they have internet connectivity. We're still working through all of those issues. So, it's not surprising that there are some questions about grading. I think what I'm going to say to folks is, continue to pay attention to the guidance that is being developed. We're working very closely with lots of focus groups that include teachers and principals. We're working with the unions as well, because they have a really good pulse of what's happening out with their members out in the field as well. We want to be practical, but we also want to be rigorous and that means that we're doing a new way of teaching and learning that's never been done before. So, that guidance will continue to become clearer and clearer as the weeks go by. For right now, what I'm going to ask all educators to do out there is to think about how do we engage students to the maximum ability possible, giving them a really robust kinds of experiences. Unfortunately, the alternative is to just let kids sit at home, do nothing. We'll see you when we see you again. I don't know of one educator that wants that for their students. So, as we figure this out together, let's not worry about grades. Let's really worry about how do we keep kids actively engaged and we give the educators what they need to actually craft lessons and experiences that will keep students really, really engaged.

Question: At the enrichment centers, it sounded like you mentioned there were about 4,500 students who are – not students who actually attended today, students who are eligible to attend?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So there are about 4,500 students that registered. Now, again, this isn't an open registration. It's very specific for the children of first responders, health care workers – I've read the list before. So, these students have actually registered to attend. Now, it's also important to understand that as families are adjusting to their new reality it's going to be a gradual uptick in the number of students that are actually taking advantage of this opportunity. So, they've registered and we understand that life intercedes sometimes with the best laid plans. So, we expect that we will have an increase in actual children showing up at these sites over the course of this week, so we'll hit our maximum enrollment.

Moderator: Paul, from the Wall Street Journal's up next. Paul, can you hear us?

Question: So, I just wanted to clarify something. I may [inaudible] Mayor said earlier on, that, in addition to police officers, some of the other city workers from the Parks Department, Sanitation Department and other departments that would go out to try to talk to people and get groups to disperse and to follow the social distancing rules.

Mayor: Correct, go on.

Question: The full question – tonight, do you anticipate that perhaps while people would ordinarily listen to a police officer or even a firefighter, but they may not take direction from other City workers? What powers – or, how would you help City workers for enforcement?

Mayor: Well, so let's go over what I said here. Again, you're talking about enforcement agencies, so NYPD, Fire Department, Office of the Sheriff, Office of Special Enforcement, and Department of Buildings, all which do enforcement anyway, they're pretty familiar with how to talk to people, including people who may not agree with the notion of being enforced. But again, I think a massive X-factor here is, this is a global pandemic that everybody knows about. You know, anyone who doesn't know about the coronavirus is living under a rock right now. So, I think you're talking about different reality when so much has been established publicly in such a clear imperative here. But again, these are folks who do know a lot about how to engage people on enforcement matters. I mentioned Department of Parks itself, which obviously knows its constituency and the people they deal with all the time and folks from the Mayor's Office who deal with communities all the time. I think people will be fine. If there we find there's something particular that has to be dealt with, we'll deal with it. But I think in this environment, again, education, reminders, warnings, all of that's going to be a really, really valuable. And if there's a situation that needs more sophisticated, if you will, or more intense follow up, they'll know to call in the NYPD, who obviously will never be far away.

Moderator: Last two, Mike Gartland is up next.

Question: Hey there, Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yes, indeed.

Question: Hey, how you doing? So, I had a question about the playgrounds and I was wondering if you could talk about the rationale behind keeping them open, given that there's so many surfaces for kids to put their hands on. I get the social distancing aspect of it, but you know, as far as that goes, it seems like a place where the disease can be spread pretty easily.
Mayor: Yeah. Mike, this is about a couple of things. One, you know –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Wait, we lost you for a minute. Hold on. I heard you, you raised the point about – your concern about the disease being spread and then we lost you all together.

Question: Yeah, that was it. It was just the rationale behind keeping playgrounds open given that the surfaces seem like the way the disease would primarily be spread rather than the social distancing aspect of it.

Mayor: And so, again, the first point I would make is the social distance, which is, and our health commissioner has guided us throughout all this, that the – the central concern here is the social distancing, that is the strategy. Absolutely, what we're all working on in unity is social distancing and that directly relates to the manner in which the disease is clearly spreading most prevalently, which is the droplets. So, that's entirely consistent and that, to our point of view, you know, again, if a family goes to the playground as a family unit, if a parent goes with their child, this is, again, a parent who's already under the same roof with that child, it's a different reality. You’re not seeing the same social distancing concerns because those folks are already constantly exposed. So, from a social distancing point of view, the question will be can we create the kind of balance in the playgrounds where they're not too crowded, where social distancing is respected as people enter a brand-new reality this week that they've never experienced before in their lives? There will be a lot of information. There'll be a lot of enforcement. If we can do that effectively, I'd certainly prefer see the playgrounds open. If we cannot do it effectively, then it becomes a real option to close them. And I said that yesterday, we're going to give it a week to see how it goes. But I'll make the point about the underlying rationale, which is – and I'm saying this as a parent who spent, you know, years and years taking my kids to the playground. You know, I used to take my kids to the playground when they went to school during the week. They had afterschool activities, they had little league, they had basketball, you know, they had all sorts of things. None of that is there anymore, Mike. We really have to understand the amount of dislocation here where all children will have and families will have is being home in their apartment or their home, limited time outdoors each day and limited options. And in a lot of neighborhoods in the city, the playground near your home may be one of the only open areas that you can go to, to run around and do anything. So, you take that out of circulation, certainly in a lot of our lower income neighborhoods that's true, where there's just, unfortunately, nowhere near the amount of park space there should be. So, I'm very reticent to take away one of the few alternatives that a family may have for any exercise at all, during a time when everyone's going to be limited in how much time that can be outdoors. But if we find it cannot be monitored properly, then we can do something very different.

Moderator: Last question goes to the Yasmeen from WNYC. Yasmeen?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor – a few questions related to the jails. One, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about expanding [inaudible] –

Mayor: Yasmeen, we’re losing you. Hold on, we lost you mid-sentence.

Question: Okay, I’ll repeat the sentence –

Mayor: Yasmeen, are you near a window or something? Because you sound like you're coming in real sketchy.

Question: I am near a window.

Mayor: Good, try again.

Question: Thank you. Can you speak a little bit more about expanding [inaudible]

Moderator: Yasmeen, it sounds like you’re coming in and out. Could you repeat your sentence again, one more time?

Mayor: Wait, let me ask. Yasmeen, do you have another phone you can call on, by any chance? Try that, we’ll give you one last chance. You can call in again or call from another phone, because we cannot hear you.

Question: Okay –

Mayor: Last chance –

Moderator: Yasmeen?

Mayor: Well, so much for technology.

Moderator: [Inaudible] we’ll get back to her.

Mayor: Alright, we will get Yasmeen an answer tonight and we’ll give her a special role in the lineup tomorrow.

Moderator: Yes, we will.

Mayor: Okay. With that, everyone, thank you very much. We’ll continue to make technology work in this new age and thank you, everyone, for being a part of this.

2020-03-24 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, everybody as usual, there's a lot to go over here and we are all going to be in this together for a long time here in the City. And that's something I want to start with, we talked about this yesterday. We're starting a very new reality this week, something we've never experienced before. As I've gone around the city today, I've seen places that, you know, usually you think of as really, really crowded— totally empty, literally streets where you couldn't see anyone walking down a sidewalk. Places that are normally very, very crowded in the City absolutely empty or only a few people. Obviously, what's happening now is our lives have been changed profoundly. People are recognizing and dealing with this new reality, making the tough choices and the sacrifices. I want to thank all New Yorkers, no one, not one of us wants to go through this. None of us asked for it, but it's our reality and I think New Yorkers are handling it with a lot of strengths, a lot of resilience, a lot of creativity working together, supporting each other. That's what I expect and I've always seen from my fellow New Yorkers. I want to thank you, I know it's not easy, but I really appreciate everything that people are doing to get through this together.

I have to be honest about the fact that we do not expect this to go quickly and I wish we did, but we don't. I've had several conversations this week with President Trump and I respect his office for sure and I'm trying to work with him to ensure that we get support in this City, but I have to respectfully disagree with him. When he says, as he said earlier today that he's not looking at months for this crisis. – I have to say Mr. President, I wish that was the case for New York City, I hope that's the case for other parts of the country. But, right now, we are looking at months and I'm going to say it again because people deserve the honest truth that we are doing all we can just to get through March right now, particularly in terms of our health care system. April will unquestionably would be worse than March, and right now my fear is that May could be worse than April. That's the reality we're facing, I think the notion that we could be quote unquote back to normal in the month of April is absolutely inconceivable at this point. So, I want to give people the truth because I think it helps us all to just, you know, really get our expectations right. Really know how to plan, really know how to kind of gird ourselves for battle; this is a battle we're all going to be in together. Again, no one is tougher than New Yorkers, so we will get through this.

The people we’ll depend on, I want to thank again our extraordinary health care workers who every hour of every day are doing amazing work, protecting all of our first responders; they're heroes to us all the time. They're renowned all over the country, all over the – world, and they're doing amazing work right now. Our educators are so proud of the amazing work that's been done just over a days to create – an online learning distance learning program for hundreds of thousands of kids, never been done before in the City. It's amazing what's been started already as well as those learning centers for the children of essential workers. I mean, this kind of improvisation, this kind of speed and an intense teamwork. This is the mark of New York City and this is something we should be proud of. But I also want to thank other heroes I’ll keep mentioning different people each day, but there are some unsung heroes out there that really deserve our thanks because they're keeping this whole place running in the most basic ways.

When you think or you turn on that faucet, you turn on the tap and you get water. Let's thank our department of environmental protection workers for getting us clean water, the best water in the nation every single day despite this crisis for making sure our water system, our sewer system works. Thank you to all of them. Thank you to our department of transportation workers who continue to do vital work to keep us safe, to keep all those vehicles that are moving around and that we depend on for essential service, make sure that they can keep doing all of their work. So, thanks to the DOT workers, thanks to the sanitation workers, continue to do all of that possibly could be done to keep the City clean despite all the challenges we are facing. And there are many, many other public servants— folks who work in non-profit organizations, folks who work in the private sector, all of whom are chipping in.

So, I'll say thank you many times during this crisis, but a special thank you to our City workers from all those agencies I mentioned who are doing extraordinary work right now. And I'm going to keep telling all my fellows, New Yorkers say thank you when you see one of them because we are depending on them right now. So, what I am seeing again is despite the intensity of this crisis, despite the growth of this crisis that New Yorkers continue to make the changes necessary to follow the rules to step up. And that's against the backdrop of really just staggering numbers, now again; every number represents a human being. And I'm going to tell you about one human being, I know who we've just lost, we just heard about in the last hour. But first, the overall situation, amazing— horrible number, almost 15,000 cases confirmed positive.

Now, in New York City as [inaudible] – I'm sorry, 14,776 is the exact number, but that number keeps changing obviously throughout the day. So almost 15,000 cases, we're now about 58 percent of the cases in New York State and still about exactly a third of the cases in this entire Nation. So, we are the epicenter, I don't want us to be the epicenter, but we are the epicenter of this crisis for this Nation. And obviously as we discussed this each and every day, because we are the epicenter for this Nation, because we are the Nation's largest City, because the entire Nation depends on New York City we need more federal help and we need it quickly. The number of deaths related to coronavirus is 131, as of this moment, 131 New Yorkers, we've lost, the breakout by borough 4,364 cases from Queens, 4,237 cases in Brooklyn, 2,887 cases in Manhattan, 2,328 cases in the Bronx and 935 cases in Staten Island.

We've lost a great New Yorker— one of the most really renowned members of our cultural community, the great playwright, Terrence McNally. Someone who epitomizes so much about this City, came here from Texas as a young man brought all of his talents wrote some of the greatest plays of recent memory, but also someone who worked so hard for a better New York City and a better America for everyone. I had the honor of knowing Terrence because he ended up marrying one of my college roommates, Tom Kirdahy. And you know, I went to NYU, my roommate and I stayed friends over all the years and I got to know Terrence once they married. In fact, once marriage equality was finally the law of the land, we held a ceremony out here right in front of City Hall in our Plaza and performed a marriage ceremony for Terrance and Tom to mark that historic occasion – an amazing, amazing New Yorker who did so much good. So, we all should have Terrence McNally and his husband, Tom Kirdahy in our thoughts and prayers. And Terrance rest in peace, and thank you for all you did for this City and this nation.

And you can see this crisis again, it's not— it's not just numbers, it's not just something happening somewhere else or to somebody else. This is going to be something we all will feel very directly in our lives before it's over. Our job is to do everything we can to save lives, to protect lives, at this moment, it's going to take everything we've got. This morning I spoke with Governor Cuomo, we agreed on the most central fact, the most central need; and that is ventilators that right now and our efforts to save lives. The City must have the ventilators we need they are all over this country we've got to get them here. We have to be a priority for this Nation because we're the epicenter of the crisis. It has to be clear to all New Yorkers, and I'll talk about a visit I paid to our emergency management warehouse earlier talking with doctors from Kings County Hospital one of our great public institutions about why ventilators are so crucial. I think for a lot of us, you hear the word ventilator, unless it's been something you experienced in your own life or with your family, it probably sounds like – a word you can't really make sense of. I can tell you having seen one of the ventilators a machine that literally could fit in – in a big suitcase it is something that literally is going to be the difference between life and death for thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers. A ventilator and the doctors from Kings County Hospital made this so clear today if a ventilator is available for a patient stricken with coronavirus patient gasping for breath, fighting for their life, if that ventilator is available exactly when it's needed, that patient can stay alive so the doctors can do their work and in many, many cases that patient will live and resume their life. But it's as plain as this if a doctor cannot get a ventilator to that patient, literally the minute they need it, if too many minutes pass, that patient will suffocate, that patient will die a horrible death and they'll be gone forever.

That is what a ventilator should mean, it's not a technical term anymore, it means life or death, and we need as many ventilators as we possibly can get right now in this City. At our warehouse, our emergency management warehouse in Brooklyn, I saw 400 ventilators that arrived from FEMA, from the Federal Government. And I am thankful for those, but I have to be clear. So long as there is a single ventilator sitting in a federal warehouse that could be here in New York City saving lives, something's wrong. We must get the ventilators to where they're needed most. And I'm not saying we're the only place in the country, we know how much Washington State has suffered, we know how much California has suffered. And unfortunately, more states ahead will suffer and my strong view is we need the ventilators and all those who are at the front line need the ventilators now.

And as soon as we no longer need them, we will be the first to say, let's make sure they get to where the need is greatest elsewhere in the country. We're asking for help – supplies, we're asking for help getting medical personnel, but we need as Americans to be ready to contribute back to all the other States, the second the crisis comes to some kind of end here in New York City. So, we stand ready to support our nation, but now we need our nation to help us first because we are the front line of this fight.

At the warehouse today. 400 ventilators from FEMA, as I mentioned, that are being distributed and they have been distributed already this morning. 100 going to our public hospitals, 300 to a variety of other public, private excuse me, and nonprofit hospitals around the city. To make sure that no hospital gets into that awful situation that I just described where they need a ventilator immediately and they don't have it. So that 400 will help us a lot. And just a short time ago, I got the very good news that we got an announcement from the federal government that 4,000 more ventilators are on the way to New York state in the next 48 hours, and half of them will come to New York City. 2000 more ventilators for New York city, and that's great news. But I need people to understand that is only the beginning of what we need. The speed with which this disease is growing, the human impact. The fact that we could lose a life in minutes if there is not a ventilator. Even with the new supplies we have received and will receive this week, what does it tell us? It tells us we can get through this week. It tells us we can get into next week, maybe even get through that first week in April. But with the rate of increase of this disease, we need ventilators to be constantly plugged fide into New York city, constantly supplied to New York city until we got to the point where we're absolutely sure we have an ample supply.

I don't want to see a single person die who could have been saved. That's my standard and that's why we're going to need many more ventilators. We asked the federal government days and days ago, we made the formal request for 15,000 ventilators. Again, I'm very appreciative of the progress. I want to thank the administration for what has begun to happen, but I need everyone in Washington to understand that'll just get us to the first week of April and I'm very worried about the first week of April. Even with this new supply, it doesn't guarantee we'll get through April that first week. This is a race against time. This is a race against time and every one of us here at City Hall and Emergency Management, all of us who are in charge of fighting this battle, and I know our colleagues at the state level feel exactly the same way, we are all racing against time. We need our federal government to join us in that race against time.

Again, I'll always tell you when I think there's progress and I'll tell you when I think there's setbacks. There is another act of progress today and we heard it from FEMA and I'm very appreciative for all females doing, they have been difference maker in the days that they've been on the playing field since the president signed the emergency declaration. FEMA is making a huge difference already with a lot more to come. So, I thank them. We heard the news earlier today that for the first time that defense production act had actually been activated in the real world conditions we're talking about where it actually needs to be used to guarantee that companies will produce exactly what is needed to protect the American people, and that those goods will be distributed to where the need is greatest. We are finally beginning to see the defense production act being implemented. It will have to be used on a much bigger scale to produce not only what New York city and New York state are going to need. I am trying to tell people all over this country, it's coming to you next. This will be a national crisis – all 50 States. We must get the maximum production immediately. So, I am pleased to see progress, but we have a long way to go, and the defense production act needs to be used to the maximum.

I will say in addition to the good work of FEMA the good work we're seeing from the federal administration getting us some new supplies, the good work of course from the state of New York, which has done extraordinary work to help us. We are seeing more and more private corporations step up. We're seeing more and more individuals come forward. Philanthropies have come forward. A lot of people are helping.

Last night I had a very encouraging conversation with the CEO of the 3M Corporation in Minnesota, which is in a position to give us some of our most crucially necessary supplies, including N95 masks, which are those very high-quality masks. We need a lot more of, to the tune of millions. CEO, Mike Roman and I spoke at length. It was quite clear he's very committed to New York City. I want to say thanks to Mike and your entire team. And we talked about a very large order we need help with and he was ready to help. So, thank you to everyone at the 3M Corporation, and we're going to be having that conversation with a lot of other CEOs, a lot of other people in a position to help real quickly, because we're going to need it all.

I want to make clear to everyone who wants to help, especially if you have even a single ventilator that you can get to New York city or if you have a supply, even more of a bigger supply of ventilators. If you have surgical mask, if you have N95 mask, if you have face shields, gloves, gowns, anything that could help us, we need it. And the simplest way to let us know about what you have and your willingness to help is to go to nyc.gov. It's right there on the homepage. It's got a long title for this section. It says produce or donate supplies to fight coronavirus. I assure you we will come up with a simpler title, but right now anyone who can help us can go to nyc.gov, that homepage. It's really clear where you click to let us know about what you can give us to help and we need it. And I am so grateful to all who are helping and I assure you, I guarantee you, we will return the favor to our fellow Americans, to other states and cities as soon as our crisis abates. We have to be ready to say thank you and mobilize to help the rest of our fellow Americans.

Now I want to talk to you about some of the issues we're dealing with today out on the streets of our city in terms of our parks and playgrounds. Places that we are concerned, obviously to make sure that people practice social distancing. That people don't congregate. Don't live the way we used to just weeks ago but live in this new reality. And I spoke several times to our police commissioner, Dermot Shea. He has been out checking. I've been out checking. He has patrols out all over the city and getting constant feedback. And what we're seeing in many, many places is that people are truly abiding by these rules. A lot of our parks and playgrounds, actually I've had very limited activity today. Others obviously might have more, but what we are seeing broad adherence to the rules and we're going to make clear through NYPD enforcement and enforcement by many other city agencies that we must have a real respect for these rules. And anyone who is not following the rules will be quickly corrected. They'll be warned, they'll be educated, and NYPD will be out making very clear to people, using our patrol officers and with messages that'll be electronically transmitted all over parks as well as all the person to person contact that we need people to deal with this new reality of social distancing.

We have been working closely with the state of New York and with the city council to make sure that we are able to maximize the education, maximize the enforcement, maximize the chance that people can continue to enjoy our parks and in particular our playgrounds. But it's also clear, as I said just a few days ago, that if that is not working out, if people are not abiding by the rules, if they're not listening to the warnings, we may get to the point in just days where we have to close the playgrounds for the duration of this crisis. It's not something I want to do, but it's something I'm ready to do if needed. We have agreed with the state of New York and the city council that we will give this process until Saturday evening. So, we'll have some warmer days coming up. We'll have a chance to see if people have gotten the message. We will be doing all the enforcement, but if by the end of Saturday, it is not sufficiently clear that New Yorkers are following these new rules, at that point we'll be prepared to shut down playgrounds for the foreseeable future. So, to everyone out there, to all the parents with kids, and again, I've made very clear, if you're living under the same roof, social distancing is different for you. Obviously, people who live under the same roof are going to be in close proximity all day, all night. You don't need to do the six feet apart out on the playground if it's a mother with her child, for example. But you do need to keep your distance from everybody else, and your child does as well. So, the rules are pretty straightforward. If people follow those rules, my hope is the playgrounds stay open. If they don't follow the rules, most assuredly, the playgrounds will be shut and we will make that decision by Saturday evening.

Also, in terms of our streets, we've worked with the state and with the city council on an initial effort to ensure that we can enforce a limited number of streets that will be opened up. This will be a pilot program. We'll do up to two streets per borough. And everyone wants to make sure that there are spaces for folks to get their exercise, to get fresh air. We also are quite clear there must be enforcement, so it has to be places that the NYPD and the other agencies can enforce effectively. We came to, I think, a very smart, workable agreement to do a limited number of sites around the five boroughs. See how it goes, see if the enforcement works while we're trying, of course, to do the enforcement everywhere else. We're going to, our goal is to get these up and running by Thursday at the, again, up to two sites per borough. Details will be announced, but the one thing for sure, every site can and will be enforced by the NYPD and other agencies. That obviously underlies our entire approach. So, you'll see that up and running in the next couple of days.

Let me turn now to something that there's just, I have to be very clear. There is no good news at all when it comes to the topic of our budget, our city budget. And I always say, you know, a budget reflects priorities and values, and the budget really means what we can do to serve people, what we can do to employ our public servants who do so much good for everybody else. How we can make people, can make sure people get what they need. Well, as I said yesterday, unfortunately I've had to instruct our Office of Management and Budget to immediately initiate a savings program, what's called a peg program, which requires agencies to have to, in a mandatory fashion, come up with savings. That goal. I want to use these words very, very specifically. That goal will be at least 1.3 billion dollars. And everyone who's listening knows that is real money. That's a huge amount of money. And that process has begun today with city agencies. And I say at least because that number may have to grow in the near future as we continue to lose revenue and see massive new expenses because of this crisis. But I wanted to give you that update. It's an unfortunate update, but it's the truth.

Something that is also related to the crisis we're going through, but I imagine people will be a much happier about, is that we have paid very close attention to parking on our streets, in particularly alternate side parking. The issue that is one of the things that New Yorkers feel very deeply, very personally. I know from my own experience in my own neighborhood trying to find that parking space and circling the block a lot of times over the years. We gave it a week to see how things would go and I'm happy to say that the results were very good. Even after a week we found that our city remains sufficiently clean, so we will extend for another week and now alternate side parking will be suspended through next Tuesday, March 31st. So, alternate side which has been suspended for the last seven days will be suspended for another seven days through Tuesday, March 31st. We're going to look at the situation week-by-week; we might do more extensive time periods depending on what we see. But I think the thing to expect right now is we'll try and deal with alternate side in chunks of time, at least a week at a time. But again, always watching to make sure that our city stays clean for everyone's benefit and it's important against the backdrop of something like this disease that we maintain real cleanliness in the city. So that's some good news, that alternate side is suspended through Tuesday, March 31st.

Now want to just speak proactively to an issue that might come up. I know our colleagues in the media have a lot of questions and I'll be turning to them in just a moment. But one issue has come up, which is very, very emotionally important, humanly important, important in terms of health. And that is the question of, for folks who are giving birth, families that are giving birth what are the protocols about whether a partner of the woman giving birth can be in the hospital room at that moment? This is a medical decision obviously. It is something where all of us who are not doctors need to defer to the medical community. The decision made by our public hospitals – our Health + Hospital system – is that partners should be allowed in for the process of labor and when a woman has given birth that is the official policy, but with some very clear guidelines that any partner in the hospital room when a woman has given birth must be wearing a surgical mask and that there is a clearance procedure to ensure that if any partner is symptomatic with the symptoms of coronavirus or of course if they have tested positive, then they would not be allowed in the room. So, I think that's very straightforward. If someone is healthy, then that partner is allowed in. If the partner is symptomatic or tests positive for coronavirus, they are not; we certainly hope and pray that happens to nobody or very few people so that partners can be there for that amazing life moment. To me, there's just no more important moment in your life than when a child is born, obviously. But we do need to protect the health of the mom and, and really make sure we handle that. Right, so that's the way our public hospitals will be going about it.

Another topic, and this is again, I'll often have tough updates for you, but this one is good news and this is related to transportation and all the critical essential workers who need to get around. Very happy to say that our colleagues from Citi Bike are offering them – folks who are essential workers – a free 30-day membership and the owners. Citi Bike, Lyft, I want to thank them and all like so many other private sector companies that are stepping up, thank them for that effort. I know they're going to extra effort to make sure those city bikes are stationed in the right places particularly for health care workers and [inaudible] extra effort to make sure the seat bikes are sanitized frequently. I want to thank you for all those efforts, everyone at Lyft and Citi Bike that really, really helps a lot.

Now, to a very important issue that has come up a number of times and I understand why it's a hugely important issue, which is our jail system. We have important and very sensitive and very complex decisions to make related to those who are incarcerated at this moment. I remind everyone the number of people in our jails right now is just over 5,000 as compared to over 11,000 when I first took office. So, thank God, it's less than half of what we used to have in terms of people incarcerated, but it's still a lot of people. My strong view is at this point, well I want to follow the exact same categories that I heard from Dr. Anthony Fauci in terms of those who are most in danger and obviously Dr. Fauci has done an extraordinary job during this crisis leading this country with the best information and guidance on how to address coronavirus. Dr. Fauci told me last week that anyone over 70 years old or anyone one of those five major preexisting conditions, those were the people most likely be in danger. This is my view, no one over 70, no one with any of those five preexisting conditions should be in our jail system right now. We have -to work through some very intense complicated legal issues case-by-case. In the case of those individuals, some I have the direct power to release. In other cases, that can only be done with the approval of the State of New York or a District Attorney. But that category of people, those in immediate danger because of the specific nature of coronavirus, I strongly believe they all should be released and we are working through those details immediately. I believe some have been in the group that's been released already – there’s 75 that have been released already - but we want to identify anyone in those categories and get them out immediately. 

Now, to the bigger picture – the reality is of the over 5,000 people in our correction system different inmates are in different statuses. There's been, I think some information put out that is not accurate about which are the group that I have the direct ability to release into a work release monitored and supervised program versus those who could only be released with the approval of the State of New York or a District Attorney. The group that I have direct ability to act on is those who are serving a city sentence and that means that they have gone to trial, they've been found guilty, they've been sentenced, and the sentence is under one year and they would serve that sentence on Rikers Island rather than serving that sentence in one of the upstate prisons, those of course are meant for people who did more serious offenses. Folks who are serving a sentence of up to one year on Rikers are individuals convicted of offenses such as misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. So, when we looked at that category of people there's over 500 inmates in that category. There is a substantial group that because of very specific legal issues I'm not able to immediately release, we would have to work through those case-by-case. There are some who have domestic violence charges or sexual offenses charges who I have determined we are not prepared to release at this time, although we'll continue to look at cases individually – I'm not comfortable releasing those individuals at this point. The remainder, are individuals who have been convicted of misdemeanors, nonviolent felonies, have less than a year left on their sentence - some have many months, some have only a few months, some have only weeks. But I'm going to treat this category across the board, it's approximately 300 inmates, and we will move to release those 300 inmates immediately. The other categories that I think are immediately areas to focus on in terms of potential release. In addition, as I said to those over 70 with preexisting conditions and those in the city sentenced category, there are those awaiting trial. There's a particular group of them about a hundred who should be considered immediately, but that will require actions by the district attorneys. We will work with them to determine the proper outcome quickly. And then there's another group of about 700 that are technical parole violators. We will be working with the State of New York that has to ultimately give approval. We'll be having that conversation to see if that is a group that can be acted on across the board or that needs to be handled in a more a specified manner. But certainly, that is an area where we think we could find a number of people who may be able to be released quickly. And we'll work closely with the state on that.

Okay. Just a few words in Spanish and then we will start taking media questions. I know we're going to have Dr. Oxiris Barbot, our Health Commissioner on the line and Dr. Mitch Katz, CEO of our public health hospitals – Health + Hospitals. And to our colleagues in the media, if we need to get other Commissioners on the line, just to let you know, we may ask you to pause your question while we get the appropriate Commissioner on the line and we'll come right back to you after a one or two of your other colleagues has gone.

With that, just to say in Spanish, just a few sentences –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: We will now turn to questions from the media. Go ahead. Thank you.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a quick note at the top, we ask that everyone limit their questions to no more than two, including follow-ups. This allows us to be fair and try to get to as many people as possible. We're going to start off today at the top of the list with Alex from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I'm curious about two school principals. One passed away this week at Brooklyn Democracy Academy, another principal in that building and Kappa V appears to have been hospitalized. Can you confirm that? And do you know what the last time those principals were in the building?

Mayor: Alex, I heard from Chancellor Carranza last night and we were – he was very, very sad and very pained, and I was too to here we lost the principal at Brooklyn Democracy. Someone who obviously gave his whole life to try to help kids, but I do not have the details of any connection to other DOE members. So, I want to make sure I don't give you anything that's inaccurate. We can get that to you for sure later on today. Is there a follow up?

Question: Yeah, I mean, I'm also just curious like what is going on in those –for the people who are connected to those buildings now? I mean, I know that the DOE has said they're not confirming cases, but is the City doing anything to try to connect to people in those buildings who may have been exposed to either of these two educators?

Mayor: Look, I think right now – I'll start and then Dr. Barbot will certainly, I'm sure, join in and go over again the reality we're in now – I think when you're talking about 15,000 cases and community spread, we're in a new reality. I mean, the truth is out so you know better than anyone. The vast majority of our school buildings are shut down now. Some are only doing food operations, pick up, but no educators there, no students there. Others, a very small number, compared to all the buildings we have, a very small number of being used for our enrichment centers for the children of essential workers. So for other folks the school has been out since last week obviously. But we take each of these cases seriously. If there's something specific that we know that we can act on, we will. But with community spread there's unfortunately many different sources through which someone may have been exposed. And the most important thing is for folks to follow those basic rules in terms of what to do if symptomatic. We're just in a whole new world now. So, Dr. Barbot, can you hear me?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, sir.

Mayor: Well, I think it's a good time to go over once again that, you know, we've – once upon a time we were able to trace very specifically with a very small universe and act accordingly. We're now in an age of rapid advance of this disease, community spread dynamic where the broad guidance that you are providing as a city's doctor is what really governs everything we do. So, I think it would be great if you would just review that again.

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely, sir. So, as you say, when we have broad community-wide transmission, it is virtually impossible to trace back to a “point source.” And so that, on top of the fact that schools have been closed for over a week really speaks to the importance of New Yorkers self-monitoring. And so, what that means is we need New Yorkers to pay attention to symptoms they may be developing that are either fever and cough, fever and shortness of breath or any other symptoms that might make them feel out of the ordinary. And the most important thing to do overall is to stay home, but that if they're not feeling better within about three to four days to reach out to their doctors. But again, when we have widespread community transmission, the best thing we can do to break the cycle of transmission is stay home.

Mayor: Thank you doctor. Who's next?

Moderator: Next up, we have Alex from the Daily Beast.

Mayor: Go ahead, Alex.

Question: Hi, just a little more clarity around the inmates being released, but as far as the 100 people that are awaiting trial, what exactly is the process with those people? What is this process that you mean by the DA's? Because it's been a few days now and I'm just curious what exactly do they have to do to release them?

Mayor: Yeah. Alex, I'll always tell you when I have the chapter-and-verse and something and when I don't, I don't know the exact technical and legal approach. Our team can get you that right after this. I do know that it requires action by the DA's. I think – I remember we got five DA's. Each has their own view on the specifics. All of them are united as are we, as is the Police Commissioner. I am certainly in trying to strike this balance between the humanitarian need to get everyone that we can get appropriately out of our jail system out and be mindful that there are also real public safety concerns here. It's not just one thing or another. It's a really tough situation. I've talked to a lot of people who are dealing with this issue. There's not a single one of them who thinks it's simple. We're pained by both sides of the equation, the health concerns and public safety concerns. But my understanding, Alex, is that that is a situation where I know broadly what I’d like to see happen, which is for folks who have more minor offenses certainly and/or people that don't have much time left to serve. I want to see the maximum number of people that we can have safely get out, out. But I also know there's a lot of extenuating circumstances. There are some cases that are much more complex than meets the eye. And the DA's have real concerns that have to be addressed and by law they have to sign off.

Question: And just another quick question, is there going to be any change in enforcement for the city's sex workers? Are we going to – like stop arresting them, I guess is the most blunt way I can ask that?

Mayor: No, it's a good question. I – obviously the Police Commissioner needs to weigh in on this and if we can get them on the line, we should. I think we've said very clearly now over the last few years our goal is never to focus on the worker, but to focus on those who are profiting off that worker and exploiting that worker and sometimes trafficking in that human being. So last thing we want to do is you know, have a situation where the worker is put into jail, if there's any way to avoid that. That's generally our view before all of this. So I know there's sensitivity on that front but the Commissioner can speak better to it. And why don't we – oh, he’s on, okay. Commissioner Shea, let me just summarize the – can you hear me okay, Commissioner? Let's try again. Dermot Shea, are you out there?

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: Yeah, I hear you.

Mayor: There you go. The question from Alex at the Daily Beast is given the coronavirus situation, has there been a change to approach in terms of the decision to arrest and potentially jail sex workers? And I said our overall approach for quite a while has been to focus on those who are profiting, those who are behind the “business,” those who are exploiting rather than the worker themselves. But I want to turn it over to you to talk about any particular changes or approaches that you're using in this crisis.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, I think you've summarized it perfectly. And that was in place before this crisis. Certainly, this crisis is a challenge for all of us in city government. All of us as New Yorkers. But well before we had ever heard about coronavirus, the NYPD had shifted its policy in terms of dealing with certain types of arrests in New York City. And going back a couple of years, we made a conscientious effort to really go after people that traffic and are predators and victimizing women and forcing them to take part in activities such as that. Our arrests in – for people that are forced many times to partake in these types of activities, has plummeted over recent years. We continue to work with nongovernment organizations and our partners and our Vice unit to really work with and go after really the source: people that traffic, whether it's from state to state into this country or homegrown here. So I am comfortable where we are. That's been taking place for some time now. And I think that with the prior question, I would be shocked if you found any people currently on Rikers Island that are on Rikers Island for prostitution. I just don't think that's accurate.

Mayor: Okay. I appreciate that, Commissioner and Commissioner, if you can bear with us for a little while, you may have got other questions, so stick around if you can. And let's go to the next question.

Moderator: Next, we have Yasmeen from WNYC.

Mayor: Go ahead, Yasmeen.

Question: Mayor, can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Indeed.

Question: Okay, great. I do have two different questions if I'm allowed. One about jails? Aside from releasing inmates, I'm wondering, are there more aggressive measures that the DOC can be taking to prevent the spread of the virus in jails? I feel like yesterday in your opening statement, you alluded to perhaps more social distancing measures. I'm not sure. I don't know if there's any talk of potential widespread testing soon of a contained population like a jail population. Are there other measures that they can be taking?

Mayor: Yeah, Yasmeen – best of my knowledge – I think Dr. Mitch Katz is on, I'll get him in this answer in a second. Look, here's the reality. We've said again, thank God we have, you know – we've got a jail system that was built out for over 20,000 inmates. That's where we were in the 1980s. And some pieces have been closed down, but a lot of our jail system remains intact. Even though we went from, as I said, over 11,000 inmates when I took office. We're now just around 5,000. So, we have space and we're using the space we have to create some distancing in general. So, certainly, be able to isolate anyone who needs to be isolated purposefully. And there's a much stronger health provision in the jails now because of the role of Health + Hospitals than what used to be there some years ago. So, there's really intense focus to keep making adjustments and keep protecting people and anyone who needs special care there's ways to provide it. We're going to keep refining that. Obviously now that we're talking about starting to release hundreds of people, that will open up even more space. And we'll see how far we can appropriately take that. Dr. Katz, do you want to talk about the health strategy in the Correction system and any changes that you're making, adjustments you're making?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, NYC Health + Hospitals: Yes, sir. I think you've explained it well. We make a lot of effort to isolate anyone who is symptomatic or anyone who is known to be positive. We've opened up additional spaces so that we can do it. We encourage social distancing throughout the jail and most importantly for this disease, our clinicians are alert to people who may get sick quickly. This is a disease where people can deteriorate in a matter of hours. And anyone who gets sick, we are able to swiftly reach them and take them to one of our hospitals.

Question: As just a follow up to that, we have heard though from even jail employees from corrections staff that or at least their union that represents officers that they are not getting information on who has the virus so that they can take proper measures to distance themselves.

Mayor: Yeah, Yasmeen –

Question: Would you like to be more transparent there?

Mayor: I want to just be careful. I'm going to bring Mitch in. But we work with all the unions, all our different departments. You sometimes get information from a union that is more or less accurate than – obviously anyone who is symptomatic is treated differently in terms of health care. So I think it's, that's pretty obvious that someone is being treated differently and, and there's not going to be a case where there's lack of transparency because action will be taken. And Dr. Katz, we all agree there's not been enough testing in general since the beginning of this crisis and we're trying to deal with how to prioritize going forward. But I think Dr. Katz, if I said a simple sentence, anyone who is symptomatic alone, even before a test is going to be isolated and treated differently. It's going to be self-evident that someone who there's a concern about is in a different category. They're not going to ignore – no one would ever be allowed to ignore someone symptomatic. Dr. Katz, is that all accurate?

President Katz: Absolutely true, sir. Right now, while there are delays to getting test results, we of course assume that the person does have COVID-19, and we isolate them and put them in masks appropriately.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you, doctor. Next question.

Moderator: Next up, we have Amanda from Politico.

Question: Hi, how are you? You said earlier today the hospitals are going broke. Does Health + Hospitals need a relief package and how will they get help from City Hall when it's also facing a budget shortfall?

Mayor: I'm very, very concerned about that, Amanda. That's – look our hospitals are being asked to do everything right now. And the course, the message to them is do everything you can to save human lives. And you know, throw in the kitchen sink, you know, so that no one is sitting around saying, oh, no, you can't do that thing because even though it would save a life we're having a budget crisis. No, we’re acting like right now we have only one imperative: save lives. And we know right now the city's losing billions of dollars and that includes the budget that supports Health + Hospitals. So, my comment this morning was directed specifically at our colleagues in the Congress who are making a decision as we speak. And I have not gotten an update in just the last few hours to be honest, what I was basing on is what I knew this morning, where we still did not have confirmation that public and private hospitals will get direct immediate relief in the stimulus legislation. We must have that. My point this morning was if you risk our health care system collapsing financially, not only in New York City, but all over the country, we're not going to have an economic recovery, which I know the president rightfully wants to see, but we're not going to have an economic recovery if our health care system collapses. The dominoes that will fall from that will be extraordinary. So, my point was that the Congress right now needs to provide direct, immediate financial relief to public and private hospitals alike.

Moderator: Next, we have Ashley from the New York Times.

Question: Good afternoon. My question is for the Police Commissioner, as always. I would like to see if he could, you could explain, Commissioner, today what the NYPD's role is in reviewing inmates for release and what you think of this policy of releasing some Rikers inmates. Are you supportive of that? Do you have some objections and what those are?

Mayor: Let me start before the Commissioner and he will fully answer. So, actually, I have never taken offense at you asking the Commissioner directly, but you should start I think with the person who's making the decision, which is me. I have been consulting regularly with Commissioner Shea and my team has been consulting, not just with him, but other key leaders in the NYPD, with our Mayor's Office for Criminal Justice, with Department of Corrections. We've obviously been consulting with DA’s. It is a very complicated dynamic. It's one we've literally never dealt with before any of us. But I'm listening to all the input. I spoke to the Commissioner detail earlier this morning. We're making these decisions in an entirely new atmosphere. So, the Commissioner will offer his views, but I want to make very clear that I'm making the ultimate decisions, taking in the advice from all these different sources and doing what I think is the right thing for this city. Go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Shea: Thank you. Mr. Mayor. I'll start with the first part. In terms of the types of information, there's many things that we're looking at. We were asked to look at a list of individuals, for example, that are incarcerated on Rikers Island, that are due to get out in a certain amount of time. One of the basic, I think, things that would paint you a good picture is, for example, are we releasing, I'll give you an example, individuals convicted or awaiting trial on domestic violence and think of a situation where we would be releasing them to a location and the victim of that domestic violence would be at the premise. Are we, do we have open cases on any of the other individuals that we would be releasing them on, that we would then be in a position to make a determination, would they be arrested on a different case? There's many variables that we're looking at. But as the Mayor, said – ultimately, we're working together. My personal opinion on it. I've spoken to the Mayor many times on this, so we're in lockstep. It's a very difficult decision, but I think any decision you make, you have to start with what's important, and you have to be a realist and you have to be humane. And I don't think anyone wants to be in a position where we're doing the wrong thing, where we're, we have individuals incarcerated – that their lives are on the line because of an illness. It's a very difficult decision. We're trying to weigh all factors. I know that I've worked – conversations with not only the Mayor, the prosecutors, as well as the members of [inaudible]. And I think we're all united on that. It’s a very difficult decision. Let's try to do what's right. Let's try to do what’s humane, but let's also remember we got to do this right and we have to have a plan. And some of the examples I gave you I think make sense. So, we’re releasing people that could be infected to a location, where there’s an elderly aunt, where there’s somebody with an active order of protection, whether that's the victim of the crime where they went in. So that's all the type of stuff we will look. Again, thank you for the question.

Question: Thank you for the answer. Also, overall, since the pandemic has hit New York, are you seeing any emerging trends in crime, whether they be good or worrisome? What are you seeing as far as the – I guess regular crime?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. I think I hit this yesterday. Very, you know what, I don't even I don't think I've released this tidbit, but I will to you so you can get the scoop here. We just had the day yesterday, with the fewest crimes. We'd have to go back to two other dates, and the other two dates we had that few crimes were three feet of snow in New York City, Ashley. So that gives you an idea of what we're seeing. From March 12th, when we started this journey and it seems like a lot longer ago, but when really all of New York City workers, frontline hospital workers, police, fire, schools, everyday New Yorkers, when our lives were turned around about a week or two ago, we immediately saw what the steps put in place by both the Mayor, the Governor, businesses close, parks close, school playgrounds closing, and everything else that we see every day. You know, you never seen Fifth Avenue so open, you never see crosstown streets so open. We saw an immediate drop in most categories, I would say, of crime. Is it universal? It's not universal. We still have some shootings that we have to address. You know, we're much more concerned about everything else that's going on. But we're not taking our eye off crime either. I can tell you that arrests have dropped significantly, you know, in the last week or two. We managed to be up in robberies in New York City last week. That's a little troubling. We've been having significant increases in robberies last week. It’s not a huge increase, but it was still up. And that tells you a little bit about what we're facing in robberies, that it's still up and the [inaudible] are still a problem. And Ashley, you and I have spoken many times about sexual assaults. We would down dramatically in sexual assaults last week, and I'll tell you that that really worries me. And maybe I'm just glass half empty here. But I can’t imagine that you know, the crimes aren't happening. I'm sure that there's many crimes happening. So that's, I think it's something that everyone, we should just continually get that message out.

Mayor: Dermot, I’m just going to jump in –

Commissioner Shea: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Dermot, I want to just say that real clearly to all New Yorkers, what would you just said, that your fear is that crimes particularly crimes like domestic violence or sexual assault could be happening and not being reported. And I want to emphasize this is something that NYPD has been working on intensely over the last few years. And our message is always clear. It is crucial, God forbid anyone is the victim of domestic violence or of a sexual offense, it is crucial that it be reported to the NYPD so we can ensure justice is served and we can ensure that the offender never hurts anyone else. And I would say another very, very obvious area that we're dealing with right now – we've seen an immense number of bias incidents, some that rise to the level of bias crimes, some that are verbal, some that are physical, certain acts of discrimination that are clearly illegal. We've seen that in a number of areas, but particularly in recent weeks directed at our Asian community – that's thoroughly unacceptable. We will not stand for it. We'll ensure there's consequences for anyone but we need the reports to be able to have the NYPD do the investigation and follow up and ensure that justice is served. So, to your point Dermot, it is especially important at this moment that anybody who is a victim of crime, the survivor of one of these situations reports it right away. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next, we have Bridget from WNYC.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to follow up on the PEG program announcement, just to clarify – $1.3 billion, that's over this year or what's the timeframe for that? And then –

Mayor: So, Bridget, let me just let me answer that out. We'll let you continue in a sec. Bridget, it is at least, and I'm underlining the words ‘at least’ $1.3 billion. That number could change at any point in the budget process that's going to play out over the next four weeks leading up to the executive budget. We're going to go to each agency. They will have a specific dollar figure that OMB will give them that they must hit, they can offer different ways of achieving it, but they have to hit the dollar figure in time for the executive budget. And it will be savings from the current fiscal year and next fiscal year combined to achieve that dollar figure.

Question: And obviously this is a time that is difficult for everyone in New York – is the guidance coming from OMB, you know, trying to keep layoffs off the table?

Mayor: We've had – in the midst of all this other challenge that we're doing with the coronavirus, we've had budget meetings. We would have been already, you know, in the budget process normally getting ready for the executive budget. In this case, we've had essentially emergency budget meetings. And the first goal, of course, is we just – we, by law, must have a balanced budget by the middle of June, and legally by the end of June. And we need to do the things necessary to achieve that. We need to make sure that we can protect the resources to fight COVID-19. That is, you know, non-debatable at this point. We must make sure that every resource we need to fight this battle is available. And to this hour, Bridget, we don't know at all what's going to come from Washington in terms of any financial relief.

It keeps changing it seems like, you know, multiple times a day. So, we are on our own at this moment trying to sort it out. We know the State's going through a real tough time and so, we have to take actions to prepare to protect our most vital services. I'm not going to say anything at this point about what the ground rules will be going forward. Certainly, right now it's just a simple instruction to agencies to achieve a dollar goal. And I don't think any of them has to think in terms of layoffs to do that. But we have a very, very tough road up ahead and we'll – you know, I'll keep being very honest with you and all your colleagues about what's on the table and what's off the table as we go each step through the next few months of what will be an exceedingly difficult and complex a budget process.

Moderator: Next, we have Bobby from NY1.

Question: Hi, can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yes, Bobby.

Question: Okay. Couple of things. First on the street closings, I know you said a lot of the details are still TBD, but can you give an example? Like if we’re talking about Broadway in Manhattan and what is the thinking here, is there any concern that opening streets could actually incentivize people to get outside and congregate in a way that you're actually trying to discourage?

Mayor: Bobby, that's exactly – you know, Commissioner Shea and I have talked about this repeatedly. I've talked to the Governor several times about it, including this morning. We want to strike that balance. So, what we decided was to have a very limited number on a pilot basis, certainly a number that the NYPD and other agencies can account for in terms of enforcement. But the ground rule was we had to be able to enforce it or else it was going to be counterproductive. So, the streets will be selected for where they'll have an impact, obviously, where people do need that – they need space exercise, I believe in that to say the least. But there'll be where, working together with the City Council, where we think there'll be a positive impact, but where we can guarantee enforceability.

Question: Okay. And this might be more directed at Commissioner Barbot, but given the spike that we're seeing, the daily increases in positive cases and in deaths, you know, we've seen these social distance measures in place now for a few days, I mean, going back a couple of weeks even – how will we know and when will we know if they're working?

Mayor: Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes. So, it will take at least, I would say, a good 14 days for us to start seeing a potential change in the trajectory of new cases. But the concern is that the more that we get New Yorkers adhering to our guidance of staying inside, the faster that that trajectory will change. But at the very earliest, I wouldn't anticipate seeing something before 14 days. And certainly, it will last, as we've been saying, at least the peak into sometime late April, early May. So, we are nowhere near getting a good sense of what our efforts are yielding. And until that time, we need New Yorkers to really take to heart the importance of staying home. And I know it's not easy. But it's something that is our best chance at turning the tide because otherwise, you know, we're facing an onslaught – a potential onslaught of thousands of people coming into our health care delivery system, into our hospitals, and many of them requiring a higher level of care. So, the best chance that we have against this is people staying home.

Moderator: Next, we have Chip from [inaudible] –

Question: – Wanted to ask about the PEG program and I was wondering if you know, Mel is going to be able to get those numbers in time for the executive budget at the end of April. And [inaudible] –

Mayor: No, no, we are committed to the current timeline. That's why we instituted this PEG program immediately. Conversations – you know, the program was based on obviously OMB’s intimate knowledge of each agency and providing goals that they thought were absolutely attainable. And we're on the same timeline. The agencies have been informed today. And so, we will stick to the schedule and everyone will have to deliver the results in time.

Moderator: Next we have Christian from Bloomberg.

Question: Hi, two questions for the Mayor. The first is last week you talked about trying to increase bed capacity on an emergency basis, sort of, surge capacity, if you will, around New York. And you talked about several different sites where you hope to add various numbers of beds including nursing homes, hospitals, medical facilities, and also some small hotels. Any update on that effort in terms of where we are on that?

Mayor: Yes, absolutely. We're working very closely with the State. The specific instruction the Governor gave, which I think is absolutely the right one, is that each hospital has to create a 50 percent expansion plan. That's what we're doing with Health + Hospitals. Look we're going to need, before this is over, a huge additional amount of hospital beds. We're going to need a lot more of them in April and I think we're going to need even more going into May. So, that expansion plan is moving very rapidly. I use the example of Coler Hospital on Roosevelt Island yesterday, a hundred beds will be up this week, 240 next week. But many, many other examples already of that rapid expansion going on. But I just need to be clear that, you know, it's amazing that we have the Javits Center – and I commend the State and FEMA and Army Corps. Everyone is doing that. That's going to be, I believe, a thousand beds, a USNS Comfort will bring 1,000 beds, but we have to never stop expanding because of the sheer scope of what's about to hit us. So, we're confident that we can hit the initial targets, but there's going to then have to be a lot more after that.

Question: Okay. Other issues – question in terms of the borough breakdown, for the last few days, the numbers have been running highest in Queens and Brooklyn obviously since they're the most populous boroughs. It sort of tracks the density there. Is there any sort of specific help being done for those areas? I think the Brooklyn Borough President today asked for something along the lines of Javits. Is there anything sort of being done to ensure that the capacity they get or the services they get are on par [inaudible] populations in those areas?

Mayor: Look, of course we have to make sure the care is where it's needed most. And I would let in a moment, Dr. Katz or Dr. Barbot can speak to this or both. But here would be my immediate answer. You know, what we hope to do is build capacity where the hospitals are first, both the publics and the voluntary hospitals. So, that's just proportionate to wherever they happen to be. And, obviously, you know, they're going to be the linchpin to this, those existing hospitals, which as Dr. Katz has said, will be in many cases, you know, will be primarily ICU units across the board to deal with coronavirus and then build out in their buildings, their campuses, build out in nearby buildings to really focus the attention first and foremost, where there are existing health care facilities.

You'll have exceptional situations like the Javits Center and the USNS Comfort, which are very, very valuable. And then we'll look constantly to see where we need expansion the most and where we can get it done the best. So, to some extent it will be as much a question, not just of where people are, we always will think about that, but where we can very, very quickly turn a building into a working hospital facility. That speed, I cannot emphasize enough – the kind of speed we're going to need here is unprecedented. It has to happen with lightning speed or it will be too late. So, it's a variety of factors, but you know, we're obviously going to get a patient wherever the health care is. That's going to be the imperative. Dr. Katz or Dr. Barbot, you want to answer further?

President Katz: I think, Mr. Mayor, you've explained it very well. The hospitals are best suited to be ICU beds because people who are critically ill need a lot of services from the pharmacy, from nursing, from physicians and equipment. And so, what we've been doing is constantly expanding the number of intensive care unit beds in our hospitals and looking to take patients who are not as sick and place them in other environments such as skilled nursing facilities or residential hotels.

Commissioner Barbot: And I'll just add that, you know, while we are anticipating a large influx of thousands of patients who have COVID and need to be hospitalized and who will require intensive care support, there are also those people that will continue to come in for other non-COVID related illnesses that will also need hospitalization. People, unfortunately, are still going to have heart attacks, they're still going to have appendicitis and they will need to be served. And so, that's why it's so critical for New Yorkers to stay home. If they don't need to go to the doctors, if they don't need to go to the hospital or the symptoms that they have that are likely mild COVID symptoms, they should stay home. We need to protect our health care system to ensure that it is not only strong for the people who are going to be developing COVID, but for everyone else who will still have a need for a strong health care delivery system. And we're looking at this as a five-borough strategy. And right now, though we're seeing the greatest activity in Brooklyn and in Queens, you know, we have to look at activity all over the city – and so, we are putting into play all of our resources in all five boroughs.

Moderator: Next, we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hi, guys, how are you?

Mayor: Hey, Gersh.

Question: So, I mentioned this yesterday as an anecdotal story – so, the question is for the Commissioner we've actually crunched the numbers on [inaudible] –

Mayor: Commissioner Shea, I take it.

Question: Sorry. Yes. Commissioner Shea. We've crunched the numbers and found that New York City's speed cameras have issued roughly the same number of tickets over the last eight days as they did during the comparable eight-day period in January when we all know there were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands more cars on the road. So, I guess the question I'm asking first Commissioner, can I get your reaction to that fact? And since those are just the camera tickets, I'd love to get the comparable numbers of tickets written by NYPD officers themselves.

Mayor: Yeah, I'm going to jump in just for a second, Gersh. I want to make sure – I haven't seen those statistics. I'm sure the Commissioner, who's Mr. Statistics himself, will be able to speak to them or get them. But I just want to make sure we are very clear that we're dealing with a crisis dynamic where obviously a lot of people, for example, are being brought to hospitals. I want to make sure that that number is excluding emergency vehicles that are speeding for a reason and we're just careful that we're actually getting a true filter on what's happening here. So, I just had to mention that to begin, but go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, Gersh, I heard most of the question. Are you saying that in general or are you saying emergency workers getting captured on the camera? Because I wasn't familiar with it.

Question: No, the vast majority are normal drivers. It's the same statistics that would have been during January, in March. I guess the reason I'm asking is because there's so many fewer cars on the road right now, so that the idea that the speed cameras would be catching basically the same number of speeders is amazing because it suggests that, as I mentioned yesterday anecdotally, people are driving way too fast. And, as you know, when people drive fast, there's more crashes, which puts people in hospitals, which is what we're all trying to avoid.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, it's a point well taken, Gersh. I mean, we'd have to look at the data. It's a little preliminary. You know, I can certainly pass it on to Billy Morris, our Chief of Transportation who works very closely with DOT. And again, we're in the middle of uncharted territory here, but we have not taken our eye off traditional crime. We haven't taken our eye off many of the things that we do with communities throughout New York City and we haven't taken our eye off Vision Zero either. So, if we have to reassess it and move resources around, we certainly will. I'll have Billy Morris take a look at that and reach out to DOT. But thank you for bringing it up.

Mayor: Yeah. And Gersh, I also say thank you because, look, I want to say, having raised my concern about the consistency of the statistics, I'll now go the other way and pick up on your point, which is, hey, everybody out there, if you're an emergency vehicle, that's one thing, but all other New Yorkers need to take to heart the point that Gersh made. The last thing we want is any additional crash that harms your fellow New Yorkers and takes up yet another bed in a hospital. And my number one reason we don't want the crash is because it means a human being got hurt. But we also cannot afford our already struggling hospital capacity to be further strained. And it's about to get really, really bad. I have to be blunt about that. So, even though the streets are more open, everyone still has to slow down and be careful and not act like, you know, we're in a different situation where it's open season if you want to speed. It is not and we will make sure the NYPD is vigilant and that there's real enforcement because we have to keep people safe.

Moderator: Next, we have Craig from the Post.

Question: Mr. Mayor, there are 300 inmates that you had said that are going to be released immediately today. And the other inmates you're working with other agencies to help move out, are these people that only fall into the vulnerable population? And are you working with – is there any plans to get a COVID-19 testing center on Rikers?

Mayor: Craig, on the – I’ll let Dr. Katz speak to the testing center point. I'll speak to the first point. I've given the instruction today. I'm sure the process of release takes a little bit of time, so I don't expect all of them to be out today. On the specific question, the folks that I released, again, are in the category that I have the power to release in. I think, with all due respect to some of our colleagues, elected officials, advocates, et cetera, I think there's been some misstatement out there of which people I have that direct power to act on and who I don't. So, the category that I have the power to release from is those serving a sentence on Rikers Island of less than a year. And again, those are for lower level crimes. Within that population, we screened out anyone with who had done a domestic violence crime, anyone who had done a sexual offense crime, and anyone who for other legal reasons and other factors in the criminal justice system, there was a legal prohibition on me acting alone. And that number, when you take out those exceptions, you get about 300 and that's what we're acting on now. Separately, I am saying across the entire population, that it is imperative to me that anyone over 70 and that anyone who has those preexisting – one of those five preexisting conditions, or more than one, should be released as well. But I know that will mean in many cases – probably the vast majority of cases – some additional sign off from either the State or a district attorney. So, we are going to aggressively move that. They have to make their own decisions. We're all working together, but they have to make their own decisions. But I'm going to argue to everyone that those categories at this moment need to be acted on. And in terms of whether there will be a testing center on Rikers – or, for Rikers, Dr. Katz, do you want speak to that?

President Katz: Yeah, so, we follow for inmates the same protocol that we follow in general, which is to say that if people have symptoms, then we test them, or if there was a close contact that required testing, we test them. We don't test asymptomatic people. But we do constantly do symptom review and we will make sure that at the time of release, if people have symptoms, we will get them to the appropriate medical care.

Question: Can I ask you a question of Commissioner Shea before we get off? Commissioner Shea, could you give us an update on the number of officers who have contracted the virus and the percentage of officers and civilians who have called out sick or are out on sick leave?

Mayor: Could you hear the question, Dermot?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, I did. So, the most recent statistics, which are, you know, fluid, to say the least. Unfortunately, we've had 211 members of the NYPD test positive. Of those 177 of the 211 are uniformed, 34 are civilian members. We have a little over 27 to 2,800 members currently out sick. So, that is an increase. I mean, it's just a trend that, as you talk about what we've seen and what we've tried to do with social distancing and lowering the curve, essentially. What we're seeing internally as an agency on the front lines is, we are still on an upward [inaudible] –

Mayor: And, Craig, look, we are – this is something we're going to be dealing with across all our agencies to say the least. We know certainly with NYPD, but other agencies as well, that there's been a lot of adjustments made to ensure we always have the personnel we need when we need them. But also want to really emphasize what Dr. Barbot has said many times, for the typical, healthy person under 50 years old, the recovery time from the time they get symptoms to the time they're clear to go back to work is essentially seven to 10 days. So, I know a Commissioner Shea and I have talked about keeping track of who comes back on duty after they have been out. And that number will start to grow soon too. It'll always be a juggling act, but this is what we all do for a living and certainly we're going to make sure we have the capacity we need when we need it.

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: My question is about the ventilators. I'm curious, do you know where they're going to go yet? Will they only go to H + H hospitals? Will they be distributed to private hospitals that are in need? What’s the process for that? And I have another one.

Mayor: Yeah, the process through our Emergency Management – Emergency Management will determine, obviously in consultation with the Health Commissioner, in consultation with the CEO of Health + Hospitals what the needs are. The group – the 400 I mentioned earlier today, a hundred went to Health + Hospitals, 300 went to a variety of voluntary hospitals across the five boroughs, depending on need. And we'll make those adjustments each time. So, our job is to make sure that there's no hospital of any kind in the city that hits that – you know, that crucial point where they don't have a ventilator when they need one.

Question: Thank you. And my second question is, I know for the past week there's been discussion about testing sites set up at Citi Field, or even utilizing Citi Field [inaudible] the parking lot by Yankee Stadium for other uses. Is that still in the works for either a testing site or [inaudible] earlier, you know, Queens has some of the most [inaudible] had the most amount of cases? Would it ever be used for secondary hospital sites or anything like that?

Mayor: I'll start and I don't know if – Deanne is on? Okay, I'll start and our Emergency Management Commissioner Deanne Criswell will jump in. Look, this, Katie, obviously, ever-changing. Testing – it would have been so valuable in the beginning to do it on a really, really broad scale. It's now, as you've heard from Dr. Barbot the realities of testing have changed over time. We certainly need it for folks who are most vulnerable and to keep emergency rooms from being overwhelmed. That's where the focus is. So, we'll be making those decisions, those adjustments, Emergency Management, working with Health + Hospitals, Health Department, FEMA, they'll be constantly figuring out where the adjustments are. But in terms of expanding hospital facilities and capacity, we're absolutely going to constantly look for additional space. Those obviously have to be either indoor spaces or places where we could best set up tents. And we are always in touch with the federal government trying to see if we can get additional military support in and that's something I sure hope will be coming over time. But the focus will be again, wherever possible close to existing health care facilities. That's the ideal, to put any new capacity near existing health care facilities to maximize the way you use it. Commissioner Criswell, do you want to add?

Commissioner Criswell: Yes, thank you, Mayor. Regarding the site that we were looking at Citi Field, that [inaudible] one of the places we had identified to use the FEMA drive through sites, but we have [inaudible] and I think we briefed this yesterday or the day before, decided to co-locate all of those FEMA testing sites with our current Health + Hospital sites. So, our supplies have all gone over there and they are being cold located and we're working with FEMA right now to finalize those sites. I think just to add onto what the Mayor said about them possibly using it for other types of operations, you know, I have been in touch with several members from DOD today about some of the resources that they're looking at bringing in and we're working with them to identify if they do and when these resources do come in, you know, what would be the best locations that they could set up field hospitals if that's what they are going to bring in or other types of equipment and supplies that they might be bringing. So, there's a lot of spaces out there. There's going to be a lot of, at least we hope, equipment and people coming in and all of these spaces are going to be needed to help us support the bigger picture in the bigger response to this COVID crisis.

Question: Next we have [inaudible] from Crain’s.

Question: Hello? Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah. What's the name again? I'm sorry.

Moderator: Janon Fisher –

Question: Yeah, hi, this is about the small business loan program. Wanted to see how many businesses have applied? How many grants have been issued? And how much money has been dispersed so far? I also wanted to see how much money is in the pot to disperse the grant money. I have similar questions about the loan program – how many applied, how many loans have been –

Mayor: Hey, I appreciate it. Let me just give just a helpful ground rule. I've said it to a number of your colleagues and I want to keep repeating, even though it's – we're trying to keep everyone to a two-question allotment, if you could split it up, it really helps me to just be able to follow it all and give you accurate information. So, on the question of the small business loan and grant program – applications have come in and large number as I understand it. I know we are hitting some limits in terms of that, but I want to get you the exact details. I don't have them at my fingertips. We will absolutely be able to get them to you right away. I think it was back on Friday, I was giving details about when money would flow. If my memory serves, some of it already, some of it by the end of the week for the two different programs. Both definitely have limits. I'm certain we will max out both of them. But I hope it will help a number of small businesses keep going. Of course, the big question will be, does this stimulus bill focus where it should on working people and on small business in addition to our hospital system and our local governments and state governments – you know, will that be really the focus? Or, will it be a corporate bailout more than an actual relief program for people in need? So hopefully, hopefully you'll see some relief for small business in this next stimulus. I think it's fair to say there will be at least one or two more stimulus bills after this one given the magnitude of the crisis. So, we hope there's going to be help there, because the real help the small business needs is far beyond what the City government can do. But we will get you the answers on our program and what's happened with it.

Moderator: Next we have Jeff Mays, from the Times.

Question: Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering, you've talked a lot about the ventilators. Are you at all satisfied with the amount of other supplies that you've received from the federal government? And what else are you in need of at this point? And I have a second question.

Mayor: Yeah. Deanne might be able to do the chapter and verse. My memory is, the overall requests that we documented time and time again to numerous federal officials over the last two weeks – 15,000 ventilators, I think it's 50 million surgical masks, if I remember correctly – Deanne can fill in some of the other blanks. But Jeff, no, of course I'm not satisfied. I am pleased that there's finally a flow of real resources for New York City. I mean, literally a week ago at this time we had seen essentially nothing. And now, you know, there's an actual constant dialogue going on. A week ago, I believe there's only one federal secretary who, despite letters, phone calls, everything, really gave me any answer on anything. Since then, I've been talking constantly to federal officials and they have been much more responsive and much more detailed that are actually providing answers. And we saw obviously today some real progress on the ventilators. But no, the day I will be satisfied is when we have such an ample supply that I am certain we can get through April and May. And I mean, we are far from that moment. What we have right now – I'm going to be blunt as I can be – I said it earlier, I'll say it again – right now, I am satisfied we can get through this week in New York City in terms of our health care system. And even with that, I think some of our hospitals are going to be very stressed. I am hopeful we can get through the week after that, but I'm not convinced. And when I say get through, I mean be able to ensure that every single patient who can be saved is saved who has coronavirus, while also addressing all the other patients with all the other serious conditions that have nothing to do with coronavirus. So, because we got an infusion of help – we got a lot of help from the State, we definitely got some good help from the federal government. We've gotten a lot of help from just individuals and companies. We're going to get through this week and we have a strong chance again through next week and that's all I can guarantee you right now. So, we're going to need a huge amount more. Deanne, are you able, again, from memory or maybe you have the letter in front of you – was I right? It's 15,000 ventilators and 50 million surgical masks? Am I right so far?

Commissioner Criswell: Yes, Mayor, those numbers are right. We also asked for 3 million N95 masks and we are starting to see some of these supplies trickle in and we did get a truckload, or several truckloads that were delivered to the Javits Center today. Some additional PPE, I don't have exactly what arrived yet, this is just a late breaking news. But really want to expand on something that the Mayor said, and that is, while all of these items are really critical in order for us to be successful with this, our number-one most precious commodity and all of my years of disaster experience is time and you can't get time back. And every day that goes by that decisions aren’t made supplies don’t come in are going to cost people their lives.

Mayor: Well said. Very, very painful reality, but very well said, Commissioner. Okay. Who's up?

Question: Secondly –

Mayor: Oh yes –

Question: [Inaudible] Mr. Mayor about the street closings. Why only do two streets per borough? And do you have some sort of resistance to the idea of closing streets to open up more space? Why start with so few streets?

Mayor: Jeff, I'm going to very respectful answer, but I'm also going to refer you to what I said earlier in this press conference and what I said in detail at yesterday's press conference. I think I've been real clear about it. Enforcement, enforcement, enforcement – if you open up a bunch of streets and you cannot enforce because you're spreading out our resources too much into places we haven't normally had to enforce, you're going to have a problem of gatherings starting to happen and people not observing social distancing because there's no enforcement mechanism. So, what I – right now, we have a huge system of parks and playgrounds people are used to going to and we know where they are and we know how to enforce them and that's what we're doing. But we're going to work to set up a select number of other locations, but with enforcement attached. The only way we can expand in my view is if we keep proving that we can enforce. So, think of it as toeholds – like, first you get one thing done, then you climb to the next level and next level. If you cannot get regular presence from City agencies that are being stretched all over the place right now, if you cannot get regular eyes on and regular enforcement, you run the risk of exacerbating social distancing rather than reducing social distancing. And we do have a lot of places for people to go right now – parks, playgrounds – that's where we think the focus should because we can monitor and we can enforce properly.

Moderator: Next we have Matthew Chayes, from Newsday.

Question: Mr. Mayor, Dr. Katz – gentlemen, when I asked you a week and a half ago you said the City didn't have a triage plan recommending like who's gets care when there are limited circumstances. When I cited Italy, Mr. Mayor, you call that country a hot mess and you said we're nowhere near that. But when I asked, there were 15,000 cases in Italy – that's, kind of, where we're at now. Other jurisdictions – Washington State – have disclosed their plans, They call it – I think it's something called like a crisis standard care for these very difficult circumstances. So, just to be clear, I'm not asking whether the plan is in effect right now. But I am asking, yes or no, does New York City have such a plan? And, if yes, who gets priority and who doesn't?

Mayor: Matt, I'll start and Dr. Katz can jump in. Again, I couldn't be clearer about what we're trying to do right now, what we – and until I got to the point where we can't do it. If I ever – if we ever get to a point where I have to say to all of you, we cannot keep up with the number of cases, we'll say it. But the very blunt, detailed conversations we're having every single day with the people of the city is to say exactly where we are on space and personnel and supplies and equipment. And as I said, today, we have what we need, going into next week, so that we are not making the kinds of decisions that you're talking about. And when I referred to this situation in Italy, I was also referring to a very different trajectory than we went through, very different level of preparation. So, I think you have very honestly – you have creatively reinterpreted what I said and you have not accurately portrayed it. We, of course, know that we might get to a triage situation, but I don't think it's appropriate to start talking about not just a theoretical, a very painful theoretical that I don't think is fair to people to just lay out there as something that might happen when we're being real, real honest about the fact that if we don't get more help and we're going to be in a situation where not everyone can get what they need. I think we have to keep fighting to get the help we need to keep innovating, to have the space, to have everything we need ready, and we ever feel there's going to be a problem beyond that, we're going to be honest about it. And, of course, our hospitals know how to handle a situation like that as difficult as it may be. So, I'm not going to lay out some plan in advance because we are not at that point. Dr. Katz?

President Katz: I agree. I think to lay out a plan is to accept that we're not going to have the resources that we need in order to take care of everyone. And you've been very forceful about getting us those resources and I think we have to keep pushing for the necessary resources and believing in our amazing health care workers, who I can tell you, Mr. Mayor, at Health + Hospitals have just been phenomenal and doing things that would have one seemed impossible to them, such as doubling our ICU capacity. So, we are actively innovating and I'm not at all prepared to say that we can't meet the needs of everyone.

Question: Also, for Dr. Katz and potentially for Dr. Barbot, how many ventilators approximately does New York City have at this moment? And how many approximately, again, are in use for coronavirus, but also for other reasons – and ditto for hospital beds. Same question.

Mayor: Yeah, let me jump in and then they can jump in. Again, respecting the question, but this is – one of your colleagues, Henry, asked a similar question. We're just not going to be giving specific answers to something that's a constantly moving target. It's not fair to New Yorkers to constantly say one thing when it could be moving a course of hours. We said earlier in this trajectory that the estimate was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 ventilators in the city. That number has grown markedly in the last 24 hours with the shipment from FEMA and the announcement of the 2,000 more that we hope to receive as early as tomorrow or the next day. And there's lots of other sources being acted on. It will be changing all the time. The way we can interpret all of this to you, and the best way and the most honest way in the most effective way, is to talk about overall capacity with that simple standard – can we serve everyone who comes in with the coronavirus and give them the care they need? That's what we're going to be reporting on constantly. But I guarantee you, the number of masks, the number of ventilators, the number of hospital beds, the number of people admitted are going to be varying by the hour and we are just not going to be in the business of updating people on that, because it's not going to be sufficiently accurate. It's not fair. It's not a good use of our time. Our job is to give you the overview and be very, very honest where we are at any given point with that overview report. Doctors, do you want to add?

President Katz: I think you covered it. We have enough resources, as you've said, certainly to get through March and to get into April, and we have confidence in your abilities and FEMA and the federal government to bring us – and State government – the resources we need to go beyond that.

Commissioner Barbot: I don't have anything to add. You covered it, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner. Okay. Who's up?

Moderator: Last two – we'll take Yoav next.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. I'm just wondering – or maybe one of the doctors can answer this, but are there specific hospitals, either public or private, that are already or close to being in serious trouble? And I wonder if there is any value of making at least that information public, because perhaps that might change public behavior. Maybe somebody who's sick can avoid hospital that's overrun currently and try another one?

Mayor: It's a fair question, Yoav, and I appreciate it. I don't like the word overrun because I don't – I’m not trying to be semantically difficult, I'm just trying to be honest – I don't think it's a helpful word because I don't think it portrays reality. For example, Dr. Katz has been very open about the fact that there's been a disproportionately high number of cases at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, and yet, at the same time, it's an extraordinary facility that's very well run and they've been making constant adjustments to deal with it. I think we need to be careful. I agree with you, if you had a perfect world where you could say, hey, you know, everybody, let's move over here, move over there, that would be a wonderful, but I think what I've learned from the doctors is that's not the way health care works. If someone's in an emergency situation location, location, location becomes the issue. And also, our ability to communicate to people down to that kind of micro level of here's the hospital usage levels at any given hour, I just don't think it's going to get through to people. We’ll say, certainly, especially for our public hospitals, if there's something shift situation that we think is particularly troubling we'll be open about that. Elmhurst has gone through a lot, Queen's Hospital's gone through a lot, but they are keeping it together, particularly as we get them more supplies and personnel. But I don't think it's really easy to say, go here, don't go here, go to this other place. It just doesn't strike me as a realistic. Doctors, tell me if that's accurate or not.

Commissioner Barbot: [Inaudible] add here, I would say that, you know, I've been the first person to say, people stay home, stay home, stay home, and that's for two reasons. One is, we want to make sure that people are socially distancing. The other one is, we want to maintain the capacity of all of our health care delivery systems and our hospitals because we don't have to travel any longer [inaudible] not only for COVID-related, but for, as I said earlier, you know, heart attacks, appendicitis, other things that they might need to have urgent care for. We don't want to extend the period or the length of time that they have to – or space that they have to go get care, we want to relieve the congestion of what we call the [inaudible] well, meaning people who have mild symptoms, may have, you know, a certain concern that they may have COVID. The reality is, as the Mayor said earlier, and I've been saying, 80 percent of the people who get COVID will be able to ride it out at home for three or four days, and if they're not – excuse me, seven to 10 days – and if they're not better in three to four days, that's when we want them to reach out to their doctors. We need to reserve the capacity of our hospitals, not only for COVID, but for all of the other things that need to come in as well.

President Katz: I would add on the hospital capacity that it's more appropriate for us to move resources than it is for patients to go elsewhere. Part of why people come to Elmhurst is because it has an excellent reputation as a hospital and it's really well trusted by the immigrant population that surrounds it. So, rather than directing patients away from it, I keep directing resources of additional nurses and additional equipment and additional physicians to the hospital.

Question: Thanks for that. And actually following up on that issue about the distribution of resources, if we – if the city does get to a point where all the ventilators have been distributed and other supplies, is there a going – is there going to be a sharing of resources for whoever needs it at that point? I guess I'm wondering if there's going to be kind of no distinction between private and public hospitals at that point if the materials that are in short supply need to go, you know, to a particular facility.

Mayor: Yeah. This is something that talked to the Governor about. We are absolutely united in that point that there are no lines at this point between the public and the private hospitals. As I mentioned, our Emergency Management warehouse had 400 ventilators. We didn't say, oh, we're going to just, you know, keep them just for Health + Hospitals. We made sure they went where the need is greatest – Health + Hospitals has close relationships with a lot of the hospitals and the voluntary system. And the doctors can speak to this, but the anticipation absolutely is that you'll see equipment moved among them if needed, because what we cannot have is a situation where any hospital doesn't have the basics. And so, we'll keep mixing and matching literally day by day, hour by hour to stay ahead of the situation. Dr. Katz, you want to add?

President Katz: No, I think you've covered it, sir. Thank you.

Mayor: Okay, who's left?

Moderator: Last question is Julia at the Post.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, indeed. How are you doing?

Question: Good. How are you? So, two quick questions here. Can you tell me when the city was notified that they'd be getting be getting half of the 4,000 new ventilators? Specifically, I'm wondering if was if it was before or after the Governor’s press briefing discussing the dire need.

Mayor: Yeah. Julia, I want to just caution you. You've been, I've noticed, asking these very fine tuned, like who knew what, when questions. They are perfectly fair questions, but I really am trying to be as honest as I can be about how things are changing by the hour or even by less, constantly. I heard the confirmed information that 2,000 would get to New York City just before coming out here. So, sometime, you know, maybe 3:15-3:30, something like that, because we at first heard the State allotment, we did not hear if a certain amount was being determined specifically for New York City. So, that's my impression. It only came into us after 3:00 pm.

Question: Okay. Thank you. And then a second question – I know you and Dr. Katz have said that you could make any hospital bed into an ICU bed. Given that our ICU cases are escalating the city, can you just give us a sense of what the current landscape looks like in terms of ICU beds? I've seen reports out there that range from 1,000 to 2,000.

Mayor: What do you trying – I'm sorry, I want to make sure I understand your question. What is – when you say 1,000 to 2,000, what are you trying to say?

Question: What is the current number of ICU beds in New York City?

Mayor: Similar point, again, I'm going to be very rigid about this, which is, we have an ever-changing situation. The way we are grading this is overall capacity. This is so fluid, I cannot even begin to describe it to you. So what Dr. Kat said from the beginning, he could take any part – or, almost any part of his hospital and turn it into an ICU. And what you're going to see is the hospitals more and more will expand ICU capacity. A lot of other types of capacity will go over into other places, whether it’s the Javits Center, whether it's hotels, whatever we're able to stand up, but I'm not going to give ever a number that is a moving target. I'm going to talk about what we can do to serve people. If we're confident we have the capacity to serve people at any given hour, that's what I'll say. If we are not confident of that, I will say that too. If we're not confident at any particular place, I will say that. But I'm not doing a running count. It's just not responsible or fair given the ever-changing situation.

Question: [Inaudible] supplies –

Mayor: Again?

Question: But you can do a running count of medical supplies but not beds?

Mayor: Again, I'm telling you that we – I got the question on medical supplies a moment ago too and I said we'd give very broad figures, but we're not – those figures are changing all the time too. We have determined this is just the way we're going to do it, that we're not going to say something that could easily be misunderstood and that's ever-changing. We're going to talk in terms of ability to serve people. Everything is changing by the hour.

Thank you very much, everybody.

2020-03-25 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I want to give everyone an update. This is another day where a lot is going on here in New York City of course, but also in Washington. That will mean a lot for us. I'm going to speak about that in a moment. I want to explain from the beginning how important I think it is to tell you information that I believe is 100 percent accurate, that I believe is crucial for New Yorkers to know, and to tell you information that sometimes will be tough to hear, other times, thank God, will be hopeful and inspiring information that will show just how many people are working hard together to address this crisis, how many people are working together here in the city, but also all the people around the country, and not only rooting for New York City, but are really stepping up to help us out. I'll tell you those stories and those facts and I'll tell you the facts when they're difficult to hear, but important for all New Yorkers to know.

What I'm always going to be careful about is not to tell you something if I am not certain it's accurate information. A lot of times we're going to see really fast changing developments, a lot of times we're going to have information that we do not think is complete because of this ever-changing situation or information that might be inadvertently misleading to New Yorkers instead of giving you the complete picture. My job is to always try and sort that out and do the best I can to level with you about the challenge and what we do about it, but also constantly tell you the good news to, all of the things that are being done to address this challenge.

One thing I believe very, very strongly is to be honest about the timeline here. It's been a lot of discussion in the last few days. You've heard people talk about the hope that we can get back to normal really quickly in this city and in this country. I want to tell you that we should not cling to that false hope. I want to get back to normal as much as anyone. And maybe after a period of time if we saw sustained progress, really, really had evidence of progress, we could have had that conversation. But we're seeing right now unfortunately, a growing challenge, a growing crisis that's clearly going to take us into April in a really tough situation and for everything we know now we're going continue to deal with more and more challenges in April. And I have tried to be honest with everyone to not get into a situation where we let our guard down. We start to have false hopes. I think we're much better off being girded for battle and knowing the truth. So, I believe that April is going to be tougher than March. And I think at this point May could be tougher than April and people need to be ready for that. But the notion that everything might be fine by Easter, I don't know where on earth that idea comes from. Certainly, does not apply to anything we're seeing here in New York City. And again, if that situation ever changes, I will be the first to tell you, I assure you. What we're seeing right now is huge challenges and intense stress in particular on our hospital capacity, on the men and women who do such amazing work in our healthcare system and clearly on the supplies and equipment that we need to make sure that we can keep moving forward.

We did get some good news in the last few days and that is very, very important to say. Supplies have come in from the federal government, from the state government and elsewhere that have certainly improved our situation this week. That'll help us get into next week. That is a Ray of light for sure. But we know we're going to have giant challenges ahead in terms of producing enough hospital space or enough personnel who are trained to help us in this crisis and that ongoing challenge with equipment and supplies. That's what we'll be dealing with for weeks and weeks ahead. The painful obligation I have every time I joined with you to tell you the overall numbers. And I will say every single time, these are human beings, these are families represented in these numbers. These are our neighbors. So, in New York City today, as of the official numbers from this morning, the last official count that we have, 17,856 cases, almost 18,000 at this point. Now at this point, we, our cases in New York city constitute about 54 percent – 54 percent of the total in the State of New York, and about 32 percent, almost a third of the cases in the United States of America. And very, very sadly now the death toll from coronavirus New York city has reached to almost 200.

What do we do? It's what we do every day. We work to make sure that we fight back and we stay ahead of this crisis and that, and we are winning that race against time for as many people as possible. And that starts with ventilators. This is going to be the single most valuable item, the single most valuable piece of equipment in this fight ahead. And we can say compared to last week, we've seen real progress. The 400 that came in yesterday from FEMA, the 2,000 we expect by the end of this week on top of that from the federal government, a big step in the right direction, but only one step more. We must receive and we must receive quickly. And that's what we're working on every single day. The goal for New York city is 15,000 ventilators. So, the numbers that we have from this week gets us about a sixth of the way there, and that is important, but we got a lot more to do and the sooner we get them, the better.

We still need the federal government to maximize the use of the defense production act. There's been some major steps forward in the last a day or two. FEMA has certainly been taking a more aggressive role in using the possibilities of defense production act, but nowhere near where we needed to go. And I’ve got to be clear that this is in everyone's interest everywhere in the United States of America. It's us today. It will be some other part of the country tomorrow. We need this production to be maximized for everyone's good. But on top of that, we have to be honest about the fact that even if the production occurs, the only way it will get to us in time on a sustained basis, is if the United States military gets involved much more deeply. I had a second round of conversations yesterday with the Defense Secretary and the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to constantly update them on what we are facing here, to thank them for the supplies, and the troops that we’re starting to get come in from the United States military to play a crucial role. There is some military presence now in New York City, and that's going to help us a lot. And that's going to give us everything from the extraordinary talent of our men and women in uniform, the supplies, the equipment, and also a real boost to all of our morale to see heroes from all over this country coming here to help New Yorkers, protect New Yorkers, and save New Yorkers.

That's a really positive sign, but we need to go to a much, much higher level and for the good of our nation we need the military to be directly involved in getting supplies all over this country on a really rapid basis, starting with those ventilators. Putting into play their extraordinary medical personnel on much higher level and bringing medical personnel, civilian medical personnel, from all over the country to serve here quickly. And then we will all together turn to support the next part of the country that deals with this challenge after our crisis is over. But I have to be clear, if the military is not mobilized on a higher level, I can't see a scenario where those supplies, that equipment, those personnel get where they need to go here in New York City in time. The only way we have a guarantee is with the active presence of the United States military.

Now, today in Washington, obviously there's been a real movement on the stimulus bill, although we are still waiting to confirm exactly what's going to be happening with it. We have seen a lot of detail come out today. And I have to say that I will talk in a moment about some of the things in the bill that are absolutely crucial for New York City and for the people of New York City and some of the things that went right. But I’ve got to first honestly talk about the thing that didn't go right and what has to be done to fix it. And that has to be addressed really quickly. Look, here's the truth. It was the majority leader of the U S Senate, Mitch McConnell, who stood in the way of real aid to New York City and New York state. That is just a fact. We know from all the negotiations that played out in recent days that all the other parties were willing to do more to support direct aid to New York City, direct aid to New York state, to keep our governments functioning at their current level.

Look, we are every single day doing more and more to address COVID-19. We are doing more and more to help people in need and the need keeps expanding all the time. At the same time, of course, our economy has ended up in a very difficult situation and our resources are plummeting. Our revenues plummeting. The, the money that we use to help people is drying up. So, what the most obvious thing in the world would've been to say, okay, we know, everyone in the country knows New York City is the epicenter of this crisis. Therefore, the state government, the city government in New York need all the help they can get to keep helping everyday people and to keep afloat everything else that we do. We need every other service of government to work, police and fire, and water, and sanitation, all the things we do. And that gets harder and harder if you have less and less money. So, it should have been one of the easiest no-brainers in the world for the U.S. Senate to include real money for New York City and New York state, in this stimulus bill, and yet it didn't happen. And we know why, because Mitch McConnell wouldn't let it happen. I don’t understand how anybody, any public servant could live with themselves if they deprived the cities in the middle of the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, deprived us, deprived our state, of the money we need, giving New York City $1 billion out of $150 billion pool that they provide for the entire Country. But we are one-third of the cases in this country right now, someone do the math down there in Washington, in the Senate, Republican majority, someone do the math. They gave us less than 1 percent of the money that they were giving out to cities and states, and we have a third of the cases in the Nation – that is just immoral.

I'm going to call President Trump. I've spoken to President Trump several times about the stimulus bill, about what it means to New York City. I'm going to call President Trump and appeal to him – to intervene or to either fix this bill as it is or to guarantee that there will be another stimulus bill in the coming weeks that will address this problem immediately. I reached out today to Senator Schumer, I reached out to Speaker Pelosi, spoke with both of them and I want to thank them because we all know they were the lead negotiators in achieving all the good in this legislation. The direct money that will be provided to families in need to working people who have lost their jobs, those extended employment benefits, the grants to small businesses. Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi made a priority of helping the American people and helping the people in New York City who are suffering and only because of their presence do those items end up in the legislation. I say thank you to them, but I know where the roadblock is on the money, we need to keep this City and the State going. I know it's Mitch McConnell and I'm going to appeal to President Trump who's from this city, who understands very personally just what's at stake here. I'm going to appeal to him to step in and fix this situation on behalf of all Americans and to make sure that all New Yorkers are safe.

I'm going to give you some quick updates on some other issues. We have in our regional enrichment centers for the Department of Education, we are providing – education and childcare for the children of our essential workers. And we've said from the beginning that we include those who work in Healthcare, our first responders, transit workers— starting this Friday, we're going to add to that list— workers in a number of other categories and this is something that can be added to at any point. We'll make adjustments to the regional enrichment centers on a regular basis as we experience everything happening in this crisis, and we determined the best way to proceed. So, starting on Friday, the children of grocery workers and pharmacy workers, the essential staff at groceries and pharmacies, their children will also qualify for regional enrichment centers. There are staff members at our Department of Health who were not previously covered they will now be covered. Essential staff from Staten Island Ferry and NYC Ferry will join other transit workers in having the ability to bring their children to those regional enrichment centers. Department of Environmental Protection essential staff, the people who made sure we get water, the people who make sure the sewer systems working among other things their children as well, and essential staff from Department of Probation. So that's an update and all of that will be activated for Friday.

I want also to talk to you about the activities out in our communities to make sure social distancing is being enforced, I want to thank New Yorkers. Overwhelming, I've talked to Police Commissioner constantly gotten statistics from numerous agencies I've gotten counts on how many inspections are done. What came from a number of encounters, thousands and thousands of encounters with every-day New Yorkers, meeting our enforcement agents, and the results are the same every single time. Overwhelmingly, New Yorkers are paying attention to social distancing rules they understand how serious it is, they understand it's about their health and their family's health and our whole City. So, overwhelmingly, we are seeing New Yorkers follow the rules. We do have some issues though, and we're going to be very open and honest about those issues when we have them. And that specific problem we've seen is in some parks, not all, some parks when it comes to basketball courts and every one of us who loves basketball and I'm one of them loves to go out and court and play a pickup game – or play with your family on the court. I want to differentiate in fact what's acceptable and what's not on a basketball court in the age of coronavirus. If you're a kid or adult who just wants to shoot hoops yourself, single, solitary, you can do that. Make sure you're socially distanced from the people around you. If you're a family that people live under the same roof and you want to play with each other on the basketball court, that's fine. But what's not fine anymore is any kind of basketball game between people who do not live under the same roof, because, let's face it, it's a contact sport, people are going to get close together, it creates a danger. It does not mean social distancing, so here's what we're going to do. I've heard back from the Parks Department and the NYPD that they have found 80 locations – 80 courts around the city out of about 1,700 that, after repeated attempts to make sure everyone there understood what social distancing was, they did not get the response they wanted. And so, in those 80 locations, we're going to remove the basketball hoops and make it impossible, sadly, for people to play basketball there. That's what we have to do right now at those 80 locations. The courts will still be there for folks who want to do any other kind of recreation and we'll be enforcing that. But there will not be any basketball games because there will not be any basketball hoops. And as I said, there's about 1,700 locations total so that means about 1,600 more courts that we can leave intact, if people follow the rules. People don't follow the rules, we'll take the hoops down there. And if we have to end up closing off basketball courts across the board, we'll do it, if we have to. I don't want to do it. I want to see if we can get it right. I want to give people maximum options, but you’d got to follow the rules to matter of everyone's safety.

I also want to give you an update this'll be a daily reality until we get to the point that we believe all this work has been done in terms of our jail population. A lot of work is going on right now to ensure that any inmates who should be brought out of our jail system because of health issues or concerns will be any inmates who can be directly acted on by the City of New York and not pose a specific serious threat to community. But we want to make sure that those who can be released are, there will be some, as I said yesterday who will not be released because they do pose a threat or because for example, they've committed an offense related to domestic violence or sexual offenses and we're going to have to work with other agencies, district attorneys and the State to determine what would happen with a number of other inmates.

But as for the total today, by tonight 200 inmates will have been released, there will be more releases tomorrow— and we will give you that update as it occurs. By way of closing, I’ll say a special thank you to folks who have been out there educating their fellow New Yorkers working with them. I gave you the example of one of the few things we've had a problem with those very specific basketball courts, but as you saw, that's not many out of the grand total in this City. But overwhelmingly what I've heard back from the Parks Department and NYPD is again, that cooperation from New Yorkers. I want to thank all of our park’s workers and a special thank you to our park's enforcement patrol workers for all you do every day, but especially during this crisis. Thank you for educating people about social distancing. Thank you for enforcing a special thank you to all of the men and women at the NYPD who have become really experts in describing social distancing and enforcing it over the last few days and they've been doing a fantastic job. So, thank you to all the men and women at the NYPD, and to all the six other agencies that are out there doing this work. This, again, is how we keep our parks and playgrounds going. And thank you, it's making a big, big difference.

And look, I will conclude before I say a few words in Spanish and then we'll open up to questions. I'll conclude by saying just a point to everyone about this new reality we are living in – it is very easy to feel alone in a situation like this. But you really – even if you feel it, even if you feel the confusion and the uncertainty, I guarantee you you're not alone. First of all, there are millions of us all feeling a lot of the same things. Second of all, there are literally hundreds of thousands of good people working every single day to protect you. Whether it's our first responders, our health care workers, our transit workers, and all those other essential workers, folks at the grocery stores and the pharmacies I mentioned earlier – so many people who are making it their business to get out there and help you live your life and protect you and your family. So, you may feel alone sometimes, but I guarantee you you're not. There are a lot of heroes out there who are going to help us save lives, and that's what we do here in New York City, that's a New York City tradition. Even in the toughest times, New Yorkers step up – in fact, a lot of people would say it's in crisis, in a moment like this. And New Yorkers are not at their very best and no one wishes for a time like this, but we've seen time and time again just how good New Yorkers can be even when our backs are against the wall. So, I just want to reassure everyone, you are definitely not alone and we will all get through this together.

Let me just say a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I would be happy now to turn to Olivia, and we will take questions from the media. Go ahead, Olivia.

Moderator: Quick programming note at the top – to ensure that we get to as many outlets as possible, we're going to limit it to one question per reporter and we'll come back around if we have time. So, with that, we're going to start with Kathleen from Patch. Kathleen, can you hear us?

Mayor: That’s not working so far. Kathleen, last call. All right, we'll come back.

Moderator: Next up is Reema, from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Okay, great. Hi to everyone there. So, I have a question just about the Regional Enrichment Centers. Do you know what the total capacity is of the centers in terms of how many children came to go there? And then do you know what the latest attendance numbers were?

Mayor: I want to – I'm not sure if the Chancellor is on the line.

Moderator: He is on line.

Mayor: Chancellor, can you answer those questions? Chancellor, can you hear us?
Go ahead. Chancellor, did you hear those questions?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Can you repeat those questions, Reema, please?

Question: Yeah. Hi, Mr. Chancellor. So, I'm wondering what the total capacity in terms of how many kids total capacity is for the RECs and then do you know about the latest attendance members were to update us?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so we have a capacity of about 8,000 students at the moment. Today's attendance, we're still compiling that information, but I can see that a little less [inaudible] –

Moderator: Reema, I think you are typing.

Mayor: Yeah, Chancellor, you know, are you in a place where you can – we're getting a lot of background noise there.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, it's not me.

Mayor: Okay. There you go. Go ahead.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so we're seeing that the uptake hasn't been as robust as we anticipated, and that's why the Mayor announced today that we're opening up capacity for additional people in those Regional Enrichment Centers. We have 32 sites in Brooklyn, 22 in Bronx, 20 in Queens, 15 in Manhattan and four in Staten Island and we're fully staffed and we have a we have about 5,000 volunteers that are staffing those centers. So, we're confident that we're going to be able to meet the need of whoever needs those, those centers. We have approximately 40,000 student capacity in those centers. So, we're going to keep ramping up and going to different tiers of first responders and your emergency workers, until we get to that 40,000 a student capacity number.

Mayor: Let me, let me add to Reema, that we understand this is an ever-evolving situation. So, what the Chancellor's told you is, you know, we're ready to go to a number like that. We're also ready if we don't find that demand at any given point, we can adjust for that as well. The thing, the important thing is to understand because it's about essential workers, that's really the crucial crux of this matter is making sure we are supporting those essential workers and giving them the option in terms of our kids. If they want to take advantage of it and we find a lot of pickup on it, we're going to be able to have the capacity we have now. We could even build it out more. If we find that there is not as much use of it, we'll of course be able to compress it if we need to. But important point is we will grow in whatever direction according to the level of need to make sure those essential workers can get to work and be really comfortable about where their kids are and what they're doing.

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor, if I can add one more caveat, late breaking information. So, today's enrollment was about 8,000 students. Okay. So, we have some capacity.

Mayor: Thank you, Chancellor.

Moderator: Back to Kathleen from Patch. Kathleen? Kathleen? Kathleen – okay, we'll come back to her. Next up is Julia, from the Post.

Mayor: Julia, can you hear us okay?

Question: I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, there you go.

Question: Okay. So, on the open streets, again, I believe that is supposed to be rolled out tomorrow, do you have any details for us?

Mayor: Yeah, we are finalizing with NYPD and other city agencies and the Council. As we said, it'll be up to two sites per borough. Key point is to make sure that we are confident about the enforcement levels. We are going to announce those sites, I think by the end of the evening. We're going to need one extra day to get them up and running because of some of the practical considerations. So, those will be open on Friday.

Moderator: Thanks, Julia.

Question: [Inaudible]

Moderator: Julia, can you repeat your question? We couldn't hear you.

Question: Yeah, sorry, Mr. Mayor, could you say what the enforcement will look like and can you tease expectations?

Mayor: Yeah, the enforcement is going to be similar to what we're doing with parks now. We have to make sure if we leave any official space for people to gather and we don't put enforcement with it, my fear has always been, it becomes like a new magnet for people to return to the way we all lived for all our lives until a week ago. And people started gathering and getting too close together. So, especially with a new site, which might attract a lot of interests, we want to make sure, whether it's NYPD, Parks, whatever way we configure it that there will be enforcement at the locations. And that we know all the other places that have to be enforced are covered as well. So that's what we're refining. Again, we'll have those sites shortly.

Moderator: Yoav is up next. Yoav?

Question: Yeah. Hi, Mr. Mayor. There was apparently there's a FEMA leadership briefing document, the Times obtained it, and it says that the City's more than 1,800 intensive care units are expected to be full by Friday. Just wondering if you can confirm that that's is that the right figure for the number of ICU, is that prognosis correct? And also, as far as the 400 ventilators, how quickly do those get mobilized? The ones we got up in the hands of, are they all entirely in the hands of hospitals?

Mayor: Yeah, that was – as you can imagine, Yoav, the days are – I can't really remember sometimes when one day ended and the next day began. But yesterday was – when I was at the warehouse in Brooklyn and they all went out yesterday – 100 to Health + Hospitals facilities from that 400; 100 to Health + Hospitals facilities; 300 to all different types of voluntary hospitals, wherever the need was greatest. To your question about overall capacity, again, I'm going to be very, very clear that I am not going to get into details that are ever-changing. So, ICU’s are not a fixed asset anymore. They used to be in the world we knew a few weeks ago and are not anymore. And Dr Katz is the person who most educated me on this point. He is going to be turning vast amounts of his buildings into ICU’s He conceivably could have a hospital that's all ICU. So, there's a very fast evolving situation now, where we're going to make more and more and more beds that used to not be ICU beds into ICU beds. So, the notion of a fixed number is a thing of the past. It's going to be very dynamic of what we do know is if we've got the space the equipment, the supplies, the staff, we can create an ICU bed in any hospital facility and even outside of them as we go along. So, that's what we'll be doing. The ground rule I'll give you, and I'll be very clear about it, is I'll tell you every single day if we have what it takes to get through that day, that week and wherever we're looking for the week ahead. Right now, across our hospitals in New York City, we did get some good resupply both in terms of equipment and other supplies. We do have a huge number of professionals who are showing up doing what we need them to do and others who are joining. And we have the beds we need. That is the case today. That's the projection for this week into next week. But we remain concerned as we start April about capacity and we'll keep updating you on that as we go along.

Moderator: Alex, from The Daily Beast is up next. Alex.

Question: Hi. I have a question about Rikers Island. And thank you for taking my question. Legal Aid just sent out a press release saying that Rikers Island now has seven times the rate of the infection as the rest of the city. And I'm wondering if you guys have a plan on how you're going to deal with that. Are we going to open hospitals on Rikers? Is there going to be a separate place for, I mean, isolating prisoners? What, what is the plan going forward at this point?

Mayor: I'll start and then D Katz will – obviously, H + H runs Correctional health, so he'll speak to it. Okay. So, we start with the reality that there's about 6,000 fewer inmates in our Corrections system overall than six years ago and obviously, that means, especially on Rikers. So, we have more space we're dealing with, more ability to isolate, more ability to provide healthcare to what is a much smaller number of inmates. We also, as I said, by the end of today, we'll have 200 inmates who will have left because of the decisions we made directly related to this crisis. That number will keep growing as we go ahead and we're going to determine when that number stops, but it will keep growing in the short term with a particular focus on inmates who are really older, particularly over 70, and inmates who have preexisting conditions. There's a lot of work to do very quickly to get inmates out who would be appropriate to get out. We have to work in many cases with the state and or the DA’s. But that is happening now rapidly. So, you'll see, I think substantial numbers over the next few days. Every time we get a single inmate out, it creates that much more space. And that many obviously each time there's one less inmate, it makes it easier on the medical personnel. So as to your core question about how health care is being provided by the correctional health folks, Dr. Katz –

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, NYC Health + Hospitals: Anytime someone is symptomatic in the jail, we isolate them, as the Mayor has explained, because the population at Rikers is dramatically down. We have more space and we're opening up more wards. If somebody is seriously symptomatic, we move them to Bellevue Hospital. That's a much better facility for taking care of someone who is very ill, then trying to create a Hospital on Rikers.

Moderator: Next step is Mark from CNN. Mark?

Question: Hey guys, how you doing today?

Mayor: Good Mark.

Question: I wanted to ask about the morgue situation right now in the city. From what I understand from that [inaudible] the briefing that you all were referencing like choosing hospitals who already reached capacity and that the rest of the city hospitals maybe at capacity by weeks end. I want you to talk a little bit about [inaudible] mobile morgue that's in front of Bellevue now and what that plan is for relieving that, and then where exactly does it stand right now? Are there enough morgues for the city hospitals? Is that going to be full by Friday [inaudible]?

Mayor: Yeah, I'm not going to get into a lot of detail. We'll make sure our team gives you a lot of specifics. But let me say, I understand there's all sorts of documents that are being put out there. Some of them accurate, some of them inaccurate, some of them new, some of them old. I would just want folks, when you ask the question, just realize I'm going to be listening very carefully for whether it's something that has been confirmed as fact or is not fact. So the facts as I have heard them from folks in my administration are that we have capacity right now. We have capacity for the foreseeable future. We've been working with FEMA to ensure that we have additional capacity and we can handle what we have. As this crisis deepens, we'll keep updating you on the status of things, but right now we have the capacity, and in terms of any of the details, I'll have my team follow up with you.

Moderator: Josh from ABC-7, Josh?

Question: Hi there Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Josh.

Question: I wonder – you walk around the city now that almost serenity. It’s empty everybody’s inside, there's no traffic, if it was over 40 degrees warmer, it would feel like a summer weekend, but obviously we know what's really going on, But we don't have a picture of what's happening in the hospitals. And I wondered if maybe Dr. Katz or Dr. Barbot or somebody could sort of paint the picture of what it's like right now at Elmhurst or Kings County or even Columbia Presbyterian that, you know, how desperate is the situation right now? What does it feel like to walk in there and what are, you know, what [inaudible]?

Mayor: I'll turn to Dr. Katz and Dr. Barbot, but let me just give you the layman's answer first. I think it varies obviously by hospital, but I think what we can say right now is, again, every hospital has the personnel, the equipment, the supplies and the beds, but we know in a week or two it's going to be a much tougher situation. And I do think we see some real variation in terms of some hospitals having a lot activity, others less, I think over time that will even out a lot more. But I think it’s be a different experience depending on where you go. Go ahead, doctor.

President Katz: I think Mr. Mayor you've done a good job of expressing that there are hospitals like Elmhurst that have been very heavily impacted. There are other hospitals in our public system such as Coney Island that haven't had very many patients with COVID. But today we were able to transfer 30 patients, including 28 to them to help relieve our hospital at Elmhurst. I think the hardest struggles right now are psychological. This is a very difficult disease despite providing the very best of care, those people who are elderly and to have comorbid conditions especially are very much hurt by this illness. It is an illness right now with a major role of the hospital is to provide supportive care as doctors and nurses. We like it best when we can provide a medication that is known to be effective. In this case, we're using experimental treatments where they're available, but primarily we are supporting people until their immune system comes back. So you would see if you walked into Elmhurst, you would see a lot of heroic doctors and nurses who were working very long hours under challenging conditions. They are unfortunately seeing some of their patients die, which is always extremely difficult for doctors and nurses. We seek not only to provide all of the care, but we hope that it works and it's very difficult for us when it doesn't.

Moderator: Jennifer, from the AP is up next. Jennifer.

Question: Thank you. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Thank you. Following on that, actually, I wanted to ask what information the city has about the number of health care workers who are themselves testing positive and what impact that's having on the hospitals?

Mayor: I'll start again, Dr. Katz or Dr. Barbot jump in. Clear look – everyone, everyone's being affected. And you know, I said in my message this morning that we should anticipate that half of all of us or more could be infected. Although again, thank God, most New Yorkers who are infected with this disease will have a very limited, mild experience, and be able to get back to work in seven to 10 days. So it's a real issue for all parts of the city, for all of us, but especially as we think about how much we're depending on our health care workers and our other essential workers, we're going to have at any given point in time a number of them, you know, having to go home, having to take care of themselves, but in the vast majority of cases, they will come back quickly and get right back into action. But we are seeing it happen across every part of the city, including the health care sector. Do you want to add?

President Katz: Yes, absolutely. They’re have been health care workers who have - who are infected with COVID-19, just as you would expect, given how many people are infected already in New York City. The vast majority are doing well, but there have been people who have required hospitalization. I don't think anybody has an exact number. But we wish them all as we do with all patients who are sick a speedy recovery.

Moderator: Katie Honan is up next. Katie.

Question: Hey, Mayor de Blasio, I wanted to get your reaction to statements saying that everyone has visited New York City should self-quarantine?

Mayor: I'm sorry. You're saying that from the federal government?

Question: Yes, that people who visited New York City should self-quarantine, I just wanted to get your reaction on that and the city's taken any quarantine measures for visitors?

Mayor: Yeah, look, I think what I heard was – I'm always going to respect our federal authorities, but I think there's a little bit of a lack of recognition right now of just how much this disease has already spread around the country. So, you're talking about New Yorkers going elsewhere, I think we know where the disease that's in all 50 states and pretty much all over the world, I don't love the notion of the suggestion that, you know, there's any more likelihood of coming from one place or another. It's obviously everywhere already and will continue to spread. People need to be smart individually. Anyone who's symptomatic needs to isolate themselves and follow the rules we've been over so many times and you know, reach out only after a period of time to a doctor if they haven't gotten better.

So I would say that Katie, I think we're seeing a weird kind of – you know, if I was using the psychological term, sort of approach avoidance, to the topic of coronavirus from different officials around the country, where on the one hand, people seem to in one moment talk about the seriousness of the threat and in another moment sort of say, oh, it'll be over soon. It's not going to be over soon. For us it's going to be several tough months ahead and then for a lot of other places in the country, they're going to go through their round. So, I think the notion of a travel being particularly relevant at this point is it seems to be pretty limited. That's my nonmedical opinion. But I'm happy if either doctor wants to jump in.

President Katz: I think you did it well.

Mayor: Alright, I’m learning –

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Mr. Mayor, you got it just right.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you, doctor.

Moderator: Bobby Cuza is up next, Bobby?

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, I wanted to follow up on the morgue issue. I know you said you can't confirm details, but there is a tent that's gone up on the East Side and the Medical Examiner's Office told us they have bought 45 tenths and trailers to expand the capacity of the city morgue. I guess I wonder what, what's the message for New Yorkers who see that, who see this tent and it's obviously alarming, but you know, in the vein of what you said earlier about telling people the truth, should New Yorkers be bracing for the possibility that the death toll is going to go up dramatically from what we've seen so far?

Mayor: Yes, of course. Bobby. I mean, there's not – you know, I don't think any of us and I think I can speak for Dr. Katz and Dr. Barbot, I don't think any of us have tried to sugar coat this. It's going to be really tough. I know the more I was pushed a really strong emotional button, obviously we're all humans, it's a very troubling thing to see, and it makes it kind of very immediate, very visceral. But let's be honest, we've been talking now for weeks and weeks about this disease coming on and we watched it move all over the world and we've seen the horrible things that happened in China and Italy, so many places. I think most people are really quite aware.

I think the news media understandably is trying to tap into the human reality, the emotional reality. I think that's what you guys do and that's very important. But I would tell you, having talked to somebody in New Yorkers, I think people are there and then some already. They know how bad this is. And I've been trying to be real straight forward. I think the Governor has been very straight forward as well and I commend him. We've been clear, it's going to get a lot worse. So clearly, you know, what we're trying to do now is save the people that don't need to die. And that's where our constant pleas, particularly to the federal government, for more supplies, more equipment, to help us get personnel, you know, all the efforts are being made to create more beds, that's to make sure that no one dies who could have been saved. But we've been real honest that unfortunately we're going to lose a number of people as this continues to grow. So no one's trying to, Bobby, no one is trying to downplay. It's going to be very, very painful. But let's acknowledge it's here. It's our reality. Now let's fight back. Let's do everything we can to fight back and we can't do it alone. We need help from Washington in particular. If we get that help, we're going to be able to save a lot of lives.

Moderator: Matt Chayes is up next. Matt?

Question: Hey there, Mr. Mayor. Last night you said you'd consider closing playgrounds by Saturday night. You guys found insufficient social distancing compliance. You also consider doing that for the city parks if there's similar insufficient compliance? And are there more or fewer unchanged numbers of people reaching out to Thrive during this time?

Mayor: I don't have the thrives statistics, but I will say I think anyone, I know the Governor made an announcement today, which I thought was very good for folks all over the state who are feeling anxiety, who are fearful, who need someone professional in mental health to talk to. I was very happy to see that. And certainly, with Thrive, a reminder to all of New Yorkers you can call 8-8-8-NYCWELL, a 24/7, trained counselors, multiple languages, there's nothing wrong with feeling afraid or anxious at this moment. If you need some help, pick up that phone and they can also help you get ongoing mental health support if you need it. But, so that's that part of the question to the part of the question and I don't – again, we'll get you the follow-up on the numbers, Matt, I don't have them at my fingertips.

On the question of the parks now, I really want – glad you asked it, I want to differentiate strongly the parks and the playgrounds. The area that we're all concerned about to make sure that there's real clear adherence to the rules or else by the end of Saturday we might get to a shutdown, is the playgrounds themselves. The parks obviously are – in many of them huge. They're absolutely necessary in a situation like this. Parks will remain open, but with a lot of enforcement under any scenario. So, there's a real differentiation there. And again, we'll make that decision on the playgrounds at the end of Saturday after we've seen how it's gone up to them.

Moderator: Amanda, from Bloomberg is up next. Amanda?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: I'm wondering – we had a story today about emergent emergency medical services, you know, seeing the most calls since September 11th. Are you worried about, you know, whether those services are staffed enough? Or, is there any kind of change to the resources that, you know, emergency medical services have at this time?

Mayor: It's a great question, Amanda. I mean, until very recently – I checked with Commissioner Nigro only days ago – we were actually fairly steady, fairly normal. We also had that reality with emergency rooms around the city, by and large. So, we've really seen some movement in recent days and, obviously, we're additionally concerned because a number of workers are out sick. I've said to Commissioner Nigro, whatever we have to do to make sure he has what he needs we'll do. Like the Police Department, the Fire Department has a very deep bench and they're really good at knowing how to move folks around to compensate for different situations. So, I'm confident about that. At this point, we'll continue to back that up. But, you know, this is the kind of thing we'll be dealing with intensely for the next weeks that we are going to need to make sure those services keep going. And this is why, again, it comes back to that discussion earlier about Washington. I'm going to be very blunt with everyone in Washington, starting with President Trump, that when we are in a situation where we don't have the money to pay for the most vital services, this is where you get to a very dangerous place. And I know the State's in the same boat. We need the resources to not only keep our fire department doing what it does every day, but you know, fire, EMS, doing what they would have to do on a higher level in this crisis. And we are the epicenter for the nation, so this is exactly an example – it's not just all the huge expenditures being put out to protect people's health with Department of Health, with Health + Hospitals, but also the additional strains on police, on fire, on a lot of other agencies, and that's why we need that direct support from Washington and we need it immediately.

Moderator: Erin Durkin is up next. Erin?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I heard you say that you're expecting that 50 percent of New Yorkers will be infected with coronavirus. Can you just talk a little bit about what that is? What's the basis for that prediction? And relatedly, since most people are not being tested, I think – I assume the number of confirmed cases doesn't reflect a full spread currently. Do you have any just order of magnitude sense of what the true current prevalence might be?

Mayor: I'll start on both those and then if Dr. Barbot wants to jump in, she will. Erin, I don't think there's anyone that knows the answer accurately to your second question. Perfectly fair question – I think we – my layman's way of saying it is, there's a lot more people out there who have had coronavirus already and gone through the whole course of it and people out there right now who have it. There's a lot more of them than we know and there's a lot, obviously, who have never been tested. We don't even know truly when it first asserted here in the city, that could have been people who had it before we even knew it was here. So, what we do know based on a lot of different projections – and we don't have a perfect single projection, but sort of compositing a lot of projections is, it's a fair bet to say that half of all New Yorkers, and maybe more than half, will end up contracting this disease. And that's worrisome, very deeply worrisome for all of us. But you know, we have to start with the truth and recognizing that for 80 percent of those who do it will be a very limited experience. So, you know, I don't – I can't tell you it’s going to be 50-50, but I think as much as we're dealing with a lot of painful reality, a lot of fear, one way to think of this that is a little more hopeful is, you know, a certain number of people will not, and that may be 50 percent, or 45 percent, or 40 percent – whatever it is, a certain number of New Yorkers will not contract this disease this season. And of the ones who do, 80 percent will have very limited experience. But for that other 20 percent, we have a lot of work to do to protect them. Most of them, of course, the vast majority of even them will come through okay. But we have to make sure of that by really having all the health care they need available. So, the answer is, it is a composite of a lot of different projections. But I think we see consistently that 50 percent-plus is the right way to think about it. Dr. Barbot, do you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, Mr. Mayor, I think you got it right. The only thing I would add is that, right now, you know, I think it's safe to say that there are tens of thousands of New Yorkers that are somewhere along the spectrum of having COVID-19 or having been exposed to COVID-19, and that's why it's so important for people to stay home. You know, we've been saying all along that person to person transmission is widespread in the community and 80 percent of the folks will have mild illness. And I think also just to reemphasize what the Mayor said in terms of, you know, we think 50 percent will – by the end of this epidemic, this pandemic – so, by the time September rolls around, likely 50 percent, but it could also be much higher. And so, that's why we've been so focused on slowing the spread of this pandemic, because we don't want all of those people to be seeking health care at the same time. The measures that we're putting into place in terms of closing schools, in terms of telling New Yorkers to stay home is our best chance at slowing that spread and then spreading those individuals who may need to seek health care in a hospital – spread it out over time so that we maintain the capacity to treat everyone who needs treatment.

Moderator: Last two. Ashley, from the Times. Ashley, can you hear us?

Question: Yes, I can. Thank you. My question for the Police Commissioner.

Mayor: I don’t think we have the Police Commissioner, Ashley. Let's make sure on our team that we put up every time who is actually available so reporters can see that –

Moderator: They can see it on the app right now.

Mayor: Where is the app? Let’s advertise how reporters [inaudible] make sure we’re clear –

Moderator: Yes.

Question: Yeah, it’s fine. You know, I’m on audio only [inaudible]. But maybe you know the answer to this question, Mr. Mayor. The NYPD sick rate is approaching 10 percent and the Police Commissioner in the past has talked about going to 12-hour shifts and doing reassignments of administrative officers to patrol jobs. I wonder if you can – what the most recent numbers tell us, you know, at what point [inaudible] does NYPD go through those contingency options and what happens if they exhaust them? For instance, they call in the National Guard?

Mayor: Yeah. Ashley, appreciate the question, but I'd say, first of all, we're not to that point with even the 12-hour shifts and all yet. At any point we might get there and we'll obviously announce it when and if we do. Last conversation I had with the Commissioner, he was confident that, you know, we're sort of in plan-A now and plan-B was very, very straight forward about how to utilize people differently and we’ve got a lot of people to work with. Again, we also have to remember that, for the vast majority of folks who get sick, after seven to 10 days, they'll be back. And I would further remind you, there's no one taking vacations now. So, there will not be people taking vacations anytime soon for any of us until this battle's over. So, we're going to have a lot of areas where we lose different public servants for a period of time, but we also are not seeing people take their normal time off like they would in peacetime and we'll make all the pieces fit. In terms of needing any outside help, we are nowhere near that this point. If we ever get to that point, we'll talk about it, but we're nowhere near that.

Moderator: Last call is Kathleen from Patch. One more time – Kathleen, can you hear us?

Question: Can you hear me this time?

Mayor: There you go. Third time's the charm, Kathleen.

Question: Thank you for your patience, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to check in with you about a potential rent freeze. I know that you said last week it was something you would potentially support and April 1st is fast approaching. What's your update for the renters out there who have concerns?

Mayor: Thank you for the question, Kathleen. There's obviously the process that our Rent Guidelines Board goes through – and we'll have more to say on that soon for sure – but there's also a question of beyond the Rent Guidelines Board, how we should handle folks who are not covered by rent stabilization. Look, I think at this point – I mean, we know for all intents and purposes, evictions are not happening and that is absolutely the right thing in the middle of a crisis like this. To the question of whether we could do something deeper like a rent moratorium, this is an idea that I think has a lot of value to it. I'm going to be looking to see if something like that is possible. Even though I'm heartened by what I see in the stimulus bill in terms of money back in people's pockets, again, I want to get all those details and I want to see how long it's going to last, and I want to see how long this crisis is going to last. I mean, that will certainly help, but we need to understand if it's enough for people to actually make ends-meet and be able to afford food, be able to afford the rent, be able to afford a medicine, and, if not, we need to look at all, you know, any and all possibilities. So, all that's being discussed and we will have updates on that very soon for sure.

And let me say thank you again to my colleagues in government who are part of the call. Thank you. To all the members of the media who have participated. Just one more thing at the end here. We started something today in addition to press conferences and individual interviews I give to the media. Every day I will do a daily message from the Mayor. It's going to be a very brief but, I hope, a helpful message, giving people a little bit of grounding as we start the day as to where we stand, what we're dealing with, and some very important reminders about how to think about this situation, but also answers to questions that every-day New Yorkers are asking me and all of us in government. So, I'll make that a daily feature. I'll give some opening statement, but then I'll quickly go to talking about questions I've received and giving you answers that I hope will be very helpful to you in your every-day life. Anyone who has a question for me, you can go to #AskMyMayor – again, #AskMyMayor – and raise whatever question it is. It could be something about, you know, very specific to your neighborhood or your life. It could be something that we're all dealing with. But send in your questions, I'll try and answer as many as I can and will make sure that we're constantly updating people on things that they care about. You can get that message from the Mayor every day at 9:00 am. It'll go up and you can find it on my Twitter feed – and that's @NYCMayor. You can find that at Facebook, which is NYCMayor. And on Instagram – @MayorBilldeBlasio. And I will constantly endeavor to give you information in a brief, straight forward manner that will really, hopefully help you get through this crisis.

And I'll conclude by saying, the one thing I know in my heart – and I know for sure, and it is a fact – we will get through this crisis. And it will not be easy, but we will all get through together.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-03-26 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Everybody, I want to give you a couple of updates on things are happening around the city and how we're addressing this crisis. Every day I think we're learning about the sheer challenge we're facing and all the forms it takes and every single day we're making changes. We're adding new approaches, new strategies. We're getting help from the state, from the federal government, from all over. Things are changing day by day, hour by hour. We find new challenges, we find those solutions, and, of course, we find the extraordinary efforts of New Yorkers to address this crisis. There is a lot more to do. Especially in terms of our federal government, a lot more to do. But I can at least say that we see on many, many fronts, help coming in. And I'll talk about, of course what happened in Washington yesterday with the stimulus bill. Many forms that help but also immense challenges that we're facing.

There's just nothing we've been through that could possibly compare to what we're experiencing now and where we’re going and it will be a long, tough fight. And I'm going to keep saying that because I know there are a lot of voices out there trying to act like we can turn the page soon, and I just don't believe that's true, and I don't think it's helpful for people to be given false hope. I want to give people real hope. Real hope comes from the extraordinary commitment and hard work of our health care workers and our first responders and all the people that are protecting us right now. Real hope comes from the resiliency in New Yorkers. Real hope comes from real support. Every time a ventilator arrives, every time we get more supplies we need, every time the military comes to help us, those are the causes for me for real hope. But it's going to be a long, tough fight and we're going to be stronger if we understand that, than if we try and wish away something that in fact, we're not able to change entirely right now.

Let me talk about the overall situation, and it continues to be numbers I can barely even comprehend. I know a lot of you feel the same and they all represent real human beings, real families. Total cases as of this morning in New York City, 21,873. A number that would have been unimaginable just a couple of weeks ago. Deaths in New York City, we've now lost 281 of our fellow New Yorkers to this disease. So, we got a tough time ahead, and that's obviously particularly true in our health care system. I want to take a moment to talk to all those who are doing extraordinarily valiant work right now all over New York City. Doctors, nurses, all health care workers, everyone who works in a hospital, whatever your job is, every single one of you are doing something heroic and really difficult and absolutely necessary to save the lives of your fellow New Yorkers.

There's a phrase we use. We say people have gone above and beyond the call. Well, all of you are doing that now in a way that we're going to remember. We're not just going to remember it next week, or next month, or next year. We're going to remember it for the rest of the history of New York City, oh and forward. It'll be part of a chapter in this city's history that will be unforgettable. That all of you stood up, all of you showed up, all of you gave your all, under very, very trying circumstances, because none of us have experienced anything like this, and it came out of nowhere. So, I want to say on behalf of all 8.6 million New Yorkers, a thank you to all our health care workers, and not only our gratitude, not only our words, but our deeds. That's what we should show our thanks through.

You deserve, and you must have, and you will have, the supplies you need. One way or another, we're going to get them to you every day. It will not be easy and we absolutely must get federal help if we're going to be able to sustain this. But my commitment is, if it is available anywhere in the United States of America, and we can get our hands on it, those supplies we'll get to you immediately to protect you, to allow you to do the lifesaving work you're doing. This is going to be a day to day, hour to hour reality. I keep saying, I know this week that we have the supplies in this city we need. I hope we can get through next week, but that is literally as far over the horizon as I can see right now in any way that I can feel comfortable about, because I need to know we're going to have what we need for our health care workers and our people.

But any health care worker who's out there who feels afraid or worried, we all stand with you, we understand why you might feel that. Anyone who feels resolute about serving their patients but is worried about supplies, I understand that, and I want to make sure you don't have to worry. That you can see the supplies coming and know there'll be there. It's understandable that health care institutions, hospitals, clinics are trying to be careful about their use of supply. They're trying to make sure that we'll always have it going forward. But we also have to make really clear to our health care workers that any supplies we get from Washington, from Albany, from the private sector, are immediately being turned around to our hospitals and our health care facilities, and I want people to see more and more evidence of that. We're going to show it very publicly. And to all of you who are experiencing challenges, we need to hear from you. We need to understand what you need, so we can get the job done for you, and thank you for all you are doing.

Now, I've said throughout this crisis, there's a lot of that we're facing, but we also have some extraordinary advantages and one of them is that we have the best public health system in the nation. We have the largest, we have the best by far. Health + Hospitals is an amazing organization that's only gotten stronger in recent years, but now it's under a tremendous amount of stress. And obviously Elmhurst hospital in Queens is right now the epicenter within the epicenter, dealing with an extraordinary surge of cases. It also happens to be an extraordinary hospital. It's renowned within our public health care system as one of the very best hospitals we have, with an incredibly committed staff who have been able to deal with so many challenges before with great skill, great compassion, great ability, and that's what they're doing right now.

The folks at Elmhurst Hospital, the folks doing this noble work, need supplies, and I'm committed to getting you supplies. In fact, in the last 10 days, we have four times resupplied Elmhurst Hospital with additional ventilators, and we will keep doing that until we're at the point that Elmhurst absolutely always has more than enough ventilators. Today we sent over 40 additional ventilators that have arrived at Elmhurst. This'll be an ongoing commitment to make sure that that hospital and all our public hospitals have whatever they need at any given point in time. If we have it, it will get to you. We also sent today to Elmhurst hospital, 56 additional staff members to deal with the challenges that they're facing, and again, we will keep adding as needed. We have to make sure that they really, really hardworking doctors, nurses, all the health care workers who have dealt with the sudden surge. We need to give them a break as quickly as possible. We need to bring additional folks in to give them, to spell them, to give them a chance to catch up, catch their breath, get a little downtime, so they'll be able to continue on going forward. So, it's crucial that we get more and more support into Elmhurst and we will do that.

So, in terms of our entire health care system, public and voluntary nonprofit, the whole picture. Look, before the coronavirus came to New York City, we basically had 20,000 hospital beds with everything that was needed. All the staffing, the equipment, everything that you would need to fully attend to a patient in a hospital bed. That number about 20,000. Once upon a time, and once upon a time was only weeks ago, that was a really big number and that was certainly sufficient to handle demand every day in New York City. In fact, there are people who used to talk about there were too many hospital beds in New York City. Well that 20,000 number, that once seemed so impressive, now it's only a part of what we need to deal with the coronavirus. Our goal is to triple the number of hospital beds in the city by May. Now, that's an extraordinarily difficult goal, and I am not going to look you in the eye and tell you, I can guarantee you we will get there, because we have so many challenges. The bed, again is only one part of the challenge. Location is only one part of the challenge. We need the equipment, we need the supplies, and we need the highly trained personnel. All of that we're working on simultaneously. And this is where the federal government, again could be absolutely crucial and I've been very clear about what could be done on the federal level that could affect that entire equation in our favor, particularly when it comes to things like personnel. The reality is we have a very, very difficult goal to reach, but it is our goal and we will every single day work to achieve it. The surge plans that the state put forward asking every hospital in the city to increase capacity. I think it was a very good strategy. We'll add at least 7,000 beds quickly. And that's a crucial part of what we need to do.

We've obviously – in addition to what can be done in hospitals, it is crucial to find new locations either facilities that are health care-related where we can put in more beds or facilities that weren't health care at all, but where we can now create a crucial new capacity. So, those new locations in places like Coler Hospital, part of Health + Hospital system, Javits Center, obviously a convention center had nothing to do with health care, now it does. And the Federal Government, FEMA, State of New York are playing a leading role there to get that up and running— with the surges in the hospital with the additional beds outside the hospitals. That gets us to almost 34,000 beds compared to the 20,000 we had just weeks ago. That is a very, very important start in addressing this crisis. But as I said, my goal was to get us to not just 34,000, but then the 40,000 to 50,000, ultimately to 60,000 if we can get there. And if this crisis continues to build the weight, we think it will, I would love nothing more and I know you would love nothing more than to find out in fact we got some relief from this crisis and the numbers got better and the human misery got reduced and there were fewer and fewer cases. That day comes, maybe won't need 60,000 hospitals, but I cannot depend on maybe I have to prepare this city for the toughest scenario and that's what we're doing right now.

On supplies, look, there's nothing more important than ventilators – we’ve all talked about this, I really didn't know a lot about ventilators a month ago. Now, I know something, at least I've realized that a ventilator, it's, you know, we could put one right here on this desk. It goes in a packet that's about the size of a suitcase, but it is a lifesaver, as simple as that. If you have a ventilator, you can save a life. You can keep someone going, get them through this crisis so they can recover. You don't have a ventilator people die who didn't need to die it's as simple as that. This is one of the most important pieces in this whole puzzle, getting enough ventilators, getting them quick. 500 have come in through our efforts working with the White House, working directly with the administration to get immediate direct supplies to New York City and that's been very helpful this week. In addition, 2,000 more from FEMA – about half of them are here in New York City now over a thousand already here, the remainder coming in the next couple of days. So, when you combine all that 2,500 more ventilators that will have a few days from now, we'll have about 2,500 more ventilators than we had say 10 days ago. That's hugely important, that's only about a sixth of what we are going to need to get through this entire crisis. We predicted this moment, we need 15,000 ventilators and we are pushing every possible button. We're looking under every stone we're calling all over the country to find every ventilator we can get and soon we'll be talking about the efforts to create them right here in New York City as well. But my deep concern remains that the Federal Government is not using it to its full disposal of the Defense Production Act.

That's the game changer, that's where we could get a lot more ventilators built around this country, manufactured and shipped to New York City in time. While this crisis is raging and every ventilator comes here when we don't need it of course when the crisis is over, we're going to help make sure it gets to other parts of the country that need it. But we've got to get to that number and we got to get to that number fast. Today I saw a great example of New Yorkers stepping up to help fellow New Yorkers at the Brooklyn Navy yard an amazing example. This is something that just a few days ago, not only didn't exist, but the idea didn't even exist. And I want to thank Michael Bednark, of Bednark Studios and Michael Duggal of Duggal Greenhouse. They are doing amazing work working with everyone at the Brooklyn Navy yard, led by David Ehrenberg.

They literally came up with idea just days ago, they said, we need to help our health care workers, our first responders, we're going to create face shields. And they literally decided they would create a factory in a place that wasn't a factory, they would create a factory from scratch to make these face shields. They'd find the equipment, the different elements, they'd find the different supplies they'd get a plan, they bring it to the Department of Health. As recently as Sunday night was when they got this plan approved by the Department of Health to come up with their own version of face shield to protect all of our crucial leaders and crucial folks in the health care field our first responders, all the people out there at the front line doing such important work. This brand-new idea out of nowhere was this was put into production these face shields were put into production yesterday. They're at full bore today, they will on Friday ship 50,000 face shields to the Department of Health to distribute to hospitals all over New York City and to first responders. By next Tuesday, they’ll have 120,000 made— this is just an inspiring, beautiful effort and we're going to make sure New Yorkers see a lot about this and understand how powerful this is. And what it means is for the future, so many New Yorkers are just finding many, many ways to help each other. So, we need more of that coming you're going to see a surgical mask, gloves, surgical gowns, all sorts of things being built right here in New York City manufactured right here to protect our fellow New Yorkers. None of that takes the Federal Government off the hook, I want to be clear, and we need everything that is being produced here just to keep going day to day.

We need the Federal Government to come in with a really big numbers that really big supplies if we're going to get all the way through April into May, but we're going to help ourselves in the meantime every way we can. Finally, couple updates, there's been a lot of concern about the situation in our jails. Want to give you an update that I'll keep doing every day I'll give you an updated number. We are looking to release the inmates that we think are appropriate to release— that we think do not pose a threat to the community. And we're also very, very concerned there are inmates with very serious preexisting conditions, inmates who are much older. We have an obligation to think about them the same way we think about all New Yorkers who are in those high-risk categories. So, we're working that through.

I'll give you updates regularly about where we stand – we have to work in many cases with the district attorneys in the states – state governor, I should say, to get to a specific decisions case by case, but we'll keep updating you. So, as of last night, 200 inmates from our jail system had been released from the beginning of this process, 200 that action last night allowed us to hit a major, major milestone and none of us expected this crisis. But one thing that has come out of it has that our jail population continues to decline. Last night we went below 5,000 inmates in our jail system again, last night we went to below 5,000 inmates in our jail system in a City of 8.6 million people. The last time the New York City jail system had fewer than 5,000 inmates was 1949 right after World War II. So, this is an important a note against the backdrop of this crisis, something happening that has a real value in other ways, even though it's part of addressing this crisis. It should be noted as an important moment by tonight, by the end of the day, going into tonight that number of inmates released will go from 200 up to 375 and we will keep giving you updates as we go along. So, I wanted you hear about that, just to officially know that now our jail population as of this morning is 4,906.

On supermarkets, there's a lot of concern to make sure we keep our supermarkets clear so people go in there, can shop, observe social distancing, not be crowded, not end up being in a situation that violates the rules we put forward. We need everyone to stick to that idea. So a couple of thoughts, first of all to again, the store owners, the store managers, the employees, very, very important to practice social distancing and insist on social distance in any line inside or outside the store needs to be distanced six feet between the person before them and after them constantly have to make that happen. We have to be conscious about limiting the number of people coming into a store, if you start to see an overcrowding situation again, if that means the line outside, keep that line distanced. To any storeowner or store manager or employee says, wait a minute, we need some help to do that, we need some backup, we need some enforcement. Just pick up the phone and call 311 and we will get you help quickly. Whether it comes from the NYPD, the Fire Department, the Sheriff's Office, Buildings Department, whatever it is — members of our City Government will come to you and we'll help you achieve that social distance and you're not alone in doing this, we want to help you do it. Call 311 and we will get help to you quickly, but we've got to get this done.

Finally, a recommendation for all store owners; this will certainly be true for grocery stores, supermarkets, pharmacies, if you can - and some it will be easier, some will be harder, but if you can, there’ve been a lot of requests to institute senior citizen hours early in the day. So, the idea would be to set up a time – and I'm going to suggest something like 6:00 am to 8:00 am where only seniors come into shop. Look, this is a suggestion, this is a recommendation. It's something that is not typical, but, in this crisis, people are adapting and you know, getting used to very different realities. I think all New Yorkers want to make sure our seniors are safe and they get what they need. So, having those early morning hours available to any pharmacy or grocery store supermarket, anyone who can do it, whether it's six to eight or whatever version you choose; letting seniors have that time, that's just for them, keeping the crowds low, making it a little easier on them - a lot of them are up early and can get to you. If you can do that, it would really help, if we can stretch things out, it would really, really help to avoid social distancing other times of the day. I mean, excuse me, to ensure social distancing, to avoid crowding, my apology.

So, everyone, just to finish and then we'll take questions from the media and I will be joined by Dr. Oxiris Barbot remotely, our health commissioner. I talked earlier about our health care workers, our doctors, our nurses – every single human being whose working in a hospital right now, whatever your job title, you're a hero, we need you, you’re at the front line. I want to also remember at the same time our, everyone at EMS, everyone emergency [inaudible] medical service who is constantly there saving New Yorkers. We depend on them 24/7, you know, you call 9-1-1 and [inaudible] as New Yorkers, we expect not only an ambulance to arrive quickly, but some of the best professionals anywhere in the world to be there and they are, and they've been great throughout this crisis. They're dealing with a lot, but they've been there for us every single day and I want to thank everyone at EMS for all you are doing.

And I want to thank the folks who get even less attention, I would say. I want to make sure EMS gets their fair share of attention and their praise and their appreciation, but our voluntary ambulance services, community based, neighborhood-based ambulance services that really play a crucial role as well, a lot of times they get low overlooked. I want to thank all of you for all you do for our communities and especially in this time of crisis and I'll make sure to, make sure to use Twitter and other forums to thank each of your organizations individually for everything you're doing. We appreciate it and it makes a big difference.

So, everyone, I conclude before saying a few words in Spanish by saying, it'll be a hell of a challenge these weeks ahead, but there's nowhere on earth where people meet a challenge like New York City and I want to thank you all, I know it's tough. I know people are really, really changing your lives, but you're also doing it in a way that's inspirational and showing the whole nation what it looks like to deal with a crisis, and, and do it with strength and dignity and resolve and I want to thank you all for that.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let me turn to our colleagues from the media and we will be calling upon you one-by-one and we'll call in Dr. Barbot on questions that are relevant to her. Let's go ahead.

Moderator: Hi all, just a quick note at the top. Today, we'll ask that everyone limit themselves to just one question in an effort to get to as many outlets as possible. Just a reminder, we have Dr. Barbot and Dr. Katz on the phone today.

Mayor: Good, Dr Katz has joined us. Okay. Glad for the update. Thank you.

Moderator: With that, I will start with Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to ask for your reaction to today's historic unemployment numbers and if that's changing your response for your plans, looking ahead,

Mayor: Shant, it’s staggering. We're only seeing the initial numbers. They will get worse, unfortunately. A lot of people can't even apply for unemployment yet, they’ve been trying to get through. So, right now, our early estimate is unfortunately probably at least a half million New Yorkers will end up unemployed - are already or will soon be. That's just a staggering, staggering number. What it means is, you know, we need everything in that federal stimulus bill and we need more going forward. And this is not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I really do appreciate what's in that stimulus bill. It is unprecedented. I'm very appreciative to Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi in particular for what they achieved, but I don't think there's anyone in Washington – I've talked to Senator Schumer, I've talked to Speaker Pelosi, I've talked to Senator Gillibrand, talked to our whole congressional delegation as a group earlier today. No one thinks it's enough. Everyone agrees there's more that has to be done, and the next, the next act will be potential additional legislation in the house very soon. So, we're going to need a lot more help for working people and a lot more help for our local government to support working people in this city. It's staggering, but look, if the federal government does everything they're capable of, it will help us get through and we can help everyone to the point that we then actually start a recovery, which I think, you know, is something that's hard to believe before the summer or fall, but we will get to that point. We need that direct support for the city government, we need that direct support for the state government in the next stimulus package or else we just won't be able to help all these folks who are unemployed and their families to the level they need, but if we can get that help we'll find a way to do a whole lot for them. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Kathleen, from Patch

Question: Hi, can you hear me this time?

Mayor: Yup. That's good. It's working this time Kathleen.

Question: I was going to ask for your thoughts about legal aid society hoping to get 22 juvenile detainees with [inaudible] kind of ACS and if Dr. Barbot you wanted to weigh in, that would also be great. They are saying that these facilities aren't really equipped to protect people and that, you know, they are prone to some of the health issues that would make them more vulnerable to COVID-19.

Mayor: You're talking about specifically the ACS facilities for young people under 18?

Question: Exactly.

Mayor: Okay. Yeah. This is something we're going to come back with more on shortly. Obviously, the focus has been on addressing the issues around adults in our jail system, particularly those who are older or had preexisting conditions. That's where our focus has honestly been. We will have more to say on the juveniles soon. The facts keep bearing out that thank God that the challenge, the threat to those under 18 is substantially less, but we don't take it lightly and we will address what we're going to do there, but we just don't have that plan ready to announce yet. Dr. Barbot, do you want to add?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: No, I think you covered it well.

Mayor: Okay. But Kathleen, we will have an update on that very shortly. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Matthew Chayes, from AM New York.

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, the Governor said yesterday that New York state has 11,000 ventilators – your own health department website breaks down by zip code specifics about the flu. When you've been asked provide specifics like this, you've explained you can't because the numbers are in flux, it's a fluid situation, et cetera. Obviously, they're in flux with the flu, obviously they’re in flux with the state guarding ventilators. Why are you able to provide those zip codes, specific numbers for the flu? Why is Cuomo able to say how many ventilators the state has, but you won't do the same for that and other things?

Mayor: Well, it's really as simple as this, Matt, when I feel that we have something that's a non-moving target, as I just told you, the 2,500 ventilators that come in or are about to come in from the federal government – when I got something I think is really solid - I'll tell you, but I think we've got other situations here that are changing constantly. I think there's too much potential for misinformation, misunderstanding. The issue to me is that we owe it to the people to say what the practical impact of all these numbers is, what's really going on and to update them on what really matters, which is do we have the supplies, are we able to take care of people? Are we getting to a point where that's not necessarily the case and what we're doing about it? That's where I'm focused. I just don't find it productive to put out numbers that I'm not sure at any given point are accurate cause things are changing constantly and I'm just going to stick with that. If at some point I feel that we've got more stable information and I feel like it's productive and consistent cause I do not want to give out information then have you guys legitimately ask questions and it turns out it wasn't accurate or it changed in a way that isn't being reflected. So, I'm sticking with where I am. If it gets to a point that we can get that in a forum I feel better about, I'll be happy to share.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav, from The City.

Question: Yeah. I just wanted to ask him about the recreation centers. What's the plan if someone there tests positive for COVID-19 which –

Mayor: Yoav, what are you talking – which recreation centers?

Question: The school for the kids –

Mayor: No, No, you confused me with the phrase, you mean the regional enrichment centers?

Question: Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry.

Mayor: Yeah. Recreation centers got closed down already. That's where I was confused.

Question: Yeah, sorry, the enrichment centers – if someone there either a student or staff tests positive is there going to be like the, the plan for the schools where you shut them for 24 hours and clean them? And if so, there seems to be some – there seemed to be some issues with that. The teachers union didn't think the City was following the guidelines properly when it came to schools. Are you going to adjust that at all?

Mayor: So, first of all, going to the past, which seems a long time ago, we've checked very carefully. I've no evidence whatsoever that those guidelines were not followed in the past. If anyone wants to provide me evidence, I'll look at it. But I just want to say – looking you right in the eye – no, I believe those guidelines were followed properly when we were in a whole different reality a couple of weeks ago. Now we're dealing with something that's not bluntly a typical public school anymore. Now we're dealing with these enrichment centers that are explicitly meant to be there for our central workers who we must have at work. We're in a state of emergency, our first responders, our health care workers, our transit workers, and the additional workers we've added – groceries, pharmacy workers, all the people we've added to the list – we must have them at work or this city cannot function particularly in this emergency environment.

So, we have to keep those centers running. It's literally mission-critical. If we have a sickness, we're going to deal with it specifically. Meaning, we would obviously make sure that anyone who became sick immediately was taken out of school, gotten to their home, or wherever is the appropriate place for them. And anyone else that we think needs to be gotten home or gotten to a different location, we would do that. Anything that needed to be cleaned in the immediate area, we would do that. But we have to keep the centers open. So, no, it's a different standard because it's a state of emergency standard and it's for a very limited and essential purpose.

Moderator: Next, we have Sydney from the Advance,

Question: Can you hear me? Hi.

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: Thanks for finally taking my question. So, you talked about how you want to triple the number of hospital beds across the city, there's currently about 829 hospital beds on Staten Island between the borough’s two private hospitals. We just found out that 1,000 more are going to be added at the College of Staten Island. So about 1,900 beds total. This morning, there were 1,200 confirmed cases on Staten Island. Do you think 1,900 beds is enough for a borough with no public hospital? And do you have a plan in place to mobilize Staten Islanders to get to the city's public hospital system or places like the Naval hospital ship or Javits center if Staten Island's hospitals reach their capacity?

Mayor: Well, I think the first part would be like I said, we want to first double and then ideally triple our capacity everywhere. So, what already exists on Staten Island and what is going to be built out is a beginning. I want to keep looking for every additional opportunity we have to build it further on Staten Island. That to me is the obvious thing to do next and I understand the distinction on public and private hospitals, but that distinction means a lot less in the middle of an emergency. Right now, it's just about wherever we can get the beds and the ability to serve people. So, we're going to keep doing that on Staten Island. What I would say then if you say in any part of the city, what if you needed people to get out of their own borough and go somewhere else?

Well that's something that you know, Health + Hospitals is doing right now, for example, in Queens where there's been – the hospitals, the public hospitals in Queens have been getting a huge number of people coming in. Cases that can safely be diverted to other Health + Hospitals, facilities outside of Queens are being. So, we would do the same thing with any borough – if some cases – you know, people need health care out of their borough, we will do that. But I think the goal now is to maximize the growth of this system in every part of the city to make sure health care is as close to people as possible. We'll constantly give updates as we open up more capacity. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Julia, from the Post.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, indeed.

Question: I'm wondering if any federal, State, or City guidelines allow for the reuse of personal protective equipment during a pandemic. And was that in any of the executive orders you signed?

Mayor: I'll let the Health Commissioner speak to the guidelines. I think from the entire global discussion – literally, when I say global, I mean all over the world – there's been a recognition that we're in an unprecedented situation. I think it's a great question, Julie. I'm not in any way belittling the question, but I want to say that I think what's happened in the global health community, the global governmental community is a recognition that we are in something has literally never been experienced by humankind previously. And that there are a number of things where we have to use different standards to practically reach as many people as we need to and care for them. And I believe – and Dr. Barbot will speak to it – that we've seen from the World Health Organization and CDC, any number of different sources depending on the issue, depending on the topic, a recognition of the need for flexibility and improvisation in this kind of environment. So, Dr. Barbot, that's my layman's framing. You take it from here and you can give a much more eloquent answer.

Commissioner Barbot: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, let me just first of all start off by saying that we have been focused on maximizing getting the personal protective equipment to the front-line staff and in that focusing on ways in which we can reduce the unnecessary use of personal protective equipment so that again we can maximize that supply getting to front line health care workers. That being said, there are evolving guidelines that are allowing for more extended use of personal protective equipment and we are working collaboratively with the CDC. We're working collaboratively with the State Health Department as well as our clinical partners to ensure that whatever guidance we end up evolving to always maintains the maximal safety of health care workers and front-line workers as we move to address this response. And additionally, I will say that, for example, there are health care leaders in other parts of the country that are looking at ways in which we can potentially re-sanitize, if you will, surgical masks.

We recently had a meeting with health care providers in Nebraska that are looking at ways in which we can re-sterilize surgical masks. So, the [inaudible] is that while we are focused on ensuring that PPE gets to the places where it's needed and where we are focused on ensuring that we don't squander these precious resources, we are also looking at different ways in which we can extend that supply. And actually, the Mayor referred to earlier some of the innovations that have been introduced in this, which include those full-face masks, [inaudible] again to ensure that our front-line workers are safe as they perform their really heroic duties.

Moderator: Next we have Jennifer, from AP.

Question: Hi, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: Thanks very much. I'm talking again about health care workers. As you’ve probably seen [inaudible] number of reports of workers who are seeing [inaudible] there's been at least one death, many are frightened about getting sick. Is there any further effort to kind of tally this and its impact on the hospitals and to try to figure out whether there's any further measures that need to be done for them?

Mayor: It's something I know our health care leaders think about all the time, both the folks who run each hospital and certainly Dr. Katz in terms of Health + Hospitals, Dr. Barbot looking at the overall situation with health care in the city. Everyone's thinking about this. I think the ways that, you know, are the basics, making sure that the equipment and supplies are there for our health care workers, trying to get them some relief going forward by bringing in more and more additional health workers from around the city, around the metropolitan area, even around the country. But the – it is obviously, you know, part of the heroism, just like our first responders, you know, run toward the danger, our health care workers every day, you know, even when there's just a normal day in New York City before this ever happened, this crisis, you know, they put themselves in harm's way and they've chosen a profession that comes with a lot of challenges, but is an extraordinarily noble profession.

Our job is to support them and back them up and get them what they need. And so, we're always going to be looking at how we can protect them. And if there's something we're seeing, any of us, are seeing some kind of indication of something else and different that needs to be done, we're going to do it right away. But it is, unfortunately, you know, we're seeing in all parts of the essential workforce that a number of people are out sick. The vast majority of the people out sick will be back seven to 10 days later in each case. But it's a real issue we have to keep working on. So, Dr. Katz or Dr. Barbot, do you want to add anything?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Mayor, I think you've expressed it very well. It's certainly within Health + Hospitals – it's extremely upsetting to staff when a fellow person becomes ill. And that [inaudible] they happen, we don't have a tally of it. But we do want to protect all our workers as best we can. And, again, as you have done, admire, they're amazing heroism in working through this pandemic.

Moderator: Next, we have Erin, from Politico.

Question: Hi, there. I'm just wondering, out of the 4,000 – about 4,000 hospitalizations, how many of those are in Health + Hospitals, facilities? And also, how long until the system runs out of operating revenue? And I guess related to that, are you currently billing patients or billing their insurance in these cases?

Mayor: Let me just say, before Dr. Katz jumps in, he can tell you about the billing process and he can tell you about the broad numbers of patients. But look we've had to and we're very willing to, as the City of New York, backup Health + Hospitals before, and we'll keep backing them up. They have to have the resources they need. I consider that really sacred at this point, especially in this pandemic. There was substantial support in the stimulus bill for hospitals. We’re getting all the details on that, but that's certainly going to help. And some of the other elements of the stimulus will help us to protect Health + Hospitals for sure. So, you can talk about the budget situation, but I'll instantly say that we're going to be there to make sure that they are protected. Go ahead, Mitch.

President Katz: Well, as the Mayor has said, our focus is on saving lives, not saving dollars. If people do have insurance when we're over the crisis and we're able to send all our bills, we will certainly send out bills. There is no reason not to. The City will need that revenue. But right now, we're focused on saving lives. We'll have to get you an exact number of the people who have been hospitalized at Health + Hospitals. I don't have it separate because obviously we do a lot of testing in our outpatient facilities as well.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Mr. Mayor. I'm curious – I know Governor Cuomo said he's done a tour of some of the New York city sites he's eyeing for overflow space in hospitals, Aqueduct Race Track and CSI on Staten Island. Two of them. Will you be joining him? And then secondly, you have to release more detailed data on cases and deaths. It's negligent that you're not, I understand you [inaudible] point, but please, everyone has to get this data. Thank you.

Mayor: Look, Katie, respectfully, you can ask any question you want. I'm always going to respond. If you believe it's your role to editorialize in the middle of your question, that's your right as an American. I don't believe that not only is it not negligent, I would say to you it's the exact opposite. We are trying to never give you inaccurate information. Again, if we get to a point where we feel the information is consistent and accurate and not misleading, happily as we've done many, many times over these last months, give you a lot of information. But I don't find it appropriate for you to offer your own personal opinion on something where you're not in the middle of trying to manage this crisis. I don't think that's what the journalists are supposed to be here to do, to offer your opinions. You’re supposed to ask questions so you can get answers for people.

On the question of the facilities, I was out at the Coler Facility and really appreciate the progress that’s being made there. I'll be going around, certainly, as we find some other facilities that we’re ready to open. You know, the Governor is working on a number of leads. We're working on a number of leads, we're all coordinated, and we'll keep doing that.

Moderator: Next we have Mark Morales, from CNN.

Question: Hi everyone. How you doing?

Mayor: Hey, Mark.

Question: A quick question. I know we have 13 deaths attributed to Elmhurst Hospital. What about today? What’s the death toll there and how does that compare to the other hospitals in the city? Are they seeing comparable numbers? Is it also in the teens? What is that like?

Mayor: Mitch, do you want to start with that?

President Katz: Yeah, so the – of the last 24 hours, Elmhurst had only four deaths. I think that from the overall city counts, it looks to me like the deaths, as you would expect, are tracking very closely with the number of patients who are intubated on ventilators. So, I think all hospitals that are having a lot of patients on ventilators are experiencing a high number of deaths.

Mayor: Mitch, do you have any – I don't have the figures in front of me. Do you have any kind of comparison to other hospitals beyond that?

President Katz: I don't, Sir.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you.

President Katz: [Inaudible] work on that for tomorrow.

Mayr: Okay.

Moderator: Next we have Amanda from Bloomberg.

Question: We ran a story today about New Jersey setting up an ethics panel to kind of guide, you know, which patients will get access to ventilators. And I'm wondering if your administration would consider moving to create a similar kind of, like, ethics panel with experts, kind of, to make some of those decisions.

Mayor: Amanda, I'll let the doctors speak from their perspective. My perspective is I honestly want to do everything we can to have the equipment we need so that that is a decision that our medical personnel do not need to make. So, I understand your question entirely. If you knew you would have to make that decision, of course there should be standards. I know there already are in many cases. But I'm not giving up on the notion that we can get the ventilators we need in time to make sure every hospital has what they need, including creating our own here in New York City. I just want to be real clear on that. You know that is a challenge I still think we can meet. It won't be easy, but I still think we can beat it. And if I ever think we can't, I'll be the first to say it. But doctors, you want to add?

President Katz: I would agree that right now our focus should be on getting enough equipment so that we can save every life. There are existing State guidelines that have specific [inaudible] ahead of time into pandemic issues and what are the right ethical principles to follow in such cases. But I believe that with our efforts we’re not going to need to get there.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, I would echo that. I think that if and when we ever got to that situation, there are guidelines that are out there and, you know, we've worked collaboratively with our partners through Greater New York through Health + Hospitals, to ensure that if and when we ever got to that situation, we would have those conversations. But I really can't stress enough that all of our efforts have been directed thus far at slowing the spread of this pandemic and protecting the health care delivery systems so that individuals who need access to care get that access to care as quickly as possible.

Mayor: Amen.

Moderator: Next we have Gersh, from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor and others. Thank you for taking the call. Late last night, the administration revealed its plan to open up those four stretches of [inaudible] for pedestrians. I have a two-part question [inaudible] question. First part is how were those particular stretches selected given that [inaudible] you chose seem to be harder to secure than quiet and residential streets that drivers could easily be diverted from?

Mayor: Gersh that was a process with my team, the City Council, DOT, NYPD. I can't give you the chapter and verse on how they were chosen, but we'll get folks to follow up with you on that.

Moderator: Next we have Bobby from NY1.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. And this may also be a question for Dr. Barbot. I'm wondering what is the latest guidance for people who feel sick? I know as of recently the messaging was, they should stay home for three to four days, see if they get better on their own. How sick does someone have to be before they should feel it necessary to go to a hospital? And related to that I'm wondering about the status of testing. I know you guys had said testing is really only being done on people who show up at hospitals. People shouldn't be seeking a test. Is that still the case or has the testing capacity expanded?

Mayor: Dr. Barbot –

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly, so I'll start with the recommendations of what people should do when they're sick. So, from the very beginning, we've been saying that people should stay home rather than flooding the emergency departments or clinics. And we have been telling folks to stay home for about three-to-four days. And if they are not getting better, either at that mark or certainly before that mark, they should be reaching out to their health care providers. And the rationale for that was that, as we've been saying, 80 percent of individuals who do contract COVID-19 will have a mild course. And so, the recommendation has been three-to-four days not getting better, then go to your doctors. And certainly, if you're not feeling – if you're getting worse in that period of time, don't wait the three-to-four days. You know, with regards to the testing, our priorities still remain testing the right people. And I have to tell you that – I really have to emphasize the importance of testing the right people. And the right people – by the right people, we mean individuals who are above the age of 50, have one of those five chronic underlying illnesses, and who are sick and not getting better. I'm still hearing of people getting tested at some of these, you know, walk-in urgent centers like City MD and getting a test. And I really want to discourage folks from getting the test unless they are not getting better. And the reason for that is twofold. One is, we don't want people who are sick walking around. We want you home. And only if you're not getting better and your doctor tells you that you need to be seen is when we want you outdoors. The second thing is that every time we do an unnecessary test, we are burning through personal protective equipment that we need to ensure we have maximal supply for health care workers and for our frontline staff.

Moderator: Next, we have Todd, from AM New York.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I know it may be a little premature – I know that it's rare that you get the kind of money that you want from a stimulus package. So, what are you telling your commissioners in terms of what they're going to need to cut in their budgets? And are you envisioning the possibility of layoffs of municipal workers?

Mayor: Todd, it's a very important question. I mean, look, first of all, the way we have to approach this crisis is to say, what are we going to save? What are we going to protect at all costs? You know, what is the bottom line? So, the budget process is going to go like this – if it's related to fighting COVID-19, it goes to the top of the list, and that will be protected all costs, and obviously the most crucial services that New Yorkers depend on – police fire, water, you know, sanitation. We have to protect the basics very, very rigorously here. What we're going to do is, you know, as I said, we're going to look for everything that we can appropriately cut in this first effort for the April budget and that's going to be initially at least $1.3 billion, but it's not going to be from those areas that we have to protect and save at all costs, which, again, is the COVID-19 response and all the basic services that New Yorkers depend on. The other thing is – look, the stimulus bill is not everything I think it should've been, but there's a lot in it. There is a course to direct money that New York City will receive and then there's other elements of it that we will benefit from directly – any money that goes to our public hospital system, money that goes to our school system. So, we're still figuring out the full effect of it, but it's going to help a lot. What it doesn't do is address the billions upon billions of dollars we're going to need to keep our budget balanced, going forward. That's what I hope will be included and should be included in the next stimulus bill, the one next month because it's crazy that we are the epicenter of the crisis and we're a third of the cases in the nation, but we got funding very similar to places that have almost no cases. Something's wrong with that to say the least. So, I'm hoping that will get addressed next month in Washington.

Moderator: We'll take two more today. Next step is Alex Lynn from the Daily Beast. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. I am asking about new – if there's a guideline or plan in place for New Yorkers who are chemically dependent. There have been some reports of overcrowding at methadone clinics, both public and private and people who have been suggested to be in quarantine not being able to have access to their methadone and there is no sort of delivery plan in place for things like that. What do you guys have in mind?

Mayor: Doctors?

Commissioner Barbot: So, I can start and then if Dr. Katz wants to weigh in. We have been in contact with providers, reminding them of various ways in which they can ensure that their patients are safe when they come to seek care, including social distancing during a visit to the office as well as ensuring that people who are asymptomatic receive to care and people who are sick either have a mask placed on them or [inaudible]. We haven't, as of this point, heard of any issues at any of the centers that are providing methadone. And we would encourage you, if you are hearing of any of those, we would gladly follow up on them.

Moderator: Next we have Alex Zimmerman from Chalkbeat. He'll be our last question.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: Great. So, I wanted to ask a question – so, I know that some internet providers in New York City have been providing, you know, 60-day plans for families who might have, you know, limited internet conductivity at home. Obviously, that's relevant for the, you know, million students who are now turning to pivot to online learning. But we know that some providers aren't giving free access to families if they have outstanding bills at those providers. So, if that had like an unpaid cable bill even from a while ago, they're refusing to hook some parents up to internet access. And I'm just wondering if you can comment on that, if that's an acceptable practice to you?

Mayor: No, I very much appreciate you raising it, Alex, because you know, we've all been going nonstop for weeks now, but that's still – every single day, either reporter raises an issue that had not been brought to my attention that I wanted to know about – in your case, I'm really glad you did – or, obviously, I'm on now accepting questions from New Yorkers that I'm talking about the morning update and, you know, a lot of important questions are coming in on things we have to deal with and I very, very much appreciate that. That really pisses me off to tell you the truth, that any provider in the middle of a crisis like this would deprive a child and their family of the chance for that child to continue their education, which we all know is going to be, you know, disrupted already because school isn't in session. I'm going to instruct my team to go back to the providers and be very clear about the fact that we find it unacceptable that any family wouldn't be given that opportunity. If there's any outstanding bills or outstanding issues, those can be addressed once the crisis is over. But we are not going to allow them to deprive children of their education. And if we have to take action – legal action or other action, I would happily do that to protect our students. Thank you very much for raising that.

Alright, that covers it. Thank you, everybody. Take care now.

2020-03-27 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: It’s Friday – what feels like has been an endless week. I know so many New Yorkers have really felt this week. It's been very, very difficult. We've lost a lot of people. It's been a tough slog already. We've also seen just so many examples of heroism and strength, and the very best in New York City. And particularly from our frontline health care workers. And I want us to, just from this point on, understand how much our nurses, our doctors, everyone in the hospitals is going through. What a shock this is to them to go through what is basically battlefield type conditions compared to just a few weeks ago. What was a lot more normal life in their hospitals. Now, they're dealing with very, very painful realities all the time, but they're doing it with skill and with passion and with compassion. And we really need to thank them always, and we need to support them, and we need to get them a break, and reinforcements, and all the supplies they need. And we're going to be talking about that today. The things we're doing to try and reinforce, and support are noble, extraordinary health care professionals.

And what's abundantly clear to me is we've all been focused so much on, on supplies, on equipment, on ventilators. We need to focus increasingly on our health care personnel, both everything they're going through and how we help them now. But the fact also we're going to need a lot more people. We’re going to need a lot more highly trained health care professionals to get us through this in the coming weeks. I spoke a few hours ago with President Trump and Defense Secretary Esper, and over the last few days I've been talking to White House and the Department of Defense about the personnel needs that are facing our public hospitals in particular. And I have asked them for help with additional medical personnel as quickly as possible from our military all over the nation, from the civilian sector around the nation. I have made very clear we're going to mobilize everybody in the health care community in New York City, but we're going to need help from outside to get through the sheer magnitude of the crisis ahead.

The day that I've identified to President Trump and Secretary Esper and other federal officials that I think is the crucial date to think about is Sunday, April 5th. Meaning, as I've said, we're getting through this week. It's tough. We have what we need for next week, but it will definitely be a very hard week. But after next Sunday, April 5th is when I get very, very worried about everything we're going to need. The people power we're going to need, the equipment, the supplies, obviously the ventilators. I'll keep updating you regularly about what our situation looks like, but I want to put down that marker right now. And I've put down that marker to the White House that that is a decisive moment for the city of New York. We need to make sure that we can get to that day ready to face the week after that, and the week after that as well, and right now we're not there.

So, look, I've been trying to work with the President and his team. We obviously have to be, at this moment, working in common cause on behalf of New Yorkers. That doesn't mean we agree on everything to say the least. But I will always say when the White House does something to help us, I will be thankful and I'll give credit when due, and when I think they're missing something, I'll say that too. I do think the notion that any, any messages being put forward, that this will be over by Easter. It's just unfair. It's not true. It's not accurate and it's going to mislead people and raise false hope. I've been honest as I know the facts to be – that April will be tougher than March. May could even be tougher than April. And if that becomes less true, if things get better, I'll be the first to say it. But I don't want people to think this is going to be easy when it's not going to be. I think people need to be ready for battle, and the hard truth helps people gird themselves for what's ahead. And it is a battle, but it will be over. It will be over at some point in the coming months. And then we'll start that, that long recovery. But we will come back strong.

The numbers, every time I have to tell you about this, it’s human beings who are afflicted, the people we've lost, it is painful and it's shocking. 25,573 cases in the City of New York. We remained the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States of America. I look forward to a day when I can tell you that's no longer true. But today that is true. 366 New York City residents have been lost. 366 of our neighbors have been lost. And I want to note that this is becoming personal for all of us in our neighborhoods. All of us have experienced this pain, and it's coming home certainly to our city government, to our agencies that are out there serving people every day. I think you know, just in the last few days, we've lost a principal in our public school system. We've lost a custodian who works at police headquarters. We've lost a member of our Department of Transportation team, a member of our Department of Corrections team. And sadly, we are sure to lose more of our colleagues, and that's painful. Some of the most senior members of the NYPD leadership have been afflicted by the disease and are fighting it now.

Want to take a moment to just offer my sorrow and condolences to the families of some of our public servants that we've lost. Dennis Dixon, the custodian I mentioned at One Police Plaza; Irene Weiss, a community assistance in the Parking Meter Collections Department at Department of Transportation; David Perez, an investigator at the Department of Correction; Kious Kelly, a nurse manager at Sinai West – this is not one of our public sector organizations, but obviously our voluntary hospitals to us are our brothers and sisters in arms, and to have lost a nurse on the front line of this struggle is very painful for all of us; and Dez-Ann Romain, principal at Brooklyn Democracy Academy. Everyone's feeling these losses deeply. We look forward to the day when we don't have to talk about falling comrades, but that day is still a way off and we have to be clear about that.

The human toll is what matters. And for everyone who says it's about the economy, and getting the economy back up, that's just wrong. It's about saving lives first. That's what we believe here in this city. And it's about keeping our hospitals going and keeping our health care system going. I want to remind everyone, you cannot have an economic recovery if our health care system isn't working. You can't have an economic recovery if hundreds or thousands of people are dying. You can't have an economic recovery. If city governments and state governments are going bankrupt. That's the reality we're facing right now. So, I want economic recovery. You want an economic recovery, but we better deal with the problem first. And that's my message to the president and everyone in Washington.

The stimulus bill voted on today, an important step forward, but we sure as hell need more if we're actually going to stave off the full extent of this crisis. If we're going to keep our city running all our vital services, our health care running, our state running, our ability to keep our health care system intact, our ability to save lives. We are not where we need to be yet in terms of the support we need from Washington. And if that support doesn't come, then anyone who harbors the illusion that we can have an economic recovery, is putting the cart before the horse to say the least. Recovery only comes when our people are whole, our people are safe, our health care system has recovered, our city and state governments are working. We're a functioning nation again, that's when we go into recovery.

The economic impact already vast hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers already unemployed. When all is said and done, I think soon, unfortunately we'll find as many as a half-million New Yorkers might've lost their jobs in recent weeks it’s inestimable. My parents who were from the World War II generation, they would tell me stories of the Great Depression, and my older relatives would as well. The only thing that I can compare these last weeks to is that time. And I don't say that with any joy, it's just a fact. In the Great Depression, there was unemployment as high as 25 percent. In this city, in this country, we're seeing that level begin to be approached. Right now, that's the extent of the economic crisis. We have to be honest about it. The fact is that people are being hit real hard. And yes, the stimulus bill does provide some crucial direct relief to working people. That's very important, and I commend everyone in the Congress, the House and Senate who did that. But that impact that people are feeling right now, it is vast. It's why we're preparing right now to make sure that people can't afford food, will have food. And we're working every day to make sure that whatever those basic needs people have, they're going to get them, even if they don't have any money left. But we've got to take another step to recognize just the sheer extent of the pain, the suffering, the challenges that New Yorkers are going through as we suffer this massive fast economic decline.

I think if ever there was a time, there should be a rent freeze, it is now. So, for the millions of New Yorkers who live in a stabilize rent, stabilized housing in this city, normally you wait until later in the spring for the Rent Guidelines Board to make its decision on what rent levels should be for the upcoming leases. What we've seen here, to me, makes clear that we need a rent freeze for everyone who’s rent stabilized and we have to talk about all the people who are not rent stabilized as well. But for everyone, who is rent stabilized, since we have a mechanism, we need to have a rent freeze. But the only way to do that is with the help of the State of New York. And I would like to see the state immediately join with us and they've been very cooperative on so many fronts. We've worked on so many issues together and come to a common agreement on the way forward. So, we will be working with the State starting immediately, requesting the opportunity to suspend the rent guidelines process for calendar year 2020. If we are able to get State agreement to suspend the rent guidelines process for this year that will effectively create an immediate rent freeze for new leases, that's something I think we have to do given the sheer severity of this crisis.

I want to go back to the topic that's been on people's minds so much and it should be, which has all the equipment and supplies we're going to need for our hospitals to get through this crisis. As you know, on the crucial lifesaving issue with ventilators. We do have some progress and I do want to give the Federal Government credit and thanks for having gotten us 2,500 of ventilators in the course of the last week or so. Each ventilator at any given moment can save a life, keep someone going who can find their way to recovery with the help of our extraordinary medical professionals. But we have stated from the beginning that the number we need in New York City is 15,000, 2,500 helps a lot and it helps us right now until I see evidence to the contrary, I am sticking to this number because I believe is based on fact. 15,000 is the number we need,

I have reiterated that to President Trump and other key members of the administration. The President made a comment about New York State I think it was last night questioning the number of ventilators needed. I think New York State has been exactly right and asking for the number they have, which they've said is at least 30,000. When you look at the growth of this disease, not just in the City, but also in the suburbs, in other parts of the State. Governor Cuomo was exactly right to identify that number of ventilators we need them here in New York immediately to stave off this crisis. We are clearly in this city, in this state the very, very center of this national crisis. And the Governor said, and I've said once the crisis starts to pass, we will absolutely make sure that ventilators and supplies and personnel we'll get to all the other places in our country that need help.

But I want to be clear those ventilators, we are not kidding about that number, that is about savings lives right now. I spoke to the President earlier this afternoon about not only the medical personnel but also the situation at Elmhurst hospital. And we spoke about this on Wednesday night as well. I wanted him to understand very personally just – how hard it is for our health care workers, what they're dealing with, why we need so much more in the way of personnel and equipment and supplies. And I do want to say the President knows that area, his family coming from Queens and he made very clear, he's familiar with Elmhurst Hospital and the area around it. I want to keep asking the President to keep Elmhurst Hospital in mind and realize that today it's Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, tomorrow it's going to be other hospitals in this City and soon it's going to be hospitals in other parts of the country. And since he can understand and relate to the borough Queens let that be the touchstone, let that be the example that moves the President and the Federal Government to maximum effort immediately. Now, today we saw some progress and again, I will always praise progress, the President put out the statement having invoked the Defense Production Act related to general motors. That's a step in the right direction, I'm very happy to see it, but now we have to go a lot farther. And I would urge the President to use the full power of the Defense Production Act to mobilize industries across America to produce the maximum number of ventilators and other crucial medical supplies. It's quite clear this crisis is spreading rapidly around the country.

We as a nation did not have the supplies and equipment ready. It's not just this crisis it's whatever happens in the future we should produce now while we have the chance, all the ventilators possible to save our people. Obviously to make that happen, the military will be needed in every sense, the logistical capacity, the ability to move material without question, the finest ability in the nation to get things where they need to go and to deal with the toughest conditions that's our military. In addition to the extraordinary personnel that can bring to bear, the military needs to be mobilized fully our standing members of the permanent military reserves national guard this – has to be the ultimate team effort. And there's no Americans more ready to serve than the members of our military, the commander in chief now needs to make that call and get them into this fight, immediately.

Questions has have come up this week, rightfully about – Personal Protective Equipment, the PPEs that our health care professionals need, our first responders need I’ve talked about the amazing effort at the Brooklyn Navy yard. You’re going to see a lot more of those homegrown efforts to create a lot of the supplies we need, but obviously what we need most is to help with the Federal Government and the supplies to come in from all over the country. Even in some cases from outside the country, the mass, the gowns, the gloves, the face shields we need them in huge quantities going forward. We have enough of the personal protective equipment again to get us to that crucial day of Sunday, April 5th. I will update you constantly if that crucial demarcation line changes, but right now we must keep getting more to make sure we can get passed Sunday, April 5th.

Here's the distribution that's going on as we speak, just to give you a sense of the sheer magnitude. And this is all what's being done by the City of New York and our agencies right now, our Department of Health, Emergency Management, Health and Hospitals, all our agencies working together. As we speak 20 trucks are on the road delivering to our hospitals this includes a grand total of 1 million surgical masks, 200,000 N95 masks, 50,000 face shields, 40,000 isolation gowns, 10,000 boxes of gloves this is all happening right now as we speak. Tomorrow trucks will be delivering 800,000 more N95 masks and 2 million more surgical masks, and this is going to be constant from this point on. We've had a really amazing outpouring of offers from New Yorkers and people all over the country offering to get us supplies like this who have sources of their own companies that they can draw on.

We need it all is the answer. And everyone who wants to help us anywhere can call this number and let us know what you can get us and how soon, and we will follow up immediately. The number to offer supplies and equipment to help the people in New York City is 833-NYC-0040 again, 833-NYC-0040 and we appreciate the help and we need it now. A few more updates, Elmhurst Hospital, as I said, we all understand has been a hit so hard, it's been the epicenter of this crisis. The doctors and nurses, all the staff fighting so hard and they need reinforcements and reinforcements keep coming each day. Today the Health and Hospitals ascent 64 additional clinicians to Elmhurst hospital that's registered nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and physicians. 64 more clinicians sent today within the hospital, 45 members of the ambulatory staff have been moved over to work on urgent COVID cases. Tomorrow 105 additional nurses will be sent to Elmhurst hospital. So this is what we're going to be dealing with in the days ahead. Moving people, moving materials moving equipment where they're needed the most and trying to get more and more brought in all the time. But Elmhurst is the first in everyone's mind and we're making sure that reinforcements are sent constantly. Obviously yesterday the ventilators that were sent the 40 ventilators to back up, additionally their supply needs we will keep doing that. So, everyone, Elmhurst you will always get resupplied with everything that we can get you. We've talked recently about where what we're seeing around the City what information we have about the spread of this disease.

Our Health Commissioner will be part of this press conference, so she can certainly speak to as many of the details we know. But what we know for a fact is the disease is widespread around New York City, all five boroughs across the board community spread means community spread everywhere. What we also know is testing patterns have vary deeply around the City it's really been different depending on where you are and some parts of say there's been a lot more testing and other parts less testing. And some parts of the City testing has really been focused on folks with the most severe cases, in other parts of the City testing was done on a lot of people who now we would say would not be priorities for testing that will affect the rates of positive cases in each neighborhoods because the testing patterns have been uneven.

We're always looking to figure out what is the exact truth and what do we need to know strategically. But the information we have now is skewed in some ways of course by the realities I just explained to you. But we are going to try and put out information, we put out the borough numbers. Now Department of Health has put out a map showing what the pattern is, and this is on the Department of Health website, what the pattern is around the city. But again, this information only tells you part of the picture because the testing patterns have been so inconsistent. We're going to keep digging down to figure out if there are any particular areas that need particular strategic approaches. We know what's different around the city is that some areas have a greater concentration of hospitals others have less. That's part of what's going on in Queens for sure with Elmhurst, whether there's fewer hospitals that people are going to, but we've got to get to the bottom of any deeper trends that we can act on and we will keep doing that and then keep reporting the facts as we know them.

Couple of other quick points, our jail population we will continue to reduce our jail population to address this crisis to ensure that any inmates who can be appropriately released, particularly those with real health concerns that we act on we know we have to do this quickly. I mentioned that because of all the efforts over the last few years, but also this recent release effort that we now have for the first time since 1949 under 5,000 inmates in our jails, that number will continue to go down in the coming days. As of last night, 375 inmates had been released, by tonight that number will be at least 450. We are working with District Attorneys and the State to additionally work on release of the appropriate inmates that they have a specific jurisdiction over. So, we'll constantly update you on what's going on with that situation. But again, as of tonight, at least 450 will have been released.

Related to our parks and the question that's been on everyone's mind about what's going to happen going forward with our parks and the question of whether we're seeing compliance and commitment to social distancing? Overwhelmingly, the answer is yes and this is coming back from the NYPD, Parks Department, and many other agencies. We're seeing the vast majority of New Yorkers do the right thing, observe social distancing, take it seriously, spend only the time that they have to be outdoors, outdoors, and then get back indoors. But we are seeing in the last day or so, we have seen some noncompliance that is really a concern. We obviously have to think about the warmer weather coming ahead and we need to make sure that people understand this is really, really serious. So, the NYPD has been instructed, of course, to educate people, warn people, move along if people need to be moved along, break up groups and make sure there's no gatherings. I want to be very clear that at this weekend we're going to make a decision on whether we need to start instituting fines for anyone who is noncompliant. We have not made that decision yet. We'll make it this weekend. Fines of up to $500 per incident are being discussed right now. This means if any of our officers – NYPD or Parks or any other agency tells you, you need to move along, you need to move along. If they tell you to break up your gathering, you need to break up your gathering. It does not mean you can break it up for a few minutes and then come back. It doesn't mean you can tell the officer you're not going to do it. We're going to start to bring heavier enforcement to bear if people don't pay attention to the nonstop guidance that we've all been giving, and our officers are giving, and our health experts giving, and the national news media has given. Come on, you've gotten enough information to know you have to practice social distancing. I know it's not easy. I know it goes against everything we're used to doing. No more team sports, no more social gatherings in the park, no ganging close together, unless it's your own family members or the people you live with under the same roof. Those are the rules and people really need to follow those rules. If you don't follow those rules, then what it's going to say to me is we start to have to use much more serious penalties. I don't want people to be penalized in a time when there's so much economic distress. I don't want people to be penalized who are trying to make sense of a new painful reality, but I need people to listen and understand this about protecting yourself, your family, and all the rest of us. So, we'll have more information on that over the weekend, but I am asking my fellow New Yorkers to take it seriously or else there will have to be more severe measures. Obviously, the same point about playgrounds. After tomorrow night we're going to make a decision on whether to keep playgrounds open. It will be directly related to the level of compliance we see, whether we can keep them open or not.

Another area, and it pains me to say this and it's probably a pretty limited phenomenon, but it has to be addressed. I've spoken to religious leaders of all backgrounds and I want to thank them. So many of our religious leaders have really taken a lead and said to their congregation, said to members of our faith communities that we have to act differently now. A vast majority of houses of worship have stopped their traditional worship service. If they could, they went online, they went on the radio, whatever they could do, but they've stopped gathering people, understanding the nature of the crisis. We've had extraordinary support from the leaders of major Christian denominations. We've had extraordinary across the board, rabbinical support from all the different elements of the Jewish community, and the same is true other faiths as well. A small number – a small number of religious communities, specific churches, specific synagogues are unfortunately not paying attention to this guidance even though it's been so widespread. So, I want to say to all those who are preparing the potential of religious services this weekend – if you go to your synagogue, if you go to your church and attempt to hold services after having been told so often not to, our enforcement agents will have no choice but to shut down those services. I don't say that with any joy. It’s the last thing I would like to do because I understand how important people's faiths are to them, and we need our faiths in this time of crisis, but we do not need gatherings that will endanger people. No – no faith tradition endorses anything that endangers the members of that faith. So, the NYPD, Fire Department, Buildings Department, and everyone has been instructed that if they see worship services going on, they will go to the officials of that congregation, they'll inform them they need to stop the services and disperse. If that does not happen, they will take additional action up to the point of fines and potentially closing the building permanently. Again, that will begin this weekend. Again, I'm sorry I have to tell you this, but anyone who's hearing this take it seriously. You've been warned, you need to stop services, help people practice their faith in different ways, but not in groups, not in gatherings that could endanger people.

Finally, on remote learning it is a huge new endeavor. It's a challenging effort. Yesterday I have to say, I was really upset when I heard from one of our reporters that a couple of major broadband providers apparently were making it more difficult for certain households to get the internet service they needed so that our kids could participate in distance learning. I made very clear we would act if Charter Spectrum and Altice did not resolve these issues. I do want to give you good news and I do want to give these companies credit for acting quickly. Both have now said they will waive the rules that were the problem. They will not hold back service from families with students who need to learn online. And now more of our students will be able to learn. So, that is a good step and I want to thank our colleague in the media who brought that forward, so we could act on that.

And finally, just to say to another group of people, I've tried to really take time to thank people and then I'll say just a couple of quick words in Spanish. You know, there's so many people to thank and I’ve talked a number of times and I'll keep talking about our doctors, our nurses, our frontline medical staff, but there's another group of unsung heroes who are the clinicians who are staffing our 3-1-1 Health + Hospitals hotline. That's more than 750 clinicians, they work at literally all hours of the day. This last week already, they've taken 23,000 calls just in a week and what they're doing is helping New Yorkers to understand what they need to do in this crisis, how they can address whatever they're experiencing. And what's in fact the case is that 90% of these calls, the answer is hearing from a medical professional, understanding what's really going on and how to handle it – 90 percent of these calls, the advice was to stay home, see it through or see it through to another point in time and then call back if the situation got worse. For those who needed additional care immediately, our clinicians were there to direct them immediately to where they needed to go and make sure they had the information they needed. Those clinicians are doing something crucial and they've helped give people the confidence that if they did need to stay home, it was after having talked to a capable medical professional to get that advice. That's really crucial because that's been helping people to feel that peace of mind. To do the right thing, to be able to make the right decision cause a public servant, a professional was there to help them. So, thank you to those 750 clinicians, you're doing something very important for all of us.

Finally, just a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

New Yorkers are always at their best, at their strongest, in moments of crisis. We saw it after 9/11, we saw it after Sandy, we're seeing it again now. With that, I want to turn to our colleagues in the media and Dr. Katz and Dr. Barbot will be available on the line as well. And we welcome media questions now. Please proceed, Olivia.

Moderator: Quick reminder that we're going to do one question per reporter to get to as many outlets as possible. And with that, Erin Durkin is up first. Erin?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I just have some questions about – there have been reports of overwhelming numbers of 9-1-1 calls and they're telling people, you know, even if you're having trouble breathing, go to the emergency room by yourself. I guess I'm just wondering sort of on a practical basis, we're also hearing that emergency rooms are turning people away if they're well enough to walk or talk on their own. So just on a very practical level, if you need care, how are you supposed to get to an emergency room if you're not supposed to call 9-1-1 and you can't walk on your own. I assume you don't want people in cabs and subways. And related to that, just with the guidance to stay home, if at all possible, and people being turned away, is there a concern that people are going to end up, you know, deteriorating getting into really serious conditions, possibly even dying without getting into care?

Mayor: So, Erin, I'll start and our doctors will jump in. Look, I'd say to you, I'd say to your colleagues, every time you raise an issue we're all following up on it right away. But I also want to be careful that sometimes the issues raised are based on either rumors or very, very narrow circumstances that don't reflect the reality. You're asking a very important question. I want to thank you for the question, but I want to be careful that the opening assumption of the question that people don't hear it and think, suddenly, you know, everything that we knew before is gone because it's just not true. We have some hospitals that have been particularly stressed. We have a number of other hospitals that are in much less of a situation of overload. Of course, all of our EMTs continue to do their work.

I will look into everything happening with FDNY, EMS, 9-1-1 – but the basic rules that have always applied apply. If someone's in urgent need we get them, we give them help. Now you're right to say that people have been walking up. It's true. A lot of people have been walking up, particularly in the case of Elmhurst and we said days ago, that every emergency room now has outside medical professionals who are screening to see who actually needs to go into the emergency room and who does not, who needs testing, who does not. In this crisis, there's so much fear. There's so much confusion. Of course, people are going to want to, you know, get as much testing as possible. It's natural. We kept telling them who really needs it, who doesn't? But I understand that that message is hard for people to hear.

So, the fact is that the emergency rooms, those decisions are being made outside. But anyone who needs immediate care is getting immediate care. We're not telling people if you're in immediate danger, stay home. That's not the message at all. The message has simply been, if you have cold or flu-like symptoms, stay put to begin, give it three or four days, if you're not getting better, call your doctor and your doctor will direct you from there. Obviously, if you have anything that's an emergency, we treat it as an emergency. But what we didn't want was a lot of people – and we know this about this disease, 80 percent of the people who get it are going to have a pretty mild experience. We don't want those people flooding the emergency rooms and the hospitals. We need them to have the confidence that the pattern is so consistent that they can stay home and ride it through unless something changes for the worse, in which case, of course, we want to get them to more care.

So, no, I do not have reports of people not getting care who need care. In fact, I think, Erin, it's been the other way around. A lot of people still kind of understandably rushing to the hospital even though they're only having those very initial symptoms. And we're trying to get people to understand they don't need to do that. They can call those clinicians, as I said, and call 3-1-1. You can get connected to a Health + Hospitals clinician if you need to confirm how to handle your situation. So, there's always help out there. But FDNY, EMS, they continue to do as they always have and address people who have real emergencies in real time. To Dr. Katz, Dr. Barbot, you want to add?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: I would just add – I think Mr. Mayor did a great job. As you said, 90 percent of the calls to our clinicians have resulted in people being advised to stay home. But that means 10 percent of the time we're telling people they need emergency care. And the biggest distinction is shortness of breath. So, people who are short of breath are much more in danger and do need to be seen as rapidly as possible. Part of your good advice about people staying home that three or four days is we don't want them to expose – to be exposed and we don't want them to expose others. So, it's also part of our preventing disease transmission.

Mayor: Mitch, can you just dwell on that for a moment? Hold on one second.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I'm sorry, Oxiris. Mitch, just stay on that for a moment because I think this is really been under-discussed. You know, a lot of people I think understand that there are times when you have to go to the hospital and how hard the people at the hospitals work to protect you. But there's also a lot of truth way before coronavirus that a hospital is an environment that's not ideal either. And, Mitch, you know, talk about the fact that if someone might have very mild symptoms or a mild experience with this disease, that it actually could create more danger to go to where there's a lot of people trying to get into a hospital. I think if you play that out a little, it'd be helpful for people.

President Katz: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. You know, I've been advising my own primary care patients that they need to stay at home unless they develop shortness of breath because I don't want them to be exposed to other people who might have COVID. So, I think it is part of our social distancing. I think one of the common conceptions that's wrong in this disease is generally we teach people come early, come early. So, I've already heard people say, you know, I'm trying to come early before this gets bad and I'm being told to, you know, not leave my house. Part of the difference is, we don't have an effective treatment for this disease. So, it's not as if we want people to come early and start a medication. We want people to stay in their homes, we want them to drink lots of fluids to get lots of rest. But if they do develop shortness of breath then we want them to come forward.

Mayor: Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, so, I was going to add that certainly if someone feels like they are unable to get to see their physician and they're getting worse and they're having symptoms where they're not sure that they're going to be able to make it through the night and they're not getting better, of course, we would encourage people to use the 9-1-1 system. That's what it's there for. But I think it's incredibly important to really emphasize the fact that 80 percent of the folks will have mild illness and that if someone is not getting better, we want them to reach out to their doctor first and to use EMS as a last resort.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: Matt Chayes is up next.

Question: Hey, guys. I hope you will indulge me. This is a question for Dr. Barbot or Dr. Katz. Can you tell me how quickly people are going from initial onset of symptoms to a more serious situation? How long to recover? Do fever and cough appear together or one after the other? Do symptoms come and go or do they escalate? Do they disappear permanently and how long is recovery usually?

Mayor: Okay, Doctor?

Commissioner Barbot: Do you want me to take that or do you want to take that? Why don’t I start?

Mayor: Okay. You start and Mitch will join in.

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely. From the onset of this pandemic, we've been saying that we're learning more and more every day about how this virus behaves. And generally, we know that individuals can develop symptoms anywhere from two to 14 days after being exposed. With that – as we learned more, it became apparent that people would generally develop symptoms somewhere around five to six days and that individuals would present with symptoms of fever and a cough, fever and shortness of breath, but that it didn't necessarily mean that they would develop the fever first and then the cough. Oftentimes what we've been finding is that individuals may start off with a raspy throat, with a runny nose, and then develop a cough, and then progress into fever and more severe symptoms. And that course is generally dictated by someone's underlying health conditions. And so that's why it’s really important to focus on those five chronic underlying illnesses as potential risk factors for having a faster progression to more severe illness or unfortunately worse health outcomes in terms of needing intensive care support or unfortunately dying as a result of the illness. And so, the thing that I will say is that as we've learned more, what we've generally learned is that children tend to have a much milder course than adults do. And so, there's large variability in how someone progresses along the spectrum of COVID-19 infection. But the bottom line being that what we've seen still roughly born out is that 80 percent of individuals will have a mild course of illness.

Mayor: Do you – Dr. Katz, do you want to add anything?

President Katz: I think Dr. Barbot did a great job.

Mayor: Alright.

Moderator: Reema from Chalkbeat is up next – Reema.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. So, I have a question about the regional enrichment centers – we've heard and now we've seen a statement from the Speaker's office and a few other elected officials that the City is deciding to close some of these centers. Can you give me a number of how many are closing or consolidating, and can you explain why that's happening?

Mayor: Yeah, what we are doing at this point is recognizing that the – and I'll get to the exact, I don't have the final numbers in front of me here, but I can give you the basic approach. We are looking at the sheer number of students signed up and then the sheer number of students showing up. And we need to be mindful that to have one of those centers up, which are there for one purpose only to ensure that our essential workers can get to work – Health care workers, first responders, transit workers, grocery workers, pharmacy workers, and others. That's why they were created. If it weren't – I want to be real about this – if it weren't for that purpose, they would not exist because we shut down the whole school system, which I hated doing. But we did that. And this would have been true for all those kids, too.

But the essential workers, we all understood – the City understood, the State understood we needed every single one of them, and if not having a place for their child was a possible impediment or a problem for them to get in the way of them being at work. We needed to make sure we addressed that. So, we set up a really substantial capacity. And then we opened up the opportunity for enrollment. We got a decent amount of interest, but nowhere near what we thought might be based on projections. We continued to add additional categories of essential workers and the numbers have not moved much, but even more important, not just the enrollment numbers, but the actual attendance has been very strikingly low. Now, what we want to do – and we can expand and contract depending on the situation, but if we're talking about thousands of students, if it's single digit thousands or even a little more than that, we can certainly, you know – 10,000 kids or 15,000 kids, we could handle in a lot fewer centers.

And that means we don't need as many staff to be there. That means that we're freeing up school nurses who can go and do other important health care work. So, this is a fluid situation but fluid, not just because of circumstance, but because of a strategic decision that we want to only have the number that we truly need and then maximize the use of those precious health care personnel in other ways. So, you will see this number potentially go not only down, it could go back up if real enrollment starts to move. If we really start to see more and more interest in kids being there.

Moderator: Yoav is up next – Yoav?

Question: Yeah. Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you about a tweet that Representative Grace Meng tweeted. She said she talked to a nurse at Elmhurst who said that they need vents, but “more so we need doctors and also doctors who are ICU trained”. I know you've moved a considerable number of staff over at Elmhurst, but my question is are these people ICU trained doctors? And the same would go for nurses because I've heard they're using floor nurses who don't have a lot of ICU training in the ICU. So, is the hospital still short of that experienced personnel and is that part of your plea to the federal government? Are you looking for folks typically who have that ICU experience?

Mayor: Let me it’s – there’s a couple of points there and I'll start and obviously, Mitch will jump in, Yoav. Mitch and I talked about this in detail earlier today. To the last part of your question – absolutely, positively, yes. I have said to the President of United States, the Defense Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the military medical personnel in the standing military, in the reserves – these are folks who in many cases literally have battlefield experience and even those who have not served in battlefield conditions have trained to be able to handle those conditions. And the military leaders have been very clear that that's a true statement about the nature of military medical personnel, that they are trained for the toughest conditions. So, I think calling them up and sending them to the new American front, which is New York City right now, to fight this battle the same way we would fight a battle or a war if we were being attacked by a foreign invader, I think that makes all the sense in the world. Because not only do we just need additional numbers of personnel, they would bring some of the very best skills and most pertinent skills for this situation.

The second thing I want to say to you is, no one, no one, expected to go from relative normalcy just weeks ago to this totality that we're going through now with so much stress, so much difficulty, so many people suffering, so many people dying so quickly. Of course, the human beings who are our health care professionals are feeling that strain. Everyone would feel that strain. I think it's true to say that some people have had the kind of experience that prepares them more for it and others less so. But that's true throughout our entire health care system. You cannot say that a health care system that's made up of folks who, some of whom have had a lot of ICU experience, some of whom have not, that suddenly they're all going to instantly understand things the same way.

That's just not realistic. And we're going to need all hands-on deck. We do need to be mindful of ensuring the maximum number, sort of, battle ready medical professionals in each of the key locations, especially the ones going through the most. And I think in part that is the folks who do have that experience, in part, that’s just having enough personnel, just a sheer number of quality personnel of different kinds of experience together to support each other. We got to think about all those factors. But where we are going in this crisis, we don't have the luxury of saying, well, the only people who are going to be around to help are those who have, you know, the most perfect experience. In fact, we're going to have to use every single health care professional we can possibly get into this fight. We're going to have to get people who have been trained in one background to learn to do things very differently in another background because it's going to be a war-like dynamic.

So again, I'm sorry for the long answer – and Mitch will jump in – but I'm sure I'll get other questions like this. I want to appeal to my colleagues in the media. You can ask anything and everything that's absolutely your job and I will honor it. But I need you to understand that some of the questions sound like the kind of standards we would hold in peacetime and why are we not reaching the kind of, you know, ideal situation we would normally aspire to in a peacetime dynamic. This is no longer peacetime. I'm not saying that to be melodramatic. This is a wartime dynamic already and this is just the beginning. We're going to have to make all sorts of tough choices and do things very differently and, you know, fight each day to get through this. So yeah, there'll be imperfections for sure, but our job is to make sure that the people we can save, are saved. Mitch.

President Katz: You said it very well, Mr. Mayor and I think all of the hospitals in New York City will be like Elmhurst in the next week or two. Elmhurst is just ahead of the curve. As New Yorkers we're used to subspecialists. That's our tradition. And I certainly understand that given that I have doubled the number of ICU beds at several of our hospitals, it would be ideal if I could double the number of ICU intensivists – that's a sub specialty function. But if we went to other parts in rural America, we would find that there was a family practitioner doing an excellent job in the ICU at his or her hospital. So, we can teach people to do these skills and we have the advantage of having amazing intensivists who can teach generalists how to function in the ICU environment.

Moderator: Kevin from the Brooklyn Paper is up next. Kevin, can you hear us?

Mayor: Kevin? Kevin?

Moderator: We’ll come back to Kevin. Sydney is up next. Sydney?

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah Sydney.

Question: It's a weird echo. Do you have any figures on how many coronavirus patients are in recovery or have recovered? If not, why don't you have that information and does the city – sorry, I know does – sorry about the ICU beds. Why don't you guys keep track of the number of ICU patients who are in the ICU.

Mayor: So, again, couple of different points there. There definitely are people recovering all the time. I think you make a good point, Sydney, that in a perfect world we would get to the point where we could say we have, you know, confirmed that this individual is recovered and we would keep a running list of folks who have recovered. I think it would be reassuring to people. It'd be helpful. The doctors will know better than me what it would take to achieve that. Obviously, there are a lot of people, Sydney, who contracted disease, never go to a health care institution, go through the whole course of it in seven to 10 days and come out okay, that's that 80 percent. Obviously, that's overwhelmingly folks under 50 and folks who don't have those preexisting conditions. But I think that's the fundamental challenge in giving you a number like that is that so many people consistently are going through the whole course of the disease and they never are in direct connection with the city or the health care system. There is no way to track that number. We could track I guess for the ones we know for sure, like we will – start to talk to the Police Commissioner yesterday and Dermot said, you know, he will start identifying the number of officers who come out of being sick and come back on the job. We can do that certainly for public agencies and to our colleagues from our communications team, that would be a very valuable number to start putting out from each agency as they start to accrue those numbers. But I don't think we can do it entirely accurately for the larger population. I want, I'll answer the other part of your question, but doctors – to the two doctors online, am I in the ballpark there that we could only get a very partial sense of that? Do you agree?

President Katz: Yes sir. I'm not – the happy part is people are recovering. And we do see people leaving the hospital who had shortness of breath. We even see a few people being able to get off the ventilator.

Mayor: Good. So, on the other part of the question what we are trying to do here, and I said it to you yesterday to everyone – we want to make sure if we give you numbers, they are accurate numbers. We are constantly changing the number of ICU beds because we are honestly going to convert a number of our major hospitals to all ICU or primarily ICU rapidly over the coming days. So, when I feel we've got stable, consistent numbers we can give you and we're sure they're accurate, we'll happily put that out. But, right now, it's very much in flux. The number of patients is constantly changing. The question I always keep coming back to is, do we have the capacity to handle the patients we have? That's really the measure I'm looking forward. Not what is today's number or this hour’s number or the next half-hours’ number, but are we able to serve the people we have that comes down to beds staffing ventilators, et cetera.

As we are able to get to a situation where we feel we can give more real time updates that are absolutely accurate. Again, I'll happily do more as we go along, but right now the priority has been just setting up this infrastructure, getting it to be able to handle what's about to hit us and again, that's why I'm using that date, Sunday, April 5th. We are not thinking about what happened, you know, at four o'clock today or five o'clock today. We are trying to build enough capacity to get us to Sunday, April 5th and then beyond and that's my obsessive focus right now.

Doctors, you got anything to add?

President Katz: We opened up, I see us in all, in three of our hospitals last night, which I think again goes to what you're saying Mr. Mayor that our job is to meet the need for ICU.

Mayor: And we will. Okay, who's up?

Moderator: Alejandra from AM New York is up. Alejandra?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, indeed. Alejandra.

Question: Okay, thank you. These fines for religious institutions that keep having services, how large would they be and is there going to be any sort of a warning system before they're shut down permanently? And how is this going to be enforced?

Mayor: Okay, so – make sure I got this in front of me. Let me emphasize, Alejandra. It is a small number of institutions, meaning the vast majority, and again, I've had calls with a lot of the senior religious leaders of all the faith traditions in recent days. What I'm hearing really consistently is the decision they've made and they've communicated, they've acted on it to shut down their houses of worship and to send a message to their faith communities that it's actually consistent with their faith to keep people safe. What we’re seeing is a small number and I don't have a perfect number for you. I think it could be you know, only a few dozen that you know, maybe it's a storefront church, maybe it's a small synagogue, but we are seeing in certain communities, smaller religious institutions that despite everyone around them acting, they still are refusing.

So I'm being really clear about the fact that we are telling them right now do not hold services this weekend period. It goes against everything that we've put forward in terms of this state of emergency. And what will happen is if there is any report and obviously anyone who sees such a service can call 3-1-1 and it will be acted on immediately. It begins with a warning to disperse. If they disperse immediately and obviously our enforcement agents would watch that happen, make sure that happens. That's fine. We just want to address the issue. If they refuse to disperse, there would be a fines that could be levied. I'll get you the exact dollar figure. I don't have it in front of me now, but we could do a fine further, if we see any recurrence, we would move immediately, or refusal, we would move immediately to have the Department of Health issue in order to have the building shuttered, so that could not be used for those services. Again, no one wants to see this happen. No one wants to see us ever have to take an action like this. So the word to the wise is just don't hold services this weekend. And if anyone tries to and our officers arrive and say it's time to leave, they have to honor that request or we will have no choice but to ensure there are consequences.

Moderator: We're going back to Kevin from the Brooklyn Paper. Kevin?

Question: Hi. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Kevin.

Question: Okay, great. Thanks so much for taking the question. Mr. Mayor. I'd like to go back to the neighborhood breakdown that you provided today and thanks so much for providing that. I know you mentioned that, you know, the numbers vary on testing patterns and all that, but for our purposes at the Brooklyn Paper in Brooklyn, I'm seeing a large concentration, you know, starting in Greenpoint, going down along the east of prospect park to Midwood, and Borough Park. Do you have any idea of why there could be a large concentration there and are, you know, sending out a targeted response to these areas of high concentration?

Mayor: I'm going to turn to Dr. Barbot because the Health Department assembled this information or is part of that process of assembly. But I just would say at the outset, we are – just everyone is day to day, hour to hour, constantly responding to new information and trying to dig down and figure out each trend. We see we're obsessed right now, that is the right word, with building out the capacity to save lives. But obviously if we saw something we could act on in the nature of the disease or how it's manifesting, or where it's manifesting. If we saw something actionable, we would immediately move. The concern here, and the Health Commissioner and I have talked about is that this information, although it gives you something, it gives you unfortunately a very incomplete picture because it was not based on a uniform testing standard.

If we had said, okay, every one of these you know, specific subset areas of the city, we were going to do a thousand tests in each one with the exact same criteria who gets tested and you know, you had perfect consistency and then you saw a really big variation between neighborhoods, that would tell us potentially something very real. This doesn't tell us something as easily understood and acted on because the testing standards and amounts were so different in each neighborhood. So, the Health Commissioner will tell you if she sees more in it, that can be acted on and we are looking for something we can act on. But I'm not sure this information tells us enough. Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: So, Mr. Mayor, I think you've got it exactly right. This map tells us about testing behavior. It doesn't tell us anything about how the virus is being transmitted. For that, we know and we've been sharing that we have widespread community transmission, which in essence means that New Yorkers are more likely to be contracting COVID-19 from their fellow New Yorkers than from travel. And that the guidance and the treatments if you will for this community-wide transmission is for people to stay home. What the map shows is the variability in terms of if you could think about it as hit rate, meaning that there are some parts of the city, Brooklyn and Queens where providers are being more judicious in terms of who it is that they're testing and that in other parts of the city you still have a-ways to go in terms of ensuring that we are reserving testing for those individuals who are not getting better and who fall into those chronic underlying illnesses. So I wouldn't make anything more of the map other than it reflects testing behavior of providers. It doesn't tell us anything about community transmission because we know that there is widespread community transmission in all the five boroughs and what will help prevent or help slow the spread of this virus is again New Yorkers adhering to staying indoors.

Moderator: Bridget is up next. Bridget.

Question: Thanks. Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to follow up on the April 5th date and your comments talking about how you think the city is going to have enough equipment through that date. Just wanted to clarify, when you say that, are you only speaking about hospitals or does that extend to some of the city's frontline workers? EMS NYPD, FDNY, and you know, we're seeing – I'm seeing a lot of folks talking about being out there without any protective gear. So to what extent are they part of how you assess whether the city has what it needs and when it will be at this April 5th sort of shortage point?

Mayor: The – I want to be really clear and I understand there is real fear and anxiety among all of our public servants. And we're all getting used to a new reality. So I think some of our public servants, even some our first responders are trying to figure out when you're supposed to use what form or protection when you're not, et cetera. The message I've given the Police Commissioner; Fire Commissioner is whatever they need, if we have it, they're going to get it. And I think I've said publicly with major shipments of masks, for example, were presented to the PD when they needed them. We sent the last one I think was half a million masks a few days back. Whatever our first responders need, they're going to get whatever we have. But I know of at this point, no shortages in getting those protective gear to our first responders. I do think we have to constantly make sure that each and every one of them are getting the information about when to use them, and when not to use them, and we have to make sure that it's being done properly. So, the answer to your question is yes, we are taking into account the whole picture. The first consideration you'll understand is to ensure that we can save lives. In our hospital system. The measure Bridget, and I've said this very bluntly, publicly, constantly, and in the conversations with everyone in Washington. I have a very simple sad, painful but common sense measure – are we going to be able to save every life that we can save? We know that our doctors, all our nurses, our medical personnel are working nonstop and we are all able to honestly acknowledge that sometimes despite their very best efforts with all the equipment they need with all the supplies, sometimes they cannot save a life. And we mourn when that happens.

I'm worried about a life they could save and they would have saved if that ventilator had been there in time or if that equipment had been available, that supply had been available. That's the standard I'm holding. Right now, from everything I've seen from, from Mitch, from Oxiris, from every part of our team and the amount of supplies being delivered. There are clearly enough supplies, enough equipment in New York City to meet that standard this week and next week. After Sunday, April 5th. I'm not yet ready to guarantee as we go into that following week that we'll be able to say that across the board. Just being fairly, bluntly honest. And I want everyone in Washington to hear this point. And that's the reason I'm making the appeals I'm making.

Now help keeps coming in from some places we expect and sometimes from places we don't expect, and that's very good news. And if at any point that estimate changes and improves, I'm going to be saying that too. It's going to be constant updates, but I needed to give everyone a clear understanding of – we need help by that date. We need to make sure that we have in place the ability to respond on a much greater level. You heard what Mitch said, I thought it was very painful but poignant that what's happening in Elmhurst today is going to be happening in a number of other hospitals starting next week. So that's what we're bracing for. But we're going to of course include our first responders and everything. But the first thing on our minds is making sure that we can actually save every life with everything we have.

Moderator: Julia Marsh is up next. Julia.?

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor,

Mayor: Hi, Julia.

Question: So just back to the personal protective equipment. You know, this morning on ABC, George Stephanopoulos showed you the Post cover with the nurses wearing trash bags. We've heard similar reports of lack of supply that Elmhurst, the nurses at Jacobi are having a press conference tomorrow morning saying they don't have proper equipment. You said that we have the supplies this week and next yet you're, you know, you're kind of wondering why maybe the hospital management isn't pushing it out to the nurses and you yourself are going to push out millions of pieces of equipment over the next two days. So can you just kind of explain like why you and other officials are saying there's plenty of equipment and yet all the frontline workers are saying there isn't.

Mayor: Yeah, Julia, respectfully, I think you, you often ask very intelligent questions, but I want to just watch you on that last “everyone is saying there isn't” You mentioned three instances. I take them all to heart. I know all those folks are going through a lot. We would never belittle anyone or underestimate the challenge, the fear, the difficulty that people are going through, when they get to the point of reaching out to you or any other reporter or having a photo go out, that represents real pain and real fear. I get that. That's a different question than whether a huge amount of supplies had been sent to each hospital. I want to understand that better for sure. When it comes to Health + Hospitals, Mitch is the person that can always answer that. And when it comes to the rest of the health care system, Oxiris works on that all the time to understand if those hospitals are getting everything that we've sent, if there's some issue of why they may not be reaching everyone who needs them, or is there something happening internally? Is there some miscommunication? Is there – I don't know the answer. I don't want to assume the answer, but I do know what we've taken in and I do know what we've sent out. And what I want us all to understand is that we will absolutely try to get to the bottom of any situation where our health care workers feel there's a problem. We have to take that on face value and believe it and act on it. But you know, we've also got to acknowledge, if the materials had been sent out. Then there's something happening somewhere along the line that needs to be addressed. Mitch, you and I have talked about the situation at Elmhurst. I know there's tremendous fear, anxiety. I know a lot of those really noble health care workers were shocked by just a sudden change of events.

The ventilators is a good example. There was a real desire, a real fear about the lack of ventilators. We kept sending more and more shipments. But I think it's important for you to this point, because again, we can't speak as well for Sinai West or for Jacobi. Well, I guess you could speak to Jacobi but I can't speak for Sinai West, but in the case of Elmhurst, could you just clarify this point of what you know personally – and you visited – about the supplies that had been sent?

President Katz: Yes, sir. And I do think that it's a very emotionally difficult issue and that's why communication is so hard. In the public system, we have not run out of protective equipment at any point in this pandemic. You've been very clear though that we do need to be resupplied to go beyond April 5th. I think a lot of the concern that providers are saying is they know that this is going to go on for weeks. They know the supply that we have and I think they are calling out to say we don't have enough supplies. They don't mean we don't have enough supplies at this moment. They mean we're not going to have enough supplies to get through this unless there are major restocking. So, I think distinguishing between, do you mean we don't have enough supplies this minute, or do you mean we're not going to have enough supplies as part of this?

People are used to a previous day where you could just open a supply closet at Health + Hospitals and there would be as much equipment as you could possibly need. Right. That's very different than now where we keep the supply to several days’ worth. I think the other complicating issue that we need to be transparent about in the way you have is that as we've learned more about the virus our advice has changed. And we try within that change to also recognize that our providers who are on the front line and are doing different work have different arrangements that make them feel more comfortable. So, for example, in some settings in the emergency room, we would say that the appropriate PPE necessary on your face is a surgical mask. But if you feel more comfortable wearing an N95 mask, we're good with that. And we give you an N95 mask, you wear it during the day, which is actually safer because you're not taking it on and taking it off and you wear a surgical mask over it. So, without going into all of the various details, I’ll just say that as a way to say it's complicated and it's been changing. And I think that's a second feature of why this has been so difficult.

Mayor: And to both doctors – Mitch just said something really important. So again, to all my colleagues in the media and all the New Yorkers who are out there watching this and listening to this, we used to be in a time of plenty. I mean, let's just be honest about how much of a shock to our system this is. We're Americans, we're New Yorkers, we're used to an abundance that most of the world still can't dream of. And that was true weeks ago only. And Mitch is saying something very important. The supplies that used to be plentiful and people would use them, and doctors explain just how often people would throw away different supplies after even a single use. And now there are cases where we're saying you need to wash them and reuse them, or whatever is the specific guidance to keep the – extend the life of a certain product for a day or multiple days. And that's been a shock to people. It used to be, you know, that they just knew they could use anything and throw it away. In previous generations, people had – you know, any possession they had, they had to hang onto and try and preserve and people had very few possessions. In our time, we're used to a culture where you could get anything you want anytime and it's going to replace instantly. So, I think that's as a one of many, many things going on here. But doctors, could you just explain, because I think it would help our colleagues in the media, which of these items can be reused and what the basic guidances in the health care community about how you do that?

President Katz: Sure. So again, because I know Mr. Mayor, how you value transparency, we don't ask anybody to wash anything.

Mayor: I used a bad word, Mitch. I'm sorry, that's a layman's word. Let me rephrase, I’ll let you used the right word.

President Katz: So, what the issue is that an N95 masks, which is, right now, our most protective device and it has been in short supply worldwide, once you put it on, if you're staying in an area where all of the patients are have COVID-19, it's okay to keep wearing that all through your shift. And what you do is you wear a surgical mask over it to make sure that it doesn't get splattered. And if you do feel it any time that it did get splattered, then we would want you to change it. But it's perfectly safe to wear that N95 mask all day long on your shift as long as it's not soiled.

Mayor: Any other examples Mitch? Or, Oxiris?

Commissioner Barbot: I could add to what Mitch said because I agree 100 percent with him. The other thing is that we have – we want to emphasize that the way in which this virus is spread is through droplets spreads and so that there are places and times when an N95 is certainly indicated, you know, high risk procedures like suctioning someone who may be on a ventilator. And then there are other parts of providing care where a surgical mask is equally protected. And so part of this evolving nature has been spending the time to talk with staff and showing them what the evidence is and what the evidence isn't, answering questions that may come up, but really keeping front and center the fact that we want to make sure that all of our health care workers are maximally protected and that's why we, and especially the Mayor, have been so forceful in asking the feds and demanding of the feds that we get the supplies that we need because certainly as the doctors and the nurses are sounding the alarms and the hospitals were doing similarly that may need ongoing supplies because we're at the very beginning of what will be a very challenging can weeks and months ahead.

Mayor: I just want to – one last quick second, we'll keep moving after that. Doctors, besides the N95, is there any other example of reuse among the sort of crucial we keep talking about?

President Katz: Yes, sir. Some of our health care workers have chosen to wear helmets that come with filters and this is a kind of protective equipment that someone owns themselves, that is to say it's going to be there as for a period of as long as a month and it has air filters. It looks a little bit like you're wearing a Darth Vader mask, if people want a visual. But it's one of the pieces of equipment that people are allowed to reuse for a long period.

Mayor: Thank you very much. Go ahead, Olivia.

Moderator: Jeff Coltin is up next. Jeff?

Question: Yeah, sure. Right. Mr. Mayor, this City did a pilot program this week of [inaudible] for seniors –

Mayor: We lost you for a minute, Jeff. Start again –

Question: Sure, I've heard that the City did a pilot program this week for a meal delivery for seniors, but I'm hearing a lot of complaints about seniors being left off the list among some other issues. Is that still planning to go to a citywide on Monday?

Mayor: Jeff, I need to get our folks to update you on that. I spoke to our Commissioner for the Aging, Lorraine Cortes Vazquez, just a few days ago about all of the efforts we're trying to do to expand access to meals for everyone and for seniors in particular, because, again, we know a lot of people are really being challenged now in terms of food supply. But I don't have the specifics on what's going on with that and we'll make sure – in terms of the pilot, we'll make sure to get those to you right away. Everything in the area of food now is going to be not just what each agency does, what DFTA does, what Human Resource Administration does, what the traditional food banks do. But now, again, under the leadership of Kathryn Garcia, there's going to be a much bigger strategic look at food supply and getting food to folks who don't have the money to pay for it in the weeks ahead on a much bigger scale. And we'll have a lot more to say on that as that plan develops.

Moderator: Bobby Cuza is up next. Bobby?

Question: Hey, guys. This question is for Dr. Barbot and maybe Dr. Katz also wants to chime in. There's been this, sort of, experimental treatment that has come to light in the last couple days of using blood plasma from those who have recovered from the disease and giving it to those who are hospitalized and, sort of, in a serious, or maybe even critical stage of the disease. I believe it started Mount Sinai. I'm wondering what the City's view is. Are we even participation on this? I don't know if the City is involved. And what is the message to those who have recovered? Should they be looking at going and donating blood – and why or why not?

Commissioner Barbot: So, I'll start and I’ll let Dr. Katz weigh in. I'm not familiar with this particular instance. What I will say is that, again, we're learning new things every day and there are certainly new experimental treatments using established medications, but this is a particular area that I have to admit I haven't heard, but I will certainly look into it.

President Katz: I can provide a little bit more information because our hospital is participating in doing this. The basic idea is that part of how we get over this virus is that our bodies create antibodies and it's been found that those antibodies seem to help some people to get over this disease more rapidly. The way that – it wouldn't be someone giving a blood donation. It's a specific procedure that would be done at a blood donation center, but where we harvest those antibodies and then give it to another patient. And the city hospitals are part of a group of hospitals in the city that are pursuing this. I think it's something that you will hear about more in the coming weeks.

Moderator: Last two. Jennifer, from the AP. Jennifer?

Question: Hi. Can you hear me?

Moderator: Yes, we can.

Question: Thank you very much. I'll be switching back to the topic of 9-1-1 calls. The EMS unit I believe was reporting the calls hits something like 7,100 yesterday, the highest level since 9/11, perhaps. I’m wondering what you knew about that and whether it was having any effect on response times and whether there was a plan to reinforce capacity since these calls will probably be up for a while.

Mayor: Yeah. Jennifer, thank you for the question. So, the bottom line is that we know – we've been saying that the call volume has been going up. It's a real serious issue. But also, we know – and we've talked about the staffing levels at FDNY in general, and Commissioner Nigro has been very confident he can keep ensuring that he has the staffing he needs to respond. So, I can get you the exact – our team will get you the exact statistics on what we know about response time so far. I think the central question is, can we handle a greatly increased call volume? Yes. Will we have the personnel? Yes. We can keep making adjustments. You know, all of our first responder agencies are used to making adjustments in real time to keep staffing levels high. We are in a crisis. The crisis is clearly going to have an impact. Our job is to either ensure that it doesn't affect response time or affects it as little as possible, but I want to be real about the fact that if we are ensuring, you know, we can get the person out where we need it to the maximum time possible, but we have a constantly growing volume, of course that's going to create challenges. And it gets back to the answer I gave earlier about the reality we're going to experience in our hospitals, in our ICU’s – it's going to be different than what we're used to and it's going to be a challenge and we'll throw everything we got at it. But, again, we cannot do everything alone. We are going to need a certain amount of outside help in general to keep this whole thing moving and keep people safe.

Moderator: Last call, Jeff Mays. Jeff?

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, you gave this very ominous date of April 5th. Is there any way other than what you explained – do you know exactly what that is going to look like if the city doesn't get what it needs? Does that mean hospitals will have to turn people away? Will there not be protective gear? You know, what exactly – and maybe Dr. Katz can weigh in as well. What exactly does that look like?

Mayor: Okay, Jeff – no, I appreciate the question. I want, I want to flip the question other way to make sure you understand what our game plan is. By being honest about the threat we face, it is not to us, you know, that we are going to leave that reality the way it is. In fact, the goal is to not allow that day to come and be a day where we run out of supplies. It is to, in fact, ensure that we get the maximum help we need from the federal government, from all other sources and everything we can create here in New York City. It's to be clear – it's an act of clarifying that, you know, 10 days, including today, to brace ourselves for a new and more challenging reality and do everything we can to get ready and to get ahead of it and to stave off the problems that I'm addressing. So, I’ve got to be really clear, there's still a lot of time on the clock to get ahead of it and we intend to. But look, I think the simple definition – I don't want to paint pictures of horrible things happening when we're trying to ensure they don't happen. I think the simplest way to say it, Jeff, is we don't want to have a situation where someone dies who didn't have to die. And that means we want a ventilator available where it's needed every single time. We want to make sure that every health care professional has the protection they need and the confidence they can go to work and have the protection they need. We want to make sure there's sufficient personnel at each of these ICU’s, each of these hospitals that need it. That's the crucial issue, is to make sure that we can hit all those milestones and make sure people are safe.

So, you know, I could try and paint you a picture of what if everything went wrong but it's just not the way we operate and I'm not going to do that. If it started to happen in any way, shape, or form, if we felt things were clearly not working, we would tell you bluntly. But I want to be clear about there is still time to prepare and get ahead of that date, and, in fact, get it to be a very different day, a much later day in April when we might be facing these challenges. If we get the help we need.

Very good. Thank you, everybody, and we will give you more updates soon. Take care.

2020-03-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everyone. We've got a lot to go over here and we're all feeling very heavy hearts as we deal with such an extraordinary challenge and we think about the New Yorkers that we've lost and we think about what's ahead and I'm going to go over a number of things now that update you. Understanding the challenge but also understanding that New Yorkers will get through this together and it’s hard to explain that balance sometimes that we're dealing with something absolutely profoundly different than anything we've dealt with before, extraordinarily difficult and invisible and confusing, but we will get through this together. That is something that comes back to just the pure strength of this place and our people. But in the meantime, we will go through a really tough, tough journey and it all comes back to, as always, needing to work with the federal government in particular to get the help we need.

And I'll give you some updates starting there. There was confusion yesterday obviously when President Trump mentioned the concept of quarantine. I think a lot of us were confused, thought it was something that would be in so many ways counterproductive and obviously unfair to so many people. What ended up happening was a CDC travel advisory, something much different – not a lockdown, something much more consistent with what we've been actually saying and doing in the city and state already, which is telling people to stay home unless they have an essential reason to go somewhere. So, again, that threat of a quarantine turned into a very different CDC travel advisory working with the federal government, working with the governors of the tri state areas. Now, I spoke to the president this morning and in truth, I did not want to discuss with him the travel advisory that had been settled in a way that, again, I think we can live with.

What I wanted to talk to him about was ventilators. What I wanted to talk to him about was medical personnel and I went over with him again, the reality in New York City, the fact that we have until next Sunday, April 5th, to get the reinforcements we need, particularly when it comes to ventilators. In fact, I asked the federal administration to get us additional ventilators even earlier. My request to them is to get 400 more ventilators in by April 1st because we've seen such movement with this disease, we have to be ready for all eventualities. So, my hope is that we'll see some of the results we've seen previously in the last few days. And again, there's a lot we could talk about what the federal government has and hasn't done over the last two months, but in the last week we have seen some real support and I want to see it again with the 400 ventilators we'd like to get in immediately.

Then we have a lot more we're going to need by Sunday, April 5th and beyond. And certainly, the medical personnel, which I talked to the president about repeatedly and to the defense secretary and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. I think the best way for us to get a lot of that medical personnel is from the military. Everyone's been receptive. I'm waiting for specific results. But again, I will keep hoping that these very specific requests and very specific conversations will yield what New Yorkers need so that we can be safe. The fact is we remain the epicenter of this crisis nationally. A day will come when I will be able to no longer use that word and we all look forward to that word. But right now, we are the epicenter and the numbers are staggering. And again, they all represent real people, real families.

As of this morning, we were at 32,308 total cases, a stunning number. And we have lost, and this is so painful, 678 of our fellow New Yorkers. That means in the last 24 hours from this morning to Saturday morning, we lost 161 more people in this city. People of all walks of life, every kind of New Yorker. And it's so painful for everyone that we're going through this and we have to fight back with everything we've got. I want to tell you some of the stories because it's important to understand the lives of the people we've lost, and many of them were devoted to all of us and helping all of us in protecting and serving their fellow New Yorkers. And I have to say every loss, every death is painful. I feel a particular sense of loss when it's one of our public servants.
So, I want to name some of them and talk about them very briefly.

At Health + Hospitals – and Dr. Katz is here, I know he feels the same pain as we discuss the loss of some of his colleagues – we lost at Health + Hospitals, Freda Ocran. She was a psych educator at Jacobi, previously the head nurse of the psych unit, and a mom supporting her family, but also supporting her mom who lives in Africa. So, what a horrible loss for that family, that hospital, and our city. Another story of tremendous commitment to Theresa Lococo, a pediatric nurse at Kings County Hospital, serving families and children. Amazingly, she was in her 48th year of employment in our hospital system, protecting her fellow New Yorkers – 48 years, serving us, and she gave her life helping others.

We've heard of terrible losses from the MTA. Our colleagues at the MTA, we grieve with you and we're so sorry for what you're experiencing. Of course, we all heard the story of Garrett Goble, 36 years old only, had only been working at MTA for six years, out there helping to keep the city run in this crisis of fire on the train put his life in danger. And what did he do? He worked to get everyone else to safety first and then got off the train and passed away immediately after, leaves behind two young sons in his family. So sad. And someone who, again, was right there at the moment, his last moments of his life, protecting others, serving others, saving others. Also, from New York City Transit, Peter Petrassi, 21 years as a conductor. And a beautiful tribute to him was posted by his nephew, Dylan, calling him the most loving, enthusiastic man, always putting others before himself.

You see this really painful pattern here of people who just cared so much about others and we’re losing such good people. Also, Oliver Cyrus, a bus operator, 21 years at the MTA, based at the Manhattanville Bus Depot, a quiet and humble man, loved by his coworkers. We have lost to Oliver as well. And then you heard, painful loss at the NYPD. A man that worked at One Police Plaza, I mentioned yesterday – or Friday, I should say. We've now lost Detective Cedric Dixon, 23-year veteran of the NYPD, he worked in the 3-2 Precinct in Harlem. Not only a great detective, but someone that everyone who knew him knew would always be there to help other people. An electronics and tech genius who always could fix things for other people. A horrible loss for the NYPD and the city. And from the NYPD as well, Giacomina Barr-Brown, an administration assistant in the Bronx, 49 Precinct roll call office, seven years in the NYPD and the kind of person her colleagues said she lit up the room with her smile, also always there for other people. And the FDNY – we rely on the FDNY in so many ways they've lost James Villecco, auto mechanic. He's been with Fleet Services since 2014 and this is the kind of unsung hero who doesn't get the credit he deserves. This is the kind of man who keeps us safe because he kept the ambulances in good repair so they could get there to help all of us. We grieve with his family in Staten Island.

Finally, NYC & Company, they do such important work promoting New York City to the world and helping bring in all those tourists, all that investment that helps this city keep moving forward. NYC & Company has lost Hubert “Rally” Nurse. He was there for 30 years working to promote New York and share New York with the world. And now we've lost him and all of us, all of New York grieves with his family. These are examples – and it's just so painful to say that's just a small, small fraction of those we've lost. As I said, these are the people we've lost who are our colleagues in public service. And as you heard, every one of them, an amazing story of sacrifice and concern and love for their fellow New Yorker.

So, we see this crisis growing and for weeks and weeks we've been talking about getting ready for this and we have to get ready for even more. And it's not just the incredible toll this has taken on our health care system. As you've heard in recent days the number of cases is growing, it’s also having – putting a huge burden on our emergency system. I can't thank enough everyone at EMS, they're doing amazing work under the toughest circumstances. Our EMTs, our paramedics, all the officers, everyone who is doing such important work at EMS. We thank you and we feel for you because I know that the number of calls to 9-1-1 have been skyrocketing, it’s putting a huge, huge demand on EMS. Let's be clear, Commissioner Nigro will be available to speak to this later on in the question and answer. This is unprecedented.

We've never seen our EMS system get this many calls, ever. But what Commissioner Nigro is doing with his team and our Deputy Mayor for Operations, Laura Anglin, is we're making a series of very fast, intense moves to ensure that more personnel will be available for the EMS. We're going to shift personnel onto the work of EMS. We're going to come up with more ambulance shifts, additional vehicles, whatever it takes to keep serving New Yorkers who are in emergencies. We're also going to make sure that folks who don't have a pressing emergency, because we all know for years and years, folks have called 9-1-1 and most of those are true emergencies and some of them are not. Anyone who's calling and needs something else, doesn't need an ambulance but needs a different kind of help we're going to find a way to get that to them too so ambulances are never going to a place that they don't need to be. But what we have to do first and foremost is put on more personnel, more ambulances, more shifts. And we are doing that immediately so we can serve the true emergencies and there's a lot of them to make sure that New Yorkers get the help they need.

Obviously, there's been a lot of attention on the situation in our hospitals in general and in particular at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. I'm just going to give you a few quick points. Dr. Mitch Katz, here with me, will talk about Elmhurst and Health + Hospitals more specifically. But look, the bottom line is the incredibly valiant team at Elmhurst has gone through so much in the last few weeks. That's an extraordinarily effective hospital. Real professionals who have found a way to keep saving so many lives while dealing with such pain at the same time and real loss. And you can imagine how hard it is for people whose whole life is saving lives to see that sometimes there is no way to save a life, but they have been doing amazing, amazing work to save so many others. We've been sending constant reinforcement. So, 169 clinicians have been sent in recent days to Elmhurst.

That means physicians, registered nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants. 100 nurses this weekend alone. In addition, within the hospital, clinicians have been moved from outpatient activities to ICU activities. Staff from the central office of Health + Hospitals are moving in, taking on roles in terms of ICU and emergency department. We are going to keep moving personnel and getting more personnel constantly to help Elmhurst and every other hospital that needs it. This is going to be an extraordinarily tough next few weeks, but we will keep sending more and more reinforcements. And again, we have to get the good people who are there doing such tough work, we have to get them a break, we have to [inaudible] them. And this is why I want to see medical personnel come in, not just from New York City, but from all over the country, including those military and medical personnel. Because we have to give these extraordinary heroes a break at places like Elmhurst.

Also, ventilators – we have added 55 ventilators to Elmhurst over the past two weeks and we will keep adding whatever number of ventilators they need. So, this will be a nonstop effort. Across Health + Hospitals, the whole system, the 11 hospitals, 500 contract nurses have been added already, 500 more coming this week. So, we are just going to constantly, constantly reinforce. Now I want to turn to supplies and the distribution of supplies. And I've already said our first milestone is this coming Sunday, April 5th, we must shore up to get ahead of the challenges. We will start to face that following week. So, this is a race against time. We have gotten some real help. As I said, the ventilators that came in from the federal government – some are coming in from other sources. That's helpful. Incredibly helpful. We need it all. We are thankful for it all.

Yesterday we sent 1,400 ventilators out to our hospitals, to all types of hospitals. That is a huge step forward, but that number we need overall is still 15,000. So, we've made a big dent between different sources to get toward that 15,000. We have a long, long way to go. We still need to see the federal government do a lot more and more quickly. We need the Defense Production Act utilized to the maximum. We need to see a distribution system that's fast and intense. And again, I think the military must be involved. And, again, my specific request to the federal government is 400 more ventilators by April 1st to get us ready for later in the week when we expect the upturn to really intensify and we need those ventilators to be in place and ready.

In terms of personal protective equipment, PPEs, a very moving moment yesterday when the United Nations provided 250,000, a quarter million surgical masks, to the people in New York City, to our health care workers, our first responders. The United Nations, we are their home and they did something very good for their hometown with a quarter million surgical masks and we've asked them, any and all help they can provide going forward we will need it. And those masks are getting out to our hospitals right away.

Dr. Katz will speak to the overall situation, but my message to all the doctors, the nurses, the hospital staff starting with all our colleagues at Health + Hospitals, our public hospitals, but to all of those out there, the voluntary hospitals, the big hospital systems, the independent hospitals – we are all in this together. We're going to go and work to get you every conceivable supply you need and get it to you quick. We have to protect our health care workers and that's what we're working on every single day. And we can only – all of us who are not health care workers can only imagine what you all are going through. We have to be there for you and get you all the help including the additional personnel immediately. That's our job.

In terms of a health capacity. We're all really moved by the fact that the USNS Comfort is arriving tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to greeting the men and women, the medical professionals, the sailors, everyone who is making this possible. I want to thank our colleagues in government at the Economic Development Corporation who played a crucial role for the Comfort to dock and be able to add immense hospital capacity for the city instantly upon docking. Well, they had to be able to dock and they weren't going to be able to dock unless the dock was dredged to allow for a ship of this size.

The operation was supposed to take two weeks. The folks at EDC, working with the Army Corps of Engineers and the State Department of Environmental Conservation that got the job done in eight days. And so, the Comfort will be arriving tomorrow and will right away be making a difference in this city. And we are so, so grateful to the Navy, to the military that this new help will be arriving in our city. Also, very important, in Central Park, we're going to be using every place we need to use to help people. Mount Sinai Hospital, working with a relief organization named Samaritan's Purse, is creating a 68-bed field hospital. So, this is the kind of thing that you will see now as this crisis develops and deepens. The partnership with Central Park Conservancy, our Parks Department, and the Mayor's Office – we all worked together to get this done with Mount Sinai and Samaritan's Purse. Going up now in the East Meadow, should be operational by Tuesday.

Some other quick updates for you and then I'll turn to Dr. Katz and then we'll go to questions. There had been a concern about those incarcerated, update, in terms of our jail system. As of last night, over 650 inmates had been released, again, working carefully with the State of New York and the DAs and being very, very mindful of public safety while also being mindful of deep humanitarian concern. Over 650 released. I can update you and say that since this crisis began, our jail population is down by about 860, not just because of the releases, but because we've seen falling crime and, and lower arrests. Want to thank the DAs and the State for their collaboration and cooperation working all together. And the State I think made an important decision related to those on parole and working through the right approach there. I just want to commend the State for that.

There’s been concerned about our juvenile detainees. A number of actions have been taken. Over the last two weeks, there's been a significant reduction in our juvenile detainee population, there's been a 67 percent reduction in one category, 53 percent reduction in another category. So, when you combine that, obviously we've been able to reduce very, very substantially – it was not a huge population to begin with. We'll get to the exact numbers, but more than half of those who had been detained over the last two weeks have been released, again, while always making sure there is follow-up and monitoring to protect safety. Want to thank our Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, want to thank the Law Department, the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, and the Administration for Children's Services for working together to ensure that was done properly and quickly.

Related to transportation – a couple of things. Staten Island Ferry, we had made a substantial reduction in service because ridership was down so intensely. We have seen ridership continue to drop, it is now down 86 percent from the same time period last year. As a result of the lower ridership and the need to conserve resources and a number of factors, we're going to be moving to hourly service on the Staten Island Ferry. That will be 24/7 but it will be hourly service. There's so few people using the ferry now compared to what we normally have that we had to make this move. It will go into effect at midnight tonight.

And then related to our subways. We've gotten some reports of crowded subway cars despite obviously a huge, huge reduction in subway usage. Obviously, there's been service reductions as well. We've had some times where there was a service problem and that led to – in other words service had been delayed and that led to some crowding. We are going to work together, the MTA and the NYPD, to go and do spot checks and immediately intervene if we see any subway cars that are crowded. Want to ask all New Yorkers again if I – that should not be something you see very often. And if you're on the subway, it means of course to begin with, you're an essential worker or you're doing something essential under the rules. There obviously should be a whole lot of New Yorkers who have no reason to take the subway at this point.

But if you do have an actually a central reason to be on the subway and you see a crowded car, we want it reported immediately to 3-1-1, so the NYPD and MTA can act on it. And if you're an individual in the subway and you see a crowded car, please avoid that car. Please go to a different part of the train or a wait until another train comes. It's crucial that we avoid any crowded cars. Social distancing means everywhere, including in our subways. I'll finish up and then a couple of words in Spanish – on a very, very important topic, which is the direct relief that New York City needs from the federal government. I had several calls today and over the last few days with Senator Schumer who is not only our Senator, of course, but is the Democratic leader in the US Senate. I spoke as well this morning with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin.

The two important topics. The first is regarding the third stimulus just passed, ensuring that the resources devoted to New York City could be accessed immediately. That's $1.4 billion so we can keep providing essential services to New Yorkers. I'm very satisfied based on the conversations with Senator Schumer and Secretary Mnuchin that we will have access to that money very quickly and under rules that will be very usable and flexible. So that's good news. But I immediately spoke to both about the need for the fourth stimulus, for action to be taken in the month of April by the Congress to provide real and immediate relief to New York City and New York State, given the vast new expenses that we are incurring to help people, to save people, to protect people. We must get additional support. We all know all parts of government are losing a huge amount of the revenue we depend on to provide services to people.

The Congress, the president have to act to keep New York City and New York State whole. It's the right thing to do morally. It's the right thing to do to protect people. And anyone who wants to see a recovery – you're not going to have recovery if the nation's largest city and one of our largest states cannot do our work and are not going to be solvent, we need that support. So, I spoke to them about that and I feel, in addition to the conversation last week with a Speaker Pelosi, I feel hopeful that additional help will be coming.

Finally, just to say we're having a strange experience, all of us would go out in so many parts of the city and see something we've never seen before or only once in a while during a blizzard or some very exceptional event. We see a lot of empty streets, a lot of empty sidewalks. I’m sure it feels strange. It feels strange to me. I'm sure it feels strange to so many of you – remember that that's a sign that New Yorkers are taking the instruction seriously, that they are doing the right thing. The vast, vast majority of New Yorkers are doing the right thing. The vast, vast majority of New Yorkers are practicing social distancing, are really only going out when they absolutely need to and are staying in otherwise. And I really want to thank New Yorkers, all of you, for the way you're handling an incredibly tough crisis. Again, we will get through this together, it will not be easy, but we will get through this together – quickly in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I want to turn to the head of our Health + Hospital system. The men and women under his command have been doing extraordinary work and he has been doing extraordinary work keeping the largest public health system in America running in the midst of the biggest public health crisis we've had probably in a century in this country. I want to thank him for his leadership and his spirit and for the great work of the people that he, every day, commands. Dr. Mitch Katz, CEO of Health + Hospitals.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for recognizing the amazing heroes that are working every day at Health + Hospitals as well as the private nonprofit hospitals throughout New York City. It is extremely difficult work. People know that the vast majority of people who are COVID positive, who get the virus do just fine. 80 percent of people don't need hospital care. Of the 20 percent who need care, only five percent of the total need ICU care. But imagine that the other way – you're a doctor or a nurse at the hospital and what you see is patient after patient coming in critically ill and your actions are determining whether that person has all of the medical care they need. And our staff are performing so well under very difficult conditions. Our emergency rooms are about twice as filled as usual. Our intensive care units are about three times as large as usual and still our staff often using new equipment, working with new colleagues who have never been in that hospital before. People are learning together. People are rising to the challenge. It's extremely difficult work, but they are doing it. I want to be clear that everyone who has needed a ventilator has gotten a ventilator, that people who need the protective equipment have gotten the protective equipment. But there is tremendous anxiety about the coming weeks and that's why we are so grateful to you, Mr. Mayor for advocating for our health care workers to make sure that they have the equipment that they need, both the equipment in the sense of ventilators to save lives as well as the equipment to protect them. We know that there's a lot of fear that that equipment is going to run out and we're so grateful to you for your advocacy efforts. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Dr. Katz. Okay, we are going to go to questions and please let me hear the name and the outlet. Go ahead.

Moderator: Hi, just a quick note at the top. We'll ask everyone to limit themselves to just one question in an effort to get to as many outlets as possible. Also, just a reminder that we have Dr. Barbot, Police Commissioner Shea, Fire Department Commissioner Nigro on the phone today. With that, I will start with Todd from AM New York.

Question: Okay. Mr. Mayor, Dr. Barbot, I'm interested in finding out – with the growing loss of life from coronavirus, can you guys speak to what is being done to accommodate the influx of bodies of people we've lost? The relationship with the funeral homes and whether or not there’s any risk to people handling the bodies, or even the loved ones passing on COVID-19 after people have died.

Mayor: Todd, it's a painful topic to say the least. Dr. Barbot can talk about the safety measures in place and the concerns if any precautions need to be taken. I want to say that, look, I'm [inaudible] keep, whenever this topic comes up, I’m going to keep it very broad and very brief. We have the ability to deal with this very, very tragic part of this reality. We have gotten a lot of support from the federal government to make sure we had what we need to deal with it all. I can tell you, I'm not going to go into detail and my colleagues can get you more detail after this press conference, but we have what we need to deal with an absolutely tragic situation. Our job is now to focus on what we need to do to save lives. Dr. Barbot, do you want to speak about how precautions are being taken?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, sir. Mr. Mayor, and I want to just to echo what you've said in terms of all of our efforts thus far, really being geared at reducing the spread of this virus and giving the health care system an opportunity to absorb the number of individuals that are unfortunately stricken with COVID-19. With regards to COVID-19 and people who have deceased because of it, there is no indication at this point we'll time based on my experience from other countries, based on the science that has been published, that there is any risk to individuals from this respiratory virus. I want to remind you that it's a virus that's spread by droplets and after someone is deceased, there is no risk. We at the Health Department are very focused on working with you know, homes and ensuring that as one of our essential services, our burial desk is working 24 hours a day to help meet the needs of families that have unfortunately lost someone to COVID-19.

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah, thank you, Mayor. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on what you want to see from the fourth stimulus. Do you have a dollar figure in mind and what kinds of things that funding would go toward?

Mayor: Yes, Shant, the – and this is a conversation – look – and I'm always grateful when our federal officials are responsive. Secretary Mnuchin was very responsive. Obviously, on the legislative side, I've spoken to Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer, they've been extraordinarily responsive. There's no question in my mind at this point that a fourth stimulus bill is coming and coming relatively soon. I spoke to as a Senator Gillibrand about this as well and everyone's saying the same thing and that's a very encouraging sign. Our delegation, I spoke to the entire congressional delegation a few days ago. Obviously, Congressman Jeffries is very high ranking in the House leadership as well. Everyone is agreeing that another stimulus bill is coming soon. We have to ensure that that stimulus bill reflects what's happening now, not just in New York, but increasingly tragically all over the country. And you have noticed coronavirus doesn't discriminate, it is now in all 50 states – red states, blue states, big and small. The next stimulus needs to replace the lost revenue that cities and states have lost as a result of coronavirus. There is no other viable path to making up the kind of revenue we've lost: billions upon billions of dollars very quickly, more to come unfortunately. While we're trying to keep essential services going, and I want to remind everyone we're – anything that's about saving lives right now, money's no object. We're going to do everything and anything to shore up and strengthen our hospitals to support our first responders. Whatever it takes to save lives, that costs a lot of money and it is the right way to use money. But if you combine all the huge new expenditures with all the loss of revenue and we have to provide the basics every single day, we still have to fight crime and make sure the garbage is picked up and everything else that the city does. I think it should be literally replacing the lost revenue and funding the additional expenses that were incurred because of COVID-19. And that should be for all states, all cities. But this time instead of a bill that treats everyone, like there's no differences in the reality, this bill must reflect where the actual epicenter has been and ensure that New York City and New York State are truly whole, not just a token amount, but are truly whole.

Moderator: Next, we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. You said on Friday that you were considering fines for social distance and violators and you were going to make a decision this weekend. What is the decision to stand on that? And relatedly, when you say NYPD is doing spot checks of subway cars, what are they checking for exactly? The MTA is determining the number of cars being run, right?

Mayor: But the point is, obviously, NYPD is in the subways, always. And the instruction, in addition to everything else that the NYPD does for safety in the subways, is to go out and look for any instance where there's a crowded train car and immediately clear it. So, when we say spot checks, it's not just watch and wave, you know. It means intervene, clear out that car, hold up that train, get people spread out immediately. Do not allow any crowding. And obviously the information is crucial to understand why it's happening and what adjustments MTA has to make.

On the use of fines, I believe, and we set it with the religious institutions – very small number, I want to emphasize there was a very, very small number of very small churches and synagogues that we were concerned about on Friday. Thankful this weekend, we did not see much of that activity. I think they got the message. I authorized fines and closing buildings if needed. I certainly do authorize the use of fines in parks and playgrounds if needed. Again, what we're going to do to begin as we've been doing is – and the weather has been such that I haven't been too many people out, but all of our enforcement officers haven been giving warnings, have been educating. There's been loudspeakers telling people the update, all that. Now it's as simple as this: if someone is told by an officer, disperse, keep moving, you're not distanced and they don't follow the direct instruction from officer or they say they're doing it and then they'd come back right away, I'm comfortable at this point that they will be fined. My understanding is the fines are in the range of $250 to $500. That obviously be, you know, a violation of summons that would be provided. I don't want to see that happen. Erin, I want to just let all New Yorkers know that what we're trying to do is say: you've been warned and warned and warned again, now, if an officer comes up to you, if someone wearing an official city, a uniform official city identification comes up and says, move along, disperse, et cetera, if you ignore that order, they're going to say, if you ignore it, we're going to have to fine you. They're going to give people every chance to listen. And if anyone doesn't listen, then they deserve a fine at this point. And I don't want to fine people when so many folks are going through economic distress, but if they haven't gotten the message by now and they don't get the message when an enforcement officer's staring them in the face saying, I don't want to fine you, but if you don't change what you're doing, I'm going to have to, well, you know, that person then deserves the fine. So, we are going to proceed with that as part of how we intensify our enforcement.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: Mr. Mayor, this is Sydney Pereira with Gothamist. I was just calling to see if you could elaborate on whether you're reevaluating closing parks and playgrounds or increasing the scrutiny on congregating and those types of open spaces?

Mayor: Sydney, here's where we are and there'll be obviously an ongoing conversation with the State and the City Council, but at this moment what I wanted, because we've had a little bit of an aberrant situation with the weather but it's very much connected to what I just said. If we see, and I know this from talking to our Police Commissioner who's with us, who's – constantly he and I are comparing notes on what he's seeing, his officers are seeing and obviously what Parks Department’s seeing. Any place where we see any consistent violation of the new standards, we will simply do a series of direct things. If it is, for example, a soccer field, a tennis court, a basketball court, any place where we see people ignoring the rules, we'll just take the equipment out immediately. We've already started to do that with all three of those categories. And I think people will get the message very quickly. If you keep doing things that are inappropriate. There's just, we're taking it all out. You don't have to be able to do it anymore.

In terms of playgrounds, again, we have not seen much noncompliance. If we see any noncompliance, we'll begin by shutting that playground down. If we see broader noncompliance in the coming days at any point, I may give the order to shut all playgrounds. But what I am trying to do is do this a little bit in stages to see what we might be able to keep open, because I'm really feeling how much New Yorkers have been deprived in these last weeks and will be deprived for quite a while of so many of the things that we used to have. I'd like to keep something available for people. But I have to be pretty fast to say if I see and if our police see, if our enforcement agencies see a pattern of non-compliance anywhere, we will take action on those individual sites. If it becomes a bigger pattern, I mean literally over a matter of days we will be watching everything and acting in each situation, we see a bigger pattern, we will take an even bigger action.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, Mayor de Blasio, hope you're doing well. I wanted to thank the City's Health Department and your administration for releasing that map on Friday, but I'm curious if you could release the raw data because as the map stands now it's sort of meaningless to not know the raw numbers and it actually, like you said yourself on Friday, it actually might confuse people. Would you take into consideration releasing more of that information? Because I know that [inaudible] the city has it if they can produce that map? Thank you for considering.

Mayor: Thank you, Katie. Yes. And you heard correctly the map showed something but it's a little hard in some ways to get the true meaning out of it. And we are looking for measures that we think are more give you a fuller picture, give you better, more consistent information. The more we can determine will be actually consistent, accurate that we can put out. We do want to put out more. Dr. Barbot, obviously with the caveat that we understand the imperfection of that map, if you're willing to put out the raw data, that's fine with me, but you know more about the details than I do.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah. Mr. Mayor, I appreciate your remarks and we're all committed to transparency here. And as we've seen before, a lot of this is evolving quickly and we want to be able to produce consistent maps that have reliable, accurate data on a daily basis. And so, we're definitely working hard at ensuring that the next tranche of data that we release, are data that can you give folks a more granular picture of what's happening at the city level.

Mayor: Okay, and we'll follow up. Our team will follow up with you, Katie, on the specifics.

Moderator: Next, we have Myles from NBC New York.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Good afternoon to you. I'm looking to get some information regarding the Police Department. They yesterday said that they would do some kind of work from home, reasonable accommodation. I think that it came in [inaudible] more information on that.

Mayor: Dermot, are you with us?

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: I am. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep.

Commissioner Shea: So, since this unprecedented time really kicked off three weeks to a month ago, we've been staggering our workforce, working from home. We have thousands of employees working from home as long as they could do those jobs and still operate at a high level with the Police Department delivering functions. We've given discretion to our frontline commanders in terms of accommodating people, particularly people over 50 years of age with vulnerabilities such as this disease seems to strike harder. So, I think that, that we've been consistent in that we're continuing to look out for the safety of our employees. We did put a message out, already have had some people contact us seeking in a combination. So, we're going to work with not only then with the unions to make sure that our workforce is to safe as it possibly can be.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Craig from the Post.

Question: I'm wondering, Commissioner if you can update on the staffing levels in the NYPD and just with that, if we could – what is the timeframe once an officer is getting a confirming case that they're going back to work? What's the guidance there?

Commissioner Shea: So we can get back to you in terms of – from a medical district – has to do with whether you're tested positive or not, whether you have fever or not, whether you're going to have a fever and you're off medicine, not when the symptoms started. So, there's a series of different protocols that are medical professionals go through. I can tell you that in the last two days we began to have people for the first time that had tested COVID-positive, now returning to work, and we anticipate that that number now as we move forward is going to significantly grow, just as, as this situation matures. When we first started to see the sick numbers grow was roughly on March 12th. So, as you plan out from that day and you'd look at periods of whether it's two or three weeks after an individual goes sick, we know that those numbers are going to continually grow. We're looking at both sides of the spectrum quite frankly. What is the current sick rate as, as officers is still becoming infected and when is that beginning to apply? Tell as well as forecasting out two to three weeks and, and when did those, when is it going to be a person on the other side?

Where we stand as of this morning is – we have – we're closing in on 5,000 members currently out sick, and we have I would anticipate by tomorrow morning close to 900 test positive for COVID.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Mayor: Jeff. How you doing?

Question: Good. How are you? Can you elaborate on the number of lives lost over the past 24 hours? And I don't know if Dr. Barbot can maybe talk about the projections from that number. It seems to be increasing pretty rapidly, every day.

Mayor: Yeah. Jeff, you know, it's really, really painful and troubling and yes, it is growing. It's been growing. It keeps growing. And you know, when, I hate to say it again, but it's just true. April will be worse than March. And I fear that May could even be worse than April. Like we've got to get in our minds against all that rhetoric of, you know, everyone get back to work and we'll be done by Easter, that's just not true. We're going to be in for weeks of this. When exactly peaks and starts to go back down. I think, you know, different projections say different things, but the worst is definitely ahead of us and that's why we are, you know, intensely working to lay in the kind of personnel supplies, equipment, everything to try and save the maximum number of lives. But even with that, we're going to see, you know, a really, really painful number of people lost in this crisis. Oxiris, do you want to speak to that?

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly. So that's far from the individuals who have passed as a result of COVID-19. The vast majority have been above the age of 75 and/or have had chronic underlying illnesses such as emphysema, diabetes, immunocompromised, et cetera. And with regards to the numbers that we are anticipating. You know, I think at this point, as we've said earlier, all of our efforts have been really directed at reducing the number of individuals who can track the illness and becomes severely affected by it. But the reality is that if we think about sort of a typical school season on a yearly basis, New York loses rough to be 1,000 to 2,000 people because of influenza. I think that we are on the scale having many more people pass because of COVID-19. And so, you know, right now it's challenging to give an accurate number in terms of projection because every day that New Yorkers adhere to the social distancing is another day that you buy to healthcare delivery system an opportunity to meet the needs of those that are affected by probate.

So, I think, you know, we're definitely on track for having more deaths than we would typically see in a flu season, and part of the challenge there is that it will happen in a shorter amount of time. And as the Mayor started off this press conference, you know these are unprecedented days and days that are going to be challenging for every New Yorker. And it's really a time for us to dig deep into how it is that we come together, though we may physically be distanced, you need to really dig deep and come together emotionally and spiritually and be there for one another.

Mayor: Amen.

Moderator: We'll take two more. Next up is Samantha, from 1010 WINS.

Question: Yes, hi. This question is both for the Mayor and the Police Commissioner. Has there been an increase in domestic violence calls with the lockdown? And for women or victims of domestic violence who may be afraid because the courts are closed and, you know, services may be limited, are there resources for them? Do have a message for those people who may need help?

Mayor: Samantha, I really appreciate the question. It's something we've been talking about that we're worried about, what happens in a crisis atmosphere like this and, you know, who may be vulnerable at a time like this. We have to make sure that anyone who might be a victim of domestic violence is protected even in a crisis like this. So, the NYPD, and the Commissioner will speak to it, I mean, they've done more and more over the years to try to disrupt the horrible, horrible situation with domestic violence and to follow through when they have any sign of that danger, including the recurrence from previous cases. So, that work will continue no matter what else is going on here. And we need to make sure if anyone feels in danger, and that's a priority, immediately to act on it. And they can reach out to the NYPD. And, you know, this again, the NYPD is prioritizing domestic violence always, but especially in this crisis. Dermot, you want to follow up on that?

Commissioner Shea: Mr. Mayor, you hit most of the points. I mean, the message is domestic violence is an extremely high priority for all members of the New York City Police Department, from the police officer level, to the domestic violence offices that we still have on hand that can aid in this issue and [inaudible] particular situation and the detectives as well. It remains a high priority for us. I think it's a very good question and that it is something that we're very mindful of. We have not seen it manifest in across-the-board increases yet, but it's certainly something that concerns us for the possibility. What we've seen is, generally, a reduction in crime, not just the domestic violence, but many crime types over this last roughly three-month – three-week period, excuse me. What we worry about in some types of crimes, particularly domestic violence, is it occurring and there’s a lack of reporting. And that's certainly something that's on our mind. To try to combat that, we're reaching out to households where we know there has been domestic violence in the past and they’re, kind of, trying to get ahead of things. But thus far, we have not seen a reported increase in domestic violence.

Moderator: Last one, we have Jarrett, from City Limits.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Commissioner Nigro, this is a question for you, regarding the strains on the 9-1-1 system. Can you characterize what the impact of those has been? Are calls being rerouted [inaudible] come with neighboring towns [inaudible]? And related to that, have you changed or are you thinking of changing the types of calls, medical calls that fire companies themselves respond to?

Commissioner Nigro: Well, we're in an unprecedented time, of course. The last five days have been the five busiest days for the EMS in their entire history. And today, no doubt, we will be over 6,000 calls for the day, which is more than 50 percent higher than an average day. So, the impact that that has had is slowing our responses. Of course, our resources are not infinite. And so, 6,000 calls are difficult to respond to. It causes significant delays in the lower categories of calls, the less critical calls for help. And that's happening now. As far as the firefighters, firefighters are responding to the critical calls, the cardiac arrest, the choking, the major traumas along with EMS and paramedics, but the bulk of these medical calls is falling on the shoulders of EMTs and paramedics.

Mayor: Okay. And Dan, as we said, you know, we are going to make a number of adjustments very quickly. And this is this level of activity is unprecedented. Commissioner Nigro and I have spoken in detail, along with Deputy Mayor Anglin about any and all adjustments we need to make to get additional personnel into place, to move people to additional types of work, whatever it's going to take to make sure that those emergency calls all kind of get answered in real time. And whatever it will take to add shifts, we'll keep doing it. And noting that there's ways to make sure that those calls that might be handled a different way and don't need emergency support can be handled a different way. But I want everyone to understand, Jarrett – it’s a very, very crucial question. I'm glad you asked it. We must remember, even in the midst of this terrifying challenge of COVID-19, we still have to fight crime every day, we still have to ensure that fires are fought, we still have to ensure that anyone who calls 9-1-1, having a heart attack or any other emergency gets emergency help. We will keep shifting resources, personnel, vehicles, whatever it takes to keep that going. This is another example of, you know, remembering that this crisis requires of us not only a massive health care response, but a massive response to keep all the rest of life in the city going, and to protect human life and every other way, because human life is threatened by things beyond COVID-19 and we cannot let get down our guard on those other fronts. So, whatever Dan Nigro needs, he is going to get, so that we can keep the 9-1-1 system functioning strong and so New Yorkers can know when they place that call and they have a real emergency help come comment will come quickly.

With that, everyone, thank you. We will be back tomorrow with more updates. Thank you very much.

2020-03-30 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: So, this morning we all watched something absolutely extraordinary, absolutely inspiring as the USNS Comfort entered New York Harbor, coming here to as save the lives of New Yorkers in our hour of need. We've all been through a lot these last few weeks and we needed this boost, we needed this hope that's being created by our brothers and sisters in the US Navy and the Marine Corps, everyone who is here to help us at this crucial moment. This ship arriving is not just an example of help arriving in a physical form. It's not just about the beds and the doctors and the equipment, it's also about hope, it's also about boosting the morale of New Yorkers who are going through so much. It's about saying to our heroes in those hospitals that help has come. That relief is on the way. I can't tell you how much this means, it is so much more than even we realize at this moment that our nation has heard our plea for help here in New York City and there could not be a better example of all of America pulling for New York City than the arrival of the USNS Comfort, some major, major moment in this long battle that we will be fighting against the coronavirus.

I think there've been times in recent days where a lot of New Yorkers have felt alone. A lot of New Yorkers have felt a sense of not being sure of what's coming next, not being sure of help would come. Well, I want to say to all New Yorkers, we have evidence here you are not alone. We are not alone. Our nation is helping us in our hour of need. There's a lot of people to thank and you're going to hear from two of our real heroes here from the federal government who are doing so much for us. You're going to hear from Rear Admiral John Mustin in a moment and the Regional Administrator for FEMA, Tom Von Essen, who's well known to all of us in New York City. But I want to thank everyone who was a part of this many, many people work together. And look, we’ve got to remember, this is a wartime atmosphere, we all have to pull together. We may have differences in peacetime, but to the maximum extent possible, we all have to be as one in wartime. I know our colleagues in the military understand that. We all need to understand that now. So, I do want to thank President Trump. I want to thank Secretary Esper. I want to thank Chairman Millie, everyone at the United States Navy, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Coast Guard, all the people at FEMA, so many people at the federal government who came together to make this happen and so much more for New York City. I want to thank Governor Cuomo, and everyone in the State government, who has joined us in pushing from day one for this kind of support. I want to thank from our administration, everyone to work to get the dredging done, working with the military. I want everyone to understand – and Admiral Mustin will affirm this – this ship is here ahead of schedule because the amazing work of the military, it's here ahead of schedule because the dredging was done faster than anyone knew it could be done to allow this ship to dock. I want to thank everyone at the City Economic Development Corporation, our Emergency Management Team, and also, of course, the State Department, Environmental Conservation, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Everyone pulled together. This was supposed to take two weeks to make it possible for this ship to dock. They did it in eight days and that means help has arrived quicker and we're going to be able to do the lifesaving work right now. I want to also thank from the military, one of the leaders who did the work to make this moment possible – Marine Corps Colonel Brian [inaudible] who's with us. Thank you, Colonel. And from my team, Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, for Health and Human Services, and Commissioner James Hendon, Department of Veteran Services. Colonel James Hendon, thank you.

So, with this ship comes an extraordinary compliment of talented individuals in service to our nation, 1,200 medical staff and sailors here to help us all. 750 beds will be put into play immediately to relieve the pressure on a hospital system. Let me be clear that this is such a crucial part of the plan we are putting in place, but I want you to understand the sheer magnitude of the plan. We need to triple our hospital bed capacity in New York City by May. The number of beds we had at the beginning of March have to triple by May – it’s a daunting task, but we got a big, big boost. The arrival of the Comfort – this is like adding a whole other hospital to New York City. It's like, think of all the big hospitals in New York City – Bellevue and all the other famous hospitals we think of – it's like another one of them just floated right up to help us right now.

And I hope New Yorkers know that this is something we've been fighting for, and we're going to be fighting for a lot more help, because there's just the beginning. My job is always to tell you the truth and I'll tell you when we get the help we need and I'll tell you when we need more help. I'll tell you when we're getting into the thick of the battle and I'll tell you when we're coming out of the battle. Right now, the toughest weeks are still ahead, but we are grateful. We are grateful for every doctor, for every nurse, for every ventilator, for the supplies, for the beds, for everything that's come from the Comfort and everything that has come from all over the country. I have to tell you, it's the federal governments, it’s the State government, of course, but it's also the companies that come forward offering help people we've never met, individuals who come forward with supplies, health care workers who have volunteered, it's the United Nations, which came up with a quarter-million surgical masks and got them to us right away. We're seeing amazing offers of help and people are moving fast to get help to New York City and we appreciate it. We need it.

So, let's look forward. Let's pray. There's going to be a lot more days like this when people can see our nation stand by us. And then, I affirmed to you, when the battle is done here, New York City will stand firm for the rest of our nation. New York City will be the first to donate to the rest of our nation. We will send the ventilators, the supplies. We will ask our doctors and nurses to go to the front, wherever it is in this nation, because our country was there for us and we will be there for our country.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I want to turn to a guy who’s been a hero before for this city and we need him to be a hero again. And I know he is already rising to the occasion. He helped lead New York City through our darkest hour on 9/11. He was then our Fire Commissioner and he did an outstanding job under the most adverse circumstances our Fire Department had ever known. When he became the Regional Administrator for FEMA, he could never have imagined this day, nor could any of us. But I said to Tom earlier, thank God he is where he is now. I think God had a plan for him because his City needs him again. My great honor to introduce the Regional Administrator for FEMA, Tom Von Essen

Regional Administrator Thomas Von Essen, FEMA: Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, it really seems it’s gotten real personal for me this morning. About two weeks ago, we moved our regional response recovery coordination team down to a Naval base in rural New Jersey where we have an operation center and we're able to get people off public transportation. We have all our equipment down there set up there, it's really good set up. It was built during Sandy, had a Naval base, so we have about 30-35 people working there every day, late, late into the night working to try and accommodate everybody we can in New York City, New York State, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin islands – that's what region two is at FEMA. So, I had been down there the last two weeks and I came back for this today, and I was driving on East River Drive and I looked across by 14th Street and I had a flashback to the morning I was driving in and they told me a small plane had crashed into the Trade Center and life changed at that time. And I remember having the Comfort come then, you know, a couple of – I don't remember when, a couple of weeks later or whatever. And we didn't need it for what we needed for today. We didn't need it for people who needed hospital care, it wasn't necessary, but we brought it in. We needed it for crisis counseling for a lot of fire chiefs and police officers who were really, really overcome with the grief and at that that they faced with their friends and people that they worked with and we needed to house federal workers and give them food and everything. And we got it out of here and we started putting them in hotel rooms, but I'll never forget the feeling, I talked about it this morning the names of perfect, the comfort and the mercy and I was told they were here in 1918 for the pandemic we had then not these particular ships, but their predecessors. So, the federal government has always been here, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, that they've always been here for us when we needed them and they here again for you now and for me.

To the flashbacks, I get knowing that the City is under such stress now, it's real personal for me. The Fire Department, I spent 30 years in it. So, when September 11th happened, it was personal. It was friends, it was leaders, people had worked with, everybody was affected by September 11th. And that's what's happening now – everybody you know is affected by the coronavirus in one way or another. A friend, a relative, a loved one that you can't go and see because there are in quarantine or you don't want to— and I stopped to see a 100-year-old lady last week and just, you know, talk to her from six feet away. And I know everybody's doing that and it's important, but this, this is a big-time visible sign of what our government is like when we put it into action. And the Mayor said it and it's really – I'm really proud to be part of it now, I know how tough the people of this city are and I've seen us take on some seemingly— insurmountable challenges. Once again, we need to do it once again we need to be together six feet apart. I saw the Mayor taking pictures with some of the military folks I never noticed it before, taking a picture with someone that was two or three feet away. It's weird. It's really strange what we're all going through, but it's necessary and it is going to make a difference. The more we separate, the more everybody stays away, the better off we'll be in, the faster we'll get out of this. But thank goodness now help has arrived. It's going to make a big difference. FEMA’s working with the City, with the State to supply everything we possibly can, working with HHS to get as many medical people here as we can. People that help us with the forensics and the mortuary problems that we're going have, because we are going to have an awful lot of folks that aren't going to make it.

But we're doing the best we can. And it's an honor to be back in a middle of such a tough, tough battle that we have in front of us. But September 11th, it seemed like every day we were fixing stuff and it was getting slightly better. The grief, of course, was enormous, but the operation seemed to get slightly better every day with this. It seems to be we're not there yet, it's not going to get better, it might not get better for us here in the City for weeks, maybe a month, I hope not, I don't know. I listened to Dr. Fauci on here about models and worst-case scenario and best-case scenarios. We just don't know. So, we are preparing for the worst case and that's all we can do at this point. And we're doing a good job, and we're here for you.

Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Tom. Now, such an honor to bring to you the military leader of this effort he comes a family long connected to the US Navy. He is someone we're thinking about right now as one of our saviors, one of the people led the forces who came to help us in our hour of need, but his day job is Vice Commander of US fleet forces. So, he has a big, big job and a lot to think about. But, right now, his mind, his heart, his soul is focused on New York City. And I'm proud to say he is also a resident of Manhattan and has a family here and understands what we are all going through. And I just want to express on behalf of 8.6 million New Yorkers, my gratitude for your leadership and for all the men and women who serve under your command, an honor to present to you Rear Admiral John Mustin.

Rear Admiral John Mustin: Mr. Mayor, Mr. Administrator, Commissioner, thank you for being here today to welcome this great ship to the officers, the crew, the medical professionals of USS Comfort. Thank you for the vital mission that you've undertaken. I'd also like to recognize and thank the many, many contributors who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make this day possible. Each of those who helped to fit out and prepare this ship in record time from the maintenance community to the dock workers, to the ships company, to the doctors, to the dredgers. Thank you, all of you for the agility and professionalism that you have all shown over the past few weeks. That focused collective effort will save American lives. Today, I also want to recognize that not all of our nation's heroes wear military uniforms, especially today we acknowledge that many wear scrubs. Let us not forget, nor fail to recognize that the doctors and nurses across America, those who are treating patients in these unprecedented times, they are all heroes and like those heroes, the unmistakable Whitehall and Red Cross at this great ship had been a welcome site around the world standing at the forefront of our humanitarian missions overseas.

This ship represents all that is good about the American people, all that is generous, all that is ready, responsive and resolute. Like her sister ship the USNS Mercy was recently [inaudible] and is already serving patients in Los Angeles, this great ship will support civil authorities by increasing medical capacity and collaboration for medical assistance, not treating COVID-19 patients, but by acting as a relief valve for other urgent needs, freeing New York's hospitals and our precious medical professionals to focus on this pandemic. So, now this great ship will serve and support our fellow Americans in this time of need, providing critical search hospital capacity to America's largest City. As a resident, a New Yorker myself, I can attest to the invincible spirit of New York from the ships that she built in World War II to are unflappable determination following 9/11 and hurricane Sandy. I have great confidence that New York will weather today's storm as well.

This time with the support of another great American community; the naval families on-board and supporting the crew of the USNS Comfort. Words are incapable of expressing the depth of my gratitude for those on this mission and for the families that they leave behind. The men and women on-board Comfort are mothers, they’re fathers, they’re sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers and while our lives may look drastically different today than they did even a month ago, the circumstances for these men and women are no exception. They left their families during this uncertain time in our nation's history, knowing that they can make a difference. That is what the US Navy does and this is an example of Americans helping their fellow men. I know that for our military families, social distancing is not a new concept, but rather a frequent reality and I remain grateful for all that each of them do for our nation and for our communities every single day.

As you've heard from the Administrator, the last time this great hospital ship – all 70,000 tons of her – was in New York, was in the wake of 9/11 where she served as a respite and comfort for first responders working around the clock. Today, like then, we bring a message to all New Yorkers – now, your Navy is returned and we are with you committed in this fight. Mr. Mayor, every sailor, every Marine, and every civilian on this mission stands proudly, stands ready to serve the people of New York City. We have not yet begun to fight and we will not give up this ship.

Thank you.

Mayor: Beautifully said, Admiral. And thank you so much. All right, we're going to take questions now from the media, just please project your voices so I can hear you well. Go ahead. Oh, we have microphones, even better.

Question: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, what's your, what's your message to President Trump after the Comfort docked here to help New York City and when it came in here to the pier, what was your emotion and what was your reaction, overall?

Mayor: It's a very emotional moment. I went up on the roof here to watch the Comfort come in and I had this incredible feeling of peace actually – that help was finally coming – that we were not alone and I just have a reverence for the military. I come from a family that had a deep involvement in the military – I have a reverence for the military. Feeling the presence of the United States military here it just gave me a sense that things were going to be okay and just, it's such a moving sight. This ship is so impressive and just looming there in our harbor, you know, it was like a beacon of hope and it really felt that way to me.

My message to the President is thank you and we need more help – and that's not because any of us likes to have to say that, but because it's true that the toughest weeks are ahead. We are bracing ourselves for something we've never seen before in any of our lives and the federal government in many ways is the only force that can help us to reach the level of preparation we need to - to save every life we can save. So I'm going to keep calling the President, I’m going to keep appealing to him, to get us all the help we need for these really tough weeks. And then again, we will turn around and help everyone else in this country right after.

I'll go this side, yes.

Question: Mr. Mayor, as you know, normally this time of year we'd be very busy and focused on the state budget and Albany. I just want to ask, I know it's kind of a secondary issue now, but there is a lot getting crafted up there. Do you have any concerns in terms of what you've been hearing in terms of how the City will be affected?

Mayor: I have real concerns. I have deep concerns because what's being discussed is essentially health care for people who need it. When you, you know, we can talk about the Medicaid budget, but that's I think the wrong way to think about it: what it equals is health care for people who need health care, right now and need it more than ever because of the pandemic. I spoke at length last night with Speaker Carl Heastie and Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. I let them know that from the perspective of 8.6 million people in New York City, we cannot afford Medicaid cuts or health care cuts at this dire moment. The state must accept the Medicaid funding that was in the third stimulus bill. We need that money to be accepted and we need to make sure that the health care so many people are depending on is not disrupted. So, I understand that the state has a budget challenge; we have a huge budget challenge, I mean, I'm right now in the middle of cutting a huge amount out of this budget for this City right now, but what I will not cut is health care and I said that the other day, we're going to find some really tough cuts we have to make, but it will never be about health care - it will never be about the fight against COVID-19. So, I urge the State – accept the federal money, do not cut Medicaid, do not cut health care for New Yorkers who need it.

Question: Can you [inaudible] tell us what the what kind of services this ship will be providing and who, how will it be decided what patients will be going to this ship and which patients will stay in the hospital?

Mayor: I'm going to start and I'll let the Admiral join in, obviously. What I have to explain to everyone, I think it is such a shock to hear this that people are still kind of adjusting to it. The Intensive Care Units in our hospitals used to be a small part of our hospitals and again, at the beginning of this month, we had about 20,000 working hospital beds in New York City. What we have to do is convert as many as possible, potentially almost all of those traditional hospital beds into ICU beds. We have to make whole hospitals into Intensive Care Units to get through these next weeks. That's how dire, that's how tough this situation is. If we're going to turn a hospital, I mean think of Bellevue, think of NYU Langone and you go by these huge buildings, they're going to be all ICU if we can bring all the pieces together, the staff and the equipment, everything. Well what happens to everyone else who doesn't need intensive care? We have to have hospitals for them too. What happens to people who've been infected with Covid-19, but are not at the point where they need intensive care - hopefully on the way to recovery? They need a hospital bed in many cases too, but we can't put them in an Intensive Care Unit, which has to be reserved for those we're trying to save. So what the USNS Comfort allows and Javits Center and so many other places being developed right now, is the ability to take all those other patients and give them care and each location will be different, but it will allow us to keep a health care system going while we convert the core hospitals into something we've never done. This is beyond anyone's imagination. I asked the head of our public hospitals, Dr. Mitch Katz, I said, have you ever heard of any place where they had to turn hospitals into all ICU? He said, no, no one's ever come near having to do that in the last hundred years in this country, but because the Comfort is here because of what's happening at Javits Center, we're going to have the ability to do that and save a lot of lives. Admiral you want to join it?

Admiral Mustin: Just in terms of the specifics and the mechanics, we've been working very closely with the local health care officials to determine what that process looks like. So, so frankly we are prepared to receive and we trust the screening process that is in effect at the Javits Center so that we will receive advance notice so that the ship can prepare to receive the patients. But, but in terms of what the health care providers determine are the best patients for us, those are the ones that we would expect to receive.

Question: Question, how can you take us to the mechanics of this transfer of patients? How are you communicating this to the patients? What kind of situations are these patients experiencing and are the families going to be able to visit them on board of the Comfort?

Mayor: Alright, I'm going to start and I'm going to give you the disclaimer right away that all of this is being worked out in real-time. So, I guarantee you we are not going to have all those answers today because we are literally in a wartime situation, building it as we go along. Dr. Raul Perea-Henze, our Deputy Mayor, if any of you want to jump into any of these questions about procedure please do, or Admiral as well. I think the common-sense basic answer is, we are going to work out the protocol between all the players, how to get the right patients to the right locations. Again, reserving the hospitals for ICU to the maximum extent possible. Some places will specialize in convalescent COVID-19 patients, meaning patients on the way to recovery, no longer intensive care. Some places will specialize in all sorts of other medical needs that require hospitalization because remember all the folks with heart disease, all the folks with cancer, there is still so many people that will need hospitalization for other things that are not COVID-19. So, we are working out those protocols right now. As to things like visitation. I think a fair statement would be the normal rules will not apply. Just going to – I’m the non-doctor telling all New Yorkers right now, we are always going to always try respect families, but we have to be clear that the normal rules of going to a hospital, just aren’t going to exist in this kind of wartime environment and people should get used to a different set of standards. It will be determined for each location what that is. But there is going to be such urgency, dealing with a huge uptick in cases that we can’t do all the things we normally do. Admiral you want to add or Deputy Mayor?

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: Yes, as the Mayor outlined, we have stood up, Hospital Executive Committee which includes all the public hospitals, the voluntary hospitals, the independent hospitals, and the Command from Comfort and Javits. There’s a screening mechanism, very complex, in order to allocate who goes where. As the Mayor pointed out we are prepared to convert as many as the regular beds in all hospitals in the city into ICU beds. Hopefully we will get the ventilators so the most severe cases end up being taken care of there. The visitation piece will require a screening like we are doing for everyone right now. So, if there is any risk that a patient that has no COVID-19, that is being taken care of here at the Comfort, has a relative that could be potentially infected, of course there will be screening for them not to come in.

Question: You had said that by Saturday you would decide whether or not to close the playgrounds. Why have you left the playgrounds open, when for example, Hoboken has closed its parks and Bergen County has closed its parks. Why do we not have consistency on that guideline for social distancing?

Mayor: This is an issue that obviously we are working with the State on and the states have all been working together and there is not one uniform standard. That’s just the truth. We are very cognizant, look, 8.6 million people in a very small space, I don’t think taking away parks is a great idea unless we have evidence that people are not following the rules in a really substantial way. I have had this conversation daily with our Police Commissioner. He says overwhelming they are seeing compliance. We know warmer weather is coming, not today but warmer weather is coming. We are going to watch carefully. What I said yesterday is this, right now the police and all of our agencies are authorized to use fines, we have given enough warning, enough, education. Anyone who, if you Andrew, are in the park and an officer said sir, you are not practicing social distancing, I need you to move. And you said I am not going move. They are going to say sir, you are about to be given a fine, this is your last chance. And if you don’t move or if you don’t follow the instruction you are going to get a fine. If we see any basketball courts where there’s games going on and we have warned people to stop. We are going to take down the rims. We are going to take out tennis nets, we are going to take out soccer nets, whatever it takes. On the playgrounds, if we see individual playgrounds where there is noncompliance. We can close the playground. If we see it, broadly, all the playgrounds will be closed. But to date, based on the sheer facts coming back from the Police Department, Parks Department, noncompliance is limited. You will find some instances, I’m sure you will Andrew, but not enough to tell 8.6 million people they cannot have parks. And that’s the balance we are trying to strike.

Question: Thank you Mr. Mayor. Yesterday we heard pretty scary numbers from the federal government. Do you have any particular forecast scenario for the city? I mean particularly for New York City?

Mayor: I have been real honest with New Yorkers that at this point we assume at least half of all New Yorkers will contract this disease, again consistently we see for 80 percent that means, thankfully, a fairly mild experience. That they get through okay and recover quickly. But, right now, at least 50 percent, could be substantially more. We see this horrible increase in the number of deaths. And I have been honest. I think the weeks ahead will be tougher. To date, I still fear that the worst is not going to be April, but actually in the beginning of May. But no projection is perfect. I guarantee you and I wish I couldn’t. But I guarantee you that April is going to be exceedingly tough. And we have to understand that any projection of things being all okay by Easter, there’s just no way that’s true for New York City.

Question: This is a question, actually for the former fire commissioner, Von Essen. Hi, Commissioner, can I ask you a question. Over here. Welcome back to New York.

Regional Administrator Von Essen: Oh, thank you. I never left.

Question: Well great to have you here now. I am wondering, you mentioned mortuary logistics. What are working on right now? What’s the current city capacity to hold the deceased? And is there any consideration of turning places like MSG, Madison Square Garden into a mortuary facility?

Regional Administrator Von Essen: No. Fortunately, we are not thinking of anything like that. But we are sending refrigeration trucks to New York to help with some of the problem on a temporary basis. I was speaking to Commissioner Criswell this morning, we have sent – the military has sent 42 folks to the Manhattan Medical Examiner’s Office to help over there. And we need – you have a desperate, New York City, we in New York City have a desperate need for help over in Queens. And we are working on that as we speak, there’s folks trying to put it all together. There’s only so many of these teams that military has. We have 50 states and a couple of territories and commonwealths that we are trying to, not hold back resources, but trying to make it, make a plan ready that works for the whole country. So, it’s difficult but everybody’s trying. And we will get more help here for New York.

Question: Thank you Mayor. Clearly as you have pointed out, this is a very visual representation of the help that has arrived. But can you give us a clearer sense of how much more help is going to be needed? I mean if you will, how many equivalences of the Comfort does New York City need to get through the worst of this, sir?

Mayor: Yeah it’s a great, great way of thinking about it. Think of this ship, which is 750 beds to begin, has a capacity, potentially of 1,000 beds. So, here’s the way to think of what we are all working on right now. We started with around 20,000 working beds in New York City. We have to get over 60,000 by the beginning of May, according to what we know now – like adding 40 US Comforts, and that’s the magnitude of what we are talking about. And the amazing thing is, that we believe with enough people working together that we can get there. As hard as that sounds, you know, here’s this extraordinary contribution from the federal government, here’s the Javits Center where they are talking about up to 3,000 beds right there. The surge capacity in the hospitals, where every hospital is adding 50 percent more beds, that’s on top of that original 20,000. They are all finding additional beds to add in their facilities. You know creating new spaces. Mitch Katz said a long time ago, he can turn a cafeteria into an ICU if he needs to. He can put up a tent in the parking lot and turn it into an ICU. And then the hotels and the other buildings that we’ll be moving to. So, it’s a herculean task. It’s never been attempted in the history of New York City. We believe that’s the number – we’d love to find out it’s a lesser number – but that’s the number we’re shooting for and I believe with enough work and enough creativity and enough teamwork, we’ll get to it.

Question: Last night your administration made an announcement about all of the supplies and ventilators you have given to the hospitals throughout the city to date. I’m wondering how your administration is handling supply distribution to private hospitals. A lot of it has been focused on going to the public hospitals, rightfully so. But I’m wondering if any of these supplies and ventilators have gone to the private hospitals on Staten Island. And then I have a second question –

Mayor: Absolutely. And I’ve had this conversation daily with Borough President Oddo to make sure that supplies are getting where they are needed. Yes, the City has provided supplies to RUMC in substantial numbers and we’ll continue to do so. The supplies for Staten Island University Hospital come from a combination of sources – State, City, the Northwell Hospital system. But I’m keeping my eye – and my team is – on all of it. We really don’t see a separation between public hospitals, voluntaries, independents in this kind of situation. We’re all working together.

Remember the other day we got in 400 ventilators from the federal government. We sent 100 to the public hospitals, 300 to the voluntaries and independents. And so that’s going to be the pattern – not necessarily that percentage – but that approach. We’re all sharing to make sure at any given moment a hospital has what it needs. Go ahead.

Question: How are you guys planning to get COVID patients from the outer boroughs to the Comfort? Places like Staten Island [inaudible] –

Mayor: The idea is to keep folks who need that urgent care, that ICU care in hospitals that will be converted increasingly to ICU care. Folks who do not require ICU care but do need hospitalization for COVID-19, the goal is to keep them as close as possible, of course, to their home and in their home borough. So, we’re continuing to build out capacity on Staten Island and we will continue as in every borough.

Question: Can you hear me – with rent due tomorrow for many people, wanted to ask about a proposal from some local officials who want to allow people to apply their security deposits to next month’s rent. Do you support that? Are you doing anything to make that a reality?

Mayor: I do support that and I think the – my understanding is that we need some kind of State action to allow that to happen. But I think that’s exactly the right approach. Look, everyone’s hand to mouth – or so many people, at least, are hand to mouth right now. Their income has just been blown away, federal help is coming but that will take time. People need help right now. Applying the security deposits, it actually – it helps the renter to pay the rent, it actually helps in many cases landlords especially smaller landlords because that money is in escrow right now. And the smaller landlords need money to get by as well, so it frees it up for them. There has to be some process to eventually restore that deposit, you know over time – maybe an installment plan overtime. But immediate relief is needed. I think it’s a great idea. We’re working with folks at the State level to see how to make that happen. Okay, go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, in terms of – you talked about the ventilators and the hospital beds, where are you at in terms of the PPE for the hospital workers, nurses, doctors – where do we stand on that?

Mayor: So, on personal protective equipment, this week – and I’m always giving you this update week by week. If it ever turns into needing to tell you day by day I will. This week in terms of personal protective equipment for our hospitals, we do have a sufficient supply. We have sent it out and continue to send it out around the city. Hospitals – this is something Dr. Katz said yesterday and everyone has to keep in mind – hospitals are teaching their professionals, their health care workers, a new way of handling this equipment because until there is a truly ample supply like there used to be in peacetime, folks are being trained to handle the supply differently to stretch it out, to re-use it whenever safe.

That’s a whole different way of life and instead of seeing in the supply closet, you know, a month or two of supply, people are seeing less. They are seeing days or a few weeks. And I think it is understandably unnerving to the health care professionals. But we’re all working together to help everyone understand the new reality for this moment in history. The supply today is sufficient. It will take us into next week. The thing I’m worried about right now is ventilators overwhelmingly.
I have asked the president and the White House for 400 more. We will take them from any source. If 400 more come in some other way, that’s great, but we need that to make sure we will get to April 5th okay. As we approach April 5th, which I’ve said is a very – a day I’m really concerned about in terms of equipment and in terms of personnel – I will update New Yorkers as to whether we have enough to get through the next week. But that’s how tight it has been. Number one concern – ventilators, right behind it the need for more doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists to actually handle ICU capacity and give some relief to these health workers who are going through so much. Yeah?

Question: You said $1.3 billion, you were looking to cut from the budget but that number might need to update –

Mayor: Yeah, it will go up. We will give you an updated number shortly but it’s definitely going to go up.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And will patients treated on the Comfort have to pay their medical bills as usual or will this be paid for by the federal government?

Mayor: Well, I don’t know. Admiral – well, I mean, first of all, insurance is insurance so whoever has insurance, I assume that’s the go to. But Admiral or Raul, do you know the answer?

Admiral Mustin: Yes, Sir. When the president declared a national emergency, the implication from the Department of Defense is that we provide this service – and we are not looking to check insurance cards or send any invoices or bills. This is an investment by the government on behalf of the people of America. So, there is no additional cost to the patient.

Mayor: Well done [inaudible]. Admiral, that’s a great plan. We thank you for that.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. You mentioned that 750 beds are available immediately on the Comfort. Does that mean patients will start to be moved today and if so or if not, how many patients will be moved in what sort of timeframe?

Mayor: So, I want to make sure they are fully docked before any patients go in. They are still securing it. Between the Admiral and Deputy Mayor, who wants to speak about the timelines? You want to start or –

Admiral Mustin: So, as the Mayor mentioned, obviously, we want to take care of all the regular husbanding services required once the ship comes into port. We’re prepared to begin receiving patients tomorrow. I won’t open the box to say while we may be ready internally to do that sooner, we want to use a very methodical process that’s been developed in conjunction with the local health authorities which is predicated on starting tomorrow.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: Just a quick point, we’re going to do the assessment that I talked about before with the hospital committee, going through the Javits Center, and as the patients start coming from the hospitals, screening will happen today, probably in the next day or two you will start seeing patients here.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Did you get any results, any outcomes of the drug test which was started last week?

Mayor: I’m sorry, which one? Clarify –

Question: Last Wednesday you were supposed to tell – to start the drug test of the new kind of medications regarding this problem.

Mayor: Yeah, there are several different approaches that are being tested now certainly in our public health system. But I want to make sure we give you a fully accurate answer so I’m not updated on that, I’ll make sure our team from Health + Hospitals get you that answer. Okay, everybody, thank you very much – a good day for New York City.

Thank you, everyone.

2020-03-31 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everybody. Yesterday, in the midst of this crisis, we had an extraordinary moment where the USNS Comfort arrived. And boy, did it bring hope, did it bring comfort already to New Yorkers who wanted to know we were not alone, and that real help was coming. We got to see it all live. We got to feel it. Well today is another example that this city is immediately acting every single day and so many good people are helping us, preparing every day for what lies ahead. Getting ready the hospital facilities we need to protect lives and New Yorkers. Yesterday, it was the comfort basically floating right up to New York City with another full hospital – an amazing feat.

Today, it is this facility here in Queens that, right now, looks like a bunch of tennis courts. Very soon this is going to be 350 hospital beds to protect the lives of New Yorkers. And there are two ways of looking at this. If you want to say the glass is half empty, you would say these tennis courts symbolize what we're all going through right now. We'd all like to go back to the times when things are normal, and people are out here playing tennis. We all feel that. I feel that and we miss it and it's sad, but we also know that this crisis will not go on forever. It will be very intense but, thank God, it will be brief. When I look out here, I see the glass is half full, which is the fact that everyone is rising to the challenge. Everyone is contributing, each in their own way. We have people from organizations all over this city, all over the world calling literally every single hour offering help. When the folks here at a tennis center heard there was a need, they said yes immediately, and all the people who reached out to the Creek, this hospital said the same thing.

So, I'm looking forward to the day when this was going to be a place for tennis again, but in the meantime, I'm inspired by the fact that people are stepping up. And we have set a very, very high bar of what we need to create in the next few weeks in terms of hospital beds in this city. And every time I turn around, I see another person, another organization stepping up to make it happen, and that to me is inspiring, and that speaks to what New Yorkers do all the time. The attitude we have that we will overcome anything and everything. That is on display right here at this tennis center.

We have to, as New Yorkers, deal honestly with the pain we're experiencing, the grief we're experiencing, and, at the same time, keep moving forward. I've unfortunately had to liken this to a war. That's what soldiers have to do in a war. We have to find a way to mourn, but never be paralyzed, because people's lives are at stake, and we have to be there always for those we can save, those we can comfort, those we can help. But we are definitely feeling the pain of those we have lost from our own community here in public service. And I want to particularly focus on the Department of Correction that's doing such difficult work right now. Handling a crisis that's never been seen before by any of us obviously, but with the particular conditions that exist in our correction system. I told you back on Friday that we lost an investigator, David Perez. We've now lost a young IT worker, Hunter O’Kelly Rodriguez and a beloved longtime officer of 20 years as a member of our Correction team. And we're withholding the name at the request of the family, but I know all the Correction officers, the staff, everyone at correctional health services, everyone's feeling these losses right now, and they’re resolute that we have to keep fighting to protect everyone. The folks who work in our correction system, and all those who are incarcerated as well.

Now, we all know that we are racing against time right now, and I felt it is my job to really let people know how intense this battle will be. The fact is coming on fast and it will not be over in an instant. There will be weeks where we are going to have to keep fighting. And every time I've heard any projection of it's going to be over soon, don't worry about it. I always say, no, that's not the truth, and it's a danger to tell people something's going to be easier than it really will be. So, I'm telling you all it will be tough, but it will be something that we will fight through and we will survive. But it begins with a recognition of just how much we're going to need.

So again, before all this started, before the coronavirus in this city, we had about 20,000 working hospital beds in our major hospitals. Public, private, voluntary, independent, whatever phrases you want to use. All the hospitals combined had about 20,000 staffed hospital beds. We now need to in just the next weeks, triple that number. Produce three times that number. And you might say to yourself, how on earth is that possible? And when I first heard the projections, I questioned it myself. But then look at the facts. Look at how quickly a hospital can be created. Whether it is in a place like the Javits Center, or a place like this tennis center, or a hotel. We know how to make any number of buildings into a hospital in a matter of days. So, they need to say, well how does that all add up. Look, the Javits Center alone, thousands of beds will be built out there. The Comfort starts with 750, can go up to a thousand beds, there's 350 beds here, a lot of hotels, hundreds of hundreds of beds each. We're just going to keep going every single day adding and adding and adding to get to the point where we have what we need.

This facility will be crucial. The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, it's going to be handled by the same company. They are going to set it up rapidly and we're then going to go to the next site, the next site, the next site to meet our goal. We're working with the federal government, with FEMA, with the state. We're working with the hotel industry. We're working with folks who own major facilities. Everyone is working in common cause. I have not heard someone say no yet, and that's something New Yorkers should know about and be proud of. No one. I literally have not heard anyone. We say we need your building. I've not heard anyone say no. Everyone understands what time it is. So, right here at the Billy Jean King Center, named after someone who's such a hero to so many of us. Well, I think it's very fitting. I think Billy Jean would agree that this place will be a lifesaving place. This place will not only help folks afflicted by the coronavirus, help them to survive and recover and go home, it is specifically going to help patients who come through Elmhurst hospital and can receive care here. It's going to help take the pressure off Elmhurst. We all know that for a variety of reasons, Elmhurst has been the place that is borne the brunt and the staff at Elmhurst, the doctors and nurses, everyone that works at Elmhurst, they've done an amazing job, but we want to give them as much relief as possible.

Starting next week, this facility will be able to take people from Elmhurst, not folks who need ICU care, but other coronavirus patients. Bring them over here, relieve some of that pressure immediately. 350 beds will be here with all the staffing, the doctors, the nurses, all the staffing needed, that's what the company does that brings all this in, brings in the equipment, brings in the beds. It’ll take three weeks to build out, but as I said, starting next week patients will start arriving. And I want to thank the folks who made this possible right here in terms of this amazing facility and I want to thank him, he's with us, the Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Tennis Association Daniel Zausner. Thank you, Daniel, for partnering with the City and all of us to make this happen. Thank you and all your colleagues and you said yes and I thank you for that Billy Sullivan, CEO of SLSCO the contractor that does this work, Billy is over there, sorry, cause of distancing it’s hard to see people sometimes and they'll be working with us at the Brooklyn cruise terminal as well. And, of course, our partners all the time, the Army Corps of Engineers, New York State and our own Office of Emergency Management. Thank you, Deanne, to you and your team. And special thanks to our colleagues at Department of Design and Construction of the City who do amazing work and they can do it very quick. So, thank you to Jamie Torres Springer, the First Deputy Commissioner who is definitely— Jamie, no one's going to miss you wherever you walk in that jacket. I want to thank you, you're very visible right now, very visible. And we're going to be joined in a moment from Health and Hospitals is obviously the collaboration with Elmhurst Hospital, Dr. Eric Wei, the Vice President, Chief Quality Control Officer for Health and Hospitals will be joining us and we thank them.

I want to give you some other updates real quick and then we'll turn to questions from our colleagues in the media. So, a few days ago we all heard the very tough news about the record number of calls to 911. And— the real challenge is that our first responders we're facing our paramedics and our EMTS through EMS. And we said, we're going to have to make a lot of adjustments, lot of changes to address the demand, but we would do it. Well, at that point we were hoping the cavalry was coming, but I have to say I am so moved and so appreciative to the Federal Government with how they move so quickly here and in great number. And I give all the credit in the world to FEMA and Regional Administrator Tom Von Essen who everyone knows was our Fire Commissioner and I think it's no accident that Tom is really looking out for us and he certainly understands how important EMS is to the City. So, I want to tell you that we announced this morning formally that 250 more ambulances are coming right away to New York City from FEMA from all over the country to help us address our 911 calls. 135 of those ambulances are here already, I want you to understand how unusual it is to hear something's coming, and is here immediately. This is really powerful and it shows how much the Federal Government is getting into gear now full gear to help us. We're going to have approximately 500 more EMTS and paramedics coming in from all over the country, 270 are here right now and they're going immediately into action to help our extraordinary colleagues at the Fire Department and EMS to do the work that they do. I mentioned yesterday that nurses, more and more nurses are coming in. 500 on Friday had already gotten to our hospitals I said, we do want to add another 500 this week. I'm now announcing an additional 1,000 nurses that Health and Hospitals has coming very soon through contracting they've done. So we are sounding the alarm in many places and reaching out to many friends and may colleagues to get help, but these numbers now are going to make a huge difference. Imagine just in the last few days, adding a grand total of 2,000 nurses to help protect New Yorkers, that's just in the last few days more coming and that's going to mean lives will be saved.

Now, I'll always tell you good news, but that does not mean that the battle is over, it doesn't mean we're not going to need a lot more help. Remember, as we speak now, we have a quarter of all the coronavirus cases in the United States of America and— I've spoken several times to the President in recent days to the Defense Secretary, to the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous federal officials. I've said the same thing to all of them, this coming Sunday, April 5th is a demarcation line. This is the point at which we must be prepared for next week when we expect a huge increase in the number of cases. What I asked very clearly last week was for military medical personnel to be deployed here from the permanent military and from the reserves. I had this conversation with all of them, I’ve said specifically 1,000 nurses, 300 respiratory therapists, 150 doctors and I said, we need as many as possible by Sunday, April 5th and we need to know that any others are going to come shortly thereafter. I have reiterated that need and that request, and I have to say in many ways it's a demand because this is about saving lives in time and I'm waiting for an answer from the White House. And I will always give credit where credit is due the Federal Government in the last couple of weeks has shown us a much more vigorous approach and it's helping us and we are very appreciative. I thank the President, I thank all the Cabinet Officers who have been a part of this effort, especially thank FEMA, but we must have that additional personnel to be able to get through next week and the weeks right after that. So, I'm going to keep reiterating this specific request and I'm waiting for an answer from the White House. It is a reasonable request given that we're the Nation's largest City and we're the epicenter of this crisis.

Now, ventilators, which I'm going to talk about constantly we’re grateful again in the last week or so, the Federal Government really stepped it up. 2,500 ventilators came into New York City, that is amazing, but we're going to need a lot more and we’re going to need them soon. We’re hearing that more help may be on the way shortly from the Federal Government, we're waiting for that to be confirmed, we need it. That number we put forward 15,000 as the total need remains, the total need and it is a very tight timeframe because none of us knows for sure is the worst week going to be in one week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. We don't know when exactly it peaks, but we know April is going to be very tough and I'm trying to gird people from the possibility it will continue on into May and we're going to need those ventilators and the moment we are done with them we're going to send them wherever they're needed most in this country. Now I’m going to put out a call now to others who can help us and they’re people in our communities right now and I need them to step up some have, but I need all of them to. People who are part of the normal fabric of this City, oral surgeons have ventilators for when they perform surgery, plastic surgeons have ventilators wherever they perform surgery, veterinarians, yes, veterinarians have in many cases, ventilators that we could use every single one of them. If you've got a ventilator in your office, in your operating room, we need it now it should not be sitting there doing nothing. This is a war effort everyone needs to contribute. You'll get it back when this battle is over to donate ventilators to find out how we can immediately get your ventilators where they're needed, anyone can go to nyc.gov/helpnow.

And I want to now talk to you about personal protective equipment this has been such an important topic there's deep concern all over the City, all over our healthcare system. Today our City agencies are distributing to all New York City hospitals I want to make that crystal clear, not just to our public hospitals, Health and Hospitals, but also voluntary hospitals, independent hospitals. We ensure that supplies go wherever the need is in an equitable fashion. So, this day – today – we are distributing 3 million surgical masks all over New York City to our hospitals, 800,000 N95 masks, 600,000 pairs of gloves, 120,000 face shields, 40,000 surgical gowns – this is one day. Now anyone out there who has supplies like this you can donate or has a truly reliable source for these supplies, we need them. And again, if you can donate to this effort, every bit helps. Go to nyc.gov/helpnow or you can call. Obviously, people from all over the country are helping New York City. You can call 833-NYC-0040. And thank you to all who have helped us.

I'm going to give you some other quick updates before we go to questions. An update on our jail system, the efforts that we have made directly and working with District Attorneys and the State to ensure that inmates who have the kind of medical problems that would put them in direct danger and those who could be released for other reasons as well; again with some very strict guidelines and safeguards. As of the end of yesterday, there had been 900 inmates released from our jail system. There will be more ahead. We will give you an update as soon as we know of any additional numbers.

Want to talk about construction. There's been a lot of concern, obviously. We work closely with the State to affirm that only essential construction should be allowed at this point. Non-essential non-emergency construction must end immediately. Our Department of Buildings agents are out as we speak. Yesterday we gave education and warnings; today we are starting heavy fines and closing down construction sites that are in violation. They will be not just fined; they will be closed down immediately. If Department of Buildings has any difficulty from the people at a construction site who are non-emergency, non-essential, they will call into NYPD to shut down that site immediately. There's no kidding around here. All non-essential non-emergency construction must be ended right now.

On tax lien sales, this is a really important issue for some folks -tax liens, property – it was going to be [inaudible] by Department of Finance for unpaid property taxes or water bills or other charges. We understand right now people's lives have been turned upside down. They don't have money to pay bills. We want to be fair. We want to be understanding. So, all tax lien sales are going to be postponed. They were supposed to be in the month of May. They will be postponed to August, initially.

On alternate side parking, and we all know everyone who’s a New Yorker knows few issues stir the hearts of New Yorkers more than alternate side parking. Well, I'm sorry it's because of coronavirus, but let me at least give you a little good news in your day. Alternate side parking will be suspended for the next two weeks – two weeks through Tuesday, April 14th. So, leave your cars where they are. One less hassle and fewer people who have to go out of their homes to deal with it and we'll be looking after the two weeks to see what’s the right thing to do at that point.

On playgrounds, I have been talking daily, in fact multiple times a day with Police Commissioner Dermot Shea and to get feedback from his enforcement efforts, obviously from Parks Department as well. Overwhelmingly, we're seeing compliance in parks and playgrounds with some real problem spots too. So, I've been very clear, if we see a problem spot that's recurrent, we are going to shut it down. I have ordered 10 playgrounds to be closed at the end of today. Those are playgrounds that have had crowding multiple times. They will be shut down. They will be locked. There will be signs put up; there will be enforcement. My goal again is to try to preserve as many as possible if people follow the rules and if people will not follow the rules, we will continue to shut them down aggressively.

Another issue has come up and it is an issue that's causing us real concern. We heard from Staten Island, from the Amazon fulfillment center, a specific charge that a worker who raised health and safety concerns, raised social distancing concerns was fired. The allegation is because he spoke up for the safety of his fellow workers, he was fired. I have ordered the City's Commission on Human Rights to investigate Amazon immediately, to determine if that's true. If so, that'd be a violation of our City Human Rights Law we would act on it immediately. I should also note that the Sheriff's Office did an inspection of the facility to ensure that social distancing is being observed and they will continue to inspect as needed.

So, I'll conclude, and, again, we're going to see a lot of things we've never seen before. I know every one of us has walked down the sidewalk and looked up ahead a whole block and it was empty and we can't remember when that ever happened. I was driving on the FDR the other day and I looked ahead, for a mile it seemed like on the FDR there was no other car on the road up ahead. We're seeing things that are just strange and in so many ways troubling to us as New Yorkers. Some of these things are going to be painful. Some of these things are going to be hard to make sense of, but some things we're going to see – like this tennis center – are to be signs of the fight back. The fact that New Yorkers don't take this crisis lying down; New Yorkers are not people who get defeated easily. So, you go all over and you see this fight back. You see a place being turned into a hospital – it wasn't a hospital. You see people providing food for their neighbors. You see people helping in so many ways. You'll see unusual things and some of them will be things we wish we'd never seen. You're also going to see things that are going to tell you that New Yorkers are not going to accept defeat. I'm very, very proud of all of you for the way you've handled this extraordinary crisis. Something we'd never experienced in our lifetimes, I hope we never do again, but I have faith in New Yorkers; I have faith in New York City. We will see this through.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, again a thank you to all our colleagues here. Everyone is doing so much work so quickly. Thank you all, thank you. The amazing teams at Emergency Management at Health + Hospitals, for all you’re doing and with that, we welcome your questions.

Dave?

Question: Mayor, I know you said this location will eventually in about a week start taking non-ICU coronavirus patients.

Mayor: Correct.

Question: From Elmhurst, but is there a master plan in the city of, Oh, this person goes to Mount Sinai, this person goes to the Javits, this person goes to the Comfort. Is there a master plan or is it each doctor decides or what?

Mayor: No, that's – there actually is a master plan that's being built out as we speak in a cooperative effort between FEMA, the State and the City led by Emergency Management. So, job one Dave, is to build out the space immediately and to make sure as each spaces comes online, that there's a clear protocol. And again, I'll start and if my colleagues want to jump in at any point, just start walking toward me. I'll get out of the way because of social distancing. Stay there Deanne. So, the – but no, in fact the idea is to knit all this together into a coordinated effort, but I also want you to be clear, Dave, we have to immediately start building out the space first. Because to meet these deadlines, before you work out all the protocols of how it's going to be staffed and where the patients are going to come from, you got to get the physical part moving instantly. And that's been an extraordinary effort. But every day, more and more it's going to be started and gotten online. Ultimately, yes, you have to get the right people the right place. But remember the hospitals right now are being converted to all ICU or maximum ICU, but they still have a long way to go before they get to that point. So, while the hospitals can handle, of course other types of cases right now, what's going to happen over time? Every day it becomes -- each one becomes more and more ICU, more and more COVID related. So, it is literally a day by day evolution. Deanne, I'm moving. Okay, no step for you. I'm going to go over here. Now, I don't want to do, I'm going to go here. Okay.

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Emergency Management: Yeah. The coordination piece is a really big piece and what we have set up is the Health Care Evacuation Coordination Center, which is going to be run out of the Javits. It's actually a system that's been in place and its run by the State that was set up for coastal storm evacuations. That's just being put in hyper mode and being able to do that for this type of an event. What they're going to do is they're putting out protocols to all of the hospitals across the New York City area on how they request patient transfers and then that coordination center will match the acuity of the patient with the acuity of the bed as these beds continue to stand up. Right now the only places that are open are the Javits Center and the Comfort and so they are matching patients to those two facilities, but as we continue to stand up facilities and depending on what level of treatment we're going to be able to give, they will match those patients with the proper space.

Question: Just while you're there. So, it is up and running?

Commissioner Criswell: It is up and running. It's over – it's located at the Javits Center.

Question: Okay and just [inaudible] Comfort and Javits?

Commissioner Criswell: Because those are the only two that are open right now to move patients to.

Question: Okay a quick a follow up. [Inaudible] there is a large set up in the parking lot of Citi Field, is that somehow - what is that?

Commissioner Criswell: Yeah, the tent was originally set up at Citi Field to support the drive through testing clinics that were going to come in from FEMA. But we, through this process, as other clinics were set up. We co-located the FEMA operations with our Health + Hospitals and so we left the tent up there for right now to determine if we needed an additional use for it. So maybe it can be used for some of our food access distribution points. So, we've been in contact with Citi Field on leaving it there for right now until we determine if we have a use for it there. So, right now, it's just staged for us to use for something that we might need because the changes or the requirements continue to change every day

Mayor: So, I want to note with real appreciation to Deanne that you know, she brings an extraordinary background to this work in Emergency Management because she started out as a firefighter. She served in the Air Force, then served at FEMA. So what is amazing is watching everyone be able to work with Deanne, military folks immediately feel comfortable with Deanne because she was in the military. Firefighters of course, she's one of them. FEMA folks from Washington, she knows all of them, including the National Administrator. So, I would really want to give credit where credit's due, not only to our team, which is great, but Deanna herself has been really one of the pivots here because she brings a wealth of experience and relationships and it's really helping New York City right now. It's not a surprise that those ambulances, for example, showed up in record time. That's a lot of her doing and Tom Von Essen’s doing. Yes.

Question: Can you give us an update on Elmhurst Hospital and where that stands? What’s the number of fatalities that have come through there?

Mayor: Dr Wei will join me. I just want to say to preface and then we will artfully in a ballet-like fashion go around each other. It's been a really tough time for Elmhurst but I want to note and I give Dr Mitch Katz and the whole team at Health + Hospitals and Elmhurst credit. They continually made the adjustments. We talk about how the NYPD for example, constantly make strategic adjustments through CompStat. You saw that Elmhurst. They surged doctors there, nurses there, equipment there, four times, they sent more ventilators to ensure that it could save lives. And also moved patients off to other places who could be. So, they got some of the very toughest cases in the city. And in a sudden surge. And that has a lot to do with where the hospital is and how few public hospitals are in that area for so many people. But they really dealt with a sudden onslaught very, very powerfully. With that in terms of the overall situation, Dr Wei, why don't you come over. You go that way. I'll get this way.

Vice President and Chief Quality Officer Eric Wei, Health + Hospitals: All right. So, thank you for that question and thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Health + Hospitals and Elmhurst. First and foremost, my heart breaks for all of the patients and the families who have been afflicted with this terrible, terrible virus. I’ve practiced emergency medicine for a long time and I'm seeing things that I could never have imagined in terms of what this virus can do to all ages, people who are previously healthy, people with comorbidities. So, our thoughts and prayers are with everybody who's lost somebody, as well as everybody who's in the ICU and especially to our health care workers who have fallen ill. Elmhurst Hospital still continues to make all of us very proud. All the doctors, the nurses, the leadership, everybody is moving heaven and Earth to do everything they can to take on the onslaught of COVID-19 patients. And so over the past two weeks, it's gone from more than double the volume of people coming to the emergency department, to now the volumes actually down. But the people who are coming in are so much more ill and so much more critically ill, with shortness of breath and respiratory failure. And so what we're seeing is more and more ICU type patients. And so, I was just on the phone with the Emergency Department Chief, Dr. Stu Kessler to get a better picture. I speak to him every day. We have an ED action team that means that 6:00 pm every night. I've also spent a lot of time at Elmhurst myself over the past two weeks. They intubated 19 patients in the past 48 hours, 42 patients in the past four days. And that is way more than normal for an emergency department, even in a level one trauma center like Elmhurst. And so many patients are boarding, meaning they're admitted and waiting for space upstairs in the emergency department. Health + Hospitals has been acting like a system in terms of literally flattening the curve. Everybody should be familiar with that term with all the public health information about flattening the curve. What we've been doing is we've been transferring patients, both medical, surgical acuity as well as ICU acuity out of Elmhurst. Queens Hospital, Lincoln Hospital, Kings County Hospital to our other hospitals that have not been – are surging but not nearly as much as Elmhurst and others. And so, we've moved almost 200 patients in the last week and a half across the system.

But the indicators I'm looking at are flashing red. Right? The number of patients that are boarding in the emergency department, the number of patients that are filling our medical surgical units and our ICUs are surging well beyond our traditional ICU units, into step down units, to operating rooms, medical surgical units. And so, this space is exactly what we need. We need to look outside of the four walls of our hospitals and not just tents in front of our hospitals, but where they can take admitted patients. And so, the Javits Center, the Comfort are welcome reprieves. We have teams pouring over every patient in our hospitals, matching it to the inclusion and exclusion criteria to see who we can get to Javits Center, which we've sent multiple people today, as well as to the Comfort. And so, I want to thank the Mayor, OEM, the Governor, FEMA, everybody for stepping up and helping us.

Mayor: Stay there if you would, Doctor. I just want to see if there are any other questions about either Elmhurst specifically or Health + Hospitals. Anybody else have questions about that? Yes, way back.

Question: I wanted to ask, I know you said other hospitals are surging. Which in the system do you say, especially here in the borough of Queens, which is the epicenter, or the city's epicenter, could you specifically talk about Queens hospitals and, you know, the other hospitals here and how they're doing and which ones are an area of concern for HHC?

Dr. Wei: So, Queens Hospital is surging as well. They're about four or five days behind Elmhurst in terms of where they are on the curve but it's a much smaller hospital, and therefore we've been putting a huge emphasis on getting ICU patients out of Queens Hospital to Bellevue to Harlem Hospital, to Metropolitan and North Central Bronx. So, the borough of Queens is clearly on the front edge of this pandemic. But we're seeing it in Brooklyn. We're seeing it at Kings County, Coney Island, Woodhull – are all surging as well. Jacobi in the Bronx and Lincoln in the Bronx are right there as well. So, like I said, it went from being relatively easy to flatten the curve in terms of moving and shifting the surge across the system to now it's much more difficult. But I just really want to give the credit to the H + H leadership, especially the CEOs of all these other hospitals. Every time I pick up the phone and call them and say, can you take 10 med-surg and two ICUs? They say, of course, let me figure it out on my end, but send those patients please.

Mayor: [Inaudible] please –

Question: [Inaudible] understanding about Elmhurst, at this point, is it still receiving heart attacks, broken legs, standard ER visits? Because from what we saw from the inside, there were people at Elmhurst saying, we need this to be essentially COVID triage right now, we can't deal with all these other folks. Has that been straightened out?

Dr. Wei: Yes. So, we – I was on the phone with FDNY leadership yesterday, hospital special surgery has made a generous offer to take all ortho-related EMS runs there. So, we are setting up a call with City Hall, with FDNY to figure out how to operationalize this because this is not normal operating procedures – you take, you know, within 10 minutes of where you pick a patient up. We are stabilizing traumas and immediately putting them in an ambulance if safe and transferring them to ICU elsewhere in the system. So, yes, we are doing everything we can. Memorial Sloan Kettering is offering to take our cancer patients. I mentioned special surgery for our ortho patients. We've also created capacity at Roosevelt Island Medical Center to get other patients. So, we're making space, we're making space for COVID patients and especially ICU COVID patients.

Mayor: Anything else on HHC, please –

Question: Just, is it possible that patients that have [inaudible] that are not being treated specifically for [inaudible]?

Dr. Wei: Yes. I think that was one of the initial, most surprising things for us, that some of the positive tests that were coming back were from those that we least expected. We thought travel, we thought fever, cough, right, all of these respiratory symptoms, but some people with just diarrhea and upset stomach, right? We had traumas come in, so people who got hit by cars, or got beat up on the street, and we put them into the CT scanner. You see ground glass opacities, which show pneumonia that's consistent for COVID-19. And so we're operating under the understanding that anybody could have COVID at this point, any patient that we see.

Question: [Inaudible] when they are sent away from the hospital to other facilities, including here, what kind of precautions have to be taken just because of that –

Dr. Wei: Absolutely, so droplet precautions for anybody who is a suspected, what we call a person under investigation – so they have a test pending, anybody who has a confirmed if they have – yep, that means a mask.

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Dr. Wei: I mean – yep. But if they're intubated, then we take even further precautions called airborne precautions. So that's an N95 mask, that's a face shield, eye protection, gowns, gloves, a hat. And so, for both our EMS and ambulance personnel who will be transporting these patients, they will all be in personal protective equipment as well as the receiving providers at each of these facilities. And we will keep these patients in those isolation precautions.

Mayor: Anything else Health + Hospitals or Elmhurst? Okay. I'm going to go around, you go here, I'll go here. I want to switch around. Okay. Let me get other questions. Go ahead. Over here, first –

Question: On the released inmates, could you say in which agency or agencies is responsible for them and also are any staff or other resources being allocated in addition, in terms of finding them housing, supervising, and support programs.

Mayor: Yeah. So, I'll give you the broad answer and then we'll get you more follow up. There's definitely a follow-up effort between Department of Corrections, Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, NYPD, and then also sometimes other agencies. Some of these folks are homeless. They're going into a hotel setting, for example. That can involve the Department of Homeless Services or sometimes Department of Health and definitely Health + Hospitals because they do correctional health. So, anyone that goes out is given a lesson in how to address any potential health concerns. They can call Correctional health anytime and get support. So, there's actually a pretty elaborate follow-up scheme, but we'll get you exactly the details of it.

Question: [Inaudible] being involved?

Mayor: I think given everything that's happening we're drawing on staff that already exists to do some new things because obviously a lot of what people were doing, a lot of those tasks are gone, and people are doing different things. Obviously, the population on Rikers now is, you know, lower than we've ever seen. It's around 4,500. Rikers and the whole correction system, I should say, is around 4,500. So that is freeing up some time and effort in Corrections that can be applied to ensuring we're doing the proper follow-up and monitoring. Yes.

Question: In your mind, and maybe we can get Danny to weigh in on this, too – can the US Open happen this year? We've already seen the Olympics postponed for an entire year, so that's a July event. We're talking about late August, early September. Can this event happen and when would that decision need to be made and what plans might exist to [inaudible]?

Mayor: Before Danny comes over and I want him to speak for himself about their plans. I'll only say, I mean, look, I think the time horizon that's of deepest concern to New York City is April, May. I think thereafter we pray that we start to come out of this, but it won't be instant. You know, it'd be going – you’ll be going up the mountain, then you come back down the mountain. It's going to take time. Remember it was weeks ago that our Health Commissioner said her best estimate was we would have a chance to return to normal around September, but that's an ever-changing reality. So, August may be a very, very much better time or we may still be fighting some of these battles we don't know yet. But for things that are coming up much sooner, I think it's very tough. By late summer, you know, we may get some good news. Come on over.

Danny Zausner: Ironically, today is March 31st and five months from today is August 31st, which is the first day of the main draw of the US Open. We still plan accordingly, but it seems so trivial in light of what's going on in the city and the state and the government right now. So we want to be as supportive as we can, we will continue to plan every single day as if the US Open is being hosted, and hopefully we'll be in a position five months from today to see players actually practicing on the courts right behind us and playing in Arthur Ashe Stadium and all the other courts on the site. But way too preliminary to be thinking about that right now.

Mayor: Yeah. From your lips to God's ears. Okay. That would be a nice, nice part of our comeback, wouldn't it? Yes.

Question: There was a report today that Rikers inmates are being offered $6 an hour to dig mass graves on Hart Island –

Mayor: I have not heard that.

Question: [Inaudible] on the Intercept [inaudible] –

Mayor: That doesn't sound right at all. Yeah, that really doesn't sound right. We'll have someone get you all the details, but that's a – proceed with caution on that, assuming that is right. Okay. Anyone else over here? Yes, please.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Yeah, there's – look, there's a lot going on and we have to make sure one, that families are treated with respect no matter how intense this crisis. What a painful moment for families. They need all the help and support they can get. Two, everyone's trying to make sense of a new set of ground rules. And we've – you know, it's going to take a little time to get it right, but what I can assure you is, God forbid someone lose a loved one, we want to make sure that the medical examiner gets over there quickly, we want to make sure that if involves a police matter the police get over there with proper protective gear – everyone. And we are getting help from the federal government. It's a topic, as I've said scrupulously, I don't get into the details of, but we are getting help from the federal government. More help is coming to expand on what the medical examiner does. So, I think we're going to need a little time to get it to be the way it should be, as quick and respectful as it should be. But that's what we're going to do. See if there's anything else. Yes?

Question: On Samaritan's Purse, which is opening the Central Park facility, do you have any personal concerns about their organization? Did you choose not to attend because of that?

Mayor: Well, when I heard originally, Andrew, that there was, you know, an organization that was going to help Mount Sinai address COVID-19, I thought, that's fantastic. I don't have – the fact that it was moving so quickly was something that I found positive. Then when I heard more about the organization, and particularly some of the things I read from Graham [inaudible] it was very troubling to me. And I said immediately to my team that we had to find out exactly what was happening. Was there going to be an approach that was truly consistent with the values and the laws in New York City that everyone would be served and served equally. We've received those assurances from the organization. I spoke earlier today with the CEO of the Mount Sinai system, Dr. Ken Davis, who was adamant that they will only continue their relationship with the organization if those rules are followed, that they have a written agreement, that there’s going to be no discrimination whatsoever. We're going to send people over from the Mayor's Office to monitor. So, I'm very concerned to make sure this is done right. But if it is done right, of course, we need all the help we can get.

Question: I wanted to ask – I know you had mentioned that the city would be releasing more detailed data. I wanted to ask for an update on that and when it will –

Mayor: As I said – thank you for the question – I'm comfortable on the raw material that you indicated yesterday. I'm comfortable with its release. I want the Health Department to come up with an answer, if they haven't already, I guess, so Freddi will follow up today. If there's some specific concern, I want to hear it, but otherwise I think it should be released. We've given you the disclaimers and my goal is to get more accurate information that we could actually feel comfortable that in releasing it publicly you would scrub it and find it to be scrupulously consistent – that's what I want to get us to the point of. It's been, as you can imagine, very hand-to-mouth the first few weeks, getting set for this kind of onslaught. But I think soon we should be able to have much more detailed information we can put out consistently that we can have confidence in.

Question: Has [inaudible] changed for you? I know last week you were reluctant to release the data because you were concerned that it might not be accurate. Was there a shift or change to change your mind?

Mayor: The change was, I have been shown more and more information that I believe is getting to the point that it will be consistent and accurate. Early in the crisis we were dealing with very specific cases. You remember those days? It seems like a long time ago. And I was able to get very specific information that when I put through people through their paces, it came back consistently, and I said, great, that's information we can put out. Then as things intensified greatly, I saw too many things were changing every hour and I didn't feel it was right to give out information that was so quickly changing. Now, I think I'm getting a flow of information that's ready to be made public more and more. As soon as it is, we're going to put it out.

Question: Do you want to see anything more from President Trump? He's having his news conference later today. What do you want to hear from him about New York City in his news conference later?

Mayor: I've said, I've expressed my appreciation for the USNS Comfort for FEMA being here in force, for the ambulances and the first responders who have arrived, for the ventilators – this is all moving in the right direction, but this is still the calm before the storm. And so, the request I made directly to the President and other top officials in the administration for 1,000 nurses, 150 doctors, 300 respiratory therapists to arrive beginning as early as Sunday for the next particularly intense week or two. That's what I need a response to right now. That's the urgent need for New York City. And I'm going to update what we need next as soon as it becomes clear, I'm going to tell the President directly, but I need an answer to that question right now.

Okay, everybody. Thank you very much and we will see you again soon.

2020-04-01 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, everyone, very important updates to go over today. And also, as we talk about challenges, we also want to talk about always all the support. We're getting, all the people who are coming forward, not just from all over around New York City, but from all over the nation to help our city in our time of need. We're dealing with a big challenge together, but we are certainly not alone. And there are so many amazing stories. People who want to help and are helping and giving their all for New York City right now. And in a few minutes, I'm going to talk about an old friend who has returned – and we are so happy he's back – coming to our aid at the moment we need it.

But first, let me talk to you about a conversation I had earlier today with the administrator for FEMA, Peter Gaynor. This is the man who the president has tasked with leading the effort nationally to ensure that the efforts to stop coronavirus are fully resourced in New York and around the country. So, he's really leading this extraordinary mobilization all over our nation. And Administrator Gainer was very, very focused, very concerned, concerned about needs in New York City. Very aware of the details of what we're facing. We had a long and detailed conversation. We went item by item related to everything we need here. Timelines, specifics about how to get the job done, and also about how important it is to protect New Yorkers in this moment. To stay ahead of this. To recognize the challenges in the next few weeks, and get the personnel, and the equipment, and the supplies in place in time. I think everyone knows, I've talked about this Sunday, April 5th as a crucial, crucial day, and I've done that for a reason. I want everyone to understand it. It's not to be alarmist, it’s to focus the energies of our national government, to focus the attention of everyone who can help us, to help them understand how important it is to maximize support for New York City by this Sunday. And then in the days immediately following as we prepare for a real upsurge. But I'm happy to say that Administrator Gainer, I could not be more pleased with the conversation. The focus he showed on each and every item, and the ability we had to determine together how we would proceed to the maximum. I express my thanks to him on behalf of all 8.6 million New Yorkers for everything FEMA has done already. And we are so especially appreciative for the amazing support we've gotten with the ambulances that have arrived, the EMT’s, and paramedics to help us address the challenges we're having. And I think a lot more help is on the way. So, it was a very encouraging conversation.

Now, I'm going to talk about our immediate needs, and I'm going to give you some real detail about what we need in the coming days. And then of course, I'm going to be talking about the important work that Jimmy O'Neill is going to be doing starting immediately. But let me say, as I go into the specific numbers, and you'll hear, I should say also after my report, you'll hear from Dr. Katz. And he's going to go over some very specific updates related to Health and Hospitals, and then how we're going to be building out our hospital capacity in general, and then you'll hear from Jimmy O'Neill after that. But I want to emphasize how much effort has already been expended. It's unbelievable. If you look at what's happened over the last weeks, how many people have gathered together to provide support already. And again, the toughest weeks are ahead. But I want to tell you upfront, hundreds and hundreds of people who have worked to ensure the supplies we need have kept coming in. And I'll talk about them more as I talk about Jimmy's new role. But there are so many people at the Emergency Management Command Center in Brooklyn, folks from City Hall who are there at the command center and working remotely who have played a crucial role. Folks who work at Department of Health and Health + Hospitals in their warehouse, in their supply operations – so many people every single day are participating in getting the supplies where they are needed. We talked about huge, huge distribution that happened yesterday. This is going to be an ongoing effort and it's going to be like nothing we've ever seen in the history of the city, and a lot of people are making it happen. I want to thank all of them, and all New Yorkers should have them in their hearts, because this group, they are unsung heroes, but they're doing amazing work to protect all of us.

Now, I want to talk about, since I've put Sunday, April 5th, as that kind of demarcation line, that D-Day, by which we have to get ready this coming Sunday. Let me tell you where there is good news and we said this Sunday to prepare for the entire week of April 6th ahead. There are two types of supplies that we're now confident we will have a sufficient amount of for the week of April 6th for all hospitals in New York City, for all first responders. I want that standard to be really clear. We are all working together. Federal government, State government, City government, nonprofit organizations, charities, everyone's working together. When we think about our hospitals, we are thinking about all hospitals together. Public, voluntary, independent, we're thinking all of them. Everyone is wearing the same uniform. We're also thinking about our first responders who obviously need to get the protective gear, the PPE’s when they need them. We have to make sure that supply is strong. So, we are confident based on all our projections that for next week we will have sufficient eye protection. That means the face shields, and the goggles, and sufficient surgical gloves for all those needs, for everyone who is doing this crucial work. For all our heroes who are out there protecting us. For all those healthcare workers who are at the front line. We will have enough of those two categories.

We need major resupply in some other categories. Now, I want to emphasize, I say this – we have requests out to the federal government, the state government, to private vendors, to the many, many individuals who are seeking help. So, when I tell you these numbers, it's against the backdrop of many moving parts already, many actions already, to make sure we will get the help up. My job is to tell you where we stand, and I'll constantly update you as more supplies come in. So, the need at this moment here on this day thinking ahead to Monday, we still need 3.3 million N95 masks to come in by Sunday to prepare us for the week ahead. We need 2.1 million surgical masks. We need 100,000 isolation gowns. These are big numbers, for sure, but they are reachable numbers, but we have to make sure it happens in time.

Now, those are all very, very important. But the area that I focus on all the time is ventilators. When it comes to equipment and supplies, the number one concern I have is ventilators because they keep people alive and they give our healthcare professionals an opportunity to save lives. We have continued to get a very substantial supply of ventilators, but we still need 400 more to be in place by Sunday to prepare us for the week ahead. So, we have many, many requests out, many efforts that are underway to get those 400 in place in time. That's to be ready for Monday. In the course of next week, and again, we have requests out to the federal government, state government, many sources. In the course of next week, we will need a minimum of 2,500 to 3,000 more ventilators. Now, extraordinary efforts are underway to tap into the supply all over the country and to work to see what we can produce here in this city. But that is the number we're working with at this moment for next week. There's also an ongoing effort to get personnel. This is a growing concern as we go forward, but again, one where we see a tremendous response. So many New Yorkers have volunteered folks with medical training of all kinds. More and more volunteering to come forward and their being act on right away [inaudible]. We'll talk about the many people who have been found. Medical professionals been put under contract, who are joining us rapidly. And the requests that I've made to the White House and the Pentagon for over a thousand military medical personnel. I reemphasize that request to Administrator Gainer of FEMA earlier today as well. I'll keep you updated on that. So, many personnel needs but also a lot of personnel coming our way quickly. But we have to always remember to keep building out that ICU capacity. We need to keep using those ventilators we need, we need the personnel that go with it. And we also have to constantly think about giving some relief to the heroic folks at the front line right now in our hospitals. They need to see reinforcements come, they need a chance to get some downtime so they can finally recover from everything they've been doing and then they can get back into this battle. So, we will keep an eye constantly on that personnel situation and update you regularly.

So, the bottom line, supplies continue to come in at a very rapid rate and they go out right away to hospitals all over the city and to first responders. The speed has become remarkable. The turnaround time very, very quick, to again, all the hundreds of people and especially to that team at Emergency Management, all the folks from Emergency Management, from the agencies, from City Hall, my extraordinary colleagues who came together to create this rapid deployment plan of bringing in supplies and getting them out. I want to give you, again, profound thanks for what you've achieved, and we're going to need you even more in the weeks ahead.

Now, I decided as we built out this apparatus that we wanted to bring in additional leadership and some of the best leadership anywhere in this country, and we know him well. He led with great distinction our Police Department. I was so proud the day I named him Police Commissioner. He did an outstanding job in those years serving us, leading an organization of over 50,000 extraordinary people and keeping this city safe. I'm going to talk about the role that Jimmy O'Neill will play and it's going to connect exactly into what I've just told you already about everything we're doing to keep our hospitals strong. But I want to take a moment to express my gratitude because Jimmy's coming to aid us, because of the willingness of his company VISA and particularly its CEO Al Kelly, who is someone I've known for quite a while, who’s someone who really loves New York City and cares about this place. I want to thank Al. I want to thank VISA for freeing up so much of Jimmy's time so he can do this crucial work, it's going to be a truly lifesaving. So, a profound thanks to you.

Now, that team, as I mentioned, the hundreds and hundreds of people who are moving the shipments constantly, that's been an area where we've seen tremendous strength and consistency. What I want to see now is absolute seamlessness in terms of how supplies, equipment to go into our hospitals immediately get distributed where they're needed in the hospital to the frontline workers that we constantly are able to say exactly which hospital needs what at any given hour. I'm not talking about weeks, I'm not talking about days, I'm talking about any given hour, knowing exactly what each hospital needs. So, we can make those rapid moves those rapid shipments and ensure that within each hospital that distribution is strong and smart and of course we are being honest. We've always been honest, I know Dr. Katz will make this point as well, that as we get into supplies, we have to shepherd them. We have to make sure they're being used properly, support our health care workers with everything we've got, but also be smart about rationing what we have to make it last in this tough situation. I thought about all of those pieces and I thought about the many different kinds of hospitals and I think we've got some of the greatest hospitals in the world. Everyone knows that in this City we've got our public health system, which has really distinguished itself in this crisis and Dr. Katz's leadership and his team has been amazing. We've got independent hospitals there, they're smaller community-based hospitals and they play a crucial role in our City. But a lot of them have gone through for years – financial hardships. They often deal with folks with tremendous medical needs, but— on many, many times people that don't have insurance. So, those independent hospitals are absolutely crucial in our ability to fight this battle, and a lot of them have struggled lately no fault of their own— they've always been there for people in greatest need, but they need special help now. So, I've asked Jimmy O'Neill to develop a system for ensuring that we'll have personnel in every hospital where they're needed. To help make sure that this supply chain is seamless and constant and focused, that the supply usage is just the way it should be and any hospital that needs additional help will be able to get it to them quickly. Jimmy will assemble a team with folks from City Hall and other agencies so we can have that presence in the hospitals and it will allow us to have a much faster and more precise communication and get people what they need when they need it. So, I'm very, very appreciative. You'll hear from Jimmy in a few minutes.

And now, I want to talk to you about looking ahead, this whole month of April. I told you what we're trying to get done by Sunday, I've told you how we see next week. Next week is going to be a very difficult, intense week, and yet the preparations have been very, very strong for next week as well, we'll keep updating you on that. But here's the overall situation the alluded to it many a time, but I want to just remind all New Yorkers about this we're always going to need more of— that supply chain I talked about. We're going to need the masks and the N95s and the gloves, the gowns, all that, every single week we're going to need more of that. We’re going to need the ventilators, especially in that number that we've said I've said from the very beginning, 15,000 for New York City, that number is a very specific number based on the projections we've had. That number continues to be the right number, continue, I've told the President, United States and everyone else I've spoken to in the federal government that is the true number. And the second we don't need all those ventilators we will happily share them with the rest of the country immediately. When it comes to— hospital beds, again, the goal is to take the 20,000 or so we started with the month of March with a normal compliment of hospital beds in this City that we're staffed with professionals all over our hospital system. Those 20,000 are increasingly going to become all ICU beds over the month of April. That's what our hospitals will be for more and more taking on the toughest COVID cases at the front line. We need to build out during the month of April, an amazing number of additional hotel beds 60 excuse me I said hospital beds, I should say, my apology, hospital beds and hotels would be one of the ways that we achieved that. But hospital beds, we need to build out an additional number of 65,000 hospital beds in the City of New York by the end of April. We already have a tremendous start the 20,000 beds, as I say, they were already there. Hospitals are now adding up to 50 percent more capacity just drawing on all the space they have and Dr. Katz talked about this from the beginning of the ability of hospitals to quickly build out more beds, more space, more ICU. That number will add an additional almost 10,000 beds right there, Javits Center we've talked about, Dr. Katz will go over this, thousands of beds there, and then all the hotels will bring online increasingly. So, this is going to be an epic process through the month of April to build out that capacity but this goal is within reach. It's going to take herculean effort, but I'm confident it can be reached.

So now, as I turn to Dr. Katz, we're going to talk about where we are today on our hospital capacity, the building out process, starting with our public hospital system. This is – this growth pattern, this building out I'm talking about is literally going on 24/7 – and a profound thanks to everyone who's participating in it. So, Dr. Katz is going to give you a sense of where we stand today and how we're going to be moving forward over the coming weeks. Dr. Mitch Katz.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. And thank you for supporting the public hospital system. It's clear in this emergency how lucky we are that New York City kept open its public hospital systems didn't allow them to close the way it happened in Philadelphia and Washington DC and Milwaukee because in this crisis we so desperately need the public system. We have 324 ICU beds that we run on under normal circumstances and a total of 4,428 beds. And while that, those are very large numbers they pale in comparison, Mr. Mayor to what you showed us we're actually going to need in this crisis. But we are prepared to meet the crisis in our immediate surge to handle it. Elmhurst Hospital, which is on the forefront of handling COVID patients, it's in an area of central Queens. Where a large number of districts depend on this hospital because there is no other hospital near it. It has already increased from 29 intensive care beds to 111 intensive care beds and, sir, that’s in the matter of 10 days. I mean, these are changes that you would expect under normal circumstances, would take six months to a year to get the beds in place, to get the staff in place, to get the equipment in place. Every single one of these beds represents a courageous nurse taking care of the patients. Courageous physicians on all of the support intensive care patients need a great deal of support from pharmacy from transport, from radiology. It's a tremendous effort to take care of each intensive care unit patients and yet Elmhurst has magically gone from 29 to 111 beds. At Lincoln Hospital they've grown their ICU from 34 beds to 114 beds with 30 more coming there. And Bellevue Hospital has grown from 66 to 127, with 52 more coming.

And this is really just the beginning of what we need in order to handle this emergency. We have in order to deal with the fact that COVID-19 patients have not appeared evenly across our system as the epidemic hits different parts of our City at different moments. Also, we recognize that some areas of our City like Queens have markedly fewer hospitals, so it's not just Elmhurst Hospital, but Queens, hospital that has also been hit extremely hard by patients and very sick patients. So, in order to be able to do this we have transferred 193 non-ICU patients and 43 ICU patients from the hospitals that have been most effected and moving them to hospitals where we have had greater capacity in the last few weeks. So, we've been moving patients to Coney Island Hospital, to Jacoby, to Harlem, to Metropolitan, and the North Central Bronx have all taken patients in order to make sure that we are able to provide care for every patient who needs it. Every hospital and I speak to them every night knows exactly what space they're next going to open during the night. We've seen a large number of patients needing intubation come in in the evening hours so we open the units often in the middle of the night in order to accommodate them. But in every case, we know what those surge wards will be it fits with the very plans that we started working on in January and February when we first saw the data coming from China. We recognize, Mr. Mayor, that while these are huge efforts, they won't meet the needs as you've outlined them to New Yorkers. So, in the short-term we're going to bring on an additional 762 intensive care beds for a total additional beds of 2,466.

And again, while these numbers are astronomical, they don't add up to the numbers that you showed New Yorkers of what's going to be needed. We intend to convert all of the hospitals into intensive care units because an intensive care patient relies tremendously on the ability of the laboratory, on the pharmacy, on equipment, radiology – you cannot create an intensive care unit, a bed in a hotel. But what we can do is turn out facilities into large intensive care units and then use the hotels and the other alternative facilities for medicine patients who do need support but don't need the same level with ICU need. This is going to require a huge influx of equipment and even more importantly of staffing. The issue is not one of spacing and we've said this right from the beginning. There are many places in New York City that would be available to create additional space. The challenge is having the staff, having the equipment, and in the case of intensive care units, having all of the other services that would be necessary in order to keep people alive. So, it's our commitment to you, Mr. Mayor, that we are going to do everything working with you and all of the great people in New York City to achieve this.

In order to reach just what we've done so far, we've added 165 physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants to the system. We deployed a thousand registered nurses; we have another thousand registered nurses coming within two weeks and we've added another 350 physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants that will be coming in the next week, but this will still, again, not be sufficient. We will need a great deal more staff than this to be able to successfully increase by the number of intensive care beds that New York City's going to need.

We're doing everything possible to support the incredibly brave nurses and physicians and support staff of every kind, who are working long hours often watching their own coworkers become ill. It creates a tremendous sense of distress to both be working hard and know that coworkers have gotten sick, but people are bravely working on. We want to do everything possible that we can to support them. We're making sure that there is COVID-19 testing available free for any of our frontline personnel - that's starting at our occupational health clinics. We've received more than $1.6 million in donations to provide comfort items to our frontline staff. They can't take any breaks to go out to get food. That's not even in, in our rule book about how you get through these kinds of crises. So, having people give us donations so that we basically can bring in food for all the shifts of workers, people do need to eat and we are very grateful. The rooms in the hotels – many people who are working 12, 16 hours and around many, many patients with COVID do not feel comfortable returning home to their spouses and their children. So, we have provided hotel rooms so that they can go to a place where they feel they can get rest without putting their families at risk and come back the next day. We're providing taxi rides. You, sir, provided parking vouchers for people so that they can park their cars easily. Our Helping Healers Heal is extending emotional, psychological counseling to healthcare workers in dealing with the stress; having your patients die despite the very best efforts is so distressing. This is a very fierce disease for a very small number of people. We've put up the for people who wish to donate to support your healthcare workers at nychhc.networkforgood.com and we so much appreciate the support of all of the first responders: fire, EMS, the police, the people at the Office of Emergency Management who have been getting us supplies and keeping us going.

In terms of additional surge Mr. Mayor, would you like to speak about these facilities? Would you like me to speak about them?

Mayor: I'll just say broadly, and Mitch, you can talk about some of the specifics, but broadly, when you look at this list, and remember everyone, this is a series of facilities that just days ago were not outfitted to provide healthcare. So, if you go through the list, which, and, and Mitch will talk about it, but every single one of them is either a place that was doing something totally different or is something brand new in this city. Obviously the most powerful example, the most compelling example, which we all are feeling is the presence of the USNS Comfort. So, Mitch will talk to you about the specifics that we have already moving and then I'm going to talk about how we're going to turn more and more hotels into hospitals. So, you start, Mitch.

President Katz: Sir, I had the pleasure, the pleasure of going to Javits Center and seeing a tremendous number of staff who are willing and able to take care of patients to help us to unload our hospitals so that we can focus on the intensive care unit of intubated patients – located on the West Side of Manhattan. In phase one, a thousand medical surgical beds are currently available with another 1500 medical surgical beds to come in late April. Samaritan's Purse located in Central Park with additional support for Mount Sinai: 65 beds, 10 intensive care unit, and 55 medical surgical beds that we believe will come up in 24 to 48 hours. We were all so proud to see the Navy bring the Comfort ship located in Western Manhattan with 750 medical and surgical beds and a crew of phenomenal physicians and nurses who are prepared to take care of patients. At one of our own facilities on Roosevelt Island we were able to open up 240 medical surgical beds. We already have more than 25 patients who are being taken care of in that facility and during this week we will fill it up. We have, I know you were yesterday at the National Tennis Center located in Corona, Queens showing New Yorkers that you've prepared a facility that can take care of up to 350 medical and surgical beds. At Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook we believe it will be possible to create up to 750 medical and surgical beds that will go up in mid-April. And then finally, we know that the hotel industry is capable of providing us with a large number of rooms. We so far have secured 10,000 beds and 20 hotels and we believe that the capacity is there. Again, staffing will be one of the things we will most work with you, Mr. Mayor, to be sure that the people in all of these facilities are fully cared for.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much Mitch and get ready, I'm going to come back to you on the, the way people can donate to your frontline healthcare workers so get that website ready again. But, let me first say, so, think about the amazing, amazing, fast, intense, passionate effort that's being made here to expand our hospital capacity in record time. Nothing like this has ever happened literally in the history of New York City. Let's go back to that previous slide; I want to work off of that. The, again, think of where we started. We started at the month of March; 20,000 staffed hospital beds in what everyone would say is, you know, we’re the finest hospitals in the United States of America. Take all the hospitals in New York City, take all the professionals, all the amazing talent; you know, this where so many of the doctors of tomorrow train for the whole nation. That was an amazing place to start. No one could have imagined a world in which we'd have to build out so much so quickly but now, when you think about the fact that those hospitals that with their 20,000 beds are basically adding 10,000 more within those hospitals. You look at what Mitch has reviewed on this slide before us, the thousands of beds at Javits, the USNS Comfort, like adding right there in that ship - like adding - another major hospital to New York City. All these different pieces are starting to add up and then we go to the hotels. So, the fact that, right now, the hotels we've already identified and contracted with – and I want to thank everyone in the hotel industry by the way – I want to thank the owners of the hotels, the managers of the hotels, the people that work in the hotels, the unions who represent the people in the hotels, everyone has been working shoulder to shoulder to speed this effort because it has to happen in record time. So, right now, we already have accounted for 10,000 additional beds: you take the 20,000 we started with, the 10,000 more we're adding in the hospitals themselves, look at 10,000 more already from the hotels that will be coming online soon - that's 40,000. The thousands more you see on this slide in specific locations and we're going to keep building and building. The key going forward is going to be more hotels and more big spaces. We've got obviously in the case of the Javits Center, in the case of the Billy Jean King National Tennis Center, in the case of the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, these are large spaces where you can do hundreds of beds at a time or in the case of Javits, thousands. We're going to be looking for more and more spaces like that. I know the State of New York is also doing the same, and we're all coordinated; we're dividing labor. They've got major spaces that they'll be working on. The City will be adding our own.

We've been getting tremendous cooperation from the private sector. Again, I'll tell you the day we ask someone to help fight the coronavirus and they say, no, but I have not had that day yet. So, in terms of finding the additional beds we need, we believe there is enough major venues - bigger spaces in New York City - that we can retrofit, and we can do that quickly. And we're working with folks in the construction trades, contractors, folks in real estate; they're all saying yes, they’re all quickly helping us get this work done. And then those hotels, and I'm very, very sorry for what the hotel industry has been through in this crisis. A lot of people have been put in a tough, tough situation to work in our hotels – they're obviously struggling, but what it has meant at the same time is a huge number of hotels have become available to the City of New York and literally we can go in and lease an entire hotel building and we can do that dozens and dozens and dozens of times until we get to the point that we have all the beds we need. So that is the game plan. It's going to be furious and intense, but we're going to get it done and I'm so grateful to everyone that’s a part of it. As I say a few more words and then we'll turn to Jimmy, I want to remind people again; if you're able to help our frontline hospital workers, these heroes have been doing so much and Mitch’s folks in the public hospitals have borne the brunt they’ve done amazing work. Mitch, one more time, what's the website people can go to if they just want to give those direct donations, the food and the other things that will help your heroic workers get through the day, what's that website again?

President Katz: Thank you Mr. Mayor it's nychhc.networkforgood.com.

Mayor: Say it one more time.

President Katz: Nychhc.networkforgood.com.

Mayor: All right and then to all New Yorkers and anyone in the country who wants to help New York City with equipment, with supplies, who wants to volunteer their time – reminding you anyone can call 833-NYC-0040 – 833-NYC-0040. And we are so thankful for the help. So, let me pull this all together. I think we've known for a long time that New Yorkers are the strongest, the toughest, the most resilient. And in a crisis, we show what we're made of. And it's happening again in an amazing way. I, you know, I don't have to say again what our doctors and nurses and health care workers are doing. Our first responders, they've been exemplary. Our companies, the private sector has stepped up in a huge, huge way, donating so much to help our frontline heroes. What's happening now at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an example, it keeps coming back to me, really touches my heart. And please go see the video that we've had on my Twitter feed on this @NYCMayer. The – it's unbelievable to see a wartime factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard making those face shields to protect our health care workers and our first responders. And there's more going on in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we'll be talking about in the coming days. But the fact that PPEs are being built right here in New York City by hand, each piece built by hand, labor of love to help their fellow New Yorkers is so moving. So extraordinary. Everyday people who are donating food to Mitch’s colleagues who are purchasing and donating masks, gloves, you name it, it's been nonstop.

So, this virus is tough. This virus is going to give us a real battle. But this virus is no match for the people of New York City. This city is strong. We will get through this, we will get through this together. We will come out the other side an even stronger city. And I mentioned that we are blessed to have help always. And I want to talk about that, but I realized I first needed to say a few words in Spanish, just to summarize.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

So, everyone, as I said, help has been pouring in from around the country. And I got some help a few weeks back from San Francisco. The second San Francisco put their shelter in place order out, I thought that that looked like the model we should follow here in New York City immediately. But I wanted to make sure it was functioning in a way that would really protect people, make sure we could get ahead of this virus and also work in terms of people's day to day lives. I needed an eye witness to tell me what was happening in San Francisco and someone I could trust to confirm that it would work here in New York City. And once I got that confirmation, I said that this was something we have to do right here. Well that eyewitness happened to be none other than our former Police Commissioner, Jimmy O'Neill, who has been based in recent months in San Francisco working for Visa. And not just every day, but it seemed like every hour, Jimmy was sending me reports, updating me, telling me what he saw, telling me what he thought would work.

And then a few days ago he reached out to me and he said that he would be coming back to New York. And he said he was ready to serve his city again in whatever capacity we needed, no matter how big or how small. And I said to Jimmy that knowing the amazing ability he brings, we need him to take on a major, major role. And we talked about all the ways he knows the city and he knows the city so well from his 35 plus years on our police force. He's been in every hospital, he's been in every neighborhood. He knows the people of this city so deeply, cares so deeply for this city. And so, I talked to him about this vision of ensuring that not only the supplies get to the hospital, but that we could really make sure everything was being used ideally, and that we could resupply instantly whenever hospitals needed it. Needing a leader of that effort to create that network of professionals that we could work with to really make that precise and hone that. So I can tell you that Jimmy O'Neill has answered the City's call before and he's answering the call again. And it is just a great honor to welcome him back, our former Police Commissioner, and now my senior advisor, helping us wage this battle against coronavirus. Welcome back, Jimmy O'Neill.

James P. O’Neill: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. It's an honor to come back to New York City. First of all, I want to thank Chief Bill Scott from San Francisco PD who provided me with a lot of the intel of what was happening. And plus, I took a couple of trips into San Francisco myself and I wish the people out in the West Coast all the best. It's just a – it's the responsibility of all New Yorkers to do their part. I always felt that way and I continue to feel that way. And I want to thank Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you. I want to thank all the great people at Visa that I've been working with over the last four months and I will continue to work with. And I really want to thank the CEO Al Kelly for giving me the opportunity to do this job and to do my job at Visa. And it's important that we all come together as New Yorkers. It’s one thing I saw in my time as a cop, you know, this is a resilient city. Everybody's supportive. Lately, I've just been seeing, reading, hearing about all the great work that's going on in New York City right now. And I just felt compelled to come back and offer to help and do whatever I could.

And basically, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be helping to manage or managing the supply chain. Supply – making sure that this is an inspection regiment. Make sure that we're sourcing, delivering, distributing, and tracking to make sure that we do our best, continue to do our best for the health care workers that are out there right now, this very minute, doing their best to save lives. And it's a system of accountability and we have to make sure that it's operating efficiently.

Just before I wrap it up and we're going to – some of that equipment is N95 masks, surgical masks, isolation gowns, face shield, goggles, all the equipment that our health care workers need. Just really, I'm truly inspired by what I've seen over the last two months. The doctors, physician's assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses all the other workers in the hospital. Now we have the military involved. Thank you to the Navy, the State police, the Port Authority police. It's, they really - these people truly are an inspiration and I'm thankful for them. And last but not least, I want to thank the men and women to the NYPD who continue to keep the city safe. And in spite of everything that's going on right now, they're out there answering radio runs, doing their best to keep people safe. And I’d like to commend Commissioner Shea, what a great job that you're doing right now. So how could you not want to help this great city and I'm going to do my best and thanks for giving me the opportunity Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you very much Jimmy. Your best is very, very good. So, I know with you here our health care workers are going to get even more support. And I want to thank you. It means a lot to all of us in this city that you are back. Okay. With that we are going to turn to questions from the media. And Olivia, you're going to let me know the name and the outlet of each caller?

Moderator: Yeah, just have three quick programming notes at the top. The first is we're going to do one question per reporter to get to as many outlets as possible. Also, if reporters have additional questions about hospital capacities, we are going to have a technical briefing with Dr. Katz after this press conference. You can save those questions for later. And finally, Commissioner Shea's on the phone.

Mayor: And Olivia just to clarify that reporters who want to be a part of the technical briefing to just stay on the line after?

Moderator: Yes.

Mayor: You want to do that? Okay. And Mitch will standby when we finish the main portion of the press conference. And welcome to the call Dermot Shea. And we will go ahead now with the first question from the media.

Moderator: Gloria, you're up first. Gloria?

Mayor: And from NY1.

Question: Hi guys, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Gloria.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. Thank you. First, I want to ask a question about Queens specifically. And I know that you have been talking about the increased cases that we are seeing there. But I wondered if - for Dr. Katz, if there's anything that you guys as health professionals have found about why there is such a concentration in Queens specifically? And I understand you mentioned today the lack of hospitals, but is there anything else to it? We have been getting some reports today about the situation at Elmhurst, specifically about the lack of ventilators. And I'm wondering if there was any detail from today that you can give us an update on, in terms of what the current status is there as it pertains to ventilators at that hospital?

President Katz: For the ventilators there are enough ventilators right now for Elmhurst and all of our hospitals. As the mayor has been very clear. We have enough ventilators in New York City until Sunday. Beyond that, we're waiting to get help from the federal and State governments. I think what any time people - and we've had at various times at various hospitals, people think that there aren't enough ventilators. That's because at any one area of the hospital, such as within the emergency department, they may not see all of the ventilators that are there in the hospital physically. But I check every night myself before I go to sleep. I look at how many ventilators each hospital has and I'm sure that they will have enough to get through the night. And I restock every single day. So, we are totally on top of it, but the issue that the Mayor has pointed out is that that will not go beyond Sunday when we will exhaust our supply.

In terms of why Queens. I think the clearest answer, and we've looked at this, is that Queens has about half the number of hospital beds per thousand persons, than Manhattan. And especially where Elmhurst is, there is a huge area of population that are extremely dependent on Elmhurst. It's the hospital that's closest is also a hospital that is very well regarded. Where immigrants and the uninsured feel safe to go. So that also plays a role into why people go. And then finally, although it will be a while before we fully understand all of the aspects of the epidemiology, we know that in Queens, many families because of poverty, live together in very close quarters. So that while we are practicing as a city, social distancing. You may have multiple families living in a very small apartment. And so it's easy to understand why there's a lot of transmission of COVID occurring.

Moderator: Henry from Bloomberg is up next. Henry?

Question: All right. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Henry.

Question You know, we're coming up on some religious observances and I want to know specifically whether the City is going to exempt some groups of people, some size of groups? Is there any policy that's set forth?

Mayor: Henry, just to clarify, you mean – do you mean from religious gatherings?

Question: Yes, the Seders, the Easter services, any gatherings to observe these holidays?

Mayor: I appreciate the question very, very much. I mean, it's obviously a sacred time of year for so many people. And I've had this conversation in general, not about the specific holidays, but the broader issue of what's the morally right thing to do? What's the right thing to do from the perspective of faith? With some of the great faith leaders of this city, starting with Cardinal Dolan, who I have consulted with so many times over the years, but also leaders of so many other denominations and faiths, we have a very consistent process of consulting with them on many matters through the organization [inaudible] and through our Clergy Advisory Board. Henry, I have rarely heard more unity and consensus in New York City than I have on this topic. That this is a time in our history where you have to protect the lives of all New Yorkers. And that means there cannot be religious gatherings. And I know that is particularly painful at this time of year for folks who cherish their faith and look forward to these holidays and they are moments of deep, deep devotion. But what I've heard overwhelmingly from our religious leaders is they understand that traditional religious gatherings cannot occur until this crisis is over. And it certainly will not be over until we get through April and potentially well into May. And then we'll still be dealing with it, you know, for months after just thank God not on the kind of constant level of increase that we've been dealing with in recent weeks.

So no, I – look, if a family lives under the same roof already, then social distancing is a different matter entirely. Because once you're on the whole roof, the same roof with people all the time, social distancing isn't the same thing that you obviously are already in constant contact. A family, having a Seder, a family worshiping around Easter is one thing. But we are practicing strict social distancing. And I would just be very, very careful about doing anything outside of the family unit. I don't think we want to see any kind of gathering. The idea is that at this point in our lives, we're just staying very tight with our own families and that is the safe way to observe faith and that's the safe way to go about life. So that's the guidance we're giving.

Moderator: Julia from the Post is up next. Julia?

Question: Hi, can you hear me Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Yes, Julia.

Question: Hi. So, on playgrounds – 24 hours ago, a little over 24 hours ago, you said that there was largely compliance in terms of social distancing on playgrounds and your goal was to try to preserve as many as possible if people follow the rules. So, what changed to lead you to agree with the Governor's decision to shut them down? And what would you say to critics who claim playgrounds are the latest example of you delaying tough decisions and leaving them up to the Governor?

Mayor: Well, Julia, look, first of all, we're all working together. The Governor and I have agreed overwhelmingly throughout this crisis. The strategic direction is something we have constantly consulted on. Our teams talk about all the time. We've just agreed almost without exception on the major things we've had to do. There were definitely moments where there were slight differences. I mean, obviously I wanted to see shelter in place. You know, the Governor and I talked about that. We talked about closing schools and we're always trying to make sense of the different things we were seeing. We've talked about the parks issue. But in every case, it was collegial Julia, that comparing notes, our teams comparing notes. No one takes lightly these decisions. None of them are easy, none of them are or anything you wish on people. But what has been a real agreement that we're going to work together. And we talked several times last week about the playgrounds and agreed that we would, you know, try and give it a few more days. We got to Saturday, we still wanted to give it a few more days to see. But in the last 24 hours, as you know, I decided it was time to implement fines over the weekend. We've been stepping up enforcement. You know, yesterday we announced the particular playgrounds that needed to be closed. Previously we have started to take down basketball rims. But you know, the Governor got to a point where he really thought it was an abundance of caution issue, that to go ahead and move across the board in terms of the playgrounds. And I respect that and I'm going to work with him. The truth that I said is true. We did not see a lot of noncompliance. Commissioner Shea and I talked about it not only daily, multiple times a day. We didn't see a lot of noncompliance. But I do appreciate that the Governor at this point thought, you know, this is a good one to take an abundance of caution and I respect that. And, again, we're always going to seek that consensus. I hope when this crisis starts to abate, that one of the very first things we can reopen is playgrounds. But that's obviously a way in the future.

Moderator: Reema from Chalkbeat is up next. Reema?

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Reema.

Question: Okay. So, as you know, the State lawmakers are trying to nail down a final budget and you know, we just got a chance to look at school aid. Looks like [inaudible] you probably know this, that New York City is set to receive nearly the same need that they received, that they have this year. Part of that, about $717 million is from the federal stimulus package. So, you know, we're still waiting for them to vote on a final budget, but I'm - remember earlier in the year, you and Chancellor Carranza were saying that the Governor's proposal was actually still $136 million less than what you needed. So, what I'm wondering is this budget, if passed as is, is that going to, you know, is that going to force New York City to look at layoffs or other kinds [inaudible] and tell me more about that?

Mayor: Yeah, Reema let me respond to - I heard your question pretty clearly. Just so you know, your line was kind of skipping in and out, but got enough of your question. What we said back in February was true, that the budget as was proposed then was going to lead to you know, the need to cut the budget for the New York City Public Schools. And I was very worried about that and commissioner - excuse me, Chancellor Carranza was as well. Obviously, the world is entirely different. That's, you know, I think about that day, I gave my testimony up in February, up in Albany, that seems like a century ago. We've all gone through so much. So, the budget as proposed, it does not shock me that the Governor felt, and apparently the Legislature apparently also feels there wasn't an ability to even keep the schools the way they were practically speaking, that we're going to take another hit here. I don't – how can anyone feel good about that? But we don't have a choice at this point. It's just the reality we're dealing with. We are going to have to make tough, tough budget decisions going forward. I have announced a $1.3 billion initial PEG program and I've said very clearly that number will go up.

But Reema there is something very, very important that could happen in the coming weeks, well before we adopt our budget in June. And that is the fourth stimulus, which again, I spoke to Speaker Pelosi, to the Democratic leader of the Senate who was also our Senator Schumer. I spoke to Treasury Secretary Mnuchin. There's a clear understanding there's going to be another stimulus bill. And that one of the elements of that stimulus bill will be aid for localities and states. And I think that has to be money to make up for all the massive expenditures that we're putting out to protect people from coronavirus, but also all the lost revenue because we need that money back to keep basic services going in the city, to make sure that everything people depend on our police, our fire, sanitation, education, hospitals, parks that everything can keep going. Because I keep saying if we're going to have recovery, it will be because our hospitals are functioning, our city governments are functioning, our state governments are functioning. If you don't have all those things, we're not going to have recovery. And I do believe that our colleagues in Washington understand that. So I'm very, very hopeful that those resources are really going to help us out and help us avert bigger cuts before June.

Moderator: Katie from the Wall Street Journal's up next. Katie.

Question: Hey everyone. I wanted to ask if, Dr. Katz wants to weigh in, and you too Mayor de Blasio, you know, you laid out why Queens was hit so hard, but I think the stat there that's so alarming is that there are so few hospital beds. So if, Dr. Katz, do you want to talk about why this is, I'm sure you know when you get into state funding in that, but also for the Mayor, you know, how many hospitals in Queens private but still hospitals had closed when you were at Public Advocate and the Mayor and the actions the city could have done to keep these hospitals open?

Mayor: Katie it's a good question, but I will also say the obvious you know, in the middle of a crisis, it is not unfair to say, you know, what could have been done way back when on issues like hospitals. I mean, you know, I felt for years and years long before I became Mayor that the city had ways it could have intervened to stop some of these closures and the state as well. But they did happen. And the issue now of course is to take everything we have and use it as well as possible and then, you know, continue to build out from there. So I would take – before turning to Mitch, I'd say, Katie, I think the meaning I would take for your question is not can we, you know, I know you're not suggesting this, but we can't go back in time and undo what was done over the course of the last 20 years. But we can learn the lesson going forward. And I think what we're seeing in this crisis is a very profound lesson to our city of what we're going to need in the future – our state, you know, what we're going to need in terms of health care in the future. In fact, this is a moment in history where we have to invest more and more in health care. We have to make sure that folks get covered – this is really – this crisis has been a powerful message to us about the need for universal health care. We're going to deepen as we recover, we're going to deepen our efforts with NYC Care and with guaranteeing health care to all New Yorkers. We need to push for universal health care around this country. This crisis is a powerful illustration of if we don't get this right, there's going to be other challenges ahead that could be even worse.
And it's a real wake up call to our nation.

I've now talked to every major leader of the United States of America in the last few weeks, and we are all scrambling to find ventilators among many other items. There's no conversations that have been more powerful than with our military leaders who I think also are coming to a deeper realization of what it's going to mean to protect our national security in a different way, which is our health care security going forward. I think when we get through this crisis, this country has to reassess everything. Starting with what kind of a stockpile nationally we're going to put in place, of ventilators of, you know, equipment, supplies, how we're going to build up a national health care corps that's much, much deeper than what we have now to prepare for the future. So, I think, I think there's a lot that has to change when you get through this crisis. And I think it's a wake-up call for this city, this state and this country. Mitch?

President Katz: I would just add Mr. Mayor that when I first came to New York City, health care consultants told me my focus should be on closing public hospitals because there were “too many empty beds.” And I so appreciated that that was not your perspective at all. And your direction to me was to make the public system work. And that's been our focus and I can't imagine what I would be doing right now if we had closed public hospitals. That is one of the things that's saving us is that we – I'm able to expand to areas because I did have empty wards. I would also say that in order to help Queens, our first steps were okay if the patients are at Elmhurst because there aren't other hospitals in that area, then I need to send the staff to Elmhurst to take care of those patients. And whenever Elmhurst or Queens has gotten overwhelmed, we have transferred patients out and that's where the 193 non-ICU transfers and 43 ICU transfers comes from. And again, that's part of, along with checking the ventilators, every night before I go to bed, I look at who, who is most hard hit and we determine how to level the patients across our system.

Mayor: Yeah. I just want to add one more thing and real thanks to Mitch – over the last few years, Mitch Katz took Health + Hospitals, which was struggling financially for years and put it on a very strong footing financially, managerially. When I came into office, that conversation about the need to potentially close hospitals was very, very active. And I remember in budget meetings, people would say, we have to think about that possibility of maybe we have to close some public hospitals or lay off frontline health care workers. And I'm proud to say that my administration and I said from day one, we're not going to do that. So, we kept every public hospital open. We employed all the health care workers we needed. We had no idea that would ever be a COVID-19 crisis. But thank God all of those people, those buildings, everything was in place and ready.

And I also have to tell people that for years, unfortunately, Health + Hospitals Corporation needed massive infusions of support from the city government through the city budget just to keep afloat, while it was being modernized and while it was being improved to be able to deal with the future. And we made that investment. Again, we had no idea what was coming up ahead. But we made that investment because it was right thing to do. And then Mitch has put this amazing organization on much stronger footing for the future. So, a long answer, Katie, but you raised a very important point. I wish over the last 20 years there had been moments where there was more foresight about protecting hospitals that we've now lost. But I can at least say from the perspective of City of New York in the last six years, we made a priority of protecting every single one of our public hospitals, every single one of our public hospitals has stayed strong and now we need them more than ever.

Moderator: Sean from the Daily News is up next. Sean?

Question: Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. I understand the sticking point on the budget in Albany has been making it “adjustable” and giving the Governor power to make cuts as he sees fit throughout the year. I just wanted to get your take on the idea of an adjustable budget and if you're concerned that would give the Governor too much power.

Mayor: Sean. I would just say this, we all understand it's a crisis, but it's also a democracy, and you know, the power of America, the power of New York is no matter what's thrown at us, we stay by our values. We stay by our laws. And so clearly even in a crisis, there has to be checks and balances. And it's crucial that the legislature have the kind of oversight it has traditionally had and has the ability to ensure that it agrees with what the Governor's doing. So, I understand and I respect that the Governor's going to have to make a lot of tough choices in the middle of crisis, just like I'm going to have to. So, I want him to have the freedom to make tough choices. But I also believe in those checks and balances as I always have, and we can do both at once. I don't think there's a contradiction – that balance can be struck. I think the important thing to remember is that thank God the previous stimulus bill, the second stimulus bill provided a lot of support, particularly in terms of Medicaid. Thank God the third stimulus bill provides so much support to everyday New Yorkers directly into their lives, into their wallets and real support that's going to help the state government in particular. And I am convinced there will be a fourth stimulus. So, I think beyond just the issue of how the different branches of government work together is the fact that there could be a lot of help out there. And let's remember if you take every single dollar that New York State needs to make up its budget deficit, to make it 100 percent whole, every dollar that New York City needs to make us 100 percent whole, the federal government could achieve that in a heartbeat.

The stimulus bill went to a lot of trouble to bail out you know, bigger corporations. There's question in my mind that that next stimulus can very, very easily reach a New York City, New York State with everything we need. And it should be the same for other cities and states in need. We, you know, we all say the federal government bailed out the auto industry, once upon a time, bailed out the big banks. They can bail out America's cities and America’s states, but we all need to fight for it. And by the way, I think it's going to be a bipartisan fight. I think you're going to see Republican governors, Republican mayors shoulder-to-shoulder with us Democrats fighting for it in these next weeks in Washington.

Moderator: Matt Chayes from Newsday is up next. Matt?

Question: Thanks, Olivia. Mr. Mayor, last week I asked you for the triage plan to ration care and you said “I don't think it's appropriate to start talking about. [Inaudible] called it a theoretical. You said you didn't think it's fair.” Well it's no longer theoretical – NYU Langone has a plan like this, according to the Wall Street Journal. The State’s had recommendations since 2015. So hospitals are making these calls, but it's behind closed doors with no public input. In Alabama and Washington, people with intellectual disabilities are a lower priority and [inaudible] for being out of ventilators. So, my question is this, is it your position that it's inappropriate, unfair for hospitals to have these plans at all? Or that it's inappropriate or unfair for the public to know what these plans say?

Mayor: No, I mean – look the underlying question, I obviously disagree with your wording, but the underlying question is a very powerful one. What I was saying is I think we have to be careful in this crisis. It's going to be a tough battle. And I know the media has to ask tough questions and ensure that all the concerns of the public are being aired. But I also think in an atmosphere of crisis, we have to remember that we're trying to really respect people's humanity, trying to help everyone to know all the things are being done to protect them, to help them. And be careful not to give people an impression of something that's just not the reality. And so sometimes I fear that the, you know, the questions or the representation leads people to think things are different and even worse than they are, and I'm very concerned about that.

Of course, we understand and it's not a new thing, and Dr. Katz will speak to it. There are medical ethics around what to do and really, really tough situations where tough choices have to be made. And I respect the profession to work that through. But the goal is not to talk about what to do when it's too late. The goal is to fight every minute to avoid ever having to get to that point. And that means having enough medical personnel, enough ventilators, enough beds. That's what we're focused on. And honestly, I think talking about these horrible choices and contingencies just distracts from the mission, which is to protect every life and save every life we can. If you say it in terms of – I don't know what's happening in Alabama or any place else, but if you say is government making a decision that would a separate different people the way you're suggesting? No, of course not. And I don't know what some of the private hospitals are doing about their ethical choices, but I respect that they're very professional organizations. In terms of our public hospitals, in terms of what we are doing as the City of New York. Our goal is to save every patient that can be saved, and that's the basis of this fight. You want to add?

President Katz: I would fully agree with that that at this moment we can be saying as a City that we have enough ventilators till Sunday and we need for ventilators to be released from the federal and state caches to keep people alive. Well, we could be saying let's focus on allocation decisions. I think it's much better to focus on getting enough ventilators so that we don't have to make an allocation decision. The state guidelines that you refer, which are thoughtful, have never been promulgated into law. So as of now, they stand as some very thoughtful guidance by a very learned group of people. But they're not applicable as law. They cannot be – you cannot make decisions based on those guidelines and say, well this is how we are governed.

Moderator: Sydney, from the Advance is up next. Sydney.

Question: Hey there, Mr. Mayor. So, you and Dr. Katz outlined your search plan for all of the public hospitals in the four boroughs, but you didn't mention any plan for Staten Island. As we know, it's the only borough without a public hospital. And from the numbers we know today for Staten Island’s two private hospitals, it looks like they're operating at more than 50 percent of their combined capacity. Today, there were 458 coronavirus patients alone being treated at the two hospitals and from what we know about the two hospitals’ search capacity, they can expand to a total of 829 beds. The State, Congressman Max Rose, federal government won't give us any information on when the new field hospitals are going to be opening on Staten Island, and it looks like, you know, the private hospitals will need some relief soon. Does the City have a plan in the interim to relieve Staten Island’s private hospitals before the field hospitals open in the event they reach capacity before they open and who's in charge of, you know, putting together that plan? So far, nobody, no one's been able to articulate it. Is it the City? Is it the State? Is it the job of the private hospitals?

Mayor: Okay. I appreciate the question very much. And I think we have articulated to how this entire endeavor is proceeding. The federal government, through FEMA, is constantly providing us with support. The State government and the City government are coordinating constantly to make sure each hospital gets what they need. A massive amount of supplies is being distributed all the time to all the hospitals. I want to emphasize that again, public, voluntary, independent does not matter – all the hospitals. What we are going to do in terms of Staten Island, of course keep constantly supplying the two hospitals. I've mentioned to you there's a conversation I've had with Borough President Oddo pretty much every day over the last week, constantly monitoring what's happening, working with the State on building out capacity on Staten Island. The State's got some pieces they're working on. We're going to work on other pieces. Again, one of our focal points will be hotels. And it's just going to be a constant effort to keep building more and more capacity to protect Staten Islanders. Commissioner O'Neill in terms of using RUMC as one example of a hospital that serves a lot of Staten Islanders, a lot of people in need. We're going to make sure that they have what they need. This is the kind of thing where the team that Jimmy puts together will be present in hospitals on a regular basis to make sure that flow of supplies is exactly what they need, make sure they're being rationed out the right way to get the maximum support for the health care workers and make sure there's always what they need for the next day. There's going to be a very dynamic process, but that's the process that our team at Emergency Management and H + H are working on every single day. That's why you've seen millions and millions of items already flowing out to the hospitals. And the exact pattern we talked to you about was not at all just about H + H – when I talked about all those hotels we’re expanding, that's every single borough and public spaces as I mentioned – large public spaces, we’re going to constantly find more and bring them online. And, Sydney, the amazing thing is how quickly they can be brought online. Yesterday, I was at the Billie Jean King Center – the tennis center in Queens – that's going to be open for patients as early as Tuesday. So, we're going to move rapidly and Staten Island is absolutely going to be a part of this plan

Moderator: Erin Durkin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Hi there. I was just wondering, you mentioned briefly that Health + Hospitals [inaudible] going to be offering of all staff testing. I know previously the Health Department was saying this wasn't necessary for people without symptom. Can you explain why the change in policy and why it wasn’t done sooner?

Mayor: Yeah. I'll start and then Dr. Katz will add. One, we're starting to get more testing capacity and, Erin, boy, if you look back – you know, my first press conference on coronavirus was January 24th when I called for more federal testing and the ability of the city to do its own testing. And I wish to hell the federal government had listened to us back then. But finally, we're actually starting to get a lot more testing capacity. And so, we have the capacity that we can use a different strategic way. The other thing that's true is our health care workers who are just fighting so hard and going through so much for, a number of them – they are requesting testing as something that will give them a greater sense of confidence as they do this extraordinary work. We want to accommodate them. And since we have the capacity now, Mitch thought this was a smart time to make it available for those who want it. It's not obligatory, but for those who want it. Let me have Mitch [inaudible] –

President Katz: I agree with all of those, but I would add another major reason that we are not encouraging the general public to go for testing if they're asymptomatic is that we want everybody to shelter in place. So, we recognize that if people are seeking a test, then they're going to be leaving their home, they're going to be going out to going to go to another health care facility, there’s going to be a need to use protective equipment on the person who's doing the test. In the case of our health care workers, they are already at the hospital, which is where the tests are being done, so it no way results in more people being out and communicating in ways that could cause transmission of the virus.

Moderator: Yoav, from the City, is up next. Yoav?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Hi, Dr. Katz. I wanted to ask about something Governor Cuomo said today. He said, once you go on a ventilator, you only have a 20 percent chance of coming off. And Dr. Katz, I wanted to ask you whether you're kind of seeing the same figure on a city level and, I guess, if there's anything you can say about that. It's just, you know, we've been hearing the ventilators are kind of our best hope and, obviously, every life is worth saving, but, I guess, what does it say that our best hope perhaps only has a 20 percent chance of succeeding?

President Katz: Yes. the Governor is right. In fact, the estimates that I've seen are closer to 15 percent, but the issue is that you don't know when people come in who's that 15 percent that can survive. This is a fierce virus for a very small number of people and part of when I talk to people in the hospital – part of what's so hard for them is they only see the people who are so sick on the ventilators. The reality is, again, most of us are going to be – who are exposed to COVID are going to have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Only 20 percent of us are going to need the hospital's care. Only five percent of us are going to need to be in an ICU. Only about three to four percent of us will need to be on the ventilator. But it is true that those people who have gone on the ventilator, the chance of getting off it is only about 15 percent. We have seen successes and we celebrate – we have at Health + Hospitals had people come off the ventilator and that is so rewarding for the physicians and nurses.

Mayor: Yeah. And, Yoav, our goal is to – I just want to be really clear, because it's really important – sort of the mission statement – our goal is to save every life. And any life that can be saved, we will save. Mitch just made it real plain, when someone comes into that hospital, they don't have an ID badge on them saying, you know, what's going to happen to them in a week or two weeks. Our health care workers fight for every single human being, doesn't matter who they are or where they come from. So, that's how we're going to go about this. And, look, a ventilator is just – we know it, we know it can be the difference between life and death. We know there are other people who are not going to need a ventilator, but they're still going to need health care. We don't take an attitude of, you know, any way de-valuing each life. We value each life tremendously. And we're New Yorkers, so we value everyone equally. And that's why we're going to fight to get every ventilator, to get all the staffing we need, and to save every single life. And I want to never have a day where I say, you know, the help we ask for wasn't there and someone died – someone died who didn't need to die. That's the standard to me. Did everyone get saved who could be saved? Or, did anyone die who didn't need to die because the ventilator wasn't there? That's why it's so sacred to get every single one we need in time.

Moderator: Last two with the Mayor – Jeff Mays, from the New York Times. Jeff Mays?

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Quick question on the playground issue, does that mean that the rest of the parks remain open? And do you plan to open up any more spaces such as streets to allow people to have more space? And finally, are you at all concerned that not making this decision shows that you are slow to make certain critical decisions during this crisis?

Mayor: No. Jeff, just look at the facts please, respectfully. January 24th, I started fighting to get us the testing we needed and kept throughout February for it. The day that I came to the decision it was time to close the schools, as painful as that decision was, that same night I also made the decision to close bars and restaurants, make them go to only takeout and delivery. Those decisions, closing schools, closing bars and restaurants, obviously way ahead of so much of the country. It was then shortly thereafter – and again, I give special thanks to Jimmy O'Neill who helped me think through the shelter in place issue because of what was happening in San Francisco – I called for shelter in place ahead of the vast majority of public chief executives in this nation. So, no, I can make decisions all day long, but there's sometimes, Jeff, where the data tells me that we have an opportunity to try and strike some balance. And again, I have tremendous faith in the NYPD, and tremendous faith in Commissioner Shea, and we looked at the compliance levels in the playgrounds and we did not see a particular challenge. But, again, I understand why the State wanted to go to an abundance-of-caution stance and I accept it and want to work with the State and always be united. So very, very comfortable with that. Once I think something needs to be done, I will – I remind you of this last weekend, saying that any houses of worship still having services, we would shut down and disperse, announcing the fines for folks who were violating social distancing. Not problem in the world when I think something is justified, and we've thought about the consequences intended and unintended, I will pull the trigger every time when it's time to take the next step.

Moderator: Last call with the Mayor, Jennifer from the AP. Jennifer?

Question: Hi. Thanks for taking this. I know that [inaudible] questions about the H + H surge plan [inaudible] technical briefing and I appreciate that, but I just wanted to ask you, as the Mayor, how confident do you feel about getting [inaudible] –

Mayor: How confident – what?

Question: Do you feel about getting the number of beds that are needed?

Mayor: On the beds – so, Jennifer, it's a great question because it also points up the larger dynamic around the beds, which has everything that goes with the beds. So, I'll start and Mitch can elaborate. And then, again, Jimmy and I will leave and Mitch can stay on for any other technical briefing matters that journalists want to go into. But, Jennifer, the education a lot of us have received during this crisis is that all the pieces have to fit if you're going to save every life. So, the beds are one thing, the equipment's another thing, the supplies are another thing, and, most importantly, the people, the health care professionals are the crucial piece of the equation. The great, powerful truth is you can't achieve the goal without all the pieces come together. So, the beds in some ways are the easiest part of the equation. They're not hard to do in the sense of, for example, you take a hotel while you've got, you know, a building full of beds – you’ve got to make some modifications, you've got to build a nursing station on every floor and things like that, but it's not a ridiculously complex. It takes a lot of work quickly, but it can be done. We know how to do it. And when you're talking about a lot of supplies, they're out there, it's just getting them here in time. When you're talking about ventilators, a much tougher equation, because we all know there's just not enough in the country, but we obviously have the greatest need, we should get the most and then pass them on later. You talk about personnel, endless need for personnel, with a lot of people unfortunately out for a period of time because of the virus, with folks who need time off cause they've been working so hard. That's where I've been clear that we must have an infusion of personnel, not only from the private sector in the New York area, but also from the national level. I've had this conversation with the President, with the Defense Secretary, with the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the FEMA administrator, and I could go on and mention others as well. And I've said, we must have a national mobilization of our doctors, our nurses all over the country like we've never seen before. Something much closer to a wartime dynamic – and if not a draft, per se, something close to a draft in which every available doctor, nurse health care worker who is needed at the front is moved there by the military to serve for the time they're needed and then moved on to the next location and the recipient city will send a lot of our health care professionals to the next place that needs them. That's how serious it is. That's how unprecedented it is. I have asked the President and all the other leaders I've mentioned to get us, starting on Sunday, 1,000 nurses, 150 doctors, 300 respiratory therapists, and that's just the first request. And the President, I talked to him and to the other leaders about calling up the military reserve across the nation. The President did that last Friday. That's the level we're at now. So, the point – I'm sorry for the long answer, but it's a very, very crucial topic. The beds, we can do. It’ll take – it’ll be a race against time, it'll take a lot of hard work, but I'm confident we can get there. But the bed is only as good as the supplies, the equipment, and especially the people that go with it. And that's – that's the tougher part of the equation that we need to see a lot more help, particularly from the federal level to achieve. 

Mitch, do you want to add?

President Katz: You did it.

Mayor: I did – okay, Mitch has trained me well. Okay, we’ll continue with the technical briefing. Thank you to everyone. And thank you, again, to Jimmy O'Neill. Welcome back. Thank you so much for all you're going to do for us.

Thanks, everyone.

2020-04-02 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, everyone, there’s a lot to report on and a lot to tell you about today. But the first thing I want to talk to you about is something we all need to focus on this crisis – and that is hope. And I'm going to be talking about it a lot, because there's a lot of reason to hope. No matter how tough it's going to get, there are so many reasons to be thankful for all of the people who are helping our city, all the good people around the city, all the good people around this nation who are helping us. We are not alone in the least. And I got an incredible, incredible experience today this morning in Queens. It was two parts, really. The first part was visiting our EMS Station 50, meeting some of our extraordinary EMT’s and paramedics. They have literally in the last few days gone through the biggest surge in 9-1-1 calls in the history of New York City. And I’ve got to tell you, these brave individuals, they were so strong in the way they were dealing with this crisis. They were confident. They believe that their training and their partnership, their comradery, were going to serve them in this crisis no matter what. They let me know they were up for any challenge and they were also very grateful that help was arriving.

And that's the second part of what I experienced this morning at Fort Totten in Queens. It's a FEMA staging area now. And I met EMT’s and paramedics, came from all over the nation to help us in our hour of need – folks from states all over. You know, at one point, I was talking to these EMT’s and paramedics. I was thanking them on behalf of all 8.6 million New Yorkers. I was telling them what it meant to us that they had driven from all over the country in their ambulances and how powerful that was to us and how that gave us such a good feeling in this city – what it meant to our brave EMT’s and paramedics that this help was coming. And at one point I said to them, please call out the states you're from. And I just had – a shiver went up my spine. I felt this sense, this really profound sense of appreciation and faith as I heard this roll call of States. You know, Kentucky, and Alabama, and Indiana, and Illinois, and California, and Michigan, one after another, people called out the names of their states with pride, and they were so proud to be here in New York City, and they knew that New York City had often been there for them. The FDNY have been out many times around the country helping other parts of this country during natural disasters and that is appreciated, and people wanted to return the favor.

So, it was really something stirring about our nation at this moment that people are rising to the call in such a powerful way. And that helped, those hundreds of EMT’s and paramedics, and the 250 ambulances that are coming or here already. And I got to watch so many of them roll out of Fort Totten. That's amazing what that's doing immediately to help us to deal with all the emergencies we're facing around this city. Want to give a special shout out to two guys from Kalamazoo, Michigan. I had a good talk with them, Andrew and Jeff, and they literally gotten their rig and had gotten their ambulance in Kalamazoo and drove all the way to New York City, and they were just ready to go to help us out. And so special thank you to our friends from Kalamazoo for being a part of this.

I spoke earlier today with the President and a group of key members of his administration that he had gathered. They were having a strategy session and they called to ask me what was going on in New York City and how the federal government could continue to help. So, it was the President, Vice President Pence, the FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor, Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Director, Admiral Giroir, who's the head of the Public Health Service, the equipment czar, Peter Navarro, the President's senior advisor, Jared Kushner, who's obviously a New Yorker, and knows a lot about the city and cares about this city. So, we got into a very detailed conversation about where we stand. First of all, I thank them deeply for what they did for the NYPD and they called it operation blue bloods. I think that's a great name. Helping the NYPD to have the protective gear they need at this moment. Deeply appreciate that special effort the White House made. But the real difficult part of the conversation was talking about the days ahead.

We went into great detail about a number of New Yorkers in ICU’s. The number we projected coming up this Sunday and Monday. The facts that were so powerful and challenging about what we're going to face next week. I talked to the president about the need for ventilators. I talked to them about the need for N95 masks and other PPE’s. I talked to them in detail about the personnel reality, and the whole group of leaders assembled, the fact that even with the equipment, you always need the personnel all these doctors and nurses and extraordinary healthcare workers, we need more and more help. I talked to the president about the expansion of beds, and I will say the president knows something about real estate in New York City. And I talked to him about the fact that we had 20,000 hospital beds just a month ago, and we're going to be adding up to 65,000 more to handle this crisis. And that's going to happen all in the course of about four weeks. And I think he understood that that will be a herculean effort. But I said to him, we believe we can do that, taking a huge number of public spaces, converting them, hotels by the dozen, that we can actually build out that capacity, but it won't save us unless the personnel is there.

So, we had a very good conversation. I was thankful for the help we’ve received, and I immediately told them just how much more we're going to need. And I told them we will fight every minute of this crisis to get through it, and then we will turn around and give everything we have and send our heroes to other parts of the country to help. And I really appreciate the conversation because it was detailed, and it was sober about the facts. But I was also clear with them that I believe at this point we have to come to a recognition that anything short of a full mobilization of our military will not serve this nation sufficiently. Just going over the situation in New York City and pointing out, imagine for a moment we had 20,000 hospital beds, we're talking about needing three times more that, just to get through the next four weeks or so. Imagine that pattern in other parts of our nation. What that's going to mean for the ability to build out our healthcare system and protect our people in many places simultaneously. The only way that can be achieved is with the leadership of the United States military. They have the talent, the logistical capacity, the professionals that can play a crucial role. There's no other way it will happen.

So, I had a good and respectful conversation with the President, but I also had an urgent conversation with him. I told him, I just think this is the only way we're all going to be able to get through this and save as many lives as possible is to use the military much more deeply. I reiterated to the President what I talked to him about several times last week. The fact that we need personnel right now, and we need military medical personnel right now. And that I had asked repeatedly, and in writing many times for help by this Sunday. We had asked for military medical personnel, 1,000 nurses, 300 respiratory therapists, 150 doctors. These numbers, I've been over with the President, with the Secretary of Defense, and with General Milley numerous times. They are quite familiar with request. I had a follow-up conversation with Secretary Esper, and General Milley again this afternoon. I'm going to be talking to the FEMA administrator again to reiterate that this is crucial, and he will have the ultimate say over whatever military medical personnel are made available.

But again, it comes down to this. This is a wartime dynamic, and everyone in Washington has to understand that right now, too much of what's happening is on a peacetime basis. There's a disconnect, and I want to just be blunt about that. We're in the middle of a war. We can feel it here in New York City. I could feel it this morning when I stood with those good men and women, those EMT’s and paramedics went all over the nation. It didn't feel like business as usual. It felt like we were in a war and people were coming to save us. We need a lot more of that, and other parts of the country will need the same. It's not going to happen unless we get on a war footing. So, it's the mobilization of the military for sure, but I also think we have to remember in the wars of the past when we were really fighting for the survival of our nation and our ideals, we called upon all Americans to serve, and I think it's time for that in a different way now. I think it's time for our nation to enlist our medical personnel on a national basis. We don't have the same kind of draft we used to have, but we're going to have to create something new right now at this moment in history to enlist all available medical personnel around the country, and I mean civilians. Anyone with medical training anywhere in the country who can be spared by their city, their town, their state to come to the front. And right now, it's New York City, and we see it starting in some other cities as well. But I guarantee you, all 50 States will have their own battle. The only way we're going to get through this truly, if we're going to save every life we can save, it means taking health professionals of every kind with every skill, every training, no matter where they are in their career, and enlisting them in a national service, creating something we just don't have right now, but we could have, and we need to have.

So, that's what I talked to the President about it, the secretary of defense, General Milley, going to a place we've never been before, because we are actually dealing with a crisis we've never experienced before, and we have to innovate. We have to see possibilities that we just didn't see before, if we're going to really protect and serve the American people. So, I hope these conversations will lead us to another place, because right now I've been really honest about the numbers. I do want to give the president credit. I told him the numbers, and I could tell there were some real silences during the conversation, and some real acknowledgement of just how tough it's going to be in the weeks ahead in New York City. But we know there's other places about to face this same reality. If we're all starting to fully, deeply recognize the extent of the crisis, then let's act like one nation. Fight this crisis together, enlisting everyone possible into this cause whether they be the men and women of our military and our reserves, or whether it be civilians who could bring their extraordinary skills to bear where needed most, it's time for that in this country.

I did talk to the President about the ventilator situation, as I mentioned, and the 400 ventilators that we found out late yesterday would be coming in time and be in place by Sunday morning. That was the number I mentioned yesterday that we absolutely have to have to ensure we could protect everyone in need. Those ventilators came out of the federal allotment that went to New York State, I want to thank both the federal government and FEMA and New York State for quickly making those 400 ventilators available. So, the good news is we will get through Sunday, but the tough news is what I told you yesterday is still true, we will need 2,500 to 3,000 more ventilators next week, during next week to get through next week. I explained this to the President and his entire leadership and everyone heard it and everyone took it seriously and I said, I'm not going to sugar coat this, it's a very tough number to reach. I know everyone's fighting to get more ventilators, create more ventilators, and manufacture them. But for all those folks who are about to arrive in hospitals around the City whose lives we must save their simple need is not for us to talk about it, but to find those ventilators somewhere, somehow. And I put that clearly on the table and said to the leadership of our Nation that it is, I think a National priority to find those 2,500 to 3,000 ventilators and get them to New York City over the next seven days. So, we talked to also here in New York City about other tools we're going to use the BiPAP machines, which are something that could be really helpful ensuring that for some patients they can be kept off the ventilators or at least for a period of time. We're getting some of those in, we're training staff and how to use them – that will be a part of the equation that will help as well. The fact is people want to help us, as I said, from all over the country. If you can help anyone out there, if you can help please go to our website, nyc.gov/helpnow or call 833-NYC-0040. Folks all over the nation that want to help, we're particularly – if there's anybody anywhere who has a ventilator they can get to us that is particularly important to anyone who's a medical professional wants to come here and help us, we have the accommodations, we will immediately plug you in, we need your help right now.

Now, I want to talk about some new guidance. And I want to emphasize that I start and— we'll talk more about it with the questions with the media, with our Health Commissioner, Dr. Barbot – but I want to emphasize that we, throughout these last few months, this city, this state, this nation, the global community of nations, the global medical community, everyone has been trying to learn as rapidly as possible everything they can about the coronavirus. And we still know there's a lot we don't know, and that's a really challenging reality one of our heroes at this moment, our Nation, someone I'm very, very proud of as a New Yorker is Dr. Anthony Fauci. And even with that wonderful, reassuring voice and that knowledge and that wisdom, he’s first to say there's a lot we don't know, but we are learning every day and every week more. We're trying to act rapidly on what we learn, sometimes you reach that point when there's just enough confirmation, enough new information to say, okay, it's time to do something different. So, there've been studies recently on people who are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic and whether they could transmit the coronavirus to others. One particularly important study coming out of Singapore yesterday, our Health Department, our health care leadership have looked at these studies. There's been several in the last week or so, and I've come to a conclusion that it's time to advise New Yorkers to do something different. I want to emphasize what I'm about to tell you is very, very important, but it does not in any way change the basic guidance that you've received now over many weeks. The most important things are still the basic hygiene covering your mouth when you cough and sneeze, wash your hands a lot, use hand sanitizer still that's the frontline way to protect yourself. The social distancing that’s the way to protect yourself and everyone around you and that must be observed no matter what. And we've obviously put shelter in place here in place in New York, and we have strong enforcement through the NYPD and other agencies and we're even now at the point of finding people who do not abide by social distancing. So, all of that is just as important as it was before, but now we're adding a new important point we're advising New Yorkers to wear a face covering when you go outside and will be near other people. So, let's be clear, this is a face covering, and again, we'll talk about the details in a moment, but it could be a scarf it could be something you create yourself at home, it could be a bandana, it does not, not need to be a professional surgical mask. In fact, we don't want you to use the kinds of masks that our first responders need that our health care workers need. Don't use those can't be clearer, leave those alone, leave those to the people who need them the most who are saving lives. But you can create a face covering with anything you have at home right now any piece of cloth— and that will give the protection to others. And I want to emphasize this I think there's been, you know, a certain amount of misunderstanding and we're all dealing with so much information and so many things that are kind of tough to understand and confusing. The reason for this guidance is because the studies are showing that some asymptomatic people, some pre-symptomatic people appear to actually be transmitting this disease. We don't have perfect evidence it doesn't conform with what the initial showed us weeks ago, but it does seem to be more and more evident. What that means is when you put on that face covering you're protecting everyone else. You're making sure that, you know, you don't inadvertently, if you happen to have this disease and you may not even know it, you don't end up giving it to someone else. Now, remember, with community spread with the projections, we've told you over half New Yorkers will contract this disease for everything we know. It means that a lot of people are out there right this minute don't even know they have it, we want to make sure that anyone who doesn't have to get it doesn't get it. So, face covering is just a simple way to protect other people and to reduce the speed of that community spread, and hopefully keep a number of people from being affected who don't have to be affected. Again, you can create your own version you can be creative and put whatever decoration you want on it. It can be as homemade as you want, but that's what we want you to do something homemade, not something professional, not something from the supplies we need for our heroes and that's going to help protect everyone.

And a few other updates, we've talked a lot about the fact that there are more and more people need food because let's face it, even though thank God there is some federal help coming now through the stimulus bill, there's still so many who people lost their jobs, lost their income, don't yet have that help, are struggling to pay for food. We can't have that in New York City we have to help people more and more, I named a few weeks ago our foods [inaudible] Kathryn Garcia who's done an amazing job for the city on many other crucial missions. And her job is to make sure that food is available to everyone who needs it and to build out a bigger plan for the weeks ahead. She's working, especially now with Department of Education that had feeding sites up for our students, even though there weren't schools the way they've normally been, they were turned into sites to provide meals to kids in need of them.

So, we've got about 435 sites around the five boroughs where young people can go and get meals for free. They can get breakfast, lunch, and dinner all to go, grab and go, and they can bring them home and eat them when they're ready. If other people at home need food, they can get it for them as well. So what we're doing starting tomorrow is we're welcoming adults, anyone who needs food, anyone who's hungry can come to these 435 sites— you can get all three meals for yourself and your family for free. No one will be turned away, I want to really emphasize that there's no charge and no one will be turned away. You can go online nyc.gov and get the sites you can call 311, 24 hours a day and get the sites. But we know people are hurting, we don't want anyone to go hungry in the City, so there's 435 places starting tomorrow, not just for kids, but for adults as well everyone, everyone who’s hungry, has a place to go to get food. Just to tell you for kids and for families with kids, we're going to do the, the early morning hours for pickups at 7:30 to 11:30 AM and then from 11:30 to 1:30 for any adults who don't have kids with them you can go in that timeframe. So again, 7:30 to 11:30 AM for children and families with children, 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM each day for adults. And if you want to find a school in your area, you can text the word FOOD or if you speak Spanish, the word COMIDA to 877-877 and they'll get you to location.

Okay, couple of quick things. Small businesses this is a heads up to all the small business owners that starting tomorrow, the Federal Paycheck Protection Program opens up is a key part of the stimulus $350 billion loan program. It's for businesses and for nonprofit organizations that have employees up to a number of 500 people. So, it's a lot of businesses will qualify and we know how hard hit our small businesses and our nonprofits have been these last weeks – it’s been horrible. You deserve this opportunity to get these loans to keep afloat - build for the future. But here's the punchline; this is a first come first serve basis. So, first come, first served. Therefore, you need to apply as early in the morning tomorrow as possible. So, New Yorkers, the early bird gets the worm here – go to sba.gov – sba.gov. And these are loans on very good terms and they are forgivable loans and there's specific categories that you can get going online. They’ll talk to you about all the ways that these loans had been made flexible and forgivable, and they cover a lot of different things, not just costs related to your payroll, but also interest on mortgages, your rent, your utility payments, a very flexible program to help people through this crisis – so please sign up immediately.

I'm going to close now and I talked to you about a lot of reasons to hope, but I also always owe it to you to tell you when we've lost a friend and, and to mourn with. Particularly all of us in public service, when we lose one of our own, it hits home, especially. Our Department of Citywide Administrative Services, they've been doing so much work these last few weeks to help everyone else to get the help they need. Well, now, they've lost a dear colleague and a leader in that agency, Lenin Fierro, Director of Safety and the Vision Zero Director for Fleet Management at DCAS. This is an amazing story – he immigrated from Ecuador, a total New York story and American success story – immigrated from Ecuador, served 10 years in the United States Navy joined our team five years ago, helped get Vision Zero off the ground in its beginning to protect people and save lives; personally trained thousands of city drivers on how to drive safely – amazing contribution. To his wife, Brenda and his two daughters – we grieve with you and we have truly lost a great man.

And every New Yorker right now, we all have a story. We all know someone who we've lost or someone who's sick. Pretty much everyone could say that right now. We are doing all we can to help those who are sick and we are grieving for those we've lost and, and mourning with their families. But, as much pain as we're going through and, and even though the worst weeks are ahead, we, we just don't give in in this city; it's not who we are. I have to tell you with those EMTs and paramedics today I saw a resolve, I saw a toughness, I saw a belief that we were going to get through it and the same is true with our frontline heroes, our healthcare workers, same is true with the folks who work in the grocery stores and the pharmacies to make sure their communities are safe and have what they need. So many New Yorkers – by the way, the vast, vast majority of New Yorkers who are practicing social distancing, who are doing it right, who are looking out for each other – everyone has shown an incredible spirit of perseverance. I'm very, very proud of all you. I have no question we will see this through together. I have no question, in the end, New Yorkers will watch out for each other and every time that someone comes to our aid from around the country it’s going to give us that boost we need to fight our way through this crisis and come out together.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to questions from the media and please let me know each name and media outlet.

Moderator: Hi all, just a reminder that we have Dr. Barbot here in person, and on the phone we have Commissioner Shea, Commissioner Garcia, Chancellor Carranza, Deputy Mayor Been, and Dr. Katz. With that, we'll start with Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor, I'm, I'm wondering if you can just go into a little more detail on this mask or face covering guidance? You know, if you have old masks sitting around, paper ones, can you use those? Do you need to use them once and then discard them? How can you sanitize cloth - you know- homemade masks? Just kind of the practicalities of how this is going to work if everyone's supposed to be covering their faces now.

Mayor: Thank you Erin. I'm going to ask obviously Dr. Barbot will go into the details, but just, I think you raised a really, really helpful set of questions there. Reminding everyone - face coverings - so I want to actually not use the word masks because I want, when you think of masks, you're talking about what our healthcare workers and our first responders need and those precious supplies that we keep bringing in - those PPEs. That's for them; that's for all the people at the frontline that need it. If you've got something around the house already, Dr. Barbot will talk about how to deal with that, but I'm talking about face coverings to distinguish, things you can create yourself – like I said, scarfs, bandanas. I think Dr. Barbot will be the first -she's a good New Yorker, grew up in the Bronx - she'll be the first to say it doesn't have to be fancy to work. It can be real homegrown and it will still help protect others. So, Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, I think that's a good thing, the less fancy, the better. So again, these face coverings are intended to do two things. One, is for individuals who may be at the very, very beginning of an illness and don't yet know it and so they're pre-symptomatic; to ensure that they don't transmit infection to other people when they have to go out for essential activities. The other thing that these face coverings do is again - if someone has to go outside - I want them to be a reminder for anyone that they may come in contact with to keep the distance of six feet. These face covering shouldn't be seen as an invitation to come closer. They should actually be an indication to keep six feet distance. And so, in terms of the materials for these face coverings and the upkeep, et cetera, if someone has a paper face covering that can cover the mouth and the nose, then certainly what I would recommend is that they use it when they go outside and that they can continue to reuse it as long as it doesn't get wet and as long as it maintains its integrity. I would remind individuals they shouldn't share these paper face coverings and that when they are done using them, they should store them in a place where no one else can touch them.

What I would actually recommend is that individuals use cloth [inaudible] face coverings and that they can use old bandanas or new bandanas, they can use a scarf and again, the important thing is that it covers the nose and the mouth. What I recommend is that for these face coverings to be used for a day, and then you can hand-wash them in soap and water, just regular soap and water, nothing fancy and that the important thing is that they dry completely. And so, you know, we would recommend that you have more than one face covering so that you can alternate them. The important thing to note is that there are a number of different potential designs if you will, that individuals can use in terms of these face coverings, but again, you know, remind - thinking back to when we were kids and, and playing games and/or Halloween and covering our faces with a cloth, it really is as simple as that. And again, one of the reasons that we want to make it as basic as possible is to remind folks that these face coverings are not a substitution for all of the layers of prevention that we've been talking about since the beginning of this outbreak, which are hand washing with soap and water, hand cleaning with alcohol based hand sanitizer, covering your mouth and your nose when you cough with your elbow, and the most important and evidence based intervention is the social distancing. And so, these face coverings are just one more layer to those layers of prevention. None of them will work a hundred percent in isolation, but all of them together, I think provide the greatest opportunity for us to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Mayor: Thank you, doctor.

Moderator: Next, we have Rich from the Post.

Question: Yes. Hi. Could you just explain, Mayor, is spring break on or off and why haven’t parents been formally told? Can you clear this up and what are your feelings on the subject? The DOE website still has it listed as from April 9th to April 17th. Why wasn't it updated?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question, Rich. So, there's been a back and forth with the State. We're all trying to figure out the right way to handle, you know, the really, really unusual situation here. The Chancellor will jump in if he has anything he wants to add after I've gone over this. But here's the deal. We said originally, of course, that our hope was we could bring school back up by April 20th, after the spring break. We all understand how tough that looks right now and we'll have more to say on that as we figure out what the future looks like. But originally people were thinking of spring break in traditional terms. Well, guess what? There are no breaks at this point. There's no vacations. There's no place to travel. You know, our kids, we're asking them to stay indoors all the time with – you know, except for a little bit of exercise each day.

It's a whole new dynamic. So, the more people thought about it, both at the City and State level, the more they realized, wait a minute, that idea doesn't make sense anymore. We're kind of in a very, very different environment. There are obviously, you know, crucial religious considerations if you're talking about a religious day, a day of obligation for people are truly devout, but we've got to rethink that week and we're working with the State on how to do that right this minute. And then the second that that's all confirmed, it will be updated. Chancellor, you may have more breaking news than I have on that, but obviously whatever the final decisions, we will update the website for sure. Chancellor, you want to add?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yes. Mr. Mayor, thank you. So, we will update our website. This is obviously an ongoing conversation. We just want to – you know, all of the projections say that this virus is going to be hitting its peak around the time of spring break. So, while we want to be optimistic, we also have to be very, very grounded in what we're doing. So, we want to make sure that students are actively academically engaged. And Mr. Mayor, I know that you and I have had many conversations about this. We really appreciate how above and beyond our teachers, our administrators, our food service workers, the custodians have gone to make sure that our students and families are being served. We honor that work. But we also know that we need to flatten the curve and in order to flatten the curve, we want [inaudible] indoors and we want our school communities to be actively engaged at home. So, we're working actively with our labor unions around finding a way to honor their contracts, but at the same time, making sure that we're also taking care of the [inaudible]. So, we will have more information as soon as we can get that out. But at this point we want everybody to understand we're going to be actively engaged and we want to make sure that academically students have opportunities to be engaged as we go through next week.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Debralee from Manhattan Times News, Bronx Free Press.

Mayor: Debralee, can you hear me?

Moderator: We'll circle back next. Next, we have Yoav from the City.

Mayor: Yoav?

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good.

Question: Just wanted to ask you on a host of issues we've confronted with coronavirus, your administration has taken some steps that you've described as being out of an abundance of caution. And I'm just curious now with, kind of, the change in the advice on the masks, why a more cautious approach wasn't taken when clearly there wasn't a lot of evidence one way or the other? And it seemed that the message coming out of the administration was that the prime concern is symptomatic transfer. I guess what, why on that issue wasn't more caution kind of voiced?

Mayor: It's a fine question. And I've obviously had this conversation repeatedly with my team every step of the way to determine what we think would make sense. So first of all, the first answer is there just wasn't evidence. And for the first time, and you know, we obviously have a great Health Department and they've been scrubbing evidence from all around the world for weeks and weeks. And for the first time in just the last days, there have been studies that actually started to show some meaningful evidence about asymptomatic transmission. By the way, those were some studies. That doesn't mean everything is known about it. It just, for the first time, gave our health leadership a sense that there was something more tangible here than they'd seen previously. Second, there was a real concern all along about focusing people on the most important things. And that really is the basic hygiene that we talked about. The shelter in place, the social distancing, those are still the most powerful elements of the strategy. And to make sure that we did not send a message that made people overconfident the other way. Because, Yoav, I think there's a real balance always in this that you don't want people thinking, ‘Oh, I put on a face covering and now I have nothing else to worry about in the world’.

No. In fact, the face covering idea is just to help make sure you're protecting everyone else around you. The ways you protect yourself and everyone else are those basic hygiene practices, the shelter in place and the social distancing. So, it was really about making sure that the most important messages were being acted on, the most important strategies were being acted on. But once people felt, look, there's something here, there's some evidence at least, that's when it made sense to put it out there to folks but in a way – and this is the last point, Yoav, and I’ll see if the doctor wants to add – we were very concerned all along about the supply. And this was really – again, Yoav, you've watched the work of the Governor for a long time – this was really a big factor as well. We've been fighting for those PPEs.

We're finally starting to get a better supply, but we've got a long, long way to go. It was very important not to give the impression to people early on that everyone should go grab everything and hoard everything when we knew that there was no way lives would be saved if our first responders and our health workers didn't have the personal protective equipment they needed. So, without a lot of evidence we didn't think it made any sense to suggest to people something that for some people might be interpreted as, you know, go grab those supplies, in fact, deprive others of them. That's why we're saying face coverings, homegrown, make your own. You can make it with stuff that's already in your house. You don't need something that a first responder or a health care worker needs. Dr. Barbot –

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, Mr. Mayor, I think you got it just right. So, I'll add just a couple of other things. One is from the very beginning we've been saying that as the evidence grows, because it is a new virus and there was very little known, as the evidence grows, we will adapt our guidance. And so specific to masks, you know, I think we have seen a progression on our guidance as the evidence has grown, but it has always been based on the evidence. And so, we've also tried to sort of measure that with, although the evidence isn't there, if New Yorkers want to wear masks, as we were saying at that time, then we're not going to stop them. I think the shift now is twofold. One is there's scientific evidence that people can transmit infection before they realize they are symptomatic. And then the second one is that we are at a different point in the curve, meaning that with widespread community transmission and the new evidence that people can transmit when they are in their pre-symptomatic phase, makes the extension of our message of, wear a mask if you're sick, a logical step, meaning that don't wait until you're symptomatic. Now assume you've been exposed and use a face covering to ensure that you don't contribute to the ongoing acceleration of this spread. That along with physical distancing and staying home, a face covering can be an additive measure.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey. Mayor, I just wanted to ask – Mr. Mayor, sorry, I wanted to ask you, you know, kind of bouncing off of Yoav’s question. If you're just asking people, you know, to recover their faces with scarves and pieces of cloth, couldn't that directive be given sooner? You know, I mean, [inaudible] on bandanas necessarily, but you know, I guess the question is on March 15th you said asymptomatic people don't transmit, which didn't turn out to be true. When did the shift sort of happen, recognizing this as an evolving thing [inaudible] shift really happened for you?

Mayor: In the last 48 hours really is when our health leadership, our Health Department has gotten information and analyzed the information and provided this specific proposal. So, literally just in the last days, but I want to emphasize, and again, you guys, you know, we're going to go through a long difficult journey where we don't know everything we want to know and need to know. We're always going to be doing our best with the information we have. But what's abundantly clear is literally only in the last day or two did our health care leadership come to the conclusion that the studies were finally providing some evidence that face coverings helped prevent the spread. And again, I'm going to say it very clearly and bluntly. This is not, put on a face covering and you can't get the coronavirus. That's not what we're saying.

We're saying put on a face covering, abundance of caution to help prevent further spread. But the evidence just wasn't there before. And I explained a moment ago with Yoav, the other reasons, the other factors in the decision that we were evaluating a lot. We've always valued in this discussion protecting our health care workers and our first responders. And what they needed, that was a big factor here to always be cautious about that. Because that piece of – if that piece isn't right, nothing else is right. But now that we have some evidence, it was time to say, okay, we're giving advice. It's an advisory based on new evidence – March 15th or whatever date you said, we just didn't have the evidence.

Moderator: We're going to circle back to Debralee, Manhattan Times News, Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey there, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: So, I want to ask – it's sort of a tangent but a related question about testing. You know, we're having reports that frontline workers, including transit workers, including nurses and doctors and folks that are out there every day who are actually essential workers, are just unable to access these tests. They're being rerouted to their primary care physicians who are overwhelmed. They're being rerouted to testing of sites and it just seems to be not enough. And yet we've got enough boldface names reporting that they have been tested positive and within hours we know it as well. So, you've spoken about there being this ending of this divide between public and private care as regards the pandemic, what exactly can you speak to? And I'd also toss this to a Commissioner Barbot. What is the directive now from the City and medical guidance as regards to testing? What is the point of testing? And in fact, if anyone seeks out a test, are they just wasting their time?

Mayor: I really appreciate the question, Debralee. I'm going to start and pass too – I want actually Dr. Katz to jump in and then Dr. Barbot. And the reason I want to go to Dr. Katz is that Health + Hospitals has now changed its approach now that it does have sufficient testing, its approach to its own health care workers. I want him to talk about that because I think it's a valuable example for the whole city. But look, to answer this properly, we’ve got to go back to the origins and I know my colleagues feel this deeply. We started on January 24th calling on the federal government to give us testing here in New York City. It took weeks and weeks and weeks to even get the beginning of the ability to test here. And by the time it was here, it was already bluntly right on the verge of having community spreads.

So, all of the virtues of testing that could have been strategic to help us address this crisis more fundamentally like a few other parts of the world had done, that window was lost and the federal government just didn't act. But then we went through a phase over weeks now where there wasn't enough testing available anywhere and we kept trying to say the priority needed to be for people who are really sick and for first responders and health care workers. And to some extent that has happened, but you're right, Debralee, there've been some exceptions that make me very angry when I see folks who use their wealth and power to get a test who didn't even need a test. Rather than all those tests going to people who are really in danger and particularly they're a – those tests being available for health care workers and first responders.

I mean, it just makes no sense for someone who's privileged to look out for themselves ahead of all the other people who need it more. But now we've got a phenomenon of more testing coming in – more capacity, I should say, coming in, new interesting possibilities now starting to finally take root like the 15-minute tests, like the antibody test. There's a lot coming together that could revolutionize the approach and make it much more widespread and much more effective. And what I want to see is that it be as widely available to first responders and health care workers and any other essential personnel that, that be the first thing we do – really make sure that anyone who wants that test among those crucial, crucial workers we’re depending on, that they can get it when they want it. So, that's where we're trying to go rapidly. Mitch, would you talk about what you're doing with testing for Health + Hospitals workers?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Absolutely, sir. So, starting today, any of our frontline workers can be tested at their facility in occupational health. And we're doing that because we recognize the tremendous heroism of our doctors and nurses and other support staff. We want to make sure that they have the ability to get a test when they want to have a test. We recognize that many of them worry about the possibility that they will bring the virus home to their spouses, to their children. We feel strongly that people have the right to know. We appreciate all the work you've done to give us enough access so that we can now do this. Thank you.

Mayor: And Dr. Barbot –

Commissioner Barbot: So, in terms of testing, as we've said many times before, in a world where we have widespread community transmission, for the average new Yorker, 80 percent of people will have a mild course and having the results of a test aren't going to change the recommendations that your doctor is going to give you, which is stay home and call me back if you're not getting better. I think the situations for health care workers are different because from the beginning we've also been saying that all of the measures that we've been putting in place are to slow the transmission and reduce the burden on health care delivery systems because we need them to be whole in order to take care of the vast number of New Yorkers that can get sick from COVID-19. We've also said that in a clinical setting, the most useful way in which a test can be helpful is if it's going to help a doctor make a treatment decision about his or her patient. And so, those recommendations remain.

Mayor: Okay. Who's up

Moderator: Next, we have Jill from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Jill.

Question: I wanted to ask you about the death of Sandra Santos Vizcaino. She was a teacher at P.S. 9 in Prospect Heights and I believe she may be the first teacher to pass away from the coronavirus. I wanted to see if you or the Chancellor had anything that you might want to say about her, but also wanted to ask, you know, as far as we know she was the first teacher to pass away because the City has not been tracking or publicly releasing any information about how many teachers have become ill. I understand the teachers aren't reporting to work in a school right now, but obviously some of – they're all still teaching. Some may be ill and calling out [inaudible] why that kind of information has been made available or haven't been tracked. And then a somewhat related question just are you also recommending face coverings for children?

Mayor: Okay. Let me let me have the Chancellor speak to the first part and Dr. Barbot will speak to the second part. I mean, look, I just want to say as a parent whose kids went through our public schools there are so many teachers who I can right now name, you know, dozens of teachers who had just a profound impact on my children's lives and the notion that we've lost, you know, a teacher, it's very painful. These are people who devote their lives to our kids. And you know, losing someone who's that good a person who's giving that much is just very, very painful. We lost a principal last week, a young woman full of extraordinary promise. This is, you know, I wish I could say we were not going to have to tell these stories of these incredible people anymore and it was all going to be over tomorrow, but it's not, we're going to be at this for a while and we're going to lose some really good people and we have to fight to try and save every single life. So, Chancellor, why don't you take it from there?

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to say this is a devastating tragedy. And Sandra was a beloved teacher at P.S. 9, and our heart goes out to P.S. 9 and that community and her family. As you said, Mr. Mayor, this is not going to be the first or the last of beloved community members that are going to succumb to this unfortunate tragedy of a virus. This is the first teacher death that is self-reported by a family that is being linked to COVID-19. We are working on a protocol to capture these kinds of informational strategies. We know the NYPD and the Fire Department, these are first responders that are out in the community right now serving our community. We know that our teachers are at home but serving our students. So, it's a little more complicated for us to get those numbers. But the other thing is it's important to understand that we have to respect and recognize the wishes of families during these trying times. Some families don't want us to publish the names of their family members that have been afflicted by COVID-19. So, we want to respect the wishes of the families, but we also want to be transparent as much as possible. So, I will just say that to Sandra and her family, we are incredibly – just incredibly thankful for her service. And we are devastated by her death.

Sandra Santos Vizcaino, we know that she's made a lasting impact on her community and her family, and we are going to work to make sure that we honor her work with her students and we will be there to support the family and the community of students and colleagues at P.S. 9 with this devastating news.

Mayor: Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: So, on the question about whether face coverings should be used for children, I would say yes, and I want to go a little bit further than that. I think that in engaging children in making these face covers, I think it's an opportunity to teach them about COVID-19 and, beyond that, to really instill in them the role that these face masks play as part of our civic responsibility in ensuring not only our own health and the health of our family, but really the health of our communities and that when we are sick, or potentially symptomatic, it's our responsibility to take definitive measures in order to protect those around us. So, I would really encourage parents to take this as a teaching opportunity for all of the city's children.

Moderator: Next, we have Jennifer from AP.

Question: Hello? Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Jennifer.

Question: Thanks very much. I was wondering whether the city has had any discussions with the federal government about the potential of switching the Javits Center and Comfort facilities to take COVID-19 patients rather than only others of which there may be some [inaudible]?

Mayor: Yes. I had that conversation with several of the admirals in the command structure and with, as I talked to you earlier, I talked to a Secretary Esper, I talked to General Milley. So, it's a conversation that's been going on over the last 24-48 hours. I know we are all trying to figure out the right balance, but I think what makes sense is to – because the number-one, biggest community of patients we have to deal with are those who have the disease but are not in ICU. The ICU patients are most sensitive, by far, and those are the folks that are going through a life and death struggle, but there's many, many more who are not in the ICU. So, I think it's smart to say let's use those facilities in whatever way makes sense, whatever proportion makes sense for COVID-19 patients who are not folks who are going to be in ICU.

Moderator: Next, we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. On the face coverings, just wanted to ask if you're contemplating any kind of enforcement there. Is it possible there could be fines or maybe just police officers or others encouraging people to cover their faces?

Mayor: I'm going to start and want to certainly let Dr. Barbot add. No, I am not anticipating enforcement at this point. This is an advisory. We – you know, we're very, very clear when we're giving you an order, when we're giving you something that's required in this city under our emergency. We're very clear when something comes with penalties and when it doesn't. This, right now, is an advisory and I would say to you I think it will remain an advisory for the foreseeable future because we have much more important things to achieve with enforcement. Enforcement, right now, has to be focused on, you know, shelter in place and social distancing, ensuring that people only go out when they have to go out only for the time they need to and that there's not gatherings, there's not violation of social distancing. So, that's where I want to see the enforcement go. This is about giving people some helpful advice based on new evidence we think will help protect other people.

Commissioner Barbot: I agree with that, Mr. Mayor. And just to add, you know, 11 years ago when we had H1N1, before that no one ever really coughed into their elbow and it was a huge cultural shift and now it's the norm for most people to cough into their elbow. And so, I see this as a similar sort of cultural shift so that giving New Yorkers this advice, giving them opportunities to reinforce that with their own loved ones, with their neighbors, I think will be probably the best way in which we can have an opportunity for this to really take hold and become part of the cultural shift of more civic accountability for our community's health.

Moderator: Next, we have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor and Dr. Barbot, just a quick question about the masks. The CDC, I guess, is issuing similar guidance today and I'm wondering about the timeline. Dr. Barbot, did you ever think about doing this in advance? Was there a time where you thought about issuing this guidance and, you know, how much of your guidance is related to the change that the CDC is making? And for the Mayor, just wondering, when you talk about the, sort of, guidance, can you talk about how your language, whether it's couched in a way that tells people that this may change eventually. How do you go about doing that? Because there have been, you know, a few changes in guidance over the past few weeks.

Mayor: Yeah. Jeff, first of all, I just want to keep saying, everyone, face coverings, because I want to strongly differentiate from the surgical masks, the N95’s, all the things that must be protected for our health care workers and our first responders. So, I just want people out get a real clear line in the sand there. A face covering, you can make out anything you’ve got home and Dr. Barbot gave you the news you can use about how you take care of it. A facemask, to me, is something that, you know, is for professionals and the people who protect us. Jeff, I think – Dr. Barbot will talk about the CDC element. Jeff, I don't know how to say it more clearly than this, we have said from the beginning, and anyone who's honest to send from the beginning, we're dealing with a disease that the entire global medical community still does not fully understand. We said that back on January 24th, and we're still saying it today, because it's true. There is no cure. There is no vaccine. And new information is coming in. I remember sitting here weeks ago when we talked about the study from China, that was the most definitive study to date, saying it was not airborne, it was droplets. You know, now these studies have come in, including in particular study from Singapore, saying, look, we don't have perfect evidence – we don't have exhaustive evidence, but we have some meaningful evidence that there could be a symptomatic transmission – doesn't mean that's what's happening a lot, doesn't mean that it's happening most of the time, but it's saying something different than what we've seen before. So, guidance will change, Jeff. I just want to be as blunt as I can be and I need people to understand that, that we are on the ever-changing situation. And if we're used to – all of us, I understand that we're used to a world that was very, in many ways, you know, clear and straight forward and certainly was a lot more comfortable a few weeks ago than what we're dealing with now, and we all strived to want everything to make sense all the time. We're dealing with something that unfortunately is a bit of a great unknown. The honest truth is to say, this is what we know now and we're going to act on what we know now and we're going to tell you how to protect yourself and your family with what we know now. And we're also telling you all the time, it could change if we learn something new. That is the honest truth. Anyone who wants, you know, the perfect definition of everything related to coronavirus right now – if anyone tells you they can tell you everything about coronavirus and know it perfectly, they're lying to you, because I have not met a single person, starting from Dr. Fauci, who will tell you that they fully understand this disease at this point. But we're always going to get in the information we have when we think it's a confirmable and real, we'll say it – when we think it determines actions we need to say, need to take, we're going to tell you.

Commissioner Barbot: Yes. And to add to what the Mayor just laid out. I have scientific advisors on staff at the Health Department and we have scientific advisors in the academic community all of whom have been, since the beginning of this outbreak, really scouring the medical literature to learn as much as possible on an ongoing basis. And so, I think this evolution of this guidance is an extension of that. And, as the Mayor mentioned during his remarks, there was a study that just came out yesterday in terms the – what was found in Singapore. And we put that together with a study that Dr. Daskalakis, who's been leading the day to day operation of COVID-19 was actually a part of reviewing. So, we are intimately involved in the scientific community to make sure that whatever guidance we bring to New Yorkers is based on the best science available and is done in a timely a manner as possible, because in this fight, you know, hours and days really make a difference.

Mayor: Amen.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Sydney.

Question: So, today, you made the announcement that the City's public hospitals are going to be getting 3,000 ICU beds by March 1st – sorry, May 1st – more doctors and nurses are going to be going to the public hospital system, there's going to be free COVID testing, and you keep talking about how you're going to be adding more beds on Staten Island – it's not part of the public hospital system – and sending more supplies there. But the only problem is, you know, there's no – these beds haven't come online yet. You haven't identified any sites, Staten Island’s two [inaudible] hospitals are nearing capacity. We don't know if [inaudible] after two fields of hospitals are going to be ICU beds, and the Health Department doesn't disclose how many supplies it sends to local hospitals. So, there's really no way of knowing if the hospitals are getting what they need from the City. So, I just want to know is that an Island going to be getting the ICU beds, the free COVID testing, doctors and nurses like the rest of the hospitals, and, if so, like, when? And do you know if the two field hospitals are going to include ICU beds or a mix of both? And since you're –

Mayor: Sydney – Sydney, wait a minute – too many. You’ve just got to stop there. I cannot keep track of so many different pieces, and, you know, what you've said is very important questions. Let's just stay on that. Our team will follow up on anything else you need. Okay. The central – I think you've asked the question before. It's a very important question. And this is part of a build-out plan I talked about at length yesterday, Dr. Katz talked about – every part of the city, I'm going to keep saying it to you and you will see the evidence through the doing of it – every part of the city is going to be reached in our hospital build-out plan. Now, remember, first on the ICU issue, because I think you – respectfully, I'm not sure you're remembering the original plan that the City and State agree on, on ICU’s. Hospitals are going to be converted more and more to ICU. RUMC is going to be converted more and more to ICU with the existing beds that has, the same with Staten Island University Hospital, and all hospitals public and private have to have an expansion plan – a 50 percent expansion of their capacity within their building, within their campus, again, for the purpose of expanding ICU beds. So, I think your question suggests that we're looking for ICU beds out of our main hospitals. That's just not a fact. We've been talking about this over and over again. The hospitals – there's three areas to think about and I really want people to feel this. ICU is for the people in the greatest danger, the lives that we're fighting to save. That work will be done in hospitals, public, private, voluntary, independent, whatever words you want to use, in existing hospitals in the city. That means initially about 20,000 beds, but with the order to build out capacity by 50 percent, it means almost 30,000 beds ultimately will be ICU. That includes every single hospital. Those two Staten Island hospitals have to do that by State mandate, and I'm certain they are doing that. But what will happen every day in all sorts of hospitals is, it doesn't matter what the ICU capacity was a month ago or a week ago, what Dr. Katz went over in great detail yesterday was how a lot of his hospitals are blowing by any numbers of ICU beds they've ever had, and they're expanding daily into numbers of ICU beds they never had in their entire history. Every hospital's going to do that. Then, there's the question of the COVID convalescent folks, folks who have the disease but do not need ICU. And then, of course, there's a question of everyone else who needs hospitalization for, you know, a car crash or trauma or a heart attack, you name it. So, the division of labor is the hospitals – first and foremost, ICU, and then these additional facilities that are being built out, whether it's a field hospital, whether it's a college dormitory, whether it's a hotel, will be for the other types of medical needs – that will be done all over the five boroughs. The goal always be to keep people in their home community to the maximum extent possible. So, that's how the build-out plan is going to go.

Moderator: Next, we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I think the face covering guidance, I think, it's fair to say, is going to be jarring to a lot of New Yorkers. And it's hard to think that with some of the additional guidance that, you know, including among the essential activity, the ability to go outside for exercise. And so, I'm wondering if you and Commissioner Barbot can speak to, you know, how much time is it really safe to be outside? And what we say that now we should be [inaudible] covering that all times? You know, if someone goes out for a run, should they be wearing a face covering? If someone brings their child who's under two years old is outside, you know, are they safe without a face covering? [Inaudible] the CDC recommendations are expected to be not for children that young to wear them?

Mayor: So, I'll start and pass to Dr. Barbot again. Brigid, the first thing we're saying is this is based on new information. The second thing is, this does not in any way replace the much more foundational protections for yourself. To protect yourself is the washing the hands, the hand sanitizer, the way you take care of your own hygiene. Obviously, protecting other people too with the way you cough and sneeze in the right way. The social distancing, the shelter in place are about protecting yourself and other people. That face covering is about protecting other people. So, I really want to make clear – that's the what the studies are telling us. It's not that the face coverings will miraculously keep the disease from reaching you in your life. It's about making sure if you happen to be affected by this disease, even if you don't know it, that you're not going to inadvertently spread it.

But I think you're right, it will be, in one way, jarring. But I would also say to you, Brigid, again, I got to say this, honestly, I think there's a disconnect that I see. And I don't mean any disrespect to anyone. I think the media's job is to look at the problems, look at the challenges, you know, portray what people are feeling and their fears. But I also think what I'm seeing is everyday New Yorkers are making extraordinary adjustments. Everyday New Yorkers are incredibly resilient people. I have been through everything and with my fellow New Yorkers, 9/11 and Sandy and everything – what I constantly see is – I never fault the media for talking about the pain or the difficulty or the anxiety or the fear. But then what I see in everyday people is much more of the resilience and much more of the sense that they're going to find a way to get through and they have to find a way to get through and they're going to make those practical adjustments and they just go on with their lives. That's who New Yorkers are. Even after terror attacks, people go right back to business.

So, this has been extraordinary and more difficult and more painful in many ways and more jarring. But I still think people can keep up with these changes. They've been doing it. We've seen a hell of a lot of compliance with the new rules that have been put out. I think people are, you know, to some extent you got to respect everyone's definition, but I think the definition is pretty clear and it's like if you go outside, you go outside for enough time to do your shopping, get your medicines, you know, the basics you got to do, get some exercise. You know, get done what you need to get done and get back inside. And that's what I see people doing. So, I think what you're going to see in the coming days is more and more people in face coverings doing exactly the same things.

Commissioner Barbot: I agree, Mr. Mayor. It is a message that we have been sort of conveying to New Yorkers in terms of the physical distancing, in terms of all of the other preventive measures over the last couple of weeks. And yeah, I think, you know, each time we've given new guidance, it's another thing that people have needed to get adjusted to. But like the Mayor says, I think New Yorkers are incredibly resilient and adaptable and people have been rising to this unprecedented situation. And so, with regards to face covering, it's not so much the time but physical space. And so, I would focus on ensuring that even with a face covering, people are adhering to the six-foot distance. And you know, in the past we've also said that if a parent and their child go out, we're not expecting the two of them to adhere to a six-foot distance because they've already been in close quarters. And then to answer the question about whether someone should wear a face covering during exercising, the recommendation would be again, if they're able to keep six feet of distance between themselves and everyone else. There's no need to wear a face covering.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next up is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Henry.

Question: How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, how are you doing man?

Question: Okay. My question is whether or not you knew whether this company in Texas that's going to be building out these temporary hospitals is also building the Mexican wall at the border.

Mayor: Yeah, I heard that after. I think it was – we did the event with them a couple of days ago and then the next day I heard it. I don't agree obviously with what the President has done with the border wall. I think it's a mistake. I think it's was a waste of money, but I also think all of the soldiers involved in anything involving the building of the border wall should be at the front fighting coronavirus, I've said that before. But it's immaterial to me, honestly, if the company was doing that work on a federal contract, they also, I know they've done disaster relief work and set up shelters after hurricanes. I'm not really worried about which federal contracts they've had previously. I only want them to create hospitals for us here in places like the Billy Jean King Tennis Center and the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. Right now, what I care about is, are they going to help save New Yorkers lives? The answer is yes.

Moderator: Last for today, we have Jeff Colton from City & State.

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, there's an ice cream truck in the background. Sorry about that.

Mayor: Okay. That's a good thing. That's a positive sign, Jeff.

Question: Absolutely. Just one of the – in the previous months you were really worried that the State would try and balance the budget on the back of the City. Have you had a chance to review the State budget yet and do you think the City is getting screwed?

Mayor: Well, thank you for your clear question, Jeff. I have been worried about that and I was worried about that obviously in normal times and we're not in normal times. Look, I think the most important thing that happened in Albany was that because of the actions federally to support states and cities with the Medicaid money, and I give a lot of credit to Senator Schumer for that, the State was able to take that money and tide itself over. And then what we need to focus on is that fourth stimulus and making sure that that really helps states and cities fully address their lost revenue and fully address the extraordinary expenses that we have from coronavirus. So that, to me, is really the essence of what happened. That's the big story. And the big next step will be the stimulus, getting that done.

Look there some cuts in there I don't like one bit. We're still toting them up, but you know, we don't have another, $100 million to give for example, to Access-a-Ride. And I've expressed real concerns about how that program is managed. I would like to have clearer goals for reform of that program before we ended up being put in a situation where we have to spend a lot of money. But, you know, the Governor and the Legislature in their wisdom, did what they did. We will deal with it. I think in a perfect world it would have been, you know, the State holding the City harmless. We were not held harmless, but we will live to fight another day. That's the way I look at.

Okay. Thank you everybody, and we will have more updates for you soon.

2020-04-03 NYC Mayor de Blasio Brian Lehrer

Brian Lehrer: It’s the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. And we begin as we usually do on Fridays with our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions in yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 212-433-WNYC – 433-9692. If you have a question for the Mayor that you want to call in or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. And good morning, Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian.

Lehrer: So, Jared Kushner announced at the President's daily briefing yesterday that he has secured and is having shipped to New York hundreds of thousands of N95 masks that he says will be enough for the whole New York City public hospital system for the next month. Can you confirm that?

Mayor: Yeah, the – well, first of all, I appreciate very much the effort. I'm going to be clear, Brian, when I think the white house in the federal government needed to do more, and overwhelmingly they need to do more because we are not ready for next week in terms of the supplies from the federal government when it comes to ventilators, when it comes to medical personnel. I have a specific request in to the White House, to the Pentagon, I've had repeated conversations with the President, the Defense Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the FEMA administrator, telling them all that we must have 1,000 nurses, 150 doctors, 300 respiratory therapists immediately. I started this conversation and documented it over a week ago, said that we needed them by Sunday. We don't have anything yet. And I've said we need 2,500 to 3000 ventilators by next week and we do not have a resupply for next week yet. But I do want to say, Jared Kushner, to his credit, specifically reached out to Dr. Mitch Katz, the CEO of Health + Hospitals, our public hospitals, asked about the N95 supply. The base-level supply that we needed was a 200,000 N95’s to get through April. Now, I think, honestly, that that number is going to probably grow intensely as the number of COVID ICU cases go up, but Mitch gave him the number as it was at this moment. Jared Kushner said he would get that supply. We need to get that in hand. But I very much appreciate, you know, that there's at least a pathway to action. I want to see it now arrive and get where it needs to go.

Lehrer: And what about those health care workers? I saw you called for almost like a wartime draft of health care workers to be deployed to New York now, to be deployed elsewhere if maybe New York passes its peak and then other places reach their peak. Is anybody doing anything like that in a centralized way?

Mayor: No. Brian, you said it perfectly. Again, I've had this conversation with the President, with the military leadership. I have said that we are literally, I think, days away from missing the window for the military to mobilize, first of all, their own medical personnel – tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, highly trained medical personnel in the U.S. military. Obviously, the military right now is at their basis, they are not mobilized for action – they should be. The Commander in Chief, the President has to give that order right now. If he gave it right now, there would be time to actually mobilize them in a way that could save lives here and elsewhere. So, just having those military medical personnel, and that's the group I asked that specific set of requests from – I said – I didn't ask some crazy number that was unattainable, I asked them for numbers they have for the nation's largest city that's the epicenter of the epidemic. And they could do that right now, they need to do it. But the bigger point is to mobilize the military more broadly, get all the medical personnel in the play, all the reserve medical personnel into play, use the logistical capacity of the military, the organizational capacity to do just as you said – a peace time call-up of civilian medical personnel who can answer the nation's call. Look, some of them are going to be urgently needed where they are, obviously. Some of them may be people who, because of their own personal health, couldn't do it, but there's still going to be many tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, other medical personnel who are in parts of the country that are not feeling this crisis yet, who could be mobilized, sent to New York, send to New Orleans, to all the places that are struggling and then moved immediately, as you said – moved immediately out to another frontline location. But the only organization that could possibly make that happen is the military. They have not been given that order. It has to happen now for them possibly to ramp up in time.

Lehrer: Locally, you are now recommending that all New Yorkers going outside should wear masks. The City's position used to be that healthy people don't need masks because they're not very effective at preventing the virus from coming in, they're mostly for keep you from spreading it. So, explain this new recommendation.

Mayor: Exactly. It's still the fundamental truth. So, we have, you know, a renowned health department here in New York City, the largest public hospital system as well – all of our health leadership had been going over this issue and only in the last really 48 hours or so do they feel they've seen evidence from around the world, particularly a new study coming out of Singapore, that shows more evidence that this disease can be spread by asymptomatic people. But the point is exactly what you said, by saying face coverings – I'm really going to use that word very carefully – face coverings, because we do not want anyone anybody who's not a first responder or a health care worker to go anywhere near surgical masks or N95’s – those are only for the people fighting the frontline battle. What I talked about yesterday, advising the people of the city, use a scarf, use a bandana, use something that you create at home. But it is exactly what you said still, it is not about an average New Yorker using that scar for bandana to stop themselves from contracting it, it is to make sure that if they happen to be – if you happen to be someone who has a disease and you just don't know it yet, it just helps make sure that you won't inadvertently spread it to another person. So, it's a smart move in am age of community spread of this disease when we're trying to do things like a shelter in place and social distancing as preventative measures. Let's take another step, just abundance of caution and make sure that no one's spreading the disease inadvertently.

Lehrer: Didn't we know weeks and months ago that asymptomatic people can spread the disease?

Mayor: No. The fact is – and, you know, I've been at so many of these press conferences where our top doctors from New York City address this issue and they said, we just didn't have evidence from all the global medical community that was studying this issue. There was suspicion, but there was not evidence. And the concern throughout was, we did not want to have a situation where people were taking the supply of surgical masks and N95’s away from the people who are doing the life and death work who must be protected. We did not want to create an artificial demand there, nor did we want to create a sense that if you had something over your face, you didn't need the practice social distancing, you didn't need to shelter in place, which are much more profoundly important strategies. This is a new approach based on new data that says this is an additional measure. It makes sense to protect the whole community somewhat more. But it's still an area that is – where we have imperfect data, because we have imperfect data bluntly about coronavirus in general. It's a smart precaution. Now, you don't need to do it when you're around the people that you're in your own household with, you don't even socially distance with people you're in your whole household with.

Lehrer: Well, maybe somebody who's being internally quarantined, but we're actually going to talk about that in our next segment. But go ahead.

Mayor: Right, but the last point I'm making – if you're out on the street – this is what Dr. Barbot said to the whole city yesterday, our health commissioner – if you’re out in the street and you're truly alone, you're distanced, you don't do it then either. It's when you think you might come in closer contact with people despite social distancing as a precaution, that's when you put a face covering on.

Lehrer: Two things about masks and gloves for that matter. One is just, I will reinforce, and I presume you will too, tell me if you don't, that masks and gloves can give people a false sense of security when these items become contaminated themselves. So, you still have to keep six feet. You still have to wash your hands and many people don't realize we actually have to treat the masks and gloves like contaminated, dangerous themselves when we take them off. So, masks and gloves in some cases can do more harm than good unless people use them exactly right. And the second thing is, I know people can make masks themselves, but they need the right materials, and the quality of protection of a homemade mask might vary widely. So, what's your vision of how 8 million New Yorkers are going to get masks without competing with the health care workers for them?

Mayor: So, the first part of your question I think was right on the money. The second part of your question, honestly, I think is inadvertently misleading. It's not about protection. That's what I'm trying to get across. And it's not me talking, it's our health commissioner, it's our deputy commissioner for disease control who are folks who are studying everything that's been produced by the global medical community. Putting on a scarf, a bandana, a homemade item to make sure that you're not inadvertently spreading the disease to others because you have no indication you even have it, that's all this is and we were very blunt about it.

Lehrer: Only that, not for protection, incoming, even minimally –

Mayor: Yes, correct. There's just not enough evidence to suggest otherwise based on what the doctors are telling me. So, we are going with – we're trying to tell people what we know, which changes as more studies come in, obviously, in a disease that no one ever heard of six months ago. But here's the bottom line, so you can use household items, you can use a scarf or bandana – it’s to just keep your own breath from not inadvertently spreading this if you happen to have it and don't know it. That's the name of the game. That's why it's just additional smart guidance. What you said in the first part of your question is 100 percent true. First of all, the way to stop the spread, the way to slow, you know, and bend the curve, is shelter in place, it is the social distancing, and it is the constant cleaning hands, hand sanitizing, you know, covering your mouth when you cough and sneeze. All those fundamentals are much more important than anything for the every-day person that a face covering could achieve. In terms of the strategy for how to protect this city and bend this curve, the previous policies are the core strategy still. This is something – additional abundance of caution. Now, your point about when people – some people have – had some kind of gloves or some kind of mask and they've thrown them on the street, you're right, that's fundamentally dangerous. Not only is it littering. it's dangerous littering. Anything that you've been wearing needs to be discarded. Some things are cleanable, some things are not. There's guidance out there about that. But the point is, you don't – when something needs to be discarded, you can't leave it around because it could create its own danger. That's exactly right.

Lehrer: You know, we have a call coming in about this throwing masks and gloves on the streets. So, let's take Que in the Bronx. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Que.

Question: Hi, yes. Thanks, Mayor de Blasio and Brian for your efforts in keeping the people in the New York Tristate area safe. So yeah, you did answer my question about the gloves because I'm finding lots of gloves all over the street. People are taking them off and just throwing them in the street and sidewalks and I'm having to pick them up. I either sweep them all with gloves because being a homeowner, having the disposable [inaudible] you know, other people's [inaudible] thanks for addressing that and telling people to put them in the garbage. The other three important things I think would be helpful for people. One is, essential stores, the 99 cent stores, I'm wondering how come they've then shuttered and not included in the essential services? And why that is, because grocery store, I mean, often – I mean, in normal time, essential stores have often served – have often –

Lehrer: 99 cent stores have often been a center – if you're going to do three, you got to do them as bullet points. What's number two?

Question: Yeah, well, I'm just saying, just have them open so that, you know, people can buy the essential stuff at those stores, because often their prices are cheaper than regular local neighborhood stores. So, that's why their stores are essential [inaudible] –

Lehrer: Got it.

Question: The other thing with parks, I know the Governor yesterday in the news conference said he's going to close the parks and leave open areas, and I'm assuming he's talking about bigger parks. But in communities we have local parks, rather, with open spaces so you can close the playground areas or group play areas and leave the open spaces with tracks where people are getting their exercise. I have a track near me where it's never crowded and people do use it. And those – and sometimes people cannot run in the streets for whatever medical conditions or whatever their rehabbing. So, have those tracks open. The fourth thing is, I don't, it's not pertaining to you, but you can help the Congressional representatives and maybe City Council people – it's regarding the stimulus check for individuals. I mean, I think people forget that there are people who don't have bank accounts – excuse me – and then they go cash their checks in check cashing places.

Lehrer: Absolutely. And Que, I'm going to leave it there so we can get to some other people, but every single one of his questions is a good one. Can we go through them quickly? 99 cent stores, are they ordered closed?

Mayor: It's a good question. And to the best of my knowledge they are, but I want to check that carefully, Brian, and we'll put something out publicly today to confirm. And one, are they closed now or not, and, two, should they be conceivably allowed open? It’s a good question, because they are cheaper in a lot of cases –

Lehrer: And they do sell a lot of food and cleaning supplies, I know the ones in my neighborhood do.

Mayor: Yeah. So, I'm going to – that's a very good question from Que, and I'm going to check on that and we'll get an answer up immediately. On the parks, so, again, parks remain open. The State’s action was related to playgrounds specifically, not the larger parks. The larger parks remain open, but you must practice social distancing. NYPD and Parks enforcement are enforcing, and if people do not abide by the rules, even when given a warning, fines are being issued now. So, we want people to go get the exercise they need and get right back home and do that quickly, but we're going to enforce the rules very, very vigorously. On the stimulus for individuals, I think the question was about the check cashing places, which are still a huge problem throughout our city, because they really put people over a barrel. I didn't get the end of the question to know what the –

Lehrer: I think he was concerned about people who don't have the means for direct deposit or who don't have social security numbers and getting them their checks, which is a more cumbersome process.

Mayor: Yeah. I will get my team that's working on the stimulus to get out some public information on that, because I don't want to give any information I don't yet have ideally. So let me, let me get that out on how people can go about addressing that if they don't have a bank account or a social security number.

Lehrer: Que, thank you for all that. Amir, in Jackson Heights, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Amir.

Question: Hello. Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How you doing today?

Mayor: Good morning.

Question: Very good, very good. I'm calling today because I just don't understand it, it's beyond me to understand why it's taking so long to get a rent freeze for New Yorkers as well as a commercial rent freeze for small business? We’re suffering here, it’s April 1st, the first of te month, thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers are going to have to pay their rent and they can't. They don't have the money. And now on top of that, the commercial rent is still due the first of a month and a lot of small businesses still – and they’re closed, and they got no income coming, and they have to pay rent.

Lehrer: Right. And so, what's the best you can offer now for this? I know the State policy now is no evictions for the next 90 days, but the rent would have to be made up after that. Can you do any better at the City level?

Mayor: Well, first, for the residential side, I have requested that the State at the – again, this is at the City's request so the State doesn't feel that they're doing anything inappropriate – at the City's request, at my request, that they suspend the Rent Guidelines Board that would allow us to do a rent freeze for well over 2 million New Yorkers who live in rent stabilized housing. So, that's the first thing that could be done with a stroke of a pen up in Albany that just would allow us to ensure that there's no increase authorized to this year for those 2 million-plus New Yorkers. The second thing is to figure out some kind of moratorium structure for other renters, because it's obvious – and certainly at least for those who can't pay – and I'm obviously aware that some people can pay and they should – but for those who can't, giving them a structure they can work with. And there's the point about security deposits, the State could take action to authorize that for those renters who need, who don't have the money to pay the rent, that they could draw on their security deposit and that would give the renter the money to pay the rent, it would give the landlord money in their pocket to pay expenses. It would have to be in some ways replaced over time that, you know, an installment plan or something like that. But, right now, by law, the renter can't do that and the landlord can't do it. They can't draw on that money, that's in escrow. The State should change that right away, give renters and landlords that ability to do that. And then on the commercial side, as well, I think there needs to be some kind of moratorium structure to help those small businesses that cannot pay the rent to get through. You know, the stimulus right now, people should go to the SBA website, all small businesses, and apply immediately for those loans.

Lehrer: That's the federal Small Business Association, right?

Mayor: Yes, I’m sorry – Small Business Association. Small businesses, right at this minute, if you haven't applied yet this morning, apply right now, it’s open. Those loans are on favorable terms and those loans can be forgiven, so getting that money in your pocket might allow you to pay the rent. But for those who can't pay the rent, there has to be a forbearance structure. And crucially, you know, there's no evictions happening. There should not be any because the court system is shut down effectively. And extending that no eviction as long as we need to, because, Brian, that's the bottom line for anyone who literally – they just have no choice, they can't pay and no relief is coming from the federal government or State government in that particular case, then so long as they can stay in their apartment, we can sort it all out later. So, keeping that no eviction policy in place until this crisis is over and then, you know, we'll worry about settling up the financial score later on.

Lehrer: Willa, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Willa.

Question: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. My question is about FDNY EMS. Specifically, last week on March 26th, FDNY EMS responded to over 6,500 calls surpassing the number of calls that they responded to even on September 11th, 2001. Last year, when FDNY EMS’ union went to renegotiate their contract, the Mayor said that he values the work that EMS professionals do, but that he sees it as fundamentally “different” than the work that other first responders do, namely FDNY [inaudible] and NYPD, in essence justifying a $40,000 pay gap after five years on the job between the services. So, this is what these men and women signed up for – this pandemic – and they will meet this moment. They will be here to help us heal and rebuild after we beat back coronavirus and they're risking real sickness and death and doing so. But they need to know that you have their back. So, my question is, do you still value the work that FDNY EMS [inaudible] less than other first responders in terms of real dollars and cents?

Lehrer: I'm going to leave it there, Willa, but your question is very clear. Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Willa I appreciate the question. And look, I was with EMS members yesterday morning out in Queens, paramedics and EMTs, and 100 percent value their work and we're trying to support them in a lot of ways now, including getting reinforcements for them and from around the country, which we pushed FEMA to do. FEMA has now brought in 500 EMTs and paramedics and 250 ambulances, and that number has to grow and we have to do everything to shift the burden that we can off the paramedics and EMTs. They are doing an amazing job and they're very brave people and they are in this time and they always are.

Again, we have a different reality in each of our services. They do different things, different challenges, but respect all, we're trying to support all, we will continue to try and support all in different ways. But the bottom line, to me, is that the burden that's hit in these last days, it is extraordinary. But what the FDNY is doing is they're shifting personnel on to the 9-1-1 calls. The – again, bringing in the out-of-state personnel, shifting internally personnel, getting a better system in place to take a number of those 9-1-1 calls that actually don't need, I will not go into detail, but I'll tell you that in talking with the EMTs and paramedics out in Queens yesterday, they said they're still seeing people call 9-1-1 for things that are not in the least in emergency or because they are worried or because –

Lehrer: Right, but she's drawing attention to the pay disparity between EMS workers and firefighters. Does this crisis disprove that that’s a fair pay disparity?

Mayor: I – it's just not – we want to take care of these workers and support them. Of course, have their backs, but this is a bigger issue in the labor dynamics of the city. It's not the time to you know, make something up on the fly in the middle of crisis. That's just the truth. We'll figure this out when we get through this crisis.

Lehrer: Question from our newsroom regarding first responders, could the city provide quarantine housing for first responders who are worried about bringing COVID-19 home to their families? I read they have something like this in China.

Mayor: Could we say – clarify? Could we provide quarantine housing? So, we have a number of hotel rooms for first responders and health care workers who want to stay separate from their families, and, in some cases, who are working so hard they just can't even get home to their families. Yes. Those are available and we're making more available.

Lehrer: David in Rye Brook, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hello David.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. Mayor de Blasio, I'll make it pretty quick. We thank you for all of your service. We appreciate it. We know you're very overwhelmed. I have access to millions of masks and gowns because my father represents factories in China and we will of course – and I listen to every day Brian – and you said over the last two weeks that you are running out of supplies you would have –

Lehrer: That the city is, yeah –

Question: You would have an order already going if somebody from your team had responded. So, we'd love to get in touch directly with someone in order to get these supplies to our front line. Can you help?

Mayor: David, right now, I'll tell you if you please give your information to WNYC. I'm going to have our chief procurement officer reach out to you immediately who's been accessing supplies from all over the world. Reach out to him right now and he'll be calling you. I also want to tell all listeners, anyone who can offer supplies, equipment, who knows – who is a medical professional who is ready to volunteer or knows one, you can call 833-NYC-0040 or go on our website, nyc.gov/helpnow. So those are the two universal – and Brian, if you guys would keep getting that out there throughout your shows –those are the two universal ways that people can offer. We want these offers, we need them, David, I'm very, very appreciative. David, I'm sure you know, we are dealing with a struggle. China is, you know, the government in China it kind of seems to be changing the rules as we go along about the exports. So that's a real concern, but we want to get those orders in and see which ones we can expedite. We need that – we need all that material immediately.

Lehrer: And we're still taking them too, and if it's a significant donation, we will try to match you with the city or with the hospital or whatever's appropriate. But that number again to get in touch with the city directly again was 8-3-3 – what?

Mayor: Yeah. Again, it's 833-NYC-0040.

Lehrer: All right, you're – and David, thank you so much for offering this through us. You're using the NYPD to enforce social distancing now, we have the worst spread in low-income areas according to the neighborhood zip code by zip code numbers released by the city. I've heard of police cars blasting sirens and lights at teenagers of color congregating. The Intercept has an article about police without masks approaching people to disperse them. So, what direction would you like to give the NYPD about the softest, affective touch to not wind up with disparate policing by race and class in the emergency?

Mayor: Yeah, I think right now that goes with everything that all of our training at NYPD over the last six years and everything about the neighborhood policing strategy is about communication with the community, respect for the community, building relationships. This is – and this is something Commissioner Shea has said really clearly. This is about educating people, helping them understand the new reality, warning them if they're not following the guidance that they're actually creating a danger for themselves and others. So all officers can approach if they keep to social distancing, they can approach a group. They don't need to be wearing a mask to approach a group if they're six feet or more away from the individuals. The guidance we've given today is if you're approaching more closely to anyone, you know, put something over your face for everyone's benefit. Again, that could be in the case of everyday in New York or something like a scarf or a bandana.

The NYPD has been sent hundreds of thousands of masks for when officers do need them for their protection in situations where they're closely in encountering people. So I hear your underlying point, Brian, but I think NYPD has been, you know, really evolving to be much more about communicating with communities. If a group of young people are congregating, I want officers to go and address that group of young people make really clear that's unacceptable. I don't want to give fines unless we have to, but fines will be given if warnings are given and folks are told if you don't disperse, we're going to start fining you, then they're going to get fined. So our officers have to be urgent about it. And they have been, they’ve been doing a great job, but I think they've been doing it in a way that really is respectful of the people in the middle of a crisis.

Lehrer: One other NYPD thing that's also related to the White House, President Trump's advisor, Peter Navarro said at the briefing yesterday, they've also procured more than 1,700 Tyvek suits from Raytheon, specifically for NYPD homicide detectives after being asked by NYPD Chief of Department, Terrence Monahan, so that the detectives don't have to go into homes with possible COVID cases and put themselves at risk to investigate murders. So one, can you confirm that one? And also important as the homicide detectives are, we don't have more than a few hundred murders a year in the city these days - thank goodness – is that where 1,700 Tyvek suits are most needed right now?

Mayor: Yeah. Look, first of all, Peter Navarro has been very, very responsive over these last weeks and actually gotten this a lot of the things we need here in New York City, so he and I may disagree on some bigger policy matters, but on this one I want to give him credit. He's been moving a lot to New York City. On that one, I think that as with everything there is a need and the NYPD, if some of that need isn't readily, you know, something that needs to be tapped into right away, it should be moved to other agencies, obviously health workers or others who need it. There's been tremendous coordination between the agencies. Chief Monahan has been right in the middle of all that. So I assure you that, you know, we wanted everything we'd get our hands on in terms of every form of protective gear. We'll work with the NYPD to make sure if some of it is not being urgently used that it gets moved where it's needed most.

Question: Last question from a listener for today. This one comes via Twitter. I'm a FedEx employee. Every day we go to work with less subway cars. The trains are full, again. We could drive but we can't park near facilities in Manhattan without paying high fees. We're asking for free parking specifically for essential employees and workers so we go to work safely, maybe even just suspending parking meters. What do you say to this FedEx employee?

Mayor: It's a great question. I say I want to get an answer for that employee. We have different ways that we can address that and I want to figure out, because obviously they are essential employees and we have to make sure that they can get around. The MTA – look to the train's point and I'm perplexed by this because the MTA has something like, you know, only 10 percent of the ridership it had a couple of months ago. I don't understand why we have these persistent reports of trains being crowded. I do know they've lost a lot of staff obviously, and they've lost a lot of money, but I don't understand what the MTA is doing in terms of their planning that they can't put out the trains where they're needed to handle such a small number of people without crowding. We've also asked the NYPD to intervene to go to the places that appear to be hotspots and literally, you know, direct people to spread out across the train or keep people from getting on the train if it is too crowded.

And I would say that to all New Yorkers, if you're waiting for a train or bus and it is crowded, don't get on it. You know, if you're worried about what's going to happen at your job or something that's fair. But we cannot, you know, you can't be in harm's way. It's not right to have anyone get into a situation like a crowded subway car or bus at this point. We've got to figure out – I just don't understand the situation with MTA and I'm asking them to give us a better answer on why they can't adjust for this, so that everyone can have the assurance who those essential workers, that they get on a train, they're going to be safe.

Lehrer: And last thing for me for today, and then you can say anything to the listening public that you want going out the door. You appointed a Food Czar, Kathryn Garcia who's usually the Sanitation Commissioner. Are you concerned about the food supply?

Mayor: I am, but first reason I'm concerned, Brian, is that, you know, we think in the short term it's going to be something like a half million New Yorkers who lost their job as a result of COVID-19. Even though there was action in the federal stimulus bill, that money won't instantaneously be in people's pockets. You got a lot of people – it goes back to your rent question too – you got a lot of people who just don't have any money. So my first concern is that even though there's food on the shelves, a lot of people can't afford it. So that's – today we announced at 435 public school sites that were feeding kids, they're starting today they will feed families as well, meaning any New York families who need food. You can go online nyc.gov, get the sites, you can call 3-1-1, find a site near you.

Anyone can walk up during the hours of operation, which I believe are 7:30 am to 1:30 pm. You can get breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's all to go. No ones sitting down, obviously. But you can go in there and say, my family needs food. You'll get breakfast, lunch, and dinner for as many people as you indicate you need it for. The, you know, there's going to be absolute respect that families are in need and everyone, the workers there have a green light to give people whatever they deem appropriate. And that's going to be every weekday for the foreseeable future because we want to make sure there's a very widespread network of food. This is something Kathryn Garcia put together with the Department of Education, and we're going to go farther than that because I just think you're going to see with every passing week, people are just going to run out of money and need food. So we have to ensure that we have a very strong delivery mechanism and we have to make sure that food gets where it's needed.

And that's another thing, we're in a wartime dynamic and this, you know, thank you for the offer of a chance to finish with something and I'll put the two points together, this is a wartime dynamic, but the federal government's not acting like we're in a war. A war time dynamic is this. We've lost 1,500 new Yorkers lives already. There's going to be a lot more tragically. You've got people getting sick all the time. You got this city among other cities around the country struggling just to keep our health care system going. If that doesn't describe a war, I don't know what does. And yet Washington's on a peacetime footing right now when they should be on a wartime footing. So even to the point of not just the medical personnel we need, the surgical supplies, the ventilators, I'm concerned also, how do we make sure that food gets to everyone who needs it? You know, how do we make sure it is actually distributed properly in a situation where people don't have money to pay for it?

We are in a crisis that combines a lot of what we've experienced in a war with a lot of what this nation experienced in the Great Depression, but the federal government is not on that footing. So, I'll finish the way I started. Everyone who’s listening should raise their voice to our congressional delegation and directly to the leaders in Washington and say, this is unbelievable that this many people are suffering and our military is at their bases, they have not been called up, and there is no effort, literally no effort right now by the government to take doctors from other parts of the country that are experiencing little or no COVID-19 and get them where the need is greatest. We would have done that if there was a hurricane, we would have done that if there was a crisis in another country and humanitarian aid was pouring in from around the world. It's not being done for our own country and the only chance we have to fix this is if the federal government acts in the next days. Otherwise, we'll already be in the thick of the worst of it and it'll be too late.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, I know you're holding extended news conferences every afternoon. We appreciate that you're continuing to come on with us on Friday mornings. Talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian. Take care now.

2020-04-03 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Everybody, this Friday afternoon, we are beginning now a race against time as we prepare for next week. I have said to the federal government, I've said to all New Yorkers that this Sunday, April 5th is an absolutely essential day as we prepare for a very, very difficult week ahead and I've called to arms all New Yorkers who can help in this fight. And I've asked our federal government to recognize, and I've told them this now over the last two weeks, that this was going to be an essential moment where we had to be supported and prepared for a really difficult battle ahead. We have to think about all of the pieces that we need to get through this important challenging moment in the history of this city. And I want everyone to understand that – it's not just one thing that we need at this point. We have to pull together all the pieces if we're going to save every life that we can save. We need the supplies. We've talked so much about that. The equipment, the PPEs, all the things that we need to get through this fight. We need more than ever, the personnel, the people, the doctors, the nurses, all of the medical personnel that will help us through this fight. We need the beds, the hospital beds, the hospital capacity, and we're going to be building it in every conceivable location to get us through.

I'm going to go over with you the details so that everyone understands what New York City is up against, what it's going to take. We've obviously looked at every piece of the equation and the PPE's, the personal protective equipment, is something that has been rightfully focused on deeply because that's what protects our doctors, our nurses, all our health care workers, who are heroes fighting at the frontline. And that matter is crucially important, but I'm going to focus even more on the pieces of the equation that we're struggling with even more right now. So, everyone understands it's been a dramatic fight to make sure we got enough PPEs. But I want to be honest with everyone that making sure we have enough ventilators is even tougher. Making sure we have enough beds is going to be an extraordinary race against time with only a month to produce a number of hospital beds. It's almost inconceivable in the modern history of the city, but we believe we can do it if we get the help we need.

Possibly the toughest part of the equation is the personnel. And we're going to need help not only from everyone in this city but from the entire country if we're going to meet this goal in time. So, I will not focus as much in this update today on the PPEs. They're vitally important. But we're even having a tougher time with the other pieces of the equation. I want to lay that out in specificity. I will say, and I always try and give thanks when people help us. I'll be critical when we don't get help, and I'll be thankful when we get it. And later on, we'll go over a number of organizations and people who step forward, but I want to give a special thanks to the President and to Jared Kushner. They told me yesterday that they would get to 200,000 N95 masks to our public hospital system. The part of our health care system that has been bearing the brunt in places like Elmhurst Hospital and Lincoln Hospital, Bellevue, Queens Hospital – all of these places have really been the tip of the spear. And I was on a call with the President and Jared Kushner yesterday. They said they would produce these things immediately. And lo and behold Dr. Mitch Katz sent me a photo a couple of hours ago that they had been delivered to Health + Hospitals. So that's going to really help us get through a lot of the month of April. And I'm very thankful for that. 

Now, what are we up against now? Well, here are the numbers. We said from the beginning, we would need 15,000 ventilators to get through this crisis. Basically, think about April and May. That's the right way to still think about this: to get through April, May to get through the worst of it, to save every life that can be saved, we will need 15,000 total ventilators, 15,000 more than we started the month of March with. We have gotten some ventilators in, but right now we're struggling to have enough for next week. We will need approximately 45,000 new medical personnel over that which we started the month with. And I'll go over those details with you as well. We will need 85,000 hospital beds beyond the 20,000 we started March with and again, I will go over those details with you. We had a presentation from Dr. Katz about that, so you've had a lot of that before. 

The ventilators, why are they so crucial? Because as you'll hear from our doctors, and I want to keep emphasizing this, just think about the person in your life who you love – could be a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a mother, a father, a brother, a sister. Think about that person, a spouse, that person who needs that ventilator right then to live. Doctors do not have the luxury – if someone's gotten to a point where they cannot breathe out ventilator, the doctor can't say, the nurse can say, hey, could you hold on for a few hours while we try and find one? You know, could you come back tomorrow? They can't say that. When a medical professional needs that ventilator, they need it right that moment. So, the ventilators to me are one of the clearest examples of life and death. If we're going to save every single life we can save, we must have the ventilators we need exactly where we need them, when we need them. 

What do we need for next week? A minimum of 2,500 to 3000 ventilators. Now we will update these numbers every single day and let us all pray that we start to see better news and we start to need less than projected, but we have to plan on the very toughest assumptions, 2,500 to 3000 ventilators more than what we have right now. That is a part of that overall 15,000 I mentioned.

Now you'll ask the obvious question, where could we get them? Well, the federal government is the single most important source. We have only an approximation, and let me hasten to say the federal government has to cover the needs of the entire nation. I do understand that. I've had this conversation with the President, the FEMA administrator, the military leadership. I understand the entire nation has to be served, but I also understand we are the epicenter of this crisis – still about a quarter of the cases in this entire country right here in New York City. And we are the tip of the spear. And everyone I talked to in Washington acknowledges it. We're about to hit a huge surge in these coming days. They all know it. There's not a single leader in Washington, whether in health care, FEMA, military, white house, no one denies that we are bearing the brunt and it's going to hit in the next few days.

So, when I talk about the 10,000 ventilators in the federal stockpile, it stands to reason that they should go where the need is greatest in our nation, and right now that's here. And the second we don't need them, we will happily work to move them to any other part of the country that does. The New York State stockpile – to the best of our information at this point, there's about 2000 left in that stockpile. Again, I understand the State has to think about every part of this state, but we are overwhelmingly the place in the state where the problem is greatest. So those are two places to turn. 

Now, where else can we think about? Well, today there was something really positive that happened and that was that the Governors of both New York and New Jersey took a crucial step and that was to order private companies to release any stockpile they have of crucially needed supplies. Ventilators, obviously PPEs, we're waiting for all the details, but I want to be crystal clear. This is exactly the kind of thing we need. In fact, I would urge every state in the union to exercise the same approach. Any private medical facilities, doctors, any industries, construction, manufacturing, any place that's holding back personal protective equipment or ventilators at a moment of profound crisis. We have to be clear, this is a wartime dynamic. People's lives are at stake. There is no reason in the world to hold back that equipment. If that equipment is meant for someone who's fighting at the front line, someone who's one of our health care workers, our first responders, that's one thing. If it's part of fighting COVID-19, that's great. But we know for a fact there still a lot of equipment, a lot of supplies that have not been applied to the struggle.
They are sitting in offices and warehouses and that's unacceptable. So, I commend both states for taking action and we will act in tandem with this effort. I am authorizing the NYPD, the Fire Department of New York City, the Sheriff's Office of New York City to immediately support the efforts to acquire these supplies from these private sources. I am certain many, many companies will comply with the new order readily. In that case, we want our law enforcement agencies to help make sure that the deliveries are done promptly and that they are secure. We all know how valuable these supplies are. We want them to be secured. But in the event that any private organization, any company, any individual attempts to resist this new instruction from the State and does not provide those crucial lifesaving supplies and equipment, then I'm authorizing the NYPD, the Sheriff's Office, the FDNY to use their law enforcement capacity to make sure that those items are turned over immediately and brought immediately to where the need is greatest in our hospital system.

Now, another part of this equation, and this one's tough because it's never been done before. We don't have any companies in New York City that make ventilators. It just doesn't exist. But I have asked our Economic Development Corporation to attempt rapidly to answer this call with some form of local production. They have developed a plan. We will have more to say on that in the next few days as soon as the details are perfected. But this is an important part of the equation. It has never been done, but we have to see if there's any viable way to produce ventilators locally that could help us achieve this goal. 

Finally, the alternative devices. These devices, and the doctors will talk about this. Later. Dr. Katz has given me a tutorial on this. They do help, for sure. They can help in several ways as part of a variety of tools we use to save lives. They are not the same as a ventilator per se, but they are still a very valuable piece of the equation. We've secured 1,780 of these devices. We believe there's about 3000 in New York State reserve, and we're going to certainly work with the State to maximize the use of these items as we get ready for this very difficult week ahead.

Let me now talk to you about our heroes, our health care workers. Our health care workers – I think this is their toughest hour, but it's also their finest hour. They have been going through so much the last few weeks. They've been extraordinarily valiant. We've got to make sure we protect them. We've got to give them the equipment they need to do their jobs, but we also need to give them a lot more reinforcement. Look, think about it. These folks have been working night and day through very tough conditions, seeing a lot of painful realities. A lot of them have not gotten any break at all. And they've watched as a lot of their colleagues had gotten sick and had to go offline. That just put more pressure on so many of the health care workers, they had to do even more work. We need to bring in additional personnel rapidly to relieve them, to support them, to rotate, you know, give them a chance to get a break, but also because the need is just exploding in terms of the COVID cases. 

So where did we start? Well, at the beginning of March we had about 125,000 citywide clinical staff. All our hospitals combined. And just for all of us who are not doctors, and I'm constantly asking these questions so I can understand better, and I can explain them to the people of the city, clinical staff, here's the broad definition – doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, dieticians for the purpose of dealing with COVID, that's the core group of professions we're talking about. So again, the beginning of March, about 125,000 folks in our hospitals, all our hospitals, public, private, every kind from those categories of professionals, about 20,000 of them – within that larger group, about 20,000 worked in our public hospitals at Health + Hospitals. 

Now here's what we need to get through April and into May and to really help save lives all through April and May, we need to build out rapidly, additional staffing, and the number is really substantial and it will tell you just how tough this is going to be. We will need the additional 45,000 clinical staff. That means about 7,500 who will be in our traditional hospital buildings and another 37,500 who will be staffing all the nontraditional hospitals that are being created. You see already places like the Javits Center, the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, we're going to be in the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, we're going to be in hotels all over our city, whole hotels converted to hospitals. All of this is going to take staffing. Now some need a lot of intensive staffing, like of course intensive care units, but others, the hotels in particular, given the patients they'll be handling can get a lot done with less staffing. And there's a phrase I've been hearing these last days that all New Yorkers need to understand: this crisis staffing, crisis protocols that we're going to be staffing these medical facilities, not in the ideal way, not in the way we all wish we could, but in the way that makes sense in battle, when we have to make smart choices and smart compromises to be able to save the most lives and serve the most people. We're asking our medical personnel right now – they don't have the ideal in terms of the kind of numbers of personnel they deserve. They don't have all the equipment they deserve. They don't have all the PPEs they deserve. We've have been now for weeks and weeks on a crisis footing and the CDC recognizes this, that there's one standard, if you will, for peacetime, there's another standard for wartime and we have to make tough, tough choices and get by with less in wartime. I keep saying to everyone this is like a war that hasn't been declared and needs to be declared by our national government because if you go to one of these hospitals what our health care workers are going through shirt looks like a war to me and they deserve the best, but they're doing their best even with the limits that had been placed on them, and we need to recognize that and acknowledge that and say to them, we know what you're going through. We have some inkling, even though none of us are walking in your shoes, but we know you don't – being given everything you should and we're going to try and get you more and more. But even if we do, well, it's still not perfect.

But I'll tell you something about health care workers, just like our first responders, they keep showing up. They keep doing the job no matter what. We need to get them these reinforcements and we need to do it quickly. So, we will do it in a variety of manners, through contracting. We've already in recent weeks, added an additional 3,600 medical personnel. Our goal is to double that quickly through the contracting process. This means bringing in medical personnel from all over the country under contract a lot from this part of the country. Volunteers – we've been working with our own New York City Medical Reserve Corps through our Department of Health and with the State through its a medical volunteer system. Together that's almost accounted for a thousand new medical professionals. We need to get a lot more out of that. We intend to.

FEMA. I've been talking to the White House, to FEMA, to the military since last week. I request, I've said many times, I ask for 1000 nurses 300 respiratory therapists and 150 doctors by the end of the day, Sunday. I spoke just about an hour ago to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Millie. That request is being acted on actively. I'm not going to be able to tell you at this hour exactly what the numbers will be. I expect to hear that by the end of the day. My message to all of – to FEMA and everyone as we thank them for all they've done and we need more and I need as much as possible that this request be fulfilled in total by Sunday. If it is not fulfilled by Sunday, we are going to start to have challenges immediately. So, we have to get the maximum help from Washington and I'll have that report soon. 

In terms of what could happen to truly enlist all the medical personnel of our country. Look, we are going to do everything the old-fashioned way, if you will, to the volunteer recruitment efforts. You're going to see an alert go out shortly asking for all medical personnel in New York City to volunteer to sign up – and I want to emphasize when we say volunteer, they will be paid for their time. I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression. We're asking them to break away from whatever else they're doing, sign up now, join this effort. So that alert will go out on top of all the other efforts to pull together volunteer medical personnel. But I want people to understand this is not what will get us through this crisis here in New York City nor any place else in the country. Again, we're in the middle of a war, a war against an invisible enemy. Look, if another country were attacking United States of America, if I told you that a country was attacking United States of America, attacking our largest city and simultaneously attacking Florida, attacking Louisiana, attacking Michigan, and that thousands of Americans had died, and I said to you, do you think the military would be called up to fight that enemy? I know you'd say yes. It would be so obvious and they would've been called up a long time ago, in fact. We're dealing with an enemy that is killing thousands of our fellow Americans and a lot of people are dying who don't need to die, who should not die if the right medical help and equipment were there for them. While you cannot say every state for themselves, every city for themselves, that's not America. America is a place where we look out for each other. When there's a disaster somewhere in America, everyone goes from all over the country to help, whether it was Katrina in New Orleans or Harvey in Houston, or all the horrible hurricanes that have hit Florida, or even when we experienced Sandy or, or even more, 9/11, people came from all over the country to help. Right now, we have these wonderful ambulances, paramedics, and EMTs are here from around the country to help us. It's an American belief that we go to help. But usually what happens is a disaster hits one place or a few places in the whole rest of the country responds. This is something very different. We have to wake up to the reality we're facing. This is a war with many, many fronts, and we cannot ask each city to try and somehow improvise while dealing with the greatest health care crisis in a century. And we cannot ask each state to just go it alone when the only possible way of getting through this is with the full support of our federal government, our military, and the medical community of our entire country. Right now, there are doctors and nurses and other medical professionals all over the country going about their normal lives and they're doing good work, but a lot of them could be freed up in a crisis to help save lives. And the lives to be saved are right here in New York City. So, I have called for today something unprecedented – a national enlistment effort, a national effort to bring all available medical personnel into the fight against the coronavirus, wherever that fight is raging the most; to recruit doctors, nurses, and medical professionals from all over the country, send them rapidly where they're needed most, and then move them rapidly to the next biggest problem, the next biggest challenge. And what we will do, and I know every other city and state will do the same, is we will then offer our personnel to go to the next front to help as well. That's the only way we're going to get through the months ahead. It's never been done, but we know what it looks like because this country has been through war. And we know who could organize it and that's our military because they've done it before. Our military has the ability to put together a national structure to mobilize its medical personnel and ensure they get where they need to go rapidly and to make sure the priorities are right. But our military has not been brought into this fight, in anywhere near the way they could be.

And let's be clear about that. I'm really thankful that the USNS Comfort is here. I'm really thankful for all the members of our military who are here in the city, helping us. But they are few in number compared to the might of the American military. When you think about our standing military, our reserves, right now there's a very small presence in New York City. It should be a huge presence. Right now, the tens of thousands of medical personnel who are part of our military and our reserves, they have not been called up to action across the board. It's time for the Commander in Chief to give the order. If we're fighting a war, let's act like we're fighting a war right now. There's a peacetime approach in Washington and that won't cut it. So I'm urging the President to do something that no president has had to do in our modern history – to create an enlistment effort for our medical personnel, civilians all over the country, and to ensure that our military medical personnel are not left on their bases, but are brought to the front. That's what our military does. That's what they believe in going where they can save the most American lives. Well, we need them now.

Few more points and I mentioned to you there's some wonderful people who have been helping us out, but before I go to that very positive, hopeful roll call, I do want to offer personal condolences to our City Comptroller Scott Stringer. He lost his mom, Arlene Stringer-Cuevas. And for a lot of us in public service here in New York City, well, we've all known Scott and many of us for many decades and we appreciate him and the work he does for this city. But we also have known his mom. His mom did so much, a trailblazer in public life in this city, a New York City Council member, a woman who often was one of the first women in the role she played. Someone who served in our City government, in Social Services, did so much to help others. Raised a great son and a great family. We've lost her to the coronavirus. A vibrant, amazing New Yorker, a true New Yorker with a lot of personality and our condolences. All of us here in City Hall are feeling this. And we offer our condolences to Scott and his whole family. And it's another reminder of how personal this crisis has been for all of us. Every single New Yorker knows someone who either has this disease or has lost a loved one to this disease. It's very personal for all of us. And, and we mourn with all the families who have lost a loved one.

I told you that again, in the midst of the challenge, we keep being inspired by the generosity and the good works of so many people. This gives you a lot of hope when again, I keep calling that role of heroes, when the Comfort steamed into our harbor. When we saw the amazing efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers at the Javits Center, when we saw those ambulances arrive from all over the nation, all of that has given us hope. All of that is helping us fight back. But there's a lot of companies and organizations, even foreign nations who are stepping up to help New York City in our hour of need. I'm just going to say it quickly just to give you the sheer magnitude. I want to thank Facebook, 25,000 face masks, 48,000 pairs of gloves. The UN Mission right here in the city, of the nation of Qatar, 60,000 surgical masks [inaudible] 70,000 respirators and surgical masks. The Met, 33,000 gloves, great New York City institution. The municipality of Shanghai, obviously China has gone through so much, now they're helping us – 20,000 surgical masks. Right here from New York City, New York Road Runners, that sponsors our wonderful marathon, 20,000 pairs of gloves. Rudin Management 20, excuse me, 10,000 pairs of gloves, a million masks, wonderful organization has sent us a thousand respirators. Ford has sent 50,000 face shields and they were made by Ford and delivered. And that's fantastic. American Express, 36,000 N95 masks. Louis Vuitton, 21,000 N95 masks.

I mean, this really adds up and it shows you, even when we look at daunting numbers and daunting challenges, look at how many people are stepping up and helping. And each one of those helps us and think about all the health care workers, everyone who is going to be protected because of these generous donations. I want to thank all of them and there are some more. And these are not supplies and PPEs. These are other types of things. Discovery has put up public service announcements. They did this as a contribution to the effort to make sure that our young people will get food they need for free. We've gotten some donations to our schools. Rihanna, her Clara Lionel Foundation has helped our public schools and our kids in their hour of need. Goldman Sachs the same. Uber has provided $750,000 in free rides to health care workers and first responders. Uber Eats, $250,000 in food codes. And one that I'll end on and it's one I'm very, very personally appreciative of. Obviously, you've heard how deeply I feel we need to get health care workers from all over the country to help us. And I think our military are about to play, I hope, a very crucial role. But you know what it's also great to see civilian airlines stepping up. So thank you. A profound thanks to JetBlue, which is our hometown airline here in New York City, based here. But thanks to JetBlue. Thanks to United, they're providing flights for free to medical workers who volunteered to come here and serve. And that really, really helps us out.

So, all of that, even against this tough, tough backdrop, all that is good news. And I want to remind everyone we need help from anyone and everyone of every kind. And if you want to help New York City, please call this number, 8-3-3-NYC-0-0-4-0, or you can go online nyc.gov/helpnow. And I'll only finish before I say a few words in Spanish. Then we'll go to your questions from the media. That I talk to New Yorkers all day long who are fighting this fight. Their resolve is unbelievable. It is a, there's a power in the people of this city, a strength. I'm seeing it every day. I do not see people running. I did not see people letting the legitimate fear overcome them. I see people standing and fighting. That's who we are as New Yorkers and that's what we're going to do. And all we ask is that our nation stand by us to the fullest.

Few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we welcome questions from our media colleagues. And please tell me name and outlet.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder. We have Dr. Barbot and Dr. Katz here in person and Commissioner Criswell on the phone. With that, I will start with Josh from ABC-7.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you? Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah. Josh, how are you doing?

Question: I'm well, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good man.

Question: I'm curious, Jared Kushner yesterday at the podium made the comment about the federal stockpile being "ours," you know, and that it's not really – it's there to support the states, doesn't belong to the states. And in the context of that today, you know, the Patriots are driving through the city in a big brand of tractor trailer with 300,000 masks, I think N95 and dropping them off to the Javits Center. That is, if I'm not mistaken, completely supplied by the federal government with federal health care workers. And I'm wondering if those masks for which they're taking a lot of credit for delivering to New York should instead be sent to Health + Hospitals or some other facility in New York. Your general thoughts on this.

Mayor: Josh. Yeah. Josh, let me just keep the line open so I can get clarity. Josh, I just want to make sure we're speaking the same language here. You know, I talked to Jared Kushner yesterday and that particular shipment that, you know, there was a real focus on our public hospitals. I know Jared talked to Dr Katz to get clear about the need. And the agreement that 200,000 N95 masks would play a crucial role, protecting our health care workers at Health + Hospitals. And we received that. We're very, very grateful. But I'm not clear about what you're talking about specifically. So just clarify.

Question: So, the New England Patriots just in the last hour, I think they had a big public flight. They flew to China, they got, you know, like almost 2 million masks and they apparently drove 300,000 of them according to them, into the city and they dropped them off at the Javits Center. And there's a video on Twitter of like this motorcade, an NYPD motorcade with this truck. And I'm wondering if you know where they are really destined. Are they destined for the federal workers at the Javits Center who presumably came with their own material? Is that material that the city should be able to use or a combination of both?

Mayor: So, first of all, thank you. And there's been a lot going on today, so I did not know about that being done by the Patriots. I want to thank the New England Patriots for that extraordinary donation. As many of you know, I was born in New York City to a New York City family, but I grew up in Massachusetts, and am a fan of the New England Patriots through thick and thin. That's a fantastic donation. And Josh, I think the assumption that anyone comes with the supplies I need, I just want to challenge you on that. Everyone around the country is struggling, including those who are working as part of the FEMA response to make sure they'll have enough supplies for the duration of this crisis here in the city, which really could be as much as two full months. The worst of it. So no, when you get a huge amount of supplies like that. That's just a wonderful thing and it will absolutely be used and needed. And Javits Center is a great place for it. How it will be specifically utilized, we'll get back to you. But no, anyone who wants to show up to one of our hospital sites and has something that's helpful. We have, you know, an organized system that we obviously want people to go through. That's the best way, by calling 8-3-3-NYC-0-0-4-0 or going online nyc.gov/helpnow. But if, you know, if someone wants to show up with hundreds of thousands of masks, and I know that's happened at Bellevue in one case. And you know, of course we're going to accept them with great gratitude. So, we'll get you the details on the use, but that's a fantastic development.

Moderator: Next we'll take Julia from the Post.

Question: Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good.

Question: Good. So, the appointment of former Police Commissioner Jimmy O'Neill, just kind of begs the question about why that role is not being filled by Commissioner Criswell, who I understand she's on the call today, but we really haven't seen her and visible as we've seen say, Dr Katz or Dr. Barbot?

Mayor: So, Julia, I'm not sure I understand the question, so I'm just going to try and explain how this is all working. You know, I've been working with all of my colleagues over these last weeks, even months now. Deanne Criswell as our Emergency Management Commissioner has been, you know, with the deputy mayors, you know, and the lead organizing this entire operation. And she also happens to have tremendous relationships at the federal level and has helped us to bring in a lot of the resources we have and work out the operational plans with the federal government, the State government. She's doing exactly what you want an Emergency Management commissioner to do. She's working on all aspects of the crisis as is her team. You're seeing the health care professionals more Julia, I think this is pretty straight up, that because many, many, many of the questions and concerns that we raise in these press conferences are about the health care issues and the science and the actions that are going on in Health + Hospitals.

Jimmy O'Neill's playing a very specific role. And I asked him to play this role, which is to ensure that in the hospitals themselves, that given the dynamic-ness of what we're about to go through the next few weeks, that upon the arrival of supplies, we know that the utilization, the security of the supplies, the turnaround time in terms of what we need for resupply, that everything is very tight and there's eyes on the situation with people that he'll have in each hospital. And we've got a very, very strong coordination structure. That's a piece of a much bigger equation, but he's perfect for that piece of the equation. I'm so grateful that he's taken that on. But Deanne is one of the people who was one of the conductors of the whole orchestra. And I want to thank her for the extraordinary job she's doing.

Moderator: Next we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing? I want if I may, two separate questions. First, I wanted to follow up on the City's guidance yesterday about New Yorkers wearing face coverings. Will the City be providing workers and people in homeless shelters with the necessary equipment or masks? And if I may follow up?

Mayor: Yeah, just do it all at once. That one's easy.

Question: And then I wanted to ask you if there's any update on a rent freeze. I know you spoke about that this morning and I, and you talked about the role that Albany plays here. But is there anything that the City is looking at or planning? As the days continue to go on and people are having trouble making their payments and so on, what kind of power does the City have here beyond folks who live in rent stabilized apartments?

Mayor: Yeah. Gloria, thank you. On the first part, the answer is yes, we will be. It'll take us obviously a few days to fully implement, but we will be providing bandanas, scarfs, whatever kind of face covering makes sense in the facilities that we control that people live in, in our Correction system, in our homeless shelter system, et cetera. So the answer's yes there. And on the second part, and hold on, you know, Gloria, we have not enough gotten so much sleep lately. What was the second part again? Oh, you can cue me – rent freeze. Thank you. On that part. The question you're asking is the right way, which is that the City's power has to do with the Rent Guidelines Board, which I've asked in fact the State to suspend. The fact is, you know, that would create a de facto rent freeze. I think that's the right thing to do. But unless the State suspends by law, that process, we would have to go through the whole process, which would take months. So that's something we can do immediately with State support. The other thing we've done is through the power of the City, obviously anyone who was threatened with eviction originally, we were going to provide free lawyers for in this crisis. But then the, the reality, a very good reality in a sad backdrop is we got wave after wave of agreement from the real estate community, from the court system, from the State, that there would not be any evictions. Now that's for a time limited reality and we all have to make sure that that no eviction policy continues as long as it needs to. And that's something we'll be watching and acting on very closely.

But the bigger answer to your question, Gloria, is it is overwhelmingly the State's legal domain to act on things like potential, some kind of rent moratorium beyond just the rent stabilized apartments. That's 2 million plus people, but there's obviously a lot more people who are not rent stabilized. And I really like the proposal that says for those renters who need, it's not everyone, some people do have enough money to afford the rent, but for those who need to pay the rent and can't, let them use their security deposits and then have some kind of repayment plan, installment plan or something. That also requires State action. So we're very clear as we go through this. There's certain things that only the State can do. There's certain things only the federal government could do. But we've been very clear about what we think the State can and should do immediately. I know they just got through their budget in the last 24 hours, a lot going on in Albany, but I hope this will soon be something that will be acted on.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to ask about the 45,000 medical staffers you're trying to recruit to come help us out. I'm just wondering if there's, if you're going to be able to guarantee that they're going to have enough PPE to keep them safe, rather than rationing? Because they're going to want to go back to wherever they're from when this is over and take care of their neighbors obviously. So how are you going to keep them safe, given the city's PPE shortages?

Mayor: Yoav that's a very fair question. And I don't mean this in any way to be disrespectful. I really don't. It's a peacetime question and this is not peacetime anymore. It really isn't. It just isn't. People are dying and they need to be saved. And one thing I've learned about people in the health care field, like my colleagues here is they don't, they don't think the same way a lot of everyday people do. Everyday people of course have to think about all day, you know, their immediate family and protecting their health and wellbeing. And certainly, we want every health care worker protected. But I have to tell you, there's a selflessness, there's a heroism to health care workers, to first responders. They - we don't want them taking any chance they should not take, but I need you to understand what I hear all the time is that they understand - they don't like it, who would like that there's dangers lurking. But they're doing it because it's what they believe is the right thing to do. So, we will be honest with people about what we have and what we don't have. When you say will we have to be rationing? Yeah, we're already rationing for God's sakes. I've been very honest that we don't have enough ventilators for next week. We have most of the PPEs we need for next week. We're still trying to round out that supply and make sure we will have absolutely everything we need for next week. As you add more and more health care workers, you'll need more and more protective equipment. Look, I want to believe Yoav that time is a little bit on our side in the sense of there's production now happening everywhere. I mean, you know, you saw those face shields being made in Brooklyn. All sorts of production is happening all over the country trying to help us in other areas. You know, we've gone all over the country, all over the world contracting to get stuff in. It is coming in. So, I think there'll be a regular resupply. Will it be perfect? I'm sure it won't be. Will we have to ration? Absolutely because we're doing it now and we're absolutely going to have to keep doing it. And I think the doctors should speak to this, but the health care professionals will make their choices. If some ever feel it's not appropriate. That's something we will respect if they come here to help us. But I think what you're going to see is the vast majority of people who signed up for that profession intended to save lives and they didn't think it was going to be easy and nor did they even think it was always going to be safe. But they did it because they're that kind of human beings. They're just that good. Dr Katz, you want to jump in?

President and CEO Mitchell Kats, Health + Hospitals: Mr. Mayor, I can assure you, Health + Hospitals is full of heroic doctors and nurses, pharmacists and other health care workers who are doing their very best. We are definitely not in a best-case scenario when it comes to protective equipment, but we have enough to keep people as safe as we possibly can.

Mayor: You want to add, doctor?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Sure. And what I'll add to what both of you have said that I agree completely with, is the fact that as the Mayor said, we're not in peacetime, we're in wartime. Which means that we have to let go of that throw away culture that we've had previously. And to really think about what we use, why we use it, and how we use it. And, the guidance that we have put in place is to preserve the life of and extend the life of PPE, always keeping in mind the safety of our frontline workers. And so, I think that's important to note here as well.

Mayor: Thank you doctor. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Joe Anuta from Politico.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Joe.

Question: I was wondering if you could give us a little more detail about what types of private businesses you think might have ventilators, PPE that potentially if they don't want to voluntarily give it up [inaudible] why people go [inaudible], sort of, how do you find these people and who are they? And do you have an estimate of how much they have?

Mayor: Joe, first of all the categories. We know a lot of the construction industry uses PPE's, especially various types of masks. Clearly a lot has changed in that industry just in the last few days. I want to emphasize, I think there's a lot of people in a lot of industries who will come forward readily, but we need them to feel urgency. We need these supplies immediately, immediately. And I think it's like everything else in human life, there'll be a whole lot of people that do the right thing, there'll be a whole lot of people who follow the directive and just want to help their fellow New Yorker. There'll be some who aren't acting quickly enough and they'll be others who, you know, try to resist that. That always happens. Some people would be more motivated by greed than they will by helping others.

So, the construction industry for sure, there's different types of manufacturing that require people to have protective masks and other gear. Obviously, there's elements of the private healthcare sector that are dormant now, either entirely dormant. For example, I think it's fair to say about something like cosmetic surgery or, you know, much more limited than it normally would be. So, we need to get all that in. And what I'm trying to say is, again, I agree with Governor Cuomo, Governor Murphy, they did the right thing. I think it should be absolutely for every industry, not just healthcare, every industry that has them now. In a wartime mentality, whatever people are doing, they should just give the supplies they have up right now so they can get to the front, they can get to those who need them. And once we have them in, I can't give you an exact estimate. I can tell you it will all help, and I think it's going to be substantial, but when [inaudible] we know the supplies are available. I'm also clear, and this gets back to the role that I've mentioned with Jimmy O'Neill, we want the supply chain to be very secure. So, if people have supplies, we want to make sure that the NYPD, FDNY, Sheriff's Office are making sure those supplies are getting where they need to go. You know, working with the state directive. And anyone who is not complying, then we'll use the power of our enforcement agencies to make sure they do, because this is about protecting human lives, I mean, this is an emergency. So, we'll have more knowledge of sort of the sheer impact soon, but I have no doubt it's going to be a very helpful amount.

Moderator: Next, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Henry, how are you doing?

Question: I'm doing well. I wanted to ask you about the status of EMS workers who are really upset that they're making salaries as low as $16 an hour. They're risking their lives in situations that you've already described as heroic. And I don't, reading their letters, or the letter their president [inaudible] the morale of this workforce is in jeopardy. I mean, he's written you a letter or has put out a statement saying that it's shameful. That their salary of $16 an hour for the work they're doing is shameful. What's your response to that?

Mayor: Henry, I appreciate the question, and we will get you offline all the facts about how are very brave, very strong and effective EMT's and paramedics are compensated, so you have all the facts in front of you. I spent time yesterday out in Queens with a group of paramedics and EMT's. I talked to them about everything they were experiencing, what they were feeling. I talked to them about, you know, how their spirits were after everything they were going through. And I'll tell you something. There was, they were absolutely resolute. They were proud of the job they were doing. They were certain that EMS and all the FDNY would handle this challenge. They knew that reinforcements had come in from around the country. They were very grateful about that, really happy about that. They knew more was coming.

There was not a hint of anything but a total devotion to the work and understanding this was a moment where their city needed them. And I believe that's the pervasive view in this incredibly noble workforce. We're going to work with that union going forward. Always, the doors always open. That's the simplest way I can say it. We're always going to have the conversation about ways we can support the workforce. But the big issues that are being raised now, those are long term issues that can't be decided in the middle of a crisis. We're happy to talk about them when the crisis is over. But anything we can do right now, I support the workforce, that I can do, I'm looking to, and obviously making sure this was something that Deanne Criswell worked very hard on getting those ambulances here from around the country. And I have 500 more EMT'S and paramedics is a big deal. That's a big, big addition to the team, and that's a lot of her handiwork with FEMA. And we thank FEMA. That's real direct support and we're doing a number of other things with Health and Hospitals to take a lot of those 9-1-1 calls away in the sense of peeling off the calls that really are people looking for medical advice. People are scared, people looking for guidance who really don't need an EMT or paramedic to show up and every time we can lighten the load of our EMTS and paramedics we're answering that point of how we can support them. So, we're going to keep doing that, my door will always be open to talk about what we can do for them now and then when the crisis is over, we can talk about the future.

Moderator: Next we have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, quick question about the volunteers. Is the City able to use any of the 85,000 people who've already signed up to help the medical professionals, are they insufficient or unqualified? Is there any reason you're calling for an additional 45,000 volunteers?

Mayor: Jeff, right now, we've had lots of people sign up. But still as you saw from the numbers I outlined earlier, still relatively few have turned into actual placements in our hospitals where the need is greatest. Look, you're going to have people sign up who really, really want to help. But some of them because of their professional experience or background or maybe their own health reality, some of them will not be the kind of folks who could put in an ICU for example, or an emergency department. But we're going to need them in different ways and I'm going to welcome everyone that we have an immediate role for. So, we're going to keep working that list for sure like any other lists of people who come forward, some will work, some won't, but you know, that's going to be a big part of the equation. But we know right now with the numbers we're talking about and the speed that we have to achieve this, and this is unprecedented, I think, I think we've all acclimated to crisis, but we're still not really, really seeing what's happening, which is why I keep trying to say it's wartime, you know, to talk about we are trying to add on top of the 20,000 hospital beds that were the normal reality in New York City for decades. We're now saying we're going to put 65,000 more on top of that in the month of April. That is a staggering endeavor, and then they all have to be staffed and it has to be consistent throughout April and May. And in the meantime, we're losing a lot of healthcare workers to the disease for a period of time and some of them have worked their selves to the bone and they need a break.
So the numbers represent an incredibly dynamic situation we need those people, we need them exactly when we need them, we need exactly the capacity and experience. And that's part of why I've had the conversations with the White House and with the military about the power of bringing in the military medical professionals, first of all. A lot of whom literally have battlefield experience and we need them, I really value the comfort, I value Javits center, I value all of these pieces. But what I have asked for directly to the President, to the Defense Secretary, to the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff is people go right into the ICU and emergency departments starting with our public hospitals. That request, I put out the 1,000 nurses, 150 doctors, 300 respiratory therapists is all for our Health and Hospitals, those 11 hospitals. So we need that, but I don't believe we'll be able to make all the pieces come together as quickly as they need to and sustain ourselves through the thick of this crisis without that deeper national structure for bringing in civilian medical personnel as well, the only way we can guarantee it with this magnitude and knowing that people will be going down the whole way there. You're going to see people come in, they'll get sick, they'll be on the bench for a period of time— before we get them back. We need a much bigger apparatus that could possibly be generated just locally, that's where I think— the military needs to work and the White House needs to create a civilian medical enlistment system immediately. Jeff, I just put an op-ed in your publication, just came out in the last hour, stating the case for something we've never had before in this nation. But if we do that, then I could see us getting these numbers to actually align in real time and again, when our crisis is over, then moving those folks on to where they're needed most.

Moderator: Next we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to get an update on Rikers Island and specifically reports that there have been five corrections officers who have died from COVID-19 and many more who are out sick. Do you have those numbers? And can you confirm that? And then also when we talk about the face covering guidance that you showed yesterday, is that also going to apply to inmates and staff there?

Mayor: So, Brigid, on the first part— I've talked about the other day we were mourning the first correction officer to pass away. In addition to the investigator passed away, there's IT person for correction department. I don't have the latest update and— I care about every single one of our colleagues in public service we've lost, but I don't have the latest update. We'll get that to you right after. We have to do everything we can to keep everyone safe in our correction system, and— the thing we believed was the right thing to do. In addition to correctional health, which is run by Health + Hospitals and a very, very strong capacity, we had to reduce the population in our jail system. We had to get out inmates that were in immediate danger because of their own health conditions. We have to get out inmates with low-level offenses there was no reason to keep them there in this crisis. We worked with the States, we worked with the DAs, right now, Bridget we're over a thousand inmates who have been released there are more coming. We'll get an update to you when we have that, but that means that— the jail system now is well below 4,500 inmates and if I'm doing my math right and I think that's right now and that will keep declining at least meaningfully. And that is one of the best things we can do to just create more space, more ability to distance, more ability to isolate when needed fewer cases, fewer people obviously for correctional health to deal with. That's the strategy that we're using, obviously that'll help keep the personnel, the officers and other personnel safe as well. So that's what we've been doing and we're going to continue that.

Moderator: Next we have Anna from the Daily News.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hi, Anna.

Question: Hi, I'm wondering if you guys have any update on any delays in issuing death certificates, either for people who have COVID and have died or for just run of the mill deaths that the city sees all the time? And as a quick follow up, have you guys hired any additional drivers to carry the bodies or transport bodies of those who have died?

Mayor: Anna, you know, I've said previous questions about some of this reality, I'll give you broad stroke answers; that's just something I'm going to be very adamant about. I won't get into a lot of detail in these press conferences on that topic, I don't think it's helpful to the people in the city, but we will have the team - our City Hall team - get you detailed answers. The big strokes here, I can't answer the death certificate issue, I don't have those details. I can tell you we will hire whatever personnel we need to address this very painful reality. I can tell you that I've had extensive discussions with FEMA and the Department of Defense and to the credit of both of them they have sent in all the personnel and, and equipment that we asked for to help deal with this challenge; it's over a hundred federal personnel, including military personnel who've come in with the equipment needed to help deal with this crisis on the mortuary side. You know, we will have the ability to, to handle this, but to the question of the certificates and the timing, we'll get back to you on that. I'll take the occasion, Anna, to just clear the air on something that was raised a couple of days back when we were over at the tennis center - you know, which is being converted obviously to a non-traditional hospital - and someone raised a story, I believe from the Intercept and I said at the time, the story really seemed entirely inaccurate to me and I want to report the story is entirely inaccurate. So, going forward we're, we're going to figure out how to deal with this painful reality of those we've lost. What will happen in the future will be all based on treating each individual as an individual. We believe we'll be able to come up with a system to accommodate families over time. We will not be using any inmates from our corrections system in any way to address burial needs and so again, I'll, I'll leave it at that and say there is a plan in place, there is lot of support from the federal government, we'll find our way through and our team will get you any other answers.

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, can I add to the burial death and the [inaudible] and the death certificates? We have reorganized our workforce to ensure that we have Health Department staff readily available to work with funeral directors to make sure that we can proceed with, they can proceed with the disposition in a timely manner. So, we've got staff at our offices at 125 Worth Street that are working with funeral directors on an ongoing basis to make sure that we get through those in a timely way.

Mayor: Thank you, doctor.

Moderator: We'll take two more today. Next up is Sydney from the Staten Island Advance

Question: Hey there, Mr. Mayor. So, I have a question more for Dr. Barbot, I talked to a number of people who have tested positive for the Coronavirus and they're recovering at home, but they feel like after they're sent home, they're not really given any guidance on what to do next. No calls from the Health Department checking-in on them, not a lot of information on how long they're contagious for, no efforts to re-test people to know whether they're still contagious and I feel like this lack of guidance is contributing to the virus spreading in the community. So first I wanted to know what your response is Dr. Barbot and second is the City doing any contact tracing when somebody tests positive for COVID-19 or working with the state or the federal government on developing a COVID tracing app like that countries like Germany or [inaudible] are on board with?

Mayor: And doctor, you'll go through those answers and then I have another update I want to give Sydney after that. You go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly, so in terms of the first part of the question, we have lots of patient information on our website that encourage any New Yorker who has questions about their COVID-19 status, but the, the bottom line is that we have shared with New Yorkers that when we have widespread community transmission, we want people to stay home for at least seven days since the onset of their symptoms or three days after their fever has gone away, whichever is longer. And then after that period of time they are free to go about their normal routine and before we had directions on sheltering at home that would mean going about their, their normal lives. So, there is no special directions that are needed after someone recuperates from COVID-19. And it's an opportunity to remind folks that 80 percent of the individuals who do contract COVID-19 will have a mild course and they will be able to self-treat at home with rest fluids and medications if they do develop a fever. With the other question, which I have also not been able to keep in my brain.

Mayor: It's okay. We're all allowed at this point. Let's get as Sydney up for that question again. But just to say before Dr. Barbot, could you explain – you mentioned the point about people who can self-report their information, might be good to just explain that a little more.

Commissioner Barbot: Right. And so – that's right, the contact tracing. So, at this point in the outbreak when we have every day in the high hundreds of the low thousands of people developing positive tests and when we have probably that many more, if not more people who don't get tests, we are not doing contact tracing. It is not a good use of our resources. And yes, other countries are based on where they are in what we call the epidemic curve, meaning they're early on enough in their epidemic curve, there are places that are still doing contact tracing as a way to do what we call containment. And if you'll recall early on in the outbreak, we were working on containment. That was the whole investigation that was happening with the Rochester outbreak, that was what we were doing in the early part of this outbreak.

Mayor: Westchester, think you said Rochester.

Commissioner Barbot: Rochester – sorry, Westchester. Thank you. But again, at this point we are not in the containment phase of controlling the outbreak. We are in what's called the mitigation phase. And in the mitigation phase, when there is no proven treatments, when there is no vaccination, the most effective way to slow the spread of an outbreak is through social distancing. So, that's where we are right now in telling New Yorkers to stay home. If they have to go outside for essential services, that we want them to be wearing a face covering. So, we are past the point of contact tracing.

Mayor: You want it to – just the portal also, is that – people want to self-report information –

Commissioner Barbot: Yes. If they want to self-report information, they can go through nyc.gov/coronavirus.

Mayor: Excellent. Thank you. Sydney, also following up on a previous question. So, the expansion of health care capacity of beds for Staten Island, just give you a quick summary. At the two hospitals, like every one of the 56 hospitals around the city that are participating in the front line of the COVID-19 response, every single one of them is required by the State, and we agree with this 100 percent, to maximize capacity – that basically means a 50 percent increase in beds through a variety of means. Mitch Katz early on in this crisis talked about turning a cafeteria into an ICU or putting a tent in the parking lot or whatever it takes. You know, taking – getting beds online that had been understaffed and out of commission. So, both the hospitals have to increase their capacity and constantly increased the number of beds that are being classified as ICU so they can serve the most urgent COVID-19 cases.

That's part one. Part two – and obviously, as we've talked about, we are going to constantly be resupplying both of them. Part two, the State has two locations they're working on to create additional nontraditional hospital capacity. And part three, I mentioned that the City was focusing on hotels. We have a hotel, we'll get you the details once it's public – hotel on Staten Island that we will be leasing first to provide space for health care workers who need a place to be away from their family so they can keep doing their job. But as the needs on Staten Island grow, if it needed to be converted into something where we're providing direct health care and turning into a de facto hospital, we can do that. And again, we will keep expanding into hotels and into other public spaces in every borough, including Staten Island to match whatever the need is. As it grows, we're going to keep adding. And I want to say something about hotels and public spaces. Hotels can be converted very rapidly because it's a kind of a battlefield conversion. There's not a lot of additional work done to turn a hotel into a non-traditional hospital that can serve people convalescing from COVID-19, for example. You'll need the staffing, you need some equipment, but you actually don't need as much as you might think. And there are other buildings that can also be converted rapidly. So, we're going to keep expanding constantly to meet need and the idea here is to just not stop it until we are certain that we have enough beds for everyone.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Seth from City Journal.

Question: Looking at the data from your Health Department on new hospitalizations, it appears that the numbers have stabilized and are dropping. At peak – and this is due to the lockdown, I think – at a peak, they were 820 hospitalizations in one day. Now, your projection that will need an additional 85,000 beds –

Mayor: Total. Total. I'm sorry, Seth. Total – 85,000. 20,000 we started with, plus 65,000.

Question: Okay, another 65,000 beds. We would still really need to be past peak hospitalizations for two months with no one recovering or dying. So, it seems like your projections aren't really matching the current data. And I was wondering if I could get some clarity on that. I don't – the number of new hospitalizations appears to have peaked and is going down. It would have to be accelerating for us to need so many tens of thousands of new beds.

Mayor: Well, let me contest that. I'm going to start as layman, and then we'll go to Mitch, and then if Oxiris wants to add. So, first of all, I'm going to say, these two are much more scientific in their training than I am, but I think they'll agree with this opening statement – it is too early to make any – I'm not trying to say – I think your question is a great question, I'm not trying to say this about your question, I'm trying to say this about anybody observing, particularly in public life – it's not time to pronounce the direction that this is going in, because it's still early. And we are preparing absolutely for worst-case scenarios. So, Seth, if it turned out, you know, a month from now, your question was, wow, you know, it turned out to be a lot better than you projected, and you had too much ready to handle the problem, I would be very, very happy with that question. But we have to plan for worst-case scenarios. We've seen this – this is a ferocious disease, and the number of cases, the way they've grown, the number of hospitalizations and ICU admissions, you know, we, again, we are projecting that at some point next week we could be as high as 5,000 people intubated simultaneously in New York City. You know, that's an astounding figure. So, I don't see it as we have any evidence yet that things are turning in our favor. The other thing I would say is, whenever you reach the peak, and certainly from our conversations I've had, at least, with a national health care leaders, that they think we're still a ways from it and that's just the infection piece – there's still a lag time in terms of how that turns into hospitalizations and particularly in the ICU. I think there's a lot tougher times ahead, as I've been saying, but, also, remember, you're talking about people who may need to be in the hospital for weeks, folks who are on those ventilators many times – that's three weeks. And Mitch and Oxiris will go into more detail. And you've got to think about the bed through the lens of a human being and what they go through, and a human being who's in that bed for, you know, a month or more, or someone who's convalescing for a period of time. All of that takes the bed and the staff, the equipment, everything. And there's another person coming in and another and another and another. So, I would argue when you look at the whole equation, we're going to need a whole lot and it's going to sustain for certainly weeks on end. You want to add, Mitch?

President Katz: I think the Mayor has characterized it correctly. The huge [inaudible] still continues to be intensive care unit. So, a good example, Elmhurst, right at the forefront of this pandemic in New York City, had an ICU of 29 beds under normal circumstances. This past Monday, they were up to 110. Today, on Friday, they're up to 150. So, these are all patients who are extremely ill. At least 85 percent of them are on ventilators. And the level of intensity of staff needed to care for somebody who's on a ventilator, often they are on also multiple medications by vein at the same time in order to maintain the blood pressure, requires an extreme amount of staffing. I think some of the overall census increases as you were asking – I checked myself in Health + Hospitals for the last three days, we're higher each day than the day before. But I do agree that the real boluses are around the ICU more than on the regular medicine patients.

Commissioner Barbot: And then I'll just add that in terms of looking at the broad trends that we're looking at data from emergency departments as well as data related to admissions. The overall trend is that this is not slowing down. And the Mayor's absolutely right in terms of the bolus to the system. The other thing that I will say is that, it's normal when you look at the upward trend to see a sawtooth pattern into that. And so, I wouldn't make too much of a curve going down one day because we're on a trajectory for it to continue upwards.

Mayor: And obviously, look, everyone, that the day that we can say – and this is a conversation all of us have quite frequently – the day that we are convinced the worst is behind us and things aren't going to truly consistently get better, we will be right here at City Hall telling you that for sure. But until that time, we don't want false hope we don't want people, you know, relaxing prematurely or losing focus. This is, we're going into the thick of battle and I think it's absolutely crucial that people that. I've had this conversation with a lot of New Yorkers and a lot of people who are really deeply, deeply involved in the life of this city. And what I've heard consistently, and I had this conversation with one of the greatest of all New Yorkers, Cardinal Dolan, and he said, you know, tell it like it is, New Yorkers appreciate that. They want to hear the truth. They want to hear what we're about to go through, even if it's going to be tough. People would much rather hear exactly what we know and then be ready for battle than have it sugarcoated. But we know New Yorkers can get through anything, and people are really shown tremendous solidarity and strength. And we also know that this is a battle that will not go on forever. It will go on intensely for weeks, as I've said, April and May, and then we'll start to get some relief, and then one day life is going to get back to normal. It is a battle that will end at one point and then we'll all recover together. But in the meantime, we'll tell you every day what we know to keep all of our fellow New Yorkers informed.

Thank you. Everybody.

2020-04-05 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Today is Sunday, April 5th. And this is a day that we have talked about now over the last week or more as a crucial day as we prepare for an even tougher battle next week against this virus. This is a day that I called upon our nation to help us, coming forward to this day, I said to the President of United States and all the leadership in Washington that they needed to focus on Sunday, April 5th, to help us prepare for the onslaught next week, obviously to the State of New York, to so many organizations and companies around the country, around the world that came forward wanting to help. This is the day we focused everyone on and I think that was the right thing to do because the facts demanded it and I think it was also the right thing to do because it helped to focus attention and action. There is nothing more powerful than giving people a deadline in life.

And this was an honest deadline given everything that we have seen. The deadline referred to the whole range of needs that we had. Ventilators. We've all come to know how crucial those are to saving lives. Personal protective equipment, personnel – all the pieces of the equation necessary to be able to address this crisis. So, what I can tell you now that we've gotten to this crucial moment is there is definitely some good news. Our call for help, our call for people to focus on the needs in New York City, we're the epicenter of this crisis, but people in this city are doing everything possible to fight this virus, to do the right thing in terms of shelter in place and social distancing. The people of this city are doing the right thing, helping their fellow New Yorkers – our first responders, our health care workers are acting heroically in this crisis. I called for everyone else to come to our aid. And the good news is that our call was heard and acted on in so many ways, but that does not mean we're out of the woods for next week. There is still real help we will need to get through the week. And I'm going to go over that with you now.

So, first, let's go over how we got to this moment and what we saw coming. I gave people the honest truth about what we were seeing all through last week and this week as we led up to Sunday, April 5th, to today. And a quick summation is that we thought as early as tonight there was the possibility of running out of crucial equipment like ventilators – and ventilators, I keep saying, when you need one, when the doctor needs one for a patient, there's no time to wait. It is needed that exact moment to save a life. That's why we've been so precise about exactly what day, what hour we will get to that point where the city might run out. Well, now I can tell you, and this is certainly good news, we have bought a few more days here. We believe now we can get to Tuesday or Wednesday with the supplies we have.

We're going to update the numbers constantly and update the projections. But in human terms, this is very important. It means that the ventilators that we've gotten are going to stretch farther than we originally projected. And I want to be very clear. I want everyone to understand this. My order to my entire team, to all my commissioners, everyone who's doing this crucial work dealing with this crisis, my order is always to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Not the best-case scenario, not what you think might be an average scenario, but to get ready for the worst case because God forbid, the worst case happens, we can't say at that point, 'oh gee, we underestimated'. We have to be ready for everything and anything. New Yorkers think that way. We're ready for anything and everything in our daily lives. That's part of what makes us great. But I've said to all my colleagues, we're preparing for whatever is thrown at us. So, it's good in one way that the original projection was cautious and that we have a few more days, but I want to be clear, it only means a few more days. Nothing more I can guarantee beyond that. And we have real work to do to fill that gap going forward.

On personnel, I've been saying, increasingly sounding the alarm that we're going to need more and more personnel to deal with the growing number of cases and also the growing number of hospital – alternative hospital facilities that are being created, more and more beds being created. That's a good thing. We have a very, very ambitious plan to create more beds, but we're going to need the medical personnel to go with it. The overall goal is 45,000 additional doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, dieticians, pharmacists, you name it. This week we need to keep adding to our total. The good news is that we are seeing a real important surge of military medical personnel. This is something I've been calling for over these last two weeks vehemently and pointing out that this is necessary to help save the people in New York City and it will be necessary beyond in all the cities and states that will experience this crisis up ahead. We are now starting to see as of today a real sharp increase in the number of military medical personnel coming to New York City. That's a very good thing.

And then on PPEs, we all know how important it is to protect our heroes. That's everything from N95 to masks, to surgical gowns, gloves, eyewear, a whole host of things. The good news is there are several categories where we do have enough PPEs to get through the weekend. I want to emphasize when I say enough, that means on the crisis standards we're working with. I want to be very clear to all the health care professionals out there, all the first responders, I'm not saying this is the ideal we wish we were dealing with. I'm not saying we had the kind of supplies we're used to when we're in peace time, but by the crisis standards set by the CDC, we have enough of most items to get through this week ahead for our health care workers, for our first responders. There are two areas where we need additional delivery during the week, that's N95s and surgical gowns. We do have orders in. We're reasonably confident about the timeline of that resupply. But we do need it to happen on a timely basis. Let me go over some overall numbers with you now and I'll start with ventilators.

So, what's happened so far, in addition to the ventilators that hospitals had, we have delivered 2,865 ventilators to hospitals throughout New York City in addition to 1,780 BiPAP machines. And these are machines that can be very helpful. As I discussed with the CEO of our public hospitals, Dr. Mitch Katz, they are a part of the puzzle. They don't do the same thing that ventilators do. But they can be helpful in dealing with some patients in some ways and relieve some of the pressure on the overall situation in terms of ventilators. That said, we still need the number of ventilators we need in any event. So, having distributed those 2,865 ventilators, having now stated that we can get through to Tuesday or Wednesday, what's left? We have 135 ventilators in our reserve. We are holding those for very rapid deployment to where they're needed most around the city. And that obviously can happen in a matter of hours, but that's the entire reserve we have left for all of this city of 8.6 million people.

I want to tell you why these ventilators, the supply of ventilators is so crucial in particular at this moment because what we're seeing lately is between 200 and 300 more patients needing to be intubated every day lately, just specifically patients related to COVID. We believe at this point, as of this morning, that the approximate real number of patients, COVID patients who are intubated in New York City, we believe that number is actually approaching 4,000. When you add up all the information we have and information that's coming in – and everyone understands this is a rapidly changing situation – we think that number is about 4,000. The math is clear between today, tomorrow, Tuesday we could add almost 1,000 more in that timeframe. That's why we believe we will hit that 5,000 mark in truth on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Again, I would love it if it proves that our projections were too cautious. That would be a very good thing, but we are bracing for the reality that that's the number we could hit. It's a staggering number. And remember for so many of those patients, we've got to fight hard to save their lives. Our health care professionals are doing an amazing job, but it's a tough struggle and a lot of those patients will be hospitalized for many weeks. They could be intubated for two, three weeks easily. Once someone needs a ventilator, they need it for as long as they need it. And that's another part of this equation we have to keep in mind.

So, to get through next week, based on these updated projections, we believe we will need between 1,000 and 1,500 more ventilators for the period roughly Wednesday to Sunday. Again, those dynamics will change daily, hourly even. So, we will keep updating the assessment. But that's the plan that we have going into this week to find 1,000 and 1,500 more throughout the course of this coming week to make sure that there's always a ventilator for every patient who needs it. Now, as you see on this chart, this is the whole health care system in New York City. And this composites what we're seeing against – across, I should say, a variety of health care providers. This includes our public hospitals. It includes the major – five major hospital systems that are part of the Greater New York Hospital Association, it includes the smaller independent hospitals. When you look at the whole system, some specific hospitals and systems running out quicker than others, we're working to make sure that everyone who needs resupply gets it promptly. But what's true in every single case is that every hospital system in a matter of only days faces the danger that they will run out. That's what we have to stay ahead of.

So, where would we get additional ventilators? Well, there's two obvious places right now. The federal stockpile, which our understanding is numbers of about 10,000 ventilators, and the New York State stockpile, we've heard that number is roughly 2,800. Obviously, we are the epicenter of this crisis. So, I would certainly appeal to both the federal and State government to help us get the ventilators we need rapidly. We will get them in place and remember, everyone, we need them in place before that new patient comes in, who a doctor has no choice but to put on a ventilator. That ventilator has to be there, has to be up and ready in time for that one next patient. So, it's not a matter of them just arriving in the warehouse. They have to be in the hospitals and ready. We're going to ask, certainly, our federal and State colleagues to advance more of a supply to us so we can be ready for this onslaught next week.

I've said it many, many times. When New York City is done with these ventilators, when the crisis starts to pass, we will happily send them wherever they're needed in this state or in this country. And we will work hard to help everyone who needs our help and to thank all the people who have come forward to help us by actually giving them the aid and support they need in their hour of need. But those are the two obvious places to get what we need for next week. We're continuing to look on the private market. We're continuing to hear from some people who are making very generous offers of contributions of ventilators, we're talking to companies all over the world. I, myself, have talked to companies all over the world to try and get us additional ventilators on the open market, but right now for the immediate needs next week is the federal government and the State government that we'll focus on and certainly we'll be talking to all of the appropriate federal and State officials to get this going quickly.

Now I want to talk about our public hospital system and specifically the personnel that I've been requesting for it. Everyone knows there are so many hospitals out there that are fighting so hard, the health care workers fighting so heroically. But everyone would agree that amongst the toughest battles have been fought in our public hospitals, our Health + Hospitals system. So many people in this city but also literally around the world have watched with admiration the really noble health care professionals at Elmhurst Hospital, which has borne the brunt more than any other hospital in the city. We've seen an extraordinary surge in the number of patients at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, at Bellevue in Manhattan, and many, many others in our public health system. So, I have been, for the last two weeks, fighting to get direct federal support for our public hospitals.

We have the biggest public hospital system in the country and we are the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis and our public hospitals are bearing the brunt. You've seen the information recently put out by the Department of Health. That makes very clear that so many of the challenges that we're seeing from the coronavirus track very, very sadly with where we've seen historic health disparities, where we've seen historic problems with communities whose health profile really suggest really, really tough situations, even in peacetime. In this crisis that's only amplified the reality. Where are there the hospitals that deal with those communities and deepest need? Well, those are our public hospitals, so they're at the frontline of this crisis. Absolutely the front of the front line. I appealed to the President of the United States, to FEMA, to the Defense Department for very precise support. I asked for 1,450 medical personnel from the United States military, specifically 1,000 nurses, 300 respiratory therapists, 150 doctors.

I've repeated that request publicly in writing, in numerous conversations with the president and many others in Washington. What we have as of today, literally just coming in now at this hour of the day, for the first time, a response. I asked that those personnel be in place by today, Sunday, April 5th. At least today we are seeing a down payment. That's the way I would phrase it – 291 medical personnel from our military dedicated specifically to our public hospital system arriving now in New York City. That's 174 nurses, 104 doctors, 13 respiratory therapists. That's a very good start. We have bought ourselves a few more days, so we have a little more time and that's great. But I want to say to everyone in Washington, that's a start. It's nowhere near what I requested for our public hospitals. I know other medical personnel coming from the military to do other important work in New York City. And I say amen. Thank you. That's tremendously helpful for all our people. We need that too.

But part of why I've called for the military to be fully mobilized and for national enlistment and system for our health care professionals is our needs are growing in this city and they'll be growing everywhere else. So, this is great news, but it doesn't end here. I'm going to go back to the president, to FEMA, to the Department of Defense, and let them know we need a lot more help for our public hospitals as they continue to bear the brunt.

Finally, I want to say there's some, as per usual, we've seen New Yorkers step up in amazing, amazing fashion. But it's also great to see the stories of those who step up for us. And it – this one warmed my heart because our friends in the State of Oregon, they are starting to see a crisis there, although much more limited, thank God than what we're seeing here. I spoke to Governor Kate Brown yesterday. Everyone knows that she did something just extraordinary, an act of kindness and generosity, that really should make all Americans feel very good about this country. But all New Yorkers should feel a great sense of gratitude and appreciation to the people of Oregon and particularly to Governor Kate Brown for, literally, spontaneously stepping up and offering 140 ventilators for the people of this state. That's a selfless, powerful act. I talked to her yesterday and said, we're going to remember what Oregon did for New York State and New York City and we're going to return the favor and then some, because this is going to be crucial in our hour of need. So, it's something people should really feel good about. People are seeing what we're going through and they're really trying to help. And I want to say to anyone who wants to help, whether you're a New Yorker or you're from any other part of the country or any other part of the world – please, we need your help. We need supplies. We need medical personnel to come forward to volunteer. We will compensate them, but we need them to come forward and give us their time and energy where it's needed most. We need so much help to get through this crisis. Anyone who wants to donate can go to nyc.gov/helpnow or call 833-NYC-0040.

Also, another really wonderful story – and again, amidst the pain and the challenges, there are some beautiful stories. Two hospitals, two of the most renowned hospitals, not just in New York City, but anywhere on the earth, they have stepped up to help our public hospital system. Sloan Kettering, Memorial Sloan Kettering, known as one of the greatest hospitals on Earth dealing with cancer patients and supporting them and saving them, and a hospital for special surgery, which is unparalleled anywhere in the world for what they do. They have agreed to take non-COVID patients in their specialty areas from our Health + Hospitals institutions to relieve pressure on them so our Health + Hospitals hospitals can focus on COVID patients, particularly those who need ICU care. This is a kind of act of partnership, collegiality of kindness that's a game changer. It's going to save lives because it's going to allow Health + Hospitals to focus on those in greatest need while these other patients will get great care in the meantime. So, it's another example of hospitals – some New Yorkers have been to these hospitals and, you know, and including in their hours of greatest need. A lot of New Yorkers have only heard the names and know they're extraordinary institutions, but wouldn't have necessarily assumed they would form this partnership with our public hospitals. And they have, and it's incredibly powerful. I want to thank both those hospitals for really, really stepping up in a crisis.

Just a few more things I want to talk about. Some more unsung heroes. I like to always remind us of the people who are doing amazing things for us. And in this case, it's our social service workers. Don't forget what they do in this crisis to ensure that the families that don't have food get food, that families that are in crisis get support because their crisis doesn't pause for the coronavirus. It continues and they still need help. Children who are in danger get support. The folks who are homeless get help, you name it. Our social service workers have been extraordinary in this crisis, stepping up in so many ways. They deserve our admiration and our gratitude. And, of course, I, every single time will talk about our doctors, our nurses, our health care workers, our first responders.

This last week, or in the course of this week, I should say, I've spoken to literally tens of thousands of health care workers on tele-town halls organized by the unions representing our health care workers. I expressed my appreciation on behalf of all New Yorkers and talked about the ways we're going to give every conceivable type of support to our frontline health care workers, what we're doing but what we have to do even more in the weeks ahead. I want to just recognize a really beautiful moment this last Friday night where a group of firefighters went to an NYU Langone Hospital in Kips Bay and they went there specifically to cheer on the doctors and the nurses and all the hospital staff. And that's a really, really beautiful thing. Our firefighters are so admired. And to see the first responders show up, not because there was an emergency, but because they wanted to pour out their hearts to our health care workers to thank them, that is a really beautiful New York City moment. So, I want everyone to recognize that.

Let me just say a few words in Spanish, just a quick summary and then we will take questions from the media. I'm joined by Dr. Barbot here in person and we have by video Chancellor Carranza and our Emergency Management Commissioner Deanne Criswell. But first in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we're going to take media questions and please let me know the name of the reporter and the outlet. Thank you.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder, as the Mayor just said, we have Dr. Barbot here in person, Commissioner Criswell and Chancellor Carranza on the phone. With that, I will start with Samantha from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, there are some reports that you took a walk again in Prospect Park yesterday, but not seen wearing a face mask. Are you going to be wearing a face mask? And also, why so far to take a walk when you're – Gracie Mansion is right in a beautiful park?

Mayor: Yeah. Samantha, look, I think we have many, many things to talk about today that are about saving lives. I think what – everyone who needs some exercise should get the exercise for the amount of time they need and then get back to home or work if they're doing essential work. That's what I do. And I was using a scarf as a face mask and following the exact instruction – face covering, careful that I use the right phrase, face covering. Thank you, Doctor. I could see you were thinking it. Face covering, a scarf that I had on – and exactly the rules if you're distant from everyone, there's no one near you. there's not a specific need. If you think you're going to be near people, you bring it up and cover your face. That's what I did. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. Governor Cuomo this morning said there's reason to think the State might be approaching its peak or peak that's plateauing. Wanted to get your assessment of that both at the state level, and if you think at the city level, the city is nearing a peak.

Mayor: Shant, although I want to say that – I'm going to be really careful because the last thing I want to do is say, you know, we're turning the corner and then we get surprised. I see some positive indicators. Clearly the fact that we thought we could run out of ventilators as early as tonight or tomorrow morning and now we believe we're going to get to Tuesday or Wednesday. That's a good sign. And the number of people being intubated each day additionally is high, for sure. It's nothing to treat as a minor matter when you have 200 or 300 more people per day getting intubated. But it's actually less than we feared it might be in terms of the increase each day at this point. So, my simple answer to you is I see a few signs that are a little hopeful, for sure. And as soon as we get to a point where we think they are consistent enough, if they remain consistent, Shant, if we really see the kind of progress that Dr. Barbot and Dr. Fakelakis and Dr. Katz and Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze and others, like, can have a consensus that, hey, this is sustained progress, we will say that for sure, but I think it's early to be able to declare that. Let's hope and pray, but we're not quite there yet. Doctor, did I summarize well?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Absolutely.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Todd from AM New York.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, my question is about the release of prisoners from Rikers Island. Some the probation union members say they don't have enough people or resources or PPE to work with, with the release. Some law enforcement sources are saying many of the people being released have drug problems and are returning to crowded homes, and some have no housing whatsoever. What follow up is the City doing with the people who are being released from Rikers?

Mayor: Todd, thank you for the question. It's a good question. From the beginning, look, we saw as this crisis emerged a very particular challenge, thousands of individuals incarcerated, obviously, by definition in limited space. And there's been concern not only in New York City but all over the world about incarcerated people in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. So, what we did was we looked at a couple of things who had minor charges that they were in our jail system for, who had very little time left on their sentence, who had health conditions, preexisting conditions that put them in particular jeopardy according to Correctional health, who, because of age, you know, very advanced age might be in jeopardy or both. So those were the criteria we worked with as did the State of New York and the District Attorneys. The release was engineered to ensure that anyone who needed a supervised release, which across the board there was some kind of supervision structure for everyone, but those who needed particular intensive supervision that that was created.

So, right now, over a thousand individuals have come out of our jail system. That obviously means for correctional health, they're dealing with fewer inmates. That's good. There's more opportunity to socially distance. There's more opportunity to treat people and isolate those who need isolating. Those are good things. The specific individuals who need follow-up are getting follow-up. And remember the way the release worked for those awaiting trial, when the crisis is over if the DAs deem inappropriate, there's a process to bring people back to jail awaiting trial. And equally if someone needs to continue further, a sentence. So, this was calibrated to be a humanitarian action and I think has been done in a careful way. And again, we have gotten to a number based on a careful process as has the State and the DAs. On the concerns of the probation union, I'll check on that. I don't know the exact amount of how much of the follow-up is being done by their members versus other elements of law enforcement, but we can give you a more detailed follow up on that soon.

Moderator: Next, we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask a question about the data the City is releasing related to people who are diagnosed with coronavirus and the deaths. We know that there are inequities built into our health care system, other cities that are releasing more information specifically around the racial breakdown of some of the diagnoses and the deaths. Why isn't the City releasing that information?

Mayor: I'll start and Dr. Barbot can add. You know, Brigid, look, I said at the beginning and I stand by it. In the first days we had, first of all, a central concern to set up all the systems to protect people's health and save lives and get supplies where they were needed. I mean this thing went from zero to 60, very, very fast. Getting out the public data was not the first concern compared to, you know, rapidly mobilizing and ensuring that those who need health care were getting it. Second, when we started to put out data, we were concerned to make sure it was accurate and not a constantly moving target. I think you guys would have every right in the media if you got a piece of information that was invalid a few hours later to say, wait a minute, why have you given us this information? So, we were trying to figure out how to give you information that would be more consistent and that sort of was keeping up with the numbers more effectively. I think that situation has improved. That's why the Department of Health has started to put out more and more. We want to go from here and go farther now – put out more fine-tuned data, more per capita data, sort of showing the real specific impact on all communities, certainly demographic breakdowns to the extent we can. I've certainly – I've had this conversation with Dr. Barbot and her team. I think we're going to be able to do more and more with every passing week. But what we do know from what was put out just recently is and we had a long discussion about this with our whole team, a striking overlap of where this virus is doing the most damage and where we've had historic health care disparities – a very, very strong overlap. And again, that overlaps also with where our public hospitals are in particular. So, we will keep getting out more and better data as we go along, but I think some of the conclusions are already becoming clear.

Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Barbot: So, yes, Mr. Mayor, to add to what you said, which I completely agree with – you know, I couldn't agree more that it is important to also report on the racial demographics of the individuals that we're seeing who are diagnosed with COVID, who get hospitalized, et cetera. But the reality of the matter is that our ability to report accurate and consistent data is only as good as the data that we get in. And so there have been significant challenges in consistently getting that complete data from laboratories and from our health care delivery partners. But what we're doing is we're working with those partners to try and to tap into other electronic sources so that we can augment the data that we get. So, we are working on that. We've been working on that and I am hopeful that we will get to a place where we can consistently and completely report on the racial demographics, because again, we're very much committed to the transparency of our response and we are very concerned as the Mayor mentioned about the inequities that are getting magnified with the severity of COVID-19 and we want to make sure to address that in its totality.

Mayor: Yeah. Just to finish on that, again I think no one should underestimate what it means to be the epicenter of this American crisis. Being the epicenter meant for us, extraordinary, extraordinary, huge number of cases out of nowhere. And again, that's – other cities are doing other things, but by and large, you know, not dealing with the whole onslaught we are, but we are absolutely devoted to getting better information out.

The other follow-up just on Todd's previous question because I realized Todd also asked about masks. Todd, any probation workers, any of our workers who need to do work that involves any kind of personal protective equipment – we're devoted to getting it to them. We're finally starting to get a better supply, as I mentioned just days ago, we were not sure about the PPE supply for this coming week. And again, I'm saying that based on the crisis standard, not the ideal standard, but the crisis standard of what people need to be able to keep functioning in their jobs. We are encouraged, I'm encouraged to see the supply start to increase, start to improve. We're getting some new types of PPEs in that previously were not approved by the FDA, now have been approved. So, there's a lot going on that's given me hope that we're going to be able increase that supply. But definitely if our colleagues at Probation need them my team will be following up to make sure we can get them to the appropriate types of PPEs. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. We reported on the Bronx having a higher rate of hospitalizations and deaths for coronavirus relative to its population than the rest of this city. Some of the elected officials we spoke to said there's no testing site in the South Bronx where a lot of these more serious cases are suspected to be. You know, like a public or a big testing site there that would allow people to know to self-isolate and also to communicate to others, you know, that they've tested positive. Why isn't there a large testing site in the South Bronx, and has the Department of Health taken a look at the Bronx statistics and come up with an explanation for the discrepancy?

Mayor: So, I'm going to start and then pass to Dr. Barbot who importantly grew up in the Bronx and is very attuned to the needs of people in the Bronx. I think we're in a moment where the testing dynamics are starting to change, but we're certainly not all the way there. I mean, Yoav, I think if we could replay this entire horrible history we've gone through, we would say what differentiates us from some of the places that actually were able to really get ahead of this is that there was not testing available when it was needed early on, when it could have been strategically crucial. And that's obviously at the feet of our federal government that as we know now had a lot of information about the danger of this crisis and the ability to mobilize and get the testing out and they didn't do it. So that's where we could have had the strategic opportunity to potentially change the trajectory. Once it was already a full-blown crisis with a community spread and all, we got very clear about the need to focus the testing on health care workers, first responders and people with the most severe medical problems to help save their lives. We're starting to see signs of greater testing supply coming into play, but I don't, that changes the core reality that as there's more testing, we still have to first and foremost make sure that we're maximizing the impact on health care workers, first responders and those in greatest need. And remember the numbers are continually climbing in terms of cases, in terms of number of people in the ICU. So, we can't act for a moment like any one piece of this equation is static. The crisis keeps growing. Even as we're getting more testing supply, we kept to keep applying it to the highest priorities. If one day it was truly, truly abundant, I think we could have a different conversation, but I don't think it changes the guidance and I suspect you're going to hear this from Dr. Barbot. If someone's not feeling well, we want them to isolate and go home and they don't need a test to follow through on that. And that's still the thing we have to get really, really across to people. That's the most valuable thing, it's responding to what their body is telling them.

Doctor?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, Mr. Mayor. So to add to what you correctly laid out, I think there are a number of different issues happening here and really we can't overemphasize the fact that we've been telling New Yorkers that if they have developed the symptoms of fever or cough, any other sort of feelings of malaise, if you will, that they should assume at this point in time that they have been exposed to COVID-19 and that they have COVID-19. And what we want them to do is to remain home, if their symptoms are not getting better, to then reach out to their health care provider. And so again, as the Mayor mentioned, whether or not a test is done doesn't change that guidance. The important thing is for self-isolation and to seek care if they are not getting better. I think specifically in the Bronx, what we're seeing is the reality of unfortunately what happens when we have a high density of individuals with lots of chronic underlying illnesses. And you know, we know from historical data that there are high percentages of individuals in the Bronx with heart disease, with diabetes and the like. And so unfortunately when you have a virus that tends to affect those with chronic illnesses more severely, we have what's playing out.

That being said, we are working very closely with our health systems partners in the Bronx including H + H, including Montefiore, to make sure that those who are in need of care certainly have access to it in a timely manner. I think the important thing for us to be mindful of is again, for folks to be staying home and especially those who have chronic underlying illness, not to go out if they don't have to have someone else can buy their groceries, get their medications for them. And if they do have to go out to ensure that they are wearing a face covering when they're unable to keep six feet from their fellow New Yorkers.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Hey, Gersh, how are you doing?

Question: You know, the playgrounds are closed and parks like Prospect Park as you know, are overflowing as the weather gets better. Now, you've experimented with four short car car-free streets, but they expire today from what I remember. You've said you're limited because of the need for police enforcement, but Streetsblog's own review plus conversations with residents in those neighborhoods show that this experiment is actually working and could be done with far fewer cops. So will you expand this popular street safety strategy as you've been urged by people such as Dan Rather, and New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg?

Mayor: Yeah. Gersh look, we're very interested in seeing what can be done with that strategy. What I think you would agree, we ran into an unusual situation that just as we started it, we had day after day of bad weather and folks just didn't show up. So, I'm certain they want to see us continue to experiment with it going forward, but we have to figure out the right way to do that. It does take a lot of personnel. Like I keep saying, you know, you've got to be clear that when you do this, you have to create enforcement or it could end up being another place, unfortunately where people gather. So, we're going to look at that again. But right now, my concern is this, the first and foremost concern is that we focus the NYPD and other enforcement on ensuring there is social distancing in all the places that people have to go. They have to go grocery stores and supermarkets, pharmacies, the places that we know are really essential. Our parks are a place where people are going, they're getting their exercise, but they're also does need to be enforcement. Generally, what I hear from Commissioner Shea and other key leaders of administration is they've seen a lot of compliance, but there's still areas where we need to do better and we're going to continue to deepen the enforcement. So, looking at those streets, that's still an open question because we didn't get a great control model, but we did end up using up a lot of NYPD personnel that we don't have to spare right now. So happy to look at it again. But I think we first have to focus on job one, which is making sure all the places we know people are definitely going have the enforcement they need.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, everybody. This question is for Chancellor Carranza and it's about the DOE's decision late Friday to prohibit the use of Zoom and Google's video conferencing. Spoken to a lot of teachers, parents this weekend who are really disappointed and I'm curious from them and then from myself, you know, why hadn't the DOE looked at some of these privacy concerns before setting up this program? And are there concerns that particularly students with special needs who got related services and rely heavily on Zoom for them, that they won't get these services – I mean some people are upset that Microsoft Teams is very confusing and they don't even know if they can download them. So, if you could speak a little bit about the DOE's process. Thank you.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yeah. So, look, we are very concerned about all students getting the support they need. Does anybody really think that we want students' personal information out there for anybody to see? For anybody to access? That's absolutely unacceptable. So, we put out guidance and it doesn't go into the effect – it doesn't go into effect tomorrow. We want people to gradually transition to another format. Zoom – and we've been working with Zoom – is unwilling and unable to meet the security needs of our students. We will not put our students' information out in cyberspace for anybody to access – that is unacceptable. So, the notion that we would let that happen is just not – it's not reality. Now, that being said, we want students and all of our families to get the support that they need, so we're going to transition. It's not going to happen tomorrow. It's a transition to another format. The good thing is we have teachers that have bachelor's and master's and doctorate degrees that can figure this out. But we're going to make sure that our students' information is not out there for everybody to access. So, work with us. We're going to do this, you know, in a very, very thoughtful manner. But that being said, we also want to be very clear that we're going to keep our students' information safe and secure, and when this was brought to our attention, like it's been brought to everybody's attention across the country – I'm in conversation with colleagues across the country that [inaudible] school system. This is not an issue in New York City. This is an issue across the country. We are going to make sure that our students' information in safe during this time period and going on. So, it's not going into effect tomorrow. We're going to have a time to transition. Listen to our guidance. We're going to help you make the transition, but we don't want students to go without the services that they need.

Mayor: Thank you, Chancellor.

Moderator: Next we have Harry from the Daily Beast.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Understanding the stress on saving lives, what is the City's plan [inaudible] for burying bodies as needed? Is there land identified? Are there City workers who be digging those graves? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Harry. Look, I know the questions I asked in goodwill. It's a painful topic, it's one I've said repeatedly I won't go into great detail on. The bottom line is there is a plan. One of the key elements was to get support from the federal government, from FEMA, from the Department of Defense, from all of the parts of the federal government that had expertise in this area. They are providing all the support we're asking for. Yes, we will have available places to deal with this. I'm not going to go into detail now. I'll just say to you, we do have the capacity. We sure as hell hope we don't go anywhere near as our worst-case scenarios. Think of all the human beings, think of all the families that that would mean have lost someone. But we will be ready in any eventuality and we're getting exceptional federal support.

Question: Last two for today. Next, we have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about how you came up with the calculations for the number of ventilators you need. Is there, you know, are you guys like crunching actual numbers? Is this projections? Maybe you can go into a little more detail. And then in addition, I'm wondering about whether you have any concern about being seen wearing a mask at all? Or, a face covering?

Mayor: On the second point, Jeff, again, my doctor is sitting right there and I asked because this decision came out of several studies, most especially the one from Singapore a few days ago, which, any of you, if you haven't seen it, should look at it, that led our health team to decide that they had evidence that should change the guidance we provided. Obviously, shortly thereafter, a day or two later, the CDC did the same thing. So, I think this is smart guidance, but it's something we all needed to get used to. And I, like every other New Yorker, had an opportunity – every New Yorker is asking, what does it mean? And I had the opportunity to ask the City's doctor directly. And I said, what does that mean for anyone, you know, going outside? And what she said was, you know, you use it when you're near people. If you might get less than six feet from people, that's where it matters, because you're trying to protect everyone else. Again, I think it's understandable folks hear it and they think, oh this is something that will protect me from COVID-19. That's not the way it works. It is an abundance of caution guidance based on new evidence, really new evidence that led to the conclusion that it's a smart effort to prevent the spread in the community. It is not the only strategy. No one is saying it's perfect. It's a thing we can do that's helpful, but it only is pertinent when you're near other people. It's not pertinent if you're with the people you live under the same roof with, because you're in so much contact with them anyway. It's not pertinent if you're out there alone on a street, for example, because there's no one else to experience you, you know, within six feet. It just doesn't matter. So, what I've done the few times I'm out is, I take a scarf and I have it ready, and if I'm getting near people, if I think I might get a as close as six feet or less, I bring the scarf up over my mouth and nose as I was trained to do. And I think a lot of people will do that. You'll have it available. You don't have to wear it every minute if there's no one near you, but you bring it up if you need it. So, I'm going to answer the second part of your question. But doctor, for the record, did I summarize your instruction properly?

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely correct, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. I've passed the test today. Thank you, doctor. So, on the very good question about the ventilators. So, Jeff, we're been scrubbing this equation for weeks and weeks and it's constantly getting updated. So, it is based on specific reports from each and every hospital against a base of 56 hospitals in the city that treat adults. That population of hospitals, consistently surveyed to determine the number of ventilators they have working ventilators that they have – crucial point. And we separate in that number ventilators, we do not count the ventilators that are being devoted to other types of non-COVID patients. So, I want to remind people, there are – you know, we only heard about the coronavirus just a few months ago. Before that, there were obviously lots of people who needed a ventilator because of their own health conditions. They still do. So, a certain number of ventilators already were devoted to non-COVID patients. They must continue to be a devoted to non-COVID patients. So, we continually, literally daily, weekly are looking at the numbers and how they're moving, taking every hospital's report on what they got that's working and, obviously, how many people are intubated, how many people need a ventilator and projecting, of course, how long people will be on ventilators, because we have a lot of information on what those patterns have been. That's how we got to a sense of what we were dealing with. And then, of course, the other factor was what was the growth pattern, the number of cases, and what it meant for more and more people needing ventilators. So, what I mentioned earlier that we are lately in the last days seeing an increase each day of about 200 to 300 patients per day more going on to ventilators. Now, we had feared that that number was going to go up, that that 200 to 300 could be more like 300 to 400 growth per day. We're not seeing that yet. I'm knocking on wood. I'm praying that we have a level off here. But we don't know that yet, it was just too early to tell. For the last days, that 200 or 300-person increase is holding. We believe based on all the information we've gotten from all the hospitals that when you really get to what's happening, real world conditions and look at the trends and everything, we believe we're somewhere in truth around 4,000 people intubated right now. And again, with that 200 or 300 person per day growth, that will get us to Tuesday or Wednesday when we'll cross that 5,000-person mark. And then, as I said, we're assuming the same kind of growth pattern that would require us to come up with another 1,000 to 1,500 in the course of the week ahead to make sure we got to Sunday, April 12th with everyone having a ventilator who needed one. Jeff, I hope and pray that in the next couple of days as I'm reporting that that number not only stays stable but actually might decrease. But until it happens, I can't bank on it. As I said, I've told my team work from a worst-case scenario because we cannot ever have a moment where a patient needs a ventilator and there is not one available. So, that's how the numbers were put together.

Moderator: Last for today, we have Aaron from the Post.

Mayor: Aaron? Aaron's not there. Do you have another? Aaron, can you hear us okay? Okay, do you have another lined up?

Moderator: I think that's all for today.

Mayor: Okay. That's all for today. Well, everyone, thank you, and we will continue to give you updates. And, everyone, keep fighting.

Thanks so much.

2020-04-06 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. So, 11 days ago – it seems like a long, long time ago, but 11 days ago we were here at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and we were here looking for solutions in the midst of this ever-changing, ever-growing crisis. But we are also here looking for hope, looking for answers, and the answers came from everyday New Yorkers who were stepping up, who are doing something amazing to create the products that will protect our frontline health care workers and our first responders. So, what we saw a few days ago with the face shields was moving. I was totally, totally moved to see these everyday people of all backgrounds, all together, creating something from scratch. Companies working together that never had previously built anything like a face shield, and they create it by hand, and that was part of the power of what we saw was everyday people piecing together these PPEs by hand to protect their fellow New Yorkers who are serving all of us.

Well, we're back 11 days later and what we're seeing today is equally inspiring. Two companies that got together here in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to create, again, a product they never created because our frontline workers needed it. And it is inspiring to see how quickly people figured out a way to do something that was needed and not just do it in a small way, but do it in a very big way. And to pull together the talent, the designs to pull together all the equipment they needed, all the fabric. I was just hearing how much it took to improvise this and create this as very, very moving. And it shows how much heart, how much soul people are putting into protecting our health care workers in our first responders. So, as I was touring and seeing what was happening, I felt this real surge of emotion that it was clearer than ever that New York City is fighting back. New York City is fighting back. We have an invisible enemy. We have a ferocious enemy, but this city is fighting back with everything we've got. And this is strong city and a resilient city and people are showing it in so many ways and we're seeing it today at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

It makes me very, very convinced that we're going to get through this when I see these kinds of amazing efforts. Now in the midst of a moment where we have to tell people constantly, it’s a strange thing to tell New Yorkers, we are a warm and emotional people. It's strange to have to tell people all the time, stay apart and break with all the traditions that we have had for our whole lives. But we keep telling people stay apart for your own protection, for the protection of the community, for the protection of those you love. But today we have an example of people coming together, coming together in common cause, doing it the right way, doing it the smart way, the healthy way, but coming together in common cause to help other people. And I really want to thank these two amazing companies and they're very, very different. Lafayette 148 is a high-end fashion brand and Crye Precision is a company that particularly focuses on making gear for the U.S. military. Two companies that started out with very different approaches, very different mission statements. They may not have seen that a lot in common, but they immediately found common ground and decided that together they could create something that would really help everyone else.

This creativity and this ingenuity are New York traits. Not surprising to us, as New Yorkers, to see this kind of thing happen, but it's very moving. It's very beautiful to see it go through all those rows upon rows of sewing machines and seeing the surgical grounds being sewn that very soon we'll be protecting our frontline health care workers. Want to thank of course, all the good people, all those on those sewing machines, on those assembly lines, all the working people who are making this possible. And extraordinary thanks to the leaders who had this vision and pulled it together in record time, to Gregg Thompson, Executive Director at Cry Precision, to Deirdre Quinn, the CEO at Lafayette 148, you'll hear from both of them. I want thank someone who's really been the matchmaker here, David Ehrenberg, the President CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, who keeps looking for ways to get all the amazing capacity of the Navy Yard to put it together to support this cause, and I want to thank you David. Excellent job.

Now, I want to say a number of companies here in Brooklyn Navy Yard are working with Crye Precision and Lafayette 148 to help them do their work. They're all joining in. Anyone who can pitch in is pitching in. So, there's a real community here that's working together to get this done. I also want to thank our colleagues at EDC, which plays a crucial role in all of these efforts to produce our own homegrown supplies to fight this war. Thank you to James Katz, Executive Vice President Chief of Staff at EDC. And, of course, we have with us here today as well. Two of the leaders in the fight from the health care side, our Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot and the Vice President Chief Quality Officer at Health + Hospitals, Dr. Eric Wei, thank you to you and your teams always.

I mentioned the folks who are doing the work and I want to say something that needs to be said in this moment. There's been in the midst of this crisis, another crisis that we've all seen and we've all been disgusted by it, which is discrimination and hatred directed at our Asian-American communities, particularly our Chinese-American community. I think it's absolutely unacceptable and I know legally it is unacceptable by the laws in New York City and I keep saying to everyone, if you see a act of discrimination, if you see a hate crime, you see anything that is about bias, call 3-1-1 immediately or if it's an urgent situation, call 9-1-1. We want to find the perpetrators of these crimes. We want to find anyone who's discriminated and throw the full weight of the law at them. But today was a poignant message in the midst of this crisis, in the midst of this discrimination, to see so many of these workers who happen to be Chinese-American who are doing something for everyone, who despite the discrimination they have faced, they're standing up and they're joining this effort to save lives and support those who are protecting us. I want to thank all of these good working people for what they are doing.

So, like I said, when I was here last, this is a wartime factory. If you look at it, it immediately is clear. This is something that was put together from scratch with a sense of urgency created for a common cause, not for a profit but for something higher. Nine days ago. It was just nine days ago that this started to come together. By the end of the day, 9,200 surgical gowns will have been created. By the end of the week, almost 19,000. By the end of the month 320,000, amazing contribution to this effort and it protects our health care workers. These gowns and Dr. Wei can explain to you in detail, they are absolutely crucial to protection of our health care workers and these are reusable, which is crucially important and a point where we're on a crisis footing and we have to conserve every item we have.

Now it comes at a critical time, this new supply, because as I said to you yesterday, this is one of the areas where we're seeing a real problem, surgical gowns. Our public hospital has enough for this week, but some of the private hospitals and nursing homes are running low and this is an area we're very, very concerned about. Last week, all hospitals combined used approximately 1.8 million surgical gowns in New York City. This week they are projected to use 2.5 million as the crisis grows. So, we have to find more surgical gowns urgently. There are orders out, we believe that there's a good chance these orders will come in time, but we're also working intensely with the federal government to see if we can get additional supply in time. So, this is an area of real concern as we start this week.

And again, we will leave no stone unturned. We'll be as creative as we need to be to create new surgical gowns or use anything else that may be appropriate as a surgical gown to get us through this crisis. Now the other thing I talked about yesterday is the N95 masks. This is the other area of real concern for this week. We got – at the time I spoke to you all yesterday afternoon, there was still an outstanding need for N95s to get us through the week. Very appreciative that we got a major supply from the federal government. My thanks to President Trump and to Jared Kushner for the role that he played as well. 600,000 N95 masks coming today for our independent hospitals. Those are some of our hospitals that have the greatest need and serve communities in greatest need. That's on top of the 200,000 arrived for our public hospitals on Friday. So now we can say that our supply of N95s for the week is sufficiently secure. Again, it's going to be a tough week. People are going to have to be careful and conserve on the crisis standards we're working on, but this has definitely changed the dynamic for us for this week and that's a very good thing. So, we continue to focus this week on finding more surgical gowns and of course on ventilators to get us through.

Now, more and more the challenge is going to be personnel and we need these supplies, but we also need to heroes to wear them and more and more personnel than we needed from every source. Remember, our overall need is 45,000 – from where we started, the additional need is 45,000 clinical personnel over this month, an ever-increasing number to get us through this crisis. I've been pushing particularly for more and more military medical personnel to come in. My requests for our public hospitals again is 1,450 clinical staff from what's – that's what I've requested from the federal government, 291 arrived yesterday – that's a good start, but we need more. I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff yesterday. I will be speaking to more federal officials and the President today to let them know how much our public hospitals have really borne the brunt of this crisis. We'll need more of those medical personnel from the military. Those I greeted yesterday upon arrival. It was very inspiring that came from states from all over the country. They were ready to immediately go to where the need was greatest in our ICUs, in emergency rooms, in our public hospitals. I'm so grateful to all of them. It was very, very moving to greet them as they arrived in New York City.

Again, this is just the beginning for this city and for many cities and states all over the country. I'll continue to say we need to have an enlistment structure to find medical personnel from all over the country, civilians who would come forward as volunteers, be compensated for sure, and then be mobilized by our military and sent where they're needed most. I remind you again, over a million doctors in America, almost 4 million nurses in America – thank God we have many, many medical personnel, many ready to serve where the need is greatest but no mechanism right now to get them where they need to be. And I will keep pushing the federal government to achieve that.

So, I want to finish before a few words in Spanish and then we'll hear from our colleagues here at the Brooklyn Navy Yard who've done this amazing work. But I want to finish with a point about the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Those of you who have looked at the history – so this place is heroic by its nature. In World War II, it was one of the single most important places in the United States of America fighting the war effort. This was a place that so many of our troops left on their way to battle. This is a place where so many of the ships were built and repaired. This was a crucial, crucial place in the war effort. And it comes with an incredible tradition of service in a time of crisis. And you know, when the Navy Yard became a civilian facility and became a place synonymous with jobs and economic development. People might've thought, well, it's years of service are over. But now we're seeing once again, the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a symbol to this city and this whole nation of extraordinary and selfless service leading the fight against the coronavirus. So history has come around in a very, very powerful way. And I remind everyone, a lot of us heard stories maybe from parents, maybe from grandparents of the epic times of the past, World War II, the Great Depression, what people had to fight through as a full community. Now it is our time. We are living that reality now. It's our generation that has to make that imprint on history and fight that fight now. I don't think when we heard a lot of those stories, we ever thought it would be us one day, but now it is us and it's time for all of us to show what we can do in this moment of crisis and that's what folks are doing here at the Navy Yard.

Everybody out there who can help, try to emulate the amazing work of the folks here at the Navy Yard. Not everyone happens to have a clothing line of their own or a company that makes military gear, but if you have a company that can help us, we need you. If you have access to surgical supplies, we need you. If you're a health care professional who can volunteer, we need you. Anything you can donate that will help us to continue this fight. We need you. If you want to donate food to our frontline hospital workers. If you want to donate money to pay for the kind of support they need, whatever it is we need you and anyone who wants to help can go to nyc.gov/helpnow or call 8-3-3-NYC-0-0-4-0.

A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

So now I want to bring up Gregg Thompson. And Gregg has done so much, his company has done so much for our heroes in the United States military protecting them – now taking that same expertise to protect our doctors and nurses and frontline health care workers. Great pleasure to introduce the cofounder, Executive Director of Crye Precision Gregg Thompson.

Executive Director Gregg Thompson, Crye Precision: For sure. Great. It feels good. Yeah. Yeah. I'm starting to recognize people by their eyes alone and looking around, it's nice to see. Sorry, I have to read off paper.

Thank you, Mayor de Blasio. And again, thank you to the DOH, Department of Health, and EDC, and of course thank you to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation who has provided us with a fantastic home for the past 18 years. They are a top-notch team both in difficult times like these in what we remember as our normal lives as well. It's been an inspiration to work with our partners here in the Navy Yard, including Lafayette 148 and about 10 other companies who've all banded together to help make this happen. Some of them are sitting right in front of me now and [inaudible] New York and Cambridge.

Again, this effort started only a few days ago. But in that time, we've been lucky enough to witness such tremendous support and generosity, not only from the domestic supply chain, such as MMI Textiles and Tweed, but from resources right here within the city itself, including Brookwood and VAR Test Labs. Again, it's really simple. We at Crye Precision are incredibly fortunate. Every day we get to create and manufacture products for our heroes in the law enforcement and military communities, people who have made a far bigger sacrifice than we could ever imagine. This is no different. So with that, I'd like to thank all of the brave men and women who are winning the fight and our hospitals and medical facilities. It is an absolute honor for all of us to work for you. It is an absolute honor to continue to get to work with my amazing team here at Crye Precision and it is absolute honor to work with everybody here in the Navy Yard. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. You go that way, I’ll go this way. There we go. Okay. Thank you so much Gregg. And now I want you to hear from Deirdre Quinn, who is a leader in the business community in a bigger way. She was the recipient of the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award a few years ago and someone who brings a lot of vision to what she does and when we needed help, when our health workers needed help, she was quick to act. So, a great pleasure to introduce the CEO and Owner of Lafayette 148. Deirdre Quinn. I think I'm going to give you a little extra height.

Deirdre Quinn, Co-Founder and CEO of Lafayette 148: Good morning and thank you. It's an absolute honor to be here and it's an honor to make a difference in New York City. Our company moved to the Navy Yard two years ago and I would say by far the best move we ever made. Not only is it great to be in Brooklyn, it's great to be part of this incredible community. So, when David called me and asked me what we could do to get patterns quickly, we made them over the weekend, digitized them, and got them to Gregg who took the ball and ran with it. I am on the board of the Brooklyn Hospital Center and so I've got to see firsthand the tragedy that's going on over there. And we will do anything and everything to make a difference for New Yorkers, for this city, and for the good of what the gowns can do for people. So, it's not exactly fashion, but it's definitely needed. And it's what we want to do. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much. Okay. With that, we will now turn to questions from our colleagues in the media. Yes.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Just – yeah, there you go.

Question: [Inaudible] social distancing. I'm sure you saw the stories yesterday about [inaudible]. Are there any plans to change of that [inaudible]?

Mayor: You know, we're going to be a – I've spoken to leaders of the community previously and we're going to do that again. We're going to be very clear with people we just cannot tolerate, at this moment in history, any gatherings and unfortunately, we have no choice and the NYPD has no choice but to immediately break them up. They're dangerous even though I know people are trying to, you know, deal with a very painful moment. I understand that it's not easy for people to give up traditions, especially when they're in mourning, but it's just too dangerous. So, we'll go back, tell community leaders we need them to step up as they have so far. And the NYPD will be very aggressive and anytime we get an indication – I need people to understand this, you're doing a service to other people. If you know something like this is going to happen, please call 3-1-1 and report it so we can stop it before it happens. And I'm going to ask that of the community leaders as well, if they know that there's some group individuals who are not following this guidance, we need to know in advance and the NYPD will absolutely intervene to stop it. Yeah.

Question: [Inaudible] treatment [inaudible] going on right now in the [inaudible] tests or not [inaudible] –

Mayor: We'll get Dr. Wei to come over and address those.

Vice President and Chief Quality Officer Eric Wei, Health + Hospitals: Thank you for that question. So, our thoughts and prayers are still with all the patients who are fighting for their lives in ICU. So, that's why we show up every day to reduce the number of lives lost. And more good news of people getting excavated, going home, kind of like the good news and what gives us hope from touring this factory today and seeing what New Yorkers and Americans can do to help our frontline heroes. In terms of treatments we are still learning every day about this virus, this terrible disease. We have multiple types of treatments, studies underway to see what's working best. Many of our patients are receiving hydroxychloroquine, or Plaquenil, as part of those treatment regimens. But these are all done with appropriate kind of IRB approval and – it's an institutional review board – so we're making sure that we're following science, right.

Question: [Inaudible]

Dr. Wei: I think it's still too early to tell. I think we are still looking at the data but right now we're willing to try just about anything to save patients

Mayor: Testing center [inaudible] –

Dr. Wei: Testing centers on weekends – I am not sure about the hours on the weekends, but I can get back to you on that. We are shifting from broadly testing in New York City to making more testing available to our employees, our heroes who are in the hospitals fighting COVID-19. Testing is, you know, ongoing 24/7 in our emergency departments. We are following Dr. Barbot and DOHMH’s advice of testing those who are being admitted to the hospital. And so that goes 24/7.

Question: What do you have to say to parents, teachers who have expressed unhappiness that Zoom is no longer being used?

Mayor: Thank you for the question. And, again, I was a public school parent for the whole time that my kids went to school and I want to amplify what Chancellor Carranza said yesterday that there's been an effort by the Department of Education to work with that company to ensure the privacy of our students, to make sure their information could not be accessed wrongly. And the Chancellor and the team at the Department of Education did not believe the company has cooperated. And we're not going to put our students' privacy, our students' data at risk. It's just as simple as that. So, we'd all like to use that capacity, but only if we can do it in a secure way.

Question: [Inaudible] –

Mayor: I think – Doctor, can she take it off for the question? The doctor has allowed it. The truck came at just the wrong time. Hold on a second. Maybe we can move that truck just a little, give you some better ability to be heard. Go ahead, Erin.

Question: [Inaudible] this morning that you’re going to be ending the open streets pilot. Can you speak a little bit about the rationale for that and in particular is there anything else you’re considering [inaudible] sidewalks [inaudible] stay far enough away?

Mayor: Yeah. Again, I consistently talk with Commissioner Shea and other commissioners who are looking at social distancing and compliance. Consistent reports we're getting is that we see a very good consistent effort from New Yorkers. There's obviously some areas we're concerned about, but the overall reality is that people are observing this. But we do need to keep the enforcement efforts strong. The problem with the additional street closures is you have to attach enforcement to them. If don't attach enforcement to them, we're very concerned they become new gathering points and we do not want to seem to be solving one problem by creating a new one. So, right now, keeping the NYPD and other enforcement entities focused where they are, is what we believe is the best strategy. Remember, they do have fewer personnel themselves than usual. And that's why we're sticking with what we got. We'll certainly assess as we go along.

Question: Just to follow-up on the enforcement piece, is there a protocol in place to make sure the officers are able to maintain a distance when they’re [inaudible] how does that work especially considering the high rates of NYPD officers [inaudible]?

Mayor: Right, the – first of all we've made sure that whenever, and I've had this conversation with Commissioner Shea multiple times and we've all been united – our Health Commissioner, Dr. Barbot – we've all been united that when the NYPD needs PPEs, they get them. It's a priority in our supply. Second, everyone is learning a new way of being. So, the Commissioner has told me there's been multiple rounds of training officers how to approach each situation, what protection they need. It's not surprising that people are still getting used to it. It's a big change, but that training continues and we want to make sure our officers are safe, and certainly the standard for going and telling people that they're not in compliance and what – we don't want to have to give a fine. We've been very clear. I've been clear. The Commissioner has been clear. We want to tell people they're doing something out of compliance to stop it. We want to warn them they're about to get a fine. There's been very few situations, Erin, where officers have had to intervene more than a warning. There's only been a small number of situations even where there’s been a fine – a couple of examples have come up where there was a more aggressive intervention needed, but it's been very rare. Let’s see if there’s anything else.

Question: [Inaudible] City Hall committed to covering the costs for providers and foster care, front line workers [inaudible] and how exactly is that going to work [inaudible] –

Mayor: I don’t know – when you say that phrase, and I know she's not here, so I'm having trouble interpreting it, the enhanced pay point. Let us get you an answer on that. Whatever commitments we've made, we'll keep, but I'm not familiar with what the phrase means in this case. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: No. I spoke to Commissioner Shea this morning, we went over the situation with absentees, but we also went over the return rate, which has gotten very strong. I'm going to say it again. Remember, the vast majority of patrol officers in the NYPD are younger and very healthy people. So, the extent they've been exposed to the virus, they're coming back rapidly, they’re coming back after, you know, somewhere between a week and two weeks. He's seeing a steady flow of officers returning. And what we hope and pray is that once you get this – we don't want anyone to have it – but once you get it, you're done and you can continue your life and be immune. So, no, we can handle the situation with the very deep bench that the NYPD has now. There's no consideration of bringing in outside forces.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: It’s going to be a very tough situation. We are going to on April 23rd, I believe it is, unveil the executive budget. It's going to be a very sober day. But I'm not going to foreshadow.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Right now, again, we, the enforcement efforts by law enforcement are working. As you know, as Commissioner Shea has reported, we've seen a decrease in crime, thank God, and we've seen a high level of compliance with shelter in place and social distancing. There's literally no better expert at data that I've met in my entire life than Dermot Shea, and I have asked him every single day for the last few weeks, what are you seeing on compliance? And with all the capacity at NYPD, also layered over with everything we're seeing from 3-1-1, Parks Department, everybody, we do not see a major compliance problem. We see some hotspots that we deal with. We see some places where we need to do extra warnings and enforcement. But, overall, I think right now our – what we're seeing is, our law enforcement is doing a great job with their current structure, with their current personnel. We're getting the results we need. We have more work to do, but we're getting the results we need.

Yes?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: It's going to be a large number of hotels. So, first of all, Van Cortlandt Park, yeah, that's another example of a field hospital that’s being set up by FEMA. You're going to see a constant growth. So, it will be, again, hotels on the one hand – what I would call big public spaces on the other hand. Sometimes it’ll be a field tent kind of thing in a park. More typically, it will be a big open public building. We use the example, the Billie Jean King Tennis Center that I was at a few days ago. We're looking for any large spaces that we can put a lot of beds in simultaneously. But the hotels – so, the City now has at least one hotel up and running for medical use. We have a number of hotels up and running for, if you will, dormitory use for health care workers, especially those who do not want to go home to their families because they want to be careful for their families. We've got a lot of hotels up and running for people who need isolation. We're just going to keep growing that. It's going to be – when all is said and done, I think we're going to be in, you know, a hundred-plus hotels, in most cases, taking the whole hotel on a lease. But as they start to become medical facilities, we'll give you updates. It's still going to be a few days before you see it in a large scale, in the hotels, the medical use, but it's coming very soon.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: What about?

Question: [Inaudible

Mayor: As I said, I'm never going to go into a lot of detail. We have the capacity. It's going to be very tough, but we have the capacity. The military, the federal Department of Health and Human Services have sent us a lot of personnel, a lot of equipment. And we will keep dealing with this very, very tough situation. And I just don't want to go into detail because I don't think it's a great thing to be talked about publicly, but we have the capacity we need.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Again, I'm not going to go into those kinds of details. I'm only going to say we will have the capacity we need. As I said over the weekend, we may well be dealing with temporary burials so we can then deal with each family later. But again, I'm just not going to detail. When we have something to say on it, we will.

Okay, here we go.

Question: Nonprofit workers in the [inaudible]?

Mayor: Yeah. I will get you a more specific answer from my team. We need to get that support there, obviously. And we also have a number of City employees, nonprofit employees who we've kept paying explicitly to be able to move them to wherever the need is greatest. So, if we're finding a shortage there and we have people qualified, we can surge in some additional people. But let my team look into what we have to do to sort it out. We'll get you an answer today.

Yes?

Question: Mayor, you mentioned temporary burials. What does that mean exactly? Are you talking about public cemeteries, or –

Mayor: Again, it is what it says. If we need to do temporary burials to be able to tide us over to pass the crisis and then work with each family on their appropriate arrangements, we have the ability to do that. That's all it means.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Again, I'm not going to go into detail at this point in time. We're not to the point where we're going to go into that.

Okay. Anything else? Yes.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Dr. Barbot – the nature of what happens with bodies [inaudible] –

Commissioner Barbot: Yes. So, let me start by saying that all of our efforts to-date, from social distancing to all of the educational materials we've been providing New Yorkers is to really slow the spread of the virus and to protect our health care workforce so that they can absorb the large number of people who require hospital services because of COVID-19. And it is a sad reality that we have many New Yorkers that have died because of COVID-19, and to say that our hearts and prayers go out to those families really doesn't give it the justice that it deserves, because it is a very difficult time that we're all in and it's a reminder of our collective humanity and the need that we have to come together and to be there for one another – even though we're physically distanced, to be spiritually and emotionally connected. With that being said, and I've said this before, there are no special precautions that need to be taken with individuals who have died because of COVID-19. And so, we, and the OCME office and the hospitals and the funeral homes are all working with the dignity and the respect that these families deserve during this very hard time.

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah. There are no special precautions that are needed to be taken with people who have died because of COVID-19. You know, we've made the comparison to other infectious illnesses in the past. You all may recall that with Ebola there were very sort of specific precautionary measures that needed to be taken so that the – it would not continue to be spread. This is in no way, shape or form like that. So, there are no special precautions. People who die because of COVID-19 are treated the same way as someone who dies from, let's say, a heart attack or any other reason.

Mayor: Okay, last call? Yes –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Again, let me just – obviously, the place we have used historically is Hart Island, but I am sorry and I say this respectfully – this topic is something that a lot of folks in the media want to ask me about. I'm just going to draw a line on this one. We'll put out updates when is the time. I am telling you the thing that I believe is what New Yorkers need to hear. Do we have the capacity to handle it? Yes. We've been working closely with the federal government to make sure we have the capacity. Yes, there will be delays because of the sheer intensity of this crisis. We're going to try and treat every family with dignity, respect, religious needs of those who are devout. And the focus right now is to try and get through this crisis and obviously also put all of our energy and resources into saving those we can save. So, that's how we're going to go about it. We will have the capacity for temporary burials. That's all I'm going to say.

All right. Thanks, everybody.

2020-04-07 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Everybody, all along I've said this would be a tough fight against the coronavirus and it's important we understand more and more we are fighting this war on two fronts. First, in our hospitals to save lives, but the second front now is more and more an economic one as well, where folks are struggling to make ends meet, running out of money, New Yorkers who don't have enough money to pay the rent to get the medicines they need, to get the food they need. So, we're going to talk today about our efforts to get food to New Yorkers who need it because this is a growing problem. This is a problem that's going to more and more affect the people of our city as they run out of money. And even though there is some federal help coming, it's not that much and it's going to take too long for many people. So just as we deal with the most important moment in the fight against the illness in our hospitals to save lives, there's a new front opening up and we have to be there for people who need food, cannot have any New Yorker go hungry.

Since we're talking about two fronts, I want to open on the first one and I'm going to say to all of you, it is way too early to draw any definite conclusions. I want to really make sure none of us in public life tell you we have turned a corner until we are absolutely certain. We are not there yet and I want to make sure no one stops practicing social distancing and shelter in place. We must continue those strategies if we're going to protect lives, but I can say in the last couple of days something is starting to change. We don't know if it will be sustained, but it is meaningful now. We projected to you even on Sunday that we had seen a little bit progress in terms of when we were going to need ventilators. We've seen more progress now. That means the number of people showing up in our hospitals who need a ventilator, that situation has improved a bit in recent days. I'm hopeful, but I'm not drawing conclusions until I'm 100 percent sure and my health team is 100 percent sure, but the good news is it is giving us some more time. It is giving us the opportunity to get more ventilators in and know we get farther into the week, so that's very good news. Just the fact that we know we've bought a few more days and we can absolutely protect lives because ventilators will be there. That's crucial news.

We'll have to see in the days ahead if it's something sustained and something that deepens, we will give you daily updates to tell you what's going on, but I want to at least note a little improvement last few days and thank God for that. But as I said, when it comes to the economic battle, when it comes to battling to make sure that people have the food they need, that situation is not getting better, it's getting worse, and think about why, because all of those people lost jobs. All those people still work, but not as much. All those people not getting a paycheck or getting reduced paycheck. The number is staggering. The initial projection is at least half a million New Yorkers are either already out of work or soon will be. That is the kind of level of unemployment and economic distress, the only comparison you can make for that is the Great Depression, which scares me to death to even say that and, and it's right where we are here. Here in Manhattan I am reminded of what this city went through in the Great Depression. I'm reminded of it because of the stories I heard from my family, my older relatives who went through the depression right here in this part of New York City. And the stories they told about how difficult it was, how painful it was, how disorienting it was, we have to understand that what we're going through now and what we will go through, that's the only parallel we can look at and we cannot underestimate the problem for everyday New Yorkers, especially when it comes to food. We're having a lot of people literally having to ask that question, where is my next meal coming from? More and more people are in that situation, so we have to act very aggressively to address that.

Now I want to be clear, I've given you the extent of the problem, but I want to be clear what the mission statement is. I want to be clear what our resolve is. We will not let any New Yorker go hungry. Literally, we will not let any New Yorker go hungry. We have been planning from the beginning of this crisis to address the hunger problem and because we understood that this would be a profound part of what we faced, and this is something that we had seen in other crisis as well, but this is a whole different scale, but we knew this was something we had to prepare for. I named a few weeks ago, an extraordinary public servant, Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, as our Food Czar with the responsibility to come up with a system that we've never had to have in decades in this city, but a system to feed people on a mass scale if it came to that. She has been working closely with Department of Education, Department for the Aging, and Emergency Management to immediately put into action a food plan, but also build for anything bigger we may need to do.

The Chancellor and I had opportunity, a very special opportunity to spend some time with the food service workers here at P.S. 1. They've served 3,100 meals in the past week to people who need it. They’re good people. I said in there, there are another kind of first responder they've showed up to help people in need and they've been a lifeline for people in this community. So, 3,100 meals in the past week for children and families right here in the Lower East Side. This is a part of something much bigger and I want to thank of course everyone at P.S. 1, all the teachers and staff, everyone who's been part of this effort here, the food service workers, the principal, Amy Hom, everyone who has done this work and this whole team that has come together focused on food. Chancellor Carranza again, from Department for the Aging our Commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, of course our Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, all of them, our Emergency Management Commissioner, Deanne Criswell, working under the leadership of Kathryn Garcia who's been helping to coordinate all the agencies and common cause. And as always, our elected officials are helping us spread the word, helping us find people who need help, helping us to make sure we have the resources we need. Thank you to state Senator Brian Kavanagh, who's with us now for everything he's done.

So, I want to give you a sense of the scale of this effort and this is just the beginning. In the last three weeks, the efforts of Department of Education, Department for the Aging, Emergency Management, all coordinated by Commissioner Garcia, those efforts have provided 2.6 million meals to New Yorkers who needed food. 2.6 million meals in the last three weeks and that is just the beginning. Now everybody, the site you see here, there are 434 other sites around the city just like this where anyone can come get breakfast, lunch, dinner, all three if they need it for as members of our family as they need. So, we're asking for students or students with their parents to come earlier in the day, 7:30 to 11:30, we're asking adults who are alone to come later in the day, 11:30 to 1:30, but it's the same exact standard everywhere. No one is turned away. No one has to pay anything. You get as many meals as you need. This is about making sure people have food.

Now there's a different initiative for those, for the senior citizens who need help for folks who are homebound, for folks who are vulnerable and that the only solution for them is a delivery. There's also a growing delivery system. This is something Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez has been working on from the beginning and it's building all the time. So, anybody who truly needs a home delivery can call 3-1-1 and we'll get them that delivery. Or they can go to nyc.gov/getfood to sign up. There's a lot of different things that we can get for people. We've got these grab and go sites at the schools. There are a lot of food pantries. The home delivery, we can make sure people who do not get food stamps sign up if they're eligible. Lots of different things we can do to help people. So again, anyone who needs help can go 3-1-1, you can go to nyc.gov/getfood or text the word FOOD or in Spanish they can text the word COMIDA to 8-7-7-8-7-7 to find the site nearest to them. So, if anyone needs it, you can use that text. Again, the word FOOD or the word COMIDA to 8-7-7-8-7-7 and find out a site near you where you can get the food you need for yourself and your family.

Now that's about helping all New Yorkers, anyone in need, but I also want to mention something very particular about our heroes, our health care workers who are at the front lines dealing with this crisis. It's been a very, very difficult month for them. The month of March into April has been very, very tough. These folks are working so hard, under such adverse circumstances. They often don't even have time to go outside for even a few minutes. They don't have time to go to the deli like they used to in the hospital, or the cafeteria. They need help in every way they can get it and we want food to get to them. So many people are responding in communities all over New York City and getting food to hospitals, helping our health care workers directly. But I want to mention some very special efforts, really appreciate these efforts. For example, Lavazza Coffee, that company is helping hospital staff. They're donating 60,000 bags of coffee for doctors, nurses, and hospital workers. And we all know how important it is to have coffee in the middle of this fight. So, I thank them deeply for that.

On a very big level, amazing announcement today. This is something I'm announcing as brand new: I want to thank Deborah and Leon Black, two New Yorkers who are showing extraordinary generosity. They have teamed up with the Mayor’s Fund. They have donated $10 million to help get food and crucial household supplies for the families of the health care workers. So this initiative is called Health Care Heroes and Deborah and Leon Black had put their $10 million forward. They are looking for matching donations from others who can help. If more comes in, they're ready to provide another $10 million to match up to $10 million in donations from other donors. So an incredible, incredible effort. I want to thank both of them on behalf of all 8.6 million New Yorkers. They teamed up with the Mayor’s Fund and in turn they have partnered. Everyone's partnered with the company, Aramark that does food services. They will be putting together at least 300,000 packages of food and household supplies for doctors, nurses, hospital workers of all kind to ease their burden and to help their families. The Red Cross will be doing a lot of the deliveries for the Health Care Heroes. The Robin Hood Foundation will be managing the matching funds to make sure that as other donations come in, we activate that match. This entire initiative will be beginning to deliver these crucial supplies and the food to the families of the health care workers hopefully no later than Monday, maybe even sooner.

So that's an amazing effort. We also have an effort by New York Road Runners. They're a wonderful New York organization. Last week they have 20,000 pairs of gloves to help our health care workers. Now they're donating 10,000 meals for doctors and nurses and frontline staff. So, we see so many different efforts coming together. Every day New Yorkers standing up, people doing everything they can to help our heroes.

Now, one more point I want to make before some quick summary in Spanish. I talked to you over the weekend. It was very moving to me that the Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, volunteered ventilators from Oregon to help New York. See another great act by a governor, Governor Newsom of California who has taken 500 ventilators that they were using in California, had a very tough time, we know it in many parts of that state. They're taking 500 ventilators returning them to the national stockpile so they can go to places like New York and the other places that are hard hit. So, I want to thank Governor Newsom. There is something happening all over this country where people are pouring out their hearts to New York. They're standing with us. People all over the world are standing with us and I think New Yorkers are feeling it more and more. We're in a deep, deep fight, but New Yorkers know we can win this fight. We see more and more people helping us and our own toughness as New Yorkers. Our own resiliency is coming through more and more, but look at all the ways that people are lifting each other up. It's absolutely amazing. So, we're in a fight, but we will not lose this fight. We will prevail and I have great faith that with all the help we're getting, we're going to see this through together. A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, and again, with great gratitude to everyone who's helping us in all my colleagues here for the amazing work they're doing. Want to take questions from our colleagues in the media.

Yes?

Question: So, we’ve been talking to Fire and EMS folks and they’re telling us they’re not getting dedicated [inaudible] there’s no 12-hour shifts to sort of alleviate how long they have to be working. N95 masks –

Mayor: Wait, just speak up a little more. I'm sorry.

Question: Supplies are scarce for Fire and EMS. I know we talked a lot about hospitals getting resources, but what about for EMS. What about for paramedics?

Mayor: Yeah, I spoke to Commissioner Nigro yesterday. He affirmed – every time he has said they need additional N95 masks or any PPEs, they're getting them instantly. It's a priority to support our first responders. Everyone is working on a crisis standard. I keep saying this, it is so important. There's an ideal standard we'd all like to be at. We're not there now because we're in a crisis, because of the shortages is all over the country. So the standard, the crisis standard held by the CDC is what we're matching consistently and Fire Department, EMS have those N95 masks to meet that standard. Anything more they need, they will get period. Dan Nigro calls and says, I need something more. It will be immediately provided from everything that we have. So we want to make sure that happens. Testing has been prioritized for first responders and we're continually trying to add to the amount of testing. We all know that's been an uphill battle from the beginning, but as we get more testing capacity, first responders, health care workers are a priority. So I think literally with every day particularly, we get a little bit of relief here in the progression of disease, we'll be able to get more and more supplies in and be able to help more and more people. But there's no question in the world. They are priority.

Question: Did Commissioner Nigro ask for [inaudible]?

Mayor: Commissioner said he had the N95s that he needed. I said, whenever you need a resupply, you'll get it immediately. Period.

Yes?

Question: You mentioned at the beginning seeing something start to change [inaudible] and I was hoping you could go into some more detail about that? [Inaudible]?

Mayor: I spoke to Dr. Mitch Katz and obviously Health + Hospitals has been the hardest hit. Elmhurst has rightfully been focused on as this – kind of the epicenter of the epicenter. But we know that Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, Bellevue, Queens Hospital, many others have borne the brunt. For the first time in many days we did not see a major increase in the number of ventilators needed in those hospitals yesterday. Very striking when you go back about two weeks, every day there was a substantial increase. Some days more, some days less, but every day there was a substantial increase. We needed more ventilators than the day before, every single day. For the first time yesterday, they were pretty much breaking even. That's not the end of discussion there and there's going to – again, we have to watch out. This is a disease that, you know, if you take your eye off the ball, there's nothing that stops it from reasserting. So, we have to be careful. And no one should let down their guard, no one should stop taking the precautions. But just on the sheer numbers, some improvement was evident yesterday. Again, that's buying us some time to get more ventilators in and get ahead of things. That's encouraging, but we’ve got to see it happen for a number of days before we can declare it a bigger trend.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: The number intubated, I believe he said they were around 830 across their system. So, they’re about 20 percent of the health care capacity of New York City, is Health + Hospitals in terms of hospital beds. They had about 830 people intubated, so that number was pretty stable from Sunday into Monday.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Correct.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: We are tracking the State – the State information is what we are using. And so, we agree with the State on that, but also – and I think the State's in the same place – we want to report something good just like we have had to report the tough stuff, but it's too early to call it a pattern or trend because we don't want a situation where you know you could see something change rapidly the other way and we don't want to give people the wrong sense of things. Also, really crucial, this is a testament to the fact that social distancing, shelter in place clearly is having an impact. We’ve got to keep it tight if we're going to consolidate our gains here. If people suddenly start loosening up, you're going to see those numbers shoot right back up.

Yes?

Question: We’re talking about social distancing, what is happening in laundromats, supermarkets? I see people, like, into laundry, like four people without wearing a mask. And this is getting like, people not getting the message. What do you think about this? Because I know that laundromats are essential –

Mayor: Yes.

Question: So, there isn’t a limit for the people that can be outside, but can the government do something about the implementation of more rules, because nothing is being done –

Mayor: Well, I don’t think nothing’s being done. You’ve seen some examples, I'm concerned about that, I think, in general, because, look, our enforcement agencies – NYPD, FDNY, Sheriff's Office, Buildings Department, you name it – they've been out there constantly now for weeks. Hundreds of thousands of times they've gone to businesses, they've gone up to everyday New Yorkers to do enforcement and what we're finding consistently is people do respond to the enforcement. If they're told break up, if they're told, spread out, they do it with very, very few exceptions. What we've got to keep tightening up is that if you see something, call 3-1-1 and that enforcement is supposed to come rapidly. I had this conversation with Commissioner Shea and the other commissioners – that has to be very fast. So, yes, people need the laundromats. They were kept open for a very specific reason. We want people to have clean clothes. The cleaning of clothes actually kills the coronavirus, that's a good thing. But you can't crowd into a laundromat or a supermarket or a pharmacy or anything like that. So, it means that the people who work there, I have to remind people, and if they're not getting cooperation, they need to call 3-1-1 immediately. I need you to say this, please, everyone – anyone who sees crowding or people are not socially distancing, call 3-1-1 right away and we will send enforcement agents immediately. And again, we're going to warn people, if they don't follow the warning, they can be fined now and those fines can be very substantial. But what we want to do is, if someone shows up to the laundromat, it's too crowded, hold back, you know, form a line. If you can't wait, come back another time. People should be really smart, only go to laundromat as little as you can. You know, don't go all the time. Go as infrequently as you can. The same with the grocery store, go as few times as you can, stock up, and then stay home. But that ability to send enforcement over quickly is what will make all the difference here. Who has not gone? Okay, Jeff?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: We are releasing data this week. The data in an atmosphere of crisis is less precise. This won't surprise you, Jeff. Gender is immediately available. Age is immediately available. The ethnicity data in a crisis atmosphere where health care is being provided rapidly to everyone that can be reached, that's been less of a focus to get the ethnicity data in that environment. So, we have enough data to put out, I'm not sure it is as perfect as it could be and I think it will take time to make it better, but we're going to have something out this week for sure. And what it will show, and I've already spoken to this from the maps that the Health Department’s put out – this is clearly tracking health disparities in general. I've said that before, I'm going to say it again. I cannot be more blunt. This disease is affecting people disproportionately in lower income communities, in communities that have had more health problems historically, and in communities of color. The extent of that disparity we're still trying to fully understand and the data we'll give you will help us understand, but it will not be the final word because again it is preliminary and imperfect data in the middle of a crisis. But there's no question in my mind, we've already put that out publicly, we've already said there is a disparity dynamic here. It is real, it is meaningful. Now, how do we keep addressing that? First of all, on the question of beds, there is no question, we've been tracking beds to [inaudible]. Beds have been available, are available right now. I've had this conversation with Mitch Katz literally every day with a whole team of people at OEM. We projected the worst-case scenario, we prepared for the worst-case scenario. We are not experiencing worst-case scenario right now. Thank God. There is no place in our public hospitals – and, Jeff, you would agree that public hospitals are explicitly the place where so many people experience those health disparities go for their care – that's the number-one venue. There are beds in all of our public hospitals. Some have had to transfer patients at times, at peak times from one public hospital to another, but there's always a bed. So, we know there's disparity. The whole effort to keep ahead of this with the ventilators, with the PPEs has been for everyone. But clearly, if this is tracking health care disparities, it means that all this herculean effort that all the health care workers are putting in, all the supplies around the country is explicitly to help everyone in need. And therefore, if it's in an atmosphere of disparity, thank God, all of this effort is being expended for everyone. And that's not showing disparity. Where we're not seeing disparity is the full court press to help everyone in need everywhere. The amount of help has gone to Health + Hospitals, that’s gone to Elmhurst in particular has been overwhelming – the number of health care personnel that have moved over there, been sent over there, the supplies – there's no disparity in that. The military, when I made the request of the military to send medical personnel, it was explicitly for our public hospitals, for frontline work in the ICU and emergency departments. We've gotten about 300 military medical personnel. I'm expecting more, but that's going right to where the need is greatest, so all of that speaks to the situation. The testing issue, this is the –has been the worst part of the equation from the beginning. If we had the testing, January, February is when it could have made a huge strategic difference. Once it finally started to arrive, we essentially found out that within days it was too late and we already had community spread. Testing now cannot allow us to change the basic trajectory. At some point, there may be a role strategically for testing again, but right now it does not allow us to fundamentally change the reality. It does allow us to ensure the maximum number of health care workers and first responders are available to save everyone else. It does allow us to focus on the more severe cases, which are still very numerous. It does not allow us to stop the vast majority of people out there who will get infected from getting infected – testing doesn't do that, because, obviously, if you got tested one day, it could be your negative and the next day you could be positive. Testing is not prophylactic. It's not preventative. If you had 100 percent universal testing, that would be a different matter. We're nowhere near that right now. So, I understand why people are yearning for testing and they see what feels like disparities in the provision of testing, but I want to say – and there are, clearly, but that's not the same thing whether the testing would save lives the way we need live saved. That train left the station a long time ago. But we're going to try to figure out if there's anything else that we can do and I'll have more to say on that in the course of the week. I do think there's strategies that we might be able to innovate to try and figure out where we can get particularly more education efforts and more multi-lingual education efforts to communities that need them.

Let’s see over here, if there's anyone, going back over here –

Question: Have you talked to Commissioner Shea about how the department's doing today with the number of the officers that are sick or the ones that still need testing? And do you know if there are any specific testing sites that have been opened around the city for cops, firemen, paramedics?

Mayor: I don't know. And we can get back to you today on specific locations. I do know that both police and fire, from talking about commissioners, report a substantial number of their members coming back from the disease. What we've talked about before, their frontline forces are overwhelmingly younger, healthier people, officers on patrol, firefighters, EMTs, paramedics. Any of those that are getting sick, the vast majority are coming back rapidly after a week or two each, some not. And we're very, very concerned about anybody who's suffering or anyone whose life is in danger. But the vast majority are coming back quickly. But the absentee level, the sickness level is still very high. Both Commissioner Shea and Commissioner Nigro are absolutely consistent in saying they have the forces they need to have a deep bench. They're able to make moves to keep things moving, to keep providing the service that we needed to provide. We'll get you the specifics on how testing is done. Clearly when first responders need testing, that is a priority. Okay. Way back, I'm sorry –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Little louder, can you take the mask down so I can hear you? There you go.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Couldn't hear the beginning.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Yeah, so we've talked about this before – and I'm looking at my lineup, yes, you can join in Dr. Barbot – Dr. Barbot, behind your bandana. I wasn't sure for a moment there. The City is continuing, the Health Department, Health + Hospitals continue to look at this issue and try to determine how helpful it could be. What Dr. Katz said, I believe it was yesterday or Sunday, is that it is being administered to certain patients who are COVID positive because of the extremity of their sickness to see if it would be helpful. But that is in reaction to a particular dynamic that individual is having with the disease, not a broader effort because so far as I understand it, Dr. Barbot will comment, there aren't the kinds of studies to clarify what you would gain from it versus the dangers and the negative side effects. As I understand it, there are side effects that could be very severe, particularly for older or more vulnerable people. And so, trying to strike that balance has been a big question in the health care community. Dr. Barbot let me, hold on, I'm going to go back, get out of your way.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So, I want to echo what the Mayor said in terms of the use of hydroxychloroquine. I think the main point here – I think the main point here is that Health + Hospitals, in collaboration with other hospital systems throughout the city, have been looking at any and all potential therapies to help save as many New Yorkers as possible. And hydroxychloroquine is one of those early medications. I think that there have been, to date, very few patients actually able to take the medication. So, it's too early to say what the clinical benefit has been. Dr. Katz has been clear that the focus of using hydroxychloroquine has been to try and have individuals who are currently suffering respiratory distress from having to keep them go on ventilators, which I think is a really critical component. But, again, it's still too early to know what the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine will be. And again, that's why it's really so critical for us as a city to adhere to social distancing because what we're trying to do is not only slow the spread but reduce the potential impact to individuals who may be adversely affected, especially those above the age of 50 with chronic underlying illnesses.

Mayor: Okay. Anyone else? Erin –

Question: [Inaudible] number of deaths undercounted [inaudible] –

Mayor: I’ll start and then if Dr. Barbot, you'll let me know if you want to add. Look right now, and I want to say this as a non-doctor, I am assuming the vast majority of those deaths are coronavirus related. It's understandable in a crisis that being able to make the confirmation is harder to do with all the resources stretched so thin and with the central concern – Erin, I think you would agree that the concern, the first use of all of the everything we've got our professionals, our health care workers, our resources, the first thing we are focused on is saving the next life. So, we do want to know the truth about what happened in every death at home. But I think we can say at this point, it's right to assume the vast majority are coronavirus related. And that makes it even more sober the sense of how many people we are losing, how many families are suffering, how real this crisis is. So, again, why I'm trying to be very careful, even while saying we see some good news that we not overrate the good news. So, I think we'll, over time, be able to get a clearer picture. But I don't even doubt for a moment what that broader reality is and how we should think about it to drive our action to keep saving lives. If you want to add, you're good. Okay. Last call. Anyone else? Yes.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Again, I'm going to be very clear that I'm just going to draw a line on this question. I'm going to say what I said last night on NY1 and I really am not going to keep getting into detail. We have the capacity we need. We don't want – you know, we are hoping and praying we never have to come near using it. We're getting tremendous support from the military and the federal government. Everything we have asked them for, they've given us. We have a lot of capacity to deal with it. But remember, this is about human beings. This is about families that are suffering. And the reason I don't think it's something that we should dwell on is I think every time we talk about it, we're talking about families that are going through a lot of pain right now. To them, it's their loved one. It's not some bigger discussion. It's about the person in their life they've lost. And we want to be really dignified and really respectful in our support for those families. So, we're going to do everything we can to handle each case one by one respectfully. And we will be able to deal with whatever's thrown at us, but right now that's – I just want to leave it at that and say the focus is on being respectful to those families while always putting everything we have into saving the next life. Last call.

Okay. Thank you, everyone.

2020-04-08 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. So, yesterday I told you that we were starting to see something very important. We were starting to see some change in the right direction. And I want to really talk this through for a few minutes and I want to make it very real, and very personal to all of you, because this is one of those things where understanding what it means, what it doesn't mean, is really, really important. Understanding that when we see progress, we do need to talk about it, because it tells us something, and it's something I think New Yorkers should be proud of, because it's really about what you have done. It's really about the fact that New Yorkers listened to the guidance from the health care leadership telling you to socially distance, telling you to shelter in place. People really listened, and they really did what was needed even though it was very tough.

So, I want to talk about that and what it means, but I'm going to also say numerous times, we have to be careful not to take this initial information and make more of it than we should, because it is only based on a few days, and it's only initial information. It's not something we can draw much bigger conclusions from. In fact, it would be dangerous to take a small amount of information and decide too many things based on it. That actually could create some new problems, and new dangers, and we don't want that.

But let's talk about what you have achieved, because I think the real heroes here are everyday New Yorkers who had to change their lives. All of you had to do something very, very different in very little time. You know, a month ago this city was in a very different reality and a month ago feels like, you know, a year ago now. I think a lot of us are having that kind of feeling that so much has happened so quickly. There's really nothing I can think of in our lives that has had this kind of reality where we've gone through just massive, massive changes in so little time, with, it seems like, every day there's something very, very different, very new. Sometimes, you know, hour by hour we saw huge changes. This is hard for all of us to make sense of. We're human beings. That's asking a lot of us to constantly adjust to such a difficult circumstance. And we as New Yorkers, we are warm people, we are emotional people, we love our family gatherings, we love our gatherings with our friends, we love to go to restaurants and nightclubs. We're probably the most social people in the whole country. We're used to being close together, and for these last weeks that hasn't been possible, and that's really hurt.

You know, the fear about the disease, the anxiety, the pain we're seeing around us, every New Yorker knows someone who has the coronavirus. So many of us know people who have passed away. That's what's in the front of our minds, and that's what we are every day fighting together. But at the same time, we all feel a sense of loss that we had a life that we in so many ways loved in this city. And it's been so strange and so different in the last few weeks. But I want people to know, the reason I say the heroes are every-day New Yorkers, is because when asked to do something incredibly difficult, when asked to make these massive changes, New Yorkers went and did it. Amazing levels of follow through, compliance with these instructions no matter how hard it was. And it's something everyone should be proud of, because even though we’ve got a long way to go, this is still going to be a very long battle, what we've seen these last few days really proves that social distancing, shelter in place, these are ideas that make a huge difference. And they only make a huge difference when people do them the right way, and New Yorkers are doing that in so many ways. So, this gives me hope, more hope than ever that we can get through this really tough moment and come out together, save a lot of lives and get on to recovery at some point.

But now here's the point I want to make about not drawing too many conclusions, because, again, there's a danger in that. We're proving every day that these smart strategies can save lives, can protect people. But we know from some other parts of the world that he started to see a little bit of progress, took their foot off the gas, let down their guard, and guess what? This awful ferocious disease started to reassert itself. And that's something we have to guard against. We have to beat it back, not open the door again too early for it to resurge and hurt so many people. So, what I'm telling you today is something has started to move. We're going to let you know day by day if we see that that positive pattern is sustained or not, because there's no guarantees. Clearly tells us something about what has been working, but it doesn't tell us when this is going to be over. It tells us we got to actually double down. I'd stick to the strategies that are working, and that is frustrating. I'm trying to tell you the truth based on all the information we have, but it's frustrating because we all want to get back to normal. We all want to go see our family, our friends, you know the weather's getting nice. Everyone would love to go out, be in the park, you know, eat outdoors at a restaurant. There's all sorts of wonderful things in this city, outdoor concerts, all the things that we look forward to as it gets warmer, but we're not there yet and we can't get our hopes [inaudible] up the wrong way. We have to keep vigilant, disciplined, strong, resilient. This is what New Yorkers have done, and this is what we've done in other crises too, and we need to keep doing it.

So, the point about doubling down is the strategies working, stick to it. Even as it gets warmer, you start to feel that pull like you want to go do some of the things you used to do, stick to the plan, stick to the strategy. Over time we'll be able to give you more a sense of how long this will be. I've always said, expect a tough April and a tough May. I'm still saying that. But what we'll do is with every piece of new information we'll update you, give you a sense of what it means. But in the meantime, see the progress as an affirmation that you have done the right thing, and if you keep doing it, it's going to help us through this.

Why are we telling you there's some progress? Well, this is about the facts. First of all, the ventilator use. We've talked so much about ventilators. They are lifesaving. This is the way you ensure that someone, God forbid, they're in distress, this disease is a close to taking their life, and a ventilator can save their life, help them keep breathing, help the doctors and nurses see them through. The question until very, very recently, just a few days ago is would we have enough? And that was based on the fact that we saw some very clear patterns in the use of ventilators. And in the last few days we've actually seen fewer ventilators needed than were projected. And that's very, very important. We expected a really deep intensification of this struggle. We expected the number of ventilators to keep being needed to be more and more going into this week. We've seen actually much fewer needed than we expected. Now, to be clear, we still need more, meaning that they're still each day more people who need them, but much less than expected. That's a good sign. The hospitalizations have stabilized. For a long time, that just kept going up and up. We're now seeing some leveling off. Again, based on only a few days, but something good on that front too. That's telling us something positive. And I want to be clear, we know that means we're not out of the woods. It's too early, it’s to preliminary, but we'll keep telling you each day what the evidence is saying. So far, so good, but a long way to go.

Now, the ventilators. So, I want to just recap to you what was going on as recently as Sunday. I said then we, based on all the estimates we could put together, we talked to all the hospitals and looked at every pattern, all the facts that at that point are about 4,000 New Yorkers who needed to be intubated, who needed the ventilator to keep alive. And as recently as Sunday, we expected the number of new ventilators we were going to need each day to be 200 to 300 maybe even more. But what's happened in the last couple of days is that number has come down, and it looks like that number is more like a hundred or even less in terms of the number of ventilators we'll need new each day. That's a striking difference. It's very early. It's very preliminary. But that is a striking difference. We thought we would need many more ventilators to come in this week just to get through the week. As recently as Sunday, I told you that we needed 1,000 to 1,500. A few days earlier I told you we needed something more like 2,500 to 3000. That's how different things have been day to day. We thought we'd need a huge number of ventilators just to keep the hospital system running, just to save the lives that could be saved. That number went down, and it's gone down again. Still a long way to go, but that is striking.

Now, constantly over these last few weeks, we have appealed to the federal government, the state government to help us with ventilators. I want to be thankful and I want to be clear that our call for help has been heard time and time again. So, we got constantly shipment after shipment, including most recently 500 more ventilators from the state of New York. This now means we have a total of almost 5,500 ventilators available throughout our New York City hospitals of all kinds. We have a small emergency reserve of 135 that we're holding in case something has to be quickly moved to a place where the need is greatest. What it means for the first time in a while, is I can say with assurance that we will get through this week in terms of ventilators. We actually have enough to get through this week, free and clear. We are not going to say that we can accurately predict next week yet, it’s still too early this week to say that. But the fact that we have confidence we can get through this week is definitely a good sign.

Now, there's some other things to report, and some of them are hopeful, and then some of them are very, very tough, and raise very important questions about what's really going on. But one that's good is when it comes to our public servants, our first responders, the people who we depend on to keep us safe. So many of them we know were out sick because of symptoms of coronavirus or because they had a confirmed case, the coronavirus. And that has been something that caused tremendous worry we were worried for them. They're our heroes, we wanted to make sure they came through okay; their families came through okay. But we also saw fewer and fewer of our first responders available on any given day and people got very worried about what that would mean. I want to thank the NYPD and the FDNY for holding the line throughout this crisis, always coming up with another way to address all the challenges out there to make sure that the men and women we relied on were ready, always bringing in new first responders. Of course, the amazing effort to bring in paramedics and EMT is from other parts of the country we're so thankful for that. But here now we're seeing something good start to happen because I've said all along, one thing that's true about our first responders is primarily they are younger and obviously very healthy people. And that meant that they could go through this disease quickly thank God in the vast majority of cases, and I'm not for a moment for getting, we have lost some of our first responders. Their families are grieving, but thank God for the vast majority they've come through quickly and they've come through well.

So, the NYPD now reports that they have 276 officers who had tested positive, who have now returned to duty. The FDNY reports that 1,310 EMT, paramedics and firefighters who either tested positive or were exposed to a patient who had tested positive or were suspected of having been infected. 1,310 of our first responders at the FDNY have returned to duty and that's so moving and that's so important for all of us, so we're very grateful. But I told you there's also some things we're learning that really should cause real concern and facts that now are clear and we want to make it very clear to people this city that as facts become clear, we're going to put them out. We're always going to make sure that we believe the information is accurate, but once it's factual, once it's clear, we're putting it out.

So, one of the things that's been discussed in recent days is what do we know about who is being afflicted by this disease? Who are we losing? What does it tell us? Are there some larger realities that we need to look at here? The answer is yes, there are. Here is a disease that has hurt people, hurt families in every corner of our City, let's be clear, every community, every ZIP code has been hurt by this disease, families are grieving right now across every part of the five boroughs. But we also now have information that points out that there are clear inequalities, clear disparities in how this disease is affecting the people of our City. The truth is that in so many ways the negative effects of coronavirus, the pain it's causing, the death that's causing tracks with other profound health care disparities that we have seen for years and decades in this City. So many people have struggled to get the health care they need, who didn't have the money to afford the health care they deserve. So many people have lived with chronic health care conditions throughout their life, so often associated with challenges like poverty. We're seeing folks who have struggled before really being hit particularly hard by the coronavirus. Look, that's a blatant inequality and we don't accept it, meaning we have to fight in new ways we have to come up with new strategies to address what is now a documented disparity. As you're going to see, again, every community feeling this pain, some communities feeling it disproportionately, we're going to help everyone. And the strategies we have in place are meant of course to save the lives of New Yorkers across the board, every part of our City. But we're going to double down on the strategies that reach people who are the most vulnerable now because we're seeing these very troubling facts.

So, here's what the information from our Health Department shows us and this is preliminary information, but it is based on specific records meaning, and this is a tough thing to say, but I want to make sure people understand the facts. This is based on a death certificates, this is based on the work of our medical examiner's office and our Department of Health confirming that someone has died of a COVID-19 related illness and that their specific background is documented. So, what we've learned is that the deaths, because of COVID-19 in the City, first and foremost have affected the Hispanic community with 34 percent of the deaths. That community is about 29 percent of all New Yorkers in terms of population, but 34 percent of the deaths. And, again, this is preliminary information that we'll keep adding to. It's hard to talk about this stuff like statistics, this means human beings, this means families but we have to look in the face, these disparities that we're learning about. So, the Hispanic community, 34 percent; the black community, 28 percent of the deaths compared to about 22 percent of the overall population; the white community, 27 percent of the deaths compared to about 32 percent of the overall population; the Asian community, 7 percent of the deaths compared to about 14 percent of the overall population. This is painful to talk about, but we have to be honest about it, there's a lot more information that will keep coming out as we have information, excuse me, we can verify. We will keep making it public, but it already tells us something we need to know and it tells us that we need to act.

So, now I want to talk about the plan that we will put in place immediately to address this information we now have about disparities. First, the first and most important element of the plan is to focus on our public hospitals in particular and some other hospitals, some of our independent hospitals certainly as well. But first and foremost, our public hospitals because this is about the most essential concept of ensuring that everyone gets health care regardless of their background, regardless of their ZIP code, regardless of their income. That has been the entire idea of our extraordinary public hospital system from the very beginning we have the biggest, best public hospital system in America. It was always built on that New York belief in fairness and equality. We need to double down on that now, we need to ensure that our public hospitals get absolutely everything they need because we know that so many New Yorkers who are in the most vulnerable communities in the most danger. Where do they turn to? They turn to our public hospitals the most obvious example has been Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. We've all seen what's played out there and the doctors and nurses, all the health care workers have been the most amazing heroes because whatever was thrown at them at Elmhurst, they held, they kept that hospital going, they handled an extraordinary number of cases, they kept saving lives. The public hospitals are the greatest guarantee we have that there will be fairness and equality in saving lives. And that's the single most important thing because we know the blunt truth is we know a huge percentage of New Yorkers, no matter what strategy is put in place, this disease is here, it's going to reach a huge percentage of us, most likely over half and even more. So, people are going to have to confront this disease, it's painful, it's awful that's the truth, but that's the truth. But when they need urgent health care, when they need to have the best doctors and nurses there to save their lives, for so many people that means going to their local public hospital. And we must ensure that that hospital has all the personnel it needs, all the ventilators it needs, all the PPEs, everything that's been the core of the strategy. And we got to go even deeper into that strategy because that's where you literally save the lives that can be saved.

The second is, we're going to do a major campaign to educate people, to give them more and more detailed information on how to address this crisis. There'll be a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, a traditional media digital campaign focused on communities of color, focused on communities where English is not the first language. In fact, these ads will be in 14 different languages with a deep effort to get to folks who have gotten some of the word obviously, but not all the information we want them to have so that we can further protect them. We're going to keep investing in this kind of effort to make sure we get much deeper into communities, including immigrant communities with real valuable information about how to navigate this extraordinary challenge. Third, you know, the media efforts everything we're trying to do to educate people every day are crucial, but they certainly will not be enough and now comes a part that's going to be very challenging because the nature of this crisis, but we have to do a grassroots outreach again. This is something we're going to develop over the next few days, we're going to have to work closely with community based clinics where there are health care workers who have a deep sense of their own communities who speak the language in every sense of their own community, who have the relationships and the trust. We're going to have to find a way to get health care workers out into communities to educate people, to answer their questions, to help them address their immediate challenges, but in a way that's safe for those health care workers. We are absolutely, as you heard earlier, sticking by shelter and place a social distancing. But we need to find a way to get health care workers in a safe, smart, strategic way out into communities for direct communication with people in greatest need. So, we'll have more on that plan in the coming days, clearly those health care workers will need to have proper protection and that has to be absolutely secured for this plan to work, which is why we will continue all our efforts to bring in a huge amount of additional supplies to the City’s PPEs to protect all our health care workers and first responders and everyone who needs them.

Fourth point is to deepen our efforts that have started, but I think they can go a lot farther. When you call 3-1-1 for example, there are many times when you're patched through to a Health + Hospitals clinician, a doctor or a nurse or another health care worker who can answer questions and determine - for example - why people call wondering if because of how they're feeling if they need testing. That's been something that people have been able to get through 3-1-1, but we need to deepen that and make it more possible for people to call just to talk through their situation more, to get more advice. And not just because they're wondering whether they need a test, but to actually have a dialogue with the health care workers – again in multiple languages – about what they're feeling, what's going on, maybe it is not someone even just calling about their own condition; maybe it's someone calling about their grandma, their grandpa, maybe it’s someone calling about their mom or their child. We need to create more of an opportunity for every-day New Yorkers who many of whom don't have a doctor that's their everyday doctor - to get someone on the phone right away; a trained professional who can talk through the details and give them guidance. That has to be much more available and that's what we're going to do.

Now, to ensure that we protect that first key part of this plan, are public hospitals. We just need more help, particularly when it comes to personnel. The frontline health care workers have gone through hell, but they've held the line. They've been heroes in every way. Some of them have gotten sick themselves and been out and we look forward to them coming back healthy - we're praying for them, we're hoping for them and for their families. But in the meantime, the many, many health care workers who are continuing to fight this fight, they have really borne the brunt and they're tired and they need relief and they need support, which is why I've repeatedly asked for military medical personnel and it's been a plea I've made to Washington repeatedly. We've seen some progress; we have almost 300 who have come in now out in our public hospitals. These are doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, highly trained people, highly effective medical personnel, many of them with a kind of military experience that makes them very, very ready to handle the toughest situations. Almost 300 of them now, deployed out in our Health + Hospitals public hospitals. The Navy has sent health care professionals to Elmhurst, Bellevue, Woodhall, and Kings County hospitals. The Air Force has sent health care professionals to Lincoln, Jacoby, and Queens Hospital. I'm very grateful that our armed forces have come forward to help our public hospitals, but we will need more help and we need it quickly.

Now, let me talk to you about building out even more health care capacity for people who need it. And this is another area where there's some real progress and we got to make sure we keep building. We're still working always, always from the worst-case scenario to make sure that whatever happens with this disease, New York City is ready. So, one of the crucial things, again, is adding additional beds to relieve some of the pressure on our core hospitals. Last week, about eight days ago, I was at the Billy Jean King Tennis Center in Queens. When you looked at it then it was a bunch of tennis courts – indoor tennis courts. Now, right now, it is being converted into a hospital facility. We'll start receiving patients this week. We will convert 20 beds in the new facility to ICU care and the total number originally was going to be 350 beds, will now be 470 beds. So, this is a case of continuing to go faster, add more to make sure we can serve people in need exactly when they need it.

On the Personal Protective Equipment, a lot of us didn't really use the phrase PPE before a few weeks ago, and now it's something we talk about all the time. We've gotten a lot more in to protect our first responders; to protect our health care workers. And yesterday we made a delivery out to the hospitals of this city; over 3 million surgical masks, over 2 million surgical gloves almost 1.2 million N95 masks, over 100,000 pairs of eyewear – protective eyewear – 61,000 surgical gowns. It's very important that this material has come in and gone instantly out to the places that need it. And we're working hard every day to make sure each and every hospital gets what they need, distributes it effectively, constantly gets resupplied when they need it. But we have one urgent need and that is these surgical gowns. I was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard yesterday talking about an amazing homegrown effort to produce them here in our city. A really heroic effort by companies in the Navy Yard and the folks who work there to protect all of our heroes. They're creating a lot of surgical gowns, but this is an area where we need a huge new supply. So. we have asked the federal government for over 9 million surgical gowns to get us through April and into May. We are hopeful that we'll start to get deliveries from that request quickly. We need them even to get through this week. We need more and we're going to have fallback options in place to make sure we can protect people this week.

So, the final thing I want to do is talk about some of the people who are stepping up. And even amidst the challenges we see nonstop everyday New Yorkers helping each other, people feeding our health care workers, our first responders, businesses stepping up - amazing efforts. I want to keep talking about them because it's something people should be really proud of and it's something that's helping to sustain us. And one that's very special I want to talk about today because it's from a foundation that was born out of our city's darkest hour and it’s a foundation that [inaudible] means so much to us all, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation. Born out of 9/11, symbolic of the strength and resiliency of our city, Tunnel to Towers has done so much for so many people - always there for our first responders and their families. Now stepping up again, we've just heard of a $3 million pledge by Tunnel to Towers to help our health care workers and I'm so appreciative of yet another heroic action by that amazing foundation.

Also, crucially, Senator Schumer has unveiled something important, the COVID-19 Hero's Fund and this is an idea that would give the essential workers additional pay up to $25,000 and would give a one-time $15,000 payment to health care workers, home care workers, first responders. This is an idea that needs to be made real to help those who are suffering the most. I keep reminding people - the federal government - we did see some progress in that last stimulus bill -we need a lot more. Spoke to Senator Schumer this morning about the next stimulus bill. I know he is proposing to his credit, I know Speaker Pelosi is leading the way as well, that in the next stimulus there be money for our hospitals, there be money for food banks, money to support small businesses, not big corporations, small everyday businesses, and money to help localities and States that have borne the brunt; obviously that means all of us here in New York and New Jersey, especially. Crucially, Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi are focused on ensuring that all the cities and States that have lost not only lives, but they've lost so much of the resources to save more lives and protect people and recover, that those resources would be restored through a fourth stimulus bill, hopefully as early as this month. So, I want to thank Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi for their leadership. Now we need to get the Congress to come back and pass that bill, so we can still fight this battle and win this battle and then start on the road to recovery.

Look, I'll finish just affirming the point that we all need hope - we all need hope. And when we see good news, when we see something that's working, we need to talk about it, we need to feel good, and we need to especially feel good that everyday New Yorkers built this progress with their hard work, with their sacrifice. Every one of you, when you're hearing today that we see some progress, you should feel that was because of you because it was. At the same time, recognize we're not out of the woods. There'll be a long time before we're out of the woods. We've got a strategy that is working, let's go deeper into it. Let's double down so we can get through this together. I am confident, really confident, always felt in my heart that New Yorkers would rise to this occasion and you have, you have it in a remarkable way - let's finish the job. It's not going to be days, it's going to be weeks and months, but let's finish the job. Just a few words in Spanish and then we'll take questions from our colleagues in the media.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that let's turn to questions from the media and please let me know the name of the reporter and the outlet.

Moderator: Yeah and just a quick reminder for folks we have Dr. Barbot in the Blue Room and, on the phone, we have Dr. Katz, Commissioner Grillo, and First Deputy Commissioner Torres Springer. And with that, we have Shant from the Daily News up first. Shant?

Question: Yeah, thank you Mayor, just wanted to get a little more info about the, the very troubling data about communities of color from you and Dr. Katz and Dr. Barbot, can you say what the understanding is now for the cause of this disparity?

Mayor: I'll start with a very basic point and then turn to both doctors. You know, in the beginning of this crisis, we all were rushing to set up the ability to handle a huge number of cases. One thing we knew from the beginning, and we saw it around the world, is that this is a disease that could escalate quickly. So, we were securing the ability of our hospitals to fight this battle. But then as we got more and more information – and you saw the map a few days ago, and that was striking, and this new information is striking – it became clear that these disparities were real and sharpen and needed to be talked about and needed to be acted on. One thing I think is clear, and I've talked this through with our health care leaders, is that people who have had less health care available to them are more vulnerable. If throughout your life you haven't gotten the care you deserve or if you've had preexisting conditions that weren't addressed the way they could have if you had had more resources, because, again, health care still in this country is based on how much money you have. And in this city, all of us have tried to change that in some very real ways, but there's still a reality that folks with more resources get more health care. So, I would say, the first thing to know is that, you know, there are a lot of people, particularly seniors in communities of color that were more vulnerable because their conditions had not been treated the way they could have and should have if the resources had been given to them that they deserved. Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So, I'll add to what the Mayor just laid out, which is something that I agree with. I think it's important for us to note that where we are seeing these inequities are places and populations that have historically had higher rates of underlying chronic illnesses. And certainly, those chronic underlying illnesses put these individuals at greater risk for poor health outcomes. The other thing that I will say, and, you know, I think that we are still really digging into this is, I am very concerned where when I see the large percentage of Latinos who have died of this illness, and even though we have made lots of efforts to reassure people that all of our public hospitals see individuals independent of their immigration status in the independent of insurance status, that, you know, the overlay of the rhetoric across this country I think has real implications in the health of our community. And certainly, concerns about public charge are some things that I think we need to dig deeper into it. Commissioner Mostofi and I have spoken out about the importance of suspending a public charge during this time. And I think, you know, it's something that, again, we will be digging into deeper to better understand. But the overall, you know, concerning aspect of this is the fact that these are communities that have had higher rates of underlying chronic illness and that it's a reminder that these chronic underlying illnesses in peace time, as the Mayor has spoken about, contribute to higher rates of premature mortality from those chronic illnesses, but that in this particular war-time scenario are really very concerning for higher rates of mortality.

Mayor: Dr. Katz, do you want to add?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Let me just to add to what the two of you have so smartly said, that lower income people also live more likely and multigenerational housing because of the high cost of apartment rentals in New York City. And so, multiple families may be living together in very small spaces, which I think facilitates the transmission of this virus.

Mayor: Yeah. And to finish, Shant, I’ve got to tell you, when I saw this, it made me very angry. I want to be clear, we're all trying to fight this battle and keep focused and keep, you know, calm in the midst of a battle that we must win. And as leaders, we have to stay calm. But it made me angry to see that the disparities that have plagued the city, this nation that are all about fundamental inequality are once again causing such pain and causing people, innocent people to lose their lives. It's just abundantly clear. It's sick, it's troubling, it's wrong, and we're going to fight back with everything we got. And, right now, all we have to think about is saving the next life and getting through this crisis, but someday there's going to be a reckoning about what all this taught us, that, obviously, our nation was not in so many ways prepared. But more importantly even than that – I would say literally more importantly than that, that our nation has still not come to grips with the fact that health care is provided so unevenly and all based on how much money you have. And until we get to some form of universal health care, until that's the reality, this kind of danger will exist not just when there's a pandemic, obviously in people's everyday lives. But you know what, we should be worried about the future. This is not the last time we're going to see a new disease. Here's a disease we never even heard of, it literally didn't exist six months ago and now it's ravaging us. If we're really going to prepare for the future, we better recognize that if we don't create equality and fairness in health care, there's going to be people vulnerable always who didn't need to be.

Moderator: Kathleen from Patch is up next. Kathleen?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Wonderful. I was hoping that we could talk for a moment about food disparity or food accessibility? You said you've said yourself that more than half-a-million New York City dwellers have lost their paycheck. NYPD data is showing that half of the thousands of supermarkets they're visiting are closed. Are you worried that New Yorkers aren't going to be able to access food? Is that something that your office is working to fix and what would the potential solutions be?

Mayor: Kathleen, I really appreciate the question. I'm very, very worried. I want to make this crystal clear. When I announced a few weeks ago that Katherine Garcia would be our food czar, it was explicitly because I saw a gathering storm that with so many people losing their income. In the first weeks, you know, you could presume people might be able to get by, but with each passing week is getting harder and harder. And yes, I'm glad there was that money in the stimulus to help people directly. But it's not that much money in the scheme of things and it's not in people's pockets yet. So, I'm very worried. When you're talking – you're not talking about a few thousand people, you're talking about half-a-million people who lost their job and very soon that is going to mean more and more people who cannot find a way to pay for the food they need. So, I think you make a really good point that if supermarkets are shut down, thank God there are a lot still going on. I want to thank the supermarket workers, the grocery workers, these are folks who are doing something really heroic too and we’ve got to thank them – thank the pharmacy workers, all the people out there making sure that the basics are available for people to have enough money to pay for it. Thank God those workers are there, making sure that people get what they need. But I'm worried about more and more people literally not having any money at all to pay for food. The plan that Commissioner Garcia is putting together is for a largescale feeding effort, a largescale effort to feed hungry New Yorkers such as we've never seen before. I hope that when it comes down to it, it won't be as bad as we fear but we are preparing for a very largescale effort. That will be a priority in everything we do, where we put our resources, where we put our energy, our focus, making sure people have food is going to be a central, central priority. We haven't felt the fullness of the danger and the need yet, but I unfortunately believe it is coming. So, that means the initial efforts we're doing expanded home delivery of food to seniors and vulnerable folks, folks who can't get out of their houses, anyone can call 3-1-1 and sign up for that who is in – one of the folks who is vulnerable. They can get that. We announced last week that we are now at 435 sites, schools that were previously just providing food for kids are now providing food for any and all adults who need it. So, I just want to make this crystal clear. I was at P.S. 1 on the Lower East Side yesterday. Any adult in New York City can go to one of these 435 sites and get three meals for yourself and as many family members as you have. You can ask for – if you have a household of five, you can say, I need breakfast, lunch, and dinner for five people and they will give it to you. It's going to be available at all 435 sites. It is high-quality food. I saw it yesterday with my own eyes. I saw the food service workers who are also doing valiant work. They want to make sure people not only fed, but there’s quality nutritious food. So, they're out there doing that. You can call 3-1-1, you can go to nyc.gov to find those locations. So, that's going to be a crucial part of the equation. But I think we're going to even have to go farther than that. We're definitely going to be supporting in a variety of ways local food banks, food pantries to keep them going, and then just keep building from there. My order to Commissioner Garcia is, whatever it takes to feed New Yorkers, whatever the expense, whatever the effort, no matter how many City workers it takes, no matter how many volunteers it takes, we're going to do it.

Moderator: Julia from the New York Post is up next. Julia? Julia, can you hear us?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you –

Mayor: Good? How are you doing?

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Julia?

Moderator: Julia, we can't hear you.

Mayor: You're going to come back?

Moderator: Yeah, we'll come back to her. Yoav from the City is up next. Yoav?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask, you've made it clear beforehand when we've asked about the racial and ethnic data that providing the data was of secondary concern to saving lives, but here in response to producing the data [inaudible] it's clear that the city is taking steps that are intended to save lives. So, why weren't you able to do that beforehand? You know, because clearly the data is important in determining how the city responds. Why was it secondary – why was it secondary in nature, you’ve always said you can walk and chew gum at the same time. Why wasn’t that possible here?

Mayor: Because we were all walking in chewing gum on many, many levels. This is nonstop crisis and everyone, everyone on the phone with me here and all my colleagues are working nonstop. The concern – and Dr. Barbot can speak to it – is the Health Department was very concerned that there'd be something verifiable, that you have to make sure there was enough evidence that it was confirmed, that we not put out something that was unclear or not based on enough data. So that is absolutely crucial. If we’re going to tell people something, we better damn well be right about it. Also, as I said, what's happened out there, there is more data we'd like to be able to provide and some of it has been hard to get as clear as we'd like because in a crisis atmosphere, I assure you, that folks at the front line are not focusing on, you know, recording data when they're trying to save lives. So, there's been real crisis dynamics that have mitigated against getting the kind of data we would in peacetime. And then there's been real concern to make sure that what we had was accurate and consistent and enough of a – enough evidence over what's really been just weeks. Now that we believe it, that we really have something hard and fast, it's telling us what we got to do. But as I said in the beginning, the one thing that was unquestionably job-one and remains job-one for folks experiencing the disparity and everyone is to protect the hospital system. That's where the overwhelming majority of our efforts were going, to protect and build up our hospital system. And that was more important than anything, because that's what every New Yorker needs.

Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: So, to build on what the Mayor laid out, I think, you know, we've been focused on having complete data and I've spoken before about the fact that our reporting is only as good as the quality of the data that we get in. And it's been a challenge to work with hospitals who are overwhelmed with patients in the intensive care unit, on the floors, in the emergency department to focus on the more granular importance of data. And as I've said in the past as well, we've then resorted to alternative data sets in order to augment the data that we have, meaning that, you know, we are going directly into electronic health records at hospital systems because we recognize that, as the Mayor laid out, you know, these folks are overwhelmed with taking care of patients, but it doesn't take away from the importance of needing to know this information. And so, the other thing that I will say is that, you know, in spite of all of those efforts that we've made to have complete data, the percentage of reports that we have in terms of race related to people who have died from COVID-19 is slightly less than two-thirds. So, we are still dealing with incomplete data. But I think it's important to note that we are, as the Mayor likes to say, not making perfect be the enemy of good. And so, we're not waiting until we have 100 percent. We are acting now. There are other aspects of our data that we are also looking to improve the racial demographics of, but, again, it is an ongoing effort in collaboration with the State as well as with our health care partners.

Moderator: Back to Julia. Julia?

Question: Hi. Can you hear me, Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Yes, Julia.

Question: Hi. So, I found the numbers you gave on the ventilators very interesting. You know, that we were projecting we need 300 more but we're only needing about 100 more. Could you give us kind of similar numbers to show how hospitalizations are, you know, either leveling off or down? And then I'm just wondering if you could follow up on what you said on TV this morning that you think that the statistics for folks dying at home, which are overwhelmingly being driven by coronavirus should be included in the official death toll. Do you expect that to happen soon?

Mayor: So, on that one, look, it's a very, very painful reality. I just want to say, imagine what a family goes through, struggling to help a loved one, and, obviously, hoping and praying it's something that’ll pass, and then suddenly someone's gone. I mean, it’s just horrendous. But the numbers speak for themselves. I've been over this with our health colleagues that this used to be a very, very rare thing in New York City and suddenly it's jumped up. And, obviously, the only thing that's changed is COVID-19. So, the Health Department knows what they're doing, but what I would say as a layman is, let's assume that with this kind of increase, the vast majority of these are related to COVID-19, you know, directly, indirectly and start counting them. And I'm sure the Health Department, you know, can figure out what's the right way to do that. But I think it would be more accurate to just acknowledge what is, to me, a growing truth. On the question of hotels – excuse me, the hospitals – I'm saying stabilization, because I think it's fair to say that the hospital admissions numbers and people going in and out of ICU, there's still a lot of variability there, meaning we get data. But again, what we're finding from a lot of hospitals is there's a lag in their data because they are first and foremost focused on saving lives and the data is a little bit uneven for that reason. Also, the improvement we've seen is only over a few days. So, I think the word stabilization is right to say, that we, for a period of time, we're seeing a constant increase. We're not seeing that now. I'm not clear yet if we're in the territory of any kind of sustained reduction. The ventilator pieces actually, in some ways, much clearer, because it's a real finite number. It is specifically about people who are intubated, people in those ICU’s. We can literally know how many ventilators out there and we can get very quickly updated on how many are in use. So, that one, where we thought it would be 300 more each day and it's looking like a 100 more each day or less – that's striking, because that moved rapidly in a matter of days. Again, I want to see a lot more days and weeks before we draw any firmer conclusions.

Moderator: Dave Evans from ABC-7 is up next. Dave?

Question: Hey, Mayor, this is Dave Evans. Can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yes, Dave.

Question: Yeah, I just had a question about antibody testing, and I know it's a State function, but I wanted to ask you because when we are the epicenter of this crisis. And the Governor talked about it yesterday, Dr. Birx talked about it this morning and they call it a game changer. I just wanted to see if you see it the same way. And my other question about this is, since we are the epicenter, has the FDA, the CDC, has anyone in the federal government contacted the City to see if we can start moving in that direction? I mean, how in the world are we going to do all these tests? And do you see it as a possible game changer?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question, Dave. I'll start and Mitch, who's obviously thinking about this from the perspective of the frontline hospitals and their heroic employees, and, of course, Oxiris, thinking about this in terms of the whole city – they'll join in. So, I think it's a big deal. I think that the first thing that I understand about the antibody testing is it's not here yet in the kind of numbers we would ideally want. So, I want people to understand that with everything with testing – and testing has been sort of the big problem, the big X-factor through this whole crisis, is anytime people are wishing for testing, the most important thing to understand is does it actually exist in the numbers we need it to or not? Right now, the answer is no for antibody testing. But at some point, and that might be, you know, in in weeks that might be in a month or two, you could have antibody testing available on a much bigger level. I think it would be very, very helpful, because, to begin with, it would help to strengthen the folks who are doing all this heroic work in the hospitals. And the first responders, if they knew for a fact they were exposed to this disease, and, you know, we all presume that means some immunity. It's not a perfect equation, Dave. I'm sure the doctors are going to say this, there's no one who knows the answer yet on this question because there's still so much about the coronavirus that there's no one on earth has definitive answers on. We don't know for sure that if you’ve been exposed to it, it means you cannot get it again. It seems likely that if you'd been exposed to it, you wouldn't get it again this year, this season. But we don't know that 110 percent. But we know enough to say it would sure as hell be helpful if people knew, it would give them a lot more confidence and would tell us a lot. So, I'm hoping that's something that could be a big part of the strategy when it's really available on a broad level. I think the bigger point about testing is what we should have had in the beginning was universal testing. It's one of the really crucial strategies we've seen that has worked in the world. It clearly was something the federal government did not have ready to not provide somewhere in the future universal testing could be part of the way out of this crisis, but it's still clearly – again, the numbers aren't there yet and they won't be there for a while, but that's something we should be focused on as one of the potential ways to recovery.

Mitch, you want to start with anything you want to add?

President Katz: I think you've gotten all the big points. I know Mr. Mayor that you yourself spoke with the head of the FDA, Dr. Hahn about having enough access to these tests and they've indicated that they will facilitate it. There are tests that are on the market from other countries that have been developed. Only one has been approved by the FDA so far. The State is interested in using a different one at their state lab. But as you say, I think the, the most important issue is getting the reagents. Having an approved test is no help if we can't get the reagents to perform it. I think that will change in the next week or two. And I do believe that it could be a game changer, as you say. We won't be able to assure people that they're immune, but we certainly will be able to say to them, look, you've been exposed to this virus and your body successfully dealt with it. And I think that will keep people a sense of confidence that they don't need to be as fearful.

Mayor: Yeah, and Dave, just a quick thing to add before Oxiris. So, I want to give real credit to Dr. Steve Hahn, the Commissioner of the FDA. Mitch has talked to him a bunch of times. I've talked to him. He's been incredibly accessible and really trying hard to speed approvals. And I'm a layman, but I think we could say FDA was never known for speed historically. I've been really pleased at how responsive he's been and how much they seem to get it now that they have to move quickly if they're going to be able to help us in this crisis.

Commissioner Barbot: So, what I'll add is I think we need to remind ourselves of a very fundamental question and that is what are you going to do with the results of an antibody test? And so, I agree with Mitch on the individual level that it can help in a number of different ways. However, when we think about the – what we're going to do with the results of those tests at the population level, I don't think we know enough yet about what it means with regards to immunity. The concept of herd immunity is something that I think as a city we've become familiar with through the experience we had with measles. But the reality is, you know, what does it mean to have a whole group of people who may potentially be immune? We just don't know enough about that. We don't know enough about how long that immunity remains. And so, I think we just need to temper our expectations about in what arena the use of antibody testing can be a game changer. I think there's a distinction between at the individual level and at the population level.

Moderator: Erin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Mr. Mayor. Hi, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Okay. I heard what you spoke to earlier about, you know, communities with a history of disparities being the worst affected here. I'm wondering if you could speak more specifically to the Hispanic community since it seems like in the city specifically, they're the largest share of deaths. I've seen a lot nationally that the black community has been the worst affected. So is there a reason why we're seeing this particular effect in the Latino community here?

Mayor: I'll turn to Dr. Barbot because obviously the statistics come out of the Health Department and she has been for her whole life focused on fighting health care disparities and with an obvious focus on the community she comes from, the Latino community. But I think just first of all, it is a huge community in the city getting close to 3 million people in terms of total population. And second of all, I think it's fair to say language means for some people they're not getting as much information as they need and we want to keep addressing that aggressively. And then immigration status, what's happened in the last few years has really driven a lot of immigrants, undocumented in particular, but even folks who are documented, has driven them away from a lot of the places they would have turned for support and for health care. And that's another story that I think will come out as this whole painful history has looked at. I think that's another one of the reasons here. Doctor.

Commissioner Barbot: And so to add to what the Mayor laid out, I think fundamentally what we're seeing across the country relates to the additional burden that poor people have in terms of dealing with underlying chronic illnesses, either because of their insurance status and the additional burden of copays, a whole host of reasons that we typically talk about with regards to what we call the social determinants of health, but that in reality translate into the impact of where we live, work, learn, and play has on our ability to address and manage underlying chronic illnesses. And so I think what we may be seeing here played out, which is also being seen in Chicago, LA and other places, is that cycle of those underlying drivers to poor health outcomes. You know, essentially on steroids because of the acuity of this virus.

So that in combination with issues related potentially to immigration status and the mixed immigration status households that we have here in the city. I think there are many potential contributors to why we may be seeing the disparities and inequities in this particular situation. But clearly, I think we won't know fully until we have more data. And you know, as I've said before and the Mayor has said before, we're not waiting until we have perfect data. We need to act now in urgency. And it's a reminder that it's not just about what the Health Department can do. It's not just about what the health care delivery system can do. It really is about what all sectors of civil society can do to contribute to the ongoing improvement and slowing of the spread of this virus. And that, you know, the work that's been put in place and being led by Commissioner Garcia addressing food has implications on not just, you know, everyday survival, but on people's ability to manage their chronic underlying illnesses. What we're doing around housing, et cetera. All of that plays out in terms of how successful we are in, in beating this COVID-19, which obviously we're all engaged on as a team in doing so.

Moderator: Gloria from New York one is up next, Gloria.

Question: Thank you Mr. Mayor. I have two questions, but if you could indulge me, I want to give Dr. Barbot an opportunity to talk about the data in Spanish specially for our Spanish-speaking viewers. I want to make sure that they're getting a chance to hear this information in their language. If she could summarize what you have found up until this point, and also talk about the campaign that the City's putting together to reach those communities. And then I have two questions for you if I may.

Mayor: Okay. Wait, that's Gloria. I need you to tighten that up a little bit just because we're trying to have a same standard here. So absolutely. Dr. Barbot will give you the Spanish summary and I will describe the campaign a little bit more, which we're just putting together now. Let's stay there and we'll do that. And if you can, I'll give you a one, one follow-through right now on that. Is there anything else you want to add to that?

Question: Sure. If I could ask you if you have an update for us on whether Correction officers and inmates have received masks. We're getting some reports including some folks in the union that they have not.

Mayor: So, I'll be quick and then Dr. Barbot, we'll do the quick summary in Spanish and I'll come back and, and just clarify the new initiatives we’re putting in place. So, the Corrections Department, for the officers who require any form of mask or face covering, yes. That has been sent and will be continued to be resupplied as needed and for inmates the same. For, again, folks who I think Dr. Barbot confirmed this, you know, if someone is infected and doctors and Correctional Health want them to be wearing a mask, they’ll do that. For other people, it's the same thing as for all New Yorkers to wear a face covering. All of that has been sent and will be resupplied as needed. You want to do the Spanish summary?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes.

[Commissioner Barbot speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: Thank you, Doctor. So, Gloria on the other point about the campaign, so all of these pieces are going to be laid out individually as they're starting. Of course, the first part, the most important part, the continued support for the public hospitals – that we've been updating you on constantly. The ad campaign, we'll be unveiling those ads again, TV, radio, digital print, 14 languages. We'll be unveiling that shortly. The grassroots outreach is something we are going to do. That's a new and we have to figure out again, a way very quickly to work with the community-based clinics and to figure out how to get health care workers out in the appropriate safe way. So that's something that's literally being put together over these next few days. We'll announce pieces as they are ready. There'll be a texting element of this, which is important and it's something that we've seen to be helpful in other countries, continuing to communicate with people in need information by text. So that's something that will be a part of it. And then the phone [inaudible] as I said, we already have a good experience with this with 3-1-1 with folks who are trying to get information about testing and they got an opportunity to talk to a clinician directly to determine if they actually were someone who had a priority need for testing or not. We have definitely found that people can talk to an actual human being with medical training. It makes a big difference. We want to go deeper now we're going to figure out how to do that through 3-1-1 and make clear that there will be enough clinicians available. But what I want to get to is the point that we really feel confident that anyone who needs to talk stuff through in multiple languages can have that kind of back and forth with a clinician to make sure that they know if they do need to get to health care facility, to know how they can handle their own situation. But I also think crucially for family members, I think this is one of the missing links we have to address. Family members who are trying to figure out how to take care of a loved one properly while also protecting themselves, who a lot times are just, you know, doing what they would do historically. Just taking care of someone. We want to help them to take care of their loved one, but also be safe doing that and having someone that can talk that through with. So those are elements of the campaign. Each piece will be unveiled a very quickly as they are ready to go public.

Moderator: Katie from the Wall Street Journal is up next. Katie.

Question: Hey, good morning Mr. Mayor and good morning New York. My question for you in the administration and everyone there. You know, you laid out the longstanding disparities here in the city, in certain communities, particularly the immigrant communities and communities of color. Last week or two weeks ago, Dr. Katz noted the lack of hospital beds comparatively to other boroughs in Queens, which is the most diverse county in New York City. My question for you is, knowing this pandemic was coming and seeing that as far back as January, what did you and the administration do to ensure that these vulnerable communities had better access? We're hearing now today on, you know, almost in mid-April about grassroots outreach. Why wasn't this done before or earlier? Why weren't community-based organizations and health centers engaged earlier? It just seems to be a little late compared to how quickly this is moving.

Mayor: Look, this has been a hugely moving target, first of all. This entire reality with coronavirus. There's no one alive who has experienced a pandemic on this level. The last one was a hundred years ago. So, everyone's been trying to rapidly figure out strategies to address something that's just beyond anything we've ever known and beyond anything we ever could have imagined, honestly. The fact is from the first time we started talking about it, Dr. Barbot, Dr. Katz and I, our folks at Emergency Management, our Deputy Mayor, everyone was saying one to start warning people was coming and that we were putting in place the strategies to protect ourselves, which meant reinforcing our public hospitals and getting them supplies, getting them ready for what was coming. It meant a lot of public education, which we were doing constantly and Dr. Barbot has led the way on in multiple languages. A lot of the foundation was laid, but the notion of the kinds of strategies it was going to take, we didn't have a – I don't think anyone had a perfect plan of when you were going to go to each piece and how to prepare people in advance for each piece because we have never been here before. What we do know is the kinds of outreach we used to do, which we would have done immediately, couldn't be done in the first instance, meaning sending health care workers out door to door, having a deep grassroots effort. You couldn't do it. One, you had the challenge of course, of shelter in place and social distancing. But two everyone was needed in the hospitals. In – a few weeks ago, we were projecting that not only would today be as bad as it is, but it would be much, much worse and every health care worker was going to be needed in the hospitals, and then some, all the PPEs would be taken up there. Again, we're not out of the woods, but we are seeing an improvement in our PPE supplies. We are seeing more and more medical professionals come in. The notion that we actually could get people out into the communities that the need is greatest is not impossible now as I think it would have been even a week ago.

So, it's a very dynamic situation. We're learning from experience, what we need to do more of, as in every situation. I understand your question, I really do, but I've also watched everyone trying to stay ahead on the most basic level and that was protecting the hospitals. I can't say enough. There's been a conversation over weeks and weeks and weeks at all costs, protect the hospital, surge everything we had into them, particularly the public hospitals and only now are we even able to think about using our personnel and some different ways to try and go at some of the real specific problems, the deep problems that we're seeing emerge.

Commissioner Barbot: And Mr. Mayor, if I can add to that. You know, I would say that we from the beginning have engaged our partners both in the health care delivery system, hospitals, ambulatory centers, but also our CBOs to deliver much needed information. We've done a lot of outreach with regards to the ethnic media. I think what we're talking about now is using the data and adjusting our approach to add yet another layer. I think none of us could have anticipated, and we said this from the beginning, not only how the virus behaves, but then how are New Yorkers behaving in terms of what we're asking them to do. And this is an acknowledgement that we then now need to leverage those same partners that we used at the beginning in a different way.

Moderator: Matt Chayes from Newsday is up next. Matt.

Question: Olivia, thanks a lot. Mr. Mayor, doctors, good morning. I'm wondering how exactly is your staff calculating the numbers of ventilators needed in New York City? Can you take us through the specifics of the models you're using, the assumptions you're making? I'm not asking for a general or kind of conclusory statement [inaudible] I'm asking you specifics. Basically, please show us or rather tell us your work.

Mayor: Yeah, Matt it’s a good question. I think it's pretty straight forward. A regular survey of each of the 56 hospitals to understand the exact usage, that has been deepening. Obviously, the team that Jimmy O'Neill has put together. It's directly in the hospitals working with the leadership of the hospitals, working with the people who are managing equipment and supplies, that's giving us, you know, very, very tight, consistent information. And it's the number of people intubated, cross checking against that. So, one part of it is literally the number of machines and the other part of it is obviously the number of people on the machines. And the supply side of the equation is straight forward because the supply comes in to a central warehouse and we act from there. So, I think it's as straightforward as that. The – we are asking very specifically direct into the hospitals – how many people are intubated today? How many ventilators are you using, how many ventilators do you have left? And constantly rechecking that count. That's how we're doing it.

Moderator: Brigid from WNYC is up next. Brigid?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to make sure that I understand stand some of the challenges associated with and some of the new data that your – the city's providing to the demographics and some of the COVID death. I spoke with an emergency care doctor in Brooklyn who had talked to me about how he has a regional health information exchange and that all of our electronic medical records collective racial and ethnic demographic data so that this is information that the city had. So, can you or Dr. Barbot explain, you know, is it that the Health Department needed to start doing something differently or why was it not possible to publish this information sooner? And then on top of that, when you do begin releasing more information about some of those home deaths that are presumably related to coronavirus, will you also leave the race and ethnicity of those deaths as well?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start and pass to Dr. Barbot look anywhere where we have definitive information. The answer is yes. So, the home debts are again, a painful, awful reality for those families. Clearly, ultimately each one will be we'll have the information and when we confirm a death in New York City, yes, we do know the background of the people involved and when that gets factored in as it should to the COVID-19 deaths we’ll absolutely provide the data. I think the other piece is, do not underestimate the part I'm telling you about, I'm trying to be careful to draw conclusions where we thought we actually had enough information to speak to. It's very – this is, as I said, the last month felt like a year. But where the first case, not the first death and someone can check my facts, I believe I’m right, the first case was March 1st. The first death was a while after that. So, we're really talking about a universe of about three or four weeks and most of that has been the last couple of weeks. We had to be really careful to make sure that we were providing accurate information based on enough to go by. And I think that's really important because otherwise it could have been something that did not represent a bigger reality and then that would have been misleading. And the other point, which Dr. Barbot can go into much more specifically is there are some kind of data that they do not feel the Health Department – they're getting full data on yet – and some of that is because in the heat of battle the folks who normally would keep the data and collect the data, one, just are busy fighting, you know, busy trying to save lives and to the flow of information has been disrupted compared to normal times. And there's other factors as well, but it's not as simple as the information that we would normally rely on is happening as quickly and reliably as normal. Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: So yes, I think the most concise answer that I can give is we have had to do a lot of new and different things with regards to data that we've never had to do before. And it speaks to the way in which we have all needed to adapt to our new reality. And so, in that we have approached the regional health information networks and tapped into them. There are some networks where that was a fruitful endeavor, there were other networks where there were technical issues, where the – it wasn't as easy as just tapping into [inaudible] – and so we needed to then make arrangements to go directly into their electronic medical records. I think the point is that all of that is work that needed to be accelerated. There were technical issues that had to be addressed as well as legal issues. I think that we are in a much different place now and my hope is that when we begin reporting on the probable COVID deaths that we will be able to similarly report on the racial demographics as well.

Mayor: And just finishing the point, I just got the facts provided to remind me, the first death, this again is such a painful reality, but also just a shocking statement on the time and how long each day has been for all of us, the first death was March 14th. So, literally 25 days ago. So that's the world in which we're dealing with that, that the information we have is based on a very brief period of time. But again, now we believe it is unfortunately enough information to say that there's this clear disparity and that tells us something that we can act on

Moderator: Jeff Mays from the New York Times is up next. Jeff?

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Just wanted to ask about again – about the preparations regarding the potential disparities. I mean you announced on January 24th that it wasn't a matter of if, but when the virus would arrive in the city. So, you know, what was done in those weeks leading up to March 1st during the first case, especially if the city knows that these disparities are existing, was there not a plan put together in those beginning weeks to address that potential disparity. And then secondly, you know, you ran on ending a lot of inequality in New York City. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about whether your efforts were focused enough in the health care area in terms of inequality to help end some of these disparities that are causing these deaths now.

Mayor; The first point – the whole point of going out early and saying that it was not if, but when was to try to do the thing and achieve the thing that really could have protected people so much more deeply, which was the testing and for weeks and every – I mean this is all very documented – the whole idea was to try and get the federal government to send the testing that would allow us to get ahead of it while there was still a chance. And then it quickly turned into a non-stop effort to get the aid we needed from the federal government to prepare our hospitals, sustain our hospitals, the ventilators, the supplies, now more and more of the personnel. The point about education, I don't think it should be missed, and I want to really make clear the Health Department's been doing this non-stop, that the education about how to handle this virus, how to protect yourself and your family has been non-stop for weeks and weeks and weeks and it has been focused on all communities.

The Health Department in fact by its nature historically focuses on communities that have gotten less health care and less support. So, I think you go back and look at all the messages, all the efforts made to educate and inform people, get them help, to help people know where to turn. There's a huge amount that was done, but it's quite clear now, we have to go to another level and we have to do some things now that we would never have been able to do a few weeks ago. Like I said, the grassroots outreach would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago. It's still going to be tough now. If we still – I would have to have enough medical professionals in the hospitals to allow for that and we'd have to find a way to do it safely. But if we could get more in-person activity out there, it would be in terms of health care professionals being out in communities, it would be, I think, profoundly helpful. So, I think it's quite clear, there's been huge amount of communication, huge amount of direction given to people, huge amount of guidance in multiple languages to many, many communities. Now it needs even more and we'll do that.

On the other question Jeff – yeah, the battle against inequality takes many forms and I think what Oxiris said a few minutes back is really important. There's a deep connection between whether people have affordable housing or not and what happens to their health. There's a deep connection between how much money a family makes, including working people, do they have decent wages? Do they have things like paid sick leave? Do they have paid family leave? All of these things contribute. Obviously, you're talking about a combination of income, benefits, housing, all of these things that come together, food to say the least, making sure people have available food and nutritious food.

So, and we see all that interconnects with education, all the pieces come together. So from the beginning what we've tried to do is do, bluntly, a massive amount of redistribution of wealth to help working people and help poor people to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. And it's quite clear, all of the things that we did whether it's, you know, a massive amount of affordable housing or subsidizing people to stay in their affordable apartment or a rent freeze, that kind of thing, straight on through to all the food oriented programs, all the efforts to increase wages and benefits, $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, all of those things contributed to try and get people healthier and address the disparities. But then on the pure health care front, a lot of the efforts and initiatives that have been supported at the Health Department, including, you know, the fight against tobacco for example, which clearly is pertinent here, but also what we did a year and a half ago with guaranteed health care. Creating for the first time in this city, the notion of every single New Yorker would either be given an insurance plan that they could actually afford and use or given direct health care through NYC Care. That to me is a kind of initiative that gets really even deeper to the root of the matter. We worked on that for years, we were finally able to get it to be something that could work in this city about a year and a half ago and now it's being implemented.

And lastly, and crucially important, Health + Hospitals was nearing collapse a few years ago, it was nearing bankruptcy, and we put a huge amount, billions of dollars into restoring Health + Hospitals and Dr. Katz and his team had done an amazing job turning it around. I had no idea, Jeff, at the time that we were putting those billions of dollars into the turnaround at Health + Hospitals, that they would be, you know, the vanguard of fighting off a pandemic, that the eyes of the entire world would be on places like Elmhurst hospital. I couldn't have imagined that in a million years, but that's exactly what happened. So, all of those efforts were based at fighting disparity and preparing to have a more fair and equal city and especially to get all the pieces, including the health care pieces. And we didn't know we would confront this to say the least, but thank God we invested in Health + Hospitals because it's the only reason they're able to hold the line.

Moderator: Last two. Henry from Bloomberg. Henry?

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, Harry here.

Mayor: Good. Henry, how are you doing?

Question: On this ethnic disparity, these statistics, I'm struck actually on how close they tracked to the city's tomography. Yes, there's disproportionate impact, which, you know, can't be surprising to anyone who has eyes and ears open, you know, there's institutional racism, there's social disparities. But when you look at Chicago, 68 percent of the deaths have been experienced in the black community, which represents about 30 percent of the population. That's disparity. And the question that is in my mind is whether or not these city statistics, even the reality of racism, are actually accurate or whether the disparity is much worse than this data would indicate? It's one question I had. And the second question which relates to it is how much is city's network of community clinics engaged in this pandemic? We hear nothing about all of this work that was put into community care and decentralizing care outside of the hospitals. Where is the surveillance there? Those are my two questions.

Mayor: Yeah, no, they're good questions. I appreciate it, Henry. The – on the community clinics, again, I think in a situation that went from something like normal to total war time in the period of a few weeks this was an element of the equation that was really important. But it was hard to focus on, to be truthful, when we were first and because first and foremost trying to save the hospital system and I really need people to hear this point. There was a period there where it looked like our hospital system across the board could be overwhelmed and again, we're not out of the woods. We're not out of the woods to say the least, but there was a period of just a few weeks ago where the numbers were tracking very dangerously that even with all the reinforcements we could bring in, our hospital system might not be able to hold and might not be able to save every life that could be saved. That's where we just put supreme energy and effort, because that was what mattered most, was saving those lives. And the local clinics were not in that immediate equation obviously, and a lot of them were disrupted by a shelter in place. They're disrupted, their economic reality is disrupted.

Now we want to go back and try and build out more of a grassroots strategy, now that at least thank God today we're in a better position to hold and maintain and strengthen our hospital system. This grassroots piece becomes more powerful. We've got to go back and work with those clinics to see how we can do it, but again, I'll be the first to say, if God forbid there's another surge or our hospital system needs to help, then everything's going to go back that way. But if we continue to get some breathing room, figuring out that grassroots effort absolutely involves those community based clinics and it makes their role more central again, and that's what we would love to get them in the game and provide them the resources to do that kind of outreach the right way, the safe way. Some of it can be done remotely, but some of it really can't to be effective.

To your very good question about the disparities. Look, I don't want to talk about the pain other cities are going through some of the numbers we've seen about the loss of life, the cases, but also the disparities are just disgusting and troubling and deeply, deeply un-American, really. I don't want to talk about their pain and their challenges. I do want to talk about something that's right about New York City. I think here we have the strongest public health system in America by far. We have the strongest Health Department. We have the strongest public health system with health and hospitals by far. We also have these amazing community-based health providers, which like everything else in the non-profit world in New York City is just much, much deeper and richer per capita. I'm not just talking about grand total, I'm saying per capita this is a city it's always believed, it's been a compassionate place since well before Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. This was a city that put a huge amount into those community non-profits and the charities and all the organizations that did such important work at the community level. And I think that means that even with real disparities, our disparities are nowhere near some of the other places that just don't have anything like that or some of the cities that don't have you know, cities and states that don't have particularly expansive public health capacity. It's just a real profound difference and something New Yorkers should, even in the middle of this crisis, should be proud of that. We've always invested in things like this. We've always invested in helping people at the grassroots.

I think this information we've given today, is today's information, Henry. Meaning to say, as we get more, we're going to update people as we take into account those home deaths. I think those will probably add something to the disparity. I don't know that yet, but I think that. But I think it's not going to be a massive change. I think the template you're seeing here is likely to be pretty consistent. I don't think it ever is the kind of thing that you're talking about has happened in a few other cities, but we will keep updating it and if the numbers shift because – the facts shift, the reality, the human reality is shifting, we're going to talk about it and we're going to talk about what it means. But this today is the best information we have. We'll keep updating it from there. Doctor, anything you want to add or does that cover?

Commissioner Barbot: It covers. The only thing I will add is that of all of the indicators that we track in public health and that we are tracking in this response the number of deaths of people who have passed because of COVID-19 documented by test is probably the most pristine. And as we add, as the Mayor said, the, the number of individuals who have died from likely COVID-19, I think it may end up showing a somewhat different picture. I don't think, as a Mayor says, it will be that much different. But I just want to draw the distinction between a piece of data that is fairly absolute versus a social political construct that is inherently biased if you will. There is no definitive way on how to collect someone's race, right? If you look at my name on paper, you would never think that I was Latina. If you saw me and I didn't say anything, you would never, you might think that I was white, and I'm not white. And so there are inherent biases and how we as a country categorize people, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we are focused on everyday saving lives and that if there are communities – and this is the very definition of addressing inequities – if there are communities that need that much more, than we use our data to drive what in addition we provide to those communities so that we can continue to save lives.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Last call, Mary from the Brooklyn Eagle. Mary?

Mayor: Mary?

Question: Hi. Can you me?

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: Yeah, hi. I have two questions. The first is, is the city considering doing a random sampling at various spots around the city to see what percentage of people who may not even know they have a virus have it? That's my first question.

Mayor: Well, say them both, say them both.

Question: Oh, okay. And the second one is a totally different one. I know the city is not in charge of the post office, but we've received reports here in Brooklyn of an awful lot of people not getting their mail or getting it only very sporadically. And in the main post office on Cadman Plaza East, a large percentage of the delivery people are out for various reasons. They only have like six out of 60 left. So, is there – do you have any word on the mail delivery service, getting them personal protection equipment, anything like that?

Mayor: A great question. So, I'm going to say we do not run the post office. That is a very true statement but I want to speak to it. On the random testing random sampling, I'll pass to you because that's something I've not heard said like that. But let me say on the post office, look, we all depend on the post office. If they're in trouble, that affects us all. We got to figure out how we can be helpful and how the federal government could step up too. So if they're having that kind of a problem with their personnel we're going to certainly talk to the folks from the postal service to see if there's something we can do. Now we got to first take care of obviously so many other people. Our first responders, our health care workers, as I said, people at grocery workers, pharmacy workers who need whatever they need. But if we can help postal workers as well, we certainly will. But I'm also going to push the federal government to step up in that because that should be their first responsibility. They're in charge of the postal service. Bottom line, we have to protect those workers. We're all depending on them. Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: So, on the random testing, I think that the concept of random testing is more useful in the very early stages of responding to an outbreak. And unfortunately, we were hampered by the fact that the testing at the federal government’s level was really not readily available as early as we would have liked in order to have done that early surveillance. I think that the concept of testing will take a different level of importance as we get to the other side of the apex, but it's probably too early to start talking about that just yet because we don't have a good sense in terms of what the overall distribution and availability will be of tests that are being slated for approval.

Mayor: Okay. You very much doctor and thank you to my colleagues and everyone. We obviously have a lot of updates that'll be coming up on things we've talked about here, but we're going to be very, very careful to constantly update you on what we're seeing, the things we've talked about now, the ventilators, the hospitalizations, all the trends. Again, I'm happy we're seeing a little bit of progress. I don't want any over-confidence, anyone jumping the gun, anyone taking their foot off the gas. Let's stick with what's working. New Yorkers should be proud of the fact that your efforts are working. You are the heroes here. Stick with the shelter in place. Stick with the social distancing, double down on it. That's the best way for us to overcome this virus.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-04-09 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. Yesterday I talked to you about some of the first signs we were seeing of some progress of some change. And, I want to go deeper into what it means, what we know, what we don't know at this point, but also how we are going to prepare for the weeks and months ahead. Because the fact that we've seen some initial change, we shouldn't overrate it, we should not count our chickens before they're hatched. But it does remind us that if we do everything we need to do as new Yorkers we can hasten the day when a bigger change happens, when we can go even farther. What this all is saying to me, the more our team researches the situation, the more we learn from experience, the more we really understand this horrible disease through actually dealing with it here at the front line, the front line of this entire nation, what we're seeing as how much the people matter, how much the future will be determined by all of you, by the people of New York City.

What you're doing so far is absolutely on target. It's very, very tough to do social distancing. It's very tough to stay home and practice shelter in place. No one thought it would be easy. I can certainly say, I think for all of us, it's even harder than we imagined. So, for everyone who's frustrated, for everyone who's already feeling, you know, cooped up and like, it's hard to imagine doing this for a long period of time. For a lot of people, actually, one of the things I hear constantly from people is they feel bored. They feel held back from doing the things they love. Obviously, we all feel deeply disconnected from loved ones that we would normally travel to see, particularly at the holiday season. So, there's a deep feeling in this city of the frustration with dealing with all of the changes we've had to go through. And I remind everyone, it's only been in a matter of weeks that we've had to make these massive adjustments.

So, for anyone out there who feels frustrated, who feels confused or angry that all this had to happen, I share that, we all feel it. But we also know that you've been finding a way, in an incredibly noble, consistent manner. The people of this city have answered the call. You are practicing social distancing. Is it perfect? No, of course not. We're the most densely populated city in the United States of America. We've the worst spaced place in the world to try and achieve social distancing, but people are actually doing it. You know, if you wanted social distancing to be perfect, there are places where people don't live so close together. Maybe that's where it could be perfect. But you know what, it may not be perfect, but New Yorkers are doing it in an amazing way. People really are going out of their way, and you see it all the time, to find new and creative ways to live with the reality of social distancing.

Our police officers and all of the public servants who are enforcing this law are doing an outstanding job. Again, is it perfect? No. Are there problems? Yes. And everyone sees the problem. I remind you, please do everyone a favor. If you see a store that's overcrowded or you see a line that's close together, not distanced each person six feet apart. If you see anything where social distancing is not being practiced, call 311 right away and NYPD or other agencies will come there quickly and make things right. But the fact is the NYPD, the FDNY, the Buildings Department, the Sheriff's Office, the Parks Department, they've all been out there doing enforcement and what they're finding time and time again is a very high level of compliance with the rules of social distancing. And they’re finding that, yeah, sometimes people need to be reminded, particularly younger people, that's not a shock. Teenagers having to be reminded to follow the rules, for all of us who are parents, that's something we're very, very used to. That's something we did or do every single day in dealing with teenagers. I certainly did and Chirlane did when we were bringing up our children. So, it's not a surprise that all the adults in the lives of our young people have to remind them constantly to follow the rules. And that our enforcement officers go out and see people of any age, they're going to have to remind them, particularly younger people.

But what we're finding is when the police show up or any of the other agencies, the reminder is working, the warning is working. We're not in a situation where we have to give a huge number of fines, but we do need people to call 311 the second you see it. Anyone who is frustrated, angry, or they see a lack of social distancing, or they see people crowding. You know what? Don't be angry. Just pick up the phone. Now you can still be angry, but the most important is don't be angry and hold it into yourself. Act on it. If you really believe it's a problem, and you don't make that call, then I have to say, I guess you don't think it's that much of a problem. So seriously, all it takes is a call to 311 and then help will be sent immediately. This is a highest priority for the NYPD and all the enforcement agencies to get this right.

I say that to a point. Generally speaking, people have actually been following these rules. Folks have been staying home. They understand you go out, you do just what you need to do your, you get food, you get medicine, get a little exercise, get back. People have been doing that. I've been in many places in this city, and you feel like it's a ghost town. People have been following the rules and that's why we're starting to see some improvement and we are far from out of the woods. But we're seeing something because you did that, you earned that. And I want people to think about it this way. We, all of us, 8.6 million of us have to earn our way out of this horrible situation. Do we deserve what we've gotten? Of course not. No one ever heard of this disease six months ago, didn't even exist. And yet it's visited upon us in a way that's the worst in our nation, one of the worst experiences in the world. But that, when I say we need to earn our way out of it, it's not because we did anything wrong, it's actually because you're doing everything right.

New Yorkers are answering the call, but we need to understand, we have to save ourselves here. There's clearly a lot more our federal government could be doing and I'm going to talk about that, particularly when it comes to testing. But we have to fight back this virus and we have the power to do it in many, many ways. And if we do it the way we're capable of as New Yorkers, the toughest, strongest, most resilient people in this nation, we actually can push this virus back. We actually can overcome this phase we're in. And I'm going to show you what that means. I'm going to lay it out today and we actually can get to a point where we start the pathway back to normalcy and it will not be easy. It won't be like a nice straight line. I want to warn you right now. It's not like we're going to, you know, each week it's going to get a specific easy, clear milestone and it's all going to go perfectly and cleanly. It's not going to be like that if we're not careful, if we're not strong, if we're not disciplined. In fact, this is a disease that can reassert, resurge. You should be very worried about resurgence. We all are. The last thing we can afford is to let down our guard and let this disease back in the door even more and then see the numbers spike up. The pain, the illness, the death spike up even worse because we let down our guard. So when I say earn, I'm using the phrase to make a point. You didn't deserve this, but we're in it. As New Yorkers like to say it is what it is.

But we can fight our way out, and we have been, and we have proof of it. The fact that we saw some improvement in the dynamics with hospitalization, we saw some improvement with the number of ventilators that we had to use versus the number we expected to use. That says that shelter in place and social distancing are working. And now, it's not, let's, you know, let down our guard and take it easy. No, it's the other way around. It's let's double down, let's intensify. Let's take these new standards, these new approaches we've all learned together and really tighten them up and make them as strong as they possibly can, because that's the way out of this. All of us together and everyone has to be a part of it and everyone has to help each other get better. We're one team as New Yorkers, we are one team. Think about that for a moment. 8.6 million people, we all are depending on each other now. So, if someone in your family, someone in your life, or someone on the street isn't doing what's right, you got to help them, you got to remind them. And if there's some people that are trying to figure out how to do it even better, help them too. Because the rules are out there, the standards are out there. We have to help people, literally each person do it better. Think of it this way, every time you practice shelter in place and social distancing the right way, you're literally reducing the chance of transmission to another person. If 8.6 million people do that in unison, the whole trajectory changes. Are we going to be perfect? No. But we can do amazing things together if we feel that we're all in this together and we surely are. And that's a spirit New Yorkers have shown many, many times in times of crisis. And I know, I have total faith in the people of this city that we can overcome this by helping each other to be the best we can be in fighting this disease. So, we need to win our way to the next phase. And I'm going to talk to you today about where we are now and then what it would look like to go forward.

Now, obviously we have a long way to go. Long battle. I've said from day one, this is going to be a long battle, it’s going to be a tough battle. So, the first thing I'm going tell you is to not expect instant gratification or expect something easy. I don't think you do, but I'm just going to make it plain. We still have widespread transmission, clearly. We still are seeing horrible, painful realities for so many New York families. We've got a long way to go. I don't see anything getting easier in the month of April. I think it's going to be a long, tough April. I said for a long time, get ready for a long tough May. Now, if we continue to make progress as we've seen, at least a beginning of, May might be easier than what I originally feared it would be. And I want it to be easier for all of us. But I think the way to think about this is, April and May are when we have to win this phase, we have to push back this disease. We have to open that door to the next phase where things get better. We have to fight for it. And what we're going to do, all of us, particularly our health care leadership, is constantly give you updates. More and more specific updates so you can see the progress yourself. So you can see the fruits of your labor, what you have done to help bring about the change. But the one thing I guarantee you is we will not jump the gun. Unless we have sustained hard evidence that things are getting better, we will not relax any of the Tufts standards, the restrictions in place now. So I want us all to get to that next phase together. But it's going to be based on the facts and those facts are going to be very public.

But we can say, now that we have had a chance to see what a little progress looks like, we can say that it's time to start planning for the next phase very overtly, to talk about it, to give you a sense of what it looks like, and to make sure that we all understand together, everyone, what the common objectives are. The more I think New Yorkers understand the game plan, the better off we'll be. Look, we all understood the beginning of this crisis, no one on earth understood the coronavirus fully, and there was no roadmap. There was no playbook just sitting around for every city, and state, and country to use. But now for the first time, as we've learned more, as we experienced more, we're starting to be able to put together a game plan for the future. So, while we're in this phase, the toughest phase, is the time to plan for the next phase when things start to get better, and to lay out the goals very clearly for everyone to understand.

So first, number one, we cannot allow a resurgence. This would be the single most powerful goal. Whatever you do, don't let it get even worse. And we've already talked about, we know what we have to do to nail this down and not let it spread even further. We have to be tough and disciplined.

Second, our health care system. Protecting it, protecting it is paramount. So much effort in this last month and more went into providing the support, the personnel, the supplies, the equipment, really beefing up our healthcare system for the onslaught that we've seen in these last weeks. And our healthcare system is strong. It's holding our healthcare workers, our doctors, our nurses, everyone that works in our hospitals, they've gone through hell, but they've held the line. They've saved a lot of lives. We’ve got to keep the health care system strong, the one thing we cannot afford is for it to buckle. We can't afford to have a single day where a patient is brought in, his life could be saved and there's not a doctor or a nurse or a ventilator or what they need, so far, we've held that line we got to keep holding that line. And then we've got to keep ensuring that we do everything we can to help people practice shelter in place, practice social distancing and get the support they need. And one of the things we talked about yesterday, and we'll talk obviously about the clear evidence of the disparities that are showing up with this disease and I've been existent for healthcare for way too long in this country and in this City. We've got to help people who need more information, more support, whether it means doing it by phone or whether it means doing it in person, whatever it means. We've got to help people who are struggling the most with this disease and find a way to communicate more information to them, get them more support, get them the ability to talk to healthcare professionals more frequently, more in depth, whatever it takes.

Now, that piece of the puzzle, helping the most vulnerable is something that again, has been hard in an atmosphere where we're all supposed to be practicing social distancing and shelter in place. And we felt very strongly that our health care professionals, of course had to be first and foremost devoted to our hospitals, which for a period of time it looked dangerously close to being overwhelmed. I'm hoping, I'm praying that we can continue to hold line in the hospitals and free up more healthcare personnel for that frontline outreach, whether it be in person or by phone or whatever way it is to help the most vulnerable, I think we can.

And the other thing is to understand as a common objective that the restrictions, the ground rules, the guidelines that we're all living by, they can be adjusted when there's real evidence, but that evidence goes down, hopefully, meaning better progress, more proof that we can start to open up more or bluntly if we don't do it right or if this horrible, ferocious virus hits us in some new way. Unfortunately, restrictions might have to go up, meaning if things really get worse, we might have to tighten up further. It's not what I envisioned today, it's not what any of us want, but the truth is the truth. You should not, and I don't think anyone out there listening or watching wants to be told, you know, pretty lies you want to hear the truth. And the fact is, if we do things right and we get the help we need, especially including more testing from the federal government, we could make some real steady progress, not perfect, not always linear and beautiful progress, but still steady. If we don't do things right or if we get thrown a curve ball, we might actually have to tighten the restrictions further, no one wants that. But we have to be honest to that is a real possibility and what we'll tell you what's going on is the facts laying out to you the exact indicators. So you'll know, you'll see, you'll literally be able to judge all of us, not only the leaders of this City, your leaders, but all of us, all New Yorkers, we're going to be a judge together, whether we're getting it right or wrong, or whether our strategies are working or not because the numbers will be out there for everyone to see. So, it's going to be participatory, it's going to be everyone in it together, we do it right and we never have to get to worse restrictions, tougher restrictions. If things don't cut our way or if we're not tight, then tighter restrictions are an option, an option I hope we never have to use. So, let's be clear about the things that are in place now and the fact that clearly we see initial progress from them and that they are all necessary. And I don't think there's a lot of people doubting that right now but if there is anyone doubting that, let me make it straight for you, make it clear that all of these restrictions were necessary and continue to be necessary. So just to remind us all, we restricted large gatherings, restricted visits to hospitals and nursing homes, obviously all of this, a combined effort between the City and the State. Closed bars and restaurants, closed non-essential businesses, called for face coverings in public, six-foot separation, social distancing, closed things like schools and daycares, limited outdoor recreation, and of course most importantly instituted shelter in place. Now these things happen at different times in different ways according to the information we had, the evidence, we had our coordination with the State, but all of them have proven necessary and all of them will be with us, certainly in my view through April and I think for much of May. Now, it's not all or nothing in the future, it's not like you take this menu and say, okay, none of it can ever move. No, if we do things right, if we make progress, some of these pieces can start to be changed and relaxed, but again, it could go up or down depending on how well we do. So, let's talk about the phases and I've had really extensive conversations with our healthcare team and I want to thank all of them— all of them have been great. Our Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, Dr. Raul Perea-Henze, the team of course at Department of Health, Dr. Oxiris Barbot and our Deputy Commissioner, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis and all of their staff, Health and Hospitals, Dr. Mitchell Katz and his great team. We've had some great help in recent weeks from the Senior Advisor we brought in to advise us on the COVID-19 strategy who is an internationally recognized expert, Dr. Jay Varma, who's with us here today. Many, many people and I'm not even mentioning a lot of others who have contributed, but the constant conversations over the last few days have allowed us to want to really go into depth about these three phases of the epidemic and to help people understand it more clearly want all New Yorkers to be a part of this and to feel again invested in the solutions and the actions we have to take.

So, let's recap where we are now, again, in the first phase that we're experiencing widespread transmission. What it means you're seeing constantly new cases regularly just consistently and we're at a point because of community spread where we can't trace the origins of individual cases to their initial source. We do need in this phase the strong guidelines and restrictions and we have to ration testing, we have to prioritize testing because we have a very limited supply of testing. Where is it going? Again, testing is being focused first and foremost on saving the lives of people who are already in danger of losing their lives. Folks in the hospital in danger or people who it's quite clear are already experiencing disease in a direct dangerous way and the healthcare professionals need that testing to know what's going on. Job one, job two, our healthcare workers testing to protect them, to know who should be at those hospitals and who shouldn't to keep them in the game, all those who can be. We desperately need our healthcare workers, we've obviously lost a certain number of them temporarily to disease and— it's such a tragic, painful truth we've lost some permanently and we know it's so painful that some of these heroes are gone forever, because they sacrificed for all of us. We have to make sure they have the testing they need period, high, high priority to make sure our healthcare workers have the testing they need so they can do what they're doing to save everyone else. And then our first responders who were depending on deeply in this to save lives in so many ways, including all the ways they do that have nothing to do with COVID-19 to be the backbone of getting people to the hospitals when they need and to enforce these rules that are keeping this disease from spreading.

Those are where the priorities are, in this phase where we don't have a lot of testing and we have to think about the most basic things that we can do to make sure healthcare is— there and help is there for those who need it most. As the testing supply increases, we're looking at additional strategies that could be used with the testing here now even in this phase, but we're going to need more testing if we're going to use testing in any other strategic ways or pinpointed ways. We've got to have a bigger supply this has been— the underlying challenge from day one and we've never had a satisfactory answer from the federal government, not one single day since this began, have I felt that the federal government has proven to us they are doing everything to get us the testing we need. Because if they had done it, we would be in an entirely different situation and bluntly, I'm not going to let bygones be bygones to say the least, but I can tell you we still need them to produce in a way they have not done, because if we could get widespread testing, it would start to change the entire— strategy and allow us to do so much more. So, how do we get to the next phase? How do we get to a phase where there's low-level transmission and our lives start to get better, and obviously many, many lives are saved. Continuing to practice the social distancing, the shelter in place is the pathway to the next phase. So when I say earn it, I want people to hear this in a good positive way, we all keep doing what we're doing we actually can work our way to that next phase where things get better and our lives take a step towards normalcy and we're not talking necessarily a huge period of time. This is something, again, I don't think it happens in April, I think if we really work hard, we have a chance of seeing change in May or June so that hard work and everyone in the government has to lead the way and we have to support it in every way possible and force it in every way possible, but we need 8.6 million teammates to do it. That's what gets us to low-level transmission, what does it look like? In low-level transmission, again, I would love to believe this is something you could see later in May or going into June. You're seeing, yes, you're seeing some new cases and you're seeing them regularly, but there's a very profound difference. You can actually trace them again, what we were able to do in the very beginning of this crisis, remember when we used to talk about a individual case and then we'd say, Oh, we're talking to the family of that person or who they worked with and we traced them, we found out these people are okay there, they tested negative. We knew exactly how to trace the map of people that they came in contact with we actually could go back in that direction, which would be a very good thing. So with low-level transmission, you're actually able to use those disease detectives again, because there's few enough cases that you can trace the whole universe of anyone who may have been exposed and get them whatever help they need. In that scenario, with low-level transmission, you can do some relaxing of the restrictions. Not all, not all at once, but you can start to make life a little more normal and people have to be smart about it, not overdue but if we're patient, if we're measured, we can actually sustain that low-level transmission phase and work our way towards the next even better phase. To do this we would need a more substantial amount of testing, if we tried to do a low-level transmission strategy with just the testing we had now, we would constantly run up against the problem of lack of testing capacity. So we need some greater capacity, it's not clear how and when that happens, it's not clear if there'll be enough technological advances or if somewhere on the international market we can get the right kind of tests. It's not clear at all if the federal government will really have the—breakthrough of that they need to, that they'll focus their energies on getting testing to all the places they need it. I think the federal government is still the single most important piece of this equation and when it comes to testing, so we would need more testing and we don't have it yet. But since that phase is not likely until May or June, there's time and now we're going to work very hard to get that testing one way or another, we're searched the whole world to find it, whatever will get the job done. And then they'll next phase is the one we all want to get to, and that phase where there's no transmission to speak of— is when we actually can get back to normal. And always being vigilant, always guarding against the resurgence, always realizing we're up against a very ferocious and clever enemy in the coronavirus. But there is a phase and we can actually describe it now, where you have the ability to see very few new cases so much so that you can basically say it's a no transmission dynamic. To get to that phase you need a lot more testing, that phase requires testing whenever needed, however needed, again, we would need that federal help to get there. In a no transmission phase, what it basically means is there's very, very few cases and essentially the cases that do emerge come from outside the City, not from within the City. So, someone travels or comes here and that's how someone contracts it, but again, rare and traceable that kind of phase means we're out of the social distancing business if we really work hard, we get to the point where we don't have to practice the same kind of restrictions that again, is months away but it is something we can at least envision. And in that phase, you do a lot of testing, you test anyone who might potentially have been exposed, even if they're not showing symptoms, you test anyone who has any kind of symptoms that might relate to the coronavirus. It's a very aggressive testing approach and it is very, very much focused on a lot of information and a lot of support for anyone who needs it. That's a phase we could get to, but it's going to take a lot of work.

So, let's go back on this whole idea of how we go from here to there, to that no transmission phase we all want to get to as soon as possible. So, this graphic is on purpose showing you that it is not a beautiful straight line. In truth, we've talked to all of our health experts and I mentioned Dr. Jay Varma, who's worked all around the world fighting the Coronavirus and other infectious diseases and he's brought back lessons from a lot of different countries and what they've seen and what is one of the most important lessons is it doesn't go in a straight, perfect line. In fact, there's always the danger that people start to relax a little bit and you see the disease start to come back and then you have to fight it back. Our job is to try and make it as straight a line as possible; to stay focused, stay disciplined, practice whatever the standards are at that time and practice them really well and enforce them. And that's where all of us - I keep saying that this is participatory - everyone's in it, but the government, this is piece where the government 100 percent has to always create the right kind of enforcement. And that's my job and the job of all my colleagues, but we need you always. Again, if you see it, call 3-1-1. We used to talk about in the fight against terror; if you see something, say something. Well for right now the enemy is a disease; the terrorist is a disease and if you see something, call it in immediately. Crowding helps this disease to grow and where people are not social distancing, the disease grows. We need you to call 3-1-1. Just call. Don't even think about, just call, report it and help will come right away. That is something I'm guaranteeing and if there's any place where it doesn't come, I will deal with that agency or that official who didn't get the help where we needed it. So, I need the report so I can protect you. So, resurgence, I've addressed, this is a real thing, this is a danger always, this is why we have to look at this and feel it. I'm asking people to not just think about it, but to feel it. We get too loose, we loosen our grip, we get overconfident - this is what can happen. You think things are going good and then suddenly it's back with a vengeance. That does not have to happen, but God forbid it ever did happen, then restrictions go back on and in fact, restrictions may get to a higher place than we've ever seen them before. That to me is incentive to all of us. None of us are enjoying the restrictions we have right now. Lord knows we don't even want tighter restrictions. Let's get out of this phase and get to the better phase. Get up, but let's hold it. Let's stay firm with it and never let that resurgence happen.

Now, let me talk to you about the way we will be giving you the information going forward so that you will be able to watch in real time along with everyone here at City Hall, everyone in the Health Department, Health + Hospitals, Emergency Management, all the people leading this effort to fight the coronavirus, you'll be seeing the same data they see in real time and this will start on Monday. And the goal here is that everyone together, all New Yorkers can watch the movement of this data and have a common goal, a common standard. When all of the data, all of the lines move in the same direction for a sustained period of time, that's when we can start talking about changing some of the rules and making life a little easier. So the goals will be clear and the three indicators are these; we're going to show you every day the number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 conditions. We will also show you, second, the number of people admitted to the ICUs for suspected COVID-19 conditions and then we will show you the percentage of people throughout the city who tested positive - the specific positive tests for COVID-19 throughout the city. Now, what do we need to start to discuss moving to the next phase, that better phase and to start to discuss any change, any relaxing of restrictions; we need to see all three of those indicators move in unison in the same direction. We cannot see two of them get better and one of them get worse. That doesn't work. All three have to move together down; all three have to move in a better direction together. They have to do that for at least 10 days to two weeks -sustained, consistent. If it's one day gets good and the next day goes bad, that doesn't count. We need to see a clean, clear pattern that sustains itself for several weeks to then say it's time to even discuss some of the positive changes we'd all like to experience. So you will be watching in real time and I think it will be inspirational to all of us to realize we're all in this together. We all have agency here, we all have power here, we all have the ability to make a change. You're going to see in real time if it's working for all of us or not working or what we have to do next to drive that down- drive all three of those numbers down.

Okay, what do we need as a city? What do we need as a people to get to where we want to go? That promised land, low level transmission; that's where we want to go and want to go there as soon as we can and it's not going to be easy - long battle - we're going to be at it for a while, but we need to get to that place - all of us - and we need to sustain that. What do we need? Testing, testing, testing; number one, we need a whole lot of testing. We need the federal government to step up. We need them to do it quickly. You can't just snap your fingers, they have to work on it now so that we get more and more and more of it and we get it when we need it. We already have been suffering since January, a number of us on January 24th pleaded with the federal government to get testing in New York City in substantial numbers immediately so we could do tests here. From that day to today, there's never been a single day where our federal government has provided the amount of testing we need. That has to change if we're going to beat this disease not only in New York City, but everywhere else in the country.

Second, we're going to need to take a lot of people power. A lot of staff, a lot of human beings are going to do the outreach; talking to people constantly, primarily by phone of course and text, constantly keeping in touch with people as we get into those better phases where we want to stay in touch with anyone and everyone who either has the disease, might have the disease, needs to be quarantined or isolated. Lot of communication, a lot of follow-up, making sure people have what they need, making sure we're finding out what's going on, making sure people know how to handle things or if they need additional medical advice or care. A lot of staffing, which we will provide. We're also going to need to use information technology to constantly communicate with people in a very advanced way, constantly tracking what they're experiencing - what they need - using IT as a tool where everyone will be able to log-on and say what's going on and what they need and it will allow us to keep so much more information and get so much more information out to people. We're going to need more options for quarantine and isolation. So, we've been building out hotel capacity to create temporary hospitals. If we get to those better phases, particularly to the best phase, to the one we want to get to - low level transmission. That in the end to low-level transmission, again to no transmission I should say, that requires being able to have a lot of capacity for people, for example, say someone needs to be away from their family, from their family because they have the disease or they're symptomatic -we need to isolate. We're going to be doing that on a really big scale; someone needs to be quarantined, we'll do that on a big scale. So were going to have to build that out. Hopefully we'll need less of those rooms for hospitals, but we will need a lot of those rooms for isolation and quarantine. Either way, we have a lot of hotel rooms at our capacity and we will do what it takes to have them available.

And then finally, what we don't control, but we're trying to support with all the efforts of our health team and we're praying that the national and international medical community advances on the front of treatments and vaccines. These are two areas where there could be real progress. I think most of the professionals I've talked to, say the vaccine is probably at least a year away, if not more, but treatments, there's been some interesting efforts going on, research going on, trials going on, maybe that changes the picture and that is happening in large measure in the city of New York. So we are a part of that effort and hopefully that will help to change the whole situation for everyone for the better.

So, we understand what it’s going to take and we understand we're going to need a lot of tools to get there. Some we can create ourselves, some we're going to need help from the outside, especially the federal government. So, the testing capacity that underlies all of this – solve that problem and you can solve a lot of other problems. The ability to isolate people when they need to be isolated; that's something we have more control over and we can build out that capacity. The ability to trace and quarantine folks who need that - that's something that this city does well - our Department of Health and Disease Detectives do well, when they can get to a point where they can actually have a number of cases that they could reach, not an overwhelming number like we have now. But we have a lot of that capacity and we can build more and continuing to do the right kind of social distancing when we need it. We've already proven that, people in New York City have proven they can meet that standard. We just have to show we can hold it. So, we can get to a better place - that's the bottom line - we can get to a better place. We have the ability in so many ways, yes, we need help, but we can do it. People are already showing that we can win – were going to have to do a lot more to get there and we're going to update constantly. Me and my team will update you constantly so you’ll [inaudible] see exactly how we're doing and all the questions, all the concerns that New Yorkers have, you'll be able to ask those questions against all the facts before your very eyes.

As I conclude, then we'll turn to questions from the media. I want to just say, you know, we've talked so much and rightfully so about our health care workers and so many New Yorkers have poured out your hearts to our health care workers and they feel it. I've talked to so many of them; they feel your love and your appreciation. Please keep showing it all the time. Let's sustain them, let's support them, but so many individuals and organizations are stepping up to help our health care workers. I don't think I've ever seen in, in all the years of public service in the city, I have never seen more love, more support, more appreciation for our healthcare workers than at this moment. You know, they, they've been through it after Sandy, they were saving lives after 9/11, and this every day - you know - dealing with the toughest situations. But I think for a long time we sort of took for granted, we had these amazing doctors and nurses and hospital workers and they really haven't been given the thanks that they deserve for a long, long time. Finally, this horrible, horrible crisis is at least bringing out into the open just how amazing they are. So, thank you to everyone who is supporting them. Even the smallest act of appreciation and generosity towards our healthcare workers really helps and they feel it. And there's been some big acts of generosity, I want to thank Goldman Sachs, which already had been very, very helpful - made a major donation to our public schools - now have given a half million dollar grant to Health + Hospitals for staff and supplies, staffing and supplies - that's very much appreciated. And I want to thank a very civically engaged couple, Mark Gallogly and Lise Strickler, I’ve known Mark a long time – he's done a lot for the city. Well they've given a very generous gift to our healthcare workers to make sure that they get food and care packages to make their days a little bit easier while they're fighting this fight. So, thanks to that great couple and so many other people who are stepping-up. We're going to keep celebrating that piece of the love and generosity of New Yorkers for our health care workers.

Okay, so I think I've said it and said it again; you have the power. It doesn't always feel that way in this fight, it really doesn't, and for a lot of times I think we felt confused, pain, powerless, but in fact, you have the power in so many ways to fight this disease back. Our job is to build up a strategy, get the resources in place, get the enforcement in place, do all the things to support you. Of course, get you the healthcare you need when you need it. Everything we're going to do from this point on is to protect you, to protect the people who do protect you - our healthcare workers, our first responders - to enforce these rules, to get you the things that allow you to get through this crisis and for so many people, that means the basics like food, make sure you have shelter protected from eviction. All the things we have to do to protect New Yorkers and also to empower you with information, with support to get through this crisis. We can do it. I wanted you to see those phases ahead, I wanted you to feel those next phases. I wanted you to see where we could go and I know we can get there together. Let me say a few words in Spanish before we take questions from our colleagues in the media.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each reporter.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have Commissioner Barbot, Dr. Daskalakis, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma here in person to answer your questions as well. We will take one question from each reporter in order to get to as many outlets as possible. With that, I will start with Andrew from NBC New York.

Question: Hello, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Andrew.

Question: How are you? Hope you're doing well. My question is, you did state the scenario where there could be a loosening of the rules by mid-May. If that plays itself out, do you envision restaurants opening with limited seating? What can you describe to New Yorkers as a good case scenario should this play out forward?

Mayor: Yeah. First of all, you've interpreted – we've known each other a long time, Andrew – you've interpreted very generously. So, I want to make clear that I'm saying from what we know today, at this hour, April, we're going to have to fight this fight the way we are now into May – and that could be a lot of May, in fact – and I would love it if some change could happen at some point in May, but it may not be until June. So, I want to make real clear, this is based on what we know today. It's always changing. So, I don't want you or anyone to hear that as, oh, we got some hard and fast date in May where things are going to start to be easy – not in the least. Let's win April. Let's go into May and try and get to the change as quickly as we can. It may be May, it may be June – I just want to make sure that that's very clear. But I would say – I'll begin and then our health colleagues will jump in – again, to see those different rules, Andrew, as like a menu, and you may relax one a little and another one not at all. There's different things you can do. We want to be very careful about letting the foot off the gas. And this is something we would obviously coordinate very closely with the State of New York. We all have to work in unison. But the point is to understand the possibility and understand we only get there if we meet some very, very high standards. So, I think what is fair to say is, you know, I'll give you an example. We, I think in any scenario, want to see the maximum people – maximum number of people work from home for a long time. So, that's something that I would say is unlikely to change based on what we know now. We would like to keep anyone who can work at home, continuing to work at home. But there may be some other things where we can start to loosen up a bit, but still with real social distancing and real clear boundaries because we cannot risk the resurgence. So, I don't want to say to you, you know, oh, here's what it looks like and it's real easy. I want to say to you, no, let's first get there. As we get there, if we hit those three indicators I talked about, that's when we can paint a picture more of what might change. But there's some other things that will not change. The last thing we want – and this is kind of a points to this national discussion of how we get a recovery – you know what would really screw up a recovery? Is if we let everyone come back to “normal” too quickly that we cause the resurgence of the disease. That's something that would be intolerable. You can't have recovery if the disease is reasserting. You can't have recovery, if the hospitals are getting overwhelmed. You can't have recovery if, you know, your State government, your City government can't sustain basic services, which is still a challenge because of the massive budget problems we're having and that obviously must be addressed in the next federal stimulus bill. So, for all the voices out there, sort of, painting an easy way back, it's not going to be an easy way back. But what I can tell you is, you get to May, June, and you've made enough progress, you can start to make some changes. But only if we see those three indicators moving the right direction for a sustained period of time.

Any of my colleagues – and I'll open up, Dr. Barbot is here, Dr. Daskalakis, Dr. Varma if you want to jump in, because I've tried to paint the picture but now let's see if the experts want to tighten up any pieces of it?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: No, I think, Mr. Mayor – I think you got it just right. I think it's important to also note that there is no set cookbook to this, right? We've never been here before. And so, the intent with regards to starting to loosen up some of the restrictions around social distancing is to allow the City to take early steps to getting back to a new level of normal. We don't know exactly what that new level of normal will be and so it may include loosening some restrictions so that perhaps different types of businesses may reopen so that we can maybe have some very small number of gatherings occur, all the while maintaining the preventive measures that we have put in place from the beginning with regards to hand hygiene, with regards to covering your mouth and your nose, likely continuing to recommend the use of face coverings for individuals that are high risk. But the most important thing, Mr. Mayor, I think is really critical that you said – is that we need to really take measured steps, because I think what would be detrimental to this response is to have those measures come off too quickly or have New Yorkers feel like everything goes back to normal and we have a resurgence. That, I think, would be the most detrimental to this response.

Mayor: Either doctor, you want to join in? Open chair – you're good. Okay, go ahead. Who's next?

Moderator: Next, we have Anna Sanders from the Daily News.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes. Anna.

Question: So, you've repeatedly said that you don't want to go into details about how the City is handling the bodies of people who have tragically died of this disease. For a week now, I have been waiting for specific answers from the Medical Examiner's Office about this process and what the City is doing. I have not gotten specific answers for many of those questions. It's been several days. I’ve followed up many, many times and I just wanted to see if there's any way you can promise to me that all of my questions will be answered, you know, outside these public briefings because if you're not going to answer these questions then your staff certainly should and I really do think – I want to say that for people who might lose someone from COVID-19, they would probably feel a little better to find out what's going to happen before they are mourning someone.

Mayor: I agree, Anna. Yeah, Anna, I appreciate that point a lot. The reason I don't want to get into sort of deep and graphic discussion on this issue is I just don't think it's fair to New Yorkers and I don't think it's fair to families who are grieving or families who are afraid to spend time talking about something very painful. And I think the dignity that we have to give to all families who are suffering is not to make this a public issue and an issue that causes graphic descriptions publicly and blaring headlines and pictures of dead people. I mean, really, I do understand what a free press has to do in a crisis, but I also think there needs to be real sensitivity to the families that are suffering. So, I think the question – the number-one question to me is, are we able to address this painful reality? My answer to all New Yorkers – yes, because our Office of the Medical Examiner is very strong, very professional, you know, nationally renowned. We've given them every resource they need. There’s still going to be challenges, there's still going to be delays, but we'll support them with whatever they need. And we've gotten tremendous support from the federal government. Of all the areas where I've asked the federal government, from the White House on down, to help us, this is one where every single request has been answered. Everything we've asked them to send has been sent. And we clearly have, you know, painful, but real contingency plans to deal with anything that might come up ahead, but with a very clear standard – dignity for the families. Every family is treated individually. God forbid we lose anyone, but they will be treated, their body will be treated individually. And specifically, that will be something we can do with each family. And some of the rumors and some of the reporting have suggested something much more horrible and inhumane, and that's absolutely false and it should not be reported. With that, to your question about specifics, I agree with you that if there’s specifics that can be answered – not here, but in other setting – it is appropriate to get you answers. But I don't know every question you've asked. I can't tell you every question our folks are feel is appropriate or can answered this time, but I can tell you that our team here at City Hall follow up with you and every single answer that is available and appropriate to give and is specific we'll make sure to work with the Medical Examiner's Office to get you those answers.

Unknown: [Inaudible]

Thank you, Freddi Goldstein. Freddi will follow up with you this morning to make sure we can give you all we can. Go ahead –

Moderator: Next, we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Julia.

Question: Hi. Good morning. So, you know, you're talking about we're going to be going, you know, through May, maybe even June, so I'm wondering when you're going to make a call about schools given that, I guess, for now, they're closed through the end of April per the Governor’s order. And then if you could just touch quickly on why we didn't have that real-time data that we're going to have on Monday. I know it was a wartime footing and everything, but you [inaudible] vast bureaucracy with hundreds of thousands of employees. Why couldn't we have gotten this information earlier?

Mayor: Julia, it’s the same – on the first point about the schools, a series of conversations happening right now to decide do we have one last chance to open them up, you know, in person before it's too late for the school year. The school year goes to, you know, the last few days of June. Do we have a realistic opportunity to get the schools back up for a meaningful enough period of time? I think we are a couple of days away – two, three days probably away from getting to that decision. You’re right that, for sure, April's already gone in terms of our in-person education. We'll decide soon if we think there's a window to still save any part of the year and we'll obviously announce that as soon as that decision is made. The question of data – look, I'm only going to keep this simple. I think what I've said repeatedly is the reality. This has been a wartime footing. We are dealing with a pandemic. We are dealing with something no one has ever experienced – any of us – in terms of how you deal with a brand-new disease, a ferocious disease that has hit us extraordinarily hard with no playbook. We're doing our damnedest to do the most important things and that means saving lives and protecting the hospitals. And that's been where the energy is gone. And in some cases, there was some readily available data. In other cases, it wasn't as readily available or it wasn't as consistent as we wanted. We weren't sure that putting it out would not confuse matters. And that was a real concern, that it wasn't going to be accurate and consistent enough to shed light rather than create confusion. And when you're on a kind of wartime footing, you have to be careful about that. We're now convinced that this is the most important data, the clearest data, and that we can provide it on a very regular basis. And we think, as we've also experienced this – and the doctors – I'm taking from what I – conversations we have daily. So, I'm trying to kind of translate them from doctor into English here, but the – and you all can – anyone can add – but I think more than ever, having fought the fight – one of the things Dr. Barbot said weeks and weeks ago, it feels like years ago, when the disease detectors were dealing with the first cases, they were also getting a whole lot of information about what was truth and what was fiction or what was more true and less true compared to the international literature or experience other places. We're having our own particular experience. But we've also learned a lot about statistics, if you will, along the way, which measures are more important and tell us the most, which had been less crucial to understanding the picture, which had been more accurate, which had been less accurate. There's a lot of different measures out there, some we have found to be lagging more, others are more real time. These we are convinced are the ones that will tell us what we need to know and that we can produce for you constantly in real time. So, long answer to say, I'm just not going to go back and litigate the past, because we're fighting a war right now. But that is the truth. We now have confidence that these are the right measures and we can provide them to you regularly. Anyone want to add, or if I have translated –

Commissioner Barbot: You got it just right.

Mayor: Okay, good enough. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next, we have Joanna from News 12.

Question: Good morning. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Joanna.

Question: So, we understand that you spoke to people one-on-one yesterday outside Lincoln Hospital, people who were demanding for more testing in the Bronx. Could you tell me a little bit about what you spoke about with people who you spoke with inside the hospital, and, honestly, just your reaction?

Mayor: Yes, absolutely, Joanna. Well, first of all, I want to thank the three individuals I sat down with. I want to thank them because it was a very important conversation. But the reason first I was up there, I want to focus on, you know, I've spoken to all of you a lot about getting military medical personnel for the city. There has been progress. I still want to see more. I've had this conversation with the President, the Defense Secretary and many others. We do have the Comfort here. We do have a military medical personnel at Javits, but now we have about 300 also directly going into our public hospitals, and I'd like to see a lot more because our public hospital, doctors, nurses, health care workers need support and the medical military folks are top of the line and they can plug in right away and we need them.

So, yesterday I was with doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists from the Air Force all starting their efforts at Lincoln Hospital, which has been one of the toughest hit in the whole city. And I’ve got to tell you, the health care workers at Lincoln Hospital were applauding them and the Air Force doctors and nurses and therapists were applauding back – literally applauding back. For the health care workers at Lincoln Hospital to literally see the Air Force arrive, to see the cavalry come – and it was very moving to me, dozens and dozens of health care professionals in their fatigues, people who served this nation, they were from all over the country. Literally, I asked him to call out the states they were from – California, Colorado, Florida, you name it, Michigan – it was so inspiring to our health care workers to see those reinforcements arrive. And as I was walking around the hospital to see them all over the place, like plugging in immediately to help – what a shot in the arm. But, Joanna, there were three people who, you know, when they saw I was there, they called out and they said they were really concerned and they were having problems and they wanted to talk about it. And I said, I want to hear what their concern was. And what they really talked about was a lot of the same disparity concerns that we talked about yesterday and feeling like there were a lot of people in the city who needed help getting more information, particularly if they didn't speak English. There were a lot of people who are afraid. And this – the individuals I talked with spoke a lot about immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants who have been pushed away. And, unfortunately, this is what President Trump and the federal government has done and ICE has done, and it's been horrible unto itself, but another thing we've been warning about for a long time before this horrible disease is pushing undocumented people away from health care, away from education, away from things that they had access to is dangerous to everyone. When we announced guaranteed health care in this city a year and a half ago, we said explicitly it was also for undocumented New Yorkers because they're our neighbors too – half-a-million people who are part of our community. But what the Trump Administration did, kept scaring immigrants undocumented and documented from getting the help they needed, like the public charge policy. There's so many things that pushed people away from care and away from help. So, this is what a lot of the conversation was about, that we have to somehow make up for that with more grassroots outreach, more information, particularly in other languages and just a recognition that a lot of people, no, they understand there's a crisis going on, but they don't have enough information on how to respond to it or where to turn for help. And that's why that telephone service we're going to start where people can reach a clinician on the phone in many languages is going to be crucial. We have some of that, but we need a lot more. So that's what the conversation was about. And I thanked them. I told them, even though they, you know, when they first met, they were agitated. I said, you're actually helping me to see things that we're feeling, but you're giving it some real specific shape that's going to help us to deepen our strategies. So, I was very thankful to them.

Go ahead.

Moderator: Next, we have Alex from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask a question about student attendance. Some other school districts have already started releasing some top line attendance data. I know that the Department of Education has started collecting that information, but [inaudible] we're already in week three of remote learning here, there still hasn't been any data released publicly. I'm wondering if you've seen any top line figures about student attendance that you could share or if you could provide a timeline for when those will be provided?

Mayor: Thank you, Alex. Yeah, we should provide that. I think, again, what I'll remind everyone, this is the single biggest effort, the single biggest experiment in distance learning in the history of the Republic all put together in a matter of days. So, what the folks at Department of Education are doing, what our educators are doing is really heroic in another way and it's reaching a lot of kids, but there's clearly an issue with attendance. We know a lot of kids still don't have the devices and that's been an ongoing effort. We know a lot of kids aren't logging on as much as we want them to and that's something we projected. I said it very bluntly, it’s one of the many reasons that closing schools was a painful decision, is that we knew even with the best distance learning we didn't have every kid ready for it, we didn't have every teacher ready for it. And we knew – I know plenty about kids and particularly teenagers – that you were not going to get not only not perfect attendance, you going to have a real problem keeping attendance if you couldn't supervise. So, we will get your data. I imagine what it will show – and what I've gotten is really only very top line, which is it's a problem. It's a problem we predicted, unfortunately. It's problem we assumed. And I think we'll get better in the sense of more kids will get devices and in a world where kids don't have a lot of choices of what to do because they're sheltering in place, hopefully more and more will choose to engage in distance learning. But there's an issue there and we will get you a data as soon as it's ready.

Moderator: Next we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Mr. Mayor, a very joyous and weird Passover to you.

Mayor: Gersh, I want to wish you a zissen pesach. And I hope – I want to see you one day throw me a curve ball and ask a non-transportation issue. I really believe it's in you.

Question: It is in me, but as you know, I cover a very narrow lane and this is a COVID related question. You know, we all know that a budget is not just numbers, but it's an agenda, a signifier of priorities. You issued some PEG cuts that were, that slashed Vision Zero programs by about $10 million yet may have no cuts to any Department of Transportation, expense, budget allocations for road building or maintenance. So I'm wondering what that says about your priorities during this crisis and beyond this crisis, that cyclists and pedestrians are sacrificing key programs but drivers are not?

Mayor: No, it does not say that. And I’m – perfectly fair question, but it doesn't say that because – and I would contest you on your understanding of what's been put out or we'll put out clearer information. A lot of work of the Department of Transportation has to continue because the most basic maintenance like keeping, you know, the classic New York question of keeping our bridges intact and strong, road maintenance, that's about immediate safety issues. All of that has to continue. But there's a lot that isn't continuing as normal. And clearly the Vision Zero work required a certain amount of consistency in the overall work on our streets. If that was being reduced in different ways it was going to affect our ability to do as much Vision Zero work as quickly. So in truth, I think your initial assumption that everything else is the same except the Vision Zero couldn't be farther from the truth.

The Vision Zero work is continuing in many, many ways. As we get back to normal and DOT ramps up more by definition, we're going to prioritize Vision Zero. But what you're seeing in a lot agency in the budget, Gersh, is things that we care deeply about are being held off because this – normal operations don't exist. I mean, look at professional training in our schools, something that's been the absolute foundation of how we make schools better. We can't do it if teachers are not in their schools. And there's many examples like that. If you look carefully and we'll – our folks will go over it with you – a lot of things in the budget proposal that's been put out so far are about money that just can't be spent because normal operations are not going on. Hopefully that's a very limited period of time and then we can ramp back up. But Vision Zero has always been a priority, always will be a priority.

Moderator: Next we have Gloria from New York 1.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask quickly two things. One, do you have an update on how the city is handling people who are dying at home? And what I mean by that, I know that – I understand your reluctance to discuss some of these things in public, but what I'm simply asking is we understand that a lot more New Yorkers are unfortunately passing away at home and that because of the system being so taxed at this time, there are delays. But I am also assuming that there is, as a result of a massive undercount that's happening. So what are the city's plans to count those people? And can you talk a little bit more about how New Yorkers will be able to access this new data that you'll start publishing on Monday?

Mayor: Okay. Yes. I'll start. And then Dr. Barbot, Dr. Daskalakis, Dr. Varma, anyone who wants to join in on any of the pieces or clarifying any of the pieces. Okay, the new data and my colleagues can talk in detail, but it, you know, it'll just be available on DOH website is the easy answer. And again, we'll be not only putting it out publicly every day, but talking about it a lot because it's going to be the prism through which we interpret everything. So again, now that we've had these weeks of very painful experience, Gloria, and we have a sense of what we really think tells us the larger truth, we're going to be putting it out and then telling you what we're seeing in it as a regular part of our discussion.

On the question of this painful reality for our families. So let me frame it this way because I think it's really important for people to understand, anything related to COVID-19, my approach to my whole team to the people in New York City is whatever it takes to help people and protect people and to support families that are going through this, if we can do it, we're going to do it. A lot of other things that we used to do in this government are going to be on hold, as you just heard, or some things we won't be able to do in the middle of crisis. But when it comes to addressing this crisis, protecting people, protecting their health, protecting our hospitals, making sure people are safe, making sure our first responders are there when people need them. All of these very basic things are going to be the priority and that's where we're putting our time, our energy, our money, everything.

So whatever the Office of Medical Examiner needs, they will get, and one of the first things they said they needed was a huge amount of federal personnel and federal support and they got it. But they'll get anything they need from us as well. Because I don't want families to go through this pain more than they already are. I want us to make sure to the best of our abilities, we can get to families quickly and provide them support. We know that'll be tough at the height of this crisis, but it has to always improve because people deserve to be treated with tremendous dignity. So that's just to let you know, my message is whatever they need, that we can get them, they're going to get so they can provide that support.

On the question of the data, absolutely, I want to say there's no question in my mind and the doctors can speak to this, the driver of this huge uptick in deaths at home is COVID-19 and some people are dying directly of it and some people are dying indirectly of it, but it is the tragic X factor here. And I want us to count it in the facts we're putting out, not because I – any of us should be involved in that morbid exercise, but we're forced to, because we have to be open with people about what's really going on. So I say, let's state what I think is the truth. Yes, those deaths overwhelming and not everyone necessarily, but overwhelmingly every because of COVID-19, we should count them towards a total as quickly as we can get the full facts about them and include them in the demographic data. We must. But we understand there's going to be some challenges and some lag in that just because of the sheer nature of the crisis we're going through.

Commissioner Barbot: So Mr. Mayor, if I can add to that, I think Gloria, the only other thing that I would add to what the Mayor laid out, which is absolutely correct, is that we are first and foremost focused on ensuring that every New Yorker who dies because of COVID-19 gets counted. I think that as a city, it is part of the healing process to be able to grieve and mourn for all of those that have passed because of COVID-19. And to date, we have only been reporting on people who have had the test. We recognize that there are many people who have not gotten a test and may have, as the Mayor said passed for other reasons, but likely in this period have passed because of COVID-19. So we are committed to ensuring that that data goes up on our website.

We anticipate that that will happen in the very near future and we are committed to also ensuring that we maximize the amount of racial demographic data that we're able to report along with that. Though, you know, we are facing some of the same challenges that we have faced with the other data that we are reporting, but the, the magnitude and the importance of having this data out there so that it becomes part of the healing process for the city once we get to the other side of this horrible outbreak, I think is going to be crucial.

Mayor: Either doctor, are we good or you want to add? Okay. Good. Next.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from the Staten Island advance.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. So, Staten Island's Political Delegation sent you a letter this week calling on you to treat the borough more equally during the coronavirus crisis after you left Staten Island out of the latest surge planning for the public hospitals and the recent announcement of more military personnel. When Staten Island hospitals need these things too, especially at the new South Beach Psychiatric Center, what is your response to the letter? Have you seen it? And do you plan to send Staten Island military medical personnel or any of the free coronavirus testing for health care workers? If so when? And which hotel have you selected on Staten Island to house medical staff and use for more hospital beds?

Mayor: Okay. On the hotel, Sydney, we'll make sure that something that's ready to be public, but we do have one hotel ready to go and we'll add as needed. So our team will follow up because we just need to confirm that that's ready to go public. Sydney, your questions always are framed a certain way, you have every right to do that, but I just want to aggressively disagree with the way you're framing it because I honestly don't think it's fair to the half million people of Staten Island. We have been supplying constantly the Staten Island hospitals. I've been constantly talking to a Borough President Oddo about what Staten Island needs and what it needs, we're getting it. When we talk about ventilators, N95s, surgical masks, everything we provide, what the Staten Island hospitals need, we are sending them. And I understand the history.

I've lived it a long time as you have of why people on Staten Island, some people are very concerned about making sure Staten Island is not ignored, but I want a protest when actual constant shipments of needed supplies and equipment are going to Staten Island hospitals that should be reported too, because it's not fair to the people Staten Island to only show one side of the picture. It's just not. All the efforts being made to support health care workers, to support first responders, also are for Staten Island. Everything we're doing is for Staten Island, like all of the five boroughs.

So the question of the military medical personnel. First of all, what I said was the hospital's bearing the brunt of the crisis in New York City, and is true by the sheer numbers that some of the very toughest situations at Elmhurst Hospital, Lincoln Hospital, Bellevue Hospital, that the military medical personnel going right into the ICUs and the emergency departments was a high, high priority. And I think that was the right priority because those were the places bearing the brunt the most. And we've gotten some of those personnel nowhere near what I'd like to see. I am continuing to push the White House and the Defense Department for many more military medical personnel. And if we get more and more, of course we should be applying them beyond the public hospitals into places like Rumsey, for example. But we don't have that yet. I'll keep fighting for that.

The question of the testing. Yes, I think this is a very fair question. I did appreciate the point raised by the elected officials from Staten Island that because there – this is a case where I think the point about not having a public hospital is very fair, where we know that Rumsey in particular handles a big burden making sure that testing as we have it is available for health care workers in Staten Island, I think that's fair though. The point, Sydney, and I want this accurately reported is the as we have it. Right now, we're trying to take what is still too limited amount of testing, use it to address the most serious cases everywhere, Staten Island and everywhere. Save lives, protect health care workers, protect first responders. We got to keep building that out and we're continuing to deepen that. So we're going farther with that than where we were even a week or two ago. But it still has to be within the amount of testing we actually have.

So presuming we have it, I would love to see a place like Rumsey and ultimately a place like Staten Island University Hospital have that testing as well. We will work to make that happen. The whole thing hinges on increasing our supply of testing so that we can actually use it the way we want to going forward, not just for the health care workers and the first responders, but actually just start to be part of those strategies to get down to low level transmission and no transmission as well.

Moderator: Next we have Isseu Diouf Campbell? Isseu Diouf Campbell from African in Harlem.

Question: Good morning. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes. How you doing?

Question: Good morning Mayor. I have questions about the data that was released yesterday –

Mayor: Oh, I'm sorry?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, but get close to the phone.

Question: Okay. So I have a question about the data that was released yesterday?

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: I have a question about the data –

Mayor: Yeah, no, I heard you. I heard you, go ahead with the question.

Question: Okay. So, it seems like it's more complicated than just checking a box to know who is dying of COVID-19. It seems like 37 percent of death wasn't clear who those people were. Would you be releasing that data soon and is it possible to make it mandatory? So maybe these types of things will not happen in the future? I had a follow up question about the juvenile centers, will youth be released also because I know that you released some people from Rikers Island but not [inaudible].

Mayor: Thank you, on the last part – and one of the doctors, whoever wants to speak to it will speak to the, the work to make sure that the information is accurate. But let me just speak to the juvenile facilities. First of all, to compare with the adult facilities corrections, we're now between 1,100 and 1,200 inmates have been released as part of the humanitarian effort to make sure we are protecting lives of everyone who's in our correction system. And obviously when we do these releases, we are looking at who can be appropriately released, particularly those who have the most serious health care conditions. We want to be very careful about any human being, even if it's someone who happens to be an inmate who has those serious preexisting conditions, particularly, they're older.

But that is also to protect everyone, to protect correction officers, to protect the inmates who remain by reducing the population overall in corrections. So that's a substantial number who have been released and some releases are continuing, in this case, we need the decisions from the DA's or decisions from the State of New York to be able to do additional releases. And, you know, we've been pushing that those answers need to happen very, very quickly because this is a crisis here and now and we need all of those other parts of the government that have to make decisions to make them right away.

On the juveniles, a very substantial number of juveniles have been released. That has happened. That work has already been done, focused on those who could be released because of lower offenses or those who had any kind of health issue that might be compromising, that has been completed. I want to thank Dr. Perea-Henze and I want to thank the Law Department played an important role, Corp Counsel Jim Johnson, our ACS Commissioner David Hansell. They did that work. They completed that work days ago. We can get you the specific numbers on that. Now to the question about how we try and make sure the information is accurate on those who have passed away. Dr. Daskalakis?

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, sir. So, in an effort to get the data around race and ethnicity out, we achieved a threshold of quality data that allowed us to show an initial view of deaths among individuals based on race and ethnicity. We continue to improve our data sources and you will see that we will have more and more available data. So, I think you were referring to the 37 percent other or incomplete. As we increase our data sources, as we're building this, those data sources will become more and more clear and there'll be fewer individuals who are in that category.

Mayor: Okay.

Moderator: Next we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor, on the testing. When you say we'll need to go to widespread testing, can you clarify what exactly are we missing? Is it kits? Is it the criteria from the federal government? What exactly is lacking there? And are we being as aggressive as we could be with the amount of testing we have now? Because you know, I've heard you and your administration repeatedly say, doesn't really matter if you get tested. Don't even try to get tested unless you know you're gravely ill. So can you just sort of explain the divergence between those two messages now that you're saying it'll need to be really widespread before we can start to move on?

Mayor: Yeah, this is a very good question. I appreciate it, because you're raising a couple of different points that I think make the testing discussion a little difficult. So on my colleagues here in a moment, you all will figure out who wants to jump in on, I know Jay Varma has done a lot of work on this to sort of how you get the testing and what you need for the testing. And one of the most frustrating parts, Erin, when I was talking to Jay about this last night is that it's I wish it was like one thing, it turns out that, you know, the problem with the testing is you don't just need the kits, you need the reagents. And I wish I could even tell you fully what a reagent was and there's plastics involved in all sorts of things. I've heard the phrases, but what it adds up to is a lot of component parts to be able to mix the recipe together or as Jay was saying last night on the phone, if you want a cup of coffee with you know, cream and sugar, you need the coffee, the water, the cream, the sugar and the mug to put it in and we don't have all those pieces, if you will when it comes to testing to get that cup of coffee with cream and sugar.

So the problem is the supply chain is complex, the availability is very uneven to get to the point you'd like to be at, which is what we wanted on day one is what we want today. Nothing has changed. We would like the ability to test anyone, any time, for whatever purpose and know it would be there and it would be quick turnaround. If our entire health team and I know everyone at Health + Hospitals feels this to, if we had that from day one, this would have been an entirely different reality. If we have that in the future, we will have extraordinary tools to lock down the situation and protect people going forward. But what we've been reduced to – for a lot of time, we had nothing. Then we had very little for – you know, you remember at the beginning we had to wait for stuff to go down to Atlanta and come back and it took like three days, four days. You know, we finally got it in New York City, we never had enough. It's expanded in New York City, it’s still not enough, but at least we've had enough to say we can focus on the people in greatest need, that the testing is actually about saving lives. And I'm going to ask Dr. Varma to jump in on this part to help people understand that part – the sort of, if you will, the tactical use of testing in saving lives that are in real immediate danger.

Clearly the testing to help health care workers and first responders to know when they have to leave work, to know when they can come back to work, to help reassure them so they can stay on the job, which is mission critical for everyone. We're trying now to deepen that and take the testing we do have and get to more and more health care workers, more and more first responders and then ultimately if we really had a better supply to start to think about the best ways to use it strategically in communities that need it most. So that we'll get into, Jay can talk about some of that. But the other point, Erin, you put a lot into one question and I commend you, is not to see testing as a false idol. Testing is one part of the equation. It's a complex part of the equation itself, but there's only one part of the equation. Because if I tested you today, Erin, you could be a negative. And then if I tested you tomorrow, you could be positive. So the test doesn't tell you everything. It tells you a point in time.

The antibody test is interesting, which we still don't have, obviously, in sufficient amounts either. It’s a little more interesting on one level that it could tell you at least historically if you've been exposed or not, and that's valuable information, but that's not perfect information either, but it is at least a little more a broader time-frame. I think the challenge is that testing helps as part of an overall strategy, but it doesn't per se save a life. If the testing is negative today positive tomorrow, the person positive tomorrow now still has the disease and our focus is on how can we help them through it. The testing can give people some valuable information for sure, and it can be part of a larger strategy, but it isn't unto itself enough to save the life. And that's where I think some of the confusion comes in. So I've tried as the layman, let's let Dr. Varma get in and Dr. Barbot, anyone could help clarify further.

Dr. Varma: Great. Thank you very much. I do think the kind of key messages to think about are that we use different tools for different types of epidemics. Right now, we're in this storm and the tools that we might use when it's just a little bit rainy or when it's a sunny day have to be used differently. So I think the Mayor has as clearly described that that testing is just a tool. It needs to be combined with the fundamentals of public health. We need to find people who are sick, make sure they're separated. We need to find people who are exposed also separate them, but also monitor them carefully so that if they do get sick, we can get them the care that they need. So I think it's very important for people to understand that during this very difficult time where there is a major storm we can't use all of those tools the way we want to, but we need to plan for that. We don't know if the technology that we want is going to be there. We don't know if all of the supplies are going to be there, but if we don't plan aggressively now, we won't be ready to turn that on the moment they are ready. So I think one of the key messages for people to understand is different tools for different times. But we also need to plan to use those tools as effectively as we can when the time comes.

Mayor: You go, and then I want to ask you both something to add to the question.

Commissioner Barbot: So what I'll add to what Dr. Varma laid out, and Mr. Mayor, what you laid out is if we look at this from the big picture, if you envision the curve of this epidemic as a rough bell shape curve, the utility of wide-scale testing in the very beginning is to contain the outbreak and to try and minimize the number of people that are affected and our efforts at that were severely hampered by what happened at the federal government and not having testing widely available. Strategically, again, on the big picture perspective, the utility of having large scale testing as you're going the other end of the curve is to help speed that process up so that if we think back to the weather chart that the Mayor put up and, and looking at, you know, is it cloudy or is it sunny? That wide-scale testing is going to help speed that downward trend as much as possible, so that as Dr. Varma said, we can find individuals who are symptomatic, provide them the opportunities and the wraparound services for them to remain in isolation, in quarantine so that we can further accelerate having fewer and fewer infections in the city.

Mayor: So thank you doctor. So this is just a playoff of Erin's question. I think, and again, the fact that this is so for all of us, hard to make sense of all the pieces, it’s not just testing everything else is because, I keep coming back to this: here's a disease – if I had said coronavirus to you six months ago, you would have any one of us would have stared blankly back and say, what are you talking about? It's a disease that didn't even exist as far as we know in this form half a year ago. And there is literally no one on the earth who fully understands it. So we're all playing catch-up here but I think what is clear, and I'm going to try it as the layman and let my two colleagues respond to it, is since we don't even have the testing on the level we want and we have had to from day one ration testing in a way, none of us wanted to do. We have that problem. But then there's also the problem of what the testing can tell you. And what it can't tell you. As I said none of it is perfect. We don't have the antibody testing on a wide scale and that will tell you something about people's past exposure, but it doesn't even guarantee you couldn't get sick again. We think it suggests it, but we don't know it. On the regular testing, that doesn't guarantee what's going to happen tomorrow.

So one of the things that all the doctors have talked about is, you know, to focus on symptoms which is least tangible. If someone has symptoms, then you want them to immediately isolate. You want them to, you know, have a different situation with the people that are living in their household with. And this is something we're going to really focus on. If you're living under the same roof with someone, a positive test tells you something for sure, but symptoms tell you something also. And symptoms are really obviously visible, and that's when you want to make sure there's as much separation as possible to help people through and make sure more people don't get infected. But now, you know, the evidence from the last week or so about asymptomatic transmission, you know, that finally now has some scientific backing. Well that's another curveball too. And the fact that someone can be on that scale of, you know, starting to, I'm going to use again my imperfect layman's words, but starting on the pathway to being infected and being able to infect others, but it might not even show up on a test. So we're constantly trying to figure out how to make this simple and common sense that people respond to that, what they're experiencing even when we don't have enough testing. But even that is complicated because this disease, it is, you know, I keep saying it's a very clever disease. It doesn't give you a clear target a lot of the time. So I'm trying to bring something out. Maybe the doctors can help me about the fact that we know testing would help, but part of why it's not a silver bullet is even with the testing, you don't get always the full picture. You want to try that one.

Dr. Varma: Yeah, I’ll sort of emphasize two points. One is to remind people about – for this type of infection, there are really two types of tests that we have. One tells you whether the person has like an active infection and is likely to infect other people. That's the test that you're hearing about most commonly. The second is a test to see whether or not you've been exposed at some point in the past. And it may also help you know whether or not you’re safe and won't get infected again. Unfortunately, what makes this challenging for us and what makes this challenging for all of you is that there is a lot of uncertainty. Everything we're telling you has a but, or, except for. And so, we really need, you know, everybody in this fight. We need the scientists in this fight to help us get clarity to all of that. So, I think that's one point.

The second point is, in addition to the innovation that we need in testing, we need some innovations to our regular tools. Our normal approach, whether you have a, let's say, an STD or HIV or tuberculosis is to find the person who's infected, interview them carefully to find out all of the people who might've been exposed to them, and monitor them and inform them also. But when you have a disease like this, which is so contagious, that it spreads through everybody. We need to figure out a way to do that, not just with the people that we have, but with modern technologies. And so one of the things that we're working very actively on is trying to learn from the practices that are being used in other countries that are going through this as well as find out our own innovations that are adapted to New York. So, it's innovations in the testing and it's in innovations in the information technology as well as our tried and true experts in public health that together are going to really make us move to those first to the rainy session and then ultimately to the sunny days.

Mayor: Both of you, one more thing, I’m just playing off this. On the point that and again, I think the asymptomatic, again, another horrible wrinkle in this and still not fully understood to say the least. The guidance that was put out by the Health Department was based on, you know, initial research. But that doesn't mean we have the full picture in any way, shape, or form. But this point about – in the absence of the testing that we should have, the kind of numbers and quantity, you know, availability, that can only happen as best we understand it with a strong federal intervention, and we've never had that in the absence of it, trying our best to help people protect themselves and their families. I think the symptoms has been the one thing that's been evident and strong and a lot of people can make sense of, but we've got to keep communicating more and more what you do once someone in the household has the symptoms and how to navigate that.

I think in a world where there's not enough testing and there may be substantial asymptomatic transmission, you know, it's incredibly frustrating and challenging and difficult for everyone. But I think it's fair to say the one thing that you kind of have some consistency on is when it does manifest, there's something you can do and we've got to help everyone. We've got to keep getting more information out. We got to keep getting people in more dialogue about that. We've got to help people navigate it and people have to take that guidance and work with it right in their own home. Can either one of you speak to that?

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, no, absolutely, Mr. Mayor. I think that we have over the course of this outbreak evolved our guidance as the science has become available and it's important for individuals to have a low threshold for recognizing the early onset of symptoms, cough, fever, sore throat. We're learning more from our frontline colleagues that you know, what happened during the allergy season sometimes got misconstrued as allergies. So things like postnasal drip may have been early symptoms of COVID-19. That being said, recognizing symptoms early, isolating early, and ensuring that if you are unable to self-isolate at home, away from other family members, to use face coverings in the home and ensuring that if you are a caretaker of someone in the home that you are taking the proper precautions. And so I think to your point, Mr. Mayor there is as we prepare for coming over the other side of this epidemic, we will need every single New Yorker to be able to recite these recommendations in their sleep. And so we're focused through the Health Department on ensuring that we're leveraging our partners, that we're working with media and we're open to suggestions of any other ways in which we can really spread this message even further.

Mayor: I think that's very important and want to emphasize all the new ways that we announced yesterday we're going to try and reach deeper into communities, but also this point about for those who can isolate in their home and those who can't. I think one of the things we've got to keep focusing on, again – let us pray that our number one focus, which has been preserving and protecting our hospitals to save lives, that we continue to get a little bit of relief on that front and we can put so much more of our energy and resources out into communities, but continuing if, if, if that we continue to have that opportunity, this point about helping family members understand, particularly in a multigenerational home if one is sick of any generation, how to properly isolate and support that individual without creating challenges for the rest of the family members.
And being able to do that with the right information and the right support and literally have someone being able to call a human being a trained clinician and talk it through and get advice on how to do it. But also, as I mentioned in the overview of where we're going to go through these phases, taking that hotel space and using it more and more to support families who need to have a loved one out of the home for a period of time to create more protection for everyone else to date the hotels, the focus again has been preserving and protecting the hospital system and being ready to address the huge percentage of people who are in life and death situations. That's been the focus on the use hotels, using them as places that health care workers could go who couldn't go home to their families, those types of things. Over time particularly we don't need the hotels as much for hospital space. We can open up more space to allow family members to have isolation if they need it. And I think to the discussions that we've had Dr. Varma on what it looks like to move into the new phases, you use things like hotel rooms and quarantine and isolation more and more in that kind of strategy. That's something that could relieve pressure on folks who are in really tight quarters.

Dr. Varma: Yeah, absolutely. I think the, the experience from around the world has been that until you can stop transmission from one person to another, you're never going to get a hold of this. And a lot of that transmission does occur in homes. And New York City is similar to some very, you know, large East Asian cities where we all live in apartments and we live close together and we live with multiple family members. So we need to be able to create opportunities not just for the public's health to be protected but for your family's health to be protected. And so that means if you develop symptoms and there is no way for you to safely be kept in your own apartment in a way where you're not infecting others, we have to create those opportunities. And, and I think as the Mayor has highlighted those opportunities are often a privilege. And we need to recognize that there are so many communities that are so vulnerable to this disease not just because of existing disparities, but also because they don't have the opportunity to do these things in their home. And so it's really incumbent upon us to not just have a strategy that innovates, but also that really addresses the equity issued as well.

Moderator: All right. We're going to finish up there for today.

Mayor: Okay, good. Yeah. Thank you. And everyone just to finish to say this I said the other day, but I want to keep emphasizing this is a long, tough battle. But there are a lot of heroes. Health care workers have been heroes. Our first responders have been heroes, but really everyday New Yorkers, you've been heroes too because you've really done an amazing job practicing social distancing, handling shelter in place, making it work. God bless you all. It has not been easy, but you're doing it. You're the heroes in this fight too. And we can get to that better place. We really can, but it's going to take a lot of hard work, lot of devotion. Keep doing what you're doing. Simple message – keep doing what you're doing, double down, and that's the way we get to a better place.

Thank you all.

2020-04-01 NYC Mayor de Blasio Brian Lehrer

Brian Lehrer: It’s the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. And I think we’re going to begin as we usually do on Fridays with our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. But our line to the Mayor is not yet connected. So, you can give us a call at 212-433-WNYC with your questions for the Mayor. We assume this will be rectified momentarily in the socially distanced world here. 212-433-9692 – or, you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. And the Mayor is here now. Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you very much, Brian.

Lehrer: And, you know, before we get into the latest news and next round of policy decisions, can we take a moment together to simply acknowledge on this Good Friday, day of the crucifixion, whether it's historical or not, and, you know, with the universality of human suffering that it's supposed to represent, at very least to Christians, of a situation behind the numbers. Today, we're likely to hit 5,000 New Yorkers dead from the virus, but that's 5,000 individual lives with therefore tens of thousands of New Yorkers in mourning and who can't even grieve together. It's hard to have the words, but how have you been finding them to express the humanity behind the numbers?

Mayor: Brian, thank you. Thank you for what you said, because I think we're all in the middle of fighting. It literally feels like fighting a war. The number of people we've lost feels like a wartime reality. It's far surpassed the number of people we lost on 9/11, and that's seared in our memory, all of us, that day. And so, I think we're all struggling to make sense of it in the most human terms, because, at this point, you know, every one of us knows people who are suffering from this disease or have suffered. Many, many of us, most of us know people who have passed away, and their families. And it's very personal now. And I think, somehow, we have to – there's this sort of – some struggle going on in all of us to figure out how to acknowledge that humanity while fighting this war, because everyone's in this, everyone is in one form or another trying to save each other and help each other and help their families, because even a person who, you know, goes out with a face covering on, or a person who makes sure everyone around them is socially distancing, or any of those things is contributing to finally pushing back this disease and saving lives. But, at the same time, we all are in, like, a suspended state of grief, because it's so intense, it's so total, it's hard to even make sense of. It's so, just, constant, and it grows. And so, I think the holiday season is a very, very important prism to understand this, because when you think about Passover, when you think about Good Friday and Easter, there is an eternalness to the messages that come with those days and the faith that tell us of people's struggles and how they overcame them, and tell us of people's values, sort of, triumphing over the adversity and the pain in the world. So, I think it's – this whole episode has been so horrible, but the fact that it is overlapping these holy days and these days where people really, kind of, dig deep into their faith. And someone said it a few days ago, that we're all almost being pushed back toward what our ancestors lived in those biblical times, in the sense of there's scarcity, there's fear, there's so much less, and yet people are holding on to their faith and their values and each other and supporting each other. So, even in this pain, there's like – there's something noble – there’s something noble in this city.

Lehrer: That's a good thought. Thank you for that.

Mayor: Thank you.

Lehrer: I read you're now saying social distancing will continue until at least mid-May and it'll take widespread testing of New Yorkers to safely reopen things very much. Is that scenario, widespread testing for the virus or antibiotic antibodies to the virus, of the general population by mid-May, not just people who are sick at that time?

Mayor: So, there's basically two phases here. We'd be very lucky if it's mid-May. I want to first level set for the people of this city.

Lehrer: That's new isn't it?

Mayor: Well, no. I think some heard my remarks yesterday where I tried to really put a lot of guardrails on it and cautions on it and they sort of jumped in the most optimistic version. So, I've been saying – unfortunately, I've had to say it for weeks, you know, expect a very tough April. And for a while there it looked like May might even be worse. Knock on wood, Brian, it’s looking like May could be better than April, but we just don't know enough yet. We've had some good days of progress in terms of what's happening in our hospitals. At the same time, as you said, we're losing a lot of people, you know, who had gotten infected earlier. So, it's just not time to get in any way to assume we now have like a clean, clear picture of what's going to happen in the next few weeks – that's premature. But what is possible, what is possible is to go through April into May and see enough progress to start, you know, thinking about and start acting on some changes to take small steps towards normalcy. But they'd get to the testing, we would need a lot more testing to get to that next phase. So, the three phases we talked about are right now this kind of community transmission, widespread, which is what we're experiencing right now. Low level transmission is the stage we need to get to next where it's much less frequent and we can actually trace each case, and this is where the testing, you know, must be available on a broader level than anything we have now to be able to do deep – you know, that disease detective work we talked about in the beginning of this crisis. And it was possible when there were only a few cases.
We need to get back to that level where we can trace every single case, find everyone who might've been exposed, test all of them, contain them, give them a quarantine if they need it. And then, that pushes us down to the point of basically no transmission, where there's basically no new cases except for occasional ones that come in from people traveling into the city or traveling out of the city. That's the sequence we have to go through. That last part, to sustain it, you need really widespread testing to be available. And that's what we saw to some extent in South Korea, that was part of what they used to overcome this, or, at least, to, you know, have some success. So, Brian, right now, the history of testing is just so painful here. If we had it in the beginning, it would have changed everything. It might've allowed us to really contain this disease. We all know the federal government was, you know, not doing what we needed them to do, did not provide the testing here or anywhere else. And we still don't have it. We still don't have it on the level we need even to get to that next phase to really be secure, that we can trace every single case as they come up while protecting our health care workers, while protecting our first responders. So, we need more and we need everyone to stay tight, tight with the social distancing, with the shelter in place in the meantime to really double down on it to get to that next and better phase, somewhere between May and June.

Lehrer: And I read that you'll begin to publish real-time information on COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations beginning Monday to better track data that will determine when coronavirus restrictions can be lifted. The Daily News has that, maybe others – will you be putting out new kinds of data?

Mayor: Yeah, so what we're doing is in some ways new and in some ways we think clearer and more reliable than some of what has been available previously. And this has been how – this crisis, someday we're going to go back and understand that how little time passed between it being just an initial crisis we were all trying to make sense of and then being in the thick of it. It was literally just a few weeks. And the data, although crucial, was not always accurate and consistent, because data collection, obviously, was a lot less of a central point – a central focus, I should say, compared to saving our hospitals, saving the lives of people who needed the ventilators and the doctors and the nurses to be where they need them to be. But now, because we've had a little bit of a pause here, a little bit of an improvement and it’s allowed people to regroup, we will be putting out data starting Monday. It'll be very clear about COVID-related or suspected COVID-related hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and percentages of people testing positive. And looking around the city, it's quite clear it will portray the disparities that we're already seeing. There's no question about that and that's very sad. But what is important strategically, Brian, is that we've said if those three indicators – this is what our health leadership believes very, very strongly – if those three indicators go down in unison for, say 10 days to two weeks consistently, that is when we can start to discuss changes in the restrictions we have. But even then, it's partial, it's careful. We're not going to – no one is saying “go back to normal.” I don't even know what normal will be after this and I think we're all going to have to work to define that. And I'll be talking to New Yorkers about that in the coming days. But the point is, you're going to see it very publicly, daily, three indicators. If they're moving unevenly, if some are going up, some are going down or they're only flat, not enough. All three have to go down in unison for at least 10 days to two weeks to be able to see our way to the next phase.

Lehrer: So, that's a good frame for our listeners to know how to begin to watch the numbers, starting next week. And also, a good warning for how long it's going to take. Gideon in Englewood, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hello, Gideon.

Question: Hello. Hello, Mr. de Blasio. I wanted to ask you a question about the subway system in the city.

Lehrer: And Gideon, forgive me, just for the reference for the context for our listeners. You told our screener, you're the director of a medical clinic in Brooklyn?

Question: Yes, I am.

Lehrer: Okay. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. I'm a doctor. I direct a medical clinic in Downtown Brooklyn and every single member of my medical staff and clinical staff – a total of 14 people – use the subway system to get to work. And also, many of my patients, the ones who can't be seen by video, have told me about intolerable overcrowding on the subway platforms while waiting for long periods of time for the trains, which are routinely packed with passengers as well as containing homeless people who are lying down on the benches occupying multiple seats. This makes your mandate to observe social distancing impossible, Mr. Mayor –

Lehrer: Whoops, go ahead. Finish that thought.

Question: And endangers dangerous my staff of essential workers and often medically impaired patients of advanced age – makes as social distancing impossible.

Lehrer: And let me get you a response, Gideon. And, Mr. Mayor, I'm sure I don't have to tell you that we've been getting calls like this. I'm sure you've been getting reports like this with the subways running as infrequently as they are now largely because of staff shortages because of subway workers out sick. The subways are actually not a good place to do social distancing and these are the people who have to go to work or are sick.

Mayor: Yeah, Gideon, thank you for the call and it's very, very painful to hear. And I don't think we're getting the whole truth on this one. I'm very frustrated by this because I spoke to the head of the MTA, Pat Foye, I think it was actually after the show last week, I believe, when these issues came up as well. And I know him a long time and I respect him and he affirmed to me that this was a very limited problem. And I don't understand how we can say that when I have all through the week heard these reports. Again, look, we have got to be clear here, this is a crisis and we all have to work together. The MTA is run by the State of New York. I'm going to immediately go back to Pat Foye, to the State, and ask them how on earth if people are experiencing this, how come it's not being more clearly acknowledged so we can act on it together?

Lehrer: And what could be done?

Mayor: Well, look, I mean, I think we’ve got to, all of us, work together to figure this out, but it begins with if the frequency of the trains is a problem, is there anything that could be done? I mean, at this point, it's horrible what everyone's going through, but, you know, is there any way to run more trains where they are needed? It may not, of course, be everywhere. It may be certain times a day or certain lines, but if that is what's going to protect people, we should do that. If the trains can't be run, can we run buses on those lines as an alternative? Again, I don't run the MTA, I can't speak for them, but I can say that the solutions to me would be either more trains in the right places or more personnel to avoid the overcrowding and make sure people are spread out, or more buses. Now, I've told the NYPD I want them to be at are part of the solution to. This is the part of the equation I do a control, that the NYPD needs to be where there are problems. For example, I know there were certain stations in the Bronx, 149th Street, as an example, where there were specific problems and my instruction to Commissioner Shea was send the NYPD in to make sure there is not overcrowding on the trains or the platform. Spread people out, tell people, you know, don't get on that train yet, hold people from getting into the station of the stations too crowded – the kinds of things that can be done if there's leadership and supervision on site.

Lehrer: [Inaudible] have to wait for an hour and a half to get on a train in that scenario?

Mayor: It's horrible, Brian. But look, we are talking about protecting people's lives. And I know a lot of that people on the train are health care workers, first responders, people we need to get to work, but we also can't endanger them and everyone else by failing to practice social distancing. And it's like – it's literally, to the extent where you’re seeing any progress, and we are seeing some, it is because people took social distancing and shelter in place seriously. So, we cannot break out of that without endangering – one of the things, Brian, I really warned people about yesterday morning when I went in detail over these phases and where we're going is, if we are not careful, this is a disease that can reassert and you can have a resurgence and that's the worst of all worlds. So, we have to practice social distancing. I would say, I'm going to talk to Pat Foye at the MTA, can they increase service on certain lines, especially I would assume, during certain hours or shift changes of medical workers and other folks? Can they – if subways are not a good option, can they do buses and really publicize that that will be available. If they need more PD help, we will provide it where they need it. The homeless piece is very real too and we have sent out our outreach workers even in the midst of all this to try and get homeless folks to come into shelter, and some have, but there's some that, unfortunately, you know, because of mental health and other reasons are very, very resistant. But you have to have enough space, for example, on the subways, really clear limits to how many people can be in each train. So, that has not been done yet. I think to do it more clearly, that there should be no more than whatever it is – 20 people or whatever it is – is the right number on a subway car that allows proper distancing. I'll talk to the MTA about making that standard clear and more public, because I think it's got to be abided.

Lehrer: Okay. Amir in Jackson Heights. You're on a WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Amir.

Question: Hello. Good morning, gentlemen. How are you today?

Lehrer: Okay.

Question: So, I have a couple of – I have two points. So, last week I called in and I asked you, Mr. Mayor, about having – canceling rent. You see, this should have been in my opinion, priority number one, two, and three.

Lehrer: If you got on with the Mayor last week, I just want to say, you're a lucky guy on call-in roulette. We might have to start a quota, so lots of New Yorkers have access to the Mayor on different weeks. But go ahead and ask your follow up.

Question: So, I called and I tried to – I asked you about having a canceling the rent. You're telling us that this might go on until May – excuse me, I'm a little sick – this might go on until May. And I feel like we need to have to cancel the rent. That's just my first point, I want to see where we are on that. And then two –

Lehrer: And you're a NYCHA residents, so this is why your question goes to the Mayor – not a private landlord, correct?

Question: Exactly. So, my second point is, how about trying to get the rent canceled for NYCHA residents at the very least? [Inaudible] suffering, I lost my job, I still have to pay rent, and I'm just wondering why can't we get that? At the very least, NYCHA residents are some of the poorest residents in New York City, the most vulnerable residents in New York City. Let's get the rent canceled for the very least until June.

Lehrer: And Mr. Mayor, we get one form or another of this question for whatever public official is on every single day.

Mayor: Of course, you do. And it's – so, first of all, Amir, I want to start at the beginning, you said you were sick. I want to make sure you're okay and, you know, that you have the information you need and you know what to do if your sickness has anything to do with the symptoms of coronavirus. So, I just want to check, are you okay?

Question: I'm fine. I’m taking the quarantine seriously and staying home and wearing a mask. So, I'm fine. I had a little fever a few days ago, but nothing life-threatening so far so good. I’ll be here to call you next week.

[Laughter]

Mayor: Amir, if there's any problem, and if you have your own doctor, that's great. But if you don't, you can call 3-1-1 and get connected to a doctor at Health + Hospitals if you need any guidance. Okay. So, there's a broader idea of a rent moratorium. That's something that the State only has the power to act on. There's this specific idea of a rent freeze for the over 2 million New Yorkers who live in rent stabilized housing. I think that's an idea that makes sense. We're working through how to act on that because that's something that has been done in the past in times of economic distress. Clearly, this is the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. I think it's quite clear why a rent freeze makes sense. And then on NYCHA, it's a really good point. NYCHA is obviously, Amir struggling in general to keep going because of all the history of disinvestment over decades. So, what I will do is get an answer today. It's a very fair request. It's against the backdrop of, you know, an organization that 400,000 people are depending upon for their housing. And it's something I'm pretty certain we could only do with federal approval because all the public housing is chartered by the federal government. But it's a very, very fair request and I'll get an answer on that today.

Lehrer: And Amir, thank you for your call. We may block your next week, but thank you for your calls. I'm glad you said that thing about 3-1-1, if you don't have a primary care physician. Because the WNYC and Gothamist report this week that I know your administration has noticed, that the number of people dying at home has gone from about 20 a day to 200 a day in the city. Presumably a lot of that is because COVID patients who aren't in the hospital are succumbing at home. And I have a theory about that, which is that people who don't have private primary care physicians, who are there to be attentive to them and give them the warning signs about what they're walking or breathing might feel like for when it's time to go to the hospital or take that next step toward going to the hospital. People who don't have those primary care physicians might be primarily the ones who are dying at home because they're not going for in person medical attention quickly enough. I don't know if that's the case, but I have that theory. So, I think that it's important that people know that 3-1-1 is a last ditch option for getting to a primary care physician.

Mayor: Yes. And let me, you're making a powerful point. I’m just going to take a second to explain this. You're right on the money that there are so many New Yorkers, let's be clear. You know, a year and a half ago I announced that we were doing guaranteed health care for all New Yorkers and it really brings out the larger facts here, the disparities that we're talking about that are underlying this crisis. So, a year and a half ago, the number was 600,000 New Yorkers who had no insurance at all. And about half of them were because they're undocumented folks who could not legally get health insurance. What I put in motion then was a plan that's been growing since then that everyone gets coverage. If you can afford health insurance, we came up with lower cost and easier options. If you couldn't afford it or you didn't qualify because you're undocumented, you could get an NYC Care card, get assigned a primary physician at our public hospitals and clinics and get regular care like everyone deserves. So, it's a version of universal health care.

And I think what's happening in this whole horrible tragedy with COVID-19 is that we are seeing just how devastating it is when a country does not have health care available to all, regardless of income and regardless of documentation status, that people are made very, very vulnerable. So, I think you're exactly right. Brian, I think it's one part people who don't have a primary care physician. I think that's another part, people who are immigrants, undocumented or documented, who have been made afraid by the actions of the Trump administration, they're afraid to go and access services that were, once you know, much more common for them to turn to. We have things like the horrible public charge rule and of course the ICE raids that have contributed. And I think a lot of people have gotten into a culture of understandably, a culture of fear where they hold back. And I think its endangered lives.

So, the answer, first and foremost, to the point you raised about can people turn for help? Yes. You can always turn to 3-1-1 and if you say, you know, I'm in danger. If it's a right now danger, you're going to be transferred to 9-1-1 and an ambulance will get sent. If it’s a danger where you're trying to get help from a doctor, see if it might be a situation where you're in enough danger, you might need to be tested or hospitalized, then 3-1-1, we'll plug you in, we'll sort of patch you through right away, live to a Health + Hospitals clinician who will talk to the individual and they can do it in multiple languages, to see if they need immediate care or coach them through. Now, we announced a few days ago and seeing all these disparities fully documented now and clear and the Latino community, unfortunately particularly bearing the brunt and then the African American community. That we're doing a new plan that's going to involve a lot more grassroots outreach in multiple languages, to educate people, get them support. But also try to much more deeply provide that calling capacity, that a person can talk to a clinician. I want this to be much more widely available because I think a lot of people need answers, need coaching, need to just, need reassurance. But they also need to be able to ask questions and have a trained person answer them in real time. And I think that's going to help protect folks who otherwise are just living with a lot of fear and confusion and they need a trained person to help them through it.

Lehrer: Good. I'm glad we got that out clearly and in a little more length. We're getting a number of tweets from people in the Streetsblog community asking why you can't close miles and miles of streets to allow for easier social distancing while walking? They say Oakland, California did it. I know I've had the experience walking around in my neighborhood with, you know, me and my neighbors bobbing and weaving around each other on New York City streets so we can keep six feet. And most people are trying to do it. And not everybody is as attentive to keeping the six feet from the people in their neighborhoods. So it is a challenge when you go out, you know, in a lot of parts of the city, even if everybody's trying to do it, to keep that social distancing. So, can you do something like that or what would the impediments be?

Mayor: So, it's a very fair question. I'm not familiar with the Oakland model. I'll look into that today. The original proposal was to have – sort of based on the Summer Streets, where certain ones were closed off that people would use and, in many ways, congregate around. That, although it was a noble underpinning to that idea, the fear that I had and the NYPD had, and our folks at Emergency Management and our Health people, everyone was worried that we would create new focal points for gathering. And that we couldn't properly enforce it. Because remember, in the beginning of social distancing, we were really trying to teach people a new way of being. And we had to focus on all the places that people go. I mean you just told the story of the subways, which is very distressing and so we need to keep enforcement because enforcement is crucial here, focused where there are problems and we only have so much enforcement available. And obviously, you know, the NYPD had a lot of personnel out. They are starting to come back in bigger numbers, thank God.

But it's been a challenge where there's been a lot of enforcement to do and fewer people to do it with and a huge city. So, the original concept of having those Summer Streets, we tried it. We didn't get a great control model because of weather, but we also realized it was taking up a lot of enforcement. So, we said this just can't work at this moment, certainly with NYPD and other agencies depleted. But I do get the point like wouldn't it be great if just there was lots of space for everyone to walk around? It would be great if it did not cause gatherings and therefore create new problems. And it would be great if there was not the problem of all the stuff that still has to keep happening. Obviously emergency vehicles are being called on constantly. All the food deliveries, the things that have to keep happening. We have to be careful that we cannot create a situation where we clog all of that up. So, I'm going to look at the model further, but to date the answer is, and I'm going to hold with this answer today -- it is not enforceable, the way we need it to be. And it disrupts other things we need desperately in this moment. And finally, Brian, I think people are going through the bobbing and weaving. I've done it. Everyone's doing it. I know it's inconvenient and strange and some people are not perfect at it, but I've seen really, really good follow through by New Yorkers. I said the other day, New Yorkers are the heroes of why we're seeing this change. The fact that we've seen even a few days of progress is because 8.6 million people in unison, actually stuck to, overwhelmingly, the overwhelming majority stuck to shelter in place and social distancing and learned an entirely new way of life in a matter of weeks. And they're doing it and they're doing it with just tremendous decency and kindness. So, we can make it work under current conditions. But I'll always be looking at, you know, any other innovations going forward that would help us do it better.

Lehrer: One more call Mustafa in Harlem, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Mustafa.

Question: Hello. How are you doing? Good morning Mr. Brian, good morning Mr. Mayor.

Lehrer: Thank you for calling.

Question: Thank you very much. Long time listener, first time caller. [Inaudible] pass away, God bless them. [Inaudible] I live here in Harlem. I was homeless for the last three years. [Inaudible] Everything is closed now, so I [inaudible] very difficult time. I know it's difficult to talk about that but I will need help. I'm 60 years old. I just don't have [inaudible] but that's my problem. Okay. [Inaudible]. Too many people die. I said God bless. [Inaudible]

Lehrer: And Mustafa I hear your concern for the whole city. Is your concern for yourself that you're homeless and with the restaurants and stores closed where you might've taken some shelter before, you have nowhere to go that isn't too crowded like a City homeless shelter where you'll be in close quarters with people? Is that your question?

Question: Yes. Like I said, I was homeless for last two years, it's a long story. I used to [inaudible] my homelessness without problem because everything is open. I could go to the mosque, you know the [inaudible]. But when COVID came, everything is closed. I have no more chance to [inaudible] I need help. I am a 60-year-old [inaudible].

Lehrer: And what a New York story, Mr. Mayor. He was managing, his words, if you couldn't hear him, managing his homelessness well enough for him over the last several years through the mosque, through stores. Now, he has nowhere to go that isn't crowded.

Mayor: Mustafa, thank you so much for calling and please, please stay on the line. So WNYC can help us find a way to reach you today. And we can, two nights have you in a safe place. We have right now, we've made sure there is a lot of safe, clean places available for people who are struggling. And I want you to be in a safe place tonight. I want our people to follow up with you today. Come find you and get you the help you need. I think what Mustafa said and thank you for your concern Mustafa, for everyone else too. I heard your words and they were very powerful. But I also think Brian, it is a New York story and it's a – there's a bigger point here I'm feeling as I listen, which is, here's Mustafa, who obviously is a very heartfelt, a decent human being and an intelligent person who, you know, whatever has happened in his life, whatever way he ended up being on the street, we have to help him back from the street permanently.

And this is something that we were working on before this crisis. We announced a vision called the Journey Home to end permanent street homelessness. There's no reason anybody who's been on the street for a long time like him should be when we now have Safe Havens and permanent affordable housing we can get people to. But it takes an intensive effort to reach people and convince them that it will be safe for them and it will work for them. But what a comment that someone like this who is so composed, so clear in what he's saying, somehow something that his life led him to the street. It should not be that way. And the one thing I can say in this crisis is we have a place for everyone. I guarantee you we have a place for everyone. More than ever, we have gone out of our way to make sure there's more capacity for anyone who needs a roof over their head. No one will be turned away. And we need -- and then going forward out of this crisis I want us to end that long term, that permanent street homelessness. That has been a horrible feature for decades in the city. As we think about the future, as we think about rebuilding and recovery, we need to disrupt the patterns of disparity that have dominated this city for generations. And it begins with not allowing the street homelessness that somehow became a norm over decades. It should not be a norm going forward

Lehrer: And Mustafa hang on. We will take your contact information off the air or in, you know, with whatever it takes, put you in touch with the Mayor's Office so you can take that invitation to get personal help. And we're over time. Mr. Mayor –

Mayor: Just one point, Brian, about Mustafa who – when your people talk to them, tell them to say exactly where he is. Our people will be calling you right after this. And we want to send outreach workers to him right where he is right now.

Lehrer: Great. And we are over time, but one policy follow up to that is I know that advocates for the homeless have been calling on you to open 30,000 of the 100,000 vacant hotel rooms, estimated 100,000 to prevent the spread or COVID-19 among both homeless New Yorkers and shelter staff. Can the City make those 30,000 hotel rooms available to them? That's from Vocal New York.

Mayor: Yeah. There's, clearly first of all, the first reality I want me to clear - what are we doing with hotel rooms? We are creating hospitals for the potential that we're going to have a real massive surge still in this disease. We are making sure that hospital workers and first responders have a place to be if they need to be away from their families. But that is to say that, you know, we have some immediate needs we must take care of to protect this city and protect all the people in this city. But we also have to make sure of course, that we ensure that any time there has to be a use of hotels to keep people safe who are in shelter, we'll do that. We have in shelter now, a lot of specific procedures have been placed to protect people. We should be careful that in moving large numbers of people around, there are their own challenges. And we have to be really smart about that. And I think Commissioner Steve Banks, who's been a champion for the homeless for literally 30 years or more, he is the person managing this and making sure that where we need to use additional hotel space, we will. But there are other cases where that would not be the best thing in terms of keeping people safe. And we need to be really balanced in that approach. So, where we need beds, we'll use them. I trust Steve Banks and the people at Homeless Services to figure out when they need them, when we can keep people safe where they are. We don't want to artificially move large numbers of people around because again that creates its own dangers in a time of social distancing and shelter in place.

Lehrer: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I hope you and your family find your ways to enjoy Easter and talk to you next week.

Mayor: And the same to you Brian. Same to all New Yorkers. A happy Easter. Let's find a way even though it's not a happy time, let's find a way to celebrate each other, people of all faiths in this holiday season and support each other.

2020-04-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Before we get started, I just wanted you to see this. This is what one of the hospital beds will look like here in the center opening today. And again, a lot of you were here eight, nine days ago – it was all tennis courts. And I want to just thank everyone who did this work so quick. I'll talk about some of them in a moment, but this is an amazing transformation. When we were here, it felt like, you know, normal times – a sports facility. I heard they were going to change it and get it ready quickly. I didn't expect this much to happen so vividly. I mean, this is amazing that this was all here now, ready to see the first patient coming in today. It’s going to build out quickly. I wanted you to just see that out of a tennis court suddenly we have a hospital and it's a testament to everyone who has been doing this work that they could do this so quickly and so effectively.

I also want to say meeting the medical personnel was very, very moving. These are folks who reminded me of the experience I've had in the last few days meeting the military medical personnel. These are civilians, but they came here because they love New York City and they wanted to help New York City in our hour of need. They came here because they knew this was the epicenter of a national crisis. And in fact, the group that is joining us here, the doctors and nurses, all the medical personnel that are here, they understood exactly that they were coming here to relieve Elmhurst Hospital and Queens Hospital that had been through the toughest stuff of any hospitals. And they wanted to be a part of that fight, they wanted to help where the need was greatest. And I went around and asked people where they're from and we have a lot of people from Florida, South Carolina. We had folks from Oregon, just talked to the guy from Omaha, Nebraska who said he left his wife and three children because he knew – he told them this was something he had to do for his country and for the country's largest city, and he'll be back when this fight is over. But he did it because he cared about saving lives here. And the most interesting of all was a woman from Anchorage, Alaska, who has come all the way here to help folks in need in Queens. So, it was very, very moving.

So, everybody, let me start – there we go – let me start by saying obviously today on Good Friday, it's a very holy time of year for so many New Yorkers. People are celebrating Passover. Today, Good Friday, Easter is this Sunday. For so many New Yorkers, it is a time of year that in normal times we look forward to, we plan the whole year around, and what do we think of, we think of not only faith and not only tradition and things that guide us in good times and bad, but we think of our families. We think of those gatherings that are some of our fondest moments every year. The things we really remember and feel throughout our lives. Every one of us. When I say to you, think about Easter, think about Passover, you have memories going back your whole life, your childhood, and for the first time that I can remember for so many families, we can't do that. And thank God people are using, you know, FaceTime and Skype and Zoom and whatever they can get their hands on to connect with each other. But it's not the same. It's painful to not have that closeness to each other the way we're used to. But there's something about this time of year that I believe is fortifying and strengthening New Yorkers because we're listening to the meaning of those stories, of scripture, and of all the traditions, and of all the family rituals, everything that we've known all our lives in some way prepared us for today. And when you look at faith and when you look at the lessons, so many of them are about people fighting adversity, fighting overwhelming odds, trying to find something in themselves that was strong and good even when faced with massive challenges. And the message through all of our faiths is to love each other, to support each other, to be charitable to each other, to understand each other, to feel empathy for each other. All of the faiths come back to that.

So this is a time that we could be angry. We have every right to be angry and frustrated. We can't do the things we're used to and we need our families right now so much and we can't have that connection the same way and yet all that we've learned from our families, all that we've learned from our faiths and our traditions was telling us exactly how to persevere in a moment like this, to dig deep and find that wellspring of hope and belief and that ability to be there for each other. And that's what New Yorkers are doing. I keep saying the heroes are everyday New Yorkers who are finding a way to do things I think we would have thought literally impossible. The people who turned this tennis center into a hospital in a matter of days, the people who every day are protecting and serving us. The first responders, the health care workers, all these people going so far above and beyond, but it's the everyday people who are helping us turn the tide and fight back this disease. The everyday people deserve credit, to everyday New Yorkers who are taking to heart this common mission, 8.6 million people, the most diverse place on Earth with one goal in common to fight back this disease and save each other. That's what I'm seeing every day. And then to know that help is always coming from the rest of our nation, that only reminds us further that our faith is well placed in each other.

So, here we celebrate against the backdrop of pain, the goodness in each other. And it brings us right back to this place that was a tennis center and now is a hospital. So, we're right here in the epicenter of this disease and we've learned a lot in the last few days. Sometimes we face a challenge or crisis and we say everyone is equally affected. Sometimes a crisis is the great equalizer. Well, that's not true with the coronavirus. Yes, every community is affected. No doubt, every ZIP code, every neighborhood, so many families of every background. True. All of New York is suffering. We all know someone who has been lost. We all know people who are sick. We all know families that are suffering. But in the last few days, the disparities are sharper and clearer than ever before. And unfortunately, this disease has found every problem in our society, every inequality and gone right deep into it and exacerbated it. And so here in Queens we see that folks who are low income are suffering. Folks who have not had enough access to health care because health care is still given out according to how much money you have in this country, and especially immigrant New Yorkers have suffered some because of language barrier, but many I am convinced because they've been pushed away in recent years from the support that they deserve just as human beings and New Yorkers, they've been told to be afraid because of what's happening all over our country. A lot of them had been so fearful, whether it's an ICE raid or any effort to take away their rights, their benefits, the things their family depended on. A lot of folks have turned inward out of fear. There's no question in my mind that's part of what's happening here and part of why this part of Queens has been hit so hard.

Everyone at Elmhurst Hospital, Queens Hospital have been just amazing heroes in this fight. We need to support them all the way through. No one thinks this is going to be over soon. It's going to take a lot more fight but getting them some relief, a place like this, to draw off some of the patients, getting them the military medical personnel who have served so nobly already, all of that is helping us against the backdrop of those horrible disparities. It's helping us to make sure that one thing is fair and equal, that every New Yorker will be treated the same. When they come to get health care, they will get it regardless of ZIP code, regardless of background, regardless of ability to pay, no one will be turned away. That's what we believe in. That is what we are doing.

So here, this originally was going to be a 350-bed facility. The team here has done an outstanding job. They are now going to create a 470-bed facility. Last week we believed there would not be capacity for ICU beds. Now they are adding ICU beds – 20 to begin with. As I said, first wards, beds opening today, first patients coming today, and then they'll build out in the coming days. I want to thank everyone, all the good working people who did the work to get this ready. All our good friends at the Department of Parks and Recreation, a lot of parks workers while being careful and practicing the right distancing, they did the work. A lot of work was needed around the site to get ready and they did it. I want to thank all of them and I want to thank them for also helping all of us to stay safe by the work they're doing in the parks to keep everyone enjoying them, but the right way. I want to thank Danny Zausner, the COO of the Billie Jean King Center who's been a fantastic partner in this and his whole team. Billy Sullivan, the CEO of SLSCO, the contractor that's worked to put this together. Thank you to Billy and his whole team. Obviously, Commissioner Deanne Criswell and everyone at Emergency Management, Dr. Mitch Katz and everyone at Health + Hospitals, and the Department of Design and Construction that jumped in here to help make things happen quickly and they're doing the same at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. Thank you to Lorraine Grillo and Jamie Torres Springer and everyone at DDC.

So, New Yorkers have watched as we've transformed – all of us, the City, the State, FEMA, everyone together transformed sites that we think of in everyday life and now they're all turning into medical sites. The Javits Center, of course, up and running the Coler Center on Roosevelt Island, that was a medical site, but one that was not full, now filling up rapidly, relieving the pressure on other H + H facilities. This site in Queens, the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal next week. All of this is building capacity. Now I want to emphasize, even though we are seeing some progress, and we are, we don't know what comes next. With this horrible disease one thing we've learned is to expect the unexpected. So I warned yesterday, you never know when you get a resurgence, you never know if it doesn't move in a straight line. So, we want capacity ready, no matter what and let us pray we don't need some of these facilities to be as much for medical use. Where are we going ahead to those phases I described yesterday with low transmission or no transmission, you need a lot of capacity to quarantine people and isolate people to make that work. So facilities like this, if they're not needed for medical, will be turned into quarantine and isolation facilities to help people get through their own experience with the disease while making sure we don't infect the other members of their family or the people in their life.

So this good work is going to help us hopefully only for a limited time on the medical side, but very much in our progress in fighting this disease as we go into the next phase of low-level transmission. Again, we're not there yet. We're not going to ever suggest we're there until we're there, but we're going to be planning for that phase and this facility will be a part of that phase too. It was said throughout, the goal is to always make sure if we need to, our hospitals can keep building out more and more ICU capacity. They've been doing that. They're going to keep doing that until we're sure that it's not needed. And other kinds of patients would come to places like this.

Now, yesterday I talked about the fact that if we're going to make that next big move – maybe it starts in May, maybe it starts in June – to that low level of transmission, we will need testing and we will need a lot of testing and we'll need more testing than we have right now. And the federal government must step up. We must have not only the antibody testing, which is certainly valuable. We need the traditional coronavirus testing to be able to really implement a strategy to achieve low level transmission and start to get us back to normal. So, I'm going to keep calling on the federal government to focus and produce large scale widespread testing for this country so we can get to the next phase, so we can really start to normalize over time.

But once again, while we're waiting for the federal government to act, we see others coming forward. We've seen private companies come forward in an amazing way. And we're also seeing our colleagues around the country in public life come forward. And this is a beautiful story – a guy I've gotten to know, he's part of the leadership of the U. S. Conference of Mayors, so I've worked with him on the leadership body of the conference of mayors for years now and really like him and really respect him. Mayor Jim Brainard of Carmel, Indiana – this man has been mayor for a long time in Carmel, Indiana. He's someone I respect greatly for what he’s achieved. I've been to his city. He's done amazing things there. In the spirit of bipartisanship, I will let you know that he is a Republican and someone who, as we talk together, our partisan differences melt away all the time. He's someone that I just respect as a good public servant who cares about people. Well, he made the great decision to make sure that his city would help New York City. And we've seen that before, we saw that the Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown; the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, helped make sure that more ventilators would be available for New York. Well now, Carmel, Indiana steps up and they're sending us some of the components that will be needed to provide 50,000 coronavirus tests to New Yorkers that'll be coming over the next few weeks. We’re going to need other components to make it work, and we talked about this yesterday, used the analogy of making a cup of coffee with cream and sugar – we’re going to need all the different pieces. But what Jim is sending us is going to help us immensely. And with the other pieces in place, we'll be able to reach 50,000 New Yorkers. So, Jim, and everyone in Carmel, I want to thank you. It is wonderful to see the support from the heartland of our country. You're doing something really important for New York City. We're all feeling it, especially at this holiday season. We are so appreciative for your wonderful kind gesture and it's going to help save lives here in New York City. So, God bless you all. Let's see if our federal government can be as effective as Mayor Jim Brainard in Carmel, Indiana in getting us testing.

Another important piece of the puzzle will be thermometers. Going forward, as we move into lower-level transmission thermometers are big part of it, because you will do a lot more monitoring of people. But in the meantime, we are delivering more and more thermometers to our agencies, our city agencies to make sure we're constantly testing. Folks are on the front line, doing such vital works – so there’s thermometer's now that have been delivered to our Department of Education enrichment centers for the children of first responders and health care workers. Thermometers have been delivered to the Department of Corrections; to the Administration for Children's Services for the work they do, including the juvenile detention work; to our 9-1-1 call centers, which is so important, because they're keeping so much running; obviously, for first responders as well – a central goal to make sure they get whatever support they need. So, today we're delivering thermometers to every NYPD precinct and headquarters and command office, to every firehouse at the FDNY, to every sanitation garage. And we'll keep delivering more and more as we get them. We’re getting in a big supply, going forward, and we've got to keep getting them out around so we can maximize that kind of monitoring and support people.

One other point, and this is about – I've talked about the way the coronavirus attacks our health, but also hurts us, fights us in another way. It's taken away our livelihoods. So many New Yorkers are struggling right now. I hear from people all the time who are, right now, running out of the little money they had. The last paycheck is long gone. So, we must protect people. We must protect people when it comes to their health and we have to protect them when it comes to just being able to live life, to have a roof over your head, to have enough food to eat. We've got to protect people in every way and we will in this city. We will not let any New Yorker go without the help they need. So, I have to say, when you think about the reality of people just not having enough money for food, for medicine, for the rent, and this many people, hundreds of thousands, unemployed at the same time – my heart goes out to every family dealing with this pain, because just weeks ago your life was pretty normal and then bang, it's gone. And the shock, the pain, but also the fear – I'm hearing the fear everywhere. People are literally wondering, am I going to be able to stay in my home? Am I going to be able to get enough food? So, my message is we will keep everybody – keep a roof over your head, protect you, make sure you have the food to eat. We will do that. The City of New York will have your back. We're making sure there's no evictions, and that's a start, but we have to go farther. So, I had asked the State of New York to consider for over 2 million New Yorkers who are in rent stabilized apartments, and that's governed by a Rent Guidelines Board – I asked the State as a legal matter to suspend that board so we could achieve a rent freeze. There were complex legal matters and the State wasn't sure if that was the right approach, so I have made the decision that we will proceed with the Rent Guidelines Board process. We'll do it all remotely. We'll do it quickly in the coming weeks, but I am calling upon the Rent Guidelines Board today to issue a rent freeze to ensure that New Yorkers that are going through the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and were covered by the jurisdiction of the Rent Guidelines Board – again, that's over 2 million of us – that all of those good New Yorkers who are struggling right now get a rent freeze, because, Lord knows, people do not need another burden at this moment. And I want to see the Rent Guidelines Board act quickly, to say the least. If you look at the facts – and I do give the board credit, they've always looked at the facts, the objective facts – look at the facts, the greatest economic crisis in generations and hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers with no livelihood overnight. I think the facts are clear and we need that rent freeze and we need it now.

I also say again to the State of New York, please act quickly. Let New Yorkers who can't afford the rent pay it with their security deposit. That's going to take a legal change. I'm asking the State to do that right away, so folks who have no money can draw upon that security deposit to pay the rent right now. By the way, for a lot of landlords, they would applaud that too, because if the tenant has no money, they have no money and, therefore, the landlord can't get the money they need to pay the bills either. Let's unleash those security deposits for the good of all.

Let me close, and I'll say a few words in Spanish, and then we'll take questions from the media, but close with this. And we talked about faith in the beginning, I talked about what the season means to all of us, people of different faiths. But it's also clear, it's a moment that tries us and challenges us so deeply and makes us fearful and makes us doubtful. It's a moment that tests our faith, but whatever your faith is, whatever you believe, whatever your values, it's a moment to lean into them even more strongly. This is a week where we reach milestones we could never have imagined – 5,000 New Yorkers lost – so many more than we even lost on our worst day of 9/11 – a number we literally can hardly imagine. And every single one of the people we lost, a human story, a family grieving. At some point today, we will get to the point of 100,000 cases that have occurred in New York City – 100,000 cases of coronavirus, a disease that literally did not exist six months ago in the experience of human beings all over the globe, and now 100,000 New Yorkers infected. And that's only the ones we know about. It's likely that hundreds of thousands more have already experienced this disease that we don't even know have gone through it. But, thank God, so many – the vast, vast, vast majority survived. So, it's a moment where we could be doubtful. No one could be blamed for being doubtful. And we don't have a roadmap here – there's no one who has a roadmap, this is the great unknown. But our faith, our belief, our values, our humanity should continue to guide us. And what I've seen these last weeks, I don't think New Yorkers could have done anything better or more heroic than what they've done. I think every one of you should be proud of how you all have answered the call in one way or another. I think people all over the world are looking at New York City with renown – with renewed admiration. People all over the world are feeling a new respect, a new admiration, a new love for New York City. I think we've always been a place that people felt something special for. There's always been a sense that New York City was an expression of the best of humanity, but what all of you have done is proven even more deeply and the world watches with admiration, the world is applauding. Let's show the entire world that we will complete this mission, that we will stay true to the lessons we've learned, we'll go even more intensely into the work we're doing together to protect each other, and that's how we'll come out of this together.

In Spanish, just a quick summary –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues. And I know you're far-flung, but I'll do my best to see you and just speak loud so we can all hear you.

Question: Two questions there. The first is this flood of volunteers of health care professionals from around the country. We've heard that many have not been assigned to do anything. They're sort of just waiting on the sidelines. And then another complaint they have voiced is that there's no one coordinating where they should stay, where they should live. Should they be paying out of their own pocket? Is the – are you – is your office coordinating all that? What can you tell [inaudible]?

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew this is obviously a rapidly moving situation. So the bottom line is this: everyone who comes to help us, we will make sure that they have accommodations and have support and Lord knows, we'll make sure they quickly had an assignment. I'm going to let Mitch, Deanne can speak to pieces of this, but look, when folks come in, it takes sometimes a few days to make sure that they get the right place, they're trained, they're oriented, et cetera. But that's what I'm seeing – only a few days to get them from arrival into action, overwhelmingly. Anytime there's someone who is not being placed quickly that I don't want to see that, I won't accept that. So, I've charged my team repeatedly in the last few days to go back, call through everyone who's volunteered, make sure they've gotten their assignment, make sure it's moving quickly. Talked to Mitch and Deanne numerous times these last few days about making sure that the folks who are coming in to Health + Hospitals are quickly being applied to the task at hand, and Mitch can describe to you what that process has been, but anyone who's coming in, we want to get them accommodation make sure that what they need is covered or anything that they pay out that we need to get reimbursed. We will. So, no question the world, again I'm sure there's some growing pains and something being done this quickly, but everybody needs to be applied quickly and get the support they need. Let me let you go. I'll come right back to you. But Mitch, why don't you talk about your experience and Deanne, you want to –

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Certainly, at Health + Hospitals we've been able to bring along more than 2,000 doctors and nurses who are currently today working in our hospitals. So, we've been able to deploy them. We have a pretty much an instant credentialing system where they basically show their ID and we sign them up. So we've had a lot of success.

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Office of Emergency Management: And the one thing that I'll add is that we had a number of volunteers that were part of our Medical Reserve Corps. Again, they are volunteers. Many of them could not volunteer for this because of their own circumstances, but we have placed, I think as of this morning's report, over 900 of those volunteers out of our initial pool into the system. And that's just a great success.

Question: My quick second question, why is it that other cities like Minneapolis have been able to close so many streets to allow safer social distancing, but your pilot program ended. As the weather improves shouldn’t you be doing more to give New Yorkers the space to socially distance outside?

Mayor: It's a very fair question. We're going to keep looking at it, but I want to tell you what – certainly NYPD felt strongly after – we had a very initial experience. And I want to say it was an initial and also affected by weather. So it wouldn't – didn't give us the clearest example of what would be achieved, but NYPD, everyone knows has lower staffing right now than normal – guys I'm going to come to you just don't, don't worry. They have lower staffing than normal. They're very concerned about being able to enforce in all the places that already exist and do it effectively. And I've talked to Commissioner Shea daily about this, that, you know, all the places we – the supermarkets, the pharmacies, the parks, every place where we're depending on PD and other agencies that get out there and force and really make sure there's social distancing. The concern consistently from Commissioner Shea is, if you open up a lot of those spaces where people can congregate, they're not going to have the ability to monitor all that and do enforcement. I understand the very logical point, well if you open up spaces, it’s easier for people to walk around each other, one thing, another. The concern so far has been, yeah, but there's a real unintended consequence about gathering. Think about a block. If you close off a block, people have that impulse to come out and gather. We want to be really careful about that. And then there's also the question of being able to get emergency vehicles around and deliveries and everything else. So we'll keep looking at it for sure. But right now I will think that makes a lot more sense when we have more of our enforcement personnel back than it would right now. So we'll look at it, but we're not ready now. Go over here. You can take it down. You're just, just enough. I can hear you if you choose to.

Question: Khristina Narizhnaya from the New York Post. I have a few questions about Hart Island. So burials, according to the Department of Corrections, burials increased by five times from one day a week to five days a week. To what do you attribute this increase?

Mayor: Okay, so I'm going to look to Freddi. I think we put out very detailed tweets to make sure that this was all clear, because I think this is an area, and again, I'm very careful to speak broadly about this whole topic because I think it's a very, very painful one for New Yorkers. And again, for the families who have lost people. This is not, you know, a policy matter. This is their lives or family members or loved one’s life, and we want to speak very respectfully about it and keep it a very broad, respectful conversation. So what we have seen is an increase in the number of people passing away overall. And what it means is there are more people who are passing away who just, we unfortunately we've seen this throughout our history, but it's being made deeper by the fact that more people are passing away because of this disease.

That there are people pass away and there is no family member, no loved one, no friend, no one who we can find, who our Office of Medical Examiner can find who has a connection to that person and is going to take responsibility for their burial. So this is something that has existed for generations in this city. When that is the case, the City of New York steps up and says, okay, that person will be buried at Hart Island. But if a family member comes later or a loved one comes later, that individual, that body can be returned to that loved one. So because there's just been unfortunately more people passing away, including those who are not claimed by any family. That's what's been happening at Hart Island. But that's the only thing that's been happening in Harlem.

Question: Are these COVID victims that are being buried there?

Mayor: It’s any kind of person who passes away. This is not a new procedure is what I'm trying to make clear to you that this is, it's a sad topic. Imagine anyone who passes away and there's no one there to claim the body. This has been the truth for generations. So anyone who was passing away now from any cause, that's what's happening. But more people are passing away obviously in large measure because of COVID.

Did you finish?

Question: I have another question.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead. Finish it.

Question: So I mean these people, are they – is it possible that they’re COVID victims temporarily buried there because funeral homes are overwhelmed or you know –

Mayor: No, this is not what I'm saying. I'm going to – I thought the tweet was clear so let me just answer it really clearly. No, these are people who no one after a period of time has claimed them and not just COVID victims but victims of all diseases, all reasons for fatality and they are being buried. But if at any point a family member returns or shows up, they will be, you know, the body will be given to the family as we would always want to do. That's all that is happening. And if you – you choose if you want to, if you're going to keep that on, just speak even louder. No problem. Just speak loud so I can hear.

Question: So, can you give more details on the quarantine and isolation facilities and is it an acknowledgement that perhaps the earlier hospital bed estimations where off? And then I have a second question.

Mayor: Sure. I would love nothing more than for the hospital bed assumptions to be off. We, Katie, we're 100 percent clear. I gave this order to the team. We were planning for the worst-case scenario. I did not want to have a single day where a New Yorker couldn't get a hospital bed or there wasn't a ventilator, there wasn't a doctor nurse. So I said, show us the modeling and I want to see the toughest version. I want to see the one that we believe is the worst-case real scenario. And particularly at the Department of Health as they looked in the models around the world and looked at what was going on in New York City early on, we saw the ferocity of this disease and thought we're going to need an extraordinary amount of beds and medical personnel. Even last week – sadly last week for the pretty much the whole week it looked like those projections were tragically on target. And then only in the last few days have we seen something very different.

I hope this is sustained, but I need people to hear there is a profound danger of resurgence if we all don't handle this right and we've seen it in other parts of the world. So, we're going to be in a stance of having lots of capacity ready and lots of capacity that we could turn on quickly even if we don't fully activate it, that it's in reserve and ready. And we're going to be ready to convert it to a different use, which is that isolation and quarantine use if needed at any point. So, the bottom line is I'd love the initial projections to be wrong. I'd love it to be that this disease is causing much less damage. I love to see that we can move into the next phase, the low-level transmission phase in May or June. And as we move into that phase, we're going to need a lot more space for isolation and quarantine and these spaces would be perfect for that.

Question: My second question is, I know you're talking about freezing rent. You’re a landlord, have you frozen rent for your tenants in Brooklyn?

Mayor: So, our tenants all are employed and are all able to pay.

Question: Mayor, you mentioned it this morning on the radio. I just wanted you to clarify if you could, you were asked if mid-May is the goal, I think getting things back to normal to get to the low-level trends, but anyway, if you could clarify and also what is mid-May, that we would – what would happen mid-May, and are we talking June, July?

Mayor: Right. That's – Dave, it’s a really fair question, but I remember when I gave that I tried to give a very complete presentation. I know it was long yesterday, my apologies, but I was really trying to, I had talked to so many health care people and tried to distill it down into one thing. Now what I was saying is this: let’s start with April. April is going to remain tough. The fact that the number of additional hospitalizations lowered and the number of additional ventilators we needed lowered still doesn't mean we're not seeing new problems every day. We're just seeing fewer than we expected. So there's a lot of people coming in who need a ventilator. Fact that's still more each day in recent days. It's still been overall more each day than the day before. And a lot of what we're experiencing in our public hospitals and independent hospitals is not, I don't want anyone to think there's a decrease in the number of beds, we've actually seen, unfortunately an increase but less severe than what we saw before.

So there that tells you that April, do not for a moment imagine April is going to be easy. We thought it was going to be absolutely, positively hellish everywhere. It's less bad, but it's still bad. When you go into May, we start to have an opportunity to have that moment where we can say if we do enough – if all of us together do enough of the right things that we could, and again, those three indicators I talked about, if they all move together for 10 days to two weeks, that's when we start to talk about some changes in restrictions but only changes, not like on-off switch. It's like careful, smart changes always guarding against resurgence. So there could be a point in May where we can start to make those moves. It may not work like that. Remember my chart that showed the bumpy ride, the kind of roller coaster up and down. It could be that we get better for a while and then get worse for a period of time. So that's where I don't want anyone thinking there's a magic date or, you know, a guarantee. We've got to all fight for it. But it could be May or it could be June. But at that point you get all the indicators moving the right direction. We then would decide here's some changes we can make. And then when we make those changes Dave, we have to prove that we're still able to drive down cases. So you wouldn't want a situation where you're saying, okay, we lighten up a little bit. And then suddenly there's a resurgence of cases, you have to constantly sort of, it's like the foot on and off the gas. You have to sort of constantly figure out how much pressure to apply and if it really works then you're starting on the pathway starting on the pathway to normal. You get to the point where you have very few cases and you can trace them and contain them, which is where we were at the very beginning. Again, you know, getting back to where we were those first days. And then that's the pathway to the eventual day where there's effectively no transmission. Go ahead.

Question: Mayor, [inaudible]?

Mayor: Belt it out. If you have the mask on.

Question: I have a follow up with the Hart Island question and then I have a separate question. On Hart Island, the Medical Examiner's Office says on their website, it still says right now that they will hold a decedent for up to 14 days. You sit your tweets, it doesn't matter if it's weeks, months, you know if you have family to [inaudible] the body we’ll hold it. So can you clarify which of those is correct? Are they changing their policy or what is it?

Mayor: Okay. I'll give you the best I can give you and we can always get a clarification later. Again, here's the bottom line. And again, this is a topic I just don't, I'm not going to be able to dwell on with you guys. There's other people who can give you more detail on this is we're really need to focus on saving lives and respecting the dignity of each family. Any family member, any individual who's passed away and no one claims, they can always be claimed at any point in the future. That's the bottom line. And any individual who, even if they individually are temporarily buried, they can be brought back to their family member. It's as simple as that. So we will, that's open-ended, Erin. That's – it’s anytime the family shows up after this crisis, we will work with them and we will support them. But it's all individual.

Question: Yeah, because in your tweet you say we will hold the remains and until they're ready days, weeks, month. It doesn't matter.

Mayor: The point I just made, that they will be available at any point for family members.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: If they have not, if no one has claimed them, no one has communicated, no one can be found in any way, shape or form, they will be very temporarily awaiting to hopefully the day when we can find the family members or loved ones. If family members and loved ones communicate, even if they can't come now that will be handled differently.

Question: Okay. That makes sense. And then my second question. In regards to the distribution of meals to seniors, a number of seniors are reporting that they're not getting the meals they're supposed to be getting. Can you address that?

Mayor: Yeah, I'd love – I need to make sure that every senior who needs a meal gets it. Period. So, this – you're literally the first person who has said that and I've been talking to, and I'm not belittling or disagreeing, I'm saying I've been talking to our folks who are at our Department for the Aging, our commissioner. I've been talking to the community leaders, I've been talking to clergy, I've been talking to elected officials. I've not heard a single person say that a senior who needed a meal delivery is not getting it. If you know of someone, I want to make sure that person gets a meal immediately. And anyone who needs a meal can call 3-1-1. If anyone is vulnerable, cannot get out, cannot get to a meal, they call 3-1-1, we will make sure it is delivered. I appointed the Food Czar Kathryn Garcia to set up a huge feeding program to support all New Yorkers, to make sure no one went without a meal. So anyone who's not getting it, we need to fix that today.

Question: One in particular, Independence Plaza Towers, they say that all of the seniors there who have signed up haven’t been getting their meals.

Mayor: I couldn't hear the last part. Independence Plaza.

Question: Yeah.

Mayor: And what did they say?

Question: That more than two weeks ago people at their senior centers signed up and the shipments have not come. A few dozen members have not received their meal shipments since they were signed up.

Mayor: Alright, we will get those done today. We'll go. That's, that is unacceptable. I'm going to assume what you're saying is accurate and it's unacceptable. People must get their meals. I'll talk to the Commissioner today and we will make sure that happens.

Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, early on the White House, criticized the projections from New York in terms of how many hospital beds that they would need. Do you think, were you guys using the same models as the White House and can you go into a little detail what the models were that you were using? Did you guys hire a consultant? How are those models created?

Mayor: So, I guarantee you we were not using the same models as the White House. And with all due respect to the White House, I think for much of this horrible tragedy we've been through, there's been a constant underestimation of this problem. So I think that's the story of January and February in the United States of America, that the President did not acknowledge the fullness of the threat and we didn't get the testing we needed.

The team here at our Department of Health, at Health + Hospitals, all of the people they consulted with around the world, they consulted the World Health Organization, CDC and many others. A composite of a lot of different sources. And I'll have my colleagues follow up with you because it's a very extensive effort. But the modeling was sobering and I encouraged people to give me the sober, you know, version. And I kept saying to people, you have to plan for the worst-case scenario. That's the only way to do planning in a crisis. So a lot of times I feel like the White House has been pushing for the best case scenario. Remember the famous statement by the President, that we would reopen by Easter. How off-base does that look now?

So definitely in that sense, a conservative model that was preparing us for the worst. And I'm glad we did that. And I don't know at this moment, no one doesn't. I don't know if Mitch has a view on this as someone who's done so much in his field, but we're not out of the woods, for all we know. This thing could surge again and we'll be very happy we have a very conservative approach, but we'll get you, you know, folks can follow up with you directly on all that modeling and how it was created.

President Katz: I would agree with the Mayor's assessment. While things are definitely flattening, meanwhile the hospitals keep growing because what's flattening is the amount of increase every day. So the need, and that's why at facilities like this are so important to create.

Question: City Council Health Chair says that very sick people are being turned away from—

Mayor: Very sick people what?

Question: Very sick people are being turned away from the hospitals, people with pneumonia, who need oxygen and other issues. Do you know if that's the case?

Mayor: Who are you referring to?

Question: The City Council Health Chair.

Mayor: Who is that?

Question: Mark Levine.

Mayor: I want to make sure we're [inaudible] same thing. I know who it is, but I want to hear you say the name. Listen, with all due respect to the Council Member, who is someone I actually appreciate and admire over years, but I was very distressed by his statements earlier in the week that were patently inaccurate and actually very unhelpful to the City of New York, and I had a very blunt conversation with him about it. So, I don't know what is going on with him, but saying that our hospitals would turn away someone with pneumonia is irresponsible, inaccurate, and unfair. Mitch, would you like to comment?

President Katz: We are not turning away anybody with pneumonia who is short of breath. We do tell people who have mild symptoms that they are safest and most comfortable at home, but anybody who has shortness of breath needs to be in the hospital.

Mayor: Yeah, I think it's really an insult to our health care professionals. I would ask the Councilman to think about the import of his words. He is suggesting that doctors and nurses and clinicians would not care enough about a patient, pneumonia for God's sakes. These people are working night and day, giving their heart and soul to save everyone, of course, if someone has pneumonia, they're going to help them. And if he has evidence of a specific case, I want to hear that evidence. I want names and dates and places. Not this madness. It's irresponsible. Wait, who hasn't gone?

Question: [Inaudible] first one is, have you spoken with MTA board about [inaudible] –

Mayor: I’ve spoken to Pat Foye earlier today of the question of overcrowding. I told him I was very distressed that I keep getting reports. I will give him credit that he was responsive and he went into detail with me about why he believed that any such situation was very rare and unexpected, if you will, that they were trying to keep as much service going where they'd seen a lot of need. Obviously, we all understand the MTA is suffering in every way including a number of MTA workers who are suffering and out. But Pat felt strongly that those situations were rare. I want to make sure that there's anything that – any evidence of where it's happening or how it's happening, that we address it urgently. And one of the things we've talked about is the need to have bus service as an alternative and he said that something the MTA has done and will do more of whenever they need. So that's about the overcrowding.

I'm very concerned about anything involving our transit workers and their safety. And I would say simply if there's actions that the MTA still needs to take to ensure their safety, there should, because that's a morally right thing to do, these were hardworking New Yorkers who need to be kept safe, but also if people are out in our subways and buses continue to provide less and less service. But still so many essential workers have to get around, it's just going to create a worse situation for everyone, more overcrowding, fewer people can get to their work that we all desperately need. So, I would ask them to keep putting those protections in place.

Question: Also, the Spanish language and multi-lingual campaign [inaudible] New Yorkers who learned English as a second language, how is that going? [Inaudible] –

Mayor: Yeah, you're going to hear in the next few days the specific elements, the media piece of it, the advertising and TV, radio, digital, 14 languages, we'll unveil that in the next few days. The tele-health, if you will, element of it, the ability of New Yorkers to call clinicians, and again, this is predicated on continuing to see the relief so we can free up some of our clinicians to do that tele-health work and thank God, let us pray, they don't need to be in the hospitals. That was our first concern. Hopefully we're going to be able to free up more of them to do that ability to call – you know, have people call them and talk through what's going on, get support, get advice, get guidance. That we will announce in the next few days and then the grass roots piece. This one's a little more complex where we're going to really try and maximize the use of community-based clinics and send the health workers out in the communities with protections, of course. That's going to take a little more organizing and obviously a little more security in our supply of PPEs just better but not where we need it to be. So we'll have more to say on that next week, but I think it's going to be a little slower rollout because we have to guarantee we'll have the personnel and the PPEs for that.

Question: [Inaudible] workers that will be sent out into the field, so to speak, are they volunteers or [inaudible]?

Mayor: I know we have community-based health clinics that are offering their employees and do this work already that are very connected to their communities, trusted, speak the language in their communities. Obviously, people would do it who are willing to do it. We're not going to ask someone who works for a non-profit to do something they're uncomfortable doing. And again, as we can free up any other health care workers or folks who are used to being providing health care information and guidance, we will. So my details to be announced, but I would say it will be heavily grassroots. So, it's people serving their own community, not needing to commute obviously. And obviously those who are willing, this would be something people would do who are willing to take on that kind of work, and it would be careful. We can do a lot by phone, we can do a lot with digital and advertising. There are certain things you just can't, and I think that's particularly true in immigrant communities. Some of it has to be in person, but still with careful protections and social distancing. Go ahead.

Question: You mentioned 50,000 tests coming to New York –

Mayor: Components for 50,000 tests. Not the whole thing, but go on.

Question: Can you talk about how many tests are available now and what does widespread testing look like? How many tests do we need to, you know, for it to complete widespread testing?

Mayor: We needed a lot more. I can – we're working right now on the exact numbers to talk about how to get into that second phase. But you know, we're talking in that case, not the ability to do thousands a day, but you know, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands a day. So we can give you a clearer outline as we prepare for that phase. But right now testing is still a rarity and it needs to be much more widespread to get to the next phase. And then really what we'd like is universal capacity, meaning that anyone who needed a test at any time could get it. Anyone. Because when you think about what we've learned from other parts of the world, and no one has a perfect solution, but what we have seen is when you can test people, anybody, anytime and when there's lots and lots of follow-up, lots of communication with people including people need to be isolated or people who are trying to figure out if they might have the disease, you want a kind of ubiquitous-ness of the approach, which has been done to a substantial degree in some of the Asian countries in particular. We want to emulate that within the context of our society. But that requires a huge amount of testing capacity each day.

Question: Do you have an update, I guess for all the students, parents, caretakers and teachers listening in at home for what's going to happen? Will school return for the school year and if any update on that?

Mayor: Between now and Monday I'm going to make a final decision with the Chancellor and we'll announce it. Did you have a follow up?

Question: Is it possible at this time to have the person cremated, COVID victim cremated, or [inaudible] funeral homes having issues?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll again, I'm going to stay broad on this and then we have to move on to other topics. The most funeral homes are still operating and they're operating the way they have. Okay. Last call. If there's anything else. Yes?

Question: On the quarantine centers. Is there a timeline for when your current space might be available either in the hotels or in this type of foster the facilities people want a place to go?

Mayor: So, there's a lot available right now in terms of first responders, in terms of – but I mean just to sort of show you the segue – first responders, health care workers and as we've talked about folks who need it if they're living in facilities that are run by the government or sponsored by the government, supported by the government, we have folks in isolation who have come out of Rikers, for example. We have some homeless folks in isolation. There's different people already in that kind of model. But to build it out much further, we clearly have a huge amount of hotel capacity and we would use it and we have the spaces like this that could be converted. So capacity is strong. We are still, you know, for sure weeks away from that kind of moment in this – hopefully in a trajectory towards a much better situation. We're still weeks away from being able to do that wide-scale. Okay. Please, go ahead, Deanne.

Commissioner Criswell: Just so you know, for today we had just about 2,000 people in hotels, in isolation, in the categories that the Mayor mentioned and we still have capacity to use that space if the need does get any larger.

Mayor: Okay. We're going to shut down. Did I see one back there? I see one there. Okay. Last call.

Question: How far are we from widespread testing?

Mayor: It's a great question. I don't think anyone has the answer. I think it is, and I put aside the antibody, which is a different thing and a valuable test and the things that Mitch and I have talked about is antibody testing is particularly valuable for helping our first responders, our health care workers, to have more information about their situation and more confidence in going about their crucial, crucial work. But antibody testing is not enough. We need the coronavirus testing itself. We need it in a vast scale. I've not heard any estimate of that being less than a month or two, but that's very broad answer. We just don't have a clear answer from Washington and we don't have an easy way to get on the global market. So this is one of the big X factors, one of the great unknowns in figuring out how we get to that next phase and then ultimately back to something like normal.

Okay. Everybody, I want to thank you and just to say to all New Yorkers as you look around this facility, a lot of people coming here to help us, folks from all over the country, making a big difference to protect us. We want to do everything we can do to make sure that this hospital is one of the last ones we need to set up. The more New Yorkers do the great, great work you're doing with social distancing and shelter in place, the fewer of these new hospitals we're going to need, the quicker we get back to normal. So, thank you for what you're doing and let's do it even more to get to that day where things get better.

Thank you.

2020-04-11 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Here we are, in the middle of this crisis but we are also in the middle of a holiday season that is one of the anchors of our year, any year, even in the time of pain and sorrow and challenge. Or Jewish community continues to celebrate Passover and our Christian community prepares for Easter, we are all feeling the strange pull of traditions that we cling to and care about and ground us on the one hand, and then pull of this crisis contradicting that, working against it feels like all the time. We are trying to have our deep connection that we all cherish to our traditions, to our faith, to our family and at the same time, working against so many things that hold us back from being connected to each other. I think one of the toughest parts of this is for all of us who are parents and I know even in some ways even more deeply for grandparents, who are not going to have the same connection that they might have and would have in a normal year to their children and grandchildren because people can’t travel, people can’t gather. I think there is a deep, deep yearning and a deep pain when on top of everything else, we are kept apart from the people we love the most and the people who give us so much joy. And all the adults are feeling this crisis and particularly when they can't be near their children and grandchildren, it just makes it even worse, even tougher.

But again, we keep reaching back for our faith, for our beliefs, for our values, for our traditions to help us see our way through. At the same time, we got to think about what our children are going through. This has been such a tough time for them. Such a disorienting time. Our kids, we all know are resilient and we all know that our children can feel our love even if we can't be in the same room with them or even in the same city with them. They can feel our love. But for so many children right now, this is a really difficult, challenging time. And think about what we've asked of our children. It's a lot, nowadays just in normal times, to deal with all the challenges of modern society. I can say as a parent, our children deal with challenges today that I never dealt with when I was growing up and they grow up kind of faster nowadays and there's too much information available, too many real difficult things put before our children, even in normal times. Now think about what these last weeks have been like for our children. Think about the disruption. Think about the confusion and in so many cases the trauma.

A lot of our children have lost a loved one. A lot of our children have seen their families racked by disease. A lot of our children know that someone in the school community they come from, has been real sick or even has passed away because of the coronavirus. I know our children are resilient, but I also know they feel that fear and they feel it in a different way than the rest of us. On top of that, think of what children are going through when they can only spend a little bit of time outdoors. They can't really see their friends the way they are used to. They can't go to school, they can't play team sports. It's been a tough, tough time. But at the same time, we know everything we're doing is to protect our children, our families to help end the pain and the trauma. We've all been through so much, but we have to work constantly to make sure that this ends. This is the thing we all have to be focused on. I know every New Yorker feels this. People are always asking when will this end? And to get to that point we have to work together and we all have to do our part. We all have to support each other. And in this season of faith and this season of love, the highest love we can show for each other is to protect each other, support each other, practice these new rules, these new realities that have actually started to help us get safer. The social distancing, the shelter in place, the things that have been really difficult for everyone and probably in some ways the most difficult for our children are also how we protect our children and our families and we get to that point where we can start to turn the page and work towards a day when we get back to some kind of normal. We get back to the lives we once knew.

So, this conversation about how to protect everyone and how to really keep bending the curve of this disease and how to move us forward. It's been something we've been talking about every day, every hour here at City Hall. And I've been having these conversations with Chancellor Carranza particularly in terms of our schools. And we all have felt that the real pain of knowing that our kids are missing out on so much of what they could have if they were in a school building. But we've also been more and more sure every day that keeping this policy, this strategy of social distancing and shelter in place, keeping that going and deepening that is the best way forward to protect all of us. At the same time, we've seen really heroic efforts by everyone at the Department of Education, by our educators, by all the people who work in our schools, to find every way to keep educating our kids and keep supporting them even through these extraordinary times. And I have to remind everyone, our educators were asked to learn an entirely different way of teaching. And they weren't given a year to get ready. They weren't given a month to get ready. They had a week to quickly retool and turn to distance learning, online learning and make it work. And it's been really an amazing story. And I think when this crisis is over, this is going to be one of the heroic passages. This is going to be one of the amazing moments that will be looked at with admiration. The New York City Public Schools, even in an hour of crisis, managed to come back so strong and create a new reality online to support our kids.

When I made that very tough decision, and I know the Chancellor felt the same way, it was literally a painful decision to close our schools because we feared that moment that we would not be able to bring them back. And I said it bluntly from the very beginning that if we close the schools, there was a very strong likelihood we wouldn't be able to bring them back for this school year. We knew that would be a really huge problem in terms of what we would lose and the education of our children, what families would lose. So many families who depend on, depended on, and still depend on our school system for food, for their children, for a safe place for the kids to be. We knew a lot was being lost, but we also knew, painful though it was, it was the right thing to do to protect everyone, our children, our parents, our families, our educators to protect everyone. And I had a real faith that even though we were asking our educators to do something they'd never done before, that they would rise to the challenge. And they have. You know when you make a decision, it's with the information that you have at the moment. I felt my gut, and I know the Chancellor did too, that our educators would find a way, even with the little time they had to prepare, they'd find a way to do something amazing with distance learning. They have surpassed every expectation. And everyone at DOE, all the folks who are in the leadership at the Department of Education, all of the technology people, everyone who had to put together this amazing system and all the companies we turn to for help who really, really stepped up. Everyone went above and beyond because they realized they had to help our kids. And we didn't know how long this crisis would go on. 

So, before I go on to tell you how we're going to go forward, I just want to say a real thank you. Thank you to Chancellor Carranza, thank you to the whole team at the DOE headquarters that work so hard and I can tell you everyone, whether I called them at midnight or I called them at seven in the morning, they were all working. Because they knew this was sacred, if you will, to make sure that every child got the help they needed. I want to thank all the educators who have done so much who just never gave up, including all those educators who came in and continue to come into our regional enrichment centers to protect and teach the children of first responders and health care workers and essential workers that we need so desperately right now. I want to thank parents. This has not been easy. As I said, it's not easy to be a kid nowadays. It's not easy to be a parent nowadays and parents have really had to dig deep and create and deal with really challenging situations. It is not easy to have a child cooped up at home, I assure you. But our parents have really stepped up and they've been great partners in the distance learning that the DOE has done and we're going to work with them to become even stronger partners. And I want to thank our kids. I want to thank the children of the New York City public schools. There's no, I've said to people for years and years and years, there's nothing more wonderful than a New York City public school education. Not only for what it gives you academically, but for what it gives you in your heart and soul, how it teaches you to deal with every kind of person, the whole world. And our kids, they're finding a way as well.

So, everyone, thank you. Thank you for stepping up and I'm going to ask you to keep stepping up. I'm going to ask you to dig deep and help us through to the end of this crisis. We originally said the best-case scenario would be to come back on Monday, April 20th at the end of the spring break. We could see already, that was not going to be possible many days ago. And then the State put the pause on until April 29th. But we've had conversations in the last few days to say, is it viable? Is it safe? Is it smart? Would it work? Would it help our children? Would it be fair to the entire school community to bring our schools back at this point, at any point between now and the end of June? And after very careful consideration, I announced today that the New York City public schools will remain closed for the remainder of this school year.

Again, there is nothing easy about this decision. I can't even begin to express how much for all of us, the goal of making our schools better for all our kids and fighting against the inequalities that were so clear in our school system. You know, that was the first mission in so many ways of this administration and making sure that kids, including so many kids who have been left behind, got much greater opportunity. That's what we've been so focused on for six years. So, Lord knows having to tell you that we cannot bring our schools back for the remainder of this school year is painful. But I can also tell you it's the right thing to do. It clearly will help us save lives because it will help us to guarantee that the strategies that have been working, the shelter in place, the social distancing, all the focused strategies that are finally beginning to bear fruit, they need the time to continue to be effective. And when I talked to you the other day about the stages we would go through, I reminded everyone, the worst mistake we could make is to take our foot off the gas and end up in a situation where this disease had a resurgence and threatened us even more. We're not going to allow the coronavirus to start to attack us even more and to make sure it doesn't, we have to, we have to be cautious. We have to be smart about the moves we make and we can never get in a situation where we end up jumping too soon and regretting it later.

I had a conversation last night with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who's really been a hero in this entire national crisis. And I said to Dr. Fauci, that I had talked to the Chancellor and to our health care leadership, and really increasingly we were thinking it did not make sense. And he said to me he agreed and he appreciated the sense of being cautious and careful because the most important mission for all of us in New York City and all of us in this country is to end this crisis. To not let it reassert and keeping the New York City public schools closed is a way to contribute to finally beating back the coronavirus. And of course, what we think about every single day, and we think about this during normal times as well, protecting our kids, protecting our families, protecting our educators. From that perspective, this was obviously the right thing to do. So, it's not an easy decision. It's not a decision that is satisfying for all of us who have devoted so much of our time to try and make sure our kids got the very best education. But it is the right decision. And it's also a decision made a little clearer by the fact that the distance learning is working more and more every day and we're going to have more and more good ways to reach our kids and help them over the next few months.

Now we'll be working with the State of New York. We want to work with the State in many ways as we have throughout this crisis. But one of the specific ways is that the State regulations officially require that all school systems around the State have kids in the classrooms for 180 days. Those regulations have been waived to date all over the state. We're going to work with the State to continue that waiver so that we can see the school year through, but again, with distance learning, not with our kids in their school buildings.

Look, the other thing to recognize here is that the timeline says it all. I told all New Yorkers over the last few days, we got to assume that April will continue to be real tough. We're going to go into May, we don't know yet what this disease will do. We may get the kind of relief in May that allows us to begin to make some changes, but that may go into June. But the one thing that was clear to us was if we even want to consider bringing our schools, there was going to be a lot of lead time, a lot of work that would have to be done including in the school buildings to get ready. And again, it was not realistic to believe that that work, which would have to start in just a matter of weeks, would be appropriate given the challenge we face, given the timeline we're looking at.

We also knew that if we just brought kids back for a few weeks, it really wouldn't add that much to their lives academically. The risks simply – the risk did not outweigh the reward. It just proved to be that there was not a clear reason of what we would gain to help our kids. But the challenges and the problems were very, very clear. And we knew that there was a real danger that if we came back, some schools would have to close because of individual cases of coronavirus and it would create so much disruption and confusion. But there's another factor that's really important to point to and it's where I started about what our kids are going through. Our kids have gone through a lot of trauma here. We all know, again, kids are resilient and sometimes they don't show it, but look at what they've had to witness. Look at what they've had to experience and think about those kids who are grieving right now who've lost a grandparent or aunt or uncle or a member of their school community, an educator or another member of their school community. Think about what that's doing to our kids and we want to help them through that. We want to support them. And we don't think the best way to do that is by bringing them back into the schools between now and June. We do think there's much that we can do to support them in the meantime. 

And there's a lot we're going to have to do starting in September that's very different than what we've ever done before. I've spoken with the Chancellor about this, we're going to have to think about September in a way that really is a new era for the New York City public schools and a new approach. And one that's going to have to be very, very mindful of all the trauma that everyone's been through. And really, we're going to have to all work together to overcome it.

So, I'm going to lay out quickly, a five point plan for how we get from here to the opening of school in September. And again, we're going to ask a lot of parents, of teachers, principals, all educators to help us through this path together and work together to help our kids. And it's going to get tough. And not because of the disease alone, but because of the weather. As it gets warmer and warmer, our kids are going to get more and more restless. We know that. So, we have to help you through and we have to give you the best possible tools, the most compelling options to keep our kids focused on the distance learning and keep them safe and indoors for a lot of the day until we really see things change with this disease.

So, the first point is to make sure that the devices, the iPads and all the other devices that we have given out, will give out to kids, that every student who needs one gets one. And we will ensure that that happens by the end of April. I said at the day we had to shut down our schools that we knew a lot of kids just didn't have these devices and there would be a lag time. But we've gotten great cooperation from the companies involved and again, the team at DOE has stepped up. We now need to get devices distributed on a very fast pace. We already can say that 66,000 devices have been distributed. We have to get 240,000 more in the hands of our kids over the next couple of weeks by the end of April. And we will do that. And then I've said to the Chancellor, whatever it takes, the entire City government will assist to make sure this happens. So that's point one, devices for every child by the end April.

Point two – parent help line, we're going to take the helplines and hotlines we already have for parents and that they can reach through 3-1-1. We're going to expand them, we’re going to add more educators, add the ability to get much more coaching and support for parents in multiple languages and expand the hours. And we'll have a further announcement on that shortly. But a lot of parents, since they're dealing with an unprecedented challenge, they need coaching, they need help, they need support, they need ideas. And a lot of educators and trained professionals that they can reach at any hour of the day in multiple languages to give them that support.

Third, we're going to provide a lot more creative at-home programming. So, teachers already – teachers have always known how to be creative, but they have been extraordinarily creative in this crisis. So, DOE’s been creating new programming. Teachers themselves have been creating all sorts of important new ideas to help our kids. The Parks Department has put together some great new programming online and our Children's Cabinet is doing the same. We're going to be working with a number of media companies here in New York City and creating a variety of free programming to help children and help our families get through this, and more and more compelling options to make that stay at home a little bit easier, but also supercharge the education process in the meantime.

Fourth, we got about 75,000 seniors. They were looking forward to graduation, want for every child who we can help to meet the requirements in time, we need to do that. So very, very important mission and one that the whole DOE family feels deeply right now. We do not want to see these seniors robbed of their future, robbed of that joyous moment when they graduate high school. We have no idea, at this point, if there's going to be anything like a graduation ceremony this year, but we do know that so many of our seniors can graduate on time if we support them properly. So that's going to be a very important focus. We will have a full plan out next week that will allow us to focus on each and every senior individually, help them if they're on track to graduation right now, see it through. If they're not on track, do all we can to get them there. We have a lot of focused capacity to help these seniors. That's going to be a primary objective. So, to all the seniors out there we are going to help you and we're going to communicate with you and figure out what you need. We want the maximum number of seniors graduating on time by June, and we want to support them in every way possible.

And then the fifth point, we are working now on a comprehensive plan to reopen the schools in September and as I said, it will be unlike any other reopening of schools we've ever seen because we're going to have to ensure the safety of all our students in a new way. We're going to have to make sure our vulnerable students get maximum support. We're going to have to do so much for the mental health of our students who have been through as trauma and the mental health of the whole school community. Our educators have been through so much – everyone who works in the schools. We're also going to need to address the emotional impact on parents and families. All of that. This focus on mental health and support for everyone who's been through this crisis will be crucial to our plan to reopen in September. And next school year is going to have to be the greatest academic year the New York City public schools have ever had, because we're going to be playing a lot of catch up. So, we're going to be looking for every conceivable way to make it the richest, most powerful year we've ever had to really help our kids move forward. I'm going to turn to the Chancellor. I think it would be good to let him weigh in now and then I'm going to come back on just a couple of other items before we take questions from the media. So, Chancellor –

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I want thank you for your leadership. This is not an easy time, but I also want to echo your words of thanks to all of our educators, our administrators, our food service workers, our custodians, everyone that has been out supporting our students and our families. I've had the opportunity to participate in a number of online forums with families and parents. And the stories that they share with me are both inspiring but also challenging. So, I want to thank our families who have really stepped up and moved mountains to support all of our students. A special thanks to all of our colleagues and friends that are volunteering at the Regional Education Centers, our food service workers, who are also demonstrating true heroism every single day. I want to thank you for your service to your fellow New Yorkers. Without you, this city would grind to a halt. So, thank you for what you're doing. You are true heroes and every night at 7:00 pm when you hear all of those claps and cheers and pots banging, you're part of the heroes that they're celebrating. So, I want you to remember that.

I know that this news today may come as a bit of a shock to everyone out there, but the Mayor and I absolutely agree that this is in the best interest of all New Yorkers. We know that the past few weeks have not been easy. And we've asked a lot of our teachers and our administrators and our families and our students, I know you're exhausted. But thank you for continuing to do the work that you do. While we may not be together in school buildings, I want to be very clear that schools remain in session because of our teachers and our administrators and the learning continues. We just don't do it in person. And that'll continue throughout the rest of the school year by this announcement. I also want to reemphasize what the Mayor said. We are going to be here to support you, both our teachers, our administrators, our students, and our families, through this transition. We're staffing up our parent hotline, we're speeding up device delivery. And I want to thank you, Mr. Mayor, for helping us work with the supply chain. We, literally, when you think about what is happening around the world, every school system in the world is ordering devices right now. And we are at the top of the list because of your intercession, Mr. Mayor. So, thank you.

We're staffing up and we're going to be there every step to support you as we finish this school year in remote learning mode. We know what an undertaking this has been. But we want to thank you. Remember the two words that we've continued to emphasize. Number one is flexibility and the second is patience. So, thank you for your flexibility and your patience. We will also be reaching out to families to get your feedback about how remote learning is not only going but what that should look like as we go into the rest of this school year because we truly want it to be as an enriching experience as possible. You are truly our partners in this effort and we want to thank you.

[Chancellor Carranza Speaks in Spanish]

Mr. Mayor, thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Chancellor. Let me just turn to a couple of other quick items, important matters, but I want to get through them quickly and then we'll say a few words in Spanish and we'll turn to our colleagues in the media for questions. So, another area where we are focused, of course, on protecting people, protecting their health, ensuring that we do everything to address this crisis is with some are almost vulnerable New Yorkers who are homeless. And our shelter system is an area where we are focused on ensuring that those who do not have a home are protected, that they are given the support they need through this crisis. It's tough enough to not have a place to live. We want to keep people safe and healthy and make sure all the support they need is there for them.

So, first I want to announce that by Monday, April 20th, we will have 6,000 homeless people in our shelter system who were in other settings, will now be in hotel settings. So, 6,000 single New Yorkers, meaning single adults, will be in hotels, not traditional homeless shelters. That's about one-third of the single clients of our overall shelter system moved into hotel settings. We are doing that because we think that is the right balance to strike as we ensure that people get what they need to be safe. And I want to remind everyone, when we talk about the health and safety of homeless people, we have to protect everyone from COVID-19. We also have to support the needs of homeless folks well beyond COVID-19, folks who have serious physical issues that they might need support with, but also a lot of whom have mental health issues and need support and need services available to them constantly. And that's what happens, of course, in so many of our homeless shelters. So, we're going to keep that going while also recognizing a number of people need to be in hotel settings. We'll strike that balance.

Those who will be prioritized across our shelter system for transfer to hotels, will include seniors, will include, of course, anyone with symptoms of COVID-19, or who tested positive for COVID-19. They, of course, will be isolated in hotel settings. And anybody in shelters where it's been difficult to achieve social distancing. So, I want this to be clear. Some shelters have a lot of space, some do not. Where it's clear to our Department of Social Services and our Department of Homeless Services that social distancing cannot be achieved properly, a number of those clients will be moved to hotels to achieve the balance, to make sure there is the proper social distancing. So, we will use those hotels aggressively as a tool to support homeless individuals, to strike the right balance in our shelters to make sure people who need to be isolated are isolated. Commissioner Steve Banks is with me here, our Social Services Commissioner. I want to thank him and his whole team. They've done a remarkable job of keeping people safe in the shelter system and we have all agreed on this plan as the best way forward to use hotels to ensure that we can strike the balance and achieve those health and safety goals that are paramount right now.

We are also at the same time in this crisis working to continue what we talked about before the coronavirus hit us, which is getting more and more New Yorkers off the streets who have been permanently living on the streets. To do that, even in the midst of this crisis – and I commend everyone at Social Services, Homeless Services – we’ll open 230 new Safe Haven beds and low-barrier beds. These are the kinds of beds and facilities that help us get people immediately off the street who have reached that point where they're ready to finally come in and accept shelter and change their lives and hopefully never, ever go back to the streets. A lot of our street homeless folks are going through a lot right now like everyone, of course. We're going to remind them and show them that there's a better way and it's available to them now. And those outreach workers, those hero outreach reach workers continue to do their work while being safe. And we're going to work hard to get more and more people off the streets into shelter, particularly those who are older. That will be a focus – an intense focus in these next weeks.

Finally, I want to do some thank-yous every chance I get. I want to thank people who are doing amazing things. So many New Yorkers have been heroic, so many New Yorkers have dug deep to help each other. I want to do a special thank you to everyone at the Parks Department. We have asked a lot of them and they've been doing amazing things. The one thing I don't think people think about is, the Parks Department has part of how we help our kids who have to stay home because of shelter in place. But they have been, they've been coming up with great, exciting content to ensure that kids have something new and exciting to participate in from home. If you go to nyc.gov/parksathome, you can see the great content that Parks Departments put together.

But I also want to thank all the Parks workers, everyone at the Parks Department, especially the frontline workers in our parks. They've been working, despite all the challenges, to keep the parks safe and clean. They have been absolutely teaching and enforcing social distance and it's been remarkable how well they've done that. The results we've heard consistently from the Parks Department, from the NYPD have been really striking how well they've done it, convincing people that we all have to do social distancing together. This was not, I assure you, what Parks workers thought they had signed up for when they took their jobs, but they have been adapting and doing a hell of a job, helping to ensure that our parks are safe for everyone. So, thank you to everyone at the Parks Department.

And always want to thank those who are supporting all of our frontline heroes. And a lot of people have stepped up. Someone that New Yorkers know well from his illustrious career on the basketball court, John Starks. He has dished out an assist, and this time it's not with a basketball. This time it's 3,00 sets of scrubs for our city hospitals to help out our health care workers. IBM has provided a half-a-million dollars in [inaudible] technology to the Department of Health and a million donation to the Department of Education. Apollo Global Management, and cofounder Josh Harris, have provided 100,000 N95 masks. That's outstanding. 100,000 N95 masks to our public hospitals, particularly to Elmhurst Hospital. We are so grateful for that. And Salesforce has made a half-million dollar donation as well to help the effort to fight COVID-19 in New York City. So, a lot of people stepping up, a lot of people helping from all over the city, all over the country, and we are so appreciative. And I'll close, before a few words in Spanish by saying, look, even in the midst of this challenge and this pain another thing that people are doing that brings out the beauty of the holiday season is they are living out their faith.

All of you are helping each other, respecting each other, supporting each other. All of our faiths, all of our beliefs, no matter what your belief system is, they almost all come back to the same place, which is love each other, help each other. And that's what we're seeing New Yorkers do. And it's beautiful even amidst the pain and the struggle. So, thank you because you're showing the whole world something very beautiful in this time of challenge. In Spanish, just a quick summary.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let us know the name and the outlet of each person calling in.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have Chancellor Carranza and Commissioner Banks here in person, and Dr. Barbot on the phone. We'll take one question from each reporter in order to get to as many outlets as possible. With that, I will start with Christina from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mayor and Chancellor. Thanks for taking my call. Looking ahead to September, we would like to know whether there's any talk about extending the school year. And also, if you could talk more about what reopening schools might look like in terms of helping students catch up academically.

Mayor: I'll start and pass to the Chancellor, Christina. We're still dealing with the great unknown, obviously. So, the first thing to say in any attempt to project the months ahead is we first have to see what happens with the fight against this disease and ensure that we're making steady progress and ensure that we can get into those next phases that I described earlier in the week, the low transmission and the no transmission. For us to be effective at educating kids in person, we have to really prove that this crisis is effectively over. So, that's going to be the determinant more than anything. The DOE is working on all sorts of contingency plans depending on how that timing goes. But the one thing that is certain is we can at least plan for the scheduled opening of school. We have to make sure the disease is beaten back, but we can plan for it because as we've been saying from the beginning, and our Health Commissioner has been saying, we think September is a good date to think about when things get more fully back to normal. And we know it will take a different kind of approach than we've ever had, particularly as I say on the mental health side, but also on the academic side because we're going to be dealing with challenges we've never had on this scale before and we're also going to have to find a way to make up a lot of lost grounds. So, it’s going to be real tough. Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Sir. Christina, so as the Mayor said, we're working on multiple scenarios and again, caveat is always depending on the public health, how this COVID virus is promulgating or hopefully not throughout our city. That's going to be a huge determinant. That being said, we're also working very closely with our labor partners, CSA, UFT our food service workers as well because we want to make sure that their voices are included as well in terms of what makes sense. And as I mentioned in my comments as well, we will be soliciting the feedback of parents as well. Because obviously they're going through a very difficult time as well. I can say that everything is on the table but nothing has yet been decided because again, circumstances in terms of the public health are going to determine when we open again. But we are very, very concerned about making sure that our students’ mental health, the trauma that they are suffering and families are suffering, is well taken into account, as well as the academics as we go forward. So, more information will be coming next week and in subsequent weeks.

Moderator: Next, we'll take Doris from NY1. Hi.

Question: This will be in Spanish for NY1 Noticias. This is for Chancellor Carranza –

[Question asked in Spanish]

Chancellor Carranza: [Speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: I got a lot of it, but not all of it. Is there anything you didn't say previously that you need to highlight in English?

Chancellor Carranza: I just want to say again how are parents – the question is how are parents going to take on this challenge of educating students and having them home through the end of the school year. I just want parents to understand that you're not alone and we recognize, and this is part of what weighs so heavily on the Mayor's decision-making authority is that we understand that families – this is a crisis. This is a traumatic event for families as well. All of the things that you may be dealing with on top of now you're been drafted into the Teaching Corps. But you're not alone. If you go to our webpage, schools.nyc.gov, you will go to Learn at Home. There’s a Learn at Home link with lots of guidance for families, lots of activities, lots of things that families can do.

I've also been privy in some of my conversations with parents to learn that parents are forming their own support groups and they're sharing activities. For example, this coming Wednesday is going to be a Fitness at Home Wednesday where our New York sports teams are doing fitness videos that families will be able to log on to and participate in. There's a lot of creativity that's happening out there, but what we want to be able to do is put people together. You can also call 3-1-1, and that'll put you in touch with folks at the Department of Education that can also help you navigate what these next few weeks and next few months will look like.

Moderator: Next we have Myles from NBC New York.

Mayor: Myles? Let's see if Myles is there. Myles, can you hear us all right?

Moderator: Sorry, apologies. We will circle back. Next, we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I was just looking for an update from yesterday on the issue of delivery of meals to seniors. You had said that you hadn't spoken to anyone who had heard of a senior going without delivery. Have you heard anything differently since then?

Mayor: Yes. And thank you for the question. I'm looking to Freddi Goldstein. I thought we put this out publicly. Yes, we did. Okay, did you tweet it out or, okay. Freddi, so check what Freddi put out last night. The – in fact it is a true statement that previous to yesterday I did not hear of anyone not getting their meals. This a real mistake what happened with the seniors in Independence Plaza – it should not have happened. I want to apologize to those seniors. Something went wrong in the application process and we are aggressively fixing it. Meals will be delivered today. I've asked our Food Czar Kathryn Garcia to work to make sure that that will not happen ever again, anywhere. If someone calls 3-1-1 and they sign up for those home deliveries again, there's certain particular characteristics we're looking forward to ensure that someone gets a home delivery. But if someone qualifies, they must start getting them immediately. And so our leader who's proven herself many a time before, she will ensure that all agencies involved and the 3-1-1 operation are tightly coordinated to make sure that anyone who signs up, any senior signs up get those meals right away, this is literally crucial. We cannot have a senior in this moment where there's been so much dislocation – if a senior needs a food delivery at home, it has to happen instantly. And I've made that really clear to Kathryn Garcia. Let me be clear, when I say instantly, meaning as quickly as humanly possible from the time they sign up to the time the meal arrives, I want that to be the fastest conceivable timeline. I have told Commissioner Garcia that this is an area, even though we're dealing with a lot of challenges you know, human, especially logistical, financial, this is an area where we're not going to spare any expense. If people need food, you know, it's going to be one of our highest priorities to get them food. So we will fix that going forward. If anyone has a problem, you sign up with 3-1-1 and you have a problem, please call 3-1-1 back and alert them immediately that if you have not gotten a delivery you were supposed to get, so that can be fixed. But the Independence Plaza situation will be fixed today.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and Chancellor and everyone on the call. I'm curious if you could outline if there's any changes or plans to summer school. As you know, particularly the District 75 students, they have school for 12 months out of the year. Will there be any plan to open some of these buildings during the summer or will you have a further plan in the coming days?

Mayor: Thank you Katie. Great question. I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. We care a lot about making sure the kids who go to the District 75 schools are supported and protected and given what they need, but it's the same larger reality is the first question for us all. We don't know what the summer will mean for anything we do because again, we have to first get to – out of this widespread transmission phase, which according to, you know, all the information we have to date is something that only happens in May or June. And then we have to sustain the effort to get into low transmission and hold that and keep making progress to that to get to the point where we're basically at no transmission.

You know what our Health Commissioner, Dr. Barbot has said from the beginning is we could see in September being back in a state of something like normalcy, but that's very initial and preliminary based on what we know. There's still a lot more we don't know and I keep warning against that possibly of a resurgence in the disease, which is really one of the underpinnings of why I made this decision on the schools to really help ensure that there is not a resurgence. So I would say right now, it's hard to know for sure. It's hard to see a summer programming until we have a lot more answers. I feel a lot more confident about anything starting in September than I do something starting in July. But to the last part of your question, yeah, we're certainly going to be planning and ready for different options and when we see something definitive, that's when we would talk about any possibility for the summer. Chancellor?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, I will only add to what Mayor de Blasio has said – is that there are two other operating words that we're operating under. One is optimistic and realistic. So optimistically yeah, we want to get students together, we want to have them with their teachers as soon as humanly possible and where it's safe. Realistically, given the modeling that the Mayor has talked about we are going to be in remote learning phase through the summer and for students with disabilities in particular whose Individual Education Plan, their IEP, calls for services, we are working with families and with their teachers to make sure that those services are being provided. The good news is that in the vast majority of cases, we are able to provide those services remotely. There are some things that are just much more difficult and – but even then, we're working through those, those particular situations as well. So again, as public health information dictates, that's how we will then determine what those programs look like for in-person instruction.

Moderator: We're going to circle back to Myles, Myles from NBC New York.

Question: Mr. Mayor, Good morning.

Mayor: Good morning Myles.

Question: I'm happy to be back here. Just a question about how do you envision and the Chancellor as well, the Regents working. In order for these seniors to be able to graduate, they need to pass these Regents exams and you're envisioning them coming into a central building and getting them done? Or could they be done remotely?

Mayor: I'll pass that Chancellor by just say, I think and everything we're going to be dealing with, with the Regents, with the State, I think we're all sensitive to the fact this is a place we've never been to four, we're dealing with a crisis that, you know, literally on a health level we haven't seen anything this in a century. But in terms of impact on young people, we have to be creative and strategic because the last thing we want to see is a lot of young people who were literally well down the road to their plans to go to college or to go onto whatever else they were going to do next, you know, being interrupted and being stopped on a path that they had been working on, you know, for years and years and their families had been working on for years and years. So, whatever it takes, and I would imagine the state and the regions feel the same way, we come up with creative solutions so we don't disrupt the lives of these children any further. But Chancellor you take it from there?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, good question. So the State Education Department has already,
I would say eliminated the June administration of the Regents. So students that were going to sit for that in June do not have to take the Regents. They have not yet made a decision on the Regents administration for August. We suspect that they will take that up in a matter of weeks. The State Education Department has also put out guidance for those seniors that still needed to sit for the Regents. And we've distributed that guidance to schools. So anyone that's listening that has a high school senior should be in touch with their guidance counselors and with their high school for more specific information because again, this is all very individual to individual students. But I want to thank the State Education Department for really keeping an eye on how do we realistically get students to cross that threshold and get their diploma.

Moderator: Next we have Sophia from Gothamist.

Question: Hi, good morning.

Mayor: Okay, good morning. Go ahead Sophia.

Question: Okay, good morning Mayor and Chancellor. I wanted to ask about attendance rates so far with remote learning, especially if as you said, 240,000 students still don't have the right technology yet. And is there any way to move some of the learning components offline to help relieve the pressure?

Mayor: Yeah, great question Sophia. I'll pass the chance to, but say one the DOE has been also doing a work offline and he'll describe – the Chancellor will describe it. But yeah, attendance is a very challenging dynamic when you're dealing with distance. But that is also being worked on. I want to remind everyone what we asked of educators. It was almost like a military situation to say you have to mobilize in a week's time and put together you know, something and get it going. So at least there was something for kids. And then as we said, literally the day that we, you know, that painful decision to close the schools, this will get better each week, literally meant that with every passing week there would be more devices in the hands of kids with every passing week. The educators would come up with new and better ways to do distance learning with every passing week we'd find more and more ways to engage kids and keep track of what they are doing. But it is, this is a work in progress. So, Chancellor, if you could explain sort of what's possible and what's not so far on attendance, that'd be helpful.

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, sir. So, this week we put out guidance for taking attendance. Obviously, we're not taking period by period attendance. It's a full day one, once a day schools are reporting their attendance. We can get you the details of what that attendance is looking like. What we're trying to pay particular attention to is students that have not been in contact with us. We're spending a lot of time, our teachers, our administrators are really taking time to get in touch with those students. We want to know where every student is. What's also important to really be clear about is that when we originally talked about device distribution, we had put out a number of about 300,000 devices based on a number of modeling scenarios. Since that time we've actually had parents fill out a survey and I'm going to give you the information because if you haven't filled it out, and I'll tell you why this is important in a minute, you need to. You can do the survey by calling 7-1-8-9-3-5-5-1-0-0 and press the number five. Okay, 7-1-8-9-3-5-5-1-0-0 press the number five, if you don't have internet. If you do have internet, it's very simple: coronavirus.schools.nyc/remotelearningdevices and that's available in all nine languages. 

Now the reason that's important is that the families that have taken that survey, we now know who you are, if you need a device and the reason that becomes really valuable is that this, this week we have mailed over 40,000 packets to families that don't yet have devices. And we know they don't have devices because they filled out that survey. So they have learning packets that have been mailed directly to them. It's also important to note that we've given out 175,000 devices that were school devices. They’re loaned out to students, they're in their hands.

We've also, as of this week, shipped 70,000 Wi-Fi equipped iPads to students because we know who they are because of that survey. So that means that in the hands of students are about 245,000 devices. If that was a school system, that would be the sixth or seventh largest school system in America that we've put devices in the hands of those students already. And as the Mayor has said, our goal is by the end of April, every one of those students that have identified themselves or families that have identified themselves as needing a device based on the survey will have a device in their hands as well. So it's really important that we know who you are because we need to get you in the queue, but it's also important so that we can mail you those learning packets so that you're not losing any instructional time as you wait for your device.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Christie from News 12 New Jersey.

Question: Hi, good morning. Mr. Mayor panel. Quick question about food distribution where – well, actually the money towards food pantries and soup kitchens we're hearing that $25 million is being designated from the city, which I assume is actually mirroring what the state is giving the other $25 million. Just a question that collected $50 million, how long is that expected to last? You know, you're saying hopefully by September at least schools will be back on, but do you think this $50 million collectively from the state and the city will last even as long as you hope it will?

Mayor: Well, Christie that’s a great question. We – I'm very, very worried about the food situation. I think we're only beginning to see the impact of this this piece of the coronavirus crisis is going to have on people. It's remember – kind of, it kind of will get worse with each week because folks have lost their income and people have lost jobs and will continue to lose jobs and then, you know, whatever they had still coming in that runs out. So I think it unfortunately, tragically it gets worse going ahead. There is some help coming from the federal government. That's a good thing in terms of, you know, the money coming out of the stimulus and certainly these particular new initiatives that you referred to will help a lot. But no, I'm not confident yet that everything is going to be needed is in place. That's why I named a foods are Kathryn Garcia and that's why I've said to her, whatever it's going to take a, we're going to put forward the resources to make sure that everyone has food. We literally have to have a simple standard. No New Yorker goes without food and what the folks in the Department Education are doing, which is amazing, 435 sites that have now been up over the last week or more where anybody, any adult can come in and get breakfast, lunch and dinner, grab and go as for as many family members as possible. That to me is the kind of thing we're going to have to do on a really big scale going forward to make sure that everyone has food. 

Christie, this is something that could go on for months before – think about, I mean, when are people going to have normal incomes again, you know, even when you're factoring in unemployment insurance, things like that, it's still a lot less obviously than people had. When are they going to have normal incomes again, you know, we hope and pray that it's no later than September, but we don't know that yet. So we're going to have to do a really constant, ever-growing food effort to make this work.

Moderator: Next we have Sally from Politico.

Question: Hi Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Sally.

Question: Apologies if this was asked already because I was cutting in and out. But do you have an update on the number of homeless people who have been infected and have died from the coronavirus? And also, I had a second question. We reported last night that your administration has been having some difficulty getting timely information from the Cuomo administration on the number of positive cases and deaths and that sometimes you have to wait until his press conference to get the updated daily number. So, I was wondering if there's any hope that that might be changing?

Mayor: I think everyone is working together to try and deal with information in a very, very tough, painful, ever-changing situation. So, we certainly work with the State constantly. The two health departments communicate a lot. We're constantly working together to try and get the best information, the most timely information. You know, so, I think that right now I'd say, everyone is together trying to work – and we've been honest about it with our health department. I know Dr. Barbot is online, if she wants to comment, that we've had to make sure as we've collected information that we thought it was a consistent and accurate. And there's been lag sometimes that probably wouldn't have been the case in a more normal time. But I think, overall, you know what the State is finding out, what we are finding in many ways is the same information, even if it, you know, comes in a different hour, it's the same conclusion you can draw from it. And then, what we're going to do on Monday is put out these three indicators that we think are the truest measure of how we proceed. And I've said publicly, we need to see all three of them move in the right direction, meaning downward together for at least 10 days to two weeks before we can even consider changing any of the current rules and restrictions. So, before I turned to Commissioner Banks, on your first question, I'm going to see – Dr. Barbot, I did my best to summarize. Is there anything you want to add to that answer? 

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: No, sir. You got it just right.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you, doctor. And now, Steve Banks on the other question.

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: Let me give you an update. We've been putting out information each day and want to make sure that you have it. So, we will make a note to make sure you're on our distribution list. So far, we've had 343 positive cases, 20 deaths among those 343 cases; 19 of those deaths were after a period of hospitalization, and one after someone was self-isolating. Within that 343 positive cases, in addition to the 20 people that passed away – and my, my heart goes out to them and their loved ones – there were 37 individuals who've been discharged, meaning their cases have been resolved. 139 are in isolation, a space that we created within our shelter system portfolio; 81 are in the hospital; 35 are self-isolating – that means they're in families with children or families where the individuals – I'm sorry, where the individual is in a family that has a self-contained living unit; and 31 have made other arrangements and reunited with family or friends in the community.

Mayor: Steve, I didn't – I may have missed, did you say what the overall census right now in shelter is roughly?

Commissioner Banks: The current overall census is 58,000. And then, of course there are, you know, roughly 4,000 people on the streets. We've conducted more than 12,000 encounters, outreach encounters on the streets since the middle of March. And our outreach teams and our frontline staff have really been doing a tremendous job in this effort and questioning individuals on the street whether or not they've got the symptoms, observing whether they've got the symptoms. Out of all of those engagements, 12 individuals from the street have been transported to the hospital for testing and all of them thus far have come out to be negative.

Moderator: Next, we'll have Matt from Newsday.

Question: Good morning, all. For the Mayor, you said Thursday there could be even stricter restrictions, depending on the infection rate.

Mayor: Wait, Matt, I'm sorry. I couldn't hear your beginning, Matt. Start again.

Question: Sorry about that. I'll say it a little slower and louder. You said on Thursday that the restrictions could, depending on the infection rate, be stricter. What specifically are some of those restrictions beyond the status quo. And for the Chancellor, to what extent are students being graded for this semester?

Mayor: So, Matt, look, I think – it’s a good question, I appreciate it – the way to think about this is that with the social distancing, with the shelter in place, we're obviously right now at a situation where we've changed life in New York City profoundly. And people are trying to live in a very, very different way and it's been real difficult for a lot of New Yorkers. But clearly, if we have to even tighten up further, we could. We don't want to – who on earth would want to? But if we felt that we we're seeing a resurgence and a danger to the health and safety of New Yorkers, and we have to tighten up the rules further, we would do that and we would obviously work with the State on that as well. So, you know, I don't want to project what all those different things may be, but, you know, the easy example is the interpretation of what's essential and non-essential. I think it's a good interpretation right now. You could tighten that even further. You could take some of the work that is now considered essential – excuse me, considered non-essential – let me say it again, I can do this, Matt – you could take some of the work that's considered essential now and limit even that further or limit the number of people that were allowed to do that work. So, that's one area where you could tighten further. But the fact is, I don't think it's real healthy to do theoreticals either way. Some folks in the media have asked me, you know, describe exactly how we might loosen up at a certain point. And I said, no, it's – we can't do that, because we don't know if we're going to get to that point when we're going to get to that point and it's not healthy, I don't think, to say to people, well, this is what might happen and then raise expectations unduly. I don't think it makes sense to do it the other way either. What I think makes 100 percent sense is to say, here is a plan that New Yorkers are actually making work. As tough as it is, it's working. We have seen some really great indicators in the last week. It's not – we're not out of the woods by any stretch, but something's working. It's clearly because people took shelter in place and social distancing to heart and they're doing it really, really well. Now, Matt, another point is, we have to keep enforcing all of that all the time and the NYPD and a lot of other agencies mentioned – Parks Department, Fire, Sheriff's Office, Buildings Department, they’re are all a part of that. The Buildings Department did a great job when a lot of the construction was deemed a non-essential, did a great job getting out there and shutting down those construction sites and making sure they didn't come back. Parks has done a great job. NYPD is doing it all the time – grocery stores, pharmacies, streets, parks, you name it. In fact, thank God, as we're seeing today NYPD is starting to see real progress in terms of a police officers coming back who had been sick. We're seeing finally a little a decline in the absentee rate as we beef up the NYPD again, the ability to get out there and do even more enforcement. So, I would argue, Matt, that the singular focus should be the rules and restrictions we have now that are working, enforce them really, really consistently, New Yorkers double down on them. And then, when we see that sustained progress, let's assume the positive with those three indicators go down all in a row, we can talk about some loosening up. If, God forbid, those indicators went in the wrong direction, then we're going to talk about the things that might mean tightening up. And I think that means for everyone, do what you're doing, do not take the foot off the gas so we never have to get to that tightening up. The second question, go ahead.

Chancellor Carranza: So, on grading – work is being graded, but, again, we are emphasizing flexibility in this time period. And the reason for that is we understand that there are students that may not have devices yet. We understand that there may be students that are taking care of their younger siblings and the next door neighbor siblings because their parents or guardians are out doing work for the city. So, flexibility is key. We are – we've put out guidance to the field about grading that will be further refined as we go into remote learning for the remainder of this school year. The bottom line here is that we want students to continue to engage academically, but what we're hearing very strongly from our parents and from our teachers is that there also needs to be a very strong emphasis on trauma-informed curriculum so that students can process what's happening to them. As the Mayor has said, we haven't done this in a hundred years. So, it's important that we are also focusing on the social and emotional learning needs of students as well. And there are many – listen, as a teacher, I had many ways of monitoring student progress and were they actually mastering the concept. Our teachers are being very creative in that regard as well. Grading will not look the same as it would in a traditional in-person classroom, hence flexibility. And that's okay. So, grading is happening, but it doesn't look like it was happening even last semester.

Moderator: Next we have Debralee from Manhattan Times-Bronx Free Press.

Question: Good morning, everyone. How are you?

Mayor: Hey, Debralee.

Question: I wanted to follow up, Mayor, on the conversation that you've been having with labor leaders on this discussion, and also with Chancellor Carranza. What was the precise response from the UFT on this decision? When did they know and what has been their response to you on this? And then also, given the fact that these schools that we're talking about in terms of closure are going to disproportionately impact families that, given your own data – the Department of Health data – is already impacting families that, as you noted, have been disproportionately impacted by illness or death by COVID-19. What contingency plans, what formal steps can the City speak to that will, beyond just looking at remote learning options and looking to bolster the academic support for students? Can you speak to specific reinforcements for students in the Bronx where you're seeing this COVID-19 virus really hit so hard and their families that go beyond the scope of what the DOE is already doing for everyone?

Mayor: Great question, Debralee. Appreciate that very much. I'm going to start and pass to the Chancellor on both parts of your question. On the question of the folks and the families, the kids in the Bronx, I think you're exactly right – as we said, there's this real clear disparities in how this crisis is playing out and folks who have borne the brunt of so many other challenges for, you know, decades – poverty and health disparities long before coronavirus are now bearing the brunt with the coronavirus. It's a cycle of unfairness that's playing out very clearly and deeply and painfully. So, we have to double down. You know, one of the things that Chancellor led the way on was the Bronx Plan. This was, you know – last year, before we ever heard the word – literally, before the coronavirus existed, one of the great things this Chancellor has done was the Bronx Plan to ensure that the best teachers in a lot of subject matters at had not been – literally had not been available in schools in the Bronx – and some of the schools in the Bronx having the toughest time, had for years and years, not had the teachers they needed in math and science and foreign language – and because of the initiative the Chancellor created and agreed with the union on, we were able this last September to get a whole new group of teachers into the Bronx schools and start to make them better and stronger. And you could see the evidence right away. We're going to have to do all that and more, going forward. So I would – I know the Chancellor will go into a little more detail, but I think we have to think right now about with a distance model what we can do to support kids in the Bronx and kids who are going through the most, including how we can help with mental health. And we already have 888-NYC-WELL to help anyone with mental health challenges, 24/7, multiple languages for free, but we have to think about how to pinpoint that to kids who have particular needs around mental health or obviously any other ways we can help them academically. So, that's part one. And I'd say, of course, in September, doubling down on our investments and our focus in the Bronx so we can come back very, very strong, because this – again, this next school year is going to have to be the greatest school year we've ever had to overcome what we've lost. On the decision process and the workforce, the Chancellor can certainly speak to that, because there's been ongoing discussions. Of course, the people that do the work, our educators and the people who staff our buildings, have been wanting to know what was going to happen next, have been expressing real concerns about health and safety, and just about effectiveness, whether they could – if we came back, we could do it effectively and have any real impact on our kids' education, you know, whether it was going to be worth the risk. And I think consistently what the folks representing our workforce have said is that they're not convinced at all it's worth the risk. And that certainly was important in our thinking. But really, I want to make clear that in making this decision, which we solidified last night – it's something we've been talking about for days, but we really came to the full conclusion last night after long conversations with the Chancellor, with our health leadership, and, as I said, with Dr. Fauci last night. And I think Dr. Fauci is like the great health conscience of America right now and he was so clear about the importance of a careful, cautious approach in fighting back this virus and how keeping schools closed would be a really important component of an overall strategy to beat the coronavirus once and for all. So, when I added up everything I'd heard from the Chancellor and his team, including the discussions they'd had with labor, what our own health leadership was saying, and then ultimately with what Dr. Fauci said, it became clear to me last night that this was the right thing to do. And, of course, we wanted to announce it right away because so many parents, so many educators, everyone's been looking for clarity and we wanted to give it to them.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So, I'll only add that I've had many conversations, daily conversations, multiple conversations every day with the labor leaders that I get to work with and not one of them has expressed anything but support. Let the data drive the decision. So, they are all very supportive of this decision. I think more than anything, students and families and our colleagues, our teachers, administrators, food service workers, custodians, everybody just wants to know what are we going to be doing? And so, I think this is important for – and I want to thank the Mayor for making this decision and us putting that decision out there. That being said, there is an incredible team working in the Bronx led by the executive superintendent Meisha Ross Porter and her team. The superintendents, the high school superintendents, District 75 superintendents, the principals – and there is so many wonderful stories of resilience and enrichment that is happening in the Bronx – people doing things that are creative but supporting each other. I will also say that, you know, to every dark cloud there's a silver lining. And it's unfortunate that we are in the state of public pandemic that we are. However, when we get to the other side of this pandemic, we will have bridged the digital divide for our students – that is particularly egregious in communities like the Bronx. Students will have laptops, students will have devices, there'll be connected, they will have the ability to explore the world in ways that they didn't have this past August. So, again, it's unfortunate there's a crisis, but we are looking at this from a perspective of how do we continue to make the learning experiences of students even better. And if there is a silver lining that'll be the silver lighting, not only in the Bronx but in many communities that have been disproportionately not connected with devices and connectivity.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next, we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I know you on Streetsblog to ask a non-transportation question, but the ability to move around while also socially distancing is itself a vital issue for fighting the spread of this disease. So, on Friday – so I will ask this question – on Friday, multiple business improvement districts, and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, asked you to open up many more streets, including Broadway, which is virtually car-free right now anyway. And given that you are asked about Oakland's 74 miles of car-free streets yesterday, maybe you can give us a timeline beyond your answer yesterday, which was no.

Mayor: Yeah. Gersh, thank you. Again, I want my team to evaluate the Oakland plan. Look, all over the country, people are learning from each other and people are creating in a crisis atmosphere. So, I want to absolutely understand what Oakland has done and then see what it tells us. I want you to – even though, Gersh, you have a specific mission and I respect your mission, you're very smart person, so I'm going to ask you to take in the fullness of what I said, not just say, you said no, but listen to why I said what I said, which is, we have an NYPD that has been diminished in terms of workforce, although continues to do a great job. We have a concern about enforcement at grocery stores, supermarkets, pharmacies all over the city that is so crucial right now to ensuring that social distancing and shelter in place will work. The NYPD strongly believes, in addition to everything else it has to do to keep people safe, that it needs to focus its enforcement efforts on where people are right now rather than open up a whole new vein of places that have to be enforced and could be gathering points. And that's where we are right now. Now, to be fair, as I said, for the first time, we have seen, and it's been reported by the NYPD, beginning of some progress and getting the workforce back to fuller strength. That's an important factor here. So, we will evaluate the Oakland plan for sure. I'm happy to give you an answer next week on if we see something there we can act on. But for the meantime, I'm saying this is about enforcement, making sure that the enforcement we need in every other way is sufficient, watching the amount of workforce we have to work with the NYPD, not creating the danger of new potential gathering places. And I'm also concerned – and I'll ask the DOT to look at this – you know, we have to, unlike Oakland, which is a noticeably sized city – obviously, a big American city, but it's not New York City. It has nowhere near the population, of the density we have. So, what do we need to keep open for first responders, for ambulances? What do we need to keep open for food deliveries? We have to look at the whole picture and decide what makes sense. So, my straight forward understanding with you will be, we'll have an evaluation on the Oakland plan. We'll have a sense of what we think of it and whether it's applicable here and we'll give you an answer next week.

Moderator: Last for today, we have Jessica from WNYC.

Mayor: Jessica, can you hear us try again? Jessica, you said WNYC? Jessica?

Moderator: Okay, we'll take one more. We have Alyssa from NY1.

Question: Good morning. Forgive me [inaudible] some connection issues, but what the City working with the State on the 180-day waiver, does this mean the school year is shorter? Is June 26 still the plan as the last day?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. The State's been granting waivers to all school systems to-date. We're obviously going to ask them to keep extending that and keep going with the timing of the school year, but not the in-person reality of the school year. We clearly want to see our kids get the most education we can give them. And we want to take it through to what would have been the natural end of the school year.

Chancellor Carranza: So, yes. Mr. Mayor, I also want to emphasize again that while we have not physically been together in schools learning and teaching is happening, teachers are teaching remotely, students are learning remotely. So, we've also been working very closely with the State education department so that they know what our remote learning plan is so that they can see that we are still teaching and students are still learning. It's not in the optimal environment that we would all like, but teaching and learning is still happening. So, we're going to continue to emphasize that as we work with the State around the waiver, but no change in the end of the school year on based on the waivers we've received.

Mayor: Thank you. And everyone, thank you. I know a lot of people all over the city are getting ready for Easter tomorrow. I want to wish you a Happy Easter in advance, even though it's against the backdrop of something very tough and very painful. And I know people can't gather in so many cases the way you want to, but I hope you have your loved ones either with you or on Skype or FaceTime or some way are connecting with the people you love. And even if you can't be in the same place, the spirit, the love of the holiday, the faith is with you all. God bless all New Yorkers in the middle, this incredibly difficult crisis. But again, I am so proud of all of you and the way you're helping us forward out of this crisis. So, keep doing what you're doing and God bless you all.

2020-04-12 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. A very happy Easter to all New Yorkers who are celebrating this joyous holiday, even in the midst of this pain and this crisis. It’s a time to think about renewal and to think about what comes ahead, a time to think about how we support each other, and to everyone continuing to celebrate Passover, a zizen Pesach to all. I just want to say this simply upfront, this is a season where we focus on faith and so my message to all New Yorkers is keep the faith, keep the faith in this time of challenge, not just your faiths that you practice your beliefs, your values, whatever they may be – keep your faith in New York City. Keep your faith in your fellow New Yorkers. I'm watching what all of you are doing with such pride and admiration because you're showing this whole nation what it means to act as one to help each other and protect each other. That's faith. That's something greater than any one of us. That's something powerful. That's something beautiful. That's something worthy of this season we are in, a season where we reach for our highest ideals. So, thank you, New York City. Thank you for the way you have shown everyone that no matter what's thrown at you, you keep the faith, you support each other, you stand up for each other. We're going to need it. We're going to need it in the weeks and months ahead. That faith will sustain us and then we're going to need that faith to build something better in the future. Not just to get to a day when we're over this disease, but a day when we reach for something higher and I have faith in you and I have faith that we will get there.

So, this week we went through a lot in New York City. It was a very, very tough week in our hospitals. We lost some of our loved ones. We lost some of our fellow New Yorkers. It's so painful to think about, but I also want you to remember what we thought this week was going to be like originally. We thought it was going to be something, honestly, even much worse. And we have never, ever underestimated this enemy we're fighting. Coronavirus is ferocious and has presented us with challenges that we have never ever seen before. And that certainly our nation has not seen anything like in a century. So, this was a tough and painful week, but it was also a very different week than the one we expected. And thank God for that. You know, last Sunday was a moment that we were preparing for the worst and then we started to see some improvement and we're thrilled – I'm thrilled to be able to tell you that just when we thought it was really going to get even worse, we started to see some improvement, and I'm a first one to always say, let's not overrate that improvement, let's not draw too many conclusions too quickly, but let's be very clear and let's be willing to, of course, not only see the good, but see hope in the good.

Last Wednesday, I told you we had seen something real that was the beginning of change and that has continued over these last days. Starting tomorrow, we're going to give you a new set of information, a new set of indicators that will help us to determine where we go in the future. I've said it's going to be three indicators we are going to watch every single day and you're going to watch all of you because it's all going to be public. We need to see those indicators move in the right direction consistently to be able to start to talk about changes that we can make to move us towards the next phase of fighting this epidemic. But what's so important to recognize is that even as recently as a week ago, we were seeing in our hospitals, people coming in and needing to be intubated more every single day, more and more people in need of those ventilators, more and more people would not live without them. A week ago, it was 200 to 300 more people each day coming in, every day, 200 or 300 more than the day before. We thought that was even going to go up more. And then by Wednesday we were able to say no, in fact, thank God that number had come down to about a hundred people more per day. Still way too many, still more each day, but fewer than projected by a lot. Today, I can tell you that number has gone down again – 70 more people per day now is what we're seeing on average. But again, I don't want anyone to mishear it. It's not, things are definitively, clearly, permanently getting better. It's still 70 more people each day, but it's a lot fewer than what we feared.

When it comes to the equipment and the supplies that we need to get us through this next coming week, I'm very pleased to say I want to thank everyone. Let me just say everyone in our team has been working so hard – an incredible operation at our Emergency Management Office where people from all agencies are working together, all of our colleagues in the private sector have been helping us, the federal government, the State government, FEMA, everyone has been part of this. Thank you, because we are now at a point where we can say for the week ahead based on everything we know now we will have enough ventilators to get through this coming week. I will keep updating you because we never know when something may change and we always have to have our guard up and we're always looking for new supplies to get ready for what's ahead because this won't be over tomorrow. This is going to be weeks and months ahead. So we're not letting our guard down but we do have enough ventilators based on what we know now to get through next week. Also, on personal protective equipment, PPEs – for the coming week, and I'm going to talk about the crisis standard. I want to emphasize – and I say this to all New Yorkers, but particularly to our heroic health care workers that we've got to be always honest with you – no one can tell you truthfully that we are providing what would be the peacetime time standard where we'd love to have a true abundance of PPEs of every kind that could be used once and thrown away. We would love to be in that situation. That's the situation we were in for a long time. We're not in that situation over these last weeks.

Once this crisis hit and earnest, we went to a crisis standard and that means always protecting our health care workers, always protecting our first responders, and anyone who needs these PPEs. But with a standard that our CDC says and our Health Department says is acceptable but not the one we would use in peacetime. Based on that crisis standard, we will have the N95 masks, the surgical masks, the gloves we need for this week ahead. And I will say we will have the surgical gowns and coverings of different types and we'll have the face shields, but barely enough in those two categories. It's going to be a struggle this week to make sure that we get them to the right places to make sure that they are conserved. This is something I've spoken with Commissioner Jimmy O'Neill about, that he's playing such an extraordinary role making sure that our hospitals at the front lines in the hospitals are receiving what they need, distributing the right way, doing what they have to do to support each other. This week's going to be one where we're going to do very dynamic and precise, making sure that each hospital gets what it needs in those categories. But for the next week we absolutely must have resupply in surgical gowns and face shields. I've had this conversation with the White House. We are continuing to press the federal government. We'll, of course, press the State government, private sector. We're contracting everywhere we can, but trying to get those deliveries in on time, which is always a challenge in this environment right now. So, this week we will get through, next week we have real challenges we must address over the next few days. And again, when I say this week, I mean this coming week, the week just beginning Monday, we will get through. The week after that, we have a lot we have to work on in advance.

Now let me talk to you about testing, this is an area where there's so much concern obviously, and I just want to remind everyone this basic history and these basic facts. The basic history is we pleaded for weeks and weeks for the federal government to provide testing upfront in the kind of quantity that could have helped us contain this crisis and change the whole course of it. We never got that help. We continue to plead for more testing. Still has not come any anywhere near the numbers that we need, but we will not stop. We're continuing the conversations with the White House, with FEMA demanding the testing. We are the epicenter of this crisis. We must have the testing to help us move towards that next phase where we get out of widespread transmission of the coronavirus and move to low-level transmission and on to something better. We also have to remember that testing helps us in many ways, but it does not provide all the solutions. It is a fact that someone could test negative one day and a few days later, tragically contract the disease and test positive. It's a fact that if you test negative, it doesn't mean let your guard down, you still have to take a lot of precautions. And it's a fact that if you test positive, you have to follow through and we have to help you follow through to protect your own health and the health of everyone around you. So, there's a lot that has to be done to take testing and make sure it is used in the best way possible. But there's still – it remains the fundamental problem, there's just not enough testing.

The priority has been clear. We have focused on hospitalized patients, those who were in greatest danger, those whose lives we have to work hardest to save. That was the testing priority. Protecting our health care workers, keeping them doing their lifesaving work, protecting our first responders so they could protect us all. That's been where the priority has been in what's essentially been phase one of what we were able to do with testing. But now we're going to talk about phase two where we intend to expand testing more to the community level as we get sufficient supply. And I want to emphasize every time I say the word testing, that it is contingent upon getting the supply we need. This is something that has to come from, I'm sad to say outside the city, we cannot produce here in any kind of way that anyone's explained to me, at least. We need to get these supplies in from elsewhere. And the testing must come in for us to do phase two the way we intend.

But here's why phase two is so important and this'll be targeted testing in communities with the greatest needs. I said the other day, this virus is not the great equalizer. It does not, in the end, have the same impact everywhere. It hurts people everywhere. Every community, every ZIP code has been affected, and we all know people who are suffering or even people who have passed away. But we see disparity. We see a clear disparity in the impact, who's been hit hardest, communities of color, lower income communities, immigrant communities, folks who are vulnerable already because they haven't had the health care they needed and deserve throughout their life. We cannot accept this inequality. We have to attack it with every tool we have. So by the end of next week, we will create community testing sites and these are targeted to have the biggest impact. We will create these sites in the following locations – and these are all Health + Hospitals locations in these communities, existing locations – in East New York in Brooklyn, Morrisania in the Bronx, Harlem of course in Manhattan, Jamaica in Queens, and the Vanderbilt Clinic on Staten Island. We will be setting up a system, we'll announce the details soon, for people who live in those communities particularly hard hit to be able to access this testing. There will be a priority system focused on those who are most vulnerable. And again, to do this effectively, we're going to have to keep getting the supply of testing we need and we're going to have to keep getting the PPEs we need. Because remember for the professionals who administer the test, they must be protected. We need those PPEs so we are going to work on a game plan that says let's keep finding the tests. Let's keep finding the PPE so we can get this up and running by the end of next week.

We will update you on the details. And obviously if there's any changes in the specifics because of supply, we will update you on that. But here's the key point. The federal government really needs to step up. Again, they have not been doing what we all needed and this is true all over the country. We have not gotten the help we need on testing. Here's a chance to get it right. I will be asking the federal government today for test kits to allow for 110,000 individualized tests. That will allow us to get started with this community effort and to continue everything else that we are doing. Specifically, 25,000 of those individualized test kits would be focused on Health + Hospitals for their current needs and for the new sites that I have just described. And we need to get these test kits in this week. If we can get that done, then we can keep building out our testing program. Now this is a beginning. Want to emphasize, those bigger phases we talked about a few days ago, to get to that next phase, that low-level transmission phase, we're going to need much more testing. To get to the phase where we've basically defeated the coronavirus and there's basically no transmission, we're going to get a lot more testing, really, really widespread testing. We're nowhere near that now. This is what our national government should be focused on first and foremost, if we're going to really help us get to those next phases here and everywhere, so I will have that conversation today with the White House again, but this is going to be the decisive in determining, not only have we got through the next weeks, but how we get to something much, much better. Couple of other points –

A week ago, I shared new guidance with New Yorkers, said we’re advising all New Yorkers to wear face coverings in public and that it was about protecting other people. It was about protecting all of us. That was the idea. It was an idea of doing something that would help reduce the spread, doing something that would help hasten the day where he could get out of this crisis. It was very clear that by putting on that face covering you're protecting everyone else. And that was for the good of all. I want to say thank you again to all New Yorkers. It's been amazing. Wherever I've been around this city, I see so many people wearing face coverings and you know, they made their own, they use bandanas, they use scarves, whatever they had. But it's been really impressive how many people took that guidance and ran with it immediately. And everywhere I've gone, I've talked to my team, people are seeing the same thing. Tremendous follow through on the guidance. So, thank you. I want to add to the instructions we're giving. Starting tomorrow, Monday, I am requiring all City workers who come in contact with the public while on duty to wear face coverings. This'll be a requirement of their work. We've already provided 1.4 million face coverings to City workers. We will provide as many more as are necessary for our City workers to consistently, constantly have a face covering on when they interact with the public. So this will be a requirement starting tomorrow Monday.

On another topic, I've said that unfortunately and painfully we're not just fighting COVID-19 as a disease and in terms of health care and protecting lives and saving lives, COVID19 has also robbed a lot of people of their livelihood. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have lost their jobs. Today we're announcing a new initiative to help some of the folks who have lost their jobs to get work again. And I want to do everything I can to give people back their livelihoods, to protect people not just in terms of health and safety, but in terms of their ability to pay for the basics, to support their family. In times of distress what our government should do on all levels, especially the federal government, is step up and provide support for people and help them continue through the crisis and get to the other side. And that includes putting money in people's pockets.

So we are establishing a new initiative to hire New Yorkers to do absolutely crucial and heroic work in our hospital system, starting with our public hospital system, Health + Hospitals. But we're also going to be expanding that effort, working with the voluntary and independent hospitals as well. So, I want to say to all New Yorkers who are looking for work, join a team of heroes, help out in our hospitals, fighting back the coronavirus and saving lives. Right away, Health + Hospitals will be hiring 500 non-clinical staff. So not medical staff – folks who can help transport patients, who can work on the clerical team, who can help the hospitals running with critical work, including cleaning and maintenance. Health + Hospitals is starting with 500 jobs immediately that will build out to thousands. And as I said, we're going to also have jobs available in the other types of hospitals, all of whom are going to need this support and help.

These will be temporary jobs starting with a 90-day assignment. But for so many families that do not have enough money right now, they're going to be a real lifeline. So, I want to ask anyone who wants to help us out and wants to get that opportunity to get employed again. Go to nyc.gov/coronavirus – again, nyc.gov/coronavirus. You can apply right away and we need you right away. And I want to remind everyone even while we're trying to get new employment opportunities to New Yorkers, we will not let any New Yorker in this crisis go without the food they need. We will not let any new Yorker be evicted from their apartment. I want to be very clear that the City of New York, we will protect our people and anyone who needs food and can't get it, call 3-1-1. Anyone who's being told by their landlord, they have to leave their building because they're sick or they're being threatened with eviction, call 3-1-1. We will get you a lawyer, we will stop it. Our job is to protect our people.

Now, another point, just a few more before we turn to questions from our colleagues in the media. Yesterday, Chancellor Carranza and I talked about the painful reality that our schools would not be able to open up again for this school year. And we explained, obviously, why that was the right thing to do in terms of health and safety, why it was the right thing to do in terms of recognizing what would be possible academically with only a few weeks in person. But we had a reason in making that decision to know that we could keep supporting our kids. And we had laid out a five-point plan of the ways we're going to support our kids and our parents, prepare for this phase and beyond. One of the reasons that Chancellor Carranza and I are confident in the decision we made is that we have had amazing partners working with us really, really deeply and with great passion, great energy to create a distance learning system, an online learning system that New York City has never had before. And again, this was put together very rapidly, but I want to give credit where credit is due. Not only is it the great folks at the Department of Education leadership who put together this plan and implemented it so rapidly, not only the educators who have been absolutely outstanding in taking on a whole new approach and starting to make it work - and I said from the beginning and Chancellor says, not going to happen overnight, it will get better with each week – but our educators have been front and center very devoted to making this work and I thank you all again, but I want to also thank the private companies that stepped up.

You know, we ask these companies to come in as partners to work with us. Yes, it's part of their business, but to work with us in very, very different ways than they even had before, to do it very fast, very agile to really work with government as partners, think the way we had to think in a crisis and follow through in real time. And I want to thank these companies who have done that because it's allowed us to keep making distance learning work. First of all, Apple they have been outstanding partners. We said from the beginning, we needed 300,000 iPads. They were very quick to prioritize the children of New York City and I want to thank them for that. And yesterday I talked to the CEO Tim Cook, and the outstanding challenge was we needed 50,000 more the iPads to fulfill our order. We needed them really quickly to be able to meet our deadline of putting the iPads in the hands of each child by the end of April. I spoke to Tim Cook yesterday and he said, no matter what it takes, Apple will get those iPads to us in time. So I want to thank him and everyone at Apple for all they are doing to make sure our children will have these iPads and to make sure every child has an equal opportunity to learn. And I know that is a labor of love for them. So I want to thank you, Tim, and thank you everyone at Apple.

T-Mobile has been supplying the LTE data plans. They've been great partners. We ask them to move quickly. They did. Thank you. IBM, setting up our iPads with apps and resources for learning. Everything we've asked, they've been doing. Thank you, IBM. Microsoft, Google, ProTech, creating apps and tools for learning. They've all again been willing to answer the call, answer it quickly, make sure that we could give a rich experience, a powerful experience to our kids. It's not the same as being in a classroom, obviously, but we are trying to make it the very best it can be even if it's distance learning. And then the folks who actually get the devices to our kids. And I want to not only thank the companies, but thank all the hard-working delivery workers. These folks are unsung heroes in this crisis and you don't think to stop and thank the FedEx guy or the UPS guy, but just should because they're actually helping things keep going and so many cases delivering vital supplies. So, thank you to FedEx, to UPS, to NTT and Deluxe, all of whom have been delivering these devices to our students.

And finally, our library systems, Queens Library, the Brooklyn Library, the New York Public Library, all had been working to make sure the apps are loaded on the iPads, giving kids access to thousands of wonderful books they can use. So think about that for a moment. A lot of kids who would never have had that access at home, families that could never afford to buy a lot of books, a lot of kids who have never had the opportunity to have their own personal extraordinary library. It's now happening because of all of these combined efforts.

So I'll close before a few words in Spanish wishing everyone again a very happy Easter. Continuing to wish everyone a zizen pesach. I know today and every day in this holiday season, people are finding a way, whether it's FaceTime, whether it's Skype or whatever it is, to connect your loved ones, to stay connected as best we can. Thank you for keeping traditions alive, even when it's hard. And again, thank you for your faith. And the last thing I want to say about that word of faith is we connected to the word endurance. Boy, New Yorkers have shown us that we can endure even the hardest times and our faith traditions always talk about what our ancestors went through and they went through so much. But we're showing that we in our time can endure as well and that's what our faith helps us do. So, everyone, continue to keep that in mind as you fight your way through this crisis.

Few words in Spanish, just quick summary –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will now turn to questions from our colleagues in the media.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have Commissioner Barbot here in person and Chancellor Carranza and Senior Advisor Jimmy O'Neill on the phone. We will take one question from each reporter in an effort to get to as many outlets as possible. We’ll start off today with Debralee from the Manhattan Times Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. How are you?

Mayor: Morning.

Question: So quick questions on this new roll out of the testing plan, Mayor, and also to Commissioner O'Neill. Essentially, I know that your role will in ongoing conversations with the federal government. Are there tests though in place, additional tests the way you've described to actually begin testing in a more expanded fashion to these communities essentially in five days?

Mayor: Well, again, Debralee, we want to, if we can get the testing in, we want to be up starting the end of this coming week and it may not be the same exact start date in each location and it may alter a bit depending on when the testing comes in. The testing we've had to present has been overwhelmingly taken up by the - again, the patients in greatest urgent need, the health care workers who we needed to protect, the first responders we needed to protect. So we've got to get more to sustain an effort like this at the community level. I'm going to remain hopeful that we will find that supply and start to be up and running at the end of this coming week. But I'm also being honest that – we have the locations, we have the personnel, we have a game plan, we're going to lay all that out, but we have to make sure we have the supply of tests and PPEs to actually make it start. And again, right now we're going to need more to be able to guarantee that. But this'll be a day to day thing. We'll keep updating as we go along. I know you said something about Jimmy O'Neill, I want to make sure that's put in that upfront next time just so we can make sure we get it. What was your Jimmy O'Neill point? Can you hear us?

Question: [Inaudible] Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, just go ahead and finish on the point about Jimmy?

Question: Right, just sort of a reflection of the same query. If in fact, what is in place now and what deployment - what could deployment possibilities are in place now? When we talk about waiting for the federal government and having these ongoing conversations, that's one thing I understand, but what's in place now in terms of the supplies, the testing, and the equipment to actually be able to start? What's in what's in place now?

Mayor: Yeah, so again and I think Jimmy – this is less about what Jimmy is doing, which is obviously about making sure that at the hospitals the supplies are there and usable and getting to the right people in all the hospitals. This is more something new we're creating, of course, through Health + Hospitals. Debra Lee, we’ll give an announcement later this week on the specifics. What I'm trying to signal very clearly is we will need the PPE supply to be secure and we'll need the testing capacity to be secure. That varies. The testing, the amount of testing we're doing, even with the current capacity varies, of course, by week depending on what's happening with this disease. So, it's literally something we'll know more about as we get into the week. I can say with assurance to sustain what we are talking about here and build it out the way we want to we will need additional testing. Now the federal government is my first destination, but we're continuing to work on private market constantly. So, I don't want you to think it's the only, we have been working with private companies constantly over recent weeks to try and find additional testing supplies. So, we'll have more to say on the specifics in the course of the week.

Moderator: Next, we have Myles from NBC New York.

Question: Mr. Mayor, happy Easter to you.

Mayor: Happy Easter, Myles.

Question: Just the question about the time table from yesterday's announcement. I know the Governor's Office told us yesterday that they had only been made aware of the decision to close schools five minutes before your press conference. Can you talk to that and about your thinking behind that?

Mayor: Myles, Chancellor Carranza and I, as I said, consulted widely with health care experts, with the folks who do the work in our schools, the unions that represent them, and we had those conversations through to Friday evening and we came to the firm conclusion that this was the only thing possible, honestly, the only right thing to do and that it had to be done. And as soon as we were convinced that to be done, it was important to tell our community and tell our parents that this was a decision so people could plan accordingly. It's as simple as that.

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. Just wanted to ask a little more about the dynamic with Albany. You know, Governor Cuomo, since the outbreak has said that [inaudible] not a time for politics as usual to ask if you feel he's lived up to that? And also, just what you would say to New Yorkers who might be vexed to see you clashing with the Governor over schools?

Mayor: Shant, I respect the Governor. I think the Governor has done a very good job in this crisis. I've said that before. I want to say it again. We've talked a lot during this crisis. Our teams talk literally many, many times a day. I think there's been a lot of agreement on the direction that we've had to take. So that's my statement. We've been managing to work everyone in common cause. When it comes to a decision like this, I know the Chancellor feels the same way, our job is to protect the children in New York City, to protect the families in New York City, to protect our educators, and our job is to make sure that we beat back the coronavirus once and for all. It's abundantly clear that to do those things we have to keep our schools closed for the remainder of the school year. So this is just about doing our jobs and making sure people are safe.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: [Inaudible] This is Sydney with Gothamist. Just on the schools matter. I'm wondering, do you have a – my understanding is there's about 175,000 devices that need to go out to families and I'm wondering, is that the correct statistic or up to date number that you have and how do you – how does the city plan to do that by the end of April, considering the rollout of devices so far and has anything changed to be able to do to distribute devices more quickly?

Mayor: Sydney, I'll start and pass to Chancellor Carranza. So when we started and we announced there would be distance learning and obviously being created essentially from scratch on a vast scale. There's no places tried to do it on this scale before in this country that I know of, certainly. We said expect that the first few weeks would be tough because there was not time to distribute in the schools. We had to obviously, immediately get out of the schools. We didn't have all the devices. We knew it would take some time. The pace has been picking up. Chancellor will go over the exact numbers, but here's the reality with Apple, which is obviously been crucial to this equation with the iPads. They have been expediting and prioritizing supplies for New York City kids. We had that last piece, that 50,000 we needed, that was outstanding until yesterday, when we got the affirmation from Tim Cook that they would be here rapidly. We're just going to be turning them around constantly and getting them out to families.

So we're in a position now to do something we couldn't have done a few weeks ago, including that we had to get the supply. There wasn't 300,000 iPad sitting around in a DOE warehouse. And as the Chancellor keeps saying, 300,000 kids is bigger than, you know, any other school system in America basically except for our own. So, it's a massive, massive undertaking, but now it's really gathering steam and we set that deadline because we need kids to get them and that deadline is going to drive action. Chancellor, you want to jump in?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, Sydney, yeah, the – we've actually distributed a little over 175,000 devices. We've shipped approximately 70,000 devices of the 200,000 that we need to still distribute. Yesterday's conversation with Tim Cook is critical because it's been really a supply chain issue. If you think about every school system in America right now is transitioning to online, remote learning as well. It's not – we're not the only ones in need of devices. So this is – it was just a game changer for the Mayor to have that conversation with Tim Cook. And as soon as we get them, and we get them set up, we're shipping them right out to students and families. So it's important that we have their information and we know who needs them, and I'll just keep repeating. You can go onto our website, schools.nyc.gov, there's a link right on the landing page for the survey – tech survey, or you can call 3-1-1 and they'll put you in contact so we get that information.

Mayor: I want to ask all our colleagues in the media who are reporting on this issue, please let people know that website and they can call 3-1-1, because we are doing this very, very rapidly and we have obviously a good sense of kids who need them but we don't have a perfect sense. We need parents or the young people themselves to let us know immediately if they don't have a working device so we can get them one.

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning and a happy Easter to everyone who celebrates. I know you've asked this, but if you could just explain, Mayor de Blasio, for the sort of everyday anymore for listening who maybe isn't as well versed in the kind of interpersonal conflict that the City and the State often find themselves in, can you just explain what happened with the closing schools? when the Governor was notified? And also, why this weekend, it was a holiday weekend, was there a reason why this was announced yesterday as opposed to maybe Monday? Thank you.

Mayor: Katie, thank you and happy Easter to you. The decision was made on Friday evening. It was imperative to announce it as soon as it was made. People have been asking for days and days. I think you're one of them in fact. Many people have asked us for days to help people know where we were going, to give people that measure of security, of knowing the direction we were going in, and to allow everything to be planned accordingly. I was a public school parent, obviously, for the entire upbringing and my kids and whenever we get to a decision we owe it to parents to announce it immediately. Again, the decision was made based on the health and wellbeing and safety of our kids, our parents, our families, our educators. So we were quite certain it was right thing to do. The state was notified yesterday morning and we made the announcement. I believe that even though New Yorkers are observing this holiday weekend, obviously against the backdrop of a painful crisis, it's not stopping people from wanting clear information and it's something also Katie, that I told people from the very beginning, I thought this is what was going to happen and I feared it was going to happen. And it was just important to make it as clear as possible as soon as we were certain.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from the city.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I just wanted to clarify, and forgive me if you explained this, but the expanded testing and H + H is that going to be a new city ability to test or are you moving resources from somewhere else and is the capacity going to be there?

Mayor: So, Yoav, good question and it picks up on Debra Lee's question. I think people have understood that a lot of times in recent days and weeks we've had to say to you, this is what we project, but we're going to talk to you again, you know, in a day and two days and three days to tell you what the latest is. Sometimes we've had to tell you the projections came back very negative, very tough. Sometimes we've been able to tell you the projections came back better. So this policy that we're announcing today, community-based testing, focused on community's greatest need, focused on people who are most individually vulnerable, starting later this week. Specific locations, five locations, and again there will be targeted testing for people who are particularly vulnerable. That that will be contingent upon two things like so much else in this crisis has been that we give you a game plan then we tell you there are realities that we have to adjust for according to supply. So, we need to make sure that the testing capacity is there. We need to make sure the PPEs are there to protect the people doing the tests.

The PPE supply in general has improved in the last few weeks and we have a huge number of orders out around the world that if we started to see a little more consistency on the deliveries, we would be a much better shape. I’ve told you, you know, this week where we stand, which is we will get through, but on a crisis standard. Next week, we still have this coming week again, we will get through on a crisis standard the following week. We have a lot of work to do still, but our goal is to reserve enough PPEs to make sure that we can do this testing properly. And then with the testing supply we have now, to see how much of it would be available to put into this new effort while simultaneously working federal government and private market to get more testing. So this is the plan, we feel good about at this hour that we're going to be able to get this plan moving by end of the week. Although, as I said, different sites may start at different times. If we need to vary the days of start a bit because of supply, we will. But this is what we plan on doing.

Moderator: Next we have Alex from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, happy Easter. Two quick questions. One just on the device numbers, just wanting to make sure I understood that correctly. The 175,000 number is that the number of devices that have already been distributed. And my second question is just, have you and the Governor spoken since his press conference yesterday? I mean he seems to be under the impression that the final authority about the school closure decision is his. So, I'm just wondering if you can comment on that at all.

Mayor: I'll start and I'll pass to the Chancellor on the specific numbers. It's as simple as this. This is something the Chancellor and I had to do. We had to protect our children, our parents, our families, our educators. The New York City Public Schools have to remain close for the remainder of the school year. So yes, the Governor and I communicated, our staffs communicated, but the bottom line here is it's about health and safety and it's about getting us out of this horrible phase we're in with widespread transmission and getting us safely to the next phase and we have to be real smart. And I've said cautious, careful to not allow resurgence of this disease. So, this is the right thing to do and we're going to keep moving forward. On the question of the exact numbers around the devices and that 175,000 number, Chancellor, do you want to pick that up?

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, sir, Mr. Mayor. So, the 175,000 devices – it’s a little over 175,000 – these are school-based devices that have been distributed. We've also now shipped a little over 70,000 iPads that are Wi-Fi enabled as well. Those are the specific numbers.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Abu from Bangla Patrika. 

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, thank you.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Just speak up – I’m sorry to interrupt, speak up a little more.

Question: Are you hearing me now?

Mayor: Yes, I am.

Question: So, this is Abu Taher from Bangla Patrika [inaudible]. Do you know [inaudible] –

Moderator: Sorry, Abu –

Mayor: There’s something wrong with your line. Something’s moving that’s causing a sound. Could you stay real still and stable so we can hear you better?

Moderator: I think you have to stop typing.

Mayor: Yeah, don’t type during it – that would be real helpful.

Question: So, my question is, do you have any program for the people who are undocumented in New York City? Because there is a lot of undocumented people that are here. They don't have any programs where they can apply for an unemployment or, you know, any other benefit, which is a government benefit. But they're staying in the home, they don't have money to buy the food, they don't have any place to go for help. So, do you have any program, anything you can offer for the people who are undocumented in [inaudible]?

Mayor: Absolutely. Abu, it's a great question. Thank you for it. Look, there are hundreds of thousands of people – let's be really clear, there’s a half-million of our neighbors, our fellow New Yorkers, our coworkers, the parents who go to – you know, whose kids go to the same schools as us – there's a half-million human beings who are undocumented in New York City. They're very much a part of our community. And we in this city have for these last six-plus years tried every way we can to respect them, to acknowledge them, to value them, to support them. Right now, in this crisis, what do people need most? They need to be protected. They need to be protected in terms of public safety and they need to protect in terms of their health. We are going to make sure always – and this is something that NYPD has done, I think, with extraordinary skill and respect and compassion – people will be protected regardless of documentation status. Health care, our health and hospital system – anybody who needs help and support, it will be there for them regardless of documentation status, regardless of ability to pay. Having a roof over your head – no New Yorker can be evicted at this point. And if anyone is threatened with eviction, they should call 3-1-1. If anyone is told to have to leave their apartment, even temporarily because they're sick, they should call 3-1-1, we will get you the help you need. Food – anyone who is hungry, we will get food too. It does not matter what your documentation status is, we're all New Yorkers. Anyone who does not have food can go to any of the 435 sites all over the city. You can get them through 3-1-1, you can get them that nyc.gov. All three meals for a day will be provided for all family members every day those sites are up and running. Anyone who's vulnerable at home and needs a food delivery can call 3-1-1 and we'll arrange it quickly. That is all regardless of documentation status. So, I know how much fear there is in immigrant communities right now. There are people who are undocumented who are very, very afraid. There are people even who are documented, who are afraid because of all the fear that's been created around this country, particularly coming out of Washington. And that fear has exacerbated this health crisis and exacerbated the disparities, because there's a lot of people who have been so fearful they, they haven't even been going to the doctor, they haven't even been going out to health care facilities because they're so worried about being deported and put in danger. So, Abu, the bottom line is, on all those really basic things the human beings need, the City of New York will protect and support all immigrant communities, including undocumented folks. And please let people know that all that help is there for them regardless of documentation status.

Moderator: Next we have Maya from Patch.

Question: So, on the topic of City workers, are there any plans to institute – like, if policy is at all city agencies to protect essential city workers who are older or have underlying medical conditions, like authorizing all of them to work from home? Because, right now, it seems to differ by agency. Just last week, I was talking to DEP workers with preexisting conditions who said they still had to report to the office while, at the same time, the City's Board of Elections had announced that all employee is over 60 or with underlying health conditions could work from home.

Mayor: Good question, Maya, and I'll certainly get our Health Commissioner into this one. Let me make it clear, any city worker who has underlying conditions that pose a direct threat I'll give – I’m a City worker, I'll give an example. I have asthma, but it's not the kind of asthma that causes a threat in this situation. Other people could have very severe asthma and it would be a threat to their health in this crisis. So, any City worker who is particularly vulnerable, we do not want to make them more vulnerable, to say the least, and we're very comfortable ensuring that they can work from home. Or if they even are in a position where it's impossible work from home, but it's not safe for them to be at work, we want to get them home and we'll obviously continue them on the payroll during the period of this crisis. We just have to make clear with every agency a single standard. And I think you're raising a good point, we have to quickly make sure all agencies are working off a single standard. But what I can tell you immediately is, anyone who has any of those serious preexisting conditions that might create a threat I don't want them any place that might be a danger to them. I want them home. And we'll make sure that guidance has given again tomorrow.

Commissioner, you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, I think you got it, obviously, just right. The only thing I would add is that we have been giving guidance to our City workforce to ensure that everybody is safe and giving guidance about the use of face coverings and ensuring that if and when, at all possible, remaining six feet within someone that they may come in contact with. And so, obviously, many of our essential workers don't have that opportunity. So, certainly, working with individual agencies to see what can be done based on those priority groups I think is an important thing to consider.

Mayor: Right. And, obviously, look, I want to be very, very clear that job-one is to protect lives. And I don't want any City worker who is in a compromised state to be in a situation where they may be in danger. We have a huge workforce, and even though we've seen a lot of people go off duty for a period of time because they were sick, we're seeing more and more than coming back now. So, anyone who is threatened, we're going to take care of we. We do not want any confusion in any agency or with any supervisors about that. It’s first and foremost about protecting our people. And again, it's about protecting each other, which is why, starting tomorrow, we are requiring the face coverings for all City employees come in contact with the public.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you? Happy Easter.

Mayor: Thank you, Henry.

Question: I wanted to ask you about these – about the online schooling. As I understand it, no attendance is taken. Is there any exams? Is there any way to gauge whether students are engaged in this? How do you – how do you quality control this kind of education experience?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question. I'll start and I'll pass to the Chancellor. I think a very important way to think about this, Henry, is, you know, this started just a few weeks ago on an unprecedented scale and it's being – you know, this is a classic example of building the plane as it's going down the runway. But you know, ridiculously large scale – 1.1 million kids. Every week, we're seeing more and more capacity, meaning more and more kids with devices, more and more teachers figuring out the best ways to work with their kids, connect with our kids. We need to take another big jump in terms of working with not just educators, but with parents to really ensure that kids are engaged. It's not shocking in the first weeks where there was a lot of disruption and everyone was learning a new way of life that it was hard to know who was engaged and how often and trying to get the system up and running was the first priority. But what we need to do now is really ensure that parents are close allies with their teachers in a way, honestly, that we would love all year round in a school year in peacetime. Maybe in this wartime dynamic, a new cohesion will occur where educators and parents will get to communicate more and think together about how to best serve the kids and make sure the kids are focused. Kids are going through a lot right now. It's really tough time for kids cooped up in doors and all, but with the support of parents and other adults, you know, helping them get focused and then we'll have a better ability to engage them and know when they're part of the learning experience. So no, and we do not have an easy traditional attendance measure. What we know so far is there's nowhere near the participation that we would like to see, but we do expect that to change with each a week as a devices are in hand, as the parents are engaged. One of the things we announced in our plan yesterday was to have a much higher level of engagement with parents too who are looking for answers, meaning to be able to have a number they call constantly through 3-1-1 where if they want to understand how to approach getting their kids connected to this and keeping them connected, they have problems, they have questions – that parents have a place to turn and they have a help line in multiple languages that's available to them constantly. They have, like, coaching, if you will, how to figure out how to do this best, because, you know, the parents are going to be, and the, and the family members are going to be eyes and ears to make sure the kid engages. So, we're going to have a lot more beefed up capacity to do that, starting in just the next few days. Chancellor, you want to follow through on this?

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, sir. And with a great deal of respect, I'm going to disagree strongly with the premise of the question. Attendance is being taken. What we've had to do is shift the system of taking attendance because, obviously, students aren't in class and we can't take it the way it used to be taken. So, we've started a new way of collecting attendance. We'll report that out this coming week. But attendance is being taken. And grading and academic standards are still in effect. What we've asked teachers to do is to be flexible in terms of what they're doing and how they're assigning grades, only because, as we've mentioned, not everyone has a device yet. So some students are working off of packets, some students are working online. So the two words that I keep emphasizing during this time period is flexibility and patience. We also are looking at our grading policy. I have mentioned that I've been speaking with focus groups of parents and the number-one concern that parents have expressed to me is it's fine that we are continue to have academic standards, that we're doing homework, that things are getting graded and collected and students are getting feedback, but the real need that they have is around trauma-informed supports for students. Parents are very, very vocal with me that their kids are going through a lot, their families are going through a lot, and whatever we can do to help them to help their students navigate, they would appreciate. So, there's going to be a lot more of that support commune as well to our teachers. Finally, the other thing that I would say is that, I have seen just many examples of teachers going above and beyond in terms of what they're doing in terms of engaging students and how they're engaging students, and being creative, and while still being flexible, they're being innovative. So, I can assure you, that as students are engaged there's some, there's great learning happening. It's just not the same as when we're in person.

Moderator: Next we have Roger from 1010 WINS and then we'll take one more after him.

Question: Mayor, how are you? Happy Easter. I'd like to ask you – and forgive me if this is something I should know – but what exactly are the rules and the laws when it comes to who has the authority to close schools? Because that seems to be, you know, I think, confusing to a lot of New Yorkers who are hearing something from you yesterday and then something different from the Governor.

Mayor: Roger, thank you for your question and Happy Easter to you. Roger, look, the more important even than the question of the rules and the laws – I'll speak to it – but again, it's sort of the moral question. What's the right thing to do for our kids, our families, you know, our parents, our educators to protect their health and wellbeing and all of the people that they come in contact with? The right thing to do is to keep the schools closed and the right thing to do to beat back this pandemic is to keep the schools closed. And that's really what it comes down to. And that's why the Chancellor and I believe very simply, this is something we have to do. Obviously, what's clear is, I'm responsible and the Chancellor's responsible for the health and wellbeing of all our kids. And we are dealing with something that is different from pretty much any place else. I want to absolutely respect the fact that the Governor has an important, crucial role to play in a crisis and particular powers in a crisis for sure. And again, I think he's done a very good job and he has to think about the whole State for sure, he has to think about coordinating with other States. But my responsibility is to the children of this city, my responsibilities to the parents of this city, to the educators who serve this city. That's my singular focus. And, to me, this is not about legal or jurisdictional questions. This is a moral question. How do we protect people best? The best way to protect people is to keep our schools closed.

Moderator: Last question for today. We have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning. Happy Easter, Mr. Mayor. Wanted to ask, again, this is not the first time that you and the Governor have had the sort of spat during a crisis. Is there anything you think that can be done to improve you guys’ as relations, especially during moments of crisis?

Mayor: Jeff, I think respectfully – and Happy Easter. First of all, most importantly, Happy Easter to you. I think it is not surprising – and I respect the media deeply and I think you guys understandably focus on what you see as exceptional – but I want to remind you that this is exceptional in this sense. From the beginning of this crisis, from the beginning of the challenge of coronavirus, the Governor and I have agreed on the vast majority of things. I have been supportive and appreciative of his leadership. I've said many times I think he's doing a very good job. We agree – and we've looked at the main strategic things we had to do throughout – it's been a high, high level of agreement. Our teams are working constantly together. So, you know, there may be times when people have different perspectives, that's not unusual. My singular focus is on the children, the parents, the educators of this city. The Governor is thinking about other parts of the equation, that's fine. But I don't think if you literally look over the whole course of this thing, you're going to find very many times where there was a substantial disagreement. You're going to find on the vast, vast majority of the moves that were made, agreement on the nature and the timing of what was done. And the teams work together constantly. And so, in the end, when you think about what do we all tried to do together? We've all, City and State together, we have worked to make sure that our hospital system was strong and could sustain this crisis. Thank God for our health care workers, our doctors, our nurses – our hospitals are holding. That's been something we've all worked on together. We've all worked together to get the, the supplies, the ventilators, the PPEs, that's been moving. We all work together making a lot of the big decisions on how we would address this crisis and it has shown in terms of the fact that we're seeing some progress. You know, we believe, all of us, City and State, we believe in social distancing, we believe in shelter in place. It's been working and New Yorkers are the real heroes, obviously, they've been the ones following through on it. So, I think if you really do the composite, if you really do the big picture of what's happened over months now, there's a hell of a lot more of agreement than there's ever been any disagreement. And sometimes when there's a difference of perspective, it's just because there's different jobs to be done. I'm always going to tell you what I think will protect my people and I'm going to be real, real clear about that. Keeping our schools closed will protect New Yorkers, period. But we're all going to keep working together for sure.

Okay. Thank you, everybody. A very Happy Easter, again. A zizen Pesach to those continuing to celebrate a Passover. One last thought, and I think it's on the theme – again, so many powerful themes in the holiday season – and another theme is renewal. That is part of the faith traditions. That's obviously something we feel at this time of year. As spring begins, renewal is coming. It's a tough moment we're going through, but renewal is coming. One thing we've known from the beginning, this crisis would have an end point. We still don't know exactly when it is or how it'll happen, but we know this will end. We know we're going to come out the other side and we're going to be together. The renewal has to be true to the word, not just a replacement of what was, but something different, something more fair, more just, something that addresses the problems of where we were before the coronavirus and helps us towards something better. So, renewal, because we will come out of this. But, renewal, because we will build and create something together different and new and better. I am convinced we can do that. And again, God bless you all New Yorkers, you should be so proud of what you have done throughout all this pain. And on this very holy and special day, I say, God bless you all and keep the faith.

2020-04-13 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. Talked a lot the last few days about faith in a season of faith and how we have to keep the faith because we're all doing something together that is so important at this moment. And it really depends on all of us. New Yorkers have really been stepping up. And even though sometimes it's hard to see, it's hard to feel we are making some real progress, and it’s because of all of you. It's because of the hard work you're doing with social distancing, with shelter in place, because of the changes you've had to make in your life. But you've done it and you've done it really, really well under very tough circumstances and very fast changes in your life. So, faith is when we believe we can get somewhere, we can get somewhere together and I want people's faith to be rewarded. I want you to see the fruits of your labors.

And today we're – in a moment we're going to unveil some really important new information that gives you a sense of how things are progressing and how it directly relates back to what you have been doing, the hard work you've been doing, all of us have been doing. But I want to put it this way. We are now one big team, New York City, all of us, 8.6 million people all together. One cause, one destiny. We're one team. And when you think about it, this is the most important team you will ever be a part of, fighting the coronavirus, the greatest health care crisis in a century. Greatest crisis of any kind in our lifetimes. We all together need to fight this. So, every single one of us is on the same team here. There will never be a moment that's more important to act as a team, to believe that together we can be greater than the sum of the parts.

New Yorkers are proving that right now. And I want to thank you for that. And so, as I said, it's important to show you that what you're doing, every single one of you, affects the information about the show you because every time you practice shelter in place, every time you practice social distancing, you're reducing the spread of this disease and you're saving lives, you're protecting people, you're reducing the number of people who end up in the hospital, the number of people who end up fighting for their lives in the ICU, you're reducing the number of people that test positive. Your actions will be reflected every single day in the information we provide and we'll all watch it together and act on it together. So, let's go to this new information now and talk through what it means. 

I talked about it last Thursday when I said we're going to go through phases here. Right now, we're in the widespread transmission phase, the one we don't want to be in, where the coronavirus is deep seated in our communities. We want to end this phase. We want to move forward. But to do that, we have to keep doing the hard work, the shelter in place, the social distancing. We have to keep earning our way out of this. None of us asked for this horrible disease. None of us deserve it, but we still have to fight our way out, earn our way out of it through our actions. So, that means staying focused, staying buckled down on the rules that actually work and continuing to stick to them. No matter what's going on around us, this is the way forward. 

Now, three indicators I said we would roll out today and you can see them live right now at nyc.gov/coronavirus. I’m going to go over them but again, this'll be information that's always available to you, updated daily, and we'll all watch the progress together. And I want to note right there, I want it to be steady progress. We all want it to be steady progress. It may not always be steady progress, stating the obvious. Sometimes the numbers may go up, sometimes down. We want it to be down, though, a lot, but we can't guarantee every day is going to be perfect. Sometimes one will go up, another one will go down. We’ve got to see them all move down in unison over a prolonged period of time to be able to get to that next phase where we have low level transmission and then we can start on the path to a more normal life. So, let's go over these indicators.

Number one is the daily number of people admitted to hospitals in New York City for suspected COVID-19 conditions. So, again, we're going to show you the progression from day to day. And the data, I should tell you upfront, is typically about 48 hours lag between when the information that we're talking about – when the actual admissions to the hospital or the ICU, et cetera, when it happens and when it's reported. And that is because different hospitals report at different times in different ways and our Health Department has to get all the data collected and consistent before it's published. So, there will be a lag. We’re always going to see if we can reduce it, but, for now, assume about a 48-hour difference. But it's still going to tell us what we need to know. So, for April 11th, that is Saturday, you had 383 people admitted – new hospital admissions for suspected COVID-19. The day before that was 463 people, so that's a really meaningful improvement. That's a step in the right direction, the second number of daily number of people in the ICU across our Health + Hospitals hospitals. That's 11 hospitals, public hospitals, the number of people in the ICU for suspected COVID-19. So again, going back to April 10th, 857; by April 11th, Saturday, 835 – also moving in the right direction. And then the third indicator of the percentage of people who tested positive for COVID-19. So again, that number going back to April 10th, 59.3 percent citywide; by April 11th, 58.1 percent, moving in the right direction. And then a very specific subset of that, the tests done by our public health lab and they focus those tests specifically on a certain type of case, and the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner can go over that in detail in a moment. There we see the public health lab testing again the same good pattern, April 10th 80.5 percent of those tests were coming back positive; by April, 11, 78.4 percent.

So, day-one of this new effort, I'm pleased to report, we do see all the indicators moving in the right direction, moving downward together. This is a very good day. This is day one. Now, we’ve got to keep working all together to keep these numbers moving the right direction. And I want everyone to take it personally. I want you to feel like when you see these numbers – numbers are abstractions, but they represent human beings and they represent the future of the city and what our lives are going to be like. When you see these numbers, take it personally. Recognize this represents the progress that you have achieved, but we've got a lot more to do to keep that progress going, to get to the point where we might be able to ease some of the restrictions and move towards normalcy and have a low transmission dynamic with COVID-19. And I always will keep saying, if we don't get it right, or, God forbid, this disease resurges, we're going to have to potentially tighten restrictions further. So, we don't want that to happen. Obviously, best way to avoid that is to stick with what's working and keep our discipline and New Yorkers have been absolutely outstanding.

So, the next topic I want to talk about, this is the question of how we make sure that we address everything we're seeing in this crisis. This crisis has had so many negative effects on so many New Yorkers, but more and more we're learning, we're finding out just how much there's been a painful disparity. So many people have suffered across all communities. Some communities have suffered very particularly in a disproportionate manner. Now, we know we will get through this. We know this is a crisis that will end at some point, but the disparities that we have now uncovered are deeply, deeply troubling. They reflect historic disparities and they remind us that we must do something different, going forward, if we're going to stop these disparities. We can't just see it and consider it something that's unmovable or something we have to live with. We should never live with these kinds of disparities. We should in every way we can today and in the future to end these disparities. Right now, we have a lot of work to do to address the needs of communities of color right this minute. And what I announced when we put forward the information proving the disparities was a four-point plan, and I'm going to talk today in more detail about two parts of that plan. There will be more announced going forward over the coming days, but I want to start to fill in the information as we have it for everyone. So, one of the key pieces of that plan was a really large scale, a media campaign to educate people about the coronavirus to help them know what they can and should do to protect themselves and their families and all of us.

And we had an original campaign that we launched in the middle of March, as we were seeing the first deaths from this horrible disease. We launched an $8 million media campaign, TV, radio, digital ads in 15 languages, subway ads in English, Spanish and Chinese, print ads in 15 languages. $1.5 million of ads that were put putting community and ethnic media that are so important in this City and trusted in so many communities. We put that out there to try and really get people a lot of information that a lot of people weren't getting from other sources to start clarifying what was going on with the coronavirus and how people could respond. We launched an advisory committee of 80 community-based organizations, every kind of New Yorker of all five boroughs to help us make sure we were doing the right message, the right outreach. And we did outreach and other forums on WhatsApp, on WeChat, on KakaoTalk, which is Korean focused. So, we used a lot of methodologies, but what we're announcing today is a new campaign and this one is laser focus on the communities that have been hardest hit and where the disparities are greatest. This is going to be a $10 million advertising campaign to not only get the information out again, but to get it out in a deeper way, meaning to focus on a very pinpoint—manner on where the need is greatest. So, we've targeted 88 ZIP codes in New York City where we see the most disproportionate negative impact of the coronavirus. That's where the focus will be to get this information out, to make sure that some of the confusion that everyone's feeling about coronavirus is addressed head on. That some of the myths and misunderstandings are addressed, that people are given more information about what they can do or where they can turn if they need help and to do it in the languages that so many New Yorkers speak.

So again, a $10 million campaign, 88 high impact, high needs zip codes will be focused on, TV, radio, and digital in 15 languages, but beyond that now direct mail pieces to homes giving people information that will go right to their doorstep in a very accessible format. So that's on the media side, but as I said a few days ago, traditional media and digital are very powerful and we need to use them fully. But we also need to go to the grassroots, especially if we're going to reach communities that are not necessarily hearing all the messages and that need more help and reassurance. There are many communities that that describes, but particularly immigrant communities, particularly communities that in recent years have felt very much that they were in danger and in many ways have receded in terms of how they connect with the rest of our community, pulled back out of fear. We've got to reach out in a really compassionate open manner to communities that need a lot more information and some of that has to be done on the front lines media alone can't do that. So, we're going to be doing two targeted communities, we'll be doing robocalls, we'll be doing live calls from people who have the information calling directly into households, we'll be doing a texting campaign. We'll make sure at places that people still are going essential businesses, grocery stores, supermarkets, pharmacies, those grab and go meal locations, the 435 locations where people can get free food we'll have information posted there. We're going to also work with community-based health clinics and these are organizations that do such important work and they know their communities, they speak the language, they know the culture, we want to bring them back into this work more deeply. A lot of them been disrupted in recent weeks, we want to get them back in this will have more to say on that in the coming days. And we want to see ultimately the restarting of the kind of grassroots outreach literally people out in the community educating, answering questions, but to do that, we have to keep our health care workers safe. We have to have health care workers who can move into that type of work and not just be needed at hospitals and that has everything to do with those indicators I talked about earlier and we need, of course, the protection for all of them, the PPEs. So, a number of pieces have to come together, but our goal is to soon have that grassroots outreach moving to really make sure the information reaches communities deeply and widely and people feel it, understand it, act on it. This is how we can help protect folks who are really bearing some of the brunt here.

Now, speaking of bearing the brunt, I've said many times, this is unfortunately not just a health care crisis, it's something worse it is also the greatest economic crisis since the great depression. That's what we're seeing unfold right now, and for a lot of us, we used to hear those stories from our parents and grandparents and never thought we'd live through anything even slightly like it. Well, guess what? Very, very sadly, we are living through something like it, the number of people who have become unemployed just in the last few weeks is staggering and unbelievable we're just still beginning to understand the magnitude of it. And the only parallel is the Great Depression and the suddenness with which this happened in some ways was even worse than what happened 80 years ago. So, we need to move aggressively and I'm going to tell you always what the City is doing, there's a lot of things the State needs to do, there's a lot of things the federal government needs to do. The federal government did come along with the stimulus and that was good cause that were important pieces directly for working people, but we need so much more and we need the next stimulus to happen quickly this month to keep getting support to working people, keep getting support to small businesses and to the City and State governments that directly support everyday people and protect them. That has to happen, we need to do a lot of other things quickly to catch up with the totality of this crisis. So, what's happened already? There's been a moratorium on evictions, that's a very good thing and that continues. So, you know, what's, what's basic and essential here? Having a roof over your head, even if your livelihood is gone. Well, no one can take your home away from you, there's a moratorium on those evictions to protect you. The 2 million plus New Yorkers who are rent stabilized, I've called upon the rent guidelines board to act quickly to give all of you a rent freeze. It's something Rent Guidelines Board has the power to do is something they have done before in times where the facts merited it. I think this is absolutely a time where it's 100 percent clear people are hurting like never before, they deserve a rent freeze. I want to see that happen quickly, that will provide some relief for over 2 million New Yorkers and rent-stabilized housing.

I've urged the State of New York to act, change the laws and rules to allow renters to use their security deposit to pay rent, there's no reason at this point given how much dislocation has occurred that a security deposit is sitting in a bank account, not helping anyone when it could be used to pay the rent, help the renter, help the landlord have money to pay their expenses. That is the kind of thing we need to do in the middle of a crisis and I want to see the State act on that, we need to think about and act on some other pieces as well. So, we're launching— a tenant hotline for tenants in all five boroughs through 3-1-1 because a lot of tenants right now don't know what their rights are, they don't know how to navigate this, they're running out of money, they want to know where they can get relief. And remember, what we can help you with is all the different you can get income, making sure you get money from the stimulus, making sure you get unemployment insurance, if you qualify for food stamps that's another way to put money in your pocket. We want to make sure that if there's anything that people can get, they're getting it and that your rights are being recognized – no landlord can attempt to evict you - no landlord can tell you, you have to leave temporarily because you're sick. You have clear rights as tenants. We want to protect everyone, so we're setting up this hotline through 3-1-1 to make sure people can get those answers and that support and if it raises to the point that someone needs a lawyer right away through 3-1-1 we can get you free legal assistance and assign a lawyer if you need one to protect your rights – so that will be up and running immediately.

And then two other things I think would be really crucial in this situation given the magnitude of what people are experiencing. I’m urging the state of New York to take a very good thing – the moratorium on evictions - and extend it to 60 days after this crisis. And so, I'm very thankful that the state acted to protect renters and I know to protect other folks to keep a roof over their head, but we need to make sure that that moratorium on evictions doesn't run out and it doesn't run out prematurely. We need to see this crisis end and then give period a grace period to people to protect them so we don't have a horrible situation where we finally get out of the coronavirus crisis and then see a massive wave of evictions. We need a period of time to help people get things back together and to protect them and make sure that they still have a home. So, the State should act on that right away.

And then also something I think the State of New York could do that would help everyone – let tenants who lost their income defer their rent. So, if a tenant can document that they lost their job, which I'm so sorry to say so many people can at this point. If you can document you lost your job and you don't have income; give tenants the ability to defer their rent payments and repay over the next 12 months on a payment plan. There's, I think some clear ways to put this together that protect tenants and respect the rights of landlords and make sure that everyone is whole in the end, but we can't have a situation where folks just have no money and no way to pay and they're living with that constant insecurity. Let's acknowledge the extent of this crisis and give our tenants a clear way forward. That's something I think the state should do as well, as quickly as possible.

Alright, let me move to a very different topic and on this one again, one that we all care about and one where I can at least give people a little bit of good news as we fight through this crisis together. As we've seen with alternate side parking, folks obviously want to know where we're going with this and want the security of knowing that they don't have to worry about moving their cars. I've always said the one thing I cared about was making sure we didn't end up in a situation where our neighborhoods weren't clean, especially in the middle of a health crisis. I'm happy to say we've been monitoring, our Sanitation Department has been out there; the neighborhoods remain clean in a large measure because so few people are out and about the way they normally are. So, we actually see a level of cleanliness that is the right one for our city, and therefore I'm announcing we are suspending alternate side parking for another two weeks and this will take us until Tuesday, April 28th. So, we're going to continue to update you, but right now - rest assured - no alternate side parking until Tuesday, April 28th. We'll update you again as we get close to that and to the maximum extent possible we can give people this relief, I want to do it.

Okay, now going back to where I started with how we are making the progress we're making. Look, every single person is a part of this, as I said, and it's not just what you do. What you're doing is working - people are practicing social distancing, they're practicing shelter in place. And you know, we've sent out a lot of enforcement agents; we've sent out the NYPD and, and we've constantly followed up on any concerns and we're seeing really pretty amazing levels of compliance by New Yorkers and sometimes when there's a report of a problem and the police show up or another department shows up, folks immediately fix the problem is what we're finding, and that's what we want. So, the best way to make sure that everyone observes social distancing and continues to follow these rules for the good of all is to make sure you're doing it yourself, but if you see someone who's not, that, I want you to think about that, that phrase we have used for years about protecting ourselves in this case from a different enemy; when we say, “if you see something, say something”. In this instance, I want you to see that you can make a real impact; if someone's not doing the right thing, if a line has developed that's packed too tight together, if a store's too crowded, if people are gathering someplace they shouldn't be not practicing social distancing, please let us know right away. This is about saving lives - no one should hesitate - this is about saving lives. Every time we practice these rules, it helps us forward. So, you can call 3-1-1 at any moment, tell them exactly what you're seeing, where it is, what time you saw it, and we'll send out the NYPD and the other agencies to enforce and fix the situation. And another option is you can go on nyc.gov/coronavirus and you can just quickly put down just a little bit of information and that will instantly register, so all of our enforcement agencies can get on it right away. And in the next few days we're going to add another option where you can just submit a photo on the 3-1-1 app or the 3-1-1 website and just indicate, you know, the location and just by the virtue of having that photo and knowing what time it was and the location, the NYPD and all our other agencies will be able to act quickly to address the condition. We want to make it easy, we want to make it fast - we want to make sure the enforcement is fast. Everyone has a role to play in this and we need everyone to help us. You are the eyes and ears; it's your city, it's your fight against the coronavirus. We're all in this together. Letting us know if you see a problem is one of the best ways to contribute to getting us out of this really, really tough phase and onto a better future.

So, I'll conclude and then I'll just say a quick few words in Spanish and we'll turn to our colleagues in the media. But I'll conclude on this important point about being a team. A lot of us are feeling right now, the absence of sports. We, you know, so many New Yorkers, we love our teams and we love team sports; we love playing team sports. I'm missing it all the time; I bet a lot of you are missing it all the time. We're not getting to watch the teams we love, but in fact we are now part of a team. As I said in the beginning, this is the most important team you will ever be a part of in your whole life, right now. And we, you know, we watch sports and we have heroes who play on teams that we love and they do amazing things and they show strength and they show resilience and they do things we thought couldn't be done and we love them for it. Well, guess what? That's you now. You are actually in the middle of such an extraordinary fight. You get to do the things that you have admired in other people. You get to be the player on the field who makes a difference, who does the extraordinary, who does what people thought couldn't be done.

So, this is where we are now – all 8.6 million of us on one team and people have been acting like they're on one team and have been making a huge difference and we see it already. Those three key indicators we’re all of us going to be able to watch them together. We're all going to be able to talk about what it means, but you saw even on day one, that what you've been doing has had an impact; what you've been doing is working. We're all going to keep watching them together to get us through to the next phase. So, everyone, we right now in our time, we've been shown a challenge we could never have imagined, but you have been doing everything that we need you to do to win. This is, you know, this is a battle. This is something we've never seen before, but together we can overcome it. And instead of just saying, you know, here's some vague ideas, we're going to show you the facts that prove we can overcome it and prove what it means for you to be in this game and fighting hard and fighting to win. So, thank you for being a team and acting like a team. It's making a huge difference.

Just a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will now turn to our colleagues in the media.

Moderator: And just a quick reminder to folks that we have Dr. Barbot in the Blue Room and Dr. Katz and Dr. Daskalakis on the phone. And with that, Andrew Siff from NBC New York is up first. Andrew?

Question: Mayor, good morning. Hope you're doing well.

Mayor: Thank you, Andrew.

Question: Question about the reportage shortage of swabs for COVID tests – wasn't the reason you brought on Jimmy O'Neill to sort of get ahead of these gear shortages? And how severe a shortage is this? What will it do to the goal of ramping up testing to the point that it makes a difference?

Mayor: Great question, Andrew. Okay, let me separate for a moment the reality in the hospitals, which is where Jimmy O'Neill is focused with his whole team. He's got dozens of people working with him versus the broader question of testing, which is really central to our strategy going forward. So, in the hospitals, Andrew, the question has been this week-to-week, day-to-day struggle to make sure the equipment and the supplies, the PPEs, are where they're needed when they're needed. I always say – and I hate to have to emphasize it, but it's true – this is a crisis standard with the PPEs. It's not the ideal standard. It's not what we wish we could do. It's a crisis standard to protect our health care workers. But Jimmy and his team have been working to make sure that flow of supplies is constant, the materials, the things that are needed in each place are in the right place at the right time, being distributed effectively, and when there have to be adjustments, which is normal when you've got 56 hospitals and an ever-changing dynamic. Those adjustments made in real time. That's the central focus of his team. We’re, obviously, all together, watching personnel levels as well to make sure that is accounted for with our hospitals. The testing – the testing has been in a dynamic – scarcity from day one. The weeks and weeks and weeks that we all pleaded before things got so bad for the testing that could have helped us stave off this disease, the week since then we've been pleading for more testing so we could make more impact, the amounts we've had have caused us to be essentially limited to the patients with the greatest problems who are right now in a life and death situation where the testing was crucial to protecting them, protecting our health care workers, determining who could be on duty, who couldn't be at any given point, and trying to keep as many health care workers in the game as possible and making sure those who needed care got it. And the same with our first responders, to make sure that we were handling them and supporting them properly. That's where the emphasis has been. We are now trying, as we see a little bit of progress with this disease to open up more and more of the testing capacity for strategic use in communities where the need is greatest, communities that have been hardest hit and the vulnerable individuals within those communities. And we're going to give out more of those details soon. But even that testing, remember, the tests kits are one piece of the equation – and they come with lots of components just to make matters more complicated, we need all the pieces – the swabs and everything else, but then you need the personnel to administer them who are trained and you need the PPEs. So, until very recently we were struggling to have enough personnel and we still are fighting that fight, but we hope we'll be able to free up some more personnel for testing. We hope to be able to free up more PPEs, but that, again, is going to be a day-to-day decision. If we can put those pieces together, we can start this grassroots testing in the places that have been hardest hit. But as you can hear in my answer, Andrew, it's still an atmosphere of tremendous scarcity. What we need to get to low transmission – that next phase we all want to get to – is much more widespread testing. And I have appealed consistently to Washington. I spoke to the President yesterday and other key members of the administration, the FEMA administrator and others, to say, this is the crucial need if we're going to transcend to the next level and really reduce the presence of this disease. We have not gotten yet any guarantees from Washington about how and when we will get a much greater amount of testing. So, right now, I at least want to keep us doing what we're doing, start to get into targeted community testing, but I know that until we get a much more ample supply of testing, we can't sustain what we need to to get into that next phase.

Moderator: Next up is Debralee from the Bronx Free Press and Manhattan Times. Debralee?

Question: Hey. Good morning, everyone. How are you?

Mayor: Hey, Debralee.

Question: I want to follow up on that question, and also, just generally, as we talk about amplified testing, both in resources and personnel, Mayor and Commissioner Barbot, you know, the question becomes when will we have these resources, because you know, one thing is pie in the sky in terms of what we need, what we need now and what we don't have, what the requests have been. But in order then for us to return to some semblance of normalcy, as per administration, we've got to get to zero transmission and we'd have to really ramp up testing. When you look at it in light of opening up the city and the region for business and particularly for schools as well, how can we achieve that with the resources in hand? And then, specifically, can you tell us what kind of testing needs to be in place? When you talk to school leaders, they talk about these buildings having to be safe for the gathering spaces for the community, for families, for parents, for teachers. How will you in fact be able to assure that come September – that’s the end goal now – that these buildings will be that. What will testing look like at that point when you have strangers coming in and out of the buildings all the time?

Mayor: Great question. I'll start and I know Dr. Barbot will certainly want to comment on this. So, Debralee, you've done your homework, obviously. I think you really framed it powerfully. Okay. So, first of all, what I talked about last week with the phases, you know, from widespread transmission now to low level transmission to, you’re right, zero – no transmission, effectively no cases or only very occasionally. Dr. Barbot has said from the beginning to give us some guidepost – and we all understand it could change, but she said, look, September is a viable thing to be talking about really getting back to normal, but no one's guaranteeing that. We're saying it's something we can shoot for that we think is realistic. And remember, when we talked about coming out of the current phase, you know this month we're going to be unfortunately in the widespread transmission no matter what. Next month, undoubtedly, for some of May, if not all of May, we'll still be in widespread transmission. We go into June, I hope we're either already moving out or start to move out in June. This puts – again, you know, you raise the issue of the schools – this puts the school's point in perspective again given that it's so unclear when we even start on that pathway to low level transmission. This is another reason why it makes sense to keep our schools closed. But then you talk about what would it look like? Well, we keep demanding a real timeline from the federal government. And look, unfortunately, from what we know right now for the kind of level of testing we would need – really widespread – the federal government is the only place where we could get the impact we need. We're working on the private market and every other tool we can find, but to really guarantee a constant supply, the federal government’s got to do something very different than what they've done so far. I was clear they're still not using the Defense Production Act to the maximum, it's clear there's still not the level of coordination that we need to see on the federal level. We need to know a lot of testing is coming and it will be sustained. I don't think any of us believe that's happening, you know, in the next few weeks. I think that's something that looks like a month or more away and we just don't have clean answers on it. But it can be done, it's a matter of, you know, using all their powers to make it happen. Because, again, Debralee here is the fallacy – if the President of the United States or anyone else wants a recovery – and we all want it, right – but if you're serious about it, you can't do it without widespread testing. You cannot have a real recovery if you can't test people and you can't get this horrible widespread situation reduced so we can get down to low level. If you don't get down to low level, you're not going to have recovery. If your hospitals are constantly on the verge of being overwhelmed, you're not going to get a recovery. If your cities and States can't function, can't provide basic services, because we're still in the middle of crisis and there's no revenue, you can't get to a recovery. You actually have to get the health care part of this equation, right to be able to get the rest of the economic equation right. And I fear a lot of the time hearing the President, and some others in Washington, that they kind of want to skip a step and say, hey, let's just reopen regardless of what it's going to take. And I think if you listen to some of the really great health experts, including Dr. Fauci, you hear the constant warning, get it right, do not take your foot off the gas, do not jump the gun, or you'll regret it when this disease reasserts. So, that is my way of saying to you to actually get to the day where we can get to low level transmission, that takes a lot of testing so that anytime you need to test anyone, anytime you need to test people, you're tracing in a group of people like those disease detectives from the Department of Health do. They need a test available, you know, anytime we're trying to make sure that someone who has been in quarantine or isolation can come out. You need a test available. We have to be able to have it when we need it. That would then put us on the pathway to showing that transmission had gotten so low that you could have confidence in doing things like reopening schools in September.

Doctor?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So, to build on what the Mayor just laid out, what I would say is, first and foremost, the most important thing that we are doing right now to get us to that point of reducing transmission is the social distancing, is all of the things that are currently in place. Beyond that, this tightening of the supply chain for the swabs that are necessary for testing are part of a national and international challenge. And that's why we have been focused on ensuring that we target testing to those most in need and that the testing of others is sort of ramped up as supplies allow. But the most important thing is that as we get to the point – or let me rephrase, the most important thing is we won't be able to get this over the finish line, if you will, if we don't have the supply that the Mayor was calling for and the assistance from the federal government, because that's when testing is going to become that much more critical for us to ensure that when we have identified additional individuals who do contract COVID-19, we're able to put the control measures in place to ensure that we go from low-level transmission to no transmission and testing is going to be critical at that juncture.

Moderator: Marcia Kramer from CBS New York. Marcia?

Question: Can you hear me?

Moderator: Yes, we can.

Mayor: Hey, Marcia. How are you doing?

Question: How are you doing, Mr. Mayor? So, the question is this, there's a big fear that if we don't get businesses open soon, you may have widespread business failure in New York City. I wonder if that's something that keeps you up awake at night, if you're worried about it, and how do we get to the point where we can do it so that we have, you know, both healthy New Yorkers and a healthy economy?

Mayor: Yeah. Marcia, excellent question. I do worry deeply about our businesses, particularly our small businesses surviving this and being able to employ, you know, our fellow New Yorkers and keep us all going. So, that worries me, but what worries me even more is all the people whose lives are in danger, making sure we do everything to protect them and making sure we do not make the mistake of letting this disease come back even stronger. And there is evidence around the world that sometimes governments took their eye off the ball and they paid for it in a really bad way when the disease reasserted. So, to save those businesses, we actually have to get the health care part of this right. And Marcia, I don't think that means forever. I think that means doing it right for, you know, weeks or a few months and really making sure we've shut the door on this to the maximum extent possible, moving into that phase of low-level transmission, getting through that to the point where we basically don't have cases. We’ve got to get that right, that's the best way to make sure that businesses can come back. In the meantime, it's incumbent on our federal government to keep supporting small businesses. I'm done with the corporate bailouts. The big corporations are going to find a way, but the bailouts we need, the support we need is for small business. I know this is something Senator Schumer keeps talking about. There's more that needs to be done in the next stimulus. So, let's get health care part right and that's the way to actually save the small businesses and revive the economy.

Moderator: Yoav from The City is up next. Yoav?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I'm just wondering if you can detail some of the City's efforts to ramp up testing? The last public-private partnership I can recall being announced was March 17th with BioReference. That was on the analysis side. If there's a swab shortage, is there anything the City can do possibly to tap local manufacturers to create it? So, you know, leaving the federal government's role aside for a second, what has the City been doing and what have been the obstacles here?

Mayor: The City is -- we're definitely looking for anything that can be done effectively to either create components or in any way expand capacity. We got to do a lot of expansion and we've got to keep it sustainable. But yes, we are trying right now to figure out if there's a way to do it. I think the truth is that from what we're seeing so far, the only way we could have the really big supply we need on a sustainable level is if the federal government was able to do something very different to help us. But we will keep looking to see how we can help ourselves for sure. And as we have any progress, we'll announce it. The challenge has been since that announcement from -- with the great help we got from BioReference, which was absolutely fantastic, how much of the testing has been needed to address the ever-growing number of cases and then ever-growing number of people whose lives are in danger, to address the needs of the health care workers and keep them going and the first responders as well. So even though we built out a lot through BioReference, there was a whole lot of need too. The other thing to remember is since then the number one preoccupation has been keeping the hospitals going. And only in the last few days have we begun to feel that situation is improving. But it's only improving, you know, to an extent. And we're still struggling on the supplies, the PPEs and that's where a lot of focus has to be. So the answer is, you know, that's where we, that's where we've been over these last few weeks. But we are going to see quickly if there's more we can do in the city and how far that could take us.

Moderator: Katie from the Wall Street Journal is up next. Katie, Katie, can you hear us?

Question: Can you hear me?

Moderator: Yes,

Question: Hi, thanks Olivia and thanks Mayor de Blasio. My question, and I've kind of asked this previously, but hearing again about the increased advertising and the robo calls in 15 languages to communities, particularly the most vulnerable communities. I just, I'm so struck by how late it all seems and I want to know Mayor, why this wasn't done a month ago, why this wasn't done sooner? You know, you look at the number of the sick and the dead and the communities and I just can't help but think that this all feels a little late when it could have been done a month ago. And I just want to know why, you know, the City knows which communities are their most vulnerable. They know the languages people speak, they know the health care realities that they have. So can you just explain to listeners and to viewers why now and not last month or not even two weeks ago?

Mayor: Well, Katie, again, I said just a few minutes ago that the first major campaign was mid-March and it was an $8 million campaign. So clearly, in 15 different languages and much of it was in community and ethnic media. So in fact, it did happen right as we were seeing this crisis take a new direction and that's when that happened. This new one is targeted even further given what we've learned in the last days. In addition, the central thrust over the last few weeks has been to protect the people of the communities hardest hit by protecting the hospitals that serve them. The public hospitals and the independent hospitals. The last few weeks have been day to day, hour to hour, making sure we had the ventilators, the supplies, the doctors, the nurses, the health care workers where we needed them, when we needed them in a crisis that took on an extraordinarily fast trajectory. That was how we could make sure to save the lives that could be saved. And that's always been the core guiding light here is save every life that can be saved.

So that's where a huge amount of time, energy and resources went. And again, it builds upon, thank God, the billions of dollars we put into our public health system to save H + H years ago. That now has given us a foundation to be able to save lives here and now. But no, we've been out there with these messages deeply into communities. We're targeting them even more now and we're going to keep fighting with everything we've got. We're going to try and get the new testing out there. Again with a clear understanding, it depends on the supplies, the PPEs, the personnel, but everything has been about trying to get what we need to keep things going and protect the health care, protect particularly the hospitals that save lives.

Moderator: Brigid from WNYC is up next. Brigid?

Question: Morning Mr. Mayor. You know, there was a lot of reporting over the weekend about the decision to close schools for the rest of the school year. You said the decision was made, the Governor said the decision wasn't official. You two haven't appeared together since March 2nd. Respectfully, what do you think went wrong in terms of the communication in this particular case? And respectfully, what's the way forward so that your messages are in sync and New Yorkers don't have to experience the disorientation they feel when you're saying different things?

Mayor: Yeah, Brigid, respectfully back, as I've said many times, the vast majority of issues the City and State have been absolutely on the same page. Again, you guys will report on the exceptional. I understand that, but I'm going to strongly ask you to look at the whole trajectory through February, March, April, where the City and State and we've all been talking constantly, have agreed on directions together constantly. It is not shocking that sometimes there's this differences of perspective because what I need to do to protect kids and parents and families and educators in New York City, it may be a different reality than what the Governor's thinking about if he's thinking about the whole state or the whole tri-state region. But what I did, what the Chancellor did was to protect our people. Schools clearly need to stay closed. They will stay closed because the reality is just what we talked about before. There's not going to be a context to reopen schools with so much we're going to have to deal with on the health front to get to a better place and a more stable place. So we're always working to make sure that we get to the same positive outcomes. Sometimes there may not be perfect agreement, but we're still going to get someplace together. And I actually think the – respectfully, I think the media is very sensitive on this topic. I think everyday people just want to know where we are ultimately going to go. And I'm telling you the schools are not going to open because it won't be safe to open them.

Moderator: Sydney from the Advance is up next. Sydney?

Question: Hi there Mr. Mayor. So Borough President James Oddo said over the weekend that you agreed to send more medical staff supplies and coronavirus testing to RUMC and SIUH. Can you tell us a little bit more details about these commitments? What specifically are you sending, when they will be arriving at the hospitals and also why it took you so long to commit to sending these things to Staten Island? And just one more –

Mayor: Sydney, it didn't take long. And again, I, you know, I think very highly of the Borough President, we've had this conversation, he and I over many days, every single time. And Dr. Barbot will attest to this. Every time the Borough President has said there's a certain supply needed, we've made sure the supply got where it was needed. Or we made sure that the State or FEMA or someone was getting the supplies where they were needed. The personnel situation we've been working on, that's been a hard situation for everyone because we're still trying to get more personnel. But no, I'm sorry, I'm just not accepting the way you're phrasing the question. Staten Island has been a priority with all the other boroughs to get constant supplies PPEs ventilators, whatever hospitals have needed. And every time I've checked in on what's going on with the Staten Island hospitals, I keep getting the report back that they, like everyone else have been sent all of these basic supplies, what everyone is grappling with is that it is not the standard any of us want to be living with, which is to go back to a kind of peacetime standard. We are in this crisis standard. No one loves living this way, but all hospitals are being supplied and served.

Moderator: Gloria from NY1 is up next. Gloria, can you hear us?

Question: Yes, can you hear me?

Moderator: Yes, we can.

Question: Okay. I have a question from my colleagues who are covering the education beat during this time. And they're specifically wondering, the UFT has said that they have knowledge of at least 40 school staff that have passed away as a result of coronavirus. But the Department of Education has not released any data or any numbers about it. So what is taking so long? How are you tracking deaths within the DOE? And why hasn't the information been released yet?

Mayor: Yeah. And Gloria, every piece of information that we have that's been confirmed should be released exactly as we're doing today with the new indicators. So the Chancellor is not on the phone with us. But the bottom line always is that we want, once something's confirmed, we want it released. So I'm told that today the DOE will put out an update, it’s a very painful update. I mean, this is about people who are beloved in their school communities and have done so much good and now they're gone. But today the DOE is going to give that update.

Moderator: Erin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Mr. Mayor, on the school closing or opening issue. I heard you say that they will remain closed and that, you know, most people just want to know what the outcome is going to be, which is definitely true. You know, so can you explain – it would seem in normal circumstances at least, the schools are controlled by the mayor. If you say they're closed, they're going to be closed. Have you done any kind of analysis as to whether there's anything in the Governor's emergency powers or any other contingency that could require them to open? Or as far as you understand, is your authority simply to close them because they work for you?

Mayor: I appreciate the question, Erin. And I think it's a real question, but I also think in many ways it's a hypothetical question. I'll tell you why. Because the health reality, the safety reality is just overwhelmingly clear. In the final analysis, we have to protect our kids, our parents, our families, and our educators. The only way we can do that with assurance is to keep our closed. The only way we can help make sure that we actually get out of this horrible phase of this disease is to keep our schools closed. Now, think about it this way. Who is presenting the opposite view? Well, I'll tell you when I talked to national and local health care leaders, they all say keep the schools closed. When I talk to educators and union leaders, they say, keep the schools closed. When I talk to all of the people who have been in the middle of fighting this crisis and want to see us turn the corner and beat back the coronavirus, they say keep the schools closed. I literally don't hear any voice saying we need to open these schools in the middle of so much insecurity and such a huge fight. I don't hear anyone saying, Oh, don't worry. It's going to be fine. It's going to be safe for 1.1 million kids. So I understand the question, but I'm only going to say it this way. I think in real terms, in practical terms, like bottom line, the schools are not going to reopen.

Moderator: Jeff Mays from the New York Times is up next. Jeff?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Just a quick question on the disparities, your plan to address the coronavirus disparities. I wanted to ask is are there any other plans to do things such as increase access to health care for people in these underserved communities? Or provide more PPE to sort of the frontline workers who tend to be from some of these underserved communities? What else are you going to do other than the ad campaign to address these health disparities?

Mayor: Okay, so Jeff, you'll remember that we said there were four points to what we were doing right away. Protecting and continuing to support the public hospitals that have borne the brunt of this. Elmhurst being the most prominent, but many others as well. Making sure they had the personnel they needed. We've gotten a lot of those military medical personnel to them. Hundreds which have been very, very helpful, giving some relief and support. Getting a lot more contract personnel in there. That's been thousands. Making sure they have the supplies, the PPEs, the ventilators, anything and everything to protect the public hospitals that are really at the front line, the tip of the spear of addressing the disparities. And obviously true for a lot of the independent hospitals as well. And we're supporting them directly to make sure they can keep doing their work.

So this is the most important piece of the equation. If you are going to fight disparities, you have to actually ensure that the hospitals that have borne the brunt and historically didn't have enough, because this is a blunt truth about the disparity. These are all the hospitals that were under-resourced for decades and have borne the brunt of this crisis, but all the disparities for, for years and years before. As I said the other day, we put billions of dollars way before this crisis, into saving Health + Hospitals, saving our public hospitals. Thank God that was done because now those hospitals can be in the lead of this fight. Second to make sure we were communicating more deeply, more in a targeted fashion to the parts of the city, to parts of the community that needed even more communication. Third, the grassroots outreach that I described, which ideally is going to take a very direct physical form in the meantime. It will be, you know, through things like texting and direct phone calls into individual households to help them get information, to have a way to get guidance. Fourth to do the telehealth model on a much deeper level. So anyone, but particularly folks who are in communities that have really suffered particularly and need more information, need more guidance, need a health professional to talk to, that they can reach someone readily at, you know, a broad range of hours a day and get the help they need. So that's the immediate plan. But it is connected to years of trying to shift, and I told you, billions of dollars redistributed towards communities of greatest need and we talked about it the other day, not just for the hospital system, but for housing, for employment, for benefits, wages and benefits being improved. All of the things that come together, the public health people will attest to this and I'll turn to Dr. Barbot, how all these things come together.

If you're actually going to go at these disparities, you have to spend years redistributing wealth and creating a whole different foundation for communities that have been left out to have some potential to get what they deserve, including the health care they deserve. And then most notably, what we started a year-and-a-half ago, a guaranteed health care effort for anyone who didn't have insurance, to either get them better lower cost insurance or get them the NYC Care card so they could get health care directly through our public hospitals and clinics. Physical health, mental health, obviously the entire Thrive initiative has been about getting mental health services to people who never had them, who never could afford them. That has been working on a big scale. The demand for Thrive mental health services is skyrocketing, unfortunately, sadly, because of this crisis, but no one has to pay for those services. You know, that mental health services used to be largely for those who are well off. And those who did not have money, didn't get mental health care. Thrive has been changing. That is particularly true now.

So, all of these things are about addressing disparities in health care. We've got all the things we did before, we've got the things we've announced more, and then as we look to recovery, we have to continue to change this city. We have to see the recovery effort as a fundamental moment for further redistribution and further equalizing and creating a fairer and more just city. We cannot just take a bad broken status quo and report it – and repeat it again. We've got to do something different. So, we're going to go through all of these stages rapidly. But anything that we have that we can use to help people, we're going to. And you made the point about the PPEs, the whole concept of getting the PPEs to protect our health care workers and our first responders has inherently been addressing the historic inequities because so many of our health care workers come from lower income communities, come from communities of color, need the protection. This has been the obsession to get it to them. We want to get it even more widely out into our workforce and into communities. But the first thing has been to protect our health care workforce and our first responders so that everything else can happen. Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Barbot: So, Mr. Mayor, just to add to what you laid out so comprehensively is that in tackling the inequities, it's not enough to deal with what is on the surface, but it's also important to deal with the underlying drivers. And so, the fact that there has been attention paid to supporting the infrastructure, the health care infrastructure that serves communities of color and serves poor people in the city and the infusion of support to Health + Hospitals, infusion of support to the underlying educational system, all of those things really drive to support an equity agenda. You know, the sad reality is that these inequities have been for generations, hard-baked into the way in which this city works. And undoing those takes much more than just dealing with what's on the surface. Doesn't mean, of course, we don't deal with what's on the surface, but if you don't deal with what's underlying it, then we're always going to have those inequities. And so, this equity plan that we're laying out that the Mayor really talked about is going to be a phased approach and there are going to be more components to it. But we're starting here and now with doubling down on the direct mailings, on the robo-calls, and we're ensuring that we leverage the trusted voices of the community-based organizations that serve these communities so that we can then go even further into delivering the message that's going to help to save lives.

Moderator: Last two, Anna from the Daily News. Anna.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor Yes, Anna. How are you doing?

Question: Good. I hope you're doing well, too. I'm wanting to know if – whether the Correction Commissioner, if there's any reason why Commissioner Brann hasn't spoken publicly about the pandemic, given what's happening at Rikers and just the high rates of infection and the number of workers and inmates who've gotten sick and died. She doesn't appear to be at any briefings and I don't think she's ever appeared on television speaking about it. So, can you address that?

Mayor: Sure, Anna. Of course, I don't know everything about her schedule. I know about her work. I think Commissioner Brann has continued over the last couple of years to really reform and improve our Correction system and it's a huge, difficult job. But she and her team have been moving the jail system forward and making it, in so many ways, safer and more humane for everyone. But it's against a backdrop of making up for years and years of bad policies and disinvestment well before we came here. In this crisis I know she's been working very closely with Dr. Katz and everyone from Correctional Health to make sure that health care is provided. She's been working with our team here at City Hall and with the NYPD on determining what were the appropriate releases of inmates, which is now a number somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 who had been released, including those released with the agreement of the State and the DA's.

Everything to ensure that inmates who needed to be – as they were released were handled properly, supervised, gotten to isolation if they needed that, got the health care they need, she's been in the middle of all this and leading through all this. So, whether she is, you know, a public face all the time or not, I just don't know how and when she addresses the press, but I can see her work and am very sure it's effective. Certainly, want to make sure if she's got something that she wants to say publicly, she gets the opportunity to do it. But that's why, you know, I'm convinced having watched what's happened, that the work that we need done is being done.

Moderator: Last question goes to Henry from Bloomberg, Henry?

Question: Yes, how are you Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Hey, Henry.

Question: Hi. I want to get back to the subject of these neighborhoods that have had a disparate impact. These neighborhoods, I've been calling people in these neighborhoods for the last month and they've really had no information at all for the last five weeks. I mean, they literally have – some of these politicians have constituents who have had no clue as to what to do about the virus and people were getting sick. But my question really goes to the neighborhood clinics where, you know, you set up this health system and you touted it very highly that you were going to save the public hospital system by going into the neighborhoods and having clinics. And when this crisis hit, the clinics were gone and people couldn't walk to get medical care. So, they stayed at home and their conditions became much more acute and they wound up overwhelming hospital emergency rooms. Isn't this a complete reversal of what you saw as the salvation of the public health system in New York?

Mayor: No, it's not. It is a response to an unprecedented global health crisis. And I'll start and then Dr. Katz is on the line and he can add, and if Dr. Barbot wants to add as well. First of all, Henry, just following the track of what you said. Obviously, we've been incessantly trying to get information out very, very broadly. And on the one hand there's been a non-stop flow of information, whether it's these daily briefings or all the outreach that the City government does in so many ways to make information available to people. We've actually asked the elected officials, community organizations, faith organizations, everyone to be our partners in getting information out as well as the advertising and the other ways we get information out. I think there's been a lot put out. I think it's true, however, that with an ever-changing crisis and a confusing reality because there's no one on Earth who fully understands the coronavirus, that some of the information still needs to be amplified, clarified, done in other languages, you know, reached in a more targeted fashion. That's what we're doing now.

But there's no question about how intense and total the basic effort has been to get good information out, including a lot of direction. I've heard Dr. Barbot say in English and Spanish more times than I could count in the last few months exactly how people should address the situation personally in their family, in their lives. So, that's been happening. We're going to just do more and more targeted all the time. On the question of the community-based clinics, Henry, the fundamental conundrum here was we had to fall back to the hospitals. I mean this was a very explicit discussion over weeks and weeks right from here at this table that the trajectory we saw for this disease was so bad that we had to hold the hospitals as the last line of defense to save lives.

And that meant focusing everything we had on supplying and protecting the hospitals and making sure that they were never overwhelmed. The community-based clinics couldn't do, of course, what the hospitals could do. There's also the problem of trying to make sure that people didn't travel in the ways that they historically had. It would have been another danger if that had happened. We had to try and limit what people did in the right way by making sure at the same time that people who needed the help the most got it. So, it was a very challenging equation. Now that we have a little bit of breathing room, we want to go back and reinvigorate those community clinics to the maximum extent possible so they can go out into communities. We're still not saying to people do a lot of traveling around, go back to your regular patterns, but we do want to get the clinics out in an outreach way, out into communities to maximum extent possible as we work our way out of this phase and get to a better phase where we can then start to loosen things up.

So, to conclude, and I'll turn to Mitch, Henry, this is absolutely the result of going from peacetime to wartime. What you saw was a radical shift because it was the only way we could guarantee that our hospitals could function and save lives. And we had to make some very, very tough choices in an atmosphere where we knew there would be profound scarcity whether you're talking about hospital beds, personnel, PPEs. Until a week or so ago, it was entirely hand to mouth. It's still pretty damn hand to mouth. You know, as I said yesterday, I only can say that the city has the PPEs to get through this week. I can't guarantee you next week yet. So that's the backdrop against which we made the decisions, concentrating all of our capacity where it would have the biggest impact and protecting the core of our health care system. Dr. Katz.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: I would just add, Mr. Mayor, that through your efforts, we have 3-1-1 sending all phone calls to Health + Hospitals with anyone with a clinical question. We've answered more than 50,000 questions. And that's a real doctor, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And because of the language capability of 3-1-1 it's in all languages. So, I think that's one of the ways we've tried to stretch ourselves during these horrible times. Also, all of our clinics are open. Our doctors make telephone visits to their patients. I called all of my patients last Wednesday that were on my schedule, including a new patient who had not previously been seen to check out if any of them needed refills, that we maintain enough staffing so that if people do need refills of chronic medications or they need to be seen because they have a problem they can still be seen. So, we are doing our very best, as you explained, to keep things going during this horrific emergency.

Mayor: Thank you, Dr. Barbot, do you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: No, I think the two of you covered it just right.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Doctor.

Everyone, thank you. Again, I'll conclude with the point that we have today for the first time, these new indicators that are going to give us a very clear picture of what's really happening and where we are going. Today you can see, thankfully, thank God some proof we're going in the right direction, but we got a lot more to do. And finishing on that point of team, when you're on a team there's that feeling, that very good feeling, that sense of camaraderie, that sense of everyone pulling together. We're all used to thinking as individuals, but when you're on a team, you think about something bigger. That's what I see New Yorkers doing more and more. And sometimes you see, if you're a sports fan, you see a team that's got some good players on it, but somehow achieve something even greater than you would think that group of players could achieve, greater than the sum of the parts, well, New Yorkers were already great, but you're achieving something even greater with the way you're working as a team. We are really moving mountains right now because people are sticking with social distancing, sticking with shelter in place. It's not easy. We've been really clear, it's not going to be easy, but you can do it. You've proven you can do it and God bless you all. Keep going.

2020-04-14 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, today, we have some very important news for all New Yorkers. We've had some real breakthroughs, and one in particular I want to talk about related to testing, which has been the topic we've all been focused on now for months and months. So, I'm going to give you some important news and some good news, but I want to frame it first because this really comes down to how New York City and New Yorkers are responding to this crisis. Now, this is a city that has always been a special place, has always been a place full of energy, creativity, entrepreneurship. This is a place – everyone knows it all over the nation, all over the world – this is a place where people make things happen. And even in the midst of this crisis, New Yorkers have been making things happen. You know, small things in the neighborhood to help people out; big things that could change lives and save lives as well. The spirit of ingenuity, the spirit of fight has been so clear over these last weeks in this city and it's growing all the time. People are not – not only are New Yorkers not giving up, New Yorkers never give up. New Yorkers are forging ahead to find new ways to fight back against the coronavirus. And, look, this is who we are, this is a place where we believe in getting things done. And I have challenged the members of my team to do things that were previously not doable, not thinkable, but now have to be in light of the crisis we're facing and all the problems we've had getting our federal government to respond, getting the markets all over the world to be reliable, all the challenges we've faced trying to get the supplies we need and the help we need have create a reality for us where we have to defend ourselves. We have to fight for ourselves. We have to create things here even if they were never created before. So, that's who we are as a people. And that's what New Yorkers are showing once again in one of the greatest crises we've ever felt.

Let me talk to you today about how we got to what I'm about to tell you about. Over these last years, we've seen in New York City more and more the growth of advanced manufacturing, the growth of biotech, the growth of the technology sector – over these last years, more and more capacity growing in this city and it's allowing us to do things that before would not have been imaginable. So, let me start with the crucial, crucial supplies that we depend on to protect our health care workers and our first responders, the personal protective equipment. I've taken several trips out to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I've tried to show all of you the amazing work happening there. But what I first want to tell you about today is that this work is now being supercharged. The face shields, which are so crucial to keeping our heroes safe, started modestly, people in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, making the face shields by hand with the components they could get – a wartime factory for wartime conditions. I told you a few days ago on Sunday, that when it came to face shields. We really need them, but we only had enough to get through this week when you look at all the hospitals of our city. But now, we are having a real breakthrough. The companies that came together have now been joined by more companies. Now, we have eight companies in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and in Manhattan, all working together to create the maximum number of face shields for our heroes. They started very modestly, but now they can produce 240,000 per week. That will grow to 465,000 per week by Friday, April 24th. And then the goal soon thereafter will be to produce 620,000 face shields per week right here in New York City, made by New York city workers in New York City companies. That is enough to reach the crisis standard we're working under right now. What this means is we will be able to fulfill our entire need for face shields right here in New York City. Now, we're going to keep working to get more outside. Obviously, we want a bigger supply. We want to make sure we're secure for the future. We want to someday move off that crisis standard and go higher to an even, better standard. But for long as we're in the middle of this war – so long as we're fighting the coronavirus in the kind of crisis dynamics we are in now. For the first time with something as important as face shields, one of the major PPEs, we're going to be able to say we are self-sufficient – New York city will be self-sufficient. We will no longer be at the whim of either the federal government, the international markets. We won't have to import things from overseas. We will be self-sufficient. That's the first point.

The second point – surgical gowns. Now, we need a huge number of these every week, this is an area where it's not possible yet to be self-sufficient, but where we're making huge, huge strides. Again, on Sunday, I told you this was an area I was deeply concerned about where we had enough to get through this week, but we couldn't tell you yet about next week. We're moving to get major supplies in from all over the country. So, this is an area where we do see some relief coming, but, again, we will be best off if the most possible surgical gowns are made right here in New York City. Five companies are now participating in this effort to protect our heroes.
They're in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they're in Sunset Park, they're in the Garment center in Manhattan and in Long Island City, Queens. They're currently only making 30,000 per week, but by next week that will go up to 1,000. Soon thereafter, we want to get to 250,000 surgical gowns per week. And then, we're looking to go even farther. So, this is an area where we're going to make a lot of progress. These are particularly important to protecting those who are saving our lives – another great example of New York City ingenuity and the speed with which New Yorkers can move. Both these items I just told you about – face shields, surgical gowns – were never in recent memory made in New York City. These are brand new production lines created from scratch by companies here, by New York City workers in an atmosphere crisis, and they've surpassed any possible expectation we could have, and they're going farther.

But look, as much as we've been so deeply concerned about the PPEs, and we're going to be concerned about them until this crisis is over, because they mean protection for those who are saving our lives, the number one issue from day one has been testing. When we started fighting the coronavirus here in the city, we said we needed the federal help with testing. It never came. We have scoured the world looking for a test kits on the open market. It's been extraordinarily frustrating. We've had so many good people searching everywhere just to buy the test kits, to get a reliable supply. It has not been possible. So, over months now, the place we turn to for help, Washington DC, we never got a straight answer. We never got a consistent approach and we wondered when would the day come that we could actually get the test kits we need so we could start on that road that I talked about a few days ago from this widespread transmission of the coronavirus to low-level transmission and eventually no transmission. To get there, you must have testing in large quantities. And we knew that, as recently as yesterday, we did not know when and where we would get those test kits.

Now, we've had one breakthrough on the open market and then another breakthrough right here in New York City, and I'm so excited to tell you about this. Our friends from Carmel, Indiana, I talked about them a few days ago, they donated test kits – a biotech firm there donated test kits to us. But now, they have confirmed they can produce them regularly for New York City. So, on top of their donation of 50,000 kits, which we're so appreciative for, Aria Diagnostics, Carmel, Indiana is now going to be producing test kits for New York City. We will be purchasing them, starting Monday, April 20th – this coming Monday – we'll be purchasing 50,000 full test kits per week from Aria Diagnostics. I'm sure New Yorkers wouldn't have thought that the cavalry would come from Carmel, Indiana, but it has. This is going to be a big piece of the solution, going forward. We're going to get a whole lot more, I want to be clear, because to really get to that point where there's no more transmission, we're going to need a huge number of test kits. But even being able to know we can rely on 50,000 a week from a supplier that we believe in, that's going to be a major, major step forward for this city. I want to thank Mayor Jim Brainard of Carmel, Indiana, who I've gotten to know over the last few years very well at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. He and I are on the leadership of that body, and he has been an extraordinary friend, and ally, and really stepped up for New York City. So, Mayor Brainard, again, thank you. Thank you to everyone in Carmel. Thank you to Aria Diagnostics. This is a big step.

So, that's 50,000 per week, but we're going to need a lot more. And remember, a test kit – and I talked about this a few days ago, I used the analogy of a cup of coffee with cream and sugar – you need the coffee beans, you need the water, you need the cream, you need the sugar, you need the coffee mug. Putting together the full test kit takes three basic components, the nasal swab, the liquid solution – that's what you keep the sample in, it’s called a viral transport medium – and a tube with a screw top that keeps the sample secure and sanitary. You need all three of those things to perform a test for the coronavirus. And then, of course, you have to get that test to a lab that then processes it. So, we're talking right now about just collecting the test itself from an individual – whole other part of the equation is continuing to increase the capacity in labs to process these tests and give us the answer person by person, positive or negative. And again, we'll have to do that on a mass scale, going forward. But to get these three parts together so you can collect a test from someone, well that's – you can't get the first base unless you have the actual test that you can collect from people. So, needing those three pieces was crucial. Again, our efforts to get them consistently from Washington DC – no result; our effort scan from the open market – never could get a reliable partner until today with Aria Diagnostics. So, as we went through these last days and saw New York City companies stepping up, our local government, particularly our Economic Development Corporation, bringing together partners from the private sector, figuring out how we could do surgical gowns, figuring out how can we do face shields, starting to figure out other equipment that we need to build – and we'll have announcements on that too – constantly figuring out new ways to support our hospitals and get them the supplies and equipment they need. More and more what's happened is the members of our team here at City Hall, Economic Development Corporation and companies, and even universities now, all talking about what can we produce here? How can we do it more and more? How can we do things that have never been done in New York City?

So, just a few days ago people started saying, wait a minute, if we can make all these other things, could we say no matter what's going on in the international market, no matter what's going on in Washington, could we actually make the test kits here? There's nothing like it in New York City being made right now. Nothing even close, but could we make them here if we just throw in the kitchen sink and tried all the ingenuity that exists in this city? At first, of course we didn't know what the answer would be. We had to pull together a lot of smart people to figure out could it be done? Could it be done quickly enough? Could it be done in the quantities that we needed? And we thought about what New Yorkers are facing. We thought about this crisis and what we have to get through, and we said, well, if people can make them around the world, why not us? Why couldn't we make them, even if we've never done it before? Companies all over the world could make some of these components. Why couldn't the most innovative city on earth figure out a way? So, I'm here to announce to you that we have found a way. And, starting in a few weeks, we will be producing here in New York City, 50,000 test kits per week with components put together right here with companies, universities, New York City workers right here, building a brand-new supply chain to feed this industry that will now develop in New York City. 50,000 tests per week to begin, and if we can go farther, we're going to build it up rapidly. It means commercial labs and academic institutions in this city working together to produce that liquid solution the right way. It means local manufacturers and 3D printers, coming together to make the testing swabs and the tubes. Something as simple as us testing swabs, the entire international market has been struggling, because those swabs had been less and less available. In fact, a lot of them are made in places that were deep in the middle of the COVID crisis themselves. So, the whole international supply was disrupted. But now, through the ingenuity of New York City producers, figured out a way to make them right here. Production will begin in a few weeks at the beginning of May – 50,000 a week to begin. Add that to the 50,000 a week from Aria Diagnostics, we'll have 100,000 full test kits per week that New York City can rely on, 400,000 per month, and that's just the beginning.

So, we will have to take that new capacity, ensure that there are labs that can handle all those tests and get us results in real time. And remember, we're going to need the personnel to administer the tests, we're going to need the PPEs to protect the personnel who administer the test. There's a lot of pieces to this equation. And, all the while, continuing as a city to make the progress we're making through social distancing and shelter in place. So, even while we're building out this brand-new capacity and it's going to help us to the next stage, we will not let our foot off the gas. We will not relent in the successful strategies that are now opening the door to getting out of this horrible crisis. But I want to keep cautioning, it takes all these pieces coming together.

Now, the good news is as we see some progress on the hospital front – and we're far from out of the woods, but as we see some progress, that's going get us a little more ability to free up some medical personnel for testing. As we see some progress getting more PPEs, that will allow us to devote more PPEs to testing. But all of these pieces have to come together and we're still not in a situation where we can say it's going to be easy, it's not, but we need to find a way to keep building up the testing because it's one of the foundations of gained that next phase. When you get to that next phase, when you get to low-level transmission, remember, then you're able to constantly test people, figure out who has the coronavirus, needs to be isolated, needs to be quarantine on, get them the support they need, keep them away from other folks that they might infect. You have to know how to constantly trace anyone who has been infected, the people in their life who might've been exposed – you can get to them, test them, isolate them if they need it. It's a constant moving machine to ensure that the cases, each and every one individually are addressed and you go back to a containment strategy, which is where we were weeks ago when we had the very first cases here in New York City. That's where we want to get back to. But to do that, we need a whole lot of testing. For the first time, we're going to have a truly reliable, major supply of testing. And I'm so proud of my fellow New Yorkers. I'm so proud of the people in the companies who are helping us. So proud of the people in my administration who put together this plan. You know, a lot of folks would have said this was impossible. They're making it possible, and that's what New Yorkers do.

Now, I want to be crystal clear. This does not let the federal government off the hook. So, please, even though I'm telling you good news and something unprecedented and a real breakthrough, it does not take away the responsibility the federal government has. Not only do they have to deal with the fact that for months and months, they didn't do what they needed that could have helped us stop this crisis from growing the way it has, but they still have to come through now because the amount of testing we're going to need, the amount of testing is going to need it all over the country is vast. But hopefully the example New York City is setting will be recognized in Washington, that if we can do it here – a place that doesn't produce tests is figuring out a way to do it – then why can't it be done all over this country? Why can't we build up a supply that could protect all of us? If the federal government can't figure it out, then get out of the way and let us at the local level get this done, but support us, get us the components, get us the help so that we can do this rapidly and protect ourselves.

So, I want to see how far we can go, how quickly we can go. 50,000 test kits produced in New York City per week, starting in the beginning of May is just a beginning from my point of view. I want to see how far we can take this and I want to challenge all New Yorkers who could contribute to this effort – I want to challenge the academic labs, I want to challenge the research labs, I want to challenge the manufacturers, I want challenge the 3D printers – all the companies with 3D printing – the biotech companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the research universities that chemical companies – if you're in New York City or you're in any part of the New York area or anywhere in the country and you want to help build this effort, we need you. We're going to get a lot of help to make this work. You can be a part of history. You can do something unprecedented. You can save lives through this effort. So, everyone who can help, please, right away, communicate with us. Let us know you're willing. Let us know you're ready. Email us at testhelp@edc.nyc. Again, testhelp@edc.nyc. We need you. We will be responding to people. As soon as the emails come in, we're going to be reaching out to people, because this needs to move immediately. And anyone out there that could help us, I want to say thank you in advance, because this is going to be a huge step forward.

So, again, everything I just talked about is about taking us on that journey from where we are now – high level of transmission, widespread transmission of coronavirus, deep in this crisis, to low-level transmission where we go that containment strategy and we get to trace each case, get people isolated, quarantine, support them, reduce the number of cases all the time, and then no transmission – the place we all want to get to where coronavirus is a rarity in this city and life goes back to normal. That's the journey we're on. The testing is crucial, but also making sure we use the right strategy. And, again, the social distancing, the shelter in place – it is working, New York City. You're doing an amazing job. You, again, are the heroes, because you're following these rules in unprecedented manner – 8.6 million people, together. We need to keep doing it. And I said, every day we'll go over those three indicators that we announced yesterday to tell you where we stand. We'll all watch them together. We'll all know where we are. We've got to see consistent progress to be able to talk about any changes in those rules and restrictions that are working. So, we're going to stick with them until we see really sustained progress.

So, going over the numbers today, the new numbers. Again, you'll be able to see this online, a nyc.gov/coronavirus. So, when it comes to the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected a coronavirus conditions, that number has gone down, I'm happy to say. Remember, these statistics have been verified, there's a two-day lag because of when the information comes in from the hospital. So, this goes back to April 12th – that's the latest confirmed information. But April 12th, two days ago, we saw a reduction from the day before – it went from 383, April 11th, to 326, April 12th. That's the corrector a direction, that's a good thing. But now here's a situation where we don't have good news, on this statistic. The daily number of people in ICU across our health and hospital system, our 11 hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – that number from April 11th to April 12th actually went up from 835 to 850. Then the other measure, people – percentage of people tested who are positive for COVID-19 – citywide, that number again went up – April 11th, 58.1 percent; April 12th, 59.6. The public health labs tests – again, that number went up – April 11th, 78.4 percent to 84 percent on April 12th. So, look, again, this is the real world, real talk. We had a really good day yesterday, progress in all those indicators, all went down together. Today, no such luck. It does not mean you should be discouraged. It's just a reminder. We're going to fight our way out of this. It's not going to happen overnight. There'll be good days and bad days. We got to start some momentum here. You need to keep at it. We all need to keep at it with the social distancing, with the shelter place because it's working. Every day, we have to win that battle to prove that we can reduce the spread of this virus, get those indicators to go down in unison over a longer period of time. And then we'll be in a position to talk about our next steps. But I think what's clear is people will be able to see what we're doing and what's working and be reminded there's going to be ups and downs, but sticking to the strategy is the best way forward.

Okay. I'll summarize now with a few words in Spanish and then we'll take questions from our colleagues in the media.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we will turn to questions and please let me know the name of the reporter in the outlet.

Moderator: Hi all, just a reminder that we have Commissioner Barbot and James Patchett, President and CEO of the EDC on the line. With that, I will start with Debralee from Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, indeed.

Question: Great. So, this is good news obviously on the testing front. Can you speak specifically, both Commissioner Patchett and Mayor, on what efforts are being done to make sure that this first wave of new testing capacity is going to go right to the front lines of these hard0hit communities, the 88 ZIP codes that you spoke about now for the past week. And then secondly, to the degree that you're looking to deploy a workforce that's going to respond to this new capacity, the personnel, the creation of PPE, what efforts are being made to make sure that these communities are also being engaged directly, that beyond the Brooklyn Navy Yard that you're also looking to call, recruit, you know, really attract from these communities. Again, they're also being hit with these unemployment numbers. And again, are being affected so disproportionately by the virus.

Mayor: Excellent questions. I'll start and if the President of EDC, James Patchett, wants to add, he will jump in. So, first of all, yes, of course, one of the things that's so powerful about this new announcement is it's going to allow us, in combination with everything else we need, to focus on the communities that are being hardest hit and get them more testing, but also to build the framework for the bigger effort to do, again, as I said, that constant tracing and the constant efforts to take us out of this period of widespread transmission and into a better phase of low level transmission. So, the targeted piece in the communities that are hardest hit is crucial. For everyone, having the ability to transfer our efforts, to evolve our efforts to a containment strategy is absolutely necessary. That's how we actually save lives the most, getting out of this period of the crisis and being able to apply testing anywhere and everywhere we need it as part of a containment strategy.

So, in terms of the first part as you heard over the last few days we plan to get additional test centers up later this week, but we have – also it was very clear that we needed to ensure the test kits, we needed to ensure there'd be the PPEs, we needed to ensure there'll be the personnel. Every day changes. And Debralee, it is something that's hard to describe, but I've been trying to, that literally the supply dynamics change by days. We have good days and bad days. We have days where supplies come in. We have days where we get more than expected. We have days where a company steps up or the federal government or state government or FEMA come through with something. We have days that are bad days too, where an order that we were promised from a company in this country overseas suddenly evaporates or is delayed. So, to get the PPEs to the point that we know we can sustain testing is still a challenge, but we're fighting that fight all the time and being able to make more of them here obviously is going to help.

The part about personnel, too. We've got to see this crisis beat back enough to free up medical personnel who can be devoted to testing. Remember a few days ago, really, when it looked like the hospitals were going to bear the brunt, even worse, we were surging all available personnel with any medical training into the hospitals. We are getting ready to expand ICU massively. And again, Debralee it’s hard to think about, like, the – it feels like a day is like a week or a month nowadays because things change so rapidly. But literally just days ago we were preparing for a vast conversion of our hospitals to ICUs and taking every available medical personnel in this entire area and surging them into hospitals, which would have taken away, of course, from the ability to be out testing the communities. We're getting some improvement in that situation. That is freeing up the potential of getting more personnel who could be out doing the test. You do need people with a certain amount of medical training to do these tests, but I'm a little more hopeful now.

So, to finish the first point, this now improves our ability to do the grassroots testing. We certainly will make it a priority. We do need to add those other pieces to the puzzle. We obviously need to make sure there's also the lab capacity to process the tests. Every day we'll be working to perfect that equation, every day we'll be giving updates on when and how grassroots testing is progressing and how much will be done at each site, which also will vary according to all these supply dynamics and logistics. Our goal is to get as many tests done where they're needed the most and that's we'll keep driving towards.

On the job front, I think that's a great point, a lot of the companies that we are working with, of course, the first thing they did was they brought back their own workers who really do represent working people all over this city. When I was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard a couple of weeks ago, you know, you could not have had a more beautiful picture of all of New York City, all people of all backgrounds in one place, working class people who had been out of work because those companies didn't make essential items. Then they converted to making face shields. They brought their whole workforce back. So, that's going to be a kind of thing you'll see that will employ a lot of people who have been out of work particularly from communities of color. But we can target further, to your point. And so, I'll ask James Patchett and the team at EDC to ensure when we need to do more hiring, we focus on the communities that have been hardest hit. And I certainly want to remind everyone that there are also our jobs being made available now at H + H and, again, we want people to take advantage of those jobs. We need the help, we need the labor, but we also need people to get a paycheck. But, yes, we will target those new hiring efforts as they emerge to the places that need them most. James, do you want to add at all?

President James Patchett, Economic Development Corporation: Sure, I'll just add primarily on the second point. I think, you know, the Mayor has visited the Brooklyn Navy Yard two times, but I don't want folks to over-index on that as the sole producer. We have over 15 different firms across gowns and face shields that are producing across the city that represents four boroughs. So, the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. And one of the – although Staten Island is not represented, one of the organizations we're working with is run by two Staten Islanders, although their organization is based in Brooklyn. So, all five boroughs are well-represented. Just to give you an example, one of our largest gown producers, it's an organization called Course of Trade, and not-for-profit organization based in Sunset Park who does [inaudible] training of seamstresses. And they are bringing back over 400 seamstresses from the Sunset Park and greater community to construct these gowns. So, it really is an across the city effort. And the great thing about a lot of these jobs is they’re people, as the Mayor said, who were put out of work and are now back to work doing this type of manual labor that is both a good-paying as well as being available and accessible to a lot of different New Yorkers.

Moderator: Next we have Andrew from NBC New York.

Question: Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Andrew. How are you doing?

Question: Good. Since you've spoken about New York and the ability to innovate and come up with creative ways to do things, I want to re-ask about why you have not come up with a way to close more of the streets given that there are very few cars on the streets, streets like – cities like Oakland and Minneapolis have closed block after block. And I know your answer before was that the NYPD wouldn't have the personnel for that, but do they really need the personnel for that? Could you not find ways to get people outdoors safely with more space?

Mayor: Well, yeah, I've heard the concerns and the questions from people in communities and also from the media. I asked the NYPD and Department of Transportation to analyze the Oakland plan, which was the one that was raised a few days ago. Adamantly, the answer back was, we are just profoundly different than those other cities. In Oakland, as I understand it, they said that streets were closed off, but they didn't put up any barricades. They didn't have any enforcement. They just depended on drivers to not go on those streets and everyone to look out and be careful and that's, you know, noble and hopefully that would happen anytime, particularly in a crisis, but we are not comfortable saying that we are going to just assume that people are going to be safe because that's our good intention. You know, this is all about safety, Andrew, the whole concept right now, everything we're doing is about people's health and people's safety. That's where we're going to stay focused. And I do not believe we can do that safely. I do not believe that we can do it in a way that does not undermine enforcement of other things we need to do. So, I heard it. I've been elected by the people to make decisions including at a time of crisis. I have heard the concern, we've analyzed the concern, we've analyzed the possibility. The answer is, I do not believe it will work, period. We'll continue to look at it if situations change going forward. But right now, I am convinced that we need to take the NYPD and the other enforcement entities, keep them focused on where people have to be, the grocery stores or supermarkets, the pharmacies, the parks, the subways, the buses, make sure those are being enforced properly, get the NYPD back to full strength – that's where our focus is – and protect lives. The last thing I want to do is have a situation where we end up endangering people because we put a plan in place that we could not enforce properly. So, that's where we stand now. We'll keep looking at going forward.

Moderator: Next we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good morning, Marcia, how are you?

Question: I'm good. Mr. Mayor, there's been a raging debate about when and how to reopen the economy and businesses. I wonder who should be making the decision? Should it be the Mayor of New York City, the Governor of New York, or the President of the United States? And will you follow the decisions made by the governor and the president?

Mayor: Marcia, great question. Marcia, I think you'll appreciate – we've known each other a long time – in this case, I'm going to declare myself a conservative. The fact is we cannot jump too soon. This is all about safety and all about health. That’s all we should be thinking about. That does not mean we don't need to restart the economy. We do, of course. People's livelihoods depend on it. We've got to, over time, get back to normal. But, Marcia, my profound concern is that if we do this the wrong way, if we do it prematurely, we will see a resurgence of this disease. And this disease is a ferocious one. It has put the entire nation, the entire world back on its heels. So, we would be fools, I think, to ignore the warnings we have received and including in places that did act a little prematurely and ended up paying for it.

My view is job one, health and safety; job two, restarting the economy. You can't restart the economy effectively until you perfect the health and safety equation. If you do attempt an artificially early restart of the economy, you'll end up having to shut a lot of it down again because the coronavirus will reassert. That's the worst of all worlds. So, my view is, smart, cautious approach, beat it back, prove that we've beaten it back, get to that containment strategy, that low level transmission phase I've talked about, secure that phase. That's when you can start to loosen up. But don't do it artificially.

In terms of who makes the decision. Look, it's a federal system. The founding fathers are really clear about this. Of course, the president has a crucial role to play, particularly a time of national crisis. Of course, the governor has a crucial role to play at, particularly in a time of crisis in this state. Localities still play a crucial role in our federal system no matter what. That's how this country was built. So, I'm going to defend the health and safety of New Yorkers. I believe in a lot of ways people will – all levels of government will find some consensus. That's my hope, especially because I think the disease will give us a lot of information, you know, literally, because if we do things right, we'll beat it back. If we do things wrong, unfortunately, the disease will prove its power to us. But in the end, my job is to protect the health and safety of New Yorkers and I will do that no matter what.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Hey, Julia. How do you feel?

Question: Good. I'm wondering if – a follow up on Debralee's question, who exactly will be prioritized for testing because we know that, you know, 100,000 is a great start, but based on what the Governor said, we may need tens of millions of these tests to get to the next phase. And then I wonder if you have a cost of the tests from Aria and if you can name any of the companies and universities involved in New York City's homegrown testing efforts.

Mayor: Okay, good questions all around. We'll get you what we can on Aria. I don't have it in front of me. On the institutions involved – absolutely anticipated that question – we are, right now, in conversation with a number of organizations to get this done. Want to make sure they are comfortable with their names coming out before we just start talking about them. And again, we're trying to recruit a lot more. So, over the next few days we will announce the different partners in this initiative. On the question of the testing priorities at the community level. Again, what I said was, here's the plan to get this done by the end of the week, at least to start in as many locations as possible pending getting those PPEs and the personnel. The exact priorities we're going to announce shortly, Julia. It's obviously going to be a focus on the most vulnerable. So, the exact criteria we will announce, we've said what the locations will be, the tests will be for people from those communities because those had been amongst the hardest hit. But the general criteria we've discussed previously, folks with pre-existing conditions, folks who are older, and particularly those who have both. And that's the number one concern. Folks who are over 50 and have pre-existing conditions. So, we'll lay out the exact focal group, the exact priority group for the grassroots testing. It's going to be limited to begin, so we want to make sure it gets to those who need it most. And we'll have more to say on that in the next few days.

Moderator: Next, we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Thank you, Mayor. Wanted to follow up on the regional working group a bit more. Have you spoken with Governor Cuomo since the regional working group was announced? And what would you say is your role either formally or informally in that group?

Mayor: I have not spoken to them. I think it sounds like a good idea. You know, I love the notion of everyone trying to solve these problems together. And again, the states have their role to play. Here's the truth about cities and localities. We provide the services to the people. You know, the federal government does its role. The state government does its role, but in the end, this is where the rubber hits the road. So, when it comes to protecting people it's our police force, it’s our fire department, when it comes to the health of everyday New Yorkers, it's our health department, it's our public hospitals with Health + Hospitals. We've obviously been mounting the constant effort to get supplies to the hospitals that need them, to get help to people who need them. It's our EMS, obviously, that brings people to the hospital. And our EMS workers have been extraordinary and valiant in this effort. And by the way again, a thank you to FEMA. Thank you to the federal government. Those 250 ambulances we've gotten, 500 EMTs and paramedics from around the country. I visited with them a few weeks ago. They've been amazing. They've helped us deal with this crisis and, clearly thank God, we see the number of 9-1-1 calls starting to go down. We have, by the way, more ambulances and EMTs and paramedics coming in from around the country to augment further. I'm told by our OEM Commissioner, Deanne Criswell, we have another hundred ambulances and 200 paramedics and EMTs coming in, I believe, next week to add to those ranks further. So, that's been crucial.

So, Shant, that's just my reminder to everyone that what we do is actually directly serve people and directly protect them. So, if the governors of all those states have particular ways that, you know, I can work with them, our city can work with them, we want to for sure, but whatever they're doing together – and I'm glad they are working together – my job is to protect New Yorkers every day with all the resources of this City government. And that's what I'll do

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. And Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you, I know that the City eliminated the Summer Youth Employment Program in it's a budget saving measures, and now there's been a push to save it. I was curious because I know last month before you canceled schools, one of the major factors you cited for not canceling was what would the youth do, you know, especially teens. So, I'm curious if things improve, if there is, you know, widespread containment of the virus in the summer, would you consider bringing back this program, so teens and the youth can have something to do in the summer. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Katie. It's a great question. We thought a lot about this. There's been a great expansion of the Summer Youth Employment Program in the course of my administration. The City Council’s made it a major priority. We've worked with them. It’s, I think, more than doubled from when we came into office. So, you know, it's painful to take away something like that. And it's not just that it's the other summer programs that we have well beyond summer youth, all of which are valuable. I talked about it in the State of the City, we wanted to do even more of that kind of thing. But here's the truth. And again, I'm going to declare myself a conservative on this point – when I say conservative, I'm not talking about ideology, I'm talking about strategic conservatism in light of this crisis. I want to make sure we get the health piece right.

I want to make sure we protect people's health and we actually know we've beat back this virus and we're actually in that new phase. We’ve talked about somewhere between May and June, we hope to have the proof that we've moved forward enough to be able to start to change some of the restrictions. But that's just the beginning. And even then, we have to watch like hawks to make sure things don't go back in the wrong direction. The numbers today, you know, we really believe in these indicators and as you saw, unfortunately, today they went in the wrong direction. So, we don't yet know the trajectory. What I do know is the kind of planning that you would normally authorize and the spending you authorize for summer initiatives of all kinds would be happening right now. We can't do that. We cannot spend a lot of money and put people through a lot of trouble for something there's no guarantee at all could possibly happen. And there's a real chance – and remember our Health Commissioner, Dr. Barbot, talked about September as really the time that we think is realistic to think about getting back to normal. We're confident, at this moment, we can reopen the schools in September, but we're not confident about June. We're not confident about July. We're not confident about August, that we could have people gathering together again in large numbers. And that's what Summer Youth is and all these other youth programs. So we're going to take this very slow and carefully to make sure we get it right. In terms of your question, what should young people do? It's tough. It's tough, look, I'm a parent. I vividly remember when my kids were teenagers and it would have been really tough to say to them that you got a whole summer ahead and you still have to practice social distancing and you still have to stay in a lot, but that could well be the case. We're going to try to provide every conceivable kind of online programming we can. We're going to try and be ready to in any way we can help kids through it. DOE is preparing contingency plans for each and every scenario for what might happen over the summer. So the answer to your question is I don't see that scenario at this moment. And I'm always going to first focus on how do we guarantee the health and safety of New Yorkers and make sure we don't take our foot off the gas too soon.

Moderator: Next, we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good Gersh. How are you doing?

Question: I'm great. And Mr. Mayor, we can all appreciate the good news you shared today as we fight this war. But let's look ahead for a second. Residents are saying they don't want to return to streets filled with traffic. Sky polluted by car exhaust, hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists killed every year, the result of how we allocate public space to the automobile. So just as FDR, Churchill and Stalin repeatedly met to discuss the future even before they defeated Hitler, do you have someone in your administration, perhaps it's your talented Transportation Commissioner who we haven't seen during this crisis, who is planning for the car light future that residents will demand when this is all over?

Mayor: Well, Gersh, even with some editorializing there in the question, I don't agree with your entire frame. But I think your underlying question is a very good one. And the answer is yes. Real work is starting now to plan our future. So I want to affirm, I think the point, the basic point you're making, which is that we are not looking to simply bring back the status quo that existed before the coronavirus. I think that'd be a huge mistake. Now Gersh, my first concern here is the health and safety of New Yorkers. So one, the planning has to recognize that we have to get it right on ending this crisis. And if you look around the world, coronavirus is not linear. It doesn't like just have an on-off switch. We may be fighting it in different ways for an extended period of time. So I want to be careful that people not think we turn a corner and we're done necessarily. We have to be smart about that. But when you think about where we are going forward, when we think where we are now, and how we have to move forward, the first thing I would say we need to do is fight inequality. This is what I came here to do. This is what New Yorkers, I think fundamentally believe in. We're still a city racked by inequality. We must do so many things differently. And it starts with making sure that working people have better lives and have the ability to really take care of their families in a whole new way. And this is where I think the health care disparities have been pointed out here, so painfully are a call to arms. That when we come back, when we start our recovery, it has to be also about a redistribution. It has to be about fundamental changes in the direction of fairness and justice and equality. So I think the first question is about health and safety, is about economic justice. But then talking about how we address the future of the city in terms of sustainability, in terms of transportation. Unquestionably we need to make more changes. I have a real feeling that this horrible, horrible crisis, unprecedented, at the same time as it's so horrible unto itself, it’s such a jolt. It’s the worst health care crisis in a century. It’s the worst economic crisis in 80 years. I think it's also preparing us for something ahead. And I wish it wasn't, I really do. But I think unfortunately it is preparing us for something. Which is the battles we'll have to face in the future in the fight against global warming. We all understand how dangerous that situation is. So it comes to your point to fight global warming, we have to, we have to get away from individual automobile use a lot more. We have to build a city that more and more will rely on mass transit. We have to double down on everything we've done with Vision Zero. I intend to create a plan that will do all of that. Because when we finish beating this enemy, we've got another enemy up ahead that's fierce. And that is bearing down on us quickly and we're going to all have to work together to fight. And getting out of our cars to the maximum extent possible is part of that fight. So yes, you will see those plans for the future of the city.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering if you're going to explain the rationale for requiring medical staff at the city's public hospitals to provide a doctor's note when they get sick? Relatedly the NYPD has been releasing daily updates of how many officers get sick, how many are confirmed positive. If the situation at H + H is so bad that you're requiring medical staff to prove they are not faking an illness, why can't we get the same data for H + H?

Mayor: Happy to get you that data. And I don't agree with your inference. I look at it the other way around. We need them. We need those key health care workers right now. We just need a system that creates consistency of verifiability. In fact, in a crisis, you need it more than ever. So yeah, we'll happily get out statistics. But the intention here is one thing to make sure we can save lives. We need to make sure every available health care worker is where we need them. We also need to make sure that anyone who is sick gets the support they need and is not at work but is at home getting well.

Moderator: Next we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor and thank you for the news about testing. It feels a little bit hopeful today.

Mayor: It is, it is.

Question: I have a question on a different supply chain related to food security. Particularly for our seniors, we are hearing from people who signed up for meal delivery who are getting texts saying a delivery is coming and then nothing arrived. First, what should a senior do, you know, when they can't go out and they're not getting what they need? And I know you have Kathryn Garcia in this role as the City's Food Czar. Does that mean that she also has oversight of these supply chains, including, you know, these types of meals that are supposed to be delivering?

Mayor: Yes, Brigid. Every piece of the food equation DFTA has played a historically crucial role feeding seniors at senior centers, Meals On Wheels, that type of thing. HRA has played a crucial role with food stamps and food pantries, soup kitchens. All of that and every other piece that can be brought to bear is under the umbrella of Kathryn Garcia's leadership now, as the Food Czar. We are going to present this week a much more detailed plan on the work she is doing. There is a lot more ahead. The blunt truth is I'm very worried about the ability of New Yorkers to get the food they need because so many of them are running out of money because they've been out of work. And so what I've said is we will not let any New Yorker go hungry. I want to emphasize this. We will not let any New Yorker go hungry. Any New Yorker who needs food right this minute, we can get them food, either of those 435 programs we have through DOE. Right this minute where any family can go get three meals a day, grab-and-go, as many family members as they have. All of the soup kitchens and food pantries that we're supporting in the effort we announced with the City Council, $25 million effort we just announced. All the other ways that we get food out, including the direct deliveries to seniors and vulnerable folks, which have been growing all the time. So we will have much more to say on that this week. But to your question about if you will quality control, make sure that anyone who signs up gets them right away. I have been really clear with everyone that it needs to be an immediate turnaround and we can't miss, because people are depending on this. There was a situation in Independence Plaza. I'm glad several of you raised it last week. You were right. I apologize to the folks at Independence Plaza. It should never have happened. And I've told our team we have to tighten up, that can never happen again. If there's individual instances we need to know about them immediately. So any journalist or anybody who hears of a situation where someone signed up for the food and didn't get it, our team here at City Hall needs to know that so we can get Kathryn and her team to fix it. And the fix can be very quick. There's constant deliveries being made all over the city now and we'll give you those details. I think you'll be struck by how much is happening. So you know, quickly making sure that if a delivery was missed, it is quickly fixed and get the food to the person in need. We can do that, but we need to know where the problems are and if it's just individual or something more systemic that we need to fix. So please Brigid, if you'd share that information with our colleagues at City Hall and again, we'll have a bigger outline for you of everything happening this week.

Moderator: Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Yes. Good morning Mr. Mayor. Good to talk to you.

Mayor: Good morning, Juliet. How are you doing?

Question: Hi, fine, thank you. My question is this, now that you have this capacity to do a lot more testing, do you think there will come a time when every New Yorker should or needs to be tested? And I'm asking because there were concerns that there are people that are asymptomatic that may not know that they're carriers. So what happens? How would people know if they've had it with mild symptoms or they're carrying it or they have an immunity? How would that work and how would you go about doing that?

Mayor: Great, great question, Juliet. I'm going to start as the layman, Dr. Barbot will jump in, but I'm going to – she's been teaching me, so I'm probably going to immediately summarize some of what she would say. Look, again, we're fighting an enemy that we never even heard of six months ago. I mean, let's be clear about this. The coronavirus did not exist in human beings to the best of human knowledge, you know, half a year ago. And there's literally no one in the world who understands it enough. The entire international medical community is still trying to understand it. I have talked to every health expert I could find from Dr. Fauci on down. And what you keep hearing is that honest hesitancy about what they know and what they don't know. So this gets to your question, first of all, now we don't even know for sure if someone has had it and they cannot get it again in the near term. We think you can't get it again. And this goes to the antibody testing, which is its own topic. We think that would tell you something valuable, but it's not 100 percent clear if it is the final word. The same on the other side with the main coronavirus testing, the PCR testing. It tells you at that moment if you have it or not. It doesn't tell you if you're going to have it tomorrow. So some -- we’re obviously getting people who are negative one day and a couple of days later they're positive. That whole point about asymptomatic transmission, which is still not sufficiently clear. You could even have someone somewhere on the pathway to infection, but it doesn't necessarily show up in the tests. I'll let Dr. Barbot speak to all of this. But the point is we're dealing with imperfect knowledge of the disease and imperfect tools to fight it, but they still give us something. So to your question, I think what I would say is the first thing we need is testing for everyone who needs it. So obviously we have struggled to just have the testing for patients who are really sick, for health care workers, for first responders. That situation's getting better and now especially that we'll be able to have our own supply. Then of course we wanted to target communities that are hardest hit and the most vulnerable individuals specifically, not just to everyone, but the most vulnerable specific individuals in those communities. But when you go that next phase, you need testing all the time to make sure that you know exactly who can work, who can't, who should be contained and isolated, or a quarantined, who shouldn't, who's coming out of quarantine. It's like a constant assembly line, if you will, where you're constantly having to test lots of people to know exactly where they are and make sure they get the support they need. I don't know, and I don't believe in the many, many conversations we've had here at City Hall with all the health experts. I don't believe I've heard the idea of every single person, 8.6 million people needing to be tested. But I don't rule that out either. I'm thinking of this in stages where the greatest concern is to have the testing, to actually keep track of the people who need testing and have that kind of dynamic situation where anyone needs isolation or quarantine, we can get it to them. Anyone who's ready to come out of it, we can confirm the rate who come out of that, that kind of thing. Dr. Barbot take it from there.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, sir. And so, I'll build on what you have just laid out. And I want to just sort of back up a little bit to remind folks about what I've said in the past regarding testing. The reason to test is because we want to be able to then use that information for decision making. The second thing is that the importance of testing depends on where in the curve you are and then what decisions it'll help inform. So, right now, when we have widespread community transmission, what we have said to individuals, all of our fellow New Yorkers, is assume that if you've got these symptoms you have COVID because it's so widespread. And whether or not you get tested is sort of secondary because we want to make sure that people stay home. We want to make sure that people pay attention to their symptoms. If they aren't getting worse, we want you to reach out to 9-1-1. That being said, as we start seeing a decrease in the number of new people being infected with COVID, that's where having more testing available really makes a difference. Because it then helps us identify who are those individuals that have COVID and how can we then move more quickly to slowing the spread of COVID, by ensuring that not only do we make sure that these folks stay home and isolate, but anybody who's come in contact with them also then self isolates. And so right now I think it's premature to think about the value of every single New Yorker being tested. I think it's a combination of ensuring that, as we've been saying along, the folks who are at greatest risk for poor health outcomes as a result of COVID-19 get tested. Meaning the intersection of age and underlying illnesses, as well as, individuals who may be in particular communities where we see ongoing high levels of transmission so that as a city we can start cutting off those chains of transmission.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering, have you asked for authority – we reported that your administration was considering borrowing for the operating budget because of the budget crunch that you're in currently. Have you asked yet for the SRD to do that or do you, sorry – begun that process in any way?

Mayor: Thank you for the question Erin. It's something we have to think about. Obviously we'll be presenting the executive budget soon. And we've had to go through a really tough process around cuts to the budget and savings and PEG program. But we're going to have to look at everything to figure out how we get through this. There's a lot of uncertainty ahead, revenue we're seeing everywhere going down, very painfully, more and more expenses. Look, protecting the health and safety of New Yorkers, that's the priority. We'll throw everything we got at it, but it is obviously costing a lot of money. The State budget situation is real bad. So it's a tough, tough time ahead. So we're going to look at all options. But I'll have more to say when we do the budget presentation. And we'll talk about if and when we're going to seek any formal authority to do that.

Moderator: Next we have Kathleen from Patch. And we'll take one more after that.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Kathleen.

Question: Oh, great. So I'm following up on a question from my colleague on Sunday. Maya asked whether – about your blanket policy across city agencies to protect essential workers with preexisting conditions. She wondered if you had a follow up on that and what's been instituted?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. And I have – I appreciated the question. It turned out it was a very good question because it did point out that different agencies had somewhat different standards, all pretty much pointed in the same direction, but somewhat different standards. We'll be issuing guidance this week for a uniform standard for all city agencies. And basically it will be that the first consideration is to protect those with really serious health challenges. And we want to be clear that anyone whose particular health reality would put them at serious risk, we want to keep them home. Some of them can work from home, some of them can't. But whatever the case, the number one thing is to protect our city workforce. If someone by coming out of their home and going to work, even if they're doing essential work, if it would endanger their health, if they have the kind of serious specific conditions where it would endanger their health, we don't want them to take that chance. So we'll clarify that. Thankfully there are other folks who, you know, are not in the same kind of risk category. Of course anyone who can work from home, we want working from home. But there's other people who would not be running the same kind of risks, that's a different story. But we're going to send out guidance defining that if you have those serious risks, we do not want to put you in harm's way. And we will of course continue on the payroll, anyone like that on the payroll. So that guidance will be coming out soon and it will be made public.

Moderator: Last question for today. Alejandra from AMNY.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Alejandra.

Question: Okay. My question has to do with the announcement from the DOE yesterday that at least 50 staffers have passed away due to coronavirus. And I'm just curious to see when you were first made aware that it was at least 50 and how much of a role did that news play in your decision to keep New York City public schools closed, last a few days ago?

Mayor: Thank you Alejandra. I had been hearing honestly day by day, the updates so long before it reached such a painful number. You know, I was hearing each day when we lost any member of a school community and that definitely is something that I had in mind and the Chancellor had in mind. The Chancellor talked about this when we announced that we keep the schools closed, that school communities are hurting right now. There's a lot of pain, there's a lot of trauma. It's something we are going to have to address now and it's something we're going to have to address very deeply and you know, intensely in September. You're going to have kids coming back who have lost people in their families, in their neighborhoods and even of course in their own school. And that's going to be really, really difficult. We've not faced something quite like this in a long, long time in this city. And it's going to be very, very painful. And pretty much every neighborhood and every school will be affected in some way. So yeah, that is a painful, awful number that we've lost so many people who were devoted to uplifting our kids. And absolutely weighed on not only the decision that the Chancellor and I had to make, it weighed on our hearts. You know, my life and public life has been very, very focused on education and Richard's whole life has been focused on education and it's horrible. But I do think it puts a point on the fact that it just is not safe to bring back our schools until we are absolutely certain that we have moved out of this crisis. You know, we're talking about places where you bring together a lot of people and the safety and health of our kids and our parents, our families, our educators, that's what we should be focusing on in making every decision we make. And it's certainly was paramount in why the Chancellor and I decided to keep our schools closed for the school year.

So everyone I'll conclude by saying yes, we had a big breakthrough today. Really exciting news. And again, I've said many times the heroes are the New Yorkers in this fight, starting with our doctors and nurses and health care workers and our first responders, everyday New Yorkers who the whole nation, the whole world is watching as you do heroic work. The heroes are all of you who every day, no matter how tough it is in the biggest city in the country, you're practicing social distancing. You're doing shelter in place. It's making a big impact. But now we have a new set of heroes. The folks in all these companies, all these innovative, creative people, including the folks on our government team who said, you know what? It doesn't matter if it's never been done before. We're going to do it here in New York City. We're going to make something happen. We're going to make something out of nothing. People said, there's nothing here to work with. We're going to still find a way. And they've actually figured out now how to make us self-sufficient in face shields. How to make a big step forward in those surgical gowns that protect our health care workers and most notably, most powerfully, how to create our own test kits. How to make up for all the mistakes that we've seen from our federal government by taking matters into our own hands more and more. And starting to produce test kits on a mass scale here in New York City. It’s very powerful. It's very exciting. It's going to help us save lives. And it's a tribute to all New Yorkers.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-04-15 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. This time we're living in, it's causing us to experience so many challenges, so many painful realities, things we never could have imagined. There is such uncertainty. There's such confusion. There’s such a sense of insecurity. I want all New Yorkers to understand what all of us here in the City government are devoted to doing in this crisis for you and it's really basic. Our mission is to make sure we protect your health. Our mission is to keep you safe. Our mission is to make sure you have a roof over your head, and that your home is safe and secure. Our mission is to make sure you have enough food to eat, and that's what I want to focus on today. That last point, because what is more fundamental than being able to put food on the table for your family. And for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, that is now a question. That is not a certainty, and that's because somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-million New Yorkers have lost their livelihood in just the last few weeks, and money's running out. Whatever savings people have is running low. A lot of people already have run out of money. And yes, there's some help that's coming in. We all appreciate that for sure, but we all know it's not enough to sustain people. So, for more and more New Yorkers, we're hearing this all the time, people are literally asking, where's my next meal coming from? That's something painful to consider in the greatest city in the world, but it's what's happening. More and more people are experiencing that kind of insecurity. That's one of the most basic, and particularly for families, parents worrying about how they're going to feed their children. That's a reality that's now gotten sharper and sharper.

So, I want to affirm to everyone out there who is feeling that fear, everyone who's dealing with this problem, even if they couldn't have imagined just weeks ago, they'd be dealing with it. Here is the simple mission of your city government, and I pledge to you, I'm very confident in making this pledge, we will not allow any New Yorker to go hungry. This is not only a mission we are devoted to because it is the right thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, we must do it. And we must do it as your City government. We must do it working with all those at the community level who for years and years have helped to make sure that people are fed. The food banks, the soup kitchens, houses of worship, the nonprofit organizations. So many people have been devoted to making sure that New Yorkers had enough to eat. We're going to need them more than ever. We're going to help them more than ever. But the city government is going to take the lead, because we will not allow anyone to go hungry.

Now, yesterday I was out in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and I saw something moving and remarkable, but also it was a warning sign. I was with the wonderful people who are part of the campaign against hunger. It's an organization that's been around for decades. Started at the grassroots to feed people, help people. I want to thank Dr. Melanie Samuels and her whole team. Devoted people from the community who keep coming out, and they know that they're taking a risk doing it, but they keep coming out with the proper protection on, to feed the residents of their community who need help. Melanie told me that even just a few weeks ago, typically 250 families per day would come to their food pantry to get help. She said now it's more like 500 families a day. Doubled in just a few weeks. And this is just the beginning, because when we look at this coronavirus crisis, we understand we're trying to make sense of something brand new, a disease that didn't even exist for human being six months ago. But we're also trying to understand the huge negative impact it’s had on the rest of our lives. And we know when it comes to something like unemployment, the effects get felt more deeply week after week. It doesn't all happen at once. It actually gets tougher as we go along. So, I think what's coming up is going to be even more of a challenge. And that's why we're preparing right now to feed everyone. And as you hear this presentation from me today and from our new Food Czar, Kathryn Garcia, I hope everyone listening will understand, literally, we will not let anyone go hungry. And if anybody in your life needs food, we will get it to them. We have to make sure that word is spread. We have to make sure that no one thinks they're alone. We will not let anyone go without food. We need to make sure everyone gets that message.

Now, I was in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, but this challenge is literally in every neighborhood, because if you have no money, how do you get food? And we know that the massive unemployment that we're experiencing is literally every zip code, every part of the city. So, whoever you are, wherever you are, if you need food, we're here for you, and there should be no shame. I want to emphasize this. There's no one's fault that we're dealing with this horrible crisis. Anyone needs food? We're here for you. You don't have to think twice. Of course, it's for free. Just pick up the phone or go online. And if you need information, you can go to nyc.gov/getfood. You can call 311. You can find all the places, all the ways we'll get you food. Please do not hesitate and spread the word to everyone you know.

Now, this is an unprecedented moment. This is something beyond even our imagination in some ways, but we have to fight back. That's what New Yorkers do. We're going to find a way. Yesterday I talked about the amazing work that's being done right here in our own city, to do what our nation's not been able to do, to create our own test kits, to create our own PPE’s, that’s the New York City way. If no one else is finding a way, we'll find a way ourselves. We'll take care of ourselves. We'll support each other. Well, this is the same idea. We are dealing with an unprecedented challenge, in terms of people needing food. So, we're going to create an unprecedented response. Today I'm announcing $170 million initiative to make sure every New Yorker gets what they need, and no New Yorker goes hungry. Now, thank God we have a strong foundation to build on. All those food pantries, and soup kitchens, all the amazing organizations out there that have been doing work all over the city for years and years. Meals on wheels, all the things that we know that are part of the compassionate approach that we take as New Yorkers to those in need. We'll be building on all of that, and we will be adding many new components, because the situation we're in now calls for a whole different strategy and approach, and one that will grow with every passing week.

So, let's talk about the sheer scale. Before this crisis, before we ever heard of coronavirus, there are about 1.2 million New Yorkers who were food insecure, who didn't regularly have the ability to get all the food they needed. And that very, very painfully included about one in every five children in this city. This crisis is now adding to that number of people who are food insecure every day, because literally people are running out of money every single day. So, we expect it to grow. And yet there is some relief coming and we're happy for sure to see the relief that's coming from the stimulus, from the unemployment benefits, this is all very, very important. But we know not everyone's going to get that money right away. We know there's a lot of red tape that some people have to navigate. We know there'll be time lags. We know some people don't qualify, and whether that's fair or not, we know there are lots of people in this city who will never get that kind of support. And I would say it's not fair, but it's the reality. So, we know that the food crisis will grow, and that's why we had to do something different.

So, I'm going talk to you about four things that will be the essence of how we go about this new strategy. And then you'll hear from our food czar who will go over more of the details. So, first, this has to be done on a grand scale, a really massive scale to reach everyone who needs it, and even more people up ahead. Since March 16th, when we really got in the thick of this crisis, there have been 4.5 million meals served to New Yorkers through all of these approaches we're now taking, and that's just the beginning. We're scaling this up very fast. You know, we've talked about the operation through our school sites. We've talked about what our senior centers are doing. So, the Department of Education, Department for the Aging. We’ve talked about the operation that's been set up through Emergency Management, led by our food czar. All of these efforts together during the month of April, will account for 10 million meals being provided to New Yorkers who need them. All for free. Now, I don't like having to tell you that number, because it says how big the problem is, but it also says how big our response is. That's April, we're ready to do even more in May.

So, the second piece of the equation is making sure that as we're providing food, we're also putting people to work, because so many people need a paycheck. So many people want to help. So, three weeks ago we launched emergency deliveries, and this means getting food to people who can't get out. Who literally can't get out physically, maybe they're disabled or seniors who can't get out and get food, and don't have anyone to get it for them. Folks who are scared to go out, because they have one of those preexisting conditions or they're immunocompromised. A lot of our residents in public housing, lot of people who if they don't get a delivery, it's not clear if they're going to get food. What we've done is we've reached out to drivers in the for-hire vehicle industry, so many of whom have seen their livelihoods upended by this crisis. We've now registered 11,000 drivers who are TLC, licensed taxi and limousine commission licensed, and they are all taking on shifts to deliver food directly to people in the greatest need who can't get out of their house, who need that delivery right to their door. These drivers are doing that, helping us feed people, they're being paid by the shift, show the game money back in their pockets to feed their families in turn. This is something that's going to have a huge positive effect on the people doing the work, but even more they're doing something absolutely crucial to help the vulnerable, most vulnerable amongst us.

Third point, we have to make sure knowing that, as I said in April, we think we will have served 10 million meals by the end of April, that's going to go up in May and it's easily going to be somewhere between 10 million and 15 million meals in May at the rate we're going, we have to make sure there's enough food to ensure we can make those deliveries, keep our food supply strong and stable. Even a small disruption in the food supply would have a huge negative effect on New Yorkers we won't let that happen. So, in our $170 million plan is a $50 million investment in an emergency food reserve for New York City this will allow us to purchase and store 18 million shelf stable meals. This means we'll have a failsafe, we'll have a reserve that's just for New York City to protect us no matter what else happens 18 million meals ready at all times. Keeping that in reserve while continuing all our regular programs to feed New Yorkers it's important to have that backstop so we can keep everyone safe.

And then fourth, protecting the people who we depend on for so many other millions of New Yorkers to get their food that's our grocery store workers, our supermarket workers. I want to just say thank you to them first, you know, they are among the groups of unsung heroes in this fight. We talk and we rightfully talk about the heroism of our health care workers, our first responders they've been absolutely amazing battling through this crisis, keeping the health system going, keeping us safe. But let's give a lot of appreciation, a lot of respect to the people who make sure we get fed those grocery store workers, those supermarket workers, they get up every day, they go to work it's a tough job we need them and they keep coming through for us. So, first of all, anytime you go to the supermarket, you go to the grocery please say thank you to them because it's not easy for them or their families, we appreciate them. But also remember this is not what they expected, these are folks just trying to make a living for their families they did not expect to be on the front lines of an international crisis, but they're acting with the same resolve and the same spirit as all our other heroes. Now we have to protect them, so we've been working with the different companies, supermarket companies and the grocery stores to make sure that their workers get the PPEs they need of one kind or another, there's all different kinds of PPEs, different kinds are needed for different situations. We're working to make sure those supplies continue to get to those supermarket workers and grocery workers so they can be safe and confident. And finally want to mention in this category we're giving some new guidance today and it— about when you go to the store, when you go shopping for food what makes sense to do. So, I'm giving the guidance to all supermarkets and groceries require customers, require customers to wear face coverings when they come in. Put up a sign at the entrance around the store making clear that that's the right way to do things and that's a requirement of your particular store that is legal and appropriate, the City will back you up. This will help everyone to remember when they're in that kind of space, it's so important to protect each other, to protect the whole community that face covering is a smart thing to do. Every store has the right to put up that guidance and make it a requirement in terms of entry into the store and anybody who will not, any customer who says, no, I refuse, I should not be allowed in. And again, we will back up those stores; we will help you to enforce the rules. You have a right to have those rules in place, it's the smart thing to do for the health of all New Yorkers, and the City of New York will back you up. We need to keep each other safe, we need to keep these groceries and supermarket workers safe so they can keep serving us, this is the smart thing to do. So, that's the big picture and I think you hear throughout that big picture, our resolute commitment to feed all New Yorkers and to make sure it happens.

I turn to one of our most effective public servants, and, again, she has delivered for New York City as our Sanitation Commissioner throughout all the challenges the City has faced, including the biggest blizzard in the history of New York City on her watch and we came through. And thank you to all our sanitation workers, that was one of their finest hours and right now is one of their finest hours now, keeping the City going, keeping it clean in the midst of this crisis. But her leadership there was outstanding. She did an amazing job addressing the lead issues and helping to create a plan to keep all of our children safe in a way that's unprecedented and that's having a huge impact— time and again, she's answered the call and now she's doing it again as our foods czar. My pleasure to introduce, Commissioner Kathryn Garcia.

Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, Department of Sanitation: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It is my pleasure to serve New Yorkers in this capacity we are facing a difficult but important challenge right now, feeding New Yorkers and also maintaining our supply chain in a rapidly changing environment, and I really want to get right to the details. So, as many of you know, we stood up the grab and go meals at the Department of Education. Over 3 million meals have been served at those schools and they are now serving over 250,000 meals daily, I want to really say thank you for the folks at DOE who have stood this up they've been amazing, but this is serving all New Yorkers, students, families, adults. We are also continuing to do senior meal deliveries over 300,000 meals have been delivered and they are now serving— 250,000 meals daily serving seniors, seniors who were eating at department for the aging senior centers. As the Mayor mentioned, we stood up the get food portal and we are giving emergency food delivery to the most vulnerable New Yorkers and this has been a great partnership with TLC and all of the TLC drivers who have made sure that they are showing up to get those deliveries done. And so, it's boosting earnings, but it is also serving an absolutely critical purpose in terms of making sure that there are meals available for these populations. So, we have delivered in the last three weeks over a million meals to the most vulnerable and we will continue serving 100,000 daily and growing and our primary focus is on seniors, NYCHA, the medically fragile and anyone else who is vulnerable.

As the Mayor mentioned, we are building an emergency food reserve I want to make sure that New Yorkers are clear, our supply chain is stable, I know that many of you have seen items on store shelves, not there. The supply chain is adjusting to what we decided to buy that was very, very different than what we had ever bought before and so it is rapidly adjusting to this new reality. So, we are ramping up the food supply to make sure that we can take care of the most vulnerable. So, we have $50 million invested and we will be purchasing 18 million shelf stable meals, which means that they will last to protect New Yorkers from any temporary disruption.
As I mentioned that we are taking steps to secure the food supply it also is really critical that our central grocery store workers are protected coordinating their non PPE to make sure that they had the protective equipment that they needed, making sure that we were issuing social guidelines and making sure that people are following them. And then today talking about the fact that we really will support grocery stores who require their customers to wear a face. So again, I think that this is another group of unsung heroes I will echo what the mayor said, they have been doing amazing work. We are also focused on the fact that we need to prevent store closures, one of the challenges that this industry is having, as are all of us, is that people have been sick or people have been afraid. And so, we are connecting these grocery stores with our small business services to give them wraparound service and connect those who are newly unemployed with opportunities in this sector.

So, as the Mayor also mentioned, we want to make sure we are supporting our first line of defense, which is the 800 plus food pantries and soup kitchens who have converted to take away. So, we have put $25 million in and this is $25 million that is meant to be more flexible than funding for these establishments has been in the past, this means that they can use it for staffing, they can use it for equipment or they can use it for food. This was a partnership that we did with the City Council. I want to thank the Speaker for the work that he did advocating for this. But, there also are large other parts of the puzzle that we are putting together – the DonateNYC app [inaudible] and large in-kind donations to pantries and now we are seeing about 20,000 pounds move through that portal daily. We have moved city staff to support our pantries who are short on volunteers; many were supported by volunteers who were older and obviously they should isolate and stay at home and we continue to recruit volunteers through city service.

In the next phase of our emergency delivery program, we're going to concentrate on registering entire buildings, senior affordable housing buildings, senior NYCHA buildings, and other nonprofit buildings because we know that that is where the most vulnerable will be. And also making sure that we are using a case work style with other social services to directly enroll New Yorkers because it will give us an opportunity not only to make sure they're getting food, but making sure that we are addressing any other needs that they might have. So for those of you who might know, about 90% of all of New York City's food comes-in by truck. We want to make sure we are supporting the long haul truck drivers across the country who come here and are delivering our food and we have stood- up to rest areas; one in Staten Island and one in Hunt's Point to make sure that they can get the rest they need after their long haul drive.

We need to be partners though, so federal food aid will be critical going forward. Having the amount of benefits that SNAP provides, which was formally the food stamp program, to make sure that we're maximizing that benefit and getting that funding into people's hands. There also are two additional programs that are available; one is called P-SNAP – Pandemic SNAP – and our State application is before the federal government, we look forward to having that approved, which will also put funding into families’ hands. And then, D-SNAP, which is disaster food relief, which would require a federal declaration of disaster, but we know that our congressional delegation has been advocating for that. So, we think that those will be key pieces of the puzzle as we move forward into the summer and the fall.

We have a lot of work to do, but as the Mayor said, we will not let any New Yorkers go hungry. We will not compound the tragedy of the pandemic with the tragedy of hunger.

Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much, Commissioner. And thank you for all you're doing on your team. This is the plan – just want everyone to see it. They’ll be available online today at nyc.gov, but this plan summarizes the ways we're going to make sure everyone gets the food they need.

Now, this brings us to the bigger picture again, which is if we're going to make sure that we work our way back to something normal, it's going to take a lot of work, but we can do it. New Yorkers have proven what an impact you can make and if we want to get people back to work, if we want to restart people's livelihoods, if we want people to have more and more money so they can afford food again, we have to get this part right, we have to get the social distancing right, we have to get the shelter in place right, we have to keep doing what we're doing. In fact, double down on it, tighten it up every way we can to keep ensuring that we get out of this current phase. Right now, again, we're in this widespread transmission of the coronavirus. None of us wants to stay in this reality; we got to work our way to the next reality – low-level transmission. And what we've said is back to these three key indicators, when we can get the three indicators I'll talk about now to all go down in unison, all in the right direction together for 10 days to 14 days – that’s when we'll be able to talk about some other changes we can make, hopefully a little bit of loosening the restrictions. But, if we can't get them to go down together, it will tell us a lot. It’ll tell us that we have to stay tough and also make sure in some cases that are things we do even better. So, let's keep talking every day about these numbers and what they mean and we'll again always post them publicly so all New Yorkers can follow along together.

So, today, we have a mixed bag. The first day things were moving in the right direction; the second day, not so much. Today, we have a mixed bag and again don't get discouraged because it's going to not be a perfect, clean line the way forward. There'll be good days and bad days, but we got get to the point where we string together a bunch of good days so we can get to the next phase. Here's what we have today; first indicator daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 cases – and again, this is a two-day lag in the data – so on April 12th that number was 326 on April 13th, it went to 370. Unfortunately, that number went up. On the second indicator, daily number of people in ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19 cases – again, unfortunately this number has gone up from 850 to 868. On the third category, the numbers have gone in the good direction. When it comes to testing positive for COVID-19 – the percentage of people that tested positive – this went down – April 12th, 60 percent; April 13th, 53 percent. So, that's a good sign. The public health lab, the specific tests they do on some of the folks with the toughest conditions, April 12th, 84 percent; went down April 13th to 76 percent. That's going in the right direction. So, mixed bag today, this'll be a day-by-day fight. But the fact that we can show you every day that there continue to be signs of progress - these indicators and others - is a testament to what all of you have done and it's just a reminder; keep doing it. Don't let up on the gas. Hang tough with these standards, with these restrictions, with these approaches, because they're working.

Now, I talked about how New Yorkers, we're all helping ourselves and New Yorkers doing amazing things to create what we need to protect ourselves and I thank everyone who's a part of those efforts. But I also want to always note when we get help from outside and a lot of people care deeply about New York City and are stepping up. I mentioned Apple, I talked to the CEO, Tim Cook again and they've been amazing getting us the iPads we needed for distance learning for our kids, but Tim said they wanted to go farther and they wanted to help New York City directly with PPEs. And so, not only did he say he'd get us what we needed, but he got it to us in 24 hours, which is deeply appreciated; 100,000 N95 masks, 127,000 face shields, that's one of the items we needed the most this week - those face shields. So great effort by everyone at Apple, thank you, Tim Cook, we really, really appreciate this donation to New York City. And I want to thank my predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. We're really appreciative that Bloomberg Philanthropies made a $6 million donation to World Central Kitchen, specifically to provide meals for our extraordinary healthcare workers in our public hospitals who have gone through so much who have borne the brunt; great donation to help make sure that our heroes have the food they need and it also shows, you know, real appreciation and support for them at the same time. So thanks Mike, that that really helps a lot.

I'll wrap up and then of course a few words in Spanish before we take questions from the media. But, when you look at this plan, here's the bottom line – you look at this plan - one, I want all New Yorkers to recognize that Kathryn and her team and all the folks who are doing this work at all the agencies, they are resolute. They are not giving up and they've created a plan to feed people on a huge scale that few cities have ever attempted in history. This is something really powerful and I commend them all, but it comes down to that basic promise; we are going to feed every New Yorker. We're not going to let anyone fall through the cracks. We have to do it; it's the right thing to do and we will do it. Quick few words in Spanish to summarize –

[Mayor de Blasio Speaks in Spanish] 

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each reporter.

Moderator: And just a quick reminder to folks, we have Dr. Barbot and Commissioner Garcia in the Blue Room and Dr. Daskalakis on the phone. And first-up is Mark from CNN, Mark.

Question: Hey everybody, how you doing today?

Mayor: Hey Mark.

Question: So, I had a couple of questions about the, the data from the weekly report. I was hoping you could clear up or just add some more context to a couple of these numbers. The first was the almost 60 percent of the probable deaths that happened in the hospital in the ER. And the other one was any type of the distinction between the home fatalities and the ones that, that were classified under [inaudible]?

Mayor: Thank you. And look, I'll turn to our health experts. Just say this is, you know, you look at these numbers and again, a reminder, it's human beings, it's families, and it's tragic. And we thought it was very important to portray this larger reality as more and more information was coming in. And I just want everyone to remember, it's, it's another one of those sobering moments, understanding the sheer totality of what's been thrown at us and what we're fighting our way through. But, let me turn to Dr. Barbot and Dr. Daskalakis to answer your specific questions.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So I want to begin by echoing the Mayor’s sentiments in terms of really the sheer magnitude of the loss that we're experiencing as a city and the importance that there is in ensuring that we make sure every New Yorker is counted who has been taken by this vicious virus. And so, what you'll see in the data that we have on our website is that the number of individuals who have died because of probable COVID really is in many ways reflective of what we have been directing New Yorkers to do. The vast majority have been diagnosed in hospitals and emergency departments. But we do see a significant number of individuals who are dying outside of hospitals and emergency departments. And so, the way in which these deaths are categorized is by grouping where the location has been determined either by the Office of the Medical Examiner or the funeral director or whoever the person was that registered the death. And so, that's how we have categorized them.

Mayor: Demetre, anything to add or did we cover it? Okay. Guess we covered it.

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: [Inaudible] covered it.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you.

Moderator: Next is Juliet from 1010 wins. Juliet. Juliet, can you –

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, good to talk to you.

Mayor: Good morning, Juliet.

Question: Hi. So, this is my question. There are clusters and encampments of homeless on the streets. Is this considered a public health issue and should they be removed for health reasons?

Mayor: First of all, Juliet, we do not allow encampments in New York City. I want to be very blunt about this and make sure no one misunderstands. For several decades, somehow encampments of homeless people were tolerated, meaning literally homeless people created like little villages, sometimes it was on railroad tracks or, you know, deep in parks or industrial areas and set up, you know, places with, you know, almost permanent structures and tents. And one thing or another. What I said several years ago – and I brought in the NYPD, Department of Homeless Services, Sanitation Department and we said, we're just not going to allow that anymore. It's inhumane. It's not fair to homeless people. It's not fair to everyday New Yorkers. It's not fair to the quality of life in the city, it’s not healthy, it's not right. And I said, we will not tolerate any encampments. And since then I've asked all of our commissioners on a regular basis, including our police commissioners over the years to guarantee that they did not see any encampments reasserting.

So, sometimes you have a few homeless people gather. And we address that for sure. And sometimes people try and put up, you know, cardboard boxes or things. We address that right away. But when you say the word encampment, it means to me where people have tried to create something kind of ongoing or permanent. That is literally not tolerated, will not be tolerated. If you know of a location, if any New Yorker knows a location, call 3-1-1 and we will send out the NYPD, Homeless Services, Sanitation immediately to take it down. If you're talking about, Juliet, a smaller number of homeless folks who have gathered temporarily, we don't want any gathering, obviously. We want people to observe social distancing. If anyone tries to even begin to stay in the same place on the street, that's not acceptable. It's not healthy or safe. So, we would send out our Homeless Outreach Teams, send out NYPD to address that.

So that would be true even before the coronavirus, but it's even more true if it means anybody gathering in close proximity. That's not healthy or safe. So, please, anyone who sees something like that or any homeless person on the street in need call 3-1-1. We are getting homeless people in, off the street in record numbers and keeping them in. And our outreach workers are doing really amazing work. They're out there through this crisis. And actually thank God they found that very few people on the street, of those several thousand – very, very sad reality of several thousand New Yorkers who are street homeless, permanently homeless – we have not seen much incidents of the coronavirus among them, thank God. But we are trying to get people to come in, in this crisis more than ever to say it's not safe to be on the streets, come in where we can get you health care and protect you. So, that work continues constantly, but we want those reports to 3-1-1 so we can act on them quickly.

Moderator: Gloria from NY1 is up next. Gloria.

Question: I wanted –

Moderator: Gloria –

Question: Yes. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: Okay. I wanted to ask a question again about the numbers that were released yesterday. There's an additional number in the data set that the City released, it's a little over 8,000, and it says that it's the number of people that the City at this time can neither confirm where a victim of COVID or a suspected COVID death. I wonder if any – if either you or any of the other health officials can clarify what that number means, and is the City taking any look at how many people have died that could have been saved but weren't simply because the hospital system has been so overwhelmed for days. So, I'm talking about maybe a person who had a stroke at home and help didn't get there fast enough and they did not have COVID or any of the other conditions that might have put them at risk, and simply because of the delay and the overwhelmed system, passed away as a result. Is the city doing any kind of tracking for that?

Mayor: Okay. Let me give you a couple of responses and then turn to Oxiris and Demetre to add. First, we are trying to get out data constantly and more and clear, and more accurate data, and data that portrays the whole truth. I want the whole truth out. Whatever the facts, wherever the facts take us, I want the whole truth out now. Gloria, that's inherently always second to saving lives right now. And as the indicators we just talked about made clear, we still have a lot of work to do to protect people and save lives right now. So I'm never going to say to our health leadership, hey, you know, focus on the data of what happened before more than focus on how we can save lives right now and what we need to do to stay ahead of this virus and beat it back. That's always going to be the first priority. But I do believe there's more information to get out and will constantly get out.

Absolutely, I believe there are more people who died because of COVID-19 in one way or another because of something that happened to them related to COVID-19. And I think it's important that we just recognize there will be more that comes out and we should assume that not with anything but pain and sorrow, but we should assume that And when that information can be verified, it should be put out. I want to caution though about part of your question because I don't think it necessarily portrays the whole truth. Job-one in this whole crisis was to hold and protect and preserve the hospital system so that we would never have the situation you describe where someone needed care and couldn't get it. That's why we fought so hard to get more ventilators and the PPEs and keep the personnel, and when we lost personnel, get new personnel in. I've asked this of Dr. Mitch Katz, the head of our public hospitals, they've borne the brunt. I keep ensuring that anyone who needed care and was in a real danger got the care they needed. We never had a day where we ran out of ventilators. We never had a day where there wasn't the personnel we needed, even if they were stretched real thin and fighting very hard. So, the thing I warned us about constantly, the people of this city and warned the nation honestly about, was the day when someone came in, needed a ventilator, there was no ventilator or someone came in, they needed a doctor or nurse, there was no doctor or nurse. We did not, thank God, experience that and we're still fighting to make sure we never experience that.

But the point you're raising about EMS, obviously we know our EMTs, our paramedics have gone through such a tough time these last few weeks and they had to prioritize in really tough ways – and thank God we got reinforcements in from around the country, 500 EMTs and paramedics came in before, another hundred are coming – but what EMS tried to do was immediately prioritize the cases where people were in danger, not the ones where people were just asking for information or were, you know, scared and needed to talk to someone. They tried to move those calls off. They tried to focus on people who were in direct danger the most and get the response to them as quickly as possible. And from everything I saw the cases that were really life and death, the EMS, as usual, not only prioritized them but did an extraordinary job saving lives.

I think there's a different issue about cardiac arrest, for example, with a relationship to COVID and what was happening to people's bodies who were dealing with extraordinary physical stress and health challenges. And the doctors can talk about that, but we will certainly keep analyzing exactly what happened with EMS. You know, Gloria, those numbers, thank God, are coming down in terms of the number of calls they are getting, it is reducing and a lot of calls have been moved off that were just people seeking medical advice and support, not needing a paramedic or an EMT to show up. But I want to emphasize how much EMS constantly prioritized the folks whose lives are in immediate danger and rushed help to them. To Dr. Barbot and Dr. Daskalakis, if you could speak to issues like where cardiac arrest may have been in some form or fashion related to the coronavirus that would be helpful to put this in perspective.

Commissioner Barbot: And I want to just build on what you've laid out to really start off by saying that each of these deaths is a tragedy and we all feel it as New Yorkers. And what we have been putting in place as a part of this response is really to maximize the number of people that we save. And the unfortunate reality is that there have been people who have died either directly because of COVID or indirectly because of COVID. And we've talked a little bit about that in the past, but I think seeing it in black and white, so to speak, with regards to what the numbers show, gives us, really, a moment of pause and reflection on what we, as a city, are going. And, you know, I just want to start off by saying that in the Health Department we have started a moment of silence to really acknowledge the New Yorkers that have died because of COVID and to remind ourselves of the mission that we have.

And so, to answer your question more directly, Gloria, I think that the importance of this number in terms of deaths not known to be confirmed or probable COVID is important to take it within the context of the same number of deaths during that period – or excuse me, let me start again. The number of deaths during that same time period in the previous year. And what we find is that there are roughly 3,000 deaths above what would have been anticipated. And I think only time will tell about what that number really means. We're still learning. As we have been saying about the – I was going to use a fancy word – the pathophysiology of the virus, meaning how the virus truly affects the body. And, you know, one of the things that we still have to learn more about is how does this virus affect the heart?

And are there potentially cases where, you know, someone registered a death as a heart attack because the person hadn't yet developed symptoms of COVID-19 and truly should have been categorized as a COVID probable. I don't know that we will ever be able to answer that question fully, but I think it's something that still needs to be looked into further. The other thing that, you know, the Mayor sort of alluded to, which I just want to build on, is that part of what we have learned from previous disasters, be it 9/11, be it Superstorm Sandy, is that the load of stress, prolonged stress on a body has consequences. And so I think that we will then also need to take into consideration how this then plays out with individuals who may or may not have chronic underlying illnesses. So, I think you'll understand that there are still a lot of underlying questions that will need to have more in depth analysis. But that will likely not be fully revealed until all is said and done.

Mayor: Demetre, do you have anything to add?

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: No, Sir. I think Dr. Barbot covered it. I think the important idea, again, these are humans, I think all of us will take that moment of pause to remember that these are lives, but then I think it's important that not only are we showing the visible deaths, but also the ones that would be invisible even at this point in the pandemic. So, as we learn more about the virus, we will understand the impact but really critical to make sure that we're counting all of our New Yorkers.

Mayor: Yeah. And the last thing I would say, and this also reflects on our public hospital system, the emphasis always was that if anyone was showing signs of something that was an immediate danger, of course they were going to be admitted. And what public hospitals did, and I think they did it very well, was they made sure if someone had lesser symptoms, they made sure to guide them and support them. But anyone who they saw signs of danger, they brought in. And even when the going was toughest at places like Elmhurst Hospital, Lincoln Hospital, Bellevue, they would bring in anybody who was in danger and kept fighting. And that I think has been consistent throughout this crisis.

Moderator: Julia from the Post is up next. Julia.

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Hey Julia, how are you doing?

Question: Good. I have just a two-part question on testing maybe one for the doctors and one for you. The first part is we saw with the data you released yesterday that of the probable deaths 60 percent of them died in a hospital or ER room. And I'm just wondering what that says about, you know, our lack of testing given that the city had prioritized testing for people in hospitals and yet that big percentage of people still weren't getting tested in hospitals. And then just lastly on your announcement yesterday on the 50,000 homegrown coronavirus tests, James Patchett said that you're just in active conversations, but no one's actually signed on yet. So, was that announcement premature?

Mayor: No, it is a wartime environment. We are absolutely certain – we wouldn't have made the announcement if we weren't certain we could make that happen. We're talking to enough players who have shown enough willingness to do it and we're just assembling the final group that will actually proceed together. But we talked about this in detail. A lot of capacity has been brought to bear. This is going to happen. Remember we were in a similar situation in terms of the face shields, in terms of the surgical gowns just a few days before I went to the factory that produces the first one that was producing the face shields and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was just an idea and they had to blitz to bring everyone together to make it work. The same with the surgical gowns, which involved actually a pretty elaborate production process.

It went from idea to execution in a number of days. Because of 3D printing, we know that things are possible now that would have taken, you know, immense effort and time in the past can now be programmed into a 3D printer and acted on very, very quickly. And there's a lot of 3D printing capacity in New York City. There's actually something that the Economic Development Corporation has been working on for years now, is expanding that piece of our economy. So there's a lot of 3D printing capacity in New York City. So, we said beginning of May and we mean beginning of May. On the previous question, I'll turn to the doctors.

Commissioner Barbot: One thing to clarify – that 60 percent refers to the totality of those who were probable COVID related deaths. But when you look at it from the perspective of individuals overall who died in hospitals, you'll see that the vast majority were confirmed. So I want to just clarify that interpretation of the statistics and again, of the people who died in the hospital related to either confirmed or probable COVID, the vast majority had tests done. That being said, you know, I think how did tease apart what happened with the probables is something that will take us a fair amount of time to tease out if we're ever really able to do that because what we won't have is the breakdown of, you know, severity of underlying chronic illness, et cetera, et cetera. So, there's a lot of variables there that are, I think, to be determined. But the important thing here to note is to not misinterpret the way in which the table is laid out and to really focus on the fact that the vast majority of folks who died in hospitals did have tests.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: Marcia from CBS – oh, sorry.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Sorry. Just one thing to add if that's okay.

Mayor: Yes, please.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: Mr. Mayor, so I would also add that the table also shows really what trends were and availability were of testing throughout the entire pandemic. And I think we'll all remember that early on in the pandemic because of various issues with testing kits that we received from the CDC, capacity lagged a bit behind. And so, another possible explanation for more probable cases that weren't diagnosed is also the limits to testing that we had early on. Which had at this point at least for inpatients, have been resolved. So, our volume of testing on the inpatient side is now great as does the capacity. So, it really represents also a snapshot of what happened with our ability to test.

Mayor: Thank you very much Demetre.

Moderator: Next up is Marcia from CBS New York. Marcia?

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Marcia. How you doing?

Question: I'm good. I have a two-part question having to do with your food announcement today. The first is this, since you've asked that all people going into supermarkets wear masks, will you be asking the NYPD to enforce it? And my second question is, given the fact that you've pointed out that the best way for people not to need the food is to have jobs, what steps are you taking to help create jobs so that people won't need the food that you're offering?

Mayor: Yes. Excellent questions. Marcia on the first one. So, face coverings, I want to keep using this phrase appropriately. You know, the PPEs, the personal protective equipment, the highest grade of those like the N95s. I mean, obviously those are meant for health care workers dealing on the front line with COVID-19 and others who have, you know, real vulnerabilities. So, you know, when we talk about masks, we're thinking about things like N95s and surgical masks. When we talk about face coverings, we're talking about things like bandanas, scarves or the kind of masks you can buy, you know, in any hardware store for example. So those face coverings I want to see anyone who goes into a supermarket or a grocery store wear one of those. By the way, huge, huge percentage of New Yorkers are doing it already based on the guidance we gave them previously. But I want to see people, if you go into a place as important and as sensitive as a grocery store or supermarket, just put on a face covering. Protect the workers there who are doing such important work, protect each other. Now, what I'm saying is every store just put up the sign saying you're required to wear a face covering. One of my colleagues at City Hall made the point, for all our lives, you go into a diner or something like that, you see a sign, you know, no shirt, no shoes, no service. It's the same exact concept. Put up a sign that says, unless you're wearing a face covering, you can't come in. Then the store has every right to enforce that rule for its own premises. People don't, aren't willing should be told, hey, you have a face covering? Can you get a face covering? Or if they have one that can offer them, great. You can shop if you have a face covering. If you don't have a face covering, you have to go back out until you get one. If there’s any problem with that, of course the NYPD will help. And all the store owner has to do is call 3-1-1 to get that help. Or if they have a connection to their local precinct or they're a neighborhood coordinating officer under neighborhood policing, they can reach out to them directly. But we have to be clear, this is another one of the things we have to do to protect each other. And anytime the NYPD or any of our agencies are needed to help enforce, there'll be there. And NYPD is as we know, is starting to get back more and more of its officers coming off of convalescence from COVID-19. So, their strength is gathering, we can do more and more enforcement.

But that segues perfectly into the other part of your question about restarting the economy. I want to restart the economy desperately. I want to make sure that people get back to their jobs and get back to livelihood. But the best way to do it is to be careful. So, Marcia, in this case, I'm going to call myself a conservative. You know, I want to make sure we do this right. The worst possible scenario would be to take the foot off the gas, think we're out of the woods, let people come back too quickly and have the disease boomerang back on us. And that has happened in some parts of the world. Then we're going to have to step back all over again and deal with more and more people getting sick and more, more people dying and more and more restrictions. And the economy won't be able to start. If you want to restart the economy, get it right, actually make sure that we've contained this thing. So that's going to take being slow and purposeful, not too slow, but you know, cautious until we get it right. That will take some time, not weeks, but months to really get to the next phases. But that way when we actually start to restart in earnest, full scale, we'll be able to hold it and keep it and people's livelihoods will come back and stay back. That's what I want to achieve.

Moderator: Alex from Chalkbeat is up next. Alex?

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Hey, Alex how are you doing?

Question: Good. I'm going to keep in the tradition of two-part questions. This one is on school spending. The first part is in your proposed budget you had suggested cuts to Single Shepherd and College Access For All. And I'm wondering if that means that those programs are on pause right now? Or whether there will be personnel cuts to those programs? And my second question is you're also proposing about a hundred million dollar cut in Fair Student Funding. And I'm just wondering if you have any sense of how those cuts will be distributed? Obviously, some schools receive more than 100 percent of their Fair Student Funding. Others receive far less than that. So I'm just wondering if you have a sense of how those cuts would be distributed?

Mayor: Yeah. And we'll get you more details when we go over the executive budget. But to your second question, yeah. The idea is to say, look, everyone is having to sacrifice now. Everyone's having to give something to get us through this crisis. So, the schools that have done very well on funding, I mean, every dollar that's been worthy. Every dollar we put into education is a good thing. And some schools have gotten more than others. And I don't begrudge a school that is doing great work at educating kids and has some more resources to do it. I want to see maximum equality obviously. And we keep raising that floor as you know, on Fair Student Funding. And we look to the day where every school is at 100 percent. But for schools that have had more than a 100 percent in a time of sacrifice, we're going to ask them to help and sacrifice and cut back some so that we can, you know, get this together.

On the Single Shepherd and the College Access, which are both really good elements of Equity and Excellence. They both have been areas where we fought inequality. We helped kids get support where they didn't have before. We helped families to navigate through a lot of challenges and particularly to help kids get to college who often didn't have a lot of exposure and support to what it would mean to get to college. And it's really been very, very productive. But those are on pause because of the kinds of choices we have to make. Now we got to stay on the basics. Right now, the whole message you'll hear in the budget presentation is sticking to the basics, protecting people's health and safety, making sure there's food, you know, food on their table, a roof over their head. And with education it will be about the basics, making sure we can be safe, healthy in our restart of school, making sure we're providing the most important elements of education to our kids. We're going to have a lot of mental health challenges as the Chancellor has indicated that we're going to have to address and we are going to have to provide the resources to address. So initiatives like Single Shepherd, College Access, they will be paused. But the personnel will certainly be needed for other important work. So we'll just, and we'll keep, you know, as we go along, evaluating what we can do and keep updating our budget accordingly.

Moderator: Melissa from NBC New York is up next. Melissa?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Good to see you.

Mayor: Hey Melissa. How are you doing?

Question: Okay, thank you. My question was about the fact that the deaths classified by the Health Department as non-COVID were up by 3,000 for that same time period. And it was largely asked by Gloria and answered, but what do you say to people, Mr. Mayor, who are concerned about an undercount? And who wonder why that comparative spike of 3,000 cases, it's not a small number, was not specifically pointed out in yesterday's announcement? And do you think it's likely that the number of deaths caused either directly or indirectly by COVID could be closer to 13,000?

Mayor: Yeah, I think the, to your question again, understanding Melissa, this is about human beings and you know, we want to be respectful of the families, not say more than we are pretty sure about. Remember in the case of those, a very, very sad reality of the probable deaths that in many, many cases, health care providers suspected it was COVID-19, but there was not the time or the reality, you know, the condition to get a test done before the person passed away. Some people passed away very quickly, for example. It's very, very sad. But you know, there was already some indication it might be COVID-19. In the case of other deaths of people we've lost. I again, I believe that that gap you're talking about is made up overwhelmingly of folks who, if it wasn't that they had COVID-19, you know, that had manifested, it still was some part of the equation. It affected the fact that there were so many deaths. It seems to me like that's the obvious truth. As there's time to make sense of the details and put more out, the Health Department will certainly do that, but there's also some of the information that may not be reachable anymore because things happened weeks ago and we've been in crisis. But I think the bottom-line answer is clearly so many people have passed away. It was bigger than we even fully understood or could document. And I think it'll be bigger still. We have to be honest about that. We have to be open about that because it tells us just how big a crisis we're in. But much more importantly, we have to move forward. We have to keep saving lives and constantly figure out what more we can do and where we can get the help we need to keep doing that because we're going to be at this for a long time. So that's how I see it. Anything you want to add Doctor?

Commissioner Barbot: No, sir.

Moderator: Henry from Bloomberg is up next. Henry?

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Hey Henry, how are you doing?

Question: I'm okay. How are you dealing with the loss of baseball? It's not my question.

Mayor: I think a lot of us, I know you're – I'll wait for your full question, but I have to comment. A lot of us are like pulling our hair out over the loss of baseball. It's a very, very strange, I associate spring with baseball. So, it feels really, really strange. But I'm also in the camp that we have to do our recovery careful, you know, really careful way. And so as much as I want to see a baseball game deeply, I don't want to see a baseball game until everybody's safe. That's the way I think about it. But go ahead. What's your question?

Question: Well, I just, I also want to just tell you that as much as we give you a lot of tough questions and give you a hard time and criticize you, I think most New Yorkers appreciate the hard work you're doing and understand how difficult this is.

Mayor: Thank you.

Question: The IBO today came out with a report that said almost $10 billion in revenue will be lost through Fiscal Year 2021 and they're forecasting as many as 475,000 jobs lost, including a gigantic number just in this quarter. Your budget modification included something like $1.3 billion in cuts. The IBO, the CBC and others say that that's way too low. How are you going to fill this gap?

Mayor: Okay, Henry. First of all, thank you for what you said. I appreciate it personally, but I also want to say thank you on behalf of my whole team because I hope New Yorkers have a some sense and I hope when it's all over, they'll be able to look back and understand that you know, so many people at City Hall, at Emergency Management and all our agencies, certainly the Health Department, H + H, they have just been working nonstop since day one of this crisis. And everyone understood that we were saying goodbye to anything that was normal and just working every single day, nonstop to try and save lives. And they, you know, the team has done a really, really outstanding job. So, I appreciate what you said and I receive it as appreciation for this whole team.

The IBO report I think is pointing in the right direction for sure. We'll talk more in the budget presentation, but the bottom line is, you know, and I said it earlier, absolutely we're talking about a revenue loss, 100 percent in the category between $5 billion and $10 billion. And again, I'll provide more detailed information very shortly. But even when we try and peg that number now, we're going to lose much more after that. Remember the revenue losses are deepening. Remember that we have taken a big hit from the State government. We got a $800 million cut from the State government and their budget. This is going to get tougher. And I also agree with them, you know, I've been saying about a half million people I think are unemployed or will be. So I agree with the IBO. We're very similar in our count.

But to the question of how much we're cutting and when. Job one is to protect people. Henry. I got to come back to the basics here. This budget will be about keeping people healthy, protecting their health, protecting their safety. Making sure there's a roof over their head and making sure people have food. That's how we're going to go about this. And whatever it takes, we are going to constantly focus on those goals. It was tough to make the cuts that we've already announced. As we need to make cuts we will do all we can. But there's a lot of things we just can't cut. So we have to keep fighting for the support we deserve from Washington. We have to keep fighting for a stimulus bill that will actually address the needs of the places that have been hardest hit. I mean, the billions and billions of dollars of revenue we've lost, that isn't the fault of everyday New Yorkers. And New Yorkers deserve the support of our federal government in the time of crisis. Henry you and I remember the famous headline, you know, back during the fiscal crisis, Ford to the City, drop dead. Well, you know, it's Donald Trump's time to decide what kind of headline he wants. The stimulus bill is being discussed right now. And we all know the Senate could act very quickly and we need to see the President's leadership. I criticized them in the past when I thought he was letting his hometown down. There's been some progress in recent weeks in terms of getting us things like ventilators and PPEs. And I've been thankful when we get those things. Well now it's another one of those litmus test moments. Is the President of the United States going to step up and tell the republican Senate that they have to pass a stimulus that will make New York City whole, that will make New York State whole. That will make all the other cities and states that have lost vast amounts of revenue whole. It's up to him now to provide some leadership. So again, is he going to be there for his hometown or not? But he's going to be there for everyone else or not? So we cannot, there's no way to balance this budget with cuts alone. It's impossible. Unless, we're talking about not providing basic services to New Yorkers. And if we're not providing basic services, then you can kiss your recovery goodbye. If this city – this is one of the most important cities on Earth. We are the economic leader of the United States of America. We are the financial capital. We're one of the economic engines of this nation. If we can't provide basic services to our people, if this city can't function, there will not be a recovery for everyone else. So we need that stimulus and we need it quickly so that we can remain whole and we can actually help lead the recovery. And that's what I'm going to fight for in Washington for sure. But the President has to lead.

Moderator: Brigid from WNYC is up next. Brigid?

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor. And I wanted to follow up on your food announcement with questions to you and Commissioner Garcia. I'm wondering particularly around the home deliveries, can you talk about any of the challenges you've faced up to this point? And is the City able to check in with clients or just is it about relying on the information delivery vendors provide? And then what should people do, particularly seniors, if they don't feel like they're getting what they need?

Mayor: Very good question. I'll start and pass to the Commissioner. So this is being attempted on a scale that we'd never seen here in this city before. We have to make it work. Calling 3-1-1 is the way for people who want to sign up, who can't get out and get their own food, they should call 3-1-1. We're trying to not make it a bureaucratic process. We're trying not to make it complicated. We're trying to make it fast. Someone needs food, we have to get to them fast and then we have to keep bringing it to them until the crisis is over and they have a way to get food that's secure. So, you know, we expect the numbers to grow. We're ready for the numbers to grow. But if anyone signs up and then doesn't get it, they also have to call right back to 3-1-1 right away so we can make sure that every case is being followed up on. Commissioner Garcia is very rigorous, and this is something we've talked about. We cannot have – you know, of all the things in the world that cannot miss, this can't miss. So, anyone who needs to sign up, call 3-1-1, will follow through. Anyone who's not getting it, call 3-1-1, we need to see that addressed instantly by all the agencies working with the Commissioner. And I have faith that she will make that happen. Commissioner.

Commissioner Garcia: Thank you Mr. Mayor. And particularly, we know our seniors are the most vulnerable and I want to stress that if today you need food that you should call 3-1-1or go to nyc.gov/getfood. As we move forward, we will continue to strengthen all of our systems to support that delivery mechanism both through the Department of the Aging and through the Getfood portal and make that more seamless for everyone involved and ensure that we are getting the senior centers back in the mix between the seniors that they know so well and the food that they know needs to get delivered. And so we have been standing things up very quickly. But I see that we are going to be able to make those matches and have that information available to us to ensure that all of the deliveries are getting made. And if they're not getting made that we have a backstop to get them done.

Mayor: Yeah. And Bridget, I want to also note, I mean again, amidst all these challenges, the fact that we have 11,000 TLC-licensed drivers signed up to do whatever shifts we need – so, this is really, really important – not only giving them and their families a break by giving them some additional income, but that's an army. If the Commissioner needs more drivers, she can get them anytime she needs. So, we can just add shifts, add drivers. So if demand increases, we're going to be ready. Commissioner knows that she's been given a green light to make sure that the food is purchased to keep all these initiatives going. The food pantries and the soup kitchens, as we discussed, everything the Department for the Aging is doing, everything DOE is doing, all that is being constantly funded. That's all part of that $170 million plan and everything for the home deliveries. The answer is yes, whenever the Commissioner needs something. And then additionally to have that huge reserve – 18 million meal reserve – unprecedented in the history of this city, so that she'll always know there's something there no matter what else happens in the world. So this is aggressive. But in terms of your question about making sure people get it when they need it, you know, anyone who has a problem they call 3-1-1, it’s as simple as the team at Emergency Management just finding another driver and getting them to where the food is and gain that delivery made.

Moderator: [Inaudible] –

Commissioner Garcia: [Inaudible] scale we started a little bit over three weeks ago. We had distribution sites in each of the boroughs. We now have three in the Bronx and we are adding two in Manhattan. So, we are making sure that we can expand our capacity to move the meals to the people.

Moderator: Yoav have from The City is up next. Yoav –

Question: Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering about the city's assessment of its needs. The 15,000 ventilators, the 45,000 personnel, and the upwards of 85,000 beds. Have you revised those projections at all in the face of the most recent data? And one of the reasons I ask is there was a report today of medical workers coming to the city on contract who are being told kind of abruptly their services are no longer needed. And the other related issue is you mentioned last week the possibility of EDC working with local companies to build the ventilators locally. But we haven't heard anything further on that. Is that still – I guess what's the status of that? Are you still looking to do that and is there still a need?

Mayor: Yeah, great question. Yoav, look, your question kind of gets to the heart of the matter of where we stand in this crisis and really bluntly, how this crisis just doesn't go in a straight line. And this is one of the toughest things for all of us to accept, but it's the truth. We talked about the three phases last week. We're still obviously in widespread transmission. I mean, look at the data today, our three indicators. Clearly we're still in the throes of this crisis and I said many, many times, April was going to be tough, you know, be ready for May to be tough too. We just have to keep understanding that even if we see some improvement, even we see some positive signs, we're far from out of the woods. You know what we're talking about, just with our three indicators over the last three days that we've been talking about them, haven't been stable. So, no one should think, you know, that we've got this perfect trend in the right direction. We don't, we just don't, which means to your bigger question about all these different elements of our response, the answer is everything is being kept ready for the danger that we could see a resurgence. We do not know where this disease is going. It is the great unknown, Yoav, this is what we've seen all over the world. There were places that thought they had it under control and then suddenly it was coming back. There were places that prematurely started to relax restrictions. It started coming back. We don't know – this is a disease that's brand new, did not exist in human beings six months ago, to the best of our understanding of the medical history and we don't know what pattern it will follow.

We'd still don't fully know. Is it truly seasonal? Can you get it again if you've had it? There's so many open questions we don't have final answers to. So, we got to be ready for resurgence. We got to be ready for an uptick. So, to break the pieces apart that you talked about, first of all, any health care worker, we need them. So, anyone who's turning away health care workers, I've not heard that at all. I've been on daily calls about personnel. There's unquestionably a need for personnel. The personnel we need the most are those who can go to the front line, to emergency departments and ICUs. But we need other types of personnel as well. So, if you would please share with our team here at City Hall, if you've heard that kind of report, we need to track that down and address that. Because I have literally not in any meeting, any place heard of a health care worker being turned away. We still need health care workers for – and remember not just for front line, but we're trying to expand testing. You need health care workers to do testing. And the big question has been, would there be enough if there was such a demand in the hospitals, you know, both the traditional hospitals and the alternative hospitals. So no, no, no, no. We need to health care workers. If they're available and somehow not being used, we got to fix that immediately.

The ventilators – EDC has been progressing with that effort. It's a tough one because creating a ventilator is a very, very complicated enterprise. What I've said to them is keep pressing, keep pursuing it because, again, today things have been better. We don't know where the future's going. We want to make sure that God forbid we were in a tough situation going forward, we had as much of our own supply as possible. So that effort is ongoing and as it progresses, we're going to have more to say on it.

On the beds, the personnel, the PPEs – here's the bottom line. We've seen improvement on beds for sure, and we have slowed down some of the schedule for opening new facilities, but we have a strong reserve structure because we know we may need those facilities, God forbid if there's a resurgence of the disease, but also we know we could turn them into quarantine and isolation locations as part of that movement into low level transmission and the strategies we would need for that. In terms of personnel, as I said that big number we were going for, right now we don't need all of that as scheduled because we saw some slowing. And remember our fear had been after April 5th – Sunday, April 5th – there was going to a huge intense upsurge. We didn't see that, thank God, but we still have to be ready for up surges. So, we don't need all those personnel right here this minute. But we need a plan that we could activate as many as that if things got bad.

In terms of the ventilators, the supplies holding, the last I checked, we were between 4,500 and 5,000 people intubated and we had more ventilators than that and we had some buffer. That's holding. But remember, even though the number of people who needed a ventilator each day, the increase was less than we expected, thank God, there still is an increase each day citywide. So that does not mean we're out of the woods on that issue. And the same with the PPEs. There've been some we've been able to get more of, some we've had big problems with like face shields and surgical gowns. We're going to solve some of that with our own production. But when you talk about PPEs, I can tell you, you know, we are making it through this week. We're looking a little better for next week than I thought a few days ago, but we're still not 100 percent secure for next week. That's how tight it remains. So, we're going to be at this for a while trying to perfect these supplies, really get them to be ample, really make sure we have enough for any scenario. And we have to watch carefully to make sure this thing doesn't reassert and until we're sure we're out of those woods, all of that fallback capacity is going to be kept available because we might need it.

Moderator: Last two, Erin from Politico. Erin –

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I want to ask another question about the probable deaths. So, these 60 percent that took place in hospitals, that's over 2,000 people, can you clarify if you know, are these people who died while they were waiting for care before they got, you know, in the emergency room, before they were able to get care? Or are we talking about people who are admitted to the hospital but still are not actually getting a test because of the lack of testing?

Mayor: I'm going to start with just a very simple point again reconstructing in the midst of a crisis is always kind of hard. But remember, I have had these conversations with Dr. Katz about what Elmhurst experienced and other places. We had people who came in – and this is not unheard of, obviously, sadly with emergency rooms, but it happened in really substantial numbers in this case. People came in, you know, right on the verge of death – people came in and you know, were lost in minutes or hours after coming in. There's all sorts of – that's just one of many realities to recognize. It was this – such an intense upsurge over those weeks and everyone's situation was different. So, just to give you some perspective, but I'll let the doctors go into detail.

Commissioner Barbot: So, to build on what the Mayor just mentioned, I think one of the things that we need to keep in mind is that these data represent a quantitative picture of a snapshot in time. They don't really give us the qualitative texture of the stories behind them. And so I think that with time we will be able to tease apart the type of question that you’re asking. So, for right now, all that, you know, we can say is that these were individuals who were seen in the hospital or the emergency room and died because of probable COVID-19.

Moderator: Last call is Anna from the Daily News. Anna –

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I was wondering, you know, given that so many people are losing their jobs and therefore might be losing health care, is there any plan to allow for online marriage licenses? Because you know, when people get married, they can share health insurance. And you know, I've actually got a couple of questions from New Yorkers about this. Is that something that you might consider? I know that, you know, you'd have to create some sort of system for that, but it might increase access to health care.

Mayor: That's a real interesting question, Anna. The – one, I would certainly consider it. Now, I don't know enough about how you do it in this atmosphere and do all the things you need to do to properly ensure that a marriage certificate is done the right way. But I think it's something we should look at, for sure. I want to emphasize though that people do not have to only think – I mean obviously there's lots of ways to get health care if they need it and we don't want people to feel like, oh my God, unless I'm married, I can't get on someone's plan, I have no options. The whole idea when we did the plan a year-and-a-half ago to guarantee health care for New Yorkers is anyone who is eligible for insurance if they can't find on the exchange a plan that works for them, what we're doing with the city's public option, with MetroPlus, is to make sure that plans are very, very affordable and very easy to use and easy to sign up for. So, that's something that people can tap into now. For folks who are not eligible for insurance, there's – for a lot of people, we've expanded NYC Care. So that's building out. And that means even if you're an undocumented person, you can get a health care card, you can get a primary care doctor assigned to through the Health + Hospitals hospitals and clinics.

Clearly in this atmosphere crisis it's a different reality. But that underlying point that anyone who needs health care, we will provide it. If they cannot pay, we'll provide it. If they can get – if they need health care and we can get it and we can get them on an insurance plan as they come in for health care, we'll do that. H + H is now doing all the time. Someone comes in the door, they need help, they're giving them help and then they're saying, hey, I noticed you don't have insurance, let's sign you up right now. So, we'll keep getting more and more insurance to everyone who does qualify. Anyone who doesn't qualify for insurance still is going to get health care no matter what. So, I just want to give people that reassurance and anyone who's not sure, you can call 3-1-1 right now. Anyone who needs health insurance and is eligible, could call 3-1-1 and we are continuing to sign people up for health insurance through this crisis. They could be getting it right now, even if they're not getting married. Anyone who doesn't qualify, could be getting help right now, health care they need right now, again, even if they're not married.

But I think your question's a good one. If we could allow people to get married through some creative online approach, maybe verified by, you know, people calling behind it and talking it through with a couple, maybe there's a way to do that. If we can find a way, I certainly would like to see that. I don't want to see people's lives disrupted any more than they need to be. So, we'll look at that and come back with an answer in the next few days and I appreciate that question.

Everybody, I'll just finish with this. You know, in these extraordinarily challenging times I just keep emphasizing how New Yorkers are rising to the occasion. Everyday New Yorkers, of course, social distancing, shelter in place, finding a way to make it happen, but also look at what's happened in just the last 48 hours. Here are a bunch of New York City companies, research labs, universities led by our City government and our Economic Development Corporation coming together to create test kits here in New York City. You know, doing something that a lot of people thought was impossible, but doing it with that kind of that creativity, that entrepreneurship, that energy that New York City is famous for. People just making it happen.

And then the same with our food plan that we're talking about today. This plan, it wasn't, you know, something that was easy and just obvious to do. People had to work hard in our team, working with all our partners at the community level to say, what do you do in a crisis of this magnitude? How do you create something new? And think about the ingenuity of saying, well, wait a minute, let's take all those TLC drivers, let’s take all those for-hire drivers that are out of work, they're going to become the new heroes, getting food to a senior citizen or disabled person who has nowhere else to turn.

I mean, that's a beautiful ingenuity, putting these different pieces together to make sure New Yorkers are safe. Again, we've never had a food reserve in our history. We're now going to have, you know, $50 million spent to get us 18 million meals there in the reserve no matter what happens to our city to protect our people. These are the kinds of things that are being created. So it's a very tough, painful moment, but there's also a lot of heroism, a lot of creativity, a lot of fight back. And I want to just thank everyone who is a part of all of these efforts and every one of you for everything that you're doing to get us through this. And we will get through this.

Thank you very much, everyone.

2020-04-16 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. The crisis we're going through, it's been real tough on all of us. Some families have suffered so much, in particular. The challenge has been so great and on top of it, there's been so much confusion, because no one, no one anywhere, still fully understands this disease that’s afflicted us. So, we're all trying to make sense of that and we're all looking for anything that's clear and concrete in the midst of this fight, in the midst of this painful crisis. So, I want to offer something today that's just crystal clear, and this is about how your city will approach this crisis. How we will approach making sure that we do the things that matter most for New Yorkers. And it's often said that a budget is a statement of values. So, I'll be very, very clear about the values that I'm bringing to this process. This entire administration is bringing to this process, and it really comes down to four things. There are four things that we will focus on. Four things that I care about profoundly as we fight this battle. Four things that we will prioritize in the way we spend our resources.

First of all, keeping New Yorkers, healthy. Number-one job, keeping New Yorkers healthy. Second, keeping you safe. Third, making sure there's food on your table. Fourth, keeping a roof over your head. These are the basics. These are just fundamental basics. And look, even just weeks ago, we would've been trying to talk about a lot of other things, we’d been thinking about a lot of other things. Our lives have changed just so profoundly in very, very little time. But these four things are what people are overwhelmingly focused on, rightfully so. And your government needs to be focused on these four things too. So, things that might've been a priority, you know, two months ago, three months ago, can't be a priority right now. Things that we would love to focus on in peace time, we don't get to focused on in wartime. And this in effect is wartime. But what I can tell you is, these four things, we will spare no expense. I'll spare no effort. Whatever it takes to keep New Yorkers healthy, we'll do it. To keep you safe, we'll do it. To make sure you have enough food to eat. To make sure you have a roof over your head. Whatever it takes, we will protect you. And that's going to be clear in this presentation I make today. And everything we do thereafter when it comes to the city budget, which will be finalized in June. Whatever we do is going to follow these four priorities.

Now, let's be clear, because we're going to talk today about what we need our federal government to do for us, to help us make sure we can protect all New Yorkers. If the federal government fails us in our hour of need, then these four things that we must do get harder and harder to do. If the federal government fails us, then I want to be really clear, the notion of this city recovering, it doesn't work if we can't do the basics. Everyone wants a restart. Everyone wants our economy to recover. I know everyone in Washington feels that too, but it has to be a really clear understanding. If we can't provide the basics for our people, then you can kiss your recovery goodbye. It's as blunt as that. The only way you have recovery, is if places like New York City in particular, the great economic leader and engine of this nation, if we're strong, our nation can be strong. If we're not strong, if our people are not safe, then this nation can't recover. And that's true for cities and states all over the country. So, as this debate starts raging in Washington D.C., I would ask the President, and Leader McConnell, in particular, in the Senate to remember the first thing you should be thinking about is the human cost. The moral question, what should we be doing for our people? What should we be doing for our fellow Americans who are New Yorkers and Americans everywhere to protect their health, their safety, the ability to put food on the table, and a roof over their head? That should be the moral question. That should be the straightforward question. But if they need somehow a pragmatic motivation, if they need a motivation that's about the economy or the restart, then I offer this. If you don't do those basics right, you won't get your restart, so why don't we do it now? Why don't we help people right now? Why don't we make sure that these basics are there for every New Yorker, every American, so we can move forward together?

When you think about what we've had to do over the last weeks, and it feels like it's been months or years, but it's really only been weeks. We had to shut down our retail stores. We had to shut down bars and restaurants. We had to change our life fundamentally in a city that's so famous for all that, all go on, all altered profoundly. We had to close our schools, that painful choice, which has meant such challenge for our families, for our children. And we had to go to shelter in place and social distancing. A way that would've been unimaginable just weeks ago. We made these decisions. I made them, New Yorkers made them too by taking these new rules and living by them, and again, you've been absolutely outstanding in your adherence to these new standards. We made these decisions. They were the right decisions. It was all about keeping people healthy and safe. But it was impossible to ignore, at the time those decisions were being considered, it was impossible to ignore all the other impact it would have on people's lives. The fact that these decisions would mean a lot of people would lose their livelihood, and we didn't know for how long. The fact that our economy would be set back profoundly, that would mean we would have a lot less to work with. We would have a lot less revenue as well to serve our people with. But again, we put the priority on your health and your safety. And now as we're feeling the effects of this crisis, those decisions we had to make, but it all comes back to the sheer ferociousness of this disease, the worst health care crisis in a century. Now, we have to do everything we possibly can to make sure that people are safe, and to protect them in all the ways I've outlined, and that's what this budget is all about.

Now, over the last six years, we talked frequently about preparing for a rainy day. We got much more than a rainy day. We got a pandemic, we got something unimaginable. I've been in many meetings where there was discussion of preparing for a recession. There was discussion of preparing for hurricanes and blizzards, all sorts of challenges. No one foresaw a pandemic of the extent of this. Something we haven't seen in a century on this earth. But getting ready for a rainy day still helped us, because we had created profound reserves, and we'll talk about that. We've had right before this horrible disease struck us, the highest fiscal reserves in the history of New York City, and thank God we did. And that work happened over the last six years, and with the great partnership of the city council that was very devoted to that process of ensuring we had ever-growing reserves. The extent of the problem, however, so unprecedented, is such that it immediately makes clear getting out of this problem will take solutions unlike any we've seen before. They must come from Washington. This is just the honest truth. We will do our share as we are going to see today, over $2 billion in very tough budget cuts, very unfortunate budget cuts, but they had to be done. We're taking the actions that we can take, but the only force that can ensure that we get through this the right way, is the federal government. They have the ability to provide the resources in a way that no one else, no organization, nothing else on earth can help us the way the federal government can, and now it's their hour of decision.

We had those great reserves, and you'll see today, they have been deeply affected by this crisis. We have been making cuts, and those cuts are painful, but they pale in comparison to the challenges ahead, and this is not a solution going forward to cut your way out of this crisis. If you cut your way out of this crisis, it comes at a huge cost in terms of our ability to provide for those four basic things all New Yorkers need. Let's be very clear. If we don't have the resources to ensure people's health and safety, their housing, their food, this becomes a very different city. We have to make sure those basics are there for people. So, where we can cut, we will. But when it comes to protecting New Yorkers, we will not cut that.

Now, the backdrop here is painful the loss of the revenue we need to protect our people. Sales taxes are way down because people aren't going out, they're not buying things, income tax, obviously way down, people have lost jobs, lost income. We believe based on the kind of careful forecasting that our Office of Management and Budget does every year that right now this is a horrible figure and— I'm very sorry I have to tell you this, but over this current fiscal year and next, we will lose $7.4 billion in tax revenue. That's today's estimate. We don't know what the future brings, but that's what we know right now and that's a horrifying figure. And on top of that, we have a lot of new things that we have to do and costs we have to incur to protect people. There are huge new costs in terms of our hospital system, medical personnel, supplies to save lives this all must be a priority and we're spending whatever it takes to make sure people are protected. Food, we talked about this yesterday, $170 million in new spending to make sure that New Yorkers have enough to eat because we now have to ask that question. How many more families won't have enough to eat in this crisis? We have to protect them and we don't know when this crisis ends, we do know it will end that much we can say thank God, but we don't know when. We don't know how and we know that the impacts that's been made on people continues to grow and we know that the loss of revenue could be even greater. So, it's a very sobering situation, but we keep coming back to those basics that's what's going to guide us.

The executive budget I'm presenting today was built for this moment in history and a moment unlike any other, literally the budget totals $89.3 billion for Fiscal Year ‘21. It is balanced. Again, focuses on four things – overwhelmingly health, safety, food, shelter. It’s that simple, health, safety, food, shelter. As I said, we found ways to save we found cuts we could make even if we didn't feel any anything about pain in taking away some of these things. Two billion-plus in cuts through our PEG program that's a mandating that agencies find cuts to their spending additional almost 700 million in other savings we've found so a total of $2.7 billion in savings across both Fiscal Year ‘20 and Fiscal Year ‘21 and there will certainly be more tough choices ahead and to get us through this immediate phase. We are drawing down on our budget reserves, we built them up we hope this day would never come, but it has. Thank God those reserves were carefully built, they will now help us get through if ever there was a time to draw on reserves it's now. And on top of all the challenges brought to us by the coronavirus directly that are part of why we have to draw on those reserves, there's yet another challenge what we've seen already in cuts from the State of New York, $800 million already and we obviously are watching carefully cause we have to be ready for what the future brings in terms of the State budget. Now, the one way that you can get out of this without causing immense human pain and setting back our recovery, the one way is to get the kind of direct federal aid that we deserve.

No New Yorker – no New Yorker is responsible for this horrible crisis, but New York has borne the brunt, we have been the epicenter. When you look at the impact here, anybody with a heart would recognize that the federal government has to come to the rescue. We lead the nation's economy, we're the biggest City in the country, we constantly send resources out to the rest of the country year after year. There are so many reasons why it's clear, but just humanly, this is the reason that should matter the most because people are suffering because no Americans should have to go through what New York is going through and the federal government should be there for us. I remind you federal government was very quick to bail out the banks a decade ago, no questions asked, federal government was very quick to bail out the auto industry. How about bailing out the nation's largest City? How about bailing out the epicenter of this crisis where people have been suffering? That is what our federal government should do for every reason morally, practically as any question of fairness, as any question of how we move forward and we're still waiting. Now, what we're going through is what other cities are more and more going through other States are going through, we're not alone they haven't seen the help they deserve either.

There's been $2.2 trillion in stimulus funding so far – $2.2 trillion – of which only $1.4 billion has been indirect aid to New York City. To give you a comparison, we got $1.4 billion and we're the epicenter of the crisis – 8.6 million people. The airline industry got $58 billion, so corporate bailouts, huge. But a bail out for the place that needs it most has been minimal. I want to be very clear, the leadership that we have seen, and I want to commend Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi, I spoke to both of them yesterday, I want to commend them for the work they're doing because they have led the way in pushing for all the elements of the stimulus that were needed, not just for Cities and States, but for everyday people. Those checks are going out to help working people, so much of that came from the leadership of Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer. We know where the roadblock has consistently, Senator McConnell, the majority leader of the Senate has stood in the way so many of the things needed. He has to hear our plea, he has to understand what it means for human beings that is not allowing the kind of aid to flow that we need, but it's also clearly time for President Trump to speak up. I spoke to the President yesterday, I let them know what's happening in his hometown. I let him know that we're experiencing a huge budget problem and I said to him in the clearest terms, if we don't have any more resources, how can we provide for the safety, the protection, the health of New Yorkers. And I was clear with him and the Vice President that the only way to recovery is if New York City and all our cities are able to come back strong and if they can function as they can't function, there is no recovery.

So, right now, there is an opportunity right this minute, literally negotiations are going on in Washington and what's being called Stimulus 3.5. There's another even bigger stimulus package up ahead, number four later apparently in May. But right now, there are negotiations going on stimulus 3.5 with a focus on small business and paycheck protection. Obviously, our small businesses have gone through hell and only the federal government can help them in the way that's needed. Working people need to know that their livelihoods will be preserved, that piece of this stimulus 3.5 is crucial, if there's a discussion right now, proposal two point, excuse me, of a 250 billion, 250 billion for small business and for working people through paycheck protection. There's 100 billion on the table for hospitals and health care workers crucially needed here and many, many other places and 150 billion and I think it should be at least 150 billion. I know the governors, to our credit, the nation's governors – bipartisan consensus – are calling for even more and we need more. But, right now, even to begin a discussion of 150 billion in locality at aid directly to localities and States. But I'll be clear, that formula must be based on need, it must be based on what localities and States have actually experienced with COVID-19, not just some generic distribution for political purposes, but actually addressing the needs of this City, this State, what people have gone through. You know, if we were talking about a hurricane, we were talking about natural disaster, you wouldn't put money in for the entire nation equally, if the natural disaster help happen in one place, this is a different reality because this disaster of COVID happened many places, but thank God there are some parts of our nation have had very little impact, some parts that have had a moderate impact and then a place like New York that's borne the brunt, that's been the epicenter. This funding must reflect that reality it's just common sense, it's about helping people and about helping us back on our feet.

So, I made clear to the President that its hometown needs him, and I've had this conversation with them before they all New Yorkers, 8.6 million are watching the White House right now to see if the President will lead. Will the President speak up, if the President United States— speaks up, let's be clear, if President Trump raises his voice, the Republican Senate will follow period. Haven't heard his voice yet, I want to give him an opportunity to do the right thing. So, President Trump, here's my appeal to you, help us back on our feet. Tell Mitch McConnell that we need stimulus 3.5 and we need a directly to New York City directly to New York State so we can keep providing the help that people need, keep them healthy, keep them safe. If you lead, the Senate will follow, if you are silent, they will not. It's on you, Mr. President, as true for every City and every State in America as well. So, anyone who wants that national recovery, better take care of the places that have to build that recovery. And that's why we need this stimulus 3.5 and it could be agreed to today – literally today – and passed by the Senate by unanimous consent, and that's what we need.

Now, that is a very broad summary of what we are presenting today in the budget. The details have been posted publicly now, showing you how we made the difficult cuts we had to make – the specific programs and initiatives we had to cut back in this time of crisis. Some of them, thank God – you know, many of them, will be able to hopefully restore one day in better times. But so much of it is also about just the reality, a lot of what we're doing just can't happen now. Any expenditure that was related to people gathering as part of their normal year - there are no gatherings. So, there's a lot you'll see in these cuts that were obvious, a lot that were difficult of course; all that were necessary so that we could keep the resources for those basics I described. So, the facts, the details, are now public. How we got to the specific numbers that now dictate this budget. The toughest part will be ahead and that will all be about what happens in Washington and we have time, thank God, to see Washington decide if they're going to act or not. If they're going to save New York City and America’s cities or not; we have time between now and June for those decisions to be made and they better be made right and that will dictate everything else we have to do.

So, that is a very broad overview of the budget. I want to talk about a few, couple of, few other areas and then we will turn to questions from the media. So, right now as we fight this battle against the coronavirus, we're learning every day more and more about it, more and more about the reality. And one of the things we've talked about in the last week or two is we're seeing some real disparities in how this horrible disease is affecting our city. We're seeing some places hit particularly hard; we're seeing lower income communities hit particularly hard, we're seeing communities where people have not gotten enough health care historically hit hard, communities of color hit very hard, immigrant communities hit hard. So, we're making additional adjustments to our approach and one of them is to increase the number of free hotel rooms available for isolation and quarantine. Right now, 11,000 hotel rooms are being readied for this new effort. And this will be focused on people who need a place because of the reality of their living circumstance. For example, there are many people in multigenerational homes, particularly lower income communities that just don't have a lot of space and if there is a threat that someone might get infected in the home and it might spread amongst the members of that family, we have to guard against that. So, we are making sure that people in those multigenerational homes – many of them overcrowded homes – will have a place to go. If a member of a family, for example, is symptomatic or if a member of a family is high-risk, we will have a hotel room that will allow them to isolate from other members of the family. This is something that's going to help us protect people and slow the spread further. We'll work with community health centers and all of our public hospitals and clinics to identify who needs this particular support. This will begin this coming Wednesday and we will move those who need that help to those hotel rooms.

We're also continuing to make sure the hotel rooms are available for all health care workers. I want to emphasize this, whether they work in public hospitals, whether they work in any of the other types of voluntary hospitals, independent hospitals - any health care worker who needs a place to stay while they're doing their work, who needs to be isolated from their family for fear of spreading the disease to their family and obviously they, these incredibly heroic health care workers are exposing themselves every day to that potential risk and a lot of them do not want to take the risk of bringing it home to their families. Those hotel rooms would be available, regardless of which hospital, there’s 56 hospitals in this fight – regardless of which one you work at - they will be available to you if that's what you choose. And obviously, as we discussed a few days ago, making more rooms available for homeless individuals who are in shelter settings where we need to create more space; wherever it's not possible to have the space that we need, we are going to use hotel rooms as the better option. This is made more possible by the fact that we see the reality with coronavirus somewhat differently, affecting us somewhat differently, today than it was a week or two ago. We are far from out of the woods, but bluntly at this point I had expected a number of these hotels to already have been converted to field hospitals. Our projections told us we might have to use a vast number of hotels - dozens and dozens - to be able to accommodate all the medical needs. So far, thank God that has not been the case and we will not let our guard down; we will always be vigilant. We are never ruling out that this disease might throw us another curve ball, but because there are [inaudible] hotel rooms now available, we're going to turn them to these uses more and more to keep people safe.

Another area where it's been a lot of concern and understandably so, has been about our jail system and keeping everyone safe; the people who work there, our corrections officers and all the other folks who work there, the inmates as well – there's been a real humanitarian concern. Well, what we've been devoted to from the beginning is reducing that jail population in whatever way we appropriately could, whatever way was fair and humanitarian, but also always kept public safety in mind. So, at the beginning of March, there were 5,447 inmates in our jail system and that it bears remembering, was already less than half the number compared to the day I took office when we had over 11,000 inmates – so, beginning of March, 5,447. Three weeks ago, we announced that we had gotten under 5,000 inmates and yesterday. Another historic milestone – jail population is now under 4,000 inmates. That is the lowest in 74 years. You have to go back to 1946, the year after World War II ended to have had so few people in our jail system. And again, under 4,000 people compared to a city of 8.6 million. So, thank God, we're able to find a way to do that the right way and that means there are many fewer people in the space that remains – more ability to socially distance within the jails, more ability to ensure that if people need isolation or quarantine, they can get it and this is how we're going to protect the health of everyone involved and with of course, the extraordinary efforts of our correctional health system, a part of Health + Hospitals. And I thank everyone at correctional health, they don't get a lot of attention, they don't get a lot of kudos, but I want to thank everyone in correctional health who has been making sure that everyone in our jail system, employees, and inmates, are safe. And again to all of our correction officers and everyone that works in our correction system, we know how tough your work is and it's been really tough in this period, but you've stuck to it and you've all worked together to keep people safe and we really appreciate that deeply.

Now, we're at the point where each day I tell you about the indicators that tell us how we're doing and I think you're going to see again that we should never underestimate this disease. We're hoping for sustained progress. We believe these indicators are the truest indicators to tell us where we stand and where we're going and how to approach it. But these indicators tell us a tough truth some days about the fact that it won't be easy, it won't necessarily be fast, it won't be all in a straight line. So, we believe this is the truth and New Yorkers always want the blunt truth and it tells us we've got a lot more work to do, but it's also a reminder that the progress we have made is all because of you and stick to it with those social distancing standards and with shelter in place - stick to it cause we're going to need it. So, in terms of the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, unfortunately that number went up. And again, these are based on numbers from two days ago that have been verified - went up from 370 to 386. Daily number of people in ICUs across our Health + Hospital system for suspected COVID-19 – went up 868 to 887. The percentage of people who have tested positive - went up from 53 percent to 55 percent. And our public health labs testing, the number who tested positive went up from 76 percent to 78 percent. So, this was a tough day; this is not what we're looking for, but we know we're going to do this stage-by-stage, step-by-step. We'll get there and it just reminds us we have to stick to it.

So, before I conclude with a few words in Spanish, I'll just say, everything we've tried to do over years and years is about making people's lives better and bringing more fairness to this city. Now it is about that for sure, but it's really about four things, four basic things – your health, your safety food on your table, a roof over your head. That's what we are going to make sure all New Yorkers have. Whatever else happens, that's what we're going to focus on. Not even a pandemic can stop us from protecting New Yorkers, and that's what we're going to do.

Quickly in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. And, as always, please give me the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Just a quick reminder for folks that we have Budget Director Melanie Hartzog, First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, and Dr. Barbot on the line as well. And our first question is Andrew at NBC New York. Andrew?

Question: Yes. Good morning, Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good morning, Andrew. How you doing?

Question: Good. I wanted to ask, this is the second day this week that you've described as a tough day with the metrics not going in the right direction. I wonder, was the Governor premature to say the worst is over? And secondarily, is it contradictory for the mandatory masks to be in place now that we've flattened the curve? Is that not a mixed message for New Yorkers?

Mayor No. Good questions, Andrew, but no. First of all, I think these numbers that were given out that we – I want to emphasize, we believe these are the true numbers, meaning these are the numbers that tell you the most. There are many things – it's all about human beings. I always keep coming back to this, this is about human beings in their lives, but the numbers tell us something and we set up this kind of rigorous standard so there'd be, you know, no overconfidence. This is disease to take very seriously. I'm stating the obvious. This is disease that has thrown us curve balls before, can throw us curve balls again. So, we set up what we thought was a really smart careful way to measure where we're going. So, we never took our foot off the gas prematurely. Requiring face coverings – you know, we put out that guidance on face coverings as soon as we saw evidence that that would help protect people. And I said we required it for city workers who came in contact with the public and I was glad that the Governor acted additionally. In fact, this is exactly the time to double down. This is exactly the time to take the standards we created and make sure we're applying them very intensely, in a very disciplined manner, because we got to get out of this. And we're not going to get out of it easily, we have to get out of it through hard work. It's no fun, but we have to do it. I do think when you say something like the worst is over, that there's a truth to that in terms of what we thought was going to happen, for sure. I told you that – remember that line of demarcation, Sunday, April 5th? We thought that next week was going to be so much worse than it turned out to be. It was still horrible. We still lost a huge number of our fellow New Yorkers, but we thought it was going many times worse. So, we definitely averted at that point what we thought was going to be something much worse. We can't entirely say where we're going. But I'll tell you something, I keep coming back to this – we know that some places took the foot off the gas and paid the price. We know – and I said this to the President and the Vice President yesterday – I said very squarely – I said, you know, I know you want to restart the economy, so do we, but the worst possible scenario is take your foot off the gas prematurely, the disease has a resurgence, then everything you were doing to try and restart, you have to stop, you have to go backwards, you have to add more restrictions, you have to slow down the timeline further, and you're going to end up waiting a long, long time before you can get people back to normal. The way to get back to normal is with careful, patient, smart actions to work our way through those phases we've discussed to the point that we can have something like normal life again. So, no, I think the face coverings is smart. Keep using them, everyone. We really need to do this. And if we are smart and disciplined, then the worst definitely will be behind us. But we really have to make sure that happens.

Moderator: Jeff Mays from the New York Times is up next. Jeff?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. I'm wondering if you have a projection on how much federal aid you need to continue balancing the budget? And, secondly, IBO has called a slightly larger budget deficit, I believe it's close to $10 billion. How do you reconcile those differences? Are you cutting enough in order to stabilize the City's finances?

Mayor: Well, I respect the IBO a lot – the Independent Budget Office, they do good work. I mean, it's not the first time to say the least, we've had different projections, and we stand by ours. We think ours are careful and cautious always – our OMB projections. If you said to me, is there a chance that this revenue loss could grow? Of course, there is, and I'm very, very worried about that. It could grow by a little, it could grow by a lot. It could grow by billions even. But, right now, this is based on the facts as we know it and obviously it will all be connected to how and when the economy restarts. We need the federal government to make up all lost revenue, period. Period. Think about this model for a moment – we can't achieve new revenue in any coherent fashion at this point. We can only get revenue from the federal government. The State government is in no position to give us revenue. The federal government's done over $2 trillion already. Of course, they can make up our budget gap. Right now, if that lost revenue stands at $7.5 billion, of course they can make that up. Again, if they had $58 billion to airline industry, I assure you, they can find $7.5 billion for the nation's largest city. It's not even close. Of course, they can do it. I also think that the FEMA aid, which we deeply appreciate, and FEMA has been a fantastic partner, but right now we have to do 25 percent reimbursement – I mean, 25 percent, I should say, of the costs we have to cover – that shouldn't be in the middle of a pandemic. The federal government should cover all those costs. So, right there, to me, is the immediate issue of what the federal government should cover. And then, you know, the exceptional – anything that's exceptional related to COVID-19. It's a pandemic, it's international, it's the responsibility of the federal government. And we're fighting this fight here – there are so many cities and states that – no way they can afford to protect people unless there's federal aid. So, Jeff, it's as simple as that. The federal government should cover all lost revenue for cities and states, should cover all COVID-19-related new costs, should make sure cities and states are whole and get back on their feet. That's in everyone's interest.

Moderator: Todd from AM New York is up next. Todd?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I hope your family's doing well.

Mayor Thank you, Todd. I hope the same for yours.

Question: Yes. Anyway, my questions in regard to the of Rikers Island’s prisoners because of COVID-19. Commissioner Shea said yesterday, he was very concerned that some of the committing bank robberies, intimidating witnesses, one who set fire to the door of a witness. The unions [inaudible] concerned as to who's monitoring the mostly convicted felons. We spoke to Parole, Department of Corrections, your Office of Criminal Justice had no answers. With all due respect, maybe you can answer just not for me, but for your commissioner and your unions what's going on here?

Mayor: Todd, I appreciate the question. You and I have known each other a long time. I want to contest you and say, I do not believe they had no answers. So, I want to make sure we connect you to the right people, because I've heard the answers directly from them. So, with all due respect to, I know they have answers. There is a clear monitoring program that's been set up for anyone released. This is something that – a supervised release structure existed already. It's being utilized in this case. There are a number of measures that have been put in place to make sure that people are monitored, including in some cases using electronic monitoring. Our team can get you those details. The NYPD, Corrections Department, our Office of Criminal Justice all worked together on this. We've been talking in constantly to the district attorneys and the State on this plan and they've obviously approved releases as well. This was about making sure that anyone with a profound health danger was not put in harm's way and making sure that those who could be released were released to keep everyone else safe in that jail system. I'm concerned too. Anytime we release someone, we have to make sure we work to keep it everyone as safe as possible, but we had a real imperative about saving lives that came first. But the fact is, we're going to keep doing whatever it takes to monitor these individuals. And then, as soon as the crisis is over, the way the releases occurred, if anyone needs to be brought back to jail, they will be. So, for example, someone who was awaiting trial and there were no trials. This is a country by our constitution where they're supposed to be a speedy trial. These are folks accused of a crime, have not yet gone through their trial. If we deemed it appropriate to let them out in this crisis, but then the system comes back to normal and there are going to be awaiting trial again, we bring them back to jail awaiting trial. So, that's how the process will work going forward.

Moderator: Julia from the Post is up next. Julia?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Julia. How are you doing?

Question: Good. I see in your budget that all outdoor pools will be closed for the summer. And I understand that City Hall has told the Parks Department to prepare for every scenario, including the possibility that beaches will be closed for the season. You know, yesterday, you talked about not being able to envision Yankee stadium opening until later in the trajectory. So, at this point, how likely is it that beaches will remain closed all season? And give New Yorkers a sense for what will summer in the city look like?

Mayor: So, Julia, very good question. I appreciate it. On the question of the beaches, which I think we have to parallel to the pools – it's a little different, of course, because, you know, someone can walk along the beach even if the beach is not open. But, right now, I don't see us narrow anytime soon where we could – you know, imagine Coney Island the middle of summer, hundreds of thousands of people. You know, I've been on Coney Island on that beach many times – hundreds of thousands of people packed tightly together. Like, I don't see that happening anytime soon. So then, obviously, you could have a situation where people can go to the beach to walk along the beach, but not in large numbers anytime soon. We still have to observe social distancing. I know people are doing that now. But the notion of having lifeguards and people coming to the beach like normal, we don't have that in our sites yet. I think it's going to be tough to project. Right now, I'd say, lower expectations – just for everyone's sanity, lower expectations. We're at a point right now in the middle of April where we're practicing intense social distancing. Everyone's being very careful to only go outside as much as they need to, and just to get basics and get back inside. To go from that to mass gatherings of thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people – that's a big jump. And that jump should only happen when we're sure is not going to exacerbate the disease, because, again, the worst of all worlds would be to see a resurgence. So, I need to see those indicators start to move to even talk about some loosening of restrictions and they have not been moving yet. So, I would say, every one of us would love to have our summer or some part of our summer, but keep expectations low for now. Let's not have any false moves. Let's not jump the gun. Let's make sure we get it right. The things that would have take – that would have required spending money now to get ready for the summer we're just not doing, because we don't have yet a clear roadmap to how we get to those summer activities. So, right now, cautious approach focused on beating back this disease. That's where we're at.

Moderator: Yoav from the City is up next. Yoav?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask about the 11,000 new hotel rooms, particularly when it comes to the families who are living in overcrowded houses, et cetera. What prompted this move now, I guess? Was it – were you seeing a lot of transmission among family members where some of the people trying to isolate in places like hospitals? So, what were you seeing that made this seem like a necessity? And what – I guess, why wasn't something like this implemented sooner?

Mayor: Thank you. Yoav, I mentioned it, but I'll emphasize it. First of all, even though these last like six weeks or so have played out in a way that feels like, you know, more like months or years, it's been just rapid, constant changes, and, you know, shocking developments in the course of six weeks that we've all been trying to make sense of. But I go back to that warning I gave about Sunday, April 5th, which, again, seems like a long time ago. It was, you know, 11 days ago. On Sunday, April 5th, even as that day dawned, I thought the likelihood was a horrendous week that week ahead. And we got into that week and things got a little bit better for a few days and I didn't know of a sort of a false dawn or something real, but it proved to sustain and we've had a better situation since that Sunday than we expected. But still, plenty of challenges, plenty of pain, plenty of things to deal with. Since that day, we've gotten to think a little bit differently. And in those 10 or 11 days, we went from thinking every hotel room – and I want you to hear the word every – every hotel room was going to be converted to hospital space. Obviously, there'll be some for dormitories for health care workers, but otherwise it was hospital, hospital, hospital. The projections we made when we talked about having to add 60,000 hospital beds, that was going to be massive use of hotels. And we were trying to build it rapidly on top of Javits Center, and the Comfort, and the Queens tennis center – all the things that were happening. In recent days, we've had more and more assurance that we didn't need all those hotel rooms and we've been starting to use them more and more for other purposes. We talked a few days ago about using the opportunity to take those hotel rooms and get more and more people out of shelter. But now this piece we're talking about today correlates with what we learned about disparity over the last week or more. And the fact that the disparity dynamic seems to also connect to the multigenerational families and the crowded households. And you see that particularly in some lower income communities, particularly in immigrant communities. So, we're trying to come up with another targeted strategy, just like the targeted testing that we'll be starting as early as tomorrow. The targeted focus on the families that are really crowded together where we want to make sure if someone's in danger that we can give them an alternative. So, it's all been coming out of our experience, but most especially the fact that we have – we built a strategy – and the State did as well, to their credit – that was all about saving lives and saving hospitals so we could save lives, and having hospital beds, having personnel, having ventilators, having supplies to save lives. Luckily, we've been able to move a little bit off that strategy and do some other things now with those rooms so we can protect people a different way.

Moderator: Henry from Bloomberg is up next. Henry?

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How about you?

Question: I'm okay. I'm trying to understand how the budget was balanced in the absence of a budget book. We don't really see a balancing of, you know – we don't see the arithmetic. So, you're saying we've lost 7.4 – or we will lose $7.4 billion in revenue. You're cutting the budget by $6 billion compared to January. How do you – where is the arithmetic that balances more than $13 billion?

Mayor: We will get you – I know some has been put out, we'll make sure that more has been put out. We’re obviously in a very different situation than our normal budget process and today's presentation certainly reflects that, but we will there'll be plenty of detail filled in. But to hear it – let me give you the basics that I think speak to your question. So, remember, we had the, the crisis hit, you know, in the fiscal year we're in right now, Fiscal Year ‘20, obviously starting in March. And we had to address the impact on this fiscal year, and on next year. You know, for six years as we've had these discussions, we were pretty much always looking at the fiscal year ahead, and the year we were in a was balanced, and we were going to send money forward. That's been the tradition. We're in a very different situation here because the crisis hit immediately and it's undermined this year's budget, as well as next year. So, what we are dealing with now, that revenue loss that has been projected throughout the calendar year, and, of course, the $800 million we lost from the State. The gaps we had to close for this fiscal year, currently $2.5 billion, for next fiscal year, $6.2 billion. So, a grand total about $8.7 billion. How we did it. Again $2 billion in the PEG program. We originally talked about $1.3, we added to that, it got up to over $2 billion, another $700 million or so in other types of savings, debt service savings and others. The reserves were drawing down about $4 billion on the reserves. And then over the two fiscal years there's about $2 billion in various types of federal aid accounted for from the previous stimulus packages and also from FEMA aid directly. But again, reminding you that right now we're required on any expense that's FEMA eligible, we're required to pay 25 percent of it. And I think that's a horrible mistake in the middle of a pandemic and we should not have to pay for FEMA eligible expenses. The federal government should cover those, but we have budgeted on the assumption that we're still having to pay that 25 percent. So, Henry, that is the way the math comes together. Obviously, this is profoundly different than what we were expecting. You know, just weeks ago when we had the preliminary budget and it's kind of like thinking about the time in February when the preliminary budget was presented. Seems like again, another century That was projected to be over $95 billion. This budget is $89 billion. We are literally $6 billion less in what we were planning on spending than just as recently as February. So that's the basic layout. But we'll make sure we get you, you know, all appropriate charts and take questions going forward on those.

Moderator: Juliet from 1010 WINS is up next. Juliet?

Question Yes. Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How do you feel?

Question: I’m okay, thank you. So, my question is this, I called 3-1-1 this morning to inquire about, you know, the process of the food program and the delivery program. So I have to tell you what happened. I was on hold for 10 minutes. And I did time that. And then when I did get through to somebody who was very nice, I was told that there was – they couldn't process anything or register me or whoever would call and I would have to call back at 11 o'clock because the system wasn't available. So how can people get through if they need and specifically seniors who really probably rely on their phones more than, you know, going to a computer to look something up or register? What can people do?

Mayor: Juliet, I'm glad you did that. I appreciate it. I'm very frustrated by the report you're giving me. I have a lot of respect for the folks in my team who had been fighting this battle. And a lot of respect for the good people at 3-1-1 and I visited with them a few weeks ago and really, really appreciate their work. But I have been saying to my team incessantly, we have to make sure that people get served immediately and we need quality control on 3-1-1 and bluntly, you just proved what I've warned people about, that no one should have to go through what you went through. I understand sometimes there's a surge in demand and we in fact yesterday emphasized to all New Yorkers that food would be available for anyone who needed that delivery because they were vulnerable or a senior couldn't get out, a disabled person. We made that very clear yesterday, so it does not surprise me, Juliet, there'd be a spike in the number of calls after I told all New Yorkers this food is therefore you, no matter what, we're going to feed you. And maybe the system, maybe they did not put enough personnel on to address that spike. I don't like that, but at least I can understand that. But it is not acceptable to me and I'm going to deal with it right after this press conference. It's not acceptable that anyone would be put on hold for 10 minutes for anything in the middle of a crisis. It's not acceptable that people be told to call back later. It's just not the way we're supposed to do things. So, I'm going to be really honestly, pissed off at the people who are supposed to be handling this, who I have warned repeatedly to not let this happen and we will fix it today. I'll just order more personnel – this is exactly the kind of thing that I'm making a priority. We will spend whatever the hell it takes and get as many personnel as is needed to ensure that doesn't happen.

And you're totally right, Juliet, that seniors are much more likely to use the phone. I mean we can, you know, we can give out the website till the cows come home, but in the end most seniors are going to pick up the phone. And a lot of people don't speak English and they need to have the translation too when they call. So, I will get this fixed today and I want you to test it again tomorrow please. And call in and I'll turn to our colleagues and say, when you call in to give your report, I want to make sure that call gets through so I can see if people have made the changes they need to make.

Moderator: Marcia from CBS New York is up next. Marcia?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Marcia, how are you?

Question: Good. My question today is about relaxing the standards for social distancing. President Trump has said today that he's going to announce new guidelines for relaxing social distancing and for reopening the economy. I wonder, two parts – when you spoke to the President and Vice President yesterday, if you discussed this issue and what your views are about how that would apply to New York City, which is clearly the epicenter?

Mayor: Yeah, and in fact, Marcia, I always am careful not to characterize in detail what other people said to me in a private conversation. I want to give them that respect. I will be very broad in characterizing their view. I'll tell you what I said though. I told them it would be madness to rush the restart in a way that would cause, you know, a boomerang effect, where the disease reasserted, we got setback even farther, the day when the economy could reopen got pushed back much worse, much farther because they moved too soon. I had A conversation with the Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed last night, and she talked about she had been studying the history of 1918, the Spanish Influenza epidemic and how in San Francisco, they had like a false dawn in 1918, where they thought it was going away and everyone came out and started doing big gatherings again. They literally had like a big, like city celebration that the flu was over and everyone came flocking to the celebration. And days later there was a massive outbreak and it got worse than ever and put off much longer, any recovery. That was a hundred years ago. Different situation. But it's a cautionary tale, Marcia.

So I told the President and Vice President it would be a huge mistake to restart too early. It would be a huge mistake to take our foot off the gas and to start taking away the things that actually were working before we were sure that we had turned the corner. Now I do think they – and I’ll let them speak for themselves. I think they do think New York's in a particular situation. To some extent that's true. But my warning was don't see New York City as so unusual that you think the same thing we've gone through isn't going to happen in one form or another in a lot of places.

The social distancing was necessary. The shelter in place was necessary and you have to come out of it carefully and smartly or you'll regret it. So my answer is we've got these indicators, Marsha. These three indicators are going to tell us a lot. We have to be smart. We have to be cautious. I think if the President artificially, if you will, ignores the warnings we're getting on this disease and rushes to do a restart that ignores the danger, he will regret it. I think he has one chance. I think the President has one chance to get it right. If he is smart about it and careful about it, we can actually get to a restart of the economy we can sustain. If he jumps too soon, it'll be horrible, it’ll set us back further. And everyone is going to judge him by how he makes that decision. Rightfully so. And that's the decision I have to make for my city too. And I'm going to be damn careful in making that decision.

Moderator: Kathleen from Patch is up next. Kathleen? Oh, never mind. Reema from Chalkbeat is up next. Reema, can you hear us okay?

Question: Yeah, can you hear me?

Moderator: Yes, we can.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Reema.

Question: Okay, great. Hey, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, how are you?

Question Good, good. I wanted to ask you about just a couple of things here. Is there going to be summer school for kids who are behind, as well as the enrichment programs that are available to kids for extra classes? And also you know, unless I'm missing something, we see a lot of programs and school-based cuts here, but I don't see much at all on the central level or you know, cuts to capital projects and I'm wondering why there's not more cuts there so they don't fall on programs?

Mayor: So, Rema a combination of points I'd make. Definitely on the capital side a lot is being delayed. You know, things we want to do and believe in. We, obviously, you know, I'm someone who started the initiative and I believe in deeply, to put air conditioning in all our classrooms. But things like that just inherently have to wait compared to food, shelter, safety, health. You know, there are things that have to wait. But the capital spending, it will happen eventually, but a lot of it's going to be delayed. The, in terms of, you know, central costs, administrative costs, we've been making cuts to that already in previous savings plans. That continues. The summer issue, we can't plan on summer right now. So the simplest way to say it, our schools are closed for this school year. The things that we would normally plan for the summer, we cannot guarantee, we only at this point I think, can truly plan on the reopening of schools in the beginning of September. That's where our energy is going, actually start the schools up right. Coming out of this horrible crisis, really amplify the academic side, but also address all the other challenges including the mental health challenges that the whole school community is going to go through. In the meantime, the focus on online learning, the focus on mental health needs of kids and families now, but summer's a giant question mark. So we are not announcing anything for the summer at this point. The Chancellor said they're planning all sorts of scenarios including online scenarios for the summer. But we don't have any assurance yet that we can do anything in person this summer, you know, in school buildings. And we're going to look at every option and then as we get some actual proof of where we're going, we're going to decide. But again, I'd say watching those three indicators, that's going to say a lot about whether we even get to think about summer programming in some form going forward.

Moderator: Anna from the Daily News is up next. Anna?

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor. Happy Budget Day.

Mayor: I guess you could call it happy, but I don't know if it is so happy. Go ahead, Anna.

Question: It’s my favorite day of the year. So just back to the beaches issue, I think a lot of people are interpreting your comments a few moments ago that the beaches are likely to be closed. And I just have like a logistical question about that. Given, you know, the issues with enforcement of social distancing and the limited workforce, how can the City guarantee people won't go to beaches? And especially since you know, even before the summer season starts, a lot of people still go and there have been drownings because no lifeguards are on duty. How do you guys protect against that issue?

Mayor: Okay, so what you said is an important beginning. There's a whole lot of the year where beaches, you know, we do not have lifeguards, we do not permit swimming. And there's signs to warn people and there's all sorts of messages telling people it's not safe. And thank God the vast, vast majority of people honor that Anna. But a few people don't. And so many times it's young people and it's very, very sad. And we've lost some young people because they went and they went swimming someplace where it wasn't safe and there wasn't a lifeguard on duty. And that's been true, unfortunately for years. And all we can do is keep telling people it's not the right thing to do for their safety and keep telling families that. And hope that people understand. That's what we deal with every year. But in terms of the summer, I do not want, and again, until we have a much, much better sense of where this is going, I don't want to create a situation where people start gathering. So if we bring out lifeguards and it's a situation where people think it's safe to go to the beach and it's safe to start resuming normalcy, it's going to endanger people based on what we know now. So no, right now we do not have a plan to open the beaches. Just like we don't have a plan to open the pools. People, you're absolutely right. Someone could go right now and walk on a beach and if they do it while practicing social distancing, okay. But right now I don't want to create a situation where people think they can go back to something like normal and be beachgoers this summer. I don't like saying that, but it's just a blunt truth. It's not safe. If things evolve, we'll assess our options going forward. But I can't project it now because it wouldn't be safe to project it now.

Moderator: Erin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor, quick follow up on the budget and then I have a question about the hotel program. On the budget, did you end up requesting any authority to borrow for operating expenses? And then with regards to the hotels, can you go through what are the criteria to qualify one of these? Just as a lay person, it seems like most of our apartments are too small to not transmit the disease in close quarters, so what threshold do you actually have to meet to be able to go to one of these?

Mayor: We will get the specifics out, Erin. The idea is to address where the dangers are greatest. So we already are seeing it. You've seen the maps, you've seen the -- we understand there are some neighborhoods that are bearing the brunt of this disease. So if we combine the notion of, we know where some of the most challenged places are and where people are in danger, and we know people in multigenerational homes in crowded conditions are in particular danger within those neighborhoods, that's where we're going to focus. Overwhelmingly, that means lower income folks. I think you're right, many, many New Yorkers deal with much more crowded situations than most of the country, but for lower income folks, you know, it can mean doubling up, tripling up all sorts of things that folks were a little more money tend to not experience. So we're going to really focus on those in greatest needs and those who are most threatened. And that will be the priority in terms of these hotel rooms.

In terms of borrowing, we have not yet activated or work to activate a new borrowing capacity. It's certainly a conversation we will have going forward, the possibility of doing some kind of long-term borrowing that is fiscally smart. That's under the kind of terms that would be fair and smart. An example from the past, a 20-year repayment timeline for example. But right now we have not yet acted on that.

Moderator: Brigid from WNYC is up next. Brigid?

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor and two questions, one related to the budget. Just can you talk a little bit more about the decision to dip into the reserves? And you know, whether you feel like the current plan goes far enough in terms of long-term planning for, you know, some of the challenges you envision ahead? And then separately, a question related to health care workers. I'm wondering if the City has an estimate of how many health care workers and hospital employees have died at City and public hospitals? And are you tracking that information? Will you be releasing that?

Mayor: Yes. We do. And of course, it's a very painful topic because these are folks who worked heroically to save lives and put their own lives in danger. We have information, I don't get every daily report on what's been released publicly and what hasn't, but that certainly needs to be released and we will. But my heart goes out to their families because these are people who did something very, very heroic. On the reserves and the long-term planning. The decision to use the reserves was to get us through this moment, understanding that the discussion on what would be the right thing to do, the federal support given the nature of this pandemic and the fact that we're the epicenter, that that discussion was happening now in April and would happened in May, but our budget would be determined finally in June.

So this was to get us through now. We're going to fight hard to get that stimulus funding we deserve. And that's the big X factor here. In terms of long-term planning, right now obviously the immediate focus is on saving lives, protecting people, all those basics I talked about and then figuring out the right way, the responsible way to restart our economy. We will be doing more and more long-term planning as we go along in this process. But our urgent consideration with this executive budget was to make sure we could address the immediate needs of New Yorkers, keep our budget intact and you know, build a foundation for the future. But we'll have much more to say on the long term going forward.

Moderator: Sydney from the Advance is up next. Sydney.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing? Why did you decide to move forward with a reduction in overnight service at the Staten Island Ferry in the executive budget and what do you think reduction in overnight service is going to look like through 2021? Do you have an idea of which hours will be affected?

Mayor: I will get you details. Sydney, look, I very much believe we have to keep consistency in Staten Island Ferry service. People depend on it. It's a lifeline for Staten Islanders. We will do that. What we found, of course, was a massive drop in ridership in the midst of this crisis. I mean, it's truly massive and they were running boats with very few people on them. So, we're trying to just create a consistent schedule that will be the one people can depend on going forward. And I don't think we can yet say through 2021 at all on anything. My hope is that, you know, we're able to do something better before 2021. If we can handle this disease properly and only restart when we're ready, you know, it's conceivable for sure to start bringing some things back to normal piece by piece carefully. So, I don't want to project anything about 2021 right now, but what we're trying to do here is just say, here's a baseline people can depend on, this makes sense given very, very low ridership right now. And then we'll figure out the future as we start to see the health care situation change.

Moderator: Gloria from NY1 is up next. Gloria.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Bridget sort of got to my question, but if I could ask a follow up and just for a point of clarity, did I hear you say that you're asking for $7.5 billion from the federal government and what are you doing – if you don't get a response from the [inaudible] if you don't get the exact amount that you are asking for and looking at what you've proposed so far, I realized [inaudible] an immediate crisis and this is [inaudible] with those immediate crisis. But what about the impact this will have on the following year and how much planning is your budget team doing now to balance some of that? This is a – you haven't made any kind of cuts [inaudible] since you've been in office, like, it's the first time that you proposed a budget that’s –

Mayor: Gloria. I got you, I got you. The stimulus should be – for us, New York City, the epicenter of the crisis, for New York State, for all cities and states affected – it should be the amount of lost revenue due to the coronavirus. That lost revenue should be replaced dollar for dollar by the federal government. The federal government can do it. Again, $2.2 trillion so far that they have put into various stimulus programs, only $1.4 billion directly to the City of New York to address this crisis in the epicenter. Clearly they can make up that $7.4 billion that we have now projected as our lost revenue. If that grows, they should fill that gap further. There's a stimulus 3.5 now. There's another one coming in May. They will have in each one the opportunity to keep making cities and states whole and it should be done according to need, according to the impact of the coronavirus.

Also, the FEMA aid should not be 75 percent federal, 25 percent local cost. It should be 100 percent federal because of the nature of what we're dealing with. If they want a recovery, and I believe the president does, I believe everyone does, if they really want a recovery, if they really want to restart the economy, make that choice to make us whole and help everyone move forward. So that's what I'm saying to them. In terms of planning, yes, of course, this is what OMB does all the time. And pandemic or not, they keep doing it. These choices are to address the immediate situation. The cuts that were made were very substantial and very necessary and very unfortunate. The reserves, this was time to use the reserves and thank God we had built them up over the last six years. But there are many, many tough choices ahead. It will all depend on what Washington does. If they do the right thing, we'll still have tough choices to make, but we'll be able to get through and protect all those basic services I talked about. If they do the wrong thing, it's going to be a very, very tough scenario. But we're planning for all eventualities and then we're planning, of course, years ahead. That's what OMB has to do. And does do.

Moderator: Leslie from the Wall Street Journal is up next. Leslie.

Question: Hi, thank you. Are you planning any furloughs or layoffs for City employees?

Mayor: Leslie, I would call that the last resort. And again, I think honestly that decision rests in Washington. There's just no way to make up for this level of lost revenue, which has happened almost overnight because of a global crisis we've never seen the likes of in history and Washington has to step in so we can provide basic services. And I said this to the president and vice president, I said this to Speaker Pelosi, I said this to Senator Schumer. It's this simple, for New York City to be able to provide basic services to our people and participate in the recovery, we must have that stimulus money or else we're going to have to make horrible choices going forward. So those kinds of choices are absolutely the last resort.

Moderator: Gersh, from Streetsblog is up next. Gersh.

Question: Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Gersh.

Question: Hello.

Mayor: How are you doing?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Gersh. How are you doing?

Question: I'm good. You said earlier the things that might have been a priority cannot be a priority right now, but you also said that a budget is a statement [inaudible] values. All of the cuts are not yet online, but some are. If you cut, for example, your placard corruption team or you cut your Better Buses initiative [inaudible] you cut millions to divisions of your programs – are you saying that these kinds of programs are not currently a priority even though two days ago you said you will create a plan for the car reduction that many New Yorkers will want?

Mayor: Yeah, there's clearly – let's go over it again. The most basic things are health, safety, food, shelter. So, we're going to focus there first. The question you asked a few days ago was a great one. As we move forward into a recovery, how do we have a recovery that moves us forward beyond where we were before? I agree with that entirely and I've said very clearly the recovery must include profound changes to address a host of injustices, and we've seen it deeply with these health care disparities. We have to address injustices, we have to create a more fair society coming back, and we have to address the huge crisis of the future, which is still global warming. And that means getting people out of their cars. That we will address in the recovery plans. But right now with the choices we're facing, it goes right back to those basics and it is a statement of values to say we're going to make sure people have, you know, a roof over their head, food to eat, that they're safe, that their health care is protected. That's where we're putting our focus now. There's no question that a lot of the other things you mentioned are very important. That's why we put him in the budget to begin with and they will continue as we have more resources in the future. But we got to focus on the basics now.

Moderator: Last two. Kevin from the Brooklyn Paper. Kevin.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Kevin.

Question: My question is about the testing sites. Brooklyn Community Board Six, which overlaps with your former City Council district in Park Slope, sent you a letter yesterday saying that the drive-thru testing centers aren't cutting it for the majority of New Yorkers given that, you know, the majority of New Yorkers don't own a car. I know the City is looking to open a new center in East New York and I think the State is opening one in Brownsville. Can you talk a little bit about the status of these new centers for people that don't have a car and want the city is doing to make it at least equally as accessible to get tested for coronavirus if you don't have a car?

Mayor: Yeah, Kevin, look, the testing situation has to change profoundly. And this is one of the biggest, saddest stories of this whole history of the coronavirus. You know, from January on, we were demanding that the federal government give us the right to do local testing and that took a long time and then they put huge restrictions on it. Then we were demanding the actual tests and that took a long time. And we still aren't anywhere near the amount of testing we need. And it'll be a long time until we get there. I did announce a few days ago, you know, a major breakthrough that we found a way to get some test kits that we can purchase from the open market and others that we're going to create right here in New York City, and that's really exciting, in the beginning of May. But even that will be only a piece of what we need.

So I think the way to think about it is, there's been very limited testing. The focus to date has been on patients whose lives needed to be saved, though the testing was crucial to saving their lives. Health care workers, first responders, and now in recent days we're starting to expand it – and again, we'll have sites up starting tomorrow, some of the sites I talked about in some of the most hard-hit communities. That is the next piece we are trying to build out, but it still requires us to have the test kits, the PPEs which had been tough to come by, and the medical personnel, then we can apply to testing, and that situation's a little better, but there's still challenges for sure. Over time we want to get to a situation where we have really widespread testing available and that's part of how we get to that low level transmission phase we're talking about, and on to, effectively, zero transmission, but we don't have all that in hand yet. We got to keep building that.

So the notion of people saying, hey, I just want to make it really easy to get testing in my own community, I get that 100 percent why people feel that. We got to do something more strategic than that. We got to figure out how to get a lot more testing, apply it where it's needed most, and then build toward the day where we use it as a strategic tool to actually contain this disease, to focus it on people who have – are symptomatic, to focus it on people who we need to determine should not go to work, people who can go to work again, to focus it on who needs to be quarantined, and to make those quarantine spaces available in large number. That's the next phase. That all has to be tightly organized and prioritized. So, we’ll have more to say on that, as testing supplies start to increase, but I want people to think about this as strategic. This is about how we end this crisis. Not so much just, you go someplace and you get a test that tells you at one point in time how you're doing. I understand why people want that, but we've got to do something more strategic for everyone to get out of this crisis.

Moderator: Mark Morales from CNN. Mark.

Question: Hey, everybody. How you doing today?

Mayor: Hey Mark, how you doing?

Question: Good. Good. So, I had a couple of questions on a couple of different topics. The first was – it's about the probable cases. What if anything, can or is the City doing to check up on or help the people that say maybe haven't tested positive for COVID but have gone back home and need help there or maybe in fact even die at home. And the other question I have is about the DOE and about reporting is happening now amongst the administrators and teachers and principals [inaudible] –

Mayor: Mark, I'm going to cut you off. Just Mark, go back on your first question. I want to make sure I understood it. Could you just restate your first question?

Question: Right. It's about the probable cases. What can the City do about them? So, it's like, let's say you have somebody who's at home who ends up dying at home and they get – their bodies get picked up or services end up coming too late, what can the City do to help them to sort of prevent them from being casualties of COVID?

Mayor: And then what was your DOE question?

Question: What's being done about the reporting at DOE like as far as administrators? Like are they reporting positive numbers of COVID cases to the City, to the Health Department? Is that being done in a timely manner?

Mayor: Okay. On the second piece, I mean, we'll definitely have the Department of Education follow up with you, Mark. Look right now because essentially, you know, very, very few of our employees are going to a school building except for the folks who are doing the food programs and the very small number of enrichment centers for the kids of essential workers. To the extent we pray, no more DOE employees suffer. But if everyone does, that's, you know – that's going to the Health Department most likely directly. But we'll get you an update on that and we're obviously – everything we can do to try and protect, you know, the people who do such important work we will do.

On the folks – God, it's such a horrible scenario that there have been people who died at home. It's something that existed in the past, but obviously nowhere near on the level we've seen it with a coronavirus. But I think what we want to do, and as part of this intensive effort to communicate again to people including what appears to be, you know, a certain number of people who, even though there's been constant communication, still need more and we want to get it to them. That huge campaign we talked about advertising, you know, TV, radio, print, digital, the community health outreach – so, the texting and calling campaigns that we're putting in place, hopefully eventually health care workers out in communities talking to people. I think a lot of this is people who don't have access to information as much through mainstream media, a lot of people who don't speak English. We've got to get more information out to make sure that anyone who needs health care knows it is always available to them. And we're going to do that follow up with telemedicine more so people can speak to a clinician live whenever they have questions, they need anything in multiple languages. We have that but we're expanding that as part of the plan.

So, I think it’s just going to be more outreach to help anyone know if they fear for their lives, if they think they're in danger, we will get help to them, unquestionably. We have to make sure they know it is there for them, no matter what.

Moderator: Last question goes to Jose from Univision. Jose.

Question: Hi, there. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Jose.

Question: Oh, fantastic. So, Mr. Mayor, thank you for doing these daily press briefings. They're very helpful. My question is about this paper from an economist at MIT, it came out earlier this week and it asserts that New York City's subway system was a major disseminator, if not the principal transmission vehicle of the coronavirus infection in the city. So, what I want to know is if your office has taken a look at this paper, I don't know if I would call it a study, but it's definitely a paper. And what your office makes of those assertions and if you can, whether the City has tried to come to its own conclusions.

Mayor: I appreciate the question. My health care team looked at it. I think you're right. It does not appear to be – I haven't seen it myself so I'm working from their summary. It doesn't appear to be a full-blown study. It appears to be sort of an effort to look at some broad data and draw some initial conclusions. I think the part that is evident is, you know, this is why early on we said to people, if you don't need to go on the subway, don't; if you can work from home, work from home; if you can walk or bike or anything else, do so because there was a concern to start clearing out the subway to the maximum extent possible while recognizing that we also depended on the subway to get essential workers to do the lifesaving work they do.

So, we had a challenge from the beginning, but I think what is fair to say is it's, you know – I haven't seen it, but my sense is it sort of is broad in telling us that any place people gather is a place of concern. There's no question about that. And there's been, obviously, efforts now since the beginning of this crisis to have less and less, fewer, fewer people on the subway, less and less crowding on any place, including subways. And we'll keep that going I think for a substantial period of time.

Okay, everyone just wanted to say this is a very unusual day. It's not like any other day that I've ever experienced not only as Mayor, but in my life before that in public service, never seen a day like this where we're announcing an executive budget against the backdrop of a global pandemic and with so many challenges and so many question marks. But what's clear at least is we know where the help has to come from, it has to come from Washington, and it really has to, or else we're left with horrible, horrible choices. But what we will do, no matter what, no matter what, is protect New Yorkers health, protect your safety, make sure there's food on your table, make sure there's a roof over your head. That's what we will do. No matter what is thrown at us. And anyone who needs that help, it's there for you. A budget is a statement of values. Our values are clear. We're here to protect people and we will do so, and we will get through this crisis. It will not be easy, but we will get through this crisis.

Thank you very much, everyone. God bless you all.

2020-04-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone and now our weekly Ask The Mayor segment my questions in yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our phones are open at our new call in number which allows our producers to screen your calls from home. It's 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can always tweet a question. Just use the hashtag #AskTheMayor for these segments. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, and a few times already today, Ask The Mayor has now moved for the foreseeable future from its old 10 o'clock slot on Fridays to here around 11 or a little after 11 because of a coronavirus-era change in the Mayor’s schedule. And with that, good morning Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning Brian and thank you to everyone at WNYC for your flexibility because we are doing morning press conferences so everyone can get the latest updates. So, I appreciate you helping us to set this new time.

Lehrer: Now, you used to do your daily press conferences in the afternoon. So, let me ask you a political question. Is that so you can set the day's news agenda for New York by going before Governor Cuomo daily briefings?

Mayor: No, it's just about making sure that we get information out that is fresh at the beginning of the day. We've -- in the beginning we all were trying to make sense of so much incoming, so many changing circumstances. And now, you know, we've had a little bit of improvement, I emphasize a little bit. It's allowed us to create more consistency and I think it's just valuable to start each day giving people the updates that they need, giving them the latest. And then everyone can go on from there.

Lehrer: And I see that in the press conference that just ended among the other things you announced five additional test sites for frontline health care workers at a rate of 3,500 tests per week. And also opening up 11,000 hotel rooms for people who need to quarantine away from loved ones. You want to talk about those additional testing sites?

Mayor: Yes. And that'll all be available on nyc.gov, the details. It's actually a new City program through our public hospitals and clinics. That will start at about 2,500 a week at five sites around the city. But I expect that to ramp up intensely quickly. Another set of five different sites, a partnership we're doing with a private health care provider and with a 1199 SEIU Health Care Workers Union. That's going to be about 3,500 a week. Those are both targeted to the communities that we've seen specifically hardest hit in this crisis where we've seen the highest level of incidents of this disease and particular challenges among folks who are older with those preexisting conditions. So they will be the specific target for all of this testing. With the addition that with the sites we've done with 1199 and One Medical, the private entity, those will be focused both on community members who are over 65 and have preexisting conditions and on health care workers, adult home workers, folks who work with the disabled.

So these are very important new initiatives, but they're just a beginning Brian of something much bigger as the City is now starting in the beginning in May, we'll be producing our own test kits. We're finally getting some test kits in from the open market. We are going to be able to do a lot more testing and we'll use it strategically for now. But what we really need to get to is very, very widespread testing. That's part of how we get out of this tough, tough phase with the disease. And then the hotel rooms compliment this point for folks who are particularly vulnerable and folks who are in many cases what we're seeing in the neighborhoods hardest hit, which we've seen are lower income communities, immigrant communities, communities of color, places that have had much less health care available even though people deserved it, they didn't have it because of economic injustice that folks in those neighborhoods who live in crowded conditions in their home, often multigenerational homes, need opportunities to isolate. If obviously they're symptomatic, if they test positive, that have been around someone who tested positive, the hotel rooms will help us give an option for anyone who needs to isolate from the rest of their family. They'll be able to get that support for free.

Lehrer: And do I understand that the hotel rooms are going to be prioritized for people who live in crowded housing circumstances or am I over interpreting that?

Mayor: No, you're interpreting it correctly, Brian. So look, all New Yorkers, I mean, we know every New Yorker deals with having less space than we'd all like, but you know, there are certainly people in the city who live in homes, live in apartments where there's some space, there's others who live in just horribly crowded dynamics. Again, many times multigenerational families, some of them doubled up, even tripled up. That's a result of poverty and many other challenges. For folks that are in sort of extremely crowded conditions, we're making a priority for sure, that if someone in one of those situations, if someone is symptomatic, if someone's tested positive, if someone's been in close proximity recently to someone who tested positive, we want to make sure to particularly get anyone out of those homes who may be vulnerable. And if for example, any member of a family, let's say there's, you know, ten people under one roof. If one gets sick, we want to isolate that person from everyone else to protect everyone else. So we're going to be using this very strategically and we'll constantly build the supply as needed. But this is also targeted, especially at the places where we've seen the problem growing because of these very realities.

Lehrer: And before we get to phone calls, when you talk about ramping up testing, any reactions to the three phase reopening guidelines the President and his team announced last night? They acknowledged that New York and New Jersey are not ready for this at this time, but they also did say a sufficient availability of tests in any area of the country is going to be one of the prerequisites for doing it, you know, without flying blind. So did they give you any helpful tools to work with for gauging when and how?

Mayor: You know, minimally I think is the answer. You know, this just in, we need testing, right? Breaking news. I mean it's been the strangest and most troubling part of this whole equation from January on, because I first demanded testing from the federal government on January 24th. And we've still never seen it. So I think what you saw is there were some broad strokes to that plan that I think made some sense and clearly they acknowledged the differences that different places are experiencing. But the problem with the Trump administration to date is they haven't provided the testing and they're not acting on the stimulus. And these are two things, there's literally two things where the federal government could play a decisive role, getting testing to all parts of the country that need it in really great quantities. And moving right now on Stimulus 3.5 to provide the relief to cities and states that need it right now that have lost billions and billions of dollars of revenue so we can maintain basic services and start to work towards a recovery. These are two things they could be doing right now they're not doing. And particularly the stimulus, that is literally right now – I mean, the word from Washington now, Brian, is that if Donald Trump said to Mitch McConnell, you need to move this Stimulus 3.5, the Republican Senate will go along. It could be signed today, tomorrow. It could be moved on immediately by unanimous consent in the Senate. So that is the productive thing the federal government should do. Instead, we're not seeing action on that and we're being told, Hey, testing matters, but we can't help you. You know, that’s just not going to do much for us.

Lehrer: Right. They made it very clear again last night that testing is up to the states and localities around the country. And when you combine that -- and we shouldn't harp on this because there are things at the city level that you have to deal with, but when you combine that with the President's statement earlier in the week that he has total authority to tell the states what to do if he chooses to. We have a President who is claiming total authority but zero responsibility. So there we are. Dr. Harris in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hello.

Question: Hi. Thank you. Good morning. So I have a question based on science. So is that we know, as a health professional that N95 masks and gloves properly used prevent infection in nearly all cases. So the question I have –

Lehrer: And you know that – Doctor, you know, eight o'clock tonight, it takes effect in the city that everybody who's out in a public space needs to be wearing a face covering. So then what's your question?

Question: Right. Thank God. But that's not N95 masks, which is the problem. [Inaudible] why the City is not providing free, every New Yorker N95 masks and gloves and providing the instructional videos to wear them properly is beyond me. And of course [inaudible] enough. So why the City does not force factories in the city, like in World War II to provide those masks free to everyone and then actually people can get back to work and be safe.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, Dr. Harris, I'm going to leave it there and get a response. But even before getting back to work, which is down the road, even just for going out in public under the current stay at home conditions, you are requiring the masks at eight o'clock. And he's asking you to use a kind of municipal version of the Defense Production Act and make companies in the city ramp up mask production because I don't know where to get a mask, do you?

Mayor: No. And let's be clear. So first of all, you want to really help your listeners to understand the huge difference between the N95 mask, which is a top of the line medical mask that our health care workers need to be safe in many circumstances. Versus a face covering, which I've said from the beginning, until only, you know, a couple of weeks ago there was not even evidence that the face coverings would have the impact and that that was something that was important as we understood the disease. When more data came in, our health care leadership said, you know what? Face coverings would help. Now let's tell people to use them. But that meant for an everyday in New York a bandana, a scarf or the kind of mask you can buy in a hardware store, not a sophisticated medical N95 mask. So I want to really make that a clear, sharp distinction. To Dr. Harris's question, which I appreciate, but I think it's leaving out a crucial part of the equation. N95 masks have been very hard to come by for months. We have literally been in a hand to mouth situation. I've reported it very publicly through my press conferences Brian. There were days where we were not at all sure we would have enough N95 masks for our health care professionals, for just a few days ahead. I can say at this point it looks good for next week, but it doesn't yet for the week after that. And I'm just talking about the needs of health care professionals and first responders. So I think Dr. Harris's question is a good one, but needs to recognize that the supply all over this country has been stressed and N95 masks were not something clearly made in New York City. And we've tried to ramp up production in New York City on a variety of things we need including things like the face shields for health care workers and first responders, the surgical gowns. We've been working on ventilators and now of course test kits. I’m going to see what we can do and those all have to be created from scratch because there's no homegrown industry. All of that has to be created. I’m going to see if there’s a chance to start up N95 production on a big scale.

There are other ideas out there as well about ways to sterilize N95 masks and put them back into operation. There's a lot we're looking at right now, but the only way we could talk about N95 masks for the general public is if we had a massive supply. And right now, we literally don't have enough on a regular basis and a sustained basis to even give people what we want to give them. Right now, we're on what's called a crisis standard for our health care workers and first responders. We want to get to a higher standard of protection for them, that would be job one. But for everyday New Yorkers, as our health care leaders have said in this city, the homemade options, the bandanas, the scarves protect other people, protect the community. That's the goal right now.

Lehrer: Nic in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Nic.

Question: Hi, Brian. Hi, Mr. Mayor. Thank you so much for taking my call and for everything that you both do for the city. I'm calling with regard to the situation right now at Columbia University with grad students in housing. They are in apartments, not dorms. And they find that they will be unable to pay their rent over the summer because they’re not able to sublet out their apartments, they can't get the extra jobs that they used to get, and many of these are international students who cannot leave because, you know, there are restrictions in their home countries, the borders are closed. And Columbia has made it very clear that they will not offer any rent relief during the crisis. The only thing they've done is offer $500 in a case-by-case basis for reimbursement to move out by April 22nd. So, my question for the Mayor is if the students are unable to leave and can't pay rent, how can the City protect them from retribution from the university, which is both their employer and their landlord?

Mayor: This is – I really appreciate this question and I'm astounded as you lay it out. I have not heard this before, and I'll get my team on it immediately. I'm going to ask my general counsel to follow up. I am perplexed why, if these students don't have other options, particularly those who cannot go back to their home country – why Columbia would not be more flexible. Columbia University obviously has a vast financial endowment. So, I'm going to be mindful that I haven't heard all the facts and I haven't heard the university’s side of the story, but I will work on this today with my team because something doesn't sound right about asking people to pay who can't pay or telling people they have to leave, if they don't have some place to go, especially if it's, you know, one of the wealthiest institutions in the city. So, we will follow up on that. If you’ll give your information to WNYC, I'll make sure our team follows up with you today and keeps you posted on how we're handling this.

Lehrer: Great. So, Nic, hang on, we'll take your contact information off the air. And even more widely on the question of housing – you probably know by now that tenant activists are trying to organize a widespread rent strike for many people who will owe May 1st rents in the city. As it's reported on Patch.com, for example, it says housing advocates hope as many as one million New Yorkers will participate in the May 1st rent strike to pressure Governor Cuomo to cancel rent for the duration of the stay in place order extended to May 15th and through June. Their demands also include a rent freeze for 2020 and housing for about 92,000 New York City dwellers currently without homes. Do you support the rent strike from May 1st?

Mayor: Not per say, no. I do believe the State has to act. And so, let me separate the two pieces. Look here in the city, first of all, no evictions are being allowed. We need that to be continued and we need to make sure that the eviction moratorium – we've been working with the state on this – that eviction moratorium needs to go not only through this crisis but 60 days past this crisis to protect people. So, we've ensured no evictions up to now. We need to keep that going for this crisis so that anyone who legitimately can't pay is obviously not in a situation where they would ever be evicted. And anyone who feels that is happening to them needs to call 3-1-1 because we will get you support and we'll get you a lawyer if needed to make sure that no landlord is trying to get you out of a building. That's absolutely unacceptable.

We've been pushing the State – and, again, there's been good conversations and I think there is some progress starting – pushing the state to allow the use of security deposits. So, that would immediately free up money so tenants could use their security deposits to pay rent. We've been pushing the State to come up with a plan that if you're unable to pay rent, you don't have to until you have income back and then you pay on a payment plan to repay over time. All of those changes are needed. So, I do think the state needs to act. I agree with those saying the State needs to act. I don't agree with a rent strike because there's too many folks who are trying to keep their buildings going. There’s a lot of smaller landlords in particular who if they don't have any income coming in, they're not going to be able to keep their buildings going. And then you have a very bad situation for everyone. So, we've got to strike a balance here.

On rent freeze, that's what I've called for our Rent Guidelines to do for over two million New Yorkers who live in rent stabilized housing. I'm hopeful that action will be taken soon. And then people know that they have a rent freeze for this year. But bottom line here, the State should act quickly –

Lehrer: Could there be a rent freeze for non-rent stabilized rentals?

Mayor: Again, I don't know if that is within the State's power. It may be, but I think the other things I've suggested would achieve the same impact. If the State would allow renters to use their security deposits to pay rent now and would put a clear plan in place that if you cannot pay, you have up to a year until you have to start paying and then you pay on some kind of payment plan, that kind of approach would make sense in a crisis like this.

Lehrer: Question via Twitter from listener Carolina, she asks, can someone ask him about how undocumented New Yorkers apply for the one-time payments from the immigrant emergency relief fund that you announced yesterday?

Mayor: Yes. It's a great question. Thank you, Carolina. Carolina, I'm going to speak broadly about this on purpose because I want to make sure everyone is protected in this process. The goal of this fund is to help immigrants, including those who are undocumented, who were left out of the national stimulus programs. And again, want to thank the Open Society Foundations for providing the support, thank George Soros and Patrick Gaspard who led the way on this. Those resources will go to the Mayor's Fund, they will go to grassroots organizations that work with immigrant communities, and people will have access to that to keep their families going during this crisis. I think the right way to say it is a lot of great community-based organizations that know how to reach people in need will spread the word and do so. There's not a single point of application for obvious reasons but we will make sure and those – much more importantly, those grassroots organizations know their communities, know how to reach people. The word will spread, I assure you, rapidly for those who can't get other forms of support that this is the way to get it. And I think it's something that will be very, very helpful for everyday New Yorkers who happened to be undocumented.

Lehrer: You also announced this week that beaches and pools will be closed this summer and I want to read to you from an email I've got –

Mayor: Yeah, Brian – I'm sorry Brian, I need to interrupt you because that wasn't what I announced. I announced that pools –

Lehrer: Go ahead.

Mayor: Pools are not in the City budget.

Lehrer: Okay.

Mayor: One, because we don't have any money, two because pools mean people gathering in a small space and we did not feel we could do that safely for anything we could project [inaudible] summer. Beaches I've said we are not able to open them when they would be, which is Memorial Day, which is very soon. I don't see any time soon being able to have large numbers of people on the beaches like normal, but I have not said that that's ruled out for the whole summer. I've simply said we're not in a position to open them on schedule.

Lehrer: I apologize. I always want to be as accurate as I can so thank you for that clarification. With respect to the pools. I want to read to you from an email I got from former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, who served under Mayor Bloomberg, as you know. He sent me this this morning and he writes, “I've been very grateful for and supportive of pretty much everything Mayor de Blasio has done in response to coronavirus.” He called it spectacular, heroic, sage, and compassionate, so he doesn't hate you. But then he writes, “However, his announcement on Thursday that the City will close all of its public pools this summer, raised some serious alarms for me.” Then he goes into citing science that shows water does not transmit the virus. And he cites not only the stresses on kids in the city who can't cool off, but also the history of kids drowning, he says, in places like the Bronx River when they don't have access to safe and lifeguarded places to swim. So, have you heard these arguments and is that something you might be reconsidering?

Mayor: Well, look, I do – I appreciate the point and I don't take it lightly. I think the way it was – to be honest, I didn't see the original, I got the interpretation of it and certainly the notion of New Yorkers swimming in the rivers en masse, I just don't think is a reality. I think the Bronx River situation is real and I appreciate that point and we will have to be very careful about that and we will have to be careful about the beaches. Here's the bottom line – we've got to start from a health and safety point of view. The coronavirus has killed a huge number of New Yorkers. We are far from out of the woods and we must defeat it or else, you know, you're going to see a lot more people die and a lot more people sick and no ability to restart our lives.

So, job one is to defeat the coronavirus and if we start allowing mass gatherings at pools and beaches before we're ready, that will certainly contribute to a boomerang where the disease starts to reassert. That's unacceptable. So, when you then say, okay, we're not able to do those things yet, how do we make sure that young people in particular don't choose dangerous options? We're going to have to do a lot of education and warning to young people and their parents, we are going to have to make sure there's a lot of enforcement out at the places where they might go. And those are, you know, finite. It's not everywhere obviously. There's certain places where there's been – you know, where you could get into the water, which would be the obvious places. That's where we would put NYPD and Parks enforcement and others.

It is a very tough situation, Brian. First of all, I would love for the beaches to be opened on schedule. It's just not realistic. But I understand if you say we can't do it one way, we've got to then compensate for it with really smart enforcement to protect people. So, compared to thousands and thousands, you know, tens of thousands of more cases in the coronavirus and hundreds or thousands of more people dying from it, I think it's better safe than sorry to limit these big public gatherings. But that does not negate the point that Benepe is making that we want to be careful that there is enforcement so we don't lose a single young person who is seeking some other kind of alternative and that'll be a tough balance to strike. But that's what we'll do.

Lehrer: I know you got to go in a minute. Let me ask you two quick ones. If short answers are possible to these. One is Dr. Fauci, in his briefing last night with the president, estimated that the country would be in good shape maybe in the fall for very widespread testing. Do you have an estimate for New York?

Mayor: I want to do better than that because until you have widespread testing, you cannot get back to normal. I mean the absolute – you know, we've seen some of the good examples from around the world. You need it. I hope we can do a lot better than that. And that's including, you know, building our own homegrown test kits and trying to do that on a bigger scale. I want it – for kids to come back to school in September, we would have to have had a lot of testing in place ahead of that.

Lehrer: So you see a prospect for that for New York?

Mayor: I'm saying we have to do it if we want to get to that in September. So, one part is what we will do, but the federal governments still have to step up or I don't see how we get there.

Lehrer: And last thing, a little presidential politics. I don't see that you've endorsed Joe Biden yet. Did I miss it?

Mayor: No. I said the other day – I was asked a question, I don't know what show was on, but I said absolutely. I always said I would support the Democratic nominee. He's going to be the Democratic nominee. I absolutely support him and I'll do anything I can to help him. I have not been focused on presidential politics right now. I've been focused on keeping New Yorkers safe and healthy. But absolutely I look forward to supporting and helping Joe Biden in any way I can to become our next president.

Lehrer: Thank you, as always, Mr. Mayor. Talk to you next week.

Mayor: Take care now.

2020-04-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. So, everyone I talk to, New Yorkers of all walks of life, wherever I go, everyone has the same exact feeling – we all want to know when can we get back to normal? When can we get out of this? When can we start living our lives again? I think it's amazing how much people have, in the midst of this crisis, figured out all sorts of new ways to keep going, all sorts of new ways to keep connected to their loved ones, their friends, all sorts of new ways to entertain their kids and teach their kids. You know, folks are staying connected and sort of creating a whole social life, even if it's virtual. People are doing amazing things to keep that sense of community, keep that sense of heart and soul of this city alive even through this crisis. And it is a beautiful thing. It's a horrible backdrop, none of us wants to be in this, but what's beautiful is the way New Yorkers have responded. The creativity and the warmth and the kindness and the sense of making something out and nothing – even if we don't have the things we want, still finding a way to keep going and to stay connected and to stay hopeful. So, everyone wants our freedom back. We all want our lives back. We all want to experience the things we love about this city and the question is always when, when, when – how quickly can we get there? I feel that too. I want us to get back to normal as quickly as possible and I'm going to move heaven and earth to get us there. It's my responsibility to as quickly as possible take us through those stages, but I want to remind everyone we got to go through those stages. We’ve got to get out of this stage of widespread transmission of this disease. We've got to get to a much better place to be able to start getting back to normal. And that means sticking with the things we're doing that are working. And I will always say thank you to all of you for what you have done, the way you've adopted shelter in place and social distancing and made it work, made it come alive in the probably the hardest place in the whole nation to do it. But you've done it and it is moving us forward. But we have to be smart about what we do next. To get back to normal, we have to be really smart and careful about how we go through those stages. We have to make sure we move steadily and carefully and don't create a boomerang effect where we go too fast and then the disease reasserts and then we set back the timeline much longer for when we can get back to normal. So, I feel what you feel. I miss it too. I want to get us there, but I want to make sure we do it safely. In the meantime, I talked yesterday about the four things we're focused on, making sure people are healthy, safe, have food on the table, have a roof over your head. That's the focus now, beating back this disease, doing it smart – smart stages until we can get there.

Now, to get there, here's the thing. Here's the truth, there is no way to get back to normal without a huge amount of testing – testing on a citywide level, something we have never had, we've never seen since the beginning of this crisis. Now, undoubtedly, we need a lot of help from the federal government to get that done. We are not just sitting back waiting because we've been waiting a long time for that federal help that still hasn't come. We're taking matters into our own hands more and more. We finally found a way to get a large number of test kits on the open market. We finally found a way to produce our own here in New York City, which is very exciting, we're going to see how far we can take that. But we still need help from the federal government if we're really going to have the testing on the scale necessary to get us to the point where there's much, much, many fewer cases of COVID-19 where it becomes a rarity and where we can get back to normal. In the meantime, we're building out testing every day as we're finding a way to get more kits in for testing, we are building out testing every day. And what I announced earlier in the week, I want to give you some important updates on how community-based testing is going to grow over the next few days, going into next week. And this will be something you'll see more and more of, but, again, this is just a beginning compared to where we need to go, which is very widespread testing so that we can really turn the corner.

Now, to really think about what that looks like in the future, imagine that any time we needed to know if someone had this virus, at any given moment there was a test available for that person immediately when they needed it and that we could get a quick response. When someone had the corona virus and we needed to guarantee they were ready to go back to work, that we could have the test we needed exactly when we needed it and a quick response, that we could use that testing to make sure that anyone needed to be quarantined was quarantine right when they needed to be. Imagine that – how different that has been than what we’ve experienced, but testing everywhere all the time. That's where we have to get. But this additional community-based testing is going to help us a lot, because at least in the meantime we can focus on addressing some of the greatest needs in the city and some of these very painful disparities that have become clearer and clearer in this crisis. Now, to remind you, where did we focus initially? We didn't have enough testing, but the testing we had, what did we do with it? We focused on saving lives, testing for the folks who are most vulnerable, who are literally the patients in the hospitals that the doctors and nurses were most concerned about saving their lives and the test would tell them what they needed to know. That was job-one. Protecting those health care workers was the next thing we had to do to keep the hospitals going, to make sure they could serve us and if they needed to be home, if they needed to be quarantined, that they would be. And, of course, our first responders, keeping them healthy, keeping them safe, knowing who could be on the job, who needed to be home, who needed to be given care. That's how we set up with the limited testing we had. Now, we're focusing on the groups of people in this city who have been hardest hit by this disease and they're very, very pinpointed way. So, we're talking about folks and some of the lowest income communities in this city, people in communities of color that have borne the brunt of this crisis, immigrant communities, but very targeted to the places we've seen the biggest problems and the individuals who are suffering the most – obviously, we've said this for the beginning, folks who are older and have those preexisting conditions – those have been the folks who've been most vulnerable throughout this whole crisis, that's where we want to make sure the testing goes first.

So, last Sunday, I told you we'd be opening up these community testing sites around the city, all run through our public health system, Health + Hospitals, and directly serving those hard hit areas. So, today, the first centers open at Gotham Health in East New York, in Brooklyn, at Gotham Health at Morrisania in the Bronx, and the Vanderbilt Health Center in Staten Island. These will open today. On Monday, at the Sydenham Health Center in Harlem, in Manhattan; at the Queens Hospital Center on Monday as well – Health + Hospitals’ Queens Hospital Center in Queens. Those five locations, some opening today, some opening Monday. Now, what's the way it's going to work? This is specifically again about focusing on people with those preexisting conditions who are 65 or older and live in those particularly hard-hit areas. So, these test sites will be walk-in sites. It will be based on serving people who meet those particular criteria. And we'll get more details out today. The way for people to access that testing is to call 3-1-1, so that people going in, we know exactly who needs the test, who meets those criteria, comes from the community, we can tell them when to come in. There will be initially 2,400 tests per week across those sites, but that's going to ramp up quickly. I want to see that number double quickly. And that will depend, of course, on getting the test kits in that we expect momentarily. But once they're in, that will give us that supply. And the PPEs – and this has always been a bit of a struggle, to say the least. We're looking better for next week, but we have to make sure we have everything we need and, of course, the personnel as well. So, those are the things we need to put together, but I'm feeling more confident today than even a few days ago that those pieces are all going to come together, that's testing capacity up and running for those communities. As I said, some opening today, some opening Monday, and then we're going to ramp that number up as rapidly as possible. We want to reach everyone we can reach to keep people safe, that's the bottom line, and to particularly keep those safe who are most vulnerable.

We're going to accompany that with information and education, because the test is important, to say the least, but people need to know what to do with the results. And I want to remind all New Yorkers, if you test negative today, it does not mean you're out of the woods for good, and you still have to be very, very careful and cautious, particularly if you're one of those folks who is most vulnerable. It does not mean a negative test today is an all clear for the weeks ahead. It's not – got to still be very careful, still take those precautions. Positive test tells us something, of course, very important. And for folks who are vulnerable, that's a very tough moment when they get that positive, but it tells us immediately what we need to do to help them. It also confirms how important is for anyone who tests positive to isolate from the people in their life and in their household to the maximum extent possible. Now, some households can do that more easily than others depending on how your apartment or your home is laid out. There are a lot of people in this city who don't have a hell of a lot of choice because they're in a very, very tight circumstance in their home or their apartment. Some families doubled up, tripled up, particularly for folks who can't socially isolate at home properly, especially if they're symptomatic or even more so if they have a positive test, we want to make sure there's alternatives available. So, I announced yesterday, again, 11,000 hotel rooms coming online immediately to help folks who need to be quarantined. This is all moving quickly. So, anyone who needs that quarantine, who's in a situation where they can't properly socially distance from the people around them – again, they're symptomatic or they have a test positive – if they want to be in one of the hotel rooms, it will be provided to them for free. So, that's available now. We'll be acting on that immediately and it will fit directly with this community-based testing.

Okay, so that's one important piece. We also have to keep our focus always on our health care heroes. And they already are a priority for testing for sure, but we want to keep deepening those efforts. So, we are partnering with a private health care organization, One Medical, and with labor union 1199 SEIU that represents so many health care workers, and, together, we'll be opening five new sites beyond the ones I mentioned previously – five additional test sites, one per borough. Brooklyn and Queens will open now, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Manhattan will be open on Monday. So, these sites will be up and running quickly. Their testing capacity will be about 3,500 per week. And again, this is one we're going to be really clear about eligibility. The frontline health care workers who are members of 1199 SEIU, will have the opportunity to go there. Essential workers, including employees of adult care facilities and employees who care for people with disabilities, this'll be sites where they can get tested. And these people do such important work, I want to say to everyone who was in those adult care facilities, everyone who's caring for people with disabilities right now, again, you are among the unsung heroes of this crisis. It has not been easy for you. You deserve praise and appreciation and you deserve the opportunity to get the protection you need and the testing you need, and this'll be part of how that happens. And then beyond that, these sites will be open to New York City residents in each borough, 65 years old or older with preexisting conditions. So, sticking to that notion of the focus on folks who are older and have preexisting conditions. So, thank you to 1199 SEIU. Thank you to One Medical for this great effort. We're happy to partner with you and that will expand capacity greatly. Anyone needs to schedule an appointment and fits those criteria, you can call 1-8-8 – I'm sorry, 1-888-ONE-MED1 – it’s O-N-E-M-E-D, the number one. Or, go to onemedical.com and use the code NYCCARE30. So, between those two efforts, 10 new community-based testing sites in the places that need it most, scaling up fast. But again, this is a small beginning of where we – an example of where we really need to go, which is truly widespread testing so we can get out of this phase and move forward.

Now talking about getting out of this face, it's important to recognize it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to be a long fight. But if we get it right, we will thank ourselves. If we get it right the first time, months from now, we'll look back and say, thank God, we did that. One chance to get it right – that is what I believe is true for New York City. And this is a conversation I had with the President United States. I said, there's one chance to get the restart right. If you rush it, if you ignore the warning signs, if you minimize the dangers, you’re going to end up with a boomerang effect, and that's the last thing we want to see. So, we're going to do this step-by-step, be smart about it. And we understand it's going to take awhile, we understand it won't be pleasant. No one wants to go through this, but we are going to appreciate it because we're going to get it right. We're going to appreciate it when we're down the line a few months and we actually are able to steadily move towards normal and not see that boomerang effect. And so, we’ve got be smart about what to prioritize. I told you over and over, safety, health, food on the table, roof over your head – those are our core priorities. When we think about what we're going to allow and not allow, going forward, it fits those priorities exactly. So, one of the things we think about that we love – we love about this city, but doesn't fit those priorities, to be honest with you, is a lot of the special events. We look forward to them all year – the parades, the street fairs, the concerts, the festivals. It's a lot of what makes New York, New York. It's a lot of what we cherish. Literally, you know, we look forward to it 12 months a year until that day comes. We love those events, but what do we know about those events? It inherently means large numbers of people crowded together in a pretty small space. That's New York City, that's who we are, but guess what – that goes against everything that we need to do to fight back the coronavirus. So, we have to be smart. We love those things. We'll miss them when we don't have them, but they will be back. They will be back. And by knowing when it's time to temporarily let them go so we can get to a greater goal, we're going to actually look back and say that was the smart thing to do. So, right now, events in this city that had been permitted by our City government through April, those were already canceled. And we miss those already, but now it is time to be clear that non-essential City-permitted events for may need to be canceled as well. Not happy to tell you that, but I want to tell you the honest truth. It is the smart thing to do to protect the health and safety of New Yorkers. I don't think many of you watching right now are particularly surprised by this concept, but I think it's important to say it out loud and lock it in so people know what's really going on and so, people can plan, including these people who put together these amazing events. And we really honor them, we appreciate them, they know they do something so special for New York City every single year. They deserve some certainty too. So, things like the Brooklyn Half Marathon, things like Summer Stage in Central Park, things that were going to be happening in May or starting in May, we are making clear we're not issuing any permits for the month of May, We're canceling those events. Now, I want to be clear, these kinds of permits are for special events, community events, cultural events. This does not mean permits necessary for any kind of medical site – those, of course, will continue to be approved; for hygiene stations, those will be continue to be approved; and for anything related to food, one of those four basics we're focused on – farmer's markets, meal preparation, meal delivery, any sites needed for that will, of course, be permitted. And the same goes as I said, medical sites, those field hospitals, all that, of course.

Now, June will be here soon. And again, June is when we start to really feel the summer and even want those, those big, wonderful events more. But we’ve got a lot we’ve got to get done to be safe for June. We are far from out of the woods. So, we're talking to the people organize those big June events and a lot of really, really major events in June that we cherish. But we're talking to the people who really have the most important ownership stake in those events, the folks who organize them, put them together, a lot of them, spend the whole year planning them. We're talking to them now. This is important decision to make, whether it really makes sense to have those giant gatherings – and some of them are huge in June – whether it makes sense to have them or not. We'll talk it through the organizers. I'll come back soon with an update for all of you. But this is an area, again, if we have to make particular sacrifices, I think those huge gatherings which run so much risk for the health and safety of New Yorkers, those are things we're going to have set a real high bar on whether we want to continue that in the short term, because job-one is to get out of this crisis and move us forward.

Now, I want to talk about another thing that we need to do to get us out of the worst of this crisis, and it gets back to what New Yorkers have done so well. You have been absolute heroes at social distancing at putting on those face coverings. The shelter in place, stay at home, people have been amazing. You all had to learn how to do it in a few weeks, it goes against everything we're used to, but you've done it. Now, one of the things that I've emphasized is to keep us all moving forward, we got to keep doing that and we need enforcement sometimes to make sure that everyone understands. And NYPD, FDNY, Parks Department, Sheriff's Office, Buildings Department, many, many agencies have participated. They've done a great job. Part of why they've been able to identify and act on any problem – you know, a group of people gathering on a street or in a park; there's an overcrowded subway train; there's a grocery store or a supermarket that has aligned that's not socially distanced – we've seen these problems. Part of why we've seen a fast response by enforcement agencies is that people have been calling 3-1-1, and we need that. We need those calls to 3-1-1 to target where a problem is so we can get enforcement out immediately, solve the problem, save lives, protect lives. Okay. That depends, of course, on the 3-1-1 system functioning well. And, historically, it's functioned very well. It's actually a great part of New York City, something that actually has worked for so many New Yorkers, to have that place to turn 24/7 and get real answers and guidance. But there are problems that have emerged in the 3-1-1 system and I have been asking my team over the last weeks to do more and more quality control to check, because it seemed quite evident that we were depending on 3-1-1 more and more and we have to make sure it was working for everyone. And I want to just take this opportunity to thank everyone at 3-1-1, those folks who every day answer your questions and follow up on your needs and connect to you the right people. They are doing incredible work. I visited with them a few weeks ago. Thank you to everyone who works at 3-1-1, we need you more than ever. That is the obvious truth. But there are real questions about whether people can get through the right way, get the information they need in this crisis we're in. So, I want to thank one of our journalists on this city who's a veteran journalists – done great work for years, Juliet Papa of 1010 WINS, who raised the question to me yesterday at my press conference. And I want to say, today I'm praising a Juliet, but I want to say to all journalists out there, anytime you raise these concerns, I want to make a point to say thank you. Several journalists raised to me a similar issue – this was related to food – both what Juliet raised and some of our other colleagues raised about food delivery is not happening at Independence Plaza. That issue got addressed quickly, but I'm very appreciative that it was raised. This is, you know, the free press at its best, seeing things that need to be addressed, raising them so they can get fixed. So, Juliet, special thanks to you because you did the smart thing and you tested the 3-1-1 system yourself, and you found it was not providing the service that was needed for someone who was hungry that I said has to be the standard. A New Yorker is hungry, they need food, they call. If they're the kind of person who's vulnerable, who can't get out of the house, a senior can't get out of the house, a disabled person, they need a delivery, we need to make that delivery happen quickly, or we need to help get them connected to a local food pantry or soup kitchen who can get them food quickly. Whatever it takes, we need a system that works and works every time. So, as a result of Juliet's call, some important work was done yesterday. And I want to give a special thank you to Commissioner Jesse Tisch, who is our information technology leader in this administration. She did some great work helping to address these issues along with Deputy Mayor Laura Anglin. Thank you to both of you. So, here's the deal, 3-1-1 calls have grown exponentially during this crisis. Before – so, go back to a February – typically, 3-1-1 got something like 55,000 calls a day. The peak in April was 200,000 calls in a single day. So, to be able to address this level of demand, we're taking some immediate steps literally since yesterday morning. One, more and more we're going to prioritize for 3-1-1 that it'd be about the response to the coronavirus. There are a lot of other things that people turn to 3-1-1 for. We're going to more and more encourage people to go online and get that information, or use the 3-1-1 app. That's where we want to try and get people who have non-COVID-19 concerns more and more. But what we're doing specifically at 3-1-1 for folks who call in – and remember, a lot of folks are going to use the phone, the go-to for a lot of people will be the phone, particularly for seniors. We want – if you need food, you get an immediate response. Not be put on hold for 10 minutes, you get an immediate response. You get immediate clarity about when food will start to arrive.

So, that's going to be the standard, going forward to 3-1-1 – if you're calling about food, you go to the front of the line, you get an immediate response from a human being. We also want to make sure that things are absolutely crucial, like calling in those social distance violations, those must go to 3-1-1, or, if someone can report it online, that's even better, faster. You can go to nyc.gov. And now, you can send a photo directly. If you see a social distancing violation, take a photo, text it to 3-1-1-6-9-2. So again, just take that photo, text it to 3-1-1-6-9-2, or through the 3-1-1 app. All we need is the photo and the specific location. Just put the address down and we're good to go, and enforcement will happen right away. And then to keep 3-1-1 keeping up – to make sure, keep up with this demand, particularly the COVID-related issues, we're going to hire 120 more staff for 3-1-1 immediately. So, again, anyone who's got any concern related to the coronavirus, if you can go online to nyc.gov or use the app, that's ideal. But if you need to call 3-1-1, of course, the priority will be on 3-1-1 for coronavirus calls. The non-COVID, calls, if you do need to call through on one of us, the only way that you can communicate and you have a real concern, even if it's not related to coronavirus, please, whenever possible, try and do that later on the evening or on a weekend when it's a little slower. That would be really helpful if you can do that. So, you're going to see a much stronger a capacity at 3-1-1 immediately, because I am 100 percent clear with all of my colleagues in City government, those four basics, keeping people healthy, keeping them safe, making there's food on people's table, making sure there's a roof over their head. That's what we're doing. That's how we're going to handle this crisis. The food part we cannot miss on. If someone needs a meal, they need a meal, they need it right away. We've got to make sure that happens.

Now, I want to do the part of the report, the update each day that is in many ways the foundation of everything we'll do going forward, which is tracking our progress and what's going to help us on the pathway to getting back to normal. We have a high bar. We have a high bar here because we have to make sure we get it right. So, look at our indicators today – and the first one, again, is the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 cases and that number went down, thankfully. Again, two-day lag in the data, so from April 14th, 386; to April 15th, 329 – that's very good. The daily number of people in ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that number went down as well from 887 to 874, also moving in the right direction. Now, percentage of people tested positive for COVID-19 – citywide, the number went down from 55 percent to 46 percent. The only indicator that went in the wrong direction, and only by a little bit, was the public health lab testing – went up from 78 percent to 82 percent. Look, this was a good day – definite movement in right direction, not a perfect day yet. We want to have those really clear, positive days, good days, moving in the same direction over the course of 10 days to two weeks to start to then talk about the next steps we can take. But this is progress nonetheless. It all goes back to what all of you are doing and this is clearly a better set of indicators than what we saw over the last couple of days. So, definite progress and thanks to all of you for what you're doing.

Okay, speaking of thanks, want to thank some people who have really stepped up for us. And the, the big story here is what New Yorkers have done for each other, and the heroism of New Yorkers, and the ingenuity of New Yorkers, but we also want to thank everyone who's come forward to help us. And a lot of great examples today, helping our health care workers in particular. I want to thank Delta Airlines and Southwest Airlines that are providing free flights to get doctors and nurses and health care workers here to serve us, that we appreciate that deeply and previously have thanked United and JetBlue – really thank the airlines for stepping up to help make sure we have the health care personnel we need. To Harry's, which specializes in men's grooming, I want to thank them, because we all know so many of our medical personnel barely have had any time to take care of themselves in the middle of this fight. Harry's has donated a $500,000 worth of razors and lotions to Health + Hospitals health care workers. Thank you, very much appreciate it. Target just gave $50,000 to our fund for public health – thank you. Peloton – 90,000 N95 masks – this is fantastic. This is really one of the personal protective equipment that we need the most. So, the N95 masks, particularly appreciate it. Thank you to Peloton. Americares has sent us 300,000 pieces of PPE equipment. That includes masks, gloves, eyewear, very, very much appreciate it. Thank you, Americares. Now focusing on our students, our young people, In Motion Entertainment, donating 6,400 pairs of headphones to students in homeless shelters and temporary housing to help them really do well with remote learning. That's very much appreciate. And now many, many good examples today.

Here's the biggest, and this one's really fantastic, I want to thank the Open Society Foundations. They are working literally all over the world to address COVID-19 and I want to really appreciate the Open Society Foundations. They're so often looking to how to help people where, you know, they're not getting the help they deserve and need and they're oftentimes there even before governments are there and protecting people and uplifting people that others don't, so I'm so appreciative. $35 million flowing through the City of New York to help people in need. $20 million for the Immigrant Emergency Relief Fund and that will work through our Mayor's Fund. That is to help immigrants who are bearing the brunt of this crisis in so many ways. And that includes those immigrants who will not be getting any of that federal relief, and we have to be clear, there are neighbors, that are follow New Yorkers, they're part of our communities, but they are not being included in a lot of those important relief programs. I am so thankful for those relief programs to help everyday working people. We need them. But there's a lot of people who are working people that happen to be undocumented, who've been left out. This money will help them to have the basics for their families and keep going through this. And $15 million for our Fund for Public Schools for online learning, and to help provide support and care for the children of essential workers. That's fantastic. That's going to help us a lot.

A deep and profound thanks to George Soros for his kindness and generosity and everyone at the Open Society Foundations who made this happen and a special thank you to a dear friend of mine, Patrick Gaspard who runs the Open Society Foundations. Patrick used to work right here in this building. We worked here together during the administration of Mayor Dinkins and loves the city he grew up in deeply and has really come through for us. So to my old friend Patrick Gaspard, thank you brother. This is tremendously helpful and it's going to help so many New Yorkers.

So that shows you that a lot of people are stepping up, and that shows you that people see New Yorkers fighting back. They see New Yorkers helping each other. They see the amazing heroic health care workers, first responders. We see the world stirred by what New Yorkers are doing and the fact that folks are coming to the rescue in so many ways is because they see what New Yorkers are doing and they're moved by it. They're inspired by it. They're touched by it. We need our leaders in Washington to feel that same feeling. They're the missing piece here. Look, the federal government has been the elephant in the room in this entire crisis. We needed the testing. It wasn't there. We still need it. It's still not here, but the federal government has a chance to get it right and they could get it right literally today.

So I'm appealing directly to President Trump and to Senate Leader McConnell, here's a chance to do something heroic. Here's a chance to be as good as New Yorkers, and particularly in the case of President Trump, here's a chance to step up for your hometown. Look, all of you like to praise our health care workers and our first responders, all the leaders in Washington, but President Trump, Leader McConnell, don't just praise our health care workers, don't just praise our first responders, actually help them. There is right now an opportunity, negotiations happening right now in Washington on what's being called Stimulus 3.5. With literally the stroke of a pen, you could ensure that our health care workers, our first responders, all the public servants of the city have the security of knowing that their work can continue. That New York City will be able to provide the basic services necessary to help us out of this crisis and to help us towards recovery. Anyone who wants to see a recovery, anyone who wants to see the economy restart needs to understand that the American economy does not restart without the nation's largest city, without the economic center of this country. This is one of the great economic engines of America right here.

So morally, Mr. President, morally Mr. Leaders, you should want to make sure that that Stimulus 3.5 includes the money to make New York City whole, New York State whole, all cities and states hold that have lost billions upon billions of dollars in revenue and will never get it back and won't be able to fund basic services without it. You should want to do it because it's the right thing to do, but if you need a pragmatic reason, you will not be able to restart your economy, our economy, unless you get this right. This could happen today, literally today. So look, I've asked and I've asked nicely. Mr. President, your hometown needs you. Leader McConnell, your nation needs you. Let's get this right, right now. Everyone knows right now you two could get it done. And Mr. President, I dare say if you were to say out loud, we need to Stimulus 3.5 and we need to make sure that all cities and states are made whole, that are lost revenues replaced by the federal government. If you said it out loud, I guarantee you the Republican Senate would go along, so it's time to say it out loud.

With that everyone, let me turn to a few words in Spanish before we turn to questions from our colleagues in the media.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Okay, we will now turn to media questions and please let me know the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q and A. As a reminder, we have Dr. Barbot and Dr. Katz also available answer questions.

Mayor: Speak up a little more.

Moderator: The first question, we'll go to Andrew from NBC.

Question: Hi Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes. Andrew, how are you doing?

Question: Good, thanks. I hope you're doing well. A question is about the June events and the discussion you're now having with the organizers. Based on what you said yesterday, which is that you cannot envision a scenario where the beaches could be open this summer with groups of people. What is the discussion even about with these June organizers? Is there any scenario, for example, where the Pride Parade takes place?

Mayor: It's a great question, Andrew. Look, and again, I'm the first to say – it's important to frame this – none of us knows yet the future of what's going to happen with the coronavirus because Lord knows the coronavirus has thrown us a curve ball more than once and there's still no one on Earth or fully understands this disease. What I said about the beaches was we can't give you a plan to open the beaches because we don't know what's going to happen going forward. I would love it if we had sustained good news and progress and we could drive down those cases to such a small number that then the day could come where we could open the beaches. That would be amazing. But I'm trying to be honest with New Yorkers that I can't see that yet because we don't have the facts to back it up. As you just saw, we did the indicators for today, they were better but they're still not even beginning to be what we need them to be.

So when it comes to the events, again, we're doing them step by step. It's – now we’re in the second half of April, there's time to make sense of things. But I think your underlying point is fair. Can I envision as early as June mass gatherings like some of these huge events, they're beautiful events, but they're really mass gatherings. Hundreds of thousands of people, in some cases more than a million. I can't see it. But I want to talk to event organizers. I want my team to talk to them. I want to see what they're feeling. Look, I suspect a lot of them, from what I've heard so far, they don't feel confident that they can do the events properly. They don't feel confident that they could keep them safe.

So I want to hear what they want to do and I suspect some of them are going to say, hey, we're just not – we just don't feel good about it and we would prefer to have certainty, but we want to have that conversation because these again are truly huge important events. We'll do that quickly and we'll have the announcement quickly because we want to give people a clear picture going forward. But I think this is the thinking we're going to have to do from this point on is what kind of decisions do we have to make when to stay ahead of things, but to always focus on this number one truth, we got to get it right. We got one chance. We cannot allow the disease to boomerang back. So I don't see it for June, but we're going to have the conversation carefully and then have an announcement real soon.

Moderator: The next question is, Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Yeah. Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good morning, Juliet.

Question: Yes. And thank you for your very kind words and your response. You know, we're all out here trying to help. I followed up, as you asked, and I have a two-part question. I made the second call this morning to 3-1-1 and this is after WINS received many emails and tweets regarding, you know, various problems with the food distribution system. So I am glad that is being addressed as you said. So the call went much better today. I was directed to a food specialist who could register me, provide an interpreter, and directed me to food pantry locations, all well done and all I was – I was on hold for like a minute. We did have some emails yesterday involving language barrier, however. A Mexican family in the South Bronx had a language issue trying to get through on 3-1-1 and another pointed out that the Arthur Cunningham School in Brooklyn is listed as a free meal location, but that it’s stores were closed and that there was no personnel there April 6th and April 8th. So I guess I'm asking how will you be addressing that? What's online in coordination with what's out there on the street?

Mayor: Juliet, I give you points for persistence. I'm very much appreciative because this is exactly what helps us, honestly. We – I keep telling everyone on my team and they're all working through this crisis, you know, literally every day, 12, 14, 15 hours a day, nonstop since the beginning. So people are doing their damndest. But I keep saying quality control, a thing from the perspective of everyday New Yorkers trying to get access to this. So I again appreciate what you're doing to make sure that things are really what they're supposed to be. And I'm the first to say in a crisis, you know, it's understandable sometimes things are not what they're supposed to be because just there's so much going on, some signals get missed, but that's not acceptable to me. I understand it, but it doesn't make it any better. So the school you mentioned, we're going to follow up on that immediately. That's unacceptable entirely because we need people to go to those free meal locations and have total confidence that the meals will be there when they're supposed to be. If not, I have family who go hungry. That's unacceptable. So we'll follow up on this immediately to understand what happened to that location and fix it.

The translation is supposed to be available instantaneously. So again, that's another issue we'll address. If that isn't, there's something profoundly wrong because that's an – way before the crisis that was supposed to be available for anyone and everyone who asked for it or obviously needs it. We'll fix that immediately. That should be easy to fix. But I'm glad you are only on hold for a minute. I don't even want you to be on hold for a minute, is the truth. I'm going to keep pushing people that sometimes I get it, if just a whole lot of people called in simultaneously, you know, just dumb luck. I get it. Sometimes someone might have to be on hold even for a very, very brief period of time. But my goal is to not even have that and I'll tell you why, Juliet. Because I'm particularly concerned about a senior or someone vulnerable who is feeling worried, who's anxious, who doesn't literally know where their meals are going to be coming from and many of whom are not going to be confident when they're making that call. I wish they would assume that everyone's going to care and be there for them. But a lot of people, you know, understandably feel a little hopeless or feel like they're not being seen and heard. I don't want anyone to ever feel that.

So if someone calls, I want them to know immediately they're getting help. So I'm glad you had a better experience today. I want to make it better than that, even. But we will follow up for sure on these particular missteps and get them fixed. And again, thank you to you and to all your colleagues in the media. I will always endeavor in this crisis to say thank you, when you point out these things to us because I'm telling everyone we need quality control and I know people are trying to do it, but we're going to need even more and you guys are helping us to do that. So anytime you helped me do this work better, I will make sure to thank you.

Moderator: Next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. My question has to do with the focus on low-income neighborhoods for testing. I'm interested, first of all, how soon the test results will come. But mainly, I'm trying to figure out what's the rationale for focusing on a few neighborhoods other than to demonstrate that your administration cares about them. Now I don't see you yourself, said you test negative one day, you can test positive the next day, and we're a city in which, as you know, is a mosaic in which people are traveling around the entire city. So I'm not sure I understand exactly why a resident of the Upper East Side or Upper West Side or Dumbo isn't as important to the city in terms of testing as these neighborhoods.

Mayor: Now, Henry, respectfully, I know it's an honest question. I appreciate that you often ask very thoughtful questions. But this one I'm just going to contest. It's not about whether people are important. Now, everyone's important. Every New Yorker we're here to serve and everything we're doing is for 8.6 million people. This is about sharp, clear disparities that are becoming clearer all the time, that align immediately to things that we know that are facts. We know more and more, not only what general kinds of communities are bearing the brunt, but specific neighborhoods that are bearing the brunt. We know the kind of people, the kinds of individuals who are most vulnerable are folks who are older, have preexisting conditions, and in so many of those neighborhoods, lower incomes, less access to health care for a long time, particularly vulnerable people. That's what we've been seeing with all the data that's coming out. By getting to people quickly, as often as we can with the limited testing we have now, but again, something I expect to grow greatly over time, we're going to be able to protect people. 

If someone is infected, we have a greater chance of protecting them if we know that. If they're not, that's good news, but we're going to keep educating people to never get overconfident about it. It is not perfect. Perfect would have been 100 percent widespread testing from day one, but it will help in a targeted fashion. And what we're talking about here, 6,000 tests a week to begin between the two initiatives, that's going to ramp up greatly. If you're one of those 6,000 individuals who's vulnerable and you're getting the testing, it's very important to you and we're going to keep getting it to more and more people over time. So no, it is not a statement of anything but focusing on the people whose lives are in greatest danger. And that's what we'll continue to do

Moderator: Next, we have Anna from the Daily News.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to see if you had any response to some Council legislation that Corey Johnson is introducing next week that would require the city to close streets to cars. They say up to 75 miles is the goal. I wanted to see if that's something that you would be willing to work with them on and if you could talk about it in context of a lot of the stuff happening in summer that is going to be canceled or potentially canceled like pool hours and beaches. So maybe streets would be an alternative for kids to just get some air.

Mayor: Yeah. Anna, I'm always, always ready to talk with the Council, with Speaker Johnson and the Council about any idea they have. Over these last years there’s been a real partnership and a lot of good work together and we've always been able to resolve issues positively.

On this particular issue, the important point for me is safety - health. That's what it comes down to. The safety issue, the health issue. Whatever we do isn't helping us to turn the corner on this crisis. Is it keeping New Yorkers safe? The proposal – I haven't seen the details. I'll look forward to seeing the details, but the proposal I think builds on some of the notions we've seen in other parts of the country. But again, and we talked about Oakland the other day, very, very different realities and plans that would not work here, if adopted the way they were in other places.

So I want to make sure that anything we do with our streets keeps in mind the following, that we do not put any New Yorkers in danger, we do not create a situation where people think they can walk in the middle of the street, but in fact there's still vehicles there. We do not create a situation where emergency vehicles and crucial deliveries can't get through. We do not create a situation where we need to use enforcement personnel we still don't have enough of drawing them off of other things that are crucial. These are my concerns. This – you know, we're going to look at how everything evolves – maybe the situation opens up over time and we have other options. So I’m going to hold a high bar for that. But we look forward to a real conversation with the Council.

Moderator: Next is Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Marcia, how are you?

Question: Good. I actually have a follow-up question about summer. I'm wondering, you know, given the fact that we often have a lot of hot days, heat-waves, hundred degree days in New York City, I wonder if you're working on a plan or you're going to work on a plan to what you will do in terms of, you know, opening up streets, opening up parks, allowing cooling centers to open because people have no – right now there's no pools, there's no beaches. You've canceled a lot of public events. People are going to want to leave their hot apartments. What will they do? Will you need to have the NYPD do special enforcement? And also if somebody were to give you $12 million to open the pools, like a private donor, would you accept that as a possible solution? Especially in these hot days when you know probably tempers are going to flare, people are want are going to want to go out and get out of their hot apartments. What's the city going to do?

Mayor: Excellent questions. So, okay, thank God it is April 17th. So we have some time to plan, but this is exactly the kind of thing we're going to be going into planning mode on now. Your first question, absolutely crucial. While we're dealing with one crisis, one problem, we can't take our eye off of other problems. So today we're not dealing with heat waves, but we sure did last summer, so we should be ready. You know, when you think about June, July, August, that's when we have to be ready for and I think you're exactly right. If we don't have some of the options we're used to having four providing cooling, what do you do? And I think what will be important in the discussion with our health care leadership is how do you balance the factors. If we're at that point where we still need to practice social distancing, you could in principle have a cooling center, for example where folks could go to get cool but with clear social distancing rules.

Now the pools are hard and this is something we're grappling with. We did not put the pools in the budget at this point because of everything. Because we have taken a huge hit on revenue and we just don't have the money to spend. But also because if there's something that defines people getting together in a small space, it's, you know, lots and lots of – I've been to the pools in summer. Last summer I visited a number of the public pools. I mean it’s a huge number of people crammed together, there’s locker rooms, there's lines, it's everything you don't want if you're trying to still use a strategy of shelter in place and social distancing. So the pools didn't make sense for a variety of reasons.

It's not just if a donor came along, we would be very grateful for anyone who wanted to help us out, but the pools until we are in a much better situation, health and safety wise with this disease, the pools present immediate challenges. But I think your bigger point is an excellent one. We have to have a plan to prepare for the potential of a hot summer and make sure we can keep people safe in that vein. We will, we will for sure. And we'll publish it when we have it, but it will be a different kind of plan than what we've had in the past.

Moderator: Next, we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor. Good morning. I'm wondering if you can tell us where do you see the city coming in on the reopening scale for President Trump's plan? You know, he listed June, July, August, September. Where are we at? And then I just wondered if you could respond to former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe who said that if you close pools, city kids, largely minority kids who don't know how to swim, are going to get relief in the city, rivers and, park ponds and lakes and drown.

Mayor: Yeah. I just fundamentally disagree with him. We've seen already, New Yorkers of all ages adapt to this really, really tough crisis and we have to protect people and we cannot set up a situation where we gather large numbers of people together and then exacerbate the coronavirus crisis again. We're going to make sure that whatever we face up ahead, there's going to be a lot of enforcement out there, a lot to protect people. But no, we do not see, and we've never seen our young people swimming in city rivers in large numbers that just, I don't buy that. I think it's right to say whatever we do, we have to be careful. Yes, we need enforcement. Yes, but no, no, you cannot say, let's do something that's going to exacerbate the coronavirus crisis and put people's health and safety in danger because we fear some other outcome. No, let's do the smart thing and then make the adjustments we need to, to keep people safe. That's to that point.

To the point about where we are on the spectrum, we're obviously different from any other places. Julia. We have to be smart and careful. We have borne the brunt. We've been the epicenter. We're the most densely populated city in the country. We have special challenges here. We're going to be careful. We're going to be smart. So I think, you know, the plans that have been put forward so far are very broad, obviously. It's clear that we're going to take this slowly and carefully and we need our indicators. One of the things we have, which I actually think predated some of what the President's put forward is we put out very clear indicators that we've said have to move in the same direction for 10 days to two weeks to even begin to start trying to relax some of the standards and then to do that to see if it's working. [inaudible] keep watching those indicators. It has to keep working. So no, I think we're going to slow and careful. Other places may feel that can forge ahead and they better be right if they do that, they better make sure they know what they're doing and they're doing it right and they better be watching their indicators carefully. We're going to make sure we prove that we're getting out of the woods before we take some of those steps.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Mayor: Hey, Mr. Mayor and everyone on the call. I wanted to ask – it's a two-parter. I'll be quick though. The first is the city's Health + Hospitals announced today that 26 of their employees working in city hospitals died but they haven't released where they were working or who they were. And I'm curious why there is this sort of lack of information being shared, and the second is and it's bouncing off Julia’s question, do you really think that you can responsibly say that people won't go in the ocean when it's 95 degrees if there's no lifeguards, they go in unguarded beaches even when there isn't a global pandemic. So do you have a plan to expedite this plan? You will you expedite the release of this plan because you have a lot of worried people about what's going to happen at the city’s beaches this summer? Thank you.

Mayor: Yeah. So wait, Katie, on the second part, I'm going to speak to that about the first part again. I'm sorry I was distracted for a moment on, did you have that or do you want to just to repeat it.

Question: Oh, which one do you need me to repeat? I'm sorry.
Mayor: First part of your question.

Question: First. Is Health + Hospitals, 26 employees. It was announced that they died. They won't release where they work or who they were. I want to know why this data isn't being released. And the second is safety.

Mayor: Thank you. Look, again in the middle of a crisis, the first thing has been saving lives and you know, making sure we were doing all we could to protect people. And I remind you as recently as Sunday, April 5th, we expected it to be going into a huge upsurge and that's where all energy was going to make sure the hospital beds, the equipment, the doctors and nurses were ready. In the last days we've had a chance to have a little bit of a relief and do more work on things like giving updates about specific things that happen and where they've happened. And that's important. So yes, I agree with you. We need to keep getting out more and more information. I'll talk to Health + Hospitals and certainly let them know it's important to put out the details. We'll do that.

The question of the beach, that I want to separate the point that was made about the rivers versus the beaches. My point was we have not seen over the years – I've been watching for a long time, we have not seen large numbers of city kids swimming in our rivers in generations. So that was my point. I do not believe that is going to happen. If we saw anything like that, we would create the enforcement to deal with it. I think your point about beaches is a very different point. I understand that there'll be a temptation and we have to guard against it and that's going to be a lot of enforcement. The beaches are there, but they are a finite area. We can put out a lot of enforcement to protect against it. But again, when you think about not doing something that makes the crisis worse, this is the bottom line. The pools don't, I don't even think I have to lay it out to people. I think people are smart. Lines of people to go into the pool, then they go into the locker room and the pool, which is a small area. Then they go into the pool, which is a small area. You could attempt to do that with social distancing. Good luck to you. I think you'd have a very, very tough experience and we don't have the money for it. The beaches are big open spaces. That's true, but big open spaces historically where a huge number of people gather and we are not in a position to do that yet. I'm now simply making sure the opposite problem doesn't happen, that people go there of their own volition and they're hot and they want to go in the water and it becomes dangerous – we have to guard against that. We will have a plan to guard against that and we will have a plan to deal with heat waves, but we're not going to exacerbate the crisis before us because this is what's killing people right now. This is what's putting people in danger right now and if we don't turn the corner, we'll be in this state for a long time. So I'm not going to, you know, say yes to something that I think will make the situation worse, but we will protect people. If we have to come up with new ways to do it, of course, we will.

Anymore?

Moderator: We have time for one more. Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you about some of the budget cuts. There's been some concern about how the cuts affect young people specifically lower-income young people and you've already been asked some of these questions about the pools and some of the other programs, but do you have any sort of plan to mitigate that specifically for young people or lower-income young people – the impact of some of these programs not being available that summer?

Mayor: Yeah, Jeff, what we are working on now is, you know, different scenarios. We just could not both because of the financial crisis we're in, but also just because it was so unclear what would be possible this summer. We couldn't move ahead spending a lot of money when we're still at a point where literally no one's supposed to be traveling around who’s non-essential. No one's supposed to be gathering. It just didn't make sense. We're going to have ready a variety of options. Department of Education's working on this right now. If we're in a very tough situation like we're in now, what would we do to continue distance learning and to do things to engage young people from home over the summer? If the situation improves, what are our options? That's being planned out right now. But the traditional summer programming was just, it was not possible to approve it in this atmosphere.

Again, I think our path out of this crisis will take time. So we'll do everything we can possibly do online and giving kids options they can use from their home. And then if we see, you know, a real break in the clouds, if we see real sustained progress, actual indicators that are factual, telling us we can start to turn the corner, then we'll do that carefully, slowly. We'll keep watching those indicators. That might open up the possibility of doing some things differently. Even as I said with the beaches, I'm saying right now we're not going to be in a position to open them next month when they would normally open. Let's imagine a scenario where we had absolute proof that we had turned the corner where there's very few cases anymore, there’s strong containment. That's a scenario where you could talk again about opening beaches and other activities for young people. So we'll have different scenarios ready. But the physical ones, the ones where people gathered together in large numbers, those just can't be approved until we see constant progress. We'll have plan A and plan B ready for sure.

Okay. Everyone. Thank you. And just, you know, remembering that we know that what we've been doing is helping us towards that day. We want to get back to normal. Stick to the plan, cause it's working. We're working every day to get that testing we need. Again, we need the federal government to come forward, especially with that stimulus support, that's going to be absolutely crucial to getting back to normal. Think of it this way, New Yorkers, every one of you are doing what you're supposed to do. Our health care workers are doing what they're supposed to do. Our first responders are doing what they're supposed to do. So many people are stepping up. Washington needs to step up, make us whole financially so we can survive so we can provide basic services. Help us, help ourselves with testing, and that's the pathway to getting back to normal. Won't be easy, but we will get there together.

Thank you.

2020-04-20 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, we start a new week. And as we start this week, it's a chance to really, think about something that's kind of different than what we normally think about. I want everyone to just take a minute, really take a minute to break out of whatever you're doing right now, whatever you normally would do this time of day, even the middle of this crisis, and put yourself in the shoes of the people who are saving lives right now. Think about our doctors, our nurses, our health care workers. For a moment, try to feel, try to imagine what their lives had been like for these last two months. You, every one of us has some kind of daily routine, and we're trying to make sense of our daily routines in the middle of this crisis, but think about the daily routine for a doctor, for a nurse, for anyone in one of our hospitals and how it really is anything but routine what they're going through right now. They wake up each morning and go directly into battle. That's the reality they face today and they have been for weeks and weeks. They all are in the places that are the epicenter of this epicenter that is New York City. And you think about this crisis affecting our whole nation, our city has been the epicenter, but our hospitals have been the place where this horrible, painful crisis has played out most deeply. And they, these heroes, have been the ones who just every single day walk through those doors to confront whatever is thrown at them. Now, they are fighting an enemy they've never seen before and they're fighting an enemy that the rest of us fear. But they go to face every single day. They do that thing we always talk about with first responders, then run toward the danger. Day after day, these heroes are saving lives, and it's even more powerful, more profound to think about the fact that they're fighting an enemy, they cannot see. They're fighting an enemy no one fully understands, but they have not for a moment run from that responsibility or shirk from that responsibility. They keep fighting.

Now, these are warriors fighting a different kind of war than we've ever seen. And we would never send our warriors into battle without armor, without ammunition. We would never do that. When you think about a soldier, when you think about our armed forces, we would never imagine sending someone to battle and saying, oh, you know what, we don't have a helmet for you, we don't have a gun for you. That would be literally unthinkable. So, we have to understand that for these heroes in our hospitals, the personal protective equipment is their armor, is their ammunition. All the things they need, the equipment, the supplies, are to keep them alive and protect them, protect their families so they can keep fighting this war. And we work every day to get them what they need. And yet, we see the profound challenge that every city, every state, every country on earth is trying to find the exact same things for their health care workers and there's simply not enough in this country, there's not enough in this world. And so, it's always a race against time. So, we're going to keep talking about these PPEs. But I don't want you to hear, you know, think of a product on a shelf somewhere, I want you to think about the armor for our heroes, the ammunition for our soldiers in this battle. I want you to recognize how hard they have been to come by and how we have to fight every single day to find everything we need. And that's why we're going to build more and more of these things and manufacturing and create them right here in New York City because it's the right thing to do. And we literally don't have a choice. We're going to keep demanding the federal government provide us what we need for these heroes, but we know those demands sometimes are met, sometimes they're not. We're going to scour the market all over the nation, all over the world, but we know how unreliable that has been. So, the point is to think of each of these. These items is exactly what we say, the personal protective equipment – think about protecting our heroes. And now, I'm going to talk to you about where we stand. I think it's yet another reminder of how every week, every day this is a fight to stay one step ahead of this crisis to make sure we protect people. But it's never been easy since the very beginning and it won't be easy going forward either until we get to a very much better place.

So, let me update you on where we stand with our supply of personal protective equipment and the other things we need, the equipment we need. And there is good news in the first instance, because, compared to a few weeks ago, we definitely have a better situation. I've talked to you a lot about Sunday, April 5th. That was a crucial day where it looked like the supplies and equipment were not going to be there when we needed them and the crisis was going to grow. And, thank God, the crisis to some extent has leveled off and more supplies and equipment have come in. But, again, we are far from out of the woods. We're just in better shape than we were at the worst point. And remember, I want to say this because our health care professionals deserve for all of us to understand this, what we're providing them is still have that crisis standard that the CDC has set – the Centers for Disease Control. It means in a wartime dynamic, in a crisis dynamic, this is a level of protection that will still help them. It's by no means the level of protection we want to achieve in better times. We want to give them so much more. So, by that crisis standard, we do have a sufficient supply for this week. We have begun, it'll get us through to Sunday and that means the N95 mass, the surgical masks, the face shields, the gloves. These things are constantly being delivered to hospitals more and more to nursing homes as well, and to first responders, to all of our agencies that protect us. Those supplies, by the crisis standard, we have enough for this week. We also, thank God, have enough ventilators. We’ll be saying more about ventilators this week. And that's an area where we came from behind and we've made a lot of progress and the situation is much better than what it was a few weeks ago.

But there's been a growing problem, and this problem we have not found a solution to yet – that is the surgical gowns. And these are crucial because they protect our health care workers when they're doing some of the most sensitive work and some of the work that really makes them most vulnerable. Now, it got to the point where it's very clear that we were not going to be able to buy enough on the open market no matter what we did. It got to the point where it was clear. Sometimes the federal government has gotten us supplies or the state has, but those have been very uneven. And we always appreciate it, but we can't say it's reliable or an abundant supply. So, we made the decision to manufacture our own here in New York City, and that is now starting to become a major part of the equation, because it's the one thing we can depend on. But even with that, we do not have a secure supply. We're using fallback items like coveralls that certainly provide protection, but, even with the fallbacks, we are not sure we're going to have enough to get to Sunday of this week. We're fighting every way we can to find more, but that's how tight this situation is. This is an area I'm really concerned about and we're going to work every way we can. So, I want to immediately say, I'm making an appeal to the federal government, because if there's any place that might be able to find a supply that is not yet been tapped, it is the federal government. We need more surgical gowns in New York City and we need them now. And I have reiterated this request over the weeks. I will go today and reiterate it again, but we're trying our best to create our own in the numbers we need, and those numbers are very, very large – that's the truth – but we need the federal government immediately to try and help us find solutions even just to get to the end of this week.

Now, I want to give credit. When the federal government does something right, I'll also say that. And here's an example of them doing something right. They did not have a substantial supply. We asked over a week ago, knew that this was a growing crisis, and I do want to say what they did come up with is deeply appreciated – 265,000 Tyvek suits to help our public hospitals. And that is helpful for sure. And I want to thank everyone who was involved in that effort. I particularly worked with Peter Navarro in the White House, who has been very responsive. I want to thank Peter and everyone who worked to get us those Tyvek suits. That helps a lot. But again, we need a much, much greater number to move forward. So, the other thing that we asked for, we said, if you can't get us actual surgical gowns – and imagine, the greatest country in the world, you know, the richest, most powerful country in the world, and we can't get surgical gowns for our largest city to even get through a week. It says so much about what we're learning from this crisis about the madness of so many of the supplies we need for health care and for protection of our people are not even made in this country and not even available or can't even be moved quickly. It certainly speaks to the lack of use of the Defense Production Act to build these kinds of supplies on a much greater level. There's a lot of things wrong here. But I will say, that when we couldn't get the surgical gowns, I said to Peter Navarro, can you get us fabric, because at least we have fabric, waterproof fabric, we can start to manufacture more and more of our own gowns here. And he did come through, and a group of other folks from the industry – the textile industry came through. I want to thank everyone who's a part of that effort and we'll list them out soon so we give all the thanks that are due. But we've got enough fabric in now to make 400,000 gowns. That's substantial, but, again, nowhere near the need we have. But I'll still say, if we can make 400,000 gowns, that's 400,000 times that our health care workers are protected. And I certainly am very appreciative for that. 40,000 will be made now. That full 400,000 will be made by May 23rd. We're going to try and speed that up, but we're literally building a new industry right away in this city and my goal is to see it expand rapidly. This is not a product that was made here in New York City. We want to see it become a major, major part of what we do as we fight this battle. But we're going to need a lot more than that to get through.

Now, let me talk to you about another piece of this reality we've been facing. A few weeks ago, we went through something that was a huge challenge. We saw a major, major uptick in the number of calls to EMS – 9-1-1 calls on a level we had never seen literally in our history. The kind of records that were set were the kind of records you never want a set of the most calls to 9-1-1 ever. Our EMTs, our paramedics fought back. I want to thank Commissioner Dan Nigro and everyone at FDNY for the really powerful, smart, you know, calm, steady way they handled this crisis in a way they fought back. And now, I am really pleased to say we've seen a rebound. We've seen really big improvement, Still, a lot to do, but FDNY held the line, EMS held the line. Our EMTs and paramedics worked long hours. They saved a lot of lives. They fought back. There's no question that we are not out of the woods yet. So, I'm saying there's been a rebound, but there's still a lot more to this game. But the numbers are coming down substantially and getting much closer to normal. So, I want to give you an update on that and just a sense of how extraordinary the surge we saw was, going back to March 30 – a number that's just astounding – we got 6,527 medical emergencies in one day. Never seen anything like that. By this last Saturday, April 13 – excuse me, April 18th – this last Saturday, April 18th, the number was down to 3,485. So, not quite half, but getting close to half the number of calls that came in just about three weeks earlier. So, Saturday was 3,485. When you compare that to the average for last year – the average day last year, it was actually below the average. The average last year was 4,196 on a typical day. So, thank God, that number has come way down. There’s still a lot to do, but that's giving us real relief. We also, of course, had a huge challenge, ensuring that we could respond in this crisis with so many more calls. And, obviously, the most urgent, the most life and death calls got prioritized, but if you take the average across the board, in March, that average was just over 10 minutes on the response time. In the last two weeks, it's gone down to – up until Friday of this last week, it went down to eight minutes, 46 seconds. Now, on Saturday, April 18th, that went down to six minutes, 43 seconds. So, something’s, again, profoundly changed. Many fewer calls, much faster response time, thank God for that. Also, the number of FDNY personnel who had been on leave – a sick leave continues to go down. So, again, 1,446 and returned to service – a much lower sick leave level now than we saw at the peak. The same with for fire and for EMS – the same thing. So, EMS has now almost a thousand members who have returned from dealing with COVID-19 and we see the number of folks on sick leave going down. Long way to go, but real progress for sure.

Now, one of the things that tied us over, I want to give a lot of thanks to FEMA. And so, this is the federal government doing something really good, and I want to give credit where credit is due. And I've talked to Pete Gaynor, who's the administrator for FEMA nationally – a really, really good guy who's really been there for New York City many may times. Tom Von Essen, our former fire commissioner from the days of 9/11, who now is the FEMA regional administrator. They've both been absolutely fantastic. When they saw that FDNY, EMS were struggling so much, they reached out immediately and got ambulances, and EMTs, and paramedics from all over the country. And I had that real amazing experience going to meet a lot of these good, good people who came from around the country to help us and to thank them on behalf of all New Yorkers. And folks came from California and Alabama and Florida, all over the country. And particularly met ambulance crew from Kalamazoo, Michigan – two really good guys that drove all night to get to New York City because they just wanted to help out. And that has made a huge difference. That's really been one of the X factors and giving relief to EMS and helping them through. I'm happy to report the FEMA has helped us again, and just in the last week we've added another hundred ambulances from around the country. So, now, from FEMA, we have 350 ambulances active with 790 EMTs and paramedics that come from 19 states of the union. This is truly America's stepping up to help New York City, just like New York city has so many times sent our heroes and our first responders out to help folks all over the country in the middle of their challenges and disasters, and folks are really coming to bat for us. So, we expect this group now to take us through basically the month of April and continue to provide a lot of relief and support for our EMTs and paramedics, help them through – I'm sorry, I should have say past April, another 30 days, my apology – into May – to the end of May – and to give a lot of relief to our EMTs and paramedics who, again, they've done so much in these last weeks. They continue to need that support and that teamwork and it's continuing to come thanks to FEMA. So, very good news.

Now, a couple of days ago we talked about the fact that as we evaluate where we're going, going forward, we keep recognizing the power of what people are doing, what every-day New Yorkers are doing. Again, I'm going to say thank you a lot of times because you've been amazing at social distancing. You've been amazing at shelter in place. It's not easy, but you've been doing it really, really well. I want to be very clear, we're going to be smart about how we come back. We're going to be smart about how we turn a corner. We're not going to let our foot off the gas prematurely. We're not going to run the risk of this disease reasserting itself. So, we're going to be going in stages as we work that slow, steady road back to normal. And we already miss so much of what was part of our everyday lives. A lot of us are missing sports, both playing sports, watching sports. We're missing all sorts of community gatherings, family gatherings. There’s so much we miss right now and it's almost like it's impossible to count all the things that are gone that we love and we miss. And this is the time of year where you start to have more and more big public events, the street fairs, the festivals, parades, outdoor concerts, outdoor plays, things that are really a beautiful part of the year in New York City. That's all true, but we also know compared to all the basics we're focused on right now, compared to people's health and safety and food, shelter, all the things we're trying to guarantee for New Yorkers, and especially compared to the big question – how do we come back safely, smartly? These kinds of community events, we love them, but they're not what we need right now, they're not the most essential things, and we have to be smart about it. And we have to also recognize when thousands and thousands of people gather in one place, of course that goes against everything we're trying to do with social distance in a shelter in place and everything we're trying to do to bring ourselves back.

So, a few days ago I said that a city permits for events scheduled for the month of May have been canceled. I told you we were going to talk to the organizers of events in June, which includes some really big important annual events. We have had those conversations and this probably will not surprise you, but I'm now reporting today that we will cancel city permits for June events as well. It's not a happy announcement but it's one we have to make. And look, a lot of these events will be postponed. I want to be clear, the permits are being canceled for June, but the event organizers, a lot of them are looking at doing something later in the year, and we're going to work with them on that. And, again, I think the fact that they're postponing now is actually going to help us get to that point later in the year where things can open up and be better. And then, we're going to work closely with them to find the right time and place to do what they do each year. The bottom line, of course, is to think about safety, to think about saving lives, protecting people's health, speeding us to that day when we get more normal. So, this is the right thing to do and this is what we are doing. But I will say, obviously, I will note three events in particular that are just highlights of the whole year – the Salute to Israel Parade, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and the Pride Parade. And this was – you know, this year is the 50th anniversary of the Pride Parade, and it's a very, very big deal. That march is such an important part of the life of this city, but this year in particular was going to be something that was a historic moment. Look, we're going to miss all three of them in June, but they will be back, and we will find the right way to do it, working with all the event organizers. And that joy and that pride that all of these events bring, that celebration, will be back. We're going to do it when it's the right time.

Now, to the question that we turn to every day, how are we doing overall? And we have these three indicators we keep coming back to tell us so much. And it’s a high bar, but we wanted to set a high bar to make sure we get it right. So, what I would say, what we are seeing day after day is progress in many of the categories. We still haven't hit that perfect note we want to hit, which is getting all three of categories to go down together for a long period of time. But we see consistently most of the categories going in the right direction. And so, something is moving positively because of everything people are doing and it says, just keep doing it. First of all, the first indicator, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that is down – good news – down from 317 to 212. That's a really good drop. The daily number of people in ICU across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that is up, although it's up by just a little bit – 849 to 853. So, not the right direction, but notable that it's a very, very small increase. The percent of people who tested positive for COVID-19 citywide, down from 38 percent to 34 percent. Public health lab, down 84 percent to 67 percent. So, this is not a perfect daily report, but it's getting better and it's damn close to what we're looking for. Let's see if we can keep pushing. Everyone, keep doing what you're doing so we can get this tracking to start moving consistently in the right direction and that's going to give us the chance to really start to make the moves towards a more normal life.

So, let me close with this. We said from the beginning of this crisis, it's like nothing we've ever seen. We're fighting an invisible enemy, an enemy no one understands, and there's no timeline here, there's no ground rules, there's no playbook. No one knows exactly how this will go. Anyone who tells you they know exactly how this is going to go is lying to you. What we can say though, one thing we have heard universally is this is a crisis that has an end point. Everything we know about the nature of this disease is that there is a point where we turn a corner. That doesn't mean it won't be back in the future. It doesn't mean there won't be challenges. We obviously all want to see that day where there's a vaccine and a cure, but this crisis will end at some point. The question is, are we strong enough? Are we tough enough? Are we resilient enough as New Yorkers to fight our way through to that point? The answer is a resounding yes. You have proven it already in so many ways. The heroic health care workers, first responders, they've proven it over and over again. But everyone in this city who's contributing in so many ways to this fight has proven it. So, I've no doubt we're going to get there. I know it's going to be a tough road. I know it's not going to be simple. I know it's going to be a long road. Now, how do we get there? We'll keep coming back to the testing we need to allow us to make that transition to when we have a low level of transmission of this disease and we can really start to get to normal. Can't do it without the testing. But the other thing is, we cannot do it if we don't get help from Washington DC, it's as simple as this. Think about it for a moment, this city, this heroic city that has been fighting this battle, epicenter of the crisis for the United States of America, fighting so often alone without help from the federal government from the very beginning when the tests weren't there, to the many may times we've asked for help and it hasn't come. I will always give credit for when the help did come. I'll always say thank you for that. But we still don't have a clear picture on testing. And the one thing that I've asked the President for lately that should be the easiest part of the equation is to help New York City through this crisis, give us the financial support to make us whole, to actually balance our budget, pay our first responders and our public servants who are doing this work, because, you know what – and I'll address this to the President again – you know, Mr. President, you know what we're doing right now? We are saving lives here in New York City. We are spending hundreds of millions of dollars now, it's going to be billions of dollars to save lives. We are not hesitating. We're not for a moment doing anything but what is right to protect New Yorkers and to protect all Americans by beating back this disease. We estimate by the end of this calendar year the City of New York will have spent $3.5 billion to save lives and protect people in this city. The federal government is not stepping up. You, Mr. President, are not saying, I see your burden, I see the fight you're waging, let me offer a helping hand, let me save the day by taking that burden off of New York City. In fact, Mr. President, you know, it was quite clear when the airline industry was in trouble you were quick to act. You gave them $58 billion. But when New York City, and cities all over the country, states all over the country had been pleading in the middle of a huge budget crisis where we can't provide the services that our people need going forward, we're not going to be able to have a recovery, you are absolutely silent. I'm challenging you to open your mouth. I think I may be the first person in history to challenge Donald Trump to speak up. He's not shy. But it's amazing, he was asked yesterday at his press conference and he barely could say a word about the need for a stimulus program that would actually help America’s cities and states.

So, everyone's watching. Mr. President, you say the word and Mitch McConnell will act, the Senate will act, we can be made whole and we can actually help restart the nation's economy and move a recovery. But if you don't act, we're just not going to have what we need to move this city forward to help our people, to protect our people, to help our nation. We're not going to have it. So, I don't know what more I have to say but that is the truth. And there's still time to act right now in Washington. That stimulus bill is being discussed right this minute. You know what? There's even some bipartisanship. I'm hearing it from mayors all over the country, Republican and Democrat. You're seeing it from governors, Republican and Democrats saying the federal government has to provide this help. Even yesterday, two senators – Republican Senator Cassidy from Louisiana, Democrat Senator Menendez from New Jersey put forward a $500 billion plan to help cities and states recover. Even in Washington, there are people trying to act in a bipartisan fashion to move us forward. Mr. President, you're the only one who's missing an action right now. Why don't you step up and say this is the right thing to do? And you would be doing something for this whole country in our time of need.

To conclude, let me say a few words in Spanish, and then we'll go to questions from the media.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: With that we will turn to our colleagues in the media and as always, please let me know the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have Commissioner Negro, Commissioner Criswell and Commissioner Barbot on the line. With that we will start off today with Debralee from Manhattan Times Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. How are you?

Mayor: Good morning. Debralee.

Question: So Mr. Mayor, in light of these ongoing cancellations announced today of these large scale public events, of youth summer employment programs and continuing staying at home measures for really the duration, essentially the first half of the summer. You were bound to see these moments of resurgence, of surreptitious gatherings, you know, whether there be young people socializing at our barber shops on weekends or the religious gatherings at [inaudible] and other instances. We heard of both just over the weekend and they were likely to pop up again. But in reports you're seeing young teenagers being arrested and in some instances you're seeing nothing happen where, you know, the police officers show up and sort of shrug their shoulders and ask people to disperse. You know, what are the strictures that are being put in place? What are the assurances that you're providing that there's one standard as folks continue to adjust to the new normal and some communities are not being penalized in ways that others are not?

Mayor: Debralee, it's a great question. I'm going to say that I've asked about the facts and I don't think the facts bear out on equal treatment, meaning we do not have – I'm really sensitive to this point and concerned about it. I'm glad you're raising it. I won't tolerate unequal treatment. I've had this conversation with Commissioner Shea and Chief Monahan, Chief Pichardo, that we – the bottom line is this, before you even get to the question of fairness across all communities, I want to see an aggressive, assertive, consistent effort by the NYPD and all enforcement agencies. No matter where they are, no matter what's going on. We cannot tolerate gatherings. We cannot tolerate a lack of social distancing. There has to be just really fast, consistent enforcement. That's why I want people calling 3-1-1 or giving us information on where they're seeing problems so we can act on it quickly.

NYPD unquestionably has been enforcing in all kinds of communities and I've asked them to consistently put out reports so people can see the whole truth of the many times when enforcement was done across many communities. We don't want to give summonses and violations and fines if we don't have to. But some places people have been resistant, they're going to get those fines. We certainly don't want to arrest people in this environment but if we have to, we will. So, we'll get that information out more clearly because I think when you see the whole picture you see consistency across communities. If there’s any instance where there is not consistency, I will deal with that harshly because I won't accept it. And by the way, to our officers, we all know the vast majority of our officers are out there enforcing these rules and it is part of why we're succeeding. We have to thank the NYPD and all the Parks Department enforcement officers, everyone who’s been doing this enforcement is part of why we see these indicators getting better and they'd been doing it even though they'd been short staffed. But I don't have any hard evidence of any officer failing to disperse a crowd or following through, if I get hard evidence of that, I am going to ask the NYPD to follow through in whatever manner related to discipline they normally would in such a case. But I would welcome you, Debralee and everyone, anyone in the media who has hard evidence that any officer did not follow through on enforcement or that there was unequal treatment in communities. I want it and I won't tolerate it and we'll act on it.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning Mr. Mayor and everyone. I wanted to ask you sort of mentioned it with Debralee's question, but do you have the numbers and I guess if, how many photos and, and tips that have come in on the sort of like three one, one neighborhood watch, social distancing line and how that's been going. And if you've followed up on any of those tips?

Mayor: Of course, there's follow-up on all those tips. We'll happily assemble the numbers and get them out. I'll ask my team to make sure that happens. And again, when I spoke with our NYPD leadership, I made clear to them that I want public reporting on how enforcement is going and I want to show the fullness of it. There are many, many times where they've broken up gatherings across a whole range of communities, but that has not been something that's been portrayed publicly. I want a maximum reporting. I want to show all the times whether it's a line at a supermarket or it's breaking up a gathering on the streets or whatever it is, or certainly a religious gathering. You'll remember a couple of weeks ago I made very clear that any attempt by any people of any faith to gather in religious worship is unacceptable. And I'm sorry it will have to be broken up, but it will. So we're going to get out more and more of both the overall numbers, but also I want you to see the pictures. I want you to hear the stories. I want you to see how much enforcement has been done. I don't think it's been portrayed effectively. I think a lot more is happening than has been talked about. And I'm going to ask NYPD in particular to put all of that out more so you see it

Moderator: Next, we have Marcia from CBS.

Mayor: Marcia?

Question: My question today has to do with when the city gets to the point of reopening, but it has to do with the fact that you've had a lot of people or city workers who have passed away because of the virus, be it transit workers, be it, you know, firefighters, police officers and especially teachers. And I wonder if that's going to make it more difficult for you to reopen. I mean, kids going back to classrooms where their teacher isn't there anymore. Sanitation workers unable to pick up the trash. And how difficult will it be that your workforce has been depleted? What special problems will that pose for you and especially in the classroom?

Mayor: Yeah, Marcia, it's much more of a human problem and an emotional problem than anything. I want to start with that. I think for all of our – all the folks who serve us, the fact that they have lost their colleagues, I think a lot of them are going to go into, you know, the future with that pain. Whether you're at a Sanitation garage or you’re at a school or a police precinct, just you know, the, the loss of someone they cared about and someone that they worked so closely with. I think that's going to be a pain that will feel for a long, long time. And I think in school communities in particular, it's going to be very, very challenging because we have schools that have lost teachers, principals, you know, people who are backbones of school communities and a school community is like an extension of the family. It's very, very tight knit. You're also going to have kids who have lost family members. So one of the things the Chancellor talked about in the last week is how we have to provide a lot of mental health support starting now, and we're going to be expanding that as we go through the spring, for children and families who have been through a lot. But really getting ready for the beginning of school in September, I think it's going to be a painful beginning trying to sort out how to move forward while recognizing the loss and the trauma that kids have been through. So that's where I think the, the real challenge is and it's a tough one and we're going to, you know, whatever is needed to address it. We're going to, we're going to provide.

In terms of, you know, running our city and moving forward. We're going to find a way as we always do, but the losses are great and, and not just in number, in talent, some incredible human beings who did so much, but you know, we will find a way through that problem. I think the emotional and human and psychological problem is going to be in many ways the tougher part.

Moderator: Next, we have Julia from the Post. Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I know we're still months away from reopening the city, but you said on Morning Joe this morning that you thought that workplace temperature checks would be a key point of reopening. I'm just wondering if you could expand on that a little bit. Will those be, do you think you'll require that? Will they be suggested? Will we see temperature checks at restaurants and what are the other facets other than a citywide testing for reopening?

Mayor: Yeah, Julia, we're going to be putting out more and more specifics of the reopening plans as we're working through the details for this city. I would say the important thing to recognize with the temperature checks, they absolutely have a role to play. They've been an important tool in other countries that have – some have had some of the better experiences containing the coronavirus and working their way back. But guess what, there's not enough thermometers right now. So this is another one of these like staggering realities about our country that I just – it's hard as an American to take in how ill prepared this country was in terms of just basic supplies and how little we make of our own at this point. Or to the extent we do make things or can make things how long and slow the process of gearing up production has been.

I just can't make sense of it. I really think there should have just been a full-scale mobilization from the beginning of industry and obviously I think of the military as well to have tried to break through all of this and it's still never happened. So to even get to that point, we'd have to get a really substantial and steady supply of thermometers. We do not have that. That's another thing I'm going to try and see if there's any way to create in New York City. But I do think it's a logical part of the equation and it fits with the testing. I mean, if you think about it, what you want as you come back is the ability to constantly monitor for who might be sick and then get them to quarantine or isolation, get them the support they need to get through, make sure they don't go back into the workplace until they're really well, make sure they are isolated from their family members and other people in their life.

The temperature checks are a great way to see if someone might be starting to show symptoms. Obviously wide-scale testing is needed to make anything like that happen and I have to say, you know, initially I think that's something like hundreds and thousands of tests a day given the scale of this city, as much as we're doing in the whole nation right now per day. So I think it has an important role to play in combination with testing, but we'll put together those details as we get closer and obviously we've got to find the reliable, a huge supply of test kits and lab capacity just like we have to find a reliable supply of thermometers.

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Good morning, Mayor. I wanted to ask about a plan that some City Council Members plan to propose this week under which cars would be banned from I think 75 miles of city roads. I'm just wanting to ask you if you agree with that goal or even think it's feasible. And also could you [inaudible] what kind of communications you've had, if any, with the Council on this issue.

Mayor: Thank you, Shant. I've spoken to Speaker Johnson several times over the last weeks about this broad concept and you know, we tried a version of it early on working with the Council and it was, you know, not the best time to try it, obviously given weather, but it also, what we found immediately was the real drag on the enforcement needs that we had everywhere else. And with an NYPD in particular, that still is below the strength levels we want to be. So we're – I'm definitely ready to, you know, talk to the Council about it, see if we can find some common ground. But what I've said to date is I'm concerned that it doesn't fit our reality in terms of safety. It doesn't fit our reality in terms of enforcement where we need to put our enforcement. The models have been used elsewhere in the country I think were for places that had a much different reality in terms of, you know, how dense they are and what their sort of driving culture was compared to us, and one thing or another. So, it'll be a real conversation. But I still start with the concern that I have not seen a plan that I think works for New York City yet.

Moderator: Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good morning, Juliette. How you doing?

Question: I'm okay. I wanted to get back to the NYPD enforcement of social distancing. What exactly are they doing on the subway to enforce that? Are they limiting people standing on platforms or limiting the number of people getting on the trains? What exactly is their plan on the subway?

Look, it's a great question, Juliet. I think – I've talked to Pat Foye, the head of the MTA about – I think there needs to be a clearer message about how many, literally how many people are allowed on a subway car. And clearly, you know, it can't be more than 50 percent of what the normal capacity is. It may have to be a lot less, but whatever it is I think a clearer ground rule would help everyone. I haven't heard it at least, but yeah, the deal is that the NYPD is out there. If a subway car is too crowded, the idea is clear it out, disperse people throughout the train or get some people off if you have to. If a platform is crowded, you know, disperse people through or spread them through the platform or have some people wait outside the station, whatever it takes.

Now I still think we're seeing kind of an uneven reality where we get kind of sporadic reports around overcrowding and it seems to be in large measure due to the shortages in labor at the MTA and the fact that some, you know, there's some disruptions on some lines and trains don't come for a while – doesn't seem to take a consistent shape or in a consistent place. But the plan that the police are working on or working from, I should say, what they've been doing now for weeks and weeks is just if you see any instance of overcrowding on a subway car or on a platform, disperse, break it up, don't allow it to exist. You can't have a crowded subway car and just leave it be. You have to get people off and dispersed throughout the train or to the platform or whatever will work.

Moderator: Next, we have Kathleen from Patch.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I was just wondering if you could provide us some numbers on those surgical masks. How many do we have right now and how many do we need by the end of the week and how much you know those would cost on the – today's market.

Mayor: Yeah, the cost part we can get back to you on Kathleen. In terms of supply, so surgical masks has actually been – if there's a bright spot in this whole reality, the surgical masks had been the thing we've been able to get the most of and our supply is good for this week and from what I saw earlier into next week as well. The N95s which are, you know, a higher caliber if you will, have been harder to get. But again, at least we have a secure supply for this week on that crisis standard. I'll keep emphasizing that crisis standard is what we're working from. So, we can get you exact numbers. There's a lot – we need a lot to get through each week. But surgical masks, a strong supply, N95s, certainly enough to get through this weekend and next week and we'll get you a sense of what we're finding. We have to pay for these things in the current market.

Moderator: Next we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Mayor, good morning. How are you?

Mayor: Good man. How you feel? 

Question: Hanging in there. A question about the large public events. You mentioned this morning that when you spoke to organizers, particularly of Pride in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, that they're interested in postponing, but given the size of these events, you're talking hundreds of thousands, maybe a million or more people realistically. Can those events happen in calendar year 2020?

Mayor: Andrew, they might. I mean this one, you know, it's a great question. I think again, for all of us sports fans we’re asking this question, can you know our leagues come back in 2020 at all? I think this is an area where we don't know yet. I'm taking what I think is a cautious, steady approach to how we reopen New York City, but – and we have to always plan on the worst-case scenarios we have to protect ourselves. But there's also, you know, better case scenarios that could come along and could get proven that might open up possibilities for later on, you know, late in the summer going into the fall, there may be opportunities. So I think what was clear was the event organizers really and to their, you know, the folks at Salute to Israel Parade, the Puerto Rican Parade, Pride – very consistently there was a concern for the health and safety of all of the people who come to join these gatherings. That was their central concern. And they knew that it would be very hard for a lot of people to feel comfortable and it just didn't make sense to have them in this environment. But I think everyone does want to consider from what I've heard, the option of going and looking at opportunities, you know, late in the summer or into the fall and we'll know a lot more in the coming weeks, according to these indicators I go over each day and how we see this disease act and how we all act. So I certainly don't rule it out Andrew. I think it is a possibility and every, you know, every organization will make their own choices and, and we will know a lot more as we get through the next few weeks.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Well, Mr. Mayor, I'd like to ask you a question about the budget. The budget has some deep spending cuts, but for this year, but a lot of them reflect, not spending on schools, etc. because of the virus. And you've had some critics like the Citizens Budget Commission who says there's not enough recurring cuts and your estimates of federal aid, state aid and the bounce back of the economy may be way too optimistic. How would you answer those critics?

Mayor: Well, I don't understand the part about state aid and federal aid. The only things we have indicated in the way with federal aid are the things that already exist. The amount from the previous stimulus bill, which I'm certainly happy we are getting but is nowhere near obviously what we are paying out in terms of COVID-19 related expenses and the money we received from FEMA, but we still receive it with a 25 percent local payment requirement, which makes no sense in this crisis – by the way, that is much worse than what was true in previous natural disasters where localities were not required to pay 25 percent. They were required to pay substantially less. I know Senator Schumer is fighting for what I think is the right thing, which is 100 percent of FEMA coverage of costs related to COVID-19. This is an international pandemic and we are spending money to save lives and we're spending it wisely, but always when people need help, we're going to be there for them. I don't know why that isn't a hundred percent federally covered. So the only thing we've assumed, Henry, is the 75 percent coverage of the FEMA eligible costs and the previous money from the previous stimulus. We have not made any projection going forward about what future stimulus money should be. It should be a full coverage of all COVID-19 related costs and all lost revenue. If they really want to get New York City and all cities and states back on their feet. And I just want to come back to this point. How do you restart an economy with these big gaping holes on accounted for and they've already done $2 trillion plus in stimulus programs including again $58 billion for the airline industry, why not make cities and states whole if you're serious about a restart and a recovery, but we are not assuming that, Lord knows. So, I don't understand that part of the equation.

With the, the critique you raised in terms of the recurring expenses, look in terms of the recurring expenses, look, we've already done some really painful things including not being able to provide for our young people this summer so much of what we would normally like to and believe is crucial to our city. But when you go forward with all due respect to the Citizens Budget Commission, we – this is not a what they think from their point of view, maybe they think this is a wonderful moment for budget cutting. That's not how I see it. This is a moment to try and protect our people, protect their safety and health, make sure they have enough food to eat, make sure that they have a roof over their head and whatever that costs is what we need to do, and then work our way back to the city that just months ago was succeeding across the board in terms of having a thriving economy and the lowest unemployment we've seen in a long, long time, and you know, the things you would want for this city. We want to get back to that and the formula was working. We want to get back to that formula. So, I would argue, you know, we were on the something very good. We want to work our way back to it. But no, we're not for a moment – we're not assuming any State aid. In fact, the state cut us $800 million and we have to guard against future State cuts. So, I think we're being very realistic about that. I think if there is not federal aid, you're going to see many tougher decisions that are really going to hold us back and undermine our ability to provide even the most basic services.

Moderator: Next, we have Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Hi everyone. How are you doing this morning?

Mayor: Hey Mark.

Question: So, I had a couple of questions. The first was about a report that happened over the weekend about folks that are [inaudible] –

Mayor: Mark, Mark, you're coming in and out. Let me – let me interrupt you, Mark. You're coming in and out a little bit. Can you get closer to the microphone and speak a little more steadily?

Question: Sure. Is this any better?

Mayor: Yeah, let's try.

Question: Oh, cool. So, the first one is about inmates at Rikers Island that have left the jail system and have gone out, committed crimes, and are back in the jail system now. Can you just speak a little bit about that and what have you seen? The second question I had was about testing.

Mayor: It's about? Go ahead, say it.

Question: You mentioned on Friday that you were going to be opening up new testing centers and I just wanted to know how did that work out? Who was tested? Do you have any data on that?

Mayor: Okay. Thank you, Mark. On the second question, we'll get the data and start to put out that data as we confirm it. Some of the centers were opened Friday, some are opening today and we gave the projections on what they'd be able to do each week. But again, said I want to see those numbers go up rapidly. So, we'll get a report out later today on how Friday went and on how today is going and what the numbers look like. On the folks who have come out of Rikers, look when this crisis began, the issue was how could we address the humanitarian crisis in our jails appropriately? Let out people who could be let out safely, deal with the fact that there were individuals with profound, you know, major, major health problems who had been particularly vulnerable to this disease, but also always keep public safety in mind. And obviously by getting people out of the jail system, it was going to allow a safer environment for everyone who was still in, including very much the folks who work there, and we depend on so much of our officers.

And that has proceeded to happen, about 1,400 people have been released, and that has certainly improved the overall situation in our jail situation – in our jail system. But we said there would be, you know, a rigorous monitoring effort as well, and that has been built up. We do see some recidivism. I don't have the exact numbers, we see some, I've not seen a huge amount, but any amount is obviously troubling. And I think it's unconscionable just on a human level that folks were shown mercy and this is what some of them have done. But, you know, it's a small number of people. We're going to keep, you know, just buckling down on it, making sure there's close monitoring and supervision to the maximum extent possible, and the NYPD is going to keep doing what they're doing. They've obviously been driving down crime these last few months and they're going to keep doing that. But if anyone commits the kind of crime they have to be rearrested, of course they will be. If they have to be re-incarcerated they will be. But I think, you know, against the backdrop of what was a real humanitarian crisis it was the right approach. Now we're going to deal with everything going forward.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. I have two questions if I may, about the medical personnel you announced yesterday and the 3-1-1 number. So first can you explain what exactly the differences between the 600 medical personnel and volunteers and 535 medical military staff? Our medical personnel, more nurses and technicians and our military medical staff - staffs specifically more like doctors and nurses. And why didn't you send any of the medical military staff to Staten Island hospitals? And my second question is yesterday I tried out the 3-1-1 Social Distance Enforcement number and I received an error message saying the tech service was unavailable, your office was quick to fix the problem, and I resent the photo and it seems to be working. I got a text message saying that a representative would be with me shortly, but I never heard back. Can you explain how exactly the tech service is supposed to be working? Is someone supposed to get in touch with you after you send a text? And why was the tech service not working at least, you know, yesterday?

Mayor: Yeah, there was an issue yesterday. It has been resolved. So the basic concept is this, if you call in, as I said to the day on anything COVID related, particularly food, we want people to have an instant ability to talk to a human being and register their need and get it acted on. On the calls related to violations of social distancing, that's also obviously urgent. We need people to be able to get that to a human being right away and then get it out to where it can be dispatched by NYPD. So I appreciate – again, I'll keep saying thank you to you and everyone in the media who is doing this quality control because I think it helps us to keep monitoring. Obviously, the city does it’s own quality control, but anytime you find a gap in the system that's helpful because we want to fix it. So in terms of the calls, that's how it has been working on, should work, and again, many, many additional personnel have been added in the last few days to beef it up. In terms of the photos, I know I've spoken to Commissioner Shea about this, that the photos are being monitored constantly by the NYPD for action. In terms of whether there's a response back to the person who sends the photo, I don't know that, but we will get you an answer on that today.

On the question of the military personnel and the volunteer medical personnel. So the military are a variety of specialists. There are doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, dieticians, pharmacists, there are a whole range of specialists, primarily doctors and nurses. They are – the original request was for our public hospitals that unquestionably were bearing the brunt. Elmhurst, Bellevue, Lincoln, so many others, and that's where they'd gone and they'd been absolutely outstanding. The personnel coming in through the Medical Volunteer Corps, which is a city function created by our Department of Health, our folks who bring a wide variety of medical skills, they are being distributed out to independent hospitals that need help and to – including obviously thinking about hospitals on Staten Island – at any hospitals, whether they're a part of a bigger system or they're independent, but the ones that need help the most we have found are the independents and two nursing homes that need help. And that system, again of wide variety of health care professionals, we're applying that wherever the need is greatest.

But I think the simple point here is, which we've talked about before, Sydney, and I know you're advocating for Staten Island, I appreciate it. The hospitals that bore the brunt of this overwhelmingly were those public hospitals, that's where we sent the help from the military. Obviously I'd like to see a lot more help come in and then we could expand it more broadly. But we have been able to get that medical volunteer group, which is a lot of the same exact medical professionals in terms of training out to a broader swath of the city and our health care institutions, our nursing homes, and we're going to keep making adjustments as the need is clear. I think that's the central point and again, I appreciate the advocacy, but it's really going to come down to us as where are the gaps that we need to fill and we will move people according to the gaps. Whenever we see a situation where, you know, someplace just doesn't have enough personnel and another place has more than they need, we're going to move them around accordingly to address that need.

Moderator: Next, we have Gloria from NY1.

Mayor: Gloria?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yup. Can you hear us?

Question: [Inaudible] thank you. Oh yes, I got you.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: I wanted to follow up on our report that we got this weekend about three men who were discharged COVID-19 patients and they were sent to the Hilton Garden Inn in order to isolate from their families. They – the three of them have passed away. I wanted to see if you had an update on that specific situation and if there's anything you would tell us about these, why these men were discharged, and how was the city monitoring this and what happened here?

Mayor: So we are doing a review right now to understand what happened. My understanding very initially and it's obviously tragic, I mean as I understand it, Gloria, these are three people who were in hospitals for COVID-19, got care, recovered and were released. And my understanding is one was from a Montefiore in the Bronx, one was from Maimonides in Brooklyn, one was from Harlem Hospital. And then we – you know, all three have passed away and we need - we're doing a full review right now to understand what happened. If they were all discharged and all from different hospitals, something doesn't make sense here, and why are these people – why have they lost their lives? So we're doing a full review to understand that.

We're also going to add as an abundance of caution, add additional medical personnel and other personnel to do more checking in with people even if they've been discharged. You'd think if someone has been discharged from the hospital, it's an all clear and the reason they're in a hotel is simply transitional, particularly if they happen to have a family situation that's not conducive to go back to or something like that. But we're going to add additional personnel to ensure that everyone is being very closely watched and supported. But I don't know – we don't know yet what happened here and why it happened and when we do, we'll certainly let you know.

Moderator: Next we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Thanks Mr. Mayor. First I just want to follow up, I have two questions, but I want to follow up on Gloria just to clarify the hotel where those three individuals were staying, you know, wasn't like isolation hotel. So I'm curious if the city is planning to increase any screenings for the other guests who are still there beyond just a wellness check? And then my second question relates to the Governor's announcement over the weekend about statewide antibody testing. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the plan and how the city fits into it?

Mayor: Yes. On the first point, yes, I tried to say – I'll say it better that we absolutely are going to check on people more deeply in that facility because we want to know that hotel – we want to know exactly what's going on and we're confused how this could have happened. And again, don't know if there's a connection between the three deaths or not. We just don't know enough yet to give you a definitive answer. But we again, we’ll be beefing up the amount of personnel devoted to consistently working with people who are staying in those hotels. You know want to make sure we're constantly checking on them and if people need something, it's evident, real quickly enacted on.

On the antibody tests, again, this is an area I think we can say where there's some real promise. There's also a lot of open questions. There's different kinds of tests of different kinds of quality level and quality levels and accuracy. We'll have more to say very soon because our goal is to do more and more testing, both the PCR testing, you know, the kind of main coronavirus tests. We want to see that on a vast scale as part of our recovery. We need a lot right now, but we want to see it. It's prerequisite to making a recovery. But the antibody testing could play an important role too. There's still some open questions, but we do anticipate using it in a substantial manner and as soon as we have the specifics worked out, we'll be announcing that hopefully quite soon.

Moderator: Next, we have Javier from Queens Latino.

Question: Good morning. I'm Javier Castano for Queens Latino, and in Queens, Corona, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, [inaudible] of undocumented immigrants are waiting for the money from the Open Society Foundation. They don't have the money to pay the rent, to buy food, or even to pay for [inaudible]. So when and what they [inaudible] New York City is going distribute those dollars?

Mayor: Javier, just to keep the line open there so I can make sure we're saying the same thing. You're talking about the money that we announced a few days ago from the Open Society Foundations?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: Yeah. Yeah, as I said that money is flowing quickly. Community based organizations that work closely with immigrant communities will be providing that support to people who need it. And again, given the nature of what's being done here to help folks who have not gotten federal support and obviously have often been mistreated by the federal government, we're going to be very careful about handling this, and the best way to think about is, the money's going to flow quickly. It's going to be available at the community level through these grassroots organizations that work with them in immigrant communities and we have faith in them having worked with them in the past that they'll know how to get the word out to their communities rapidly and make sure the money gets in people's hands who need it. And that's the smart way to handle this.

Moderator: Last two for today, we have Reema from Chalkbeat next.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Reema, how are you doing?

Question: I'm good. How are you?

Mayor: Good, good.

Question: Good. I just wanted to follow up on something you said earlier about students needing mental health support right now and especially into the following school year. Given the need for those supports, but schools also facing potential big budget cuts, how do you sort of reconcile those two? How are schools – I mean, schools might need to potentially cut counselors and social workers. So how will schools be able to support – schools that lose that, you know, those staffers – how will they be able to support students going forward?

Mayor: Reema, look, you're asking a very, very important question because it kind of frames the whole discussion we're having now about how are you going to have a functioning city? How are you going to have the largest city in the country that the entire country depends on? How are we going to have a recovery if we cannot even provide the basics? And that's the danger right now and this is why the federal support from the stimulus is so crucial. I mean, how are you not, if you can't even have enough personnel for your schools, you know, that does not look like a restart and a recovery to me. So what I would say in the here and now, the mental health support that kids need right now, families need right now, I put that under the category of emergency COVID expenses. You know, mental health is part of health. We know there's a crisis happening. We have to support those kids.

We'll be talking more in the coming days about the ways we're going to do it. Just like we're doing, you know, distance learning. Just like we're trying to help the seniors who we hope will graduate by providing them extra support from guidance counselors. And we know there's a lot of traumatized kids out there and we have to help them, now, we will. But going forward, you know, if we don't get support, we're going to have a really big challenge ahead. So we're going to do whatever it takes right now. But you know, again, this is another one of many, many examples of why folks in Washington should not, you know, toy with this city and other cities that are simply trying to fight our way through a crisis and get back on our feet

Moderator: Last for today. We have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you about the small business loan program. The $20 million interest free loans the city put together and just wanted to ask you – we just heard about a lack of communication from SBS for the applicants once they submitted. There's been no word. And I'm also curious if you have a handle on whether any of the businesses have received the funding yet, and if so, how many?

Mayor: I don't have those numbers at my fingertips. I do know we expanded the loan and grant program and it ended up being almost $50 million. I do know that both those programs, all applications went in, a number have been funded for sure, we can get to exact facts. I'm certain there were more people applying than we could necessarily reach, but we can get the exact details on how many we were able to reach. But knowing that that resources have been flowing it's a great question. You know, what exactly is still outstanding and are other people that have had problems, what we can do to help them.

So, the – we will get you the facts as they are today and Yoav if you know of folks who had a particular problem, we want to follow up with that and see if it's someone that, you know, we still can reach with this effort. So please, if you are getting reports of people who applied and did not get communication, we want to know about that. We want to follow up with them, but we'll also get you the overall status where we stand with the grants they've gone out and the loans that have gone out.

Okay. Well, everyone, look as we conclude just to say this you know, again, I take solace from the fact that this is a situation we will work our way out of. I take solace in the fact that unlike some horrible, horrible moments in history where people never knew if there would be an end in sight, there is an end in sight here, thank God. And I take a lot of solace in the fact that New Yorkers have done such an amazing job during this crisis. I have absolute faith that New Yorkers will fight their way through. I don't have such faith in Washington D.C. and I'll keep coming back to it. I just want the people in Washington to try and be as good as what they see here. I want our elected leaders to be as honorable as New Yorkers have been, as diligent as New Yorkers have been, as devoted to others as New Yorkers have been. Folks we elect in Washington are supposed to help us in a time of crisis. The President has to step up. Senator McConnell has to step up. Their silence is deafening. So, imagine for a moment a government as good as the people, and that's all I'm asking of the President and the Senate Majority Leader. Just try to be as good as the people of New York City and help them out in their hour of need as we all fight through this crisis together.

Thank you, everyone.

2020-04-21 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. We’ve got some important things to talk to you about today. And really what it comes to is understanding New York City, understanding who we are, understanding how we confront the challenges we face in normal times, but even more so in a time of crisis. There's something about the city that when the going gets tough, just the best comes out in people. And, you know, I've said before, but it bears saying again, this is a city where people make things happen. Folks don't shirk from a challenge, they meet it, and then they go farther than they ever thought they could. And it is part of who we are. It's in our blood as New Yorkers, there's a reason we are known as this great capital of entrepreneurship and creativity and ingenuity. It's been proven time and time again over generations and it's certainly been proven in the middle of this crisis. I've seen amazing things, and no one for a moment can underestimate how much pain there has been, how much loss there has been, but that has not stopped New Yorkers from doing things big and small to make a difference and to fight back and to prove that nothing and no one and no disease will ever stop us. New Yorkers, by our nature, we're resilient, we're tough, and we know how to take care of ourselves. Well, now, I think it's a time in our history where we're learning an important lesson about how self-sufficient we're going to have to be, going forward. We have watched in these last few weeks when we called for our federal government to help us, sometimes we got an answer, sometimes we didn't. When we went out on the open market, internationally even, trying to find the things we needed to protect our people – sometimes they were there, a lot of times they weren't. So, what we're seeing right now are the profound limits – limits to a globalized world. We were all told how many things would come from globalization that, in theory, are going to help us. We're starting to see the things that don't help us at all, in fact, have made our lives tougher, because so many of the things we need, the medical equipment, the medical supplies aren't even made here, not only in New York but in the United States anymore, and that's left us vulnerable. And we New Yorkers are learning that lesson and we're not going to be fooled again. We're going to be ready. We know we have to protect ourselves and we know we have to be ready for whatever comes next.

Now, I’ve got to tell you, even though it feels like this has been going on for months and months, it's only been six or seven weeks we've been in the thick of this, and what's happened in those six or seven weeks is absolutely remarkable. New Yorkers, creating products we didn't make here at all. New Yorkers, coming together to do things to protect our heroes, our health care workers, our first responders out of love, out of a deep, deep concern for those who protect all of us. And that compassion didn't just come out in words, it came out in deeds. So, we have seen amazing progress in just a few weeks, and I've taken you to some of those places to see the face shields being made in the Brooklyn Navy yard. I showed you the surgical gowns also being made in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but now more and more parts of the city are coming into the game to help out, more and more companies are doing remarkable things. I talked to you a few days ago about the fact that when we found, despite every attempt, we found we couldn't get the test kits we needed from the federal government. We couldn't purchase them anywhere in the quantities we needed. We said we're going to make them right here, and you're going to be seeing the results of that in just days. So, it has been a remarkable journey against a very painful backdrop. But now, today, I want to tell you about another important step and it has a lot to say with how we will protect ourselves now, but it also says a lot about how we will protect ourselves in the future. And today I want to talk to you about ventilators. You see one here and we're going to get a little demonstration in a moment, but as you can see immediately this is not a simple piece of machinery. This is something complex. This is something challenging to make. Nothing like this was being made in New York City just two months ago, even one month ago. Nothing like this was being produced here, but extraordinary entrepreneurs came together for the good of all New Yorkers and said, we can do it, we can do something. Whether it's seems possible or not, we're going to find a way.

So, I want to take you back just to remind you, just a few short weeks ago – and I use that specific day, Sunday, April 5th was the day where we felt based on every projection, based on all the evidence that we were going to be at a point where we might run out of ventilators. The number of people who needed them was growing every day and it was a very fearful time. Supplies were running short. We needed answers. At that moment, it looked like we could get to a point where there might not be that ventilator needed for the next patient. Thank God, right around then was when things started to improve and it's all because of everything you have done, all of you, the social distancing, the shelter in place, all of the things that are making a difference. So, today, we can say that, thank God, we have the ventilators get through this week. We have the ventilators for the immediate future. But as recently as the first days of April, the numbers were staggering. Approximately 220 more New Yorkers each day – more each day needed a ventilator. That's what it looked like at the beginning of April and that's when this valiant effort was going full bore to make sure that ventilators would be available and would be ready if they needed to be pressed into emergency service, these homegrown ventilators. And this is the epitome of that kind of wartime production model, people coming up with an idea and making it happen. Because if it hadn't been for these ventilators being ready, we might've been in a situation where there would not have been one for someone. By April 10th, we were still seeing an increase in the number of people needed them each day, 75 day, but it was slowing, thank God. Now, today, it's actually leveled off and we hope to see a situation where it really declines consistently the need each day. But having gone through that terrifying moment, I can tell you, I am determined to make sure that New York City never ever is in a situation in the future where we need ventilators and we can't get them. We have to protect our people. And so, these bridge ventilators that have been created are part of what will protect us now and into the future. This is something we now have that can never be taken away from us. This is something we make here that no one else in the world can deprive us of. We are now increasingly self-sufficient. We've got a long way to go, but this is a remarkable achievement. You're going to hear from some of the people who made it happen. I want to tell you, these ventilators, right now, ready to go being moved into hospitals so they will all have a reserve that need them. FDA approved – and I want to thank the FDA. I want to take a moment. I always try and give credit where credit is due. Dr. Steven Hahn and his remarkable team at the FDA. I spoke to him several times, I know Dr. Mitch Katz did as well from Health + Hospitals. They moved this process in record time and I will really want to give them credit. FDA is not historically known for speed, but they have in this crisis really stepped up and they were tremendous partners in getting this ventilator approved and ready.

Now, this story, again, it is about making something out of nothing, and that is a New York tradition, doing remarkable things against the odds. And there's three guys who deserve particular credit – Scott Cohen of New Lab; Marcel Botha of 10XBeta; and Charles Boyce, of Boyce Technologies. These individuals had a remarkable civic spirit, a remarkable desire to get something done. And I want to give special credit to Charles, because he also was one of the driving forces behind making those face shields that, right now, when you see them out there in our communities – in fact, just yesterday I was in Staten Island, deliveries of PPEs were being made to RUMC, to the in Staten Island, and there were those Brooklyn Navy Yard face shields being delivered. And that made me very, very proud to be there with those delivery workers, seeing the response from all the health care workers to that help coming. So, a special thanks to Charles for being a part of both these efforts. So, when we think of this city, we think about chutzpah, when we think about the incredible verve, the drive, the ability to do something no matter how brash or unlikely. So, literally, people who are part of this effort at to say to themselves, hey, we've never made a ventilator before, we're going to have to figure out how to do it, and then we're going to have to figure out how to produce thousands of them. You know, if you talked about a normal timeline to try and create a brand-new product like this, you'd think it would take a year. You know what they said? They said we have to do it in a month or less. And they went and did it. So, they put together a team, an extraordinary New York City team of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, physicians folks who knew the regulatory system, all sorts of folks who work together, nonstop work, literally alone, round the clock, 24-hour efforts over the past three weeks and they got it done.

So, what are these bridge ventilators do? Well, what they mean is, when someone needs that urgent help, that ability to breath without which they simply won't survive, these bridge ventilators are there to keep someone alive. They can play different kinds of roles. They can buy time to keep a patient alive who might need a more elaborate kind of help from a full-service ventilator. They can help to stretch out the capacity of a hospital so that as they're getting more of those full-service ventilators available at any given moment, they buy time to save lives. They also work with a number of different kinds of cases where there are less severe issues, but that people need that help breathing. So, there's many things they do. To make this possible, to save lives, to make sure we could be self-sufficient, we, the City of New York made the decision to work with these companies, to help coordinate their efforts, to work with the FDA on the approval, but also to make clear that we would fund the effort. And so, we placed an order for 3,000 of these ventilators – a $10 million order. And that raises of crucial point, that what these extraordinary New Yorkers did was not only create a great product and a necessary product, but a product that was affordable – $3,000 for each ventilator and that compares to $40,000 or $50,000 or more for a full-service ventilator. This means that we have already reserve in the event that this crisis continues, or, God forbid, this disease becomes stronger. It means we're in a position to protect ourselves and to help others who may need our help.

But it also is now the beginning of something much bigger that will help frame our future. Today, I'm announcing that we're going to create a New York City strategic reserve. We have learned the hard way that we cannot depend on the federal government in the future. I hate saying that, but I think it's quite evident. We certainly cannot depend on the global market. We can't depend on our nation to produce products that, tragically, are not being produced enough in this nation as we've seen in our hour of need. I hope that will change. I hope our country gets the message that we have to start producing these things all over the country again and be self-sufficient as a nation. But until that day comes, New York City, we will protect ourselves. With the leadership of the Economic Development Corporation and working with our health care leadership, we will create our own reserve. We will take the production that's now been created in those four areas, the facials, the surgical gowns, the test kits, and now the ventilators. We're going to create a ready supply of those so we'll always have enough in the future and we'll purchase what we need and create a stockpile so we will never be in a situation where we turn to those who are supposed to supply this and they say, sorry, we're all out. We, New Yorkers, will take care of ourselves. Now, I have to say this all was created from scratch. And I remember the day I first went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and I saw those face shields being made by hand. There's no machinery. It was all by hand. It reminded me that people would do whatever it took. We've seen it now for whole different kinds of products being produced in large quantities, protecting our health care workers, saving lives. This is our future to be able to take care of ourselves. And now, that we figured out we can do these things, whatever we need in the future, we can use as a blueprint to build more and different supplies and equipment, whatever the occasion may be, whatever the challenge may be.

I also want you to know that in the process of these good people figuring out how to create this ventilator, they found out that there was a lot of interest in this ventilator from hospital systems and absolutely in other parts of the world as well. So, in fact, there will be a market for hospitals and for parts of America and other countries that need lower cost ventilators. This has started to open up a new possibility of getting people help who aren't getting it right now because the cost is so prohibitive. And any of our fellow cities and states that need help, our reserve will be there to help them, just the way they've helped us. So, we've been so appreciative to other states, other cities that have stepped up to help New York City. Any of them that need our help in this crisis, we will be there for them, because we will have a reserve that's available and that we can depend on.

You're going to hear a little more in a moment about these ventilators, but let me give you a couple of other updates first, because we know – and this is part of why we want these reserves – we know we're not out of the woods by any stretch of imagination. We've got a lot more to do. And we also know that the impact of this disease is being felt right now. Still, too many people dying, too many people going into the hospital right now, too many people going into the ICU right now because of COVID-19. This fight is raging, and it's raging, especially in the parts of the city that have been hardest hit, that have unfortunately had the worst disparities, the biggest burdens, the least health care available historically – and that means our communities of color and our immigrant communities, our lower income communities. We need to fight back and we've got to do that in a lot of ways. We've talked about all the community outreach we're going to do, the telehealth programs, everything we're going to do to reach people, but, obviously, it also will take more and more testing at the grassroots level.

Yesterday – we, as of yesterday, had five community-based sites open in some of our hardest hit neighborhoods. Those sites will be performing 3,600 tests this week. So they're all up and running. I'll go over them in a second, but they will do 3,600 tests this week. Next week, we'll add five more sites in hard hit areas and we will get that total up to over 7,000 tests per week and we're going to keep growing from there. If we can get the supply of testing we need, plus the PPEs and the personnel, we're going to keep going farther and farther with the grassroots testing where it's needed most. The five centers are now open in Brooklyn, and they're all Health + Hospitals, I should say – the Gotham Health Center in East New York; in the Bronx, the Gotham Health Center in Morrisania; in Staten Island, the Vanderbilt Health Centerl in Manhattan, the Sydenham Family Health Center in Harlem; in Queens, at Queens Hospital, the testing center there. All of these are walk-in sites. So, I want to emphasize, anyone from the community – and these are targeted to the immediate community – you can walk up. We are prioritizing people who are 65 years old or older and who have those preexisting conditions that we've talked about so much, those serious conditions that put people in danger. So, please, if you meet those criteria, if you are someone who is in, particularly – in a particularly vulnerable situation, we want to get you tested. Go to one of those centers, walk up. That testing is starting – is started, I should say – has started, is available today, and then more will be announced next week.

And now, I want to talk about what we do every day, looking at the indicators that tell us where we are. And I keep telling people, it's going to be a long battle. We want to see them all move in the right direction, it’s not always going to work that way, but it doesn't change anything about how we approach this. We keep fighting, we keep sticking to what's working, and we will see progress. And overall, we have – even though these indicators have not been everything we wanted to be, we definitely see some real movement, and that's really good news. So, first, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, well, that went down from 212 to 2-4 – that's good news. The number of people in ICU is across our Health + Hospitals facilities for suspected COVID-19, that went up, but by very little, from 853 to 857. The percentage of people who tested positive for COVID-19 also went up, but, again, by very little, from 34 percent to 35 percent. The number of people who tested positive through our public health lab test went down from 67 percent to 63 percent. So, again, you see some progress when some of the areas going up, they're only going up by a little. Overall, we are seeing definite progress. Not everything that we're looking for to get to the point where we can relax some of the restrictions but definite progress for sure. So, keep doing what you're doing, New Yorkers, it is working. Just let's keep with it, it'll take some time, but we can do it.

Now, I always want to offer my thanks to anyone and everyone who stands up from New York City. And, today, we're talking about great stories of New Yorkers doing things for their fellow New Yorkers, but also a lot of the time people have come to our aid so we could help ourselves. And I talked to you about surgical gowns yesterday – this is our toughest situation right now with PPEs and it got to the point where we couldn't get – it was just quite clear that the global market isn't functioning right no matter what you try, you can't get the kind of supply that we need. But we said, okay, if we can't get the gowns ready-made, can we get the fabric? I mentioned yesterday, we worked with the White House, particularly with Peter Navarro and his team who have been fantastic, and they put us in touch with leaders in the textile and garment industry who have been really helpful. A special thank you to Kim Glass, who's one of the leaders in the industry who has been giving us great help. They connected us to a health care supply company, Owens & Minor in North Carolina, and they went to bat for us. A special thank you to Chris Lowery and everyone at Owens & Minor. I was on the phone with them several times. They have already delivered – in a matter of days, they produced and delivered to New York City, 1 million square yards of American-made fabric. And I want to emphasize what a refreshing reality this is, that we're not searching for something in another country that may or may not let us have it. This is American-made fabric, waterproof fabric that we can turn into surgical gowns. So, 1 million square yards already here that will create enough for 400,000 more surgical gowns. And I have an update on the day by which they will be produced – they will all be ready and done by May 10th. And that production is going to be expanding constantly as we create more and more of these gowns in New York City. Special thank you to folks at UPS, Laura Lane and everybody at UPS, they jumped in immediately to make sure that the delivery from North Carolina – 570 miles away – and it happened a second, that the fabric came off the assembly line. It came to New York City in record time. So, incredible team effort to help us help ourselves. And we're very, very appreciative.

I want to say one more thing before I close. We gathered today and, you know, normally if our society was functioning as normal, there would be a very solemn remembrances today because it's Holocaust Remembrance Day. There'd be solemn ceremonies, moments to reflect, and not just for the Jewish community and our Jewish brothers and sisters, but for everyone to learn the lessons of the Holocaust, to think about what it means and to always gain strength from the incredible examples of people who fought their way through. You know, one of the most painful realities of these last weeks is some of the people we lost to the coronavirus were Holocaust survivors. Think about that. They lived through one of the greatest atrocities in human history and then succumb to the coronavirus. We have to learn a lesson from all of them, even those we've lost and certainly from those who still survive. And I have met so many of them, particularly in Brooklyn, in areas I used to represent in the City Council, where I constantly would meet people who would tell me their stories of fighting through and surviving the Holocaust. And it was extraordinarily inspirational. We’ve got to realize that there are people right now in our city who stared down unspeakable evil, who dealt with unthinkable pain and terror and overcame it and fought through it and decided that they would not only survive, but they would create a new life with new families, new hope, they would sustain their people, their beliefs, their faith, and they did it. And some of those stories, when you're talking to some of these individuals, you are humbled. I am humbled, I know it, because it reminds you of the greatness that's possible in each of us and what those who have gone before have done, and it inspires us. So, we need to endure right now. We need to overcome and we need to learn from all of those who went before, but particularly those extraordinary, noble Holocaust survivors. They're teaching us a lesson right now that we should take to heart in this moment.

Lastly, you know, the last days I've made it a point to be very straightforward, very honest with all New Yorkers, with all of you, about what we face, the fact we have a long battle, the things we can do and the things that we can't yet do. You know, it was no fun to have to tell you that May events had to be canceled and then June events had to be canceled, including some of the events we love the most each year, we cherish, we look forward to. It's no fun to tell you, you have to keep social distancing and staying home, but it's the right thing to do and you're doing it, again, with extraordinary ability. We had to say that those things couldn't happen, those parades, those concerts, those street fairs, we had to. I had to say it just isn't time for them yet, there's still too many unknowns, there's still too many threats. There's a lot we don't know, but there's one thing we do know for sure – the day is coming when this city will fight our way back, when this city will get back to normal. The day is coming when we will overcome this disease. The day is coming when I'm going to be able to tell you we can gather again. The day is coming when I'll be able to tell you, in fact, we will be having the concerts and the street fairs and the parades again.

But I want to guarantee you one thing, that when that day comes that we can restart the vibrant, beautiful life of this city again, the first thing we will do is we will have a ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes for our health care workers and our first responders. We will honor those who saved us. The first thing we will do before we think about anything else is we will take a time, as only New York City can do, to throw the biggest, best parade to honor these heroes. And many, many great heroes have gone down that canyon to be appreciated and loved by millions of New Yorkers, but I think this will be the greatest of all the parades because this one will speak to the rebirth of New York City. This one will speak to a kind of heroism that is intrinsic to who we are as New Yorkers, to our values, to our compassion, to our strength, our resiliency. This parade will remark – well, mark, I should say – this parade will mark the beginning of our renaissance, but it will also be, most importantly, a chance to say thank you to so many good and noble people, so many tough, strong people. They're fighting right now, and they have to keep fighting and we have to keep supporting them and showing them our love and appreciation. But one day, we will be able to start back on the road and we will honor them as they deserve, and that will be a beautiful and joyous day in the city.

Everyone, I want to just say a few words in Spanish, and then I'm going to turn to one of our heroes of this great ventilator efforts, Scott Cohen, and he's going to talk about how this amazing effort came together.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, in the spirit of doing for ourselves and protecting ourselves, a man who had tremendous vision. And I just want to say, what an amazing thing to look at what's happening around the world and say, wow, we need ventilators, how about we create our own? What an amazing spirit, how much creativity he and his colleagues had. But that will to get it done and that tirelessness, not waiting for one hour and not resting for one hour until the job got done. So, my great pleasure to introduce the cofounder of New Lab and the Lead for the Emergency Ventilator Response Initiative, Scott Cohen.

Scott Cohen: Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Appreciate that.

Mayor: Thank you, Scott.

Cohen: Yeah – sort of a few words about the journey we've been on.

Mayor: Please.

Cohen: Well, I just really wanted to say that we really wouldn't be here today without the partnership with the City. Really early on when Marcel – and Charles Boyce, from Boyce Technologies and Marcel [inaudible] on the end here from 10XBeta who's been a founding member of New Labs since the very beginning, we all started talking about the resources we had around us and the engineers and roboticists and inventors that were around New Lab, the engineers and experts over at Boyce Technologies, and we all started talking very early on at the impetus that was actually another New Lab member who was watching what was going on in Italy – was Italian and asked us could we help Italy? And we really started thinking about it, and we weren't sure – both Marcel and I were quite skeptical whether we could do something like this. But then when it started coming to New York, we were like, well, we have to, we have to lean into it. And so, the three of us came together and very early on we reached out to James Patchett at the EDC. We let him know what we were thinking about and that we really needed to know there was some sort of partnership with the City, because this was a very risky and fluid endeavor. I don't think we ever knew at any given instance, whether we were going to get this done in the timeframe that we set out to, but we all navigated through it. And I mean, there were – there were really, I'd say, hundreds of people involved in this effort. There were engineers from New Lab and from Boyce. There were engineers that reached out from other communities in Silicon Valley. There were engineers from MIT up in Boston, that were shuttling down to New York to help us work on the software for the device. And so, I do think this is about the agility of New Yorkers, but it's also about the inventiveness and commitment of Americans coming together and the type of training that's happening in our engineering schools around this country that, I think, is really paying off for us. So, I'm grateful for the City and grateful that we had the benefit of having the City invest in New Lab years and years ago. And I don't think any of us knew where we'd be today, but it's an asset.

Mayor: And I just want to ask, I know our colleagues in the media will ask questions in a second, but to all of you, there is an audacity to saying we're going to make something we never made before, not even close to making before, and to do it on this timeline. And you said at first there was doubt, understandably. What helped you overcome the doubt?

Cohen: I just think we all really felt this was something that had to be done. And I think there were different moments. I mean, one moment was when we had something that looked like it was working and all the critical care physicians came down with folks from the EDC to look at where we were and give us kind of some input. And they sat with Marcel and all the engineers and gave feedback and just seeing what they were going through and seeing how this was a glimmer of light for them, gave us a real charge, gave all the engineers a real good boost when they were exhausted to push on. And I also think that, you know, that's, that's what engineers do all the time. That's what everyone, that's what Marcel's group at 10XBeta does. We walk up to his studio all the time with a napkin sketch and say, you think we can build this thing?

And that's not something – that's not a new thing at New Lab. That's something we do every day. So, I think we all felt this was possible. I also really appreciate the fact that in 2010, a group of engineers led by Dr. Slocum at MIT, were thinking about building a low-cost ventilator that could address this kind of problem in the developing world. And I don't think they realized that it could have such a service to New Yorkers and to this country at the time. But when we were searching around the internet for like, what would be something that could be responsive, we found what they were, they'd worked on 2010 and a close friend of ours, Saul Griffith on the west coast weighed in with us and said, yeah, I think that's the one. We all kind of triangulated on that device, and then we reached out to the folks in MIT and I think they had started mobilizing three or four days before and then it became a round robin of sharing and kind of cooperative competition between lots of engineers and so they were really amazing and I think whenever we hit roadblocks, we'd call other folks at MIT. When they did roadblocks, they called us. We built some hardware devices for them that they brought back up there. So it was a lot of real kind of competitive cooperation between a lot of really smart people.

Mayor: Yeah, I love that. And it reminds me of things we've seen in different movies of folks racing against time to come up with some solution. But this is real life, this happened here and now and the fact that you are so inspired when you heard from the health care professionals what they were trying to do and the people they were trying to save and that moved you to even higher levels of inspiration and action. I mean, that's very, very powerful. And I just have to thank you so deeply for sticking with it no matter what. And I want to see Marcel or James, if you want to add, you're more than welcome. We appreciate it so much.

Marcel Botha: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think all of us we're sort of, I think intimidated by the complexity of a full scale of ventilator six weeks ago and then four weeks ago we realized that, listen, put that aside, find a solution. And I think that the beauty of this bridge ventilator is that it replaces a hand that’s squeezing an Ambu bag or wearing a resuscitator bag, that's an existing process in the clinical care stack. And what we learned in the last four weeks is that the hand is a very complex neuro- skeletal muscular system trained by a brain. So we tried to replace all of that, not just the mechanical function. And that's why this stands head and shoulders above most other bridge devices out there.

Mayor: Well done. Well done. James. You want to add?

President and CEO James Patchett, NYC Economic Development Corporation: I would say it was a – Scott described it well. It was a process where there were a lot of days of doubt. There were moments where, you know, I would call Mitch – Dr. Katz at the Health + Hospitals and say, how soon do we need these? Do we need these tomorrow? Do – and he said, I have five more days. You have five more days. And then I would call Scott and say, okay, we have five more days to perfect this device. And it was a day in, day out thing and fortunately the day never came where Mitch said we need these tomorrow. But it was a constant process where they were working to make the device better and better to be more functional every day while we were watching the clock. And that was, and there were times I think when all of us felt like this would never come together and it just an inspiration now to see this device here working, to have seen it at hospitals already with doctors and clinical care settings. So it's a tremendous inspiration to see these folks and the team at EDC, frankly, it's, you know, a team of over 20 people who a month ago didn't know what a peep valve was and today can tell you all about the different components that are necessary to construct a device. And we're just an honor to be a part of this team. And I think it's an inspiration and just as you said, an example of what it's possible for New Yorkers to do when they believe in something. We have an amazing creativity in this city and it's amazing to watch.

Mayor: Thank you and well done, James, you and your whole team at EDC and all our colleagues who did this amazing work and please thank your teams and all those folks who spent all those long hours and everyone they consulted with. It was an extraordinary group effort. So the fact is to the point James made that I was on a number of those calls with Dr. Katz too, and it really was coming down to a matter of days and we even thought at one point it would come down to a matter of hours, whether the next ventilator would be ready. This ventilator had it been needed on an emergency basis, would have gone into action during the week of April 6th because it would have been literally a matter of without it lives would have been lost. So this effort succeeded on that kind of wartime footing. They were ready at the moment where there would have been no other choice. This machine would have been ready. And that's an amazing testament to the work that folks did, but also, thank God it did not come to that moment. But I remind everyone, again, not out of the woods by any stretch and we're dealing with, I always say a ferocious enemy in this disease. So it is something that gives me a little relief on behalf of all New Yorkers to know we will now have that reserve in place to protect us no matter what is thrown at us. With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and the outlet of each reporter.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have James Patchett, President and CEO of the EDC, Scott Cohen, co-founder of the New Lab, and Marcel Botha, CEO of 10XBeta here in person, and we also have Dr. Katz, President and CEO of Health + Hospitals on the phone. So, with that, I will start with Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering, what have you told the NYPD to do to address the increased rate of speeding motorists? What benchmarks have you established and are you satisfied that those benchmarks are being met?

Mayor: Yeah, Matt, it's a good question because obviously, look, I want to start at the beginning of this to all my fellow New Yorkers. Look, I know there's a lot fewer cars on the road. I understand the temptation people have. They think, oh, there's, you know, no one here, I can go faster. It's dangerous. You have got to recognize in the middle of this crisis, this coronavirus crisis, we cannot afford another crisis, which is people speeding, getting into crashes, harming other people, harming themselves or lives being lost. And we've already seen some of that. We cannot have that happen. So, the first point is slow down, it doesn't matter if there's not a lot of cars on the road. You've got to protect yourself and others. The second point is the NYPD has been instructed to crack down, as is always the case and the NYPD has been, I think over the last six years with Vision Zero extraordinary in their devotion to the concepts of Vision Zero. We still need a lot of enforcement. Now let's face it, the NYPD now has multiple tasks they're trying to undertake simultaneously. And I do want to express not only my appreciation, but my understanding - the NYPD is short-staffed because of the number of officers who are out sick, has to deal with everything that normally deals with in fighting crime and helping people. On top of that, we have the new reality of having to enforce social distancing rules and shelter in place on a vast scale. That's a lot to do. So, we're not always going to be able to do everything to the level we perfectly want because there's just limited numbers of officers. But definitely have said to the Commissioner, we need aggressive enforcement related to speeding. We cannot ignore the problem. We got to be present, we got to let people know there will be consequences and that will continue and we'll do everything we can and as more and more officers come back, well we'll be able to expand that further.

Moderator: Next, we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. I have a follow-up about the ventilators, then I have a separate question. On the ventilators, how many are going to be in the strategic reserve and is it is it all bridge ventilators that are going to be in the reserve? Are you going to put full-service ventilators in there as well?

Mayor: So, we're going to put a lot of different things in the reserve over time and I’ll – in the coming weeks I'll detail what we intend to have and how we're going to go about it. But this purchase of 3000 of the bridge ventilators, that guarantees us a lot of strength going forward if we ever deal with, again a rebound, God-forbid, a rebound of this disease in the here and now or next year, but also for the future protects us against many other challenges. We definitely want to make sure we have enough full-service ventilators as well going forward. And the other items, I mean, we've all seen things like the N95 masks that have been absolutely crucial. So I think it's going to be a combination of what can we produce here so that we know, and this would be, Erin my preference, what we can produce here that we know we can not only have a reserve amount but a reserve capacity to create a lot more on short notice. And then some things I'm certain that we will have to purchase in quantity to fill our reserve. But my perfect model, the thing I want to drive toward is a physical reserve of equipment and supplies and even more so the ability to produce here at a large level.

Question: Then my other question was—

Mayor: Erin, can you hear me? I want to make sure just everyone just for consistency, just get your questions – normally in our regular press conferences where there's a different format, I tell people split it up. I just want to always say to folks, basically we're letting people do two questions up front. Just get them both up front. It’ll just make the process easier the way we're doing things now.

Question: Yeah. Sorry, I think I got muted. Anyway, is there anything the city can do to help municipal workers who are struggling to get death certificates that they need to claim the benefits they're entitled to? I'm the head of two major union said this has become a major obstacle for those who have passed away.

Mayor: Yeah. We got to get – we have to resolve that. I don't want to see anyone waiting who doesn't need to wait and you know, unless there's a very specific reason causing the delay or whatever – we've said this to Medical Examiner, we said this to Health Department, whatever they need in the way of personnel or support – this is such a painful moment for so many families, including our public servants. We don't want people delayed. There's some things we're all dealing with here that are beyond anyone's reach because of the nature of this crisis. But anything that we can fix, anything we can do to lighten the burden we need to. So on something like that, I want to see that sped up and we will make sure that happens. And that anything those agencies need to do, we will make sure they have the personnel to get it done.

Moderator: Next we have [inaudible] from Hamodia.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. While the state has banned visitors – in most cases banned visitors from hospitals because they don't want overcrowding, there've been reports of from hospitals across the city of neglect and patients not getting lung suction properly, being found with empty oxygen tanks, taking hours and hours to get food or water. Again, some of these are confirmed, some aren’t because no one's allowed in to the hospitals. Would the city consider what some people are asking for is allowing in some sort of outside monitors where not on hospitals’ payrolls to ensure that there is proper care.

Mayor: I appreciate this question a lot because we understand, and I think what I'm hearing as the core of your question is that, you know, as good as our hospitals are and our health care workers are, they're also incredibly busy and stressed right now dealing with so much. And it is always helpful for a family to be able to advocate for their loved ones or anybody who's a loved one in their life being able to advocate for them and understand that that's been thrown off by this dynamic. Let me speak to what we can do to work on that, but I first want Dr. Katz to jump in and talk about how at our public hospitals, how you are addressing that challenge, understanding that we're trying to save lives every single hour of every single day and that comes first. But I know Mitch, you are very sensitive to the realities of the people in someone's life who matter to them and the important role they play in helping and protecting someone. How are you balancing that at Health + Hospitals?

President Katz: Sir, it's such a difficult question. In regular times I advise people never go to the hospital without having a family member with you. All right. Just to think that things are complicated at hospitals and you should always have someone to advocate for you, especially when you're sick. But these are such extraordinary times. The major reason that we haven't been allowing visitors, and it's not just us, it's all of the hospitals, isn't crowds. It's that we're trying to prevent transmission of the disease. We want people to shelter in place. We don't want them to be in a hospital where there are a lot of people who have COVID and could transmit COVID to them. We don't want to use extra protective equipment because we have to maintain enough protective equipment for our health care workers. And we don't want to introduce other people who themselves could be COVID-positive to the hospital. So it has been an extremely, extremely difficult, we have been trying as much as possible. We have volunteers with iPads who are connecting people to their families which I think is a beautiful thing. But it's been very challenging to weigh the risks of creating more infection in New York by allowing more people into a very high COVID place and trying to also be thoughtful about people's families.

Mayor: So, thank you very, very much, Mitch. That that really paints the picture on the challenge very powerfully. I think to the question of having some kind of monitors in hospitals, I think what I'd say right now is we better make sure, and this is something we will work on with all the hospitals, that family members who are trying to get information, who are trying to advocate, even if they can't be there in person, that there's a way to do that the right way and to support them and to hear them. While again recognizing what Mitch just said, that, that, that is not the same thing as allowing people to have the access they used to have because we have to protect everybody. But I don't want us to miss that that advocacy still has a place. So, we will work together with the hospitals to figure out how we can do that for this circumstance in a better, clearer way. And I'll come back with an update on that.

Moderator: Next, we have Alex from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Hey Alex, how you doing?

Question: Good. I wanted to ask a question about school grading policies. Some other large school districts have moved to kind of no harm policies, acknowledging that students are going to have kind of like differential access to online learning. And I'm wondering why that hasn't happened in New York City or if that's something that you're considering?

Mayor: Yeah, Alex, it's a great question. We are considering a lot of things because we're in the great unknown and you know, at the time we closed the schools it was quite clear there were so many questions to answer, and that every school system in the country dealing with this has had the challenge, but we're having it in a way that's beyond any other school systems just because of the size and the complexity, the diversity. So we've got to figure it out. The thing we're particularly focused on is helping our seniors who can graduate to graduate and go on to what's next in their life. And that's been a singular focus, obviously with every week trying to strengthen the online learning. But we got to figure out within that what we're doing about grading. There's, you know, some time, obviously, to figure that out before the end of the school year, but not a lot of time.

So that's something that the Chancellor I know is trying to determine with his team. We’ll come back and say more on that soon. I think the – I appreciate that point you make about the sort of no harm approach and we're certainly looking at that. I think right now the first focus again is to help the seniors who can graduate, maximize the online learning, and getting those devices in the hands of kids who don't have them yet in the next few days and getting more of a rhythm going with the online learning. And then we'll definitely make sense of the grading issue and talk about it publicly.

Moderator: Next, we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. The fact the city is resorting to creating its own stockpile feels like a sort of combination of the federal response to the outbreak since it's the feds who are supposed to maintain or both robust national stockpile in the first place. I was wondering if you can put the city's strategic stockpile in the context of the nationwide pictures on supplies and do you think other cities should emulate what New York City is doing?

Mayor: Yeah, Shant, it is a very, you said a mouthful there. It is a very sobering telling moment when I have to say here before you and say the New York City needs its own strategic reserve because we can't depend on the federal government at this point. It's sobering as all hell. I mean it's just not something I'm happy to tell you, but it is really, really clear. This is a city that, you know, really led this nation over generations in building up the concept of a federal government that would be there to protect all Americans and obviously no one did it more than New York's own Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But that idea has atrophied in so many ways. And now we have a New Yorker in the White House who unfortunately is putting an exclamation point on the idea that the federal government is no longer reliable when it comes to protecting everyday Americans and no place is bearing the brunt of that neglect more than New York City. It's just unacceptable.

So I, you know, the reality, the famous phrase, you know, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. I mean we've, we've now gotten the point – you know, since January 24th, we've been asking for a sufficient supply of testing that we haven't had one day where we had it. What else did we have to know to understand that going forward, we have to protect ourselves? And so we will build what we can build here. Yeah, that's my first preference to have the production be right here and to make sure that we know how to turn it on rapidly for anything that we think we might need that's viable to produce here. And then on top of that, to buy what we have to buy, but we've got to have our own reserve to protect ourselves. You know, I would hate in the future if New Yorkers faced a crisis and turn to the federal government and they said, sorry, we're all out. And then New Yorkers suffered, New Yorkers died because of it. We cannot take that risk, so we have to do it ourselves. And I'll just preview that when the Q and A is over, we're going to have Scott just show us a little more about how this thing works. So that'll be our finale to give people a sense of how this amazing machine actually works, homegrown in New York City. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask about, you know, the State is rescinding some of its orders for equipment, basically stuff that might no longer be needed and is now giving ventilators to other states. Is the city going to similarly try to perhaps cancel – I know we need a lot more PPEs – but on ventilators, are you going to cancel any of those contracts or will those perhaps go into the reserve –

Mayor: We need –

Question: As far as the field –

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: As far as the field hospitals, do you still plan to build all the ones that you've announced or might you scale those back as well?

Mayor: So, the quick answer is on the purchasing. Again, we do need to ensure that we'll have enough full-service ventilators for the future. So, a number of come in, some of those are going to be returned obviously when the crisis really is over and we're far from out of the woods. When everything's sort toted up and we know which ventilators are going to remain in New York City at the end of this process, we do need to make sure we have a reserve beyond that, and we will have that as part of our strategic reserve. Obviously, the bridge ventilators as well, the 3,000, but yeah, you said it on the PPEs, we are way far from out of the woods. We're still – we don't have enough strategic gowns to get to the end of the week, so we're going to have to have a really substantial supply to protect us in the future.

On the field hospitals. Yeah, the basic reality now is the ones that are up and running will continue for the foreseeable future. The ones that are not yet built out, some may be built out and be ready in reserve and or to be turned into isolation and quarantine centers. Remember in most of these cases, the same a building, whether it's hotel or some other kind of building that could have been used for a field hospital, can be converted to an isolation and quarantine center. We're going to need a lot of those rooms, a lot of those beds when we go into the next phase of really pushing back to the disease, and then lots of testing, lots of temperature checks, lots of people who, if anyone is positive or symptomatic, isolating them, quarantining them, helping them get through, testing more before people come back. We're going to need a lot of space for that. So those facilities will have more than one purpose for sure.

Moderator: Next, we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Go Marcia, how are you?

Question: I'm okay. I have two questions for you today. First of all, there are several southern states including Georgia that are thinking of reopening their states. I wonder if that concerns you and if the concerns you have that people from those states might come to New York City and spread more disease, would you consider barring those people from coming into New York in order to protect New York City residents? And my second question has to do with the fact that the Governor is meeting with President Trump today, and I wonder if you were in that room, what you would be saying to the President today?

Mayor: So, Marcia, on the first point, I am really concerned. I don't begrudge any state or any city that has really carefully looked at their health care situations, seen a lot of improvement, they've gotten to that phase where there's only a few cases and they can trace them and contain them and keep the outbreak from reasserting. Any state or any city that has certain that that's what they've got, God bless them. I understand why they would then open up, but if they're wrong about that, if they're not careful about that, then it could threaten all of their residents and then everybody else, and that becomes a problem for New York City. That becomes a problem for all of the United States of America. So, I'm definitely concerned that, you know, you've heard a rhetoric from the President, you know, liberate Michigan, liberate Virginia. That's dangerous in my view because it pushes people to move whether they have the facts or not, and I think the facts are matter here. If you can prove that the disease is really under control, then start opening up more. But if you can't prove it, don't make a false move. Don't take your foot off the gas. So, in terms of the threat to New York City, that's a real threat.

I want to be careful about the notion – and this is something we would work on the State with – I would be very careful about the notion of, you know, being negative to any individual from a state. People tried that towards New Yorkers, I didn't think that was fair. So I'd be very careful about that. I think the more essential point is to push for federal leadership to work with the states to make sure they reopen carefully, slowly, and if they see anything wrong, that they quickly put some of those restrictions back on to protect all of us. We get one chance, Marcia, to restart our economy and restart our lives the right way, and if people jump the gun, we're going to pay for it. We're all going to pay for it.

If I was in a room today with the President, I would say, Mr. President, there's only been two things you need to do this whole time. One, get the testing to New York City and all the places in America that needed it. And two help us through this horrible challenge by providing us the aid we need to get back on our feet. The cities and states that have borne the brunt that are going through this health care crisis, this economic crisis, and aren't going to be able to pay the bills, aren't going to be able provide basic services, help us as only the federal government could do. Well, Marcia, he has got two things he really, really needed to do. The first one, he has blown completely. The second one he's been silent on and right now we're waiting for a word from Washington about whether that state or local aid is going to be in the current package. It's not looking good right now. The President must speak and tell the Senate they have to do it. They have to either do it right now or do it very soon or else you're going to see cities and states start to go bankrupt literally and not be able to provide what our people need, and then you won't have a recovery.

Moderator: Next is Roger from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi, good morning Mayor. I wanted to ask you what you thought about the President's immigration announcement and what you think the appropriate immigration policy should be during a pandemic? Should there be cuts in immigration if it threats public health?

Mayor: Roger, I want to say what I saw was bluntly and very sadly a just a brazen political move by the President. To introduce the question of immigration in the middle of this when he hasn't done those two things I just mentioned. He hasn't gotten us the testing. He's not getting us the stimulus funding. He's not doing his job. So, he's going to his all-time favorite distraction, immigration, which he uses as a campaign weapon all the time. Remember when, you know, the caravans were all going to be coming to our towns and taking over our towns from Mexico and Guatemala. Of course, nothing like that ever happened. This is his go to when he's in trouble. So that's what I think is motivating it. To the bigger issue, I respect any kind of a plan that is trying to protect us all while we deal with a pandemic. It's an exceptional situation, an honest plan to protect us while we deal with this and get back on our feet and then resume our traditions in this country of being a welcoming open country. That's one thing. I don't think that's what he's talking about. I think he's talking about a political ploy, honestly.

Moderator: Next is Julia from The Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone else on the call. A question for you, Mr. Mayor and a question for James Patchett, who I believe you said is on the call. First for you, I'm wondering if you regret not having this bridge ventilator program going weeks earlier when we were in, you know, more dire need of the machines and I'm wondering if they were available on April 6th, why didn't we hear a bit then? And then for James Patchett, I was looking for an update on the homegrown testing. Have any of the contracts with the universities and the private companies been signed and if so, can you make that announcement now?

Mayor: So, Julia on the – I’ll turn to James in the moment – I think, you know, our ground rule, when we have something to announce, we announce it. James will offer whatever he wants to now, but I will remind you that, you know, we've said those homegrown test kits they'll be coming in the beginning of May and that we're going to announce the different organizations that are part of the companies, the universities, anyone who is part of putting that together like this amazing coalition to put together the ventilators. We'll announce it publicly, but when we are ready and when everyone has been notified and they're ready, that's when we make an announcement. But to the question of the bridge ventilators again and we're going to do the demonstration a couple of minutes now because I know time is running short.

These were ready to go into action the week of April 6th. The situation changed radically and for the better, right around April 5th, April 6th including that we got some shipments of the full-service ventilators in at the last moment that we had not been able to depend on, so we didn't need to put them in the service. But if they had been needed, they would have gone immediately into service even though they were partway through the process with the FDA. And I want Dr. Katz to explain this because I think it's hard for a non-medical person and someone who hasn't been here in this kind of a wartime headquarters dynamic to understand just how close it got. Dr. Katz is the one that said to me, look, if, if we get to the point where it's about saving a life, then the rules, the medical ethics are actually different, vis-à-vis something like an FDA approval, if it's the only way to save a life. Dr. Katz, could you explain that?

President Katz: You have it exactly right, sir. And during those days, I remember every night, right before going to sleep, I would be checking to make sure there were enough ventilators at every one of our 11 hospitals and it would be the first thing I would do in the morning. Everything was about making sure that we wouldn't run out of ventilators. In general, we like for all of our machines to be approved by the FDA, we like them to have been gone through clinical practice. And so, when it turned out because you were able to secure those ventilators for us right when we were running out, we did not run out that week of April 5th, but how do we run out? We would not have needed the FDA approval. We would have not needed having done the research studies to prove that it works. Physicians can always use a device to save a life. And so if there were no ventilators to use and the choice was between allowing a patient to die and placing them on a ventilator that had not yet received FDA approval or been proven in clinical studies to work, everyone would favor using the ventilator device. And so that's why I was tremendously relieved when these, I knew these devices could be put into service.

Mayor: Thank you Mitch and I'll add to last point before turning the James quickly that, no, I want you to understand, Julia, the notion in the beginning that we would not have a supply chain that functioned in the beginning of March as this was going on, you know, we thought our supply chain was holding. We also thought federal aid would be consistent. And it was really, as we got into the third week in March that it became abundantly clear that something was getting worse and worse and something was going wrong. And had there been already supply chain and, or a federal effort to either use existing stockpiles or move ventilators around the country, which is something that could have done at any point, and they never did. I kept saying, mobilize the military, create a national supply chain that was federally run, use the defense production act properly. None of that happened. All of that could have given us the security that we didn't need to even think about something like doing a homegrown model. But at a point it became clear, you know, towards the – again, the third week of March that everything had gone haywire, that we couldn't depend on any of the things we normally depended on. And that's where, from my point of view is like if we have to create something ourselves, whether we know how to make it or not, we got to do something, and these folks were amazing in pulling something together. And the fact is they did it so that – and we didn't know exactly how the pieces would align – but had it been needed, it was going to be pressed into service and this ventilator would have saved lives. James, you want to add?

Patchett: Sure. I'll just say on your second question. We've made tremendous progress. We've had a number of our partners sign contracts with us and we are well on our pathway to being able to meet the overall test kit obligations that the Mayor has set out for us to acquire for the city.

Mayor: More to come on that soon. Go ahead.

Moderator: We'll take two more questions today. Next we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Mayor. Good morning. How are you?

Mayor: Good. Andrew, how are you doing?

Question: Good, thanks. So yesterday you announced the cancellation of all the June events including Pride, which is June 28th, just six days after that is the 4th of July. I wondered, have you already begun discussions about whether there can be any kind of fireworks watching in New York City and can you envision that?

Mayor: We have not begun those discussions. Certainly not at my level. I'm sure our team has been talking to our colleagues at Macy's and everyone else who would have to coordinate an endeavor that size. Hard to see it today, but you know, that is obviously one of the most important days of the year, and boy does it speak volumes to our values and what we're feeling as a country right now. So that one, we have some time to sort out, hard to see right now. But you know, Andrew, we're going to be looking at our indicators every single day to see where we're going. And so, you know, I'm going to reserve judgment on that for a little bit while we see what the health care facts tell us and just recognize that July 4th is a day like no other and want to be really thoughtful about that.

Moderator: Last question for today, Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, I hope you're doing well. I've got two questions. They're related. The first is how is this bridge ventilator different from a normal ventilator? My second question is a lot of the recent research and reporting on this disease suggests that ventilators are not necessarily the most effective treatment of this form of respiratory distress. That really respiratory therapy, moving patients in bed, using oxygen, maybe better techniques for treating this particular new disease than going to a ventilator and intubating a patient.

Mayor: Okay. So, what we'll do is this, I'm going to turn to Dr. Katz to answer your medical question on one, what a bridge ventilator allows and two on whether there are alternatives that are being considered. I can say from being in the middle of this battle I certainly think our health care professionals across the board believed with dealing with the scale of this problem, that it was absolutely necessary to have ventilators available in quantity to keep up with the demand and keep people alive and they have saved many a life because they had the ventilators. But Dr. Katz answer your two questions and then we'll have Scott, just take a moment as we conclude to show us a little more of how this works so everyone can see it. And Scott, you can just describe first in the microphone, what are you going to show people, and then you can do that, but let's have Mitch Katz first answer the questions.

President Katz: Thank you, sir. I'll start with Henry’s second part. So Henry is correct that as we've learned more and more about this illness, we know that it's best to try to avoid intubation. It's best to use other methods like giving people oxygen, doing aggressive respiratory therapy, using a BPAP – BiPAP – and other methods of trying to keep people off the ventilators in part because once people need ventilators, they don't do very well, in general. That being said, no one disagrees that if somebody cannot be oxygenated through other methods, they should be on a ventilator and there is no choice. So, we do everything we can to try to keep people off ventilators, but when they need a ventilator, no choice. And that has not changed anywhere in this medical picture.

In terms Henry of how to explain it, and I think when you see it, it will help. Most ventilators work by pushing oxygen through tube into the tube that people have placed in their mouth and then down into their lungs. So you're essentially - the machine is blowing out, a typical ventilator is blowing out air that goes directly into the tube. This ventilator is based on a robotic squeeze of what is known as an Ambu bag. When we ventilate patients if they only need to be ventilated for short periods of time, we've always used what I call an Ambu bag. You - it's not a ventilator - basically you squeeze it and it pushes in the oxygen. And we've used this for generations. It's a very safe and well-known tool. The problem is somebody has to squeeze it and you need a live person to do that and you need them to do it at a particular rhythm, so that the inspiratory phase and the expiratory phase is the right length of time, the pressure is the right amount of pressure. So firstly, it would take a real human being 24 hours a day to do it. And second, they wouldn't necessarily always get it right the way a robot can. And so basically the way I look at these vents is it's a robotic Ambu bag presser. It presses the Ambu bag the way a human might, but they – it does it with much greater scientific precision. It doesn't require a human and the developers of this have added some amazing bells and whistles, literally bells and whistles, that would tell us if the person were not getting the proper amount of oxygen through the ventilator.

Mayor: I think that's perfect. That's great, Mitch. I think Mitch just gave us the narration we needed unless there's anything you want to add, Scott, and feel free and then show us.

Cohen: Okay. Yeah, the only thing I really wanted to add was that I think what the bells and whistles that Dr. Katz's is talking about we have on here primarily because the – we had physicians, clinicians working with us from the very beginning. Dr. Quan and Dr. Slocum Jr. who were working with Marcel and the engineers, and we were getting constant feedback about you know, what physicians would want on a device like this. So they had the the visibility, kind of a control panel to understand how the device was interacting with the patient.

Mayor: Excellent.

Botha: Okay. So that's good. Yeah, so you switch it on, you set your [inaudible] volume, your respiration rate and your inspiration expiration ratio, and then you hit run. And then once that is going, it's going to be just be like watching paint dry. It's going to go for hours and days. The bags themselves lasts for about three days. So, we replaced the Ambu bag every three days. We have an inline pressure sensor that measures the respiratory or the airway pressure. So that's one of the safety feedback loops so that you get all of that displayed on the interface on the front. If there's any of the thresholds for safety that are surpassed the device will show one of the relevant alarms, run air pressure, if it fails to work or if there's something that obstructs it, it will have a mechanical failure alarm that you cannot silence. And so, it's a minimum viable product around replacing a human hand and it's able to do that with a much higher rate of precision than an untrained hand, for instance.

Mayor: Excellent. Well, thank you again to everyone, really an amazing achievement. And as we wrap up just to say this is New York City ingenuity at its best. This is a homegrown solution to an international problem and it really, really inspires me. As I said, as days come in when we're going to really praise and appreciate and love and celebrate all the heroes of this fight, starting with our health care workers and our first responders. I'm going to make sure we also have a moment in that parade where we get to celebrate the folks who created these ventilators and the folks who built those face shields and the surgical gowns and all the things to protect our health care workers and our first responders because it's just been an amazing effort by so many New Yorkers to help each other, to be there for each other, and that is something that one day we will celebrate like we have never celebrated before –

[Ventilator beeps]

I think the ventilator agrees with me. Okay, thank you so much everyone. God bless you all.

2020-04-22 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. The experience we've all been having these last weeks, something we could never have imagined in all our lives. So many challenges. So many things where people have had to create a new way of living, a new way of thinking. We've all here at City Hall, here in the City government, we've tried to give you guidance, we’ve tried to give you all the information we have to help you through this. But I know for all of you, for every New Yorker, for all of us, it has been a really challenging process trying to figure out our own approach. Every single one of us, every single family, our own approach to this crisis. A crisis that nothing, nothing like this has happened in a century in this country. And we're all trying our best to find the right way to handle it, to help our families, to help each other, to help our communities, to help protect ourselves. And I think one of the most challenging parts of all this has been that there's so much we all don't know. And it has been very frustrating for all of us to not know more, to wish we could know more, to wish the scientific community, the medical community, anyone anywhere had all the answers, and yet we know that's still not the case. We have learned a lot from fighting this virus right here in New York City. We've learned a lot about what New Yorkers are capable of to support each other and to rise to new heights. We've learned a lot about what works, and we've certainly seen the power of social distancing, and shelter in place, but there are so many things we still don't know and so many things that very personally, very humanly gnaw at us because we don't know and we want to know.

Very immediate questions. The most obvious, I ask it myself, my family asked it, have I already had the coronavirus and I didn't even know it, have I been exposed to it? All of us are asking this question. Have we have we somehow contracted this virus already? Have we in some way exposed other people to it? We don't know. And that is the reality of this phase we're in right now. Where this disease is widespread. Where we have had community transmission now for weeks and weeks, and we haven't had the thing that would really be the difference maker, and that's testing obviously on a really broad scale. That would help us all to have a lot more answers. That's been the reality we've been living through the months of March and April. It's not an acceptable reality for any of us. It's been what we've had to make sense of somehow, and again, I credit all of you, you've found the best way you could to deal with a situation where there's just not enough answers. But I want to remind us all and I want everyone to take hope from the notion it does not have to be this way. It does not have to be this way going forward. We can change this situation. We can actually provide a lot more answers if we get the help we need to do it and then we use the extraordinary capacity and ingenuity of New Yorkers to follow through. When we have that testing, a whole world of possibilities is going to open up. We're going to be able to give people a lot more answers, and it's going to help us not only to have more comfort knowing that we know a lot more about what we've experienced, what our families experienced, it's going to give us more power to push on to the next phase to push back this disease and make things better for all of us. We need to be able to envision that next phase, that new reality where things really do start to get better, and it's someplace that will take real work obviously, but we can get there. We will get there. My promise to you is that I will keep pushing us forward. I will do everything in my power. This entire city government will do everything in our power to get us out of this phase we're in, and onto something better as quickly as possible.

We need to do the work now to be able to make that next big jump. So, today I'm going to give you an update on the testing, the approach to testing, the approach to tracing the contacts, all of the things that will take us to that next level. Today, I'm going to give you the shape of what it's going to look like. Broad strokes, but enough for you to start understanding, and feeling the way forward. And I remind you that we talked a few days ago about those phases of this disease. I'm going to go over those again for a moment. Right now, we're in the widespread transmission phase. This is not a place we're going to stay, obviously. We can't accept this reality. We're going to fight our way out of it. The next phase is called low-level transmission. Now, to get to low-level transmission and to hold onto it, you need a huge amount of testing. Not just tens of thousands of test per day, as many as hundreds of thousands of tests per day for a city of 8.6 million people. But when you have that kind of testing, when you have it available whenever it's needed for whoever needs it, then you're also able to do a lot of the other things that continue to contract this disease, and make sure that people are protected. So when you find that someone has tested positive, you're in a position to isolate them, to quarantine them, to trace all the people that they came in contact with who might have gotten the disease from them, the people that came in close contact with, and then help all those people as well. So, we have to be ready to push into that phase, that low level transmission phase that we all want to get to. We have to have all the building blocks in place, even while we're fighting to get the testing we need, we have to have the building blocks in place and that's what we're announcing today.

So, the plan is called test and trace, and it's a very straightforward concept. It's what you have deserved all along. Had there been the testing from day one, this is what we could have done so much more of in the very beginning to contain this disease. But now, this is how we ultimately defeat this disease. You need to be protected every day. You deserve that as a New Yorker, you need to be protected. You need to know help is there for you. You need to feel that sense of protection. Testing is going to allow us to do that, and you need that test to be easy to get. So, it has to be plentiful and then it’s our job to make it available in communities all over the city in lots of different ways, so it's easy for people to access. We're not there yet, but we're going to show you how we get there pending being able of course to get the help we still need from the federal government to get that vast amount of testing or somehow to find it in the international market, which to date has been extremely difficult. But we're going to keep looking under every stone to get the quantity of testing we need. So, the testing will be the key, but I want to give you the sense of the whole plan because you deserve that too. You need to know, you deserved to know, if something happens to you, what is going to be the reality of how we'll help all the people in your life. How is it going to affect the rest of your family? What kind of support are they going to get or the people that you come in contact with, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, whatever it is, we're going to lay this out to you.

Now, even though we don't have the testing that we need today, we're going to keep fighting for it and we want all the other building blocks to be in place more and more each day. So, as the testing comes in, we can plug it in, and get all these pieces working together. So, we have made some progress on testing. As I announced a few days ago, we found one company in the entire world, one company that is providing us now a steady supply of test kits. It's not a huge amount, but it's really helpful. And in the beginning of May, we'll be creating our own manufacturing, our own here in New York City. Huge breakthrough. It's going to help a lot. Every additional test we get helps someone to be safe, but we want to find a way to expand that production as much as we can locally while finding every other source around the world, and especially getting that federal help we need. And that demand has to continue every day, because the one place that could really create the breakthrough is the federal government. They still haven't done it. So, we will then need, once we have more and more tests, more and more sites to do the testing, and we're identifying public sites, public buildings all over the city that will be turned into those test sites, and they'll be ready to be turned on very quickly.

So, we do believe because we're seeing progress from everything, all of you are doing, the social distancing, the shelter in place, everything you're doing is making a difference. We believe every day is getting us closer to the point where having that testing, having the ability to follow through on each case becomes more and more possible, because as the numbers are driven down, then the notion of literally tracing each and every case through knowing everyone the individual came in contact with closely, and helping all those people, every day the number of cases declines, that possibility of doing that really completely becomes greater. But we also know we're not there yet in terms of our overall indicators to what we show you every day. We'll talk about them again in a few minutes. We still have work to do, but we definitely see progress and that makes this plan all the more necessary.

Now, two concepts here, as I said, test and trace. So, testing widely available, here's how the plan would go. Widely available, plenty of sites, plenty of tests. So, what happens to you if you go to a test site. Well if you test negative, that's great, and of course you'll get instructions about how to continue to protect yourself, because even a negative test doesn't mean you're, you know, out of the woods forever. It means, thank God that day you don't have the coronavirus, and we'll remind you of all the things to do to continue the smart precautions to protect yourself, your family, and help drive this disease back. But if you test positive, then we get you care right away. If you can't isolate properly at home, and that's a lot of New Yorkers that just don't have the right space in their homes, in their apartments. If you can't isolate at home properly, we'll get you a hotel room, we'll get you the help you need. The whole idea is to help you to isolate, to get well, to have the support you need, and of course get tested again to know when you're done with the disease, so you can go back to your regular life. Making sure that that is available, that support is available for each and every New Yorker who needs it, that's what this plan is all about, and that's the building blocks we're putting in place now. The hotel rooms, and all the support that goes with it.

Now, the tracing is literally hunting down each and every case, every individual who contracts this disease, following up with them and making sure that they're interviewed about the people in their life they've been in close contact with in the previous days and then following up with those people and it's the same thing, it’s continue following it all the way through. If you were in close contact with your cousin, then we're going to go see your cousin. We want your cousin to get tested, then we want to see— if your cousin test positive, who were they in close contact with and just keep following it through every single time to make sure that everyone who needs that test gets it. Everyone who then because they got a positive needs care gets it. Imagine it just happening over and over again and that's how we constrict this disease. We obviously help people, most importantly help people to know what's going on with their own body, their own health and get them to help they need to get well, job one, but it's also how we just drive the disease back day after day. We have to keep doing it, it's very repetitive if you think about we have to keep doing it to the point where in a perfect world we literally can see every single person in the City who has the coronavirus at that time and we know exactly where they are and exactly the help they're getting. That's where we have to go to the maximum extent humanly possible.

Now, the kind of care that you will need, let's go through an example. If you do test positive, here's a real scenario, while we want to take care of you. As I said, job one, take care of you, get you the care you need, get you the isolation, the quarantine you need. So, you want to know the second you got a positive test, what do I do next? Where am I going to get medical care? How am I going to make sure I get better? How am I going to make sure my family isn't infected because I have the disease? That's what we work with immediately, we get you to, if you don't have, again a place you can isolate properly at home, we get you to a hotel we put that care in place and that support in place. Then that interview immediately, who have you been in close contact with in recent days? And each and every one of us would say, okay, well I was either around my family members, my friends, someone I worked with, someone who’s a neighbor, go through that whole list, go and then literally follow up with each and every one of those people, get them tested. Anyone who's negative, great, we still will give them the information to help them take care of themselves. But if anyone's positive, if your friend, for example, who you just spend time with the day before is positive, then we get your friend to the care they need, to the isolation they need and the support. And we take an interview that friend and go through those contracts over and over and over again. It's going to take thousands and thousands of people to do this right and we're putting that team together now, when you think about what it is to put this whole apparatus together, we're going to need tests and that means the test kits. It means the personnel to give the tests, it means the PPEs to protect those personnel, it means the locations to give— the tests in. It means the labs to process the tests, we need the personnel to do all that— contact tracing, we need the hotel rooms for isolation and then all the services to protect people and give them support while they're in those hotel rooms. That entire apparatus is being put together and obviously a city the size, we could be talking about thousands of people in isolation at a given point, tens of thousands. We don't know the number yet, but we do know that we're going to build an apparatus that will keep expanding to accommodate whatever that true number is because it's the only way we protect people and it's the only way we drive this disease back.

So, if you're someone who test positive and now let's say you're in that hotel, what do you need? We have to get you to the hotel, so we'll provide that transportation of course, you need the place where you can stay. We have a lot of hotel rooms and again, it's very sad what's happened to everyone who works in the hotel industry, not having jobs. Everyone's gone through a lot, but there clearly are a lot of rooms available to us so we have those. We would have to provide food and we're obviously in the middle of a huge food effort for the whole City, so we can use that same effort here. We have to provide a laundry services, just the basics, obviously we have to provide health care and that's something we will do for anyone who's in those isolation settings, making sure they're safe, making sure to well checking on them frequently and again, every day we drive back the disease, we have more and more people, more and more health care workers who can be turned to other crucial tasks like this instead of just having to focus on the front lines in our hospitals. So, again, it kind of all fits together, the more you reduce the disease, the more health care personnel you free up to focus on the isolation sites and driving back to the disease. And then of course, telemedicine, we're going to use technology clearly in many different forms to help update people stay in touch with them, but also direct connection to a human being, to a medical to a doctor or a clinician who you can talk to, who will check in with you, who will answer your questions. So, we want a lot of contact with folks who are in isolation, we want to make sure they're well and if they need anything, they can get it quick. So, if you said, can we do all that this very day? No, all those pieces are not in place today, but they will be in place next month. And as we fight to get all of the testing we need, we're going to be building this apparatus every single day. And again, we don't know the exact number yet of people it will be serving. Absolutely. it's going to start in the thousands, I'm not going to be shocked at all of it goes into the tens of thousands, but we will build an apparatus that can grow with the need. So, as soon as we can start to do those tests in a truly widespread manner, we can start to accommodate people in this fashion as part of that effort to get to low-level transmission. And that's going to be an intense fight, I want to be clear. I think as you're hearing all these pieces, it's a lot to orchestrate some massive operation. We will put it together, we'll make it work, but it also means finding everyone and making sure that we communicate with all New Yorkers and make them really understand how easy it will be eventually to get testing and encourage them to come and get it because we have to know if someone has the disease to do all that tracing and all that follow-up and all that isolation.

If there are people out there who never get tested and might have the disease and we hope and pray a mild version of it, remember then they're still spreading it to other people. So, this is a big, big job and it comes with a certain amount of unknowns, obviously. But what will be crucial as we build it is to communicate to all New Yorkers how important it will then be to engage at constantly. There will be a big outreach effort, there'll be call centers with people constantly communicating with anyone who is trying to get information. There will be a lot more health care workers, as I said, moved into these kinds of tasks, testing people, taking care of them in isolation. We're going to expand that that pool of disease detectives that we talked about back in the early part of March who do amazing work through our Health Department. But we're going to add a whole lot more folks who don't necessarily have that high, high level of training that our Health Department disease detectives have. But they're going to be trained to do the basics and that's going to take thousands of people. And again, we have a lot of City government employees who right now some of them could be put into this work because their regular work is not happening. We have a lot of people work for nonprofit organizations who contract with the City, some of them can be transferred into this kind of work. If we need to hire more, of course we will cause this will be absolutely crucial to our success and we're going to use all of these efforts to collect the kind of data that will allow us to know exactly what's happening with this disease and how we keep finding it back.

So, we'll have a team that puts together that data, analyzes it, helps understand the strategic meaning so we can act on it quickly. A lot to do, but it's a vision that makes sense, you can hear how all the pieces fit together to protect New Yorkers and move us forward. I'm absolutely confident that we can put this together, the missing link is the testing. I have no doubt about New York City's ability I talked yesterday about the self-sufficiency that we are going to exhibit as New Yorkers, we've learned a very powerful lesson in self-sufficiency too often during this crisis. Too often we've been left on our own to fend for ourselves, but New Yorkers have been absolutely brilliant at fighting back. We will set up this entire apparatus, no one's giving us a playbook or coming here to do it for us, we will create this. But where we absolutely must have help is that testing, if we don't get the quantities than all the other pieces don't come together.

Now, that is the vision that we will be implementing over these next few weeks. There'll be growing throughout May and it's how we will get to that kind of transcendent place where we get out of widespread transmission into low level transmission. I can't give you the exact day that we'll get to low-level transmission, I can tell you it's very much a function of how much testing we have and how many New Yorkers we reach and making sure that everyone gets tested, everyone is reached and is communicated with, that we don't miss people to the maximum extent possible. That's going to tell us a lot about how long it's going to take to get to low-level transmission, and then remember we want to get through that phase and onto the even better phase what is effectively no more cases. So, I can't give you an exact timeline, but I can tell you we're going to build a very aggressive effort to get through it as speedily as humanly possible and all New Yorkers once again are got to be part of it, just like you fought back to the disease with everything you're doing in your own life, we're going to need you to fight it back by being a part of this effort, by communicating, by participating, and while have a lot more to say about that as it builds out.

Now, in the meantime, we've got a lot of work to do even with the tools we have right now because we know where some of the hardest hits hit areas are and I want to emphasize the right thing to do is to go where the need is greatest, where people are suffering the most. Where we've seen this disease take hold the strongest and it's all connected to those health care disparities we've talked about before. It's deeply unfair and it's quite clear what's happening here that this disease is hitting hardest, where people have had the least income, the least health care available to them. We need to go there and help people more because it's the morally right thing to do, it's also crucial to any strategy of drive back this disease overall to go where it's having the biggest impact and cut it off in every way we can. So even with the imperfections of the amount of testing we have now, we're still going to devote more testing as we get it in to focusing on the hardest hit areas. One of the groups of New Yorkers who were most concerned about right now who are bearing a lot of the brunt and have borne the brunt even before this crisis, is our public housing residents, New Yorkers who live in NYCHA buildings. Now, I want to say, I've spent a lot of time with NYCHA residents. I’ve spent a lot of time in those buildings over the years. These are folks who are the backbone of our city who work so hard and fight through such tough odds all the time. NYCHA for decades did not get the support it deserved. A lot of people are living in buildings that haven't gotten the kind of support and maintenance they deserve in the sense of, you know, a building, 50 years old, 60 years old that should have been rehabbed decades ago – never got that. And so, a lot of people are living in really tough circumstances and obviously these are among the lowest income New Yorkers on top of that. So folks who often haven't gotten a fair shake and didn't have access to the health care they deserved over the years, but these are folks who are the backbone of the city and we owe it to them to make a special effort. Now that we finally are getting some testing in and building some of our own, this is going to be a real focal point. Everyone in New York City has been hit hard by this pandemic - everyone - but the residents of NYCHA have been hit particularly hard and we want to do a lot more to reach you, to help you, to bring you support, not just the testing, but other forms of support to help you through this crisis.

So, folks in NYCHA have experienced these health care disparities. A lot of folks in NYCHA also have the additional challenge, again, not having had really serious conditions treated sufficiently, whether it's diabetes or severe asthma or heart disease. So, we're talking about a lot of people who have those preexisting conditions - they're vulnerable, especially the many, many seniors who live in NYCHA. We're going to provide new support; so first of all, the testing that we have up and running already, the five community sites through Health + Hospitals, we're going to, we obviously know they are in many cases, very close to NYCHA developments. That's an important option for folks in NYCHA who are older who have those preexisting conditions. We want to make sure you're getting tested so those sites are up and running now. We're going to add six more sites in the next few days and NYCHA residents will be a priority at all six of these new sites and we're going to obviously with the leadership of NYCHA - with all the people work there - we're going to spread this word to all 400,000 residents, but these new six sites are near NYCHA developments and are going to be prioritized so that NYCHA residents can get tests there. So, opening on Friday at Health + Hospitals community sites, so Health + Hospitals will run these community testing sites, opening Friday, three sites at the Cumberland Health Center in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, at the Belvis Health Center in Mott Haven in the Bronx, and Gouverneur Health Center at the Lower East side here in Manhattan. Then opening next week, three additional sites that'll actually be at NYCHA locations in NYCHA complexes - at the Jonathan Williams houses in Williamsburg, at the Woodside houses in Woodside, Queens, and at the Saint Nicholas Houses in Harlem.

Testing, we're going to keep expanding, again, focusing first on where the need is greatest and these six new sites will be a crucial part of that. Second, we've got to make sure that NYCHA residents get more and more support in terms of the supplies to keep them safe and keep everyone around them safe. So we're going to keep delivering supplies as they are needed and that starts with face coverings and gloves for all NYCHA residents. Those will go out next week delivered across all of the housing authorities - so literally every building, every resident - it will help people to stay safe, it will help them to protect others. We're also going be giving out hand sanitizer to seniors in particular, so that'll be the priority to make sure all seniors have the hand sanitizer they need and as we get more supplies, we'll go beyond that.

Third, we're going to focus on the reality of hunger in public housing. I've been talking about this for weeks, everyone in the city is dealing with this challenge more and more - hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs. Everyone who doesn't have a paycheck and doesn't have a way to pay for food needs help. We will be there for all New Yorkers; no New Yorker will go hungry. That is the pledge. We've talked about all the ways that people can get help, obviously by going to 3-1-1 or nyc.gov/get food. We're going to do a special effort around NYCHA buildings and senior buildings in particular as the focus. So, obviously NYCHA residents, like anybody else who have been hungry in these last weeks, have been able to go on to 3-1-1 or go online to get help. We're going to do something different now with the senior buildings, the buildings in NYCHA that are explicitly for seniors that have high levels of concentrations of seniors. We're going to just provide the meals directly, meaning instead of anyone even having to call and apply, we're going to go right to their door - right to your door - and bring you meals directly. So, we’ll have enough meals for a whole building of seniors and get them right to them. We don't want anyone to miss out on the food they need. So, we're going to do this proactively.

Now, another crucial piece, a fourth element of this plan is to recognize that there's still so many people who say, understandably, they're not only vulnerable, they don't have all the information they need. They don't know where to turn. This is particularly true with folks who are dealing with serious health care conditions; folks who are disabled, seniors, folks who do not speak English as a first language. There's a lot of folks who are particularly vulnerable and don't know where they're going to get the help they need. We want to go right to them. So we'll be calling through seniors at NYCHA and other vulnerable residents directly. Live calls, folks calling to get them the help they need - if they need food, if they need supplies, whatever it happens to be. Obviously if they need medical care, connect them right away to a clinician. We're going to do that as a proactive approach as well.

And then finally we know of so many seniors in particular senior citizens who are feeling more isolated than ever. Obviously, one of the most painful realities of this crisis, there are so many, but one of the most painful human realities has been grandparents who can't see their grandchildren or their children. Seniors who used to get visits of one kind another; kept their spirits up and got them help they needed, a lot of them feel particularly isolated right now. We want to make it a little bit easier and one of the ways of course is through technology. So, there are so many seniors in public housing who don't have access to technology. We're going to do something about that now; we’re going to make a $5 million investment to give free tablets with internet service to 10,000 NYCHA seniors who are particularly isolated and need that support so they can stay in touch with their family and their loved ones and have more access to the help they need. We'll start in locations in Brownsville and East New York, in Mott Haven, Red Hook, Bushwick, and Coney Island. There'll be a phone helpline if the seniors need any help working with the tablets or figuring out how to get the information they need - there'll be a live phone helpline for them. And I want to thank, I'm often giving thanks these days for all the people who stepped up. I want to thank the folks at T-Mobile who are partnering with us on this project to help these seniors get more connected and get the support they need.

So, a couple more things today. One question that came up yesterday and I appreciate that the question was raised because I had made the announcements and they were no fun obviously, the announcements that the May and June events had to be canceled in the city – the big – the festivals, the concerts, the parades that we had to cancel them. But then the question came up yesterday about the 4th of July. And you know, I thought immediately about the big gathering like we're used to, you know, the millions of people, millions of people coming out and all, I thought, well, how are we going to do that by the 4th of July? But then I started thinking, wait a minute, there's no day like the 4th of July – it's special – and even if we have to do something different, we have to market in a very meaningful way, especially at this moment where everyone's fighting shoulder-to-shoulder to get through this disease. So, I reached out to the CEO of Macy's, Jeff Gennette and he has been a fantastic partner as has everyone at Macy's with the city. We fare a, feel a very special connection to Macy's in this city, obviously because of the fireworks in particular, because of the Thanksgiving parade, but they've been just very, very civically minded for decades and decades. So I said to Jeff, look, we may not be able to do it the way we historically have, but I want to know how you feel about this because we think it would be right, I think it would be right to mark the day in some special way, whatever the circumstance and to the credit of Jeff and everyone at Macy's, he said, we are right there with you. We want to do that too; we're ready to do it. So, one way or another, the show will go on; one way or another, we're going to celebrate the 4th of July in a very special way in New York City. There's definitely going to be fireworks, how we do them, where we do them, how we do it in a way that's safe and keeps New Yorkers healthy - a lot of questions that we have to answer between now and then. Thank God we know that fireworks can be seen by New Yorkers all over the city even just looking out the window or from the fire escape, from the roof, but we have to do it in a way that's safe and smart. We all are going to have to, I think for quite a while recognize social distancing, but this is a day we cannot miss. This is a celebration that has to happen because it's about our nation and it's about all we stand for as Americans and New Yorkers as a symbol of our strength and resilience. But we're going to do it the smart way and we'll have a lot more to say on that as we get closer. But a profound thanks to everyone at Macy's; no one would have blamed them if they said, hey, we just can't do it this year, but their spirit was, you know, come hell or high water, we're going to find a way to do this and do it the right way and do it the safe way, so thank you to everyone at Macy's.

Now, let me, as I start to conclude, go over the numbers we watch every single day. And this really always will tell us how we're doing and what we have to plan on going forward. Again, I've been very honest with folks; these numbers tell us a truth. It’s not always the truth we want to hear, but it’s the truth we need to be able to make the right decisions and it reminds us to stick to our plan. Even against the backdrop where there's been real progress, we still need more progress to get to the point where we can get to low-level transmission and loosen up some of those restrictions. So, for the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, unfortunately that number went up from 204 to 252. Daily number of people in ICUs across our Health + Hospitals, hospitals for suspected COVID-19 - that number went down, good news, from 857 to 821. The number of people tested positive citywide – went down from 35 percent to 33 percent. The number of people testing positive in the public health lab test – went down from 63 percent to 54 percent. So, three out of four indicators absolutely in the right direction; one more wasn't so good today, but overall real progress, let's stick to it.

So look, before I talk to you, just to give you a few words in Spanish and then we'll, we'll hear from our colleagues in the media. The bottom line here is to always be building the next phase, always be building the next step forward. We have proven in this city - all of us that - we can protect and support each other. Now we're going to build something in some ways even bigger. We had to fight every step of the way through the last few days. Now we're going to build something to fight back to take on this disease and push it back. This is nothing, never been done in this city before. Let's be clear, an operation that could reach potentially hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in a single day and have thousands or tens of thousands of people in isolation with all the support they need and constant tracing of everybody who might've been exposed to this disease. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in the history of the city, but we will create it and we will make it work because that's what New Yorkers do. And it will be part of our story of how we fought back this disease and we won the day. So, a lot to do, but we'll do it together and I have no doubt that we will prevail. Just a few words in Spanish -

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media. And, again, please give me the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we have Deputy Mayor Vicki Been and Senior Advisor Jay Varma also on the line. The first question will go to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Hey, Juliet, how are you doing?

Question: I'm good. So, I actually have a two-parter for you. Just following up on the ticker tape parade, how do you do this with people standing in the street next to each other? [Inaudible] actually that's so much a part of this parade – if social distancing issues are still there or there are people that are concerned with being close after they're lifted. And also, following up, I called 3-1-1 again this morning to see how things were going with senior food delivery. And I was told that after placing one order, which supplies food for two days, the senior needs to call back to place another order. So, is that something new?

Mayor: That is something we're going to change right away, Juliet. The folks who put together the food initiative were building out the program massively and trying to make sure that they always had enough for everyone each day and trying to make sure that folks got what they needed, but obviously making sure that if someone only needed a brief supply, that they would get that supply of food not assuming they would be needing it every day or every week. What I've said to them is I want to change that assumption immediately, turn it the other way around, ensure that the food supply is constant. We can be in touch with each New Yorker who asks for food to see if at any point they have enough or their situation has changed. But I don't want it to be time limited like that. I do understand why it was created that way, because the situation was so urgent, meaning there were so many people needed food and they were building up the distribution system and trying to make sure that food got to who needed it. And, of course, it wasn't sent if someone didn't need it anymore. But I think in this crisis we have to go with the other bias that it's ongoing until we confirm that someone's in the clear and doesn't need it anymore. So, I've instructed that change to take place and you should see that very quickly in your calls to 3-1-1. And I want to thank you again for being our 3-1-1 monitor, it is very helpful. The quality control that folks in government does is important, but there's nothing like journalists and every-day New Yorkers continuing to check to make sure it's really happening. So, again, I thank you for what you're doing and what your colleagues are doing. On the parade, again, when the day comes when we can have parades again – and we don't know that day yet – what I've said is, this'll be the first thing we do. This will be the first parade when we come back, but we don't know what that time will be. And that time would mean, Juliet, that we'd have to have a much different environment where we could have a parade properly. I mean a parade where people could come out and actually be a part of it and actually celebrate and thank and appreciate our health care workers and our first responders. And you know what a Canyon of Hero's parade looks like and feels like, it works because everyone gets to come together and there's an incredible passion to it for that reason. When that day comes, it will be indicative of the fact that we went not only out of widespread transmission but into low-level transmission and to a point where there were very few, if any cases anymore. So, that's when I want us to be able to have that kind of true, big public celebration, but not until it's ready. So, we'll keep updating you as we go along, but it's another part of the goal we all are fighting for. We all want to get to the day where we could have that kind of celebration, and, if we work hard enough, there's no question in my mind we will get there.

Moderator: Next question is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How about you?

Question: I'm doing good. I'm looking at this program, I'm thinking about what you're trying to do here and I have to admit that I'm extremely skeptical about whether the City, or any city of this size, could have the capacity to do this. The testing, first of all, it's not a hundred percent [inaudible]. We have absolutely no capacity to test people by the hundreds of thousands a day. The test results come in hours, if not days later [inaudible] the test is conducted. And the amount of personnel to contact trace people in a city with subways and, you know, dense population and all of the ways in which social contacts can be made – and not even social contacts, but touching a surface that may contain virus on it. It just seems to me that the amount of effort involved and the costs involved in this thing just make it almost impossible to succeed. And so, please explain to me how this is accomplishable.

Mayor: Henry, the question is obviously a heartfelt one, and I appreciate that, and I don't blame you for saying how do we mount something of this size and impact. And I would say, it is like any other moment in history – we have to do it. You know, to borrow Apollo 13, failure is not an option. We have to find a way to do this. This is the only way we can get out of this phase we're in and to a better situation. The shelter in place, the social distancing is having a big impact. It alone will not get us there. So, we have to mount this effort. Now, I think a couple of things you said, I would say you're seeing the glass half empty. The amount and speed of testing, clearly as more and more work is being done on the testing we are looking to a day where results come back much more quickly. So, I want to emphasize that this model is not based on the assumption of long delays in getting test results back. We hope for speedy test results as this model develops. And I think there's evidence out there that there's more and more work being done in that direction around the country. Also, on the question of contact tracing, I hear you if you said, well, wait a minute, what have you had to think about anybody, you know, they were on a subway car with, or anybody they walked down the street past or whatever. That's never how contact tracing has been done here or other places. It's not – it's not focused on any one you might've been anywhere near. It's focused on the people you've had close contact with. And we were talking yesterday, a group of us, with our medical leadership about this, and I know we have Dr. Jay Varma on the line, he can speak to this too. There is an international definition of close contact and that's the definition that we would use where you are really in close proximity and engaging someone and tracing those folks. Remember, in the beginning, early in March when we were able to do this work with the disease detectives, I remember – and I always use real life examples – we had the lawyer from Westchester that was, sort of, the center of so much of this. We were able to follow up with that lawyer’s family, and we knew exactly what was happening with your family member, with, I think it was eight employees of the law firm that had been in close contact with the lawyer. And then, the son of the lawyer went to Yeshiva University, had two close contacts we followed up with. It was actually something that was finite and that we could do. Is it perfect? I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it gets you to the heart of the matter. That kind of tracing we have done in this city we can do on a mass scale and we can follow through on. So, I would argue to you, Henry, your underlying point – is it a vast endeavor? Yes. Has it ever been done before in New York City? No. Is it going to be perfect? No. Is it absolutely, positively necessary? Yes. We have to do it. We have to innovate. We have to find way. We didn't previously have an approach to surging hospital beds and bringing in, you know, military medical personnel and finding N95 mass from all over the world or building a ventilator here in New York City. We didn't have any of these things two months ago. We had to create all of them. We're going to create this too. On that specific question of who you trace, Dr. Varma, could you step in here and just describe what that international standard is to answer that point of Henry's question?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Thank you very much. We use a definition internationally that we often modify a little bit, depending on our investigations. But the basics of it are, you have to have either had physical contact with somebody during the time that they were infectious – so, hug, kiss – or spent a prolonged period in close [inaudible] contact. We sort of arbitrarily set a time of about 15 minutes, but, of course, also leave ourselves open to judgment depending upon the symptoms that the person had. So, really, the two most important things are, were you in actual physical contact with the person? Or, where you in face to face contact with them for at least 15 minutes or longer?

Mayor: Right. And that means, obviously – and it gets back to why the six-foot standard has been the norm here and elsewhere – that face to face, direct contact closer obviously than the six feet is what we'd be looking for. And so, it gives us something tangible to work with and to build that contact tracing around.

Moderator: Next question is Jenn Peltz at the AP.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you? Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Jenn, how you doing?

Question: Thanks. A question about the progress indicators – as we've seen, they go up and down day by day. Since even one additional person can be the difference between red and green. How practical do you think it will be for these ever to go down all together in tandem for
weeks at a time?

Mayor: Jenn, that's the whole concept here – it's a very fair question, but I want to emphasize this standard was put together on the basis of, of course, knowing it was possible – for sure, knowing it was possible – and knowing that it was a high bar, but also a smart measure, meaning, you know, we do not want a mistake – make the mistake that I'm worried some other places might be starting to make of reopening so quickly that you could let the disease reassert and set us all back. We want to be smart. We want to be cautious. But absolutely these are attainable measures. And if you sort of think about the common sense of them, you know, if you saw the number of people testing positive going up or the number of people in the ICU going up or the number of new hospitalizations going up, that would not be the time to relax restrictions. You really want to have evidence that something has turned a corner more profoundly. So, they're common sense to me, but of course they can move. We've already seen movement. And interrelates with what we're talking about here. We're going to have to use these new strategies as part of the push. So, the things we're seeing that every-day New Yorkers are doing are clearly working. But we're going to have to do more and these kinds of strategies I just outlined, they help you get to low-level transmission and then secure it and then push on to the phase we all want, which is when there's effectively no cases at all. So, no, I'm absolutely convinced these can and will move, but they're cautious for a reason.

Moderator: The next question is Anna from the Daily News.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Anna.

Question: I was wondering, given, you know, the cost of putting on a fireworks display in New York City both for Macy's and for the City, you know, for security and other measures, is a fireworks display really worth our time, you know, given that Macy's has also furloughed thousands and thousands of employees?

Mayor: Yeah, Anna, I think those are two – it's a fair question, but I think there's two separate concepts here. Macy's is a massive company that's been dealt a huge blow here by the economic reality and that is a much bigger reality than whether they put on a single fireworks display. The cost of a single display is a pretty limited thing in the scheme of things. Again, we're going to figure out something we can do. We have to make sure it is safe and, you know, we're not going to do something that we think isn't safe. We're going to find a version of it that we think is and obviously would therefore simultaneously limit whatever else had to be done around it. But I think it is right to say it is a sacred day each year, it is a very powerful day. It's part of our effort to fight back, to recognize a day of this importance, but to do it in a different way and it will be a different way. But I think it's very generous and, you know, really patriotic of Macy's to say, no, we had planned on this we were ready to do it, we're not going to back away from that commitment, but we're all going to find the right way to do it. And it will be something that takes into account safety and, obviously, not something that's going to cost a lot of money.

Moderator: Next question is Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you. Mr. Mayor, I'm wondering if you have made – if there's any progress or changes to how the City is going to handle other parts of summer. So, you're talking about the July 4th celebration, but have you made any progress on a plan to deal with people going to the beaches, to deal with people who maybe don't have air conditioning at home and need to go to a cooling center that might now not be open because of the restrictions that are in place? What is the City doing to prepare for a summer other than making sure that we have this day of celebration that you're talking about?

Mayor: Yeah, that's something, Gloria, we've been talking about over the last few days. Obviously, in these settings we're absolutely going to be unveiling a summer plan that looks at how we can protect people, first and foremost, because we don't know as the summer begins – I mean, some people mark it from Memorial Fay, obviously, other people would mark it from when school normally lets out. Whatever way you think about it, we still don't know what we're going to be confronting. What we knew was there were some things that would not be ready, certainly like opening a beaches on Memorial Day was not going to be a real possibility and whatever we do has to be with a health and safety focus. So, we'll put together a plan and we'll announce a plan that says this is how we're going to begin as we get into the warmer weather, this is how we're going to keep people safe. Knowing that beaches are not opening in the beginning, we still have to protect people who might go to the beaches, but we don't want to see anything like the normal reality of folks traveling. And let's face it, most people go to the beach, they take the subway, they take the bus. That's not happening right now. That's not acceptable right now. We don't want large numbers of people anywhere near the beaches, but we have to protect if people show up in any number to make sure that they're safe. We do need a process to protect people against heatwaves and there are different ways we could do cooling centers, even with social distancing. There's a lot of pieces. A question was raised a day about blackouts – great question. Again, I think the situation is different this year in a way that will allow us to handle that differently, but we'll speak to that as well. So, a lot of pieces will come together. Now, it is April 22nd. So, this plan is something we would talk about in the next few weeks, obviously well ahead of the hot weather. But yes, it is being worked on right now and it'll be ready soon.

Moderator: Next is Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I was hoping you can give us an update on some of the announcements you've previously made, particularly when it comes to outreach in the most vulnerable communities. In Queens, in particular, the neighborhoods that have been hit the hardest don't have NYCHA developments, so they can't really tap into the relief you've mentioned today. But can you let us know which community groups that your administration has connected with, community health organizations that you've mentioned to do what you described as grassroots outreach? And I'm curious, you know, I know this test and trace plan, how can it really work if we don't have the tests yet? And why wasn't there – I know that there was a lot a shortage of tests, but, you know, a lot of this seems like things – and I've said this before, but it seems like things that we should've done a month ago or even more than a month ago. Thank you.

Mayor: Katie. I appreciate the editorial comment, but I got to tell you it's moot without the tests. I mean, you could say it would have been nice to do it a month ago, but we just didn't have anywhere near the testing capacity. And so, I understand the impulse always is for journalists to wonder what could have been, but I think we all lived through this together and everyone had eyes to see there was barely the testing available to do the most basic work we had to do. And remember, that was protecting the patients whose lives were in danger, that was testing the health care workers, testing first responders. We cannot forget that two weeks ago – a little more than two weeks ago, we thought we were about to go into a massive ascent, unfortunately, with this disease and it was going to take more and more testing just to focus on saving the lives and protecting the health care workers and the first responders. And everything we had was focused on that mission, on saving the hospitals so they could save lives. And it's only been in the last couple of weeks that we have begun to come down from that situation and think about reassigning health care workers to things like community testing, having enough PPEs, which is a constant struggle. We still don't have enough test kits. We still don't have enough lab capacity for tests, going forward. I am hopeful those pieces will keep coming together. But no, there was no way this could have been mounted previously. Now we're building it out rapidly so we will, as much as we have the testing, we'll be able to act on it, but there has to be a sustained supply of testing to do that.

To the other question about the other pieces of the disparity plan, the plan to address the health care disparities. We will have an announcement shortly on expanded telemedicine options and we will have an announcement shortly on grassroots outreach, which again, we want to engage those clinics not just for texting and phoning and things like that. But eventually actual on the ground work and as more personnel are becoming available and as the PPEs are starting, again, not out of the woods, but starting to get a little bit more available, going to be more possible. So those pieces expect announcements on those in the coming next few days.

Moderator: Next question is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you about 50,000 tests that were supposed to come this week from, I think it was Aria. Well, I guess what is the current daily testing capacity in the city and will we see those 50,000 tests actually conducted this week so that by the end of the week the city will have tested 50,000 more than it did last week?

Mayor: We’ll get you the testing capacity previous. The Aria shipment, we've gotten half of it in now. The rest will be coming over the next couple of days. But remember before that there was no widespread testing test kit source. So everything was much more hand to mouth and again, the focus on helping the patients in greatest danger, the health care workers, which we expanded health care worker testing in H + H and first responders. So we'll get you those numbers of where we've been up to now. The community testing has just begun. The introduction now of a bigger supply and what we think will be a sustained supply both from Aria and from our own production. That's now going to allow us to go to something much bigger. So we'll get you the update on what has happened previous to this supply arriving, but this is literally the first week where we ever even began to have a supply that would allow us to have something that was more of a community-based approach. Up to now, it's been a very hospital-based approach. Now it's going to start to be more and more a community-based approach.

Moderator: Next question is Julia from the New York Post.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I want to read you the response from the head of the FDNY-EMT union Oren Barzilay to your ticker tape parade announcement yesterday. He said “a parade does not put a roof over the heads of our men and women. A parade does not put food on our members’ tables. The Mayor needs to stop his irresponsible treatment of heroic work of EMT, paramedic and fire inspectors of the FDNY, heroic men and women at FDNY-EMS have risked their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic and the time is now to pay them what they rightfully deserve. If he can spend millions on throwing a parade, he can do the same with paying EMS.” So, what do you say to first responders who want you to honor their work with a pay raise, not just a parade?

Mayor: Julia, throughout this process we've been honoring all of the first responders by supporting them with what they need most, which is the personal protective equipment, the reinforcements, obviously for the health care workers, that meant getting in the military medical personnel, getting in the contract nurses and other employees, the medical volunteers. For the EMTs and paramedics, it means the hundreds and hundreds of ambulances we brought in from outside, and more and more EMTs and paramedics will get you the exact number. But I think the last I heard was something in the neighborhood of 700 or more that we brought in to support of folks who do such crucial work for us and to take some of the burden off them. And thank God as we talked about just a few days ago, the numbers have come way down. We're at a situation now where our EMTs and paramedics are dealing with a number of calls that are much more like would be normal for this time of year, but that extra support was crucial to help them to take some burden off them and we're going to keep supporting them.

I think Senator Schumer is right. There should be a federal bonus program as part of the next stimulus for all the people who acted heroically here, all of the first responders, the health care workers, the essential workers who are part of this fight. Federal government is in a position which we very sadly are not, but they're in a position to provide bonuses as part of a stimulus. Everyone understands what has happened to the City of New York to our finances in this crisis, but it absolutely should be part of the federal stimulus that's voted in May, and our heroes deserve that. So we're going to fight for that. And I would say I think the notion that when the day comes, and it could be, you know, quite a while from now, but when the day comes when we can honor everyone, I think people in this city, I think our first responders and health care workers will appreciate being respected and honored.

Union leaders do what union leaders do. But the folks who do the work keep showing up, they take their oath seriously. They serve other people and I certainly think for them, for their families, but for all New Yorkers, the opportunity to thank them and appreciate them is meaningful. And we're going to get a lot of support from outside to pull together that parade when the day comes. But that day is off in the future. Right now, we got to support our first responders in the here and now and we got to get them those bonuses through the next stimulus.

Moderator: Next is Jeff from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have two questions. Can you talk about the hotel isolation program and the challenge it's intended to address? How much of a role has family transmission played in this crisis so far? And the second question is about the contact tracers. Has the city considered any use of a mobile applications to trace people? And if you have any idea how large, how many traces are going to be needed. Do you have any sort of more details you can give about the scope of the tracing plan?

Mayor: Okay. So the – Jay – keep, keep Jeff there for a second. I want to make sure I got this right. Jay will speak to the use of what's been done that, and we were borrowing obviously to some extent from models that have been at least somewhat effective elsewhere. How technology is used and how people are used. I can definitely tell you, Jeff, that there will be thousands of people employed whether they are existing city workers, whether they are nonprofit folks who work for the city or if we have to hire new people. But you know, I would say thousands and thousands of people doing the contract tracing, five to 10,000 would not surprise me at all. But we're working on what that exact number would be. Jay in a moment can talk about sort of the technology and all, but the first part of your question about the isolation, you, I think I heard you say, was it indicative of a certain amount of the problem coming from people living in crowded conditions? Is that the question?

Question: Well, two questions. What, you know, can you talk about the challenge that the hotel isolation program is intended to address? And then secondly, what is the role of family transmission in this crisis?

Mayor: Sure. Okay. I'll start and again, Dr. Jay Varma can give you a much more precise answer, but clearly transmission, you know, to the people you are closest to in your life. And we said this from the very beginning, our Health Department team said this from the very beginning that that's, you know, the people you spend the most time with, have the closest contact with. If one gets sick, the chance is substantial it could spread to other people. And when we were doing, that early, early contact tracing that we were doing, remember day by day in the beginning of March over each and every case with all New Yorkers, you could see that transmission within families very vividly. So there's no question that's a real concern. And that concern is amplified if more people live under one roof or they live in particularly crowded conditions. But Jay – I’ll turn to Jay in a second on that and also on the use of technology and the tracing.

On the question of the role of isolation, I think this is one of the things that actually gets in – you know, falls under the category of common sense that anyone who is positive unless they are in the living circumstance where they can really be, you know, overwhelmingly isolated and comfortably able handle to that and have the basics they need, we would rather put them in a situation where they're safe and sound in one of the hotels rather than run the risk that they could infect other people in their lives. So again, some people have a living arrangement that would allow for proper isolation at home. And that's ideal. But a lot of other people, it just wouldn't be possible, particularly if you have a lot of people under one roof, if you're doubled up, if you're tripled up, whatever it may be. So that's where having that option to have people, you know, in a safe, secure place with lots of support and monitoring and no chance that they could spread it to spread the disease to the people immediately in their life makes a lot of sense. Jay, you want to jump in?

Senior Advisor Varma: Great, thank you. So, for the question about transmission in households, we know so many experience in many places around the world that the only way that these [inaudible] contained and you can get to this low level transmission phase is by doing more than just the social distancing. You have to get to a point where you are also making sure that people [inaudible] infection don't transmit it to people that they are close to, either those in their house or anybody else that they socialize with regularly. We don't know the exact proportion of that that is occurring in New York. And in fact, one of the reasons that this program should start now and scale up over time is that we will learn more. We have the scientific basis to understand why people should be separated. But, of course, we're going to also learn from the practical experience about how to do that in a way that is you know, ethical, that is safe and also of course is effective.

Now for the role of technology. New York City has tremendous experience with case contact tracing. This is the basis of how in New York City controlled a huge epidemic of tuberculosis in the late eighties and early nineties. And it's the basis for our also driving the end of AIDS in this city. But of course, what we're talking about here is something that will have to be done on an exponential scale. We use that word exponential cause we see how fast the virus grows. It also refers to the scale at which we need to respond to it. Now, technology may have a critical role here. We've actually had a number of discussions already with the big technology companies that have been developing apps and other things. They're not ready for prime time yet. We also don't know how effective they will be. But we absolutely plan to use technology like these mobile apps. As soon as they become available and it may end up being good. It reduces some of the human contact tracing that that we need. But we have to start on the assumption that we'll use the tools that we know already work and then, and innovate with new tools as they become developed.

Moderator: Next question is Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Hey Mayor, can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yes, indeed. How are you doing?

Question: Doing okay, sir. How are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: I got two questions. The first is for Dr. Varma. Doctor, who would be taking these hundreds of thousands of tests. Is every New Yorker at some point expected to do this on a consistent, regular basis? Is there some probable cause that triggers a test? Does a person hang out at the test site and wait for the result? And upon positivity is the person then put into isolation and awaiting transport, either home or to a hotel? And for the Mayor, can you be specific and enumerate the stated reasons that New York City's different from Oakland to Denver and some of the other jurisdictions that have pedestrianized their streets. So like in what specific way doesn't it as you've put it doesn't the plan fit our reality in terms of safety? So I'm looking for specific reasons the NYPD feels that the city is different from these places, not just like a general process answer of who you've talked to and what they said generally. And lastly, did the NYPD generate a written report—

Mayor: Matt, I got you. Hold on. Just parity. Everyone's been pretty balanced about trying to get to as many people as possible. I think you will go. We're going to take the multi-part for Jay. That's a consistent question and I'll answer your question on the streets, but let's, let's leave it there.

The – I think I've been specific about it, so everyone has their own judgment here. But I think I've been pretty damn specific and I'll say it again. The models that have been looked at around the country, the Oakland model as I understand it was assessed by NYPD and Department of Transportation was here are streets that are delineated as pedestrian. They are not blocked off physically– this is what I've been briefed on – they were not locked off physically and there is not an enforcement apparatus in place. So it's something of an honor system, if you will.

And the notion isn't, to be fair in California, I mean, a very obvious specific thing in California, drivers stop at intersections even if there's no light or stop sign. They stop when people are trying to cross the street even in the middle of the street, a lot of time. This is a very different culture. In fact, a number of you have rightfully raised the concern about speeding lately, which we're trying to address, but I'm not comfortable with streets being delineated as for pedestrians and just hoping and praying cars don't go on them and pedestrians are going to be safe. I think there's too much danger that drivers might still go on those streets and put pedestrians in a danger. And then the alternative you could say, okay, well block off all the streets, put in lots of enforcement. Well we can't do that right now. NYPD is still not at the headcount, the sort of troop strength, we want them to be given the number of people out sick and they have a bunch of additional responsibilities in terms of enforcing social distancing, which are more fundamental to the strategy then would be opening up the streets.

So I think it's very specific why the model that, you know, the leading model was Oakland. I do not think that model fits our circumstances specifically. Obviously, we are much more densely populated and we have a very different driving culture. But on top of that, the enforcement piece, which I think is just absolutely necessary if you're going to ensure safety in New York City in anything, it cannot be devoted to open streets. It has to be devoted to all the other places where we have to protect against social distancing. And I've delineated them, the supermarkets, grocery stores, pharmacies, parks, subways, buses, that's where we're putting our energy and that's where I think we should put our energy. So again, I'll happily talk with Speaker Johnson and we'll work on it with the Council and see what we think makes sense going forward, and over time that situation could evolve. But, right now, I think those are very specific reasons why it doesn't make sense for us. Go ahead, Dr. Varma and the other question.

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah. So, we'll have to understand, you know, what's ideal and then what's pragmatic. So what is ideal is actually the [inaudible] game because this is an infection that we know can be transmitted, sometime before people develop symptoms, maybe two days, maybe even three days, it's quite important to actually in an ideal situation, from what we know right now, that people be tested regardless of the presence of symptoms and that being an opportunity that they be retested. Now, that's the ideal world. The challenge with that, as you've heard regularly is the fact that we don't have a steady supply chain. So many parts of this testing problem still need to be fixed.

So in the pragmatic sense, what we can do now is that we can prioritize our testing sites in those areas of the city where people are most vulnerable. We know that even before this epidemic, and we know that with this epidemic. So, what we will prioritize testing for is people in these areas, and as you've heard the Mayor describe today places and neighborhoods where people, and for too long not had access to all of this. But as we scale up, as we build testing capacity, we intend to make use of it that throughout the State so that it becomes something that every New Yorker has available to them.

We also don't want to overburden our clinics and our hospitals. Right now, a lot of people, you know have to forego an in person visit because we need to keep capacity for you know, coronavirus cases. But as we move further along to a low-level transmission state, we want to make sure people can get tested, but we don't want people at very low risk to continuously being tested and using up space these other clinical facilities. So that's one of the reasons why it's important to start with high priority people in areas and populations, but over time, as our capacity expands make it available to everybody and also make it available outside of the regular clinical infrastructure that we have.

Mayor: Good.

Moderator: We have time for two more. The next question is Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. This is Sydney from Gothamist. Regarding some of the City Council legislation expected to be introduced today, I'm wondering if you've had a chance to, to review some of that and if you would support some of the announcements regarding essential workers bills, which include premiums for essential workers, prohibiting firing without just cause, paid sick leave for gig workers, and among other things? And also have you considered or would you support hazard pay for those recent medical school graduates who are in their residency programs at city hospitals?

Mayor: Thank you for the question, Sydney. I've only heard that the package is being introduced. I have not seen any of the details. I look forward to speaking with Speaker Johnson about it, want to understand, you know, what he and the Council are looking to achieve. And look, we're obviously kindred. The values are very much in common between both sides of City Hall. We're very, very concerned to protect working people in general and particularly during this crisis. So, I can't comment on any of the specifics because I haven't seen them. I can say I know the motivation behind them is good and you know, want to see where we think we can work together on that. Always the question in my mind will be, you know, what can we do versus what do we need help from outside to do? And that of course means Washington. And I think a lot of our future is going to be determined by the fourth stimulus. We wanted to get a lot done in stimulus 3.5. A lot of what I think should have been there wasn't but I still want to say, you know, nonetheless, some real progress was made in stimulus 3.5 in terms of small business for sure and new money for testing for example. So, there's some very good things in it. Support for hospitals. There's a lot of good in it.

What was really necessary was the help for cities and States to actually be able to get through this crisis and support our people and provide the basic services that wasn't there, but a lot of energy, a lot of fight is being organized to get that done in the next few weeks in stimulus four. Obviously as I mentioned earlier, another opportunity to stimulus four is to provide bonuses, a special compensation for folks who have played a crucial role in fighting back this disease. So I think that's the place we need to focus where it could be achieved and be done as part of a bigger package to make us whole economically because otherwise we're just going to be in a horrible state in this city. So, you know, when I talk to the Speaker, we'll obviously compare notes on how what he's talking about interplays with what we're trying to achieve with stimulus four in Washington. But absolutely looking forward to having the conversation with them and then I'll be able to give you more of an update.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Aundrea from CBS.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hi Aundrea. How are you?

Question: I'm good. So earlier this week the governor announced a partnership with Ready Responders to provide door to door testing in NYCHA. Is the city a part of that? Also what would you say to NYCHA residents whose vulnerabilities were well known prior to the pandemic about why they were not prioritized much earlier?

Mayor: Oh, I think it's a very painful truth and I want to always level with people because we just didn't have the amount of testing and the personnel and the PPEs to do testing on the community level the way we needed. That's just the reality. I mean, look the – I want to separate the State had certain initiatives and you know, I appreciated those, but the point is from the city perspective. We were focused on saving our hospitals and I'm going to keep going over this with people because this was just a few weeks ago. So I want everyone to kind of not lose track of history we just lived through. For that period in March where we saw a sudden upsurge into April, the focus was on saving lives and the way to save lives was to keep the hospitals going and a way to keep the hospitals going was to make sure that we were protecting our health care workers and obviously very much related our first responders who were doing everything to get people to the hospital and protect lives in so many ways.

We needed to ensure that we had enough personnel, we needed to ensure we had enough PPEs. That was a struggle throughout. We remember those horrible days where we weren't sure we were going to have enough ventilators. That was until just a couple of weeks ago and those hospitals, particularly the public hospitals and the independent hospitals are the ones who in fact serve NYCHA residents and that's where people were going to be saved. So that's what we had to prioritize. The testing we did in front of the hospitals was to help separate the folks who really needed to come in immediately and be addressed versus folks who did not need to be hospitalized and that was to protect the capacity of the hospitals to keep going and to protect people who, you know, we didn't want anyone in a hospital setting where they might be exposed to the disease if they didn't need to be there.

So, everything was this kind of last line of defense. And I bluntly, I talked about it very vividly in those days. The hospital system in general was our last line of defense and we were trying to hold that. The notion of having the personnel, the PPEs, the pure testing capacity, the kits, to do something really broad at a community level would have been impossible just a couple of weeks ago. So now that we finally are starting to get the supplies and we're finally getting some relief, it makes all the sense in the world to now focus outward and start pushing the resources outward to the maximum extent possible and reach the community level where the need is greatest. We're going to keep doing that. and then that's going to segue into this much bigger plan around testing and tracing and the follow-up we'll do.

Remember the PPE issue here, we are not out of the woods on that. Even this week we're still struggling to get all the surgical gowns we need. So, I want people to remember when we talk about testing is still going to always come down to do we have enough personnel? Do we have enough PPEs? Do we have enough test kits? Do we have enough lab capacity? And that's been a very tenuous reality until just now and it will still be a challenge for us going forward, so we're always going to be honest about that. So that's to the, what I would say to NYCHA residents that we had to do what we had to do to save lives and protect people and protect the hospitals. Now we're in a position to go out to communities much more deeply. The first part of the question, I want to hear that again. I don't know if Aundrea is still out there?

Question: It's about Ready Responders. The Governor announced partnership with Ready Responders going door to door, is the city a part of that?

Mayor: Yes, indeed. So that idea, I want to give credit where credit is due. It originated with Congressman Greg Meeks and he and I first talked about it and I'm thinking something like 10 days ago, 12 days ago, our team has been working with Congressman Meeks and with Ready Responders. In fact, Dr. Varma spoke with the lead medical officer for Ready Responders to figure out how to do it effectively and to make sure that the Ready Responders said they would be able to bring all the resources in, because especially when the conversation started, we were right - we were clear we weren't necessarily going to be able to free up personnel and PPEs. They were talking about what they could bring in independently to mount this effort. So, we fully intend to work with them to get it done and obviously they came to us. Congressman Meeks and Ready Responders came to us because we run, you know, the Housing Authority is something that's run on the city level. But we absolutely think it's a, a very noble initiative. We want to see it build out and as soon as the very specific sites are put into play and up and active, we'll make that announcement for sure.

Okay. I want to thank everyone. The whole issue today - thank you – the whole issue today of thinking ahead while we're still fighting this fight. I want people to understand that we know it won't be one simple, clean, easy path forward. We understand this is going to take some real effort and some real time to get us through to a point where things start to get back to normal, but we can now build this apparatus. Again, it's going to be unlike anything you've seen before in the history of New York City. It's going to be a huge apparatus. It is ambitious. It has to be ambitious. It is very fair. If someone says, can we reach this scale? Can we reach everyone that needs to be reached? These are very fair questions. But the bottom line is we have to build the biggest, strongest apparatus we can during the month of May to reach as many New Yorkers as possible, and we have to keep the pressure on at all times on Washington to get us the testing we need and all the other support we need so we can really make this effort come alive.

But I wanted people today to get the shape of it and to understand this as being built as we speak. Let us pray that the testing supply becomes stronger so we can really start to pump this up and make it something that reaches not just thousands of New Yorkers, but then tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers because that's how we're really going to turn the corner when we can reach those kinds of levels and sustain them. So that is the plan and we're going to get there one way or another. And again, thank you to all of you. The only reason we're able to talk about this plan today is because all of you did so much already in your own lives to fight back this disease and to put us on a pathway to something better. So as always, I expressed my appreciation to all my fellow New Yorkers and this next phase is a chance for all of us to take a big step forward together.

Thanks very much.

2020-04-23 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning everybody. What do we all think about every day? We all think about our families, people we love, keeping them safe, keeping them healthy. We all think about our own lives dealing with this new reality, wishing it was over. We all think about breaking free, and what it would feel like to start to go back to normal. That's what every single one of us has running through our mind all day long. That's what so many conversations are about, so many questions are about. We want to get back to our lives. We want to be able to feel the things that we felt were really part of our everyday lives. Maybe we took them for granted a little bit. Maybe we didn't recognize how wonderful they were, and when we get back to normal that day, not too far from now, I hope, and I pray we're all going to appreciate the little things a whole lot more. But right now, the question is how do we get there, and I don't think people fall into the trap of thinking it's going to be easy. I think New Yorkers are tough. New Yorkers are resilient. New Yorkers are streetwise. We do not underestimate our enemy. We understand this'll be a tough fight. And I do speak about this virus as an enemy, because I think it's important to think about the fact that it's a fight that we all are waging. It's a fight that we all have to participate in. And again, New Yorkers have been outstanding at taking up this fight, doing everything we can possibly do to beat back this disease. But I want to be very clear, this virus does not defeat itself. We have to defeat it. We have to keep doing the hard work. And I think it's important when you think about that, that you not see yourselves as sort of witnesses to history, if you will, or just somehow this whole thing catching you up in it. I want you to think of yourselves as people have power, remarkable power to fight back, to be able to bend not only the curve of this disease, but the future to create a different reality.

Everything you do, and this is sort of clear I think maybe then in almost any situation we've lived through, every single thing every one of us does has an impact. If you add it up everything you do each minute, each hour, each day, and then you add it up with 8.6 million other people, it becomes something much, much greater obviously. But it takes on a power every time someone practices social distancing every time, even though they don't want to go back inside, they still go back inside. Every time people are smart about what they're doing it adds up. Every time you use a hand sanitizer even, you're depriving the disease of yet another avenue, and you do that over and over, 8.6 million people do that over and over each day, millions and millions of times combined, and you actually are fighting back. So, we see in the three indicators that we are displaying every day, we see evidence, real hard evidence that what you've done has had a tremendous impact, and that should be energizing and encouraging to every one of you that you're participating in something absolutely necessary. And I'll tell you something, people, people might have felt defeated, people might have felt overwhelmed, instead New Yorkers just stood on their own two feet and fought back. And I think it's going to be looked at as an incredibly noble moment in the history of the city. And we will come back and we're going to come back with all the energy, all the strength, all the vibrancy that New York City has been known for, for generation upon generation. But the history will show it's because of what you did that we were able to come back.

So, these numbers we've gone over every day. They tell us a lot. And again, the goal here was to give you the power of seeing the same exact measures, and then watch how they vary day by day. So, you're part of this, all of us together. There's no mystery, there's no, you know, secret laboratory somewhere where the numbers are being crunched. It's all out in the open to show you what's happening. And then we all judge together how we're doing. Now, I don't know what's happening in each and every state, each and every city. I don't pretend to understand the details of what they're all going through, but I do know a lot of states are rushing to reopen. I hope and pray they have very clear indicators that back up that decision. I hope and pray they're sharing them openly and transparently with the people of those states. Because if the facts don't merit that fast reopening, and if the facts are not out in the open, then there's a real danger that something else is being made a priority over what should matter most, which is saving human lives, protecting all of our health, making sure that we do this the right way so that when we reopen, we can do it once and for all, and do it for good, not start to reopen and see a resurgence of the disease and then have to shut right back down again or even get more restrictive. So, my fear is that there are people governed more by politics or image or their concern about the economy than they're concerned about the health and welfare of their people.

Now, we're trying to take not only cautious, careful approach, but an approach that shows you exactly what is governing the decisions we're making, and these indicators speak volumes. They help you understand why we're doing what we're doing. They show you obviously some progress. They also give you a real clear caution about how much fight we still have to wage. And I think, look, my view is every one of you would rather have the blunt truth, would rather get the straight story of what it's going to take rather than be given a lot of platitudes and then find out they're false. So, we are being real clear. And again, I talked about the progress, but I'm also going to talk about the underlying challenge. The challenge is, and I say this very sadly, that the coronavirus is alive and well and living in New York City. It's quite clear from the numbers, it has not been beaten yet.

So, the facts just yesterday – 2,519 new cases identified in New York City yesterday; 320 deaths yesterday in New York City. These are really painful facts. These are all indicators of people's lives, families that are going through so much. In recent weeks, we hear numbers like this and we say, look, this is better than where we were a few weeks ago, that's something that shows we're moving the right direction. That's true. But just think about what they mean. These facts, what they mean in and of themselves. And if it was any other time, if it was three months ago or three years ago, and I said to you, we had 320 deaths and 2,500 new cases, we would have been all deeply, deeply troubled. So, we cannot lose the forest for the trees here. Yes, there's been real important progress, and we can and will make more, but we're still very much in this fight. We cannot forget what we're up against and the power of this disease, but if we find our own power, if we act on our own power, I'm also convinced we will prevail.

So, let's talk about these indicators and what they mean not only day by day, but what they tell us over the last few weeks that we've been tracking and publishing this information. So, on the indicator number one, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID 19 cases. Okay, this indicator is simple. It tells us how many more patients our hospitals need to care for related to COVID 19. And when we started this, showing you these particular indicators, it was right after the very, very worst moments. So, you go back to March 31st, 850 new admissions per day for COVID, astounding number. By April 11th when we started showing you these numbers, down to 383, so honestly huge improvement. And now, in the last 10, 11 days down to 227. So, 227 admitted for suspected COVID cases, that's this morning's report. Much, much better. But it's still 227 new cases in one day. That means we are not there yet. I'm stating the obvious, but I want to just hammer home the point. We're not there yet, and we need to be sober about it, and we still have a substantial distance to cover.

Now indicator number two. Okay. The daily number of people in ICU’s across all of our public hospitals for suspected COVID 19. What does it tell us? Again, shows us how this fight is raging, and for the folks in those ICU’s, they are literally fighting for their lives right now, and it's putting a huge strain of course on our hospital system. And so much of what we have done over the last two months has been to protect your lives by protecting your hospitals, and your healthcare workers. We're in a better place again, but we still see way too many people in those ICU’s. So again, we've seen over time some progress, but in this one, we've got to understand that this is a telling report because it shows, this one has not moved as much and that's cautionary. So, the day we launched indicators, we were already at a really troubling point for our public hospitals. They were more than double their normal ICU capacity, and that looked like it was about to continue to go up in those first few weeks of April. April 11th, 835 patients in our ICU’s and our public hospitals. April 14th, it went up to 887. Now it’s started to come down, but it’s 796 in today's report. So again, 796 compared to 835 10,11,12 days ago. That's not the movement we need. Progress – we see the capacity for progress, but we don't see the movement we need. So, we have to keep working to get it right.

Look, put it all in perspective. Think about all the people we've lost already. Think about how much the hospitals had to do just to hold on. All those ICU beds they added. All the personnel they brought in. All the doctors and nurses and healthcare workers, the extraordinary long hours they fought through. The fact that we had to bring in the military, military medical personnel. We had to hire people from all over the country as well to come in, just to hold the line. And so, we need to understand, just keeping where we are now and making even slow and steady progress that's still putting a huge strain on those hospitals and those health care workers. God forbid there was a resurgence – and this is another reason for caution, if there was a resurgence think about the heroes, think about the people were celebrating every day, every night. Think about when 7:00 PM when we applaud them, think about what a resurgence would do to them and how much pressure, how much stress, how much strain it would put on them if this disease came back. If that were to happen, once again, there'd be more and more people in the hospitals, we go back to having to create new hospitals, new beds. We don't ever want to go there again. Indicator number three, percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19. So, this – obviously, it gives us some sense of how widespread this is in the city. And we've said from the very beginning, you know, I still say that the saddest part of this whole very painful reality is what could have been. If on the first day that I called for testing for New York City from the federal government, January 24th if on that day the federal government had acted for New York City, for New York State, for cities and States all over the country and gotten us the testing in the beginning of February, this entire scenario would have been different. We would have seen so much less pain and so now we have still so many new positive cases, but we don't know even the beginning of it because we can't test anywhere near the level that we need to. What it does tell us is still of course there's a lot of new positive cases, 2,519 yesterday. The more testing we get, the more truth we will find, the more testing we get, the more we can fight back and contain this disease, all roads lead to testing. Literally, the more you have, the more you can trace each person's reality and get them the help they need, figure out who needs to be isolated. All those things become possible the more testing you have.

So, even with the limitations, we still have information that's valuable here. So, when we launched indicators, April 11th, 58 percent of those being tested, we're testing positive for the citywide measure. For the public health lab, it was 78 percent, where we are now much better – 32 percent citywide, 57 percent for the public health lab, but still a long way to go. That's definite improvement, but we needed to keep going down more. So, what can we say? We're decelerating, you're seeing all these charts, they're making very clear the – sometimes charts and graphs and those things don't tell you much, these are telling us something. Yes, we're decelerating, that's a very good thing. But we need to finish the job. We need to go farther because if it were to level off, that's not acceptable. You know, we've heard this word plateau. Plateau is not a good word. Plateaus a dirty word where I come from. This is – in this case, plateau means too many people suffering on a consistent basis and we can't have that. We need the deceleration to go down further so we can link it up, so we can hand off, we need to go through the efforts we're going through now. Everything you're doing that's helping make you safe and healthy, everyone else safe and healthy we have to hand off that effort to the testing and tracing we talked about yesterday because all of what you're doing alone gets us a long way, but we have to be able to test and trace to finish the job. We've got to be able to suppress this disease and contain this disease. So, putting the pieces together, the indicators tell us a lot. We're going to keep showing them to you every day, we're going to keep analyzing them every day, they tell us a lot. They tell us there's progress and they tell us there’s still real work to be done. They tell us, don't give an inch here, do not relax, do not let this disease back in the door, they tell us about the power of social distancing and shelter in place. They tell us that it has been smart to postpone those big events to only have essential workers out and keep non-essential businesses close. They certainly tell us still and it’s sad, but we got to keep our schools close for the rest of the school year. They tell us we have to be smart and careful and then it makes abundantly clear that to get to the pathway to normal, we need the firepower of testing and tracing.

That handoff must happen and we have to have a large-scale testing effort to do it much more than what we have available today in New York City. But we're going to keep fighting because we're finally getting more test kits. We're going to create our own in the coming days here in the City and we're going to keep expanding every effort to get the test kits in, to get the lab capacity, because this is how we get to the next level. And I described to you yesterday a huge initiative in May, unlike anything we've seen in this city ever before, thousands and thousands of people will be a part of it. Testing people, tracing their contacts, isolating everyone needs isolating, supporting them. That is the way forward, it will take a huge effort, but that's how we actually beat this disease and that's when we actually get to relax these restraints and start back to normal. So, I want to just take that from where I started to this point, we all want to get back to normal, we all want to breathe free. We all have to fight together to get to that point it's a very painful struggle but a noble struggle. We can do it and I hope you see the re-progress in the numbers and this idea of the handoff to the strategies of suppression and containment handoff to the testing and tracing. That's how we get to the day where we can actually ease these restrictions and start to have a normal life again. So, I’m going to go over the daily numbers one more time since we do it every single day, just show you the day to day comparison. So again, on the three indicators, daily number of people admitted to hospitals down again, there's a couple of day lag here. So, down April 20th, 252; April 21st, 227 – real progress. Daily number of people in ICU’s, down, April 20th, 821; April 21st, 796 – real progress. Percentage of people citywide testing positive down just by a little, but we still like anything that's moving in the right direction from 33 percent to 32 percent. The only place where we didn't have progress in this daily report is in the public health lab; their test went up, but slightly from 54 percent to 57 percent. So, this is a good day, it's not the perfect day we're looking for where everything moves together in the same direction, but it's a good day and we just have to keep doing what we're doing.

Okay, just a couple more things for your today. So, what a very painful reality in one way and a very emotional reality in another way and a very maybe clarifying reality is the way to think of it at the same time that this horrible, tough journey we've all had to go on coincided with such profoundly important holidays of the major faiths of this City. We all wish that the celebrations of Easter and Passover could have been so different. And yet I talked about at the time, I think a lot of people talked about it, that the power and the meaning of those holidays really came through in some ways even more vividly because of what we were all suffering together. And a reminder of the endurance of our ancestors in each faith and reminder of the messages and the values, and the – meaning of each faith when it came to strength and community and came to belief and charity and being there for each other. And now we find ourselves once again about to celebrate a profoundly important holiday of one of our major faiths. So, tonight marks the start of Ramadan and there's hundreds of thousands of Muslim New Yorkers who for this moment, this is the most important time of the year. And I want to say to all of our Muslim brothers and sisters, you’ve been going through so much as we all have and not able to worship and not able to do the things that you're used to doing as part of your faith, but you shown strength as all New Yorkers have and you've joined with everyone else and fighting back this disease. One of Ramadan's most noble callings is to feed the hungry. It's a crucial part of how the holiday is celebrated to remember to be there for those in need and that is now harder than ever, obviously, people can't go to their mosques. In fact, mosques have often been a place that those who were hungry, those who were poor would know they could go during Ramadan to break the fast. They knew there would always be a meal there for them that's not going to be true in this season. So we want to, the City of New York wants to support this community as we're supporting all communities. We've been making sure there's food for every New Yorker and we've tried to also make sure that for those with a special food needs that we could be responsive. So, we've been creating kosher food programs and Halal food programs to recognize that we're all in this together, we want to respect all the people, all the faiths of New York City. This is part of what makes New York City so great, that we have that mutual respect and we understand that we all come together to create something greater than the sum of the parts. So, for anyone who needs food, again, no New Yorker will go hungry, any New Yorker who needs food, it will always be there for you during this crisis, your City will provide, there's no question. For those who need Halal meals, there will be 400,000 Halal meals available at 32 specific Department of Education sites, remember overall we have 435 sites and I'll keep reminding people, anyone that needs food, whether it's to go to one of those DOE sites or home deliveries, whatever you need, call 3-1-1 or go to nyc.gov/getfood. But for folks who need Halal meals, there will be 32 of those DOE sites in particular focused where there are large Muslim communities. 400,000 meals available, another hundred thousand will be distributed through partnerships with community-based organizations, food pantry, soup kitchens. So, over half-a-million meals will be distributed during Ramadan and it's a reminder, this is a place that truly believes in equality and it's something that is a profound New York City value.

People have come here from all over the world, all over the country from [inaudible], always knowing this was a place where everyone has a chance, a chance to achieve their dreams, their goals – everyone is respected. You know, there are people out there – and I'm not happy when I see this – there are people who are naysayers about the future of New York City. There are people who are trying to suggest that New York City won't come back or won't be as good in the future. I think that's absolutely wrong. I think that people who say that don't understand New York City and New Yorkers. New York City will come back. New York City's been through a lot over many generations. New York City has always come back and New Yorkers are made of something very strong, very powerful. We come back and then we find a way to do something even better. We come back and we find a way to answer the questions that were dredged up by the crisis and create a place that's even more fair, that's even more respectful of each and every one of our fellow New Yorkers. We come back and we find a way to be stronger. That's just who we are, it's been proven time and time again. Anyone who's telling you it's not going to happen this time doesn't understand history, but they clearly don’t understand New Yorkers. So, I am convinced that that spirit of equality that pervades this place is going to sustain us. That is why whoever you are, if you're hungry we're going to feed you, and that has meant in the month of April, we expect about 10 million meals to be served to New Yorkers in need. That could be more like 15 million in May, but we will be there for you no matter what.

So, as I conclude, I want to refer to a phrase I've been hearing lately that I find very troubling on the national scene and President Trump has been amplifying this idea of states being “liberated.” He's been tweeting out, “liberate Michigan,” “liberate Virginia”. Well, you know what? We all want to get back to normal – that's true. We all want to get rid of these restrictions. We all want to start our economy again, get back to our jobs. Who doesn't? Everyone wants that in common. What does liberate mean? Liberate means being free, being free from danger, having the security of knowing you can live your life. Well, you know what? If we don't protect people's health, we're not going to be liberated. If because of political slogans or political agendas or more focus on corporations and the stock market than human beings, there's some effort to “liberate” that forgets about people and their families and their health and their safety. It will not only backfire, it will set us back by months and months. And the recovery we all hope and pray for will be diminished and slowed and people will suffer. So, it comes to everything I've been talking to you about today. We all want to be liberated, but you can only be liberated by the truth. You can only be liberated when it's real and not a lie. So, I know in New York City, when we get to the day where we start to open things up, it's going to be [inaudible] because we're absolutely convinced that we're truly at the right moment to do it and I think you will be convinced too, because you'll be seeing all the facts and then together with confidence we can move into a new reality. But any place that attempts to “liberate” before they have the facts, before they have the proof, they're actually going to be chaining their people to a painful reality and prolonging this agony – that's my warning. Here, we're going to do it right and we're going to look back and be glad we did. Let me do a few words in Spanish and then we'll turn to questions from the media.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please remember to give me the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Quick reminder for folks that we have Dr. Barbot, Dr. Daskalakis, and Dr. Katz, and Dr. Varma on the phone and our first question is Erin at Politico, Erin.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I'm wondering with the latest models that you've been looking at, you said previously you thought that half of New Yorkers would contract this virus. Is that still the prediction or has that shifted at all? And also, I'm wondering if you could just give us the total number of cases. You gave us the increase yesterday, but the website's down, so if you could just give us the total number.

Mayor: Okay, total number of cases. I gave you the number, hold on one second, make sure I get it right, Erin - 2,519 new cases yesterday. Remember the indicators are on that two-day lag. For some of the indicators, let me just check this here. Yeah, no the indicators on a two-day lag and the, the cases yesterday was 2,519. To the bigger question that you raise, it's a great question, Erin and I turned to the health folks and I am sure they have strong views on this matter, but I think they'll also be the first to tell you we are still dealing with the great unknown in the absence of testing. We don't even a hundred percent know, you know, when the first cases emerged in this city because we didn't have testing in February. We know it was February, but we don't know when; we don't know how many people got it back then that went entirely unnoted. So, I think it is right to assume - this is the way I'd say it as a layman - first of all, we're in the thick of it, right? We're not in this perfect linear descent yet. So we don't know when we get to get out of this widespread transmission phase. Second, unless we are very careful and we have some good luck and some blessings thrown-in, we have to be wary of a resurgence. And then, you know, we still don't understand the seasonal reality. Does this come through in a sort of very clean seasonal pattern? Does it re-emerge later in the year? We're certainly concerned about next year already and being very, very mindful that it will still be a part of our lives until there's a vaccine. So, I think the big answer is we don't know for sure, but I would say the assumption that still more than half of New Yorkers could get this is a safe place to hold because we can't tell you the opposite. We can't confirm to you it's going to be less at this point. That's my layman's assumption based on the conversations we've had, but now we have a fabulous panel of four doctors. Let's see what you guys want to add to that.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: So, Mr. Mayor, what I would add to what you correctly laid out is that currently we are at over 138,000 people who have had confirmed positive tests. But that, really, I think is the tip of the iceberg for a number of different reasons. Primarily because, you know, New Yorkers have been heeding to our advice that if they have mild symptoms at this point in time - when you've got community-wide transmission - having a test result isn't going to change what we're going to tell you to do in terms of staying home and you know, monitoring your symptoms for whether or not you get better or worse over the course of three to four days. And that we want to reserve testing for those individuals who are really sick enough to be in the hospital. So with that being said, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if at this point in time we have probably close to a million New Yorkers who have been exposed to COVID-19. And so again, we're, we're tracking the number of positive test results as a way in which we can then better guide the healthcare delivery system interventions, the way in which we can help emphasize New York to New Yorkers, the importance of life saving measures, like staying at home. But you know, I don't think any of us have any misconceptions of how widespread this virus is and how ultimately it will affect the vast or large numbers of New Yorkers overall.

Mayor: Any other doctors want to jump in? Okay.

Moderator: Kathleen from Patch is up next, Kathleen,

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor and everyone.

Mayor: Kathleen, we need you to speak up a little more.

Question: Sorry about that. Can you hear me better now?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: Okay, so I'm just following up on my question from a few days ago about how many people are projected to become food insecure this year and does the city have resources to feed them without federal help? Also considering the plateau that we're seeing and concerns about how New Yorkers are going to behave when the weather improves, are you considering a stricter lockdown?

Mayor: Okay, so the first point, Kathleen, I'd say first of all, we, we do need to give you an estimate and I think it's fair to say, and I'll, I'll just be very broad now and, and make sure we get the exact numbers out to you. You know, previously over a million New Yorkers just in, in the times before COVID-19, over a million New Yorkers experienced food insecurity with some frequency and that's a horrible fact that directly correlates to poverty levels, obviously. And talk about the tale of two cities that, you know, I've been focused on for a long time. There's still obviously a persistent poverty problem in New York City. This is one of the things we have to fight back when we overcome the Coronavirus. We have to go much further in our strategies to reduce poverty in New York City. We did in the last few years get hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty - that's a very good thing. But there's still too many people facing that challenge and that directly connects to food insecurity. In this environment, the number of people are food insecure as unquestionably going up, and we'll get you the exact number, but I think it's going to be not around over a million, I think there's going to be pressing on towards 2 million, given that you've got half-a-million people who have lost their jobs, almost – you know, we don't have the exact numbers yet of what's going to happen, but, you know, I've said from the beginning, I think between the folks who have lost their jobs and the folks who are going to lose their jobs, or the folks who have lost a very substantial amount of their income, that's a half-million people at least. So, many of them, of course, were the sole breadwinners for their families. And that means the ability to buy food gets massively disrupted. So, again, I fear – and we'll give you a more exact number, Kathleen, but I fear the number is going to be around 2 million New Yorkers who are food insecure as this crisis deepens. And that's a horrifying number. The meals count tells you something. You know, we started smaller, we got to the point now where we project about 10 million meals in April. We are preparing to do 15 million meals in May. Can we do it alone? No, of course we can never – of course not. We can never do it all alone, meaning we need a federal help always. We need a lot more people to be made eligible for food stamps, for the SNAP program. And there are actions being contemplated in Washington right now that would increase the eligibility under this kind of disaster scenario. There specific ways that more people can get that support, but they need to be – it needs to be approved by the Congress. To the best of my understanding, I don't think it can be done administratively. I think it requires Congressional approval. We'll be back you on that. And we need – what we're hearing is coming, I want to get a 100 percent confirmation that FEMA reimbursement will be 100 percent and that it will cover things like this. So, you know, we have $170 million food program we're in the middle of now and that's going to have to grow. So, we need help from Washington to make all that happen. It's a very painful reality. I mean, just think about so many people – it's bad enough for people always were food insecure – that's not acceptable and we need to overcome that, going forward, but think about folks who just weeks ago couldn't have imagined not having enough food to eat and now they're struggling to find it. And there's so many people who need help.

On the lockdown question, what I'd say is – you know, what I've tried to say and I know the doctors have tried to say, and they'll jump in as well if they want to add anything, these indicators are to tell us where we stand. If they keep going in the right direction, that tells us at some point we can loosen up. If they don't go in the right direction, it tells us the opposite. If at some point we saw a resurgence, of course, we would have to come up with even tighter standards, because the reason that we've seen the progress we've seen is because the standards were tight and people lived by them. So, Kathleen, I don't predict it, I don't want it, but if the indicators tell us that things are going in the wrong direction, then, clearly, we would look at tighter restrictions. I pray that day doesn't come, but that's what we would do. Do the doctors want to add to that at all? Are you good with that Oxiris?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, sir.

Mayor: Okay, great. Go ahead.

Moderator: Andrew from NBC New York is up next. Andrew?

Question: Hello. Good morning. How are you, Mayor?

Mayor: Good, Andrew. How you doing?

Question: Good. I have two questions. The first one is – and this this sort of springs off of the lockdown question – are you concerned that there's been an uptake in traffic, people getting in their cars, driving to run errands, sort of a more casual attitude of late? And my second question is, is any City agency, whether it's the NYPD or Department of Buildings monitoring construction? Because we are getting calls and complaints from some neighbors that construction has seemingly resumed all over the city even though that is not considered an essential workplace.

Mayor: No, I appreciate those questions. And Andrew, thank you also for the question the other day on 4th of July, because it helped focus all of us on getting ahead of that and figuring out how to work with Macy's on something as important as that. So, thank you very, very much for that. On your questions today on construction – first of all, non-essential construction is supposed to be shut down period. So, if you are seeing any instances, Andrew, or any of your colleagues in the media, or any New Yorkers, we need to know. Colleagues in the media, please tell our team here at City Hall. Every-day New Yorkers, call 3-1-1. We need to know. This is directly COVID-19-related. So, when you're calling in a complaint to say you see construction happening that may not be essential construction, you're actually helping to protect people's lives. So, please place that call. Remember, what the State laid out was, what was essential, what was non-essential. There may be some cases where people see something, they think it's not essential, but it actually does fit the standards for what essential is. But I'd rather be safe than sorry. So, I want every report possible if people think something looks wrong so the Department of Buildings – and yes, it is the Department of Buildings – they follow up. They were very aggressive when the new rules came out. They sent their inspectors out, they shut down sites on the spot and, at least, as of a week or two ago, we saw pretty consistent results where there was not inappropriate construction. But if any of those sites are trying to reassert themselves who shouldn't, we will crack down on them, they'll find them, we will force the people off the site. We'll padlock it, whatever it takes.

On the uptake and traffic. Yeah, I do share this concern. Now, I will have a deeper conversation today with our police commissioner and our transportation commissioner to understand what they're seeing. But I've been seeing it personally and I am worried about it. Look, to the extent, again, it is essential workers moving around, that's appropriate. If it's folks starting to get a little too loose, that's a problem, meaning folks who are not doing essential things. We’ve got to be smart about it. So, going someplace in your car, if that leads you to a place where you're then going to be with a crowd of people or you're then not going to have social distancing, that becomes a huge problem for everyone's health and safety. We’ve got be really smart about it. So, if someone's going to the grocery store, that's one thing. But if they're starting to get a little looser, we’ve got to really be careful about what that means. The most important thing is what does it lead to, Andrew? If it leads to people being less careful about social distancing, less careful about staying at home, we’ve got to be very mindful of the problems that create and we’ve got to find ways to enforce on that.

Moderator: Sydney from the Advance is up next. Sydney?

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. So, you've been citing these three indicators for the last several days of new admissions, ICU patients and the Health + Hospitals system and the percentage of New Yorkers testing positive for COVID, but you haven't been including private hospitals in your daily ICU indicator count. And by doing so, you know, you're leaving out an entire borough of Staten Island. Why isn't Staten Island and other private hospitals being included in at least the ICU portion of your daily count? And do you think that the count could be skewed if you're not factoring in the number of people in the ICU from an entire borough?

Mayor: Yeah, Sydney, again, I understand you're going to always look at it from that perspective, which is obvious and necessary. I think the way to think about this is, there's 56 hospitals in the city, we're looking at the 11 public hospitals because we get very consistent information there and we're trying to make this tracking system as clear and consistent as it can be. The 56 hospitals all have different ways to some extent – each one has its own tracking mechanisms and it's kind of hard to get the consistency that we need for this kind of measure. So, no, it's not a in any way – [inaudible] the hospitals is different because we serve all 56 in a variety of ways. It is trying to get clear and consistent information out and the public hospitals –and I've been over these numbers recently of the hospital admissions for COVID, and the ICU activity, and the public hospitals, tragically starting with Elmhurst Hospital, have borne the brunt, clearly. So, that is going to give you the slice that tells you most carefully what's happening with the ICUs as a measure of what it means for the overall trajectory of this disease. Any of the doctors want to add?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: [Inaudible] that Health + Hospital data has tracked the other hospitals. When we were getting more and more full, they were getting more and more full. When we started to be less full, they started to be less full. So, I think, as you say, Mr. Mayor, it is an accurate indicator of what's going on in all hospitals in New York City.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Anna from the Daily News is up next –

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Can I clarify one thing? Sorry, really quickly – I just want to also clarify that the admissions indicator includes all New York City hospitals and not just H+H. I think you probably know that, but just wanting to make that very clear as you get testing parameters.

Mayor: Right. So, just to pick up on Demetre’s point, indicator number-one is all hospitals; indicator number two is the Health + Hospitals, public hospitals; and then indicator number three, again, two measures, one citywide testing everywhere, and, two, public health lab testing. So, different measures, but really important to recognize the goal was to get clean, clear, consistent information that would tell us what we have to do. And that's why it was chosen.

Moderator: Anna from the Daily News is up next. Anna?

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Yesterday you were asked what the City's current testing capacity is for COVID-19. You didn't have that number, so I'm going to follow up and ask if you have it today, given that your plan relies on that.

Mayor: Absolutely. And I just wanted to make sure, Anna, thank you for asking that. I am always careful to make sure that we give accurate information, because this is another example where we have numbers of course for our public hospitals and the testing they're doing of patients, the testing they're doing of their own personnel. But we want to confirm what was happening in the voluntary and independent hospitals as well, and with first responders. I wanted to make sure we were getting the whole picture. So, I think the simple way to say this is, and I think this puts into very clear perspective, that up until next – I mean, excuse me, up until last week – so, last week's an important kind of watershed – as of last week, we did not have a major source for test kits. We were cobbling together a number of test kits from different sources, but we didn't have a single strong supplier nor a dependable supply. So, that was limiting us. We had been, until very recently, unable to free up personnel from hospitals, unable to free up PPEs to protect the people doing the test. So, again, to do a test, you need the kit, you need the person, that trained person to give the test, you need the PPEs to protect them and then you need the lab capacity. You know, in the first two weeks say April, it would have been impossible to imagine that we could free all that up consistently given what we were coming out of with the hospitals and all. But then, as we got into that second week in April, we saw the situation improving and that allowed us now to be able to free up some of the people we need to do the testing on a bigger scale. But, this is why I go into last week, we still didn't have the tests are reliable supply of tests. Finally, this week we have gotten, you know, the beginning of the shipments in from Aria in Indiana and that looks like it's going to be a major consistent supply. We have our own test kits that are about to be developed here in the city. This is the first time we've been able to imagine a true expansion. Nowhere near where we have to be, ultimately. And, again, the only way that happens is with federal involvement. But the point is to get to the punch line of your question. Up until Friday we were at a point of, we were, I'd say, under 10,000 a day would be a good measure. And – meaning if you combine everything happening in New York City, testing of patients in danger, testing of health care workers, testing of first responders – if you combine everything across the 56 hospitals and every place else that testing was happening, you were coming in and under 10,000 a day. This week, that number is going to start to go up, we're going to add on average probably at least a thousand a day because we have now these community-based testing centers that we're putting up, but we also have all the things that go with it to allow us to increase that number. And that number I hope will start to increase steadily. The numbers I want to get to, certainly begins with many tens of thousands a day. I've projected in a perfect world, we would have hundreds of thousands a day to really suppress this disease. And I don't know when we'll get to that point, but we are at least on the gateway, going into May, where we could get to 20,000 tests a day, 30,000 tests a day. At least that's a major, major step towards the kind of suppression and containment we need. So, I think that gives you some perspective about where we have been and where we're going now.

Moderator: Julia from the Post is up next. Julia?

Question: Hi. Good morning, everyone. I have a question for you, Mr. Mayor, and a question for the doctors. I'll start with your question, I'd like to get your reaction to Governor Cuomo saying yesterday that it's “not our job” to provide nursing homes with personal protective equipment even though, you know, we've had over 3,000 patients die in nursing home facilities. And I wonder if you agree that sick nursing home patients, COVID patients should go back into the facilities or if they should go somewhere separate, like maybe in the hotels you preserved for isolation and quarantine. And then, for the doctors, Department of Health tweeted out the graph this morning on hospital admissions and it says they want to get below 200 a day. I'm wondering what the significance is of that number, and, if you can tell us, it looks like you've got close to 200 on the 18th and 19th, but the number went up again. I wonder if you know why that is.

Mayor: Thank you, Julia. I'll start and then turn to the doctors, and they can both speak to part of the senior citizen nursing home question and the quarantine question, and then they’ll also speak to the indicator question. Look, protecting senior citizens, protecting people in nursing homes is – for all of us, it's our job, it's our responsibility. I think this is a point where we'd say any sense of, you know, which part of the government does what is less important than the moral imperative to protect our seniors and to protect people in need. By the organizational chart, the State of New York is responsible for nursing homes, for regulating them, for ensuring they're doing their job. These are overwhelmingly private profit – you know, for-profit facilities. And, obviously, they have to bear responsibility for whether they're doing everything to serve their patients, their clients or not. So, the way I look at it is, whatever is supposed to be each responsibility of each level of government and of the private owners of the nursing homes and everybody, the most important thing here is to save lives. So, we, the City of New York – we have been providing the personal protective equipment to nursing homes for the last few weeks. The State asked us to help out. We said, of course we’ve got to protect our seniors, we’ve got to protect the health care workers and the nursing home workers. We've been getting them personal protective equipment. We will continue to do that. And anything we can do to help save lives, we will do. So, I think it's all our job. I think this is a time where everyone's got a find a way to help in every way we can until we can beat this back.

In terms of the question of – again, to the doctors, start if you will, on that point, of the other part of Julia's question on the notion that if a senior test positive who lives in a nursing home, do they go back to the nursing home or is there some other alternative place that would be better? If you could speak to that, doctors? And then on the point about the indicator at the 200 level – Mitch, do you want to go first?

President Katz: Yes, sir. It is as you've explained, it's been a tragic issue how many people have lost their lives, seniors in nursing homes. We all feel terrible about that. When someone tests positive, the best solution, if they're symptomatic, is for them to go to the hospital, because we know that people who are elderly with other comorbidities are at very high risk. So, people who are testing positive in a nursing home and have shortness of breath, those people need to go right away to the hospital, they're at greatest risk. People with no symptoms or with minimal symptoms should be isolated within the nursing home. I think what we've read in some of the descriptions is that many of these nursing homes have not had appropriate equipment, they haven't had the appropriate staff, but that's certainly the best way to contain the virus, is to isolate the person within their existing room and to make sure that everybody taking care of them is using the appropriate PPE, personal protective equipment.

Mayor: Mitch, I want you –

Unknown: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Hold on one second. Just, Mitch, if you would expand, and then your colleagues can jump in. I think the question, which is a common sense question, is, would a nursing home resident – and again, as you said, if they need hospitalization, there's no hesitation, right, to the hospital. But if someone tests positive, I think there's a common sense question, would they be better off in a quarantine, like a hotel, or would they be better off in the nursing home? And I think one of the things that you've talked about previously is they still need a lot of other services and hotels, we can provide a certain amount, but not necessarily the same as it's presented – provided, I should say, in a nursing home setting. So, could you speak to that?

President Katz: Yeah. So, you're, you're exactly right that people who are in nursing homes cannot be maintained in hotels or they would more appropriately be living independently. And also many people who are in nursing homes for long time are very dependent on their relationships with their caregivers, their caregivers understand their specific needs and are best able to meet those needs. So, I think all of our effort, should be on how do we make that safe, how do we make sure they're isolated—

Mayor: You still there?

President Katz: —other residents [inaudible] able to protect themselves.

Mayor: Okay. Now other doctors please join in.

Commissioner Barbot: So, Mr. Mayor, I'll just add to what you and Dr. Katz laid out. So clearly what we have done is ensure that when these patients are coming back to the nursing home which is their home, right, because they need higher level of skilled nursing services that we provide the PPE that these nursing homes need as well as the technical assistance to make sure that all infection control procedures are properly in place to prevent any further transmission of COVID-19 in those homes.

Mayor: Okay. And then on the indicators question?

Commissioner Barbot: So, sir, on the indicators – what we have laid out is the rough guideline of 200, which is typically twice the baseline of those types of visits that we would anticipate seeing in previous years for that same time period. So it's a rough measure that gives us a sense of the load, if you will, that hospitals are seeing broadly for the number of admissions due to COVID-like illness.

It's a measure that we have to follow over time. It's not that we get there for one day and all of a sudden, you know, we're in a brand-new game as you have said in the past. This is something that we need to monitor over time and it's over a course of several days, like with anywhere between 10 to 14 plus or minus that we would have to track that number and ensure that it stays roughly around that line or below.

Moderator: Marcia from CBS New York is up next. Marcia? Marcia can hear us okay?

Question: How are you today?

Mayor: Hey Marcia, how are you doing?

Question: Okay. So, I have two questions. The first one has to do with the Fourth of July. I wonder what your concerns are in terms of social distancing and whether you're going to have to get the NYPD involved to enforce that and around that issue, so Stuart Applebaum, a union leader has said that Macy's shouldn't be spending millions of dollars on fireworks when the workforce is out of work. If you have any thoughts on that and also relating to that, why you think, you know, having fireworks on the 4th of July is a really good idea? And my second question has to do with nursing homes. Last week your office told us you were sending extra staff to nursing homes – that sending staff to nursing homes was a state issue. Why did you decide to do an add extra help today?

Mayor: Well, Marcia, it goes back to the previous question that we're going to do whatever it takes to protect senior citizens and the nursing homes are struggling. If we can help, we're going to help. That's the bottom line right now. They needed more personal protective equipment? We got it to them. They needed more staffing? We're getting it to them. It just is a matter of we're in a crisis, people's lives on the line. We're going to do whatever – whatever help we can, whatever it take, we're going to do it.

On the 4th of July. So again, what I'm saying is sort of the central question was are we going to do something? Are we going to do nothing? And I'm saying, no, we're going to do something. We're going to celebrate our nation's birthday, especially in the middle of this crisis.
We're going to take that moment to appreciate what we're all doing together to fight this disease back and to honor our nation. And I think the absence of that celebration would be very damning, would be very troubling, you know, would be, it would hurt the morale of New Yorkers as they're fighting this fight. So, from my point of view, unlike, you know, so many other, there's many other important celebrations and gatherings, but this one is truly universal and it's something that we should not go without.

Now, what the CEO of Macy's, Jeff Gennette and I spoke about was trying to figure out the right version of it for this circumstance. And we don't know what July 4th, that day is going to bring, right now, it's by the standards of this crisis, which is, you know, the worst of what we've gone through here is seven weeks old, you know, that is far enough in the future. We’ve got to go through the rest of April, all of May, all of June into July. We could have very, very different reality or we might be still fighting a very tough battle. We don't know yet. We will calibrate what's going to happen to that reality. So, Marcia, if it's a situation where you, you really can't have any crowds at all, then we'll create something that people can appreciate on television. People can appreciate, you know, from the rooftops maybe we'll figure it out. If it's something where there could be modest crowds with social distancing, we'll figure that out too. But I don't want any assumptions yet about what role the NYPD has to play or anybody else because it's just premature. We'll have more to say on it as it gets closer. On the question – Stuart Applebaum is a great labor leader and he represents working people with real passion. I don't think it's an either or. Macy's put aside the resources to provide this celebration. They're committed to doing it for New York City. I respect them for that. I clearly want to make sure their workers get all the support possible, but let's face it, that goes beyond the question of Macy's. That goes back to the federal government providing working people with the way to get through this crisis providing us the City of New York with the way, the ways to help working people get through it. I think that goes far beyond what Macy's can do. The cost of this one display, and it might be a more modest display, obviously than unusual is small compared to the needs of working people. And clearly the companies have to step up, but the federal government has to step up too.

Moderator: Brigid from WNYC is up next. Brigid?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, last week you were asked about the City's plan to keep vulnerable people cool in the summer. I'm wondering first what the status of that thinking and planning is and Comptroller Scott Stringer is urging the City to expand the cooling benefits program and to even begin stockpiling air conditioners. Would you support those policies?

Mayor: Well, first of all, Brigid, I think I was asked this yesterday, we're going to have a summer plan for sure that will include different ways of keeping people cool and keeping people safe unquestionably. And even if it means in a socially distance manner, we're going to have that. As I said yesterday and we were still a-ways off from summer, so we will put that for a plan out in the next couple of weeks as it's ready. On the question of the air conditioners, I think it's a good question. We have to think about things in a whole new way in this environment we're in. So what role air conditioners could play on a more individualized basis? It's a good question. I think that obviously would raise a lot of questions about how you would put together such an effort. But let's see as we get closer, if we think we can do the right kind of cooling center or something like we've done in the past or we need a different kind of solution and we'll add that question into the plan that will unveil in the next few weeks.

Moderator: Yoav from The City is up next. Yoav? Hey Yoav, can you hear us?

Question: Yeah, can you hear me?

Moderator: Yes.

Question: Okay. Hi, Mr. Mayor. On nursing homes, you've said a number of ways in which the City is supporting nursing homes through staffing and PPE, but is there also an accountability side to that equation? You know, is there anything – I recognize the State has the ultimate oversight of these, but if you see red flags at any nursing home, is there anything that the City has done or can do to ensure that they're following the proper protocol to keep their patients safe?

Mayor: Yoav, we’ll do whatever it takes. Again, I respect the role of the State of New York, especially the role the State plays in the crisis dynamic. It is an area where – the City doesn't have a deep connection to nursing homes. The City of New York government doesn't regulate nursing homes, we don't deal with them every single day. It's just, it's a part of the equation that we've had to learn in a new way to actually be able to be helpful. And it just, I want all New Yorkers to understand that, you know, there's so many pieces that make up life in this City that there's always kind of a division of labor between what the City government does, what the State government does, what the MTA does, you know, what the federal government does, everything is laid out in, in a pattern of who has responsibility for what is the only way you can make sense of things.

So in this crisis, the City's tried to step up and what we've done is even though we don't have a regular working relationship with these nursing homes, we've just tried to say, what do you need? And we're going to try and get it for you. Whether it's PPEs or more and more, we see staffing as a real issue. We're just going to get them what they need to deal with this crisis and to protect these seniors who are in danger.

In terms of figuring out, you know, if there's a specific thing that needs to be acted on anytime. I'm sure if there's a specific problem – there's constant communication between the City and State, we're giving feedback to the State on what we're seeing for sure. But, right now, I just keep it really basic. It's just if there's a need, we're going to do everything we can within the resources we have to fulfill the need and protect people.

Moderator: Katie from the Wall Street Journal is up next. Katie?

Question: Hey Mayor de Blasio, I was hoping you could give some more information cause it's actually not on the website and I'm sure people would want to know which of the 32 schools will offer halal food? It's not on the DOE’s website and the truth will set us free. So, I think it would be good with liberating that data. And while we're on the topic you know, the Department of Health website, it's – sometimes it's down, doesn't always update, you know, keeping with this vein of truth setting us free will you eventually, and will the Department of Health eventually update with more hospital stats, which hospitals have the most deaths? And release more information?

Mayor: Yes. well I like that you're invoking the phrase, the truth will set us free. I didn't use that one before, but I like it and I agree with it. So yeah, the – I'm going to – while I'm giving answer on the second part, I'm hoping that Freddi Goldstein is going to write me an answer on the first part, because I'm confused [inaudible] starts tonight. The – what I need, Freddi is the 32 sites. Are they going to be up or when they're going to be up because clearly we need to – and that's a good catch, and Katie, I want to thank you for it because we're trying to make sure people know where this food is and we have to be smart about getting information out in real time. And sometimes, and you can understand in the rush of events here, sometimes things are missed. So anytime a member of the media catches something that we needed to do and didn't happen, right, I will say thank you and we will make sure this information goes up immediately on the DOE website.

But beyond the DOE website, the WNYC, excuse me not WNYC – sorry, product placement there – the nyc.gov/getfood and folks calling 3-1-1, everything has to be working together today so that if someone's trying to find those halal meals that they know where to get them.

So I am thanking you, I hope to get an update in a moment, but as also a reminder to everyone who's listening from the DOE and everyone is listening in the – our food czar and everyone that works with her, that we will do quality control later on today to make sure that if you call 3-1-1, you go on the City website or you go the DOE website, that anyone looking for halal meals, will find them. And this is yet another example of making sure we are getting information out to people.

On the second question, Katie, everything that we can put out that we believe is accurate we're going to put out. I think the bottom line is there were a few weeks in there we were literally in the throws of a deepening crisis and putting out data was much less important to us than securing our hospitals and everything we needed to survive what looked like it was going to be a truly terrifying number of cases. Now that we have had a few weeks of some improvement, we're catching up on a lot of areas where we need to put out data. We will keep doing so. So, I'll come back to you more on the specifics, but the overall goal and the overall instruction I've given is whatever data we have that we know is accurate and we can sustain on an accurate basis, we should keep giving out.

Moderator: Dan from NY1 is up next. Dan?

Question: Morning. Mr. Mayor. I have a question and a request to respond to what an MTA official said yesterday, both pertain to homelessness in the subway. Interim Transit – New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg said, we urge the City to take more aggressive steps to address this problem. It is without a doubt a City obligation and responsibility. Also saying we stay in close contact with the NYPD and the City, but I think it's safe to say everyone here is losing patience with the situation. So, I like a response to that. But my question is that homelessness in the subway has been on the City's radar since the peak last year, almost a year ago when it seemed like it was out of control and the City announced some steps. So here we are April 2020. Does New York City have a new strategy to deal with homelessness in the subway as essential workers commute or is it going to be the same old?

Mayor: Dan, I appreciate the question, but I'm just going to disagree with you on it ever being “out of control.” And I again, I understand that the media looks at situations and tries to portray them in clear and simple terms, but it's just – homelessness, let's have an honest conversation here. This reality of homelessness in general, homelessness in the subways has been with us for decades. No, it's not just something that got the attention of the NYPD in the last year. They've been working on it for years and years. But it's tough to – again, you can't just take someone and arrest them because they're homeless and that's not what New Yorkers would want and it's not legal. We have to work with homeless people to get them off the streets once and for all. And the NYPD's actually been outstanding both above ground and below ground contributing to the HOME-STAT effort, HOME-STAT’s, gotten thousands of street homeless people permanently homeless people off the streets, out of the subways, into shelter and into affordable housing and kept them there, and the NYPD has been a crucial part of that equation. So I'm not going to accept respectfully a question I think – I don't think you mean to denigrate the men and women, the NYPD but I think your question probably inadvertently does so.

They had been working constantly to address homelessness with our Department of Social Services and Homeless Services with all those street outreach workers who tirelessly go out, even during this crisis had been going out and trying to get homeless people to come in. But an honest conversation about this does not ignore the fact that if someone is in that kind of state, a lot of people with real serious mental health problems and we can work to get them in, but we don't have like the magical ability just force everyone in. It's tough, tough work. But that's what the NYPD has been doing and that's what all these outreach workers have been doing for a long time and with success, there's clearly more to do and we're not stopping. We never have stopped and we're not going to stop. And some day when we get out of this crisis, we're going to go back to what we're talking about with the Journey Home Plan of ending permanent street homelessness because we have the tools now that we think work. This crisis has disrupted some of what we were doing, obviously, but we have the tools that work. In terms of Ms. Feinberg, I don't understand what she's saying because NYPD has been out there in force trying to address this issue constantly. And if she's losing patients, I don't know why she hasn't called me. People who have serious concerns and I assume she's talked to Commissioner Shea, which should be the first stop, and if she thinks his strategies aren't working, she should talk to him. If she's not satisfied with that conversation, she should talk to me. And there's anything more that we can do, Of course we’d do it.

Moderator: Gersh from Streetsblog is up next. Gersh?

Question: Hello Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Hey Gersh, how are you doing?

Question: Well, my, my apartment's a mess and I'm baking bread, but nonetheless, I want to follow up on Andrew's question, the issue of traffic, however, it goes beyond the current situation he was asking about. We're hearing a lot of people say they won't feel comfortable taking transit after the crisis and we're hearing many people even saying they're considering buying cars to get around. The result of that might be tens of thousands more car trips in the city, which would add congestion, pollution, danger, anxiety, and undermine your own heart felt effort to increase the mode share of cycling as a sustainable, clean transportation. So what are you and your Transportation Commissioner doing right now to plan for this possibility?

Mayor: Well, it's a very good question. First of all, before I go into that Gersh, I hope you're doing – you’re live streaming your baking process. I think all New Yorkers would like to see you in this crucial endeavor.

Question: [Inaudible].

Mayor: I'll be watching it all day, Gersh. The – it's a great question. I think we have to come up with a plan to not only avert what you just said, which is hesitancy to go back to mass transit, but to go much farther than we ever went before in terms of deepening mass transit options, deepening the ability of people to use alternatives like bicycles, getting people out of their cars more and more, because – excuse me – because the today's crisis is COVID-19. The bigger crisis has not gone away and that is global warming and we have to take these actions to save ourselves and save our planet going forward. Let alone what it would mean for improvement in people's quality of life and reducing congestion and all the other things we care about. Obviously safety.

So that work is going on now and will go on. I think the – I do not start with the assumption that the vast majority of New Yorkers are going to be thrown off by this experience. In the short term, of course, everyone's going to be cautious to protect their own health and safety and their family's health and safety. But New Yorkers are amazingly resilient and as we come out of this, I think the vast majority of us are going to resume, you know, the lives that we have had. So I do not start with the assumption there's going to be a radical shift, but I think you're right to say it's something we should be concerned about, is something we should guard against, but much more importantly, we have to build an entirely different reality going forward anyway. So we have to find more and more ways to attract people to mass transit, to better options, and I think it goes back to the basics we've always talked about. Frequency, reliability, cost, the quality of the experience, all the things that determine whether people are willing to engage or not. We just have to double down on those investments in the future to make sure that people can believe in mass transit and go back to it in record numbers.

Moderator: Last two, Jeff Mays from The Times. Jeff?

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Two questions. I'm hoping to get update on the deaths in the quarantine hotels. Does the city know what went wrong? Did the city know that this is a disease that can kill people who appear to have been on the mend? And what will the monitoring look like from now on? And then secondly, the numbers on the indicators that you give seem to clash a little bit with the States. You know, the slides that the governor has say 1,300 people per day are being admitted to hospitals, whereas you say 227 per day can Dr. Daskalakis or Dr. Barbot just kind of clarify what's going on with those two numbers?

Mayor: All right, let's have the doctors speak to that first and I'll double back on the hotel question. I'll just preface by saying, Jeff, again, there's three levels of government, you know, and we are working very closely with the State government, have a lot of respect for the efforts of the Governor and everyone in the State government have some real differences obviously with the federal government in the way this crisis has been handled. But all that is to say in the end, the City of New York and every city is going to keep their own measures that we think are right for judging our reality and when we can make moves that affect our people. So, we're all working together and everyone's always comparing information but these indicators are ones that our health care leadership believes are the truest, most effective ones in terms of deciding if and when we loosen up restrictions and changes we would make. So, they can speak to the specifics but I wanted to give you that kind of background. Go ahead. Doctors.

Deputy Commissioner Daskalakis: This is Demetre. So, I'd like to - so the indicator about hospitalizations is actually using not only individuals who are COVID-19 confirmed by labs, but also looks at every person who gets admitted to the hospital with a syndrome that can look like COVID. So we think that that indicator is an excellent gauge. It's a different way than how the State does it. So they are actually looking at hospitalizations that are in fact directly COVID related. So this is just a different way of doing it and again, shows a pretty robust picture of what hospitalizations are like in New York City related to this virus.

Mayor: Anyone else want to add on that? Okay, and again, on this one, on the hotels, I'll start and if any of the doctors want to add. So, Jeff, first of all, we have more information but still I don't think all the information we would like to have on these three deaths. Again, confirming three individuals who had been coming out of three different hospitals, in one case, and I want to be respectful of privacy and all, but the person's death may not have been COVID related. In the other two cases it appears it was as I understand it, but what we are still trying to understand is what happened in the discharge process that would have led someone to end up being discharged to a hotel if there was still any kind of danger or maybe something, you know, maybe there was not an evident danger and something very different happens. So, we do not have the full, full picture yet.

What we're doing is adding clinical staffing in these hotel facilities. There was a monitoring process in place and a certain supports in place, but we, based on this experience, which we're still find not only troubling, but there's still unanswered questions here, we're going to be an abundance of caution having a clinical personnel monitoring people regularly in these sites to make sure that folks are safe even if they appeared to be fully and appropriately discharged, out of abundance of caution we're going to keep monitoring.

Moderator: Last call, Reema from Chalkbeat, Reema.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Reema.

Question: Okay, great. So, I have a couple of questions. The first one is, you know, and I know you've been asked this a lot. We're still, you know, hearing from families who haven't received devices yet for school, the internet capable devices, and we know that video isn't a process of handing, you know, hundreds of thousands of these out. But I was hoping you could sort of walk us through why taking so long to get these devices to families? And then the second question you know, there's all this mounting push to salvage some of the Summer Youth Employment Program and providers have been saying that they've been pretty frustrated that the city didn't [inaudible] first and asked [inaudible] if they could develop some sort of [inaudible] option for students? [Inaudible] I know City Council is talking to providers. Just want to see if your team has been talking to these folks to figure out alternatives or where your administration sort of stands on that?

Mayor: Sure, okay, Reema let me answer your two points but also give an update as I lead into this. So, what I'm being told here is a little bit different than what I understood previously this going back on the halal meals. So, I have first of all again, thanks for the catch earlier. I think it was Katie on the – or, someone to tell me if it was or not? But it was Katie. Thank you. Thank you again, Katie. On the website those locations that have additional halal meals, the 32 sites will be clear on the website by noon, schools.nyc.gov/ramadanmeals. Very specific. Now, here's what I did not get clean information from my team on, I apologize. I'm going to give you a good update, which is apparently all sites of the 435 halal meals. The 32 specific sites that are in communities that have large Muslim populations have an additional quantity available to make sure they can meet demand. So what I am getting here is if you go to any of the 435 sites and specifically asked for halal meal, they have something that does qualify as a halal meal. At the 32 locations there'll be ample additional quantity and again, the website will have that by noon.

On the question of the devices. So the latest, and I checked in with the DOE a day or two ago, is they're on track, every student, every family that has reported not having a device and internet service will get what they need by April 30th. There is still – so that's happening. The devices have come in from Apple, they're being distributed out, the delivery systems moving, you know, internet service enabled, the whole nine yards. But where there is still an open question is we think there are still families who need a device and have not reported in that they need a device. And so if anyone is talking about this issue, and all the New Yorkers watching out there could get the word out, any family of a public school child that doesn't have a appropriate device for their child to participate in online learning or doesn't have internet service, call 3-1-1, let them know right away because we can add them to those deliveries instantly. It's just something we have enough of a supply, but we still think there are kids out there who need help and we don't know. We've asked school administrators and teachers to identify any families they think may not have a device and reach out and confirm whether they do or don't. That has been ongoing. But, right now, we're going to have more devices than there are kids asking for them and we want to make sure we close that gap. So that's the update on that.

On Summer Youth, Reema again, there's the first reality with Summer Youth was we had no way to start a process which would have meant right away making arrangements with employers, putting the time and energy into arranging for kids to be selected, all the things that go into building up Summer Youth Employment, that all would have been underway already at this point in April. And when we did the budget, we could not authorize a major effort for something that we thought physically couldn't exist in time based on everything we knew at the time and we know now. A lot of those employers are nowhere near being open. We obviously only are allowing the most essential adult employees right now to do work. All other adults who are working are either doing work from home or God forbid many of them just don't have a job anymore. So we couldn't say, let's start up a Summer Youth Employment Program when we didn't even know what the summer would look like or whether they'd be employers to receive those kids and whether people could gather in one place or any of those things.

The second reason was money. We're running out of money. This is obviously, you know, the crucial question as we look at what's happening in Washington with the stimulus, but even beyond that, we're in the middle of a massive budget crisis. It's horrifying, all because of COVID-19 and of the things that we have to focus on, we had to focus again on health, on safety, on food, and on shelter, and we could not prioritize certain things as a result of needing to focus on those basics. So, Summer Youth was not going to be a financial priority compared to a lot of other things like the $170 million we're spending on food already, again, a number that I think will be growing. So that's the bottom line on how we got to the decision. Look, if this situation improves going forward and we can do some creative things with young people, of course I want to do that. But again, will we have the money for that is an open question. We got a first think about getting the breadwinners and families back to work so they can support their families. That's the first priority obviously. But if we can find some creative alternatives of ways to engage young people, we're very, very open to that discussion. Just not into this point, clear what that's going to look like. It's going to take time to figure out what's really going to be viable.

All right, everyone. Just want to bring it together as we close today and you know, we talked about what these indicators mean. We talked about the approach this city is taking. Steady, careful approach focused on your health and safety, that's what we're doing and making sure that when that day comes that we start to reopen, we're really sure it's the right moment. We're really sure we're ready to do it and that we can do it right and sustain it and not have a boomerang. So that's what we've been doing. The important thing to think about is the month of May, because the month of May is when these pieces now start to come together, keep driving down those indicators and that's our jump off point, do that link up, do that hand off to the testing and tracing program. And as I described yesterday, we're going to build up a massive apparatus that will be up and running in the month of May to reach thousands, and then tens of thousands of New Yorkers to test and trace to really start to constrict and constrain this disease and beat it back even more.

So, we all have a lot to do and again, I'll always say thank you. I want to say thank you again. People have been amazing. I'll keep saying thank you. Stick to it, stay with it. Because if we can keep fighting these next weeks to get to that handoff, that's going to be a point where we really start to make even greater progress. And then we're going to need everyone to participate fully in testing and tracing as many tests as we have, we're going to use. When we need to trace cases, we're going to need the New Yorkers who are part of that to fully participate, to help us do that the right way. When we tell people you got isolate, we're going to need people to follow those instructions for the good of yourself, your family, and everyone. So it's all participatory. We're all in this together. But if what we've seen these last weeks is any indication New York City and New Yorkers are off to a great start fighting back this disease. As we go into May, I think we can do some really extraordinary things and go a lot farther.

Again, thank you everyone. Appreciate you, appreciate all you're doing, and God bless you all.

2020-04-24 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. So, you know, when we started on this road together, none of us asked for it. None of us could have imagined it. But in the beginning, as we were dealing with the coronavirus, there were some phrases that we would hear and some efforts to characterize it and sort of tell us what we were dealing with. And at first, we thought it sounded right. And I remember one phrase we heard a number of times was that coronavirus was the great equalizer. And that's because very early on we saw celebrities getting infected, heads of state, athletes, royalty, literally royalty getting infected by this disease. I remember when all of us think about celebrities, the night people heard that Tom Hanks was infected. It was kind of a shock to people given what he means to so many folks in this country. So, in the beginning we heard about all these very prominent people testing positive and the story kept getting written as this was something affecting everyone the same and no one was immune and no one could hide from it. And it really did seem to be something that affected everyone equally.

But beyond the surface, something much more painful was going on and a larger truth was occurring that wasn't clear at first, but the more facts came in, the more that we got evidence, the more clear it was that this virus in fact discriminates. This virus in fact, seeks out in particular those who are most vulnerable. Now we know about that on a health level alone. We know that folks who are much older and particularly those with preexisting conditions are in the greatest danger. And that's true across every community all over the world. But at the same time, what we've seen here in New York City, and we've seen in many parts of the country, is this virus has a truly disproportionate impact on folks who haven't had as much access to health care. And folks who throughout their lives weren't able to address some of the conditions that afflicted them because they didn't have the money to do it. So, it came back once again to economic reality, to the reality of what so many working people have faced that their health care was determined by the size of their bank account, not by their humanity. It comes back to the painful reality of structural racism where some people in this country have always known they would have health care available to them and many have never had a day where they were secure in the health care they could get. So, this turns out in practice, in reality, this virus does discriminate because it's particularly good at afflicting those who for so long have been afflicted by so many of society's ills

In a sense – and I always hate to treat the virus like it has human characteristics, but I'm going to do it in this case. In a sense, this virus teamed up with the inequalities that already existed in our society and that we've been fighting here in New York City over these last six plus years. And it's very painful to see folks who have worked their whole lives so hard to barely get by, then have to bear the brunt of this in a way that's overwhelming. And that's what we found for a lot of low-income folks. For a lot of immigrants, a lot of folks in communities of color. This disease has had an overwhelming impact. It's hurt everyone everywhere, but it's been an insurmountable enemy for so many, particularly among our seniors in communities of color.

So, we have a choice to make at this point. Every city, every state, our nation all have a choice to make. We can either ignore these disparities or we can throw up our hands and say, hey, that's just part of life. There's nothing you can do. Or we can attack these disparities. We can take them head on. We can fight back when we see something unacceptable and something that doesn't fit our values as New Yorkers. And I think you know where this is going. New Yorkers have a lot of fight in them. It's one of the great things about this city. People don't back down from a fight. People are not intimidated. New Yorkers will fight back against these disparities. We will fight back against these inequalities. We will not accept the status quo that's broken. We didn't accept it before and now it's been laid bare even more and it's time to fight with everything we've got

Now, two weeks ago when we laid out the facts about these disparities, we wanted to show what was really going on. And again, at first it wasn't entirely evident but it became more and more so. And then when we are able to show the whole picture, it was quite clear. So at that time I laid out the outline of a four point action plan and we've continued to build that plan each step along the way. Let me go through it with you now to let you know the things we're doing.

So first of all, again, the outline of the plan. Point one was to protect and preserve our public hospitals to make sure they could be that front line of protection for all people, and particularly those who had experienced the greatest disparities. Point two, a massive public awareness campaign. This disease is confusing to everyone. For a lot of folks who haven't had as much access to information including if they don't happen to speak English, it was very important to really double down with a huge public outreach campaign. Second grassroots – I mean third, excuse me, grassroots outreach. This is a different kind of thing. All the media, the digital, that's one thing, but going out into communities and deepening the connection with communities and helping community providers to reach the people they serve more deeply. And then last -- phone, a clinician, telemedicine, the ability for people to talk to even if it's not the right time to go to a doctor's office, to talk to a doctor or a nurse or trained professional to get advice and to get guidance whenever, however, people need it. This is all about protecting people. This is all about keeping people healthy, but it's about focusing as well on people who need help and oftentimes haven't gotten it in the past. We want to fix that in so many ways right now. And make that help, make that health care, make that guidance more available than ever.

So first, with the public hospitals, we've talked a lot about it, but I want to summarize because it's important to realize when I came into office, the public hospitals were in deep trouble, Health + Hospitals on the verge of bankruptcy, and there was talk all the time, would we have to close public hospitals? Would we literally shut down whole facilities? Would there be layoffs of our health care workers? Think about how strange those conversations look in comparison to what we're going through right now. Thank God we didn't do any of those things and I made clear we would not close public hospitals. We would not lay off doctors and nurses and health care workers, and we didn't. In fact, we invested billions to keep our public hospitals going. No one gave me or anyone else in City Hall a memo and said, Hey, there's going to be a pandemic in 2020, you should keep your public hospitals going for that reason. We kept them going because it was the right thing to do to help people, anyone, everyone in New York City who needed health care. But thank God that those actions allowed us to fortify our public hospital system in advance of this horrible pandemic. Because right now they have been heroic and all the folks who work at Health + Hospitals, thank you. I want to say thank you and I'll say it a lot of other times. You've been heroic. You've been extraordinary. Some of the most famous instances of heroism in this story over the last two months have come from our public hospital system. All our public hospitals, of course, we all know what's happened at Elmhurst Hospital, but at Lincoln Hospital, at Bellevue, at so many, there has been a heroic fight. And this has been one of the reasons we've been able to hold the line and keep our hospitals going and keep saving lives.

So, in the midst of this fight, it was clear we had to throw everything we had into supporting all our hospitals, but that our public hospitals were really the front line of the front line. So we added thousands more personnel. We hired nurses and other medical personnel, not only from around New York City in this area, but from all over the country to come in and help out our public hospitals. We worked with the federal government to bring in hundreds of military medical personnel who have been outstanding and had done so much to help us through this crisis. 

Those PPEs, we always talk about personal protective equipment. We've sent hundreds of thousands of masks, gloves, face shields, you name it. Constantly into our public hospitals and all our hospitals. We've been building our own, as we've talked about this week, literally for the first time in New York City -- face shields, surgical gowns, ventilators, all these things. The bridge ventilators we talked about earlier in the week. All of these things being made to protect our ability to provide health care.

That was what we had to do just to get to the point that we knew that our hospital system would hold and that we could fight back this disease. But now we're going on the offensive with the community testing sites, also run by our public hospital system, by Health + Hospitals, five sites already open around the five boroughs. And now adding additional Health + Hospitals testing sites today, adding – at the Health + Hospitals facilities. Adding three more next week at NYCHA buildings, public housing, buildings run by Health + Hospitals. We also have, it's important to note another part of the community-based testing, working with Local 1199SEIU the health care workers union and One Medical, a private provider. Those are open as well. These grassroots testing facilities all focused on the hardest hit neighborhoods, combined will be able to do about 10,000 tests per week to begin. That number will keep going up as we get more capacity.

So that is about what we've done to strengthen public health care. The first rung of this effort to fight back disparities. Now the second is the public awareness campaign. So I’ve been over some of this before, I want to add back in mid-March we ran the first big campaign, $8 million focused on television, print, digital, 15 languages, but we then found that we needed to do even more to reach the communities that needed more information that weren't always getting it because of language barriers and economic realities. We had to get more and more information out there. And so, we have now initiated a $10 million public awareness campaign, advertisements specifically aimed at the hardest hit communities. And we're hoping that more and more people of course so many people at home, that this will really reach people and saturate and get them all the information that will give them a sense of what to do, but also where to turn for help.

TV, radio, digital, again, 15 languages focus on 88 particularly critical zip codes where we've seen the greatest challenges. An additional piece, direct mail. This is being done on a massive scale. We want to send to people -- another way to make sure the information is getting through and direct mail gives people another option, another way to receive information, for some people better than through TV or other advertising. We will be sending out mailers next week to 3.4 million homes here in our city. They will be in English, Spanish, and Chinese. 

So, the third part of our initiative is the grassroots outreach, the things, the sort of human element that media campaigns cannot achieve. And what it means is to reach people in every conceivable way and particularly from voices that they trust and know. Now it begins with using everything we can to just start to get the word out. So, we've done bilingual robocalls to 1.1 million New Yorkers, again getting the basic information out and helping people know where to turn. And we've used all of the City's social media to reach people in 24 languages and that has a reach obviously, of hundreds of thousands of people to begin. We need to do more now. So, some of the things we're doing particularly to bring into play voices that communities know and trust. Four teletown halls with faith leaders and those will reach tens of thousands of folks. Another crucial voice that people want to hear from, need to hear from giving them the same kind of guidance.

We're creating webinars with health officials and commissioners of different agencies to help people directly hear what's going on. That's reaching thousands of New Yorkers more. And we're going to start soon specific efforts with community-based health clinics, not going to announce those details today, but they will be announced in the next few days. This is going to be a crucial piece of this equation as well.

The last piece – telemedicine, and this again gets to working more and more at the community level in another way. Because telemedicine allows you to have that direct connection with a trained provider and allows people to just ask whatever's on their mind, whatever questions, whatever concerns. I think a lot of times given just the sheer confusion that has been part of this experience for all of us. There's such a kind of every day set of questions that people have about the coronavirus and there's no fully satisfying answers because the scientific community still doesn't understand it enough. But I think people need to talk. They need to get their questions out. They need to ask, what do I do in this situation? What I do for example, if you know, I'm in a crowded home and someone appears to be getting sick, how do we isolate that person properly? Is it time for that person to be sent to a hotel or someplace else where they can be fully isolated? How do I know when it's time to reach a doctor or go into a health care facility? These kinds of questions, people need more human interaction. A lot of folks have their own doctor they can call and that's great. But for folks who don't have their own doctor or can't reach their doctor, we need to keep building the telemedicine capacity. And this is a lot through working with community health providers as well. A lot of smaller community-based health practices, again, have tremendous trust from the people they serve, but they don't necessarily have experience dealing with telemedicine. So, we're working with a thousand small community-based health providers to help them determine what's the best way to reconnect more deeply with those they serve. Now for 250 of them, they've signed up immediately to get trained in telemedicine to make this much more of what they do. We're going to help them quickly get fully involved with telemedicine, particularly for their patients who have chronic conditions. Other small providers need other types of support. Whatever they need, we're going to give it to them because we know they're having that kind of frontline direct relationship with people who need help.

Now we have more, that will be coming out soon on telemedicine because this is going to be a much bigger effort. And again, in the next few days we'll have additional announcements. But one thing I will raise now and it is a good thing and it's something that is historic because it's the first time in the city's history that the City has done this. The City government helping these local clinics, local providers to do wellness calls. So again, this is not just someone calls when they have a question or a problem, but proactive wellness calls as an aggressive strategy to reach the most vulnerable patients, to just check in with them regularly and see if they need something. I want on a very big scale, the ability to anyone who needs to talk to a health care professional to be available so folks can get those questions answered. But we want to more and more pinpoint the individuals who need those proactive regular wellness calls. And that's something we're ramping up as well.

The bottom line on this reality – there are so many good people at the community level, at the neighborhood level who are providing health care or have been providing health care for years and years in their communities. A lot of them have seen their work disrupted, obviously by the coronavirus. We want to help them get back on their feet. We want to help them get stronger, provide them support, but also help them to use new tools to reach all the people they serve in this moment of crisis.

Now I want to switch gears here and talk about another reality of people being hit really hard by this crisis. And this goes now to some of the economic reality. It's hitting the same neighborhoods that are feeling those health care disparities. They're being hit very hard by this economic crisis. Obviously, everyone's being hit hard. This is something where we're seeing the pain very widespread. So many folks have lost their jobs of every description in every community -- working class people, middle class people, you name it. People have been thrown for a loop. And we've got to help people through this crisis. And for so many New Yorkers, that means if you don't have your livelihood, you cannot keep the basics going. How are you going to pay for food? How are you going to pay for medicine? And the question all New Yorkers ask themselves all the time, how am I going to pay the rent? We need to make sure that every New Yorker can stay in their home during this crisis. We got to keep a roof over everyone's head. And so this is a crucial part of what we're doing right now to make sure that that basic human need, knowing you will have shelter, knowing you will have a roof over your head, is something that New Yorkers know as secure as we fight through this crisis.

Now, that begins with knowing the most basic thing, that you will not never be evicted during this crisis. That no landlord will tell you, you have to leave even temporarily. We've heard reports of some landlords saying, Oh, you have to leave because you're sick. Come back when you're, well. That's not legal. If someone needs a place to be because they can't properly be in their apartment while they're sick. Again, we have those hotel rooms available, but that's a decision for doctors to make, not for landlords to make. So, anyone who is experiencing a problem with a landlord can call 3-1-1, get our tenant hotline. You'll get free support. Everything we provide is free of course, support knowing what's available to help you, and the rules, the standards that you need to know about your rights and how you can protect yourself if you're dealing with an unreasonable landlord. Obviously, all the other ways you can get help, whether it's food or any other kind of assistance. But if you need legal help, we will provide it for free. If you're being threatened by eviction, which no one should be at this point, but if it's happening to you, we will get you legal help immediately to stop it. And that is regardless of who you are, it doesn't matter what neighborhood you are in, what your income is, what your immigration status is. Anyone threatened with eviction at this moment, the City of New York will step in and we will stop that eviction. And I want people to remember, when in doubt on something, anything COVID-19 related, I mean we use 3-1-1 for many other things traditionally. But right now, especially the focus of 3-1-1 is anything related to the coronavirus. If you might be threatened with eviction in the middle of this crisis, that is a fundamental problem. Pick up that phone to 3-1-1 so we can help you.

Now as we get to the first of each month, this question of how am I going to pay the rent is coming up for more and more New Yorkers. And people are struggling. Thank God there's been some help finally from the federal government but it hasn't reached everyone by any stretch and it's not going to last for long. So, the bottom line is tenants need more help. And the first thing we have to do is make sure that comes from the City of New York. I'll talk about what the State needs to do and there's a lot the State needs to do and they need to do it quickly. But the City has to do our part of the equation and that comes to our Rent Guidelines Board. The Rent Guidelines Board put out a report late yesterday. And I think it was very confusing to people. And I want to set the record straight now. It's a report they do every year. It is a report that explains in an objective manner what is going on with the economy and what it means for landlords, what their costs are. It's a report that's supposed to take stock of one piece of the equation. But as I said from the very beginning of this administration, the problem historically with the Rent Guidelines Board was, and I'll be blunt about this, it was over decades in the city, it's been around about 50 years. It was more focused on the interests of landlords than the interests of the vast majority who are tenants. And so, when I came into office, I said the Rent Guidelines Board needs to consider both sides of the equation, factually objectively and determine what to do. And the Rent Guidelines Board over the last six years in several instances decided that a rent freeze made sense, in the other instances that our rent increased made sense, but a modest one. It's been a much more fair equation since the needs of tenants were given the weight that they deserve.

The report yesterday I think was misleading because it suggested that the interest was in what landlords are going through and I said very clearly last night, the challenges that landlords are facing right now are real. I'm not belittling them, but they pale in comparison to the challenges that tenants are facing. It is abundantly clear, of course the Rent Guidelines Board will hold hearings. It will go through its processes very quickly and get to a decision. But to me it's abundantly clear we need a rent freeze. The facts couldn't be clearer. Greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. I can't even believe, and I never thought as your mayor, I would be telling you that we were going through something that could possibly compare to the Great Depression. And when I think of the Great Depression, I think of the stories my older relatives used to tell me about, that sounded like something that was so severe, so difficult that we couldn't possibly imagine it happening again. And yet a lot of what we saw in the Great Depression is happening right now, right here. So, my message to the Rent Guidelines Board is clear. Issue your reports, do your research. That's great. Hold your hearings as quickly as possible. Take your vote and give the tenants who are rent stabilized in this city, over 2 million New Yorkers give them a rent freeze. They need it. It's clear, the facts are clear. Let's get this done.

Now the State of New York has a lot more they need to do. And I've said this a number of times, and I know we've all been dealing with a crisis. The State’s had a lot to deal with, but it's time to focus on the needs of renters. First of all, the most obvious solution, let renters use their security deposits to pay the rent now. This is something the State could do quickly and easily and it makes so much sense. Those security deposits are stuck in escrow accounts. The tenant can't use them. The landlord can't use them until someone leaves their apartment for good. It makes no sense given that we're dealing with an absolutely unprecedented crisis. The State needs to act, free up those security deposits, let the tenant use them for rent. That helps the tenant, that helps the landlord. There's no reason not to authorize this right now. It's an emergency action that would help a lot of people. Second, for folks who can't afford it, look, some people can still afford the rent. That's great. Or some people can afford their rent for a period of time and we hope the economy comes back quickly. But for folks who simply can't afford anything and still, you know, hopefully they can get that right to use their security deposits, but especially while they don't have that right, if people just run out of money, let them defer the rent. They can pay it back after a period of time. If people don't have any money, they don't have any money. I believe there should be a plan to allow people to defer their rent and then have a repayment plan that's set that everyone agrees to. So, the landlord knows they will get the money back eventually. But you can't ask people to come up with money they just don't have. And lastly, as I said right now, there is an eviction moratorium. This is something the City and State have worked on in common. The court system, everyone's on the same page, but it needs to be extended not only to the end of this crisis, but 60 days past the end of this crisis because what I do not want to see is landlords – and this is not the majority of landlords, it's only some – but landlords waiting for that moment when the moratorium comes off to then start evictions. And I don't want to see a whole lot of New Yorkers put in that horrible situation. Just as soon as things get a little better, bang, here come a bunch of evictions. No, let's give that 60 days to help people get back on their feet after the crisis ends and make sure we can avoid those evictions. So, people need these things. They need them now. So, I'll just make it clear to the State of New York, it's time to act, people need to know they're going to get through, and this is something that would give so many New Yorkers peace of mind and security at this moment where they need both.

Okay. As I start to wrap up here, what we do every day is track the indicators. We talked about this week, understanding our larger trajectory we’re on, understanding the progress we made, but the challenges ahead of us too and how we have to keep working hard, and then link up to that next phase where we're going to do the testing and tracing in May. So, today I am happy to say we have just plain good news. Our indicators are now moving all in the correct direction, which is down. So, let me go over them. We've got – first of all, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that is down. Again, these numbers on the two-day lag. That's down from 227 to 176 – so that's great, that's a serious decline. The daily number of people in ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19, also down – it's only a little, but it's still progress – 796 to 786. Now, this is an area again where we need to see much more progress, but I still like seeing a step in the right direction. The percentage of people tested positive for COVID-19 citywide down from 32 percent to 30 percent. The public health lab tests, down from 57 percent to 52 percent.

Okay, just plain good day. Congratulations because you did that. Everyone out there, you did this – social distancing, shelter in place – you made this happen. Now we got to keep doing it. The plan that we stated from the beginning – do this, all indicators down – we need to do that for ten days to two weeks and that's when we can actually start to talk about how to begin loosening up some of these restrictions and taking a step towards normalcy. And again, that handoff to the massive test-and-trace effort. Good day. Keep working hard. Let's get some more just like this day.

So, as I close, and I'll say a few words in Spanish, as always, look, I want to just note, I talked to you honestly about these disparities we're facing in this city. And again, it's something we've talked about for a long time, but it was seeing it in a new, even sharper light, and is even more unacceptable when you see the human toll, what's happened here. The important thing as we prepare for this next phase of life in our city, as we prepare the long road back, but it will be a clear and strong effort to come back to because that's what we do in New York City. We can never look away from these disparities. We're going to stare them in the face and beat them back. I think the important thing is that blunt honesty about what we have continued to learn and why it just does not fit with what we believe in, here in the city, and how we have to fight it every day and we can and we will. And we'll do that together. Fighting these disparities makes us all stronger. Fighting these disparities fits what we believe in as New Yorkers. And there's a reason New York is admired and respected all over the world, and it's because it's a city for everyone. We have more work to do to ensure that everyone gets the same health care, everyone gets the same treatment when they need it, and that's what we're going to focus on as a big piece of our recovery ahead.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and as I always like to say, please remind me or allow me to know both the name and the outlet of the person asking the question.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have Commissioner Barbot and Commissioner Mostofi from the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs on the phone. With that, I will start with Lisa from NBC News Radio.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I interviewed your son, Dante, a few months ago. He sounded great and I wanted to know how your family's doing through all this. It's been a tough time for everyone.

Mayor: Lisa, thank you. I appreciate that. Well, first of all, I want to say it's been a tough time for all New Yorkers. We're all experiencing the same really challenging reality of feeling cooped up and feeling like we can't live our normal lives and that frustration. But I also admire how people have just shown a lot of toughness and resiliency through it. I can say for my family, you know, we're used to being out in the world. We love this city. We love the people of the city. We love the neighbors of the city. It's really strange to not be able to be out there and connected to people. I particularly miss the restaurants of our city and I can't wait until they come back. But thank God my family, everyone's healthy. Everyone's well. We – you know, we try and stay really connected despite all this.

I will say Dante is going stir crazy. I don't think that's surprising for a 22-year-old. But he's connecting with his friends all over a lot and finding a way to, you know, make sense of it all. But I think in many ways, you know, I'm frustrated, we're all frustrated. I think it's particularly tough for younger folks. I think, you know, there's – I mean he's someone who just loves being out and around the city and has so many friends and loves to go out. And it's really strange that the only connection you can have to your friends is online. And you know, that's – I think there's been a little challenge for him, but he's finding his way through. But I appreciate the question and, Lisa, I hope you and your family are doing well and are, you know, finding a way to make sense of this. And most importantly are staying healthy.

Moderator: Next we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I want to follow up on the lawsuit brought by the Corrections Union, which I think you addressed on Twitter last night, and you said that the 24-hour shifts were going to end. I'm hoping you can speak to if you've looked into at all how that happened and have they already ended or when are they going to end. And then also the other concern that was raised in the lawsuit was about going back to work without being confirmed to be a negative for coronavirus. Is the City going to do anything about that aspect of it?

Mayor: Okay. Thank you for the question, Erin. And I'll just preface by saying when there's a lawsuit, I always have to be a little careful with my words. We always want to try and resolve issues like this with our colleagues in labor. And my door is always open. I know our First Deputy Mayor, Dean Fuleihan, has been talking constantly to the President of the Corrections Officers Union throughout the crisis and before. So, our door is always open and we always prefer to try and resolve things without a lawsuit. And a lot of times I don't think it's necessary, but given that there is a lawsuit, I'll be a little careful. The first part though I can say very bluntly, there never should have been 24-hour shifts. It really was just a horrible mistake. People – you know, our officers, our supervisors are going through so much, they've got a tough job already. This was just a dumb, managerial mistake and one that I do not accept. And that's why I was quite clear in saying, no, it's not going to be allowed from this point on ever. The reality is that, look, in the first weeks of this crisis, I think everyone was trying to figure out how to manage. Workforces all over this city were depleted. I get that that was a real challenge. I don't belittle that for a moment, but there's always an option. Unless there's literally no one else available. You know, a 24-hour shift just doesn't make sense, and my strong impression was there were other options here, and that's what I want to see happen, that we not do that again.

On the testing, look, we've had a pretty clear standard across all of our first responder agencies and public safety agencies and public health care. There's a pretty clear standard of how people who are coming back off the disease, what those indicators are. Dr. Barbot has spoken to it many times. The test is not the only way to know if someone's well enough to come back. So, we're going to stick with the standard that we've been using. When we go forward into the test-and-trace phase, of course, there'll be so much more testing around in general, that will be a different reality. But this situation we're in now, the fact is the standard has been applied, you know, consistently as to the best of my understanding. So that's all I'll say about it right now.

Moderator: Next we have Melissa from News 4 New York.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good. Melissa, how’ve you been?

Question: Okay, thank you. As you may know, we've been reporting on the situation at the Vernon Houses in Brooklyn. These residents have been without gas for 30 days now. So, as you can imagine, their ability to afford food right now is even further impacted since they can't cook. Can you tell us anything about why have they been without gas for all these weeks and why are they getting snacks from the City instead of meals and what are you doing to help them?

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Melissa. It's an important question. It's horrible. I feel for everyone who lives in that development because this is one of the most frustrating realities in public housing when the gas goes out and it requires this massive repair effort. It's not like, you know, most of us think about, there's a gas problem, you know, it's a simple repair, not in public housing in many cases. These are buildings – a lot of them are 50, 60, 70 years old and they are in really tough shape. They should have been rehabbed decades ago. They weren't – the way that the system’s work, to the best of my understanding, I've had a number of conversations with the General Manager of NYCHA, Vito Mustaciuolo, about this. He's worked tirelessly trying to improve the situation all over public housing. But these buildings require going floor by floor and in some cases I even think apartment by apartment, you know, literally going into walls and resetting the apparatus. It's a very, very labor-intensive effort. There's no switch you can just flick. And it's all about just the age and the tough shape these buildings are in.

So, it's horrible it takes so long. But there is a reason it takes so long. And this is why, you know – and when we get back to all the other things we need to do in this city – this is why it's so important to go into this intensive effort that we've put forward to rehab a huge number of our buildings because they need it. The food that's been provided, I understand from our Food Czar, Kathryn Garcia, that it's been more than just snacks to say the least, but that we want to increase or improve the variety of the food that's being provided. So, we'll get you the details, Melissa, on what has been provided up to now. There is a certain amount of variety for sure that's been provided now, but we want to do more and better. Right now, additional food is being brought in, more variety of food is being brought in to help the residents get through the time until we're done here. But I want to make sure – I feel very badly for the residents in this development. I want to make sure they have all the food they need and quality food, and that these repairs are made as quickly as humanly possible.

Moderator: Next we have Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Hey, everyone. How are you doing this morning?

Mayor: Hey, Mark.

Question: So, I wanted to ask about the antibody tests for first responders. What's the process for that and at what stage are you guys –

Mayor: Mark? Mark, you're coming in and out. This happened before, I think one time. I don't know what kind of – it sounds like you're in a car or something, but if you could get closer to the microphone, you're coming in and out.

Question: Right. Is this a little better?

Mayor: Yeah. Try.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] for first responders. Where does that stand? But is there a process to be determined yet, or is there any test available for them yet?

Mayor: Okay. We're working on this issue now and I think that, Mark, the simple way to say, and our whole health care team has been working on this, is we are hopeful but there's still unanswered questions that we're trying to resolve quickly. At some point I want to see us use antibody testing. I think it could be very valuable. And again, a number of conversations are underway trying to lock that down. And as soon as we have an announcement, we'll make it. It's been a little hard to resolve making sure that what we get is the most reliable antibody tests. There's lots of different varieties as I understand it from our health care leadership. And we want to make sure that what we get is the most reliable, that tells you the most. You know, as we've said before the science still isn't a hundred percent clear and we want to always be really upfront with anyone who would get antibody testing that it is not a guarantee, it's not a rock solid guarantee, even if you test positive in that case, that yes, you've been exposed to this virus. It doesn't 100 percent guarantee you can't get it again. So, when we get to the point where we can do antibody testing, we're really going to put up front, particularly to all the folks who work at health care, first responders, et cetera, you still need to protect yourself. You still need to wear the PPEs, et cetera. But it hopefully will tell us something important. And it is related obviously as well to the growing efforts to do the plasma treatment and finding people who have previous exposure to the disease is important for that very meaningful effort. So, we'll have more to say soon, but I think the simple way to say it is we're trying to get right, we're trying to make sure we get the most reliable version, then we could do it, obviously, on a big scale and as soon as we have that we'll make an announcement.

Moderator: Next, we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Gersh, have you finished baking yet? That's my question for you.

Question: Mr. Mayor. If you know anything about baking bread, you're never finished. I have dough in the fridge waiting for later. So –

Mayor: Gersh –

Question: It’s an ongoing process.

Mayor: Gersh, I know nothing about baking bread. So, my question was asked out of pure ignorance, but I do want to say that we at City Hall have been waiting for our loaf. I think it's sourdough bread, I heard, and we have not received any sourdough bread yet and just wanted to make that note.

Question: I don't want to endanger anybody, obviously, by sending it. Nonetheless. I know you have limited time and I will get you some bread. But the City Council is taking up its bill today to require 75 miles of open streets. I'm wondering two things. Could you give us a preview of what you want your Transportation Commissioner to say in her testimony? And then given that we have Dr. Barbot here, perhaps I could get her to reflect on the health benefits. You know, because this is not just a transportation initiative, it's a health initiative. The health benefits of creating more open space so people don't have to congregate in New York's increasingly crowded parks.

Mayor: S, first of all, as I've said previously, Gersh, we want to work with the City Council. They're trying to figure out ways to address the problem. We are too and we want to work with them. And I'll be speaking to Speaker Johnson about it. I think there's lots of interesting ideas out there we can work on together. Second, I had a long talk yesterday with Commissioner Trottenberg and Commissioner Shea, and we continue to want to find every way to protect people. I think that's a fair point you make. For example, if parks are going to get more crowded in the warmer weather, which we keep hearing is coming but never seems to be here very long, but we anticipate obviously the parks will get more crowded and we want to think creatively with the Council about ways to address that. That's a very real issue.

But we also went into great detail yesterday about the different plans around the country and still feel that those plans do not connect with a lot of our reality. And so, we'd have to create something different for New York City, whatever it may be. And there still again is the problem – and Commissioner Shea, you know, obviously has given us some good news that the number of officers coming back has increased, but he's still far below the amount of personnel he normally has for regular, everyday patrolling of New York City and helping people in New York City, let alone for the new demands because of social distancing. So, we've got a lot of pieces we have to work through here. I want the Commissioner, as always, to say what she knows and what she's seeing. And I think she'll say that, you know, there are worthy issues to look at here, but there are very real safety concerns on the other side of the equation if there's not enforcement and the real issue that I still care about – and again, Gersh, you'll appreciate my Vision Zero orientation – a lot of folks out there who we’re struggling to get to follow the rules, which is why we have had to do speed cameras and so much enforcement, if we say streets are just for pedestrians, but there's no enforcement, I do worry about cars going on those streets. I do worry about the speeding we've seen lately, which we're doing a lot more to crack down on. But I worry about that in any place where pedestrians may think there's not going to be cars and suddenly there are.

That doesn't mean we can't find solutions, but that's something that Commissioner Trottenberg, Commissioner Shea, and I talked about. That's a real worry we have. So, when you talk about health – and I'll welcome any comment that Dr. Barbot has – I think because I believe so deeply in Vision Zero, I'd say Vision Zero is public health to the maximum. It's preserving people from their lives, their safety, from being hit by cars and trucks. And that Vision Zero sensibility has to still be applied in this instance even as we are going to try and find creative solutions because of the crowding that you're talking about. Dr. Barbot you want to jump in?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Sure. Mr. Mayor, I want to echo your sentiments that certainly there are tremendous mental health benefits to having people be outdoors, safely distance between their fellow New Yorkers. And I agree with you that there are creative solutions that we can identify, but that we need to be mindful of minimizing and avoiding unintended consequences that may put us in a situation that the solution is worse than the problem. And so, I look forward to contributing to the ongoing conversation about this, but I think that we are in a position where New Yorkers, having the opportunity to go outdoors, remain six feet of distance, there's plenty of space for them to do that.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Anna from the Daily News.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I was wondering if – I know that this is going to sound crazy, but I would really like it if I'm one of the doctors can explain why injecting yourself with disinfectant, like what can actually happen if people do that. Because I think, you know, people are kind of taking what the president said as a joke, but I want to know, is someone at risk of poisoning themselves if they do that?

Mayor: I don't think your question is crazy at all because if that's been suggested to people, they need to hear the truth from a doctor, not from someone who doesn't really seem to care about science at all. So, Dr. Barbot, you're a real doctor, what do you say?

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely. You know, and I appreciate the question because oftentimes we take for granted directions are going to be followed the way in which they are stated. And you know, I think I've said before that as a pediatrician I often took for granted that when I prescribed antibiotics for an ear infection, that parents knew that the antibiotic was to be taken orally and not put directly into an ear. So, I think it's important for us to have clarity about how products are intended for use. And so very clearly, disinfectants are not intended for ingestion either by mouth, by ears, by breathing them in any way, shape, or form. And doing so can put people at great risk. I think, you know, tragically we've heard of situations where individuals have misinterpreted the type of chloroquine that has been talked about as a potential treatment and ingested chloroquine that was intended for use in aquariums. So, I think it's important for us to be very clear with New Yorkers that disinfectants are not intended for ingestion and they can cause great harm.

Mayor: So, Dr. Barbot, I want to – I might not have heard clearly, but I think Anna said injection not ingestion. I want to – I don't know if I heard that right. But let's ask that one, too. I assume injection is at least as bad as ingestion in this case.

Commissioner Barbot: Exactly. Introducing one of these products in any way, shape, or form be it by injection, ingestion, or application on the skin is harming the body.

Mayor: Yeah. And I would ask all our colleagues in the media, you would be doing a great public service to spread that message far and wide that it's sad when we have to correct the President of the United States on a matter of science and health. But I think Dr. Barbot just did a good job replying to the president, so please let the people of the city know the guidance that she's giving.

Moderator: Next we have Jen from AP.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I hope you can hear me.

Mayor: Yes, Jen.

Question: This probably is a question for Dr. Barbot, but I wanted to return to the subject of the contact tracing program that was discussed a couple of days ago. And since this is to ramp up in the next few weeks or months, I just wondered if we could get a little bit at the nuts and bolts of how this works and will work. You know, if the person were to get on the list of some contacts, should they expect a phone call or a door knock, what kind of ways do the disease detectives or tracers used to start this conversation?

Mayor: Yeah, and I want to just jump in, Jen, as Dr. Barbot gets ready to reply, to say that remember that what we're going to be doing starting in May, it's going to be on a much bigger scale and will involve, of course, the disease detectives the way we saw at the beginning of March. But this is going to go far beyond that with lots of different trained personnel and also with the use of technology to trace the maximum number of people. And all those details we’ll be laying out in specific plans. So, the disease detectives are the best of the best. We'll certainly be using them, but we're going to have a much bigger effort behind that. Go ahead Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Barbot: So, with regards to the testing and tracing to help us accelerate out of this pandemic, you know, the basics are the same in terms of identifying individuals who are symptomatic with a condition consistent with COVID, testing them to confirm whether or not it's COVID-19, providing isolation so that there is no further transmission and then identifying who they may have come in contact with, reaching out to those individuals, assessing whether or not they are symptomatic and – excuse me – requiring that they remain out of circulation, so to speak, for 14 days. So, those basics remain the same. The how, of how this will be carried out, as the Mayor alluded to, I think it will be a combination certainly of disease detectives, but others as well, and also employing a technology. This is going to be a tremendous effort. It's going to be tracking thousands of individuals. And I don’t think there's going to be just one way of doing it. And then the other thing that I will add to this is that while this is going on, we will still need New Yorkers to remain indoors as much as possible to continue using face coverings and to continuing to limit their exposure to others and remaining with that six-foot distance.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Mr. Mayor, my question has to do with the antibody testing that was conducted by the State. I'd like to know what you think of that survey that was done that found that as many as 21 percent of New York City residents may have been – would have tested positive for the virus and what that finding might pretend for the city generally. What's the reaction from the Commissioner and from yourself?

Mayor: Thank you, Henry. It’s a good question. And look, it's obviously – the Commissioner will speak more scientifically. What I'd say is, I welcome any and all information we can get. It's a relatively small sample, obviously, but it is interesting that it kind of directionally points where we've been thinking and seeing as well. You know, Commissioner Barbot said a day or two ago that she thought at least a million Mew Yorkers had been infected in the whole course of this, including the time when we didn't even know it was here yet. I think that number makes a lot of sense that it's been at least that. And so, you know, that's not profoundly different than that 21 percent number. I think we're somewhere in that kind of ballpark, 15 to 20 percent, something like that, of the population I think is what we're thinking too right now. But we don't know for sure. And that is just one measure, but, again, we welcome them all. I think the important thing is to recognize that, you know, we have been preparing on the assumption that over half of New Yorkers would be infected during the life of this disease in this immediate period of these next months. I'd love it if it turned out to be a lower number, but we've been preparing for that eventuality. That was why we did everything we did with the hospitals to prepare them for a very big onslaught. That's why we still have a lot of that capacity and reserve no matter what. I'm hoping and praying we never see a resurgence and I'm hoping and praying that we see a steady deceleration then that hand off to the test and trace initiative that drives it down even further. I would love nothing more than we found that many fewer New Yorkers were infected than were projected. But for planning and preparing and keeping people safe, we have prepared as if it will be a very high number and a longer playout. We'll be ready no matter – you know, no matter what is thrown at us, we will be ready.

Dr Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: So, to add to what the Mayor said, I think from the beginning, you know, we've been clear that every day we learn more and more about this virus, not only from the public health perspective but also from the clinical perspective. And while we have focused quite a bit on the more severe components of COVID-19, I think it's worthwhile focusing on the less severe because this then speaks to a number of New Yorkers who may have been infected with COVID-19 and didn't realize it because their symptoms were so mild. I think we're learning now from our clinical partners that, for example, individuals who may have thought that they had allergies at the beginning of flu season – excuse me, in the spring, may have actually had a very mild course of COVID-19. And early on, you know, we were talking about how because of lack of testing we were unable to, in the early periods, distinguish between the slew that the BioFire identified versus influenza symptoms that were not identified by BioFire. So, all that to say is that I think as we go on in this response, there will be much more that we learn about in terms of the number of New Yorkers that were exposed and infected. And this is one of those pieces of information that we will continue to look at.

Moderator: Next. We have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning. Mr. Mayor, I had a quick question about the disparities you addressed at the start of the news conference. I know you've talked before about your efforts at keeping Health + Hospitals open. But I just wanted to ask you again, given that the city is – was very aware of how the virus might affect the existing, and longtime existing health disparities in the city, can you point to anything specifically that was done to prepare for that reality that, you know, the idea that any more people in low income, poor black and brown communities were going to be hit harder by this virus. Is there anything specifically the City did other than hospitals?

Mayor: Yeah. Jeff, I think you and I've had this conversation a couple of times, so I want to try one more time and if doesn't work out, I'll just declare a detente here. You either have to understand and believe the basic theory of the case or you cannot, that's fine, but the whole point is this was a very rapid evolution and it was all about protecting the hospitals and the health care workers, and that is in fact about addressing the disparities. We understood from the beginning that those public hospitals were going to bear the brunt and so it was not just about what we did years ago with billions of dollars then, it's everything we threw in from the beginning to fortify the public hospitals in the here and now. The PPEs, the additional staffing, everything – the appeals I made to Washington for the military medical personnel – were all for our public hospitals, therefore all to address the health care disparities. We did not know until the evidence came out the extent to which the disparities were playing out with this disease, but we knew from the beginning that people in lower income communities in particular and folks who had had less health care were going to be vulnerable. So, we overcompensated in the sense of putting a huge amount of effort into strengthening and backing up the public hospitals, and the health care workers who do this work, who also overwhelmingly, largely come from those same communities. That was the game plan because the projections we had suggested that we were going to have a massive upsurge in just a few weeks that was going to put into doubt whether all of our hospitals could hold the line and save everyone who could be saved, particularly the public hospitals. And Elmhurst obviously became the powerful – the painful example, but also powerful example, given the heroism of everyone at Elmhurst, of how that became very real very quickly. So, that was the strategy. The strategy was hospital-centric because of reality. The personnel needed, the PPEs needed, the equipment needed, if we didn't throw everything into the hospitals, we would not have been able to make it through, even with what we experienced, let alone the projections, as you remember, Sunday, April 5th, that we're supposed to go up much higher that following week. So, we threw everything into the breach. The other piece is the public information – the original $8 million ad campaign, again, multiple languages. There were many, many efforts like that to reach into immigrant communities to reach folks who didn't speak English, to try and make them aware of quickly what was going on and that there would be help available. The things we're doing now, like the community-based testing we could not do then because we did not have the available personnel or PPEs, or even for quite a while the test kits. So, it was about applying everything we had to the place where it would do the most good and, at the same time, we knew that would help the most vulnerable people. And then as soon as we started to come out of that phase, that phase of ever-increasing numbers and started to see some level off, we switched, especially on the strength of that data, we switched to more of a community-focused approach, sending out now more and more testing and the other elements that I've discussed today.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I had two questions for you. One, we heard yesterday that kosher meals ran out very early. The first day, you know, that the program was rolled out we also heard that seniors are still having trouble getting meals. We just heard from Melissa about the issues with meals for NYCHA residents. So, clearly, the meals program has been plagued with problems. I'm wondering what you're going to do to address specifically the issue of kosher meals and that if you're thinking about any kind of overhaul of the program or leadership change?

Mayor: Well, Julia, I think you're – I'd like to know more when you say you've heard problems. We've had some of your colleagues have raised very specific problems, which I've expressed my appreciation for, and then one by one those problems have been fixed. We had the problem that Independence Plaza, that was fixed. We had the problem with 3-1-1, that got fixed. There's always more to do given the sheer volume that 3-1-1 is experiencing. But I just disagree with your thesis that there's a bigger problem. What I'm seeing is some individual things that need to be improved upon, for sure. But this is a program that's providing a 10 million meals in April and it's slated to provide 15 million in May, and from everything I can see it's working. When we find a problem, we address it. If there's something more widespread, I want to know about it. So, I'm not saying it negatively to you. I'm saying I don't – if you've got more evidence, give it to me. The NYCHA development in question, that's a very specific problem related to the gas outage. That is not a larger problem everywhere. That's that particular developments challenge and we want to – and we have been providing food and I want to provide more and better food to that development. I want to see that done better. The kosher food issue, that's what I've heard too, that they ran out in one or more sites that very – we don't want that to happen. We need that not to happen. What they're going to do from now on is stock up more on those sites, that's something we can act absolutely do and absolutely fix. But if there are more examples of seniors who can't get food, give them to me. I want to know them, I want to fix it. And if we find a more structural problem, of course I will address it very, very aggressively. But so far what I'm seeing is specific fixable problems, not bigger structural problems.

Question: Great. And can I ask my second question?

Mayor: Yeah, but please do it upfront. As with everyone else, it would help me just to get it all up front for the format we're using now. Go ahead.

Question: I tried to, but you cut me off.

Mayor: No, I didn't cut you off, actually. So, let's just get clear to our team here running – let's please make sure that everyone's gotten – I thought those were all the questions, Julia. So, please, everyone, try and coordinate to make sure we've gotten out the fair number of questions. Go ahead, Julia.

Question: Okay, no problem. So, on the second issue, I'm wondering if you've discussed what types of businesses could open in the city first, second, and third under of an eventual reopening plan per the White House guidelines. And, if so, can you give us a sense of what those businesses are that could open first versus what will likely have to wait?

Mayor: Right. We have started for sure that discussion and we're going to be laying out more and more plans related to restart. And what I'd say is, you know, I think a good guidepost to begin, this is not a formal plan I'm offering here, it’s just initial – initial thinking that we have that does reflect a lot of what we've seen around the world that works. You obviously want to avoid a lot of people in the first instance coming to work. So, we still want to emphasize telework and telecommuting. We want to make sure that where people do come back to work, there's the ability to socially distance. So, you've seen in a lot of countries, for example, in Europe is they've allowed certain stores to open, but with strict social distancing rules and the kind of stores that could actually implement social distancing rules properly. So, I think it's going to be a – you know, sort of, a careful, steady approach. But that's something we're going to start to lay out in detail. We're clearly not there yet. I mean, today was a good day with our indicators, but as I've said, you’ve got to get to 10 days to 14 days consistent progress on the indicators to be able to even begin to talk about some of those loosening of the standards. So, we clearly have time. I want it to be as soon as possible, but we clearly have time to put out those specific standards and what will go first, what will go second, and that will be something we'll speak about in the coming days.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next, we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I hear you announcing – some of the, some of what you've said today has been announced over the last few days regarding community outreach and what the city is doing to address these hard-hit communities. When are we going to get the details about these community health centers? Why have only 250 practices signed up for telemedicine? How is the City handling that effort? And I mean these, these tele town halls, I understand that part of it, but people want to know what to do and where they can go be on a computer screen. When is the City going to provide that information?

Mayor: So, on the – three things. So, on the tele town halls, these are interactive obviously. I want to make sure that's clear, Gloria. At a tele town hall, you get a huge number of people actually get to ask questions of the people involved and get a lot of feedback and get to – get guidance that is very helpful and practical. The telemedicine, that is actually a big deal when you think about the reach of 250 community health providers. It's a big deal that so many are immediately taken to the notion of learning how to do telemedicine that has not been part of their practice before. So, your question, sort of, respectfully, minimizes it. I want to put it in its true light. If you've got 250 community-based health providers in lower income communities that are understandably used to providing medicine the old fashioned way, and now we say we're going to show you how to make telemedicine part of what you do all the time and reach all your people much more effectively and consistently – that's a big deal. That has ramifications for tens of thousands of their patients. We have just begun with this. We want to expand that greatly. I think many more providers are going to be taking that up. And in terms of what I've said, we're going to have announcement very shortly on community-based health clinics, which is something we've really wanted to start to activate, just it’s taken some work to get it ready to go. But we're going to have announcements on that in the next few days. On the community-based testing centers, we're going to start reporting regularly on the numbers there and the people that are testing. That's going to keep growing. Again, it's a brand-new initiative. I think everyone has to understand, in a crisis atmosphere, we're putting things in play that have not been there before. We expect them to get up and running quickly. We expect to have real numbers quickly. But what happens in the first week or the second week is very different from when you can do once you really get ramped up. So, all of that is going to be moving intensely and we will give you the metrics on that regularly.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Debralee from the Manhattan Times Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone. How are you?

Mayor: Hey, how are you doing, Debralee?

Question: I’m well, thanks. I wanted to follow up on the testing conversation. As the City and State both ramp up their capacity and their outreach, can you speak to what degree of cohesion, correlation and real information sharing there is that there is a stratified, reliable set of data rather than needless duplication. We've been out to some of the community sites, including Morrisania, and we understand that there's a limit to the test that can be administered on a daily basis and that that's being increased as well. But between the City and the State, now going into, again, hard-hit areas, what is the concern there and the dynamic that's being used to address, again, the possibility for to publication and information sharing. And then on the second note, there was an ongoing conversation about the accessibility of death certificates. People are still reporting that they're having a very hard time a month later. We have an example of a transit worker in the Bronx [inaudible] who's still – his family is still seeking out a real information and getting some – just not getting the things that they need to be able to have this done a month later. When they do – when they do reach out, they're not getting information they need. That said, what can we speak to that, that allows for people to know there's a reliable manner in which they can access these death certificates. And for that matter, when we spoke about the deaths that were not reported in hospitals, can you speak to the families that have family members who died at home or elsewhere and perhaps were not necessarily identified as COVID-19 victims to begin with and now are facing an uphill battle to getting them properly identified as victims.

Mayor: Thank you, Debralee. Very important questions. Let me speak to this second part, and we'll bring in Dr. Barbot as well, and then I'll double back to the testing question quickly. Look, it's very painful for a family that's already gone through so much, that’s lost a loved one, to then be fighting for a death certificate. It's just unacceptable. I understand everybody was thrown back on their heels in the first weeks of this crisis. It's a pandemic. We've never seen anything like it in a century in this city. I'm not going to blame anybody or any agency that in March, as things were growing and growing and growing, even in the beginning of April, folks were trying their damnedest to make sense of so much. And in so many cases, you know, the part of the equation that got toughest was the things that we're used to in terms of just information being accurate and being kept compared to all the efforts that were being made to save lives and struggle through to protect our health care workers in the work they were doing, et cetera. But even with that understanding in place, Debralee, it's not acceptable that any family has gone through that, that painful effort of just trying to get the truth and get the facts and get the certificates they need. I don't accept that. We need that fixed. I've certainly said both to, and given this direction to the Office of the Medical Examiner and Department of Health, whatever they need in the way of resources, we will give them to get all these death certificates up to date and get them to the families that need them. And if they can reach back and understand in a case that wasn't clearly COVID-19 originally, if there's any way to get the full truth, they should. Some cases they can, some cases they can't, but we've just got to give the families closure and support. So, I know real efforts are being made to fix that. Dr Barbot, you pick up from there and then I'll come back to finish.

Commissioner Barbot: Absolutely. I want to start off by stating that we are committed to ensuring that every person who dies from COVID-19 gets counted. And a few weeks ago, we started reporting on deaths that we labeled probable COVID-19. Now, it took a while for that to happen because of two things. One is, we were waiting for the federal government and the oversight body to finalize the definitions of what it meant to be COVID-90. Additionally, we, along with the OCME, were doing trainings of hospitals, funeral directors to make sure that anyone who was registering a death was prompted to think about could this be a COVID-19 death. And then lastly, we were then also ensuring that all of the death certificates were being registered electronically, and that took us a longer than we would have wanted to get the last remaining funeral homes to register those deaths electronically. Additionally, we put more staff to ensure that we processed that certificates in a more prompt way. And I couldn't agree more with the Mayor that it's unacceptable that we have family who's waited that long to get a death certificate. And I would love to receive that information. We'll follow up right away and we'll look at the systems issues that need to be re-tweaked to make sure that nobody has to wait that long, because, again, we’re committed to transparency and accounting for all of the New Yorkers that have been taken by this vicious virus.

Mayor: Yeah. And let me just pick up on that. And, Oxiris, I'm going to ask you a question as I do this, but first to say, Debralee, and anybody in the media, if you know of a family that is so struggling to get a death certificate, please let your colleagues here at City Hall know so we can let Dr. Barbot and her team know and get that fixed. It's just not acceptable that families are struggling. If we know of individual cases of that, we got to fix it. Dr. Barbot, can you speak now, because, thank God, we are in a deceleration of this disease and we're able to finally make a little more sense of things here, can you speak to how quickly families can expect to get these certificates, going forward, and finishing whatever painful backlog there is?

Commissioner Barbot: Generally, the turnaround time depends on the funeral directors. But from our end, generally within 24 to 48 hours, they should be able to get those death certificates.

Mayor: Okay. So, we will press – to the extent there is the issue with funeral homes, I commit certainly that we're going to press them, that they have to do their piece of the equation so we can make families have some closure and give them support. And if there's problems with funeral homes too, I want to hear about it so we can deal with it. To the other question to conclude, Debra, so, right now, I'd say everything that the City and State are doing is complimentary in terms of community-based testing, because we obviously are trying to work for the day when we can have, you know, close to ubiquitous testing. So, the State is doing certain things, we're doing certain things. Obviously, every single person, particularly in the targeted areas that have borne the brunt, every additional person who gets tested that's a good thing. Our focus has been on folks who have those preexisting conditions and older folks. But, you know, all testing that continues to build out in communities that need it the most is a good thing. So, there's no duplication that I know of. The question, going forward, you know, info sharing, as you said, are we going to all figure out together where we're going? Of course. This is something we work on all the time with the State. We have a responsibility to people in this city and we're going to do everything that we need to do to protect New Yorkers, but we're always working with the State. We share information all the time. We're convinced the way to get through this is with a very, very aggressive test and trace program and that's what we're building right now. And, again, there'll be bigger than anything we've ever seen previously, but that's how we think we push back this disease and really get to that phase of low-level transmission we all want to get to.

Let me conclude and just say, just finish here on this question of disparity. I think the important thing, going forward, is to be blunt about it, to be honest about it. New Yorkers, I've found, over many, many years – New Yorkers prefer real talk. They want us to lay the facts out and be honest about realities, even if they're not pleasant than anything we want to see in any society. This is what we know now. We know how badly these disparities played out with this disease. It's another clear signal that we have to do things very differently. Now, where we were before this disease with our guaranteed health care plan with NYC Care, these are the kinds of steps that actually I think are foundational to making the changes we need to address fundamental health care disparities and obviously continuing to support our public hospitals on a really profound level going forward. But to make all the changes we have to make on health care, we're going to have to have a real conversation about a lot of other things about income and affordable housing and a whole lot of other things – all the structural problems, the structural racism, the fundamental problems that have held people back for a long time. And what I pledge is that I'm going to be blunt about it. I think that's what New Yorkers want and need, and if we're going to do better when we come back, it will require us to be really clear about shining a light on what we've just lived through and how it cannot happen again.

With that, everyone, we're going to keep fighting. And, everyone, you're doing a great job fighting through this. Keep going. Today was a good day on our indicators. I'll talk to you again on Sunday and let's hope we've got more good news by then, but keep doing what you're doing.

Thank you very, very much.

2020-04-24 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It’s the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. And now it's time for our weekly Ask the Mayor segment – my questions in yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our phone number is 646-435-7280 – 646-435-7280 if you have a question for the Mayor this morning or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. And good morning Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian.

Lehrer: So let me start by following up on the clip that we just played in our newscast of you at your news conference earlier where you talked about a massive public education campaign to let people in the most vulnerable communities, meaning including the hardest hit zip codes know about this. Explain it briefly if you would, but I'm also curious if this means that you're relying on sort of a personal responsibility model for fighting the virus.

Mayor: No, I mean, I would not say that at all, Brian. I think the fact is, one, what the City has tried to do from the beginning is make sure that the places that serve our most vulnerable communities, particularly our public hospitals, were strong to get through this crisis and be able to, you know, literally save every life. That clearly was about what we could do to protect people on top of everything else, you know, the, the personnel we've brought in the, the PPEs to protect the health workers. And it's been a very focused effort to protect health care and to protect that sort of frontline ability, particularly when it was very much looking like this disease was going to keep growing and more and more people were going to have to go to the hospital for lifesaving care.

But what's happened in the last few weeks, especially as we've had more and more evidence of these disparities, it's been at the same time as the sheer pressure on the hospitals has reduced, thank God. And now we want to do much more going out into communities to inform people, but also to make it more interactive. It's not just, Oh, you know, here's a piece of paper and good luck. It is – creating ways for people to interconnect with clinicians, particularly through telemedicine, it’s a big part of our plan to teach local health care providers to use telemedicine who haven't really used it before, to work with community based health clinics which we’re going to say a lot more on in the next few days but also to create a bigger citywide telemedicine apparatus and then a huge advertising and outreach campaign to help people understand the disease better, understand that what they need to do but also the helped us there for them. For example, one of the big realities is families and crowded households – God forbid someone gets sick or a symptomatic, they may need to be isolated. We have hotels that we will provide the people and the support to go with it so they can be isolated. That's the kind of information we want to get out of what's there to help people and how they can connect with it and really do that at more and more of a grassroots level because I think we are forgetting sometimes that all sorts of people, 8.6 million people, people get information a lot of different ways. And for a lot of people in the city, if it's not in their native language, it's not as helpful. For a lot of people, if it's not coming from a trusted source, they're not as quick to believe it, which is understandable. That's why we have community leaders and community-based health clinics, faith leaders, we're engaging more and more. So no, it's about, it's about what we can do to help people and also arming people with more facts and more options for where to go to get the information they need to protect themselves.

Lehrer: You know, the last segment that we did just before you came on was about the antibody test results that the State released yesterday. And I have heard from our newsroom that your Health Department apparently sent a notice to physicians cautioning them that antibody tests currently cannot tell people if they're immune because having antibodies isn't the same thing as having actual immunity. It might indicate it. We don't know yet, which is the same thing that our science journalists in the previous segment said. But it appears, I see it reported that you haven't been getting that message out to the general public. People are lining up for these tests and we know that many of the commercially offered ones haven't even been vetted by the FDA. So would you like to get some version of that message out now?

Mayor: Yeah, of course. Brian. And thank you and I said it at my press conference earlier. I was asked when would the City be starting to work with antibody tests and I said, right now we're deeply engaged in that conversation, but we do want to make sure that we get the most reliable version of the test, because there's another topic which is there's a lot of different versions of the antibody test and our health care leadership believe that some are, are substantially more reliable than others at identifying, even if someone's been exposed to the specific coronavirus that we're dealing with now as opposed to other you know, similar diseases. So we're working to ensure that we feel good about the test that we might be utilizing, and when we get to that point where we're ready to act on it, we'll make an announcement.

But I said today, and I'll be saying it a lot going forward. Whatever we do is going to come with all those cautions that this test tells you something – if it's a good test and an accurate test that tells you you've been exposed to this coronavirus. Well that's important to know it does not tell you everything, because the science is clear that we cannot rule out that someone could be infected again. It's probably unlikely because there's not a lot of evidence the other way either showing, you know, large numbers of people reinfected and I want to be clear about that, that you know, that's a vote in favor of antibody testing, but it is not a slam dunk here. It's not clear enough. And for example, for folks who are in health care and first responders who have been using PPEs, we're going to tell them, keep using them. Even if they have an antibody test come back positive and says they've been exposed, we're going to tell people still out of the abundance of caution, keep using those PPEs. So it's a tool, it gives us some information. It certainly tells us people who could be part of providing plasma for the plasma treatments and those do seem promising, so that's important but we're going to be really clear about the limits of it as well.

Lehrer: Lennox in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hello Lennox.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. My name is Lennox, and I'm, thank you, on my high school senior at Brooklyn College Academy in Brooklyn, and I'm also the Policy Team Leader at Teens Take Charge, which is a youth led organization now fights for educational equity in New York City. And my peers and I were really devastated to hear that you decided to cancel SYEP for the upcoming summer. and so are the 28 City Council members, and over 28,000 New Yorkers who have signed our petition calling on you to reverse your decision and we appreciate like that you said that you wanted to make sure young people have opportunities this summer and working – you were working with SYEP providers to create some remote solutions. But is it possible for you to start putting out plans in place when all the funding has been cut because you cut over, you cut the complete $124 million of the SYEP funds, but like how can plans be put in place if there's no money?

Mayor: Thank you for the question, Lennox, I appreciate it a lot. And Teens Take Charge. I really appreciate the work you and your colleagues have been doing. In fact, we all work together on things like social emotional learning and restorative justice and I think we've made a lot of progress and I think Teens Take Charge, it's really been a great, a great voice in the city, so thank you for that. On this question, let me just give you the facts because I think I do understand why you and so many other people would like to see summer youth employment up and running this summer. But I think we got a couple of problems we have to be honest about the first is at the time when we had to make the decision, the question was could we devote money to an initiative that it looked very unlikely could exist? And just think about the basic reality. You know, summer youth employment starts right after the school year and that means you have to have employers and they have to be able to take in young people and be able to give them the option to do the work. And, right now, we don't even know if the vast majority of employers will be up and running by that point. Certainly, they won't – a lot of them will not be up and running the way they would have been. And then what about social distancing? What about the standards? You know, is it going to be safe to bring a lot of people together? So, when we looked at all of it, Lennox, it was like we did not have the possibility of even saying we knew if summer youth employment could work in any way, shape or form, especially could it be safe. And with that in mind, we said, okay, well we can't spend money on something that we don't even know if it'll happen. But beyond that we just had a horrendous budget crisis. We, what I announced last week that we are – we project a gap of $7.4 billion and we still have gotten minimal aid from Washington. We're going to fight for a lot more now in the new stimulus bill. But we have to be clear that, you know, these budget cuts were necessary under any scenario and we had to make choices. And, right now, what I'm focused on is getting literally getting people food, getting people – making sure people have a place to live, making sure they're safe, making sure they're healthy. I mean, that's the priorities right now. So if we get to the point Lennox where you know, things move fast in terms of beating back this disease, we don't know that yet, but let's hope and pray that's the case, and we started to be able to open things up and then we see there are some actual things we could do to support young people. We know we will then look at every option and see how we do that. But we couldn't put money into something that at the time looked like it literally would be impossible. So you, you have my pledge that if the situation changes for the better quickly enough and we think there are creative options that we can put in play, we're certainly going to work with the city council on that. But we just got to, we’ve got to focus on health and safety first and we're certainly not there yet.

Lehrer: What is the situation with the budget? You heard Mitch McConnell this week and you just kind of referred to it say states should consider bankruptcy and cutting retirees pensions rather than get federal help. He called the idea for federal help, a blue state bailout. Obviously, you're going to hate that, but can you give our listeners a picture of the City's financial outlook and how many layoffs or cuts to services we can expect just as there is more demand for emergency services that you're now looking at?

Mayor: Yeah, and I'll start on McConnell. I don't need to, I've already said what he said was profoundly inhumane, that he obviously, you know, he claims to care about the cops and firefighters, but what he said would literally lead to all over this country first responders not being able to do their jobs and it was just sick and insensitive that he would act like it's okay to see America’s cities go bankrupt and America’s states go bankrupt. It means that he is okay with human beings not being safe and not being healthy, but it also means he doesn't seem to worry that it would show a nation falling apart. I think he's contradictory on a moral level. I think he also, if he has any interest in a recovery and a restart, it's not going to happen if cities and states can't provide basic services, and that's what would happen for so many places if they don't get a bail out here. I remind you, Brian, that the airline industry got a $58 billion bailout. He was very quick to approve that. But if cities and states are in trouble, he politicizes it. It's just disgusting. But what it means for us, it means that, you know, which $7.4 billion missing, we're going to have to find things to cut if we don't get a lot in this stimulus. And we'd have to at some point look at cutting basic services and, and that's going to really – it's going to harm a lot of people and it's going to set back the ability of this city to recover.

Lehrer: Do you have projected city worker layoffs for the new fiscal year on July 1st assuming no federal help?

Mayor: I'm not going to say it like that yet because I want to be sensitive. There's a lot of people out there who it's their livelihood, let alone all the good they do for this city, so I'm not going to project. My job is to go and fight for that stimulus funding. I'm working with Senator Schumer. I've been talking to Speaker Pelosi, I've been pushing the President of the United States, and I've had several conversations with them. I'd be very blunt. He's the one who actually could have the most impact here. If President Trump said a full bailout of cities and states, replace all the revenue that they lost, it should be a priority, the Republican Senate would do it. So really it comes down to Donald Trump and whether he's going to help his hometown back on our feet or not, and every place else. But I am, I was clear when I presented the budget, Brian, that I consider layoffs a last resort, but it's all going to come down to does the federal government help us or not? And if they do, there's a lot we can do to get back on her feet. If they don't, we're going to have to make very, very painful choices.

Lehrer: Electra in Harlem. You're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hello Electra.

Question: Hello. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Mr. Lehrer for all of your work. I'm the director of a youth-based organization supporting youth in their communities in Harlem. We're in New York City owned building, which is solely occupied by nonprofits, community organizations. We've been locked out of a building which we understand in the light of the pandemic, but we have not been offered any relief or any adjustment payments schedule. One of our crucial programs includes a language interpreter helpline, which prioritizes African languages. We support these communities in their everyday function and survival. We were helping them with the census and critical information for overcoming the pandemic and now all of this is service by phone and we've been cut off. So, my question is, is there any way Mr. Mayor, that the city could offer a letter of recommendation to give service organizations in our New York City on building and others like it, the support to get back to the community?

Mayor: Yeah, Electra, thank you so much for calling. First of all, thank you for everything you do and your colleagues do, appreciate that very much. I've come to know the growing African communities in Harlem and around the city and you know, very, very important. We provide people support, especially in their own language whenever we can. And we want to help – definitely want to help you. Everything you said made sense to me that if you have service and support, you can provide the community right now by phone. We have to help you, you know, be able to do that. So, I'm going to have my team follow up with you today. If you please give your information to WNYC, I am certain there's something we can do to help you get back and running and figure out how to do that the right way and if there's other organizations like yours, we want to know about it, and you know, whatever we can do, we will. It's a really important that we get maximum trusted voices speaking to community members, particularly on health care, but obviously on the economic challenges people face and all that we have to provide them the food and all the other services we have to provide them. So, the answer's yes. We want to help you get back in the game.

Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with more of your questions for Mayor Bill de Blasio. And I'm going to ask you, Mr. Mayor, if you support the City Council's new grocery store clerk bonus bill, in fact, mandated hazard pay for those grocery store clerks who have to be on the front lines. So prepare for that and everyone else stay with us as we continue with ask the Mayor.

[…]

Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue our weekly, ask the mayor segment my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0 or you can tweet a question. Just use the hashtag, #AskTheMayor. And as I said before the break there are increasing calls for hazard pay for people on the front lines. In the private sector, City Council has a grocery store clerk bonus bill. Crain’s which publishes from the business perspective has a headline that says City Council grocery store bonus bill could bankrupt supermarkets. Maybe they're crying wolf, maybe you think they're not? In the public sector, I see it includes doctors, not that same bill, but there are calls for doctors in training at city hospitals and other municipal employees who've had to continue work, first responders, also others to get bonus pay or in effect hazard pay. How much are you for this for city workers who are in those categories and would you support that? Do you support that bonus bill for grocery store clerks?

Mayor: So the biggest sort of way to think about this in my view – the sort of the most universal I guess is the right way to say, way to think about this is I think all of these efforts are going in the right direction. So, you know, all the folks, the frontline workers, essential workers, the health care workers, the first responders, but also definitely the grocery workers, et cetera. Everyone deserves something special in light of this, the challenge is how do you do it the right way? And the best way, and I really think people need to realize just what time it is in terms of what has happened here to the sheer, painful reality of what we're going to be able to do to feed people in the future, given what I told you about previously, the kind of deficits. We're running now, cities and states all over the country are running. I know a lot of businesses are struggling to keep going, really struggling to come back.

The best way to handle all of this is to do a federal bonus program and this is what Senator Schumer is called for, A Hero's Fund for the frontline workers. And again, the federal government's in a position do it and we just have to be real about they, you know, they do print money and they've obviously come up with very, very genuine – generous stimulus for big corporations. I want to see the stimulus reach these essential workers. I think it's right to give them a bonus structure. I think that's the best way to do it. That's the most universal way to do it and would allow that to happen while everybody else, the cities, the states, the businesses that are trying to get back on their feet. So that's – that's the way I think we can resolve it and that's going to be decided in May one way or another. I mean that's the one thing to understand about everything stimulus. There's – everyone said it, the stimulus for which is the one word this kind of bonus pay will be taken up, will be decided in May. So we do not have to wait long to get this answer.

Lehrer: Laura, in Crown Heights, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Laura.

Question: Hello?

Lehrer: Hi, you're on the air.

Question: Oh, hi, hi, hi Brian, hi Mr. Mayor. Thank you so much for everything you're doing. My question is, is there some sort of move to mandate toilet seat covers in New York City going forward or even as a condition of reopening? We know that toilets flushing aerosolizes feces and that viral shedding from COVID-19 can occur in feces as long as 30 days after infection. So for me, I'm picturing a place like a public bathroom in Grand Central or JFK and that these could be incredible vectors for transmission of infectious disease without toilet seat covers. Is there anything being done about this?

Lehrer: You're talking about public restrooms?

Question: Well, not just public restroom, but even in restaurants and bars and any other places where a flushing could aerosolize COVID-19.

Lerher: Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Well, I will tell you, thank you Laura for the question. I am never going to tell you I'm an expert when I'm not, so this is the first time and I've obviously had a lot of conversations with our health care leadership on a lot of different issues, it's the first time I'm hearing this one, but I promise to follow up. If you'd please give your information to WNYC, I'm talking to our Health Commissioner and our other key health leadership all the time and I'll ask them about this issue. I think if it – if they regard it as a priority, then as something we will focus on and figure a way to act on it. So let me get – let me get their guidance. But I'm glad you raised it and you know, if it was something that proved to be a priority need to to reduce the spread of COVID. Of course, that's the kind of thing we're putting our energy and our resources into.

Lehrer: Question via Twitter from a listener who apparently reads our website, Gothamist, that says, please ask the Mayor about Gothamist reporting on open streets. Other cities don't need a large police force to open their streets. Neither do we. And I guess this refers to the proposal from some people to open up as much as 75 miles of city streets throughout the five boroughs in order to give pedestrians and cyclists room to maintain proper social distance and obviously slow the bread – the spread of COVID-19. And I know that the Gothamist article and question points out that other cities are doing it right now, Oakland, Minneapolis, Boston, Berlin, Paris, Portland, and Bogota have all instituted similar programs according to the Gotham article. What's the impediment for you if all those cities are doing it?

Mayor: So, I spoke to this a number of times, including earlier today. The – you know, we're going to work with the City Council. The council has some interesting ideas on how to look up an initiative like this. We're going to work with the Council on it. I want to make sure whatever we do is safe. I think I heard that list of cities and some of them are more like us and others are more not like us, but I think we are singular in terms of some of our challenges, particularly given how densely populated we are and the question has always been safety. In fact, our Health Commissioner Dr. Barbot was asked this morning, you know, was there a public health way of looking at this? And she said, look, we all of course want to see everything could be done to give people good options and we have to keep going with social distancing.

But the other part of the equation to worry about is what Vision Zero has always taught us, that we have to be careful to make sure that we don't put people in a situation where they think they are safe from cars and trucks and they turn out not to be some of these other models around the country, which I talked to our Transportation Commissioner and our Police Commissioner yesterday jointly about this. Some of the models around the country are more of an honor system kind of model, where the streets are closed off but not in a way that is entirely secure and there's no enforcement and you sort of hoping that drivers do not end up on those streets, and I'm worried about that kind of model. Now if we can find a way to do some of these streets that did not require a lot of NYPD presence but still are truly safe and secure, I would definitely be open to that.

But the problem to date has been we do not want to create a new– we certainly don't want to create a new gathering point because that would violate social distancing. We don't want to create a new safety problem where we would need enforcement but we don't have it. But if we can find a way to address those issues, of course I'm interested and you know, up to date the - I mean up to now the problem has been the NYPD, the personnel levels have been way, way low because of this disease. They're starting to come back, but I think it'll be weeks before they get back to something like normal. But if we can find places where this could work or the right approach that could keep people safe, then of course I'm interested.

Lehrer: One more call, let's see if we can do a quick question and a quick answer and about our remaining minute. Jessica in the East Village, you're on w NYC with the Mayor. Hi there.

Question: Hi Brian. Thank you so much. Thank you for everything you've done. Hi Mr. Mayor. I have a brother in the police department and a brother in the fire department. Five people in my brother's house in Queens have tested positive and he has still not received any antibody testing and that [inaudible] my brother and the police department, can we expect to have our firefighters and police officers tested for antibodies?

Mayor: Thank you Jessica, and thank you to your whole family for all they do for New York City. Please thank them for me. Yeah, that's what we're working on right now. And even though as I said, there are real questions still about the right kind of antibody testing, it is certainly our hope to find an antibody testing quickly that we could feel is reliable and then employ it on a larger level and immediately, you know, the first priority would be our first responders and our health care workers. So I hope to have an announcement on that in a matter of days. But as soon as we have that up and running, it would be something that we'd make available to all members of PD and FD who want to be a part of it.

Lehrer: I see that the high absentee rate from the police department and is starting to ease, quick update on that? And crime stats, I see that crime is mostly down because people aren't out, but some categories are up. I'm curious about domestic violence?

Mayor: Yeah, that's very troubling reality Brian. And you know, this is a horrible crime in so many ways and one – that's one of the very hardest for our police to, you know, see proactively and enact on, because obviously it happens in private spaces behind closed doors overwhelmingly. But look, the thing we have to emphasize here is NYPD has a very aggressive initiative. Once anybody reports someone engaged in domestic violence, they not only follow up with all the charges, consequences, et cetera, but then there's an ongoing monitoring of that household or literally the NYPD shows up regularly on announced to keep clear to the survivor of domestic violence that they'll be protected and the send a warning to anyone who wouldn't consider engaging in domestic violence.

But the problem now is we are not hearing, as usual, we don't hear enough about people who feel they're in danger, and I understand why. I understand how hardly intimidating the situation could be. My appeal to anyone who feels they're in danger of domestic violence is, please pick up the phone. Call 9-1-1. We need to know if you feel you're in danger, you know the NYPD can help you and anyone who knows of someone who's in danger, please ask them to make that call. The other crime realities Brian. Yes, they are going down broadly a few exceptions, but generally crime has been going down and we're going to keep building on that, but on domestic violence, we definitely have more work to do and we need maximum reporting so we can get out there and help people.

Lehrer: Thanks as always, Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.

2020-04-26 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Businesses are struggling, and are going to struggle to come back, but there is in my mind also no question that New York City will come back strong, stronger than ever. This is what New York City does. This is who we are. This is what we’ve always done. I get very upset when I see people betting against New York City. When I even seen New Yorkers putting down New York City, they need to go and read a little bit of history. They need to go and understand how many times this city has been put back on his heels and fought its way back. They need to spend a little time with everyday New Yorkers, who’ve got a lot of fight in them. We’re going through a lot. We’re going through a lot of pain, but we will unquestionably come back. And we will learn powerful lessons, and we will act on those lessons because that is who we are.

There are so many instances where that’s clear. Think about what happened after 9/11. A lot of places might never have been able to find a way back after something as horrifying as 9/11. This city fought back. We remembered the heroes we lost, but we were inspired by their example. Think about Hurricane Sandy, worst natural disaster in the history of this city. So literally 9/11, worst attack on the city in our history. Sandy, worst natural disaster in our history. People fought back, those extraordinary efforts at the grass roots to help each other just in the hours immediately after the storm hit the way people came together and helped each other in neighborhoods all over the city.

And then the way people fought back and rebuilt, learned lessons, did things better. We will rebuild. We will be stronger. There is no question. That does not in any way minimize or ignore the pain that we are going through now, but it is, to me, so clear who we are and that we will find a way back. And it’s important to remember even as we grieve.

That is the nature of this place to work together and to build something new. That’s always been the history of this city, so we’re going to build something new and we’re going to build something better. And not just better because it’s more modern. We’re going to build something more fair. We’re going to build something for everyone. This recovery has to have that spirit, that New York spirit that everyone matters. Doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from. Everyone needs to be included, and we need to build a better and more just society than the one we left behind. I don’t want to see recovery mean, let’s just go to the status quo we had before. I don’t think that’s what’s going to work, and I don’t think it’s fair. Recovery means making something better, and we have it in our power to do that. Even as we’re in the midst of this pain and this challenge, New Yorkers know in our hearts that we don’t give up.

It’s in our DNA. We don’t give up. And we find a way to create, and a lot of times… A lot of people out there listening have I said more than once in your life, you’ve made something out of nothing. You know what I mean. And this city… Can’t tell you how many times in our history people said it was all over, the ’60s, people were leaving the city and droves. In the ’70s, the fiscal crisis, all the other challenges we’ve faced.

This city was written off more times than I can count. This city came back stronger every time. Now we’re going to come back stronger and fairer, we’re going to learn the powerful lessons of this horrible tragedy. We’re not going to allow the disparities that we’ve seen to exist in the future. We’ll fight every single day. We know these are intractable problems, or at least they seem to be intractable. We’re going to find ways to beat them back and make profound changes, as only New Yorkers can make.

So, today I’m going to start talking to you about how we’re going to approach this. And this is going to be a long effort. It’s going to be the next 20 months of my administration and then far beyond, but today I’m going to talk to you about some of the building blocks we’re going to put in place to get us to that restart and that recovery. I’m going to talk about four specific pieces of our strategy. And again, these are just the initial building blocks, as I said, some of the ways we’re going to put together the deeper plans, the more specific plans that will move us forward. We’ve got a lot of work to do. And it’s going to be for me and my team, a nonstop effort, a race to the finish line over these next 20 months to do the most we can to put the city on the strongest possible footing for the future.

Everyone wants to know about the restart, and that discussion is going to happen over these next few weeks. We’re obviously watching our healthcare indicators every day. I’ll talk about them again in a few minutes. They will tell us a lot about the timing of what we can do. We’re working right now on what each element of a restart looks like, and it will not all happen at once and I keep cautioning. Restart happens in careful smart phases because the last thing we’re ever going to do is allow this disease to reassert itself. We’re not going to risk people’s lives. We’re going to be smart about it, but that work of framing the restart is going on right now. And we’re going to bring in a lot of people to help us, and I’ll talk about that. And then we have to focus on these disparities in everything we do. They’ve been laid bare in this crisis.

We have to talk about how we fight these disparities now in the work we’re doing now, and then in a much deeper, bigger way going forward. The economic and racial disparities that have been made so clear by this crisis. We knew about them before. They’ve been just a powerful, painful exclamation point has been put on them by this crisis. It is a clarion call to us to start right now fighting back against those disparities and to build a deeper plan to fight them, on a more permanent basis. So you’re going to see a lot in the next few weeks about the immediate efforts to restart the first steps and then over the weeks ahead in the months ahead, a deeper vision of what a fair recovery looks like.

So again, not just let’s get back to the status quo that was before, but something different and better and fairer and it’s going to be in a reimagination of what this city could be. We are the greatest city in the world before the chrono virus hit. The city was in an amazing point in our history, with an economy so strong with a constant effort to include more and more people in what the city has to offer and what it can mean for all of us, a growing reality that we could include everyone in our prosperity and our strength. We’ve got to take that and build something much bigger to truly make this a city for all.

And we have to look at our basic laws, our basic government structure. We have to look at the whole thing to think about how we can much more deeply ensure a fair recovery. So I’m going to be talking to you again about some of the initial steps that will help us with the first acts of restarting. I’m going to be talking about the immediate and ongoing effort to address disparities. I’m going to talking about a bigger effort to create a vision for a fair recovery that then can be put into action. And I’m going to talk about how we consider the very reality of our government in this moment of crisis and where it needs to take us in the future. And I’m going to bring in a lot of very, very talented people to help augment all we do here at City Hall and our agencies.

This is a moment where we’re going to invite in tremendously smart, innovative New Yorkers from many, many parts of our city. Many different parts of our life of the city, of our economy. Bring their brain power, their ideas, their perspectives to help us do all we do. So, the restart is the first thing in our mind. We know it directly interrelates with what we’re learning about this virus and its presence in our city and those indicators. We’re going to constantly talk about where we stand each day, what kind of element of restart we can think about now, what we have to think about later. Remember when you think about restart, think about those indicators going down. Let us pray, always going down and then think about the testing and tracing that we talked about a few days ago. That really widespread effort to test as many new Yorkers as possible, trace their contacts when needed.

Isolate people that need isolating. Those strands need to come together and we’re preparing for them to come together in the first two weeks of May, so that we can really go on the offensive. But again, the healthcare indicators have to give us that all clear so we can start that effort, and we need the supply of testing, which is still a big open question here to pull those pieces together. Okay, let’s start with the question of when we restart.

We restart wen we have evidence. Look, we see some states around the country rushing to restart their economies. I’m worried for them. I’m worried for their people. Some seem to be paying attention to healthcare indicators more than others. Anybody, any state, any city that doesn’t pay attention to those factual healthcare indicators that evidence is running a risk, is endangering their own people. And their whole idea of wanting to rush a restart so we can have a economy again and recover, it could all backfire. Because if the disease reasserts, you’re delaying potentially by a long time when you could have that kind of recovery.

We won’t let that happen here. We will focus first and foremost on the health and safety of New Yorkers protecting our healthcare system so it can be there for all of us making our moves when the indicators tell us and then making them piece by piece, testing to see how they’re working, making sure that each step we take is a strong foothold before we take the next step, so that’s the when. How? How do we restart? There’s so many open questions and the people we’re going to bring together are going to help us answer them with their powerful perspective on the life of the city, and the different parts of the city they come from, the different industries, et cetera.

They are going to bring perspective so we can get these decisions right. So here are kinds of questions that we all have to ask. And again, some of these will be things we do earlier, some of these will be things we do later, but here are obvious everyday questions. How do you reopen a restaurant and still do it in a way that protects the customers and protects the people that work there? How do you do that right? What kind of protection will people need? What kind of PPEs will people need to wear in a lot of different parts of the city? A lot of different work that they do to make sure they’re safe. When will they need more? When will they need less? We’ve got to start to fill in those blanks. How much will we be doing temperature checks or symptom checks on a regular basis? Where, how? They’re clearly powerful tools. They fit our test and trace strategy.

How are we going to do that? How extensively? Are we going to have enough thermometers? All sorts of basic questions have to be answered to determine what’s our ideal, but also practically. What can we get done at any given moment? What kind of cleaning protocols will businesses need as they restart? What kind of social distancing will be required in the business? How many customers can be there at any given time? All of these answers need to be filled in. We have some really good information from around the world of some things we see working better and worse.

We’re going to borrow from that and use it as we formulate our plans, and this is all going to move fast because we have to be ready for that moment where the indicators tell us it’s time to open up a little. But I want to be clear there’s no on/off switch here. It’s not like… I think people know it, but I want to say it for emphasis. It’s not like there’s ever one jump back to normalcy. It’s a series of careful smart moves. And then you test each one along the way to make sure there’s not that backfire. And then when you see things working, you take the next step.

Now to help us on this journey and to help us immediately, I am going to bring together people who really know their communities, their industries. People bring a huge amount of expertise. So, we’re going to have a set of advisory councils. And it’s going to be sector by sector in our city, going to get these folks together very quickly. They’re going to start meeting in the first week of May. So, literally in a matter of days. I’ll be meeting with each of them. My team will be meeting with them constantly. We need to get this perspective from the folks at the frontline of every part of this city’s life. We’ll have small business, as its own council. We’ll have larger businesses in their own council. They have different needs. We want to account for both. We need both to come back strong. We’re going to have one for public health and healthcare.

Obviously, so crucial in this fight, but we have to make sure strong to say the least for the future because we don’t know what the future brings. And it’s a crucial part of our city to begin with. Arts, culture, tourism, which we’re so proud of, such a big part of our city, they all will come back strong. We want to figure out the right way to get that started and then build upon that. So these councils are going to get together immediately to help us frame the restart, but they’ll stay with us for weeks and months to come. As we build out our actions to open up and then to envision our future and build our future, there’ll be one for labor. We have to hear from the folks who represent working people and determine what we need to for working people. Nonprofits and social services, huge part of New York City life and our economy often not given the credit they deserve.

They’re going to have a council. I’m going to be meeting with them because we need that part of our city to come back strong. The faith-based community. We already have extraordinary efforts with CORL, The Council of Religious Leaders, with our clergy advisory board. We’re going to bring them together to help guide us in thinking about how we restart the life of faith in this city, but also the crucial role that faith based communities can play in rebuilding our economy, making sure people are protected, making sure people have what they need in their lives even in this struggle. And education and vocational training, obviously bringing back our public schools strong, bringing them back safely, dealing with the trauma the kids and families and educators have gone through, thinking also about all parts of our education system, how we work with our religious education schools, how we work with private schools, higher education, vocational training. All of them will be at the table to help us think through this restart. So, we’re going to start right away. It’s going to be very practical and specific about what we-

Let’s start right away. It’s going to be very practical and specific about what we need to do together and then also be part of how we build our bigger plans. That’s immediate. Another immediate piece, it’ll start with immediate actions the city government needs to take and build out as part of the bigger vision, is a city task force on racial inclusion and equity. This will be made up of leaders of the city government, focusing on the disparities we’re seeing already, making sure that we are addressing structural racism that is obviously present in the realities we’re facing with this disease, making sure we take immediate actions through all the agencies of the city government to address this painful reality. This is a right-now thing. Right now, we can start to address these disparities. We’re doing it in many ways on the healthcare front with the plans that we have announced, the community-based testing and the outreach programs of community-based health clinics, many other things working on right now.

I want to make sure that every agency of the city government is moving in that same direction urgently. The task force will be led by our First Lady Chirlane McCray and by Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson. This is based on ideas that they have both developed in the last few days to address the immediate disparities, but also to make sure that we address these disparities more thoroughly in our recovery plans ahead. We will be naming a group of leaders from the administration who focus on and represent all communities of color in this city. Again, they will think about immediate things that need to happen that work with the community-based health clinics and providers, how we can work right now with minority-owned businesses and obviously deepen our MWBE efforts right now, how we can support essential workers. This task force will focus on those issues but also build out and help us think about the bigger structural changes we need to make going forward.

Now, those are some very immediate things that all build to the future. Let’s now talk about the broader concept of recovery. Restart is necessary to recovery. Recovery means, to me, getting back, not just to a point where life feels more normal, but getting back to a point of strength and additionally, addressing the underlying issues that we still need to address in the city, certainly building back, but building better, building stronger, building fairer. Recovery starts with the restart. It starts with making sure we’re all taking those steps back. We always, in that road to recovery, think about those four basics I’ve been talking about throughout that are governing our actions, our budget, everything, making sure people are healthy, safe, have food to eat and a roof over their head.

We have to get those basics to be 100% secure as we build out. We have to get people back to work. This is central to everything. So many people are clamoring, rightfully, to get back to work the first moment it’s safe. I want people back to work. I want to restart our economy. I want to see people back to work. Whether they work on Wall Street or they work in a bodega, we need everyone back to work. We have to do it the right way and get our bigger economy going, so it’ll support everything else we do. When you think about all the pieces we have to pull together, it’s not just a restart. It’s not just the mechanics of how you start your economy again. It’s not just a recovery in the sense of… Okay, we have a functioning city. We don’t just need a recovery. We need a transformation. We need to go much farther. We need to take this painful, difficult moment and turn it into something that we can build upon for a better city.

This is where I want to talk about the concept of a fair recovery. The crisis has laid bare so many things that are broken in our city and in our country. There have been so many amazing acts of heroism. Let’s praise the good: the heroism from our healthcare workers, our first responders, the incredible things people have done for each other at the community, the amazing discipline and strength of New Yorkers with social distancing and shelter-in-place. There have been many heroic, positive stories, but also extraordinarily painful and clear inequalities.

We see it over and over again. We see working families who have been brought to their knees in a matter of weeks, and there’s not enough safety net there for them. We finally are seeing some progress from our federal government, but our federal government’s always been behind the curve, not dealing with the reality and only coming up with very partial solutions. For so many working families, this has been a devastating time. We see the federal government focusing on the wealthy and corporations before working people. It’s painful to acknowledge how much of the stimulus discussion in the beginning was about big business, not small business, and about a payday for those who are already wealthy and privileged, not those who are struggling.

The federal government here, in this case… It’s been consistently the case, not only behind the curve, but the focus has been all wrong. Our federal government was much quicker to bail out the airlines, $58 billion, than to focus on cities, and states, and working people. These contradictions are now clearer than ever, and they’re more unacceptable than ever. As we fight what’s broken, as we fight these inequalities, we draw upon what we’ve done over these six years, the whole reason we all came here to do this work. It came through in so many ways leading up to this crisis. We’ve seen it vividly during this crisis. Thank God, our focus was on healthcare equity, saving our public hospitals, creating a guarantee of healthcare, and making sure people could get insurance, or if they couldn’t get insurance, had the right to healthcare through NYC Care, building up access to free mental healthcare across the board, through ThriveNYC.

These acts of equity are serving us right now in this crisis. They’re reminders of how much more we have to do as well and fighting for economic fairness: $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, rent freezes. The things that we have done to try to bring a beginning of fairness and equity to the city, we need to do even more now. As we’ve talked about this crisis, I’ve said it very bluntly. The only comparison we can make in terms of what it’s meant to people’s livelihoods, their family reality or economic reality… The only comparison is the Great Depression. I heard those stories from my older relatives. When they spoke about the Great Depression, it sounded like it was yesterday. It was so vivid. It was so intense: the challenges they face, the pain that they overcame somehow. It’s also clear in those stories… I bet a lot of you have heard them, too. It’s very much a New York story.

When you talk about how our nation fought back through the Great Depression, it was very much through the leadership of great New Yorkers like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia, giants that we can only think of with awe. In our time, we look to them for inspiration. Well, they did not say, “Let’s just rebuild what was happening that day before the stock market crashed in 1929.” I want you to remember this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, and all the other great leaders in New Deal… They did not say, “We just want to go back to that horribly unequal, volatile, unfair world of 1929.” No, they said, “We’re going to build something transformational and different.” That was the New Deal.

They reimagined what government could be. They reimagined what it could mean for people. They very much made clear that it was not going to be a government for the few, but a government for the many. The visions that they put forward, the policies they created were for all. It was a sea change. It was a breakpoint in the history of this country. By the way, the things that came from that noble fight, we live with today because the ideas were so good, so durable, so right that they still frame, thank God, so much of what we do as a nation now. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, just reach for your Social Security card, and you’ll have a great example right there.

We need to build a group of people to help us come up with the same ideas, the same kind of ideas, I should say, the same creative, innovative, forward-looking ideas. When you think about what these great leaders and thinkers were doing in the first half of the 1930s, they were coming up with ideas that had never been heard of before. They were seeing the world in a whole new way. They were doing things at the time that people said were impossible, but they made them happen. We all have benefited, generation after generation, from it. We have to find the ideas for our time. We have to dream new dreams. We need great thinkers to help us do it.

I’m appointing today a Fair Recovery Task Force. This is an extraordinary group of New Yorkers, each of whom has contributed to this city in really profound ways. They bring different perspectives, different ideas, but all have a common thread. They have devoted so much of their lives to building a better New York City and a fairer society. They all have the impulse to lift people up. They all have the impulse to say, “The status quo is not good enough. We have to do better.” We can do better. Every one of them has that energy and that spirit to build something new and better. I’m bringing them together to help all of us to advise me, to help us create the plans for now and for the future. It’s a group of people I think will make New York City proud.

Let me introduce each one to you. This will be a group of people in common, thinking together. Each of them bring so much to the table. First, Patrick Gaspard… Patrick is a New Yorker through and through. Born to Haitian parents. Grew up in New York City. Went to our public schools. Served in the Obama administration, now president of the Open Society Foundations, one of the most important philanthropies on earth. Someone who served right here in City Hall, loves this city, and believes things can be created, and has been part of it all over the world.

Dick Ravitch, former Lieutenant Governor of New York state, a legend… Dick Ravitch is one of the people that helped this city survive the fiscal crisis of 1970s, one of the great innovators who saw us through. He helped save the MTA in the ’70s and ’80s. He is someone who, time and time again, has seen what others could not see and helped us, not just to come back but come back stronger. His extraordinary experience will bring so much to this group. Jennifer Jones Austin… Jennifer is someone I have such appreciation for. She was the cochair of my transition when I came into City Hall. She helped us build this administration as CEO of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies. She’s a leader in this city in so many ways, in our nonprofit sector, in the work of social justice, in the work of the faith community. Her family is four generations. She is the fourth generation of faith and social justice leaders in her family. She understands what it is to run a large nonprofit. She understands how crucial those extraordinary nonprofits are to the city. She brings amazing perspective to this effort.

Her cochair in that transition, off in that transition effort seven years ago, joining us as well, Carl Weisbrod… Carl has done it all for New York City and most recently, serves as the chair of the City Planning Commission in my administration. He has served in one form or another in city administrations, going back to the time of Mayor Lindsay. He is legendary for the work he did, taking a symbol of so many things that were troubled about New York City, Times Square, and turning it into something strong and vibrant. He knows what resurgence looks like. He played a crucial role in bringing back Lower Manhattan after 9/11, as well. I think one of the most respected leaders in government in civic life over the last half century in this city.

Henry Garrido leads our largest municipal union, DC 37 AFSCME, the people who do so much of the work that keeps this city going. Henry is a thinker, and a change agent, and a visionary. I have had many a long conversation over the years with Henry. He’s always looking over the horizon. He also comes from the immigrant experience, his family from the Dominican Republic. He fights for working people and believes we can do much better for working families. He also has the extraordinary experience of running a huge organization that’s there to serve and uplift working people. Henry brings a great mind and a great spirit to this effort.

Maria Torres Springer, vice president for United States Programs at the Ford Foundation… Maria is someone who, in her 15 years of public service to our city, hit the trifecta, if you will. She led three agencies. Very few people have done this and done it so well. She led, various times, our Economic Development Corporation, our Small Business Services Department, and our Housing Department. She understands what it’s like, not only to run these large organizations, but to serve people who need the help now, folks who need affordable housing, the folks in our small business community who are going through so much now and need a helping hand. She certainly understands what it means to foster economic strength, but from a perspective of fairness, child of Filipino immigrants. I remember when I first talked to her, the passion with which she spoke about helping working people and immigrants. She’s going to bring that passion and all that experience to this group.

Liz Neumark, CEO of Great Performances… She is an extraordinary New York city entrepreneur, a great New York City story. She started a small business that turned into a much larger business, now employs so many people all over this city, a New York success story, but not someone who just kept her success to herself. What Liz did was said, “How can we turn business into an engine for change?” She’s led efforts to empower people, to train people, to bring them into industries that previously didn’t have an opportunity to participate in. She’s worked tirelessly to fight hunger in this city. She’s a great example of someone from our business community who every single day asks the question, “How can we take our New York City businesses and make them agents of positive change in our city?” And she has proven it over and over again that it can be done and it must be done.

And finally, Fred Wilson, Fred is a legend in our technology community. Some consider him the godfather of the New York City tech scene. He was an early stage investor in many of the New York City tech companies that are thriving today. He is someone who really had a profound vision, one of the first to have the vision of New York City as a great international tech hub. And now that vision has come to be true. But his true passion is making sure that our kids get computer science education.

I’ve worked closely with Fred, I’ve been so impressed by his generosity, but also his extraordinary entrepreneurship and his drive. He created the Computer Science For All initiative that now has been one of the most successful elements of our initiatives at equity and excellence in our public schools. Because of Fred, every child in New York City public schools is now getting computer science education. And he led that effort and now we’ll bring that same drive and ingenuity to this group.

So an amazing collection of New Yorkers bringing so many different talents, so much perspective. This group will come together quickly and I’m going to ask of them that they come up with an immediate product to frame our work. Now it’s going to be a preliminary product. They’re all very, very talented, but I’m going to ask them to, in addition to their very busy day jobs, to take some time to come up with a preliminary recovery roadmap by June 1st. This is not going to be the final word. This is going to be the first outline of how we build that smart recovery, that recovery, that will work, that recovery that will be fair. I’ll expect that preliminary roadmap by June 1st, but then their work will continue on in the months ahead.

Finally, we need to look at the bigger changes, and I’ve talked about what it’s going to mean that long road ahead, dealing with things like the inequities in our healthcare system, dealing with the challenge that New Yorkers face still finding affordable housing. The profound issues that working people face. The huge issues of protecting this city and our ability to serve people going forward. And obviously the questions that will come back to the fore shortly of how we fight global warming and what the role of this city is. I’m going to expect this group to work on all of these things in the months ahead. Remember, we have 20 months to build this longterm fair recovery. I’m going to depend on them to help in every phase of that.

But the last piece of the equation is the structural question of our government and everything that our government is built to do and what we need to do going forward. So the fourth thing I will do is I will plan in the days and weeks ahead to formulate and announce a charter revision commission. The announcement will come when we’ve put together the team that will do this work. And again, this is something that will happen in the weeks ahead. First we need to deal with the more immediate matters. But I think it is the right time for a charter revision commission because if ever there was a moment, a breakpoint moment in the city’s history, this is it. And it’s time to look a new at everything we do and see what works, what doesn’t work, what about our city government structure might be outdated or less effective? What do we need to build a fair recovery?

Charter revision commission will hold hearings all over the city and again, hopefully someday soon there’ll be public hearings again where people come in person. And anything they have to do in the short term, if they need to do it virtually, they will. But I want this group to really think about the big picture of how our government works, how it serves our people, where we need to go for the future.

So those are four pieces, four building blocks to building the strategies to get us through some of the immediate decisions and on into that broader fair recovery. I am convinced we can pull these pieces together and build something new and better. Now, the part of the day, we always wait for: reviewing the indicators. And this has everything to say, again, with the restart. We’ve seen some good progress the last few days and today is another good day, and I’m very happy about this.

Now the first indicator is unchanged and I want to see it go down, but still it’s not going in the wrong direction. I am a guy who believes the glass is half full, so I’m happy to see it’s not going in the wrong direction. And many days this one has gone in the right direction. Indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID: unchanged.

Indicator two, number of people in ICUs across our health and hospital system for suspected COVID has gone down 785 to 768. Percent of people tested who are positive for COVID-19 has gone down 30% to 29%. now unfortunately this is the one piece of this that is not so sunny. Public health lab tests have gone up 31% to 46%. but still when you look at this day and the days before, overall continuing to move in the right direction, seeing good signs, but I want to see all of these go down consistently for 10 to 14 days. That’s what will signal those first steps in opening up.

So I’m going to conclude before a few words in Spanish, just want to focus on the word normal. So, a crisis will end, and I keep saying it, this crisis will end. We will come back. We will be a great city. We always have been a great city. Will we be normal again? People talk about this word a lot and I understand it and I relate to it the same way. Normal in some ways sounds like a very good thing right now, but normal isn’t good enough for our future. Normal could be interpreted as the status quo we knew before the coronavirus. That’s not the normal I’m aspiring to. I’m aspiring to something different and better.

We have 20 months for this administration to run all the way to the finish line and really make sure we address these inequalities while building up a strong economy, while building up a strong city for all. I think we can do those things. I think we can pull those pieces together and really build something better and that’s what I’m devoted to and that’s what my whole team will be devoted to. A few words in Spanish.

With that we’ll talk to media questions. Please remind me of the name and the outlet.

Speaker 3: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have commissioner Barbot, Deputy Mayor Thompson and Deputy Mayor Been on the phone. With that, I will start with Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Katie: Hey, good morning Mr. Mayor. I have a two parter. I’ll be quick. The first is what’s the city’s immediate plan or just plan in general if they don’t get significant federal aid? Also the state cut $8.2 billion in cuts to localities from the state budget, which I’m sure will hit the city pretty hard. What the city’s plan on that? And looking at, I guess by my count 10 task forces are so, but I don’t see one on things like public transit, which some people seem to alarmed about. What’s the plan for improving that, figuring that out? And will you perhaps add or consolidate more task forces to the list of task forces?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Katie, this is a living, breathing reality, Katie. We’re certainly, if we think something has to be added, obviously we can do that. Public transport is going to be a big issue. Respect that the state runs the MTA and we want to be mindful of that. But as we get more deeply into the recovery thinking, we’re going to do a lot of work on the future of transportation. And again as we talked about previously, how we have a New York City that’s more about public transit, less about cars. That makes sense in terms of saving our environment and protecting against global warming, reducing congestion, and is more fair and available to people. So that’s going to be a big piece of what a fair recovery looks like. These immediate sectorial groups, as I said, it’s very much about what we have to do to restart and then they’ll help us build out division. But absolutely transportation issues will be a big part as we go further into this discussion.

State budget, I’m very, very concerned. I cannot tell you, there’s no words for how much alarm was sounded when we heard of the magnitude of the cuts the governor plans. Now look, I want to immediately empathize with the governor. He is dealing with a horrible situation just like I am in terms of massive lost revenue, and so many people out of work, and so many people hurting, and a federal government that hasn’t been there for us. So I share the governor’s anger at what he’s dealing with in Washington, what I’m dealing with in Washington. We’re both pounding away with so many others for a stimulus four that would make us whole and replace the lost revenue and really support us in dealing with all the huge expenses we have in attacking the coronavirus.

Could Washington do the right thing? Yes they could. And we’re going to fight for it. And in fact I’m heartened that this legislation, stimulus four, is going to start in the House of Representatives with Speaker Pelosi. And I’ve spoken to her and have a lot of confidence that she is doing the right thing for New York and for the whole country.

But if that doesn’t reach the level it needs to and then the state has to make cuts, it will be devastating to New York City. And I’m certainly going to work with the governor’s team, the legislature to say, look, whatever is thrown at us and whatever we do or don’t get from the federal government, we have to remember that New York City, not only is this a huge percentage of the people in the state are right here in New York City, and so many people need help. But if New York City cannot provide basic services then there won’t be a restart of the economy in New York City or New York State. So we have to balance all those factors. I’m very, very worried at the prospect of even deeper budget cuts from Albany.

Speaker 3: Next we have Alexa from News 12.

Alexa: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I have a question about cancellation of rent. Yesterday people were protesting for cancellation. Do you think that’s a real possibility and what kind of burden would it cause to landlords, if so?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Alexa, I don’t think it makes sense for… I understand people’s pain to say the least. I understand there’s so many people struggling and so many people have no money for the rent, but I don’t think we want to compound the problem by saying, if no one acts together to address this problem, it’s going to be okay. I don’t think it will be okay because there are so many landlords trying to do the right thing, including smaller landlords who need to pay the bills too and keep their buildings running.

My first concern always is for working people and tenants. But I want to make sure their buildings are running and so they are getting what they need to live a decent life. I think the answer is for first of all, our rent guidelines board to pass that rent freeze, I’m calling for. That will reach over 2 million New Yorkers. That’s crucial. But the state really needs to act quickly. Allow tenants to use their security deposits to pay the rent. That one to me is a no brainer. It can be done quickly. That would immediately take pressure off the situation. Create a plan for tenants to pay back rent later when they have money. So at least landlords will know the money will be there, but tenants who have no money will know that they are safe. Obviously continue to stop evictions and make sure that no evictions happen during this crisis and for at least 60 days thereafter. So the state needs to act on these things. Folks who are hurting need to see a response. I want our rent guidelines board to do that for the city with a rent freeze. But I want the state tag quickly on these other issues, to finally give some relief to our renters.

Speaker 3: Next, we have Sean from the Daily News.

Sean: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I was wondering if you could speak some more about the task force on racial inclusion. I know you only just announced it, but could you say what are the sort of metrics or goals you might have in mind by which progress would be gaged? Also, could you say why you decided to make a first lady Chirlane McCray, one of the leaders of that task force?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Sure. Sean, we will with all of these things, so on each of these groupings that have not yet been named, we’re going to be putting out the names in the next few days. So on this task force which will be made up of city government leaders, we’ll put out the name and we’ll give you more and more of a sense of the specific work products that’ll be coming from it. The same with those sectorial advisory councils. We’ll be putting out those names in the next few days. They’ll be meeting, all of them, in the first week of may.

The idea here is to be very much focused on the metrics of addressing disparity. Making sure city agencies across the board in this time of crisis are continuing and deepening their work of addressing disparity. For example, how much are MWBEs right now being supported, getting opportunities to continue to stay alive and then rebuild? Are agencies acting with the same energy and focus they need to serve MWBEs? In fact, they should be doubling down in their supportive MWBEs in this moment. That’s one example, it would be very metrical in terms of being able to present what our goals are and holding agencies to those goals.

So we’ll I’m more to say on that going forward, the ideas originated here from Deputy Mayor Thompson of why a task force like this could be crucial at this moment where we have to make sure every part of the city government is coordinated and addressing the immediate disparities. The first lady, when she became involved in those discussions, added a set of ideas as to how this could be played out and the urgency that was needed. And as we had the discussions over the last few days, it was clear to me that the two of them were the perfect people to bring this larger effort together. They’ve both known each other a long time. They work very well together, but they share that sense of urgency.

So they’ll set up the group. It will be focused on all communities of color and the question of deepening inclusion, and then we’ll report what the larger group will be and the goals of it.

Speaker 3: Next, we have Yoav from The City.

Yoav: Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you, there was a story recently [inaudible 00:47:57] about the medical center on Roosevelt Island and the Coler-

Speaker 4: Medical center on Roosevelt Island and the Coler Nursing Facility, and they basically said that the city brought COVID-19 patients into that facility even though there’s a nursing home there with some vulnerable patients. So I wanted to see if you could just tell us what the situation is there. Do you know anything about an outbreak of COVID and do you know how many folks in that facility might’ve passed away?

Yohav, we will get back to you today with the updates that we can pull together quickly. I can tell you having visited as that facility was being built out, my understanding at the time was there was a very distinct separation between the new medical elements of the facility and what was there previously. At that time, you’ll remember there was an absolute desperation to make sure that we had backup hospital spaces because of the growth of COVID-19 and the need to save lives. So it was very good and smart of health and hospitals to open up space in that facility. But we’ll get you the details on how that separation was kept and what proceeded to happen there. Dr. Katz isn’t online with us now, but I’ll make sure that we get that to you later today.

Speaker 5: Next we have Sydney from Gothamist.

Sydney: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I hope you’re doing well this morning. I know you’ve said before that you feel like New York City is different from other cities regarding some type of open streets plan that that several people are supportive of and city council is hoping the city will look into. But just considering just my own experiences on the waterfront in Manhattan personally, is it’s so crowded, it’s not even about enforcement. I see Parks enforcement vehicles. I see NYPD vehicles, presumably driving around to make sure people aren’t gathering, but it’s not about people gathering in groups, it’s just people taking walks. It’s people just biking or running or walking with their children, toddlers. They’re wearing masks and they still can’t stay away six feet from people because there’s physically just not enough room for people. And so just wondering if you can update us on what you plan to do if you don’t support an open streets plan, because right now it’s not physically possible to socially distance and take a walk in our parks.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Sydney, couple things real quick. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Sydney: Yeah, yeah, two parter here. Just what would you plan to do if you don’t support some type of open streets and that kind of goes into the larger summer plan you’ve talked about a couple of times that you’ve said is being developed.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Right. So as I’ve said, we will have a bigger summer plan for sure. It’s April 26 today. There’s time to bring that out over the next couple of weeks. We will do that. Your points are very well taken and as I said, I’ve spoken to a transportation commissioner, police commissioner, we’re talking about the ways to address the issues around the parks in particular where there may be very valid areas that we need to open up further. We’re having very productive conversations with the city council, but everything starts with health and safety.

So what I have to make sure, working with the police commissioner, transportation commissioner, parks commissioner, is that we are solving problems, not inadvertently creating new ones, and that we do things in a way that always is connected to enforcement. Look, I believe fundamentally what works in New York City is a whole lot of information and education to people, and New Yorkers have been amazing in the way they’ve approached social distancing, the way they approached the face coverings. Overwhelmingly people are using them.

So you may see, and I see too, some instances where it’s not what it should be, but the vast majority of what I’m seeing is people doing it the right way. But we need to do more. But to me it is about enforcement and it is about making sure people understand how this needs to work, supporting them in that. And then if there are places where we do need to open up new options, we can and will, but with the right enforcement, with the right ground rules. So we’re going to keep working on that for sure. I want to emphasize to Sydney’s point to all New Yorkers taking seriously the face coverings. They help. You should have them on all the time. I see some people when they’re running or exercising, they take them down. I can understand that.

If you can run or exercise or bike with a face covering on, that’s even better. If you take it down, sort of the intense exertion, put it back up after. Every member of the family needs a face covering. Anything will do, a bandana, a scarf, anything you’ve got. We’re going to keep giving this message. We’re going to keep enforcing. But a lot of what I see out there is people, families together, close and again that is acceptable. That is within the boundaries of social distancing, and other folks making a very good effort to socially distance the maximum amount possible. Face coverings matter all the time, but we will be working particularly as the weather gets warmer to look at new options but with enforcement attached.

Speaker 5: Next we have Luis from New Yorker.

Luis: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I’ve got two questions.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Go ahead, Luis.

Luis: Okay there. Going forward as we approach the point when mass testing becomes a true reality in the way that you and the Governor envision it, in light of the families who have suffered through the same predicament that the Chris Cuomo family have gone through, God bless them, would there ever be a time when a person who tests positive not be allowed back to their family, presuming they have a family, and under what circumstances might that be?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Okay, so Luis, the goal here is to work with everybody and work with every family to determine if someone tests positive, to determine if they have a living circumstance that will allow for isolation properly. Some people do. Some people don’t. Someone living alone obviously can do isolation in their own apartment or home. Someone who lives in an apartment or home where there’s enough room determined by the other members of the family could do it too. A lot of New Yorkers can’t. That’s where the hotels come in and providing people the support in the hotels.

So what the test and trace approach means is determining not only if someone’s positive, who are the other people in their life that might be affected or might have been affected, but can they have proper isolation or not? If they can’t, the hotel is there for them immediately. And I think from what we’re seeing so far, people are going to deal with that on a very common sense level. We’re going to always try and work with people to figure out the thing that works for them. But you know, the most important part of the equation is testing people, which we’re still do not have the capacity to the level we want. That’s what we’re focusing on every day, making sure we have those hotels available for people, and making sure there’s a tight process between the test and the tracing and then getting people to isolation who need it.

Speaker 5: Next. We have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Jeff Mays: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Two questions. I wanted to ask a little more about the charter revision commissions. What do you envision them tackling? If you could go into some more specifics, and then secondly on the racial equity task force led by your wife. I’m wondering if there’s any concern in appointing her to this position given some of the questions that have been raised about Thrive and their operation in the past.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Of course not. The reality is, and Jeff, you’ve asked the question several times, about what was done before the coronavirus to address healthcare disparities in New York City. I’ve talked about the kind of physical health changes that were needed, things like saving the public hospitals, creating a guaranteed health care system with NYC Care and getting insurance to people. I’ve talked about a lot of the very immediate physical health realities. But in terms of fighting inequality, Thrive has gone to that point in many ways even farther, because Thrive was about addressing profound inequalities in health care, and in fact even more so, creating access to healthcare that didn’t exist for anyone in a society that never has given proper attention and respect to the issue of mental health. So I think what Chirlane has done over these last six years is take this issue, put it in the light, open up access for millions of people, and then continue to build out a structure that could focus on effective delivery and equity.

I think that’s exactly the kind of mindset needed for this task force. And again want to give credit where credit is due. The initial thinking came from Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, who has a lifetime of work serving the city and a lifetime of work as an innovator in public policy. As he and Chirlane talked and more of the rest of us started talking about it, it made total sense to me that they would be the leaders and then they’ll bring together a whole team from the administration.

In terms of charter revision, again, we’re going to announce a whole team for that, a charter revision commission. That’s at least weeks away, honestly. We got a lot we’ve got to do in the immediate term. The Fair Recovery task force is a group I’m going to depend on for the initial thinking, and again with that very preliminary June 1st, roadmap is going to be crucial to determining how we act in the months ahead. Charter revision commission, when we get to naming that group, that’s an opportunity to take a more structural look at the work of New York City government and determine if we’re positioned right for the future or if we have to make other changes. And again, that’s a very deliberative process. Bring together a wide range of perspectives, have public hearings. That’s what a charter revision commission is great for, but that will come farther down the line.

Speaker 5: Last question for today. We have Jannen from Cranes.

Jannen: Hi Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Yes, Jannen, how you doing?

Jannen: Good. How are you?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good.

Jannen: The city council last week announced a suite of bills for COVID relief protection. The business community, however, sharply criticized this as a burden on small businesses. Where do you stand? Do you support this legislation?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Jannen, it is brand new and I still have not had the opportunity to carefully review it. I look forward to doing that. I look forward to talking to Speaker Johnson. As I’ve said, some of the elements that I’ve heard, just the broad outline of, I think I share the goal, but where I want to see these things handled is in the federal stimulus, and there is a lot of energy in that direction. Senator Schumer has put forward the Hero’s Fund idea to provide bonuses to essential workers, first responders, healthcare workers, grocery workers. I think that is very smart. I think it is entirely within the reach of the federal government to do that. Remember, effortlessly, they gave $58 billion to the airline industry, a very profitable industry. They were quick to bail them out. I think they should bail out essential workers and first responders as well and they can do that.

So I think that is a live option to be in the stimulus, and that vote in the stimulus, we’re hearing more and more, not even late May, that could come in early May, so that’s where I think the focus should be. But again, we’re going to review everything that was put forward by the council, work with them closely. It is a great working relationship. We’ve all been working closely through this crisis, and I really appreciate that the council is constantly thinking about the needs of essential workers and all working people. I think we have a lot of common ground there. So more to say on that as we deepen our conversations with the council ahead.

So with that everyone, again to conclude sort of where I started, we got a lot to do right away and everyone’s feeling that urgency to restart. I feel it. Everyone in here at City Hall feels that. We’re going to do it when the time is right and in the right way and in stages. But New Yorkers have the ability to do great things. It is who we are and we’re going to do something great over the next 20 months. We are going to figure out how to rebuild, how to come back strong, how to take all the strengths of the city that were so clear just a few months ago and bring them back stronger than ever, but with a fundamental devotion to making sure this is a better city for all, a fairer city, a more inclusive city. It can be that. And look, we’ve shown how fast you can make change in this city.

This place is capable of great things. The people of the city are capable of great things. All of you have participated over the years in making New York City greater and greater. Now let’s make it fairer and fairer. Now let’s go someplace we’ve never been before. In that same spirit of the new deal, imagining a world that does not yet exist and building it. It’s something we can all do together. And that’s what I’m devoted to and I know together we will achieve it. Thank you so much, everyone.

2020-04-27 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. It's a Monday morning, and even with all the changes we've been going through these last months, a Monday morning still can always be a little tough for all of us. So, I'm happy to give you some good news to start your week. It's important to think about this whole fight we're in the middle of, and how many times we've had to emphasize that it's a long battle, there are no shortcuts, to get where we need to get to really beat this disease back is a long, intense process that everyone has to participate in. So, the good news I'm going to give you in a moment is about how we make that easier for all of us. Everyone's been doing a great job. Every time, I'm going to say thank you to all of you for everything you're doing to practice social distancing, to shelter in place, to help each other. It's been absolutely outstanding, but it's not easy, and it's taking a long time. Everyone wants more certainty.

One of the most frustrating parts of this whole experience has been how many things aren't known, how many things aren't known about this disease. We constantly feel like we're fighting an invisible enemy, but not only an invisible enemy, an invisible enemy that we just don't have enough information about. But the thing we all want to know the most is about what's happening to our own families, what's happening in our own lives. Have we been exposed to this virus or not? Are we still vulnerable? These are the questions that people want answered and want to know what it means for their own safety and everyone they love. And we know the question has always been from the very beginning. This goes back to when we first talked about COVID-19 back in January. The question has always been testing, testing, testing. How are we going to get the testing? How are we going to be able to get answers? Even with this difficult adversary, this mysterious adversary, how do we at least get less mystery about our own lives and get answers through testing? So testing is the way forward, and it's been a long fight just to get the testing we need, the ability to give the tests, but today we have good news.

Today we are beginning to see an easier process for testing. I'm going to talk about it by putting it in context of what I experienced Saturday in the Bronx at the Health and Hospitals Gotham Community Testing Center in Morrisania. I went up there to see how the testing was being done. To see how our extraordinary health care workers at the front line are giving people answers, helping them get clarity, figuring out with them what they're going to do next based on the results of the test. Making a lot more testing available in the places hit the hardest like the South Bronx. So, we all know that a few weeks ago we were just trying to save our hospitals, save lives. We couldn't put together the personnel, and the PPE’s, and the test kits, and all to do community testing, but now we were able to over this last week or more, and so as of this morning they'll be eight Health + Hospitals community testing sites around the city, open for business. And since we started this initiative a couple of weeks ago, even less than a couple of weeks ago, there've been now over 5,000 tests at the H + H sites, another more than 2,600 tests at the sites we've sponsored with local 1199 SCIU, the health care workers union and one medical. That number is substantial, but now we're going to be taking it up. There'll be 10,000 test per week or more at these community-based sites, and we want to keep ramping that up.

But the challenge has been, and I saw this with my own eyes on Saturday, that the test process we've known up to now, the test kits that were used, which had a specific long swab, and it required a trained medical professional to administer the test. Not fun and easy, very long swab, had to go way up into someone's nose, had to be handled a certain way, kept in a certain environment to be sent on to the lab. This was a more elaborate process, and not only slower, more elaborate for the patient, but for the health care worker. A challenge in many ways, and our health care workers have gone through so much already but realize even in the testing process how much they had to do. A health care worker, even to do one test, had to put on, if you will, their body armor. They had to put on the whole PPE ensemble. The face shield, the N95 or whatever type of mask was appropriate, the gloves, gown, a whole specific plan to keep them safe, because the problem was with the test we've been using up to now, a lot of times it made the patient sneeze, and obviously it might be someone with COVID 19, and that was going to expose the health care worker. So, it was a laborious, careful process. But of course, a process done with someone who might be infected with a disease that might therefore infect the health care worker. So, we had to take real precautions, and that was every single patient, every single person being tested hour after hour, day after day. And it was a slow process and a process that came with real exposure for the health care workers who have been through so much. We have been working to confirm for weeks now that there was a better way to do this, and the good news I have today is there is a better way, there is a better way to do testing. There is an easier way to do testing, and there is a safer way to do testing, and we're going to start that this week at our Health + Hospitals clinics right here in New York City.

So, we're calling it, just to make it simple, straight forward self-swab tests. What does it mean? It means when you go to one of the community testing sites, instead of the health care worker having to be all prepared with all the PPE’s, and then take that very long swab, and administer the test. Now this is a whole different thing. This means the health care worker explains to the person there for the test how to administer the test themselves. They go into another room for privacy, and the patient takes something that's basically a sterile Q-tip, puts that in their nose. They don't have to go way deep, just enough to get a sample. They, forgive my bluntness, they spit into a cup, and that, those two samples, provide enough information for the testing to be done. Much simpler, much easier for everyone involved, no chance to cause the same kind of sneezing that that long swab way up the nose does. Simpler but also safer, especially for that health care worker. So many of whom had been putting their lives on the line now for weeks and weeks. So, when that's done, just like we've all experienced, many of us, at least at doctor's offices, you hand the sample over to a doctor or a nurse, a health care worker, you do the same here. The clinic or the health care provider sends it off to the lab to get the results. Now, this is simpler, this is better. This is something we're going to start using now aggressively, because it'll improve the situation for everyone.

We need partnership from the private labs that do the processing. We're engaged in these conversations with them already. We need them to step up. What our health care leadership here in New York City have told us is it's a very similar process to what they would do with the current samples. It doesn't take a lot of modification, but we need the private labs to agree immediately to do this on a wide scale. We have enough to get started, but we want to make sure we do this on a wide scale, so I'm asking the private labs, step up, make the small alterations necessary to be able to take these simpler tests. I think that will be a step forward for everyone. For health care workers, this will be a simpler, better reality. Also, think about the PPE’s that will now be saved in this process. They've been precious up to now, that personal protective equipment. We know it's been a fight week after week to make sure we had enough. This will mean we'll be able to conserve our supply a lot more, and make sure we have it for everyone who needs it when they need it. So, there's a lot of virtues here. It will also just take fewer health care workers to administer this kind of test, because we'll get more done in the time we have. So just it helps on so many levels and allows more health care workers to be at the front line where they're still needed so deeply.

Now, it's faster, as I said right now at an H + H site, because you have to process each individual, and explain what's going to happen, and administer the test, and everything has to be done very methodically. They can do about 15 tests per hour for each health care worker taking the tests. But the – I'm sorry, 15, I shouldn't say per person, per site –15 tests per hour. With this new approach that will go up immediately to 20 tests per hour, and then we'll keep expanding from there. Again, we need help. The private labs, we need them to really get with this new approach quickly, help move it forward, because this will make everyone's lives easier, and faster, and this'll give more people answers, and it will simplify, and clarify our steps forward as we move into that test and trace period in the month of May. But we also still need the federal government, I don't want anyone for a moment to think this means the federal government doesn't have responsibility. They still do and the big question now and again, testing has been the big Achilles heel of the federal government from the beginning, but here's the chance to get it right. Use all the tools of federal government to expand lab capacity so we can help New Yorkers and this is needed all over the country. We need the supplies that go to those labs to make them work, particularly what's called reagents, which are part of the process of doing the actual analysis of each sample. There is still a crisis of supply affecting the labs, we still don't see the federal government owning this problem to the extent they need to. It's been the same story from the beginning, not focusing on testing when we needed them to and then even when everyone became clear that testing was the answer. We don't see the federal government using all its powers, all its tools to secure the supply chain and make sure the test kits originally and the lab capacity is there, that needs to be fixed immediately so we can take a big step forward in May.

Now, remember, the more tests you do, the faster you move towards low-level transmission of this disease. It all starts to come together, expand, testing rapidly more and more of the contact tracing, more and more getting people to isolation who need it. That's what May is going to look like, but this is actually going to help us speed that up markedly to be able to do a simpler kind of test. One day and I think it is possible, we'll be able to test everyone we need to, again, we cannot do it without federal help, but one day if we do this right, we'll be able to reach everyone we need to on any given day and you'll see a extraordinary correlation of how every step towards that day connects with pushing back this disease. I'm not saying it's going to be perfect, I'm not saying there's always going to go into a perfect straight line you've seen with our indicators and we'll get to them in a minute. Things go up, things go down. Sometimes we'll have setbacks, that's part of life, but so far New Yorkers have done an extraordinary job pushing back this disease and now the testing is starting to come into play. If we do it right, may not be a perfect straight line, but it will be regular consistent progress. The more testing, the more progress, this will help us achieve more testing, simple as that. So, of course once you have the testing more and more widespread, you need that ability to trace the contacts of everyone who tests positive. And as we've talked about before, when we were tragically seeing the disease spread and spread, and spread, we weren't able to do the contact tracing. We were trying to save lives, protect hospitals, deal with the most basic needs of people, but we couldn't build a whole— contact tracing network that we wanted for something of this size.

Now, the good news is we can, and that's what we're going to build in the month of May. A contact tracing network in this City likes never been seen before on a vast scale. So, every time someone tests positive, immediately we can swing into action, figure out who were their close contacts, get those people tested to isolate anyone who needs isolation. So, I'm announcing today that we are hiring, we are looking for talented, experienced health workers. So, anyone out there listening to me now, watching this or anyone who hears about this, if you have experienced in the health care field, if you're ready to lend your talents, this fight, we need you and we need you right away. We are hiring immediately and we will be hiring throughout the month of May, City of New York plans to hire 1,000 contact tracers immediately. They will be working with all the health care personnel we have already and people we will train from a variety of City agencies to complement this work as well. But, right now, we need 1,000 new contact tracers. We're getting great help from our fund for public health and I want to thank everyone at the fund for public health, for the great work you do and all the people who support you and have donated to the fund for public health. You're going to see that support come alive in a powerful way now, as we fight back this disease here in the epicenter, but we want to get the word out to everyone that we need to hire up right away as work begins. What will they do? The contact tracers, literally, they'll do the interviews to determine who were those key contacts, they'll follow up with those contacts, they'll arrange for each of them to be tested. Folks who need isolation, they'll make sure they're getting it. They'll help make sure that the steps that are needed are glued together and they’ll ask the questions that are needed. And that training will be so important to understand if there's anyone who needs that follow-up, talked about disease detectives before. This is a variation on that, but it's the same concept of knowing how to ask the right questions, knowing how to search for the clues of the people in someone's life who tested positive, that need to be contacted, need to be followed up on, need to be tested. So, again, we'll start immediately and anyone interested should go to the fund for public health website it's FPHnyc.org again FPHnyc.org. Very, very important please, we need you to come forward right away so we can get you into this battle and help save lives here in this City.

Let me switch to a couple of other important topics before I talk about the daily indicators. First of all, something so many New Yorkers ask about and care about and it's important to everyday life, alternate side parking, alternate side parking. In this crisis we've seen something very unusual, there've been so many fewer people out and obviously businesses closed, et cetera, that the reality why we need alternate side parking to begin with has been altered fundamentally. So, we've been watching regularly, our Sanitation Department is monitoring communities to make sure we don't want to see communities get dirty we don't want to see anything that would undermine the hygiene of this City in the middle of a pandemic, been very pleased by what we're seeing. Streets are staying generally clean I know a lot of everyday New Yorkers are helping to make that happen and I thank you for that. So, as we continue to see progress, we can continue to pull back on alternate side parking, we've been doing it two weeks at a time we're going to keep doing that for the foreseeable future and we're going to judge each time what makes sense. But I am here to announce that we will suspend alternate side parking for the next two weeks and that will take us to Tuesday, May 12th again as we get close to that point, we'll have another update.

Very important update I want to give now and it's something that's been worked on for the last few days. The weather has been getting warmer, slowly but surely, we've talked about the changes that when it gets warmer there'll be more and more people outside. Gotten a lot of good questions from every-day New Yorkers and from the media and from elected officials. How are we going to balance this? Well, we're going to have a bigger, for the truly warm weather in summer, but in the here and now we can predict in the next few weeks as we go through May, it will get warmer and warmer, more people out, more challenges. Lot of folks have asked good questions about what can we do differently and I've said consistently, we want to see if there's new approaches but we have to make sure they're safe and we have to make sure there can be enforcement.

The City Council came forward, I think it was Wednesday, with a vision of how we could come up with a plan to open up more streets do it over time and do it in a way that was responsive to the core concerns we've heard from the NYPD for example, about safety and enforcement. We've been engaging the city council over the last few days with a very positive spirit because as I said a few days ago, when you look at the history of relationship between both sides of City Hall, we always come together in the end and find a solution. There's been a collegial, positive spirit always, but particularly during this pandemic, and we share a lot of the same values. So, the city council has been absolutely right to say, let's keep looking for solutions here and I want to thank them for that. I think it's been right to say, let's find a solution that helps open up space, but absolutely keeps people safe, because the first job here is to protect people's safety. So, I want to announce today that we have reached an agreement with Speaker Johnson and the city council. And over the next month we will create a minimum of 40 miles of open streets and then the goal during the duration of the COVID crisis, and we don't know how long that is obviously, but as this crisis continues, we're going to all work hard to keep it as short as possible. But during this crisis, the goal is to get up to a hundred miles of those open streets and the way we will do it, we're going to focus first on streets in and around our parks. Very concerned about the streets on the outside of parks that oftentimes we're seeing that immediate area getting very crowded, that's an obvious opportunity. Those streets adjacent to parks are an obvious opportunity to open up more space, so we're going to work together to figure out how to do that. Some places will be able to expand sidewalks. Use the example of what we did over the holidays around Rockefeller Center where you just open up the sidewalk space into the street more, but with the proper kind of barricades. Some streets will be more local areas that aren't necessarily where you have a major attraction like a park, but they are places where we can safely open up some space and have it be enforced. And another important piece of this discussion is early action bike lanes where we see an opportunity to do more with bike lanes - done some of that already in this crisis, we want to do more. So, the focus here will be to focus – of course, same as we're doing in so many other things, where the need is greatest. So, so many communities that we already have identified have been very hard hit by COVID, we want to be particularly sensitive to implement these kinds of steps - working with the City Council, working with the Police Department, Transportation Department, Sanitation Department, and Parks Department figuring out all the right places we can do this, but first priority are the places hardest hit. And then of course, figuring out where they'll have the biggest impact, where the most people are. So that's good news, from the good work we've all been doing together with the Council over the last few days.

Now let me go into the indicators for the day. And I think today's indicators are broadly good [inaudible]. It's not the perfect thing we want all down in the same direction, but broadly good. And we keep making progress in one form or another. I want to see more and I want to see steadier progress for us to really be able to make some of the bigger moves we all would like to make. So, the first indicator today, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19. This is obviously the root of everything – this one's down meaningfully from 144 to 122. That's very good. Daily number of people in ICUs across our Health + Hospitals, public hospitals for suspected COVID-19 - that's down but, only a little, 768 to 766. Percentage of people who tested positive for COVID-19 citywide – stable, not going in the wrong direction at least, but stable at 29 percent. The one place that was not so good, the public health lab tests went up 46 percent to 55 percent. That is again an important measure, but it's a measure of a smaller group of people. When you composite the day, progress, but not enough progress. But it's a reminder everything we're doing is affecting these indicators; let's keep doing it.

So, as I conclude, and I'll say a few words in Spanish, but first say, look, the test and trace plan we talked about a few days ago, this is really the key. It's going to be very aggressive; it's going to be large scale. This is how we take the good work that all of you have done. We supercharge it by finally getting testing on a wide scale. Tracing people, isolating everyone that needs it. Doing that is the path forward, but we knew the testing piece of the equation was a challenge because we've always struggled to have the testing capacity we needed from the very beginning of this crisis. Finally, we see something simpler. Having an approach to testing that will protect our health care workers more, save time, allow a simpler process. A process that's easier for the person being tested as well as for the health care worker. And the fact that it will speed things up and require less personnel over time is a huge, huge benefit. So, the goal here is to test as many people as possible. This is another step toward that. It's a good way to start the week with some good news and it makes us even more ready to go into May with that aggressive test and trace strategy that I think is going to be a game changer from New York City. Just a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we will turn to questions from our colleagues in the media and as usual tell me the name and the outlet of the journalists calling in.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q & A. As a reminder we have Dr. Daskalakis, Dr. Barbot, Dr. Katz, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma all also on the line. First question today goes to Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor, I have some questions that related to the election. Tomorrow would have been the Presidential Primary here in New York. So just a few questions; first, the Governor announced an executive order last week and that the State Board of Elections wants municipalities to mail absentee ballot applications to all voters. Just interested in your reaction to that along with keeping poll sites open. Do you have any concerns there? He also canceled the special elections for Queens Borough President and City Council and I'm wondering your thoughts on that. And then finally, the State Board of Elections is meeting today and may cancel the Presidential Primary here in New York. Given that you’re a base supporter of Senator Sanders, I'm wondering about your thoughts on that.

Mayor: Thank you, Brigid. So, I think the absentee ballot approach is very much a step in the right direction and look, Brigid, you've been very, very deeply involved reporting on these issues for years now. This state was way behind the country for a long time. Last year we saw extraordinary reforms and change. It was a moment a lot of us have been waiting for, for decades; where New York State finally caught up with the rest of America in terms of a lot of crucial reforms to make voting easier and to protect the voting process. In this crisis, to me, the first question is health and safety. I care deeply about the sanctity of our elections, but the first question is health and safety. So I think the absentee ballot approach is the smart way to go. And in fact, you know, it's teaching us for the future if mail-in ballots might be a part of yet another piece of a strategy - which some states use very widely already not just cause of this crisis - to make it easier for people to vote and encourage more people to vote. So, I'm very happy that, that approach is being used here. I think we could go a lot farther with that potentially. I think the absentee approach is what everyone should do. So my advice to everyone involved is let's just focus on folks mailing-in is the safest approach, it’s – so long as it's being made widely available and it will be handled benevolently. Meaning, you know, for years and years, you know, there was kind of a burden of proof on the voter. If my assumption and my hope here is that every absentee ballot application will be regarded as automatically valid; in that case, that's the way to go. That's where the energy should be focused on. Certainly, don't want to see people out and about who don't have to be. On the other issues, I honestly compared to all the other concerns out there, none of this registers to me as something I'm particularly worried about. I respect the decisions that the state has made. I was a proud supporter of Senator Sanders. He obviously made a decision to leave the race and support Vice President Biden. I think that matter is closed. So I think keeping the election activity to a minimum in this environment makes sense. What I'm looking forward to is getting through this recovery the right way and getting our whole society back to normal and having elections again as an indicator of our Renaissance of our resurgence. But I think that's something that obviously is going to happen in the fall, not now.

Moderator: Next question goes to Andrew from WNBC.

Question: [inaudible] How are you? Good morning.

Mayor: Hey Andrew, how are you doing?

Question: Good, I was wondering if you had seen some of the studies which show that outdoor transmission of this virus is extremely low and as a result of that, are you considering assisting restaurants like closing some of the streets, like Ninth Avenue, to when they ultimately reopen, essentially create sort of the maximum amount of outdoor restaurant space in New York City? Have you begun discussions on that and do you think it can happen?

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew, I think that's a very interesting idea. You know, as we've thought about and we have begun discussions, but as I said, when we have firm plans step-by-step, we'll unveil them. But there's something elegant about that solution, we know that when the right time comes for restaurants to reopen there's still going to be real questions about how much distancing, how you protect customers, how you protect the folks who work in the restaurant. And clearly, there could be advantages to having more of it be outdoors. You still have to have those precautions thought through and acted on. But there's something appealing about shifting more of the activity outdoors and adjusting accordingly, obviously, in terms of how we handle streets and sidewalks. So, there's something very, very interesting there. Now, I have not read that particular study, to be fair, and I think one of the things we can say about COVID-19 is we get new information all the time and a lot of unknowns. But I'm very intrigued by the idea and I want to see if it's something we can act on as we think about that piece of the reopening. I don't know of any of the doctors wants to comment further. Doctors? Anyone?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Sir, I'll just add that my team and I actually have begun those conversations to talk about ways in which we can provide a clear guidance to New Yorkers with regards to maintaining distance while we are able to lift early some of the layers of social distancing and certainly maximizing our use of outdoor spaces is one of those potential options, especially when it comes to restaurants.

Moderator: Next question is Jenn Peltz from the AP.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Jenn. How are you doing?

Question: Fine, thanks. I had just some questions a little bit about the self-swab testing that you mentioned earlier. One was, could you explain a little bit further about why there are two samples being collected here, one nasally and one from saliva? And also, a little bit of more about how come this reduces the need for personal protective equipment?

Mayor: I'm going to start as the layman here and then pass to the doctors. So, Jen, so it is two samples, two different samples from the same human at the same time, and that actually is helpful in terms of cross checking and helping with ensuring the validity of the outcome of the test. But the other thing is, just to try – and I'll try and be clear without being overly graphic – so, why is it safer? Because when I was there at Morrisania in the Bronx today, they took out the actual test kit, and here's the swab – and the swab. I don't know if I can get the exact length, one of the doctors probably knows exact – but it's a long swab. It's not a, think about a Q-tip, it looks like most of twice that size. And the idea is to put it really deep into your nose in a way that a human being would have trouble doing themselves, but a medical professional can perform. But the problem is, it also causes for a lot of people a kind of impulse – sudden impulse to sneeze. So, you've got a certain number of people who are going to be COVID positive, they're there with a health care worker and their health care workers right up close to them performing this test, and then the immediate reaction is someone sneezes right at the health care worker because they're right there in front of them. So, that's not great. It's been what we've had. It's been the only option that appeared to be truly consistent and viable. And that required a health care worker – think about it, the face shield, the PPEs, everything. This ain't that. This is, you know, like many of us have experienced at a doctor's office, they give you your instructions and here's the sample cup that just spit into and you put the cover on and here's the Q-tip, and, you know, bring it back and hand it over, and then they can package it and send it for processing. So, it just takes away that, that close contact, that sneeze, the things that would create vulnerability for the health care workers. Also, from what I've heard at least – it has not been done to me, but from what I've heard a lot more comfortable for the patient to not go through that deeper procedure. Doctors, that was my attempt to put it into plain English. You take it from there.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Thank you. I think you did really well, Mr. Mayor. Everyone who has the nasal pharyngeal culture done, the one up their nose almost always coughs and sneezes on the health care worker because it's so uncomfortable. So, new methods are really needed. In terms of the multiple specimens, in some cases we may be able to do it just with the nasal swab – just swabbing the front of the nose, something that the patient can do under the supervision of the health care worker. As you keep saying and teaching people, we learning new things about the disease all the time, we may find that adding a sputum spitting does improve the test characteristics or doesn't make it different enough. So, we may just be doing the swabs. But I think the big point, which you've made so well, is that this will be safer testing, it’ll be more comfortable testing for the patients and will enable us to do more testing and reach your goal of being able to open the city safely with enough data to be sure that we don't have a large outbreaks in the future.

Moderator: Next question is Christina from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mayor. We have seen some reporting that the DOE is considering a grading policy that many advocates think is unacceptable. They don't want to see any grades for high school and they want assurances that every student will graduate from high school this year. Just curious whether the DOE is taking that feedback, when we can expect an official policy to come out, and what the holdup is?

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Christina. Now, look, the focus has been over these last few weeks to really get the distance learning moving to the extent that we need it to and to try and consolidate the education of our kids right now under the most adverse possible circumstances – 1.1 million kids spread out over a whole city, not a single one of them, you know, in a classroom in the traditional sense, although some are at the enrichment centers, it's still not the classrooms that we knew – you know, in the school structure we knew. So, that's been the focus of the DOE – get that piece right and start building for the future, for the summer and for beyond in different ways. This week we'll have an update on the grading policy. I've had detailed conversations with the Chancellor and his team. We'll have an update for you. I will say, of course, the voices of the advocates and every stakeholder is listened to. And we want to be fair and we want to be really respectful of students and families in this moment. We also want to strike a balance. I think it is important, as with everything in life, that there be some real standards. I think it helps people to have some clear standards. And we think we can do that in a fair way that accounts for how difficult this experience has been. Clearly, we want to see as many seniors as possible move on at the end of this school year the right way. But we have to structure that in a smart way, and again, we'll have the details this week.

Moderator: Next question is Henry from Bloomberg?

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How are you doing?

Question: I’m okay. Let me ask you this – have you – I don't know whether you've ever spoken about this, but why do you think New York City has been an epicenter for this pandemic way beyond other cities that are densely populated and act as international gateways?

Mayor: Well, it's a profound question, Henry. I've spoken a little bit to it and I think we're going to keep researching that question, going forward, but I would say you're on the right track. International gateway in a way that very few cities on earth are. I mean, I think we have to understand New York City, you know, who we are, what we are, how we compare to the rest of our country, how do we compare to the rest of the world? We are one of the most international cities in the world, with a handful of cities as the true international capitals that, obviously, in a pandemic makes us more vulnerable. We have, you know, the greatest diversity in the world, so we have people traveling back and forth from every part of the world. And we saw this pandemic growing from different parts of the world. And I think as we look at more and more, we'll see that some of that came in from more than one location and that was more of a vulnerability for us than it might've been for some other places. Yes, there are densely populated cities in this country, but there's nothing that compares New York City. There’s just no city that's laid out the way we are, that concentrates anywhere near as many people. That's a huge part of the equation. When you think of the second biggest city in the country, Los Angeles, it's structured entirely differently. It's spread out over a vast area, you have many, many fewer people concentrated in big buildings. There's many, many reasons why it made sense, very sadly, and the human cost has been profound and painful. There's many reasons why we were particularly in the crosshairs of this disease. A lot more we'll say about over time. I think the other interesting question will be examined over time is, you know, when all those challenges added up and this disease manifested so intensely and we'd never seen anything like it. I mean, again, the only parallel is a hundred years ago. Thank God this city long ago devoted itself to having a very strong public health apparatus, Department of Health, Health + Hospitals, community-based clinics, and that is part of what saved us here, because our hospital system was strained deeply, but it never broke. A lot of other places, if they had gone through the kind of overwhelming growth of the disease that we've gone through, their hospital systems would never have been able to handle it. Ours held, so that's something that all New Yorkers should be proud of and, obviously, the health care workers were the heroes. But those are some initial thoughts, Henry. But I think we'll all be doing a lot more research as we get more information.

Moderator: Next is Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: I'm good, Gersh. How you doing?

Question: Great. I appreciate that. I'm sorry, I do want to obviously talk about this massive open-streets announcement you just made. You did [inaudible] from enforcement, so I need to understand a little about what's different now between what you're going to do and what the NYPD was doing with the original open space pilot. Have you accepted the Council’s position that open streets can be done with far fewer cops and with more trust in drivers to stay out of areas where they don't belong?

Mayor: So, I would say it this way. I mentioned, I think, in one of these settings – it may even have been an answer to one of your questions – a long conversation a few days back with Commissioner Shea and Commissioner Trottenberg and we went deeply into the question of looking at each of the plans from around the country, something you and others have asked, Oakland, Minneapolis, et cetera, things happening around the world, and our comparison to New York City and what it would take here. And I think there is, you know, an assumption in everything we do, and it gets back to Vision Zero, that we want to be very cautious about making sure drivers are constantly given the message, slow down, drive safely, recognize the ramifications of what it means to drive a vehicle and your responsibilities. So that worldview, Gersh, makes us very cautious when it comes to trusting that if you create a situation where there are not protections and there's not enforcement that you could put people in danger, and, obviously, the goal of an open street or safe street kind of structure is that people can enjoy it and experience the virtue of it and the social distancing without having a new danger from vehicles. So, we've always had a concern about enforcement and continued to, but the Council – discussions with the Council, I think, were kindred in the sense that we could come up with places to open – I think the areas around parks are a great example – whereby, opening them up, you are going to capture the natural flow of people. One of the things – many of the questions I've gotten from all of you in the media, but beyond, is, one of the most important places to open might be where a lot of people are going anyway and just give them more space since more and more people will go there when it gets warmer. That also is actually a more straightforward enforcement dynamic than if you're trying to open a bunch of places all over. So, it was sort of a focus on where the need was greatest, both in terms of where people would go and obviously communities most affected, using some of the enforcement we were already devoting to those areas in an efficient way. And then more and more of the conversation revolved -- this is something the Council felt deeply. And actually as we looked at it more, we felt this was a very important piece, revolved around community partners that could be upon to create structures that, you know, if you were going to have a place closed off, there would be a constant effort to monitor it, to make sure it was safe. If there was any problem to get NYPD over there quickly, something with a little more structure than for example, what we saw in Oakland. So, I think there's been a really good consensus that we can do something substantial while keeping the health and safety issues up front and ensuring the right kind of enforcement, more work with trusted community partners. But I would not go so far as to say, forgetting what we learned from Vision Zero, which is to always keep our guard up against the problems of people who drive irresponsibly and making sure we're protecting pedestrians at all times.

Moderator: Next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, I was wondering if you could share some more details about the street closure plan? I mean, to start with, can you sort of help New Yorkers visualize what the plan will look like? Will there be barricades, police cars, officers enforcing? Also, can you say exactly who's going to be picking the streets? Will that be DOT or the Council or somewhere else? And maybe last but not least, do you know what this stage, what the first streets will be, parts of Manhattan, Bronx, et cetera, anything like that?

Mayor: Okay. So we're all going to work together on the selection. Council, Mayor's Office, NYPD, DOT, everyone's going to work to figure out the places that make sense immediately. Again, I think it's going to be a combination – I think assume first and foremost those streets around parks where that natural ability to expand, if you will, the park space and the places where a lot of people are going to be congregating as it gets warmer. I think in May we're going to see, you know, steady warming and more and more people. So let's get ahead of that. Expand out around the parks. We'll figure out together where to focus. It's one part where you're going to see the most activity, another part where you're going to see the most need in terms of the health reality. So that's obviously a lot of the communities that have been afflicted the most. Yes, there will be enforcement and I think everything you said could, you know, can and will be a part of it, meaning in some places barricades. But one of the open questions is, you know, how permanent for the duration of this crisis, the barricades need to be or how temporary they can be, what will be effective. Yes, there has to be enforcement attached. Depending on the location, it might be more enforcement, other places it might be less, so long as again, there were trusted partners. Bids have come forward as one example. Certain neighborhood entities that work very closely with the NYPD, this is an idea that Commissioner Shea put forward. If NYPD has a working relationship with an organization and knows that they can rely upon them to manage something, and keep in touch if there's a problem. That makes sense. So, and timeline to move obviously as quickly as possible through the month of May. But to start where we think there will be the most activity and then build from there. Details will be announced. You know, we have to deepen this process with the Council and with the agencies as we have the first tranche of the places that will occur, we'll announce that.

Moderator: Next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you about the three indicators the City is tracking for the percentage of people tested who are positive for COVID-19. Why are you guys separating out the Public health Lab? My understanding is that that's a very small subset. I guess if you can tell me how many tests the Public Health Lab is conducting and is that a special group of people? I'm just trying to understand why it's being separated out.

Mayor: It's a great question. Appreciate it Yoav. So the indicators, I'll start and I'll turn to Dr. Daskalakis and Dr. Varma to speak about this. The indicators were developed because we wanted everyone to be able to see in common where we're going. But there was real concern that, and I think this is playing out in a certain states right now in a very troubling way, that if you either didn't have clear transparent indicators or you use the wrong ones, or you didn't give them enough time to develop, you could really set up that horrible boomerang scenario. Where the disease reasserts and disease reasserts, you know, I have no words for how much of a problem that would be if it reasserted in a strong way, both in terms of the people who would be endangered and the lives that might be lost, but also setting back any effort to get to normalcy. I've said we're not going to be in a perfect straight line on our path back, but we need to keep it as tight as humanly possible. So having these indicators, it was a conservative act to choose three indicators. Again Yoav you'll appreciate this, on this matter of how and when to reopen, I'm a conservative, I'm a proud conservative in this matter only. But getting it right, being cautious, being smart, looking for the correlation of the indicators. That was the underlying value. Yes, the Public Health Lab is sort of a rarefied slice in my layman's terms. It's a high bar, but we thought it was right to have it there because we wanted a high bar. We wanted to make sure we were really cross-checking all our indicators and seeing something consistent. We're going to see how it plays out. We always have the option to reevaluate down the line. But so far I think what we've been seeing tracks with what I believe is happening. Which is we are getting steadily better, but we're far from out of the woods. Look at the number of new cases every day and look at the number tragically of New Yorkers who are losing every day. It's better than what it was, you know, a month ago or a few weeks ago. But it's nowhere near what we want it to be and need it to be. So I think the indicators are doing their job right now. But Dr. Daskalakis, Dr. Varma why don't you jump in?

Deputy Commissioner Demetre Daskalakis, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So the Public Health Lab actually focuses on testing in patients. So, it's the sickest New Yorkers who are being tested. The indicator, the reason that they're together in a graph is because we want to look at them in combination of sort of the sickest folks who are being tested, as well as just the general population who is being tested. So, we think it gives a pretty robust view. And again, like the Mayor said, you know, we really will be able to adjust these further if necessary, but the most important message is that the trend is definitely down in both. So day to day variations to be expected, especially since we test fewer folks in the Public Health Lab. But again, since the trend is down, we are going in the right direction and does provide for some cautious optimism.

Mayor: Dr. Varma, you want to add? I guess he doesn't want to add. Okay. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next is Gloria from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. I have two questions for you. The first, I understand what the doctors have explained about how this test is easier to administer. But is there anything they can say about how you eliminate or prevent the possibility of a person not self-administering this test correctly? If they do it wrong, then is there a possibility that the test might get a wrong result? How do you monitor that, if the idea is to send the person off into whatever space to administer the test? And my second question is about the Streets plan. I thought much of the discussion around this had been about giving people who don't have, who might not have access to say a park or a large area of open space options? So why start with places that are near parks? Why not focus in places where people might not have immediate access to a green space or a place to spread out and take a walk?

Mayor: So, I'm going to speak to that one and then I'll turn to the doctors on the self-swab issue. And I think a very good question you're asking about how do you make sure the tests are accurate? I think the crucial question here Gloria, is about health and safety. So when you think about social distancing and the ability to help people do it effectively, and you know, New Yorkers have been amazing, but obviously space is something we are all challenged by here in general, even when we're not doing social distancing. It stands to reason, the first concern from a health and safety perspective is where are the most people going to be? And how do we help address that? And of course, the warm weather coming on. And this is something we've talked a lot about with the City Council that the warm weather is going to change the dynamic. It's going to make it more challenging. So the notion of going where the people will be, which we know will be a lot of the places they'll be attracted to, we're already seeing that on a few nice days we've had. That's about maximizing the impact to protect people, to give the most people the most opportunity to socially distance. Again, there'll be a focus on making sure we can do it the right way and enforce it. And there is an efficiency to focusing on the places we're already doing a lot of enforcement and just building them out more, if you will. And as I said, there's going to be a real focus on the communities that have been hardest hit. Every community in New York City has some kind of place for recreation. It's by no means even an equal, but every place has some places and folks do congregate all over the city, every kind of community, in those places. So it makes sense to focus there. I think as we think about expanding outward, it'll all come back to where can we find those local partnerships that we can trust to make sure that people are safe? Again, different from the Oakland model, which was I think a more honor system kind of model. As I said, we want something more backed up by a structure and by monitoring and then by enforcement when it's needed. But we can do that in a number of communities obviously, so that'll be an option as well. But I think that the first concern should be to think about where the most people are going to be, how quickly they are going to be there, and try and get there first. And that's around the parks. But we'll do these other pieces as well. We're talking about a substantial amount of space that'll be addressed. And we'll work with the Council on those priorities for sure. Let me turn to the doctors on how you make sure the self-swab tests is done accurately. Mitch, you want to start?

President Katz: Yes, sir. Thank you. At least in the beginning we will not be asking people to go into a separate room. What we'll be doing is setting it up so that they are looking into a mirror and the health care worker is behind them, thereby protected from the health care worker being sneezed that or coughed on, but they'll be able to observe in the mirror and help to instruct the person on how to do it. We may be using for health care workers who need to be tested and who are therefore very familiar with the procedure, we may allow them to go into a separate room. And as you keep saying, as we learn more and more about these diseases and these technologies, we may be able to liberalize it. But I think in the beginning it is appropriate that a health care worker be observing it. But way less risk to that health care worker.

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, I'll just build on what Dr. Katz said and if Dr. Daskalakis wants to weigh in. I would say that Gloria, there are other situations where we work with patients for them to do self-collection. So, for example, in our Chelsea clinic, we have a clinic where patients can self-collect samples to do testing for sexually transmitted infections. We provide patient education materials that easily walk them through step by step, how to conduct the self [inaudible] collection to make sure that we have samples that we can test accurately.

Mayor: Good. Okay.

Moderator: Next is Nolan from the Post.

Question: Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Nolan. How you doing?

Question: I'm all right. How are you?

Mayor: Good man.

Question: I have a couple of questions on two separate topics. First of which is I was wondering how your own personal experiences in the park changed your mind or decision making when it came to opening streets around parks? I know when I've been riding my bike on the weekends, especially along [inaudible], the streets and the sidewalks have all been packed with people. I'm wondering how your experiences in the parks shaped any change in decision that you made? And secondly, you’ve repeatedly talked about the importance of testing throughout the entirety of this crisis. The New Yorker published a story yesterday that said that in early March, your broader proposal to test flu swabs that had already been taken to see if they contained coronavirus, I'm wondering if you can comment on that story and why it took your administration according to the story, the better part of three weeks to okay that proposal?

Mayor: So, on the first question Nolan, I've been watching carefully as I've gone around the city and tried to always check to make sure that I was watching for how much people are distancing. As we told people, it's important to use face coverings, how much people are using them, you know, all these different realities, how much people appeared to be out versus you know, different points. And that's part of why I've been praising New Yorkers throughout, I've just been really moved and impressed by what I've seen has been so consistent. How much effort people are going to, to distance and how much adherence there is to the face coverings. There's more to do on that front, but still it's pretty remarkable. And when you think about the places I've gone, when I've gone to different public hospitals or voluntary hospitals, I was at RUMC on Staten Island, Kings County Hospital, Bellevue, Elmhurst, Lincoln, you know, looking around the neighborhoods as I was there.

My own – you're right, I've kept an eye out whenever I've been in a park. I've been in several different parks, getting a sense of that, talking to our different commissioners – but, you know, Commissioner Shea has been particularly focused on this issue of going out and seeing for himself places like Central Park, Riverside Park, Hudson River Park, but talking to all of his commands about what they're seeing. And I think it became clearer and clearer that the parks were filling up in nice weather, but people are still doing a pretty admirable job of keeping distance. When you saw folks together it tended to be people who were family groups or people obviously were in relationships under the same roof by and large. So, the impulse that people were living by was really good, but the question has been coming out more and more, it's going to get warmer.

And we've all been having these constant conversations. When it gets warmer, what's it going to look like, and what new stresses and strains is that going to create? And you know, that's where a lot of the energy came from, to think about what can we do around the parks and particularly to expand them out, if you will. And certainly, the City Council had been thinking a lot of the same things and it was a good consensus. So yes, everything I saw in parks but beyond made me feel we had to help people continue to be able to socially distance. And that a lot of the nexus would be around the parks as it got warmer.

On the question of the New Yorker piece, I have not read the piece. What I've had summarized to me doesn't make sense to me. So, I'll look at it and I can speak about it in more detail. Whenever we've heard of any opportunity to get more information and I remember these conversations vividly, we wanted to maximize anything that would bring us more information on what was going on and anything that would help us reach more people to help them know their health status. So, I'll give you a more thorough answer after I've read it, but from what I've heard so far, it does not bear a resemblance to what I remember. 

Moderator: We have time for two more. Next is Aundrea from CBS.

Question: Hi, good morning. My question is pertaining to the task forces that you announced yesterday. Will the City not consider or delay reopening until those task forces come back with recommendations in June? And to that end, Mr. Mayor, you campaigned on a platform to address inequalities in the city. Are you now using these committees and task forces to make up what you haven't been able to accomplish during your tenure?

Mayor: So, on the first part, no, the reopening will move as quickly as is safe and healthy obviously, based on the indicators and deliberatively. And we're going to be very, very transparent about what can happen in each phase so long as we keep making progress. It’s just a good incentive for every one of us to keep doing the things we're doing and keep showing the discipline that New Yorkers have shown. So, no, these groups will come forward immediately to work on both issues of the immediate restart and the bigger recovery. I've said with those sector specific groups, for example, we'll have one for small business, we'll have one for larger businesses – we're going to start meeting with them right away because we need their input as we're figuring out restarting plans, obviously want to hear from the people who will be most effective and the people who know their businesses best and their employees best. Think about the fact that May is our first chance to even begin any kind of restart, that will depend on the value – the indicators going in the right direction and it will require, you know, careful smart efforts. And then you test them, Aundrea, you know, you do some relaxing say of a particular rule and you watch the impact of it. Is it working, is it enforceable? 

So that's all going to play out starting in May. These groups are going to be meeting in a matter of days to give us initial input and then they'll keep giving us input throughout. That June 1st initial roadmap that I'm expecting from the Fair Recovery Task Force is to set some parameters on how we're going to go through a bigger recovery process and do it in a way that actually helps us address some of the real disparities we've experienced and have a smart and effective recovery that reaches all. So, we'll get down on June 1st, you know, we're clearly not going to be all recovered by June 1st so that will be more than timely. So, no, none of this slows down anything the whole rest of the government will be doing. It augments and advises and gives us more perspective. 

To your other question – no, I'd say the reality is six years we've been fighting inequality and in many ways that have been profound. I mean hundreds of thousands of people came out of poverty as a result of these initiatives and obviously now many, many hundreds of thousands of kids got pre-K and I could go through a whole list of things that have happened that have changed the lives of New Yorkers. No question that that was the right direction. Also, no question that didn't solve inequality. No one said that that's enough to solve the fundamental problem. We just have to keep fighting. We have to keep going deeper. Now, I think this moment is a transformational moment. The first and foremost is to protect the health and safety of all New Yorkers and to rebuild an economy so everyone could get back to work. But remember that comparison, I say it with the deepest humility, Aundrea, that this city was in another crisis, you know, 80 years ago that really paralleled some of what we're going through now. And New Yorkers led the way. And instead of saying, we're going to repeat what we had before, including the mistakes we had before, they were devoted, led by giants like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia, they were devoted to bringing us back, but making our society better and fairer at the same time. That's what I aspire to start. I've only got 20 months, but in those 20 months we're going to take some very big steps in that direction and then leave the city a clear, bigger road map of where we go from here. And I believe these actions can take another big bite out of inequality and move us forward.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Allen from 1010 Wins.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing? 

Mayor: Good, Allen, how are you? 

Question: I'm fine [inaudible] for me. The experience needed for those 1,000 contact tracers the City is hiring and what does it pay? And then the second one, we have groceries, pharmacies, essential businesses have been open now for some time with the new standard, the mask, the gloves, the social distancing – when do you see other businesses opening with the same protocol? It seems that maybe there are other businesses that could open right now with the right precautions.

Mayor: Let me do the second one first. Allen, I would be careful about that. The – and I think again, there's a bit of a tale of two cities going on here in this country. The places that seem to be putting, you know, economics ahead of human lives, and then those of us who are trying to focus on the health and safety of people first, and then build out our economic restart from there. If we're not making decisions based on health care indicators, there's something wrong. If we're not making sure that, like I said, that sort of foothold idea, if you're climbing a mountain or something, and you get your foothold and make sure it's secure before you go up to the next one. I mean, right now we're still very much in the throes of this. It is better than a few weeks ago, but we're very much in the throes of it and, you know, we're not going to make a sudden move that sets us back. So, when you talk about, you know, what could you reopen safely? We want to be very smart about that because imagine for a moment, you know, you start to reopen a lot of stuff and people start to get looser and they don't do as much social distancing and they don't wear as many face coverings. Now the disease starts to spread again and here comes that boomerang. We can't have that. We have to believe that when we have that jump-off moment, it's one, we've really seen the indicators go down; two, that handoff I talked about, to the testing and tracing – remember the testing and tracing is like an offense. It's like a fight back against the disease because you're finding people proactively, identifying who has it, and then tracing the people in their life and getting them testing, and everyone who needs isolation gets it.

That apparatus is being built right now. That's going to empower us if the indicators are with us to open up more because we’re pushing back to disease constantly through that effort. So, when you get to that kind of point, yeah, you can say here's some places we can start to open up. And, yes, as you said with face coverings, with gloves, in some cases, whatever it might be, with distancing. But I wouldn't suggest that just those precautions solve the underlying problem. I think we have to make progress on the root cause here and then start to open up slowly but surely. And the better we do, the faster we open up, the more we open up.

On the question of that contact tracers. And I don't know if there's someone on the phone of our doctors who can answer right away, pay levels and things like the questions Allen asked. If – hold on, I've been handed a note. I guess I can answer this because I've been handed a note. Thank you, Freddi. So, the pay – the annualized pay would be in the $55,000 to $65,000 range. So, we're talking about folks who have some kind of health care background and can come on board and that is the range. But we'll get more details out unless one of the other doctors can speak to any of the other specifics of Allen's question. What I can say is we're hiring right away and the details would be online at the Fund for Public Health website – unless one of the other doctors has something to add. Let me give them that chance. Okay, so Allen, that's some initial information, but we will get more to you today and we'll put it up online today so everyone can see it. 

Okay. Everyone, look, as we conclude, I do want to say a very pleasant thing to have a good Monday morning and we're having a good Monday morning. We're taking a big step forward here with testing. The fact that we can do testing now in a simpler, faster way is going to improve everything. It's going to allow us to fight back better and faster. It's going to protect our health care workers more. It's going to be a better experience for everyone that gets tested too – not a minor matter. That's a really good thing. I spoke to some of the folks online at the Morrisania clinic in the South Bronx on Saturday morning and you're not surprised to hear they were anxious. They were worried. They were worried for themselves. They were worried for their families. The test was going to be a moment of clarity and definition and the test was going to tell them something. And I talked to the health care workers. They were outstanding. I want to thank everyone at the Morrisania clinic. They really, really impressed me. What they said is you know people – of course they want answers and they want to know what to do next especially if you test positive. How do you stay safe? How do you keep your family safe? How do you isolate? If you test negative, you still have to take precautions. So, the fact is anytime we can make that simpler, people are going through a lot and they're worried that they're looking for answers. If we can make it a simpler process, a better process, more comfortable process. That's a good thing unto itself.

But imagine now the ability to get a lot more tests done, simpler, less danger to our health care workers, thank God, and something that allows us to move forward without being dependent on some of the sources we used to be dependent on. Again, that does not mean we'd no longer need the federal government. We do because we still need the lab capacity and, again, to the labs – help us out, this test is going to make everyone's life better. Join us in that effort. To the federal government, work to make sure the labs are doing that work to make sure we have all the supplies we need at those labs. We expand lab capacity. Testing, testing, testing. When we can do this truly on a bigger level all the time, that's when we're going to be able to beat back this disease even more. So, a good step in the right direction today and a lot more to come in the month of May.

Thanks, everyone.

2020-04-28 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. There's a story that needs to be told about what's happened in these last couple of months with our schools. We all know the basics of the story. We all know that the greatest school system in the country, 1.1 million kids in the face of a pandemic had to be closed. We all know that that asked of everyone an extraordinary challenge, something literally unheard of in the history of New York City or even this entire country to somehow create something new. To create an online learning approach again for over a million kids with very little time to prepare without all the advantages that you'd want if you're going to try such a massive endeavor. If I had said to you, hey, we're going to provide online learning to 1.1 million kids. If I had asked a panel of experts, how much time would you like to prepare for that? I bet they were said, oh give us a year, give us two years, we'll have something great for you. We had precisely a week in which to prepare educators, many of whom had never attempted an approach like this, but all of whom embraced it with tremendous energy and love for the kids they serve. That's why people become educators to begin with, and I want people to understand that. Known a lot of teachers, a lot of principals, a lot of educators. This is the subject matter I've put my heart and soul into over decades, and my kids went to New York City public schools the whole way through and they got a great education from incredibly devoted educators. What was clear to me throughout was people, people don't go into this field because it's a way to make a quick buck I assure you.

People who become educators do it because they love kids, they care about them, they want to help them, they want to build their future. There's an incredible sense of satisfaction when you help a child to realize their potential. And I want you to remember something. I've talked to so many people, I bet you know people in your own life that have had this experience, maybe you yourself. How many people do you know, maybe things weren't so great for them when they were a kid. Maybe they weren't sure what was going to happen. Maybe they didn't have a lot of sense of goal, but one teacher, one principal, one educator gave them that hope, that confidence, that sense of their own self-worth. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a story where it was one teacher started a young person on a very different road. And so many of the people we depend on right now in the middle of this crisis can look back to that one teacher, or maybe it was a group of teachers in their school who made all the difference. Now we're asking those very same people to achieve that same inspiration, have that same impact, but not be in the same classroom with the kids they serve, imagine how difficult that is.

Now, our teachers are tough. Our teachers are strong. The educators in New York City don't shirk from a challenge, and they're used to dealing with some of the toughest conditions in America. So, when told you have a whole week to get ready and you're going to have to figure it out as you go along, they said, we're ready, let's do it. And it's been inspiring to watch them. It's been inspiring to watch the parents, many of whom again had no experience trying to figure out how to support their kids with online learning, but they've put their heart and soul into it, out of love of their children. How about the kids themselves? Let's note the heroism in our young people who are cooped up going through so much, but they've applied themselves to online learning too. There's a big story to be told here about just how good the New York City public schools are, just how good our families are, our educators, our kids. And today we want to talk about how we move forward over the course of this school year and beyond, and how we prepare for next year. And I've already said, next year is going have to be the greatest school year in the history of New York City. I'm not saying that as a flourish of words. I'm saying that because that has to be a sense of mission. We're going to have to do, starting in September, things we've never done before. We're going to have to help kids come into the year with an incredible sense of inspiration, incredible desire to make up for any loss ground, but also to overcome the pain they've been through. I have absolute faith in our educators and the leadership of our Department of Education, and you'll hear from Chancellor Carranza today. I have absolute faith that we will achieve that mission, but I want to set that bar high right now. Say that's going to have to be kind of a historic achievement, what we have to do this coming school year, but I know we're up to it.

Now, everyone, everyone who serves our kids, principals, teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, the folks who work in food service, the crossing guards, the custodians, everybody who makes up the school community, there's so many more. Everyone's feeling this moment. Everyone's devoted to our kids, but everyone has that sense. Our kids are going through a lot right now, and I want to just make sure we're all sensitive to them, we're all thinking about them. Look, I think all of us can take ourselves back to when we were kids, especially those really confusing middle school years, all the challenges of high school. I think every high school student kind of has a self-doubt, fear about the future, anxiety, not knowing if they're going to fit in, not knowing if they're going to succeed. Loving all the good things about being young, but with that constant anxiety. Now imagine you take that, and you overlay a pandemic. That creates so much more fear and confusion and anxiety about the future.

I often reflect upon the experience I've had as a parent, and what my kids went through and now what I even see from them as 20 somethings. This generation came up with a lot, even before this pandemic. The kids who experienced the great recession and the aftermath. There the kids who growing up in the shadow of global warming, they're a tough generation. They remind me of what my older relatives used to tell me about that experience they had grown up in the depression. There's something that I see in this generation too, and I wished they hadn't gone through all this before the pandemic, and I wish they weren't going through everything they're experiencing in the pandemic, but they are, and it's hurting them. It's in some cases traumatizing them. Some kids have already seen so much just in the last weeks, the losses in their own family, in their own schools. They're tough kids, New York City kids, and they're going to find a way through, but we have to be there for them. We really have to understand how much they've experienced, how much pain they're going through.

Our job is to help them, help them with the mental health support and really that effort that all educators do, but it's going to have to be even greater now to raise up their self-esteem for the moments ahead, for the tough times ahead. But what is inspiring to me is even with that tough, tough backdrop, the fact that we have seen our educators rise to this occasion gives me a lot of hope. You know, when I talked about the online learning and everything we've had to create in these last weeks, this kind of gives definition to that analogy that's often used when they say building a plane while it's gone down the runway. This is the ultimate example of that. But the plane has been being built week after week, more and more online learning working better and better, and the incredible adaptability of young people to figure out how to connect with it, and make something of it. We're seeing it and it's given me a lot of hope, but we also know we have to respond to this moment, be smart about it, be flexible about it, understand the changes that are going on and how we deal with them. And that's why today we're announcing the new grading policy, because we want to make sure the grading policy we use now fits the moment we're in now, and the reality of our kids, our parents, our educators now.

So, the Chancellor and his team worked with parents, teachers, elected officials, advocates, listened to all different viewpoints. We've had a series of conversations confirming the direction of this policy, and it came to the notion of what we owe our kids at this moment. First of all, flexibility. This is literally a once in a century crisis, and the pain its inflicting on children and families has to be taken into account. There has to be a sense of flexibility in a moment like that, but there also has to be a reminder of our ultimate responsibility to our kids to prepare them for the future, to make them as strong as they can be, to give them the best education we can. This is a moment, a horrible moment, a moment we'll remember all our lives, but remember our kids have decades and decades ahead. We have to prepare them for that, so we have to continue to have high expectations for them. We have to continue to take an approach that helps them be their best. That work continues, and it will even more going into the next school year. We have to do both. We have to understand the moment, be flexible about the moment, but also hold those high expectations. If we didn't do both, we would be doing a disservice to our children.

So, the policy is built with some important foundations. First of all, we must help our seniors graduate, any senior who can graduate, we're going to help them get there. We have to keep our kids engaged. We have to keep improving distance learning, but also have them stick with it all the way up to the next school year to the maximum extent possible. We have to recognize that some kids are having a tougher time, because there's crisis emotionally and academically, we have to help them catch up and use all the time between now and the next school year to do it. So, that piece, that question of will kids be able to catch up? But that's not in the minds of a lot of families. A lot of parents are very worried about that, so let's talk about that first, because that's so important to address. Here's the bottom line, every student is going to get the help they need. The school year, as we know it is so different now because everything's virtual, so that also means we don't have to see the same boundaries we often did in the past. We're going to help students all the way through the spring, through the summer if they need it into the fall. Some kids will not need a lot of help, some kids will need a whole lot of help, some kids in between, but whatever it is, we're going to find ways to continue education for kids who need it. Those who need the most support are going to get the most help, obviously, the seniors need to graduate and they're having trouble that's our first priority, but there's also going to be a lot of kids in eighth grade getting ready to go to high school, we want them to be ready. Anyone, any child who needs that extra help, we have not just May and June, we have July and August as well we're going to use them to the maximum extent— possible.

So, let's talk about the different grade levels and grades K to five and this is such a crucial time. Obviously, I'm a big believer in 3-K and pre-K, but when we look at the times when we really start traditionally to grade kids, all of this from 3-K, pre-K, K-to-five has all the foundation building of course. So, we want to take advantage every day and we want to give clear direction to our kids. So, in light of the moment we're in now, instead of traditional grades, there'll be two grading standards for kids grade to five, either they are meeting the standards or they need improvement very simple, straightforward. But even kids need improvement, we're going to stick with them because we know we can get them to the point where they meet those standards. The Chancellor will talk about more detail, but it will be an evaluation based on a lot of the same things that we normally would, school projects, assignments, writing entries, the same kind of things we would do in person a lot of that can be done online as well. And any child who we need more time with, we're going to find ways to use the summer, we don't know what the summer holds this is something I'll keep saying to you, there's things we do not know yet. We do know that we can use online learning all the time, so we'll have options for the summer for the kids who need that extra help. Middle school, well, middle school is an incredibly difficult time in general when there is no pandemic, middle school is a tough time, every parent out there of a middle school child, you know what I'm talking about. So, we want to make sure we reflect that reality and we work with those kids one-on-one, get them where they need to be. Stand the grades there again, instead of the traditional grades, we'll have three meet standards, needs improvement and course in progress, that's for a young person who particularly needs more time to finish the schoolwork before them.

Again, not the same as in-person classroom instruction, but a lot of similarities there's still class discussions that happen online. There's still presentations and assignments, they're still the kinds of tests that a teacher gives to their own classroom. All of that continues in one form or another and that can be the basis for the evaluation. We're going to make sure those kids who go through so much get the help they need. We can carry that through the summer, we can carry that into the new school year in terms of knowing kids who might need extra help when everyone does come back together as well.

High school, well again, time of so much hope, but so much confusion and anxiety and regular times even more now kids are thinking about future, that's what high school kids do one eye to the future at all times. So, the big question now is, you know, will the future happen on time? And the answer is yes. We're going to work with all of our high school kids, keep things moving forward but with rigor, with real focus on quality and with support. So, in the high schools we'll use the existing grade scales, it's the most pertinent level to continue the grading scales that we've had previously. The same range of things you're graded on the written assignments to turn papers, exams, the presentations, all that continues online. Teachers will be watching to see if young people have gotten where they need to go. But we want to offer an option, again, the flexibility given the moment. Any high school student that's earned credit by completing a course, traditionally they would get a grade, one of the traditional grading structures and that will go into their grade point average and that would obviously have a lot to say about their future, including things like college admission. In this environment, we're giving young people an option in a high school level that given the disruption that's occurred has been different for each student. They have the option, if they have completed a course, they're going to get the credit, but they have the option to choose and this is for the, again, this half of the school year, not for the previous grading that happened earlier in the school year, but for this half of the school year, they can choose to have a passing grade rather than a specific grade in the traditional structure. If that's what they think makes more sense and they have completed the coursework and they have earned the credit, they have that option rather than something that they think might adversely affect their GPA because of aberrant circumstances. That's a choice for each young person and if they need more time, there'll be a course in progress designation that allows them to keep working on that course into the summer even beyond if they need.

For the seniors, of course the focus is on graduation and traditionally there's been June graduation, but also a lot of seniors have finished in August, so we have more than one way to succeed here. We just want to make sure that every senior can graduate does and they'll get the most intense support of any students in our school system. So, that gives you a sense of what we're trying to achieve, we're keeping standards in place, we're keeping a log continuity, we're adding flexibility for this crisis. And our educators are smart, they're going to use a word we normally associate with business, but I've seen this with educators they're entrepreneurial they're creative. They'll figure out what makes sense for their classroom so long as they have clear standards to work from and these will be consistent standards throughout the school system. Now, I just want to speak for a moment to our high school seniors and to their parents, their families. Wasn't that long ago, I've got a 25-year-old and a 22-year-old, so it wasn't that long ago that I was going through with my kids senior year in high school – what a powerful time. Again, a lot of confusion, a lot of doubt, but also a lot of hope and a moment of profound importance to the future, we're going to be there with you every step of the way. Can't do it some of the ways we used to do it, but we're going to be there for you, we need to foster your future.

You are literally the future of New York City, you're our hope, we're going to be there for you and we need to celebrate you. This disruption has been so intense, but that does not take away our belief in you and our sense of the human moment. This moment is so special to you as you approach graduation, we don't want you to lose that. So, every school will have its own approach and every school will look for the opportunity to celebrate you for sure, and right now that all means virtual, but maybe down the line, maybe we'll get lucky enough that some gatherings can start to occur, but here's what I will guarantee you. We're going to do one big citywide virtual graduation ceremony. We're going to do one big celebration of New York City's high school seniors, we're going to make it something very special. You may not have the traditional ceremony that you were looking forward to, we're going to give you something you will remember for the rest of your life and you will cherish. We're going to bring together some very special guests to celebrate you, to salute you the way you stuck with it, not just in the years before, but particularly during this crisis. And you know what's wonderful, some of the people who will be the special stars of this gathering will be graduates themselves of the New York City public schools. That's an extraordinary roster of talented people who make an amazing impact, not just on this City, but on the nation and the whole world. They're going to celebrate you and remind you of the greatness of the students who come out of the New York City public schools. You're going to have a day of inspiration and support and celebration, no matter what this pandemic has thrown at us. We'll have details announced in the weeks ahead, but expect it to be something very special, very memorable, and all about appreciation for you and family members. Parents, that means you too, because we all know God bless our kids in the hard work they do, but every kid gets there because of the love and support of their family. So, we're going to celebrate the parents and the family members as well.

Now, before I conclude on schools, a big question has come up throughout last few weeks – how could we make sure that every kid got what they needed? The technology they needed to be able to participate in online learning we were honest in the beginning, it wasn't in place. Kids didn't all have it, that's part of the digital divide, it's not good, it's not acceptable it's something we need to fight. And I've talked about this horrible crisis also being a moment where we get to learn what's wrong that needs to be fixed and we will fix it going forward. But in the middle of this pain, there's been a chance to— really deal a blow to the digital divide, really fight back against that divide and put technology in the hands of lots of kids who have never had it. And so, the iPad deliveries, the latest best iPads delivered directly to the homes of so many kids who didn't have access before. We said that for every single child who we knew needed one, they would get that delivery by the end of April and that is precisely what is happening. Right now, 247,000 iPads either arrived at the homes of the students or in the process of being shipped to them as we speak – 247,000. That is many more students – and Chancellor, you'll remind us of the exact number of students in the Houston school system, for example, but that's one of the places that the number of kids getting iPads in New York City through this initiative over the last few weeks is more than there are total students in the Houston school system. It's been a vast undertaking and it had to be created very, very rapidly to reach all these kids in time – it’s happening. Now, we had an order for a bigger supply. That means there's some kids that still have not come forward and families not come forward and I'm saying that with empathy. I want you to come forward. If you for any reason or if anyone in your life, anybody watching, listening, anybody in your life, a kid who needs that iPad, doesn't have that technology at home, needs that access and still hasn't asked for it - all you got to do is pick up the phone and call 3-1-1 or you can go to schools.nyc.gov and we can ship it, have it to you in a matter of days. So, we know there's still more kids who need them. We want to find those kids, we want to get them to them and until the, you know, any, any child who still needs it, we're going to serve. Even if they call today, tomorrow, a week from now, we're going to get it to them. But what I'm so proud of our DOE team and all the folks who helped us in the private sector is we're approaching a quarter million kids who have gotten iPads in a matter of weeks and that's tremendous with the internet service attached. This is how you fight the digital divide and this is going to supercharge the online learning in the months ahead.

Let me go to a few other topics, well one other topic and then I want to go to our daily indicators. So small businesses, I have talked to so many people, small business owners and people who love their neighborhood small businesses and there are, there's so much concern for our small businesses right now. You know, it's going to be hard for everyone to make it through so we can restart our economy and I'm sure bigger businesses are deeply challenged as well, but the brunt is being born by small business. They don't have the reserves and the big apparatus and all the experts that they hire to help them navigate this. Small business has taken on a chin and we need to help them every step of the way. Now look, I've said from the beginning that the city put together a loan and grant program almost $50 million; that's being exhausted immediately. That's what we could do, but what we really needed was intensive federal support and, and some has really come in the previous stimulus and in the action taken in the last few days in Washington as well; that's a good thing. We were all very distressed to see a lot of that money siphoned off by big businesses and some of that is now being returned so it can go to small and medium sized businesses who really need it. But what we saw is as good as it is that the federal government actually is stepping up and putting real money out there for small, medium sized businesses, the way it's being done is creating a lot of problems. First, that those big businesses tried to usurp it, but second, it's a first-come, first-serve basis and some businesses are in much better position to take advantage of it than others. And the ones that need it the most, the ones that have the fewest resources actually are getting boxed out; we cannot let that happen. So, the Paycheck Protection Program – that money – we saw how quickly it was used up the first time around. Now there's another round; came out of what was referred to as stimulus 3.5 and the program is replenished and with serious money, $310 billion. And there's two particular heroes in this effort, one, our own Senator Chuck Schumer, who led the way and fought intensely on the Senate side and then on the House side, the Chair of the Small Business Committee for the House of Representatives for the whole nation, is New York City's own, Congressmember Nydia Velázquez. And she fought not only for all that money and to push back the usurping by big business and make sure it was reserved for the businesses that need it, but she also made sure that the process was much fairer to community based businesses, to businesses that fuel resources, to businesses that don't use big banks, but use community credit unions and other sources of financing, to businesses in communities of color that have for a long time been denied access to credit. Senator Schumer, Congressmember Velázquez, really pushed to change this program to make it more about every day small businesses and make it more fair for all. Now, everyone out there who is a small business owner or close to a small business owner, it's time to get you in the game and get you the support. You deserve this money. You've been hit so hard. We need to help you survive. So, we want to make sure you get access to this federal money. It's first come first serve, so you have to apply immediately and the simple way to apply is the federal government website, SBA, “small business administration,” sba.gov, sba.gov that's where you apply. The application is certainly not the easiest in the world, but you got to do it; you’ve got to do it quickly. Now, we're hearing from a lot of small businesses that it’s tough to navigate that application. We're today putting together an initiative to help you immediately. In the next few hours, you'll be able to call 3-1-1 and get connected to sources of help; experts who can help you navigate the application. This is something we're putting together quickly as we see this need. We're hearing it so deeply from small businesses. So we're going to get you some help, some facilitation. But the most important thing is to immediately start working on the application. So, if you haven't yet small business owners, go to sba.gov, please immediately. Get that application, get ready, the information you need and if you need some special help, call 3-1-1 this afternoon and beyond and we'll be able to help you out.

Okay, it's time for our daily indicators and again, what we've seen is over the whole course of almost two weeks now; definite and serious progress, not the progress we ideally want, which is for all the indicators to go down steadily and in the same direction, but clearly progress and that's getting us closer to the day when we can start to make some of the moves to open things up. But I've said it before, I'll keep saying it – we're going to be cautious, we're going to be careful, we’re [inaudible] governed. We will be governed by the facts and the facts have to get consistent for us to make some of those moves and we're going to be very smart and cautious when we do it. Today a good day, not a perfectly good day, but definitely a good day. Indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID - that went down from 122 to 112. Daily, excuse me, indicator two, daily number of people in ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19 that went down from 766 to 745. Indicator three, percentage of people tested positive for COVID-19 citywide – that went down 29 percent to 27 percent. The only category went up is in some ways the toughest category, the testing at the public health lab of some of the folks dealing with the most illness - that went up, but only by one percent – that's a good sign – from 55 percent to 56 percent. So, a very strong day – further evidence that what you all are doing is working, keep doing the social distancing, keep doing the shelter-in-place, stay at home, it's working. We're getting closer and closer to those days when we see steady downward trend every single day and that's what we need.

So, I'm going to just say one more thing to the kids in New York City and then a few words in Spanish and I'm going to turn to our Chancellor. So, to every kid out there, every student, every young person, if you feel like you're going through a lot right now, guess what? We understand that you are; you're going through a hell of a lot. I feel bad for you, I do, because you're being asked to shoulder a burden that honestly, young people haven't been asked to shoulder in a long, long time. You're being asked to make sense of this crisis in your own lives while going through everything else you go through as young people; it's a lot. Sometimes parents and family members you think may not understand everything you're going through. I'm sure that's true on one level, but we all try with all our might to appreciate everything you're grappling with and we will be there for you. The times we're living in, they're literally unprecedented. There's nothing like this we can find a parallel for – certainly not in our memory – but what we know is we have to support you. The love we all feel for you has to come out as support and understanding. We have to express it as a real empathy for what you are going through. And so, we're going to be there with you every step of the way. I have faith in you, I really do. I have spent the last six years going to New York City public schools, it's literally the most inspiring thing I do as part of my job as Mayor is meet all of you and see how extraordinary you are. There's a bright, bright future ahead. We're going to have to fight our way through these months ahead, but there is a bright future ahead and it is because of you. So, thank you.

Few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, I have to say one of the things that people may not remember well is at the time that I hired Richard Carranza to lead the largest school system in the country, he had just been a leader in Houston in the valiant, extraordinary effort to bring that city and that school system back after Hurricane Harvey. Again, an unprecedented disaster that afflicted one of the nation's biggest and greatest cities. And then, as superintendent of the Houston schools, Richard Carranza was the man who had to innovate a whole new approach and speed up the process of bringing back education in a place that had been put back on its heels deeply. I was so impressed when I spoke to him about those tough days he went through, and everyone in Houston went through, because he had this clear spirit, this can-do attitude, this belief that any challenge could be overcome. It was unmistakable and it gave me a lot of hope thinking about what he would do as our chance or Lord knows, I never expected him and everyone at the Department of Education to have to deal with a pandemic, but how telling that this man had already brought his school system back previously in another place from another disaster and it was in his DNA to do so. So, Chancellor, what you have done, what your team has done has been pretty miraculous. And I have great faith that we're going to have a strong spring, a strong summer and an outstanding, absolutely outstanding next school year with your leadership.

Chancellor Richard Carranza –

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Mr. Mayor, thank you very much. I am humbled to be here and honored to be here. And I want to echo everything that you said about our students, about our teachers, our principals and our families. But before I say anything else, I want to give – you know, I've spent every week visiting our regional enrichment centers and seeing heroes in action – our school safety agents, our student nutrition workers, our teachers, our administrators – really tending to the children are of our first responders and our medical personnel in a very caring, loving and trauma-informed way. It's been nothing short of miraculous. But I do want to take a moment to thank the teachers who are teaching, the administrators that are supervising and clearing the way and clearing the obstacles for teachers to be able to do what they do, and our parents at home. I have seen countless examples of incredibly innovative and enriching activities that our teachers are putting forward for our students. I've seen teachers engaging every single day with their students, finding their students, making sure they're engaged. So, I want to say to all the teachers out there and all the principals, thank you. One of the fallacies that we often hear is that we've been out of school for a number of weeks. Well, I want to be very clear that school has been in session. We have never stopped being in session. What has changed is the manner in which we've engaged with our students. Instead of face to face, in-person, we are doing it remotely, which is why we say this is remote learning. So, to all of our teachers and administrators that are on the front lines, I want to say thank you to you as well. You also are the heroes that are continuing to keep our students engaged. So, thank you.

What we're announcing today is a result of a tremendous amount of collaboration and discussion. And on this particular topic, the opinions and ideas are vast and wide. On one end, there is the notion that nothing should change, we should continue to have everything as it was prior to COVID-19, that accountability is important; on the other end is, listen, it's a traumatic event, we've never gone through this, so everybody passes, everybody gets an A, everybody just moves forward – and everything in between. We've heard all of those comments, but, at the end of the day, Mr. Mayor, you and I have the responsibility. You and I have the accountability of having a policy that will not inadvertently harm students when they decide to do the next thing in their careers, whether it's going to college, whether it's a scholarship, whether it's a career. So, we have to craft the policy that recognizes the trauma, that recognizes the voice, that recognizes what our students and our community have been through, yet still provides for a path forward for our students, given the fact that we've never stopped being in session. So, the policy we were introducing takes into account all the feedback that we received. We've heard from students, parents, principals, teachers, we've heard from professors, we've heard from elected officials. We've taken all of that input into consideration with a policy, but we've remained focused on keeping our students learning well, taking this into account in this new reality. Mr. Mayor, as you said, we've developed a policy that keeps our students on track, especially our seniors who are about to graduate. And I want to thank you for the commitment of this city to recognize and celebrate our seniors. We will celebrate you. It may not be in the manner that you thought and we know that there are a number of schools that are thinking about what they're going to do as well, we're going to support them as well, but we want to make sure that you know we're proud of you. This policy also accounts for the extra support that students are going to need and helps us to identify those students that are going to need those extra supports. I fully stand behind this policy. I think it's an elegant way to thread the needle of keeping students engaged while still recognizing that our community has suffered trauma. Remember, that this is about recognizing the needs and the strengths of our students as we go forward.

This policy also recognizes that an enormous number of our students are bringing the acute trauma they've suffered that COVID-19 crisis has wrought for them, their families, and for the city. It also takes the current environment into account when assessing students and ensuring that we have a uniform equitable system across the board. The number-one thing that I've heard from every stakeholder that I've engaged with is we need something that is citywide and that is standard. It maintains our standards and require students to complete the work, but recognizes as well that we as educators, we, as a system, an educational system, must be flexible in how we go about that work. Our teachers, as you've mentioned, Mr. Mayor, are our experts in meeting students where they are and responding to differentiated levels, but they need to know and they need to have the information at their fingertips to be able to make those assessments. We're providing and we will continue to provide, but with this new policy, we will provide guidance specifically to schools immediately, and if you're a parent or guardian with questions, don't hesitate to ask. We're here to walk you through this and we're here to support you every step of the way. The extent of this public health crisis has become clear that we need to close buildings. And, as you remember, Mr. Mayor, this was a very deeply painful but necessary decision. However, through all of the ups and downs, our families and school communities have remained resolute while tackling this tremendous undertaking. As always, we know that our students can rise to the occasion, but we've already seen our educators take this on into the largest school system in America, entering our sixth week of remote learning where other school systems are starting today. So, this is kudos to our educators who have made this heavy lift. And, Mr. Mayor, I just want to clarify one data point. You asked with our iPad distribution, we have now shipped 247,000 iPads – Wi-Fi-equipped iPads – that's equivalent to the entire school system of Atlanta, Seattle, Detroit and San Francisco combined is that number – 247,000 iPads. So, we should be very proud of the work that we've done, but also understand that there's much more work to do.

Mayor: Thank you for – thank you for that update very much, Chancellor. Okay, we're going to turn to our colleagues in the media. And please remember to give me the name and the outlet of each journalist. And here we go.

Moderator: Just a quick reminder to folks that in addition to having Chancellor Carranza in the Blue Room, we also have Dr. Barbot and Commissioner Banks on the phone. Juliet from 1010 WINS is up first. Juliet?

Question: Yes. Good morning, Mr. Mayor and Chancellor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How you doing?

Question: I'm fine, thank you. So, I actually have a two-part question for you regarding the education issue. There had been about 300 parents on a Zoom meeting, I believe yesterday or last night, that were opposed to this proposal that you're making, the announcement that you're making. And they are supportive of this measure that would allow the lowest grade to be dropped so that students can still receive a grade for, you know, three-quarters of the work that they did during the year. So, that's the proposal – question number one. Number two is, how are you dealing with – will [inaudible] days exist at all for this school year? How are you working at coordinating that?

Mayor: Hey, Juliette helped me just understand that question a little bit better. What are you saying with that second part?

Question: About snow days? Are they going to exist anymore or do you account for them at all?

Mayor: I'll see if I can get that. I mean, the notion for the future certainly exists, but I think the question here has always been, you know, once you broke out – and it was horrible to have to do this, but once we broke out of the traditional model of kids going to a school building, you know, everything changed. So, you know, if we were to have physical schools the way they were, something like a snow day would be an issue, but everything like that is now been subsumed by distance learning. When we come back in the future, we'll resume the focus on education in school buildings and, you know, for next school year, the concept of school of snow days and all will exist. Hopefully we won't have the snow to go with it, but it’ll exists. But to the first point,
I'll pass to the Chancellor, but just say, remember that the work done in the first half of the school year happened and is in the books and what we're talking about really is the second half of the school year, which got disrupted very early on. The kids came back just weeks before, you know, for the – for the second half of the year, they came back just weeks before this all happened. And so, this is about really acknowledging how disruptive this all was for kids and how it makes it really hard to adjust, do what we were doing before with no modification. It was smart to add some flexibility, but that does not affect everything that was in the books previously.

Chancellor?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So, we've actually taken into consideration that particular question. It's important, as the Mayor has mentioned, to recognize that three quarters of this school year were in the books when we adjourn to remote learning. So, teachers do have an academic record of students. At the high school level, which is what I read into this question, because it's much more germane at the high school level, there is a provision which is aligned to what CUNY does, which allows students at the end of this marking period – first of all, a student won't get a final grade that is lower than any of the grades they got in any one of the marking periods this year. That's a safety net for our students. But secondly, once a student is ready for a letter grade, the student and family will have the option of either taking the letter grade or instead opting for a pass. Now, the difference is – is that if the student chooses to keep the letter grade, that gets factored into the grade point average, the GPA. But if the student opts to take a pass, then it does not impact the GPA. It just shows credit has been earned. So, it's another flexibility and flexible – flexibility point that we've built into this grading policy that, again, recognizes the trauma. It's aligned to State education department regulations and it's aligned to what CUNY does as well. So, again, trying to make sure our students are being well-served while providing the maximum amount of flexibility as possible.

Moderator: Katie from the Wall Street Journal is up next. Katie?

Question: Hey, good morning. I have a two-part question and it's focused on, you know, the students who have an alternate assessment who have school year-round, if there's any plan to update that program. And I guess it will continue remotely. And then, additionally, what is the DOE working on to provide that additional needed support for students who may need – maybe missed a lot of remote learning – whether it's in September or will they be allowed to kind of enroll in summer school when maybe they wouldn't usually have enrolled?

Mayor: And let me just preface what the Chancellor will answer to both those questions by saying we are working through the shape of summer as we speak. We’ll have more to say on that soon in terms of what summer learning options there will be. We all understand that summer and what summer's going to look like in the atmosphere of this crisis is a big open question. But what we – what is not an open question is that the DOE will have more than one contingency ready for how we’re going to support kids online at minimum. And so, I want to be very clear that, you know, when the day comes when we're going to flesh that out and show the exact nature of that, we will present it. But as we speak, different elements of a summer plan are being put together by the DOE.

Go ahead, Richard.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, really good question – questions. So, the grading policy and the flexibilities will apply to all students, including students that have alternate assessments. As we know, students that have alternate assessments have individual education plans, IEPs. So, that is being noted in their IEPs and there's outreach to parents, because parents have a voice in what that IEP looks like. That started on day-one when we went into remote learning. That continues to this day. And again, the focus here is to provide the maximum flexibility to students and to parents that recognizes traumatic events that we're currently in. It also applies to our students that are immigrant students, students that are multilingual learners. So, any subgroup of student that you can think of, our schools, our teachers, our administrators are focused on making sure that they're being served to the greatest extent possible. Just to add to what the Mayor said about summer school, there are multiple scenarios that we are modeling and working through about what summer school would look like.

Obviously, the medical advice and what it looks like in terms of this virus in the community is going to have a big role to play in what summer school can or will look like. What is absolutely clear though, is that this grading policy will give us the opportunity to identify students that need additional support, that need additional enrichment, that need additional time, and then provide them the time to be able to actually complete. The goal here is not to fail students. I can't think of any educator that would say, I want to be a teacher because I want to fail students. The goal is to have students master the subject matter. That's always been the goal. So, if some students need more time, this is a perfect opportunity to actually create that system where students get that time.

Moderator: Henry from Bloomberg is up next. Henry?

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. There's a report in Yahoo News that says that the federal government is going to support the City in a massive antibody testing program. And I'd like to know whether or not this report is accurate, and, if it is, how many tests are going to be conducted? When will it start? Who will be tested? And what's the intent of this program?

Mayor: So, Henry, there's been a number of discussions with the federal government on the question of testing, to say the least. I have had the conversation about testing with the President, and the Vice President, and a whole range of the key health officials in the federal government. So, this has been going on for weeks on one level. We are trying to figure out how we can do more testing of every kind – antibody testing, which, you know, I've been clear and our health leadership has been clear, brings some real virtues, obviously has to be done the right way and has to be done with the qualification that it isn't a perfect answer. But – and, of course, the PCR testing that will be the backbone of what we need to do with testing and tracing. And that's really the central strategy, going forward. We need federal help to do all of the above. So, we have been in real conversations about how to do that and how to expand it. My hope is we'll have something more tangible to say in the next few days. But the fact is, as with all things federal, it's been a kind of uneven situation. I'd like to get clear answers so that we can present them to the people in New York City. And I'd like to see a lot of federal support for testing here in the city. As soon as we have something that is ready to go, we're certainly going to announce it.

Moderator: Next up is Marcia from CBS-2. Marcia?

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Marcia. How are you?

Question: Good. I'd like to talk to you about the homeless on the subways. I have a multi-part question, but they're all related. The fact that you've announced this new program, are you now accepting responsibility for getting the homeless off the subways? And since the NYPD flooded the end of line station at the World Trade Center today with cops and workers, are you planning to do it at the other end of line stations? There are 38 total. I know you're focusing on 10. And I just also was wondering, since you've [inaudible] about a billion dollars out of your affordable hose housing plan over the next two years, will that adversely affect the number of homeless in the city because there'll be less places for them to live?

Mayor: Thank you, Marcia. I appreciate those questions. The last piece, I don't think – I mean, look, we're all [inaudible] that we've had the largest affordable housing program in the history of New York City. It's been an incredible success and I want to tip my cap to everyone who has been a part of it from day-one, creating such an aggressive affordable housing program and that has been consistently ahead of schedule and on budget. It's been amazing. It's sad to have to delay some of that. It's very sad, but that is the budgetary reality we're dealing with. And of all the things we had to deal with in the immediate term, that was something that we decided we would just grudgingly have to make a tough choice on, but it will continue, unquestionably Marcia, on that piece, I would say, like everything, the more affordable housing, the better off you're always going to be in terms of fighting homelessness, because the shape of homelessness today in terms of shelter homelessness is more and more, as we've talked about, it's families. It's families who found economic struggles not because mental health or substance abuse, but it was an economic problem, end up in shelter. The more affordable housing you build, the more you can address the shelter homeless reality, unquestionably. But when it comes to street homelessness, which is a painful, painful problem – a very painful and historic problem in the city, but it is a much smaller problem. It's a few thousand people. That has always been about, you know, the outreach efforts in recent years. The HOME-STAT effort, the, the Safe Havens that we've talked about a lot, those smaller places that we bring people in to try and get them off the street and keep them off the street, the supportive housing, which is affordable housing specifically for people who have mental health challenges and other challenges and need social services in the place they live. That work all continues. In fact, we announced yesterday that additional Safe Haven space and affordable housing space for homeless people is being brought online right now.

So, I would separate the two pieces, Marcia and say the pieces that are most focused on the homeless are continuing unabated. The larger reality of our affordable housing plan, some of it, unfortunately, is going to have to be delayed. But here's why I remind you, and Marcia, I know we talked about this back around the holidays, that Journey Home vision of getting street homeless people off the street, those who have been on the street a year, two years, three years, four years. We believe we can consistently get more and more of them off the street. We've seen a lot of success with the HOME-STAT initiative that now we're going to build it out. And even in this crisis, I spoke to Commissioner Banks about this in the last couple of days. Marcia, we've seen a number of street homeless, permanently homeless folks, come in and accept those Safe Haven placements. And we want to do a lot more of that. So that work does not stop now.

Now on the question of who's responsible for homelessness in the subways? It's like other questions I've been asked lately. We're all responsible. It's all of our jobs to get this done. The State runs the MTA clearly. The State has a whole lot of the pieces to the puzzle here. All the employees of the MTA who we need to help in this effort in a variety of ways. We need to be the eyes and ears, the MTA police. There's lots of pieces of the equation that are run by the State. But the City has a big piece of this too because we have the NYPD as the primary element of safety in the subways. Also, the NYPD doing more and more work in recent years on homeless outreach and teaming up with Social Services, with health care providers to do more to help homeless people get into shelter. The NYPD has been outstanding. And, of course, Social Services, all the organizations that do outreach that are part of the City's efforts, all the nonprofits. I see this as a big team effort and the joint responsibility. What we announced yesterday is more places to bring homeless folks from the subway or the street to get them off the street, out of the subway permanently. And what we announced is a vision that we need the MTA to help us with. We'll do our share. We'll devote the police resources, we'll devote the outreach workers, we'll do whatever it takes, but we need the MTA to agree to this plan.

It's a common sense plan, Marcia. Here's how it goes. We’ve got 10 key stations. They're the end points of subway lines. That's where we have a particular problem. We all know for decades there have been homeless people in the subways going from one end of a line back again, back again, all night long. That needs to stop. The way to stop that is to support those people and help them come in and accept housing, but also to disrupt the pattern. The way to disrupt the pattern is between midnight and 5:00 am, close those stations. Deep clean those stations, which is good for everyone in this moment. Have a shuttle bus that takes any customers who need to get on the subway, take some one-stop up to the next station. So literally you're talking about between midnight and 5:00 am, in a subway system that's got a small fraction of the number of strap hangers that it normally would have, so that can be done with shuttle buses. We will help get that done too. But deep clean the stations and everyone has to get out of the stations. Instead of what's happened for years and years, that a homeless person just sits there on the train or maybe gets off the train temporarily gets right back on it. Goes then the whole way back. We want to create a change where everyone gets out of the station. Our homeless outreach workers are there to engage and get people support, take them right away, if they're ready to come into a Safe Haven. NYPD is there to assist and make sure that we get the help to people they need.

This would be a game changer, Marcia. We just need the MTA to say yes. It's not hard. They just need to say yes to this innovation and we'll do our share and then some. I'm going to tell you the stations, just so everyone hears them. It's Coney Island Stillwell Avenue on the D and F, Flatbush Avenue Brooklyn College on the 2 and 5, Jamaica 179th Street on the F train, Jamaica Center, Parsons/Archer on the E, World Trade Center on the E, 96th Street Second Avenue on the Q, Pelham Bay Park on the 6, Van Cortlandt Park 242nd Street on the 1 train, Wakefield 241st Street on the 2 and 5, and Woodlawn on the 4 train. The MTA just has to say yes and we can together, do something really important to reduce the number of homeless people in the subways and get them the help they need. So asking the MTA to join us in that effort and let's get to work on it together.

Moderator: Shant from the Daily News is up next. Shant?

Question: Thank you Mr. Mayor. I gather that homelessness on the subways is just one piece of commuters’ reservations about using the subways during coronavirus. There's still a lot of concern about packing close together. I'm wondering what else you can tell New Yorkers to potentially reassure them once the subway -- once the city reopens that the subways are safe? On a completely different note, graduation traditionally being a time when seniors might indulge in pranks, what would you say to seniors who might be contemplating that and they want to blow off some steam?

Mayor: Well, Shant, obviously we were all young ones and it doesn't surprise me that that moment, it's a jubilant moment when you graduate. But I don't, maybe I'm missing some of the mood, but I don't think so. I don't get the feeling that young people are thinking about pranks right now. I think everyone's pretty sober by this moment. I've watched carefully as I've gone all over the city, talked to so many people who are deeply engaged in their communities. I'm not getting the impression so far that young people have somehow missed, what a difficult moment this is. I think they're, you know, they hate being cooped up at home. I think when they go out in parks and all, they still have a tendency to want to gather together. That's all understandable and we got to keep helping them understand for their safety and their family, that doesn't make sense. But I'm not getting the sense of pranks being on people's minds, but it's something we'll certainly keep an eye on. And I think the message would be, Hey, you know, anything that might be upsetting to people or you know, hurtful to people at this moment, people are going through a lot, it's probably not a great time for most of the things we would have thought were pranks in the past.

On the question of the subways, look, Shant, I think this is going to be a step by step thing. We're going to be real clear about these indicators that I go over, when it's time to do a little more and then a little more and a little more. But we're going to be cautious and I think that's what the people believe is right at this point to be careful and smart and really go by the numbers. Which means I don't expect a subway ridership to turn on suddenly. I expect it to be sort of slow and steady in stages. I think people are going to have to feel their way and I think some people are going to be more ready to go back to the subways. Others are going to take their time. Eventually, I believe, you know, we're New Yorkers, we're all going to come back to the subways over time. But will be in direct connection to a couple of things. How much progress we're making overall on the disease, I think will be the single biggest determinant. What is done to keep showing that the subways are being cleaned regularly and that there's a real sensitivity to the health realities, you know, and I think people just having a sense that when they weigh the options, it's the one that makes sense for them in their lives. New Yorkers are very resilient and I think at first, even some of them might be hesitant, over time the convenience of the subways, the fact it is part of our culture, we'll bring people back. But you know, I think we have to do it in stages. I think that's the smart way to go.

Moderator: Yoav from The City is up next. Yoav?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you about underground yeshivas. There's been recent reports that the efforts are more organized and not perhaps a rogue operation as initially thought. So, I wanted to ask you how you guys are investigating these complaints? And also, what the protocol is because you've heard in one case the NYPD was investigating but in another [inaudible] we heard that City Hall responded directly to someone's complaint? Just how are you guys investigating it and what's the latest you're hearing? Because initially City Hall kind of dismissed it as these kind of rogue teaching operations.

Mayor: Yeah. Yoav, I don't remember anyone dismissing any gathering, honestly. I think we were very, very clear. As you know, I've talked about publicly weeks and weeks ago I had a conference call with key Jewish leaders around the city. And there was tremendous support on that call for shutting down. And it was painful obviously for people, but for shutting down shuls, shutting down all sorts of community gatherings. And I think the leadership of the Jewish community, the rabbinical leadership have been absolutely united in saying all of that has to change. And I've seen a whole lot of adherence to that. The one we saw some specific complaints about, which was identified from the beginning as a very small number of people who were trying to create services, some in their actual synagogues, smaller synagogue, some in homes, we made very clear, I made very clear in my whole team has, that's unacceptable. And the NYPD was ready to enforce. And in a few cases had to enforce, but there wasn't much that I heard of that needed enforcement in the end.

I put the yeshivas in the exact same category and for any faith, any background, any gathering, no gatherings. We are not allowing gatherings now. So, I'm going to say it to you, Yoav and I'm going to say it to all your colleagues. Someone give me an address. We had a point the other day raised by one of your colleagues from one of the Jewish publications. And I said to him, give me an address of the problem. He gave me an address right there. We sent NYPD out to address the problem immediately and to make clear it's unacceptable. So, if anyone knows of an, I don't know of a specific address of an underground yeshiva. If anyone sees it, knows about it, tell – you can call 3-1-1, you can tell the City Hall team, you can tell the NYPD it's one common approach. It will be shut down period.

Moderator: Alex from Chalkbeat is up next. Alex?

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good. Alex, how you doing?

Question: Good. I have two questions. One is just whether you guys can explain a little bit more what you mean by in progress, like how that will be determined? And like if you're a student who is just getting an iPad this week, like are you just automatically going to get an in progress grade? And my second question is about screening. Given that obviously grades this year are going to be very different. And attendance is not going to be considered in middle and high school admissions. Like what you're going to tell schools in terms of how they can screen students or whether they will be allowed to screen the students?

Mayor: Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: So, on the question of screening and the grades, the Mayor and I have been very clear that we will not penalize students in any way, shape or form because of circumstances out of their control. A pandemic is certainly a circumstance out of their control. We've already said with attendance. So concomitantly with now the grading policy, we will be bringing -- we will be putting forth some guidance in the coming weeks around what that will look like in terms of the screening and admissions process as well. As it pertains to in progress classification that is being used for students where there's just not enough information for teachers to assess where are they. Have they met the standard or have they not yet met the standard. So, in progress connotes to the system and to us that these are the students that we particularly have to engage in a rigorous assessment protocol to assess where are they, what do they need? It could be a number of things. It could be the fact that they in fact did not have access to the technology. It could also be that they did have the technology, but were dealing with a number of family members that were sick. It could be that some of these students, especially older students, were essential workers in grocery stores. So, there's a whole myriad of things that could affect a teacher not having enough information to make an assessment of that student's academic progress. In progress is something that gives us not only a marker, but it gives the teacher the ability to say, we need to do a deeper dive with this particular student.

Moderator: Sydney from the Advance is up next. Sydney?

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, last week I asked you why you weren't including the entire borough of Staten Island and private hospitals in your ICU indicator portion of your daily count. I wanted to see if you might consider, you know, moving forward at least adding Staten Island’s private hospitals to that count so that the ICU projections from all of the five boroughs are represented? And if you can just elaborate a little bit more on why you weren't including the ICU count from private hospitals? Have you tried to do so or have you not tried at all? And I have another question about the ferry. My paper reported that NYC Ferry will retain all existing funding and not receive a budget cut or a fare change while Staten Island's Ferry's budget was cut in your Fiscal 2021 Budget. Wondering why the Staten Island Ferry’s budget was cut and not NYC Ferry’s? And do you anticipate Staten Island’s new fast ferry route will still be able to launch this year given the financial uncertainty the city is facing right now?

Mayor: Okay. On the ferry. One there will be cuts to NYC Ferry and that will certainly be reflected in the next stage of the budget process. Two – obviously, it's never fun to talk about any cuts, but everything that has to be cut will be cut as we deal with more and more challenges. Two, we're certainly trying to figure out the next stages that had been scheduled for the Ferry expansion. Staten Island was a piece of that, Coney Island, in the Bronx. We're trying to figure out what's going to happen with that now in light of everything going on. So we'll have more to say on that as well in the budget process between now and June.

On the ICUs. What I've said before is that the data related to the Health + Hospitals hospitals is the data that is most consistent and readily available to us for a daily tracking system. As Dr. Katz said over the course of the last two months, we've seen very high levels of consistency between the data in the Health + Hospitals and what we're seeing in the rest of the hospital system. So Health + Hospitals is about 20 percent of all City hospitals, gives us a pretty clear view of what's happening throughout. But it's more readily available, consistent data because 56 hospitals overall, very different systems, very different speeds with which we get their information. So this was about keeping our indicator system going on a regular basis and consistent and informative. We'll check for sure Sydney, to see if there's any dissonance when we factor in not just the Staten Island hospitals but other hospitals around the city if it tells us anything particularly different. But if not, I think you should not see this as an effort to give you a snapshot of what's happening in every hospital. This is a citywide indicator to decide how we're going to approach the restart and what point and which way. So long as we continue to see it as a consistent, accurate citywide indicator, that's what it's there for.

Moderator: Erin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Mr. Mayor, Marcia touched on part of my question, but with regards to the cuts to the affordable housing program, do you know how many units that is going to affect? And why specifically were the cuts chosen to be made in this area?

Mayor: So, Erin, we'll get you more detailed today and obviously we're going to be going through a lot of detail over the next few weeks as we go into the heart of the budget process culminating in the middle of June. But look, I – first of all, the larger vision around affordable housing remains intact. This is about slowing down some investments and postponing some things. It is not taking away the bigger vision and it’s a vision that I really, again, commend everyone from the very beginning of the administration to now, who is part of creating and implementing the affordable housing plan. Because it's been extraordinarily consistent and it's reached hundreds of thousands of people. And ultimately, as you know, at its full extent will reach more than 700,000 New Yorkers. So it's an astounding initiative. It will keep going. But when you think about the budget dynamics, we were dealing with suddenly a massive budget gap. We were dealing with a cash flow crisis on top of that. Anytime that you book a capital project, it has ramifications for the budget. Obviously for the expense side of the budget too because of debt service. We had to slow down a lot of capital investments just to be able to make sure we could pay the bills now. And it's really a horrible situation, but that's what we had to do. But the plan is intact and it will be implemented in the future. 

Again, the big question in the month of May will be the federal stimulus and what that will mean for everything we're doing. I spoke to Speaker Pelosi on Sunday and we had a very good detailed conversation. And I want to thank her for her amazing leadership. And the next stimulus bill will initiate in the House of Representatives. That's a very good thing for all the places that have been hurt so much by COVID-19, because I know the House of Representatives is listening to the reality of what we've been through.

So, the stimulus will really determine what we're going to have to do going forward. There'll be tough choices any way you slice it, but the stimulus, if it actually takes into account what has happened here, all the costs, human and otherwise that have been inflicted on New York City and all that's been lost – and including first and foremost the human loss but then, of course, the horrible impact on the budget that's used to provide services to people – if it's really, really heard and understood and acted on, that stimulus could be a lifesaver for us. And if it's not, we're going to be in an even tougher situation, but that's going to then really govern everything else we have to decide in June.

Moderator: Gwen from Crain’s is up next – Gwen.

Question: So, real estate is a major –

Moderator: You’re really quiet –

Mayor: Yeah. Get close to the phone or – 

Question: Yeah, sorry about that. 

Mayor: There you go.

Question: Okay, great. So, good morning. Real estate is a major part of the city's tax base. What's your plan to reassure the commercial and residential property owners during a time when so many are calling for a rent strike? 

Mayor: It's a good question. Look, I've said the answer lies primarily in Albany and it's time for Albany to act. Rent strike is not the answer, but relief for renters is the answer. So, one, I've called upon our Rent Guidelines Board in the city, this is the piece we can do to ensure a rent freeze for the year ahead. It's the right thing to do given what tenants have gone through. The horrible economic situation we're in. But the State has the power to take other actions, including most immediately to allow renters to pay their rent with a security deposit, which is the ultimate win-win – it helps the renters, it helps the landlords. The State of New Jersey acted on this and I commend them. And I put out a tweet and said, you know, as proud New Yorkers, it's hard to get the words out of our mouths, you know, we're going to follow New Jersey on this one, but we really should follow New Jersey on this one. The State of New York should do what New Jersey did and give that opportunity to renters. 

And then beyond that, create a system that people who have no money – and it'd have to be documented – but if you have no money to pay the rent, you should be allowed to forego it and pay it back later on. There should be a payment plan system. And, of course, tightening up our anti-eviction rules to make sure that there cannot be evictions now during the crisis and for 60 days after to protect people. I think, given that, I know landlords are going through a lot too, and again, the vast majority of landlords go about their business appropriately and fairly. They need, of course, sources of income. But we can't ask tenants who don't have any money – if they don't have any money, they don't have any money. It's not their fault. So, for the tenants who can pay, great key paying on time. If you can't pay, you should have the option to use your security deposit. If you can't pay even after that, you should have the option to defer, but with a payment plan so at least the landlords can plan on that.

Moderator: Last two, Jeff Mays from the New York Times – Jeff. 

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. The Governor said recently that he wished he had blown the bugle earlier about coronavirus and what was happening in Wuhan Province. I'm wondering do you have any thoughts about that? Do you wish you had done anything earlier in relation to dealing with the pandemic that we're experiencing right now?

Mayor: Jeff, look, I respect the question. I know your publication has already put a lot of energy into looking back and I think it's an important endeavor and as a human being, I'll tell you, you know, of course, I think about all the things that have happened in these weeks and months and think about what did we understand – all of us – what did we not understand? You know, what might've been different? But I will also tell you that right now, honestly, we've got lives to save right now. We've got extraordinarily important decisions to make right now about the future, about how we protect people, and how we bring this city forward, and how we figure out the right kind of restart. I don't personally put a lot of time into dwelling on the past when I have people to serve right now and people to protect right now.

I think there will be a time to really evaluate everything and figure out what we can learn, what it can tell us for the future, what we understood, what we didn't, what we did right, what we didn't. That time will clearly come. But I'll tell you one thing and I appreciate, you know, the Governor, I think, was speaking from the heart and I appreciate that. I do know one thing, on January 24th, a group of us gathered at Emergency Management and were very clear about the fact that this virus was coming to New York City. And I remember vividly saying it was not a matter of if, but when, and that the ability to protect the city hinged on testing and that if we could not get not only the physical tests but the authority from the federal government to perform our own tests, our city was in danger.

Remember the weeks and weeks where we pleaded just to be able to do tests locally. Remember all that long stretch of time where every test had to be sent to Atlanta. I mean, when you look back, there'll be plenty to discuss about everyone's role, but the central issue here, the original sin here, is the question of the federal government's role in testing. Because we had a chance in this city to contain this had we been able to see it. We couldn't see it without testing. But again, we'll analyze and every one of us, you know, if you're a human being with a heart and soul, you're thinking all the time, I'm certainly thinking all the time, you know, not only what was, but every single hour of the day, am I doing the right thing with the information I have, am I making the right choices for my people?

And what I'm crystal clear about is it's about health and safety. That is what governs these choices. And you know, I still am frustrated that knowing that the best way to protect my people would be maximum testing – even this morning as I speak to you, I do not have the cooperation I need from the federal government to do that. So, imagine January 24th, February, March, now almost all of April, asking the same exact question, making the same exact demand and still we're not getting the help we need. That's the big story here. And we're not going to stop fighting until we get it.

Moderator: Last question goes to Gloria of NY1. Gloria? 

Question: Thank you. I just wanted to see if it's – I have two questions – if it was possible to get some clarity on the summer school aspect of this. I understand that you're still working out how you're going to do summer school or if you're going to do it, but have you determined how your goal with the – my point being with the grades changing, how will you determine what students have to go to summer school? And then Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask about the subway announcement. Some of the advocates have talked about the fact that even though you have provided the 200 additional support beds, the Safe Haven beds, the city isn't tapping into the hotel rooms that it could be providing for people and that there just isn't enough being done to provide people a safe option to take shelter in. Obviously with the shelters not being ideal right now with the pandemic. So, can you just talk about that?

Mayor: Yeah. Let's do this. Let me start on the summer school, pass to the Chancellor to add, and then I'll come back and finish up on the subway question. So, on summer school, Gloria, the first thing I want to say is it's hard, I think, for all of us who are used to, you know, a school building and a school year in the traditional sense. And so summer school, we all – and I think the thing a lot of us were used to is relatively few kids needed that extra instruction, and they went to summer school and they were usually not too happy about it. But it was not what most kids experienced. Online learning has changed the whole reality. And it – there's a lot of things you cannot do as well on online learning to say the least.

But one thing it is good for is it's very flexible and for kids who very sadly have to be indoors a lot of the day now it's an option that they can go much more deeply into and they can do it at their own pace and all sorts of good flexibility is there. And it's not just during the school hours, it's the evening, it's the weekend. The online learning really opens up a world of possibility. So, I think to think a little bit more as a continuum then the kind of boundaries we experienced with a regular school year, school calendar. I can't wait until we have that regular school year and regular school calendar back because I think it's the most effective and the most human and the most engaging approach to education. But for now, we have the ability to reach kids in a lot of different ways.

And I think you don't have this – and this is where I'll pass to Richard and say, I don't think it's that kind of binary, oh these kids don't need summer school and you know, these relatively few do need summer school. I think we have a much bigger set of kids who are going to need some more help because the disruption that they went through, the trauma they went through, they didn't yet have the iPad, whatever it is – I think it's going to stretch out the equation into the summer. So, we don't know exactly what summer looks like and there's going to be different options prepared. But I think one thing we can assume is a lot of kids are going to engage summer learning. Some kids are going to engage summer learning, not because they're in a deficit, but because they don't have much else to do and it might be a good time to learn more and get ahead of things. I think we have to see this more of a continuum than we usually do. Richard?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So, adding to what you said, Mr. Mayor, I think that is absolutely on track. It's more of a continuum rather than the compartmentalized way we've thought of school. You have semesters and you have summer and then you have fall and spring. This is going to be much more of a continuum but perhaps to put this in context every grade level and every course at the secondary level there are standards. In other words, there is a body of knowledge that students must demonstrate mastery of to say they've completed the third grade, they've completed the sixth grade, et cetera. So, the in-progress classification as I've said is really an indicator that the teacher is saying, ‘I don't have enough evidence yet of whether or not the student has actually mastered this body of knowledge’. Now that's important because whatever the student has not mastered or whatever information the teacher does not have, then becomes the learning plan that students carry on through the summer.

The difficulty that we've had in the past is that not having this kind of remote learning ubiquitous across the system and having recognizing that there's been a technology gap and a technology divide, the opportunity we have during this pandemic is that we are closing that digital divide. We're closing that technological divide. Our teachers who I give tremendous credit to have been building their capacity to be able to provide instruction, the pedagogy, in very different ways than we did seven weeks ago. That's not going to stop after this pandemic is over. We want to continue to build on that capacity so that we are, as the Mayor has said, providing students with opportunities 24/7 to continue to expand and continue to master the standards. That's going to be the cornerstone of – that is the cornerstone of what we're planning for summer and what summer learning looks like. The nuts and bolts about the who, what, when, and where, those are the models that we're working through based on what the medical advice and the medical situation at the time is. 

Mayor: Thank you, Richard. So, Gloria, to your other question. Okay, first of all, the work we're doing to help the homeless, as I said, it was really not that long ago when you think about December when we announced the Journey Home vision. This is the most audacious, ambitious effort in the history of the city to end permanent street homelessness. And the reason we announced it then was that we had seen for three years progress in finally figuring out what it took to get someone off the street, how much work it took, but the fact that it could be done. And as I said, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Commissioner Banks that even in the months of March and April, we've seen success getting people to come in off the street and stay off the street because of our amazing outreach workers.

That effort is going to continue, but one of the things the outreach workers always report back is they need more Safe Haven options. So, that's part of what we're going to keep doing. And the 200 beds we announced is a crucial piece of the equation. The right Safe Haven bed in the right places is the way you get someone off the street and if you make it stick, you get them the mental health services, the substance abuse services, whatever it is they need, in a lot of cases that person never goes back to the streets again. That's what we're here to do. So, this is crucial to the big equation, but to the other points you're raising, the shelter system now is being constantly reviewed to make sure that it is safe. Anytime where we need to remove people from shelter, we will, and that's what we've said. We will literally make as many hotel beds available as needed. Any shelter that needs more social distancing, has any challenge that requires more access to hotel beds, they will be there period. And there's a constant review being done to make sure that any time that's needed, it's acted on right away. 

But what Commissioner Banks has said as well is that we've got to remember a lot of who people are in shelters need tremendous support. The coronavirus is one challenge, but a lot of them have serious mental health issues and other issues that require a support structure in place and not all of that can easily be transferred to a hotel. So, we're trying to strike that balance, making sure we don't, you know, solve one problem and create another problem, figure out what's the right number of people that should be in any shelter and anybody – anything beyond that, those people go to hotels. So, right now we reached that mark, we talked about 6,000 people who – 6,000 homeless folks in hotel settings. We're going to be adding another thousand this week, going out of shelter into hotels. We will keep adding as needed to that number, but it's not like an abstract number. It's according to the medical needs of folks, the social distancing needs, and what's going to keep people safe the best. Is it to be moved to a hotel or to stay in a shelter, but in many cases just reducing the population in that shelter. So, bottom line is whatever it takes, we're going to do. We have no lack of hotel rooms. When we know we're doing the right thing to put someone in a hotel room, we're going to do it. 

Okay. Let me close us up today with just a point about, you know, where we started. Today was about what we owe our kids. Today was a day to recognize what our kids have gone through and how much we have to be there for them. Every adult with a child in your life, you know what I'm talking about. You're there for them all the time. Parents, aunts, uncles, guardians, grandparents, you know, so much of your life is being there for the children you love and all the people who take care of kids in all sorts of other settings as well and people who – the guidance counselors and the folks in foster care, and everyone who helps kids, and, of course, our educators, all feel that passion for protecting our children and helping our children. And we owe our kids real understanding and sensitivity and love in this moment they're going through. But we also have to think about what we owe this whole city right now. And I can tell you what I'm committed to and the whole team here at City Hall and in the City government – we're committed to protecting you, we're committed to making sure that the testing that we need, one way or another, we are going to get this testing to happen in this city. We're going to make sure that people are traced if someone tests positive. We're going to make sure there are hotel rooms available for people who need to be isolated. We have an obligation to you to build the biggest testing and tracing apparatus this city's ever known, something never been done before, but we're going to do it because that's what we do here in New York City. We create things that have never been seen before. And we're going to restart the city. We're going to do it in a smart way, in a way that's based on the facts and the science, but we are going to restart. 

And the last thing I'll say is to remember why this city is the greatest city in the world. It's because of the people. The buildings are great, love the buildings, the cultural institutions. That's wonderful, but it's you that makes this the greatest city in the world. Your strength, your resiliency, your creativity, your entrepreneurship, all of that is going to be called upon now. So, we in leadership owe it to you to build the framework to keep you safe and bring us back. And also, we owe it to you to unleash all that you do, all that you're capable of because when all that energy and passion and ability and creativity comes to the fore, the city will come back, will come back strong, and will even come back better because we're going to address some of the very contradictions that have been laid bare by this crisis. I don't have a question in my mind of the fact that this city is capable of a great and strong comeback. We're going to give you the foundation so you can paint that picture, build that story for the ages. Something great will happen in New York City and you will be a part of it and you will be the architects of it in the months to come.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-04-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. All of you should be very proud of how this city has handled this horrible crisis, and you should be proud of the heroism of so many in this city. I've said before, it's those who we honor so deeply, are health care workers and our first responders. It's also everyday people, who have found ways to get through, to be there for each other, to deal with these new tough rules, but find a way to make them work for the good of everyone, for the good of their own families and the good of everyone. New Yorkers have been absolutely remarkable in this crisis, and I think one of the ways that people have excelled is in a very quiet way that needs to be talked about more, and needs to be understood better, which is the way people have just been there for each other. The way people have remembered that the person they're with, a loved one, friend, a neighbor, a coworker, someone from the neighborhood that everyone's going through so much, and sometimes what's so important is just to be there for someone, just to listen to them, just to see how they're doing.

New Yorkers have always been incredibly social people. And it's true, we have tough exterior's, but behind those exteriors beat hearts of gold. That's what I've seen for decades and decades. How good, and compassionate, and kind New Yorkers are. And New Yorkers look out for each other, and we know it from our buildings where we live or our neighborhoods. So many ways New Yorkers have each other's backs, and in a crisis, it really comes through. So, just those little things, when you say someone, how are you doing? Are you okay? How are you feeling? People need that, they need that moment of empathy. They need to hear that someone's concerned. Sometimes they just need a chance to unburden themselves, all the stress they're going through. Just ask a simple question, how are you holding up? Can mean so much to someone, and I see it all the time, and I appreciate it. I appreciate all of you for having that spirit. For understanding people need that chance to be heard, and just to express what they're going through. And that compassion matters, especially when it comes to people's feelings, when it comes to their mental health, because it's still an area as a, as a society, we're still grappling with how to talk about mental health, how to act mental health. It's still an area where there's so much stigma. It shouldn't be, it's part of human life, mental health’s no different than physical health. It's part of who we are as human beings, and yet that stigma still pervades in so many ways. And so just that act to asking someone how they are and inviting them to speak openly is powerful.

Now, it need not be said that it's not just a New York City reality that mental health doesn't get talked about out in the open, it's true in our whole country. And it's true that there's never been an effort in this country to actually bring this in the open and treat mental health conditions consistently. There's not a place that people know to turn. It's not the way we grew up. And then on top of it, think about that stigma and add to it a pandemic, and all that brings with it. Think what it means for families who have lost their loved ones, pain they're going through and all they want to express and many times they don't know if it's okay to express it. Think about the senior citizens who have been isolated, how much pain there is to not be able to see your grandchildren for example, or just not get the visits your used to having from neighbors. Think of what that feels like and yet what do they do with that? Where do they turn? Think about how parents deal with this incredible anxiety of not having a paycheck and how they express that to their families. What it makes them feel.

So, all New Yorkers are dealing with these challenges and we want to make sure that there's help for everyone. I've talked yesterday about our kids, what they're going through. We want to make sure there's help for them and we're going to focus on them a lot. But I don't think I even have to say, when you think about who's gone through the most in this few months, the most trauma, the most pain, the, the things that would dredge up the deepest, sharpest feelings that somehow have to be aired and addressed. Well, that's so many of our health care workers and our first responders. And for some of them, and you've, you've heard the stories of places like Elmhurst Hospital. For some of them, the only parallel to what they've gone through is what soldiers go through in war. And there's a phrase combat stress. There's a field of combat mental health, because it's understood that soldiers go through so much, and the way to deal with any mental health reality is not to ignore it, but to take it head on, and the military understands that. I just met with some of the amazing officers from the U S army who are doing this crucial work, who have learned the lessons of what our soldiers go through in war, and have understood what they need to address it, and they're going to be helping us, and you're going to hear about that in a moment from our first lady. But that phrase, combat stress, that's a wartime term, and Chirlane and I know something about it, because both our dads served in World War II, and brought back a lot from that war. And I've spoken very openly about what my dad went through. The scars he brought back both physical and emotional, and how much it framed the rest of his life. But that phrase combat stress wasn't really known the same way back then and the support wasn't there, but now our military does provide it in a very powerful way. And I never thought we'd have to use this word in the middle of New York City civilian life, but in fact it is the right word. And we do need the help of our military to make sense of this situation. Think about what our doctors, our nurses, our health care workers have gone through, our EMT’s, our paramedics. Think about the people they've had to watch pass away before their very eyes. Think about the fact that they are surrounded by this virus. And they're fighting it and they're walking towards the danger, but they also have to think about what it means for their own health, and what it might mean for their family. And what happens if they want to go home and see their family. So, they're carrying that burdens. I'm sure a lot of them sometimes feel alone. We can't let that happen. We can't let them carry that burden alone. We have to be there for them.

Now, the idea of providing access to mental health services, it's been a core notion for this administration for the last six years. That's why Thrive NYC exists, to break down the barriers and open up access to mental health. And that initiative was for all New Yorkers of all kinds, but we've also had specialized initiatives for our heroes, because we've known they've dealt with challenges before. No one could have imagined this pandemic, but they were already dealing with challenges. There's two programs I want to mention that are particularly good examples, the Health and Hospitals, the Helping Healers Heal program. And a lot of our health care workers are leaning on this right now. It's a 24/7 helpline for doctors, nurses, staff, any Health and Hospital staff can call it 646-815-4150. And the FDNY has had a counseling services unit. It's renowned, it's gold standard for the whole nation. In fact, other cities have sought out the FDNY’s guidance in how to set up a similar approach. A very poignant example and a painful one was after the Parkland shootings in Florida. Folks in Florida turned to the FDNY to know how to provide that ongoing support to first responders. And our paramedics and our EMT’s have been right there at the frontline of this crisis. They need that help. And so, I want to make sure FDNY members know you can call 212-570-1693. So, these initiatives are up and running, but we need something even more in this moment of crisis, and that's where our military come in. And what they have been doing these last weeks, the military has been helping us in so many ways. I want to thank all those who have come in to help in our hospitals. The extraordinary contribution they've made to fighting back the coronavirus. Now they're going to play a crucial role in addressing the mental health challenges as well.

Now, to tell you about this extraordinary partnership with the department of defense with our armed forces, I'm going to turn to the first lady. And I'm going to say it this simply, she is devoted her time as first lady to breaking down the stigma that stands in the way of people getting the mental health services they need. She's really helped this whole city to have the right open conversation about what's going on inside all of us, and how we have to bring it out in the open and ask for help, and how help needs to be there for everyone with no stigma, no barriers. In this pandemic, she's taking that same impulse, those same lessons, and working to make sure we reach more and more New Yorkers who have gone through so much. And I want to thank her for that, and particularly for the work she is doing to bring these extraordinary military professionals in to help us further.

So now, I’ll turn to our first lady, Chirlane McCray.

First Lady Chirlane McCray: Thank you Bill, for your leadership and especially for your compassion. For weeks now, all our frontline health care workers, who I think of as our soldiers of grace and mercy, have been pushed to the limit inside our hospitals. We've had battlefield conditions with triage and fear in the hallways, but when the emergency field hospitals and morgues close after the TV crews leave and the clapping stops, our soldiers, our healers go home and we have to wonder how do these healers manage their stress after seeing so much death and suffering? Their emotional state is a crisis within a crisis and an urgent mental health emergency and that's why we are working with the Department of Defense, which has brought together a force from the Navy, the Air Force and the Army. They are experts in dealing with combat stress and have a unique insight into how to help those who provide care in this kind of setting. The Department of Defense will train a thousand behavioral health staff and helping healers heal, helping healers heal, champions as trainers who will further train H+H, Greater New York Hospital Association, FDNY and EMS staff. The Department of Defense will also conduct assessments, sharing events, decompression and wellness strategies for combat stress management. This work with the Department of Defense is a critical new piece of what we are doing for all of our essential frontline workers in New York City.

So, how will we provide more support for our health care workers? Well, these DOD trauma specialists will look at individual hospitals and also the entire system. You know, every, every hospital is different. They'll want to talk to frontline leadership to get a picture of the most pressing, mental and emotional needs and they'll add to the programs, training our team on combat stress. At first, they'll do small groups from FDNY, Health and Hospitals and private hospitals will also be trained and next we'll train more than a thousand Health and Hospitals personnel and other staff. The Department of Defense will provide a whole new higher level of trauma care for those on the frontline.

Our heroes will have the opportunity to receive an individual assessment and all of this work is already underway. We're ramping up to be fully operational in May with the program fully in place by June. This is not the time nor is it appropriate for us to hide the level of express of stress that is experienced by our nurses and doctors and medical technicians, we have to face this head on. This is not something that, that we should be secretive about and I have to say that once again, New York City is a leader in this effort. No other city has a comprehensive mental health program for health care workers at this scale and it will not be a one off, this program with the trainers and other resources will be incorporated into our health care facilities. So that even long after this pandemic is over, our health care workers will have these services, I want to thank the U.S. military, H+H, Office of Emergency Management and the New York Fire Department. The service of our frontline health care workers is beyond what anyone could have rightfully asked, they have inspired a City and a Nation, but it comes at a steep price. In recent days, we've lost John Mondello, an EMT working in the Bronx and Dr. Lorna M. Breen, an ER Medical Director at Presbyterian. Please join me for a moment of silence and their memories.

[Moment of silence is observed]

We owe these workers the world that we will enjoy after this virus is defeated and we will not forget them, we will not forget this debt. When people ask our hospital workers, what did you do during the great pandemic of 2020? We want them to say with pride, I showed up, I did my best, I saved lives because my community supported me. I was able to take care of myself while taking care of others and I stayed healthy in mind, body, and spirit.

Mayor: Thank you, Chirlane. That's a beautiful sentiment and it's exactly the spirit we have to bring to everything we do to support our heroes and this incredible initiative with the U.S. military is going to help us do it. And remember every single one of you, every time you say thank you to a health care worker, our first responder, every time you applaud them, every time you ask them if they're doing okay, there's anything they need that helps so much, but what our military is going to do is going to be outstanding because we've seen they bring a special ability and their presence, as I said, in our hospitals, not only their skills, but that extraordinary confidence it gives everyone to see them present has been really, really crucial to get them through this crisis. So, so thankful to everyone who's brought together this new initiative to address the combat stress that's the reality for so many here.

Now, there's another important new approach we're going to take to protect our heroes and it is to give them more information about what they've experienced during this pandemic. I want to talk to you about testing and what we've talked about before is the coronavirus test, it's called a PCR test, and that is the test that answers the most immediate question at this exact moment. Are you infected with the coronavirus? That's the test that is crucial to so much of what we're going to do going forward as the test I wish we had had a lot more of when we needed it earlier on. But there's another test that really will provide a lot of help and support as well and that's the antibody testing and I'm going to talk to you about a new initiative that will reach so many of our health care workers and first responders and I'm going to tell you why this is so important and the sweep of what we're going to do here. I'm also going to give a few qualifications cause it's important to recognize what we know and what we don't know when it comes to antibody testing. But here is what we do understand that a particularly good antibody tests, there's many different kinds, but the ones that are most accurate and effective give you a clear indication of whether you have been infected by the coronavirus previously and they give you some real confidence because here's what we can say anyone who has been infected and came through, obviously I had the ability to beat this disease knowing if you've been exposed to it is powerful information.

Our health care workers and our first responders who are dealing with folks who might be infected, it is going to give them additional confidence to know if they've been previously exposed. Think about what it takes every day to get up and say, I'm going to go where the COVID-19 is, where I know it is the folks go into the hospitals, the emergency rooms, the ICU, the paramedics, the EMTS, all the folks who know they're going to where the danger is. They’re of course thinking of their families, their own families too, so having a sense of whether you've been exposed previously is very important and giving the best answer we can brings a lot of value. On top of that, we are seeing really impressive results with treatments based on plasma that needs to come from those who have already been exposed. So, there's a growing hope that when you identify people who have been exposed, you're identifying folks who can then give blood that then allows for the treatment of more people who are sick help save lives. And we know one thing about our health care workers are first responders they are doing this work because they care so much about saving lives and helping other people. So, knowing that they could be amongst those who give blood that saves other lives, is entirely consistent with everything they've devoted their lives to. And then there's the fact that we're going to get information that can help us fight this disease, we all understand the entire global medical community is still trying to understand the coronavirus, figure out the best ways to fight back. One day there will be a vaccine, one day there will be a cure, but the more information we gather, the more likelihood we get to that day sooner.

So, antibody testing brings a lot to the table and our goal is to reach a lot of people who would like to take advantage of on a voluntary basis, of course. But I'm talking about our health care workers, I'm talking about our police officers, our firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, Correction officers, so many who would like to have this opportunity and now it will be provided for all who want it. So, thinking about our health care workers, thinking about our first responders; we are initiating a plan to reach 150,000 of our heroes and give them this antibody testing to give them that knowledge and that peace of mind and to ensure that they are also helping us take the next step in fighting this disease. We have agreed to a partnership with the federal government, with the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and more details will be announced in the next few days, but the plan is to begin as early as next week to offer the tests in hospitals, at fire houses, at police precincts, at correction facilities, wherever our health care workers and our first responders are to make the tests readily available. Again, this will be provided for free. The federal government is covering the cost and it will be provided to all who want to take advantage of this test. Now I mentioned that I'm going to say the antibody tests - no one is claiming it is perfect. It does not tell you the best of I understand from all of our health care leadership and from listening to Dr. Fauci and others, it does not tell you if you're entirely immune in the sense we all think of that word. When we hear the word immune, we think you just can't possibly get something again. There is not yet confidence that having been exposed to the coronavirus once means you can never get it again. Now, common sense tells us if you’re exposed once and you made it through, you're in very good stead; you're in a very good situation to make it through again if you ever were exposed again, but we don't know for sure if anyone can contract this disease the second time. The good news is honestly, there's not a lot of evidence that people have, but we don't know for sure. So that's a limitation that we have to be clear about and it's also important that even folks who get a positive result do not think that means that they can let down their guard. I'm not saying people would think they're invincible, but they have to be really clear that they still are dangerous because we're dealing with an unknown disease. We're dealing with so many questions. So, for health care workers and first responders, they would still continue in their work to wear the PPEs just as they were previously. And we still need to practice the same concepts of social distancing and we still have to be watchful for symptoms even if someone has tested positive. But again, it's not a perfect test, but it does give real information. It is helpful, tells you something very important and its part of solving this bigger puzzle of the Coronavirus and fighting it back. So, this again, more details to be announced, but a wonderful step forward and a huge initiative. The goal is to reach 150,000 of our heroes.

Now, let me talk about another effort to protect people and this is now about how we protect some of the very most vulnerable in New York City – homeless New Yorkers. And again, the compassion I talked about earlier; New Yorkers feel tremendous compassion for folks whose lives in some way came unraveled and they ended up on the street or they ended up in shelter. So, a few weeks ago I told you we had a goal of having 6,000 homeless in hotels rather than congregate shelters to make sure that people were safe and that goal has been reached and now we are going to go farther. This week we will move an additional 1,000 homeless individuals from congregate shelters to hotel facilities. The priority will be on folks in those larger congregate shelters that are having more trouble with social distancing. There's going to be a constant effort to evaluate all shelters and wherever there are social distancing problems continue to take people out of the shelters into hotels. One thousand this week, we are prepared to do a thousand more each week going forward as the need indicates, because we want to make sure people are safe and again, there are real reasons for people to be in shelters who need the services and shelter. So, for some people that actually can be much, much better to stay in the shelter setting, but we've got to make sure there's enough space. We've got to make sure that we strike that balance. We're also going to provide additional medical oversight; our Health + Hospitals team is going to work with the Department of Homeless Services to bring additional medical oversight to all homeless services sites. The goal is to constantly be vigilant for anything that might pose a danger to homeless New Yorkers and starting this week we will begin a program of testing homeless individuals at homeless services sites. Of course, anyone who tests positive will be isolated. This initiative will begin this week and expand over the next couple of weeks. The goal is to reach across the entire shelter system by the middle of May.

All right, a few more things before we turn to our colleagues in the media and we've talked about some, some serious and somber topics. But now let's turn to something I think people are going to be happy to hear about. And you know, look, when our lives changed so profoundly over the last weeks, it's almost been impossible to take stock of all the things that are different and the things we miss and the things we need that we can't have right now. And some of those things are going to take a while longer, but there are other things that we can start to bring back if only online for now, later in person. But there are some things that we need to make available to people online that could really change their lives for the better. And we know there are a lot of folks in the weeks leading up to this crisis who were planning on doing something absolutely beautiful, they were planning on getting married and Chirlane and I are coming up on our anniversary on May 14th – 26 years. And we know what a beautiful reality marriage is, what it means to people, how it frames their whole lives and yet folks haven't been able to get married in these last weeks. So, the good news is we're going to have a very, very good new visitor in our city. Cupid is coming to New York City; Project Cupid will allow couples to get married online and this will start later on next week and it will be available in 11 different languages. And this is a great team effort and we want to thank Speaker Johnson and the City Council, want to thank the City Clerk's Office and our colleagues at DOITT, our information technology department who all put their minds together in a spirit of love and said, how do we figure this out? How do we get back in the marriage business and help people who are ready to tie the knot do so online? So again, not this week, but late next week, this'll start up and information will be available at nyc.gov/cupid and I want you to know this is such a great example of New Yorkers saying, you know what, even in the face of a pandemic, we're not going to let it change us and we're not going to let a pandemic stand in the way of love. We're going to let people get married and go forward with their lives and look to the better days ahead.

Okay, let's now talk about what we talk about every single day, which is the daily indicators. So, as I go into them, I can say we've had a good day, not a perfect day, but a good day and we got to keep pushing and we got to keep doing better. So, the first indicator unfortunately is up. The daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 went up from 112 to 136, but the other indicators going in the right direction. Daily number of people in ICUs in our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19 - down from 745 to 734. Percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19 citywide – down from 27 percent to 23 percent. Public health lab tests – down from 56 percent to 29 percent. That's great. So, progress like most days we've seen progress, but not what we still need fully to get everything going down in the same direction. Now, we’re going to talk I am certain about the challenges of maintaining social distance. I can tell you we have to stick to it and yes, we're about to have warmer weather and yes, everyone's going a little stir crazy, but we have to stick to it because every time you see these indicators going the right direction, that's because of the work you've been doing. But if we loosen up these indicators, we'll start to go in the wrong direction. Now unless there's someone out there that wants to delay the restart and wants to see this horrible crisis continue, I think we can all agree we got to buckle down and beat this disease. And every time you're socially distanced, every time you stay home, you're helping to fight back the disease and save lives. We got to stick with it.

I'll just close before saying a few words in Spanish and then we'll open to our colleagues in the media; that you know, we're going to be spending a long time trying to figure out everything that happened here in terms of the human impact over these last months and certainly the months ahead and the mental health piece of this is in some ways probably going to be the hardest to make sense of. As we always say, it's different than the physical reality or the physical scars; the mental scars take longer to uncover and process and make sense of. But so many people are dealing with these challenges in one way or another. The bottom line, as you heard from the announcement today, whether you're one of our heroes, whether you're an everyday New Yorker, practicing social distancing, whether you're a parent trying to support your kids, whoever you are, you're not alone and we're going to be there for you and 24 hours a day, seven days a week, multiple languages, and for free. Anyone who needs help can call 888-NYCWELL and get a trained counselor and get that support. Lots of people are doing that and it's helping them through. I want to invite anyone who needs that help to take advantage of it. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and again, always remember giving the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have First Lady McCray and Police Commissioner Shea here in person, and on the phone we have Fire Commissioner Negro, Health Commissioner Barbot, Social Services Commissioner Banks, and Vice President and Chief Quality Officer for NYC Health + Hospitals, Dr. Wei. With that, I will start with Ashley from the New York Times.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and everyone on the phone. I wanted to ask a two-part question. One, there was some suggestion by the shul that this – that the funeral in Brooklyn that was broken up last night had been coordinated with the police somehow. I'm wondering, Mr. Mayor if you could tell us if you were aware of those plans? And then for Commissioner Shea, can you tell us in detail about any contact that or plans that the NYPD may have made pertaining to this individual's funeral, and also answer, you know, are there others planned and how do you plan to deal with this in the future if there are other deaths in the Orthodox community?

Mayor: Ashley, I'll start and I'll turn to the Commissioner. I heard about this situation. I believe it was somewhere around the 6:30 to 7:00 pm. I was very concerned when I heard there might be a large gathering. The Commissioner will talk about how the NYPD approached it. But I have to say again, I understand that when people are going through mourning, they're in real pain, but we have to understand what it means to hold a large gathering in New York City today. It means unfortunately that people who go to that gathering, some will be sick with this disease. That's just a fact. We know this. Some will spread the disease to others. People as a result will die. So I have a long deep relationship with the Orthodox Jewish community. A lot of personal relationships, a lot of people I know and respect. I have a lot of love for the community. The notion that people would gather in large numbers and even if they don’t mean to, would spread a disease that will kill other members of the community, is just unacceptable to me.

So we have to do something different and we have to break out of whatever we thought was normal in the past because these are not normal times. So we're not going to be allowing these kinds of gatherings in any community. This was by far the largest community - the largest gathering in any community of New York City of any kind that I had heard of or seen directly or on video since the beginning of this crisis and it's just not allowable. So we have to change this reality. We will work closely with the community to do it, but we have to change this reality. Commissioner?

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: Yeah. Mr. Mayor, I think you hit the nail on the head. Before we get into the specifics of yesterday's incident, what troubles me most is as a department, as a city, we've been through a lot already and members that have gotten sick, members that have given their life, whether it's in the health field, certainly in the police department, make no mistake, this large gathering such as this is putting members of my department at risk and it cannot happen and it will not happen and it's going to be met with very stern as it was last night, immediately being broken up and stern consequences. What we know about yesterday's incident was at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, we learned of the passing, unfortunately, of a prominent rabbi from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Immediately within minutes, members of the local precinct were in contact with clergy liaisons and members of the Jewish community in terms of what to expect at that location.

Plans were put in place, a detail was put in place, unfortunately, when you look back at some of the past incidents, there's been a lot of work done throughout New York City with every faith and people again have been overly – overwhelmingly compliant. But there has been a couple of incidents that were not so. So contingency plans were put into place, a number of offices with detailed in the unlikely event that large numbers came and we thought that that was a possibility. But absolutely, I think we've been pretty consistent, Mr. Mayor, for what seems like a longer time, but probably months now that there are to be no gatherings in New York City such as what we saw last night. So within – as the time unfolded last night, there was probably several thousand people that that came in and around that location on Bedford Avenue, additional offices. I was in conversations with members of the upper echelon of the NYPD. Additional offices were called in and in pretty short time, that crowd was dispersed and a number, I think the final tally I saw was 12 summonses were issued for a variety of offenses. Certainly social distancing and then including some for a refusal to disperse.

But I want to end where I started with this, what happened last night simply cannot happen and we need all New Yorkers - all New Yorkers have come together during this crisis, but they need to do it more than ever and we need community leaders to stand beside us. We cannot have people unnecessarily being exposed to a disease that is having catastrophic effects on our membership and really New Yorkers as a whole.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Mr. Mayor, good morning, my question has to do with how you are going to assess the different levels of risk involved in human activity. For example, why can't people play tennis? Why can't you regulate the amount of people who will be visiting or who could visit city pools when it's 98 degrees in the summer or regulate the traffic going into city beaches and give people maybe a ticket or a rain check for another date, if they can't go to the pool that day and regulate the time period and the amount of use at that pool because we're facing what happened last night is almost like a release of a valve. There's going to be a level frustration in this city, that will be very difficult. I think, maybe I'm wrong, but it will be very difficult to manage the expectations and the needs of this population. I mean, am I wrong? What is your response to my question?

Mayor: Well, Henry, I think you said a couple of different things. I think the issues you raised obviously are being felt all over New York City, but again, I want to say a large gathering, this is a different issue – when you talk about pools or beaches or tennis, you're talking about what individuals do. This – what we saw last night was absolutely unacceptable and would be unacceptable in any and all communities. It was a large gathering. Again, tragically thousands of people. The amount of danger of created by that kind of gathering is inestimable. The fact that people will die because of it just goes against everyone's values. I want to separate that kind of thing from the question you're asking, which I think is a fair and important question about what can we do for everyday people, individual people from all parts of our community as we try to over time work our way back to normal.

So I'd say as the first rule is there'll be no large gatherings of any kind anywhere and anyone who equates a small number of people around, you know, a blanket in a park with what we saw last night is entirely missing the point. We are talking about thousands of people in close proximity in one site. We will never, ever allow something like that to go unchecked anywhere. Now, if you say, okay, people are understandably yearning to get outside and the weather's going to get warm, we're working on this all the time and we're going to have announcements on this soon how we're going to address the warm weather. We've worked with the City Council on one piece of it, which is to try and open up more space in certain key areas with enforcement.

But when you talk about pools, beaches, tennis courts, each thing's going to be looked at individually, there's the whole different piece of the equation, which we've talked about, which is what can we afford to open, and that's going to be all about what happens with the stimulus in Washington, whether we even have money to open some of these things, and that's a big question, Mark, right now. But then beyond is the question of what will keep people safe? The most important question, what will protect people's health and safety? And places where a lot of people might congregate create a real danger. We have to know we can manage them properly and there could be proper enforcement and that the time is right. So the indicators will tell us when we can start opening up and we're going to do it very carefully, methodically, and each thing you mentioned will be looked at in turn when the time is right, but only when the time is right.

Moderator: Next we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good morning, Marcia, how are you?

Question: I need to ask you about what happened in Williamsburg because a number of leaders in the Jewish community are quite upset that the members of that community were singled out when there's been violations of social distancing in many places. Number one, they're asking for an apology. And number two, they're inferring that the fact that you're singling out a Jewish community could add to the number of anti-Semitic incidents that happen in this city. So I wondering if you will apologize if you feel bad about singling them out? Also related to social distancing, wondering if the NYPD will repurpose some staff like crossing guards who are not being used to help with social distancing? And on an unrelated topic about medical examiners, are you thinking about the possibility of directing the medical examiners to extend the hours on weekdays, maybe to midnight and possibly staying open on weekends?

Mayor: Marcia, respect all those questions, our team will follow up with you on the medical examiner because again, I'm asking everyone in the interest of fairness, all your colleagues have been doing two questions up front, one or two and we're going stick to that rule. So I will speak to your question and the Commissioner can speak to the crossing guard question.

I spoke last night out of passion. I could not believe my eyes, Marcia. It was deeply, deeply distressing. Again, this is a community I love. This is a community I have spent a lot of time working with closely and if you saw anger and frustration, you're right. I spoke out of real distress that people's lives were in danger before my eyes and I was not going to tolerate it. So I regret if the way I said it in any way gave people a feeling of being treated the wrong way. That was not my intention. It was said with love, but it was tough love. It was anger and frustration and what I saw, no, Marcia, it's not happened other places. Let's be honest, this kind of gathering has happened in only a few places and it cannot continue. It's endangering the lives of people in the community.

So to all those, and I understand politicians, everyone has said, oh look, you know, this is like people gathering the park. No, it's not like people gathering the park. It was thousands of people. Can we just have an honest conversation here? It was not acceptable. We will not tolerate it. I also will not tolerate any anti-Semitism ever. And for decades I've made it my business to stand up for the Jewish community and people know that. Won't tolerate anti-Semitism, won't allow it to grow in the city, we fought it back many times. My message was to all communities and that was written in black and white, but it was also to be clear that what I saw I had not seen anywhere else and I was trying to be honest about the fact that there's a problem that people have to come to grips with and deal with or else people in the community will die, and that's not something to get somehow shunted aside. I understand the power of words, obviously. But I'm not going to let that power, that concern about words overcome the value of human life. We're here to protect human beings and people were put in danger last night. Members of the Jewish community were putting each other in danger. They were putting our police officers in danger.

Now, if I see it in any other community, I'll call that out equally. So again, if in my passion and in my emotion, I said something that in any way was hurtful, I'm sorry about that. That was not my intention, but I also want to be clear, I have no regrets about calling out this danger and saying we're going to deal with it very, very aggressively. Commissioner, do you want to speak to the crossing guard issue?

Commissioner Shea: Sure. And if I may – I mean, just to echo the Mayor's comments on last night. There were thousands of people crammed onto one block. And when you look at everything that we are going through as a city, we live in an imperfect world and we, you know -- my department certainly, I have seen instances of not social distancing. But I could tell you Marcia, that as you know, there were two funerals last weekend from members of the NYPD. We would normally have probably tens of thousands of people at that funeral. We had a handful. People have to be accountable for their own actions regardless of what neighborhood, ethnicity, where they come from. We cannot have what we had last night. We will not tolerate it. We are going to break it up immediately. And really, you cannot even go to that event. That's what it comes down to.

Regarding the crossing guards, you know, we've been hit hard throughout the department. We have really positive news. We are still praying for a number of members that are in the hospitals. But we're on the road back, thank God, in terms of our sick rates. One of the things that we are still watching closely is who is at work, who is essential across many titles. And when we look at crossing guards, I think it's well known. You tend to have people that are a little bit older. So we are very cautious of how we use those crossing guards in what capacity and people in terms of age, prior medical conditions and the situations we put them in. Of course, we're looking at any and all employees of the NYPD, how to get the most out of what we use. We've worked with other city agencies in terms of lending some of our expertise to other city agencies. And we would not be against continuing to do that. But we're also going to do it in a smart manner that really watches out for everyone's safety.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. I wanted to follow up with the question that many of my colleagues – the one thing that I can get some clarity from the Commissioner on is, you know, the NYPD’s involvement with the organization of last night's funeral. So former City Councilman David Greenfield said, I guess that this was allowed. He, you know, he tweeted again, some information that, you know, this was organized with the NYPD’s approval. I don't know if they knew that if you, if your department knew there would be so many people who showed up, but questions on that and more details on that? When these summonses were issued, was it after the Mayor came and asked for it to be broken up or did it happen before? And just for the Mayor, you know, there have been multiple reports, the Governor has cited these reports of funerals and I even drove by a large funeral once on the BQE a few weeks ago. So why were you so shocked that this was the case? Because it seemed to have been a consistent problem?

Mayor: No, Katie, I'll start and pass to the Commissioner. Again respectfully. I'm not – you're, saying I was shocked this was a case. That's not what I'm saying. I've been talking about this issue previously that we won't tolerate – I even said we wouldn't tolerate it. Again, I really want you guys to take the fact that we constantly are briefing you and respect that we're trying to give you a lot of information. And you're all intelligent people. You've heard in great detail, telling people they cannot gather, from all religious communities, in their houses of worship. That's been going on for weeks. Telling people they can't even do services in a living room because that's going to endanger lives. We've been talking about all of these dangers and the fact that we're not going to tolerate them. And we are going to enforce. And we've talked about funerals before as well. That's why I'm so angry. That we have given plenty of warnings, worked with community leaders to ensure they gave the warnings. And they have by the way, overwhelmingly. Let me make sure this is crystal clear. I've said it many times, but I know there are many in this town who love to create confusion and division. So let me try one more time. I want to thank the Jewish community leadership. I want to thank the rabbinical leadership who have consistently said people should not gather for religious services or anything else because it will endanger their own community. I have seen total unity. And I appreciate that unity. And so it's up to everyone in every community to respect these voices of their City government, of the leaders of their communities. There’s been clarity across the board. What is so frustrating to me is after all those messages were so clear that so many people would still choose to gather. I understand that they lost someone very dear and important to them, but this is still a pandemic. People's lives are put in danger when people gather. So what is shocking to me is that after all the warnings, something of this size would happen. And that's where I'm making very clear, unapologetically that the next gathering will be met by summonses and arrests. Period. No more warnings. And that's true in every community, equal opportunity, New York City. If you gather, I'm not talking again about a few friends hang out in the corner. I'm saying if you have a large gathering, hundreds of people, thousands of people that we're not even going to have a discussion. It's just we're going immediately to summons. And if we have to use the arrest, we'll use arrest. Go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, Katie and I think I touched on it before. We've been in constant contact with leaders of different communities throughout New York City of different faiths. Just last week I could tell you members of the Muslim community, members of the Jewish community, I spoke to the Cardinal just this week. This is what we do. And in terms of social distancing, probably not a day goes by that myself and the Mayor don't talk about whether it's social distancing in parks, whether it's the sick rate of our employees, whether it's testing that came up earlier today, mental health yesterday, and certainly funerals and religious events comes up. I don't know of anyone in New York City that doesn't know what's going on, two months into this. I think from the Mayor's executive orders, from the Governor's executive orders, from watching the news every night, everyone knows what is acceptable and what is not. And conversations between members of the NYPD and leaders who, by the way, members of the Jewish community, extremely helpful in navigating circumstances with this over the last two months, because there have been a couple incidents. But planning for what shouldn't happen is in no way having a conversation regarding, you should not equate that with having a conversation regarding condoning a particular event. That event last night never should have happened. It better not happen again. It can't. It is, again – we can talk about this until the cows come home. It doesn't get any crystal clearer than this for me. You are putting my cops’ lives at risk and it's unacceptable.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hi, good morning to everyone. I have two questions. One for you, Mr. Mayor and one for Ms. McCray. For you, you addressed the homeless and the shelters, but I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your plan for the homeless in the subways? I see that the MTA worked with the NYPD last night to get some people off the trains, but it seems unsustainable to do that night after night? So what's the long term plan?

And then for Ms. McCray, I'm wondering if she can just list her specific credentials for co-chairing the racial inequity task force and the mental health program for frontline workers, given that critics, including Councilman Reynoso has called the first appointment cronyism and nepotism?

Mayor: Well, let me speak to the homeless issue and then I'd like to preface on the question of the commission since I'm the person who decided how to approach that internal task force I should say. And I'll certainly turn to Chirlane then. On the homeless, I had a conversation yesterday with Sarah Feinberg of the MTA to emphasize that we are ready immediately, to implement a plan in those ten terminal stations that I talked to you about in detail yesterday. And this is something Commissioner Shea and Commissioner Banks and others we all gathered together to discuss and have real faith this will be a game changer. But to be a game changer, we have to disrupt business as usual, which means we have to close those stations in the late night hours, 12 midnight to 5:00 am. Replace the service with a shuttle bus for anyone who needs to get on that line outbound. And they'll still be able to use it just like you use a shuttle bus when there's maintenance or anything else. So it won't disrupt service for people that need service. But it will allow for deep cleaning of the stations. And will allow for the NYPD and our outreach workers to engage people in a much more effective manner. And it will change the pattern that Julia, has existed for decades in this city. Where a homeless individual could ride a subway line back and forth and back and forth. And that's something that's just not right. We need to address that. What we are seeing here is a real problem, but it's not because something fundamentally changed compared to all the previous decades. It's that there are very few people riding the subways. There are much – there's much less service. And so the homeless individuals who have been there all along are obviously standing out more. But it's also a clarion call to help them, to do more to get them out of the subways, off the streets, into long term shelter, into affordable housing.

And I feel for all the riders who are distressed. It's painful to watch. It's unpleasant to watch. It's unsettling to watch. We don't want anyone to go through it. But this City has been dealing with this issue for decades. We've got to do things differently. That's why we came up with the Journey Home approach. That's why we came up with HOME-STAT. And these things are working. But this is a new approach, NYPD feels strongly this is the X factor to end that habit of an individual, just being able to stay on that train or maybe only get off briefly and get right back on and go the whole other way on the line. We're not – we're kidding ourselves if we think we can get a different result by doing the same thing over and over again for years and years and years. So I talked to Sarah Feinberg, I said, we're ready to do this. We're ready to cover the cost. All we need is the MTA’s support. We have good conversation. We're waiting for an answer. And we could get going immediately.

And in terms of sustainability, this is a sustainable plan for sure. The HOME-STAT initiative has brought thousands of homeless folks off the street permanently. The Journey Home initiative will transform the reality of homelessness on the streets of this city, I don't have a doubt in my mind. And if we can get the support of the MTA, we'll put in all the people power. We’ll pay the cost to get homeless folks out of the subway in a whole new way. It won't be perfect, but it will be a game changer. It's absolutely sustainable, but we need the MTA to say yes, so please ask the MTA today if they will support this plan. Allow us to pay for it and get going with it so we can really change the reality for not only the homeless but for all the strap hangers who suffer with this problem.

To the question of the internal taskforce on equity and inclusion. We have a disparity crisis in this city. We had it before. It's been made sharper and in some ways even worse by this disease. My goal with the internal task force, which came out of a variety of conversations among members of this administration, was to ensure that all city agencies maximally address disparity. There's been great work over the last six years. There's more that can and should be done. To ensure that happens it was crucial to make sure that the leaders of this task force would be the people who had the strongest understanding of the issue and the greatest vision about how to address the problem and carried the weight to ensure that all city agencies would follow through on the work of the task force. Your idea with all due respect, Julia, of what is a qualification? Well, you have the right to your opinion. I'll tell you what a qualification is. A qualification in my view is who has the weight gravitas? Who has the intellect, who has the vision, who has the standing in this administration? Because this is an internal task force.

Well, this whole administration was created and we talked about it long before you happened to be a reporter here, the way we did our transition, the way we chose our team, the way we've continued to build our team. The person who's been the architect with me has been our First Lady. And I've said many times she's my closest advisor and my partner in everything I do. So who better to co-chair an internal task force to make sure that the government is addressing these issues then her? Deputy Mayor Thompson has devoted his entire life to issues of inclusion and equity. And I also am announcing that we're adding a third co-chair, Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, who brings a wealth of experience and obviously has expertise in some of the issues and agencies reporting to him in some of the areas where there's been greatest concern about disparity. But I'll turn to Chirlane and forgive my long intro by saying I know who will get the job done and she will get the job done. Chirlane?

First Lady McCray: Julia, I would remind you that the primary task of this body is to listen, to gather information and to make recommendations. It is not a decision-making body. It is a position that requires the ability to listen well, to convene and be able to gather information. I'm a volunteer. I'm certainly well-placed within this administration to take on this work. And I have a very committed approach to this work. I've been a mental health champion from the beginning of this administration. And I have been praised by leaders of national organizations around the country. I think that if you want to know more about my qualifications that you should talk to my team and we will let you know all of the things that I have done that would merit such a position and more. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Anna from the Daily News.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Two questions. One, given the budgetary issues that the City is facing, are you guys going to move forward with the BQX project? And also, I'm just curious if the First Lady is going to have to give you a haircut at some point. You're looking a little – your hair's looking a little long these days. So I’m just curious if that’s in your future?

Mayor: I want to give Anna credit. You're – you know, we knew this day would come where a journalist would ask the question. Yes, this has been a topic at home and Chirlane is a long – Anna, you may have seen some of my pictures from my younger years when I first met Chirlane and my hair was at least as long as this. And so she's a fan of the longer hair. But yes, it's getting a little, a little much. So we're going to have to figure out a new approach to hair management. The longer hair’s day I think has is coming to an end.

But on the question – a very good and important question about the budget. You know, something like the BQX which we had just begun a whole phase of environmental impact review. It's going to be looked at now with all the other major capital initiatives. We talked yesterday about some things that have been absolutely essential, like the affordable housing program, which is being, you know, some pieces of it are being delayed because of the reality of this crisis and our budget reality. So, we're certainly going to look at the BQX and make decisions, thinking about those same realities. I don't want to give you a firm answer today. It will be discussed in the budget process and be part of what we say around the budget in June. But it's a very good example of the kind of thing that now has to be thought of very differently simply for the budget ramifications alone. Now, that was going to be obviously an initiative that could only work with very substantial federal funding. But to the extent there was any City exposure, it has to be considered now as part of our budget process.

Moderator: Next we have Steve from Westwood One News.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Thanks again for taking our questions every day and giving us ample opportunity to get responses from you. We really appreciate this. Quick question about a major recreation space in Southern Brooklyn. The Gateway National Recreation area has been a really important release valve for people in Brooklyn and Queens who want to get outside, who want to be out there recreating with their families while maintaining significant social distancing and not having to worry about being close to others. But the MTA has decided to park idle buses because they're using fewer buses at the Floyd Bennett Field facility. And as a result of the entire facility, which had been used for weeks now for safe recreation is now close to the public. It's also cut off 400 people from their community gardens at a time when many New Yorkers are having trouble putting food on their tables. And those 400 people rely on the food that they're growing in those community gardens to feed themselves. I'm just wondering, it seems like the MTA and the Parks Department reached this agreement without the knowledge of City Hall. I'm wondering if that's the case? And if there's anything being done to try to find an alternative such as the Riis Beach parking lot, which is completely unused right now or any other facilities to park these buses? And then one other question about the beaches. Considering that we have people social distancing –

Mayor: Steve, you there? Steve? Well we got, we got part one. I guess if we can get him back, we can do the second part. I'll start answering and you'll let me know if you, if you bring him back. Steve thank you for your comment at the beginning. I want to say, I think for everyone – is Steve back or not? I'm hearing some feedback there. You good? Steve?

Question: Yeah.

Mayor: Okay. There you go. We heard you start to talk about beaches and then lost you.

Question: As a second question, the beach issue was just, you know, it seems like social distancing as it's maintained in Central Park and Prospect Park could also be maintained on many of our 14 miles of City beaches over the summer? Some of them maybe, perhaps not. I'm wondering if that's being considered for approved recreation over the summer?

Mayor: Okay. So, Steve, thank you for the questions. And I want to say thank you for your kind comment about what I've tried to do, my team's tried to do here, which is to constantly make information available and take questions from all of you that would help the people in New York City get a better sense of what's going on. And obviously, you know, answer important and tough questions that the public deserves answers to. So, thank you. I want to thank everyone in the media because this has been, you know, an extraordinary situation where we're doing this so often. And I think the people of this city have appreciated that this dialogue happens so regularly. So thank you to all.

To your two questions. So, I'm not happy with what I'm hearing about, it doesn't make sense to me. Steve, what I don't understand is exactly who all the parties to this were. Obviously, the MTA, my understanding is that situation is controlled, that space is controlled by the United States Parks Service. I don't know enough about what city agencies involvement was or wasn't. I'll get down to the bottom of that today and we can give you more of an answer later. But I can tell you I don't like what I'm seeing for the very reasons you outlined. That we want people to have access to recreation for just the amount of time they need each day. And obviously with social distancing, but people do need access to that recreation, people do need access to community gardens, again following those rules. And I don't understand. It's not anything negative to MTA. I just don't why with so much less service going on, it would be necessary to knock out, you know, those opportunities for everyday people. You know, I have to believe there are other alternatives. So, we're happy to work with MTA on other alternatives. But we'll come back to you today on that.

On the beaches. I think we're starting with the notion that first of all we don't know what the next few months bring. The normal time we would have opened the beaches would have been a matter of weeks from now on Memorial Day. That was inconceivable from everything that we have been experiencing. Because remember, how do most people get to the beaches? They get on the subways, they get in buses, they drive their cars and then a bunch of people congregate. That was not something we could possibly imagine for the near term. We are still fighting day to day to beat back this disease. You've been watching indicators, Steve, we’ve been making some progress but we're still not to the kind of progress we need. So that's why we knew we could not start the beach season anywhere near like normal. As I've said, we're open to later on in the summer where we may get an opportunity. I think your point is well taken. If we get to something, if we get to a point where we could start to open up, how would we do it and how would we do it smartly? I think it's fair to say I could see a scenario where we would do social distancing and limits on the number of people, but I also want to urge people to recognize that won't be easy. That's a lot to enforce, it comes with real problems and potential dangers. So that one would be a high bar from my point of view. We'd have to be really certain we were turning a corner on the disease, really certain we could do it the right way, and that we could enforce it properly. But it's a perfectly fair idea and something we're going to look at as one of the options, but that's not happening overnight. That's something that would be down the road when we've had a lot more progress beating back this disease.

Moderator: Next we have Christina from Chalkbeat. 

Question: Hi, Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. There's obviously, and rightfully, a lot of focus on mental health right now. I'm just wondering if we can expect a specific plan for teachers and students who are also dealing with a lot right now with the shift to remote learning.

Mayor: Yeah. Christina, the – absolutely, yes. The Chancellor mentioned this originally a couple of weeks ago and I tried to amplify yesterday how much we're focused and concerned about the mental health needs of our kids. I've spoken with the First Lady about it. The First Lady and the Chancellor are working together to take a lot of the initiatives that have been created through Thrive and apply them in the coming months with our kids remotely, but also to start the planning for September. We understand that September is going to be a challenge in terms of mental health for our kids that's absolutely unprecedented and we're going to have to do a lot in every school to support kids who have honestly been traumatized. So, you're going to in the not too distant future hear the specific plans to address mental health needs of kids over the next few months. And then as we get closer to the opening of school, definitely a plan is going to be put out on mental health services in all schools for September. And the First Lady and the Chancellor will be working on that together. And the First lady is going to add – 

First Lady McCray: Yes. You should know that the mental health services that are provided to our young people are continuing, that teachers are being trained in social emotional learning, which of course deals with the children's emotional needs so that they are able to continue working with children online to a certain extent. In the fall we hope to have a more expanded program because we know that so many of our young people are going to come back in distress, but we haven't stopped doing anything that we're already doing. We're doing what we can virtually, training the teachers, bringing them up to speed so that they will be ready in September.

Mayor: Alright. Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Melissa from News 4.

Mayor: Melissa? I don't know if we have Melissa – are you there, Melissa?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing? 

Mayor: How are you doing? 

Question: Sorry, I was checking on my daughter in school.

Mayor: That's important. You had your priorities right.

Question: Walked away at the wrong moment, so thank you. We've been reporting that a few children hospitalized here in the city appear to be experiencing some of the same inflammatory symptoms that British officials warned about over last weekend. Some of the children have tested positive for COVID-19 while others have tested negative. But we're wondering what you're seeing, big picture. Your Health Department says since the inflammatory symptoms are not required to be reported to City health officials, they can't say exactly how many children are experiencing these serious side effects right now. Is this something you'd want your Health Department to be tracking? What else do you know about this, if anything?

Mayor: Thank you for the question. Look, I'm concerned because, you know, Melissa, we've talked about from the beginning, we're dealing with the great unknown here, and I think we have to be vigilant all the time to any new development that might give us a warning of something bigger because obviously the entire mission here is to save lives and particularly precious is saving the lives of our kids. So, I'm concerned about it. I don't pretend to have expertise on the exact reality, but I'm very concerned. And I think we've got to figure out how to understand it better and if it is something to be tracked. Let me turn to Dr. Barbot and I know we have Dr. Eric Wei who's the Vice President of Health + Hospitals. I want to see if either of them would like to speak to this issue.

Commissioner Barbot: So, Mr. Mayor, I will say that – I'll start with what we've been saying for a while. Every day we learn more and more about how this virus behaves, both from a public health point of view as well as from a clinical point of view. And, you know, recently we have been talking about the way in which coronavirus can affect the heart and the cardiovascular system. To date, we have not heard of ways in which the coronavirus has been affecting children's cardiovascular system. We do have regular ongoing calls with infectious disease specialists throughout the city. We have webinars with them. Additionally, we meet on a regular basis through webinar with doctors and leaders in the intensive care units of all of the hospitals, and we have not seen this to date. I've also been in communication with our Medical Examiner. She has not noticed this in cases that she has seen. But we are in contact with our academic partners to ensure that if this is a trend that's being seen through our clinical partners that we work collaboratively to understand it better. We are always paying attention to what seems to be emerging not only from the worldwide literature but also what we're experiencing here in New York City.

Mayor: Dr. Wei, anything you'd like to add?

Vice President and Chief Quality Officer Eric Wei, Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, similar to Dr. Barbot, I am not aware of this being a trend in New York City Health + Hospitals. I think that was one of the things that we were most, kind of, I guess appreciative of and being a father of two toddlers, three and five and a baby who is seven months old – you know, being scared for our children is it – the virus seems to not affect our young patients nearly as much as the older and those with comorbidities. But as Dr. Barbot mentioned, we are paying attention through our Pediatrics Council, our Critical Care Councils, our Emergency Department Councils, and we are not seeing a lot of children testing positive for COVID or getting very ill or ending up in our pediatric ICUs from COVID. But we are aware of the news and the literature that's ever-changing out there about inflammatory changes, Kawasaki disease, and we're paying very close attention to that and also listening to our science and our experts.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next is Matt Chase from Newsday.

Question: Hey, thanks for taking my question. I appreciate it. For the Police Commissioner, regarding gatherings, what exactly will you be doing differently going forward from what you did last night? How will your summons and arrest policy be different from what you did last night? And to what extent has the procedure changed for handling arrestees and folks getting summons physically since the coronavirus? And for Dr. Barbot, can you explain an epidemiology, the difference between absence of evidence and evidence of absence?

Mayor: Okay, Dr. Barbot, why don't you take that first, since that sounds like a question I would certainly not have the answer to. So, why don't you take that one and then we'll turn it to the Commissioner?

Commissioner Barbot: You know, that's a really good question. And when we say that there is absence of evidence, it means that there are not a good amount of studies that have documented evidence one way or another, what the particular finding in question or that particular question in question may be. So, that's an absence of findings. And then the other part of your question, if you could restate it.

Mayor: Do we have Matt still there?

Question: Sure. Can you hear me okay? 

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: I was wondering if you can explain evidence of absence.

Commissioner Barbot: Evidence of absence, meaning that scientific studies were done, clinical studies were done, observations, et cetera, and confirmed that there is, no current association with the particular question in mind. Now, that's not to say that future studies may not find a finding. But that's what that means.

Mayor: Okay. Commissioner Shea. 

Commissioner Shea: So, what I'll say about the gatherings – we're two months into this pandemic at this point and when you look at how we, as a police department, have policed. I am biased, but I think we've done a good job of balancing and using discretion and working with New Yorkers from one end of the city to another. In terms of whether it's in parks, whether it's at religious gatherings, whether it's outside housing developments, or whether it's on the street lining up to buy groceries. I think we've gone into it with an appreciation of this is tough for everyone and we’ve got to get through this together. And we've empowered our offices for years now to use discretion. And I think that that has come through in this. By-and-large you've seen New Yorkers cooperate. You've seen incidents pop up.

Certainly, we've had an increase in 3-1-1 calls. I view that as a good thing that people are letting us know what's going on and taking interest in their city and it is their city. Overall, we've seen really few, when you think of the tens and hundreds of thousands at this point, interactions across this city in a variety of circumstances. Arrests are the far extreme, there have been some summons, it’s really not a lot and usually it's been a mutual cooperation. But here's the only thing that's changed. We are beyond, at this point, asking people to comply. We cannot have, for the third time, what we had last night. And that is irrespective of any religion, any race, any part of this city. It is simply putting you at risk. It is putting your families at risk. It is putting the critical workers at risk that are already risking their lives, saying goodbye to their children and going into the unknown in emergency rooms across the city every day. And it's certainly, for the last time, putting my cops at risk. And what you should take away from that is how really unnecessary it is. We grieved this weekend for two fallen detectives, but we did not come out. We did it from our home by-and-large. And there is no reason that anyone in this city cannot do the same in this unprecedented time.

Moderator: Last question for today, Debralee from Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. 

Mayor: Good morning.

Question: I wanted to follow up on the conversation that's being had around testing and how the capacity for it continues to ramp up both on the city and the state level, to the extent that we're talking about expanding testing at NYCHA sites, at independent pharmacies, and the like. In doing so, can you speak to whether in fact the guidance on residents seeking out testing has changed, has more testing, in fact, then led to a conversation about inviting residents in the effort to both test and trace and identify the illness [inaudible] continues to progress. In fact, are we saying to residents, are we changing the guidance and saying, if you're asymptomatic, potentially you should still seek out testing to be certain? And then in light of that, are we looking at a prelude essentially to what's already happened in Chile, and we've heard Dr. Fauci discuss, which are essentially coronavirus certification or some kind of identification that speaks to whether you've tested positive and what that will mean? And then finally, when we talk about this testing and tracing policy, what concerns does the city have about how this will affect undocumented immigrants who are already concerned about, you know, the big brother quality of some of these programs, and in fact the disincentives to come out and get tested because there is this follow-through in a way that potentially might be invasive and they would worry, might well lead to dire consequences.

Mayor: So, Debralee, appreciate it. Let me work through these questions quickly and our medical colleagues, they might want to jump in as well, but let me take the first stab. For undocumented folks – look, this is a city that has gone out of its way to show absolute and total respect for all human beings who live here regardless of documentation status. I think that's something that's deeply understood in immigrant communities that we do not ask documentation status when we provide services, especially things like health care. NYPD does not ask documentation status, we go out of a way to make sure that records are not kept, that would be problematic. People have been told who are undocumented in this crisis, you know, we want to make sure you get food and you get medical care just like everybody else. So – and obviously the initiative that we created with the Open Society Foundation is to provide direct support to undocumented folks who don't have a livelihood, is exceptional and says the level of commitment this city has to all human beings.

So, my hope is when it comes to something as important as knowing if you have a disease that obviously can be life threatening to you and your family, that that is more important than anything else. Folks who have come here, have come here overwhelmingly to try and better the lives of their families often from very, very difficult and even tragic situations where they came from. So, I would like to believe that notwithstanding the fears, there would be – the first impulse is if someone needed testing, they would get testing, and know that it would be kept confidential by the City of New York because we keep everything confidential. In terms of your larger questions, has the guidance changed, in a sense, yes. But in another way, I wouldn't say all the way. It's changed in the sense that we once had almost no testing in the city.

And then we had to try to use the little bit we had to focus on the sickest patients and the health care personnel and the first responders. And now we're able only in the last few weeks to open it up to broader communities. So, that's definitely a change. Our message to people is that getting tested is important particularly if you are most vulnerable, older, and/or have preexisting conditions. So, that's been consistent. But what will change, for sure, much, deeply – much more deeply in the next few weeks is when we go to a huge test-and-trace approach. Then we're saying to tens of thousands, ultimately hundreds of thousands, of New Yorkers, we want to maximize testing, and then we want to test to anyone that if you're positive, if you test positive, we want to test the people that you had close contact with.

So, the guidance is changing, but it's going to change a lot more. I think on the question of certificates that's something we have to think about for the future. It has been used as a tool in one way or another. A certificate or something that's an online registry has been used in different places. I think it's certainly a commendable idea, but we have not made any conclusions on that. It would have to be done in a smart way. There's lots of things we'd have to think about legally – privacy, other issues. But it's certainly on the table as something we're looking at – how you support a really broad gauge testing system and how you get us back to normal with the information that testing system provides. So, those are some answers – doctors, anything you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, Mr. Mayor. I will add that it's important to tease apart the two tests that we're talking about because I think all too often antibody tests get lumped in with testing for the actual infection. And so, it's important for us to tease that apart. With regards to testing for infection, the guidance remains in terms of wanting to make sure that individuals who have chronic underlying illnesses that put them at greater risk for bad outcomes are prioritized for testing. But then as the availability for testing increases, we want to then test more individuals. In addition to that, we are doing everything we can to maximize the number of ways in which we increase access to testing. And so recently we announced that we are moving forward H + H and then we, through the public health lab, will also do nasal swabs instead of nasopharyngeal swabs, putting less of a strain on PPE. So that's how that testing arm has evolved. 

When we talk about testing for antibodies, we have to be very clear that there is no science that tells us that there is durable protection or immunity if someone tests positive for those antibodies. And so, we want to be very careful not to give false hope for people because there's no correlation with immunity. And in fact, there have been some preliminary studies that indicate that people can be potentially reinfected with COVID-19 in the same season. And so, we're waiting for more studies to be done to tell us whether those findings are corroborated or not. I think where antibodies may be helpful for us in the future is to give us a better understanding in the next season – if people who have antibodies for this season get reinfected next season, then we'll have a better understanding of what those antibodies really mean and whether or not they are protective and if they are protective how long they last.

Mayor: Dr. Wei, anything you'd like to add?

Dr. Wei: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. Yeah. Now I would just reinforce what Dr. Barbot said. The antibody tests, I think there's benefits even to our health care workers in terms of the psychological safety of knowing that I've been exposed and I wasn't one of the ones who ended up on a ventilator in the ICU. But we don't know how much immunity, and so we don't want people to relax their social distancing or their PPE usage. And then on the undocumented immigrants comment, I mean, that really resonates with Health + Hospitals with the Mayor's administration. It is part of our ethos. It is in our mission statement. The two most important words are without exception, we want to help New Yorkers live their healthiest lives. Without exception, we don't ask. I, as a doctor, don't care about your immigration status, I care about your health. And if that health is at risk because of COVID-19, I want you to get a test and I want to provide you the appropriate treatments and results. And so, I don't want anyone to think that at Health + Hospitals, we will be asking immigration status because we don't. We care about your health.

Mayor: Nicely said, doctor. Thank you. And let me conclude by us going back to where we started – the extraordinary work, the heroic work so many health care workers have done, so many first responders have done over these weeks. Unprecedented, unimaginable what so many have gone through and that no one could have foreseen. And yet the heroism has been so clear and so sharp. I want to thank the First Lady, I want to thank our Police Commissioner. The idea that we will all support our health care workers and our first responders in every way is absolutely crucial. So, it's of course everything that's been done up to now to give them protection, to get those PPEs, the personal protective equipment, and that effort is going to be ongoing and we're going to deepen that effort. All we have done to try to support them and thank them, but now going deeper with testing, going deeper with mental health support – we need to be there for them through this whole crisis and then beyond. And this is a good example – when they say that phrase, we'll leave no stone unturned, that's what we're talking about when it comes to supporting the heroes of this fight. There's a lot they need. There's a lot we have to give to them to support them. And everyone recognize, every time you say thank you to one of these heroes, every time you offer to help them in ways big and small, all those wonderful people have come out to applaud at seven o'clock at night, all the people who have brought food and support to hospitals and to our EMTs and paramedics and all of our first responders, every bit of it helps. And we're going to be there for them because they have certainly been there for all of us.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-04-30 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. When you think about what we've all been through, you think about the eyes of the world, the eyes of the nation have been on New York City and all of you in this time of unprecedented crisis. When the nation at the end of all this thinks about what happened here, when they try and put together the essence of what happened, and what New Yorkers did to try and summarize how New Yorkers confronted this extraordinary moment. I think the simple way to put it will be New Yorkers found a way through thick and thin, no matter what was thrown at you, you found a way. New Yorkers, we know for a long time, for generations, we've been a driven people in the best sense of the word. People who get things done, people who set a goal and then go and achieve it. That's who New Yorkers are. It doesn't matter where you come from, how much money there is in your bank account, it's something we all have in common. And think about the way that folks, even against extraordinary adversity found a way. Our teachers found a way. Our educators found a way to reach 1.1 million children without the benefit of school buildings and classrooms. Our entrepreneurs found a way to manufacture lifesaving supplies and equipment right here in New York City. Things that were not built here even just a couple months ago now being produced in New York City to protect our health care heroes and our first responders. And those extraordinary frontline heroes found a way through the toughest circumstances to keep going and keep saving lives.

You certainly deserve to know that your city government has found a way and will always found a way and that's what I intend to do. And all of us here at city hall and all the city agencies intend to do. So, finding a way has taken many, many forms I assure you. Sometimes things we didn't expect and help from places we didn't expect. I never would have expected that we would need to seek test kits for the coronavirus from Carmel, Indiana, but that's exactly what has happened, and that's helping us now to save lives here. I never would have expected to meet a pair of very, very good guys, EMT’s, paramedics from Kalamazoo, Michigan drove through the night to come here and help out our EMT’s and paramedics in their hour of need. Never ever would have anticipated the Brooklyn Navy Yard turning back the clock and becoming a wartime factory again. World War II it was a legendary shipyard creating the vessels that helped to protect us and save us. Today in the Brooklyn Navy Yard wonderful people, from the folks who own the companies to the folks who are sowing the surgical gowns and making the face shields by hand, creating those lifesaving products for our first responders, and our health care workers. Never could have imagined any of it, but each and every time New Yorkers found a way, and there've been some areas where it was hard to find a way to be very honest. Something I, like most of us, didn't know much about surgical gowns, isolation gowns. When we came to realize how crucial they were to protecting our frontline heroes in the hospitals. We set about trying to find a supply anywhere in the world only to find that it was very, very difficult. We needed this armor for our health care heroes, and we looked under every stone, and obviously started producing them right here, but it was nowhere near the number we would need.

Well, it often felt like we only had a few days before we were going to run out. That was the reality we were facing, but today I am happy to share some very good news, and this is one really important piece of the puzzle, because having those surgical gowns is so important to protecting the people who are protecting all of us. And I'll tell you, I want to as I say this, tell you that the local businesses that stepped up so brilliantly, they're now making 125,000 of these surgical gowns each week, right here in New York City. Again, zero were being produced two months ago, 125,000 a week and growing right now. And one company that was part of that, BCI Brands. They've been working closely with the city's Economic Development Corporation. One day, not so long ago, they shared a very important piece of information with the city. They said they had a sister factory in Vietnam that was capable of much greater production. The factory is called Viet Thanh Garment and we immediately knew we needed this help. Again, we had to find a way, but it was not going to be easy. The logistics were not going to be easy. It was not like getting something from just down the street. This was going to be a whole other endeavor, and the questions were many. How would we get the massive quantity of fabric needed to create the gowns far away in Vietnam? Could we get the, the planes put together? We literally have to find 747’s to bring these products back. Could we do it all immediately? Because the need was immediate. And I want to thank everyone at the city's Economic Development Corporation, because when presented with all these questions, some of which seemed extremely daunting, the answer to each and every one of them was yes, and they found a way.

So, we now have, for the first time in this crisis, a large-scale provider of surgical gowns for New York City. Over a million gowns are now on their way as we speak to the city. Another 900,000 will be on their way next week, and 3 million more are being produced as we speak. We're sending fabric to the factory in Vietnam so they can make even more. Now, this is something that I have to tell you, we've been measuring our supply of surgical gowns, isolation gowns. We've been in all these similar protective garments. We've been measuring our supply in days. That's how tight it has been, whether we could even get through any individual week. But now, because we have this strong production right here, and because of this extraordinary partnership with the factory in Vietnam, we are now confident that we will have enough surgical gowns to get us to the middle of May. And that's, I have to tell you compared to any other point in this crisis, that's the best we've been able to achieve, not out of the woods for the long haul, more to do. And clearly want to emphasize to all the frontline health care workers, this is not the ideal standard. We're still operating at that crisis standard where we're providing the PPE’s, but we'd like to provide even more, but at least for the first time in quite a while we can say we have a secure supply for the weeks ahead. And now we can get the hospitals, the nursing homes, what they need on a much steadier basis, and that is very good news for protecting our heroes and helping them save lives.

Now, another place where we had to find a way was when it came to testing. Testing, this has been the central issue during this whole crisis. The absence of testing from the beginning. The fact that testing is still so hard to get now, and the unclear as a charitable term, the unclear role of the federal government, the absence of the federal government as the driving force throughout this whole process when it comes to testing. Remember, testing is how we get to that next phase. Testing is how we get out of widespread transmission of the coronavirus and onto the next phase where we can start to get life back to normal. Testing is key to everything. So, for so long the testing we had was very limited, and the focus had to be on saving lives in the hospitals on protecting our health care workers, knowing who had the disease, who didn't, who needed to get home or get treatment, who was able to stay at work, and the same with our first responders. But in recent weeks, the last couple of weeks, we finally had the testing capacity, and the personnel, and the PPE’s to actually go out and do community-based testing the way we want to do a lot more of. We finally are getting this to grow into something much more important and bigger at the community level.

So, just a few weeks ago, there were literally no sites that weren't attached directly to a hospital. Now, there are 11 community sites open. Eight at Health and Hospitals clinics all over the five boroughs, three at New York City Housing Authority sites. And those three sites are now open at the Jonathan Williams Houses in Williamsburg, at the Woodside Houses in Woodside, Queens, and Saint Nicholas Houses in Harlem. So, that has been a big step forward. We're now going to go a lot farther. This fits beautifully with what we have to do to build up a much bigger test and trace mechanism. So, this is the first of many steps we're going to take. I'm also pleased to announce there will be new sites opening as part of this community testing initiative. Two more Health and Hospitals sites will open this weekend at the Ida G Israel Clinic in Coney Island, and the Dikeman Clinica de Las Americas in Inwood in Manhattan. Starting next week, we will also provide community testing on a broader scale at all 11 Health + Hospital hospital locations as well. So, as you can see, this is really growing rapidly, and it is the precursor to a much bigger test and trace operation that's going to grow throughout May. Again, we're here to serve the communities that are hardest hit, and we're going to be growing out from there to reach more and more New Yorkers across the whole city, every community. And I want to remind you, the first priority always is folks who are older, and folks who have those preexisting conditions, and particularly if someone fits both those categories. So, more and more testing in the communities that are having the toughest time, the coronavirus that then will blend into a true citywide test and trace operation reaching into every corner of the five boroughs.

So, when you add in everything that we have planned, we'll go from the 11 sites now to 30 sites tripling the number by the week of May 18th. So, this is now really moving fast, testing dynamics are changing, thank God, we talked a few days ago about the self-swab test that's going to simplify things and speed up the testing process. We still have more work to do with the labs to extend lab capacity for that test and we need more lab capacity overall, this is still the big missing link lab capacity and the products that go into the lab process like the reagents. This is still where we need help from the federal government on a big scale, but more and more since we're finding more and more sites we can use, we have more and more personnel and PPEs we can apply. We're able to use this simpler self-swab test, the expansion is really moving, so 11 sites now will be 30 sites by the week of May 18th, and we'll be able to triple the number of tests given each week, so now we're at about 14,000 tests per week. Again, getting faster, the more we do it more efficient, the more we do it, by the week of May 4th it'll be 35,000 tests a week, by the week of May 18th, 43,000 tests a week, and we want to go a lot farther from there.

Now, want to talk about the way we link up the things that we've achieved so far. Getting more and more of the PPEs, getting more and more of the testing link that concept up with what all of you have achieved by your extraordinary devotion to social distancing, to shelter in place, to the things that have been working. Another piece of this that has clearly been working is face coverings, talked about this weeks ago when the evidence came in that was time to tell New Yorkers, everyone needs a face covering outside, I want to thank you because overwhelmingly New Yorkers took that instruction and ran with it. When the City gave that guidance initially New Yorkers really moved fast to take it and make it a part of your everyday life and it's helped and it’s helps protect everyone and again, face coverings means a scarf, a bandana, anything you can create a home, not a fancy medical grade mask, just anything that you can create at home. A lot of people are getting mask from a hardware store or something like that, whatever just keeps your nose and mouth covered, people have been doing this really, really well, but we know there's some people that still don't have a face covering and need one or some people that need to be reminded energetically that this is now a rule that everyone needs to follow. So, with more folks going outside the warmer weather coming, we want to keep limiting the time outside as always, but we know as it gets warmer, people will come out for their exercise, that's fine, get your exercise and get back home. We want to keep people safe; everyone needs to have a face covering on. Now, a place where you particularly have to be attentive and I want to remind people these rules, when you go into a grocery store or supermarket, a pharmacy, you have to have that face covering on. You have to, you have to do that out of respect for your fellow New Yorkers, you have to do that to help protect everyone. Remember when this disease is not spreading, it's also protecting you and your family, everyone you love, that face covering helps reduce the spread of the disease. So, you need to do that and if you don't do that, you're actually putting people at risk and if you don't do that, we've made very clear to the owners and managers and employees of those grocery stores, those department stores, excuse me, those supermarkets, those pharmacies that if someone comes in and is not wearing a face covering of course, it's great to remind them, Hey, you don't have your face covering put it on right away, please. If someone doesn't have a face covering with them or isn't willing, they need to get out of the store, let's be abundantly clear. We've said in the City will back them up and if the store owner or manager needs support from any city agency, including NYPD, we will be there right away. No one goes into a grocery store, a supermarket or a pharmacy without a face covering on. If you try to, the people in the store have every right to send you right back the other way out and we will back them up a hundred percent so again, really clear rules, let's all follow them, it's just for the protection of everybody.

Now, again, want to make it easy for people to have face covering, so we're going to start to give them out free in our City parks. We know it's going to get warm; we know people to go to the parks, again, want people to keep some real limits on that, but I want everyone to have a face covering. Sometimes someone just forgot at home that we understand, some people are having trouble finding one, okay, we're going to start giving them out for free. So, a hundred thousand will be given out starting this week and we'll keep going from there. We're going to focus on parks where we expect a lot of people to be, we're going to focus on communities that have been the hardest hit by the disease. Anyone wants to know where these face covering distributions are going to be, you can go to nyc.gov/facecoverings.

Now, social distancing has been absolutely crucial, it's working, and another type of heroism has been the quiet heroism of so many of our city employees who have been out there, our public servants, educating people, reminding people that it was really important to practice social distancing. And it took some time, it's not normal for New Yorkers we understand it's taken a lot of adjustment, but a whole lot of our city employees have been out there doing a great job educating people, very persuasively, reminding them that this has to happen. The NYPD has been in the front line of that effort, I want to thank all our officers who are doing that work and all the members of all our agencies who have been doing that work. Look, we know this isn't easy sometimes and it certainly wasn't what people thought would be part of their regular job, but we need it and it's making a big difference. So, NYPD has been in the frontline of this, we're going to bring more and more other agencies to this effort and we now have over a thousand non-NYPD city workers who are being assigned to patrol parks and public spaces. They're from the Parks Department, the Office of Special Enforcement, Sanitation, Fire Department, Environmental Protection, and the Sheriff's Office. So, this is a big group, a lot of them have been out there already more will come and we're going to keep building this ability to be out there in public spaces, educating, patrolling, but also enforcing. At the same time these public servants will have a lot of face coverings with them and they'll be able to distribute them to anyone that needs them for free. Every time we give out these face coverings, I emphasize it will be for free and they'll be distributing 275,000 face covering starting this week. So, it's going to be really easy to get a face covering and everyone needs to stick with using those face coverings all the time when you're outside.

Now, let's talk about some good news for the heroes who have been doing so much for all of us, our health care workers, our first responders. Something very good happened earlier on this crisis and I want to thank everyone at Citi Bike. They did, they created something called a critical workforce program, they gave first responders, transit workers, health care workers, a free month of membership and 5,500 of them signed up and took advantage of that and were able to get around using Citi Bike. I want to say with great appreciation, the Citi Bike is now expanding this to a one year free membership and it will be offered to an even broader set of essential workers, I want to thank folks at Citi, which provided and MasterCard, both Citi and MasterCard have provided tremendous support, a million dollars to fund this program. This is going to be fantastic for helping people get around who need this alternative. And on top of that Citi Bike, we'll be expanding with a hundred new stations, docking stations in the Bronx and Manhattan, including key locations that have been the frontline of this crisis, including Lincoln Hospital and Harlem Hospital. And it will help everyone, these new stations of course will be open to all and they'll give more and more options to more and more people, so that's a great, great step forward. I want to thank Lyft, which is a company that now owns Citi Bike, this is a great step forward, thanks to everyone at lifts, thanks to everyone at Citi for investing in this program. And again, MasterCard as well for investing in this program, we appreciate this initiative that's going to make a big difference. And while I'm giving some thanks out, I'd like to thank some more organizations that have, and it's just wonderful when people step up from New York City and it really shows that a lot of people, a lot of organizations that have for a long time benefit from their connection to New York City are remembering that and honoring that and stepping up from New York City and we are very, very appreciative.

First of all, our friends at the NBA have donated over a thousand N95 mask and 30,000 surgical mask and we thank them for that. American Eagle has donated 175,000 surgical mask, that's fantastic and the Consulate of Egypt has donated 200,000 surgical mask, 3000 protective suits and 2000 surgical gowns. We are very, very appreciative to all now that's in the category of the protective gear, there's been some other great donations. AT&T donated a hundred thousand dollars to our food for heroes effort through the Mayor's fund. Fresh cosmetics has donated $205,000 worth of personal cleaning products to our Health and the Hospitals locations and to the isolation centers, working on behalf of our homeless New Yorkers. And Facebook – this is really fantastic – Facebook is helping out our small businesses that are going through so much right now. We need all the support we can get and most especially we need the federal government to keep stepping up and putting real money into supporting our small businesses, but this is a great example and we're going to be doing more and more of this to get in every conceivable source of support for small business. Facebook has launched a $6.5 million grant program for New York City small businesses specifically, and it is help our small businesses richly deserve. I want to thank everyone at Facebook. This is a great initiative - any small business owner wants to apply, can go to facebook.com/grantsforbusiness.

Now, on that same note, obviously the key here is the federal aid and we know the first round of the federal support for small business – the Paycheck Protection Program – it did not work as planned on many levels. A lot of big businesses tried to usurp the money; it was a hard process to make sense of. A lot of businesses couldn't get their applications in time; a lot of businesses didn't have the relationships with the banks that made it easier. There were a lot of problems that came up in that first program granted, it was an important program. It was put together quickly in a crisis, but the good news is that, especially through the leadership of Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, Congressmember Nydia Velázquez, the Paycheck Protection Program got replenished with $310 billion and made more available to businesses that don't have those traditional big bank relationships; businesses that use local credit unions more, smaller mom and pop businesses, community-based businesses, businesses in communities of color. A lot was done to improve the program. So, $310 billion, an astounding amount of money, but we need to make sure it goes to New York City small businesses – it's going fast. So again, every small business who needs that help, if you haven’t applied - apply immediately. Go to sba.gov – for the Small Business Administration – sba.gov that's where the federal application is. Get it in as quickly as possible and as I announced any small business that's having trouble navigating the application process can call 3-1-1 and our team at Small Business Services and other agencies will help small business owners to navigate this process, but we've got to get these applications in right away to help our small businesses. So, please pick up the phone if you need help.

Now, let's go to the daily indicators. This is what we talk about every day and so important to track them all together. And so today we have a very good day. We don't have a perfect day, but a very good day. And again, I constantly see progress here because of everything you're doing. I want to get to those days where we hit all the notes and keep hitting them, but, overall, we still see real progress. So, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – down 136 to 129, so small amount of progress, but still progress. Daily number of people in ICUs across Health + Hospitals for COVID-19 – down 734 to 705. Percentage of people who are testing positive citywide down 23 percent to 22 percent, again small progress, but progress nonetheless. Public health lab, this is again the toughest measure in many ways – went up, not by a huge amount, but it went up 29 percent to 36 percent. So, overall a good day overall moving in the right direction, keep doing what you're doing because it is clearly working.

So, I'm going to close and a few words in Spanish and then we'll turn to our colleagues in the media, but, but just want to come back to that notion of finding a way. Again, it's a very New York City idea; it's a New York City way of life. You know, New Yorkers for generations have known how to make something out of nothing; how to take what looked to be impossible odds and turn them around. It's happening over and over and over again in this crisis. It's been amazing to watch. My respect for all of you was intense before this crisis. It has grown even more because I've watched this city somehow fight back this disease and do it with an incredible strength and a compassion for each other; that's what New York City's all about. So, we're going to find a way, and I can tell you what we're all going to do here at City Hall. One way or another, we're going to find a way to get more testing; we're going to find a way to create the biggest testing and tracing program this city, this nation has ever seen. One way or another, we're going to get those supplies, that equipment that protects our heroes. We will find a way, we will find a way to restart the city and we will find a way to recover. And we actually will find a way to come back in many ways stronger, and fairer, and better. I have absolute faith in the people in this city. So, we know how to find a way that's who we are and we will find a way to beat this disease.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we will turn to our colleagues in the media. And as always, please let me know the name and the outlet of each journalist

Moderator: And a quick reminder to folks that we have Dr. Barbot and Dr. Katz on the phone. And the first question goes to Juliet from 1010 Wins, Juliet.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning all, how are you today?

Mayor: Hey Juliet, how are you?

Question: I’m okay, so I have a question. I’ve seen and reported a chronic rat infestation. It has been a swarm of rats coming out of the sewer and crawling on garbage bags left on the street on Sixth Avenue and I was informed by 3-1-1 and then the Health Department that pest control teams are not responding due to social distancing regulations. Now, I don't know whether you've seen the situation in New Orleans where the rats are out in the streets in droves. So why isn't pest control responding and are you concerned about a rat problem getting out of control here?

Mayor: Juliet, thank you for the question. I have to say it's a very graphic question, but thank you. As New Yorkers, unfortunately we know way too much about rats and we are certainly not going to ever let it get to be a worse situation. We're going to fight it back. Look, in the beginning of the crisis, Juliet, a lot of the normal way we did business had to be changed. Remember that for weeks in March going into the beginning of April, it looked like this was going to become an even deeper health care crisis and everything was about making sure the disease didn't spread, making sure we were really forcefully keeping people inside to the maximum extent possible. And we had to be smart about our public employees because everyone that could be kept in and could socially distance, we had to do that. But now we have a situation that's improving. We got still a long way to go, but we have a situation that's improving so we cannot let that situation with the rats you describe get out of hand and we will address it head on. I'll follow up today with the Health Department; we'll assess the right way to address that while still being mindful that we have to use only the minimal amount of city personnel while still trying to keep everyone in who we can, but we're certainly going to address that problem.

Moderator: Next is Andy from the Gay City News, Andy?

Question: Yes, hi Mr. Mayor. Good to see you.

Mayor: How you doing man?

Question: Yeah, I'm okay. I'm 66 and overweight, but, you know, we'll hope to get through this. Two questions, you proposed a rent freeze and renters being allowed to use their security deposits for rent, but the Rent Guidelines Board has always had the legal power to lower rents. The group Housing Justice is calling for a three percent decrease in rents; a roll back given the severity of the crisis. Might this not be the time to roll back rents? And second, the United States Navy Ship Comfort – the hospital ship – is going back to Virginia. What then is the need for Franklin Graham Samaritan's Purse in Central Park? And are you at all concerned that they've been filming dying patients and using them in their fundraising ads on television and online and proselytizing for their religion while caring for the patients?

Mayor: Well, Andy, that one, this is the first-time hearing anything like that and I would be deeply concerned if that was happening. I mean, look, when we all first heard about a field hospital near Sinai Hospital, you know, it was in a moment where the disease was growing rapidly and it was part of an effort to provide more and more care for people as the situation got worse and worse. And honestly, when I first heard about it, I had no idea about the history of the organization. The more I learned, the more concern I got. There've been a number of efforts to make clear, and I want to say everyone at the hospital has been very clear about this, that that no discrimination was acceptable in any way that everyone who worked there had to serve anyone and everyone equally and from everything I've heard that was enforced. I'm going to leave it to the people at Mount Sinai to determine if they still need the help to protect lives; that is the first concern here and whether that, whether that field hospital is still needed. That's something I want them to first pass judgment on. But, on the question of using footage to promote an organization that clearly has exclusionary values, I would be very concerned about that. And I would ask that Mount Sinai lay down the law about that and make clear that that's not something appropriate. They came here in principle to help save lives- that is good. That is something we all agree on, but we do not want to see the experience here in New York City used in some way to proselytize for any kind of exclusionary values. On the question of the rent, look, rent freeze to me makes a lot of sense given what people are going through. The Rent Guidelines Board needs to look at the, what the sheer totality of what tenants have experienced – it's overwhelming, it's unprecedented – the only comparison is the Great Depression. The people that are hurting the most in this equation are the tenants. I am certain, a lot of landlords are going through a lot too, especially smaller landlords. I don't belittle that at all, but rent freeze is the way to go because it protects the interests of renters but also recognizes that the buildings have to keep running and renters need that too. So, that, from my point of view, is the right balance to strike. I certainly think the Rent Guidelines Board should consider all the facts. There's other proposals on the table, they should look at them, but I think the balanced approach is a rent freeze. 

Moderator: Next is Julia from the Post. Julia?

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor and to everyone else on the call – just two questions. One, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said yesterday that the City needs to create a bereavement committee to deal with the surging deaths due to the coronavirus that would bring in more funeral directors, morgues, MEs, and clergy to assure the deceased are treated in a dignified manner. That's after police found dozens of bodies being stored in unrefrigerated U-Haul trucks outside of a Brooklyn funeral home. And then secondly, you mentioned the ramping up of testing. I was looking for an update of New York City's homegrown testing effort given that it's now April 30th and you said it would start producing 50,000 tests a week at the beginning of May. Can you say what labs, universities, or other companies are involved?

Mayor: Yeah, that testing effort is moving forward, Julia. I'll confirm with folks, I don't have all the details in front of me now, but I got an update yesterday. It is definitely moving forward aggressively and we will be able to confirm very shortly the exact participants in it, but they're doing good work. We'll get that out on the proposal by Borough President Eric Adams. I think it's a good idea. Now, this horrible situation that occurred with the funeral home in Brooklyn. Absolutely unacceptable. Let's be clear about this. Funeral homes are private organizations, private businesses, they have an obligation to the people they serve to treat them with dignity. I have no idea in the world how any funeral home could let this happen. The City historically does not have a direct working relationship with funeral homes. They are regulated by the State of New York.

So, it's not an area that we work with a lot, but again, we all have to work together to solve problems. I don't understand in this case, if the funeral home – I heard something about a driver didn't show up or something like that. Why on Earth did they not either alert the State, who regulates them, or go to their NYPD precinct and ask for help, do something rather than leave the bodies there. It's unconscionable to me. So, we will all work together and I think what Borough President Adams has said is smart. Get everyone talking to each other. Bring in our clergy who obviously brings so much perspective about what families need in this moment. So, I think that's a good idea and we'll find some way to create something like that, get everyone communicating and working together. 

Moderator: Henry from Bloomberg is up next. Henry?

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, good to see you again. I'm going to go back to the question I really asked yesterday because I think it got deflected into the problems with social distancing and that incident in Brooklyn with the funeral for the rabbi. And the question that I'd want to focus on is how do you assess the risk to New Yorkers in trying to come back to some semblance of everyday life, whether it's playing a game of tennis, whether it's shooting foul shots on a playground, whether it's, you know, just meeting up with your relatives for some kind of social interaction? When does the City decide to give New Yorkers some kind of break, some kind of relief? And of course, overriding this whole thing is the question of opening the school at a time when we're getting contradictory evidence of whether kids are contagious or not, whether they spread the disease. There are conflicting studies on that, whether asymptomatic kids spread the disease or not. How do you intend to go about assessing the risk and making a move back toward the life that we knew six weeks ago?

Mayor: Yeah. Well, Henry, again, very fair, good question, and a very real-world question. I appreciate that. First of all, we are going to get back. The how and the when are still unclear and the facts are not all in and the science is still – you know, we need a lot more scientific understanding of this disease to get to the point where I would say we are fully normal and obviously what we all pray for, a vaccine and even better a cure. But I think the way you put it's important, sort of, thinking about the stages, thinking about the things that might be more appropriate to do or less dangerous to do versus other things. So, first of all, when I think of schools, schools mean a lot of people in a close space. That's just the reality. This is New York City, 1.1 million kids in our school system. I saw a picture a few weeks ago of a preschool in Denmark. I think they were the first country in Europe to try and bring back at least education for the youngest kids. And the picture had a big open space, a big open yard, and a few kids and they were distanced, and I thought, that's wonderful if you're in Denmark, but that's not what we have here. We have schools, so many of them, that are just filled with both kids and adults.

And in fact, we've been building a huge number of new schools all the time because in many of our communities we still have overcrowding in our schools. So, the notion of bringing back school, to me, that is one of the most sensitive decisions because it inherently means putting a lot of people in the same place. And I think it's absolutely right to say that can't happen until September and it's going to take a lot of work to get it right for September, but that's the right goal. But on other things like you mentioned, you know, I think we're going to see the combination of what does the science bring because there is always the possibility of real innovations, either new information that tells us how to better fight this disease or the possibility, obviously, of something like a vaccine would be a game changer. So, the science is one of the X-factors.

Our own efforts, how New Yorkers stick with social distancing and staying at home is going to have a lot to say with what we're going to be able to do because the more they do that, the more we'd beat back to the disease, the more we get back to normal. So, it's – the painful part about fighting our way through is actually the part about also liberating ourselves. We're not going to fall for these cheap slogans about being liberated. The way to liberate ourselves is to stick to the plan, fight our way through, and get to the point where people can start to resume more of their lives. So, it's following the current rules and then the test-and-tracing program, which is really going to be a big offensive thrust, if you will, to go out there and change the dynamics on the ground with a much greater amount of testing and then the tracing of the contacts and the isolation, quarantine. We do all that right, the day's going to come where we're going to start to lift some restrictions. When you think about how you lift the restrictions, then your question becomes very pertinent. Are there things you can do, piece by piece? 

So, I spent many a day as a child shooting foul shots. Sometimes alone, sometimes like with one other friend, or playing Horse or something like that. You think about that, you're like, oh, that'd be okay. The problem is you put back up, you know, the rim and the net and then it's going to be very, very tempting to kids to start to play full games with lots of kids, and then you got a problem on your hands. So, we have to be really smart about it. We've talked about something like the beach – you say, well, what if we just invite a few people, if you will, and they have to socially distance. It's going to be very hard to do that and not turn into a lot of people, not socially distanced. We're going to have to do this very carefully. 

So, what we will do, Henry, is present the next stage as we're getting close to it, we're not there yet, and you can see from the indicators, we're just not there yet. But when we get close to the point we can do some loosening up, we're going to literally delineate what it's going to be and it will be, do some, a little, try it, see if it works, and then try and do more, but stage by stage, piece by piece. But even the examples you give, unfortunately, they rarely end up being linear, if you will. That something that first seems like wouldn't that be a great individual activity, it could lead to group activities, and that's what we're not ready for. And then the last thing we're ready for is, of course, huge gatherings. That's going to be one of the last things to come online. We're just going to have to do this in stages and be disciplined and the indicators are going to tell us when it's time for that.

Moderator: Marcia from CBS-2 is up next. Marcia?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today? 

Mayor: Good, Marcia, how are you?

Question: My first question has to do again with the homeless on the subways. I wonder if you think that cleaning the subways every 24 hours is really the way to get the homeless off the subway since it seems that they're just going to get back on again anyway. I wonder if the solution is to send teams of outreach workers and NYPD cops to each of the ten end-of-line stations you spoke of, every night to try to convince them to leave the subways and get into some form of shelter or hotel. And my second question has to do with the unrefrigerated bodies. I'm wondering if there's anything the City can do to help these funeral directors. I don't know whether there's anything like a portable crematorium or you can do more temporary burials at Hart Island, but something to relieve this burden that they're all facing.

Mayor: Yeah. Marcia, look, I always am very careful when I speak about this very sad topic and I don't go into a lot of detail, but my strong impression – I've asked this question a number of times – is that the funeral homes know that there's a lot of support available if they need it. Overwhelmingly, they've been doing their job under tough circumstances. You know, I think this was abhorrent. I think this horrible incident, which again, I think it's unconscionable, I just don't understand how they let this happen, but that funeral home shouldn't have let it happen. Like I said, if they really were out of options, they should have called the precinct and we would have found some way to help them. But I do not see that as a widespread reality. They've gone through a lot, but they've managed to keep providing support for people. You know, overwhelmingly the funeral homes have done a very admirable job in this tough situation. So, I do not get the sense that those kinds of extraordinary measures are needed. We will support them anyway we can and we'll keep watching for what they need. But I think they're doing a very admirable job, the vast majority of them.

On the question of the subway – yeah, the idea that I absolutely believe in is the combination of NYPD and homeless outreach workers. It's proven to be very, very effective both above ground and in the subways. But the problem has been when homeless individuals are able to just go back and forth all night on the same train. We've got to disrupt that. What I proposed is have those ten key stations shut down in the overnight hours, have a shuttle bus instead. And that's exactly when we would surge NYPD and outreach workers to those places when the last train comes in and deal with all homeless folks who are there and just use every tool we have to convince them to come into a Safe Haven and stay in and not go back to the street. More cleaning is good. Let me emphasize, Marcia, more cleaning is always good, but I think the notion of the disruptive strategies, this is what we really believe in, to encourage homeless folks not to follow the same old pattern they’ve been following bluntly for decades, but to recognize that a lot of help is there for them and we're going to provide them whatever it takes. If some need mental health services, some need to kick a drug habit, need substance abuse services. Some of them, if there's just enough conversation, enough trust building that they can be safe in a Safe Haven and get medical care, get food, they will become convinced to come in and I'm absolutely convinced if we do that enough times, we're going to change the reality of homelessness on our streets once and for all.

Moderator: Dave from ABC-7. Dave?

Question: Hey, Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Dave, how you been?

Question: Yeah, I've been fine. I wanted to ask you about something that you said during your presentation and that was this thousand City employees who are going to be backing up police on enforcing social distancing and helping out to distribute some of the masks. I found it ironic that we're bringing this up today when one of the messages coming from the White House is to relax these social distancing rules and the requirements that people should wear masks when they're outside. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that, that how the City seems to be going in one direction while the rest of the country seems to be going in another, at least the direction from the White House.

Mayor: Dave, you used an interesting phrase in a very charitable phrase, ‘direction from the White House’. We have not gotten direction from the White House since January. We've gotten the biggest moving target in the history of the United States of America. No two days are the same. I mean, you watch the briefings and it's the magical mystery tour. So, you know, in the end it's sad, it's really sad, but it's incoherent. And the notion – you know, the President of the United States was tweeting those, liberate Michigan, liberate Virginia, all that – incredibly dangerous. So, telling people, open up, there's nothing to worry about, when we see the horrible things happening at the meat packing plants and the horrible stories of nursing homes around the country – what is he thinking? It's unbelievable. So, here's what we know in New York City, we know we have not beaten this disease yet and we're going to take a tough line and hold the line until we do beat this disease because that is the only way to come back safely. It's the only way to protect people's health and safety – is to hold the line and then when we actually do those steps towards restarting the economy, they will hold, they will work. We won't have that boomerang. Dave, that is not to say we won't have some good days and bad days. You know, as we start to open up, we may have some setbacks, but if we're tough about it, those setbacks can be kept to a minimum and we can ultimately get to something normal again.

What I fear, Dave, is when the president tells everyone to loosen up and we're already seeing, you know, people flocking to the beaches in some of these states and, you know, congregating again, there's going to be a flare up and it's going to set them back. But I'm also worried for New York that the more the disease starts to spread around the country, just as we're beating it back, that puts us in danger again. So, no, it is no time to loosen up. There are some places in the country that have real evidence that they can take certain steps, but they should take the first step and then watch to see if it works. Second step, watch to see if it works, and always be ready to pull back if it's not working. But the places that are just saying go with it, you know, good luck out there, they're going to – I fear they're going to pay a steep price and the president is not helping with that kind of language.

Moderator: Katie from the Wall Street Journal is up next – Katie. Katie, can you hear us?

Question: Can you hear me? 

Moderator: Yes.

Question: I'm here. Thanks for taking my question. I was hoping for an update. I know that the City announced opportunities for people to utilize hotels for quarantine. Whether it's people who are sick, have symptoms, or even just live in quarters in some of the hardest hit neighborhoods. Could you just give an update on how many families and individuals have access to the program and just an update – I know apart from some people who say they don't know how to find out about this and actually access this. So, if you have some information on that. Thank you.

Mayor: I have – thank you, Katie. Very good questions and very important questions. And this is – we're at a point on a continuum. So, I want to tell you where we are now versus where we're going. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me. Our team will give them to you, but it's a great question because it really gets to the heart of what we have to do with testing and tracing. So, to date, we started with – remember the hotel rooms were going to be all about hospital facilities. Thank God we didn't need them. Then we focused them first on health care workers getting what they needed, first responders getting what they needed, if they needed a place to stay and they couldn't go home to their families. Then we started opening up to families who needed a place to isolate, individuals who needed to isolate away from their family if they might be sick. Obviously, more and more, trying to reach homeless New Yorkers. 

So, a lot of pieces are now moving aggressively – folks who have come out of hospitals but aren't able yet to go back to their families. There's all sorts of categories. What we have not had to date is that sort of central apparatus to do this on a vast scale. And that's what test-and-trace is going to provide. So, for example, the other day, Saturday, I was at the Morrisania clinic, the Health + Hospitals clinic in the South Bronx – extraordinary operation. And I got into this very conversation with the doctors and nurses there about when they tested people, how did it work to get someone who needed to get to an isolation room. And they said if a test came back positive and someone couldn't properly isolate at home, the social worker for the clinic would then connect them to a hotel room. So, it was a facilitated process. 

We need to do that now on a big, citywide scale that it's all facilitated. Once an individual is identified that they get that helping hand to make the arrangements and then once they're in the room, food, of course, is provided, medical support, laundry, you name it. It's a big, big endeavor. It's a costly endeavor, but it's how we beat back this disease. So, test-and-trace is going to get going really intensely in May, and a key part of it will be that direct facilitation where people know exactly where to call, or they are called, to connect them to the hotel room and make sure the arrangements are made, the transportation is there for them, et cetera. That's what's coming out soon.

Moderator: Yoav from The City is up next. Yoav?

Question: Yeah. Hi, Mr. Mayor, on the funeral home issue – this actually isn't the first case where a funeral home has struggled. The main issue seems to be the lack of storage space. And I guess I'm just wondering if there isn't more the City could do as far as perhaps coordinating with the funeral homes to address some of the systemic issues? You know, if the issue is a shortage of refrigerated trucks perhaps that's something either the City or – I recognize the State oversees funeral homes, but that's something that would be better coordinated on a citywide level perhaps than at the single funeral home level? And the other issue is, you know, a funeral home calling a local police precinct when they're dealing with an issue like this is not really intuitive. I guess I'm wondering if there's a more formal kind of communication, you know area that the City can set up so that funeral homes have kind of a known place to come with their issues?

Mayor: Well, Yoav, it's a fair question. Again, the – remember this is something that when this crisis began just weeks ago, this was not an area the City had relationships in. I mean, the places that we don't regulate, it's not surprising to you – we just don't have those natural relationships. And we've had to start working with the funeral homes and in fact there has been a weekly call with funeral homes and City personnel to go over the support the City was providing and to go over what the latest rules and ideas for dealing with a situation we're in. And to also offer an opportunity to deal with any problems they were having. So there has been an outreach effort.

There definitely is a substantial amount of refrigerated trucks available. The fact is, what I was trying to say about the police precinct is, if for whatever reason this funeral home had not had contact with the City or didn't know how to turn to the State folks they deal with or whatever, anyone in a just a human crisis like that, Yoav – I don't think it's so mysterious at all. If you were dealing with a horrible crisis like that, it was true that the funeral home had something break down and they couldn't deal with the situation. And you're talking about, you know, the, the deceased loved ones of, you know, families, I'm sorry, it's not hard to figure out if nothing else is working call the NYPD. It was an emergency situation. So, I'm very disappointed they didn't do that. And I'm not – they are a private business. They have responsibility here. I'm not going to say, Oh, you know, they don't bear any responsibility. No, they do bear responsibility. They should have figured it out. But we have been able to provide ongoing information and support. We will continue to deepen that. Anything we can do, we want to do. And I think again, the Borough President's idea of a committee that not just is about funeral homes, but clergy and just all of us thinking together – thankfully, let us pray against a backdrop of fewer and fewer people being lost. I think that does make sense, that we'll pull that together just to increase the amount of information and support.

Moderator: Gloria from NY1 is up next. Gloria?

Question: Hi. Good morning. Mr. Mayor, I want to follow up on these City workers who will be enforcing social distancing. If you could just talk a little bit about which City workers they will be? Are they going to be civilians? And how are you going to ensure that they're doing this properly? There are people who have concerns about how social distancing is being enforced.

And then I wanted to follow up on the question around this incident at the funeral home. I guess on a broader scale, is there anything the City is doing or working on to help people who might be struggling to pay for services? People who can't afford to bury their loved ones or to give them a proper service, or they just don't have the money immediately available? Are there any City resources being set up to help with that?

Mayor: Yes. Gloria, we can get you the details, but yes we have been able to provide some help and we want to provide more. There's – it's a somewhat complex dynamic because there's a City element, there's a State element and obviously we also want to bring in private support and philanthropic support. Because it's not something obviously the City has done in the past on a large scale. And thank God it's not something we ever would want to have to do in the future. But you know, for people who need help, we want to make sure they get help. So, our team will get you the details. But we are very clear there are some people who are in a horrible situation, not only first and foremost because they've lost someone, but then on top of that they can't afford a burial. And you know, it just makes a bad situation so much worse. So, we want to be helpful or find other resources that will help them. That's something we're definitely doing.

On the civilian enforcement. So, I'll just go over the agencies again. In addition to NYPD we're talking about Parks Department, Office of Special Enforcement, Sanitation Department, Fire Department, Environmental Protection, and the Sheriff's Office. So all of these are City agencies that have enforcement powers that have the ability to give out violations. And we're talking about over a thousand employees from those agencies who already have that power being applied to enforcing social distancing. We've done a lot of education over the last weeks. We're going to be really clear with people, immediately move, do not in any way shape or form hesitate. If you are not doing something right, you got to stop immediately otherwise there will be enforcement. And there will be violations given, period. So, these workers are going to play a crucial role in that effort, augmenting all of the efforts of the NYPD. And then we're going to be doing more and more to help people in the process like giving out the free face coverings. So I think it's just constant education, making it easier with the face coverings, but then a whole lot of enforcement. And showing that, you know, at this point it's time for people to be really clear. We have got to stick to social distancing if we want to get through this. Folks who don't practice social distancing are prolonging this crisis and we certainly will not allow that.

Moderator: Anna from the Daily News is up next. Anna?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Two questions. What is the current citywide testing capacity for daily testing capacity? You said last week it was about 11,000. And then on the issue of the bodies of coronavirus victims, it's my understanding that the City is temporarily freezing these bodies, but that if a funeral home collects the body, they cannot give it back to the ME’s Office? So I'm just curious if there are any circumstances in which a funeral home collects too many bodies, like without realizing that they're going to go run out of space, they could then go back to the ME’s Office and say, hey ,can you please take these bodies off your hands even though you already released them to us? Because you know, obviously the City is providing the freezing, so I don't understand why that wouldn't add into the dynamic?

Mayor: Yeah, Anna, respect the question. I know you're trying to get information legitimately. I'm just not going to answer any more questions today on this topic. I do not think this is what we should be focusing our public discourse on. I'll have the team get you the answers. Perfectly legitimate question, but I'm sorry. We are here to talk about addressing this disease and moving the city forward. So, and I just don't know the details on the question that you're asking.

On the testing, we'll get you the latest numbers. They're evolving for sure. The fact is that we are seeing some good things happen. More test kits because of the relationship with the company in Indiana. Soon with our own local production more options now that we have the self-swab method. We've seen some improvement in lab capacity, but this still remains the big X factor now. How much more lab capacity can we get going? So that ability to do more testing each day is growing. I'll get you the latest on what the daily number is.

Moderator: Erin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. About the masks and the social distancing enforcers, first of all, the masks, if I understand it from the Governor's order, are in fact mandatory. So, are these – is the City actually going to be enforcing that you have to wear a mask? You know, I know some people don't have them, but there've been complaints about runners for instance, just choosing not to wear them or other people just not wearing them. So, if people just don't want to wear one, what is the City going to do in the absence of a fine? And then also you said yesterday there weren't any more warnings, but you said that applied to large gatherings, I think you said hundreds, but you also said thousands. Can you specify what's the threshold for when there's no warning and you go straight to a fine versus when you tell people to disperse? And finally, what kind of face coverings are they? Are they cloth that you're giving out or what are they?

Mayor: We'll get you the details on the type of face coverings. We've certainly used bandanas in some cases. And the type of masks that are not the medical kind, but the ones for other uses. But we’ll get you the details on that. So, on the question of face coverings, I'm going to keep using the word face coverings because I want to never confuse people. You know, the N95s and all the medical grade masks, that's one thing. Face covering again, could be something very informal, but it still does the job. I'll go over again, the exact details of the State rule. But my interpretation is that everyone should be wearing a face covering when they go outside. We're going to remind people of that. We're going to provide them to people for free. As I said, in terms of grocery stores, pharmacies, supermarkets, those are private spaces, they have every right to eject people or not let people in who don't have the face coverings. And they should do so. And we will back them up.

But I think at this point, everyone should be wearing a face covering. But we can come back to you on the exact interpretation of the State mandate. The central focus here, I think your question puts it in the right perspective. The first focus is no large gatherings. But gatherings in general are unacceptable. I use the point about hundreds and thousands to say that's not even close. If you even think about that kind of size gathering, you're so far over the line there's just nothing to talk about here. We've been at this for two months. Let's get real. Anyone who thinks about planning a large gathering or facilitates a large gathering or participates in large gathering, is really taking a chance with their own health and everybody else's health. So, you know, certainly anything, if you're talking a hundred or above, there's just nothing to discuss. You're going to get fined. And if you resist you're going to get arrested. When it gets lower than that it's the same concept. In a smaller gathering, let's say it is a few dozen people, that's not acceptable either. You have a situation there that if the police or the other enforcement agencies are walking up and people who immediately disperse and stay dispersed, great. You know, that's what we want. But if people try to stay together, they're going to be summonsed. And if they resist that they're going to be arrested. So those are the things, the gatherings are the most dangerous of all sizes. And then just enforcing regular, clear social distancing. Which is a lot of times a reminder to people. And I think that's mainly what people need. I think the big break line is when the difference between individuals who just need to be reminded to, you know, get that six feet and stick to it. Versus when people have made the decision to come together in groups, that's a pretty affirmative decision at this moment in the pandemic. And that's what will not be accepted.

Moderator: Last two, Todd from AM New York. Todd?

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. Sorry, I missed you Tuesday night. My question being, well the police department did a really good job coordinating with the volunteer organization Shomrim, except that they are very young kids mostly. And they don't command the same respect as the rabbis of that community, as you know. We both go back a long way with that community and we know that the rabbis command the respect of that community. So, if the rabbis had told them, told the people in that community to stay home, they would have. So, isn't this an act of defiance? Isn’t this something, did we – did your administration speak to Rabbi Niederman or any of the rabbis there? And to ask them and get an affirmative answer that they would encourage people to stay home?

Mayor: Look at Todd, I can't give you the exact tick-tock of everything that happened. I only know what was done wrong that needs to be addressed. And I do appreciate that some of the community leaders I believe associated with the synagogue involved, came forward and apologized for what happened and took responsibility. I found that very admirable and I commend them for doing that and also sending that message to the larger community. And I think overwhelmingly the community leadership, the civic leadership, the elected officials, the rabbis have sent a very powerful message throughout this crisis. That people should not gather even for religious observance, which is a very tough, painful message to have to give. But the community leadership has been very clear about it. So, whatever happened here, it just can't happen going forward. And I think we've all made that abundantly clear. I think the message has been received loudly all over the city in every community. And we're going to stick to that. And Commissioner Shea said it powerfully yesterday, that everyone is being endangered, including our police officers when those large gatherings – but I reiterate, you know, anyone who loves their city and loves their community and loves their own people should not participate in something that will end up killing people in their own community. A large gathering unquestionably will eventually lead to a loss of life. It will spread the disease and people will die as a result. And the most likely people will die are our elders. So this is a matter where everyone has to take personal responsibility and not engage in that kind of activity. And if anyone does, they will be given a violation and a substantial one. And if need be, they will be arrested. Period.

Moderator: Last call goes to Brigid from WNYC. Brigid?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Just to follow up on some of Erin’s questions and your announcement today about the face coverings. I know it sounds like you don't know the details of what kind of coverings they are yet, but I would add to Erin's question, are they going to be reusable? [Inaudible] to clarify if the 100,000 that are being distributed at city parks are part of that whole 275 number, the 275,000 that you announced? And is this a one shot? Is this the City's going to distribute these 275,000 and that's it? Or are you looking to procure or get donations for more to continue to distribute more widely since obviously they're many more people who need them?

Mayor: I appreciate the question, Brigid. Yeah, to coin a phrase more is more. We are definitely going to do more beyond this. Well the team will follow up with you. I believe the 100,000 and the 275,000 are separate. Any way you slice it, it's a lot of face coverings and we'll keep going from there. Absolutely want to help people to do this. And it's a smart program to get them out regularly to anyone who needs it. The specific ones and whether they're the reusable kind or not, we'll get you all those details. But I think the bottom line here is it's just – look, once we announced this originally and said the evidence was now in that it was important for everyone to use a face covering, you know, I want to be really clear is we said that doesn't mean anything elaborate. And that doesn't mean that kind of fancy masks that the medical personnel use. This was literally something as simple as a bandana, a scarf, take a piece of cloth at home, build your own, create your own, express yourself. That's still true. It does not need to be elaborate to be effective. So I want to keep telling people to do that because it helps a lot. But we will make this supply available and then we'll keep going from there. Because you know, anytime we can make it easier on people, I know sometimes people go out, they forget it. That's understandable. We're human beings. We want to make it easy in every way we can. But I want people to think that it's not a small act to put on a face covering. In fact, it's a very generous, altruistic act. It helps protect everyone around you. It helps reduce the spread of disease. Think about the face coverings as yet another way to inhibit this disease. Which has done such horrifying things to New Yorkers. We need to fight it back. And this is a very simple, powerful way to do it. So we're going to do everything we can to help people use those face coverings. But I want to ask everyone with the people in your life, please, if you see someone not wearing a face covering, appeal to them to realize how important it is. We'll keep sending the message. But I want people to also use their own ability to communicate and influence people and let them know how important this is.

Well, everyone look, as I said in this city, we find a way, and you know, literally in this fight we have gone to the ends of the Earth to find the supplies, the equipment we need to protect our first responders, protect our health care workers. The story I told you today, all the way to Vietnam to get the surgical gowns and then the amazing support we're getting from Indiana, from Michigan, from all over the country. Whatever it takes, we're going to find a way to do it. And I am so appreciative to everyone who has helped us wherever they are in America, wherever they are in the world, the hearts of people all over this world have poured out to New York City. Just like we have been there for people so many times before. So, there's a real love and respect for New York City already. But the admiration for New York City is growing as we speak, because of everything you're doing. People are watching and they feel it and they care about it and they admire the way you're fighting this fight. Let's keep fighting it. We will find a way. That's who we are, and we'll find a way to a better day in this city.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-05-01 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning everybody. You, you may have the same feeling I often have a trying to remember in this new reality what day of the week it is or what week it is to begin with. We, we've all been through so much that's been disorienting and it's very, very strange the way it time flows together nowadays for all of us here at city hall and everyone has been fighting this battle, it just seems like one continuous day from the beginning of this fight, and we know there's a lot up ahead. And I know all of you are dealing with the frustrations of everything we used to think was a routine being disrupted, and we're all trying to make sense of it and everyone's doing their best and trying to help each other through. So, since it's hard to remember sometimes what day it is or what week it is, I thought at least I could do a service by telling you what month it is. Well, this is an undeniable fact, it is now May. Strange as that may seem, it is May 1st, and we are embarking on a new month, and I hope it will be a transcendent month. I hope it'll be a month when we make profound progress. March was a shocking month, like nothing we've seen in the history of this city. The beginning of April was extremely troubling, and it looked like this disease might grow and grow. Thank God, largely due to your good efforts, things started to change in April, and by the end of April we saw a much better situation. We've got a long way to go, but May I think is going to be a decisive month, and a chance for us to do something great here in this city.

So, understanding that May is here, we also know that with that comes the warmer weather, and that's what's predicted for this weekend. We all are noting that the weather reports are talking about temperatures in the seventies. So, the spring fever, we're all going to feel it more and more, and particularly our young people are restless, and I don't blame them, and it's been a tough few months, and now the warm weather is going to pull at them. So, the truth is May can be a great month for the city in terms of fighting back and really starting to turn the tide on this disease, but it's going to require us to be tough and disciplined, and the warmer weather will make that harder. But I've seen so much from all of you already, so much achievement in fighting this disease. I have no doubt that we all will buckle down together and get it right. The bottom line is we cannot let up now, and the indicators that we go over every day are telling us a really important story, a good story, but a cautionary tale too, and a lot of information that helps us understand why we can't take our foot off the gas just yet.

Let me frame this by saying that the indicators, indicators really are the evidence. Think of them as sort of the key to everything. The indicators help us to understand what's really going on, and how to make our decisions, and how we all need to act. And it keeps coming back to the things that you do show up in these indicators. When people practice social distancing and shelter in place, the indicators get better. If at any point people were to be less disciplined, you would see it pretty quickly and start to come true, unfortunately, in those indicators in a negative way. Now, we believe in showing you this information, talking about it constantly. There's some other parts of the country that have not done that. They have not focused on the evidence as part of their reopening and fostered a community conversation about it, and I hope and pray for them that doesn't backfire on them. I hope and pray for the people in those States that their governments did not act in a hasty manner or an evidence free manner, because that creates tremendous danger to people's health, and that distinct possibility of the disease reasserting itself. We're not going to let that happen here. That's the bottom line. As I said yesterday, we do not expect a perfect linear march to exactly what we want in a way of normalcy. It won't be exactly perfect every day, obviously. There'll be some ups and downs, but what I do believe is that by being transparent, we can ensure that we stay on top of this disease and do not allow that kind of really dangerous, big kind of boomerang effect that I think happens if there's a decision to open up before the facts back it up. So, each day when I hold a press conference, we go over the indicators, and then every Friday what I'm doing is to talk about the big picture of what the indicators show us over a more expansive period of time, put it all in perspective.

Okay, so what do the indicators tell us when they look at them in big picture? The first thing they tell us is don't count your chickens before they're hatched. That this virus is tragically still alive and well, and living in this city. We have not beaten it, and we should not take it lightly. It's a fearsome enemy, and we need to understand this enemy if we're going to beat it ultimately. Today when I go over the indicators, you will see some good things for sure, we've seen that many days, but you have to put it in perspective of what's happening around us. So, yesterday in New York City, 2,637 confirmed new cases of the Corona virus in the five boroughs. That is a huge number. The number of people we lost yesterday, 202 New Yorkers lost their lives yesterday to the Corona virus. These numbers, when we look at them compared to where we were a few weeks ago, maybe we feel a little better, but we can't forget that each and every one of these cases, each and every one of these numbers is a human being. And we can't for a moment, forget what we would have thought about this. If I said these numbers to you three, four months ago, it would have been staggering that that's what happened in a single day in New York City. It would have been staggering. We can't get numb here. We have to realize that numbers like that tell us there's still a real fight ahead. Even if we're going to be tugged by that warm weather, even if we want it to be over, and Lord knows we all want it to be over. We got to look at those realities square in the eye.

So, everything I'm telling you is context. The biggest reality, and I fundamentally believe this, we will win this fight ultimately, is a matter of time. No one knows exactly how much time, but we will win this fight ultimately. But we have to be cognizant. We have to understand our enemy. If we're going to win this fight, we cannot forget these realities if we're going to win this fight. So, there's a direct correlation between acknowledging these realities, being honest about them, understanding what that calls all of us to do, and then how we ultimately beat this disease back and open our lives up. Anyone who wants to get back to normalcy, that toughness your displaying, that discipline is the way back.

So, let's talk about the indicators in the context of a longer period of time. So, on indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, well this chart speaks volumes. It's very striking, and you see it and you get very hopeful, and you should be hopeful. But you should always be sober about the larger reality at the same time. So, this is how many more patients we needed to care for each day in our hospitals. Now, when you look at the progress, the peak that we experienced with this disease, we now know that on March 31st 850 new cases one day, 850 new admissions to the hospital for suspected COVID-19. On April 11th when we started putting out these indicators publicly, so basically three weeks ago, went down to 383 that's great. By April 22nd last Friday, 176, by today 136, fantastic. That's the good news. Real progress. However, remember the numbers I told you a moment ago. Overall, the number of new positive tests, the number of people who have passed away, and that 136 we feel good about that number, but we still have to remember why we shouldn't feel good about that number, because that's still the number of people every single new day that we're seeing go in to the hospital.

So, part of what I think is really important to contextualize this is to say, okay, that kind of progress looks incredibly steady and it is, but at the same time, what would it feel like if we opened up in an atmosphere where there were still hundreds of people each day going into the hospital. It was bad enough to have to go into hospital and be admitted to the hospital for COVID-19. If there were thousands of new positive tests each day. That means every single one of those people potentially could be spreading the disease. For losing people every day and in large numbers. What does it say to us? It says that if you open up too soon, you can pretty much guarantee a resurgence of this disease. That amount of activity immediately tells you that you opened the door a little bit for this disease, it comes back strong. That's what we will not allow.

Now, we've talked a lot about test and trace, and we're going to keep talking about it. This is going to be the game changer. The ability to go after each of these cases and find everyone else that might be affected and test widely, and we're building that up rapidly. But you can see, the numbers we're talking about now, how daunting a task that is, you're still talking about thousands of new positives each day. It just puts in perspective how much we have to do.

Now, let's go to indicator number two, the daily number of people in ICU’s across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19. Now, what does this tell us? Well, it tells us a lot of New Yorkers are still fighting for their lives. And it tells us that our public hospitals, which were born the brunt this crisis, are still experiencing a lot of strain. And we need to get to the day where there are almost no New Yorkers, one day we hope zero New Yorkers fighting for their lives. And we have to get to the day where our public hospitals can rest assured that they can handle whatever is being thrown at them, including all the many, many challenges they deal in normal with in normal times. So, this number is encouraging again, because there's some decrease, but you'll notice the difference between this chart and the last chart. There's decrease, but nowhere near as sharp a decrease. This causes real pause. You know, when we launched these indicators three weeks ago, our ICU’s, our intensive care units and our public hospitals were basically at double their normal capacity. So, there's been improvement since then, but still not back to normal. And again, listen to the numbers, you all like progress, but then you still have to listen to the raw number. April 14th was the day where we saw the most people in these ICU’s, 887. By last Friday was 786; by today, 704 – steady progress, obviously, but not sharp, sharp progress and 704 people is a lot of people.

So, more to do and a particular focus that this, this chart makes you think about the lives of the people right now who are fighting to survive but also makes you think about our healthcare heroes who are there every day supporting them back in them up. Yesterday I had the opportunity to thank some of the folks who came to the defense of our healthcare heroes. We had leaders of our military here at City Hall and General Terrence O'Shaughnessy who has been a key figure in providing help to New York City, he came with some of his other leadership and we talked about the impact that our military medical personnel have had in our public hospitals, which has been outstanding. I want to thank the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, deep thanks to General O'Shaughnessy and also to people I look forward to thanking directly Secretary Esper, General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They really came to the defense New York City, right now we have almost 700 military medical personnel in our public hospitals because remember this shows you that our public hospitals are still strained and our healthcare heroes are still fighting a really tough battle and it's been going on for two months, but they got an incredible boost when those extraordinary medical professionals from the military showed up and they're sticking with it. And we are getting the good news that we expect them to be here during the month of May as well to back up our healthcare heroes, so that's something really, really important. But you look at this and you say, okay, we're really not out of the woods, we got to say lives, we got to protect our healthcare heroes and this chart reminds me, if and it should remind all of us. If you jump too soon, that number starts to go back up, that number goes up too much then you're back into the challenge of trying to expand hospital capacity, you're talking about field hospitals and everything else. Again, that's a place we do not want to go.

Okay. Indicator number three, number of percent, percent of people who tested positive for COVID-19. Well, this obviously is the indicator that talks about how widespread this disease is in our City and we're going to get a better and better picture as we add more and more testing. So, this is a great story, the citywide percentage is really improving pretty steadily on April 11th when we started the indicators 58 percent, by last Friday 30 percent, today 23 percent – that's fantastic, a very, very hopeful sign. And the public health lab, which again is a particularly rigorous standard, we saw a real progress today, this is exciting to see as well. When we launched 78% of their tests were coming back positive, by last Friday 52 percent, by this morning 17 percent, now that's fantastic. Now, this number has gone up and down quite a bit so I want to note it's everyday based on the facts of that day it's been as you can see a much choppier pattern. So again, we should never get overconfident but we're happy to see this progress, it certainly shows we are still decelerating and decelerating is the name of the game and that gets us to that point where we can do that big handoff to test and trace and then take the next big step. We still cannot say with assurance that we're out of the woods when it comes to that point about plateauing. Right now, it looks really good, but we are not to a point where we can say we are absolutely sure we won't have some kind of level off and we do not want that level off. That prolongs this agony we're all dealing with cooped up in our homes and everything else, so these numbers we need to keep pushing down steadily.

Now, how do we get where we want to get? So right now, again, we're in widespread transmission by any measure. The numbers I've been over today, especially the number of new cases and the number of deaths that is clearly widespread transmission, I'm sorry to say we need to get to low-level transmission. Low-Level transmission is when you can trace an act on every single new case, period. So, the indicators tell us a lot about how we get to that point and how we sustain that point. But the indicators again reflect action, it's very organic. It has to do with what you do— social distancing when it's honored, it has an amazing impact, shelter in place, staying at home has amazing impact. If it loosens up, it will show up in the numbers, we've seen some very, very unfortunate examples and we are just not going to tolerate them. We've seen gatherings, well there’s not going to be gatherings, just want to be crystal clear. The minute NYPD knows about a gathering, that gathering is over. So, if you want to get to low-level transmission, you want to get to normalcy you can't participate in a gathering, you can't condone a gathering, you can't tell anyone it's okay, you look the other way. If you hear about a gathering call 3-1-1 immediately, report it.

So, the handoff that I want to get to, is we keep driving down these numbers just as the test and trace is building up and we hit sweet spot. Where the numbers come down, the test and trace comes up in terms of capacity and the test and trace becomes so strong that literally every single new case we can trace the contacts and— act on them with quarantine, with testing, et cetera. Now that takes the pieces coming together, we're making a lot of progress in terms of testing, but we have more to go and we absolutely need that federal role. We're making real progress in terms of building up a tracing apparatus, real progress in terms of building up by quarantine and isolation apparatus with the hotels. Everything needs to move rapidly in the month of May, it's going to be a huge logistical effort. Remember everyone who goes into a hotel for isolation or quarantine needs all the supports that have to go with it. They need the food, they need support from medical personnel, everything, all that has to be provided, that's what's being built right now.

So, all of that will get us where we need to go, and I want to see us rapidly make progress in the month of May. That big apparatus building and these numbers continuing to go down and we'll go over the indicators regularly and if they keep moving the right direction, we're going to make more, we have more and more ability for that handoff to go well. And then to get to that low-level transmission period, that is the gateway to starting toward normalcy. These numbers go in the wrong direction, we're going to stay tight, we're going to stay in a situation where we do not allow the disease to reassert. So, real transparency here and a real warning about what happens if we slip up, but a very positive reminder of how close we're getting to the point where we can start to make even more progress. So, today's daily indicators after all that context, today's daily indicators show you again just how it's still way too gray a situation and it's something we have to fight harder to overcome. Kind of a mix progress in some ways for sure and progress particularly with the public health lab, which has been— toughest measure but not overall progress that we need to see. So, on the first indicator daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID that went up. It went up only slightly 129 to 136 it's not horrible, but it's not what we need, we need it to go down. The daily number of people in ICU across Health and Hospitals for suspected COVID went down but only by one 705 to 704, 704 is not a good number, progress but not the kind we need. The percent of people who tested positive, unfortunately that one went up for citywide 22 percent to 23 percent but again a very small increase. So, we've got a lot of effective break-evens here. The good news, and this is very good news because it is the toughest measure, is that the public health lab went down and it went down markedly from 36 percent to 17 percent. So, that is the hopeful the hopeful reality today.

Now, we're going to do a lot of things in this next phase in May and when I say phase, I don't mean yet getting to low-level transmission, we're going to have to earn that, we'll have to fight for that. But I mean that May— May becomes the time, if March was the time we were dealing with that horrifying unforeseen, unheard of up— swing in this disease, April was the month we were beating back from the worst and making real progress. May is the month where we do something transcendent, particularly because we build up test and trace. Now we're going to use every conceivable tool. Yesterday, I talked about the fact that we're going to have stronger enforcement efforts, not just the NYPD but by a variety of other agencies that we're going to have people out there on top of enforcement, educating, providing the face coverings for free. We're going to do all sorts of innovative things to keep people helping each other through this crisis and supporting them and pushing them. And of course, enforcing, we’re going to use all the tools creatively and assertively to keep making progress. So, whenever we have a new tool, we're going to talk about it and the impact it can make.

So, now, I'm going to talk about the open street’s initiative, and this is something I want to thank the city council for their partnership. And it's been worked on, not just with the council but with of course, the NYPD and Department of Transportation. The open streets are going to be another way we help encourage social distancing, because the warmer weather tells us we're going to have a new challenge and we combine the fact that we have to meet that challenge by understanding where people are going to be. Again, we're going to require social distance distancing face coverings and people only being out for just a period of time they need for their exercise and then get back. But we do know warmer weather, it's going to draw more people, that's obvious. And we also know that, thank God, the NYPD and all our agencies are getting back their personnel and really great numbers. So, they're regaining their strength in terms of being able to enforce farther and farther across the City and better and better. So, with the city council, we agreed that we would put together a plan to open 40 miles of streets in May, a hundred miles overall in the course of this crisis. And the focus would be on those streets in their parks because we expect them to attract a lot of people in the warmer weather. We want to expand the parks, if you will, by opening up these streets. And of course, the hardest hit neighborhoods, the place where we've seen this disease have the most devastating effect. So today we'll announce the first seven miles over seven miles in fact, of these open streets and these will all be opening on Monday. 4.5 miles are inside parks, they are areas that will now be devoted to pedestrians, bicyclists. 4.5 miles and that's made up of Callahan-Kelly Park, Forest Hill Park, Fort Tryon Park, Flushing Meadows Park, Grant Park and Silver Lake Park. And then 2.7 miles of streets that are adjacent near parks that'll help to expand and affect the parks. And that will be a Carl Schurz Park, Court Square, Highbridge Park, Lieutenant William T. Triangle, Prospect Park, Stapleton Waterfront Park and Williamsbridge Oval.

That's the beginning and we're going to build out from there. So, this is a, an initiative where we think it’s going to help a lot. It's going to go where people need it to go and again, this is an initiative that we can do with proper enforcement by the NYPD and the Parks Department and all our other colleague agencies. So, you can expect that this is going to help people to have some more space, but also with vigilant eyes to make sure there’s no gatherings - there are no attempts by people to create a sports or group activities. We're not going to allow that; we’re going to keep making sure people socially distance and keep making sure people have face coverings and anyone that doesn't happen to have one, more and more someone will be offering you one out on the street if you don't have one.

Now, I'm going to close in a moment, but I want to talk about something very, very sad. This really, I heard about it late last night and it really hit me. We have lost someone who came to our aid, to our defense and there's something particularly painful when someone does the right thing; a fellow American comes from across the country to try and help the people in New York City and while working to save lives here, gives his own life. It's very painful, it's heroic. It's something we honor, but it's very, very painful that we've lost this good man. Paramedic Paul Cary from Aurora, Colorado, part of the FEMA relief effort has died of the coronavirus. For three decades he served the people of Aurora and then came very bravely to serve us – he did not have to do it - he made the choice to come here to save lives. And remember when he, and so many other paramedics and EMTs showed up from around the country, it was a very, very tough moment; we were having the highest number of 9-1-1 calls in the history of New York City and the disease was growing and its impact and lives were being lost and we needed every hand on deck and Paul Cary's one of those people who came. And I got to tell you it just hurts that such a good man has made the ultimate sacrifice for us. So, to the Cary family, we honor, we honor Paul’s sacrifice; we honor what Paul did. He clearly saved lives while he was here. We honor all of you. We grieve with you and we're going to find a way to create a special memorial for Paul here in New York City to remember all those who came to our defense; the paramedics, the EMTs, members of the military - so many good people - doctors, nurses from around the country. So many people came to help, but Paul gave his life for us and we're going to honor him in a particular way. So, everyone, look, the – it's a reminder of the sacrifices that we've seen so many public servants, so many people who serve you have been lost. We've lost four of our own members of EMS. We've lost 10 members of the FDNY overall. First responders, heroes have been lost, healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, everyone who threw themselves into this battle. So right now, we need to be there for their families. We need to be there for the colleagues who are hurting. Imagine how tough it is to be fighting still this battle every day and have lost someone who served with you. We will do a lot to support their families and we will do a lot to remember them and honor them, but I want you to remember, if you really want to honor these heroes, then it's up to you to stick to the rules we're living by now. Every time you do, you help stop the spread of the disease. Every time you help stop the spread of the disease, you're going to save lives and the lives you save could include our first responders and our healthcare heroes. So I want to make it personal for you. I don't want anyone separating your own actions from what it means for the people around you. I want you to take it personally and realize that if we do what we're capable of doing, we're going to save a lot of lives and every time we don't, we could endanger someone like Paul and we can't have that.

So, look, we've talked today about the real progress we've made and the challenges ahead. The good news here is we are winning this fight. There's no question in my mind we're winning this fight. The bad news is we have not yet won - that's the honest truth. Declaring victory prematurely has been proven down through history to be a very dangerous thing. And when anyone from the President on down talks about liberating a city or a state without making sure that the facts support it and the protections are in place for people's health and safety, that's not liberation – that's actually damning people – that's damning them potentially to their deaths and we will not allow that here in New York City. We're going to come back, but we’re going to come back safely and 8.6 million people together have been doing something extraordinary. We got some more to do, but I have absolute faith we will get there together.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we turn to our friends in the media and please remind me of the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have Commissioner, Health Commissioner Barbot, Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg, and Senior Advisor, Dr. Varma on the phone. With that, I will start with Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. So, my paper has been trying to find out how many people have been tested at Staten Island’s One Medical test site at Snug Harbor. We've heard that the site is empty, the Department of Health and One Medical have not been able to give us any information on how many people have actually been tested there since, since it opened. Can you give us some details about how many people have been tested at the site? Is it, is it really [inaudible]? And you mentioned that one that the One Medical test sites would be able to test 3,500 people a week. Is that still the goal?

Mayor: Sydney, I'll get you a, an update. I don't have those numbers in front of me. I don't know if Dr. Barbot happens to, but if not we will get you an update. Yeah, the goals we've set from everything I have heard, we're sticking to those goals. We want to, as you see, more aggressively build out testing all over the city. And this is again, just the beginning of what would be a lot more testing later on. So, in terms of One Medical and that effort with 1199, again if Dr. Barbot has the answer now, great. Otherwise, we will get that to you in the next few hours. Doctor, do you happen to have that?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: We don't actually we would need to get it from One Medical which operates this [inaudible] testing site.

Mayor: Okay, Sydney, we will get that to you for sure.

Moderator: Next, we have Melissa from NBC News 4.

Question: Hi, good morning Mr. Mayor. I have two questions for you, please. It's been two days since we asked you about whether you plan to start tracking symptoms of shock or Kawasaki disease as a possible complication of COVID-19 in children. Since then, what have you heard from local hospitals about what they're seeing and what, if anything, are you or your team doing differently to track this because we know there's some concern in the medical community? The other question is from my colleague Andrew Siff, and he wants to know with the forecast for such great weather this weekend, why not open those streets for pedestrians now, before the weekend?

Mayor: Thank you, Melissa. I'm going to turn to the doctors on the first question; on the second question, look, we have to set up obviously to be effective. So, we're opening up a number of locations and in terms of setting up the right physical structure and having the right enforcement. And I think I've been real consistent from day one; all of this requires enforcement and we have to believe it's situated properly. So that is the plan right now for Monday that we believe we can have everything in place and effective and I think we've seen from recent days enforcement is everything. So, that's what we have right now. I think it's a very fair question that being said, and certainly we'll consult with the NYPD and the Parks Department today to see if there's any way to speed it up in light of the warm weather. So tell Andrew please, very good question and I will take it to heart and see if there is a way to speed up, but that would only happen if we were sure we could enforce it properly. On the, the other question I think when we, when you asked a couple of days ago, it was clear from our medical, excuse me, our healthcare leadership that they were not seeing a trend - I should say as a layman - but let me have Dr. Barbot and Dr. Varma speak to that.

Doctors, can you hear me?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, sir. [Inaudible] on mute. Let me start off by saying that we take very seriously any potential emerging trends regarding COVID-19, because, as we've been saying from the beginning, we're learning something new about this virus every day. That being said, my team has reached out to pediatric hospital providers to get more information about specific cases that they have concerns, maybe indicating an inflammatory cardiovascular response in children that had not been previously observed. Beyond that, I have personally communicated with our medical examiner who has put out the call to her international community to see what has been seen across the world. And we're compiling all of that information, again, to make sure that we've put the best science to work here in New York City. So, we are looking closely at this. We will continue to work with our pediatric providers and we will provide information as it becomes available and certainly guidance to the pediatric community.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, everybody. I have two brief questions. The first is, you know, looking at the map that was released yesterday on where the masks will be delivered, I know will that map – I guess, first, how were those – how were those parks selected? And will there be an expansion? Because I know there's like entire sections of boroughs that are not included in it. And the second is looking at the plan to open up some of the streets within parks. One park that I have some questions about is Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, because inside, you know, there's a hospital there now, there's a food distribution site – which streets in that park will be shut down?

Mayor: So, I am going to on the streets issue turn in a second to Commissioner Trottenberg. I think that's a very fair point, that, obviously, we value opening streets where we can, again, with proper enforcement to keep everyone safe, and I've said before we want to make sure we're additive here – we're not creating a new problem, but we're solving an existing problem and a growing problem with the warm weather – not ending up adding a new problem. But you make a really good point about places where there might be additional medical and other facilities, how we navigate around that. So, in a second, I'll turn to Commissioner Trottenberg on that. On the face coverings – and I'm going to always say everyone please promote that word face coverings, because it is profoundly different from the medical masks, the N95s, the other, kind of, more sophisticated masks that our first responders and our health care heroes need. This is face coverings, face coverings, face coverings – it's scarfs, it's bandanas, et cetera. Definitely, this is just a beginning, Katie. These efforts – everything's being built constantly. One of the things we've learned during this crisis is we just have to be in constant motion. The disease is constantly in motion and throwing us curve balls, we have to be in constant motion. So, this initial effort to really intensify the distribution of face coverings, it will just keep growing as long as we need it to and in more and more places. So, that's just phase-one, if you will. Okay, on the streets, particularly in Flushing Meadows Park, Commissioner Trottenberg? I think she's out there. Commissioner, can you hear us?

Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, Department of Transportation: Yeah, I'm here. Good morning. Just so you know in general how we picked all these roadways, we worked with NYPD, and Parks, and, in some cases, FDNY. So, all those agencies were involved in making the selections. In Flushing Meadows [inaudible] between Model Airplane Field and Meadow Lake Bridge parking lot – I think we will have later in the release all the details about the roads we picked. And this is where we picked – exactly as you were saying, Katie, makes sure we were not interfering with medical operations or any of the other things taking place in that park.

Moderator: Next we have Debralee from Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone.

Mayor: Hey, Debralee. How are you doing?

Question: I'm well, thanks. I want to follow up, Mr. Mayor, on the conversation started earlier on the race equity task force. And I know that you had described it as really taking on the work of examining and addressing existing disparities and inequities, and, in some ways, looking to obviate a recovery that would neglect impacted communities and their experiences. So, I wonder if, in the interest of transparency, you can speak how the administration plans to apprise the public on the task force’s meetings, it's progress, and to what degree will the public be invited to take part in those conversations before the June 1st deadline that you set for the roadmap? And then secondly, as you know, nonprofit groups and community stakeholders are extraordinarily concerned about SYP being canceled and have been lobbying of forcefully to have it reinstated in some way and are asking for the city and involved community groups to find a way, a creative, innovative way to engage the youth who were so concerned about having had their school year impacted. And now we're looking at this warm weather and really having these youth engaged in a way that makes sense for them this summer. And when you talk about some of the programs, whether it's contact tracing, the kind of field work that's being described at the city is taking on such an ambitious level, many of these groups point to that and say, particularly on the older spectrum, that many of the SYP participants could actually take up this work and could be trained in ways that could be very, very supportive and helpful to that effort. Can you speak to that as well?

Mayor: Yeah. Debralee, it's – look, it's a very fair question and a question I've heard from a number of elected officials, but I'm going to have to put this in context. I feel deeply for our young people and what they're going through. And the young people who would benefit from the Summer Youth Employment program are of an age that, you know, my own children were not so long ago and I can relate to this reality. And during this administration we built up Summer Youth Employment constantly, year after year with the City Council, and the Council made it a high priority. So, I'm a believer, but I’ve got be real about some of the key facts. First, you know, the historic notion of Summer Youth Employment requires people gathering. We don't know when we're going to be able to do gatherings. Second, it costs a substantial amount of money. We're in a massive budget crisis and, in fact, we're going to turn more and more of our attention in the coming days to talking about the budget reality, because the stimulus in Washington is starting to be debated and that's going to determine a lot of what happens. And if it's not fair to New York City, if the stimulus does not make New York City whole, then you're talking about really big cuts coming far beyond what's been cut already. And so, we have to be clear that right now we just do not have the money to do anything like we've ever done previously with summer youth. I think there are things we can do for young people for sure this summer, but I think, right now, we have to assume they are not – with young people being out in communities by and large, a lot of it may have to be from home. I don't know if contact tracing fits because of the level of expertise needed and I don't think it's something we'd think of in terms of someone so young. We want the contact tracing to be very much people who either have a medical background or existing city employees. That's where we're focused first. And I think we have to remember that there are hundreds of thousands of people responsible for their families who don't have a job right now. And as we try and create more employment, we're going to focus first on the people whose paycheck helps a whole family and that's going to be crucial. So, there's a lot of challenges there. I'm very sympathetic to helping our young people, but I think to the extent we can do it, it's going to look very, very different right now. I will also say, we're certainly going to look at private sources, philanthropy to see if there's other things we can do for young people, and I think there is a lot of interest in the charitable community to help fill some of that gap and we'll certainly be working on that. In terms of the different groupings, so, you know, quick refresher for everyone, we're going to have a group of advisory councils, sector by sector, small business, larger businesses, arts and culture, you go down the list. We're going to be naming some new ones and next week – excuse me – you'll start to see the people are going to be on those committees and they're going to start doing work immediately to advise us on the restart, and then for the longer term. We're going to have the fair recovery task force that will really look at both immediate framework for how we come back and do it in a way that's fair and addresses disparities – that's that June 1st report – but then they're going to be working with us, going forward. We're going to have the internal working group on equity and inclusion that's going to be made up of leaders of the administration from communities of color who are going to focus on the disparities in the work our agencies do to address those disparities. And that's going to be a very tangible effort to make sure agencies right here and now are acting on these issues. And then, as I said, later on down the line, I'm going to name a Charter Revision Commission. A Charter Revision Commission will undoubtedly do public hearings, that's part of that process. The other efforts are going to seek input from people a lot of ways, but I do not anticipate a formal hearings at this point. The advisory councils are, in effect, me bringing in input from a variety of people. The fair recovery group is really eminent leaders of the city that are bringing their thoughts and their energy, but they also have massive networks they'll be turning to. And the internal working group is going to be people who are always working with communities and bringing that back. But down the line I think we're going to have an opportunity to get more into the kind of public hearing model through the Charter Revision Commission.

Moderator: Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning, all. First, Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you for resuming the rat patrol. We learned from your office that the inspectors will be out to check on the complaints and honor social distancing. So, we updated our story and we've heard from our listeners about that as well. So, thank you very much.

Mayor: Thank you. Well, Juliet, thank you for raising that issue. You have a really good batting average lately when you raise things that action happens. I thank you. But I want the rats to know they are not safe. We're coming for them.

Question: Yeah, that's good. Okay. So, my questions for you this morning, given that there had been differences between you and Governor Cuomo on the school closing issue, did you have any input or discussion with the Governor on the decision he's expected to announce today? And my second question is, what exactly is involved with the monitoring and enforcing of these closed streets? I'm thinking of, you know, will there be barricades for people to walk around or through, you know, will it be sort of like a definitive space or will it just be open space? How's that going to work?

Mayor: Thank you. Let me speak to the school issue and then I'll just say a word on the open streets, and then Commissioner Trottenberg can jump in as well. So, the Governor and I spoke yesterday, but when we did it was obviously a focus on the MTA issue before the announcement. We have spoken in the past on the school's issue. I think the Governor understands fully why I am – feel so strongly. And I'm a parent, you know, my kids went to public schools the whole way through and I feel very, very close to public school parents and educators. It was a big part of life, my life, the life of my family. So, you know, the Governor understands that I fundamentally believe it is not safe to bring back New York City public schools for this academic year, period. I respect, as I said at the beginning, he has to think about the whole state. He's working with the other governors in the region. There's a lot of factors that he has to put together. But I have certainly made clear to him that I believe fundamentally New York City public schools cannot be reopened until September. I've also made clear in every way, including publicly, that we're going to not only see what's happening right now with the online learning as something that goes to June, but we're going to stretch that through July and August in different ways for any kids that need it. Maybe some kids at the end of June have gotten everything they needed out of the school year. They've sure had a lot of time on their hands, Juliet, let's face it. Some kids have engaged distance learning very deeply because they haven't had anything else to do. Other kids that need more help, it's going to be there for them on an unprecedented scale during July and August.

So, I think we have more of a continuum reality of this school year going into the next one then we've literally ever had in the history of New York City and we're going to keep building that. As I said, the Chancellor and his team have contingency plans for how much we're going to crank that up depending on what's happening in the world. But we're going to be there for any student who needs continuing help over the summer with an online methodology. And our goal, of course, is just focus everything we've got on a clean, safe opening in September. So again, I think the Governor's quite clear on my position, I respect that. He's thinking about the big picture and look forward to his announcement.

On the open streets, the goal here is more space, more social-distancing, but safe, not creating a contradiction where we open up space and then it becomes a gathering place or we open up space and there isn't enforcement there, so people start to do things they shouldn't do, or we open up space but cars can still access it. And again, that was a critique I had of some of the plans elsewhere in the country is that they didn't really segment off the cars sufficiently. This is going to be, you know, well-protected and well-regulated space. And that's part of why we have to do this in stages to get it. But, you know, it should be the kind of space where a pedestrian can, you know, and a family can feel very, very comfortable that they're safe once they're there, but we can also make sure that social distancing is observed. Polly, you want to add?

Commissioner Trottenberg: I think you have it, Mr. Mayor and DOT, NYPD, FDNY, while we're working with parks and we hope to be working with local bids and neighborhood groups to use barricades and sawhorses and good signage to remind people that these are what we're now calling open streets for pedestrians and cyclists. They will be if emergency vehicles or deliveries need to get through, they can. The goal is to minimize any vehicle activity and agencies and other partners will help sort of man the barricades and keep an eye on them.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Jacob from Jewish Insider.

Mayor: Jacob?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, you hear me?

Mayor: Yes. How you doing?

Question: Good morning. I wanted to ask you a two-part question if you allow me.

Mayor: Of course.

Question: First of all, how would you ensure that the crackdown of the NYPD – [inaudible]

Mayor: Jacob, can you hear us?
 
Question: - I think that was what first of all taken consideration the observant Jews who do not carry IDs on Shabbat, who would not necessarily know –

Mayor: Jacob, you're coming in and out. Jacob, Jacob, we're not. Hold on Jacob. We're not hearing you. You’re – something's causing your signal to come in and out. Could you start again the question please? And, and try and I don't know if you're moving around or something, but try and stay stable so we can hear you, Jacob?

Question: I'll repeat my question if you hear me.

Mayor: Yeah, there you go.

Question: So, my question is how would you avoid conflict with the Orthodox [inaudible] –

Mayor: Yeah, we're going to come back to you, Jacob. We're not hearing you clearly. We’ll come back in a moment. Try and call from a hardline if you can? Go ahead.

Moderator: Jacob, we'll circle back. Next step is Julia from the Post.
Question: Hey, good morning Mr. Mayor and everyone else on the call. Two questions, one for Dr. Barbot and one for you, Mr. Mayor. And actually, this first question for Dr. Barbot is from a colleague of mine after I tweeted the number of new confirmed cases. She's curious to know if we have any information on where and how people are getting newly infected, are there kind of central transmission points in the city? And then Mr. Mayor, there's a Reopen New York Rally planned for outside City Hall today by a group that vows to bring thousands out to protest the State's locked down. Yesterday you said any groups of over a hundred would be immediately find and those who refuse to disperse would be arrested. Can you guarantee that this group will face a fine and potential arrest if their numbers and behavior warranted?

Mayor: A 100 percent, and I don't want people to hear that 100 number, which I just threw out and as an example of my personal definition of what's a large gathering, but, you know, if you've got 50 people, we're not allowing that. If you've got 20 people, we're not allowing that. We're not allowing any kind of gathering, period. So, let me just make it easier on people. If you are in a gathering and a rally is a gathering, I'm very sorry that at a funeral, of course, historically people gathered to mourn, I respect that, but it's still a gathering when we can't allow gatherings. A party is a gathering. I don't care if it's 20 people or a hundred people or a thousand people, it's not going to be allowed. So the point is, if you gather, NYPD is coming there to give you a summons and if you resist too arrest you, period across all communities. So no of course this organization is not allowed to hold a rally that goes against every rule we’ve got. They can express themselves online. There's all sorts of other ways, but if they attempt to hold a rally, they will be summonsed immediately, and that's true for people of any viewpoint. We're not doing rallies at this point. They spread the disease and help to kill people. It's unacceptable. So as to the other question, Dr. Barbot, go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, Mr. Mayor. So you know what I would say is that when we have more than 2,000 cases per day in the city, we are still in widespread transmission, and so what that means is that New Yorkers, even though a large number are staying indoors and we're seeing that reflected in our hospitalization numbers, we have to balance that with the fact that we still have thousands of people being infected - to me what that means - and happening all across the city. So to me, what that means is when they're going out, hopefully just the essential activities, we need them to be even more diligent about it adhering to the use of face coverings and more diligent about adhering to the use of alcohol based hand sanitizer when they're not close to a water source. So the reality is that we're still seeing, you know, transmission across the city, and what – given the large volume of new cases, we can't track those back to a single point source.

Moderator: Next, we have Kathleen from Patch.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and everyone. I have two questions. The first is that you've been saying repeatedly over the past three days, if anyone planning a large gathering endangering lives considering that people flocked outside to see that military flyover Tuesday, are you reconsidering your own plans for the 4th of July fireworks? And secondly, I was wondering if you could provide more information about what homeless people can expect if they are found to be on trains at 1 am [inaudible] and make sure that you are a person who doesn't have a home, you're sleeping on a train because you're frightened of catching this disease in a crowded shelter, and two armed cops are walking your way?

Mayor: Kathleen, again, that's one way of painting it. Let me paint it another way. Someone who is sleeping on a train needs help. We're here to help them. We're here to get them to a safe place, a safe haven. And again, we've had thousands of street homeless people in the last three years go into safe havens and find them to be safe. And how do we know this? Because they never went back to the streets. So I appreciate it and I think you're speaking from compassion, but the picture you're painting is one side of the story and it's actually not to me the productive way to look at because I don't want to continue a broken pattern. The fact that so many homeless people for years just went back and forth all night on a subway train, that's not what we should be aspiring to in our city. We should be aspiring to every single person who needs help gets help and safe havens were created in a new way to address the concerns that homeless folks had about safety and it's working and there's medical care attached. And if someone's thinking that the best option they have in life is to ride a subway all night, that's not good, that's not acceptable.

So what it means is that the – when it gets to 1 am, and stations are being cleared out, there'll be plenty of outreach workers there right away, able to get someone to help to get them to a safe haven, to get them the medical care, whatever they need, police officers to help. If someone is able and decides meaning that they are, you know, emotionally, psychologically, health wise able to make their own decision, there's no immediate threat to themselves or others and they decided to not want that help, they still have that constitutional right. If they are a threat to themselves or others as per usual, that's a different situation. But the help will be offered, but they will not have the option of just staying in the subway, period.

On the question of the fly over, look, I think there's been a very unfair parallel made. I don't have every fact of what happened everywhere in New York City during the fly over. I saw images that showed people watching the flyover and socially distancing. I'm sure there were some places where it wasn't good enough and I don't like that. That is very different than an organized gathering where people know they're going to be close together for a prolonged period of time. The fly over, if you watched it, went by very, very quickly. The – we're talking to this funeral the other night, but also parties, rallies, no, that's not acceptable. And when it comes to the 4th of July, what I've said and Macy's has said, is we're going to make that decision as we get closer. It's May 1st, I understand everyone is anxious on so many things, everyone's looking for interesting things to write about, but it's May 1st we have two whole months to figure out 4th of July. The one thing I can guarantee you is the 4th of July will be honored and celebrated and it will be fireworks in some form or fashion. But we're going to have a lot, we have to decide about how to do that safely. Safety first, social distancing first, a long time to work it out. We'll have more to say when we come back, but no, no, no, let's be clear. Right now, we have a clear and present danger for New Yorkers, anytime people gather and especially a prolonged gathering, not acceptable, will not be accepted, will be broken up by the NYPD.

Moderator: We're circling back to Jacob from the Jewish insider.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Sorry for the miscommunication before. I appreciate your assistance. If I can ask two questions? First, how would you ensure that NYPD crack down on gatherings and on social - ensuring social distancing orders are being kept would avoid a conflict? With the Orthodox Jewish community, especially in Shabbot, you know, people don't carry IDs and are not the confined to the home, if they are on the street. And what do you say to those who are concerned that due to the media attention to recent incidents that – of this crackdown would be considered overpolicing? And my second question is have you reached out to Jewish community leaders to clarify and apologize for what they called scapegoating of the entire Jewish community?

Mayor: I have had a number of conversations, Jacob, with Jewish community leaders in the last few days, and I'm going to respect the privacy of those conversations. But a number of them said to me that they understood my frustration and they understood I was trying to protect lives and they understood how close I am to the Jewish community and how much of a personal connection I feel to the community. Some said, hey, you know, be careful – to be careful with your words. And I said I agree and I spoke out of passion and I regret that I, you know, used words the wrong way in terms of giving people the wrong impression, but I don't regret sounding the alarm and I don't regret saying we're not going to tolerate this behavior going forward and a very substantial number of the people who I spoke to agree with that.

And I think everyone heard my public comments and understood that I was trying to strike a balance and show that I cared and I spoke out of concern. The question of how we're going to address this, look, I'm pretty straightforward about this Jacob. If people are following social distancing and shelter in place, which means you only go out for a very limited period of time and you keep a part from other people while you're doing that, although of course family units can stay together when they're outside because they're already have been exposed to each other, but that, you know, in terms of, you keep moving, you think about just life on our streets. You keep moving, you have your face covering on, there's no gatherings, and you stay outside only for a minimal amount of time. No one's going to have a problem anywhere. If they do those things, if people start gathering, they're going to have a definite problem and that's going to be in every community. So we've all understood now this is equal opportunity. Any community, any faith, any ethnicity, any geography, same treatment – there's going to be a crackdown everywhere. If we see gatherings and on the question of Shabbes and, and people not having ideas, that's a very fair point. I'll talk to Commissioner Shea about what we can do in light of that. But I have to be clear we cannot hesitate to enforce. So I do appreciate why people don't carry an ID on Shabbes, I really do. But that will not be a reason why we won't enforce. So I think the smart thing for everyone to do, and a lot of the Jewish community leaders I spoke to said they are spent spreading this word very aggressively, is don't even think about a gathering during Shabbes because it just can't be tolerated and IDs or no IDs, we will enforce.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next is Courtney from NY1. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Courtney, how are you doing?

Question: I'm good. Hope you're well. Thank you. You too. So I don't know if you saw, but last night we reported on New York 1 about a nursing home in Washington Heights that had close to 100 deaths even though they have only reported 13 deaths to the state. And I understand nursing homes are obviously State territory and under State oversight, but I'm wondering if the City has any responsibility at all when it comes to the deaths at nursing homes and where the City would investigate this particular facility called Isabella Geriatric Facility?

And then I have another question, which is about the homeless issue and Safe Havens. And I understand that you're going to be sending homeless individuals when the train shut down next week to save havens. The question I have is, do you actually have enough capacity at those Safe Havens and aren't those Safe Havens actually congregate dorm-like settings, which could essentially help spread the virus among the homeless population?

Mayor: You know, I'm going to give you my view, having been to Safe Havens and seeing them – I don't, I wouldn't say, I'm not going to use the sort of formal definition point here. I – what is exactly congregate versus other types of settings. A Safe Haven is a very small facility where I think certainly in many cases proper social distancing can be practiced. And again, I don't want any romanticization of what it means for someone to be living out on the street or sleeping on the subways, which I think one of the previous questions unfortunately could have been interpreted as – it's very unhealthy, not just COVID, we're talking about everything else in the world, all the other challenges. It's not healthy for people to be living on the street period. If you're in a Safe Haven, you're in a place where you're getting a lot of care and a lot of tension and there's medical care available to you.

But again, they are not they are not – when you say congregate, in my mind it talks about the much bigger facilities. I would not put Safe Havens in that same definition, but I'll have, you know, Commissioner Banks can talk to you to clarify that. In terms of capacity, yes. As we said, we added additional Safe Haven capacity just in the last days and we're going to keep at it. And there are folks who are willing to come in who prefer Safe Havens and prefer certain locations. There's also some folks who are willing to come in from the street who actually are willing to go to one of the traditional shelters if the location is right or it's someplace they know. So Safe Havens are not the only answer, but unquestionably everything we have is better than living out on the street or living in the subways. And we have ample options that we can accommodate people and we will keep adding to them. Courtney, it's not a fixed situation. The whole plan, everything we said back in the Journey Home plan was based on more and more Safe Havens. We're going to keep doing that.

On the Isabella Geriatric Center. This is horrifying. I've been there – a few years ago I spent time there. I know that facility. I know that a lot of people will work there. I mean, it's absolutely horrifying. This is a staggering toll that we're hearing about now. And I'm shocked. And so look, first of all, the City has for the last, over a month since I believe starting on March 25th, we started delivering a substantial amount of PPEs, and the numbers I have is, for example, 12,000 N95s to that site. So this is to me, it's inestimable loss and it's just impossible to imagine so many people lost in one place. We all have to work together. It is the State's domain, but the City has been trying to provide help in every way we can. I want to provide more help in any way we can. I want to figure out what we can do better, all of us, and we'll certainly work with the State. I think the one thing we now know about the nursing homes is the status quo cannot continue to say the least and something very different has to happen. We'll offer any and all help we can to the State as we try and figure out a new way forward because it's just horrifying what's happened here.

Moderator: Last question for today, Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning Mayo, how are you?

Mayor: Good. Matt, how are you?

Question: I'm okay. I'm wondering how specifically, please specifics, not generalities, are you going to stop gatherings beyond the status quo? What specifically are you going to be doing different from the policy that was in place on Tuesday in Williamsburg beyond the policy that was in place in Borough Park yesterday? And when you say that it will be summoned in gatherings, you know, ballpark a thousand, a hundred people, are you planning to issue a hundred summonses, tickets, and arrests? And secondly, can you go over whether there's any environmental impact of all of this PPE?

Mayor: I don't have an answer for you on environmental impact. If in a moment I'll turn to our colleagues, both doctors and see if they have an answer on that. Obviously I'm always concerned about any unintended consequences, but right now we're fighting a war and trying to save lives. So that's our first concern. But before I turned to the doctors, Matt, look, I think we couldn't be clearer here and I don't, again, I used a hundred to make an example of what anyone would regard as a large gathering, but if it's 40 people, if it's 20 people, it's the same standard. If people are gathering, they're going to be summonsed. Now, look, if the police started arriving and everyone's scatters and they don't come back, I'm sure a lot of policing experts will consider that a successful mission just to stop the gathering and get everyone to go away immediately. But if people try to continue their gathering, they're going to get summonsed instantly. As many people who are a part of that gathering. If anyone resists the NYPD, they'll get arrested. It's just really, really straight forward. I don't know how to be more than that. So don't gather and you won't have a problem. If someone tries gathering and enforcement starts to arrive, you better go away and not come back at all. But if you linger, you're going to be summoned, every single human being who lingers will be summoned to anyone who resists will be arrested. Every community, period. Doctors, on the environmental impact of the PPEs. Any insights or else we can look into that and get back later?

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, I would only say that I'm aware of people littering with discarded PPE and we would ask them not to do that. Right now I would have to get back to the question on the bigger impact – potential environmental impact of PPE.

Mayor: Okay. Well, everyone, look, as we close today, just want to offer a real simple concept. A word that we are all familiar with and maybe in some ways conjures up a positive and other ways conjures up a negative. But to me it's a bad word now. And that word is boomerang, and boomerang when it comes to the coronavirus is a dirty word. We cannot allow this disease to reassert itself. We've come a long way in a matter of weeks. You've been the authors of that success, but we take our foot off the gas, this ferocious disease can come back. We've seen it in other places and they certainly regret that they loosened up the wrong way and they paid for it and people lost lives because of it. We're not going to allow a boomerang here. So when we think about what we learned today, looking over those numbers, something to be proud of, the progress we've made, but also being really sober about the distance we still have to cover. And I think we can all be proud that we're moving forward and I think we'll be even prouder if we land this in the coming weeks and months, beat this disease, and never allow that boomerang to happen. I think that's going to be a measure of our success. So, everyone keep fighting and thank you for all you're doing. God bless you all.

2020-05-01 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone and before we bring on Mayor de Blasio for our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, I want to acknowledge the turn of the calendar out of April to the month of May. We knew going into April that it would be one of the most horrific months in the history of New York City, with the number of coronavirus cases spiking, which meant the number of deaths would inevitably spike thereafter. And it happened. From April 3rd through April 19th more than 500 people a day died from the virus in the city according to the official count. On six straight days in the middle of that, more than 700 people died. That has continued to decline but is nowhere close to zero. I thought we would take stock of the stats a little bit as we move into May. On the last two days of the month, the death toll was down to around 300 but we should not breathe a sigh of relief when 300 people every day are dying from a disease that didn't exist until recently. 300 people is the total number murdered in New York City in a full year and more than the number who die from car crashes in a full year. And we know that we put so much public attention onto reducing those stats. We also know that black and brown and poor and working class people have died at such higher rates than white or better off people, twice the rate according to preliminary data that's been reported. So thank goodness April is over, but what will happen in May and June and thereafter in the city, that remains highly uncertain.

And with that we began our weekly Ask The Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our phones are open at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag, #AskTheMayor. And good morning Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you Brian. I want to thank you for the way you just laid that out to all New Yorkers. I think you said it exactly right. I want to say thank God it is May. You know, I see hope in the month of May and March and April were just extraordinarily tough. So I really think you put it all together right there and now we all got a lot of work to do to make May a much better month.

Lehrer: Thank you. And I talked about the death toll, which is what the data people call a lagging indicator because it takes a few weeks, usually before people who die from the virus do so. We know that. But I want to get your take on a number that reflects the present. And that is the number of new confirmed cases, which is still in the thousands per day, almost 5,000 statewide on Wednesday, if I saw that stat, right. Most of those in the city and the shape of that curve is sloping downward but not as steeply as it went up. So in theory with all the social distancing that we're doing, new cases should be petering out by now on paper. Why are there still thousands a day?

Mayor: Well, look, it's such a central question and what I'd say first of all is, for people to understand that we only have a partial picture of what's really happening to all 8.6 million of us because we have been starved of testing from day one. And this is really just the essence of this history. So when you see those numbers you indicate, that's based on still very little testing compared to what we would like to see. And so it gives us some of the truth, but not all of the truth. The fact is that we haven't been able to do until now and we're starting now finally to get to the place where we can do the aggressive, kind of fight back, which is widespread testing. And then quarantining people and providing them support a course to really start to address this disease at the root, if you will. To date, you know, it's been unfortunately in so many ways it's had to be a more reactive reality of the disease spreading with no way to properly trace its progress. And having to defend our hospitals at all costs to save lives. That's what March was all about and so much of April. As we've come out of that because social distancing and shelter-in-place have been working on questionably, even though I understand your question is sort of like why hasn't that worked even more? I do want to emphasize glass is more than half full Brian. How far we have traveled in just a matter of weeks is unquestionably because of effective social dismissing or shelter-in-place. And New Yorkers have been outstanding at that and we need them to stick with it. But the new phase of heavy testing and tracing and quarantine is where you sort of go on the offensive rather than being back on our heels. We get to sort of turn the tables on the disease if you will, and go on the offensive. We have some of the testing capacity we need. Nowhere near the amount we need. That still requires federal intervention to get us there. But we do have a lot of hotel rooms. We do have more and more personnel, medical personnel who can be a part of the testing freeing up, more and more PPEs coming in. So it is a moment where we are going to get to change the situation. I would say folks have to realize they have to stick with it, with the social distancing and the current rules to allow that strong testing and tracing program to really come to bear. And that's actually going to be the gateway to finally at one point seeing much, much reduced numbers and then some loosening up in the rules.

Lehrer: And I'd say as we reinforce the message that it's not time to ease the social distancing. I would throw in that we should probably warn the listeners and maybe the media should incorporate this in every weather forecast, that there's a dangerous weekend ahead because it's supposed to be sunny and 70 degrees tomorrow. And then 70 again on Sunday. Would a dangerous weekend ahead be too strong language for you?

Mayor: No, it’s exactly the right language. And Brian, I thank you for that as well. It's so counterintuitive and painful in a way that, you know, we all wait for this time of year and we cherish it. And yet, yeah, ironically the nice weather is very much a threat to us. Not if we all handle it right. You know, there's nothing wrong with going out and getting some exercise and getting back home. Having the windows open at home to enjoy the fresh air. That's all great. That the temptation is the problem that folks are going to start to feel that they want to spend more and more time outside. They want to play sports. They want to gather with other people. We can't let that happen. So yeah, there is a danger here. And look, it's hard to think about. But I do think one thing that's been amazing is New Yorkers have been so participatory in fighting back this disease. Everyone in your own life, you know, you need to send a message to your own family, your friends, your neighbors that you know, go out for a little bit, but don't go out for too much. Don't gather, don't try and do the things we would normally do on a beautiful spring day.

And people have to be kind of assertive with each other. They see people [inaudible] have to remind each other to wear the face coverings. And we are going to have a lot of enforcement out. We are going to have a very strong NYPD presence all over the city and a bunch of other agencies that can do enforcement. And Brian look, the goal here is not to give anyone a summons and not to arrest anyone. But I've made very clear this week, gatherings in particular, anything where people are gathered together, particularly in larger numbers, there's going to be one chance. If the police are walking up and that gathering doesn't immediately scatter before the police get there and never come back. If they in any way attempt to maintain a gathering, everyone involved will be summonsed. And I don't like saying that Brian. I really don't, but this is where we are right now. [Inaudible] resist, you know [inaudible] there will be arrests and we really don't want to see that happen.

Lehrer: Beth in Lower Manhattan, I think on this point. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Beth.

Question: Yes, thank you Brian. Thank you Mayor. I live in Battery Park City and I'm afraid to go outside down here. I have sent in photos and notes to 3-1-1, thanks to the Mayor's recommendation. Yesterday when the hospital ship sailed out, there was a crowd down here. There were at least four police. And right near them people not distancing, not wearing masks. And I asked the police, what are you empowered to do about it? And they said nothing. They said, please ask the Mayor to empower us to do something. So there seems to be a disconnect between what you just said Mayor de Blasio and the police understand. I have also called the police precinct patrol down here. The Battery Park City Commander. I've written to the Governor, I've written to you and I called the Road Runners Club. I have not seen enough people wearing masks and distancing down here and it's only going to get worse as the weather improves.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Thank you Beth. I really appreciate the point you're making and I really appreciate that you went up to the police and asked the question. And I don't know who those officers are, but they need to get the memo that -- you know, the Commissioner spoke very passionately this week about the fact that first of all, let's start with the worst of all things, which is gatherings. No tolerance for gatherings. We're going straight to summons. And again, if someone resists the summons, we're going to arrest. And I don't like saying it, but that's what we're doing. And every police officer in New York City should feel very clearly empowered and all the other enforcement agencies that we're sending out. Period – on the gatherings. On the social distancing of individuals, face coverings of individuals. Look, our goal here is to just get people to do it. So in that instance, if you see someone who's, you know, getting too close to other people and you say to them, hey, back off. Or someone has a face covering and they're not wearing it, put it on. I'm not interested in giving a summons if it's not needed. If people just do what they are asked to do. If they're not doing it, of course they can be summoned. So I want it to be very, very clear that we're escalating now because we have to. This is about saving lives and about beating back this disease. I will call Commissioner Shea today to make sure he sends out yet another formal instruction to the men and women of the NYPD that they can use their discretion. This is, you know, we train our officers more than ever now and we treat them as professionals and they are lifesaving professionals. That's what they do. And they use their judgment. But in this instance they have to feel empowered that if their instructions are not being followed, summonses has to be the go-to now. And so we will use that aggressively.

Lehrer: As a follow up on the intentional public gatherings. I think most of our listeners know of the story in the news this week about the large public funeral for a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn on Tuesday in Williamsburg. There was another one yesterday, 150 people reportedly close together and Borough Park for another rabbi who passed away. But Gothamist reports that while the NYPD broke it up on Tuesday, according to Hasidic community leaders, the NYPD actually approved and helped coordinate the Tuesday procession. So is the police department enabling these events with special treatment and then having to break them up because they were too accommodating in the first place?

Mayor: So let's separate the two examples because I don't know in the way you asked the question, I'm not sure your listeners will hear the differences between the two. Clearly all around what happened on Tuesday was wrong. And by the way, to be fair to the leaders of the synagogue involved, they put out a letter to the next morning apologizing and saying that they took full responsibility for what happened in Williamsburg. And that it should never have happened. We understand mourning is a very, very difficult reality. And they lost a revered rabbi. And I do feel for anyone in mourning, not being able to express it in this time is very difficult. But it was a clear violation of everything we said and it endangered the lives of members of that community. And I want to say I appreciate when community leaders come forward and take responsibility and say they were at fault and they will not let it happen again.

But I think what's clear here is the NYPD, while trying to be respectful of the community, certainly trying to be respectful of people's faith and the process of mourning. I get that that's a lot to try and balance. NYPD has to be abundantly clear, there's no accommodation, there's no acceptance, there's no tolerance of any gathering of any kind. So that needed to be done better on Tuesday all around. What we saw yesterday, I don't have all the details, but my understanding from Borough Park is as soon as the NYPD precinct heard there was something happening, they made very clear they would not tolerate it, and if anyone showed up, they'd be turned back and that, that gathering was disrupted immediately and that's going to be the model going forward.

Lehrer: Did the police department make that original Tuesday plan with or without your knowledge?

Mayor: Oh, I don't – first of all, the notion of ‘plan’ I think is a little generous here. I think there is – this was not well handled by anyone, you know, in the community and the precinct by anyone because there was obviously miscommunication and assumptions all around, when what should have been clear from the very beginning was no gatherings of any kind, even the slightest attempt to gather will be met immediately and turned back. But no, I heard about it somewhere between 6:30 and 7:00 pm, that something was brewing and it sounded entirely wrong. And I called the Commissioner immediately and then when I heard the details, I went there right away because I thought it was absolutely unacceptable.

Lehrer: Right. And you did go there yourself. We'll continue in a minute with Mayor de Blasio, more of your calls on our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, stay with us.

[...]

Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, with our weekly Ask the Mayor segment my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0 or tweet a question. Just use the hashtag, #AsktheMayor – and Vicky in Manhattan, you're on WNYC – hello, Vicky.

Question: Hello. Thank you so much, Brian. Hello, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. I'm calling on behalf of a neighbor of mine in Tudor City. Her name is Danno. The Housing Preservation and Development courts have been suspended because of the virus. And her trial was just on the edge of being heard. She had a flood in her apartment in September and between the managing agent and the landlady, she hasn't been able to have the problem addressed. Sorry, I'm a little nervous. And she's been staying at the Y and in hotel rooms and now hotels are closed and she's kind of falling between the cracks, and as of today will be homeless. I'm calling to ask if the Mayor can take her number and if someone in his office can help address her problem. 

Mayor: Yeah. Vicky, first of all, thank you for looking out for her. I really appreciate that. There's been a lot of really great examples of New Yorkers showing compassion and looking out for each other in this crisis. And you're giving a really good example to the people right now of that, so thank you. Please give your information to WNYC. Our team will follow up with you immediately or with Danno directly, whatever you think makes more sense. We can certainly make sure she has a place to stay immediately. And if the landlord has not fulfilled their responsibilities, that's something that goes beyond just the question of the crisis and whether courts are open. If the landlord has not addressed a condition and someone can't live in their apartment, our Housing Department, HPD, is able to step in, in many cases at least. So, let's see how we can immediately get her someplace safe and then see if we can solve the underlying problem. And share your information to my folks. We'll follow up right away.

Lehrer: Vicky, we’ll take your contact off the air. Just stay there and we'll put you on hold. Ivy in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Ivy.

Question: Hello. Thanks for taking my call to you both. I'm calling because I am a small business owner. I own a bar called Leyenda in Brooklyn, in Carroll Gardens. We have been closed now for six weeks. We have only income coming in from some contactless cocktail delivery that we were able to do. But I want to know, Mayor, what you plan on doing to help businesses like mine. Just according to a report that you did in 2018, the food services industry employs more than 141,000 people, delivering $4.2 billion in wages and $12 billion in direct economic output. I want to know what is going to be happening with the rent abatement, if there'll be any sort of tax relief because we are uniquely vulnerable. We've been talking about gathering on this call so far this morning. My business makes money off of gathering, gathering people together, and I'm not alone. We are the – small businesses like mine that employ less than 40 people are the social fabric of our city and we were already in danger of having every corner turned into a Duane Reade or Starbucks. And I'm worried that we will continue to go that way. So, I'd like to hear your thoughts. 

I'd also like to talk – to invite you to talk to the coalition I am part of, I'm part of New York Hospitality Coalition. I'd like to invite you to speak to us in our group – and thank you. I can take my call off the air. 

Lehrer: Ivy, thank you very much. Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Thank you, Ivy. Ivy, please share your information with WNYC. I'd certainly be happy to speak to your coalition. So, if you'll give your information our team will follow up with you today and we'll figure out a time to remotely gather together, as with all conversations nowadays. But certainly, happy to – I want to hear from you and everyone else what's going on. Look, I think your basic thesis is exactly right and Carroll Gardens is obviously the community I've represented in the City Council and feel very close to and, you know, the kind of business that you own is the backbone of the city unquestionably every way emotionally, culturally, in terms of the identity of the city, in terms of what makes neighborhoods great, in terms of employment, you name it. So, we have to find a way to bring you back. You know that you're dealing with – I think you indicated it – one of the most sensitive elements of life in the city and our economy in this kind of crisis, which is when do we bring back people in sort of really close quarters like a bar. How do we do that? There's a lot of ideas out there. We haven't solidified anything yet. But as we start to normalize, you know, can bars operate with limited capacity, can they have different ways with restaurants, for example? Can restaurants do more outdoor seating? There's a lot of ideas out there that we're working on right now and we want to work with people in the industry to sort through. So, would love to hear your thoughts and the coalition. 

On the relief we can provide – so the City provided about $50 million immediately when this started in loans and grants to small businesses then, excuse me, our just massive budget crisis started and that is unfortunately only getting worse right now. We've been pushing the federal government to keep adding money to the Paycheck Protection Program. They did add $310 billion and we're trying to help New York City’s small businesses get full access to that. And as you know, loans but in many cases, forgivable loans, so, they turn into grants. A reminder to all small businesses, you need to apply immediately to get in line for those at SBA, Small Business Administration, sba.gov, and anyone who needs help with the application can call 3-1-1. That's where the real money is right now to keep people afloat and we need New York City’s businesses to maximally apply for that. 

On your bigger issues, you're asking about what we should do going forward. I'll have more to say on that soon on other ways we can help small businesses to get through to the point where we can really start reopening, which obviously is a few months away at minimum. So, I know the job-one right now is to get people to maximize those federal dollars. I'll say more going forward on anything that the City can do and the State can do to help people

Lehrer: And Ivy may be interested or other people in your coalition that we're going to be doing a restaurant specific segment on Monday’s show probably around 10:30 on Monday morning – what restaurants can do right now, what it will or could look like when reopening time comes at different levels in different places starting whenever it's appropriate to start or various places in our area. So that'll be Monday in case you're interested. Here's a question via Twitter, Mr. Mayor. A listener asks, “What does the Mayor think of the presidential primary being canceled in New York State while local elections are not canceled in that June primary?”

Mayor: Yeah, look, I will start with the most important identifier, which is, you know, I was a very strong, proud supporter of Bernie Sanders and, you know, really passionately believed in what he would have been able to do as president. But, you know, I think he made a choice, understandably based on the facts, to step out of the race and support Joe Biden. And I think at that moment it was clear that the notion of a primary was in many ways moot. In the context of this city where we're going through hell right now, we do not want to see people gathering and we have to conserve all energy we can for fighting this battle. I think the decision made sense. I would separate that fully from the question of the work that still needs to be done to make the Democratic Party more progressive and make the rules of the party more progressive, and a lot of other things that have to happen going forward. But in this context of crisis, I think it was an understandable decision.

Lehrer: We're going to run out of time pretty soon. And there are so many more serious things going on than we can reasonably get to in our available time. Obviously, this is not your only media outlet. I think it's really good that you're doing news conferences basically every day. But let me touch on a couple here in brief that really deserve longer treatment. But this is the situation we’re in – one is, the hospital system may have not gone into official overload, but it looks like the funeral home system has, with reports of bodies piling up in trucks outside some funeral homes at least. Is it merely a function of overload or are some people doing something wrong?

Mayor: I think some people are doing something wrong. I mean – look, most funeral homes kept working through this. They did extraordinary work. They comforted families. We worked very closely. Funeral homes are regulated by the State of New York, but the City works in this kind of crisis, of course, with them and our Office of the Medical Examiner, Health Department, and we've tried to support the funeral homes in a variety of ways. Vast majority of them have done their job and done it very well. A few of them, I think, have been really negligent and one particularly horrible case we heard about in Brooklyn – it's just unconscionable. And if they needed help, they should have asked for it. So, I do not see a situation where most of the funeral homes aren't doing their job. I think they are doing their job, but I think it's imperative – and we're going to – it was a good idea from Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams – to form a sort of council or committee to make sure the funeral homes were talking regularly with the City government and others on anything they need. We're going to do that. But what I've seen, Brian, that particularly horrible case was abhorrent.

Lehrer: And today is the day by which you promise to have iPads to every New York City public school student who did not have the equipment for online learning, it is kind of amazing that we're six weeks into this now and there are still some kids without the equipment to do the online schooling. As we talked this morning, can you declare mission accomplished?

Mayor: Yes, with an asterisk that's actually not a bad asterisk, but something that, you know, you and your listeners can help us with, which is there's still some kids who have not asked for one who we think need one, and we've got to identify them. So, here's the bottom line. The day that I announced the schools would close I was clear, the Chancellor was clear that we knew that the digital divide is a horrible, painful reality in this city and this nation. And we knew one of the really bad effects of shutting down schools would be a lot of kids would not be able to immediately take advantage of the distance learning. And, of course, we had to set up the online learning from scratch to begin with, which was a herculean task. And our educators did an amazing job, but we knew, we just knew there would be hundreds of thousands of kids who did not have either devices or the internet service or both.

And we didn't have them in stock. We did not have them sitting around. So, what's happened in these weeks was getting the actual devices in and then getting them to the kids. And it's actually been a very, very systematic effort. So, I know we are now over a quarter million kids, over 250,000, have received their iPads. I know there are extras left over waiting to find kids who have not yet asked for them. Any family that needs one can just call t3-1-1. Just a simple, you know, quick questionnaire they fill out and if they qualify it's, again, very simple to qualify, the iPad is delivered to them. So, mission accomplished, in the sense that every name that the DOE had, they did deliver to on time, and it was over a quarter-million kids. But if there's anyone else who still doesn’t have one, if you know of anyone in your life, anyone listening, a kid who does not have access to the internet does not have access to a device, we can – one of our public school kids – we can get it to them right away.

Lehrer: And last question, summer camps and beaches, partial openings this summer or none at all, can you say on May 1st?

Mayor: Well, I can certainly say there's no plan for any summer camps in terms of anything that the city funds, it's like the very sad reality we're experiencing with our other youth programs, our youth centers, and youth employment. You know, we just are not in a position to – first of all, we cannot predict at all when anyone can gather. And second, we just don't have the money. We have been hemorrhaging money in this crisis and the whole ballgame of what the City is going to look like going forward is going to be decided in a matter of days in Washington. And I'm going to be sounding the alarm here. You know, the House of Representatives right now is drawing up the stimulus bill. If that bill focuses on where the impact of COVID-19 was greatest, and if it's a bill that's based on the justice of serving communities that were hurt the most, then New York City can be made whole and we can move forward.

If that bill creates a formula that does not focus on the needs of cities and localities as well as states in terms of what COVID-19 did to them. Then we're going to be talking about huge budget cuts. So, the pressure needs to be on everyone in Washington. They're responsible now. They’re either going to help New York City back on our feet or they're not. And we need to see results. But we, that's the youth programs. The beaches are a little bit more of an open question, Brian. Not starting on Memorial Day as we normally would. Maybe – maybe later in the summer we'll be in a position to do something with the beaches, but it's premature to say at this point.

Lehrer: Thanks as always, Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week. 

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.

2020-05-03 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. I want to start by thanking the men and women of the NYPD and the Parks Department and all of the agencies that had our enforcement agents out yesterday, all over the city in large numbers, out there protecting people's lives by making sure there were no large gatherings by making sure that social distancing was being enforced. I am so appreciative for everyone who is out there from all those agencies who are giving out face coverings and I know people really appreciated that, a great effort yesterday and only a beginning because as more and more members of NYPD are coming back on the job, some of whom of course were sick, some of whom are still fighting against this disease or even in the hospital. And our thoughts, our prayers with all of them, all the people who work for the city on behalf of you who are still fighting this disease, our hearts and prayers are with all of them, all of you, all of your families. But what I am so proud of yesterday was a strong effort across the whole city by the NYPD, the Parks Department, all of these agencies to make sure that these rules are being enforced, to make sure people had what they needed. And this is just the beginning. More will come as we get more and more personnel back and we're going to deepen these efforts are going to be more and more efforts to give out those face coverings, more and more efforts to educate people. But as I've made very, very clear and Commissioner Shea has made very clear, more and more enforcement efforts as well in every single part of the city.

Now I have to put that in context. We of course need enforcement is part of life, but the big story here is what New Yorkers have done right. There's always going to be exceptions. There's always going to be some people who don't get the message or are thinking about themselves and not other people, but the vast majority of New Yorkers have really risen to the challenge powerfully. I want to thank you. It's been amazing to watch how carefully the vast majority of you are going about social distancing. How many people are already wearing face coverings – not perfect yet, but by the way, this is something we would never have imagined just a few weeks ago. But when you go out there, you see, and I've been able to, it's all over the city in the last a week or two, noticing that the vast majority of people wearing face coverings, and we're going to make that easier and easier, but people are doing it right overwhelmingly, we need people to stick with it. We need anyone who hasn't gotten the memo to get the memo because that's the only way we're going to get through this. But New Yorkers, you have a lot to be proud of. And that's the big story here.

Now it's important to always remember the direct connection between what you do and what happens to the whole city, and what happens to our future. It comes back to those indicators we go over each day now on Friday, I talked about what we had seen over the last few weeks and it's overwhelmingly good news. We know we're not out of the woods yet, but it's good news for sure. But today I want to focus on the challenge. What today I want you to understand that when I talk about the danger of this disease reasserting, it's not an idle idea. It's not an idea somewhere someone just thought about, but it's never happened. It's an idea that unfortunately comes from the real-life experience that we've seen in other parts of the world. This danger that if you let your guard down, the disease can reassert and setback everything. So, when New Yorkers think about the question I hear so often from people, how do we get back to normal? I want you to think about it is every one of us that gets us back to normal. It's your responsibility. It's my responsibility. It's all of our responsibility to get back to normal. We all play a role in this effort.

And when you think about what would it mean if we didn't do it right, what should we be afraid of? What should motivate us not just because we want to do the right thing and we want to get back to normal? What should be motivating us to be aware of, to be worried about that will keep us, keep us on the mission, keep us focused, and I'll come back to that ugly word, that dirty word I mentioned the other day. Boomerang. That's the word I want you to think about when you think about what could go wrong. I've told you a lot about what's gone right, but I want you to look at that image of the boomerang, get it in your mind and think about, that's the thing you do not want. We cannot afford a boomerang with this disease in this city. Now it's a ferocious disease. I think we've all established the all have seen painfully so many of us have experienced in our own families and our own lives why it's such a dangerous disease, and this is not a disease that will just walk away and leave us alone and go quietly into the night. No, we're going to have to fight it back if we want to rid ourselves of it.

Look, the danger is a bounce back, a boomerang where the disease seems to be going away and then reasserts and the cases come on more and more and the numbers go up and more and more people are afflicted and that would set back a restart and a recovery by a long time. And I'll give you real examples to you what's happened some other places where that's exactly the problem they had. They jumped too soon in various ways and then their restart and recovery took a lot longer. So now the question I'm sure you will ask yourself as well, what can I do to make sure we don't have that boomerang to make sure we don't have that happen here? And the answer is that we need to stick with what's working. We need to understand that the restrictions in place are working and that they only get relaxed carefully and slowly. There's no on-off switch here. It's not like you have all the restrictions one day and the next day you're back to normal. I don't think people even expect that anymore. I think people understand we'll be fighting this disease in different ways for quite a while. Doesn't mean we can't start to get more normal, but it means job one is to beat back the disease. So, since it's not on-off, we would do things in careful stages and make sure that each step we take is working before we take the next step. We have to do this to protect our people. We have to do this to make sure our hospitals are not overwhelmed and they can be there to save our lives. We have to do this so we can restart and recover.

Now I told you when I talked to you about this image and I now hope it's really in your mind, the boomerang. It's not abstraction because it's actually happened in other parts of the world. I want to give you those examples. So, the place to look is to Asia because they have been through many experiences that prepared them for the coronavirus. Many parts of Asia went through SARS and the bird flew in different challenges and we can learn from their experiences – it helps us to understand our future and how we can get it right and what not to do as well.

So many, many parts of Asia have done smart strategies, but they also have made those missteps at times that are instructive to all of us. And the smallest misstep, the smallest weakness is exploited by this disease. So, I'm going to give you three examples of a boomerang and we can learn from each one. First, let's go to Japan. And the lesson of Japan is don't come back too early. This is a raging discussion in our own country right now is some states are rushing to restart and it looks to me like some of them are doing it without a lot of evidence, without a lot of health care indicators to tell them what's really going on. And I'm hoping and praying for them that doesn't backfire horribly on the people of those states. In Japan, there is the example, the region of Hokkaido and it was a region that had initially experience with the coronavirus. And then late in February, after having only about 70 cases, this region declared a state of emergency. For three weeks, there was a lockdown in Hokkaido. And again, I emphasized just three weeks, at which point it seemed like the disease had been contained. Now we all know three weeks is not a long time. So, after three weeks, the lockdown was lifted on March 19th and it wasn't lifted gradually. It was lifted rather abruptly. So schools were reopened, public gatherings were allowed again, there were still some restrictions, but some of the biggest indicators, if you will, some of the places where people get together the most, like our schools and public gatherings, those were the places that somehow were allowed again, almost instantly. 26 days later, there was a surge in cases again in Hokkaido, and guess what they had to do very sadly, they had to go right back to stringent restrictions. And that's what they're still experiencing now. So that's one case study of a place that thought they had it beat, didn't necessarily wait a long time to make that conclusion and then went very fast back into a restart and now unfortunately are paying for it.

Now let's look to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is an example of how even if things look better, small levels of activity can suddenly grow into something much worse. So, by early March it looked like Hong Kong was pretty much done with the disease and normal life resumed. Travelers started returning home to Hong Kong. People were allowed to go out again. Nightlife started again, obviously very, very active nightlife in Hong Kong, a city very much like New York City, lots of bars, lots of restaurants, clubs. People went back out and in late March the cases started to surge. What happened, the government had to now in Hong Kong put a variety of new restrictions in place, restricting travel, restricting gatherings, schools, all sorts of places people went, those restrictions had to be asserted again and then in April even more had to be added. So again, an example of a city very much like ours that found they had to put back restrictions and then go even farther. The last thing we want to see here again, our job is to have a clear, steady march forward, as steady as it can be when time comes to relax restrictions, relax them, and get it right once and for all and never have that boomerang effect.

One more example, Singapore. Now Singapore has been lauded for doing a lot of things the right way early on in this crisis. By the middle of March, there were relatively few cases, Singapore was getting a lot of praise for a very strong, focused effort to address this disease. But again, not every part of the equation apparently was considered in Singapore. And one of the things that typifies Singapore is there's a number of migrant workers and they live in dormitories. The dormitories were allowed to fill up. By late April, there are hundreds of new cases of the coronavirus and the government had to impose a two week stay at home order and now has even increased restrictions on schools and restaurants and other types of public gatherings.

So, three case studies. What they have in common is they're all examples of the dangers that exist if the restart goes the wrong way, and if that boomerang effect is allowed to happen and it's a reminder that we have to be vigilant because even a small number of cases can lead to that resurgence if the right restrictions aren't in place. It's also a reminder that what we're building up – the massive testing apparatus and tracing apparatus and the ability to isolate people, quarantine people, that has to be stronger and stronger all the time to make sure we put the disease in check and keep it in check. So, the bottom line is we have to get this right

Now, testing, as I said, testing is the key. Testing has always been the key and I'm going to talk to you now about something exciting happening right here in this city to make sure that we will have what it takes for wide-scale testing. As of this week, we have begun the process of producing test kits here in New York City and this is a first in our city's history because this was not a place like so many other parts of America that thought we had to have our own medical supplies and medical equipment built right here. But we've learned a tough lesson that we have to create and we have to protect ourselves. That's why we're going to have a strategic reserve going forward for New York City to protect New York City. So, for the first time we are producing now test kits in New York City and this has had to be put together very quickly. A lot of partners brought together a lot of different moving parts that had to be made since that has never been done before. So, we're really an uncharted territory creating these test kits in New York City. And I will tell you like so many other things we've been working on. There'll be moments when we have to figure things out. Sometimes there'll be times when we have to try something even if it doesn't work, try something else until we get there because we are in uncharted territory, but we are confident that we're making progress and we're confident that we're going to have test kit production in this city. That's going to be a key part of what we do going forward. Now, at one point I talked about a test kit and I use an analogy to a cup of coffee. If you want a cup of coffee with milk and sugar, you need a cup, you need water, you need coffee beans, you need sugar, you need cream. You need all the things that allow you to make a cup of coffee the way you want it.

Well, a test kit has something in common with that. You need three parts for a test kit. For the PCR test, the diagnostic test for the coronavirus. You need the swabs to take the actual sample. You need the transport medium, which is what keeps the sample in place on the way to the lab. And you need the screw top tubes to protect the sample from any contamination. So what the lab gets will be accurate. Well, the good news is these screw top tubes are something we have plenty of access to, but the two challenges where the swabs and the transport medium, the fluid that you actually keep the sample in. So the swabs, well, a painful, painful irony that the entire world experienced a shortage of these swabs starting over the last month. Why? Because almost all of them were made in Northern Italy. That turned out to be one of the epicenters of the global crisis. We realized we had to find another source. The global market wasn't working, there weren't sources around this country that were reliable enough. So, we decided we would make our own and this small piece of plastic here it, it's long. I want to remind you that way. This works is it is put literally biomedical professional well up your nose. So, it is a very careful effort that has to be done by someone that knows what they're doing. But this seemingly simple piece of plastic actually proved to be a complex matter because it has to be done just the right way and it has to be kept sterile in packaging like this until the point when it's actually used on a patient. So, getting this right proved to be actually a complex matter. But again, there's tremendous talent in this city and so many people, so many companies, so many partners who came forward and said, we want to get this done because we know it'll save lives in our city.

So, our local partner is Print Parts, a 3D printing company and they are using designs like this one that have been clinically validated. In this case, we found a partner in the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and another partner in Envision Tech, which is a medical 3D printing firm. So, we put together a coalition of different organizations to help us get this right. Now, how many when, well 30,000 will be delivered by this Friday and then we'll be on a track thereafter for 50,000 a week. Now, I mentioned what's called a transport medium, this is the fluid that the samples are kept in our local partners at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a great New York City institution. They worked with what you might call a recipe, which follows a CDC-approved protocol, and the first batch of this transport medium will be produced this week in New York City. Still has to go through a validation process, so that's going to take a little more time. But by the week of May 17th we will begin to pair the locally made swabs with a locally made transport medium and then like that cup of coffee, we'll have all the pieces come together and for the first time in the city's history, we will have our own test kits produced in large numbers right here in the five boroughs.

In the meantime, we're not going to wait. That initial set of 30,000 swabs. That'll be delivered by Friday. We will pair with an interim source of transport medium from outside New York City, and that pairing will happen Friday May 8th. Those full test kits will be delivered wherever they're needed to be part of our widespread testing effort by the week of May 10th. So this is all growing all the time and more and more pieces are going to be brought into play so that we can get to that widespread testing to help us go on the offensive testing, tracing, isolating, quarantine all the pieces needed to fight back this disease and avoid that dreaded boomerang.

Now we've talked about testing from the beginning. First time I asked the federal government to help us get testing was on January 24th that request, that plea was ignored. We still are waiting for the federal government to help us. Now we need their help with lab capacity. We're still not getting the help we need and we're going to keep fighting for it. But I want to take a moment to appreciate the people who work in those labs. You know, we've been rightfully talking about our health care heroes, our doctors, our nurses, all the health care workers and our first responders, our essential workers, folks in the grocery stores and supermarkets and pharmacies. All the people out there doing such important work. But let's talk about the people who actually help us know if someone has this disease or not. The lab techs, let's talk about them. All the people work in the labs, we depend on them and they are unsung heroes too. And I want to thank everyone of course who works in the private labs because we're depending on them. But I want to highlight those who work in our public labs and I want to say – give credit where credit is due. I was on Friday evening, you know, of course the 7:00 pm clapping for all the health care heroes. I went to Interfaith Hospital in Brooklyn, a wonderful institution. Earlier in this decade, a lot of us in Brooklyn fought to protect Interfaith Hospital from closing. Thank God we all did, work with the community and the community stood up strong to protect Interfaith. And Interfaith has been front and center in this crisis. I talked to some of the folks that work at Interfaith, some of whom I knew from that first fight to keep it open.

And we were talking about everything that had happened there. And a couple of people from the lab came forward and said, hey, don't forget about us. Don't forget about the lab workers. So, to all the lab workers, first of all, in all the 56 hospitals in New York City that have been a part of this fight, all the lab workers in all the private labs. All of you are also heroes in this effort. I want to express my deep thanks to all of you, but I want to especially thank those who have worked in our public labs. So first of all, at the New York City Department of Health, the Public Health Lab, you've heard more and more about it. It's been a crucial part of this equation. More than 200 staff work there. And for the last two months, they have literally been working 24/7. It's been a big part of how we fight back to have the Public Health Lab, you know, nonstop getting results for New Yorkers who need them.

I want to thank Dr. Jennifer Rakeman, the Assistant Commissioner, Department of Health and the Director of the Lab and her entire team, job well done. And at Health + Hospitals, our public hospital and clinic system, more than 1000 lab professionals have been in the forefront. Our public hospitals have been the frontline of this crisis. I want to thank the technologists, the technicians, the pathologists, everyone who was part of those H + H labs. You've been amazing. You've worked nonstop, you've been strong and focused, and it's helped us to make the progress we've made with this disease so far. Special thanks to Kenra Ford, the Senior Assistant Vice President of Lab Services and her entire team. Thank you so much.

So, remember when you're thinking of all the reasons to be thankful to be a New Yorker right now, think of all the heroes we thank every day. But think of some of the heroes we may not think about as much. Think about those lab workers. You only get the answer to the test because of them. And we only find the ways that we can fight back this disease because of the information they give us and they never stop. They work around the clock. So thank you to all the great people working in the labs.

Now we're going to beat back this disease. We're going to do it with testing, tracing, isolating, quarantining, all these strategies that work. We're going to do it on a vast scale, but, in the meantime, we continue to fight that other part of the crisis, that horrible reality of people who have lost their livelihoods, struggling to make ends meet. And in so many cases struggling just to get food on the table. Remember the estimates before the coronavirus were about 1.2 million New Yorkers, and this is a very sad reality. 1.2 million New Yorkers experience some amount of food insecurity at any given point in the year. And that's a horrible number to begin with. It's something we've been trying to fight back for years now. That number, even though we don't have all the facts yet and we're still trying to understand the sheer impact of this horrible crisis on everyday New Yorkers, that number may have grown by a million. There could be as many as two million or more New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity now or who will be experiencing it in the coming weeks. So, we have to help people right now and from the beginning, I've been painfully aware there's a lot of New Yorkers who now have to ask a question they never thought they'd ask. And that question is, where's my next meal coming from? The answer from the City of New York, the answer from your City government is we will be there for you. No New Yorker will go hungry. No matter what it takes, we will provide food to everyone who needs it.

So, food delivery is a big piece of this because there are a lot of people who can't get out. They're seniors. They're vulnerable folks that maybe people with disabilities, whatever it is, there's reasons why they can't get out, can't get the food. And particularly in this tough environment, there are a lot of people used to depend on other people to bring food for them who can't right now or dependent on members of their family who were the breadwinners, who don't have an income right now. So, we made it our business to do a massive food delivery effort for those who are most vulnerable. Again, I want to emphasize, a lot of people who need food right now are people who just weeks ago considered themselves solidly middle class or working class. Everything was if not fully under control in their life, certainly something like where your meals were coming from was under control. A lot of people felt a horrible disruption in their lives and we have to make sure that each and every one of them know, no matter what you go through, we're going to be there for you. There is no shame in asking for the help you need and we want to make it as easy as possible for you and your family. Currently we are at a capacity where we can deliver as many as 3.1 million meals per week. Our goal is to keep ramping that up as high as we need it to be. If needed, we can take that capacity as high as 1 million meals per day. A staggering number, but we can do that if that's what we need to do to keep people safe and to keep them fed here in New York City.

So, we continue to expand our Get Food program and particularly our delivery program. But to do this, to keep expanding we are going to need help at the community level. So, I'm going to today be asking people to join in who can help us in this endeavor. We need more personnel at the distribution site. So, if you're a nonprofit organization, a community-based organization, there are a lot of great ways we can partner with you. First of all, we need to immediately find an additional 300 staff members who can manage distribution sites. So we're looking for nonprofit partners with that skill, that ability to manage a site. We need you to come forward right away.

We need help actually preparing meals. Look we are now at a point where I'm talking about going as high as a million meals a day, where all of the places we're preparing the meals are getting maxed out. So, we need commercial kitchen capacity. And this is an opportunity to work with a number of nonprofits and businesses that currently don't have the ability to operate normally. We want to bring you back into play as part of this very noble effort to feed your fellow New Yorkers. We would love to get people who represent all the communities of this city. So we're interested in any organizations that can help us, particularly feeding folks with some of the foods they're more used to in the East Asian community, South Asian community, Caribbean community that will help. We're going to make sure people are fed. If we can help people to have some of the foods that they are familiar with in the process, that's even better.

And we need help with delivery in specific neighborhoods where we need more personnel. And in sourcing available meals in those neighborhoods. The more we can do locally, the better off we'll be. Having the kitchen capacity, having the delivery all happen locally -- the more local, obviously the less traveling around, the more efficient, the speedier, the better. So, I'm going to name some neighborhoods where we are particularly looking for help. We are looking for help in Melrose, in Washington Heights, in Howard Beach, South Ozone Park, in Gravesend, and Sheepshead Bay, in Morris Park, on the North Shore of Staten Island, in Flushing, in Jackson Heights, in Eastchester and in Sunset Park. And we're particularly looking for providers who can help us by producing at least a thousand meals a day. We've put out a request, it's online right now. Anybody from a nonprofit organization or anybody who thinks they can help us with these immediate needs so we can really expand this meal program intensely, please go to nyc.gov/nonprofits, nyc.gov/nonprofits.

Okay. Few more things. So next Sunday, a very, very important day, every year, Mother's Day. It is a day that we cherish in our family. It's a day when everyone remembers to express their deep appreciation to, in our case, the mothers in our life, but every family, remembering how much we owe the moms in our families. Now, this is not going to be a typical Mother's Day to say the least, and, unfortunately, we've gotten some practice here because so many other crucial days in our year, from all different faiths, all different communities have overlapped with this horrible crisis. We went through Easter, Passover, now Ramadan, everyone's trying to figure out how to maintain our traditions and everything that is so dear to us in the midst of this crisis. Well, we're going to have to improvise again for Mother's Day. Now, Mother's Day for so many of us meetings gathering together. In fact, it's a day when our moms expect everyone to come together. Stop what you're doing and just slow down and appreciate the family and appreciate the mom in your life. But to appreciate mom this year, it means keeping mom safe. It means doing things differently. And that's particularly true if your mom happens to be older. We want to protect all the moms in New York City. And the way to do that is to show love and appreciation in different ways.

We used to all flock home to mom. This is not the year to do that. It is the year to show love and support in different ways. In fact, normally the gift we give to mom is to all show up. This time the gift we can give to mom is to give her some space and help her stay safe. So you can celebrate lots of other ways. Facetime, Skype, Zoom. There's so many ways you can celebrate. You can also do that old-fashioned thing we call a phone call, which moms still appreciate very much. In fact, many moms are like you could call more often, they'd like that. You can go outside mom's house and wave from the sidewalk. You can do all sorts of things. But let's remember how important social distancing is for everyone. And let's remember protecting mom's health should be the number one thing we think about on Mother's Day. Our moms have brought us through everything and the way we honor them is to remember what it's going to take to fight back this disease and bring them through safe and sound. And we can do that together

Now, I want to talk to you – something I talked about on Friday and it's such a powerful, tragic story, but also a powerful story of human devotion. I talked about a paramedic from Aurora, Colorado, Paul Cary. And we lost Paul. He came here to help us and we lost him to the coronavirus. And amazing how small a world it is. So, Aurora, Colorado is also where New York City's Emergency Management Commissioner Deanne Criswell comes from. And for years in her hometown, she served in the Fire Department. And she served with Paul Cary. And what a shocking coincidence that he ended up coming to New York City to help us in our hour of need and then so painful that this disease has taken him.

Well, first of all, my deepest thanks to the entire FDNY family, the firefighters, the EMTs, the paramedics, everyone at the FDNY, and my deepest thanks to NYPD. After Paul was lost, they gave him a tribute and treated him as one of our own. And a lot of you may have seen the images, but a powerful, powerful respect shown by our first responders to one of their own who didn't come from here and was only here a short time, but gave to New York City so much. And all of our first responders honored him as if he had been a lifelong New Yorker. And I know the Cary family was deeply moved by that. I also want to thank the New York Daily News. Daily News, put Paul on the cover yesterday and it was a very moving tribute to him. And you know, the thing that goes on the cover of the newspaper sends such a powerful message. So to think that one of the most prominent newspapers in the country honored this man who came here of his own choice to protect us and serve us. That was a very beautiful tribute. So thank you to everyone at the Daily News for doing that. And thank you again to Paul's family. And we will remember him and we will memorialize him. But it's so important to remember this great example of heroism.

Now, we have an example of heroism in Paul, we have an example of people doing the right thing every day in New York City. It has become something we are so proud of to recognize how many people are just doing what's right, to protect other people, to be compassionate for other people, to care about other people, to recognize the depth of this crisis and be there for their fellow New Yorker. That's what everyone should do. Anybody – any everyday New Yorker, and especially anyone in a position of authority anywhere in this city, anywhere in this country should feel in their hearts what New Yorkers have gone through and ask the question of what can I do to help, just like all our heroes do?

Well, let me talk today, unfortunately, about someone who did the exact opposite of that. And I was shocked when I heard this. The White House Economic Advisor Kevin Hassett. He [inaudible] talking about the stimulus program, talking about what's needed to get New York City and all cities and states back on their feet. Yesterday morning, he says, well, everything appears to be happening safely. And literally, this is a quote he says, there is a chance that we won't really need another stimulus – a phase four stimulus. Listen to those words. There's a chance we won't need it. Well, let me tell you something, Kevin, why don't you come to New York City? Why don't you go to Elmhurst Hospital? Why don't you talk to our first responders? Why don't you talk to the families who have lost their loved ones? Or go to the ICU where hundreds of people are still fighting for their lives? In terms of your desire, which is pretty transparent to save money rather than to protect people, to risk the future of New York City and this State and so many cities and states around the country. It is outrageous that anyone with a position of authority in our federal government could even breathe these words. Because it's disrespectful in every way. It is an absolute misunderstanding of what has happened here and what continues to happen and the fight we're still waging. And how much it's going to take to get back on our feet. This year and next year and the years thereafter. I was disgusted when I heard these comments because it sounded like the comments not only of a cheapskate, but someone who just didn't care.

So, I hope President Trump will renounce these comments immediately. I don't know why this guy is his economic advisor if you could say something like that. The President needs to speak up and say that's absolutely unacceptable. Right now, we know in the Congress, intense effort is going on to create a stimulus. Why? Because what's happening in cities and states all over the country right now, red states and blue states, red cities and blue cities is mayors and governors unfortunately are having to cut back more and more. And it's soon going to really affect the basic services we all depend on. The kind of cuts we're talking about will lead painfully, horribly to furloughs, to layoffs of public sector workers who are the backbone of our cities, our states, the people who keep everything going. The people we need even more in a recovery. And here's the painful reality I want you to take in. Listen to these very dangerous comments from this White House official and then translate it into reality. If there is not a fourth stimulus and that stimulus does not amply provide for the needs of cities and states this year and next year, then the very people who have been our heroes, the very people who have been saving our lives, those doctors, those nurses, those firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, police officers, the people keeping this place going, the people who keep it going all the time, the sanitation workers, the educators, all the people we are depending on for a restart and a recovery, their futures will be compromised.

Imagine if the very same doctors and nurses working in our public hospitals are the very same EMTs and paramedics who were such heroes in this crisis, imagine if after fighting through this battle, months from now they had to face furloughs or layoffs here and all over the country. If we don't get help from Washington that is what will happen. And I'm talking about one place, one city right here already, $7.4 billion in the hole because of a crisis we didn't ask for and we didn't create. Came to us from another place. But all of you have fought heroically through it. I just want to see everyone in Washington show a little bit of respect for what New York City has gone through and so many cities and states around the country have gone through and just do the right thing and help us back on our feet.

Okay, we're going to go over the daily indicators. And as I've said, the reality of these indicators is what's going to determine our future and directly relates to all you do. We've generally seen progress, not quite enough yet. We have to keep at it. So, today progress, generally, still more to go. First indicator – daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that's up, and that's that one troubles me but it is the truth up from 92 to 113. But the other indicators are down. Daily number of people in ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19, down from 677 to 645. Percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19, citywide down 21 percent to 20 percent. Only a little but still down. Public health lab tests for COVID-19 – percentage down, 50 percent to 33 percent. We keep putting together good days. I want us to put together great days and consistent days, but we're clearly moving in the right direction. Let's stick with it. Let's stick with it because it's working. But job-one is to get through this steadily, constantly, and get to the point where we can start to get to normal. But at the same time, job-two is always there – never let that boomerang happen. So, avoiding that boomerang, that's up to you, and that's up to all of us here at City Hall to make sure we are prudent and careful in the steps we take. You keep doing your part – and you're doing it great, New York – we'll keep doing our part, we will not let our foot off the gas until we're sure it's time. That's how we keep the boomerang from happening. That's how we move steadily forward together. A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will take questions from the media and I always like to remind people, please remind me of the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder also on the line, we have Police Commissioner Shea, Health Commissioner Dr. Barbot, Food Czar Garcia, EDC President James Patchett, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Roger from 1010 Wins.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mayor. I'd like to ask about the eventual reopening of New York City. It's going to happen obviously at some time. There may be workers, either older workers or workers with preexisting conditions or those with preexisting conditions in their families who are reluctant to go back to their workplace. Does there need to be legal protections in place to protect them from job discrimination?

Mayor: Well, it's a really interesting question, Roger. Clearly, look, there are tremendous protections right now in New York City against discrimination. We have one of the strongest human rights laws in the entire country and we're very proud of that. We absolutely want to make sure there's no discrimination as we begin our restart. So, I think it's a very fair question. The restart will have to come with really clear rules. Again, it will happen carefully and in stages. We have to make really clear what's expected of people, what types of businesses will begin, in what fashion, which ones will be handled later. So, I think it's incumbent upon all of us here at the City to get the message out clearly from the beginning. But absolutely important to say no discrimination of any kind will be tolerated. We need to make those rules clear from the beginning and we also need to let people know if they do experience any discrimination that they can turn to the City. And that's always true – by turning to our Human Rights Commission or calling 3-1-1. So, great question, we will be making sure to get information on that out as the restart really does begin.

Moderator: Next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning. Question for both the Mayor and Police Commissioner Shea. Can you say how many fines were given out for social distancing violations yesterday? Also, were any arrests made in that context? I'm also interested in hearing the Police Commissioner's perspective on how well social distancing is going over in parks.

Mayor: Yeah, I guess we'll start by saying NYPD did a remarkable job as did Parks Enforcement and employees from a number of agencies we had out, both in enforcement effort and in efforts to educate and give out free face coverings. So, I think it was a strong day. I was monitoring throughout the day and saw enforcement actions happening all over the city. But I think the numbers also say that a vast majority of New Yorkers are following the rules as has been true throughout. So, Commissioner, do you want to elaborate?

Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea: Sure. I would echo that in terms of, you know, we had a lot of help yesterday and we appreciate all the other agencies that were working alongside us. In parks specifically yesterday, we issued 43 summonses. We had an additional eight outside of parks for a total of 51. Now, not every single one was socially distancing, but the majority were. So, that's a total of 51 summonses. We also see six motorcycles in an incident in the 1-14 Precinct in Astoria Park. Two of those motorcycles turned out to be stolen. Too many summonses is to count for motorcycles in that incident as well as other incidents in the city. That's more for the moving violation and driving recklessly type of scenarios. And in terms of arrests, I'm aware of three arrests citywide.

Mayor: Okay.

Moderator: Next question is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you about the HRA benefits offices. As we understand it, the police that supervised those offices are no longer barring access to individuals if they refuse to accept or wear a mask –

Mayor: Yoav, I couldn't hear that, [inaudible] 'no longer' and then I couldn't hear your words clearly.

Question: Sorry. They're no longer allowed to bar people from entering the building if they refuse to wear a face mask or a face covering. And I'm wondering if you can address that because it kind of contradicts the City's other messages on this.

Mayor: Yeah, I don't – I have not heard that before, Yoav, I want – I think it's abundantly clear that people need to be wearing face coverings and particularly in an enclosed space. We've been abundantly clear that, for example, a supermarket, grocery, a pharmacy, you go in, if you don't have a face covering the manager, the owner can send you right back out. It's just not fair to other people. So, I believe that makes sense at a public office too. Again, we are trying with all benefits, to any kind of benefit program, including things like food stamps, SNAP, et cetera, to get people to do all this online or by phone so there really is not a lot of reason to go in person or into an office. We're discouraging people from going to an office, but if you do go into an office, you need to be wearing a face covering. I don't know the details. We'll follow up. Our team will get you more later on today, but the clear message needs to be, people need to be wearing a face cover.

Moderator: Next is Christie from WCBS 880.

Question: Hi, good morning panel and Mayor. My question was just about these advisory boards that you were talking about last week. [Inaudible] you saying, [inaudible] –

Mayor: Christie, I'm having trouble hearing you, Christie. See, I don't know what's going on with your phone. Could you start again and speak slowly so I can hear you?

Question: Sure. Hello, does that sound better?

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: So, my question is about the advisory boards that you were talking about last week [inaudible] just wanted to know how those [inaudible] –

Mayor: I'm not sure I got all of that. And I just want to say to all our colleagues in the media, please, we're sometimes having trouble hearing you and whenever you can call in, if you have hard lines, it helps or whatever kind of a phone line or headset or lack of headset, whatever will make the calls come in clear so we can hear you is appreciated. But on the advisory boards, Christie, I think you're asking about the sector groups that we have put together. These are going to represent all different parts of New York City in the sense of different industries, different key elements of life in this city. I am going to be personally meeting with each one obviously remotely, starting with the two groups that will represent key elements of the business community, the small business community and the community of larger businesses in this city. But there'll be a number of other organizations, there are a number of other advisory groups I should say. They're all coming together this week. They'll all be announced this coming week and get immediately to work and they will be crucial to the restart, to begin with, advising on how we go about the restart properly. And then they'll stick with us going forward as we have so many decisions to make and we want that input, we want the ideas, we want to test different things, and see what they think about them. So, all of those will be announced in the course of this coming week. They'll get started immediately. And then we can give you some progress reports as we go along on the work that we're doing.

Moderator: Next is Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor and everyone on the call. How are you guys?

Mayor: Hey, Gersh.

Question: I want to ask you about the Open Street launch, Mr. Mayor and obviously Commissioner Shea. It was very noticeable how few NYPD officers or crossing guards were needed to safely create the space for the public. Now we talked to a DOT Commissioner Trottenberg on Prospect Park West, who said the administration's thinking had evolved on Open Streets in the eight days since she and the NYPD testified that such a plan was impossible. Now clearly yesterday proved that it is possible. So, can you talk to us a little bit about the administration's evolution on policing Open Streets and did you get a chance to experience one of these open streets yourself, Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Gersh, look, first of all, what was deeply a concern to us weeks ago was that all of the agencies we depended on for enforcement starting with NYPD were really experiencing tremendous trouble because so many of their employees were out and obviously first and foremost, our concern was for our police officers and all our public employees who were fighting against this disease. But it also meant that a lot of agencies couldn't do what they normally could. And I am still fundamentally a believer in enforcement in all things. We had a good first day with a limited sample size. I don't think anyone yet can say that we know exactly what it's going to take to enforce these things going forward. But I can say one absolute evolution is that a few weeks ago we did not know what kind of capacity we've had in terms of returning officers and how many more would get sick each week and one thing or another, like we didn't know enough about where this disease was going. And overall, we've seen a lot of progress on that front. That means we have a lot more ability to enforce and that gives me a lot more comfort going forward with these open streets. But, you know, day one from what I could see went well, certainly hopeful – we're looking to expand. I think it's going to be great, but it always will require enforcement. We'll find out how much by doing it. And I think it's also fair to say with more and more knowledge of the open streets and warmer and warmer weather, more and more people will come. And again, that's where you do need enforcement for sure. I saw the open street on Prospect Park West and it looked like things were going well. Chirlane reported that the open street by Carl Schurz Park was going well. So, definitely a good day and a good concept and we look forward to broadening it.

Moderator: Next to Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, hope you're doing well. I wanted to ask about – going off of that bit about crowding in parks. Again, I know that you had expressed that the vast majority are doing it well and the vast majority of New Yorkers are doing it well. But I just wanted to ask about some of the, what seems to be a little bit of possible unequal enforcement, and what the City is doing to avoid that. And there was this particular photo near Christopher Street, the pier there, where there were very large gatherings and I'm wondering also what you all – how to approach this enforcement issue when it's hard to tell, I guess, if people are gathering with people in their households. Do you have any response or comment on that?

Mayor: Absolutely, first of all, I know you mean the terminology in good faith, but I want to contest your terminology instantly because this is literally a life and death matter. No, a gathering is a purposeful group of large numbers of people. We've seen examples of that as part of funerals or religious observances or sports activities or parties, barbecues. Those are gatherings. In some cases, you know, dozens of people, hundreds of people, even thousands of people. That's job one is to absolutely not allow that to exist anywhere in New York City at this point while we're going through this emergency and I've been very clear and Commissioner Shea's been very clear, we won't tolerate that and we are going instantly to break those up and anyone who persists is going to get a summons or worse. What we see in some places is a large number of people in a small area and our job is to make sure they practice social distancing. Even if there's a large number of people in a small area, people have to practice social distancing. If not, they're running the risk of a summons. I heard there were some real issues in the Hudson River Park. I instructed the Commissioner this morning to make sure there were extra patrols today in Hudson River Park. We're not going to tolerate even small groups of people not practicing social distancing.

Now, I want to affirm, if people live under the same roof – this is a matter of the truth. I think New Yorkers understand at this point, this is not business as usual, this is literally about life and death. If you live under the same roof, you do not have the same social distancing requirement. And we've talked about this incessantly because you're already in such constant contact. So, if a family is gathered together in a park, close together, that's because they already have been gathered close together. They should not come in contact with anyone else. They should keep distance from everybody else. A couple lives under the same roof, they are already connected to each other. It's a different reality but they should not come in contact with other people. They should keep the six feet. So, there are some things you see where you can say, 'Oh, look at those people, they are close together', but they are definably members of a family. People need to be honest about this because it's not cute to say, 'Oh, we're all together, we live under the same roof', if you don't, because you're literally endangering the lives of the people around you and then everyone else's lives because of potentially spreading this disease. So, the NYPD and Parks Enforcement, all enforcement folks out there are very, very clear, no gatherings. And even if you see small groups of people too close together, we're going to separate them. And if people have any desire to resist, they are going to suffer the consequences. Commissioner, would you like to speak further to the question of what happened in the West Village?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, I think you summarized what we're facing day-in and day-out. Our priority is certainly large groups gathering for whatever the activity is and then it gets slightly more challenging when you bring up people in households out trying to get a little bit of exercise, and, you know, in close proximity to each other because they are constantly in close proximity to each other. But maintaining that six feet from others. The East Village, a couple of other places in the city too, we saw some incidents. We've certainly seen some incidents in Domino Park in the last couple of weeks and we will be out there again enforcing today and going forward to make sure that people are practicing that safe distance, also that people are wearing masks when out in public. So, it's more of the same, unfortunately, for New York City, they can expect it, but I would just reiterate that we had tens of thousands of interactions with people all across the city yesterday, most of them all without having to issue any type of enforcement activity, whether it's a summons or arrest. So, I think, again, New Yorkers are exhibiting extreme patience for the last two months. We're going to ask for a little more of it but we will be out there in force to remind them that, you know, for everyone's safety, they got to practice these social distance standards.

Moderator: Next is Fern from the Jewish Voice.

Mayor: Fern, you say? Fern, are you there? Hello, Fern. Are you there? Okay, let's get someone else and come back.

Moderator: Fern, we'll get back to you. Next is Ashley from the New York Times.

Mayor: Ashley – hey, Ashley.

Question: How are you

Mayor: Good, how you doing?

Question: [Inaudible] fine, thank you. I wanted to ask the Police Commissioner and you about a couple of things. One, yesterday in Harlem there was a memorial for a young man who was killed about a week ago and there was a really large crowd and the officer seemed to have the street shut off. I'm wondering for, you know – these kinds of vigils are pretty common in the warmer months and also in the winter. And I'm wondering if the Police Commissioner or you have any specific kind of social distancing guidance for officers who are in communities where you have overlapping public health crises – in this case, gun violence and the coronavirus – and where there's still some very strong mistrust of the police. And then the second thing – I want to ask about the incident on the Lower East Side where there appears to be an officer – officers appear to be making an arrest and one of them comes toward a group of bystanders pointing his taser. And apparently with his hand on the trigger, you hear it clicking. And he also – it sounds like he uses the N-word. I'm just wondering if the CCRB or the NYPD will be investigating that incident and what happened there.

Mayor: I'll start and just say that, Ashley, first of all, any incident where there's any potential of something inappropriate, unquestionably will be investigated. I don't know any of the details of this one, it is the first time hearing it, but there will unquestionably be a careful look at what happened there and the Commissioner can speak to it more. But on the question of a memorial, we have to get clear to people that no such events should be happening. We're at a point where when you start to attract large numbers of people, the chance of social distancing being maintained is minimal. And it's clear from the guidelines that both the State and the City have put out that we do not allow gatherings. It is too dangerous. It's too much of a – there's too much of a possibility it will spread the disease and harm people in the community. And I find it particularly painful and frustrating if it's a funeral or memorial, something honoring someone who's passed away, the ridiculous, painful reality that by gathering actually more people might pass away, more people might lose their lives. It's unacceptable in every community. So, no, we cannot allow such gatherings to begin with. We have to not allow them to be created to begin with. It's just they have to be stopped before they even get started. And that is the rule we will apply all over the city. Commissioner –

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. Ashley, regarding the Harlem Memorial, I am not familiar with that incident. I will certainly have somebody look into it. But, I think, that you know, that's the irony of this situation. This isn't an NYPD policy, this is now law. It's law passed down through executive orders that there ought to be no gatherings and it doesn't specify what the gatherings are for here – unnecessary, non-essential gatherings, and that would certainly encompass what you're referring to. So, your answer, we will be out there enforcing it wherever it happens across the city. And we just urge – we continue to urge New Yorkers to work with us. And the last thing we want is well-intentioned gatherings that wind up causing more harm. Regarding the incident in the East Village, when I mentioned earlier 51 summonses in three arrests, that was the three arrests I was talking about. It started out as a social distancing enforcement. There were three arrests made from that incident. I am aware of the video that's out there. It's being investigated currently by our Internal Affairs Bureau as a result of that very preliminary investigation that's ongoing. There was one officer modified and that's where we stand right now.

Moderator: The next question is Andrew from Gay USA.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. This is for you and for Commissioner Barbot. You signed a law in 2016, Intro 552-a, to mandate that the Health Department and other agencies provide demographic surveys to all persons served, including about sexual orientation and gender identity. But we've been given no data on LGBT people hit by COVID-19. Will you direct that the Health Department provide that data? There's a kind of a thirst for it among the LGBT service groups and AIDS groups.

Mayor: Yes. Thank you very much for the question. Certainly, I think that's the right thing to do. And you're right, we long thought it was important to put out information to show people what's really happening and how we can all work together to protect people. Commissioner, would you like to speak to this?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Commissioner Barbot: Terrific. So, yes, we are obviously committed to transparency and ensuring that all New Yorkers are counted during this pandemic and we will work with our partners to ensure that as data is available, we certainly report on it. We do health opinion polls and certainly that's an area where we're looking to provide more information about how our LGBTQ community is being affected by this pandemic. And so, we will be following up.

Mayor: Good. Thank you.

Moderator: Fern, from the Jewish Voice. Do we have you back, Fern?

Question Yes, but can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yes.

Question: Thank you. Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Concerning testing and this question, I go to the Health Commissioner as well. The City is now providing centers in local areas where people can go to be tested. I understand that priority has been given to people over the age of 65, people who have had the symptoms. The question is, do people just go down without making an appointment? That's number one. Number two, concerning health insurance, will they be required to bring their health insurance card? Will these tests be provided for free? And thirdly, especially for elderly vulnerable people, will the places be crowded? In other words, will they be afraid to go down? Will there be, you know, measures taken to make sure that people don't get so close to each other at the testing site?

Mayor: Yes, these are great questions and thank you so much. So, I'll give you the examples from the two sites that I've been to. A week ago, at the Morrisania Health Clinic in the South Bronx and yesterday in Coney Island at the Ida G Israel Clinic, both run by our Health + Hospitals corporation, and I was very, very impressed by what I saw. So, first of all, the testing is free. You do not need to have an insurance card. I want to make that very clear. The testing that's being provided – and, again, first priority is on older New Yorkers and anyone with those preexisting conditions like diabetes lung disease, heart disease. The focus is on those who are most vulnerable, but anybody who comes of course will be tested free. You do not need an insurance card. And people are socially distanced in line and tested individually. So, there is real care taken to protect people during the testing process itself. Let's please spread the word, because this is the beginning of a much bigger effort to test New Yorkers across the board. You're going to be seeing more and more testing in this city. But these sites are for people from communities who need the tests and real care is taken to keep people safe.

Moderator: Next is Luis from New York [inaudible].

Question: I'm hoping you can – hello? Hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Luis. Go ahead.

Question: Alright, thank you. Hey there, Mr. Mayor. I'm hoping you can share what you know about the expanded testing criteria the Governor outline last week. I'm guessing it isn't up and running yet since I know of a number of essential workers, from an EMT and airline steward, to restaurant owners and local pharmacies, yet none of them have heard of thing. So, if or when the time comes, how will essential workers be notified? Will it be through your upcoming public awareness campaign? Will the Health Department reach out to them? Is the Health Department even aware of every single person or merchant that needs to know? And also, Mr. Mayor, have you any details about the pharmacies that are participating in the testing process? You know total numbers, locations and such?

Mayor: Luis, thank you for the questions. So, a couple of things. I want to make sure all New Yorkers understand, we've got the diagnostic testing – what's called PCR testing, which is to tell you right now, anybody, do you have this disease right now or not? And that is the focal point of our effort to do massive testing and tracing building up in the month of May. That's going to be the main thrust. That's what's been used in one form or another around the world as parts of successful efforts to contain the disease and move to a restart. So, testing on a big level, widespread level, tracing each contact, following up with people in need their own testing, isolating and quarantining. anyone test positive. That has been the game plan that has worked in much of the world. That's what starting to grow in the month of May, it will start to be very widespread. We still need that federal support to be able to have all the lab capacity we need, but that's the core of the game plan. Luis, what you're referring to as another piece of the puzzle – the antibody testing. Two announcements in the last few days, the Governor made an announcement about a State initiative which was focused on certain health care workers, first responders – I think you're right, pharmacists. That initiative, the antibody testing that again is a kind of testing that we've said is imperfect. The antibody testing tells you something, it doesn't tell you everything about what you've experienced before. The State is doing that on a wider level. We've announced a collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control. We'll be insuring ultimately – and I hope this is responsive to your question – we'll be ensuring that all New York City first responders, all New York City health care workers who want that antibody test, they will get it. It will be administered through an effort put together by the CDC and the expenses and staffing, et cetera covered by the federal government. Details will be announced shortly, but that's been agreed to. So, that will be literally any and all health care workers and first responders. The State has other initiatives they're working on and certainly you can get the information from them, but that is different from the really community-wide, widespread testing that we are going to be building out over the coming weeks.

Moderator: We have time for two more. The next is [inaudible] from Hambodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes. How you doing?

Question: Hi, how are you? There's some criticism of you on Twitter over the weekend by elected officials that I'd like you to respond to saying there's a tale of two cities. On the one hand, you tweeted sharp criticism of a funeral, Williamsburg, and the next day police officers descended on the neighborhood giving out large numbers of summons. I know you mentioned the distinction between gathering versus a bunch of individuals, but those people who got the tickets the next day were just a bunch of individuals out in the street. Yesterday, there were many images of jam-packed parks in the city, people not wearing masks. You had no Twitter comment. Assemblymen Simcha Eichenstein wrote, Hasidism regressively slapped in summons of up to $1,000 for not wearing a mask, a tale of two cities. NYPD tweeted, no mask, no problem – this lady in the park didn't have a masks, we gave her a mask. Councilman Chaim Deutsche responded, I'm confused, when do you give a mask to when do you give a summons? And so my question is, why – if you can respond to this criticism, the politicians are saying that apparently there's one neighborhood that's gets sharp criticism and the community called out by name, while in other instances there's silence or the polite handing out of masks. Thank you.

Mayor: Yeah, Rubin. I just dispute that fundamentally. There has been enforcement for weeks and weeks. And look, I love my city and I understand everyone looks out for their own communities within this city, but I've ultimately heard critique of too much enforcement or not enough enforcement in a variety of different communities. So, we want to make this an entirely consistent reality. I want it to be abundantly clear, the NYPD will be out enforcing and a number of other agencies will be out enforcing in all communities the same way, period. What I saw with my own eyes on Tuesday night in Williamsburg was absolutely unacceptable and was something that we had not seen on that scale anywhere and it was exactly what we cannot allow to happen. And there had been other large funerals before in the community and we're not going to allow that to happen. So, we had a particular problem we had to deal with. But we've had other types of problems in other places, and we're going to deal with everyone equally. So, again, that hierarchy – and I'm sure Commissioner Shea will add to this – the worst thing is a large gathering. And if it's dozens of people, it's bad. If it's hundreds of people, it's worse. If it's thousands of people, it's terrifying. And Rubin, we saw on Tuesday night, thousands of people in close proximity. If they had not been broken up by the police, they would have stayed for longer, many of them did not have face coverings. This means lives will be lost. It is unacceptable. But that's going to be true in any community. You talk about a really large gathering, absolutely acceptable, everyone's going to get a summons. Anyone who stays, summons instantly. Again, whether it's hundreds, same thing; dozens, same thing. We're coming after all gatherings. That is different than a bunch of people in a park who are distanced from each other. If there's small clumps that people are not distanced, we're going to go in and tell them you have to distance immediately. If they don't, they're getting summonsed. Each situation is looked at in degree. If someone doesn't have a face covering, we're going to offer them a face covering. Someone says, I refuse to have it put on a face covering, they have a problem and they're asking for enforcement. So, it is going to be done equally across all communities, one message that we have to save lives and anyone who is not following these simple rules is endangering the lives of everyone else. Commissioner Shea?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. As I'm listening to the conversation, I'm reminded of – you know, to thank the officers that are out there every day doing this work and across the city from borough to borough, regardless of what neighborhood it's in, officers are out there doing their best to enforce the social distancing, which is something six months ago we certainly couldn't have even imagined it. I think that I would agree, every situation is unique. They do the best they can in certain situations, and, first and foremost, they're trying to correct the condition, they're trying to educate people, they're trying to get compliance. The last thing they want to do is summons and arrest, and that goes from the Bronx to Staten Island. But there are some gatherings that we have said, we are past the point of warnings. And I think we've been consistent from the start, we're out there across the city, engaging people and we get varying levels of compliance, and if it comes to summons, then, you know, wherever at the summons point. But we urge New Yorkers to hang in there with us. We are going to get through this, but we just need your compliance, we need your patients and we need you to continue to work with us. And that goes whether you're in Williamsburg, that goes whether you're in the Mott Haven, or whether you're in Staten Island or Manhattan or anywhere else in between. I think that, you know, you can always find that an individual that's not happy. I rarely come across somebody that is happy after they've received the summons. But I think that in the difficult circumstances that we are in, and we certainly are, the officers are doing the best they can in trying, trying times.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Gail from Impacto Latino.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. So, as we all know, the immigrant committee community of New York City has been disproportionately economically impacted, given the types of jobs that they had, restaurant work, hotels, et cetera. It's estimated that 30 percent of some of those businesses will not come back, leaving this community in dire economic distress. Can you talk to us about any plans you have for providing economic support to this community that can't tap into the federal and State programs available to legal residents and US citizens? And then I have one more question on the health side, do you have any estimates on how many Latinos are getting tested? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Gail. Very important questions. So, on the second question, we're going to be able over time to put out, you know, more and more information based on community-based testing. Community-based testing is only started obviously in the last few weeks, but it's going to grow intensely over time. So, we certainly can get you information about how many tests are being performed in our different centers. And that tells you a lot about which communities are benefiting, and these are the hardest hit communities obviously. In terms of, you know, giving out data by individuals and their own demographics, I'm not sure we're structured for that right now. I'll have the team get back to you on that, but we can show you how the testing is growing neighborhood by neighborhood. But, again, this is a very initial piece of the testing program. We intend it to be much more widespread as May progresses, because we have to get into a very aggressive taste test and a test and trace strategy. The way to beat back this disease further is to have very widespread testing, very widespread tracing, isolating and quarantining anyone who needs it. And that's going to be an all communities. We're always going to keep a special focus on the communities that have been hit hardest, but we have to expand that ultimately over all communities of New York City. So, whatever we can get you now to give you a sense of the testing so far, we will get you. We'll come back with the answer on what kind of demographic data we're keeping by individual. On the question of small business, well, I think the fear is very real, meaning the fear that so many businesses might not come back is unquestionably honest, because we're all unsure of what the future brings and a lot of people, you know, have been going through now months where there's no income. I'm very, very worried for so many small businesses and I agree with you on immigrant communities. There's a particular danger to those small businesses. Now, Gail, I would say to you, history would tell us something else, which is that small businesses in general are extraordinarily strong and resilient. Immigrant small businesses are legendary in this city for being able to take very limited means and build something. I don't want to bet against our small businesses. I don't want for a moment people to assume that a lot of them can't come back. In fact, I wouldn't be shocked if the vast majority came back. We're going to have to help in every way we can. For the small businesses that can receive that stimulus support paycheck protection program, again, any small business that has not yet applied, please go to the small business administration website, sba.gov and apply for that money. Those are loans that in many cases can be forgiven and turns and turned into grants. Please, if you need help, a small business needs help with that application process, call 3-1-1. That's a whole lot of small businesses and we want to make sure that they get that federal support and New York City gets its fair share. Now, if you're talking about a business that is owned by someone who is undocumented and they're trying to stay on their feet, there obviously are some special efforts that have been made to help undocumented folks, most notably by the Open Society Foundations. That's a big initiative, tens of millions of dollars, and it's being distributed by grassroots organizations that work with immigrant communities. That's where I think people can initially turn for help, tidying over and eventually getting back on their feet. I think you're going to see more initiatives like that. But, in the end, I think, you know, our job – it kind of comes back to where we started, Gail – is, the best thing we can do for immigrant small business is get through this as quickly as possible and as thoroughly as possible and make sure the restart happens as quickly as possible, but in a sustained fashion where we do not have the restart interrupted at all. And that's what we're focused on right now.

And that will bring me to the close, which, again, I will say the dirty word one more time – boomerang. That's the thing we have to avoid at all costs. I tried today to show you something about this disease in the context of what's been done around the world. This disease, if it were a person it would be a very clever and very, very dangerous person. And the way to think about it in that sense is this is a disease – don't turn your back on it, don't give it an opening. Even the smallest opportunity and this disease might reassert, and that's the boomerang. But the good news is, what we see is a lot of great examples around the world and we'll be talking about them going forward of what has worked. And a lot of times what we see is what's worked is a careful, steady approach based on real indicators, smart steps forward, smart steps to loosen up, but always making sure that the loosening up is working and not having the unintended impact of a backfire. So, we have lessons about that boomerang where places moved too fast or opened up too much and experienced that boomerang and a much longer setback. We also have growing examples of where the restart was handled carefully and slowly and the right way, and that's what we're going to be guided by.

So, we will get through this, but I want everyone to understand that work of creating the right kind of restart is on all of us. That effort to stop the boomerang, we all participate in that. If we do it the right way, we can make sure that we come through this and move together as a city and get to that restart that we all want and need. Thank you very, very much, everybody.

2020-05-04 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. Monday morning, and a morning that really feels different in so many ways. First of all, it's a beautiful morning and really feels like spring is here finally, but also there's a little more hope in the air, because we've seen some real progress, and that's a good feeling every day when we think things are getting a little bit better and we see some real evidence of it. And we know that we're focused on not just what we feel but what we know. Proving to you each day that we are making tangible progress so we can get back to that road to something much better. But again, we're always going to focus on the facts, and when the facts are moving the right direction, that's because of you. That's because of the hard work all of you are doing and doing so well. The warmer weather makes us start to think maybe things are even a little better than the facts suggest, and that's why we have to always keep our balance. Be hopeful, be inspired, be diligent, keep doing what we have to do, because what we're feeling that beautiful weather out in that pole of normalcy, let's make it become real by our actions. So, we understand, all of us, that we have a job ahead of us. And we also have to remember that our reality for each and every one of us is New Yorkers, It feels according to what everyone's life is like a little bit different of course, but for most people there going about their lives, seeing something better, however, not so far away, no matter what neighborhood you're in, not so far away is a hospital. In that hospital is a different reality in many cases, in a reality that keeps us grounded and is a reminder that we don't stop fighting this battle. In the hospitals are our healthcare heroes still fighting to really ensure that not only their lives are saved, but that we fight back this disease once and for all.

Our hospitals do not feel normal yet. While we might feel out in the streets is a lot better than what people are experiencing in the hospitals. There's still a huge challenge in our hospitals. It may be better than what it was a few weeks ago, but it's still very, very real. In our public hospitals, we're still around double the capacity in the ICU’s that we were a few months ago. There are still every single day people coming in in desperate shape who need the help of our healthcare heroes. There are people who have been in the ICU a long time, still fighting for their lives. So, remember that as we start to feel a little better, we have to have a lot of empathy, a lot of feeling for the doctors and nurses, the frontline healthcare workers who continue that battle, every day go toward that danger. We've all heard the heroic story of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, but there are many, many others like it. And each day, remember these professionals go into a situation, still fighting an enemy that is not fully understood by the medical community. Still understanding that danger awaits them when they go through those doors and yet they show up every single day. We all want to go as far away from wherever COVID-19 might be. These healthcare heroes go right toward it.

So, we need to keep supporting them. And remember this was a war. The body armor for the health workers is those PPE’s, that personal protective equipment that we've talked about so much. That remains such a crucial piece of the picture. And remember for a long time, this has been a week to week, day to day struggle for weeks and weeks to make sure there was enough where we needed them, and so many people have been working so hard to always make sure that our hospitals, our nursing homes had what they needed. I have to tell you it's been very tough and sometimes it got very close to the point where we looked like we were going to run out, became kind of a game of whack-a-mole, trying to get supplies one place and then you hear another place needs him and now you're shifting over there. It was nonstop. We've seen some things move in the right direction. The ventilator situation that looked like the single worst part of the equation at one point, that got a lot better, but just as that was getting better, we had a crisis with the surgical gowns. Another crucial part of protecting our heroes.

So, how did we get to a point now where we're starting to have a little bit of breathing room? A lot of it was good old-fashioned New York City ingenuity. It was those folks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other places who built face shields, like the one you're seeing there. That was literally put together by hand in the Brooklyn Navy Yard by New Yorkers who wanted to help our healthcare heroes. That made a huge difference. The folks who came together, you met them a few weeks back who put together the ventilators from scratch, an amazing effort. The surgical gowns that had been both created here in New York City never were produced here, now they are, and sourced from places as far away as Vietnam using relationships that New York City companies had. There's been a lot of good stories here of New York City ingenuity of New Yorkers coming together, but we cannot rest on those laurels, because we know we got to keep protecting our heroes, and we know we're far from done with this disease right now and we also know that this disease later on could have a second wave, and we're not going to be caught looking. We're going to be ready for it.

So, here's where we stand today. For the first time since March, we actually start a week with enough of all of the PPEs we need on that crisis standard, and I'm always going to emphasize that, that basic standard. Not what we'd like to have ideally, but what is workable and usable for a situation like this. We have a little breathing room. We can finally ensure for the whole week ahead that every hospital, every nursing home will get what they need. And that means the N95 mask, the surgical mask, the gloves, the face shields, the surgical gowns, the whole set. It's striking the largest city in the country, the greatest country in the world. And yet this is the first week in a couple of months that we've been able to say we have a solid week ahead of everything. And it's sobering to remember just what a ferocious enemy we're up against, and just how much we did not understand, any of us, that the supplies we depended on, the equipment we depended on was so many cases, not only not made in New York City, not made in the United States of America. This has been a real sobering lesson, and one that we have learned from, and we're going to handle things differently going forward.

So, within this struggle, over these last weeks, what has become clearer and clearer as it's been tough enough for all the arrows and the hospitals? They've been fighting such a tough battle, but we've come to realize that there are also heroes in our nursing homes. The folks who work there don't get as much attention. They need support too. We've come to see very, very painful things happening in our nursing homes and we all need to work together to make that situation better now, and for the future. So, when I think about a nursing home, I think about the people, the parents, the grandparents, the people who those facilities are there to protect. Now again, many of them are private facilities, and I think there's real questions about if they've all done as best they could do, but that's not the question for today. The question for today is how do we stabilize the situation? How do we help right now? How do we build a stronger future for protecting our elders? Over the last weeks, we've sent 10 million pieces of personal protective equipment to the nursing homes to protect the folks that work there, and the folks who live there. This week we are sending to nursing homes across the five boroughs. 1.9 million surgical masks, 170,000 face shields, 760,000 gloves, 173,000 surgical gowns, 15,000 coveralls and aprons, and 10,000 shoe coverings. So, we're going to keep surging those PPE’s into the nursing homes, continue making them stronger so they can protect the precious individuals who are living there and who mean so much to so many families in this city. That's a commitment we're going to keep.

As I said, we've learned a lot of powerful lessons about all of this and the notion that I can tell you we have a whole week supply ahead, and that's big news, that's good news, but it's certainly not the way we can live going forward. We have to do something much better. I never want to see New York City in this situation again. I want New York City to protect itself going forward, because we've come to realize we couldn't rely on the private market, we couldn't rely on the federal government. We need to protect ourselves. There's no place like New York City, and New York City has tremendous ability and capacity, and the most talented people in the world. Going forward, we're going to make sure that we're ready no matter what else is happening around us. So, I told you a few days back about the fact that we're starting a New York City strategic reserve, and this is something that's going to grow, and it's not only going to be about stockpiling, it's going to be about ensuring we have the capacity to build things right here. And whatever we deal with in the future, we're not waiting on factories in another part of the country or another part of the world to the maximum extent possible. We have the plans and the ability right here to build what we need.

So, job-one, of course, is to make sure we can address the immediate needs. So, when we got to the point of having a two-week supply of PPE’s for the immediate needs of our hospitals and nursing homes, we are then going to start the process of building up our reserve. We want to have a 90-day stockpile of PPE’s and crucial equipment. We want to have that ready and in reserve for whatever happens up ahead. Look, I talked yesterday about the boomerang. We want to fight against that boomerang, but that reserve is there, God forbid we ever saw a resurgence of the disease. There's also more and more talk about a second wave of the disease later in the year at the beginning of next year. We want to be ready for that, so we're going to have our own reserves that we control ready at all times to protect our people. Now the strategy will be one that could simply be summarized as buying and building. We'll buy the supplies from all over the country, all over the world whenever they're available, but we'll increasingly have the ability to build them right here in New York City. We will not be dependent on one source, because we have to protect our people. That means we need more than one place to turn to make sure there's always the supplies and equipment we need. Now, the strategy will be one that could simply be summarized as buying and building. We'll buy the supplies from all over the country, all over the world whenever they're available, but we'll increasingly have the ability to build them right here in New York City. We will not be dependent on one source because we have to protect our people, that means we need more than one place to turn to make sure there's always the supplies and equipment we need.

Now, an important piece of this larger puzzle, how we protect each other, how we fight back this disease is something that is a more recent part of the strategy, but I think it's been very, very successful overall, and that is face coverings. You know, weeks ago I said we want New Yorkers to now start using face coverings in public, I have to say thank you to the people in this City. Overwhelmingly, even though it wasn't something you were used to doing, overwhelmingly New Yorkers have taken to using face coverings when you go outside it takes some getting used to as we've emphasized, you don't need a fancy surgical mask, you don't need an N95, you just need something to cover your face. And New Yorkers have been creative and resourceful as always, and the vast majority of people are complying, and we want to see a lot more compliance going forward.

So, remember that protecting each other reduces the spread of the disease gets us one step closer to normal. I know putting on a face covering is not necessarily fun, I know as the weather gets warmer, it may feel inconvenient. Sometimes you don't remember it, but think about this to motivate you, when you put on that face covering, you are reducing the spread of this disease and taking one small step towards normalcy. So, it may not always feel fun, but it's going to feel really good when we get out of this. When we can put this crisis behind us, everyone can contribute, just put on that face covering, yes, don't hesitate to put it on, bring it with you, bring some extras with you so you always have one. Now, we know that sometimes people just forget, or they don't have one or they don't have a way to get one, so the City is going to step in. This weekend is the last couple of days we started huge distribution of free face coverings in parts and other locations around the City, great response, people were really grateful to get them, we're going to now build that up to a much higher level. So, we are now going to ramp up a plan and it will take effect starting immediately to distribute 7.5 million face coverings, meaning wherever you turn you're going to be offered in face covering and it's going to be on an ongoing basis for weeks to come to make sure that everyone has what they need. These of course will be distributed for free, as we work together to beat back this disease. 5 million in this, so there's a couple of kinds, I'll hold up this kind first. 5 million are the three-ply nonmedical masks. So again, I want to, when you look at one of these, and I did not really fully understand it first, these are the ones that have the wire at the top that you can kind of shape around your nose. These are the three-ply non-medical masks, these are not the same as what our health care heroes use, but they really do help. They really do reduce the spread of the disease if anyone happens to be infected it helps make sure that others are not, 5 million of these will be given out. Now, these are reusable so long as they stay dry. And I think there's been a lot of questions – I think some people, again we unfortunately live in a little bit of a throwaway culture here in our country, something we need to start getting away from. People might think, oh, you use it once you throw it away. No, you can keep using it so long as it stays dry, if it's dry the integrity of it holds and it performs the protective function. If it gets wet it might be compromised, but so long as it's dry you can use it, certainly a number of times. The other thing we're going to give out is 2.5 million of the— cloth face covering, so cloth face coverings that are reusable, that are washable, you can use them as long as they hold together. We'll be getting a lot of those as well. Now where will we be giving them out? A lot of places in New York City, a whole different, whole different set of places I mentioned our parks, of course, that will be one focal point. In addition, at public housing developments, at the grab and go food sites being run out of schools, at Mitchell Lama affordable housing buildings, at the Staten Island ferry. Any place that the NYPD and the Parks Department and other agencies are going to enforce social distancing, they'll also be carrying a supply of free face coverings. So, it's going to become more and more given to see it expand this week we're in now. And I think it's going to make things easier and easier for New Yorkers who want to follow these rules and want to keep people safe and that is clearly the vast majority of the people of this City.

Now, let's talk about what we continue to do as we work back towards normalcy. What we continue to do to keep making things happen for our kids. You know, I've said before, our kids have gone through a lot in this crisis. I think in some ways it's been particularly tough for them compared to everyone else, we all feel stir-crazy – I think they feel that many times over. But what has been a real ray of light here is that the remote learning, the online learning that was entirely experimental, trying to build something out for 1.1 million kids in a matter of days. It's really been a good news story, and everyone deserves credit, our educators, our parents, our kids, all the folks who came together from the DOE, the companies, everyone who put this together, they're doing something amazing and it's working. But one of the things that was clear from the very beginning we were honest about is, look, there's a digital divide is something we have to fight against and it's alive and well that means some people have technology and other people don't. Well, in the middle of this crisis, something good happened despite the pain, despite the challenges, and that was something really important for closing that digital divide. Every single public-school student who requested an iPad, got one. I just want you to think about the magnitude of that statement, in a City where for a long time the haves and the have nots have played out in terms of technology and huge numbers of kids just didn't have access to the technology that so many other New Yorkers considered to be absolutely basic to their lives. Every child who asked for an iPad got an iPad for free, that is now total up to 255,000 iPads that have been distributed in a matter of weeks. Extraordinary effort, everyone involved should be very proud of themselves and any public-school child who still doesn't have that iPad, it's totally available on request delivered to the door of the family. But for any reason there's still a child who hasn't gotten one, they can call 3-1-1, the family can call 3-1-1 and get one right away. But the good news is we now want to go further and there's a special group of New York City children we want to help and these are students with disabilities in our non-public schools. We want to make sure since we have some additional iPads available, we want to help them to learn to the maximum during this tough time, take full advantage of online learning. So, we are offering iPads for free to these students as well. Now I've often said kids with disabilities struggle, and they fight so hard and we have to have their back. We have to respect how tough it is for our students and their families dealing with this additional challenge and now a pandemic on top of it, we have to be there for them. So, we will provide a free iPad for any students who have disabilities and are in our non-public schools. We believe that's a university of about 35,000 students and that means students in religious schools, independent schools, any non-public schools, any student needs an iPad and goes to one of those schools and has disability can call 3-1-1, their family can call 3-1-1 or go to schools.nyc.gov, sign up, iPad will be sent to your home for free.

Okay. Now we're going to go to what we look forward to every day, which is our progress report, our daily indicators. And I want to give you an update that we have structured these indicators we say there's three categories, but the third category has always had two pieces. And there was a reason for that originally there was a citywide and the public health lab numbers. And the reason originally was the public health lab was really the leading edge of so much of what was being done in the way of testing in the beginning of this crisis. Remember, January, February, pleading with the federal government just to let us do tests in New York City to begin with and how long it took. And, in the beginning, that were very, very few tests being taken, public health lab leading the way and they did a great job. We needed, especially when hospitals didn't have a lot of testing capacity up and private companies were just coming into play. Now we have a much better situation when it comes to testing, many, many hospitals have access to their own testing. The public health lab is actually down to a very, very small fraction of citywide testing at this point. So, knowing that the public health labs sample has gotten smaller and smaller all the time, and knowing therefore that makes the results more volatile. We're now going to take that public health lab measure out of our indicators, it served us well to now, but we don't think it is necessary anymore. We're going to use that citywide testing number as the sole measure in the third indicator, especially as more and more testing is coming online, we're getting a truer and truer sense of what's happening, and that number certainly will suffice. So, I am very pleased to say we have three indicators now and all three are down today. So, congratulations New York City, this is the kind of day we have been waiting for and it is a beautiful thing and let's put together some more like it and that's our pathway to something better. Daily number of people indicator one daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that is down from 113 to 88. Daily number of people in ICU across our public hospitals for suspected COVID down 645 to 632. Percent of people tested who are positive for COVID-19 citywide down from 20 percent to 17 percent an excellent day. All three down, all moving in the same direction. Let's do it again. Thank you. Well done, New York City.

So, as I close, I want to do a small thought process of empathy, because I think the vast majority of people in the City, you either know a doctor, a nurse, a lab tech, someone, a health care worker, someone who works in a hospital, someone who works in a nursing home. Think of the people in your life, think of your friends, think of your family. Most New Yorkers know someone who works in our extraordinary health care field in this city. Just take a short time to put yourself literally in their shoes, walking through the door of that hospital, that clinic, that nursing home, and as you do that, if you try and empathize, if you try and feel what they're feeling, I don't think you're going to say, oh, I don't feel any fear at all, I don't recognize any danger. I think you would immediately say, no, in fact, you do feel fear. You do feel the danger present, but what's so striking, what's so amazing is not that people somehow make themselves blind to the fear, but that they stare it in the face and they walk through the door anyway; it's absolutely inspiring. It's happening every hour of every day here in this city. Why do people do this? Because they believe in saving lives; they believe they are answering a higher calling than they are. So, lets us answer a higher calling and get them what they need. Get them those PPEs, make sure they are protected and then let's protect them with what we can do by sheltering in place to the maximum extent possible, by going and making sure that we always practice social distancing, by putting on those face coverings; all of that is part of protecting our health care heroes and protecting each other and it works and today's indicators prove it. So, we are clearly winning this fight. Let's keep winning and let's protect the heroes who we depend on so much.

Few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all, just a reminder, we have Police Commissioner Shea, Health Commissioner Barbot, Social Services Commissioner Banks, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma on the phone. With that, I will start with Ashley from the New York Times.

Question: Good morning to everyone present. I want to ask two questions. First, I would like it if the Police Commissioner can give an update on the investigation of the event on the Lower East Side including the status of the other officers involved in that incident. Whether he plans to release the demographic data requested by the Public Advocate on social distancing enforcement and what appear to be discrepancies between the NYPD account and the videos? For instance, the NYPD account is that these officers stopped these group of individuals for social distancing, but in the video you see just two people standing outside of bodega or a corner store and discrepancies persist from there. And then for the Mayor and both the Police Commissioner you know, the city has spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars on de-escalation, neighborhood policing and such and we still see incidents like this or officers often times and in this case with histories of this conduct allegation involved in incidents where they have appeared to use more force than what is necessary and escalate confrontations. I'm wondering if the Mayor, if you could address whether you're giving any second thought to having the police as the frontline in enforcing social distancing and if there will be any changes going forward?

Mayor: Ashley, I do appreciate the question very much because I think it gets to the heart of what we have all been working on for over six years now in terms of changing the nature of policing in New York City. Remember the entire police force has been retrained constantly in de-escalation and in neighborhood policing – very, very different approaches than what existed in the past. I'm very confident that these approaches are taking hold more and more in the NYPD. The video was very troubling; what I saw was absolutely unacceptable and obviously discipline was swift by the NYPD, but I want to note that, that video is more and more of a rarity. What you saw there is more and more of a rarity. We still have work to do, unquestionably, but the progress is very clear to see; policing is changing and the city has been changing. The leadership of the NYPD over three commissioners now has emphasized much more training focused on de-escalation, focused on close connection to the people the NYPD serves and a neighborhood policing philosophy. And more and more members of the NYPD are coming into service with this being the entire message and lesson and strategy they learned from the very beginning and I think we're seeing the results of that very positively. That doesn't mean there aren't incidents like this that we don't have to fight against all the time and if any individuals don't understand and are not willing to work with those strategies, the NYPD has the capacity to identify them and deal with them because we're not going to have that kind of behavior in our police force. On the other point about the, the nature of social distancing enforcement, again, this one incident is troubling, but there's been thousands and tens of thousands of interactions between police officers and civilians over the last weeks that went very well where the NYPD went and made sure that people were practicing social distancing when enforcement was necessary. They exercised enforcement in communities all over the city. By and large, we've seen New Yorkers really abiding by social distancing and the rules we're living with; the NYPD has been crucial to that, they will remain crucial to that. So I've said we're bringing other agencies in to augment this effort. More and more civilians will be brought in to augment this effort as well - more and more free face coverings. But you can't do effective enforcement without the NYPD and the NYPD is more than up to the job. Commissioner?

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: So, I would say a lot of the same. I mean, I spoke yesterday about the end of that video and I was not happy with what I saw. I think we can be better than that, quite frankly. But I think you need to look at it in the context of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of encounters across the city; whether it's through routine encounters, arrests, taking guns off people without firing shots, certainly summonsing many people. I think the de-escalation training that was put in place in years past and continues is just yet another tool in the toolbox and I think it's effective. I wish it was 100% effective, but that's not unfortunately the world that we live in. But we'll learn from it as we do from any example, continue to train and try to get better. I would, I would also remind you that de-escalation takes two, unfortunately. There's two people involved in every encounter and what we've seen in the past is, is when people do not comply with the police in the first take down now I'm talking about, sometimes those things are not pretty when they're seen on video. And again, that's something also that we train to, we train to avoid it, [inaudible] we train to take people into custody seeking compliance at all times, but, ultimately, we don't always receive that compliance.

Just very briefly, to tell you what we know about the entire incident. We have three individuals taken into custody, still ongoing. We've recovered several pieces of video beyond the first piece. So, what we can tell you now is that the incident begins with an individual that's sitting on a milk crate in front of the location. He's engaged in conversation with a female. Those two individuals subsequently arrested as well as the third person that the video on the corner takes place. In totality of this incident what was recovered was a taser that does not belong to the NYPD, a small amount of marijuana, and roughly close to $3,000 in US currency. So exactly what was going on there is still somewhat under investigation, Ashley. But I don't think this takes away from what I said the other day. The end of the video, I think we’ve got to be better and that's what was most troubling to me.

Mayor: Yeah. And to the point, Ashley, about data – want to make sure that whatever data we do have on enforcement, we get out. Obviously, enforcement takes many forms. We've talked about this for a long time. If it involves a substantial gathering, we are going to, I've been very, very clear, the Commissioner has been clear - that's straight to summons unless people are gone instantly and anyone who lingers is getting a summons. That's easy to get data on. Other cases of course just the appearance of the NYPD causes people to correct their behavior. So you know, where we have an action that is trackable we will get that data out. I want people to see just how clearly enforcement is being practiced all over the city, every kind of neighborhood. But the good news again is in many cases we don't ever get to the point of summons, because the behavior is corrected instantly and that's exactly what we want.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. I wanted to ask, Mayor, it was on my mind this weekend with the beautiful weather. I wanted to see if there was an update on the city summer plan. I know it seems that the 4th of July fireworks are all set, but what's the plan for making sure that beaches are guarded, maybe working out a plan to monitor social distancing there? I, you know, it was just on my mind because the weather was so nice and the parks were so packed. So, what's the status on that?

Mayor: We're going to be issuing a plan. The – again, traditionally, beaches don't open until Memorial Day. As everyone knows, they will not be opening on Memorial Day and will not be opening anytime soon, but we're going to certainly keep the option open, depending on how well we do for options later on in the year. But as I've said many times, we're going to be publishing a summer plan soon. And we're going to give people a clear sense of how we're going to keep everyone safe, even if we're doing things differently. Beaches that are not open still require enforcement, clearly. So, those parameters will be put out and then we'll watch to see how things evolve to see if we can do something different as we go along as things get better. The 4th of July, I keep saying, the specifics to be determined as we get more information, working closely with Macy's, obviously, the NYPD. The one thing I will guarantee is there will be a celebration of the 4th of July and fireworks will play a role, but how and where and in what fashion, what it means for people's ability to watch it, what the conditions will be, that's still far in the future – literally, it being May 4th, you know, two months ahead. So, that we're going to have a lot more to say when we get much closer.

Moderator: Next we have a Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask a few questions about homelessness on the subways in light of two apparently homeless men dying on the subways over the weekend. For one, is the City going to do wide-scale medical examinations of homeless people found on the subways? Another thing, can you say how many hotel rooms have been secured for the homeless and how many of those would be accessible to people found on the subways? Just one or two more things would be, if the Bowery residents committee is involved directing homeless people to hotel rooms. And, just in general, what is the overall strategy for preventing more deaths of homeless people on the subways and a potential real tragedy?

Mayor: Thank you, Shant. Look, it's horrible. It's horrible when we lose people whose life – you know, their lives – something went wrong in their lives at some point and they ended up homeless on the streets. And this is what we have talked about over these last months, that this is not a reality we should accept any longer in our city. And, in fact, the specific plan we put out in December, the Journey Home Plan is literally the pathway to ending permanent street homelessness in New York City, and particularly bringing in those folks who have been out there for years. It's an unacceptable reality. It has been this way in this city for decades. We finally believe we have the tools to stop it, to end it once and for all because of the HOME-STAT strategy that's been working, and Commissioner Banks can tell you the exact number as of today of folks who have been brought in over the last three years from the streets, from the subways into Safe Havens, into permanent housing, have stayed there. We have a strategy that’s working. We're going to apply that strategy more and more intensely. It's even been working through the pandemic and I know it will work more and more as we come out of the pandemic. So, that's where we have to go, because this is about human beings whose lives came unglued. We have to find a way to, you know, everybody – something brought them to the street, we have to help them back from the street and to a better life, and we can. In terms of – I’ll turn to the Commissioner, but I'll say that the basics are we will always have a hotel room available for anyone who needs it who's in the shelter system. We will always have a bed available for anyone who's coming out of the subway, has been living on the street, who needs a Safe Haven bed or shelter bed. We will always have one available. We're building out that capacity further. We do already send out teams to check on homeless folks that can do and often do include a doctor or a nurse. Whenever needed, they're available. NYPD and homeless services can call in medical support very, very rapidly. And we want to see more and more of that, going forward. But the real goal here is not to live with the reality of homeless on the streets and subways, but do something about it. I think the vision that was I think a very positive one that I worked on with the Governor and his team to ensure that the subways in this crisis would be closed in the early morning hours and cleaned and it'll give us a better chance to engage homeless folks and get them to shelter, I think that's going to be another important piece of the strategy. Commissioner Banks?

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: Thank you. I would just add a few pieces of information, Shant. So, overall, as the Mayor I committed to, we're continuing to move people out of shelters into hotel rooms. Right now, about 7,000 of the 17,000 people in our single-adult shelter system are in hotel rooms. And we've set a goal to continue to move out people each week until we can have widescale testing in place. And we're going to continue to do that this week and into the future. With respect to bringing people in from the streets, we've recently brought on – beginning to bring on 200 Safe Haven stabilization beds, and we'll bring on more to be able to bring people in. It's just a tragedy when we lose people and these two individuals were people that we've been trying to bring in from the streets. It's a difficult process, it can take, you know, dozens if not more encounters to bring somebody in. The BRC is one of the key partners that's been in place for a number of years to bring people in from the streets and they're part of the effort, along with other street providers, [inaudible] subway provider, they've been able to about 2,500 people to come in from the streets and remain off the streets. We do know about these two individuals who passed away, that they were obviously part of people that we've been trying to bring in. And since the beginning of this – the beginning of March, we've had 20,000 encounters with homeless people, attempting to identify whether or not they have any signs of symptoms of COVID. In that process, 12 people were identified with potential symptoms. They were each brought to the hospital and they tested negative. Of these two individuals, we do know that one of them has tested negative and we're waiting on the results from the other. So, we're going to keep doing what we've been doing every night, which is trying to bring people into available beds that we have, making sure that they have services, not just putting them in rooms without appropriate supportive services where we can help people get on the road to remaining off the streets.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Borough President Oddo and Congressman Max Rose called you last week to send military medical personnel to Staten Island’s private hospitals, saying it's inexplicable that Staten Island has not received any. What's your response to their letter? Are you ever going to send any military medical personnel to Staten Island? And what's been holding you back from sending, say, even just a handful or a dozen of them to Staten Island. And if you could elaborate a bit on protocol, who makes the call when it comes to where to send military medical staff? Is that you? Is that the State? Is it a mix of both?

Mayor: Sydney, again, I want to be very clear, the military medical personnel have been absolutely outstanding from the Army, from the Air Force, from the Navy. This all emerged from conversations I had with President Trump and Secretary Esper and General Milley about the need to address the situation in Elmhurst Hospital, Lincoln Hospital, Bellevue, the places that we're seeing an absolutely overwhelming number of cases and where the teams there had been through a particular challenge. We have 56 hospitals that have been in this fight all over the city. Our public hospital system bore the brunt and we got a number of military medical personnel, nowhere near the number that we asked for, but still a healthy number, and they have been devoted to those public hospitals and doing important work. But in the meantime, we have been sending additional doctors and nurses from different sources that we have gotten to hospitals all over the city – not just public hospitals, but independent hospitals as well, including in the case of Staten Island, RUMC. We will continue to send additional staff as needed. So, the military medical personnel, one piece of the puzzle, but in terms of additional staffing – I've been in touch with the borough president, I’ve been in touch with the CEO of RUMC. When they have asked for additional PPEs, we've gotten them to them. When they've asked for additional personnel, we've been working to get them. We'd gotten them some, we'll keep getting them more. We're going to keep working case by case all over the city, but that military piece was a discreet piece of a much bigger effort and those individuals have been outstanding and they've been focused on some of the hospitals that have really borne the brunt in this crisis.

Moderator: Next we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I’m wondering if you think that essential City workers who died from coronavirus should be classified as line-of-duty deaths? I know you said the federal government should step up for their families, but, in the meantime, do you have any plans to extent any benefits to them, such as continuing their health insurance? I would love to hear Commissioner Shea’s opinion on this question as well.

Mayor: Look, we obviously care deeply for the families of our public servants and we feel for any family that’s lost someone. We want to figure out how we can be supportive as they’re going through all of this. We’re working now to determine first what the federal government can and will do. Obviously, the City is in a very, very tough spot right now in terms of everything we’re going though humanly and the fact our resources have been drained down in a way we’ve never seen in decades. And we need to make sure we help people, we also need to make sure we can keep providing everything that people need in this city. So, I think job-one is the get that federal support. Job-one is to make sure that our heroes and their families are supported by the place that has ample resources, the only place that has ample resources, which is the federal government. But we will keep working as well to figure out all the ways that we can support those families. We’ll have more to say on that in the coming days.

Commissioner Shea, do you want to add?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, there’s not too much to add to this, Mr. Mayor. It’s certainly a complicated issue. I could tell you that from the Police Department side, we’ve lost 38 members, six of them are auxiliary, six of them are uniformed, and the remainder are civilians, each with different benefits, some with none quite frankly – some are unpaid employees. And what was said from the beginning with this is we’re going to try to weather the storm. The good news is that people have been coming back, we’re getting closer to normal strength, and when this is all over we’ll sort out this extremely complicated issue, working with the unions, working with labor people to make sure we can do everything to support our people.

Moderator: Next we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. First, I just want to get some clarity on why the City is eliminating the public lab indicator from its data? I'm not sure I really followed the difference between the public health lab and the other category. And I wanted to ask if you – why you're distributing – why you made the decision to distribute PPEs to nursing homes this week and why that wasn't done earlier. And that's it, that's what I got.

Mayor: Okay. Well, again – so, the public health lab, right now, it's less than one percent – I think it's 0.1 percent of the testing that's being done all over the city. So, you know, 99 percent-plus of tests are now being done in other types of labs than the Health Department’s public health lab. So, the numbers have just changed markedly. Originally, we were talking about a situation where it was one of the only places that was testing. I mean, it's really amazing, Gloria, to think about – go back in time two months when there was very little testing and the public health lab is one of the only things we had, and for that we had to beg the federal government to allow us even to do that. The public health lab test loomed very large as a percentage of what we knew. Now, it's an exceedingly small percentage and it's more volatile because it is such a small percentage, it is such a small sample size. So, we came to the conclusion that the much more pertinent measure was the citywide testing and that it was safe – we obviously have a very cautious approach here – it was safe to use that measure alone. And that's why we made the decision. On the nursing homes, again, I'm going to quote what I said back earlier in my presentation. I went over what we have – what we're sending out this week. But the distribution to the nursing homes began in March, and it increased. And again, we have been working with the State as more and more concerns emerged, we stepped in and provided more and more PPEs directly to nursing homes. So, it's been 10 million pieces so far. And what I gave today was simply an update on what we're doing, going forward. But this has been an aggressive effort since March, and we're going to keep building it as needed.

Moderator: Next we have Steve from Westwood One News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning, everybody, on the call. I have a question for the Health Commissioner. I'm wondering – actually two questions. Where do we stand as far as the mortality rate goes for our critically ill patients in hospitals? Our doctors, have they gained a better understanding of best practices for treating critically ill patients today compared to six weeks ago? Has that mortality rate in ICUs, has it gone down? And then, also, doctor, concerning some of the new medical treatments, like Remdesivir, are public hospitals involved in the expanded use of these experimental drugs? And, if not, why? And then, also I've done a couple of interviews with people who had coronavirus who have some very serious underlying issues and are on immunosuppressant drugs. And this is completely anecdotal, but they all recovered. And considering that a lot of what these critically ill patients are suffering as a result of their immune systems’ reactions to the virus, has there been any study or look at immunosuppressant drugs and the role they play, or possible role they could play in the treatment of critically ill patients? Thank you.

Mayor: So, Dr. Barbot, you start, and, Dr. Varma, if you want to add after that, feel free. Dr Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: Terrific. So, we, as we've been saying all along, have been learning every day about how this virus behaves, both from a public health point of view as well as from a clinical point of view. And initially, there was very little that could be offered with regards to treatments for individuals diagnosed with COVID-19. And, as a reminder, we still don't have definitive treatment for COVID-19 and, obviously, we still don't have a vaccine. That being said, there were several drugs – there have been several drugs that have been utilized to treat COVID-19 on an experimental basis. We have gone through things like hydroxychloroquine, et cetera. Now, this new drug, Remdesivir, has been demonstrated to shorten the amount of time that individuals need ongoing support, [inaudible] support. And so, I think with time and with more studies we will be able to better ascertain how effective this medication is for COVID-19.
Our public hospital system has very much been at the forefront of leveraging medications that have a potential impact on improving individual's health. They are, for example, looking at potential use of antibodies for treating individuals who are severely ill with COVID-19. So, the long and the short of it is that we have a very robust public health care delivery system with H + H being a leader, and they most certainly are leveraging all of the potential therapeutics that are made available in ways that look to minimize the number of people that are on ventilatory support for extended periods of time. That being said, I think we'll have to get back to you on mortality rates of individuals that have been in the intensive care unit. Dr. Varma, you want to add at all?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Sure, yeah. I would just try to emphasize that there's absolutely a lot that we're still learning about the role of the immune system in this disease but we also have to be cautious and make sure that different treatments that modify the immune system are, are studied rigorously. We know from the experience in intensive care for a whole range of similar types of diseases like influenza that there's always been a lot of promise to drugs that might modify the immune system, but when they're actually studied rigorously where you compare one group that gets the drug versus another group that doesn't you actually end up finding that you don't have that impact. So, I think we're are going to continue to learn a lot. And one of the real great advances here has been the role of, of our public hospital system in, in piloting this research, as well as collaborations that are occurring all over the world. So I do think the questions that you're raising about the role of the immune system, both in people who are taking these medications before they get the infection and in treating people who then get it – we're going to get answers very soon, but it's most important to keep in mind that they should really be done in the context of research because there's a lot of fog in the middle of a war. And we really need that clarity for everybody that that's already been infected and everybody that may get infected.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have two questions. The first one has to do with the role of social distancing and the reopening of small businesses. I wonder, first of all, if you feel that you're satisfied with the level of compliance you're getting from New Yorkers in terms of social distancing, wearing masks, et cetera, and then if when you reach that point where you are satisfied, will you be able to then let small businesses open with the correct social distancing, keeping people six feet away, wearing masks, wearing gloves, et cetera, because a lot of small businesses are really hurting and I wonder if the social distancing part of it would enable you to, to open these small businesses sooner rather than later so that they don't face economic ruin. And my second question is for you and for the Police Commissioner. I wonder if you can tell us about the attempted rape on that out of town nurse, if she's still working on the front lines and living in New York City while the suspect is on the loose?

Mayor: Thank you, Marcia. I'll have the Commissioner speak to the second question and we're obviously very pained any time anyone is attacked, particularly someone who is doing such noble work for all of us and we will certainly bring the individual involved – the perpetrator to justice. There's no question and we'll support that nurse in every way we can. But I'll have the Commissioner give you that update.

On the question of small business. So, you're questioning a couple of different pieces. I'll put them all together. Am I satisfied by what I'm seeing? I am very impressed by what New Yorkers are doing, Marcia, in terms of staying at home to the maximum extent possible, practicing social distancing, wearing face coverings – people deserve high marks overall. There are some people not getting it and those people need to get it because they're putting everyone else in danger. There are some instances where the rules are not being followed, that requires enforcement. There's more to be done. But if I look at where we are over the course of two months in a great unknown, in the middle of a pandemic, no one could have predicted how have New Yorkers done. They've done very, very well. In terms of what that means for reopening small businesses, well, that's a foundational start to reopening small businesses. If that wasn't true, Marcia, if New Yorkers were not doing such an exceptional job at the social distancing and all the other pieces that we need we wouldn't be able to talk about reopening small business.

So, job-one is going pretty well. The indicators that we're putting out, we've been making real progress. We haven't still turned the corner the way we need to where we see those indicators go steadily, consistently down. We still have too many new cases. Too many people we're losing each day. We're not out of the woods, but we are getting closer for sure when it comes to how social distancing will help in the restart a small business unquestionably, it will be a necessary piece of it for small businesses that will have a tougher time practicing social distance. Those are the kind that will probably open later or with even more stringent rules for those, that can practice social distancing more easily. Those might be the ones that open sooner. We have not put those final plans together. We'll be speaking about that soon, but I do see some good indicators from other parts of the world. We certainly see in Europe that there's been a very smart effort to open kinds of small business that have the greater ability to practice social distancing. Those tend to be the first wave. I think that's the kind of thing we'll be looking to do here, but details to come shortly. Commissioner Shea.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. So on this you can plug right into a NYPD Tips, the NYPD 3-0 Precinct Twitter page, my Twitter page, there’s a very good video of an individual that we're looking to identify from this incident. I can tell you that the incident occurred about 9:00 PM on Friday up in Upper Manhattan. I won't get into too specific about the victim in this case, but she was a nurse that was working, helping others on the pandemic and I have no doubt that somebody knows who this individual is. If you do, please reach out to our Crimestoppers and let's get this person off the street as quickly as possible. Thankfully the individual was fought off and fled. We have again, some good pictures, so I am sure that in short order he’ll be brought to justice.

Moderator: Next, we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning to everyone. Hope you're all doing well. A couple of quick follow-up questions to Shant's questions on the homeless individuals who died in the subway for the Mayor and Commissioner Banks. And then Mr. Mayor, just a separate question for you on the quarantine hotels. Commissioner Banks, you said that one of the individuals tested negative. I wondered if, you know how long ago that was because of course after the negative test he could have caught the virus? And then Mr. Mayor, I'm wondering what you can say about how these deaths within 12 hours of each other – what do they say about how the City is handling the homelessness crisis during the pandemic? And then Mr. Mayor on the quarantine hotels, any update on that City investigation into the men who died in the hotel and have hospitals resumed sending people to the hotel and others? I believe that was pending because of the investigation.

Mayor: Right. We'll get you an update today, Julia, on the investigation at the time, obviously we wanted to make sure it was a very – for us it was an interesting and painful reality. Interesting in the sense that we thought we were receiving people who were fully cured – painful because we lost people that didn't make sense why we were losing them. The fact is that those individuals came out of hospitals, we understood, having fought their way through – something went wrong. We'll get to the update today on that investigation. We need to make sure that everyone is protected. So we'll also you an update on what's going on with the hotels in terms of accepting patients. One of the things we said and are doing is to have medical oversight and all facilities checking regularly on people. Again, it's so strange and troubling that someone would have left the hospital being cleared to leave and then something else still happens. So we're going to constantly have medical oversight to make sure that never happens again.

On the question of what's been happening with our street homeless, again, different reality for people in shelters, but for the street homeless, there's been a constant effort to check in on them. Commissioner Banks can tell you about the number of contacts that the street outreach teams have made. I have to tell you, the street outreach workers never stopped. Even during this pandemic, they kept going out to try and protect the lives of homeless folks. It was an incredibly noble effort. It continues and in fact, we're able to get a number of homeless people off the streets even during this and get them into a safer location. But in general, we have seen surprisingly few instances of street homeless people appearing to have suffered from this disease. But I think it does put a point on the fact that the reality of homeless people living in subways or most of the time being in subways is just unacceptable. It's unacceptable on every level. It's inhumane. It's not right for the homeless individuals who should have a roof over their head, who should have regular access to medical care. It's not fair to straphangers. It never has been. This is why we're now on the offensive with the Journey Home initiative, which is continuing through this crisis and we'll deepen when it's over. This is why I think it's very good that we teamed up with the State and the MTA to do the closures late at night to disrupt that pattern that's been with us for decades because it's just not safe for anybody to be living on the street or living in the subways. And I want to see that end once and for all. In terms of the specifics around these individuals and the testing and anything else Commissioner Banks wants to add. Go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Banks: To answer your question, Julie, the information that I gave her about the test came from the Medical Examiner's Office. So it's, it's fresh information. Just to reiterate what the Mayor said, you know, before the pentatonic, during the pandemic our teams are out there 24 hours a day, literally bringing people in off the streets. You know, there's nobody who's more impatient than I am about trying to get people to help that they need the reason why, even in the middle of academic, we're beginning to bring on more Safe Haven beds more resources to be able to bring people in. And I think the ability to connect to more people on the subways during the shutdown period will get more pathways off the streets. We were able to bring, for example, last Monday night at the World Trade Center station, we were able to bring in almost 30 people and other 30 people got back on the train. And I saw that as a lost opportunity to try to engage people. And that's why I think the initiative that the Governor and the Mayor have will give us more chances to bring more people in from the streets, which is our goal 24/7 to be able to do that and to link them to the resources that we have to get a roof over their heads and get them the services and support that that they deserve and need.

Moderator: Next, we have Todd from AM New York.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have a question actually for Commissioner Shea and it pertains to gatherings in regards to freedom of expression, freedom of speech. of people who have protests. Yesterday there was a protest over by Mount Sinai on First Avenue and most, there was about a dozen protestors that were there and they were gathered. They're very spread out, very spread out. Most and the media was definitely more than six feet away from the speakers and the people. And yet a lot of the cops that came over to us and came over to us were initially threatening to give summonses and arrests even though we were far enough away. Do you have a policy as to how to approach these protests with maintaining freedom of speech, but at the same time maintaining the social distancing?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. Thank you for the question. It's – I think it's a powerful, and I think it's a great question. You know you’re talking about some of the values that we hold in the highest regard in this country and certainly this city, the right to people to gather and the right of free speech and the right of protest. But now and now comes the bad news. We're in a pandemic and there's been executive orders issued and these are not policies of the Police Department. These are now laws that have been passed down executive – through executive order to maintain people and keep people alive. So while we greatly, greatly respect the right of people to protest, there should not be protests taking place in the middle of a pandemic by gathering outside and putting people at risk. And that's the short answer.

Mayor: Yeah. And look, Todd, people who want to make their voices heard, there's plenty of ways to do it without gathering in person. And just the question is always whoever has whatever, because they want speak to, are they interested in protecting people's lives? If they are, use all the other tools you have to get your point across but avoid anything that might put other people in harm's way.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. My questions have to do with testing. I am curious as to how many people are being tested per day, how that compares with two or three weeks ago. And your data point on people who test positive, wouldn't it be completely unsurprising if the more people you test, the lower the percentage will be? So why would that be an indicator of progress? I mean, if you're testing 10,000 people and 50 people show up positive, that's one thing. But if you're testing 100 people and people and 50 people show up positive, that's another thing. So I'm curious as to, first of all, like, you know, what's the measure for what kind of progress is being made just in terms of quantity of testing and beyond that, you know, you mentioned the self-testing protocol. Is that moving forward or is it delayed by all kinds of logistical problems getting reagents and other supplies? That's basically the thrust of my question today.

Mayor: Okay, thank you Henry. Okay. First the factual question. So last few days we’re at approximately 13,000 tests per day that is definitely progress. You go back three weeks ago we were under 10,000 a day, so we are definitely starting to ramp up. You know, when you add 3000 more per day, you're adding, you know, over 20,000 more per week. So that's a big deal. But that number has to grow a whole lot more. Unquestionably. I would respectfully disagree on the universe question because you know, we have said now for quite a while and our Health Commissioner has said that you could expect easily more than half of New Yorkers to contract this disease. So I don't think at all it is a given that if you test more and more people, your numbers inevitably go down. With every given day there's more spread of the disease and we look, we're fighting it back now that is true. If you say, well, hey, you know, isn't shelter-in-place place social distancing aren't all these things bending the curve. Obviously, they are, but we still see a substantial number of new cases each day. So, I don't think it's right to say, well, if you do more and more testing, you're always inevitably going to get a more favorable result. We want the truth, whatever it is, and the more people we test, the clearer truth we get. If we're testing more and more people and the numbers keep going down, that means something objectively is happening and that's what we're seeing more and more. And that's a really, really good sign. So I think it means that these strategies are working, that we're going to stick to them, that we're only going to let up very carefully and in a very steady fashion to not allow that resurgence or that boomerang.

But no, I think more is more here, Henry. The more we test, the clearer picture we get and if we test more and more people and the numbers keep going down, that is absolutely meaningful information. And then on the self-swab, you know, that's now being used in our health and hospitals clinics, there is some lab capacity go with it, but we need more and more lab capacity to go with it. We need more and more lab capacity in general. So this is a moving target situation. We're working with the labs to get them all to be able to handle or as many as possible of them to handle the self-swab test because they're faster and they're easier. They're better for everyone involved. They're safer. We're making progress on that front. But the big question, you mentioned the reagents, the big question is we need a massive uptick in lab capacity overall, which can only be achieved with the help of the federal government and the ability of the federal government to get the reagents in from around the world. Maximize production here in this country. Maximize production of the machines that actually are used to analyze the tests. We're still seeing a federal government is somehow is at a lower speed than everyone else when it comes to maximizing lab capacity, even though this has been an urgent issue for two months.

So, it's another case of, I don't know why the Defense Production Act is not being used more fully by the President. We're going to be at this a long time, so if he went into full gear today, it would help us for sure in the weeks and months ahead. We still don't see that. It's absolutely, I just can't understand it for the life of me, but that said, we're going to keep working with the labs and I think in general the labs are trying their best to get us the maximum capacity.

Moderator: Next, we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning, everyone. Hope you're doing well.

Mayor: Yes, indeed. Andrew, how you doing?

Question: I'm hanging in there. My question is about field hospitals with the closure of Javits and now Central Park. What is the status of the Billy Jean King Center? When do you plan on closing that down? And could you not be using the people currently assigned to that facility right now to do some of contact tracing that you've said is so urgent?

Mayor: Yeah, I think when we were last at the Billy Jean King Center, in fact we said that the goal would be as it was needed less to convert it to an isolation facility and exactly as you say, to use the staffing there for other needs. We'll get you an update today, Andrew, on exactly what's going on. Remember, the Billy Jean King Center is attached to Elmhurst Hospital and Queens Hospital that have really borne the brunt here. So the last I heard they still had plenty to do on the site, but if that has changed and they can start making that transition to being an isolation site, that's great. If some of the medical personnel can be used differently, that's great. We would do that as quickly as we can. So you're definitely right that we've seen a good trend the last a week or so in terms of not needing some of those facilities. But unlike the field hospitals that were only usable for our hospitals, this one was when we projected from the beginning at the right time, would be converted to being yet another place for isolation as part of a test and trace strategy. So we fully expect to see that happening in the coming days.

Moderator: Next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi everyone, I wanted to follow up on Ashley's questions about the incident that resulted in the three arrests. First of all, is it confirmed that the encounter started as a social-distancing enforcement? And if so, I wanted to ask more generally speaking, is that the kind of enforcement that the city wants to see, A, should plain clothes officers be involved in that enforcement? And B, do you want enforcement of groups as small as, as two individuals?

Mayor: Yoav, I've all turned to Commissioner Shea, but I appreciate the question, but I also want to call out just the logic here. Look, the NYPD again, overwhelmingly for weeks and weeks and weeks has been focusing on enforcing in communities all over the city. In situations where we needed that presence to make sure that people were safe and obviously, overwhelmingly it's been working and we do not see instances like this. This is a rarity. But clearly there was more going on here as the Commissioner just said, than a typical social-distancing enforcement situation. Commissioner, why don't you go into the details again?

Commissioner Shea: Yep. So, and that's why I was providing some context earlier. When you look at other video cameras, what it shows is before the officers arrived, you see the – I'm talking about the initial encounter now, you see an individual sitting on a milk crate, you see somebody coming up to them, them in the short conversation, the female after a short conversation steps back and is waiting. Then you see a number of other people walking by, milling about. You see a number of people not wearing masks at that scene. And that is the scene that the offices in plain clothes, as you pointed out, initially walked up to investigate. To your question about should offices in plain clothes be participating in these activities. There is no hard and fast rule, but really what it comes down to is all members of the NYPD a very active and in both warning people, educating people, and when it comes to it summonsing and arresting people, which is again, very infrequently happening when you look at the totality of our interactions.

But absolutely, there is nothing that says that they should not be engaging in this. And I would just point out again, while all this social distancing is going on, crime is continuing, you know, those same offices throughout the city this weekend, engaging people participating in dice games where we recover firearms. 16 separate incidents just Saturday and Sunday, 16, where offices engaged individuals on the streets of New York City and recovered a firearm. So, you know, most of those incidents you don't hear about because the arrest is made without fanfare, without a use of force, thankfully, without any loss of life. But you know, this is just what's some of what we're seeing on the streets.

Moderator: Last two for today, next we have Jake from Gothamist.

Question: Hi there, Good morning. My first question is about the city's distribution of free masks. I think the number last week was 275,000, and I heard today it's 7.5 million. So I'm curious how that pumped up so dramatically. And then I have a question for Commissioner Shea as well. I think Ashley asked earlier about data on social distancing enforcement. We've asked NYPD as well for this multiple times. Does the NYPD have that data and would you guys commit to releasing it?

Mayor: So, Jake, I'll start and certainly as I turn to Commissioner Shea, I'll say, look, whatever data is kept on enforcement and demographics and locations in terms of neighborhood by neighborhood, we want to get out there. But I remind you again, a lot of what happens, it doesn't reach the level of something that would be formally tracked like a summons. So, the Commissioner will talk about that in a moment. The face coverings, yeah we put out a huge amount this weekend, couple of different initiatives that between them add up to several hundred thousand that we started this weekend. We have been wanting to build a sustainable approach to distributing face coverings for free to New Yorkers. In the last few days that's come together. So we're going to be distributing 7.5 million face coverings in the weeks ahead and just, we want to keep with it. We want it to be ubiquitous. There are parts of the city that were not in the initial wave this weekend. We're going to be expanding to many, many more locations as I indicated on that list. So any part of the city that's so far didn't get a lot of distribution, this weekend will see the distribution increased markedly this coming weekend and throughout the week.

But the goal here is to make it that it's really, really easy if you need a face covering, get one, which said from the beginning, people can make it out anything they have around the house and can use a scarf, a bandana, whatever, but we want it to be something where it's just constant that you're being offered face coverings as a reminder. But also for people legitimately don't have one or forgot one we want to make it ever more easy for people to have a face covering. Commissioner?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, we've gotten this question a couple of times in different forms. We are absolutely committed to being as transparent as possible. I would anticipate releasing a quite a bit of information detailed down to the precinct level, possibly as even as different parks. We're just working through the requests that we have received as well as you know, working it through legal. But for the reporters that are on the call listening, I would absolutely anticipate that information being released. Sorry, it's taken so long.

Moderator: Last for today we have Juliet from 1010 Wins.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning, everyone. So, my question is specifically for Commissioner Shea. You said earlier this morning that you'll be making a lot of adjustments going forward on how to monitor and enforce social-distancing. And I've been seeing photos of the weekend of the West Village and Orchard Beach with people very close together. And I know the police department has plenty of experience with crowd control at big events and even limiting people and location. So, what are your concerns and what adjustments do you think you need to make?

Commissioner Shea: Juliet, I think we all went into this weekend with our eyes wide open that this weekend would be a particularly challenging. I think that's why we had the number of offices deployed that we did, as well as – I can tell you that behind the scenes there was an awful lot of coordination with other city agencies stood up our joint operation center as we do for large scale events such as New Year's Eve to the field the complaints that were coming in, whether it's from 3-1-1 or other sources and make sure that we were operating as efficiently and in a streamlined manner to get resources to where issues might be popping up across the city and to deal with it as quickly as possible. I went into this weekend as well, thinking that every week that we move forward, of course we're going to be making adjustments to see what areas we're seeing increased use in parks. I don't think there's any two parks exactly alike when you look at the landscape of them, the ability to social-distance in them. So that's what I'm referring to. I expect that coming out of this weekend we'll look at what went well, what areas did we see a crowding that was a little too close and we'll make adjustments both in deployment as well as the messaging too. I think the messaging is very critical here in terms of getting the word out as early as possible by the police department in particular areas. But it should be, as always, we'll take a look at what we do with the after action reporting, try to learn from this weekend, and we'll go forward to make sure that we do everything possible to keep people safe.

Mayor: And, Juliet, let me just add, I think you know the really want to commend the NYPD, the Parks Department, all the agencies they days and days before the weekend recognized to be warmer weather, they put a whole lot of personnel out. Obviously, the face covering distribution was a very good thing. A lot of things were done right and there were a lot of places where the consistency around the social-distancing, the percentage of people wearing face coverings were very high. There clearly are some places that we experienced challenges, we have to do better, we will do better, but the Commissioners right, this is a work in progress cause we're all learning a whole new reality here. What I can guarantee you is every week we'll get better in terms of the ability to enforce more and more personnel or coming back from being sick. That's going to help us. We're learning important lessons about what works. We're going to use those lessons to figure out a template and that template will be used everywhere consistently, and I want New Yorkers to have that assurance. We are going to make sure that social-distancing works and all the other rules work so we can – that's our pathway back to normal. It has to work. We have to make it work, but it requires enforcement to do that.

Let me conclude today with a point that's really, really crucial to the future of this city and so many of the things we talked about today are about our ability to move forward, and that means getting back on our feet. That means not only thanking in so many ways our heroes from this struggle, but making sure that their jobs will be secure for the long haul, for the crucial work they do. It means providing the services we need as part of a restart and a recovery. All the things we want to do. We want to thank people, give them security, give everyone a way back. All of that hangs in the balance in the discussions happening right now in Washington DC. I want people to feel this very personally. It really comes down to what happens in these next weeks in Washington with the fourth stimulus bill will determine a lot of the future of New York City and many other cities and states all over the country.

Our nation has a simple choice. Either help cities and states back on our feet, help us move forward, or turn their back on us and leave us in a situation where we cannot even provide the most basic services to our people. This is the same discussion that's happening in cities and states all over the country, red states and blue states. Everyone's going through the same crisis. Everyone has the same question and we're not getting answers certainly from the White House. In fact, the indicators we've gotten from the White House in the last 48 hours are dangerous. And I want to quote again, I want everyone to understand. I want you to take this personally because it's aimed at you, each and every New Yorker, and it's true again for people in cities and states all over the country. Take personally when the White House Chief Economic Advisor, Larry Kudlow says, we're taking quote, this is a quote, “we're taking a pause on additional coronavirus relief.” The Chief Economic Advisor in the White House saying, you don't need any more help, so they can afford to take a pause, like everything's just perfect right now. Or Kevin Hassett, the White House Economic Advisor, who said the President, this is a quote again, “the President is absolutely opposed to bailouts.” So, if he's so absolutely opposed to bailouts, why did he give $58 billion to the airline industry? Why did he create all sorts of giveaways to corporate America if he's so opposed to bailouts? How about a bailout for the first responders, the health care workers, the essential workers who right now are at the frontline protecting lives? Is he opposed to that? Does he want to look them in the face and say, you don't deserve help? I don't think he has the guts to do that. So why doesn't he take a stand and tell his advisors to shut up and actually come out and say, we need a stimulus four that will take care of New York and cities and states all over the country so we can get back on our feet. I mean, just think about it. It's common sense. You can't go through something like this and then snap your fingers and come out of it. You have to get some help to able to move forward and that's what our federal government's supposed to do for us.

So, I'm very frustrated what I'm hearing from the White House and I'm very frustrated the President doesn't speak up and say, nope, he should say I fully support stimulus four, I want to see our city’s and states come back together, I'll be there for them. Instead, stony silence from the President and very dangerous statements from his advisors. That said, array of light here in the Congress, something much better. Over the weekend I spoke with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been an extraordinary leader in this crisis. I spoke with the leading Democrat in the House from this State, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, both of them 100 percent committed to making New York City whole and moving us forward now and in the future. And that is leadership, understanding that people are put back on our heels, you come to their defense, this heroic city that has done so much in this crisis. We only need that helping hand so we can come back and then we can help lead America's recovery because we have always led all the recoveries in the past and we're ready to do it again. So, I see different things coming out of Washington and I just hope the White House is paying attention because here's a chance to do the right thing, but what some of these people are saying is absolutely the wrong thing, and I hope when you hear it, you're as angry as I am. We're not going to – we're not going to allow this to happen. I want to be really, really clear. They are not going to do this to New York City. We're going to stand up and fight and when we fight, it counts for a whole lot.

So, everyone, thank you. Thank you for all you are doing. Thank you for the way every one of you is participating in fighting back this disease. Let's keep fighting and we can move forward together. Thanks so much.

2020-05-05 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. You know, a lot of days I have the privilege of telling you about good things that New Yorkers are doing, heroic things that New Yorkers are doing, the way that New Yorkers are standing up to this virus and fighting back. I try to really focus on that cause it's an extraordinary story of the goodness of this city, the honor, the decency of the people of this city, and we only wish that that goodness, that decency were reflected in the way our national government sees this struggle here in New York City and understands what our people are going through. We only ask that people in Washington show a little respect for the people in New York City have borne the brunt of this crisis who have been living in the epicenter of a national dilemma, a crisis we'd never seen before, a pandemic the worst health care crisis in a hundred years. There are so many ways I could describe it, but we all know what's going on. And anyone with a heart and soul would show respect and appreciation for the people in New York City. For our first responders, our health care heroes, the everyday people in New York City who have fought through this and now deserve some help to get back on our feet so we can move forward. We didn't ask for this disease. It came from far away, but it has knocked us back no fault of our own, and yet we have fought back. All we want is respect and support, and a sense that we're all in this together, but that's not what we're seeing coming from the White House.

This morning I woke up to this President of United States, a former New Yorker who seems to enjoy stabbing his hometown in the back, talking about no bailout for New York. What kind of human being sees the suffering here and decides that people in New York City don't deserve help? What kind of person does that? Well, I'll tell you something. Every day, President Trump resembles more and more Herbert Hoover, the president who ignored the Great Depression, who didn't care to put America back on its feet, who has been now remembered in history as someone who failed at the most basic responsibility, which is to protect the people he serves. President Trump wasn't there for us when we needed the testing to stop this horrible disease. And now, he's talking about not helping us in our hour of need.

He says in this interview, he's not inclined to do bailouts. They gave a $58 billion bail out to the airline industry. A few years ago, he gave a one-and-a-half trillion-dollar bailout to big corporations and the wealthy. So, who is he kidding? He's not inclined to do bailouts now, that means he's not inclined to help firefighters, EMT’s, paramedics, police officers, doctors, nurses, health care workers, teachers, sanitation workers, all the people who are depending right now on the federal government stepping up and making New York City and New York State, and so many other cities and states, whole so we can get back to business, so we can get back on our feet, so we can lead the recovery. So, right there, he says he's not inclined to do bail outs. He's a pure hypocrite given how much money he's put in the hands of the corporations and the wealthy already. He says that it's not fair to the Republicans because all the states that need help are run by Democrats. So, now, he is putting partisanship ahead of the needs of the nation. You know, I referenced Herbert Hoover a moment ago. Even Herbert Hoover in his worst moments didn't try and pit Americans against Americans, one part of the country against another in a crisis, a leader is supposed to bring us together. What the President is doing, is playing politics while people are suffering. He says it right out loud there. The States that need help run by Democrat. Who cares who runs the states? The people need help, there are Americans who need help right now. Do you not care about that firefighter, that EMT, that paramedic, that police officer, that health care worker, because they live in a state run by a Democrat or a city run by a Democrat? Does that make them less American in your view, Mr. President? It's absolutely unacceptable. We've never seen anything like it the entire history of this republic, and people won't stand for it, because we need help. We need help, because people have been fighting and suffering, and all we're asking you to do is get back on our feet so we can contribute to this national recovery. There's not going to be a national recovery without New York City and New York State and cities and states all around the country that had been hit so hard.

Then he says, Florida is doing phenomenal. Texas is doing phenomenal. Midwest is fantastic. Okay, so Texas – here's a letter signed by a hundred mayors in Texas, Republican and Democrat, both talking about how their cities are suffering. How they help, or they will not be able to serve their people. They will not be able to provide basic services. They will not be able to get back on their feet from the great state of Texas right here. He says, the Midwest is fantastic. How about this headline from the Associated Press? Coronavirus cuts deep scars through meat packing cities in the Midwest, crisis growing in Iowa and other states. I don't know what country he's living in, but here in the United States of America, people are hurting. And it doesn't matter what state they're in. It doesn't matter if it's red or blue. It doesn't matter who they are. They're hurting and they need the help of their government. And now, we have the President of the United States trying to back away from his responsibilities.

Look, we cannot allow this to happen and we won't. We're not going to allow one man to stand in the way of what the people of this city, this state, this nation need. The people rule here. The people will not stand for a government that turns its back on those who have fought heroically through this pandemic and are being looked at with great respect all over the country. You know, I talked to the president about Elmhurst Hospital and he expressed sympathy, expressed admiration for the health care workers. He said, oh, I grew up in that area, Queens. Well, Mr. President, if you respect those health care workers, you don’t walk away from them. Help them, because those very same people who have fought this heroic battle are now the people that don't know if they're going to have a job in the future because there's no money left. The only place that we can get the help we need to get back on our feet is the federal government. Mr. President, be as kind and decent to those health care workers as you were to the airline industry, and the wealthy, and the corporations. That's what we're asking. One standard for this whole country. It doesn't matter which state, doesn't matter red or blue, it just matters that Americans need help and they need it now.

Let me bring you back right here. And even though we'd been through so much together, you know what, I've really admired and appreciated that the people of this city want to do things the right way in this crisis. They want to get it right once the first time. We are being guided here in this city by the facts. We're being guided by the data, by the science. And every day I'm going over with you with everyone. Those indicators that tell us what's happening. And you could look at them as just numbers, but I always remind you behind those numbers are human beings and families in the city. When those numbers go down, it means something is happening, and it means you're the reason why it happened, because you're doing the right thing to make it happen. This is a story of New York City coming together in common cause. And the numbers tell you something you should be very proud of. Daily admissions for COVID 19 in our hospitals down below a hundred a day now. Still too many, but tremendous progress. Fewer and fewer New Yorkers fighting for their lives in our intensive care units, in our public hospitals. The percentage of people testing positive, generally going down. Not every single day, but overall going down and going down a lot. You did that. You achieved it. You get the credit, and I'm sure you're proud of it and I want you to feel the pride that causes you to want to finish this fight strong, and take the next step.

So, as we keep fighting that fight, we don't forget for a moment because we're a decent city, a compassionate city, we don't forget for a moment how many people are hurting right now. We're still not out of it and people are hurting. How many people have been hurt? How many families have lost a loved one or dealing with the disease right now? How many families are dealing with the devastating impact of this crisis on their livelihoods? And you see constantly the dominoes falling in this crisis, and it's affecting in one way or another, millions of us. People who literally have to ask, who maybe never asked the question before in their life, where am I going to get my next meal? People who are struggling still to get that unemployment check because the job's not there. People are worried that their apartment may be gone. They’re worried about literally how are they going to keep a roof over their head and their family. People own a small business and they're worried they won't be able to get back on his feet. That's what's happening to so many people, and while we're fighting for fairness and decency and justice in Washington, we're helping our people right now. With all those problems, every single one I just mentioned that a family may face, where do people turn? A lot of times they turn right here to their city government and the number-one way people do that is by calling 3-1-1. And 3-1-1 was created to make it easier for people to get what they deserve, to get the information and get the support, get the services, and throughout its history, a lot of good has been done because of 3-1-1. It's worked pretty well, and when you see our enforcement agents go out to address a problem, if you see a line at a supermarket needs to be spread out, or a problem in a community that call to 3-1-1 sparks action. Whether it's the NYPD, or the Parks Department, or the Department for the Aging getting someone a meal, whatever it is, it is the fact that a New Yorker could pick up the phone and know that something can happen and will happen. That's the power of 3-1-1. But 3-1-1 that system we depend on has gone through an undeniable strain in these last weeks before this crisis, a typical day was 55,000 calls, that's a lot of calls. The peak in April, nearly 200,000 calls a day, four times as many calls, and that just exploded in a matter of weeks. 3-1-1 team did their best, but it's been clear they need a lot more help and now we're going to give them the help that they need to really expand what they do, so more and more New Yorkers can get help and get it quickly.

So, we have a three-part action plan to add support to 3-1-1 immediately. One, we've hired reinforcement call takers, this one made all the sense in the world, so many calls, more people need to take them. 285 more call takers have been added in the last two weeks, 150 are NYPD cadets, what a great training for them and how to serve and help people in the City devoted young people ready to serve people and get them answers, get them help. 120 temporary hires, 65 percent of whom speak Spanish and that's crucial in this crisis, so many folks who speak Spanish needing help and needing that reassuring voice on the land line. Also 15 FDNY employees have stepped up to help reinforce 3-1-1 and now we've added four new call centers because we needed more capacity. Now, 3-1-1 got a lot done before the crisis, but the crisis demanded a different mindset, so we brought in leaders from the NYPD and the FDNY to really strengthen the approach at 3-1-1 to think not just about responding, but about actually preventing problems, preventing emergencies when someone needs food, if they don't get food, there's an emergency that's going to happen eventually. If someone has COVID symptoms, we don't know yet, that means they have the disease, but we do know it's a danger that must be addressed immediately. You talk about urgency, you talk about focus, you talk about getting things done, you're talking about the NYPD and the FDNY. So we've brought in a leadership group of senior officers from PD and FD and they're bringing some very important practices with them, like a morning roll call where they get everyone together and talk about what is coming in the day ahead, what they're seeing, what happened on the last shift, what are the new topics they have, address, how they can get ahead of things proactively. Also, a reliance on data and learning from the data, 3-1-1 has some great data scientists, the NYPD and the FDNY have really perfected the use of data to serve people better, so they're bringing in that expertise to ensure they see a spike in calls at a certain hour, they see a certain problem that needs to be addressed, they're shifting resources, shifting personnel to that problem. They're also creating an express lane and the express lane idea is if you're calling with something related to COVID-19, if you're calling with a need for food, something as urgent as that goes to the front of the line gets addressed immediately. The goal here is to have little or no wait time for people who are calling about anything related to this crisis in English or Spanish and of course we serve people in many other languages as well. So, what's happening now at 3-1-1 is something very different to deal with a crisis we've never experienced before. I want to thank everyone at 3-1-1 for the amazing work you do, and you've been strong during this crisis. I want to thank the NYPD and the FDNY for stepping in and bringing your expertise. Folks who know how to deal with emergencies and challenges better than anyone else on earth to make 3-1-1 much stronger, much faster, able to serve much better. This is something really important, it's going to help hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers right away.

Now, one example— I told, several times, I've told you about the importance of our New York City, small businesses, getting that federal loan program, getting the opportunity to tap into that because the Paycheck Protection Program, it's a good thing. But what we found was the first round, a lot of money went to businesses that weren't the most needy; the second round, the money is going fast. We want to make sure that every New York City small business that needs those loans and that can turn into grants eventually, that every small business that needs them applied. Remember this newest round, $310 billion for small businesses and a special thank you again to our Senator Chuck Schumer, Congress Member Nydia Velasquez, the Chair of the House Small Businesses Committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They all fought hard to make sure there was more money actually for small businesses, every kind of small business in every kind of community, but now we need our small businesses to take advantage of it. You can apply, it's first come first served, so apply quickly if you have not money could run out in the course of this week. So please apply immediately, go to the federal website, small business sba.gov but the reason I bring it up now is because if you need help and you're struggling with that application, you need answers, you need support call 3-1-1 and our small business team will help you to complete that application and get in immediately. There are a lot of ways 3-1-1 can help and that's a great example, let's help our small businesses get back on their feet. So, anyone out there, if you own a small business or you know anyone who does, tell them right away, fill out that application, if they need help, call 3-1-1.

Now I'm going to go to a matter that really deserves attention and I want to tell you what happened here just in the last few days. And, if you're a parent, I want you to listen carefully in particular. I made a point since we're all in this together in this City, we're all working together to protect people, when something is raised by our colleagues in the media that points out something, we all need to know about or something that needs to be addressed. I'm trying to remember to say thank you. So I want to thank Melissa Russo who raised an important issue about a problem we're starting to see and we take it very seriously and in general we know as we've dealt with the coronavirus that we have not seen the same kind of impact on young people that we see on older people, particularly much older people. But something's happened the last few days, that's beginning to concern our Health Department and again, parents pay attention because it does involve our children and I say that as a parent myself, I take this seriously. Even a few days ago we were not seeing much incidents, but now we are 15 cases in New York City now we've identified and that is enough for sure to say even though it's uncommon compared to the hundreds of thousands of people who have contracted this disease is still causing us concern. So, this particular condition, even though it's rare, here are the symptoms and again, this affects children, fever, rash, abdominal pain and vomiting. If your children are experiencing any child's experiencing these symptoms, particularly in combination, call your doctor right away. We want to make sure that if a child is dealing with this reality, they get the support that they need. We will have in a few minutes an opportunity to hear from our health care leaders who can explain in more detail, but again, when we see something, we want to identify it and tell the public about it. This is something that's concern I want to make sure all New Yorkers are aware and we've put out a health alert letting health care providers know that if they see incidents of this new condition that we want to make sure it's reported immediately to our Health Department so we can identify what's going on and how extensive it is and deal with it.

Now, we all know the way for is all about testing and we know there's different kinds of tests, different kinds of approaches, but every test of every kind contributes to the solution. There's still not enough testing available, there's still not enough of the diagnostic testing that we particularly need, there's still not enough lab capacity, the federal government is still missing in action when it comes to testing. But we do have some good news today, talked about a few days ago, and this is a step forward, and I do want to give credit when the federal government does something that helps us, and I've done that throughout this crisis. On the question of antibody testing, I told you a few days back, we had been in conversations over the last few weeks with the Department of Health and Human Services and with the Centers for Disease Control. The focus was on antibody testing on a widespread level for our first responders and our health care workers. Last night I spoke with Admiral Brett Giroir, who is the Head of the U.S. Public Health Service and Assistant Secretary at H + H – sorry, HHS, my apology – HHS. And he was abundantly clear the federal government is ready to move with antibody testing for the heroes here in New York City, any first responder or health care worker who wants to take advantage of it, it will be made available for free. This initiative will be up and running by next week, maybe even sooner, but certainly by next week the goal is to test 140,000 of our heroes and this testing will be done at hospitals, firehouses police stations and correction facilities. So, this is very, very important, it's going to give us much more ability to let all of our heroes know what's happened in terms of exposure to this disease in their own lives. It's going to be really helpful in terms of finding more donors for the plasma treatments that we're very hopeful about. It's going to give a lot of information to the federal government and to us about what's happening out there with this disease that's going to help us fight this disease further. So, this is a step in the right direction for sure.

Now, a few more things before I conclude, it's very, very important, while we're fighting this battle to express our thanks for the people who've really stepped up. And those thank you’s I think are even more important in the middle of a crisis where people are working so hard. So, a couple of different things we honor each year, happen to fall today and this week, and let's take time to thank the people we know who serve us so well, starting with Teacher Appreciation Day. Our educators have done an amazing job. They've never been asked to do anything like online learning, distance learning on a vast scale. They've done it really well. The dedication has been outstanding. Our educators are going out of their way to reach kids, reach parents, help them keep learning no matter what. Any educator in your life, please take the time to thank them today and this week because they certainly deserve it. They've done something remarkable.

Today is also Building Service Worker Day. Now, talk about unsung heroes, the doormen and the doorwomen, the porters, the cleaners, the security officers, the folks who keep buildings running, every kind of building, every place that's functioning right now – that's part of fighting back this disease. Every place that people live that has a staff that makes sure the building keeps running. Everything we depend on every day in this city, in peace time and wartime - these are unsung heroes who are there for us and keep things running. Take an opportunity today to thank them. They don't get the thanks they deserve, but what would we do without them? The city wouldn't work without them. Let's thank them today. Special thank you to our colleagues in labor – 32BJ, SEIU – all over New York City for the amazing work you're doing in this crisis. And yesterday, and this we should be thankful for every day, but yesterday was International Firefighters Day. I went to go meet with EMTs and paramedics at EMS Station Four on the Lower East Side yesterday. Our EMTs, our paramedics, our firefighters, all part of the FDNY family - they've been amazing. They've dealt with things that no one's ever seen before; they have saved so many lives. They have stood firm, absolutely made us proud in this crisis. Keep making us pride, proud. We should be thankful for them all the time, but let's give a special thank you to them this week.

Okay, the part of this press conference at each day we all look forward to the daily indicators to know where we're going. Yesterday, great day; today, a little less great, still some good news. We need it to get better to fully take the next steps. So, three indicators, first one daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – that is down, that is good. It from 88 to 75. Think about that for a moment – 75 people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19. That is a sea change from where we were a few weeks ago – that's fantastic. Daily number of people in our ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19 - down from 632 to 596, great news. That still means there's almost 600 people right now fighting for their lives in those ICUs. So good important news, but with something that reminds us, the battle still rages for so many. Here's the one I don't like, the percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19 – up from 17 percent to 22 percent. We know each day can vary for a variety of reasons, but the reason we want all three to go down at once is that tells us we're on a solid, consistent path and that's what leads us to be able to start loosening up. Didn't have the day we needed today, but, overall, we're making progress. Let's keep fighting. Let's keep fighting to bring these numbers down consistently and take that big next step forward.

So, before I say a few words in Spanish, I just want to come back to what I started with. This is just about basic humanity and decency. Anyone watching has seen the pain that New York City has experienced. Anyone watching has seen the heroism of so many New Yorkers. Anyone watching with a heart and soul would say, I want to help those people because they've done something so good, so decent. That's all we're asking of our federal government. We’re just asking the President of the United States to act like the President of the United States and care – actually care about the people of this city, regardless of politics; care about the people of the city like any President should, regardless of where they come from. But you’d think a president who grew up here might have a special feeling for this place, might go out of his way to help his hometown. I'll give him another chance to show that there's a beating heart there, but these comments today show me something very cold, very, very unfair towards the people he grew up around – the people gave him every opportunity in his life. So, Mr. President, you have a chance to atone for what you’ve said here; you have a chance to get it right. Remember, your hometown, and remember every hometown in America – just lend a helping hand so people can get back on their feet once and for all.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please remember to give me the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Just a quick reminder that on the phone we have Dr. Barbot, Dr. Katz, Dr. Varma, Commissioner Shea, and Commissioner Kish. Juliet from 1010 WINS has the first question, Juliet.

Question: All right, thank you. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning everybody here on the call. There's now playing, a plan in place to deal with homeless underground. So, what is the plan to deal with homeless encampments? I know Mr. Mayor, you've said they're not acceptable, but I happen to know of three encampments where there are groups of people with sleeping bags, blankets, shopping carts – even one had a tent. A response to a 3-1-1 call in one location indicated, it was indicated it was cleared by police, but that was not the case. So, I'm wondering what is happening with that? What is your concern and what is the response?

Mayor: Well, Juliet, you have distinguished yourself over these weeks in finding things that need to be fixed and I really appreciate that and we're going to go fix it. They're absolutely unacceptable. Again, there's a story that really should be understood for decades encampments were tolerated in New York City. People would see them in different places and, somehow, they were allowed to exist. I found it absolutely unacceptable and I said to the NYPD, to Social Services, to Sanitation Department, I said, if we see any encampment developed anywhere in New York City, we're taking it down period. So, I want you please to give those three locations to my colleagues here at City Hall right after this and they will be dismantled immediately. It's unacceptable; it's not a way for human beings to live. It's not right, it's not fair to anyone; it's not healthy. We will not tolerate it. So just give us the locations and they will be gone. It's as simple as that.

Moderator: Nolan from the Post is up next. Nolan?

Nolan?

Mayor: All right [inaudible] –

Moderator: We will come back to Nolan.

Mayor: Double back to Nolan.

Moderator: Brigid from WNYC is up next. Brigid?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. First, ethical questions about enforcement for you and Commissioner Shea. Excuse me, first for tonight’s historic subway closure [inaudible] by the Governor, how many police officers will be guarding MTA stations overnight from 1:00 AM to 5:00 AM since every station that doesn't have a locked entrance presumably needs an officer and do you have an estimate for how much its enforcement will cost? And then separately in the 75th precinct there was another event captured on video of an aggressive police encounter with officers [inaudible] with someone's social media [inaudible] with a teenager for not wearing a mask. Commissioner Shea, do you have details about this incident? How are officers being instructed to enforce the city's guidance on social distancing and wearing masks? It appears that one of the officers actually punched the young man in the head, but that cannot constitute excessive force and does the department need to do additional retraining for officers in –

Mayor: Brigid –

Question: – how to effectively interact with community members on social distancing concerns –

Mayor: Brigid, hold on. Brigid, respectfully, I'm trying to get everyone to really respect the ground rules here. I'm absolutely going to answer your questions, but folks in the – our colleagues in the media, we're trying to get to as many people as possible. We have a clear rule; get two questions upfront. A run-on question that becomes four or five questions is just not fair. We really are trying to be consistent here. We're taking lots of questions in the course of a week. So, we're going to speak to obviously the first question about the subways. We'll speak to the video from the 7-5 Precinct, but I'm going to take that broadly and again, I'm sure your colleagues will have questions as well, but please everyone just respect each other by not trying to stretch two questions into four or five questions.

Let me start and I’ll turn to Commissioner Shea. On the question of closing the subways in the late night hours, this is something I think is absolutely the right thing to do to ensure the subways are safe and clean; to ensure that our essential workers are respected, protected, know they can be safe in the subways with a cleaner environment. The folks who are putting themselves in harm's way, knowing that every effort is being done to keep them safe, but also because I think it will disrupt another decades old pattern of homeless folks, street homeless folks staying on the subway all night in a way that I think is unhealthy, unfair, not good for anyone involved - starting with the homeless person. We want to disrupt that, we want to get them help, we want to be able to be there with outreach services to get them to shelter. So, I really think it is the right policy. Clearly it will require serious effort by the NYPD, but I'll remind you that in those same stations that are closed, there will be people cleaning; so there will be MTA staff there. Those are not stations that from every understanding I have from the MTA, they're not just going to be empty and barren, they're going to be activity going on. But the NYPD certainly is going to support in a variety of ways. The Commissioner can speak to that. I will remind everyone that since there aren't trains running, NYPD officers will not be on trains, so it frees up a certain amount of personnel to address the stations during those hours. Also, obviously, hours that there's generally in this city much less activity than other hours of the day. On the 7-5 Precinct, and I know Commissioner Shea will speak to it, I have seen the video, there's obviously going to be a review to understand all the facts. The Commissioner and I spoke this morning. I think every one of these cases has to be seen individually. I would caution against anyone trying to look at different videos or different situations and see them all the same. They're not all the same. I want to caution that any time that officer asks someone to observe social distancing or put on a mask, the response from any New Yorker, one, should follow the rules and the laws we're living with right now; two, should be concerned about the health and safety of everyone, starting with their own family. The response should be to follow the instruction of the officer, and people have to understand that. We look at every incident carefully, and, as I spoke about the incident in the Lower East Side the other day, when I see something I think is inappropriate, I'm going to say it, and, obviously, that was a case where an officer was modified right away. But I also want to remind people that what New Yorkers need to do is respect the NYPD as well, and respect the instructions, and certainly never ever fight with an NYPD officer. That is not acceptable. People are not ever allowed to use physical force against an NYPD officer. That's just not something that can happen in this city. So, we have retrained our entire police force to deescalate, to respect communities, to work with the neighborhood policing approach, and I've seen tremendous progress. There's still work to be done, but I want to remind everyone it's a two-way street. Respect goes both ways and that's how we create a better city for everyone. And when an officer says, follow these rules around social distancing or wearing a face covering, that is for the protection and health of everyone. And I say, I'm glad that officers are out there making sure that people are safe, because, if not, people wouldn't be safe, period. Commissioner?

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. So, on the first part with the transit – as soon as this press conference ends, I'll be on a video conference with senior leadership and the NYPD, including Chief Delatorre, the head of the Transit Bureau, just finalizing the stage-one of this plan for tonight. And, again, this is something that's never really been undertaken to this scale. I expect it to be fluid and we will learn from tonight's, and, as we go forward, try to develop a system that is as efficient as possible to get the job done with the minimum amount of officers. Hundreds of officers will be deployed tonight. And, you know, again, as I said, we’ll learn from tonight's experience and see if we have to adapt and if we can do it with less or have to add more. And all of that will be done in conjunction with our partners from the transit system. In terms of the video in the 7-5, we've seen a couple videos surfaced in the last couple of days. I would just point out a couple of things. The common denominator here is, starting with a lack of compliance. And I think echoing some of what the Mayor said, respect here is a two-way street. We understand that everyone is stressed out under these trying times in two months, but, you know, we need people to work together more than ever. And when officers approach a crowd for whatever the reason, you know, work with the officers. We commit to work with the community, but one thing that we cannot have is – we cannot have individuals having physical contact with our officers. To the comment about the punch, you know, every incident is unique and has to be examined under the lens of the circumstances of that particular incident. A punch is something that we actually trained for in the Police Academy. It is a part of the level of escalation that begins with discussion, begins with the de-escalation, and it progresses up from there. So, to answer your question, no, a punch should not be assumed to be excessive force. It should be examined in the totality of the circumstances and, as any incident is reviewed, we review all of these incidents. But, again, I don't think it's surprising when you look at – start to see some of the patterns emerge here, your individuals that are being repeatedly arrested, and it is not shocking to me that they are not complying with the police's orders at times. This individual, in this particular incident that you mentioned, had just been arrested for a burglary a month ago. So, that's something that the officers are dealing with as well. But we'll work through it. We'll continue to do what we do, keeping New Yorker safe and, you know, hopefully we'll come out of there sooner more than later.

Moderator: Henry from Bloomberg is up next. Henry?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How about you?

Question: I'm hanging in there. I'd like to try and see whether or not we can get more precision on what you think the timeframe would be on opening up various aspects of city life, particularly schools, the restaurants. You agree with the Governor's assertion that schools and theaters should open in, sort of, a stage four, the last stage that they are equivalent in terms of when they should be opening.

Mayor: Well, Henry, we keep working with the State all the time to refine the approach, because we're all in uncharted territory here. Here's why I'd say, I feel very impressed by the progress this city is making that gives me greater confidence about something that we all should be working towards, which is the reopening of school in September. We’ve got a lot to do to get to that point where we can do that effectively and safely and smoothly, but I'm getting more confident by the day when I see these facts. Now, we are not there yet. You've been watching our daily indicators, a lot of progress, but still not the kind of consistent progress we want to be able to take the first steps to relax some of the restrictions. But I am increasingly hopeful about the ability to open school well and fully in September. Remember, the tightness of the approach that we're using right now is again to ward off a resurgence, a boomerang, and that is the best way to keep squeezing this disease. And the test and trace strategy, which is going to be coming up intensely now is crucial to that as well. So, I think there's broad agreement and, certainly, this is some of what we see from around the world, that certain types of settings lend themselves in terms of reopening to being in the earlier stage, because they have more space available, more distancing to be done. Others are inherently places where people are close together – you would include schools in that, you would include theaters and sports events and all. So, it makes sense that you're going to go on stages. But rather than theorize about it, Henry, we're going to literally lay it out step by step as we are ready. When we see the indicators get close to where we need them to be, we’re going to lay out what the steps will be. And that's something that I think will be constant because we keep making progress, but I don't want to theorize about what happens too much down the line because the first thing is not to get overconfident and to fight off any chance of that boomerang. If there's a boomerang, then all schedules get set back and that's not something I'm going to see happen.

Moderator: Trying Nolan from the Post one more time. Nolan?

Question: Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Nolan. How are you going?

Question: I'm doing all right. Two questions – two separate issues, the first of which is, the Governor has frozen wage increases for State employees as a way to try to create some breathing room in the State budget. Are you considering a similar move here in the city? And the second question is, with the city's death toll, you know, approaching – the States rather – death toll, I think, approaching 20,000 at this point. What is does your administration continue to be so guarded in discussing how the city is treating its dead?

Mayor: Well, again, I don't feel we've been guarded. I feel like we've tried to answer a wide range of concerns, but also respect the families involved. I think there is a very big difference of interest here, meaning I think the media, respectfully – and I understand it's your job, but I also understand the nature of the free enterprise system – the media very much wants to report on this story constantly and I think a lot of families are not interested in constantly having their pain portrayed publicly. And we're trying to strike a balance here, where we're answering the concerns functionally without dwelling publicly on something that's very sad and tragic and very human and very individual. So, whereas a substantive issue to address, we're addressing it. The situation continues to move forward as we reduced the number of people we're losing each day, thank God, as we're taking small steps towards getting back to normal. But, you know, I think whenever an issue has come up, we've addressed it and been open about it, just not lurid about it. We're not going to go into a lot of detail. That's just the way we're going to handle this. On the wage issue, the State has different laws and standards than the City. Right now, our central focus is on keeping our city going, keeping our workforce going so we can serve people so we can provide services so we can get back on our feet. Our to do that is going to be absolutely determined by what happens with the stimulus bill this month. If we get help, we can move forward. If we don't get help, some very, very tough decisions are ahead, and much tougher decisions than something like a wage freeze – much harder decisions ahead if we do not get help from Washington.

Question: Christina from Chalkbeat is up next. Christina?

Question: Hi, Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. I was hoping to get some more clarity about the budget cuts to College Access for All and how the City plans on making sure that students who managed to graduate from high school in this very difficult year also continue to go on to college, if they're on that path?

Mayor: Thank you, Christina. Look, there was a lot of things that we do in normal times that we think are really valuable, like College Access for All, but just was profoundly disrupted by not having people together, you know, in a school building and things like college visits. There's many things that could not happen in this environment and in a situation where you have to make tough choices, this was one we had to sacrifice. But what continues is an incredible commitment at the DOE to support high school seniors to make sure that every single one who can graduate does. I know guidance counselors are constantly reaching out to high school seniors. I know the Chancellor and his team have said what whatever else they're doing now, and so many things are doing now, job-one is to really focus intensely on those high school seniors, get them the help they deserve. So, you know, we're going – we're doing that right now with the online learning, with counseling remotely. Remember, that our seniors, we want to see as many as possible get through in June, but if for any reason they're not ready in June, there’s still July and August to keep working with them. And online learning offers a lot of flexibility that we can use in this case, in a good way. And we're going to celebrate all our seniors with a citywide graduation ceremony. That's going to be something very special and we'll be putting that together soon in announcing details as we have them. But I would separate what we had to do with College Access for All, which is, obviously, a big program to acclimate our students to the opportunities ahead versus the pinpointed work to help each senior. That work to help each senior continues intensely.

Moderator: Next is Yoav from The City. Yoav?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to get a greater clarity on what I asked about yesterday, about the enforcement of social distancing for a group, let's say of two people. Is the presumption that those people live together under the same roof? Or, is the NYPD instructing its officers to confirm – you know, check their IDs and confirm whether they should be within six feet of another.

Mayor: Again, this is something we're all learning as we build out the approach, Yoav. This is never something that the NYPD or any enforcement agency has had to do before. And so, we don't have every perfect rule in place. We're learning by experience. One thing that's true is that for anything to work, there has to be enforcement. There has to be some consequences. If you mean to ensure that a place where the 8.6 million people moves forward and fights back this disease and we save lives, enforcement is a crucial part of that, NYPD, Parks Department and all the other agencies that we have brought into play. So, we're going to keep refining our approach to enforcement as always. A substantial amount of any enforcement activity depends on communication, depends on public education, which there's been a huge amount of, depends on the training of the folks who do the enforcing, depends on their professional judgment, which we always depend on. That's just part of any enforcement activity.

So, we're working through to keep tightening up the protocols. We know the biggest thing we're concerned about is anything that's a larger gathering. We know we want to avoid anyone not social distancing whenever humanly possible and we know we want people to wear face coverings and I think that's the sort of hierarchy of need. But we'll have more to say as we refine the specific protocols, but again, some of it is common sense, just talking to people, reminding them of the importance and where folks need enforcement because they refuse to follow instructions then that's what we have summonses for.

Moderator: Shant from the Daily News is up next. Shant?

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor with the Council doing a hearing on the budget tomorrow, just wanted to ask you about some of the issues that I understand are on Councilmembers’ minds. For one, the Summer Youth Employment Program, I know a lot of them want to bring that back in some form. Do you see a way to meet them halfway or do you basically consider that program dead? Another area is with crime down during the outbreak [inaudible] budget cuts for the NYPD and DOC and last thing –

Mayor: Shant – Shant, I couldn't hear that. You skipped out for a moment there. You said would crime down and then I couldn't hear you.

Question: Yeah. Sorry about that. With crime down, would you consider budget cuts for the NYPD or the Department of Corrections? And last thing if I'm understanding correctly, is that your budget – your revised budget has $2.4 billion for the coronavirus response this year but none marked for Fiscal 2021. So yeah, just what are your thoughts on preparing for Fiscal 2021?

Mayor: Again, I'm going to do this, but I'm going to start to just cut questions off going forward when people go from two into three, we're just – respect, the questions, they are all good questions, but it's the SYEP is one question, the PD and DOC is another question, and the 2021 is yet another question. So just saying it to everyone, I'll start to edit if needed. I would ask people just really respect each other and respect what we're trying to do here to get as many people an opportunity. Two questions, really clear what two questions is. SYEP, always talking to the Council. This is what we do. This is democracy. This is, you know, the different branches of government working together and I will remind you, this is now the seventh time, seventh year that I've gone through this process with the Council. Every single year we've come to common ground, gotten to a budget on time, gotten to a fair, smart, balanced budget.

So we're going to do it again, and the work with the Council has been very, very respectful cause everyone understands what we're going through. The Council cares deeply about SYEP. I care about too. It's expanded greatly during my administration. I've said we one, we don't have money right now two, we don't have a logistical framework to make it work because people can't gather and it is wholly dependent on people gathering in the same place. So I don't see a way to do it right now, but I'm always going to have an open door to the Council and budget adoption is not until the middle of June or later June. Things could change by then so don't see it now, but the conversation is open.

On police department and Department of Corrections, no anticipated budget cuts at this point. Both of them are doing extraordinarily important work and we need to keep them doing it, dealing with a lot of new challenges in this crisis. Again, anything could happen between now and adoption, and the number one question is what's going to happen in Washington with the stimulus. That will frame everything and then what's happening with the disease will frame a lot. So nothing anticipated now, but everything is an open question depending on what happens in Washington. And then absolutely in the following Fiscal Year we're going to be dealing with the coronavirus in a variety of ways, certainly the aftermath of it, if not the real thing again. So we will be definitely thinking about what that means for a future budgets. Right now we're focused on the here and now, but we have time between now and June to figure out how to project our needs ahead. They will be substantial for sure.

Moderator: Sydney, from the Advance is up next. Sydney.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, I have two questions. I wanted to follow up about adding Staten Island’s private hospitals as well as the rest of the city's private hospitals to your daily ICU indicator count. I asked you a week ago if you would consider adding at least Staten Island to that count so that the five boroughs are represented and you said you would look into it, but it looks like you've decided not to add Staten Island and private hospitals. Can you explain why you decided not to?

And second, going back to the military medical personnel, it's my understanding that the federal government said that military medical staff could only be sent to New York City's public hospitals. I wanted to know if you ever tried to go back to the federal government and ask if it would be possible to send them to Staten Island because it has no public hospital and is still a part of New York City? Can I read you a quote, I know you don't want us to run on with questions, but it's relevant to the military medical part? So yesterday in response to what you said about not wanting to send the military medical staff to to Staten Island and only to public hospitals, Borough President Oddo and Congressmen Rose said, “the ease in which the de Blasio administration allows the fact that Staten Island has no public hospital to be an excuse for them to avoid their responsibilities to Staten Islanders is stunningly callous and contemptible.” What do you have to say to that? And again, you know, about if you tried to ask the federal government to send staff to Staten Island?

Mayor: Thank you for the questions, Sydney. Look I think we're just in a kind of revolving door here and I'm just not going to play that game. Whatever any hospitals have needed around the city, there is 56 hospitals, when they have needed help, we've gotten them help. In the beginning, we all were struggling just to try and keep the most basic operations going as the disease was growing intensely. Overwhelmingly, the biggest challenges were in our public hospitals starting with Elmhurst Hospital. We needed to reinforce the places that were bearing the brunt. As we got more resources, we started spreading them more intensely all over. Every hospital has been served by that effort. As we got more personnel, we've been sending them all over. You know, I get requests from Staten Island, from RUMCSI, and every request is honored, whenever we have something, we provide it.

But the military medical personnel were explicitly requested for our public hospitals that were bearing the brunt. We got a good number. We got less than half of what we asked for originally. So it was not anywhere near the number that would have been ideal, but we've used them for the intended purpose. So I think this, your questions are trying to suggest something that's just not there which is any difference of feeling and concern. I care about all 56 hospitals. I care about all five boroughs. I think a lot of people don't want to ever let that in because it's politically inconvenient, but that's fine. I'm used to it by now. If the hospitals and Staten Island need something, we're going to get them help. We always have gotten them help, but different hospitals, different communities are dealing with different needs. That's just been clear throughout.

The other question, the indicators, again, as I said to you several times, the public hospital indicators are the most consistent and they tend to reflect what we're seeing from all 56 hospitals, but they are more readily available and consistent information. I'll double check with the team again, but to date, no one has shown me evidence that we need to broaden. You're seeing something in these – this indicator I think isn't there. It's not meant to be what's happening in each of 56 hospitals. It's meant to be a trend line for the whole city and using the 11 public hospitals is a simple verifiable way to do it and appears to be consistent with what other hospitals are experiencing.

Moderator: Last two. Katie from the Wall Street Journal. Katie.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. I have a question for Dr. Babrot and it's actually about the warning about the Kawasaki disease and the toxic shock syndrome seen in children. I'm just curious what took the city so long, I guess to identify these pediatric cases. I know you said on April 29th that the city had not seen cases of this severe rare illness and children and they were surveying pediatrics intensive cares. So the 15 patients were hospitalized between April 17th and May 1st. So was there just more monitoring being done or what can you explain the gap there? Thank you.

Mayor: Yeah and let me jump in on Katie's question. Oxiris, and obviously if Mitch or Jay would like to join in as well after Oxiris. Start if you would by defining so everyone knows, particularly parents know, what are these syndromes? Explain it from scratch and how do identify and what it does to children, et cetera.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Certainly, Mr. Mayor. Kawasaki's illness is actually a rare condition. When I was a pediatrician in clinical practice, I actually had patients with Kawasaki's disease and what we see is generally children present with prolonged high fevers, several days of very high fevers. They can also have very red eyes very brightly colored lips, and then, you know, one of the hallmarks that we see is called what we call a strawberry tongue, which means their tongue is very bright and red. Then the other symptoms that children can have are rash. They can have swelling of their hands and feet, and generally if the condition is identified early there is definitive treatment, and there are typically no long-term consequences. However, if this, the syndrome is not identified early, there can be long-term consequences, most commonly related to ongoing heart problems.

So the important thing here is though that when you have a syndrome that's not very common in the context of a worldwide pandemic, there are situations where pediatricians may not be thinking, oh this could be an atypical manifestation of what's going on. And so we, when we got the question from Melissa, made sure that our – I directed my staff to reach out to all of the pediatric providers to say, are you seeing these types of symptoms coming in in children? And they're like, oh yes, we actually have seen them, or no we haven't seen them, but we will be on the lookout. And so, you know, in public health oftentimes we say that outbreaks are made or broken by astute clinicians that are paying attention in clinical settings, be it their private practice, be it in the emergency department, or be it in an intensive care unit. And that then signals the call for us at the Health Department to look more widely across the city to see if this is a one off or if this is part of an emerging trend.

That being said, there have been cases identified in the UK and we are learning that there are very small numbers of cases that have been identified in, for example, Philadelphia and Boston. We're not sure what to make of this yet, and as I've said several times in the past or still learning every day about how COVID-19 behaves not only from a public health point of view, but from a clinical point of view. And as we have learned that for example, in adults, the virus doesn't just affect the lungs. It can also affect the kidneys. We are learning that even though children by and large are mildly affected when it comes to COVID-19 that there can be situations where they are more severely affected. Thank God in this situation we haven't had any children who have died from the number of children that have been identified with Kawasaki or Kawasaki like illness. And so we want pediatricians, we want pediatric intensive care specialists to let us know when they have more patients and importantly, as the Mayor alluded to or stated in his opening remarks, we want parents to pay attention so when they see these symptoms to reach out to their doctors early, because the most important thing in this situation here again is not only diagnosing it early but providing the appropriate treatment early. The treatment for this is something called immunoglobulin as well as aspirin and it's actually one of the few, if not the only pediatric conditions where aspirin is an indicated treatment. So kind of a long winded answer, but very important that we not lose sight of the fact that we need doctors to report, it's actually part of the health code to report when they see atypical presentations of common conditions or even rare conditions because it could be, it could help inform our greater understanding of how this vicious virus is affecting our city as a whole.

Mayor: Dr. Katz or Dr. Varma, you want to add?

President Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: I think Dr. Barbot did a great job of responding. I would only add that the city hospitals have successfully taken care of children who have this condition. So it is something that the astute clinicians that Dr. Barbot was talking about did see and provided appropriate care for the children.

Mayor: Excellent. Dr. Varma?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: No, nothing else from me.

Mayor: Right. Thank you. Okay.

Moderator: Last question goes to Melissa from NBC New York. Melissa?

Question: Hi. Good morning Mr. Mayor. And I want to thank you so much for the acknowledgement. I really do appreciate that. What changes are you making now to make sure that your Health Department is getting the most up to date information on these emerging health concerns? And at this point, how, if at all, does the knowledge that children are impacted by this more than maybe we thought change or considerations about planning safer schools? That's my first one.

And then I have to ask one for my colleague, Andrew Siff, who wants to know, given that studies show minimal outdoor transmission, it seems like the city is expending massive energy on policing outdoor behavior. Wouldn't time and energy be better devoted to testing and tracing?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you Melissa. Melissa, appreciate your question and again, always appreciate when our colleagues immediately bring things to our attention that we want to make sure are deeply focused on. So I think the first question, look, we have to be vigilant. We have seen some things with the coronavirus and I'll start and certainly our three doctors can jump in afterwards if there's anything they want to add. We have seen some things with the coronavirus that have been very consistent from the beginning. For example, that the vast majority of people did not need hospitalization – ended up with something that, you know, was much less severe. But there obviously had been so many people who did need hospitalization and so many people we lost.

That is, you know, there's no consolation on the fact that most people went through it better, but the predictions did hold on that sort of vast majority not having the extreme experience. From the beginning, we heard that the impact seemed to be mostly on those with preexisting conditions and older, particularly much older folks. That again, very sad for everyone who has been affected. That truth has seemed to be consistent pretty much throughout, but we have to have our eyes open for anything that might change and evolve – I mean our doctors have been warning us all along that no one knows everything about this disease anywhere and it's an ever changing situation. There's always new information coming in. So no one is saying we have the definitive understanding that we'd like to, we haven't seen much impact on kids, but when we see something like this, we're going to be very, very vigilant and anything else that might come along like this. So we'll be all over protecting every child who is affected in this way. But in terms of what it means for schools, I think the way to think about is, you know, that decision about how we're going to restart schools in September and exact ways we'll do it will evolve in the months between now and that we certainly want to make sure we come back safe and if we're seeing any other particular challenges to kids, we're going to add that into our strategy. But my bottom line is I believe fundamentally we'll be able to reopen schools in September, but the way we are going to do it has to be a safety first approach and absolutely we'll have to reference the best knowledge we have as we get closer from the health care community.

And on the outdoor question from Andrew, I don't think it's an either-or. It's a fair question for sure. I would say it this way: the testing and tracing operation is going to get anything and everything it needs to succeed. That is a different question than how we use all of our enforcement personnel to ensure there is social distancing. The fact that our numbers are going down is directly related to the fact that people stayed home to the maximum extent possible, practice social distancing, and more and more wearing those face covering. That is why we are seeing the amount of people affected by this disease steadily declined.

So we're going to stick with those strategies and we have to enforce them to make sure they work. That's just reality, especially in warmer weather. So I don't think it's either or. I think we will have a strong enforcement approach, constantly be informing and educating people, but also build an intensive testing, a tracing apparatus. We need both actually to succeed. It's the only way forward.

Doctors, anything you want to add on Melissa's questions? A question about how we stay vigilant to anything that might affect kids and, and as we look forward to school. Anything you want to add to that?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, Mr. Mayor, I would add – first of all, I want to start by thanking Melissa for bringing this to our attention. And it's certainly something that we will continue to pay close attention to. So as a result of this, we issued a health alert that goes to thousands and thousands of doctors across the city. And so my and expectation is that as a result of us issuing [inaudible] as a result of the coverage that this is getting, we will get more cases identified, a Kawasaki’s Illness, as well as Kawasaki-like syndromes in children that are more aggressively infected. And so we will continue to monitor that situation. You know, with regards to the ongoing transmission of COVID-19 and children, I think from the beginning we have said that children are not an exception to this, that they like adults can be infected, they can transmit the illness, but that the learning that has gone on has been that they are not severely affected.

I think one of the new things that we are also learning and I think time will tell how much this will sort of change the clinical course and the public health course is that the strain of the virus that we're actually seeing here in New York is behaving slightly different than the strain that was observed in China. And so hence we're seeing children with Kawasaki's – Kawasaki-likes syndromes. And so the answer is that the preventive measures that have been put in place with regards to closing the schools, social isolation, physical distancing, the face coverings, that the vigilance of around hand hygiene, all of those things are the layered approach that are going to help us when the time comes for safely opening our schools. And I think that we've got a significant amount of time to continue doing that learning, learning from the scientific community and you know, as we've demonstrated to date: as the science becomes available, our guidance needs to adapt to that to ensure that we continue to keep New Yorkers safe.

Mayor: Dr. Katz or Dr. Varma, anything you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: I would just like to kind of emphasize the fact that we have to be really humble in the face of this infection. There's a lot that we're still learning. And there's a lot that we'll continue to learn. The fact that it wasn't seen or reported in Asia, may be something to do with the virus. It may be just that there needed to be a certain number of people that were infected until we saw these things. So I think it really does reinforce number one, the fact that we're learning as other people are learning. So we value the feedback and input that we get from providers and patients and need to always be open to consider new possibilities. And the second is that it just really does emphasize how important the efforts that New Yorkers are taking regarding social distancing. We can't be complacent and say that you know, even though kids generally have a mild illness, of course, if it's your child or yourself that gets that illness and it's severe you're more than just a statistic. It's a real dangerous problem. So I would just emphasize that these points about the need to be humble in the face of new information, constantly accepting and learning it, and also emphasizing that we should never take this virus too lightly.

Mayor: Amen. Dr. Katz, anything to add?

President Katz: No, sir. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you.

All right. We'll conclude today and I just want to go back to the point about when people need help, where they turn. I want everyone to understand this has been a time in our lives, in our history, unlike anything else we've ever been through and I think there've been many, many times where people have been shocked to be dealing with something they never would have expected. There are people right now watching right now who have had to worry about food. I did a conference call with a tele town hall, I should say with thousands and thousands of members of AARP and a man got on the line from Manhattan who clearly explained that he had never had to wonder about food before in his life, but now had to and it was a shock to him. There are people who always had a job until the day that there were no jobs because of this crisis. Folks who felt that they had their life together and now are dealing with fears, anxieties they never could have imagined. This is happening to everyone in one form or another. I want people to not feel alone. I want everyone to know we are here for you. Your city is going to stand by you and support you and help you. That's where I talk about 3-1-1 as the way to think about that, helping hand that's always there. You need a meal call three, one, one. You need to know if it's time to, for example, just what we talked about with the Kawasaki syndrome. You need to talk to a medical person about it and you don't have your own doctor call 3-1-1. We'll connect you to health and hospitals, whatever it is. If you – you have a landlord is talking about evicting you, which is not allowed in the middle of this crisis, call 3-1-1. We'll give you the information you need. We'll get you a lawyer if you need. The bottom line is to think that if you can't make sense of the situation, there's some place to turn. You're not alone. And by the way, if you're dealing with the doubts and the anxiety and the fear or even feeling depressed, it's quite a time in history. It's not at all abnormal for anyone to feel depressed. We have another way to help and that's the helpline that's there 24/7 for free, 8-8-8-NYCWELL, for anyone who wants to talk to a trained counselor.

These are the things we do in New York City for each other, and we will always be there for you, and you should never feel alone – even in the toughest moments, there's always helped there for you. And today I particularly thank everyone at 3-1-1, they don't get a lot of attention, but they are always there for us, always helping people to get what they need, always there with the answers. And that means so much to us every day, but particularly in this crisis. So, everyone, we will get through this together, but one of the ways we've always gotten through in this city is by being there for each other. And we will continue to be there for you.

Thank you very much.

2020-05-06 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. Today, I want to start with a word – and it's not a word that is necessarily one that's so common to life in our city – and the word is, moderation. Moderation sometimes may seem like a bit of a foreign word here in New York City, and I mean that in a way that's actually kind of positive. We, as New Yorkers, we tend to think about big dreams, have big plans and do things with a lot of energy. As New Yorkers, we put our all into everything, and you certainly have seen that in the way that all of you have fought back this virus. It's been outstanding and I'm very, very proud of the people this city. Just like we do everything in a big bold way in normal times people have fought back with all they’ve got in this time, and that's why we're pushing back this disease more every day.

Now, it would be natural for New Yorkers to want a big, fast, bold restart. It's natural for us to want to get back on our feet as quickly as possible. We are not a patient people, and that is in many ways part of what makes us great, but this is a time where we need to start appreciating what's good about the word moderation because for us to get to where we need to go, for us to get to that big strong restart and to get to the recovery which I know we can achieve, we have to do this the smart way. This is a case where a little moderation I think would be good for all of us. One step at a time and let's get it right. So, there's no on off switch here. This has to be done in stages, it has to be done gradually. That doesn't mean doing it any slower than it needs to be done. It means doing it just right. When it's the right time to open up a step, we do it. When we prove it's working, we take the next step, the next step, the next step. And there's a lot of questions we will answer as part of this process and we're going to come to decisions, share them with all of you, and together we're going to make them work.

So, for example, what kind of personal protective equipment will people need in each industry, in each part of our economy as they open up. We want to be very specific about what will protect both the folks who work in each industry, and their customers. We have to be very clear about how we're going to use temperature checks. I think this'll be an important part of the equation, but how are we going to use them? Where are we going to use them? Making sure we have enough thermometers. These are all things that we're planning on right now, and as we get the details ready to go, we're going to be announcing.

How do we make sure that cleaning is handled the right way? It's going to be different depending on what type of work we're talking about, but we want it to be clear and transparent. What kind of cleaning is going to be necessary to sustain the right environment going forward and keep everyone safe? And when someone tests positive, what happens next? Well, we all know, we've been talking about it for weeks now and you're about to see it come alive. The test and trace initiative is all about identifying people and then tracing their contacts, making sure everyone who needs to be isolated is isolated. Everyone who needs to be quarantined is quarantined. We want to be clear how that works, right down to the point where someone shows up at work and at that moment finds out they've got a positive test. What do they do then if they find out the night before, what do they do? We're going to lay it out so people know exactly how to handle each scenario.

Now, we already know a lot from the science. Even though no one knows everything about this disease, we know a lot from the medical community. We know a lot about what has been working and not working in other places of the world. We're going to take the good models, and adapt them for what we do here. But we also know there's no place like New York City and we know that we as a city government, we can take all the best information, and come up with the right game plan, but we need to always run it by the people who actually do the work. The people in each business, the people in each sector of our life in this city and our economy, who understand the day to day life of their workplaces best, and can give us real world advice about what's going to work, what's not going to work, what questions they need answered. We want to help each business back on their feet as quickly as possible. To do that, we have to listen to them to make sure that we answer their questions and hear their view of what they need. So, we are bringing together what we call sector advisory councils from different parts of this city. Both in terms of different parts of our economy, but also people represent all of us, all the different neighborhoods, people of all backgrounds, people of different perspectives, to help us understand what is needed to get this restart right. And it's very, very important that we think about everything that makes up life in this city.

So, we're naming a group of different councils. We're going to start with a group of people that I'm appointing to each. If we think others need to be named, we will, if we think any other group has to be formed, we can do that obviously at any point. But I think this initial group gives us a good start at some of the things we have to work on right away. So, today we are going to roll out six councils and then there will be four more on the way after that. The first of these we'll meet tomorrow. All the others will be meeting in the next few days. By next week everyone will have had their initial meeting, and we'll be up and running. And their views, their questions, their input are going to be used immediately in our restart planning, and then continue on as we build ahead towards recovery. Each group will have between 20 and 40 members. Each group will be led by one or two deputy mayors and heads of different city agencies seeking their input. We'll roll out today the names of the first six councils, and then the additional four as quickly as possible, and I'm going to give you some examples of councils we're bringing together that are particularly crucial for the restart.

So, small business, this advisory council will be led by our Deputy Mayors, Vicki Been and Phil Thompson. Now, small business has really taken it on the chin here, and even though I am glad there's been a very robust federal aid program, we need to make that program work a lot better, and we're pushing hard on the federal government on that front. We need to make sure every single New York City small business that can take advantage of it does. We want to figure out every way we can help. We also have to think about the sheer mechanics of how this restart can work best for small business. What small business are going to need, a lot of small businesses are very worried about their comeback. A lot obviously have much less in the way of resources than bigger businesses. Small business owners have poured their heart and soul into their small businesses. Nothing more personal than creating a small business, making it work, making it an asset to your community, your neighborhood, to this whole city. It's never easy, and on top of that, with all the struggles any small business goes through, and they're going through a lot of struggles before this crisis hit. I talked about a lot in my state of the city address back in February. Now on top of this, this pandemic, which has created even more uncertainty. So, we are going to listen. We're going to come up with plans that will help small businesses back on their feet. We need them. We need them because they’re the heart and soul of our city. We need them because they-re so much of what makes New York City great. We need them because that's actually where a huge percentage of employment is in this city. We need everything. We need our bodegas and corner stores. We need our bars and restaurants. We need our startups. You know, that are such an important part of our emerging tech economy. You name it, we need them all. So, this group will be eyes and ears, idea generators, innovators to help us figure out the next steps.

Obviously, the city has a huge number of larger businesses as well, and we depend on them deeply. The larger businesses will be crucial to jump-starting our economic recovery. We're going to be listening carefully for how we can help them to get up and running as quickly as possible. Certainly, from the employers I'm hearing from, that's their desire to hit the ground running. But also, there's a tremendous understanding we have to do it right, and we have to do it in a way that's safe, and we cannot allow that boomerang to happen that we've talked about. With larger businesses in many cases, thousands of employees, huge logistical considerations. Many have big workplaces that have to be thought of very smartly in terms of keeping everyone safe. This group again will be led by our Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, and bring together leaders of large businesses from around this city, and we welcome their input and we need it.

The next group focuses on labor, and workforce development. Look let's face it, who is hurting most in this crisis? Working people. Who is this city? Why is this city so great? Because of working people. Who makes this city great? Working people. And so many working people have been heroes during this crisis, keeping the city going, and they will be the heroes of the restart and the recovery as well. They need to be heard, and their rights need to be protected, and their needs need to be recognized, and their voices often left out when governments make their decisions, this time we have to get it right, and have working people and those who represent working people at the table from the beginning. I am a big believer in the power of our labor movement. They will be front and center. Their voices will be heard as we build this restart and recovery. This group will be led by First Deputy Mayor, Dean Fuleihan and Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson.

Now, something that makes New York City, New York City. Unquestionably all of those amazing organizations and institutions. All the incredibly talented people in our arts community, our cultural community, in the tourism sector. We're bringing together a group focused on those areas, arts, culture, tourism, because it is the essence of so much that makes New York City great in our hearts, in our souls, and what we are proud of. Obviously also one of the underpinnings of our economy, and one of the pieces that we've been missing deeply has to come back strong, has to come back smart, but this is also a sector where some of the biggest challenges exist, because synonymous with gathering a lot of people together in one place. Some of our arts and cultural venues gather thousands and thousands of people in close quarters. How are we going to go about that in the future? When is the right time to do what? That's what we're going to work through with this group. Strike that balance – safety first, health of people first. Making us fight off this disease at all times is job-one, but we want to bring this sector back strong. We want to figure out the right stages to do that. Deputy Mayor Vicki Been will be leading this group, working with great leaders from these fields.

We have seen faith leaders of every background say safety and health of our people first and they've had to do really tough things, shutting down worship services, but making sure that always it was about people's safety, I commend them and thank them for that. The value has been on human beings and human lives and that's been so powerful and commendable. Now, the practical question now comes into play. How are we going to restart worship services and what's the right way to do it, when and with what conditions? This is something that like the other kinds of larger gatherings has to be approached very smartly, we're going to be listening to the voices of our faith leaders as we develop those plans. And again, everything is going to start to move in the coming days and weeks as we put these pieces together, we can project step-by-step their voices will matter immensely, this group will be led by Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson.

A new sector council that we're adding is in the area of construction and real estate. Big, big part of this City's economy, big part of what makes New York New York as well, and people want to get back to work and we want to get them back to work, but here are a set of challenges as well. Different kinds of work, some which might lend itself better to social distancing, some which might be better in terms of health, others present other types of work in this field presents more challenges, particularly indoor work. We got to figure out what kind of personal protective equipment is needed, what kind of distances needed, what kind of schedule needed to get this right, this group will be led by Deputy Mayor Laura Anglin and Deputy Mayor Vicki Been. So, those are some of the initial councils and we'll be putting out those names for more coming behind that. The good news is this is an example of listening to people who are the experts because they live the life, they do the work, they understand what everyone's going through. We want to hear from them, we want to hear their voices helping us understand what will work, also warning us about what may not work. Everyone has that New York energy, that desire to get going – we're never going to lack that, these folks are also going to help us figure out how to strike that balance and based on real experience and they will be pivotal in the effort to get New York City going again. I want to say in advance a thank you to everyone who's agreed to serve on our advisory councils, we're going to ask a lot of all of you and we are deeply, deeply appreciative for your willingness to serve New York City.

Now, that is what I've talked about is the things we have to do to get ready for the restart and the recovery, but right now as we're doing that work, we're fighting every day against this disease. We're fighting every day to make sure that the people of this City are kept whole and supported no matter what this horrible crisis throws at us, and that means both the health care crisis and the economic crisis talked about many times. Our priorities right now four things, people's health, safety, making sure everyone has food eat, making sure everyone has a roof over their head. Well, in that last category, we all know the challenge this City has faced for decades is homelessness and we also know that homelessness is a problem that has often defied conventional solutions. That's why we started to do some unconventional things over the last few years, nothing more powerful than the HOME-STAT strategy and the more recent vision called the Journey Home, which are all about ending permanent street homelessness through intensive engagement with homeless individuals who live on the streets. We've seen some things start to work, but what we've talked about in recent days was something that clearly had not worked for a long time, which was the reality that many homeless people, particularly in colder months of the year will go into the subways and then many cases spend all night going back and forth on a single subway line. What a horrible situation for everyone starting with that homeless individual, not safe, not right, not right for the people around them on the subway train either. In recent days, some really new and important thinking has emerged because of this crisis, because of the challenges it created because we had to think differently about how to keep mass transit running, how to keep it safe and clean, how to support our essential workers. The Governor and I and our teams and the course, everyone at the MTA, we worked together on this notion of closing the subways in the overnight hours for deep cleaning. And also, as a way to facilitate a different kind of engagement with the homeless to disrupt that pattern that existed for decades and was getting us nowhere. Well, I'll tell you something, last night was the first night that we got to see some evidence of what would happen if the subways were closed in those late-night hours. The deep cleaning was happening, and everyone had to leave the stations including homeless individuals. We only have an initial snapshot cause we're talking about something that just happened hours ago, but the initial snapshot is a powerful and positive one. Last night, 139 homeless individuals out of 252 who were engaged by our outreach workers and by the NYPD officers, specially trained in homeless outreach. 139 individuals agreed to accept support, accept services and come in off the streets, come in out of the subways, this number is extraordinary. First of all, more than half of the people encountered and engaged, agreed to leave the subways to leave the streets and come in and that's an amazing reality to begin with. But we have more importantly never ever seen so much success in a single night before, we've never seen this many people, this higher percentage of people who are living on the streets agree to something different and it's only one night. And we obviously need a lot more information, we need to see how things play out over a longer period of time. But this number is staggering because look consistently what federal surveys have shown is that this City, and I don't say it with anything but sorrow, but the facts have been consistently that the federal annual survey shows somewhere between 35,000 and 4,000 people living on the streets of our City streets and subways combined. If in one night 139 people took a step towards leaving that life and coming into a safe haven or a shelter and starting the process of getting to long-term housing and never going back on the streets, that's an extraordinary number for one night and very encouraging. We have to sustain it in many, many ways, we've got a lot of work to do, but I want to say to everyone involved, to the NYPD to everyone at Social Services and Homeless Services, to the MTA, to the Governor's team. We all work together on this vision and hopes it would create something new and the very first night we see a very hopeful sign. So, we've got to keep at it and hopefully this is beginning of something much bigger and really good for people all over the City and particularly for those who ended up on our streets and our subways who we want to get back to a better life.

Now a related point, I've said I want to always give credit where credit is due when our colleagues in the media point out a problem that we need to fix. I always appreciate getting that kind of heads up so we can do something about it. Juliet Papa from 1010 WINS has been particularly active, pointing out problems, and luckily, we're able to fix these problems. So, yesterday she talked about three encampments of homeless people, I want to make sure all New Yorkers understand, whenever you say the word encampment, it means that there are homeless people who attempt to set up sort of a long-term living arrangement. This is something that used to be common all over the City, absolutely unacceptable, absolutely not right for the homeless people, for their health and safety, not right for the communities they lived in and everyone around, just not right for New York City and yet for decades it was a norm that these encampments existed and were not disrupted. In my administration, we made a decision that from our point of view, it was unacceptable to have it as single encampment anywhere in New York City and they had to be dismantled anytime they're identified. And we've been doing that now for years and it's really caused the encampments to become a rarity, but whenever we see a new one, we immediately take it down because again, it's not fair to anyone and it's not healthy and safe. Juliet identified three encampments yesterday morning, I want to thank the NYPD, I want to thank Homeless Services, I want to thank the Sanitation Department, they have worked together to dismantle those encampments. All the people who were living there have been offered help, which is always the goal, we don't want to see anyone living on the street, we want to always offer help. So, those three conditions have been addressed and anybody in the media, we welcome anytime you see something like that, we want to address it immediately. But all New Yorkers call 3-1-1, if you see anything like that, if you see any place where homeless folks are congregating, we need to know so we can get out there and address it and get people help and get them off the street.

Well, speaking of streets some good news today as we continue to build out the open street’s initiative. This is an initiative city council put this idea out there, it's an idea that now is ready to go into higher gear. Want to thank the city council for their partnership, want to thank the NYPD and Department of Transportation, Department of Parks, all the city agencies that are working together to make this work. And thank God all those city agencies have more and more of their employees coming back who had been sick with COVID-19, the workforces strengthening all the time, so we can do these open streets now with the right kind of enforcement and make them work for everyone. So, over the last few days, including the weekend, we have opened over seven miles and now we're adding two more miles that will be open tomorrow, Thursday. And in this case, these are specific sites that are being managed by local business improvement districts. So, local organizations that do such important work for their communities and are taking responsibility for making sure that everything is set up and monitored and is safe and they'll work very closely of course with the NYPD and DOT. I want to thank the Flat Iron partnership, Garment District BID, that Lower East Side BID, the Downtown Brooklyn partnership, and the Third Avenue BID in the Bronx, all of them stepped forward and are going to ensure that these streets that you can see there on the slide will be open streets, again, starting tomorrow. Also want to announce that one open street that was part of the very original pilot program, this one is now coming back. It's a half mile long, 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights pilot location, now becoming a full-time location for the duration of this crisis. And again, this is the next phase, we're announcing more to come soon as we build this initiative out.

Another thing we are building out all over New York City is the initiative to distribute free face coverings to all New Yorkers who need them. This is getting a very enthusiastic response. People are really thankful to be getting these face coverings and the more they get, the more they're using them, which is exactly what we want. I told you this week earlier that we would be distributing 7.5 million free face coverings and that is really going to make a huge impact. And so people who want to know where they can get them, again, we have a map that identifies locations all over the city. We've added a number of locations since the weekend. All you have to do is go to nyc.gov/facecoverings and you can see any, you can see a number of places where you can get a face covering to help protect everyone, your family, your fellow New Yorkers to help drive back this disease.

Now I like to express my thanks every day. There are so many people doing so many good things in this city. This is the ultimate team effort, 8.6 million people pulling together to fight back this disease. Well today is one of those national days of thanks for a particular group that has been just unbelievably heroic and that is our nurses. Today is National Nurses Day. So, listen, unbelievable, just absolutely breathtaking what the nurses of New York City have done during this crisis. They're heroes in this city; they're heroes to this whole nation. So, I think it's a fair statement if there's any New Yorker out there or any American out there who didn't appreciate our nurses before, well they damn sure well appreciate them now. And that is just and fair that nurses are finally getting the recognition they deserve, but we sure want to do more. I've had the joy of going out to a number of our hospitals, places like Elmhurst Hospital, Kings County Hospital, a number of others, to applaud all the health care workers; take a special appreciation thanking our nurses for what they've done here. And everyone today when you see any health care worker, but particularly since it's their day, when you see a nurse say the word thank you and say it with passion because they deserve all the thanks in the world.

Okay. Now, I'll frame what we do each day. Of course, go over our daily indicators. I'll frame this by saying not every day goes the way we plan it. The big trend is good, but day-to-day we still see fluctuations that are sobering and it's a reminder, do not take our foot off the gas. Do not relax our rules until it's time. Get it right, fight back this disease. Avoid that boomerang because today we see some numbers that reminds us we still have some work to do. So, on the first one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that number has gone up. Look, it's gone up markedly, although thank God against a much smaller base than it used to be. So, from 75 to 109, we got to see that go down obviously. Daily number of people in ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19 - still too large a number overall. The increase is small from 596 to 599. We got to get that number down; that's another key piece of the puzzle. Very good number to go down is the third one, percentage of people testing positive for COVID- 19 citywide – that is down from 22 percent to 15 percent. Obviously, a particularly universal measure – that is a good example. That's good news today. So, more fight ahead. We want to get all these numbers going down together. I am convinced we will, but we got some more work to do.

So this brings me back to that word I started with, moderation. Think of the virus again - give it human characteristics for a moment. This is a virus that seeks out our weaknesses. Talked to you a few days ago about some places, some big cities in Asia that started to open up a little too fast and unfortunately had to clamp back down, in fact add new restrictions. In some cases, it was only one part of the city where there was a problem, but it became a problem for everyone. This disease looks for our weaknesses and tries to exploit them. We can't let that happen. So again, I see all over the city, incredible discipline, incredible adherence to the rules. I want even more. I don't want to let this disease back in the door. So, let's keep fighting because I know we all want that restart. If you want that restart, let's get it right, right now. Let's, and we'll do it in moderation because that's how we make sure that every step we take holds. Then we take the next step. That's the game plan and we'll have a lot more to say on this in the coming days.

Okay, a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

Okay, with that, we are going to turn to colleagues in the media and as always, let me know the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: And just a quick reminder that on the phone we have Deputy Mayor Been, Deputy Mayor Thompson, Dr. Barbot, Commissioner Banks, and Commissioner Trottenberg. And the first question goes to Gloria from New York One, Gloria.

Question: Thank you. Good morning. Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask we heard from Pat Foy this morning who said he believes 2,000 people were removed from the subways. I'm wondering if you have any information on that and out of the folks that you were able to engage can you give us an idea of exactly where those people were sent? What is the resource that the city is using at this time and what are you doing to ensure that they don't go back on the subways when this crisis is over?

Mayor: Got it.

Question: My second question

Mayor: Gloria, wait a minute. Wait a minute, timeout. Again, we're going to keep – guys, I really need everyone to understand this. Gloria, that's a multipart question. We're going to stay there with that, respectfully. We got this rule where we're trying to give as many people an opportunity in the time we have. There's a lot going on that I need to get back to every day. So, what I meant, I originally said to each journalist, one question. We decided to give people another question. They're turning into three, four, or five-part questions. We can't do that. So, let's make it clear. I'm going to make sure we answer what you just asked - great multi-part question. We're going to answer that and I'm going to ask your colleagues who follow to please do really literally one or two questions. And if people can't do that, then we're going to have to change the format to make it even simpler because we just need to be fair to everyone. I want to get to as many people as possible. So, I'm going to start and then turn to Steve Banks.

Gloria, from what I can see, and I want to make sure we're speaking the right language here about what's going on. First of all, again, very thankful for the collaboration with the state and the MTA. I think something very important is happening. Steve will be able to tell you everything we're doing once people do agree to accept services, because this is something that's now been built over three years – the HOME-STAT initiative. It's really, you know, a pretty well- oiled machine now with great results. Several thousand people have come in off the streets and stayed in and not come back to the streets. So, Steve will talk to you about what we do with people to make sure that they receive those services and stay-in to the maximum extent possible. But to the number, I want to caution that again, the federal government's annual study that's been going on for a long, long time says the total number of homeless people in New York City, on the streets, on the subways, all five boroughs, is somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000. That number has been pretty steady in recent years. In the really cold months not like now, but the more the winter months, you do see a lot more people go into the subways. Steve will give you his view. He's literally one of the leading experts on homelessness, not only in New York City, in the United States of America, and he's been at it for about 30 years. When I hear that number, I respect Pat Foye a lot. I like him and respect him; we've worked closely together. I don't understand how that number could be accurate given what we know of homelessness in the city and this time of year. It's hard for me to imagine that many people who are actually street homeless. Now, that's [inaudible] different from people who might live in a shelter or people who maybe appear to be homeless, but may not be homeless, but that number surprises me is all I'll say. But Steve, you're the, you're the expert. Tell us what you think of that.

I know he's out there. Steve, can you hear me? Alright.

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: Can you hear me now?

Mayor: There you go.

Commissioner Banks: You hear me now? Okay. I mean, I can tell you what we saw last night out in the field and the platforms. You know, we were down at World Trade Center and other locations working with the staff. We encountered just north of 250 people and in about 60 percent of them accepted services and came inside. And, Gloria, we have shelters and safe havens and we're providing the same services to the people last night that have enabled us to bring, you know, 2,500 people off the street who remained off the street, and that's really the key metric. And, you know, look, some people may return, but we'll be back every night, offering that helping hand to bring them off the streets with the same success that we've had over a period of time, bringing lots of people off of remain off the streets – more than 2,500. But I also want to put the numbers in context, and Pat Foye and the MTA have very collaborative with us. We appreciate the collaboration with NYPD and our social services not-for-profit staff. But, you know, half the people that you see in the subways are transient, meaning we'll see them one or two nights and then not see them again. And last night was really a focus on the people that are long-term on the subways. And so, that's why I think the success of last night is just preliminary, it's only one night – about bringing in 139 people is really what we're focused on. The human beings that are in the subways and had been there for a long period of time, as opposed to the people that may be there one or two nights and we never see them again. And then, that's the perception that there's lots of people there for long periods of time. Actually, our focus is on the people that are really there a long period of time and those are the people that were able to bring in last night.

Mayor: Yeah. And, Steve, just, if you could take one more step in that answer, I think we all want to understand a little bit better. Again, hearing an estimate of several thousand, my question is, from your experience, is it conceivable that, that could all be street homeless folks or do you assume that some combination of people that is street homeless and other kinds of folks?

Commissioner Banks: I think, again, experience tells you that people end up on the streets for brief periods of time or are perceived to be on the streets for different periods of time for a whole range of economic reasons, but they're not the people that you see every day. And those are the people that you see every day that we're focused on in the City's plans. And so, someone who might be panhandling, for example, may well have a home. I think that people make a lot of assumptions when they see people and assume that they don't have a roof over their heads. What we're doing with our social services staff is actually determining, through our by-name list, which individual – individual by individual – needs our services and who we can bring inside. And, you know, sometimes this all gets lost in large numbers. At the end of the day it's about human beings. And on a case by case basis, that's who we were able to bring in last night and we'll keep doing that.

Moderator: Next is Marcia from CBS-2. Marcia?

Question: Good morning. Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Marcia, how are you?

Question: Good. My first question has to do with social distancing enforcement. As you're well aware, I'm sure, Jumaane Williams and Eric Adams say the NYPD enforcement of social distancing has shown racial disparities, that the enforcement has been subjective and selective. And, of course, they want you to release data. I wonder your take on it and if you've given any instructions to the NYPD in terms of guidelines for who gets approached and who gets a summons. And my second question has to do with the homeless again. Homeless advocates are saying that you're taking homeless people off the subway, but not providing them with safe alternatives. Your response to that?

Mayor: Thank you, Marcia. No, I just respectfully disagree profoundly with those advocates. I appreciate their work, but, again, you know, Steve Banks, leading our efforts to help the homeless, one of the premier advocates for the homeless, you know, for decades in the city, in this country, and what Steve has created with his team and with all the amazing nonprofit organizations that do the outreach is something absolutely unprecedented in the history of the city. And it is compassionate and decent and it's about helping homeless folks get to a Safe Haven or a shelter that works for them. We've been adding so many more spaces in places that homeless people – you know, where we find them, where they need to be so that we have places that work for them. We provide medical care, food, substance abuse support, you know, in terms of programs to get them off substances, mental health services. It's extraordinarily compassionate and we know it's effective because over 2,000 people have come in and not gone back to the streets. And I would think the advocates would want to applaud and support something that is ending street homelessness, something that's never been done in the city before. And we put a huge amount of resources into it and is clearly working. And this new opportunity because of the collaboration with the MTA I think is going to open the door wider for getting even more people off the streets.

On the question of the NYPD, I've been in touch with both Borough President Eric Adams and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. We've had very constructive conversations. I understand the concern 100 percent. I want to see fair and equal policing everywhere. That's what we've been devoted to now for over six years, changing the nature of policing in New York City to make it focused on neighborhood policing and being respectful and responsive to every community and more deeply connected to every community. And I think it is working. I think the challenge we all have with this pandemic is we're learning new ways and new approaches. We’ll have a lot more to say on how we're going to refine our approach, particularly with the warmer months, but the message NYPD is be consistent across all communities, you know, communicate with people as always under neighborhood policing, help people to understand this is about their own health and safety and their family. And the vast majority of people, Marcia, are accepting these rules and following these rules. It's actually been quite rare that the NYPD or any other agency encounter as much resistance. The vast majority of New Yorkers get it and they're living this way. And sometimes they need to be reminded or sometimes they need to be offered a face covering, but they accept and they act accordingly. We definitely want to get the data out, so we will make sure the NYPD gets the data out. It's going to show you where there's been, for example, summonses. But remember, there hasn't been a need to do a lot of summonses in the last two months for social distancing – that's a good thing. But definitely that transparency will be provided.

Moderator: Matt from Newsday is up next. Matt?

Question: Hey, good morning, Mayor. Two questions. First, this morning on TV you said that localities, including New York, are “either acting on furloughs and layoffs or preparing for furloughs and layoffs.” How many people are you preparing to furlough or cut? And secondly, absent of crime, that two people who live together have a right to be in public without practicing social distancing – yes or no?

Mayor: So, Matt, on the social distancing issue, the way I've understood it from the beginning, and Dr. Barbot can comment on this too, that if people are already entirely exposed to each other all day long in their household, social distancing is a different concept than it is for folks who are not exposed to each other. If you're already in constant contact with someone, it does not require the same approach as if two people who do not live under the same household – same roof, I should say – come in contact. So, our focus and enforcement is to make sure, first and foremost, there's not large gatherings – not any kind of gathering; second, that social distance is recognized; third, that people have face coverings on – in that order.

On the question of furloughs and layoffs, what I said this morning is I've been talking to mayors all over the country – Republican and Democrat, both – some of them already announced layoffs. Some of them already announced furloughs. Some are planning to, every one of us has to start looking at that possibility if we don't have any money. We have a budget coming up in June. I'm not here to project anything while we're in the middle of fighting for the stimulus funding, because that's what would get us out of this mess, and that's what New York City deserves. That's what every city and state that's suffering deserves, is stimulus funding that makes us whole, that replaces all the loss revenue, that allows us to retain our full workforce, ensure that public services are being provided, basic services so we can get on with a restart and recovery. That's what I'm doing right now. I've been talking nonstop to the members of our Congressional delegation – spoke to Speaker Pelosi on Sunday. We need to get that stimulus done so that people don't have to experience furloughs and layoffs. If it doesn't happen and we're missing $7.4 billion in revenue, then all options are on the table. But it's not time to talk about specifics yet.

Moderator: Erin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. On the question of the subway, the homeless people on the subway – so, if I understand correctly, these folks, if they accept your offer being sent to shelters, is there any consideration of offering them the hotel rooms? You know, if that might be safer than the [inaudible] shelters?

Mayor: Well, again, I'm going to turn to Commissioner Banks, but I want to note that over these last years – this is another thing that didn't get a lot of attention and it really should have, so I want to bring it to light now. For decades, there was a bad division of labor, I think, in this city where shelters that needed the positive influence of the NYPD didn't have it. And some years ago, we made the decision – and I really want to thank the NYPD for seeing how important this was – to have the NYPD go into shelters, supervise the security, train the staff, and have a regular presence in our shelter system. That's been tremendously helpful in terms of making shelters safer. On top of that, we really invested intensely in the Safe Havens, which are much smaller facilities. So, I think we have to keep in mind that the realities of our shelter system are different than what they were a few years ago, different also because we have so many more Safe Havens. And then you have to think about the individual and what they need. Steve can speak about it more eloquently than me, but, depending on each individual, they need certain services and supports. Some people could fit a hotel run fine, others may not and may need a different kind of supervision and support. So, we're tailoring it to each. We have hotel rooms available whenever we need them now, but the decision I think becomes very case by case. Steve, why don't you jump in?

Commissioner Banks: If I could just add to that. I think it's important to understand the range of tools we now have to try to meet people where they are and bring – help people come in from the streets. In terms of our overall shelter system, right now, about 7,000 of the single adults out of the 17,000 single adults are actually in commercial hotel rooms as part of some initiatives that proceeded COVID-19 and some that were put in place since COVID-19. And we're continuing to move people out of our single adult [inaudible] shelters into hotel rooms, that will continue. So, coming into our regular shelters, there are pathways to get into the commercial hotel rooms that we're bringing online literally every day. In terms of the tools that we have to bring people in from the streets in addition to our traditional shelters, with now the availability of commercial hotel rooms through that system, we also have the Safe Haven beds and the stabilization beds, some of which are in hotels now that have enabled us to bring the people in off the streets over the past several years. And people are accepting those beds every night, that we're bringing people in from the streets. And I think we announced a week ago that, even in the middle of the pandemic, we're opening up another 200 beds in the Safe Havens as, again, a pathway off the streets for human beings. So, there are a range of options that our shelter system now has, some of which we didn't have before. And that we're using those – all those tools to try to bring people in from the streets.

Moderator: Debralee from Manhattan Times-Bronx Free Press is up next. Debralee?

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Debralee. How are you doing?

Question: I'm well, thank you. I wanted to follow up, Mr. Mayor – and actually I'm not sure if Commissioner Shea is on, but I wanted to follow up on this conversation about the enforcement on social distancing, specifically about the fact that you've got both PBA President Pat Lynch and other thing that there's just not enough clarity around the guidance, that there isn't really a sense of what it is that police officers are supposed to be doing when they approach people who they feel are in violation of social distancing guidelines. Moreover, others are saying that this is just another opportunity for subjective policing and are concerned that this is going to become, particularly as warmer monster approach, that it’s going to become just another opportunity for mistakes. Forgive me. That said, can you speak to the fact that others are calling for other agencies and other individuals to be involved in this other than police officers? That this is in fact not a policing conversation, but particularly, as it deepens, and you've got more people out in the streets, that this should become a citywide conversation across other agencies. And then finally, I wanted to ask Commissioner Barbot, with wellness visits being postponed by parents who are concerned about visiting doctors, what guidance is the City offering for parents who want to make sure that their children are vaccinated on time and are receiving the – receiving the visit that they need in light of the fact that there is now Kawasaki concerns and also that we are asking people not to travel and visit doctors unless they absolutely need to.

Mayor: So, I'm going to let Dr. Barbot answer that and I'll double back to the policing answer, but just to say, as we lead into Dr. Barbot, I've been very struck already, Debralee, by visits to a couple of our Health + Hospitals clinics, one in Morrisania in the South Bronx, the other in Coney Island, that the way they are reporting so much more use of telemedicine in this crisis and that it's actually getting everyone more used to using it, and lot of the patients, a lot of the people who go the clinic are getting more and more accustomed and more and more comfortable with that option. So, even as we're navigating the question of people limiting travel or not being willing to go out, I do think we're seeing more and more use of telemedicine in a helpful way and it's something we clearly want to deepen in our efforts as well. We’ll more to say on that soon. But in terms of how to advise parents, Commissioner Barbot, jump in, and then I'll come back on the other question.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Certainly, Mr. Mayor. And, Debralee, thank you for the question, because I think it's an incredibly important one. You know, when we hear new information that is potentially scary for parents, like something like Kawasaki’s or Kawasaki’s-like syndrome, it can make parents more hesitant or more concerned about what they should be doing for their children. And so, I want to just clarify that even though we are hearing about Kawasaki more and more, it still remains a relatively rare condition, and we want to draw attention to it because during this time it can be confused with other things and we don't want to lose time in terms of children getting access to treatment that can be definitive and avoid long-term consequences. In addition, we want to make sure that not only parents, but New Yorkers in general know that health care is open for business, meaning that we want New Yorkers to seek prepositions that they may have that they've had to put off seeking care for because maybe their doctors weren't open. And, as the Mayor said, it doesn't necessarily mean going to the office in person, but it could mean having telephonic access. It could be a whole host of ways in which medical practices are now objecting to social distancing and how they continue to see patients and ensure that they have ongoing care. And so, that also extends to children going to their pediatricians to get their necessary vaccinations. We want parents to continue taking children to their pediatricians ensuring that they have, you know, the proper face coverings when they go. We are working clinical practices to make sure that they are also open and available to provide patients with necessary vaccinations. I know that H + H is very much actively reaching out to patients to make sure that parents know that they should be bringing their children and to get their vaccinations as scheduled, because we don't want this situation to then lead to children getting infections or conditions that are vaccine preventable. So, I think it's a really important question and that opportunity for us to get out the message that medicine is open for business and that practices are seeing patients for things other than COVID and that there are ways to conduct these visits that don't always need an in-person visit.

Moderator: Jeff Mays from the New York Times is up next, Jeff?

Question: Yes. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. You didn't really answer the first part of Debralee's question about –

Mayor: Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Let me – Jeff, hold up. I meant to and I got caught up in other things here. My apology and then we'll come back to your question. Yes, Debralee on the previous – so look again, we are dealing with something that is entirely new still to all of us. It's going to take time to get it as good as it should be, but I think the core realities are still strong, meaning we have for years now built up a philosophy of neighborhood policing. We have a whole new generation of police officers who have been trained in this. All the entire force has been trained in this philosophy in de-escalation. I think we've seen two months now of the NYPD engaging the people of this city in the context of the coronavirus. And I have to say, and I obviously every day am listening for what's working and what's not. We've seen a couple of really unfortunate and inappropriate instances, but only in my view, a very small number compared to the vast number of interactions between our officers and our communities that have gone the right way. And I want to keep things in perspective. Our officers are trying to understand how to be effective in this new reality, this pandemic. We need to do more to create clear, simple protocols and make sure that our supervisors are supporting them. We also have to remember that for weeks we had the NYPD missing a huge percentage of its officers because of the disease. We're now coming into a situation where the force coming back to its normal levels. We're getting more and more experienced with what works, what doesn't work in terms of trying to figure out the right kind of enforcement. Again, the hierarchy I present is were most concerned about stopping of larger gatherings.

That's where the most danger is and then enforcing social distancing on a more individual level and then the face coverings and most people, this is the bottom line and I've checked this many times over with community leaders and with the NYPD regularly. Most people when asked to create more distance from around the people around them, or are asked to put on a face covering, they're doing it. So, we're not having overall a compliance problem. We do need to give clear guidance. And to the other part of your point, Debralee, we definitely want to bring community leaders and community organizations much more deeply into this. Previously when the virus was on a constant upswing, that wasn't our focus, obviously. Now that we're getting some relief, it's something we can do more and more. And obviously with the warmer weather it makes sense to do it more and more. So, I have more to say on that in the coming days as well.

Moderator: Jeff?

Mayor: Jeff?

Question: Thanks. Just following up on that question just given the interactions we've seen between police and enforcement of the sort of individual social distancing, I mean, do you think that there's a benefit to that enforcement or does it outweigh the risk of these negative interactions you've seen police without masks and some of these encounters. And then secondly on the subway, what are your expectations about a return to 24-hour service? Do you have any sort of timeline and do you do you expect that 24-hour service will eventually return?

Mayor: Yes, Jeff, absolutely. There's a conversation the governor and I had as part of the decision to move to the overnight cleaning. He was clear. I was clear. We were totally unified, that we will return to 24-hour service. Obviously the state runs the MTA, but this was something to me was prerequisite to the city agreeing to this plan and agreeing to the, you know, putting the resources into it that we are, is we want to know that when the crisis was over, we would resume 24-hour service. I think the answer to your question is when the crisis is over and that will be determined by our indicators that will be determined by what happens with this disease. Look, my general hope is that we're going to see more and more normalcy through the next few months with particularly this very aggressive test and trace approach and that it'll get better with each month. And when we get to September, particularly with the beginning of school, I want the beginning of school to happen fully and safely. And that is one of those things I think will signal that New York City is back in a really strong way. I want to get us there again, that moderation approach to get us there. So, I'm not going to be surprised if the overnight cleaning goes on for months because health dynamics require it. But my hope is it's a matter of months. And then we get to a situation where we can go back to the 24-hour service.

On the question of police officers. I've had this conversation with Commissioner Shea. It's absolutely essential that officers wear masks. The idea is of course for their role that they play in our society, it is, everyone looks to them for guidance. Everyone looks to them as an example. We want people wearing masks when they're outside and coming in contact with people. Look the rules clear if you're outside and you're not coming in contact with anyone, that's a situation where you don't, are not required to wear a mask. But I think it's safe to say police officers are in contact with people very, very regularly. And so, the notion of wearing the mask regularly is the right thing to do. And again, I am watching really closely what are we seeing with interactions overall across now two months – the rules have evolved over two months, but the reality of dealing with the coronavirus and the police's role in the coronavirus crisis over two months, we've seen very few incidents. People say, oh, it's getting warmer. Be careful. Be worried about that.

I'll tell you, Jeff, I, from the very beginning of the administration, people have warned me about the warmer months and I think it's something we take seriously. I know I take it seriously, but I don't want to overrate it either because the world has changed a lot of ways before this pandemic. The reality of policing in this city has changed profoundly. The reality of the city has changed profoundly. The summers are not what they used to be in the city. I remember when summer was equated with just vast amounts of crime and violence and tension between communities and tension between communities and police. That has not been the case in recent years. In the city and the pandemic cuts both ways. It has changed a clearly has created a lot of frustration and challenges. It's also changed people's lifestyles profoundly and it's caused a lot more unity, I think, a lot more purposefulness about what can out for each other – a lot fewer people on the street to be policed. So no, I don't think it's, you know, a simple equation that says, oh, we're inevitably going in one direction. I think we have to give clear guidance to our officers and make adjustments and we will do that. But I think the vast majority of interactions between our police and our community are positive and effective and, and I have faith that will continue to be the case.

Moderator: Kathleen, from Patch is up next, Kathleen?

Question: Thank you Mr. Mayor and everyone. I was just wondering if you had a response to the Comptroller's Office report yesterday estimating as many as 900,000 people lose their jobs this quarter. And since my second question was already asked, could I seed it back to Gloria for hers?

Mayor: That’s an inventive approach, but I'm not going to get into that today. I think if Gloria had sent you the question you wanted to ask it, that's great, but we're not going to bring her back on the line. So, if you have a second question, ask it now, Kathleen.

Question: Oh, that's okay. That's what I've got. If you could just focus on the report, I would greatly appreciate it.

Mayor: Great. So, Kathleen, look, it's a staggering number. I mean, think about this in human terms. You know, that's so many families that now are left in doubt for their future. That's so many people who are not going to have money for the basics in their lives. There's so much pain that comes with that. When you hear that number, it's just unbelievable. I appreciate that the Comptroller did this report. It is sobering. Look, we have been preparing for this reality now for the last two months. That's why, you know, just earlier this week I said, we are now ramping up our food program to be able to feed a million people a day. I mean, think about that. A million meals a day.

Unfortunately, we've entered a whole new reality and this certainly puts a point on the human suffering happening in this city, but it also puts a profound point on why we need federal aid and we need it quickly because the situation is getting worse all the time. And because people are suffering, because the ability of the city to reach people is getting strained where we're going to use everything we have, but it's getting strained every additional time someone loses their job, it's more and more need that gets created. So, I take that number very seriously. We're going to build everything we do on the assumption that it's that number and could even get worse. We're going to be there for every New Yorker. As I said, the focus will be health, safety, food and shelter. That's where we're going to keep our focus all time for whatever the number of unemployed people becomes. But if ever there was evidence why the federal government needs to step in now, I mean, we've literally not seen anything like it in our lifetimes. This many people becoming unemployed this quickly. So, we need a much bigger response to be able to really protect people going forward.

Moderator: Anna from the Daily News is up next. Anna?

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. I like your haircut, looks nice.

Mayor: Thank you Anna.

Question: I just wanted to get an update. How many coronavirus tests are being conducted in New York City today on average? Last week when I checked in, it was about 14,000. We obviously need tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a day. What are we at?

Mayor: We're in that same 13,000-14,000 range the last I checked a day or two ago. We will keep updating on a regular basis and we need a breakthrough, meaning we need the federal government to come in with a real sea change in terms of lab capacity because Anna, what we're seeing right now – so we're around, let's say we're around 13,000. The fact is we would like to be initially, you know, tens of thousands a day. I want to get to 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 a day as quickly as possible. We'd love to get higher than that. Now the antibody testing is coming into play now more and more and that's certainly helpful. So the numbers that you and I are talking about, the PCR test, the diagnostic test, which still I think are the single most valuable tool we have in a test and trace program, but even with the imperfections of antibody testing, we're going to use that information. It's going to contribute to what we do in terms of testing, tracing, isolating, quarantining, making decisions about how individuals can engage their workplace or not. It's another piece of evidence we're going to use. We obviously started without even having any testing and we had to base things on people's symptoms.

That's not the whole story, but that's another piece of evidence we can work with. But to get these tests numbers up really closer to where we want to be, we've got to get a lot more lab capacity. We now have the self-swab test approach, which is easier and faster, but we need that lab capacity whether we're doing self-swab or test kit, whatever it is, we need the lab capacity to really increase and that's what we're working on right now. So I am very hopeful in the coming days when we pull all these strands together, we're going to be able to put up real numbers that will allow us to do the test and trace we need to, that would really have a transcendent impact, but there's definitely more work to do on the lab front.

Moderator: Gersh from Streetsblog is up next. Gersh?

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Gersh. How are you?

Question: I’m doing great. I appreciate that. Listen, two quick questions. The new Open Streets that you just announced are just almost entirely all of them being overseen by business groups. As you know, the City's effort to get a hundred miles will involve community groups and residents to create the open space under guidelines asking for some pretty serious commitments in terms of staffing and monitoring the space. Today's announcement reveals a potential problem with that. Will the only communities that get this vitally important Open Streets program be those that have Business Improvement Districts or neighborhood associations that happen to have the luxury of not being completely preoccupied by matters of life and death for essential workers in those communities? And just the quick question is, I noticed you finally decided to include transportation is one of your recovery panels. I'd like to know about that.

Mayor: Sure. On the first point, Gersh – so, no, we're not, this is a beginning. We expect to be in every kind of community. In fact, you'll remember that when the idea first came up, the central concern was how do we do it safely? Will we have the right kind of enforcement; will we have the right kind of structures? As we have been working with this model, we're finding different ways to get it done that we believe are safe and come with structure. So I really want to emphasize my concern from the beginning was needing structure, needing enforcement, needing safety. I think as we're getting deeper and deeper into it, we're finding more and more ways of doing that. And that's great. We also said from the beginning, this had to be something that focused on where the need was greatest, where this kind of approach would benefit the most, and when we worked with the City Council on the recent package, one of the strands was focus on communities that have been hit by the disease hardest. Another of course focus on the areas around parks and in parks where the demand was growing with the warmer weather. So, these examples you see today are just the beginning. You're going to see these, kind of, open streets in all five boroughs more and more, and you're going to see different kinds of organizations that have the capacity to help make them work and give them real structure joining into it. We'll announce them as they come together.

In terms of the advisory panel, and you raised a couple of good points in some of your colleagues and the media did too, about what is going to mean for the future to come back differently in this city in terms of issues of transportation. When we put together the panels initially, we were thinking about the most immediate restart issues and obviously some of the issues around transportation are going to be dictated by larger realities that are different than what's happening, for example, with small business. A certain amount of our transportation system clearly has – a lot of our transportation system has continued unabated because it had to. So, it's a different reality. It's not the same kind of level of restart as, for example, what we're going through with small business, but we put the group together because even though it's less about the restart, it's very, very important to what happens in the months thereafter. And we want to start planning now and again, some of the questions – I want to thank you, Gersh, and I want to thank your colleagues that raised this point about is this an inflection point, is this a moment to rethink how we get away from too much dependence on cars? And the answer is yes. We need to see this as a transformational moment, even with all the pain, even with all the challenges, we are not going to bring New York City back the way it was. We're going to bring it back in some ways that are different and better. And because we're in a transformational moment, we can rethink some things and do them very differently.

So, what I want to see from this group, again, less about the immediate restart decisions we have to make in the coming weeks, more about how we think about the months and years ahead. I want ideas on how we maximize mass transit, minimize use of the automobile, think about this in terms of fighting global warming and pollution. Think about this in terms of fighting congestion. Think about in terms of equity for communities and really help us take a big jump forward by the end of this administration in terms of how we approach issues of transportation with an eye on the future.

Moderator: Last two, Julia from The Post. Julia.

Question: Hey, good morning, two separate questions for you, Mr. Mayor. One is a follow-up on the furloughs and layoffs, are you willing to sacrifice first responders, teachers and health care workers without first making spending cuts identified by Comptroller Stringer, programs that do not have proven results such as Thrive NYC and unnecessary DOE contracts? And then my second question is a follow-up to what you said on TV this morning about nursing homes. You said that some COVID patients should go back to the facilities because that's where they're known. But how does that make sense if you're also exposing other vulnerable elderly residents to the disease? Shouldn't there be alternative facilities where they can go and get good care to help prevent the spread of the virus?

Mayor: So, Julia, as I've talked to our health care leaders, there has been a recognition that this is a complex question, it’s not a simple question of saying that the best thing for a senior is always the send them into a hospital setting. What I think I would say to take your question and broaden it further, is we need some real serious changes in the approach to nursing homes. Although the city doesn't have a direct role in nursing homes, and because I don't experience these issues because we don't regulate the nursing homes, what I'm seeing on a human level is unacceptable and obviously the city has trying in every way we can to help the nursing homes in the last two months to get them a lot of PPEs and provide whatever support we can. But I think this crisis has pointing out that we need a different and better approach to nursing homes going forward. A lot of them are for-profit enterprises. If that model is going to be continued, it's obviously going to need more rigorous standards going forward, but on the specific question of where should a senior be if God forbid they contract COVID, first of all, a doctor has to decide that the second of all, I do understand that you have to think about the totality of that senior’s life and for many seniors in nursing homes to be away from that place could be problematic and a whole host of other ways. I think the question is can the nursing home support that individual while keeping everyone else safe? If they can, that's a viable option. If they can't, of course the seniors should not be there, but I think it's up to doctors and it's about each individual case.

On the second point, we're going to just disagree from the beginning, respectfully and I respect the Comptroller, don't agree with him on some things as well as to which initiatives are having which impact on people. Anything that's about health and safety as a priority, whether it's physical health, mental health. We’re focused on health. We’re focused on safety. We’re focused on shelter, and we're focused on food right now. So, I'm going to look at the entire budget and for the duration of this crisis through that prism. I said earlier, I'm not going to start projecting what we have to do in terms of the budget. I'm saying that if we are missing $7.5 billion now and then add the projections that the Comptroller just gave us on unemployment, which means horrible things for working people and families, but also means there'll be less and less revenue on top of that for the city. If our revenue picture continues to get worse and worse, not just for the next Fiscal Year, for the one after that too. If we're threatened with potential cuts from the State level because the State has run out of money, we're going to have to do very, very painful things and every option will be on the table.

The way to avert that, the right way to do it, the fair way to do it, is for the federal government to step in and bail out cities and states all over the country, in every part of the country that is hurting. Every place that's lost revenue, not any fault of their own, deserves to see that revenue replaced. The federal government can do it. I keep saying they found $58 billion effortlessly for the airline industry, why are they not helping America’s cities and states get back on their feet? So that's what we're going to fight for. I'm going to remain hopeful in that fight because I think there's a groundswell of support including from Republican governors and mayors. That's the way to solve this problem. I'm not going to theorize. I'm going to say let's go solve the problem in Washington, otherwise any and all options will be on the table.

Moderator: Last question goes to Dave from ABC-7. Dave.

Question: Hey Mayor, I just wanted to ask you two quick things, so if I could please. I didn't quite understand what you, and if Steve Banks wants to clarify or you, the difference between Pat Foye’s number of the number of homeless people on the subway this morning and what your all's tally is? The differences, and I think Steve used the word transient, if they were just on the subway catching a ride, hanging out, they are not counted in your tally but they are in Pat’s, and what you're saying is upon interviewing them that you determined that they are long-term basically living on the subway. And my really quick question to you Mayor is I just wanted to get your thoughts on the president announcing yesterday that the white house coronavirus task force is going to be going away sometime around Memorial Day? It seems kind of early.

Mayor: Yeah, Dave truer words ain't never been spoken. It sure as hell does seem kind of early. I don't understand it. And Memorial Day is right around the corner. I do not understand what he's thinking. Dave, I checked this morning and my understanding is that there are several states where the numbers are increasing markedly, big states. This is – we are not out of the woods by any stretch of imagination. So, thank God things are getting better in New York City, but we still have a long way to go. That fear of the boomerang is something everyone should be having on their minds until you are sure this disease has been fought back down to the point where we call low level transmission, where there's so few cases you can trace every single one in all their contacts, until that point, no one should breathe easy and this isn't a place where the number of cases are going down.

If you're in – if you've got parts of the country a number of cases are going up, that's a profound danger to the people in those places and even more to the rest of the country that it's going to start to spread elsewhere. So, this is far from over. I do not understand what he's thinking. He should not close down that taskforce. He should treat this as the national emergency it is. President needs to understand the coronavirus is not going away right away, no matter how much you wish it was. He needs to understand that the thing he could do to actually fight the coronavirus would be to get us all testing and he still hasn't done it, and needs to understand if he wants a restart and a recovery, he needs to help the cities and states. And as of last night, he is more interested in helping rich people get a break on their capital gains tax than he is in providing relief to New York City and other cities and states around the country. So, I think he is losing touch with the reality and that is very, very dangerous.

On the number of homeless, it's a good – I'm glad you asked the clarification, Dave. I'm going to say it and then Steve can join in again as one of the leading experts anywhere. We know again from annual studies that the number of permanently homeless people, which I think when people are talking about homeless, they're thinking about the street homeless, the person who's on the corner for months or years on end, the personal lives in the subway, and that's a thank God, many fewer people than I think people imagine. But still way too many, and we have to end that phenomenon once and for all, versus a lot of people you see panhandling, they're actually not homeless. They have a home there, they live in a shelter, not homeless in the sense of street homeless, have no place that they go to at night. So, I think there's some confusion sometimes on which is which. We have a very specific strategy for folks who are permanently street homeless versus someone is out on the street part of the day, but has somewhere to go at night. And that number 2,000 just doesn't sound possible in terms of talking about permanently homeless people. So, Steve, again, I'm trying to as a layman explain it. You can do it better than me, but could you finish out that answer?

Commissioner Banks: Yeah, I would just add to that, that the people that we engaged last night were the people that we found in the subway. You know, Pat's a great partner. We work with him all throughout the year, and I think that one of the key realities here is that this work isn't just work we did last night. So, we know the people that are there on a long-term basis and we've been working to bring them off and we've had success on a human being by human being basis, and that's what last night showed as well. But that much larger number is often referenced for, you know, one night the coldest – usually a cold night in January. Sometimes it's warmer and more people in the streets rather than subways or vice versa. But the numbers that we engaged last night with the numbers that we saw last night, as opposed to as the Mayor said, that transient that – that people that, that have somewhere to go that may be seen much or twice and then not again, as opposed to the person you see all the time, and that's the person we're really working very hard to bring in and last night we had success, much more to do in order to really change lives.

Mayor: Yeah, and Dave, I mean look, it's way too early to tell. Obviously, we'll be at this for months cause again, I assume this period of having the subways closed at night for the cleaning will go on, you know, for months. But I mean if it's anything like what we saw last night in terms of the ability to reach people and actually change their lives and potentially get them off the streets for good, this could have a really transcendent long-term effect on this city. If you're talking about the worst part of homelessness is the folks who are permanently street homeless, living in the streets, living in the subways or some combination, but that, you know, at 8.6 million people that 3,000 or 4,000 people at any given point in time or living on our streets, it is one of the most painful things in the city. It's one of the things that bothers us the most morally in so many ways. We believe we can break that, change that once and for all, break that cycle and actually get these people to homes, not living on the street, living in a home. And we've seen real progress in that direction. But last night showed us something we've never been able to see before in history because we've never had a single night where all of the stations were closed for cleaning before. And if those numbers are at all an indicator where we're going, this could be the beginning of something very positive in terms of helping the homeless and improving life in this city overall. So I'm very, very encouraged by what I see.

Let me close it down now and just say to everyone that, and as we come back to that word moderation, I think it's a positive word in this case because it means you're going to get it right. It's a positive word because it means when we make the move to begin reopening, we're going to feel real confident about it. Then we make the next move, we're going to feel confident about that and so on and so on. We're bringing in the voices a lot of folks who bring tremendous expertise to help us make these decisions the right way, but what's going to guide us is the facts, the science and the sureness that when we do something, we really know it's backed up by some rigorous analysis and then when we do it, we watch to see how it's working and confirm it's working and then take the next step. If we can do that right and avoid that boomerang, the two points go together obviously, imagine how good it will feel to get to the point where we're really restarting and we don't have to be looking over our shoulder all the time, wondering if we left a door open for this disease. I want people to have confidence. I want people to feel the comfort that when we make these moves that are right moves and the folks we're bringing together to advise us who are going to help us a lot, and the next few days we'll lay it out more and more of the thinking coming out of these groups so people can literally start to visualize what the restart looks like and how we're going to make it safe and secure for everyone.

Thank you very much, everybody.

2020-05-07 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. This morning, I want to talk about something that really is quintessentially New York. Something that really is the spirit of this place and who we are, and I can summarize it with a simple sentence – New Yorkers do not lack for confidence. We are a people who believe in ourselves. We believe in our city. We have a certain energy in a certain spirit that is renowned all over this world and we need that now more than ever. That essence of who we are is what's going to see us through this fight. I'll tell you something, even a pandemic, even the worst health care crisis in a century, even an economic crisis that only rivals the great depression. Even with these things happening at the same time, I have not seen New Yorkers lose their confidence. Talk to a lot of people, all walks of life. I'm not going to say there are no doubting Thomas’s, but overwhelmingly New Yorkers tell me they are confident that we're going to come through this and come through this strong. They are confident about the role they are going to play in fighting back this virus and bringing this city back to life.

Now, this virus, understandably, this whole crisis we've gone through, it's not surprising if it gnaws at that confidence. If it's sows doubt, that's normal, that's human. Who wouldn't feel some moments of doubt in the middle of something this difficult, and that uncertainty that comes with it, a disease that still is not fully understood by the global medical community. A disease that we all wonder about in terms of our own personal lives. Even though we're confident by nature as New Yorkers, there's uncertainty pervading this whole experience, and the most essential question we all ask is have I gotten this disease already or am I going to get this disease. If I have gotten it or if I do get it, do I put my family in danger? The people I love in danger? The uncertainty is directly related to the lack of testing, that's been the reality from day one, and this has been the central problem in this crisis. The lesson we have to take from this as not only New Yorkers, but as Americans, our nation wasn't in position in terms of testing, and we can never let that happen again. But what we can say for sure is that every day more and more New Yorkers are getting tested. Every day there's a little more confidence, because there's more answers person by person, and they're starting to add up thousands, and tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. And this is going to give us a clearer picture of what's going on. It's going to help people have more certainty in your own lives. And won't happen overnight, but it will happen steadily from this point on, and we'll be moving in the right direction. So, to feel our natural confidence as New Yorkers and to answer those uncertainties, the key is more and more testing, and that's what we intend to do.

Now, there's two kinds of tests. The diagnostic test known as the PCR test. That's been the main part of the discussion from the very beginning of this crisis, and we still need to do a lot of that. And then there's the antibody testing. Remember, there's a clear difference. The PCR test, the diagnostic test answers the simple question, do I have this disease right now? It does not answer what happened in your past. It does not answer what happens in your future, but it does answer clearly, and consistently do you have the disease right now. It allows us to take the actions right now we need to take in a test and trace approach. The antibody test is, really refers to the past. It asks the question, did I get exposed to this disease in the past? And it therefore helps you understand the obvious answer of your own experience. If you did get exposed in the past, were you able to beat it? Well, you know it's, it's a good sign when you know your body's been exposed to this virus and you obviously came through it, it's a good sign. Does it tell you everything? No, and we'll always put that disclaimer on it. There are different kinds of antibody tests, some more accurate than others, some more specific than others. And even the best antibody test does not guarantee that you can't get the disease again. Seems that it's unusual for someone to get the disease again, that's what we've seen so far in our actual experience, but it is not a guarantee. What it does tell you is something and right now we could use all the certainty we could get, we can use all the information we could get. Any step in the direction of more information is better, and if someone knows they've been exposed before, that's helpful. That gives people more confidence to know they came through it. It's also really valuable in terms of the emerging treatment using plasma from folks who have been exposed before. That's a positive development that we want to support more and more, and more and more testing for antibodies does that, helps that along, and it's also part of answering the bigger questions about this disease. The more people test, the more our doctors and scientists have a body of information to help us really understand the disease better and beat it back. So, we are going to proceed energetically with antibody testing in this city as we also build up the PCR testing capacity at the same exact time.

Now, I talk to you before about the effort focused on our first responders, and our health care workers. That is a joint effort with the federal government, with the US Department of Health and Human Services and the centers for disease control. It will reach 140,000 health care workers and first responders, everyone making their own choice. If they want to participate, they will get individual results, but it'll also help us with the larger research we need to do. 140,000 New Yorkers will be tested. It will start next week at hospitals, firehouses police precincts, correctional facilities, and we're going to move that rapidly over the next few weeks ahead.

But now, a new announcement today. Beyond the testing that we'll do for our heroes, we're going to open up antibody testing to a much bigger group of New Yorkers. So, more and more people have the opportunity to get a test that will give them some information, some certainty as we fight ahead. So, as we do this, I want you to remember every time someone gets an antibody test, it's helping them have information. It's helping all of us to have information, so we're really killing two birds with one stone. The individual gets something they need, but the health care leadership, the scientists, they get the information they need to do the research better to answer the questions about the disease. So, real virtue in this. On top of the 140,000 for the first responders and the health care workers, we're adding another 140,000 for everyday New Yorkers. Combined 280,000 people will get antibody tests in just the next few weeks in New York City. Over a quarter million antibody tests will be given. These are numbers that really start to add up, even against the size of a city as big as ours. This initiative, the additional 140,000 that will be available in communities across this city, comes through a partnership with BioReference Labs. They've been an extraordinary partner with our public hospitals, Health and Hospitals. They've been a key part of our response to the coronavirus from the beginning. I want to thank the CEO of BioReference Labs, Dr. John Cohen, who's worked very closely with the City throughout. The first survey will involve 70,000 New Yorkers. It will start next week and continue through the month. It will be repeated again in early June. So, we'll get these 140,000 additional tests done between the remainder of May and the beginning of June.

We're going to work with five sites initially, but then we will be adding, and the goal is to focus on people in the general area of these test sites. I want to be very clear. There's so many people in the city. Any time you set up a test site, tens of thousands of people live very nearby. We want to focus on where the test sites are, not having to have people travel a long way to get to these tests, but we'll keep adding sites as we go along. So, the sites will be in the Bronx, in Morrisania, in Brooklyn and East New York, and Manhattan, upper Manhattan, Staten Island in Concorde, and Queens in Long Island City. 1000 tests per site every day. Again, 70,000 tests will be given in the space of about two weeks, and then we'll repeat that again.

Now, how does someone get this test? You get it by appointment. Again, the priority given to the surrounding communities and the hotline for making the appointments will be launched this Friday, tomorrow. Now, how does it work? You give basic information, because remember this is to benefit you as an individual, but also to get us information on what has been happening with this disease so we can fight it. So, people will be asked demographic information, employment information, very important. We want to understand how the disease has hit people in different parts of our economy, in different parts of the life of this city. It's a simple procedure. A nurse takes a blood sample, you get your individual result back in 24 to 48 hours. So, even though this is the kind of thing, this testing and the PCR testing is what would have made so much of a difference early on, and could have fundamentally changed the history of this disease in this city if we had had it early. It still helps us now to learn more and more, and obviously to give more and more New Yorkers the confidence in knowing their own situation. So, we will keep you posted as more and more details come out, but I'm looking forward to between the two kinds of testing becoming more of a norm in this city every day that people are getting to those tests and we're getting a better and better picture, and it's all going to contribute to our efforts on testing and tracing, which are going to be developing rapidly in this month.

Okay. Next thing I want to talk about is how we continue to deepen our response to this disease using every tool at our disposal. We already know some things – we want all the research we can get, but we know some things already and we've been very open about the very sad fact, the very troubling fact. That this disease tracks with profound health care disparities that we already knew in our City and it's only made them worse. So, when we came out with the information on disparities, when we showed the just painful raw truth about what's happening with health care disparities and impact of the coronavirus, talked about a four-point equity plan to address the needs of communities have been hardest hit. The fourth point in that plan regarded tele-medicine and we are now going much farther with tele-medicine than we have ever gone before through our public hospitals, through Health + Hospitals and the focus again will be on the communities that have been hardest hit by this disease. So, tele-medicine had become increasingly common in private health care, but not as much in public health care— before this crisis, now Health and Hospitals will be doing it on a massive scale. So, first phone clinician, this initiative, very straightforward and it's one of two key things that we are now putting into play. Phone clinician is about what you do individually, it means that, you know, as a New Yorker, if you don't happen to have your own doctor, if you don't have a place to turn to get an answer to a question that you can pick up the phone for free and get a health care provider from our public hospitals and clinics to answer your questions. We want people to get much more guidance even though more and more information is out there about the coronavirus. And again, New Yorkers have listened because you can see and how much progress we made in this City, that's because of your work, that's because you listen, then learned and acted on what you heard. There's still so many questions every hour, every day people have questions, the best thing is to know there's someplace to turn where you can talk to a medical professional and get answers, particularly in communities have been hardest hit. Helping people get the truth about this disease, helping people navigate tough situations, the most obvious being if you have symptoms, what do you do? Or if you have symptoms, how do you deal with keeping the right distance from other family members? Or if you test positive, what are your choices for how to isolate and quarantine? It's really helpful for everyday New Yorkers to have someone to turn to add any hour of the day that they can trust to give them real answers, not just a piece of paper or something they see online, but an actual human being. So, the free hotline is 844-NYC-4NYC – again, 844-NYC-4NYC, and this means that anybody, anytime you need to come pick up that phone and get answers and never leave their home, never have to go through the hassle or the challenges that come with going outside. We keep telling everyone, stay inside the maximum stand possible, therefore, tele-medicine is part of how we give people confidence they can get the help they need without ever leaving their home. Now this initiative is growing all the time, so far, in the midst of this crisis, we've had about 90,000 calls and the result is that over 90 percent of the people make that call, never need to leave their home, get the information they need, get the care they need through the tele-medicine process, and it works, we want to keep building on this. Now, our goal, all of us is to drive back this disease and not need as much help, but we know we've still got a road ahead here. So, our goal is to keep building up this apparatus, we expect to do at least 4,000 calls a day, and if the demand is there, we'll keep building more. So, in the month of May, we're ready to handle 120,000 calls, and again, if this becomes a popular tool, more and more people make the decision to pick up a phone and that is helpful to them, especially again, those who do not have a private doctor or a facility that are already working with that they can rely on. The more people use it, the more we will build it, but expect about 120,000 calls in May – that's going to make a great impact on the lives of those people and their whole families that they have access to that help.

Now, the second piece of this strategy is tele-visits and this is a different approach because this gets initiated by the health care institution. So, think about all those H+H hospitals and community clinics, a lot of them of course have a deep constituency in their neighborhoods of people who have been coming to them, are connected to them. In this instance, this means that the provider reaches out to the patient to check in. Obviously, the vast majority of people are not going to normal appointments right now. Now, previously in our Health + Hospitals facilities, particularly the community-based clinics, tele-visits were pretty rare, almost none, the whole idea was show up in person. Now already during this crisis, there's been 60,000 tele-visits initiated by Health and Hospitals clinics, this is going to deepen, this is going to be a big part of the strategy going forward. So, the goal is to ramp this up to at least a 16,000 per week starting in June. We believe that at least 80 percent of people who need through our clinics for now can do it through tele-visits. So, it'd be aggressive program by the clinics to reach their patients, check in with them, make sure they get whatever appointments they need. Of course, if someone needs to be seen in person, they still can be, but the goal is to the maximum extent possible, lean on tele-visits reach a lot more people a lot more quickly and always give people the option of getting health care without having to leave their home. Now, look for our public health care system, this is opening up a whole world of possibilities because this is now helping us understand things that weren't used so much before, but might be really helpful not just during crisis, but as we go back to normal might allow us to reach a lot more people. So, this is an example, something we're going to refine more and more while we're fighting back this disease, but I think it's going to be a crucial part of our restart and recovery and making a City that works better and is fairer. If we can perfect the use of tele-medicine in public health care, we're going to reach a lot more people and we're going to reach them faster. That could be an example of something that comes out of this horrible crisis that actually makes us a better city in the future.

Now, this crisis has been tough on everyone, but we know not only have some communities been particularly hard hit, we know some New Yorkers are going through a particularly tough time as individuals and this case I'm referring to homeless New Yorkers. People live on the streets, those 3 or 4,000 people at any given day who are permanently homeless. We have been trying intensely in recent years to bring them in and in this crisis again, new ideas are coming to the fore that are actually allowing us to reach people in whole new ways. And I'm going to report something to you that's pretty amazing today. You know, last night was only the second night in which subways were closed down in those very late night hours for cleaning and therefore all passengers had to leave the subway system and that meant that our Department of Homeless Services and our outreach workers and specially trained NYPD officers could be there in places where there were a number of homeless folks to help them out and offer them a helping hand and offer them a place to come in and get the support they need. Yesterday we talked about very, very impressive progress that was made just on the first night, but of course the question is, okay, well what's going to happen the second night, the third night? What does this really tell us? Well, the results on the second night were even better than the first night, which is very encouraging. Last night, our outreach teams engaged 361 homeless New Yorkers coming out of the subways when they shut down 218 of them well over half accepted help. Again, this is the entire core principle of doing this outreach work to constantly open that door. For those who are homeless to realize there's something else that could be done to make their life better, there's a different way that could pursue, 218 out of 361 accepted help, that meant 196 went to a safe haven or a shelter, 22 went to a hospital. Remember a lot of homeless folks out there need medical care, it's about helping them feel the confidence that they can come in and get help. This is an amazing result, now we've got a long road ahead, but this is an amazing result. Again, permanently street homeless, New York City federal studies show year after year in recent years, somewhere between about 35,000 and 4,000 people. When 218 coming in one night and then we hope and we pray that with a lot of good work, the vast majority of them will stay in except long-term shelter. And then affordable housing and all the support they need to deal with whatever challenge they have, whether it's a mental health challenge, a substance abuse challenge, whatever it is. When these kinds of numbers mean that that many human beings who had lost their way now get a chance to live a better life, that's an extraordinary story. So again, thank you to all those extraordinary outreach workers out there night after night, no matter what's going on, they're there. The NYPD officers who got trained to do this work, who are devoted to this work, thank you. Thank you to the MTA, great partnership going now, I think this also is something that could lead to a whole different approach in the future that will make life in the City better for everyone, particularly homeless New Yorkers.

Now, in this crisis, there are some other people who have been really vulnerable and this is a sad additional story within the story and it's not something we can ever turn away from to save people from the disease to knock this disease back to save lives. We have obviously had a policy of shelter in place, stay at home and it's obviously working. For the vast majority of people, it's about keeping them safe and keeping all of us safe, but there are some people who deal with a very different reality at home or home is not a safe place. And it is a painful reality and it has been before this crisis; we've seen some troubling trends that we must address aggressively. We've seen much domestic violence, too much gender-based violence. We can't accept that. We need people to stay home for everyone's safety, but we also have to find a way to disrupt this problem because it's unacceptable – unacceptable that anyone would be in danger in their own home. We do not allow that in New York City. So, there's always help available literally on a moment's notice. If anyone's in danger, not only will the NYPD come to help and they've put immense resources into fighting domestic violence, but anyone who needs shelter will get it instantly - no questions asked – 24/7 anyone who's in danger, we will help immediately get a roof over their heads and be protected. Anyone who feels endangered, there's a particular hotline for people who are facing this threat - it's 800-621-4673 – 800-621-4673. You know the person on the other end of the line will understand your circumstance and will act immediately to get you help. But responding to the crisis is not enough, we have to prevent domestic violence from happening to begin with. The NYPD and so many community organizations, so many providers, advocates have done extraordinary work finding new ways to fight back against domestic violence and gender-based violence. We need to find even more preventative strategies in this crisis and even more ways to protect those in danger. I'm announcing a COVID-19 response taskforce on domestic and gender-based violence, taking some of the leading minds and some of the people who do the most important work in this city to fight this scourge, bringing them together, working with our Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender Based Violence. We'll bring together about 20 of the leaders in this field, convening them right away to figure out what else we can do and what's working any place else in the country of the world that we can bring here. But the bottom line is, we're just not going to allow this to happen. No one should be suffering because they're at home; no one should suffer in silence. No one should be afraid that the place that's supposed to be their safe harbor is actually a place where they're in danger. We cannot have that in New York City. This taskforce is going to help us to come up with new solutions.

So, a couple more things and, and when we talk about new solutions, I want to talk about the challenge that this city faces. In fact, cities all over the country, all over the world are facing as we fight back this disease, as we restart and recover and then work together to find a better path for the future. So many cities have in common a lot of realities and we are increasingly working together to solve problems, to figure out what works one place that might work another place; to share ideas and approaches all as one because we face the same exact challenges. There's not a real sense of difference when you're talking city to city. I can tell you talking to mayors around the world; everyone has a common language in effect because we deal with the same issues and needs of our people. And we all know that as we come back, as we recover, we're going to be facing some huge challenges ahead, not just from this disease, but from what's happening all around us in this world. This disease has pointed out disparities and has also pointed out the danger of not being prepared for the bigger challenges ahead. So, we have to figure out all of us, all the cities of the world have to work together particularly to address profound dangers to health and safety when it comes to our climate. We've got to reduce pollution; we've got to reduce emissions. We know if we don't band together, global warming will overtake us and global warming is the kind of threat that literally everyone shares. It's a horrible danger, but let us pray it is a unifier and maybe in this moment as the world has fought this virus together, there's been some signs that the nations of the world might come together in common cause - the cities of the world are doing that already. So, we, New York City have been part of an organization called C40. It's a group of cities around the world that are committed to ambitious action to fight global warming and now C40 has laid out a set of resiliency principles for the cities of the world to follow in terms of coming back and coming back better. We've signed on to these principles because they give a good, very basic roadmap of the things we all need to do together and the things we're going to help each other do. And that means a focus on not just bringing back the employment we had before, but creating new green jobs. It means investing more in our people, in the health and safety of our people, including in communities that never got their fair share. It means reducing pollution, reducing emissions everywhere; obviously focusing on communities that have borne the brunt of pollution and the health care impacts of pollution. These principles are really helpful in guiding our work. They're going to be the kinds of ideas that our Fair Recovery Taskforce works with to broaden them into more and more specific game plan over time. But what's actually inspiring in this moment is I've said to you, as New Yorkers, as individuals, you should never feel alone your city's here for you. We also should not feel alone because all the cities of the world are banding together to fight these problems and to find solutions together. And that gives me a real sense of hope.

As we wind this down, I want to take an opportunity to offer some thanks and it's amazing as you've heard this week, there are many days and weeks designated to thank the people who serve us and are there for us, but those days and weeks don't always get all the attention they deserve. In this pandemic, there's a real spotlight on the people who are our heroes, the first responders, the health care heroes, the essential workers. So, you probably didn't know this before, but you should, it's National Correction Officer's Week and these are heroes who don't get their due. It's a tough, tough job. I've spent time in our correction facilities talking to our officers. They have a very tough job. It's thankless, it doesn't get the acclaim, but it's another crucial part of how we make this city work and how we protect people. Our correction officers have to show a lot of agility, a lot of creativity in doing the work they do because remember, it's not just the work of public safety, it is the work of redemption. The entire concept of why we call it department of correction is to help people come back from their mistakes, never see the inside of a jail cell again and our correction officers do amazing work to achieve that kind of goal every single day. So, to everyone at the Department of Corrections, our Correction officers, all the employees at Department of Corrections – appreciate what you do. It is not easy in normal times; it's been a lot harder during this pandemic. It's been a tough, tough time for all of you, I know, but you keep showing up and you keep making sure everyone is safe and you keep doing that work of redemption. And I want to thank you and I ask all New Yorkers, if you know anyone in your life who works for the Department of Correction, please give them a special thank you this week because they do so much for all, all of us. We don't get to see it that often, but it's, it's something we depend on a lot. Please give them a real heartfelt thanks.

Okay, now time for the daily indicators and again, I'm looking forward to us working together, continuing that strong disciplined approach you've all engaged in to get these numbers to go down together steadily. Today we have progress, it's not perfect progress, but it's damn close. So, this is a good day. I want to see even better days and I want us to string them together cause that's our pathway to opening up, reducing restrictions, and taking the steps towards the restart. So, let's go over to the indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 - that is down from 109 to 79. Isn't that good to hear? Only 79 people, now for those 79 people they are dealing with real challenges. I never want to belittle, even if a single person has to go into the hospital for COVID-19, but thank God compared to where we were only 79 people as of the latest measure. The daily number of people in ICUs across our public hospital system for some suspected COVID-19 that has gone down as well – from 599 to 567. Again, still 567, that's a lot of people, but it has gone down noticeably and that's great. Now, one thing went in the wrong direction, but I will say thankfully only by one percent, so you know, it's still a good day. Percentage of people tested positive COVID-19 citywide – up 15 percent to 16 percent. Overall, right direction – let's dig in and go farther.

Let me offer a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Okay, with that we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now being now our Q&A. As a reminder, we also have Dr. Barbot, Dr. Katz, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma on the line. First question today goes to Andrew Siff from WNBC.

Question: Hi, Mayor. Good morning. Good morning everyone. Hope you're all doing well.

Mayor: Yes, good morning, Andrew. How you doing?

Question: Hanging in there. My question is about the testing. You have set out benchmarks for testing before and then acknowledged that those benchmarks, despite the best intentions were not met. So, I'm wondering, first of all, what assurances can you give New Yorkers that, that 140,000 number for first responders and 140,000 number for everyday New Yorkers will actually be met? And then assuming you do hit those numbers what is that information supposed to tell us?

Mayor: So, the 140,000 that the City of New York will do with BioReference Labs, I'm totally confident that that will get done on the schedule we've laid out and the details will be filled in, in the next few days. The 140,000 that we have been putting together with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control, I feel good about it because all of the steps have now come together and the mechanical process has been agreed to. And I expect that testing to start next week. It still involves the federal government. I think, Andrew, you would agree, it's been an interesting ride dealing with the federal government during this crisis. But, on this one, things have been moving very steadily in the right direction and we've gotten confident answers from the federal government about the ability to have this up and running for next week and to hit those numbers. So, the 240,000 pools I feel good about – that will get us 280,000 of the antibody tests right there in addition to all the other testing that will be going on. Again, it is a part of the puzzle. If we had – Andrew, if we had the perfect world, it would be a totally available, universal PCR testing, diagnostic testing. If we had the perfect world, that's what would tell us what we need to know, when we need to know it. That's what we should have had in the beginning of this crisis or as close to it as possible. The federal government has always struggled on the PCR testing. I don't understand it. It is the center of the fight. I first called for the help from the federal government on PCR testing on January 24th. I know others around the country did as well. And the reality of the testing is, the test kits – we know what it takes to make a test kit. Now, we haven't even easier way with the self-swab – the self-swab testing. We know what it takes to analyze a test in a lab. These are knowable things. These are things that can be acted on by the federal government. This is another area where the President has hesitated to use the Defense Production Act to the fullest. I don't understand why for the life of me, our country was not prepared for this and we don't make the things we need in the United States of America. And this is absolutely a negative result of globalization, a real indictment of all the decisions made over the decades to ship manufacturing out in the United States. And it has to be reversed, bluntly. And we're leading the way right here in the city by creating our own capacity and as many areas as we can to produce our own things. But still the federal government isn't getting it right on the PCR testing and they still need to, and they still need to use the Defense Production Act, and to get us what we need. But until that day, Andrew, we will do as much of the diagnostic testing as we can and we will do as much of the antibody testing as we can, because both tell us something and both are usable in our test and trace strategy and in our pathway to a restart.

Moderator: Next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to follow up about homelessness on the subways. Colleagues of mine who've been on the ground have found a number of homeless people refusing to go to shelters out of fears of contracting the virus there and instead sort of setting up on buses. So, I just wanted to get your thoughts on the [inaudible] that the problem is basically relocating from subways to the buses. My second question would just be if the outcomes you've seen from the subway closures are giving you to reconsider your opposition to calls from some homeless advocates who are pressing for the City to provide single hotel rooms to every homeless person. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. Shant, I appreciate the question, but I actually would say that in both instances the results we're seeing in the first two days entirely validate the heavy outreach strategy and the fact that when provided the choice the right way and when there's lots of support there, a lot of homeless people will choose to go into Safe Havens and shelters. This is something Commissioner Banks has been talking about for years. And, again, this crisis and the specific plan with the MTA is putting a point on it, but I remember – I remember the first press conference we did in Tompkins Square Park – and we can get to the exact date of that – when we announced HOME-STAT and how revolutionary it would be to put a huge amount of outreach workers on the task of bringing in homeless folks off the street and just investing whatever it took to gain the trust of homeless folks and disrupt the negative patterns of their lives and give them a better way. And over the last three years, that strategy has been proven and proven improving again, which led to our Journey Home strategy announced in December, to end permanent street homelessness. This new approach is striking to me because it is creating the kind of positive disruption that's causing homeless folks to make that decision to come in. So, no, the results are speaking for themselves. People are going to Safe Havens and shelter. Again, if there's ever a specific situation where our outreach teams believe a hotel is a better option, that's there for them. But we want to help people, Shant. Remember, this is not, like, someone just needs a roof over the head. These are folks who, for whatever reason, their lives ended up bringing them down to the street on a permanent basis, many, many of whom have either a serious mental health issue or a substance abuse issue or both. You can't just take someone like that and put them into a hotel with no support and call it a day. That takes intensive support, which is what Safe Havens do in particular. So, no, I would focus on the strategy we have now. And as for the homeless folks potentially going on the buses, that's something we have to disrupt as well. We have to help people to the better options. The buses, the subways are for essential workers – this is an emergency, that's what they're for. People who need help should get help. So, I am certain we can work with MTA to address that issue and keep maximizing the offer of help. And, as we do, we see more and more people taking it. That's a very good sign.

Moderator: Next is Marcia from CBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Marcia. How are you?

Question: Let me say, I like the haircut. I hope you didn't do it yourself. Anyway, moving on. This is a social distancing question. Yesterday, the family of the 15-year-old involved in that incident and the 7-5 in the Bronx said that police social distancing arrests are the new stop and frisk. I wonder how you feel about that, but also what are you going to do about this? What will the new guidelines be for the NYPD? Are you going to tell them, you know, just not to issue summonses and make arrests, just to give out masks and sanitizers and advice and messaging?

Mayor: Well, thank you, Marcia. First of all, I want to affirm, thank God, I didn't give myself a haircut or the people of New York City would not be able to look at me as I give them these updates. So, I'm happy you like it though. That's a good sign. No, this is – look, I predicted someone would try to make this parallel and there is no parallel. I feel bad for any family that is suffering in any way. And there was one particular incident on the Lower East Side that was just patently unacceptable – I said it, Commissioner Shea said it, the officer's been modified. It bears no resemblance to what policing is supposed to be in this city. It has nothing to do with the coronavirus, it's just inappropriate activity by an officer. Remember, the vast majority of officers their job, do it well, do it respectfully. The vast majority of interactions between our police and our community go well and you never hear about them. So, the number of times that people are talking about a video that's troubling is still a very, very rare occasion. That doesn't mean we don't have more work to do, a number of leaders of communities of color have said to me they are concerned and they want to make sure that we are actually continually doing the work of leaving the past behind because the past was absolutely unacceptable in the way communities of color were policed. But we have made a huge amount of progress over these years and we're going to continue to. What happened with stop and frisk was a systematic, oppressive, unconstitutional strategy that created a new problem much bigger than anything it purported to solve. This is the farthest thing from that. This is addressing a pandemic. They're addressing the fact that lives are in danger all the time. By definition, our Police Department needs to be a part of that because safety is what they do. Now, the vast majority of interactions around this pandemic are officers reminding people what to do, asking them to change their behavior. People, they respond. I've had this conversation with Commissioner Shea and Chief Monahan – the vast majority of New Yorkers, when an officer – not only police officer, any of our enforcement officers says, hey, I need you to create more space; hey, I need you to put that face covering on, people do it. Some incidents have occurred that have nothing to do with social distancing and we should not forget that there's an entirely different activity going on. Police still have to fight crime and they still have to address conditions and neighborhoods when neighbors call in with a complaint. But no, we're going to make the protocols clearer and clearer, but it's that hierarchy I've talked about several times. The thing we're going to be particularly intolerant of is larger gatherings, those are just downright dangerous. When people are too close together, we're going to help make sure that they create more space. We're going to help make sure people wear face coverings – very consistent with what our police do to protect safety in general. But we're going to keep refining the protocol to make it clearer for everyone involved. It's a whole new world we're dealing with. We never had to deal with this in the past. This is a new world. It'll take time to get it better and make more sense of it, but I'm confident that we'll get it done.

Moderator: Next is Julia from the Post.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and everyone else on the call. Two questions for you on the DOE. One on the fact that the DOE still hasn't presented its final middle and high school admissions plan. Don't you think that parents and students deserve know how seventh graders are going to be applying for high school next year? And then, I'm looking for you to respond to remarks by Chancellor Carranza at a panel discussion recently. He questioned the ethics of screened schools and told fellow administrators not to “waste a good crisis in pursuit of a change.”

Mayor: So, the specific – I don't know the specific panel discussion you're talking about, so I can't respond to comments. I haven't seen the context. We've been clear in this administration that we are reevaluating the admissions process across the board and we're asking important questions about what is fair and equitable, going forward. Many things are going to be reevaluated as a result of this crisis. The whole concept I've been putting forward, that we are not just going to bring New York City back with the status quo that was there before, but we're going to try and make a series of changes that favor equity and fairness. We were already in the process of doing that when it came to school admissions. So, certainly, the screened schools are being reevaluated and we’ll have more to say on that in the future. On high school admissions – look, everything has been disrupted here on a seismic level. Of course, with each passing day we're able to do more and more to clarify to students and parents how things are going to go in the future. So, admissions certainly will be addressed and will be addressed soon. But I want to remind everyone that we've had to remake the entire school system in the last few weeks, to create online education on a massive scale for the first time and the focus in recent weeks has been making sure that was up and running fully and getting kids the technology they needed. I remind everyone and anyone, if there still is a child that doesn't have that free iPad who's a public-school student, call 3-1-1, we'll get it to them right away. And also, for children with disabilities in our nonpublic schools, religious and independent and private schools, we will get them a free iPad as well, and, again, any family can call 3-1-1. But our focus has been getting the education system up and running in this new approach, making sure we're focused on high school seniors, because that's the most sensitive piece of this equation, helping everyone who can graduate to graduate, and starting to build a pathway to the summer and then next year. But as we're able, we're filling in more of the blanks, and we'll certainly have a lot more to say on admission soon.

Moderator: Next is Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: Good morning, Juliette. Are you going to present me with another problem to solve today?

Question: No, maybe tomorrow.

[Laughter]

Mayor: Okay, good. You're taking – take one day off once in a while, okay?

Mayor: But, listen, now, thank you for the acknowledgement on the encampments. That’s really – we're hearing about more locations, so I'll keep you posted. But my questions today are as follows. What options are you reviewing to avoid furloughs and layoffs? There is a lot of concern about that from working New Yorkers. And the other question is, we had Yankee President Randy Levine on 1010 WINS talking about plans for the possible resumption of baseball. He's hopeful there could be some kind of opening at Yankee Stadium. Now, I know you're a Boston fan, but given that baseball can be a very good things for the city, do you think you'd find your way there for a first pitch?

Mayor: Yeah, you know, Juliet, I am a huge baseball fan and I'm getting to the point now – you know, I just saw that ESPN is going to start broadcasting the South Korean baseball and I'm like, I need baseball. I think a lot of us need baseball, I'll watch it anywhere, any country anyhow. But look, I would love nothing more than to see baseball come back to New York City and I would happily go to Yankee Stadium and be part of that first game. It would be a joy. And the same with Citi Field for the Mets. I don't think that's coming soon. I think we have to be honest about it. I think it would be – the day that baseball comes back to New York City is going to be an extraordinarily positive moment, and I will celebrate with Yankee fans and Met fans alike. But I think we need to set our sites in a realistic place. As we think about restarting, and we see this from the good examples around the world and the bad examples – and the good examples around the country and the bad examples – you start in smart, purposeful ways. You start where you can do the maximum social distancing. You’ve got be careful – the more people you put in one place, the greater the danger until you're really knock down this disease. So, the kind of chicken and egg here, Juliet – you want the perfect time to really reopen big events is when the disease has really been beaten back to, you know, next to nothing. So – and the danger with big gatherings, especially, is that could be one of the things that propels the disease back and gives us that boomerang we really don't want – the example of New Orleans and Mardi Gras – you know, big gatherings cause problems. Could you have baseball without fans or with, you know, a limited number of fans? Yeah, there's different things to discuss, but I want to really emphasize we're not there yet. And I think those bigger gatherings and bigger events are going to be one of the last things that will really fit the equation as we restart. And this one I put in the better safe than sorry category. I know I want to see baseball come back badly, but I want that the day that baseball comes back, everyone is really confident that it's the right thing to do. So, when it comes back, I will unquestionably be there joyously with all other baseball fans, Yankees and Mets alike.

Quick point on the encampments. Again, those are not acceptable in New York City. So, Juliet, if you find others, we want to hear about right away or anybody – anybody watching now, if you see homeless New Yorkers setting up a semi-permanent place to live, we will not allow that. Just call 3-1-1, we'll get NYPD and homeless services and Sanitation over there to clean it up immediately. We need those reports so we can make sure that nothing like that happens. On the furloughs and layoffs, Juliet, this is the last thing I want to do – literally, the last thing I want to do. And the key to avoiding furloughs and layoffs is in the hands of the President and the Congress. So far, the conversation I had with Speaker Pelosi on Sunday suggests that the House will present a stimulus four that is very respectful of our first responders, very respectful of our health care heroes, very respectful of our essential workers, and very respectful of cities and states that will help us fully back on our feet. That's what we need. Senator McConnell has been disdainful of helping out states and cities in need. The President has gone from silent, to now he's throwing all sorts of perverse conditions on – he's literally talking now about wanting to get a tax break to the wealthy for Capital Gains Tax as a precondition for helping our first responders and our health care heroes. That's unbelievably wrong. It's inappropriate, it's inhuman. It's literally – imagine a rich guy wanting to take care of other rich guys rather than wanting to take care of cops and firefighters and doctors and nurses. It’s unbelievable. We're seeing things in this crisis that you can't even believe are coming out of the mouth of the President of United States.

So, I would argue that everyone who wants to see that stimulus so we can be made whole so we can keep our whole workforce intact and needs to raise their voice, whether they're a Democrat, Republican, whoever you are, raise your voice, and our heroes need to raise their voices to remind everyone in Washington of the fact that we need them to be on our payroll serving people. They deserve to be doing the great work they're doing and having the confidence and the security they will do it for years and years to come. But Julia, if you take $7.4 billion dollars out of any budget, which is exactly what we're dealing with now, and even worse without a stimulus, we'll lose more money because there won't be a restart. There'll be lost revenue more and more the state, if they don't get the help, they're going to cut us more and more. This situation goes from bad to worse really quickly. Right now, any government anywhere missing $7.4 billion would have to make a lot of tough choices, but it gets a lot worse if we don't get the stimulus. So it's the last thing I want to see for lows and layoffs, but if we don't get to help, we're going to be having to make a lot of really, really tough and painful decisions here in this city.

Moderator: Next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry, how are you?

Question: I'm good. You know, I saw a 1969 Mets-Baltimore game the other night. Two to one McNally versus Koosman. I highly recommend it – second game of the World Series. My question has to do with this report and the New York Times today that says that a large number of cases nationally emanated out of New York City. New York City was sort of the source of spreading the virus nationally to an extent that was previously unrecognized. I'm wondering whether you or the Health Commissioner has any thoughts about this, whether, you know, what does it say, if anything about federal policy, about city policy and about the nature of this virus?

Mayor: Well, Henry, I haven't seen the specific reporting you're referring to, but I can say this much. The fact is that we know this virus came from multiple parts of the world into the United States. So, of course, the question will be what was done and was not done to stop the introduction into our country. And then the second question has to be what was done or not done to stop the spread once it got here. And that comes back to testing. There's no question in my mind had the testing been in place that we asked for the end of January of it'd been place in February, this entire scenario for the city would have been different and much, much better. So that to me is the story of what happened here. There were choices made or not made that could have profoundly changed the trajectory of this entire disease in the city and this country. But after that, you know, I think it's clear when something is introduced at the kind of level it became introduced, of course it was going to spread from one place to another and now we're dealing with the results of that.

The lesson we have to take from this is if we ever dealt with anything like this in the future is to be really clear about what would need to be done to keep a disease out of this country, but most especially what would need to be done here to stop it once it got here with every forceful federal response and local response available. But I would also say while we're trying to analyze what happened, how about we get the federal response right now? Again, two things the federal government really needed to do in this crisis: testing and support the cities and states right now, failing still on the testing and failing to step up to support the cities and states. So we'll look back and we'll have plenty of time to analyze what was, what I'm shocked by Henry is the same mistakes are being made right this moment. And this will determine whether this disease continues to spread or not. And I think we need to take every opportunity to stop at dead in its tracks now. And we can only do that with really full federal support. We still don't have it.

Moderator: The next is Abu from Bangla Patrika.

Question: Hello Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing?

Question: Good. Thank you so much. I have a question, which is you express the frustration and anger a day before yesterday about, I think yeah, about the President who is not helping New York City. What is the alternate plan if you don't get any support from federal government? And then number two, you know, the city is closed, so might be in the future city will be open. What is the plan? How will be the style of [inaudible], restaurant and bar nightclub? You know, I mean if it's open then how it will be authentic – same like crowded or it could be a different kind of shape. What would be the new, you know, the style and system?

Mayor: Great question, Abu. I thank you for that.

So I think it's fair to say the restaurants, bars, nightclubs are one of the most sensitive pieces of this equation. We just talked earlier about Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, you know, there's really big gatherings. That's probably the single most sensitive piece of the equation when you bring huge number of people together. But the restaurants and bars, nightclubs combine lots of people and usually very limited space. So, there's a lot of good ideas around the world now about how you could bring them back properly. I can't give you the exact timing. We're not there yet. We will say much more in the coming days about what we are seeing in terms of the sequencing of each part of our economy and the restart. This is part of why we have our advisory groups helping us now who represent each of the industries of the city, give us real world advice about what they're going through, what they need. But what I can tell you is there's going to be different times for different types of businesses and different conditions for each type of business and it's going to be steady and careful. So when you think about what we were used to just a few months ago with restaurants and bars and everyone's super close together and it's part of the energy we love about this city, that's not happening right away to say the least restaurants and bars we've got to help him back. But figuring out when that can begin is something we have not finalized, but we'll say as soon as possible. And then inevitably with some initial restrictions. So different ideas are out there about a capacity within a restaurant and bar. How many people could be allowed in different ideas about restaurants compared to bars or nightclubs? That's a whole discussion. They may not be treated equally because of different realities. Outdoors is an interesting and promising possibility to rely on more of the service being outdoors. You still need precautions, but that's an interesting option we're looking at. Face coverings, gloves you know, a number of specifics to make the experience safe. Now we have to see that that can be done in a workable manner. And also, for each business they have to decide if that's a set of conditions they want to reopen with or whether they want to just keep focusing on take-out and delivery. But we will put together a plan that gets very specific about the when and the how and the conditions and the precautions. And that's going to grow with time. But don't expect anytime soon that kind of crowded bar or restaurant that we knew before. It will be here one day, but it will not be soon.

On the question of what we would do with no stimulus. It's just tragic, horrible math. I want people to think about $7.4 billion. What a staggering number that is. And you know, a lot of people look at the city budget like, oh you could do this, you could do that. You know, $7.4 billion means a whole huge swath of things have to be cut. And again, if there is not a stimulus and if it's not a very generous stimulus, the situation gets worse because the lack of stimulus hurts, restart and recovery. Then there's less revenue. So the problem we have now, the $7.4 billion becomes a much bigger problem if the state isn't made whole. They've already cut us $800 million on top of the $7.4 billion. So really right now the hit, we've taken a $7.4 billion plus $800 million, which is $8.2 billion. There will inevitably be really substantial additional state cuts. It just gets worse and worse and worse and then we have to think about all sorts of things just to balance a budget. By law, we must balance our budget. So it is a very tough picture and it should motivate everyone to fight every day to get that stimulus and to put pressure on the President and Senator McConnell. Look, if the President of the United States had said, we got to do stimulus four, we got to make the cities and states whole, we got to replace their loss revenue. If he said those three sentences, it would have been done already and we would be much more strongly back on the road to recovery. This is just a sick game that the President will not open his mouth and say, we will make the cities and states whole, that's all he has to do and the Senate will follow. But he's playing politics. So, everyone who cares and needs to raise their voice. And the more the voices come from, you know, a whole range of our society, obviously Republicans and Democrats and people from every walk of life in every industry, the faster we will get this done.

Moderator: Next is Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you Mr. Mayor. I want to talk about this antibody testing effort you're announcing specifically what's so much debate and discussion going on around how these antibody tests are being done and what the results actually show the problem of positives and some of these tests not being properly vetted by the FDA. So, what is the guidance, that's my first question, that the city is using? What is the test to be specific? And my second question is about homeless engagements last night. Out of three out of 361, 218 accepted help is the City of recording what happened to those other people?
 
Mayor: So that's a really good question, Gloria. And we'll have Commissioner Banks follow up with you. So again, on the 218, 218 out of 361 is a stunning figure to begin with because I've been watching this, this situation over the last three years with the HOME-STAT initiative and again, well over 2000 people have come in and stayed in and remember that that base we work from, this is again, as Commissioner Banks talked about yesterday, this is not everyone who's ever been out on the street panhandling or someone who's homeless very temporarily or someone who lives in a shelter. We're talking about the essence, the most painful, tough part of the problem is permanent street homelessness, 3,500 to 4,000 people at any given moment. A horrible tragedy we have to fight. Against that backdrop, well over 2000 people in the last three years have come in, stayed in, never gone back to the street.

So, 2,000 over three years is actually pretty amazing compared to the universe we're dealing with and compared to the history of the city where there was never anything like that, they never even got close in previous years to bringing in that many people. This is the single most intensive effort to reduce street homelessness in the history of the city. 2,000-plus in three years. I'm telling you, you heard yesterday's figures last night, 218 in one night. Now that doesn't mean everyone will stay in permanently of course, but if you had 196 accepted shelter, and 22 went to the hospital, that's an amazing start. So, I want to emphasize just how promising that is and the more we do that, the more people who decide to stick with it, you're going to see that street population shrink.

On those who did not accept help, we keep coming back. Remember, think of how individualized the approach is, God forbid you or I were street homeless. The outreach workers would know us by name in the vast majority of cases and they be continuing to work with us coming back time after time, dozens of times, hundreds of times even trying to win our trust, trying to get us to come in, figure out what we need to come in. So Commissioner Banks will fill in the blank for you. But I would pretty much guarantee that some of those people last night who weren't willing to come in, we're known to the Department of Homeless Services and they're going to keep engaging them and just keep coming back cause the persistence is working. That's what was the missing link in previous strategies. The persistence works here.

On the antibody test. We will give you all the specifics of which test we're using. As I said, we're working with BioReference Labs on the city test. The federal initiative with the CDC and HHS will be done with Quest Diagnostics. So, to really leading a well-respected testing entities, we will get you exactly which test each is using. And, and with it will of course be guidance for everyone about what the test tells you. What it doesn't tell you. We've been explicit about this. The test doesn't tell you everything. It tells you something and it's not a perfect measure. It does not mean you don't have to keep practicing social distancing and using PPEs depending on your profession. But it gives you some confidence, some knowledge, and it helps in other ways as terms of our bigger fight against the coronavirus. So, we'll give that information to everyone who gets tested and we'll give them their own results and make clear to people what kind of follow-up makes sense depending on their results. But we want to be very transparent about what the test is, what it means, what it doesn't mean, and what the results are – we're getting as we go along.

Moderator: Next is Mark Morales at CNN.

Question: Hey everyone, how you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Mark. How are you?

Question: Good. I wanted to follow up on the social distancing questions and specifically about what was discussed yesterday. I know we were talking about releasing data as far as someone's is go for the month of April and I wanted to know when is that going to happen? When are you, when is the city going to be releasing the summons data related to social distancing for the month of April and if you've seen the data, what does that show you?

Mayor: So, I have not seen it. I expect to see it very shortly. It will be released for sure. I want to remind everyone – thank you, I've been given the update. It will be released tomorrow. That is certainly shortly. So, I'll see it today. It'll be released tomorrow. Here's what we know. We know there's 8.6 million people. We know we've been at this crisis about two months and we know that in very few instances has there been a need to give summonses. That's the good news. There's certainly been sometimes we had to give summonses, when they were needed, they were needed. But we will give you that breakout. It's still such a small number that I think it tells us something, but it doesn't tell us anything nearly as important as the fact that there has been intensive effort by the NYPD and other agencies to educate and to enforce. And now also more and more to give out the face coverings. And the vast majority of that is worked. And the reason we know it's worked is because we can see it in our daily indicators. We can see how much progress has been made with the social distancing. We can see it with our own eyes the way the vast majority of new Yorkers are applying social distancing and putting on the face coverings. So vast majority of cases this is working, but we will give you that data tomorrow. It'll show the facts as they are, but it'll also be against a pretty small sample size because summons has not been something we've had to do too much, but we won't hesitate to do it when we need to.

Moderator: Next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you about the subway sweeps. Do you have a sense for what percentage of the homeless people at the end of those train lines are being engaged? And, and what type, it's kind of a similar to Gloria’s question about what type of accounting is it for, what happens to them? But you also mentioned that it sounded like offering a hotel room was one of the options that they can be given in certain cases. Can you just say in which cases and have any of the homeless people actually moved to hotel rooms from the subway?

Mayor: So again, I'll have a Commissioner Banks give you more detail, but I can give you just an overview. Let me ask from Freddi Goldstein that just if we have yesterday's numbers too on number engaged – yeah, that'd be helpful. On your first question, Yoav, so again, I've said it, I'll say it again. 361 were engaged last night by our homeless outreach teams and NYPD, 218 of the 361 accepted help, 196 one to shelter 22 went to the hospital. So, when we say accepted help, it means that they actually left the scene with our teams and were taken someplace else where they could get help. So a huge percentage, the remainder did not accept help, but again, we know a lot of them and we'll keep working on them. And I need people to understand that these are human beings. Each one is different. You know, you don't win every time, but you keep at it, you do get a lot of people to move. And I think we're seeing more and more in this crisis, more and more street homeless people are choosing to accept help, and I think it's in some ways related to all the changes that are happening and all the disruption of our normal life pattern, it's actually opening up a lot of homeless people to the possibility of accepting help, and that’s a good thing. To compare to the night before, 252 were engaged and 139 accepted help.

So high levels of engagement both nights and in both cases a majority accepted help and that's a very striking result. Again, there seems to be in my humble opinion overfocus on the hotels. The hotels seem like in many of our questions here, I think the hotels are being put on a pedestal, that's just not the reality, and so let's try and get it clearer here. Hotels work for some things, they don't work for everything. When it comes to a homeless person who needs help right now, this is different than if someone's in a shelter setting, let's just try and get this tight here, someone's in a shelter setting, congregate shelter we've talked about, and there's a need for more social distancing, that's a case where we are using hotels. We've been doing it more and more to make sure there's enough space and we choose according to the person and what they need, and some people do better because they can handle a hotel situation. Other people can't so easily handle a hotel situation. Many are folks who need a lot of support and being in a shelter with fewer people can be the better and healthier option, and that's what's worked on every single day.

The folks who are street homeless and have been spending a lot of time either on street or subway or both are in many cases dealing with really extreme problems, and the goal is not to just take them and leave them alone somewhere, but the goal is to get them the intensive help they need. That's the entire concept of the Safe Haven and that's a concept has been proven now for three years to work. Think about, Yoav, someone who is street homeless with a very high interconnection to serious mental health issues and or substance misuse. They need a safe place. They need a lot of support. They need a lot of medical care. They need mental health services and or substance misuse services. It's not snap your fingers, you know, instant gratification, they were living on a subway or a street and now they're in a building and they're fine and they're going back to normal life. It is a process. It takes time and energy, but we've seen a lot of success. So you don't just take someone and drop them someplace. You take someone someplace where they can get the intensive help they need as part of their rehabilitation, as part of getting them to a better place. That's the whole reality. As I said, if there's an instance where a hotel for any particular reason makes more sense, of course that option exists, but when you're talking about people coming off of the streets, I don't think that's the typical option. The typical option is Safe Haven or shelter. And again, Commissioner Banks will get you more later on.

Moderator: Next to this, Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Just two questions. Some of the city’s black elected officials, police reform groups, even some of the police unions are warning that the social distancing enforcement is dangerous, untenable, and it's only a matter of time before some sort of tragedy occurs. Are you concerned about one of these incidents becoming something tragic? And then secondly Commissioner Shea I believe suggested that when the weather gets warm there may be a plan to limit the number of people can go into parks. Is that something that you are working on or have discussed with the Commissioner or plan to put into place?

Mayor: Thank you, Jeff. Yes, on the second piece, yes. Commissioner and I have had extensive conversations with members of both our teams and other agencies as well. And there are certain parks where the – just the configuration of the park lends itself to overcrowding and we're working on strategies right now to address that and we'll have more to say on that tomorrow. But there's no question that in a kind of toolbox of approaches that we could use to help make sure that social distancing works. It – we've got some parks that are just, the way they're set up is it's just too easy to have crowding. We can't let that happen and we have to limit the number of people going in. And we'll, again, we'll talk about how we're going to do that. And it's not that many places honestly, but wherever that is the case, we're going to work with a protocol to do that. Well it will take some experimentation. It'll take some effort to make sure it works, but I think it's a good direction.

On the first part of your question, look, this is our job to avoid these tragedies, and the reason that I do this work, and I know it's true for Commissioner Shea and so many people here, is to fundamentally change things. We have fundamentally changed policing in New York City. There's more change that has to be made, but before we came here, policing was based on a very punitive approach, heavy reliance on stop and frisk, heavy reliance on arrest. There was not a value put on deepening relationships between police and community. There was not a value put on retraining and we've been doing all these things and we're going to do a lot more. We've already trained the entire police force in de-escalation. We obviously put body cameras on every patrol officer. The entire strategy now is neighborhood policing and building relationships with communities. We have de-emphasized arrest to a huge degree, let alone getting rid of the vast, vast majority of stop and frisk. Nothing has changed in this crisis. The whole mission is to protect people's lives and avoid the tragedies of the past.

We have a new threat that we have to put front and center and this is where I parked company from the PBA and some of the activists as well simultaneously, and I'm very comfortable parting company from both, with all due respect to them. The way you keep people safe in New York City is to use the finest police force in the world to protect people. That is a fundamental truth and when confronted with the biggest crisis we've ever known, we're not going to sideline the NYPD. We're going to use the NYPD to the fullest, but with smart protocols, smart training, figuring out what works and doesn't work, and I am not making my decisions based on a very few interactions that were handled poorly or went bad. I'm making my decisions based on the millions of interactions that are going right and the fact that clearly the city is moving in the right direction on social distancing and shelter in place and it's making us safer and it's saving lives. We're here to save lives. I'm not going to sacrifice saving lives because people are fearful of something that loomed in the past. I want to protect people in every way, but it begins with protecting them from the clear and present danger of this disease.

So I hear the concerns, I hear the criticisms. There's been some very positive constructive ideas from, for example, public advocate Jumaane Williams or Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams have talked about bringing in a lot of additional elements of the community to help with educating and supporting efforts at social distancing. I think that's a great idea, we'll have more to say on that soon as well. But no, the NYPD has to lead the way and keeping people safe and fighting this disease is job one and that's what we're going to do.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. Next is Christina from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to know if there are any plans to systematically test teachers to contribute to being able to reopen school and what role also the subway system will play in reopening schools? Obviously now there are shutdowns and lots of students and teachers rely on them to the class.

Mayor: Very important. I would dare say profound questions, Christina, I appreciate it. On the second one, look, everything's going to interact here. I am a firm believer that we can get to a full reopening of schools in September, but I want to keep giving people a window into my philosophy developed through constantly talking to the experts and looking at the conditions in our city and thinking about how we mix all these factors together the right way. My worldview is its mission critical to get our schools up and running in September. It's mission critical to get our economy started as soon as we can do it safely and then build it out in a safe, careful manner. All of that is going to require the pieces fitting carefully in each case and each step being proven before we take the next step.

So, you're absolutely right. It's hard to have that full reopening of schools without the subway system being more available to our students and the people that work in schools. That says to me how important it is to keep tight with our current strategies. If you value the reopening of school in September and stick with the social distancing, stick with the shelter in place, stick with the strategy that work, put a face covering and all the things we're going to do to keep that working is about driving down the disease and then that hand off, as I said to an intensive testing trace strategy that keeps driving down the disease more. We do that intensely enough May, June, July, August, that's the gateway to reopening schools fully. I would also argue that's the gateway to expanding subway service again and doing so many other things. So yeah, there's a deep interconnection and I think the job is to get those pieces to align through the hard work we're doing now.

On the testing of teachers, we have not obviously defined all the pieces yet of what a reopening of schools looks like, but I think a lot of testing will be a part of it by any definition. And the world I like to get to is one where there's maximal testing available for school communities to give people confidence that they can come back into the school community and really know what's going on and that anyone who for whatever reason still might need to be isolated is isolated in a timely fashion. So what that looks like when that can be done, how that can be done, those are blanks we need to fill in. But will testing play an important role in the restart schools? Absolutely.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor – couple quick questions about the antibody testing. Have you received new information or assurances as to the reliability of the results of these tests? I know just a couple of weeks ago the Health Department put out an alert, essentially saying not to rely on them. There's anything changed between now and then. And then can you just give some more details of who is eligible? You said people in the neighborhood are prioritized, but how do you define that exactly? And beyond that is, is everyone eligible or do you have to hit other criteria?

Mayor: Thank you, Erin. So, we'll put out the eligibility criteria. Look, we've got a good thing which is testing, but I don't want to see people start to go too far for testing, especially in a world where we're going to start to make it more and more available and more and more places. So I want there to be a sense of localness to this. That's why it's so important to have a priority for residents in, you know, nearby communities. This is to reach a lot of people. It's also for the research purposes I talked about and if you're talking about you need to do thousands of people at each test site, you know, you can do that in so many parts of the city, in a, you know, an area within walking distance of the test site even, you could get enough people to reach those goals. So, I want it to be very local. People will call and reserve, preference will be given to the local area. Obviously there's additional testing and people can to it from places that are somewhat farther, we're going to allow that, but it's not our preference, our preferences for it to be as local as possible just to minimize travel, because we know more and more testing is coming behind it. We're obviously in an intensive ramp up now.

On the reliability, you know, I think it's a great question. I think it's really important that we are clear. This test is not the end all, be all. Said it a bunch of times, we'll say it every single day, it will be – there'll be written materials given to people. There'll be reminders given by the health care professionals. We are not promising people a rose garden here. We're not saying the antibody test is the last word. It's not, but it tells you something. The most effective tests, and obviously we're working with BioReference and Quest Diagnostics to make sure that we have the tests that we believe are the most fine-tuned, if you will, the most specific to indicating that you've had COVID-19 and you've been exposed to it previously. We will announce exactly what those tests are and give information about the nature of them. But we would only utilize as the City of New York, we'd only work with partners who agreed to use a test that we have higher confidence in, in terms of its specificity, identifying the presence of COVID-19 previously in someone's experience. There are some other tests out there that I think are less reliable. We're not going to work with those so we will be clear about reliability levels.

But even with that said, that what we know, what we don't know, what we can know is if you've been exposed to the disease and you came through it, that tells you something, that is helpful. It tells you something about your experience, it tells you something about your resiliency. It's helpful to know. It does not change the fact that you still need to take precautions. We'll keep delineating all those precautions because we don't have the hardest evidence that you couldn't get the disease again. We don't have a lot of evidence that you will get the disease again or it's likely, but we can't say definitively you won't, so we're going to keep telling people to be careful and safe because of abundance of caution. Certainly if someone has been exposed to disease, that's important again for knowing who could be candidates to provide plasma for that kind of treatment for others and the research is the research and having facts about people helps us on a research level to understand disease, as I said, to understand it demographically, by occupation, all sorts of things we need to know.

So, we'll keep putting all those qualifiers on and if someone comes to get tested, they're like, oh wow, you know, if I get a positive it means I don't need to wear a face covering anymore or if I work in a I don't need PPEs, we'll say instantly, no, you still do. Until this is over, you still do. So we'll keep putting all those qualifiers on, but it still helps. It still tells us something. And again, as we get the final specifics out there, we'll give a lot of detail on which test we're using and what it means and how we're going to move forward.

All right, well everybody, I'm going to finish where I started on a word again, synonymous with our city, confidence. I feel a lot of confidence today myself and I have been taking in so much information from day one. If I was not convinced we were on the right path, I would tell you. You'd be able to see it in my face. I am 100 percent confident that we can and will beat this disease and I am even more confident because of what I've seen you do. There is an interesting line in life between confidence and arrogance. Arrogance is when in many cases you aren't backing it up with the facts. In this case I have confidence and New Yorkers have confidence because we're actually proving to ourselves and to the world that we can change the reality of what's happening in this city and we can beat back this disease. It’s happening literally every single day and the indicators go over it each day show it, and you can see it in the life of the city that things are getting better because people did the right thing.

So, there will be doubts along the way. There will probably be some setbacks even, but you don't have to wonder about New Yorkers. You don't have to wonder about our basic nature. You don't have to wonder about our toughness, our strength, our compassion for each other. You don't have to wonder about the ability of New Yorkers to do big things. It's playing out on the great stage right now. It's playing out before our very eyes, and I am confident we're moving in the right direction and please, I know it's not easy. I know it's too long a battle, but we will get through it. Do what you're doing. Do even more. Spread the word about the power of social distancing, of wearing those face coverings, of staying home to the maximum extent possible. It's working. Let's keep going and that's the way back to normal.

Thanks, everybody.

2020-05-08 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. You know, sometimes I have talked about this virus like it has human characteristics, and I do that to get a point across, to help us understand our adversary. And even though we're fighting every day, it's important to never underestimate your enemy. So, if this virus had human characteristics, it would be a pretty clever virus. Clearly more than once has thrown the medical community a curve ball, and a lot to deal with all the time, especially because of what we don't yet know. But this virus is no match for a group of people who are much more clever in that is New Yorkers. This virus has met its match in fact, in this city more and more. What we've seen from New Yorkers is an extraordinary commitment to a winning strategy of social distancing, and shelter in place, and face coverings, all the things that are clearly working, but they would not work if people were not so devoted to them. And overwhelmingly that's what we've seen around this city. It is not easy to do these things. This may be the single-hardest place in the United States of America to implement those kinds of strategies, for us to live in that way, and yet you have been doing it, all of you in such an amazing, impressive, extraordinary fashion.

Now, I'm going to go over the numbers and take a look at them in the perspective of a whole week, and what we will see is real progress and what we will see is a winning strategy, and you are winning, but it is so important to never rest on your laurels. When you're winning in anything in life, in sports, and anything else, when you start winning, that's not the time to relax. That's not the time to take it easy or take your eye off the ball. When you start winning, it's time to double down, and make sure you keep winning. So, we're not resting on our laurels here in the city. It's not the way we are anyway. We're always striving to be better and better. And so, we're always looking for new tools, new ways of fighting back against this disease. And when we find them, we move really, really quickly, because again, what's more New York than that? Finding a great idea and acting on it would record speed. That's what we're going to do, and I'm going to talk to you about the new ways we're going to fight back. The fact that we're going to go on the offensive against this disease here in this city, and everyone's going to be a part of it, and it's been working already to have everyone be at the same table. 8.6 million people in common cause, and in this next phase we're going to take that even farther.

So, let's start with going over the indicators. And again, it's Friday. On Fridays now, we're taking a look at a longer timeframe. So, when we look at the daily number, indicator one, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19. Alright, this is just extraordinary. Look at that progress in such a short period of time. Again, we are probably the place on earth, or certainly in this country with the most challenges dealing with this disease. The biggest population packed into the smallest space, big buildings, an international travel hub as we saw, that's the origins of this disease here in this city. So, many things working against us, and you could see early on in this crisis what it meant in terms of the number of people each day going into the hospital. And now look how far we've come. So, most days lately we've been under a hundred new hospital admissions a day for COVID-19. That's amazing, but we are not out of the woods. And today's indicator – so you see the big picture – but now let's just talk about today's indicator – unfortunately, is up. Another day where we see the big picture is unquestionably good, but still day to day we're not where we need to be, we've got more work to do. So, unfortunately today's indicator is up from 79 to 102. Still overall much, much lower numbers, good sign in the bigger scheme of things. Not yet what we need to take the next step towards loosening restrictions. So, more work to do on that one. Now, number of people in our public hospital ICU’s for suspected COVID 19. Again, the glass half full here is the improvement you can see clearly there. In the last few weeks, we've literally had over 300 fewer people in the ICU’s fighting for their lives. That number is really a crucial number, because it talks about the, the most extreme impact this disease has having. The folks in the ICU’s, are the ones facing the greatest threat. When that numbers going down, it really speaks to the heart and soul of this issue, the one we care about, saving lives. That number goes down, that means a lot more lives are being saved. A lot fewer people are in danger. But again, not yet where we need to be. Now, there's an uptick today by just one. I don't want to make more of that than I should. It went from 567 to 568. So, basically it breakeven, but we need that number to go down, and we need it to go down steadily, and we need to see fewer and fewer people fighting for their lives. So, progress overall today, we didn't get the progress we wanted.

Now, the one that might be sort of the biggest, obviously the biggest indicator in terms of the number of people it reaches and looking at the whole city. Percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19. Now, this is going to be a number that is informed more and more by the fact that testing is coming on more and more each day. So, we're going to get a better and better picture the more testing we do. But you can see massive improvement. I mean, look where we were early on in that chart. Look at the stunning percentage of people are testing positive. Look where we are now, real progress. Today's number, progress as well from 16 percent down to 14 percent, that's great. More work to do, but that's a really good sign.

Okay, so when you put together these indicators and you look at them from the beginning of the crisis, what does it tell us? Well, there's a quote I often refer to from Bob Dylan. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Anybody can look at this chart and say, we're obviously making progress, and that is what we are here to do, and something everyone should be proud of. That kind of progress, that intense speedy progress, and the way we got there is something every single person out there should be proud of, because you all contributed to it. So, the trends are clear, the hard work is paying off. It does not mean we're all the way there, but it means we keep seeing broadly the right direction. Now, as I said, time to go on the offensive. When you're ahead, don't let up when you're ahead, fight harder, go on the offensive.

So, we are now going to take the next big step with this test and trace vision that is going to allow us to squeeze this disease, constrain it further. Remember, the disease flourishes when people who get it are not identified and spread it to other people. But this disease is put in a very bad place if more and more people are identified and isolated properly, their contacts are traced. Those people need isolation, or quarantine, or reach. The more knowledge, the more reach, the more ability to treat each person appropriately, the better off we are in fighting back this disease. Now, we've, the whole way through, not had the testing we needed or deserved, and it's still an issue. Every day, I am trying to get the federal government to recognize they have to do more on testing, and thank God one of the things that folks in the Congress, notably speaker Pelosi is focused on, is making sure that there's a lot more resources for testing, and the federal government will take the lead it still hasn't taken and needs to take so we can turn the corner even more. But in the meantime, we're going to use every tool we have here to maximize testing, to maximize tracing, to change the trajectory even further in a favorable direction. And we put together a great team to do it, and this effort will be housed and will be led by the organization that's been throughout this fight nothing less than heroic, and that is our Health and Hospitals. The folks who have led the way in our public hospitals and clinics. The folks who have been at the frontline fighting this enemy in a way that literally came to the attention of the whole country, of the whole world. I'll use the obvious example of Elmhurst Hospital. When I say Elmhurst Hospital, you're going to conjure up I think a vision of an extraordinary onslaught that that hospital took from this disease, but you should also conjure up the vision of heroes. People who fought back, people who had the wherewithal to hold the line. And our hospitals across the board, all 56 of them in this city, but particular respect for the 11 public hospitals and all the clinics, they held, no matter what was thrown at them, they held in this fight, and I have gained even more respect for the people in Health and Hospitals for the heroic role they have played.

So, considering that in this fight, New York City was the epicenter in this whole nation, and places like Elmhurst Hospital were the epicenter within the epicenter. It is such a statement on the strength and quality of the people at Health + Hospitals that they bore the brunt of the single biggest attack in the whole country by this disease, and they held and they fought back. They also, and I want to give a lot of credit to the folks at Health + Hospitals. They've been leading the way in so many other ways. They had to put together a huge new staffing plan, finding doctors, nurses, clinical staff, overnight, literally to fight back against this disease. They created the community testing program in the clinics literally in a matter of days. Everything at health and hospitals has been based on speed, and intensity, and precision, and they've done an amazing job. So, that is why it makes sense as we build this next effort to use that great leadership and that great organizational capacity of a huge, huge organization would reach into every part of the city, and have them lead the way on our new tool that we're bringing to bear in this fight. And I am so happy to announce today the New York City test and trace corps. The New York City test and trace corps is going to be a dedicated group of trained individuals who will lead the way in creating testing and tracing on a level we've never seen before in this city or this country. And they are going to bring together a huge amount of expertise. The expertise of folks who have spent a lifetime in public service and in health care, but also the expertise gained from these last months fighting this disease at the frontline.

Now, this is how we move forward, creating this test and trace corps confronting this disease, if you will, reaching deep into our communities, expanding, testing, expanding, tracing, really getting our arms around the problem as never before and let me talk to you about the leaders of this new effort. So, first of all, the executive director of the Test and Trace Corps will be Dr. Ted Long. Dr. Long is Vice President of Ambulatory Care at Health and Hospitals. He oversees care at the 11 hospitals and 70 primary care clinics, this is the largest public hospital and clinic organization in the nation. This is the ultimate and Ted is the guy who oversees the day to day care to make sure that millions of New Yorkers get the help they need. He also led the way in putting together the community-based testing program over the last few weeks, literally in a matter of days creating grassroots testing all over the City. Ted has the experience and the knowledge and the spirit to lead this effort and I'm so thankful he's agreed to take on this assignment. Jackie Bray, Jackie Bray has done amazing work during this crisis and long before she will be the Deputy Executive Director of the Corps. She has been one of the unsung heroes with a great team of other unsung heroes and we're going to get a chance over the weeks and months ahead to really talk about the people who put together that amazing effort to get tens of millions of pieces of PPEs to our hospitals, our nursing homes, clinics, amazing efforts. Our first responders, you name it, Jackie was one of the ultimate leaders of that amazing effort that found PPEs all over the world, worked to get the federal government to get us more work to create more here in this City. She's done extraordinary work during this crisis and she has a special understanding of the challenges that vulnerable New Yorkers face from her previous work in City government, most recently as Director of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, so, she'll bring that sensibility to this work as well. The Chief Medical Officer will be Dr. Andrew Wallack. For more than two decades, Dr. Wallach has served at Bellevue and he knows our public health system in and out, and he understands the lives of New Yorkers and how to make sure they get what they need and how to create in real world circumstances. Bellevue is synonymous and revered all over the country, synonymous with practical frontline medicine folks who deal with any challenge and somehow find a way. I first got to see that so vividly during the Ebola crisis and I got to tell you then, and now during the coronavirus crisis, folks at Bellevue are just tough as nails and they do not bend, and they do not break. So, this is something that Dr. Wallach has been a leader of and a part of this experience and he will bring that attitude, that spirit, this work over sees a staff of over a thousand as the physician in charge of Ambulatory Care at Bellevue. So, again, someone used to working on a very big scale and he'll help to create this extraordinary test and trace effort. Someone you've heard of before, if you've been watching these press conferences, Dr. Jay Varma, my Senior Advisor for public health. Jay brings a wealth of experience literally from all over the world. When you're talking to Jay and you ask him about certain realities we're facing with this disease, he'll tell you instantly about different ways he's understood this disease and other infectious diseases. And he'll reference the places he's been including Hubei Province in China, which is where this disease got its start. He's worked all over the world to understand how to fight back infectious diseases and he's renowned for his work nationally and internationally, but he also has a tremendous sense of New York City having served for seven years in the last administration as Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control, so, someone will bring so much to the table. And then, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, you've all seen and heard his good work during this crisis. He'll be advising this effort through his current role, of course, as Department of Health Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control – before fighting the coronavirus did extraordinary work in terms of reconceptualizing and helping to lead the fight against HIV and AIDS here in New York City. And he has been helping to lead the fight against the coronavirus from day one. So, someone who brings so much experience, but also so much creativity and good new thinking to the process, he'll be a key voice helping us build this unprecedented effort. So, we're all trying to do something that's never been done before and this is the team of people who knows how to think that way, knows how to build something, knows how to make it real and practical and fast and precise and something that can reach all across the five boroughs of New York City.

Okay. Now let's talk about the two magic words, test and trace and what this means. What it means is creating more and more testing all the time. Now we still have one hand tied behind our back because we're not getting the help we need from the federal government and we're still fighting for all the lab capacity we want, but unquestionably, we're going to be able to expand testing greatly. It means eventually being able to trace more and more, in our perfect world, every person who tests positive, we want to find everyone who is positive and then trace all of their close contacts. And then everyone needs help, you got to provide the help and that's what we'll do. So, someone who tests positive can they continue to see this disease through at home or they're in a place where they can isolate from the other members of their home or not? Do they need to be in a hotel? Do they need something more in the way of support to make sure they don't infect others? When you trace their contacts, the second question, someone was in close contact with three people. You interview those three people, those folks need to be tested, those folks need to be asked, can they isolate if they test positive, do they need a hotel room? If they need a hotel room, they're going to need a lot of support, medical support, food, laundry, you name it, this takes a big coordinated team to put all those pieces together.

Now, we decided to call this the Test and Trace Corps because we wanted to make clear the word was chosen on purpose. This is a call to arms; this is a call of duty to come forward and put something together and the emergency basis to help people in a crisis. This is not business as usual, so this team has been charged by me by doing things very quickly, very intensely. They're up against a ferocious enemy that you have to be even more intense in the way they fight back by early June and this is an example of how fast we're going to move. By early June, we'll have 2,500 public health foot soldiers in this corps. So, it would take an entity that didn't even exist and the course of just weeks, it will be ramped up to 2,500 people to begin big number, but a necessary number to be able to build what we need to build that number will grow thereafter and keep growing as large as we need it to be. Now the same goes for testing, today our maximum daily capacity is hovered around 14,000, we need to go a lot farther. This team has guaranteed me that they will get the number up to a capacity of 20,000 tests per day by May 25th so basically in the next two weeks, and by that point we'll be using 33 community-based testing sites. Now, that's May 25th right around the corner, 20,000 tests per day, 33 testing sites, but that's just the beginning. This team is preparing to get us to the level of 50,000 tests per day and the goal is to have that in place in the next few months, 50,000 per day, 300 plus community sites and that will be both public health sites and working with private providers as well. When you get to the level of 50,000 tests a day, a hundred thousand every two days, a million every 20 days, you can see now we're starting to get into the kind of extraordinary levels we need, and we want to keep building all the time. So, the testing crucial at the beginning of it all, but now the tracing, think about what it means. A tracer needs to engage someone who tests positive, they have to say, who have you had close contact with in the last few days? Talk about all the places you've been, let's reconstruct it, then we have to find the people you had close contact with. We're going to use every tool we have, and I'm convinced we'll have a very high success rate identifying those contacts, tracking them down quickly. And then the whole process begins again with those contacts, if they test positive, everyone they've been in contact with in close contact in recent days, et cetera. In the next few weeks, as I said, we're going to build up rapidly, by later this month we'll be at a thousand contact tracers and folks working on the phone bank operation related to it. As I said, by early June 2,500 eventually we're preparing to get to a number of tracers and folks in the phone bank operation, so a corps that will reach between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals. So, this corps is going to be extraordinarily important and we're going to keep adding as many people as we need to get the job done.

Now, I told you we were hiring that first thousand, we want people with a health care background, we put out the call for people to apply. Well, boy, talk about if you build it, they will come – 7,000 applications already and the hiring has begun. We are working closely with the Johns Hopkins university contact tracing and training initiative and that's sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Again, a big thanks to Mike Bloomberg and everyone at Bloomberg Philanthropies for the great work they're doing and for the great partnership, they're helping us quickly perfect this hiring and training apparatus so we can bring people on board rapidly. Now, just like we have this big vision of test and trace and we're using the huge extraordinary capacity of our own agencies and bringing outside help in like Bloomberg Philanthropies. This is just the beginning of something much bigger because what we will do as the city government is going to be the lead, but we're going to start to have more and more partners in the private sector as well. And last night I had an absolutely inspiring conversation with leaders in some of the largest in New York City, I told you, we've created these advisory councils. So we pulled together leaders of some of the largest businesses in the City to both talk about what their businesses are going through and how they were planning to restart and what they needed, what support, what ideas they had, but also talk about this city and the future of the city.

I have to tell you, these are some of the, literally the greatest minds in the business community, not just in this city, but in this country and the whole world. And uniformly people were confident that New York City was going to come back strong and these are folks who are going to have a big impact on that comeback and they believe in New York City. They believe in the spirit of this place; they believe in the talent that's here and they're all going to contribute. And what was so striking on the call was people are not asking what could the City government do for them? They consistently said, we want to help the City government; we want to help the people in New York City; we want to help the smaller businesses get back on their feet; we want to help the people of neighborhoods that have been hard hit; we want to help lead the way; we want to help create testing and tracing in our own organizations that will compliment what the city is doing. So, I just to say, it was very encouraging to see the commitment of our business leaders to getting this right and all of us doing this together and the willingness to contribute to everything the city needs to do.

And I also had another conversation last night, which was also inspirational to me. One of the, I think the most impressive business leaders in America, Marc Benioff, of Salesforce. He's someone I've had the opportunity to get to know over the last few years and I think one of the business leaders in this country who has one of the strongest voices in terms of social conscience and what the business community needs to do to help the larger community. We talked about the work ahead with test and trace and Salesforce; his company is already doing this work with a number of States around the country. And we've agreed that we're going to work together and bring Salesforce into this effort - testing and tracing here in this city. Extraordinarily able company with the kind of technological vision and capacity to help make the test and trace approach as efficient and as far reaching as possible. Then they've been working closely with our information technology department DoITT and Commissioner Jesse Tisch, who's doing an extraordinary job on many different, addressing many different pieces of this crisis, but I want to thank Commissioner Tish and everyone at DoITT. We have called upon them many times in many ways and they've answered the call brilliantly, but the ability of our IT team to now bring in the talent of Salesforce, which will allow us to track every case, analyze the data constantly, keep the right information on each and every case, and manage the whole process efficiently. This is going to be a huge effort. Just think how it grows and grows over the weeks, but it's something that if we do right, continually will constrain this disease. So, Salesforce is coming on board in the next few weeks. Their effort will be up and running by the end of this month and a great thanks to Marc Benioff and everyone there. As we spoke, there was no question in my mind he believed this was a personal responsibility to support New York City. Also mentioned to you before Salesforce has done a whole lot in terms of getting donations of PPEs here to New York City to help our heroes and that's deeply appreciated as well.

Now, when we get to the reality of tracing people that will inevitably lead to folks who need to isolate and folks who sometimes won't be able to properly isolate in their own home. So, look if you live alone, you can isolate. If you live in the kind of home or apartment where there's enough space and you can be separated from other people in the home the right way - people are doing it all the time - that's fine, but there are many, many New Yorkers who live in such crowded circumstances that they simply couldn't isolate properly or they don't feel they could and they need support and that's why we're going to be leaning heavily into this isolation effort through the hotels. So, by June 1st, we'll have 1,200 rooms available specifically for this isolation effort, but we can build that number out very quickly anytime we need. Remember, it is not just here's a hotel room, have a nice day. It is we're going to get you to a hotel room, we're going to transport you, we're going to make sure that you have food, we're going to make sure you have medical care, we’re going to make sure you have laundry, whatever it takes and constant checking-in. Someone who is experiencing the disease we want make sure they're okay and if they need further care, we're going to get it to them. So, that hotel operation comes with a lot of support and all that has to be coordinated and individualized to the person. That's a key part of what the corps will do as well.

So, pulling the pieces together here, we're going to have to do things we never have done before to fight an enemy we've never seen before. We're dealing with an invisible enemy; we're dealing with a disease we've never experienced. No one six months ago on this earth had experienced and a disease that the medical community still doesn't fully understand, but the things we do understand, we're throwing everything we got into. We know testing and tracing works; we know isolation works. When you combine these strategies with the progress we're making already because of social distancing, because of shelter in place, because of face coverings, it's that one-two punch to really push back this disease. We keep doing that right, we get to then start taking those steps towards normalcy and opening up, but this piece is going to supercharge our efforts to beat back this disease.

Okay, couple other things. I want to talk to you about the way we're approaching social distancing because it has been unquestionably successful. That doesn't mean we can't get better at it. We have to keep getting better at it. I do note by the way, more and more people for example, wearing the face coverings, that's a good sign and we'll keep giving out more and more for free. We're not standing still. We need more and more people to wear face coverings more and more of the time; we need social distancing to work better, more and more of the time, not let it go lax. We need to get better; we need to get stronger. That's part of why we have enforcement to keep people on their toes, to make sure people are doing it the right way. We know we have a new challenge, the warmer weather; we've talked about this before. The way to address social distancing is tons of education and of course the right kind of enforcement. But we see in some places the enforcement is made harder by the sheer physical circumstances. So we're going to try a new approach and this is a beginning - this weekend - and we're going to try in a few places where we've had particular problems. It's something we can apply to more and more places if it works. We're going to do a certain amount of experimentation here. Again, we're in the great unknown; we're going to experiment sometimes to try and get it right. And clearly, we've talked about this before. Our police officers are being asked to do something they never were originally trained for it. We're going to keep improving the training and the protocols because no one's had to do this before on this scale. But we know we had some parks last weekend that were more crowded than they should have been. And we know it wasn't just some [inaudible] individuals; it was really the physical reality of the park, so we want to do something different. So, for example, at the Hudson River Park, there are some places in Hudson River Park was one of the places where we saw too many people too close together. Hudson River Park, Piers 45, 46 we're going to proactively limit the number of people who can be in any given area right there. We're going to have the NYPD working with other agencies from the very beginning of the day, limiting the number of people who go in. Obviously offering people face coverings as well and keeping an eye to make sure the number of people never reaches too high a point and when it does, obviously asking people to move out and make more space - make sure there's turnover. We're going to try that approach, see if that gets us where closer to where we need to be. Domino Park, Williamsburg, another place where we've had problems; we're going to intensify the enforcement and monitoring there to make sure the numbers are kept smaller as well. This is what we'll do to get started and try this out. We think that limiting access at the beginning make sense, helps us to stop problems before they begin. Helps us to educate people from the beginning there has to be limited time and turnover. Why? Why are we doing this? Because it saves lives and that's what we're going to tell people from the beginning. If you're going in, you're going in for a limited period of time. We're not going to let it get too crowded. If people don't want to wait and they come and there's a lot of people there and you have to wait – a lot of people are going to move on. If people do want to wait, we're going to make sure they're socially distanced, but we're going to start using this kind of approach in these parks. If it works and we need to use it in other places, we'll do that, but the idea is proactive, early NYPD and other agencies are there before people show up in numbers. We set the tone from the beginning. We think this is going to help a lot.

Now, another really important topic we've talked about last few days, and this is also about saving lives, fighting back this disease, protecting our essential workers, but also protecting some of those vulnerable among us - homeless New Yorkers. We've talked about the subway initiative, what we've been doing with the state of New York, the MTA the last few days. Something we'd never seen before in the history of city, the cleaning out of the subways each night, making sure they're safe and clean. So, we continue to see unbelievable hard data, hard evidence of the positive impact this is having on our ability to reach homeless folks, get them support, get them services, get them to come into a safe, supportive environment. I told you about the last couple of nights. Last night, 163 homeless individuals accepted help. So again, the 163 out of 269 people are engaged. Now, we've had three nights in a row where more than 50 percent of the people engaged, accepted help. This is a very, very striking reality – 163 accepted help, 148 went to shelter, 15 went to hospitals. We have never seen anything like this. I have been working on issues of homelessness now for literally 20 years since I was Chairman of the Jail General Welfare Committee in the City Council going back all the way to 2002. We have never seen results like this in our history; that this many people accepted services and came-in in a single night and it’s happened three nights in a row. This is amazing; this is beyond anyone's expectation. This is good news and it's pointing us in a really powerful direction. So again, totaling the last three nights, 520 homeless New Yorkers have accepted help, have agreed to come in to safe havens and shelters or go to medical facilities; 520 people in three days – it's breathtaking. So again, a thanks to everyone involved. A special thanks to Commissioner Steve Banks, everyone at Social Services and Homeless Services, all the amazing outreach workers, all the wonderful nonprofit organizations they work for. They are doing the Lord's work. They are unsung heroes. But these results are literally historic and I commend you all.

Okay. And let's say a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Okay. With that, we will take questions from our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder, we have Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze, Police Commissioner Shea, President and CEO of Health + Hospitals Dr. Katz, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps. Dr. Long, and Senior Advisor, Dr. Varma on the phone. With that, I will start with Steve from Westwood One News.

Question: Thank you and good morning. Thanks for taking my question first. I feel honored, thank you. So, a question about the contact tracing – first of all, what went into the thought process behind moving this over from the Department of Health to hospitals? And considering the history of the Department of Health doing this and having the expertise and the experience in doing this, why make the shift? I'm just curious what went into the thought process and what were the conversations between the two agencies. Also, both the antibodies testing and the contact tracing armies, are these efforts unique to the City or are they part of the larger State efforts that are also taking place at the regional level? And if they are separate from the regional efforts, why would the City be doing their own separate contact tracing and antibodies testing? Why not be part of the larger process?

Mayor: So, on that question I think it's important to remember the basic structure of things in government has not changed, meaning the federal government provides a certain amount of guidance or a certain amount of decisions that affect us, provides funding and obviously should provide a lot more in the stimulus, should be providing much more in terms of testing, but then turns to states do a lot of the decisions on how to handle their state. The State government makes a whole host of decisions, implements certain things, but it is, in many cases, providing the framework, the rules, the guidance and devolves to localities to do a lot of the day-to-day work, just as is true in any normal governance situation, anytime, even outside of crisis. So, we as the locality, it's our job, of course, to provide the health care directly, for example, through our public hospitals and clinics; to provide the PPEs, which we've been doing vigorously for public hospitals, private hospitals, clinics, nursing homes; to do the enforcement efforts, NYPD and other agencies. This fits in that same broader pattern. The test and trace apparatus that the City is setting up is to serve our people on a huge scale with our operational capacity. The State is putting together a big effort working with localities, working with Bloomberg Philanthropies. We're going to connect into that effort in a variety of ways. But what matters is that the numbers add up and that the numbers are shared and coordinated. And that's absolutely what we intend to do. But in terms of boots on the ground, that's what localities do, by definition. You know, the State government – think about all the things the State government does, all the things local governments do. We run police forces, you know, fire departments, sanitation, public health care, schools. I mean, go down the list. Local government runs the day-to-day operations and the things that reach people's lives very directly. So, we're putting together this vast apparatus, but it will be well coordinated with what the State is doing and information will be shared so anything that's being done will be done in a manner that's – where we avoid duplication and it all adds up towards a common goal, and there's been a lot of communication with the State on the approach. We feel good about that.

On the work of putting this together – so, look, throughout this whole crisis, there's been a group of health care leaders that we have turned to, to think through the strategies and then to bring into play all the other folks who can think about the strategic issues, the organizational issues, the logistics. And it's been an extraordinary effort, a whole lot agencies – Health + Hospitals, Department of Health, Emergency Management, but then all sorts of other agencies – I mentioned DoITT – you know, all sorts of agencies have contributed. In building something as big as this, the first question was just the sheer operational and logistical size and complexity and where does that fit? It fits an operational agency. Health + Hospitals – 11 hospitals, 70 clinics, the ability to do things on a vast scale, the ability to manage huge numbers of operational frontline personnel. They provide health care directly to people and so they understand what it means to put together a process that's going to be not just testing a lot of people and tracing a lot of people, but then ensuring a lot of people get to the hotels, get the health care they need, all the pieces. It fits the sheer operational scope and capacity of Health + Hospitals. Department of Health is going to be deeply integrated into this effort, bringing their expertise. They have tremendous expertise and obviously understand so much about the tracing piece in particular. That's why a number of personnel from Department of Health will be involved in this effort directly and be coordinated into this effort under the rubric of Health + Hospitals. And this is how we're going to build something very rapidly. Health + Hospitals also, because of its nature as an independent agency, is able to move very quickly – major contracts, make things happen in terms of personnel and operations faster than traditional mayoral agencies. This is going to take an immense and fast effort. And Health + Hospitals fits for all the reasons I've said, but also just the sheer heroism of what they've done in the last two months. They had an incredible challenge thrown at them and they found a way to fight back and hold, and I think that speaks volumes about their capacity and why they will be perfectly situated to lead this next phase.

Moderator: Next we have James from PIX 11.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good to see you. Happy Friday.

Mayor: Happy Friday to you James. How you doing?

Question: Great, thank you. I appreciate your asking. I tuned in just a little late, so maybe you covered this at the very top, but, as I recall, you said yesterday we'd get information today breaking down social distancing arrests citywide. We have the Brooklyn where the majority were black and Latino. Could you please respond to that and give guidance about the other boroughs?

Mayor: Yeah, I'm going to respond while turning to Freddi Goldstein to say, please, if we have – if you could bring me that chart on the summonses and if there is arrest data on the other boroughs, just put it here in front of me and I'll speak to it. I've seen some of it, I want to make sure I have the latest.

Question: And this is my first time –

Mayor: Welcome. Welcome.

Question: So, I was told that I get a second question in.

Mayor: Yes, you do.

Question: And it's just this – just a little more on the test and trace corps. You've change it – changed testing and tracing from a Department of Health function to the larger corps, and are including the DOHMH as part of it certainly. But can you talk about the optics of not having anyone from the Department of Health involved in this briefing?

Mayor: Again, this has been something that was built with everyone – team effort, figuring out what makes sense to mount a vast operational effort. The deputy mayor, Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze has under his purview Health + Hospitals and Department of Health. Again, he working with the whole team that's been managing this larger effort has been bringing all the pieces together to make sure that the expertise of those two agencies, but other agencies as well is maximized. This is what you're doing in an emergency. You don't rest on tradition or traditional lines between agencies, you create what's needed to achieve extraordinarily challenging goals in a very, very fast timelines. So, to me, this process really just looked at how we were going to get the job done and what was the right mix, bringing the right talent together in the right setting. And, again, if there's specific questions, the Deputy Mayor can speak to it, but I am convinced this is the way we'll get it done. And, look, ultimately, I'm the one accountable here to make sure that people are served. And I'm the one who believes that the best way to get a vast operational mission done is to turn to an operational agency that has proven its capacity.

Now, on the police data. So, again, I'll speak to what I've seen so far, and, I'll say from the very beginning, we do not accept disparity, period. I've had this conversation with Commissioner Shea, he shares these values. Commissioner Shea has spent a lifetime helping to improve the NYPD, make it more effective make it better able to fight crime, make it more modern and data-driven, but also make it an agency that reflects the values of fairness and equality more and more. And he has been in the lead of creating neighborhood policing and the retraining of the police force and the de-escalation training and body camera usage and all the other fundamental reforms. So, we don't accept disparity. When we see disparity, we’re going to address it. On the arrests and summonses, the thing to focus on first, just the sheer fact is we're looking at numbers across a city of 8.6 million people and across a time span, I believe, was six weeks. And the numbers of arrests and summonses are extraordinarily low. So, I don't for a moment misunderstand folks who raise alarms and concerns or project forward concerns. But I say, hey, start with these sheer facts that we're talking about very few people have been arrested and very few people have been summonsed. And there's been a huge amount of restraint by the NYPD, that's just factually obvious from the numbers, and we intend to keep it that way only using summons and arrest when needed, but we will use them when need. It's also important to note that in some cases – I think some of the data that went out originally included arrests that were not actually related to social distancing but are related to – or, summonses that were related to other types of offenses. So, that just needs to be clarified. But the bottom line is, when I saw those numbers, I found them to be an indicator that something's wrong we need to fix. And we will fix it. Six years we've been seeing things that were wrong, we needed to fix. This is another thing we will fix. We'll give more training to our officers, clearer protocols. I want to make sure every community is treated equally. But that being said, we are going to use the NYPD where – we absolutely must use the NYPD to keep people safe in every sense, but specifically when fighting this pandemic. Job-one is to save lives and enforcement is necessary to saving lives and we're not going to have proper enforcement without the largest, best police force in the country being in the game here. So, we're going to do that, but we're going to keep working to make it better literally every day.

Moderator: Next we have Anna from the Daily News.

Mayor: Yeah, Mr. Mayor, I was wondering if you could explain a little further the need to, kind of, put public hospitals in charge of this? I mean, I know that the public hospital system has turned around in recent years, but, of course, there's been a lot of managerial issues there over the last 10 years or so. And I'm just curious if people in the Health Department, you know, thought that this was also the way to go, because it feels like they're not happy that this control is being taken from them.

Mayor: Yeah. Anna, thank you for the question. So, first of all, my job is not to ensure people's happiness who work for 8.6 million New Yorkers. This is not about happiness. This is about effectiveness. It's about serving people. This is about fighting a pandemic. I'm not going to get overly focused on anyone's personal opinions in the midst of that. I think the question is what's going to get the job done. And getting the job done means taking the best of each agency and applying it in a way that makes sense. Again, the entire effort to date, has been asking different agencies to do different things. We have asked agencies to collaborate, to defer to each other, to join together in all sorts of ways and people have done it and they've done it with a tremendous sense of teamwork. Here, bottom line is simple, massive operational task. I'm giving it to a massive operationally focused agency. That's what makes sense. That's what we're doing. Now you make a good point, H + H of the past, H + H of today – H + H of today is a very different reality. We have provided the immense resources to strengthen Health + Hospitals. Health + Hospitals has gone through a series of reforms. They are becoming a stronger, better organization all the time. Dr. Mitch Katz has worked miracles. Anyone paying attention in the last few years has seen a stunning transformation. And he's renowned all over the country. One of the great health leaders in this country. But remember this is a guy who ran Los Angeles public health system, the second largest in the country and then came here in the last years, has been running the largest in the country. And in both places, created tremendous progress and reform. So, when you have an inspired operational leader, you know, pass the ball to them is my attitude. And the last important thing to say is two months of sheer hard evidence – H + H was put through hell and fought back, held the line, created, came up with solutions, came up with innovations. It was breathtaking. So, whatever happened in the past is in the past, but what H + H has done today, what H + H has done before our very eyes, the people at Health + Hospitals, the talent at Health + Hospitals that's been on display these last two months. That's all I need to see is what's before my very eyes.

Moderator: Next we have Andrew Siff. [Inaudible] apologies. Next we have Andrew Siff from NBC.

Mayor: Hey Andrew, can you hear me?

Question: Yes. Hello, Mayor and everyone, hope you're all doing well. I have two questions. The first question has to do with your crowd control initiative at parks. I'm wondering why that's the policy as opposed to a more strict message that New Yorkers simply not go out for long? Given that hospitalizations tick back up today. It seems that both you and the Governor are talking about people going outside as though it's a reality instead of trying to continue to enforce that people go out for quick exercise and stay home? My second question is on behalf of my colleague Melissa Russo, you know, she broke the story about the impact on COVID and Kawasaki Syndrome and kids. Your Health Department put out an alert on Monday that there were 15 cases of Multi-Inflammatory Syndrome in children in the city. Yet we were told by the Chief Doctorate at Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital that they have 15 cases at their hospital alone. So should we assume that the number you put out at the start of the week was incomplete? Do you have an updated number now that more hospitals may be reporting?

Mayor: Okay. Let me come to that one second and I'll turn to Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze and Dr. Varma for anything they want to add on that. But let me in the meantime on the crowd issue, Andrew, I think you're raising a very important question. I'm glad you asked it because I think this is the kind of dialogue we need to have. So we made a decision from the beginning that we had to figure out how to get this whole strategy to work. Asking 8.6 million people to, for the vast majority of day stay inside, when they're outside to practice social distancing. And then we added wear a face covering on top of that. And asking that many people to follow an instruction which was so difficult, so unusual, so unnatural for them in very little time, you always have to ask the question, what kind of balance do you have to strike? What's going to help people do it? How are we going to recognize their honest needs and frustrations and you know, create some bounds? And so to me the notion of saying, okay, you're going out for a period of time each day. Keep it as limited as you can get back in. That makes sense. And that's really what we've seen the vast majority of people do. We've had a couple of really nice days and actually very few really nice days since this crisis began. And it's understandable after days and days and days where people on top of shelter-in-place, we're dealing with bad weather, that on the very nice days people came out disproportionately. But we're going to keep making the point, you go out, get some air, get some exercise, get back in. But the way to do that in my view is a combination of approaches and I think to say to people we're going to start putting these limits on the space in some parks that need it, that are particularly challenged by their layout is another way to say to people just get what you need and go back. This is a way to strike the balance. So no, the numbers we've seen overall have been very good and consistent, but still not everything we need. But the fact is if we're going to get people to adhere to everything else, Andrew, we've got to have some balance in the equation. Because this is not going to be done overnight. We're going to be at this for a while. So we're trying to figure out and something we talk about all the time, what's that appropriate balance that keeps people inspired to do all the tough and discipline stuff but gives them a little bit of a break because we have to sustain this strategy for the long haul? That's what's undergirding this approach.

On the Kawasaki Syndrome. Again, any information we find we're going to put out, we're going to acknowledge. Days and days ago when Melissa first asked and I'm really glad she raised it, we just weren't seeing it in any appreciable number. Then the minute we did, we came forward, said it, put out the health alert. If there's more out there, we want to know it, we want to acknowledge it and act accordingly. So it's not surprising that new information is coming in. That was the whole intention of the health alert to try and encourage new information. But if there's more than we originally saw, we want to know that and we want to see it. Talk about it, act on it. Deputy Mayor or Dr. Varma, anything you want to add?

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: I think you just said it all, Mr. Mayor. We only know what is reported to the Health Department. So, the moment we put out a health alert, it is highly likely the awareness heightens and then we get more visibility to the cases. So, we'll continue to report them as much.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. My first question, and I think it was raised before, but I didn’t hear it addressed. Is there a reason Dr. Barbot is not on the call today to discuss this new effort? And secondly, I believe you said 50,000 tests a day in the next few months? You've previously said we need hundreds of thousands a day in order to reopen the economy. So, does that mean reopening is even further than a few months away?

Mayor: Great question. On the first question, Erin every day we put together a different lineup. You all have seen that. And the lineup for today was to speak about the things that we're talking about today and obviously bring a range of expertise to talk about today's announcements. On the tests. The, you're exactly right that what I want is hundreds of thousands a day. I'm going to keep fighting for hundreds of thousands a day. The only way we are getting to a hundreds of thousands a day is if we have a sea change in the federal approach because we would need an immense amount more lab capacity. And the federal government would have to address that and the problem with the supply of reagents. That is beyond our reach to fundamentally change that reality. Either the federal government's going to step up and do that or we are going to be limited to something like 50,000 – we might be able to get beyond 50,000 but certainly there's not an immediate vision of how to get the hundreds of thousands.

Now, that's the PCR test, the diagnostic test. With all the appropriate disclaimers about the antibody tests and the imperfections of the antibody tests the – hold on technical thing. There we go. With all of those qualifications of what's not so perfect about antibody test, the antibody test still will help in the larger equation. It's something we can use as another piece of information. And as I announced yesterday, just the two efforts that we're working on immediately, that's going to be over a quarter of a million people. So you know, and there's going to be other antibody testing out there too. So that's actually important to think about in the equation. If we're ramping up first to 20,000 then to 50,000 PCR tests per day, as I said, that's going to get you to like a million, 1.5 million in a month. And you have a heavy antibody testing element and it's all being coordinated. That's still giving us a hell of a lot to work with. Not perfect, but a lot to work with. Also remember the good old-fashioned concept of if someone has symptoms, you can act on that too, in terms of isolating someone, that still is a very valuable tool. So I think the best way to summarize it is we have enough to put together a serious and effective test and trace program. We'd like more, but we're going to get plenty done with this approach.

Moderator: Next we have Reuven from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor. Considering that patients in hospitals are generally not allowed to have relatives stay with them, with all the stories of neglect in hospitals, there's a lack of communication with the patients and families. Patients in some instances were not receiving basic care -- going very long times without food or water. There's an effort underway to allow volunteers in hospitals or even the patient's relatives who have tested positive for antibodies, who can help and advocate for the patient's needs. 35 council members sent a letter to the President of H + H and the President of Greater New York Hospital Association requesting they put in place a compassionate helper volunteer program. This follows letters from Assembly members and State Senators. And recently letters from many members of New York's Congressional Delegation to have Governor Cuomo pass this as an executive order. There's also an effort underway to have it passed as a bill although in this state an executive order would be faster. I'm wondering, Mr. Mayor, do you plan to push for this program?

Mayor: Thank you, Rueven. Thank you for a very, very good and important question. So I'll preface and I'll turn to Mitch Katz. Preface would be this, first point pandemic, tremendous challenges. Got to keep people safe. So normal rules don't apply and things that are painful, you know, we've had to grapple with families not being with loved ones, not just in terms of advocacy but even just in terms of love and support, in ways that are very painful. No one would ever want to see that. But it has been about protecting lives. The last thing a patient would want is for their loved ones to be compromised and get sick as well. So that's been the governing philosophy and I think it's a pretty common sense, sane philosophy. With that said your underlying point is very fair. If you think about health care in normal times, family being there, loved ones, friends, being there to advocate for a patient is really important and necessary.
I mean it's not just nice, it's necessary. But that's in normal times. So balancing the two is tough. I would like us to move more and more in that direction where there could be more of a family voice, more family advocacy, more information for families. And I think the point about folks who have been antibody tested is interesting. Although again, remember antibody testing is not a guarantee. But it is certainly is a meaningful point to say it tells us something more about someone's ability to get through this disease and fight it back. So I appreciate the spirit of what's being said and I'm sympathetic to it, but only if we can do it in a way that we think does not increase the spread of the disease. So that's kind of the balance I'm trying to think about here. Dr Katz, you have to actually run the place. Tell me what you think?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: So, Mr. Mayor, I think you've covered the important issues. People really should have their families with them at a time when they're ill. And as you say, we have to balance that with the realities of this infectious disease. We have distributed throughout H + H, a large number of iPads. We're able to connect people to their families and relatives using the iPads so that people can see their families. We do calls as well while the doctors are in the room. So that the doctors can talk to the families, give updates. We have at all of our Health + Hospitals, a patient hotline so that family members can call and inquire about their relatives. But so far, in part because we are under a State order about visitors, we haven't been able to go further. I'm hoping as you say that in the coming days, perhaps using antibody results as a tool, perhaps just because there will be fewer patients and more PPE, that there will come a time when we can go back to normal, but I don't think we're there yet. Thank you.

Mayor: Okay.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Morning. Mr. Mayor, I was hoping you could clarify the difference between this trace corps and the disease detectives that we heard so much about, I guess in the early stages of this. What's the main difference other than that they were through the Health Department? And I wanted to ask a question – two of my colleagues at the Journal wrote a story earlier this week about the City's lack of vetting of certain contractors, including one man who was convicted of a felony back in February and he received a $14 million contract. They saw this by Googling. That's how they found it out. So, I just wanted to get your take on –

Mayor: Katie, what was – when you say the contract, are you saying something related to COVID or something else?

Question: Yeah, through the emergency procurement. So, obviously it's not going to the same vetting process, but I'm curious if you think that there is still more that needs to be done when giving out contracts related to COVID.

Mayor: Right. Yeah, Katie, that is a really good question. This is a – look, I think in the way, the situation we experienced in March and April, of course, we're always trying to make sure people are on the level and, of course, especially in the middle of a crisis you want to make sure if you're giving people money that you're going to get the product back you need and require to keep people safe. And it has to happen in the timeline they're saying. So, when you're in the middle of an emergency, the vetting and the care you take is about making sure that they will perform the function needed to keep people safe and save lives. Of course, we want to guard against any unsavory background and of course there's always checks and balances, but it's all about saving lives right now. And that was the March, April reality. There was very little margin for error. When you start to get to a somewhat better case, like we are now where things are starting to improve, you want to start to apply the more traditional standards, more and more still understanding, for example, on PPEs, you know, we're still not out of the woods on that and that we that we have to move very quickly on test-and-trace. So, there's a balance to strike. But you know, with every passing day it gets a little bit more possible to apply some of our previous standards. So, you know, I'll get folks to give you a more complete answer, but no, I'd say, vigilant but emergency is still emergency. It's first about saving lives and we have to strike that balance always.

On the disease detectives – they are highly experienced, highly trained people. They continue to do immensely important work. They're a small elite corps. This tracing apparatus, as I said, we're going up to a thousand then to 2,500 then with the likelihood of going to end up between five and ten thousand, it's a totally different situation. The disease detectives are sort of the ultimate expression of this work, but there's only a few hundred of them. Where we're going is to thousands. Ultimately, you know, as many as five to ten thousand. So, it's a different approach to be able to do something on a much wider scale.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next, we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I want to ask about the tracing effort. You talked about capacity being one of the big reasons for making this change. But I wonder how this is going to work with the rest of the hospital system, obviously accounting for the public hospital part of this, but how do the other private hospitals come into this equation when obviously contact tracing, being about tracing as many people as possible, including those who may have gone into a private hospital. And my second question is about just, you spoke about the heroism and the capacity of Health + Hospitals, but in the past, the Department of Health has led the charge on other contact tracing efforts, including the most recent one I think is when the city was having the measles outbreak. So, what about capacity changed and why is [inaudible] as you describe it, what does it have to do with their ability [inaudible] Department of Health’s ability to do contact tracing?

Mayor: Yeah. Gloria, I was deeply involved in the measles effort – night and day reality, very important effort for sure, and took time to develop, but ultimately a very successful effort. Department of Health did a great job. A lot of other pieces of the equation came into play too. A lot of work was done here at City Hall, but also other agencies to support that effort and build it. Very good and valiant effort, but this is an entirely different scale now we're talking about with test-and-trace, it’s just night and day. So, again I respect all the questions, but I think you all are interested in facts. We're talking about a vast, vast undertaking. Bears no resemblance to the good and important work that occurred during measles. This is a huge operational undertaking to literally test – we're talking about initially, as I said, 20,000 people a day and then ultimately move up to 50,000 people a day, to bring together all the information from the other testing, to trace people, to make sure that people are isolated, get isolated, to make sure they get the medical care they need, the hotel room, the food, everything.

This is an entirely different kind of operation. Different agencies do different things and there are – and anyone who spends time in government knows that some organizations are primarily operational agencies, others do really crucial tasks, policy setting, regulatory work, oversight, public information, all sorts of things. But in terms of a vast operation, I can tell a mile away, an agency that runs a huge amount of on the ground work, 11 hospitals, 70 clinics, has thousands and thousands of employees who engage the public every day and provide direct service – it's an entirely different thing and it's a better fit for the scale of what we have to do here. The question about the private hospitals, we're going to work with everyone. The testing, we're going to have information on test results. We're going to follow up with anybody and everybody. So, the testing that we'll provide as a city is going to happen primarily through public buildings. But we're, as I said, ultimately going to start working with private entities as well. But the follow-up on people, we don't care what we get the positive result from. We're going to follow up with people no matter what, and do the tracing work and then do the isolation work as needed. So, ultimately, this will involve a much bigger swath of the private health care world as well.

Moderator: Last question for today. We have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you about the social distancing data from the police. When did you first see that data? It sounded like it might've been yesterday or today. And if so, I'm just wondering why you waited so long to look at six weeks of data. You said that you don't accept the disparity, but if you're not aware of it, obviously you can't do anything about it. And secondly, what are you going to do about it? What are your instructions going to be to the Police Department?

Mayor: Yoav, you are a diligent reporter. So, I would ask you to check my Twitter feed because if I replied to it last night, obviously, I did not see it this morning for the first time. I saw it last night, but last night was the first time I saw it and I immediately responded. You know, again, I wanted to give the context for sure, which I believe fundamentally that this is about health and safety first. That when you say safety, you say NYPD we're dealing with a pandemic, we're dealing with something absolutely unprecedented, and there is no way in hell we are going to be able to keep people safe if we don't use the strongest, best public safety organization in this country. So that's my – you didn't say this exactly, but some folks have been saying, ‘Oh, we should deemphasize the NYPD’. I couldn't disagree more. We have to keep people safe. And this is the organization in the city that knows the most about keeping people safe. The honest truth when you look at those numbers is it's very, very few instances. That disparity, I don't like, I don't accept. We can do a lot about it and I'll certainly talk to you about that. But why did – was that not a priority compared to everything else? Because for weeks and weeks we were focused on saving lives. Trying to keep our hospitals going, trying to make sure people had PPE. This was not where the focus was. The focus was on the most essential life saving activity. Now as things are getting a little bit better, we're looking at a lot of outstanding questions. Last night was the first time I saw the data. First thing that struck me was how few arrests there have been and how few summons there have been.

The number that I responded to last night was an overall number. It turned out was higher than the real number, that the summonses directly related to social distancing are 374 from a period that stretches from March 16th when this thing really started to heat up to May 5th. Let's call that six weeks, 374 summonses in six weeks, 42 days. That's fewer than 10 summonses a day and the arrests. The arrest data I saw was from Brooklyn was 40 arrests. It's so small, not belittling the experience that people go through at all, but it's such a small number. Let's put it in perspective, in a city of 8.6 million people in the middle of a pandemic. So the most important thing to me here is that very little use of summons and arrests has been necessary. But what we'll do about it is what we always do when we see a problem.

We're going to go back, clarify the protocols, more training for officers, more work with supervisors to make sure that they're attentive to these issues. I want to see every community treated fairly, but I want a resolute approach where it's really clear we got to follow these rules. I've said, especially when it comes to gatherings, we're going to be very, very aggressive. It’s just they’re too life threatening. We're not going to allow it, but we're going to work to make sure that the law is applied, the rules are applied evenly in every community. And we know what it takes to help approach that in a more effective manner. Commissioner Shea and I've had this conversation and we're totally united on this point and that's what we're going to do. But you will see our officers out there doing enforcement because that's how we save lives.

Okay, everybody, I'll conclude with this. Sometimes, you know, some people when you hear bad news and good news, some people like to hear the bad news first. Some people like to hear the good news first. I'm the kind of person that likes to hear the bad news first. So, indulge me for a moment. When we talk about test-and-trace in the nation's largest city, big, complicated environment, epicenter of the crisis in this nation, the bad news is we don't have the full partnership with the federal government we want and we need. I'm very appreciative to the Department of Health and Human Services and CDC that they are going to be lending a very important helping hand with the antibody tests for our first responders and our health care heroes. That's good. That's a start. But what we really need is a pure, intense federal commitment to maximizing the amount of diagnostic testing to ensure that it's widely, widely available so that we really could get to that level of hundreds of thousands of tests a day, that the lab capacity is there – only the federal government could do that. They still haven't done it. They need to do it. This is something the president should focus on. I'd love to see fewer words from the president and more action. Just get us testing, get us lab capacity. It will work wonders if we can actually provide the testing we've never had. So, that's the bad news that that's never happened that we don’t know when that's going to happen.

The good news is in New York City, we make things happen. We do it our own way. If we are not given the help we need, we don't give up, we don't throw up our hands. We go and make things happen. So, now you're going to see the biggest testing and tracing initiative you've ever seen in this city, in this country before. It's going to be fast. It's going to be intense. It's going to reach deeply into the city. It's going to be lifesaving, unquestionably. Everyone who's coming together to do this are the – are going to be the next wave of heroes in this crisis. So, I want to thank everyone who's worked so hard to set up test-and-trace, everyone who's coming on board to join us, everyone who will be joining us. The work you're going to do is going to be crucial to fighting back this disease and once and for all pushing it away and bringing us a step towards normal again. This is going to be lifesaving work, but it's also going to be how we break the back of this virus once and for all. So, I thank everyone involved and again, I conclude with a thanks to all New Yorkers. You're doing the amazing work that's taken us forward. Keep doing what you're doing and we'll get to a better place.

Thank you.

2020-05-08 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It’s the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone, and as we do every Friday, it's time for Ask the Mayor, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our phones are open at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0 or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag, #AskTheMayor. I see some people are holding on from our last segment where you want you to talk about other things. We respectfully ask that you please clear the lines so people can call in with their questions for the Mayor at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, for our next guest who has to spend his birthday holding coronavirus briefings and doing interviews like this.

Happy birthday, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Brian, you are very kind and thank you for the well wishes. Well you know what, it’s a little-known fact but I, I was born across the street from Gracie Mansion in what was then called Doctors Hospital. Now it's in a classic New York story, it's now condos, but back then it was called Doctors Hospital. Can see it outside the outside the window of Gracie Mansion. And after this whole long life, I've only gone a block away. So, I am celebrating today that I have the privilege of serving the people of New York City and helping us all through this tough time and, interesting way to spend a birthday. But I'm in good company of 8.6 million friends.

Lehrer: There you go. An interesting journey around the world, that lands you back for maybe, your ultimate accomplishment in your life, being Mayor of New York, one block away from where you were born.

So we heard in the news and I know you addressed this earlier today at your briefing, the stat that NYPD, I'm sorry, from Brooklyn prosecutors that 35 of the 40 people arrested for social distancing violations in the borough are black, and of course there were those videos that emerged earlier in the week showing apparently violent NYPD arrests of people of color. And I know you already said this morning that all of this is not who we are as our city, in terms of New York values, and you're going to see that it changes. I want to ask who specifically in city government is responsible for these disparities, getting as far as they have on this and how will you hold them accountable?

Mayor: Well, look, I want to put it in perspective for a quick moment. I don't accept disparity, you know, the whole reason I came here to be Mayor was to address inequality and I think in the context of NYPD and I give a lot of credit to the NYPD leadership up and down the line that there has been a real devotion these last years to addressing disparity in so many ways. That's why we got rid of the unconstitutional use of Stop and Frisk, and retrained the entire police force in de-escalation and have moved to a neighborhood policing strategy, body cameras – I mean, so many fundamental changes. So I want to put it in perspective. I think the NYPD has been constantly improving and addressing disparity in a variety of ways and needs to keep doing more. And I want to also put in perspective that that the set of arrests in Brooklyn over a period of time during this crisis, 40 arrests in the borough of, you know, 2.6 million people. I don't want to overrate what happened, but the disparity is still unacceptable. So we're, look, I'm responsible, the Police Commissioner's responsible, we all have to figure out the strategies that we'll get up and down the line and NYPD the clear understanding that we have to ensure that policing is fair and just an equal that sometimes takes retraining that sometimes takes more work from supervisors at the precinct level. But again, you're talking in this case about very few specific instances and the importance of enforcement in the context of the pandemic. And that's where I will part company with some people honestly on both left and right, who are saying, Oh, pull back the NYPD in from enforcement – no, no, no, we have to have them NYPD enforcing these rules to ensure that we save lives and we get out of this pandemic.

But I think the answer to your question is it's the same exact way we've made as much progress. There's no question. There's been serious de-escalation efforts you see at these videos we've seen lately, one of which was particularly heinous and I was very critical of what happened there. And the officer has been placed on modified duty and is facing discipline. But you see relatively few videos compared to the millions of interactions in the course of a year between NYPD and citizens, the vast majority of which are done in the appropriate respectful manner. So we're going to work on this and we have ways of addressing this [inaudible], but I want it to kept in that bigger context.

Lehrer: You mentioned what people from the left and right are saying about the role of the NYPD. We have the Chair of the City Council Public Safety Committee, Donovan Richards of Southeast Queens on the show this week. And he argued something that to your point, ironically the police union had Pat Lynch, politically very different from Donovan Richards is also for, and that is not using the police for getting New Yorkers to socially distance. Here's Donovan Richards:

Council Member Donovan Richards: I agree with them and you know we should utilize different tools that we have in a toolbox right here in the City of New York. Now first off, we have the Department of Health and they have staff, I think we could utilize them a lot more to do PSAs, to drum up PSAs, to be out in local communities, this is something I've mentioned to the Mayor a few weeks ago, we need to see more of a city agency, city worker presence in a lot of communities. And then we should also be looking at community-based solutions. You know, we as a Council have funded crisis management organizations to the tune of I think close to $30 million, right? Why aren't we utilizing the validators, the people from our very communities to actually be part of the solutions on the ground?

Lehrer: So Mr. Mayor, why use the police at all as opposed to Health Department people as the Councilman refers to there for others who are not law enforcers?

Mayor: Look, this is the broadly, I think we're actually in agreement that we want to see more and more types of efforts beyond just police and that's why I announced over a thousand other city employees – enforcement folks from different agencies would be out. That was a week ago plus, I announced that. And then on top of that, we are going to move to bring into this more and more city employees who aren't enforcement folks and community-based organizations as well. So, actually, moving in the very direction that the Councilman is talking about. But you know, I want to differentiate that from folks who have suggested that you take away the single best enforcement tool we have, which is NYPD. NYPD is in every neighborhood, you know, deeply connected and knowledgeable about neighborhoods, deep relationships all around in a way that there's no parallel in other agencies have that kind of reach and that ability to be present and effective. Again, the vast majority of what the NYPD does is both effective in terms of protecting safety and more and more community focused and engaged with communities. So we should do all the above, you know, the right kind NYPD presence mixed with other agencies mixed with community-based leaders and organizations too. And that's certainly the direction we're going in.

Lehrer: But one more question about this relative deployment of what kinds of city workers and this time with respect to the subways, I know that overnight closures are by the Governor, not you, but I see a thousand NYPD officers are involved to deal with the homeless people being evicted each night. And our reporters from WNYC and Gothamist were out at some stations this week and said the number of police on the scene dwarf the number of social services people there to do outreach, and I asked the head of the transit agency, Sarah Feinberg on the show yesterday, shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't social service workers from the HRA, Human Resources Administration –

Mayor: Not the NRA, definitely not the NRA.

Lehrer: Definitely not the NRA, we’ll both agree about that. Shouldn't the HRA dwarf the number of police? And she said, I would love that. So why is the ratio what it is?

Mayor: So let's understand. I think, I think there's a little bit of mixing of realities here. The – we're three nights into an unprecedented shutdown of the subway in the late night hours for cleaning, which was exactly the right thing to do, Governor and I agreed on this, to better cleaning, protect the essential workers, but also I believed fundamentally it would help us address homelessness in a more effective way. The MTA was very, very concerned to make sure that'd be enough police presence because you're talking about, I think it's almost 500 stations that were going to be closed for that period of time. And there were concerns about what happens when you close them and what kind of support would be needed for the NYPD in terms of preserving safety. And so there was a very extensive NYPD presence made available for the first days to help a deal with, you know, something we've never dealt with before. That was actually something that MTA wanted, and we agreed to it.

But on the outreach workers, we're going to keep sending as many are needed. I want you to hear this number, Brian, this is literally historic: the last three days – the last three nights when the trains were closed, outreach workers engaged hundreds of homeless folks and over three nights, 520 homeless individuals agreed to come in to shelter or to get to a medical facility because they needed medical help. 520 people in three days. We've never seen anything like that in the history of New York City where so many people agreed to come in simultaneously. And that's because the outreach workers were there to engage them on a huge scale. And we'll send more if we need more for sure, but it's – the numbers speak for themselves. The outreach workers are doing their job in an amazing fashion. Now, there were people last night, for example, they engaged 269 homeless people and 163 accepted help more than 50 percent. That's amazing. That's unprecedented to have that kind of success rate. But there's still others who didn't – the outreach workers will stick with them. They're going to stay in touch with those people and keep trying to persuade them to come in. So, we have the biggest outreach effort and the history of New York City and we'll keep building it as needed. But I don't want to get confused on why we also had an important police presence in the first days of something unprecedented.

Lehrer: Let's go to the phones. David in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hi, David.

Question: Yes. Hello. Thank you very much. I'm calling because this is very relevant to a lot of other people I believe. I have had COVID-19. I am recovered. I have a letter verifying that I was tested for a COVID-19. I realized that donating plasma saves lives, which I'm very anxious to do as soon as possible. And the problem is that I keep on getting phone numbers, who gave me websites and with a great expert on computers and websites, I've repeatedly tried to get on the website and cannot get through. So, I am willing to drop what I'm doing now to go donate plasma, but for over a week now I can't and I don't know how to do it. There are problems with the website.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, can you help David? Good Samaritan and wants to donate blood now that he's recovered from COVID-19, can you help him and if he’s having a problem other people might be too?

Mayor: Of course. And David, first of all, I'm so glad you recovered. And second of all, what a good person you are to immediately say, how can I help other people? So, I commend you. Please give your information to WNYC, our team will follow up and get you connected to blood donation. And Brian, to your point, yeah, I want to understand how we make this simpler. I know the New York Blood Center has been the go-to and I know people can go to their website and get information on how to give blood. But what I'll do is get a clearer answer about the specifically folks who are coming to offer the plasma donations, which is part of what is a very promising type of treatment so far for folks who are have been affected with and are experiencing really, really tough symptoms. The plasma treatment seems to be, you know, part of really helping them. So I'll get an announcement out on where people can turn to want to particularly come in because they've had COVID and want to give blood. We'll clarify that for the public. But I know, again, the New York Blood Center will be part of that. And I know in David's case we will connect him via WNYC. So, thanks David very much.

Lehrer: David, hang on. We will take your contact information and you said it, you're ready to drop everything and donate blood. Now we're going to make you do it. So, hang on. Seriously. Thank you for being such a good citizen. Edward in Corona, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Edward.

Question: Hello. Wish you a very happy birthday. And I also want to say that you've got a very important historical birthday because today is 75th anniversary of VE Day in Europe, when the war ended in Europe and the allies were victorious, allowing democracy to flourish and to experience the freedoms that we are now experiencing today. So, the question that I have is are you and the Chancellor going to give the teachers back their spring Passover-Easter break that were taken away earlier? And how's that going to work?

Mayor: Thank you. Edward. First of all, Edward, thank you for your kind birthday wishes, but you also, you know your history and yes, Victory in Europe Day, and I will just take a moment to reflect on that very quickly because you know, my parents were both 44 years old when they had me, and so my parents were part of that World War II generation and felt that moment deeply, Chirlane’s parents as well. All four of our parents were in the war efforts. Chirlane’s dad was serving in Europe in the war in the army and her mom worked at the Springfield, Massachusetts armory. And my mom was very conscious of victory in Europe day because she was working at the Office of War Information on a broadcast to Italy at the time. And my dad was serving in the Pacific and the U.S. Army Seventh Division, and for him, Victory in Europe day was a very special day, but unfortunately for him there was still a lot of battle ahead in the Pacific. So for our family, you know, this anniversary means a lot. It's something that's very present for us. So it is a special honor to share a birthday with such an important historical anniversary.

But to your question, Edward, the teachers – look, we asked so much of our educators in the last weeks and, you know, I think the fact is we had to ask people to do some unusual things because it was about keeping the kids engaged, especially as kids were just going stir crazy and we're trying to keep kids in and we're trying to give them something positive to do, keep them focused on their education. And we asked educators to have to make some accommodation for that and the unions agreed to their credit. But we also created mechanisms for some flexibility to try and make sure that it would be recognized that teachers were, you know, being really helpful to the kids in that way and making sure that that time could be reflected in another way. So I don't have the exact mechanics with me. Obviously, we respected any teacher who for purely religious reasons needed to observe, but we did create some kind of accommodation beyond that. I'll make sure, if you give your information to WNYC, Edward, we will get that information to you on how that was handled. But definitely, you know, we're very, very respectful of what teachers have done. And that just last point that you know, I really again appreciate your referencing the history because on a birthday is a day where you remember, you know, who brought you here and who taught you and gave you the strength. So as I'm fighting this crisis, I am really, really thinking about my parents and the everything they taught me because they went through, you know, a really, really tough time in history and maybe somehow those lessons are what is helping me to get through this and help people through this now. So really appreciate you raising that point, Edward.

Lehrer: Edward, thanks. And if you want, we'll take your contact off the air. Terry in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the mayor. Hi Terry.

Question: Good day, good day, good day, Mr. Mayor. I’d like to commend you on all your leadership and all your good ideas and I know things are moving and change it. But I'd like to say I need some help. I’d like to get in contact with your office if at the end of this conversation and also I used to work at an agency, the Department of Corrections, but I work now at a homeless shelter and I think the homeless shelters who are still having clients there still need some assistance and guidance. Do you have any new plans to help people who work in those environments?

Lehrer: Are you talking about, Terry, in particular that it's too crowded and the virus can spread or, or something else in particular that you want to shout out?

Question: Yes, the virus can spread and also the facility may not be prepared to deal with individuals who might need quarantine and sometimes that information is kept secret away from counselors or case managers, caseworkers, who might be in the facility.

Mayor: Terry, I really appreciate you raising the concern. I'd like you to give your information to WNYC and the people who lead our homeless efforts, our efforts to make sure that people are not homeless in the city and support those who are homeless. Commissioner Steve Banks and the Administrator for Homeless Services, Joslyn Carter, I would like one of them to speak to you today and hear your perspective directly to see if there are things that we need to do better. Look, the bottom line is that there are clear protocols that are being enforced with every shelter in terms of things like cleaning and personal protective equipment, but when it comes to the people you serve, making sure that anyone who needs isolation can get to a hotel very quickly with proper medical support. We’re sending in more medical backup to shelters to keep evaluating the situation. Any place there is need for more social distancing, we’ll take more of the clients out and put them in hotels. So that’s being, very energetically pursued. But if there is any gap, if there is anything that is not being communicated to the staff or that we need to better, we will, so please give your information, because I think your frontline knowledge would be really helpful to understand what we need to do better.

Lehrer: Alright, we’re putting you on hold, we will take that contact information Terry, you bet. Katie in Ocean Hill, you’re on WNYC with the Mayor, hi Katie.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor and hi Brian, thank you for having me on. I was hit by a car in a hit and run while biking on the first day of your new Open Streets initiative. I waited for half an hour for the police to come to file a report and they did not, so the EMT’s advised me to go on ahead to bike over to the precinct. I live in Ocean Hill which is a predominately black and working class neighborhood and I’m calling to say that you need to – you need to open up streets for the people. I do not think that limiting space in parks is the answer and I do not think that you understand or trust your citizens to police themselves as it may be open streets. Mr. Mayor, I don’t live near a neighborhood near a park. I need – I was, I feel very failed by you, Mr. Mayor, and by the way you have wavered on this. I’m sorry – I’m not sorry, because I’m horribly afraid to leave my house and I think you need to do better and I want to ask you how you are going to do better to protect all of your citizens?

Mayor: Katie, look, thank you. Thank you for the question Katie. I only want people to tell me what they feel and New Yorkers usually do tell me exactly what they feel and I’m perfectly used to it. So, I want to make sure we’re constantly offering people more and more options, but I also have a bottom line about what I think is safe and it’s my responsibility to keep people safe. And I, with all due respect, I do not know your history or your sense of this city. You know, I’ve spent my life serving this city. I understand and trust the people of this city deeply, I also understand the challenges in this city and I don’t agree with the approaches that we’re taking in some other places being applicable here. I just don’t. I’ve been over with this with our Police Commissioner, our Transportation Commissioner, and lots of other people in our team who work closely with communities and we just don’t believe that the approaches that don’t involve enforcement are ultimately what’s going to create a safe environment for people, but the good news is that we’re finding more and more ways to open up streets with enforcement. Not just around parks, but far further, with the plan we agreed to with the City Council will ultimately be 100 miles of streets in the course of this crisis, and we’re finding more and more community partners who are going to be part of creating the structure to make sure the people are safe while also having the advantages of the open streets.

So, we are going to move in that direction, we were not able, and I stand by this, we were not able to do it at first because we were hemorrhaging people all over the place that were getting sick. We were losing public servants incessantly toward the end of March and beginning of April. We couldn’t put together the right enforcement mechanism. We were in the middle of a deep crisis where the focus was on saving lives and protecting the hospitals from being overwhelmed and when we got to a situation where we had more enforcement personnel, we could set up structure that actually work, we could find local partners to work with, that’s when started to open up more and more streets, and again I would get to a 100 miles. I’m sorry we disagree, but I think safety in this city, in this context, especially, bluntly, with too many people speeding lately, requires some real, visible enforcement.

Lehrer: But it does come back to the issue that we talked about at the top of the show which is what is the proper role of the police and when don’t the police need to be involved if the streets are open as I think Katie is referring to pedestrians, and not to cars in those cases, you had said originally that it was because you did not have enough available police officers, that you couldn’t open more streets and now we see the disparate treatment, so there is even more of a backlash against having police involved and enforcing something that is not a violent crime, social distancing – failure to social distance, even though we want everyone to do that. And so people say that New Yorkers have continued to see these kinds of racial disparities persist even in your supposedly progressive NYPD. So what will you do differently this time if you’re going to use the police to ensure that this doesn’t keep happening?

Mayor: Brian, you’re putting together the pieces in a way that I understand why you are but I just have to push back and say I don’t agree with the way you’re seeing the equation. First of all, you know, I don’t – I’m really going to remind people, there are literally millions of interactions between New Yorkers and police officers in the course of a year. And in terms of the course of this crisis, which has been, you know, over two months now, whatever the number is, hundreds of thousands, millions of interactions just within this month. And we have seen a few very troubling videos, I don’t take them lightly, and we’re dealing with anybody who is does anything wrong on the police force, and we’ve seen some situations, you know, where people thought the enforcement was uneven and there are some obvious facts to back that up and we can’t let that happen and we’ll address it. But the overwhelming, majority of cases, we have seen effective enforcement. How do we know this? We know this because the vast majority of New Yorkers are honoring social distancing, are avoiding large gatherings, are wearing their face coverings, and then the numbers we print every single day on what’s happening with the disease that have shown constant decline directly related to the success of those strategies. And human beings do need some enforcement and consequences in our life as a general rule, and the NYPD has done it but with a very light touch. The actual number of summonses, since this crisis began, we went over this this morning at the press conference, it was fewer than ten a day for a city of 8.6 million people. And so we will do better on ensuring there is evenness but we got to put this in context.

As for the Open Streets, I stand by the fact that the model for example in Oakland, which was no police, streets were designated as open, there was no enforcement, anyone in theory, if they wanted their car to go on those streets could have, there were not the kind of barriers in place that would have made it impossible. And I know New Yorkers enough to say that if you leave streets available that some people could choose, if they wanted to decide to drive on that street for whatever reason, and there is no one around to protect people, and there’s been too much speeding lately, you could end up losing lives for a new reason, and I just wasn’t going to let that happen. I was not going to allow us to create a new problem when trying to fight a pandemic. But now, we have a lot more officers back, we have a lot more community partners to work with, we will intensify the open streets, but we’re not going to stop enforcing. The number one issue facing the city right now is the coronavirus. The number one threat to health and safety is the coronavirus. We’re not going to stop enforcing on the thing that threatens the most lives, period. But we will keep working to make it as fair and as – with as light a touch as possible that’s still effective.

Lehrer: Last question, we’re almost out of time, we’re going to take this one from a listener writing in via Twitter. It says, I’m an artist, I applied for unemployment starting March 26th, and still have not received anything, can’t get through via calling, what can I do? And Mr. Mayor, I know that’s a State function, that’s not a city function, but we get these calls and tweets every single day, it’s such a dysfunctional unemployment system, and you saw the stats this morning, the national unemployment rate hit an unbelievable 15 percent at the end of April. So, can you help get that State unemployment system going?

Mayor: Well, Brian, I’m always going to tell people the truth. You know, I don’t pretend to be able to solve what’s going on with the State unemployment approach. I do understand and appreciate that the State’s been overwhelmed by, you know, something we’ve literally haven’t seen since the Great Depression. So, I’m not here to, in any way criticize when people are trying to deal with something beyond any scale they’ve ever had to deal with before. But I do want to see it fixed for the good of all New Yorkers and we’re going to try to help in any way can. We do try to help people understand how to navigate it, folks having a problem can call 3-1-1, and at least we can make sure that they're going about the application process properly and help them with some troubleshooting. But my hope and prayer is that the State will be in a position to, you know, add the capacity to allow people to catch up because it's been just terrifying to see so many people go through this, lose their jobs, lose their livelihood, and then not be able to get unemployment. It's, you know, an untenable situation. It has to be fixed quickly.

Lehrer: And I'll just throw in that my producer just wrote that people are apparently having some luck or some people are having some luck calling their State Senators or Assembly Members to get their attention and have them intervene on their cases since it's a State government function. So, we're out of time, Mr. Mayor. Once again, happy birthday. I hope in the midst of all this crisis, you get to eat a piece of cake sometime today and have a little bit of fun. So, thank you very much for coming on and answering everybody's questions as always and I'll talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian. Much appreciate it and good luck to everyone, all your listeners this week. Stay safe, everybody. Thank you.

2020-05-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. It is a beautiful, beautiful Sunday morning here in our city and what a beautiful day for Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers of New York City. Right there is a beautiful image of the mother that we are honoring and celebrating in our family today, our First Lady who raised two wonderful children. There are so many mothers all over this city who do extraordinary things every single day. And I want to start by saying, everyone, as you show your love, you show your appreciation, you celebrate the moms of your families and the moms of New York City today, remember, first of all, let's think about the greatest gift we can give besides our love is the gift of keeping them safe. So, if a mom in your life is vulnerable at this moment because of this crisis, if a mom is older or has those pre-existing conditions, remember lots and lots of ways to show love, but let's make sure we keep mom safe no matter what. That's job one today, it’s showing our love and respect by keeping the moms in our life safe. 

Now, there are some moms who deserve particular credit and they are the moms who are on the front lines fighting for all of us, the moms out there who are members of – the doctors, the nurses, the members of the NYPD and FDNY, so many moms who in addition to the everyday heroism, what they do in their families, they've been heroes in this fight against the coronavirus. So, we owe a special thanks to the moms, the essential workers who have been there on the front line while at the same time caring for their families. What an extraordinary thing they have done. Let's give them our love and respect today. By the way, as we say in our household, every day is Mother's Day. So, special appreciation today and then let's continue it the other 364 days of the year.

Okay, let's talk about what it's going to take to get us to move forward here in this city as we fight our way through this crisis and move to a better place. And to get there, we've talked in recent days a lot about what we have to do with testing and tracing. But there's a whole additional piece to this equation and it's the medical side of the equation, the eventual pathway to a vaccine and a treatment. We know right now with the state of medical science that we all need to stay devoted to the things that work now, the social distancing, the shelter in place, using face coverings, while there's time provided to all the people in the medical field to find those bigger solutions and everyone's working hard on them. But in the meantime, there are some new examples of progress. They're important in the here and now. Even though the ultimate goal of course is a vaccine and the treatment, there are some things happening that actually are going to help those afflicted with the coronavirus here now. And some hope this last week when the FDA approved a new drug for treating those with severe cases of the coronavirus, remdesivir. It's a drug that now is being utilized as part of the trials that is going through in some of our public hospitals, Jacobi, North Central Bronx, among others, are starting to use this drug to treat those who are suffering and to make sure that this is hopefully part of the long term plan to help people. 

What we're seeing so far is that this drug has decreased hospital stays for those who have utilized it from 15 days to 11 days. Now that may not sound like a lot to you on first blush, but let me tell you, that means four less days of suffering for that patient, four less days of worrying for their family, four days sooner that each patient can get home to their families and continue their recovery. So, it's a big deal. And I want to tell you the company involved, Gilead, donated over half-a-million doses of this drug to the federal government to distribute. And that's a great thing. So far, however, we've gotten very few doses of the drug provided to New York City. Only 4,000 doses for hospitals here, our public hospitals that particularly need them the most. And we need that number greatly intensified. In fact, we need about 10 times that much just to get started. I've reached out to the White House, I've sent a letter to the president, I've spoken to White House officials to try and speed up the shipment. So, this is something that could really help. And this is an example of something we need here in the city because whether we like it or not, we're still the epicenter of this crisis. So, I am hoping that the White House will hear our plea and quickly get us the additional doses we need.

Now, when we think about the toll this crisis has taken, when we think about the pain it has caused here in this city, we think about the lives we've lost. For all of us who work in public service, there's a particular pain to reflecting on the fact that a number of people who have spent our lives helping their fellow New Yorkers lost their lives due to the coronavirus over these last weeks. People who, their entire mission, sense of purpose was helping other New Yorkers, people we looked up to, people we appreciated, that we've lost. Those that we particularly honor for what they do for others. 260 public servants, 260 City employees have lost their lives. And this includes police officers, correction officers, teachers, EMTs, doctors and nurses, people who have given so much and gave the ultimate sacrifice fighting this disease. Now their families, in some cases, are facing the loss of health insurance and we want to make sure there's immediate support for those families.

So, I am extending, by 45 days, health insurance coverage for families of municipal employees who passed away from COVID-19. This is a specific request we got from the Municipal Labor Council, and the MLC has been a key partner in everything we've done over the last six plus years, believed that it was crucial to get this 45-day extension to families so they could have that piece of security right now as they're dealing with so much else. There is a much bigger effort that we hope to achieve with partners all over the city, all over the country in getting much deeper benefits for public employees and for all essential workers included in the next federal stimulus bill. I'm hearing some good signs that the Congress is moving in that direction, but we still need to see more and obviously we need to see that bill voted out, but I'm more hopeful that we're going to see something really significant in that stimulus legislation. In the meantime, we want to help these families right away with this health insurance extension.

Now, we said many times this is a disease which is so troubling and challenging because it's so new, literally did not exist as far as medical science knew in human beings just six, seven months ago. There's still so many unanswered questions. There are still things we see that confound doctors and scientists. We keep learning every day. And we keep hoping that by learning every day we're going to find solutions. But some of the things we're learning are raising new questions and concerns. And particularly a deep concern is anything that might affect our children who previously have not been affected by this disease by and large anywhere near as much as adults and particularly older adults. But there is a rare condition which we're seeing more of just in the last days and it is causing tremendous concern. I'm deeply concerned. As a father, I am feeling the concern I know other parents are feeling. Our health leadership is deeply concerned. Doctors are now calling this pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome. And what it does is basically in a child's body triggers intensive, almost overwhelming, immune system response. And that actually causes harm to the body. So, as the body is fighting, it fights in such a manner that it actually starts to cause other problems. The symptoms are fever, rash, abdominal pain, and vomiting. 

So, last week our Health Department alerted, doctors alerted the people in New York City that we're seeing cases of this and that we need everyone who experiences this to get help right away, every family that sees a child going through this to get help right away every health care professional that sees anything like this to report it to our Health Department, and we're getting more information now and it certainly is causing us additional concern. So, now as of today, there've been 38 cases detected here in New York City. That's up from 15 at the last count. There are nine more cases that the specifics of the case are still pending, meaning they're still making an evaluation to determine if it is this syndrome or not. Now, of the cases that have been verified, 47 percent of the kids involved tested positive for the coronavirus at that point. Of those who tested negative, 81 percent had the antibody. So, had been exposed at some previous point. So that's telling our doctors and our scientists a lot, this is something we really need to focus on and address. We have lost one child in New York City and previously this is something that we didn't see cases of. Then we started to see a few cases, then we saw more cases. Now, we've actually lost a child to this syndrome and that is deeply, deeply troubling and I want to express my condolences to the family that's lost their child and our hearts go out to you. This is something all New Yorkers are feeling this new threat. 

So, we now are going to make a major priority of addressing this. A set of new actions are being undertaken at our public hospitals, at Health + Hospitals. All facilities will do antibody testing for all children with the symptoms, with fever, with the abdominal pain, gastrointestinal symptoms. That will be done across the board. That guidance is being given to all pediatricians in New York City, calling on all hospitals, not just public, but all private and independent hospitals, to do the same, to start immediately administering these tests when you see these symptoms. Our medical leadership, our health leadership, Department of Health, Health + Hospitals, convening pediatricians from around the city on a video conference to analyze more of this information and learn more together what's going on. We're sending a health alert to the parents of more than one million public school kids to put them on alert of this challenge and make sure anyone who sees these symptoms in their kids gets health care immediately, reaches out to their doctor or gets their child to health care immediately.

Also, obviously, although our schools are by and large shut down, we do have our regional enrichment centers for the children of essential workers. All regional enrichment centers are being instructed to increase enforcement of the use of face coverings and masks and the use of hand sanitizer. So, we're going to take steps immediately. But remember, every parent out there, if you see these symptoms, take them seriously, act immediately. This is a real problem, but it's a problem that can be addressed if it's caught early. So, I want to emphasize to parents, if you see these symptoms, report them to your doctor immediately. If you don't have a doctor, call 3-1-1 to get connected to a doctor, a clinician at Health + Hospitals, we want to make sure everyone takes this seriously and if you see these symptoms, act immediately.

Okay, want to go back to the topic of social distancing and as we talk about the challenges we face, as we talk about the hope for new medical solutions, we've got to keep coming back to the fact that the thing that has worked, the reason we've made progress and can continue to make progress in this city is because of what all of you have done. The extraordinary effort New Yorkers have shown around social distancing, the extraordinary effort to stay home to the maximum extent possible, to wear those face coverings, all of these pieces, they work and you've done it and we need to keep doing it. Now, generally speaking, New Yorkers have just done the right thing. I mean overwhelmingly New Yorkers have done the right thing. That doesn't mean in a city of 8.6 million people, you don't need reminders, you don't need education, you don't need some enforcement. I believe you do need all those things. I believe that's true of everything in our society. No matter how good the people are, no matter how much there's an amazing team effort going on with 8.6 million people, we still need the ability to enforce these rules when needed and only when needed. 

What we don't need is anything that goes beyond the proper enforcement of these rules into something else. And we saw a very troubling video a few days back from the Lower East Side, an instance of the wrong approach to policing that was very alienating to so many people in this city. You know, we've come a long way in New York City to change the nature of policing, to build trust between police and community, to de-escalate conflicts, to train officers to help bring down the temperature. And that has worked in so many ways, but we certainly have seen one video in particular and there have been some others that have raised concern and I think they pull at people in a very real and painful way and remind us of things that were too common for too long that are not acceptable. So, I want to make sure we emphasize the positive, the extraordinary effort that New Yorkers have made around social distancing on their own, listening to the guidance, helping each other to remember the social distance. That's the big story here. The vast majority of the work that's been done by the NYPD and all the other enforcement agencies has been education, going out and reminding people, more and more giving them face coverings for free, which is great, and never wanting to give a summons unless it's absolutely necessary. And in fact, remember the number of summonses given is very, very small throughout this crisis – fewer than 10 a day for the whole city. But that being said, the last thing we want to see is enforcement, if there's any other way to get the job done. 

So, we're going to increase intensely the number of public servants who are out there educating, providing face coverings, reminding people of the rules, helping people to get it right. Enforcement has always been the last resort. It will still be there when needed, but we're going to have more and more social distancing ambassadors. We put together a group of a thousand non-NYPD personnel who have been going out already. We're going to increase that number to 2,300 by next weekend. City employees charged with educating, reminding, providing the face coverings, going out there, and working with people and helping them get to the right place. Again, a positive approach has been working in so many ways. We're going to double down on that. If we ever need enforcement, it's there. And again, we will be quick to enforce particularly in the situations that are most dangerous such as large gatherings. But more and more the emphasis will be on a communicative, encouraging approach through these social distancing ambassadors. And with a team of 2,300 we'll be able to reach deeply into the city and make a very big impact. So I want to thank our good public servants who are going to be a part of this effort. It's going to help save lives. It's going to help so many New Yorkers and really, really appreciate all that you are doing and will do.

Okay. Now, another piece of this has been the important work of protecting some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers in the middle of this crisis. And we've talked about all through the week something very big, something very different that's happening with the changes that have been made at the MTA to do the nighttime cleanings. First night we saw something we had never seen before, literally in the history of this city, an extraordinary number of homeless folks who came off the trains, who weren't going to be able to stay in the stations, came up above ground, saw there were people there from the City ready to help them, ready to provide them support and service and shelter. And a huge number of them accepted that offer. Of course, the first time you see something, you say, let's see if this is real. Next night we saw equally good results. The next night, again, we keep seeing something very special happening.

So to give you the reports from the last couple of nights – on Friday night, our homeless outreach workers and trained NYPD officers who focused on homeless outreach, they engaged 416 homeless individuals coming out of the subway in those early morning hours. 212 of them accepted services. 183 went to shelter, 29 went to hospital. Again, amazing, amazing fact. More than half. We've seen this every night. That's – these are numbers that we have literally never seen in our history happened again on Friday night. So what about Saturday night? 384 people engaged in the subway. 198 accepted services, 175 went to shelter, 23 to the hospital. This is just amazing. I mean, this is about changing people's lives. Think about if someone's life had come apart over months and years to the point they were living permanently on the street. And now in just a matter of days, hundreds upon hundreds of people accepting services, coming into shelter. Now we'll be able to get them the mental health support, the substance misuse treatment. Now we'll really be able to change the lives of so many of them for good. But we have now seen this day after day. We got a lot more to do, but this is an amazing step forward and really, really encouraging what we're seeing. And again, a great thank you to all our partners, the MTA, the State, of course the NYPD and Social Services, Homeless Services, those amazing outreach workers, keep doing this great, great work. It's having a huge, huge impact.

So every day I try and count my blessings and every day I try and remember to be thankful. And I know so many of you feel the same way in this crisis. We've gone through a lot together, but we also remember all the good around us. The people are doing so much good and the people who are trying so hard to help each other. And I like to remember to publicly thank a lot of folks who have stepped forward to help New York City. So a list of thank yous today starting with the skincare company Tatcha and its founder Vicky Tsai, who donated one million non-surgical masks, really amazing donation. Wonderful. Educare, Germany has donated 20,000 KN95 masks. AIG has donated 1,500 N95 masks. Mattel donated 20,000 surgical masks and over 6,000 face shields. Perrigo has donated 50,000 bottles of hand sanitizer. IEDM has donated 50,000 nonmedical masks. The UN Staff Union donated 10,000 nonmedical masks. Project Isaiah donated 400 tablets to H + H. And BNY Mellon donated 150 tablets to H + H. Friends of Rockaway donated 2,000 nonmedical face shields. Center for Professional Education of Teachers donated 7,000 surgical masks and Warby Parker Lab donated 1,900 nonmedical masks. Warby Parker has been amazing, what they’ve been doing for our school kids for years with eyeglasses. Now they are helping in the fight against the coronavirus too. We're thankful to them. We're thankful to all the people and all the companies, all the organizations that keep stepping up. It helps every single time. So thank you from the bottom of my heart and all New Yorkers are thankful to you.

Okay. Every day we go over the indicators and what they tell us about the direction we're going in. So this weekend, generally good. Yesterday, very, very good. All three indicators down yesterday. Today, a mixed bag. In terms of the people admitted to hospital with suspected COVID-19, we had a day, a breakeven day, 69 one day, 69 the next day. Now thank God that number is as low as 69. That's a very good thing. But again, we want to see steady downward trends. People currently in our public hospital ICUs with suspected COVID-19, that is down and that is very, very important. Down from 559 to 540. Still too many people, but that's real progress. Now this is the one that didn't go right today – percentage of people tested who are testing positive for COVID-19 citywide, up from 12 percent to 17 percent. So still a much lower percentage than where we were just weeks ago. But we want to get that going in the same direction. So when you take Saturday and Sunday together, a very good weekend. Not yet exactly what we're looking for, but a very good weekend. And you know what I'll say next. Keep doing what you're doing because it clearly is working. We just need to do more of it and keep disciplined and keep strong. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Okay, we're going to turn to questions from the media and as always, please remind me of the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q and A. As a reminder, we also have Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze, Dr. Barbot, Dr. Katz, Commissioner Banks, and Commissioner Campion also on the line. First question today goes to Jen Peltz from the AP.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, hope you can hear me.

Mayor: How are you doing?

Question: Good, thanks. In light of your discussion of social distancing enforcement, I wonder whether there are any statistics from yesterday on where there were summonses and or arrests and how many?

Mayor: Jen, I don't have anything from yesterday. We will figure out a system for reporting them regularly. Again, I want to keep reminding people the number of summonses and arrests is extraordinarily low given that this is a crisis that affects all 8.6 million New Yorkers. I want to keep in perspective that summonses and arrests still have been used sparingly. When it is absolutely needed, it's going to be used, but it's been used sparingly. But we need to make sure it is used fairly and consistently in all communities. So we will get you an update. We'll put out those stats regularly and we'll figure out a timeline for that. And then we'll keep that consistent going forward.

Moderator: Next is Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning. I wanted to ask Dr. Barbot about the Mayor's decision to move the contact tracing to HHC. And we didn't get to hear from you when the decision was announced. So wondering if Dr. Barbot agreed with that decision or has any concerns?

Mayor: Go ahead, Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes. Thank you. Jeff, let me start off by saying that I am proud of the dedicated staff that we have at the Health Department, demonstrated expertise in dealing with outbreaks all the way from things like TB, HIV, Ebola, most recently measles. And we are committed to applying that world class expertise to bringing this epidemic to an end as quickly as possible. And we are committed to ongoing collaboration with all of our sister agencies to make sure that we bring this epidemic to an end quickly and continue saving lives.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning everyone on Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome – I know Governor Cuomo said yesterday, the State is helping the CDC develop criteria for identifying and responding to that syndrome. I wanted to ask if you think there's anything else the federal government should be doing? Other than that on homeless outreach, you've given numbers for homeless people at shelter. I was wondering if you could specify if that means those individuals actually went into shelter and spent the night there? Or does it maybe just mean vehicles drop them off there and it was incumbent on the individual whether or not to go to shelter from there? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you Shant. I appreciate both questions. So let me do the homeless question first and then I'll turn to our health care team to talk about the federal role vis-a-vis the syndrome. On homeless outreach, so before I turn to Commissioner Banks, just say this. Remember that now for three years, this HOME-STAT strategy has about this constant engagement of homeless folks by the outreach workers who are just amazing people, the work they do because it takes such persistence and dedication to keep working with someone whose life obviously took a wrong turn, a bad wrong turn. They ended up living on the street. Winning their trust, figuring out what they need to feel comfortable to come off the street and stay off the street. That effort we've said for three years now, it is painstaking. It doesn't always work, not only the first time. Sometimes it takes many, many times. Sometimes someone comes in and goes back out, comes in, goes back out and you keep at it. It's a real study in persistence. So when someone agrees to come in, particularly if it's the first time in a long time, that is a signal moment. If they will come in one time, it's the beginning. And sometimes it literally works the first time and someone comes in off the street and then they like what they experience in a Safe Haven or a shelter, or get the medical care they need and they decide that they're ready for a different approach and they stay in and they never go back to the street. And sometimes it's not as you know, immediate. It takes several rounds if you will. But the fact is, as Commissioner Banks will tell you, thousands of people have come off the streets and stayed off the streets in the last few years. So, we know it can be done in a big, big scale. But I would expect if you're talking about just the last few nights, you're going to see a mix. You're going to see people that came in for one night. You're going to see people who have stayed in longer. You're going to see people who will some cases go back to the street over time. Others who we're going to keep in permanently. But it's all going to be about persistence. And I really believe if they come in even once, it is the beginning of something much better. Commissioner Banks take it away. I know he's out there. Commissioner Banks?

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A little technical difficulty. Look Shant, let me give you just a context of what we're working with. We are five nights into a brand new approach to try and to bring people in from the streets. And we're building on a body of work as the Mayor said, that's gone on for the last three years in which, look, the gold standard is helping someone come off the street and remain off the street. But we know from our experience in the last three years that even a single night to accept service is a victory for that human being. We also know from the body of work in the last several years that people will come to the front door and may leave. But simply getting you to the front door for that individual is a step forward. Now again, this is a five day, brand new operation. And we saw Thursday night into Friday morning some challenges with individuals who had accepted services and then didn't want to go further than the acceptance of services, even when we brought them to our central intake site at Bellevue. And so, you know, we -- our outreach workers and our staff are literally working around the clock to save lives in the middle of this situation. And we decided, you know what, let's not go through central intake. Let's make placements directly from the platforms and we'll send the buses directly to shelters instead of central intake. And we began to do that on Saturday morning and this morning. And we think that is giving an additional helping hand to those who may be ready to take the hand, but not yet ready to go all the way with that helping hand. But we're going to continue to evaluate every day. We'll make changes and we'll get to a place where we can take a retrospective look back and say what kind of individual success we're having. But I have to go back to what the Mayor said originally. I've been doing this work for a long time before I came into government. And since I got the Department of Homeless Services in addition to HRA about three years ago, a little over three years ago, if we could get five percent of the people who we offered help to actually accept it on any given night, that was just a huge sign of progress. We're getting half the people now at least taking that first step off the platform, onto transport to get the help that they need either to the hospital or shelter.

Mayor: Yeah, thank you Steve. I mean that's – Shant, just take that in from what we considered five percent a good success rate, to these last days, it's been 50 percent. So ten times more. It's striking and again, we need to see it play out over a much longer period of time. But I think the positive disruptive impact of the cleaning of the subways and sort of breaking the cycle that existed for a long time and giving our outreach workers much more opportunity to engage people. This is absolutely powerful and I'm hoping it's the beginning of something much bigger. So good news there. And Steve, congratulations to you and your whole team because I know this is part of work you've been building up to for years and years.

On the federal role dealing with the syndrome affecting our kids – obviously, this is something we are all grappling with – the City, the State, I'm sure the federal government – but in terms of any specifics of what we know so far from the federal government, what they're doing, what they're saying, we have three of our health care leaders on the phone. Does one of you want to jump in?

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly, Mr. Mayor. I think probably the most important thing that the federal government can do in this situation is really help us maximize the number of people that are getting tested. I think, you know, you've been very clear that from the beginning this response has been hampered by lack of universal access to testing and I think this is yet one additional way in which that's being manifested.

Mayor: Anyone want to add from the health care team? Okay. Yes – and, obviously, the reality of testing, because all roads keep leading back to it, and that's what we're going to keep pushing hard on the federal government on to intensify everything related to testing, particularly lab capacity, which continues to be the outstanding concern.

Moderator: Next is Debralee from Manhattan Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Debralee. Good morning.

Question: Excellent. Happy Mother's Day to everyone on the call. Wanted to touch base with you, Mr. Mayor, specifically on how the pandemic and the kind of hit that small businesses are taking has in fact perhaps transformed your own thinking on rezoning? And the fact that the communities that have been hardest hit overlap with the ones that were targeted for rezoning, some of which have been successful, some of which have so far stalled. Have you thought about that in terms of thinking of it as more than just recovery, because many of the small businesses, particularly those that are a small mom and pop and immigrant-owned, are concerned that what gentrification and the powers of the market forces do – weren't able to accomplish before, the pandemic essentially will successfully execute. And then secondly, have you consulted, had any conversations with, and can you share those if you have with the Governor on pause being extended potentially to June and beyond and how the City is also planning for that?

Mayor: Thank you, Debralee. So, in terms of the Governor and the State – I mean, we've been highly aligned on the approach to the pause. So, we're all talking all the time between the Governor and his team, me and my team, everyone's engaged. And I think the approach to the pause is the right one. I mean, we're looking at our indicators and clearly need more time according to just the sheer facts. And the State has its own indicators as well and I think there's a high level of alignment. We need to be confident as we start that it's going to be safe and it's going to hold. Now, I'm going to combine your two questions for a second and then go more fully into the small business question. So, I spoke to a number of small business leaders on a conference call earlier, I think it was Friday, and then large business leaders on Thursday night, and it was very interesting, Debralee, that there was a real continuity in the two conversations on the question of getting the restart right. I couldn't help but notice, you know, sort of, when you see something that looks like a consensus or unanimity among New Yorkers, it's a pretty striking thing. Everyone kept saying, get the restart right, we cannot afford a start and then a stop. We cannot afford a boomerang. We cannot afford what happened in some of those Asian cities, very big sophisticated cities that, for whatever reason, had a kind of false start and then had to double down on restrictions. From the point of view of all of them, and I think the small business owners were particularly sensitive this point, it would be most devastating to their business if they put in the resources and the energy to restart and then had to bring it back down again. So, we've been cautious here in the city. The Governor's been cautious in terms of the state. We’re united that we're going to get this right. And each step, I keep using that kind of rock-climbing analogy – you get your toe hold and you make sure it's firm and secure and then you get your next one – that's going to govern the approach here.

So, we'll keep coordinating on that for sure. On small business specifically, it's a great question. Look, we have a particular challenge in terms of how to help our small businesses and particularly our immigrant small businesses and small businesses that are the most tenuous, the smallest, the most mom and pop. And they’re such an important part of life in this city in every sense in terms of everything from the life of our neighborhoods and the identity and the culture of our communities to the fact there's a whole lot of people employed in them and they're hanging in the balance right now. When I talked to the small business owners, interestingly – rightfully, their first concern was not – not that I'm saying your point isn't a good one, but it wasn't sort of the big playout of what's going to happen in the months and years ahead – it was the immediate question, just how they dealt with the rent and how they just kept going in the here and now to try and get to that point where they could restart. And we're trying to figure out any way in every way we can to help them to just hang in there until we can get to a point where we start and then the sheer force of – you know, the buying power of 8.6 million people starts to lift them up again. And I do think New Yorkers are going to want to embrace their neighborhood businesses when we can go out and engage them again. I think there's going to be a lot of energy for that.

But to the question of rezoning – I mean, the whole land use process now is on hold. When we're able to think about that again, we're obviously going to think about it differently in light of what's happened here. We need to be really, really mindful about anything we do, going forward, what it means in terms of affordable housing, what it means in terms of small business, what it means in terms of working people and more vulnerable people. I think that's going to be a singular focus of our policies, going forward, when it comes to land use and city planning because we're in a whole new reality. So, I think the essence of your question is, is it going to be business as usual? No, it's not going to be business as usual. It's going to be reexamined from scratch. And even the ones we've done previously, we've been studying carefully to understand what the impact is on small business and how we can make sure we get when we do have a situation where rezoning is helpful, putting additional measures to support and protect small business. And there's a lot more I think we can do on that front, going forward.

Moderator: The next is Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, everybody. My question – I want to go back to Commissioner Barbot again. You know, I guess there's still some confusion about the Test and Trace Corps. I know that the disease detectives are with the Department of Health, but the rest are with HHC. So, Dr. Barbot, do you believe that having HHC lead this test and trace effort will hurt, given the Department of Health’s history of doing this? And do you believe that you and your agency has the full confidence of the mayor? Thank you.

Mayor: Katie, as we turn to Dr. Barbot, I just have to say, it's America, anyone can ask a question the way they want, but I don't honestly think the word confusion is right. There's a plan put forward here to take a huge operational agency, Health + Hospitals, has been at the forefront of this crisis, and use that operational capacity to build a test and trace program all over the city in a way that an organization with that kind of reach and with local outposts all over the city is well suited to, but deeply engaging the Department of Health and bringing over Department of Health personnel to be in the center of the process as well. So, again, confusion, respectfully, that's your word. I think we laid out a really clear organizational plan that makes sense for a massive undertaking that’s never been tried before in New York City and we are going to bring a talent from those two agencies and a lot of other agencies to bear to make this work. With that, turning to Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Barbot: Katie, thank you for the question. Like I said, we've got world-class expertise in our agency and we're focused on one goal and one goal only, and that goal is to bring that world-class expertise on tracing to this effort. And we are committed to collaborating with any and all sister agencies, community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, because, at the end of the day, the reality is, you know, we all need to be focused on saving lives and this is a response that requires all of us to be focused and not to be distracted. So, thank you.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Luis [inaudible].

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I've got two questions for you.

Mayor: Yes, Luis.

Question: Over two weeks ago, you mentioned that as part of your grassroots outreach there would be four tele-town halls with faith leaders. Anything you'd be able to share about that now? Also, regarding the sector advisory councils, the numbers of those appointed range anywhere from 20-something to 40-something. I'm trying to grasp how all of that works. Do all of these people submit suggestions? Do they get questionnaires? Do they have one big virtual conference call? Can you explain that?

Mayor: Sure. Luis on the first question, I'm going to confirm with the team, but I believe those faith-based tele-town halls happened back around the time that I raised it. We'll get you more information on that. On the advisory councils, so it's kind of all the above of what you mentioned it, you know, through the magic of WebEx and Zoom and everything else, you can put obviously a huge number of people together and have the ability to have a serious conversation with a larger group. And I participated in some of these already and I've found them to be very successful in terms of people sharing concerns and ideas. But then, of course, beyond the group meetings, there is every opportunity for people to put forward written ideas. We definitely circulate things and have people's feedbacks feedback, questionnaires, things like that will be used. So, we've brought together some pretty extraordinary people who represent so much of the city, and what we're finding is, you know, a very, very, sort of, rich experience already of folks bringing perspective, bringing ideas, bringing concerns, saying some things that are different than what we might hear in the regular daily discourse and things we need to hear. I mean, I'll go back to the question that Debralee asked a moment ago about the interplay of, you know, land use policy and small business. I mean, that's exactly the kind of thing we need to think about differently for where we're going. And that's the kind of thing we're hearing from these advisory councils. We're hearing really interesting ideas. We're also hearing people sort of volunteering what they will do, what their organizations will do or their constituencies can and should do to help bring this forward. So, you know, it's understandable that if a group of us here are trying to make the very best decisions for the people that you have, you know, we all have a lifetime experience we're bringing to bear, but we also inherently need other fresh voices to help us see perspective and new ideas. And I find that the advisory councils already are doing that really well

Moderator: Next is Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: Mr. Mayor, good morning. I hope you're well. I wanted to talk about the syndrome that's impacting children. Could you walk us through a little bit of the timeline of like when symptoms were first started to be linked to – when the syndrome was first started to be linked to children and what is the City doing to determine the extent of this and how far back this may have already been impacting children? Or, has the City already found evidence that these symptoms have been happening in children for longer than we've been aware of?

Mayor: Thank you very much, Sydney. I'm going to turn to – again, we have Dr. Perea-Henze, Dr. Barbot, and Dr. Katz on the line, so I'm going to open it up to them in a second. This has moved very, very quickly. Sydney, suffice it to say that, you know, for the last 10 weeks all day, every day, we've all been talking about the coronavirus nonstop and looking at so many different elements of it. And this particular challenge around kids, I mean, it came up literally days ago – was the first time that I remember it in any discussion and Melissa Russo brought it forward in one of these press conferences. And literally at that moment we had not seen a bigger trend. But shortly thereafter, as more and more facts were gathered, it was clear that something was happening that was a real concern. And so, I'll let the doctors speak to that timeline. But, again, it's literally been a matter of days. The question you raised, Sydney, how far back might it have been going on and what research are we doing to better understand it – and, again, we'll let the doctors speak to that. Who wants to go first?

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, I'll begin. This is a syndrome that has been evolving over the very recent past, but it first began to be identified in the UK and it was roughly maybe about two or three weeks ago and we hadn't seen any cases here in the United States. We actually had our first webinar alerting health providers to this emerging syndrome on May 1st, because part of this identifying this syndrome – and I've said this before, but it's worth repeating – really relies on a student's clinicians recognizing that something, which is potentially presenting in an atypical fashion needs to be reported to the health department. And Kawasaki's is a rare illness to begin with, but when it presents atypically, that's when we need doctors, whether it's for this syndrome or for others to report to us. So, right now, with this infectious inflammatory syndrome, we're still learning quite a bit about how it manifests. And we issued a health alert that goes out to thousands and thousands of clinicians, doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners rather in the city alerting them to letting us know if they have patients that meet certain criteria that we want them to let us know. And those criteria, as the Mayor listed before, but I think are worth repeating, are children who present with prolonged fevers that have laboratory indications of inflammation and who may be suffering symptoms consistent with shock, meaning that their organs are overwhelmed and they need more intensive support in hospitals. All of those – so you can well imagine that's a fairly broad, yet defined set of potential symptoms and signs that we need clinicians to alert us on. And, as the Mayor mentioned, you know, we're doing ongoing investigations about suspected cases. We do have a series of confirmed cases, 38 that meet the case definition. But the reality is that this is still evolving. We are working in collaboration with our state partners, with the CDC. And it may be that this case definition evolves, and so it may be that we add even more children. But the important thing here is we are very much focused on first and foremost ensuring that parents are aware of potential early warning symptoms such as prolonged fever, that rash, kids being really cranky, having bright red lips, and what we typically think of as a strawberry tongue. These kids look really sick. And when I was a clinician, I actually treated some of these children and the most important thing is for them to then contact their doctors and for the doctors to make the potential diagnosis early and then refer them to specialty care. So that is sort of the evolution of this and I'm certain that we will continue to learn even more over the course of the next few days and weeks.

Mayor: Thank you doctor. Either one of our other colleagues want to add?

President Katz: Oh, I'll add Mr. Mayor. Thank you. I agree with Dr. Barbot’s summary. The only things I can think to add is I don't think we missed children who were at the sick end of the spectrum before because at the, this is obviously a disease with a wide range of manifestations and we certainly would have seen the children who we've seen with the very sick syndromes in the hospital before. We would have noticed that they would have been in the hospital at the sicker end, so I feel confident in New York City to miss those kids. I think the other interesting observation as we learning more and more about this disease as Dr. Barbot says, is that it may not be a coincidence that we're seeing these cases several weeks after the peak in New York City of the transmission of the virus. That this is likely, at least in part, an immunological manifestation that occurs after infection. And so it's not surprising that several weeks after the peak time of transmission of this virus, we may now be seeing a variety of these manifestations in children. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: You next. We have Ruben from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you the state's ban on plastic bags has been postpone during the coronavirus pandemic. People are hurting financially and reusable bags are believed to carry germs. Many progressive places like Massachusetts and San Francisco have banned reusable bags now. Well, you as part of your emergency powers, at least lift the 5 cent fee on paper bags until the pandemic's over? And my second question is, you tweeted on Thursday, tenants are hurting, we need to let every New Yorkers who needs it be able to defer rent payments for up to 12 months. Last month, Council Member Justin Brannan tweeted “one person's rent is another mortgage payments. I want rent relief for my constituents. I also want to make sure small mom and pop landlords, yes they exist, don't have to shoulder that burden on their own. We can do both and we must.” Now we know what property tax payment was doing first. The grace period ends April 15th. I think it's fair to assume that those who haven't paid as of now having trouble possibly due to coronavirus, what's the city doing to help property owners, perhaps you'll consider waiving interest for unpaid or late property taxes? Thank you Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you Rubin. On the small landlords, look, we know that so many people are struggling right now and small landlords are struggling too. In terms of property tax, we said from the beginning, right now we're in a tremendous crisis in this city. Adjust the ability to pay for the basic services that people need is being stressed deeply right now, and obviously this is why the upcoming debate over the federal stimulus and it can't happen soon enough is so crucial. We have to get support to allow us to keep going in this city, to be made whole to be able to provide those services. But especially since we don't know what's going to happen in Washington, we right now are absolutely dependent on whatever resources we can get and property tax is a part of it for sure. So we can keep this city moving forward and get to that restart. But we've also said from the beginning that anyone who's just not in a position to pay, there are hardship provisions where if someone can document that they are unable to pay there's something that can be done there, there's a process for that. Also the different methodologies that we've been talking about and the State of New York has acted on one of them, which is great, you know, allowing tenants to be able to apply their security deposit so that they can pay the rent if they don't have any other money, that's good for the tenant, that's good for the landlord. That's the kind of reform that I wanted to see and I'm very glad the state did that. But any other of the suggestions that we put forward as things like figuring out a way for if a tenant can't pay the rent, that there's still a payment plan for the future, so the landlords at least know that they will be able to depend on that. So all of these tools are going to be needed to help people through. But I think the single most important question going forward, everything hinges on the stimulus, our ability to support the people of this city. And if it comes, you know, we're going to be able to be helpful in a lot of ways. If it doesn't come, it's going to be very, very difficult.

On the plastic bags and all, we'll work with the state on the question of what makes sense in terms of any short term relief. The underlying ideas are still the right ideas because again, what was done on plastic bags on paper bags was about addressing profound challenges. We're having challenges, we're going to have, you know, this, this crisis, this virus, we're going to beat back this virus. This crisis is going to be over and it's going to be over sooner rather than later. But the challenge we are facing with our environment, with global warming is going to be with us for the rest of our lives. So those ideas around the plastic bags and the paper bags, the right ideas. In terms of anything we might do to modify them in the short term. You know, we'll work with the state on that and come back. But I want to affirm why the underlying ideas are just as pertinent now as they've ever been.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. Next is Todd from AM New York.

Question: Mr. Mayor. My question is actually inspired by our first demonstration, 1982 at NYU and that was against tuition hikes. So question is about, they were eight rallies this week. Two of them were by people who against the, the economic lockdown. One of them was by Reclaim Pride against a Samaritan's Purse. At those, the police were very strong, and nine people were taken into custody at the economic rally, and one person was given a summons at the Reclaim Pride rally in which people were socially distant. Now there were five others. One was by the fire union and four others were by the nurses union. All of them, police were at and did nothing to interfere. In fact, one of them, the nurses rally, there were 50 people there, 50, 60 people and there was no social distancing. So my question is, what right does the government and the city have to determine which organizations, which groups have the right to gather and should the police get out of this business like Eric Adams says?

Mayor: Todd, thank you very much for the question. Your NYU education is doing you good right now because you're asking a very good, important question. And I thank you for reminding me of our younger years when we first knew each other long ago as undergraduates. So look, first of all, I want to start with common sense. We're in a time in history where anyone who wants to get their point of view across, there are so many ways to do that without gathering in one place that will get plenty of attention. You can go direct to the people with Twitter and so many other methodologies. You all in the media will cover any number and sorts of protests and concerns, people do not need to gather in one place. It does not make sense in the middle of a pandemic, for people, you know, to be using a form of protest that could endanger each other and other people and our officers. It doesn't make sense. We're asking people to do things differently across the board. The same goes for protest. If people gather, the NYPD is always going to try and use its judgment like they do every single day in every situation. And if there's a gathering that is carefully, socially distance, I saw one of the earlier gatherings that nurses did, the nurses union did, and they were all socially distanced and everyone had on PPEs. Look, I still would ask them not to even do that, but at least that was a very conscientious effort. But if there's any attempt to gather that is going to endanger people, the police's job is to not let that happen. And that means to tell people from the very beginning that they should not be gathering because it is about addressing this pandemic and any two people that get too close together and there might be a spread of the disease, it then leads to more and more people. It's as simple as that. So I'm a huge believer in the First Amendment. I think there's another way to do it. If people gather and then NYPD gives instructions about social distance and the right way to handle things and those instructions aren't followed, then of course they reserve the right to summons or arrest. But Todd, I don't know why anyone is gathering in this environment. It is a choice. Let's get real here. We can believe absolutely in our constitutional rights, but it is literally out of step with the times we're living in to believe that the only way to get something done is to gather in the middle of a pandemic. It's just idiotic. There are plenty of ways to express yourself, but if you gather, you're inherently creating a problem for other people. And so I would just start at the beginning and say to anyone who's thinking of expressing themselves and working on behalf of whatever cause do it in step with what we're all going through. Do it online. You'll get plenty of attention, but you won't put other people in danger.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Roger Stern from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi, good morning Mayor. I wanted to get back to the issue of this inflammatory syndrome. You said that kids going to the hospital with symptoms will be tested. Will they be tested for the actual virus or for the antibodies or both? And how would that then affect their treatment?

Mayor: So I'll start, Roger and then turn to Dr. Barbot or Dr. Katz. What we're going to do in our public hospitals is give the antibody test for sure. Because again, what is crucial to know is have these kids been exposed before. We're going to do that across the board and we're urging all hospitals to do testing. The doctors can talk to you about the virtues of either or both types of testing in this situation but the important thing – again, I want to emphasize the health care professionals can do a lot. Again, this is really important, Roger, to recognize from what we're hearing from our health leadership. This is in that category of early detection makes a huge difference. We all know this from, you know, years and years and years of talking about different diseases, how many times early detection is the difference maker. This is one of those times. So for all the parents out there, you see these symptoms in your child act immediately, pick up the phone right away to your doctor. If it's something urgent, get your child to a health care facility. If you don't have a hospital, or excuse me, if you don't have a doctor, you don't know where to turn. Call 3-1-1, they'll connect you to Health + Hospitals. So the early detection of the early action is the way to then empower our health care professionals to address it. But in terms of the different types of testing and how they're being used, Dr. Barbot, Dr. Katz turning to you.

President Katz: I'll start on this one and then Dr. Barbot will help me out. At our Health + Hospitals facilities children will be tested both for the antigen, which is what people think of as what they get when the nasal swab, a PCR test, and the antibody tests. And the significance is that this is a syndrome that we think may occur after a child is infected. So we don't want clinicians to send just the nasal swab, have it be negative for the antigen. And then the doctor thinks, oh, this is unrelated to COVID, when in fact it may still be related to COVID because the child may have had an actual infection some weeks earlier and had they had a nasal swab at that time, it may have been a positive. So in this case, the antigen and the antibody provide different but complimentary pieces of information. And that's why at our public hospitals we'll be testing children for both. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Barbot: I'll just add to what Dr. Katz laid out and I agree with him is that really we need to think about this from the broader perspective of both prevention and treatment. And with regards to prevention, you know, it goes back to more wide-scale testing so that we can identify people early, put them in appropriate isolation, quarantine, et cetera. The other thing, it's also a reminder of the importance of continuing to stay at home, continuing to use face coverings because the reality is that for this syndrome there is no way – you know, you develop it after you had this infection. And so the best treatment prevention for it are the prevention messages that we're getting all New Yorkers and it's just yet another reason why we need New Yorkers to continue adhering to social distancing.

Mayor: Thank you very much Dr. Barbot. Dr. Katz. That's a perfect note to end on. Remember how many times you've heard from Dr. Barbot about these really basic things that make all the difference in the world. The basic hygiene, the washing your hands, using the alcohol-based hand sanitizer, the social distancing, that simple act of keeping distance, the use of the face coverings, which have been, you know, another example of New Yorkers taking something that we would not have imagined ourselves doing just weeks ago and now doing it overwhelmingly –go out in the street, you see the vast majority of people are using face coverings. Our job is to keep informing, educating, but also encouraging, letting you know that what you're doing is working. It's having a huge effect and that we want to facilitate it. We want to make it easier. So, we're in the process of giving out 7.5 million face coverings and we'll keep doing that as long as we need to, to help people get it right and to help people protect each other.

Think about social distancing. Think about how unusual that is for New Yorkers to practice that. And yet people have done it. We're going to keep building on that effort with 2,300 social distancing ambassadors. So, you're going to be seeing people constantly reminding people, helping them see if there's something that has to be corrected, making sure if they need information, support, they get it. If they need a face covering, they get it. We're going to use all these tools to keep the progress going.

We're doing really, really well as a city, people, everyone's participating, but we could go even farther and again, everyone wants that reopening, everyone wants that restart. Double down on the things that are working that is the pathway to speeding the restart. So, every time you go out there, just double down on really focusing on the social distancing, on remembering to put on that face, covering on reminding the people in your life the right way to do it. It makes a huge difference. And then our ambassadors will be out there more and more, helping to get the message across, helping to make sure people are moving in the right direction. That's how we move forward as a city. And with that again, ending where we started: Happy Mother's Day to all, have a wonderful day today. Thank you.

2020-05-11 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Think back weeks ago and remember this – it’s so striking to think about this whole crisis we've been through together. Most of it has happened over the last 10 weeks or so and it feels like such a long period of time, but think back to March where every day brought new shocking developments, things we had never seen before. A lot of times we were just fighting to keep going as we dealt with more and more challenges, and now thank God in recent days we've had much better news. We're still not out of the woods, but much better news, much bigger progress. And now as I talked about a few days ago, the whole idea is to get on the offensive against this disease, fight it back, martial our forces to make sure that we get to the day where we rid New York City of this challenge once and for all.

When I think about that sense of being on the offensive being on the march, I think about first of all, what all of you have done because that's the essence of why we've seen this amazing progress. I also think about the fact that as we fight back this disease, we're going to fight back the many, many challenges it has laid bare, most especially the disparities we see in communities around this city, the health care disparities in particular that have been so striking and painful in this crisis. We were all doing everything we could in the first weeks just to make sure that we could save as many lives as possible. Now we're going to not only save lives, we're going to fight these disparities in so many ways going forward. So, we talked about what it took to save lives, to protect people, particularly in the areas hardest hit – our public health care system, our public hospitals and clinics were really the core of that, particularly in the first weeks of this crisis. That's where so many people turned for help and they did an extraordinary job – to all the folks who work at H + H, all the folks who work in our public hospitals and clinics, they were absolutely outstanding during this crisis and that was many ways. The first place we had to focus. Now we are focusing more and more on all the other ways we can reach communities that have been hit the hardest and need the most help and one of the most important elements of that is supporting community-based health care providers.

Now, community clinics, think about what they mean to so many people. They’re the place that people turn for health care who don't have other options. They’re a place for a lot of folks who don't have a lot of resources, aren't sure where else to turn, don't have a long-term relationship with a private doctor. The community clinics are the place they can depend on. Literally the community clinics know the people in their neighborhoods. They speak the language of the people in the neighborhoods. They do amazing work and they've had to do a lot during this crisis, but with many, many challenges that have been a real hindrance to the good work they do in normal times. Remember these are smaller community-based practices, so their financial situation has really been put through so much. There's been a lot of strain during this crisis. It's been hard to keep the personnel they needed as they've dealt with so many new challenges. They have always a need for more technology to deal with an ever-growing demand. Our job now is to fortify these community-based health care providers because as we go on the offensive, as we go right at these disparities with the goal of helping more and more New Yorkers through this crisis and beyond, they – these clinics become a crucial part of the solution.

So, I talked to you a few weeks ago about a four-point plan to address disparities right after we showed that the facts bore out how deeply the disparities played out in this crisis, we said there was a number of things we're going to do differently in this city. I laid out four different parts. I want to dwell on the third part of it today, which is the grassroots reach of these community-based health care providers. So we are going to be working with over 1000 community-based providers in 26 of the hardest hit neighborhoods in this city.

What are we going to do? Well, first of all, a lot of them need the personal protective equipment, so we're going to make sure it's there for them. Some of them literally couldn't do their work, even couldn't keep their clinics open for the lack of it. We're going to get them to the PPEs they need for the work in the clinics for the ability to go out into communities. This is crucial to protecting the good folks who work in these clinics, but also allowing them to do their work and reach more people. We will be distributing 120,000 surgical masks per week, 115,000 pairs of gloves per week to begin and we'll keep building from there to make sure these clinics have what they need.

Of course, like so many other parts of our health care system, these clinics were often shorthanded during this crisis. They had to deal with those that they lost who are sick and that to deal with the fact that they had immense financial strain and couldn't afford to keep people on their payroll. We are now addressing that head on with members of our Medical Reserve Corps, doctors, nurses, other health care professionals. We're going to have hundreds of these professionals, these clinicians, to the clinics in the coming weeks and provide them with the personnel resources and cover the cost so that they can get back up and running as fully as possible.

Telemedicine, we've talked about this before. This is a crucial piece of the equation. When it comes to the clinics, telemedicine is also important, not just what we're trying to do with our public hospitals and clinics, Health + Hospitals, not just what we're trying to do with phone a clinician. We talked about that a few days ago, but the telemedicine that could be done with a community-based clinic. They know their patients, they know the people they have long-term relationships with, but they're not historically using telemedicine as a crucial tool. We're going to help them now do that more and more. And the wellness checks are a big part of it. Reaching out regularly to the patients from the clinic to just checking on them, see if they need anything, constantly proactively communicating. So last month and continuing this month, the Department of Health is running weekly telemedicine webinars to help these community-based clinics get used to how to maximize their use of telemedicine, and our goal is to train 150 of these clinics to be particularly proficient in telemedicine to help them make it a very common part of what they do, and then we'll expand from there.

We also want to see these clinics play a crucial role in our test and trace initiative. This – testing and tracing is the thing that you're going to see grow and grow in the coming weeks. It's absolutely crucial to how we move past this phase of this disease and move forward. These community-based clinics can play a crucial role. We're surveying all of them this week. By next week we're going to know what each one can contribute to the test and trace effort. I wanted to bring them into it deeply.

And then one more point on federal aid. A lot of these community-based clinics are crucial, not just to fighting this disease, but to the future of the neighborhoods they serve and keeping them healthy against so many other health care challenges as well, but they're going to need resources to keep going. There are literally billions of dollars available from the federal government through initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program. These clinics qualify, but we have to make sure they get their fair share. Our Small Business Services Department’s going to reach out to each of them and help them in the application process to maximize the federal aid going to them.

Now the focus will be on the places hardest hit by the coronavirus in this city, so we're going to be focused on neighborhoods all over the five boroughs. In Brooklyn, those neighborhoods will be Flatbush and East Flatbush, Brownsville, Brighton Beach, Flatlands and Canarsie, East New York and Starrett City, Sunset Park, Bushwick, and Bed-Stuy. In the Bronx, Crotona and Tremont, Highbridge, Mott Haven, and Morrisania, Bronx Park, Van Cortland Park, and Fordham, Northeast Bronx, Pelham and Throggs Neck, Kingsbridge and Riverdale, Soundview and Longwood and Hunts Point. In Manhattan, Morningside Heights, Inwood, Washington Heights and Hamilton Heights, East and Central Harlem, and the Lower East side and Chinatown. In Queens, Corona, East Elmhurst, and Elmhurst, Briarwood, Jamaica, Rockaway and Far Rockaway and Queensbridge. And in Staten Island Stapleton to St. George and Willowbrook. So, the goal will be to right now maximize the use of these community-based facilities, the providers, the clinics that have such a big impact on their communities. Help them right now to be in the forefront of our efforts to fight back the coronavirus, get them right now more deeply into things like telemedicine and the test and trace initiative and leave them in stronger shape for the future as well, serving the communities that have been hardest hit during this crisis, the low-income communities, the immigrant communities, the communities of color that have really taken it on the chin during this crisis. We want to strengthen these community-based providers now and for the future.

Now, when we think about our neighborhoods – when we think about what it's going to take for our neighborhoods to come back – and we are a city of neighborhoods, so thinking from the grassroots up is the right way to do things. When we think about our neighborhoods and what makes our neighborhoods strong, we think about small business. We think about small business in every way. Part of what makes our lives so good in this city is the small businesses that we depend on that are part of the character and identity and the culture of our neighborhoods. Of course, they're also huge employers. When you add up all the small businesses of New York City, the mom and pop stores, all the kinds of small businesses, it's where so many New Yorkers get their livelihood and small business has gone through so much during this crisis. Small business makes New York, New York. When you really think about so much of what we emotionally identify with, so much about what we care about, about our city, it comes back to our small businesses. So, we're going to have to do a lot to help them back. Many are going to struggle coming back. We've got to save as many as possible help as many as possible on the road back. On Friday, I had a call with a group of small business owners, in this case, smaller bars and restaurants. There are a group called the New York Hospitality Coalition and they wanted to help me understand what they were going through and what they needed to come back. And what was so clear on this call was these are folks like, like every small business owner, they put their heart and soul into building up their business. It was something that was really a part of their identity. It was, they put themselves into it and they would do anything to keep their small business going. And they had a deep sense of being there for the people who are their customers, who are the people in their neighborhood that depend on that small business. They, each and every one of them, wanted to come back not just because it was their livelihood and what they had created, not just because they cared about the people worked at their small business, but because they knew their neighborhoods depended on them. So, hearing their voices – and I going to be talking to many, many other people in the small business community, going forward – reminds me of everything we're going to have to do. In the beginning of this crisis we did what the City could do with a $50 million loan and grant program. Obviously, a huge, huge federal program, hundreds of billions of dollars has come into play since then, although there are many challenges with small businesses accessing it and we're still fighting to help them get that done. But we are going to need much more to help small business, going forward. And we're going to have to find new sources of support for small business. To say the least, this is not going to be business as usual. We are going to have to find ways to help small business that are different than anything we've ever done in the history of New York City. We've got to maximize, of course, the federal aid to small business and state aid to small business, but we're going to have to do some things differently to find a whole new type of support for small businesses to help them back on their feet and help them stay on their feet, going forward.

So, I have two personnel announcements today that are related to a new approach we're going to take to small business in this unprecedented time. First of all, I am creating a new position as senior advisor for small business related to the COVID-19 crisis, and I'm naming to this position Gregg Bishop. Gregg has served as our commissioner of Small Business Services since 2015. He's done a great job and he has been the voice of small business owners all throughout the City government. I've talked to so many small business owners who appreciate deeply what Gregg does. He understands the small businesses of this city. He's going to bring that expertise to bear to help us develop a whole new approach to bringing resources and support to those small businesses. He'll work closely with our public-private partnership czar, Peter Hatch, who's been doing a fantastic job bringing in philanthropic support and support from the business community locally, nationally, internationally for New York City. Now, we need a lot of that support to be focused on how to uplift small business and provide the resources for small businesses to get back on their feet and the ability for small businesses to have new customers, new revenue to keep them going in this new reality. I'll charge Gregg with finding whole new sources of capital for small business. I know from having spoken with people in the philanthropic world that they understand that in less New York city, small businesses come back, our neighborhoods can't come back the way we need them to. I think there's going to be a tremendous sense of generosity from the world of philanthropic organizations, many of whom have a deep focus on New York City already. Gregg is going to be charged with tapping into that desire to help and building a whole new initiative to bring in those resources, but also to deepen the connection between larger businesses and small business. When I had a call last week as well as the heads of some of the largest businesses in New York City, and to their credit, they said they understood small business was hurting a lot more than larger business and small business would be crucial to any restart and recovery and they were already asking themselves what could larger businesses do to patronize smaller businesses, to work with them, to provide them capital to do things that larger businesses hadn't done so much before systematically with small business but needed to do now for the good of New York City. It was a very heartening conversation. Gregg Bishop is who I'm going to turn to, to take that idea and make it a reality and really catalyze that instinct we're seeing in the larger business community and bring it to bear to help small business.

Now, and given the important work that's happening, the every-day work of Small Business Services, we needed a new leader to come in to be the commissioner, following Gregg, to pick up the work that he's done and deepen it in the next 20 months ahead in this administration, because Small Business Services every day is solving problems for small businesses, figuring out new ways to help small businesses. Even in normal times, that reality is going to be more and more complex now, but our Department of Small Business Services has proven itself time and again, it's going to take on more and more responsibility going forward. To fill the role of commissioner, I've chosen Jonnel Doris. Jonnel has done an outstanding job as our Director for the Office of Minority- and Women-Owned Business enterprises. He's led a really systematic, energetic effort to expand M/WBE contracts coming from the city – $14.6 billion awarded since 2015, $1 billion ahead of pace for our 2020 goal. A of that has been because of Jonnel’s energetic leadership. So, as the new commissioner for small business services, I'm going to ask him to look at every way that that agency can help small businesses in this recovery. All the ways that we have to simplify what small businesses go through in their dealings with City government. Here's a moment of crisis, but it's also a moment to rethink what we do with and for small business and how we can lighten the burden on small business. Jonnel, someone has proven himself to be an innovator, I'm going to ask him to look at the situation from scratch and figure out how SBS in its own work, but also as a leader for the small business community in the whole City government can get all City agencies engaged in the work of helping our small businesses back. Look, we know small businesses of every kind are hurting. I've heard particularly concern from immigrant communities and from communities of color about whether their small businesses will be able to come back in this environment, in many cases small businesses that had the most tenuous financial situation even before the coronavirus. We've got to help each and every small business come back. I know it'll be a huge challenge, but I want small businesses all over the city to know the City government is here for them and we're going to find new resources and new ways to help and that we can weather the storm together. So, with Gregg's leadership, with Jonnel’s leadership, I'm confident we'll be able to do a host of new things to help small businesses to get through and then become strong again as we move back to normal.

Now, we've talked about some of the challenges that have been so profound in this crisis. We've talked about what some of the hardest-hit communities have gone through. We've talked about what our small businesses have gone through. Clearly, when you think about who's challenged every day in New York City, our hearts always go to homeless New Yorkers. And in this city, we feel a lot for the fact that some people ended up living on the streets, something happened in their life that led them to that point. Our job is to help them back and to create a better reality for homeless people. So, I have two updates today, and the first relates to our shelters. We've been trying to make sure as we deal with the coronavirus that we're constantly evaluating our shelter system and moving people as needed to make sure everyone is safe and healthy. I told you we were going to have a goal of moving a thousand people per week out of shelters into hotel settings to keep opening up the shelters to keep making sure we could do a proper social distancing. We met that goal last week. We will be meeting it again this week. There's now over 8,000 single adults in hotel rooms and we'll keep doing that as-needed in the weeks ahead, and particularly as we build up our widespread test and trace initiative, which is going to help. Everyone in that initiative will also be focused on our homeless shelters.

Now, the second update I want to give, and this is something we've been talking about over the last few days, is what's happening with homeless folks who have been in the subways. And I keep telling you something historic is happening, and, day after day, the facts bear it out. The new initiative that we put together with the MTA and the State, six days now and six days that have been entirely consistent, something really groundbreaking is happening here, something very different and very powerful. Last night, when a subway shutdown for cleaning, our homeless outreach workers and specially trained members of the NYPD were out there to help homeless New Yorkers, to offer them a chance to come in and get support. 261 homeless individuals were engaged, 139 of them accepted help. 116 went to shelter. 23 went to hospitals. Again, numbers we've never seen ever in the history of the city – such an extraordinary number of people agreeing to take help, agreeing to take the first step towards a very different life. It's early to say the least, just six days, but they've been very, very consistent. And when I look at the sheer number of people whose lives now could be changed, it really gives me hope that we're going to be able to get a number of homeless people once and for all off the streets, into a better life. So, another good day for this new initiative.

Now, let me turn to something that's an every-day thing in this city, something we all think about – or, many at least think about and always want clear answers on – and it’s alternate side parking, a part of every-day life for so many New Yorkers. So, alternate side parking, we've been suspending it quite a bit. Obviously, given everything people are going through, we wanted to make it easier for people to stay home. We’ve said throughout, we’ve got to keep an eye on how our neighborhoods are looking. Are they clean? We want to keep them sanitary. We want to make sure that while we're trying to give every consideration to people, we also have to keep an eye on cleanliness, very important to the overall health and wellbeing of the city. So, we've suspended alternate side many, many times in the last 10 weeks. But now we do see a number of areas in the city where some litter is starting to add up and we're concerned. So, we'll go to do something a little different this coming week and then that will help us reset for the future. So, alternate side will continue to be suspended this week through Sunday through May 17th. And, by the way, this suspension now that's happened over recent weeks is actually one of the longest in the history of New York City. So, this suspension has helped people, made the lives a little easier, help people stay inside. We'll keep it going through Sunday, May 17th. Starting on Monday, May 18th, we're going to do a clean sweep all over the city, a catch-up to make sure neighborhoods are clean. So, alternate side parking will resume on Monday, May 18th and go through the end of that week. So, again, one week, the week of Monday, May 18th, alternate side parking will resume just for that week. We will then suspend for the following two weeks, so it'll be suspended again through Sunday, June 7th. So, the goal here is if we do that one week clean up, hopefully that will last us a substantial period of time. But, again, we have to see how it goes. We have to see what we can achieve to make sure neighborhoods are clean. So, again, everyone – this week, no alternate side; next week, back on for one week only and then suspended again for two weeks after that.

Okay. I want to talk about an incident that happened last night and this is something that we've seen in the context of this whole painful crisis. Remember, there were too many times, way too many times over the last 10 weeks when I've had to talk to you about incidents of bias directed at Asian Americans in the context of the coronavirus crisis. We don't accept bias in New York City. We don't accept hate in any form, any act of bias, any hate crime, we pursue it. We make sure there are consequences for the perpetrator. That's something that people have seen time and time again in this city, that we take it seriously. All of us take us seriously. We take us seriously here in the City government and the NYPD takes it seriously. So, we saw those horrible incidents directed that Asian communities. Now, last night, a different incident in South Williamsburg, two perpetrators, one male, one female ripped masks off, members of the Jewish community who were walking down the street. This is obviously absolutely unacceptable in every way. It's something that expresses hate, but also create danger, and that's unacceptable and we're not going to allow it here in this city. The two perpetrators have been arrested by the NYPD and we are treating this incident as a hate crime. So, there are serious consequences when someone commits one of these acts. So, look, whether it is this horrible anti-Semitic act that we saw or the horrible anti-Asian acts we saw in previous weeks, none of these acts of bias and discrimination are acceptable in New York City. And the fact that the perpetrators were arrested immediately is a reminder to everyone out there, we will not tolerate hate, we will act on it quickly. Anyone who engages in an act of hate will be suffering the consequences of their actions.

Okay. Every day we come back to our daily indicators and this is what we look at every single day to see how we're doing this city and where we're going today. I have good news. And this is really wonderful to report to you, because it gets back to what you've been doing every time I get to give you good news. It's just a reflection on all of you, because New Yorkers are taking shelter in place so seriously, social distancing, so seriously face covering so seriously and it's making a difference. So, the indicators today show it first. The daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that is down from 69 to 55. And look, two things to see here, one down and down substantially – that's great to begin with – but down to just 55. We are not out of the woods, but when you see that number go down as low as 55, that sure is heartening compared to where we were and a credit to all of you. The daily number of people in ICU is across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19 it's down, it's only a little from 540 to 537, but it's still down, and that is progress. And the percentage of people who tested positive for COVID-19 citywide, down from 17 percent to 13 percent. So, this is exactly the kind of day we want to see. Now, let's say we can stretch a number of these days together and that'll be the signal that it's time to start talking about relaxing some of these restrictions. But first, we have real work to do to get there.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please remember to give me the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have Commissioner Barbot, Commissioner Banks, Senior Advisor Bishop, and Commissioner Doris on the phone. With that, I will start with Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning. Mr. Mayor, I know yesterday you spoke about the Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome and the number of cases in the city. Just to follow ups on that – one, do you have an updated – are you still at 38 in terms of the number of cases? And is there more information in terms of the specific ages, demographics of the patients, where those cases are located and how the City is tracking this data? Are you actively seeking information from hospitals or as the Deputy Mayor said last week, are you waiting for hospitals to report that information?

Mayor: Thank you very much Brigid. We're all very, very concerned about this situation. I want to keep emphasizing to parents if you see these symptoms and I'm going to ask Dr. Barbot to go over the symptoms at the beginning of her answer. Again, because we want to keep reminding parents and family members to look out for these symptoms and act quickly because as concerned, deeply concerned as we are, it's also important to remind everyone this is the kind of a situation that if it's seen and acted on quickly, can be crucial in addressing the syndrome and protecting a child. So early detection, early action really matters here. Brigid we want to make sure we get clear information out. The number of cases, thank God is still small. So in terms of seeing demographic trends, we have a very small sample size, but we absolutely want to report what we know about the demographics of the cases. And Commissioner Barbot will speak to that. And we mentioned a few days ago, the Health Department sent out a HAN, a Health Alert to all providers, to report in what they were seeing about this syndrome. That is an obligation for them to report. So I think we're in a proactive stance, getting information constantly to understand what's happening and how we can address it. So Dr. Barbot, I'll turn to you to further answer Brigid's question, but again, if you start with the symptoms and a reminder to parents, I'd appreciate it.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Certainly Mr. Mayor. So this evolving syndrome has many of the similar features of what we call Kawasaki's Disease. And those tend to be a presentation that includes high fevers for a prolonged number of days, as well as a rash and very red injected eyes along with red swollen lips and what we characteristically refer to as a strawberry tongue because of the degree to which it's so red. And these children when they present – so the most important thing is, as the Mayor mentioned, are clinicians to identify this early and an order for them to do that we need parents to reach out to them if they have children with these symptoms, not to delay but to consult with their pediatricians. And for the pediatricians, if they have a high level of suspicion, obviously to then refer them for definitive treatment because the treatment that is required is given through intravenous routes.

And so during this process we have in collaboration with our health care delivery providers, confirmed 38 cases. And the case definition is something that is important to have consistency about because we all need to be as a clinical community, clear about what are the symptoms, what are the signs that then confirm or not whether a child might have this new syndrome. And the guidance that we have sent out to the provider community is an individual less than 21 years of age, and thus far the majority of children have fallen within like the five to nine year range. So we have certainly kids younger than that as well as older. Laboratory signs of inflammation and then a single or multi-organ indication of failure, meaning that your kidneys are not working. They're going into shock. Their heart is giving out. So this is something, obviously that is incredibly concerning because the best way to ensure that we limit the number of children that are diagnosed with this inflammatory syndrome is to ensure the prevention. Right? So it goes back to having New Yorkers stay at home, continuing use of face coverings and that early access to care if children develop these symptoms. And then the appropriate referrals for definitive treatment.

Mayor: Thank you, Doctor.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. And Mayor de Blasio, I've kind of asked a version of this question a few times throughout this. And it feels a little bit like Groundhog Day, not to trigger you, but I'm curious, this initiative to engage community-based health care organizations. Why wasn't it done sooner? Particularly in neighborhoods that have fewer health care? I'm thinking of, especially Queens, which is the epicenter of the epicenter, has fewer hospital beds. Why wasn't some of this work done earlier? I have colleagues who've spoken to these community-based doctors who said that they were really struggling in March when, and in April when it was really at its peak. So you know, why couldn't it have been done any sooner and maybe perhaps prevented some deaths? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Katie. Look again, Katie, the strategy which we've – you've asked it before, I've answered it before. I'll answer it again. The strategy in March going into April was focusing on saving lives at hospitals. That's where we had to protect the most New Yorkers in the most profound way. We know that as the disease escalated, our hospital system was going through intense stress. In fact, the projections were going into beginning of April, it was going to go through much, much more. And everything was about protecting the lifesaving capacity of hospitals. There was a deep concern that hospitals would at some point be overwhelmed, and that meant in every sense, literally number of beds, personnel, PPEs, all of the above, ventilators, you name it. That's where the focus had to be to protect the ability of the hospitals to save lives. We only started to get relief as we got into the middle of April and that's when also the disparity information came out and we shifted a number of our efforts towards addressing the grassroots and addressing the disparities. So now we are going to continue to deepen those efforts. And of course the central strategic thrust now is going to be test and trace and we're going to bring these community-based providers into that as well.

Moderator: Next, we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: Hi. Good morning. Two questions. First on Kawasaki. I just want to get some clarity about the protections that parents should be taking for their children in terms of how this syndrome is spread? And how much is this now being taken into consideration as part of a possible reopening of schools in the fall? I also have a question for -- on testing, if I may. I'm wondering if you could give us an update on where testing is at? And if the City's guidance has at all changed? I know in the beginning the guidance was, you know, not everyone should be going out and getting a test if your symptoms aren't terrible, stay home, ride it out. But has that changed at all as testing becomes more available?

Mayor: Thank you Gloria. I'm going to start on the testing and then speak to the syndrome and turn to Dr. Barbot. The answer is absolutely, the initial reality of testing and remember testing has been the central issue from day one going back to January when we first called for federal support for testing. Still don't have the federal support we need. That's obvious. We are – we have much less testing than we want to, but we do have a growing amount of testing so we will be changing the criteria. Previously, it had to be focused on those who were in the greatest danger of losing their lives, as well as of course, keeping our hospitals going. So testing for our, our health care workers, keeping our first responders going. It was a very narrow construct. And as we started to do even the community-based, we focused first and foremost on those who are older and or had the preexisting conditions. We're going to be broadening that because by definition as you go into test and trace, you want to go as deep into communities as possible. So first concern will remain with those who are most vulnerable. But the goal is to go far beyond them and go deeper and deeper into communities. So right now we're still at that level, 13,000, 14,000 a day. We will get to 20,000 by May 25th, and then we want to get up to 50,000 a day. That's our goal in the course of the next few months. Maybe even get beyond that. If we could get federal help, we could go a lot farther. And that's just on the diagnostic testing. Obviously the antibody testing, which I always say you know, is helpful but has limitations, that will be a whole additional piece of the equation. So the criteria will loosen up. Then you know, for the foreseeable future, first preference always will be to older folks and or folks with preexisting conditions. But we will see an opening up more and more reach into communities as we go along.

On the issue of the schools. Look, we're going to watch this very closely. This is a syndrome that is historically rare. Dr. Barbot can speak to that, but we're taking it very seriously. We are watching it very carefully. And anything we do about schools is going to be led by health and safety first. That's absolutely the first question in any reopening. As of this moment, we believe we can reopen schools safely and well in September. But we have to keep a very close watch on this syndrome to make sure that we attack it in every way possible in the meantime. Dr. Barbot, you want to add.

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, sir. So this syndrome is Kawasaki-like, but it's really beyond that. So we're calling it Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome. It's a mouthful. But it really is a descriptive diagnosis. And the reality is that we're still learning about the way in which COVID-19 is affecting children. And so in terms of prevention, the most important thing is again, for families to remain indoors as much as possible. When they go outdoors for activities, they should use face coverings, children about the age of two should be using face coverings. When a parent, as I mentioned earlier, does have a child who has symptoms that may be consistent with this new syndrome, and they take their child to the pediatrician. One of the things we want pediatricians to be very much aware of is that oftentimes when they get the results back for COVID-19, the results may actually be negative. And so this is a syndrome where it can't really be directed by whether the test is positive or not. Although certainly it should be done. We are encouraging pediatricians to also do the antibody testing for these children. More so to confirm the diagnosis, not as an indication of whether or not it's going to then impact the case moving forward. The most important thing is, as I mentioned earlier, early diagnosis, do the test, the test is positive or negative and you still have concerns about could this be COVID-19 related? Do the antibody testing in the meantime, make sure you refer the child to hospital so that they can be more definitively diagnosed and given the appropriate intravenous medication as needed. The important thing here is based on experience, I actually, when I was in clinical practice actually treated children with Kawasaki's, you find it early, treat it early. The long term consequences for children are pretty negligible. If you delay treatment, then the concern is that children may have long term consequences. Most often in Kawasaki’s is related to the heart. And so we want to take this opportunity again, bring this information to parents, have them be on the lookout, bringing this information to primary care pediatricians so that they can act early. And then with regards to the safety, as the Mayor mentioned in terms of schools, absolutely paying very close attention on a basis. We are reaching out to pediatric providers and intensive care units. And as the science emerges and our guidance, if it needs to adapt, we will certainly adapt it. But for right now continue with face coverings, remaining indoors as much as possible and not delaying in seeking care.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor. So businesses along Front Street say that closing down Front Street between Canal and Edgewater streets as part of the City's open streets plan has been hurting their businesses even more during the pandemic. No one seems to be using the street that's been closed off and appear to be using the Stapleton Waterfront Park, which is adjacent to Front Street more than the Front Street area. Would you be willing to reopen Front Street and choose another street in the area to close down?

Mayor: Thank you for the question, Sydney. This is exactly again, I've said to many, you and many of your colleagues, it really helps when our colleagues in the media raise concerns that help us see if there's something that needs to be adjusted or addressed. So I'm going to have my team look at that immediately. Look, we put together these streets working with the City Council, working with NYPD, Department of Transportation where we thought they would be most helpful and where we could of course, keep them safe. Like everything else, if we try something and it proves that there's not that many people who use it, we need to reassess. Or if it has an unintended consequence we need to reassess. So I can't tell you the final result now, but I can tell you right away I'll have my team follow up, see what we're seeing in terms of the number of people using it, see if we think there's a different approach, or a better alternative. Definitely concerned about those small businesses. So we'll assess it over the next few days and have an answer for you.

Moderator: Next we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor and everyone on the call. Hope everyone is doing well.

Mayor: Good morning Andrew, how are you doing?

Question: Good. I have two questions. The first question is, Mayor, what is your understanding of the earliest date New York City nonessential businesses could reopen? Based on the Governor's new executive order, it would seem to be June 7th, but I wanted to know what your understanding is of the earliest that could happen? My second question is on behalf of my colleague Melissa Russo, who of course has been breaking news on the Kawasaki and related syndrome. Are there any changes being made to testing and must the testing now routinely involve children to gauge overall exposure? Do children start to be necessary for the testing samples?

Mayor: Okay. Let me do them in the order you asked them, Andrew. On the reopening look, so we have our daily indicators. The State has their indicators. We're all working together. They're all valuable measures. By both sets of measures, we're clearly not ready yet. It's May 11th today. What we can see in the case of both indicators is, you know, the likelihood right now, unless something miraculous happens and we're going into June. So I think it's fair to say that June is when we are potentially going to be able to make some real changes, if we can continue our progress. Now, Andrew, everyone who asks those kinds of projection questions, it's absolutely natural. Everyone, every New Yorker is asking themselves the question. I get the question all the time from people. we got to keep bringing it back to the science and the data. Because I've been critical, the Governor's been critical and a number of people have been critical around this country of places that decided to make their decisions without facts and the dangers that creates for their citizens. So we're going to always go by the data. It's been pretty good and pretty consistent. It's not quite been what we need it to be, but definitely trending the right direction. But we need to see it sustained in a deeper way. Right now that takes us into June. As we get close to the beginning of June, we'll be able to say, if it's looking like things are really coming together, and then what are the areas where we could be – begin to have some flexibility? But I remind you, I keep using the word boomerang. We got guard against the boomerang. And at any point, if the data started to change, that then delays the moment when you could do any kind of loosening of restrictions. We also know, and I gave the bad examples some days ago, of places that had to not only pulled back on loosening but then have to tighten up even further than where they started. So we have to earn it every day as the bottom line. And I think the right thing to think about is this conversation, end of May beginning of June is when we'll be able to start filling in the blanks.

On the question, passing on to Melissa's question – again with real appreciation to Melissa for the work she's done here. We're going to do, you know, throughout the whole health care system, we're going to be vigilant to see what's happening with this syndrome. And again, it begins with pediatricians and other health care providers, looking for those symptoms in kids. And it begins with parents and family members immediately reporting if they see their children with these symptoms. So that's, I want to really emphasize how we have the best chance of protecting kids and making sure they're safe, that early detection, early action. In terms of testing I'll turn to Dr. Barbot. Obviously the testing is happening now more and more as I talked about yesterday. For example, all Health + Hospitals facilities are now testing kids proactively with the antibody test as one of the measures to take in light of what we're seeing here. But that's in the case of kids who are already hospitalized, already have a problem. So the focus right now again is addressing kids with the symptoms, but definitely testing when you do see the symptoms. Doctor, you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, sir. What I would emphasize is if a pediatrician in his or her opinion has a child that has symptoms potentially consistent with COVID-19, they should by all means test that child. Do it in the outpatient setting, do it in the inpatient setting. There should be no limitations to a pediatrician's ability to test the child for COVID-19. Now, that being said, if they have a child who has symptoms they're concerned about, could be this new inflammatory syndrome, they should be -- take that test results with a grain of salt. Meaning that if the test does come back negative, then they should also consider doing antibody testing. And really the important part is not delay referral for more definitive treatment if the child has symptoms that they think are consistent with this new inflammatory syndrome.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Jeff from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I just have two questions for you. One from a colleague, based on the NYPD’s daily coronavirus reports, the number of summonses issued for social distancing offenses between March 16th and May 5th, is at least a hundred more than what you and the NYPD reported last week. Last week's data did not include instances in which officers used charges such as disorderly conduct to enforce social distancing or when they found other violations such as marijuana possessions. That means the number of arrests and summonses stemming from social distancing seems even higher than you were saying. Why isn't the City releasing the full number and breakdown of these arrests and summonses? And how can you reach the conclusion that enforcement has been used sparingly without that data? And the second question is on alternate side street parking, it's been suspended for weeks and the City has remained relatively clean, you said. Has the City considered any permanent changes to alternate side parking? And are there other things that the City's learned from this pandemic that might change once the pandemic ends?

Mayor: So, Jeff, I mean your last part of your question is, is a vast one. I think there are many things we're learning from this horrible crisis that are going to change the way we do things in the future. That's why you know, everything we're putting together now, the Fair Recovery Task Force, the internal task force on Equity and Inclusion, the sector councils, everybody's going to be looking at restart and recovery, but also lessons learned. Painful lessons, things we're going to have to learn to address. But also innovations and changes that are coming. Telemedicine is a great example. The fact that we're seeing a lot of places now learning telemedicine that didn't before and that's going to actually expand the ability to reach so many more patients. So yeah, that's going to be a huge discussion going forward of all the things we're learning and we're going to act on.

Alternate side, you know, I would say what we're seeing in the short term is that because people's lives changed so profoundly, because there are so many fewer people on the street, there was so much less litter. There was so much less activity that we could be okay with a lot less alternate side. When you get back to something more normal, I think, you know, there's a strong argument that you want to restore it fully, but that's not something we're going to deal with for quite a while. We’ll certainly look to see if there's a bigger lesson that we can learn vis-à-vis alternate side that might change the approach for the future. I definitely think there's some places still in the city where we're doing, you know, before all of this, where we're doing more alternate side than is needed. So I think there's an opportunity here to reassess frequency for sure. But right now we're going to stick to, you know, having this one week, next week we have a cleanup week. And then go back to suspending it. And then as we come out of the crisis, assess what it means going forward.

On the NYPD. I want to again, always begin at the beginning. The NYPD is at this point for years and years has been reducing the amount of arrests. Obviously radically reducing the number of stops. In this crisis, even though we've made clear that we have to make sure that there is the opportunity to enforce when needed, the vast majority of time enforcement hasn't been needed. The vast majority of New Yorkers are following the rules related to shelter-in-place and social distancing and face coverings. Enforcement has really not been needed on anything like a large scale. In fact, when you look at the summons activity, it is averaged out to fewer than ten a day, ten summonses for the whole city per day. It's really, really small. So we got to keep putting this in perspective. Now, the original numbers put out last week actually did combine specific summonses related to social distancing with some other summonses at the same time for other offenses. So that needs to be disaggregated so people can see. But Jeff, it's just standard policing that if another offense becomes clear in the midst of one type of enforcement, of course there has to be enforcement on the new offense as well. We'll keep making sure this information is published and is clear. But the level of activity by the NYPD is minimal right now when it comes to how they're participating in enforcement. And we want to make sure it's there when it's needed because enforcement is part of life. But I think it's quite clear that NYPD has been very restrained in the approach.

Moderator: Next, we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. First a quick follow up on the Pediatric Inflammatory Syndrome. Yesterday you said 38 children. I'm just wondering if there's an update on that number? Particularly with regards to the homeless folks being taken off the subways, have you been tracking in terms of those numbers, whether they're unique individuals or whether some of those people are being removed from the subways multiple nights in a row and, you know, therefore ending up back there?

Mayor: Very good question. I appreciate it Erin. Let me first on the Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome, turn to the Commissioner, Commissioner Barbot. I don't have new numbers as of today, since what we talked about yesterday. Commissioner, do you have any new numbers yet? If not, if there's anything new, we'll get it out later in the day.

Commissioner Barbot: We're still at 38, though we have less than a dozen that are pending investigation. So, I anticipate those cases will be resolved sometime this week, early this week. If not today, then tomorrow. And we'll be able to update numbers to see whether any of those actually turn out to be PMIS.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you. Now, I want to turn to Commissioner Banks. I think Erin's question is a crucial one always – are we reaching the same people over and over or are we reaching different people? Commissioner, obviously this gets to the point of when you have folks come into shelter – it's very early, it's only six days, but how many people are staying in versus going back out and then we bring them in for another night. So, let me immediately note, six days is a limited sample size and I know it takes time to gather the information, but what can you tell us so far about whether you think folks are staying in or going back out and then you're bringing them back in again?

Commissioner Banks: Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate the framing of this. It’s really only six days into a brand new initiative. Without this initiative we always had people who would come off for one night, return, and then we would bring them in, be able to persuade them to come in at another time. So, this is a phenomenon that we have been working with. What we have not ever seen, though, is this kind of success rate. As I said yesterday morning on a good night, five percent accepting assistance would have been a high night. And here we're getting half the people accepting assistance. We're looking at the trends. We certainly see some people that are staying in. We see some people that are not staying in and we're going to take a hard look at it over the course of this week to see if we can really focus on the people who might've come in for a night or two and then not come back in. Those are the people that we really want to focus on. In addition to the other half of people who are not accepting our services, if there’s some additional help we can give to them to have them accept it. So, you know, Erin, it's a new initiative, it's too early to make global statements, but we're looking very carefully at this because we want people to stay in once we've been able to get them to accept services to begin with and we want to redouble our efforts for the people that are not accepting our services currently.

Mayor: Yeah. And just to finish it, Erin, the – look, the perfect world is, first engagement, someone comes in, you know, gets support, gets mental health services, gets substance misuse services, never leaves again. But we know in the real world there's going to be times where it's going to take multiple efforts to get someone in. So, even if you get someone in for a night, it's still one night less that they were out on the street and that's when you can begin to get them help, begin to show them the kind of help that would be available for them. Anytime someone comes in, even for a night, is something of a victory. But you're absolutely right. The goal here is to try and sustain it and make sure it's as deep as possible. And I think over the next few weeks we're going to have a much greater ability to say how lasting an impact this is happening. But just the fact that so many people, at least beginning to experience the help they could get is very, very encouraging to me.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor and everyone on the call. I actually just wanted to see if – ask a follow up to Erin's question to see if Commissioner Banks at this point has any numbers or percentages in terms of the people who may have left after one or two nights. And then Mr. Mayor, I'd like to ask you about what alternate side parking enforcement means when it's back in effect next week. Is that just summonses or tow trucks? And what areas have had the dirty streets? Because we've heard from a number of readers in some neighborhoods that streets are actually very clean.

Mayor: Thank you, Julia. On the – I'll do this part first and then turn to Commissioner Banks. So, we'll get you information today on what the Sanitation Department has seen. Remember that for all these weeks, the Sanitation Department’s out there surveying regularly and the fact that we kept extending alternate side was – meaning not having it in effect – was because the Sanitation Department kept confirming that they were satisfied with the standards. Only in the last few days have they said they really do start to see more of a problem. And, of course, the one thing we know about alternative side is it’s applied citywide simultaneously. So, if we see a problem in a number of areas, we have to turn it on everywhere to be able to be effective. But I think, you know, what I've said from the beginning, I do not want to see us, even as we're fighting this bigger problem, end up with a city that gets dirtier and dirtier. There was going to be a point where we had to make sure if we saw a problem, it got addressed. And to do it for one week is, I think, a smart, limited way to do it. But we'll get you the data that led to this decision. And it would be applied the way it normally is applied with the same kind of approach to enforcement as would happen in normal times. Commissioner Banks, do you want to answer the other part of the question?

Commissioner Banks: Yes. Just very briefly, Julia, you know, as I said in response to Erin's question, it's really too early to tell. It's particularly, you know – I had the curve ball in the middle of this, of a Code Blue on two nights in May, which is not something that typically happens. And during Code Blue we typically were able to bring people in for a night or two and under circumstances in which people would not accept services. And I think as you saw in the numbers of engagements on Saturday night into Sunday morning and Friday night into Saturday morning that we had higher numbers of engagements and higher people accepting services on those nights. But if you took a typical Code Blue night, in the winter time, we would see one or – people coming in for one or two nights. So, we had to sort out all of the back and forth over the course of these last several days and we'll be doing that in the coming days as the Mayor said.

Look, our goal is to have people come off the streets and remain off the streets. That's – the tools that we've used with HOME-STAT have gotten more than 2,500 people to come in off the streets and remain off the streets. These last six nights have been opportunities to reach people, to try to help them on a pathway off the streets. We've been offering new tools, including Safe Haven stabilization beds in a commercial hotel. We brought on new Safe Haven beds in the middle of the pandemic in order to offer new tools to our outreach workers. And when we have a body of work that's a little bit longer, we'll be able to reach some conclusions about how we're doing in terms of people remaining inside. You know, if we can get someone in for three nights, it's an opportunity to know them better and to be able to offer things for them in the future that’ll keep them off. So, every night for each human being is a victory to have a roof over their heads rather than be on a subway train.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry, how about you?

Question: Good. My question has to do with whether or not the City has given any thought to separating the comeback from the lockdown by the amount of risk involved in certain parts of the population, mainly age. Old people are particularly susceptible to serious complications of this disease. Is it possible that you will have a kind of bifurcated advisory in which older people, people over 65, are asked to continue to shelter in place while people who are at less risk may have a little bit more latitude in the amount of freedom, if you will, that they can go about a city?

Mayor: It's a very smart question, Henry. And it's the kind of thing we have to look at as we get toward the point of being able to relax restrictions. But again, I keep reminding people, one, we're not there yet, and two, we have to prove consistently that we get to that point and cannot count our chickens until they're hatched. So, we're constantly looking at these indicators to see if we get to that point we can do some opening up. But remember even if you do some opening up initially, it does not change the basic rules of engagement. You still want people to practice social distancing and wear face coverings, and you still want folks who are particularly vulnerable to take extra precautions. So, I would say your question is a good one because it helps us all start thinking about the fact that the first steps towards reducing restrictions and opening up, certainly those first steps in particular do not change the basic rules of engagement. And in fact, I would argue it will be well along the way, months ahead, we're still going to be practicing a number of these precautions until we really get to a point that this disease is so limited in this city that we can anticipate, you know, something very different. Definitely want folks who are older, particularly those who are much older and, or who have the preexisting conditions to keep being careful and smart for quite a while, and the people around them to exercise a lot of care and caution with those who are most vulnerable. We're at a point now, last 24 hours, over a thousand new cases, we're far from the point where people can let down their guard. So, we'll give guidance for sure. But I think a good general rule is to say that those precautions need to be in place for quite a while, even as we're taking the first steps to open up

Moderator: Last two for today, we have Steve from Westwood One News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning everybody on the call. Just wanted to ask you something about small businesses since you're focused on that today. I've been talking to small business owners around Brooklyn and many of them are wondering what they'll be able to do and how soon they'll be able to do it. Specifically, they're wondering if they can be open soon for curbside pickup only, in the words of the same way that restaurants can, you know, fill orders for takeout. Would it be possible for small business owners to take orders over the phone or online and then fulfill those orders at the door front without having people inside their stores? Now, they say they're hurting so badly, they have to pay their rent, the City needs the tax revenue, and wondering if that's an accommodation that can be made soon. And then I'm just wondering, also my second question, I want to come back to the contact tracing decision to have Health + Hospitals do this and ask Dr. Barbot, what are your thoughts on this? And, you know, there's been so much criticism from predecessors on this, specifically Dr. Tom Frieden who says that this isn't a wise move. He thinks it doesn't make sense. Wondering what Dr. Barbot’s thoughts are on the criticism that came out over the weekend. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Steve. So, on the first point with the curbside pickup, it's definitely the kind of thing we need to look at because when we think about the many different permutations of how you start to relax certain restrictions or start to open up. We're going to look at any and all options, and we're looking at things that have been used around the world and around the country to see what's been working well, what hasn't been working so well. That's the kind of idea that's on the table. But again, it's premature to say exactly what we're going to do because we're analyzing each option, the timing, how it would work in a place like New York City, which is obviously different from a lot of other places. And we have – you know, even something like curbside pickup plays out very differently here than it would in a lot of places around the country that have a lot more space. But it's an idea we definitely need to weigh. And to Gregg Bishop and Jonnel Doris, both of whom, you know, constantly are engaging small business owners and talking to them about their needs, when you – you know, again, you can think about curbside pickup or any of the other specific ideas you're hearing from small business owners, but just wanted to see if either one of you wants to add about the kinds of approaches we're going to take initially as we listen to small business owners and try and figure out the best way to support them. If either one of you would like to add at this point, you're welcome to. Gregg, if you'd like to jump in at all.

Senior Advisor Gregg Bishop, Small Business COVID-19 Recovery: Sure, Mr. Mayor, and thank you for this opportunity. I think it's important for us to get our reopening strategy correct. And so, certainly we will be listening to our small businesses with our task force to figure out what is the best way to get our businesses operating because we want to make sure, as the Mayor's talked about, that we do this smart so that we don't see that boomerang effect. So, whether it's curbside pickup or whether it's helping them with technology so they can actually deliver that material or whatever the product is, we will be looking for solutions.

Mayor: Thank you. Jonnel, you want to add?

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Yeah, Mr. Mayor, I believe that the best place for us to find the solutions, as you said earlier and also as Gregg mentioned, is really by engaging our small businesses, trying to figure out what will work for them. And I think part of our role as SBS going forward is really to strengthen and extend our reach and communication with those small businesses, and then figure out ways that we can advocate for them both on the City level, but also on the federal level. And I think some of the resources that is needed particularly from the City and from the federal level, we can help them get there. And so, we are going to be laser focused on this. We are going to increase our communication to those businesses and get greater input and what they think can actually work for them and their particular business because every business is different. One business may ask for curbside pickup, others may need some sort of a different approach. And so, we are open to everything and, as I said before, as we assess, we will definitely come back with recommendations concerning those requests.

Mayor: Thank you, Jonnel. And thank you, Gregg. And again, congratulations to both of you on your new roles. You know, Steve, the question you asked also reminds me of, you know, I mentioned the call I had Friday with the Hospitality Coalition and it was very interesting to say to them, you know, what percentage of capacity do you need to have to be able to come back effectively? What kind of distancing guidelines do you need? And this was one group of small businesses, but they said, you know, from their point of view, they would rather wait until a point where things were substantially more normal, they could have bigger capacity, fewer precautions to be able to create, you know, the atmosphere and the service that they historically provided as close to what they had before as possible. So, it was interesting to hear that perspective that, you know, some businesses I think are going to understandably want to come back as quickly as they can and be able to come back as quickly as they can and provide something like the same service effectively, maybe with a methodology like curbside pickup. Others are going to be much more sensitive to needing to get qualitatively closer to where they were even if that means waiting longer. So, it's all about listening to them. This is why we've set up these sector councils and why we're going to be in such constant engagement with the small business community. Because we got to figure out what will actually work for them and be viable.

 On the second question, I'll turn to Dr. Barbot, but I'll also say, Steve, look, I respect anyone who served in public service, I really do. But folks who are now doing other things and offer their criticisms and critiques, you know, we always understand it's different when you're in the middle of the fight versus folks reflecting back on previous service. We're in the middle of the greatest health care crisis in this country in a century. No one has gone through anything like this in our lifetimes except for the people serving on the front lines right now. So, when we determined how to do test-and-trace on an unprecedented level, we wanted to bring together the vast operational capacity of Health + Hospitals, which is in every part of this city with, of course, the expertise of the Health Department and we've combined those in this effort. But I would just caution, criticism and critics are a part of public life, but it's particularly important to remember when people are criticizing related to something that's unprecedented, to put that in perspective. No one's ever tried to mount a test-and-trace operation on this scale. And it's not just the testing and tracing, it's the hotels, it's the transportation, it's the food, it's everything that has to go into it, the isolation initiative. This is a vast undertaking. And that's why we had to put together the pieces to do something on a scale never seen before. Dr. Barbot.

Commissioner Barbot: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, you know, as I've said before, I am incredibly proud of the dedicated and experienced staff at the Health Department who have been working day and night on this response, and people who have experience in tracing contacts all the way from things like TB, HIV, Ebola, most recently, measles. And so, we're committed to bringing this world class expertise in tracing to bringing this public health emergency to an end as quickly as possible.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Last question for today. Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Morning, everyone – on pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome again. Just given how common symptoms like fever, rash, and vomiting are among children, I'm wondering if Dr. Barbot can give some more specific guidance on when parents should seek or get in contact with their medical provider. For instance, is there a time period they should wait before they should do so? Also, on the new rules in small business, Mr. Mayor, just wanted to ask what you would say to criticism that the City should use, you know, existing infrastructure to deal with the coronavirus response as opposed to, you know, create lots of new task forces, roles, and potentially red tape. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. [Inaudible] go to Dr. Barbot with this preface and I say it as a parent, Shant, I think when we see something like this and we're seeing it come up in the last days intensely, again, we're trying to send a really clear message to parents – take this seriously, act quickly, report it to your doctor immediately. Yes, you're right, Shant, some of these specific symptoms are not particularly unusual in kids, but we're in an incredibly unusual moment in history. So, if a parent sees these symptoms in a child, get your health care provider on the phone immediately. We'd like people to be really energetic about that. Again, because this is a particular reality with this syndrome that if caught early, it can be addressed, and anyone who does not have a provider, does not know where to turn, can call 3-1-1, and get connected to a Health + Hospitals clinician. So, we want parents to do that. Dr. Barbot, you want to add to, you know, the way you would talk to parents about – and you obviously know plenty about pediatrics. How to discern that moment when it's important to pick up the phone to their doctor.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, that's a really important question. I'm glad you asked it, Shant, because, you know, as a pediatrician who is in clinical practice, you're absolutely right. I mean, those symptoms in and of themselves are really common symptoms. I think what we're looking for in terms of giving parents that greater guidance is that when these things come together or when their child has a fever that doesn't seem to be going away, the kid is off. I think that's – when I was in clinical practice and I would get a call from a parent, as soon as I said my kid is off, then that is a signal that a deeper conversation needed to be had. And so, I think that's what we're asking parents, that if your child has a fever, they're running around, they look great, their appetite is fine, then you're probably okay waiting it out and seeing. But if they have fever, their energy level is off, their appetite is off, they're developing a rash, their lips look extra red, their tongue is looking extra red – those, I think, are the early signs that we want parents not to discount them and say, Oh, they'll be better tomorrow, but to reach out to your pediatrician, have that conversation, and then, you know, do the testing if your pediatrician thinks it's indicated.

Mayor: Thank you, Doctor. Shant, on the other question about small business. So, look, we talk about the great unknown and this is the reality we are facing with this crisis in general, but for small business it's a profound set of challenges. I mean, when I've talked to folks in small business in the last weeks, you know, they're presenting this series of questions I've never had to deal with before. They don't know what's going to happen in their relationships with their landlords if they don't own the building that they're in. You know, they don't know when they're going to be able to get their customer base back, when they're going to be able to provide a service anywhere like what they did before. And again, for small businesses that don't have a lot of resources, they are profoundly worried about survival. So, we do not anticipate being able to do what we did before and considering enough, we have to do something very different.

So, in these – the two realities of what my colleagues are going to be doing – for Gregg, the idea is to find whole new sources of support because small businesses will need a different kind of helping hand going into these phases ahead than they've ever needed before. We're going to have to find some kind of sustainable sources of support to help them come back, and particularly the smallest businesses, particularly businesses in immigrant communities and communities of color that have very, very little capital to work with. So, we're going to have to find capital to infuse into the situation. And it's exceedingly hard to do from a City government perspective, given that we're in the middle of a vast fiscal crisis. But our hope is to get capital into play from, again, the philanthropic world and from changing the relationship between larger businesses and smaller businesses, have more and more of our larger businesses patronize smaller businesses and support them in a variety of ways. So that's going to be Gregg's mission. Absolutely need to do something different there. So, we needed someone to take charge of that and build that new reality.

Meanwhile, at Small Business Services, they're going to have to do everything they were doing before, but they're going to have to create a whole set of new things too, to figure out what else we can do in the context of City government to support small businesses, to ease their burden. We've already reduced fines a lot and we've worked on some regulatory reform, but there's a lot more that I think we need to do now in light of this, and to streamline the way small businesses can get answers and support from the City government and innovate new approaches. So, that's going to be Jonnel’s task as he runs Small Business Services going forward. And I think the fact is – you know, again, for small business it will not be business as usual. It will be an incredibly tough time. And we're not just talking in 2020, certainly into 2021, even 2022, we're going to have to support the maximum number of small businesses because they are so crucial to life in this city.

Let me close with just a reminder that, kind of a basic truth about New Yorkers. I learned this long ago when I started in public service in this town that New Yorkers like the hard truth, they would much rather hear what's really going on than any attempt to placate or sugar coat. And so, the day we brought out the truth about the disparities that we've seen with this disease and we documented it, it was a day where we devoted ourselves to being really, really clear about the fact that the disparities that this disease both took advantage of and intensified had to be addressed head on. And it started in our public hospitals but now has to broaden out much more deeply to the grassroots. And this is a first step to strengthen and empower our community-based clinics in combination with the other steps we've talked about, the telemedicine and then the advertising campaigns, all the things that are trying to get people more and more information, more and more access to care, more and more access to actual support from a clinician.

But really getting this effort down to the grassroots is crucial in the here and now, but it also is a precursor to rethinking how we provide health care going forward and how we're going to reach many more people. This is a city that is devoted to universal health care. We announced a year-and-a-half ago that this would be a city where there would be universal health care, guaranteed health care for all, including folks who don't have insurance or can't get insurance. We need to take that vision, deepen it, and make it ever more community-based to really go at these disparities. So, this is an example of something coming out of this crisis that's going to cause us to right now make changes to protect lives, but also go deeper into the structural changes we need to address these disparities for the long run. I have no doubt in my mind that's what New Yorkers want and that's what New Yorkers need and that's what New Yorkers will be devoted to with the same kind of devotion that we've seen people really, really do admirable work with shelter in place, with social distancing, with face coverings, all the things that are changing the reality every day for the better. This is another common mission we will go on together. Thank you very much, everybody.

2020-05-12 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. The past few days we've focused on the progress we've made in this city, throughout this city, and how it relates back to everything that you have done, your hard work. I am very, very clear about the fact that socially social distancing isn't easy. Shelter in place isn't easy. Even remembering to wear a face covering all the time isn't easy, but New Yorkers have done it overwhelmingly, and consistently with a lot of strength, a lot of discipline. So, we have talked about how that has given us now a chance, having done a lot to get to a stronger place to go on the offensive, to do the things that will contain this disease further and move us towards a better situation. Now, we've talked about some of the things that we're going to need to do. We're going to need to have the most extensive ability to trace people around the city who have been exposed to disease, to get them the help they need, to get them to isolation if they need that in one of the hotels, all the services that go with that. We've talked about that whole apparatus that has to be built, and obviously the grassroots piece intensifying our grassroots efforts. More community efforts like the community clinics I spoke about yesterday, fortifying them, strengthening them, helping them with new tools to deepen their work. More and more telemedicine, more and more support and personnel to reach deeper into communities. These are the characteristics of going on the offensive. These are the characteristics of being able to move forward in a coordinated way to beat back this disease. All of these elements matter, but the thing that matters most, and its mattered most since the very beginning is testing. Not a surprise to any of you. Testing, testing, testing from day one it's what we needed most. Didn't get what we needed from the federal government. Kept building nonetheless to do the most we could do here. And it is the essence, it's the connective tissue, it's the foundation of everything we're going to do here to fight back this disease, and we have to keep building it up all the time.

So, let's go over where we are right now when it comes to testing. Lately we have been citywide when you combine all the testing done around the city, generally in the neighborhood of about 14,000 tests per day. Now again, that is a much better than where we were, and it shows improvement, but it doesn't show us where we need to get. We have to keep expanding rapidly. Right now, at our public hospitals and clinics, we have capacity for just over 5,000 tests a day across 23 sites. And again, every single one of these tests counts for the everyday New Yorker. It gives you information you desperately need about your own status, but of course it is crucial to our ability to fight the disease everywhere, and to lay that foundation for the ability to trace the disease and follow up with each and every case over time. But we've got to get to the point where testing is much more widespread around this city. It will be done in stages, but it's absolutely a requirement if we're going to win this fight to have testing be widespread.

So, today, I'm announcing 12 new Health + Hospitals sites, and these will be expanding over the next three weeks. So, during the month of May. And let me go through them with you, so you'll see the progression of how these will build over the coming weeks. First, starting next week, week of May 18th, two new sites. In Manhattan in Washington Heights. In Brooklyn, in Midwood. So, when you take where we are today, about 5,100 tests per day in our Health and Hospitals sites, that's going to add another 1,200 or so. That gets us in the course of next week up to 6,300 per day. Then the following week, the week of May 25th, we will add 10 new sites. In Staten Island, three sites, Prince's Bay, Concord and Port Richmond. In Queens, one site in Woodside. In Manhattan, a site in East Harlem. In Brooklyn, sites in sunset park, Bay Ridge and Canarsie. And in the Bronx, in Fordham Manner and Melrose. So, add that into the equation. So again, by next week we get the sites up. It takes us to 6,300 tests per day. When you add those additional 10 sites, that will add 4,400 tests per day more. Therefore, by the week of May 25th we'll be at 10,700 tests per day at Health and Hospitals sites alone. So, we'll be more than doubling our testing capacity in our public hospitals and clinics, and that is the essence of getting out to the grassroots, but it's only beginning. We're intending to do more and more as more and more testing, more and more lab capacity becomes available. And again, as I said, by the week of May 25th when you add everything together, we'll be in the range of about 20,000 tests day. I want to see us in the months ahead, get to 50,000 tests a day, and then ideally go beyond that. The criteria for who gets tested will keep evolving as more and more testing becomes available, and we'll have more to say on that in the coming days, but it stands to reason. As we reach deeper and deeper into the city, we want more and more people to participate. So, we'll keep you updated on that as we build out our testing program at the grassroots.

Now, test and trace. So, remember testing is important for every individual who gets tested, and tells you something absolutely vital for yourself and your family, and helps you know how to handle the situation you're in. But what we want to do for everyone, is build out the tracing element of this. Finding out if someone tests positive, who have been the other contacts that they've had, close contacts who need to be evaluated in many cases will need to be tested as well. So, the goal here is to trace people, and then for those who do require support and isolation, to make sure that happens seamlessly. Look again, some people will be in a situation where they can isolate effectively at home, other people will not and will need help, and will want help. Will want a place where they feel safe, and where they know they're not in a position to spread the disease to other members of their family or their household. That's what the hotels are for, but I keep reminding people, it's not just a hotel room somewhere, you know, here's an address, good luck. No, it's a very, very deeply coordinated effort. Once someone's identified as needing that isolation, and needing that option, to get them there, the transportation to get them there, the medical support once they're there, food, laundry, you name it, all of that has to be put together. It has to be constant. It has to be something that people can access quickly. And when they're done and they're safe, they go back home. And then of course there's more people who will need to take advantage of the isolation. So, it's a nonstop effort, always having a room available for anyone who needs it, and that's crucial. I want people to be very, very clear about this. We're building out a test and trace capacity with the goal of making sure there is an isolation location for anyone who needs it. And we have a lot of hotel capacity that we already control, and we can get a lot more as needed. So, we'll build it as big as it needs to be.

So, as we look at it, what it's going to take to build something like this, and it's never been done on this scale in any American city before. So, when you think about what's necessary, a leadership that can really put together something big and challenging, a big logistical and operational challenge, but also a compassionate challenge, making sure that each and every human being is treated with dignity, with respect, with the support they need. So, the team we have been building very much comes from that tradition of knowing how to get things done, but also people with big hearts, and big appreciation for what it takes to serve all the people of this city. Folks who come out of our great health agencies and have been steeped in that philosophy of being there for each and every New Yorker. I last week announced the executive leadership of our test and trace corps. We are now bringing two more leaders in to build out this leadership further to oversee the tracing and isolation operations. And each of these pieces is a really big job unto itself, given the scale of this city. So, we looked for people who were really good, really talented, really experienced, and could handle the sheer intensity of what we were asking them to do. So first, our new Director of Tracing Dr. Neil Vora. Neil Vora is someone who since 2015 has served in our Health Department as Director of Disease Control Informatics Data and Outbreak Response. That is a mouthful, but, but a very important job. And he is someone with tremendous expertise in tracing infectious diseases. In fact, so much so that in 2014 working with the Centers for Disease Control nationally, he literally went to West Africa in search of information on Ebola and literally went into caves in West Africa to learn about the bats. Who were the carriers of Ebola and rabies. Talk about hands-on, talk about a can-do spirit. Dr. Vora has proven by his actions that he is someone who is going to go out there and get the job done no matter what it takes. He's also overseeing New York City's Ebola monitoring and Zika Testing Coordination Program. So, he has dealt with tough situations before, and brings so much expertise and spirit to this effort. So, we welcome him. We welcome Dr. Vora as our new Director of Tracing.

Now, the team he will lead, the contact tracers, their job will be to identify each and every case. Dr. Vora knows from the work he's been doing already as a key member of our COVID-19 response effort, that we've got to make sure that that is good and precise work, but then we also have to make sure there's the right hand off to the team that will manage the isolation for all new Yorkers who need it. And so, to coordinate our isolation team, the new director of our isolation effort will be Dr. Amanda Johnson. She is currently the Senior Director of Ambulatory Care Integration at Health and Hospitals.

Now, Dr. Johnson is not only a great physician herself, but she has built a career on helping other physicians to build their skills, to really understand their patients and everything that's going to take to get someone through the whole process from the beginning of their challenge or disease identified to full recovery. She was chief resident at the university of California at San Francisco and also there and in her current work at Health and Hospitals. Her focus was on teaching residents, teaching doctors to care for the whole person, to care for the patient from beginning to end, to make sure that there was that continuity, and this is so important to the work she will do directing our isolation effort. Because remember we've got to see people through from the moment it's clear, they need that isolation to the moment that they can go home safely, every piece of the equation has to be covered. So, Amanda brings that mindset, that history, that experience. Also, a bonus qualification, she has a joint MBA, MD from Harvard. So, her background is not only as a doctor but also with an operational mindset, a business mindset of how to make something big and complex come together. A really rare and special— background, a special capacity that will be perfect for this role serving this City. So, the isolation team that Dr. Johnson will put together will make sure that people have a seamless experience and we want to encourage those in need isolation to take advantage of it, to know it's there for them, to know it's free to know, to know it will be an easy, straightforward process. But again, we're building it from scratch, not a task for the faint hearted, but Dr. Amanda Johnson is up to the task. So, these two great leaders joining our leadership team in test and trace and everyone is moving quickly. And in that vein the actual hiring of the tracers is moving rapidly, we have the generals, but now we need the army. And 7,000 applications have come in so far and we're still encouraging more because as I've said, we're starting with a certain number, but this effort is going to grow out easily, could take us to the five to 10,000 range. So, we want people with public health background to apply and apply right away at nyc.gov/traceteam. Again, nyc.gov/traceteam put your application in immediately. And I have an update today that the first 535 contact tracers are now being trained through the Johns Hopkins university training initiative sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies. As they complete their training and they're ready to go, those tracers go into action right away. So, this effort is moving quickly, our goal is to have 2,500 tracers in play by the beginning of June on the field doing this good work. So, this has to constantly, constantly move and we welcome more applications all the time.

Now, one important personnel announcement today, and this gets back to one of the big points that we've been talking about over these last weeks, which is the fact that this disease has laid bare horrible disparities that every one of us should find unacceptable that must be addressed more and more aggressively. And that is something we need to work on in the big picture as we think about how to rebuild this City and bring it back, not the way it was, but better, fairer, more inclusive. But right now, there's also crucial work to do to make sure that each and every city agency is doing everything it can do right now to ensure that disparity is being addressed right in the middle of this crisis. So, we put together a working group of city officials, the inclusion and equity task force, and we needed an executive director for this group who really knows the City, knows our people, but also understands how the city government works and understands how to make change energetically and rapidly. And we have found a great leader to serve in the role of executive director announcing day that Grace Bonilla will be Executive Director of the task force. She has been doing an extraordinary job since 2017 as the Administrator of the Human Resources Administration, she'll continue in that role but also take on this important responsibility. Her whole life has been spent helping vulnerable New Yorkers and folks who are not getting their fair share, this is what she has focused on. She is a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised in Queens, she understands life in this City. She also understands the immigrant experience coming from an immigrant family. She has done amazing work before government as well and including as CEO of the committee for Hispanic Children and Families and she was one of those unsung heroes who helped us to put together the pre-K initiative. And the very beginning of the administration, we had a senior advisory group in 2014 that helped us figure out how to rapidly put together pre-K. And it was a group that immensely contributed to that success in the first months of this administration. So, Grace has done so much and we're so happy she'll be taking on this role. The goal here is clear, right now, what can our city agencies do as part of this immediate response to help address these disparities and then go beyond to contribute to all the thinking, the planning, the, the bigger changes that we're going to need in this City that we'll be working on over the next 20 months, the more structural change as well. This group of key city government leaders will be with that every step of the way.

Okay. Let's turn to another topic and this topic, this is really on our minds and it really has grabbed us all just in the last week or two. It's sobering, it's bluntly frightening and I want to say to parents out there of, you're hearing this information about pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome. And it sounds scary, it does sound scary, I'm speaking as a parent myself. It's something we did not see essentially throughout March and April, this was not something that the health care community saw on their radar and then in the last week or two, suddenly we're seeing something that's very troubling. And we're combining the efforts of health care professionals all over New York City to understand what it is and how to deal with it. In this context of the coronavirus, this is obviously, and you know, we'll have an opportunity in the Q&A to talk about more. We're talking about characteristics that have been seen before but now are being experienced through the prism of this pandemic, that's what's causing particular concern. So I'm going to give you an update on the numbers here and they continue to grow and that's why we are really, really concerned and really want to get the word out to all family members to keep an eye on their kids and to act immediately if they see a problem. As of the latest information we have 52 confirmed cases, so that number has continued to grow, 10 cases pending right now for this City. Of the 62 cases, so the 52 confirmed in the 10 they're still being evaluated, 25 tested positive for COVID-19 and another 22 percent – excuse me, another 22 had COVID-19 antibodies. So again, 25 individual children tested positive for COVID-19, 22 had COVID-19 antibodies. We have lost one child and that has made it even more sobering and even more an area of concern to all of us. But again, what we understand so far from our medical community is early detection, early action makes all the difference here. So again, the symptoms, persistent fever, again, persistent fever, rash, abdominal pain, vomiting and if you see any combination, especially be concerned. Dr. Barbot, I thought yesterday I gave a really great description that every parent could understand, or every family member could understand. If your child is off, if your child doesn't have energy of your child, is not themselves, and has at least one of these symptoms, call immediately to your doctor, your health care provider. If you see multiple symptoms even more urgent, we want people not to hesitate here and if you don't have a regular doctor, call 3-1-1 and you'll be connected to a Health and Hospitals clinician. This is something where the quicker a parent reports to them, the quicker a health care professional can evaluate, the more chance of protecting the child and seeing through them, seeing them through this challenge safely.

Now, we've also been talking a lot in the last few days about something that every New Yorker cares about, which is helping folks who are homeless, helping them to overcome the challenges in their life and get to a safe place and no longer live on the street. And we're now one week into the experience of having the subways shut down in the late-night hours for cleaning and experiencing each night, what that means for our outreach efforts to connect with the homeless and bring them in. Consistent results now, every single night, last night, 362 individuals were engaged by our outreach workers and again, specially trained police officers who work with the homeless, 360 to engage 211 accepted help, 178 went to shelter, 33 went to hospitals. Every single night, we're seeing the same things, high level of engagement, large number of homeless individuals being engaged, the majority accepting help. We've never seen that before, it keeps happening night after night, I'm sure it won't happen perfectly consistently every night. But if the first week is any indication this is a game changer and we're going to put everything we've got into making this work because I think it could fundamentally change the future of homelessness in the City for the better and get a really large number of people off the streets once and for all.

Okay, let's now talk about the daily indicators. And this is every day the thing we are focusing on together, all New Yorkers get to see this in common, it's all based on the work you do. Overall, the work you've done has been great and the indicators have really, really moved over the weeks. But we've got to keep going, we had a really good day, yesterday, three going down together. Today, we do not have as good a day, but I'll qualify it by saying where things went up it was very by very little amounts. So that's at least something to note, we want it all to go down, obviously. We want it all to go down consistently when they all go down consistently it says something really profound has happened and that's the gateway to opening up more and reducing restrictions. But today little too much of a mixed bag. So, indicator one daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 that is down from 55 to 51. And I always want to celebrate when only 51 people are going into the hospital for COVID-19 compared to where we were a few weeks ago. But the sheer numbers when they're this good, that is something really to be happy about. That one went down. Let's keep that going down. Now, on the number of people – indicator two – daily number of people in the ICUs across Health + Hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that number went up. It only went up by a small amount in the scheme of things from 537 to 550, but it still went up. That's not what we want obviously. And that's a number that's still higher than anyone would want - that many people still fighting for their lives. So, we got to see more progress there. And then indicator three, percent of people tested positive for COVID-19 citywide – it went up by only one percentage point. Again, not what we want, but only one percent up. So, overall trend line, very good. Daily results, not yet what we're looking for. Stick to it because we know what you're doing is working. Let's just keep doing it. Let's keep trying to do it better.

A few quick words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we will now turn to questions from our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We now begin our Q & A. As a reminder, we have Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze, Dr. Barbot, Commissioner Banks, and Test and Trace Corps. Executive Director, Ted Long also on the line. First question today goes to Dave Evans from ABC.

Question: Hi Mayor, I wanted to ask you because Dr. Fauci is beginning to testify as you know, in front of the Senate and we already know that he's going to be telling us that early opening around the country, that, that what's needless suffering for so many Americans. I wanted to get your reaction to that. And yesterday you mentioned June as the possibility we could be opening things up in the city. Is even that perhaps a little ambitious, a June opening?

Mayor: Dave, let me ask you just repeat because I got handed a note, my apology, repeat the point you made about Dr. Fauci.

Question: Dr. Fauci will be telling by remote testimony today to the Senate that other parts of the country opening up quickly - earlier than he thinks they should - puts needless amount of suffering to so many Americans. Basically, saying that they shouldn't be opening so quickly. That we will see that second wave - that boomerang that you have talked about. I wanted to see your reaction to that.

Mayor: Yeah, thank you. And obviously the two questions go together. I appreciate it, Dave. I’m very much aligned with Dr. Fauci’s concern. Again, you'll, you'll see here that we are very devoted to our daily indicators and they're, you know, they're real honest indicators because they show you a good overall trend line, but they don't show you enough yet to feel comfortable reducing any of the restrictions. In fact, they keep telling me that, keep doing what we're doing and double down. You know, people can keep doing all they can to stay at home to improve our social distancing efforts to, you know, keep wearing face coverings. I think what folks have done has been outstanding, but I still see room for improvement; all of us can improve. So, just want to see people go deeper and deeper into it because that's the gateway to actually loosening restrictions, but I agree with Dr. Fauci. We are seeing places that clearly are not basing their decisions on the science and that's dangerous. It's dangerous for their people; it's dangerous for all of us because if the disease reasserts in some part of the country inevitably it will spread around again. So, I share his deep concern. I think everything should be based on the science and remember you can throttle-up and throttle-down, so if you set some really clear indicators and they start to go in the wrong direction, you can resume some restrictions. It doesn't have to be as bad as what I talked about with some of the cities in Asia that really opened up in some cases way too quick and then they needed to put restrictions back and then even go farther and clamp down much more. There are more moderate visions of that point that if you stick to your indicators, open-up carefully, decide it's time to try relaxing some restrictions and then you see numbers you don't like you can bring those restrictions back carefully without having to go to a much deeper kind of turnaround. So, we're going to constantly be led by the numbers.

Now to the question of June, what I was saying is that by our indicators, you know, clearly these indicators are not getting us the kind of answers we need to change our restrictions in May. We've said very clearly, you got to have 10 days to two weeks of consistent downward motion. We haven't had that in a sustained way at all. I can just do the basic math, you know, we're going to remain in the state we're in during the month of May. In the beginning of June, that will be the first chance we get to start to do something differently, but only if the indicators show us that; only if they show that we’ve reached the kind of consistent progress we need. At that point Dave, again, we can make very fine-tuned moves. I've been real clear that again, what, what's different between us and some of the places I think may have done it the wrong way is if we make a move, it's going to be piece-by-piece. We're not talking about bringing everything back and kind of, you know, off-switch goes to on-switch. We're talking about very measured moves, that kind of toehold concept; try something, if it works for a sustained period of time, then try the next thing, if it doesn't work, you're not going to obviously take the next step. So, I don't think it's ambitious to say if the indicators validate that it's time to start some loosening-up - I don't think that's too ambitious. But the indicators have to keep telling us that each move we make is working or we can't take the next move. I think that's the bottom line to, that unites it with the point Fauci is making, it has to be based on numbers and science.

Moderator: Next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Morning, everyone. On the Test and Trace Corps. leadership, I believe consultant Amy Dickson told Politico that the interviewing process set back the launch of the program by at least a week. So, I just wanted to ask if that makes you feel any regret over taking responsibility for tracing away from the health department. On a separate issue, a colleague of mine wrote that the MTA is using markings on subway platforms to encourage social distancing. Just wanted to get your opinion on that measure and what you can say at this stage about how the city will help prevent the spread of the virus on subways whenever businesses reopened. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. Look on the markings; I think it's a sensible concept. We've certainly seen some good results outside of grocery stores and supermarkets for example. When people sort of know how to form a line that's socially distance, I think it's helpful to people. I think it's a smart idea for the subway as well. Obviously, we're talking about really modest subway ridership now. As ridership increases over time, we've got to think about what will work for that moment, but for this moment I think there's some sense in that. Bringing back the subways, it's obviously the state runs the subways and the MTA, but we're all going to work together to figure out what will work and that's something that has to be done very mindfully. People will come back if they have faith, it's safe and if they're worried it may not be safe, they won't. So, you know, it really puts a premium on listening to everyday New Yorkers - what they need to feel more confident. I think the example of a decision we all worked on together to do the overnight cleaning, which has really, I think given more confidence to essential workers right now that their health is being protected and also a way of addressing in a new way the homelessness issue. I think that's a good example of everyone working together to build confidence in those riding the subways. I think we have to think about what those realities look like going forward and all of us work together to achieve the same thing as more and more ridership comes into play.

On the test and trace initiative, it is being put together rapidly. I don't know what this individual is talking about. All I know is that we have put together a very, very strong leadership team. The interviewing process, the training process as you're hearing is moving very rapidly. This was the right way to make it happen as quickly as possible with the right operational capacity. So I'm satisfied that this is how we can do it most quickly.

Moderator: Next is Andrea from CBS.

Question: Good morning, everyone. I've got a question about the homeless outreach. How can you tout success when they're not concrete measurements about who actually stays at a shelter and truly accept services? Also, Mr. Mayor, you were talking about how there are a plethora of hotel rooms that you can easily access more. Clearly those that are wanting to be in a subway don't want to go to a shelter. Is there a route where they don't have to go through the shelter system to get one of those hotel rooms?

Mayor: Andrea, I'll turn to Commissioner Steve Banks, but I want to caution again, I think there's a real misunderstanding. I respect anyone who thinks a hotel room, thinks how that might be more appealing, but you got to think about everything that that homeless individual needs. This is not just someone who like a certain number of people in our shelter system, were living in an apartment, working and then they just couldn't make ends meet and they end up in a shelter. That's more and more of the people in shelter for really economic reasons. Folks who are street homeless, permanently homeless overwhelmingly are folks with serious mental health issues and/ or serious substance misuse issues. And you can't just say, here's a hotel room, you know that's going to work for you on your own. No, you really have to provide a lot of support, a lot of oversight, a lot of services. And again, Commissioner Banks can speak to it better than I can. The, the fact is that well over 2000 individuals have come off the street and accepted shelter and not returned to the street in the last three years. I'm going to keep talking about it. I hope you guys will look into it because it's a very, very important story for this city. They came-in because the support was there for them. They came in because safe havens have been created that they did feel good about and more locations were created that they felt good about and that is the way to get people in and keep them in with all that support. It needs that intensive heavy support to get someone on a better path and keep them there and keep them from going back to the streets. So, no hotels are generally in that case, not the answer. The success as we've tried, you know, many times to go over – and Steve, again, will do it more eloquently than me – engaging people is success to begin with. You're trying to win the trust of folks who their lives have really come apart to the point that they're living on the street. That is not an overnight exercise, that takes a lot of effort, a lot of repetition. Even someone who in a single instance agrees to come in for a night, that's a step in the right direction. And, as Steve said yesterday, that means we're getting a better understanding of who they are, what they need, and we keep coming back and coming back. So, I would tell you that when you've had this many people accept engagement and come in for anything, that's a victory unto itself. Over time, we're going to be able to see how many of those people stick, in the sense of stay in, and that's going to tell us a lot more. But even the level of this level of engagement is really surprising and positive as a beginning. Steve, why don't you pick it up and then talk about, in addition to anything else you want to say, how we're going to be tracking the longer-term outcomes with these folks so we can keep reporting them.

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Human Services: Thank you. Look, I just want to remind everyone, you know, when I was standing on the platform in the early hours of last Wednesday morning and this initiative was first begun, we didn't know what to expect. As I've said a couple of times over the last couple of days, you know, on a good night if five percent of the people want to be engaged and accept services, that was the norm. And the fact that, you know, half the people at this point on any given night are willing to be engaged and want to want to work with us in terms of a pathway off the subway is a significant step forward. I do agree that as time goes on, we will be digging into each individual and what is working to keep them off. As the Mayor said, the tools that we've had to bring 2,500 people off the streets in the last three years who have stayed off are really important tools. But we’ve added to that arsenal of tools for average workers over the last a week or so, we brought on more Safe Haven beds – and those are the low barrier beds that we've had great success of last three years – once people are in those beds, that people actually over time remaining permanently off the streets – but brought on those beds. We've even used a commercial hotel to create Safe Haven beds. But it's not simply a question of a bed, it's a question of the services and the supportive services that are needed. It's also important to remember that we're talking about human beings. Each individual has a different pathway that got them onto the streets, each individual has a pathway that's going to take them off. It’s going to be very individually tailored. So, for some clients that have been in shelter, they have an assigned shelter and something went wrong. We're working with them to either get them back to that shelter or a different shelter. For some individuals that have never been in shelter and they need a higher level of support, we're getting them to Safe Haven beds. So, for each individual, that's the way we've been proceeding. And as we look at this over the next number of days, we'll have more to say beyond simply the victory of getting people to engage and getting people to accept services at higher rates than we've ever seen before. Ultimately though, as I've said a number of times, our gold standard is providing services, providing a roof over your head so someone remains permanently off the streets. And we're, you know, using every tool we can to do that every day.

Moderator: Next is Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone. I'll just start with a follow up to Andrea's question and then ask a second question about the City's COVID deaths. So, the follow-up is that several leading advocates from organizations like HumanNYC and Coalition for the Homeless share serious doubts about this so-called historic successes of getting homeless off the subways and into shelter. They say people are being miscounted cause they don't actually spend a night inside. They cycle through the subways and shelters or they're being driven further into the shadows because of the treatment. What's your response to that and how do you know if these figures are accurate if we don't know whether or not the daily account includes unique or duplicate individuals? And then, secondly, last night for the first time since the Health Department started posting coronavirus deaths, they weren't made available until after 9:00 PM. It was the same day that the city's COVID deaths passed the 20,000 mark. Why were they posted so late if it wasn't to try to bury the news?

Mayor: I think we've been – I'm really surprised by that question because we've been constantly putting out more and more information, including really unfortunate and painful information, but we've been telling people what the truth is throughout and New Yorkers have wanted to hear what's going on and have really worked together to fight this back. So, I just don't even understand your question, respectfully. But, Dr. Barbot, why don't you respond to that? And then Steve Banks can respond to the advocate concerns on the homeless.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Certainly, Mr. Mayor. I think that there were delays last night in uploading our refresh of data, but, clearly, as the Mayor has said, we've been committed to transparency since the very beginning of this. And, you know, it was unfortunately a matter of a delay in going up on our website, but there's no interest – it doesn't serve anybody for us to try and hide any data. It's all out there. We are committed to ensuring that count every single
New Yorker in this public health emergency.

Mayor: Thank you. Commissioner Banks?

Commissioner Banks: Yes. Let me just sort of address this in the same way that we talked about it yesterday. I think we've been very transparent, Julia, in saying, you know, it's a brand-new initiative and in the early days there were some challenges with getting people directly into the shelters when they had agreed to get on a bus. We made a change by redirecting the buses directly to special shelters and not the Bellevue intake center. That change was made on Friday night, I thought it was an important evaluation of challenges that we had and that where we're making changes as we go along. As I said the last couple of days, and just a couple of minutes ago, when we get a few days for further we think we'll be able to have a broader look at the individuals who have accepted services and actually remained in shelter and the individuals that are need more services in order to remain in shelter. But I can tell you, when I was on the subway platform at Stillwell on another night, last week, we encountered an individual who we tried to engage 50 times – more than 50 times actually – and he had never accepted any services, and he accepted services to come into a Safe Haven that night, and that was a tremendous step forward in terms of his life. And each night we're making those kinds of steps forward for human beings, and we're having a much greater rate of engagement, a much greater rate of people accepting services. Yes, you're right, on any given night, someone's going to make a decision, you know what? I don't want to stay inside. I'll go outside. And we're going to be right back there trying to persuade that person that there are tools, there is hope, there is a roof we can give you and services we can provide to you to have you come in and stay inside.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Commissioner. And again, really, really appreciate what you and all your colleagues, and especially all those outreach workers and the police officers are doing, because I've seen it with my own eyes. I know that each time someone comes in the chance really increases that they will stay in and get the help and support they need and turn a life around. So, I really, really appreciate what you and all your colleagues are doing.

Moderator: Next is Andrew Siff from WNBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Hope everyone is doing well.

Mayor: Good morning, Andrew. How you doing?

Question: Good. I have two questions. My first question is, yesterday I spoke with Mike Mulgrew of the teachers union and he indicated that a leading likelihood for kids returning to school this fall would be hybrid scenario where the kids go to school one day and then have online the next. Wondering what you thought of that and whether you're embracing that? My second question is, on behalf of my colleague Melissa Russo, who's been reporting on the illness affecting young people, again, will kids be included in the testing samples, going forward? And are you encouraging families to get their kids tested?

Mayor: So, let me go to the first and then turn to Dr. Barbot and Dr. Perea-Henze, if either wants to comment on the second. The first point is, we're looking at any and all options, and we're certainly going to work, Andrew, closely with educators, with the unions. We're going to think carefully about all the ways we might go about bringing our schools back. The first focus will be the health and safety of everyone involved – kids, parents, educators, everyone that works in a school building. And we've got a fair amount of time – I mean, remember, we were talking about most of four months before school opens. So, there's lots of time to see how things develop with the disease and what we learn about how to address it and how all our other efforts hopefully have taken us to a very, very different place by early September. But health and safety first, unquestionably. So, when we think of it that way, we're going to look at any and all options – of course, something like staggered hours or something like a hybrid approach will be considered. My goal is to return us to the normal school day with the full functioning of schools as quickly as possible. So, what I've said to the Chancellor and his team is, plan-A is everyone goes to school in early September as usual, we're up and running, we're at full strength. We understand a lot has to happen to make that possible. If plan-A can't happen, there's lots of other permutations that still could allow us to give kids a great education and take a major step back to normal. But it's way too early to know which it will be. We'll have scenarios and planning for multiple eventualities on the testing and kids. Again, we're going to do whatever it takes to keep a kid safe. Right now, the most important question is what families can do seeing these symptoms and acting on them. So, remember, testing is important in this equation, but the most important thing is following the symptoms and getting the medical attention immediately. So, I want to just keep that front and center. But Dr. Barbot, Dr. Perea-Henze, do you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, Mr. Mayor. What I would also add to what you said, is that the most important way to prevent PMIS – the pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome – is to adhere to the prevention guidelines, which are New Yorkers should be staying at home as much as possible, using face coverings when they go out and practicing diligent and frequent hand washing and use of alcohol-based hand sanitizer. The reality is that the degree to which we minimize potential exposure to COVID-19 for children is the best way that we can protect them. Second is, as the Mayor mentioned, being alert to the symptoms and having early recognition by pediatricians testing as indicated. And this is something that I want to just spend a little bit of time on, because there are – as we have said before, we're still learning every day about how this syndrome presents, evolves, all of those sorts of things. But one of the things that we have noted is that not every child has a positive PCR test. There are children who are positive for the antibodies but not positive for the test, which means the [inaudible] infection a while ago. And so, it's critical for parents to be vigilant about the symptoms that could potentially indicate developing this inflammatory syndrome, which are prolonged fever, a rash, having really red, bright lips, swollen hands and feet, they can have abdominal pains – all of these symptoms, especially if they come together, are concerning indications that these children need to be evaluated for in-patient treatments. And so, again, just to reiterate what the Mayor said, I think we're still learning, we're taking this very seriously and, of course, children who need testing we'll certainly – we'll do everything to make it available for them.

Mayor: Dr. Perea-Henze, do you want to add? Is he there? Dr. Perea-Henze?

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: Am I on?

Mayor: Yeah, you go.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: I think Dr. Barbot said it all, sir.

Mayor: Okay, great. Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next is Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning. I have two questions, Mr. Mayor. The first is I know you had said a couple of questions ago about how the City is committed to transparency and releasing the data. That was in response to Julia's question. I'm curious when the City will release more information and data, specifically deaths by ZIP code so we can get a better sense. I know Health + Hospitals had refused to release the number of deaths per hospital. They won't even say of their own personnel and staffers, where they work. When can we expect that data to be released? And my second question is, I know it's about 52 degrees today, but I know summer is creeping towards us. So, I wanted to know if you had an update on the summer plan, particularly once the weather warms up – unguarded beaches, that kind of thing. So, what's the status on that? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. On the summer, there’ve been a variety of meetings, calls, et cetera, recently to hone that plan. We're going to start to talk about pieces of it in a matter of days. So, very much on our mind and very much cognizant of the need to protect people, whatever ultimately is done with the beaches. Any permutation requires protecting people. So, that's the core of this discussion and the Parks Department, of course, central to discussion, Police Department, et cetera. So, we'll have much more on that in the next few days.

On the Health + Hospitals, we'll get the information out. There has been a concern about people who work in multiple locations and it being hard to identify exactly what has happened with each person in a way that's accurate and not misleading. But we do need to get that information out. So, we'll have a follow-up with Health + Hospitals and get that out shortly.

On the deaths by ZIP code, absolutely need to get that out, want to get that out. Again, a very sad topic, but we are going to always provide transparency. Dr. Barbot, do you want to speak to how and when that information is going to be put out. 

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, I think it should be shortly, certainly by the end of this week, if not sooner.

Mayor: Thank you very much. 

Moderator: Next is Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have a couple of questions for you. The first one is the police have given 482 summonses specifically for social distancing infractions, according to daily reports, but that's 108 more than the number of you issued for the same period. Why aren't those additional summonses part of your number? And secondly, I wanted to ask about the legislation that the City Council is going to consider tomorrow to vote on, to cap what Grub Hub and other food delivery apps can charge restaurants. That legislation is tied to the state of emergency that you issued. Wondering if you support that legislation. Do you plan to sign that legislation?

Mayor: Yeah, Jeff, I do support that legislation. I want to thank the City Council. They're – been really, I think, focused in a good, smart way on the different challenges that New Yorkers are facing. And this is one where we want to make sure people are treated fairly. And they saw something that wasn't fair to everyday people going through so much, and I think it's smart legislation, so I will support it. 

On the summonses, again, we'll have our team get back to you later on today. As I said, I think yesterday there was an initial set of data put out that aggregated summonses that were specifically for social distancing versus other offenses that might've been given at the same time. And I think there was some confusion about which was which. We'll figure out the specific delta that you're talking about here, the difference of the numbers, and speak to it. But, Jeff, very clearly under either scenario, it's a very small number of summonses in the course of the core of this crisis. The data I last saw was basically mid-March to the beginning of May, the time when the city has gone through so much, and on average the NYPD was giving fewer than 10 summonses per day across the entire city. So, I care about it. I want to make sure it's fair. I want to make sure that they're not disparities. I want to make sure summonses are only given when necessary. But I, again, see that that is such a low level of giving summonses that it gets back to one, New Yorkers overwhelmingly are complying with these standards. And two, when the NYPD has engaged, it's been overwhelmingly with a light touch. That does not negate that we have to address disparity. It's unacceptable. That does not negate that there've been some individual instances that were not acceptable and we will deal with those for sure. But the numbers are the numbers, and summonses have been used sparingly, and we'd love them to be used very sparingly, so long as people follow the rules. But we'll get you those details. 

Moderator: Next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi there. Two questions regarding test-and-trace. You said that there was no delay in the contract tracer hiring and you didn't know what this individual was talking about who said that it was pushed back by a week. And you mentioned 500-plus people who are being trained, but if we understand correctly, no one has actually been hired. So, can you explain what's going on with that? And secondly, I believe you said there were going to be 1,200 hotel rooms available by June for self-isolation. Just compared to the number of people being diagnosed, it sounds like a small number. I'm wondering, have you figured out the criteria for who can get one and is there a way to expand that, if more people want one that than the 1,200?

Mayor: Yeah, Erin. So, let me speak broadly and then I'll turn to Dr. Ted Long who is running the entire test-and-trace initiative. Clearly, that projection is based on the hotel rooms on what we expect to need immediately, but I want to be very clear that number can be ramped up rapidly at any point. The apparatus that we're putting together is going to be flexible enough to move quickly. Health + Hospitals has a huge deep bench of medical personnel. So, in terms of providing the medical support, it's available. Clearly there are lots and lots of hotel rooms available and we've engaged a number of owners of hotels because originally, remember, we thought we were going to need them for field hospitals. We are ready to expand to the tune of tens of thousands of rooms. So, that whole infrastructure is in place. We can put together what it takes to take care of folks rapidly if we need more. But that was a projection for just the very beginning. I think there's a big open question as to how many people will need isolation, how many will prefer to stay in their own homes and make the right accommodations to isolate at home. But I think there are going to be other people who don't want to take any chances around their family and would far prefer a hotel. So, that ability to expand will be there. 

And again, the training, hiring, et cetera, has been moving rapidly. Working with Johns Hopkins, and Ted can explain, but it's a process of evaluating people and going through a training process that then leads to the decision on the permanent hiring. But all that has been moving rapidly so we can have people in place in just the next few weeks. Ted, do you want to respond to all that?

Dr. Ted Long, NYC Health + Hospitals: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, the Mayor hit all of the main points there. I'll reiterate a couple. The process we've set out is to move as fast as humanly possible to hire New Yorkers to be contact tracers. In order to do that, we first had them complete the training course, which is the world class curriculum developed by Johns Hopkins. Then we moved them towards hiring. Since the Mayor created this program a matter of days ago, we've already signed up more than 500 people to complete the training, which is a very fast progress, next step to hiring for them. In terms of the hotel rooms, the reason we use the number of 1,200 is that's a proportional increase with the number of new tests that we plan to do. Assuming that many more people would benefit from being able to be in an isolation hotel room. As the Mayor said, the most important point there though is if we need to have more hotel rooms, we can do that overnight. We can move very, very quickly. But we want to give everybody an accurate estimate of what we think our best estimation of the number of rooms true [inaudible] would be.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. Next is Brigid, from WNYC.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor. Two questions, the first is another follow up on the syndrome infecting children. In your guidance for parents if they're observing symptoms to contact their pediatrician. I'm wondering if you or Dr. Barbot can clarify what the next steps would be there, since so many pediatricians are not actually seeing sick patients in their office. Is the goal just to get some diagnosis that might then send the child to an emergency room? And then my second question is from my colleague Gwynne Hogan, following up on the Governor's announcement yesterday that some businesses will be opening statewide on May 15th including landscaping and gardening and some low-risk outdoor activities like tennis and golf – does that apply to New York City as well?

Mayor: So, Brigid, every time when there's an announcement by the State, we obviously look to see it codified in the following executive order and that's when we're able to see the specifics and how it plays out for the city. I think the State has been very clear and very consistent with us that the city's situation is different than so much of the rest of the state. And we're going to be conservative and cautious here. So, I'll be able to give you a better answer when we see the codification in the executive order. Anything that the State puts out, we're then, of course, going to look at in terms of our local context and with health and safety as the first consideration in terms of figuring out how to implement. So, we'll get a lot more information in the next day or two and be able to speak about it practically. But the central point will be whatever is being authorized by the State, we're still of course going to look at the practical ramifications and ensure that health and safety are the first considerations in any implementation. 

On PMIS, as I turn to Dr. Barbot, want to be clear, Brigid, very important question and I thank you for it. Again, I want parents to feel with great intensity that, you know, to look out for these symptoms and talk to a health care professional immediately. That is the thing that must happen for a child to be protected. And I keep emphasizing if someone doesn't have a doctor of their own, they can be connected through 3-1-1 to a Health + Hospitals clinician. So, literally 24/7, anyone who needs to have a trained medical professional talk to them about their child, that's available. But the fact is, depending on the situation, of course, if a child needs to be seen by a doctor, that's a given that that would be available starting with our public hospitals. If any child were in danger, we would make it a priority obviously to have them seen in person. But Dr. Barbot, you can give a more specific answer than I, so go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: So, the reason to reach out to their pediatrician is first and foremost so the pediatrician can take a history, which means get more information about the symptoms, the severity of the symptoms, that duration of the symptoms, assess whether the child has any underlying illnesses that might be accounting for the symptoms or might be made worse by the symptoms. And then also to make arrangements for either diagnostic testing or the PCR test and/or the antibody test. And then depending on the severity of the symptoms to know whether the referral for inpatient assessment needs to be done sooner or later. 

So there are a number of reasons why it would be really critical for a pediatrician to be contacted by a parent when they have concerns about these symptoms. And you know, as you say, we are in a different world where practices are doing medicine differently. There are practices who have available telephonic services. There are others that are doing telemedicine by video. So there are a number of different ways in which parents can have access to their pediatricians. And then you know, as the Mayor mentioned, any parent who doesn't have a pediatrician certainly we encourage them to call 3-1-1 and to see which is their nearest H + H facility. I know that they certainly are open and available to seeing any and all children irrespective of their immigration status, irrespective of their insurance status. There really should be no barriers to parents that have their children assessed, especially if they have concerns about possible Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome.

Mayor: Thank you, Doctor.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you. Mr. Mayor, I want to follow up on what Julia asked earlier after we crossed this terrible mark last night of over 20,000 New Yorkers having been lost to COVID-19. The CDC, as I know you're aware, and I know you spoke about this briefly on our show last night, has put out data showing that there's a massive undercount happening. So my question is, what, if anything, is the City looking into to try and do or rectify about the way people are being counted? So that by the time this is over, we have an accurate picture of not just how many people were lost to this crisis, but to be able to use that information for the future so that the City can be prepared and can dictate policy to deal with a crisis like this?

Mayor: Well, I thank you, Gloria for the question. It's very important. And I'll start and I'll turn to Dr. Barbot. So, I do want to say as we've reached this very painful milestone we all have to remember these are human beings and families. So we've all gotten used to looking at numbers we can barely imagine, but we got to keep coming back to the human reality. And as I say it, I'm thinking about the people that I know who we've lost and the families who are suffering right now. And so, to me, in the end, is very human and it's every neighborhood in this city, you know, people from every walk of life. In this city we made a decision to acknowledge the probable deaths weeks ago. And I think you know Gloria, in much of the country that has not been done. And I think it is so important to the point you make about really understanding what happened here and what it means for the future. That to begin with any death where a medical professional thought that COVID-19 was a likely factor that that be acknowledged. And that's what those probable deaths are. And we were very forthright about that.

The question outstanding is about those who have passed away that we are not going to have enough information about by and large. But I'm very clear that I think, you know, a very substantial number of those deaths had some connection to COVID-19 as well. So we do need to know, you know, does it tell us something different, is really the question. Does it tell us something different about how the disease manifested or where, which communities, you know the disparities we've seen? Dr. Barbot can speak to it better than me. I suspect based on what we've seen already with both the deaths that were clearly documented to be COVID-19 related and then those that were probable, the reality has been pretty consistent and very, very sad but clearly consistent of what communities have been hit the hardest. What kind of people by age, gender, everything. So, Dr. Barbot can tell you whether she thinks that the new information might change our basic assumptions or our approach to the future. I don't see a lot of evidence of that so far, but she can speak about it much more expertly.

The only other thing I want to say before turning to Dr. Barbot is that we are focused right now on saving lives now. And so the endeavor to understand what happened before and use it for the future is always important. Absolutely want to encourage that and validate that. But I want to say nothing is more important than saving lives right now. So, my focus is always going to be on the things we have to do today and tomorrow. There's a lot we have to do to keep people safe right now, to keep the progress that we've built and hold it and not jump too soon and not let our foot off the gas and then prepare. You know, we don't know if there's a second wave out there, but we sure as hell know what we have to do to save lives right now and to prepare ourselves best in case there is any potential of a second wave. So my focus is futuristic in the sense of what we can do practically to protect New Yorkers now and ahead. If the research helps us do that, that's very valuable. But I don't want us to get so lost in the past that we forget there are right now things we have to do. Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: Thank you Mr. Mayor and thank you Gloria for the question. Let me start off by echoing something that the Mayor said that the number of New Yorkers that have died because of COVID-19 really is staggering. And we are committed to ensuring that we count every single New Yorker that has died because of this vicious virus during this public health emergency. And the reason for that is because every New Yorker deserves that dignity. Their families deserve that closure. But as a city it's also going to help our healing process as we move forward.

Second thing is that in the here and now having that information certainly does inform our response. And during this public health emergency, we have made really unprecedented moves with regards to the way in which we report on data. One is again, reporting on probables and not just those that have been confirmed with the test. Beyond that, releasing the race and ethnicity data before it was fully complete. And that's really breaking public health rules, if you will, right? We went against the grain because it was important for us as a Health Department to know, to be able to inform our response. It was important for the City to know to make sure that our messages were tailored and continue to be tailored to the communities most affected. And so you know, as the Mayor and I have said in the past, there are deaths that are directly related to COVID because they were tested. There were deaths that are likely related to COVID because the health care provider, the individuals who are certifying the death certificates have indicated that COVID was related to the death. And then there are those that are not necessarily immediately or approximately related to COVID, but that in the long run will likely be attributable to COVID through a number of different mechanisms. I think we can all agree that this has been an incredibly prolonged and stressful situation for all of us. And we know that stress kills. And certainly, if you've got a chronic underlying illness and you've got prolonged stress, that can contribute to act to premature mortality.

And so there may be also be these situations where, for example, you know, we've been using the example of people dying from heart attacks. We're learning every day about how this virus affects the body. And it may be in the long run that we determined that during this period people who died from heart attacks could have very likely died because of COVID related illness. There would have been no way to confirm that either with the test or with a provider indicating it on its – on the death certificate. And so, we will continue to put out the data on the confirmed, the probables, and what we technically call excess mortality. Which is the number of deaths that are occurring above and beyond what we would have anticipated given the trend of the last previous years and what would have been expected during a particular season. Because again, it's important for us all as New Yorkers to know, to honor, and to grieve those that have passed during this time.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much, Doctor. I really appreciate that sentiment. So let me conclude today and say, when you think about what you just heard from Dr. Barbot, when you think about what we've all been through together, it wouldn't be shocking if a city that has been the epicenter of this crisis somehow allowed itself to be lessened or become fearful or become weakened. And that's not what has happened here. What all of you have done, what New Yorkers have done across the board has had the spirit we have known for so long in this city, of taking the challenge head-on. It's really striking. And I think the history will show this, that when New Yorkers were called upon to step up across the board, you did. And when it was time to do something to fight back, to create things that had never existed before, that's what New Yorkers did.

We have seen it throughout this process. We've seen it in the heroism of our first responders and our health care heroes. We've seen it in the efforts in our hospitals to hold the line against all odds. We've seen it in all of the people who came together to produce face shields and surgical gowns and even ventilators here in New York City to protect their fellow New Yorkers. We've seen amazing contributions. And now building a Test and Trace Corp, something that has never existed on this scale in New York City. It's being put together every hour of every day, building up quicker and quicker to serve people in just a few days ahead. So, the fact is that the talent that exists in this city and particularly in public service in this city, has really become evident in this moment of crisis. I don't know anyone who's had anything but a fighting spirit. There's been no sense of being defeated, no sense of being overwhelmed, just a resolute attitude.

And so, when I've said to this team, we're going to have to build something unprecedented and we have to build it with extreme speed and precision, people stepped forward and said, we're ready. You're going to see this test and trace effort come alive in the next few days. And then you're going to see the impact that it has in terms of protecting lives. And I'll conclude with the point that protecting lives is what it's about. And every single time someone is tested and then their close contacts are identified and we find out if others need to be tested and find out who needs to be isolated, who needs special support, and they get that support. Every time you do that, you're saving lives because you're cutting off the spread of this disease. And you do it more and more and more each day. And this disease has less and less oxygen. And that's what we want to do. Cut off its ability to grow, continue to constrain it, continue to squeeze it, continue to reduce it in the city so people can be safe. And so, we can start on that pathway back to a better life. And every day I see New Yorkers devoted to that mission and I thank you for that.

2020-05-15 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. It's been a really tough time these last weeks. And, as your mayor, I've had an opportunity to really look closely at what's happened all over the city to feel what you're feeling and understand what New Yorkers are going through in all five boroughs. And it's been tough for all of us. But I have to also tell you, for me it's been an honor and a privilege to see the strength and the resiliency that all of you have shown in this crisis to look into your lives and see what's so good about this city. And, as New Yorkers, we are legendary for being tough and we're legendary for being self-reliant. No matter what else is happening around us, New Yorkers make things happen. We always find a way. This crisis has brought that out so deeply. The strength that people have shown, the creativity, the ingenuity. That self-reliance is part of what makes this city so great. And I think we have shown the whole world yet again why New York City is a very special place. So, I commend all of you for everything you've done. And for once again, affirming the beauty and the strength of this place. But just because we prize self-reliance, it doesn't mean we should go it alone. It doesn't mean that we have all the solutions here. We need help. And that's only right when you think about a virus that came to us from overseas, and unfortunately it made us the epicenter of this national crisis. We need help, we need help to get back on our feet. We need help to restart and recover. We need help to be whole again. And we need help to be the leader that we have been for so long in this nation, in terms of our economy, our cultural life, so many of the elements of New York City that are great, and also benefit the entire country.

So, there's literally no such thing as a city that could possibly stand up against a pandemic alone. So, for weeks and weeks now my clear demand to everyone in Washington D.C. is – understand what Washington needs to see – understand what New York City is going through, understand the fight that's happening here. Come to the aid of New York City so that we can be strong again. So that we can be the leader we have always been helping this entire nation. What we have needed is a clear commitment from the federal government for a massive stimulus plan that would put us back on our feet and make us strong for the future. And finally, we see the beginning of such a plan. Finally, we see a step forward in Washington that really responds to what all of us have experienced over these last two or three months, and all that we've gone through.

Finally, we see the beginning of an answer in Washington D.C. This is the biggest health care crisis, the greatest challenge that we've faced in terms of health care in a century in this city, in this nation. The biggest economic crisis since the great depression, and they're both happening at once. So, it's only right that we would see a proposal come out of the house of representatives that equals that moment. That actually speaks to the fullness of what's happening here. The unprecedented health care challenges, and the disparities that have come up so clearly, and the unprecedented economic challenge at the same time. And it's scary to think about, but even compared to the Great Depression, and I always say, I remember so clearly the stories of the great depression from my older relatives and how vivid they were, and how much pain they went through, and how much I related as I heard their stories to what it must have been like to see your world turned upside down. Well, even compared to the great depression, some of what we're seeing now is even worse, where the hit that people have taken was even quicker, even deeper. The number of people unemployed, staggering in this city, in this nation, it’s happened so quickly, even faster than it did in the Great Depression.

So, it is right that the Congress and the president act at a level that actually fits this absolutely unprecedented moment in American history. They call it stimulus four, and what we have seen now proposed by the House of Representatives actually lives up to the moment. I want to thank Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her extraordinary leadership. We've had a series of conversations over the last few weeks, and she has been resolute and clear, and understanding not just what New York City needed, but what cities and states all over the country needed to truly get back on our feet. I want to thank leaders of the House of Representatives from New York, including the Appropriations Chair, Congress Member, Nita Lowey, and one of the top members of the democratic leadership in the house, Congress Member Hakeem Jeffries. Both of them played an absolutely crucial role in bringing this proposal forward, as did all the members of New York City House Delegation who fought hard for us.

So, let's talk about this proposal coming out of the House of Representatives, because it really will be the game changer we need. First of all, in terms of the impact on New York City, and this is over two years and it really defines clearly what we need to be strong again. $17 billion in aid directly to New York City over two years, $34 billion in direct aid to the state of New York. Now, I think everyone knows this, but I want to put a point on it. The city, we've already taken a massive hit in every way. The human toll, first and foremost, what families have gone through the pain, the suffering of this continuing right now, the economic impact, the number of people that don't have a livelihood, the number of people don't know where the next meal's coming from. That's what matters most, the human reality that we're facing. But on top of that, the city government that's here to serve all of you to make your lives better, to take care of you. We've taken a huge financial hit, and it only gets worse all the time. So, to stabilize this city government to make sure that we can pay the bills and keep our public servants at the frontline doing the great work they do and build for a future when our economy actually comes back strong. We need to think about the year, this year, the next year, we have to think several years ahead and this plan by providing $17 billion actually gives us the ability to move forward. But then there's the state piece, because remember the city depends on the state for so much support. Many, many areas, education's a great example, but there's many others where State funding directly State funding that comes via the state, but from the federal government. We need that State funding to be consistent, to be able to do everything that people expect us to do every single day in this city. The State's been going through a horrible economic crisis too. The State's been taking a huge hit on its budget. If the State of New York isn't whole, then the City of New York can't be whole, so that $34 billion for the state of New York, a huge step to making the state whole, so that we can be protected as well so that everyone gets served. The overall package, $500 billion in aid to States, $375 billion indirect aid to localities. This is exactly the kind of assistance that we need to get evil to move forward again.

Now, there are also specialized elements of funding of this, and it's so important. For the entire country, $10 billion increase in food stamps, the SNAP program, and we see already how many people are going hungry because of this economic crisis. I want to remind you our estimate was before COVID-19 a million or more New Yorkers were food insecure. That means they were hungry some part of the year. Now, we think that number is 2 million or more, so it's doubled in the course of 10 weeks. That's the magnitude of this crisis that direct food aid from the federal government through the Snap benefits is crucial and more will be available to New Yorkers because of this new national allotment. Housing, I've said that we have four pillars of everything we're doing right now. Protecting your health, protecting your safety, making sure you have a roof over your head and food on the table. Housing continues to be a struggle always for New Yorkers, affordable housing, and that becomes even more true in the midst of a financial crisis and economic crisis. This legislation would add $4 billion nationally for the Section Eight program. Section Eight vouchers that help people afford housing, one of the most successful affordable housing programs, $4 billion nationally, that would unquestionably help New York as a piece of that. And then transit, we all know the city depends on public transit. We all know the MTA has taken a huge hit. All transit has taken a huge hit. This plan would have almost $16 billion in national grants for mass transit. Again, this is something where we expect New York City and New York State to benefit very specifically and help us come back in the area of transit that we depend on.

So, that's some of the big picture impact. And again, all of it actually responding to the magnitude of the problem. But also, let's talk about our heroes. Let's talk about those who have served us so well. The health care heroes, the first responders, the essential workers who have sustained us during this crisis. The bill includes federal benefits for first responders, for those we've lost in the line of duty related to COVID-19. We of course want to make sure that every public servant lost in the line of duty is covered and not just first responders, but we're very, very appreciative that this action would take us a big step in the right direction starting with our first responders. And then the heroes fund, this is a crucial piece of this package to recognize those who have given so much on the frontline who worked through this crisis no matter what. Listen to this because this is again something that actually speaks to the moment in a meaningful way, $200 billion nationally to establish hazard pay for essential workers and their survivors. This is something that people who are working right now who have fought through this crisis they deserve and it's coming from the place that can actually manage to do it on a vast scale, the federal government.

So, I have been for months now saying this is the kind of help we need. And again, Speaker Pelosi heard she listened to and she heard what New York City was going through and she heard what other Cities and States were going through and she with a Chair Lowey and with Congress member Jeffries and all the congressional delegation crafted a stimulus plan that actually spoke to our reality. They worked from a vision originally created by New York's own Senator Chuck Schumer that we saw in previous stimulus package and they built it out in terms of aid to Cities and States in such a powerful way. Senator Schumer also deserves our thanks, and he now has the very tough job of shepherding this through the U.S. Senate. And that's the fight ahead that we'll be talking about a lot in the days and weeks ahead. Thank God Senator Schumer is in the role he is in as the democratic leader of the U.S. Senate and we're going to be depending on him more than ever. We need this vision that's come out of the house to get through the Senate. We know it'll be a fight, but we also know that Cities and States all over the country, it doesn't matter if you're a red state or blue state, zero small state or a big state and you're in the Heartland and you're on the coast, everyone's going through this. So, we expect that mayors, governors, Republican and Democrat, like we'll be fighting in their States for this package telling their senators, Democrat and Republican, both how important it is to get done. It's going to be a fight, unquestionably, but it's a fight we can win because it's the right thing to do because this whole country is feeling something going through something in common and because they're going to be so many voices and a clear bipartisan message that this is what our nation really needs.

So, I'm going to say it simply today. The difference-maker right now personally could make all the difference and ensure that this plan gets through the way it is. The way that would actually help us to fully get back on our feet is obviously the President of United States. And I'll say it simply today, Mr. President, we're looking to you. Your hometown is looking to you and cities and states all over the country. And again, we're not red America, blue America at this moment. We're one America trying together to recover. We need you. You say the word and the U.S. Senate will follow, it's as simple as that.

Okay. So, that fight will proceed in the days and weeks ahead. But right now, we're engaged in a fight, an urgent, urgent fight this very minute. And this involves our children and protecting our children. And we all remember that the whole trajectory of this horrible disease that we've faced, coronavirus, when it first hit here, we saw the horrible toll it took on the oldest New Yorkers. Horrible toll it took on people with preexisting conditions for a long time, thank God we saw very little impact on our children. Now, we see something different that we did not see in the beginning and the entire medical community is coming together to answer this challenge and we take it very, very seriously and I want everyone to take it seriously. And I keep saying to parents and family members, I need you to be vigilant to protect your children, all our children, because your vigilance will make all the difference in this crisis. Pediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome. Again, Pediatric Multi-system Inflammatory Syndrome, PMIS we're going to keep updating you on it as we get more information. So first, the number of children affected in New York City, we now have 82 confirmed cases. This number has gone up consistently in recent days from a point where we had literally no acknowledgment of this problem because health care professionals weren't seeing it even just a few weeks ago to now 82 confirmed cases. 53 of these cases have either tested positive for COVID-19 or had COVID-19 antibodies. Now, a few days ago we lost a child, that's the first time we saw a child die from this horrible syndrome and we all have to work together hoping and praying that there will not be another child lost and that we can every child going forward. But again, that that vigilance is crucial, it's crucial in the whole health care system, which is why our health commissioner issued an alert to all health care providers to immediately both look for these symptoms in children and act on them, but also report any and all activity to the Health Department so we could understand better how to fight back this problem. But again, it comes down to all of us because the sooner anybody identifies in a child in their life, this problem, the sooner they get to health care, the more chance that a child can be saved. And I keep saying it, early detection matters here, we know this in health care, we know there are certain challenges and diseases where early detection can lead to full resolution. We need early detection in this case because we know can make a huge, huge difference. Now, our health care professionals are learning about this syndrome as quickly as they can and there's still unanswered questions. There's things we don't know – we don't know what makes kids specifically susceptible, why some kids and not others. It's still, even though it's a striking number, it's a small number compared to the number of kids in the City or even the number of kids who have been exposed to COVID. Why are some kids susceptible? How long does it take for this syndrome to manifest in a child? What's the timeframe so that we know what we're dealing with, how much time we have to save a child? What is the likelihood of a child developing it going forward as we learn more about it? Again, that's what we don't know. What we do know is early detection, early treatment makes all the difference.

So, to aid in that effort, we're launching a citywide effort to inform parents to alert parents. We need public awareness to grow rapidly. This is something, remember it parallels the reality of COVID-19, the coronavirus, we had never heard of it. It didn't exist to human beings six or seven months ago and then it suddenly was something happening far away and then one day it was happening here, and everyone had to learn about it and we still don't have all the answers. Well here is P.M.I.S. Something that it was not evident in the beginning of this crisis now is we have to rapidly inform families all over the City. So, a digital advertising campaign will begin today and then over the next week or two you'll see a growing effort to inform people, to let them know what to look out for, to let them know how to act. TV and radio ads, ads and community and ethnic newspapers, bus shelters, new stands, you name it. You're going to see these all over New York City, we need everyone to spread the word. And again, we're going to keep talking about what to look out for a parent, a family member, a professional works with children. This is what you need to look for, persistent fever, rash, abdominal pain, vomiting, those problems, even one of them could suggest the syndrome, but in combination they especially are worrisome. So, when you see these problems, reach out to a health care professional immediately and anyone again who does not have their own doctor can call 3-1-1 get connected to a Health + Hospitals clinician and get to care that you need. The bottom line is we are going to do everything, everything to protect our children. Whatever it takes, we're going to protect the children of New York City.

Well, it all comes back to when it comes to protecting people, protecting our health. It all comes back to deepening our efforts to reduce this disease with the things that are working. Social distancing is working, shelter in places working face coverings are working. We see it every day, we see the facts, we see the evidence. We want to make it easier for people to socially distance, particularly as the warmer weather comes on and the open streets initiative is helping us to do that. We've been working with the city council and NYPD, DOT a real joint effort to keep building out the open streets vision. So, today we announced several waves of open streets opening up total of over nine miles by tomorrow we will double that total 12 miles more of open streets. We'll be opening tomorrow, Thursday. And this will be different types of open streets. There'll be streets managed by local partners like business improvement districts, streets supported by local precincts where the precincts will figure out a plan with community members to make sure the open streets are protected and that there's presence to make sure people are safe and then protected bike lanes. So, we've got a lot of partners in this and we're going to be showing you on the screen different places that they'll be and different people who have been partners and organizations. But let me take the opportunity now to thank all of our partners. The business improvement districts, they've really stepped up here. I want to thank all the BIDs involved. You do so much good for your communities. Here's a time in the middle of a crisis where you found a new way to do something that really helps give people a new and help protect people. Thank you to all the business improvement districts, to all the local alliances that do so much for their neighborhoods, to the local businesses that have stepped up and said we want to be part of the solution in our community and we’ll put time and energy into creating something safe and something helpful for the neighborhood. So, the local partner streets will be adding 1.3 miles of open streets in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan – all will open tomorrow.

Now, I mentioned police precincts are getting involved working with community members, making sure that open streets are available to people, but are also safe. Precincts are working together with community partners to add 7.6 miles of open streets and that will be in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan – all opening tomorrow and then, again that mile, that mileage, 7.6 miles. Then streets adjacent to parks; this is something that's very important, particularly as the weather gets warmer, people are gravitating to parks. We want to make sure there's ample space so there isn't crowding. We'll be adding 2.8 miles of streets around parks. This'll be in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island all opening tomorrow. And then protected bike lanes; this is important, obviously many, many New Yorkers are choosing to use bicycles to get around more than ever as part of their everyday life. Many are using bicycles of course for exercise at this moment where people are looking for the right way to get exercise and the safe way to get exercise. We're adding 9.2 miles of protected bike lanes in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. The timing will be starting tomorrow; the bike lane on Broadway in Manhattan. The rest will be phased-in, in the remaining days of this month. And that's what we're announcing today; more will be added as we go along.

Okay, now, you know, when we gather every morning, we talk about so many things that are specific responses to the coronavirus – specific changes we're making, specific ways we're adapting. And again, all of you have done an amazing job of constantly adapting. That's another great New York City characteristic, that adaptability. But we got to remember at the same time, so much of life does go on as it did before and so much needs to go on. And so I bring you to something that is a joyful topic and one that I feel a special love for and that's what we do for our youngest children; to help them on their way, to help build-up who they are, to bring out their potential, to give them self-esteem and hope, and all these things come together in the world of pre-K. That image on your screen I think captures it all – the way that our youngest kids go into a classroom and blossom and it's part of what works in this city and it's part of what we want to celebrate because we know our kids have been through so much these last few months. I can't wait for the day when school resumes and our kids can go back into all their classrooms. And I have a particular joy when you go into a pre-K classroom and you see those four-year-olds full of life, full of hope – well, that day is coming again soon. So, the good news is that pre-K offers have been sent out to families of kids who will go into pre-K starting in September. We are preparing for the launch of the new school year. We’re preparing to make it the strongest and best school year we've ever had in the history of this city and it begins with our youngest kids in early childhood education. So, the update for you – 61,790 students offered pre-K seats. And very good news, we have a record number of families that received an offer that was their top choice – 77 percent of families got their top choice in these pre-K admissions. And then another record, 90 percent received an offer from one of their top three choices. So, the pre-K program has been getting better and better each year and I want to thank everyone who's a part of the pre-K initiative. It's a labor of love for everyone involved, but this is a great example of progress- getting more and more families their top choice or one of their top choices. Now, that's good news. One thing that's not as good news, it's not surprising though, is the number of applications were lower this year than in recent years and that is not shocking given that there's been an overlap with the exact timing of this horrible crisis – with the coronavirus, that has thrown off the normal admissions process. So, I want to remind all parents, all family members, it is not too late to apply. In fact, you still can apply for pre-K for your child. So, if your child was born in 2016, all you have to do is go online, myschools.nyc or call 3-1-1 and you can put an application in right away. There are still seats available, every child – I guarantee it – every child benefits from pre-K. So, if you haven't applied yet, please do for your child.

Okay, a few more things. I talked about the hope and the joy I feel when I think about our pre-K kids – well, when you talk about hope, you think about faith, you think about our extraordinary faith-based communities in this city. And I cannot say enough, I cannot praise enough the faith leaders of this city – of all faiths – who came together. This is a kind of consensus, a kind of unanimity that you could rarely find anywhere in the world, but here in this beautiful city, people of all faiths came together and their leaders did something extraordinary and said in common - it won't be easy - it will be painful in many ways for people not to have their normal faith services. It was particularly painful around the holidays, the major, major moments each year that have occurred in so many faiths just in the time of the Coronavirus, but our faith leaders did it. They said, look, there is nothing more important than saving lives and we will take the lead. And they did the tough thing and they said, we can't have our services until this crisis is over. And what they did was heroic and what they did changed the history of the city for the better because their leadership helped us to move into this time of shelter in place and social distancing so effectively, so well. I had the real honor last night of calling together faith leaders of every tradition as part of our Advisory Council from faith communities; hearing their concerns, hearing their ideas, hearing their commitment to the city. And it was a fantastic exchange and a very life affirming exchange and a reminder of the extraordinary role our faith communities play in this city and particularly the strength that these leaders have shown in this crisis. So, I just want to thank and commend all the faith leaders of New York City; special thanks to those who are serving our advisory council to help us figure out how we restart the city, how we create a fair recovery, how we address the material and spiritual needs of the people in this city, how we do things at the right time to keep people safe; a very, very powerful discussion and a very tangible discussion. So many of the faith leaders are concerned to make sure members of their congregations get the food they need and they're partnering with us and they've always partnered with us in so many things including helping homeless New Yorkers and so many other people in need. So, it was a great indicator of another strength in New York City, that our faith communities are present and accounted for in this fight and we are all working closely together to fight back this disease and get to a better place.

Now, I mentioned homeless New Yorkers. I want to keep updating you on the efforts to reach homeless New Yorkers related to this new plan to clean the subways each night and amplify the opportunities for our homeless outreach workers to reach homeless people and get them to safety and get them to a better life. Here [inaudible] the results from last night – 370 homeless individuals were engaged, 213 accepted help, 178 went to shelter, 35 to hospitals. Again, I've said it enough times and not going to repeat it; unprecedented results and the trend continues now for over a week very, very consistently. And this, if we can sustain this, it’s going to have a very long-term and positive impact reducing homelessness in New York City.

Before I get to our daily indicators, I want to offer some thanks. I've seen so much greatness in the city. I've seen so much strength and I've also seen so many instances of people stepping- up. We talk about all the heroes in this fight and then we have so many people come to the aid of our heroes, come to the aid of everyday New Yorkers; many companies, many organizations, some of them in New York city, some of them in other parts of the country, some of them in other parts of the world keep stepping-up for us. So first of all, so many organizations have focused on getting us the protection that our heroes need, the PPEs, the Personal Protective Equipment. So, I want to thank them today. That's what I'm going to focus on with my thanks today; the folks who have done so much to provide PPEs. So, AmeriCares has provided 550,000 N95 masks, 13,000 surgical masks, almost a thousand packages of disinfectant wipes. The China General Chamber of Commerce has provided 100,000 surgical masks. Ford and Troy Design Manufacturing has provided 30,000 nonsurgical face shields. A great, great New York City institution, Century 21 – Century 21 stores are providing 20,000 square feet of PPE storage space and help with delivery of PPEs to the residents of public housing. A special thank you to our own Century 21. Anheuser-Busch – well, when I first saw this, it said Anheuser-Busch and it said bottles so I was wondering where we were going with this, but it's actually not beer, its hand sanitizer – 23,000 bottles of hand sanitizer donated by Anheuser-Busch. Thank you very much. The Urban Assembly Maker Academy has provided 24,000 nonsurgical masks. Tivuna, construction company in Brooklyn has provided 14,000 coveralls to protect our health care heroes. The American Chinese United Care Alliance has provided 20,000 disposable masks, 3,000 pairs of gloves, and 500 KN95 masks. Finally, Public Health Solutions has provided $14,000 to help us acquire PPEs. All of these organizations, businesses, institutions, doing something so great to protect people in New York City, particularly to protect those who serve all of us and protect all of us.

Now, for the daily indicators – well, we got a mixed bag today. Again, I want to see us get to consistent progress and this is another reminder, we still have a ways to go. So, indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that is up from 51 to 78. And again, 78 is a hell of a lot better number than where we were just a few weeks ago, but we need to see that number go down and stay down. Daily number of people in ICU use in our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that is up. It's up by a small amount – 550 to 561 – but still up. And, again, that base number is higher than we want it to be, that means actual people fighting for their lives in ICU. So, again, an area where we have to keep doing better. The good news today is to percentage of people who tested positive for COVID-19 citywide, that is down from 14 percent to 13 percent. So, again, a sea change from where we were a few weeks ago. That's the good news today. Overall trends continue good. Today's results not what we're looking for. Let's double down on the things that are working so we can have more of the good days and start to string them together and move towards the first steps in our restart.

To conclude, a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. And please let me know the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have Police Commissioner Shea, Health Commissioner Barbot, Social Services Commissioner Banks, Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg, and Senior Advisor Varma on the phone. With that, I will start with Rich Lamb from WCBS News radio.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Rich. How are you doing?

Question: I'm doing okay now. I'm just wondering now – I have not been on these calls, but I'm wondering whether you and your senior staff are being tested regularly for COVID. I know that the White House has come in for some criticism. They say they’re daily testing down there. If you are being tested, how frequently is it and what does it consist of?

Mayor: Thank you very much for the question, Rich. No, I haven't been tested this whole time and we, certainly from the perspective of City Hall, there's not a regular testing program. We do our best to, you know, take the precautions that we talk about with everyone. And, you know, there's not a regular testing protocol. There is a devotion to trying to be careful. We have a skeleton staff here. Obviously, City Hall is usually – you know well, Rich, a place that buzzes with activity, and it's really quiet nowadays comparatively. There's a core group of people here doing a whole lot of hard work and working closely with our colleagues and agencies all over the city. But no, there has not been a need for testing on any greater level.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone. Two questions. One for Commissioner Shea. The Department has not held its own press conference for the media with you and your executive staff since before the start of the pandemic on March 5th. I'm wondering why hasn't the Department made itself available for questions about crime and other topics, especially considering the recent rash of videos, disparities and social distancing enforcement. And, you know, reporters can come on this call who covered the NYPD, but they often don't get their questions in. And then another crime related question – more than a hundred inmate inmates cut loose from incarceration on Rikers over the coronavirus concerned in late March have had run-ins with the law since being released. Looking for reaction to that, and any concern from the Mayor or the Commissioner.

Mayor: I'll start, Julia. Thank you for the questions. On the first point, I think it's fair to say that business as usual has not been the way we're doing things since this crisis escalated. And so, our focus has been on addressing the issues related to the coronavirus and this has been the main venue. And obviously, we're doing the vast majority of days of the week. Over time, we're certainly going to be re-establishing some of our previous habits. So, one thing we did every month was to go over crime statistics and we'll certainly reestablish that at the first available opportunity. But we know that overwhelmingly we've seen the challenge we face, of course, being first and foremost the coronavirus. Second, we know that in so many ways crime has gone down directly related to the coronavirus. But the Commissioner will speak to it, but I want to affirm that things like those monthly press conferences will certainly resume at the appropriate time, and many other things we used to do will resume. But, right now, we've been doing everything through this crisis mode. On the question of the releases from our jail system – again, I think this was an example of New York City leading in a crisis situation. The fact that we had to do something from a perspective, a humanitarian perspective, a health care perspective, working with the leadership of Correctional health, deciding what was the right way to keep people safe in our correction system – the people work there, the people who are inmates there. And the plan was put together on the basis of specific health challenges and dangers and, of course, referencing what kind of offense people committed. That effort involved the City directly in many cases, in other cases required decision making by the State or the district attorneys. But I am convinced it was the right thing to do because we were thinking about the health and safety of everyone involved and looking to save lives where I'm disappointed in anyone who was shown mercy and then turns around and commits an offense. But everything will be dealt with in the long-term because any offense will meet with its consequence. And, again, when this crisis is over, anyone who is awaiting trial who needs to be reincarcerated will be. So, this was the right approach. But, again, I am absolutely disappointed when anyone doesn't act in the spirit consistent with the mercy they were shown. With that, I'll turn to the Commissioner.

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: Hey, Julia. How are you? Thank you for the question. You're right. I mean we've certainly curtailed our press conferences over the last couple of months intentionally, you know, due to this pandemic. But I would just point out that, you know although we have a DCPI that, like the rest of the Department, is running a little bit of a skeleton crew. We’re certainly fielding questions on a daily basis, incoming and outgoing, trying be as responsive as possible. We've been doing a lot more, I think, pushing information out on social media. We've been doing live social media, whether it's questions that are coming in and we try to address anything there. And in terms of the crime statistics, I think the Mayor hit it on the head that, you know, I think we've, through a number of outlets, put out, and through these very press conferences, the fact that crime has been pretty significantly down in the early stages of this pandemic. We're starting to see some concerns recently. But we've put all of these statistics out, including the end of the month for April through a press release. So, I think we're covering most bases here. There's no plan immediately right now to jump back into the, the “routine,” end-of-month press conferences. We had a standup this week and with that terrible incident in Staten Island, but that would be probably the exception rather than the norm at this point. Just erring on the side of caution and we'll use other means to get the word out.

Regarding the releases from Rikers – look I've said a number of times, whether it's releases from Rikers Island or – you know, we have a serious concern recently with paroles. I mean, we're seeing that core issue that we've seen for a number of years that, you know, 8.6 million – 8.6 million people and most of them commit absolutely no crime. But we have a core group of people that unfortunately do commit a disproportionate amount of crime. And it's usually a challenge to keep that under check and to do it as efficiently as possible, being fair etcetera. But you know, we'll get a handle on it. You know, we'll be fluid and adapt to conditions as more people start coming out. You know, we'll probably see crime rates ebb and flow in different areas and we'll be ready to respond accordingly.

Moderator: Next we have Al Jones from 1010 WINS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing?

Question: Getting by, getting by. This has to do with schools in the fall. You know, Dr. Fauci kind of ruled out any possibility of a vaccine or treatment. So, with all the unknowns about COVID-19 and the inflammatory syndrome, how can schools safely open in the fall? How do you convince parents that their kids can go to school every day and that it's safe, because short of – it seems like short of testing every kid every day, I don't know how the schools could be considered safe.

Mayor: Well, I want it to – I appreciate the question. Look my kids went to the New York City public schools and I think like a parent all the time and I can immediately empathize with the concerns that parents are going to have as we prepare for school. Now, we are most of four months away from school reopening. So, that's a long time. We need to see, of course, how successful we can be at beating back this disease, limiting the number of cases, using all the strategies we've been using already – shelter in place, social distancing, face coverings – but then also amplifying the testing and tracing strategy, and that's a big X-factor here. You've seen the number of cases steadily decline. Testing and tracing is going to bring a whole new sort of offensive thrust to this that could really change the trajectory further. So, let's not discount the element of time here. What is the world going to look like when you get into July and August when we'll be making the ultimate decisions and there'll be based on the facts. We do anticipate more and more testing in general and specifically focused on schools, and lots of methodologies for keeping people safe – the cleaning regimens, for example. And we're going to have a plan-A, which is to open the schools fully as normal. And then as I've said, and the Chancellor said, we'll have plans, B, C, D, different types of options if we don't feel it's safe to open schools fully. But, for now, with this much lead time, my goal is a full reopening with any number of protections in place to give confidence to parents and give confidence to educators and everyone who works in schools. That's what we're planning on. That's what we're going for, but it will all be about the facts and, you know, the proof of what we can do. That's what's going to determine the final decision.

Moderator: Next we have Debralee from Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Good morning, everyone. I wanted to follow up on the conversations about social distancing and the arrest. The question really is for both of you, Mr. Mayor and the commissioner – Commissioner Shea. Given the interest and the focus on how there have been emerging patterns of what seemed to be racial disparities and how these arrests are being executed, are you looking, Mayor, to change anything, specific guidance for the department? And for that matter, would you consider appointing a social distancing czar or someone on that level that would actually focus wholly on this as we continue to, sort of, go into the summer and perhaps [inaudible] more and more of these kinds of arrests – someone specifically focused on this kind of policy when you're looking at policing specifically, particularly as you're talking about a more just recovery for all communities. Secondly, and related, you haven't spoken about former Commissioner James O'Neill in some time. I know that he was plugged into the pipeline for supplies and for materials that were coming directly into the response, the medical response. Would he be someone you'd consider for this kind of post if you were to consider it to begin with? And secondly, what is he doing these days as we talk about the city and its recovery process?

Mayor: Thank you, Debralee. First of all, Jimmy O'Neill – boy, what an amazing positive story of just when we needed help, he showed up at just the right time. And remember, in his day job, working for Visa, he was based on the West Coast, and when the crisis hit, he relocated back here and then step forward to volunteer. And he and the team he put together, working with our colleagues at Emergency Management did a fantastic job improving the distribution of PPEs and supplies and equipment and making sure they were distributed more effectively and consistently. That work has continued. But I really want to say, at the crucial moment, the moment of greatest danger that Jimmy O'Neill and his colleagues did something outstanding to help the city. And it made a big difference. It made a big difference to protecting our health care heroes and then their ability to save lives of other people. So, job well done already. That work still needs to be completed, because we're not entirely out of the woods by any measure. We still need to strengthen our PPE supply and have the ability to project it forward into the future. And, obviously, we've talked about we're building a strategic reserve. We are always vigilant for any possible boomerang of this disease, so there's still work to be done on that front. Meanwhile, as I said, Jimmy has a day job and he has to attend to that consistently as well. So, the – what we're going to be doing long-term in terms of his role, we'll have more to say on the coming days, but, right now, that's the focus. And again, more of his energy has to go back to his day job as that company is starting to resume more of its activity.

On your first question, and then I'll bring in the Commissioner – look, again, we need to recognize that getting social distancing right, ensuring there are not large gatherings and gatherings where people don't observe social distancing, this is crucial to protecting people's health and saving lives. So, all the other considerations that have been raised are obviously tremendously important, but I keep coming back to job-one is to save lives. And having the NYPD there as part of that plan, as part of the enforcement when needed is crucial, and that's not going to change. Now, that said, the NYPD is really very rarely had to enforce. When you really look at the facts, again, on summonses, fewer than 10 a day for the whole city. So, I'm sorry, people keep raising the question and I keep saying, you've got to look at it in perspective. If it's fewer than 10 a day for the whole city during this crisis, that is light touch to say the least. But it's very important to people understand, if they don't observe these rules, that summons is something we will use when needed, because there has to be consequences here. Again, arrest as the – you look at more and more of the details – very, very rarely utilized and typically for other extenuating reasons. The Commissioner can speak to that. So, the restraint has been there and it will continue to be there. As we go forward, I mean – we have not honestly thought about the notion of a social distancing czar. It's an interesting idea. I would only argue as we think about it that let's not undercount what New Yorkers have done, Debralee, that, you know, without generally needing a lot of enforcement, they really have done an outstanding job of following these rules. I know people think it will get harder in the warmer months. I think that's fair. But I also think the impulse here, people want to do the right thing, they want to protect themselves and their family, they want to get back to normal, they don't want to contribute to the spread of this disease. I think people are pretty locked on now about why this matters and why they need to stick with it. So, that's an interesting suggestion, we'll certainly consider that. But, right now, I think the goal is more and more education, more and more presence out in communities. Our ambassadors and that group has grown to over 2,000 civilian employees will be out there, talking to people, educating them, giving them a face coverings. We're going to engage – I talked to the faith leaders last night about this – more and more faith communities going out in their own communities, educating people, giving out the face coverings. You going to see much more of that grassroots piece come into play. But PD will always be there to back it up. Commissioner?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Debralee for the question, because it gives me a chance to address this narrative that I've been hearing for the last week or two and I think it's very important that I do address it as the Police Commissioner. You know, there's been a lot of talk recently about disparities, about racist policing and quite frankly, and then it's followed generally by a press conference, or maybe even a demonstration about how the NYPD is acting. And I think if we step back and be honest here, you know, I think we can all agree what we've seen on some of those videos is incredibly disheartening, it’s not what we want to see, and it's quite frankly disturbing. When you have a situation – if the police is wrong in an instance, whether it's on one of these videos or not, there has to be accountability. I think there has to be transparency and that's my job as the Police Commissioner to make that happen. And quite frankly, if that's not happening, I shouldn't be in this position. We also have to recognize that police officers are human. They are you and they make mistakes, they're not infallible. So, that's the backdrop. But I will push back strongly on any notion that this is business as usual for the NYPD or that this is “racist police.” I think this could not be anything further from the truth. Let's remember, we are a minority-majority police department – fact. We make fewer arrests than we ever have – fact. We make fewer summonses issued and that's whether it's in a pandemic or not in a pandemic. Our record over the last six-and-a-half years is there for anyone to see in how we police this city with the lightest possible touch. You can continue this discussion regarding civilian complaints, use of force, stops, firearms, discharges – all of these things are either at or near historic lows. I don't think anyone would say that we're racist when we're delivering food to elderly victims that are shut up in their apartments or when we're playing with kids and looking for having things to do in summer through parts of this great city which is going on planning as we speak or when we're visiting the victims of domestic violence or when we're working with homeless or the mentally ill and bringing them to the hospital.

Now back to disparities for a moment. We have issued a small number of summonses, even fewer arrests tied to COVID. Are they mostly to minority members of this city? Yes, they are. And I think you knew that answer before you asked the question, but no one is talking about the disparity of the last ten homicide victims in New York City, and I think that should be spoken about or the victims of robberies across the city. Disparities exist in every facet of life, not just in New York City but in this country and it's rooted in much deeper issues than the New York City Police Department. So, I would urge caution to everyone now to honestly, before a press conference is held on a ten second video of a street brawl in the middle of the day in Brooklyn in broad daylight, by the way, before it's turned into an agenda for a press conference. it is dangerous and I will repeat what I said, I think it was back in January where words matter. We saw this in December of 2014 with Officer Ramos and Liu. We saw this with Miosotis Familia. We saw it this January where two cops were almost assassinated sitting in a police car in the Bronx and then the next day a madman walked into a police precinct and tried to shoot more cops. And now in the last week we have had death threats on police officers in New York City and their families, over ten second videos where the police officers are dealing with individuals that quite frankly fight, not with the police department, they fight with everyone. They fight with their significant others. They fight when they go to court, they have open gun cases, they are gang members, and we expect our police officers to do the best they can. That is exactly what they are doing. So, I would, again, urge caution. Accountability is what we must have from this police department and I, as the Police Commissioner, will not stand for excessive force nor will I stand and defend indefensible actions, but I will also not have my police department called a racist police department. Thank you very much.

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner. Very happy that you shared your feelings with everyone and put everything in perspective there. I think you laid out the big picture that people needed to hear. And I hope everyone is considering these issues and they're very, very real issues. You made a point there about the history that hangs over us. There's a history of institutional and structural racism that afflicts the city and this country still. We have to weed it out in every way. And as Debralee said, how does this all fit with a fair recovery? We have to continue to improve policing in this city as part of a fair recovery. We've got a lot more to do, but it is also really important to recognize the distance that we have already traveled and the changes that we have made. And the fact that we have made those changes is proof that we can make more changes. So, Commissioner, thank you very much for your comments.

Moderator: Next, we have Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Hi, everybody. How you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Mark. How you doing?

Question: Good. Good. So, I had a question I was hoping that you and Commissioner Shea could respond to this. The first was regarding line of duty designation. I know that a lot of the members of the FDNY and NYPD have been asking in different scenarios about this designation. And I know that this ends up becoming a legislative issue up in Albany and there's an Assemblyman working on this right now and there's possibly a Councilman who is working on this right now, but I wanted to get an opinion from you both first and where do you stand on line of duty designation? Where should it go, how quickly should it be implemented? That was the first one. And the second one was about reopening as it applies to policing. And at this point, you know, there's more people coming out on the streets, but stores are still not open. Does policing change in any way with an expected ramp up of people heading outside, for instance?

Mayor: Okay. On the second part of your question, we'll turn to the Commissioner, and I'll preface before that. But on this question, on line of duty – look, we want to make sure that families are taken care of and we want to honor those who have served valiantly in this crisis and honor their sacrifice to us. The legislation that came out yesterday was a major step in the right direction with the federal government potentially – and obviously we have to see this get through the Senate and be signed by the president – but the federal government stepping up in terms of line of duty benefits. In a different area but very important the Hero's Fund as well. So, we would need to see the maximum federal involvement in supporting line of duty families and more to say on this as we get a better sense of what is going to happen in Washington. But the goal is to make sure families are protected and are whole, and to make sure the federal government really steps up to its responsibilities. This is not business as usual. I just want to emphasize that, Mark, this is an international crisis, this is a pandemic that came to us from overseas, this is a federal situation, not day to day life in this city. We need the federal government to step up and honor these families and support these families with the resources that the federal government has. But we'll have more to say as we get a better sense of what's going to be happening with this legislation in Washington.

On the question of policing going forward. I just want to remind people and it picks up from the Commissioner’s powerful remarks, that we do expect in the warmer months, different activity, unquestionably, but I don't want to discount how much there is a consensus in the city, the vast majority of people understand why social distancing matters, why avoiding gatherings matter, why face coverings matter. You can see it with your own eyes. When all of you in the media report on something abhorrent, which is the nature of the media reality, of course it gets attention, but then we have to remember all the times when the everyday is happening and the everyday is that the vast majority of New Yorkers have already adapted. And, yeah, in the warmer months it'll come with its challenges, no doubt. But people know this is about their own safety, their family's safety. Everyone who wants to get back to work, everyone who wants to get back to normal, knows that this is part of it now, abiding by these rules. So, I think you're going to see that as the main point. When people are convinced of something, it is more powerful than anything the government can say or do or any form of policing, when people themselves are convinced of something.

We always need enforcement as a fallback. But I do think the die is cast already in many ways. And we obviously have seen a reduction in crime and that's very meaningful, but we will be ready for anything and everything going forward. But it all begins with continuing what has worked, which is the deep devotion to communication. The NYPD of today, working with a neighborhood policing philosophy, is focused on communicating with communities and working with people and notwithstanding some incidents that are very troubling, the vast majority, talking about 99.9 percent of the interactions, are positive and the way we need them to be. And that's where we move forward with that devotion to communication and respect and working on a neighborhood level. Commissioner.

Commissioner Shea: Mr. Mayor, thanks for the question. We've lost 41 members of our family. We still have a number of people in the hospital, some that need your thoughts and prayers from – that's a message to the public. I start every day and I started this morning wanting my executive staff and right down to the precinct commanders, you know, to be resilient and continue to wear masks. We had a couple people in the last day that were admitted to the hospitals, which ticked up a little bit. We had been doing so well over the last month. So, this is first and foremost on our mind. And regarding the line of duty designation, it is – I would echo what the Mayor said in terms of this is a, you know, you would liken this really to what you saw on 9/11 in some regards with the sheer number of people affected. And I could tell you that just in the Police Department, we have uniformed members affected, we have the majority of civilian members each with different benefits. We have unpaid employees, auxiliary members that have lost their life during this terrible time. So, their family's future is at the top of what we are concerned about. And we're working – having discussions with the union. This is paramount on the unions’ minds, I can tell you rightfully so. And I think it's an evolving situation, but nothing to us is really more important than making sure that the families of those that suffer during this crisis are taken care of.

Regarding the policing and whether it's social distancing or traditional crime, I think that like many parts of the city I would expect there to be changes after this. And it's something that's just evolving. We'll have to be very responsive and fluid in terms of our workforce being able to adapt. Whether it's ridership coming back on the trains to what level of businesses opening. You know, we'll be ready for it. I can tell you that the men and women of the Police Department will be ready. Thankfully on our uniform side, we are very close to our normal levels, if you will. So, that's some very positive news. And we are literally monitoring whether it's 3-1-1 calls, 9-1-1 calls, crime reports. Day by day, I can tell you that there's been a drop off, for example, like in people visiting precinct station houses. But as the warmer weather comes out, and as we move further into this, I think that things are gradually going to get a little bit closer to normal and we'll be ready for whatever is thrown at us

Moderator: Next. We have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good. Henry, how about you? How are you doing?

Question: I'm good. I'd like to ask you a question about the schools and particularly about really young children. The city has been operating a program for several years, been pretty effective from what I understand, in offering therapy to young kids who were developmentally delayed in one form or another – occupational therapy, various speech therapy. And it's pretty intensive. It's, from what I understand, it's one-on-one visits with these kids. They're at a very vulnerable age, obviously. And I've been told that these are pretty valuable experiences for these little kids in rushing their development and helping them catch up. Of course, this has probably been suspended during the time. Since it's one-on-one and it doesn't really involve the risks that would be involved in you know, which would require social distancing, why has the City not moved to increase or restart the service?

Mayor: Thank you, Henry. First, to your characterization, I want to affirm it energetically. The efforts, like the early speech therapy, can work wonders and the occupational therapy, and this is really important and like so many things in life, if you reach a child at the earliest years, you can have the most profound impact. So, these are initiatives that really do work. I want to always tell you when I'm certain of something or when I'm not. I don't know exactly how the DOE has managed these services during this crisis. I imagine some of this actually can be done virtually, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I need to get you a very specific answer. But clearly, we want to keep providing kids the help, if it can be done virtually. One [inaudible] confirm to you if it is being done and to what extent or what it would take to bring it back, if it can only be done in person, in some cases, when we think we can do that safely. But there's no question about the value and there's no question about our focus and this conforms with everything we feel about early childhood education, which is why we did Pre-K for All and why we're on the pathway to 3-K for All, and all the mental health efforts that are being focused even as early as the pre-K level. Everything is about early support for children and the greatest impact that you can make if you get to kids earlier. So, we will get you an answer on where it stands now and how we think it can evolve and how we're going to make sure that as many kids as possible are reached even in the middle of this.

Moderator: Next, we have Anna from the Daily News.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. First, I have a practical question. Does the City put any thought to providing clear masks or masks with a clear opening for the mouth for deaf New Yorkers? I know that obviously many deaf people read people's lips. So, I'm curious if that's something that you guys have thought about. And I also wanted to see if you would address the fact that the New York City district attorneys aren't prosecuting most social distancing arrests and maybe Commissioner Shea can also address that as well.

Mayor: Sure. Again, on the arrest issue, there's been very, very few and the Commissioner can speak about the difference between an arrest that's directly related to social distancing versus an arrest that is related to something else, some other kind of extenuating circumstance. But any way you slice it, this is a really, really small part of the picture over now, you know, ten weeks of this crisis. And I'll turn to the Commissioner in a moment on that. On the issue of the clear mask – it's a very interesting suggestion and I had not heard that previously, so, I don't have an immediate answer for you. I think it makes sense that we have to be sensitive to deaf New Yorkers and support them in every way we can. But let me talk to our team and see what we think makes sense and how we can address it, and we'll come back to you with an answer on that. Commissioner Shea, do you want to speak about the other piece?

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. Regarding social distancing and arrests. I mean, I think I've been pretty clear on that. There really hasn't been a lot of arrests. Again, when we encounter groups, we ask them to disperse, we ask them to comply with executive orders, and all over the city we've gotten overwhelming compliance. That's a fact. Have there been some occurrences? Yeah, there have been some occurrences. Occasionally we've had to write summonses. We've gone through these numbers. It's not a significant amount when you pull out about 10 incidents, where there was a lot of summonses written. And then when you talk about arrests, you're really not talking about the same thing. It's arrests for other offenses. There might've been a few that started as social distancing, but it's really such small numbers. You know, when you look at the district attorneys and what they have to deal with, I do feel for them.

You know, five of them throughout New York City, and including, you know, our partners in special narcotics part. They've had to turn their lives upside down during this, dealing with processes up-ended. I think they're doing the best they can in circumstances. Do I agree every time? No. Do they agree with, you know, everything we do? No, but we have a great working relationship. If I was concerned about anything during this, it would be that small number of career criminals that are committing more serious crimes, like burglaries and things of that nature. And you know, why I'm concerned about it is because it's additional victims. I mean, that's what it always comes down to with me in trying to prevent people from being further victimized. But I think all in all, you know, it's a tough situation when you look at grand juries, when you look at court proceedings, when you look at what the whole city has had to deal with. And I think, you know, we'll probably learn a lot from this and be better prepared next time, but I think everyone is doing the best I can.

Moderator: Next we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Gersh. How are you doing?

Question: Two words, virtual schooling, but that's enough on that. Anyway, I got two quick questions on open streets. First is the 9.2 miles of protected bike lanes, are those because of budget cuts, the full list of what we're going to see the DOT accomplish this year. And the second question, the restaurant industry is calling for far more open streets so they can serve the public in a socially responsible manner once the pause is over. I know there's a City task force on this, but do you personally see a time when hundreds of miles of NYC streets could be taken away from drivers and for storing cars for socially distant dining?

Mayor: So, on the bike lane issue, I'll say I'll turn to Commissioner Trottenberg in a moment. Again, everything's evolving, Gersh, to say the least. I think this'll be the understatement of the year. Everything's evolving. Our budget situation is evolving. Obviously, horrid right now, could be deeply, positively affected by the stimulus, but we don't know what level the stimulus is going to reach, when it's going to happen. So, a huge number of question marks. We know the House proposal is exactly the right direction, but we don't know what happens next. So, the budget side of the equation is a question mark, the health side of the equation is a question mark. Steady progress, but still a long way to go before we know what more we're going to be able to do when. So the Commissioner can tell you the vision as of this moment, but I will preface by saying that there's a huge amount of unknowns here.

On the Open Streets look, I'm certainly intrigued and I've begun to have this conversation with folks in the restaurant industry. Intrigued with what we could do with more outdoor dining. We're not there yet in terms of figuring out what that means, how far we could go with it, when we could do it. But it is an appealing idea. It's an idea that may offer some real options. But I'm always going to be cautious in saying, you know, I don't want to theorize and raise hopes unduly. I want us to really lock down step by step what we're going to be able to do to restart when, how it affects each industry. But at least I can say it's a really interesting idea because it stands to reason that if we could move more of that activity outdoors, it would be safer for everyone involved. Give us time to figure out, you know, if we think that's workable and to what scale. Commissioner Trottenberg, do you want to add on the bike lanes?

Commissioner Trottenberg: Right. I mean, look, I'm excited with the nine miles you've announced today, Mr. Mayor, particularly Fourth Ave in Brooklyn and 38th and 39th, another crosstown route in Manhattan. We would like to do more lane miles this year. We’ll, you know, we'll have to see working through that. And one of the requirements we have to work through, we have a Council requirement. These bike lanes are temporary because we have to give the Council a 90-day notice period before we can make any bike infrastructure permanent.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Ashley from the New York Times.

Question: Good morning. Good morning everyone. I wanted to ask you two questions, one for my colleague Jan Ransom and one based on the NYPD data and the Commissioner's remarks on this call. First for the Mayor or whomever can answer the question. How many people who went to the hospital while in DOC custody have died from COVID-19 within hours or days of their release from custody? We've become aware of two cases that are not included in the Riker's COVID death total. But we're wondering if there are more and if you're tracking that? And then the second question first a bit of context. I think part of the frustration with using the police to enforce social distancing is that it's a nonstarter because that distrust that you put neighborhood policing in place to fix didn’t suddenly disappear in the pandemic. And that same distress is also an impediment to solving the shootings and murders that the Commissioner mentioned earlier. And that's part of why the City has brought on the Cure Violence groups. So I'm wondering if the Police Commissioner can tell us how many shootings and murders this year have been solved with an arrest? And how the NYPD is tracking social distancing encounters and determining which summonses and arrests to include or exclude from your totals?

Mayor: Okay. Let me start and then I'll pass the Commissioner. Thank you for the questions, Ashley. On the Department of Correction which I want to make sure – I believe I heard DOC, so I want to make sure we're not mishearing here. DOC, Department of Correction? Right? Okay. That, we are going to have to get back to you. We've tried to be very transparent about everything that's happened. Obviously, the strategic decision was to do a substantial number of releases. That number now is about 1,600. And as you know, the jail population is now down below 4,000 for the first time since the 1940’s. So that was a humanitarian decision, a strategic decision to protect the lives of everyone in the Correction system, the employees and the inmates alike. And I think that will prove to have been the right thing to do on so many levels. But in terms of anyone who passed away in DOC custody, we want to be absolutely transparent about that, wherever that happened. And so, we'll make sure to get you information today. If there's any outstanding questions, we'll resolve it.

On the question of the Police Department and social distancing before turning to the Commissioner, I appreciate the frame of your question because clearly the entire vision of this administration has been to fundamentally change the relationship between police and community and fundamentally change policing. And Chief Monahan said it the day he was sworn in in his role as Chief of Department that we've been inventing an entirely different type of policing here in New York City. And it's in its infancy. There's going to be much more development in the years ahead. And a lot of when we talk about fair recovery, we have to keep changing and improving policing. What has started now is only a beginning. But I don't want to lose the fact – I think this is really important. This may be almost an ideological issue where there's going to be differences and we should just surface them and be honest about them. When you say, and I know you say it with a whole heart, when you say non-starter, I just couldn't disagree with that more. Because it is not as if the question of improving the relationship between police and community is existing in a vacuum where there is no coronavirus. Of course, we want to keep deepening the relationship between police and community. We want to weed out injustice in every form. We want accountability. Everything we've been doing has been moving that agenda. But saving lives in an unprecedented context, in a global health crisis, there's nothing that compares in a hundred years in this country. Saving lives is the first responsibility and it's different then what you do in day to day policing in normal times. We have got to make social distancing work to save lives on a vast scale. And you can see it in the statistics because social distancing has been working and shelter-in-place has been working, a huge number of lives are being saved. So, I just call out the quote unquote, non-starter point because I just disagree with it. The NYPD has to be part of this equation. That is my decision. That is what we're doing. Because we cannot have a situation where social distancing comes unglued because there's no enforcement. Enforcement is part of human life. I'm a progressive and an optimist that people again will do a lot of good things on their own. And I said earlier, overwhelmingly New Yorkers have. But enforcement or the potential of enforcement is part of what keeps people devoted to the right rules and the right approach. You can't take enforcement out of the equation, but you can use it very sparingly and you can use it with a light touch, which is what the NYPD has been doing.

And I absolutely agree to your reference to grassroots element of the equation. We are going to use more and more civilians. We are going to engage more and more faith communities and community organizations to be the front – the sort of leading edge of the effort to educate people and remind them and give them face coverings with the PD only when necessary, playing an enforcement role. But I'm not taking that enforcement role off the playing field because we have to save lives in this unprecedented moment. And finally, you can do enforcement in a smart, communicative, respectful way. And that's what happens the vast majority of the time. And the videos of these improper activities which will be dealt with, are very much the exception, not the norm. Go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Shea: Hey Ashley, how are you doing? Ashley? Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, she's there. You keep going.

Commissioner Shea: Yep. Okay. So, I mean you bring up probably what I would say Ashley, is one of the most important things that we think about every day in policing. And it speaks to neighborhood policing. It speaks to transparency, it speaks to the relationships and why we do what we do. And it's trust. And you know, this is not unique to New York City. I think this is what police executives across this country talk about when they start talking about, you know, strategies in fighting crime and dealing with communities and having relationships. Everything is built upon a foundation of trust. And if you don't have it, you're in big trouble. And we recognize this. This is again, what's behind what we've been trying to been trying to do the last six and a half years, and everything that I said before. And the quandary that we're in in law enforcement, and I think this is well-recognized. That you – you know, it's like a bank. You make deposits and you build up trust, but you can lose it awfully quick. And I don't think that that's a bad thing. That's just a fact. It's a reality and we're aware of it and it's why we work so hard and do what we do in all the facets of planning with this police department every day. And you know, one or two bad incidents or public incidents can really set you back. And it's the last thing that we want. And it's something that we're aware of. It's something that we work towards every day. And you know, when we get to that place where we have you know, the nirvana if you will, of police and community working together, community viewing the police department, not as the police department but their police department. That's where we really get to where we want to be. And it's an ongoing process and it's something that we are committed to. It's why we instituted neighborhood policing.

It's why one of my big regrets with this pandemic besides the obvious, is that, you know, the first week we had to cancel the implementation of a youth coordination officers. I think that's, I still think that's the next big level of really making a difference in this city. And we had 200 youth officers in training and we just couldn't go on. There's been a lot of changes Ashley in the last two months. People working out of positions, people picking up the pace, people filling in, whether it's in detectives or police officers or executives for that matter. But no matter who is filling what role, the mission remains the same. It's keeping New Yorkers safe. Doing it in the most fair manner to everyone. And moving forward and getting the heck out of this situation of this pandemic all together as quickly as possible.

You mentioned you asked about five questions there. The one that stuck in my head was the one about the, you mentioned shootings, I believe, or clearance rates? My language, not yours. I can tell you that we were, on March 12th we were up 23 shootings. We really had a drop in shootings towards the beginning to the middle of this pandemic. It's unfortunately started to climb a little as you do have ebbs and flows. So we are now up 29, I believe as of this morning. So it's a slight increase from the beginning. It's way too high, because we don't want any increase. We want to decrease. But that's you know, that's what we are with the shootings. And you know, our detectives are doing amazing work. They continue to work the cases. And I have no doubt that as time goes on now they'll continue to do what they've been doing for the last five or six years -- identifying who's doing it and continue to drive the shooting and violence level down.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi everyone. I wanted to ask about the new cases and particularly the new hospitalizations that are coming? Is the City doing any kind of analysis to understand whether there's a particular group of people who are comprising the majority of new cases and new hospitalizations? Whether it's a particular group of workers, or people in a particular living environment like a nursing home? So, are you doing any of that work? And if so, what is it showing? And separately, I wanted to ask about the three public health milestones. Are those a guide to when the city might begin reopening or are those absolute must meet targets? And if they're the latter, what can we expect on the day when all three are met? Currently in the description of them, it says once all of these indicators reach their milestones, the City will likely begin to lift restrictions gradually. So, if you can give any sense of what that would look like exactly, that'd be helpful?

Mayor: Thank you Yoav. I'll turn to, excuse me, Commissioner Barbot and Dr. Varma on your first part of your question in a moment, in terms of what analysis and what we're seeing about who is continuing to get sick. But I'll start on the indicators. The indicators, I'm glad you asked because I thought we had said this a bunch of times, but it's always good to clarify. We're taking them literally. We need to see them go down in unison. We need that to happen for 10 to 14 days. When we see that that's when we're at a point to talk about relaxing restrictions. Obviously, there's also the State's indicators and we're all working together because we want to see all of the above achieved. By definition that's going to put us into June. Now there's no guarantee that everything comes together in June. We got to keep doing what we're doing. Everyone's hard work, the shelter-in-place, the social distancing, the face coverings, all the work that's being done has to continue to be done to make sure we can keep driving down these numbers. And as I said, the test and trace initiative is going to help us even more. And that's coming online in the next days.

So we take these indicators literally, and then when we get to the point we need to get to, we'll take all the information we have from our own indicators, the State, everything we're seeing in the health care data and we'll make a decision about what a relaxing of certain restrictions looks like. We'll certainly be talking about that in the coming days to give people a flavor of it. But the final decision will be based on the details of what we're seeing at that moment. And you can't rule out, unfortunately the things don't start to go in the wrong direction, which means we would delay any relaxing in restrictions by definition. So, take them literally and let's keep fighting to get them to all go down in the same direction. On the question of what we're seeing amongst those who are getting sick lately. Dr. Barbot, Dr. Varma, what do you say?

Commissioner Barbot: So, Mr. Mayor, we look at the data on a regular basis and what we're seeing recently isn't particularly different than what we have been seeing all along in terms of the distribution of cases. I think one of the bright spots is that the number of new cases continues to go down and you know, it's a sort of a testament to the work that New Yorkers are doing every day to stay home, use face coverings and adhere to the preventative guidance that we've been giving. But we're going to continue to look at the data on a regular basis and help to then ensure that we use that data to drive the further reduction of transmission as we go along.

Mayor: Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah, I would just also note that one of the important outcomes of the Test and Trace initiative that's been announced will be that we will also begin to have a much clearer understanding of who is getting infected and what the risk factors are. One of the real important outcomes of hiring you know, up to a thousand and possibly more, people who can contact every case is that we're going to get much more finely tuned data. And so, I think we are going to get a better understanding over time, over where people are getting infected and most importantly, how we can make sure to reduce those infections.

Moderator: Last question for today, Jake from Gothamist.

Mayor: Jake? I think we could hear your voice echoing. Let's try – we sure got Jake?

Moderator: Jake, are you there?

Question: I'm here. Can you hear me? Hello?

Mayor: Yeah, we can hear you. Jake, can you hear me?

Question: I can hear you now. Yep. So, my question is for a Commissioner Shea who said a few minutes back that there has to be accountability and there has to be transparency. I'm wondering if Francisco Garcia, the officer who was seen beating a bystander and kneeling on his head has been fired yet? If not, why not? And will the NYPD commit to sharing updates on all officers who are facing investigation for social distancing enforcement? My second question is there are reports of an off-duty NYPD officer who may have fatally shot someone on Long Island. A spokesperson for Nassau County PD told us to ask the NYPD about that. Can you speak on that, either Mr. Mayor or Commissioner Shea?

Mayor: Yeah, I don't know about that, case Jake. Let me have the Commissioner speak to that. And the case of Officer Garcia.

Commissioner Shea: Yep. So, I'll start with the first question regarding Officer Garcia. The Ninth Precinct incident from the Lower East Side a couple a weeks ago. As I stated before within an hour or so, he was removed of his firearms and placed on modified duty pending the outcome of the investigation. And our Internal Affairs officers, Commissioner Joe Reznick coordinating very closely with the Manhattan DA's Office as that case proceeds. We will have more to say when that case is, when that investigation is done.

Regarding the incident last night, or yesterday evening late. In Nassau County an NYPD officer discharged a firearm. That case is being investigated by the men – Nassau County District Attorney's Office as well as the Nassau County Police. I would refer any questions regarding the investigation to the Nassau County DA's Office on that. I can tell you he was a NYPD officer that discharged his firearm. As a result of that discharge, an individual was struck in the head and killed and it's an ongoing and very early part of that investigation. But we were conferred with almost immediately last night. And that is an active investigation and as we work closely with the Nassau County authorities, we will have more to say.

Mayor: Thank you very much Commissioner. Well, as we conclude today many, many topics have been discussed in the press conference today and there's many things going on in this city. But I want to bring our attention back to the thing that will really determine so much of our future and that's what will happen in Washington even in just the next few weeks. We don't know exactly what day the US Senate will take up the stimulus package. We do know that the Senate and the President now have to make a decision about the future of New York City and cities and states all over this country. We do know the difference between a restart and not having a restart lies in that stimulus plan. The difference between a recovery or something much less, lies in that stimulus plan. We know we cannot get back on our feet without that stimulus. The hit this city has taken is simply too much for us to recover anytime soon without federal aid. And that is true for cities and states all over the country. And again, red states, blue states, red cities, blue cities alike. So all the action now goes to the US Senate. But it's actually even simpler than that because it's really one man who gets to make this decision and it’s the President of the United States. The fact is that if President Trump acts, if President Trump speaks out, the Senate will follow. So Mr. President, here is a chance to do something so good, so important for your hometown and for cities and towns and states all over this country. Here's a chance to get it right. Here's a chance to actually build the recovery we all need. Here's a chance to put aside partisanship and do something for the whole country to bring us together as one. So we know you hold the power and we know when you raise your voice, the Senate will follow. All we're saying, Mr. President, speak up. Speak up for the stimulus so we can actually move our city and cities and states all over this country forward. It's in your hands and what we need to hear is your voice so we can move forward together.

Thank you very much. And thank you, everyone.

2020-05-14 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. I want to talk to you today about not just what's going on in our city right now, but what our future looks like. But if you will just indulge me for a moment upfront, something very personal I want to say. Today is the 26th anniversary of my marriage to Chirlane. And Chirlane, I think you're watching right now, so I just want to say – 26 years later, you are my best friend, and I am madly in love with you, and I look forward to celebrating with you this year and many years ahead. So, thank you to all the people in New York City for giving me a moment to send out that anniversary message. And when I think about it – 1994 when Chirlane and I got married, this was a very, very different place. We met actually right here in this building in 1991, and, for a long time, this city was struggling in so many ways. Even in 1991 you could feel the huge impact of the fiscal crisis still hanging over us. We didn't know in those years that horrible things were up ahead like 9/11 or Hurricane Sandy. When you think about the city's history, the strength of New York City, the strength of New Yorkers has been tested so many times, but what has been clear throughout is that what we have here is eternal. What we have built here in this city over generations is much bigger, much stronger than is ever realized, because each time, and you've seen it in recent days, you may have seen different people theorizing, different people starting to talk about New York City's demise after the coronavirus, and I want to say up front, they've got it all wrong. This was predicted even going back to the depression, but certainly predicted after each of the things I mentioned, the fiscal crisis, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy that somehow New York City couldn't come back. Each and every time New York city has come back and come back stronger, literally come back stronger.

So, it is true that there will be changes if there's any place in the world synonymous with change, it's New York City. If there's any place in the world that manages to adapt and improve, that in fact sets the trends for every place else, it's right here. The notion that somehow because things will change, we should be fearful. I just reject that out of hand. Yes, things will change. A lot of folks are saying for example, fewer people might work out of their offices. We'll find a way to make sense of that. We'll find a way to have new and exciting opportunities grow as they have constantly, and if you want a great example, look at our tech sector, which a couple of decades ago didn't exist, and now we're an international tech hub, one of the greatest in the world. We always have to believe in what's next, because that's what we do as New Yorkers. And human beings, we are social creatures. We need to be with each other. We need to collaborate. We need to think together. We need to experience things together. That may not be so possible for the next few months. But remember, the coronavirus crisis is time limited by definition. A day is coming and it's not too far in a future where there will be a vaccine, and then life will be very different in how we manage the coronavirus. Just like we manage so many other diseases that are a part of our world. The day is coming when more and more social activity, and business activity will be possible. It will come in waves. But if we're talking about the big picture, and the future in New York City, what we have is magical. What we have is irreplaceable. People from all over the globe want to be here, and that's going to continue to be true, but we have to have faith. So, I'm not for a moment trying to ignore the tough challenges, the tough questions ahead, but I'll tell you something, you get nowhere being pessimistic and you get nowhere betting against New York City. So, I advise the naysayers to check their history, and recognize the strength of this place and our people. And I predict that we will not overcome only, but we will find a way to come back as a stronger and better city in the years ahead.

Now, let's talk about the things we need to do on that path ahead, and if there's something that from day one has been the most necessary part of the equation, the thing that would have done so much good, helping us beat back the Corona virus to begin with, but now will be the core to any solution, you've guessed it testing, testing, testing. We know that we're still playing catch up, and unfortunately that's because the help we needed from the federal government never was there in the beginning, still isn't here, but we do not let that stop us. We are innovating as much as we can locally. We're working with local partners in healthcare, we're working with labs, we're doing the most we can. We still need that federal support, but we're going to keep building nonetheless. And testing capacity is growing rapidly, and it's going to make a world of difference. And at the same time, we are seeing the great benefits, the human benefits of the deceleration of this disease, the fact that more and more people thank God are safe, and fewer and fewer people are ending up in the hospital. This also means that a lot less of the testing capacity has to be devoted to saving lives in hospitals. That's opening up more and more possibilities of getting testing out to communities. More and more PPEs available, more and more personnel available. The situation is turning so that we can now do much more widespread testing and we're building our capacity with our test and trace initiative. That's going to be huge and it's going to grow as big as it needs to, and I want to emphasize that. Whatever that point is we need to get to, we're going to keep building it out. We'll hire as many people as we need. We'll go as far as we need. The only limitation we face is the amount of lab capacity available. And again, we need the federal government to step up. We need the labs to step up. We need the federal government to push hard to get the labs, the equipment they need, the reagents they need, but all the other pieces are coming together really, really well for more and more widespread testing.

Now, given that we have more capacity all the time, we want to now start to encourage more and more people to get tested. This will all come together, meaning the more testing, the more people can take advantage of testing. The more we know, the more we're able to reach people, the more we're able to put the test and trace protocol in place, trace the contacts, get people who need isolation, isolation. It grows together. So, now, as of today, we want to broaden the guidance on who should take advantage of more and more widespread testing. And again, you will see it growing in communities all over the city in the next few weeks, but this is the direction we'll be going in. We now want to encourage three groups of people to get testing that's available to them. One, anyone with symptoms. So again, what are those symptoms for the coronavirus, cough, fever, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell and again that those symptoms and remember those symptoms that are particularly of concern if someone's older or has those preexisting healthcare conditions or both. But what we're saying is, even if you're not older, even if you don't have those preexisting conditions, if you have the symptoms, we want to see you get tested, and more and more testing will be available to you. Second group, anyone who was in close contact with a confirmed COVID-19 patient. Now, this is the work that the test and trace initiative will be doing systematically as it grows all over the city. But right now, people know in many cases, if someone in your life has tested positive, and you know you've been in close contact with them, well right away. If they're a household member, they're an intimate partner and you know they tested positive, we want you to get tested as well, regardless of whether you have symptoms or not. And number three group, and these are folks who do such important work. They work in congregate residential settings, they take care of others. Folks who work in nursing homes, folks who work in shelters, folks who work in adult care facilities. Again, whether you have symptoms or not, we want to make sure you are tested.

So, the testing is going to be built out more and more. We're welcoming more and more people that take advantage of it as priority groups of people we want to see tested. And that of course is now bringing to your mind the question, how do I get a test? So, we are building out the locations. We now have 23 walk-in sites through our Health and Hospitals facilities. 23 sites that are open, five more through the collaboration of a one medical and local 1199. So that's 28 sites, more sites coming online quickly. You can call 311 to find a testing location or you can go online nyc.gov/covidtest.

Now, I've said our goal was to get to 20,000 tests per day by May 25th. We are now confident in that goal. In fact, we want to beat that goal, and I will be giving you updates as we go along on how we're doing, but we believe that more and more testing capacity can be put into play quickly, and that's going to allow us to then test people, do the follow up tracing, contact tracing, and for those who need to be in a hotel, make that hotel available to them. We welcome more and more people into this. We're going to keep accommodating everyone we can. When we get the real support we need from the federal government and that additional lab capacity, we'll be able to go much farther. Because remember, the testing process itself has gotten simpler because of that self-swab technique we talked about a few days back. So, sky's the limit so long as we can keep getting more and more lab capacity. But knowing that this month we will get to 20,000 tests a day and I think surpass that number, that is a great start on the road to a truly widespread testing approach for this city.

Now, as I said, more testing means more locations, and they will keep growing and growing. I told you a couple of days ago about 12 news sites, that they would be opening soon. So, now I'm going to announce officially the locations of those sites. So, opening next week, week of May 18th in Manhattan the Highbridge Rec Center in Washington Heights. In Brooklyn, 1223 Coney Island Avenue. Those two sites will bring our overall capacity up to 6,300 tests a day at Health and Hospitals, facilities. And then the following week, week of May, 25th. Two sites in the Bronx in Fordham Manor and Melrose. Three sites in Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, and Canarsie. A site in Manhattan in East Harlem. A site in Queens in Woodside. Three sites in Staten Island, Princes Bay, Concord, and Port Richmond. Those are the specific addresses and that capacity will bring us up to 10,700 tests a day. Again, this is going to keep growing, the more capacity we have, the more labs we bring into the game, the more we'll keep building this program out. And now as it grows and grows, again, anyone in those new categories I talked about today, please take advantage of this testing opportunity. It's going to help you, your family, the people in your life, but it's going to help us as well as we fight back to the coronavirus in this City.

Now, you know, we keep learning about this disease, and it is always challenging to be dealing with something new that medical science still doesn't fully understand. And I've said, you know, in the beginning it really seemed to be extraordinarily consistent and painful that our oldest New Yorkers were bearing the brunt and folks with the preexisting conditions. But we noticed consistently that children seem to have very little effect from this disease until what we've seen in recent days, and this is really troubling and I say it as a parent, it's really troubling to see now after we thought we understood a consistent pattern, something new has been happening and the pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome, P.M.I.S this is a deep concern and we're going to throw everything we've got at it. The number of children affected, continues to grow. It is still in the scheme of things a rare condition, but it is something that we take very seriously and we're now on high alert and addressing because the numbers have grown. We now have a hundred confirmed cases in New York City, 55 of those cases again have either tested positive for COVID-19 or tested for the antibodies, tested positive for the antibodies. And we lost one child and that is painful and awful for that family and for this city to have lost a child, we don't want that ever to happen again. So, we're about to do the maximum to get everyone informed, to get everyone the help they need to make sure that parents and family members understood— exactly what to do and when to do it. I told you yesterday we're launching an ad campaign that's up and running and more coming on that quickly. But again, I'm going to keep reminding you of the basics, if the child in your life has persistent fever, rash, abdominal pain, vomiting, or especially any combination of those afflictions, call your doctor immediately. Do not hesitate. If you don't have a doctor that you need to talk to, a clinician, call 3-1-1 and we'll connect you to a Health and Hospitals clinician. It is so important to start that dialogue immediately, if you see these symptoms and then working with a healthcare professional, they can decide with you if the child needs to get to medical care immediately. But the early detection makes all the difference, with early detection, we can save the lives of these children and that's been what we've seen also from the evidence of these cases so far.

Now, we have to make sure every health provider is fully aware of the situation and ready to act. So, tomorrow, the Health Department will [inaudible] weekly webinar. The weekly webinar they do will be focused heavily on P.M.I.S that normally reaches six or 700 providers. We want to welcome as many health care providers to join that tomorrow as possible, particularly obviously focused on pediatricians. And then in the coming days, a special webinar that we put together by the Health Department with all 23 pediatric ICUs across New York City, making sure that the doctors and nurses, everyone in those pediatric ICU has the latest information and all sharing together what they're seeing and what they're experiencing and how best to help our children. And then, every day going forward the Health Department epidemiologists will reach out to all 23 pediatric ICUs on a regular basis following up on literally every case, even new or suspected cases to check on what's happening. This is something where we need to put supreme focus to understand what's happening here. It apparently, you know from the eyes of medical science came out of nowhere in this City, we have to understand it better, we have to get ahead of it. We'll keep giving you updates on what we're seeing and additional steps we're taking, but these steps will immediately ensure that healthcare providers are deeply coordinated, sharing information and finding the best ways to protect our kids.

Now, we focus all the time, we're looking to help each and every New Yorker, 8.6 million of us together. All of us going through this crisis the same. But we know some people are particularly vulnerable and that brings us back to homeless New Yorkers. Again, this effort now that's being undertaken each night to clean the subways, I keep reporting on the results in terms of homeless outreach, the results continued to be striking. Last night, 328 homeless individuals were approached for help by our outreach workers and by the homeless outreach members of the NYPD. Of the 328 approached, 182 accepted help, so again, a very, very striking number of very positive number. 149 accepted help to shelter, 33 accepted help by way of getting them to a hospital. Now we want to make sure as we keep doing this, that we maximize the impact of this moment. We want as many of these homeless individuals are living on the streets, living in the subways, we want them to come in and get the they need. This is the first step and I've told you what we've done over the last three years involved very intensive, very humane, very decent, very careful, thoughtful connection to homeless individuals to try and win their trust, bring them into someplace better and safe and someplace they can get medical care and get help overcoming the challenges they face, including mental health challenges and substance misuse challenges. So, the question has been asked by some of our colleagues in the media is a great one. What do we know of these results so far? What they tell us? How lasting are these results? Well, it's only been a little over a week, but still first we know in the first week, 824 individuals accepted help at one point or another. That's a huge number, when you think that the federal assessment of the number of homeless people in this City is somewhere between 35,000 and 4,000 the street homeless people. If 824 individuals accepted help in one form or another, that's of truly historic figure that says more and more of the homeless individuals are starting to experiment with what it would be like to come in and get off the streets. 201 of them made it to shelter and that might've been for only hours or that might be for a few nights and we'll get more details on that as we do the analysis. But again, 201 staying in shelter for a period of time, that's a big deal because it's the first step towards change. But the number that we should dwell on the most is the 103 who have stayed in shelter. Now again, we're only talking about a little more than a week, but 103 individuals who were living on the street have come in and stayed in so far. That doesn't mean every single one of them will remain in the for the, you know, for months and years ahead, but that's what we're working toward. And the fact that 103 have stayed in so far is a huge step in the right direction. So, we've got to break the vicious cycle that held people in a life that was truly dangerous and unhealthy and not anything we want to see a human being living. This is a very promising sign and again, a deep thank you to the homeless outreach workers and the men and women in the NYPD who do this— homeless outreach work who are trained for it, who do it as a deep form of public service. It's not easy, but both the homeless outreach workers and the NYPD officers of this work, they're doing something so important and so meaningful and I thank them all.

And I want to stay on the topic of the NYPD for a moment. These last weeks have been a profound challenge as we are trying to make sense, all of us in this City of a new reality. There was no playbook for the coronavirus, we've all had to learn together how to do things like shelter in place and social distancing and wearing face coverings. These things don't come naturally to any of us, we're all trying to make sense of it together. Of course, people are feeling the burden of these changes, the burden of so many families not having a livelihood. The— the questions, the fear, the anxiety. It's a tough atmosphere for everyone and we're asking our police officers to figure out how to address all the normal challenges, address quality of life, address crime, assist people in a variety of ways. Every day is different from a police officer, we're asking them to do all that, but also figure out how to play the role we need them to play in making sure the rules are followed so we can beat back this disease. Remember, the rules are to fight this disease, the rules are to reduce the number of people get this disease and the number of people die. There is nothing more sacred than that in terms of thinking of what people in the line of public safety do. So, it's such crucial work and yet there's no playbook we're making up each day. We're trying to figure out better approaches, better ways to figure out how to train officers and how to listen to communities about what's working, what's not working, trying to figure out what that balance should be between what our police do, versus our civilian employees, versus community members, houses of worship, community organizations. We've got to strike that balance and we're not there yet.

So, I want to put this on me and Commissioner Shea that we have to figure out how to strike that balance. We have to figure out a plan and a protocol that works. What we've been doing up to now is trying to address situations as they emerge, particularly the situations that are most dangerous, which are large gatherings, but it's clear we have to improve the supervision, the training, the protocols, the game plan for a very complex situation and not create unnecessary tension between our police and our communities. And you know, some out there raised concerns and I value the concerns and have worried that we might in some way take a step backwards or race so much of the progress we've made over six plus years and bring police and community together. I can tell you I won't let that happen. I can tell you Commissioner Shea won't let that happen. We didn’t all not come here to let that happen. We came here to fix things. We came here to fundamentally and permanently change the relationship between police and community. We will not go backwards, but we have to get it right and that's on us. And I affirm that the vast majority of time, the interactions between our police and our communities are done the right way. There's more and more mutual respect, more and more communication. But the coronavirus has thrown us a curve ball and created situations that no one's trained for and that are really complex and very emotional. And we have to figure out how to deal with those better. So, certainly for all the folks out there have said, can we make sure that in the first instance, the education and the giving out face coverings and the efforts to try and remind people the right way to do things, that those are first and foremost done by civilians and by community members. Yes, that's what we absolutely want, that’s the direction we’re moving in, and enforcement needs to be with a light touch and overwhelmingly it has been, but we've seen a few situations where that wasn't the case and were deeply troubling. We saw another video last night and like every human situation there are complexities, but what was not complex at all was it shouldn't have gone down that way, period. It does not reflect our values. It's not what we want to see in this city. I know for Commissioner Shea and I, we talked about last night, it's painful for everyone involved. No New Yorkers want to see something like that. For us it is painful because it means something is still not working the way we need it to and to say the least whatever else was going on in that video, whatever else was happening in that moment, we should never have a situation where a mom with her child ends up under arrest for that kind of offense. It's just not right.

Now, if you look at the whole story, unfortunately there are problems in the whole thing including, I want to remind everyone, no one should be disrespectful to police officers. No one should ignore the instructions of police officers, particularly when they're trying to protect people's safety and trying do something for the health and safety of all of us. So, we have to work together in this city to try and get everyone to play their role respectfully of each other. But what we saw there did not reflect our values. It did not reflect our goals of de-escalation and we have to do better, and it's my responsibility and the Commissioner's responsibility to find that path forward and we will, and I feel very confident about that. We will figure out a way – if I didn't feel confident about it, I'd tell you. But I do feel confident because we have to do everything we've done for the last six-plus years in changing our department and making it have a closer relationship with the communities and that happened. People said we couldn't get away from Stop and Frisk or the city would end up being more crime ridden, chaotic. The opposite happened as we got away from Stop and Frisk. People said there'll be all sorts of problems if we implemented body cameras or if we reduced marijuana arrests or reduced arrests overall, we are hundreds of thousands of fewer arrests than we used to make and still remain the safest big city in America. So, we've made those changes. We will figure this one out too, but I want the day to come when there are no such videos when people can really have faith in each other, and that's what we will strive for and we will work on that every single day.

Now, a few more points before we conclude. One of the things that matters always, and I said, talking about police in communities, we have got to listen to all the time. I make it a point to listen all the time to people who raise concerns. Well, obviously this coronavirus crisis is one part profound health care crisis and another part profound economic crisis has just done horrible things to families all over the city and the anxiety, the fear, the sheer, not just a lack of a livelihood or the fear of how people will keep a roof over their head or where the next meal is coming from, but not even knowing when the economy will come back and whether their jobs will, their small businesses will still be there. Last night I talked to folks who brought so much to discussion leaders of the small business community of this city who are part of our small business advisory group and we've called together these advisory councils because we need to hear from people their perspective. We need to hear what they're going through. We need to hear their fears and their anxieties and the unknown, but also their solutions, their ideas. What an extraordinary conversation. Small business leaders from all five boroughs, folks who created from scratch, the extraordinary businesses that they run. I want to thank everyone who was a part of that advisory council for the work you're doing, helping all of us, helping your fellow small businesses, helping New York City to bring back the small businesses that are part of our heart and soul. So, it was a very energetic and inspiring conversation even it was against the backdrop of a lot of fear and anxiety. A lot of questions. People had ideas and they had proposals of what would work and a sense of can-do, let's make something happen, classic attitude of a small business owner, and it gave me confidence that if we listen to small business owners, we'll find the solutions and it means the city government's going to have to act differently and do more to work with small businesses and hear small businesses, and it also means we're going to have to find new forms of support from the larger business community, from the philanthropic community to help our small businesses, and we talked about all of that. But there was one particularly poignant moment where an owner of a small business in Chinatown talked about what it has been like since basically the beginning of this year. That against the backdrop of this horrible crisis and the human suffering, that so many members of the Chinese American community and the Asian American community have on top of that suffer discrimination throughout, which is wholly unacceptable and I want to remind everyone we will fight this discrimination. We will fight this bias wherever we see it and we need people to call in if it's any act of discrimination or bias, call 3-1-1. We need to know when anyone has been the victim of a bias crime, if it's obviously something violent and immediate call 9-1-1.

But the point last night that was even more poignant was that people have suffered discrimination while losing their livelihoods, think about this for a moment and let's put ourselves in the eyes and in the shoes of people who worked all their life to create something for their families, created these beautiful small businesses all over New York City then suffered discrimination and then saw their business fall away because of fears that people had. unfortunately fears stoked by misunderstanding and bias that caused everyday New Yorkers not to want to go to a Chinese restaurant. I remember going to Chinese restaurants in Chinatown and in Flushing, Queens to make the point that there was no bias that should be accepted or perceived from one community to another, and what I heard last night was about the pain of a community that has lost his livelihood, not when most others did, but a month earlier, two months earlier than so many other people in the city, many other small businesses in this city.

So, look, it is a reminder to us that we have a lot to do. The city has done a lot to overcome bias and discrimination. We are, we have a much stronger social fabric than we used to even just a couple of decades ago. We will overcome this. We need to embrace and uplift our Asian American brothers and sisters in this fight to bring back our city, but we also need to specially focus on the economic reality of those communities and make sure those small businesses come back and that we all go and make an extra effort to patronize them and help them back on their feet because in many ways they suffered long before everybody else in this crisis.

Okay. It's time for what we do every day, our daily indicators and in terms of getting out of this crisis and moving forward this is the main street right here. This is what matters most and my friends today is a very good day and you deserve the credit because it's because of your hard work that I get to tell you this good news. Every time you stay home, every time you socially distance, every time you use hand sanitizer even, every time you put on a face covering, you're helping to drive these numbers down and get us closer to a better place. Indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 is down from 78 to 59 that's wonderful. Number two, daily number of people in ICUs across Health + Hospitals for suspected COVID-19 down, markedly down from 561 to 517 so that's a big movement there. That's a big jump in the right direction, bigger than we've seen most days, even when things go in the right direction so that is really important, and that means you're talking about fewer and fewer people fighting for their lives. More and more people being saved. That is a very powerful number, and number three, percentage of people tested who are positive recovered 19 down from 13 percent to 11 percent three for three, a perfect day, New York City. So, let's now put together a bunch of them and that's what's going to help us take the next big step forward. Okay. A few words in Spanish

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Just a quick reminder that we have Dr. Varma, Dr. Katz and Commissioner Banks on the phone and with that the first question goes to Andrew from NBC New York. Andrew?

Question: Hi, good morning, hope everyone is doing well.

Mayor: How are you doing, Andrew?

Question: Hanging in there.

Mayor: Alright, positive spirit.

Question: My first question has to do with testing. You said at the outset that there are now 23 sites where people can essentially get up and go wait in a line and get tested. We also understand that there are some free sites in each borough where people can make an appointment and not have to stand in line. But on those free sites it seems impossible online to get an appointment, and with regard to the 23 sites you have open, there are some in neighborhoods where people cannot walk to them, they'd have to take mass transit or an Uber or something. So are you satisfied that anybody you need the test right now in New York City can get one?

My second question is on behalf of my colleague Melissa Russo, are you satisfied with the job that your Health Commissioner Barbot is doing? And are you responsible for any of the reported tension with her because you didn't take her advice in the crisis early on?

Mayor: So, on the first question, am I satisfied with the level of testing in New York City? Of course not. Andrew, you and I have known each other a long time and I know you're listening to my presentations. I don't think there's anything I've said in these presentations that suggests we're at the level testing we want to be at. I want to be at, you know, to begin with many tens of thousands a day. We've talked about by May 25th, 20,000 a day. We've talked about later in the summer gain of 50,000 date. If I had my druthers, we'd be at hundreds of thousands a day. But I can't get there without the federal government. So, of course, I'm not satisfied. I am pleased that we're making progress and I'm pleased that the labs are working with us to open up more capacity and I'm pleased that we're able to bring more capacity online quickly, but far from satisfied. No, the goal is to have so many sites over time and so much availability that you don't need to see people travel meaningful distances. But that's going to obviously take time and it's going to be imperfect for quite a while. And, again, the federal government has to step up in a very big way.

On the question of the health department – Andrew, look, from the very beginning, all of us have been dealing with the great unknown of this disease and, again, unfortunately without the partnership from the federal government. We have wanted – you know, I asked for widespread testing to be available in New York City starting back on January 24th, and I still don't have it. So, that's made it hard on all of us. But I have worked closely with all the health care professionals on our team, with Dr. Barbot and the team at Department of Health; with Dr. Katz and the team at Health + Hospitals; with Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze, who is also a doctor; with Dr. Jay Varma, who I brought in as a senior advisor – nonstop communication and conversation. You know what, even among the health care professionals, there's going to be different perspectives, which is normal. They're humans and they each have different training, different expertise, different understandings, different perspectives. But the conversation has been constant and we've kept building out a strategy and the strategy, obviously, thank God, is working to reduce the number of cases in this city, and we're going to keep building on it. So, I think there has been a constant consultative process that has led us to get the city in the right direction, but there's a hell of a lot more to do and we still need that federal partnership deeply.

Moderator: Next is Marla from WCBS 880. Marla?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good morning. How are you doing, Marla?

Question: Good. Glad to ask a question this morning. I want to know where Commissioner Barbot and Shea are at. Why are they not at this press conference? We spoke to both the PBA and the SBA this morning. They want you to fire Dr. Barbot and question why that wasn't done when the comments were made in late March. According to the New York Post, you were at the meeting where the comments were made. Can you tell us what was said and will you ask Commissioner Barbot to resign?

Mayor: Marla, I was not at a meeting where I heard that. What is being reported as I understand it – and I heard about it for the first time last night – is a conversation between Dr. Barbot and Chief Monahan. Now, I don't have the full details yet and I want the full details for sure. I want to speak to each of them and understand exactly what happened, but it's not something – the allegation that something was said that was disrespectful towards the men and women the NYPD, that's not something that was said in my presence. I assure you I would have dealt with it at the time had I heard it in my presence. What I was involved in was the effort to make sure that the PPEs that were needed by the men and women of the NYPD got to them. And I had numerous conversations with Commissioner Shea, Commissioner Barbot, Chief Monaghan and others to make sure that happened. And I felt a deep sense of urgency that I wanted to make sure that the distribution happened and when I didn't see it happening quickly enough, I intervened to make sure it would happen. So, again, I want to get more information. I will state something I feel very strongly, that no public servant should ever in any way saying anything disrespectful about the men and women of the NYPD. They protect us, we need to protect them. So, to me, it would be inappropriate for anyone, particularly in a leadership role to suggest any lack of interest in protecting the men and women of the NYPD. That would be, for me, a real inappropriate statement. But I'll have more to say after I have had the opportunity to hear directly from people. And as for today's press conference or any press conference, we put together the lineup each day according to what we think is necessary and that changes every day.

Moderator: Next is James from PIX11. James?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good morning. How are you doing?

Question: Thank you for asking, doing okay. Appreciate that. Now, today, you described as a “very good day” with the metrics. Congratulations to you and the city.

Mayor: Thank you.

Question: You know, you've recently had a few more days with all three indicators coming down. How does that fit into your hope to have New York City be more on course with beginning to reopen possibly by the beginning of next month?

Mayor: Yeah, James, it's exactly what you're saying is right that, you know, the goal of the first steps – and I'm going to keep saying we have to get these indicators right, move down together for 10 to 14 days, we also have to meet the State indicators, but both of them right now could be met in the first half of June. That would be the right time then to lift some restrictions, but carefully, slowly, smartly. And, remember, I keep using that toehold analogy – you know your rock climbing, your mountain climbing, whatever, you get your toe hold, you make sure it's secure, then you take the next one. If at any point things aren't secure at any point, the indicators going in the wrong direction again, that's going to tell us something different and we're going to be very careful and cautious. So – but your question I think hits the nail on the head. The indicators have been moving pretty damn well, not quite as well as I want them to, but pretty damn well. We are getting in range now of hitting all our numbers in the first half of June. And then if it's consistent, that's when we take the first steps to open up more.

Moderator: Next is Al from 1010 WINS. Al?

Question: Well, happy anniversary, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you, Al. I appreciate that.

Question: Yeah, my question has to do again kind of with where James was going with reopening. I'm just wondering as far as restaurants and closing off street, has a decision to made about like Mott Street or Arthur Avenue or Austin or any of these streets that are aligned with restaurants? You know, I know it's been discussed, but is there any sort of timetable for closing off sections of those streets and allowing the restaurants to expand out? Because I know from hearing from our restaurant owners, they're – you know, they grow nerve more nervous by the day. This is hard for them, so they're wondering when can we open and expand beyond delivery and takeout?

Mayor: Al, it's a really appealing idea. I've been talking to restaurant owners too, a number of them on Friday and some restaurant and bar owners on the small business call last night. They're making a great case that this could be a difference-maker, but what I've said is – I want everyone to be clear – first of all, we're not there yet. We have to be convinced that we even get to first base here with these indicators getting to the right place – the City and State indicators. Second, the restaurant piece of the equation, and even more of the bar piece of equation, I would argue, you know, call into question, how do you hit that sweet spot where you have the right social distancing and protections, where you have the right capacity so the businesses can actually be profitable and the right atmosphere, which is one of the things that restaurant and bar owners are raising to me, that they, they need a certain atmosphere to be effective. That's what people want. And so, we have to sort of figure that trifecta, if you will. The streets certainly offer a very appealing option, but they are not – you know, that doesn't automatically solve our problems in terms of when you think about the social distancing, the capacity, the making sure that people are safe and is handled consistently. Even the streets don't instantly achieve all of those goals. So, we have to be smart about it. But I can tell you humanly I think it's a really good idea. I think it is something we might be able to reach. Whether it's something we reach sooner or later, I'm not sure about yet. And I do agree with you, Al, every day matters for these restaurant owners and bar owners. But it's being very thoroughly discussed right now what it would look like, how we would do it. The minute we have a plan, we're going to announce it. But it would not start – if we even got to a plan we had confidence in, it would not start until we were absolutely sure that the health indicators told us it was that time. And we'd still need to figure out the right kind of enforcement mechanisms, working with all the civilian agencies that work with small businesses because we would not want to start something and then have it get so loose that it caused a resurgence of the disease, that would be something that would only setback small businesses much more.

Moderator: Next is Gloria from NY1. Gloria?

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you a question first on behalf of my colleague Courtney Gross, who spent a night of following the process of the engagement with the homeless during the subway overnight cleaning. And we – she spoke with some homeless people who said that they were not giving a place to sleep. I know that she also spoke to the Commissioner who said that they would no longer be taken to the 30th Street intake shelter, but she did see lots of people getting dropped off there. So, I want to talk – ask you about that disconnect, but also how you are defining these numbers. Is it an accurate count of the services people are actually being provided if people are being dropped off at a shelter and still walking away because there was no bed or because they don't feel safe there and it's not sanitary? My second question is about your health commissioner – I don't believe you answered the question about these calls for her to resign. And if you have the confidence in her that she is doing her job well and what do you say about these law enforcement unions that are calling for her removal?

Mayor: So, let me speak to that and then we'll go back on the homeless question. I have not seen all the comments from different unions. And I want to caution that if people are concerned about this issue, they need to express their concern in an appropriate manner and two wrongs don't make a right. And I've heard, but I've not seen that some comments were offensive in their own right. But look, again, I've been working with the Commissioner with the whole health care team. We've been getting a lot done. I need to understand what happened here. I am concerned about it. It does need to be addressed. If what is being reported is accurate, the Commissioner needs to apologize to the men and women of the NYPD unquestionably. But again, I need to hear her perspective, I need to hear Chief Monahan’s perspective. And, you know, we have a job to do here and it's not about – you know, I know many of the questions kind of come down to the personalities in the lineup. And, to me, this is supposed to be a team where it is not about one personality or another or one agency or another, it is about all of us working together as a team to help the people in New York City. And that has to be the approach. So, that's what I'm focused on. Again, I don't want to say more until I've talked to the Commissioner directly. But what I want everyone to focus on, including everyone in my team is how can we support each other in doing the best work possible to keep the people of New York City safe, period.

On the question of the homeless outreach, Commissioner Banks will weigh in now, but I'll say we need to give you very accurate information, not just because you all in the free press deserve it, but we need to be able to understand what we're learning from this experience and what's working and what's not. Now, again, anyone accepting any services is a step forward and that might be hard for people to hear who have not been working on this issue a long time, but if you work on this issue a long time, you know how extraordinarily difficult it is to get someone who's street homeless to accept any change. And, again, we are talking about people overwhelmingly dealing with serious mental health issues and/or substance misuse issues. So, it is a very, very tough playing field. If someone accepts help, that is a very good indicator. It doesn't work necessarily the first time, the second time, the 50th time, it just – you have to stay with it. So, just getting to the door of a shelter is a beginning, but I don't want the presumption to be, people walk away because of X or Y reason. There's been a lot done to improve the shelters, there has been a lot done to make them safer, a lot done to create new options like Safe Havens and each person is an individual and each one needs to be understood individually. So, if there's anything that's inaccurate about the numbers, we got to fix it and explain it. But what I'm seeing suggests major change and it's very early on, but suggests major improvement and a lot that we can work with in a very imperfect world. Commissioner Banks, pick it up from there.

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: Thank you, Mayor. I just want to really nip this in the bud there. We have a bed for everybody. We have capacity in the shelter system. Gone are the days when the shelter system did not have enough beds for everyone. Having said that, I think we've been pretty clear that this is really hard work, as the Mayor said, and to have someone on a subway platform accept help and then when they arrive at the shelter door, make a determination that they don't want that help that night, that is actually a step forward in helping rebuild trust with people who have fallen through every social safety net. It's understandable that they’re distrustful of every system they've ever interacted with because they've been let down repeatedly. To me, at the end of a week or so, that we've got 103 human beings that are actually still in shelter after all of these efforts, is indicative of what we've been seeing for the last couple of years. If you keep looking for what it is that the person wants and you eventually connect with what they want, we can change lives and bring people off the streets. It's certainly true, and we've been saying this since the beginning, that the victory one night might simply be to get someone to say, ‘I'll accept services and go to the entry point of the shelter’ and then not actually go through the process, but that tells us we can really try to reach that person on night-two or night-three. We're not going to give up. Every night we're out there trying to bring people in. We've made certain changes in terms of not bringing people to Bellevue as a default, unless the person said that's where I'm willing to go, but people have free will, they could change their mind, but that gives us an insight into what might work next time.

We're going to keep taking these looks after each week to see how many people are remaining in shelter because those people are on the pathway to coming off the streets permanently as the 2,500 people have come off the streets permanently since we began HOME-STAT. But we're going to have defeats every night too, which is – the acceptance of services on a platform is not necessarily going to lead to the staying in a bed for more than a few hours or even continuing with the process, but we'll know more about that person having gotten them to accept the offer of help to go to a shelter even if they don't stay because the next time we know more about what might be the thing that will help them. And let's not forget we're adding new tools for our outreach workers. In the middle of the pandemic was stood up more than 300 Safe Haven or stabilization beds including a commercial hotel. And we have an active solicitation with providers to bring on even more of beds because we're learning more every night from clients about what it is going to take to have them come in and remain in. But we'll have defeats and we've been pretty blunt about that. Acceptance means acceptance of services, but the gold standard is coming inside and remaining on inside.

Moderator: Next is Erin from Politico. Erin.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. First question is about the test-and-trace effort. We understand that DC37 expressed concerns about it being housed within the Health Department. Wondering what role those concerns played in your decision [inaudible] to Health + Hospitals. Second question, follow up on the homeless issue, I just want to understand if 200-some people went into shelter, are you saying the other 600 were driven to the shelter and then decided they didn't want to go inside? And if so, when you're saying they're accepting services, what services are they accepting, if in fact they don't end up going into the shelter?

Mayor: Okay. So, I’ll bring Commissioner Banks in on that in a moment. On the question of DC37, I want to affirm, I have immense respect for DC37 AFSCME as a union and what the people in that union do for the people in New York City and their day to day work and particular respect for the executive director, Henry Garrido. But I want to be very clear, I did not have any conversation with him about the test-and-trace initiative at the time we made the decisions and the decision was made in terms of creating an apparatus to reach the entire city of New York, that we needed a large operational agency with the capacity to build out test-and-trace. Not on a small level, not on levels we like we had known before in our history, but on a massive level that I believe fundamentally only a major operational agency could do, and one that in the case of Health + Hospitals performed brilliantly during this crisis. And we wanted to bring the best and the brightest from all agencies into it. Obviously, not only Health + Hospitals, but also Department of Health and the work of many other agencies because we're depending intensely on Department of Buildings, on our IT Department, DOITT on so many other pieces of the equation, Department of Design and Construction. We need everyone to be a part of this effort. But the decision I made was about what would work operationally, particularly on such a tight timeline. Not because of any consideration with the union, despite my respect for the union, which is real.

In terms of homeless and what comes in, I think Steve Banks here could help us all with a little more of the human level view of this. Again if all we had achieved, Erin, in the last eight days, nine days, whatever it's been, was a hundred homeless people came in and stayed in, it would be a victory unto itself because a hundred homeless people, that's a hundred human lives, but also again against the reality that's been documented by the federal annual study of somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 street homeless people citywide on any given day – if a hundred people came in in a week and stayed in, it would be worth it for that alone. But all the other people who got medical care, that's good for them as human beings and that also sometimes is the first step towards people coming in. All the people who began to accept shelter, any experience there that opened their eyes to the possibility or started to see the options that we had, the Safe Havens and other options. This is painstaking, slow, difficult work. So, any even marginal step forward helps. Even a single night where someone comes off the street helps. But Steve, I think you could help us by one, the specific question of what happens if someone goes to the door of the shelter and turns away? What do you try and do to convince them or support them even if they get second thoughts about going in? And two, could you help people understand a little bit more about why even that interaction still gives you something you didn't have before with that individual?

Commissioner Banks: Sure. And if I could just reiterate, if you had told me that we would be able to implement that initiative and five to seven days later have a hundred people, you know, a hundred human beings off the street, I would tell you this is a great opportunity to really change lives. And those people are in the process of really making a positive step forward. But I think a couple of days ago, maybe Mayor, the best way is to go back, a couple of days ago, I talked about somebody that we had tried, our teams had tried to convince more than 50 times to come in off the streets. I think that kind of gives you the sense of what happens before someone says, ‘yeah, I'll give it a try to get on the transportation to go to a shelter’. It's not that the engagement issue is, you know, you meet somebody and they say right away, ‘I want help’. And that individual, that was 50 times that skilled outreach workers trying to convince them to accept services and on the platform one night, last week I witnessed, he said, ‘yeah, I'll come on in’. And he's come in and stayed in. But there are other people who are in that continuum where it's been 50 times they've tried to engage – the outreach teams have tried to engage that individual to come on inside and they continue to say no. And half the people on the subway platforms are continuing to say no. We have to look for what's the key to get them to say yes, to have somebody be ready on a particular night. But for the people who are saying yes, they're saying yes because they want to give it a try and then they're not quite ready yet.

And it's incumbent upon us to look for what are the things that will make them ready either that night or the next night or the next time because we won't give up. I think as the Mayor's asking me to focus on, it's a series of options. ‘You don't want to be in this shelter, is there another kind of place we can send you, what kind of place would make sense to you?’ And some of it, too, is we need to analyze what kind of service would make sense for the individual. Someone who's got a serious mental health challenge may not want the mental health services that we think are critical to provide. And part of building trust is to get the person to accept that helping hand that will help them come off the streets. So, it's not a one-size-fits-all. It's a case-by-case, and on a case-by-case basis, we're changing lives but we're not changing everybody's life every night. And that's the frustration of the work and it's the reason why our frontline outreach workers are so dedicated and so critical to this work because they keep coming back night after night to the same person who won't engage. And then night after night to the same person who engaged enough to go to the front door of the shelter but not stay, then night after night to the person who came to the front door and stayed for a few hours but wouldn’t stay more, and night after night to try to get that person to come in off the streets and stay off the streets at least even for a week like those 103 people.

Mayor: Thanks very much, Steve.

Moderator: Next is Brigid from WNYC. Brigid.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor. Another question about Dr. Barbot. I understand you want to get more information about this latest report, but I'm just wondering, do you believe she has effectively done her job to this point? And then second question, the NYPD is testifying at the City Council budget hearing today. They have reportedly identified about $10 million in cuts but Council members have ID closer to $50 million, given the lack of scheduled summer activities and lack of OT. Are you willing to ask the NYPD to cut more than that $10 million?

Mayor: So, Brigid, on the NYPD, we're going to look at all agencies with fresh eyes as we go into the rest of this budget discussion. Remember, it's May 14th. Typically, we would be deciding the City budget for next year in about a month. We don't know – the big X-factor here is the stimulus vote in Washington. We don't know when it's going to happen. We don't know how it's going to happen. The House is in the process of doing something very important and putting down the marker of a stimulus package that would actually work for New York City and New York State, and cities and states around the country. But the Senate is going to take it up. We don't know how and when. We don't know if the Senate's going to come back with a different version and there has to be a conference process. So how will that align to our budget process? And Brigid, you know, we have to pass a budget by the end of June. That's a legal requirement. It has to be balanced. So, we got a lot of decisions to make with a kind of moving target reality in Washington. But that will determine what we have to do with each and every agency.

Right now, we're asking the NYPD to do a whole lot. We're asking them to do everything they normally do to protect people and to keep crime down and to provide support to people in terms of quality of life, while also having to play a constructive role on addressing social distancing and all the other realities of this crisis. And again, we have to do better at that, but there's no question that there's a role for the number one public safety organization in the city to play in making sure we are all safe in this crisis. So, I'm not ready to comment on how we're going to handle that budget because it will be absolutely dependent on everything we see with the disease. Everything we see in terms of what our game plan is going forward and what happens with the stimulus. When we get closer, we will certainly talk about what we have to do with every agency. And if God forbid, there isn't a stimulus, then you're talking about really tough decisions that will affect every single agency, unquestionably.

Look again, the situation with Commissioner Barbot in the first instance as you indicated, I need to have a conversation and understand this latest situation. It obviously raises real concerns to me, but I want to hear everyone involved before passing any judgment. On the bigger picture, I keep making the point that I have been working with Commissioner Barbot and her team at the Health Department, Dr. Katz, his team at Health + Hospitals, Dr. Perea-Henze, Dr. Varma, a whole host of people have contributed to where we are now. And I am looking at the progress we've made from a team perspective. I appreciate everyone's contribution. I know there's things that we still have to improve upon. So, you know, from my point of view, I am pleased where we are today because we're continuing to make progress. I know we're not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. I don't spend a lot of time looking backwards. I need to focus on keeping people safe right now and in the future. But again, when I've had a chance to have the right conversations, I'll have more to say.

Moderator: Gwynne from Crain’s is up next. Gwynne?

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. So, Crain’s looked at a checkbook, looked at Checkbook New York City data and found that the biggest order the City placed for PPE was with a business who had never contracted with the City. And how the history of tax and other financial issues. I'm wondering if you think the City should tighten its verification process for potential contractors even during the pandemic?

Mayor: Thank you, Gwynne. I mean, look, Gwynne, I would say we have two realities here. Where we were in March and into the beginning of April, where we literally did not know, and I think you remember this and your colleagues remember this. We didn't know many times if we would have enough PPEs for the week ahead. And we – obviously, the folks who do our contracting and the folks who did the effort to put together the PPEs, they did an amazing job. Many, many great people, I want to give special thanks to Dan Simon who runs the Mayor's Office of Contracting. Jackie Bray played a crucial role in the effort. So many good people at the Emergency Management Office who really had to construct something out of nothing to get PPEs on a historic level from all over the world in an incredibly unstable dynamic. And I want to thank Emma Wolfe for her extraordinary leadership, helping to bring together the team that always stayed one step ahead of the situation. And I got to tell you it was so close sometimes, but they always found a way of course. Jimmy O'Neill came in and played such an important role, making sure the distribution was right.

I can't emphasize enough Gwynne that it was touch and go for days and weeks, but this team managed to always find what was needed to protect our health care heroes and protect our first responders. And I cannot fault them for a moment, that even with their instincts, again, since our Chief Contracting Officer was a big part of it, I assure you there were plenty of checks and balances involved, but they had to come up with the materials. But now as we hope we're going to get to a point where we're going to be able to breathe a little bit easier and then start to build up our strategic reserve. Of course, I want any and all checks and balances in the process. So I don't know about the specific business you're referring to. I'll look into that. But again, I'm not going to fault anyone for making sure that the materials were in, in an incredibly difficult environment. And I'm happy to say it is looking better and I think that's going to allow us to be choosier going forward.

Moderator: Last two, Sydney from the Advance. Sydney?

Question: Mr. Mayor this week [inaudible] –

Moderator: Sydney, we are having issues hearing you.

Mayor: Sydney, can you hear me? Sydney? Try again.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, I can.

Question: Okay. I think I'm having Wi-Fi issues. Yeah. So earlier this week, a batch of rotten food was sent to seniors on Staten Island from the City, rotten carrots, bread and potatoes. I wanted to see what you have to say? Do you think it's acceptable that people in need are receiving rotten food in their deliveries during a time like now? And will you commit to resending people who received rotting food, fresh delivery of food right away?

Mayor: Of course. And Sydney, thank you for raising the concern. I heard about your reporting. I appreciate it. We never want to see anyone in need get anything but the best food available. And, certainly, never acceptable for people to get food that's rotten or unhealthy. So, I'm very angry that happened, but I know it can be fixed and I know efforts were taken immediately to replace the food. And look, this is a massive operation, trying to reach New Yorkers on a level that's never been done before with food relief. It's going to keep growing, unfortunately, because of the really tough reality we're hearing about the number of people unemployed and people who don't have a livelihood to pay for food with. So, I need this program to grow and grow and grow and reach more and more people, but always the right way, always with quality food. And if ever there's a mistake and there will be mistakes because there are human beings involved, your point is right. The need to replace it immediately. So, anyone who gets food that's not the right quality, we need to know about it so we can fix it. If there's any vendor who's not doing their job, we need to deal with them. But you definitely have my assurance, we don't accept that state of affairs. We will fix it.

Moderator: Last question goes to Anna from the Daily News. Anna?

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Two questions about the comments reportedly made by the Health Commissioner. First, I wanted to read you a tweet from the SBA specifically. They called her a bitch and basically said that she should have been fired a long time ago and they're not surprised that an appointee of yours would make comments like that. And then I also wanted to ask – the comment that Dr. Barbot made according to our sources, was the result of NYPD cops trying to commandeer some masks that were otherwise meant for health care workers. Which I can – you know, which might contribute to the strong words that she used. I wanted to see if you could respond to that aspect of it? As well as the SBA calling her a bitch?

Mayor: Yeah. Anna, again, I have not heard the details of this situation. I learned about it last night and I want to hear from everyone involved. So, I don't know what the scenario was. I do know that whatever the scenario was, it is crucial that our first responders have PPEs period. And obviously that our health care workers have PPEs. So, there's no either or here. We said from the very beginning that all of those that we're serving at the front lines needed to be protected. And separate from the question of what people said, the bigger question of, was the distribution happening to the NYPD in the number they needed and the timing they needed. When I heard there was some kind of problem or delay, I stepped in to make sure it was corrected. Because remember, on top of everything else, NYPD was short-staffed, a huge number of people were sick. We were asking so much of the officers on duty, it was crucial to provide them with the protection that was available. So, I don't know the specifics of the context you are suggesting, but I can tell you that what everyone had to do was figure out a way to distribute fairly to everyone involved because there was no choosing among people. Both first responders and health care workers needed help.

Second, what the SBA is saying, what Ed Mullins is saying or authorizing is absolutely unacceptable. He should apologize, but he never does. That language is a misogynist and unacceptable. And I've learned long ago that so much of what comes out of the SBA is divisive and meant to set the city back. I don't know how an organization could be so consistently negative towards its own city and towards its own people, but that's what they do. But no, that's absolutely unacceptable. As I said, two wrongs do not make a right. So that language should be condemned. And I think everyone needs to focus on trying to, in the middle of this crisis, be respectful and try to work together and not divide people. So I absolutely condemn that language.

All right, well again there are some things around us to give us pause, but I want to always come back to the larger truth about New York City. And again, I love this city very deeply and I believe in this city, but I'm also a student of history. And I think a lot of people watching right now, you know your history, you've lived here, you've seen this city through so much. I'm amazed when I see not just naysayers, naysayers are part of life. But some people seem to be taking to it very quickly and assuming like it's an unquestioned fact that somehow the city won't be able to overcome this. And I'm stunned by it because I remember what the city went through in the 60’s and 70’s and it really looked like it would be impossible to be anything like we are today. Or if you remember the days and months after 9/1, there was so much doubt. There was so much fear. People said no one would ever go Downtown again. That never, you know, businesses, offices, people wouldn't want to live there. Well, Lord knows the opposite happened. And time and time again, this city comes back.

So, unless someone wants to root against New York City, I would advise people to look at the facts, look at the history and recognize what we have is absolutely irreplaceable. And we are not up against an enemy that is going to be the same forever. Like every other crisis, whether you're talking about the Great Depression or the fiscal crisis, every other crisis we've been through, it had an end point. This one will have an end point too, history tells us that. In fact in this case we're not going to have a vaccine tomorrow, but we're going to have a vaccine. Maybe it's this year, maybe it's next year, maybe it's the year after, but we're going to have a vaccine. And at some point this disease is going to play a very different role in our lives, a much less role. And the strengths of this place will come to the fore again. The fact that even earlier in the discussion today we're talking about restaurant owners trying to figure out how to open up outdoors and create that energy and excitement again in the city. And they're ready to get going as quickly as possible. That speaks volumes. People are not giving up and people will always want to live here. People will always want to come here. People will always want to do business here because it has been proven generation after generation, there is a magic to this place. So don't get lost in the moment. We're going to overcome this too. And one of the things I think history also teaches us is, the way you move forward is through faith and belief and hope. Not through belittling what the people of this place are capable of. I never bet against New Yorkers. New Yorkers have proven themselves time and time again, and we will again, I don't have a doubt in my mind about that. And again, thanks to all of you who are proving it again by the way you're fighting back this disease. A good day with our indicators because of you and a bright future because of you.

Thank you very much.

2020-05-15 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. You know, we're going to look back on these times and we're going to remember them very, very deeply. And I think there's going to be a story written, a story told of what happened here in New York City and how the people of New York City responded to this unprecedented crisis. And I think it's going to be a story that is filled with a lot of heroism, a lot of selflessness, a lot of compassion, a lot of teamwork and certainly it's going to be a story of people adapting in ways we never could have imagined and with lightning speed, because remember 8.6 million people, all of us together here in one place – and not that big a place, meaning there's not a lot of room, but there's a whole lot of people. We had only days to change our lifestyle, to adapt to a whole set of new realities and New Yorkers did amazing things in those days and continue to.

Now, we have a reputation as New Yorkers that were tough, we’re resolute, we want what we want. Maybe you could call that stubborn sometimes, but New Yorkers have shown incredible ability to create, to make sense of a new reality, to work together. And I’ve got to remind you, this happened almost instantly in the scheme of human life. We're talking about people at a matter of days to make these changes. And they did. You did, and you saved lives in the process. There's no doubt about it. We're going to go over our daily indicators, and it's Friday, so we're going to go over the indicators for the whole week and you're going to see once again the fruits of your labor. And this took immense change and immense hard work and it will continue to. But we also know that a lot of that happened when it was a little bit cooler. And as this morning is already indicating, it's getting hotter. We're about to get into the warm weather in a serious way, starting today and this weekend. And that means summer's around the corner and that's a whole new reality. So, we have been planning intensely over the last few weeks how we're going to address the summer and the warmer weather. I'm going to give you some major pieces of that plan today. There'll be more coming, but we know it's a new reality. And look, the tough part of this is it's going to take more adaptation, more strength, more discipline to get through this next phase. But the good part is we've now proven the progress we can make and how quickly we can change our reality. And everyone wants to see some opening up, everyone wants to see a restart. We're all invested in this. This will be a reminder that we have to lean in and fight hard for the weeks ahead to get us to that next phase. And it will be harder in some ways with summer, but we've also learned how to do it. That's the other great advantage. We know what works, we've already gotten used to it, we just have to stick to it now.

Now, this is going to be a different summer than any summer we've experienced in the history of New York City. And a lot of the things that we love about summer – we love barbecues, picnics, ballgames, going to the beach, all sorts of things. Those things are going to be different for the foreseeable future and there's a lot of things that we would look forward to doing that we can't yet do. Doesn't mean that's a judgment on the whole summer yet, we're going to take this day by day, week by week, but we know right now the lot of the things that we would look forward to doing, starting right away, we're just not ready for. But what we can guarantee is the heat is coming no matter what. And last year we saw some very sobering reality around the heat. It was the 10th hottest July in recorded history in New York City, and you remember those particularly hot days. It's not only uncomfortable, it's not only going to be a challenge in terms of social distancing and everything else we're dealing with, it can be dangerous unto itself. The heat itself, we've learned more and more of the hard way, can be dangerous. We're seeing this all over the country, all over the world. Obviously, because of global warming, things are changing and we're seeing a kind of heat we haven't seen before so much and we take it seriously. We understand the lives on the line. So, we're putting forward today the beginning of a plan to protect New Yorkers – these are the first steps, more to come – and this is all about protecting New Yorkers and helping them through the summer as comfortably as possible and as safe as possible.

So, we have three goals for our summer heat plan. First, protect the health and safety of the most vulnerable. Second, give New Yorkers safe, positive cooling options, different in many cases than what we've known in the past. Third, prevent power outages and, God forbid, they happen, be able to respond to them quickly. I'll go through each of them now. Protecting the most vulnerable – okay, so in every crisis we work to save everyone, protect everyone, protect the health, protect their safety, but we know some people bear the brunt in the heat. It is those who have the least ability to provide options for themselves who are the most vulnerable. Who is that? Many times that's our seniors, many times that's lower-income New Yorkers who don't have air conditioning. It's people who can't leave their home even if they wanted to because of disability or other challenges. It's folks who have chronic health conditions, certainly mirrors a lot of what we're seeing in terms of the impact of the coronavirus, but the heat has elements that allow us to hone in on those who need help the most and literally know person by person, department by department, who are some of the people that need the most help, and that's guiding us in our strategy to proactively get help to people and protect them against any heat wave that might be ahead. So, I'm going to go over some of the key elements of how we will protect the most vulnerable New Yorkers. First, we're going to be providing more and more a growing initiative to provide free air conditioners to low-income seniors who need them. Again, remember, senior citizens often with the fewest options, sometimes limited mobility, a lot of times lower income. These are the folks who are in the most dangerous situation. Many have major preexisting health conditions. Knowing that low-income seniors are the most vulnerable, we're going to start initiative right away to get them air conditioners. We're going to have 74,000 air conditioners in the first wave of this initiative, 22,000 of which will go to residents of public housing. We're going to identify the individuals need the most working with our colleagues at NYCHA public housing, at the Department for the Aging, our housing department, HPD and the Human resources administration, so we'll identify those who need help the most, we'll reach out to them, confirm that an air conditioner makes sense for them, and then we'll begin installations. Those installations will start next week. This is a $55 million investment and $20 million of it will come from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority – NYSERDA. And we are very, very appreciative to everyone at NYSERDA, everyone at the State government for their participation in this effort. It’s absolutely going to protect our seniors and help save lives no matter what mother nature throws at us. The remainder of the cost is – it’s an area of a public investment that is eligible for federal reimbursement. We want to make sure that we get those federal grants to offset the cost.

Second, we want to help lower income New Yorkers with summer utility bills. Now, look, first of all, summer utility bills go up in general. This summer, they could go up a lot more because more and more people are staying home sheltering in place. On top of that, you have so many people who have lost their livelihood. So, we want to focus on people who are struggling to pay the bills and we want to make sure that it can stay safe and stay cool and have the air conditioning they need. So, right now, there are almost half a million New Yorkers who get a subsidy for their air conditioning needs from the New York State public service commission – that's fantastic and we appreciate that. We are petitioning the public service commission to double its current commitment and that would mean for the average customer $160 more typically to help them defray the costs and help them have the air conditioning they need. So, for so many working people, lower-income people, particularly people who've lost their paycheck, this could be a lot of what helps them get through the summer both safely and in a way that helps them pay the bills. Now, again, some of this involves partnership with the State and we are very, very appreciative for all the things that we're doing together to protect lives. New York State gets a home energy funding from the cares act. We're going to reach out to the State and see if this is another area we can team up to magnify the amount of people we can reach.

Okay. Now, that's some of the ways that we focus on those who are most vulnerable, those who both in terms of health and safety and, obviously, economically as well need the most help. Let me go to a second goal, which is to have a variety of safe cooling options in the summer for those who need them. Now, look, again, many people have a place where they can stay cool, but there are too many New Yorkers who don't. And we've always had cooling centers and they've been very, very much appreciated by people who needed a place to go, but there are going to have to be different now because of the realities of the coronavirus. So, we've got to keep people cool to protect their lives and their safety, but we also have to have cooling centers that work for this moment in history. So, we're going to be looking at a number of locations, particularly locations that are larger and allow for social distancing and we're going to be making sure they are places where seniors and folks who are vulnerable can go and be comfortable and have some things to do during those hot days. Again, lots of space will be needed. So, some of the traditional cooling centers will work, but some won't. So, we're going to be looking at libraries, we're going to looking at large community centers gyms, sports venues, auditoriums, arenas, you name it – places that will afford us some bigger open spaces that we can turn into cooling centers, of course, with social distancing, with the right use of PPEs and face coverings. And we want to make sure that there's something to do. If people going to be there all day, especially if it's days in a row, we want to make sure there's programming and things for people that do, particularly if it's families coming in with kids, we want good things to keep those kids entertained, but that are also safe. So, that's the cooling centers.

Second, we're going to be focusing on a variety of ways to cool people and keep people hydrated, this is so much, so much a crucial piece of protecting health and safety in a heatwave is hydration. So, first of all, we know that some of the things that people traditionally do, the beaches and the public pools, that's not in the cards right now. Again, we'll see what the future brings, but not right now. But what our Parks Department will do is create misting oasis – I think that's a beautiful phrase – that misting oasis and spray showers. So, new opportunities just to get people some cooling water on them and keep them cool kids in particular in the middle of summer. And there's a plan coming up in the coming days to take a classic New York City option and use it the right way, which is opening up hydrants. There's a way to do that that can provide cooling for a lot of people, a lot of kids in particular on their blocks, but can be done the right way, the safe way and the way that doesn't undermine the work of the FDNY. So, we’ll have more to say on that in the next few days. And we're going to help New Yorkers hydrate in addition to the other types of food we're providing and beverages that we're providing, either by delivery or pickup, we're going to include a lot more of the hydrating kinds of liquids, the Gatorades and the Pedialyte that will help people during this kind of crisis.

Now, I mentioned that we have a real concern as we always do, but we certainly saw it last summer in terms of preventing power outages and being raised respond no matter what. So, this is a crucial piece of the plan and we know that the more people are using electricity, the more strain it puts on the electrical grid and that's a real challenge. Now, this is going to be a strange summer. By every measure, we're going to see a lot less commercial activity. There's obviously not traditional tourism now, which is a big part of what happens in summer the City, there's not a lot of the big events, you know, there's no big events. And so, the things that often took up a lot of energy won't be there, the whole larger commercial reality, even though it may come back in small pieces, nothing like we would normally see in the summer. But on the other hand, a lot more people home, a lot more people using air conditioning. So, we have to be ready and we've been dealing with ConEd on this early to get ready and we've put new protocols in place with ConEd to see the warning signs earlier to predict problems earlier and take appropriate steps. There are a number of steps that can be taken if there is a danger of a blackout, a looming or an outage looming. And we're going to make sure there's tight coordination with ConEd and a lot more communication between ConEd and all of its partners and government, but also with the people. So, we can address these issues early has been a regular series of meetings with ConEd, a new approach to a situation room jointly between ConEd and our emergency management leadership. Our mandate to ConEd is to alert us even the slightest sign of a problem so we can all act together, and we can inform the public. And the public always plays a role here because the public can make adjustments in the way people are using energy and that makes a big, big impact.

Now, one of the things that happened last summer we saw some particular problems in Brooklyn and what's called the Flatbush network of ConEd. ConEd has replaced a lot of the equipment in that network, 70 power line sections replaced, updated the relay switches on 15 sections that supply the grid. Replaced more than half the rubber cable so far with the rest being done by the end of May. So, we insisted and contacted a credit is acting aggressively that this was the place we saw last summer that needed real structural work and that work has been done and is being done. But again, we will be ready for anything and so in terms of response, God forbid we see a problem. We right now have 60 portable generators ready for emergency deployment, we are going to add 22 more large generators that will be available to us for the summer months. We're going to preset pre-stage those around the City so they can be moved quickly to places that need them.

Also, we want to focus on our seniors, we want to focus on nursing homes and adult care facilities. We need to make sure, and this is something we'll work closely with the State on, that every facility has a plan in place and is ready if there's ever an outage. And we're going to work with the State and certainly encourage the State to mandate that every one of these adult facilities and nursing homes has generator capacity ready to go in the event of a crisis. So, we'll be working on this every day as we get into the summer to prepare to protect everyone, but particular focus again on our seniors. So, this is the beginning of the plan more to come, it's as usual going to require all of us to think a little differently, do some things differently, watch out for each other, something New Yorkers do really, really well. Watch out for their fellow New Yorkers. If the results of the last weeks are any indication, people are going to make these adjustments to help each other out and help us move forward the same way we have already.

Okay. Now I want to come to a very sober topic and it's one we've been talking about now over the last week or more and it is one that has continuing to cause tremendous concern to all of us, which is pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome, P.M.I.S. This is about protecting our kids from something that we are seeing differently than we've seen before. And again, a huge amount of energy is being expended in the medical field, not just here in New York City but all over to understand what's happening here and address it as quickly as possible. So, the numbers continue to concern us, we now have 110 confirmed cases, 54 percent of those cases either the child tested positive for COVID-19 or a tested positive for antibodies. And as I've said, we lost one child and I want us all to work together and parents to do everything you possibly can to make sure we don't lose another child in this crisis.

So, we are continuing to build out a citywide ad campaign and information campaign to make sure parents are aware. Health Department is reaching out and holding meetings and webinars with providers to make sure they're aware to get the maximum information back to them to make sure they are vigilant. We have preliminary data on the demographic breakout of the kids affected, but I want to emphasize very preliminary cause it's only 110 cases, that's way too many. But in the sense of trying to understand this challenge, 110 cases is obviously a small number in the scheme of things and that the data is inherently incomplete as you'll see on the ethnic breakout. But we want to give people what we have as we have it. So here you see the age breakout, the number one category has been the youngest kids zero to four. The next category in terms of percentage effected five years old to nine years old. The next category 10 years old to 14 years old. And the category we've seen it the least end is 15 years old and up. So, this is initial information, but we want people to see and be particularly vigilant with our youngest kids. We see as we have seen with the coronavirus itself, more impact on males than females, and that is something that's still obviously being studied. The borough breakout here, the number one impact has been in the Bronx, followed by Queens and then Brooklyn with much less in Manhattan and Staten Island. And then the ethnic racial breakout, which again is incomplete because almost 40 percent of this is still not classified, meaning kids that we're still not getting the details but so far again, sobering – 24 percent African American, 14 percent Latino, 10 percent Asian, 9 percent white. Until we know more about the kids that are not yet identified, we can't give you a fuller picture, but again, very much concerned that this looks like it's tracking the same disparities we've seen throughout this crisis. And that is something have to address very, very aggressively with everything we've got. Now, we are going to go at this with everything we have, but again, this case that we know so far, and this is always based on changing information, but we know early detection matters. We know if it's identified quickly, if a health care provider is alerted quickly, it can make all the difference in the world. And that is why in so many cases, children have been saved and they can recover. But every family member out there, every parent, please you see those warning signs that we've been over. Please, please immediately reach out to a healthcare provider. And again, if you don't have one, call 3-1-1 and we'll connect you to a Health + Hospitals clinician.

Okay. We are spending a lot of time these last weeks preparing for what comes next. And it begins of course, with continuing to move forward on this City becoming safer, healthier because we knocked back this disease. I'll go over the indicators in a moment, but everything we're doing, when we think about a restart, when we think about any lessening of restrictions, start with a health and safety prism. That's where we begin every conversation, that's where we end every conversation. Whatever we do is going to be based on health and safety. Of course, we all want to get back to normal, of course we all want to get people's livelihoods back. It's absolutely crucial and we want to get our lives back. We want to get the spirit of this place, the life of this place, the vitality of this place back. Last night, I was reminded that I met with our arts, culture and tourism advisory council, these are folks who do such amazing work, who have such a big impact on the life of the City who give us so much of what we identify as being great in our City. Also employ a huge number of New Yorkers. So, we want them to come back for every reason and this is going to take real work and real time. This is a sector of our City, of our economy that we're going to have to be inherently careful and slow with some pieces of what make up the sector can come back faster, others slower. But we're going to work together to find solutions and I got to tell you, every time I listened to people talk about what it's going to take to come back, we had a lot of practical suggestions. I get a lot of ideas, I get a lot of cautions about what will work, what won't work. This is exactly what we want from these advisory councils and the folks who are putting all this time and energy and they're doing it to help all of us. I want to thank everyone who was on this advisory council and all the others because it's really helping us to sort these things out and make decisions, but what— I would love you to feel the way I felt last night was the can-do spirit. I talked to folks from all different parts of the arts and culture and tourism sectors and they all said the same thing. Not if, but when we're coming back, we're coming back strong. We’re going to find new ways of doing things. We're going to revive the arts and culture community of this city. It's going to be in some ways different, but it's going to be as good or better. We're going to really focus on our own communities and our own audiences here in New York City because so much of this of course was not just for New Yorkers, but people who would come from all over the world to experience our artistic and cultural institutions and that's going to be different for a while. It will come back eventually, but it's going to be different for a while. But you know what also is going to happen is more and more New Yorkers are going to discover what's right under our noses and a lot of things that maybe we haven't focused on enough, or enjoyed, or experienced enough, we're going to come back to. And that was something that these arts and culture leaders felt very deeply, that a whole new wave of New Yorkers are going to experience all that's here in a new and special manner. So, a hopeful, positive meeting, a lot to be done, but real, real devotion to coming back and coming back strong.

Now, there's been a lot we've talked about in recent days about how to make sure as we continue toward that better situation that we hold on tight to what we've achieved with shelter in place with social distancing, with face coverings, the things that have been working, the things that have been driving down and driving back this disease. A lot of talk about how to do it, how to sustain it, and the role that enforcement plays in that equation – the role of the NYPD. So, we've been talking a lot here and had numerous conversations with Commissioner Shea and his team and a whole lot of conversation with elected officials and community leaders who have offered a lot of insight, a lot of concern, but a lot of insight as well - a lot of suggestions, a lot of ideas. And I think what's become clear in recent days is we're balancing a very complex equation here. Health and safety come first – unquestionably. We're dealing with a pandemic; we're dealing with the biggest healthcare crisis in a century. We have to get it right. Enforcement is always a part of protecting people's safety for time immemorial. But at the same time, we have something very precious that we have achieved here in this city in changing relationship between police and community, in reinventing our approach to policing, in reducing crime because there's more of a bond between police and community. And that's also about protecting people's safety and we need to protect that. So, we do not in any way, shape or form want to slide backwards and undermine that precious bond that's been growing and improving between police and community. As we've talked it through and thought about how to apply a neighborhood policing approach – the strategy that's been working – how to apply it in the middle of a pandemic, it became clear that everyone deserves more clarity. And I said, you know, yesterday that Commissioner Shea and I are responsible to inform the people of the city and our officers, what's expected of everyone and we needed to do that in a way that made sort of clearer, sharper sense to people. And so, I want to talk about a reset in our approach today, which I think will clear things up and make it work better. And as I mentioned, talking to a lot of community leaders, I want to give a special credit to three elected officials in particular offered ideas and insights that really informed a lot of my thinking as we went into this new approach. I want to give a special thanks to Congressmember Yvette Clarke, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, and Assemblymember Tremaine Wright. All of them really gave very constructive ideas and referenced the, the deep trauma that communities have felt over the years and the problems and the history that we have to fight our way out of and why we need to protect the progress we've made in relationship between police and community and come up with a clearer set of instructions. So, the reset will be this, we start with the fundamental notion – the NYPD is here to protect lives, to save lives, and where we see the greatest danger to lives in terms of the Coronavirus and the area where we can enforce is around gatherings, particularly large gatherings. So, that's where we're going to focus, wanting to give people this clarity. And it's literally the bigger the gathering, the more that needs to be done by the NYPD to make sure that gathering either never get started to begin with or is quickly broken up. And again, if we never need to take any additional enforcement action other than the NYPD showing up and people leaving, that's the ideal by far. Summonses are an available tool and they will be given if people do not disperse, but the goal is to not even get to the point of summons, just to make sure that large gatherings don't happen. Large gatherings inherently come with a breakdown in social distancing and the danger of spreading the disease to a lot of people quickly and that's what we have to guard against. That will be the focus of the NYPD. What we will do in other areas is focus all of our energies on educating, on encouraging, on providing free face coverings; that will be done by civilian agencies, that will be done by houses of worship, that be done by community groups and the NYPD will be out there as well, but it's role will be focused again on the positives, giving out those face coverings, giving out reminders to people, helping people to understand what good social distancing looks like. We want to make this a positive approach. We do not want to revive the mistakes of the past. We think we can strike a balance when someone says, I don't have a face covering with me; we want NYPD officers and all these other civilian ambassadors and everyone else to be there with a solution. I think that is the right way to move us forward and strike the balance, but it's also comes with a reminder to all of you that it is a responsibility of all of us to keep doing what we're doing; we have been doing on social distancing and to do it even more. You see a lot of people doing social distancing, right; you see some who are not. Let's all work together to remind people to do it right, especially the people we're closest to in our lives. It's the vast majority of people have face coverings, some don't; sometimes someone just forgets it. That's why we're going to have free distribution, but we got to keep reminding people how important it is and every one of us is responsible and we can create more balance the more responsibility everyone shows in this situation.

Okay, some other important updates in a similar vein of how we're going to maintain proper social distancing, especially as we have a warm weekend coming up. So, in the parks, we've definitely seen some places where overcrowding started to happen. We don't want that to happen. So, in the places where we know we can put physical limitations, we will. So, we'll be limiting access to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, to areas of Hudson River Park, and Piers 45 & 46, and Domino Park in Williamsburg. We're going to create a monitoring approach; NYPD officers, civilian ambassadors, they'll be there, they'll be there early. They'll set parameters on how many people should go into these areas and always be providing guidance, be providing free face coverings. We want to just get ahead of the problem by limiting the number of people in these areas that become crowded and if our approach continues to work, we'll apply it to any place else we need to. And then our social distancing ambassadors, that number is now gone up to 2,260 – that's a lot of City employees who will be out there educating, giving out face coverings. You'll see a lot of presence this weekend. You'll also see in the beaches, which of course are not open; enhanced patrols to keep people safe and to remind people that beaches are not open and to protect against any danger that people will go in the water. You'll see that in the Rockaways, Coney Island, Orchard Beach, and we're going to make sure in terms of addressing those large gatherings, there'll be a dedicated NYPD car in every police precinct that will focus always on being able to get to wherever a large gathering might be to make sure that situation is addressed.

Okay, now we go to the daily indicators and again. On Fridays, we look at the big picture and we see some tremendous progress overall. Today's report, not everything we want it to be for just today, but the overall progress – again, I'm going to keep saying so impressive, so consistent and so much because of all that you are doing. So, the turnaround, you look at this chart, it's breathtaking. We've been consistently below in daily indicator number one, number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, consistently below 100 now for a meaningful amount of time. And again, that's 800 fewer people per day being admitted compared to the end of March – that's just breathtaking. So, that's the good news. The less good news is today's update. Unfortunately, we have a situation where things have gone up from a 59 to 78. So, that is not what we're looking for – still a low number overall, but wrong direction. Daily indicator number two, this is the toughest one to move because it is about folks who are the most sick and fighting for their lives. Again, progress unquestionably – you look at that chart over 300 people, fewer in ICUs than at the peak, that's a very good thing, but still a lot of people fighting for their lives. The good news today, the numbers down from 517 to 506. And then percentage of people citywide testing positive for COVID-19 – amazing progress – again, we've seen consistent improvement, but not everything we need. We still have to keep going. And again, today, wrong direction, only by one point, but wrong direction from 11 percent to 12 percent.

So, concluding that – not the day we wanted today. We've had some very, very good days lately and we've also had some days that were imperfect. Overall direction, absolutely right, but to get to that restart, we need to go further. So, take it personally. That means every time you practice social distancing, every time you put on the face covering, every time you help make sure there are not large gatherings. And if you see or hear anything about a large gathering, please call it into 3-1-1 immediately. We need to do more. We're clearly making progress, but we need to do more to get to that next step. Okay, few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Okay. With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and, as always, please remind me of the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Good morning, everyone. We’ll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we have Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze, OEM Commissioner Criswell, Social Services Commissioner Steve Banks, and Dr. Eric Wei, Vice President and Chief Quality Officer of New York City Health + Hospitals also on the line. First question today goes to Julia from the New York Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. And a happy belated birthday and anniversary to you and the First Lady. I would have extended the well wishes yesterday and Friday, but I wasn't called on. So, I'd like to get to my two questions now about the Health Commissioner. One, you said yesterday you had no idea about the exchange between Dr. Barbot and Chief Monahan, but Chief Monahan said yesterday he told City Hall immediately after the incident and Barbot called him 30 minutes later to apologize. So, who at City Hall knew about this and why weren't you informed? And then, you also said yesterday you would speak to Barbot and Monahan to determine next steps. Have you had those conversations? If so, what were the results? If not, when will you be speaking with them?

Mayor: On the first part, Julia, I don't know why I wasn't informed, but I wasn't informed. On the second part, I've talked to Chief Monaghan and I will be speaking to Commissioner Barbot this weekend.

Moderator: Next we have David Evans from ABC.

Question: Good morning, Mayor. I wanted to ask you about two different things. First of all, the reset with the police enforcement that you talked about on social distancing and the expansion at least into Sheep Meadow. I take it [inaudible] what you're saying is that police are no longer going to be doing the one-on-one enforcement, telling people you need to wear a mask, you can't go into the subway, etc. The second question that I have is about the Governor overnight extending the stay at home order, the emergency declaration until June 13th. When did you first hear about it? How did you hear about it and what does that mean? I mean, if you on June 7th say we have all seven categories, we meet those numbers, can you go ahead and open or are you going to have to wait down until 13th?

Mayor: So, Dave, thank you. On the second one, again, we've been closely coordinated with the Governor's team throughout. There's been tremendous agreement on the strategic approach. And I know the Governor takes a cautious approach, as do I. I've said that our indicators consistently both the State and the City ones are pointing us towards the first half of June. But we're – that's when we get to the point where we can even think about relaxing restrictions. Anything we do would be in close coordination with the State. And look, if conditions suddenly became more favorable, we'd have that conversation with the State and obviously we and they could make adjustments. But, right now, I think we're all aligned that the first half of June is the earliest opportunity for even some lessening of restrictions and we'll work together on that. On the police department – yes, I think you have it right, Dave. We are going to focus the police consistently on gatherings, particularly the largest gatherings. We want to make sure that people understand when you gather, you create a danger for the people around you and for the whole city and that's where the police can have the biggest health and safety impact, that's where the focus will be. There’s actually been a lot of good work done in recent weeks, stopping gatherings before they start, getting them to clear out quickly – that's where we're going to focus. But the more individual work, we're going to, again, have a lot of ambassadors out there, a lot of community-based organizations. And a lot of the elected officials made this point – it was a very fair point, that there's a positive approach that can work, and the NYPD can play an obvious role in that too, reminding people, giving out the face coverings. But it's a better way to approach things to focus on where the biggest health and safety problems are and continue the positive collaborative relationship between the NYPD and the community on so many other fronts.

Moderator: The next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to ask when the last time you spoke to Commissioner Barbot was? And, if it was a relatively long time ago, why haven't you spoken to her? We're in the middle of a pandemic, one would think you would need to speak to your health commissioner certainly daily, if not more often.

Mayor: Yeah. Yoav, I've been speaking with the Commissioner constantly throughout this. And I'll remind you, we have a team of health care leaders and I am speaking to an any number of them each and every day. A couple of days ago was the last time I talked to the Commissioner. And again, we're going to have a more detailed discussion this weekend. And this has been going on for months now, we've all been communicating constantly.

Moderator: Next is Al Jones from 1010 WINS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. A two-parter – New Jerseys is set to open its beaches here in about a week. You mentioned though that beaches in the city are not in the card at this time for the summer – why? And then the other one is, estimates as many as 80, 85, 87 percent of restaurants have been unable to pay their full or partial rent this past month. Is there a real danger that when New York City opens or reopens or a lot of restaurants won't?

Mayor: Al, having now talked to a number of restaurant bar owners over the last few days, this is a distinct danger. And, you know, they are realistic about the fact that they don't want to see anything happen that is not about the health and safety of the people of this city, or their customers, or their workers. So, they have been super realistic about job-one is health and safety. And, in fact, I think I mentioned a number of them said they don't feel they can come back effectively until they can get to higher capacity and have fewer restrictions to create the right atmosphere. So, this is an ongoing conversation, but I certainly don't hear people saying, hey, let us rush back prematurely and do anything that might undermine health and safety just for our bottom line. In fact, I think restaurant and bar owners have been very, very responsible. But, unquestionably, some of them are in real danger. And, you know, we're just going to do our best to get them back the first available opportunity and help them in every way we can, but it's all going to be health and safety first. On the beaches, we're just not ready. We're just not ready. We are – as you saw today, you know, great overall progress, not enough progress to meet our goals or the State's goals for when we can reopen. And it's painful, because we would all love to be able to go to the beach with the hot weather, but it's not safe yet. Beaches come with a whole lot of people getting together. We saw what happened in California, in Florida – people started just immediately doing what they had always done. It's very hard to create distancing. It takes traveling to the beach, which means there goes the notion of only keeping to essential travel. That's something that we're just not ready for. We're going to look at it constantly, we're going to be in close touch with the State, and the day may come, but we're not there yet.

Moderator: Next is Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Good morning, Mayor. Good morning, everyone on the call.

Mayor: Hey, Andrew. How you doing?

Question: Good. Hanging in there. Happy it’s Friday. Two questions – first of all, sort of following up on what Al just asked you, do you think Governor Murphy is making a mistake in New Jersey to open up the New Jersey beaches? Why is it safe for them but not safe in New York? And the second question is, Dr. Katz wrote an email on March 10th, which said the city is better off staying open, schools open, people keep taking the subway. That email and judgment has now proven to be incorrect. Given that, what do you make of what he recommended then when California officials at that same time were already telling people to lock it down and not go out?

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew, look, first of all, I want to remind people what Dr. Katz and his whole team at health and hospitals did – they have been among the heroes of this crisis, holding the line in our public health care system that bore the brunt and held no matter what. So, this disease we all now know probably was deep seated in New York City before any of our health officials knew it, federal or local, and it was coming on like a freight train no matter what, but the one thing we knew is we had to protect our hospitals and make sure they function and make sure they save lives. And I think Dr. Katz and his team at health and hospitals did an absolutely extraordinary job in achieving that goal. I think everyone's going to look back in the medical community and say they understood some things and they didn't understand some things. I think there's a whole host of medical professionals who were basing their judgements on what they knew at the time, but it's been an ever-changing reality with this disease. So, I have seen in the work he has done – and I judge people by their deeds – he's done so much to save lives in the city, I have a lot of confidence in him. And we're all learning – our health care team and everyone's been learning about this disease all the time and adjusting as we get new information.

Moderator: Next –

Mayor: I'm sorry, the beaches. I'm sorry, Andrew, I owe you with the other piece. Andrew on – look, I think the world of Phil Murphy, he's an extraordinary leader, and he has a very different state. New Jersey's certainly been hit hard by this disease, but New York State and particularly New York City has been the epicenter. We are the biggest city in the country, one of the most densely populated places in the United States of America. Our people don't get around by car. I think it's fair to say about New Jersey – the vast majority of people in New Jersey travel by car, that's not true in new Yorkers. For people to start going to beaches it means getting on buses and subways. You know, our beaches, they have a huge long coastline, arguably ways that could spread people out. You can't spread people out in places like Coney Island that get jammed packed. So, it's just a different reality. We have different realities even in our own state. But New York City is New York City, and we're going to be slow and careful and cautious to get this right and to protect lives.

Moderator: Next is Emily from NY1.

Question: Mayor de Blasio, how are you? How is everyone on the call?

Mayor: How are you doing?

Question: I have a question please for Commissioner Banks on behalf of my colleague Courtney Gross. I hope was hoping he could speak to the photos we saw via The City of the presumably homeless men sleeping in the stairwell of the 30th Street intake center, maskless, close together, and not distancing at all.

Mayor: Yeah. And Emily, I'll lead into Steve and say, I have not seen the photos, but I've heard it summarize. It sounds absolutely unacceptable and that's not something we're going to do allow. We're all trying to deal with an unprecedented situation, but that is clearly not acceptable, and the people who work there have to do better, and if they need help we have to get them help. Commissioner Banks?

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: I would just echo what the Mayor said, Emily. This is unacceptable. I have spent my entire career making sure that the City provides beds for anyone who needs a safe and secure setting, and that's our commitment. Those photos don't represent our work. It doesn't matter that eventually those individuals got shelter. The fact that they had to wait under those circumstances is absolutely unacceptable. And we've refined our intake process to make it more streamlined, efficient, ensuring that the staff have what they need. I would say at Bellevue, just to remind everyone, that we've cut the number of beds at Bellevue in half and we'll do more so that we can make sure that when clients come to us we can promote social distancing. And, of course, as you know, we've been seeing thousands of people out of single-adult [inaudible] shelters into hotels and we've been connecting clients directly off the streets into commercial hotels who have been able to set up stabilization and Safe Haven beds, and we're going to keep doing that. But those photographs, to me, are heartbreaking, they don't represent our work, and we have to do better and we will do better.

Moderator: The next is Joe Anuta from Politico.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Joe, how are you doing?

Question: Not too bad. I had a quick follow up on the beach as well. At the – there was a council hearing yesterday and Mark Treyger who represents Coney Island said he was petrified about this summer and he seemed to say that he was still a little unclear about what he should be telling constituents and sort of what the city's policy is. Can you go into a little more detail about beaches being closed means, maybe there's no lifeguard, but what happens with people just show up? And then my second question is on a NYPD. Most of the videos that I think you and the Commissioner has said – has been, you know, problematic had to do with social distancing enforcing and not mask wearing, but could see that one video subway. So, is the NYPD taking any other I guess, are they undergoing any more changes about how they enforce social distancing specifically?

Mayor: Yeah, Joe, I – the fact is that some of the specific encounters involved, that had been on video, some of them actually weren't first and foremost about social distancing. They were about other kinds of issues and offenses and this is all I think being kind of a little confused and that's why it was really important for us to set the record straight. You know the NYPD has a huge job to do keeping this place safe. A crime has been down overall, but there's still plenty unfortunately that has to be addressed as well as all sorts of quality of life issues. NYPD will continue to do that as they always have, and again, they've driven down crime now consistently over the last six plus years and that will continue.

But in terms of addressing the pandemic, first of all New Yorkers overwhelming have done the right thing themselves and we are asking people to take responsibility themselves. We're asking people to work within their families, among their friends to really be reminders to each other of what we have to do right. But we're going to send out all these civilians and all these community-based folks to do a lot of the education and a lot of the exhortation and the giving out of the free face coverings and all that. Also, NYPD will give people reminders and give people face coverings, but NYPD's best efforts would be dealing with the things that are real danger, which is the larger gatherings.

So, what you're going to see is that's going to be the focus for enforcement, and again, the perfect enforcement is if anyone tries a gathering, NYPD shows up and people immediately disperse. That's what we're looking for. Worst case, we're giving a summonses if people won't disperse, but we're not going to have the NYPD focused on, you know, two people together or three people together. We're going to focus on when it starts to be more than a handful of people and we're not going to be having the NYPD enforcing on face coverings. That will be a positive approach where just you’re going to constantly see free face coverings given out. So hopefully that will clarify everyone's relationship to each other and help us get the best result while also really protecting the progress we've made in the relationship between police and community.

Moderator: Next is Mark Morales –

Mayor: I’m sorry, I'd also have got the beaches one there. I'm having a beach issue today. Joe, so to the Councilman's point. Here we are today and obviously normally beaches would not be open until Memorial Day and we're still not there yet. So, right now, we're in the reality that we would be any time we're at this point in the year pre-Memorial Day. We will come out with further guidance because we need to keep people safe first and foremost. So, we have two safety issues. Now first and foremost, addressing the pandemic. We can't have crowds, we can't have gatherings, we can't have people going to the beach, we can't have the boardwalk get crowded, we've got to protect against the problems that come with people being in too close proximity in this pandemic.

Second, we know there's a danger in terms of people trying to go into the water, particularly young people trying to go in the water, so we have a lot of patrols out to deal with that now. But the way we're going to sustain that in the next weeks and months, we're going to have more to say on that in the next few days about the measures we will take initially to keep people safe and to create a clear set of boundaries and rules, and then that can evolve over time if the situation with the disease improves and we get to a point of reevaluating the beaches. So, we're going to have a way we start the summer that may not be the same way we end the summer, but a more specific guidance coming to the people in the city on the beaches shortly.

Moderator: The next is Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Hey everyone, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Mark, how are you doing?

Question: Good. Good. So, I have two questions. The first was for the OEM Commissioner, I wanted to ask about those refrigerated trucks. What's the status of them? Are they still in town? Have they left? You know, where are they at, at the moment? The other I had was about contact tracing. And where does that stand right now and the build-up of that program is sort of a joint operation with Health + Hospitals and the Department of Health or is this – where does that stand?

Mayor: Thank you, Mark, I’ll answer your second question and then turn to Deanne Criswell on your first question. So the contact tracing effort again is bigger, more complex, a much greater operational challenge than anything we've seen in the history of contact tracing in this city. So the way we structured is to say we need a massive citywide apparatus testing, tracing, for those who need a hotel room and all the support systems, the ability to get them to that and support them in that. This is unlike anything we've seen before. Previously, and we saw at the beginning of this pandemic, you had a small number of Health Department folks who went out and did very good work on the tracing and the follow-up, but we did not have a massive testing apparatus. It was quite limited. We did not have a massive test tracing apparatus. We did not have an apparatus for giving people hotels and food and laundry and everything. This is an entirely different reality than we've ever experienced.

So, it's led by Health + Hospitals because they are a huge operational entity with all of the strengths that go with being a huge operational entity. They are also an independent agency, which allows them to do a lot of things, contracts and other things much faster than a Mayoral Agency. Department of Health is bringing its extraordinary expertise to the equation. A number of key people from Department of Health have gone into this effort working with Health + Hospitals. So, all that expertise is being brought to the table for maximum impact and as I've said, a number of other agencies, Department of Buildings, Design and Construction, DoITT, our IT agency, all of them working together as one team to set this up. In terms of status, we now have hundreds of people who have been trained and they're going to start their work in the coming days. We'll hit the thousand mark of people ready to go by certainly the end of this month. By the beginning of June, we're going to get up to about 2,500 and then build as needed to there potentially as high as five or 10,000. Deanne on the refrigerated trucks?

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Emergency Management: Hi, good morning, Mark. So, we're still working very closely with the Medical Examiners’ Office and we have refrigerated trucks located at each of the hospitals throughout the city. We also have refrigerated trucks supporting our operations at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. We will continue to have these here in the city to support operations for as long as we need them. But we are looking – and we do have some still in staging if we have a need for additional trucks in the future. But, right now, again, working very closely with the Medical Examiners’ Office and our hospitals to make sure we have the right amount of resources available to support these operations.

Moderator: Next is James Ford from PIX11.

Question: Happy Friday, Mayor. We've made it.

Mayor: Happy Friday. It's a - even in the pandemic, we still love Fridays.

Question: Oh, that's for sure. We’re adding more days, which is related to my – to this question, which is kind of a follow-up to a Dave Evans question. With this stay at home order in place through June 13th, can you give us a sense of what that means for New Yorkers? Like what, what will our lives look like for the next four weeks compared to the last two months? And is it possible that the city could maybe reopen, start be reopening before then? Also, do you want to share about the stimulus bill vote today in the House?

Mayor: On the stimulus, very quickly. I mean, the House did exactly the right thing and I want to commend Speaker Pelosi, Chair Nita Lowey, Hakeem Jeffries who is one of the key members of the House Democratic Leadership, Congressman from Brooklyn and all the House delegation from the city. They did outstanding work. I talked to all of them constantly. They did an amazing job putting together a package that actually represents what New York City and New York State need to get back on our feet, and we're talking about a two-year package, you know, the years after that will matter as well. But for something that clearly talks about dealing with our lost revenue and getting us back to a whole place where we can move forward. This is a great step forward. So I want to see them vote today, move it to the Senate and I'd like to see the Senate act quickly and really recognize what is going to take for us to recover.

On the executive order and the timeline, again, I've been saying this for days now, our trajectory both in terms of the indicators we go over daily and what we're seeing from the state indicators clearly it was putting us into the first half of June no matter what. The minute you get to that moment where you hit all your indicators, that's when you can start to make decisions on lessening restrictions. Governor and I have been very united in a cautious, careful approach and we both believe fundamentally in avoiding that boomerang. That's the thing that would set us back for a much longer period of time if that were to happen. It has happened elsewhere. We're not going to let it happen here. So that timeline fits what we're thinking. I do not foresee changes before that. But if anything, if we had a sudden movement in the right direction and we thought it was sustainable again, the Governor and I, our teams would talk, we could always reevaluate. We're always looking at the numbers, but nothing moves until these numbers all hit together in the right direction, hit the right goals and then you have to hold it. Remember, it's natural we think in sort of like a perfect straight line and you know, we get better and we reduce restrictions and we get better, we reduce more restrictions, we get better – that's what we want. If you do that the wrong way, then the disease starts to reassert in a real major way and then you are clamping back down. Some places, James actually went to tighter restrictions later than where they even started meaning they thought they had beat the disease, they loosened up too quickly. They not only went back to the previous restrictions, they added on many more. We just can't let that happen. So slow, steady, cautious, smart, and the first half of June is when we'll make these decisions in close coordination with the state.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. Next is Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing man?

Question: You hear me, okay.

Mayor: Yeah. How you doing?

Question: Good, good. I'm wondering, is your administration investigating any potential rule breaking or violations of the law connected with the NYPD, apparently trying to commandeer for itself, PPE intended for health care workers?

Mayor: Matt, I have no indication that happened. Every time there was a concern it was raised up the chain of command. As I said, I intervened to make sure that NYPD officers had the PPEs they needed because we needed to make sure our first responders and our health care workers were served and at various points there were substantial reserves available, and the real issue was putting together an extraordinary operation to get more PPEs and get them quickly, and that's what happened, and I want to commend to everyone in Emergency Management the team that Emma Wolfe has put together that did outstanding work finding PPEs one way or another, everywhere, looking all over the world. But it was not acceptable to me that our police officers and other first responders wouldn't have the PPEs they needed when they needed them. So anything that was done was done through chain of command and specific decisions and directions as far as I know.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good Gersh. But I miss your recipe updates.

Question: Oh, I'm having – my bread is having a dough-saster right now, but that's just a bad pun and it's a terrible situation.

Mayor: Gersh, you coined a new phrase for us.

Question: My tabloid background, I guess. I do want to say Mr. Mayor, thank you because I did test positive for coronavirus antibodies yesterday because of one of your tests, so I appreciate that.

Mayor: All right, and I guess do you say congratulations in that case? I don't know, but I'm glad you have clarity.

Question: My kids are treating me like Typhoid Mary, but nonetheless yesterday several members of the City Council questioned the NYPD budget in a time when you have cut the budgets to other agencies including funding for some of DOT’s Vision Zero work, which I know is important to you. So, this question gets into transportation in this way: the NYPD has been accused of poorly enforcing public space and also has a huge role even under normal circumstances in managing traffic in this city, which are jobs that are done by Departments of Transportation in many other major cities. So, I wonder if you've considered transferring these current police functions to other agencies that could do it more efficiently and even maybe with less controversy?

Mayor: I believe you are leading the witness, Gersh, but I just disagree with the construct respectfully. I look at what's happened in the last six years of Vision Zero and I remind everyone, with deepest respect to all my predecessors, this administration decided to do something absolutely radical and put Vision Zero in place, and I remember the first months, I remember the naysayers, I remember the people said it would be politically unpopular, it would be impossible, it wouldn't work, it would be too controversial and I'm very proud to say we forged ahead anyway and in fact built it bigger each year and overwhelmingly Vision Zero has worked and Gersh I think you will remember even before he became our first Police Commissioner in this administration, Bill Bratton talked about the importance of the NYPD playing on a more directed energetic focus role in stopping these fatal crashes and protecting lives in terms of traffic and he, along with Polly Trottenberg and her team at DOT, folks at TLC, folks at City Hall, we all built this vision together and there has been consistent success with Vision Zero in large measure because NYPD has been at the table and an active full participant throughout. So that's not changing. In fact, I'm a big believer, you've heard me say it in more and as we get back to normal, we're going to go right back to this. You know more and more and more NYPD enforcement on speeding, on failure to yield, more speed cameras, which have proven to be so effective, and we've been building them out around schools. No, we've got a strategy that's overwhelmingly been working, we're going to stick to it. We're going to build upon it. The only reasons for delays lately have been because of work that wasn't happening, couldn't happen under these conditions. But once we get a little bit better, we're going right back to all the Vision Zero physical work, and on the PD budget.

Now we still have real issues to address in terms of crime. We're not veering away from a strategy that’s worked, we’re the safest big city in America for a reason. We're not going to move away from strategies that have been effective. What we will have to do is make very, very different decisions if we have the kind of stimulus that's coming out of the House of Representatives, if that actually gets passed by the Senate, the city can be whole, the city can move forward. We can fund a lot of crucial things and necessary services. But if we do not get that stimulus or if they cut it to ribbons as some things that you've heard of Mitch McConnell say would suggest, then the NYPD budget, the FDNY budget, the DOE budget, the health agencies budgets, everything is threatened. All agencies are threatened. The kinds of – I think sometimes people hear something like, we're in the hole $7.4 billion and it's some kind of pure abstraction. I don't blame anyone for that. $7.4 billion in lost revenue, and counting and growing means every single agency will suffer and suffer big and therefore the people will suffer, and that's what we have to stop, and that's where I'm going to put a lot of energy in these coming days into working to get the US Senate to actually pass the stimulus we need.

Okay. As we conclude, so it's perfect segue actually off of that question because the reality we have to deal with is the pandemic came out of nowhere, became the dominant reality in our lives, but the rest of our lives didn't stop. And striking that balance has been a supreme challenge, but it's something we'll work on every day. Getting it right – we still have to protect people on our streets. Vision Zero is just as important today as it was before the pandemic. Quality policing, effective policing, precision policing, neighborhood policing, just as effective as they were and just as important as they were before, and the world to come as we get back to normal, all of these strategies need to come back strong.

What I announced today in terms of a reset of our approach to the NYPD's role in enforcement in light of this pandemic comes from the fact that we have to strike a balance – remembering the things that have worked. Neighborhood policing has worked, deepening the bond between police and community has worked. Helping to overcome that horribly divided past, helping to overcome the structural racism that pervaded this city and every city moving forward reinventing policing so it would be more effective and more grounded in our neighborhoods. These are things that work and these are the things we're going to continue with. So, this reset allows us to ensure that that fundamental approach will continue while also recognizing that there are new dangerous from the pandemic that must be addressed, and that particularly comes with the gatherings, especially the larger gatherings. That's where NYPD’s focus will be. But we can do both. We can strike that balance, and in fact I have particular confidence because it all comes back to you. Everything we do comes back to what you do as an individual, what you do as a family. No time in our history I think has that been clearer than this pandemic where we see your efforts making the city safer and better and you have a lot more to do. We all have a lot more to do to get to where we want to go. But it's also because of you that we became safer over these years and became the safest big city in America. You working with our police, our police working with you. We need that to deepen and continue and that's what we will do in this city. So, the one thing I always have confidence in is the people in New York City, and I hope you feel confidence in yourselves after what you've achieved when you saw those charts earlier. I hope everyone felt something warm inside, that was because of you. Now, let's take it the next step, together.

Thank you.

2020-05-15 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. And it is time now for our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our lines are open at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian.

Lehrer: I see that you announced earlier today that, absent serious danger, the NYPD will not take enforcement actions for failing to wear a mask or a face covering. And I assume this comes after the very disturbing video of the arrest of a mother with a very young child, as she was apparently leaving a subway station that she was being evicted from for not having her mask on properly. Was this a response to that?

Mayor: Well, it was a response to a number of things we saw. I mean, that was obviously a very troubling video and there's been a number of situations where I think there was just a lack of clarity and that contributed to a dynamic we do not want to see emerge. We've worked for six years to improve the relationship between police and community and really get away from all of the problems of the past that clearly plague us still. But, you know, I think it's fair to say when I came into office there were profound difficulties between police and community largely because of the unconstitutional and overuse of stop-and-frisk. And we’ve worked constantly to change that paradigm and draw community and police closer and create a neighborhood policing philosophy, and de-escalation training, and body cameras and, you know, get rid of marijuana arrests and so many other things.

This moment, a lot of community leaders, a lot of elected officials from communities of color came forward and told me they were very concerned that we might be at a moment where we started to lose some of that progress and that that affected my thinking deeply. And certainly, I know Commissioner Shea understood that and cared about that deeply as well. But also, we looked at the question of efficacy. I mean the vast majority of New Yorkers are practicing social distancing and are wearing their face coverings. And the answer I think is the positive rather than the negative. We're just going to do massive face covering distribution. We're going to have more and more civilian ambassadors out, people educating people, warning people, more and more community-based organizations, faith-based organizations doing that locally, and reserve the work of the NYPD for the most dangerous piece of the equation, which is gatherings, particularly large gatherings. The larger the gathering, the more danger it presents to the health of everyone involved and then everyone else who might be affected by people getting infected at the gathering and bring it home to their families and people in their lives. So, that's where the focus will be, not on these individual situations. I think that's going to be healthier.

Lehrer: How do you explain the backsliding on your watch of progress with the NYPD? For so much of your tenure, you had Police Commissioner O’Neill who had, you know, a reputation as being a progressive, community-oriented police commissioner. I'm not as familiar with Commissioner Shea who hasn't been there that long. But this was one of your priorities from the start. You just acknowledged that community leaders have been saying there's been backsliding and now –

Mayor: Respectfully, Brian, that's your word. I'm not using that [inaudible] –

Lehrer: What was your – what was your word?

Mayor: I'm saying there was concern that this is something that's been going on for a few weeks, Brian. I want to really push back and say we've had neighborhood policing, de-escalation training, all of these things, deep seated for years. The entire composition of the NYPD has changed. It's now majority people of color and increasingly New York City residents. Everything has been changing. The first month or so of this pandemic in March, we did not hear particular concerns around policing, and we've only heard them in the last few weeks. There's no question, the philosophies, the approach haven't changed at all. But what there was, was a lack of clarity. I think our officers were affected by a lack of clarity of where they were supposed to be putting their attention, how to deal with a different situation, a different set of ground rules, and community members and leaders were concerned that if we didn't address it, it could start to cause some diminution of the progress. That's where I'm very clear, we heard it, we're making this – we're clarifying the instructions to the officers, clarifying the expectations for the public. But I do not for a moment – for God's sake, almost six-and-a-half years of incessantly changing the relationship between police and community, that is not undermined in just a few weeks, but if we didn't address it, there was a fear that it could be and that's why we took action.

Lehrer: But then how do you explain the fact that there've been now at least three, that I know of, videos of these bad arrests and those just are the ones where there happens to be a bystander shooting video and the numbers that show overwhelmingly the arrests for social distancing related things are of people of color – when it looks like a pattern like that and you talk about a few bad apples, you have to ask the question, is there something wrong with the barrel?

Mayor: No. And, Brian, I respect you and I respect the question but I think you are not reflecting the facts, respectfully. And I've said this publicly and I'm just going to call out any time I think people are offering an analysis without the benefit of facts. There's 8.6 million people here. There's 36,000 cops. The vast majority of interactions have been positive. In fact, there's plenty of examples we've seen during this pandemic of cops saving people's lives, helping people out in all communities, giving out face coverings, all sorts of things. And there's a handful of videos that have been very deeply problematic and unacceptable, but we are not going to – if I put it the other way around, I think you have to acknowledge the few bad apples and not condemn all the people who are working every day trying to get it right, trying to work with communities. Do not condemn them, Brian, do not undermine their efforts, do not undermine the amount of change that's been made.

And you may not know Commissioner Shea as well, and I respect that earlier point, but he was one of the architects of neighborhood policing along with Jimmy O'Neill and Bill Bratton, and he's been part of our leadership team from the very beginning of the administration. So, no, I don't want people – the number of arrests has been so few. The number of summonses since this crisis began, fewer than 10 summonses per day in the entire city of 8.6 million people. So, there's disparity and I don't accept the disparity. And I made that clear and the Commissioner understands it and we're going to work to fix it. But let's get really clear. When there's been fewer than 10 summonses a day that you cannot indict 36,000 members of the NYPD and the whole vision of neighborhood policing based on so little activity when you have to put that against everything that's been done in six-and-a-half years. So, I just fundamentally disagree. But it was right that when people said, ‘Hey, watch out, if we don't make the right adjustment, it could start to undermine the progress we made’. That was a fair critique. I heard it. Dermot heard it, we acted on it.

Lehrer: And when – last thing on this – when Commissioner Shea said this week that there was a danger of violence against the police and he referenced past assassinations of police officers and assassination attempts, was that going too far? People need to be able to raise their voices in protest when there's something to protest without at every turn being, saying this is inciting people to anti-police violence.

Mayor: Well, I understand that concern for sure. And let me first affirm the positive of what you're saying. Absolutely, people need to be able to raise their voices. And it is crucial that if something's not good enough, people speak up because I'm listening. I know Dermot is listening, we'll do things about it. So, a hundred percent need that democratic process, the checks and balance that comes with a healthy democratic debate, and the cell phone videos are part of what has educated everyone about things that need to be better and about some individuals who are not doing their job right. And that's important, that's crucial. He was saying something else – and I think, Brian, this is a case where the Commissioner really spoke from the heart, probably a, you know, five, six minute statement that was very, very thoughtful and talked about the things that needed to be fixed from the past, the things we're doing now that are working, the things we have to do better.

But he also made clear that there has to be an understanding that we all are in this together. And I think that was what he was trying to get at. That when the concerns are raised, we have to raise them in the spirit of we're all trying to figure this out together and that's what the vast majority of people do. And then we have seen some people along the way who have used rhetoric that's just profoundly violent and negative towards police officers across the board no matter who they are, no matter what they do. And that is dangerous unto itself. And he's raised that because he has seen these tragedies happen to officers as well. So, I wish in this city we could take the kinds of steps in terms of policing, in terms of our mindset that we are seeing us all do together in this pandemic. In this pandemic, people are actually working together as one team of 8.6 million people. We've come a long way on policing and police-community relations but to really break through to the next level, everyone's got to decide that we're going to work this out together. And that's what we've tried to build a foundation for in neighborhood policing.

So, critiques, yes, and in fact, a lot of the leaders I mentioned some particularly this morning, Borough President Eric Adams from Brooklyn and Congressmember Yvette Clarke from Brooklyn and also from Brooklyn, the Assemblymember Tremaine Wright, all reached out to me and the Commissioner and raised very specific ideas, very specific changes that they thought would work, helped us understand where there was a disconnect and we listened to those suggestions and acted on them. I think there's a lot of people in the city trying to get it right, trying to move us forward. And if we take the spirit that has pervaded in this pandemic and we apply it to the next wave of change we need in policing, I think we can actually get somewhere.

Lehrer: Celeste in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Celeste.

Question: Yes. Good morning, Mr. Mayor and thank you to all the work that everybody is doing with the city. I just would like to inform you, I am a home attending and a homecare. I take care of elderly age 90 years old and my agency has never, never give me gloves or masks or not even a call to see how I'm doing. They're not even have a form for us to connect with the agency because they are close and everybody's working from the office and when they call, the call shows no ID so we can call back. They want us to communicate with them via email and not everybody know how to use that. So, they supposed to have a guideline for all these agency, and provide the equipment for us to work, the PPE, we don't have nothing. The family is providing me, the gloves and the masks. Thank you very much.

Mayor: Hey Celeste, I want to make sure you give your information to WNYC so that we can understand what happened here and how to fix it. Celeste, what is the name of the agency you work for?

Question: The first Chinese American Consul on Canal Street.

Mayor: Okay. And Celeste are you a member of a labor union?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: Which union are you a member of?

Question: 1199, I think.

Mayor: 1199, okay, good. Celeste, give your information to WNYC. We will follow up with the union. We'll follow up with the agency. No, this is – to me it makes no sense and it's unacceptable if any agency is not constantly checking on its employees to make sure they're safe and helping to get them what they need. The union, we've had a great working relationship with them. We've been working with them to get PPEs out to members, so, let's make sure you get connected to that. We've also been doing testing initiatives with the union for union members and that's another thing you can take advantage of. But I would say to all the home care agencies, step up, communicate. And Celeste is right, two-way communication, allow the workers to also ask questions and bring forward their needs. And any agency that needs help, we will certainly work with them. But it's also, these are private companies, it's their responsibility to step up and protect their workers. And Celeste, we’ll follow up to make sure you are protected.

Lehrer: Alright, Celeste, we'll take your contact information off the air. Hang on. Ralph in Brooklyn Heights, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Ralph.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. And I'm going to take the opportunity to thank you and all other City employees during this time to keep up the services as best as they can. My question is actually regarding the emergency crisis management in terms of the near future, for the next three to six months when we're going to see the rent moratorium expire all over the city and the state, and we will see a rising wave off evictions and basically also losing lots of the stabilized apartments due to evictions. And I was just wondering when you're going to start addressing this crisis and was hoping that the city would not take the same approach as with the corona crisis and wait until it's at our doorstep to address it.

Mayor: I appreciate it very much, Ralph. It's a very, very important question. First of all, one of the things I want to see the State do, and I've called for it, is to extend that moratorium on evictions, not just to whatever point we determined is the end of this crisis, but then at least two months beyond. We need to make sure that we have maximum opportunity to protect people, to get them back on their feet, to get them in a situation where they will not be threatened with eviction. And of course, anyone who is threatened with eviction, we'll provide legal support to. And before this pandemic, the legal support we were providing for free to people facing evictions had basically cut evictions in half. And that reality was growing, meaning fewer and fewer evictions were happening because landlords knew that tenants would have a lawyer assigned to them by the City and would be protected. And a lot of landlords have stopped trying to evict tenants wrongly. So we're going to be very aggressive about trying to get the moratorium expanded, making sure there's free legal services for any tenants who need it. And by the way, right now, any tenant who, there should not be any question of eviction, but if the landlord is talking about eviction, telling you you have to get out of your apartment if you're sick, anything you can call 3-1-1 and get support and get legal help right now.

But to your larger point, Ralph, I think it's a very good one. And this hinges on a couple of things. One, we need Albany to help us by passing the Home Stability Support Act. This would be one of the most profound things that could be done to stop evictions and to provide the support to everyday New Yorkers who are faced with eviction. And then second, the stimulus in Washington. If we could get a stimulus that mirrors what the House of Representatives is voting on today, if the Senate follows through, we'll be in a position to help a lot more people and protect them. So that's what we're going to fight for. But you're absolutely right. We need a proactive approach to protect people. But it begins with the State lengthening that moratorium and making sure it goes well beyond the immediate timeline of the crisis.

Lehrer: He threw in a dig there, the caller did, at the end of his question about not waiting until -- I don't remember the exact words, but basically not waiting until, again I don’t remember the exact words, by basically not waiting until we all [inaudible] until the coronavirus was actually on us to take action when he was comparing that to evictions. And I want to ask you about an article in the New York Times today. Just one particular thing from it about the public health official who you've put your trust in more than your Health Commissioner, Dr. Barbot. And that's Dr. Mitchell Katz, who runs the Health + Hospitals Corporation. Very respected doctor. But so many well intentioned people got things wrong early on and the Times revealed communications from March and which quote in his March 10th email to top City officials, Dr. Katz made the case that keeping the city open was the best approach at that time. March 10th, his email said, quote, canceling large gatherings gives people the wrong impression of this illness. Many of the events are being canceled anyway and fewer people are going out. However, it is very different when the government starts telling people to do this. He wrote Italy, quote, is having a terrible problem that I do not believe we will have. So how's Dr. Katz's record in the light of day, if he's the one you're giving the contact tracing program to, rather than the Health Department, which already does contact tracing for a living?

Mayor: Well, Brian, the question, I appreciate the line you're putting in the question, but I think the line is not an accurate one. So let me try and redefine here. First of all, every one of the health care experts that I've talked to, whether they work for the City of New York or whether they're federal, like Dr. Fauci, everyone has admitted throughout this crisis that they did not have all the facts because no one has all the facts on coronavirus. Every one of them has changed their estimation of what we should do over time. I literally do not know a single health care expert who's been you know, perfectly aware of everything that was going to happen ahead of the curve throughout all this. So I've listened to a variety of health care leaders in this administration and beyond. Always trying to figure out what is the right composite of information to make decisions. But none of them has had a perfect corner on the market of wisdom. They've all had times when, you know, they saw things according to the information they had. And a lot of times the information was partial and imperfect because that's in the history of this disease. So the question to my mind about Mitch Katz is what has he done in the middle of this crisis? What he's done is taken the biggest public hospital system in America and prepared it for battle and saw it through. Health + Hospitals, our 11 public hospitals bore the brunt of this crisis, starting with Elmhurst Hospital. And under Mitch’s leadership, they held the line. This is a massive human challenge, dealing with a crisis that literally these hospitals have never seen before. A huge managerial and leadership challenge. A huge logistical operational challenge. And his hospitals held and he played a leading role in our efforts to keep hospitals holding throughout the entire city, which they did. So that was what he was charged with doing and he did it, I think brilliantly as did his team. And he has a massive operation. And the contact tracing effort is not what ti was months ago when we were talking about – you remember Brian, the original cases, we had a handful of cases and it became like a few dozen cases. The Health Department did a great job going after those, they have some very, very talented people who do that work. But it was when we were talking about a very limited scope of this crisis.

We are now talking about widespread transmission in this city of 8.6 million people and we have to mount a vast testing operatus. Right now in the next week or so we are going to have 20,000 tests per day, I want to get us up to at least 50,000 tests per day, massive amount of contact tracing and that will involve thousands of contact tracers, easily could end up being five or 10,000 people. Then putting thousands of people into hotels with all the support they need. That is a vast operational approach, a vast operational mission that doesn't bear resemblance to what the Health Department does. They do great work and their expertise and a lot of their key people have been brought over to be leaders in this effort that's housed at Health + Hospitals. But Health + Hospitals runs 11 major hospitals and 70 clinics. It is an operational agency that reaches deep into the city and employs thousands upon thousands of frontline workers. That's the model we need to do testing and tracing and isolation on a vast scale.

Lehrer: John in Manhattan, you are on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi John.

Question: Hi Mayor.

Mayor: Hi John, how are you doing?

Question: Yeah good. My name is John Peters. I've been trying to reach out to the Mayor for a couple of weeks. I’m businessman who's been in the catering business for 35 years here in New York. I have a large commissary. And I've heard the Mayor ask for people who are available to do large numbers of meals. We have that, we are able to do something like that. I have a staff, I have all the insurances, I have mobile kitchens, I have trucks and I have reached out via email via 3-1-1. I've never gotten a response. So I'm hoping that I can be pointed in the right direction?

Mayor: Well, John, you came to the right place. Brian, I thank you and WNYC always because there's been a good number of moments over the years where, because of this opportunity for me to directly connect with the people of this city, that people have gotten through who had great ideas or real needs or you know, things they wanted to do to help others and we were able to make it happen here. So John, please give your information directly to the folks at WNYC. Kathryn Garcia, our Food Czar, she and her team will reach out to you today. We need you, there's no question. The number of hungry people John, this is a very sad reality. It used to be, we thought that something over a million people were food insecure, meaning experienced hunger with some regularity in New York City just a few months ago. Now we think that number's over two million people. We need all the help we can get. So you're in and they will follow up with you and get you and your team in the game.

Lehrer: And you're right, Mr. Mayor, it's one of my favorite things to be able to do here on this show is play matchmaker.

Mayor: You’re the matchmaker Brian.

Lehrer: When there’s somebody with something to offer and somebody who needs to receive it. So John, hang on and we will take your contact information off the air. And I'm confident that that match will get made. Terrence in Queens, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Terrence.

Question: Good day. How are you Mr. Mayor? [Inaudible] a number of times and hopefully maybe after this conversation or this little question, someone can take my number and help me with my situation. I just want to touch on the young lady who got arrested with the child and it was so big. I worked as an officer for the Department of Correction. I have family members and I think that sometimes an officer in uniform has to take it a step, go outside of the box sometimes. You know I saw the video, I was disturbed by it myself. Sensitivity training over and over again for these times that we are living in. And also when you have long lines and out on 125th Street today, they had one subway entrance that was open and it's just tons and tons of people walking back and forth. It gets very hectic. Officers are on edge. And I would just like to say that if you can get some of the older officers who got big awards in the department, sometimes talk to the guys who have like five years on the job or less. Just prep talk to them, give them some kind of insight and some, you know, not war stories, but just a little history about how to deal with the public and using community communications skills a little bit better. And I just, if you can take my name after the call and I can tell you more about my situation that I need help with. I don't want to say over the air?

Mayor: Okay. Yeah. If you give your information to WNYC, I'll have my team follow up. And to your point Terrence, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. Look, it is tough on New Yorkers right now. Everyone's going through a lot. A lot of families are going through a lot of pain. May have lost a loved one or someone's sick or they've lost their livelihood. There's tremendous frustration. We're all cooped up. There’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear about what happens next. And then you throw into it, our officers are trying to do their best in the great unknown. They're dealing with a lot of frustrations too. I think you're exactly right. The answer is to constantly retrain, to give clearer, better instructions, which is what I announced today. And something again, Commissioner Shea and I are responsible for, when we see something isn't clear, we got to fix it. That's what we're trying to do with these new instructions today.

But the training and the retraining, this is something Bill Bratton started and it's absolutely been the difference maker. This is where the de-escalation, which is unquestionably occurred around the city. You’ve just – I've talked to people in communities all over the city who say they have a different reality with policing. They have seen a lot less of what they used to see in the past. Starting with when we got away from the stops that led to many fewer negative encounters. But the de-escalation training has done immense, has created immense progress in terms of avoiding incidents. And people need that training all the time. And our officers actually, let's face it, the kind of what we do in way of training has been disrupted in this crisis too. A lot of things have been disrupted. So it's up to all of us in leadership to make sure that the instructions are there and really find a way to keep that training happening. And then as soon as we're past this crisis, double down on the de-escalation training because it works. But I think you're obviously right Terrence about using the folks who really understand it best to teach particularly younger officers, the approach. That's a great idea. And we'll follow up with you on, on your concerns.

Lehrer: We've just got a few minutes left and I want to ask you about school for the fall. You said something this week about possible staggered schedules if you try to open? What's your thinking as of today? And I'm curious if you're influenced at all by the news this week that the whole University of California system, 23 campuses announced that they will only have online learning again for fall semester. And I realized that's college, not pre-K through 12, but California is less hard hit than New York. And I'm curious what your thinking is now and if that informs it at all?

Mayor: That's a good question. And we are 3K through 12, more and more I'm happy to say. And in fact this week –

Lehrer: Just after I got used to not saying K through 12 anymore. [Inaudible] Now it’s 3K through 12, yes.

Mayor: You are evolving Brian, I have faith. And in fact pre-K admissions letters went out this week and a good public service reminder to any parents who didn't apply to pre- K because of all the tumult of recent weeks. You still can, you can reach out to 3-1-1 and get information and our website as well and applications are still open. But anyway, quickly to your question, now I want to be clear. Plan A is still plan A. Plan A has been for weeks full reopen. Remember we're almost four months away. I mean it's not tomorrow, it's a ways off and a lot is going to happen between now and then. So plan A is reopen schools as normal. Then you have a variety of plan B, C's, D's. That could be staggered schedules, that could be a mix of in-person learning and an online learning. There's lots of things we have to work out. How are we going to test teachers and give them the help, the PPEs, whatever it takes? But it's going to be a safety first mentality. But plan A is reopen schools on time.

So now the question of Cal State. Look, I noted it but I do think it's really different because in a university structure you can do online learning arguably a lot more effectively and a lot easier. Talking about adults, every single human being who was a student at the university except for very few, is already an adult and in principle can take a lot of responsibility for their learning and can, you know, deal with the flexibility of schedule and one thing another. But kids, especially younger kids, they immensely benefit from being in a classroom setting. And we know online learning is good and it's been a Herculean effort by our educators here in the city, but it's just not the same and it's not as effective. So I'm going to stick with plan A, but it's going to be a decision that we finalize when you get a lot closer and it's going to be about health and safety first.

Lehrer: Quick follow up then we're really done. How does the outbreak of that toxic shock like syndrome among children with three deaths and more than a hundred cases in New York inform your thinking about school?

Mayor: Well, we have one death in the city and that's one too many. The other two deaths happened outside the city. But it's very worrisome. I mean, now we're talking about over a hundred cases. And this is something that was not on the radar of the medical community just a few weeks ago is anything systematic. And now we see something that's really a concern. And the number one thing to say, Brian, to all parents, all family members, is if you see those symptoms, the rash, fever, vomiting, if you see those kinds of symptoms, call your health care provider immediately. Particularly if they occur in combination because early detection can really be the difference in saving a life of a child. But we take it very seriously. It's a hundred plus kids, obviously our school system is 1.1 million kids but we take it seriously and we're going to watch that one very carefully as part of the health and safety considerations before we decide on what happens with the reopening of schools.

Lehrer: Thanks as always Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you Brian, take care now.

2020-05-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. Happy Sunday to all. Every day I get the honor of watching the people of this city fight back against this disease and it's 8.6 million people working as one. It's really quite extraordinary how much people have banded together to fight this disease as a common front. And what our job is, here at City Hall and all our agencies, is to keep strengthening that fight, giving you more and more tools to fight with, more and more ways to support the efforts that everyday New Yorkers are doing to help us overcome this disease. And one of the things that's been really gratifying, really amazing is all the businesses, all the organizations in the city have stepped up in extraordinary ways to support this fight. We've had some amazing partnerships with the private sector. I've talked to you about over the last few weeks, New Lab and Boyce Technologies, two of the companies that got together to create the ventilators built right here in New York City. Something that was not created here and suddenly it was because of the ingenuity and the commitment of these individuals. All those companies, dozens of companies who got together on5 the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other places to create PPEs, – didn't do them before, they found a way to do it. Right now, in New York City, so many things were being produced to protect our health care heroes, our first responders, everyday New Yorkers because other New Yorkers stepped up, cared, made something happen.

But the biggest challenge throughout from day one has been testing. I don't need to say again how frustrating it’s been that we've never had the partner we needed in the federal government when it came to testing. And this is the central question of this whole dilemma we've been through – where has the testing been? But again, when the federal government doesn't come through, when the international markets don't come through, what do we do? We do it right here in New York City. We make something happen. So, we have a new partnership today that's going to be a difference maker in our effort to get more and more testing to the people of New York City. And the place we turn is to the largest urgent care company in this city, CityMD. And I want to thank everyone at CityMD for their commitment to making something very important happen here. Really appreciate that they've come forward to help this city. They care about this city. They're doing something extraordinary.

So, we've been working over the last few weeks and found a way to come into partnership on a very, very big scale. This is the diagnostic testing, the PCR testing. It will be available at all CityMD sites all around New York City and that's a lot of sites – 123 sites. I'm going to say it again – 123 sites across the five boroughs. We predict to begin, 6,000 tests a day at the sites, 6,000 more tests per day. These are walk-in sites. They're open seven days a week. The hours differ somewhat by site, but basically, it's 8:00 am to 8:00 pm Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Saturday and Sunday. You can get locations by going to CityMD.com. Now, obvious question, does it cost you anything to go get this test? Well, if you have insurance, they'll simply bill your insurance. That's fine. That's easy. If you don't have insurance, CityMD will cover the cost. And I want to thank them for that. That's an extraordinary commitment to the people of this city. They are stepping up and saying, if you don't have insurance, they'll be there for you. And this is consistent with our commitment from day one, whether it's testing or health care, whatever the people of New York City need, we will get it for them regardless of your ability to pay. So, big deal. Thank you, CityMD, big step for the city. And I want everyone to know this now puts us ahead of our goal. We had said we wanted to get the capacity for 20,000 tests per day by Monday, May 25th. I can tell you we have now hit the goal a week early. We are at that capacity now and we're going to keep growing. So, with 20,000 a day, you're almost at 150,000 tests a week. Our goal is to continue to build that rapidly and CityMD’s really helped us take a big step forward.

Now, you need tests and then you need the tracing to go with it. And to do the tracing, we need an army of tracers, and there's also progress on that front as we keep adding more and more contact tracers. We have 500 tracers who have now completed their training and another thousand on top of that have started the Johns Hopkins University training, gold standard training. And again, thanks to Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg Philanthropies for helping us to make this happen and happen quickly. So, in the week of May 24th those who have been trained by Johns Hopkins will go out and do their field training. The field training literally involves preparing for over a hundred different scenarios, getting ready for real life choices that have to be made quickly and then we'll have a thousand tracers ready on the playing field, helping the people of this city by the end of this month. We'll have a group of a hundred tracers that will lead the way starting on May 24th, a week from today. They will start their work in the field doing the case interviews and then hundreds more will join them in the days after that. That first group of a hundred tracers will work with those who have positive at the health + Hospitals testing sites. We believe they’ll be able to trace almost 2,000 cases just between May 24th and June 1st. So, it's going to be a great start, the others coming right behind them. In the next literally two weeks, you're going to see a vast testing and tracing operation come alive like we've never seen before in the city and this is just the beginning.

As I've said, we expect the army of tracers to grow to at least 5,000, could be between 5,000 and 10,000 before this is all over because we want to be able to reach everyone who needs that connection, that support, that ability to find out what's happening in their lives and the people that they are close to it. We need to find those people, get them to the support they need. So, this vast army is coming together very, very quickly and thanks again to everyone involved in this extraordinary test and trace effort. We're asking a lot of everyone, we're asking you to move very quickly and very effectively and you're doing it. We are very, very appreciative. Now, as I've said before, once you test someone and then you find the contacts and you test them and you're going to find people who need to be kept separate from their families and we use the word isolation and it's not a perfect word, it gets the point across, but we got to think about how to explain this in a more positive light. The goal is if someone needs to be in a place other than their home, their home is too crowded, they can't be supported properly in their home, that's what the hotels are for. That's why we have a whole effort, not only to say, okay, we're going to help you evaluate whether you can properly stay in your home, if you've tested positive, if you're symptomatic, to help you figure out if that can work or you need to be someplace else. But if you need to be someplace else, to get you there and get you all the support you need while you are in that setting, getting through the disease, making sure you're not infecting the other people in your life.

This model has shown tremendous impact in many parts of the world. We're going to do it on a grand scale here with all the support that people need and to make that happen by June 1st we're going to have individuals all over the city who are helping everyday New Yorkers who need that facilitation, who need that support to get to a hotel and get all the help that goes with it. And these folks will be our resource navigators. So, we're going to get community-based organizations in all five boroughs to help us do this, who know communities around the city, who understand what people need and how to help them. And with these community-based organizations, we’ll hire between 200 and 300 resource navigators and they'll be the go to people, understand communities of the city, speak the languages of all the communities in the city, understand what their neighbors need. They will be there and the resource navigators will help make sure that people get that transportation to the hotels, get the food they need, the medication they need, everything, the laundry services, you name it. If people need mental health support, whatever it may be, there'll be, obviously, medical professionals also constantly working with the people in the hotels. But we want an everyday connection with anyone who's in a hotel, in isolation so they get whatever support they need for the period they're there. So, folks are going to know who to turn to at all times and have that personal connection to get the help they need.

Now, when we think about test-and-trace and we think about all this big apparatus being put together, that's what the diagnostic testing, the PCR testing first and foremost, but all pieces of the equation are important and the antibody testing is important, too. And we've said many times antibody testing isn't perfect, but it is helpful. It at least tells you if it's a good test, if it's a quality test, it tells you if you've been exposed to the disease previously and obviously you've been able to beat it, that's evident. So, it tells you something important. It does not tell you to let down your guard or that you can never be once again infected by the disease. But it does tell you you've shown before you could overcome it. That's very, very important. So, in these next weeks we're going to reach 140,000 New York City first responders and health care workers with free antibody testing and another 140,000 everyday New Yorkers also with free antibody testing. So, combined, more than a quarter million people will get this testing. New Yorkers in all five boroughs can start signing up for antibody testing right now. It is by appointment only. And remember, it's not just so that you get the results which you deserve and is important, and of course it's free, but on top of that, it helps the medical community and the City of New York to understand better what's happening with this disease here in the city. The survey that's part of this will help us to fight this disease better. So, you'll be helping yourself, but also helping everyone else with the information that will be gleaned from all this testing. So, we have five locations – in the Bronx at 4006 3rd Avenue in Claremont, in Brooklyn at the NYPD Community Center in East New York, which is an amazing facility. I have visited and very, very appreciative to the NYPD for their partnership here. In Manhattan, Manhattanville Health Center, obviously in Manhattanville. In Queens at 3409 Queens Boulevard, Long Island City. In Staten Island, at the St. John Villa Academy in Concord. To make an appointment today, go online, nyc.gov/antibodysurvey or call (888) 279-0967.

Alright, so that's testing, tracing, all the things that we're doing to fight back, all the partners we brought into play, all the ways we're trying to help you and protect you. And now we need you to help protect everyone in this city because everyone in this city who is able to give blood can give blood and make such a big difference. And right now, we have a challenge with our blood supply. This has come up in recent days. We need to address it. And so many New Yorkers are saying in this crisis, what can I do, how can I help? One thing you can definitely do, one thing that will help for sure, is to give blood in this moment of crisis. What we know happened here is that traditionally in a regular year where people gather together, companies and organizations, there's blood drives, that adds up to a lot. We do them at City agencies, too. But this year for the last few months, blood drives have been disrupted. It's now having a real impact on our blood supply. We need to make a comeback quickly. So, the New York City Blood Center now has only a few days’ supply. We need to make sure that we strengthen that supply. That supply of blood helps all our hospitals, they're not in a position to resupply them until they get more blood from people's donations. Each hospital has some blood on hand as they need it for emergencies, but – and they're all practicing very carefully right now, conservation practices. I know our public hospitals, H + H, are doing this. But unless we have a bigger supply of blood some surgeries cannot move forward. Obviously, things that are immediate and lifesaving will, but others can't until there's more of a blood supply.

So, for all those good people out there, so many of you have said, how can I help, what can I do? Right now, you can help, come forward if you can give blood – and obviously some people cannot, but if you can give blood, we need you to make an appointment today at the New York Blood Center, and this is an appropriate reason to leave home for sure. You'll be helping your fellow New Yorker and helping to keep people safe. You can go online – NYBC.org or call (800) 933-2566. So, again, NYBC.org or (800) 933-2566, something very important you can do right away to help your fellow New Yorker.

Okay, now let's go to a tough issue we've been talking about these last days and every one of us who is a parent, every one of us who has children in our lives, we are really concerned about this pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome. PMIS. The number of cases continues to grow, 137 confirmed now, 66 of those cases, there's a positive test for COVID-19 or antibodies detected. And as I've said for days, we lost a child to this syndrome and we never want to lose another child to it. So, we're doing a huge outreach effort citywide. We're coordinating with health care providers and particularly pediatricians all over the city. We want to make sure that there's constantly the latest information flowing to our Department of Health, learning what we can about the demographic dynamics of this disease so we can act more quickly. And everything we see gives us information to act on. We see, certainly, initial indication of real transparent – excuse me, a real disparity. I'm deeply concerned about that. We have only, thank God, a small number of cases, but if we continue to see evidence of disparity, we have to continue to adjust our strategies to address this. But right now, what we need the most is to protect every child. So, every parent, every family member out there, if you see those symptoms of fever, rash, vomiting, if you see any of them particularly in combination, please immediately call your doctor or your health care provider. If you don't have one, call 3-1-1 and you'll get connected to a Health + Hospitals clinician. Early detection saves lives of children. So, please, if you see anything unusual like that in your child, call immediately so we can make sure your child gets help.

Okay, now, turning to something that is both about our health and safety but also about this time of year. Everyone is feeling – this weekend we had some beautiful weather already. We're feeling the pull of the outdoors. We're feeling the seasons changing. We all want to be out there. We all also understand we're in the middle of a pandemic and we have to do things differently. The idea here is to put health and safety first. No one has to be reminded, we are the epicenter of this national crisis with the coronavirus. Some places in this country haven’t been affected much. Other places in this country were actually affected a lot and for whatever reason decided to reopen quickly even if there wasn’t a lot of evidence it was safe, and tragically we’re seeing in some of those places a huge uptick in the disease. There are places that have been hard hit but no place has been hard hit the way New York City has. We are going to be always putting health and safety first. We’re going to be careful and cautious to get it right and so even though it’s beautiful weather, even though people want to be out there, we’re going to be really smart about what we allow, what we don’t allow for the foreseeable future.

So, there’s obviously a huge interest in the beaches and the State of New York has said that different localities can make different choices and some are deciding in the metropolitan area to open beaches for Memorial Day, the traditional start of the beach season. I’ve said it before and I’m going to say it again we are not opening our beaches on Memorial Day. We are not opening our beaches in the near term. It is not safe. It is not the right thing to do in the epicenter of this crisis. So, that decision I did not make lightly. We thought long and hard about it but continuing to watch our indicators which don’t have us where we need to be yet, we are going to be very smart and careful about this. So, what’s going to happen is we are going to take it week and day at a time to figure out where we’re going. I’ve never ruled out the possibility of beaches being open later in the summer but we’re not ready yet. And the scene you see there, that is a typical beach day when things are normal in New York City. That cannot happen anytime soon and that’s what we’re guarding against. Because right there you can see a lot of people in danger and a lot of spread of the disease and we’re not going to let that happen after all the progress we’ve made, you’ve made fighting back this disease. We’re not taking that chance.

And by the way, that’s just the beach. Imagine the scene on the A train with people going out to the Rockaways or any other train where people go to the beach, or the buses. We’re not going to allow that crowding to happen. So, the word is no, not yet, not now, beaches are not open for swimming. They’re not open for all the normal things people do in beach season. So, there will not be swimming, it will not be allowed. There will not be lifeguards on duty. We’re going to treat this immediate phase the way we do through the times of year when beaches are not open. For now, we’re going to leave it the way it is that if someone wants to, from the local community, walk on the beach, that’s okay. We’re going to let that happen for now but if we start to see people congregating, if we start to see people swimming, if we start to see people doing things that literally go against everything we’ve talked about in terms of health and safety, then we will take further measures. We’re putting fencing in and in reserve that could close off the beaches if needed. It’s certainly not something I want to do or my team here at City Hall wants to do. I know the Parks Department doesn’t want to do it. But we will be ready if we have to.

So, what you’ll see in the coming days is fencing put in place, ready to be implemented. In the meantime, a lot of NYPD presence, a lot of Parks Department presence and you could go, everyday New Yorkers from the neighborhoods around the beach, just like you are now, you want to walk along the beach or sit on the beach for a while, fine. No swimming, no parties, no sports, no gatherings. We’re going to give people a chance to get it right, and I believe in New Yorkers, I believe in everything you’ve done. If people don’t get it right, if we start to see a lot of violation of those rules, up will come the fences closing off those beaches. No one wants that but we’re ready to do it if that’s what it takes to keep people safe. In the meantime, we will prepare for better times. We don’t know the day yet when in the future we might be able to open the beaches the right way, we will have our lifeguards trained and ready, we will be ready for that eventuality. But we are not there yet.

Okay. Let me do the daily indicators and again, this kind of makes the point progress but still not enough progress. Yesterday, we definitely had a good day, but not a perfect day because two indicators down, one indicator up, but only by a little today. A good day. Still not a perfect day, but definitely a good day. Two indicators down, one unchanged. So indicator one daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 unchanged 77 to 77. Number two, daily number of people in ICU across Health + Hospitals for suspected COVID-19 down and down in a very big way. This is really, this piece of the news is just playing good news and very important for all those folks fighting for their lives down from 506 to 469 and the percentage of people are testing positive for COVID-19 down from 13 percent to 11 percent so a good day, particularly in terms of ICU, but we want even better days and we want to see him strong together consistently. A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we turned to our colleagues in the media. And please remind me of the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have Deputy Mayor Dean, President and CEO of Health + Hospitals, Dr. Katz, executive director of test and trace core, Dr. Long and senior advisor, Dr. Varma on the phone. With that I will start with Abu from Bangla Patrika.

Question: Hello Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing?

Question: Thank you so much for asking. I have just two questions. Small two question. Number one, the doctors and you know, the people who understand that kind of disease they’re always warning that this disease can come back again. So, I would like to ask you if it's come back again then how New York City prepared to face the kind of epidemic again? And number two, the you know, we face a huge crisis because of the COVID-19. And what is the best lesson you get personally in that crisis?

Mayor: Well, I think the lesson has been the power of the people, Abu. We asked the people at city to do something extraordinary and difficult and unheard of for New Yorkers and they've done it overwhelmingly. So, I think in the end we have to remember that the power in a democracy resides in the people and the ability to change things for the better resides in the people. And this is what I believed all my life, but I'm seeing it much more vividly than ever in this case, you know, the greatest crisis we've faced in generations. People are making the difference, and I think, you know, leveling with the people about what's going on and empowering them to act is the best way to actually achieve our common goal of overcoming this disease.

On your other question, what I refer to as the boomerang the disease reasserting, we are every day concerned to stop this from happening, that's why we're making cautious, careful decisions. But we also are constantly preparing both for times to get better but we're also preparing for bad scenarios and that would mean tightening up the restrictions. If we have to do that, we could don't anticipate it, but we'd be ready. So, I think it comes back to what people do every day. I want people to take it personally. When you follow these rules, the shelter in place, the social distancing, the face coverings, you're speeding up the day when we can open up more. If you don't follow these rules, unfortunately there's a danger of that boomerang and even more restrictions. So that's the balance we strike all the time.

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, wanted to ask about reporting from over the weekend that New Yorkers were flocking to locations from bars on the Upper East Side to Coney Island and elsewhere. Just want to get your thoughts on that and if you're contemplating any steps to handle that. On a separate issue, I understand the City Council is going to try to pass the bill requiring a hotel room for every single homeless person. Will you veto that if that passes without a veto proof majority? And any other thoughts on that bill?

Mayor: Look, Shant, on that bill. We're working with the Council. We're in constant dialogue with them. We're all trying to get to the same place in the end. We want to protect people, we want to keep people safe. We also have to figure out what's going to be best in all senses for homeless people, including their mental health needs and other needs. How they can get the services they need. We want to use the facilities we have and when we need others, we'll bring them into play. We also have to think about, you know, the costs involved. Everything has to be looked at. But, in the end, it's about health and safety first. And so we're working closely with the Council and I think there's been a good track record of us working through issues and ending up in a good resolution.

On the bars and the beaches on the beaches the report I've gotten from yesterday is there were people walking on beaches and there were very few instances of a problem. But again, we're going to have a lot of NYPD, a lot of Parks Department out to address anything. And if people, you know, if we have sporadic problems, that's one thing. If we have consistent problems then as I said, we will use the fencing on top of all those patrols. Don't want to do it but we're ready to. But the reports I got about beaches yesterday were overwhelmingly that there was compliance and that enforcement was honored.

The bars is a different matter. We are waiting for a full report cause obviously this is from last night, but I'm not comfortable at all with people congregating outside bars. It's the same rule. If you start to form groups of people and then you know, two, three, five and then it becomes six, it becomes 10, it becomes 15, that violates what we're saying about social distancing. I put lives and that puts lives in danger. So the Police Department will be out, the Sheriff's Office will be out watching very carefully on the Upper East Side in particular. I know we had a particular problem there, but everywhere around the city and we're not going to tolerate people starting to congregate. It's as simple as that.

Moderator: Next we have Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Good morning, happy Sunday. Mr. Mayor, I wanted you do to, I guess, expand upon the beaches plan, this new update, particularly about lifeguards. I'm curious, I've spoken to lifeguards. They said they haven't heard of anything about when they'll begin training. When will the training begin? How long will it take? Will it be different? I know it usually involves CPR classes and swimming and in the, you know, in the various lifeguard pools. I don't know if that's capable. And I know you've mentioned a few times this morning that you will allow people who live in the communities to walk on the beaches, but are you suggesting people shouldn't travel, you know, shouldn't go from Manhattan out to Coney Island or elsewhere in Queens to Rockaway? We're in. Is that one way you want to, I guess, try to limit the amount of people on the beaches?

Mayor: Yes, Katie. Exactly right, Katie. The point is we're still – look, nothing's changed in the status of New York City in the last few weeks. We do not want to see non-essential travel. We want to see people keeping things as modest as possible. Get your basic exercise in and get back home, go to the store or go to the pharmacy, whatever you have to do to get your basic goods and go back home. This is working. We want to keep it that way. So we certainly do not – again, I don't want a lot of people on a train. I don't want to allow people on buses going to orchard beach. I want us to recognize we still have to fight back this disease. It won't be forever, but we have to fight it now. So yeah, the point is we don't want to take away from the local communities. A lot of people live – hundreds of thousands of people live near our beaches. We don't want to take away from them the right to just walk on the beach. But again, if we start to see abuse of that, we're going to take tougher measures.

In terms of lifeguards. We'll start them in training immediately. As I understand it, it does take several weeks. We'll get you an exact date. But, certainly, by the time we would honestly consider reopening beaches with all that comes with that, the lifeguards, they'll be ready.

Moderator: Next. We have Debralee from Manhattan Times Bronx Free Press. 

Question: Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me?

Mayor: How are you doing Debralee?

Question: I’m well, thank you. This is the question, Mr. Mayor, regarding last week's reports on tension and discord within the Department of Health and specifically with Commissioner Barbot, who's again not present for today's lineup. I wonder if you could speak – last time we left off, you said he was going to speak to her over the weekend. If you could apprise us of that conversation. And are you concerned that our continuing absence will continue to undermine the efforts of the administration to provide accurate guidance that [inaudible] follow from the city in a unified way on what they should be doing to combat the virus? And then also, I wanted to speak to the degree to which community-based health centers are being involved or not in the testing process here. I know that the State has lined up a number of federally qualified health centers, but we're not really hearing from the City the same kind of collaboration as regards testing, tracing, that kind of one-on-one service with these already established centers on the ground. Can you speak to that?

Mayor: Absolutely. Yeah, we're – look, as you've seen today, the testing effort is growing all the time. The first and most straightforward way to do this was with the Health + Hospitals clinics and all the capacity at Health + Hospitals that already exist out in communities. That was the most obvious go-to. We're going to keep building from there. The CityMD – 123 locations – an amazing, you know, single effort that now brings so many places into play – very, very high impact. But we're going to start working with community health centers of all kinds. I've talked to you all about the ways we're starting to coordinate with them. We want them to play a bigger and bigger role as this goes forward. And obviously, they can be important places for testing as well. So, we are going to be doing more with them on testing and everything else – announcements to come.

On, Dr. Barbot – again, I don't want you to in any way compare what happens at a press conference to the overall work of our agencies. The work of all of our agencies continues every single day. Press conferences, we put together different lineups each day for whatever the purpose of that press conference is. The Health Department is doing its good work regularly. I spoke to Dr. Barbot yesterday. We had a good and constructive conversation. We talked about the concerns that I've raised and others have raised about her conversation with Chief Monahan. I told her I thought it was important for her to address that publicly. I believe she'll be doing that soon. And the work needs to continue, and we talked about how to deepen the work of all of our Departments as a single team and a unified effort for the good of all New Yorkers. And it was a good conversation. I am convinced we're all going to do important and good work, going forward, to keep fighting back this disease. So, a positive conversation and we're all moving forward.

Moderator: Next we have Myles from NBC.

Question: [Inaudible] on the Upper East side, it was more than just being people outside of bars. You had people doing dine-in at some of the Thai places that are just a few blocks from where you live. And it was a different scene that we saw at Domino Park or at the beach. The beach was packed, but at least people, you know, were spread out. This was a different situation and when our cameras went there the people were defiant, they yelled at our photographers, and it just – is it that people just don't understand what's going on?

Mayor: Well, defiant and yelling at your photographers, I'm sorry that happened to you guys. But, again, I think there's going to be a different reality when the sheriff shows up at NYPD shows up and that's what's going to happen, and all the other agencies. When we first – you know, I made the decision – and I remember the day I did it, I spoke to Dr. Fauci for guidance and made the decision to close the bars and restaurants in this city, only allow them to do takeout and delivery, and we've kept to that ever since. And, overwhelmingly, we've seen a lot of compliance. If we have instances where there's not compliance, I want to know about, I want to know about from you telling my team, I want any New Yorker who sees any place allowing a dining in, call 3-1-1 immediately, and they will be visited immediately with inspectors and there'll be serious fines. And if we have to shut places down, we will if they're starting to violate these rules, because it's about health and safety. And the same with congregating outside – look, if a bunch of people are congregating, that's a gathering. What did I say the other day? The NYPD is going to focus its enforcement on gatherings. So, please share with us those locations and we will deal with them immediately.

Moderator: Next we have Luis from New York [inaudible] –

Question: [Inaudible] antibody test tomorrow, it's part of that new survey. There was basically no criteria for us getting the appointment for our test, but looking at the CityMD site, I see the criteria needing to be met in order to get a test through them. Do you hope for a day when every single New Yorker can be tested regardless of having ever been symptomatic or having ever been in touch with anyone who tested positive? And Mr. Mayor, can we approach the future – as we approach the future when more and more and more testing would be made available and the criteria is that adjusted to include more and more people – what else can you say to everyone out there to make them understand the importance of getting tested?

Mayor: Well, look, Luis, again, the PCR testing, the diagnostic testing, which is still in a very imperfect supply – although, I'm thrilled we are now at 20,000 a day capacity and growing, it's still nowhere near what we want. We are keeping some real criteria on that according to greatest need. That will – that is starting to loosen up as we get more and more supply. It will continue. I would love nothing more than the day to come when that could be truly as universal as we want it to be. But we will keep being clear about criteria. Again, the antibody testing, very valuable, but not the same as the PCR testing, but we still want any New Yorker who wants to take advantage of the antibody testing to do so.

Now, the point to my mind going forward is that testing helps us know what's going on big picture, but it's also about the ability – with the diagnostic testing, the PCR testing, the kind we have at City MD, the kind of we have at the H+H clinics – it's our ability to determine what to do with each person, each family. If someone tests positive, then we know how to help them get support. If they need to isolate, how to isolate. The value of testing is it gives you the knowledge then to act. It's not perfect because things change over time and that's where more and more testing would help us to be able to test people as frequently as ideally. But what I can say to people is the most important thing to do is to follow those basic rules on shelter in place, on social distancing, wearing a face covering when you go out, basic hygiene, washing hands, hand sanitizer, covering your mouth when you cough and sneeze, those are still the basics. But for people who meet the criteria we've laid out, we want as many as possible get the diagnostic testing because it's going to help us understand, but most importantly, it's going to help us in their case and their family, help them to do what's safest and help them to protect their families.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. I believe on Thursday or Friday you were asked a number of times essentially to offer an expression of support for your Health Commissioner. She has been absent from quite a few of these press conferences lately. She did not attend Friday’s City Council hearing. So I just essentially wanted to offer you another opportunity to essentially assure the public that you believe you have competence in your Health Commissioner.

Mayor: I chose her, Yoav. She is the Health Commissioner that I chose to put in place. I've been working constantly with her during this crisis. I have a lot of respect for Commissioner Barbot. I have a lot of respect for the Health Department. It was important that we have a conversation to clear the air on some of the recent issues and I think we had a good and productive conversation and we're going to move forward together. So yeah, look forward to her doing good and important work, and I think we all understand this is a team effort. And I know and I don't ever blame the media for focusing on personalities, I’m going to state the obvious, having the responsibility for protecting all New Yorkers, it is not about one personality and another, it is about a huge team that needs to work together as a team to protect people with only one agenda, protecting the people in New York City, nothing else, no other considerations. And that's what I expect from everyone and we're all going to move forward on that basis.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Jacob from Jewish Insider. Jacob, are you there?

Mayor: Jacob, can you hear me?

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, good morning.

Mayor: There we go. We thought we lost you, Jacob. What's going on?

Question: You're never going lose me and I'm sorry if I'm a week late but I want to wish you a belated happy birthday.

Mayor: Thank you, Jacob.

Question: So, I have two questions. Number one, I've been getting a lot of inquiries about the State extending the restrictions on small businesses and local shops opening, and a lot of shop owners have expressed, some say disappointment, but also the frustration at you know, they were given no guidance and they do not know as to when they would be able to reopen even with, you know, some restrictions, if it's letting one customer at a time in implementing some restrictions in practicing social distancing. So, my question is what would you tell those shop owners as how long to wait and what can be done for them to resume business?

And the second question is the ADL recently reported a troubling report about a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents. Obviously, you have addressed that in the past and this is an ongoing battle. However, there have been some complaints recently that members of the Orthodox community who are more visibly Jewish have been receiving insults and, you know, amid this pandemic going to places while practicing social distancing, while wearing masks, as the ones who are responsible for this outbreak. So, what is the city doing, number one, to combat this dramatic rise in anti-Semitism, but also to avoid these incidents from happening?

Mayor: Yeah, Jacob, thank you. Look, it's absolutely unacceptable and we had a horrible incident and there were instant consequences for those perpetrators, the incident where we had someone in the Jewish community wearing a mask and someone tried to pull it off them, which is just insulting, it's anti-Semitic, it's discrimination, it's a really a horrible thing to do to another human being. Think about the implication too of someone trying to do the right thing and protecting their fellow New Yorker by wearing that mask and then someone tries to take it off them, thus endangering everybody, themselves included. Not only is it anti-Semitic and inappropriate, and an act of bias, it's idiotic because it just makes everyone less safe. So there were quick consequences in that case, those individuals were arrested, but we're going to as always ensure that there is a strong NYPD presence, anytime, anywhere we see a bias, and this has been true in many different communities and the answer has always been to make a strong, clear statement that we don't accept bias in this city, that there will be consequences for acts of bias and discrimination, to increase NYPD presence and presence of other city agencies to protect people. We'll do that whenever needed. It has worked consistently and people need to know there's consequences and it will not be accepted in this city.

On the small shops, very important issue. Look, I keep talking about these indicators every day and the State has their own indicators and we're all working together and it's quite clear nothing is going to change in May. It's May 17th, the indicators on the state level and the city level have not moved enough to change things in May for all intents and purposes. So, we're talking about June as our first opportunity, but we have to keep making progress. So, I say to everyone in every community, if you want to open those small shops, keep buckling down on the social distancing, on the shelter in place, on using the face coverings, all these things. It's literally a direct line between what you do and our ability to reopen anything. We will be providing in the coming days guidance on what that first phase of re-opening would look like, so people will have some time to get ready. But I want to say the shop owners and everyone else, there's no guarantee we get to that point until the indicators show us factually that it's safe enough to do. And then once we do it, we're going to monitor very intensely to make sure people follow the rules. If they don't, there'll be consequences. If we see a resurgence of the disease, unfortunately we would have to put back on restrictions. So, we're going to be very smart and careful about this, but there will be time for shop owners to know what's coming, but it's not coming in the month of May.

Moderator: Last question for today, Roger from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hello Mayor. Good morning. I wanted to ask you a little more about these resource navigators and how that's going to work. If someone tests positive for COVID-19 is living with family, when should they reach out to these people? How will they find out about these people and how do they reach out to these people?

Mayor: So I'm going to turn to Dr. Ted Long who's the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps, and I'll only say as we turn to Dr. Long, the goal here is to make it really user-friendly, really easy for the people in New York City who needed that support, to get it, and we want it to be a sympathetic positive process. We want people who need to go to a hotel to feel comfortable doing it and feel really supported in it. So, Dr. Long talked to us about the resource navigators and the role they'll play. I know he's out there, Dr. Long, can you hear me?
 
President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: I'm going to fill in until I see him. This is Dr. Mitch Katz, Mr. Mayor, thank you. And Dr. Long was here just a second ago. So I'm thinking it was a technological issue. Yes, we see that our ability to use these resources will really help the effort. We want people to see what we're doing as a service to them. We think that if it's as – if people see it as a service to them and recognizing that our only concern is that they be healthy and that their family be healthy, that they will then accept the idea that they need to be isolated, whether it's in their home or in our hotel room, and then these great resource people that you've spoken of will take care of bringing them the other things that they will need, including their food, help them with any economic benefits, medicines, figure out how they'll need medical treatment. So I think that it really reinforces the efforts that you've spoken of sir. Thank you, Dr. Katz.

Dr. Ted Long, Health + Hospitals: If you can hear me, I agree.

Mayor: You're back, was that consensus, Ted?

Dr. Long: Strong consensus.

Mayor: Strong consensus. Thank you. Thank you, Ted. Thank you, Mitch. All right, well as we conclude for today, I'm going to say one of the statements you can say in this city that probably would get the greatest consensus, in fact, and I'm going to say this, this is the greatest city in the world. There is no one on earth, no group of people in the whole world as amazing as New Yorkers. I believe that in my heart. And I want everyone to understand we've taken on this pandemic. We have been the epicenter and we fought back. You fought back. The success we've had to date is because of you. Now we have to go further. We have earned our way to the point where we even have the ability to talk about loosening restrictions, we've earned our way to the point we could talk about at one point having beach season again, we're not there yet, but if you keep earning it, if you keep fighting for it, if you keep being as great as New Yorkers can be, then we get there. It's everyone's responsibility. We're all in this together. So keep doing what you're doing because it's been amazing. Aim high, be as great as this city is capable of, and that's the pathway to beginning to reopen. That's the pathway to having a better summer and a much better year ahead. We all need to earn it together and I have confidence we will. Thank you, everybody.

2020-05-18 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, we've lived through a lot of history together. This pandemic, the worst health care crisis in the history of this nation in the last century. So much has happened here, so much unprecedented, and so many firsts. And this has been a crisis filled with historical firsts. We are being challenged in this moment like never before, but some of those firsts really speak to what New Yorkers have achieved together. Obviously, we've never had to do social distancing like this in our entire history. It's unheard of and yet, you know, you've excelled, you really have, at finding a way to do it. We've never had to make our own personal protective equipment, our own ventilators. We've never had to even think that way before and yet New Yorkers have stepped up, companies have come forward. It's been a remarkable and successful effort. We never had to imagine being unable to depend on our own federal government and needing our own New York City strategic reserve of PPEs and medical supplies and equipment. But now that's what we are building because we know we have to protect ourselves and we know we need the ability to produce our own supplies and equipment right here in New York City. These are all firsts and not necessarily firsts we ever would have wanted, but they are firsts that say so much about New Yorkers and our capacity to fight back and to adapt to any situation.

Now throughout this crisis, we've said the thing we've lacked from day one, the thing that would have been the difference maker in the beginning and still can be the difference maker if we got the help we needed from the federal government, would be testing, testing, testing. Testing is still the core to everything. While we're still waiting for all the help we need and deserve, another first – building our own test kits here in New York City. These test kits are the way we collect the samples from each New Yorker. And this is something we would have had to depend on supplies from not only all over the nation, all over the world previously, and now we're making them right here in New York City. So, our remarkable team at the city's Economic Development Corporation got together, and I said to them from the beginning, throw away the rule book, throw away the assumptions, even if we haven't built things here, find a way to make them right here in New York City. And to the credit of everyone at EDC, they took up that mission immediately. No holds barred, no hesitation. They had a can-do spirit. I want to thank everyone at EDC and all the companies, all the academic institutions, the hospitals, everyone they've partnered with in New York City and beyond to achieve these goals.

But from the beginning it came down. Where would they find the partners who could make this happen? How would they find the materials? How fast could they do it? And my clear demand of the Economic Development Corporation was, do everything, do it well, do it in an unprecedented manner, do it fast. And that's what they have been doing. So, a dream team has come together from all over New York City to make things happen. In the case of test kits, this is the essence of what we need and this team that’s come together is going to help so many New Yorkers and help save lives of the people of this city. Who are they? Well, when it comes to making the swabs and that is these things, here in their nice protective package. The swabs, that comes from Print Parts, a company in Manhattan. The transport medium, that is the fluid here, that comes from the team at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Worked to get that right because the transport medium holds the sample and makes sure it is safe and sanitary and can be accurately assessed. A company called CoLab in Brooklyn helped provide the design to put together the kits the right way. So, these pieces came together here in our city, things we would have depended on, companies from around the country and many cases outside the country to produce, are now produced here for our people. So, for the first time in our history, New York City is building and using its own test kits, homegrown New York City products, protecting New Yorkers.

Now as of this very day for the first time, the Made in New York City test kits are in use at Health + Hospitals community testing sites, and this is beginning today. By the end of the week, more than 60,000 of these test kits will have been delivered and be in use. And then we're ramping up from there. The production process is speeding up every week. So last week, 28,000 kits produced this week, 33,000. In the week of May 25th, 50,000. The week of May, excuse me, the week of June 1st over 60,000 of these test kits will be produced each week in New York City. That is more than the original projection of what could be produced weekly. And we'll keep going as far as we have to go to make sure that every New Yorker who needs a test gets one. And remember, this is not just about the test kits that are being produced right now for all of you to use now. This is about building capacity in New York City to produce whatever we need in the future to fight this pandemic and anything else that's thrown at us. This is about building the capacity to produce right here and to protect ourselves.

Now we have to do it because we learned we could not depend on the federal government. We had to do it because we saw the entire international market fall apart before our very eyes. And it was shocking honestly in the beginning of March to see supplies that we had depended on previously suddenly evaporate. We had to do it to make sure that we could have our own reliable supply and nothing is more reliable than what you build right here in the five boroughs. So, as I said yesterday, we're now at 20,000 tests per day capacity in terms of our labs and our ability to test out in communities. That's going to grow steadily and having the test kits to go with it keeps building this whole plan out. I talked about yesterday, the fact we're adding sites for testing. We're adding members of our new tracer corps. All of the pieces, the test kits, the test sites, the labs, the tracers, all of these pieces are coming together to give us a huge robust test and trace program we need to push back this disease and move forward in this city.

Now, constant growth from this point on, so more testing sites. We have the kits. Now, we need more sites. Two more Health + Hospitals test sites open today in communities in the city. One in Washington Heights, one in Midwood. That brings us to 25 total Health + Hospitals sites on top of that five One Medical sites. That’s the private provider working with Local 1199 SEIU. And as I announced yesterday, 123 CityMD urgent care sites now all providing testing to New Yorkers. Added up, over 150 test sites now in this city. Remember just a few weeks ago we didn't have grassroots testing. We were fighting just to keep our hospitals going. Now over 150 sites and that will keep growing steadily. To find a place where you can get tested, go online, nyc.gov/covidtest. Everything I referred to here, these kits, again this is the diagnostic testing, diagnostic testing, or otherwise referred to as PCR testing. This is to tell you if right now you have the coronavirus, the other kind of testing is important too, the antibody testing, which helps you understand if you've been exposed previously to the coronavirus and obviously proves your ability to fight your way through it.

So, in the coming weeks, two big initiatives that are starting now and they'll build out – 140,000 antibody tests will be provided to first responders and health care workers, and then 140,000 for everyday New Yorkers on top of that, combined well over a quarter-million antibody tests. This morning our antibody testing program for our first responders and health care workers began and it will run for about four weeks. This is in coordination with the federal government and I want to thank everyone at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control who came to us with this proposal. We worked together in partnership. They are covering all the appropriate costs. So, this is something that's being provided for free to first responders and health care workers and not being charged to the City of New York either. So that's a very good thing. Again, every individual gets the results, that's good. But on top of it, it will help us understand what's happening with the disease more broadly. So, it's part of a bigger study to help us learn how to fight this disease better. So, 140,000 of our heroes will get tested. It's voluntary, it's up to each of you, first responders, health care workers. If you want it, it's there for you. Now it will start with FDNY, with EMTs, paramedics, firefighters, the whole FDNY family. Anyone is welcome to participate. Testers will go to your work sites. Same with the OCME staff, Medical Examiner's Office. Those will be the first agencies reached. You can sign up to get your test right away and then we're going to reach more and more of our first responders and health care agencies over the coming weeks. To sign up, you go to firstserosurveynyc.com – yes, it's a mouthful. Firstsero – S-E-R-O – surveynyc.com or text TESTNYC to 783-78. So, we're really happy that that's up and running. That's going to give a lot of good information to individuals who have served us so well and also help us all to fight this disease.

Now, turning to a topic we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks, and it is a very sober and painful topic because it involves a threat to our children, and I say every time I speak as a parent, I understand what all parents and family members feel when they feel their children may be threatened. This reality, we are taking very, very seriously. Now what we've been calling it, and the Health Department defined it with a simple phrase, it's not a short phrase, but it captures what we've seen – pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome, PMIS, that's what we have called it and that's what our health team has been working every day to understand. Working with pediatricians, hospitals, health care providers all over the city. Now, the Centers for Disease Control, federally, has released some key updates. I want to share them with you now.

First of all, important what they are calling this new reality. CDC is now calling it multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children – MIS-C. So, we will from this point on refer to it also as MIS-C for consistency with the federal government. The CDC has confirmed a link to COVID-19. So, this is important. We've assumed it, but they have done additional research to 100 percent confirm it and they've released a standard national definition so that the whole country, doctors, scientists all over the country can share information, common definition, and we can all work together to understand how to fight this back. Now, again, we'll call it MIS-C. We'll work with the CDC, we'll work with the State, we'll work with other jurisdictions around the country. Everyone's sharing information to figure out what to do to fight this. The Health Department is now taking the CDC’s definition and applying it back over the last few weeks to see what it tells us about the cases that we have seen so far and we want to give additional guidance to parents and family members because there's some additional information that will help you identify symptoms and act quickly. And I always say it, early detection matters, crucially, alerting a health care provider if your child needs to get to a health care facility quickly. These things have to happen with real speed to make sure children are safe.

So, it begins with – since it is linked to COVID-19 you've got the immediate point that everything else we do to fight the coronavirus we need to do to fight MIS-C. So, that means the hygiene, the washing hands, the hand sanitizer, the coughing into your elbow when you cough or sneeze, all the basics, using the face covering, staying home to maximum extent possible, social distancing. All of this helps make sure our children are not exposed to this disease. And that's the best way to avoid this challenge because it keeps COVID out of the equation. Now, the symptoms – we've talked about several of them, but I want to add because the CDC research and definition has added additional symptoms to the equation. Persistent fever, irritability or sluggishness, abdominal pain, diarrhea and vomiting, rash, conjunctivitis, which is shown as red or pink eyes, enlarged lymph node gland in the neck, red cracked lips or red tongue, and swollen hands and feet. So, that's a lot to be aware of. Any of those symptoms you see in your child, call your health care provider, check in immediately. If you see multiple symptoms, especially important to get to your doctor, your health care provider immediately. If you don't have one, call 3-1-1 and you will be connected to a Health + Hospitals clinician immediately.

Now, right now, the number of children affected – the previous definition we use was 145. Under that definition, we've confirmed 145 kids affected, 67 of those cases tested positive for COVID-19 or had antibodies. And we did lose one child – and, again, our goal is to never lose another. We'll have updated numbers with this new definition, the MISC definition, shortly. But the bottom line is, the additional news, the additional information from the CDC allows us to hone our approach more. But the same bottom line, look for these symptoms in your child, act quickly if you see them. If they get to health care quickly, children can be brought through this safely. And that's what we all need to do together.

Okay. So, that's the part of my presentation that, really, again – that hits me like every parent, like everyone who has children in their life. So, I'll come down off of that and we'll move to topics that are a little more mundane, to say the least, but things that still matter to everyday New Yorkers and our quality of life and what we deal with every day during this crisis. So, one of the things that's been truly different neighborhood by neighborhood in this city is that alternate side parking has been suspended for the past two months, one of the longest suspensions in the history of the city. And it worked because it helped people stay inside and not have to deal with the hassle of moving their car, but in more and more areas we start to see litter accumulating as more and more people have been out and obviously a long time has passed. So, we want to do for one week a clean sweep – we want to do for one week a cleanup of all neighborhoods in the city. That done right allows us to then cancel to inside again for a period of time and hopefully for a long period of time so long as we see that our streets and sidewalks remain clean. So, as of today, alternate side parking is back into effect just for this week, from today through Saturday, May 23rd. There is an exception this week where it's suspended on Thursday for Ascension Day. So, basically, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Friday, Saturday, and then it goes off again. The next period of time will be two weeks from Sunday, May 24th to Sunday, June 7th, no alternate side parking. We've decided that in advance, so you can bank on that. We'll keep reevaluating then in the beginning of June, see where we stand. Hopefully, everyone, work with us, please remember how important it is to not litter as per usual, but if we can keep everything clean, we can keep canceling alternate side in the future for long periods of time. But, right now, alternate side back in effect today through Saturday with the exception of Thursday off for Ascension Day.

Okay. We're go into our daily indicators now. And, again, we've had – overall trend, fantastic, but a lot of days are mixed bags. We've got a mixed bag day today. It's a good day on one indicator, mixed on the others. We still keep making progress overall, but I want to inspire everyone, go deeper. The faster we can get through these indicators, the more thoroughly we can consolidate our success, the more chance of starting to relax restrictions. So, we’ve all got to stick with it here. So, indicator one daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that is down. And this is a great one – down from 77 to 48 – that's amazing. Now, under 50 people admitted to the hospital in a day for COVID-19, that's a really wonderful sign. But the number of people in ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that went up just a little from 469 to 475 – so, it's not a huge increase, and I keep that in mind, but it's still an increase, we need to keep going down. And then the percentage of people tested positive for COVID-19, unchanged – 11 percent. Again, overall good news, because of the overall direction. Great news on the number of people going into the hospitals, but we need to create that steady progress to get to the next stage.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please remind me of the name and outlet of each reporter.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder, we have President and CEO of Health + Hospitals, Dr. Katz, President and CEO of the EDC James Patchett, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma on the phone. With that, I will start with Steve from Westwood One News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Hope you had a beautiful weekend when you were able to [inaudible] away from work for a moment. I suppose you had some downtime, I hope you did.

Mayor: Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that.

Question: I suppose you don't have much downtime at all, but even a few minutes helps us oppose, right?

Mayor: Exactly, we'll take whatever we can get.

Question: Exactly. So, I have two questions. One is about non-essential and the decision-making process for when it might be possible for them to return to work. You have companies like Google, Facebook and others extending their work from home for their employees until the end of the year. It seems like you've been looking at this issue on a month to month basis, but it's always helpful and appreciated when people have an idea of when things will change so they can plan for it over the long-term. So, what coronavirus indicators are you looking at and what goals do you want to see reached before you consider allowing non-essential workers to return to the workplace? And will you perhaps follow Google and Facebook's lead and tell City employees who can perform their duties from home to continue working from home through the summer or maybe even later? That's an important decision since so much of the private sector will follow the City's lead. And then my second question, the New York Stock Exchange officials said when they reopened the trading floor, they're going to encourage all returning workers not to take mass transit. How concerning is that? Do you support such an idea given that it would likely create a considerable traffic issues if many private sector corporations issue similar directives and should it fall upon those employers to provide some sort of alternative like commuter vans and private buses?

Mayor: Great questions, Steve. Okay, so let me try the simplest big picture. Right now, we just went over our daily indicators. The State has its seven indicators, three New York City, seven New York State. To get to the point of even the first opening up, the first set of restrictions relaxed, we need to hit all three of the City indicators – that means 10 to 14 days of steady progress in all three – and we need to hit all seven of the State indicators. And we have to be confident – just to make it just a little more rigorous, we have to be confident that we'll be able to hold at that level. My job is to be really blunt and honest with New Yorkers, that when I think we can handle the first elements of relaxing restrictions and hold that position and then move forward to the next point where we can relax more restrictions, that’s the time to do it when you believe not only have you hit the indicators, but that you can make up work and avoid that boomerang. The last thing in the world we want is, hey, take off some restrictions and immediately have a problem, put the restrictions back on. Or even in some places they've gone and had to add more tougher restrictions. So, we're constantly trying to get it right. And I believe it's a cardinal rule that our goal is to get it right the first time. We're not going to have a perfectly straight line, Steve, where everything always goes exactly the direction we want – that would be kind of superhuman. But we cannot have a boomerang. We cannot have something where we have to shut down again. So, we're going to be really smart and careful about it to get it right. And I guarantee you, if we can hit that note right, it'll save us so much time and energy, going forward, to not have to start and then stop and then start again. So, that's the underlying a viewpoint. Very simply that says, well, first of all, there's no way we're getting to the City and State indicators before June at this rate. So, June is the first opportunity – first half of June is the first opportunity to relax anything. The States talked about some of the vision of how that relaxing would look. I'll be filling in those blanks in the next week or two before we get to a point of any decision so New Yorkers have more and more sense of what that first few steps might look like. For now, definitely we have to think about most non-essential workers, of course, are going to keep either working from home or not doing the work they've done until we get to a point that's safer. So, the basic dynamics we have now are going to hold. If there's some loosening up, it'll be in some key areas, but we're not opening up the flood gates at once. We've seen other places do that and they paid dearly for it. So, this'll be in stages.

City employees who right now are working remotely, most of them will continue to for the foreseeable future. But, again, we will lay all this out in stages as we are ready. I think everything's going to be interrelated to the reality on the ground. I think the – obviously, we all want to know will there be a vaccine and when, or will there be elements of treatment that start to work consistently – that's going to change the whole equation. But based on what need know now, we would be careful and slow and maximize remote work for the foreseeable future. As to any company that urged its employees not to use mass transit. Well, some of that isn't surprising to me and some of that people will do on their own until they feel safer. But, you're right, we have to be careful for the opposite problem – if everyone starts turning into cars that will create a whole new problem. It is a legitimate point that companies should think about, ways of creating alternatives to get people around in the meantime. I think that's a very productive thought. But I think we're all yearning for really, really, really clear answers and we'd all like to be able to see exactly what's going to happen. I think we have to be patient about the fact that we're going to learn day-by-day what's real and when the answers are there and they're verifiable, that's when I'll offer them to people. Big picture, I want to get us safely through this summer, some opening up as we go along. And then September, crucial – opening schools, I want to see if we can get it open the whole way the way they are typically. And that's a real natural point to start opening up more if all goes well because that's when everyone normally would come back from the summer and sort of go into high gear. So, I hope that gives you a flavor of it, but it's going to be day by day, week by week.

Moderator: Next we have Alejandra from AM New York.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Alejandra. How are you doing?

Question: Good, good. How are you doing? I just had a question – over the weekend, you said that if need be the City would put up fences along beaches to help prevent overcrowding. Can you talk a little bit about what that would actually look like? What those fences would look like? How practical that might be? I mean, there's a lot of lot of beach front in this city.

Mayor: Yeah. Well, people will start to see the initial work – I mean, it's going to begin today – to put the fencing in position. I don't want to activate it – I don't want to implement it unless we need to, but we have to have it ready. So, what I can tell you is, my goal – what I keep saying to people is – folks from the surrounding communities near our beaches – and that's a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people in this city – if you want to walk on the beach, you know, fine. Enjoy that. But no swimming, no lifeguards, no parties, no barbecues, no sports – it’s just open space that you can walk on take it in and then get back home. But if we see people start to turn it into something, like what happens to a traditional summer wood beaches, we'll give a few warnings, for sure, to the people of this city and to the people of the communities near to beaches that, you know, if we don't see the right thing, we'll have to be stricter. So, the fencing will be in position and ready, but it won't be put up initially. If it did have to be put up, it would simply cut off all the entry points to the beaches. I don't want to do that. That's not something I want to see happen, but this is about health and safety. Everything's about health and safety first. So, if we need to put up fencing, we will. But I'm giving people every chance to still enjoy what they can about the beach without going to the point that we have to take tougher measures.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Good morning, everyone. My question is – I'd asked it last week, I just wanted to check in on an update because I think a lot of people are asking about it. Just more information and data – I know Dr. Barbot isn't on the call again – hope she's okay – but I'm curious if you could – if the Department of Health and the City will release the deaths per ZIP code. I know that's been a piece of information that you said that we shouldn’t receive. So, I wanted to get an update on that, and, you know, if Dr. Barbot will come back on the call. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. Deaths per ZIP code, that is coming out very soon. We’ll get you the exact day, but definitely coming out soon. And, again, we do the daily lineup according to what we need for that day. So, we put out a lineup of folks who can respond to the issues and that's what we'll do every day. And been handed a note – the deaths by ZIP code, again, sorry to be talking about such a sad topic, but we are at this point trying to make sure there's transparency, obviously, even including about painful things – that will come out this afternoon.

Moderator: Next we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor, good morning. How are you doing?

Mayor: I'm doing well Marcia, how are you?

Question: Thank you. So my questions today have to do with the city's food program. We've received a number of complaints from people who say sometimes the food arrives rotten, moldy, not properly sealed. Sometimes the deliveries are sporadic and one couple said that their last delivery included and I want to quote “six bags of onions, potato chips and cookies” and that was it. I wonder if you think that's acceptable and if they think that there should be tighter controls?

Mayor: Unquestionably, Marcia, I'm counting my blessings in the middle of this crisis and it is a blessing anytime you or any member of the media points out something that needs to be fixed on behalf of the people of the city. So thank you. No, of course not – onion rings and cookies are not nutrition. We may all enjoy them, but that ain't nutrition. So I want to get all the details to my team, please. Whatever you have of where that's happened, we'll go and fix it. Anything that's not quality food that could mean, you know, not nutritious, and that could be not a food that's up to date. You know, it's unacceptable. We're putting a huge amount of time, energy and resources into getting this right. So if any vendor, any company is giving us food that's not the right quality, we're going to go after them. If anybody in our administration isn't making sure there's high quality food, they have a problem with me. We're going to work on this and fix this.

Overwhelmingly, Marcia, I've heard from community leaders, elected officials, clergy, how much they appreciate the food program, how much they've heard from their constituents, that they are benefiting from the food program, particularly the deliveries to the door of folks who can't get out, seniors and folks with disabilities, and folks who really need those direct deliveries. So overwhelmingly I want to say I think it has been a success and I give credit to our Food Czar Kathryn Garcia and her whole team and all the agencies that have been involved. But if anybody anywhere has fallen down on the job we want to know about and we want to fix it right away.

Moderator: Next we have James from PIX 11.

Question: Mr. Mayor, can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yes. James, how you doing?

Question: I'm doing okay. Thank you. I hope you're well, and the week is getting off to as good a start as possible.

Mayor: Possible. That is the right word for it.

Question: Look, the COVID tracking center saying that in some jurisdictions nationwide there are more tests than there are people signing up to take them. I'm curious what those numbers look like here in New York City? Do we know what the demand is versus the supply and how is that being tracked here?

Mayor: It's a great question, James. Remember that for a long time we had nowhere near even the beginning of a testing supply to be able to reach people. So we sent a very conservative message for a long, long time there for a long time. There was no testing. Remember it goes back to January 24th when I first asked the federal government to give us the local ability to test and to provide us testing on a large scale. And we've still never gotten it. That's January 24th till now. We're coming up on, you know, the four-month anniversary of that, it’s unbelievable.

But when we finally got some testing, we were very conservative about it because the supply was so limited. It was focused on the folks whose lives were in immediate danger and the hospitals, it was focused on protecting healthcare providers, focused on protecting first responders, those folks who continue to protect all of us and only in the last few weeks that we've been able to go out to communities and start to do community testing. But remember the initial focus was on older folks, much older folks, and folks with preexisting conditions in particularly those who have both. What we said in the last few days is we're opening up those criteria further. We want to reach a whole lot more people, particularly folks, anyone symptomatic we want to reach – anyone who's been around others that are symptomatic or tested positive because we're finally getting the kind of capacity we need, but not because, you know, we got help where we expected to get it from in Washington, because we created our own and because the labs have been helping us to get more and more capacity.

So every time we increase the amount of available testing, it gets taken up quickly. There's a little bit of lag in the beginning as people get used to it and learn the places and all. But it quickly, when people understand there's a testing site available, it's free and that they're allowed to go there, you know, they fit the categories, people take it up. So I think we're going to see a whole lot of take up on this. I think New Yorkers are hungry to get these answers and obviously understand that when people get tested, it's part of the bigger strategy of beating back this disease. So I like what I'm seeing and I'm confident as we have more and more and let people know it's for them and it's free that more and more people will come.

Moderator: Next, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, hope you're doing well. My question has to do with the city's compliance with the state's metrics. I'm looking at the 16th, May 16th, the city was in compliance or had achieved three of seven of the metrics. So I'm wondering whether this indicates whether the city is really kind of stuck in a position where it's not really moving forward. I mean, where do you see progress here in terms of the city meeting the state's metrics?

Mayor: Well, I'm looking at him now, Henry. Look, we clearly are making progress. There are several we've met as you said, and on the others there has been clear progress. For example, on the number of available hospital beds and number of ICU beds. Those are two areas where we need to go farther, but we're getting close to those goals. And I think there's a point in the first half of June when we'll meet those.

The number of contact tracers we've made very clear. We expect to hit that goal in the beginning of June. Obviously other parts of the state are working hard to catch up on their own version of that goal. We're confident we're going to get there given the number of contact tracers we're bringing on regularly. So you can't guarantee anything in life, but if you're watching the trend lines, Henry, both on our city indicators and the state indicators, both will align in the first half of June. But again, we've got to then make decisions on exactly which restrictions to loosen up, exactly how, and we have to be confident that when we're doing it, we can hold the line. We do not want to reduce restrictions and suddenly see an upsurge that puts us right back in a situation where we have to close down. So there's a real subtle balance that needs to be struck. But if the question is do we believe we'll meet all seven state indicators? Yes. When? First half of June.

Moderator: Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: I'm doing well, Juliet. How are you?

Question: I'm fine, thank you so much. So two questions, back to the beaches. I'm sure you're expecting people to turn out, even though you're talking about just people in the neighborhood to come, but what are the specific crowd control plans for people arriving to the beach? Will the fences definitely be up? Will it be police barricades to that effect? Will there be limits to who can get to the beach or on the boardwalk? And the second question is the city budget includes anticipated raises for teachers, police, et cetera. Given the cost of battling this virus, are you considering a freeze on proposed pay increases?

Mayor: Okay, so on the beaches first, so the fencing again available, but we don't want to use it if we don't have to. When you put up the fencing, you're talking about cutting off access to the sand across the board. Don't want to do that if we don't have to do it. Fencing will be there if we need to implement it. But my goal is to see us not have to implement it. Remember, Juliet, this is how we start, you know, normally beach season begins on Memorial Day. So in a week and what's quite clear is we're not in a position to start now. We just talked about the state indicators, the city indicators by every objective measure. We're not there yet. That does not rule out that later in the beach season we might do well enough and show enough progress to do something different, still with some real restrictions, and you've seen the state restrictions on beaches everywhere. There's a whole lot of things that will not be allowed at any beach in the state. But you know, we're holding out the hope that at some point we could open up and we're training the lifeguards and we'll be ready, but we have to be ready to go up or down the scale depending on what's happening. So the fencing will be there, but it won't be implemented at first. We're hoping everyone just listens to the rules, follows the rules, no swimming, no sports, no gatherings, no parties. Just common sense observed social distancing. If you walk on the beach, do it for a limited period of time. Get back home like everyone else.

In terms of enforcement, NYPD will be out, Parks Department will be out. Obviously first and foremost, help make everyone remember, don't go in the water, not supposed to go in the water. It's a dangerous situation to ever go in the water when there's not life guards present. So there'll be a constant reminder of that everyone tries to get in the water, they'll be taken right out of the water. So we want to keep people moving. We want to make sure nothing gets too crowded, don't want to see the boardwalks crowded. Just classic social distancing. I guess I shouldn't say classic because it's something we've only dealt with for a few months, but it feels like it's been a long time. We understand the basic concept of social distancing and crowding and the NYPD will always work to avoid crowds and gatherings. So they'll be out and Parks enforcement will be out, but we're not putting up police barriers or any of that stuff initially because the message to people is it's not beach season, meaning we're in a different reality – we’re in a pandemic, we’re in a global health crisis. It's not beach season like normal. So don't go to the beach. If you live in the surrounding communities and you're used to just going for a walk on the beach, that's one thing. But don't travel to the beach because we don't want to create that dynamic where people do non-essential travel on subways, on buses, which is normally how so many people get to the beach. We're not doing that. Let's keep it simple. But Juliet, we will, if we need more enforcement, we'll put it there. If we need to take tougher measures, we'll well, and if conversely it goes really well and people listen to the rules, we'll keep things more open. And then maybe let's pray. We got to the point later on where we can open up things more and maybe even have part of the beach season again.

On the city budget, we've got a stark choice ahead, Juliet. Our goal always is to help working people. This is what I came here to do. I don't want to take away from working people. I want to protect people's livelihoods. I want to protect their income. And if I get the help that we all deserve from the federal government, we'll be able to do that. This city’s been the epicenter. I mean, I don't know what people, some people are thinking of Washington. This is the epicenter of the crisis for the whole nation. We also are one of the key places in all of America for sparking and building the entire American economy for the good of all. And if we're back on our feet and if we're unable to provide basic services and we can't get the job done, there's not going to be recovery here. And I think in that case it will hinder recovery everywhere else. So all comes down to the stimulus. If the stimulus is the right kind of stimulus. If it's done in time for our budget in June we're going to move full speed ahead to provide all the services we provide, have the personnel we need, provide people with the incomes they deserve. If there is no stimulus in time or it's nowhere near the amount we need, then a whole series of really tough decisions will have to be made across the board effecting all agencies and all personnel in a variety of ways. So we're not there yet. But in that instance, everything won't be on the table. But let's, let's accent the positive. Let's go fight for the stimulus to be the right thing, the thing it should be. And that's what’ll allow us to support our workforce and support a strong recovery here.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and everyone on the call. Two questions. The first Mr. Mayor, I'd like to get your reaction to an article on today's cover about out-of-state nurses who were brought in to help the city run the adult daycare center on Roosevelt Island. They told us patients had horrific bedsores, unchanged diapers, or even feces smeared on the walls. So your reaction to that and then a second a little bit unusual question, but I know you went to high school with Patrick Ewing. I wonder if you watched the Last Dance series and what you thought about it. If not, what have you been watching as an escape?

Mayor: I did go to high school with Patrick Ewing. He was two years behind me in high school and I used to think I was tall until the day I was walking down the hallway in high school and Patrick Ewing walked by for the first time. And definitely my ego has never recovered since. He’s an amazing player and amazing person. The – I have not seen that series though. So what Charlene and I do is we tend to latch onto one show and see it through. And we for a few, I don't know, six months or a year ago, we went through the Wire, which we had watched originally. We went through it again the whole five seasons. We went through Treme, the whole, I think it's four or five seasons. Then I've been public about this fact. I don't have to always be high-minded. We did Empire, we watched all of Empire, not always the most high-minded show, but in many ways a very intriguing show. And now we are watching Billions, which we never watched when it first came out. So we're going through that from the beginning and incredibly well acted and well-written show. So that's where we've – part of the day we get to take our mind off as something.

On this very serious. And, and you know this very, when you think about the situation at Coler, and I have not read the article Julia, but I've had it summarized to me. I think about the human reality, which is any senior who's in any facility, these are our elders, these are our family members, these are people who deserve the maximum respect and the best care. Now it's important to note and we'll get you all this background. Coler is a very well respected institution. It's been recognized nationally as a quality senior facility. Recent inspections were favorable. There's a lot of very positive things historically we've known about Coler. If something went wrong in the middle of this crisis, I want to get to the bottom of it. So we're going to investigate what happened here. And you know, I've talked to Dr. Katz, we are shoulder to shoulder and we want to know exactly what happened. So H+H is going to do its own investigation with the State is investigating. We're going to absolutely work with them. We want to get down to the bottom of what happened here. Anybody with information should come forward. So it's important that these nurses come forward to our investigators and the States. I'm glad they talked to you because we want all the truth to come out, but we need them to talk to our authorities and the States authorities.

And if it's proven that anything like that happened, that's unacceptable. Yes, it was in the middle from my understanding, the timing, the worst moment of the COVID crisis. Our systems were overwhelmed, there's a lot of staff out. Things were in real, real tough shape for everyone in every facility to handle health care. But still, if something happened that shouldn't have happened, there has to be consequences. It has to be dealt with. So we will do that for sure. But again, this facility historically, I mean as recently October, Newsweek ranked the Coler senior nursing facility as the fifth best in New York State and the most recent state inspection was November and was positive. So you know, if something went wrong, we want to know exactly what it was. We want to find the exact individuals who are responsible and then there of course will be consequences and much more immediately, we have to make sure that everything now, the care there is the best it can and should be for every person there and that there's nothing like that happening anymore.

Moderator: Last two for today, next is Andrew from NBC.

Question: Good morning everybody. Happy Monday. Mayor, I wanted to ask about schools. Last week, you and Mike Mulgrew didn't seem to be on the same page about the timeline for making a plan for the fall. He said that the teachers need to know within two to three weeks whether the plan is full reopening, hybrid reopening, or online learning. So I'm wondering are you closer to making a decision or a recommendation on schools and also have schools been complicated by the emergence of this child inflammatory syndrome?

Mayor: Yes, of course, we need to know a lot more about this syndrome and what it means as we make our decision about schools. Unquestionably, Andrew, again, I'm speaking as a parent and also as someone who believes the most important role I play is to protect people's health and safety, and particularly our families, our children. I'm very, very concerned. So yes, that information will absolutely be factored into any decision we make. The question of the timing, we communicate, our team communicates with Mike Mulgrew and the team at the UFT and also the administrators union CSA all the time and we'll keep communicating with them. I haven't heard anyone state a particular timeline in what is obviously an ever changing environment. So we'll have that conversation, but I say very clearly, the best way to make a decision of this magnitude is when we have all the facts and when we know what it's going to take to ramp up, we will define that timeline, the chancellor will define that timeline.

Now I think where everyone's on the same page is health and safety first. Plan A is unquestionably open the schools as normal because that's what it's in the interest of our kids and our families, but we have to make sure kids are safe, family members are safe, educators are safe, staff is safe, we have to make sure that we are confident of that. For any reason we're not confident in that, then there's a plan B, a plan C, a plan D, you can do all sorts of things from alternating days, staggered schedules, you can just stick with the pure online learning, which is nowhere near what we'd like it to be ideally, but still has been a very, very admirable effort in reaching so many kids. But it's May for God's sakes, this is a decision on something that's you know, it's less than four months away, but not much less than four months away, and we will make the decision at the right time.

Moderator: Last for today, we have Dave Evans from ABC-7.

Question: Hey Mayor, I wanted to ask you if I could just your overall view of this weekend, how things went and how things might change going forward? The things that jump out at me about social distancing from the weekend, Domino Park seemed to go pretty well, those circles, they were interesting. I think we counted more than six people in some of the circles. Then also I think that restaurant in Chinatown that was serving takeout and drinks people seem to congregate outside, without masks, but those things jump out at me. But I just wanted to see your overall view of how things went since we did have such a nice weekend and moving forward and things are going to be changing with police enforcement or, you know, social distancing ambassador enforcement.

Mayor: Sure. Great question Dave, and I appreciate it. So sure, try and pull it all together. First of all, the educational efforts, the exhortation, the reminders from the ambassadors, which now number well over 2,000 city employees, the community organizations, the faith organizations, there's more and more we'll be announcing as we go along, but there's going to be just thousands and thousands of people out in an organized fashion giving out free face coverings, reminding people the right thing to do. You know, a lot of times people just need the reminder. The story here this weekend and every weekend as the vast majority of New Yorkers are doing the right thing, it's been unbelievable. Vast majority of New Yorkers go out for a period of time, get back home. They're staying home because they're hearing the message it's the right thing to do, Dave, is the right thing for everyone else. But also people are staying home to protect themselves and their families. A vast majority of people are practicing social distancing. It's not always easy, but they're doing it really well. Vast majority of people are wearing face coverings, I want to see better, I want to see more of them, and that's why we're going to give out millions and millions of face coverings. Look, I think it's fair to say we've got some individuals who still haven't gotten the message and it's a very small number in the scheme of things of a city of 8.6 million people.

But for those who haven't gotten the message, then that's where enforcement comes in. So for businesses, we heard yesterday some businesses are maybe trying to cheat and do eat-in dining. We're going to crack down on that immediately if we see it. They're asking for serious fines, and if we see it repeatedly, they're asking to be shut down, won't hesitate for a moment on that. The Sheriff's Office, Department of Buildings, and NYPD, FDNY, we have a lot of enforcement we can bring to bear on that, but that we have not seen anything but some stray reports so far. The issue with the bars, Dave, it's just common sense here. You know, don't congregate. What did I say about the NYPD? The NYPD is not going to give summonses on face coverings. It will give out free face coverings. It will give reminders. It won't give summonses, won't give summonses of a few people are too close together or remind them to create space. But if you've got gatherings, anytime you see gatherings, it's real simple, NYPD, Sheriff, any enforcement entity is going to come up and say immediately disperse and that they don't disperse. Then summons begin. So for all those folks in the bars, like just don't even think about it. You want to go drink, get your drink, go home, but do not allow gatherings to occur because it's not safe. It's just not safe. And you're going to, you know, you want to restart this virus growth in this city, you want to make everyone less healthy, do you want to have us all locked up for longer? You know, anytime people are doing that, that's what they're contributing to unfortunately. So let's just get it right. This virus won't go on forever, for a period of time, but if we're going to beat it, we have to be tough and we have to be disciplined. That's what most people are doing.

And the circles, look, Dave, the circles in Domino Park, it's an experiment to see if it's the kind of thing will work, generally what we saw is the efforts to reduce the number of people going into some tight spaces, had some real success, the first time we're trying it. But you know, we're going to keep experimenting to get it right and I want to thank all the folks who are out there, Parks Department, NYPD, all the ambassadors are out there very, very diligently out there and helping people. I was with a great group of Parts Department and DEP and DOT workers in Flushing Meadow Park on Saturday and we were giving out face coverings and you know, they're really into it. They're really into protecting people's health and doing something good for them, and the folks we came across, you know, we're grateful to get free face covering. So we're going to do a whole lot of that and I think it's going to add up. And just to all members of the media, anytime you've got a report of a place where there's gatherings that are not being addressed or a restaurant that's trying to serve food in or anything like that, please let us know and we will go pay them a very immediate visit to address the problem.

Okay, everyone, to conclude, look, you know over the years you've heard the very wonderful phrase made in New York and there's things we're known for and things we're famous for and things we make that people admire all over the world. But there's a whole lot of things we didn't make because we didn't think we had to for years. You know, there was no reason to make certain medical supplies and medical equipment that was made somewhere else and we could get it when we needed it. But the world changed and it changed very, very suddenly, and the things that we thought we could depend on weren't there anymore. What did New Yorkers do? Our backs were against the wall, could have crumbled under the pressure, we could have said, oh geez, there's nothing we know how to do? What are we going to do? We don't know how to make that.

Instead, New Yorkers did the exact opposite. New York companies stepped up, New York experts, inventors, scientists, people stepped up and they found a way. And this is the best of New York City. We always find the way, always find a way to make something happen. And that is an indomitable spirit. It's actually a very beautiful thing. And there's a reason why this place is filled with talented people and people with so much drive and energy, people like that have been born and raised here for generations, and this place has attracted people with those skills and talents from around the world for generations. You add that all together. There's no place that could better fight back this pandemic than this city and you're proving it every day. But I really want to just tip my cap to all the people who said, we're going to do something here no matter what. We're going to build something, whether we know how to do it or not, we're going to figure it out. And lo and behold, they did. And now the medical supplies and medical equipment being built right here in this city is protecting your life, life of the members of your family, protecting our first responders, protecting our health care heroes. It's actually a very, very moving and beautiful story. This is how we win.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-05-19 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. There's a word we used to use, but this crisis has made a mockery of that word – the word is routine. What used to be routine in so many cases is no longer, and things that we now do that are routine to us are things we could never have imagined doing. I could certainly not have imagined all of us trying to stay six feet away from each other and socially distance. This is the closest, most emotional, warmest, passionate place anywhere on earth, and we're used to being close together. It's been a really strange thing to have to create a new routine where we have to stay part of a part so often and yet you have done it and done it well. It is not routine for us to work remotely in such vast numbers. And yet people have figured out how to do it as long as they need to. It's not routine to wear a face covering, Lord knows, but people have picked up the habit and gone with it.

So, this has been the reality in these last months. Finding a way despite the uncertainty, despite the confusion, finding a new way and it won't be something we'll be doing forever, but it's something we'll do as long as we need to do to get through. And that's been true in all parts of our city, all parts of our society. But one of the most powerful examples has been with our public schools. What used to be routine isn't happening right now, but new routines have been established, and so many people are working so hard. Students, parents, educators, to make it work and get the best for our kids. Remote learning, online learning, distance learning, whatever you call it, it had never been done anywhere near this scale. And so, it meant that teachers and parents had to work together, and administrators had to lead the way. The department education leadership had to come up with the tools, the resources, working with a whole variety of companies. I mean, all of this had to be to put together in record time. And the core transition took about a week. And I, I hope when the history is written, it will be really focused on that. There was a week between the time in which our kids were going into a school building and the time at which they started to learn in huge numbers online. And that was an extraordinary effort by so many of our educators to get ready.

So, we are now very focused in these last weeks of what would have been our normal routine school year. Very, very focused on ending the current school year as strong as we can through distance learning with a special focus on our graduating seniors. We really want to be looking out for them, and helping them to complete their studies, and to the next phase of their lives. We need to also recognize that this kind of situation, it takes special effort to connect with kids, to keep them engaged, to keep them learning. And that's not just now through June 26 with the traditional notion of the school year, we're in a whole new reality. So, we see the opportunity to keep helping our kids learn, extending all the way through the summer. Remember, distance learning creates challenges, but also creates a world of possibilities. And for so many kids this summer will be a chance to keep learning either because they need a little extra learning and a little extra time, or because it's something they want to do to keep building up their academic strength.

So, let's talk about summer learning. We see it in the positive and glass could be half full or the glass could be half empty. I'll tell you, my approach to life is look for the half full. I know the chancellor shares this view. We see this as a summer where unprecedented learning can happen, and it can propel us forward into the new school year. So, we've had the opportunity in these last months to learn our educators done amazing work with distance learning and in the process figured out what works best and are learning all the time how to do it better. And we're going to apply those lessons this summer. We have a number of students that need to be in summer learning. Students who need summer learning to help them finish out the school year strong and get ready for the next one. It's about 67,000 students in grades three to eight, about 83,000 students in grades nine to twelve, and then students with individualized education programs, special education students, 27,700 when you put that together, almost 178,000 of our students will continue in summer learning.

It's going to be a huge effort, an unprecedented effort, and the goal is simple and we believe we can attain the goal. Give every child what they need. It will look different obviously depending on the grade level, the age of the student and it will take creativity. It will take a lot of innovation along the way. Who better to do that than someone who's not only devoted his life to education and has been a leader of education all over the country, but someone who knows a whole lot about how to bring the school system back after a crisis. Chancellor Carranza previously served as superintendent of the Houston public schools, and he was there when Hurricane Harvey hit and decimated Houston, and disrupted public education, and everything in Houston. And he led the charge bringing public schools back, and making them strong again. So, he brings a special talent for the rebuilding, and for the innovation that we need for this summer and beyond. So, to give you a sense of what we're going to do this summer and how we're preparing for what comes beyond for the greatest challenge I would say the school system has ever faced, but one that I am absolutely convinced our New York City public schools will meet and then surpass. Let me turn now to Chancellor Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'd like to start off by saying that while this summer will undoubtedly be different than any summer we've had before, I want to give a huge thank you to our teachers, our students, our parents, our families, our administrators, everyone that has made this pivot to remote learning be as successful as it has been. Thank you. We are ensuring that our students will get the support and instruction they need this summer to continue learning. Learning will take place remotely, and is organized to account for different grade bands. I'll walk everyone through that now.

So, for our students in grades three through eight, summer learning will take place four days a week for a total of six weeks. This will either be on a required or recommended basis, and that is because teachers will make the determination based on each student's full year of progress. As always, as a school year closes, teachers will look closely at each individual student to determine whether they have met grade level standards, and this year they will take into account any challenges they've experienced in the past couple of months during the pandemic. Summer learning will be geared towards academic success in the fall. As the mayor has spoken on many times, this needs to be the greatest academic year in our history, and this will ensure that we have a running start to that. Summer learning will be geared towards the academic success of students who need additional supports to meet standards, and they will receive those additional supports over the summer. Teachers will communicate with families, whether their student is required to participate in summer learning in order to be promoted in August or recommended to participate to ensure they've achieved mastery of the standards. Students will also have check-ins with guidance counselors so that someone is always keeping a pulse on how they are doing in this remote learning environment. And it's summer, so we'll be incorporating things that students enjoy into the virtual experience including social emotional learning activities, and virtual field trips. So, that is for grades three through eight.

In grades nine through 12, for our high schoolers, it'll be just a little different. The schedule for summer learning will be five days per week. For a total of six weeks. Students will have up to five hours of instruction daily in subjects they received a course in progress mark for, or if they failed in a prior semester. Like elementary and middle school students, these students will also have one on one check-ins and important enrichment activities as well. Again, we want to make sure that students are being supported not only academically but in their social emotional needs as well. For students with disabilities. Our students with 12-month individual education plans will receive instruction and related services five days a week for a total of six weeks. This is also the same frequency that has happened in every other summer as well. Students will also get daily instruction and related services that are aligned to their individual education plan and remote learning plan. Students will also have check-ins with counselors and with other staff so that someone is always keeping a pulse on how they are doing as well in this remote learning environment. And as a student – these students will also enjoy the same opportunities for virtual field trips, social emotional learning activities that their peers are receiving in the other grades as well.

This, obviously, has been a constantly evolving situation, but there's one thing that hasn't wavered for a moment and that is that the City of New York is focused on accelerating learning and making sure that all students stay on track for continued success the next academic year, and that is not changing when this school year comes to an end. Our priority continues to be summer learning model, that is to keep our students on track and ready to hit the ground running in September. Before I turn it back over to the Mayor, I want to acknowledge our educators, once again, who have worked so hard and adapted to these new realities with unparalleled spirit, and enthusiasm, and dedication. I hope that many of you decide to continue to teach in the summer. We need you and our students need you. Applications will be open this week and we encourage our educators to apply. And to our families, we know this hasn't been easy. Thank you for your help and your continued support in this heroic, your heroic contributions to this effort in remote learning. And we know this means continued contributions over the summer. We can't do it without you. We wouldn't be here where we are without you, and, as always, I say we have the best students, staff, and educators in the world, no matter the day or the season or the pandemic. Nothing will ever change that. And I want to say to you, thank you. And with that, Mr. Mayor, I'd like to turn it back over to you, sir.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. And thank you again for your leadership. And the whole time, I can tell you one thing about Chancellor Carranza, he has been positive, clear, forceful throughout that we're going to get through this and we're going to find the way forward and reach all our kids. And thank you, Chancellor, for that spirit and for all you and your team are doing.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, sir.

Mayor: Now, we understand, and no one's trying to say here that even though we're positive and we're looking forward all the time, that it's going to be easy. 1.1 million students, they've gone through a lot. We've talked about before, they've gone through a lot of disruption, a lot of challenges, some have gone through even trauma. It's, it's not easy for our young people. And on top of that, they're restless. It's been months that they're supposed to stay inside, especially hard as the weather gets warmer. So, look, I want to emphasize – and I'm saying this as a parent too – it's been tough so far on our kids. It's going to in some ways be even tougher as the summer goes on. We're going to be really creative in supporting them, really aware of all they're going through. Some of the things that any young person would be looking forward to in the summer they'd be looking forward to, you know, all the summer activities, barbecues and baseball, basketball, you know, concerts, whatever it may be. All the things that happen in the summer – going to the beach – you know, all those things now are on hold and it's tough. So, we know that's a challenge, that kids are restless. We know they're feeling let down. We know a lot of kids are feeling isolated. We know we have to watch out for their emotional needs and we also have to watch out for their academic needs because any summer there's the possibility of learning loss over the summer. That could be a greater challenge in a summer like this. At the same time, again, we're going to bring some tools to this that might help us fight back against that learning loss in ways we never have been able to before and in fact give kids who want to go even farther and accelerate their learning the opportunity to do that. So, we got to look at the challenges, but we also have to see the opportunity to do more that this moment affords us.

So, today I'm just going to give you a beginning of some of the ideas we have about how to address the summer and the needs of our young people. There'll be much more to say in the coming weeks, but here are some of the ideas that now are being worked on and these are some of the virtual approaches that young people can tap into and enjoy, even if they have to stay home. Virtual field trips is something that offers kids a whole opportunity to see things that they care about and want to learn about. New educational programming on TV, radio, as well as online – eBooks being made available with lesson plans, all sorts of things that will help young people want to engage in different ways and who need to engage to continue their learning. And then there'll be more structured activities – virtual clubs, ways of bringing kids together where there's a social element, where they're connecting with other young people, but in a safe manner. These kinds of ideas are being worked on. We're working with museums, we're working with libraries, we're working with the private sector to come up with more and more engaging ideas and a lot of people want to help our young people. I’ve talked to a lot of folks in the media and entertainment world, they want to help provide new and better options for our young people. So, this is a little framing of what is to come, much more to say in the next few weeks, but we're going to provide a rich range of options and safe options for our young people.

Okay, now, one of the things that has become clear in this crisis is when you need to do distance learning – when you need to do online learning – you’ve got to have a device to learn on. You got to have internet service. And we've all known about the digital divide, we've all talked about the digital divide, but it became very real and very tangible when this crisis hit because we knew a lot of kids couldn't get what they needed because they didn't have the technology. And so, the Chancellor and his whole team, they really very urgently and immediately said, we're going to solve this problem right now. They went out and acquired 300,000 iPads and we have been reaching out incessantly over the last weeks to find any family that needed one for their student. The original goal was 300,000 to be distributed to public school students. We kept reiterating the opportunity and many, many people signed up, but we saw there still weren't as many signups as there were iPads so we opened it up further and we said, if you're a student with disabilities who goes to a private school, independent school, a religious school, we want to help you too and we'll provide these iPads to you and more and more people signed up on top of that. So, as of today, we met our goal for the end of April of sending out an iPad to everyone who had signed up at that point. But then we – as we opened the doors further, more and more have come forward. So, now, as of today, 284,000 iPads have been delivered, 5,000 more have been shipped and on the way. And there were requests for more on top of that. The number now will reach 297,000, and I want to remind everyone out there that if there's still any young person in our public schools who does not have a device, who does not have internet service, you still can sign-up; call 3-1-1 we'll still make sure an iPad gets to you. The goal is to give every student the ability to learn, every student the access to all of this new programming that's being put together. And we understand the challenge, but we also understand what is called on us as adults, what we're called on to do, which is to create the best, most positive, most usable summer learning approach in the history of the school system to lead into the strongest, best school year in the history of this school system. We have to aim high. We, and I'm saying this from the beginning and I keep saying it throughout, our educators have done an amazing job these last months; our parents have too, our kids have too, we're going to keep building that momentum. When we come back in September, we're going to do things that have never been done before to accelerate the learning of our students so they will catch up from anything that might have been missed in this crisis and then go beyond. Before this crisis, New York City public schools were getting better all the time. We are not going to let that momentum slip. We're going to take this moment, this heroic moment and what we've seen from our educators and we're going to build upon it and create a new kind of momentum.

You know, lots and lots of people are asking questions about what's going to happen in the fall and it's still too early of course, to predict. But I'll tell you one thing, when we look to the fall, when we look to everything we want to do to re-open schools, unquestionably number one factor will be safety – the health and safety of our children, our parents, our educators, our school staff. And we've been looking at that from the beginning and that's going to be the first question in answering all of the challenges ahead. Now, that would've been true had we not seen the developments in the last few weeks, but obviously what we've seen with this new syndrome MIS-C causes us additional concern because it's about safety and health. So, if something new is happening or something has become evident, that wasn't evident before, we're going to focus on it, stay focused on it and it of course will be a factor in making decisions about what we do with our schools going forward.

Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, this is the name that the Centers for Disease Control is now giving it – this is what we will refer to it as. And I told you yesterday, new guidance has come from the CDC and we're working with that now. So, MIS-C, the symptoms are there on the screen, talked about them a number of times. If you're any child in your life has those symptoms particularly in combination, please call your doctor immediately - if you don't have a doctor call 3-1-1. Now, as of this moment with the initial definition we used, 147 confirmed cases – 69 of those cases, kids who tested positive for COVID or had antibodies. One child has been lost and obviously we never want to lose another child. We're going to have more updated information with the new categories, the new specifications we've gotten from the CDC. We will keep updating you on what we're learning as a result of the work the CDC is doing, but the bottom line is it is so important to just get the message out, early detection makes a huge difference. If you see these symptoms in children call it in to a healthcare professional immediately so we can protect that child.

Now, to protect all of us, we need to make sure our hospitals, our health care providers have the blood supply that they need. Normally, honestly, this is something that year-in, year-out, the blood supply is secure - it's strong. We've really not had a situation like this before. I've talked to a lot of our health leaders and they don't remember anything like this, but it stands to reason we've never had an economic shutdown before and a huge amount of the blood supply came from corporate, corporate blood drives, blood drives by different organizations, charitable civic organizations, government agencies typically would do a blood drive. So, all of that's been cut off and disrupted. Therefore, the blood supply has gotten lower than we ever could have imagined. Now, we're going to put additional safeguards in place going forward to make sure that we don't have this kind of situation again and we're encouraging all New Yorkers who can give blood to do so right away. We started talking about this a couple of days ago. So far, 2,500 New Yorkers have made appointments to give blood just in the last few days. That's a great start, that's going to help a lot, but I want to see thousands more come forward. I'm going to do it myself. I want to see thousands come forward to give blood, to make sure our hospitals have what they need. So, all sorts of times I've heard New Yorkers say they want to help in this crisis and I believe you and so many good people doing so much to help their fellow New Yorker. If you can give blood, this is a good moment to give back to the city. This is absolutely a reason to travel, to go and give blood. You're doing a great public service for your fellow New Yorker. So, anyone who can, we need you make an appointment with the New York Blood Center today; You can go online at NYBC.org, let's say again, NYBC.org or you can call 800-933-2566 and make an appointment and give blood and save lives.

Okay, now when we think about what we've learned and we've all learned so much during this crisis, here's a disease that again, less than a year ago, no one had heard of in terms of it being something that affected human beings. And we've all had to make so many adjustments, learn so much, and we still don't know everything that we need to know about this disease. The entire international medical community doesn't know enough, but there's some things we do know and one of the things we've seen here in the city and around our nation is that this disease amplifies the disparities that already exist in our society. And it's painful because we're talking about disparities based on race and class. We're talking about both ethnic and economic disparities that have plagued our city, our nation and once again, we see that those who are suffering the most, lower income folks, folks in communities of color, folks in the immigrant communities. So, that has been the health care reality. But we know, on top of that, adding to the pain has been the economic impact as well – this double crisis, the worst health care crisis in the century in this country and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. What a horrible one-two punch and, of course, communities that were already hurting are now taking the hit even harder.

We, the City of New York, our City government, we're going to fight back. We're going to use all our tools to fight disparity. We've been doing that in so many ways over the last six-and-a-half years. We're going to amplify those efforts. And that means every conceivable form of redistribution, that means making sure that we get resources to folks who have been unfairly denied resources, unfairly denied opportunity. And one of the best ways to do that is ensuring that more and more business goes to minority- and women-owned businesses. We do that through a very aggressive M/WBE contracting effort in the City of New York that's been growing by billions and billions of dollars every year, but we have to go even farther. We have to come up with new approaches, new innovations. We have to reach more and more M/WBE’s, because that is an act of fairness and justice, because we know when we provide resources to an M/WBE that, that money goes right into the neighborhood, and circulates and provides economic empowerment, people get hired, people who learn at one business start their own business. It's important any time, but it's particularly important in light of this crisis. So, we've had extraordinary efforts by those working on our M/WBE initiatives over these last years. I want to thank our Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson. I want to thank the man who led so many of our efforts, Jonnel Doris as director of our M/WBE office who has now become our Commissioner for Small Business Services. Gregg Bishop, who was that commissioner, now my senior advisor to help us build a whole new initiative to help small businesses in this city. They all made major, major contributions. But with Jonnel taking on his new role, I have the honor of naming a new senior advisor and director for our M/WBE office. The important thing to think about here is that we've got to do something transformative, we've got to do something different. And to do that, I wanted someone who had already proven her ability to make change and to take us places we hadn't been before. Magalie Austin, known as Maggie – Maggie has served for years as our Chief Diversity and Industry Relations Officer for our Department of Design and Construction – DDC. The Department of Design and Construction does a huge amount of work around this city. And what we saw as with so many agencies was there were extraordinary opportunities going missed to help minority- and women-owned businesses to get a chance to win those contracts and build up their businesses and serve their communities. Maggie took a situation where there was many missed opportunities and turned it into a situation where opportunities were being fulfilled for so many companies. She did extraordinary work at DDC. She oversaw a portfolio of projects valued at over $20 billion – a team of almost 1,400 employees that she worked with to make change, and she did it very, very effectively. Maggie is a New Yorker through and through, grew up in the city, a St. John's graduate, someone who loves and knows this city. So, she is going to take the work that's been done these last years, and that has included a more than doubling the number of certified M/WBE’s that can get this work with the city and the huge expansion in contracts that has existed, and she's going to supercharge it, take it forward and take us to a new place and that is going to help us address the economic disparities and help communities back on their feet. So, welcome, Maggie. I know you're going to hit the ground running and we are going to be depending on you to help us fight our way back from this crisis.

Okay. So, I am thankful for the very, very talented members of this team who do such good work for the people of New York City. And I like to express that thanks all the time, and I've been noticing lately when there are particular days or weeks or months that celebrate our public workforce and all the people that do so much good for us. So, here is a moment where there's an annual week devoted to some heroes who we should be appreciative any time, any year, but this year in this crisis they have done extraordinary things. This week for 2020 is FDNY’s EMS Week, and it is falling at a very fitting time because our EMTs, our paramedics, our EMS staff have been superstars. So much has been asked of them and they have performed brilliantly. This was literally weeks ago, we hit the point in the entire history of New York City the most calls went to EMS in its history and it held – an extraordinary organization held no matter what was thrown at it. Thank God, the numbers have come way down and things are substantially back to normal. But these heroes, they went through so much and did so much good and they saved so many lives. I think of all the members of EMS who fought so valiantly through this, but I particularly think about the four members of EMS who lost their lives in this crisis. EMT Gregory Hodge, EMT John Redd, EMT, EMT Idris Bey, EMT Richard Seaberry. These were members of our EMS, valiant New Yorkers, gave everything they had to save lives and protect people. We've lost them and we need to honor them and remember them. And we also need to think about a man who came here from Colorado to help us. He didn't have to, he chose to – Paul Cary, serving as a paramedic here in the height of the crisis and we lost him to the coronavirus as well. And we will remember all of them, and there's a special place in our heart for Paul's family. They will always be regarded by us as New Yorkers and we'll always be there for them.

So, the members of EMS have done amazing, amazing work. I've had the honor of speaking with a number of these heroes and thanking them and listening to their stories and understanding the amazing work they do. Please, if you see anyone who's part of EMS, give them a special thank you this week and every week for all they do. And we all know we've lost not just these extraordinary members of EMS, we've lost other first responders in this crisis. We've lost public health care workers. We've lost people who work in City agencies and served us. People who weren't famous, but people who are there for their fellow New Yorkers. We've lost a lot of public servants to this horrible disease that came out of nowhere and has afflicted us so deeply. 270 New York City employees have been lost to the coronavirus – 270. And it's so important for us to say to their families that we will be there for you. Not just words but deeds – we will be there for you. We owe that to you. Your loved one gave their all to us. We will be there for you. A few days ago, we extended health insurance for an additional 45 days to families of City employees that we've lost, that was at the request of the municipal labor committee. And we've been fighting to get more and more benefits for the families who have lost loved ones in the federal stimulus legislation. And there is some very good activity in Washington. I want to be clear, in the stimulus passed by the House, in a separate bill passed by the Senate sponsored by Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, very good steps are being taken to help first responders, to help people who have been heroes in this crisis, and the families of those we've lost, but we need to go farther. We waited to see what was going to happen in Washington and what we've seen is a step in the right direction, but it's not enough, so we need to go farther. Many leaders have called for new and better approaches to helping those that we have lost and their families. And I want you to know, everyone who has been raising the concern, I've been listening. Members of the City Council – I know in particular Council Member Daneek Miller, Council Member Joe Borrelli have been two of the particularly strong voices. So, I've come to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to help the families who have lost their loved ones, to give them line of duty benefits. This horrible crisis came out of nowhere, grabbed this city, and these valiant city employees kept fighting no matter what. The City of New York believes, I believe, they deserve, their families deserve line of duty benefits for any death that was connected to COVID-19. So, to get that done, I'm calling upon the State of New York to act and I am officially asking the State of New York to authorize line of duty benefits for those public employees that we've lost. We'll work with all of our partners in Albany to get this done. We'll work with the City Council. We need to take this weight off the shoulders of the families of these valiant New Yorkers. They need to know their futures will be secure. And look, we can give all the praise, and we mean it – I know I speak on behalf of 8.6 million New Yorkers when I express my condolences to the families who have lost their loved one, my appreciation for all these public servants we've lost and all they've done for us – that these families need to know that they will be protected. And that's why we're going to fight for line of duty benefits for them to protect their futures.

Okay. Now, let's talk about our daily indicators. This is what we every day look to, to help us understand how far we've come and where we're going. Some days are really good, other days are mixed bag. Today is a mixed bag and it's a reminder of how much we have to stick to the plan. So, indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 is up from 48 to 57. Again, a much lower number than we used to have, which I always appreciate, but still numbers going in the wrong direction today. Daily number of people in ICUs across Health + Hospitals for suspected COVID-19 has also gone up from 475 to 492. But the percentage of people that tested positive for COVID-19 citywide has gone down from 11 percent to nine percent, and I very much like to see that single digit number, nine percent. So, again, mixed bag, more to do. Take some real comfort and some real inspiration from that last number, because that's a real good sign, but let's keep focused on the mission and we will get there together.

Okay. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Just a quick reminder that we have Chancellor Carranza in the Blue Room, and on the phone we have Dr. Barbot, Dr. Katz, and Campion. Alex from Chalkbeat is up first. Alex?

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Two quick questions. One, I'm assuming the expansion of summer school is meant to help students who have struggled with remote learning. So, I'm just curious, like, how more remote learning will help – like, will it be different at all from what we're getting in the regular school year? And two, you talked a little bit about situations where it could be mandatory and situations where it wouldn't. Can you just spell it out a little bit more clearly, like when this will be mandatory and when it won't and whether parents can elect into it if they want to? Like, if they think their child might need more support over the summer, can they asked be part of it?

Mayor: Alex, I'll start and turn Chancellor. Look, the question's fair – if a kid hasn't gotten done everything they need to, how does more help them? Well, first of all, I'd say a lot of kids – the disruption, they're having to get used to a new model, there's a certain amount of drag, there's a certain amount of acclimation, and that's true for all of us – educators getting in the swing of it, parents getting in the swing of it, kids getting in the swing of it. Also, a lot of kids, as we said, didn't have the technology. We had to get it to them. But I think it's really true to say with every passing week, everyone's learning how to do it better. So, if a young person couldn't get done everything he needed to do, but we have, you know, more time and a more flexible approach that we can apply in that time, it stands to reason that you're going to see additional gains. So, that's something that I'm convinced is going to work for a lot of kids. With that, on the other questions you asked – turn to the Chancellor.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you. Thank you, Alex. I think what's important to understand here is that the people who know their students best are parents, teachers, and principals. So, the recommendations as to who is required to attend summer learning and who is recommended is going to be that individual analysis that teachers in communication with parents are having in terms of their child's academic progress. There are some students that will be required to attend summer learning. For example, students that at the end of the term are recommended for non-promotion, there'll be required to go to summer learning. Students at the high school level that have an in-progress classification will be required to go to summer learning. But there are others – and to your question, that communication, that that back and forth between parents and teachers could lead to a student being recommended because they have more gaps to fill or they have more learning that they need to do. This is why the two words we've used from the beginning of our pivot to remote learning – flexibility and patience. We're really going to count on our parents and our teachers to continue in that mode, but there's a myriad of reasons why a student would be required or recommended. And again, the people that are best positioned to make those kinds of decisions are their teachers, principals and parents working in concert.

Moderator: Emily from NY1 is up next. Emily?

Question: Mayor de Blasio, how are you? And how has everyone on the call? I wondered if the projection of students in grades three to eight – much higher than those who were [inaudible] to attend summer school last year. That's an indication that some students have fallen very far behind during the pandemic during remote learning.

Mayor: Yeah. Emily, I think it's quite clear that you take away, you know, months of the school year in the much more effective setting of everyone being together in a school building where teachers can use all their skills to maximum impact – of course it's going to have an impact and it's going to be a negative impact in a lot of cases. But what is important is how much ground has been made up by kids, by parents, by educators in the meantime. And it's actually very striking to me – I think this is, you know, very legitimate glass half full – how many kids managed keep going and keep learning so effectively. But it stands to reason it would be harder and some kids would have to need more time and more help. But the fact is – here's the good side of the equation with distance learning – it's very flexible. You can do it, you know, different times a day, you can do it weekends, you can do it summer, and so it's going to give us that catch up opportunity. So, unquestionably more kids need the help than would have been true in a traditional year. But we also have tools to work with to get that done. You want to add?

Chancellor Carranza: I'll only add Mr. Mayor that we looked at last year's data in terms of how many students were being served in summer learning. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison because there was a lot of other kinds of summer programming and schools had their own individual summer programs. This year is going to be centralized because we want to reach as many students as possible. Again, the academic term has not finished either. We haven't ended this school year. So, we are projecting and providing capacity to be able to serve as many students as possible and students that will need this kind of support. So it's a combination of both being prepared and also looking and triangulating the data from last year and looking at what should we be ready to do. We feel very confident that every student that needs this kind of support and we want to make sure that teachers that recommend summer learning for their student there will be a place for that student to be able to have that service.

Moderator: Shant from the Daily News is up next. Shant?

Question: Good morning everyone. Another question about summer school for you, Mr. Mayor and Chancellor Carranza, can you provide details of the prerecorded lesson component and address possible concerns that that kind of approach won't really engage students. Also on line of duty benefits, given that both the State legislative process and basically everything in Congress can take a lot of time. Why not use your emergency power, Mr. Mayor to expedite some level of funding out of the city budget to families of first responders? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you Shant. I'll start and pass to the Chancellor on the other question. We're going to do whatever it takes, Shant, to make sure these families get these line of duty benefits. I believe the legislature will act quickly. They're planning to act on some other matters – to the best of my understanding, I think this is something that knowing the city supports they would embrace and they would act on. So according to everything I understand about State law the right way to get this done and the way that we'll really have both the immediate and the lasting impact for families is to do it through the State legislature. If we sense there's going to be a meaningful delay there and there's other things we can do, of course I'll look for every way to help these families. But I think this is something that will get, you know, real immediate attention from our colleagues at the State level. Chancellor you want to speak to the other piece?

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, the learning modality over the summer will be a mixture of live learning, virtual learning, and some prerecorded learning as well, but our focus is to have as much live learning as possible. In the education speak, we call it synchronous learning. Now the time period between the end of this academic semester and the start of summer learning will be used for additional professional development for our teachers that will be teaching in the remote learning venue over the summer. So, we will do some more skill development. Actually, we have quite a number of teachers in New York City that are already very skilled at remote learning, synchronous learning, live teaching, if you will. So, we're going to also tap into their expertise and share that broadly over the summer as well, as well as how we prepare for any eventuality as well, so it'll be a mixture. But again, it's all focused on making sure that students are engaged and they're making up or taking care of whatever educational requirements they need. The one other thing that I can't emphasize enough is these one-on-one check-ins that will happen. Counselors will be available, social workers are going to be available, teachers will be checking on students. So again, the social-emotional needs, a trauma-informed pedagogy that we will be providing these students and families over the summer is in many ways just as important as the academic needs being addressed as well.

Moderator: Erin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Two questions. One about line of duty? Do you have an estimate for how much this will cost? Just to clarify, you're talking about all city workers, not just a uniformed first responders, right? And my second question is, have you discussed with the Governor what will happen if the city hits the State's indicators but not the City's indicators. Sounds like you said the State indicators should be hit in the first half of June. We haven't seen long stretches of, of continuous progress on the city ones. So, what's going to happen if those aren't in sync?

Mayor: Erin, on your first question, we'll get you the dollar estimate, but the bottom-line, yes. All city employees who died because of COVID-19, let's be clear, all city employees who died because of COVID-19, their families will receive death benefits. This is what the City of New York wants to see happen. This is what I want to see happen. Again, we'll go to the State legislature to get this done and we expect a lot of partnership there. The indicators look, I believe that they are going to link up. I believe they're obviously interrelated. They're not two different universes there. There are statistics and facts that interrelate to each other and move in very similar fashions. So, it's clear to me looking at both that the first half of June is the time where they all come together. If we think for any reason that's not going to happen and we'll have that conversation with the State. But I think there's been tremendous unity with the State on the fact that we're going to be careful and smart about when to do the first steps of reopening. We're going to watch carefully in each phase to make sure things work and don't go in the wrong direction. We're all very devoted to avoiding that boomerang. So, it's a very fair question, but I strongly believe they will align and as we get toward that point, if we don't see enough alignment, we'll have that conversation. I'm sure we will be able to find a common strategy to go forward.

Moderator: Yoav from The City is up next. Yoav?

Question: Hi everyone. I wanted to ask about the Health Department's analysis of what's happening at NYCHA as far as coronavirus. In a press release it said yesterday quote, the findings show that the degree to which residents of NYCHA have been affected by COVID-19 is proportionate to their representation of the city's population. Now my understanding that that was based on the number of confirmed cases, not on the number of deaths which did show a disproportionate impact. So my question is whether the death data was factored into that conclusion by the Health Department and if not, why not? Separately, I just had a quick question about testing sites. The Health Department put out a very useful map yesterday on where the sites are located. Thank you for that. But it looks like on the, on the map there isn't a site anywhere near the Rockaways which is one of the hardest impacted areas of the city. So, wondering where the closest site is and, and why there isn't a site that's closer there? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Yoav. Let me confirm because now we're over 150 sites. Let me – the team here will get an answer either right now hopefully or to you right after, but we're trying to reach every neighborhood and keep building from there. So I want to confirm if there isn't a good site there, we'll get them one right away. But I want to make sure out of the 150, I want to see if your assessment is correct there. Look, any place that that needs more – the goal is to keep spreading the testing farther and farther around the city, keep adding more and more sites. So this will be a constant growth effort from now on.

On the question of NYCHA, look, we have been trying to really focus on people who live in public housing now for years long before this horrible virus, and I have to be blunt that for a long time I think the city government tried to ignore its obligations to public housing, and we over the last years have put a huge amount of resources into trying to improve the lives of public housing residents who have gone through so much. They happen to be folks who fall exactly into the categories of people who have borne the brunt of this crisis. Obviously overwhelmingly lower-income folks, people from communities of color, folks who in so many cases have not been given the health care they deserved over years because health care is still given out according to your bank account, not your need in this country, and that's wrong, and we're trying to fix that with guaranteed health care. What the data I saw said, I think you're right to say there's a difference between the people who have been infected by the disease versus the number of deaths. The number of people infected by the coronavirus in public housing appears to be almost exactly consistent with the amount of people in public housing and their presence in the population in New York City. The death number is higher. I think the fact is that we're always trying to understand what we need to do to serve people and help people. I know in NYCHA there's been tremendous devotion to making sure that residents got whatever help they needed. We've set up a testing sites at NYCHA. The State has as well. We've distributed face coverings to NYCHA residents for free food initiatives. I just been on a very rigorous cleaning schedule. So we know there's been a whole host of initiatives taken to protect people and those will continue and will deepen. So that's, that's the approach we're taking to protect our residents of public housing. Commissioner Barbot, you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, Mr. Mayor. You know, we are and have been and will continue to be committed to transparency and we've been clear that yes, COVID-19 has affected communities of color disproportionately. In fact, you know, black and brown people are dying at twice the rate of white New Yorkers, and we're committed to ensuring that that information informs this response, and as the Mayor said, you know, there have been testing sites put in NYCHA facilities. You know, I want to just make it clear that in the press release that we put out, we also included the number of individuals who died because of COVID-19, either confirmed or probable and were residents of NYCHA, and you know, we lost unfortunately a little bit over 1,100 people who have lived or lived in NYCHA, so we are very committed to ensuring that, you know, we look at the data in any and all the ways possible and that's why we put it all out because it's important for us to make sure that we are transparent in this, in that we give communities the opportunity to interrogate the data and ensure that we are not missing ways in which we can further help support all New Yorkers, especially those living in NYCHA.

Moderator: Next is Brigid from WNYC. Brigid?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Two questions, one just to follow up on some of the summer school announcements. I'm wondering if you or the Chancellor could talk any more about the criteria that will be used to decide what students should attend summer school this year given how different the learning experience has been, and then secondly, related to this new Health Department data that was released yesterday, another follow up for some of these areas that we saw such high death rates, specifically places like Star City in Far Rockaway in addition to some of the demographics, that helps explain why there's such a high prevalence there, is the City trying to understand if there's any other, you know, physical infrastructure issues like the air flow between apartments that could be part of the cost for why the spread and the death rate are still high there?

Mayor: Thank you Brigid. Let me have the chance to go first and then we'll turn to Dr. Barbot and Dr. Katz for their thoughts.

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, Brigid, thank you for the follow-up. Again. the recommendations for summer school including required attendance and recommended attendance are all based on the teacher's analysis of the academic progress of the student. That's not done in isolation. It's done in consultation with parents. It's also done at looking at the entirety of the students' academic performance over the course of the year. It's important to keep in mind that once we, when we pivoted to remote learning, almost three quarters of the school year had already been logged. So, there is all of that time as well to keep in mind as well. Earlier there was a question about is there an opt-in option? There isn't an opt-in option, but if a parent does feel that their child needs some additional instruction in this summer remote learning venue that's a conversation they should have with their teacher. The required elements for students to attend summer learning are obviously at the high school level students that have been given in-progress mark or students that have not completed the requirements for one of the courses, and, and for other students, it's students that had been re recommended for retention in June. Those are the lower grade students as well. Those other two hard and fast rules the rest is really based on that analysis that teachers and parents and principals will make together as they look at the academic progress of their children.

Mayor: Thank you, Chancellor. Dr. Barbot?

Commissioner Barbot: So, with regards to the parts of the city where we're seeing higher transmission, we are [inaudible] investigative pieces and try and identify potential clusters. We have not identified any clusters that have been linked to transmission [inaudible] for example apartment ventilation systems. There is, to my knowledge, no indication in the ever-growing literature that's being put out by scientists across the world in terms of COVID-19 being transmitted through ventilator systems, and so you know, it's something that we are continuing examining the literature and I think the best advice that we will continue to give workers is what we've been saying with regards to the best way to slow down and stop transmission of COVID-19 is for individuals to practice good hand hygiene, practice good respiratory hygiene meaning covering your mouth and your nose when you cough or you sneeze. Diligent hand-washing new stuff, face coverings when you go outside and staying indoors as much as possible.

Moderator: Next is Matt from Newsday. Matt? Hey, Matt?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: There you go. How you doing?

Question: Hey, good. I'm doing all right. How about yourself?

Mayor: Good. Thank you.

Question: For the Mayor – will a business hosting an illegal gathering be spare to summons, provided the gathering disperses immediately upon request? And for Dr. Barbot, was the PPE in that depot at issue in March primarily intended for health care workers?

Mayor: Wait, say that again please. That last part.

Question: Sure, for Dr. Barbot, the PPE at issue at the depot in March. Was it primarily intended for folks who are health care workers?

Mayor: So, Matt, let me start on that and we'll turn to Dr. Barbot and then I'll answer your other question on the businesses. Again, the – I think the frame of the question misses the way we had to approach this from the beginning and I was intimately involved in the efforts to find PPEs all over the globe to protect our people. I spent a whole lot of time, whether it was on the phone with the White House or FEMA, or whether it was calling people who had leads to get us PPEs or talking to CEOs of companies who produce them or working to get them produced here in New York City. So, I can tell you from a lot of knowledge that from the beginning it was clear. We were really in a dangerous situation of not having enough of a supply coming from the federal government or from the international market and we had to keep building that supply rapidly. But we had to think about that supply in terms of the needs of our hospitals, our health care workers, and our first responders because everyone was interconnected. An EMT or a paramedic who brought someone to a hospital was in the same connection that doctors and nurses were who treated that patient. Many, many times, our police officers had to go into situations where they're dealing with people with COVID-19 and have to help them in a variety of ways, and everyone deserves protection.

So again, I have a feeling of tremendous respect for all of our public servants who've served the frontline. Our first responders, we were asking so much of them, they deserve protection. Our health care heroes deserve protection. Our job was to take whatever we had, get it to everyone who needed it, and then keep finding more all the time, and there was not a choice of saying, oh, you know, you're a correction officer or police officer or firefighter, EMT, we don't think we can give you something because we have to give it to someone else. No, we looked from the position of we had to supply the correction officer, the EMT, the paramedic, the police officer, and we had to supply the doctor and the nurse and the health care worker. So that was the understanding from the very beginning and to constantly try and make sure that we got what we needed, where we needed in time but against a tough, tough backdrop where it was constantly a challenge. And if we had just worked with the supply we had, we would have been lost in a matter of weeks. We had to constantly focus on expanding supply and that very successful effort. And a lot of credit goes to a core group of people. Emma Wolfe played a role and Jackie Bray and Jimmy O'Neill and Dan Symon and many, many others They succeeded every week and finding more and more and more, which is why we were able to keep those who needed PPEs in a steady supply them at the crisis level. I want to emphasize, Matt, not the level we would have ideally wanted in terms of the PPEs but at the crisis level according to the CDC standards. So, I want to give you that framing. Let me go to Dr. Barbot and then I'll come back on your second question, Matt.

Commissioner Barbot: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and yes, you know, I think the way that you've put it as exactly how I was going to put it, you know, these were crisis situations where of course we needed to provide personal protective equipment for all of our first line responders and doctors and nurses, NYPD, EMTs, and we were making hard decisions all the time. I want to just make sure that there's no ambiguity, that we value all of our first responders equally, and that we were all working under extremely tough situations, but that we were working as a team and we were able to provide personal protective equipment for our first responders. Do we wish we were able to do more at that time? Absolutely. But you know, we were working under such extreme circumstances and really looking to everyday secure additional resources for the heroes on the front line. So, Mr. Mayor, I echo your framing and I just want to clarify that there was always a spirit of collaboration and I wish, you know, every day making hard decisions that we were able to do more at the time. But the great thing now is that we're able to provide the ongoing PPE that our first responders and NYPD, nurses and doctors, EMTs need every day.

Mayor: Thank you, doctor, I want to take one step back before answering the second part of Matt's question. Yoav asked the question about the Rockaways, based on what's been handed to me, Yoav I think you're right and the update is there will be a site in the Rockaways opened on June 1st. So that's going to be corrected quickly and as I said, there's going to be many additional sites around the city. On a Matt’s question, Matt, you'll remember the day that I directed that restaurants and bars no longer serve people in person, you know, no more dining in restaurants and bars, drinking in bars. That was a long time ago that we made very, very clear that was unacceptable. And you'll remember in the days after we sent out a massive enforcement operation and actually very few restaurants or bars were not complying and most if there was any outstanding issue, corrected it immediately, and we only found a few instances where there was resistance or unwillingness to address what needed to be addressed. And these are for profit businesses and where we found that there were some summonses but it wasn't a handful. Since then, we have not found there to be a problem. We've had a few reports lately.

But again, our goal is wherever possible, if we see a problem, we just want the problem corrected. We're not trying to take money out of people's pocket in the middle of an economic crisis. We want the problem corrected. If there's resistance to correcting the problem, then we will unquestionably issue summonses. If there's continued resistance, more summonses or even a close down a business or a building. So, I think as much as I understand the real desire to see clear, linear dynamics, the one thing I want to emphasize is the overwhelming reality has been people have done what we've asked them to do, and most people when reminded, take the reminder and act on accordingly, and we have very, very rarely since this crisis began, had to use summons. But when we need to, we will. It's quite clear if we, if the only way to fix a problem is with a summons, we will absolutely use a summons.

Moderator: Jeff in the New York Times is up next. Jeff?

Question: Good morning to the mayor and the panel. Two questions. The first one is for Dr. Barbot. Dr. Barbot, after attending 54 out of 55 news conferences since the first positive case of coronavirus in New York City, why have you been absent from the last four news conferences? Second question is for the Mayor. Mr. Mayor, who among your commissioners and senior staff is in charge of the city's public health response to the coronavirus pandemic?

Mayor: So, Jeff I'll start. I see you're always interested in personnel matters and that's great, but I think you should never miss the forest for the trees. This is a team effort. It was constructed as a team effort. It has been a team effort. It will be a team effort. And whatever definitions you or anyone else wants to put on, that's fine, but you know where the government here to serve people and we build the operation that will protect New Yorkers, and that's exactly what we've been doing. So, the way I look at it, we have a team, Dr. Perea-Henze as Deputy Mayor, working with commissioners under his leadership, including Dr. Barbot and Dr. Katz. Jay Varma’s good work as my Senior Advisor. And we work with the State and we work with the federal government, and this is something that we work on literally, of course, every single day. So that's the way we have structured things. The major decisions come right here to me. Throughout this whole crisis that's been the reality. This is the farthest thing from business as usual. And the other reality is that when we organize a press conference and we've been having them incessantly, we put together whatever group of officials make sense for that given day, and that's what we'll keep doing. So you can expect that every day you'll see different lineups and that's been the reality from the beginning and you should expect that going forward. But again, I don't know, I think some people like to see things in silos. I don't, I've spent six and a half years breaking down silos in this government and trying to create a much more of a team approach, and that's the only way to handle something of this magnitude. So that's how we've structured things. Dr. Barbot, you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, I just to echo what you said, that this response has been characterized by a team and we are – I am committed to continuing to work as part of that team.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Last two, Kathleen from Patch. Kathleen?

Question: Hi, this is a question about the summer programming. When will families find out when their kids have taken these classes? Will they be staggered through the summer or will they be taking place in one block of time, say July and then two weeks in August? And then my second question is, do any of the summer programming include opportunities for kids to be earning some money this summer as they might've done before the crisis hit?

Mayor: So, Chancellor, you're going to talk about how you're structuring the programs. Look, we, Kathleen, on your question, we very much want to think about anything and everything we can do to help our young people this summer. The traditional methodologies that, you know, were available to give kids summer opportunities where they could earn money. Those have obviously been profoundly disrupted. Our budget's been profoundly disrupted. But we're going to still keep trying to find solutions. We're going to work with the City Council to see if we can think of creative ways to move forward. But in the meantime, we're going to make sure, even if kids can't get outside, that there's a lot of great opportunities for them to learn and have positive engagement during the summer months. Chancellor, do you want to speak to the specific questions?

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, the summer learning time will be in a block of weeks, six weeks. There won't be any staggering. It'll all happen simultaneously. July through August.

Moderator: Last question goes to Duncan from the Gay City news. Duncan?

Question: Hi Mayor, I hope you're doing well through all of this.

Mayor: Thank you, Duncan. How have you been?

Question: I've been fine, thank you. I have a very quick question about shutting businesses down, which you've spoken to. Exactly, how do you propose to do that? You have to go to court to get a temporary restraining order in as a prelude to a court case. Can the Health Department just shut it down? Can the NYPD just shut it down? What's going to be the methodology if you have to do that?

Mayor: It's a great question, Duncan, and I'm happy to say, and you know, our team will get you the exact scorecard here if you will, but I got to say whatever we may have thought would happen in a situation like this, our city has been amazing in the sense of how little we have seen. Again, it's now been, you know, March, April, halfway through May, 8.6 million people and the greatest health care crisis we've ever seen. you might've expected a lot of people to not make the adjustments or try to resist or be really greedy and you didn't see that. You saw the vast, vast majority of people really respect what had to be done in this crisis, support each other, do the right thing. Again that – right after the order on the restaurants and bars, I would not have been shocked if there was a need for a certain amount enforcement. There was almost none unnecessary in terms of any kind of sanction. So I do think it's important to recognize how rare it has been that we have needed to take the more rigorous measures.

Now you, you've talked about the process and again we will get you more information about the specifics with the court systems, obviously not functioning as normal right now. Best of my understanding, you know, immediate actions by the police department, fire department, Buildings Department, Sheriff's Department, if they see something that is an immediate danger, they can act. Obviously, we're under emergency – state of emergencies or that empowers actions on behalf of public health and safety. But I also understand the Health Department's ability to issue a cease and desist order if they see something that presents a public health hazard and the Commissioner's orders are something that could be acted on very quickly. So, Commissioner Barbot you want to add to that? Well, let's try that again. Commissioner, do you hear me?

Commissioner Barbot: Sorry. Mr. Mayor, had some technical difficulties. I think you covered it and I don't know that I would have anything else to add beyond what you've already laid out. Thank you, sir.

Mayor: Thank you. Okay, well everybody I again, as you can hear in each day is presentation, I'm very sober about the challenge we face, but I'm also very hopeful. And I'm hopeful because I believe in the people of this city. I've been watching in a way that no one else gets to have the vantage point your mayor gets to have, and I've watched every corner of the city and how people have reacted to this crisis and it's been outstanding and it gives me a lot of hope for the city and its future because people who do this much good under this much duress, that's a special people. That's who New Yorkers are. But I have a special feeling for our young people and I want to focus on them in these last few words because I've seen so much in our young people. They're going through a lot as we talked about earlier, but I've seen so much strength in them.

I am probably affected by the fact that I'm the parent of a 25-year-old and a 22-year-old and they're proud graduates of New York City public schools and every moment of their education occurred in our public schools. But I saw in them and I saw in so many of their contemporaries, and I've seen in a lot of young people I've met since, a strength, a kind of steeliness that I think was evident long before this pandemic. I think it's been the reality of a generation that grew up with a lot of challenges. Sometimes they remind me of some of the stories I used to hear from my older relatives who grew up with the Depression of World War II. These kids at today, maybe it wasn't quite that, but they did grow up with the Great Recession. They did grow up with the threat of global warming looming over them. They've grown up and learned more earlier in life than any generation in previous human history because they've had access to so much information and information that caused a lot of them to grow up real fast, maybe sometimes too fast. But that's been the reality.

So, this generation – a generation I think in their own way as pretty tough – has then had to confront the coronavirus, and it's asking a lot of our kids, but what we've seen already is how many of them have found a way and have found a way to keep learning, and found a way to, you know, somehow make sense of a situation which is so confusing to all of us. This is the generation that will one day inherit this city and I see a lot of strength in them and it's our job to support them. It's our job to foster their futures, to believe in them, to do things that will support them even if there are things we haven't known how to do before, like distance learning, we're figuring it out. They're figuring out, we better figure it out too to be there for them. But I will tell you when we come back in September, as I said, we're going to have the greatest school year we've ever had because we have to, we owe it to them and they will be a new version of a Greatest Generation and they give me a lot of hope in terms of what kind of city we can have in the future, because they will be ready and it's our job to help them be ready. Thank you, everybody.

2020-05-20 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Let's take a moment today to think about people in our lives who mean so much to us because they are our elders. The folks we look up to, the folks who brought us up, the folks who got us this far. Let's take a moment to think about the senior citizens in our lives, our moms and dads, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles – the people who have done so much for us – and to think about what they mean to us. And I had an experience this week – I have an aunt, my Aunt Jean, she lives up in Maine, she's 93 years old. And she reached out to me because she saw one of these morning press conferences, and she was very taken with the use of the word boomerang to describe the fact that we have to fight this disease and make sure it doesn't have a resurgence. So, she reached out to me to tell me she thought that I was saying something important and she liked the way I said it. And we went back and forth about what was going on, what was going on here, what was going on up there. And in the conversation with her, I felt a tremendous sense of reassurance, because over the years she's told me stories from her own life. She's 93 years old, so she went through the Depression. She has always told me stories of what her family went through, our family went through in the Depression, how they overcame it, how they survived that. She's told me stories about my dad when he was in the US Army in World War II – the letters she would get when he was fighting in battles all over the Pacific. The letters that would come that would tell her that he was still alive, and what that felt like. And it gives you a sense of what we have gone through as New Yorkers, as Americans when you talk to the older people in your life, it reminds you just how much we've had to overcome previously. It gives you, for me at least, but I think for a lot of us, a sense of sort of a grounding, a kind of a ballast. An ability to remember that no matter how tough this feels, no matter how unprecedented those who came before us went through so much and they overcame. But it also gives me a sense of gratitude.

When I talked to my aunt, I feel just such gratitude for her. I feel such a sense of inspiration that, you know, she's still here, and that she still has this wonderful spirit and love of life. And I think every one of us has people like that in our life. And it's a reminder that we literally wouldn't be here without all of them, but also what they've taught us, what they mean to us. It's a society that in many ways, prizes, youth so much. That's certainly true in media, and entertainment, and advertising. But I think it's a time when maybe we're reassessing a bit, and we're coming to remember what we owe our seniors and to appreciate them more, and to look out for them more, and to defend them more. So, to me, this comes down to the seniors in our lives, what they have given us, what they mean to us, and what we owe to them. What we owe to them in terms of making sure they are healthy, making sure they are safe, always being there for them.

Now, this crisis has clearly been so tough on the oldest New Yorkers, and it has shown us, once again, we have to redouble our efforts to help those who are most vulnerable. And some of the folks who have had the toughest time, our seniors who live in nursing homes. There are 169 nursing homes in New York City, and this whole crisis has made us think about what happens to folks who live in a nursing home any time, but particularly during a crisis. And it's making us think about just the way nursing homes are organized in our society. They're largely for-profit enterprises. And I think a lot of tough questions being asked and it should be asked about where we are now, and where we want to go in the future. But I think about what has been like in these last few months in the nursing homes of our city, what it has felt for seniors. The fear that we all feel I'm sure has been magnified for so many of them. The sense of isolation that all of us are feeling has been magnified for so many seniors. We all have more to do, and I know the State of New York has been working hard to address this issue, and the City has as well, but we want to keep doing more and more.

So, today I want to talk about a four-part plan to address the needs of our seniors, particularly our seniors in nursing homes. First, if you had to guess right now what I would tell you is the most important thing in terms of fighting the coronavirus in this case in nursing homes, I imagine if I gave you one guess, you would say testing. Once again, all roads lead to testing. We in the first weeks of this crisis, there was no testing to be had basically, and what we had had to go to save lives in the hospitals, had to go to protect the healthcare workers and first responders who are the people saving our lives. We're now spreading out testing throughout communities. Thank God we're getting more and more of it. Finally, no thanks to the federal government, I wish they were doing more. They still need to do more, but we are making real progress in the amount of testing.

So, starting next week we will offer PCR test, the diagnostic tests to every nursing home in New York City. This will be for onsite testing in the nursing homes. As many test kits as the nursing home needs, we will provide, we're working with a lab to do the processing, so this'll be a dedicated effort focused on the nursing homes, all 169 of them, and whatever amount of tests they need, whatever amount of lab capacity they need, we will find it for them. If every nursing home does this consistently, we believe it will take us up to a need of about 3,000 tests a day, and we want them, we want all the nursing homes. Again, we don't control them. There's a few that are in the domain of our public health system, but the vast majority are private nonprofit that we don't control, we don't regulate, but we're offering this to all for free. And the tests deliveries begin next week. We'll ramp it up immediately, and then continue as long as it takes. If this needs to go on for months and months, we will continue for months and months, whatever it takes. As long as we're fighting this crisis, we will make sure that all nursing homes have the testing capacity they need in New York City.

Second part, we're going to provide more staff. So, here's what happens. When you start doing more and more testing, you will find more people who test positive, it's understandable. And that will include some of the good people, the valiant people who work in our nursing homes. And let me take a moment to thank all of them. Again, there's so many unsung heroes in this fight. People who work in nursing homes do incredibly important work under often really tough circumstances. They do it because they love our seniors. They do it because they want to help. And for a lot of them, this has been a very, very tough time. You can imagine. So again, I always say I want to offer my thanks, but please, if you know anyone who works with our seniors, if you know anyone who works in a nursing home, thank them, because they deserve that support and encouragement. Well when the testing grows and grows, of course you'll find some of those good people will test positive, because more and more people around New York City will be identified as positive, including people you know, didn't even know they had the disease. Anyone who tests positive who works in a nursing home has to stay away for 14 days. You're going to have staffing shortages. We are committed, the city of New York is committed to filling those gaps, to making sure there's enough personnel for every nursing home. So, we've been sending additional personnel already to nursing homes. We asked the nursing homes of this city to tell us what they needed. We put in place almost 250 additional staff in nursing homes citywide, nurses, nurses aides, other staff. We will continue to fulfill the requests from every nursing home. By the end of next week, every outstanding staffing requests from every nursing home in New York City will be fulfilled by the city of New York.

Part three, outbreak response team. So, the goal here of course, is to keep containing the coronavirus, keep pushing it back. But wherever we see an outbreak, even if it’s as localized as happening in a single nursing home, we want to go right at it. We want to act immediately. So, we have 10 outbreak response teams ready, teams of minimum three people led by our Health Department. Each team has an epidemiologist as the lead individual in the team, but they'll bring in additional experts in infection control, mental health, whatever it takes to assist that nursing home to address what they're facing and fix it and move forward. By the way, this is for nursing homes, and it's also for other congregate settings that serve our seniors, like assisted living facilities. So, the second there's any sign of a problem, this team can go and can oversee the response, can help control infections, make sure the PPEs are where they need to be and the supply is right, and people are using the right way. Make sure that retesting is done in the facility. That everything is handled so that the outbreak is contained, and people can move forward safely.

And then part four, part four is looking ahead to the future. Look, the future might look very different, and I think we need to start thinking about a different future. I think we need to think about a time where more and more of the care given to our seniors is given to them at home. I know from the seniors in my life, I mentioned my aunt Jean, who is living still at home in her home in Maine. And I know this was true of my mom, and my aunts, her sisters, everyone had the same wish, they wanted to stay at home no matter what. We got to make that the norm more and more. Now, we got to think about why it even got the way it got that so many people ended up in a nursing home, including a lot of seniors who didn't want to be there. There are a lot of reasons for that, but we also have to think about the fact that we've learned in this crisis and even before that there may be a better way, not only in terms of what the senior wants and what's right for them emotionally and what their aspirations are, but literally for health care for that senior and for everyone. Having folks at home is in many ways not only a better quality of life, but it's a better place to care for someone done right. It's a better place to make sure that people have the support they need, and by the way, if people are living at home, there's much less chance of being in a situation where they're exposed to a disease that's spreading. There's a lot to think about in terms of how to build— a really comprehensive plan to maximize home care, because that's what would take to reprogram our city towards much more focused on helping our seniors to stay home and have all the support they need. That's a big effort, it's not something I can tell you we can do today, but it will be part of our recovery planning. We have said, we're not just going to bring this city back, we're going to bring it back stronger, better, and fairer. We're going to address a lot of things that didn't go address before, this is one of them. So, as part of our recovery process, we're going to look at how to maximize home base care rather than nursing home care so we can support our seniors better.

Okay. Now I talked about protecting our seniors. Let's talk about something that's been a crucial mission from day one, protecting our healthcare heroes, protecting our first responders. Want to emphasize from the beginning of this process, we said we had to protect the people who were protecting us. The first responders across all agencies, the healthcare workers across all of the different types of hospitals, everyone who was at the front line needed protection that meant the personal protective equipment, the PPEs. And we know it was a fight from day one and again when we look back on the history of this, the scarcity that attended to this crisis from the first minute that we're still fighting against now was shocking in this land of plenty, but I want to thank all the people in all of the agencies and the hospitals, all the great people at emergency management, everyone who bonded together to create a system to get the PPEs we needed and I got to tell you, I was deeply, deeply involved in that process and it was not only a matter of life and death and people knew it. It was a constant race against time because everything we thought we could depend on wasn't there. The federal government system wasn't working anywhere near the level we needed, the international market collapsed. Every day and I am talking down to, I would talk to the team and they would be pursuing individual leads with individual companies in countries all over the world, constantly trying to see could we get a shipment one day earlier and then as we've talked about before, realizing we have to protect ourselves by maximizing production here in New York City and that's a wonderful value and story and all the people who are doing that work producing PPEs here in New York City, they are heroes and I want us to remember that and really appreciate them in the months and years ahead. But the fact is we were up against the wall constantly and the reason we got through was the resolve of everyone in the city government, all our partners, all those people in business who came to help us and the ingenuity that was constantly applied to the situation. We got very close to running out many a time and this is on the crisis standard, this is not the ideal standard, this is the CDC crisis standard, which is sort of the fallback that you use that still protects everyone, but is the real world reality of scarcity that we had to deal with. But now I can say something I rarely got to say in the last few months, we are confident about the supply we have for the remainder of the month of May. That means the N95s, the face shields, the goggles, the gloves, the surgical gowns, the face masks, meaning the surgical masks. All of those items are now in sufficient supply to get us through the month of May to protect our first responders and our healthcare heroes. That's progress, that means all hospitals can be provided with what they need, nursing homes, as we just discussed. Another group of folks who have worked heroically, and we don't talk about it because it's such a sensitive topic, but the folks in the funeral homes, they've done important work we can provide for them as well. The folks at the medical examiner’s office who do such important work, again, often unsung heroes and we thank them for all they do, it's not easy. It's painful often, but they do such good work. And of course, FDNY, NYPD, correction, all of the agencies that need the PPEs we're providing for them and any of the other key agencies that have PPE needs. So, that's something that I can say with some relief that we'll get through this month. We still have work to do to increase that supply for the weeks and months ahead. And then to build up that New York City strategic reserve, and this is crucial. I announced this weeks ago, we'll never going to be caught in a situation where we have to depend on others again. So, by the end of this year, we will have in place a 90-day supply, three months’ supply of critical PPEs. We will have in place 4,000 full-service ventilators that will not be the ones that are in use in hospitals, four in reserves in reserve with a maintenance program to keep them in good shape. We'll be ready no matter what is thrown at us in the future. And we'll have the ability to build right here in New York City what we need if we ever find that the supplies, we depended on are failing us, we'll be able to go into high gear in this City and cover a lot of that gap right here.

Okay. Now I want to bring up a new topic today. In every crisis, new issues emerge, we don't even understand yet the full magnitude of the crisis we're living through right now. As I said, greatest health care crisis in a century, greatest economic crisis in 80 years could end up being the greatest economic crisis in the history of the United States. So, we're dealing with something, there's no roadmap for this and things keep happening that we learned from and the whole new realities emerge that we have to deal with. So, here's one that our healthcare leadership is now seeing and are very worried about and we need to act on it together. And this is something you can act on, particularly parents, grandparents, you can act on this. Right now, the issue is vaccinations, not the vaccine we hope for with the coronavirus, just the everyday vaccinations that kids get to keep them safe. The— vaccination rate in this City, this is striking, the vaccination rate in this city has been falling during this crisis and the sheer magnitude of it has become clear to us in the last few days. The reasons are obvious, doctor's offices have been closed in so many cases, families are staying home. We've had to focus on the most urgent needs in healthcare throughout, it makes sense that even parents, grandparents, other guardians, family members who wanted to get a child vaccinated might not have known where to turn or might have been hesitant to go out and get it done, given everything else going on. So our Health Department looked at the citywide vaccination rates for our children, looked at the number of vaccine doses administered and compared the period from March 23rd when this crisis had really gone into high gear to May 9th so about six weeks compared that period of time this year to the same period last year and what we found was quite shocking and troubling. The number of vaccine doses administered over that period this year versus last year for kids in the category two years old or younger, there's been a 42 percent drop in the number of vaccinations. For kids older than two years old, this is shocking and a 91 percent drop in vaccinations. Well, I'll give you a comparison, the same six-week period of time last year, 2019 almost 400,000 doses were administered in this City in the six-week period this year, fewer than 150,000. So, something has to be done immediately to address this and we intend to work with parents and families to do that right now. And let me explain why, the vaccines that for example, prevent respiratory illnesses in our kids— prevent a disease like pneumonia. That is important any time, we never want to see our child or any one of our children in danger, we never want to see a child threatened by respiratory disease any year. We never want to see a child get pneumonia any year. But if that were to happen this year, it comes with greater dangerous. A child who gets one of these diseases is likely to need to be hospitalized and they're likely to be more susceptible to contracting COVID. We know that anybody with a preexisting condition can be more vulnerable to COVID, so having pneumonia or respiratory disease makes that child both more susceptible, to contracting COVID and more vulnerable to the effect the COVID. And we're all watching this very troubling new syndrome MIS-C we don't want to see any child contract COVID, so the pieces unfortunately start to fit together in a way that should cause parents real concern and unvaccinated child at greater threat contracting a disease that could then put them at greater threat of contract and COVID, on top of that, that combination is dangerous in and of itself. Also brings up the link between COVID and MIS-C. We don't want to see any of that happen to any child.

So, the bottom line to all parents, all family members out there, get your child vaccinated. We're in a much better situation than we were. Go back to the, when we started looking at this data or the slice of the data, we took goes back to March 23rd. The reality March 23rd versus today, thank God, night and day in terms of what's going on with our healthcare system and our City. So now is the time to get your child vaccinated, this is essential work. Getting your child vaccinated is essential work. Getting your child vaccinated is a reason to leave your home and whatever it takes to get your child to that vaccination, it's worth it. So, we also have to remember this is for your child and it's for everyone because once one child gets sick, it can spread to the next child. So, we have to make sure we get ahead of this. You do not need to go to a hospital facility to get a vaccination for your child. So, for anyone who’s worried about going to that kind of setting, there’s other alternatives, for sure. Free vaccinations are available at over a thousand New York City facilities in the Vaccines for Children Program. Health + Hospitals is offering vaccinations at all of its clinics – 70 clinics around the city. So, to make an appointment, you go to 844-NYC-4NYC. So that's the number for NYC, again 844-NYC-4NYC – call, make an appointment right away. If you're – or, if you have your own doctor you can get done with, that's great too, but let's protect our kids and protect each other by making sure all our children are vaccinated.

Okay, now I want to bring up a topic that isn't about the coronavirus crisis per se. It didn't come from the coronavirus crisis, but is being deeply affected by the coronavirus crisis and it will have a lot to say about our future. We haven't talked about this in a while and I think it's time to check in on it – the Census. So, we're right now fighting a fight in Washington to make sure that the needs of New York City are seen and heard and felt by those representing us in Washington. Our own delegation has been amazing, our senators, our Congress members have fought for us, but we want all the members of the House and Senate to pay attention to the nation's largest city, the epicenter of the crisis, and help us with a stimulus that will put us back on our feet. Part of why our voices are heard is the representation we send to Congress – that's based on the Census. The Census says how many members of Congress you get. The Census says how much federal funding you get; the census, if it's truly accurate, will give you the level of funding and representation you deserve. If it's not accurate, you literally can lose a member of the Congress; you can lose billions, many billions of dollars. So, the 2020 Census will have so much to say about the future of this city and it's being attempted against the backdrop of the biggest crisis we've dealt with in generations and we're the epicenter. So, we are really up against the wall here yet again, and we've got to find a way forward and quickly. What does this money go for? So, the pool of money that is affected by the census, one estimate puts that about $650 billion. That's the pool that we want our fair share of. That means funding for hospitals; that means money for food assistance. We all are talking about food lately. That money is federal money in so many cases, food stamps and snap benefits, money that goes to infrastructure, to schools, to transportation, mass transit. So many things revolve around that federal funding that we depend on in this city. So, let's talk about where we stand on the census right now. Today, in New York City, 49 percent of New York City households have submitted their Census response and we thank them for that. The national average right now is 59 percent, so we're well behind the country. We all understand everyone's dealing with a lot right now, and so although there is so much going on and there has been so much good effort to get to that 49 percent, we’ve all got to double down, we have to intensify our efforts. The great folks working on our Census effort, they've done amazing, amazing work and we have so many wonderful community partners, elected officials, so many people have weighed in and become a part of this effort, but we all have to do a lot more and times a wasting. So, if you want to make sure that we recover from this crisis and we are well-represented in Washington and we have the resources we need, not just this year or next year, but for the whole decade ahead – let's make sure you fill out the Census. It takes only a few minutes. There are no questions about immigration and citizenship. This is really important because that was a big controversy earlier on – court struck that down – no citizenship question, no question about immigration status. All responses are totally confidential. So, if you need more information and you're ready to fill out that form and we need you to, go to my2020census.gov, my2020census.gov. We want to get you in. We want to get everyone you know in. We need your help telling everyone that you know in your family and your neighborhood to get this done and let's get the help we deserve from Washington.

Okay, now we're going to do our daily indicators. So, day that's not perfect, but is a good day. Two out of three moving in the right direction and the one that has gone in the wrong direction is just by a little. So, it's a good day; we want to have great days though. What do we have? Well indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 - it went up but just by a little from 57 to 63 and that is a much, much lower number to begin with than what we use to deal with. So, not too bad, but we want to do better. The daily number of people in ICUs across our public hospitals for suspected COVID-19 is down – 492 to 483. That is wonderful. And this is the one that's most universal, the percentage of people tested positive for COVID-19 citywide – down from 9 percent to 8 percent. Isn't it great to see the single digits? We've been through so much together. That is really encouraging to see, especially against the backdrop where we're doing more and more testing and getting a better and better look at what's happening to so many New Yorkers. We're now at 20,000 tests a day and growing rapidly, but the percentages are coming back better, so that's wonderful.

Okay, few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. Just a reminder that we have Health Commissioner Dr. Barbot, President and CEO of Health + Hospitals Dr. Katz, Senior Advisor Dr. Varma, and NYC 2020 Census Field Director Daniel on the phone. With that, I will start with Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Hey everybody. How you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Mark. How are you doing?

Question: I’m doing okay. I had a couple of questions I wanted to ask. First was, I know you mentioned a few weeks back, about a 4th of July and any kind of, I forget how you'd characterize it, but I don't think any of the details were solidified. Do you have any of those details yet? And have you considered anything about the New York City Marathon?

Mayor: What was the last part Mark?

Question: Oh, about the New York City Marathon. Have you thought about it? If there has been discussions about it, anything like that?

Mayor: So, okay, let me, let me do the marathon and I'll go back to 4th of July. On the marathon, so we worked very closely with the Road Runners Club. They've been amazing throughout this crisis and the folks from Road Runners have put on these extraordinary, you know, virtual, I think they did a virtual half marathon the other day - amazing things they've come up with. The marathon itself is obviously a ways off, so we're talking to them, but it's too early to come to any conclusions, but they are right at the table with us as we consider what to do. The, and I think we all know, and the state feels this, I feel this, you know, the, the really big events are the last piece of the puzzle. So, you know, we, we really have to think carefully about any large gathering. And I think it's fair to say it's going to be a while before we're comfortable with any large gathering, but we also, you know, we're, we're watching this disease daily and always going to hold out the hope that things move faster rather than slower. But the thing we're going to be most conservative about is large gatherings of people because that's where you could have the most negative impact with a resurgence of this disease. So we’ll have more to say on the marathon later.

On the 4th of July, what I've said from the beginning, we're going ahead with a celebration of 4th of July. It will involve fireworks, it will involve Macy's, and that's all we know so far. It's May, we've got time. It's all going to be about safety or, you know, we're not going to let the nation's birthday, our nation's birthday go unrecognized, but whatever we do is going to be about safety first. It may be bigger, it may be smaller, but we'll have a lot more to say when we get closer. Do not assume it will look like what we've done in the past. I've said that from the beginning, it might look very, very different, but there's plenty of time to work that out and announce it over the weeks ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask specifically about the program that you just, I guess announced earlier shifting to home based care for seniors in nursing homes. I'm thinking of the population in adult care facilities who maybe aren't technically senior citizens, but need that, that care and are in a facility like that perhaps because of mobility issues. They can't you know, they can't turn their apartment into something that's handicap accessible so that's why they're in a place like that. Do you have any thoughts on adult care facilities, plans on, on shifting that away because they're actually, you know, as you know, there've been a lot of deaths in those facilities as well? So just beyond the senior citizens and age, but those who need 24-hour care.

Mayor: Thank you, Katie – a very good question. So, I'll, I'll start and then if Dr. Katz or Dr. Varma want to jump in. So, what I'd say is, I think the whole idea of decentralizing is the ideal, but as you point out, some people need a whole lot of care. And so what I think we understand from this whole crisis is, if people need to be in a congregate setting there's everything we have to do to make sure there's PPEs for the folks who work there and people who need it, testing, all the basics that as we finally are getting the kind of supply we need, we should apply regularly. But I think the question in every individual case is, can someone live independently? Is there a kind of support we can put in place that would make that work? You know, if there is, I think increasingly that should be the preference in our society more than it has been in the past. I mean, look, we've gone through waves over generations now of people being put into institutional settings who in the past would have stayed at home with their families. Now, that's all about changes in our society. Once upon a time, you know, the extended family all stayed in one place and there weren't these kinds of facilities. And the tendency to have more and more people go into an institutional setting. Some of that has been, you know, very, very merited obviously because of people's needs and there was no other way to properly serve them. But I think more and more we're asking the question, at least with seniors, and, again, maybe some folks in the adult care facilities, but I'm going to leave it to the doctors to speak to that. You know, at least with many seniors, staying at home with proper home care could be a much better alternative – not for everyone, because some just need the support and couldn't, you know, make it work and couldn't be healthy without a lot more staffing around them, a lot more support around them. But I think it's time to re-examine the entire reality and see what it would be like to do a more home-based model with a lot of seniors. And we should ask the question about whether that's true for some people in adult care or whether it's a different reality. Dr. Katz or Dr. Varma, do you want to add?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Mr. Mayor, I think you've done a great job explaining the issues, and, as you know, I live in the same apartment building as my 97-year-old father and my 92-year-old mother, and feel very strongly that we should always look for ways to enable both elderly people and younger disabled people to live independently. I've seen too often as a physician in the hospital or in the clinic where people are sent to skilled nursing facilities or adult care facilities, because no one puts in the time and the creativity. It is hard as you say, it's not easy, and, as Katie is alluding to, sometimes it requires modification of the home, sometimes it requires equipment, sometimes requires some creative staffing. But I think the way you've set it out is that it should be our goal to enable everybody who can live at home to do so. There will always be people whose needs are so complicated, who needs so much equipment where the circumstances are such where we want to take care of them in a nursing home, and thank God then that we have those nursing homes. But I think for everybody else, we should be looking for home care.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Mitch. I want to say about Mitch – and this is something I really honor, that he mentioned living in the same home as his parents were in their 90s – that's not by accident. He chose to make sure that his – and Mitch, forgive me for taking this point and adding to it a little bit, but I honor it in you so much – he chose to set it up so that his parents could live in the same building he lives in. And most nights, goes out of his way to make sure that he has dinner with his parents. And I think that's a very beautiful thing. And a guy who's got so many other things that he has to balance, but always takes time for the people who brought him here. So, I think that's indicative of what I feel about my aunt, who is the last member of her generation in my family still alive, and what Mitch feels about his parents. You know, I hope we can do that more and more for our seniors, all of us. And in some can, some can't – there's real reasons why some people they'd love to, but they just can't do it. But if families aren't in a position to have that closeness and that connection, you know, how can we set up a more compassionate structure that allows seniors to stay in their home and give them more support? I think that's what the future should be about. And, again, as part of our recovery, we're really going to look for what it would take to build that reality to help our seniors, what it would take to do something different in this city.

Moderator: Next we have Debralee from Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone. I wanted to follow up specifically on the issue of testing and given the fact that it's become so much more widespread. You know, emerging concerns indicate that not as many people as you might imagine are taking up the opportunities to be tested diagnostically or serologically. And I wondered if Dr. Barbot specifically could speak to what the current guidance on testing is. Should everyone, including those who might be asymptomatic, be seeking tests? For example, the Governor over the weekend made a public show of his own test. Are the administration officials on this panel – are you seeking to be tested so it should be able to show the data that you'd say the city – city and state and the national agencies need as well. So, what's the guidance there? Particularly for those who are asymptomatic. And then we've talked about this some weeks past, but I want to give you a good revisit what interest, if any, the city has and the kind of certificates or identity cards that would indicate what people's test levels showed. What is exactly that, that became of that? And then finally, when we talk about easing into the summer and –

Mayor: Hold on – Debralee, going to have to bring out the yellow there. That is two – so, we're going to do those two. On the first question, the point – I think it's a very fair question. You know, is the goal at this level of testing at 20,000 a day to have everybody show up? Or is there still some prioritization? Very fair question, but I think the fact is there's obviously still prioritization in terms of the communities have been hit hardest, which is where we've concentrated the vast majority of our community-based testing. And what we've said about folks who are most vulnerable, or folks who have been exposed to the disease, or folks who are symptomatic. So, there's still a priority structure in place. Let me turn first to Dr. Barbot on the question of just clarifying that guidance. And I'm going to offer my editorial comment and Dr. Barbot can speak to it as well and then I'll come back to the certificate issue. But my editorial comment is, I don't feel – I'll use my own example, I'm not symptomatic, I'm not in one of the vulnerable categories, I'm not living in one of the communities hardest hit, I don't feel a need to get tested now when there's still a limited supply of testing. If we get to the point where we're really, really abundant, you know, that's a different discussion. But I think we still have a sense of prioritization that matters here. Dr. Barbot, please jump in.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. You know, the prioritizations that we have – the testing and prioritizing, obviously, those that are symptomatic, prioritizing those that have chronic underlying illnesses. We've also added prioritizing health care workers, first responders. And so, what we currently have is a process in place where we're expanding based on what the testing capacity is. The other thing I will add is that, beyond those groups that I've just outlined, you know, now we're also including children who may have been presenting with mild symptoms of COVID as a way to ensure that we don't miss any children who may potentially be at risk for developing MIS-C. And so, as the capacity grows, we will certainly be testing more people. And, certainly, as we get heavily into the testing of tracing, there will be an opportunity and an indication for testing people that may not necessarily be overtly symptomatic. So, I think the main message remains the same, meaning that if you are in these priority groups, you're symptomatic you've been exposed to someone who's symptomatic that we want you to get tested. And especially adding currently children who may be symptomatic.

Mayor: Thank you. And on the second question, which I think is an important one, and I'll start by saying on the question of a certificate and identity card is something to clarify your status, we aren't there yet for sure. I'm going to turn to Dr. Varma in a second because he has been looking at this question all over the world and would like his comment, but my comment would be there is a ring of truth to the notion that not only do people want to know their own situation but that it's going to be important for the connection between people and the organizations they work for to know what's going on. Certain times we talk to folks in the private sector, they are interested in setting up an appropriate structure for knowing what's going on with each of their employees. There are privacy concerns, there are individual rights concerns, there's a lot we've got a balance in this. But from a societal point of view, we understand that, you know, people want to know if they're going – you know, for example, if everyone's going back to school or if people are coming back to a workplace – what are the smart precautions that are being taken? And it's, of course, the social distancing and good hygiene and, you know, face coverings, but it's also things like temperature checks. And if someone, you know, for example, has gotten tested and they've done the antibody test, even though it's imperfect, shows that they tested positive, they'd been exposed, they overcame it. That's important. If someone's had a recent coronavirus diagnostic test and it's a negative, that's important. So, I like the idea of something that allows people to be able to validate and verify their status, but we've got real issues that we got to work through before we get to that. And that's something – it's a very important decision we have to come to and we're going to obviously work with the State on it as well to strike that balance. Dr Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Thank you very much. This is a very complex topic that has, you know, scientific questions legal questions and ethical questions. I would just separate it into, into two main areas. One is the concept of an immunity passport, that because you were infected at one point in the past and you now have a demonstrated presence of antibodies that you would somehow be more eligible for certain activities than somebody else. We have real challenges right now – one, sort of, scientifically making that conclusion, although it's likely that at some point, you know, in the very near future be able to get the science behind it. But then we have the legal challenge, you would essentially be telling people who have normal immune systems but simply haven't been infected that they're ineligible to work. And I think there are some major questions in the United States regarding disability protections and other employer protections about whether that is as legal. And then, of course, there's the ethics of it, which is that, again, do we – are we incentivizing people to get infected in some way to develop antibodies? So, that's the question of immunity, does prior infection make you [inaudible] or more eligible for certain activities. The other area which, as the Mayor just described, is entirely ethical and appropriate and practical is how do you screen for people to make sure that they are not actively infectious to others? Some of that comes through symptom screening or temperature monitoring are other methods, but it may include, once testing capacity becomes better, the frequent testing of people who are asymptomatic. In an ideal world where we had an abundance of testing, that would be the strategy we would be using. And large workplaces could use some equivalent of like a boarding pass or, you know, like a security check to allow that. But we're not really there yet, unfortunately, technology wise. So, we would really need to depend on, on proxy measures like symptom screening and temperature tests.

Mayor: Thank you, doctor. Okay.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Two questions maybe for you and-or the doctors. First, is there any indication that kids with multi-system inflammatory syndrome – I forget exactly what we're calling it these days – that they had not been vaccinated and that might be one of reasons why they got this disease. And then, secondly, I hope you got a chance to look at our cover because there's a great image of you wearing a vintage one-piece bathing suit. And I was looking for your reaction to Long Beach and Nassau County making their beaches residents only.

Mayor: Julia, I regret to tell you I have not looked at the cover, but now I must say I have to and I'll give you art criticism on it. But, look the – on the question of the beaches, every place has to figure out what's right for themselves, and the fact is that's what the state determined – that it was a local decision based on local conditions, and we are unlike any place else. Let me just start with this – we are the epicenter of this crisis nationally, the most populous city in the United States of America, one of the most densely populated places in the country. To get to our beaches a vast majority of people are going to take subways and buses, that creates crowding there and then crowding on the beaches. There's such an obvious set of reasons why we couldn't open our beaches.

But if you're in surrounding counties where people are mainly going by car, where beaches don't get crowded the way ours do, you know, if that's what works for them, I respect that everyone has to make their own choice and everyone has to set their own ground rules. So, you know, to me, I think this is more straightforward and I don't see anything but sort of the obvious reality, and I had a couple of good conversations with the Nassau County Executive, Laura Curran, who I think very highly of and very respected colleague, and you know, we just talk as two public servants talking about the needs of our different places, and it's about safety first, and we only will do what is safe for our people. In New York City, it's not safe to open our beaches yet, I hope to later in the season, but not now. In other places that are in a better situation, that's great.

On the question of the vaccination. Very good question. I appreciate it. You know, how do these pieces interplay, the vaccinations and the obvious lack of vaccinations we've seen and then this development at MIS-C. So let me start with Dr. Barbot and then if Dr. Varma, Dr. Katz want to jump in? Please do.

Commissioner Barbot: Thank you Mr. Mayor. Let me start off by saying that as we have said before, we're learning more and more about how COVID-19 manifest in children. That being said, there is no indication that there is any correlation with vaccination status for children, and I want to just emphasize that vaccines are the most safe and effective way of preventing illnesses that have been demonstrated to cause significant illness in our children, and we want to encourage, strongly encourage parents to have their children vaccinated, and so I think that's really the most important message here.

Mayor: Yeah, Dr. Barbot, I’m going to – just to add to the question, because I don't want to speak for Julia, but I think the inference of the question was the other way, that is the absence of vaccination, is the fact that so many kids are not vaccinated who would have been otherwise, is that potentially contributing to the emergence of MIS-C? So I'll go back to you and then again, welcome in. Dr. Varma, Dr. Katz said they want to add.

Commissioner Barbot: Yeah, there's no indication that there's any even remote connections. So you know, I want to make sure that the message comes across loud and clear that having or not having vaccinations hasn't been in any way, shape or form correlated to this illness, this illness from what we know right now develops from a previous exposure to COVID-19, and then most of the children that we have seen develop symptoms anywhere from three to four weeks afterwards.

Mayor: Dr. Varma, Dr. Katz, you want to add?

President Katz: I think Dr. Barbot did a good job.

Mayor: All right, go ahead.

Moderator: Next, we have Rich from WCBS 880.

Question: Mr. Mayor, just a quick question about schools. People I know in the education business all are very skeptical about reopening schools in September, just talking about transportation and talking about the spacing that you need between children in a school. Do you think it's unrealistic to think that you can reopen the schools or is that really the only thing you can hope for at this point?

Mayor: Oh, it's a very fair question, Rich and I'm very, I'm eyes wide open on this. I was a school board member for God's sakes when we had school boards, the old approach in District 15 in Brooklyn, and you know, I worked very intimately with many different types of schools and obviously my kids went to New York City public schools. This is a big, big part of my life and my history. So when I think about what it takes to reopen schools, I am not thinking abstractly. I'm thinking very humanly, very grassroots. Yeah, it takes a lot to bring it together, and it's going to be a decision based on safety first and health first, unquestionably. But we’ve got to – you know, I’ve just got to get people to pay attention to the calendar a little bit more. It's May 20th, you know we're talking about opening up schools in the second week of September. We don't know what the world's going to look like then. We have to have a Plan A – Plan A is reopen the schools. We've obviously been honest – I've been honest, the Chancellor’s been honest that our kids have not gotten the kind of education we would like them to because remote learning is not as good as in-person learning. Right? Ask any educator. But we're going to do the best we can under remote learning and we're going to use the summer to the fullest advantage. 

But to educate our kids, the best thing to do is bring them back. But if it's not safe, we're not going to do it, so – and that's about the safety of our kids, our parents, our educators, our school staff, everyone. So the things we talked about earlier, the way we would do testing on a much bigger scale, the way we would document testing, the appropriate way, you know, temperature checks, there's all sorts of methodologies that will allow us to bring anything back, and so we are planning on the goal of bringing back school fully. But you know, I will just say to you and all your colleagues, if you want to ask me the question in May, if you want to ask me the question in June, you can keep asking, but I'm going to keep saying to you, it's too early to tell because we don't know what's happening with this disease and our ability to test and trace, that's all growing rapidly. So, if we can, we will, if we can't, Rich, we can do all sorts of things. We can stagger our schedules, we can do one day in person the next day online. We could do all online if we have to for a more prolonged period of time. But I sure have not met an educator who's telling me that online is achieving the same thing as kids in classrooms. So, we'll balance it, but it'll always be about safety first.

Moderator: Next we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good Marcia, how are you?

Question: Okay. I have two questions relating to the nursing home thing. First of all, the idea of having people taking care of at home is intriguing. I'm wondering who would pay for it? Would it involve city, state, federal funds? Would you have to rethink the way Medicaid and Medicare fund things? And my second question has to do with the whole nursing home issue, and do you think that there should be a separate investigation of how the state handled nursing homes and the deaths in nursing homes?

Mayor: Now, Marcia, I think we're all in this together. I think the fact is we're not absolutely unprecedented reality and this pandemic went from zero to 60 and hit so hard and everyone was united city and state, we were totally united that we had to save lives and that we had to keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed. The singular focus we all had on was on what was going to save the most lives, and that's what we did for weeks, and weeks and weeks, and as finally things have gotten better, you know, we've all been focused on increasing testing, we've all been focused on increasing the supply of PPEs all the things that would protect people. So the focus needs to be on protecting lives now, saving lives now and fighting back this disease. That's what the focus should be on, and on the question of where do we go in the future on home care, on nursing homes. You're raising the crucial question, but I think the moment in history, Marcia, calls for us to rethink the whole equation.

I've watched for years and wondered why is it this way? Does it have to be this way? And I have to be honest with you that I, a lot of me wondered, you know, our society has changed so much and again, people used to be closer together. Our families used to stay closer together, extended families all under one roof, all sorts of things that honestly, I think there's a lot to be said for, and now families live all over the metro area, all over the country, and then nursing homes became a bigger and bigger thing, and I don't think it's a great model. I just don't, I think it is necessary for some people. I get it. But if we could create a more compassionate model in a transformative moment in our history, Lord knows Marcia, if ever there was a transformative moment, we are living it. We are living the great depression that our parents and grandparents lived through. You know, we're living the world war two that our Greatest Generation went through. This is as transformative a moment in history as we will ever see. So, we better do things differently, and the model for providing care to our seniors is just not good enough. So, who pays? Look, I would put this into the same rubric as universal health care, Marcia. We need to come out of this and have a country that devotes itself to universal health care and have a country that devotes itself to our seniors living at home as long as they possibly can, and that should be federal support first, and of course the state has a role to play, but I certainly don't rule out the city playing a role if that's what's going to get the job done. But imagine what a better society it would be if seniors had the ability to stay at home longer. Imagine how much better their lives would be, and that's what I want to see us strive for.

Moderator: Next. We have Jillian from WBAI radio.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. Good morning.

Mayor: How you doing Jillian?

Question: Hello? I'm well, thank you. Hope you're well. The first question is that we recently did a segment in depth on nursing homes and the takeaways from it were that the pandemic really exposed widespread problems that already existed in nursing homes, and the other was that there's a giant lack of enforcement and oversight, which is state DOH. So what can the city do? And my second question is, last week it was reported that the Rent Guidelines Board was going to be possibly reviving the vacancy bonus and not just for vacant units, but also on occupied units. So, I wanted to know what your—

Mayor: Jillian, I lost, I lost a few of your words. You said the Rent Guidelines Board and then? Say it again.

Question: Yeah, they revived the vacancy bonus and it's not just on vacant units, it's also for occupied units. So, I wanted to know since you appointed all the members of the RGB, what's your thought on that?

Mayor: Okay, Jillian. First of all, on that one, I need to get an update on that. I had not heard that, and I want to always be honest if I haven't heard something, especially in the midst of this crisis, that's not shocking, but I will get you an answer and we'll get you an answer today. But I do not believe they've taken any final action on anything yet because they're still, as I understand it, in their hearing process, et cetera. But let's get you that answer today. I certainly am concerned about that and want to figure that out.

On the nursing homes, look Jillian, I appreciate the question and since it's WBAI, which is a station I have a lot of respect for and appreciate the role you've played in history, I think you will especially appreciate that the answer gets to the root of things. I think one of the big problems here is this is an example of something being done by the private sector that maybe you shouldn't be done by the private sector. I'm not saying there aren't good nursing homes but I am saying we've seen really uneven realities in this industry and the economics are really tough, and if the economics are so tough, then you know, people in private sector, I understand, you know, they, they're built on a system to make a profit. But when it comes to taking care of, you know, people who are so precious to us and they're so vulnerable, is that something that's realistically going to work in a for-profit setting? Again, sometimes yes, but clearly sometimes no. So, I am much more interested in a home-based system. I think it's much more humane. I think it's much more considerate of what most seniors want, maybe not all, and I know you know how home care workers, many of whom I've gotten to know because they're represented by Local 1199 SEIU, a union I've worked very, very closely with, you know, these home care workers do amazing work and there are people who care deeply about the people they serve and it's much more personal and you know, it's built around humanity, not around profit. So I like the notion of saying, let's see how far we can go, maximizing a home-based model, and then let's ask the bigger question about whether the private sector belongs in the nursing home business, and if it does, with what kind of additional regulation and restrictions given everything we've learned here.

Moderator: Next have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: I'm good, Gersh. How you doing? Gersh, I have to say you'll appreciate this. I'm missing softball, Gersh, I know you are too.

Question: Oh, with Prospect Park. Those Saturday mornings are part of my memory. I miss you in that respect as well, Mr. Mayor, thank you for mentioning it. I do want to say actually on the topic of open space, you know, you've got 20 miles of the proposed hundred miles of open space and they're already being called a success by residents, you know, who like the idea of being able to get clean air and having their kids play in the street without having to worry about being run over by drivers, which as a parent you can appreciate it as a constant source of anxiety for us. So right now will you commit to making those hundred miles of open streets permanently off limits to cars when this is over and if not, have you been in touch with your friend in Paris, counterpart, Anne Hidalgo, who recently said it is out of the question that we will allow ourselves to be invaded by cars because pollution and coronavirus is a dangerous cocktail?

Mayor: That's a wonderful quote. So, first of all, you have done your research accurately. I think the world of Anne Hidalgo, I think she's a fantastic leader. Of all the mayors in the world, she's one of the ones I admire the most and I've spent a lot of time with her over the years. So, I will certainly – I don't know what she has implemented in Paris, but I will look at it for sure and I'll talk to her about it. Now, Gersh, you remember your history here as well, I'm the person who got cars out of Prospect Park and Central Park, so I am very sympathetic to the idea that I don't want parents and families looking over their shoulder as you said, and feeling nervous and anxious about the danger of vehicles and what we're doing now, it is working now for a crisis situation and we will keep expanding during this crisis.

I'm not ready - of course, I think you know the answer in advance – I'm not ready to make a commitment about the future, but I want to see what we learn here, for sure. I want to see what Paris is doing. You raised a great question, others did as well about what this recovery needs to look like, and even though you and I joust sometimes we have very strong common ground on a central issue, I want the recovery to involve people using their cars less in New York City. I'd like to see less car ownership in New York City. I'd like to see a lot more use of mass transit and I think we have to do bold things to get there. That's different from what we're going to deal with, you know, in the next year or two where I think we're going to be in flux for obvious reasons coming out of a pandemic, and I'm going to really be lovingly rigorous with you when you ask questions that I think missed the fact that we're dealing with exigent circumstances that are different from where we're going to go in the future. I'll draw that line. But your question gets to the bigger future, the post pandemic future, and I don't have any final conclusions, but I sure know directionally I want to see a lot fewer cars in New York City. I want to see, you know, more and more reasons for people to not own a car in New York City. So we will look at any and all good models here and everywhere else as part of that planning, I want to see a fair recovery. And a fair recovery to me means more and more mass transit, fewer and fewer cars.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning Mr. Mayor, how are you today?

Mayor: I'm doing well. Juliet, are you about to uncover another thing that we have to go correct?

Question: Maybe I do. So, let me pose my questions to you. I've been told of another yeshiva operating in Brooklyn, this one in Crown Heights. So, I'm wondering how do you get the message across to members of that community to stop the behavior unless there is effective enforcement or consequences. And my second question is, I'm hearing from listeners, our listeners, about food packages that are being sent out in the food program. A resident from Astoria tells me the kosher deliveries were fine at first, now he's getting packages with potato chips, a [inaudible] with peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies and it's the same package over and over. And another resident from Manhattan who gets non-kosher meals received the same stick and meal in nine packages all in one delivery. So, while they're very appreciative, they're wondering if there's any way to fix that?

Mayor: Yeah, no, there absolutely is. Juliet, I again, I'm going to keep thanking you. I'm going to keep thanking all of your colleagues who bring things forward that we need to know about. We need to fix. It's a big city, 8.6 million people and being able to see all the time where the challenges and problems are, obviously, we can't do it alone. So, when you help us to make things better, I'm always going to say thank you. On the food packages, the food program, the great success here has been, again, an example of going zero to 60, putting something together did not exist, finding, you know, thousands and thousands of our yellow cab drivers and green cab drivers and Uber drivers and everyone else who didn't have a lot of work and they signed up to do food deliveries directly to the homes of vulnerable people. You know, millions upon millions of meals being provided direct to home or through the school sites, 500 school sites operating now providing three meals a day to anybody, everybody who needs them. I mean, there's a lot of success here and a lot of good people who deserve our thanks who put this together. But we still see problems and I'll ask our Food Czar Kathryn Garcia and her team to follow up immediately.

No, of course people should not be getting, you know, food delivered for days and days ahead. You know there's a certain number of days ahead, that is normal. They do that with Meals on Wheels for example, but there's a limit to that. So, we’re going to have to figure out that and correct that. Folks who need kosher meals, folks need to halal meals, we have to get that right every time, obviously. But there is concern, which some of your colleagues where raised recently, I'll talk to Commissioner Garcia about this. I don't know what's going on with the potato chips and the cookies and all that. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have some fun in life and some of that, but I'm hearing about too much of that, and so I want to make sure that our meals are nutritious and are balanced and you know that people are getting quality food. So, I will get you a further answer, but I'm glad you're raising it and I'm glad everyone else did. That's certainly not the goal here to give people a food that's not going to make them healthy.

And then on the yeshiva. So, look, I think the community leaders have been outstanding in making clear that this is a pandemic and everyone has to act differently. And this is true in all faith communities. We've seen this amazing thing – look, the faith leaders, I had a meeting with faith leaders a week or two ago and they had to make the horrible decision to shut down services in their houses of worship and they did, and that's the strongest signal you could possibly send to a community that things need to be handled differently. And it's been true of all the religious schools, they've shut down. So, if a very, very few are doing something wrong, we'll go deal with them. If you have a name and a location, please give it to our team, Juliet, and we will deal with it right away. But from what I'm seeing, this is a rarity, but the best way for the very few are not getting the message despite the fact that all their community leaders have said it time and time again, the best way to solve the problem is to shut them down. And if we need to use summonses, we'll use summonses. If we need to do a cease and desist order from the Department of Health, we'll do that. If we need to close the building, we'll do that. Whatever the heck it takes, we will do it.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry, how are you?

Question: I'm good. I wanted to ask you about the stubborn statistic on hospital admissions. Who are – where are these cases coming from, where the cases keep increasing day to day. I know they're lower than a month ago, but this is the second consecutive day that we've seen an increase in the number of COVID related hospital admissions. And – it, does this signify a hotspot in some area of the city? Is there a COVID Barry somewhere or a COVID Billy somewhere who's spreading this disease? Why is there some increase over these past few days? Why has it been so stubborn?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll turn to the doctors to see if anyone wants to weigh in, but I'll – I'm going to be the layman here and say I don't – I'm not sure I would put this in the category of stubborn at all, Henry, and it's a very fair question but I want to honestly say the decrease has been unbelievable. The fact that we're talking about numbers in the fifties and sixties now compared to where we were just weeks ago is extraordinary to me. The variations have been pretty minor. I mean, we're talking about this last dataset, we're going up by six people. So I would not agree to the way you're thinking about it. I think you're right to say, you know, what's one, do we see a problem or a concern, do we see a trend? No, I think we see the overall trends moving consistently, when you look at state indicators and city indicators, clearly everything is lining up for being able to do something very different in June and that's fantastic. But this one, I don't see that kind of number is indicating a bigger problem. If it sustained, I would definitely feel differently. But let's turn to all the doctors to see if anyone is seeing any particular problem causing this increase.

President Katz: This is Mitch. I'll start this, Mr. Mayor, since the public hospitals are contributing to this particular measure. So, this particular measure looks at influenza like illnesses. And so, there'll always be a baseline, a number of people who present to hospitals who have respiratory illnesses, some of them will need to be admitted. Some of them may well be able to go home. As you've said, so well Mr. Mayor, the major gain was when this number dropped and it dropped hugely so, and I think it's important that we keep watching it, but what we're watching is to make sure it doesn't go back up, that we don't have a large number of unexplained influenza like illnesses. That would be very worrisome and that would suggest that we were having another wave of COVID. But as long as it keeps bouncing around at this low level, this is what we would expect to see in any community and there's even a possibility as people feel more comfortable going to hospitals with minor illnesses, it could even bump up a little bit. But we're mostly watching it to make sure that we have no major increase as we saw when the pandemic exploded in New York City.

Mayor: Excellent. Thank you. Either other doctor wants to jump in?

Commissioner Barbot: Mr. Mayor, I'll just add that as part of our ongoing surveillance as to how the virus is continuing to be transmitted, I think we have to take these indicators as a constellation and to the degree that we're still having people test positive for COVID-19, it's to be expected that we will have a certain number of people who mainly because of chronic underlying illnesses who will require a hospitalization. And so I think, you know, as I've also said in the past, it's not uncommon for us to see a saw tooth pattern to these indicators, meaning that they'll will be natural fluctuations over time, but that the important thing is looking at overall trends and certainly for the last several weeks, for the last couple of weeks, the trend has been very positive with regards to the small – the decreasing number of individuals that have required hospitalization.

Mayor: Excellent. Thank you. All right, everyone, as we conclude today, want to take it back where I started and talk one more moment about our seniors and this is a simplest message, which is remember the seniors in your life. Remember to connect with them. Remember to check in on them. Remember to ask them what help they need and do all you can for them. You know, New Yorkers have done so much in this crisis and so many of you, it's just who you are. Not only to watch out for your own family, but maybe it's a senior who lives on your block, maybe it's a senior in your building, someone you know that from a house of worship, wherever it may be, so many New Yorkers just make it their business to look out for each other and go shopping for a senior in your life or make sure they're okay, or just see how they're doing. I can't tell you how important that is. I can't state it enough. That is so good that people do that but it's needed more than ever now because many seniors are feeling a lot of isolation right now, a lot of worry, and they need our help. The city stepping up with things like the direct food delivery, literally any senior who needs food delivered direct to their home, all they have to do is call 3-1-1 and they're going to get it for free. But I want that human touch to where people remember, you know, even just a quick phone call, even a wave on the street, even just asking someone if they need you to run an errand, it really goes a long way. So we're going to do the big things that we need to do to help our seniors, particularly our seniors in nursing homes, but I want to ask everyone, just be there in any way you can for the seniors in your life, in your neighborhood and it really, really makes a difference. Thank you, everybody.

2020-05-21 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. Few days ago, something very beautiful – very simple, very beautiful happened. A letter was passed along through one of our food delivery providers. These are these folks out every day making sure New Yorkers who are hungry have food in the middle of this crisis, helping people, many cases who never thought they'd ever have to ask for food. And want to start by appreciating, thanking all the folks out there every single day who are bringing food to people in need. What a beautiful act of kindness, and compassion in the midst of this challenge. So, a letter gets passed along to one of them from a woman named Sylvia in Sheepshead Bay. I should let you know that Sylvia is 97 years old chronologically. She's a great grandmother of 13, and she receives senior kosher meals through our food program. And in the letter she sent, there is a poem of gratitude. I want to share it with you for it's simple beauty. It says, “Had to write you about your food. For a 97-year-young was in the mood to thank you for all your days preparing food in different ways. Thank you. Thank you. I praise you all. Be gone virus, do not stall”. So wonderful that Sylvia was moved to thank all the great people who put together those meals, and delivered them, and to think about what they do and how much it matters to every-day New Yorkers. I love her poetic ability, and the way she puts it all together so nicely, but it's important to think about a second meaning I see in Sylvia's poem, and it's the fact of Sylvia's life – she's 97. She's writing a poem full of gratitude in the midst of this crisis. If she's 97, do the math, she was born just a few years after the pandemic of 1918. So, Sylvia is someone who grew up in the aftermath of a crisis. The only crisis, in fact, we can compare to what we're going through now. And she grew up and she grew strong, and with a strong and good heart, and she's still with us here today. I think there's an incredible affirmation of life in her very existence, but even more so in her willingness to thank others for all they are doing.

So, think about the people who count on these meals, because that's what we have to do every single day when we think about why we are doing this work. Don't think of just numbers, and don't think about some abstract idea of helping our fellow human beings, think of the people in need. Think of a 97-year-old who made it this far, but needs that food to keep going, and how much we have to honor and love and appreciate our elders as I talked about yesterday. Think about the working people, hardworking people, middle class people, people who were doing everything right and suddenly their job wasn't there anymore, and they don't have that paycheck, and they don't have enough money to feed their family. Think about parents. Number-one thought in the morning, last thought at night is how they protect their kids. Think about the pain they feel when they don't know if there's going to be a meal for their child. That's why we do the work we do to help each and every one of them, and everyone liked them to make sure they never have to wonder where their next meal is coming from. And I want it to be clear with the simplest, clearest sense of mission when it comes to the question of food is simply this. We will let no New Yorker go hungry, period. It's not acceptable no matter what we're up against that anyone would be hungry in this city. So, we brought together an incredible group of people to provide food on a vast scale. And what they are doing means so much to people, not just in terms of the food they deliver, the sustenance, but also the hope that comes with it, because it means someone cares. Someone's looking out for you. I want everyone to know, the City has your back in this crisis. We are looking out for you, and a lot of good people every day are making it their business to get you what you need.

So, what we set out to do was feed everyone. Enormous mission, feed them quality food, feed them safely, make sure everyone was safe in the process, the folks who prepare the food, the folks who deliver the food, the folks who are receiving the food. And it's a huge endeavor, and every day we're trying to make it better, but what has happened in just the last few weeks, this was all put together in a matter of weeks is quite remarkable and something New Yorkers should be proud of as another example of the spirit, the energy, the entrepreneurship, the creativity that exists in this amazing place. I'm going to turn in a moment to our food czar, Kathryn Garcia, to give you a quick report on where we stand, but let me give you this important fact. Since the middle of March when this crisis went into higher gear, we have distributed, the city of New York has distributed 32 million meals to New Yorkers who needed food, and this effort is growing every day. By next week, over a million meals will be delivered per day. Delivered to people directly per day. Over half a million grab and go meals will be handed out per day at our Department of Education food sites. 500 sites across the city.

So, it's a vast, vast scale and we're trying to get it right every day, and we're trying to improve it every day. And when something's not right, we have to fix it. And this is a moment where I want to express my thanks to not just the elected officials, the community leaders who have raised concerns or told us where there is a need that needed to be filled or offered a suggestion, but I want to thank our colleagues in the media. We get together every day or six days a week, I should say. And a lot of times our colleagues in the media pointed out specific problems that have helped us make the food program better, address a problem, make the program better, realize something that needs to be fixed. That's one of the great virtues of the free press, is the ability to see things and hold government accountable. So, I want to thank four members of the media who have really focused on this issue – Juliet Papa of 1010 WINS; Sydney Kashiwagi of the Staten Island Advance; Marcia Kramer, CBS New York; and Julia Marsh of the New York Post. They've all raised really helpful, important concerns and we followed through on each of them, and we will keep following through on each concern is raised, because we need to get this right. So, now I'm going to turn to our food czar with great thanks for her effort and the team she's put together. And Commissioner Garcia has answered the call many times when the city needed something special and something important done, and I can't think of anything more important than making sure New Yorkers have food every day. So, Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, take it away.

Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, Department of Sanitation: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As you said, this is an enormous operation. It's really nothing like anything that's been done in this city or I would say probably across the world. And the team is really driven by what you talked about, about serving New Yorkers and understanding that every person that we're delivering to is someone's grandma, is someone's parent, is someone's child. So, we have accomplished a lot in the last two months, but for me, good enough is not good enough. We want to continue to strive to make our program better, and we want to hold ourselves, and our food providers to the highest expectations. We want to make sure that every meal is healthy, and meets and exceeds the minimum requirements for protein, for vegetables, for grains, doesn't contain too many calories, or too much sodium, that it's arriving on time, and is delivered directly to your door. If you order kosher, halal, vegetarian, or other specialized food, you should get it. That's what you need to eat. We don't want anything to go to waste, and if we can't deliver a food that you will eat, then we have not solved the problem. Just to be clear, here's what I will not tolerate in this program – any expired food, meals that don't meet our nutritional guidelines, late or miss delivery, and different meals than you ordered. It's very important that you are getting something that you will eat. And this is emergency food, but it still must meet key standards. And this is especially true for our seniors, and we take this extremely seriously. When we're talking to our vendors, one of the key questions is, would you serve this to your grandma? If the answer to that is no, then we should not be working with you.

We really want to make sure that we are getting them the food they need, and we will hold people accountable. If there is a problem, we will fix it, and make sure that it doesn't happen again. And as the mayor mentioned, members of the media have brought things to our attention. Electeds have brought things to our attention, community-based organizers have brought things to our attention, and we have made changes to ensure they we’re getting healthy food to people. We've fired vendors who have not met our standards, and we will continue to hold them accountable going forward. Currently, we're working with about 30 food providers, restaurants, caterers, farms, consortium's, and we're actively seeking more, both nonprofits as well as private restaurants and caterers so that we can deliver more food to New Yorkers from their neighborhoods. And that we can activate sections of the economy that have been closed in a safe way. But we take these issues very, very seriously. If you do not think that you're getting what you expected, you should call 3-1-1 immediately, or if you want to use the computer, go to nyc.gov/getfoodhelp so that we can correct it. The public should know, if you need food, we will provide food to you. We will get you food. And I'm so proud to be doing this work in this time, as is every single person on the team. So, I want to turn it back to you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Commissioner. And, Commissioner, again, congratulations to you and your team. I know you, I know so many of the people you're serving with – every complaint is taken seriously, every concern is taken seriously. And there's a spirit of wanting to get it exactly right each time. So, reminder to everyone that it's important to let us know if there is a problem so we can fix it. Now, as to that team, it really is an amazing team effort. And so, in the spirit of thanks, let's remember, everyone, the Commissioner, the agency has been playing a big role in this at Sanitation. Obviously, the folks at Department of Education, all those folks working in the kitchens and that those food sites, 500 sites around the city. Our colleagues Department for the Aging who long ago were providing meals to seniors things like meals on wheels and have been building and building since then, reusing senior centers and new ways to make sure that they can help get food out to seniors who need it. The folks at Emergency Management who have helped to coordinate so much of this, the folks who drive our taxis, drive yellow cabs, green cabs of folks who were drive Uber's and Lyfts, all the folks in the for-hire vehicle industry who have signed up well over 10,000 people, drivers signed up to be part of this to help get food to those in need. And, of course, everyone at the Taxi and Limousine Commission who's helped to put together this, an unprecedented delivery effort. Parks Department – you wouldn't think a Parks Department this – they were some of the first to put together food distribution centers. So, an amazing team effort and folks who are doing it as a labor of love. Now, anyone who needs a meal, a reminder, if you need to find out where you can get a meal at the community-based sites you can go to nyc.gov/getfood. If you needed a delivery, you can call 3-1-1. But the bottom line is we will not let any New Yorker go hungry. So, if you need food, go online or pick up that phone and we will get it to you.

Okay. Now, why do we talk about food so much? Because we're dealing with an unprecedented crisis because of what's happened with the coronavirus. I've said, before the coronavirus, we thought somewhere around a million, over a million people in this city were food insecure and needed food more at some point in the year. Now, we think that number is 2 million or more, so almost a doubling. That's why we have made food such a central part of what we do in response to this crisis and I want to reaffirm four things that we're focused on. Four things that guide everything, your health, your safety, making sure we can help you get food on your table and keep a roof over your head. These are the basics, these are the things that people care about the most, these are the things that parents think about in terms of taking care of their families. This is what we're focused on all the time and we can't just think about what's happening today, we have to think about next week and the week after and the month after and the month after that. To keep people safe, to keep them healthy, to make sure there's food, make sure there's shelter we have to be thinking about today and playing the long game of working ahead to always make sure we're taking the actions that will keep people safe.

Now, that's happening against an ever-changing reality with this disease. Look, we're going to talk today and in the next few days about the progress we're seeing in terms of fighting back this disease and so much of it is because of the work you are all doing, but that means we're going to take some steps towards getting back to normal. We'll do it carefully, we'll do it cautiously, but we're still starting to take some steps and that's going to make people act differently. Obviously, warmer weather, there's a lot of things that are going to start to change people's lives and behavior and a lot of that is good. That means we're moving the right direction, but it also means that a lot of the patterns of life will start to restore and we have to recognize the implications of that. So, in this crisis, one of the things that was so obvious on the issue of safety, clearly during the heart of this COVID crisis, we saw an extraordinary drop in crime and no one ever wanted the coronavirus here, but at least something happened with crime that was in the right direction. We saw less crime, but we know as things get even begin to get back to normal and as the weather gets warmer, we have to guard against any increase in crime. So, we are trying to make sure that everything we do, that we're focused on safety again today and what's going to happen in the weeks and months ahead. For that reason, we are going to use the strategy we have used the last summers effectively to keep crime down and that's called Summer All Out. It's an NYPD operation where officers who work in office settings in different specialized areas of the department go out to neighborhoods and work at the grassroots level. It's been very successful, very effective, we're going to do it again now. Why? Because over the years we learned that business as usual wasn't working, there were too many years going back decades where there was an assumption in this town that the summer was going to get more violent. And that was just the way it is, and we sort of had to accept it. And I got to tell you the police commissioners I've had the honor of choosing and serving with, never saw it that way. Bill Bratton, Jimmy O'Neill, Dermot Shea, they never saw an inevitability to summer being a time of greater violence. They pinpointed the very, very small number of individuals in this city who caused violence and it's a few thousand people. And they said, look, if we keep a focus on those few thousand people and keep a focus on the places that need the most help, we can keep crime in check, and you've seen it over these last summers. You've seen why New York City became the safest big City in America because it was smart strategic policing and there was neighborhood policing which was all about deepening the bond between police and community, getting a flow of information, working with the community, a whole different approach that's had a big, big impact. So we used Summer All Out as a way to expand the number of officers who could be out in communities working with a neighborhood policing philosophy that's been done over five summers and we saw the real impact on reducing violence, particularly gun violence and protecting the families of our city.

So, Summer All Out this year will involve about 300 officers, be 300 officers across 10 commands and you can see them on your screen. These are communities that have been hardest hit by gun violence, we want to make sure gun violence does not reassert as this crisis starts to wane, let us pray. And the officers are very visible presence in the community, they get to know the community. Again, those neighborhood policing principles make all the difference in the world because they help us do a lot more and we're going to do that again this summer with summer all out.

Okay. Now let's talk about a really important effort that's been gone now for about two weeks and, again, we're going to use strategies that have worked in the past and keep using them because we've learned what works and we understand we have to apply those strategies and that this crisis doesn't change that. We also are learning new strategies and when it comes to homelessness, we have seen something extraordinary happen because of the innovation of shutting the subways for a few hours late at night to get them really clean, really safe for our central workers, but also to disrupt the historic pattern of homeless folks just staying on the subways and not connecting with services and shelter and we have been working together with the state, with the MTA, NYPD homeless services, everyone working together, lots of outreach workers who spend their lives helping homeless folks and helping them in off the streets. We have two full weeks now of results and I want to go over them. The first week, 201 unique individuals, meaning we cross check to make sure that it wasn't just the same people each day, but how many total people were affected by the outreach effort. 201 accepted placement of shelter for some of time and every time someone who's permanently street homeless goes into shelter even for a night, it's a step in the right direction. It's a beginning of convincing them to come in and accept a better reality that we can give them to keep them healthy and keep them safe. 102 of those individuals were still in shelter by the end of that first week, meaning that we were maximizing our chance to keep them in shelter and help them on the pathway to a new and better life. The second week, 181 unique individuals accepted placement and shelter for some period of time. 113 we're still in shelter by the end of week two. So these numbers, they may seem to some like a small number in the context of New York City, but when you remember that the total number of people living on the streets and subways is estimated by the federal government at about 3,500 to 4,000 people on any given day in New York City. When you see a hundred people in a week come in to shelter and stay there, that's actually a major step towards reducing permanent homelessness once and for all and ending it once and for all. So, we'll put these numbers together and over the past two weeks, over 1,400 unique individuals have accepted help, 378 accepted placement and shelter 211 remain in shelter, 301 accepted hospital care. Thank you to all our partners, thank you to our outreach workers. This is a huge step in the right direction.

Now, let's talk a little more about where we're going, and I'll get to our daily indicators in a moment. But what's clear is we're making some real progress. I've talked to you about the fact that in the first half of June, there's a strong likelihood that things are going to change for the better because we're making consistent progress. So, every day we have some of the best minds in each part of this city's life and economy coming together in our advisory councils, sector by sector, talking about what it's going to take to have a successful restart, talking about how we can bring our economy back, bring back people's livelihoods, do it safely, and then start building towards a better and stronger city up ahead. Last night, I met with a group of folks who are going to have a huge impact on the future of the city, our advisory council on construction, real estate and infrastructure. So many people who will be central to the restart of our economy and whose work is crucial to the future of the city beyond the coronavirus, because this is a city more than any in the entire country that has so much work to do on infrastructure, so much work to do on building for our future. And that’s important, and that was one of the big topics last night – to see in this painful moment the opportunity for transformation as well, that a whole lot of work needs to be done. A whole lot of people need work, a whole lot of work needs to be done, and if we're going to bring back the city better and stronger, a lot of that will be construction on the infrastructure work that has been long overdue. So, there was an energy in this call to think anew about where we need to go and how everyone can pull together to do it and how that can employ a huge number of people and restore livelihoods. There's a lot of realism about the safety challenges, a lot of realism about the hesitation some companies may have in terms of how they restart, but what was clear in this call was – and it's been true at every group I've met with, every industry, every part of the city – is there's a very dynamic group of people ready to lead the way. And even if some are going to take a wait and see attitude, there's lots of pioneers; there's lots of folks ready to restart and do it the right way and show others it can be done. So, it was a very inspiring gathering. Another important point, these are folks who have tremendous national networks in the real estate world, the construction world, the infrastructure world. They're going to apply those relationships to help us get what we need in New York City, which is that stimulus bill from the federal government. Everyone on the call understood, if we get the kind of stimulus that New York City deserves, the kind of stimulus the House of Representatives passed last week - we can actually get back on our feet. We can actually start building stronger; we can put a lot of people to work. By the way, we're talking about a stimulus just to make us whole again to make up for the vast lost revenue we've experienced, but think about the word stimulus. It's actually not just supposed to get you back to square one. It's supposed to help you move forward; it’s supposed to stimulate greater levels of activity. That's what these folks were talking about; all they're ready to build that will benefit New York City and they're going to help us get the stimulus done so we can do that.

Okay, now again, I'm always going to be a voice of caution about doing a restart the right way, about taking smart steps, knowing what we should do, knowing what we shouldn't do, watching carefully to see if the steps we take work. But that said, clearly things are moving in a good direction, so we have to start acknowledging in a good way the moves that we need to make to prepare for that improvement, and some of it is already visible; we obviously see people out more, we see more traffic. We have to start to make adjustments accordingly. One example, I'm going to give you refers to a lifeline for this city; for folks who depend on the Staten Island Ferry it couldn't be more important in their lives. It's the way they get to their livelihoods; it's the way they connect with so many other important things in their life. Staten Islanders depend on the Staten Island Ferry in a very, very powerful way. Now, in the beginning of this crisis, ridership of course went down radically – a 90 percent drop in ridership on the ferry. So, we reduced service accordingly and the most we saw in a typical rush hour trip was 400-500 passengers, but now we actually see ridership starting to go up. We're seeing up to 600 passengers already and think it's going to keep rising, so we need to get ahead of that. And again, this signals something good is happening. We want to be there in time to respond to that good trend and make sure Staten Islanders have what they need. So, starting today, we're increasing the frequency of ferry trips during rush hour for Staten Islanders. We had brought service down to an hourly trip during rush hour because ridership had dropped off so much. We're now going to run every 30 minutes from 5:00 AM to 9:00 AM and every 30 minutes from 3:30 PM to 7:30 PM so a step forward in terms of increasing rush hour service on the Staten Island ferry and giving people more space as a result. You know, obviously this is both about serving Staten Islanders in terms of their work routines and their days, but it's also about keeping people safe; we want to make sure that those ferries don't become crowded, so adding additional service will let us do that. And some good news this week as well on top of that for the Staten Island ferry, we have just heard from the United States Department of Transportation that we're getting a $21 million grant for the ferry and that is going to help us as we start to ramp back up service to pay for a lot of the costs associated with restarting, growing the service, and the additional cleaning we want to do to make sure that all Staten Islanders know that ferry is clean and healthy at all times.

Okay, now I constantly come back to appreciating the folks who have helped us through this crisis. The many, many good people who have stepped up when New Yorkers needed them. And when you think about what has worked, the reason we're even getting to talk about restart, the reason we're even getting to talk about people coming back and riding the Staten Island Ferry is because New Yorkers did the right thing with shelter in place, with social distancing, face coverings. But you had a lot of help and you particularly had a lot of help from our friends at the Parks Department who led the way in terms of educating people, motivating people, showing people what social distancing looked like and how to do it, giving out face coverings. The Parks Department, this has been one of their finest hours. So I want us to realize this is not what they assumed they'd be doing, but they have adapted to this mission brilliantly and our parks have meant so much to us in this crisis because our lives have gotten much more local and much more limited and our parks have been the oasis for so many of us. Parks workers not only kept the parks going, not only gave out the face coverings and helped us to make sure we were socially distancing; they help put together field hospitals, they helped to run those food distribution sites. As I mentioned, they gave out untold numbers of face coverings all over parks and beyond. So we want to thank them. So today is, “Go Green for Parkies Day,” and as you see on your screen, the Empire State Building will go green and here's an example, everyone going green [inaudible]. I want to show you the stylish, they have very good stylish equipment, clothing, whatever you want to say, caps - they have it all the Parks Department. But we all need to take a moment to appreciate our colleagues at the Parks Department. So when you're out there, say thank you to them, say thank you to all the different kinds of parks workers you meet – the folks in forestry, maintenance, operation, parks enforcement, patrol officers, the parks ambassadors who are out there with the education and the face coverings, the urban park rangers, all the park staff. They've really gone above and beyond. I want to express my thanks and I want to ask all New Yorkers to express your thanks as well.

So, our parks workers have stepped up and they've been amazing and so many New Yorkers have stepped up and so many New Yorkers have said, I've heard it and I know all of you have heard it, they want to do more; they want to find a way to contribute, they want to help. And I believe them because people have done amazing things. So here is another important way to help - donate blood. We need New Yorkers who can give blood to give blood, it’s a very important moment in history because we're dealing with this crisis. It's disrupted all the normal blood donation drives that happen each year. We want people who can to do it. On the screen you see how you do that; you go to NYBC.org and make an appointment, or you call (800) 933-2566 the New York Blood Center – make an appointment. I'm going to give blood today along with Chirlane. We know it's important, so we're going to do it; I'm asking you to do that as well. And literally you could help save the life of a fellow New Yorker by giving blood at this crucial moment.

Okay, let's talk about our daily indicators. It's a pretty good day. Again, I want us to get to great days, but it's definitely a good day because two indicators down and one up by just a little. So, indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – that is down from 63 to 60. And number two, daily number of people in ICUs across Health + Hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – that is down from 483 to 477. The only one that's up, again only up by one point, is the percent of people tested positive for COVID-19 – up from 8 percent to 9 percent. Now, I want to put this in perspective for a moment and we're going to have a lot more to say in these next days about how we're approaching that first half of June and I want to signal it as clear as a bell - all roads are leading to the first half of June. The City indicators, the State indicators, we're seeing very clear progress; we have to sustain the progress. We all want to get there so we all have to be a part of it, but when you look at the three indicators the city has been using, it's important to recognize the progress. We once a week we look at the big trends, but I want to give you another measure of it that, that first indicator, which again is so much farther down than it was - daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19. Here's something amazing; for more than a week we have been around or even below the annual average for folks admitted to hospitals for this broad kind of disease. This is very powerful. It means that when you think about where we are now, not where we were a week, two, three, four weeks ago, but where we are now because of your amazing work, we've brought this down far enough that it actually resembles a typical year for this broad category of diseases. So that's a very important fact and that's now been going on for more than a week. On that third indicator, the percent of people testing positive citywide, again, you see a little fluctuation; you saw a little bit of fluctuation today. We've had several days in single digits, which we obviously didn't see before, but here's another big picture reality – the last 10 days have all been below 15 percent. So even though we see some fluctuation on the big picture, something very important has happened. We've gotten down below 15 percent for 10 days and stayed there consistently. So, again, this is remarkable progress. I'm going to go into more and more detail starting tomorrow and the days ahead about how we are taking this information and now using it to prepare for the steps we'll take in June and what we're looking for as we make our final decisions on restart and then how to sustain a safe restart. And again, we're talking about small smart steps. It will take a series of steps over time to get back to anything like normal. But something very good is happening because of your hard work and everyone in this town should feel good about that.

Okay. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Okay. With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're also joined today by Foods Czar and Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, Social Services Chair Steve Banks, and NYPD Chief of Patrol Fausto Pichardo, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma. First question today goes to Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Brigid. How you doing?

Question: I'm doing okay, thanks. You know, the indicators are hopeful and they, you know, give me some optimism about what the next days and weeks may be like. But it's also so striking given this new analysis from the New York Times today that shows how many more thousands of lives could have been saved if more control measures had been implemented even a week earlier. And so, as we start to talk about shifting to looking at reopening, I'm wondering how your team takes into account this analysis and, sort of, how you plot carefully about moving forward. And then, secondly, we're approaching Memorial Day weekend that we know beaches are going to be closed to swimming. It seems like though there's still some figuring out about the rules about how to limit people on the beaches and other public spaces. We saw some new signs going up here in Rockaway. I also saw that Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver will be teaching an online masterclass to an Australian outlet about how to manage and support safe use of public space during COVID-19. I'm just wondering what you know about that and if he's going to join you for a briefing before the weekend to share his thinking with New Yorkers.

Mayor: So, thank you, Brigid. Look, the fact is I think it's very important that we would go slowly and carefully with the beaches and I think we're in the right place right now to say there won't be swimming, there won't be lifeguards on duty, there won't be gatherings, there won't be sports. We're going to be very cautious both because of what could happen on the beaches themselves – and we don't want to spread this disease, so we don't want people gathering on the beaches. Brigid, I'm sure you saw the images from Florida and California, you know, in the height of the crisis, people going back to the beaches, literally like nothing had happened at all and how horribly dangerous that was. And we also are very, very cognizant that the other piece of the equation is the public transit piece, which, you know, we're going to all be trying to understand that piece of the equation more deeply going forward – what role can public transit play as we're coming out of this crisis and what limits need to be in place in terms of health and safety? But what we know for sure is we do not want large numbers of people going on mass transit right now, and that's the only way the vast majority of New Yorkers who go to the beach get to the beach. So, I'm very confident that going slowly and carefully with the beaches is the right thing to do. I agree with you that Memorial Day weekend itself will pose a particular challenge and the NYPD and the Parks Department will be taking any number of measures. There'll be plenty of personnel out – obviously, a lot of education. We're going to make sure people understand the ground rules and we'll enforce them. And if there's too many people at any point, any place, we're going to do what we've said we're going to do – we will keep both spreading people out, but if we have to send people off the beach, off the boardwalk, if we have to reduce the number of people, we'll do that. So, that's the game plan. We'll certainly have more briefings on that going forward and you'll be hearing from both the Parks Department and the NYPD.

On the way forward and what we're going to learn from what happened before, I will tell you for sure we're going to take a cautious, careful approach. I'm absolutely moved by how much progress we've made because New Yorkers are all participating and that's why we see this amazing improvement. But we're going to take each step very carefully, very cautiously. And, I think, look, we all need more information about this disease and we still don't have all the information we need. We all – you know, all of us, this city deserves to have so much more support in testing, but we're making as much of it as we can even without the federal support. We're going to keep learning, keep gleaning information from everything we can, both locally, nationally, internationally. But I guarantee you our approach will be one that's cautious and careful and health and safety-focused. And, you know, we're going to look at everything we can in terms of new research that tells us about what happened previously, it can inform our next steps, because my absolute focus now is how do we keep people safe right now and how do we make the right moves going forward and how do we avoid that boomerang. So, anything, any new research that helps us understand how to make those steps the right way we're going to learn from that absolutely. But the thing we will not do is rush this process. We have to feel that people's health and safety is secure to take each step.

Moderator: Next question goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I had a question on a similar topic. So, this research out of Columbia University finds that fewer than 4,300 people would have died in the New York Metro area compared to 21,800 who actually did if, you know, lockdown measures have been put in place a week earlier. So, when you hear those kinds of findings, does it make you wish that you had acted earlier towards some of the shutdown measures?

Mayor: Erin, I have not read the whole report, but when I've – the summary I've seen, look, I wish we had known so much more in January, February, beginning of March. I wish we had the testing that would have told us what was going on. I mean, right now, we're not sure when this disease started to be present in the city. We thought it was March and now more and more it looks like it was February, even late January and we just didn't have the testing to be able to give us the full picture. So, it's very painful to think about if we had had the testing we needed everything we could have done differently or if we had known then the things we know now what we would have been able to do for people. It's horrible. And so, you know, this is one of these situations I look back and I think about the kind of information that's now clear versus what we were seeing at the time on – March 1st was the first case in this city, literally the first case, and it was not until March 14th that we had the first death in this city. And we were fighting in those two weeks to see if we could contain this without any ability to see how deeply it had spread because we didn't have the testing. And, you know, immediately after that first death, it was the next day that I indicated and call for the schools to close. That night, we closed down the bars and restaurants. Two days later, I called for shelter in place. As we got information, we acted on it, all of us. But, of course, it's painful and, of course, I look at that and I say I wish we had known more, because we would have been able to do more. It's as simple as that.

Moderator: Next question is Yoav from the City.

Question: Hi, everyone. I had two questions. I wanted to ask about blood donations. What's the status of the ability of gay men to donate blood? I know there's some federal restrictions on that. Is the City doing anything to, I guess, see if those can be remedied – the restrictions? And on – sorry, I was running around – on the ability of –

Mayor: Yoav, you need to work out a little more, man.

[Laughter]

Question: On the issue of – Dr. Varma was asked yesterday about perhaps loosening restrictions early or for people who test positive for antibodies and he mentioned a few concerns about that, including legal concerns and also the fact that the medical science isn't quite there yet, but it is a City preparing some kind of plan that might allow that to happen in the event that the science validates it might be a safe way to, you know, restart the economy?

Mayor: Yeah, very good question. I appreciate that, Yoav. So, on the blood donations, I think this entire area – I want to come to your specific question, but I want New Yorkers to know – so, blood donations are run by the New York Blood Center, a nonprofit organization, and historically not run by the City of New York. There wasn't a need for it to be run by the City of New York or regulated – we don't have a regulatory function with the blood center, but it has operated very, very well for decades. But this crisis has shown us something we'd never seen before, because the very foundation of the blood supply was, you know, corporate blood drives, civic organization blood drive, City agency blood drives, all of that's been disrupted. So, we're going to figure out a new system to work with the blood center going forward to monitor the blood supply so that we can do everything possible to get people to donate blood in these times of need. Hopefully, you know, relatively soon we'll get back to the point where we can do blood drives on a bigger scale, but this is a real issue. So, I'll turn to Dr. Varma on that in a moment. In terms of federal restrictions, anything that attempts to exclude people improperly, of course, we're going to fight against it. But I want to affirm that because the blood center is a nonprofit organization not regulated by the city, the role we could play is of course advocating at the federal level, but we don't get to make the decisions unfortunately. But Dr. Varma will speak to that in a second. On the second piece, Yoav, again, this is one of these things in life where you try and give people just sort of the blunt truth. So, the antibody testing tells you something, by definition. If it's a good, accurate test and you know you were exposed this disease and you're taking the test. If you're taking the test, you're still alive, so you fought back the disease. It means at some point the disease was part of your life and you overcame it. And that's powerful, because it suggests if you were exposed again that you could overcome it again. We don't know – I've had this conversation with our health care leadership many times – we don't know if someone implicitly cannot contract the disease. It doesn't seem to be a lot of incidents of people getting it again after they've been exposed, but we don't know that as a firm fact. And we do not want to say to people if you test positive antibody, you don't need to take precautions anymore. You certainly do need to take precautions. You still need to – if you're supposed to be using PPEs in your work, you’ve got to keep doing it. Everyone's got to keep socially distancing. Everyone's got to keep using face coverings. So, I don't think it will ever be seen, at least based on what we're seeing now, as a sort of cure all, if you will. But if new research validates the meaning of these tests or validates that in fact you cannot contract the disease again after you have been exposed to it, we’ll that will change everything. Or, if new research goes the other way and says people can contract again, that will change everything. The bottom line right now is, the antibody test tells you something, it is helpful for people, it’s helpful for the big picture research wise, but it does not mean let your guard down at all. So, Dr. Varma, you want to comment on that and then speak to the blood donation question and the federal restrictions?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Thank you very much for the question. Starting with the blood donation restrictions, I think, as the Mayor has correctly pointed out, this is currently regulated by the federal government, the FDA, and it is managed by a non-governmental agency in New York, the New York Blood Center. New York City has long taken the position that policies on blood donation should be based on science and not based on stigma. I think in 2016, Commissioner Bassett at that time issued a public statement specifically calling on the FDA, I think in alliance with other City agencies, to remove that restriction. So, I think the New York City government position on this has been very clear, but it does require action by the federal government to change permanently. On the second issue. I don't know if I have anything in particular to add. I think as we discussed in in the call yesterday, I don't think the science is there clearly. And, as we've discussed, also potentially ethical and legal issues regarding the use of some type of immunity passport for return to work. I would say, just to add, the absolutely critical thing though is to screen for people who have active infection. And we are working very closely with a number of partners, governmental agencies here in the city, academic partners, industry, to try to look at ways that we can rapidly expand or continue to expand our capacity to test for active infection, including the use potentially of new technologies that are emerging. So, right now, our primary focus is not on certifying who might be clear to go back to work, but rather figuring out a method that can apply to everyone that would screen for active infections and make sure workplaces, transit, any other places that people might be in close proximity are as safe as possible.

Mayor: And last point, you know, because I appreciate the question very much on the federal role. I don't have any illusions about the federal government, but perhaps in this moment there will be a willingness in Washington to listen to the fact that there's a structural problem with our blood supply that needs to be addressed and it makes no sense to exclude people who should have every right to donate blood. So, I will reach out to the FDA commissioner, Commissioner Hahn, and speak to him about it. He's been, to his great credit, very quick to respond to the needs of New York City. And I will reiterate that for a long time we've been calling for this and that this would be the right moment to address this concern, because we do not want to see anyone turned away who could be giving blood and helping their fellow New Yorker or their fellow American.

Moderator: Next is Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you. Mr. Mayor, I have two questions. The first is about some of what you said about food distribution, and as you noted, we've heard so much into reporting about lack of quality and meals not being a nutritious enough, but some of what we've also heard is that people, seniors who haven't been previously connected to these services before have a really hard time connecting, whether that's through 3-1-1 or because it might be more difficult for them to navigate certain technology. So, has anything changed on that and why not specifically work with senior centers who were already doing this job in the past? My second question is about the Governor's order yesterday regarding religious gatherings. What is your understanding of that order? Are you guys on the same page? And are you given the green light to religious institutions here in the city to begin allowing gatherings?

Mayor: Okay, let me speak to that and then I'll preface on food and turn to Kathryn to give you a fuller answer. So, look, we have been – the big story here now over three months is that the City and State have been very, very much on the same page. There's been a couple of times where there's been different perspectives, we've worked them through. But overwhelmingly, you know we – not only did everyone communicate all the time, but there's overwhelmingly a sense of common purpose, common strategic understanding. We're always going to be particularly cautious. That's not a shock. I'm going to be a voice of caution. We’re the epicenter, we deal with realities that the rest of the State doesn't deal with, not only in terms of this crisis, but just because of the way New York City is built, you know, so many people in one place, et cetera. But overwhelmingly we're all on the same page. So, I fully understand why the Governor seeing the progress has been made and wanting to give people some relief, is trying to find the appropriate way to open up a little more space in people's lives, but clearly still keeping a whole host of smart restrictions in place. So, I can absolutely work with that.

Now what I'll say to New Yorkers is take this instruction literally to not take liberties with it. What the instruction is, is that up to 10 people can gather, whether it's for a religious observance or other purpose, socially distanced. If for any reason, at any point, people might not be distanced enough, they need to have their face coverings on and you do not go over 10 people and you did not let it degenerate into the kind of social gatherings we're all used to. And it's tough, I want to say, I'm not saying this with a lack of understanding that for all of us, this has been a strange adjustment, Gloria and it's not fun for everyone. You get together with your family to friends, everyone wants to be close. But if we let that start to get sloppy, the disease will spread again. We'll start to see a resurgence and all the good things we're talking about today, all the progress will start to be wiped away, and I don't know anyone who wants to play fast and loose with our ability to restart and start to get back to normal. So we can absolutely work with those instructions but we're going to be watching, and if people gather more than 10 people, I've said the NYPD is going to be focused on gatherings. If it's more than 10 people, the NYPD and other enforcement agencies will show up and tell people to move, if they don't move, if they don't disperse, then it goes to summons. So I want people to take these rules very, very literally.

On the food question. So again, the – we certainly value the senior centers and the role they played historically. It had to change because everything had to be done remotely in this context. And you know, we're going to get through this and then we're going to bring back our senior centers and I think it's going to be an opportunity to even improve upon the work they do. But for now, I think the structure we have, which is the DOE food sites, the community food pantry, soup kitchens, the home delivery, I think that's the right structure for this situation. And if there were problems with 3-1-1, as you mentioned, there were real problems with 3-1-1 and I turned to Commissioner Jessie Tisch of DoITT, and I said, work the place over and refocus everything on COVID and refocus everything on fast response times and a user-friendly experience. I think we've made a lot of progress. Anytime people are not getting that, I need to know about it because we're doing our own quality control, but when our colleagues in the media or anyone else does the quality control, we want to know about it. But we're constantly working to make sure if someone brings up a problem to 3-1-1 that it gets acted on quickly. Commissioner, jump on.

Commissioner Garcia: Thank you and thank you, Gloria. So, on any time you are seeing something that you think is wrong, we want to hear about it. We want to fix it. As the Mayor said, we do believe that 3-1-1 has gotten significantly better, like seconds wait time, not minutes wait time, and that is really a tribute to Commissioner Tisch. We do want to make sure that we are incorporating the senior centers so we added them back into the mix. So you can go to a senior center and talk to them and they will enroll you in the food supply system and make sure you're getting the right food, i.e. you need kosher or you need halal, so that is being delivered to you and we are really starting to think through as we begin to open up what this will look like in a new future of how the senior centers fit. Do we need to dial up? Do we need to dial down the participation in sort of delivery? Right now it's really critical that we are doing something that is contactless, but that could change in a few months and we want to be flexible and agile as we move forward. But just to give you sort of the scale of what was happening before, it's estimated that approximately 20,000 seniors a week went to a senior center for a congregate meal. You know, part of that was social, part of that was because they needed food. This week we'll be serving 59,000 people who the senior centers provided us their names and their addresses to make sure they got delivery. So the scale is really significant.

Moderator: The next is Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning. I'll two questions. But first, Mr. Mayor, you forgot to answer Brigid’s about Mitch Silver, so you can answer hers at the end of mine I'd appreciate it. But onto mine. Your first indicator is people admitted to the hospital for it suspected COVID-19, given that flu can sometimes present initially like COVID-19 to what extent will you modify this indicator to account in the fall and winter for flu season? And second, this question isn't about governments or county executives, but people who live in New York. What's your message to city residents who are considering going to the beach out on Long Island? So I'm like, I'm asking you what you would say to a New Yorker who's thinking, you know what, I'm going to go to the Island because city beaches are closed.

Mayor: Matt, look, I first of all, I do believe that people make their own choices and I respect that. But here's what I say, I think we're in a moment of history where less is more. It's just smart to keep it simple. I'm not encouraging people to do a lot of traveling. The beaches all over the region are going to come with lots of restrictions. You know, if there's too many people that are just not going to let people on the beaches. So, if you go somewhere, you don't know if you're going to be able to even get on the beach. I think we're all learning to be hyper-local and there's you know, things about that that might make us a little sad for things we miss, but there's also a lot of great things about being very local and being very focused on our own communities and what's available. So, my advice to people is keep it simple, keep it local. Less is more, you know, you want to really follow these basic rules that are working because we've got to play the long game here, Matt. It's what I want, what we all want is to take real steps towards getting back to normal, and if we get too loose, we're going to undermine it. And every single individual’s action matters. As I'd say, you know, stay as local as you can, keep it as simple as you can, stay in indoors as much as you can, and it's not forever. It's just for a season and then this too shall pass.

On the Mitch Silver, I thought I did say we'll certainly have Parks Department and police department updating before we get to Memorial Say. So, Mitch, Dermot, or other folks from PD, we'll make sure we get those updates out and get their voices into this because a lot of work has been done to prepare for the Memorial Day weekend. And on the indicator, I think you make a really important point and Matt, you must be reading my mind because there's a conversation we had in some detail yesterday here at City Hall about the fact that it's important to recognize what piece of these admissions is confirmed COVID versus suspected COVID and that we can do an after action days later. As you know, the test results are still not as fast as we'd like them to be, but we can go back and track and see how much is COVID versus anything else, and you're right, that becomes particularly important if and when flu starts to become more of an issue. So yes, we will be doing further definition going forward and you're kind of foreshadowing something. We're going to be talking a lot. We're going to be talking about the flu a lot in the months ahead because we really need to guard against a big flu season happening at the same time while COVID is still around. So, we're going to be doing a very, very aggressive campaign as we get to the end of the summer, beginning of the fall to get people vaccinated for the flu. But we'll have more to say on that as we get closer.

Moderator: Next is Dave Evans from ABC.

Question: Hi Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Dave, how you doing?

Question: I'm doing fine. Hey, I just wanted to ask you because yesterday the news that we saw a couple of the Ford car manufacturing plants, they had an outbreak and they had to shut down. I wanted to ask you, moving forward, as we do see some things start to open up, you know, next week 25 percent of the workers on the stock exchange will be there, you know, different restaurants, let's say we're in June, July. If there is an outbreak in New York, what is the response going to be? Is there a way that you're going to handle it? Just that area, just that business and concentrate on that or do we all perhaps have to go back to square one and there would be another lockdown, like we are in now?

Mayor: An excellent question Dave, and very, very big and important question. That's a lot about of – you know, I look at this as over to the next week or two as we get into June, we're going to be having this conversation with all of you and with the people of this city to really get clear the parameters with which we're approaching this. The goal obviously is to never have to go back to the same level of restriction we've been in and God forbid go to even higher levels of restriction. So, this is – I'm a big believer that sort of we’re slow but steady wins the race as they used to say, that if we are smart about this, we'll have some ups and downs. That's normal. There might be some temporary setbacks or some, as you say, setbacks in some places, but the game plan we're trying to put together here is one where you don't have the big setback. Where are, for example, what we're dealing with right now. We go forward into another phase or you know, the next phase after that and then have to retreat back to where we are now or worse. That's what I'm constantly pushing the entire team to work through to get to a restart that is sustainable and not sort of skiddish and moving back and forth all the time. So that's absolutely the goal.

Now you said something really important, Dave, you pointed out this sort of the local way of addressing the issue. I think to do a safe restart, it's going to take first, you know, really making sure each phase is working before we knew new to another phase. It's going to take really careful adaptation for the special realities in New York City. This is something we're in constant dialogue with the state on that we may need some additional measures that might not have been needed elsewhere, but as we go into that phase one, make sure we can do it safely and sustainably. And then that ability to focus intensely on those who are most vulnerable. We talked yesterday about nursing homes. We're going to be talking a lot about folks who are over 65, over 70, and folks with preexisting conditions and the precautions we're going to need them to keep taking, even as we start into the next phase. Folks who are most vulnerable, we really have to have an intense sense of the precautions they need to take throughout this restart. And the point you made about, for example, if a single factory or you know, a single facility has a problem, how we can deal with that and maximize the impact in containing things there rather than having to have something affect all of us. So, you definitely are on the right track there. Our goal is to figure out kind of a rapid response model that if we see an isolated problem, keep it isolated, so it doesn't disrupt the forward motion of the restart and that's what we hope to put together.

Moderator: The next is Shant from the Daily News

Question: Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask both you Mr. Mayor and Commissioner Banks about the surge in applications for benefits administered by HRA. Could you say how many applications filed since mid-March have been completed? And if you don't have the data handy, be great if you can say, even in rough terms. Also, what is the City doing to handle the increased demand? For instance, will you make new hires or reallocate staff? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Shant. Excellent question, and it parallels obviously the reality with food. So many people are hurting, and you know, among the many good things HRA does is the Food Stamps and SNAP benefits, but also other forms of benefits, and there are so many people hurting right now. We want to help everyone. We can and we want to do it to the maximum extent possible remotely, and I know that's been the whole approach that Steve and his team has taken and Grace Bonilla, the HRA Administrator and her team. So Steve, I don't know if you have the statistics in front of you or if you can give us a sense of what kind of surge you're seeing and, and what adjustments you're making, and I'll only say one more thing, Shant, that obviously when it comes to food, Kathryn can attest. I have said to her, whatever personnel you need, whatever money you need, you're going to get to feed people while equally folks who need those benefits to keep going, you know, to pay the rent, to get medicines, to keep their lives together, we're going to do whatever it takes to help HRA get them to people. So, Steve, you want to speak to that?

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: Yes, I will, and thank you for the question, Shant, and we'll follow up with you on the specifics, but as I testified at our budget hearing on Monday, we've had three times as many applications for Food Stamps and twice as many applications for cash assistance, unprecedented levels that nobody could have predicted. In order to address that, we have reassigned 1,300 members of our staff to address this on precedent demand, and we're working through those applications. We've gotten a range of waivers from the state to expedite the processing of those applications, and we've also gotten assistance, for example, from Metro Plus in terms of some staff being reassigned to help us with those benefits. But as the Mayor said it’s an unprecedented situation, we've worked with Kathryn Garcia’s staff to make food immediately available to people, and the re-purposing or the reassignment of 1,300 staff is really aimed at addressing this extraordinary increase in requests for help from us, and we'll keep up with this effort and we'll follow up with you on the specifics.

Moderator: The next is Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Hello. Can everyone hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew, how are you doing?

Question: I'm okay, Mayor. Thank you. Hope you're doing well. My question is about the Staten Island Ferry increase. You said that you had noticed a higher ridership or the boats getting a little bit more crowded. I'm wondering why would that be, given that the restrictions on non-essential businesses have not been lifted in New York City. Who are these folks? Are they tourists? Are they New Yorkers who are going back to work anyway against advice? And does this also match metrics and data at the bridges that vehicle traffic is up as well? Are you concerned that essentially people are lifting the lockdown themselves?

Mayor: Well, Andrew, it's a good question, but I would be careful not to read too much in yet. First of all, I don't see any tourists around. I haven't heard any reports of any major number of tourists in town. If there some [inaudible] that I certainly want to know about it, but I think my strong impression is that people understand that we're going through a lot still and we're fighting our way back, and this is not a time for tourism. I think you've got essential workers clearly who need to move around. You've got folks who need to get medical care. I gave the example today of blood drives. You know, that's something that we want people going out for that. I gave the example yesterday, the vaccinations of children. We want people going out for that. So, I do think, in fact, you know – think about that for a minute, Andrew, parents understandably felt worried – vaccination of a child clearly was something allowable about, a lot of people were just too worried to go out. We’re now reminding parents that not getting those vaccinations could cause real problems. We need you to go out and get those for your kids.

I think what's happening is that folks are naturally, you know, growing into what is allowed and that even many things that were allowed people were not doing out of real concern. So now I don’t for a moment want to negate the point you're raising is, are some people potentially taking liberties? We got to watch for that all the time, unquestionably, and we’ve got to be worried about that, and you know, there's been a lot of enforcement, we heard a couple of reports recently of you know, restaurants and bars trying to let people dine-in. We won't allow that obviously. So I think some of what you're pointing to may be happening and we will absolutely deal with that when we see that. But I think my gut says most of it is people still working within the rules, but being a little less conservative than they were.

Remember, we're talking about previous, you know, 90 percent drop in ridership on the Staten Island Ferry. So, it was down to 400 to 500 passengers on a peak trip, and now it's gone up to 600. That's not a massive change, but it's enough change to make sure that there's more service and more frequency, but we need to watch for what you're talking about. We need to watch to make sure that people stay within the rules for their own safety, for everyone's safety.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. The next is Louis from New York [inaudible].

Question: Hello? Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes. How are you doing?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I hope you're doing well today. We've gotten our antibody test the other day and I'm sure you'll be happy to know that the line stretched all the way up the lot. With that in mind, early this week, Governor Cuomo had a diagnostic PCR test administered on live TV. Now—

Mayor: Louis? Are you there?

Question: On the state's health department site. Hello?

Mayor: We missed you after you said the Governor – yeah. Louis, you said the Governor had the test administered. Then we lost your feeds. Pick it up from there.

Question: I apologize. Now I see that the easier and safer swab and spit test, which you first talked about at the end of April, is mentioned now on the state’s health department site. Now I know of people who are still turned off at the scene. The Governor had that long swab, stuck up his nose. So, question, have you folks considered having a demonstration of this easier test? I'm sure it would go a long way in calming folks’ concerns and worries. Maybe yourself or somebody else can demonstrate it just as the Governor has?

Mayor: I think that's a good idea, and I think it was important the Governor was trying to show people that this test is something that people can get more and more. But I agree that the self-swab test is even a step further in the right direction and it's smart for us to show people how it works because more and more labs are now accepting that test. It's definitely the – where we're going to trend going forward. It is faster, it is easier. It causes less chance of the patient coughing or sneezing. So not every lab is taking it and we still need to have some test kits of the other kind so we can maximize our options. But more and more it will be the self-swab test. So I think your point is a good one and we will arrange a demonstration to show people that it's a pretty easy, quick thing.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning Mr. Mayor and thank you for the recognition. I appreciate that, and for reading the lovely poem from Sylvia in Sheepshead Bay. When you say we're looking at a possible a restart in the first half of June, can you give us any more clarity on whether you think that's, you know, early June – mid June, about when that would be and what would a Phase One reopening in New York City entail? What sort of industries, et cetera?

Mayor: Okay. So Julia, in terms of the types of industries, it's the Phase One that the state has laid out that's obviously implementing in some other places, construction, beyond that, which is already allowable, wholesale trade, different types of manufacturing. You know, it's the same standards the state is applying. Again, we have to talk through with the state if there's any particular features of the approach here that we need to implement together. We need to think about ramifications in terms of people getting around and congregating. You know, there's things we've got to work through that are particularly challenging in the city, but that is the set of categories. Timing, Julia, you know, I'm saying first half of June, I'm obviously giving a little bit of range there, but I mean literally the first half of June, so somewhere between June 1st and June 15th. I'm basing it around everything we know today, today I will put an asterix that you won't be surprised on saying, you know, this disease has thrown us a lot of curve balls, so we're not going to rest on laurels or assume we have a crystal ball here where we're basing it on the trend, which has been pretty damn consistent. And what I mentioned that these, we've had these stretches of time now on two of the indicators where we've had a prolonged stretch of time, you know, at a lower threshold. That's a really important sign. So basically it comes down to, will it be the first week of June or the second week of June that we could move into Phase One, the state’s Phase One, possibly with some modifications for the reality in New York City, and we will be giving you more and more information in the final days of May as we lead up to it, and we hone the date, but certainly for folks in those fields I know they're watching and they know that it's time to start planning for their ability to reopen. But with, and I've talked to a lot of people, Juliet in, as I said, groups folks on construction last night and folks in different industries who would be part of that wholesale category, definitely of course, manufacturing a lot of the manufacturing folks who have played such a crucial role in helping us build PPEs and equipment here in the city. Everyone's about safety. Everyone's talking about how to can do it in a way that will be safe, that will not spread the disease, that will be a safe for their workers, that will be smart, that will be careful and figuring out what their responsibilities are. Tremendous sense of responsibility I'm getting from the people that I'm talking to. But yeah, it's going to be first week or second week of June if we continue on the pace we are on now. But it's going to be limited because that's what Phase One is and it's going to be with lots of clear standards and precautions of how to make it work and do it safely.

So, let me conclude there and talk about the topic I started with today. Yes, and thank you Julia for acknowledging Sylvia's poem. It really is beautiful and thank you Sylvia, because that's what a joy. I'll tell you sometimes there are some things in this job that are very moving and very beautiful. So, it'd be able to share Sylvia's poem with all of you is one of the good things I get to do. But look at the sheer magnitude of what's happening here. This number, it's hard to even imagine. 32 million meals have been provided to New Yorkers who needed food for free since the middle of March. 32 million meals, and this is just the beginning. This city will not let our people down. We just won't, we're not going to let our people go hungry. We are going to be there for all New Yorkers, and I have to tell you, it's been amazing to watch just the pure nobility of the folks who have gotten involved in this effort and want to feed their fellow New Yorker. I've been out to the Campaign Against Hunger in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, the amazing work that that group does in the community and the folks that I met with, of and by and for their own community, feeding people who live, you know, on their block and down the street from them and worship in the same churches. You know, the sense of we are our brother and sister's keeper. It's clear in soup kitchens and food pantries all over New York City. It's clear. I've spent time with some of the Department of Education food service workers who have been there from day one. They went from running the kitchens for our kids to immediately having to convert to feeding all New Yorkers, and they did it now instantly and with tremendous resolve, and of course this extraordinary delivery operation that Commissioner Garcia and her team has put together working with all the agencies I mentioned. This is unheard of to be delivering meals on this scale, but everyone involved, not just the city employees, all of the folks driving the cars, everyone wants to see people get the food they need.

So, it's a crisis and a painful time, and a lot of people have felt very alone. But on this topic, you should not feel alone. You should never feel that you have to suffer if you don't have food, we are here for you. There's literally human beings right now packaging the food that is meant for you and it will get to you and it will be for free, and people will make sure that you get what you need, and that is a great example of the fact that we are all in this together and that's something that makes me very proud of New York City. Thank you, everybody.

2020-05-22 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, we're about to start a very important weekend. And it would be important any year – obviously, it takes on added meaning this year. Memorial Day weekend, let's remember why it exists to begin with – to honor the lives of those who gave their all for us, and to not ever let it be forgotten that people have come forward over the generations to protect all of us, to serve their nation, and gave their lives fighting for an idea of what this country is about, the freedoms we enjoy, the way we live, and the idea that we could all create something better all the time. So, this is something that is very real to me, very real in our family, because my parents, Chirlane's parents were part of that greatest generation, the World War II generation. And my dad, Chirlane's dad served in the US army during World War II. Thank God both of them came back. But I heard the stories from my dad of the guys in his unit who didn't come back. I could feel the pain every time he talked about it. The sense of loss, and the comradery, and the sense that they would never ever be forgotten by those who served with them, by their families, by their communities. So, Memorial Day is about remembering something bigger than all of us, remembering these heroes. It's obviously also a time to appreciate all those who serve us now and all those who have served us and live here in our city. Over 200,000 veterans in New York City, and we every day work to support them. It shouldn't just be on Veterans Day that we help veterans, shouldn't just be on Memorial Day that we remember those who gave their lives for us. It should be every day.

So, that's why Memorial Day exists. But we also know there's a whole other reality that has emerged over the years to Memorial Day. It is for all of us something also very different, very immediate, very human, very real. It is the unofficial start of summer. It’s something we look forward to every year, and we celebrate, and you could feel the energy when you're coming up to Memorial Day weekend. So, when we think of a normal summer, we think all the things we love to do. All the time we want to spend at the beach or with family barbecues, outdoor concerts, you name it, and one day those things will be a part of our life again. I keep reminding everyone the coronavirus is time limited. New York City is not time limited. The coronavirus will be contained over time. There will be a vaccine at some point, hopefully really soon, and we'll be able to go back to so many of the things that we've known, but right now we have a very different reality, everyone knows it. And even going into this weekend, we associate with the joyous summer, the freedom of summer. We got to start our thinking with this simple thought. If you want freedom, if you want to go back to those things we love, you cannot let your guard down. You can't throw away all the progress we've made. We all have fought to get as far as we've gotten in these last weeks. We talk about every single day, and I thank you every single day, and I'm going to keep thanking you, and I'm going to keep reminding you. Memorial Day is a time to redouble our efforts, not lose our focus, because we want to get to that better place, and we've got a lot of momentum now, we got to hold onto it.

So, when you think about it, I know people want to do the right thing just because they want to do the right thing. I know people want to do the right thing, because they want to move forward. Sometimes it helps to think about the alternative. If we get a little too loose, we're going to start going backwards. And the last thing we want is more restrictions on our lives. So, I'm going to keep reminding you, if we play this right, fewer and fewer restrictions over time, more and more normalcy, more and more restart. And we play it wrong. You go backwards, you play it really wrong. You could go backwards a long way. We cannot let that happen. I will not let that happen. So, when you go into Memorial Day, think about the many, many ways you can enjoy it – the many wonderful things about Memorial Day, even in the middle of this crisis, but be smart about how you approach it.

So, there's going to be a special effort this weekend to help people, to make sure that we do things the right way. I've been really clear about the beaches, they are closed for swimming. There will not be lifeguards. People are not supposed to go to the beach to swim. There's not going to be anything with group activity. No sports, no volleyball, no gatherings. We want to make sure that people understand what the beach is for today. You can walk on the beach. You can hang out on the beach, but do it in a manner that is consistent with everything we've been talking about. You go out for the amount of time you need, then you get back home. You socially distance the whole time. You were the face covering. These are the smart moves to keep our progress going. Now anyone who's unhappy about that, anyone who thinks it's unfair, the buck stops with me. This is a decision I'm making as the elected leader of this city to protect all of us. And I'll tell you something, I've talked to a lot of New Yorkers of all different walks of life, and the number one thing I hear is people want to play it smart, play it safe, move forward, play the long game. Not instant gratification, but how do we actually get out of this crisis, get out of this time of restrictions, and most importantly, how do we keep saving lives? So, I know it won't always be easy, but I'm going to ask everyone to keep doing what you've been doing. 8.6 million people, one team, one cause, keep devoted to this strategy because it's working.

Now, overwhelmingly we have seen people comply with these rules – overwhelmingly. You'll always see photos, and examples of some people who don't, but they are very few in the scheme of things. Vast, vast majority of New Yorkers are following the rules, working together, helping each other out. So, I'm very hopeful that this weekend at our beaches you're going to see people following the rules because they know it's the right thing to do. But if they need some reminders, of course there'll be people out there educating, giving out face coverings. We will have the Parks Department out there in force to get the word out. They've been doing an amazing job, as we talked about earlier in the week. Parks Department has been stellar in this difficult season. They've been out there educating people, helping people. Anyone without a face covering, they go up and say, “Hey, we can fix this right now. Here's a face covering for free”. They're going to keep doing that. They'll have over 150 parks personnel out across the beaches this weekend, and every year the NYPD has a summer beach detail, we will add to that detail. So, it will be hundreds of officers out there. Again, if things are going well, they're going to be in the background. If there are gatherings, if there are people trying to go into the water, Parks is going to take the lead, but if they need support from the NYPD, they will have it.

So, when you – if you're someone who particularly lives in local communities, because, again, the last thing we want to see is a lot of people on subways and buses. So, when we think about the beaches, it's folks particularly in local communities near the beaches. When you get to the beach access points, there'll be teams of City personnel there reminding people of the standards we're holding, giving out the free face coverings, counting how many people are going on the beach, checking to make sure that there's the right number of people, and we don't see any crowding on the beach, we don't see any crowding on the boardwalk. There are some parking areas. If we see those parking areas start to fill up, they're also going to set limits on that. So, the important thing is to, it's just common sense, you'll know when things are not to the standards that we've been holding all along. That's when Parks Department will step in, if needed PD will step in. And there will be vehicles constantly reminding people, no swimming, no barbecuing, no sports. The things that will cause a problem. There'll be constant reminders to people. Look, I'm going to start from the very positive position, that again, I think this'll work. I think it'll work well. I think New Yorkers have gotten the message. If they need a little extra reminder, there'll be people there to remind them. I'm going to start with a positive view that this has got to work. If we see over time that it's not working, as I've said before, we have the option of doing something more strict, which is not what I want to do, and we could put up fencing, and close off the beaches entirely, but that is not our goal. Our goal is to make it work with the standards that I've delineated, and give people the option to enjoy the beach, but in a different way than we would other Memorial Days to help us move forward in this crisis.

Now, in parks around the city, and all over the city, our social distancing ambassadors will be out in force. So, these are civilian employees of the City government – 2,300 city employees will be out educating people, reminding them, giving out free face coverings. There'll be in 230 parks citywide. And I want to tell you – talk about giving out face coverings – our ambassadors, and all city agencies, and all our partners at the community level have given out now more than 6 million face coverings in just the last couple of weeks. Originally, I said we were going to give out 7.5 million. We obviously want to increase that goal because it's gone very well, and people are enthusiastic to get the face coverings. So, we're going to more than double where we are now. We're going to go to 12.5 million, and just keep growing. So long as it's helping people to follow these rules and be safe, we're going to keep giving them out. So, right now, the 6 million we have given out will turn into a goal of 12.5 million face coverings. There'll be 50 city vehicles out. The loudspeakers reminding people of the guidance on how to handle things, reminding people there are free face coverings available, etc.

Now, a new innovation. It's fascinating, in any crisis we go through the pain and the challenge, but we also see the amazing ingenuity. I've talked about the people who came up with a way to create PPEs in New York City. The people built a ventilator here even though none were being produced here. There's amazing ingenuity right now, and right down to the neighborhood level and the block level. People are coming up with ways to keep each other safe, and new ways to approach social distancing. And one of the more interesting ones has been the social distance circles. So, there's an example right there. The idea of showing people what it's like if you're going to spend some time in the park, how to do it in a way that creates safety, and creates the right kind of distance. This is something that, as you can see right there, that's a live action shot that that worked. And we want to make sure that that kind of model is used in other places where it could work. Something we never thought of before, it came up in the last few days. That's a good idea. We're going to see if there's other places that we should apply that idea.

Now, one of the things a lot of us are missing a lot this city – I can confess I'm missing it all the time – are amazing restaurants and bars. I spent a lot of time at those restaurants and bars, and I would love to see them back, and they will come back and due time. Normally, Memorial Day would be a time when they’re very, very full. People are partying, people are having a good time, but that’s not where we’re at yet. So, want to remind people that there are clear standards. We're not doing any dining-in, want to remind any restaurant or bar that tries that, that is not going to end well. There will be enforcement – there has to be penalties, there will be penalties. We're going to have teams from our Office of Nightlife and from Police Department going out around the city to restaurants and bars, getting these posters up, reminding people that the idea is if you go to a restaurant, a bar, it's for takeout, keep moving or of course you can get delivery at home. We're not doing congregating, we're not doing gatherings. We want people to keep moving, observed social distancing, stay safe. So, the message is as simple as it could be – take out, don't hang out. I want to give credit to the writers of this slogan, because it's pretty damn clear. Take out, don't hang out. We did not want to see people try and create de-facto outdoor seating or de facto parties. We'd love it, but we can't do it. It's not safe. So, want to keep people moving along, make sure that we stick to the standards that are working. So, you will see in places where we've had some problems, you will see the presence of the police department and other agencies just going around to bars and restaurants, checking in any place we had a problem last weekend that will be particularly present. I know the upper East side was a focal point, you'll see some real presence there. We'll also have the Office of the Sheriff out in nine parts of the city that are particularly bar-heavy. That's the exact wording they gave me – bar-heavy – just making sure that we don't see crowding and we don't see things that would undermine the safety of all New Yorkers. So, the rules are pretty clear and we want people to enjoy themselves, but we want to get out of this crisis and every single time that people don't follow these rules, these rules, there's a chance that the disease spreads and every time they do follow the rules, we're pushing the disease back. It's as simple as that.

Now, another great way to be outside is our open streets and this has been a new initiative. And again, thanks to our colleagues in the City Council, a great idea that now that we have sufficient enforcement capacity, by the way, a lot of our city agencies are almost back up to full personnel NYPD, especially almost back up to the full personnel levels that had before the coronavirus. Now we have that sweet spot where we can do the open streets, keep them safe, make sure there's enforcement when needed, allow people to enjoy it, especially in strategic where it's going to help avoid crowding parks and other areas where it's important to have them. So, we've been off to a great start and today we are announcing a huge expansion. So far there are over 31 miles of open streets and bike lanes. Tomorrow, we will open over 13 new miles of open streets across the city. So. you'll see the exact locations, we have 1.8 miles managed by local partners local organizations that we're working with closely to keep them safe and keep them effective. 8.8 miles supported by local precincts, working with the community, 2.7 miles of park adjacent streets. All of them open tomorrow and will bring us to a grand total of 45 miles of open streets. So, this now means that we have more miles of operational open streets organized, protected, enforced. We are now having more than any place because any place in this nation, and I should say, because we have found a model that works and it's very, very gratifying to see the way everyone's worked together. And it's something that people can enjoy and we're going to keep building on it through this crisis.

Okay. Now, another important point is to think about how as we move forward, we learn lessons and how we keep people safe. And we're constantly looking at what's happening in the right way to do things. So, we have been all of us dealing with uncharted territory these last weeks. It's kind of stunning to think we've been doing this for a little more than 10 weeks. It feels like it's been a lot longer than that, but this crisis came on and so suddenly, and we've all made a lot of adjustments and we had to figure out the right way to get our standards understood by people and acted on by people the right way to enforce, but also the right way to stand back and let people figure out how to do it themselves and let community step forward in terms of educating people, helping make sure they're social distancing. The best of all worlds of course is when people are bought into something, believe in it, and when the leadership comes from their own community enforcement is something we want to do only when absolutely necessary. So, we, obviously, a week ago, changed the NYPD approach with the focus only on gatherings, but for the day to day work of educating people, reminding them, giving out the face coverings, really getting people to feel why it's so important. Of course, we have our ambassadors, that's a wonderful group of over 2,000 people as I mentioned, but we want to go farther and we want to take this idea down to the grassroots more to the community level, more make it more of and by and for each community.

So that idea, community-based solutions is what animates the next thing I want to talk to you about. I had a remarkable conference call video call with leaders of our cure violence movement yesterday. And these are folks who have in the last few years, folks in the care violence movement, also known as a Crisis Management System, have rewritten how you fight violence from the grassroots. It's an idea that's been around for a while, but in the last few years in this city, it has blossomed, and these are extraordinary people from the community of the community. Some have had problems and challenges in their life before, but they've turned them into strength, and they've turned them into the ability to communicate to others and help them on a better path. They are mediators, they are educators, they are people who stop violence before it even happens. And I've had the privilege of getting to know a lot of these folks and getting to know a lot of these organizations and they're doing something amazing and it's every year contributing more and more to reducing gun violence in this city and saving lives. So, as a result of this conversation yesterday we agreed that it made sense for the cure violence movement to step forward in this moment of crisis and play a crucial role at the local level. Now, fighting the coronavirus just like they fight gun violence every day. So, we will work with 18 Cure Violence organizations across 21 neighborhoods of this city and use the trust that they have built in communities. The important standing they have the reach they have to educate people about the coronavirus to help people do social distancing, to make sure folks have face coverings and are using them to make sure they have a sense of all the things to do to keep themselves safe, their family safe, their community safe. This is a very exciting new initiative because it is the best way to move people when it's their own neighbors, helping them to understand what will keep them safe. And I want to thank everyone in the Cure Violence movement, the crisis management system, not only for what you do every day and you're still doing that crucial work of stopping gun violence right now, but for this new initiative that's going to expand your work further and help you save lives in a new and different way, and we're so, so appreciative for this partnership.

And speaking of partnership, some of the best partners that City government has is our nonprofit organizations. Our nonprofit and social services sector does so much good for New Yorkers, we depend on them all the time. We've put together an advisory council to help us think through how we restart, how we support this sector of these folks who really, people are depending on more than ever. And these are nonprofit organizations, a lot of them are hurting right now, they need special help, special support. That's what the conversation was about, talked last night in detail with them. I've gotten to see this work up close over at years and years, what you see there as an example from Bed-Stuy from the campaign against hunger, which I visited a few weeks ago, the amazing work that Dr. Melanie Samuel's and her team and her volunteers do to feed people in central Brooklyn. They didn't wait for the government to tell them this was important to do, they started something at the grassroots years ago and now they're, they're doing twice as much as they were doing just a few months ago to feed people in Brooklyn who needed help. This is one example, there are so many more. The folks who work in homeless shelters and in organizations that help our children settlement houses, I mean, you name it, a broad, broad range of community-based organizations. And I want to remind you, these are also unsung heroes in this fight because in communities all over the city, if you need food, you're turning to a nonprofit organization or a social service organization. If you need help staying in your home or finding someplace or God forbid, you're homeless, you're turning to someone for help. These are nonprofit organizations. If you need to be healthier for your family, a lot of people of course go to community-based clinics. If you need to be safe, think about the amazing organizations that do the noble work of protecting people from domestic violence. Go down the list, and this city couldn't be the city without these amazing nonprofit organizations. We have more and better and bigger in this city than anywhere in the country by far. And its part of what makes New York City great, it's part of why we've made the progress we've made. And I want to offer my thanks to everyone who works in our nonprofit organization serving New Yorkers. I see you and appreciate you and I have for years and years. I want New Yorkers to recognize the amazing work that folks do. We will support our nonprofit sector; we are going to find a way to keep these great organizations going through thick and thin. And I want to ask people to help them in every way you can. Thank them, anyone in your neighborhood that you know does this work. A thanks is always helpful, but a lot of them are hurting financially. If you're looking for a great place to donate, if you're looking for a way to help out, help one of your local nonprofits that are doing such important work, we will help them survive this and come back stronger and we're going to learn ways, as we talked about last night to make sure the city government supports them better in the future so they can keep doing this crucial work.

Now talking about another great nonprofit organization, I had an experience just yesterday with one, the New York Blood Center. What amazing work they do. Chirlane and I went and gave blood yesterday and this is something that's really important. As you see, that's us at the New York Blood Center location in Lenox Hill, they have locations all over the city and we need help. Let me give New Yorkers a goal and we'll keep track of this goal with you. I'd like to see a thousand New Yorkers a day give blood through this crisis to keep the supply up, to make sure we can protect our fellow New Yorkers. And I know people want to do something positive. I know people want to contribute. Again, this is essential, this is a reason to go outside and travel to get to one of these locations. Chirlane and I went in there and there you see all the locations around the city. We went in there yesterday. It was actually a very positive experience because the staff is amazing. They're positive, they're upbeat, they want to help it, make it a good experience and they know what you're doing is so important. So, they let you know how important it is. I know people want to do something positive. I know people want to contribute. Again, this is essential, this is a reason to go outside and travel to get to one of these locations. Chirlane and I went in there, and there you see all the locations around the city. We went in there yesterday. It was actually a very positive experience because the staff is amazing. They're positive, they're upbeat, they want to help it make it a good experience and they know what you're doing is so important. So, they let you know how important it is. And I want people to recognize that you can make a big difference by giving blood, particularly want to make an appeal to people of African descent, that it's very important to give blood at this point. And there is a reason for that and people know about the scourge that is sickle cell anemia. Obviously, it hurts and hits the African-American community most deeply. When you give blood, if you are a person of African descent, it is helpful because only a small percentage of blood supply can actually be used to treat a sickle cell patient most effectively, fact is less than two percent. So, making sure there are enough blood donations that could be used for those suffering from sickle cell is crucial. So please everyone, everyone give blood. It makes such a difference. Let's hit that goal of 1,000 per day. Again, sites all over the city, essential travel to say the least. If you're able to do this, to make an appointment, go to nybc.org or call (800) 933-2566.

Now, a few quick thank you’s. I'm feeling tremendous gratitude as we go on this crisis. All the people who stepped up. We have made a lot of progress, particularly when it comes to personal protective equipment, the PPEs. But thank God a lot of people keep coming forward to help. So, I want to thank some of those who have stepped up. Peter Tu, wonderful community leader, Peter Tu and American Fuso Business Community have donated 200,000 N95 masks and 2,000 thermometers. That's fantastic. Maple Tree, a real estate firm, 252,000 nonsurgical masks. Peloton, 150,000 nonsurgical mass, Deloitte, 25,000 KN95 masks and the Networks for Emergencies and Relief, 40,000 disposable masks. Transperfect translation company, which is focused on a very particular need right now. Making sure we can help people get what they need in the language they speak. They're providing 125,000 and free translation services. We thank them for that. So those are wonderful donations people are making.

Okay, as we get to the end here, I want to offer a special warm salute to our Muslim brothers and sisters in this city because we are marking the end of the month-long celebration of Ramadan. Most important part of the year for the Muslim community. Want to wish a special Eid al-Fitr to our Muslim community. This was a tough Ramadan to say the least. Just like we had a tough Passover, a tough Easter, all great faiths together are dealing with the challenge of having their holidays during this crisis. And yet there is also a message in that that people's faith was strengthened. People were reminded of all our ancestors, what they endured. The faith came through stronger than ever in this time and all the faith communities in the city supported each other. So, to all our members of the Muslim community wish you a very special moment in this holiday and we will all move forward together.

Now, to our daily indicators and this is going to be a moment to talk about what all of you have achieved. I tell you every day, but actually you have achieved more than you might've even realized. You've achieved so much that we're actually able to think about our indicators in a new way today because this is about the reality on the ground. The indicators are numbers that they actually just reflect what you're doing. So, for the last weeks, we've had these indicators now up for about five weeks, everything was about the trajectory. And there you see that downward sloping line, and we love the fact that it's gone down and down. Everything was about trying to move in the right direction. I constantly talked to you about. I wanted all of them to go down. I want them to go down together and it was all about making clear we could do that and we could sustain it and some days we've had those ups and downs, but what's gotten me interesting is the ups and downs have been happening in a pretty narrow bandwidth. More and more what we're seeing is sustained progress, that we've gotten to a point that is the kind of level we were hoping for and we were hoping we could have sustained. And I mentioned yesterday we're seeing these numbers at a point that seems to be pretty consistent, now we got to keep it that way. I'm going to be constantly talking about it, if we don't do things right, those numbers can start to go up. If they start to go up, more restrictions could come with them.

We want to move forward. We want to get to that first phase of restart. To do that we got to stay tight. Stay disciplined with what we're doing. But what is clear is we for the first time I've seen these indicators stay consistently low and so it's time to talk about the indicators differently as we prepare for phase one. The day to day changes, the small up and downs matter less, what matters more now is staying at a low level and keeping that way. And so, we're going to be about thresholds now. So, our indicators that we talked about before were trend lines, now we're going to talk about thresholds and that's going to be the focus going forward. The threshold is simple, it's the level you want to stay below. We've been working on this constantly with our Health Department, Health + Hospitals, our whole team. And every day, of course, the Health Department has put out these statistics. And now we want to say very clearly, staying below those thresholds on a sustained basis is what makes clear to us that we are ready for more progress. So, now, we have three thresholds and I'll describe them. We want to get below them, stay below them. Again, I've talked about that 10- to 14-day window – that's still super pertinent, because that is about the incubation period for the disease. So, that tells you the trend lines. But we want to get there, stay there 10 days to 14 days and keep staying there. So, let's talk about them now and they directly relate to the previous indicators we've talked to in terms of trend lines. First, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – so, the threshold is to stay under 200 patients admitted per day. 200 would be about double the seasonal rate for similar types of diseases to COVID. So, we sort of grouped together similar respiratory infections. We say, what would that normal rate be? And then, what would double that be? 200 is about that magic number. If you're below 200, you're doing okay. So, that's the threshold we will now live by. Today's report is good news – 76 patients admitted. That's the daily number – 76, well below the threshold and we've been staying below the threshold. And I talked about this yesterday, we've been consistently between 50 and 80 people admitted per day. That's been a great trend in recent days. Let's stay there. And that gives us that entry to the next phase. Let's talk about number two – daily number of people in Health and Hospitals ICUs. So, this is a really important issue. When we talked about this indicator, originally, we're talking about ICU patients with COVID or suspected of having COVID. Now, as we're about to go through changes, you're going to see fewer patients with COVID, but you will see other patients start to come in with non-COVID problems, because more and more our ICU will start to deal with a bigger range of health issues. So, what we care about here is the total capacity ICU. That's obviously the measure of, are we able to deal with whatever's thrown at us? So, we'll be looking at total capacity going forward, all patients in Health + Hospitals ICUs. To-date, it's overwhelmingly been COVID patients to the tune of over 95 percent. Now, we're going to generalize it and say any and all patients in ICUs, going forward. So, let's look at that daily number. The threshold is to be under 375, and that's, again, a hard indicator to reach in a sense it's about each individual patient fighting for their life and the work that's being done to save them, but we are steadily getting there. Today, we're at 451 – not there yet, but we are down more than 100 patients in the past 10 days and we're confident that this number will continue to decline. And, finally, indicator three, the percentage of people tested citywide who are positive for COVID. The goal was to get under 15 percent and stay under 15 percent. And, as more and more testing occurs, we're watching that percentage. We want to keep it there. Today, we're at 11 percent tested positive. The last 10 days, we have been below the 15 percent threshold. So, again, very positive trends overall. And so, I will from now on continue to talk to you about the indicators, three of them, but it'll be in the vein of the thresholds. Two, we are there. On one and three – indicators one and three, we are there. Indicator two, not yet there, but we think we will be there soon and then we have to hold it. So this is all about everything you've been doing and about keeping up this progress. But I want people to see the fruits of your labors. You've gotten us this far, now let's keep going.

Okay. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we’ll take questions from the media. And please remind me of the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have Police Commissioner Shea, Health Commissioner Dr. Barbot, President and CEO of Health + Hospitals Dr, Katz, Commissioner
Silver, Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg, Deputy Director of the Office of Neighborhood Safety at the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice Cumberbatch, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma on the phone. With that, I will start with Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How are you?

Question: I’m good. You know, a bunch of reporters have a problem with the way in which these news briefings are structured. We don't know when we're going to be called, we don't know who is really on this call with us. We don't get an opportunity to ask a follow-up question because you mute our mics, and it’s not a very productive way to conduct these news briefings from our point of view. We've had discussions with your press office about this. We still haven't seen any progress about this. And, today, in particular, when we see that you're moving the data criteria to a different kind of data and we're looking at these graphs and they're not explicit in the numbers that we're seeing on these charts, it's extremely frustrating to a lot of us that we're in this mode of communicating with you. And I think that I just felt compelled to bring up these issues and see if we can get them resolved. A lot of times you misunderstand our question or you don't directly answer it and we don't have an opportunity to follow it up. So, I just wanted to raise this issue and hope that our [inaudible] that we can resolve this with your office.

Mayor: Thank you, Henry. Let me just say on that and then if you have a question on the matters at hand. Again, I think – and I've talked to a lot of New Yorkers about this, that people have found these daily briefings extremely helpful and informative and that I think you guys have asked a lot of really pertinent questions and has led to a very helpful conversation and a lot of clear answers. But I'm happy to talk to you about it. I'll give you a call and we can talk through if there's other ideas to think about. I'm not going to respond right now, because obviously we're in the middle of doing this. But let me happily talk to you about that and we'll think about it together. Now, do you have questions in the here and now?

Question: Well, my question is basically, it's very similar to the questions that a lot of us have been asking over several weeks, which is, you know, as the data indicates that people have stayed home, they've sheltered in place, the numbers are going to go down as people hunker down. But as soon as we relax these numbers – or relax these restrictions, the numbers of cases will invariably go up as long as the virus is present in our population. We know this. You know this. So, the measures of declining caseloads, all they mean is that our hospitals have more capacity to handle new cases –

Mayor: Henry, I want to just give a little time check. We do have a time limit here. So, could you just tell me what you're trying to ask?

Question: My question is this, in light of these numbers going down, how did they promote the opportunity for New Yorkers to get back to some semblance of normalcy in restaurants, in construction, in commerce, in retail? How is it – you know, when is the point at which New York can begin to maintain some semblance of normalcy?

Mayor: Right. Henry, let me – again, we've got a lot to cover and a lot of people willing to ask and I obviously have other things I’ve got to do as well today. So, let me cut to the chase here. We talked about it the last few days very clearly. Right now, again, if we keep doing the work we're all doing – 8.6 million people – if we do it right, if people stick to the plan, stick to the guidance, we will move to phase one in either the first or second week of June. I said it yesterday clear as a bell. I'm saying it again today. Now, we’ve got to get there, which means people have got to stick to the plan. But that is where all of our indicators are pointing, that is where the State indicators are pointing, and phase one is clearly delineated. It is manufacturing, construction, wholesale and curbside pickup retail. We will have a lot more to say on how that will work on any specific restrictions or standards within that. What it means for mass transit and how to address that. There's a lot of pieces we will be putting together. And I expect to be explaining a lot of that over the remaining days of May before we act in the first or second week of June, but that's where everything's lining up. These standards right now, we are in a very good position on two of them and confident on the third one, the ICUs, and if we stay below them, that is a sustainable level. I hear you when you say it is inevitable there might be some growth as people do more, but our job is to really keep that as limited as humanly possible and keep it within these thresholds. So, even if there's some increase, to keep it very limited so we can stay under these thresholds and then move from phase one to phase two, etcetera. If we can't stay under the thresholds, we have a problem.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Was there – did I miss something there?

Question: Well, we've heard about June, we haven't really heard the specifics of how, of what will be open, and how we will begin to see life in some sense of [inaudible] –

Mayor: Henry, again, I'm going to conclude on this and then – and, again, we will have a conversation about any ways that we might be able improve these press briefings. But I'll just put a [inaudible] on it again, and then, for your colleagues, for them, we're going to continue where we are now until we make an alteration, if we do. So for everyone else, going forward, for the rest of this press briefing, you get two questions upfront if you want to use him. And, Henry, to conclude, the fact is that we've given you a timeline. We know the types of industries, we're talking to folks in those industries, that's why we have the advisory council to figure out – and beyond – to figure out what's going to work for them. We have time between now and when we actually make the announcement to answer some of the outstanding questions. That's what we're going to do in the rest of May. We will get into the first or second week of June and then tell people when we've gotten to the point that we can make the move. So, we're going to definitely be leading into it, but there's still work to be done to perfect those standards. So, I've told you everything I can tell you today that is settled. As each additional matter becomes settled, we'll announce it.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everybody. I'm curious if you could expand and explain a little bit – I'm confused – doesn't mean that this isn't not confusing, maybe my brain is just fried – but previously with the daily indicators, the City needed 10 consecutive days of daily indicators all moving in the right direction at the same time. So, could you explain a little bit more now about the thresholds? And then secondly for a fun question, what's your favorite beach in New York City?

Mayor: Coney Island, unquestionably. I love Coney Island for so many reasons. I love it because of the history, I love it because of the culture. I think that's one of the – when I have – when we get back to the time where people can visit from outside New York City, one of the places I try to always bring them, if I only can take them a few places is Coney Island, because I think it exemplifies so much that's good about New York City. And it's an ocean beach, I mean it's a beautiful beach, let alone the amusements, everything else. So, far and away – God bless the other beaches, but far and away Coney Island.

Yeah, no, Katie, I don't think your brain is fried. I think all of us are struggling with the nonstop dealing with this issue now for weeks and weeks and weeks. So, I'll try again on this. The trend line was what mattered before, because, bluntly, until we all could prove to each other that we could do shelter and place in social distancing and face coverings and knock these numbers down with 8.6 million people, until we could see it on a sustained basis, it was highly debatable and we had to prove it. And the trend lines were a great measure, because they said to us, we couldn't just, you know, make a little bit of progress. We have to make a lot of progress. We have to keep moving in the right direction. But it's a very high bar, unquestionably – we said 10 to 14 days, all moving in the same direction. But we then realized in recent days that with two of the three indicators, we are below the threshold we would need to be at on a longterm basis. In fact, in the case of the hospital admissions, we were even below, in some cases, the days that we had seen in previous years for similar respiratory diseases. So, it got to the point of saying, hey, we need to look at our definition and see if it makes sense at this moment. We're going to always, always vary our approach according to new information and new realities. We're all learning together about this. So, it's this simple. The thresholds now make sense. This is a standard. If you just think about it in this, sort of, common sense way – if you could stick to these thresholds for June, July, August, September, October this year, next year, you would be fine. I mean, you still would be fighting this battle, and we want to save every single human being. But in the sense of the city as a whole, if you were at these levels where so few people were having to go into the hospital each day and so few people in the scheme of things were in ICUs, your hospitals would be safe, your ability to protect people and serve them in the hospitals would be safe, and the number of people who were infected would be very small in the scheme of things, and we would be in the position to keep deepening our restart. So, that's why we believe these are now the smart standards. It's a measure of improvement, Katie. It's a change for a reason. It's because actually things got better and kept better for a meaningful period of time and people did it right. We’ve got to keep doing it right. And if we see those numbers start to go up and we start to approach those thresholds going too far up, we're going to call that out distinctly and talk about whatever changes we need to make.

Moderator: Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good. How are you, Juliet?

Question: I'm fine. And thank you for the acknowledgement yesterday. I think we're all there to help and I'm glad it's working out.

Mayor: Thank you.

Question: My question is, as far as this weekend is concerned, can people physically sit on the beach with a chair or a blanket, or is this just walking? And if you can't picnic or barbecue or go to the playground in the park, what can you do there? And my second question is, what are your plans for the virtual graduation ceremony?

Mayor: Ah, excellent. I spoke to the Chancellor and his team on the virtual graduation just a few days ago and we are going to have more to say on that. Typically, as you know, Juliet, these kinds of celebrations happen third or fourth week of June. So, we're talking about, you know, we have a lot of kids who would be graduating normally in June. There's a lot of kids who also do graduate in August. So, we're figuring out how to do that, how to balance and reach each groups of kids – each group of kids. But we will have announcements on that, I'd say in the next week, maybe 10 days, something like that. And then on the beaches, yeah, you can walk, you can sit down, you can bring a chair, you can bring a blanket, but you have to follow the same concepts – socially distance from people who are not a part of your own household, if you're going to be close to people at any point, wear a face mask. So, we want to make sure that people who – again, especially folks who live nearby can take advantage of it, but we will not allow crowding. If we start to see any crowding, we're going to make sure to limit. We're not going to allow swimming, there will not be lifeguards. But if folks just want to go and enjoy the beach for a period of time in these other much simpler ways – it's definitely simpler. You know, we don't have all the things we used to have at this exact moment. If you just want to take in the simple beauty of the beach, it's there for you, but with a lot of good watchful eyes from the Parks Department and the Police Department.

Moderator: Next we have Rich from WCBS 880.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor. Happy Memorial Day Weekend.

Mayor: Thank you, Rich.

Question: And just wondering, you know, given these new indicators, the thresholds you speak of, how long do they have to hold until you can pull the trigger on an announcement, if you will. And by what date would you like to make a definitive announcement or do you have a date in mind? And also, what are your Memorial Day plans?

Mayor: Well, I would just say, Rich, like everyone else. I wish I had more elaborate Memorial Day plans. We used to go with the kids every Memorial Day to see their grandma who lived up in Vermont – Chirlane’s mom. And Memorial Day was like a really special time of year and family gatherings. I don't have any particular deep family plans this year. We're keeping it real simple. As I said, I think people are learning to appreciate their neighborhood and just stay local in their neighborhood and appreciate a lot of things in the city that maybe they didn't recognize before. So, we're going to be super simple, super local. And then on your question about timing – so, to me, Rich, I'm just looking at these numbers. I'm looking at the consistency of them. I'm looking at our indicators, the State indicators, and I said everything's pointing to either the first or second week in June. I don't have a preferred day, like I must have it by X-day. I want it to be the day when we are convinced we're there. Every day – sooner I want, of course, in terms of restarting the economy and getting people to start back towards their livelihoods. But I'm all about the health and safety. This is – and I'm playing the long game here, I want us to get it right. I want us to move into phase one and sustain it. Sure, that might be some setbacks, but I don't want the big setbacks. I don't want the boomerang and that's what I'm guarding against. So, the day – it's an organic thing, Rich – the day that we can do it safely is the day I want to go. But it looks damn clear right now it's the first or second week in June to go into phase one. Again, that's manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail only for curbside pickup. Those are the big standards and then we'll fill in a lot of blanks between now and then about how to do those things and how to approach them safely. But I think it's going to be first or second week in June unless, unless people get undisciplined and start to lose track of the standards and we start to see a resurgence. That kind of thing could slow us down. But if we keep to what we've been doing up to now, it seems very clear, it's going to be a date in the first 14, 15 days of June.

Moderator: Next we have Jillian from WBAI.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor. I have to agree with you on Coney Island, if only for that classic New York City film, The Warriors. So here are my questions, they're all related. On May 7th, the Governor extended the eviction moratorium from June 20th to August 20th, but housing activists say he essentially ended it. He's put the onus on tenants making things much more difficult, fewer protections, a lot of confusion and little guidance. And then earlier this week the courts issued a directive allowing remote evictions to start taking place against existing victims. So my questions are what is the City going to do regarding things like the right to counsel because you're going to need it again. And the second is, is there anything planned for commercial tenants who have fewer rights than housing tenants? Because there's already an eviction crisis going on that preceded the pandemic. So those are the two questions.

Mayor: Thank you, Jillian. No, those are great questions and I thank you for that. So, no, I don't think there should be any evictions. So, let me start with principle. I don't think there should be any evictions during this crisis. And I've said there should be at least a two-month window after this crisis. And you know, I don't think, and I appreciate that the State extended the moratorium. I really do, but I want them to go farther. We – there's no schedule that says we will be done with the coronavirus crisis by August. I think we could be greatly improved by August, but we're not going to be done. So, until we are really substantially back to normal, there should not be evictions. Whether they are commercial or residential, there just shouldn't be evictions. It doesn't make sense in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression to be evicting people. We need to give people a timeline and a grace period thereafter, once we're out of the crisis because it's all about people having money to pay their rent with. And if they have no source of income, it's not their fault if they can't pay the rent.

Now I want to be clear, if someone owns a building, they have expenses too and they ultimately have to be made whole in some form or fashion. The ideal would be for the federal government to do the kinds of things that would help everyday working people and help small businesses and not leave people in this kind of horrible situation. So the best thing would be a stimulus that embraces the notion of covering people's back rent and directly subsidizing it so we can all be made whole and move forward. But while we're fighting for things like that, there should not be evictions. We're going to work to in every way we can, help tenants with those free legal services we put in place, the right to counsel. So anybody who fears an eviction right now should call 3-1-1 and if we can give you free counsel, we will. But I think it should be a simple standard, extend all eviction moratoriums of all kinds, no evictions of any kind, commercial or residential until this crisis is over. And then some.

Moderator: Next we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you. Good morning Mr. Mayor. So it sounds like you're starting to move in a direction where the question becomes more about risk and risk mitigation and less about an all-out avoidance of that risk. So with that in mind and what we've seen in the past for example, is that total abstinence never really does work. So as we enter this period where people really are tired and they're struggling and they want to get back to work, they want to see their loved ones, what is the City doing to really teach New Yorkers about how to live life in this moment? Because people to some extent want that guidance. So beyond social distancing circles and posters, which are all useful and they're working, how has the administration taken on this part of the effort? What are some of the things that New Yorkers could look forward to? And for example, have you considered using the color system? We saw this post 9/11 where we would, the City would issue a warning, if there was a possibility of a threat, we would be in red or yellow. Have you considered doing something like that? Say if there was an outbreak that you could tell New Yorkers, okay, right now we are in a red zone. So people would know that they have to kind of put up their guard even more than they have been doing as we start doing this reopening thing?

Mayor: Yeah, that's a really interesting point, Gloria. We're going to look at all sorts of possibilities and that one is a very worthy one. But I think what's interesting here is when we were fighting against terrorism and warning people against terrorism, of course it came with the danger, it could be anywhere, anywhere. You know, any place at any time. And the reality we're going to be facing now is we might well see those very localized challenges in a single building, for example, in a single company, that can be addressed in a more immediate way. So I think your initial frame is right. We are not even at this moment, we're not in a no risk stance, but we're in a very, very low risk stance. I think you're right to say if we go into phase one, in a sense, you're implicitly doing risk mitigation, but you're doing a very sharp form, I believe, a very sharp form of risk mitigation. That's the way we're structuring it. I think the State standards make a lot of sense. They're careful. They go through stages. You have to prove each stage before you move to the next one. Our indicators, again, just look at them absolutely – like forget that we've moved this whole distance and forget what was before. Just look at them today and look at these numbers. If there's 76 people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, even, not everyone that may even have COVID in the final analysis after they're tested, but even if it's 76 who have COVID compared to where we were. This is now a situation if you're holding at that level, you can manage it. You can protect people's lives. And again, we would always be guarding against any resurgence. So we would put the foot on the gas more if we needed to, whatever it took.

So yeah, I think yes there is a risk mitigation viewpoint, but a very sharp, tight version of that. Very clear ability to turn on and off restrictions quickly if needed. Yes, to teaching new ways because as we talk about phase one, we're going to have to talk very overtly about how you go about proper manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail, curbside pickup. You know, we're going to go over those standards, those rules, how they're going to be enforced, what kind of social distancing happens. So we're always going to be teaching new ways until this is over. But I think your point about color codes, we aren't using that now, but it's a real interesting idea or things like that that help people to know exactly where we stand. And then if we have a problem, see if it's a problem that could be addressed in a very local way, if that solves it or if it's something that needs to be addressed on a bigger level.

Moderator: Next we have Debra Lee from the Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. I wanted to address some of the concerns that some of the neighborhoods who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID, and arguably by some of the social distancing enforcement are facing as they go into this weekend. Can you speak Mayor and Police Commissioner Shea to those concerns and what they should be preparing for? I know that this is the official start of summer, but for many who are going to be not able to get to beaches or spend any real time outdoors and recreation like sports, this is going to be a very difficult weekend and not necessarily one to mark with a great deal of celebration. So I wonder if you could speak to that specifically to those concerns? And then also forgive me, there's also a conversation about a greater investigation into how the City has handled the underlying concerns about COVID and the health inequities that existed, including the Department of Justice probe that some are calling for. I wonder if you could speak to that and also have Commissioner Barbot weigh in on that?

Mayor: So on that again, we are, I want to say, and I want to give credit to the Health team and I know this is something that Commissioner Barbot believed in strongly that we put out the transparent data about the disparities as soon as we had it in a form that we believed was accurate. And very soon after the absolute height of this crisis when all of our energies were going into just trying to save our health care system and save as many lives as possible and keep the health care system from collapsing. So Gloria – I'm sorry, Debra Lee, I feel strongly that we did that in very close proximity to the absolute high point where everything was all hands on deck. And then as soon as we were able to confirm that information, we started talking about it openly and started acting on it with the community based testing, with the outreach initiatives, the advertising, the focus on the community clinics, the telehealth, all of the things to get more deeply into the communities that were most affected. So I think it's really clear that, especially given all of us and that we came here to fight disparity, when we saw it we immediately turned our energies to addressing it. And we will for the long term. And that is what our Fair Recovery Taskforce has focused on. Our internal working group, City leaders, City government leaders on inclusion and equity. So much of the effort that will be engineered in the days to come will be about addressing these fundamental disparities and using this moment despite the pain of the crisis to also find the transformation in the crisis and change the city profoundly in terms of addressing disparity in general and particularly health care disparities. So that's underway. Any, any part of government that's looking at the situation, I'm quite certain there'll be different reviews and that's understood. But we're not waiting on anyone else to review the history or assess from their own perspective. We already are acknowledging unacceptable disparities and acting on those disparities.

So let me turn to Commissioner Barbot and then I'll come back on the weekend and social distancing and all and speak to that and then turn to the Commissioner. I also want to get Eric Cumberbatch into this in a moment to talk about the Cure Violence piece. So first Commissioner Barbot, do you want to speak to that?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes, sir. And thank you Debra Lee for the question. Because you know, I want to just start off by saying that I appreciate the issue that you're trying to bring out. And I couldn't agree more that the fact that black and brown New Yorkers are dying twice the rate of white New Yorkers is alarming and distressing. And we are committed as we have been committed during the course of this administration, to addressing those underlying drivers. The reality is that during this response we in the Health Department did something that really was unprecedented. We released data before it was fully complete because we saw an emerging trend with regards to black and brown people being more affected. And we didn't want to wait until the data was a hundred percent completed. We saw the trend emerging and we didn't want to wait. And so, you know, I think that, as the Mayor alluded to, there will be ongoing initiatives. There will be ongoing reviews. I think the important point to note here is that these disparities and outcomes have really been to a great, great, great degree a product of decades of disinvestment driven by structural racism. And even though this administration has really been quite in the lead about reinvesting in our communities, the amount of money that the Mayor has put into the public hospital system, the amount of money that we have put into M/WBEs, all of those investments to try and undo decades of structural racism, I think only take us so far. And so, you know, the sad reality is that in spite of our efforts, there has been this disproportionate impact on communities of color and it really is a call to action for all of us that as we emerge from this public health crisis, we do it with a racial equity lens at our center.

Mayor: Yep. Exactly right. And also, I think Dr. Barbot is making a crucial point. Debralee, we're going to get you an updated number in the coming days, but a few years back Juan Gonzolez did an analysis and talked about the billions of dollars that have been transferred, you know, wealth redistribution that had been achieved through initiatives like pre-K and the affordable housing efforts and paid sick leave and so many other things this administration has been focused on, and that number has gone up quite a bit and we need to give you an updated number. To Dr. Barbot’s point, nothing like that's ever happened in New York City history. And yet it's still not enough. So, there's a lot more redistribution that has to happen. There's a lot more transformation that has to happen. What we intend to do with all the different platforms I've talked about led by our Fair Recovery Task Force is talk about much deeper changes that need to happen in this city.

But that is just the beginning. I have said so many times, I can't count, you cannot change New York City just from within New York City. Obviously, we need the State government to be a part of this and even more so the federal government, if we had universal health care in this country, we would be having an entirely different discussion about disparities. If we had the kind of affordable housing programs we need, the kind of support for public housing we need, we’d be having an entirely different discussion. We got to stop kidding ourselves. And I think New Yorkers are very proud and we are very, in a funny way, insular. We think about ourselves all the time and what we can do here, and we can do a lot here, but you know what – and they say, no man, no woman is an island, well, no city is an island either. And if we're really, really going to deal with these disparities, it means maximum transformational effort in New York City, but also getting real about how much has to change at the federal level. And I think that opportunity actually is looming in November in a good way for more transformative change.

On the question of folks being out and about this weekend in their neighborhoods. And obviously with restrictions and not being able to do a lot of the things they would like to do, it will be difficult, very quickly because we have a little bit of time crunch here. I'm going on WNYC soon, Commissioner Shea, if you could just speak to, in light of our new approach that we announced a week ago, how NYPD is going to comport itself in neighborhoods, understanding people are going through a lot. And then I want Eric Cumberbatch to just jump in briefly and give people a flavor of, as the Cure Violence Movement starts to get more and more engaged in taking the lead on social distancing, what that's going to feel like at the neighborhood level as well. Commissioner Shea first. 

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: Yep, good morning. everyone. Happy Memorial Day weekend to everyone on the call. I think that, you know, our position from the beginning has been one of trying to do education, trying to do cooperation through compliance, always having summonses and unfortunately arrest as a last resort. You know, I think the numbers bear that out. And we've moved even further recently. You know, with some of the recent events throughout the city, I think it's incumbent upon all of us. There's been discussions between PD and community groups, PD and elected officials, PD and our partners. I know Eric is going to speak next. I think it takes all working together and trying to gain compliance and recognizing that it is very stressful times for all New Yorkers. So, I think what you're going to see this weekend is continued – you'll see a high visibility of NYPD employees from School Safety and Parks auxiliaries coming on next week in the parks.

You'll see a number of uniform police officers both at the beaches as well as parks, but they're going to be out there as stewards. The last thing we want to do is be, at this stressful time for the city, resorting to some summonses. So, I think you'll see more of the same in that respect from one corner of the city to one end of the city to another. I expect it to be, considering everything that we've been through, considering the weather, I think it's going to be a very nice weekend and I encourage all New Yorkers to get out there, stop and talk to the cops, stop and talk to the cops, engage in that dialogue. And I think that's really what it's all about. And I do have to just say one last thing. I love the Cyclone. I certainly love Brooklyn, and the Mets play in Brooklyn, but there is no comparison, the number one beach is clearly, clearly Rockaway Beach.

Mayor: Okay. We're having a little, a little borough pride showing here. So, I appreciate you being a proud son of Queens and I will continue to assert the superiority of Coney Island. Eric Cumberbatch, thank you for your leadership in all the work we do in City Hall in terms of criminal justice reform, in terms of bringing communities to the fore, in terms of making change, and obviously all you've done to help build the Cure Violence Movement in the city. So, just give us a quick sense so people can feel it, of what it will look like to have Cure Violence folks out, encouraging social distancing.

Deputy Director Eric Cumberbatch, Office to Prevent Gun Violence: Sure. Thank you, Sir. Local leaders from the community that have pre existing relationships with the community, that have in depth knowledge of the culture within neighborhoods, in depth knowledge of individuals that may want to do very traditional events or hold functions, really engaging, focusing on engaging with individuals, sharing best practices around safety, and really how to best utilize the urban scape. So, we'll have partners across 21 different communities out on the street from the community of the community that have deep inroads and deep touch with individuals that ultimately City agencies and government have struggled to reach. So, at the core this is really about empowering the community to be the ones at the forefront to create the change that they want to see in their community.

Mayor: Excellent. Thank you very much, Eric.

Moderator: Last question for today. Jeff Mays from the New York Times. 

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I totally agree with you about Coney Island since I grew up there [inaudible] -- 

Mayor: [Laughter]

Question: – [Inaudible] Shea, you know, Rockaway is great but there's nothing like the Coney Island Boardwalk. Anyway, quick question about beaches since everyone's [inaudible] to go there. We learned this morning that lifeguards are being trained now in anticipation of possibly reopened beaches for swimming in June. Can you just give us any more details about that plan and exactly when you think beaches may be ready to open for swimming?

Mayor: Absolutely, Jeff. And I appreciate your affirmation of Coney Island. It’s going to be a running theme here and I did not know you grew up there. Now that I know you are a native Brooklynite, I like you even more. So, thank you for standing up for Brooklyn. The fact is we are getting the lifeguards ready right now. I'll have Commissioner Silver speak to it, but we're getting them ready right now. Now, I think, Jeff, it connects to the whole question of progression here. So, right now if we're saying in the first or second week of June, we expect to be able to – again, if everyone keeps doing what they need to do, we expect to be able to move into phase one. But remember phase one, construction, manufacturing, wholesale, and retail only in the sense of curbside pickup. So, it's about limiting contact between people. Those are all part of phase one because they come with very limited need for people to be close together. And beaches at full strength come with people really being close together. And the whole idea of a beach, of course, you know what Coney Island looks like on a summer weekend, it’s lots and lots of people in close proximity and they would like to have all the things they normally can have there, the concessions and play, you know, volleyball or whatever it is. Everyone would like the whole experience. 

We're not there yet to say the least. We're just trying to get to phase one and hold phase one where we're not doing any large gatherings, we're not doing concerts, we're not doing sports events, and obviously beaches are similar to that in lots of ways. So, what I'd say to you is we have to kind of earn our way into phase one through phase one, on the phase two, and then later in the summer if we keep making steady progress, there's a real opportunity to look at doing more with our beaches. And remember for the time being, even if we got to that point with all the restrictions that the State has on all beaches in the state, you know, real limitations on how many people can be on the beach, on parking, you know, all sorts of limitations on what kind of activities. So, it's just a long way in one step at a time. We can't give you a date when we could open up beaches more, but it's on the table as a possibility. In terms of the lifeguards being ready, that's moving now. Commissioner Mitch Silver, talk to us about when – what you're doing to get the lifeguards ready and when you would have them ready so that if we could move forward, we know that piece is in waiting and ready to go.

Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver, Department of Parks and Recreation: Well, thank you, Mayor and thank you for the question. We started training lifeguards this week. As you know, beach lifeguards are really the strongest and most experienced because they have to execute a rescue in the beach situation. So, we found a way to socially distance our training for the lifeguards rather than having it at one location, pool. We've now established several locations so that they can social distance as they're being trained. We expect it'll take a few weeks. We want them to be strong and conditioned and then at that point we'll work with the Mayor and other public health guidance to determine when it's safe to bring back the lifeguards. So, it's not just training. We want to make sure that the lifeguards are ready, but at the same time we want to make sure it is safe. People continue to social distance and that we can do it in a safe and responsible manner. So, that already is underway and it should take a few weeks. 

Mayor: Okay, thanks so much, Mitch. And the bottom line to Jeff's question, Jeff, is that the lifeguards will be ready long before we would be able to push the button for any kind of deeper reopening on beaches so people can rest assured that piece will be ready to go. 

Let me conclude real quickly and just say, look, this is going to be a special time of the year, this weekend. Just remember, again, it is to first and foremost honor those who have served us and in the spirit of their service let's serve each other, let's be there for each other. So, yeah, we're going to have fun this weekend, we always do, but we're going to have it a different way. There's still lots of wonderful things that people can do while staying safe. But remember right now we're talking about we are just a few weeks away from a big step forward in this city. If we can hold, if we can get below these thresholds, stay below them consistently, we're going to go into phase one, we're going to start the first process of reopening. That's really exciting. Let's hold onto that momentum. Let's build that momentum so we can get there. So, whatever else, the many good things I hope people are able to do this weekend, I want to wish everyone a Happy Memorial Day weekend. I really want us to be happy because we kept making progress and we got to the point where we could open up a little more and take another step towards a better life in this city. Thank you, everyone, and have a great weekend.

2020-05-22 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. And now our new normal for after the eleven o'clock news on Fridays our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Used to be our opening segment at ten o'clock on Fridays now to accommodate the Mayor's COVID-19 workflow, Ask the Mayor is now appearing here at 11:05 Friday mornings. Good morning Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How you doing?

Lehrer: Good. And I should remember to say, listeners, you can tweet a question for the Mayor as well, just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. So we heard in our last segment, I don't know if you were already holding on or listening to any of this at the end, before the news, State Senators from Long Island and the Jersey Shore, their beaches are generally more open, the cities are closed to swimming, so they don't want city residents creating crowds at some of the local town beaches on Long Island, I know that's been a controversy. But Senator Kaminsky from there said two things about you. One is that he would have preferred that there just be a region wide approach. So like what they're doing with social distancing and 50 percent capacity and things like that on the Long Island beaches, the city could have done that for the city beaches too and avoided the conflict. There are plenty of COVID in Nassau County as well. Why didn't the city take a consistent and integrated approach?

Mayor: I know Senator Kaminsky and I respect him. I'm surprised he's not seeing the reality that the city has been the epicenter, not only of the State crisis, but of the national crisis. And yes, there's been a real challenge on Long Island as well, but no one would compare the two. What's happening in New York City unfortunately has been the, you know, the worst, the toughest manifestation of this crisis. We also just don't resemble the reality of Long Island in terms of how we're built. There's 8.6 million people in a very small space, most of whom don't have cars. Most Long Island residents use their cars to get to the beaches. Most New York City residents go by subway or bus which is a problem in it of itself. I've had this conversation with the Nassau County Executive Laura Curran and I think she understands and we've talked about the fact we just have two different realities. I totally respect her decision and she respects mine because we're dealing with two different realities.

So, I just think in some ways people, you know, want to add drama where there doesn't need to be any. The fact is we've taken it on the chin in this crisis, we have to focus on health and safety first. I'm making my decisions based on health and safety. It is not safe to do what happened in Florida, in California where they prematurely opened up beaches, they had vast crowds just like normal. We're not doing that. That's not safe. If folks in Long Island or New Jersey think they can keep it safe because people get there by car, they have a lot of space to spread out. Great. That's their choice. I respect it, but that doesn't work for us.

Lehrer: And the other thing that he brought up was that he thought you sowed confusion by objecting so strenuously to some of the local town beaches closing to New York City residents like Long Beach and Hampstead Beach and didn't communicate clearly enough that the big public beaches where most New York City residents go when they go to Long Island beaches, specifically Jones Beach and Robert Moses State Park are actually open to city residents. And that should allay most of the concern for you and city residents. What's your response to that?

Mayor: I don't – I think there's a misestimation of what I said. I never made this – again, I didn't try to add any drama to this equation. I tried to make clear why we were doing what we had to do to protect our people in the five boroughs with our beaches. And I said that it was important in any discussion to just be respectful of each other. We're all in this metropolitan area together. I really don't like when people start trying to divide up or point fingers, this is a crisis we should all be working together. So all I talked about was respect for people, but I also respect the decisions that the folks on Long Island are making to try and protect their people and do what works for them. I just don't see a big controversy here. I've said what we have to do for New York City and I've said, I think people in general at this point in time are best served just keeping life local, keeping life in your own neighborhood to the maximum extent possible. We're not going to be able to live exactly the way we live for a while, but this too shall pass, but right now the singular focus should be on health and safety.

Lehrer: And as far as the city beaches, you said this week, “It's just not time for beaches yet. If people want to take a beach chair and sit on the beach, fine. If it starts to seem like a typical summer beach scene, that's what we won't allow”. And there's been some commentary that that's a mixed message, not time for beaches yet in the city, but if you want to take a beach chair and sit on the beach, fine. So, can you help some sun starved of New Yorkers by clarifying that?

Mayor: Yeah, Brian, again, I don't think there's that mixed message in the least because I've been having this conversation with the people in New York City directly for like the whole week. And again, I've sometimes – and deep respect for the good and the free media – but sometimes I also think that truth gets obscured in the search for drama and conflict. I couldn't have been clearer with people, you can't swim, there are not lifeguards on duty, and then all of the things in the State guidance. There's no sports, there's no barbecuing, you know, there's all sorts of things, there's no concessions, it's a different reality. But for folks who particularly live in those neighborhoods, and there's hundreds of thousands of people that are pretty close to our beaches in New York City, if they want to walk on the boardwalk, walk on the sand, you know, sit down in a beach chair, that's fine but they have to observe social distancing, and if they're going for any reason be close to other people, they need to have a face covering on. And as I said just moments before coming on your show, Parks Department will be out there, NYPD will be out there, watching carefully, making sure everything's okay. If we start to see any crowding, we're going to make sure that doesn't happen, obviously. So I think it is straightforward. It's not business as usual. It is a modified, lesser version of what we would normally do because we cannot allow to have happened what happened in Florida and California. We cannot see people going to the beaches and large numbers, crowding together, we're just not doing that.

Lehrer: Richard, on Staten Island, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hello, Richard.

Question: Good morning. I have a question about the electric – I’m dealing with Con Edison during the summer. We'll probably have a lot more demand during the day since a lot of people would be home, [inaudible] vacations, is the Mayor coordinating this with Con Edison?

Mayor: Richard, thank you. It's a great question and I talked about this a few days back, but we're going to keep talking about it. I think we have two realities happening simultaneously. I agree with you entirely. You got a lot more people at home, a lot more people using air conditioning. That's something we would be concerned about. People who – some of whom might have gone out of the city during summer or on a summer weekend won't be. On the other side of the coin, we're going to have effectively no tourism, which is, you know, a lot of people come into the city in the summer and that's a big deal. We're not going to have during the week people coming in anywhere near the same number for jobs, and I wish they would and I wish they could, but you know, that will be ways off. So you know, a lot of the stores that would be open won't be open. So it's going to be a little bit of a balance. We're going to see more energy usage in some areas, less in others. But I share your concern that we should be prepared for a real surge in demand and that we have to be ready with Con Edison.

Last year, I was not pleased at all with Con Edison. I thought they did not communicate before problems that could have been anticipated. They did not coordinate well with the city. They did not help people know what to do in time. We learned a lot from that. There's a much more communicative situation. We're working constantly with them now. If there is any problem, as soon as it's starting to emerge, we want to tell people about it so they can make adjustments, use less air conditioning or whatever it is to stop any potential break in the electricity. And they added a lot more equipment in some of the places that were particularly vulnerable, particularly parts of Brooklyn, updated the equipment. So, I am more hopeful going into this summer that we're better positioned but like you, I want to watch very carefully to see what the demand levels are. And look, Richard, if we get to a problem where demand starts to go up too much, we're going to tell people this is what you need to do, these adjustments you need to make so we don't end up with a blackout our hands and no one wants that and generally people do make quick adjustments when they hear those kinds of messages.

Lehrer: Do you have – do your people have a projection like whether the extra demand by people staying at home is going to outweigh the lower demand that you mentioned because people aren't going to office buildings or the other way around?

Mayor: We are working on that. I think that the X factors right now, Brian, are where we will be in the restart at that moment when things heat up more. So right now, as I said moments ago before joining your show, I think in the first or second week of June we'll do the first step, which is construction, manufacturing, wholesale and curbside pickup for retail. So that will mean some greater energy usage by those sectors. But the question going into the hottest months, going into July, August, you know what we definitely again, we will not see any appreciable tourism, obviously. So that takes a big piece out of the equation. Remember, you know the last time we counted we had 67 million tourists in a year. So that's a big change. We obviously know some people have taken a period of time where they're going to stay out of the city. That's a part of the equation too. So we're working on trying to hone it, but there's still some big open questions. I think the most important thing from my point of view is that we have a better strategic approach with Con Ed and that the one place where they had a structural problem, not just a you know, an unexpected specific piece of equipment that malfunctioned, but a structural problem wasn't a part of Brooklyn and their Flatbush network in Brooklyn and that has been substantially upgraded. So that gives me a little more confidence going into this summer.

Lehrer: Denise in Manhattan. You're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hi, Denise.

Question: Hi, Brian. Good morning Mr. Mayor. This is a two-part question, comments. First as a shout out to all our sanitation worker, they are like Rodney Dangerfield, they don't get any respect. Like we all know that they're the first line of defense in public health.

Lehrer: [Inaudible] anyway. Yes?

Question: Okay, and the second part, I said that to say this for transparency, I'm a longtime composter and I'm asking the Mayor to consider encouraging composting’s return. For one thing, decaying vegetable matter causes methane. So it's an ecological thing. And the other thing is my garbage has increased in weight since I started putting what vegetable waste in it, and I multiplied this by households and neighborhoods and boroughs and I feel for our sanitation workers. Let's do some composting and get some of the weight out of the garbage that you have to carry.

Lehrer: Denise, thank you very much. So, Mr. Mayor, Denise is retro for referring to Rodney Dangerfield and –

Mayor: Yes.

Lehrer: Policy forward by being concerned about composting. Interesting combination.

Mayor: Denise has range. All right. You know, Denise, first of all, sanitation workers. I – you just inspired me to make sure that in one of my daily updates that I give them the praise because they've been amazing during this crisis, and a lot of times I get to thank them and praise them during snowstorms and kind of dramatic moments where they come through but this has been one where they've every day been out there doing great work. So I'm going to make sure to do that. On the composting, I want to give you a mixed decision on that. Right now, I would love nothing more than to get us to go to a much higher level of composting. And that's what we were planning on. It's all going to come down honestly to what happens with the federal stimulus. If we get the kind of support that we need, we can have a serious conversation about composting. Again, if we don't, it's going to be one of the things that we just can't consider essential compared to the basics right now. We're literally thinking about people's safety, people's health, making sure people have enough food to eat, and you know, a roof over their head. Like that’s the four things that are obsessing me every day and my team because for so many New Yorkers, those things are not secure right now. So, you know, if our economic situation, our fiscal situation improves, composting gets back into discussion. If it doesn't, it's not going to, and that's just the honest truth. But one day, you know, I hope to see this city do it on a city wide level intensely because I think it would be the right thing for our future and certainly for the environment.

Lehrer: Well, a listener also writes about this quote, “they've halted curbside pickups of organics” - that's what you're just referring to – “but also the drop-off points in community gardens and farmer's markets. At the farmer's markets, people are lining up six feet apart to buy stuff, so it seems feasible to allow that for organics drop-offs”, righteous listener.

Mayor: And that is one piece of the equation is the logistics. But Brian, remember when we had to put our budget in place in April, right as this whole crisis was emerging, we had to look at both the logistics and the reality of whether people could gather and whether people could do certain things going forward, but also the money. We are missing $7.4 billion. It's an astounding amount of money and it's going to get worse. I want to be very blunt about that. The revenue loss – and you're seeing what's happening with the economy, you're seeing what's happening with unemployment – the revenue situation is only going to get worse, and I'm very sorry to say that everything costs money. Composting programs are very, very valuable, but it costs money. If there is no money and you have to make real or much less money, you have to make tough, tough choices. We're going to focus on, again, health, safety, food, shelter. That's where our focus is until we can get to a much better place.

Lehrer: Cassius in Brooklyn, your own WNYC with a Mayor. Hello, Cassius.

Question: Hey guys. Well, Mayor, you were just talking exactly to the, you know, the point I wanted to bring up – what are we going to do? Are we going to let every business that isn't a supermarket or bodega get destroyed in this city? But we're doing so much damage to our economy. It's – we need a much more surgical approach to dealing with this, that the elderly are the ones who are the most vulnerable to this virus, we need to find a way to protect them and protect the workers who serve them. We have to get all businesses back open. We're on the precipice of, you know, destroying the whole city, basically.

Mayor: Cassius, I respect the question. I can tell it's a very hard sell, but I couldn't disagree more with that core analysis and I just want to lay it out to you real simple. Of course, you're right. When you say, can we focus on particular efforts to protect the elderly within any strategy so that that in effect gives us more freedom to reopen businesses? I think there's an absolute truth in that – whatever we do going forward is going to come with particular protections for folks who are much older and folks who have those preexisting conditions or both. But we are looking at around the world at what has worked and what hasn't worked, and rushing back is consistently been proven to have the boomerang effect and make things worse and cause bigger shutdowns, because it is not just about the small number of particularly vulnerable people. It is about both this way this disease can spread and it is having an impact on a wide range of ages if they have preexisting conditions. We're obviously very concerned about what we've seen lately with the MIS-C, the impact on some kids, it's been a very limited number so far, but we're worried about that. So the health care ramifications are not just for the very old, but more importantly, if you have a resurgence, you then threaten the ability of your health care system to function, and so the reason all of us have gone through all of this is that we have to keep the basics of public health together. The next moves can be fast and aggressive if people are disciplined and keep doing what they're doing on the shelter-in-place and the social distancing.

So, I've said in the first or second week of June, we expect at this point, barring any setback to reopen manufacturing, construction, curbside pickup, retail and wholesale, that actually is hundreds of thousands of jobs. We did an estimate that's over half a million jobs in the city in those areas. If all goes well, those restart in the first half of June, and then if we can get through that phase effectively, we go to a whole additional set of businesses that can reopen. So you're talking about as we go into the summer, you could see a very, very big increase in economic activity. But one that would have to be in a sustainable manner in terms of our health situation. If we do that right, then you steadily reopen and you stick to it. If you do it wrong, you shut down, you go backwards. You put back on restrictions. So one that is the smart play to know, I've talked to lots and lots of business leaders that especially the smallest businesses are very worried about their futures, understandably, but they also are hanging on and they know that could be a matter of months that they'll be back in action, and there's going to be a lot of pent up demand. A lot of people who are going to be buying local, and as I talked to people in sort of medium and bigger businesses, they fully intend to come back. They're waiting for the right safe environment, the right guidelines, and they're ready to go. So I don't buy – I'm not saying your question isn't heartfelt, but there's been a kind of doom-saying tendency in some places lately, but the history of New York City shows the ability of New York City and its businesses to come back very strong. Look at the fiscal crisis, look at 9/11, look at Sandy. Over and over again you see people coming back strong.

Lehrer: It may be too late after a while for some of the small businesses who run out of money. I see that you're going to allow, however religious gatherings of up to 10 people. Now that's not more than would be together at any one time in a lot of small businesses like retail in New York. Could you give some more details on exactly under what conditions and is this special treatment for religious as opposed to other institutions? If public safety is paramount in public policy, why make a religious exemption for 10 people if you're not doing it for, let's say, small businesses?

Mayor: So, Brian, I want to be careful with the use of the word you. I respect you greatly and you know it and I respect this show, but I'll always let you know and I think you're missing a fact: that dictate came from the State of New York, not from me. We respect the State, we work with the State, we're going to –

Lehrer: Got it. So that is my confusion. So I will acknowledge that. Okay, so that's a state – do you disagree with that State policy?

Mayor: I think the best way to look at this is to generalize whatever approach, and I know the State is looking at that too right now. So the fact is we've been really cautious about gatherings and, you know, what I've set up to date is I would like to keep them even smaller, but we can live with that. We can work with a 10 person gathering rule. So long as folks understand that it means no more than 10 people. It means still keeping distance among people still using face coverings unless everyone lives under the same roof. It's about discipline and every time that people do things the right way, they're helping us get out of this crisis so I can live with that standard. The State is working on, we're waiting to see updated executive orders on exactly how it would be applied.

Lehrer: Now, that you've clarified for me whose order it is I have questions for Governor Cuomo, I guess. But upstate is in a phase one reopening and various places that the city isn't ready for. But you're telling me the Governor is imposing this 10 people may gather for religious purposes, even in the city.

Mayor: Yeah, there are different things that apply to different places and then there are some things that are universal, and again, I feel very comfortable. I want to really make this clear. Governor and I have agreed overwhelmingly throughout this crisis, our teams talk constantly throughout the day. We've been very, very much aligned on general direction. New York City is the toughest situation of the whole state. So I'm always going to be a little more conservative and I would like to keep people, you know, avoiding any kind of gatherings that could start to enlarge because there is a human instinct. If you have 10 people could turn into 12 people, 15 people, 20 people. We can't let that happen. So I'm a little more conservative on this one, but the bottom line is we're going to work with the guidance. If it's 10 people, it's a perfectly workable level, and you know, we also, again, I'm hoping, and I believe right now, if the indicators stay consistent, that we're talking just a few weeks until we go into the same phase one the rest of the state has gone into.

Lehrer: Jill and Queens. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Jill. Jill, are you there? Jill?

Mayor: You got to turn off your radio cause you're hearing the delay.

Lehrer: Yeah, that’s right, you got to turn off your radio cause you're hearing the delay Let's see if we need to get back to Jill in a minute. Jill. In three, Jill in two. Jill in one. You're there yet Jill?

Question: Yeah.

Lehrer: Oh, we did it. Hi, you're on the air with the Mayor. Go ahead.

Question: Hi. I have a question that hasn't been clarified and I'm sure I'm not the only person with the same problem. So my driver license has been suspended for failing to show up to traffic court appearance during the pause order and I can't get through to the DMV in Albany by phone, and the only way to lift the suspension is to pay the additional $70 penalty. So do you have any advice?

Mayor: Yeah, Jill, first of all, if you would give your information WNYC, we'll have our team follow up with you now. Just Brian always help you and your listeners to know we do not run the Department of Motor Vehicles. That's the State of New York and we do not run the court system, that's the State of New York. But if it's happening to a New York City resident, I care about it. So certainly don't want to see people have their licenses suspended, if there's some alternative we can come up with. Yeah, of course the court systems have had to close in this crisis, but if someone needs to drive their car that we should see if there's a legitimate way to address it. So Jill, I'll make sure someone follows up with you today and then it will also help us figure out if there's something we can do to solve this problem in the short term for anyone else in the same situation.

Lehrer: Jill, hang on. We will take your contact information.

I want to ask you about the Columbia University study that's making news with their model that finds 36,000 lives could have been saved nationally and most of them are in New York, if you are the Governor or the federal government had started the social distancing rules just one week earlier, March 8th, rather than March 15th. There were people calling for you to act. I asked you about the schools and the St. Patrick's Day Parade here on March 6th, as late as March 13th, the Times had a headline, de Blasio stays firm on keeping New York City schools open as outbreak spreads, attendance plunged in New York City schools and the number of coronavirus cases, cases climbed above 400. Did the public health officials not have your ear?

Mayor: We talked constantly, Brian, constantly, and I can't tell you how many meetings calls, et cetera. Look, we all, and I think everyone would say this, who was involved in these discussions. We had some information we had nowhere near the information we have now. Remember, we didn't even have testing to be able to know what was going on, and now, you know, it turns out this is information that's all emerged since then. This disease might've been well established in the city in February, maybe even in late January. We didn't know that. We were trying to get the ability, the right to test from the federal government. We couldn't get that for the longest time. The first identified verified case in New York City was March 1st. The first death was March 14th and it was March 15th that I shut down the schools. March 15th I said we were going to shut down the bars and restaurants. March 17th, I called for shelter and place the State finally decided to do that a few days later. I was one of the first public officials in the country to call for shelter in place. So look, I wish we had known in February and the beginning of March what we know now, and the conversations were constant and different information was put forward and there were different viewpoints, which is also normal in the situation, amongst all my senior team members, you know, people with all sorts of different expertise had different viewpoints and we were trying to make the right decision.

Lehrer: San Francisco had jumped ahead of us with fewer cases. How do you look back on that comparison?

Mayor: Again? I wish we had the information we have now. It's – I feel – look, every one of us and I certainly feel this, you know, you can't help but see what's happening, and say if only we had known more, we would have done a lot of things differently. But the challenge here, Brian, is the questions we've heard today about, you know, the fact that people have lost their livelihoods. The fact that businesses, as you said, some may not come back. Obviously the problem of our kids are not getting the same kind of education they would have gotten. I know I was worried and I know the Governor was worried about what a shutdown would mean and the long-term ramifications of it and that was when we thought we could contain the damage. No one, no one I think saw this getting to the state where you're now comparing to the Great Depression in terms of economic impact.

We all were trying to make sense of an ever-changing situation with much too limited information and trying to see if we could contain it, which is the other thing I think is being left out of the discussion – for days and days we held the hope that we could still contain this when it was a limited number of cases. Remember we did not have our first death until March 14th and we thought we could potentially beat it back without, you know, forcing everyone in the city to lose their livelihood. But it's a situation we'll have plenty of time to review everything going forward. Right now we're actually right in the middle of this crisis still and we've got to save lives and we've got to protect people and we've got to make the right moves going forward to avoid a boomerang of this disease. So that's where I'm going to be focused on. That will be definitely time later to assess what happened in the past and learn from it.

Lehrer: Last thing, and we're going to be at a time in a minute, appropriate to Memorial Day, which I think it's fair to say, it's not just for members of the military who've died this year. You're asking the state, I believe for a line of duty benefits for city workers who have died of coronavirus. Can you give us more details on what exactly and for whom?

Mayor: Yes, absolutely Brian, and thank you for asking. You know, we're talking about hundreds of really good people, New Yorkers who were serving their fellow New Yorkers, civil servants, public employees, first responders, public health care workers, but also people served us in lots of other ways, and to me, they're all people we value and we miss and we honor and we honor their families, and so I came to the conclusion that even though we saw some progress in Washington in terms of including in the stimulus support for the families of first responders who were lost we did not see the kind of consistent support that these families would need. So I've said, I want to see the State Legislature provide full line of duty death benefits for any city worker who died because of COVID during this crisis.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, thank you as always, I hope you have a safe Memorial Day weekend. Any observances that you're planning personally?

Mayor: Well we're going to figure that out. But again, like so many New Yorkers it’s going to be low key and very local and keep it simple and with a real sense of remembering why Memorial Day exists, honoring those who served us and gave their lives for us.

Lehrer: Talk to you next week. Thanks a lot.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.

2020-05-26 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. I hope you all had a great Memorial Day weekend, a chance to relax a little, breakout of some of the challenges that we've been facing over these months. I hope you had a chance to spend time with your family, your friends, relax, reflect. We've all been through a whole lot here, and it's not, it wasn't like the long weekends we're used to when things are normal to say the least, but I hope it was a chance to recharge a little bit. Get ready for both the fight ahead and the better times ahead. Chirlane and I were in Brooklyn yesterday. We were at Cadman Plaza. There's a memorial there to all the Brooklynites who fought in World War II and all we lost in that war. I've said many times that World War II generation is something very special to me in Chirlane, because our parents were part of that greatest generation. And we stood there, we laid wreaths and we stood there for a moment of silence. And I looked up and I saw the words on the memorial, and you know, a lot of times we go by something like that and we don't really take in what it says, but the words were powerful. The words said, “let's pray that the sacrifice that they made will inspire future generations.” And we now are that generation they were talking about, we're now the ones in the fight. It's a different kind of fight than our ancestors could ever have imagined, but we're the ones now called to be a great generation in our time and to overcome a very, very difficult foe. And as we get ready for the next phase of this fight, I again offer my thanks to all of you, because New Yorkers have done so much, have been so exemplary. We've got a lot more to do, but you should be very, very proud of how far we've come and look from the beginning to this very day, the fight has come down to first and foremost, one thing, one piece of the puzzle that defines all possibilities. It's the same thing it's been from the beginning, it's testing. So, I want to talk to you now about where we're going with testing in the city of New York.

So, now we're at situation where we're able to get more and more people tested than ever before, and we want to get the word out. And really, it's important for people to understand, because for months the message was there wasn't much testing, and that was the sad truth. But now there's more, and more every day. And I think a lot of folks weren't sure what to make of testing, and so I'm going to keep saying from now on, testing is simple, it's easy, it's quick, and it's free. And I want everyone to that, and to make sure everyone understands that. We're going to do a huge advertising campaign, TV, radio, digital community, newspapers, billboards, you name it. We're going to get the word out all over this city in multiple languages to let people know it is now time for more and more people to get tested. And with every passing day, every passing week, we're going to expand the amount of testing, and who can get tested. So, right now, we want to focus in addition to all the folks who originally were getting tested, we want to focus on people who have symptoms. We want to focus on people that are in close contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus, and folks who were in facilities like nursing homes, adult care facilities, shelters. That's where the focus is now, but it's going to continue to grow from there. We've already talked about folks who are older, folks who have preexisting conditions, folks who live in the hardest hit neighborhoods, all of those New Yorkers we're encouraging already, now these new groups of New Yorkers. More and more, the messages go out there to get tested. It's good for you. It's good for everyone, and if you want to know where to go, you can call 3-1-1 or go online nyc.gov/covidtest.

Now, over the next five weeks, we will be opening more and more testing sites. So, first of all we'll be opening 12 new testing sites through our public health system, Health and Hospitals. This week, one will open in Queens. In the week of June 1st, five more will open in Queens and the Bronx. The week of June 8th, two more in Brooklyn. And then after June 15th, four more will open in the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. And we have a new partnership to announce today. We've had really wonderful examples of folks from the private sector stepping up. We had a great announcement a few days ago with City MD, now another private health care provider stepping forward and I'm very, very grateful. Advantage Care Physicians. Advantage Care is stepping up, joining the fight, and we are so thankful to them. Locations across all five boroughs. We're going to start with 16 more sites that will be opening on June 1st through Advantage Care. Now, appointments are encouraged, but if you walk in, that's okay too. If you have insurance, it can be charged to your insurance, if not, the test will be provided to you for free. So, thank you to everyone to Advantage Care. This is another great step forward, making testing easier, making it more and more available, and I'm going to keep saying that word free. And if you want to make an appointment with Advantage Care, call 866-749-2660.

So, now, with these announcements today, we're going to have 180, over 180 sites available for testing New Yorkers by the end of June, and now we are already well above our testing capacity that we hope to hit by this point of 20,000 tests per day. That is growing all the time. By August 1st, our goal is to be at 50,000 tests per day, and we feel confident about our ability to get to that number. So, testing is what gives us the ability to know what's going on person by person, and in the whole city. And now, we're going to have something on a vast scale we didn't have before, which is tracing. Tracing allows us then to follow up on the contacts of everyone who has been tested, the close contacts, the people they had real connection to, and then make sure each of those folks gets tested and is followed up on, and anyone that needs isolation or quarantine gets it. So, this is a huge new piece of the puzzle. This is when we go on the offensive and we put into place something that really changes our whole fight against the coronavirus. This is a big muscular effort and the goal we had set was to have a thousand tracers available by June 1. As of today, I am pleased to say we have hired over 1,700 contact tracers, and they will be trained and an action by June 1. So, surpassing the original goal by quite a bit. 1,700 tracers will be on duty and during their good work by June 1st, just a few days from now.

Now, many good people have put together this effort. It has been based in Health and Hospitals with tremendous support from our department of health, and a number of other agencies have played a big role as well. Our Department of Buildings, Design and Construction, our IT Department do it, many, many city agencies supporting this effort. The leader of this effort is doing a great job building this tracing army from scratch, and all the pieces that will go with it as we help people get what they need, as we help people get to hotels, and they'll get the support that they need when they need to be isolated. The leader of this effort is the executive director of the test and trace core, Dr. Ted Long. And I’d like Ted now to give us an update on this good news, Ted.

Dr. Ted Long, Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. The test and trace core set out to hire a thousand tracers by June 1, and I'm proud to sit here today and tell you that as the mayor said, we already have 1,700 on our team that will be starting by June 1. Now, the test and trace corps believes that the best tracers are people from our communities who truly understand our communities. There's two different types of tracers. We have our case investigators and we have our monitors. The case investigators are the tracers that call people that have a positive coronavirus result, talk to them about it, make sure they're safe, and then trace or track down the contacts that they've been in with. The monitors then call those contacts, bring them in for tests, but also call everybody every day to make sure that people diagnosed with Corona virus are safe. Among our case investigators, more than 400 are from our hardest hit communities in New York City. That's almost half of them. They speak more than 40 languages. Among our monitors. More than 300 are from the hardest hit communities in New York City, almost half, and 40 percent of them speak Spanish. As we sit here today and are moving the program forward, we have an additional 100 tracers that are already doing the work in target ZIP codes in New York City right now.

Now, what I want to do is tell you a little bit more about what tracers do day to day. A tracer will start off by calling somebody on the phone that has a positive coronavirus result. They'll go over symptoms, make sure they're safe, will go over close contacts, intimate partners, people they live with or people they've been within six feet up for more than 10 minutes. The contact will then be passed to the monitors, the monitors will call them. They'll come in and get tested. Anybody positive will become a new case, and then we'll call them and start the process over. But I want to make a really important point here. In New York City, we're doing way more than just that. When you're on the phone with the tracer in New York City, we want to make sure that you're okay at home. So, we're going to ask you, do you need help with utilities, food, medications, and if so, if you could stay at home to self-separate from your family members to keep them safe. We're going to help you with everything else to make sure you're successful. We're going to put you on the phone with a resource navigator, somebody also from your community that can navigate all of those four things for you, and make sure that you could be at home and your family is safe as well. Or, during that same phone call we’re going to make you an appointment with a hotel with a medical monitoring system that we've set up to ensure that you're safe, and in doing so, to ensure that you can keep your family safe as well by not transmitting the virus to them. With that, I'm excited to share these updates with you today – and back to the Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Ted. Well done. Thank you to you and your whole team for this amazing effort. And everyone, look, this has been put together with lightning speed, literally a matter of weeks. So, this is an extraordinary effort. I'm so thankful to everyone in the test and trace core for the amazing job they're doing. And it's with a clear sense of addressing the crisis at hand, and also really going head on really clearly at the disparities that have been so clear in this crisis. The coronavirus pointed out disparities that are deep in the city, and must be fought in every way. So, it's so important that 700, over 700 of the tracers come from the very neighborhoods that have been hardest hit, and will understand what needs to be done to reach people, to communicate, people, to change this reality that we are facing. And that's what this is all about. And to make sure that effort is deepened, we wanted to add another leader to the team whose lifelong commitment has been to equity and fairness and inclusion, who has in everything she has done, made very clear. She does not tolerate the inequities that have pervaded too much of the history of this city and of this country. So, we have found a great leader to come in as our new Chief Equity Officer for the test and trace corps, Annabel Palma. Annabel is someone I have gotten to know very well over the years, worked closely with, we both serve in the city council together and her story is remarkable. Born and bred in the Bronx, lost her mom very, very sadly at an early age. Became a young mom herself, dealt with so many of the challenges that come with poverty, ended up homeless for a period of her life. She took all that pain, all that challenge and turned it into a deep desire to help other people. Got active in her community, eventually became a member of the New York City Council, became the chair of the general welfare committee. Where she helped to make sure that so many other folks got what they needed, the support they needed as they fought so many of these ills in our society. She fought particularly for the people of the Bronx to bring fairness and joined our administration three years ago as Deputy Commissioner at our Department of Social Services, focusing on how to make sure that people got the help they needed in a way that was part of every community and fair to every community. So, she's going to come in now as Chief Equity Officer, make sure that the test and trace initiative really epitomizes our commitment to fairness. Our commitment to fighting inequality reflects the people our city, and it acts on the inequalities and disparities that have been laid, so bare here. So, we welcome Annabel Palma to this team.

Now, we've talked about testing so many times testing the big constant word, the constant idea we talk about is testing. Well that's the kind of testing that tells you if you have a disease or not, but you know, there's been another test running through this whole crisis and that is the test of faith. Our faith communities have gone through so much in these last three months. I have to tell you, I've spoken to so many people, religious leaders and devout people who have felt the pain of this crisis felt the pain of people that worshiped with those they've lost the families that are going through so much. But at the same time with their devotion to faith challenged not in their hearts or in their souls or in their minds, but in terms of day to day life, the ability to have the services that are so important to every faith tradition, that ability to go to a church or a mosque or a synagogue to be together, to pray together. So much of what has made up the life of this city and the strength of this city and right in the middle of this crisis, three of the most important holidays in three great faith traditions, Easter, Passover, Ramadan, and each faith tradition had to find a way to somehow make sense of these holidays without the benefit of all the people who are used to all the support that they give each other. It's been very, very hard, I have to put on the table a challenging reality. On Friday, President Trump made a statement about reopening religious services and whatever the intention, I think it's important to speak about it in a forthright manner. Every person of faith would love nothing more, but the resume, the services that are so important to them. And I've talked to some of the most prominent faith leaders in this city and multiple faiths and reaffirm their view starting with Cardinal Dolan, who I spoke to on Friday. And there's a universal feeling that everyone would love to come back, but there's a deep understanding of the dangers right now in this crisis. There's a deep understanding that each faith tradition honors human life, and every shepherd, every pastor, every leader of a congregation knows their job is to protect their people. So, what I've heard from faith leaders over these last days is that yes, they want to come back, but they know this is not the time that we will all work together and we'll try and every way to help people through the immediate situation look for any ways of supporting faith communities. But the idea of people coming back together and full services, large numbers of people congregating, it's not that time, that would endanger everyone. And we have to be smart, we're really making progress when it comes to this disease. But it is not time for large gatherings, it is not time to take the risk of going in the wrong direction. So, I want to thank all our partners, our faith leaders, we're going to keep communicating constantly. We're going to look for every opportunity to support your efforts to restart the right way. But I want to thank our faith leadership for their clear resolve that we will do things all in the right time.

So, that is about something truly sacred, the faith communities in New York City. But now, I want to talk about something that may feel sacred to a lot of New Yorkers and that is, it's a much more mundane matter, it's a much more pedestrian matter. But when I say feel sacred, I mean it, it brings out a lot of feeling and a lot of emotion in New Yorkers and that is any time that alternate side parking is canceled. So, I'm happy to say that alternate side parking is suspended again, and we'll be through Sunday, June 7th. Last week – did a clean sweep of the whole city, catching up after weeks and weeks where we didn't have alternate side parking effect. That was a great effort by our Sanitation Department, so now we're able to suspend alternate side parking again. Again, it will be suspended through Sunday, June 7th we'll be evaluating the meantime whether we're able to suspend it further after that, but let me take a moment to just talk about our Sanitation Department because a lot of times these are the, amongst the greatest unsung heroes in New York City, these are folks who everyday keep this city going. Our Sanitation workers, I want to tell you, I have spent a lot of time with our sanitation workers. A lot of times in sanitation garages often in their heroic moments where maybe they get a little bit recognition, but usually it's nowhere near enough. Like when they beat back a snowstorm, including a few years ago, the largest blizzard in the history of New York City and our sanitation department had the city up and running as normal in about 36 hours. What they have done in moments of crisis, I'll never forget after Sandy, hurricane Sandy, so many people just were hoping and praying sanitation would show up to help them take away the things that were no longer a part of their life. The things that were broken and destroyed and let them start over and every time sanitation showed up, people had an incredible feeling of hope and closure and our sanitation workers do so much for us. They have been fighting through this crisis as well. Remember, this city is not clean, it doesn't function. In fact, they've had to deal with more and more trash in a lot of places because people have been home, but they've been there keeping things together in a city and then have gone the extra mile playing a major role. For example, in our effort to set up feeding stations all over the city and making sure that people have enough to eat, our sanitation department has been there every step of the way. So, thanks to the men and women who do this great work at the New York City Sanitation Department. And a special thank you to a labor leader who is dear to me and someone this whole city should appreciate, Harry Nespoli who's the President of Teamsters Local 831 and the chair of the municipal labor committee, one of the great labor leaders of this city who has been devoted to making sure everything keeps moving forward in this crisis. Thank you, Harry, and thank you to all your members.

Okay. Every time we get together, we talk about where we stand in this crisis and on Friday talked about the indicators we had been using previously and now the new focus on the thresholds, which make a lot of sense now given the way things have evolved. So, what does it tell us, it tells us exactly where we stand in the open, transparent manner and it tells us when we're ready for restart. So, remember when the restart comes, it's going to be in phases [inaudible] by the State. Phase one is the first phase. We're getting ready. We're taking the steps to be ready for phase one. We're getting the enforcement in place that will be needed from city agencies. When we talk about the sectors that will be reopening manufacturing, construction, wholesale, retail with certain restrictions like curbside pickup, we need to make sure the support is there, the protocols are there. We're doing all that work now we're communicating with people and leaders of different industries to get ready and we've been talking to our advisory councils to have been playing such a crucial role. Look, we're thinking about all the pieces, how do people come back to work? What kind of precautions need to be in place? How do we monitor it? How do we inspect it? How do we make sure everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing? We're also thinking about the fact that hundreds of thousands more people in coming back to work, well that means hundreds of more thousand people close together. Even with the social distancing restrictions, we're still concerned when you see a lot more people coming into circulation. Obviously, a lot of them will be taking subways and buses, that's a concern we're going to be working with the MTA on that. So, the work of preparing for the restart is going on every single day. But it's led again by the indicators, by the thresholds telling us if it's that time.

So, let's go over today's results. So, indicator one daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, so again that threshold we're looking at staying under 200. 200 is a level that our healthcare leadership leads— if the daily number coming in is under 200, we can handle that, we can keep people safe. Our hospital system can handle it today only 63 that's very good news, only 63 new patients, so that's well below the level we need to be at. Now daily number of people in our health, and hospitals ICU, that's a threshold of 375, Now that's a level of, we're below that level, we're certain we can handle anything that's thrown at us. A lot of work is going into making sure that we are redoubling our efforts to strengthen our ICUs. I know it's happening in our public hospitals; I know it's happening in our voluntary hospitals as well. We're going to be working with the state to make sure that everyone's ready on this front. So today we're want to get below 375 we're at 423 but again, that number has been moving in the right direction overwhelmingly, we're confident that it will come together. And then indicator three, percent of people tested citywide tested positive for COVID-19 – that threshold is 15 percent – and today's report seven percent, an excellent number and we've seen really, really great progress on that front, so a very good day. We're moving in the right direction steadily. We're getting ready for that restart in the first half of June we'll be watching the numbers and I'll do the disclaimer the numbers have to keep moving right direction. Stay in the right direction. That's what tells us when it's time, but very much like the direction we're moving in and it's all because of your hard work. So, I know you want to get to that restart that phase one, keep doing what you're doing so we can get there together.

A few quick words in Spanish now –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we turn to questions from our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Just a quick reminder that we have Dr. Long in the Blue Room and Dr. Katz and Commissioner Silver on the phone. And the first question goes to Al from 1010 WINS. Al?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Al. How are you doing?

Question: Very well, thank you. With it seems that New York City will be the last region in the state to reopen at least the way it lines up now. Do you think there's going to be, is there going to be additional pressure put on the city? Do you anticipate maybe some people jumping the gun? How are you going to try to tamp down expectations and keep in line for when you officially reopen everything?

Mayor: Yeah, Al, I think New Yorkers have been fantastic and I'm not saying it just because I love New York City and love the people in New York City; I'm saying it because it's clear from all the progress. I mean, look at, look at these results. People are devoted to getting it right; to protect themselves, to protect their families, of course, but I think there's a really strong understanding we're all in this together and that we have to get it right. So I don't see a lot of jumping the gun. We had a lot of enforcement out this weekend, saw very few problems in the scheme of things. So, I think the message into your point Al, we got to be really clear; we're not to phase one until the numbers absolutely confirm it. I feel very good about the trajectory. I feel very good we will get there in the first two weeks of June, but we have to actually get there. The work has to happen now to make sure that when it happens it's done safely, but with very few exceptions. I don't think people are jumping the gun; I think they want to know it's going to be safe. And I think you're going to see how some people who could come back and restart their business, who are going to hesitate until they see others do it and believe it's safe. So I don't get the feeling of many people jumping the gun. I think people are being pretty sober about this.

Moderator: Next is Shant from the Daily News. Shant?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, wanted to ask while you are considering taking out debt to cover operating costs, would you yourself take a pay cut and/or do pay cuts for the highest paid members of the administration? In a different vein looking back to the early stages of the outbreak, I've been hearing some criticism that your focus on the Bernie Sanders campaign distracted from the coronavirus response [inaudible] –

Mayor: Hold on one sec. Just roll back. I couldn't hear. Focus on what? Say, say that again.

Question: Well, on the Bernie Sanders campaign. Basically, the criticism I've been hearing is that your desire to campaign for him may have distracted from handling the outbreak more expeditiously. Just want to get your comment on that.

Mayor: Okay, on the first question, no plans for pay cuts for any New York City employees right now, whether it's City Hall or any place else, but you know, we never know what the future brings. On the second question, that's the first I've heard anyone suggest it and I find it with all due respect, Shant, I find it interesting that this is coming up three months into the crisis. So, no, I did precisely one trip with Bernie Sanders. I obviously believed he would be a great President and could do a lot of the work we needed that had it been done earlier, we would have dealt with a very different reality in this crisis; had we had universal health care in this country, everything would have been different. So, I believe he was absolutely right about that, but my focus has always been on the people of this city and as it was clear we were dealing with this challenge more and more, this is the only thing I've been doing.

Moderator: Next is Andrew from ABC, or NBC New York, excuse me – Andrew.

Question: That's right, NBC New York. Hope everyone is doing well this morning. Mayor, hope you're doing well.

Mayor: Andrew, I want to thank you and everyone at NBC New York.

Question: Hey, my question you did allude to this about concerns on folks riding the subway and buses as manufacturing and wholesale begins and resumes and people don't necessarily have a clear picture of how they're supposed to get to work. Wall Street has told the traders returning to the stock exchange, don't take the subway, but in general the advice to New Yorkers in normal times is to use mass transit. So, what is your official advice for people going back to work and how safe is it?

Mayor: Yeah, so Andrew, great question. First of all, the future is going to be mass transit; let's be very clear. We're dealing with the immediate crisis right now, but when we come out of this crisis, we have to double down on mass transit and we have to double down on our efforts to get away from our over-reliance on vehicles because you know, we're, we're going to be dealing with a much bigger challenge in the future, which is addressing global warming and addressing, you know, the, the need for this city to have a very different quality of life in the future. That has to be about mass transit, but in the short term, in this crisis, there's a real fair question of, you know, what amount of use of mass transit makes sense. We're having this conversation with the state and the MTA right now because it's, we anticipate just phase one is easily hundreds of thousands of more people going to work and then phase two even more so. So what we can say with assurance is, you know, due to the plan to have the subway shut at night for cleaning, they're obviously a lot cleaner; that's great news, but we still have to make sure that we don't end up with a lot of crowded subway cars and buses. So that's something we are working on. As we get closer to phase one, we'll provide people with clear guidance on how to approach that, but I think the central question working with the MTA is what's the maximum amount of service that they can put into play and what measures do we need to take to help make sure there is social distancing on the trains and in the buses. So, we're working on that right now and I'm hopeful we can strike the right balance.

Moderator: Next is Abu from Bangla Patrika, Abu.

Question: Hello, Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Abu. How you doing?

Question: Thank you so much. [inaudible] you know I don't have any statistics of the people who lost their life in, in COVID-19. But you know, community wise, like Bangladesh, Indian, Hispanic, you know, do you have any statistics?

Mayor: Do I have? I'm sorry Abu, say that again.

Question: Do you have any statistic that community-wise, you know, every community how many people they lost? Like City you know a magazine that had been reported, the Southeast Asia, like Bangladesh community lost about more than 270 people.

Mayor: Yeah, no.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Right, Abu. So first of all, you know, I really believe it's important to be honest about the sheer impact of this disease and the disparities that have come out here and how it absolutely directly connects to people's income, to race, to immigration status. I think a big, a big question here is how much people didn't seek healthcare even well before this crisis or during it because they were fearful because of their immigration status. There are huge issues here that have to be uncovered. We've tried to be really transparent with both the facts about where people came from, who we know died from COVID, and we put out the list of people that are the numbers of people we think probably died from COVID and we've tried to really constantly update, you know, by zip code and you know, very openly those facts. So, take a look at everything that is out there. It's at nyc.gov/coronavirus – it’s all the data is there all the demographic information. If you see an area where we need to go farther, we'll certainly see if the Health Department can get you more, but there's no question that there's been profound disparity that's affected South Asian communities as well, its affected the Bangladeshi community, which is a big community in this city. And the way forward is to fight back this disease, but then get right to work on addressing these disparities in every way - healthcare disparities, economic disparities, et cetera. If we're going to really make sure that nothing like this happens again in the future.

Moderator: Yoav from the City is up next. Yoav, can you hear us?

Question: Yes, hi. Yeah. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes Yoav, how are you doing?

Question: Okay, good. How are you? I just wanted, I just wanted to ask about the, the Texas firm Crew Facilities that's booking some of the hotels for the city.

Mayor: I’m sorry. Yoav, say the name of the firm again.

Question: It’s called crewfacilities.com.

Mayor: Okay.

Question: They're booking most of the hotel rooms for hospital workers and the homeless shelter residents and apparently they're getting a $27 fee per room per night. It appears to be well above the industry standard of a 10 percent fee and they're also charging about $18 for breakfast, $19 for lunch, and $34 for every dinner that's provided. I just want to ask you, I know that the contract was negotiated you know, in, in, in a real emergency when apparently it expired on May 1st. It may be in the process of being renegotiated and I just wanted to ask, are you going to try get some of those fees down now that things are a little bit more stable?

Mayor: I'll turn to Ted. I can be very straightforward with you, Yoav; I don't know the details of the contract and how it was negotiated. But you're absolutely right, it was negotiated in the context where we had to move immediately to get people support. But this is – you know, as we move out of the worst of this crisis, we're always going to be looking to do better and to make sure we get what we need and the taxpayer is respected in the process. So, we'll keep looking at each and every contractor's go along. But Ted, do you want to speak to that one specifically?

Dr. Long: Sure. What I can say specifically is that the hotels and our program to keep New Yorkers safe are free. We want you to come. Please come to our hotels. The specifics of the contract that you're referring to I would also have to research and get back.

Mayor: Yeah, and, Yoav, the fact is – and we'll confirm this back to you – but we do expect in this instance, this is the type of thing we expect to get FEMA reimbursement on as well.

Moderator: Andrea from CBS New York is up next. Andrea?

Question: Hi. Good morning, everyone. Just a question about contact tracing. Are there any concerns about people not wanting to share information about who else is in their circle or that they've been possibly exposed to for fear of how the information is going to be used? And on a completely separate note, last week I was at Jacobi Hospital and was struck at how empty the emergency department is. What's being done to restore trust in the community to get their needs met, especially these communities that already have other medical ailments beyond COVID?

Mayor: Andrea, great, great question. I think you are smart to be raising the point that people are starting to make adjustments and think beyond COVID and, yeah, there's a lot of health care challenges out there. So, in the second, I’ll turn to Dr. Katz on that, but on this one I'll start and then if Ted wants to add. Look, I think it's a legitimate point and legitimate concern you're raising that is, is everyone going to want to be as forthcoming as they might be with information? Andrea, I think the answer is – everyone? No. We're still dealing with human beings here. Do I think the vast majority of people are going to be forthcoming? Absolutely, because people understand what we're up against here. Generally speaking, I would say people are looking out for themselves and their families and the people they care about and their lives and they do not want to withhold information if it could lead to the disease spreading and endangering everyone. So, remember, in the contact tracing, it's pretty straightforward about whoever you had close contact with just in the last few days. I think the vast majority of New Yorkers are going to be forthcoming in the vast majority of cases. Ted, would you like to add?

Dr. Long: Yeah, I think you covered all the key points, Mr. Mayor, I would just add two things. First is, it's so important that the contact tracers we use are people from the community in which they're working, because they're the trusted people that when they're talking to somebody on the phone, they can really get that critical information about who they've been in contact with. And the second point is to give you a little bit of evidence there or data here. We've actually done – we've started to do this at the clinic where I work, at Morrisania in the Bronx where I see patients every week. There we haven't had a problem at all in terms of identifying cases, talking to them and figuring out who their contacts have been and then actually tracking them down. So, so far so good. But it is especially critical that our tracers are trusted people in our communities.

Mayor: Dr. Katz, do you want to speak to the Jacobi example and the emergency rooms?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Yes, absolutely. Jacobi and other emergency rooms across New York City are much quieter than are historically. There are several reasons for this, some are even positive, because there are fewer cars on the road, there are many fewer car accidents, homicides and other violent crimes are down. But, by all [inaudible] the major reason is that people still are wary of going to hospitals. Some of it is that they've learned that they can have their needs met through using the phone or video. And we're very proud that Health + Hospitals and the City runs a phone line, that people don't have to come to the emergency room to talk to a real doctor and get and get full advice. Within the hospital emergency departments, we're creating clear areas that where we see patients who are COVID negative, we've been erecting barriers to make sure that there's good social distancing. So, we want patients to come back if they need to come back. We want to accommodate them at home if they want to be seen through a virtual visit. We find a lot of our own patients are happier to go to a nearby community health center, whether ours or one of the other great federally qualified health centers in New York City, because there is still some fear of hospitals. But we're doing everything possible to make sure that people who come and are COVID negative are seen and taken care of in areas where there are only COVID negative patients. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you, Mitch.

Moderator: Next is Julia from the Post? Julia?

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. Mr. Mayor, I'd just like for you to talk us through the phases that are going to happen in the coming weeks. Could you walk us through phase one a little bit more closely in terms of, you know, do we expect that to happen in the first week of June? In the second week of June? And any of those NYC-specific measures that you've mentioned? And what would phase two look like if the indicators hold, when would that be and what kind of activities can we see come online?

Mayor: So, Julia, the most important thing to say to you is we're going to be briefing all New Yorkers on each of these questions as we get closer. I'm feeling confident right now that phase one will begin by the first or second week of June, as I've said. The fact is the indicators, the thresholds all keep pointing in that direction. Now, I feel confident because I'm watching the very consistent trends here, but that doesn't mean we're there yet. And until we are 100 percent there, you know, we're going to be very clear that we aren't there until we're there. I'll keep updating people every single day. In terms of the categories – and, again, we're assessing the number of people that we expect to come back in the first instance, and then if people see it's going well, I think you'll see that number grow – unquestionably several hundred thousand people to begin as you open up construction, manufacturing, wholesale and more retail because you can do the curbside and the pickups. We're going to – the State has put out its guidance, which is very helpful guidance about what's needed in each in each place of business, but we have to do the enforcement work and the monitoring. So, we're going to be talking about these next few days, which agency's going to do which industry, how that's going to go, what's going to be expected of people, what's going to happen when we don't see the kind of compliance we need. That's a lot that we have to put together and put on the table, but it'll all be in place well before we announced the actual day for the restart. In terms of phase two, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We still have to get to phase one and we have to prove that phase one works and that will obviously be for at least several weeks. We'll talk more about that as we get closer. But, right now, let's – you know, let's get through the first steps before we get too far ahead of ourselves.

Moderator: Erin from Politico is up next. Erin?

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Two questions about contact tracing. You said you're going to have 1,700 – you have 1,700 people now. I believe to meet Governor Cuomo thresholds, you need 2,500. Do you have an estimate of when that will be achieved? Second question, if I understand this correctly, you're only focusing on close contacts. So, I'm wondering, is there any plan to address the issues of people who may be contracting this in public places, grocery stores, subway cars, etcetera, etcetera. You know, people who aren't getting it from close contacts, how are we dealing with containment in those scenarios?

Mayor: Yeah. Erin, on the first point we expect to get to that 2,500-plus number in the first two weeks of June. So, as we are getting there, we'll have announcements on that, but we do feel good getting to that number during that timeframe. On the close contacts, I think this is just a practicality and reality point. If you are someone who tests positive and there's follow-up from the tracers to you and they say – and Ted can go into detail on this – but you know, who have you been in contact with? It's going to be the realistic options of who are people you knew you were in contact with and you knew who they were so they can be followed up on. It's not going to be if you happen to be close to someone, but have no way of knowing their identity. That doesn't obviously help us or get anything done. So, it's based on the reality of who you had that contact with and who you knew so we can find them. Ted, do you want to add?

Dr. Long: You hit all the main points. The only thing I would add is that the way that we're defining close contacts is grounded in the guidelines from our State Department of Health, which brings to bear all of the most recent evidence. So, things like within six feet for more than 10 minutes. We’re using the most – the latest evidence and we're consistent with what the experts are currently saying. But moving forward, your point's well taken, we're going to consider all options as the evidence guides us.

Mayor: And, Erin, I would just say, that's a lot of people if you think about it. I know it is normal to think about the things that might not be so perfect, or the things we can't achieve. But I always am glass-half-full. I want to focus on what we can achieve. If you think about the people you have been in close contact with in the last 48 hours, by that standard you probably could name a number of people. That's what we want to focus on, the people we can find, and we think that's going to add up to a lot.

Moderator: Next is Henry from Bloomberg. Henry?

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good. Henry, how are you?

Question: Good. I'm good. I'm going to follow up on Andrew Siff’s question because the subways have always been called the circulation system of the city, that’s crucial to the economy, and basically my question is what specifically can you do? Are they contemplating handing out disposable masks to everyone, requiring that everyone wear a mask? Does that create problems with disposing of the masks? What specifically has New York and the MTA discussed to deal with this problem of the subways?

Mayor: Yeah, Henry, these are conversations that are happening right now because, again, as the City and the State are looking at the sheer magnitude of the number of people who will come back into the economy, back to their workplaces, again, every part of the state is going through its own reopening approach but there's nowhere where you're talking about so many people in motion as here, by far. This is the place where the challenge is greatest. And we do need to think about exactly what you said, how do we maximize wearing of face coverings on subways? What does that look like? How do we make sure that on subways and buses, obviously, there isn't overcrowding? Some of that is frequency of service. And I know the MTA is working very hard to maximize service and they have their staffing back by and large now, which is going to help them a lot. But it's got to be very systematic and this is the concern that, you know, we're looking at and talking to the MTA about when you think about all the pieces – the cleaning, that looks great, but you need the frequency of the service, you'd need the face coverings, for sure, you’d need some way to make sure that there wasn't overcrowding and we got to figure out what that would be, that will do it in a systematic way because, again, every time you add a hundred thousand more people back into the subway system and then the next hundred thousand, and the next hundred thousand the bar gets raised in terms of how we make sure that we keep everybody safe. So, we'll have a lot more to say on that in the next few days. But, you know, this is a crucial part of the equation. As I said, I don't see the restart happening until the first or second week of June. That's not far off. But we have, certainly, some days to work with the MTA, to try and perfect these strategies, and then as with everything else to see how they're going and make adjustments as we go along.

Moderator: Jose from Univision is up next. Jose.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, good morning. So, on Friday, the City Council's Public Safety Committee held a hearing about the pretty sharp disparity in the enforcement of social distancing by the NYPD. Now at that hearing, the NYPD leadership was resistant to sharing that data, which ultimately showed that blacks and Hispanics received 79 percent of the summonses. Even though, as you know, the majority of the 3-1-1 calls complaining about the lack of social distancing came from white neighborhoods. So, I've got two questions. The first is going forward, will the NYPD make this kind of information accessible to the public in real time? Is there a way to do that? The second question is, what changes is your administration making to address this kind of disparity? I understand there's a plan to reduce the NYPD’s role in this kind of enforcement, but now some people, as I saw on Friday, are concerned that the average person would not listen to volunteers or people without actual law enforcement authority.

Mayor: Yeah, Jose, thank you for the question. It's a great question. So, first, yes, we do have to have the data provided by the NYPD on a regular basis, consistent basis. I'll make sure that happens for sure. But what I think you're going to see as you just indicated when it comes to summonses related to face coverings and social distancing, that that's just not going to be the area the NYPD focuses on anymore. There may be other types of offenses that happen in combination with someone, you know, not social distancing or not wearing a face covering, but that's what they would focus on, not the actual social distancing or face covering itself. They're getting out of that work, that's going to be done by the civilian employees of the city, the ambassadors, that's going to be done – and one of the things I'll be talking about later on today – by the Cure Violence Movement, which has been so successful in beating back gun violence in this city and is, you know, so deeply grounded in our communities.

So, I believe with the level of information and education that's out there about the coronavirus, that when you send out people to educate, to remind, to give out face coverings that does the vast majority of what we need. NYPD will be in reserve for dealing with gatherings, particularly large gatherings. That scenario, I've been very clear, we still need them to play a role when we see a problem, we haven't seen that many problems, thank God. And folks, actually, whenever any authorities have been showing up – I looked at the weekend as it progressed, Jose, I was getting regular updates on what was happening in different parts of the city, what different agencies were experiencing, same results constantly. People responded. When any figures of authority showed up, they responded. They made the adjustments overwhelmingly. So, that's where we're going to focus and I think it'll be successful. Where we will keep a PD presence and other enforcement agencies, as we talked about, is if we see businesses that are not complying with the rules. You know, we'll start with warnings and if that solves it, great. If not, we can go to summonses or even more aggressive actions. But yes to transparency, no, you're not going to see NYPD involved in enforcement on social distancing or face coverings.

Moderator: Brigid from WNYC is up next. Brigid.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor, this is sort of a follow up question unrelated to the previous question. Specifically, the Center for Constitutional Rights is filing an emergency order today, calling on the NYPD stop-and-frisk monitor to investigate the department's social distancing enforcement practices. I'm wondering if you support that investigation. And similarly, will you direct the NYPD to release full arrest data by race as the attorneys are requesting? And then separately on your announcement today about Annabel Palma as the Chief Equity Officer for the Test and Trace Corps, can you talk a little bit more specifically about what her responsibilities will be and is this a public health function or more of a data oversight function and just what she'll be doing?

Mayor: Sure. I will turn to Ted. Let me talk about your first question real quick and then I'll mention my view of – or talk about my view of the work that Annabel will be doing and Ted will talk in more detail. On the monitor, look, we've been working very closely with the monitor throughout. This is the administration that settled the stop-and-frisk case. We've done very productive work with the monitor. If the monitor has concerns, we're always going to work cooperatively. If there's a legal action being taken by an outside group, I want to just be mindful that I'll keep my comments brief. But, look, we do believe in transparency. Wherever we can get clear information, it's always important to make sure the information is clear and consistent. I want to see it published regularly. But, again, any looking at what happened with the very few instances where there was enforcement on social distancing, and I keep coming back to this, I don't blame anyone for the concern about things that went wrong or disparities.

Both of those are unacceptable. Any incident where the dynamics between police and community weren't what we wanted to be, where our police officers didn't handle things right, we care about. Any time where there's disparity, I care about that, the department cares about it, we have to fix it. But I also want to keep coming back to, thank God we're talking about very few instances where there even was any enforcement, and now that has ended. But we're always, always ready to take a look back if it helps us do our job better going forward. We're just not going to tolerate disparities in this city. That's the bottom line.

To Annabel Palma, the important work of making sure that everything being done in the testing and tracing effort is focused on addressing the disparities. That means that it has to be responsive to communities of color, it has to be responsive to immigrants, has to be responsive to people that don't speak English, that it is culturally competent, sensitive to the needs of all the communities that have taken on the chin in this crisis that, you know, again, the tracers continue to look like the people they serve and are able to best serve people. And then if there's community concerns about what's working, what's not working, that there's an actual active listening going on to make the adjustments and fix things. That's what I see Annabel's role as. Ted, do you want to add?

Dr. Long: Yeah. Thank you, Sir. The Test and Trace Corps will be most effective and most successful if it's a local initiative and Annabel Palma will be going into our communities doing everything the Mayor just said to ensure that happens.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Last two. Gloria from NY1 – Gloria.

Question: Thank you. Mr. Mayor, I wanted to follow up on Shant's question because I'm not sure I heard an answer. Are you looking to increase your borrowing capability in order to cover operational costs? And what does that mean? Isn't the City prohibited from funding operating expenses with borrowed money? So, what authority would that give the State if they were to allow you to increase the borrowing capability? My second question is about your comment on religious gatherings. I understand you were commenting on what the President ordered last week, but does it also go against the 10 people maximum order in any way or are you still in agreement with that?

Mayor: Yeah, no, the ten people – thank you for the question Gloria, because I always want to make sure I'm clear. The ten people maximum gathering, absolutely we can work with that. We can make that work. And that makes sense, whether it's a religious gathering or just people gathering for another purpose. Remember what the State has said clearly is that still comes with the need to socially distance. And if there’s any chance that people may be closed for any period of time they need to wear the face covering. So I think the State has it right there. We will work with that in a religious setting and in a nonreligious setting. Absolutely, fine with that. What I'm talking about is that big traditional religious services where you're talking about hundreds, even thousands of people gathered together. I know there's a deep yearning to restart. What I'm saying is it is not time. With all due respect to the President, the President left the impression on Friday that any and all religious services should just start again. I'm saying very clearly that is dangerous. It is not time to restart large gatherings of any kind. Even though we deeply, deeply value faith. The key faith leaders of this city are saying it's not time, across the board. I spent much of the last few days talking to faith leaders. And I'd say, what do you feel about this moment? What's right for your faith, for your congregation, for your people? To a one, they said, it is not the time for large gatherings. It is not the time for traditional large services again. So I just want to make sure there's no misinterpretation of what the President said. From the point of view of the faith leaders of New York City, it's not time yet to go back to traditional large services. From the point of view of the City of New York. It's not time yet. And so we're all going to keep working together to keep people safe.

On the borrowing – this is a last resort. Obviously, we do not want to resort to borrowing and we should not have to resort to borrowing, Gloria. We have dealt with an international crisis, international pandemic. That was something that our federal government, like any foreign threat, was supposed to address. It has not been addressed, obviously. This city, this state, many cities, many states have borne the brunt. We have lost billions upon billions of dollars of revenue that we use to serve our people. It's gone. It's not coming back. The only way to possibly keep this city functioning, keep the services provided, keep people on our payroll is if we get a really substantial stimulus program from Washington. And we don't know when that's going to be right now. They have not scheduled to vote in the Senate. We don't know what it's going to look like. And meanwhile, we have a budget due on June 30th by law. So, the action, Albany is to give us the last resort of borrowing. It is a long-term capacity. I'll have my colleagues go over with you the technical and legal issues, so you understand this obviously is something patterned on what happened after 9/11, when the City did use that capacity for a period of time.

But we're dealing with something as horrible as 9/11 was in every sense humanly and otherwise for this city. This is a much, much deeper crisis in terms of how many years it will take for us to navigate it, the depth of the economic pain that people are feeling, that over a million New Yorkers out of work now. We're going to be in a horrible budget situation for years. So this borrowing capacity is to give us a fallback no matter what happens up ahead. But I don't want to do borrowing. I want to see a stimulus that makes us whole so we can actually provide services, keep people employed and move this city forward. So I think that summarizes it on both of your questions.

Moderator: Last question goes to Rich from WCBS 880, Rich?

Question: Mr. Mayor, thanks for taking my question here. So, I know it's been a very long haul up until now, but are the numbers coming down more quickly than you and your team anticipated? And does that say anything about the possibility of opening before June 15th? And second question you know, do you anticipate that people may move out of New York City as a result of the concentration of the virus? There’s been some reports that people want to get out and get to the suburbs because – to raise their families for instance, because of the threat the virus presented in the city?

Mayor: That's a great question. I appreciate the question, Rich. And I think it's important we talk about this stuff openly. On your first question, I'm very impressed at what New Yorkers have achieved here. We here in the city government, we've tried to set the model of what we had to do and give people the support and the tools and New Yorkers have taken that and run with it. Because these numbers have come down consistently and certainly we – Rich it is not going to surprise you. We don't sit around, you know, thinking about best case scenarios, typically we prepare for worst case scenarios. And we're very pleasantly surprised when we see something better. Certainly, you know, we're seeing more progress here than we might've originally imagined.

It's hard to get too giddy when you think about as recently as April 5th, we literally thought our hospital system was on the verge of being overwhelmed. It was very, you know, it was very few weeks ago. So, I am really heartened by the progress we've made, but we are far from out of the woods. I see the kind of progress that gives me confidence we'll get to phase one in the first two weeks of June. But that's something we got to earn every day and that could turn in a number of days. So, I'll always put down a disclaimer, you know, ask me in a few days if we're still on track and then ask me a few days after that again. We're not there until we're there. But no, have the numbers come down quicker than some of our estimates might have originally anticipated? Absolutely. But this is, you know, the other problem, Rich, you know, is if people start to take their foot off the gas and stop being vigilant, then unfortunately the numbers go right back in the wrong direction. So, we got to stay tight.

On the question of the future of the city. I am very confident about the future of this city, Rich. People in this city are strong and resilient. And again, just the litany of things we've been through. The way the city came back from the Great Depression, the way it came back from the fiscal crisis after 9/11 and you remember how devastating that was, after Hurricane Sandy. Literally every single time there were all sorts of prognostications in New York City would never be the same and it wouldn't be able to come back. And it has come back every single time and stronger, literally stronger each time. So some people may choose to leave and I believe a lot of people will choose to come in. I think the vast majority of people who are here believe in this place. And that will be a vaccine one day and that will be sooner rather than later. And that will change everything as well.

So, I'm confident about our future and I'm also confident there's people all over this metropolitan area, all over this country, all over this world who want to be a part of New York City. And as soon as things get back to normal, I think you're going to see a lot of people engaging and coming here because they've always wanted that opportunity and it will be there for them. So remain optimistic because of the strength and resilience of New Yorkers and everything that we have here, which is irreplaceable. No place in the world has all the things that we have. Final point on that Rich, I think people have watched a lot of heroism here. I mean, you know, whatever the fears, again, those fears will be deeply changed as we make progress against the disease and as we get a vaccine. That New Yorkers have mounted a heroic, heroic effort here. And a lot of people admire that and a lot of people look at New York City and feel very, very strongly that this place is special and people have done something amazing. So keep that in perspective as well.

So, everyone, as we conclude, look, and I think it kind of fits with Rich's question. You know, what do we think about as we're coming off of Memorial Day? We think about people who did extraordinary things. In fact, you know, made sacrifices that are so hard for so many of us to imagine what it must've been like for so many good young men and women to be out fighting for us far away from home, giving their all. It must've felt to many of them, you know, as I said, my dad was one of them back in World War II. There must've been many a day where it felt overwhelming. Many a day where they didn't know what the future would bring. And there must've been moments where people wondered if they could make it through. But we remember them as heroes because they found a way. We remembered them as heroes, because they found that strength and they banded together. And they did something great and something greater than the sum of the parts. And that's what we're called to do now. So as we reflect on Memorial Day and the sacrifices of others, let's recognize it's our time. It's our time to find the greatness in us. And to all of you, you've been doing that every single day. Every time you put on a face covering, every time you exercise social distancing, every time you stay home even though you'd rather be out, every time you help a neighbor, every time you give of yourself, you are part of making that change. So, thank you, everyone, for doing what our time demands and helping us all move forward.

2020-05-27 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. This city continues to move forward because of all that you are doing. Again, I express my thanks every day for New Yorkers who are doing so much to fight back this disease, get us past this crisis and on to better times. We've talked a lot about the crucial new pieces of the equation. More and more testing, and our tracing program. Tracing contacts so we can contain the disease further. We've made some big strides the last few days on these fronts. Some real improvements are happening day by day, and that's exciting because that means we're getting closer every day to getting to a better situation for the people that city.

So, to review – look, a few days ago we wanted to get to 20,000 tests per day in New York City. That was something that for months alluded us. Being able to get to that basic level, 20,000 tests per day. We hit that number ahead of schedule. Now as of today, we are at 27,000 tests per day capacity and growing. We're well on our way to our goal of getting to at least 50,000 tests in the coming weeks, and then we're going to go and surpass that. The testing initiative now has over 180 sites that are either up and running or have been announced and are on the way. So, to get easier and easier for more and more New Yorkers to get testing, and that's going to help us move forward. And then tracing, as I said, the goal originally was to have a thousand contact tracers trained ready and on the field by June 1st. That number will now be 1,700 by June 1st, and then we'll grow from there. We are going to get to the level of 2,500 contact tracers in the first half of June. And then as I've said, we are ready to go to as many as five to 10,000, that's what will help us beat back this disease.

So, those pieces of the equation are moving every day, improving every day. Now it's time to talk about the next piece. And when we think about what has made us strong, it is the testing being more available, the tracing being there for people who need it, for the contacts being traced with each person. But then it is the ability to take care of people who are found to either be symptomatic or who test positive. It's so crucial to think of why we need to take care of folks in that situation because if we take care of them, we help them to get well. But of course, we also help them to not spread the disease. Now, any individual who test positive for the disease, anyone who's symptomatic, we've been telling you for months, there are things you have to do, because once you know you are symptomatic, once you know you test positive, you know there are things that you can do to make sure that you of course take care of yourself, but also that you don't spread the disease inadvertently. And that's not easy, because we're New Yorkers. We are used to being close to the people in our lives. We have close knit families, people live close together. We are used to spending time with the people we love, and the people are important to us in our lives. So, the notion of finding out information that affirms that for a period of time, you need to keep some separation. Well that's not typical for us. That's not easy for us. But the goal here is to safely separate for a very limited period of time. And I want to emphasize that. The period of time that people need to safely separate is only up to 14 days in some cases less. It's not forever by any stretch of imagination. But if you do it right in those 14 days or less, you really help them start to make sure that the people in your life are safe, and that the disease doesn't spread more throughout the city.

So, everyone has a responsibility here when they're in that situation to think about everyone around them, what you need to do to protect them. But we want to take care of you, and all the people in your life, and that's where the take care point comes in. We can do a lot to help you because think about it, if you're able to safely separate and be at home, well, okay, then you still need help, right? You need to make sure you're getting medical attention. You need to be able to check in with medical personnel as you're progressing or if there's a problem to address it. You need food, you need all the basics to get to you. You might need prescriptions. How do you do all that? Well, we are setting up an apparatus that will allow us to support you. If you're at home and you can isolate properly at home, then this apparatus will support you safely separating at home. If you have to be in a hotel, we'll be able to help you as well. But just to make clear at home, we can account for the whole range of needs, meals, prescriptions and medication, physical health support, mental health support. People are going through so much, and we have to make sure that people have that support as well. So, there'll be regular contact with our test and trace team. There'll be phone calls in person visits when necessary. Text messages, you name it to stay close, stay connected. And who does all this work, who makes sure you have what you need, these are the folks we call resource navigators. They help you safely separate at home.

Now, all of this is free. I'm going to say this many, many times today and the days and weeks to come. Every bit of this service is being provided for free, because this is how we help people. This is how we overcome this disease. If you end up knowing you need to separate from people at home but you need that support, the last thing you should have to worry about is how am I going to pay for it in the middle of the biggest economic crisis since the great depression, we don't want you to have to worry about that. We don't want that to stand in the way of you being able to have that separation you need, so all the services being provided for free and the resource navigators will be there to make sure you get what you need. 200 resource navigators are being brought on citywide. They will be your point person for anything and everything you need when you're in that period of separation. Now, the navigators are going to come from all the communities of this city. We have brought on 15 community-based organizations as you see there on the screen. These organizations will actually hire the resource navigators from local communities. They're going to be familiar with all the neighborhoods of the city. They’re going to speak the languages of all the neighborhoods of the city, be able to connect with people. That initiative is starting right now. Those navigators will be on the ground next week starting their work as the contact tracing starts to grow, and ramping up so that we'll have plenty of capacity to reach anyone who needs that help.

Now, that's the way to think about if you have to safely separate at home, okay, you're not alone, you're getting a lot of support, everything you need. There's someone there to address people, checking in with you regularly, making sure you're okay. But that also gives you the ability to ensure that the people in your life are safe because you're separated from them the right way. But what if you can't do that? What if a hotel is a better option? Well, that's going to be true of folks who live in very cramped circumstances. Who live in smaller apartments where you just don't have any space to separate from the people in your life, from all your loved ones. That is true if you have a multigenerational home in many cases where there's just lots of people in the same space, and of course the concern for our elders is paramount here. We've seen what this horrible disease has done to the oldest New Yorkers, and particularly those who have preexisting conditions. So, if you have a loved one in your home, and they're older, and you want to protect them, you clearly might be better off going to one of the hotels to make sure there's no risk to the person you love. So, right now, we have 1,200 hotel rooms right ago. And again, I’m going to keep saying that key word free. The hotel rooms are free. All the services that go with them are free. Anyone who needs that opportunity to safely separate in a hotel, we're going to be there for them. 1,200 rooms now, we'll be going more than double that number. We'll more than double that number to over 3000 rooms in the course of the next few months. But the bottom line is as many rooms as we need, we're going to have, so we're already planning on building that out, but here is the simplest rule in the world. Anyone who needs that hotel room to safely separate from the other people they live with, they will get that hotel room for free. This is how we protect people. And the same idea we talked about what kind of support you get when you're at home. Well, in the hotel, very similar approach. The whole test and trace initiative, and this take care part of it is predicated on notion of a lot of support, a lot of communication, whether it be from Health and Hospitals clinical staff, or the hotel staff. What does that mean? It means daily medical check-ins. It means meals, it means laundry. It means making sure you get, again, any medicines delivered that you need. It means mental health support as well as physical health support.

Now, you talk about period of up to 14 days, it's not forever, but for that period of time we're going to make sure you have what you need. How do you get to a room? Well, obviously if you're identified as someone who has tested positive or is symptomatic through our test and trace initiative, they'll be able to, people involved in the contact tracing will be able to refer you to a hotel room, make all the components come together, get you the transportation you need, etcetera. But what if, for example, you go in to a doctor's office, and this the doctor who says, wait a minute, you know, you're symptomatic or the doctor tells you, they in fact did the test with you, come back and say the test is positive. It's important that you safely separate, its important you go to a hotel. Well, the doctors of this city, any doctor, any nurse, any physician's assistant in private practice, in a hospital, anywhere, they can arrange for you to get one of these free hotel rooms, and the support that goes with it. So, any health care provider all over the city, they can simply email CommCareCP@nychhc.org. This is a simple process through which any health care provider can make sure that you get the hotel room you need, if that's the best way to protect your loved ones and help you through this situation.

Now, let's say you don't have a doctor, well we’ve said many times, any New Yorker who's in the middle of an urgent situation needs to check on what's going on, wants to talk to a health care professional who doesn't have their own, you can always call 3-1-1 and get connected to a health care provider, to an Health + Hospitals clinician. But specifically if you know you're symptomatic already, if you're know you're symptomatic, you know in a living situation that you can't safely separate from others, you can call directly to our COVID hotline to get connected to the hotel program, and that number is 844-692-4692. When you call that number, if you say, look, here's my situation at home, here are my symptoms. Doctor will evaluate it with you, and they say, yup, that's time to go to hotel, then all of the wheels start in motion and we make sure you get the support you need. So, again, it's test, it’s trace, it’s take care, they all go together. Testing is so important in and of itself, but testing has much more impact if the contact tracing then leads us to anybody who might have been affected if you test positive. So, we can immediately get to them and make sure they're in the right situation and it all comes together if people are actually taken care of, if they know that if they need to have that safe separation, that the support will be there. That's going to encourage people to take advantage of it, that's going to make them comfortable doing it. It's going to make them feel okay if they either need to stay home alone, away from the other members of the household or need to go to hotel. People need to know that they'll be taken care of, they need to know the support will be there, test trace and take care, that is the game plan. Now we want to make sure as this whole initiative keeps growing, that we're always listening for what people need, people from different types of communities. We're always listening to make sure that the services are provided the right way, that they're responsive to people, that there's any problem it's addressed, so we're forming a community advisory board. We want eyes and ears, we want people to help us always think about if we're doing this the best way, the right way, are we reaching everyone we should reach? Are there problems? Are there hesitations? Are there reasons people don't want to participate? We need to always understand that and address it. So, we're getting members from 60 great organizations around the city. These are organizations that do so much good at the grassroots level. They really represented a wonderful cross section in New York City, they'll be meeting twice a week with our test-trace and take care of team and they'll be guides helping us think through how to keep making this the very best effort it can be. I can't emphasize enough how important this will be in beating back this disease cause remember the coronavirus thrives when there isn't that ability to find each and every person who needs help. But when every single day you find more and more people who need the help and get them the help they need and that happens faster and faster and better and better, that keeps constricting the spread of this disease. That's why I'm so excited about this initiative, I think it's going to reach very, very far and have a profound impact on hastening the day when we end this era in our city and the evidence is there from around the world. Other countries that had very creative and aggressive test and trace programs and the take care component as well. That was the magic combination, test trace and take care done consistently done energetically with lots of resources, lots of personnel. That's what has worked around the world and that's what's going to work here in New York City.

Now, all of this of course is to help protect New Yorkers, keep us healthy, keep us safe, constrain this disease, and one day rid us of this horrible challenge. And obviously it's all about hastening the day that we can restart and go through the different phases of restarting. And I'm very, very excited about that process because things are getting better each day because of your efforts. And that's hastening our ability to start reopening our economy, getting people back to work, getting them back to their livelihoods, we are going to do this the right way. And last night I had a really powerful conversation with leaders of some of the largest businesses in New York City. And I'll tell you something, it was fascinating to listen to people from some of the businesses that really are synonymous with this city that are some of the biggest employers that are businesses that make New York City proud. And their optimism about coming back and coming back strong and what I kept hearing about their thinking was of course they want to see continued progress on the disease and they are very, very focused on this test, trace, and take care of program as a crucial piece of the strategy. But what I heard was people recognizing that the values of New York City, what has made New York City great continue to make a great and we'll make a great in the future. This was the single biggest takeaway and I was meeting with a group of folks who they were perfectly ready to tell me if they had a different point of view, but I asked them just open field and what do you think and when I kept hearing was they want to come back. They want to come back strong; they want to be here in New York City. Why? Because the talent is here because the ability to bring talent together that that creative impact of bringing great talent together. Yeah, the short term we're going to have to be smart about how we do it. But the point is doing everything remotely has its limits. You cannot achieve the same creativity, the same teamwork, the same common purpose when everyone is remote. And I think that is becoming clearer and clearer to some of the leaders of some of our biggest employers here in the city that they are looking forward to the day when they can continue to bring more and more people back and get that creative spark going and really bring out the talent base in New York City that has been our greatness and has helped make these companies great. So, a very, very inspiring conversation, everyone's thinking safety first. Everyone wants to go through the stages, the smart way, but a lot of optimism about how we can do it, how quickly can do it, and how quickly we can forward.

Okay. Now, as we continue to fight this disease, as we work towards this restart, let's of course always think about the horrible physical toll this disease has taken. The people we have lost, we think about them all the time. The people who are still suffering. The folks who we worry about, particularly because they're older and they have those preexisting conditions that we want to protect. The physical reality is always in the front of our minds, but as usual, the mental health reality often escapes our view, and this is something we should not allow to happen. We know the history of this country has been that somehow mental health has been too much of a taboo subject, but the mental health challenges of coronavirus had been profound. People have felt scared, anxious, confused, isolated, and they need more support than ever. And they need to talk about it and get it out and know that someone's listening and someone cares. This was abundantly clear to me yesterday I toured Queensbridge houses with some wonderful leaders of our cure violence movement, community activists who had done so much to keep neighborhoods safe. I talked to a lot of the residents of Queensbridge houses, largest public housing development in the city, in fact, in this country. And what I heard over and over again was people feeling the burden of having had to stay in so much of feeling the confusion about where things are going. But the thing I heard the most was the sadness over those they've lost the fact that it wasn't even possible to mourn properly in the middle of this crisis. People are carrying a weight, it's a very deep weight and it's a very real weight and we have to address it now and going forward. We've talked before, there's a lot to do this summer going into the fall, particularly for our school children. And this is a time to think about mental health in general and it is mental health awareness month. So, everybody this is a time to reflect, to think about how we support all those people, those health care heroes, those first responders, they'd been through a lot. How we make sure that mental health services are available in the places that are doing such important work. Our hospitals, our shelters, the places that serve young people, including a homeless youth, making sure that we're attending to that, not just the physical needs but the mental health needs as well. All month long we're going to be talking about mental health and of course our First Lady is going to lead the way that's been the focus of her work over these last six plus years. That's what the thrive initiative is all about, making mental health as widely available to people as possible. Mental health services that people need, mental health information they need. And it's a reminder this month and every month, if for any reason you need trained counselor to talk to 24/7 multiple languages and yes, for free, always for free call 888-NYC-WELL you are never alone in New York City. If you need mental support or someone in your life needs mental health support and you want to talk about how to get it to them, call 888-NYC-WELL.

Okay. Before I go to our daily indicators and our thresholds, I want to talk about something that's been going on over these last weeks that we've talked about from time to time. And it's not, it's not the same as the human impact and the health care impact and the lives we've lost. Those are so much more important than anything we can talk about when it comes to dollars and cents. But we do have to come to grips with the fact that on top of the health care crisis, on top of the economic crisis, we are now in a fiscal crisis here in this city. It is not the responsibility or fault of anyone in these five boroughs. We didn't ask for the coronavirus and we have spent so much time, energy, heart, soul and money fighting back the coronavirus and often alone without the help of our federal government, but New Yorkers have done it. And when you think about it, what's happened here, this, see what's happened in cities all over the country, what's happened in States all over the country is the burden has been born by cities and States to somehow make sense of this crisis to go at alone in so many ways. And to fight back a disease that really is part of an international pandemic, of course, it should be the responsibility of the federal government first and foremost to address this and yet here we are waiting once again for action. We're not hearing from the President; we're not hearing from the Senate majority leader. In fact, I spoke to Senator Schumer yesterday, there's literally no schedule for the fourth stimulus bill to be voted on. This is the stimulus that would actually help cities and States that would actually help us back on our feet and help us deal with this crisis. Literally no vote scheduled, but here's the challenge, while they're not acting in the Senate, while the President remains silent, our fiscal situation has gotten worse. I originally reported to you last month that between the current fiscal year and the one that begins July 1st we had $7.4 billion in projected loss revenue because of course the economy is not functioning the way it normally does and that's taken away all the money that we use to provide services to all of you. $7.4 billion, we now have a new estimate that we have just published and I'm very sorry to have to give you this news, but it's not shocking to me that things have gotten worse. We are now $9 billion in the hole between the current fiscal year and the one that begins July 1st. $9 billion and we project unfortunately beyond next fiscal year additional lost revenue that will hold us back further. There is literally no way that we can solve this problem without federal help or without having to make very, very painful choices that will affect the quality of life in this city. Our building provide basic services and how many people we're able to employ to support you in the middle of a pandemic in the middle of a moment where people need that public support and help more never in the middle of a moment where we were spending billions of dollars to protect your health and safety, to make sure you're fed, to make sure there's a roof over your head. This is the very time where we're not getting the help from the US, Senate or the President and we are getting to a point of really tough choices. We have to pass a budget by law by the end of June. So, we have about four weeks.

So, this week I asked the State of New York for help. I asked the State of New York to give us a fallback, to give us a safety net and that is borrowing authority. It's not something we want to use or intend to use in the first instance, but it's something we need as a last resort if our federal government isn't there for us. If we're going to maintain basic services here in this city, we need some capacity to borrow. After 9/11 in the middle of that crisis, Mayor Bloomberg went to Albany, asked the Legislature and the Governor to support New York City and provide borrowing authority – they did. New York City handled that borrowing authority smartly, wisely – got us through that crisis, got us to the point we were just a few months ago before this pandemic, a strong city, economically strong, providing so much support to our people, safest big city in America, highest number of people employed in the history of New York City. That's where we were in February – that recently – because this city has been smart in its stewardship of our resources, smart in the way we serve our people and grow our economy, we need to keep doing that. So, we've asked the state for that borrowing authority. By the way, the State has granted itself the very same borrowing authority. In April, the State granted itself $11 billion in borrowing authority. There was no debate, there was no fanfare. It was obviously the right thing to do to give it that fallback while we're all fighting shoulder-to-shoulder; city and state together and all cities and states together for the right kind of stimulus because no one wants to borrow. What we want is our federal government to step-up for it – us all of us – as it should in a moment of crisis and we'll keep fighting for that. Well, look, I've asked Albany for this borrowing authority so we can protect our people and I know a lot of people are stepping up in the city and saying that's the right thing to do; a lot of folks in our labor community have stepped forward and let leaders in Albany know how important it is to protect working people and to keep working people, working by having this authority as a last resort. So, this is a city unlike the city we knew decades ago; decades ago, New York City went through a lot of trouble and we learned a lot of valuable lessons. The city of today, a strong, careful, smart city when it comes to our finances; this is a city that can and must move forward, that can and must provide basic services. Let's keep fighting for that federal stimulus. That's the right way to do it, but in the meantime, let's get that borrowing authority from Albany to make sure we have that fall back and to make sure we can protect our people.

Now, let me turn to our daily indicators and thresholds and again I'm going to refer to the structure we're using now and this again is an example of the success that has been achieved in this city that we're talking now in terms of these thresholds. So, the first one is the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – remember, we want to see that beat under 200 individuals a day. That is a level that is sustainable if it's under 200 a day. Look at today's report, 55 for a city of 8.6 million people – only 55 people admitted to the hospital for suspected COVID-19. That's really good news. Now daily number of people in our Health + Hospital’s intensive care units - so this threshold, we want to keep that under 375. We have a little more work to do – we're at 431 patients today, but we're confident that number can continue to go down and we'll continue to go down. So, more work to do there, but on the right track. And so important, the percentage of people tested citywide who are positive for COVID-19, again staying under that 15 percent threshold is what we want to see. We are at 8 percent today and that is so good to see every day we're in single digits. So that progress is because of you; don't let up. Keep at it with the social distancing, shelter in place, wearing the face coverings. Let's be smart as we get ready for the next phase, let's do things the right way and that's what gets us to the next phase.

Okay, a few quick words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks Spanish]

And with that we will turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan, President and CEO of Health + Hospitals, Dr. Katz, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Long, and Director of Isolation for the Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Johnson on the phone. With that, I will start with Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Good morning, Mayor de Blasio, and everyone on the call. I have two questions and it has to do with our small businesses, our restaurants, and bars here in the city. San Francisco just announced a plan to open up streets and sidewalks to diners including free permits and California has had more guidance for businesses for weeks. With more people going outside and it will probably increase as the weather gets warmer, when can the city see some sort of dining plan if it's an outdoor plan? And then the second question is I know the NYPD has been targeting certain bar heavy areas, nine I believe. What are those areas? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Katie. I love the phrase bar heavy areas. That's like one of those government designations that always impressed me. We will get you a list; obviously the Upper East Side was an area of particular concern, Katie and that got a lot of attention. But I will get you, if we have in the course of this press conference, the list of bar heavy areas. I will turn to Freddie Goldstein who will take great interest in this matter and will get me the list if we can now, but well otherwise we'll get it to you right after.

On the outdoor dining question; this is really an important question. I'm glad you raised it. We've been talking to a lot of folks in the restaurant and bar industry. There's a lot of excitement about this possibility. Now, it's not in phase one as it's structured now and again, right now we are on track with phase one to begin in the first or second week of June. But we are looking very intensely at what we can do with bars and restaurants, but again, with a safety-first attitude. I really respect the wonderful work that's been done in California and in San Francisco particularly. They do have a very different circumstance for many, many reasons. So, we look at other people's ideas and approaches, we look at them all over the world, but we know our circumstance is particular and we are very much in a safety first, health first approach. So, we're going to figure out how and when we could reopen bars and restaurants; how much outdoors is going to play a crucial role in that. I think it is a very, very encouraging possibility to lean to the outdoors. But even with that, we got a lot to figure out in terms of social distancing, face coverings, protocols, and what amount of capacity you could create that would make it worthwhile because bar and restaurant owners have been really clear - they need a certain level of capacity for it to be economically viable. So, we are working on that. It is not part of phase one but it is something we'll have more to say on soon.

Moderator: Next we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Mr. Mayor, thank you for taking the call. How are you doing?

Mayor: I'm all right, Gersh. Gersh, I feel there has been no cooking updates. I feel alone, I've gained no information from you.

Question: I owe you a couple of breads and some pizza dough. I admit that. You know it's funny I wanted to follow up on –

Mayor: You keep saying that, but I've seen no bread, Gersh – no bread at all.

Question: I am socially distancing, Mr. Mayor, socially distancing. Good you took the call right after Katie’s question because I actually wanted to follow up exactly on what she asked, which is I have to say Mr. Mayor, you always, you often say in these kinds of, when, when changes are being asked of you that New York has unique circumstances, other cities, you know, do what they do and we study it and etcetera., but then after a certain amount of time passes, you have a great ability to see what other cities do well and then adapt them as you did with open streets. You know, we now are the nation's leader in open streets and you're doing it in a way that other cities had in a very small way pioneered. So, what is different with the restaurant thing? As you know, the weather is improving and these restaurant industries, the members are telling us that the window is going to close on them because they only have basically through September to really make that happen. So, what's different? Can you talk about why we can't expedite this?

Mayor: Yeah. Gersh, I think your observations a good one, but I take it as a badge of honor honestly that we look at what other people do – often honestly in circumstances that are more propitious. I mean, let's face it we've been the epicenter of the crisis here in this country. We have the toughest conditions, the most, you know, the most densely populated place that's been in the middle of this whole fight. We have a lot here that makes what we do very, very sensitive. Small steps can have a very big impact when you're talking about over 8 million people and job one is safety and health and not allowing that boomerang. So, I really think it is actually exactly right to say we're watching what other people do; we watch a lot of people do things in easier circumstances and then we decide what makes sense for us. The open streets is a great example. I did not think it made sense when we didn't have enough NYPD officers and all of our city personnel. Now that they came back, that really contributed great work with the council, great work with communities. When we started it, we we're able to start it safely and the proof has been in the pudding. It is a great idea, Gersh, and it's working real well and it's been executed safely. So, I think the parallel with the bars and restaurants is very, very clear. I would love them back up and running immediately, but the safety ramifications of bars and restaurants are very different than the phase one industries. What's phase one; construction, manufacturing, wholesale and retail, but only with things like curbside pickup. Calibrated to make sure that as we bring back hundreds of thousands of people, we do it safely and we don't hit that boomerang. Bars and restaurants implicitly come with much closer contact. We have to figure out how to do it right, how to enforce it, how to make it viable. So, I know people want to get going, I respect it. As soon as we feel it's right, we'll be ready to act. But first, we’ve got to get phase one going. It's just, there is an important part of sequencing to keep everyone healthy. So, that's how we're going to proceed.

Moderator: Next we have Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning, all. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Matt. How you doing?

Question: Good. Two quick questions for you. First, how is rideshare, like Uber and Lyft, going to be different during phase one reopening? And second, to what extent are you going to be restricting more streets than currently to bicycles for phase one?

Mayor: Let me come to that. But first, if you'll just forgive me for a second, Matt, I have the coveted list of bar-heavy areas that Katie asked about. And again, this is a sort of the historic reality, but, Katie, we will obviously watch if there's other places that need to be addressed. So, this can change according to what we see happening on the ground. But the formal bar heavy areas are, the Upper East Side, the East Village, the West Village, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Long Island City, Astoria, Hell's Kitchen and City Island. There's our formal list.

Matt, look we are going to in phase one focus on those industries that I've talked about and obviously get them up and running the right way. So, in terms of how people get there, the initial estimate is it's going to add at least a couple of hundred thousand people into the workforce in the five boroughs. That's an area – that's a reality of concerns we talked about yesterday. I want to make sure will well coordinate with the MTA and that makes sense. Right now, in terms of the basic structure of transportation, we have what we have. In terms of any changes we might make with rideshare or bikes, you know, we're still evaluating if that makes sense and if there is something specific to change in the here and now. But it's all connected, we're trying to make sense of what's the right way to get people around in a new circumstance. I think that's an important consideration. Now, I think it becomes an even bigger consideration when we go to phase two. So, the answer is still assessing, but we will have more to say on it.

Moderator: Next we have Brian from Crane’s.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Brian. How are you doing?

Question: Good. I wanted to ask you, close to 300 New York businesses called Reopen New York have defied the State and City and are reopening. We wanted to know what your thoughts are on that and if the City plans to take any action against them?

Mayor: Yeah. I mean, the City and State are totally united on the approach to reopening. And I would urge everyone to look at the facts, this city has beat back this disease really impressively because of everyone's great effort, but we are far from done. And if we do this the wrong way and the disease reasserts, then you will go in the opposite direction, more restrictions, even more we could have than what we have right now, and that's the last thing anyone wants. So, we're going to do this the smart way. Anybody who reopens in defiance with State and City orders, of course we're going to enforce. And if we have to, we’ll summons. If we have to, we'll get a commissioner's order and, you know, the place will not be allowed to be open in any way, shape or form. So, I'm a little confused when we've seen steady progress. I'm looking at the State indicators, you know, five out of seven now completed. We're confident that we'll get there in the first half of June on the contact tracers. We've only got a little bit more to go on the hospital beds, that's coming along. I've been really clear about the City indicators and thresholds. They're moving exactly where we want. I don't know what people need to hear to understand that things are moving because we're doing this the smart way. If we keep doing it the smart way, we get to that phase one reopening, do that, we can get to the phase two reopening, which really is a vast amount of the economy back in the game. But if people jump the gun and they don't follow the rules, that's the best way to guarantee we don't get to our reopening. So, of course, we're going to enforced us and we're going to enforce it aggressively, because we have to get this right.

Moderator: Next. we have Jillian from WBAI Radio.

Question: Good morning, everybody. I'd like to ask some follow ups on my eviction questions from last week. You made your preferences very clear, but as a practical matter, what can and will the City do, including the timeline and grace period you mentioned? And also, what authority does the City have in the context of the Governor's power? Thanks.

Mayor; Thank you very much, Jillian. Very important question. Jillian, look, we have pushed many a time for the State to change its approach to tenants and often with success. You know, many times sitting right here, I pushed for the State to allow tenants to use their security deposits to pay the rent – the State finally did that. We pushed for extensions on evictions and the eviction moratorium – they did that. We need to go again – you're absolutely right, there's more to do, and I want to see the State expand the eviction moratorium through this crisis, passed this crisis at least several months. But I think it is true that when the voices of tenants and the voices of the City are heard in Albany, that we often see those changes. So, we're going to keep fighting for that. I want to make sure all City agencies are doing all we can to keep people in their homes, to stop evictions. There's a lot we do all the time to do that in normal times, we'll keep doing that. And I want to emphasize, Jillian, anybody who is faced with eviction can call 3-1-1 and get legal help right away, because we do not want to see evictions in the middle of this crisis. So, we will use every tool we have to support individual tenants to stop evictions. All City agencies know they should do anything and everything to stop evictions and we'll keep working on the State to get the changes we need.

Moderator: Next we have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Mayor: Jeff?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you, Jeff?

Question: A question – in terms of the budget deficit, you know, there's been some critique about that the City hasn't dug deep enough for cuts and other budget saving measures. I'm wondering if you think there's more to be done on that front in order to help the City close its budget deficit?

Mayor: Jeff, you know, in the executive budget in April, we did between a variety of cuts and savings measures $2.7 billion – that's a lot of money. We, obviously, have shown the ability over a years to make a variety of savings, actions, PEG programs, whatever it takes. Right now, we're getting to the point where if we have to sustain further cuts, it's going to start to affect all agencies. And I've said that at the level we're at now, Jeff, $9 billion in missing revenue. That leads us to a horrible place where we would be cutting back basic services, cutting back personnel, furloughs, layoffs, things we do not want to see, things that go against everything that we believe is right for New York City and would only contribute to the economic crisis and the hardship of our people. So, right now, what we need is to get that stimulus done in Washington. Every city and state in America, I believe, truly deserves to be made whole. We did not do anything that caused us to lose billions upon billions of dollars in revenue. The federal government owes it to the cities and states of America to make us whole so we can lead this recovery. And Albany can help backstop that by giving us the borrowing authority, which, by the way, Jeff, is multi-year authority, because this is going to be a multi-year crisis. That $7 billion we're asking for could be used at any point over years. We, again, only would use it as a last resort, but I want to be clear, the upcoming fiscal year, a huge budget problem. The next fiscal year, I can tell you right now, is also going to have a huge fiscal problem. We're not going to see the revenue recover anytime soon. So, we're going to do everything we can to keep the City moving forward. But a strong recovery correlates to having those basic services in place and keeping our public workforce strong. If we have no choice, we will make tough decisions, but it won't be that – it won't help us recover if we have to make those tough decisions.

Moderator: Next, we have David from Gothamist. David.

Mayor: David?

Question: Hi, can you hear me? Hi, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes. Can you hear me, David? David.

Question: Okay, I can hear you now.

Mayor: There you go.

Question: Can you hear me? Okay, great. Good morning. I have a question for Dr. Katz on contact tracing. You mentioned previously that the contact tracing program will use a DOH mandatory quarantine order under a [inaudible] if it has to. Can you give me an example of what triggers a forced quarantine into a hotel and what happens if someone refuses a hotel room for a variety of reasons?

Mayor: So, let me start, David, and then we'll turn to – Dr. Katz is on the line, Dr. Ted Long, who's Executive Director of Test and Trace, and Dr. Amanda Johnson who is running the Take Care initiative which is focused on the need for – isolate those who need that help, that safe separation. So, any of them can jump in. But I want to really make clear the approach we're taking, David – we believe the vast, overwhelming majority of New Yorkers are going to act the same way they've acted throughout this entire crisis. If you had asked me at the beginning, was it going to be easy for people to stay home or to do social distancing or to put on face coverings, I'd say these are really going to be immense challenges. But overwhelmingly we have seen New Yorkers abide by these rules because they understand it’s about their safety, their family’s safety, everyone they care about and their entire community. And people have really been paying attention and doing what's right. So, we take a positive view here, David, the positive view that once folks know this is what will keep everyone safe. No one wants to inadvertently infect a member of their family and risk lives. No one wants to see one of their elders in danger, but folks need to know they will get the support. And that's particularly the crucial work that Dr. Amanda Johnson and her team are doing when we say Take Care. We're really to help people know this'll be a very positive, supportive experience, well facilitated, everything for free so that folks are comfortable if they have to isolate at home or if they need to go to a hotel. So, that's where I see this going. I think the overwhelming reality will be a positive voluntary approach. If we don't find that we always will consider all other options. But I want to accent the positive because that's what we've seen from the people of this city. Dr. Katz, Dr. Long, Dr. Johnson who wants to jump in?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: I'll start, Mr. Mayor. I think you've explained it very well. This is not a new issue. It has often been necessary in public health for people to isolate or quarantine and our experience overwhelmingly with other diseases such as tuberculosis is that people do the right thing. And simply knowing that there is an order that can be made is another way of telling people, look, you need to stay, you don't want us to make any orders, it's really not necessary, it would have the same effect if you would just stay in your room. I don't think this is going to turn out to be a problem for us.

Mayor: Dr. Long. Dr. Johnson will you want to say?

Dr. Amanda Johnson, Health + Hospitals: I can [inaudible] –

Mayor: Go ahead.

Dr. Johnson: – And just echo the sentiments expressed by Mayor de Blasio and by Dr. Katz. I think my experience as a primary care doctor does reinforce that people are willing and ready to do the right thing if you support them. And so I want to bring the same approach and try to understand what the barriers are, what are the realities faced by new Yorkers that are preventing them from doing what they would want to do, and bringing all of the resources we have to bear as a City, as a health care organization to make this a possibility for them, and see them through this very time-limited period that is going to enable us to reopen the city and have them get back to their families and their communities. And so, it's the investment in things like food in the hotel or food delivery, access to medication, access to mental health support and physical health supports, as we've mentioned before. You tell us what it is that you need to make the right choice. I want to take on responsibility for making that work for you.

Mayor: Thank you very much. Alright.

Moderator: Next we have Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Hey, everybody, how you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Mark, how are you doing?

Question: I’m doing good. So, I had a couple of questions. One was, did we have a count as to how many local businesses have so far gone out of business or won't be reopening when June 7th rolls around? And the other is about enforcement. There's more cars on the road, there's more people out. And I know a lot of stores have not opened up yet, but how does enforcement change now? Is it still quite as stringent or is it going to be more targeted like say in those bar areas that you mentioned or in religious communities?

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Mark. Very good question. So, let me say the – on the enforcement side, we're going to be going through in the next couple of days, the way our agencies are going to approach the enforcement. So, I think that the State has set up – I just want to sort of put it in frame here – the State set up very clear indicators. We've set up clear indicators and thresholds. So, that's telling us where we are. We're going to watch those every single day. We're not there until we're there. I keep saying I'm confident from everything I'm seeing, first or second week of June. But everything's going to be based on these objective numbers and it's a lot of different measures that all have to hit at once. And I think that's a really good high bar that has kept us safe. I think the fact that we've come this far as directly related to setting that high bar. Now as you open up, what we're going to do is, of course, we'll pay special attention whenever we see a problem area. We had some issues in some parks. We've found some good ways to address that. We've had some issues with some bars. We've found some good ways to address it, but this last weekend, you know, three-day long weekend, we had very few issues between parks, bars, restaurants, beaches. We just didn't have a lot of problems because I think people, one, are overwhelmingly doing the right thing and, two, when they see that there's some real enforcement out there, it works. We're not trying to be heavy handed, we're just trying to be present and that has been working.

So, now what happens in this next phase is, you know, you're talking about a very substantial number of businesses in phase one, many more in phase two. In phase one, the State rules about the exact way to comport yourself as a business are very clear. They're very helpful. We're going to now be putting the enforcement behind it. So, each agency designated for a certain type of business will go out in the very beginning, communicate with those businesses. We're talking to a lot of them now to figure out what they need, how it's going to work, what they're concerned about. But once they start, we'll be in regular touch, inspections as per usual, going out to make sure that all the State protocols are being followed, and everything that we need is being followed. And we're going to, again, have the spirit of, we want to make it work with businesses. We want them to succeed, we want the economy to restart, so it's going to be light touch and a lot of communication and problem solving focused. If we see a problem, we want the business to address it. We don't want to penalize, we want to fix problems. So, that's what the enforcement will look like. But a lot more detail will come out on that shortly.

On a number of businesses, Mark, I don't have a specific number for you today. I'll get a sense from our small business team what we're seeing. Look so many businesses have been thrown for a loop, but I'm hearing across all of our advisory councils with the business community, the vast majority want to come back and believe they can. And, you know, I think there's a huge amount of pent up demand that has kind of come out last night. It was very interesting, Mark, talking to folks in the retail sector. These are larger businesses, but they say what they're seeing around the country is a huge amount of pent up retail demand that kind of exploded once stores could open again. And they expect that here as well. So, we know some businesses are going to have a very tough time coming back, but I don't want to count them out yet. Small business owners are incredibly resilient and I think a lot of demand will start to be unleashed very soon. Phase one especially in the retail sector, you know, with the pickup model. But then phase two is, you know, a fuller opening. And I'm confident a lot of businesses are going to find the way back as a result of that.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next. We have Rosa from The City.

Question: Hi, can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yeah. Rosa, how are you doing?

Question: I'm okay. How are you Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Good.

Question: So my questions about testing – two pronged. First, is H + H concerned about false negatives in antigen testing? I understand what you're supposed to do with, relatedly, like with a positive test, you stay home. But if you have a negative test for COVID, for having it right now, not the antibody test, what should you be doing with that information? Does that change your plans in terms of seeing other people or going out to do some kind of work? I mean, so those questions are kind of – that's a two prong kind of thing. I've heard that antigen testing can have like 29 percent false negative. What does that mean for basing decisions off of this?

Mayor: Rosa. Great question. I'm going to turn to Dr. Katz and Dr. Long, but let me just quick frame and say you're really hitting something very, very important here. We have said throughout this process, whether it's antibodies that should, with a good antibody test, tell you if you've been exposed before. But that doesn't tell you to change your habits. You still need to take precautions. You still need to observe social distancing, face coverings, PPEs if you work in certain areas. The same with a negative diagnostic test, it doesn't mean ballgame over. It means at that moment you don't have the disease. But you still should take all the other precautions because that's what keeps people safe. And on top of that, Rosa, if you're symptomatic, even if you haven't taken the test, you need to take precautions. So I think you are raising a real important question that we have to keep telling people, stay safe no matter what the test result is the answer. But to your specific question about false positives, Dr. Katz, Dr. Long?

President Katz: Thank you Mr. Mayor. We are aware that this test, like all medical tests is not perfect. So clinical judgment is always required. When I've taken care of patients with COVID, even if they are negative, if I strongly believe they have COVID because of their symptoms and exposures, I'll still tell them that they need to isolate. So it has to do – what steps you take depends on what is the likelihood that your patient has COVID. And the test is very useful, but it's true that if they're very likely to have COVID, that a negative test does not make that impossible. As you say, Mr. Mayor, making sure that everybody maintains social distance and face coverings is a great way for us all to protect one another. And we will make decisions about isolation based on best clinical judgment and the test. Thank you.

Mayor: Mitch and Ted, I might have misheard the question because I thought it was also about false positives. Freddi Goldstein's handed me a note that she thinks it's also to refer to primarily about false negatives, which is obviously a very real issue. I still think all roads lead to the idea of you're taking precautions no matter what and if you are symptomatic, you're acting on it. But talk about false negatives as well.

President Katz: Well, again, I'll start and Ted – so my answer was about false negatives. False positives. We don't again, no test is perfect, but if that test comes back with evidence of a COVID antigen, we're going to ask that person to isolate, definitely. The question though, does come up what to do when you think somebody has COVID based on their symptoms and or exposure and the test is negative test. Test is not perfect and we will, Mr. Mayor in those cases ask people to still isolate.

Mayor: Ted, you want to add?

Dr. Ted Long, Health + Hospitals: Yeah, no. The only thing I would add to that we look at your symptoms right then and there when we're first seeing you. So we're not waiting for the test results to come back. If you're symptomatic and your doctor believes that you keep your family safe by either self-separating at home or going to a hotel. And then if the result comes back but your doctor still believes that you have the coronavirus we're going to treat you as such.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Last question for today. We have Robert from Bronx Chronicle.

Mayor: Robert? Robert, can you hear me?

Moderator: Just, we've almost got up. There we go.

Mayor: Robert?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: There we go.

Question: Okay. I caught the virus on the subway in March, coming home from one of your press conferences. I recovered quickly. I took the antibody test on Saturday, May 16th from BioReference in a free – which is a free City provider in the Bronx. When I tried to get to my results online, I was transferred to a patient portal which requested, I agreed to an extremely long list of terms which included to becoming one of BioReferences patients, allowing them to share my information with third parties, which they could not guarantee the security of my information, that they could change the terms of the agreement at any time, which included an area that mentioned payment of services. I refused to those terms and called BioReference where I was told the only way to get my test results would be to agree to the agreement. What is going on? You said you go in, get tested and get test results. How do I get my test results? Who is BioReference sharing information with?

Mayor: Well, I appreciate the question. I'll turn to Dr. Katz, but first say, first of all, I'm glad you are better. And that's what matters most. But I, this is a very fair question to make sure there's not some confusion. So Dr. Katz, in terms of obviously all positive tests in New York City from all sources are reported to the Department of Health, but in terms of the individual getting their test results how do we address this question of the terms and conditions and make sure that someone gets their test results or if they have a concern about the terms and conditions there’s someone to talk it through with?

President Katz: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. I may also ask Dr. Long to help because my experience has not included this. When my patients have gotten testing, they're able to look up the results themselves through our MyChart application and find out what their result is. I've had multiple, my patients who've gone for testing and looked up their own results. I can see their results and call patients with the results. I'm less familiar with the antibody program. Dr. Long, can you explain?

Dr. Long: Yeah, so BioReference is a laboratory, so we'd have to know the specifics about where you were tested to understand the link to the laboratory. They're not a provider though. So we'd be happy to follow up with that offline. But just to emphasize with Dr. Katz was saying, anybody that gets a test in our system or part of our program, you're in our system. A clinician is going to call you to talk about the result. But starting on June 1st, through our program, for anybody in New York City who has a positive PCR or diagnostic tests, our traces are going to call you, explain everything and see what you need to either safely, self-separate at home or go to a hotel during that one phone call. So if you could give us specifics, happy to look into it, but our program is going to be calling everybody [inaudible].

Mayor: Yeah, Robert, I'm glad you raised it. The team will follow up with you. As I was saying, I think one of the issues here in the language that you experienced was because it is a requirement for each testing company to share the information with the City Department of Health. And so that language probably referred to that. But I understand your hesitation about it. We need to make sure that people are not in any way confused by that language. So I think you've raised something here that if you experienced it and you were concerned about it, probably other New Yorkers are too. So I'm glad you raised it, I thank you for that. And Mitch, Ted, let's look carefully at the tests that people are taking through the Test and Trace initiative and make sure that if there's any accompanying language, it's clear to people and not confusing and not in any way off putting, because that obviously would defeat the purpose. So Robert, thank you for raising it. We'll talk to you about your specific situation, but also I think this will help us make sure there's not confusion for other people going forward.

And let me wrap it together today and simply say, the whole idea here is to make sure people are tested, that they know testing is more and more available. It's free, it's easy, it's something they can do quickly. It’s something that is going to be more and more available in their own neighborhood. We want to keep building out. The tracing, obviously all of that is a free service. The tracer identifies the contacts in someone's life who they've had a close contact with, quickly connects with those folks. Those folks get a test, any support they need. Again, even folks who are symptomatic get addressed because we want to protect them obviously in the people around them. And the Take Care initiative, so important, all free, supporting people either in their home or in a hotel. The idea is to make it a seamless process. Whatever you need, it's there for you. It happens quickly, it happens well and you know you're being taken care of. We keep doing that over and over and over again. That's how we beat back this disease and that's how we move forward in this city. And everyone will be a part of it. Everyone will be supporting each other during it, just as New Yorkers have done so far and so well in getting us to move forward in this crisis. So, this is how we take the next big step. Thank you, everybody.

2020-05-28 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, I've been talking for weeks now about what you have achieved through your hard work, and I think it's time that New Yorkers see their hard work rewarded. Look, it's not easy to do any of the things that we've asked of all of you in a place like this, the most densely populated place in the country, a place or so used to being close together, a place where we live in tight quarters and a lot of families live particularly in their own apartments, in their own homes, in very tight quarters. We've asked you to do a lot. We've asked you now over the last two months to shelter in place to practice social distancing, to wear face coverings. It's a lot, and it hasn't been easy. It hasn't been easy for a single day. Everyone's been making huge adjustments and I've talked to so many New Yorkers who have told me it's been a struggle, but despite that you've done it. You've done it to a remarkable degree, and because you've done it so well, we're now actually in a position to start talking about opening things up step by step, phase by phase. And I've been cautious. I think anyone who's been watching these broadcasts knows that I take a very cautious conservative view based on a focus on health and safety of how and when we take each step to restart. But the fact is that you've proven it through your actions that we are getting to the point very, very soon where we can take the first step to restart in phase one. So, you have earned it. Everybody's thinking about it, everybody's talking about it, now we can really get ready for the real work, the tangible work of taking that big first step. So, I want to talk to you today about what that's going to look like and how the city of New York's going to help people into this first phase and through this first phase. And then if we keep doing things right, well beyond that to more and more reopening, and more and more steps towards a better situation for all of us.

So, first of all, it's important to remind everyone, we say restart, we do not mean rushing back to something that we used to think of as normal. We do not mean flicking a switch and suddenly everything's where it was again, of course not. We have to make sure this virus is in check. We've come a long way. We're not going to blow it now. We're going to constantly make sure we are holding back this disease, and we're going to make sure that we are putting the steps in place all the time to avoid it ever having a resurgence. That's not just now. That's at every point along the way. We don't get a memo from the disease telling us when it plans on resurging when it plans on a boomerang, we have to be fighting every day to make sure it doesn't happen. Now, we've talked in recent days about our test, trace, and take care effort. That is central to this, because that is the offensive. That's how you make sure you're pushing back the disease on top of everything all New Yorkers have done. Now a systematic effort based on examples from around the world, but bigger than anything we've ever seen in the history of this city or this country, a systematic effort to trace every single case, follow through, make sure people have the help they need to separate safely. This is a game changer, because it's going to be done on a vast scale and it's going to keep constraining the disease. Doing that is part of how we restart smartly, and that test, trace, and take care initiative grows with every week ahead so it gets bigger and bigger, more and more impact reducing the spread of the disease.

But now, we should talk about what restart looks like on the ground and phase one, and I want to say, I really give a lot of credit to the state of New York for a clear articulation of what is, what are the industries that are part of phase one, and then how each industry should think about the practicalities of reopening. The fact is the State gives out this guidance, and anyone who hasn't seen it, I really want to encourage you to look at it. It's written in a very helpful, straightforward manner. And this is for all of the industries that will restart in phase one. As I said, based on what we know today, that will be in either the first or second week of June. Anyone looking for this information can go to the State website ny.gov/industries-reopening-phase. And it lays out very practically what you need to do if you're a business owner, what you need to do to actually make it come together.

Now, I've spoken to a lot of business owners, small businesses, bars, restaurants, retail, and some of the owners of some of the biggest businesses in New York City. Everyone wants clarity. Everyone wants to be safe. I have not heard a single reckless person. I have not heard a single person say, oh no, I'm just going to open, you know, I don't care what happens or I don't want to follow all these rules. No, people understand the rules are for everyone's safety. The rules are to allow us to keep reopening. So, there's a lot of willingness to work with the rules. A lot of understanding. You know, Rome wasn't built in a day. It's going to take time to figure this out. But businesses want to reopen. The people work at their businesses want to come back. People are ready for this, but they need to know it will be safe. So, actually what I see, is a lot of people moving in the same direction, wanting to restart, wanting to do it the right way, but a course, the question is what does it really look like on the ground? So, these guidelines are a great starting point.

First of all, they tell us what we need to know about which industries. Construction, all the construction that's not going on now, that restarts. Manufacturing restarts, wholesale work restarts, and retail that hasn't been in that essential category. So, we know what essential has been, it has been pharmacies, grocery stores, supermarkets, but now we're talking about a whole range of other retail clothing stores, office supply stores, furniture stores, you name it, but restricted to curbside pickup or in store pickup. That means not wandering the aisles shopping or lingering or comparing things, but you know, placing an order and coming and getting it. So, it's a quick transaction with limited contact between people.

Okay now, that four whole parts of our economy, manufacturing, construction, wholesale, and the parts of retail that haven't been opened yet, again, with restrictions. Well, what does it mean in terms of the number of people who will be coming back to work in the five boroughs? We've been working on estimates of that, it’s imperfect because no one knows for sure what each company will do. We're surveying companies constantly, but we don't know the final choices each will make until the time comes. Some are dealing with huge economic challenges obviously, but the vast majority say they're ready. They've been out of action now for a few months, but not forever. So, a lot of them are really ready to come back. Obviously, some workers are ready to come back, some are not for a variety of reasons. And of course, where companies can continue to do their work remotely. There's a lot of advantages to that right now. But these sectors, as you can imagine, tend to be the sectors where you need people in person. But on top of that, they were chosen because they’re the sectors where you can create a lot of physical separation, you can make sure that people are safe.

So, what does it mean? We think a minimum of 200,000 New Yorkers will be coming back to work, a maximum of 400,000. That's quite a range. A lot of other parts of the country that would be their entire city. But here, because we're in the great unknown, we've never been through a pandemic like this. Certainly not in the last hundred years. We can only give you a range to begin, but we're going to know really soon what the truth is. But even if you say 200,000 people, that's a lot of employees coming back to work. So, we want to make sure it's done the right way, and we want to emphasize safety throughout.

So now, let's talk about how we make it work, business by business. Every business has a set of rules that fit it's reality, the nature of its business. And so, there are very specific, you know, nuts and bolts rules that people can follow and make sense of. Now, let's talk about some of them so you get a grounding of what it means, physical distance to begin with. The whole concept here is you have to keep that six-foot difference. Distance, I should say. Look, there may be moments where people have to come closer together. Sometimes it's just the nature of the job. Sometimes there's an immediate situation that people have to deal with, but the goal is as much as possible, keep people six feet apart. On top of that, keep the occupancy in each location. Think about a manufacturing plant, keep it to under 50 percent of its normal capacity so you have room for people to spread out. If there's tight spaces, elevators, an area around a cash register, keep it to one person at a time to the maximum extent possible. These are sort of common-sense rules, and that look, it's all about limiting contact, limiting the potential spread of the disease. Obviously, PPE’s, some companies need more advanced PPE’s, but the vast majority just need a simple face covering for their employers. Employees, I should say, but it's crucial that every company makes sure every employee has one. They need to provide them for free to their employees. They need to make sure they're wearing them. Hygiene, cleaning, regular cleaning of any shared surfaces. That's a crucial part of this. Just constantly over and over again going back on a schedule, cleaning those surfaces. Every day there has to be healthcare screening. Now, that can take different forms. The state guidance is clear. It might be a temperature check in the morning as people come to their place of work. It might be a questionnaire that people fill out each morning just talking about their situation. If there's anything that seems symptomatic in what they're feeling, but it's a constant every day check on how employees are doing. Stating the obvious, any employee that isn't feeling well should stay home. But the important thing is to set up some rigorous screening at each and every employer to test each employee coming in, in one form or another check to see how they're doing. Check to see if anyone shouldn't come into the workplace that day.

Now, absolutely crucial, as with everything in life communication, lots of information, putting up signage, constant updates, making sure that employees are reminded of the rules, making sure there’s social distance markers around that they can see that remind them, you know, this is your workstation, stay six feet away from the next person. All of that, that constant showing people exactly how it works is part of what makes this work for everyday working people. We're all going to learn together that, you know look, our business community is extraordinary in this city when you're talking a mom and pop store, bodega, right on up to the biggest businesses. One thing businesses do is they adapt, they create, they move with the times, they move with new conditions. That's the nature of business. Our small businesses know that better than anyone. So, I am convinced our business community will work it out, but now I think it's important that there are city government give them a helping hand. So, I want to talk about the ways that we're going to help, and also the ways that we have to make sure the rules are followed.

So, overwhelmingly we're talking about helping, clarifying, educating, providing, providing pointers. We will obviously do enforcement if we see problems. The first goal is always with a light touch to remind to point the right way. If we see any company that's persistently breaking the rules, we can take more aggressive action. But I don't think you're going to see a lot of that, we haven't been seeing that in this city, overwhelmingly across the board and you're talking about everyone's health and safety. So, any company that doesn't respect the health and safety of its employees, well the people who work there and management are putting themselves in danger too. I think there's a real not only the right thing to do here, but there's a self-interest in everyone's part within the same company and getting it right.

Okay. So, we're going to provide a lot of support, of course, all support we provide to businesses will be free and it will come from different city agencies for construction. The support will be primarily from our department of buildings for the other sectors, primarily from our small business services department and from our department of consumer and worker protection. So, what are we going to do? First, we're going to publish industry guides, we've got the guidance from the State that's really helpful. We're then going to add to it with simple, plain English examples of how people can do this work, how they can implement these rules. What you do in a clothing store is different than what you do on a construction site, we're going to try and make it plain and easy to use examples. We're going to get that out next week and provide it to every business, that's a part of phase one.

Second, we're going to start a business restart hotline and the restart hotline is going to be real human beings who know the rules and know how to facilitate and help businesses think through it, that starting next week as well. Any business that's trying to understand the rules can't quite figure out how to implement them is confused about how much is good enough. How many times a day do you have to clean? How do you create the right line for customers waiting to buy something? We will work with each and every business through this hotline. If there's something that they need resolved, it could maybe be done right over the phone, if we need to send out a city official to work with them to come up with a solution. For example, if they're trying to figure out how to do a line outside their store the right way and socially distanced and they're trying to figure out how much of the sidewalk they can take up, we'll work with them on that right there in person to sort it out. So, that hotline will start next week as well. In the meantime, as we've said, many times, any small business owner dealing with any problem we talked about those loan programs from the federal government or any other challenge of course can call 3-1-1 for help. We'll have a specific hotline though that'll be all about restart and how to navigate it.

Third, we're going to have a team of small business advocates and compliance advisors. So, we're going to send a team of city personnel out to businesses to check in to make sure they understand, to see what kind of help they need sorting out. So, we'll do some of over the phone, but we want the ability to immediately, if people need in-person help send teams of city officials to do that, to work that through. We want this to work, and so if someone needs help in the business, we want to see businesses succeed, we want them to start and start safely. If they need someone to come through and literally do a walk through with them, we'll send out help to do that.

And then finally, our sector councils have been amazing. These advisory groups, we're going to keep that going through this phase one, but through all the phases and beyond, they're going to be crucial to us understanding what's working, what's not, what needs to be adjusted. We're going to be able to explain, you know, what's going on with the health situation and figure out if we have to make any adjustments. They're also going to help us figure out the long-term efforts to help small businesses and larger businesses come back strong. Again, no lack of confidence in our business community that they can take the skills they've always relied on and bring them to bear here and come back strong. But they need to know the city is going to be with them every step of the way and we will be.

Okay. So, I said the goal in each case is support, facilitate, educate, provide information, do those walkthroughs, but let's also talk about when that's not enough. If we see problems and they're not being addressed, we're going to go out more aggressively to resolve the problems. Now again, the goal here is not to find businesses, not to shut down businesses, but to educate and support businesses, but we got to get it right. If a business is having a consistent problem with health and safety, we're going to give them a chance to correct it, but we're not going to wait forever because it is about the health and safety of their employees and then ultimately all of us when it comes to stopping the spread of this disease department of buildings, they'll be out there for the construction industry. For other sectors, it will be our office of special enforcement and depending on the issue, sanitation department, department of consumer and worker protection, small business services, or it could rise up to something that involves the police department, Sheriff's office or the FDNY. So, what we will do is what we normally do, but modified for this crisis there'll be random inspections, there'll be agencies going out, checking on the businesses, looking for how things are going, but with a supportive attitude. I want to be clear about this. This is not gotcha, this is not something where we want to find a problem, we're not intending to give fines in the first instance. This is, hey, you got an issue here, let's fix this issue together and every employer who works with it, great, we will be supportive. If department buildings goes out to a construction site and workers are not wearing face coverings. They're going to say, let's get the face coverings on right now, and if they see it happening, there's no problem, we move on. If we don't see compliance, of course we reserve the right if we need to use fines, if we need to take even more aggressive actions we can. That's not what we want to do, we just want to solve problems. We just want to get these businesses up and running. We want to protect health and safety and we can do that together, the right way, that is absolutely the goal and I believe overwhelmingly that's going to be what will happen.

Okay, that's phase one. We're going to have a lot more to say on it, I assure you over the next days, because we're still not there yet. I believe all indicators suggest it'll be announced in the first or second week in June. All businesses are paying attention, they're hearing from the state, they're hearing from the city, they're seeing that this is all coming down to this, so they have time to get ready, but we're going to work very closely with them to make sure all the details get worked out. But some of them will only get worked out once businesses are actually on the ground and open and that's okay. We know we'll work it through in practice, that's phase one.

Now, at the same time as we're getting ready to begin phase one, we're already looking ahead to the phases that will come thereafter. And one of the things I'm hearing the most from business leaders about is they're paying a lot of attention to what will happen with our schools because that will say so much to them about obviously how the city is doing in general, but also if their employees can depend on sending their kids back to school in September and that will tell them a lot about their business planning as well. We are doing work every single day and I've said it really clearly, it's going to be a plan A to reopen school as normal, but with lots of other alternative plans, depending on what the healthcare situation is, there'll be a plan B, C, D I assure you, we are adamant though we want to work with the hope that we can get as close to a normal school reopening as possible for September 10th. We had a great conversation last night with our education advisory council. Now this involves a lot of key stakeholders in our public schools, folks in the department education the unions who represent the people who do the work of education parent organizations, but also beyond our public schools, religious schools, private and independent schools. Higher education is represented by some of the leaders of the great higher education institutions in this city. We're all talking together about what it's going to take and many, many organizations as well that provides support for our kids and our youth in a variety of ways. Everyone thinking together, what do we got to do this summer to get kids ready? What we ought to do educationally, what do I do in terms of their health and their mental health, not just their physical health, their mental health. How do we hit the ground running in September? Incredibly good thinking going on and more scenarios than you could count that people are preparing for because we know it's the right thing to do for our kids to be ready and be ready to make quick moves depending on what happens with the healthcare situation. But I'm telling you, it's also going to be crucial to everything in restart everything in our economic recovery to get the school equation right. So that conversation keeps happening every day, and I'm so thankful to all the members of that advisory council are putting a lot of time and energy into helping us get it right and helping us figure out what will really work.

Okay, now we're thinking about where we move ahead or thinking about how we create a change for everyone in this city. And we're always thinking about the impact this crisis is having on the most vulnerable New Yorkers. So, we plan to help everyone, the planning is universal. At the same time, we know some people are bearing the brunt. We know some people are particularly vulnerable and certainly every day, but particularly in a crisis, homeless New Yorkers are vulnerable. So, let's talk about what we have learned about this new effort in the subway system, the nightly cleaning and the impact it has had on our ability to serve the homeless. We now have three full weeks of data, three full weeks of evidence, and it's pretty striking. So, I want to give you an update since the beginning of the nighttime cleaning shutdowns, we have had 1700 individuals except help 1,700 encounters that led to a homeless person accepting help. 506 unique individuals, so that means not multiple times, but people who specifically took help, 506 unique individuals, accepted placement and shelter for some period of time, 281 are still in shelter right now. Now again, for all of us who have worked on these issues for a long time, 281 people have come off the street and just the last three weeks and staying off the street is a remarkable number and that is a beginning of something much bigger as we seek to end permanent street homelessness in this city. Very importantly, another 432 accepted hospital care to address medical situations, that's huge. So something in the midst of this crisis, in the midst of all the pain, all the challenges, something actually good has happened here where we're finding a new way to serve homeless New Yorkers and a lot of them are accepting the offer and hopefully are well on their way now to changing their lives and never living on the streets again.

Now, I talked about some of the most vulnerable among us, I'll tell you, and this is another issue I worked on for a long time. There's nothing more important to me than our children, this is what so much of the work of this administration has been about. And some kids deal with particularly tough circumstances, some kids have to deal with in their own homes, threats to them. And this is where our administration for children's services comes in and they do amazing work. And I want to highlight them today because they don't get enough attention, they don't get enough appreciation in any time. But I got to tell you how hard it has been for our ACS workers who go out there. Our child protective specialist, the folks who focus their lives on protecting the lives of kids and under very complex circumstances. Imagine what it takes to understand if a child is in danger in their own home and how to navigate that and how to protect that child. Very complex work, very trying, difficult work, and it's been made more difficult by the pandemic. People can't get out to homes the same way, and obviously home life has been disrupted and it's become very tense in many homes. We've got 3,000 child protective specialists at ACS, they do the Lord's work, they do amazing work. And thank you to all of you. Thank you to everyone at ACS because whatever your job is, ACS, it is about protecting and uplifting children. So, I want to thank everyone at the administration for children's services and a particular appreciation to those protective workers. This is an important time to take stock. May is national “Foster Care Month,” it's a time to thank all of the folks who work in foster care as well; the caseworkers and the folks who choose to be foster care parents, really crucial role in our society. Everyone in this, everyone in this area is unsung. We don't talk about the incredibly important role that foster parents play in the lives they have saved and turned around. We don't talk about the workers who make it possible. We should more often because it's an area that really, really matters to a lot of kids who found themselves in a tough circumstance, but there are adults who are there to pick them up and help them move their lives forward. So, thank you to all.

Okay, it is time today to look at our indicators and thresholds and number one, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID- 19 - good number today – congratulations, New York City, we have to stay under 200 we’re at only 59 today. So, we're showing some real consistency there. That means what you're doing is working. Daily, number two, daily number of people in our Health + Hospitals ICUs - so we want to get under 375 or 421. We're getting closer. You see that trend line, we are getting closer every day. We're very confident we can get to where we need to be, but we've got some more work to do. And then indicator number three, the percentage of the people tested citywide positive for COVID-19 the threshold is 15 percent. That we stay below 15 percent we can make it work, we can protect lives, we can keep the city moving. Here is a number that I am really happy to see – happens to be my personal favorite number – number six, and we have never been that low in these reports. This is a very good day, six percent positive and we're doing more and more testing. I told you about 27,000 tests per day and growing constantly. Here's the interesting thing a lot of folks have asked as you do more testing, do you expect the numbers to go up or down? To date as we do more and more and more testing basically the numbers are going down. The more New Yorkers we're reaching, the better picture we're getting at what's happening in the city; the fewer people were finding tests positive as a percentage. That's a great sign for the future of the city. So, congratulations, really good news on that number – a very good day.

Okay, a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q & A. As a reminder, we have also on the line Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, Dr. Barbot, Commissioner Steve Banks, President and CEO of the New York CDC, James Patchett and Commissioner Doris. First question today goes to Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Wanted to just ask if there is a specific date for this phase one that the city is looking at? I know you've said in the first, first or second week of June, but as businesses are looking at this and trying to prepare, is there a specific date that they should be planning on? My second question is about the budget. And about what you talked about yesterday in terms of the city's borrowing capability. And there from what I've reported on and my colleagues have reported on that's coming out of Albany, is that legislators are concerned about the idea of giving New York City what they describe as a blank check without any real oversight over how that money would be spent. What could you say at this moment you would be willing to do as a compromise? Is it a financial control board kind of situation so that there is some sort of oversight if you are indeed allowed this borrowing capability?

Mayor: Thank you, Gloria. So, let's just do the history first. In the days immediately after 9/11 the legislature convened, Mayor Giuliani at that point asked for a borrowing capacity to protect the city going forward and the legislature unanimously provided it straightforward with an understanding that the city was in crisis. The city needed that ability to keep providing basic services. There was no question about the importance of supporting New York City for the whole state and for all the people of this city. So that history is important because the city took that borrowing capacity, used it as needed, has successfully been repaying and obviously we've seen the city succeed coming out of that tragedy - succeed in an unprecedented manner. So what do we know about New York City pre coronavirus? We know that the city was at our all-time high unemployment. We know that we had driven down crime to a level we hadn't seen in since the 1950s. We know that New York City had become one of the great global economic capitals like never before; a great tech capital just in every way, shape or form New York City was on the right path. Much stronger fundamentals than even existed 20 years ago at the time of the tragedy of 9/11, but the city took that borrowing authority then, used it wisely, allowed it to come back strong. That's what I think can and should happen again now. Now that said, I always respect when there are concerns amongst legislators and I was a legislator myself so I've had good conversations yesterday with a Speaker Carl Heastie with Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and we're going to keep that dialogue going. I am very certain we'll come to something that makes sense for everyone, very, very positive productive conversations. So I'm not going to go into any details or projections. I'm going to tell you, I'm confident we will get to a good solution so that we have that option. Again, the other thing, Gloria, is we don't want to borrow. We would only do it if we have to, but right now we have no guarantee of if, when, how there will be a federal stimulus to help cities and states. But we do have a guarantee; we have to pass the city budget by June 30 and I want to keep city services going. I want to speed this recovery. We need resources to do that. So I'm quite confident we will work something out.

On the restart, restart date – no – the answer is simply no, Gloria, we do not have a specific date. I think I've given people plenty of warning multiple times now for days and days you can expect it to be in the first or second week of June if the numbers continue to hold in most cases or progress. We've got one city, a threshold number we got to get below - I'm confident on that. We've got two numbers on the state indicators we got to get below - confident on that. We got to get there. Every business that's paying attention knows it’s coming; get ready for it. And as I said, we're going to do all these types of outreach and provide a lot of support, but we're not going to tell people the day in advance. The day it happens is the day the numbers tell us we're there and then everyone would be authorized to move forward and we will all work together to get it done.

Moderator: The next is Juliet from 1010 Wins.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning all. So, so my question is this, regarding what you were just talking about, there are some small businesses that are planning to reopen today and some have already done so quietly. So, are the guidelines you're talking about today apply to them or is this the next phase and can you supply a timeline for small business?

Mayor: Yeah, look, Juliet, I know people are anxious. I know they're frustrated, but I really want to say I have been doing these briefings constantly; the Governor's been doing his briefings constantly. These guidelines really are clear from the state, the indicators, you know, we've got the state indicators, we've got the city indicators. I think it's been abundantly clear what's going on and the basic timeline we're working on. And no, businesses are not supposed to make up their own rules and jump the gun. It just, it's really clear. And I, you know what, if someone thinks that they are the people who get to make the rules for everyone else, I hate to inform them that's not how it works in a democracy. We are all in the middle of a pandemic; we're in the middle of a health crisis. The only way we have gotten things better is by all sticking together and following the rules and it's working as these numbers, excuse me, as these numbers show, its working. So, no, I'm not into free agents. I'm not into people deciding that they get to make the rules and they can do something everyone else can't do. Any business that attempts to open that should not yet be open, we’re going to go, we are going to tell them shut down right now; they shut down, they don't attempt to reopen -fine. If they attempt to stay open, if they ignore the instructions and we're talking about, you know, the city agencies could go out there I've talked about Small Business Services, Department Consumer Worker Protection, Buildings Department, but also obviously Sheriff's Office, Special Enforcement, and NYPD. If one of these agencies shows up and says, you need to shut down now, you're not working within the rules of the state and city and they ignore it, well that starts with a thousand dollar fine and we will keep escalating from there. You're just not allowed to be open unless you're allowed to be open. So, if you're an essential business, you're allowed to be open. When phase one is formally declared by the state and city, that’s when the next group of businesses can open. It's abundantly clear who falls under those categories. Anyone who is not clear, pick up the phone call the state, or call the city and we'll tell you. But it's pretty darn clear, I think looking at this information. So the bottom line is you don't get to jump the gun. And look, we're talking about phase one beginning in a week or two at this point. I don't think it's too much for people to be asked to wait until they get the all clear to do the thing that's safe, to do the thing that's healthy because these numbers, these are about human lives. These numbers tell us what will work and what won't. So, Juliet, that's the bottom line. If you follow the rules, you start in phase one; construction, manufacturing, wholesale and the kind of retail that's not been covered by essential, but again, with restrictions – pick up curbside pickup or in store pickup. Really straightforward – anyone who decides they're above the law, they will feel consequences.

Moderator: Next is Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: Good morning, Marcia. How are you?

Question: I'm good. I'm good. I have actually two questions. The first one has to deal with childcare. Because of the COVID shutdowns, private daycare centers are in danger of closing for good. What kind of guidance and support has the city been giving these business owners so that they'll be able to open and help working families once a city reopens? And my second question has to do with your phase one reopening where you predict that there's going to be about 200,000 to 400,000 people now coming back to work. My question is, how will they get to work? Have you been working with the MTA to figure out a transportation plan or are you expecting them to take their own cars to get to work?

Mayor: Thank you, Marcia. Great questions. I want to say, in a pandemic, in a crisis, we're going to do what it takes to get through this immediate time in this city's history, these next few months as we restart, and that is not implication for what the future of the city it looks like. So, I say that for a reason. I know there's a lot of folks rightfully concerned about the future of mass transit in this city, we have to make the future of mass transit work. We are a mass transit city. We have to become more of a mass transit city in the future, but for the next few months, people are going to make their own choices. Some people are going to be comfortable mass transit, some are not. We just have to be honest and real about that. And you may see people use their cars more in the short term if they have a car or use for-hire vehicles for example. But that's a short-term reality. The long-term future of this city is with a devotion to more and more mass transit. The short-term reality is we are working with the MTA. To your question, Marcia, of course we'll work with the MTA. And it's really straightforward, the MTA’s made great strides in terms of the cleaning of the trains and the buses – that's great. Now, we are seeing more and more frequency of service because they've gotten their personnel back – that's great. But we're still going to have to figure out how to limit the number of people in any specific subway car and any specific bus and we're working with them on what's it going to take to do that. So, that's the conversation happening right now as we anticipate phase one beginning. I think you're going to see a certain number of people who their only option is to take a subway or bus and they'll come back to it. But we still have to set the right limits to make sure that experience safe. We need social distancing. We need face coverings for folks in the subways and buses. We also, again, know there's some people who are just not going to be comfortable in the short-term. And I think to some extent it will be a little bit of a natural sorting out a number of people will eventually come back to subways and buses, but they may not immediately. I think that's one of the things that will keep the ridership a little lower in the short term as we go through this transition. The second point about childcare, we absolutely need childcare to come back, it's necessary to a bigger restart. And yet, at the same time, we got to do this carefully because by its very definition, it's an activity where a lot of people come together. So, we're working on that right now. The City, obviously, directly subsidizes a whole range of childcare. We work very closely with the providers. We obviously [inaudible] right now support for essential workers in terms of childcare. We're going to be building out over time more and more childcare capacity, but that's going to be done with a health and safety focus. So, we'll have more to say on it as we go further. But in terms of childcare looking like it normally does, just like schools looking like they normally do, that's months away. But we are going to work with the childcare providers to make sure that they do make it through, because we're going to need them deeply as we go through the phases ahead.

Moderator: Next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. My question has to do with a bill that's going to be introduced in the Council today that would require the City to locate sites where restaurants could operate outside. So, this would require City workers to do all of this site scoping as opposed to the restauranteur coming to the City with an application that details of how they would operate and the City approving or denying the request. What is your view on this?

Mayor: I have not yet seen the legislation, Henry. Look, I think the City Council shares the same value I do. We're really interested in the notion of outdoors being part of the solution for restaurants and bars. I'm very hopeful – this is not a phase one thing. I'll say it as clear as a bell – phase one we talked about the four industries that are affected by phase one, it's not yet time for restaurants and bars. But we're going to be working constantly with that industry to see what makes sense and I'm hopeful the outdoors could be a big part of the solution. Whether it makes – to your question, which is a great one, whether it makes more sense for the City to delineate space or for the bar and restaurant owners to request space, that's one of the things we're talking through with the bar and restaurant owners. How do they want to do it? What do they need? And I've mentioned before, one of the things that keep coming up in the conversation is how much capacity they need to actually be viable. If you've got a socially distance and you need to run a business, you need a certain number of customers, how much space is that really going to take to get to a kind of break-even point or better? So, those are the conversations we're having right now. We'll certainly work with the Council to sort out what the right approach is. But I want to first and foremost hear what the restaurant and bar owners think will work for them.

Moderator: The next is Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and to everyone else on the call. Two follow-up questions – the first on businesses reopening. We did two back-to-back stories about several businesses in Borough Park that opened. City Hall sent the sheriffs to shut them down. 12 hours later, they were back up and running again. So, just wondering what the situation is there. Have you been issued any fines? And then secondly, I'm wondering why you aren't encouraging people to take mass transit more as you normally would. It seems to give the impression that there's a far greater risk when people go back to work during the pandemic.

Mayor: Well, look, on the second question, Julia. No, I don't agree with that. I don't think it gives that impression in the least. I think first I'm talking to people all day long about what they're experiencing, what they're thinking, and what's quite clear is some people are comfortable going back to mass transit and others are not and that's fine, that's normal. And we've heard from the essential workers even before this that they wanted to see improvements in mass transit. They want to see it cleaner, they wanted to see a more social distancing. They had seen some instances of crowding. We've been working with the MTA on all of this and I think the deep cleaning, the nighttime cleaning's a good example of a smart move. We've got to figure out now as you start to add more and more people to mass transit, how to ensure social distancing and face coverings, which become even more important as more people start to join the system again. Again, the good news is one absolute fixed piece of this equation is we are seeing more and more of the MTA workers come back and more and more service can be provided now. But one, I'm just listening to people and some are ready, some are not; two, I'm not telling people, you know, let's go rushing ahead with something if we don't have all the facts yet. I want to make sure that we have a plan with the MTA to guarantee what's the right number of people we can accommodate in the subway system, in the buses at this point as we go into a major new phase. So, that's something we're working on right now. But I have confidence it's going to sort out in the short term because, first of all, a lot of people are not yet going to come back to work, they'll work from home if they can, even in phase one. Second, you're going to see a certain number of people not yet ready to go on mass transit. I'm confident we can make the pieces fit, but no message is mass transit is our future. But I want to get it right in this first phase. How much ridership we can handle safely?

On the question of Borough Park. No, it's quite clear. We've got nine businesses – as my notes here say, I want to confirm this, but the sheriff department's been working on this – the sheriff's office. Nine businesses shut down in the last 48 hours. If there is repeat offenses – so, when I say shutdown, they were told they could not be open, they stopped operation. If any of them are found in operation again that begins with a $1,000 daily fine. If they're found in violation, again, there's another fine and it keeps escalating from there. So, I don't have any examples of a business that was shut down by the City government and then attempted to reopen. If they do, they're going to get fined. And then if they keep doing it, worse. It is idiotic to try and open a business today that will be legally allowed to open in as little as a week or two. Hey, how about waiting till it's legal and safe and then you can do it the right way. If you don't, you're going to suffer this kind of consequences. It makes no sense.

Moderator: Next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Two questions, first one is about the budget. I have not heard you call for taxes on millionaire, taxes on the rich, mansion tax like you have advocated in the past when you're talking about now borrowing and-or federal stimulus. Is that still something you support or do you think that the current situation, you know, has changed the dynamic and made it more of a concern about the possibility of rich people leaving? Second question, to follow up on Marcia's question, I understand you're talking to the MTA. I understand, you know, obviously people are individuals, they make their own choices, but is there any kind of plan for how many people can safely be on the subway? Is there an estimate of that? You know, London puts it at 15 percent. Do we have any kind of number? And for those who can't safely be on the subway and don't have their own car, what is the guidance to them? What are they supposed to do? Is there any plan to use city streets to somehow make another transportation option?

Mayor: Yeah, Erin, great question. On that, we are working with MTA to determine what exactly is the right amount of capacity that can be handled safely. That is absolutely the crucial issue here. When you think about you want to maintain social distancing, what is that number? And, again, against the good backdrop of more and more service being available. So, what's that number? How do we help facilitate, keeping it to that number on any given a subway car, any given bus? What's it going to take to make sure that that happens consistently? That's the conversation going on right now. And we will keep working on that. There's a meeting this morning with Pat Foye to talk about how the MTA and the City can coordinate to achieve that goal. So, absolutely, we're thinking in that direction and trying to figure out the best way to put it into action.

On the question of taxes on the wealthy. Erin, this is not going to shock you, my basic view has never changed and will not change. Wealthy people in this country do not pay their fair share in taxes. I'll say it again, wealthy people in this country do not pay their fair share in taxes. You'll notice in all the discussion of stimulus, the thing that you might have thought the House and Senate would do first, which would be to rescind the giveaways to the wealthy and corporations in the 2017 tax bill. Obviously, they're not moving to do that. So, we’ve got to be honest. This crisis has brought up immense disparities, not just the health care disparities, not just the racial disparities, but the class disparities as well. The rich keep getting richer even in the midst of this crisis. So, I absolutely believe this is a fair time to talk about higher taxes on the wealthy. I don't see a context for getting it done immediately in Washington or in Albany, but I don't think this topic goes away because we're in the middle of a crisis.

Moderator: Next is Michael Garland from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Michael. How are you?

Question: I'm good. Couple of questions on the debt. What is the plan to pay back that additional debt the City's seeking? And have you had any conversations with the Cuomo administration about any restrictions they might want to put on that debt, if that happens?

Mayor: Michael, if you're talking about long term borrowing, and again, the history is really clear. We have an exact historical template to work from, almost 20 years ago Mayor Giuliani sought from Albany the approval of long-term borrowing. He got it, Mayor Bloomberg implemented it. And that debt was paid off steadily and is a good example of something that was fiscally responsible but helped us as a city to keep moving forward. And the proof is in the pudding. The City's recovery after 9/11, the City’s strength in recent years, the strength of our economy before the coronavirus. There's not a doubt in my mind. And by the way, you know, Giuliani, a Republican, Bloomberg and Independent for most of his time as mayor or Republican, and me as a Democrat, all three of us would agree that borrowing was a good idea after 9/11, it worked exactly as planned. It helped put the City on strong footing to go forward. Here we are again in a situation absolutely unprecedented, even broader in its impact, longer term, in its impact than the horror of 9/11. This can only be compared to the Great Depression in terms of economic impact.

Borrowing capacity makes sense as a last resort. It's long-term borrowing, so it is paid back carefully, slowly over time. We would only use that which we need. We've had again, very productive conversations with the Legislature. We've certainly been talking to the Governor's team, we'll keep talking to them. But I want to establish really clearly that in a world in which we cannot yet depend on a federal stimulus, we have no idea – again, I talked to Senator Schumer about this earlier in the week. There is no vote scheduled in the US Senate and I know he's not happy about that. I'm not happy about that. President Trump is not pushing the Senate. Leader McConnell is not acting. We have a budget deadline. We must have a new budget by law by June 30.

So, we have literally zero guarantee about if, how, when there will be a federal stimulus, how much it would be. We are in fact seeing our loss revenue grow now at $9 billion between the current fiscal year and next and growing. What are we supposed to do with that kind of impact? If stimulus is far from guaranteed. State government has already made cuts, will likely make more, a lot more, if there's no stimulus. What do you do if you don't have the option of some amount of borrowing? You have to do massive cuts, massive cuts to all City agencies. That will undermine any possibility of the right kind of restart and recovery. So, borrowing the right way. It makes sense. I believe we will get there with all the stakeholders in Albany.

Moderator: The next is Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I wanted to know what is your message to Staten Island Republicans who are rallying around the idea of opening Staten Island before the rest of the city? And also calling to reopen specifically small businesses that might not be in phase one reopening industries? If Staten Island hospitals hit the State and City’s reopening goals before the rest of the city, why would you not allow Staten Island or any borough that hit those metrics before the rest of the city to reopen before other parts of New York City?

Mayor: We are one city, Sydney. This is about health and safety and this is about a very careful plan, the State put together, the City put together to save lives. The results speak for themselves. We asked a lot of everyone. I was one of the first leaders in this country to call for shelter-in-place. I'm glad I did. Everything we've done with shelter-in-place, with social distancing, with face coverings, with the restrictions we put on business has helped us to get to the point where we can have a safe restart and sustain it. Anyone who wants to be reckless with this restart as some places in this country, unfortunately have done, will be paid back potentially and tragically if they see a resurgence of this disease. Which then will set us back much, much farther and endanger lives. So we're one city, we have our standards, the State is working with us. They see the wholeness of New York City. This is how we're doing it. These are democratically elected governments. People don't get to make their own laws. They just don't. So, this is the way it happens, especially in a crisis. And we're not asking people to wait long for those in phase one. And then here's the other point -- the better we do at phase one, the smarter we are about sticking to the rules, the faster we get to phase two. Phase two does not need to be a long time away if we do this right. So people need to hang tough so we can protect lives and reopen the right way.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. The next is Kathleen from Patch.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, thank you for taking my question today. My first question is about the subways. Are you talking about reserved seating on the subways? And is there any way to implement that in time for phase one? And my other question is about the situation in Central Park. There's been a lot of calls for legislation to make it a hate crime to call 9-1-1 on law abiding New Yorkers of color. I'm wondering what your stance is on that?

Mayor: I was just appalled by that video. It was literally an effort to criminalize being a black man in America. That's what I saw. It was appalling. When she called 9-1-1 and described an innocent man as if it was an indictment to call him an African American male. It was just, it was heartbreaking. And it just says how much more we got to do to fix things in this city, in this country, that anyone could even think that way. So, it was hateful. There's no question about that. We have very strong hate crimes laws now. I think we're in good, strong shape there. I think there's a very valid question about calling the police for any false claim of a crime. And I don't know the law on that, Kathleen, but that's the direction I would look at. Did she commit an offense by falsely accusing someone? That to me is the thing we need to better ascertain. But it was a disgusting incident. And I would say if the current laws cover that appropriately, great. If they don't cover it appropriately, then I think the notion of creating a new category would make sense.

On the question of reserved seating, look, we're going to talk to the MTA about what they think will make sense. It's their railroad, if you will. I respect greatly Pat Foye, worked with him over many years. The conversation today is going to be about what will work, what makes sense. It's health and safety first. Let's just be clear about that. Kathleen. It's health and safety first. We have got to figure a way to keep those cars, subway cars from being overcrowded. The buses from being overcrowded, what will work? They have to actually run the operation. We want to know what will work for them, how we can support it, how we can work together to get out one message and then make it stick. And if we need to do some enforcement to do that. But I don't want to speculate on something like reserved seating. I don't know if they believe that will work, but we need something. We need something that will limit the number of people that get into each car and into each bus. That's the bottom line.

Moderator: Last question for today, Jake Offenhartz from Gothamist.

Question: Hey, good morning Mr. Mayor. My question is about New York City's contact tracing program. We've heard from some workers who were initially hired remotely who are now being asked to go into the field, or told that their jobs have been put on hold. What accounts for the shift? And of these 1,700 contact tracers you've mentioned, how many are remote workers and how many –

Mayor: Jake? Wait, I couldn't hear part of your question. You said something about being put on hold? Could you please clarify?

Question: Yeah. So, some of the people who were onboarded and went through the training are now being told that their jobs are on hold. There seems to be a little bit of chaos in this hiring process. So, I'm wondering if you're aware of that? You know, was there a shift at some point where they realized more workers needed to be in the field then were hiring remotely?

Mayor: Jake, respectfully I don't like when someone talks to a one person or a couple of people, assumes that as the truth about a larger initiative and then says there seems to be chaos. I have no indication of anything like that. They've got 1,700 people ready to go for June 1st. That's absolutely remarkable. So, let's just be real about that. This has been an unprecedented effort to put together a huge, huge team, get them trained, with a great supportive of Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Get them trained very quickly and get them out there to make an impact. I don't know if there's some individuals who were originally going to be hired and for some specific reason, they won't be. Or if there's any other individual matter that that points up. If you give the details, you don't have to give the name, but if you give the details to our team, we'll certainly get you an answer on the individual situation.

But what is clear is as we've been building this rapidly, trying to figure out what's going to be most effective. Some things can be done by phone. I talked about it the other day as did Ted Long when we were going through the details of how this worked. There's going to be work out in the field as well. There will be contact tracers who go out directly to homes to talk to people. So, it is going to be a mix of by phone and directly in person. That's what we are doing as we're seeing what's going to work. That's how the plan is being built. So, I am always keeping an eye on it. But what I'm seeing is something coming together really, really quickly and effectively that we are going to need to be the core of how we fight back this disease on top of everything we're asking people to do. Remember the number one way to fight back is all the basic hygiene, you know, the shelter-in-place, this social distancing, the face coverings and New Yorkers are doing that. But the X-factor here as we start to reopen is that strong test and trace effort. And it's going to hit the ground running in a very, very big way. And from everything I'm seeing, it's ready to make a huge impact in this city.

All right, everyone, look, I'll conclude with the simplest point, you have earned your way to the gateway to phase one. We're not there until the day we declare it, but we are damn close. And that's because of you. That's because of the work you've done. And then once phase one begins, as I said, several hundred thousand people come back to work, that's going to be very good for the people to see. That's going to be very good for those individuals and their families. And then let's make that successful. And you get to phase two and so on and so on. Everything is about doing what we've done the right way, sticking to it. But I want people to understand, you literally get to see the fruits of your labors. There's a lot of times in life where your work and your work and your work, and you don't see the result, and it's really painful. This ain't one of them. This is one where you've done the right thing and now you see things moving. And if we stick to it, you're going to get to see life start on its way back to a better reality real soon in this city. So, keep doing what you're doing. Thanks so much, everyone.

2020-05-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. What's on everyone's mind all over this city is the restart of this city, taking the first step to getting us back to a better situation. And it's all been made possible by the extraordinary work all of you are doing every single day, and we're going to keep doing it, because that's how we get to that restart. Now, we want to make sure the restart works. So, of course, it is first and foremost about constantly staying on top of the health and safety situation. Making sure we are driving back the disease every day, watching constantly for any indicators, any evidence that the disease might reassert, because we want to address that instantaneously. But we also recognize a strong restart means making sure that our businesses can come back effectively, can come back quickly. We're talking about, as I said yesterday, 200,000 to 400,000 New Yorkers who can, and will be going back to work in a matter of weeks. We have to make sure it goes well, and that means supporting the businesses, not only listening to them, but helping them in very real ways. So, as I've been listening to business owners, big and small, what I hear from them is they need help making sense of all this. They need help getting off to that strong start. They know it's not going to be business as usual. They know we're in uncharted territory, but they're really clear that they need help to be able to start as well as they want to, and we want them to. So, we've got to make sure that business owners can keep their workplaces safe, that they can get their businesses going. We need to make sure that the people who work there are safe, that they can get their livelihoods back, but always in a way that's safe and healthy.

So, we have to work together to make this happen. And the city of New York is going to be right there side by side with each and every business owner helping them to make that strong restart. So, yesterday I talked about some of the things we're doing. We're putting out industry guides with real common sense, practical information about how you restart. We have, going to be launching this coming week a hotline. So, any business owner can talk through specific situations, get guidance, understand what's the right thing to do, what's the wrong thing to do, how to make things work. We are training a group of small business advocates, and compliance units to go out and work with the businesses. Not, we're not trying to penalize, we're trying to educate and help them get started the right way. Make sense of a whole set of rules, and constantly staying in touch with our sector councils that are giving us constant feedback from businesses, large and small. Here's what we need. Here's what's going to work. Here's what's not going to work. We're trying this. It is working. Let's do more of that. We're trying something else. We don't like it. Let's try a different approach. That's what we're going to do.

So, let's talk about something that is absolutely necessary for every business to succeed and to be safe, and this environment we're in, in this uncharted territory. One thing is simple, straightforward, necessary, and that is face coverings. You need face coverings for all employees. You need face coverings for customers. Everyone understands that for business to work, people are going to have to get into some kind of proximity. We need those face coverings to make sure that everyone's safe, but we don't want businesses struggling to find them. We know they've got a lot on their mind as they restart, particularly the smallest businesses. They don't need another challenge. It's a hassle in many cases to find face coverings. Of course, there's an expense involved, but we're focused on the fact that businesses are getting ready right now. They need any helping hand they can get. So, what are we going to do? We're going to be providing face coverings for free for all businesses that need them. We'll start with 2 million face coverings that we're getting ready right now to deliver to businesses or have them pick up at sites around the city, whatever works better for them. And that work will be done by our Department of Consumer Worker Protection, our Department of Small Business Services, and our Department of Citywide Administrative Services. We'll put together a plan. We'll make it very public how you get these face coverings, or again, if businesses need them delivered, we'll deliver them. We want businesses to succeed, and having one less thing to worry about will make it a little easier, and it will make sure that health and safety is guaranteed. No one will have a reason to say, hey, I couldn't find face coverings, I didn't know where to turn. No, you need them. We'll come to you. We'll deliver them. We'll make sure you have them.

Now, we're hearing a lot from small businesses about other things they need and we're working on that too. And I’ll have more to say in the coming days. A lot of them talked about it's hard to find enough cleaning supplies, and cleaning supplies they can afford. There'll be effective, enough disinfectants. We're working on ways to make sure there is a supply available at a price that businesses can afford. We'll have more to say on that as well in the next few days.

So, the businesses have to restart. They have to restart strong. But now let's talk about working people. Let's talk about the backbone of New York City. The people who do the work. Look working people have really been hurt in this crisis. So many working families are suffering, and they've lost loved ones in so many cases or they've fought back this disease. So, we know this city runs on the labor of good, hardworking people, and we have to keep them safe. So, people want their livelihood back. I hear it all the time. There's so much desire, so much energy to get back to work. People want their livelihoods back, but they know they have to stay safe, and they especially, I hear it all the time, they want to protect their families. They want to make sure they go back to work, and restore their livelihoods, which their families need, that they don't inadvertently bring the disease home. So, we have to be there for working people, making sure that they have what they need to be safe. Now, this is going to involve, of course, working with the businesses, making sure they're following those rules, making sure the businesses have what they need to keep workers safe. But we want to hear the voices of working people, so we're going to have teams we send out to talk to employees directly, to talk to working people led by our department of consumer, and worker protection. We want to make sure that we're working with unions. We're working with worker centers, immigrant rights organizations, all of the folks who are constantly talking to working people about what they're experiencing. We're going to be working with all those organizations, and out at the frontline, going into communities, connecting with working people, listening for the information they need, the help they need, the problems they're having, giving people a sense of their rights, giving people a sense of the right way to do things to stay safe. We'll give out information. We'll make sure there's signage of at workplaces. Workers have every right to be safe when they return to work. Workers need to know where to turn if there is a problem, and that's what the city will provide. A helping hand to working people to make sure that every business treats them right during this restart.

Now, we're going to make sure that it's not just a matter of that outreach, and that signage, and those bigger efforts with unions, but we also want any working person who needs help to know they can call. So, next week we'll be launching a worker protection hotline, and anybody who either has a question, a concern, wants to know how to handle a situation at work or see something wrong or that they want to report, and want to see enforcement on, they can call that hotline. We'll announce the specifics next week. It'll be run by our Department of Consumer and Worker protection. We want to make sure that any working person who experiences a problem or a challenge knows where to turn to protect themselves, and their families, and their rights.

Okay. Now, talk about working people. Some of the people who do the toughest work in this city, the most necessary work in this city are nonprofit workers. This city for generations has been a place that created fairness, and decency, and took care of people, and had a compassionate reality because we had these wonderful nonprofits out there making sure that no one was left behind, making sure people were taken care of. This is part of what makes New York City so strong and so great, and our human services workforce, they've been heroes throughout this crisis, and we have to be there for them as well. So, we have so many different organizations. They work with our Administration for Children's Services, our Department of Health. They work with our Department of Social Services, our Department of Youth and Community Development. All of these homeless, excuse me, all of these nonprofit organizations, what kinds of things they do? They work on mental health, they work on homeless outreach, they work with young people, they do foster care – so many important, and crucial services this city needs. Well, we know that a lot of the people that do this work come from the communities that have been hardest hit by this pandemic. And we want to protect these folks that are not only members of the New York community, but they are people that make New York better, and stronger, and they protect other New Yorkers.

So, starting next week, we will have a testing initiative focused particularly on nonprofit staff. And we have a target of reaching 31,000 nonprofit staff. It's voluntary. People have a choice of if they want to participate, but we'll provide, we'll be providing up to 4,000 tests per day focused specifically on the nonprofit sector. We'll be doing it at Health and Hospitals, community sites. We'll give priority starting Monday. Another priority will be for nonprofit workers. So, anyone who's interested in getting one of those tests, and works in one of our nonprofits, you can go to nyc.gov/covidtest. And we want to make sure that if you need a test, you get a test. I’ll also say that there will be mobile testing sites set up focusing on these nonprofits starting June 15th. So, they'll go right to the workplaces of a lot of our nonprofit workers, and then the nonprofits themselves will start to provide testing in July. We'll provide all of the material they need, the PPE’s, the test kits, and they'll be able to do their own testing starting in July.

Now, we talked about nonprofits. We think about a lot of different organizations, a lot of them very well known to New Yorkers all over the city. Settlement houses, and you know, different organizations that come out of faith traditions that provide social services. Everybody in every community knows about organizations that came up from the grassroots, and do amazing work for their communities. One of the things that New Yorkers don't know as much about is the cure violence movement, also known as the crisis management system. This is a movement that I have come to know in recent years, and I have such respect for, because this is community people deciding to stop gun violence, and standing up, often putting their own lives on their line, to create peace in their own communities, to mediate, to stop conflicts before they happen. There've been extraordinary results.

So, as I've gotten to know the cure violence movement, I've been so impressed by what it means not only for stopping violence, but what it means about communities creating their own leadership to solve their own problems. And the City of New York needs to support that because it's the right thing to do and it works. Well, right now, in the middle of this horrible challenge with the coronavirus, it's become clearer and clearer that a cure violence movement can be such an important part of fighting back this disease cure violence is the original concept, but it also has so much to say about community leaders and community members coming together to solve a range of problems. It's not that cure violence can share the virus, but cure violence can help to contain the disease, can help to push it back in neighborhoods by educating people, giving them the tools they need, helping people to hear what's the right thing to do from trusted community voices. So, our racial and include racial equity and inclusion task force, which has been set up inside the city government representing a whole range of city agencies has been working on the issue of what's the fullest use we can make of the cure violence movement. And I had a great conversation with cure violence leaders just a few days ago and we all agreed that there's a frontline role to play in fighting the coronavirus. So, we have now 20 or so community partner organizations we'll be working with in this effort, and one example was on Monday when I went to Queensbridge houses, largest public housing development in New York City. Here is a place, again, biggest public housing development in the city and has had an extraordinary turnaround in terms of reducing violence and that shows us how much more could be achieved by this movement. The organization is 696 amazing organization has helped to bring a lot more peace and a lot less violence to Queensbridge houses, they're one example of many great organizations. So, we're going to support these groups through this summer and beyond. To address the coronavirus as well. Right now, we've got 150 cure violence organization workers out in communities, educating people, reminding them, giving them warnings about issues like social distancing, face coverings, giving out the face coverings for free. We're now going to more than triple that, we're adding 375 more cheer violence workers to this effort. The title they will be given is social distance enhancers, it's a great phrase, social distance enhancers. They'll be starting in the next week or so, building out through June, and this means 10 to 15 new staff at each site deep into communities and having a big impact through the summer into September. We're also going to do a great a public awareness campaign at the same time or partnering with an extraordinary organization called Art Not War. And they have done a really profound work on, many of you may have seen the work they did related to the people's climate March. They're a national leader in terms of putting together social justice messages that reach communities that are oven buying for the communities they serve. They're going to give us a— assist here and putting out a public awareness campaign, particularly for the hardest hit neighborhoods, 21 target neighborhoods, and there'll be a variety of media we'll be using to get the word out and how people can protect themselves and their families that will be starting the middle of June.

Now, talk about communities that have been hardest hit. We know that our seniors have been the most vulnerable in this crisis and we know that folks who are lower income and have had less access to healthcare because tragically healthcare has been about how much money you have, not about your humanity, that's the history of this country. And too often that's been the history of the city and that's something we have to change profoundly. So, we know if you're a senior and you're lower income, particularly if you live in a community of color, the coronavirus has been a particular threat to you, and all of those realities come together with our seniors who live in public housing in NYCHA. We made a commitment that we were going to help a number of seniors in addition to their health needs, keeping their buildings clean, getting them face coverings, doing everything we could to protect them where they lived. We wanted to also enhance their life because a lot of them are feeling really isolated, we want to connect them to the world around them to make sure that during this crisis they were getting the help they needed. So, 10,000, 10,000 internet enabled tablets have been sent out to NYCHA seniors. 10,000 seniors will benefit because they will now be able to get the information they need, the support they need, the connection to their families delivered to over a hundred sites across the five boroughs and this is not just about that human connection in that way of fighting isolation. It's also about telemedicine, so important to making sure that our seniors get supported by clinicians without having to leave their home. I want to give you some quotes because I think they're really powerful that we've heard from seniors in public housing who got these free tablets and now we're experiencing the power of being connected in a whole new way. One of them said when I got the tablet, I didn't realize how lonesome I was without visits from my children, it's like a connection to the outside without the fear of catching the virus. Another senior in public housing said simply this, I learned I can do telemedicine from the tablet by calling my cardiologist. Now think about that. Someone who had to travel often long distances wait and then have to be fearful of this virus for the first time. Now face to face with the cardiologist, able to have the right kind of conversation, get the right kind of support. One more quote, I love. The tablet is a lifesaver. Being able to see family and talk to them, that's really exciting. At least I know everybody is okay and they know I'm okay. Isn't that the most basic that every family wants to feel, I know it as a parent. All of us know it. The first thing you want to know is, is your family okay? And these tablets are helping our seniors to feel that comfort and move forward through this crisis.

Okay. Before we go to our daily indicators and thresholds, just an important note on a totally different subject because we've all been talking about coronavirus all the time and understandably so, but there's other things happening and one of them is there's an election coming up. This is a big important election year and there's an election coming up in just a matter of weeks. The New York primary is happening at toward the end of June and today is the last day to register to vote for the New York primary. So, it's not too late. This is a reminder, everyone, if you don't happen to be registered to vote and you want to vote in that primary election in the month of June, it is not too late. You can go online at vote.nyc or you can register by mail. If you have the information center, you can send in— the registration by mail today, the instructions are online. So, there's still chance to do that, we want to see everyone make their voices heard. Voting by mail with the absentee ballots is the safe way to do it and it's a chance as always to make your voice heard. Our democracy is strong even during this pandemic, make your voice heard and make sure you're registered to vote.

Finally, let's turn to the indicators and thresholds. So, number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19. So, remember, need that threshold to be under 200 patients admitted per day today, 61 patients, very good number. Now on the daily number of people in health and hospitals, ICU threshold needs to be under a hundred, excuse me, under 375 this today is really good news. Congratulations cause again this is all your hard work paying off, we needed to get below 375 as of today, 391 we are on the gateway to getting below that threshold and staying there. So, this is really fantastic news and as they say on the late-night advertisements, but wait, there's more. This is the best of all, I would say the percentage of people tested citywide who are positive for COVID-19 we have to stay under the 15 percent threshold. Everyday we've seen progress in recent weeks today, the lowest we've ever seen, 5 percent testing positive. And how profound that is when you think about the fact that testing is growing and growing and growing all the time, we're getting more and more New Yorkers tested and the percentage is going down, what a good sign this is. So, congratulations everyone, this is putting us well on the way to our goal of in the first half of June. Well done, New York City.

Few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

And with that it will turn to our colleagues in the media. Please remind me of the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all, just a reminder that we have Health Commissioner, Dr. Barbot, President and CEO of Health and Hospitals, Dr Katz, Small Business Commissioner Doris, Executive Director of Test and Trace Corp, Dr. Long, and Deputy Director of the Office of Neighborhood Safety at the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice Cumberbatch on the phone. With that, I will start with Rich from WCBS 880

Question: Morning Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good morning, Rich. How you doing?

Question: I’m doing alright. Mr. Mayor, of course, you just said that it'll be the first two weeks in June and for practical purposes to, you know, Monday is June, so do we rule out next week or is next week a possibility for the, for the restart. That's question number one, but number two is a multiple system inflammatory syndrome in children. We haven't heard anything about that in a while. Has that calmed down? Is that still a problem at this point?

Mayor: Very good questions and very much appreciate it Rich. I'll turn to our health care leaders in a moment on that and I'll preface before I do, but first, we are confident that we will be able to go to phase one in the first two weeks of June. This is going to be based of course on the tangible indicators and thresholds from the state and city. So that's what will lead to decision, we have to have that factual evidence. We're also in regular communication with the state to make sure we're all coordinated and all ready. So, I'm going to only say it that way, I am confident we'll be getting to phase one in the first two weeks of June. Not going to fine tune-it any more than that because of all these conversations going on to determine the exact right date to start.

Now, on the second question, it's a great question. I know parents all over New York City are really, really concerned about this, you know syndrome that we did not see in the first couple of months of this crisis. And it really came up in recent weeks. The last numbers I saw at least indicated that we have not seen thank God, a, a big growth of this syndrome in terms of the number of children affected, but we're learning about all the time. We're watching it very carefully; we really want to make sure this issue is addressed, and we need every doctor and healthcare provider to be a part of that communicating with our department of health. And we need parents as we've said many times to be very vigilant that they see the symptoms particularly in combination that they call their healthcare provider immediately or if they don't have on call 3-1-1 get connected to a health and hospitals clinician. So, again, thank God we have not seen a lot of growth of the problem in the last days. But let me turn to Dr. Barbot and Dr. Katz to give you more.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, yes, we continue to get reports from pediatricians across the city about patients who have symptoms that can be consistent with this new Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome in Children. The number of confirmed cases that we have are up to 124 and roughly about three quarters of them have an indication of having had a positive test for COVID-19. And I'll just remind folks that typically what we are seeing is that children present with symptoms of fever, abdominal pain, they can have a rash, they can have swollen hands and feet, very red lips - what we call a strawberry tone, which is very red and inflamed. And these are symptoms that we ask parents to be on the lookout for and pediatricians to be mindful of to determine which of these children will need to have more hospital centered care and may need to have intravenous medication. The other thing I will say is that we continue to communicate with providers to ensure that they are up to date on what we're asking them to be on the lookout for and to continue reporting cases to us. In fact, we have a webinar scheduled for today with providers across the city to ensure that we continue the drumbeat. This is definitely a syndrome that we continue to be very concerned about and that we want both parents and providers to be on the alert for it.

Moderator: Next we have [inaudible] –

Mayor: We'll see if Mitch wants to add. Mitch, do you want to add anything to that?

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: [Inaudible] thank you.

Mayor: You’re good? Okay.

Moderator: Next we have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I just had a quick question. I saw that you tweeted yesterday about the police situation in Minnesota with George Floyd. You said that the officers needed to be charged immediately, but there's been some criticism of your remarks given the history of the Eric Garner case in New York City and, and the fact that it took five years for the officer involved in that case to even be removed from the force. So, wanted to see if you thought there was any irony in calling for those officers in Minnesota to be charged where a situation in New York that is seen as similar you did not call for those, for that officer to be charged immediately? And my second question is about the borrowing. It doesn't look like that vote is going to come up this week. Are you still optimistic about the possibility of being allowed to borrow to cover revenue shortfalls and do you have any sort of alternative plans if the borrowing is not approved?

Mayor: Jeff, on the borrowing as I said I still believe that there is some fairness in this world and so if you look at the parallel of 2001 where the legislature acted within days unanimously - a republican Senate, a democratic Assembly - to provide the city of New York with borrowing capacity, no strings attached because it was the right thing to do to help make sure that New York City could come back after the tragedy of 9/11. There was not a doubt in anyone's mind in Albany that it was critical to the lives of over 8 million New Yorkers and the future of New York State to help New York City come back. And so they acted resolutely back then, it gave the borrowing authority, the city used it carefully, wisely and obviously it was able to come back and thrive thereafter because it got that helping hand; the city has been really, really responsible in the way it's approached its finances for decades. So there's that point and then of course, that the State of New York gave itself unfettered bargaining, excuse me, unfettered borrowing power just a few weeks ago, Jeff – just a few weeks ago the New York State government gave itself the ability to borrow $11 billion, no strings attached. So, I think it's a matter of just decency and fairness, but we've had very good conversations with the legislative leaders. Everyone's working together; everyone's looking for the right way to get something done that everyone can feel good about and I am very confident based on those conversations we'll get something done during the month of June.

On this horrible just very, very painful situation in Minneapolis. Jeff, I watched that video and my heart broke. It was, you know, to watch someone before your very eyes and that I could not believe the officer's lack of concern and it was horrifying and it just can't go on this way. So, the fact is that I think the authorities in Minneapolis were right to say, you know, this was something that needed to be acted on immediately. And I've said that from this point on in the city of New York, we're going to act immediately as well. This kind of thing just can't happen.

Moderator: Next we have Matt Chase from Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning, guys. How you doing?

Mayor: Good. How you doing, Matt?

Question: Good, good. Can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yes, we can.

Question: Two questions for you. What is the specific trigger, in your words, tangible for identifying whether the disease has sufficiently reasserted itself to warrant a re-imposition of restrictions and what restrictions would be re-imposed? And second, yesterday, Erin Durkin of Politico asked you what your advice is to carless New Yorkers who don't have a car and who don't feel safe riding mass transit? You did not answer. What is the answer?

Mayor: Matt, the answer is reality. We don't have – we were trying, obviously, always to have a solution for every problem we can have a solution for, but I really want to push back on the notion that we can solve everything all the time. We right now want to make sure the subways and buses are as safe as possible. There's a meeting yesterday with the MTA. We're still not getting the answers we need from the MTA. I'm going to be speaking to Pat Foye later on today. We have got to figure out how to make the subways and buses not only as clean as possible, which I think the MTA has done a great job on, but we've got to make sure there's maximum service levels; we've got to make sure there's social distancing and limits on how many people can be in each subway car and in each bus. We're going to work with them because we all have to get that done together. So that is obviously the most important piece of the equation. That's where the vast majority of people turn to get places. And we'll look at any and all other solutions that we can reach, but again, our job is to wherever we can find a solution, we're going find one. I think New Yorkers are very resourceful. They also find their own ways to get things done, but I'm, I just want to be honest about the fact that, you know, where we can find a way to help people we will. There's not always the chance to help everyone all the time in terms of their transportation needs. People are going to have to improvise and I believe they will.

In terms of the trigger point you make the, the standards we have now, I think the state indicators, the city indicators and thresholds make a lot of sense. From the city perspective, we stay below those thresholds - we keep going. If we start inching up towards those thresholds, we're going to talk about it, we're going to tell people about it, we're going to warn people, we're going to take actions in the immediate term to ensure that we can help contain the situation. We have the test and trace initiative that's going to be a big positive x-factor. We have the ability to work with individual businesses if there's any things that need to be addressed. We're looking at if we have any kind of localized problem, we can get all over it with our health team, but the fact is nothing happens overnight so if we saw in our three thresholds a problem - we would immediately take action. But I think the simple answer to your question is if our thresholds were exceeded the wrong way, that's the situation where unless there are other extenuating circumstances, we would have to take a step back to where we are right now. So, it's as simple as, you know, when you go through each phase if ones not working and you have to go back to the previous phase. I don't see that, Matt, from what we're seeing right now, I think we, we are blessed that New Yorkers are doing such an amazing job and being so disciplined and the test and trace piece is going to hit at exactly the right moment to add an additional offense to push back on this disease, but I think that's the simple way to think about what we'd be watching for and how we'd address it.

Moderator: Next, we have Dave Evans from ABC 7.

Question: Good morning, Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good Dave, how are you?

Question: I'm fine. I wanted to ask you a couple of things. First of all about the, the social distance enhancers – the 375 workers – I think that may be seen as a great idea, but I'm just looking at is it a good idea to expand some of these programs if you're looking at a $9 billion hole in your budget now? And, and my other question is following up on what Jeff asked you from the Times about the case in Minneapolis. I think, I think Jeff was asking, do you see the irony in this case versus the Eric Garner case in that you wanted the due process, process to play out, you know, and that took five years, yet here in the Minneapolis case, you've already asked for prosecution of these officers?

Mayor: Dave, look the bottom line here is we, I've been really clear about the fact we made a mistake. I made a mistake in believing the US Department of Justice would do its job and I will be very blunt and clear about that. When the City took over, there was due process, there was a trial. Our Police Commissioner made the decision, it was the right decision. The thing I feel very clearly in retrospect is we should have ignored the Department of Justice, because what they did was unconscionable in not acting, and just moved ahead, and that's what we will do from now on, absolutely.

On the question of the budget and the social distance enhancers – Dave, I'd say this, the budget right now and the budget we're really, really concerned about, because we have to get that stimulus support from Washington, we need borrowing authority from Albany. We don't have either right now, and if those things don't come, then we're talking about massive budget cuts and clearly every single agency will be affected, and unquestionably that leads us to something none of us want – horrible thing in the midst of all this, which would be layoffs and furloughs. But, right now, while we are trying to sort that out, we've got a disease to fight in the here and now. So, the money we do have has to be focused on the four things I've talked about consistently – health, safety, food and shelter. If we're talking about health and safety and we can help more and more New Yorkers to socially distance, to put on those face coverings, to be educated, to do the right thing in this related to this disease, particularly in the hardest-hit communities and they can be convinced to do so by people who they trust from their own community, that's about as smart and investment as we could possibly make right now.

Moderator: Next we have Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to follow up to something you said I think in response to Matt Chayes’ question – people are going to have to improvise when it comes to mass transit. You know, when I speak to every-day New Yorkers, your favorite kind, they are sort of dismayed at how they're going to get around. I'm curious, do you think that's a sufficient answer for someone who's, you know, worried about the safety of mass transit but doesn't have many other options? Or, even other people – you know, if someone's option instead of taking the subway to work is now driving, that affects way more than them driving, it creates more traffic. So, do you have any kind of plan? I think people are looking for a plan. They're looking for guidance from the mayor and I think, you know, you said New Yorkers are resourceful and they find their own way to get things done, but there's actually limited ways they could be resourceful when it comes to resuming their work and their livelihoods. So, do you have any more guidance or advice?

Mayor: My guidance, as I talked about yesterday, is, that the future of New York City will be mass and fewer cars. In the short-term, if people are going to use cars because that's what makes them comfortable and, obviously, there still is a lot less traffic on the road, then they're going to use cars. And we have to be pragmatic about this, Katie. I'm sorry, you know, the guidance is in fact really clear. We're trying to get the subways and buses to be as clean and safe as possible in a really, really imperfect situation. We're working with the MTA. And, again, we need clearer answers from the MTA, we need really clear rules that all New Yorkers can understand. We need to make sure that people have confidence that they get on that subway or bus, that it's going to be safe. That is overwhelmingly how people get around. But the fact is, if that's not something people are comfortable doing and they have an option of driving, they're going to drive. We're going to look at any and other ways we can help and support people. But, again, there are things we can do and some things we can't do. So, I always believe that people will make choices based on the options they have and they'll make smart pragmatic choices and they do not expect that the government can cover every single need. If we can find anything else that will help people, we certainly will, but, right now, it is about doing everything we can to make the subways and buses as safe as possible and that people can feel confidence in. And after that, people will make whatever choices they make.

Moderator: Next we have Luis from New York [inaudible].

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. My question concerns the push for restaurant outdoor dining by the City Council and how your own team is examining the possibilities of thereof. Considering how we have no perfect clue as to what a phase three scenario would look like and what sort of social distancing rules would still be in place, I'd like to ask about those restaurants with alcohol licenses, and I guess bars. Mr. Mayor, you've often spoken of New Yorkers doing the right thing, yet even when one [inaudible] intoxicated, it's kind of hard to do the right thing. Are there any concerns about people individually and collectively forgetting themselves and doing that, which may defeat the ultimate aim of public safety?

Mayor: Of course. Now, Luis, you're – you know, every-day New Yorkers and everyday humans. Of course, if people are under the influence, they're going to think differently. And you know, look, I'm the guy who said we had to shut down our restaurants and bars back in March, because it was clear that we needed to do something different. And, obviously, we know, particularly in bars, there's not only a space issue, there is the fact that if people under the influence are not going to follow rules as well. But I’ve got to tell you, I think having talked to a lot of people in restaurant and bar industry, folks want to come back, they want to come back responsibly. They understand it's a different reality. And everyone talks from the perspective of understanding there has to be social distancing. And, you know, one of the things I've heard from a lot of the restaurant bar owners is that there's a conundrum for them because they want to bring back this part of New York City we all cherish and yet they also are concerned it has to be an atmosphere people want to be a part of – that if it feels too artificial and feels too difficult, you know, people are not going to feel comfortable. So, it's a really tough balance. But what we know for sure is we’ve got to get this industry back, we’ve got to do it with social distancing for the foreseeable future. We’ve got to come up with smart standards. Restaurants I think have an easier situation than bars in, we're going to have to figure that out and the outdoor piece is very, very appealing and I feel good that we'll be able to find some solutions there. But it's also going to require the restaurant owners and the bar owners to be really vigilant that their patrons follow the rules. And if not, we're going to do enforcement. And I think everyone's gotten the point about that and that's why we see very, very little noncompliance. The vast majority of restaurant and bar owners throughout this whole process, the ones that have stayed open in various ways, everyone's been doing the right thing almost to a one. But enforcement helps to remind people, so it'll be there.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Yeah. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I just wanted to ask you, if Eric Garner was white, do you think that he would be alive today?

Mayor: Absolutely.

Question: Next we have Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Hope you're doing well.

Mayor: Good, Andrew. How are you doing?

Question: I have two questions. First, if I have a business in New York City right now that is eligible for phase one, and I'm wondering if I can open up Monday, June 1st, one would assume that if that were the case, you'd be able to tell us today. So, I know you don't want to narrow down the guideline at all, but wouldn't you imagine that businesses wondering about Monday would be frustrated for not hearing clarity on that? And the second question has to do with, we have found a business that opened up early – I know yesterday you said anyone doing so is making a big mistake. We have a – there's a salon in Midtown, a Brazilian wax salon that's been open, booked, taking appointments, nonessential business, wondering if the City's aware and whether any action will be taken?

Mayor: Andrew again, never fails to amaze me. You got, you know, whatever the exact number is, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of businesses, the overwhelming, extraordinary majority are doing exactly the right thing and are listening to the rules, are thinking about health and safety are not just thinking about their own needs but the needs of everyone, and then there's a few bad apples that are trying to jump the gun even though it's not legal. So please give us the name and address of that salon and we will go deal with them. They're just not allowed to do that. So, we've made really clear to businesses, if you jumped the gun, we're going to tell you nicely to close down right now, and if you try to resist or come back, you're going to be hit with fines and it's just not acceptable. It's dangerous. It's a way to spread the disease. It's not the right way to do things. So, we will deal with each and every one, and again, very, very few are trying to violate these rules.

So Andrew, I've been talking to business owners throughout and they're very smart, resourceful people and they have been told now for many days, a day is coming in the first half of June, and the state has very clear guidelines, they’ve put out, we're putting out more and more information. We're going to help small businesses with the free face coverings. We're going to have the hotlines up and running. Everything is moving a pace. If you're a business owner, you know right now, if you're in those categories for Phase One to get ready and then you'll get the announcement, that it’s time to go. But we're just not going to give that announcement until we're ready, and I know the state feels the same way and we're coordinating closely so folks are mature, they know it's coming. Knock on wood that our indicators and thresholds keep looking good, but they know that it's very, very likely at this point and they'll get notice and then the minute they get noticed they'll get up and running as soon as they are ready thereafter. I think people are going to be able to handle it.

Moderator: Next we have Mark Morales from CNN.

Question: Good morning everybody. How you doing?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing Mark?

Question: I’m doing okay. I wanted to follow up on a question I asked a couple of days ago about the businesses and whether or not you guys have account as to what businesses are going to be opening up or which ones have already closed, rather – like how many have already closed. The second question I wanted to ask is when there is a real opening, and I know that this hasn't been fleshed out yet, but will the MTA continue to do the stoppage between 1:00 and 5:00 am with the cleaning and disinfecting of the cars?

Mayor: So, Mark on the number of businesses. So again, we'll get you, and I'll make sure to say it publicly even if you don't – in addition to giving it to you, that we will say publicly the number of businesses right now that are closed because of this emergency. I've said that in terms of working people we expect in Phase One between 200,000 and 400,000 to come back physically to work. But we'll get you a number of businesses that would be in Phase One at least, you know, they have the right to move in Phase One, whether all of them do it or not is their own decision of course. So, we'll get you those numbers and we'll make that a public as well.

Second part of the question – someone remind me, or bring Mark back.

Question: It was about the MTA and when they do start the reopening, is it going to be that they're going to be continuing to disinfecting between 1:00 am and 5:00 am?

Mayor: Yeah so Mark, we're working with the state, we're working with the MTA. We've said very clearly it's for this crisis, and then after the crisis is over, we'd go back to the 24-hour service. But again, Phase One is not the end of the crisis by any stretch of imagination. So, the way I look at is let's get through these phases and get ourselves substantially back to normal. That's going to take several months by definition. But we'll work with the state and the MTA on when that end point will be. But again, I understand everyone rightfully, I don't ever blame anyone in the media or anyone in the public who wants sharp definition, we all do. But we're dealing with a crisis and we're dealing with a very challenging adversary in this disease and we're dealing with an ever-changing situation. So, I can't give you the exact date, but I can tell you when this crisis is resolved, that's when the MTA should go back to 24-hour service.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Debralee from the Manhattan Times The Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning everyone. Mr. Mayor, I wanted to follow up on a question that I just don't think has been answered yet, and this specifically regards expansion of testing citywide, particularly now as we enter one hopes will be a successful reopening of things. There seems to be a real, a real focus on H+H and private partnerships with the testing, at the expense of any community health based centers and federally qualified health centers, and I'm wondering if you could speak to that because originally the answer was we're having conversations with everyone. The partnerships extend citywide and we continue to burrow more deeply into these conversations. But to date, unless I missed something, there hasn't been a linkage there, and there have been at NYCHA sites and faith-based centers where testing is not natively possible and there has to be labs involved, and yet there hasn't been that connection with these credible messengers on the ground who in fact could use the volume—

Mayor: Okay, Debralee. I got it. I got it. What's your second question?

Question: The second question is regarding guidance. On the reopening, have you specifically look to see what the city will offer in terms of specific protocols, information and policies on cleaning, deep cleaning in these offices so as to provide the best work environment for workers who are coming in? What will you be providing on that front?

Mayor: Right thank you. Debralee, that’s a great question. So the state guidelines, again, I think for government documents, they are unusually clear and specific and accessible of what's expected of an employer. Putting myself, again – I've talked to a lot of employers as they're preparing and you know, it's pretty straightforward what you need to do, but you're exactly right, you know, fine tuning it down to what exactly does it mean to get it to the level that's ideal. This is exactly why we're going to be providing this additional guidance through the city agencies. So we're going to get out you know, guides that really break down some of the exact information you're talking about – here's what that cleaning looks like, and again to have a hotline available to businesses so they can understand if any questions about how to do it, what's the right amount, that will be available, and further, as I said, we want to help them first with the face coverings. But I've heard from a lot of businesses that they really are dealing with the basics. Like they just need the right products to clean with and they're hard to come by. We have to figure that out with them, and we'll have more to say on that next few days. So, your question is right where we are. We want to make this practical and straightforward. I think everyone understands that the better the cleaning, the more consistent, the better we will do at fighting the disease. But also the more confidence employees will have in coming back. So, we need it to work, but that's exactly the kind of thing that I'm talking about today that the city will be doing reaching out to these businesses. 

And then on the expansion of testing. Absolutely. We are working our way through an ever-growing testing initiative, Debra Lee, so as I've said to you, we – you know, we expect to be not too long from now at 50,000 tests a day. We're at 27 tests – 27,000 a day right now we expect to be at 50,000, and we want to keep going from there. We need more and more partners. The big opportunities like City MD, of course we're going to go where we can get the most growth quickly and doing it in a single organization with so many outlets made total sense, Health + Hospitals obviously has vast reach around the city, but we want to keep going from there, and those community based clinics make tons of sense to be our partners in this. We want to reinvigorate them and I've said from beginning, we want them to do more telemedicine with their patients. We want them to do more grassroots public health work. We're going to be supporting them in all that. So, as we expand testing, absolutely, we're going to be working with the community-based clinics and we'll have more to say on that shortly.

Moderator: Last question for today. We have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Gersh, my life is better because I have a new, exciting dynamic baker in my life.

Question: I'm honored Mr. Mayor, but as you know I cannot make daily deliveries of bread –

Mayor: Gersh, Gersh, I think it would be doing a great public service for all New Yorkers if you would. I do want to say your colleagues in the media, Gersh shocked me with how good that bread was. I thought I was going to have to smile and be polite. That was a damn good bread, Gersh.

Question: Let the record show Mr. Mayor, you ate about a half of it before even taking a breath.

Mayor: I did. It’s true.

Question: I know you have a lot on your plate today so I just want to just ask a very quick follow up to what you've been asked already today. You know the federal government actually put out recovery guidelines that recommend against using public transportation or even carpooling and in fact recommend that employers reimburse workers for commuting alone in their cars. Now you've certainly shown no reluctance to criticize the federal government when it errs. So, what do you think of those recommendations that explicitly encourage New Yorkers to drive? And I'd like to ask Dr. Barbot to weigh in on this because she often does not get asked about the central implications of transit on transportation on public health.

Mayor: So, it's a really important question. Thank you, Gersh. Before I turn to Dr. Barbot, you know, the federal government that topic right there gets a heavy sigh from me because, you know, they have so rarely been there when we needed them in this crisis. I understand some of their guidance some of the time and other times I'm perplexed by it. This is the city that's most reliant on mass transit of any city in the country. And you and I have talked about this Gersh, the future is mass transit. There’s no question. This is a horrible crisis. It is going to go on for a certain number of months, when we come out of this, we have to keep transforming the city. In fact, it's going to be one of the biggest transformative moments in the history of New York City. And we must move away from the automobile. We must move to mass transit and find new and better ways of doing that. That said, as I said in the earlier question with Katie, we know that this moment, these next few months are going to be aberrant because some people are not going to be comfortable no matter what we do and will choose to use their car.

But on the question of can you make mass transit work for people? Again, the federal government doesn't have to run it, doesn't have to deal with the ramifications. We're working closely with the MTA and State. Clearly the cleaning initiative proves that something very different could happen in terms of cleanliness. Now we've got to do something important and clear to people in terms of the social distancing and the limits on the number of people on the trains and buses. I think we can do that together. I think we can find a way to do that. That will mean for those who do take mass transit, they'll be able to do it with a real sense of assurance. And that's necessary because that's how most people get around. So we don't have an option of saying, oh, we're just going to ignore it, if that's what the federal government's suggesting, that totally doesn't work for New York City. But we do have an obligation to provide people with something they can believe in and start to feel more and more comfortable with, and that's what we're working on literally as we speak. Dr. Barbot, please add to that.

Commissioner Barbot: Thank you Mr. Mayor, so to add to what the Mayor has laid out, I think that there are ways in this early period when we are looking towards starting to lift a little by little restrictions on social distancing, ways in which we can minimize risk of exposure to New Yorkers. And I think we just need to remember that this is in the context of continuing to encourage working from home for those people who can work from home, and reminding New Yorkers about alternative ways of getting around. You know, if people can walk to work, then that would be the best way. People can ride to work, then that would be, you know, a more desirable alternative. And as the Mayor says that there are ways in which we are working together to ensure that those individuals who do rely on public transportation can do so safely. Right? We're still going to have people wearing face coverings. There are ways in which we can increase ventilation in buses for example. So you know, I don't think that we are in a situation where it's going to be the new norm to have everybody drive into work. I just don't see that. I think that there are alternative ways of getting around walking, biking, et cetera, that can be – have reduced risk and can actually have other benefits to public health.

Mayor: Thank you very much, doctor. Well, as I conclude, let me just say this. Many times we've talked about what New Yorkers have gone through and the challenges people have faced, and I’ve said, you know, as the City of New York, we care about each and every New Yorker, and think about - I'll use the example earlier, with the tablets for the seniors who live in public housing. Hardworking folks spent their life doing the right thing and now they felt very much alone. Our message to them was you're not alone, we're going to be there for you. Getting them those tablets so that they can be connected and get the help they need. Our message to New Yorkers who have been hungry is we have food for you. Do you need food delivered to your door? We're going to bring it to you. This is all about making sure that people are safe, making sure they have the basics. But we know as we prepare for this next phase, we prepare for the first part of the restart. That our small businesses, all our businesses, but particularly our small businesses have taken on the chin. They are hurting, they need help and we will be there for you. You are not alone. So we're starting with the effort to make sure people understand the rules and have all the help they need to navigate the rules and that real people will work with each small business to make it work. We're going to get those face coverings to businesses for free, going to help them figure out to succeed, we need all our businesses to come back, come back safely, come back strong. We need our small businesses to survive. So, to all the members of business community getting ready for phase one, you're not alone. We are going to be with you every step of the way. We're going to help you to succeed and you're going to help New York City to come back through the great work that you do. Thank you, everybody.

2020-05-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone, and it is time as every Friday at this time for our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our phones are open at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Only your questions for the Mayor for this segment, in case some of you we're hanging on from the last segment or calling about other things. Questions for the Mayor welcome here at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0 or you can always tweet a question. Just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How are you doing?

Lehrer: I'm doing all right. First, can I get your reaction to the killing of George Floyd and the protest here in New York as well as elsewhere?

Mayor: Brian, horrifying, horrifying, the video. We, you know, we can ever get numb to this. What we saw in that video, it's just painful, first of all, just horribly painful, humanly. But it was, you know, degrading of a man because of his race. I mean, there's just no question he was killed because he was black. And there's no way in hell that if that had been a white person, he would have been treated the same way. And just the absolute lack of concern by the officer, which goes against everything a law enforcement officer should be doing. It was extraordinarily painful. And look, the anger out there is real and unfortunately very justified. I wish people did not have to keep raising their voices when they see this injustice. But it's become an epidemic in this country and it has to stop. So, you know, all of the changes, everything that we've tried to change in policing, everything that people have tried in other parts of the country, it all matters. All these reforms matter. But there also has to be consequences because no police officers should believe they could do that and get away with it. So we've got to understand that there's lots of anger out there and it's understandable and real anger. It's based on a horrible history.

Lehrer: And you tweeted that these officers need to be charged immediately. But here in the city, you never called for charges against the officers in the death of Eric Garner who said, I can't breathe 11 times as another officer sat on him. George Floyd was saying, I can't breathe. Of course, everybody thinks of the Eric Garner case. And it took your administration five years to fire even one of the officers. So is it easier to speak your truth when it's not in your city? And what's your own legacy going to be in this regard?

Mayor: It is no question, Brian, that I look back on that and I will claim responsibility for the mistake of waiting on the Justice Department and I'll never let that happen again. The – everything that I was hearing in that time was about the need to defer to the Justice Department. And not to comment and let them do their work. And that was just plain, a mistake. And in the future, I'm not going to handle – I hope there is no future, Brian. I'm want to be really, really clear. I hope we never see another thing like this in New York City. But I'm going to be really clear that we will not accept any situation like this in New York City. And God forbid there is one, I want to see charges acted on immediately. And I will be plain about that because it has to stop. It just has to stop. This is unacceptable. It shouldn't happen to anyone. And why does it always happen to a black man? I mean it's just, you know, this is the part that is so – it's like you can't explain it. You can't say, Oh, these are just random acts. And what is more painful is, you know, for six years thinking that all these things could change it. And I'm not just talking about here, every place else, that even with all the changes, there are still officers – and I don't think there are anywhere near a majority. I think the vast majority of officers are trying to do the right thing. But that any officer could exist on any police force who could do something like that is incredibly painful for all of us to see. And it has to be answered with consequences.

Lehrer: Do you have any message for the protesters or things you want to say about enforcement that you will or need to or won't invoke? Because I gathered some police officers were injured in New York City yesterday. Is that accurate?

Mayor: Yes, it is. And that's unacceptable too. I mean, look, I understand the anger of the protestors. And there is no place, literally no place on Earth that respects protest and the right to protest more than New York City. And I had been in a lot of protests in my life. And I really believe the NYPD knows how to handle protests and respect them, whoever's protesting. I want to see a light touch because people are undeniably angry for a reason. But I also think there's a really clear line and it's the same basic moral underpinning. You cannot attack a police officer that, you know, to say the least two wrongs don't make a right. Attacking a police officer is unacceptable. And I don't know why people express their anger at the injustices in the world at an officer in front of them who may for all they know be the best officer in the world and the most righteous. So I don't think it's fair, you know, I think back to Vietnam and the way people were angry at soldiers coming back from Vietnam when they were not the ones who started the war. Be angry at the people who set the policies and hold all of us accountable. But no, I want to just say, anyone who wants to protest, we're going to protect your right to protest. But please also respect that the cop in front of you did not create this problem. And we have to fix this problem on a much more fundamental level.

Lehrer: So on the budget crisis facing New York City right now, a listener asked this question via Twitter, why are NYPD budgets being increased? And you can say whether or not that's a true fact. But why are NYPD budgets being increased while health and education budgets are being cut?

Mayor: Yeah, I really don't understand that question, but I'll give you a quick answer. I mean today I announced something that is absolutely consistent with everything we've been talking about. We're investing in public safety at the grass roots with the Cure Violence movement, community-based people are going to help us address the coronavirus crisis. Hundreds and hundreds of community people who we're hiring to help us keep people safe, to educate them, to give them face coverings and all that. So the NYPD can step back from that kind of role. So actually we're doubling down on community solutions. That's where we're putting money. There's not any, I don't know where they're getting this increased concept from. And also, if anyone's been watching, we have been pouring, not millions but billions of dollars by the time we get through this year into protecting people's health in this crisis and feeding people on top of that. So, no, I don't follow that question. We're really trying to, really try to protect people in every way.

Lehrer: Henry and Harlem, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Henry. Henry, are you there? Henry once -

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, I’m sorry.

Mayor: Wait, we hear him. We hear him.

Question: Hey, can you hear me?

Lehrer: Yeah, we got you Henry, go ahead.

Question: Great. Thank you very much Mr. Mayor and thank you, Brian. Mr. Mayor, thank you for your calm and your leadership in this pandemic and in this George Floyd moment. We should all be proud as New Yorkers, the City's response to COVID-19. My question for you today is, what is your response today that will give restaurant owners across the city confidence that you will enact the plan to allow open air dining in New York City open streets in phase one, once the Governor allows? Many jobs and millions of dollars await your prompt and positive reply. And I ask that you please don't let June restaurant revenue die in our streets.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Henry, thank you. First of all, thank you for what you said in the beginning. You are right about what New Yorkers have done, which everyone should be really proud of. Henry, I want to give you truth, you make a compelling case, but I want to give you the truth. Right now, I do hear you loud and clear about June revenue and I'm talking to a lot of restaurant owners. The answer today is no, restaurants are not scheduled for phase one. But I'm very, very cognizant that the outdoor approach may be the solution or a major solution at least. I want to offer you the hope of knowing that I think we're going to find a way on outdoor dining. We're talking to the State about it right now. We're trying to figure out the right way to configure it. I think there's a real exciting possibility here that could help restaurants back. We have to do it safely. I want to caution that I am concerned about absolutely small businesses, restaurants, bars, all coming back. And I understand that means employment and revenue that people need. But I'm first and foremost concerned about health and safety. Right now in phase one with the industries that are scheduled to come back, we're talking about 200,000 to 400,000 workers coming back to work in the five boroughs. And that is going to be a big change in the city. We have to make sure that goes safely. We have to make sure we do not start to see a resurgence of the disease. But I can't -- so I can't guarantee you phase one today, but I can guarantee you that we're right now with the State trying to sort out the outdoor dining issue. And as soon as we do, we will set a timeline and I'd like it to be as fast a timeline as we believe is safe. So we'll have more to say on that soon.

Lehrer: And I'm seeing more and more tweets asking you to act faster. Here's one, well, let's see. I'll read the one from Ben Max, editor of the Gotham Gazette, who wrote yesterday the Mayor is showing no urgency regarding city reopening. New York City is basically there on both City and State metrics, meaning how little coronavirus there is, except for hiring contact tracers, which the Mayor's operation seems to have been slow on. And he has no plans for transit or restaurants. Wild. So that's a quote. Either he was quoting somebody or he wrote that. I'm not even sure, but that sentiment is out there increasingly right now.

Mayor: It can be out there, Brian, but I mean, I don't know if Ben wrote that or someone else. Whoever wrote it is so wrong, there are no words for it. I mean that's just patently wrong. The contact tracer program will have 1,700 people in a matter of a few days. And we are absolutely going to get to 2,500 people, which is the State goal in the first two weeks of June. I mean we've been over this so many times. I don't know what -- I don't think people understand what it means to go from zero to 60, creating the biggest contact tracing operation that's ever been done in this city by far, far, far. I mean we had a hundred contact tracers at the beginning of this. Give me a break. So that's just wrong.

And then going slow – we've explained exactly what it's going to take to get to phase one. There's been total unity between the City and the State on what those standards are. And we're not going to jump the standards and risk people's health. In fact, what we're trying to do is keep driving back to the disease so that when we open and we've told people repeatedly it's going to be in a matter of days, that you can reopen without seeing a resurgence of the disease because we pushed it back and then we brought the Test and Trace programming to push it back further so that then we can sustain. Because the goal is to open phase one and then move to phase two in real time as quickly as we know it's safe. So no there's been tons of urgency, tons of communication. Some people just want to open whether it's safe or not or if it’s the rules or not, they're wrong. It's not the smart way to do things. If we do this wrong, then we'll close back down again. And then everyone will say, why did you rush?

Lehrer: Other than the contact tracing ramp up to enough staff, are the other metrics there now in terms of new cases, hospitalizations, hospital capacity?

Mayor: Brian, I take it you're seeing the figures every day and you obviously know the answer is no. I mean they're not there on the State or the City indicators, but I'm confident they will be there in the first half of June.

Lehrer: Beth in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Beth.

Question: Hello. How are you?

Lehrer: Okay.

Mayor: I'm good. How are you doing?

Question: I’m good. I know you are committed to reopening the city. And I know you are committed to doing it safely. And my question goes right in with that. Last year you made a commitment to add 15 or 20 miles of bus lanes every year and to speed up buses by 25 percent. Right now buses are at least perceived to be and I believe they are, safer way to travel for many New Yorkers. 75 percent of whom are people of color and essential workers. So my question is, can you please put that $7.9 million for the better buses and the dedicated bus lanes back into your budget? It will be good for the city, it will be good for the economy, it will help emergency vehicles get on their way. And this is a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of your budget.

Lehrer: Thank you. Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Beth that’s a great question. Yeah, Thank you Beth. And you, you know your stuff and I appreciate that question. When we had to do the budget last month in April, it was against the backdrop of, you know, a shocking loss of revenue, which at that point we believe was $7.4 billion. Now it's $9 billion. So honestly, Beth, we were looking for things that we thought if we didn't think the money was going to be used effectively because of everything going on in the crisis, that was some of the money we pulled back. I think your point though is very, very well taken. And we're moving now to the final budget, you know, by the end of June. I'm going to go back and look at this again because I think you're right. And again, I want to -- Brian, when anyone calls in and raises either a point that I hadn't thought of or says it better than I'm saying it or helps me think about something in a new way. I always want to give them credit. So I want to give Beth some credit here for sure.

That the initial actions taken were an atmosphere of just pure crisis. Now we're better off now than we were even a month ago. But I think the point that Beth made that buses are certainly perceived to be safer. And I think in some ways truly are safer for folks, that that's a place we can and should be doubling down. So, I'm not going to make a commitment in the middle of a phone call, I want to really think about it carefully. And obviously it's going to be part of a thoughtful process around the budget. But I think what Beth is saying is ringing a real bell with me that if buses are where people are going to feel more comfortable, then we should lean into buses more and work with the MTA to figure out what's going to help us maximize usage of buses.

Lehrer: And there was a letter released yesterday by four borough presidents calling for 40 miles of new bus lanes. We've seen from the stats that I've read, bus ridership doubling recently from a low of 400,000 to more than 700,000 people a day. So, that's on your plate. You met with MTA Chairman Foye yesterday, I believe, because –

Mayor: No, my team – my team met with them. I'm going to be speaking to him today.

Lehrer: Okay, because one big issue, obviously, is how, when the city starts to reopen, people will get to work when, when hundreds of thousands are expected to start going back in phase one. And I'm curious how confident you are that the MTA even has a plan. They've yet to release a reopening plan of any kind. They're still telling people who aren’t essential workers to avoid subways and buses. Are they nowhere on this as it seems to a lot of people?

Mayor: Look, we're working with the MTA, Brian. We need clarity. We're not getting enough clarity from them. We need clarity on what it's going to take. Look, I want to give the good example – the MTA, you know, we worked with them, we worked with the State on the cleaning plan. That really has worked. That's given people a lot more confidence. That's helped make people healthier, obviously allowed us to do more to support the homeless as well. So, I'm sure we can all work together, but no, we do not have the answers we need yet. The answer to me is straightforward in this sense. People have to know that there is a plan to limit the number of people on a subway car or a bus. What that looks like, what that number should be, how it's going to be enforced, how we're going to educate people – and we're ready to partner with the MTA on it. But there's no question in the world that a lot of people, their only practical choice to get around is going to be a bus or subway and they need to have confidence in it. We also know, honestly, a lot of people are just going to refuse to take the bus and subway in the short term and they're going to try and find other alternatives. We got to navigate all of this. This is so unlike anything we're used to in New York City but it begins with finding a way to make clear to people this is how many people are on that subway car. If it's more than that, we don't allow it to happen. This is how we're going to keep you safe. This is how we're going to enforce social distancing.

Lehrer: And you've been getting pushback for something you said this week regarding phase one reopening and transportation that people commuting to work would engage in a natural sorting out, that quote, natural sorting out, which includes more people taking cars and Ubers and not necessarily getting back on mass transit. And a lot of people can't do that, of course. So, it's your job, as Mayor, I understand the State runs the MTA, but to help guide the MTA back to where people don't have to think, how am I going to take a car to get to work?

Mayor: Well, Brian, absolutely, I see it as my job to work with the MTA to get things to be as safe as possible. And we have evidence of that working because that was the cleaning plan. And I'm sure we can come up with something here that will work. But I also want to be clear, I talk to people all the time, I know a lot of people, we could do everything right with the subways and buses, there's still going to be a certain number of people that are going to make the personal choice that that's not what they want to do right now. And the more things get – you know, it's the safer we get, the better the health care situation gets, the farther we get into the restart, the more I think you will see people then decide it's okay to come back. That's just natural. Some people will be very comfortable in the short term, others will take more time. But our job, absolutely, is to find a way to give people the most confidence we can in the subways and buses while also being realistic that it’s not going to be for everyone in the beginning.

Lehrer: I want to take two calls in a row here and then get your response. I think they are going to be contrasting calls on the Open Streets program which has begun anyway in the city, opening more streets to pedestrians and cyclists to help with social distancing outside. Rita in Jackson Heights first. Rita, you’re on WNYC, hi –

Question: Hey, good morning. Yeah, I'm calling from Jackson Heights. We absolutely love this. It's been so good for our neighborhood and to see people – it's helped with the social distance and kids are using it, our seniors are using it to go strolling. We're working – it's just working so well. We're hoping that it will continue throughout the summer.

Lehrer: Okay. Rita, thank you. I'm going to leave that thought there for the moment. And Susan, in Park Slope, you're on WNYC, you're also calling about Open Streets, right?

Question: Hello? I applaud the Open Streets. However, there is one stretch that has really become inappropriate and that is in Park Slope along Prospect Park West between Garfield and Third. First of all, it's hardly ever used because the park is there for people to go into. And at least on two occasions within the last few days, ambulances that would be going down Prospect Park West towards Methodist Hospital have been deterred and had to go down Garfield Place. They were backed up, they couldn't get through because the traffic was backed up having come off of Prospect Park West all the way to Seventh Avenue. And that's dangerous. So, it's just an inappropriate block to have been included in what is a wonderful program. And if it is – if those streets were being used, then I could understand it. But given the danger that has resulted from the enormous amount of traffic that comes off of Prospect Park West, it really is inappropriate.

Lehrer: Susan, thank you. Respond to Rita in Jackson Heights and Susan in Park Slope.

Mayor: Yeah, I appreciate both of them. And, Brian, this is sort of a great example of why, you know, your show does such an important service because it is very helpful to me to hear directly from people what they're experiencing. So, I'm very happy for Rita that she's having that experience and, look, that's what we've heard mostly from community leaders and elected officials and everyday New Yorkers that, generally speaking, the Open Streets have been really good and well used. We're absolutely – Rita to your question, yes, we're continuing throughout this crisis. I certainly think that includes through the summer. And we will keep expanding as we've agreed to with the City Council.

To Susan's point, and obviously, you know, Susan lives very close to where I live in Brooklyn. I understand that point. My children by the way were born in Methodist Hospital, so I certainly know a lot about Methodist Hospital and if the ambulances are having a problem that worries me. Susan, I will follow up on that personally and I want you to please give your information to WNYC so we can follow up with you. You're raising two points. One, how with any of them, the streets, do we keep safety first and the ambulance being able to flow through, I need to get an answer from our team from NYPD, from Transportation, how we're making sure that can happen better going forward because that should not have been a case where an ambulance couldn't have gotten through from everything I know.

And then second, if an Open Street is not being used over a period of time, what do you do? And something we've seen already working with the City Council, working with the NYPD and Transportation Department is that some Open Streets, either they weren't as good as planned or they weren't that well used or they created unintended consequences. In some cases, we've made a modification or we've chosen another location. So, we're going to look at that and see what it means for Prospect Park West. But the most important issue immediately is, of course, safety and making sure that ambulances can get through

Lehrer: On the mass transit, people have said you could mandate that anyone driving into the city have at least two people in a car, which is what happened after 9/11 in Lower Manhattan during rush hour, if you recall, to, you know, prevent overcrowding in any quote, natural inclination, to repollute the city with more cars. Another idea that I've seen mentioned for potentially addressing crowding problems is a reservation system for riders. I don't know if that's workable at all in the New York City subways. I'm curious your opinion. Another that I've seen is using existing cameras to monitor how many people are entering a station. So, are any of these things, things that you're considering, at least recommending to the MTA or the ones that you could implement for the city?

Mayor: Okay, great question. Let's again, your listeners are smart and they're paying attention, but let me again say the MTA is run by the State, so they have to decide on the ultimate approach to the subways and buses. When I talk to Pat Foye today, I'm going to talk to him about whatever he thinks will work. But I think – I work almost, you know, reverse engineer the question to say if we know we cannot have a subway car with too many people in it, we got to define what that number is and just tell the world that, whatever the number of people who should be maximum in a subway car or a bus. Starting with that knowledge, I think would help everyone and then being really clear about the methodology for making sure that it's not going to surpass that, and whether that is, you know, personnel in the stations or personnel on the trains that will monitor it and act on that [inaudible] –

Lehrer: Is there a number? What could that metric be? Before you go onto the other parts of my question, I realize I asked you a multipart question –

Mayor: Yes, you did.

[Laughter]

Lehrer: But the – you know, once you're not able to maintain six feet on a subway car, which would obviously be a very sparsely populated subway car, once all the seats are taken and a few people are standing, aren't you already beyond safety? So, what's the number?

Mayor: I think the six feet measure is a very important one. And it's also based on the common sense that everyone understands. The goal is to keep everyone at six feet all the time. Sometimes physically people are going to get a little bit closer, but the goal is to constantly keep that mindset of, try to be six feet and wear that face covering. So, when you combine both of those, it really does a lot to protect everyone. And I don't have the magic number, I want the MTA to define it for all of us. But, Brian, I think you're still talking about a good number of people on a subway or a bus. You can still get a lot of people around that way. And the important thing is not to allow crowding, you know, if it's some cases a little less than six feet, that's, I could live with that. But what I want to make sure is we never have anything like crowding,

Lehrer: But you can't define crowding yet, can you?

Mayor: No. That's what I really think we need to do publicly. We need to say this is the limit. We do not want more than this number of people on a subway or bus – 

Lehrer: How about reserve –

Mayor: And to figure out –

Lehrer: Go ahead –

Mayor: I’m sorry, I was just going to say, and figure out how you follow through. And I want to say I use the word enforcement, but I want to emphasize all by – I want to see the enforcement done obviously in a non-punitive nature and primarily by civilians. But the point is we've got to figure out – people can make sense of a number, they can make sense of a goal, they can make sense of a deadline, give people a number and say, when there’s this many people, that's where we want to stop. And I believe people will work with it. But in terms of other ideas like reservations, you know, it's interesting, or the cameras, it's interesting. I don't know how workable it is, honestly. I think we should look at any and all possibilities, but I believe it starts with – New Yorkers, Brian, here's the big story here. Once told here's what's going to work, New Yorkers have been following it in a way that I think was unimaginable. People have really been trying to make the six feet work. They really been trying to make the face coverings work. If you say X number of people on a subway, not more than that, I think people are going to make their own judgment. They don't want to be on that subway with more than that number of people, if you can go to the next car, for example, or some cases wait for the next train, whatever it may be, especially with more frequent service, which is the other X factor here. MTA is being able to provide a lot more service now because their workers are back. So, that's important.

On the car issues. Look, we're going to look at everything, but, again, I'm in a real world place, Brian. I think we're nowhere near the number of people on the road or the number of people in the subways that we normally would have. Remember phase one, even though it is 200,000 to 400,000 people who could come back, that's compared to what was originally a workforce of 4.5 million back in February. Back in February, we were at an all-time highest employment in the history of New York City, 4.5 million. Now, we've lost – over a million people have lost their jobs and tons of people who have jobs are staying home and working remotely. Even if everyone uses their car, it's not in the next few months going to create the kind of congestion we're used to by any stretch. So, I want people to feel comfortable with mass transit, but I know a certain number of people are going to use their car. For the next few months, we're going to get by with that. Going forward though, the future is mass transit. In fact, the future has to be a doubling down on mass transit once we get out of this crisis.

Lehrer: Let me ask you one more question from a listener via Twitter. User, Mark, asks, ‘Mr. Mayor, I have a friend recently released from prison on parole who is now homeless and forced to sleep on Wards Island, which is full of violence and drugs and an environment likely to have him end up back in prison. Halfway houses aren't accepting new people. There are no rooms.’ That's the policy question – halfway houses aren't accepting new people and he writes, ‘Where can he go and how can you get help?

Mayor: Okay, well, look, I appreciate the question from Mark and, Brian, if your folks can help us connect with Mark, my team will follow up because we'd like to help his friend. The bottom line is we have really been trying to change the reality of our shelters in part by creating a lot of smaller shelters and things like Safe Havens, in part by changing the security reality, which used to be unquestionably unacceptable and there's still work to do. But now security in shelters is supervised by the NYPD for the first time in history. And the folks who do the security are trained by the NYPD. There's been a lot of improvement in safety in shelter. So, I want to know what's going on in that shelter that we need to fix and if this individual needs to be in a different setting, we definitely have options. The halfway house piece, I'm not sure I understand how it's being asked in this case, but what we do have for folks is different kinds of shelter options. And most importantly, you know, a huge number of people have been moved out of shelter and into affordable housing, well over a hundred thousand, and that's the ultimate goal. Not to be in anything temporary but in permanent affordable housing. And we continue with that effort.

Lehrer: We'll see if we can connect you and that tweet-er. Thanks, Mr. Mayor, in tough times – talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Brian. Take care.

2020-05-30 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Question: To what extent do you expect a rise in coronavirus cases from these mass gatherings?

Mayor: Yeah. Matt, that's a very important questions and I thank you. I've been really clear. I would wish in this moment, understanding all the pain and the agony that I talked about in the beginning, I would wish that people would choose this as a time to express all of that agony, that need for change, that anger, that frustration in a different way than in-person protests because we're still in the middle of a pandemic. But I understand why after not just years, not just decades, but centuries of oppression, that people at a certain point need to express themselves in the most powerful, present way. Again, always, always peacefully. So, I understand it. But I would still wish that everyone realized that when people gather, it's inherently dangerous in the context of this pandemic. And I'm going to keep urging people not to use that approach. And if they do to focus on social distancing and wearing face coverings.

2020-05-31 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Question: Mr. Mayor, Commissioner Shea, I hope you are doing okay. All I know is I'm exhausted. Let's, I've been looking at these protests. I've been there for every day. And what I'm finding is that there may in fact be a factor of a lot of these kids have been shut in. They've been – they don't have summer jobs now. They have no school. There's a lot of a lot of pressure on them and they have nothing to do. There's no gathering points. There's no place for them to go. And so there's a lot of pent up anger that makes it more complicated I think. What I'd like to know is going forward into the budget negotiations, does this affect how you guys are going forward with the budget and saying, well, what can we do to do more for the young people and not allow it to be a summer of nothing to do?

Mayor: Todd, your excellent NYU education is on display here because that is a very profound, insightful question. We went to NYU around the same time. So the fact is it is a bit of a perfect storm. I mean not even a bit. It is a perfect storm. I mean, you know what's been strange the last few days is even though everyone's been putting on their mask, generally speaking, when you're out there, it doesn't feel like people are remembering there's a pandemic. Because there is, you know, honest pain and anger and frustration. And people are dealing with a historic issue and it must be dealt with. And what happened with George Floyd was disgusting and something that was one of those moments in American history where the realization became clearer that we're living in an unacceptable reality.

But just a few days ago, the only thing we were talking about was a pandemic. Like literally the only thing we were talking about. And the reason I say that is I think Todd, you are absolutely pointing out that you have all the frustrations about injustice combined with the frustrations about the injustice within the pandemic because of the pandemic displayed immense disparity. Combined with the fact that people have spent two months cooped up in doors and we don't know what the summer brings. So I think you're hitting the nail on the head that there is an X factor here because people have been cooped up, because there's an extra level of frustration, but we still have to deal with that. That's the hand we're dealt and we will deal with it, you know, in every way using every kind of restraint.

Now to your question about the summer and youth. I want to find ways to support our young people. I know the City Council does and I give them a lot of credit. They've made it a major, major priority. When we said we couldn't do Summer Youth Employment, it was both because of the now $9 billion hole in our budget and that we did not think we could ever assemble young people the way Summer Youth Employment requires at work sites. Maybe things are getting a little better now. Obviously phase one starting on June 8th which is really good news. But still we're far from out of the woods, so we've got to figure out now if it's a virtual online approach, if it's a some in person approach later on, whatever it is. I know the City Council is saying, can we find an alternative? We also want to see if there's a way to find an alternative. We don't have it yet, Todd, but we're going to work on it because our young people need positive outlets this summer. The Department Education will provide them for sure, a whole variety of programming, not just quote unquote summer school as we knew it, but a whole lot more to give kids something positive and constructive. But we are working right now with the Council to see if there's more we can do. Because I agree with you. The more positive alternatives, the more young people respond.

2020-06-01 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Question: I'm okay. We're nearly an hour into this news conference and, to my knowledge, no one has even mentioned the pandemic. So, what I'm wondering is, first of all, do you have any concerns about all of these crowds gathering, regardless of the purpose and regardless of the passion in terms of public health? I'd love it also if one of your public health experts who's on this call could answer as well. How much are you concerned that there will be a rise in COVID cases as a result of all of these crowds and why have you not made public health statements over the last couple of days reminding about social distancing?

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew, excellent questions. We've been talking about this. I don't think we have our public health folks on now, but they can certainly speak to it later. Andrew, this is – I have to say, and I want to just express this openly to everyone. Just a few days ago, what we were entirely focused on all of us was one of the greatest challenges this city has ever, ever faced – this pandemic, this painful, horrible crisis, taking the lives of so many New Yorkers. When I was out in central Brooklyn yesterday, maybe I had, you know, 15, 20 conversations with just every-day people on the street. Overwhelmingly, people were talking about their concerns about their health, about their kids, about the fact that we're running out of money or to had not gotten checks from the federal government. Some people, of course, raised concerns about criminal justice, but most people are dealing with this crisis. They're scared. They're scared for their health. They're scared for their family's health. They're worried that they don't know where things are going with this coronavirus that hasn't stopped Andrew, I think the honest truth is we are dealing with right in the middle of that another absolutely unforeseen moment that's vast in its scale that if there had not been the coronavirus now, these last few days would stand out in American history as a painful, profound moment. And you're seeing it happening literally in cities big and small. It looks like entirely all over the country. So, I think we've got to almost exact opposite realities, if you will, that are colliding at the same time. Now, the disparities pervade both. Let me hasten to say, the disparities, the racism that is inherent in what happened with the pandemic is also inherent in all the concerns running through the policing debate. We've got to address them across the board. We've been trying to for years. We have to do a lot more. But to your central point, it's very hard to say to people, you know, when there's such pain, there's such anger that if you say don't come out because of the pandemic. I think that this is something we grapple with all the time. We don't want people to hear that as we are not hearing your concerns or your concerns are not valid or we don't have to change things. And it's a very tough balance. And again, this is happening on a such a painful, intense national scale. This is not like – before this, we had small protests and I kept saying whatever your left, right or center, I wish people would stay home, not protest, do it virtually. But this moment is the outpouring of such pain and frustration – years and years, decades, generations of pain and frustration outpouring. This is a different reality. We've had to adapt to it. We've had to try and understand it and address it. And I am very worried about the health impact, to the core of your question. I would urge everyone to think about this. And I do think that for those who have made their presence felt, made their voices heard, the safest thing for this point is to stay home, obviously, because we don't want people in close proximity to each other. We don't want people out there where they might catch this disease or spread this disease. And I think more and more people have to realize there is a danger that it will cause some real impact on the resurgence of this disease. We don't have the facts yet, Andrew. And these things are happening outdoors – that's better, thank God, than if people were gathering together indoors, but there's a real danger here, there's no question there's a danger of this could intensify the spread of the coronavirus just at a point when we were starting to beat it back profoundly. So, I want to beseech everyone to think about that. I would certainly urge everyone – look, you've made your point, it's time to stay home. If you do go out, please try in any way you can to observe social distancing and keep those face coverings on. But, Andrew, in conclusion, this is just a horribly complex situation. It just is. We've never dealt with anything like this, this combination of features and we're all trying to find our way to the best solutions. That's the honest truth.

We’ve got a lot to do in the city. We have to get back to fighting this coronavirus. We have to get back to being unified and doing this together. Thank you, everyone.

2020-06-02 NYC Mayor de Blasio

It's hard to remember in some ways that just a few days ago, literally all we were talking about was the pandemic. We have a lot to do on criminal justice reform. We have a lot to do on healing wounds. We have a lot to do on ensuring there will be peace and order in this city, but guess what, the pandemic is still there. And we must address that and we need to reopen this city. And we are moving forward on Monday, June 8th, and we've got a lot to do to get ready. And we got to get back to that discussion too.

They're frustrated. They're worried. They're worried about their health. They're worried about their children's health. People talked about their lives and there's such pain and frustration, and people have been cooped up for months. This is a horrible, perfect storm we're living through, but we are better than some of what you see, we are better than this crisis. We will overcome this crisis. We are stronger than the coronavirus. We are stronger than the horrible legacy of division and racism we've been handed by previous generations. We have to overcome. We have to be the greatest generation now. We have to do something harder in many ways than those we look up to in the past, but that's what we are called to do in our time.

So, we will go to phase one on Monday, June 8th, and begin to reopen this city. We will work together to make that happen, to make that work. We're going to work with the state to make that work. We're going to work with MTA to make that work. We're going to continue to expand the testing, we’re going to continue to expand the test-and-trace effort. We're going to fight back the disease. And you know what? Before last week we were all fighting shoulder to shoulder across all neighborhoods, 8.6 million people together. If we're going to move forward, and I know we will, we got to get back to being 8.6 million people fighting shoulder to shoulder in common cause to protect each other. That's what we must do.

Moderator:Sydney from the Staten Island Advance. Sydney?

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Sydney, how are you doing?

Question: Good. How are you? Are you worried about a second wave of the coronavirus in the city, given all of these large protests and people not socially distancing and at times not wearing face coverings? And are social distancing roles and crackdowns on large gatherings still being enforced, not just protests, but this Saturday I saw hundreds of people gathering in large crowds outside of bars and Hell's Kitchen, drinking, and did not see any cops around to enforce a social distancing measures. So, I'm curious, what's going on? And will you consider sending the National Guard to enforce the citywide curfew if there's more looting tonight?

Mayor: Sydney, I don't think you heard my earlier point. So, let me try again. No, on the National Guard. We will regret it if we bring outside armed forces. I want to say it's as clear as a bell, if someone wants to go and check all the history of what happens when outside armed forces go into our communities, I'm going to ask community leaders and elected officials to back me up, unless you think you want to take that chance, which case I'm going to say, you're going to regret it. When you bring in people not trained for the circumstance, but still with loaded weapons and put under horrible stress, really bad things happen. We have not had loss of life the last five days. We’re to work every minute, every day to avoid any loss of life. There has been loss of life in other places, and I am pained for all of them. But if you bring in folks who are not trained for the situation, it puts them in a horrible circumstance. Let's let the folks who are trained for the situation, 36,000 members the NYPD handle – yes, is it complex? Yeah. It's complex. Life is complex. It's a difficult circumstance is going to be solved overnight. No guys, it's not going to be solved in one on off switch. I would like people to pay attention to how things really work. This will take a little time to work through from Thursday night to Sunday night, we thought we were working things through, working them out, and moving forward. Something changed Sunday night, things change. And when things change, you quickly have to make adjustments. We made one adjustment for last night. We're going to make another adjustment for today. We're going to keep making adjustments, but no, the answer is not instant gratification, let's bring in outside armed forces and everything's going to be great. No, it's dangerous. It will make things worse.

To your other question, with all due respect, I'm a little confused what you think was happening Saturday night in New York City? The NYPD was dealing with a lot of very complex issues all over the city, protests, peaceful people, not peaceful people, that was their focus, not bars wherever you were with all due respect. We will go back to enforcing on bars and restaurants as we were many times very effectively. We'll go back to that. We're going to restart the city on Monday, June 8th, but for the last few days has been a national crisis. Maybe you've read about it. And that's what the NYPD has been focused on.

Moderator: Last two, Reuven from Hamodia?

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask very quickly since essential workers are allowed to be out during the curfew, if the Uber's and trains and taxis will be allowed to run? My main question is this, why recommended that protesters stay home, for others in the city, even forced gathering bans, not recommendations. The retail store owners have been closed for two months. It was experiencing financial ruins, been banned from opening a store. People from attending houses of worship, our regular part of life, have been banned from doing so with more than ten people. Now you've expressed solidarity with this particular protest cause, is that why it's been given dispensation to disregard epidemic guidelines? I know you were asked about this yesterday and you said there's such pain and anger and you don't want people to hear that as you're not hearing their concerns. What about the retail store owner facing imminent financial ruin or the religious person who cannot in the house of worship? What about their pain and anger? So Mr. Mayor, are we in a pandemic or not? And do we have one set of rules of protestors and another for everyone else? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, you're a smart guy asking a smart question, but I'm going to tell you that anyone who thinks there's different rules for different people, again, is not trying very hard to see the reality. And I'm just not going to hold back. If you guys want to really work hard to miss the reality, be my guest, but everyday New Yorkers can see what's going on. We're in the middle of a national crisis, a deep-seated national crisis. There is no comparison. I’m sorry, I do feel for the store owners. I really do. I know a lot of store owners and I'm so happy that on Monday, we're going to start to open up the minute we thought we could give relief.

I want to tell you in the middle of all this, we're talking about the pandemic. I haven't been in the last days talking about our thresholds because there's been so much else going on, but let me take a moment to answer your question in part with this. Three indicators, thresholds, we do every day. The daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, all of New York City, the latest report 40 patients, four, zero out of well over 8 million people, 40 below our threshold of 200. The daily number of people in our public hospital ICU, that threshold 375. Today is 354 people. The percentage of people that tested positive for COVID-19 as more and more testing is being expanded, literally every day in this city, four percent, lowest we've ever seen. Four percent. So Reuven, I want to make clear, before Thursday which was not that long ago my friend, we were doing one thing, one thing only, fighting back this disease for everyone's benefit. I want to say State and City, Governor and I have been totally united that we had to have a strict, strong approach to get to these numbers. It didn't happen by accident. So you could say, oh, couldn't we have done stores, and I appreciate how painful it's been for people to be missing religious observance. But I'll tell you, the religious leaders of this city have stood as one and said we are not going to do things prematurely that will endanger lives. So these facts speak for themselves. We stood there together. We held the line. We beat back this disease. These last days, I'm very worried about any resurgence that might come from these protests. I absolutely am. I wish, and I honestly believe it. I think people have made their point, change is coming. I wish people would now realize in the name of the health of all New Yorkers. It's time to go back, stay home. Let's turn this page, and the folks who are the criminals and the folks who are doing the violence need to be dealt with, but this is the other piece of the equation.

When you see a nation, an entire nation simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism. I'm sorry. That is not the same question, as the understandably aggrieved store owner, or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services. This is something that's not about which side of the spectrum you're on. It's about a deep, deep American crisis, we have never seen anything quite like what we've seen in the last few days. This is a powerful, painful historical moment. So now I have eyes to see – we're not going to treat it like it's just any other day, we're not going to treat it. Like why are people outside the bars and not notice that all of America is grappling simultaneously with a horrible crisis? Sorry guys, there's a world outside New York City. So we're dealing with this. I want to turn the page as quickly as possible, but we're not going to ignore the reality. Monday, we restart, and that relief is coming for those small business owners very quickly – on Monday, they can do curbside pickup. They can do pickup at the stores. That's going to start to relief – if we do things right, not withstanding, I'm worried again about the health impact here, but it's only been a few days. It's been people outdoors, which also thank God means less spread than when people are indoors. I want to get past this and go back to doing the work we're doing. We keep doing the good work fighting back this disease. Then the next phase happens and all those store owners, you're talking about our backend business as usual, it does not have to be far away. The religious services come back that does not have to be far away if we do the work together and we will. The transit issue, the essential services, all the essential workers have to keep doing their work,

they go to and from work, that's absolutely appropriate. Any hour of the day, all the transit that makes that happen, that's absolutely appropriate. So the things that allow the essential activities of this city go on will continue unabated despite the curfew. But the curfew is 8:00 PM. Unless you're doing essential work, you should go home. If you don't go home, there's obviously going to be a lot of police presence to address the situation, people being peaceful. That's one thing. If they're not being peaceful, the curfew alone is a reason for someone to be addressed.

2020-06-05 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: We've got huge inequities we have to address. Not just in policing, in our economy, in our health care system, everything laid bare by the coronavirus epidemic. And right now, we must address those disparities. We must keep our city safe in this moment of this pandemic. We have to restart our economy. Wherever I go, people talk about how fearful they are for their health, for their family's health, but also, because they're running out of money or they already have run out of money. How are they going to pay the rent? How are they going to pay for food? How are they going to pay for medications? We have to fight back this disease more. We cannot take our eye off the ball.

So, Monday is the restart, and that will be something that allow us to get people back their livelihoods, but we'll also come— with challenges of fighting back this disease. What does it come down to? If we're going to fight this disease, it is once again about that word you've heard so many times testing, testing, testing, testing. That is a way forward, then tracing following up on everyone who was in contact with someone who tested positive so much to do, to make sure we keep people safe, but this is our focus right now. Last week, we had a day where 33,000 people got tested in one day in New York City, the highest we've had since the beginning of this crisis, we intend to keep building that number up to at least 50,000 a day.

Now, the message is I want every New Yorker to get tested and more and more testing capacity is out there in your community. Go take advantage of it, it will help us to move forward. Today we announced something really important that will be mobile testing in New York City— mobile diagnostic testing. So, you can literally stay in your neighborhood, and the testing trucks come to you. We're starting in two neighborhoods next week, Soundview in the Bronx and Kew Gardens in Queens, and they'll be moving around in neighborhoods all over the City. This is an idea that came out of the work within this city government, our task force on racial equity and inclusion, our center for community and faith partnerships, our leaders in this administration talking to community members saying, what do you need? What would help? And people said, mobile testing. We need it in neighborhoods hit hard, we need it so that people can more easily connect with testing. We need to remind people, it is always free, it's easy, it's fast, and it's coming to you. Two trucks next week, we're going to ramp up to 10 trucks in the next few weeks. They can do 80 tests per day, excuse me, 80 tests per day per truck. So, 800 more tests per day because of the trucks. And again, whether it's one of the trucks or one of the hundred and 80 centers that we now are putting up or have up, you can get a free test by going to nyc.gov/CovidTest or calling 3-1-1.

Final point on this, if you have been at one of these protests, I want to strongly urge you to get tested. It has been a real concern that people have gathered in close proximity. I understood, and I understand still this painful, real moment in history, but I want to keep reminding people. It is dangerous to be close together and people must keep social distance, and we got to get back to that clear understanding. We're going have to hold that clear understanding social distancing, face coverings, we got to get back to that discipline. So, if you have been in a protest, I strongly urge you to get tested.

Now, fighting disparity means focusing on the hardest hit neighborhoods, fighting disparity means providing more to those neighborhoods all the time. These neighborhoods are filled with people who have done the work that built the city over generations, but have never reaped the rewards of their labors. We have so much more to do to create fairness and redistribute the wealth of this city, to the places that actually built that wealth, but weren't rewarded. So, one of the ways we do that is through a strong public health care system, 11 hospitals, 70 clinics that serve the people of city, regardless of ability to pay. We've got to strengthen that system, we invested in it years ago to save it. That became a crucial element of how we were able to save many lives at the height of this crisis and help push back this disease, now we need to go on the offensive and deepen our investments in communities. Once again, our taskforce on racial equity and inclusion, push this notion hard that we need tangible impacts now to address disparity, not in the future now. And so, the task force insisted that we look at how to speed up all of our plans and make sure that real investments happen in communities right now that will help people get more health care. There's a specific new initiative called Centers of Excellence, and this will mean that three new ambulatory care facilities will be built in neighborhoods that need it in New York City. In Elmhurst Queens, I don't think I have to say anything more, after what we saw happen at Elmhurst Hospital, Tremont the Bronx, Bushwick and Brooklyn. Centers of Excellence, they were supposed to be something in the future, now they will be open this September. The task force made the point, this is why I named the task force speed intensity, redistribution, focus on impact now in communities that are hurting. these centers of excellence will provide a wide range of health care, they'll focus on COVID, fighting COVID, they'll focus on making sure that respiratory diseases are addressed. they'll make sure that people not only get physical health care, but mental health care as well. Tens of thousands of people per year will benefit, construction is beginning immediately. And I want to thank, of course, the Racial Equity and Inclusion Task Force, I want to thank Health and Hospitals. I want to thank our Department of Design and Construction, that's doing amazing work, extraordinarily fast work. These three centers will be opened this September and many, many people will benefit, and it will help us fight back this disease, but it will also help us fight back that deeper health care disparities.

Now, getting people back to their livelihood, that's what phase one is about. Getting New York City back on its path, to being strong again, to our economy being strong to our people, having what they need. Three days from now, phase one begins, one of the big pieces of phase one is construction, 32,000 construction sites will reopen. Some magnitude is a reminder, as recently as February, how vibrant the economy of this city was and how vibrant it will be again, 32,000 construction sites will come back. That means a lot of New Yorkers will come back to work, but it has to be safe, has to be healthy, that is the bottom line. Every site has to be ready and we're going to make sure it's ready, the guidelines are clear. You go to nyc.gov/coronavirus, every single company can see and working people can see what those standards of healthy, safe work would be, and we are going to protect every single worker. Department of Buildings will be out inspecting the sites constantly, every single one, making sure their social distancing, proper hygiene rules, hand sanitizer, face coverings, you name it. For the first 30 days, I want this to be very clear to all the owners and managers of the companies involved in these construction sites. For the first 30 days, we will educate, we will constantly monitor, we will help you to ensure what you're doing is safe. Our department of buildings will be there to help, not to fine to help, but if after 30 days of nonstop engagement, you are not doing what you need to do, then the fines begin. I don't want to give a single fine, I don't want to take money from anyone unless you are ignoring the health and safety needs of your workers.

Let's now talk about our thresholds and in general, the news is good, but this is going to be something we will be talking about for days and weeks ahead. And we're going to watch when we see something that isn't as good and make sure it does not turn into a larger trend. So, indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for a suspected COVID-19. That was only 48 yesterday, today we saw a jump I don't like that, It's 84 today. Now 84 is still well within our 200-person threshold, but that's a meaningful movement in one day, we're going to keep a close eye on that. We need to stay under 200 to keep sustaining phase one and to move on to phase two. Daily number of people in our Health and Hospitals ICUs is under threshold today, 344 against the threshold of 375. Percentage of people tested positive for COVID citywide, well within under our threshold of 15 percent, that number today is four percent, that's a very good number. So overwhelmingly good results based on all of your hard work, but we got to hold the line, we cannot loosen up because these numbers start to move in the wrong direction, we're going to talk about it. If ever to move in the wrong direction, we're going to talk about it, they move too much in the wrong direction, we then can't keep moving forward on our plan for reopening. So, we have to be clear about holding the line.

A few words in Spanish –

With that we turned to our colleagues in the media and please make sure I know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all just a reminder that we have Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze, Police Commissioner Shea, and Buildings Commissioner La Rocca on the phone.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. Good morning, everyone on the panel. Just a little housekeeping. I'd like to start by saying that I believe reporters should have a chance to ask follow-up questions as routine at press conferences to assure that their questions are answered. And then I'd like to go on and ask my questions – do you believe that the protests are the cause of the hospital admissions nearly doubling overnight? If not, what's driving the spike? And then how far are you willing to go in terms of cutting the NYPD’s budget? Several Council members on both sides of the aisle have said the cuts are inevitable. Do you support the five percent to seven percent that Speaker Johnson and Council Members Dromm and Gibson are asking for?

Mayor: On the hospital admissions, we do not see evidence, Julia, that it’s related to something that's happened only over the last week, just because of the time it takes for the disease to manifest. We're going to watch that very, very carefully. I'll certainly be talking to our health care team, but I would be surprised if that's what's causing it. I think we're much more likely in the next week to 10 days to see a manifestation if there is one, but whatever's causing that Julia, I take it very seriously that we can sustain that level, but we cannot sustain if it keeps going up and up and surpasses the threshold.

On the budget, now look, I start from this perspective; first of all, the biggest problem for all of us is that all our agencies may be about to be cut and cut radically if we don't get the stimulus bill from Washington and if we don't get the borrowing authority from Albany – it will lead to major cuts across all city agencies. And that's what every single one of us should be very concerned about because that's going to hurt the quality of life in New York City a lot. That's going to make a lot of people lose their jobs. It's a horrible scenario; we have to fight against that every day. I've heard the vision that those have who want to reduce funding for the police. We're going to work with the City Council as always, but the concern I always raise back is we must keep this city safe. We have to do it a smart way. We have to keep our commitment to neighborhood policing, which is a labor-intensive approach. So, I am concerned that whatever we do, it cannot take away the progress we've made and it can't take us backwards or, you know, address one problem and create a new problem. That's the balance I'm concerned about.

Moderator: Next we have Reuben from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. First of all, I agree with Julia. I request that we allow follow-ups, even if it means only one question for reporters or just to make sure because sometimes reporters feel the questions aren't answered properly. Thanks. Now that it's a week after the protests have been gone. I'm wondering if you can please release extensive statistics. How many people were arrested, how many stores were smashed, how many officers were injured? My second question is this, the Supreme Court has said that any first amendment regulations must be viewpoint neutral. And you've specifically stated this week that these protesters are quote, not the same question, unquote, as other gatherings because of 400 years of American racism and therefore you're treating them differently than other gatherings. How does that square with the Supreme Court's requirement that regulations on the first amendment must be viewpoint neutral? Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Look, I'm not a lawyer, but I feel very strongly, Reuben, on the common sense point here, which is we are seeing a national historic moment of pain and anguish and, and a deep cry for help and a deep cry for change. It is not your everyday situation. When we were dealing with this virus in the beginning, we said very consistently across all communities, we want to avoid gatherings. I still want to avoid gatherings. I wanted the people to understand that one, protestors are making their voices heard; they're saying something very important. I'm hearing it loud and clear, change is going to happen. We have to show people that change, but not withstanding that this is a very particular moment. I still want to see people more and more choose to make their voices heard in other ways and not take the risk of gathering. And until we are out of the woods in this indicator today that you know is going in a wrong direction - as a reminder this - until we're out of the woods on this virus, we're still better off with people not coming out and gathering in this way. But you know, I, I am happy to have any discussion with anyone about why this is different than what we are dealing with day to day and why it has to be understood and respected and people's sheer anger and fear and pain has to be expressed so we can get past it and make change and move forward in peace. The second part you're I think you're absolutely right, we need to list the number of people arrested, the officers injured for sure, and there've been too many officers by far injured and that story is not being told enough, the number of stores that were attacked. We need to put all this out and I'm sure the NYPD and other agencies will be doing that as quickly as we have those statistics; been a very painful week, but my job is to turn the page here the right way, the peaceful way and move us forward. And finally, I definitely heard what you and Julia said; we're talking about the right way to approach the press conferences going forward. Appreciate your point and we'll come back with more on that.

2020-06-05 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It’s the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC and as every week at this time, it's time for our weekly Ask The Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0 or tweet a question, use the hashtag, #AskTheMayor and good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you very much, Brian, how you doing today?

Lehrer: I'm doing all right.

Lehrer: Ashley in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Ashley.

Question: Hi. Hi Mr. Mayor, so I just wanted to ask a question about the NYPD not wearing face mask. So I've been out protesting. I've also seen a lot of videos. I just feel like it's representative of the general attitude of the NYPD that we're in a city that is in a crisis. I mean, you've been focusing on safety and these are people that are technically supposed to protect us and they are not wearing face masks. What I've seen is all the protesters are wearing face masks – sorry, I'm very passionate about this, it just really gets to me but I don't understand –

Lehrer: And not all to be fair, but go ahead –

Question: Even makes any sense. Yes. Yeah. It just, I know you're not completely responsible for that decision because the NYPD and I'm sure that they're probably getting, you know, their temperature checked when to see whether they're sick, whether they're going out there, but still just the symbol of it. How – what does that say to the people about this police force that is supposed to be protecting us?

Lehrer: Ashley, I'm going to leave it there. Mr. Mayor, as a matter of policy, why is it not required for every police officer who's out on the streets, in the pandemic, in a crowd to wear a mask?

Mayor: Yeah, no, Ashley is exactly right. And Ashley, thank you for the question. I'm frustrated by it too. This is again, Brian, boy are we in a situation where any attempt at pure consistency is being roiled by an ever-changing environment, starting with the pandemic, but no, it's quite clear. The policy is police officers are supposed to wear face coverings in public, period. There are times when it's understandable. If you're trying to give a command and people can't hear you as well, or you know, you're drinking water from a water bottle. I mean, there's obviously exceptions, but overwhelmingly police officers are supposed to wear those face coverings for everyone's safety. It has not been happening consistently. I have had this conversation with Commissioner Shea multiple times. It has to be fixed and that bothers me.

And I really do feel Ashley's point and I share her point, but that's not the thing that bothers me the most, Brian, what bothers me even more is the reports of officers covering their badge number or their name up or not turning on their body camera when they should. And I told a story at the press conference earlier that one of the things that bothered my daughter the most in her experience before she was arrested, and she said the crowd was calling out one officer who didn't have his body camera on, even though he was in contact with the protesters, you're supposed to the minute you're having an encounter with civilians, the body camera's supposed to go on. He didn't do it. The – you know, he apparently either made a move to do it, or did it for a moment, then turned it back off and the crowd saw it and started yelling at him, your body camera's still not on. And that should never have to happen.

I understand in the rush of events, an officer might legitimately forget, but you know, people have to know body cameras on at the appropriate times, name and badge number visible at all times, face covering on at all times except for valid exceptions. This is where that there's a sense, and I hear it loud and clear of double standard, and that's not good. That's not acceptable. If people feel that the police are not holding themselves to the same standard that they hold everyone else, that is when a breakdown in trust occurs and we cannot allow that to happen.

Lehrer: Mike on the Lower East side, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello.

Question: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for your reporting and thanks to reporters like Jake who are out in the streets covering things. I just wanted to ask specifically about the budget. I know people always say budgets shows values. I'm a public servant. I work at HPD, the agency that's responsible for developing affordable housing and maintaining the cities you know, private housing stock, almost all of the private housing stock in the city. HPD gets 19 cents for every dollar that the NYPD gets. So I'm just wondering you know, is is HPD one-fifth as important as the NYPD. It seems like the priorities are really off. I think people are in the streets because they don't have, you know, affordable housing, they don't have health care, they don't have you know, good jobs, stable jobs, and I think there's a reason people are upset right now. And the way – the things we're hearing from the Mayor, I think are upsetting. And I think that people aren't being listened to and yeah –

Lehrer: Mike, I'm going to leave it there. Let me focus his budget question, Mr. Mayor. You have a June 30th budget deadline as you know, coming up for the fiscal year. That starts July 1st with the big budget deficit from the effects of the pandemic and from the stats I've read proposing to leave the NYPD’s nearly $6 billion budget in tack, while slashing education and youth programs and cutting other agencies, this has become a rallying cry for many people. And when they say defined the NYPD maybe there are a few “abolitionists” out there, but what people really mean for the most part is put back summer youth programs, put back other things and let the NYPD take its fair share of these cuts.

Mayor: Brian, and I appreciate it. Let me just start with my appreciation to Mike. First of all, Mike, thank you for serving the city at HPD and I really appreciate the work you all have done. You've created a record in the amount of affordable housing for people. Brian, I'll try and do this real quick. The there's just a dichotomy here that we need to acknowledge and it gets to Mike's point where he says he's not sure if I'm listening. I want to assure everybody I am listening from my heart and my soul. People are angry, frustrated, deeply, hurt. They were hurt before the pandemic and then the pandemic just upended lives and I've been there in communities talking to people and they care a lot about policing issues, but most profoundly when I talk to people, they care about – they can't pay the bills right now, they don't have a job. They're worried about how they can pay rent, where they can get food, where they can get medicine. This is how basic and horrible the situation is. There's tremendous frustration. So I'm listening deeply to that, and I'm listening to the cries for help and the deep desire for reform and NYPD. And we must do all those things. I've got a year and a half. I’m going to devote every ounce of energy to making deeper change. So any one of the things I'm not listening to, I better do a better job at showing them listening. I can tell you right now, I see it. I feel it.

To the point about the budget priorities. We have put massive amount of money and I'll get the updated version of what Juan Gonzalez assessed years ago when he said, and this administration there's been a massive redistribution of wealth. His number I believe is $21 billion, that has been moved to working people and low income people because of everything from pre-K to affordable housing, to paid sick leave, we go through many, many initiatives most recently, guaranteed health care, guaranteeing that every New Yorker who doesn't have insurance still will get health care coverage. Only city in America is doing that. Honestly, Brian, respectfully you and so many others have spent very little time on the fact that New York City guarantees health care for all its people. And I think if we're really talking about where our money is going, you know, with the amount of affordable housing we’ve created, the money we pay to stop evictions would free lawyers, you know, the things we are doing for people adding two full new grades of free public education. This is what redistribution looks like and by now, and Juan Gonzalez did that assessment, it was 21 billion, it's going to be a lot more now, that was years ago. That is exactly hearing the deep cries of the people for justice and for redistribution and for a whole different approach to our life and our economy.

But on the NYPD and this budget, there's a misnomer here. When things got cut in April, it was because they could not exist in the coronavirus. We couldn't do summer youth employment in person, at that point, we still can't. The things we used to do with summer youth, they'd go to a non-profit organization, work in the office, the non-profit organization is not open for them to work there. It doesn't work that way. So that was what was undergirding that decision. We're definitely going to be putting a lot of resources into youth initiatives. We're going to work with the City Council on that. There's no question about all the money we need to put into affordable housing, education, youth programming, but that is a different question than whether we will be safe enough if we change our approach to policing, and I want us to be fairer in policing, but still safe. And that's the balance we'll strike. We're going to have this conversation with the Council. We're going to work together, but we have worked for years to make this place safer. And we cannot leave that piece out of equation, working people in this city constantly talk to me about their fears in neighborhoods around the city, their fears about safety, that is central to making sure this city can work for everyday working people, people of color, outer borough people, the people I talk to all the time, and we've got to strike that balance and that's what we're going to do with the City Council,

Lehrer: Mayat, and actually, I don't know where my Mayat is, but my Mayat you're now on WNYC with the mayor. Hello?

Question: Yes, New York City, Brian, thanks for taking my call. A point of clarification, Mr. Mayor, with all due respect, but you are using the word investigation seemingly as a foil, unlike Atlanta when they don't come up, we don't [inaudible] believe [inaudible] eyes in that we saw police plow into basically upset, but peaceful protesters with two vans. We saw the Andrea - and I understand the young lady asking a question around possibly social distancing and about why they couldn't use the street, and the response was to cause her to have seizures and concussion, to be hospitalized, and the supervisor Edelman, not even coming to an aid that she obviously couldn't immediately get up. So that's the first part. The last part is what is your strategy in terms of what we have been called unions that are not, they basically have used an association to cover up, obscure, and to codified policies of abusive brutality –

Lehrer: And Mayat, we're going to leave it there. I apologize. The mayor has to go in one minute and I want to give him a chance to answer your call. And if you can, mayor, I'd appreciate you mentioning do - does the PD need to use the technique of kettling in protesters?

Mayor: Okay, let me first speak to Mayat’s very, very important question and I'll quickly respond to you, Brian. Mayat was starting to talk about police unions. I believe deeply in the labor movement and what unions were supposed to mean, and I've been explicit for years that too often, the police unions, particularly certain unions, there's five different unions, they are all different different leaders, but some of the leaders, some of the unions have spent a lot of time dividing the city and holding us back. And instead of participating in positive change, they've tried to stand in the way of it. And they have opposed me for six and a half years running, and they are opposing me today, and they always oppose me. And I'm going to keep fighting against that because this should be about actually how we heal and bring police and community together.

And accountability is actually in the interest of all working people. How about the 36,000 to do it right when there's a few, do it wrong. It is better and safer for everyone that those few be addressed and if necessary removed from the force. Commissioner Shea said on Friday, that horrible incident on Lower East Side, that those officers – there had been a full investigation – and the charges being brought and there was going to be the next stage of the trial. That's what we need to see more of when there was something wrong, fast investigation, fast trial, fast action.

Mayat’s question is very fair. When you see something with your own eyes. Mayat sometimes what we see with our own eyes is the whole story and that means fast investigation, fast action. Sometimes it's not the whole story. Sometimes there's more going on than a short video shows. That incident was horrible with the pushing to the ground. Made no sense to me. That if someone's pushed to the ground, a protester was pushed the ground like that, and then hurt, police are supposed to help her, not one, push her to the ground and two, ignore her. So that's unacceptable. That's one of the ones that again is being immediately acted upon, but I want to see much faster. And the Commissioner said yesterday, the discipline is coming in a number of the cases in these videos, including suspensions, and I want any time that something like that, this Mott Haven situation is good example. The underlying reason the police were acting was because there was evidence of violence about to happen, but if there were specific things done wrong, that has to be investigated and acted on. So, Mayat’s question is really essential and we have to do better, but yet do the union stand in the way of that process constantly, absolutely. And in other parts of the country that have different laws, different union dynamics, the due process, which we all believe in due process, but here in this city, we have many more layers because of the union contracts and all that require us to do more than is necessary in other cities. And that's an issue, but we're going to honor that.

To the kettling, Brian, no, I don't – look, I don't want to see protesters hemmed in if they don't need to be and I'll have this conversation with Commissioner Shea. Sometimes there's a legitimate problem and it does not, is not visible to protestors, and they're seeing one perspective, or the cell phone video picks up one piece of the equation, but sometimes there is an act of violence or another problem that is being addressed that leads to that pause, and that hold on people and it's not a good feeling. I've been in protests where it's happened. It doesn't feel good, but this is against a different backdrop where we have seen enough violence coming from again, a small number of protestors systematically to know we're dealing with a much more complex reality and keeping people safe sometimes means stopping things in place while a situation is addressed and then reopening again. So, I don't like it as a practice unless there's a very specific reason and it should be for as brief a period of time as possible.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, thank you as always. I hope that all the police officers are safe in this, and I hope all the protestors are safe in this, and I'll talk to you next week.

Mayor: Amen. Thank you, Brian.

2020-06-07 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. If you look outside, it is a beautiful day today in New York City.

And tomorrow something very, very important happens in the city, the beginning of phase one, the restart of the city, the restart of our economy, the restart of the people's livelihoods, and we should all feel that this is a moment that every New Yorker should celebrate as our achievement together, your achievement, because you did the hard work to fight back the coronavirus so we could get to phase one and tomorrow morning will be a very important day in the history of this city. 

Thank you to everyone who's put real intense time and energy into this task force knowing that we have to make changes right now to fight disparities in New York City. And with that, I will turn to someone who has been fighting disparities her entire life from her heart, our First Lady Chirlane McCray.

First Lady Chirlane McCray: Thank you. Forty-five days ago, the Mayor established the Racial Inclusion and Equity Task Force to take immediate action to address the needs of our Black and Brown communities that have suffered disproportionately from the effects of the coronavirus. The numbers speak for themselves – of the more than 17,000 coronavirus deaths in New York City, over half lived in just a few dozen communities, primarily Black and Brown neighborhoods. In addition to every single one of those deaths, are loved ones and families and communities in mourning. The loss of those New Yorkers means empty chairs at dinner tables, jobs and businesses lost, households de-stabilized, empty spaces in the pews in our houses of worship, a hole in the hearts of mothers and daughters, fathers, and sons. The loss of so many people we serve is chilling and painful for all of us. 

This task force is led by a diverse group of administration officials, many of whom were born in, or have lived and worked in these same communities, including myself. And it was a reminder that it is not enough to sit here and say, we're a progressive administration. It is not enough to have said we stopped stop-and-frisk and we've begun neighborhood policing. Since the task force launched at the end of April, these losses and suffering have flared into righteous anger and protest against the institutional racism that has fueled these disparities and the systems, practices, and traditions in every segment of our society that have built and bolstered this country from housing patterns and health access to employment and policing. Too many of our people are trapped in an inescapable cycle of suffering, feeling the same limitations and the same pain over and over again. 

So, the mission of this task force is more important than ever. And we are moving with haste and with urgency. And we know it's not enough to only listen to the voices calling for change as we did with nearly 300 people, including 100 community-based organizations that serve the hardest hit neighborhoods. We have to act. We have to be able to look at ourselves in the eye every day and ask, what did we do today? What did we do to make things better? How are things changing? People of African descent in this administration have had an opportunity to work together in a way that is unprecedented in this city and in this country. And trust me, we all got an earful about what we should be doing and what would benefit these communities. 

We reviewed the events of the week and made these immediate recommendations to begin reforming the NYPD. We heard more funding for youth and social services. We heard more community voices within the NYPD. We heard more investment focused on prevention. Again, today's announcements are just the first set of what will be ongoing actions until the end of this administration. As we go forward, the NYPD hire of credible community ambassadors to represent residents of these communities will keep the NYPD informed about community concerns and make sure our residents have meaningful support from the NYPD. The shift in some funding from the NYPD to youth and social services will help preserve services for youth in communities of color. The vendor and administrative enforcement will be moved out of the NYPD so that code violations will not require an officer whose presence could escalate an encounter. 

We are moving forward. We are not waiting for anything or anyone. No one – and I say no one wants to go back to the way things were before. So many people rose up in beautiful protests this last week demanding justice, demanding that things change, naming our pain. And we must use this moment to transform our pain, to be stronger, and take action. Especially now when we are in this most difficult of circumstances, we must act now and prove that Black lives matter. When times are good, when times are bad, Black lives matter. 

Mayor: Thank you very, very much. And that commitment, that passion, that sense of purpose that you just heard. I know it's felt by every single member of this task force. I'm going to turn to our Deputy Mayor who has put a lifetime into this work. I know he remembers struggles in the city going back decades for the kind of justice we were still fighting for in so many ways and must achieve in our time. So, I turned to Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze. 

Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze, Health and Human Services: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, thank you, First Lady for your leadership, for your ability to actually bring us all together. This is about solving a problem by unifying all of us, not by dividing the people in the city. As a Mayor said, I was here 30 years ago, working at the Health and Hospitals Corporation. And in those days, I was participating in the demonstrations that were looking for more funding for AIDS. My partner was very proud of being arrested for civil disobedience at an [inaudible] demonstration led by Larry Kramer whom we lost a couple of weeks ago, a lifetime of understanding that disenfranchised communities and people of color were disproportionately affected by that AIDS pandemic. 

Thirty years later, I'm seeing a lot of the same parallels with COVID-19, you know, also affecting disproportionately people in communities of color and also highlighting how our system should allow for peaceful demonstrations that lead to change. And at the same time, how the pent up anger of our communities, the sadness, the pain for having lost so many still remains a major factor. 

In the task force, helping work with the First Lady and Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, I realized that as a public health physician, I cannot see this only from a health and social services angle, but that we need all the pieces to come together and help our youth and help our city come back even stronger, just like we did during the AIDS epidemic. And so I am fully confident that we will together go through this and that we will actually address all of the pieces related to public health and COVID-19, and also the societal issues related to structural racism. A few words in Spanish, if I may –

[Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze speaks in Spanish] 

Thank you very much.

Mayor: Thank you, Deputy Mayor. So, before I turn to one more topic, I'll simply say this, this is a beginning. I want it to be abundantly clear to all New Yorkers. These are first steps of what will be 18 months of making intense change in this city. The work of this task force is crucial and many other efforts are underway right now to determine how we come back from the coronavirus, how we not just rebuild but build a city that is profoundly addressing the injustices and disparities that have been laid bare. This is a transformative moment. So, the actions today are a beginning, but I expect us to urgently incessantly work for change for 18 months until the very last day we're here. I expect you to see and feel a different reality in the NYPD and in this city as a whole, we need to make these changes. They need to be the kinds of changes that people feel right down to their neighborhood, to their block, to the grassroots. That is my mandate. That is the mandate I'm giving myself, that's the mandate that this task force believes in. That is what we'll achieve. When we leave this building, this city will be a more just place. It will be a place where all New Yorkers feel more, that their cries for help, their anger, their pain, their demands for change have not only been heard, but acted upon. 

With that, I want to turn to the issue that we've all been focusing on now. I can't believe it's been almost a hundred days of the coronavirus, but it has been, and what a horrible, challenging, painful time. And yet at the same time, a moment of extraordinary, powerful action by the people of the city, including extraordinary unity and common cause to beat back this disease. And some of it has been in ways that you see people standing together, applauding our health care workers, supporting our first responders, doing so many things to help each other, the folks – and those amazing people to do the food banks, the soup kitchens. So, many people have come forward, but I keep celebrating the work of everyday New Yorkers. Every time you put on a face covering, every time you socially distance, every time you stay at home even though you wish you didn't have to, you're helping move us forward. And today's indicators and thresholds show once again, the fruits of your labors, and this is particularly important as we get ready for tomorrow, Monday, June 8th, the first day of phase one of the restart. 

So, indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold again is 200 patients. Today's report – 72. So, well within the threshold. Number two, daily number of people in our Health + Hospitals ICUs, we need to stay under 375 patients. Today's report – 324. Also, well under the threshold. And percentage of people tested citywide, positive for COVID-19, that threshold is 15 percent. Today's report – four percent. Very, very good number. So, that is what you have achieved together. That's another way we're going to move forward in this city, beating back this disease, restarting, getting people back to their livelihood, and then doing the work of recovery together. A few words in Spanish 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media, and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have First Lady McCray and Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze here in person, and Deputy Mayor Thompson and Executive Director of the Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity Bonilla on the phone. With that, I will start with Roger from 1010 WINS. 

Mayor: Roger?

Moderator: Roger, are you there? 

Mayor: Let's see if we're going to start with Roger. Roger. 

Moderator: Roger, we'll circle back. Next, we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, everyone. If I could start by making a modest request to stay on muted so I could ask a follow up, I would appreciate it. And with that, I just wanted to ask – 

Mayor: Hold on, hold on – your modest request. I just want to – we are working on the ground rules and we've had the conversations. Let us do that formally, Shant. So that's something we want to figure out together. We'll announce it very, very shortly. So please just stay to the format we've had. If you wish to have two questions upfront, do it. If you want to do just one, that's your choice.

Moderator: Next, we have Louis from New York– 

Mayor: Do we have Roger or not?

Moderator: We're going to circle back, but we’re working on it. 

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead.

Moderator: Louis. From New York [inaudible]. 

Question: Yeah. Hey, can you hear me? 

Mayor: Yes, Louis. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I've got two questions for you. When you announced a likely phase two reopening for early July, where you erring on the side of caution? I ask that since, generally speaking, there has been a 14-day [inaudible] for other regions when transitioning from one phase to another, which would have put us at June 22nd for your phase two reopening. Also, on the subject of street fairs. I know it's [inaudible] I'm sure it is, but in light of how New Yorkers will soon be heading into the subways in greater numbers, do you think street fairs might be something to think about for a phase three reopening considering how it's in the open air and all? You know, I was talking about this with somebody else and we were thinking that aside from obviously limiting capacity, another idea, would be allowing unidirectional flow, meaning people traveling in one direction, which is like what you see in supermarkets now, or distancing stands further apart – 

Mayor: Louis, I got it. Okay. Let me speak to these – on phase two, you hit the nail on the head. Exactly what I was doing was, abundance of caution. We are not like the other regions of the state. We were the epicenter and remain the epicenter of this disease in this state. Our reopening is much more complex than any other part of the state. There's a reason why we are the last to go to phase one. You are absolutely correct, Louis. According to the official chart of the State, it could be as little as two weeks until you get to phase two. But I want to keep expectations a little lower than that. We're going to be in constant communication with the State. We're going to be watching very carefully what's happening with our indicators and threshold. If we don't like what we see, we are going to slow down the pace. If we do like what we see, we might be able to go even faster. But I think if people have in mind, think about the beginning of July as the target, I think that is a safer, smarter way to think about it. Be ready. Could it be earlier? It could be. 

But I don't want expectations so high about it being later in June and then the disappointment, if it can't happen. If I start to see the indicators and thresholds going in the wrong direction, I'm going to be very vocal about it. And remember we got between 200,000 and 400,000 people coming back to work. We're obviously watching what the impact of these protests and people being in close proximity will be, got some X-factors here that are causing some pause. So, I want you to understand that you exactly are right that I did that purposefully.

Street fairs – I don't think so at this moment, Louis. It's a bigger discussion, but we have to speak soon to the events in July and August, even into September, whether we think it makes sense to have large groups of people mass together. Yes, open air is better, but remember everything we're talking about so far is with, you know, really carefully observing social distancing. Street fairs and big events make that really, really hard. It's almost a contradiction. So we'll consider it. But I – and I do need to speak to it soon, but I start with an assumption that that's hard to achieve if we really are going to keep a lid on this disease, but we'll keep looking at and we'll speak to it soon.

Moderator: Next we have Abu from BanglaPatrika.

Question: [Inaudible]

Moderator: Abu? We will circle back. Next we have Duncan from Gay City News.

Question: Good morning, Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing?

Question: I'm fine. Thank you. You doing all right?

Mayor: Yeah. I could use more sleep, but other than that I'm okay.

Question: These disparities that COVID-19 revealed have been in existence since at least the 1980s. We've known about those, [inaudible] protested about those. You campaigned in 2013 on a tale of two cities, might those disparities have been at least minimized or reduced if you had started addressing those things, let's say, six years ago?

Mayor: Duncan, I appreciate the question. I am the first to say, look, Duncan, I think it would be disingenuous to say I'm looking back on six and a half years and feeling like everything was perfect. It wasn't. There are many things I wish I had done differently, but there's also some of those things I wish I'd done differently if I had had different information or a different understanding of how things work. To some extent, you learn by going along and see possibilities later that you didn't see in the beginning. And there’s also the profound issue of, what are you trying to do? And when can you do it? And how much can you do? And look, in the beginning – and stop and frisk is a powerful example – I'm not harping on it because people like, oh, you know, stop and frisk, that's yesterday's news. I think stop and frisk was profoundly important, but I'm trying to bring people back to the moment.

When I came into office, there was a cacophony in this city, editorial boards, the then Mayor, right as I was coming into office, the then Police Commissioner saying that if we got rid of that policy, it would lead to chaos, disorder, crime and I didn't believe that. I forged ahead, but no one knew until we did it if it would work and we had to keep people safe at the same time. And then you go through everything else we did, when we got rid of marijuana arrests, when we reduced the number of arrests overall, when we built neighborhood policing as a strategy, all these things, you don't know if they're going to work or not, but you have to figure out what are the priorities, what will have the biggest impact and then proceed, you know, with all the energy you’ve got to build one on top of the other on top of the other. When we decided to change the approach to incarceration and incarcerate fewer people, of course you could say aren't there potentially dangerous impacts to that? These are real issues, but made the decision, it was the right thing to do.

So, I look at discipline issues, and, for example, I've been very clear I have to take responsibility for misunderstanding – a mistake is therefore my mistake – we deferred to the Justice Department during the Obama administration, in the case of Eric Garner – that was a mistake. I should not have done that. I should not have listened. I should have said the immediate NYPD process should go. The disciplinary process should go. Even if the Department of Justice didn't like it. Even if they said it might make their case harder, I should've gone to the Garner family and say, this is your choice. I'm ready to go. Do you want to take this chance or not? And that's the way we're going to do it in the future. So, Duncan, I look back on those things, I definitely wish I had done differently, but I'm also convinced that we were building constantly an agenda of change and it's never easy. And now for 18 months, we are unfettered. I am term limited, not running for anything, we are in a place that is clear and fearless. We're going to get a lot done in 18 months. Judge us by what you see over this next year and a half.

Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze: A public health perspective, Duncan, since you alluded to my words, I will say two things. One is the reality over 30 years is that the communities of color have gotten some indicators a little bit better, but not in real proportion to the health indicators for more advantaged communities in the city and in the nation. This is not a New York City only issue. We have a structural issue nationwide that we have to address. The second thing is crisis generates opportunity and for now, as we come out of COVID-19, one of the things that we talked the most about at the task force is precisely why do programs – this administration has spent six years putting a lot of programs in place for communities of color – so why are they not really generating the public health outcomes we want? Part of that is because we need to have more integrated programs that not only refer to health, but also referred to social services, housing, et cetera. And so the task force is completely zooming in on this and very committed to make sure that we do community approaches with, as the Mayor mentioned, community people, community tracers, community ambassadors, and really try to build out the community as much better than hopefully what we found them before COVID-19.

Mayor: Thank you. And I want to see Grace Bonilla, if you want to speak at this point or any other point, we want to welcome you in, just want to see if there's anything you've been wanting to say.

Executive Director Grace Bonilla, Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity: Yes, thank you, sir. I mean, what I would like to say is that this is a group of committed public servants who have been at this work for years and this moment is exactly what we were built for. Many of the Commissioners or Deputy Commissioners on these task forces have pushed us and challenged us, and we are grateful for it. The community members that we are speaking to have also pushed us and challenged us, so we are listening, and I think it's important for everyone that is tuning in today to know that we are at this work and this is our life's work, and we are committed to making sure that we are addressing these disparities as quickly as we can.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next, we have Jonathan Allen from Reuters.

Question: Hi, good morning. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Jonathan, how are you?

Question: I'm well, how are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: So, two questions if I may. So, you've repeatedly talked this week about police officers should wear masks for the public safety, their own safety, but many officers do seem to continue to at least appear to be disregarding you on that. So, I want to ask why you think police aren't wearing masks, why they are disregarding you on that? And if New Yorkers you see that as sort of evidence that you don't have control over the department, what you might say to them?

Mayor: On the question of the masks, now I want to be abundantly clear, frustrates me, no end the we have to do better, in the NYPD. Everyone is being asked to wear a face covering, that includes police officers. Now I'll grant you – if you're trying to communicate to a crowd of people, you might have to take off your face covering. If you're in the middle of something, where there is a legitimate, tactical reason to have your face covering off. If you're drinking water, there are reasons to have a face covering off, but that's not the only thing we've seen. We've seen too many officers who just have it off and it's painful to people because it feels like they're flouting the rules.

I would say to all the officers out there, I know you have a hard job, but you know, do unto others. If we're asking everyone else to follow the rules, social distancing, wear a face covering for the protection of all, you should do it too. It's just a human decency thing, and I've had this conversation with the Commissioner and I expect to see improvement in this area. I know it's hot. I know the officers are out all day and that's not easy. I know I don't like wearing the masks for long periods of time, and I understand if they need some relief sometime, but it too often just looks like it's being ignored and that's not acceptable. So I have been working for six and a half years to change the nature of policing. We've come a long way. We got a lot more to do and we'll go ahead and do it relentlessly for the next year and a half.

I understand that the anger, the frustration, sometimes the sense that it's impossible to make the world better, but I say, watch and look deeply at what's changed over six and a half years and know that for the next year and a half, it's going to change more and faster. You will feel it. You will know it. That's our mission. Thank you.

2020-06-08 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, it is a very beautiful day today. It's a beautiful day out, but it's also a beautiful day for this city. This is a powerful day – day 100 of the coronavirus crisis and it is the day that we start to liberate ourselves from this disease, the day we move forward. Phase one of the restart begins today in New York City and everyone, all New Yorkers, should be proud that you got us to this day. This was a lot of hard work. Everyone who stayed home, everyone who was socially distanced, everyone who put on those face coverings – you got us to this day and it's a day to celebrate hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers coming back to work today, just the beginning of the restart. But it is literally because of every single New Yorker who worked so hard to get us here.

We have been the epicenter of this crisis. This is the place where it was going to be the hardest to make a comeback and yet New York City is so strong and resilient. We are making that come back and we're going to always remember the heroes of this crisis – first responders, the health care heroes, everyone chipped in, but also the everyday people who made this possible. So, the most important thing to remember today is don't forget the lessons we've learned. We got this far by the hard work and the discipline. We got to stick to it so we can get to the next phase and the next phase and the next phase. So, we're all going to keep doing that social distancing, washing the hands, the hand sanitizer, all of that, the face coverings, all the things that matter, stick with it.

We're here in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is such a powerful place in the history of this city. It is a place of working people. It's a place where people fought for their country in tough times. It's a place where things have been created against the odds. And here again, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a heroic place in the fight against the coronavirus. Here in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, New Yorkers came together to create PPEs, to build things and produce things that weren't made in New York City just a few months ago, but they made them here to save the lives of their fellow New Yorkers. So, this is a great place to be today as we start the next chapter.

I want to thank all my colleagues from the administration who are here, who've all worked so hard through this fight. And every one of us has been together saying we knew we would get to this day, it would take a lot of work, but we are finally here. Now, what comes back today? Construction, manufacturing, wholesale, and nonessential retail now can do curbside and in-store pickup. And we're looking forward to the day in a few weeks where they can go back to their normal operations. Thousands of people are back to work here at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This is a center of manufacturing, including some of the most dynamic companies in New York City, right here. Thousands are coming back to work here today. Remember hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers overall, coming back today to work in the five boroughs.

Now, as we begin the restart, it will not be business as usual. There's work to be done. We have to help businesses to do this right. We're not only going to do inspections and make sure they’re doing the right thing, we're going to help them do the right thing with the free face coverings, with the guides, with the help lines. We're going to help make sure working people are safe because nothing is more important than protecting the health and safety of New Yorkers. So, for every working person coming back to work today, we will watch out for you. And if you see something wrong, we want to make sure it is addressed immediately. You're going to hear, in a little bit, from our Small Business Services Commissioner Jonnel Doris. He's going to talk about some of the measures we’re taking to help businesses get back and get back strong.

But we also know that for the economy to restart people have to be able to get to those jobs. And this crisis has made that harder in so many ways. So, we have some announcements today that I hope will start to lighten the burden and help move us forward and help move New Yorkers around easier and easier. First of all, I announce today, 20 new miles of busways and bus lanes, 20 new miles. These 20 new miles of busways and bus lanes are going to help over three-quarters of a million New Yorkers to get around more easily – 750,000 New Yorkers will have a faster way to work, more frequent service, less crowding. Look, more service equals less crowding equals more health and safety. That's what we want to achieve. There will be five new busways in New York City. Just like the success we've seen on 14th Street, Manhattan, we're going to add five new busways. They will be launching on an urgent basis. I want to see this happen as quickly as possible because we need the help now given the crisis we're in. We have to make it easier for people to get around. They will launch between June and October. It'll be a one-year trial basis for each of these five new lines. If they go well, as we expect they will, they will become permanent. Again, launching between June and October, starting this month with the first one, Main Street in Queens.

And then on top of that, four new bus lanes with signage and markings to make it possible for those bus lanes to achieve the goals we've seen. Every time we expedite bus service, more and more people use the buses, more and more people feel it's the right way to go. They don't need their cars. They can take mass transit. And, again, more frequency equals more safety too. These will be launching between June and August, starting this month on East 14th Street in Manhattan and 149th Street in the Bronx. And an important point, the 14th Street Busway, this has been a success by every measure. I said, we're going to do it, we're going to see if it works, we're going to see, do people ride the bus more? Does the bus go faster? Does it have any negative impact on the surrounding streets? And the jury is back. The answer is, it is a clear success. We are making the 14th Street Busway permanent.

Now, let's talk about another important way that people get around, the Staten Island Ferry. We are seeing ferry ridership increase. That's a good sign. That means people are going back to work. We expect it to rise more now as we go into phase one. And so, starting this afternoon, there will be another increase in rush hour service on the Staten Island Ferry. The ferry will now be every 20 minutes in rush hour. We'll have social distance markers in place to show people where they can be on the ferry and have that proper distance from the fellow passengers. We will have hand sanitizer available for free, face coverings available for free. And as things come back more and more, we will add service to help serve the people of Staten Island.

Now let's turn to the subways. We have been talking to the MTA now over the last week or two, a lot of forward motion. I thank the MTA for increasing the service and for realizing how important it is to do things like have hand sanitizer in every station. We want to see more and more support for people who are using the subways, want to see the same kind of markings, the same kind of distance markers to help people know where to be. But we're going to help the MTA. We are sending approximately 800 school safety agents who will be in stations, educating New Yorkers, giving out those free face coverings, helping people to feel comfortable when they take that subway ride, that it’s going to be safe. And we're going to keep doing this work with the MTA throughout.

Now, I've got a few other things to talk about, and I think we're trying to find the location of our Commissioner because there was a little situation with his drive over. So, what I'll do is I'll finish everything I got. And when he comes in, he's going to speak, okay. Take a different topic now, one I always say brings up passion in New Yorkers – Alternate Side Parking. We have, obviously, this incredibly important moment where we're restarting. We want to try and make things as easy as possible for people. So, we are suspending Alternate Side Parking for two more weeks. Alternate Side Parking is suspended today through Sunday, June 21st. We'll be reassessing in the meantime whether to bring it back or not.

So, there's a lot to do. There's a lot to do, but we are moving forward in this city. Everyone should be proud of the fact we're moving forward. Let's get this next part, right so we can move forward even more. And this is an appropriate time to talk about our indicators and thresholds. And the news today is very good. So, this is such an important day for the city. I'm happy to say we also have the health data to continue to give us hope that things are moving in the right direction. Let's go over the indicators today. First, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold again, 200 patients. We are well under it today at 67 patients. Second, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, that threshold is 375 – today, a good number, continues to go down, 326. And number three, percentage of people tested citywide who are positive, tested positive for COVID-19. That threshold is 15 percent. This is the biggest measure in terms of showing us where things really are at in this city, how things are going in this city, the lowest number we have seen – thank you – the lowest number we have seen – three percent. So that is a great, great sign. But, again, we know that the reopening means more and more people will be close to each other. We need to get it right. So, if we would like reopening, we got to stick with it and make sure we do it right so we can get to the next phase.

Now, Commissioner, have you caught your breath? Or if you need another moment, I'll do the Spanish first. I'm going to do the Spanish first. We'll get a little bit creative in our ordering here. Few words in Spanish, then we'll go to Commissioner Jonnel Doris of Small Business Services.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, to tell us about the support that the City will provide to our businesses as they get started – and we are going to be hand in hand with them to make sure this restart goes well – Commissioner of Small Business Services, Jonnel Doris.

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Thank you, sir. Good morning, everyone. Before I begin, I just wanted to take a moment to thank the brave women and men who've been on the front lines, helping us to get to this point – our nurses, our doctors, our first responders, the health care professionals, and certainly our small businesses who have been essential to this process. Our small and businesses are tough and they are resilient. And we are excited for this day. This is a day we've been waiting for. As businesses reopen, SBS is here to provide the resources and services that they need. We have instituted a hotline that is critical for our small businesses. If you have questions and need one-on-one assistance, call our Restart Hotline at 888-SBS-4NYC, that's 888-727-4692. Since launching this hotline on Friday, we have had over 500 businesses call in with multiple issues that we've been able to resolve for them. So, please, if you need assistance, call our hotline at 888-727-4692.

If you need face coverings for yourself and your employees, you can visit us nyc.gov/business. If you need face coverings, again, you can visit us at our website. We have a map of 70 locations where we distributed two million face masks for our small businesses and their employees. For instance, if you're in Brooklyn, you can go to the Brooklyn Chamber. If you’re in Chinatown, you can go to Chinatown BID or to the Chinatown Partnership. If you’re in Queens, you can go to the Woodhaven BID or the Queens Chamber. If you're in the Bronx, you can visit the Fordham BID. Staten Island, Staten Island Chamber of Commerce, and so on. And there's a map. You can go on our website, again, and you can get the information there. If you're looking for specific guidance, City and State regulations for reopening, again, you can see that on our website or call our hotline.

If you need additional support and you need to have a training session or for your employees or for yourselves, we do have training and resource fairs available where multiple agencies are there to assist you. Again you can get that information from our hotline. And lastly, if you need capital, if you need financial support as a small business to get you going, we help you as well. We have federal, State, and City funding available and we want to make sure that you're able to get those resources. Again, I'll say our hotline is 1-8-8-8-7-2-7-4-6-9-2. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you Commissioner. Okay. Let's go to some questions. Nice to be in this sunny day together. Yes, Dave?

Question: I wanted to ask you – I know we're really adjusting how we do the follow up.

Mayor: This is the old school rules, Dave, when we're in person like this. So go ahead.

Question: Okay. I'll just ask a couple right off. Do we have a better handle on, you said a couple of weeks ago, 200 to 400,000 people? Do you have a better handle on how many people we expect to come back this week? And my other question has to do along with that, what do you have to say to those New Yorkers – because I've heard from so many of them in the last couple of weeks, have not taken the subway, not going back to the office, I'm not even going to go in Central Park for a walk because it's too crowded. What do you say to all the people who are afraid and don't feel safe?

Mayor: Yeah, no, Dave it’s a very important question. Let me, let me come to that one because I think that's the big, big question. But on the immediate point, I'm looking at Vicki, I'm looking at Janell. I don't have a better number than that 200 to 400 range yet, but I think we're going to get it in the first days as we see who actually makes the decision now that's real. So I think, would you agree that in the course of this week, we'll be able to hone that number? They're nodding behind their masks, that's a yes.

Dave, the big question, so first of all, everybody has to make their own choice and we respect that, right? People have to find their way. This is an absolutely unprecedented moment in history. I think New Yorkers are very pragmatic, very resilient. What they're going to do is watch and as they see things working more and more people will come out. And if they don't see things working well enough or if the disease reasserts, they're going to be more cautious. And that obviously is understandable. We want those who can work from home to keep working from home, obviously. But folks who now have the opportunity to go back to work, what I want to do is maximize the chances that they can feel comfortable on mass transit, working closely with the MTA. The cleaning has helped a lot on the subways. We want to see all these other measures, move the free face masks, the personnel there to help make sure there's not too much crowding, the things we're putting in on the Staten Island Ferry, for example. The bus lanes, the busways, the hope is all of this encourages people to feel safe on mass transit. And the frequency Dave is crucial because if there's more and more trains and buses, people will be able to spread out more. But I think it's going to be a day by day thing. Like everything else in life we want today to be a really strong start. And then people are going to watch. And I've talked to a lot of people these last few days when I've been out in neighborhoods, they all say, you know – I'm hearing a lot of people want to come back, but they're watching to see how it goes. We have to show them they can have that confidence. Yes?

Question: Mr. Mayor, I know you said people are going to make their own choices. In regards to the subway, I'm just wondering, you've been pushing for social distancing measures. The MTA is saying, they're not going to do it. It's not possible. They're not going to even try. The Governor is taking the subway today. Would you yourself personally, feel comfortable and safe on the subway? Do you plan to take it?

Mayor: Yeah, I intend to. So I'll be taking the subway too. I think it's great the Governor Is taking the subway. We need to show people that we think some really important work has been done to make subways and buses safe. And look, I do understand the MTA’s position. I still think it would be smart to have those markers because it would give people confidence. And this is, this is a moment in history, it is not forever, but to show people they can come back with confidence. I think that approach would make more sense. But whatever approach they do, I don't, you know, they don't – they do their thing. I respect them. We're working together. The State runs the MTA. The important thing is that we see people feeling comfortable and I absolutely will take the subway to show people I’m uncomfortable.

Question: Mayor, the bus lane announcement is significant, but it's about a third of what the MTA requested. Was the MTA asking for just too much or is it too much for you to do it right now in the short term?

Mayor: Yeah, Gersh, look, I'm someone who likes to see progress and celebrate progress and then keep making more progress. So my attitude is this is a major step. The fact that we have proven in a way that – you know, the history probably better than me. I don't think a busway like 14th Street was successfully achieved previously in city history. Maybe I don't know my facts, but I think I'm right. The fact that today we're saying 14th Street is now permanent, five more coming in. It is the beginning of something really positive, obviously between the busways, the select bus service, all of these approaches have been working and that opens the door to a very positive future for New York City. And this is a great time to do it because we got to give people confidence to come back to mass transit. So we're going to do everything we can do, but we're always going to tell you what we think we can do right now. And then as we see the next opportunity to do more, we'll of course do more.

Question: Just a follow up. You said Main Street is the first one? Do we know the other four?

Mayor: Yeah. Do you have a press release? Did they give you press releases? Do you have an email? Gersh, read your email, man. Stop baking so much and read your email. Main Street, Queens; Jamaica Avenue, Queens; Fifth Avenue Manhattan, for a section of Fifth Avenue; J Street, Brooklyn; 181st Street, Manhattan. Yes.

Question: I know today’s phase one, but do we have any update as to how [inaudible]? Are they still there? Is there any plan [inaudible] right now? [Inaudible]?

Mayor: Yeah, phase on is the beginning of something very new. Everything is now going to be reassessed. I don't have an answer for you, but we'll get you one immediately. My impression, of course, thank God is that the need has changed because thank God, more and more people are healthy, fewer and fewer lives are being lost. But we want to get things normal as quickly as possible. We'll get you that update.

Question: [Inaudible]?

Mayor: The what had happened? Okay?

Question: How was that [inaudible] all phase one?

Mayor: I don’t think it is. I think there are stores like the ones I visited in the Bronx that have a lot of work to do to come back and we're going to help them. Commissioner Doris has met with the small business owners in the Bronx and we have a specific plan to get them direct grants and support. I think some of the bigger stores in Manhattan were very quick to come back. I spoke to the CEO of Macy's. He said, in fact, Macy's Herald Square had very little damage. They were able to deal with it immediately. And Macy's as always as being a great partner with the city, they want to really make this restart work. They are energetic about it. So my impression is it was because we contained it with the curfew and the other actions, very minimal impact. It's horrible. We're not going to let it happen again, but very minimal impact in terms of phase one. Go ahead, Gloria.

Question: I guess to follow up on Marcia's question. I know there've been calls to return the Summer Youth Employment Program. And then, secondly, I know you and Commissioner Shea have kind of made separate appearances since yesterday – since your announcement yesterday. If you want to maybe talk, not private discussions, but what your conversations have been like with the commissioner. I could imagine someone hearing that their agency's budget is going to be cut. I don't know what that conversation was like. So, what you can tell us –

Mayor: Sure. The Commissioner and I talk all the time. Remember, this is someone I've been working very closely with since 2014. I have immense respect for him. We have a constant ongoing dialogue. Of course, there's no commissioner – no commissioner here would like to hear that their budgets might be cut. And there's the deep fear, Katie, that everyone's budget is about to be cut if we don't get the stimulus. But the Commissioner said publicly since then that if there's one place he would want to see money go, if it came out of his budget, would be for youth programs. He said that publicly, and that shows the caliber of the man that he believes in a focus on youth. He said it months ago, before all this happened – you know, it was a focal point of my State of the City that we're reorienting policing towards youth. We wanted to get more and more activity for youth. With the City Council, we're going to find a way to address the needs of youth this summer. You know, we don't have it yet. We have to figure it out in the next few weeks. Obviously, Katie, it is absolutely dependent on the health care situation and I'm knocking wood, I'm praying that we come through okay. But the Council and people all over the city want to see more for our young people. In April, we didn't know what would be possible at all. We thought things were going to get a lot worse. Now, there's more possibility. We're going to figure that out with them.

Question: I have a question for Dr. Barbot. We've had, say, 13 days of social – of non-social distancing, of people coming together, thousands of people –

Mayor: I don’t think it's been 13 days, respectfully, but continue – you're talking about the protests.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: I don't think it's about that. I think it's been 10 days, but go ahead.

Question: 10 days is a pretty good usually. The incubation period COVID-19 is like two, three days. People start coming down with symptoms. What's going on here? A lot of people are out there saying, well, look at all these people gathering, nobody's getting sick. The numbers are down. It must be going away.

Mayor: The commissioner comes up, Todd, I just want to say, I think the commissioner will give you the more medically insightful answer, but I just want remind you, thank God, these were outdoor activities, which does change the equation. I still am very worried there might be an impact, but that is something different than if it was a lot of people together indoors. Go ahead.

Commissioner Barbot: So, let me start off with big picture. Big picture, in my opinion, we're still in, what I would say, is a moderate transmission phase, meaning that there are still, on a daily basis, hundreds of people that are newly diagnosed with COVID-19. And in addition to that sort of big-picture framing, we still need New Yorkers to wear face coverings consistently. When individuals are outdoors, they have more sort of flexibility to have more space between them. We want to encourage individuals to continue having the six feet distance, want to remind New Yorkers of the importance of using alcohol-based hand sanitizer. And so, when we have individuals that are outdoors and protests, we need every single one of them to ensure that they continue wearing their face coverings. We, on a daily basis, monitor data that comes to us from each of the emergency departments around the city, and, to-date, thankfully we have not seen any specific or significant spikes in the number of people that are visiting the emergency departments for COVID-like illness, but we are paying really close attention to that. And just to sort of build on something that the Mayor said with regards to, you know, this first phase of the restart, we want to be really clear that it's not, you know, sort of lifting back to the way things were. We still, even when individuals are going for the curbside service, need for them to wear face coverings consistently, to use the hand sanitizers consistently, and to remember that if they are an individual who falls into the high-risk categories, we need them to limit their activities. We want them to stay as much indoors as possible. And similarly, for those individuals who do go outside and they do have someone at home with one of those high-risk conditions to remember that really sort of clear and, dare I say, militant adherence to hand washing is really what's going to continue to save lives. You know, as the Mayor has said at every press conference where we've been together, this is New Yorkers doing it for New Yorkers, and we need them to continue doing that.

Mayor: Who has not gone? Yes?

Question: The MTA had asked the city to flood the subways with NYPD, I think, in part, they were saying for social distancing enforcement. You sent [inaudible] school safety agents, which are branch of the NYPD. Has anybody talked about doing social distancing, masks, reminding people about these things without a police option?

Mayor: It’s not enforcement, I want to be very clear. It's education and giving out free face coverings. NYPD is not doing social distancing enforcement, period.

Question: School safety agents –

Mayor: School safety agents are trained to work with parents, work with kids. They have a different approach. They are not there to do enforcement. They are available, as you can imagine, because school is not in session. We need to send out people who can do this work. We're going to use all the civilians we can as well, but there's still – we're being stretched very thin all over. But it's not about enforcement, it's about free face coverings, education, just reminding people if one car is crowded, go to the next car, that kind of thing. We think that will help. We think that that human presence, that communication helps, especially free face coverings. A lot of people mean to wear it, but they forget to bring it. We just want it to be there for them.

Okay. Everyone, just to finish up. Look, I just want everyone to keep in perspective this day. This is the first day of the reopening and it was achieved by New Yorkers’ hard work. This is clearly the hardest place in America to get to this moment, the hardest place to have a reopening, because we were the epicenter. Only because New Yorkers went the extra mile did we get here. Now, we've gotten all this way, let's hold onto it, let's keep building on it. We have something really big happening now. Our Test and Trace Corps is now on the playing field, out there, making sure people get tested. Every New Yorker is now welcome to get tested for free. If you need to know where a call 3-1-1. And then, if you are positive, the Trace Corps will come in, find out who have been those close contacts, make sure they get tested, make sure they get support. So, we are going to be really aggressive about fighting back this disease so we can get the phase two, phase three, phase four. I have confidence we can do it, but everyone's in this together. We got this far together. Let's take the next big step together.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-06-09 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Yesterday was a very important day in this city, as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers came back to work. And we have been through such a fight against the coronavirus it has been such a difficult time in this city, but we saw yesterday the beginning of the comeback of New York City. Now, we have to be clear, we are not just trying to get people back to work. We are not just trying to return to the status quo that existed before the coronavirus. The corona virus taught us extraordinarily painful, powerful lessons about disparity, about the lack of equality in this city. So, our clear mission is to not just restart, not just recover, but renew this city. To do something very different. To come back as a city that is fair. A city that is just. A city that hears and sees all its people, and acts in their interests. We must build a different New York City as we move forward. And that is where the taskforce for racial inclusion and equity comes in. Leaders of this city government who are doing work here and now. I want to be abundantly clear about this, this task force was not named to talk about big ideas that would happen someday. This task force was named, specifically people who are leaders in city government right now. People of color who are leading city agencies, playing a crucial role so that we could do work right now to address disparity. I named the task force 45 days ago, it was with the goal of doing work that would have a tangible and immediate impact. And then working on the bigger vision as well of what we could achieve in the next year and a half, and what this city needs to achieve beyond. Already, the work of this taskforce has led to the decision to shift resources from the NYPD to youth services and social services. It has led to the decision to move the enforcement of street vending away from the NYPD. It has led to a decision to address health care issues, such as the creation of mobile testing in the hardest hit communities all around the city. But now there's more to do immediately, particularly on the disparities in health care, which are so sharp and so real. And were the foundation of why the coronavirus did such horrific damage in communities of color.

We have to address the underlying reality of health care being a human right. That is not understood still in this nation, but here in New York City, it is. And that is why we are guaranteeing health care for every New York citizen, every New York person, regardless of documentation status. This COVID crisis has shown how broken our national reality is when it comes to health care. How many people suffered for years without access, because access was based on money. How many people never got physical health care, and lord knows, never got mental health care. How many people just didn't even have a doctor they could turn to what we made clear with a decision a year and a half ago to move to guaranteed health care for all New Yorkers that we had to lead the way, we had to show that everyone will get health care, regardless of income, regardless of whether they have insurance or not, regardless of documentation status, if you are a New Yorker, you deserve health care.

And so, New York City created NYC Care and it began in August, 2019 in the Bronx, continued January of this year in Brooklyn and Staten Island. Tens of thousands of people now have their own doctor for the first time. For many in the first time in their lives, a doctor, a primary care doctor, they could turn to. Pay only what they could afford. If they could afford nothing, that doctor was still there for them. But the task force looked at the situation and said, even though that was a powerful start, we need to go farther. The task force called for NYC Care to be expanded rapidly in Queens and Manhattan, four months ahead of schedule so we could reach 55,000 more New Yorkers. Folks of limited means, but unlimited potential who need health care. And that means primary care. It means special care. It means surgery, dental care, eye care, women's health, affordable medications. Again, no one charged more than they could pay. That is a foundation, but where we need to go much farther is in the area of mental health, because we have seen what happens in a society that does not provide mental health care. I was painfully reminded of it as I joined members of the cure violence movement a week ago at Queensbridge Houses, largest public housing development in New York City. I talked to residents one after another, about the pain that they had experienced in the coronavirus crisis. And for so many, it was the pain of losing a loved one. It was the pain of not being able to mourn. It was the sense of injustice, and that all added up for so many people to create anxiety and depression, to bear down on them, to create a mental health crisis within the crisis. We need to help make sure that people get the mental health care they need. And the task force on racial inclusion and equity is focused on what we can do right now. And so, to talk about the latest initiative from the task force, I turn to someone who, and I know I may be a little bit subjective because of my love for her, but she is not only a great leader in this city, a great leader in this nation in calling for mental health care for all, and showing it can be done. The First Lady of New York City, Chirlane McCray.

First Lady Chirlane McCray: Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everyone. Before the pandemic, and I emphasize before the pandemic, a study found that, within New York City, serious psychological distress is three times higher among adults who experienced racism. And so, we were not surprised by the results of the survey the taskforce sent out to the communities hardest hit by COVID-19. 28 percent of the residents of the respondents said that mental health was their top concern. The tremendous grief and loss, anger around the tragic killings is palpable. And when job insecurity, housing insecurity, worry about the prospects of the children are included, with the depression, that's so often the company [inaudible] that is living with a chronic disease. It is a wonder how anyone manages such an emotional burden. Langston Hughes asked that question 70 years ago in 1951, when he asks what happens to a dream deferred, does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load or does it explode?

The accelerated expansion of NYC Care provides another opportunity for people to connect to mental health services directly, or when they seek to address other health concerns. We are also turbocharging the mental health resources in the communities hardest hit by the pandemic working with 270 community faith-based organizations. By the end of this year, we will reach 10,000 more residents with mental health supports that include education, and information about resources, and coping strategies. We will also train trainers, and that's clergy, and community-based organization representatives. These folks who already have the trust of the communities, and the ability to care for others right there in the neighborhoods where people live, people should have culturally competent care, and different ways to access support for themselves, and their loved ones. Costs should not be a barrier. There should be no stigma, and especially no wrong door when help is needed. These actions are a significant step in the direction that we want to go in these next week, and you'll be hearing more from us coming very soon. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you to our First Lady, to all the members of the task force. They are working constantly, and I mean constantly. As the First Lady said, when the task force recognizes something needs to be done right now, it will be done right now, and announced by the task force leadership, and then put into action by the City of New York. 

Finally, everything that we're dealing with is against the backdrop of this battle against the coronavirus. The pain that people are feeling is not only about the injustices that have been pervading relationship between police and community. The reality of structural racism in this country, the reality of an economy that was fundamentally based on income inequality; all of that existed before the coronavirus and then the coronavirus took such a horrible toll on communities of color, one injustice piled upon the next and the frustration is so deep. And when Chirlane invoked the poem from Langston Hughes, it captured this moment as well; this moment of pain upon pain, upon pain. We have so much to do, but remember we have to do it while fighting back the coronavirus to save lives in all communities, but also to take away that which has created so much additional injustice and start the framework for that fair recovery that we must have in this city. So, fighting the coronavirus in every way possible is essential to doing the work of justice. Right now, we saw an extraordinary moment restarting yesterday and the emergence of our Test and Trace Corps on a scale never before seen in the United States of America; now, thousands of tracers out there, right this moment, talking to the people in New York City. Making sure that anyone who tests positive - it's followed up on - their contacts are traced. Those people get the support they need; those people get the testing they need. If they need to safely separate from others, all the support is there. This is going to change the trajectory of the coronavirus in New York City, but every single day, we're going to watch what happens with this disease. We're going to see if our efforts are working, we're going to need every New Yorker to be a part of it if we're going to fight it back. I’m going to keep reminding you, it all comes down to you, stick to the strength and the discipline, the teamwork, the sense of concern for yourself, your families, but for the whole community that all New Yorkers have shown.

So, let's talk about the indicators and thresholds today. Number one, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 and today we are well within that threshold at 52 patients. Second, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs - that threshold is 375, we're well within that threshold again today at 337. And this last one is unbelievably good news and it doesn't mean it's always going to be like this and it doesn't mean we don't need to keep fighting because we do, but I'm so proud of New Yorkers, you have earned this one; the percentage of people tested citywide who are positive for COVID-19 as more and more and more testing - well, over 30,000 tests a day now happening in New York City – that threshold is 15 percent, for the first time since the beginning of this crisis. Today's report only one percent, only one percent of those tested, tested positive for COVID-19. That is an amazing statement on what all of you have achieved; all of you have done. Let's keep clinging to that progress. Let's build upon it. Let's beat back this disease. Everybody, work together, work with the Test and Trace Corp, work with your neighbors. Every time you keep that face mask on, every time you stay home when you can, every time you practice social distancing, you're beating back this disease. But look at that one percent only, an extraordinary day from New York City.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to questions from the media and our new format that we will discuss. And again, remember to give me the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all just a reminder, we have First Lady McCray here in person and Deputy Mayor Thompson, Deputy Mayor Been, Deputy Mayor Perea-Henze and Executive Director of the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity Bonilla on the phone. I also wanted to remind you that when called on, you'll have the chance to either ask one question and a follow-up or one question, and then after it's answered a second question. In the interest of time, we will still limit each reporter to two questions, but it's up to you whether your second is a follow-up on your first or a new question altogether.

Moderator: Next we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. Hope you're doing well.

Mayor: Yes, Andrew. How are you?

Question: Good. I hate to channel Katie Honan here, my good friend, but I do want to ask about the summer. Today could hit 90 degrees, it's possible in the afternoon. I'm wondering, what progress you've made towards coming up with any plan to allow young people to either swim in a pool, swim at a beach, or get in a sprinkler?

Mayor: So, a very important question, Andrew. You’re channeling an important question from Katie. We've got to start with the things we know we can do. So, we talked about before the additional sprinklers that we're going to set up in parks that, even under the current conditions of phase one, we can do in a safe and appropriate manner. So, there will be cooling for young people, cooling for older people that we talked about before the actions were taken with the air conditioners and cooling stations. But you raise a very important point about the beaches, the pools. We're now going to be reassessing everything. We're making some real progress. And I want to emphasize, Andrew, we've had two with the coronavirus – no two days have been the same, to say the least – we've had to always guard against the possibility that coronavirus was not being beaten back. Remember that period of time – and I'm knocking on wood as I say it – were we thought we might be in a plateau, where it was just going to stay at a high level and not change? Obviously, before that we thought it was going to keep going upward. Thank God, through everyone's effort, it has gone lower and lower, but we have to make sure it stays lower. If we can do that, then we're having a real conversation about beaches, for sure. If we can do that, there may even be a way to get back to pools. We're not there yet. And I'm not keep saying to people, I understand the great anxiety to get there, but we have to make sure that we don't do the worst of all things, which is to allow a resurgence. If we had a resurgence the wrong way, then we're literally shutting down phase one and going back to fuller restrictions or worse. So, it's going to take a little patience, but, absolutely, we can have a conversation now with a little more opportunity to envision progress around beaches. And now, we can start a conversation around pools. I don't know if we'll get there, but at least we can at least begin that conversation now for the first time, based on what you saw today with those indicators. Do you want it – do you have a second one?

Question: My second question has to do with outdoor dining and phase two in New York. You had indicated it would be the beginning of July. All the other regions have been able to move to phase two in two weeks, which would put New York City on June 22nd. Why could you not [inaudible] and how close are you to giving restaurants the details about how they can reclaim some of the street space?

Mayor: Yeah. So, two parts to that answer. Absolutely – is it, if you will, legally possible that we could get to phase two by the end of June? Yes. We need to provide answers on that timeline. So, that means over the next week or 10 days, we have to fill in as many of those blanks as humanly possible. But I've been very clear, and I said it yesterday, that I'm not saying June 22nd, which is the earliest, you know, official date, according to State guidance, because I do not want to unduly raise expectations. We are not like the other regions of the state. I love the whole State of New York. I've been all over the State of New York. We are different and we're different than almost every place in the country, that's why we were the epicenter – just the nature of life in the nation's largest city. So, I'm not – people – I want people to hear that we'll work with the State. We're going to constantly communicate with the State, Andrew, but if we're ready on June 22nd, that's beautiful, but I don't want people to have undue expectations. We're trying to do something so difficult in these next few weeks, bring back hundreds of thousands of workers and ensure that we keep the coronavirus down and then bring back many hundreds of thousands more. So, I said July because I wanted to keep expectations a little lower. But if we can get there sooner, of course, if the State and the City agree and we think it's safe, of course. So, yes, an answer to your question, we owe those restaurants guidance very quickly this week, next week.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Hey, Henry. How are you doing?

Question: Okay. I just have one question. I was speaking with someone in the Health Department and they said that when people come in, admitted to hospitals with suspected COVID, they're not sure because they're untested at that point. There's no content tracing of these people. In other words, they're treated at the hospital, they're tested there, but there's no examination of who they may have been close to. So, in the hours or days that it takes to get a test result, these people out in the world who they've had contact with presumably are infected or in the process of becoming infected and they're not located, nobody knows who they are, they're spreading the virus. Why aren't people who are admitted to hospitals immediately in touch with contact tracers?

Mayor: Henry, I don't know who you spoke to, but that is not the approach. If there's something that's being missed, we'll fix it immediately. I'll make sure you talk today to either Dr. Mitch Katz or Dr. Ted Long. Contact tracing is for everyone who tests positive in New York City, regardless of where they test positive. If someone comes to the hospital, they're not yet identified as COVID, because, as we know, some of the folks who are coming in with respiratory symptoms may not be COVID. But anyone who test positive for COVID, every single one of them gets contact tracing. If there's any piece of this be tightened up, it will be tightened up. So, we'll make sure you get that follow up discussion.

Question: I'm not sure you understood my question.

Mayor: I thought I did, try again.

Question: People come in to the hospital, they’re suspected COVID patients, they've got these symptoms. They have not been tested yet. The test results are not in, but they're suspected of having COVID to the point where they've been hospitalized. Their contacts are not traced until a positive test result is obtained. And this is coming from the press office of the Health Department.

Mayor: Henry, thank you. I think when you said your question, I heard the test result piece, and I appreciate your clarity. I would use the word symptomatic, just so we're all speaking the same language. I think I hear you now saying, if someone was symptomatic, but not confirmed, would they be followed up on? Yes, because, remember, we need to go after symptomatic people too, to the maximum extent possible. Now, I want to affirm to you that we've got so many positive – confirmed positives that the Test and Trace Corps is reaching out to right now – that, by definition, is job-one, because we know a certain number of the folks going into hospitals do not have COVID. That is a fact, it has been traced. We should show you that information, because it's important. It came up in an earlier question that was a very good one – I think Matt asked it – about the difference between some of that goes into hospital, COVID suspected, versus how many are actually confirmed. COVID. So, tomorrow, I want to speak about that in the briefing. People should realize that, thank God, a certain number of those folks who are going in turn out not to have COVID. That's a very good thing and we need to affirm that. But your point about symptomatic folks is well taken. The Test and Trace Corps should – has to first go after the positive – confirmed positives. But where there are symptomatic people, it makes sense to start that work as well, presuming there are resources available as we move more and more people into test and trace. We're at thousands of people now, we're going to keep growing it. I want to see us reach more and more into symptomatic folks as well. So, we will do that follow up with you so you get the specifics. But your point is well taken, so long as – you can also hear my point that job-one is where you have a confirmed positive, because you know it, and a lot of those folks who are COVID-suspected in the hospital turn out not to have COVID.

Moderator: Next we have Steve from Westwood One News.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Want to make sure you can hear me well before I start my question.

Mayor: Yeah, Steve – how you doing?

Question: I'm doing well. Thank you very much. I'll start with one about contact tracing. You know, we're still seeing a significant, definitely a lower number, but a significant number of new coronavirus cases each day. And presumably some of those new cases were the results of the contact tracers responding to new positive cases and going out and mapping the contacts, getting those people tested. At some point that contact tracing effort would, in theory, bring down the daily number of new coronavirus cases to such a low number that you'd consider it successful and it's safe to go back to normalcy. What figure would the city have to get down to in order to declare that we reached a low transmission rate and say that the program has worked? And by what date would you like to see the city getting there?

Mayor: Well, Steve, you're asking the big, big question. I appreciate that question. We're talking all the time about that very question and trying to figure out how we define that. You're right, that the number of cases is so much lower, but we're still talking about hundreds per day. If each case leads to three, four, five, ten people that then need to be followed up on who are the close contacts with the person that tested positive, it’s a huge amount of work and that's every day. And then the next day brings a whole new set of assignments. That's a lot. I do believe with time – and I've talked to health care leaders, I don't think there's anyone who has this specific answer you're looking for. It's a very good question, but I don't think – I literally have not met someone who can say this is exactly how it goes. I had this conversation just yesterday with Dr. Varma.

I think it's fair to say that the more we can kind of wrap our arms around, squeeze, contain this disease through the contact tracing that – you are right, that should push down the numbers with a challenge of a counter dynamic as more and more people are coming in close contact because of going back to work. Even with all the precautions, humans are humans, it's not going to be perfect. So, you will see some spread of disease when people go back to work. Our job is to keep it very contained, and if we see a localized site that needs to be addressed immediately, or even shut down immediately, to take those actions. But, Steve, I don't think we have an exact number. I think if you said, what’s the final stage look like where we really have succeeded, it's where there's basically no new cases in New York City. Only if one comes from outside New York City, which is a ways off to say the least, that's probably at this point only achievable with a vaccine.

So, to get to that low transmission phase, I think you're talking certainly, you got to go through the whole summer into the fall because we're going to have to deal with the impact of each new phase, each new reopening, and what that does even as we build the contact tracing bigger and bigger and bigger. But, look, if we can get there over the next few months, I would consider that a real victory – if we could get to the point that we could literally say, we had only a handful of new cases each day, that came from New York City. That would be a huge victory, but I can't give you the date yet. It's going to take some time to see what the reality brings. And, of course, to make sure we never see a resurgence, which is the clear and present danger I worry about every single day.

Question: Thank you very much for that answer. I appreciate it. And then the other question concerns phase one of the reopening yesterday, you know, many of the city's most popular retail stores in some of the most popular shopping districts remained covered in plywood because of vandalism and looting that happened well over a week ago and has essentially disappeared. Those stores didn't seem to take advantage of the phase one reopening. What is the City doing to assure the retail sector that it is safe to take down the plywood, to do away with block after block of boarded up storefronts in places like Fulton Mall, where I was out yesterday and there were barely any stores that took advantage of the lifting of the restrictions? And what are you doing to support those retailers and keeping those stores, you know, safe right now and assured that, yes, you don't have to worry anymore that you can reopen, you don't have to put the plywood backup?

Mayor: Yeah, Steve, great question as well. Couple of different points. I've been talking to people in the retail sector, starting with the CEO of Macy's, who is absolutely confident in their ability to come back and raring to go. The reality of curbside pickup or pickup in-store is complicated for a lot of retail folks in a very tight urban environment. If you're talking about suburbs, you're talking about malls, things like curbside pickup are much easier, but in a lot of parts of New York City, it's not the easiest thing. The State rules are for the whole state, and we're the least car-focused part of New York State. The in-store is different and doable, but still harder because of distance. So, when I talked to the CEO of Macy's, Jeff Gennette, you know, they want to get going, they want to figure out how to do all of the above, but most especially, they want to get to phase two where they can get closer to normal operations. He told me the Herald Square store sustained very little damage, nothing that would stop them from moving forward. And generally, the word I've gotten from folks in the business community, they understand that we saw like a perfect storm over those first few days, and that now, of course, communities all over the city, small business owners, big business owners, NYPD, everyone's on alert for anything that might attempt to reassert in terms of attempts to harm people or property. And I really believe we're not going to say anything like that again, because that happened in, again, a perfect storm moment where a lot of attention was distracted elsewhere. That won't happen now. But I think what's going to happen, Steve, is that a lot of retail folks won't think phase one is what works for them because curbside pickup and in-store pickup just won't be the effective context for them. They want to get to phase two where they can do as much of their normal operations as possible. And that's when I think you're going to really see retail come alive in New York City.

Question: Happy day two of phase one on the city's reopening.

Mayor: Day two, phase one – I like that.

Question: I've got a question for Mr. Phil Thompson. It's my understanding that you're leading the Faith Based Advisory Council. There's no question how faith plays an important part in the lives of most New Yorkers. And considering how New York City's places of worship might be able to partially open after phase two, I was hoping you could enlighten us as to the purpose of the council and any progress made this far?

Mayor: I'll start and pass to Phil. Phil and a lot of others have been deeply involved in our faith efforts. Our Commissioner for Community Affairs Marco Carrión has been a key leader in that effort. The head of our community and faith initiatives, Reverend Dominique Atchison. And then of course the faith leaders for so long, we've had extraordinary leadership from pastor Michael Walrond, First Corinthian Baptist in Harlem. We've had tremendous leadership from CORL led by Cardinal Dolan and so many others. So the voices of faith communities are constant in this administration. We listen constantly. It’s been crucial to the Thrive initiative with the faith efforts to spread mental health support through congregations. I've had a number of calls with faith leaders over the last few weeks, and they have been incredible in helping people through this crisis, including telling people that it wasn't time to come back to services. So now we have an opportunity to start services on a more modest level in phase two. And then build from there, but always making sure we're continuing to hold back this disease. So a lot of good work is happening. And then when there is specific suggestions – there's been suggestions about how to restart services that certainly contributed to the thinking of the City and the State. There's been suggestions both ways, including us asking faith leaders, take the lead in helping people understand how to be safe. But we will be engaging faith leaders constantly on what they think will be additional steps we need to take for justice in communities and to serve communities’ needs. And Phil, I know you have worked with a lot of faith leaders over the years. So if you have other reflections you'd like to offer on how we're going to work with them and some specific things that might come of that, I'd appreciate it. And obviously you've been particularly focused because you have Department of Youth Services under you, on the question of how we can serve youth, which is a central, central concern for faith leaders as well. Phil Thompson.

Deputy Mayor J. Phillip Thompson, Strategic Initiatives: Thank you. I would just mention three of the items we've been talking about on the Faith Council, and I will tell you that the conversations have been so robust that we decided to keep meeting for weeks longer than originally planned just so we can keep the dialogue going because so many things have come up. But one big concern of the faith leaders actually was that the entire faith community follow safe practices and not open up too quickly or unsafely. And that was a concern that the faith leaders themselves really emphasized. Two initiatives we discussed last week – one, several of the leaders that have large churches, synagogues, and buildings such as the Archdiocese in Brooklyn, want to open up their buildings for storefront churches, smaller churches that don't have the kind of ventilation or room for spacing people out. They want to open up their doors to invite those churches, to use their facilities so that they could have staggered hours for church services, things like that. And so that was something they were very interested in, the large churches. And we're following up on how to make that happen.

A second thing, many of the churches and synagogues said they would like – that are predominantly white, said they would like to invite people from the protest movements, Black Lives Matter, others to come and talk to their congregations about what they've been experiencing, what their aspirations are. So there could be more understanding across communities about all of this. And how we can all work together to achieve a more just and fair city. And that is something actually, we're all very excited about and we're going to continue those conversations and figure out how to operationalize a lot of that.

Mayor: Excellent. Thank you so much. Go ahead, Luis.

Question: Thank you, sir. That all sounds very promising. My next question is for you, Mr. Mayor. I traveled through the subways yesterday and I made sure I passed through major stations like Time Square and Grand Central. Admittedly there were barely any commuters. However, I didn't see the slightest bit of public awareness signage. There were social distancing markings only on a couple of station platforms and only one single platform controller, understandably so. Would I be correct in thinking that this will ramp up as we go forward in time?

Mayor: Yeah, look, this is, we have continued to work productively with the MTA. But I want to push them to do more and more and more. I believe the markings are crucial. This is an area we still haven't resolved. I believe that it would be really helpful that markings on every platform. Look, folks who own grocery stores, supermarkets. They put markings outside to show people where to stand in line. Like it's just so helpful. People make sense of things. When they see the markings. In my view, every platform, every MetroCard machine, every subway car, every bus should have markings to show people. If you sit here, or you stand here, then here's the next place someone should be sitting or standing. I understand and I do feel sympathy. The MTA is trying to move a lot of people and they're saying, they're not sure that's realistic. And I appreciate why they say it. I think we have a chicken and egg problem here at Luis. I think if they would put down the marketing's more and more people would come back and be comfortable on the subways because it would give a sense of order. So, I would just urge the MTA to try it, try doing it more and more. See if it works. If it works, it might be a really great thing. If it doesn't work, I'll be the first to say it was worth trying, but it didn't work. So, I would like to see that.

On the signage? Absolutely. That should be the one thing we all agree, the MTA needs to step up on that. The signage is obvious. People need that. It helps them. And on the personnel, we are going to work with them on that. We're providing personnel to help them. They should maximize the use of their own personnel creatively. I think we can work together and make this work. But I do think a human directive presence, Luis helps. It helps people to think about what they need to do. I mean we're human beings. If someone's there who says, Hey, here's a good way to address, you know, to deal with this situation. Why don't you stand here? Why don't you stand there? Or that car is too full, go on the one behind it. People respond to that. So, and again, I want -- that's, that's all about education. That's not about enforcement. That's not about summonses. That's not about the NYPD. We took the NYPD out of that. It is about education and helping people see the right way to do things.

So, look, everyone, I'll conclude by saying we are dealing with some of the biggest challenges in the history of the city right now, maybe the single most difficult moment in the history of New York City. But I stand up here every day with faith. And I'll tell you why, because I know the people of this city, I just do. I know all of you. I don’t know all of you personally, but I know the character and the heart and soul of the people of this city. I've spent a lifetime watching and listening and engaging and seeing the strength of this place. We will overcome everything that's been thrown at us. A few weeks ago, we didn't think the challenges of these last few weeks were coming. That happened. We will deal with this. We will deal with whatever's next and whatever's next and whatever's next. But we have to deal with it from a perspective of justice. We have to deal with it from a perspective of fairness. That's actually how you move forward, recognizing what was wrong and doing something about it. And I have faith we can do so much more. I really do.

So, for the next year and a half, you're going to see a lot of things change. You will see a recovery and you will see fairness pervade that recovery. And then it will be a better city to move forward into a future. And again, if you meet a person who says New York City can't come back, won't come back, can't overcome its problems. That person doesn't understand the people of New York City. Tell them they're wrong. Tell them we're going to show them how far we can reach together. Thank you.

2020-06-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: All right. Good morning, everybody.

Now, everything we're dealing with against the backdrop – again, I cannot believe what the last hundred days has done to all of us, to so many families. And we grapple every day now with how we overcome that. And we’ve got to figure out, to make all other things possible, a way to finally contain this disease and then painstakingly, purposefully address the disparities one after another, after another – this has to be our constant commitment. But we first, as we do all this work, must stop the ravages of this disease. It's phase one now, and we've waited for this day, but of course this day comes with more and more people coming in, more and more contact with each other. We must keep to those standards, those rules that keep us safe, because they've gotten us this far. And then, we've got to focus on the ability to reach people and address them through test, trace, take care – test, trace, take care. I want to go over it again, because it's so important – everybody who test positive, we reach all their contacts. Anyone who needs testing, gets it. Anyone that needs to safely separate in a hotel room, gets it. Anyone needs support at home – if they're isolated from their family at home, they need food, they need medicine, they get it. It is all for free. It is an extraordinary effort. It is growing all the time, but for this to work the way we want it to, we need everyone to get a test. So, I'm reminding all New Yorkers, as you prepare, as these phases begin, as life starts back towards something better, get tested. We think about the school year ahead, I want everyone tested. As you think about going back to work, I want everyone tested. We're making it more available than ever. We had a day last week where 33,000 New Yorkers got tested on a single day. We want that number to keep growing, I want to hit 50,000 and more soon. Anyone who wants to test go to nyc.gov/covid test or call 3-1-1. We have that test for free. It's simple. It's fast. It's free.

Now, we're going to do more to make testing available to people. So, I have three announcements today. First, we have launched two mobile test trucks. They were out yesterday in Soundview, in the Bronx, at the Monroe houses. We're going to just have the trucks going around to different neighborhoods, making testing as simple and available as it possibly could be. 10 trucks will be on the ground by next month, 800 tests a day, and the more it works, the more we will do. The focus of beyond the hardest hit communities. The testing comes right to your doorstep.

Second announcement, we have six new community testing partners, and these are organizations that people trust. And we're going to start investing more and more in community-based clinics, because they have the trust of the community, the knowledge of community, they know how to reach into community, they speak the language of the community. This is a big part of what we're going to do is we build out more and more testing and more and more health care to the grassroots. There'll be 15 to 20 new sites coming in the next few weeks through community-based clinics and that will take us over 200 sites all over New York City, where people get tested for free, and that is just going to keep growing. The goal is to constantly make testing more local, more available, and I'm going to say it again – fast, easy, free.

Third point, we're going to provide the full test kits to all the hospitals and hospital systems in New York City. Any place in New York City, any place in health care that needs them, the hospitals are going to get them. Whether they are public, private, independent – if they need test kits, we will have them for them. There has been a particular request from Borough President Oddo in Staten Island to get more test kits to Staten Island immediately. We have these made in New York test kits – another one of the great innovations that came out of this crisis, creating our own here in New York City – 3,000 test kits now being sent immediately to Staten Island. We will keep resupplying tens of thousands more not in Staten Island, but all five boroughs. Whatever it takes, we're letting our health care institutions know that if they need test kits, we will have them for them, because we need testing to grow and grow and grow.

And I said, test trace, take care – let's talk about the tracers. This team now, growing all the time, over 2,500 at work now, and building. We're going to keep taking that number to 5,000 or as many as 10,000 if we need to. The biggest effort in the history of this country, right here. You heard earlier with our colleagues from the crisis management system, Cure Violence movement, that in the globe, this is the single most important place on earth for that movement. This is the place where it's supported the most. It's grown the most. When it comes to test and trace, we are going to show this nation how it can be done on a vast, vast scale. So, thousands and thousands of tracers out there right now. On Monday, June 15th, we will give you an update. The people of the city will get an update on the work of our Test and Trace Corps. So, you're going to see the sheer reach that they have been able to achieve in terms of making sure that folks get the support they need. And I always think of it this way – this is not just about testing people, it's about making sure that anyone who needs help to safely separate, gets it; anyone who needs help to isolate at home. It is about making sure that the disease doesn't spread, because people get the guidance and support to not be in a position to spread that disease. It doesn't happen accidentally. It happens with painstaking work. We will have a report on Monday, June 15th of those results.

Let's talk about today's indicators and thresholds. So first, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – threshold is 200. Today's report, 67 patients – well within the threshold. Daily number of people in the Health + Hospitals ICUs – that threshold, 375. Today's report, 341 – that's also well within the threshold. And percentage of people test citywide positive for COVID-19 – that threshold 15 percent. Today’s report, three percent – excellent number, also well within the threshold. So, another very good day for New York City. Let's keep focused – as we go through phase one, and it starting really well, let's keep focus of the social distancing, the face coverings, and when you don't need to be outside, don't be outside. It's working.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

And with that, we will turn to questions from the media. And please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're also joined by Deputy Mayor Vicki Been and Dr. Ted Long. First question today goes to Gloria from NY1.

Moderator: Next is Abu from Bangla Patrika.

Question: My first question is, you know, the social distance in the mosques is [inaudible] reducing the virus. So, you have plans for the people who are not using the mosque in the city, impose any kind of fine or anything?

Mayor: No, Abu. Look, I don't think that's going to be productive and I'm answering your question straight up. Do we have a plan to do that? No, we do not have a plan to do that. I think you're right, that we're seeing the face coverings are having a really powerful impact and we've got to keep figuring out how to get people to use them. I do empathize with anyone who doesn't really enjoy the experience. I don't either, but it works and it protects people and we've got to make it easier and easier. So, you know, we're just going to keep constantly giving them out for free. I think that has been very productive, Abu, constantly educating people. And I think education, reminders, free face coverings, let's take a positive approach to it. I also think it's true, every workplace, every institution needs to keep sending the message how serious it is, and there's going to be – and there should be, for example, when folks are going into grocery stores, they're going into supermarkets, people have to have on those face coverings and if they don't it's appropriate for –

Question: Okay –

Mayor: I'm just finishing, Abu – it's appropriate for a store to say, you can't come in. So, that's not a fine, but it's a reminder to people that there are rules that have to be met. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. The second question is about the [inaudible], you know, people who are you know, the tenant and they both have kind of anxiety right now because a lot of people they're not paying and the landlord [inaudible] the rent. So, what is the exact message to the people, both sides?

Mayor: Abu, it's such an important issue. There are some people who are working and now there's going to be more and more people who are working and those who can pay the rent, obviously, that's what we aspire to for everyone because buildings have to keep moving and they have expenses, etcetera. So, anyone who could pay the rent should pay the rent. People who can't pay the rent, we want as much flexibility as possible for anyone who can't pay the rent. I believe the State still needs to codify an approach, and it can only be done at the State level, to allow people who can't pay the rent to be on a long term payment plan, to give them an exemption for a substantial period of time until they have income again, then give them an opportunity to make up the rent over time. Look, the bigger solutions – would I like to see a massive stimulus that covers those rent payments? Of course, but right now we see no action in Washington on any form of stimulus.

So, at least what we could have at the State level is action to give time to all renters who cannot pay. So, if they can't pay now, they can be on some kind of long term payment plan once they have an income back, but only once they have an income back, obviously. I also think the State needs to be much stronger on saying no evictions – no evictions now, no evictions until this crisis is fully over, no evictions for months thereafter. Because we cannot run the risk that people don't have a roof over the head in the middle of this crisis.

Moderator: Next is Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: Okay, I'm curious if you're giving any thought to establish using HOV lanes into Manhattan like New York City did after Hurricane Sandy and 9-11?

Mayor: I think that's a real interesting idea, Dana. We haven't been to date focused on that. There's been obviously more focused on how to get the subway and the buses to be safe and for people to feel comfortable coming back, and obviously you've seen the numbers, people are starting to come back. Increasing the service on the Staten Island Ferry, I mean, the things that we can do right now that will affect most people. But I think it's also true, and we've talked about that, some people are going to only be comfortable in a car in the short term. I think that's a really good question, and we'll look at that as to whether that might be an approach that would relieve some of the impact.

Moderator: Next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Mayor, I'm just wondering if we can get an update on how the reopening is going, as far as you have any numbers at this point on how many people are back to work? How many businesses have reopened? Has there been any enforcement or warnings or just any sense of compliance with the social distancing requirements at the newly reopened businesses and has anything you've seen –

Mayor: Okay, okay. That's a lot of questions Erin and hold on, let me take the broad point. Vicki Been is on the line with us, I'll start and pass to Vicki and she can give you what she has. Obviously look were two full days have passed so far, Erin. I'm pleased by what we have seen so far, but it's obviously a very, very small sample size in the scheme of things, as I said, we know people are coming back to the subways. That's noticeable. We know people coming back to the Staten Island Ferry. We're seeing as much as so far, we're getting reports back, you know, some real adherence to the rules that people understand it matters to practice social distancing and use face coverings. But I think it's early to tell you sort of the larger trend, if you will, the larger reality, but let me have a Deputy Mayor Vicki Been give you an update that as far as the information she has. Vicki, are you out there? Let's try that again. I know she's in the lineup. Vicki, can you, I think I might be on mute if you are talking or else we have a technical problem, we'll come right back around.

Moderator: We can move on.

Mayor: All right. Let's figure that out. We're going to come right back. Erin, if you have another question, why don't you go to that? And then we will see if we can get Vicki right back.

Question: No, that's it for me right now.

Mayor: All right, so what we'll do is we'll give you a credit line for, I'll take one more question and then come back, back to you, as we find Vicki. 

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Jacob from the Jewish Insider.

Mayor: Jacob?

Question: [Inaudible] Mr. Mayor. So, I want to follow up a little on Erin’s question which is, I took the subway for the first time yesterday returning to my office for the first time in three months. But what I've encountered, I didn't go in rush hour time, was empty trains and empty streets. The question is, are people just complying with the restrictions and as we turn more towards Phase Two people will start to get comfortable taking the subways, going out to the streets, or is it just an indicator that all the measures that were taken until now, and based on the numbers that you are released, that everything is working accordingly, or is it even going giving better than expected?

Mayor: Well, Jacob has a lot of options, I'd say to you again, it's only been two days. We do have factual data from the MTA about increase in ridership. So we know something is moving. You will certainly find, you should find just by the sheer facts emptier trains and streets than what we knew back in February. That just stands to reason it's going to be phases. So Phase One, as I said, it is – we don't have the final number. We hope to have a good read on it in the next days, but it was going to be in terms of people actually showing up to work in the five boroughs, somewhere between 200,000, 400,000 people. Anywhere else in the country, that would be a huge, huge influx of people into their city. But here that's actually very small compared to where we were. Remember in February, we had over 4.5 - 4.6 million jobs in the five boroughs. So there's been a huge dislocation.

For the first days. I didn't expect miracles, Jacob. I expected people to start testing and seeing if they were comfortable. People starting to see what their colleagues experienced before they made a decision. There's still obviously people who have to take care of family realities. So I don't think it's surprising that you saw some empty trains and streets. Some of the places I went over in the last 48 hours, I saw a fair amount of activity. I think the bigger question will be Phase Two as is a much more substantial phase, and that could be quite soon, obviously. So that's where I think you're going to see a, a bigger uptake, but the question is a qualitative one. If folks go on the subway and they go on the buses, they feel good about the experience. They will tell their family. They will tell their friends, people will start to try it more and more. You're going to see some natural movement. And obviously we have to keep reminding people that the maximum social distancing, maximum face coverings on the buses and the subways and the more people see that the more comfortable or feel, and they don't see it, they're going to feel less comfortable. So, we’ve got to keep doing that, work, that education, giving out the free face coverings, et cetera. What's your next question, Jacob?

Question: You answer [inaudible] –

Mayor: What's that now?

Question: I'm good with your response.

Mayor: Okay. Excellent. Thank you, Jacob. Let's see if we have Vicki Been now. And do we have Erin back? Let's try and see we can get all this technology. Erin, Vicki, are you there?

Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, Housing and Economic Development: I'm here.

Mayor: Okay.

Deputy Mayor Been: I’m here, yes.

Mayor: Okay, so you can speak to – Erin’s question. You heard, so go ahead.

Deputy Mayor Been: Yes, so, and to the question also that was just asked. I mean, we are seeing upticks in ridership, for example, on the ferries, on the Staten Island Ferry, on the New York City Ferry. Obviously as - as the mayor said, in terms of the subway, we are monitoring that carefully and trying to both ensure that people do have a good experience when they come back. We are seeing first of all, just tremendous interest. We have a small business hotline about questions on the restart. And even just in the first 24 hours of that, we got almost 3,900 calls of people asking very specific questions about their restart in our own assets, where we have the greatest visibility, for example, in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we're seeing about 60 percent of the businesses back in operation. We've seen that uptick just in the last, you know, week. Some of those businesses were essential. Some of them are coming online and so we are seeing people come back. So we're, you know, certainly seeing the restart kick in, but as the Mayor said, we're only a few days in and we're going to be seeing much more of it, I think, in the coming days.

Mayor: Thank you, everyone.

2020-06-11 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We're restarting this city. In the first few days we see a lot of energy, a lot of forward motion. People are ready to come back and move this city forward while we still fight every day against this disease. There's so much to do. We are learning every day, what we need to do, not only to fight the disease, but to bring our city back, to create a restart and a recovery, to make sure it is fair, to make sure it does not repeat the status quo we had before. And we know why that's so important because we saw in this crisis that everyone suffered in this city, but the suffering was pronounced. The suffering was particularly deep in some communities. Some communities carried a heavier burden. The virus, at first, we’d say, at the very beginning, this virus is affecting everyone. And then we learned it was not equal opportunity. The virus hit some communities harder. We saw that and we realized this virus does discriminate. And for the communities hardest hit, communities of color, immigrant communities, lower income communities, communities that have suffered for so long to begin with, communities deprived of health care for so long, it was so important to recognize those truths, to say them out loud, and then act on them. Because as we move forward, we have to go at those disparities with everything we have. Some neighborhoods lost more people than others. Some neighborhoods took a harder hit. Some neighborhoods, people lost their jobs more than other neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods, people are struggling to pay for food or medicine or rent more than other neighborhoods. So, we need to do everything we can to keep addressing the reality of neighborhoods in the city that are suffering the most right now. That is part of how we restart, but much more importantly, how we build a fair recovery.

I've heard from so many people in neighborhoods who are those who give us so much. And I mean our small business owners, people who, in many ways, create the identity of the neighborhood, the character neighborhood, because their businesses, to so many New Yorkers, really define a lot of what's special about the neighborhood. It's true for small businesses across the board. I can tell you that for so many people, the mom-and-pop store, the family business, the business that’s been there, in some cases, for generations, it defined something so powerful. We feel that about a lot of small businesses in every neighborhood. In communities of color, in immigrant communities, small businesses represent something additionally powerful. They represent culture and identity. They represent perseverance. They represent a place where people know they can belong. And nowhere is that more true than with the community restaurants, the small businesses, the mom-and-pop restaurants that people go to and feel connected to everything they hold dear.

So, we know it goes a lot farther than the food. All New Yorkers love food, and we love the beautiful variety of food in the city, but in communities of color, a mom-and-pop restaurant, a community-based restaurant is something much deeper than that. It's something precious. It's something that must be protected. These restaurants mean so much to the people of this city, but they have been dealing with immense challenges even before this pandemic. Small businesses across the board, and these mom-and-pop restaurants in particular, they were dealing with the rising rents. They were dealing with so many challenges that were making it harder and harder just to keep going each day. We talked about this months ago, before we ever expected to see a pandemic in our city, before we saw the shock to our system. Back in February, it seems a long time ago, in my State of the City, I talked about small business and particularly the extraordinary role that some places play in our community. So, when COVID came along, it hit them so hard. The question I kept hearing from so many community people, from so many small business people, elected officials – will these community-based restaurants survive? Will this thing we prize and cherish still be there for us? How can we do something about it? Well, our Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity is doing something about it. And to tell you about their new initiative, I turn to our First Lady, Chirlane McCray.

First Lady Chirlane McCray: Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everyone. As the Racial Inclusion and Equity Task Force takes further actions to meet the needs of our Black and Brown communities, I remind everyone that this task force is of, by, and for the communities it serves. It is made up of 70 members of the administration, many of whom are people of color who are born in or have lived or worked in these communities. And it is our job not only to listen, but to act, to respond to the needs of the people in these communities hit hardest over the past weeks and months by the COVID virus. Over the past week alone, we've brought fundamental changes to the NYPD including shifting money to youth programs and hiring community ambassadors within the department. We've laid out a plan to give health care to tens of thousands more New Yorkers by expanding NYC Care four months early, and provide more mental health support for the people in our hardest hit communities.

But, of course, we still have more to do. As we move closer to reopening the city's economy. We must tend to the small businesses at the heart and soul of our neighborhoods, especially our restaurants, these are familiar neighborhood places where personal histories have been written. When you are there, it feels like you're in your own kitchen. The Restaurant Revitalization Program will start with a $3 million investment from the City, the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City, and our partner, One Fair Wage. We'll start by saving 100 restaurants. I'm going to say that again. We'll start by saving 100 restaurants, bringing back roughly a thousand displaced restaurant workers at $20 per hour and providing 53,000 free meals for those communities hit hardest by COVID-19. Workers from the selected restaurants are also eligible for a one-time $500 cash assistance from One Fair Wage. And now I introduce the Mayor's Fund Executive Director, Toya Williford, who will talk more about this initiative, the role of small donors, and how the Mayor's Fund is focused on a fair recovery – Toya.

Executive Director Toya Williford, Mayor’s Fund to Advance NYC: Thank you, First Lady. We believe that small businesses are the backbone of our communities and serve as vital economic hubs. That is why the Mayor's Fund is investing $1.4 million to help restaurants provide living wage jobs to New Yorkers who have lost work during COVID-19. In order to have a fair and just city we must invest in both businesses and workers. Owners who participate in the Restaurant Revitalization Program will commit to continue paying workers a living wage on top of tips within five years of the program ending. We cannot go back to business as usual. Now is the time for change and this program helps us pave a path forward. Our dollars, which we raise with the help of thousands of grassroots donors from all around the country will help ensure workers earn a living wage both now and in the future. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. Thank you so much, Toya. Listen, I want to just say what the First Lady has done in the work with the task force and the Mayor's Fund, what Toya Williford and her team at the Mayor's Fund have done – and Toya thank you to you and thank you to everyone at the Mayor's Fund, and thank you to all the people who supported the Mayor's Fund. Because this work is so crucial, it's having an impact right now. And also thank you for the extraordinary work you're doing to help small businesses in the Bronx come back – businesses that were attacked a week ago. You're helping them right now with direct financial support so they can get back on their feet. So, I want to thank you for that great work as well.

Now it's important to recognize that the task force led by our First Lady and Deputy Mayors Thompson and Perea-Henze. This is comprised of 70 leaders of this administration from across a wide range of agencies, leaders of color, as Chirlane said, who understand our communities, understand changes that can and must be made. The task force was charged from day one, when I named the task force a month-and-a-half ago, the mission was to determine what we could do about disparities right now, of course, to work on the bigger changes, the bigger plans, but to determine what we can do right now. So, we are looking across all the issues affecting the city, all the issues brought up by this pandemic. And I'll tell you one that I hear so frequently and in such a heartfelt manner, wherever I go in the city, is concern for our young people. I've talked about it here many times. Our young people are going through something very difficult. There has been trauma after trauma in this pandemic for our young people, and we need to help them find a way forward. Imagine what it feels like if you're young and still trying to make sense of the world, to have come into this moment in history, to have been cooped up for months and not be able to do the things that you're used to that give you hope and inspiration.

We need to figure out a way forward for our young people. And as we fight back the disease, the doors are opening more and more to allow us to do more and more, to help young people who, of course, are the future of this city. Now, one of the most important initiatives we're going to talk about in the coming days, that's the Summer Youth Employment Program. This is a particularly important initiative to people all over the city. The City Council has raised important ideas, proposals, ways of addressing how we revitalize the Summer Youth Employment Program in the context of this pandemic. That is an ongoing conversation with the City Council. That will be part of our budget decision making with the City Council over the next two weeks or so. But in the meantime, the question before us and the question that the task force took on is, what can we do right now, right this moment to help ensure that we can support young people who are going through so much. So, I now turn to the co-chair of the task force for whom I know these issues are a matter of passion and deep, deep concern. And I want to thank him for his leadership – Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson.

Deputy Mayor Phillip Thompson, Strategic Initiatives: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to describe, quickly, three programs that are being initiated right now to help our young people this summer. The first is called NeON Summer – and NeON stands for Neighborhood Opportunity Network. And this program will offer remote learning programs for teens and young adults from some of our hardest hit communities by COVID, including Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, East New York, Harlem, Jamaica, North Staten Island, and the South Bronx. And this program will connect 2,700 youth between the ages of 14 and 24 with paid learning opportunities, designed to build skills to succeed in the workplace, to strengthen community, as well as to help young people and their families during this pandemic. And the participants will be able to explore their career interests, develop work readiness skills, and also express themselves creatively through learning experiences designed to strengthen social and civic leadership. The young people will be between 14 and 24, as I said, but they will also – we're going to focus on recruiting young people who are under probation, supervision, or otherwise engaged with the family court. And so, this is really reaching at-risk young people. And the program will run for six to eight weeks with a total of 40 cohorts, broken out by age groups.

And the second program I want to announce is called Each One, Teach One, and this program will offer young people an opportunity to express themselves creatively by designing media campaigns to encourage other young people to do social distancing. And they will be mentored by media experts. And they will also receive stipends over a month's time to do this work. And this will reach 120 young people. The third program is called the Community Crisis Response Initiative, and this program provided $10,000 to 22 local community-based youth-focused organizations to support and expand their existing relief efforts in communities, and engage 500 young people to develop their leadership skills in the course of helping their community through this pandemic. So, all told these programs will reach 3,300 youth. And as the Mayor said, this is before the Summer Youth Employment Program. This is right now.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Deputy Mayor. And I know for you – and we've known each other a long time – you understand how important it is to move right now while we're building this bigger framework. And these are initiatives that we're going to get to young people, that's going to make, I think, a profound impact on their lives. So, thank you so much for the work that you and your team have done. Now, another way we reach young people is by hearing their voices. And I think this is an area I can speak as an adult, I can speak as a parent. I think the First Lady would agree with me, this is an area where every adult can do better, to listen more deeply to what our young people are telling us. I don't think there's ever been a generation that is as aware, as informed, that's been put through as much as this particular generation. And they have a lot to say, and we would do well to understand better what they are telling us.

Okay, let me finish up by going over what we do every day, the status of our fight against the coronavirus and today, again, a good day in New York City and that is because of all of you. I'm always going to give you credit because you've worked so hard and you continue working so hard to get it right. So, here's our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for a suspected COVID-19, threshold of 200 – today's report, 69 patients. Daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold of 375 – today's report, 337 patients. And the one that's the most important, the percentage of people tested citywide who are positive for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent, and today only 3 percent testing positive. And that's as we do more and more and more testing. And it's a good opportunity for me to remind all New Yorkers, please, if you have not been tested yet, go get tested. It is fast. It is easy. It is free. You can call 3-1-1. You can get exactly where there's a location near you. Please take advantage of this opportunity. Few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're also joined by First Lady McCray, Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, the Mayor's Fund Executive Director Toya Williford, and Commissioner Jonnel Doris. First question today goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Mayor, good morning. Hope everyone's well. Chancellor Carranza sent a letter to all the principals and educators, or rather administrators, essentially telling them we're going to have, most likely, a blended hybrid plan for this fall. You've previously said that there's an option-a and option-b and option-c. At this point is option-a, all the kids go back five days a week, like normal life? Has that option, realistically been eliminated?

Mayor: I'll speak to it, then we'll come right back to you. No, it has absolutely not been eliminated. Look, let's do it again. It's a great question, Andrew. I appreciate it. What I think the most important thing to understand from the Chancellor's letter – and he and I spoke about it in detail before he sent it – we have to understand we're going to be on a continuum and we don't know three months from today – that's when school opens up. And, again, I understand everyone's deep concern to get ready, ready, ready. And the work has to be done to get ready, but it is a quarter of a year from now. It's three months from today. So, we don't know, honestly, will there be a vaccine? I don't think there'll be a vaccine in three months, but I don't know. And I would love nothing more. I think we all would. Will the disease have receded greatly? Will the disease have reasserted? Will our efforts to contain the disease continue to succeed? You know, what – we don't know all of the issues that will face us. So, it's impossible, it's literally, Andrew, impossible to say, here's exactly what's going to happen on September 10th, 2020. But what we do know is our schools need to be able to move on a continuum. The better the health situation, the more parents are ready to have their kids come back, the more students we have to be ready to serve in person. On the other side of the spectrum, God forbid, we have a situation with the disease where we have to be ready to serve students more and more remotely. So, Andrew, the inaudible] letter to me was to say, hey everyone, this is going to be tough, but be ready to be someplace on a continuum.

It could be every single student back in school. It could be no students back in school. We have to be ready for all of that at any point. It could change literally month to month because of the realities we face, going up or down. I know that's not easy for anyone to hear, but it's true. So, what the Chancellor is saying to all the leaders of our schools – and I want to thank all of our principals, assistant principals, all the administrators, all the educators who are trying to make sense of this great unknown – is we have to be ready for any eventuality. Andrew, we also know there's going to be a certain number of parents that even if school was open to all in person, they're not going to be ready necessarily on September 10th to send their child back. And I think there's going to take time for parents in some cases to feel comfortable. Others, I think will be ready in the beginning. So, plan-a remains. We want the number – the greatest number of kids in person. Let me make it really clear, the plan-a is the greatest possible number of kids in person, in school buildings. It must be safe. It must be safe for kids, families, educators, folks who work in the school buildings, everyone. But we know that remote learning is not as good as in-person learning. So, if we can make it safe and we really believe we can – we have a lot of testing, we have a lot of precautions, the more kids in school being taught by a teacher in person the better. But some parents won't be ready. And so, we're going to have to have a remote element for anyone who's not yet ready to send their child back. We understand this is an extraordinary moment in history. So, Andrew, plan-a remains – maximum number of kids in school, always have the remote option available for those who need it, and then we will adjust according to the realities.

Moderator: Shant from Daily News.

Question: Good morning, everyone. If I could direct my questions to First Lady McCray – had one kind of policy question, one kind of politics. One, on the policy side, can you give details on how the restaurants are being selected for the $3 million? And on the politics side, I noticed, I think this is the third time this week that you've appeared at a press conference with the Mayor. You're getting a very high-profile role in the City's coronavirus response, but critics out there say that this is essentially to help elevate your profile ahead of a possible run for Brooklyn Borough President next year. What would be your comment on that? Thank you.

Mayor: I'm going to just jump in procedurally, and then the First Lady will go, that on the first question, in addition to the First Lady, Toya Williford will talk about the details. And the second point, I’m just going to make a very, very broad statement of fact. And, Shant, I don't think you were covering City Hall in the beginning of administration. I remember in the first days of administration, when I said that my closest advisor was our First Lady and the person I turned to in making the most important decisions, the personnel decisions, the key policy decisions, and she was going to play a profoundly foundational role in this administration. We – she and I have built all of this together from day one, going back to when I ran for school board in Brooklyn in 1999. So, I don't think you necessarily saw and heard that all in real time, but that's been the reality from day one, the prominence of her role.

I think there's been critics from the beginning of people uncomfortable with that from the beginning. I don't know if they were uncomfortable because she was a woman. I don't know if they were uncomfortable just because she is an African American or because she is an African American woman or the notion that someone who has strong views and progressive views is playing such an important role. I don't know what was motivating the critics, but this has been the fact from day one, long before she even considered anything in terms of public office. So, I just want to set that record straight and with that turn to the First Lady.

First Lady McCray: Thank you, Bill. Shant, I don't know what the future holds for me. I'm a volunteer in this administration and everything that I do is because I care deeply about the people that we serve and I wanted to be a part of this administration in a way that would contribute to helping people live better lives. Again, I don't know what the future holds for me. I'm not someone who thrives in the limelight. I don't, like, need the attention of both being in front of the cameras. In fact, it's very difficult for me. I do what I do because I care about people. I care deeply about these Brown and Black communities that have been affected disproportionately by the COVID-19 virus. And I feel like it's my duty, it's my obligation as someone who has privilege, who has been given a lot to do what I can to make things better.

And that's why I get up every morning. You know, I asked myself this morning, like, why am I doing this? Bill can testify to that.

[Laughter]

Why am I doing this? And, you know, sitting here listening to Toya, listening to Deputy Mayor Thompson about, like, what we're doing [inaudible] these young people who need to have these opportunities, with these restaurant owners who are suffering so deeply – it really, it means the world to me. I sleep well at night knowing that we've done as much as we can to move the needle forward. And I get up every morning knowing that we've got to move it even more. So, I hope that answers your question –

Mayor: Toya, do you want to speak about the details?

Executive Director Williford: Absolutely. So, restaurant owners who want to apply and access this program, the Restaurant Revitalization Program, which will, again, start with 100 restaurants, this is a launchpad moving forward, that application can be found at nyc.gov/opportunity. All of the program details and the application can be accessed at that URL. This program will be overseen by the Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity and will be administered in partnership with the Human Resources Administration, HRA.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Kathleen from Patch.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Kathleen. How are you doing?

Question: I'm good, thank you. How are you?

Mayor: Good, thank you.

Question: So, I wanted to talk to you about NYCHA for a moment. Right now, there are 28 buildings and nearly 5,000 residents who don't have hot water today. It's not the first time in the past week. It's not the second. I wonder what you would say to those residents, many of whom live in high risk areas for COVID-19 and have been told the most important thing they can do to protect themselves is to wash their hands.

Mayor: Yeah, Kathleen, very saddened, really saddened anytime this happens. I mean, we are in a situation where we have got to do everything we possibly can to help the residents of public housing. And, you know, we've been doing a lot to specifically address health concerns, whether it's the repeated cleanings in the NYCHA buildings, the free face coverings, the air conditioners for older residents who might be endangered by the heat, obviously the food programs. There's so much we have to do to keep addressing the health needs of people in public housing and to keep addressing the overall challenge of how to fix our public housing buildings. And obviously, as we get through this pandemic, we're going to go right back to deepening that work. But every time the hot water is out, it personally drives me crazy because I feel for the residents who are going through that, and I know the buildings are in many cases, really – they've been without investment for decades and decades.

I know how hard it is for the folks who work at NYCHA to keep them going. But all I can say is, Kathleen, you know, we learned on the issue of heat that we could do a lot of things differently and that we could speed up the way we address heat. I'll find out today how quickly we can get the hot water back. And if there's anything we need to do structurally to stop these breakdowns from happening, or at least repair them more quickly because I don't want people going out without hot water ever, especially as you say in the middle of a pandemic. So, we'll have an update for you in the next few hours about how quickly we can fix that.

Moderator: Kathleen, you have a follow up?

Question: Oh yes. I wondered if you could respond to Sergeant McRorie’s comment on why officers aren't wearing masks. She spoke to the New York Times and said suggesting – and she has suggested that 15 hours of wearing bulletproof vests, helmets, and masks while policing in summer heat was too much to demand.

Mayor: I think she is raising a real concern, but I don't think it negates the fact that we're in the middle of a pandemic and we need all public servants to wear face coverings to the maximum extent possible. Look, let's be fair. There are times when, if you're drinking water or you're giving an instruction to a group of people, there are times where it is appropriate to take off a mask, if you're not within six feet of anyone. There are definitely exceptions, but overwhelmingly people need to have face coverings on. Every single public servant that includes our police officers. The Commissioner has made it very, very clear in his directives to officers that they have to do this and that there are – it's a matter of discipline if people don't. Again, there are exceptions. I want to be fair about that. Yes, the sergeant is not wrong that it has been hot and long hours in difficult conditions. No one that I know enjoys wearing a face covering. But it is so important that the people of the city see the people they look to, to enforce the law, actually abiding by the same rules as the rest of us. And so that has to happen to the absolute maximum extent possible among our police officers as well.

Moderator: We'll move on to Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Rich. How you doing?

Question: I'm doing all right. I'm just wondering, former Mayor Bloomberg was named by the Governor as head of their tracing effort for the State. And since New York City's part of this state, I wonder whether or not you have been in touch with him or whether he has been in touch with you to help you out with your efforts in that regard?

Mayor: Rich as I said, I'm very appreciative that Mayor Bloomberg stepped forward and his foundation stepped forward, Johns Hopkins University stepped forward. And they've been tremendously helpful. In terms of day to day operations, the way things have been set up is that a lot of the work of course, is the responsibility of the locality. I mean, that's just the truth about government in general. Whether you're talking about the way the federal government does things or the State government, they set a lot of the parameters and sometimes provide the funding. But the day to day work is done at the local level. So the Test and Trace Corps now thousands strong, on the ground, having an impact. That was done with the help for sure, of Bloomberg Philanthropies. But the day to day work is absolutely done at the local level. I haven't spoken to Mayor Bloomberg, but I am very, very appreciative for his contribution here. Go ahead, Rich.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. The next is Andrew Humm from Gay City News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Andrew. How are you doing?

Question: Well, I need a haircut, but that's the least of my worries.

Mayor: That’s coming soon – coming soon, Andrew.

Question: I appreciate all the talk about listening more deeply. If you listen to any of the Rent Guidelines Board hearings last night, people are – tenants are pleased speeding for relief that only the Board can provide. Renters are getting no aid from Washington or Albany or the City Council, but your board has the power to reduce rents by three percent and help stem the homelessness crisis at a time when we're all supposed to shelter to survive. So, we've all done things in this crisis we've never done before. And I know you're for a freeze, but will you listen to the tenants and support a historic decrease in rents?

Mayor: Andrew, I appreciate the question. Not only is it heartfelt, but I know you, you know, forever – not only is it a heartfelt question, but I understand where it's coming from and you're saying it right to say we have done things we've never done before. When I did the first rent freeze with the Rent Guidelines Board that had never been done before in half a century. So, of course, sometimes we do things that are unprecedented, especially in a crisis of this magnitude. That said, I still believe the rent freeze is the right approach and I'll tell you why – because, from my point of view, remember, the actions of the Rent Guidelines Board affect all landlords of all sizes within the boundaries of what's covered by the Rent Guidelines Board – it's a million apartments. I think there's a lot of particularly smaller and medium sized landlords that they don't have money coming in and yet they have to keep the buildings up. You and I would both say it is imperative that they keep their buildings running properly, provide services to people for as long as it takes. And we know there's a lot of people who can't pay rent right now. And we know there haven't been evictions and I want to emphasize there should not be eviction. So, here's what I think would be the better way to solve it, Andrew. The State New York clearly setting the guideline, there should be no evictions in the City of New York until months have passed after the conclusion of this crisis, that would immediately clarify a big piece of what we're talking about here. And allowing everyone who cannot pay to be on a legitimate formal payment plan, that folks who have no income when they finally get income back, start paying, over time, back rent. I think that is the proper way to proceed. I think a rent freeze is exactly the right thing to do, but I still don't agree with the notion of ultimately creating a situation who are people are running the buildings don't have the resources to run buildings. I think that presumes they all have plenty of money to spend. I know they don't. I know they're losing it as the days go by. And I'm not talking about the biggest landlords who I often have profound disagreements with, who tried to stop me from doing a rent freeze in court and we beat him. And I'm not talking about the bad landlords, and I have no use for them, and we go after them in so many ways – we’re talk about every-day landlords who are actually trying to do their job. We have to strike a balance. So, I still believe in freeze, but I appreciate you raising the point and we're going to keep looking at the situation always to figure out what we can do to provide any and all relief. And I need the State to play a more aggressive role. Do you have a follow-up?

Question: Well, my follow-up is something I asked a couple of months ago and you said you were in favor of, but we still don't have – been asking for data on COVID and LGBT people and people with AIDS for a couple of months now and I've yet to see anything from the DOH and the HHC, even though this is required to be collected.

Mayor: And I don't know why that is the case. and I apologize for that. Andrew. I'm flummoxed by that. I would think that DOH, that would be something, given the history that they've worked on so many issues that matter to the LGBT community, that that is something that they should be able to do and must do. So, we will follow up on that today. I'll ask Deputy Mayor Henze say to get involved to address that issue and fix it.

Moderator: Last question for today, it goes to Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. You've been discussing equality a lot, and I'd like to ask you about another apparent inequality in the city. During the past week on multiple occasions, NYPD officers have expelled mothers and children from playgrounds in Brooklyn – well, just a few blocks away, on the same day there were protests with hundreds of people. How does it promote equality, Mr. Mayor, when protestors have already had nearly two weeks to be out in the street, are continually allowed together, while families many are large families living in very small apartments have been shut in for months and want to enjoy a hot summer day are being expelled.

Mayor: Look Reuvain, I appreciate the question. And this has been such a complex reality. I think, again, several have asked this question. I do think the moment that this city, this nation has gone through in the last two weeks or so is something very particular, very painful, very intense, very challenging, but also a moment where literally decades and centuries of the demand for change came forward, and real change is happening as a result. And I don't for a moment, Reuvain – I don't lack compassion for those parents. I know it must be extraordinarily tough. I know parents are so frustrated. Look, for Chirlane and I with two kids, we often felt really challenged even when we weren't cooped up in a pandemic. So, a family with four kids, six kids, seven kids, eight kids, nine kids, 10 kids – I can only imagine how tough that is for the parents. And I want nothing more than to get them back to those playgrounds, it was one of the areas where I really tried my best to keep the playgrounds open. And if it hadn't been for the growth of the pandemic we would have, but we had to, at the time, this is something we worked on with the State, we had to get to the point of saying, look, out of abundance of caution, the playgrounds just created too much of a risk to families of the spread of the disease. The day is coming, it's not here yet, but the day is coming we'll be able to open up them again. We don't have a timeline yet it. It will be absolutely connected to how we do at fighting back the disease, more to say on that when the right time comes. But I hope I have given you some sense of why I think the demonstrations were something absolutely unexpected, absolute particular, but the ongoing effort to try and relieve the pressure of these families while still protecting against the resurgence of disease – and this is the punchline, this is what matters Reuvain – the last thing you want, or anyone wants, is a resurgence of this disease that then will lead to the restrictions being, once again, put back in place. We're finally in phase one, a lot of those small business owners that your publication, others have raised the concerns of are finally starting to get back to work. They're a few weeks away from getting back to normal work, for example, in retail stores. We have to hold the line as painful as it is to not allow the spread of this disease so we can get back to that. Do you have a follow-up?

Let me finish here real quick with just a profound thanks to the First Lady, Deputy Mayor Thompson, Executive Director of the Mayor's Fund, Toya Williford, everyone in the task force on racial inclusion and equity. A lot of work happening very quickly, and it will make a difference in the here and now, and that's where I want to end. We are dealing with a crisis we have never seen in our lives. The biggest crisis, arguably, that's ever hit this city – health crisis, economic crisis, human crisis, disparity crisis, a crisis that cuts all across this city. The way we fight back is by leaning in to change, pushing back a status quo that was broken and doing things differently. That's happening right now, whether it's the support we talked about this week for the Cure Violence movement, whether it's creating opportunities for small businesses or helping young people, whatever it is, it is about right now, addressing those disparities sharply and redistributing resources to folks who have suffered unduly. That's what we're going to be doing today, tomorrow, all the way to the City budget, and then for a year and a half thereafter, relentlessly. And I am convinced we can refer very, very head-on address the broken status quo and get the city to a better place. And we can do that together. Thank you.

2020-06-12 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. This story is going to be told for generations. The story of a hundred days and the history of New York City. When New Yorkers were faced with a literally, almost unbelievable challenge, something we could not conceive of happening in this city. And when it did, New Yorkers found a way to fight back. It was asking so much of the people of this city, to change their lives fundamentally and change them quickly, and yet you did it. In a matter of days, we went from being one of the most social, vibrant, active cities on the earth, to being a place where people somehow learn to adapt to shelter in place, to socially distance, to put on those face coverings, all the things that we now do, and we see as part of our daily routine. It took a lot to learn them, and to do them, and yet you did it. So, for a hundred days, we fought back this disease, and in the middle of that, it looked like it might surge beyond anything we could possibly imagine. And yet, because of what you did, the disease was stopped and then pushed back. Got a long way to go in this city, and we have to be very, very careful of the danger of this disease resurging. The danger of the boomerang, the danger we're seeing playing out right now in States in this country that tragically, I think moved too fast without the right precautions. And we're seeing people suffer, and we're seeing people die because of that. Here in this city, we have resolved to do this, the smart way, the careful way. The results each day, speak for themselves, what you have achieved and how we're going to sustain it. And now, another mission to restart the city, to bring people's livelihoods back, to help folks who don't have money right now for food or rent or medicine to get their jobs back, so we can all move forward and be the greatest city in the world.

So, we now start phase one and it's not easy. It's also the great unknown. And yet, the news I have for you today is overwhelmingly good news about how New Yorkers have found a way to make phase one work. It's initial, we know a lot of people are still watching and waiting. Certainly not everyone who could have come back to work has come back to work. Not every business that could have been opened by now is, but we're seeing more and more businesses reopening, more and more people coming back to work, more and more people deciding that they can make it work and make it work safely. One of the ways that we judge what's going on is by the heartbeat of this city and that's mass transit, our subways, our buses. This is the greatest mass transit city in America. One of the great mass transit cities in the world. And we know that mass transit has struggled in the middle of this crisis, and people have been concerned, they've been worried, and understandably so. And there's a lot that has been done, and a lot more that needs to be done to give people faith that they can come back to mass transit safely. But, as per usual, New Yorkers are voting with their feet. New Yorkers are making their own decision and showing the strength and resiliency that we know is so much a part of the core and the life of this city.

So, subway ridership. Now, this Wednesday, two days go up 25 percent compared to Wednesday the week before. Bus ridership up 23 percent, two days ago, Wednesday compared to the week before. Staten Island Ferry ridership up 31 percent. That's mass transit. Now, people are obviously also coming into the city with trucks, with cars, and we've talked about the fact we understand that will happen in the short term. We look forward to though continuing intensely our efforts to reorient the entire city to mass transit. And the announcement I made a few days ago about more bus service and busways is going to be a big part of how we move forward in the future. But you do need to look at traffic coming into Manhattan as a measure of people's willingness to come back to work and to reopen businesses. East River bridges, an increase of 17% over the course of a week. Harlem river bridges an increase of 14 percent. Working people are coming back to work. Most importantly, we must make sure it's done safely. We must protect their health. The social distancing standards are crucial. So, on our own fairies, Staten Island ferry, you're going to see that social distancing. You're going to see it marked, to show people where to sit, where not to sit. The face coverings, being given out for free at the fairies, at the subways, the buses. We're working closely, whether it's our own efforts to make sure people are safe in the transportation run by the city of New York or with the MTA run by the state. We're working closely together to keep these really foundational concepts moving that we have to constantly give out those face coverings constantly educate people, constantly help show people the safe way to do things. I ask every New Yorker, because this has always been a participatory reality. We got safer and healthier because of what you did, keep doing it when you're out in public, observe those standards and help others too, as well.

Now, our job is to help working people get back to work. Our job is to keep working people safe and healthy. Our job is to help businesses back on their feet. And we know that's particularly true with small businesses. They’ve borne the brunt of this crisis. They are the heart and soul of our neighborhoods. We have to do special things to help small businesses. Small businesses, mom and pop stores. Multigenerational stores make New York, New York. They are who we are, and we have to protect them and help them. Here to tell you about our efforts, as we begin phase one of this restart, our commissioner for small business services, Jonnel Doris.

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Thank you, sir. The Department of Small Business Services helps unlock economic potential and create economic security for all New Yorkers by connecting New Yorkers to good jobs, creating stronger businesses, and build and thrive in neighborhoods across the five boroughs. Aside from supporting the small business community, with access to finance and technical assistance programs and training, we also oversee the city's 18 workforce one centers. Annually, we serve over a thousand New Yorkers, connecting them to train in high quality jobs and careers, a hundred thousand New Yorkers. We are currently working with over 300 employers to source 4,000 essential workers during this crisis. We've partnered with the foods czar team to establish a workforce development program that is specifically targeted toward essential businesses, including grocers. We are working with hospitals and nursing homes to provide support in filling urgent staffing needs. The last week, the mayor announced the emergency grant program in which we established for those who've been vandalized or alluded doing the last few weeks, the grant focused on M/WBEs and mom and pop shops with less than 1.5 million in annual revenue. This fund had initial 500,000 investment from Somos Care Organization and the Mayor's Fund to provide grants up to 10,000 per eligible business. Today, we are announcing a new partner in this effort. Signature bank has contributed another 750,000 to help 75 businesses bring our total now to 1.25 million for grants, this will help at least 125 impacted businesses in all five boroughs with recovery, including repairs, security systems locks and more. Thank you, Signature Bank, and thanks to the Mayor's Fund for your commitment to small businesses.

Throughout the pandemic, and since phase one, reopening, I have visited businesses in every borough. I was in Staten Island yesterday, and I'm heading out to the Bronx again today. We know that New York City means business, and our small businesses are tough, resilient, and are looking forward to coming back. I've heard firsthand, there is real optimism out there, a real sense of it. Yet, we understand that the challenges of reopening for some of our small businesses are real. SBS has rolled out resources to help small businesses during this time to recover, and to reopen. From the onset of the pandemic, we quickly launched several resources to help reopen small businesses and provide the necessary guidance and support they need. Our first job was to educate and help our small businesses understand the reopening process, and get them ready to come back. As of today, we've launched educational webinars and trainings. We have connected small businesses to over $65 million in financial assistance. Our hotline has received over 6,000 calls so far for reopening guidance, financial assistance and PPE. 334,000 guidance documents have been distributed to businesses. We are translating that into also 10 languages. 1.84 million face coverings distributed to small businesses with our 72 partners across the city, and we will hit the 2 million Mark and keep going. If you are a business and need support, please visit us at nyc.gov/business or our hotline at 888-SBS-4NYC, (888) 727-4692, or call 311. Thank you, sir.

Mayor: Thank you so much Jonnel. I want to say Jonnel to you and everyone at Small Business Services, you were all doing such important work before the pandemic, but now is a time when everyone at Small Business Services is doing absolutely crucial work for this city. Small Businesses needed the help before the pandemic. We talked about it in the state of the city address, how small businesses are our heart and soul in this city, but they have suffered a lot in the realities of today's economy. We needed to help them then, we need to help them even more now. And Commissioner Jonnel Doris, and everyone at Small Business Services is really stepping up. So, thank you very, very much for the extraordinary efforts. And I want to thank all of the city agencies that are doing the work this week to help businesses back on their feet, help them get the answers they need, help them move forward. There's been a huge amount of work done by the Buildings Department, Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. So many agencies are playing a role in this restart. And I want to give you a fact, I think is quite striking. You know, we said a few days ago, the goal would be for city agencies to go out and educate, help make sure small businesses knew, and all businesses knew what they needed to get started. Help make sure it was safe and healthy. Get them those free face coverings, but obviously to make sure that the rules are being followed. And we've had a huge amount of activity in terms of inspections just these first days of the restart. Total inspections now 15,755 work sites have been inspected. I want to give you the good news, over 15,000 of those, so the vast, vast majority, 100 percent on track doing exactly what we need them to do for the health and safety of their workers. Moving forward, three percent only needed a warning or some education on something they needed to fix, and that is being fixed. And again, our goal is not to give fines in the first instance, our goal is, as everyone's learning together, how to do this, help them move forward, help them get it right down the line if we need tougher enforcement, that's always an option. But we hope to never need that, we hope to help everyone get to the right place for the health and safety of all, and so the restart can keep building.

Now, the restart is heating up, but something else is heating up and that is the weather, and we can all feel that hot summer ahead. We've talked about the fact that we have to get ahead of the hot weather and protect New Yorkers, particularly those most vulnerable from what mother nature may have in store for us. And we have to particularly focus on our seniors, our seniors have borne the brunt in the coronavirus crisis and particularly seniors who have not had enough healthcare in their life because health care, again, tragically is distributed in this country, according to income, not according to need. Another reminder, why we need universal healthcare in this country, so many seniors have gone a lifetime without all the healthcare they deserve, so many seniors who are lower income are suffering right now. We need to make sure they are protected against the heat ahead. So, we have a program we launched weeks ago called get cool NYC, and the idea of get cool mic is to focus on those who are most vulnerable, make sure they are safe, make sure they're kept cool. Even with some of the challenges of the coronavirus, even when some of the adjustments we've had to make some new approaches, make sure our seniors are safe.

So, first of all, most important immediate piece of this is giving out 74,000 free air conditioning units to low income seniors and a focus, particularly on low income seniors in public housing, about a third of those air conditioners will go to low income seniors who live in NYCHA. Right now, there has been outreach to approximately 180,000 seniors to find out who needs these air conditioners, 25,000 have met the standards and we're moving to install those air conditioners and then keep going from there. So, 4,000 units installed already more going each day, the goal is to be able to install 1500 air conditioners each day and have all 74,000 installed by the end of July, we are confident we can meet that goal. Now the public service commission, I'm sorry, I started July, I misspoke, my apologies started July end of June started July my apology. The public service commission and the state public service commission, we reached out to them, we sent a particular request to them asking help with low income, New Yorkers who have to pay their energy bills over the summer as the hot weather's coming we want people to be able to afford that air conditioning. It's one thing to have the air condition unit, you have to be able to afford it as well. The state public service commission has come through and I want to thank them, that's a big deal, they're going to double the current commitment for subsidizing the energy bills of low income, New Yorkers. So almost 440,000 New York City families will benefit because of this decision by the state public service commission. And the average savings per customer will be about $140 this summer, that's for a lot of families in this city, a lot of money. So, a big step forward, thanks to the PSC for this really important helping hand.

Alright, I want to turn to a different topic that is very much relevant to what we've done. All of us fighting the coronavirus and a reminder as we restart, we're going to make sure that the parts of our lives that really determine our future are protected, and that means voting. You know, it's been a tough, complicated time, but one thing we know in a democracy is it so important to keep the democratic process strong and moving no matter what's thrown at us, that's been the history of this city and this country. So, I want to remind people how important it is to keep voting, in fact, in a time of crisis, it's more important to keep voting. Okay, you have five days left to request an absentee ballot and remember any eligible voter can vote by mail now, it's not like it used to be with absentee ballots where you have to prove you're going to be out of town, or you could not get out of your apartment or something like that. Anyone, everyone is welcome to send in an application for an absentee ballot to basically vote by mail as is done in many parts of the country already. So, you have until next Tuesday to submit that request, to get an application, you go to NYCabsentee.com or call 866-VOTE-NYC, 866-VOTE-NYC, June 23rd is the primary election day. And if you need any more information, go to vote.nyc and you can get all the information you need, and the most important thing is to make pure voice heard.

Okay, we will now wrap up with our healthcare indicators and I want to just frame this by saying, we all understand that the restart means more and more people in close proximity. Phase one means a lot, phase two means even more, the central concern that I have, I know that the Governor has, the state has as well as to watch every day to make sure that as we have more activity, there is not a resurgence of this disease. This is what we think about every single day, and we watch these indicators constantly to see if we see any evidence of a challenge or problem. If we do, we're going to talk about out loud, we're going to remind people about what we need to do to fight it back. There's three indicators, we go over each day, two are particularly sensitive in the sense of, they will show us most quickly what's going on out there, and if we have to make adjustments. Of course, hospital admissions for those respiratory symptoms, that is a very clear immediate indicator, and most obviously the percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19 citywide, that's the most universal of all measures. So, we're watching, we have three indicators, but two are particularly sensitive and tell us in real time what's going on. What we're happy to say is over this last period of time, as we've been ready for the restart and now begun to restart, we've seen actually steady progress on our indicators, but the big test comes later in the month, as we start to see the impact of so many people being closer together, remember it takes time for this disease to be spread, it takes time for it to manifest. We're not going to see it instantly, if there is a resurgence, we would see it in the second half of the month. So, we're watching every day, but here's today's report, and this is another good news report today, and again, thanks to all of you. Indicator, number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected, COVID-19 again, threshold of 200 today's report 70 patients. And I'm going to note, and we'll talk about this further, that the more research we do, the more we're finding a lot of those patients, thank God are not COVID patients, even if they present with COVID like symptoms. So, we'll keep giving more and more information on that going forward, but overall that number 70, well within our threshold. Number two, daily number of people in health and hospitals, ICU at threshold 375, the number today 339, and then the percentage of people tested positive for COVID-19 citywide three percent again, we've been around that number for many days and that's a very good sign.

A few words in Spanish, as we wrap up.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we turned to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all just a reminder that we have Small Business Commissioner Doris, here in person. And on the phone, we have Deputy Mayor Been, President and CEO of Health and Hospitals, Dr. Katz, Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell, Senior Advisor, Dr. Varma, Deputy Commissioner for Traffic Management and Planning Beaton, and Senior Advisor and General Counsel for DemocracyNYC Wood. With that, I will start with Samantha from 1010 WINs.

Samantha, are you there?

Mayor: Samantha? Can you hear us?

Moderator: Samantha, we'll circle back.

Mayor: Try one more time. Samantha, can you hear us?

I wanted just to encourage to all our colleagues in the media, please, if you can call from a hard line, please do, or you can make sure you're in good cell range, it really, really helps all of us. But Samantha, one more time, can you hear us? Alright, we'll come back to Samantha.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, happy Friday, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Happy Friday.

Question: Great, thanks. One of my colleagues asked last week, whether you'd seen any uptick in coronavirus cases or hospitalizations since the protest started and now, I believe, it's been over two weeks. You said it would take a few more days to determine that. Now that it's been several days, have you seen any evidence of a spike? I know one publication mentioned a three day rise in hospitalizations, and if you haven't seen any, why do you think that is?

Mayor: Yeah, I don't know. I'll see if Dr. Varma or Dr. Katz want to add. I have not – the fact is, I mean, you just heard the indicators they've been stable and in very much in the range we want them to be. Again, I don't think it's all exactly linear Julia, how the disease spreads, you know, it doesn't always fit a specific timeframe, but the only thing I can offer as a layman is the fact that everything occurred outdoors is important. We know for a fact, you know, exposure is more limited outdoors than indoors and from what I saw a whole lot of people were wearing face coverings. And I, as you know, I went very close to a lot of the protests to see them myself; a lot of people wearing face coverings – that's real important. Those are only two things I can offer.

Dr. Varma, Dr. Katz, you want to add anything?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Yeah. This is Jay Varma. I would say that we have to continue to be cautious. The dynamics of the disease can vary depending on, on many different factors and we think of this as having an incubation period of as long as 14 days. And in public health, we generally try to wait even as long as two full incubation periods – so that would be even 28 days before we can be comfortable saying that a certain event, whether it's a protest or any other type of gathering might cause an increase. I think we're reassured that we haven't seen anything yet, but I don't think we can change our levels.

Mayor: Thank you. Okay.

Moderator: We're going to circle back to Samantha now. Samantha from 1010 Wins.

Question: Yes. Hi, good morning there. Can you hear me now?

Mayor: Yeah. Samantha, how you doing?

Question: Good. How are you?

Mayor: Good, good.

Question: My question is about learning in the fall, the UFT sent out a, a letter about hybrid possibly in the fall and some teachers are against it because they don't feel safe going back while parents say that they're, you know, they don't know how to coordinate childcare or drop-off, pick -up. And also there's concern about children in special education and getting their needs met. Would you, would you consider maybe just having the children in special education come in or, you know, some plans to help them because they're the ones that are really falling behind?

Mayor: Special-ed, look for I've been working on special-ed issues for decades. Kids with special needs we owe it to them to always go the extra mile, their parents and I say this as a parent myself, they've been through so much in non- pandemic times – special-ed parents deal with a lot. And for many years, I think the city was profoundly unfair to them and tried to keep them from the services that they needed for strictly budgetary reasons. We have been trying to end that madness and provide special-ed support, wherever whenever needed and it costs, you know, many billions of dollars, but it has been the right thing to do. The special-ed needs our kids this summer, this fall, we're working right now to figure out how to address that, right. The, the thing that's hard for us all to remember, Samantha its June 12th, normally this time of year, we'd be about two weeks from school ending in a normal school year and then the summer activities would pick up, you know, a week or two after that. So, we have to quickly in the month of June, determine what the summer looks like in terms of special-ed. And obviously as we figure out what's happening with the coronavirus, which is far from certain, as you can see. But in terms of the fall I've had this conversation in great detail with our Chancellor Richard Carranza and our First Deputy Mayor, Dean Fuleihan and a lot of other members of our team. The goal is to get the maximum number of kids back into our school buildings, where they can learn best, but that goal is wholly contingent upon the health dynamics. We have three months until school reopens. So, three months to see whether we beat back this disease more, or whether we are dealing with unfortunately, a resurgence. We're going to make decisions based on health and safety first. If the health conditions allow and we can keep our kids safe, our family's safe, our educators safe, our staff safe, we want the maximum number of kids come back to school, but we expect that to be with social distancing requirements, face coverings, and therefore there'll be real capacity issues. We also know a lot of parents and kids won't be ready to come back right away. So, we are going to have the option of remote for anyone who needs it and we may have to do more or less remote depending on what's happening with the disease. So, we'll have different opportunities available, different plans ready, but the goal remains three months before school begins; the goal remains to get the maximum number of kids back who are ready to come back because it is the best way to educate them. If we can keep them safe, it’s the healthiest best option for them in terms of their whole growth and development. And as you said, there's some parents who are absolutely asking us now to re-open school so they have that option for their kids as they return to work. So, we're going to be ready depending on the health and safety dynamics; we're unquestionably going to be ready.

Moderator: Next we have Matt Chayes from Newsday. Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have two questions.

Mayor: Hey, Matt.

Question: Hey, sir. Will you vet the restaurant recipients of the grants that you announced yesterday for Health Department inspection and wage complaints?

Mayor: I will start. It's a good question, Matt. Appreciate it. I will start and I'll turn to Commissioner Jonnel Doris, but just starting to say this, the crucial thing in everything we do is, of course, absolutely want fairness for working people, absolutely want health standards complied with, and we also have to recognize at the same time that we are talking about community-based small businesses that really must survive for the good of their communities. And there's such fear – and I've talked to a lot of elected officials about this – there's such fear about communities losing their art and soul, which are these mom and pop stores, these multigenerational businesses, these restaurants that are gathering places. And, you know, we're not talking about gentrification a whole lot now – and I don't blame anyone after the last a hundred days – but came up last night, we had a really powerful – I did a conference call with faith leaders and one of the leaders from Central Brooklyn – and I want to shout her out, because I found her words, profound – Sister Majida Salaam, talked about the impact of gentrification on Central Brooklyn and how long before the protests or the coronavirus there were profound senses of injustice as people saw gentrifiers come in and seemingly be favored over people who had been the neighborhood for generations and had struggled through the tough times.

So, I want to put this in perspective that those community-based restaurants are part of the heart and soul and identity, and people are so fearful they're going to be wiped away by gentrification to begin with, and then coronavirus, economic crisis, and we've got to help them back on their feet. I don't think there's a contradiction between that and making sure, of course, that they are safe and they treat their workers well. And particularly in the initiative we talked about yesterday, that was laid out by the First Lady and by Toya Williford, the Executive Director of the Mayor's Fund, there are specific guarantees about wage levels in that initiative. Commissioner Doris, do you want to add?

Commissioner Doris: Sure, just to reiterate, the Restaurant Revitalization Program, $3 million for this opportunity, 27 hardest hit communities, $30,000 grants and $20 per hour at least for six weeks for supporting 1,000 workers. All that to say that, look, we want to make sure that about 27,000 restaurants in the city, particularly those in the hardest hit communities, that they have the support they need. And I think that program does it. What we're doing also at the Department of Small Business Services is assist and help those businesses get back on their feet. But we do want to make sure that we are getting to those who need the support the most. And, again, that program is representative of that as well.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Matt.

Moderator: Next we have Sophia from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Sophia, how are you?

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me? Hi, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: This is about day camps. The State has cleared day camps to open on June 29th, but many camps here in New York City that need permits from the Parks Department say they haven't gotten them yet. Will the Parks Department issue permits to camps and when can we expect that?

Mayor: It's an important question, Sophia. I got to get an update on that. Again, our conditions here in the city are the most complex in the whole state. And I have to see what the executive order says specifically, what conditions it sets, what amount of local discretion it sets. So, it's a very important issue. I know a lot of people want to see them get up and running, but we have to do it safely. So, this is one that I can come back to you on, or our team will come back to you on later on today.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next, we have Debralee from Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone.

Mayor: Can you hear us, Debralee?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Debralee?

Question: I can, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yup. You're good.

Question: Good morning to all. Terrific. Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you about some concerns that advocates and undocumented immigrants are having as the city continues to move deeper into its reopening. A lot of them are feeling like they're being left behind, and I wanted you to speak specifically to whether the race equity forum and the panel has been actually, you know, developing specific policies and measures that speak to their concerns. You've got rent, the moratorium coming up. You've got a lot of issues, particularly with restaurant workers that you mentioned yesterday, that affect undocumented immigrants. And many of them are not hearing that there – the City is planning for their return to, you know, the regular structures of life.

Mayor: Well, Debralee, it's a very, very important question. And I know you were up in the Bronx when I was there seeing the damage done to immigrant small businesses and small businesses where many immigrants work. And I think it gets back to the previous question as well, that ending the violence so we could move forward as a city was particularly crucial to folks who are the most vulnerable and in the economy. And that means immigrants across the board and particularly undocumented immigrants. So, we've got to understand how all these pieces interplay, restoring peace, so we could move forward with the restart, so that we could get people back to work, particularly those who needed the work the most is how I see the way the pieces come together. We have, as a city, committed for undocumented folks, not only fairness and respect and never asking documentation status, all of our efforts to help people, our food program is for everyone regardless of documentation status, our guaranteed health care program is for everyone regardless of documentation status, obviously public schools, you name it, a whole range of services.

And what I've been trying to do to make sure that there are not evictions helps everyone, including undocumented folks. We also worked with Open Society Institute on specific funding from the outside, from the philanthropic world to help undocumented folks who have lost their income. Going forward, the Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity, three co-chairs, one executive director of the three co-chairs. One is an immigrant himself, Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze. One is a child of immigrants, Grace Bonilla, and the Executive Director. I know they are deeply, deeply sensitive to what immigrant New Yorkers go through. I think there's no question that task force is looking at the needs of immigrants and specifically undocumented immigrants to see everything we can do. But I would say – again, I think the first question is how to help the businesses that are most likely to support immigrant communities and employ immigrant New Yorkers? I think what Commissioner Doris talked about, a lot of that initiative – those initiatives that he's talked about are specifically helping immigrant businesses. Obviously the money helping the stores recover in the Bronx. The restaurant initiative that the First Lady talked about yesterday, I think they're all focused on helping immigrant businesses in so many ways. So a lot more to do, but I at least want to give you some frame of how much of a focus this is.

Moderator: Last question for today. We have Joe from Politico.

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you again about the COVID stats? I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about, you know, if we continue to see a lack of a spike from these protests, how that's going to impact your decision making on other types of outdoor activities? And maybe when they can resume? Then I'll ask my second question after.

Mayor: Yeah, Joe, I think the protests were, you know, a very intense, concentrated time. But again, outdoors, people broadly wearing face coverings. And we don't see a lot of evidence yet, but we might. I don't want to, for a moment, belittle that we might. The curfew also kept a lot of people indoors. So there may have been some balancing factor there. But the big question really is what's going to be the impact of phase one. Because you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people coming in contact with each other each day, all day, every day. Protests, I'm not belittling the impact, but protests tended to be for brief periods of time and smaller numbers of people. Phase one is hundreds of thousands, when you talk about the workers, the customers, and it's all day it's seven days a week. I mean, this is the thing to watch. What does phase one do? So my view is when you get to the last week of June, you're going to have a much better sense of how all of this is adding up. And if we can move forward effectively into phase two, and it's going to be a constant conversation with the State.

I think the question about other types of activities directly relates to how successful phase one is. We're obviously talking about things like beaches, pools. Then there are things I think are the hardest things, which are really big gatherings, which are probably the last thing that gets dealt with. But I think the thing for everyone to remember is we're watching these daily indicators, because they're going to tell us step-by-step are we making the right move and is it holding? Or do we need to pause for more information? Or do we ever need to in fact, take a step back to keep things safe. It's just going to be an everyday thing. But I like what I see so far. All of that qualification notwithstanding Joe. I really like what I see so far, I'm knocking on wood, as I say it.

So, I'll conclude now with just a quick thought. And it's just a take your mind back to those weeks in March, where the disease was surging. Remember that shock of how fast it was moving. Remember I told you about Sunday, April 5th, I kept talking about in the days leading up, that we literally believed those next days after we're going to be a horrible time of the growth of the disease and that our hospital system would be threatened. And yet New Yorkers did the right thing just in time. Our hospitals held, we managed to fight the disease back at the most critical moment. It's a really heroic story. And you're the protagonist of this story. You made it happen. Now we have an opportunity to do something on a grand scale to bring this city back, to get people back their livelihoods, to give people hope through action. But it remains the responsibility, remains the responsibility of all of us to stick to the things that have worked. And I want to tell you every time you put on that face covering and when it's hot, that's really not a fun thing to do. I know. And every time you stay indoors when you'd rather be outside and every time you're trying to work on staying six feet away from someone, it actually adds up. Which is why we are now in phase one. And why phase one is working. Let's keep it going, because that's how we get to phase two and everything thereafter, and a much better time for this city.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-06-16 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody.

Now, I don't think we've ever had a time like this in our city's history where so many things were being confronted simultaneously of such intense importance. But the answer in every case is to believe in this city and our people and what we can achieve together. We also recognize that the fight against the coronavirus depends on every single New Yorker. We are deep, deep in this battle, and I've said many times, my deep appreciation to all of you for what you've done to help move us forward and we continue to move forward. But the fact that we've come so far should never allow us to become complacent or to feel for a moment that can't be a resurgence because we know there can be, we have seen such troubling reality in other cities and States that somehow took their guard down or move too quickly, we have that very much in our mind. And so, we're going to stay focused, we're going to stay focused on social distancing on face coverings on all of the things that have worked. And we now have a whole new reality with our Test and Trace Corp – this is something we talked about back in April – we said it would be built in May and in June it has come alive and come alive on a huge, huge scale. In a moment you're going to hear from Dr. Ted Long and his team at Test and Trace are doing an amazing job building out this capacity rapidly in a way we've never seen before in this city's history. Testing has finally starting to reach the kind of numbers we want to see, not our perfect numbers, but a hell of a lot more than we had before. The City of New York alone is now sponsoring about 20,000 tests a day, when you add in all the other providers were over 30,000, we now can predict that we will be at 50,000 tests per day by early July and just a month. Way ahead of schedule, and that's such powerful news. 50,000 people per day will be tested by the beginning of July, that is a third of a million people a week. It's an extraordinary step forward. Our tracer core now tracking approximately 4,300 cases just in the last days that they've been up and running. In this summer, they will be building out to the potential to monitor a quarter million New Yorkers. That is the level we're going to reach, a quarter million people who will need help and support to help them through this disease, to keep all the rest of us safe as well.

Now, to remind everyone that anyone who needs a test or anyone who is symptomatic and needs help, or anyone who needs to get that opportunity to safely separate, whether it's hotel or staying at home with a lot of support, there's a number you can call if you need that help and support. And it's 844-4NYC, 844-4NYC. That number has received over a hundred thousand calls from New Yorkers, seeking health advice from a clinician, it's been a huge success. That's the number to call when you need to figure out what to do, if you've tested positive or you're symptomatic, and you want to make sure you don't spread the disease to your family or anyone else call that number and help will be available to you immediately.

So, with these new tools, I have confidence in our ability to keep fighting back this virus. We're all in it together to say the least, but we have now what we need to keep this fight going and here to tell you more of the details, the executive director of Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Dr. Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, the mission of the Test and Trace Corp, is to prevent the spread of the coronavirus across New York City. Now, this starts with identifying cases or people newly diagnosed with coronavirus. We then ask them to identify contacts or people that cases may have exposed to the coronavirus since starting the Test and Trace corp. program on June 1st, just two weeks ago, we've identified more than 5,000 cases or people newly diagnosed with the coronavirus. Of those 15 percent, we had challenge, we didn't have a phone number for them. However, for everybody that we did have a phone number for all of those cases, we have now reached 94 percent of them of that 94 percent that we've reached more than 1,800 of these cases have shared with us contacts or people they may have exposed to the coronavirus. That's yielded us a list of more than 4,000 contacts across New York City. Now we had the same challenge with that list of 4,000 contacts where 36 percent of them, we didn't have a phone number for yet. However, for those that we did have a phone number for we've reached more than 80 percent of them. And of that more than 80 percent, there was a subset more than 300 people that when we were talking to them on the phone, they shared with us that they were actively symptomatic and likely contagious with the coronavirus. In that moment, we were able to get them to isolate or quarantine to keep their families and their neighbors safe, and we were able to get them all of the resources that they needed to get through this. To date, since the program went live on June 1st, as the mayor said, we've monitored more than 4,200 New Yorkers, that's 65 percent of all of our cases and contacts put together. Of that, 65 percent of our cases in contact, more than a thousand of them, when we were talking to them on the phone, told us they needed help. That help was in the form of food delivery, help with their medications. And for each of them, we've paired them up with a resource navigator and we've given them the help that they need to get their families and their neighbors through this. In addition to that, 40 New Yorkers have arrived at our hotels after telling us that they couldn't safely separate home and they needed even more help. And we with open arms have brought them to our hotels.

Now, how are we going to close the gap for getting the phone numbers and contact information for the for the cases and contacts where we don't currently have it three key ways. First, we're using databases like the Thomson Reuters database that collect phone numbers now, we've already started to do that, it's effective. Second, our team is calling the doctor's offices that ordered the test because they have their patient's phone numbers. And then we're calling our cases in contacts, based on those phone numbers. Third, yesterday, we went live with training, a new type of tracer, this is a community engagement specialist, and these tracers are the ones that go into our communities, track people down, knock on doors and enroll them in the program. So, I'm going to say one more thing today, and this is very important. One of the key reasons why our program has been so successful so early on is that more than half of all of our tracers, all of our 3000 working tracers are people from our hardest hit communities across New York City, making this a local effort with New Yorkers in our communities, serving our communities. I'm pleased to announce today that we're awarding $4 million to community-based organizations to join us in the fight against the coronavirus and to drive this work forward together. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Ted. And congratulations to you and your team, really extraordinary work. And everyone, this work has been done about two weeks, the last two weeks of getting this effort up and running on a vast scale, connecting with all those people, building out constantly, absolutely impressive work, and a lot more to come, as you heard. Let me talk about the daily indicator’s indicator, number one, daily numbers, admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 that threshold is 200 patients and today's report 52. Indicator number two daily number of people in health and hospitals, ICU threshold of 375, today's report 334 and indicator number three, number of people tested citywide or positive for COVID-19 threshold of 15 percent today, an excellent number – two percent. That is the kind of number of we are so proud of, cause that all indicates what you have done and what hard work every New Yorker has put themselves to, to get to this point. So again, congratulations, these are the kind of indicators we want to see more and more of as we get closer and closer to phase two, these are the kind of results that are going to get us there, and beyond

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we'll turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all just a reminder that we have Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corp, Dr. Long here in person and on the phone, we have Small Business Commissioner Doris and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. With that, I will start with Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Moderator: Next we have Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor two questions for you. First, one of my colleagues recently submitted a FOIL request to the Department of Health and was told in response that it may neither be physically nor technologically possible to comply with FOIL law at this time. Are some of your agencies effectively suspending FOIL law right now thanks to coronavirus?

Mayor: I have never heard that Dana, and that doesn't make sense to me. It would not shock me if there were some delays just because of so much going on and so much complexity of what people are facing in each agency, but no, of course we have to abide by the law. If you'll get the details to our team here at City Hall, we'll follow up and we'll get that rectified.

Moderator: Next, we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: We have several reports yesterday and this morning where parents have shown up to playgrounds to cut the locks on them. These are specifically in Williamsburg and in other areas of Brooklyn. You've gotten questions about this in the past where there's some frustration that playgrounds are not opening up yet; they say they they're going against your orders and, and cutting these locks open. So your reaction to that, and is the city just going to show up and close them again? Are you going to have to clean them up? What's the process here?

Mayor: Yeah, we're not going to allow people to take the law into their own hands - it just doesn't work. So, people are not allowed to open up a playground that's not yet available to the public - it’s for a reason. Look, I was very sympathetic in the beginning to every parent - as a parent myself - why people wanted to be on those playgrounds. We tried to make it work; it wasn't working effectively. Right now, we're not going to make a change with the playgrounds until we get to phase two. Now, phase two as everyone knows, could be as early as June 22nd. I've said, I think it's going to take a little longer than that just to make sure we're absolutely certain, but until the order is given the playgrounds are open; people need to stay off the playgrounds, it's not appropriate to take their own action. We're doing this so that we can get to phase two and beyond. So, I understand people's frustrations, but if folks act prematurely and that causes the disease to start spreading again, then that's the kind of thing that will undermine our ability to get to phase two and stay in phase two. So, I know it's not easy, but people have to understand there's a reason for these rules; it's to help us move forward.

Moderator: Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you today?

Mayor: I'm good, Juliet. How are you?

Question: Great, I'm fine. Thank you. So, my first question is actually an email from a listener. I'm going to read it to you. It says, I'm a commercial landlord and three of my largest tenants are daycare centers. They've been closed for three months and have been given no indication of when they'll be allowed to open. They have no income, can't pay rent and have burned through their security deposits. None of my expenses, mortgage, property taxes, insurance maintenance have been paused and I cannot give my tenants anymore rent breaks. I've been collecting about 10 to 20 percent of my rent because I don't have any money left to pay bills. So, Mr. Mayor, the question is other than waiting for federal stimulus money, what are you doing for people like this listener?

Mayor: Yeah, Juliet such an important question. I want to just broaden it for a second, that we need daycare centers up and running as soon as they can be safely for all the people of this city. As we go into Phase Two, more and more people are going to be going back to work, and obviously folks who can work from home, that's great, but a lot of people will be going back to work and will need childcare and that's going to be even more true in the fall. So, we have to figure out how to get to the point where daycare centers can get up running and to help them do so. I don't have that answer for you perfectly today. I just don't. But as we've been working through the pieces, this one's very much on our mind. Yeah, people need childcare. They really need it for their kids, in every sense. The folks who work in childcare need their jobs back. Yes, the landlords of those buildings need to get their rent, we have to move on all these fronts, but we don't have that plan today, but we will have it very shortly.

Question: Okay. I do have a second question.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Okay, thank you. How do you explain the disparity between protests allowed to go forward with no social distancing yet those gathering outside bars or restaurants cannot do that?

Mayor: Juliet, I understand when people ask that and I think we just have to keep it in perspective history. We're seeing a social movement growing before our very eyes that’s addressing 400 years of oppressive reality in this country, 400 years of structural racism, and demanding a change in the reality of how we police and how we in our whole society address equality and get rid of all of the things that are part of structural inequality. And this movement has developed organically. It's huge. It's urgent. You have to recognize the historical moment and allows some space. And now we see that people have made their voices heard, change is happening, it's happened in Albany, it's happening here in this city, I think a lot of people are seeing it and are acting accordingly and respecting the fact that their voices were heard.

So that's a very, very different reality than people going to a bar or restaurant to pick up a drink or pick up food and knowing that from months and months the rule has been get your food and go home. So, we're going to keep educating people at bars and restaurants that they need to recognize the rules. They need to follow those rules. And hopefully very soon we'll be in Phase Two where outdoor donut dining will be a reality and that's got to help. But I just think we have to be honest about these are just apples and oranges, and sometimes things don't fit within clean lines. You got to recognize the historical moment and its meaning when you see it.

Moderator: Next we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Good morning, everybody. Mr. Mayor, I apologize if I missed this at the top of the call, but did you explain your reasoning for not getting a coronavirus test?

Mayor: No, Andrew, I did not. Did not come out at the top. I intend to get one because I've asked all New Yorkers to get one. I feel fine today, and, you know, I think I just had a 24-hour kind of thing. But the fact is that I think I've said to people, regardless of whatever their health situation, we said days ago, all New Yorkers now should get the test. It's available very widely. It's free. So, I'll follow my own guidance and I'll make sure to get one too.

Question: My second question has to do with Phase Two. At this point, correct me if I'm wrong, but if New York City does not enter Phase Two on Monday, it's not because of the health data, it's because the city isn't ready in terms of the restaurant regulations, the guidelines, the playgrounds, etcetera, because all of the health numbers you've been providing suggests that just like all the other regions in the state, New York City is ready for Phase Two.

Mayor: I don't know how to say politely you're wrong, but I'll – you're a good guy. I’ve known you a long time. I'll say it very nicely – you're wrong. That's not what's going on. What's going on is we are watching a reality here in New York City, that's by far the most complex in the entire state, we are talking constantly to the state government. We're all comparing notes. We certainly saw an aberrant reality with the protest activity. We want to know what that has resulted in, in terms of the spread of the disease, or maybe it hasn't. We don't know that answer yet because not enough time has passed. Clearly those protests were outdoors, largely with people with face coverings. We need more information. So, we're going to decide with the state, are we ready to go on June 22nd or do we need some more time to keep evaluating?

I've tried to keep expectations low and say, think about beginning of July, just so people are not disappointed, and that presumes that the data keeps coming back the right way, but Andrew, it is about data, but also knowing that you have complete enough data and that may not be all done by June 21st, we may want and need a few more days to get more data. But no, in terms of everything that needs to be in place, the state guidance is there for Phase Two, city guidance will be coming more and more over the next few days, we will be ready for next week, if the indicators and the discussions with the state tell us that we're ready to go next week.

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, everyone. My question is about comments from Governor Cuomo over the weekend, who said he would reverse the reopening in Manhattan and the Hamptons if local leaders, presumably you, do not take action to curb crowds that have been seen around town. What is your comment on that? Thank you.

Mayor: We continue to take action. The Sheriff's Office, the Nightlife Office, a number of civilian agencies, and when the NYPD is needed, the NYPD will come into play. Clearly any place that's reported as a place where we're seeing crowding is going to be addressed. If enforcement is needed, there'll be enforcement. I don't have any doubt in the world that our city agencies can take care of this issue effectively.

Moderator: Last two for today. We have Katie from News 12. Apologies, we're going to go to Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: It's a “twofer” of Katie's for today. Mr. de Blasio, I have two questions for you. The first is looking forward towards the 4th of July. I wanted to know if you had any more updates on the official fireworks plan, and then if you had an update on the number of lifeguards who have so far completed their required test that could potentially at some point be staffed on the City's 14 miles of beaches.

Mayor: Yeah. Katie on the first on the fireworks, a very good plan has come together with a Macy's. We're perfecting that plan, but we'll be announcing it shortly. The – right now, so that again, I like what I have seen of that plan. I'm waiting for a final briefing, but I think they've come up with a smart plan that fits both the moment of having to make sure that people are safe and the fact that we're moving forward and that we want to celebrate this moment in a positive spirit.

On the lifeguards, we've got 600 who are going through training now, and so that process is moving very, very rapidly, and again, it's still premature to say what we'll be able to do in terms of any reopening of beaches or pools – we’re working on that plan right now. But the training is moving aggressively so that we'll have those options ready.

Moderator: Next we, sorry, last for today, we have Todd from AM New York.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I'm glad you're feeling better.

Mayor: Thank you, Todd. How you doing?

Question: I'm doing just fine. You know we I've been at some of these protests by the groups in Williamsburg and in Midwood where they have wanted to open up the parks, the playgrounds. They make the claim that their children are out there on the streets, anyhow, playing in dangerous conditions, and they make the claim that if they were in the parks, at least they would be out of out of danger, out of the traffic out of – and in better places because the children themselves are not social distancing and they’re doing what they want anyways. So how do we respond to these, to this?

Mayor: So, Todd, look, I, again, I understand I'm a parent. I understand when parents say, Hey, what are we supposed to do? You know, kids have been cooped up. It's very difficult, especially for large families. I truly am sympathetic to that. I would say the fact is if a family has, you know, their children playing like in front of their house, for example, and sticking to their own family group and not connecting to other kids around them, that's one of the things a family can do as best they can in a very, very difficult crisis, or obviously keep their own kids indoors to the maximum extent possible. When we get to Phase Two, we will sort out, you know, as we lead into Phase Two, the whole playground issue, and I'm hopeful we'll be able to open things up, but we're not there yet.

So, the minute you say, okay, well, let's open playgrounds. Then you're talking about a lot of kids come in contact with a lot of other kids and adults coming in contact with other adults, and then the disease starts spreading, and that's what we don't want. This is again, the thing that will take us backwards. So, I'm sorry. I do understand their argument. What I'd say to every parent out there is don't let your kids play with kids from other families until we get to a safer point because you're risking the whole situation for your family and everyone else, and it's not easy. I really do empathize with parents, but we're going to do this one step at a time to get it right.

Okay, everybody. It's a painful time. It's a difficult time, but it's a time, I think, also filled with hope because as we see more and understand more, we can do more and we can move forward as a city. Thank you very much.

2020-06-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody.

I hear people in the city talking about their fears of all of the other challenges that they're facing this moment, as I've been out around neighborhoods and the city, people are talking about their fears about what's happening to their livelihoods, to their jobs, to their families. What about their health? What about the future health of their families? What about the coronavirus and what it means now and going forward? These are the things that people are talking about. We have to hear those concerns; we have to act on them. One of the biggest concerns has been the desire for more information for each person, and that means testing. Coming back to that key concept again, people want testing, they want it to be easy, they want it to be fast, they want it to be free, they want it to be very near where they live. And that's our mission to give more and more testing to the people of New York City opening this week, five new community testing sites, two in Staten Island, one in Queens, one in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn. And I, myself experienced testing yesterday at the Health + Hospitals Gouverneur Clinic. I want to thank everyone at the clinic, wonderful people, who've been doing this work now for weeks and weeks. And I talked to them about how people in the community are responding and they say there's been a lot of gratitude. Folks are coming in realizing how fast and easy it is spreading the word, I want to urge all New Yorkers, go get tested. It is fast, it is easy, it is free, and I want to emphasize that it is free. We now have over 200 sites citywide to find out where you can get tested, go to nyc.gov/covid-test. And we're bringing testing to the people wherever they may be. Today, in the Bronx, we're going into parks outside the Clinton playground, in the Bronx, today. And on Thursday and Friday, outside the Gouverneur playground in the Bronx. Staten Island, today through Friday, at 1441 Richmond Avenue, mobile testing trucks, easy to find, easy to use. And we're going to keep ramping things up in July, there'll be 10 testing trucks available, 800 tests per day, everywhere New Yorkers are, we're going to just keep building and building. So, everyone knows they can always get a test when they need one, and again, for free.

Let's talk about our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 the threshold 200 patients, today's report 55. Number two, daily number of people in Health and Hospitals, ICUs, that threshold is 375, and today the number is 333. And most importantly, the percent of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, that threshold is 15 percent, today – another very, very good report, only two percent. Everyone knows what I feel that is because of the hard work you have all done and are still doing and need to keep doing so we can move forward to phase two and beyond.

A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

And with that, we will turn to questions from the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q&A as a reminder, we're also joined today by Deputy Mayor Vicky Been, by Senior Advisor Jay Varma, and by Dr. Andrew Wallach, the Director of Testing for the Test and Trace Corps. Kathleen from Patch.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Congratulations on testing negative for COVID.

Mayor: Thank you, Kathleen. Have you been tested Kathleen?

Question: No, I haven't yet, but I'm hoping to in the days ahead.

Mayor: It's very, it's very easy.

Question: I wondered if you could talk to me a little bit about what kind of test that you got and how did you get your results back so quickly? I'm hearing a lot of people saying it's taking 5 to 10 days. Is New York City ever going to expand on its rapid testing program like I've been seeing in other States?

Mayor: Yeah, we have to – we have to make it much faster and we need a lot more cooperation from the labs to do that. I think they're working hard, but we've got to get to a much faster turnaround. The bottom line is you want people to know as quickly as possible so that there can be appropriate action and that certainly fits everything we're doing with test and trace. My specific case, Kathleen, I took the test, they use the smaller kind of Q-tip thing where they swirl around your nose, not the long painful thing that we've seen some graphic demonstration of. More and more what I want our testing program to use is that smaller, easier Q-tip so people realize it's not uncomfortable, it's not difficult, it's very fast and I did that. They took the results and then I got the notification this morning. I'm not actually familiar with the details of how it all happens, but I think in light of the concern, obviously, about everyone I've come in contact with and the need to get an answer speedy in this particular case, they got me results in a quick manner.

Do you have a follow-up?

Question: I do have another question, but I'm changing the topic. I know you've been hesitant to set the date for phase two, but I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit about the data that you're looking at. You know, the, the tracking numbers you're providing everyday are providing New Yorkers, a lot of context for your decision on phase one. Is there a place we can be looking to say, okay, when I see these numbers, I’ll know that Mayor de Blasio thinks New York City is ready for this next step?

Mayor: Yeah. Kathleen, look, I feel very good today. The earliest date we could go is Monday. It's a decision we're going to make very closely with the state. We're all mindful that we had a very unusual situation with the protests and we're going to see, we believe the fuller impact, if any, of the protests, in terms of our health indicators around this weekend, maybe into the first few days of next week - that's an important factor here. Also seeing the impact of phase one itself, obviously, which is much bigger than the protests in the sense of, you know, several hundred thousand people each day, going back to work every day for the full workday. We are watching to see how these things are affecting the reality. If you're judging by today's numbers, we're in great shape and I've been impressed that they've been very steady now for many days. But what we're looking for going into the weekend is do we see any variation there? I know the state's concerned about that as well. So, it's a day to day discussion; we want to come to a decision with the state as quickly as possible. Remember if we see new data at any point, we might have to shift gears. We'll keep saying that because it's important for people to understand; there's always the danger that things go the wrong direction. We'd have to change what we're doing, but so far so good is the answer and as soon as we get to 100% clarity with the state, we'll announce it.

Moderator: The next is Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. My first question, there's a new report out by Comptroller Stringer that says both the city and the state severely underfunded, a federally mandated ombudsman program, leading to the disproportionate deaths of the elderly and others in long-term care facilities from COVID and in fact, your administration contributed nothing in the last five-year funding cycle to the program. I'm wondering why a program that's meant to prevent neglect was itself neglected by your administration?

Mayor: Julia, I'm just not familiar with the details. I have not seen what the Comptroller put out. I'm obviously concerned to know what's going on and if the facts bear out his conclusion. So, let's get a chance to look at and then we'll have a response for you.

Question: Okay, great. I'll look forward to that. And then secondly, on a different topic, you’re taking fire from many sides over your lack of a detailed plan for re-opening, from everything, from transit to outdoor dining and the summer. Speaker Johnson said, “your utter lack of foresight and vision,” has been a defining feature of your response to the pandemic. Gale Brewer said, “We need a plan fast for open spaces for kids,” and Councilman Brandon said it seems like “City Hall forgot to plan for the summer”. What's your response to those critics?

Mayor: Politicians do what politicians do. Every step of the way, I’ve been communicating with the people. We have been talking about what we're doing now, what we're planning next. We've been fighting back this disease. I think every-day New Yorkers understand job one is to fight back this disease and the numbers were going on over every day show that we're doing that effectively. We've been bringing the economy back now the smart way and I'm very sorry other places did something very rash and unproductive, and now are seeing real upticks in the amount of coronavirus. We're not letting that happen here. We are addressing with each phase what people need to get ready for, and you can see that businesses are reopening; they have the guidance, they have the support, we're sending out the inspections, we're sending out the free face coverings. I think that in fact, things are moving consistently in this city and when each thing is ready to go, we move on it.

Moderator: The next is Erin from Politico.

Question: As we're reopening, you're talking about, you know, being worried about a resurgence. I'm wondering, you know, given the field hospitals have been closed down, the volunteer medical workers have gone home, et cetera., you know, if there were to be a resurgence, are we in a significantly better position to deal with it now than we were the first time around? And related to that do you have numbers of how much is in that PPE stockpile, you've talked about creating?

Mayor: Yeah. Erin, we'll get you an update on the stockpile. I mean, we've had finally a steady supply of PPEs so that, you know, it used to be we were worried about each day, then it was, we were only being able to plan a week ahead. Now we're dealing with thank God month by month. So we'd been secure for the month of June in terms of PPEs, still at the crisis standard. The strategic reserve we intend to build up over the coming months. But we have to first have enough consistency with the PPEs that we know all immediate demand is needed. So we'll get you an update on where we stand on that, but it's certainly a lot better, Erin, than it was, you know, a month or two ago, certainly.

The resurgence yeah, unquestionably, we will be better positioned and I hope we don't have to prove it, but the fact is unquestionably, we have now very, very detailed plans of how we would expand hospital capacity, how we would add staffing, how we would use PPEs. We obviously have a whole different reality in terms of incubator supply – not incubator, I'm sorry, ventilator, my apology, ventilator supply. So we're in a much, much different situation and we're watching indicators that will tell us, you know, well in advance, if we start to see a negative pattern and I just think the amount of education, the amount of information people have though, the fact that testing traces up fully. I mean, there's so many different factors that we could use to address any resurgence night and day from where we were in March and April.

Moderator: The next is Louis from [inaudible].

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. With the Staten Island Ferry getting increased ridership, I'm wondering about Governor's Island. I'm guessing the decision to reopen as a coordinated one between the city and the National Park Service. So considering how the ferry to Governor's Island is under 10 minutes and the one to Staten Island is 25. What can you share about the possibility of it opening sooner rather than later?

Mayor: It's a good question, Louis and one, we got to get on the agenda. I mean, obviously when I think of Governor's Island summer, I think of large people, large numbers of people gathering and, you know, we've been very cautious about anything with large numbers of people gathering, and we're trying to really keep limits on that as we work through Phase One into Phase Two and then determine a long-term plan for the city. So we'll make a decision on that pretty soon, but I want to just be clear that my concern there will be, if we are to reopen that we do it in a way that really avoids too much crowding and we don't have that plan locked down yet.

Question: Thank you. Last week you stated that talks with the City Council about the summer youth program would take place in the weeks to come. That would place us – put us in the first week of July or beyond. Would that mean that any related program for youth would last maybe just three or four or five weeks? Not that there's anything wrong with that, something's better than nothing, but can you share some insight regarding that?

Mayor: Yeah, that's a great question. The least the first of all, we're all grappling still with the issue of what is a youth program look like when we're still dealing with this disease. We're still in Phase One, obviously, if all goes, well, we'll be in Phase Two around the time we're making this final decision, but there's still a lot of questions about what does it look like? How much of it is online versus you know, kids doing things at a physical location. These are all very big and unanswered questions. Anything online could start immediately. Remembering that typically summer youth programs don't start until July anyway, because kids are in school up until almost the very end of June. So, you know, anything online that can move very quickly. If we get to the point of anything being more physical location oriented, that'll take more time, but I still think we'll figure things out and we'll be able to do something that will cover a substantial amount of the summer, and certainly it'd be better than what we feared. I mean, at the time in April, when we made the decision, we feared, we weren't going to be able to do anything this summer because it looked like the disease we're going to keep growing and growing steadily. But I think whatever we do, we'll be able to get a substantial piece of the summer in.

Moderator: The next is Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning. All first question for our health colleagues, what's the window period of coronavirus. In other words, in terms of days, what's the soonest and latest one can test positive upon infectious exposure. Then I have a follow up.

Mayor: Jay, you want to take that? Jay, get closer to the microphone.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Hopefully you can hear me. Okay. If you're exposed to the virus on let's say today is day zero, we think that the earliest that you could test positive would be three days after that, but [inaudible] you'll have a positive test increases over time. So a test drawn on day three may not be as sensitive as a test that's drawn on say day seven and nine or ten, and then we know also what's called the incubation period. If you're exposed to the virus then you can be up to 14 days until you're considered free from having that effect.

Moderator: The next is Debralee from the Manhattan Times.

Question: Okay, good morning everyone. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes. Debralee, how you doing?

Question: I wanted to follow up on something that we've spoken about over the course of the last few months. Mr. Mayor, do you foresee an instance going forward in which immunity certificates will be issued New York City residents?

Mayor: I don't know what that is, Debralee. I'm sorry. I don't know that phrase.

Question: Well, there's specifically, they've been used in other instances where folks who have tested positive and show that they've have antibodies in place received some sort of certification.

Mayor: You mean certificates that say what someone's testing status is, is that what you're saying?

Question: Essentially, they've been using the paths to be able to guarantee employment and return to employment, something that’s beyond someone saying, yeah, I got it and I'm fine now, allows for them – some – a clearer pathway to return to work, return to school, et cetera.

Mayor: It's a very good question, Jay Varma was on the phone when one of your colleagues asked something similar a few weeks ago. There has been a lot deal with, and this one is a very complex matter and I don't think we've been able to get to a satisfactory answer. That it would be wonderful to figure out how to have a record that was universally recognized, but also be very respectful of people's privacy. But Jay, you'll correct me if you know, something, I don't know. I don't think we have yet gotten to a point that we feel is a policy that makes sense, and we want to get there, but it's a real thorny and complex one. Jay, you want to comment?

Senior Advisor Varma: Correct, I concur exactly with what you said and I would also add that the same concern that came up in a previous press conference applies now. I think we in public health feel quite comfortable with the concept of records of vaccination. But in certificates of vaccination, they're used all over the world, for example, for yellow fever or other diseases, but in this condition there's a number of complex issues about whether or not you might create perverse incentives for people to be infected when you'd be discriminating against people who may not have been infected yet. So there are the science problems that the Mayor's highlighted as well as some practical considerations that we still have to work out.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Steve Kastenbaum from Westwood One.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I hope you can hear me well and am glad you feel better today.

Mayor: Thank you very much. How you doing?

Question: I have a couple of questions. I'll start with one about restaurants and the next phase of the reopening. You know in some neighborhoods in Boston where they have narrow sidewalks and narrow streets, so that city closed streets to traffic and allowing restaurants to set up outdoor seating so they can reopen and serve more customers outdoors. A similar thing going on in Red Bank, New Jersey, three days out of the week over the weekend. I'm wondering, you know, the city has this successful program in the past where they've transformed some parking spots into outdoor seating with there's a dearth of outdoor seating, restaurant owners I'm speaking with, they're just dying to be able to serve more people outdoors, where they don't have the space. Is this being considered? Creating, you know, since we've closed so many streets for outdoor recreation is this a possibility that the city is taking into consideration, transforming some parking spots on commercial avenues into outdoor seating for restaurants?

Mayor: Yeah, Steve, it's a great question. We have to find ways to help our restaurants at this moment, and there's a lot of different options on the table. And we intend to put out a policy very, very soon. Everything's being looked at, we need to maximize – look, let's face it, not only for the fact that the folks who work in the restaurants, you know, a huge part of our economy. So many people need their livelihood back. We're worried about restaurants being able to survive. We got to get them up and running. But we also know that a lot of people who want to patronize restaurants aren't going to be comfortable inside. Outside is going to be the big hope, we have to maximize it. So we're looking at a variety of options, but again, the announcement will be very, very soon because obviously people are preparing for a Phase Two and we need to get that out immediately, we're just fine tuning it, but very, very soon.

Question: Thank you very much. And then the other question I want to get back to the issue of the playgrounds in New York City, the elected officials who, along with an activist, who'd been up severing the locks on certain playgrounds. What exactly at this point in the coronavirus pandemic is the concern considering that we already now have children out in open parks versus playgrounds, and we're seeing a much greater number of children playing together outdoors now that the parents feel a little bit safer? So if they're already in parks, they're already at the beach, even though they're not swimming, what is the specific concern with playgrounds, with skateboard parks with – I can even see soccer fields, you know, still padlocked in some parts of the city?

Mayor: Yeah, Steve, I think what is being missed a bit in the discussion is a lot of attention has gone on to things that are very, very visible, but also temporary, and that we don't belittle any of them. There's legitimate concerns about the protests and what the impact might have been on health. There's legitimate concerns, people getting together around bars on a Friday or Saturday night, those things are very real and we have to address each situation the best possible. But when you talk about the things that are all day, every day, like people going back to work in Phase One, like playgrounds, which the second we open up playgrounds, I think it's a safe bet they'll be filled, you know, 10 hours or more a day, every day. The number of people, and remember how many hundreds upon hundreds of playgrounds we're talking about all over New York City, talking about a huge number of people concentrated every single day.

What we've said is we're going to make that decision consistent with Phase Two. If the indicators get us to phase two and we are paying special attention to what the results of Phase One have been in terms of healthcare, what the results of the protests have been. We get to the point working with the state where we say, we're all clear for Phase Two, that's a natural time to start acting on playgrounds. We're going to look at each piece differently. A playground for little kids is different than a soccer field, for example. The ways that people interact and what we've seen about the trajectory of the disease is different with adults and kids. So we're going to have to make each decision carefully, but we're going to make these decisions in the context of Phase Two. But first we have to be 100 percent secure we're getting to Phase Two. So we're working all the time on what those different scenarios are going to look like. But I think we still need a few more days to confirm that we're ready to go to Phase Two.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, I just have two questions for you. Just walking around the city, it's easy to see that they're just widespread violations of social distancing, the mask wearing rules, you know, businesses are open that are not supposed to be open according to your order and the Governor's order. I just want to know what is the city doing about these widespread violations? And do you plan to take any additional actions this week to address the ongoing violations?

Mayor: Yeah, Jeff, I appreciate again, I think it's natural for folks in the media to see where there are problems, but I also see a whole lot of adherence I've always seen. The vast majority of people are still adhering to social distancing, face coverings, spending as much in time in doors as possible. Businesses overwhelmingly are adhering to the rules, both the ones who have started and the ones that are not yet supposed to start have not. Of course, there are going to be exceptions. Where there's exceptions, the first thing we're going to go do is send civilian authorities over to educate and where we need to do enforcement, we'll do enforcement. Obviously our hope is that we're just in a few days going to be able to make a decision on Phase Two, and that will change the whole reality, but we're trying – we understand people – I get why people are frustrated and I get that people are, you know, it's been so long, they'd been through so much, but there's a reason we've structured the rules. There's a reason the State has structured the rules the way we have, which is to fight back to the disease and keep it out of our lives.

And Jeff, I really believe in the end, that's what people are going to judge us all by, again looking at the real painful reality and a lot of other states in this country where the resurgence is now intensely happening, and a lot of people are sick and a lot of people are dying. Question here is, are we managing this carefully and cautiously, even though it's frustrating, does it get us where we need to go? Which is to beat back this disease, use our test and trace capacity, make sure we open smartly in each phase, and ultimately get us where we need to go over the next few months. And I'm convinced that that's what we're doing, that's what the state's doing. The results you can see every day. What's your other question?

Question: But it just, it just seems that these violations are allowed to go on. So have you ordered officials to kind of take a hands off approach to dealing with these violations? You know, are summonses being issued, for example, is this a official stance from the city that you're going to take a more relaxed view of these violations at this point?

Mayor: I didn't say that. And please be careful not to accidentally put words in my mouth. It's the same thing we've said from the beginning. We said from the very beginning that if people are not abiding by the rules, we're going to go and educate, and we're going to fix the problem, when we find the problem with all our agencies, the Sheriff's Office, the Buildings Department, you name it. And if the problem can be resolved, that's what we want. We're not looking to fine small businesses at this point, especially after everything they've been through, but if we have to, we will. So the goal is to go and address issues. There's going to be plenty of inspectors out and plenty of civilian educational folks out. If they can't resolve an issue, then the folks who give fines will come in, but there's been a lot going on in the last few weeks, and obviously we've had to put resources into a whole lot of different things, but going into this week and this weekend, there'll be plenty of folks out, both doing the education work and if needed doing the enforcement work.

Thank you very much.

2020-06-18 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Today, we have some good news. I woke up this morning and heard that our indicators, our thresholds were strong for another day, because of the extraordinary work all of you have been doing. New York City making progress again today, fighting back the coronavirus. We still have a long way to go, we all know that, but based on the really good indicators we've seen today and for days and days before that, I'm very comfortable now saying that we will start phase two on Monday, June 22nd. We've been in constant touch with the state. We're all in agreement that this is the right thing to do. We're always going to be watching. We're always going to be watching for any variations, any new data. That's also crucial to always keep an eye on the data, but we've seen consistent progress. And it's time to say to everyone getting ready for phase two, get on your mark, get set, because here we go. On Monday, we'll be ready to take a big step forward for this city.

Now, let's talk about what phase two includes. It's so much, it's actually the single biggest piece of our economy. When you think about the 4.6 million jobs in this city back as recently as February, and it's kind of hard to imagine that we're talking about that recently, a thriving economy strongest in our history, most jobs in our history, and now all of the challenges we're facing, all of the struggle that people are going through, that recently we were doing so well. It's a reminder of that we can get back to that one day, and so this piece of our economy and phase two is the single biggest of all the phases and includes everyone that works in offices, retail now in store retail, the traditional shopping in stores across the whole swath of the retail industry. Hair salons, and barbershops – a lot of us have been waiting for that for a long time. So, very happy they're coming back. Outdoor dining, and I'm going to talk about that in a moment, we have very exciting news about outdoor dining today. The whole real estate industry comes back. Vehicle sales, leases and rentals, commercial building management, repair, cleaning and retail rental. A whole host of industries start to come back to life.

Now, each one has gotten a lot of guidance from the State, a lot of guidance from the City. We'll continue to get guidance. We'll have plenty of people out from City agencies to talk to folks in each industry, make sure they have the information they need. We have helplines. We're going to be there every step of the way to help businesses get up and running. But I've talked to a lot of business leaders, they feel ready. They feel like they know what they have to do. There's fine tuning we all have to do, but they feel ready. What will it mean? We don't have the exact numbers, we won't know until we get into it, but our estimate is a minimum of 150,000 more workers coming back into the five boroughs into their jobs – as many as 300,000 as we begin phase two.

Now, I mentioned restaurants. Look, let's start with what restaurants mean to us in this city. This is the greatest restaurant city in the world. I will challenge Paris. I'll challenge Bangkok. I'll challenge Tokyo. I'll challenge anywhere. We are the greatest restaurant city in the world. And our restaurants that folks have fought and struggled – look, just to own a restaurant in New York City is a labor of love to begin with. If you are a restaurant owner in New York City, you're doing it because you have a passion, and you want to do something wonderful for people, and you want to make their life better. And in that moment, when they're in your restaurant, it's such a beautiful, warm feeling that people have. It takes a lot of work to achieve that extraordinary attention to detail. It is not only a labor of love, it is a 24/7 commitment. And I've talked to a lot of restaurant owners. They've been going through so much in these months, just trying to figure out could they keep their businesses alive long enough for things to move forward, and their customers to come back. A lot of them have worried that this would be the death knell for the thing that they built with their own hands, and for all the people who worked for them. And remember, this is a huge industry in New York City. And there are so many tens of thousands of people who depend on the restaurant industry for their livelihood. And we all know, so many people get their start in that industry and go on to do amazing things often, including opening their own restaurants.

So, we have to save this industry. It is quintessential to New York City. It's the heart and soul of who we are. Not just because it's a big part of our economy. Not just because we honor the entrepreneurship of everyone involved. Not just because it's so many jobs, it's part of our identity too. Look across the communities of this city, the neighborhoods. So many of the restaurants reflect our culture, our humanity, our creativity. This is the identity of New York City. So, we know that restaurants in many ways define the greatness of this city. We have to help restaurants come back, and we have to do it now and then keep doing it all the way to the point where things get as far back to normal as possible. What are we going to do? Well, we're going to make sure that we save restaurants. That is the mission, save restaurants. Save the restaurants as part of our communities, save the jobs, make sure it's easy for restaurants to come back. And that means using outdoor space in the beginning and then moving forward from there.

So, our plan is called Open Restaurants – couldn't be a simpler name – and the idea is to bring the customers back, bring their livelihoods of the people that work there back, bring the money in to keep the restaurants going, obviously doing it in a safe way. We all want safety first. We all have learned powerful lessons about how important it is to fight back against this disease and understand its power. But New Yorkers have really, really gotten the point so profoundly. And I know restaurant owners, restaurant workers, get it, that they need to be agents of safety. They need to make sure that their patrons are safe. Their workers are safe. We're going to make it work. And outdoor dining is the way forward. So, we've got a lot to do. And we know that with outdoor dining, it's a new reality. We've had it before, but the way we have to do it now, is very new and different, but we're ready. And we want to make sure I'm going to say this several times. And I know my colleagues will say it too. We want this to be a simple, fast, easy process for restaurant workers, restaurant owners, restaurant managers. We need to make it simple for it to work. I've heard from plenty of folks in the restaurant industry. If we're going to take this step, don't make it complicated, don't make it bureaucratic, make it easy. I think when you see what we have here today, you're going to agree. This is a straightforward and easy. This will work for you.

Okay, now, for restaurants and for any bars and cafes that serve food, we have five options and they can go and use many of these options if they want to, but five different ways to help them come back. First, curb lane seating. This means that we're going to allow wherever appropriate restaurants to use what would have been the curb area of the parking area, right adjacent to the restaurant. They'll be able to use that to put in seating, and that's something we will do through Labor Day on a pilot basis. Sidewalk seating. That means we're going to allow restaurants to add sidewalk seating adjacent to the restaurant facility itself, to the building itself. Even those that have never had it before. Backyard and patio seating. A lot of restaurants have this. It's a chance to use it in a whole new way, a safe way. That's going to help for a lot of restaurants to bring in more customers. And those pieces will all begin as we begin phase two on Monday. Now, another piece we're going to work up in the coming days, and it's going take a little more work, but we're confident we can get there. On our open streets, there are locations where we can do restaurant seating. That's something that we're going to work out in the coming days. And that will be for nights and weekends, beginning in July. And there are pedestrian plazas managed by business improvement districts, and managed by local civic associations. In some cases, those organizations will want to work with neighboring restaurants to turn those into seating areas. So, the restaurants can expand into those pedestrian plazas. Wherever there is a bid or a local civic association that runs a plaza and wants to make it work, they can reach out to the department of transportation and apply, and we'll move on that application quickly, and they can do it simply by emailing plazas@dot.nyc.gov.

So, five different elements to the open restaurants plan. Want to thank all of the city agencies have been involved. It's been a labor of love for them to, to get this ready and get it ready in a way that be simple and easy to use. I also want to thank the city council. They've been passionate on this issue. We've been working together with the council to figure out the right way forward, and I think this reflects the vision that we've all had. You're going to hear in a moment from several experts on what's about to happen. Two of our commissioners, and a leader in the restaurant field. But I want to just, before I turned to them, make very clear, simplicity. The application will be simple. It will be online. It will take very few clicks to get done. You self-certify. I want restaurants to understand that. You self-certify. Once you say, hey, I'm ready to do this, I meet these standards, click send, you're in. You're ready to go for Monday. The application form is being finalized. It'll be up online first thing tomorrow morning, it will take you literally only minutes to apply. And then you only have to wait for that reply to come back, it should be instantaneous, saying we got it, you're in yourself certified, good luck, go get them.

Also, very importantly, restaurants will not need to do a separate application to the State liquor authority. This is actually a big deal for restaurants – one application through the City of New York will cover your needs with the State liquor authority as well. And I want to thank the State and the SLA for their cooperation on that, we want to make this simple. And all the folks that put this together, all the hard work's being done at a Small Business Services at Department of Transportation, we also know that as much as they've made this simple people going to need help, they're going to need information, they're going to need some place to turn. So Small Business Services has a hotline that will be there for all restaurant owners and managers to get answers, 888-SBS-4NYC, anyone who has a question or concern about how to apply, what it means can turn to that hotline. What do we think this will mean? We think this will help save at least 5,000 New York City restaurants, and I want to emphasize this help save them, meaning help, keep them in business, help stop them from shutting down and help give them a future 5,000 or more restaurants, we believe we'll get the revenue they need through this open restaurants initiative to keep going to the future, 45,000 workers will have their jobs preserved through this initiative. These are huge numbers, and it says so much about the future of the City that we can help to make sure that people who want to keep these crucial businesses going, you have to have that helping hand workers need those jobs have a way back to those jobs, and we do it quickly. And here's an executive order, which I'm going to sign now, which will now take the open restaurants and put it into action immediately.

So, now I want you to hear from the experts. And first, we have been working with the restaurant industry and those who advocate for restaurant owners and workers from the beginning. We worked together to ease the delivery fee burden for restaurants, we work with the Council on that for as well, just in the last month. Our next speaker founded the New York City Hospitality Alliance in 2012, and is now an extraordinary organization representing small businesses all over the five boroughs, and so many of the restaurants that we all depend on. I want to introduce to you as he comes over the Executive Director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, Andrew Rigie.

Welcome, Andrew.

Executive Director Andrew Rigie, New York City Hospitality Alliance: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Wow, you know, going back to my great grandparents, we had bakeries and cafes in Brooklyn and Queens, and I've been working for the past 15 or 16 years advocating on behalf of this industry. And we have gone through a lot, but the COVID-19 pandemic has hit this industry in our city, in our globe in a way that we can never fathom. And we all know as the Mayor put it, these restaurants are vital to the economic fabric and social landscape of the City of New York, and there's no way that our city will recover unless these small businesses are at the core of their recovery. So, I want to thank the Mayor, the Commissioners, Council Speaker, Cory Johnson, and the council community boards, BIDs, New Yorkers, business owners, and really everyone who has been so vocal in their support for this initiative. We know it is going to be a long road to recovery, and when restaurants are permitted to start opening indoors, it's going to be under reduced occupancy. So, they're not going to be able to generate a hundred percent of their sales indoors. So, we needed to get creative with outdoor space, and this plan that has been implemented today is so critical in getting the support to businesses so they can stand a fighting chance and coming back, rebuilding our industry, bringing New Yorkers from all walks of life, back to work and creating the city that we remember, and it's important. We need to have a streamlined process, we can't have lots of red tape, we need to support our small business owners in every way possible. And it's also going to be critically important that the small business owners, the workers, the community, the resident all work together to ensure that this program works well because there's so much opportunity and it will.

And we just want to say again, thank you to our teams, the Alliance team, our counsel, Rob Bookman restaurant tours throughout the city, and everyone that wanted to make this happen in a sensible way and open a restaurant will help do that. It's so important, we could not, not act. And the fact that we're here today with this executive order, getting ready for phase two on Monday, means so much to these businesses, to these workers, to New Yorkers who want to get back to a sense of reality and eating and drinking. So, I want to say thank you. The New York City Hospitality Alliance is here to support in every way we can to get our city back on track, our small businesses open. So, thank you, Mr. Mayor, thank you to all that made this happen. And we can't wait to see you at an outdoor cafe at a restaurant in New York City through the five boroughs and an equitable plan, equitable plan that really works for so many people. So, thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for your infectious enthusiasm and thank you for all the hard work, getting us here now, to give you a sense of how this is going to work some of the specifics of how we're going to make this work and work fast. First of all, a woman who's in charge of not only of our streets, but our sidewalks as well, Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg

Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, Department of Transportation: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And if we could put up the next slide, and this is – this is just a graphic to help folks think to a certain – and I want to echo what the Mayor said, this is a labor of love for DOT as well. Obviously, as the Mayor mentioned, we had the templates of open streets where I think we found they're really nimble and non-bureaucratic way of opening our streets up for walking and biking. And the mayor challenged us to figure out how to do that quickly and in a non-bureaucratic way for restaurants, and I'm proud to say with our partners at SBS and industry partners, I think we've done so, this just gives you a sort of, this is a rough sketch of, of how we envision this working the table space in front of the restaurant frontage and in those curb spaces in front of the restaurant tables socially distance. And if you will go on our application tomorrow, we'll have obviously much more detail about how to set that up. But our goal was to make it as simple and affordable as set up as we could while particularly being sure in street space that it's done safely. We'll just jump to the next slide, just a little more detail, and I think the mayor gave the good picture of all the different options we're going to have on the table. Obviously, we want to be nimble, but we have to make sure that they're, you know, that they're pedestrian pass on the sidewalks that we're meeting ADA compliances again, that our curb lean seating is safely set up. You know, we are also looking forward to open streets and plazas and we'll be in the coming days, rolling out the details on those. Next – next slide –

So, tomorrow as the Mayor mentioned, we will put an application online. As he said, he has pushed us. It is going to be a quick and easy application, we will be asking you to certify though that you understand the rules that you will put in your, your SLA information, and then you'll be good to go. And, you know, we – wait, I think we just, we just skipped one there, right? So, just again to emphasize, DOT will not be calling you all up or SBS and talking through the application, you will do it online. There will be a hotline number to call questions, but once you filled it out, you can start, and we look forward to an incredible partnership with the thousands of restaurants here. And again, thank you, Mr. Mayor, we're thrilled to offer the streets and sidewalks to help our, our cherished restaurants come back to life.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Commissioner. Now to talk about how the Department of Small Business Services is going to help so many restaurants as they come back and be there for them with any questions and concerns our Commissioner for Small Business Services Jonnel Doris.

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Thank you, sir. New York City is home to 27,000 restaurants as we know, and they need our support. We've been doing that with our phase one businesses and we're looking forward to helping our small businesses as they open in phase two particularly our restaurants. Today we are announcing that we have another 2 million face coverings for distribution to our small businesses, we also have already distributed 2 million and so this will bring our total to 4 million face coverings for our small businesses. Moving into the next phase, we are doing all we can to support our vibrant restaurant community as mentioned, and we are launching today, our PPE and reopening supply marketplace as well. Again, that's a one stop shop for easy access to supplier’s face mask and coverings, face shields gloves, cleaning and disinfecting products, physical barriers, portable furniture and more. We will continue to build this marketplace as we move forward. This resource is available right now, at nyc.gov/business, again, nyc.gov/business. Again, today we are launching a new phase two industry specific guides which described the broad state requirements in plain language. For example, if you were a barbershop, we will tell you, you know, you can make an appointment instead of taking walk-ins that will help you stay safe and your customers safe. So, these industry-specific guides will be helpful to our businesses as they reopened. We are also launching a centralized restaurant reopening page resource page with guidance and best practices for restaurants and industries across all five boroughs. Again, this will be available on our nyc.gov/businesspage. So, if you are a restaurant and you are opening, we have a specific page for you, and that is also on our nyc.gov/businesspage. Starting next week, we will launch our new educational webinars and training sessions for our phase two reopening businesses. And we are looking forward for you to sign up, we've done a few of these already in phase one, we've had several hundred participants and we look forward to businesses in phase two to participate in those webinars. Also during phase two, we are – we'll be offering a resource fair and series of livestream conversations with business owners; so we want to make this practical and real for you and if you are able to join us again, you can get us at nyc.gov/business to sign-up for it.

I want to end by saying, most importantly, our hotline is here to help our small businesses. Since we started the hotline, we had over 10,000 calls already to that hotline and we are able to help those businesses as they re-open. So, the hotline once again is 888-SBS- 4NYC – that's 888-727-4692. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Commissioner. And thank you to everyone. Look, as we get so ready for Monday – everyone's ready for Monday, for phase two to begin. Just want to remind everyone, every one of us, and that includes, of course, the bar and restaurant owners and the managers, the folks that work there, and all of you who patronize the bars and restaurants and cafes in your community; we want to keep moving forward. That means we need to get it right. So, phase two begins Monday. Up until Monday, please respect the rules that are in place that are part of phase one. We're going to have lots of ambassadors out, lots of people out giving [inaudible] face coverings, reminding people to keep their social distancing and if we have to enforce, we will. It's never what we want to do. We never want to give a summons and, and add additional financial burden, but the point to everyone is do it the right way so we don't need to do that kind of enforcement. If we see problems, we're going to address them this weekend. And then as we go into phase two, again, light touch, self-certification, we want to make it work; we want to get money back in the pockets of restaurant owners, but please everyone respect the rules in the name of health and safety because the last thing we want is for this disease to make a comeback and that'll set us all back and we'll be watching all the time. We'll be watching the data all the time. So, everyone believe that you are part of the solution. Be smart, be responsible, help us all move forward.

Now, we talked about protecting our restaurants, protecting our small businesses. Now let's talk about people who really need protection in this city – our tenants. Our tenants have gone through so much for years and years in the city, particularly since the coronavirus hit. We know that so many people are struggling just to make ends meet and so we have to do things constantly to address that need. Let's talk about rent stabilized tenants – over a million apartments are rent stabilized in New York City. That means well over 2 million New Yorkers live in rent stabilized housing. The folks who live in rent stabilized housing, so many have lost paychecks, have lost their livelihood, need relief in any form and what they need, what they deserve is a rent freeze. And I'm very pleased to announce that last night that's exactly what our Rent Guidelines Board did. You know, I named the members of the Rent Guidelines Board and I've said since the beginning of the administration, we have to do things differently. We have to not just look at the needs of landlords, which is what the history was only looking at the needs of landlords; we actually need to look at the needs of tenants. We need to make sure that the people that make this city run - the everyday working people in New York City – that their needs are taken into account. The Rent Guidelines Board did exactly that and they decided on a rent freeze and that is such important news for working people. One additional step to make sure you can keep a roof over your head; to make sure that you can somehow make ends meet as we fight back and bring back this economy. The renters of New York City deserved a rent freeze and now for over 2 million New Yorkers, you have that rent freeze. Thank you to the Rent Guidelines Board for doing the right thing.

Now, phase two is going to mean a lot more people coming back to work. Phase two is going to mean a huge step forward for our economy. But you know what, beyond the working people, beyond the businesses, let's go to the neighborhoods that our city everyday people what do they need? And I know so many parents have been asking for relief as well, so many parents with young children who have been cooped up. Parents have been saying, when do we get relief too? Well, look, I want to say from the beginning, there's a profound difference in terms of how we protect safety and different kinds of facilities, different types of areas that people congregate in New York City. There's still things we're not comfortable seeing like large gatherings. We're not comfortable with sporting events starting up yet. The day will come because we're making steady progress and we got a hold to that progress. So, there's a lot of things that still cannot yet happen in our parks, but for the playgrounds meant for younger children with the playground equipment, that's specifically meant for kids to get a break, get some exercise – for parents, to be able to get their kids outside. Those playgrounds for younger kids we're ready to open those up on Monday. Those will be a crucial part additionally of phase two. I know what it feels like as a parent to have young kids and to deal with all the challenges every parent deals with, especially if you have multiple young kids and it's been months and months of being cooped up, we want to give this relief. We're going to start with those playgrounds for younger kids and then hopefully sometime soon we can go even farther in terms of our parks and all of the athletic facilities they have. Now, to make sure it works, we're going to have social distancing ambassadors out all around. They're going to be out reminding people about distancing, giving out the face coverings, helping parents to remember all those basic hygiene rules they really matter with kids. If they're out in the playground, really important to use the hand sanitizer, wash hands afterwards, all sorts of precautions that need to be taken, but we believe we can make it work safely and it's another step in the right direction, starting on Monday.

And now, to finish up our indicators. So, this is why we have gotten this far because of the data, because of the facts, and, again, you have earned it. So, number one, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – threshold of 200 patients and today that number is 59. Number two is daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs – a threshold of 375 – today, 320. And most importantly, percentage of people testing positive for COVID city wide; threshold of 15 percent – another great report today, only two percent. Congratulations to all let's keep it that way.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to questions from the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg, Small Business Commissioner Doris, and Executive Director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance Rigie here in person. And we also have Senior Advisor Dr. Varma on the phone. We have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: How are you Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Hey Gersh, how are you doing?

Question: Well, could be better, but hey, I just want to, it might be a question for Commissioner Trottenberg. It might be a question for you – either or. So I do want to know how many spaces along the curbside that people traditionally call parking spaces might actually be used for this open restaurants plan, and specifically to the Mayor, is this the first step in having you see the curbside as public space for more than free car storage?

Mayor: Gersh, look, we are going to look at anything and everything – what makes sense for the city of the future, and I've said to you many times, what is clear is when we come out of this crisis, it needs to be the beginning of a very different city and a city that focuses even more on mass transit. The future of the City of New York is not the automobile, it's mass transit, and we're going to look at any and all options to help us move in the right direction. But I think it's important to also see this as an immediate urgent action that we're going to take through Labor Day to help these restaurants survive and move forward. Commissioner, do you want to add?

Commissioner Trottenberg: No, I think Gersh, you know, we've actually taken quite a bit of parking and repurposed it for bus lanes, bike lane, Citi Bikes. So, this is I think part of a development of something that's already been happening in the city. I think there's going to be some thousands of parking spaces. I think we'll know as we start to see the uptake, but I know the Mayor feels pretty strongly that this is a great trade off to help our restaurant business get up and going, and obviously if this is a model that proves successful, we'll see how much of it might endure you know, after Labor Day.

Mayor: And Gersh. I want to ask you a question to see, because you're, you're very knowledgeable in your area. How many parking spaces are there in New York City, Gersh?

Question: Well it depends on if you mean free car storage, but it's about three million, if I'm not mistaken, Mayor.

Mayor: Gersh, he got it. I'm impressed.

Commissioner Trottenberg: I've said it before.

Mayor: I know, but he was paying attention very well done. Gersh. Well done. Three million parking spaces approximately is correct. Did you have a follow-up?

Question: No, I did not, but I appreciate you taking the question.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Rich from WCBS 880.

Question: Okie dokie. Good morning.

Mayor: Good morning, Rich. How you doing?

Question: I'm doing all right. So, Mr. Mayor I just wondered that yesterday – so about an hour after you sounded optimistic, but a little bit cautious note about Phase Two reopening the Governor indicated the city is on track for a Monday Phase Two. Have you – did you have a conversation with the Governor after that? Or how did you make this decision in regard to a Phase Two?

Mayor: Yeah, Rich, it's been a back and forth with the Governor, his team now over the last week or more, and there's been I really believe a high degree of unity on the fact that we want to get to Phase Two as quickly as possible. I sounded a cautious note cause my general approach to life is where you're not sure or something lower expectations a little bit. I think most human beings, most New Yorkers would rather have their expectations lowered rather than have them brought up high and then disappointed. But the fact is what we all wanted to do was watch the individual daily indicators. There's still an issue, as we've said before, what we might see over the weekend as a result of the impact of Phase One, as a result of the impact of the protests. I mean, those are both very important factors. Phase One is actually by far the more important factor, cause it's many more people every single day. But when we saw the trend line this week and the conversations we had yesterday were about the consistency of the trend line. I said, look, let's check this morning. Let's see if we this morning, see the same thing again. We see exactly the same thing, again, it's time to move forward, and if anything comes up in the data that's a concern, as usual, we're going to talk about it publicly and you know, make adjustments accordingly.

Question: Okay. I have a second question, different topic if you will. Illegal fireworks are apparently abroad in the land here. A couple of our staffers told us that the fireworks are going off like crazy, both in the day and the nighttime in Upper Manhattan and Inwood specifically and you've heard complaints from around the city, and there, I guess more than a thousand of them, what's going on there, and what kind of enforcement is being made?

Mayor: Well, Rich as usual, you understand life in New York City. I am very surprised by this, honestly, and I heard it last night, I was in Gracie Mansion, I heard plenty of fireworks going off and I can't say for sure if it was coming from Roosevelt Island or it was coming from Astoria, Queens, because Gracie is close to both of them, but yeah, there was a lot I'm going to talk to the NYPD about what, what we're seeing and why. But it's definitely a phenomenon that I'm not used to seeing this early you know, in the days, right before July 4th, you typically would see some, but this is surprisingly early. So, I don't have a perfect answer for you, but I'll be happy to find out what the heck's going on.

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Well, hey, good morning. Mr. Mayor, and I'm curious as Phase Two, as we enter it on Monday what kind of outreach does the city do? You know, are there concerns that some businesses might not want to open and that could affect their employees? Or I don't know if this is a question for the SBS Commissioner, but also you and, and then I have a second question.

Mayor: Yeah, Katie, look, it's a very individual decision and absolutely respect the rights of any business. If the owner of the business doesn't feel comfortable opening, you know, that's their choice. We have to respect that, and a lot of business owners I think are watching to see what happens. So, there's always going to be folks who want to forge ahead and others watch their experience, and if they see a good experience, they join in. I think that's what we've been seeing in Phase One. We saw a lot of businesses jump immediately the first day, others have gained comfort from watching the experience, comparing notes, et cetera. So look, any business that has concerns or questions. In addition to the guides that the state and city have put out, there's a hotline they can call anytime to get help and assistance, obviously the free face coverings. But it is a very individual decision. I think people will make those decisions over days and weeks. Commissioner, you want to add?

Commissioner Doris: As it pertains to outreach you know, we work consistently with our BIDs and also our chambers. We also work to do outreach with those BIDs and chambers, but also we have our own list of businesses that we engage with over 200,000 on a weekly basis with different information that we send out, and of course our websites are already updated with the information. So look, we know, as the Mayor said, this is a personal decision, it's a business-by-business decision, but we here to help them make that decision.

Mayor: Go ahead, Katie.

Question: And my second question I'd asked it earlier in the week, but I don't know if you have any updates. You know, I asked about how many lifeguards have actually qualified to pass the lifeguard tests. I know you said 600 were training, but that doesn't answer the question. I mean, how many have passed the test? And if suddenly things, our indicators continue to improve and we do so well in Phase Two, everyone's having a great time. They're eating out in the curb, they're enjoying life, but then they want to go to the beach and the city has a plan. How many lifeguards can – are qualified right now at this to go on Coney Island and—

Mayor: We'll get you the – again, I just don't have it in front of me, but I am certain that by the time that we are ready and again, putting a bunch of people on the beach is a different matter. Like I said, there's the situations where you're going to group tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of people in the same place is a more sensitive decision we're talking about when that would be appropriate, but I'm convinced from everything I'm hearing that we'll have the lifeguards ready, but we'll get you more detail on that.

Moderator: Next we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have two questions. The first one has to do with the outdoor dining. I wondered if you did any heads up in advanced notice to these restaurateurs so that they could buy the outdoor furniture and get ready for outdoor dining, and if you think three days’ notice will mean that some of them won't be able to open on Monday?

Mayor: Marcia, this has been a discussion for a long time and Andrew, if you want to add, you're welcome in, you'll let me know. But this has been a discussion for a long time. I think that small business owners and restaurateurs are very smart people. They've had their ear to the ground. They know that their advocates have been working on their behalf to achieve outdoor dining. I've said multiple times publicly that I thought we could find a way, but we had to get the specifics right. I think a lot of them will use the furniture they already have, but there's no question in my mind, they've seen it coming and they've been preparing, but Andrew is much more of an expert than I, so Andrew, why don't you speak on behalf of the industry?

Executive Director Rigie: Thank you. Hi, Marcia. Yeah, I – you know, the Mayor is spot on. We've been having tons of conversation over these, you know, weeks and months about this issue. So, we knew that it was coming, today is the day, we're hoping many restaurants will be able to use the furniture that they already have. Don't forget, indoor dining is not yet permitted, so they have the tables and chairs. Even when we begin to reopen indoors, it will be at a reduced occupancy, so we'll still have those extra tables and chairs. I've also spoken with countless different suppliers and people within the industry that really want to see the industry come back, so I think they are going to be offering special deals and really working with the restaurants if they need additional furniture. So, listen, restaurants, you know, are used to working 24/7, something always comes up. Your point of sale system goes down. You don't know who the reservations are coming in. So, we're used to always putting out different fires. So, we will make this work and like we said, this is an evolving process. So the Hospitality Alliance is here to help support, and I think the restaurateurs are going to be very thankful now that they know what the details are, when they're going to be permitted to reopen, and we're going to start working right away and I'm getting texts right now saying I'm on it. I got – started to get my tables and chairs ready.

Mayor: I like it, there's evidence. Go ahead, Marcia.

Question: So, I have a second question, Mr. Mayor. I've seen restaurants in other places with COVID surcharges. I wonder if patrons of New York City restaurants can expect anything of this sort seeing is the restaurants that are going to have to buy PPE for their workers, etcetera, etcetera, there'll be additional costs?

Mayor: Yeah, I don't know about that, Marcia, I would say simply we're going to make the face coverings available to any and all restaurants that need them for free. In terms of cleaning and all, restaurants do that all the time already. I'm sure there'll be challenges, but I just don't, I've not heard that before. I don't assume that. Restaurants are going make their own decisions, obviously, about pricing and what's going to bring customers back. And I think what they want the most is to get their customers back and get them comfortable. So that will be their decision.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor and everyone on the call. I've got two questions. I'll start with the first on the restaurant topic. Someone else asked about the curb spacing. My question has to do with this, and maybe Commissioner Trottenberg will weigh in as well. How does a restaurant deal with a car that's parked in that curb lane? Won't there have to be towing? You know, there are people who park in alternate side spaces where their car is just sitting there all week. They might be in a Wednesday space right now with no plans to move it. So what do you do if there are cars in front of your restaurant?

Mayor: You know, Andrew, this is in the vein of great minds think alike. I have been raising this exact issue to my colleagues and the Commissioner will speak to it. The central thing I would say is a lot of restaurants, the adjoining parking is metered parking. So that solves that problem because you don't have the alternate side reality, but where there are spaces near alternate side parking, we got to figure that out and we're going to be making a decision shortly on alternate side parking going forward anyway. So, we got to figure that out because that's a valid concern. Commissioner, you want to speak to it?

Commissioner Trottenberg: Right, and look, certainly I think we don't want to be in the business of towing cars. For the metered spaces, there is turnover and we're going to be when restaurants do their application, there'll be able to print out a sign that they can put up and they can grab those spaces and mark them. For the residential spaces, which is a smaller proportion of the potential spaces, as the Mayor said, I think that will be tied to alternate side and hopefully announcements on that coming up shortly.

Mayor: Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: Okay. My second question is for my colleague and friend, Melissa Russo, who reminds us all that the primary is coming up on Tuesday. And I'm wondering, do you still encourage New Yorkers to vote for Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary? Or has the reality changed for you given all that's going on in the country? Is that still your recommendation?

Mayor: No, look, I think the world of Bernie Sanders, I wish he was the Democratic nominee. I wish he was the next president, I mean profoundly. But Joe Biden won clearly fair and square, and I think all Democrats should close ranks around Joe Biden now. I think it's as simple as that. Go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah, good morning, everyone. Back to the restaurants, you know, on the one hand it sounds like, you know, with self-certification potentially thousands of restaurants will get approved to serve people outdoors, but on the other hand, there's a finite amount of sidewalk space. So yeah. Just how do you make sure there's not going to be chaos on the sidewalks? And then I have a follow up question.

Mayor: Yeah, Shant, it's a good question. I – look, we have to do something different in the middle of a crisis. So, we just can't do business as usual. I think the folks who own the restaurants and manage the restaurants understand that they need to be good neighbors, that they will succeed in large measure to connected to how they handle the situation. There's going to be a lot of gratitude that restaurants are back and that people can go and enjoy them. But if it's done in a way that no one could get by the sidewalk or something, then there won't be as much gratitude. So, I actually think it is very much in the restaurant owner's interest to just follow the rules. They're very straightforward. But the only way to do this quickly with self-certification and it's literally you fill out – it's a few clicks to finish the application. You press send, you get a response back that says you're certified, go forward, make it happen Monday. That's the only way we could operate this environment. If there's concerns or problems that New Yorkers raised? Then we'll send people out to address them. But again, with a spirit of trying to solve problems, not being punitive. Commissioner?

Commissioner Trottenberg: I think you said it well, Mr. Mayor. Our goal was to be quick and nimble and help as many restaurants as we could. There will be individual circumstances in this large complicated city between DOT, SBS, Department of Health and City Hall, working with the hospitality industry, as well as local bids, elected officials, we will troubleshoot where we need to.

Moderator: Shant, did you have a thank you for that?

Question: Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, I do. You know, while we're talking about Phase Two starting on Monday, there's other cities around the world that did begin to reopen, but then had to cancel when the coronavirus came back. And I guess I'm thinking of Beijing, which I think on Tuesday abruptly shut down a lot of parts of society. So [inaudible] get people, you know, you’ve talked about monitoring the indicators, but is there anything specific that would trigger a reversal of the shutdown and is there like a mechanism in place that you have for evaluating this? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Shant. I mean this is what the public indicators are all about. The City and the State are constantly comparing notes on the data. We're unified on the fact that the data will lead the decision making. We're going to watch carefully in the days ahead and if we see anything we don't like, we can always make adjustments. But, Shant, I think a really important thing to recognize, I've had this conversation with so many of the medical folks, is it doesn't happen overnight. It happens in stages. If there's something going wrong, you see it over numerous days, probably takes a week or two to fully manifest. So, there's time to make adjustments. The fact is, I'm watching what's happening in Beijing too, and I'm obviously concerned, but we all knew that the process may not be linear, that there may be times where, you know, you'd take a step and then you have to pause and not take the next step. That's what we're watching for all the time, but I think it is – there's – the indicators really speak volumes. I think that's the way to think about it. They've been really, really consistent, but it will depend on the actions of everyone to keep it that way. And I think this personal responsibility reality, just we're going to have to really, really feel it going into Phase Two, because Phase Two is the really big reopening, and that's a huge step. So, for business owners, for business managers, being really serious about setting up those standards, protecting their employees, protecting their customers for working people. They see something that doesn't feel right, calling it in, we'll address it. We're going to have lots of inspectors out there to make sure things are done right, and just everybody in their everyday life sticking to the rules. But if there's a problem, we'll see initial indications within days, and then, you know, bigger manifestation, as I said over a week or two, and we'll address it. If we see it, we'll address it.

Everybody I'll conclude and just say, we got this far because of all the hard work of New Yorkers. Now let's keep doing it, again, beat this disease back. A lot of times, the places that had the problems were the ones where people stopped keeping their guard up and stopped sticking to the basic rules. We're not going to make that mistake in New York City. So social distancing has worked. Face coverings have worked. Face coverings have proven to be more important than we even realized initially, it's really been a crucial piece of the equation. Stick to it. Let's keep fighting this disease back. Let's keep reopening this economy. Let's keep getting life better for all New Yorkers. That is something I know we can do together. Thank you so much.

2020-06-19 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We gather on a very important day, a very important day for our city, a very important day for our nation – Juneteenth. Juneteenth is a celebration, a celebration of liberation, but the larger truth is it's a celebration of a liberation that never really came.

So much of what we want to grapple with was made even clearer by the tragedy of the coronavirus, by the shocking, overt disparities, by the pain caused by this disease. We will never forget how discriminatory this disease has been and continues to be. We’re going to act every day to address that disparity. But one thing that everyone has a common interest in is defeating this disease once and for all so we can get on with the work of transformation and change. So, I'll conclude today with what we do every day. And I'm happy to say, again, today, because of all the work that you all have done – every single New Yorker, acting as one family, one team – that today we have good news again. Indicator one, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – the threshold is 200, and today it is 60 patients. Indicator two, the daily number of people in Health and Hospitals ICU’s – the threshold is 375 patients, and, today, there are 315. And the most important indicator – number three – percentage of people tested positive citywide for COVID-19 – the threshold is 15 percent, and, once again, today only two percent tested positive. And, again, a reminder, everyone, please, for the good of all of us, go get tested. It is easy, it is fast, it is free, and it will help us move forward as a city.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're also joined by First Lady Chirlane McCray, and Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson. First question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the panel. How are you all?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How are you?

Question: I'm fine, thank you I have a question relating to reopening of the city. What are your plans for getting City workers back to work? Is there a process underway to review social distance procedures and offices or locations in the field? And when do you think that's going to happen?

Mayor: Yeah, that his work has been going on now for quite a while. Deputy Mayor for Operations, Laura Anglin, and others have been spearheading that effort. Look, Juliet, there's still a number of City workers who will be able to continue doing their work remotely for the time being, but there's others who now will be able to come back. We're putting in place a lot of the same precautions you're going to see in, in any and all offices and institutions, you know, social distancing, markers, checks to make sure that people are healthy before they come to work. Lots of specifics around cleanliness standards, all that is being put together. You will see more people coming back to work in phase two, those instructions are going to be sent out. But, again, for the foreseeable future, you'll also see a number of city workers continue to work remotely, obviously, including our educators.

Moderator: Next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Okay. Thank you. And I apologize, because I missed Juliet’s question – although I heard remote learning – the term – hopefully I'm not repeating her question. But I wanted to just ask if there's been any progress as far as determining what's going to happen with special education over the summer, as far as in-person versus remote learning.

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Yoav. That's a very important question. And again, for special-ED parents who have so many challenges they deal with every day, and, I think, very nobly. I understand that they really want to see in-person learning again. We are trying to figure out right now if there's a way to do that. We're not ready yet, that's the first thing I want to say to you. The Department of Education is examining all options right this moment and it's going to be interactive, obviously, with what we see with the disease, if we continue to make progress. Today, we do not have a new approach ready, but it's something I've asked the Chancellor to examine and come back quickly with an answer. If there are additional things we can do to help special-ED parents, I'd like us to decide that quickly, and get to work on it quickly.

Moderator: Next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: I'm good. Henry. How are you?

Question: I'm good. Back to a question I asked probably in early May and it's about, you know, when does the city feel that the risk of infection is low enough so that kids can shoot foul shots at a basketball court, can play softball, taking care to socially distance themselves, or wear a mask on the bench. There are so many ways in which people can accommodate themselves to the risk of infection while still engaging in team sports outdoors. I mean, isn't it a time to kind of reevaluate what the risks are of infection and conduct ourselves accordingly?

Mayor: It's a great question, Henry. So I will only give you a personal perspective to frame a, what I hope is a pretty consistent universal answer. So, Chirlane was involved in team sports when she was young, I was involved in every conceivable sport, never on any particularly high level. Our kids did organized team sports, baseball, softball, basketball, tennis, you name it. I believe the way to act on this, and it gets back to your question. The, when the first step, Monday, the playgrounds with the playground equipment for younger kids, I feel we're ready. We're going to watch in the next days, going into next week to see if the indicators start to move in any direction. We'll see the effects of Phase One, and that's really the big litmus tested Phase One. When hundreds of thousands of people came back into circulation, you've seen how much more traffic there is, how much more people on the subways, et cetera, did Phase One have a major impact. We'll know that going into next week, and that's going to tell us a lot. If we continue to make progress, as we get into Phase Two, then there'll be a day when we're ready to act on team sports activity. To me, it's all one big continuum. I actually don't see much difference, and this again is my experience a parent. I think if you let a lot of kids or bluntly, a lot of adults get together for sports, they are going to inherently start to get close together. I just don't believe you can properly create social distancing. I think it is much better to have a standard that when we believe people actually can be in closer proximity that's the time to act on all sports facilities together. Now that said, that does not mean give up on social distancing to give up on face coverings. It doesn't mean that at all. It means I take a very realistic position, Henry, that it is idealistic to say, oh, you know, you could, I love baseball. Baseball's my favorite sport, that you could have social distancing and baseball. Yeah, you could. But I can also tell you all the ways it would break down really, really quickly, especially with kids. So my view is let's get into Phase Two. Let's see how it's working. Let's see what we learned from Phase One at the right time. Then we can make a decision about all sports facilities in common.

Moderator: Next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. question about the reopening. We don't have any public health people on today, do we?

Mayor: No, we don't. But tell us your question, if I can answer it—

Question: Yeah, I'll ask you and maybe I'll repeat it for them next week. I'm just wondering what your advice and your guidance is, as we go into Phase Two, we know, you know, what's going to be legal at this point. You can eat outdoors. You can have gatherings up to 10 people, but you know, for people who are concerned about staying safe, is it safe at this point to get together with a few of your friends and go out and eat at an outdoor restaurant? Is that something you would advise people to do, or is it better to only be with your household members or still stay home as much as possible? What's the best practice as opposed to what is legally permissible?

Mayor: Thank you, Erin. I think there's two immediate answers I would offer. The first is this is a very personal decision that people need to make, and I'd say to anyone who feels cautious or uncomfortable, listen to that and less is more right? I mean, we are going through stages. We're feeling our way. I don't want to use the analogy of a minefield, but it might be an apt one. We are trying to find our way. We're trying to find a path that is stable and secure, and that does not allow this disease to reassert. Look, we all saw, and we talked about yesterday, the news from Beijing, which is obviously very troubling. So it's a reminder we've watched what's happening in a lots of states in this country. It's a reminder, this thing can come back.

So my first answer would be to the human level, if you're not comfortable, don't do anything you're not comfortable with, and if you think you're being asked to do something that is inappropriate in a workplace, for example, we need to hear about it right away. One of the things I want to emphasize is more and more workers come back. If they're not being provided PPEs by their employers, if they're not being given the opportunity to practice social distancing, they're being asked to do things that they think expose them. We need to know that so that we can stop it.

In terms of your question about dining out. Look, I think the standards and I've looked through the state standards, I would urge you to and everyone – they're very detailed and certainly make clear that there's a lot of precautions the restaurants need to take. The best group of people to be dining with is the people who live under the same roof with, because there you do not have to worry about additional exposure, but I would just say, if people are thinking about getting together with anyone they don't live under the same roof with, they need to really practice distancing, use the face coverage to the maximum, et cetera, be real cautious about it and we're going to know a lot more in a few weeks. So the other thing, last thing I'd say Erin is take it slow because we will know more in a few weeks as to what we're seeing with the result of Phase One and that's going to speak volumes.

Moderator: Next is Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good morning, how are you doing?

Question: I'm wondering thought when you saw plywood going up and now coming down? And is the city helping businesses remove plywood?

Mayor: Matt, that's something each business does on their own.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to a Reuven from Hamodia.

Question: I wanted to ask about the alternate side. There was a lot of discussion that alternate side has canceled for weeks, and many people seem not to miss it. Might we get rid of it permanently or maybe go down from once a week to once a month?

Mayor: I think that was one of the great understatements I've heard in a long time. Many people seemed not to miss it. I think you know, alternate side parking is like right up there with Satan and most people's views, so it's and unfortunately it is a necessary evil of ever there's been one. And I'm saying as someone who many, many a time had to move my car and hated doing it and sometimes forgot to do it and got the ticket and everything else, Reuven the answer here is, alternate side exists for cleanliness, and we certainly need to balance, you know, how often do you need some cleaning to keep the neighborhood to the standard that we'd like for all of our neighborhoods. But in this crisis, we've found that we could do with a lot less use of alternative side in part, a lot of few where people are out, we're going to evaluate it. I don't see a scenario where it doesn't exist because I think you would find there are many, many problems would come up. New problems would come up if it didn't exist, but can it be on a new timeline? I think that's a very real question. For one thing, I think there shouldn't be any block in New York City where it's more than once a week you have to move your car, and that's something I have raised before, and I want to say to Deputy Mayor Anglin and Commissioner Trottenberg who know how I feel about this, that we should double down on the work of ensuring that, you know, the most someone has to move their cars is once a week. But I do think Reuven it's a real issue of whether we can do it less frequently than we've been doing it. I think it would be a blessing if we can find a way to do that, but more, more to come on that.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-06-22 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Today is a very, very important day for this city – a very good day in so many ways, a historic day, as the nation's largest city, the nation's largest economy gets back on its feet. Phase two begins today, a huge step forward, the biggest step forward as we fight back from the coronavirus crisis and we once again become everything that New York City is and can be. So, hundreds of thousands of people will be going back to work today. And there's a real excitement out there at what it means for the city and what it means for our future. I want to talk about that and give you some updates and some details.

We take a huge step forward with the beginning of phase two of the restart of New York City. Look, it is so important to say up front it's happening because of you, it's happening because of all the hard work all of you did. But now you see on your screen, all of the types of stores, all of the parts of our lives that are now coming back to life. I know a lot of us are excited about seeing the stores in our neighborhoods we love reopening, barbershops and hair salons reopening, restaurants, of course, so much going on that really, really will help us come out of this crisis and move forward, get people back their livelihood. Look, phase one was a big deal. But phase two is really a giant step for this city. This is where most of our economy is. So, we believe that today you're going to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 to 300,000 people start to come back to work. And again, the guidance has been out there now from the City, from the State, how to do it the right way. People – some people going to do it immediately – some businesses are going to open up immediately, some folks don't come back to work immediately. Others will take their time, some are going to watch and see how it goes. But what we know is, and we saw it in phase one, every passing day, more and more people say, hey, this is working, I want to be a part of it.

So, to keep moving forward, it can't be business as usual. If we're going to help these businesses come back, we have to be there for them. We have to give out the free face coverings – now, over 2 million face coverings that have been given out and we're doubling it and adding 2 million more for free for small businesses to help them move forward. Any business that needs guidance, they can reach out to the good people at the Department of Small Business Services. And I want to commend Commissioner Jonnel Doris, and his whole team. They've been doing a great job, supporting our small businesses. Sector guides available at nyc.gov/business to tell you how to restart, if there's any questions and, more importantly, a human being who can help you by calling 888-SBS-4NYC – any questions or concerns about how to reopen that's, where you can get live, help from a person who knows how to guide you. Now, I don't know about you, but I think the reopening of our restaurants is such an important part of this day, and this is so much the identity in New York City. And I am so proud of the restaurant owners, the bar owners, the cafe owners who fought their way through this and now are ready to come back strong and be a part of their communities. And we need them, they're so much a part of who we are as New Yorkers. So, this is a very exciting day to have them coming back. Outdoor dining, as part of our Open Restaurants initiative, you'll be seeing, popping up all over the city. The important thing, of course, is to do it the right way, do it safely. But I think from talking to a lot of restaurant owners, they know the right way to do it. They want to do it the right way. They want to honor the customers and the workers, but they're ready to come back. And here's some evidence. We put the application for the open restaurants so that restaurants could use sidewalk space, curb space to put in tables. We put that up on Friday morning, since then, 3,192 restaurants have applied. They have instantly qualified. They are self-certified. They are good to go today. And I want to commend everyone at the Department of Transportation and Small Business Services for moving that initiative so quickly. So, any restaurant that wants to take advantage of that space and open up more outdoor seating, go to nyc.gov/openrestaurants. Self-certify, it takes a few minutes and you are good to go. So, that says something about how easy it will be, thank God, for these key, key parts of our communities to come back.

But the question you might ask is, do we know if people are going to want to engage in phase two? Do we know if people are going to want to come back to work, go back to restaurants, go to barbershops? Do we think it's going to actually start up again? And here's what we know, because we've been watching some of the indicators that tell us how much people are re-engaging. Subway ridership – compared to the Thursday before phase one, just a few weeks ago, this past Thursday had subway ridership up 29 percent getting close to the point of a million subway riders per day. Bus ridership over the same period, 22 percent up. Staten Island Ferry ridership up 31 percent. You're seeing people come back to mass transit, and that is our future, that's crucial. You're also seeing more traffic on the bridges. East River Bridge is up 24 percent. Harlem River Bridge is up 10 percent. So, something's happening. And part of why I think people are engaging mass transit is because there's been a real effort to keep it safe, to create the markings, to show you where to stand, where to sit, the free face coverings, a lot of cleaning. I want to thank the MTA for their efforts. I want to thank everyone at the Staten Island Ferry for their great work. People are seeing that safety and health are being taken seriously and they're responding to it. And that's what matters, people understand that they can come back in a safe and smart fashion.

Now, the other fact is that we've seen these weeks, some really good, consistent evidence, data, real, tangible, objective data, showing that we continue to move in the right direction health wise. And that's because of all your hard work, that's because the people opening up the businesses are doing it the right way. That's because we're educating businesses, workers telling people how to protect themselves, helping them do it. But it's also because we have a new, powerful element in this fight, and that's the Test and Trace Corps. This is a game-changer. Remember, we didn't use to have this on a massive scale, nor did other cities and states around the country. Now, we are doing the thing that has worked in so many other parts of the world, we’re proactively reaching people who test positive or people who are symptomatic and need help. And we're making sure that they get the help they need so they can safely separate, and it will inhibit the spread of disease. So, really, really crucial new factor and a lot of great initial progress. Here to give you an update, I want to thank him and his whole team, the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This is an unprecedented time. In our lifetimes, we have never seen a disease as widespread and deadly as the coronavirus. Therefore, we've never had to set up a contact trace and operation of this magnitude before in our history. Now, what we've done so far over the last three weeks is essentially created and built a new organization with thousands of employees, a complex training system, a complex management structure, and a complex IT infrastructure that ensures privacy and confidentiality at every turn. It is now up and running and I'm going to share with you some of the initial results today that take us through the first three weeks. I want to really focus in on three key points though, as I go into this. The first is that, for all cases, or people newly diagnosed with the coronavirus, we don't have phone numbers for all of them, but for those that we do, we've been able to reach 97 percent of them by phone. That's to be compared to Louisiana, that reached 48 percent of the people that they called and Boston that reached 60 percent of the people that they called. The fact that we've been able to reach 97 percent of people newly diagnosed with coronavirus that we have a phone number for shows the program is working.

Now, the next statistic I want to share with you is how we're doing getting contacts from our cases. Among our cases that complete our interview, meaning ones that we've asked about, whether they have contacts, 74 percent to-date have shared contacts with us. In the last week alone, week three, 86 percent of our cases, people newly diagnosed with coronavirus that got through our interview gave us contacts – 86 percent. Now, we believe in the Test and Trace Corps. that the reason that 86 percent of people in the past week, that when asked, gave us contacts, is because more than half of our tracers are people from our hardest hit communities across New York City. They understand our communities and our communities therefore trust them. And it's based on that, trust that 86 percent of the time cases, when asked for contacts, when they completed the interview gave contacts.

The third statistic I want to share with you today is that of the contacts, or people that were exposed to the coronavirus that we then called, there was a group of more than 650 of them, that by the time we called them, were actively symptomatic and likely contagious. This means that this group of 650 New Yorkers, if we did nothing, if the program did not exist, they may go out and infect three more New Yorkers each. Because in that moment, when we were speaking to them, we were able to intervene to get them to isolate, to quarantine, to keep their families and their neighbors safe and to give them all of the resources to do that, we've potentially already prevented in the first three weeks alone of the program, up to 2,000 new cases of the coronavirus to keep New York City safe.

I'm now going to go through the rest of the data. So, in the last three weeks, to date, we've identified more than 7,500 new cases of the coronavirus. Among those, 85 percent, we had a phone number for, and when we called them, we were able to get through or reach 97 percent of them. There was a group of 2,808 of those cases that gave us contacts. That group of 2,808 are the people that completed the interviews and represent 74 percent of the people that completed our interviews, where we gave them the chance to give us contacts. And I want to draw out the point here that this is better than it was in the first two weeks of the program. In the first two weeks of the program, 69 percent of cases that completed our interviews were giving us contacts. Now, in the last week alone, it jumped up to 86 percent of the cases we talked to, gave us contacts. What we think that means is that people are beginning to more and more trust the Test and Trace Corps because the corps is us. It is our own people from our own communities, calling our own communities. And again, the fact that 86 percent of cases are giving contacts to the people they're talking to on the phone, we think shows that there is that trust that's being built there.

In terms of contacts, we now have more than 6,600 contacts that we've generated. Of those, we have a phone number for 77 percent of them, which if you look back at the data we shared last week, is a substantial improvement. Of those, we've reached 89 percent of all of those contacts. And again, if you look back at the data from last week, that's also a substantial improvement. I talked to you about the number of, more than 650 New Yorkers were already symptomatic and contagious by the time we called them. We were able to intervene and help. To date, we've been monitoring 6,400 New Yorkers. Of those, 2,000 have told us that in order for them to stay home, to keep their families and their neighbors safe, they needed help. And we've been able to, 2,065 times, offer them that help, that help can come in the form of food delivery, help with getting their medications delivered, even help with eviction notices or with their jobs. Our resource navigators stand at the ready to help New Yorkers and this has been a key way that we've been able to help New Yorkers to stay at home, to prevent disease spread. In addition to that, 63 New Yorkers have stayed at our hotels to date as well. With that, I'll pass it back to the Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you, Ted – really appreciate the update. And again, thanks to you and all your colleagues for the hard work you're doing. Now, let's go over today's daily indicators. I'm going to add an interesting fact as I do it. First of all, indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – threshold is 200 – today's report, 56 patients. Let me just let you know, because several members of the media have asked a question, and I asked it myself internally, and I commend them for raising this point. But the question is what was the actual percentage of number of people who came into our hospitals with suspected COVID-19 meaning they had pneumonia-like symptoms, respiratory symptoms when they actually were tested, even if it took a few days to get the results, what was the percentage that actually did have COVID? Well, very interesting. You go back to that horrible date that we used to talk about April 5th, a day that was really looking like this crisis was going to get even worse.

On April 5th, 80 percent of folks who were in our hospitals and were suspected COVID patients turned out to be actual COVID patients when the test results came back. The last read we have is from June 14th. At that point, it was only 14 percent. So, that's another very positive sign that not only is the number of patients low at this point, but when we actually find out who has COVID and who doesn't, it's a small percentage within the group that does. So that's indicator one.

Indicator two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs – threshold of 375 – today's report 326. And the most important indicator, percentage of people tested citywide who were positive for COVID-19 – threshold of 15 percent – today's report, a very good one, two percent. That is a great way to start phase two. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder, we have Small Business Commissioner Doris and Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Long here in person. And on the phone, we have Deputy Mayor Been, Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg, and Senior Advisor Varma on the phone. With that, I will start with Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Morning, everybody. Welcome to phase two. Hope you're doing well.

Mayor: [Inaudible] how you doing, Andrew?

Question: Hanging in there. Thanks for asking. My first question has to do with the restaurants reopening. I saw in some neighborhoods, the hand printed signs that restaurants send out, ‘please don't park here, this is for our curbside business’. How concerned are you? And maybe Commissioner Trottenberg has some evidence from it already this morning. How concerned are you that drivers might just rip those down and leave their cars parked there? And are you concerned that this might lead to some confrontations out there?

Mayor: You know, Andrew, I'll start and I'll turn to the Commissioner. Look, we understand New Yorkers are New Yorkers and parking is very, very precious to us, but I also think people understand this is about bringing back our city, bringing back our economy, bringing back people's jobs, bringing back part of the community that people love. We’re giving people with a self-certification a notice they can put up, an official notice from the Department of Transportation, making clear that the space is delineated for the restaurant. And most of those spaces, of course, are places where there's a lot of turnover, where there's metered parking. So, I think it's an issue, but I believe that the vast majority of people will respect it and we’ll certainly help restaurants. Commissioner, why don't you jump in?

Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, Department of Transportation: Exactly, Mr. Mayor. Hi, Andrew. We are actually in the process today going to be emailing to all the restaurants who applied for curb space a sort of somewhat official sign, which says ‘don't park here, open dining’ and between SBS and DOT’s borough commissioner offices, we're going to be on the ground today helping to resolve those conflicts wherever we can. But it's probably going to take a little time to sort itself out. So, a little patience as we turn those parking spaces into restaurant space.

Mayor: Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: My second question, and I know this is going to sound like we're getting ahead of ourselves, but my second question has to do with phase three, all the upstate regions spent only two weeks in phase two and went on to phase three and the Governor has repeatedly said the metrics match for every region, no one gets an exception, but have you had any conversations with the Governor, or do you plan to, to essentially say slow your roll when it comes to phase three in the city, because you're talking about an entirely different density level?

Mayor: You know Andrew, the bottom line, first of all, is the data is what we all look to. The City, the State, we all are devoted to the data and today's an important day because seeing the numbers today, as good as they are after we have seen the whole experience of phase one is really, really important. We're getting more and more evidence. And I also believe New Yorkers are very devoted to getting it right. There's lots of hype when someone does something wrong, but the vast majority of people are taking this really seriously and being very conscientious. So, yeah, two weeks is the official minimum, but the State's always been clear, I've always been clear. We're going to judge by the data and we're going to look at the particular complexities of New York City, which are, you know, the most challenging dynamics anywhere in the state. So, I'll hold out hope that we can move through it quickly, but it's going to be based on the data and it's going to be, of course, a high bar because to do something here just affects so many millions of people, we have to get it right

Moderator: Next, we have Kevin from the Brooklyn Paper.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: I'm doing good, Kevin. I'm feeling great nostalgia. The Brooklyn Paper was a very big part of my life when I was a school board member and a City Council member. So, good to hear from you.

Question: Thanks for taking my question. A DOT official told the community board last week that the agency’s in talks with your office about possibly turning a car lane on the Brooklyn Bridge into a bike lane. I was wondering if you, you know, if you could contribute your take on this, give us more insight into these talks. And then I have another question as well.

Mayor: Kevin, I like to be transparent. I have not heard that previously. Commissioner Trottenberg can speak to it now. I mean, I would state the obvious that we're seeing a lot more traffic. In fact, I have been struck, as probably a lot of people, watching have been, that we've actually had – I've experienced some traffic jams lately. That was something we did not experience in the beginning of this crisis. In a funny way, it's reassuring to be in a traffic jam again. But again, the future has got to be not about automobiles, but about mass transit. But the Brooklyn Bridge is – that one's a sensitive one because it's such a crucial artery. So, I had not heard that. I'm not sure how workable that is, but Commissioner Trottenberg what do you say?

Commissioner Trottenberg: Yeah. And Kevin, I will just say somehow, I think between maybe what the staffer said and what was in that article, it wasn't quite accurate. It said that the DOT, we had completed our study of looking at whether the promenade on the bridge could accommodate more space for bikes. We haven't. So, just that – that part isn't true. You know, it has been sort of a long-standing question for the East River bridges, which are certainly particularly the Brooklyn and the Queensborough, you know, pinch points for cycling in and out of Manhattan, about whether we can take a look at traffic lanes. It's something the agencies look at – to be fair to the Mayor, I don't think the discussion has made it to his level yet.

Mayor: Okay. Do you have another question, Kevin?

Question: Yeah. Thanks for clarifying, Commissioner. I just used what your staffer said at the meeting. But to my other question I've heard from dog owners that they're upset that dog runs aren't reopening as part of phase two. With most parks reopening at this point, why aren't dog runs not reopening? Is that an oversight or is there some additional considerations for those parts of parks?

Mayor: There’s additional considerations, Kevin. It's a great question. So, let's be clear. Parks have been open throughout. I want to just really get this right. Parks have been open. Playgrounds, dog runs, sports facilities got shut down. What we've said now is that the playgrounds with the playground equipment for kids, particularly younger kids, that's reopening today. We have a whole host of other things that we're evaluating right now. We're evaluating them all together. Basketball courts, soccer fields, tennis courts, handball courts, dog runs, you name it, we're looking at all of them. And I think the fact is that they all tend to have a lot of people congregating in a small space and it tends to be not just kids, but adults, obviously, generally, and we want it – or older kids – we want to get it right. We're trying to figure out what's going to be necessary to make it right, make it workable. And that's what we're working on right now. We'll have more to say on that in the coming days.

Moderator: Next we have Michael from the Daily News.

Question: Hey, everybody. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes, Michael, how you doing?

Question: Good, good morning.

Mayor: Good morning.

Question: So, I just have one question. The Council Speaker last week talked about, at the end of this state of meeting, the Council putting out its own budget, separate and apart from the executive budget, from your budget. And I'm not sure about, you know, all the ins and outs of this, but you know, he talked about how this was its charter mandated authority, it could do this. I think this has happened at least once before, maybe in ‘99. But I was wondering if you could talk about, you know, the likelihood or the possibility of that happening and what the implications of that are and kind of – I mean, do you see it as a negotiating tactic or do you see it as something real that is in the offing at this point?

Mayor: Michael, I don't speculate on other people's words. Bottom line is we have a lot to work through. It's an incredibly difficult budget because we're in the middle of such a, you know, crisis wrapped in crisis, wrapped in crisis, including a huge fiscal crisis, but everyone's been working incessantly over the last few weeks. I know our budget teams are constantly speaking with each other. I think there's been real progress, but I think there's a lot to work through. So, the history says that we always managed to find common ground with the City Council. And that's what I’ll assumed here. And you know, we continue to have negotiations, I think, in a spirit of goodwill.

Moderator: Michael, do you have a follow up?

Question: No, that's it. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next, we have Rich from WCBS 880.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Rich. How you doing?

Question: I'm doing okay. So, I just wondered, do you plan to dine outdoors tonight? And if so, where?

Mayor: One, absolutely. Two, we're deciding the location. We'll let you know later on, but the world of New York restaurants is very, very personally important to me. And I just, I'm very excited that this day has come. I'm very excited for these folks who have put their whole lives into their restaurants. It's just so much a part of life of this city, but it's something that gives me a tremendous amount of joy. So, Chirlane and I will be out there, but we're working out where.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next, we have Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor. I wanted to know who's in charge of enforcing the rules of your Open Restaurants plan? Is it DOT or the Sheriff's Office? And is there a new tip line to report restaurants not following the rules? And can restaurants open for outdoor dining on both sides of the restaurant or only in front or and can they open on the street? On Staten Island we've seen corner restaurants set up outdoor dining on the front and sides of their restaurants and put up barricades on the street to block off traffic. So, wondering what's allowed and who's in charge of enforcing the rules?

Mayor: Sure. Excellent question. So, Sydney, I'll start very broadly and I'm going to pass to Commissioner Trottenberg and Commissioner Doris. Okay, so first of all, remember, we're in a crisis. We need to get our economy back. We need to get people's livelihood back. We are trusting people very much with this approach. We're trusting the restaurant owners to self-certify, we're trusting the people of the city to do the right thing to keep each other safe. And overwhelmingly that trust has been rewarded time and time again in this crisis. People are doing the right thing. They'll always be some people who take advantage and we'll deal with that. But it is to begin with, based on the positive, not the negative. In terms of the frontage you can use, and in terms of how to address any problems, the commissioners will speak to that. Obviously, anybody who thinks they see something dangerous or unhealthy can always call 3-1-1 because we want those reports, we want to act on right away. But we're starting from the perspective of, we do not anticipate a lot of enforcement. We do not anticipate a lot of need to go in aggressively because we think most people are going to do this the right way. Commissioner Trottenberg, Commissioner Doris you want to add?

Commissioner Trottenberg: I'll jump in. You're right, Mr. Mayor, the primary source for complaints is going to be 3-1-1. And we've been – the different agents I've worked with 3-1-1 and the complaints will be routed to whichever agency, it makes the most sense. If it’s an issue you raise about, you know, how much space are restaurants allowed to have on the street or the sidewalk that would be DOT. Other types of enforcement could go to PD. But we are very much hoping as the Mayor said to use education and really work with restaurants, the Hospitality Association, local businesses and SBS is at the forefront of that educational process.

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: I'll just add, as Commissioner Trottenberg said we are ensuring that we reach out to our restaurants and small businesses. Our hotline is the best way to get some clarity on some of these matters, but also to proactively ask questions to help you navigate the process. Again, it's 8-8-8-7-2-7-4-6-9-2. And we also have webinars and training for our restaurant owners. I was out in Jackson Heights this weekend, speaking with the Latino Restaurant Association. And many of those restaurants, as we talked to them, wanted this clarification and was utilizing our services and was also extremely happy with the five to ten minutes it took for them to actually sign up for this. So a lot of that was because of the education and we will continue to do that. Our hope is that we have a complaint driven process in which we're not going out and driving you know, violations and complaints and so forth from these businesses. But we want to make sure that we train them and let them know what's happening. And so, we're here for you. If you're a small business out there, restaurant, you still need help. Please reach out to our hotline. We'll be happy to assist.

Mayor: And again, the more memorable version of the hotline, 888-SBS-4NYC, 888-SBS-4NYC. Okay, go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Jen Peltz from AP.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Jen, how you doing?

Question: Thanks. I have a couple of questions. One is concerning the reopening, as I'm sure you know, that a lot of the big employers and offices are not yet planning to bring back their workforces or even a small number of them. What do you think that that means for the overall health of the city's business climate since a lot smaller businesses depend on their big office neighbors?

Mayor: Yeah. Jen, it's a great question. I think what you're going to see is evolution. I've talked to a lot of business owners, big and small. And what people are saying is even though remote offers certain advantages or continuity, it's not the same thing. It's not as good in many ways. And the fact is right now, as we're making sure we go through each phase safely, a lot of folks still want to be remote. That's fine. But as we get toward the fall, I'm certainly going to be encouraging people to start coming back more in person. The fact is, yeah, you're right. A lot of small businesses, a lot of restaurants, so many different parts of our economy depend on people coming back to those office jobs.

So, I think it'll be like this – there'll be some hesitation at first. There'll be some watchful waiting, people wanting to make sure it really works. People want to make sure they're comfortable with it. The economy will start to come back. And the more that people see it's working, the more that people will want to come back. I also think a lot of businesses will say, Hey, we just cannot get done this work as well if people don't spend more time together. And you'll see more and more businesses saying, Hey, it's time to come back or at least come back more often. So, it'll be stages. I think the summer will be slower. I think the fall is when you're going to see much more ramp up.

With that everyone this again, a very important day, a historic day. I'll finish with a simple thought. So, it is June 22nd. We never could have gotten to phase two without you. We could never have gotten here if people had not done so much hard work so consistently. And it took immense discipline and strength for New Yorkers to get us here. There were many a day where it looked like it might not be possible, but you achieved this victory. The simple message is this – if it ain't broke, don't fix it. You're doing the right thing. Stick with it. All of the precautions you're taking, all of the hard work, it's going to get us to the next phase and the next phase. It's going to get us back to being the city that we need to be. So, thank you to all the New Yorkers who made this possible. And now let's go take the next big step. Thank you.

2020-06-23 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Yesterday, beginning of phase two, and, by everything that we’re hearing here at City Hall, a great start for this city. A lot of excitement out there, a lot of energy as New York City takes a big step forward towards our recovery. So, phase two began. I celebrated with Chirlane last night, we went to Melba’s Restaurant in Harlem. It was amazing to – I have to tell you – to be, once again, connected with the life, the energy, the culture of our city, through our restaurants. And a beautiful night, and outdoor dining, an amazing experience. Thank you, Melba. And thank you to the whole team at Melba’s. You were wonderful, wonderful hosts. And look, this is the beginning of something very big. As of this moment, 4,136 restaurants have applied for and been immediately approved to do outdoor seating. That number is growing all the time. And, as Melba told me, it took her something like five minutes to complete the application successfully. So, to all the restaurants out there looking to get going again, bringing back thousands and thousands of workers and starting up their livelihood again, it is fast and easy. Please jump on board. And we know that hundreds of thousands of people are now back to work and families are going to have a paycheck again, and life is going to be so much better for them. We also know that people are finally going to get to do a lot of things we've been waiting for. Some of us have been waiting for a haircut for quite a while. So, this week we can able to go back to barbershops, beauty salons. It's going to be a great, great feeling.

So, a very good start to phase two. As always, you know, when we celebrate the good things happening and we really need to take time to do that, we also recognize the challenges. We also recognize that we're dealing with so many problems simultaneously in this coronavirus crisis. So, we know our families have been cooped up. Young people have been cooped up and we know that on beautiful summer nights like we're having now, unfortunately some young people are turning to the wrong approach, and that's illegal fireworks. And we have concerns about this from all over the city. This is a real problem. It is not just a quality of life problem, and a noise problem. And it's certainly that. And it's all five boroughs, and we take that seriously, but it can also be dangerous. So, we need to make sure that young people know, all people know, some of it's adults too, that illegal fireworks are not only illegal, but they can be dangerous. We need to get that message across. And that's what we intend to do. And we also intend to go to the root cause. And that is the people who are supplying the fireworks. The folks who are profiting off of illegal fireworks. We're going to start a huge sting operation to go and get these illegal fireworks at the base. Meaning everywhere they're being sold around New York City, and even where they're being sold in surrounding States that we know are flowing into New York City. The Sheriff's Office, the FDNY, the NYPD have come together in an illegal fireworks task force. We will have over 40 officers from each of those three organizations, including 12 FDNY fire marshals. The NYPD Intelligence Bureau will be a part of this effort to help us track down where the fireworks are coming from to begin with. Deputy Sheriffs will be out there addressing this at the root. So, what do we do? We go at the suppliers. There'll be all sorts of actions taken. Undercover buys, sting operations, finding where the supply is and cutting it off at the knees. And there's going to be a big public safety campaign to led by the FDNY. The FDNY has done amazing work, educating New Yorkers on so many ways that they need to stay safe, whether it's smoke alarms or the ways to avoid setting a fire accidentally, the FDNY is going to take the lead. Public service announcements, social media aimed at all New Yorkers, but particularly young people to help us root this out. This is a beginning there's a lot to do, and we have to do it quickly, but this is an issue we can confront. It's not entirely new. It's more than we've ever seen it and earlier, but it's not entirely new city agencies have been able to root out this problem in the past. We're going to go at it hard now and address it immediately.

So, those are the fireworks we do not ever want to see the illegal fireworks, but let's talk about something more positive. Let's talk about something that brings us actually a lot of joy. And that is the professional fireworks. The ones that we wait for each year that Macy's gives us. A wonderful thing Macy's does for the people in New York City, every July 4th, the fireworks display is something people look to all year around here in the city. And it's actually looked at all over the nation, all over the world. And this July 4th’s going to take on added meaning. We've all been through so much and we are finally making sustained progress. Knock on wood. We got a lot more to go, but every one of you who has worked so hard on the social distancing, the shelter in place, the face coverings to get us to this day, we're celebrating you. We’re celebrating this city. We're celebrating this country at a moment where we all need to take stock and be proud of what we have done together. So, we need this, and it's going to be done by Macy's and thanks to everyone's everybody at Macy's. Jeff Ganette, the CEO has been a great partner in this, and I know for him and everyone at Macy's, this is a labor of love. They really care about New York city, and they want to do something special. So, this year is going to be different. Let me start with that crucial point. It will not be like the past where there's one big giant show. We do not want a lot of people out watching. There's not going to be a single focal point. In fact, we're only going to let out information about specific points very close to the actual moment when these shows happen. it's going to be a series of shows, only five minutes each. Why? Because we want to get the shows around the five boroughs where people can see them from their own homes, from their own rooftops, from nearby parks, but not something where people go to a single location in group, in large numbers. This will be happening this coming Monday, June 29th through Wednesday, July 1st weather permitting.

So, the idea is very brief bursts, brief, but mighty. And this is not like what you see with the illegal fireworks. You'll know this is a very professional, beautiful show. People get a moment to experience it, feel good about it, and then it'll all be pulled together on Saturday, July 4th in a show. it'll be live on NBC with the different pieces of each night together on tape, but also music from leading cultural figures. There'll be tributes to our heroes who got us this far, the healthcare workers, the first responders, everyone who fought through March, fought through April all the way to today to make this city come back and something very special that night at the empire state building as well. So, people will be able to see different pieces at different points. It’s going to be something that's going to be special for the city different, but very special, very powerful, very moving, but also very safe. And again, thank you to everyone at Macy's for being such great partners.

Now, we think about the things that, you know, we need to be inspired at this difficult time. The things that remind us, we can come back. We are coming back. We think about those things that give us hope, but at the same time we think about what people are going through every single day. And I'll tell you something from the beginning of this crisis, one of the things I've said, and all my colleagues here at city hall have said, we understand that people are not only hurting, families hurting, families who have lost loved ones, but folks have lost their livelihood. They don't have money for the basics. And that begins with food. This needs more attention that millions of New Yorkers have suffered from food insecurity. That is not normal in this city. So many people have had to worry where the next meal is coming from. And no New Yorker gracing the world, no New Yorker should ever have to ask the question, where am I going to find my next meal? So, what we've said from the beginning is we're going to go right at that, with everything we’ve got. The city of New York to make sure that anyone who needs food gets it when they need it, where they need it distributed so far. This is an amazing number. The city of New York has distributed 70 million meals since March for free to people who need them in New York City. We're now doing approximately 1.5 million meals per day – again, for free. Whether it's meals that people pick up at sites or meals delivered right to the door of a senior who can't get out, but needs that good, healthy food on a regular basis. This has been an unprecedented effort and everyone involved has done a remarkable job. And now there's going to be an additional element of this effort for the summer, because we will not let anyone go hungry this summer. And here to talk about it, our foods czar, and she and her team have led the way throughout this crisis. Our foods czar, Kathryn Garcia. Kathryn?

Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, Department of Sanitation: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. You know, we really have made a commitment to make sure that no New Yorker is going hungry during this crisis. And so many of you have asked about our plans for the summer. Does this continue as we move into different phases? And so, I want to talk a little bit about what our plans are for the summer. So, I am thrilled to be able to announce that we will continue the grab and go meals at over 400 sites, both schools, and also there will be some in parks recreational facilities through the entire summer. I really just want to thank the Department of Education staff who have put this together and who have continued to be committed to this city in this time of need. So, they are open to anyone from 7:30 to 1:30, and you can take meals for your kids. You can take meals for your parents, but everyone is welcome regardless of income, regardless of documentation status. So, we really want people to feel that they can come and get a meal there.

So, as the Mayor said, we have distributed or delivered over 70 million meals, which is really quite astonishing, probably bigger than any other city or state has ever tried to do in the history of this country, probably outside of the Great Depression. And this has only been possible because of the deep partnership that the Department of Sanitation has had with the Department of Emergency Management, the Taxi and Limousine Commission, the Department of Environmental Protection, the Parks Department, the Department of Transportation, it was literally all hands on deck and we will continue to be committed helping New Yorkers during this unprecedented time.

So, one of the fun things for summer and feeding out of the grab and go sites is that we will be adding pizza kits, so that you can get the meals that are prepared as well as be able to take home pizza to make it. It can be made in a stove, in a microwave, in a toaster oven, so it should be accessible to all. And for more information, you obviously can text or go online to find the closest sites. And just to reiterate that we will continue the kosher sites as well as at every other site, there is a both regular vegetarian and Halal options.

Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much, Commissioner. Congratulations to you and your team. And pizza kits, this is good news – there is nothing New Yorkers love more than pizza, so it will be a very nice thing for folks to get pizza kits as something special, especially for kids in this city. And look, we are so clear about the fact that we have to do everything and anything to help bring this city back this summer is going to be a time I'm hoping and praying, and I'm knocking on wood again of transitioned towards a much better situation. Again, phase one has gone really well so far, phase two has started well, phase three could be, as soon as two weeks away, we are moving forward aggressively. And this summer will be a time when we get our footing back more and more people come to work. I'm really looking forward to a very, very new reality in the fall, if we all keep to what we need to do, excuse me, as we restart this city.

Now, we also are in the process of recovery, and I've said many times the recovery is not just go back to the city that existed in January or February and call a day. No, the recovery means we're going to do things differently. We have to change the status quo on the biggest issues of fairness and justice, and right down to the everyday issues, the kitchen table issues, the issues that affect you and your neighborhood on your block. And this brings me to an issue that so many New Yorkers care about, and it is a very important every-day issue – once again, alternate side parking. So, here's the reality, alternate side parking has been done the same way for a long, long time, and, like so many New Yorkers, I've experienced it over and over again, trying to find that place to move the car to sometimes forgetting, getting that ticket. It is frustrating, it is difficult, it doesn't have to be this way. So, we're rethinking alternate side parking and I want to thank everyone who's been a part of the effort. We've made the decision throughout this crisis to very rarely have alternate side parking on. So, a special thank you to a Deputy Mayor Laura Anglin; to, in her other hat, Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, their teams; Department of Transportation, Polly Trottenberg. Everyone's been working together to figure out how we could give some relief to folks, and we've done that by having very few times and alternate side parking was in effect, but as I said, we have to rethink the whole model. And one of the things that has frustrated me for years as a New Yorker and as a public servant is the streets where people had to move their car, not once a week, but twice a week, two different days, a super hassle, and one to me that bluntly didn't seem necessary and it wasn't fair to people. This needs to change. So, we're about to make the biggest change in alternate side parking in the last two decades. We are now going to have a new rule where New Yorkers will only have to move their car once a week when alternate side parking is in effect. Now, sometimes, as we've seen, it won't be an effect, but when alternate side parking is, in fact, no New Yorkers should have to move their car more than once a week. So, where do we stand right now, right now, suspended with alternate side through Sunday, this Sunday, June 28th, we're going to bring it back for one week, starting on Monday, June 29th. We’ve got some cleaning up to do, we want to reset the equation, we want to make sure that the streets are clean. Some restaurants are going to be able to pick up some of that space for outdoor dining, and we're going to take stock of where we stand. But when it comes back next week, if you live on one of those blocks, that right now you'll have to move the car twice a week, you will not have to do that. You should only do it once a week and it will be on the latest day posted on your street sign. So, if you unfortunately have to currently do it twice a week now, starting next week, only the later day in the week will you have to move your car. And, again, we're going to do that for one week, see how it goes. And we're going to watch this in the course of the summer, as we get on towards Labor Day and see if this is something we can make a long-term new rule. I like it, I hope this will prove to be as common sense as I think it is. That'd be something we can institute long-term, and again, we'll only turn on alternate side parking when we need it during this crisis, but I want to make it easier on people when it is in effect.

Okay, let's talk about the thing we talk about every day, this is the essence of everything we're focused on the health of our people. What do our indicators tell us? Today is a very good day, that's what our indicators tell us. Indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 and today's report only 45. Indicator two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s – threshold of 375, today only 320. And indicator number three, percentage of people positive for COVID-19 – citywide threshold of 15 percent, today's report, once again, only 2 percent. Excellent, excellent report today. Congratulations to all of you. And you know, I'm going to say next, keep doing what you're doing, let's keep tight, disciplined, focused, so we can keep these numbers down and keep reopening and restarting.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all just a reminder that we have Foods Czar and Commissioner Garcia here in person, and, on the phone, we have Sheriff Fucito, and Senior Advisor Varma. We have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Happy day two of phase two re-opening.

Mayor: Happy day two, phase two. I like that. We'll have a new greeting.

Question: So first on the fireworks, I understand the importance of, of cutting off the supply at the root, but are police going to do anything to go out and potentially, maybe confiscate fireworks from those who are, are setting them off in neighborhoods and really causing the disruption and the danger to New Yorkers every night?

Mayor: So, Julia, I'd say a couple of things. The most important thing is for the NYPD to work on the most important issues and right now, given the other challenges we're facing, I want them focused on the most fundamental issues of public safety. So, I'm concerned first and foremost about addressing the shootings problem we're having. That's where the central focus of the NYPD needs to be on reducing that violence and they're making very important moves to address that. The fireworks can be unsafe. I'm not for a moment missing that, but the challenge a lot of times with fireworks is that particularly young people fire them off and then leave immediately; so it's very hard to find them and address it in real time, in a way that actually would make a difference. But anytime NYPD has the ability to intervene, whether it might be a threat to human life, of course they will. We take that very, very seriously and have to. I think the more profound issue is going to be going to the root cause, just cutting off the supply and the city has had some success in the past and we're going to go very hard at that. And I do think the education efforts are going to make a difference. I think a lot of young people have to be reminded of the dangers. I think a lot of parents and family members have to be reminded of the dangers and start talking to their young people and I think that will, that will affect a lot of the reality as well.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good Henry, how are you?

Question: I'm good. My question goes to the fact that, or at least the reported anecdotes of people leaving the city. We have uncertain future on schools, what they're going to look like in the fall. We've got these fireworks exploding all over the city, people complaining that it's destroying their quality of life. We've got shootings going on. There's no theater, none of the amenities that New Yorkers have loved are open and a lot of people are looking elsewhere and I'm wondering whether you're concerned about this and whether there's anything you think you can do to staunch the exodus that we keep reading about?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great and important question, Henry. First of all, as Mayor, of course, I'm always concerned if there's anything that's causing anybody who lives here to feel uncomfortable, whatever it is and that's true when we're not in the middle of a pandemic – just any time that there's a quality of life concern, if there's a concern about safety, it's our job to address it. Now, as of February if you look at everything that was going on in this city, the most jobs we ever had, the lowest crime we ever had. In many ways, our quality life greatly improved compared to the past; people voting with their feet in the sense of the amount of investment that people were making here, 67 million tourists a year, none of that can be forgotten. That was not even six months ago. So, we have to take a little bit of a big picture view here, Henry. We're going through a rough patch, the world's going through a rough patch, the country is going through a rough patch. It's very tough, but this city has extraordinary resiliency. So, do I think there are some people of means who are going to decide to go elsewhere? I do, I also think there's a lot of people of means who are going to stay right here. I think there are some people who are going to come in here because they sense re-birth and opportunity and I think the re-birth is going to be happening steadily. Look last night was very telling to me; one little vignette, but very meaningful, you know, when Chirlane and I went to Melba's Restaurant in Harlem, if you looked at the scene going by, people reconnecting, you know, folks wanting to come back to the amenity of a neighborhood restaurant, folks greeting each other, the sort of the warmth of the situation it did not feel like a defeated city by any stretch. So honestly, people in neighborhoods, everyday people, working class people, middle-class people – long history of standing by and fighting for New York City no matter what. And Henry, I remember how bad the seventies, eighties, nineties were, and people fought their way through and made the city greater and greater all the time. I am absolutely convinced that will happen here. The theater will come back. The amenities will come back. It starting right now with the restaurants, you're going to see a lot more. So I have no question about what happens in the future of the city because we've seen this time and time again, the city always comes back and we will again.

Question: Yeah, can I follow up a little bit because one of the central issues for these people, the central question really is the schools. What are the schools going to look like in September? Are they going to be open? Are they going to be closed? Half open, half closed? A lot of people are going to have to base their decisions on math.

Mayor: Yeah. Henry, first of all, again – every-day New Yorkers – so I want to talk about the millions and millions of people, not the privileged few, but the millions of millions of people who deal with often tough realities; hardworking people, one job, two jobs, folks who have a long way to go to work and back, who juggle a lot of responsibility, single moms, union members. There are millions of New Yorkers who every day deal with struggle and they fight their way through and they make something happen. Those people, the people who sent me here to represent them; they're going to stand and fight. They are going to find a way back. You know what, I've talked to so many people, parents, teachers already about September. Folks are smart, they understand we're still dealing with a lot of unknowns. But the answer to your question is the goal is to have the maximum number of kids in their classrooms for the maximum number of days. So, if we have a situation where kids can be constantly in the classroom every single day, that's the ideal. If it has to be some kind of alternating system, we'll do that. But, Henry, I think the thing to remember is we are all waiting to see the direction of this pandemic. If we continue to reduce the impact, that's going to open the doors wider for more and more in-person education. If we have a setback, we're going to deal with that. We all know – I've had this conversation with so many parents, teachers, everyone knows it's not even a secret, it’s out in the open that the vaccine is going to be the crossing-the-Rubicon moment. When we have a vaccine, very rapidly you're going to see a quick resurgence in so many parts of this city. We don't have it yet. Some people say it's this year. Some people say it's next year. But that will be the ultimate difference maker. In the meantime, look at these indicators, thank God they've been moving in the right direction. And that means to me, we'll have a lot of kids in their school buildings in September. And so, I think most people are ready to deal with that. Most people are ready to embrace that and move forward.

Moderator: Next, we have Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Based on your comments of cracking down on the suppliers of fireworks and your response to Julia that you really don't want the NYPD doing anything to reduce fireworks use, it seems still that if the police come across someone using it, they're not supposed to do anything. There've been videos of cop cars driving by, as kids were shooting fireworks at each other, they haven't done anything. There's a sense that you're unwilling to use the police to vigorously enforce the law and that the quality of life of law-abiding New Yorkers is less important than the idea of using police as little as possible. So, I’d just like to ask plain and simple, if New Yorkers see illegal fireworks, should they call 9-1-1? And if police see people shooting them off, should they arrest them? Are police being instructed to stop this or to let it go?

Mayor: Okay, Reuvain, respectfully, you can editorialize all day long in your question. I don't think the best way to get at the truth is to simply present a worldview and act like that's the way things are being interpreted. What you said is not consistent with what I said, with all due respect. What I said was we have a situation where if anything is a matter of life and death, you know, of course the NYPD is going to intervene. But if you listened to what I said just a short while ago, we have a situation where a lot of the times kids set off fireworks and leave immediately. It's very hard to do effective enforcement. And we have a lot of other serious things the NYPD needs to focus on right now. If anyone hears fireworks and they want to complain about it, they should call 3-1-1. Absolutely. If they think something is an immediate matter of life and death, as always, call 9-1-1. I don't accept this frame of, like, you have a video of one thing that happened and that means everything is the same way. No, I just don't buy that. If any NYPD officer thinks that something needs to be intervened and that's part of their professional discretion to make that decision. But the focus right now is on dealing with serious and violent crime. That's where we need NYPD resources focused.

Question: Again, you said life and death, but I'm asking is quality of life not enough for a police officer to intervene? Is it only if it's life and death?

Mayor: No. Again, what I said is – Reuvain, you can miss my point if you want, but I'm trying to make it really clear – where there's an opportunity to act effectively and where there's a sense that there's a danger, of course, they're going to intervene. But in a lot of cases, you can't intervene if someone shoots off a firework and then they're gone. It just is a – it's not a good use of police time and energy. The way to go at this is at the root, cut off the supply, and engage parents and families telling them they have to step up here too, to help us get kids to stop doing this because it's not good for anyone and it's not safe.

Moderator: Next, we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Good morning, Mr. Mayor – on the fireworks policy, I understand there were people protesting outside Gracie Mansion, honking their horns in protest over the fireworks yesterday. Can you say if that influenced your decision at all today?

Mayor: Not in the least – obviously, Shant, this is something that was being worked on before that.

Moderator: Shant, do you have a follow up?

Question: Yeah. I mean, switching gears a little bit, I wanted to get your thoughts on voting today. It sounds like there are problems all over the city. I mean, just anecdotally I'm hearing a school in the Bronx was unable to process votes because their Wi-Fi was down. And that's just one of maybe a dozen instances I've heard of. What's your read on how voting is going. And even though the BOE is an independent agency, any thoughts on how they can do a better job?

Mayor: Shant, I have not gotten the kind of reports that allow me to give you sort of an overview yet. It's obviously early in the day, but as we get more information, we'll give it to you. Look, I think, you know, I don't think the Board of Elections should continue in his current form. I think it can't do the work the way it's constituted. We need a modern agency. I think it should be a mayoral agency like any other, but if someone's got another structure, that's great. But the way it's set up now, it just isn't effective enough. And we assume each year there will be problems at poll sites. And we assume that there will be mistakes. And I don't want that. I want us to assume that the voting will be easy and smooth and, you know, user-friendly, and that people are going to have a good experience, not brace themselves for a bad experience. So, we'll get you more information as the day progresses, but I just don't think the Board of Elections should exist in its current form. This is something that's been screaming out for reform for years, decades. I think it's time for the Legislature to act.

Moderator: Last one for today, we have Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for taking my question.

Mayor: How you doing Sydney?

Question: I'm good. How are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: Great. Yeah, just regarding the fireworks issue, I'm wondering, could you detail a little bit about the education part of this and campaign to speak to people who are using fireworks and will community-based organizations be involved in this and or neighborhood groups? I know other elected officials have talked about getting the Cure Violence groups and the Vulcan Society involved, particularly, as there's a desire from some people to reduce police enforcement in certain situations. And so could you detail how exactly and if you plan to involve community organizations, and the education, and neighborhood conversations part of this?

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you. Excellent question Sydney. Thank you, I'll start, and then our Sheriff, Joe Fucito is here. So, I'll start Sheriff, and then if you want to jump in on education or any other piece of the effort would welcome you in, but Sydney, I want to see not only the public service announcements and the social media effort that the FDNY will do. I definitely want to see the Vulcan society involved. I definitely want to see community-based organizations involved. And I definitely want to see Cure Violence Movement involved. We're asking a lot of Cure Violence Movement right now. The first thing I want, the Cure Violence Movement, the Crisis Management System to focus on is stopping shootings, which is what their origins are, the reason they exist. So that's the first and most important thing. They're also doing great work right now in terms of addressing social distancing, educating folks, giving out face coverings.

We're funding them on both those pieces, you know, additional resources to do the social distancing work, but also additional resources that we announced a couple of weeks ago to deepen the anti-violence efforts. But any time they can participate on the issue of fireworks too, I want them to. So yeah, we're going to be doing all of the above, but I think the crucial piece here is engaging families to understand they need to take as much responsibility as humanly possible with their kids, and I say that as a parent, engaging community based organizations deeply, absolutely, public information, and then the enforcement that goes at the root cause, the people making money off of this, that people are supplying the fireworks to begin with. So Chief, do you want – I'm sorry, not Chief - Sheriff, do you want to speak to the education effort, the enforcement effort, anything you want to add there, Sheriff?

Sheriff Joseph Fucito: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning, Sydney. So, let's start with the education, because that's the most important part. We want to make sure our message is out there to everyone, parents in particular, that they have to be good neighbors, setting off fireworks at night is not necessarily a good idea, especially during a pandemic. We want to get community groups involved in the education process. That's part of the spreading the message and the police department does an excellent job of doing that. The fire department does an excellent job of doing that. The Sheriff's Office will continue in that vein to try to get the message out that we have to do this as a community. As far as enforcement, as the Mayor indicated, we want to use the similar strategy that we've used with a tobacco enforcement and other types of contraband. We want to look out of state as the people that are making profit or for selling fireworks causing us grief.

So, we want to send teams into other jurisdictions to observe the sale of fireworks, gather evidence, stop and interdict the movement of fireworks into the City of New York, and also provide evidence to the City of New York that outside entities may be profiting from this type of behavior. And if necessary, maybe even institute legal actions. The City of New York has done that before in the areas of tobacco trafficking and firearms, they brought legal action against entities outside the City of New York that have caused this type of disruption within the city. So that's, that's pretty much our overall strategy at this point.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Sheriff. Go ahead, Sydney.

Question: Thank you. Thank you. And my second question, which Sheriff you were getting at just a bit, but I'm hoping you can detail what exactly a supplier means. Like a lot of these fireworks it appears are coming from outside of New York City, like you mentioned, and I'm wondering is the goal to focus on these out of state suppliers and organized groups or companies, or would a supplier also mean just one person selling them out at the back of a truck?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start and I'll pass back to the Sheriff. So you know, this is a classic situation in Sydney, we want to go after the big fish. We want to go after those who are making the biggest impact. We know there are suppliers outside of New York City where a lot of this is coming from. Again, we’re going to combine the efforts of the Sheriff's Office, which does a lot of very similar work focusing on the supply of illegal contraband coming into New York City. You've got the Fire Marshals who have a lot of investigative capacity. You've got the Police Department Intelligence Division. Anyone out there who is profiting in a big way outside of New York City and sort of the major suppliers, we're going to throw all that at them and go disrupt and work to cut off that supply. But then within the city, again, we're going to start from the biggest operations, not focused on, you know, the kid on the corner. We're focused on the people really profiting and really distributing a lot of fireworks and causing this problem for so many New Yorkers. So, Sheriff, you want to flush that out and explain that more?

Sheriff Fucito: Certainly. Sydney, so what we see, oftentimes the person selling the item out of the back of the van didn't just acquire it in a small way. They actually went to another jurisdiction and made a significant purchase, let's say $10,000 or more in some type of contraband that is illegal in New York City. So we're looking at these organizations that are selling this type of product to individuals from New York and allowing this type of problems to continue. We like to focus on those types of networks, shutting down the network is one of the best ways that we can stop the flow of contraband into the city. So that means the source product, with the source that's generating the product, and also the traffickers themselves that are moving the product, usually in some type of medium to large scale into the City of New York.

Mayor: Okay. Thanks very much Sheriff. And we'll certainly make sure if people have other questions for the Sheriff later day, we'll make him available. So, let me wrap up, we've talked about a lot of different topics today, but I want to come back to the very, very important one. The one that underlies who we are as New Yorkers, as Americans, and that is our democracy and voting. Today is Election Day, Primary Election Day, a lot of important decisions that we made today, all over the city, want to encourage everyone to participate. So, like a lot of you, I voted by mail, Chirlane and I got our absentee ballots and sent them in. A lot of people did get absentee ballots still haven't used them, you can up to midnight tonight, as long as you get it, postmarked, go to a post office. If you have your absentee ballot, you can go to any post office, drop it off there, that'll get it postmarked today. You can go to a poll site and drop off the absentee ballot or just vote in person at the poll site. If you go to your poll site, if you're not sure where your poll site is, go to nyc.pollsitelocator.com. And look, the lot of precautions have been made to make sure that voting will be safe. So, you have the option either way, get out there and vote, get your face covering if you're going to a poll site, the most important thing is make your voice heard. This is – we're dealing with some of the most unprecedented biggest challenges in the history of New York City right now, and the leaders of today and the ones who will be elected today are going to have to grapple with these challenges, not only in 2020, but for years and years to come. So choose wisely, but most importantly, cast your vote today, and that will help us all move forward. Thank you, everyone.

2020-06-25 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. There is a lot happening today at City Hall, a lot we have to get done so I'm going to keep this morning's update very brief, but the good news is there is good news today. Woke up today to some additional really positive health indicators. I'm going to keep congratulating you all the time when we have these great results, I'll go over them in a few minutes. But what it says is that New Yorkers have done a great job through phase one, into phase two, doing the right thing, and making sure that we keep everybody safe and healthy. And so, considering the success, which we have just pure data that tells us how we're doing, we continue to fight back this disease. Everyone's in this together. Given that success, it's time to talk about phase three. Now, phase three can start as early as Monday, July 6th. And right now, we are on track for phase three. That's exciting that we keep making progress. Now we've got, obviously, a ways to go until Monday, July 6th. We're going to be working closely with the State of New York to make the final decision as we get closer. But since it's all about the data, the data is telling us yes right now. So, we want to start getting people ready for it. We're going to have more guidance starting tomorrow on how businesses that can open in phase three should get ready to do so. But the good news is we're on track and it is such an important step forward that this city keeps moving. It's important for everyone. It's important for people trying to get their livelihoods back. It's important for businesses that are trying so hard to survive. It's important for the future of the city.

But phase three is going to have some particularly important meaning for our young people. And I think if you've been watching, not only these presentations over recent months, but the whole history of this administration, this administration has been devoted to young people from pre-K, 3-K, after school programs for middle school kids for free, you name it. Our focus has been on elevating young people and it's time to really help them even more because young people have been through so much. It has been such a difficult time. This coronavirus crisis has really put young people through so much strain – not being able to go to school, not being able to see their friends, trying to figure out remote learning, being cooped up all the time. We have to help our young people. We have to make this summer better for them. So, yesterday we talked about some really wonderful new things we'll be able to do this summer, more will be talked about in the coming days. But the good news is that phase three, presuming we get to it on time, Monday, July 6th, phase three will also be the time when we start up again a lot of sports and recreation activity in our parks.

So, we're on track to open up on Monday, July 6th, our basketball courts, our tennis courts, our soccer fields, our volleyball courts, our dog runs, our handball courts, and for all of you who love Italian culture, our bocce courts as well. All of that on track to open up Monday, July 6th. And that's going to be great for all New Yorkers, adults as well, but particularly for our kids who have been waiting for these outlets. That's going to be a great moment. Now, we've got work to do to get there. Let's keep on it. Because remember it's about the discipline we've shown so far, continuing to stick to the guidance. Remember the State and the City will also have guidance about how to, in each and every one of these cases, handle the situation the right way. There's still social distancing that has to be achieved in different ways, face coverings in different ways. We're going to have a lot of civilians out there, ambassadors, educating people, providing the face coverings. We know it will take hard work. We know it will take a lot of education, but we can do this and keep moving forward. And New Yorkers – one thing I can tell you from talking to so many New Yorkers is no one wants to go backwards. There's been a lot of discipline, a lot of strength because people want to keep moving forward. So, let's stick to it so we can get to phase three, make it work, and then keep going from there.

Okay. Now, what has helped us to push back this disease, well, it's the same thing that we've talked about from day one, testing, testing, testing. There's more and more testing all the time. That is helping immensely. And today I want to talk about two new wonderful partnerships that are going to help us provide a lot more testing and help us get it to the communities that have been hardest hit. First of all, CORE – Community Organized Relief Effort – this is a wonderful organization founded by Sean Penn. And I want to thank Sean and everyone at CORE for agreeing to become a part of this exciting effort with the City of New York. There will be a huge mobile testing effort up starting next week with a particular focus on our seniors all over the city. Second, SOMOS Community Care is now coming into partnership as well. I want to thank Dr. Ramon Tallaj and Dr. Henry Chen for their leadership. SOMOS includes providers in communities of color, health care providers, most of them, themselves, people of color who do extraordinary grassroots work to protect their communities. I worked with SOMOS before. They've been great partners. They've helped us out and donated a lot to help small businesses in the Bronx that needed to come back recently. Thank you to SOMOS and particularly for the fact that they will now be bringing online about 50 new – 50 new testing sites, particularly focused on pediatric clinics. So, kids, parents, families, a great place to reach people in their communities. So, these two partnerships are going to help us a lot.

Now, continuing on testing, we want everyone to get that diagnostic test. That's something that's important. We want the most people possible to get it, but we also know a lot of people want the antibody test. They want to know if they've been exposed to the disease before. That's important too. Both tests tell you something very important. We want people to get this information. We want people to engage in testing and so Health + Hospitals, the hospitals themselves, the clinics, will now be offering antibody testing for free on a much bigger scale, along with the diagnostic test. So, you get the two tests done at once for free. You get the results of the antibody test within 24 hours. A lot of people want that peace of mind – were they exposed to the disease before? Remember, it does not tell you that you don't need to keep taking precautions. It does not tell you, you can never get the disease again, but it does tell you you've had it, you fought your way through it. That's really helpful and reassuring to people. We want folks to know that. So, go out there, get tested. You'll be able now to get both tests at Health + Hospitals facilities both at the same time, both for free. And to find out where, go to nyc.gov/covidtest.

Now to our indicators. And again, I said at the beginning, good news. Well, you have earned this once again. Let's go to daily – number one daily indicator is the number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold of 200, today's report is 60. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, the threshold is 375, today's report is 329. And this is my favorite always because it tells us the most – the number of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent, once again, today only two percent. That's been extraordinarily stable. That says you are doing something right. Let's keep doing that. A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that on the phone we have Parks Commissioner Silver, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Long, and Senior Advisor Varma. With that, I will start with Jillian from WBAI.

Question: Morning. Mr. Mayor – sorry [inaudible] –

Mayor: Hi, Jillian. How are you?

Question: I'm all right. How are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: So, my first question has to do with the restaurant plan and since you're talking about phase three, I wanted to ask because residents in some of the more bar and restaurant friendly, more dense neighborhoods like the Lower East side or Hell's Kitchen were having problems before the pandemic with illegal sidewalk cafes, crowds in front of restaurants, obstructing sidewalks, noise violations, things like that. And they reported that they essentially got nowhere with City agencies – DCA, DEP, the NYPD, community boards. And I understand the need to reopen, of course, but are there concerns about self-certification, which has a dubious record already, and the sense of kind of abdicating control to BIDs? And what are you going to do to kind of prevent a free for all, which is kind of how it was described beforehand and make sure that people are following the law and obeying the rules?

Mayor: I appreciate it, Jillian. It's an important question. Look, I do think your question is very important because clearly – look, I heard from communities, plenty, about before the pandemic about noise, about crowds. These are real issues. It's part of why we started a nightlife office. And what I found was our nightlife office actually made a real big impact, not perfect by any stretch. It made a big impact working with bar owners, nightclub owners, restaurant owners working with a bunch of agencies, working with communities to try and strike the right balance. And Ariel Palitz and her team there, I think, have really done extraordinary work. And they'll be right in the middle of addressing these issues now. But I think the self-certification was absolutely the right thing to do in this context. Julian, you're right. Self-certification as a broad concept over recent years, different parts of government, there's some real issues there and you have to be really careful when you allow it. In the middle of a pandemic when restaurants are trying to survive and we're trying to revive the economy, give people back their jobs – absolutely the right thing to do. When I was up at Melba’s restaurant in Harlem, and she said she could do the form in five minutes and get her restaurant back up and bring people back to work, that was music to my ears. But we will have civilian agencies out there, educating, making sure people can move, that there's not too much crowding, addressing noise issues. We don't want to do fines and other enforcement in the first instance, if we can solve the problem. But if we have to, of course, we reserve that right. Go ahead, Jillian.

Question: Okay. Well, I would like to ask about the nightlife organization, but not today because I didn't prepare myself for it so –

Mayor: You’ll get another chance.

Question: Thank you. You've talked often including Tuesday about how the city's recovery can't be just doing business as usual and for the need to change the status quo. But many people have pointed to your own advisory councils, the appointees, as a lot of permanent government types, especially the real estate and construction council, which kind of contradicts this challenging of the status quo. There are no, I believe, new kinds of stakeholders like reservationists, independent planners, or affordable housing advocates who aren't also developers. Isn’t this the perfect opportunity to kind of shake things up?

Mayor: Yeah, I think that's a very fair point, Jillian. And I'm going to ask my colleagues who are working on this, like Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, to take that point to heart and see if we need to add people. Look, I think the immediate issue, we have different groups we put together here. The advisory councils of course are part of the long term, but really the first thing we said at the time, the first thing with those sector advisory councils, was getting back up and running and figuring out the restart. And I think the people on those advisory councils were well chosen for that purpose. But I think you make a great point. If we have to think beyond the immediate restart to the recovery and changing the status quo, are there voices we need to bring in who are not yet present? Very fair points. So, we're going to look at that and see how we can improve upon that. The other entities, which are working intensely on the process of change, the internal task force on racial inclusion and equity, obviously, is a great example. We've announced there's going to be a commission on racial justice and reconciliation. These entities are obviously focusing on immediate change and long term change. So, there's more than one venue playing out here, to say the least, but I think your point is well taken and we'll work to add other folks to those advisory councils.

Moderator: Next we have Dave Evans from ABC-7.

Question: Hey, Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah. Dave, how you doing? You got a good phone today, Dave?

Question: Well, I do. I'm not moving around that. You know, that makes a difference.

Mayor: This was about to turn into a running joke. So, let's have this be your great moment here.

Question: Thanks. I wasn't with you yesterday because I was doing some election follow stories, so, you may have gone over this yesterday, but I wanted to see when you talk about the 22,000 people who would have to be laid off, is that a given since we really can't, you know, have you go to Washington or to Albany and get something done by the deadline? And why can't this be delayed? Why do you have to do this? I know what the law is, but don't we have some extenuating circumstances here?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a fair question, Dave. We do have extenuating circumstances, but we don't have a change in the law. And remember the City of New York for decades, you know, coming out of the really bad, old days of the past in the 70s when our financial house was not in order, one of the things that has marked the effectiveness and the strength of the City New York is doing on-time budget. It is a law, we're going to stick to it. But that said, look, our goal in the budget – let me make sure I'm a hundred percent clear about the goal here – the goal is always because we're in a pandemic, because we're in an economic crisis, a health care crisis, it is, first of all, to protect people's health. Second, safety. Third, keep a roof over their heads. Fourth, keep food on their table. These are the things that we're focused on singularly. And that's the way we have to make these decisions in the budget. But we also have to balance a budget. And you're absolutely right, we thought there'd be a stimulus by now. It hasn't happened. Obviously Albany right now, our fear is that the State government will be cutting us further, not sending us aid. The one big open question is the potential for long term borrowing. We're still working on that as we speak with the legislature. But Dave, look, I hate having to talk about furloughs and layoffs. It's against everything I believe. The reality is we are running out of money. There's just no way in hell we're going to get a lot of new revenue immediately. So we're at the point where we have to – we have to deal with reality, but we would do it with a time delay.

So what I said is if we don't get help very quickly in terms of long term borrowing from Albany, we will have to put into this budget, the layoff of 22,000 City workers, an astounding number, a very troubling number. Every agency will experience layoffs. A lot of people will lose their livelihood. I don't want to see that, a lot of City services we depend on will be gone. But we would have no choice unless some immediate help comes. We would time that for the fall, so that if stimulus money came in the meantime, we could do something with that. But if it doesn't come, there's no guarantee of the stimulus at this point. If it doesn't come, we would then have to activate that. Go ahead, Dave.

Question: Okay. And then my second question is related to the Shepherd Counseling program that you were so pleased with earlier. Is that a given that those people are cut now or can they hold on until October also?

Mayor: That is a specific situation. I'm someone who – you mean Single Shepherd, Dave, is that what you're saying?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: Yeah. That's a program I initiated and really had high hopes for and you know, great, great people. I've met some of the people doing this work, and they've done – they put their heart and soul into helping kids. It was built as a very intensive program, a lot of investment. We saw mixed results is the honest truth. We're keeping a piece of it in place. So a substantial part of that program will continue, but not all of it. Just because we're at a point where again, if we're talking about layoffs and furloughs, we had to make a lot of tough choices already. The billions of dollars we had to cut already back in April. And this was a program that just, we couldn't keep going at the same level. So that's happening as part of the immediate budget.

Moderator: Next we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing this morning?

Mayor: Good Marcia. How you doing?

Question: Okay. I have another budget question. So the unions are obviously not pleased with your statement that you may have to lay off 22,000 people. And they say it's political saber rattling, and that you can do it with various agency cuts and other things. What's your response to that?

Mayor: Marcia, we did over $2 billion in cuts to agencies in April. As I said yesterday, we're in the middle of doing another billion in cuts to agencies right now, before you even talk about the personnel costs. And we had cut before that in previous PEG programs and savings programs. We've been cutting agencies constantly. So no, I don't think that's the truth. And I – look, I respect the labor movement deeply. I've worked very closely with our municipal unions. The last thing I want to do is layoffs and furloughs. But people have to get honest about where we're at.

Marcia, I talked about it yesterday. This budget is $8 billion less than the one we announced in February. That's a massive drop in the budget. And we're facing potential State cuts. And we're facing potential revenue losses in the future. And the following fiscal year, Fiscal 22, we have about a $5 billion deficit right now with no way to close it. This is a really, really tough situation. 1.3 million New Yorkers have lost their jobs since February. This is not business as usual. So it's the last thing I want to do. But I need long term borrowing authority from Albany if I'm going to get out of this immediate problem for Tuesday, which is our budget deadline. And then we need stimulus help from Washington if we're going to solve these bigger problems I just talked about. Because there's no new revenue coming. So we're really in a jam and it's important for New Yorkers to hear just how blunt and real this problem is. Go ahead, Marcia.

Question: So I guess the question is this. If you had to cut 22,000 jobs, where would the axe fall?

Mayor: Every agency, when you're talking about that number, literally every agency. And I hate saying that. I'm not saying that with anything but pain. It's a big chunk of our workforce. It would have to be, every agency would have to find a way – and I hate it because what it means for those families who will lose their livelihood. I hate it, what it means in terms of the services that won't be provided anymore. But again, Washington has just absolutely dropped the ball. The President's never lifted a finger for the stimulus. The Senate Majority Leader won't even put it on the calendar. So, you know, they've made it very clear, they don't care what happens to cities and states all over the country, right now. Including their own cities and states. And we've been asking for the long term borrowing from Albany to get us through this as was given to the City after 9/11. And we still haven't gotten an answer and we need that help now.

Moderator: Next we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering if you can speak to, with all the spikes we're seeing in virus cases in other states, what exactly – and if you can be as specific as possible and maybe some of the public health people can chime in. What exactly do we think is going to prevent that from happening here again? And I understand that some other states have, you know, moved much more quickly and perhaps recklessly to open, but you also have states like California which tried to take the cautious approach, seeing the huge spike. So why are you so confident that that's not going to happen here? And we're going to be able to go to phase three and everything's going to keep working out?

Mayor: Yeah, Erin, I'll start. And then Dr. Jay Varma and Dr. Ted Long certainly should jump in with anything they want to add. It's a great question Erin. None of us is falsely confident here. I have been very cautious, you know. I have openly said on this one, I've been conservative. Which is why, you know, many, many times questions from the media, concerns from elected officials, everyone saying go faster, faster. And I've been the person saying not until we have proof that we can handle it. And I even hesitated in terms of the decision on phase two, until we had enough of a body of evidence that phase one had not created a huge uptick. And I've been very pleased by that Erin. The fact that phase one, hundreds of thousands of people come back to work, in contact with their customers. I mean, that was a big sea change moment. And we've seen almost no thank God, knocking on wood, almost no impact on our indicators. So right now the data keeps saying that we're doing right. But I think the important part is to constantly provide education, to constantly provide the free face coverings, to keep people tight and disciplined because we're not out of the woods. So am I a hundred percent confident? Of course not. Do I believe that these approaches are the right approaches? Yes. Do I believe they're sustainable? We also have the Test and Trace Corp, on a huge scale. No place else has that Erin. And that's a big, positive X factor. So we're going to watch every day. If we ever don't like what we see to the point that we need to freeze or even go backwards in terms of the phases, we would do that working with the State. But right now I think we have the right tools to keep moving forward. Doctors you want to add?

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Mr. Mayor, this is Ted. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Executive Director Long: [Inaudible]

Mayor: You got – wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. Jay – Jay and Ted are talking the same time. Jay, you start then Ted.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Yeah. I just wanted to emphasize that I think the points that you made, that there are no guarantees that we can keep this infection out. So we have to be vigilant at all times. I think the strategies that we have, we tend to think of as, you know, the defensive strategies that we need to keep. So that's everybody wearing a mask, maintaining social distancing, limiting gatherings on the one hand. And then the second is of course our offensive strategy, which Dr. Long can describe in more detail, which is test and trace. And we need to keep in mind that one of the challenges for New York back in February was that we didn't have universal testing. So we didn't really have a clear window into what was happening at any given time. And that has changed dramatically [inaudible] that we have are now much more useful and precise than they were at previous times.

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead, Ted.

Executive Director Long: Thank you. Erin, that's a great question. And what gives me confidence and faith is that since over the first three weeks of starting to Test and Trace Corp, last week alone, 86 percent of our newly diagnosed people with coronavirus felt comfortable enough and already trusted in our program enough to share with us contacts that they may have exposed. And we reached 650 contacts, that by the time we talked to them, they were already symptomatic. And if they would have gone out there and infected three or four other New Yorkers each, our program already, as Jay said, something we didn't have before, has already prevented potentially 2,000 new cases of coronavirus. This is a powerful tool we have in our tool belt now, and we're going to leverage it to the maximum extent. And that's what gives me faith and confidence.

Mayor: Thank you, Erin. Did you have follow-up?

Question: Yes. I'm just wondering, you said that the enforcement for the social distancing protocols in phase two, the outdoor dining in particular would be based on complaints. Do you have any numbers on how many complaints there have been and has there been any enforcement action?

Mayor: I don't have that in front of me, Erin. We will get that to you today, for sure. I mean, I know that the response from the restaurant industry – I think we're now around 5,000 or more applications – so, that's been great. I know a lot of people in communities are happy to have restaurants back, but we'll get you what we see in terms of complaints and any enforcement needed. And again, the first option is always going to be education, resolve the problem. We don't want to give fines. We don't want to do anything draconian when people are in the middle of a horrible crisis and businesses are struggling to survive. But, if we have to, we certainly will.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How are you?

Question: I'm fine. Thank you. My question involves baseball, starting up next week. Spring training will be here for the first time in Queens and the Bronx. Do you know whether fans will be able to attend spring training or exhibition games or any official game once the season gets started?

Mayor: Juliet, first of all, I think it's fantastic that baseball's coming back. And I'm a massive baseball fan, and it's something, I think, will be a great relief to a lot of people – and all the other sports coming back. Everyone needs this, because we've been through so much. But my strong understanding is that it will be with no spectators, whether it's the spring training exhibition or the regular season games. Of course, that could evolve. But, right now, based on everything I'm seeing at the City level and the State level, it would be with no spectators at all.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. I appreciate being called upon.

Mayor: Hey, Henry.

Question: Phase three also involves indoor dining, and you didn't mention that as one of the activities that would resume. What's the story with that? Is that also going to be included? And if not, why not?

Mayor: Yes, it will be. So, indoor dining at 50 percent capacity. Tomorrow, I'll talk about the whole list of activities that will be allowable under phase three. I did not go over at all today on purpose, Henry. Today, I'm announcing one specific piece, which I know you've been interested in and a lot of other people – when are those sports activities in parks going to be allowed again? When are the basketball hoops going back up and the soccer nets and the tennis nets? So, again, based on the data we have now, and assuming we stay the course and stick with it, that will all be starting Monday, July 6th. It'll take some days to get everything back up and running, obviously, but the goal is Monday, July 6th. But there's a lot of other things that will happen in phase three, including the beginning or partial indoor dining. So, tomorrow, I'll start to outline what those pieces are and how we're getting businesses and the city ready for them. But, you know, again, so far so good. And it's exciting that we can now talk about this and get ready for it. Go ahead, Henry.

Question: Okay. Thank you. And this is – my second question has to do with the budget. The Citizens Budget Commission says that, on average, about 22,000 employees turn over every year, including a lot of employees in the Police Department, which, as you know, the personnel is very expensive, including the fringe benefits, and given the fact that thousands are [inaudible] every year, doesn't that make the task of cutting the workforce a lot less daunting, and isn't that a way to save a lot of money? And the Citizen's Budget Commission also has several other recommendations. They're not particularly austere or ideological, but they have to do with the ways that the City could save money without cutting the Police Department by a billion dollars and without really significantly cutting services –

Mayor: Henry –

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Go ahead, I'm sorry. Did you have more to that? I'm sorry.

Question: Well, I was going to talk about consolidating some of the welfare funds so that each union doesn't have their own welfare fund and various other ways of consolidating, you know, procurement so that you can take advantage of, you know, purchasing in large numbers, savings like that that really don't go to cutting essential services.

Mayor: I appreciate the question a lot. So, first of all, this is what – you know, the Office of Management and Budget all day long is looking for savings. As I said, in the last – just in April, over $2 billion in agency cuts and savings, another billion happening right now, before you even talk about the probability of layoffs or furloughs. So, that's a constant effort. Citizens Budget Commission, we've talked to them and looked at their recommendations. Some are more viable than others. Some make more sense than others. I don't know if I'd always say they're not about an austerity vision, because I disagree with the austerity concept. I think whenever possible, investing in our communities, investing in city services, investing in our workforce is the smart thing to do for the future of the city. But, right now, we're up against something like we'd never seen before. This is literally a crisis on a magnitude that could be the worst crisis New York City has ever faced health care crisis, economic crisis, a crisis in terms of racial justice issues, a crisis in terms of our budget. I mean, everything's happening simultaneously and we have to make sense of this in a way we've just never encountered before. So, Henry, I think to the essence of your question, will we look at any and all potential savings? Absolutely. Will we look at things that have never been done before? Absolutely. You know, you make a good point that maybe some things could be consolidated, maybe there were turf issues in the past that could be overcome. We should look at all of that. But, in the end, of course we understand attrition is something – if you use attrition, yes, you are saving money, you are losing the service, you're you losing the impact on people. You can't reach people and help them if that job is not filled, just like if there's a layoff or a furlough. But the problem is the sheer magnitude here. The budget is $8 billion smaller than it was in February, this year, and it's only going to get worse. I told you for the next filing – the following fiscal year, Fiscal ‘22, there's an over $5 billion deficit right now and no way to fill it, and the likelihood of State cuts. So, we're in the great unknown, Henry. And, unfortunately, unless we get borrowing authority from Albany quickly, unless we get a stimulus, a substantial stimulus from Washington, the only direction we go in is to keep cutting – and I hate that, and I don't want to do it, but I have to be honest with the people of New York City. We have to be prepared to do that. It's a last resort, but it's just the reality we're facing right now.

Mayor: Okay. Did Henry get his two?

Moderator: Yes.

Mayor: Thank you. That is a sober note, obviously, and a real challenge what I just said, and it's, again, unprecedented. But let me end on what I think is the, not only the hopeful note, but the underlying truth here, which is what all New Yorkers have done. We've been through a lot of pain, a lot of families are suffering right now. A lot of challenges, many more to come. This will be a multi-year challenge, but we are coming back right now as we speak. Right this minute, New York City is coming back and New York City is incredibly resilient. People did a great job with phase one. They're doing a great job with phase two. We actually now can talk about phase three, beginning on Monday, July 6th. I’ve got to tell you, if you asked me a month ago, did I think we could move this quickly? I was dubious. But you have done it. New Yorkers, you have done it. You've been tough. You've been strong. You've been disciplined. You're bringing us forward. Keep to it, because if we ever want to keep going from one phase to the next, to the next, and we want to keep making that progress, it depends on you.

Thank you for all you're doing. Keep going.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: All right. Good morning, everybody. We had a little bit of technical problems here at City Hall over the last few minutes, but we are back. So, good morning to all. So, you know that thing where people say to you, I've got good news and bad news, which one do you want first? So, I am always, always the kind of person who would rather hear the bad news first and get it out of the way. So, I'm going to first give you the more difficult updates and then we're going to go into some really good news. So, let me talk to you about the reality that we're facing right now in the midst of this massive economic crisis. So many people have lost their jobs. So many people have lost their livelihoods. And, of course, on top of that, a huge negative impact on the City's finances and the City budget and what that means for all of us. For our ability to provide services and support to New Yorkers, which we do every single year, but this year has taken on, to say the least, added meaning. So many people need so much more help. Many more people need healthcare support. Many more people need help with food. There's so many things that have gotten amplified, and that's the focus of our city budget now because we're in a crisis, so it's a crisis budget. The focus is on health. It's on safety. It's on food. It's on shelter. Those four things are the essence of what we are doing.

You know, now we are serving for example, every single day, 1.5 million meals for free to New Yorkers who need them. And we're talking about a lot of people who just weeks ago, had a job and were doing fine and never thought they would need free meals, but now they do. Got over 2 million people in this city now who need food support. That's just one example, but everything's about those four key needs. Health, safety, food shelter. That's what the budget's about. But here's the problem. Since February, the city of New York has lost $9 billion in revenue and you can see why, the economy is obviously so, so troubled right now. So much what we depend on for people's livelihood, also is where we get our revenue. It's not there now. $9 billion gone. So, what have we done? In April, we cut two point $7 billion from city agencies. It wasn't easy. It wasn't fun. We had to do it. $2.7 billion, then another billion is being cut right now, but that still leaves a short. And the places that we had hoped to get help from, we still haven't gotten the help yet. There's no stimulus from Washington.

We're still working on a borrowing plan with Albany, a lot of conversations going on, working hard there, but we don't have anything yet to tide us over. And we're still another billion dollars short. And what I announced this week, I hate to have to say this, but if we cannot close that billion-dollar gap, then we're talking about laying off up to 22,000 City employees, a staggering number – 22,000 city employees. That’s 22,000 families and their livelihood. 22,000 people who serve us, who make the city run. We have not seen City layoffs of that level since the 1970’s fiscal crisis. I hope we never see them, but right now we have to fill that budget gap. We're working with labor. We're looking for alternatives, but if they can't find the resources, those layoffs have to be in on October 1st. So, I've had extensive conversations with the State Legislature, with the leadership, with a number of members, we're working on a plan. We've heard really important feedback from the state legislature. We changed our plan – originally asked for $7 billion in borrowing. Now, it's $5 billion over two years, specifically $3 billion for the coming fiscal year, $2 billion for the year after that. We hope to borrow none, if we actually got the kind of federal stimulus support we deserve. Maybe that will come, but we need the fallback of borrowing. We will have a monitoring process from the financial control board. That's what we propose to look at the proposed borrowing comment on it before we make decisions, give us feedback, but still respect the City's ability and right to determine its own budget and the needs of our people. And one thing, a lot of the State Senators and State Assembly Members asked about, need to know that will not be a property tax rate increase. And I can tell you there will not be. So, those are the things we've talked about with our colleagues in Albany. I want to thank Speaker Cory Johnson for his statement yesterday, supporting the borrowing vision. We are all united in wanting to find a way to avert those layoffs and keep the city moving forward, and actually make sure we can have a recovery. So, that's the focus right now.

So, that's one thing that's tough. I want to tell you about the other thing I'm really worried about is the problem of evictions. So, the fact is so many people are hurting. So many people just don't have money for rent. Keeping a roof over people's head is crucial right now. Now, the state of New York had an eviction moratorium in place. They've started to relax that. I'm concerned about that. I do want to say that the office of court administration has stepped in and made sure that evictions are going to be handled very carefully because we cannot have, here's the bottom line. Anyone who can't afford to pay the rent, because we're in the middle of a crisis, they lost their job because of the coronavirus. The economy has been shot. They don't have money to pay the rent. Anyone who can't pay the rent should not be evicted, period. Let's be clear, we've got to be honest about the extent of this crisis. So, I think what the state should do is make clear that those who can't pay the rent should be given a grace period, should be given the ability to have a payment plan, should be given a whole year to catch up and pay whatever rent they owe when they finally have a livelihood again, but not until they have a livelihood. You can't ask people to create money they don't have. We need the federal government to step in, because that would be another solution. Give people rental support, help, avoid foreclosures. All of the things that the federal government could do as part of the stimulus to keep people whole. So, look, if you cannot pay the rent, we got to make sure you have a roof over your head. You should not be evicted. If you can pay the rent, of course you should pay the rent, because you know what? The building owners need to keep the buildings up. They need to pay bills too. A lot of them are struggling as well. So, we need the state to act, to give people that ability to make it through this crisis. And I'm going to keep working on that with our colleagues at the state level.

Okay. Those were the challenging pieces today. Let's talk about good news now. Phase three to the restart. We're looking good again. Good indicators this morning. I'll go over them again in a moment. Phase three, we are on track from Monday, July six, and that's exciting. It means more people coming back to work, more businesses coming alive. 50,000 workers is our initial estimate of how many will come back. And these are businesses that a lot of people care about. They are everyday businesses in your neighborhoods that really help you take care of yourself. Of course, nail salons, spas, so many things that people care about and have missed. Those are coming back, and for restaurants so much a part of who we are as New Yorkers, our culture identity [inaudible] restaurants will come back with indoor dining at 50 percent capacity, and that's going to be on top of the outdoor dining, a great boon to the restaurants. There'll be safety precautions in place, distancing, face coverings, but they'll be able to come back. Now, we have to help businesses come back. We've been doing it in phase one, we've been doing it in phase two. We're going to keep doing it. Here to tell you about it, our small business services commissioner, Commissioner Jonnel Doris.

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Thank you, sir. Since reopening I've had the opportunity to be at every business corridor in all five boroughs. And what we see is a sense of optimism, a sense of excitement from our business owners. I was up in Washington Heights just yesterday speaking with barbershops and salons. One particular— salon zoo salon, she told me about 10 years as she's been there and was excited about the opportunity of phase three because only half of her business was operational— at the time. So now she can actually engage with the massage part of our business, the nails part of our business. And we able to provide the services she's been providing that community for some time. And so that's what we're seeing, that's what we're hearing about the businesses who are ready to go, who are excited. Also, as we walk these corridors, a new door lane in Staten Island, you see our posters in the windows, you see the flyers, the educational materials we've distributed. We walk into the stores, we hear from the businesses, thank you for the PPE that you've given to us, we're giving it to our customers, we're giving it to our employees. Look, we are excited about phase three on every other phase to come after that, I think our businesses are ready to do what they've been waiting to do for several months.

So, what are we going to do? We're going to continue to help them, we're going to continue to provide the face coverings that they need. We've already distributed 5 million of those face coverings and we will continue to do so by adding 2.5 million more face coverings to our small businesses. So, that will bring us a total of about 7 million of those phase coverings. We are also going to continue to show that we have the resources available to our small businesses with our marketplace online marketplace. You can get PPE or from our online marketplace, if you need it for the restaurant, the Open Restaurant Program— or just a regular face covering that you may need. We're also going to be able to continue to provide services from our hotline by the way, we've got 17,000 calls to that hotline already, and we were able to help our small businesses. 70 percent of those calls are about reopening and the rest about PPE and financial services that they need.

So, look, we're continuing to help you. If you are a small business owner, our hotline is, you know, is 888-SBS-4NYC. We're here to help you and we look forward to helping every small business as we can. We have 230,000 small businesses in the city, and we want to make sure all of them come back and all of them do well.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you so much, Jonnel. Excellent report and thank you. 17,000 calls, that's a lot of calls and thank you for all that you and your colleagues are doing to help small business. And one of the greatest boons to small business lately has been the open restaurant initiative as of this morning, 5,500 plus applications to open up that outdoor dining, it's been a great success. We're going to go farther with having outdoor dining on open streets and here to tell you about it, our Department of Transportation, Commissioner Polly Trottenberg.

Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, Department of Transportation: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And you can see from the slides, we're going to be opening up an application process on Monday, and we've already heard interest from a lot of BIDs and community-based organizations to allow restaurants to take an entire block. And it will enable them to have to expand further into the street, they need to do it safely with good setups, and obviously we will want to work with PD and FDNY to ensure emergency vehicles have access, but we think this will – this will give yet another chance for restaurants to get even more outdoor space. And we've already again, heard a lot of interest from a group of partners we do our weekend walks with. We're hoping we'll get that first group up and running before on July 4th and the next group a couple of weeks later.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Commissioner. And then, you know, another big milestone that we are now coming up as today, the last day of school and what a difficult challenging school year it's been, but our kids have come through with flying colors. Look at the beautiful kids there on the slide, you're seeing on your screen. You know, our kids have been asked to do something very, very difficult and stay focused this year, despite this crisis do the online learning. Our educators been amazing, our parents. I want to thank everyone, I want to thank everyone for finding their way through the school year, finding a way to keep educating our kids helping to support our kids to those who are graduating. The graduating seniors’ class of 2020, Congratulations to you. This is a triumphant moment, you have fought your way through, you have done some things that no other class have been asked to do before, and you've done it with a lot of perseverance, a lot of strength. We honor you for that, and we're going to have a great celebration of you, the virtual graduation next Tuesday, Tuesday, June 30th at 7:00 PM. I want to thank our colleagues at WPIX for broadcasting it live, and you can see it online NYCclassof2020.com.

Okay, let's go to our daily indicators. First indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 today's report 61. And then number two, daily number of people in health and hospitals ICUs, the threshold is 375 today's report, 312. And finally, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19 threshold of 15%, and once again, today coming in at 2%, congratulations, New York City, we are holding the line. Let's keep doing it.

Now, a few words in Spanish to conclude.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all, just a reminder that we have Sheriff Fucito, Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg and Small Business Commissioner Doris – sorry, excuse me. Sheriff Fucito is on the phone, in person we have Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg, and Small Business Commissioner Doris. And also, on the phone we have Senior Advisor, Dr. Varma. With that, I will start with Marla from WCBS 880.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, you talked about the bad news of the city facing this giant budget deficit and the need for federal stimulus money. But this morning we saw a tweet from the President who is anger that the City will be painting the words Black Lives Matter outside of Trump Tower. Is that a good decision given that you really need the President's help on this stimulus?

Mayor: Marla, the President's been missing an action on the stimulus. I have spoken to him about it multiple times, I have appealed to him publicly, I have appealed to Senator McConnell. The Republicans are not moving. Let's be clear, I spoke to Senator Schumer about this recently, Donald Trump has not said a word in favor of a stimulus that would truly help cities and states. Senator McConnell has not scheduled a vote, let's get real here. They know there's a crisis, it's gotten worse. In fact, the coronavirus is surging around the country, they're doing nothing. They are choosing to do nothing. So, painting Black Lives Matter outside his home is a message to him that Black lives in fact do matter that black people-built New York City, that they never have been compensated for all they did. That all the mistakes, the sins, everything in American history that has afflicted black people have not been accounted for and must be accounted for something he does not understand. So, it is right to take the eyes of the world, the attention of the world right there on Fifth Avenue and focus on Black Lives Matter. I think it has no bearing on the stimulus because he's done absolutely nothing about the stimulus either way.

Do you have a follow-up?

Question: No, I, at this time I don't.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Luis from New York [inaudible].

Question: Hey there. Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: I'm doing great Luis. How are you?

Question: I’m pretty good. The Archdiocese of Brooklyn has stated that mass can begin at its churches on June 29th, of course, at limited capacity. And I imagine the Archdiocese of New York, might soon follow suit, considering how you've in some way, participated in a number of faith-based events over the past two weekends, might you be attending a mass sometime in the near future?

Mayor: Luis, thank you for the question. Look, I really want to thank Cardinal Dolan and Bishop DiMarzio and all the religious leaders of this city who made clear to their congregants, how important it was to hold back from services during the worst of this crisis. The religious leaders, the faith leaders of this city have actually been heroes and unsung heroes in too many cases, helping to make some of the toughest decisions, but all about the health and safety of their congregants and they did the right thing. And I'm glad that they're finally getting a chance to bring people back, but as you said, the right way with capacity. I'll absolutely be going out. As time allows, I look forward to returning to faith services and joining with people, but the important thing is we all have to do it, the safe and smart way.

Question: That's great to hear. My next question is a sort of a sticky one. For phase four, Governor Cuomo stated that houses of worship would be allowed a capacity increased from 25 percent to 33 percent and group gatherings would go up from 25 percent to 50 percent, yet repeatedly – repeatedly one sees the 50 percent capacity guideline over and over again for the sake of social distancing adherence. It's mighty hard for the economy to improve under the constraints of 5 percent% capacity rules. My question is this, does anyone know what lies beyond phase four where that's concerned? I mean, if we're able to get onto the subways, which eventually will be packed once again, then, you know?

Mayor: Yeah. Luis, it's a really good question. So, first of all, it's a big open question what happens after phase four. And I want to emphasize we are not yet to phase three. We have to get there to smart way, which is based on the data. Today the indicators look great, but we still have, you know, quite a while until July 6th, so knock on wood and everyone keep doing the right thing here. But then phase four, you know, that's a whole other ball game. We have to really be careful about the decisions around that. I'm worried about what I see around the country. That's not comforting to see this disease making such a strong surge around the country. So, it's going to be about health and safety first and we're going to be smart and we're going be cautious.

I don't know if I agree with you on the subways. I think there'll be increased ridership steadily. I don't think it's going to go anywhere back to the levels we saw in February for a while. I think eventually it will, but that's probably more when you see more progress on the disease. So, I think it's going to be a day-by-day thing, Luis. I do believe New Yorkers are being smart and careful. This is the number one thing as I've been reading about what's happening around the country; one of the biggest factors the public health folks point to is the level of buy-in by the local population, understanding the crisis, taking it seriously, doing the right thing. New Yorkers have been outstanding and that, that's the thing that keeps me hopeful.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Mr. Mayor when, when Commissioner Shea, disbanded the Anti-crime Unit you went on CNN and you said of that unit that it was “particularly aggressive” and also that it was, “exacerbating some of the tensions between police and community”. So, I'm wondering what led you to form that assessment of the unit? When did you form it and why hadn't you said anything publicly previously about those concerns until after it was disbanded?

Mayor: Yeah, Yoav, it's been an ongoing discussion. Look, I had heard concerns in the community. I also know those officers did a lot to get guns off the streets. It was a balance that needed to be considered at all times, but really the commissioner came to me and said, look, I think that we can do this in a better way. We can fight crime in a more modern way using technology, using precision policing and not have the negative of some of the concerns that have been raised by the community. So, it's something that evolved over time, but I am convinced that the decision the commissioner made is a very good decision for this city and will help us move forward.

Question: Thank you. I also wanted to ask you about the announcement. I think it was last week that any incidents between police and civilians that, that lead to “substantial injury to a civilian” will be investigated in two weeks. I just wanted to see how formally are you defining substantial? You know, is that a concussion, a broken bone? What are the parameters and is it being applied to some of the injuries of the protesters that would be retroactive? Or is it just going forward from the date of the announcement?

Mayor: Look, obviously it was from the day of the announcement, Yoav, but I want to see a very fast follow-up on any outstanding issues from recent protests. We know a number of officers were suspended or modified and there will be additional disciplinary proceedings. There are still issues being looked at for sure by Internal Affairs Bureau as well as the different outside investigations. But the important point and you saw it on Sunday; I think Sunday was a signature moment that deserves being recognized. An officer did the wrong thing, using the chokehold – another officer intervened made him stop. The Commissioner within hours announced that suspension. That's the way things need to be – fast, clear disciplinary process, clear accountability. That's what we'll do going forward.

Moderator: Next we have Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I had a question about schools; the Comptroller criticized the lack, or what he called the lack of a plan or roadmap for a re-opening of schools. So, I'm wondering if you could touch on this issue again. What are the plans for re-opening schools? Do you think schools are going to be opened in September? And I have a follow up question.

Mayor: Sure, Jeff, I think I've been clear, the Chancellor's been clear; we've put out a lot of written material. We've talked about it here. We want as many kids in their classrooms as possible on September 10th. We still have quite a ways to go – well over two months until then and everything's going to be about health and safety. That is the first consideration. Now looking at our testing numbers, it's really encouraging; looking at how much more testing is available, really encouraging. I think there's a lot of teachers, educators, a lot of parents who want to get their kids back. So, the maximum number of kids who can be in school that is a goal. Some schools can do that much more easily than others because of the number of kids they have. And we have to be flexible, Jeff, and this is the unsatisfying but truthful answer; I can't tell you what's going to happen in two months. I can tell you, plan-A is the maximum number of kids in schools. We're going to also keep a distance learning capacity because some parents won't be ready yet. And if the disease situation gets better, more and more kids in schools, God forbid it gets worse, more and more kids on distance learning. But we are, right now, retrofitting the schools so they will be ready to handle the maximum number of kids in-person September 10th.

Question: And do you know if what – you know, can you talk a little bit more about how you specifically plan to do that? Or, are we talking about staggered schedules, afternoon classes, weekend classes? And, you know, have you had any discussions with the teacher's union? Is this going to cost the City more money if you, kind of, go to some of these more inventive schedules? You know, where are you at in terms of determining any of that?

Mayor: Many, many conversations with the teacher's union and with the union represents administrators – constant dialogue. We're looking at all the options, because we're dealing with a huge amount of unknown and something that's over two months away. But I think the simplest way to think about it is that most educators want to come back, most parents want their kids to come back. We're planning on that assumption. Of course, we have to have options, not only different levels of remote learning, depending on the disease, but we have to have options where there are schools. For example, a school that was overcrowded back in February, by definition, cannot put six feet between kids. So, they can only handle a certain amount of their kids at a given time. So, we're working out schedules to work for those schools. Some other schools are not overcrowded, they can do it more easily. We're taking gym space, auditorium space, whatever it takes to use as classroom space. Look, we're still in a crisis, we're in a crisis footing. So, we're going to use every available space, set up for the maximum number of kids, be ready for staggering, where it's needed. I don't think there's so much talk about weekend, but we're going to look at, of course, anything and everything as we get closer. We'll come back to you on the budget ramifications, can't speak to that yet. That's still being looked at. But what we do know is, it's constant dialogue with the folks involved and serving parents to hear what they want. So, employees and parents, and we're going to get there. We're going to get there. We're going to make it work. We'll adjust according to health dynamics. And one day, there's going to be a vaccine, and I think that's the day when you're going to see things go back a hundred percent to every kid in the classroom as normal.

Moderator: Next, we have Debralee from Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone.

Mayor: Good morning. How are you doing?

Question: I'm well, thank you. I wanted to follow up and ask you, I know that, you know, given the fiscal – dire situation, the City is facing the conversation is centered largely around cuts. But I wonder if you could return to the topic of SYP, particularly as reopening has commenced and it seems to be on track to, to be successful. You've got nonprofit organizations and businesses, private businesses, already having to reimagine and meet the challenge of all that this entails. Wouldn't it be the moment to look at SYP now and make a commitment to doing the same for the remainder of the summer?

Mayor: Yeah. Debralee, there's been very productive conversations on Summer Youth Employment with the Council. It's a central, central issue in the budget discussions. Obviously, the health situation has improved greatly over recent weeks, and that's opening up the door to different options. So, I feel confident that we're going to figure out a way to do something substantial on SYP for this summer, but we'll have all those details literally in a matter of days, as we conclude the budget process.

Question: And a separate issue. You have Commissioner Shea recently speaking in a private setting about the criminal justice system imploding, and then in a related matter – or perhaps unrelated, but the commander at 46th Precinct in the Bronx has indicated that he's going to be stepping away from his post because he's not received guidance on how in fact to help quell crime now that the anti-crime unit has been disbanded. And there seems to be murmurs, as we've heard before that, you know, the police aren't happy [inaudible] receiving the kind of guidance. I wonder if you could speak to the concerns that they are feeling unmoored, that's not necessarily coming from the police unions, but that there is a lack of guidance. And that, in fact, they're not feeling the confidence to be able to handle the strictures of their jobs.

Mayor: Yeah. Listen, Debralee, we're in a moment where there's a lot of challenges. For a long time, the NYPD had a lot of its members out sick. They've come back. We're absolutely dealing with a criminal justice system that isn't fully functioning right now. The courts aren't fully up and running, obviously, at all. I mean, there is legitimate reason for frustration on all that, but, at the same time, the NYPD has a tremendous history of making adjustments, and that's what CompStat is all about. That's what precision policing is all about. No one understands that better than Dermot Shea. So, adjustments are being made as we speak to deal with the circumstance. We don't always get to choose our circumstances, so we're dealing with it. The choice on the anti-crime unit was the right one. But, as the Commissioner said, it's going to be the same officers. Their abilities are going to be used in different ways with more precision policing, more technology, more targeting to achieve new outcomes. And that's something that was announced just days ago. So, I would say to any and all commanders, of course, this is something that's to be worked through with them down to local level. I think anyone who has committed to the work of public safety will understand that this work can and will be done. There'll be a transition time, but it will be worked through.

Moderator: Next we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Brigid. How are you doing?

Question: Doing okay. I want to follow up just a little bit more on Jeff’s question about the school. I really appreciated, kind of, the additional details that you're providing in terms of how you're thinking about it. But I'm wondering, given that Connecticut and New Jersey are already announced seeing their plans, do you have a specific target date for when the City will make its school plans totally clear?

Mayor: Brigid, look, we are – totally respect to other states and everything they're doing, everyone's doing their best. We have the most complex dynamic of any school system in the country, by far. We have a massive number of overcrowded buildings in normal times, we have 1.1 million kids, we were the epicenter, and, in many ways, remain the epicenter of this crisis because we're still feeling the effects. Our decision is the toughest one, and it's going to have to come with a certain amount of options in place that we activate as we get closer – conversations with the unions, as I said, constant surveying of parents, constantly getting feedback. But plan-A is as clear as a bell, every school determine the maximum numbers of kids you can have with social distancing and the right precautions, that's the number of kids we want to get in the classroom. I know a certain number of parents are not going to be ready to come back to work yet. I mean, it's, we need to send our kids back to school yet, or they're not going back to work and they might want their kids at home. The fact is, we'll be ready for the maximum number of kids, but, Brigid, as we're seeing from around the country, if the health conditions change, we may need to go to a different approach. So, the answer, when do we have an exact plan? It's when we feel we have enough information to lock one down. But we have a plan-A, that's what every school has been instructed – figure out what's the maximum number of kids you can get in this school safely and all the protocols – the constant testing, cleanliness regime, you know, the hand washing stations, all of that is being laid in to be ready for the maximum number of kids.

Moderator: Brigid, do you have a follow-up?

Question: Yeah. My second question is, and I know you touched on this a little bit yesterday, but lots of enthusiasm about moving into phase three, but when we see what's happening in places like Texas, I'm just wondering how you feel? Do you feel anxiety? And are you concerned about people getting lax about wearing that and social distancing? And, you know, how do you maintain the right messaging to New Yorkers? Because, certainly, when I look out my window, I see people getting a lot more lax and it certainly raises my own anxiety. So, given the decisions that need to be made for the City, how do you balance that?

Mayor: It's a great question, Brigid. I still go to the glasses more than half full. The vast majority of New Yorkers have been doing the right thing. I, of course, see a certain amount of laxness, but I see much more a devotion to sticking with the rules. I think in workplaces, we've seen a very high level of compliance. I think people are sober. They've been through a lot. Unlike – look, we went through much more than any place else in the country. I think we're scarred by the experience. I think people were woken up to the dangers of this disease. I think it's affected our behavior very deeply. I think a lot of the places that are having these horrible resurgences, they reopened very quickly, people really didn't necessarily understand or feel the full extent of the danger, and now, tragically, they're paying for it. We're the exact opposite, Brigid. We walked through hell and back. Vast majority of New Yorkers got the message. I'm going to keep telling it to them. We're going to keep giving them free face coverings. We're going to keep showing them what distancing looks like. So, I feel good that we can keep things disciplined and the numbers keep proving it. If that ever changes, I'm going to tell people we're in danger of having to stop and pause our restart and even go backwards. I'll be honest with people about it, and I think they're listening. But, no, overall, I think New Yorkers get that they have to participate if they want to keep things moving forward.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Seth from City Journal.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I'm concerned about the uptick in shootings and violence around the City, and I know you are too. This seems like it's like a direct result maybe of the police pulling back from being, you know, like disbanding the anti-crime unit – someone was killed at Madison Square Park last night. I wonder if you could address this new state of shootings and killings. How exactly are you going to take this on if police are pulling back from proactive anti-crime work?

Mayor: No, Seth, they are not in the least. Look, if you have watched the work of Commissioner Shea and the work of the NYPD, no one's pulling back from anything. They're approaching it in a different way. We need to have a deep, strong relationship between police and community to fight crime. That is the entire concept of neighborhood policing. We have got to get that relationship to be bonded so that there's common cause, there's a flow of information that helps officers to stop crimes. There's a lot of things we need to do that will be the long-run solution to violence. The anti-crime work is being done in a different way. And I think a way that will be more effective, ultimately, because it's going to be a more modern approach. We have a problem that's profound with the court system not functioning. We have issues that I've raised before, and I'm going to talk to the DA's about that we need gun prosecutions to happen consistently. We have the problem of the parole system and individuals coming out of State prisons, coming back to their communities without proper support. We got a lot of structural problems that are all hitting simultaneously and are hurting the dynamics, but we take it all seriously. We're going to fight our way back. I don't have a question about it. We got to make sure that we – with the tools we have in the city – that we keep that pace strong and then get the help we need from the other parts of government, and of course, get out of this crisis. This crisis is holding us back. So, it goes right back to all the health questions. Until we can get the court system up and running fully, that's going to stand in the way of fighting back crime in some of the ways we need to go ahead.

Question: Yeah. My other question concerns the Racial Justice and Reconciliation Commission, looking at the statues and so forth. I mean, it was only, I think two years ago that you and paneled like a whole commission of experts and art historians and regular historians to look at all the statues in the city and they pretty much said they were all kosher except for the J. Marion Sims statue which was removed. So, I mean, did they not do a good job? I mean, why do we revisit this issue so quickly?

Mayor: Yeah, they did a fine job, but Seth, that's not the purpose of the commission. The commission will look at that issue. That's not the central purpose, the Racial Justice and Reconciliation Commission, the central purpose is to identify an official manner where it – clear institutional racism, systematic racism exists in New York City, to literally delineate as a matter of official record where we have structural racism and inequality, and then to specifically indicate the changes that we need to make here and now in our policies, in our approach as a government to address that racism. It is not about statues. Yes, they'll look at that question too, but that's, you know, the symbolic issues matter, much more profound is the policies that actually affect every-day people's lives, and unfortunately in many ways we're based on racist assumptions, that must be torn down. So that's the real work of that commission.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, everyone on the call. I appreciate you taking the call.

Mayor: Hey Gersh.

Question: It's actually a pretty basic one. I want a little more information about the open restaurants, because what Commissioner Trottenberg said was great, but not very clear. So, the first question is just can you give me more information? I'm not sure why this is starting on July 4th Weekend rather than this weekend, and I'm not sure why the applications have to go through bids and community-based organizations, because as you know, bids only cover like three percent of the city. So that's the basic question and I will have a follow-up.

Mayor: Go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Trottenberg: Yeah, happy to answer. I think Gersh, what I said is we'll try get some up and running before July 4th, if we can. And the reason we want to work through bids or community-based organizations, if you have a block that has 20 restaurants on it, we just thought it's not going to work for 20 different restaurants to all be applying separately. We need to have some cohesion within a given block, a restaurant area, and it could be a different type of organization, but it's just, I think we'll get overwhelmed if those groups of restaurants don't come together, agree on how they want to set up, hours, handle sanitation, security, et cetera. So we will try and do this as expeditiously as possible, but it's a little more complicated than, you know, our initial program which is just your piece of the sidewalk or curb.

Mayor: Go ahead, Gersh.

Question: And, and the follow-up would be okay, so that's – I get that. How many restaurants do you think, since you got about 5,500 now doing - the lower hanging fruit for lack of a better term – how many do you think will actually be participating once you open up? I guess it looks like you're going to open up to 40 streets by July 17th.

Commissioner Trottenberg: Right. I think, Gersh, the first group we're looking at is a group you're probably familiar with a lot of our weekend walks partners, a lot of the sort of major bids and merchant associations and some of the big restaurant districts. I think a lot of those will get up and running quickly. And then I think we're going to have to see how many other applications come in. I'll confess, obviously the open restaurants program is producing maybe more applications even than we had anticipated, and I – we'll see how popular the sort of open street restaurant concept proves.

Mayor: I think it's going to be – my editorial view is it's going to be very popular and I think it's going to be great. And I want to give credit to both these Commissioners, Commissioner Trottenberg, Commissioner Doris and their teams. They did something amazing with those open restaurant applications. They made it fast. They made it easy. It's working and I know we're going to do something great with the open streets as well and make it a great amenity for the people of the city and bring back a lot of jobs in the process.

Look, I'll conclude with a simple point today. Good questions, important questions today about where we're going, what the health situation is, what it means for us. We're making a lot of progress on the health front because of all of you. We got to keep doing it. But even as we make that progress, unfortunately, the challenge is affecting millions of New Yorkers, the loss of jobs, the loss of livelihood, the economic pain. That's not going anywhere anytime soon. So as we decide the city budget for the next year, and we're going to decide all these issues in the next few days, the focus is going to be on your health, your safety, making sure you have food on your table, making sure you have a roof over your head. It's a crisis moment. This city is going to be there for our people in this crisis moment. We're always going to find a way through because we're New Yorkers. We're going to make sure that the basics are there for every New Yorker. We're not going to let anyone be left out because we have to, as a team, as one New York City, fight our way through to a better day. Thank you, everybody.

2020-06-26 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. And it is time as it is every week at this time, about 11:05 am on Fridays, for our weekly Ask the Mayor segment – my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag, #AsktheMayor. I will say precisely that it's 11:06 am right now. I don't want you to be late for anything. But, Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC. Hello.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you very much, Brian. How you doing?

Lehrer: I'm doing alright. Anne in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Anne.

Question: Oh my gosh, thank you for taking my call. I just graduated two high school students. My kids are finishing their public school education and one of them goes to a DOE school. The other one goes to a CUNY high school. He was able to get in to get his stuff out of the locker, but the one who goes to a DOE school is not. And you can imagine they have all their stuff, the polite word of saying what's in your locker, from the year and they want it and we want them to have it. And the DOE, the Chancellor, the superintendent aren't doing anything to reunite our kids with their stuff. You helped us, Bill – and I’m a neighbor from Park Slope. You helped us last year to remove our principal who was not great. Can you help us get our kids into the school to get their stuff?

Mayor: Yes. Anne, thank you for the call. I did not know that, and, Brian, this is a great example of the glory of your show because hearing directly from people brings up whole new issues. Yeah, I could imagine, as a parent who had kids in high school not so long ago, that they'd be freaked out if they could not get their stuff. And I don't understand why we can't set up a system to do it. It'll probably be a little bit of a hassle and not necessarily happen overnight, but we can get it done. So, I will talk to the Chancellor directly, Anne. I don't understand why on Earth kids shouldn't be able to get their stuff back and let's figure out a way to do it. And I'm glad you told me.

Mr. Mayor, last question, coronavirus reopening. You're saying we're on track for a phase three a week from Monday, July 6th. At the same time, we're seeing record numbers of cases, as you know, in other states across the country and the beginning of hospital bed and ICU pressure like we did see here. Are you worried that we could backslide? And are you at all ambivalent that maybe now we're moving too quickly through these phases just a few weeks apart?

Mayor: Worried? Yes, not ambivalent. Everything was about data. And one of the good things that we've done in New York City is to every day, have the conversation with the people in the city about the data. So today we had really good data and it's been that way for several weeks now, very consistently. I'm knocking on wood as I say it. The most important question is how many people are testing positive. We have been hovering around two percent testing positive citywide. And Brian, importantly, as we constantly increase the number of tests, we're over 30,000 tests a day now. We're going to get to 50,000 tests a day soon. That's massive compared to where we were. And the number of people in the hospitals is, knock on wood again, not going up substantially. And very few are actual COVID cases. So right now I feel like New Yorkers are really handling this. They're very, you know, not perfect, but they're devoted overwhelmingly, to the social distancing, to the wearing the face coverings. The businesses that are opening or being really careful. I think we're good for phase three as of today. But everything is based on the data. And if things start to go the wrong way, we're going to freeze really quickly. And if we even have to take a step back, we would. It’s just about watching it every day and communicating with people.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, thanks as always talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thanks, Brian. Take care.

2020-06-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, a lot is going on and I want to start today with the most important underlying foundation of how we are approaching this moment in our city's history. Everything we are doing as a City government to serve you is focused on four things. It's focused on your health, your safety, keeping a roof over your head, and keeping food on your table. This is about what we've been doing, what we've been talking about now over the last four months, because this crisis has caused us to focus on the basics, to make sure that every New Yorker knows that we're going to protect them, protect their safety and health, make sure they have the basics to get by, their families have the basics to get by. While we restart our recovery, our economy, while we bring our livelihoods back. We have so much to do in this city to help people and bring back the vibrant life of this city. But right now, our singular focus has to be on those four basics.

So, I say this in general, and I say it because today is the day before our budget deadline. And we have been working for weeks now with the City Council on next year's budget. And to say the least, this has been the toughest budget that we've had to do as administration here at City Hall. We're in a whole different situation, in fact, than New York City's ever faced in our history, a health care crisis, an economic crisis, a disparity crisis, a budget crisis all wrapped into one and on a massive, massive scale. So, we keep coming back to the fact that we've got to focus on those basics – health, safety, food, shelter. But, while we've been trying to do that, we have been dealing with an extraordinary loss of revenue. $9 billion has evaporated in the course of the last few months, revenue that used to be plentiful because of such a strong economy, it's gone. What does that mean? Billions of dollars of cuts have happened already in our City budget, more cuts coming because we have to live within our means.

Now, I want to note that while we, New York City, has been doing everything possible to address this pandemic, to protect people's lives, to keep our hospitals together, to maximize testing, to get people food – 1.5 million meals being delivered every single day – all the things that this city is doing, we're doing it alone. We asked repeatedly for the federal government to help us with the stimulus. It hasn't come and there's no sign when it will. We have been the epicenter of this pandemic, and yet the federal government cannot manage to get New York City the help it needs nor so many other cities and states. So, the federal government side has been, in so many ways, missing an action. I went to Albany over the last few weeks, asked for help to help us through this incredibly difficult time with long term borrowing. I want to thank the State Assembly. They were ready, willing, and able. The State Senate, however, has not acted. And I'm certainly disappointed and I think New Yorkers are as well. But we're going to persevere.

We're going to move forward, but it's not going to be with a vision of let's endlessly cut everything because we know what that means. It will hurt human beings if we have to keep cutting and cutting. It will hurt families. It will hurt our workforce, the people we depend on – their families depend on them. Austerity is never the way to go. We have to find a way forward. That includes continuing to focus on what matters most in our city. And we'll do that with everything we possibly can as New York City. But again, at some point, if Washington doesn't act, if Albany doesn't act, then we end up in a very tough situation. So, as we're in negotiations with the City Council, as we speak, what's clear is we will have to put into our budget, labor savings. And I hope and pray we'll find a way to address this situation with labor unions, and especially hope and pray that Washington will act on a stimulus. But we're going to be ready for any eventuality and make sure we're going to serve New Yorkers no matter what.

Now I'm going to switch gears in a very big way. I want to go back to the health front. I want to go back to talking about the coronavirus, the issue that pervades everything we talk about. So, we're going to go over to the indicators in a moment. And the good news is our indicators our health indicators continue to be strong, continue to be positive. Phase two has been going very well in New York City. And that means, as we see progress, we're able to do more and more things to help New Yorkers. And here's a nice one – we're going to be able to open up the barbecue areas in our parks for this coming weekend, for the July 4th weekend. So, folks can enjoy barbecuing. I want everyone to remember to be safe, still practice the appropriate social distancing, still wear the face coverings, but it's time for barbecuing to come back in our parks and they will be opened in the coming days for this weekend. And again, that's because of the hard work that so many of you have put in. The New York City story is pretty damn good when it comes to the comeback we're making from the coronavirus, the continued progress in fighting back to the virus and keeping us healthy. The rest of the nation, I don't need to tell you, is looking more and more troubling, and that is causing us to think about each step we're taking and to examine what we're seeing from around the country. So, a number of cities and states, unfortunately, have been moving in the wrong direction and we do see a nexus to a particular problem. We all love indoor dining, but we also see problems related with indoor dining. So, in East Lansing, Michigan recently 85 patrons tested positive for the coronavirus, all linked back to a single restaurant. In Texas and Florida, we've obviously seen, has gotten a lot of attention, record number of cases, clusters being tied back to bars and restaurants. California had made great progress, they’re now unfortunately slipping back and they are changing the rules regarding bars and restaurants. So, we're paying attention to this lesson. My team spoke with the Governor's team yesterday, said we're increasingly concerned. I know they are as well. We are now going to re-examine the indoor dining rules for phase three. The rest of phase three is moving on pace for Monday, July 6th, this coming Monday. But the indoor dining element is now in question. We're going to work it through with the State, figure out how we want to approach it, if we want to pause that piece for a while or modify it – we'll have more to say in the next couple of days, because we want restaurant owners to have that information right away.

But the most important thing is to keep us healthy and safe and not allow resurgence. So, I've said all along, there'll be ups and downs, there'll be modifications. This is now after steady, steady progress, a point where we're saying, look, on this one piece, we may need to slow down and think differently and approach it differently. But what is clearly working is outdoor dining. And I think the big message I keep getting – I've talked to our health care people about it – is outdoors is working across the board, meaning the disease does not spread anywhere as much outdoors, face coverings are working, outdoor dining is working. We want to double down on outdoor dining. So, we talked about the outdoor dining that we'll start to open up on our open streets. Now, we want to go farther with the Open Restaurants program. Right now, we have 6,100 restaurants who have already applied and gotten that certification to go over just the last two weeks so they can do the outdoor dining. It's been such a hit. It's been so positive. It's bringing people back to work. We want to go a lot farther with it. So, we're going to reach out to every single restaurant that qualifies, but has not yet applied, and help them to apply. We're going to work with BIDs. We're going to work with the Hospitality Alliance, chambers of commerce, everyone – let's get every restaurant into outdoor dining. Let's maximize their revenue, bring back their workforce, but keep it outdoors primarily while we figure out the indoor piece. We also want to remind all the restaurant owners – please, it's been a great success so far, but be careful with the outdoor dining areas along the street, there are specific rules of how to keep them safe and a specific approach you need to take to make sure there's separation from the traffic. We're going to send inspectors around and ambassadors around to talk it through and make sure that restaurant owners really get that part right, because it's going great. People love it. It's super productive, but we have to keep it safe.

Okay, let's talk about our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19. The threshold is 200 – today's report, 51. Daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, threshold of 375 – today's report, 297. And, most important, percentage of people testing citywide who are positive for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent – today, again, two percent. So, we're holding at that number, which is really, really good.

Quickly in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to questions in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that on the phone today, we have Small Business Commissioner Doris, Chair of the Board of Correction, Jennifer Jones Austin, and Senior Advisor, Dr. Jay Varma. With that, I will start with Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you on this day before the budget?

Mayor: Day before the budget, Marcia. You and I have been through a lot of budgets together. I'm okay, how are you doing?

Question: Okay. So, one of the questions I had was this, you, apparently, have struck out in Albany in terms of trying to get them to allow you to borrow money. But I also was told that you were willing to raise property taxes if they would agree to it. Are you still willing to raise property taxes if the Senate will go along and give you the borrowing –

Mayor: That’s just wildly inaccurate. No offense, Marcia – that's totally inaccurate. I said, in fact, in writing to everyone in the Legislature, we will not – not – never raise the property tax rate, no intention to do it. The Assembly, Marcia, the State assembly was there with us every step of the way. I want to thank Speaker Carl Heaste and members of the Assembly. They were ready to come to the aid of New York City in our hour of need. The Senate was not. So, we move forward. And I told everyone I spoke to an Albany, if we don't get borrowing authority, which, again, Marcia, you remember, the Assembly and the Senate gave borrowing authority to the City of New York after 9/11 with basically no strings attached, no debate, they just knew it was right thing to do. Since they haven't done it, we now have to go ahead in this budget and put a billion dollars of labor savings. Hopefully, we can find a way with labor to avert layoffs. It's not a given. If we can't find a way, then October 1st is when that would begin.

Question: So, my second question has to do with the cuts that you've agreed to – the $1 billion in cuts to the NYPD budget that you've agreed to with the City Council. There are published reports that it would involve moving school safety agents out of the NYPD, some homeless outreach services out of the NYPD, and canceling the July police class. Can you comment on that?

Mayor: So, Marcia, I'll give you a very broad picture, because, of course, budget negotiations are continuing. We have to resolve by tomorrow. So, I'm not going to get into a lot of detail. What I can tell you is we have found a plan that will keep the City safe, will achieve the billion dollars in savings, will allow us to redistribute money to youth programs and to communities that need it most. Everything was with an eye to safety. So, we will be able to ensure the patrol strength we need. We will be able to ensure that school safety can do its job. The school safety issue would be addressed over several years and we'll have more details again as we work on an agreement. But what I can tell you is, from the beginning, I said, I need to believe that if we make these changes, as I have to see evidence, I have to feel in my heart and soul that the city will be safe. You know, I'm very concerned about the uptick in shootings. We have to make sure we can handle that and we have to make reform. I came here to make reform. We have to make reform the right way, and I am convinced we have now struck that balance.

Moderator: Next we have Michael Gartland from the Daily News.

Question: Hey there, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Michael. How are you?

Question: I'm good. I'm good. So, a couple of questions – one, Governor Cuomo was on NY1 this morning, talking about, you know, some anxiety about phase three reopening of indoor dining. And I was wondering if you could, kind of, address what he said today on NY1 about that, you know, just having to kind of take this nice and easy.

Mayor: I think he's right. I mean, I didn't see his interview, Michael, but I think he's right. Look, I've said the State and City have been highly aligned throughout this process. Not every single time, because we're human beings and there's differences, but overwhelmingly aligned. I'm enthusiastic that phase one has gone so well, phase two is going so well, and phase three is right around the corner. But we're also constantly looking at the facts. The facts have been worrisome. In the course of this week, it got worse and worse around the country, and it got worse and worse with this nexus to bars and restaurants. We saw it. The State saw it. Everyone started talking and saying, hey, we have an issue here. We're always going to make adjustments. So, we'll have more to say in the next day or two to clarify. But, Michael, my view is, we can go into phase three on all the other fronts, we can do that effectively, we can do the outdoor dining on a much bigger scale, but the indoor we really need to examine closely and come to a decision in the next couple of days.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. I'm multitasking here, so –

Mayor: You can do it, Henry. I have faith in you.

Question: I don’t know, it's tough. I want to get back to these savings in the Police Department and how you're accomplishing that. You said something about capital expenses. Is that part of this $1 billion or is that separate from it?

Mayor: We will get you – yeah, there’s a – I'm sorry. I couldn't hear the rest, Henry. I apologize.

Question: Where are you cutting that's enabling you to make these cuts?

Mayor: Yeah, so again, we are in the middle of negotiations. So you're going to forgive me if I keep it a little broad. The capital piece is separate from the billion. The capital piece is crucial, and this is something I want to do. I want to take money that was going to go to the NYPD for capital, but as projects that can appropriately be delayed. When we think about the vast needs of young people, the vast needs of our residents in public housing, everyone wants to see a focus on those folks, hardest hit by the coronavirus, and particularly on our young people, we can do that, and NYPD has worked very productively with me, my team at City Hall, Office of Management and Budget to find savings, to find different approaches, and I want to thank Commissioner Shea and his team for that because we found a way to focus on young people, so we're going to take that capital money and shift it into creating youth recreation centers, want to take that capital money and shift it to needs at public housing, and I think that will be so important for people who will benefit and also important for our communities overall, and for safety and part of how you improve the relationship between police and community. The – Commissioner Shea has talked about the NYPD playing a bigger role, a more positive role in the lives of young people. This is his central strategic feeling. We're going to do that now with NYPD saying, we want to contribute and I give Commissioner Shea credit. He said it coming out of the box. When I said weeks ago, we will take money from the NYPD and put it into youth services. He said, look, no one ever wants to lose money out of their budget. But if I had to, I would want it to go to young people, and that's what we're doing.

Question: Yeah. I remember all that. I understand what you're doing. I understand the rationale for it. I'm just wondering, where are the cuts in the NYPD, where are they going to sustain cuts and spending?

Mayor: Right. And so, Henry, again, I'll give you the broad answer, but we, until we have a formal budget agreement, we're not there. The bottom line was we asked for a lot of savings. We asked for creative redeployments. We asked for every conceivable way to do things differently that could free up money for these things we need, and to think about things like school safety, but not as an instantaneous transition, but one that was done smartly over time while focusing on safety and reform at the same time. So, you know, when we get to a final agreement with the Council, we'll show you all the specifics and how we got there. But I have been real, a real stickler Henry. I've been every moment of the way, and I've been deeply, deeply involved in details. I've said, show me, it can keep everyone safe. Show me we can move a reform agenda and help young people show me we can do both in a balanced fashion, and I'm convinced that we have now hit that moment.

Moderator: Next, we have Sam from the Atlantic.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah. Sam, how you doing?

Question: Hi. I'm doing well. So, at the end of next month, the $600, the extra $600 in unemployment money is going to wear off and New Yorkers will no longer be receiving the extra $600. What do you think the effect of that will be on evictions when the efficient moratorium is lifted August 20th and how bad will things be?

Mayor: I'm very, very worried. I think it'll be very bad. I'll tell you, Sam. I've been out all over the city in recent weeks and just showing up unannounced in different communities, primarily the communities have been hit hardest by the coronavirus. People have a lot of different concerns, but I can guarantee you the number one concern has been economic. The number one concern has been from people saying they're running out of money. They either never got their check from the federal government. They're still waiting for it, or they know it's not enough, or they got it. They're using it up. I think this is the central challenge. The fact that there's no stimulus scheduled, there's literally no vote scheduled in the U.S. Senate for a stimulus right now. There's no new money coming. I think it would be devastating for a lot of New Yorkers.

We will be there to help them with food, anyone needs food will be provided for free, obviously health care through our public assistance, through Health + Hospitals, whatever we can do to help people. But this is why I said on Friday, we need to go back to this eviction issue. If someone cannot pay the rent, they should not be evicted. They should be given the right to go on a payment plan for the future, pay it over a longer period of time. We just can't see evictions of people who can't pay. If someone can pay, pay the rent as always, but for folks who literally have no choice, we got to do better. So, I think the State needs to reconsider and expand for those who cannot pay, stretch out that eviction in the moratorium and give people by law, the right to go onto a payment plan that doesn't exist right now. It should be created as a matter of state rule or state law.

Question: And last week Council Members Mark Levine and Vanessa Gibson – they said they were drafting legislation about the expansion of Right to Counsel to include basically everyone. Do you support that, and is that possible given budgetary constraints?

Mayor: Look, Right to Counsel is one of the things we did with the City Council that was extraordinarily effective. We have driven down evictions, illegal, unfair evictions in the city intensely. I'll get you the last statistics but I think we're somewhere in neighborhood, about half as many evictions before the coronavirus as were happening previously and intending to go farther and farther because we're giving people lawyers for free to stop evictions, and we've done things like rent freezes, and other ways of supporting people that help people pay the rent and avoid eviction. So, I'm proud of the fact that we've had a consistent policy to stop evictions in this city.

Now, Right to Counsel is a great idea, but I do think we have a profound question about how far we can go with it financially, and what's the right approach to it. So, I have not seen their legislation. I want to work with them. I respect them both want to work with them, but I do think we're going to have to recognize that this is not the way to handle the eviction crisis it's for the State to act and give people the ability to have those payment plans. If they don't, we're just going to be an absolute contradiction where people don't have money, they can't pay and they end up out on the street and that's not good for them or their landlord who will never get paid. There's got to be a smarter way.

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have two questions that are very different. I'll start with perhaps a sillier one, given that we're almost nearing a budget, but it's about the Macy's fireworks that are supposed to start tonight in surprise locations. So, I was just curious you know, given the fact that I understand it's important for Macy's and for New York City to some degree to have this nationally televised firework show on the 4th of July, it signals to people outside of New York, how the city is doing. But since we're pre-taping fireworks around the city, again, people can't even see them, because we don't know where they're going to be, couldn't they have just aired old firework shows, maybe with a new performance. I mean, do you know? I've asked Macy's do they have these fireworks already where they got to go bad? What's the deal? I mean, people, as you've heard, people have had surprise firework shows for weeks and there haven't really been happy with them.

Mayor: So, Katie, look, I think, I don't know if fireworks go bad. It's actually a really interesting question, but I can tell you this much – I made this decision a couple of months ago, because to me it was about saying that, you know, we're still here, we're still fighting. We're still standing, and that was in a much tougher time, but I had confidence that New York City would find our way through. It is a message to the nation of the strength of New York City. It's also an opportunity for us to celebrate our country as our country's in crisis and have a moment of something positive and something respectful. Macy's was ready to do this. They were ready to go ahead and I thought it was the right thing to do. So, we're going to have locations that give people an opportunity to say something very brief. A lot of people be able to see them from just wherever they live. We don't want crowds. We don't want a lot of commotion. It's a simple approach in a very imperfect world to give something special to people, but do it with a lot of sense of security and safety, and you know, look, folks will know at the last minute the broad area and they'll get a sense to look out for it. I think that's the right approach and then it will be packaged together in the show for July 4th. So, in a world of imperfect options, I came to the conclusion with Macy's that this was the best approach.

Question: Oh, thanks, and my second question is involving the budget right now, I guess, as you're here at City Hall, outside of “Occupied City Hall”, there's a protest from Teens Take Charge, people pushing for the restoration of the Summer Youth Employment program. So, I'm curious, you know, I know there's still a decent amount of summer left. There were some programs you announced that would address that. But I think people – I'm curious if there will be a better plan and a larger plan for so many, the teams in New York City who don't have much else to do.

Mayor: Yes, absolutely, Katie, this has been one of the central discussions over the last few weeks. The Council feels that deeply, and I do too. We, we have to find a way to give our young people positive options this summer. Look, when we did the budget back in April, we did not know at all what the summer would look like, and we feared there would be honestly, no possibility of any kind of programming except potentially online. We didn't know if people would be able to go outdoors or do anything. Things are a lot better now. On Monday, we're going to be able to open up a lot of the sports areas in parks. We obviously have said to summer camps that operate in the city that they can be operating in our parks. We're in a much, much better situation than we were in April. So now we're going to do a number of things to ensure that young people have options, including still some online options because the traditional summer youth is going to be hard to reconstruct, but we can do other versions of it. High priority for the Council, high priority for me, we said weeks ago, money would go from the NYPD to youth programming and summer youth employment is obviously a central part of that.

Moderator: Next, we have Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hi, Dana.

Question: Hey. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on why it is that the State might be willing to give borrowing authority for operating costs to Nassau County, to the MTA and to itself, but not to New York City.

Mayor: It's a great question, Dana. I want to again say the State Assembly was ready from moment one and has said continually they support borrowing authority for the City of New York. Look, we are the engine of the entire state economy. We are aware that revenue for New York State comes from. I think this should be an all for one, one for all a moment. You know, we are all, we're all together here and I talked to a number of senators and they said, in fact, they are concerned to have borrowing authority for their localities, and I said, I agree, you should, we should, everyone who needs it should use it to get through, to use it judiciously, use it carefully, avoid layoffs, avoid cutting services and get through to a better day. So, I think that's the right way to go. I commend the Assembly. I'm disappointed with the Senate. And I think if the Senate thought it was right to give borrowing authority to the State, the MTA, then of course they should give it to the place that is 40 percent of the State's population and the economic center of the State. It's only the right thing to do. You have a follow-up?

Question: Yeah and to follow-up, when you raise this issue with the Governor, what does he tell you?

Mayor: Look, I'm not going to get into private conversations. I'm only going to say that the bottom line logic, I've never heard anyone speak against, the State gave itself the authority, as you said, MTA, the city got the authority in 2001 unanimously, no strings attached used that borrowing authority over the last 20 years, judiciously, carefully helped us come back from 9/11, no one – the New York City bond ratings went up in the last 12 months for God's sakes. This is not the 1970’s. So, I have not gotten a coherent answer as to why it's just not the right thing to do. And again, we're going to keep working on it, but I am unfortunately obligated to say that by October 1st, unless we get borrowing or stimulus or some kind of different approach from our labor colleagues, we do have to look down the barrel of something no one wants, which is layoffs.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Rich from WCBS880.

Question: Mr. Mayor, good morning.

Mayor: Hey Rich. How are you doing?

Question: Okay. Listen, are the cuts against the NYPD punitive?

Mayor: No, not at all. Rich, every agency has had to go through a lot of cuts to begin with. Remember, we're talking about between the Executive Budget in April and this budget now, billions of dollars of cuts across all our agencies. Everyone's been going through the exercise. The NYPD did a hell of a good job of saying, okay, here's a bunch of things we could do while still keeping the city safe. So no, it is a moment where we have to address profound issues. We need to redistribute revenue to communities that need the most. We know our young people are hurting. It's been a horrible time for them. We know a number of communities have been very hard-hit by this virus. We need to redistribute resources toward them. We need to go at the root causes of so many of the problems we're facing. There is a way to do both, and Rich, I was skeptical at first and wanted to see how it could all come together. But a lot of painstaking work occurred to figure out the right way to do things, to focus on both safety and social justice and young people and redistribution. We found a plan that we felt good about, and this weekend presented that to the City Council to say, here's a way we can all move forward together.

Question: If I could follow up. Is any other agency being cut the same amount is the NYPD?

Mayor: I'll get you the final numbers when we get to a final agreement. The NYPD is being treated clearly in a specific manner. A number of agencies are being cut quite a bit, but we're dealing with a specific reality with the NYPD unquestionably, and that is because it's important to show that we are going to make changes in this city, that we're going to refocus our efforts on young people in particular, and that we can do that while changing the approach to the NYPD. The NYPD is a very well-run organization. They're good at finding ways to make things happen and finding ways to be as efficient as possible. That's what CompStat is all about. So, this is a particular moment and there is a particular need to show that we will redistribute to young people to communities, but it's being done in a smart, safe manner. And I know the NYPD can handle it effectively. So that's how we approach this, Rich. And again, I set a high bar. I had to be comfortable that we could do this in a manner that would keep this city safe and I am.

Look, we're at a watershed moment for the City of New York. We have to get it right. We have to get the approach to health right. We have to keep beating back this virus. We're going to make adjustments all the time. We're going to be really open to you about when we see a need to make an adjustment, but we're also going be very, very focused on the progress we're making and what that allows us to do. So far, New Yorkers are doing great. We have to be smart to keep focusing on what works and when we see a problem, like the concerns we're having about indoor dining, we have to address them. But as we conclude the budget for the year, hopefully the next 24 hours, again, I come back to where I started. Our singular focus will be on you and your family, your health, your safety, keeping food on your table, keeping a roof over your head. That's what you need your city to do for you and that is exactly what we will do. Thank you, everybody.

2020-06-30 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good afternoon, everyone. We're at a different time today, because this is such an important day for our city – the day that we close down our City budget for next year. The Council – the City Council will be voting later on this afternoon as we prepare for the year ahead. A very, very important day every year, but this day, this year – different than any other way face in decades in this city. In many ways, the toughest budget challenge this city has seen in a long, long time. Remember, we started this discussion with a painful reality. Because of the coronavirus, because of the economic crisis, because of so much that has happened to us – layer upon layer, crisis upon crisis – we have lost so much, particularly in human terms in this city, but we also lost to people's livelihoods. We've lost so any things, including the money that helps our City government to run, including the revenue we depend on to provide basic services to our people. $9 billion evaporated – gone in the course of just a few months. And that's what we've had to deal with here. And it was a challenge when you suddenly are missing $9 billion to come to an agreement to figure out the priorities. It's not easy, but I do want to report that we have reached an agreement with the City Council. The vote is going on later today.

It's been a challenging, but very productive process. I want to thank the City Council. I want to thank Speaker Cory Johnson, the members of the Council, the staff of the Council. Of course, want to thank everyone here at City Hall and our team at the Office of Management and Budget. Everyone worked really, really hard, literally around the clock to get this done and to make sure this was a budget that was, of course, balanced – we were going to live within our means – we were also going to do the things that matter most protect the things that matter most. I always say four things we're focused on now, your safety, your health, putting food on your table and a roof over your head. That's what we need to focus on at this moment of history given all the challenges facing us, that's what this budget does. And this budget also sets our foundation for us to continue the restart of our economy, continue our recovery, but do it in a way that just doesn't bring back a status quo that existed before, but helps us to become a fairer city. So, a lot getting done here, even with the challenges.

So, we're about to start Fiscal Year '21 tomorrow, and the Fiscal Year '21 budget will be $88.1 billion. Contrast that to the budget that I announced at the time of our annual preliminary budget presentation in February, a time that feels like a long, long time ago. At that point, the budget was projected to be $95.3 billion. We've lost so much for the new fiscal year. We lost so much during the fiscal year ending now, but we're still going to move forward together.

So, how did this happen? With some very, very tough decisions – very deep cuts to city agencies. A lot of savings had to be found. Of course, we drew on our reserves, which we never want to do, but this was the moment in history that we needed to do that. So, we had hoped – for months and months, we had hoped there would be a stimulus bill voted in Washington to help New York City, to help cities and states around the country. We thought it would happen in May. We thought it would happen in June. It hasn't happened. We don't know when it will happen. We have to move on without the stimulus. We've hoped for borrowing authority for all from Albany, did not happen. We had to move on without it. New York City on its own, doing what we could do with what we have – something New York City has had to do before in our history, we're doing again. So, we put together a budget that will work within that budget is a billion dollars in labor savings. And I want to be very clear, we're going to get to work with our labor unions to find that billion dollars. We're going to keep working on trying to get that stimulus in Washington, that borrowing authority in Albany. But if we cannot find a way, then October 1st looms as the day we would have to put into effect layoffs. And that's the last resort, to say the least. We do not want it to happen. We're going to fight hard to make sure it does not, but we did have to include it in the budget as a last resort because we had no other options. So, with all these challenges, we still found a way to get to a budget that, again, focuses on your health, your safety, putting food on your table, making sure you have a roof over your head. That's the focus. And let me give you examples – the expansion of NYC Care. NYC Care, guaranteeing that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who don't have health insurance or can't get health insurance will still have a primary care doctor and will only pay that which they can pay and will have health care available to them across the board – that now is coming to Manhattan and Queens. This year, in just a few months, will be in all five boroughs. The creation of specialized clinics in some of the communities that have been hardest hit by COVID and clinics that will focus on making sure we stop the spread of disease in some of the areas where it's been most prevalent – this includes Jackson Heights and the surrounding area of Central Queens; Treemont, in the Bronx; Bushwick in Brooklyn, those new clinics coming. And then of course the efforts to feed hungry, New Yorkers. I have to tell you, I've talked to so many people who do this important work. Everyone reports to me, those lines, growing, growing for people who need food. Folks who lost their paycheck, lost their livelihood, and now need food. This has been a primary focus in this budget, and I know the City Council feels the same way. The amount of money we are now committing between the efforts in the fiscal year just ending now and the new fiscal year is approaching a half-billion dollars. That's how much we have had to spend to keep New Yorkers fed, to make sure we do not have a hunger crisis in New York City – $450 million so far and I expect that that number will grow. And I'm sorry that number will grow, but we have to keep fighting to make sure people have the food they need. Their families have the food they need until the day that, thank God, one day our economy will come back, people's livelihoods will come back and we'll be able to see people go on to a much better situation.

So, this budget is about all those basics. And it's also about change, it's also about progress. It's about ensuring that we act in the spirit of social justice. I hear the voices all over the City, calling for justice. I know the City Council does too and we're acting on that call for justice. I believe it is our mission to redistribute resources, to those who need them the most, to act on our values, to say that the community has been hardest hit by the coronavirus and so many other challenges need more. And the truest act of equality is to take resources and give them to those who have the greatest need. And it's time to do the work of reform, to think deeply about where our police have to be in the future, where the NYPD has to be in the future, how we reimagine what the NYPD does to make it ever more connected to the communities it serves. We have done that with neighborhood policing and we need to go farther now in new directions that will keep the City safe, but also really create the trust that we need between the NYPD and our communities. So, look, as we've looked at the question of public safety, I had three ground rules, when we went through all these discussions with the Council to figure out the right way forward. I said, we have to keep the City safe. We have to protect the levels of patrol strength throughout our communities. And we had to make sure that we were really doing something to refocus resources on young people and on communities hardest hit, that we were reinvesting in ways that would help us address a lot of the root causes of the problems we face. I am confident that this budget does exactly that. $1 billion is shifted away from the NYPD in a variety of manners. We will be canceling the upcoming recruit class that would have started in July. And we're going to make sure that patrol strength is consistent by reassignments from administrative duty to patrol duty, by ensuring that the NYPD will make revisions in some of the functions it performs, ceding certain functions to civilian agencies. We're also going to focus on overtime. This has been an area of real concern with many agencies, but obviously with the NYPD. And so, we're going to make sure there are major reductions in overtime expenditures, use that money for other important needs. And we'll be reducing non personnel costs and contracts. All in all, a variety of actions to take a billion dollars and move it to other needs, other approaches. Now, where are we going to focus those reinvestments? Well, particularly on young people. So, summer youth programming – this has been an issue – such an important issue. Look, back in April, we didn't know what the future would bring. We didn't know whether the City would be able to reopen. We didn't know what things would look like. Now, we know that we can really energetically recreate a variety of types of summer youth programming, whether it is online or in-person, summer youth employment, or community centers and youth centers. So, we're going to ensure summer programming for over 100,000 New York City young. That's going to be an investment of $115 million. Another $116 million will go to education. Another $134 million will go to social services and family services in the communities hit hardest by the coronavirus. And another crucial piece – so, this is something I felt very deeply about. You remember back in my State of the City of remarks in February, before the coronavirus. I said, let's focus on young people, let's focus on community centers, recreation centers for young people, let's invest in a way that gives young people more positive options. This is why I think it's so important that we take money from the NYPD's capital program and put it into the needs of our young people and our communities, and particularly young people who are in public housing.

So, $450 million, will go to youth centers and recreation centers focused on communities of greatest need. And this will include money redirected from the plan for a 100th – excuse me, for a new 116th Precinct in Southeast Queens, that money will be redirected to a new Roy Wilkins Community Center in Jamaica, in Roy Wilkins Park. Also, $87 million will be moved to create widespread broadband service in NYCHA for families that don't have it now, that don't have access to the internet. We want to make sure that families and particularly young people are able to bridge that historic digital divide. We're going to invest to answer, to give young people and families the service they deserve in that developments that don't have it now. So, this is real redistribution. This is taking resources and putting them where they're needed most with a particular focus on our young people. And look, it fits what we've been trying to do for years, and it fits the fact that New York City has been leading the way for years in a vision of redistribution, a vision of focusing on young people, a vision of change and reform. These things have been working and now we will go much farther. We can be a safe and fair city. This is the same discussion we've had from the beginning – can safety and fairness walk hand in hand. I've said for most of the last decade, yes, and we've proven it. We're going to prove it again, and this budget will allow us to do so. Two more points today that are not about the budget but are very, very important to note, and then we'll turn to our colleagues in the media.

So, the very important while we are doing this work, many, many New York City graduating high school seniors have a whole different thing on their mind. Their families are thinking about tonight, the virtual graduation ceremony, never before done, obviously nothing on this scale is ever been done before. And we want to honor the class of 2020 that have gone through so much, fought so hard, fought their way to graduation, no matter what was thrown at them, we want to honor them tonight. There will be that extraordinary citywide telecast to show our graduating seniors we care about them. There'll be a number of special guests and performers, and there will also be two keynote speakers and I'm going to announce them now. One deserves the title legend in New York City legend the pride of the Bronx, she makes us proud with everything she has achieved in her career. And the other is famous for his achievements on the baseball diamond, not someone we think of first and foremost coming from our City, but he had the wisdom to become the fiancé of the New York City legend from the Bronx, J-Lo and A-Rod will be our keynote speakers for the virtual graduation. We thank them both, and it's going to be exciting to not miss it tonight at 7:00 PM. We want to thank PIX channel 11 for a broadcasting live. Thank you so much. And you can also watch online NYCclassof2020.com. And again, congratulations graduates, we are very, very proud of you.

Finally, I do what we do every day, our indicators. And as we're dealing with the budget and so many other challenges, this is a great day in terms of our indicators. And it's attributed to all of you for the hard work you have done. So, indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for a suspected COVID-19 threshold is 200, today it is 40 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals, ICU threshold of 375 today's report, 301 patients. And most important, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold to 15 percent, today down to one percent, which is wonderful. Congratulations, New York City. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we will turn to questions from the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that on the phone today, we have Budget Director of Hartzog and Senior Advisor. Dr. Varma. With that, I will start with Dave Evans from ABC7.

Question: Hey Mayor, this is Dave.

Mayor: Hey Dave, how you doing? Dave, I'm hearing phone trouble. Hold on, try again. Dave, try again Dave

Question: Hey, can you hear me now?

Mayor: There you go.

Question: Okay. Sorry. [inaudible] so I pulled over. I want to ask you just a couple of questions. First of all, the police budget, when we talk about a billion dollars, and I know that it's been called a cut, but talking to several Council members, especially those who are no, so far on the budget for tonight. They're saying it's really not a cut, they're just basically shifting money from other things. For example, the reduction in overtime, which you really don't know if you can do. The school safety agents transferring that to the education department, that's really not a billion dollars in cuts. So, could you address that first of all?

Mayor: Yeah. Dave, with a number of items here and they all are savings from the NYPD, and they all represent changes and reforms. First of all, we are doing something that we had to do a lot of work to make sure we could do effectively and safely, which was canceling the July class that does reduce the head count for the NYPD we are able to address that with a number of reassignments and ways of finding efficiencies and changing some of the responsibilities of the NYPD to focus on that, which they do particularly well and moving other responsibilities to the civilian side. The changes that we're talking about many people have said, how do we reimagine— school safety? We're doing that with this plan, how do we reimagine the functions? Where can civilians better do the work we announced previously, moving off the vendor enforcement, there's going to be changes now in homelessness enforcement, a whole lot of things that are fundamental reform. The over half-a-billion dollars that we're taking from the NYPD capital plan and putting into youth centers, recreation programs for young people, broadband access for young people and families.

This is a lot of redistribution, but it's still done in a way that is safe for this city, that is the balance that I said we had to strike, and we have struck this balance.

Question: Mayor, my other – my other question has to do with the Education Department. I've been told that it's you're not laying off teachers, but we're not replacing those teachers who are retiring, and we do have a lot this year because of everything that's going on. And that would save about a billion dollars or the overall cut to schools will be a billion dollars this year. Can you comment on that for me please?

Mayor: Dave, we obviously – and I'll turn to our Budget Director, Melanie Hartzog, in a moment – we are dealing now with a really complex situation with our schools, because we are trying to bring back schools to the maximum on September 10th. We still don't have all the information we need to know the final approach, cause that will have everything to do with what's happening with the coronavirus. We know that there are some kids who are not going to be coming back to school right away, some teachers are not going to be coming back to school right away, there's a lot we have to balance here.

So, there's still work to be done on how we're going to approach the needs we're going to have for educators for September 10th. That is a separate question from the fact that we have a billion dollars in labor savings that are now formally part of this budget, that billion dollars in labor savings, again, that's the equivalent of 22,000 City employees. We're going to work with every union to see if we can find alternative savings and avoid a situation where any of those folks have to be laid off. And again, hoping and praying that we get support from Washington or Albany or both, but that situation is still an open question and that level of layoff would affect obviously every agency. So, let me turn out to give some additional insight to our budget director. Again, thank you to you, Melanie, and your whole team at OMB for extraordinary hard work in recent months. Why don't you pick it up from there?

Melanie?

Director Melanie Hartzog, Office of Management and Budget: Hi. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yup, there you go.

Director Hartzog: Okay. So, as you said, Mayor, there is no projected layoffs that are included in any of our savings programs pegged for the Department of Education. What we did in the executive budget was actually put a freeze on new hires and actually asking of the agency DOE to hire from the ATR pool for any new positions that are needed within the schools.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next we have Matt Chase from Newsday.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. A federal judge on Friday ruled that you must allow outdoor religious observance of any size and 50 percent capacity indoors. Are you now allowing worship under these terms for everyone? Now, to the extent you say your answer is we look to the State, you were a named defendant and have been personally ordered to let worship happen under those terms. And to the extent you say, you're still reviewing the decision you've been under injunction since Friday. So, I'm wondering if you plan to obey a federal judge, or I should say, are you obeying a federal judge at this time?

Mayor: Matt, I appreciate that you gave the question and a series of answers – I'm impressed. We're certainly reviewing the case. We review every case. It's just a very recent decision and a momentous decision. We are coordinating with the state because we coordinate everything with the state when it comes to how we manage the coronavirus crisis. The last I've heard from our lawyers, Matt is by definition when there's a federal judge's decision under these circumstances, it is in effect in the immediate term, but there are still a lot of open questions and obviously the question of how we want to deal with it going forward in the legal process. So I can have our law department update you afterwards on the nuances, but when we're instructed to do something by a federal judge and there's no action to stay that decision, then of course we abide by it. But, in an emergency like this, we still need to keep coordinating with the state to make sure even a federal judge's order still has to be interpreted pragmatically because we're in an emergency situation. Go ahead.

Question: Now, on the budget, what will the NYPD's head count be at the end of 2020? And can you give an example of an NYPD overtime shift that will not happen, that would have happened?

Mayor: Yeah, the case here is that there has to be a reduction in overtime. This is something we talked to a lot of agencies about and we've actually made some real progress with the NYPD and other agencies, reducing overtime. Good management – and we have very good management at the NYPD now – finds ways to use overtime when absolutely needed, but not overuse it. So, there's still going to be a very substantial overtime budget. Look, let me say, I want to make a clear statement that if something absolutely exceptional happens, God forbid, you know something happens an act of God, you know, a disaster, anything like that, it's a whole different discussion when overtime needs go up for very objective reasons, but under normal circumstances, the goal is always to keep reducing the reliance on overtime and I'm convinced it can be done. The, and it's just, again, smart management. You use fewer officers in a certain situation, or you find a way to use the existing officers rather than have people go on an overtime basis.

In terms of the head count, the head count change is that the class in July, and I'm going to double check the number, but I believe it's 1,163, since that class will not proceed – that is the reduction in headcount for the agency. How that gets compensated for, in terms of patrol strength is by reassignments from other types of roles like administrative roles that uniform officers are playing now and by changing some of the responsibilities, if you don't have to do vendor enforcement, if you don't have to do homeless enforcement and a whole bunch of other things, you keep freeing up officers for other types of patrol responsibilities. Final point, Matt, remember that, that class, we couldn't do an April class because of the coronavirus. July was going to be a big class, but the July class was not going to be on the streets until January 1st. So, everything that we're going to do in 2020, there's no impact of the academy in 2020 at this point because of the conditions created by the coronavirus. Everything we're going to do to keep people safe in 2020 is going to be through re-deployments

Moderator: Next we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to stay on the NYPD overtime issue essentially, because this is not the first time we heard that their overtime will be kept and I can't recall a time when it's worked successfully. So, what is different this time? What, what measures are you instituting to ensure the cap is kept to? And also, can you provide specific numbers here? What was the overtime initially planned for the amount and what, by how much is it being reduced?

Mayor: I'm going to do the broad stroke because I don't agree with your assumption and then turn to Melanie Hartzog on any details that she has now. Yoav, no, first of all, this broad brush respectfully saying it's never worked before - I disagree; there's been plenty of instances where there was a mandate to reduce overtime and it did work. It's a constant effort. I I've been working in government a while and I can say that I see constant efforts at efficiency. The things we used to do in the past that we don't do anymore is a very long list; much more modern, much more efficient, much more use of technology. There's all sorts of examples of where government's gotten more modern and effective, but also uses overtime less as a result. Also, good management, the NYPD is particularly well-managed today. It has gotten better with every decade and every year and Commissioner Shea is a very smart data-driven modern manager. He is going to find ways to make things happen. I'm just convinced. So, I'm not as – I don't blame you for being a little cynical, but I'm not cynical. I know we can find really substantial savings here.

Melanie?

Director Hartzog: So, the total uniform overtime budget for Fiscal Year 2021 was $523 million and we're going down by $296 million. I believe that answers your last question.

Mayor: Go ahead, Yoav.

Question: Okay, thank you. I also wanted to ask you about that health report from 2017, the draft that, that, that provided the larger number of police of law enforcement related killings in the city from 2010 to 2015. Your administration released that report and touted the transparency of releasing it, but the health department is refusing to provide the names of the 105 or so people who were killed and, and I'm wondering why that is, and if you will kind of allow them to release that information?

Mayor: Yeah, I'm not familiar with the details, Yoav. Obviously, I want maximum transparency if there's a particular privacy issue or something, we obviously have to look at that, but we know, look, this comes back to the central question; are we constantly reducing use of force? I remind you in 2018 the number of situations in which the NYPD used or fired a weapon in an adversarial circumstance was 17 times in the course of the entire year because of the de-escalation training because of the constantly training, the police force and the quality and the professionalism of the officers. So, we've been changing every single year. We've been reducing use of force constantly. Unfortunately, there obviously are some times where to save a life separate from any instance where something happens that we're not comfortable with or was not appropriate. There are instances where an officer to save a life has to use their weapon, but we will make sure that whatever can be made public is made public. I think it's important that there'd be a full accounting.

Moderator: Next we have Christina from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. My first is about summary youth programming. Can you specify how many slots will go to SYP and how many will go to camps and what the funding for each of those buckets is?

Mayor: Thank you, Christina. So, let me again go the overall number – over 100,000 New York City teenagers will be served this summer with one initiative or another, including Summer Youth Employment. Melanie, we'll go over some of the details in a moment, but the important point here is City Council cared very deeply about this, and I give them credit for that. They want to see the maximum investment in young people. We all were dealing with extraordinarily challenging health conditions and logistics, but as the health situation has improved, we're able to do a lot this summer with young people and some things we'll still have to do virtually, but it still will be good to for young people to have that engagement and to have the financial support that can come with it. So, over a hundred thousand kids will be served. It's I think going to really help as these young people are getting ready for the school year in September, and it's going to really help them because I've gone through so much with the coronavirus. Go ahead, Melanie, on some of the details.

Director Hartzog: Sure. So, SYP/Summer Bridge is about 35,000 slots. Summer camps are 81,000, and then we have our social distancing program, which is 500, and then leading from summer into early fall was our Work-Learn-Grow program, which is about 2000. So, over a hundred thousand spots.

Moderator: Christina, did you have a follow-up?

Question: Regarding the transfer of school safety officers? Can you say what powers, if any, they'll have, can they still make arrests and will they be supervised by principals now?

Mayor: So, Christina, we're going to work through the details with the Department of Education and the NYPD. What's important to understand here is in the first year of the transition there will be a growing leadership function played by school leadership, officers will be trained by the DOE. There'll be a heavy focus on restorative justice social, emotional learning, deeper dialogue with young people. You know, we believe strongly this is an administration that has radically reduced the amount of suspension. I believe it's over 40 percent reduction in suspension. I want to see it keep going down. We've invested a lot in restorative justice, a lot in social-emotional learning. I believe strongly and things like peer mediation, and I think school safety will be more effective if it gets more deeply trained in those approaches and in deepening the dialogue with young people and their families. So, there's going to be a lot of change of approach in the first year and then the full transition and the second year. There still, well, of course, be the ability for NYPD to deal with a situation that is violent or criminal, but the goal here, because that's not the majority clearly the vast majority of situations at school safety deals with can be dealt with in a very different manner is to move more and more to those modern and sort of reform minded practices and to train the agents in how to do that.

Moderator: Next, we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, is there an NYPD hiring freeze in this budget or is there another class besides the July one that's expected to be hired in this budget?

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Erin. So, the July class won't exist. That again takes 1,163 officers out of the head count. The next class is scheduled for October.

Question: That will go forward as normal?

Mayor: Yes. Yeah, yeah. The answer is yes.

Question: And then my other question was aside from the NYPD, can you tell us some of the most significant cuts representing as you've mentioned on several billion dollars since February?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start and I'll pass to Melanie Hartzog. I mean, we've had to re-examine every agency and ask them to dig deep and find savings. Some savings clearly came from things that just couldn't happen because of the coronavirus but others were more programmatic. So we particularly asked the Department of Education. It's our biggest budget within the city government is the Department of Education. We asked them to dig very deep and we had to add it up of course, to billions of dollars. So, it took pretty consistent, constant effort, but Melanie, you want to give a couple of highlights?

Director Hartzog: Sure. So just in total, across all of the city agencies it's about a 1600 head count reduction, which totals $100 million annually, roughly from fiscal years '21 and out. Mayor, as you mentioned, DOE had savings of $400 million over two fiscal years. Most of that is tied to remote learning and also taking a hiring freeze on central office functions, and then there are some programmatic impacts for instance, in the Department for the Aging. We had initially for senior centers given that they're not operating; we have taken savings there of a couple million.

Mayor: And Erin will get you a more extensive list.

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah, good morning, Mr. Mayor, or I should say good afternoon. Just wanted to loop back to some of the specifics on the NYPD budget. I mean, the document I got suggests some of these are not real cuts. I mean, $350 million in overtime, I guess it's subject to debate, but then there are items without going into too much detail, like fringe costs for school safety officers being transferred out of the police, as well as crossing guards. You know, that's being counted as about $130 million, but I understand that wasn't really – fringe costs aren't part of the NYPD budget in the first place. So, I guess to translate this into a question why add these costs, which may not be real cuts to say that there's a billion dollar cut and you know, what's the importance of saying there's a billion dollar cut happening as opposed to like $750 million or $2 billion?

Mayor: Shant, look, the most important question here is what are we trying to achieve? And again, if we're talking about the expense side and then talking about the capital side and the impact on people, it's actually $1.5 billion, and the impact on people is going to be very profound. That half billion going to create youth centers and recreation programs, and broadband access for NYCHA residents, particularly young people is going to have a very lasting impact and a positive impact on their lives. It's pure redistribution to those who need it most. It's also another way of fighting crime, and our police leadership will tell you this, anytime, we're investing in young people, we're helping to fight crime a different way, and that again was something I focused on a lot in my State of the City remarks in February. I think the concept of how you find savings is a pure concept. If you are not spending the money on that agency, if money that agency was planning to spend is no longer in their budget, that is savings by any measure. Some is pure headcount reduction, as we said the 1,163-member reduction in headcount, some is reduction in overtime. That's the money that will not be spent. Some is shifting functions to free up officers to do other work so that we can compensate for the reduction in headcount, changing roles. There's not just a question of money. There's the question of reform desire to see roles that can be handled by civilian agencies done that way rather than by the NYPD, the changes in approach to school safety and where school safety will ultimately reside – at the same time, focusing on how we keep kids safe in school. These are all reforms and changes and savings. So, we put together a package that responded to the real concerns of the Council, and it's always been this way, the back and forth between the Council and the executive branch. I was a Council Member. I respect the Council's role. This was something that they thought was crucial to achieve. I said, we can achieve it if we can meet three standards, if we can ensure the city will be safe, keep the actual patrol strength, the real patrol strength consistent, and of course, redistribute money to youth programs and social services. We were able to come together and strike that balance.

Question: Yeah. Thanks for that. Switching gears a little bit, I think a lot of nonprofits are bracing for pain with council members' discretionary funding being reduced. The complaint I'm kind of hearing is we provide vital services. We might, we're looking at getting killed. Why not spread the pain elsewhere? Why not do furloughs or pay cuts for city employees? I mean, I gathered the city layoffs are off the table, but why not find another way to reduce you know, spending on city salaries. Thanks.

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Shant. It's a fair question. I just disagree with the assumption. I honor the nonprofits – we've done a lot to invest in nonprofits. They play an extraordinarily important role in this study and I've put my money where my mouth is for seven years on this front, but we're in a crisis unprecedented in the history of the city. The last time we were dealing with this many fiscal challenges was the 1970s fiscal crisis. This has got to be a multi-year challenge and our city workers have been asked to do more and more and more in the midst of this crisis. So no, I'm not turning to city workers and say, take a pay cut, when I'm asking them to save lives and keep this city going. We do have to consider layoffs and furloughs, but not layoffs and furloughs so we can take from our public workforce, which is the essence of how we keep the city going and turn that money over to a nonprofit. That's not the way I see it. I want to give the nonprofits all I can, but I am really concerned Shant that not too long from now, October 1st is not a long way away, if we don't get some combination of labor savings, stimulus, borrowing capacity, then we're at a point where 22,000 city workers no longer have their job, and I don't want to see that happen. That would be the single worst thing that could happen for New York City. So deeply respect the nonprofits, but my focus is going to be on keeping city services, going and city employees in their jobs.

Moderator: Next, we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. my question has to do again with police reform and the fact that a lot of the reform groups are saying that the money that you're taking out of the NYPD budget is basically a gimmick fiscal sleight of hand, and they're not happy. What do you say to them?

Mayor: Marcia look, some people are never happy and I'm doing the work every day to make sure that we change the city, that we do real reform, that we listen to the honest desire of people all over New York City for more respect, more social justice. But also, and I know, you know, this Marcia, the deep desire in our neighborhoods for safety and how we strike that balance. I've talked to people all over New York City, not only in the last few months on this issue, but for years and years, they want safety and they want fairness. They want respect from the NYPD but they also want to give respect to the NYPD, they want both to happen. So what we're doing here, I think is profound. When you add it all together, $1.5 billion, money clearly going from the NYPD to youth programs, the way we said. There is a head count reduction. That's a major, major issue, but we're compensating for in a smart way to keep patrol strength consistent. It won't be easy. We're asking a lot of the NYPD. We are, it's a time in history where we're asking a lot of everybody and every agency, but in this case, particularly asking a lot of the NYPD, but the NYPD is up to the mission. I don't have a doubt in my mind. They will find a way to be more effective and efficient, they have for years, and they will keep us safe. And we all understand, we have to answer the real concerns of this moment that people want to see our society progress. And I think by doing this work of reform, it actually also helps us heal. So this is a real world way forward. And Marcia, are they going to be critics on all sides? Of course, but I'm convinced this is real change.

Question: So, Mr. Mayor, I actually have another question that's unrelated. I know you announced that the graduation, J-Lo and A-Rod are going to be performing. Are they going to be performing from Florida where they've been holed up or are they going to be here in New York?

Mayor: I don't know the exact location and I think it's more of a keynote remarks than performing. We will get you those details for sure. But I will say to you, you know, again, I think for our young people who are looking for inspiration after an incredibly tough senior year, like none of us has ever been through this class has been through the hardest, I think to have a woman who came up from the grassroots in the Bronx and has come so far and, you know, amazing, amazing achievements, including the last Super Bowl show, I think it's going to be inspiring for them in particular to hear this daughter of the Bronx who has a great example of what a New York City public school kid or New York City kid can achieve. So I think people would be really, really happy that both of them are a part of it.

Moderator: Next, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Henry, how you doing?

Question: I'm doing good. I want to congratulate you for doing – for getting this done. It had to be really hard and I – you know, you take a lot of lumps. I'm going to congratulate you for getting this thing done.

Mayor: Thank you, I appreciate that Henry.

Question: But at the same time, you didn't say that A-Rod is really a son of the Bronx. I know –

[Laughter]

Mayor: Henry, I will not count that as a question. I will simply comment you know, A-Rod. I really respect his achievements and he's doing a lot now as a business leader as well, but I want to differentiate and give full respect to the daughter of the Bronx as someone who's going to be particularly inspirational to our kids.

Question: All right, so that will count as a question because I know people hate how long I take. Here's my question, and it goes to back to the police spending, the overtime amount that's going to be cut just sounds completely unrealistic. I mean, the cops, I believe, drew about $115 million in overtime just from the last spate of protests in the city. So the amount that you're cutting in overtime is a very nice goal, but how are you going to achieve that?

Mayor: Yeah, look, we're going to have some exceptional moments and we're going to have to deal with those unto themselves. What we're talking about is the kind of overtime that is normally relied upon. I had this conversation with the Speaker of the Council and he and I both believe that of course we can do better, and in a big way do better on overtime because historically we know that agencies still have more to give when it comes to overtime. And this has been an ongoing effort, we've seen progress, but look, we're in a massive fiscal crisis, unprecedented since the 1970s. To turn to any agency and say, you're going to have to do things differently because we just don't have it is fair and the NYPD is a very well managed organization, it's one of the best managed agencies in all of city government, one of the best managed agencies anywhere in the country.

So to say to them, guys, you've got to find a way to do better here, it stands to reason. It will be tough. And again, let us pray, there's not an extraordinary circumstance that affect that number, but I know that they can do a lot. I really do. And we got to set that goal. And by the way, that's to get us to the next step. Henry, I think the cloud hanging over all of this is that this is not the end of the budget discussion. We're going to go through the year ahead and we are praying revenue does not go down more, but it might. We are praying for help for help from Washington and Albany. We have no guarantees. I used to think the stimulus was effectively a guarantee as something substantial would happen, I don't believe that anymore. I just have not been shown any evidence. And then we've got the following Fiscal Year, which we already know we're going to be in a deficit of $5 billion or more. So we better do some things differently if we expect to get through all this

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, two questions for you. First what – can you talk about why it is you decided to cut $65 million from the Fare Fairs program?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start and then Melanie Hartzog can join me. It's – I just think the reality of that program, which is a great program, it was an effective, important program. At a period of time, MTA ridership was down to 10 percent of what it had been on. That was a prolonged period of time. I think the whole underlying concept of the program got just disrupted profoundly by the coronavirus and we're not going to see that turnaround in the short term. So Melanie, you want to add? Melanie?

Director Hartzog: I would only add you're exactly right and it was a right sizing and we worked in partnership with the Council, particularly around what the estimates should be.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Dana.

Question: Thanks. And then my second question is why does it make sense from a, I guess, budgetary or policy perspective to implement a hiring freeze city wide, but not at the NYPD which we'll still see a new class of officers in October?

Mayor: Dana, I hope there's not a misunderstanding here. Hiring freezes are an important budgetary tool. When you have a head count reduction, that's actually even more serious. We're saying very clearly 1,163 fewer officers, because there will not be a July class. That number doesn't get compensated for that class. It's going to – and I'm sorry, because again, under normal circumstances, we absolutely would have wanted to have that class and I know there's a lot of people who are anxiously waiting to join the NYPD and I'm sorry that circumstance has forced this on us, but you're talking about a head count reduction, not a hiring freeze, a head count reduction. And we are able to compensate for that in terms of patrol strength with a variety of other moves, getting people out of desk jobs and on to the street, taking some of the responsibilities, like I said, the vendor enforcement, the homeless enforcement, a bunch of things will change so that we can make the patrol strength work. Won't be easy. We're asking a lot of them NYPD but no we're talking about hiring freezes for agencies across the board in the case of the NYPD, it's a headcount reduction.

Moderator: Sorry, next we – last question for today, we have Julia from The Post.

Question: Hey, good morning – I'm sorry, good afternoon, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering if counterterrorism within the NYPD is at all taking any hit in the budget cuts, given that there's an ongoing threat to the city and what the PD has done to stop attacks before?

Mayor: You'll remember Julia, that on my watch, we deepened the work of our counterterrorism initiatives, and even though we've been focused on so many other things in the last few months with the coronavirus and so many other challenges, we cannot dismiss the threat of terror. We're still the number one terror target in America. So, we're making sure in this budget that we are protecting our counterterrorism capacity. We have to, in everything we do, figure out how to be as efficient as possible not only because of the challenges as I said in this immediate budget, but what's coming up ahead. And again, if we don't see a stimulus, it's going to be really, really troubling what that's going to mean for this city. But we have to protect the kind of counterterrorism capacity we need for the current circumstance. That is an absolute requirement.

Question: Okay, you said we have to protect it, but will the division or any of the divisions see any cuts whatsoever?

Mayor: Well, again, the focus here is on the, what we've done with the class, which is not the same thing as obviously what we do with counterterrorism. Right now, the way we're finding savings is to cancel the July class, to reduce the overtime that does not directly affect the counterterrorism work. We can get you more detailed, but the essential answer is no, it does not undermine our counterterrorism capacity. I think that's two questions. Okay.

Everyone, let me just finish up here. I want to focus on what has been so much of the discussion in recent weeks and yeah, of course, it's been about the coronavirus. It's been about disparity and a history of unfairness. It has been about the question of policing. It's been about health care. There are so many things that have come together in recent weeks that are deeply, deeply in our mind and certainly the mind of the City Council as we come together on a budget that will make a lot of change in this city.

But if there's one thing that has, I think, struck a chord that has been deeply felt by New Yorkers across the board, it is what our young people have gone through. It is that our young people have experienced something that we would never have wished on them that has been extremely trying for them, even traumatic for a lot of them. And we need to uphold our young people and help them through this moment in history and they're going to inherit this city. We've got to be there for them now. As we all have fought this virus back, and we're not there yet, but we've come a long way. We're in a position to do a lot more for our young people and this is something that city council really passionately said, whatever happens in this budget, we're going to have to shift resources to young people and that's what we're doing.

And I want to be clear. I said it back in February in the State of the City remarks, we need to think differently about how we support young people in this city. We made a lot of changes before, but we need to go a lot farther. The NYPD is going to refocus on helping young people with the same vision that Commissioner Shea put out months and months ago before the coronavirus, the NYPD engaging young people, positively, productively, helping them avoid problems, working with their families. That's going to be a lot of our future. The youth centers that we're now going to open, that we're making a budget priority, taking money from policing, putting it into youth programs.

What I said in February rings true now. Our young people need to be reached, not policed, reached. We need to help them. We need to connect with them. We need to figure out what they need to move forward, how to overcome the challenges and traumas, how to nurture them and support them. And we can do that. We must always have safety and we will in this city, but we're also going to amplify both safety and fairness by reaching our young people more deeply than ever before and that's what this budget is all about. Thank you everyone for continuing to do the amazing work you do every day. I hope you're proud of today's health indicators. It's all because of you. And it's a good, good sign for the future of this city. Thanks very much.

2020-07-01 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well good morning, everybody. It is hard to believe it, but we are now in the month of July, now beginning the fifth month that we've been fighting together against the coronavirus. So, it's been a long battle and it will continue to be, but as we enter the month of July, it begins with thinking about July 4th and the meaning of it, thinking about the pride we feel in our city, in our country, in each other, as we fight together in common cause. It is a reminder of what July 4th is all about – one of the most profound concepts underlying what happened in 1776 was the fight for freedom. We are fighting shoulder to shoulder in a fight for freedom from the coronavirus and the people of this city have been earning, every day, more and more of that freedom through hard work and work together. So, we today can talk about some additional steps forward we're going to make.

Today we can talk about some of the things that are going to advance because we've been doing the right thing together, but there is also some tough news today. And as I've said before, I want to always start with the bad news and then go to the good news. And the bad news is regarding a situation that we've seen now all over the country. Look, all of us in leadership at this moment in history, we have to be willing to make tough decisions and we have to be willing to look at the facts and act on the facts. Let the facts take us to the right decision. We know a lot of other parts of this country, very sadly, made decisions based on something other than the data and in the heat of the moment. And now what we're seeing in Florida, what we're seeing in Texas, even California that tried really hard to get it right, slipping backwards. We see a lot of problems and we particularly see problems revolving around people going back to bars and restaurants, indoors. And indoors is the problem more and more, the sciences showing it more and more.

So, I want to make very clear. We cannot go ahead, at this point in time, with indoor dining in New York City. Look, even a week ago, honestly, I was hopeful we could, but the news we have gotten from around the country gets worse and worse all the time. We're going to work with the State of New York and we have been working together throughout this crisis. We're going to work with the State of New York to figure out what is the exact right way to do this, how to postpone indoor dining until the right moment, what the approach would be to determine when it makes sense to go about it again. As I said, we have been in absolute unity with the State on the focus on data. The data in this city and this state's been getting better all the time, but the data around the country has been getting worse and worse and worse – in the last few days, shockingly worse. And what Dr. Fauci said about the potential in other parts of the country, for the surge that gets so bad, that we could be talking about 100,000 cases a day in the United States. We've got to honor those facts and it is not the time to forge ahead with indoor dining.

But it is the time to double down on outdoor dining. And so far, we have 6,600 restaurants that have taken advantage of our Open Restaurants initiative. I believe there are many more that could benefit from it. We're going to have a huge outreach effort. It's been going on for days, but it's going to deepen over the next few days with Small Business Services, that department and the Department of Transportation, going out into communities, helping to show restaurants that qualify that they can take advantage of this right away, get a lot more business and do it in a safe way, which is outdoors. So, I am very convinced we can help restaurants survive, we can help bring in a lot more revenue to them. We can help bring back a lot of jobs, but do it safely and do it outdoors. Now, outdoor dining unquestionably has been a great hit. And I think the bottom line is that outdoors is working period. This is one of the things we've learned. Outdoors is where we need to be to the maximum extent possible this summer as we fight back this disease. Face coverings are working. We've learned some things that actually make sense. Social distancing works. We now have seen through experience the power of doing things outdoors, the power of the face coverings, the power of the social distancing. So, let's double down and let's make sure that New Yorkers can do as much outdoors as possible going forward.

So, that begins with today's very good news. We announced it before, but today is the day our New York City beaches open today. We are ready for a great holiday weekend. The lifeguards are ready to go. New Yorkers can stay cool. This is something people have been waiting patiently for – maybe not always patiently for, but it's here and that's going to help a lot. But now we're going to go the next step with the outdoor pools. And we were not sure before whether we got available to open some of them, but now we will be able to open some of our biggest outdoor pools and some of the outdoor pools in the communities hit hardest by the coronavirus. And for families, for kids in particular, this is going to be so important, something to look forward to and to enjoy this summer and a place to stay cool. Fifteen outdoor pools will open in the next few weeks. There's a list on your screen. Three open on July 24th, the remainder open hook – excuse me – on August 1st. Now it's not all of our pools. The truth is we had to choose the ones that we thought would have the maximum benefit for the communities hit hardest, the largest pools that we could open, the ones for folks who were the farthest from the beaches. We had to make some choices, but I think these 15 pools are going to make a big, big difference for people in communities all over New York City. Now, again, we're going to do it the right way. There will be social distancing, there will be face coverings when you're not in the pool. We're going to do this with all the standards the State has rightfully set for keeping people safe. And, yeah, there are restrictions. It's going to be different. There's going to be spacing when people are waiting in line to go in, there's going to be a lot of things to make sure we really hold on to the progress we made on health care, but it will all be worth it. And for our kids, in particular, it's going to help for them to have a better summer.

Okay, speaking of young people, they've been through a lot. I've talked about this a lot. They have been through so much. We have to be there for them and a very good result of the budget process, working with the City Council that really prioritized young people and I give them credit for that – $115 million will now be invested in summer programming. And that's going to reach 115,000 young people in this city. And I want to tell you about a couple of the pieces. One, so important, we're going to use young people as social distancing ambassadors and ambassadors for our Test and Trace program, getting the word out in communities. They'll get paid to do this good work, give them meaningful productive work to do, rewarding work to do, and they'll help us to keep people safe. We're also going to have summer camps, combining our pre-existing efforts, the COMPASS initiative, Beacon programs, Cornerstone programs, we're going to have a summer camp initiative. A lot of it will be online. Some of it will be outdoors. All of it will be done safely, but it'll be very enriching for kids. And then the Summer Bridge program, this takes what we have done, historically with summer youth employment, makes a variation on that for the coronavirus moment, makes sure that our young people will get financial support, that they'll be able to work on career readiness and be able to explore the future and do important community service. A lot of that again will be online, but it will be very positive and rewarding for our kids. They'll make a difference in their communities. They'll prepare themselves for their future. It will help our kids on the right path and help them to get compensated because we want our young people to have a positive and productive summer.

Now let's turn to our indicators. And again, today, good news in New York City, which you have earned. Indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 and today there are 61 patients. Indicator two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, that threshold is 375 – today, 293 patients. And most importantly, the percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent – today, two percent. That's the number we've been at most of the time in the last few weeks and that is a very, very good number. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Good morning, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A – as a reminder, we're joined today by Budget Director Melanie Hartzog, SBS Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Parks First Deputy Commissioner Liam Kavanagh, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Brigid from WNYC

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Brigid. Hey, how are you doing?

Question: Happy beach day.

Mayor: Happy beach day, yes. I know that's important to the residents of the Rockaways, in particular.

Question: [Inaudible] indeed. So, I have a couple of budget questions. The first I want to sort of more big picture historical, you know, I know this was a very difficult budget agreement to reach [inaudible] budget gaps because of the pandemic. And yet even this $88 billion budget is vastly larger than your first fiscal year in 2015 when it was just the $75 billion budget. So, I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how you want New Yorkers to understand how the City budget has grown under your mayoralty.

Mayor: Brigid –

Question:[Inaudible] question.

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you. It's a very, very important question. And the budget grew because we had the revenue, the budget grew because the City was succeeding. You'll remember recently as February – 4.6 million jobs, the most in the history of New York City. The budget grew because we had so many important investments to make to build up the city and make it more fair and equal. So, I am someone – look, my political orientation is really clear. I am someone who believes that we learned a lot of what we needed to know about life from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, and that a government that invests in its people actually creates a stronger and sustainable society. So, we invested a huge amount in education, pre-K, 3-K, after school programs, a huge amount in affordable housing, a huge redistribution of wealth, tens of billions of dollars that we redistributed to working class people and communities of color that had gotten the short end of the stick – and all of that was worth it. And look, we need to get out of this crisis and move forward, and we're not going to do it through the “austerity approach.” We saw how badly that has failed in many parts of the world. We've got to keep investing whatever way we can, but within our means, I'm praying for a stimulus in Washington that will allow us to truly get back on our feet. But I think the investments we made over the long term were the right ones to make.

Question: And then given the reaction to this budget deal and that, you know, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams is now no longer threatening to use his charter power but says he will. What actions are you prepared to take if he attempts to use the charter to block implementation of this?

Mayor: Brigid, I was public advocate. I know the law. That's just a misinterpretation of the law. The Law Department feels that strongly. I know the City Council feels that strongly. If you look at that passage, it says the public advocate and the city clerk sign off on the tax receipts. And I don't think anyone's going to say the city clerk can shut down the New York City government and shut down our budget, nor can the public advocate. So we're going to move forward. We have a budget that was agreed upon with the City Council to keep this city moving forward. And we need to recognize that it's so important in New York City to focus on our restart and our recovery and not distractions like this.

Moderator: The next is Al Jones from 1010 WINS.
.
Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. This has to do with indoor, outdoor dining. It seems to me with a lot of the smaller restaurants, the mom and pops, the corner restaurants – that they really aren't equipped to move outside. And the sidewalks are narrow, the streets are crowded. Has any thought been given to maybe opening up more of the streets? I know we have the Open Streets program, but more for restaurants? Like they're doing up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx? Closing off blocks and just giving them over to the restaurants to have a lot more outdoor seating?

Mayor: Yeah Al, I think it's a really good idea. Look we have two real successes – the Open Restaurants initiative with the sidewalks and the curbs, unquestionably working. We can take that a lot farther. The Open Streets, and I want to give the City Council credit. They really pushed that idea. We worked hard to figure out how to do it right. It took a while. And then we got there. The Open Streets are working. We're going to combine them as you're indicating to have Open Streets that also allow for a lot more room for restaurants. And I think there's more Open Streets we can do. So, yeah, I want to see where we can use that model – especially look, we've only got a few months when it's warm enough to really maximize this. I want to see us do more Open Streets in general and more Open Streets that can also benefit our restaurants.

Moderator: Al do you have a follow up?

Question: I do not.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Mr. Mayor, good morning.

Mayor: Good morning, Rich.

Question: So Mr. Mayor you mentioned in your remarks about the areas of the country where you know, the fever or the virus is surviving and climbing. And the idea of keeping the – remember the idea of keeping people out of New York, visitors from places where COVID is skyrocketing, has any action been taken on that? Can you do anything about it? Have you talked to the airlines or – you know, there clearly is a worry that that people will come here and we'll have a repeat?

Mayor: Yes, Rich, it's a real thing and a real concern. So the division of labor here, of course, the most obvious places, the airports, you know, if someone's coming on a flight from Florida or Texas. We're talking with the State and we'd like the Port Authority police, you know, working with the airlines to get those names and share them with the City. And then our Test and Trace Corp can follow up with every single one, confirm they're in quarantine, make sure they have resources if they need food or if they need health care or whatever it's going to take. The same, the bus terminal, Port Authority Bus Terminal would be a great place for the Port Authority Police to get names of people coming off of buses from the states that are on that list that the Governor talked about. And the State police at, you know, bridges and tunnels. They patrol, obviously can stop people with those plates from those states and just confirm that they're from there and get their contact info if they're going to be staying in New York City. And then we will work on the follow through, through our Test and Trace Corp.

Moderator: The next is Reuven from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Incident several days ago, Councilman Kalman Yeger proposed amendments to reduce the interest rate charged to taxpayers who miss payments during the recovery period, saying people are having a tough time during this crisis. The City shouldn't be profiting from their misfortune, especially since you have said many times that you support letting renters delay rent payments. Now during the Council vote, members of your staff were texting council members saying that if the interest is reduced, it will bankrupt the City. Do you agree that the City would be bankrupted if interest would be reduced only for the upcoming property tax payments? [Inaudible] interest used to discourage late payments or will be used by the City as a way to make revenue?

Mayor: Reuven, it's the same point. People need to, of course pay their property tax bills, pay whatever they owe to the City of New York. Why? Because it allows us to keep everything else going. If you want safety, if you want to know that there's going to be a firefighter if there's a fire in your house, if you want your garbage picked up, all the things you want, that health care system functioning, it depends on the tax revenue. We've been really clear that a lot of people are in hardship and there are ways that folks who are in hardship can make adjustments in how, and when they pay. There are interest rates. We've made adjustments to interest rates, but we can't say that it's an open situation where we can do without revenue and still keep this city going. We're not getting help yet from Washington or Albany. So we have to strike a balance. And I think we did strike a fair balance here.

Moderator: The next is Luis from [inaudible].

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Luis. How are you doing?

Question: Hanging in there. Since last Friday, the Governor's spoken of a certain air filtration systems being mandatory for malls and as a recommendation for other businesses and offices, has the city and or Health Department have been working in any way, shape or form with the State in this regard or speaking with local businesses about this?

Mayor: Yeah, Luis, it's an important point and we are working closely with the State and all of our health team working with the State health team, and we're certainly going to work with businesses, with office buildings, to figure out what's going to keep people safe. I know the vast majority of business folks I've talked to are already on this kind of thing, Luis. They want to make sure their employees are safe. They don't want to see a situation when there's an outbreak. They have a real positive self interest in getting it right. But yeah, we're all working together to maximize the use of that kind of tool.

Question: Okay, regarding indoor dining, have you any clue what the Governor's decision today might be? I mean, you think his monitors last night found something pleasing or displeasing?

Mayor: What was that last part?

Question: You think his monitors, you know, the State Police, the Health Department, the Liquor Authority?

Mayor: Yeah that’s – I want to separate the different issues. Look on indoor dining, what we're all looking at, the State and the City, is the experience from the other parts of the country that has been unfortunately so negative and so consistent. Certainly let the Governor and his team speak for themselves but I believe we all share a concern that indoor dining has now become problematic. And it's not a rule forever that we couldn't do it, but it's a postponement. That's what I believe is right to do, and wait until we have evidence that we can do it safely. There's a separate question about enforcing folks who are outdoors, and we all – we have a lot of civilian agencies that are constantly going to make sure that we do not have outdoor groupings and address them. It's not perfect, but, overwhelmingly, let's be clear, overwhelmingly New York City residents respect social distancing, wear their face coverings, don't want to get each other sick. What I think we should be very careful about is that is not a role for police. It's not a role for a city police or State Police to enforce social distancing. We learned that through experience and we are honest about it. We had to change that. We're not going to do it that way. I don't think the State Police should either.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Michael Gartland from the Daily News.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Michael. How are you doing, man?

Question: All right. You've talked about the expansion of the city's borrowing powers, that's been a discussion we've been having. You know, lawmakers we've talked to have said based on past spending practices, they don't – they essentially don’t trust giving this power to the city, that it will be misused. And you know, I understand your position that this is kind of essential to avoid austerity measures, as well as kind of the stimulus. What would you say to those people to kind of restore trust they have that the city could handle this in a way that's –

Mayor: I don't think it's about trust. I think it's about politics. When after 9/11, Rudy Giuliani went to Albany, he got a unanimous support from the Democratic Assembly and the Republican Senate to allow $2.5 billion in borrowing for New York City to see itself out of that crisis. New York City borrowed $2 billion worth has almost paid all of it back over a 20-year plan. Had no negative impact on our finances. The city continued to thrive after. This is the biggest single combined crisis the city has ever seen. The amount of borrowing we asked for, we brought the number to $5 billion. That's not a lot of money compared to the extent of our budget. It will be handled responsibly. Our team at OMB handles everything responsibly. The city's bond rating went up in the last year, whereas most of America didn't see that obviously. No this is a very financially well-run, carefully managed city and anyone who wants the facts can see it.

And so, because Albany didn't act, we had to put a billion dollars in the budget for labor savings. We're going to work with our labor unions to try and avert layoffs. And if we cannot, and if there is no stimulus or help from Albany, then something horrible and tragic will happen on October 1st, 22,000 good people, 22,000 city employees will be laid off. That's about as real as it gets. So I would ask people to put the politics aside, look at the facts, and work with this city that has done so much to help its people, and also to be careful with it's money. And that's how we move forward with that.

With that everyone, look, this is a really, really pivotal time in our city's history and we have come through these last four months, when people said it could not be done, when it looked like it was going to get worse and worse, the rest of the country often was not charitable and respectful to New York City. Guess what? As they say in scripture, as scripture tells us, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. New York City today is doing everything to keep our people healthy, keep our people safe. It is so clear that the measures we've all taken together, the social distancing, the shelter in place, the use of the face coverings, the focus on outdoors activity is the right thing to do, it's working and we're going to be smart, and we're going to be careful, and we're going to focus on data, and we're going to do things the right way for our people. So this is a moment for everyone to be real focused, real serious, to work together. If we do that, we're going to fight this disease back once and for all, and then get to the work of restarting and rebuilding the city and bring it back better and fairer than ever. Thank you.

2020-07-02 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, what we've seen during this crisis is people innovating, people coming up with ingenious ideas to address the challenges we face. New Yorkers doing what New Yorkers do best, being creative, being resourceful. And so, we've seen some great ideas, and sometimes one great idea meets another great idea and they come together and create something even better, something really, really special. And that's what we're going to talk about to begin today, the idea of Open Streets meeting the idea of Open Restaurants, coming together to create something very special for this summer in New York City. So, we have two initiatives that have been tremendously successful. Open Restaurants, fantastic – the impact it’s had helping restaurants come back, bringing back their employees, giving people a livelihood, allowing New Yorkers to enjoy our amazing restaurants again. Open Streets, free space for kids to play, families to come out. Both have come together wonderfully.

Now, let's remember we made a decision that we could not go ahead with indoor dining, given everything that we're seeing around the country, all the problems, really troubling realities in other parts of the country, and a lot of it connected to bars and restaurants. So, we have to double down on Open Streets and Open Restaurants and bring them together to address the situation and give maximum options to our restaurants, to their employees. And also, we know the people want it. We've seen an incredible, incredible response from the people in New York City. So, starting this weekend, 22 Open Streets will also have Open Restaurants on them. And some of them will be existing Open Streets, some will be new, but it's going to be amazing because it’s going to key into some of the places in our city where we have extraordinary restaurants, concentrated in one place. People love to go there in any time, but now imagine being able to enjoy it all alfresco. Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Little Italy Mulberry Street here in Manhattan.

Think about what is possible, if we could make them centerpieces of outdoor dining – taking a tough situation, turning into something good. We're going to do it all over the five boroughs. We're going to work with Business Improvement Districts and local alliances and associations that have been key partners in the Open Streets. And this will be for Friday nights and weekends, the times when people most want to come out to the restaurants and we think it's going to be something very special. So, 2.6 miles of Open Streets will be part of this dining initiative. And this is some initial ones I mentioned, more are coming in places like Dyckman Street in northern Manhattan, others to come as we go along. So, we're very excited. It is going to open up a world of possibilities and get a lot of people back to their jobs. We want to help working people.
This is going to help a lot.

Now, we are talking here about what we're going to do this summer, but our eyes are on the fall all the time. We know the fall is when people are really going to come back, when things are going to really restart, and we have to maintain our progress. I'm knocking on wood, but we know that if all goes the way we're doing it now we're making steady progress on the health care front. We're making steady progress on the restart. We can bring it together and have a really strong fall, but a lot of it hinges on our schools, reopening our schools safely, successfully. We've said, I believe it, it's going to have to be the greatest school year in the history of New York City public schools. And everyone shares that goal. And you could see the emotion earlier this week when we had the citywide graduation ceremony, how much people are feeling this moment in history, how much we have to support our kids.

We are doing the work right now to make September successful, to make the new school year successful. I want to thank the unions who represent the people who do the work that includes, of course, UFT, CSA, DC 37, all the unions that represent the people working in our school system. They have been at the table every day, literally, in the planning of the new school year. And it's been a very cooperative approach. On top of that, we've asked for the voices of parents to guide us. So, this is astounding. The DOE did a survey of parents and they got 400,000 responses – that is not a small sample size – 400,000 people answered the survey. And here's the most important fact, 75 percent of our New York City public school parents want to send their kids back to school in September. They feel ready now. They know that's what they want to do.

So, we're full steam ahead for September – the goal, of course, to have the maximum number of kids in our schools as we begin schools. And we know that there's going to be a lot of challenges. We know there's just sheer logistical challenges with schools that were overcrowded before the coronavirus and now have to practice social distancing. But we're going to make it work to the maximum in each school and we're going to work with the scheduling realities to find a way. And we're going to hope and pray in the meantime that the scientific community makes progress on this disease because that's what will really opened up the ability to get back 100 percent. But in the meantime, a lot of work going on. Chancellor Carranza, meeting later today with principals to hone their plans specifically on how much each school will be able to bring back its kids. What's the number each school can hit in terms of bringing back kids safely with distancing. And, of course, the goal and the focus will always be health and safety first for our kids, for our families, for all the people that work in our schools.

Now we are going to, of course – as part of the school reopening, what will you see? You'll see daily cleanings – deep cleanings after each day to make sure the schools, top to bottom, are safe. You're going to see constant use of face coverings. They'll be provided for free for anyone who needs them – kids, adults alike. Everyone will be expected to wear face coverings. You'll see social distancing. That six-foot rule will be in effect. You'll see a lot of features to make it easy for kids and adults in the school building to stay safe, hand washing stations, hand sanitizer all over the building. These are the kinds of things that we need to do to give people confidence, make sure they're safe, and we'll be doing that and preparing for that in the months ahead and continuing to stay close to the folks who do the work and parents as we prepare these plants.

Okay. Now I'm going to switch gears quickly and go to another topic that brings out a lot of passion in New Yorkers. Anybody who experiences this has a strong opinion about it. Yes, I'm talking about Alternate Side Parking. So, this week was the first week of a brand new approach in which we are only going to require folks, when alternate side parking is in effect, we're only going to require you to move your car once a week. No more twice a week, which has been the case in some neighborhoods. I think that's just unfair to everyone. It's going to be once a week from now on. Biggest change to Alternate Side Parking in the last two decades. This week has been a cleanup week. We've overall seen the city has stayed pretty clean. A couple of times we've had to do a cleanup. We're doing it this week. And then we will suspend the Alternate Side again the following week. So, from Sunday, July 5th through Sunday, July 12th, Alternate Side Parking will be suspended. And then we'll decide in the meantime if we need to pick it up again and when we need to pick it up again.

Another important question for so many people when you think about how you get around the city, of course, is the Staten Island Ferry. A lifeline for Staten Islanders, and more and more Staten Islanders are coming back to work so we're seeing ridership up to almost 17,000 people daily this week. That's a major step up. We got to keep the ferry safe. We’ve got to allow for social distancing. So, we're bringing back more rush hour service. Starting on Monday, we'll go back to the pre-COVID rush hour service, every 15 minutes at peak times during the morning and evening rush hour. So, that starts on Monday, July 6th and passengers will have the space they need to stay safe.

Now, I want to talk about one of the really painful stories within the very overall painful story of the coronavirus crisis in the city. When the coronavirus started to be on the minds of New Yorkers, one community already started to feel the pain of this crisis before it manifested for so many of the others, so many of the rest of us. We saw discrimination and bias against the Asian American community very, very early on. It was unfair. It was horrible. It was destructive. It was painful for members of the Asian American community. And we had to fight it then and we have to fight it now. We also know that a lot of the stores, the restaurants, the parts of the community that people depend on, they started to suffer. People weren't going to those stores and restaurants. They were suffering from discrimination early on in an economic way as well. This was especially true in Chinatown here in Manhattan, the virus, the onset of the virus, the discrimination, everything came together, and people were losing business and losing their livelihoods. Right down right in the middle of all that, the community lost its beating heart, an institution, a place that was a centerpiece for the community, 70 Mulberry Street. A building that means so much to the Chinatown community that housed some of the great institutions of the community, that had been around for so long and was a beacon to the community. A horrible fire crushed the feelings of people in that community. They saw something they love literally burning to the ground.

Well, it is important, it is vital that 70 Mulberry continue to be a part of the life of Chinatown. It is Chinatown's history. It's all our history as New Yorkers. So, we have to find the right way to bring it back. And we have to listen to the people of the community as we do that. So, I'm announcing today a plan to do exactly that. We have put $80 million in the budget for the restoration of this building. We are going to have a three-month community process to listen to the community about the different ways that this might be done and to figure out what makes sense. We need to preserve every piece of history in that building we can and what it means to the community. The elected officials, the community leaders, the nonprofit leaders have been united in wanting to find the smart way to bring this building back. And we will be with them every step of the way. And joining us now is a leader who has fought passionately to protect and preserve this building, and it's personal for her, not only as a leader of the Chinatown community, but because she literally went to elementary school in this very building when it was at that time, P. S. 23, my pleasure to introduce Council Member Margaret Chin.

Council Member Margaret Chin: Thank you, Mayor. Yes, I went to school there in 1963 when I landed in New York City. And I thank you, Mayor. I still remember right after the fire, you came down to Chinatown with all the commissioner from DCAS and Department of Buildings, and you promised that you will help the community rebuild this treasure and the five nonprofits that's been providing services that let us know about our history, taking care of our senior, training, jobs to people to help give them a better future. We're just so grateful that you kept that promise by providing funding and support for a robust community engagement and we look forward to a brighter future because what's going to happen, it's not just rebuilding or the five nonprofits that are there, but an opportunity to create more space for other nonprofits and cultural organizations. And it's going to continue to be a beacon in our community. And I thank you for keeping your promise.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Council Member. Thank you for all the hard work you've put in. I want to tell you a P. S. 23 did a good job with you and thank you for all you do for the community and we will get to a great plan to move forward together.

Now, everyone let's do what we do every day and go over our health care indicators. Indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200. Today, it is 60 patients that are being reported. Indicator two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, that threshold is 375 – today, 293 patients. And indicator number three, people who've tested positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent – today, once again, two percent. That appears to be our number. Let's keep it that way. That's a really good number. And again, that's because of your hard work. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we turn to questions from the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're also joined today by Chancellor Carranza, Commissioner Trottenberg, Commissioner Doris, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma. Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello, everybody on the call, how are you doing?

Mayor: Hey Gersh, how are you doing good?

Question: I’m good. A little more information about the open restaurants. Is there any help the city will give to some of these struggling restauranteurs? You know, because most of them, many restaurants, we're 100 percent indoor businesses and suddenly they have to round up outdoor furniture and umbrellas, et cetera, I know that the city has an online marketplace, but it's almost entirely PPE stuff, not for restaurant service itself. And also the date, will it go beyond labor day into the fall?

Mayor: So Gersh on the date, we are going to look at that. I want to see how it goes through July into August, with things are working, of course, I'm going to be open to going farther. On the equipment and all, no, I've – that's not what we've been hearing from the restaurant community. We have been hearing in fact that people have the tables and indoors that can often move him outdoors, that their central problem or challenge was getting the authorization to be outdoors and making it simple, making it easy, that's what we did. So we're actually hearing from the restaurant community, they can handle that part of the equation. What they needed was the support to get it done cleanly and quickly.

Moderator: Next is Julia from the post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, how are you?

Question: Governor Cuomo blamed you yesterday for having to pause indoor dining in this city for not ensuring compliance with social distancing and mask-wearing rules. I'm looking for a response to that, and wondering if you think you missed an opportunity to move forward on the city's restart.

Mayor: No, the reason that indoor dining didn't make sense was the data we received from states all over the country, and that really picked up in the last week or so and it became deafening how bad the situation was in many, many states and how much it was late related back to bars and restaurants. That was the reason. The enforcement has been strong, but it's also been smart. We did not believe, and we tried and realized it was a mistake, we do not believe that police officers should be doing social distancing enforcement. We believe it should be civilians. We do not believe in handing out fines and people are already financially troubled, which is pretty much everyone in this city, if we can solve the problem in other ways. Enforcement's been strong. I've looked at the data. I'm convinced the vast, vast majority of New Yorkers are following the rules. You're always going to be able to find a photo of someone who doesn't, but we're going to go address that, and I think restaurant and bar owners want to address it too. So no, I just disagree with that characterization.

Moderator: The next is Reema from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. My first question is about school reopening plans. It's more just logistical. I know that the plans have to be submitted to the state, and then there's a whole planning process there. Can you just go over sort of where you guys are in terms of timeline and this is, you know, obviously for the chancellor as well, and when you're going to be submitting those plans to the state and then when we'd expect to hear something more concrete.

Mayor: Yeah, again, Reema, I think the level of concreteness is there in many ways, and what we're trying to tell people is some very, very specific things. I don't know, it's always being heard. That means we have to say it more and more clearly. I'll turn to the Chancellor to talk about the state process and when there'll be whatever submissions and responses. But look again, I'm going to try to say this as plainly as possible. I am someone who is a public school parent for the entire education of both of my kids, pre-K to 12th grade. So I understand parents want answers. Here's some answers schools will be opening in September. Each school will have a number of as the maximum number of kids that can be in that school with social distancing, using every conceivable space in that school, we're going to convert everything that can be converted to a classroom, to a classroom, to accommodate social distancing.

Some schools will be able to have all of their kids when you factor in the total use of space, and that probably every kid will not be there to say at least – 75 percent will I believe, 25 percent may not, if you believe this very, very large and comprehensive survey. So schools will be open on the first day of school, maximum number of kids in each building possible, they'll have to be for schools that cannot accommodate all their kids in the building. At one time by definition, some kind of staggered schedule, that piece will be determined with the schools. That's an ongoing conversation with the unions to see what that final configuration will be, but it will be announced well in advance of school beginning so parents can plan, something I think we'll have decisions on in the next few weeks. There will be a deep cleaning every day. There will be handwashing stations throughout the school, hand sanitizer throughout the schools, social distancing, free face coverings. Everyone will be required to wear a face covering. So those are a lot of specifics and we're moving forward, aggressively. Chancellor take it from there.

Chancellor Carranza: Hey Reema. So we working very closely with the State Education Department, as well as the Regents. They have not yet required the submission of reopening plans, but every school district in New York State is in the thick of developing the reopening plans. We anticipate sometime this summer, they're going to ask for the plan – we're going to be ready to go.

Mayor: Good deal. Thank you.

Moderator: Reema, do you have a follow up?

Question: Yeah, I do. So my second question is about the Summer Youth Employment program. I know that this year with the passage of the budget, that it's going to be a different program, a public private partnership. My question though is about why the city is including – there's this like $23 million in state TANF funds that are needed to roll out the plan that you all announced yesterday. But we don't know yet if that money is coming through. So I'm, I'm wondering why the city included that money in the final budget, if it's not clear whether that money's going to come through for sure or not.

Mayor: Reema, we'll have our OMB folks follow up with you. I think we do believe that money is coming through. So I've not heard anyone in the meetings I've been in that discussed this suggest. It's not. So we'll get an answer to you, but at this moment, I do believe it's coming.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. The next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, on the budget. I know that for now that the city managed to avoid any layoffs to municipal workers, but do you have a sense for how many human service workers the folks at nonprofits who are contracted essentially to do city work, but don't work for this city, do you know how many of them could potentially be laid off by this budget? I'm hearing figures that it could be in the thousands.

Mayor: Yeah, that's a very good question. You'll have, I don't have an exact figure. We'll get that from OMB today, or at least a projection. I'm worried about that. I mean, as we have had to make really tough budget decisions, of course it's hurting our city workforce. It's hurting our nonprofit workforce. We're in a pandemic, a massive economic crisis, a massive fiscal crisis. It's not business as usual. So we'll get you an estimate, but I'm very worried about that, and that's another reason why we need stimulus and/or borrowing help so we can keep addressing this and stop it from getting worse. But I want to remind you that city head count now is down about 6,000 people already compared to the budget we passed last June. The changes you've seen in the NYPD but other agencies as well. So head – city head count is going down. If we don't get the federal support or the state help, if we can't find those labor savings, another 22,000 city workers could end up losing their job, which I want to do everything I can to avert, but I'm also worried about a growing impact on the nonprofit sector and hope and pray we can get the support to avert that.

Moderator: Last question for today, it goes to Jillian from WBAI.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good Jillian. How are you?

Question: Well, thank you. So the question I'm about to ask was not originally my first question for today, but something came up in this briefing so here goes, it's good news about 80 Mulberry street, but if the city doesn't do anything to protect the area from gentrification like zoning restrictions, won't saving one building, being an empty gesture if there's widespread residential and commercial displacements?

Mayor: I think there's a little bit of apples and oranges there. I do understand the question. I appreciate the question. I mean, look, this, this building is supremely important to people in the community and we have to find a way to preserve it, and I think there's a very, very deep-seated community. There are people who are, have been there a long time and are going to be there a long time. I do think gentrification's a profoundly important issue in New York City. I think we found some of the ways to address it, but not enough, and we have to keep working at it. Some ways in some places rezoning are an answer. Other places, bluntly. I don't know if they are. I also think that with the impact of the pandemic and the economic crisis, I'm not sure you're not going to see some changes in gentrification in the coming years and some reductions of the impact. But look, I will always look at a rezoning proposal. I care about that community. I want to protect that community. If there's a proposal that can achieve actual balance, that's something I'd always be interested in.

Question: Okay. So now I'm going to change my other questions to a follow up on this. So you're talking about rezonings, but all of your rezonings have been upzonings and we're talking about a downzoning, essentially. That's what the Chinatown working group was trying to put forth over the last several years, and I don't know if you have any intentions of joining anything like that.

Mayor: What I have felt up to now and Jillian again, whole different moment in history. I mean, we're going through a massive transformation as we speak, and I don't think we've all begun to even think about what it means. Again, this is like going through the Great Depression or the pandemic of the Spanish flu after World War One, but we're doing them simultaneously with a 1970s fiscal crisis thrown in. I mean, we're in the middle of a massive painful, but transformative moment. I don't know what the future's going to look like. We're going to work to try and figure that out best. I don't think the gentrification patterns are going to be the same, but what we have focused on is building affordable housing. We've done rezonings with the goal of maximizing affordable housing, because I believe ideologically, that that is the way to protect the balance of this city to make sure that working people can live here to make sure it's a city for everyone.

The free market, I always say the free market had free reign in Bushwick, in Bed-Stuy, in a lot of other places and really massive displacement occurred. Where we've been doing rezonings we're able to strike a balance and ensure that affordable housing be part of the future for the community as well, and some places we have put some restrictions in place, for sure. So it's not like it's only been one way in some places we have said, this is a limit to growth that has to happen for sure. So I will look at the situation in Chinatown anew under the dynamics we're dealing with, but I still think we don't have enough of a sense of where we're going next. What I do know is whatever the future of New York City, we're going to have to protect affordable housing. We're going to have to build more affordable housing to keep this a city for everyone.

With that, everyone. Let me just conclude and say, I do want to take a brief moment to pay tribute to two great public servants who will be leaving the administration after long and distinguished stints. Freddi Goldstein, my press secretary after four years on our team and four great years and Wiley Norvell after nine years. So that takes him back to the time I was public advocate. He has been a mainstay of this team and both of them have contributed really, really greatly, not just to this team and the work we do here every day when we're talking to the press and talking to the people, but to helping run New York City in one of its toughest moments in our entire history. So to Freddi and Wiley, thank you on behalf of all of the people of New York City, and it is a reminder and I hope all of you just take a moment to appreciate our public servants because the folks here at City Hall from March 1st to today, the vast majority of them have not even thought about taking a day off. It has been nonstop and very, very long days, people around here 15-hour day is not new to them, and throughout the coronavirus crisis, it's been typical. Our public servants, our healthcare heroes, our first responders and so many more have kept the city running no matter what's been thrown at them. So a lot of times in the public discourse, you know, it's a cheap shot to put down people who work for the government and public servants. But I think our public servants have really, really stepped up in this crisis and they deserve our thanks more than ever. So please take a moment today to be thankful for all who do so much for us. Thank you, everyone.

2020-07-06 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend. And New Yorkers deserved a holiday, deserved a chance to take it a little easier after everything we've been through. And what a beautiful weekend it was outside. And it is really an example of the fact that New Yorkers have a lot to be proud of, that there was so much to celebrate this weekend. And today, we are entering phase three, which is something else to celebrate, something you've earned by working so hard to get us to this day. But, at the same time, as we are celebrating how far we've come, we have to be real honest about some of the challenges we're facing. I always say, I think it's better to start with the bad news and then go to the good news. So, I want to talk about what happened this weekend. You know, we had a lot of people out there, very peacefully celebrating our nation's birthday and spending time together with family and friends, but we also saw too much violence this weekend. And this is something that we have a lot of work to do to address and is directly related to all the dislocation that's happened over these last four months with the coronavirus.

We've all come together in this city many times before. And what we've done in these last months is particularly notable. This disease, this unseen enemy that threw us such an extraordinary challenge without a roadmap, trying to figure out together how we would fight it back. New Yorkers should be very proud of how far we have come. So now, let me turn to the good news that phase one of the restart has been successful so far. Phase two has been successful so far. Today, we begin phase three and we begin phase three because of the hard work you've all put in. And I'm always going to thank you for it, and then I'm always going to remind you to keep doing what you're doing. The social distancing works. The face coverings work. We have to stick with it. But today is a good day, because about 50,000 people will come back to work and start their livelihoods again. A whole range of personal services will be available again. And we're starting simultaneously a lot of recreation activities in our parks – basketball, handball, volleyball, bocce, all we'll be up and running again. Dog runs will be open again. It will be more of summer again, because we did this hard work to get this far and we cannot let up now.

And as a reminder of what happens when people let up – look around the country, look at the places that unfortunately did let up, that didn't stick to the smart rules, and they are suffering now. And I feel awful for them and I hope they all come out of it soon, but this is why we did not move forward with indoor dining, because we've seen that restaurants and bars, indoor dining caused so much of the resurgence in other states. So, that's something that will be on hold for a substantial amount of time until we can figure out the right way to do that safely.

Now, people are coming back to work and people are engaging their lives again in so many ways. And we see the evidence, which I'll go over with you. And look, it's incumbent upon all of us to make sure we do this safely. The City's going to keep working hard to make sure this has done safely. The MTA has been doing great work. We need them to keep doing it, because more and more people are coming back to the subways and buses. So, I'm going to compare this last Wednesday, July 1st to two weeks earlier, June 17th. And in that two-week phase, subway ridership up 18 percent – now, over 1.1 million riders a day. Bus ridership up 12 percent over the same period – now, also almost 1.1 million riders. Staten Island Ferry ridership up 15 percent – and that's why, starting today, we have gone back to the full rush-hour service that we had before the coronavirus hit. What's interesting is we do see more traffic into Manhattan on the East River Bridges and the Harlem River Bridges – three percent and seven percent, respectively – but very notably, mass transit usage is going up substantially faster than a car traffic, and that's in many ways a good thing and a good sign that people are feeling more and more comfortable and ready to engage. But, again, do it safely with the face coverings, with the social distancing, remembering how important it is to each other, to your family, to yourself, to stay safe.

Now, as we have moved ahead with outdoor restaurant seating, that's been huge success. We are not doing the indoors, as I said, but we've moved forward with the outdoor, and that's been a great success. People have really, really engaged it. Customers have come, the employees have come back to work. People have gotten their livelihoods back. Businesses have been saved. We've been very focused on making sure enforcement is strong at these restaurants that are now open, particularly on weekends, of course. So, we had 700 City personnel, including the Sheriff's Office out in full force over the July 4th weekend. And I just want to say, the Sheriff's Office has been doing tremendous work on many, many fronts. I want to thank the Sheriff and his whole team. People don't know a lot about them, but what they're doing has been absolutely crucial to fighting back this virus and making sure this city is safe in so many ways. So, thank you, Sheriff, and your whole team. So, a huge number of personnel out where most of the bars and restaurants are – a thousand businesses were inspected this weekend. 85 percent were in immediate compliance. Those that needed to make adjustments, the inspector stayed until issues were addressed. Sometimes that meant moving tables farther apart or dispersing crowds. This is going to be the model from this point on, a huge number of personnel out, addressing issues. But what we see is, overwhelmingly, both the restaurant owners and the customers are doing the right thing. Sometimes people need some help, sometimes they need some reminders, but, overwhelmingly we're seeing people are doing the right thing. Now, the restaurants, outdoors, I said, huge success – over 7,000 restaurants now have the outdoor seating under the Open Restaurant Program. We are going to continue to work with those restaurants to make sure they are able to do a great job for their customers, but also stay safe. So, what we're doing from this point on – any new restaurant that applies not only we're going to do the self-certification, but we're going to have immediately a call from a City official the same day they self-certify to go over the safety rules, to make sure that we address all issues upfront so people know exactly what they have to do to stay safe. I know our restaurant owners want to do things the right way. Sometimes, some extra communication helps, so that's what we're going to do.

Okay. Let's go over today's indicators. And, again, we keep looking at the trend here. It is a really good trend because of your hard work. And please, remember, every day we see progress, it's because of you, but it's also a day to remember we’ve got to keep at it, because we want to keep reopening and we want to have life come back to as much as normal as possible in this city. We can only do it with your hard work. So, let's look at the indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold of 200 – today, 62 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, threshold of 375 – today, 276, a hundred less, that's fantastic. And, most importantly, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent – and today, the lowest we have ever seen, one percent. So, that's fantastic.

Just to give you a little bit of extra appreciation for what you've all achieved at the height of this crisis, we had 850 people admitted to the hospital for some suspected COVID-19 in a single day. Compare that to the 62 we're reporting today. At the height, we had 71 percent testing positive – compare that to one percent today – a lot to be proud of.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we’ll turn to our colleagues in the media. And please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that on the phone today, we have Commissioner Doris, Chief Monahan, Sheriff Fucito, and Senior Advisor, Dr. Varma. With that, I will start with Rich from WCBS 880.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Rich. How are you doing? How was your weekend?

Question: Well, it was terrific actually. And I didn't burn the hamburgers.

Mayor: There you go. I'm proud of you, Rich.

[Laughter]

Question: You know, the idea of excluding people from states where you know, COVID is very high – is anything, are there any real moves to enforce that? In other words, is there anything that the NYPD is doing, the Port Authority Police, or is this all sort of a theory at this point?

Mayor: No, Richard, it can't just be a theory. It's a great question. It has to come to life. Look, this is a new world for us to figure out, you know, on a regular basis, because we're going to be at this for a long time, how we are going to identify anyone who comes from around our own country. Originally, as you remember, when we were facing this, we all thought of this as something coming in from Europe, coming in from China. Now it is a question within our own country and we have to figure out a structure that works. It has to involve the Port Authority Police because they're in the best position to act on folks coming in through the airports, for example, but what I think would work – and we're going to work with the State on this – is to get from the State, the names and contact information of anyone that comes in from one of the states with the biggest problems, and then use our Test and Trace Corps to follow up with them the same day and make sure they understand the rules of quarantine, make sure they have everything they need to stay safe, and keep everyone else safe. So, no, this has to come alive and we're working on it right now, how to make it, like, a regular process that works every day. 

Moderator: Next, we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: I wondered if the administration has at all taken a look on how beach openings one over the weekend in terms of how many people followed social distancing enforcement. What's the administration's take on how it went so far?

Mayor: Yeah, Gloria, I'll get you a more thorough answer. But so far the reports were pretty good. Obviously, a lot of people were really looking forward to the beaches opening. A lot of people came out. We didn't have particularly difficult enforcement issues that I heard about, but I'll check the facts from the last couple of days. My sense, again, is that overwhelmingly New Yorkers understand the rules and they want to follow the rules because they understand it's about their safety and their family's safety and their community's safety. And I think New Yorkers have been pretty amazing throughout. So, as we've dealt with other challenges, from what I've heard so far, the beach openings went really well. 

Moderator: Next we have Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Hey, good morning, everybody. I don't know if you can hear me because I'm on a 7 train. So I'm going to give it a try.

Mayor: We can hear you, Andrew. You're live with the people.

Question: Yeah well 23 people on this train, and 22 of them are wearing a mask. I am wearing a mask.

Mayor: Say again, how many?

Question: 22 out of 23.

Mayor: Very good.

Question: My question has to do with phase three. Now that indoor dining is not a part of it, it's a very incremental phase. And we've already learned from the State that phase four won't include movie theaters and malls. So realistically Mayor, is what we're looking at right now today, the way New York City will be until there's a vaccine?

Mayor: No, I think that's an overstatement respectfully Andrew. I think it's a perfectly fair question, but I don't think that's the whole reality. We have a lot more to learn, to figure out how we're going to address this disease even before there is a vaccine. And look, we're seeing a lot of success so far, I'm knocking on wood. But we have seen obviously, I mean, I went over the indicators today. They're extraordinary and positive. And that says something about the ability of New Yorkers to fight this disease back without a vaccine. And you do see more and more people coming back to work. So I don't think it's, you know, one extreme or another. I think we're making steady progress. I want to see us keep making steady progress. The vaccine will be the absolute, you know, crossing the Rubicon moment. But I think we can make a lot of progress in the meantime.

Question: What would you need to see since you're already at these incredibly low data numbers, what would you need to see or need to know in order to open indoor dining?

Mayor: Yeah. Andrew, when you look at the fact that we got so much data from around the country, indicating that indoor dining, unfortunately, became a real nexus for infection, in a way that other types of economic activity weren't. It just made sense to stay away from it for now. Let's see what happens around the rest of the country. Let's see what happens with our situation. I don't have an immediate timeline now. It's a postponement while we get more information and we see how we do overall. But I want to make sure when we do it that we're sure we can do it safely.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Todd from AM New York.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Todd, how you doing?

Question: I'm doing just fine. Well, I've been out on the street and I've been talking to a lot of people in the communities. One of the things that came out for me was that – was one woman said to me, she said, you know, everybody's been locked up for a long time. The COVID thing, they’re angry. They have no job. They have no school. And, and then you mix in the Rikers people who are in their community and you add in people who are not getting arrested or they're getting arrested and getting released. And she said to me, you know what? It's like letting a Rottweiler off the leash. What do you say to that woman?

Mayor: I think we've been, Todd – we've been dealt a really, really tough hand as a city. And in March and April, it was the health care crisis. In May, we were coming out of it, obviously with the warmer months and as you're right, people were cooped up for all that time. They don't have the normal things to engage their life. We're seeing more and more challenges. But we're going to overcome it. It's going to be tough. It's going to take a lot of hard work, but we're going to overcome it. We have overcome this and much more in the past in terms of dealing with challenges in our communities and having to fight them back. So I know it feels very unsettling for people. It feels unsettling for all of us, but we're going to fight it back.

Moderator: Todd, do you have a follow up?

Question: Yeah. something unrelated. I was down at Coney Island over the weekend and my friend over there, at the Wonder Wheel who says his ride is the most socially distant that you can get. And he says that the City just won't let him reopen. He understands about the other rides and that they may not be socially distant, but he's like, wait a second. They can get on the Wonder Wheel. What do you say?

Mayor: Yeah. It's a fair question. We understand and look, the State rules have been, I think very smart about thinking through the phases and about avoiding things that might create too much closeness with people. And obviously you can understand why amusement parks might be in that category. But he makes a good point that the Wonder Wheel is different and certain pieces of it are different. And so we need to look at the whole thing. So that's a very fair point. And I love Coney Island deeply, and I want to see people there continue to do all the things they've done and keep Coney Island alive. So we'll pursue that with the State to see if there's some way to find the appropriate balance and see what can and cannot open.

So let me conclude today, very simple message. We will not go back. When it comes to our health care reality, the Coronavirus, we will not go back. We went through the worst in the nation in March, in April, we fought our way from that to now being a place that people all over the country are looking to as the example of how to deal with this disease. We're going to stick to what has worked. We will not go back and that's the work we will do together in New York City. Thanks very much, everyone.

2020-07-07 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We’ve got a lot to talk about today, important steps that we are taking to continue to move us forward as a city. Phase Three has begun. It's begun well. There's a lot more to do to restart our city. I’m going to be talking today about the crucial issue of childcare, something so many families need and are concerned about. We're getting ready to take a big step forward on childcare today. And I want to talk about a continued efforts to bring more fairness to the city, to bring more equality, to make sure that everyone has access to the things they need, and to really work on changing the city as we go forward – I’m going to talk today about broadband access.

Some of the things we have to do right away as part of this restart to help our families keep moving forward, to help people get their livelihoods back, to help parents who have been through so much. I've talked to so many parents who are trying their best to support their kids, be at-home educators, still somehow either hold down a job or try to find a new job, try to make ends meet. It's been really, really tough for parents. So, bringing it back childcare is crucial. Now, during this crisis, there's been a very limited amount of childcare – 125 childcare programs have been up and running since April for essential workers, kids, but, for everyone else, it's been a struggle. Today, the New York City Board of Health will be considering a plan to reopen childcare centers across the five boroughs next week. Now, this is over 3,000 childcare centers that could come online right away. And the Board of Health is looking at the data, looking at the facts, how to do this properly, how to do it safely. There's been a lot of conversation between the Board of Health and our Health Department and the childcare providers over recent weeks. They are ready to go. They're waiting for that approval. And look, one of the things we see, thank God, is that the data consistently shows a low infection rate among children when it comes to the coronavirus. So, hopeful that the Board of Health will be able to move forward today. Now, let's be clear, this is important because we want parents to have good choices for childcare, safe choices to avoid the kinds of situations that might not be as safe, it might be unregulated. We want parents to know that the best quality childcare will be there for them. So, strict safety requirements will be in place. There'll be real social distancing requirements as well, no more than 15 kids in a room. All kids, all staff will be required to wear face coverings. There'll be daily health screenings, regular cleanings, constantly – very careful regulation of any items that kids might use in common. So, for example, limited sharing of toys. We need to bring back childcare quickly and safely, and that's what we are working on as we speak. And we'll update you later on today on that vote by the Board of Health.

Now, I mentioned also a major step we need to take in the name of not just building back, but building back a better and fairer city. And this takes us to the topic of broadband. Broadband is the way that so many people access everything, education, job opportunities, job training, anything you need, that's where you're going to find it. And yet, for so many New Yorkers there just isn't access – that digital divide is very, very intense. 1.5 million New Yorkers lack home broadband access. So, this is something we have to go at head-on. It's another tale of two cities and it has been for a long time, and it's all, bluntly, about the profit motive. The internet companies have not attended to lower-income communities. They have not done what's been asked of them to really, truly, fairly, equally make sure that everyone has access. So, this is an issue that's been taken up by our internal Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity. And the mandate of that task force is to use the tools of City government to work very quickly to make changes. We're looking at a lot of big structural changes we need to make in the city, but also we needed to make changes immediately to ensure maximum fairness and equity. That's what the task force is doing. And it's going to involve not only the actions of City government, but turning to the State of New York for help as well, because these internet companies have gotten away with something that's just inappropriate. It's unfair. It's not respectful of communities that have such great need, and we have to do something about that. So, we're going to act in that spirit. I've talked about that spirit of redistribution. First of all, we're, on the City level, going to take resources that came out of the NYPD’s capital budget and put it into broadband access for residents of public housing, low-income New Yorkers who need that access, particularly young people who need that access. $87 million coming out of the NYPD capital budget to go into that broadband access. Combined with other resources, that will allow us in the next 18 months to reach 600,000 New Yorkers who, right now, do not have access. Also, another form of redistribution will be to demand more of companies that have really, really profited without doing what they should do for our communities. So, we're going to fight for a new State law to force internet companies to actually pay the City of New York for the use of our streets. They're profiting, but they're not paying their fair share. We need them to pay. And we would use that money to provide even more broadband access for New Yorkers who don't have it. And here to talk about this initiative, the Deputy Mayor for our city, but also the co-chair of the internal Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity, Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson.

Deputy Mayor J. Phillip Thompson, Strategic Policy Initiatives: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Many New Yorkers, as the Mayor said, in the last few months, use the internet to work from home, others use the internet to take classes or have a virtual doctor's appointment. The internet is more of a necessity these days then a convenience, and this will be even more true in the future. Not having access to the internet in 2020 is like not having access to public education was in 1950. It closes paths to opportunity and makes our economic and racial divides even greater. When our task force on racial inclusion and equity surveyed community organizations in the neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID, the demand for broadband access was one of the most frequent responses we got, including from the woman who's speaking right after me. As the Mayor stated, this $157 million initiative, which will leverage private investment as well, will expand low or no-cost broadband access to 600,000 people in 18 months, including 200,000 NYCHA residents. It will include neighborhoods that currently have very little broadband infrastructure, like East New York and Brownsville. The Mayor's Chief Technology Officer and the Economic Development Corporation will contract much of the work to be done by minority and women-owned businesses, as well as nonprofits. Hundreds of young people from hard-hit communities will be hired and trained as certified broadband installers and technicians. We cannot claim to be a fair city or a democratic city when people are denied access to the internet because they don't have enough money to afford it, or because big corporations don't make enough money providing service. Right now, a few companies have a monopoly on providing internet service and they don't pay a dime to use City infrastructure to provide broadband. As the Mayor said, we are working with Senator Kevin Parker and our other friends in the State Legislature to change that, so that corporations pay their fair share and the revenue will help the City ensure quality affordable broadband for all. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Deputy Mayor. And I want to turn to another leader who joined us on the conference call yesterday related to Harlem, but works to ensure the economic empowerment of people all over New York City. The New York Urban League, for generations, has fought for economic rights – for the economic rights of Black people to make sure that not just was their progress on civil rights, but that had to be progress on economic rights as well. And the work of the Urban League is legendary for the impact it has made and the leader in city will now join us. The CEO of the New York Urban League, Arva Rice.

CEO Arva Rice, New York Urban League: Good morning. Good morning. Thank you, Mayor de Blasio for that wonderful and warm introduction. When the Mayor established the Task Force for Racial Inclusion and Equity, they were tasked with contacting community leaders to hear about our pressing issues and ways that COVID-19 had impacted our communities and business operations. At that time, I was being asked to participate in a lot of surveys, but I took special care and completing this one, because when activated correctly, government policies and practices can positively change people's lives. The Mayor had appointed the First Lady and Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson to lead this effort. So, I believe that the leadership was in place, with the political will to address one of the issues I was compelled to address in my survey. COVID-19 had exacerbated the digital divide that we already knew existed. The divide was keeping our 1.1 million public school children from being able to complete schoolwork that went from in-classroom to a 100 percent virtual studies over the course of a weekend. The digital divide kept families from being able to look for employment options and complete job applications. The divide kept families from being able to be counted in the Census. The divide kept nonprofits for being able to easily pivot to virtual offerings [inaudible] attract their community members information digitally. 1.5 million people in the city, mainly low-income people of color, lack both home and wireless broadband service. This makes it harder for the City's most vulnerable people to access work, education, tele-health, mental health supports and the kind of training that might enable them to obtain a living wage. Community members across the city told the task force that the pandemic is exacerbating the digital divide. Today, I am pleased to be part of the Mayor's announcement that the City listened to our issue and has developed a bold response that will not only lead to better computer access, but will also provide opportunities for minority-owned businesses.

Thank you for reinvesting money that was previously at NYPD capital budget for 600,000 NYCHA and low-income residents to get the tools they need as we recover from COVID-19. I am told that by the end of this year, tens of thousands of NYCHA households will have access to new low-cost broadband options. Over the next 18 months, that number will grow to 600,000 people by the end of 2021, all provided with new lower-cost high-speed internet at $15 a month or less, which is indeed good news.

Lastly, I'm at the opportunities that this creates for small business development. We all know that small businesses have been hit hard by COVID-19 and it is predicted that over 40 percent of African-owned American businesses may never open their doors again. The Mayor has promised to work in collaboration with the State to end sweetheart deals for big companies and start generating revenue to fund digital equity, investing in infrastructure and digital inclusion resources. The City will also work to amend century-old legislation that could pave the way for smaller companies and M/WBE’s to enter the marketplace. In this time of uncertainty, economic challenge, and social unrest, New Yorkers need no-nonsense solutions that will have big results. Thank you, Mayor de Blasio, and the Task Force for Racial Inclusion and Equity for this incredible commitment.

Mayor: Thank you so much Arva. And again, thank you to you and everyone at the Urban League who's been pushing so hard on this issue, and I know you're going to be great partners, making this initiative come to life and fighting with us to get the changes we need in Albany as well. Thank you.

So everyone, just a couple more things. And whenever we talk about fighting our way back from this crisis and overcoming the coronavirus, it always comes back to where we began this discussion months ago -- testing, testing, testing. So we've seen a lot of progress on testing and more and more New Yorkers are taking advantage of more and more opportunities to get tested. We want to go even farther now. So tomorrow, Wednesday, July 8th will be our Get Tested Day of Action. We are aiming over the next week to get 150,000 New Yorkers tested. We need everyone to be a part of this effort. Our City agencies are involved, of course, our Test and Trace Corp, community organizations and with a particular focus on the communities that have been hardest hit. So testing makes such a difference. Now it's more and more available than ever. Let's get everyone tested. And if you want to get tested and don't know where, go to nyc.gov/covidtest.

And now what a perfect segue to our indicators. And again, today we have good news. Indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200, today 58 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs threshold of 375, today 295 patients. And number three, percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent, today, two percent, a very good number. Yesterday we were at one percent, but we've mainly been at two percent and that is a very, very good place to be.

Okay. Let's just do a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all just a reminder that on the phone today, we have Deputy Mayor Thompson, Health Commissioner Dr. Barbot, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corp Dr. Long, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. With that, I will start with James Ford from PIX 11.

Question: Thanks very much for taking the call. Can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yeah James, how are you doing?

Question: Good to see you. This, I suppose, the question for you and for the Health Commissioner. Can you give us more details about childcare? Like how this -- how the decision will be made as to how the opening goes, which centers open? I just feel like we got only kind of cursory information. And I know it's a little early, but can you just provide us some more details, both of you, if you could?

Mayor: Sure. James I'll start and I'll pass the Commissioner. So this is something that's been worked on for weeks now by the Health Department, which regulates the childcare centers. Getting the centers ready, having the conversations about what they need, what's going to work, what's going to keep everyone safe. Everything safety first. Let's just keep saying that. Everything begins with the safety question. How do we keep everyone involved, safe? How do we make sure we continue to fight back the coronavirus? But the restart is moving along now. We're in phase three. A lot of people are looking forward to going back to work. They need their livelihood. A lot of the support that came in from the federal government's running out. Folks need to get back to work. And the only way they can do it is with childcare. So a lot of careful work has been done leading up to this vote by the Board of Health. And the Commissioner will now give you a little more flavor of the kinds of precautions that are being taken. Commissioner?

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So this vote that's coming before the Board of Health would apply to City regulated childcare centers and school based childcare programs. And in order for the centers to be opened safely, they have to meet regulations that were set out by New York State. So for example, in addition to limiting capacity to no more than 15 children and ensuring that the physical space within the childcare center allows for appropriate social distancing, there are requirements to ensure that staff wear face coverings all the time, to ensure that there are daily health screenings conducted. And that they remain on file and available for review, as well as requirements for top care centers to have safety plans in place that include signage for social distancing, include protocols for cleaning on a regular basis, again to reduce the possible transmission of COVID-19. So all of these things have been set out by New York State. The vote will be coming before the Board of Health. And we through our Bureau of Childcare will ensure that childcare programs get all of the technical assistance they need before opening to make sure that they do so safely. And we will be resuming inspections of these centers. So all of that will be triggered by the vote of the Board of Health this afternoon.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, James.

Question: Thanks. Just a related follow up. Can you talk about what the status is for the decisions regarding the reopening of schools? And maybe address parents' concerns about how that process is going and how it's going to turn out?

Mayor: Sure. We're going to have a lot more to say on this this week, James, but the bottom line is this – safety first, health first. Everything we're going to do is going to be with that prism, to make sure that we are convinced we can do things in a healthy manner for kids, parents, educators, staff, everyone. Now we're over two months away until the opening of schools. So a lot can happen. A lot of challenges can come up or progress can happen in that time. So we're going to be ready for any eventuality. But the bottom line is to listen to the voices of parents, first of all, we work for them. And the Department of Education did something amazing. I mean, a survey that reached 400,000 New York City Public School families, 400,000 families responded. I've never heard anything like that. And 75 percent of them want their kids back in school in September. So the people are speaking. It's our obligation to respond to that, but to do it safely, to do it well. So we're going to have more to say on it this week, and then every week leading up to the opening of school.

Question: Next, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Henry, how are you?

Question: I'm okay. I'd like to get back to this childcare thing because we haven't really heard too much about this. These centers, does the State have ultimate authority on opening the centers or does the City have ultimate authority? Does the State have any role to play? Can you be overruled in this?

Mayor: So Henry I'll do the very broad strokes and I'll turn to Commissioner Barbot. The State has set out different standards depending on what part of, you know, the economy or what part of government service we're talking about. And in this case there's been, I think deference is a good way to say it to the local level within broad parameters. So we constantly confer with the State, but in many matters, as you know, the State says localities decide what makes sense in your case, within broad guidelines. I think that's essentially where we are here. Commissioner, you want to go more into that?

Commissioner Barbot: Certainly this applies to City regulated childcare centers. And it's a vote by the Board of Health. And so the State – the role, the State plays here is setting up the guidelines that the childcare centers need to meet in order to ensure the health and safety of children. But it would not be a vote that could be superseded by the State, again, as long as centers follow the guidelines for health and safety.

Moderator: Next we have Luis from New York [Inaudible].

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Yesterday, the Governor expressed his concerns about hotspots where there was non-adherence over the holiday weekend, one of which was the East Village. He would go on to partially cite an executive order he signed in early April, which detailed the issuance of fines, not to exceed $1,000. I'm quite familiar with your stance on the issue, but the Governor simply won't let up on this. Now I know we're very close to entering phase four, when allowable gatherings increased from 25 to 50 anyway. Might that be part of your reasoning, sir? Is there anything new you could add to that which you've already stated on this subject?

Mayor: Thank you for the question, Luis. First of all, phase four, you know, that's something we have to look at very carefully. As we come up on the potential for each new phase, we watch the data carefully and we watch not only what's happening here, but things we can learn from the rest of the country. That's why we moved forward with phase three, but took the indoor dining piece out. So the same careful consideration will happen as we approach phase four. We're going to analyze it. The State's analyzing it. We're going to be constantly in conversation about it. So, you know, that decision has not yet been made.

But on your question – no I think it's quite clear from what I outlined yesterday. We had a huge enforcement team out over the weekend in places like the East Village. We found overwhelming compliance upon arrival. Our inspectors found overwhelmingly that people are doing the right thing. The restaurant owners, the bar owners, the customers alike. There were some places where some corrections had to be made and people did it willingly when our inspectors and ambassadors directed them to. So, you know, we're going to keep doing the work on the ground. And I want to just give a lot of credit to the people out there who work for the City, who go out and make sure these situations are addressed. And I give real credit to everyday New Yorkers who want to get it right. The vast majority of New Yorkers understand it's their obligation to keep everyone safe and they're doing it. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. On the subject of testing and tracing – last week there were reports of Rockland County having to issue subpoenas for the sake of following through with tracing. Has the City experienced anything at all along those lines, that is dealing with uncooperative individuals whom tracers are trying to reach out to?

Mayor: I'll start, Luis, and then Dr. Ted Long, who is the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps will jump in. Now, I would say the general answer is no. Our approach has not been a coercive approach. Our approach has been an embracing approach to, you know, encourage people to get tested, encourage people to share contacts with us, reach out to those contacts in the spirit of keeping everyone safe, them and their families and everyone, and overwhelmingly, I think we've seen a lot of cooperation. We need to strike a balance always because we want the maximum number of people to participate and we think a more voluntary approach is the best way to do it. Ted, do you want to add?

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps: Yes, Sir. Just a couple of things I would add. And I think our approach has been to have more than 50 percent of our tracers be people from our communities, calling people in our communities, so that they're trusted by the time that they're receiving the phone call. And the other thing I would add is that a third of New Yorkers are utilizing our resource navigators for things like food delivery. So, as the Mayor said, we've taken the approach of really wanting to have people embrace what we're doing and do this together. And we have not seen anything like what we heard about in Rockland County.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next, we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Mr. Mayor, back when the city was at the height of the coronavirus crisis, the City reached out to other localities for a variety of assistance, and it was done at the time with the commitment that the City would help other localities in return. Now that the crisis has moved to other parts of the country, I'm wondering what the city is doing towards those efforts, and particularly given the budgeting issues here, how are we funding any such help to other places?

Mayor: So, I've been in touch with some of my fellow mayors. My staff has been in touch with the staff of fellow mayors. We're offering help. And we honor – people did come to New York City's defense from all over the country, and we want to be there for anyone that needs our help. So, we've been offering help. Mainly, to date, it's been the form of people wanting to learn from our experience, wanting to talk to our experts. There has not, to the best of my knowledge, been a request for, sort of, material help so far. But if that comes, we'll work to fulfill it one way or another, we'll figure out where to find resources even if it means private resources, but I really appreciate all the people around the country who helped New York City in our time of need. And we'll be there for them as well.

Moderator: Next, we have Abu, from Bangalore Patrika. 

Question: Hi, Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing, Abu?

Question: Good, how are you? My question is, you know, New York City school supposed to have the student food benefit, $420 each student. But do you have any idea when they will get the food card?

Mayor: Wait, Abu, I'm sorry, just repeat that last part. What for each student again, please?

Question: $420 food benefit card, each student supposed to get – 

Mayor: Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not making sense of this, so we'll follow up with you because I'm not sure, the way you're wording it, if I understand. But look, the bottom line is if you're talking about our commitment to kids, I mean, we're being very, very clear. We're going to continue everything that we've been committed to as we go back into the new school year and again, safety first, but we intend to create the whole range of services and supports for our kids. Did you have a follow up?

Question: Yeah. Then there is the thing about couple of weeks, in the evening everywhere there’s fireworks and fireworks and people get scared. Is there any comment on it, how you can stop it?

Mayor: Yeah, no, Abu, it's been a real issue all over New York City and it's been unprecedented. Again, this clearly relates to all the realities of the coronavirus, people being home with nothing to do and a lot of frustration. But we have seen in the last few days a marked reduction in the number of complaints we're getting, and the activity seems to be reducing, let's knock on wood for that. But also, I want to thank the Sheriff's Office and the FDNY and NYPD, they've made over 200 arrests in the last couple of weeks of people who were reselling fireworks for profit on a large scale. And I do think that was helpful and we'll keep that initiative going as long as we need it to. 

Moderator: Last two for today. We have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor. Going back to the child care – do you have a sense of how many centers we're talking about here? How many programs and how many kids and also with the limit on the number of people per room, are you expecting a situation like with the schools where, you know, not everyone can be accommodated and they have to stagger or things like that?

Mayor: Yeah. So, I'll start and the Commissioner will jump in. Again, right now we've got about 125 programs that are for the kids of essential workers, pending the vote of the Board of Health that would open up over 3,000 child care centers. And I think, Erin, my common sense answer – Dr. Barbot can give you a more expert answer – but my common sense answer is we're going to see, of course, a reduced amount of kids, because they have to create the social distancing. On the other hand, you got a whole lot of families right now who are not back to work and will keep their kids home for the foreseeable future. So, to some extent, I think it'll strike a balance, but Dr. Barbot, do you want to add?

Commissioner Barbot: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, as the Mayor said, this would apply to roughly 3,000 child care centers with an overall capacity of about 150,000 children. But as many parents continue to stay to work from home, we anticipate that, certainly, they wouldn't go back to the full 150,000 capacity. And as you note, there would also be the requirement of staggered openings. So, not everyone would be coming in at the same time. I think it's important to note here that part of what is driving us bringing this vote before the Board is to ensure that as more families do return to work, that we provide safe high quality child care opportunities and not have families have to rely on potentially unsafe options.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: On the daycare center reopening, you said there pending the Board of Health vote today, but you're announcing it this because presumably you anticipate them approving this?

Mayor: Yes. Look, there's always a process when you're talking about a board, but a lot of work has been done over the last weeks to prepare for this vote. And I think the board feels good about this proposal, and it's really important to tell people that child care centers will be up and running as soon as Monday, because for some parents, that's going to be very, very important to their immediate plans. 

Okay, everybody let me just say a quick thing by way of conclusion. We've got to remember that this city is a place like no other and a place of extraordinary strength and resiliency. The issues we talk about every day here, the challenges we take on, I think a lot of the places might feel overwhelmed by them. New York City always finds a way to forge ahead. So, we have been thrown, arguably, the greatest crisis in our history in these last few months. But today, second day of phase three, I see rebirth, I see a lot of strength, I see people coming together, and even when we face new challenges, like what we're experiencing in Upper Manhattan, people immediately join together. They are not pointing fingers. They're not saying it's someone else's problem. People joined together. Fifty people yesterday immediately came together, community leaders, and said, how do we solve this together? We need the work of the NYPD but we in the community have to be a part of the solution as well. That's been true the whole way we've taken on the coronavirus as well throughout these last months. So, the New York City way is the way forward. And I want to thank all of you for what you do every day to help us move ahead. Thank you.

2020-07-08 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We are going to focus today on one big topic, and it is the issue that New York City will focus on for the next few months, because it really is the single biggest part of restarting New York City and moving us forward. And it's so important to millions of New Yorkers, including 1.1 million public school kids. And, of course, I'm talking about the restart of New York City public schools. Look, this is the single biggest piece of the equation – 1.1 million kids, millions of parents and family members who want to see their kids educated the best way possible, and that means in-person learning. Of course, everyone – everyone is focused on health and safety first. We're going to talk about that today how the first focus will be on health and safety while maintaining a constant understanding that the best way to educate our kids is in the classroom. The fact that so many other parts of our restart will key off of the reopening of our schools. I've heard from community members, I've heard from people in the business, community, civic groups, clergy all over the city – the same message –everyone's looking to the public school system to indicate the bigger direction of New York City. So, we have an obligation first and foremost to our kids and our families, but also to the whole city to work hard now to be ready for September. And our parents have spoken clearly, the DOE did an extraordinary survey of parents – 400,000 responses, 75 percent of our parents said they want their kids back in the school buildings, getting the very best education. And we need to listen to the voices of our parents as we plan, as we prepare, as we think about what they are saying about the people they know best, their own children, but also what they're saying about their own lives. So many New Yorkers desperately need to get back to work. And for a lot of people, that means they have to get back to a workplace, and they need to know that their kids will be safe and secure, getting a chance to be educated much more deeply.

So, parents want this for their children and they want this so they can restore their livelihoods for their families. Parents are speaking loudly and clearly, but everyone understands, whatever we do has to be, first and foremost, seen through the prison of health and safety. So, everything we do will be with a very high bar related to health and safety. The Chancellor will talk more about that in a moment. We're going to move forward, according to the data, according to the science. We're going to work closely every step of the way with the State of New York to make the best decision for our children, for our families, for our city. We're going to watch to see what the data tells us. We're going to put every precaution in place, test to make sure it's working. And as we've said, many times, things can change along the way. And that's a hard thing for all of us to take in, but it's true. The health care situation in this city in March and April was one thing, it's been very different, thank God, in June into July so much better. We have to keep making it better and we have to keep aware of what's happening all around us in the country and make sure that the decisions we are made are based on objective fact. And that can change at any given time and we have to be able to move with those changes. But it depends on starting now, opening our schools, a little over two months away – a lot to be done. This morning. I had the honor of speaking to our principals and to educators who are doing so much work right now to get our school system ready for September, and I thank them for their extraordinary work. But I know this is the most challenging task that any principals, any educators have faced in the history of New York City public schools, trying to get ready for so many different eventualities and get it right from the beginning.

So, here's what we can tell you. One thing we know for sure, and the math just makes it clear, when you think about health first, you think about social distancing. When you think about social distancing, you need more space. You're going to have fewer kids in a classroom, fewer kids in the school building. So, you're not going to be able, with certain exceptions – most schools will not be able to have all their kids in school at the same time and schools that are historically overcrowded will really particularly struggle, because they're only going to be able to use so much space. Remember, six feet needed around each child. So, when we know that health and safety means social distancing, therefore we have to use a lot more space for fewer kids, it makes very clear, the approach we will use is blended learning. And blended learning simply means at some points in the week, you're learning in person in the classroom; at other points in a week, you're learning remotely. And we all know remote learning is not perfect, but we've also seen a lot of kids benefit greatly from it during these last months. And we know we'll be able to do it even better in the months ahead. Now, to make it really simple for every-day parents, and I was a public school parent in New York City public schools. I know parents want clear, straight forward information.

Here's the deal, for the vast majority of kids in the vast majority of schools, you'll be going to school to the classroom either two days a week or three days a week, depending on the week. Again, certain other schools will have exceptional dynamics, we can talk about that as well. But for the vast majority of kids, a typical week, two or three days in the classroom, in the school, the other days, remote learning. Of course, we understand some families will choose remote learning as the only option, the Chancellor will to speak to that, and they have every right to do that, and we'll be ready. But, basically, this blended model, this kind of split-schedule model is what we can do under current conditions. And then, let's hope and pray science helps us out with a vaccine, with a cure, treatment, the things that will allow us to go farther.

So, we know that our educators have had to adapt intensely in recent months. They've done an amazing job. We know they're up to this challenge as well, but let's go back to the point that I've talked about, the Chancellor's talked about before. It has to be the greatest school year in New York City history. And that's not just words, that's the truth, it has to be a year where really extraordinary things happen, where we help kids who are coming back from so much, where we work with different models and make them work together, where we recognize that we can find some good even the midst of crisis. Fewer kids in the classroom – well, in some ways, that could be something we take positive advantage of. Teachers will be able to spend more time with kids when they have fewer kids to reach. Online learning has been really fantastic for certain students and it's given all students more flexibility and it's a way to help kids learn at their own pace and different times of day, not just during the hours of the school day. So, there's a lot we can do with online learning that we couldn't do before. We have to look at this as a challenge, but one that we can also find good in and possibility in. And we're going to ask everyone to reach and really reach deep to serve our kids. And now, to tell you about more about what this look like, our Chancellor Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, last week we announced a series of health and safety measures that we will be implementing this fall. For example, requiring face mass for students and staff, increasing access to hand washing and sanitizers, and continuing to maintain physical distancing. As a quick reminder, schools will be supplied with additional cleaning supplies, including hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes and PPE. DOE central will provide all of this. It will not come out of individual school budgets. Our buildings will be deep cleaned on a nightly basis with electrostatic disinfectant sprayers. And HVAC systems are being upgraded as we speak to ensure better ventilation in all of our schools. We will also provide staff with the training that they need to keep themselves and our students safe. We also will be implementing social distancing requirements, and these include fewer students in each classroom, the use of large spaces for classes, for example, cafeterias, auditoriums gymnasiums – in some cases, enclosed outdoor spaces – updated entry and exit and hallway layouts to reduce contact. We are working our School Construction Authority, our community partners to identify non-DOE space that could possibly be used as well.

So, let me talk a little bit more detail about our split-schedule models that we rolled out with our principals this morning. And I have to thank, and I want to thank all of our principals and teachers and support staff, including our paraprofessionals, but including as well our student nutrition workers, our school safety agents, our custodians who all had a voice in developing these plans. We know that we cannot maintain proper physical distancing and have 100 percent of our students in school buildings five days a week. It's just geographically, physically not possible. Health and safety requires us to have fewer students in the building at the same time. So, for the 2020-21 school year, it will look different. Let me be clear, New York City students will be learning five days a week, whether it's in person or at home. Here's what will be different – students will return in September in either a blended learning model or a fully remote learning model if they so choose. Blended learning means students will be taught on-site in school for part of the week and will attend school remotely on the other days of the week. Over the past several months, we've worked with many stakeholders, including our principals and we've surveyed families and students, as Mayor de Blasio, has mentioned to develop scheduling models that can accommodate limited in-person attendance and enhanced health and safety measures. This morning, we shared these scheduling models with principals who will choose among them as they plan for the fall, taking into account the unique needs of their school communities. Most schools will choose from among three of these models and we'll make an additional two models available for schools in District 75. We will work with schools to maximize the amount of in-person instruction, but for the sake of clarity, I'd like to walk through two examples this morning.

Model one, which you see on the screen, is a two-cohort model. And by cohort, I mean two groups of students. This model assumes that a school has the capacity for at least 50 percent of their students to be in the building at any given time. Students will be in two or three days a week rotations. So, for example, one cohort comes to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and another cohort comes on Wednesdays and Fridays. Then the cohorts alternate on Mondays. Again, this is meant to give parents some semblance of predictability for planning purposes. This model – model two is a three-cohort model. This model assumes that a school has a capacity for at least 33 percent of its students to be in the building at any given time. For each group, there will be one consistent day of the week the student will be in-person, with Monday and Tuesday rotating among groups over a three-week cycle. That way you'll see most weeks students are in person two days, though every few weeks it will be one day only. Now, I know this sounds like a lot to take in, and it is. Let me tell you, it's been the same for all of us as we've grappled with these tough choices, but I'll say this as a reminder, we developed this guidance with principals and principals at the table and shared it with all of them today. Now, they will work to adapt these models to school communities, and they will provide clear specific schedules for each student in August so parents will know which days their child is expected in-person.

This is very new and different and I know it's no one's first choice, but we need to do it to maintain the health and safety of our school communities. And I know that we'll make this into our new approach of learning over time and we will be there to support you. We also know that there are families who did not feel comfortable going back to school buildings in the fall. We heard you loud and clear. These families can choose all remote learning for their child and will be specific periods in the school year during which remote-only families may elect to transition back to in-person learning.

Now, our next slide – equitable education is now more important than ever. The COVID-19 crisis has not disrupted our vision of Equity and Excellence. We are laser focused on developing and delivering a high-quality education for every student this fall. Our approach remains the same. We set a high bar for every student, no matter who they are, and that's excellence. And we give every student the support they need to meet that bar, that's equity. And we will look – it will look different for every child, especially in a time of crisis. We recognize and honor the significant trauma that our students, staff, and city have experienced over the past several months. We will return to “normal.” It is important to make space for these experiences in the new normal and recognize that our new normal is not what any of us have been used to. Teachers, staff, students must all have time and the support they need to reacclimate to school and adapt to these necessary changes. Social, emotional learning and trauma-informed care will be integrated into school programming throughout the school year and all schools will prioritize mental health supports. In-person services will be offered to students with IEP’s who opt to receive them to the greatest extent possible. And multilingual learners will receive an instructional program that ensures continued progress in language development and the areas of knowledge.

Now, I know this is a lot, and there will be additional guidance coming out to families to process this information and plan for the year ahead. As the Mayor has stated, we have to be ready for anything, and that means the guidance could change from the State, from health experts. We will need to adapt. And our commitment to you is that we will keep you informed every step of the way. Today, we will launch the return to school 2020 webpage, which we will update on a regular basis with the latest information, including dates, timelines, and all the latest information you need as we returned to school to September. Excuse me. Throughout the summer, we will continue to engage with families, students, and community leaders, both centrally through the DOE and within each school community. We will host a series of family and student information sessions to answer any questions or concerns that families may have. The first of these sessions will be held July 16th. Principals will also hold parent meetings in July to discuss their individual school schedules and needs. We will continue – next slide, please – we will continue to update our plans over the course of the summer. And here are a few key dates that are coming up that I will highlight, especially for parents and families – July 15th, the parent portal opens for families to sign up for fully remote instruction. July 16th will be the first virtual family information center. And August 7th is a deadline for families to choose fully remote instruction.

Remember, families will be allowed to transition back into in-person instruction on a quarterly basis. Families can opt for fully remote at any time. As we have said before, the 2020 school year will be like no other that we've experienced, but I know that together we will make it work for the 1.1 million students that are counting on us. Our city has been to hell and back. We do not want to return to that. So, we are going to make sure that our schools are safe for our families, for our students, and for our staff. And we are counting on all of you to work with us as we accomplish that goal of getting our students back in school. Mr. Mayor, thank you for this opportunity. And I'm passing it back to you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. Chancellor, you have worked really, really hard and your team has worked really, really hard, and I want to thank you. It's been an extraordinarily difficult circumstance, but what we've seen from this Chancellor, from the leadership at the DOE, from all our educators, they kept fighting through making things happen, created remote learning out of nowhere, gave kids something positive, even the midst of this crisis and are doing extraordinary work now to get us ready for September. So, thank you, Chancellor – to you and all the good folks who work with you.

Now, everyone let's just go over the indicators for the day. First, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200. Today's report, 65 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold of 375. Today's report, 299 patients. And the most important one, percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent. Today's report, one percent. Again, that is the lowest we have ever been at. So, we see in these indicators hope and the hard work that all of you have done paying off, but this is the kind of data we're going to be watching every day as we make smart decisions about the future of our city and the future of our schools. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're also joined by Chancellor Carranza and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Jillian Jorgensen from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. My first question is will this require extra teachers? One concern that I've heard is that as you spread kids across more rooms, a teacher can only be in one room at a time and that this might require extra teachers. And if so, how do you plan to make that happen considering the hiring freeze, save for the ATR, and President Trump indicating on Twitter today that it doesn't look like there's going to be a lot of extra federal cash flowing to cities as he's threatening to withhold money for districts that don't fully open.

Mayor: Yeah, Jillian, we've learned, first of all, that the president seems to change his mind every day or two and what he does, doesn't really have a lot of bearing here. We need obviously the Congress to act on the stimulus and the president's voice will be very helpful moving a stimulus, but so far, he's been incoherent on this topic. But in the meantime, we have an extraordinary team at the DOE that's going to do everything they can with the resources they have. We have to be very, very creative. There's no question about it. But I think the most important thing to recognize is our educators are showing extraordinary creativity and flexibility and are going to do everything we can to reach every child. Chancellor, do you want to add?

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. Hi, Jillian. So, we are in the process right now – and I think the notion is absolutely right. If you have less children in the classroom, then who serves those? So, there's a number of complexities involved with that. Part of why we are so fortunate to have done the survey is it gives us an idea of how many parents are, in fact, thinking of having a fully remote learning option. That obviously impacts how many students will be in person. In addition, we are in the process of right now identifying every single person in the DOE that is not currently in a classroom, as a teacher, but has an underlying pedagogical credential and identifying the critical work that we're doing because some of those people might end up in classrooms. So, again, it's looking from within as well as part of the ATR. We also have – and we’ve seen them step up and do a tremendous service over these last few months – a number of substitutes have been staffing our rec centers and doing a phenomenal job. So, we're counting on them as well. But we're taking a holistic look at making sure everyone that has a teaching credential that can be in a classroom will do that if we need them to do that based on the numbers of students back in school and in person.

Mayor: Go ahead, Jillian.

Question: And then my second question is, can you just elaborate on the SCA looking for non-DOE spaces or other spaces? Is there a possibility that you might look to lease space or is this more of a repurposing of existing City-owned space? You know, how are you going to approach that?

Mayor: The answer is yes, all of the above. Using everything we've got now, auditoriums gyms, you got it, everything we've got for a classroom space. If there's space that can be leased nearby, that could be used effectively, doing that too. SCA is doing an amazing job. I want to thank everyone, Lorraine and everyone at SCA for what they're doing, because they always managed to be creative, but we're going to get our hands on any and all space we can to maximize the options.

Moderator: The next is Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning, Chancellor. How are you?

Chancellor Carranza: Good.

Mayor: Good, Juliet, how are you doing today?

Question: Great, great. So, I guess this is a question for either or both – what are your plans for extracurricular activities? You know, team sports, clubs, field trips – how will that be handled?

Mayor: It's a great question. And it's certainly not going to be business as usual. Chancellor, do you want to speak to it? I know we're sorting things as we go along and education is the first concern here. But go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, we have a number of teams that are actively working to identify what the answer will be to those questions. There's still a lot of unknowns. So, we haven't forgotten about extracurriculars. We’re also – for example, a band. So, what will band look like if we have social distancing and we have the precautions that we have to take and then you blow your trumpet and then you have to empty the spit valve? Well, is that healthy? So, the new normal will not be like the old normal, and we have a number of working groups that are working through all of the complexities of all of those types of questions as well. So, there'll be more information in the coming weeks on those particular items.

Mayor: Juliet, your question caused the Chancellor to talk about the spit valve. I hope that's the last time that happens for all. Go ahead.

[Laughter]

Question: Very important, right? Very important. So, my next question actually is on another topic and maybe, Mr. Mayor, you can answer. There's been a question about the Alternate Side Parking rules. So, a listener from Kew Gardens is telling me that she understands that you move the car only on the later day on the sign, once a week. So, they have a sign on one side of the street for Thursday and the other side of the street for Friday. So, she thinks she needs to move it only on the Friday, but because they're not moving it Thursday, they're getting tickets. And she says she's hearing about this in other neighborhoods. So, what's right?

Mayor: Well, anytime you're trying to make change and update something, it takes a while for people to get all the information they need, Juliet. So, I'm really, really appreciative that you're bringing this point forward. And I thank you. You’ve been on a roll in recent months, bringing forward really important points that people need to hear. Look, what we were saying is, on the streets where you had to move it twice a week – not on the ones, like a lot of streets, you move once a week. And like you said, let's say one side street is Thursday, the other side of the street is Friday. Okay. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the ones where people had to move their car twice a week for one side. In that case, you go to the later day of the two days. That's what this new policy is about. It’s telling people, you only have to move your car once a week when Alternate Side is in effect.

So, on the folks who – for folks who historically have only been moving their car once a week for their side of the street, that continues the way it was. If you've been moving on Thursday, once a week, keep moving on Thursday, once a week. But if you're on one of those streets where you have to move it twice a week, go with the later day, and we're going to see how this goes, and if it goes well, then we're going to make it uniform across the city that people only need to do it once a week.

Moderator: The next is Alex Zimmerman from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. My first question is just about what the plan is for parents who can't supervise their kids at home when they're doing remote learning. You know, there, obviously, are lots of working parents. So, I'm wondering what the plan is for them.

Mayor: Yeah. We've got a lot to do here. And I feel for parents who are juggling so much, Alex. And obviously yesterday's announcement that we're moving forward with the opening of child care centers is going to be helpful for a lot of parents, but we're going to have to figure out more in terms of child care. This is something we're going to be building as we go along. Some parents are going to be able to make it work under current conditions. Some are going to need extra help, and we're going to work over the coming weeks to find other ways to help them.

Question: I'm also wondering if there is any consideration for, like, prioritizing certain students for more in-person learning. So, for example, students with disabilities or students who have fallen really far behind in the first phase of remote learning. Like, will high-need students get any kind of priority for in-person instruction? You know, especially younger kids who are learning to read. And I'm also wondering if the City is looking to deploy like a standard curriculum this coming year, given the sort of staffing challenges and issues with potentially lots of teachers not teaching in person?

Mayor: So, I'll start, and then to the Chancellor – Alex, look, the first goal, again, focusing on health and safety overall, that's going to be the thing that guides us. That's what we're going to be focused on all the time, looking at the data, working with the State to get right how we're going to handle things. But then the next goal is to maximize the time that kids have in the classroom. We want each kid to get the most time they can get in the classroom setting because that's how they're going to learn best. But you're right, some kids will need particular focus and attention. And I know the Chancellor has that in his plan. So, go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Hi, Alex. Good question. So, we didn't cover it in the briefing right now, but we will have details about this later. So, in working with the principals, in particular principals in District 75, there are two additional models that they've helped us develop, where there is a group, a cohort of students, that will get instruction five days a week. Obviously, students with disabilities is one of those groups of students that we're very, very concerned about as well. Not all students with disabilities are going to want to have every day of instruction. We know that from the parent surveys as well, but there are additional models where there are groups of students that will get five days a week of instruction. Obviously, that's all based on programmatic needs and it's also based on programming within the physical constraints of a building as well.

In addition to that, we're trying to be very, very clear about what additional supports are needed for students. So, for example, we obviously think of students with disabilities, very, very attuned to what they need, but students that are multilingual learners could also fall into that category. We also have students in temporary housing that we see as students that need additional support as well. Again, as the Mayor has mentioned, our goal is to have as many students in-person as much of the time as possible. And that's what we're trying to strike that balance. We know – and, listen, I just want to say to parents out there, this has been a very difficult time for parents. We are very sensitive to this. As a parent myself, I can empathize with how difficult this has been. But again, we can make up learning for students. We cannot bring a student back who is infected and passes away. So, health and safety will continue to be paramount for us as we move forward.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Hi, good morning, everyone. My first question has to do with face coverings. If you can clarify, we know that in some European countries that have reopened schools, the kids only need to wear face coverings when they're in the corridor between classes or moving from one place to another. But we've heard that here they have to keep their face covering on even in the classroom. Can you clarify what the policy is and whether it's mandatory for all kids to wear face coverings at all times?

Mayor: Yeah. Chancellor will go into detail, Andrew but the goal is maximum use of face coverings. Look, face coverings have been one of the success stories in this crisis. It's really been a high impact strategy. We do know for some kids there might be particular conditions that make it hard for them to use a face covering. We'll obviously have exceptions. But the goal is to use face coverings to the maximum. Go ahead Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, that's a great question. Our planning and our guidance has been that students will keep face coverings on. Adults will keep face coverings on. And it's – we've seen the success here in New York City. I will tell you that even in our rec centers, when we, I visited rec centers, everyone has a face covering. Even our youngest children have face coverings. So that is part of the guidance. And that is part of the safety requirements that we will be enforcing.

Mayor: Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: Okay. My second question, Mayor, you did say that you're working in concert with the State, but in the past, when you've said things like schools will do this, or schools will reopen, the Governor has followed up by saying, well, that's his opinion. I'm wondering how confident are you that you can actually implement this model?

Mayor: Andrew, the only way to get somewhere is to have a plan and work the plan. I mean it's two months plus until school begins. There's a huge amount of work to be done. And we talked – the Chancellor and I talked with the principals this morning, you know, it was to thank them for how much they've done already, but also to say, we want to support you every step of the way, because you have a huge amount you got to do in a limited period of time. So the only way we're going to be in position to open schools is if we're in a kind of ready position right now, actively doing the work. If the data tells us we have to do something differently, we will, and we'll work with the State very closely on that. But my responsibility is to have the schools ready to go. And that's a local responsibility, that you can only be ready if you're actively doing that work right now. But again, data health first and the constant collaboration with the State to decide what's right. That will be how we approach it.

Moderator: The next is Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning. I wanted to ask, I know – I don't know if you have numbers yet, but there's a 50 percent and a 33 percent model, but for the Chancellor, what is the optimal class size for the setup? I mean, taking into account that a lot of schools are way over capacity in certain districts you know, without the pandemics. So what's the optimal class size and, you know, would you add some other space, like a trailer or something? And I have another question after.

Chancellor Carranza: Okay, thanks Katie. So the optimum size is between nine and 12 students in most physical spaces, most of our classrooms. That's based on what the social distancing requirements are that we've received from the Department of Health and from CDC. So we provided principals with the analysis of their campuses and their spaces with not only the metrics, but we asked them to, with their instructional leadership teams, which include teachers, parents, and other stakeholders, to actually walk their buildings and verify the information we gave them. And then to go through the additional exercise of identifying any other public spaces that could be converted to classroom spaces. No one knows their building like a principal knows their building. And we found that by and large, the analysis that we conducted was accurate. What we got lots of additional information, was information from principals being very creative and innovative about what spaces they could use.

And some things were weren't accurate. For example in some of our high schools that had career technical education programs, the classroom space looks like you have so much physical space, but when you walk into that classroom, you have machinery and you have laser printers and you have other things, you don't have that kind of space. So again, it's going to look different and that's why we've given two to three models that I've recommended based on all of the data to principals to try on for size. And we've created a process for principals to give us feedback. If it doesn't work, what their process would be as well. But the optimum size is nine to 12 students.

Mayor: Go ahead. Do you have a second?

Moderator: We're having some tech issues with Katie. We'll circle back.

Mayor: Okay.

Moderator: The next question is from Sydney Kashiwagi at the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, now that the budget has been cut for Staten Island's deer vasectomy program for the rest of the fiscal year, how do you plan to continue to curb and maintain the borough's deer population while the program is on hold? And why are you still opposed to allowing Staten Island to move forward with a controlled cull, even, even if it's just on State owned property?

Mayor: Yeah. Sydney, as you know, there's been a host of issues, concerns from the State. Concerns about the safety of people in surrounding areas. Again, we have to find a way to keep addressing the deer issue while dealing with really difficult constraints in our budget. So I'll come back to you with more of the specifics of how we're going to approach it, but it's something we've made progress on over the years with a smart strategy. We're going to have to keep finding a way to do it.

Question: And why did you – yeah, I have a second question. Why did you hold off on signing the package of police reform legislation yesterday? NYPD brass have said this week that they want changes particularly to the chokehold bill. So was that the reason why you held off on signing the legislation? And is City Hall trying to make changes to the chokehold bill before you sign the package of legislation?

Mayor: No Sydney, we’re going to be doing a signing ceremony next week.

Moderator: We'll circle back to Katie Honan. I'm sorry, we're still having tech issues. Katie, we'll get back to you. The next time – and we've time for two more after this, is Nolan from the Post.

Mayor: Nolan? We are still having technical issues.

Question: Oh, here we go. Is it working now?

Mayor: Yes. How you doing Nolan?

Question: I'm all right. Two sets of questions, first about the announcement today. One, will there be any live teaching requirements for teachers conducting classes online, given the significant number of complaints about that this semester? Two, this [inaudible] no, this is sort of all, all regarding the announcement, if I could?

Mayor: Nolan hold on, hold on. Just – that's a question. Do you want him to answer it and then you'll come back for your follow? Why don't we have him answer the first one? Go ahead Chancellor?

Chancellor Carranza: Okay, sure. Hi Nolan. So there is live teaching that we've required this summer for summer school. We've worked very closely with UFT and CSA on this issue. And we're planning on continuing that as we go into the fall. We're in the process of working out what that's going to look like. Obviously it's, we don't want students or adults sitting in front of a computer screen for eight hours a day. So again, it's not only the live instruction portion of the question, but it's also the health and safety portion of the question and the social emotional learning part of that question as well. But we have heard parent voices and we are already implementing that this summer for summer school.

Moderator: The next question is Matt Chayes. And we'll get back to Katie for one more try afterwards.

Question: Hey, good morning all. For Chancellor Carranza, to what extent will there be provisions for DOE personnel who either can't work in person, say because they have a compromised immune system? Or just who don't feel safe for doing so? And regarding students, how do you punish your sanction or educate students who are, you know, first graders, second graders, who won't wear a mask, take it off their face? And then I have a second question.

Mayor: Well, that's two questions my friend. So we are going to do those two.

Question: Okay. Well then –

Mayor: Matt, come on my man. You know, the difference –

Question: I just want to ask you about the homeless LGBTQ population as well, if I can, after?

Mayor: Yeah, that's just respectfully you did two questions. So we'll come back on that another time. Go ahead.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So they're good questions. So the first question about enforcing masks. Enforcement, I think is the wrong word to use. It's about education. So we will be educating students. As I mentioned before, we've done this already in our rec centers where students are wearing their masks. They understand it's a matter of public safety. It's a matter of their safety. So there'll be a lot of education. There'll be a lot of restorative ways of helping students to understand why it's important to wear the mask. So it'll be redirection, it'll be education. We are not talking about punishing kids. We want to make sure it's an educationally sound approach. And it's going to be a lot of encouragement.

Now, the second question having to do with staff, we are also launching in the coming weeks, a portal where and a process where all of our staff can apply for an accommodation, based on any underlying medical conditions that they may have, that may make it difficult for in person learning. So there'll be a process where they will apply and then it will be reviewed and then it will be granted. It's important to understand that it's someone that applies for an accommodation, is still working. So when it gets to the question of then who is going to be conducting the remote learning? There will be a modicum of our staff members that will be working from home and physically they have to do it. So again, a lot of moving pieces, but there is a process that we'll be launching. I spoke about that today with principals as well.

Moderator: One last try for Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Can you hear me now?

Mayor: Oh, there you go. Welcome back.

Question: Sorry. My Wi-Fi is so sick of me being around, it's just shut down. But my second question was just, what's the plan for schools that co-locate and particularly charter schools? Have you discussed this sort of plan? Will you have a charter co-locating in a public school, will they have to abide by the same cohort and the same in person and remote and classroom size? Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Katie. I'll turn to the Chancellor, but just saying, everybody has to focus. It doesn't matter what kind of school, obviously everybody's got focused on health and safety first. Those social distancing rules just require to keep the classroom size very limited. So again, you know, one of the things that I want everyone to understand, even though we know 75 percent of parents want to have their kids back in the classroom and we want to accommodate them to the maximum extent possible, it will always be done within social distancing rules. And that's going to be the math that sort of creates the physical limitation. Go ahead Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. Thanks Katie. So absolutely in schools that are co-located in DOE buildings with charter schools, the same safety measures will be in effect. Again, this is about children. So we have a very hardworking team that works with our charter partners that is already socializing with these guidelines look like. There's going to be a series of working groups. Again, I think the key is going to be our principals. Because our principals in co-located buildings already do an extraordinary amount of co-planning and programming with their charter colleagues. So again, it's important that we're supporting the principals as they're working some of these details. For example, one way hallways, you know, how do you determine which hallway and where, which way is it going and which way is it coming back? A lot of those little details will really happen at the school site level. But our direction is going to be that safety is universal for everyone.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Chancellor. We'll just conclude with this point that look, our kids have been through so much. I've talked about it, the Chancellor's talked about it. We really feel for the children of New York City. And they've had to deal with something that no previous generation has dealt with. Imagine if you're a young person trying to make sense of the world, the amount of confusion, the amount of pain, the amount of trauma that's been around them. We owe it to them to get it right going forward. To keep everyone safe first and foremost, but try to give them some hope, try and give them some possibility again. These kids, they're going to inherit New York City. So we have to prepare them for their lives ahead. And the best way to do that is in person to let our educators do what they do best. And our kids need to know that we're going to be there for them. So we're going to move heaven and Earth to be ready for September. Always with safety as the first priority, but knowing that our kids need that boost, they need that hope so they can move forward. Thank you, everybody.

2020-07-09 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. You know, each day I try and give you the best information we have, the latest on what we know, and also the honest truth about what we don't yet know. And we're dealing with a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the coronavirus. But my job is to give you the very best information and understanding of where we're going as we address this crisis.

Now there are some things we know for sure. And it's also important to acknowledge that. One thing we know for sure is it is going to be a hot summer. And that is going to come with its own host of challenges. We know, unfortunately, because first of all, we experienced last year, last year was a really intense summer. And we know because of the projections we've received already from the National Weather Service, that this summer will be at least as bad. So our job is to take that knowledge and do something with it, get ahead of it. And the heat has certainly arrived. We're in the high 80’s projected today, in the 90’s next week, our job of course is to keep New Yorkers cool, keep new Yorkers safe, to make sure we focus on those who have the greatest challenges. Our seniors, in particular, folks with health care challenges, our kids, families that don't have a lot of other options. Our job is to do something for all of them, keep them safe, keep them cool. And we have a great initiative, Cool It NYC, that is going to be pivotal to keeping people cool this summer. Now one piece of this initiative, central priority has been to make sure that we are there in every community with the kinds of solutions that help each community, particularly the communities that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus. And in particular, again, our seniors protecting our seniors is crucial. And that's why we made the decision to give out free air conditioning units to low-income seniors, to help them, the folks who had to stay home for their own safety, but needed to be cool.

Let me give you the latest on that. As of last night, 34,294 air conditioning units have been installed since we started this initiative just a few weeks ago. And we're going to keep going, a lot more are coming to help our seniors. Now that's about indoor. We have to keep people cool indoors. We have to give out outdoor options. We just have to do everything we can to keep people cool this summer. And a lot of City agencies are working hard at this, Emergency Management, Parks, Environmental Protection, FDNY, everyone has a common cause to make sure New Yorkers are safe. And we understand we have to do this in a way that recognizes the other realities we're facing, the social distancing and the other needs that we have to take into account to keep people safe from the virus. But again, the central focus will be on health and safety, particularly for the communities hit by the disease. And here to tell you more about it, and she has been a stalwart throughout this crisis, her and her team at Emergency Management for the last four months have fought so hard to keep New Yorkers safe in the middle of this unprecedented crisis. Let me turn to our Emergency Management Commissioner, Deanne Criswell.

Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Emergency Management: Thank you Mayor. Good morning everybody. It is summertime and temperatures are going to continue to go up. And while the National Weather Service has canceled their heat advisory for today, we remain ready to support New Yorkers, as the heat does go up. To help New Yorkers beat the heat this year, the City has implemented a number of measures through the Cool It NYC measure that the Mayor talked about and our new Cool Streets initiative. Our cooling options have been adapted this year as a result of COVID-19. And our goal is to ensure that all New Yorkers that live in heat burdened areas, heat burdened communities are within a quarter mile of any outdoor cooling elements.

This is going to be done through a combination of cooling options. First, our cooling centers, we will open cooling centers this year as we have in the past, but they are going to be different. The City will open cooling centers in all five boroughs. We have identified schools, community centers, and other nonprofit organizations that have offered up space. We have 145 that are prepared to open right now if needed. And this number is going to continue to go up throughout the summer. As the City continues to respond to COVID-19, we have made additional changes. We've implemented additional guidelines to ensure the safety of any New Yorker who visits a cooling center to seek relief from the heat. This includes face coverings that must be worn at all times inside cooling centers. Cooling centers will also operate at a limited capacity so we can maintain social distancing guidelines of six feet. We will also provide face coverings and cleaning supplies to all centers. So, we again can ensure for the safety of all New Yorkers that need to find a place to relieve themselves from the heat.

We will also activate new cooling and misting locations and heat burdened communities. New Yorkers can find relief from the heat in the 650 spray showers located already in City parks and areas with ample tree canopies, where temperatures can be 20 degrees cooler. These locations are always operational and can be found in the Parks website at nyc.gov/parks.

The City also recently unveiled the first set of Cool Streets for this summer announcing expanded cooling options on existing Open streets and the most heat burdened parts of New York City. These streets will be part of the Open Streets network and will when activated can also be found on the parks websites. and as always during heat emergencies, the department of Environmental Protection and FDNY will proactively install more than 300 spray caps on showers within these heat burdened neighborhoods. As we head into the heat of summer, we are prepared to support all New Yorkers who need relief from the hot weather. As always, I want to remind everybody to check on your neighbors, to check on your loved ones, to be a buddy, especially those that are the most vulnerable to heat as well as the COVID-19 virus. Thank you, Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Deanne. Appreciate that very much. So that's the challenge of the heat. Now let's go back to the challenge we've been facing together these months, the virus itself. Now look, every one of us is looking at what's happening around the rest of the country and it is scary. Let's be honest, to see the kind of resurgence that we've seen in so many states. It gives you a lot of pause about where we are going all of us, in the future. And we do see that a number of cities and states unfortunately, are going in the wrong direction. And we know in some cases it's because they didn't focus on the data and take some of the precautions they might have. And we have to learn from their example and constantly watch, constantly learn, make sure we do not slip up. And we keep the progress that we have sustained now for many weeks.

So a lot to do and always staying tough, staying disciplined, doubling down on the things that have been working here in New York City. So, one of the things that's working and one of the things that we have on a scale far beyond what any other part of the country has is our Test and Trace Corps. It's an extraordinary operation. Now, many thousands of professionals out there, following up on every lead, making sure people are safe, making sure they safely separate. If they need support, they get it. This is a big positive X factor for New York City, that we have this aggressive apparatus out there protecting people and it's growing. But look, there's so much to do to make sure that people get tested because the Test and Trace Cops works best when more and more people are getting tested. So more testing sites are being established all the time. Two new pop up sites in Red Hook, Brooklyn and Co-op City in the Bronx, a new testing van in Manhattan. We now have over 200 sites where New Yorkers can get tested. And we'll keep adding to that.

Now this week, we have a particular goal. We want to get 150,000 New Yorkers tested this week. And we want to encourage everyone. If you've been putting it off, this is a great time to get tested. If you were tested a long time ago, it's a great time to get tested. Let's really speed this up for the good of all. So, if you need to know where, text the words, COVID TEST to 8-5-5-4-8, and you can get the right location for you. Now, the testing sites are crucial, the Test and Trace Corps is crucial, but the idea is to get deeper and deeper into communities, to educate people, to involve them, to make it easier for them to get the information they know, to get the testing, to know what to do if they test positive or if they're symptomatic.

And that means finding more grassroots partners, finding organizations that are trusted in communities have a lot of reach, a lot of connections, that people will listen to. Helping to lead this effort is a public servant who has done so much for this city for a long time, serving the people of the Bronx and fighting for equity and fairness for them. And doing great work, helping those who are among the least fortunate New Yorkers, our homeless New Yorkers. And now as the Chief Equity Officer for the Test and Trace Corps, she's doing fantastic work to get this effort deeper and deeper into our communities. My pleasure to introduce Annabel Palma.

Chief Equity Officer Annabel Palma, Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. And thank you for reminding us that we had a great day yesterday, during our Get Tested Day of Action. We had many volunteers come out and it was amazing to see our community partners, our faith leaders, our local elected officials, but most importantly, our residents from the community helping us spread the word to make sure that individuals know that they can get a free COVID test at over 200 sites throughout the city. And it was just energizing. And this morning I woke up and I said, we need to definitely continue to do this. The volunteers continue to call to make sure that we – there will be more days of actions. As Chief Equity Officer for Test and Trace my job is to fight the disparities that this pandemic has caused to our city. And so by doing that, we need to make sure we engage communities who have been disproportionately affected by the virus. And I know this work all too well because it was work that I did as a certified nursing assistant when I worked in a nursing home and had to take care of my patients to keep them safe. I also represented over 100,000 members of 1199 as a health care worker and trained them in health and safety trainings to make sure that their work places were also safe. And that environments and their management were adhering to the concerns. I served my community for 14 years as a Council member. And I'm very proud of the work that we did as a city to make sure that the community I represented was able to get the resources that they need, that they needed.

And those communities that I represented, that I had the privilege and honor to represent are the communities that have been hardest hit by COVID. And so I know the value of working with partners who know those communities inside and out. And this work we cannot do without them. And so it is again, humbling and a privilege to now be working at this capacity with those partners to make sure that we can get New York back on its feet, that we can reopen New York safely. And that individuals know the importance of testing for COVID-19 and keeping themselves safe and the loved ones safe.

And so today I want to tell you about two important ways that Test and Trace Corps is putting down roots and beginning to grow in our communities. Both of these efforts are possible because of our strong partnership with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Recognizing the crucial role of community-based organizations play in the lives of New York, Health + Hospitals in collaboration with the Health Department is making available $10 million in grants to be awarded to more than 20 community-based organizations to support the Test and Trace efforts that have been going on. These grants will enable the groups that received them to educate New Yorkers on the importance of getting tested for COVID and engaging with contact tracers. The work will cover things like how to get tested, answering the call to provide confidential information to a contact tracer, once a contact tracer calls them on the phone or knocks on their door. They need to safely separate from loved ones to stop the spread of the virus and the guidance around precautions like social distancing, continuing to wear mask coverings, and safely reopening practices. The grant will run from July through November and amounts ranging from $50,000 to $750,000, depending on the reach and size of the organization and the proposals that they submit.

Starting this week in partnership with the Department of Health, we are launching a new hyperlocal response to prevent the spread at the grassroots level. And this is extremely important because this will allow us to engage more New Yorkers and educate them about the importance of getting tested. With this effort, the City will pour resources and support services into neighborhoods where data shows there are low test testing rates and high percentage of positive tests. And one of the communities that we were able to – that I was able to work out of yesterday is one of those communities. A lot of people were afraid to get tested, predominantly because of their immigration status. And we want to make sure that people understand that this program has nothing to do with immigration status, but everything to do with this health and safety of yourself and your loved ones. The goal is to lower transmission with increased testing and wraparound services, using intense community engagement, public messaging, and working with the trusted local partners who know these communities and the community trusts what education and what message they bring to them.

The first neighborhood we are focusing on is Tremont in the Bronx, aka zip code 1-0-4-5-7. In picking this zip code to start, we looked at all our data and made the decision based on three factors. And these factors were testing is low, but the percentage positive is higher than city average. Where we are seeing cases that are actively symptomatic, but people are not coming out to get tested, which signals current spread. And where we have been persistently high burdened over the course of the pandemic. Our goal is to break that chain of transmission and get every New Yorker testing. We aim to test at least 2,500 people in this zip code in the next two weeks. And immediately connect those who test positive with services to support their safe separation from their loved ones. And I know that this may be scary to a lot of people, but this is the best way to act to stop the spread of the virus. Whether you safely separate a home or at a free hotel, or by the Test and Trace Corps. We will evaluate our performance in this zip code one 1-0-4-5-7 and use it to inform our response in other neighborhoods that may be facing the same situations.

Starting this week, we are bringing rapid point of care testing to Tremont. Testing results will be available in 15 minutes with resource navigators onsite and ready to assist people with support, including a free hotel room, if needed to safely separate from loved ones. We are also including three new mobile testing sites at the location. You see these listed on the slides. Bringing more testing to the communities with greatest need is how we can prevent the resurgence of COVID and protect the most vulnerable. This is an urgent mission as we see how the virus is raging in other parts of the country, as the Mayor has highlighted, and there is no vaccine or no cure on the horizon yet. We still have a long road to go. But today and working together, we are making great progress and I am happy to be part of the work that's being done. And I'm truly humbled by the Mayor allowing me to be part of this team to make sure that New York can safely reopen again. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you so much. Thank you, Annabel. And we can hear the passion in your voice for this work and appreciate it deeply. And it really is about getting to the grassroots. That's where we're going to make the highest impact. And this new initiative is going to help us do it. And now, since everything is about the data and the numbers and being led by the science, let's talk about our daily indicators. Indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200, today's report is 69 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375, today's report, 289 patients. And most importantly, percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent, today, again, a very good number, two percent. Let me say a few words in Spanish.
 
[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have with us today Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell, Executive Director of Test and Trace Dr. Long, Chief Equity Officer of the Test and Trace Program, Palma, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. With that, we'll start with Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, everybody.

Mayor: Hey, Brigid.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I wanted to follow up on some of the education announcements from this week. First, I understand the DOE is developing a plan for testing protocols for schools this fall. Maybe Dr. Long can contribute to the answer. I'm wondering if what the plan is if a student or staff member tests positive, does it mean the school shuts down or do classroom communities need to be quarantined? That's my first question.

Mayor: Yeah. Brigid, I'll start. Actually, Dr. Varma would be important to this answer too. Look, we're doing each step rapidly here because we've got two months until school begins and, on one hand, that's a long time, a lot can happen in the next two months and it could affect our approach; on the other hand, in planning terms, two months is real soon. So, we're working real hard right now. We are determining right now what those testing protocols should be. We don't have a final answer for you, but we'll have more to say in the coming days on this. It's a different situation than what we faced before. At the – in March, we were in the very beginning of this crisis. We now have a very different reality in the city. We also have a whole new reality with the Test and Trace Corps being available to us. So, I don't want you to assume it's the same standards or same approach as in March. We also have a lot to talk through with the State about the right way to do this safely. But the bottom line here is health and safety first. We know the vast majority of parents want their kids to be back in school, want to resume their kids' education, but we are only going to do things that we are convinced are safe and are in the name of the health of everyone in the school building. So, a lot to work through. We'll have more to say soon. Let me just see if Jay Varma wants to add anything. He's out there – Jay?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Thank you. Can you hear me now?

Mayor: Yeah.

Senior Advisor Varma: Great. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. No, I concur with everything that Mayor said about the real difference between the situation now and the situation back in March. The plan for the schools is going to be a data-driven approach and it's going to be done on a case by case basis. So, again, we're working out all of the details, but we don't anticipate the need for the same type of, you know, widespread closure that happened before, unless the data actually dictates that. So, again, the strategy is going to be based on what do we know about this specific incident, the characteristics of the people, the exposures, the test results, and then make plans and responses based on that.

Moderator: Next we have Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Rich. How are you doing?

Question: I'm okay. So, the Governor yesterday said that he will make a decision on the schools in August. Is that too late?

Mayor: Rich, I want to just say, our job is always to respond to the needs of our people. And when the Department of Education surveyed – got survey results from 400,000 parents, saying we need school open, it's our job to make that happen and do it safely. So, we're going and doing the hard work to get ready and we'll be ready in any situation. What we all need to know is exactly what the data tells us, not only at the beginning of August in the beginning of September, and we're going to watch that data and make our ultimate decisions based on it. So, no, I think the fact is we've been doing this work for months now. We're going to be ready for any eventuality. We have to be responsible for our own situation, because this is what we do. We know best, our own people, our own schools, and we'll be ready.

Question: A follow-up on the same topic. So, it was indicated yesterday that some children will be going to school one day per week. Is there any percentage associated with that? How many kids will be going one day a week? And how is that possibly fair in any way?

Mayor: Yeah. Rich, it’s a great question. I appreciate it. So, let me give you a sort of the lay of the land. We have about 1,800 schools and they all vary in terms of size and they all vary in terms of how many kids are in the building in normal times. Some of our school buildings are really overcrowded and that's where we're obviously going to a lot of effort to create new school space – that will be going on for years and years. Other buildings are not crowded at all. In fact, some of our school buildings are very undersubscribed. So, it really depends on the building and the number of kids who normally go to the school. The typical situation, I'd say the vast majority will be kids going to school either two days a week or three days a week and then the other days they would be doing the remote learning. There are some cases on either end of the spectrum, Rich, some schools that are so overcrowded normally that they're going to have to do, you know, three shifts, in effect, during the week, which means, since there's only five days in a week, you know, on some weeks a kid might only be in school once a week and other weeks twice a week. That's for the most overcrowded schools. On the other end of the spectrum, the schools that are the least overcrowded, you have a scenario there – it is even conceivable in some schools that kids could be in school all five days in the week if there’s space. Remember, the crucial thing is the math here of social distancing. It also refers back to Brigid’s earlier question. The difference now compared to February, compared to March, everything's going to be socially distanced in the school building. That means you can only have a limited number of kids in the classroom. That's going to dictate how many times per week child is there. But if there's enough space, in a least a handful of schools, you're going to see kids there potentially five days a week.

Moderator: Next we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: In terms of the cooling plan, some of what the reporting has been showing recently is that there were still a lot of questions about how the virus can be transmitted through things like air filtration systems, HVAC systems. What is the City doing to look at the equipment and some of these cooling centers and will it be required for them to make changes or will the City be making changes so that they can operate safely?

Mayor: Thank you very much. It's a great question, Gloria. So, I'm just going to start and then see if Dr. Varma or Commissioner Criswell have anything they want to add. Look, first of all, very important to remember, a cooling center is a very temporary reality. Typically, someone is there, you know, for a day or a part of a day may be several days in the daytime hours, but it's something that's used very occasionally. But absolutely we want to make sure that the cooling systems are as clean and appropriate as they can be. And also, we're thinking of any and all measures we need to take to address this new data that we're getting this new information we're getting from the scientific community. We’re going to have more to say on that in the coming days, but it's a very good point to say, we got to make sure that everything we do is as safe as humanly possible. Dr. Varma, and then Commissioner Criswell, do you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah. So, I think it’s – obviously, we're concerned about any situations where people are indoors. And so, I think the same recommendations that we've been providing before continue to apply. We want people to be, you know, maintaining social distance. We want people to be wearing face coverings, especially if they are not able to maintain any social distance in those situations. And, of course, all of the important considerations about hand hygiene and getting immediately tested if anybody has any symptoms.

Mayor: Deanne, do you want to add?

Commissioner Criswell: We've been working really closely with the Department of Health to make sure that we are providing a safe environment for New Yorkers. And so, similar to what Dr. Varma had said is we want to enforce, or we want to make sure that we are those strict guidelines of wearing face coverings, keeping separation the six feet between individuals, which is why we've reduced the capacity at our cooling centers so we can follow those standard protocols that we ask everybody to do, every New Yorker to do every day. So, again, working very closely with the Department of Health to make sure that the centers that we do open are opening in a safe and healthy way so we can protect all New Yorkers.

Moderator: Next we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: [Inaudible] Mr. Mayor and everyone on the call.

Mayor: How are you doing, Gersh?

Question: I'm good. Thank you. Quick question. So, Mr. Mayor, I wonder if you could connect two dots for me that are confusing – so, nationwide, since the killing of George Floyd, there have been 66 incidents in which drivers have used their cars as weapons. Yet here in New York City, the NYPD has [inaudible] its own station houses with barricades while you've created Open Streets for restaurants that are barely protected because you've decided to make the roadways closed to cars only for a few hours a week, so they can't be permanently protected. So, can you reflect on, A, when the NYPD will reopen the public roadways for public use and, B, why don't you make your Open Restaurant streets 24/7 so they could be properly secured?

Mayor: Okay. Two very different questions. Gersh, I think on the first point – again, I will get an update from the NYPD but I think we have to make sure – and safety is obviously the central question here. There was a real issue around precincts a few weeks ago, and we saw it around the country and it was really important to ensure everyone's safety. And I think the fact that our precincts were properly protected, everyone involved was properly protected, and our precincts mean something to our whole city and represent our whole city, I think that was important to do. What needs to be done from this point on and how it can be modified is a very fair question. I can get an update on what's going to happen with that, and certainly happy to come back to you on that.

Vis-a-vis the Open Streets – again, I think the Open Streets have been overwhelmingly a success, overwhelmingly created in a way that has been safe. As we added the Open Restaurants program, it's been a tremendous success, but we've also seen some things we have to do to make them safer. The Open Restaurants exist on a wide, wide range of streets. So, there's including a lot of streets you would never close off, but that we can do the Open Restaurants on effectively and where we combine them, we've combined them in the hours that we thought would be the times when people would use them the most and, you know, want to be at restaurants the most. So, I would say to the second part of your question about streets, look, we're having a good experience here. Something that we have tried that's really working and is going to cause, I think, a real re-examination for the future. I've said to you, the city is going to have to be more and more about mass transit in the future. That's a good thing. I'm pleased to see mass transit ridership is growing now faster than cars coming into Manhattan. That's a really good thing. But what we are learning from the Open Streets and Open Restaurants is something really positive. What it means for the future, we have to carefully analyze, but I think it's showing us some new and powerful opportunities.

Moderator: Next, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have no questions. They've been asked previously. Thank you.

Mayor: Well, you are – you, sir, are a gentleman and we will give your space to someone else.

Moderator: Last question for today, we have Jillian Jonas from WBAI.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Jillian, how are you?

Question: I'm well, thank you. My first question has to do with the broadband plan you announced Tuesday, I believe. Some of the poorest New Yorkers in the city are seniors and the disabled, many of them don't live in the targeted communities or in NYCHA complexes, rather, they live in private housing with seniors comprising the majority of tenants living in rent controlled apartments. Both groups live throughout the city. What are the details to include them and when?

Mayor: Yeah, Jillian, excellent question. Thank you. So, our internal task force, our Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity, is focused on 27 neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus that have experienced the disparities most deeply, communities of color that have really not experienced fairness in the city. And the goal of the task force is to systematically, right now, figure out policy changes that can make an impact. A whole bigger effort is coming behind that with the commission that we're putting together on racial justice and reconciliation to systematically and officially, in the next 18 months, identify where there is systematic racism in every City agency and every City institution – name it, identify it, catalog it, and then attack it, and tear it down with real immediate policy changes, budget changes, you name it.

But this one is about reaching 600,000 people. That is not everyone we need to reach, but it will be – there's a heavy, heavy focus on public housing because we have the ability to have a lot of impact in a public housing development effectively, efficiently. It's not just public housing. You're absolutely right about low income seniors suffering in many ways the most, but I want to say that I think not only will we reach a certain number of low income seniors through this first initiative, but this is only a beginning. Both the task force and the commission are going to look at the digital divide and talk about much more profound ways to address it. And one of the things we must do is get that legislation passed in Albany that we talked about a couple of days ago, Deputy Mayor Thompson talked about, that would force the internet companies to pay for the use of City property and use that money to address the digital divide.

Question: Okay. It's not a follow-up, it's unrelated – about that Brooklyn building that exploded last week. You know, it had a partial stop work order issued by the Department of Buildings in June, and the landlord had a history of failing to maintain the building up to code, level one violations. It was cited for structural cracks and buckling walls last year. But witnesses say that they saw evidence of this even recently, yet the owner only paid a $3,000 fine in October and a total of about $11,000 over two years of failing to maintain the code. The DOB has a dubious reputation as being one of the City's most dysfunctional agencies. It's very reactive and the paltry fines are often written off as the cost of doing business. When you add the budget cuts that are coming and the new responsibility of the post-COVID safety measures, how effective do you think DOB can be in cracking down on an industry that often disregards the law and can affect basically life and death with building and construction safety?

Mayor: I appreciate that question a lot. I think it's a very thoughtful question, Jillian, and it's the kind of thing that doesn't get enough attention. So, in this case, I've spoken with Commissioner La Rocca about what happened here, and I want to get a full report on, since DOB was dealing with this site, you know, what was done and what we can learn from this and what needs to be different going forward, because I don't want to see anything like this happen, and I want the Department of Buildings to be as aggressive as possible. You're right to say, DOB has a lot of different responsibilities right now. We have to be smart about that, to not lose focus for some of the historic health and safety issues while dealing with the new health and safety issues around the coronavirus.

But I do think in the essence of your question is two points – one, I want the DOB to be able to issue the kinds of fines that will really hurt people who own real estate and abuse that privilege. I don't want it to be the kind of fines that could be chalked up to the cost of doing business. I think this has been a huge problem in New York City government for decades, the fine structures just don't relate to reality. On some fronts, we've been able to increase fines intensely, and that helps. We got a lot more to do. So, I can certainly assure you, we're going to come back with ways of making sure that anyone who puts the public safety at risk for profit has to face much more dire consequences. And sometimes, Jillian, that means criminal charges, which is something DOB has been working on more and more with district attorneys, with the Attorney General's office, and I think in some cases, the criminal charges are the way to go and we have to show that that kind of exists. The other piece is the department itself.

The Commissioner has done a lot to change the DOB, and she's very, very anti-bureaucratic to her great credit. So, I think that we should not assume that what used to be at the DOB will continue to be. I think a lot of changes are happening. They have to happen. It has to become a much more modern agency, but it has to be an agency that is willing to be very aggressive in dealing with anyone who will put the public safety at risk.

All right, everybody, as we conclude, I just want to say this, and it really hearkens back to this extraordinarily challenging and painful and difficult, but also in many, many ways, triumphant fight that New Yorkers have waged against the coronavirus. Do not let anyone mistake the fact that all the progress we have made over four months is because of all of you, because people have fought so hard. Sometimes I find an effort out there to minimize what New Yorkers have done. You just have to look around the country to understand that this was because New Yorkers devoted themselves to fighting back this disease that we've come as far as we've come. You heard the indicators today. You've heard them for weeks on end. That's because people have shown real commitment and discipline. Every time someone tells you, ‘Oh, I saw someone not wearing a face covering.’ How about all the times the people are wearing the face covering? How about when our colleague from the media, Andrew Siff, called in from the 7 train and said he counted the number of people in the subway car and 22 out of 23 were wearing a face covering. That's in part, because we've been giving out free face coverings in the subways and all over the city, and people are doing something about it.

They're really working hard to keep each other safe. So, when Annabel Palma talked about the effort to reach out to the grassroots and educate people, engage people, that's the way forward. We need to do everything we're supposed to do here at City Hall, but the real way of fighting this battle and winning this battle is by engaging the people fully because New Yorkers have it in them to beat back this virus. And so, we're going to win on the ground at the grassroots where real change is made. And I want to thank everyone who was part of this fight. It's working. Let's stick with it. Let's keep winning together. Thank you, everybody.

2020-07-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. We are now toward the end of the first week of phase three of our restart. And, so far, New Yorkers are doing a great job. Phase three is going really well, as have phase one and two. This city is devoted to coming back, but coming back the right way. And I want to thank everyone for the hard work. It's not easy, but you're doing things the right way, and it shows, and you'll see it again today when we go over our health indicators.

Number-one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 threshold is 200 patients; today's report, 62. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospital's ICU’s, threshold three 75; today's report is 293. And finally, percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold is 15 percent; today's report, a very good one, two percent. So, congratulations again. Every time I give you a good report, I'll remind you, it's because of your hard work.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we’ll turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, al. Just a reminder that we have with us today State Senator Benjamin, CEO of Street Corner Resources Sekou, Deputy Mayor Thompson, Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell, and Senior Advisor. Dr. Varma. With that, we'll start with Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Good morning, everyone. And also, good luck and congrats to Freddi today. My first question, Mayor, has to do with the outdoor dining that you just referenced in terms of the weather. Given that all they have at this point, as far as customers coming to their establishment is outdoor dining, how damaging to many, many businesses can weather days like this be? And is there anything the City can do to help these establishments if they lose too much on a day like this?

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew, look, I obviously wish we could have a perfect sunny weather all the time, but I know the restaurant owners know that's not the case. What I've heard from the restaurant community is they are thrilled with outdoor dining. It's expanding all the time. It's making a huge impact on their bottom line. They're bringing back their workers more and more, but remember even when outdoor dining isn't happening we do have takeout and delivery happening on a big scale. So I would say to all New Yorkers, if you were going to go out tonight, instead order in and keep helping our restaurant community, but look, we want to keep expanding outdoor dining. We're going to do that with the Open Streets more and more, and I think with just continued efforts to support the industry, that a lot of restaurants are going to make it until we get to better times. Some are still very challenged, but I think, you know, a lot of us do very well with the plan we have in place.

Question: My next question is a COVID question and maybe Dr. Varma can weigh in as well. Are you baffled, surprised, can you explain the fact that there's been no measurable uptick from Phase One, Phase Two, Phase Three, given the massive increase in the number of cases in other states and a loosely enforced quarantine at best, do you think there's some kind of herd immunity taking root in New York City, New York State that explains the level of transmission at this point, and if Dr. Varma could weigh in as well?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to Dr. Varma very quickly. Andrew, it's a great question. I just remind you New Yorkers learned powerful lessons, and then they really owned those lessons in terms of wearing face coverings, in terms of social distancing. We have to look at how much discipline and focus there has been, how much unity there's been in New York City, which we did not see in the other parts of the country that have had the problems. A lot of precautions put in place. People have been really devoted, putting up those hand sanitizer stands, all sorts of things that have helped to keep people safe, and then the Test and Trace Corps, huge x-factor to have that constant presence out there working with people, making sure they're safe, making sure they have what they need, obviously massive testing. We're up to 40,000 tests a day now. That's something a lot of other places have not been able to achieve. I think all of these pieces are contributing to why you see sustained progress. Take it away, Dr. Varma.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Yeah. Thank you very much for the question. I concur entirely with actually the Mayor's assessment. I think it would be incorrect to attribute the current status of cases to immunity, because there's a lot that we don't know about immunity and there's also what we know, which is that the vast majority of New Yorkers actually weren't infected. So the most likely explanations for our current situation are as the Mayor pointed out the combination of our defensive strategies, physical distancing, wearing face covers, good hygiene, and as the Mayor also pointed out importantly, the offensive strategies, a massive increase in the amount of testing that's going on and testing that's tied to identifying contacts and safely separating cases and contacts.

Mayor: I don't, I may have missed it. You speak to the herd immunity question?

Senior Advisor Varma: Yes, Mr. Mayor. Yes, I mentioned, I think that immunity is a very unlikely explanation for this because we know that the vast majority of New Yorkers actually weren't infected, and so we're not nearly at a level where we would expect that immunity would play a major role in decreasing transmission. There's still far too many New Yorkers who are susceptible. Thank you doctor.

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Good morning, everyone. I have two questions, but first the best of luck to Freddi, you earned it. My first question has to do with the announcement on your weekend plans in Harlem, I know you mentioned the Parks Department stepping in, I guess, to provide some programming, but the Parks Department also saw some significant cuts in the budget. Obviously there's financial issues, but part of that was cutting some staffers like the Park Rangers and Park Enforcement Agents. So, I mean, would you consider perhaps funding some of these back if they're going to play a role in these larger and broader and important antiviolence initiatives and then I have one after.

Mayor: Yeah. Katie look, every it's a very good question. Every agency had to find ways to save money. None of it was fun and easy. I assure you we are going to make sure that what we have, we stretch to the farthest possible, but as I said, the antiviolence efforts are going to be first and foremost from the community. City agencies have a crucial role to play, but what we need to do is get the community more deeply involved. So that's, that's where our focus will be. Yeah. Please hold on Katie. One sec, Senator Benjamin.

State Senator Brian Benjamin: I also think there's a role to play for some of our private entities. There are a number of philanthropic groups, individuals with significant wealth in this city who can step up and play a role here. So I don't think it all falls on the city. I think we should be calling on a number of our wealthy individuals to step up and help. So that's part of the conversation that we've been having in our Harlem community policing task force, is figuring out ways to leverage outside donations to help as well.

Moderator: Next, we have Nolan from the Post.

Question: Good morning, everybody. Is this working? Yeah, we can hear you. How are you doing? I'm all right. I too would just like to extend my best wishes to Friday on our last day. I'd like to start with the news that you guys put out yesterday that you're suspending once again all large events in the city through at least September 30th. Why continue to suspend these events and continue to give your blessing to these large protests, you know, demanding civil rights reforms?

Mayor: Again, look, we looked at these large events. We looked at all the other initiatives we have going on now, the Open Streets, the Open Restaurants, how much people are using parks, one thing or another, it just made more sense to keep the focus on what is working now to maximize the space available to people and not have it be taken up by large events. Right now, what people are doing. No one is they're getting fresh air and recreation the right way with a lot of devotion to social distancing and face coverings. That can't happen if events are interfering with the ways that we've set things up. So it just makes more sense not to have them. I've said plenty of times the protest, this is a particular moment in American history where 400 years of oppression, 400 years of racism are being addressed in a very, very powerful way that can't compare to anything else, and people's voices needed to be heard. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next, we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning, all. How are you today?

Mayor: Good Juliet. How are you?

Question: I'm fine. Thank you. So my first question involves the schools. Different countries are using different safety protocols in schools, spraying children's shoes, having hand-washing locations or having everyone's temperatures taken, you know, students, staff, teachers, when they walk into the building, what will your health and safety protocols be in the schools?

Mayor: Yeah, you're going to get a lot more information on that next few days, but they're going to be rigorous. It's about health and safety first Juliet. So first of all, remember if the survey we got from 400,000 parents is right, something like 75 percent of kids will come to school, but about 25 percent of parents will decide that they want to hold their kids back from school. Any kid who's sick or the message is always going to be, or any adult who's sick, don't come to school. We're definitely going to have hand washing stations and hand sanitizer all over the place, constant cleaning each day, a lot of measures. What we're going to do at entry, we're going to announce shortly, but the point of all of this Juliet is it's going to be layer upon layer of health and safety measures to protect everyone. That's the only way can bring school back is with a very, very strong set of health and safety protections, and again, we're going to look at the data right up until the days before school to make sure that everything is telling us it's okay to move forward. Go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today. We have Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Hi, good morning everyone. I'm honored to be the last reporter to ask a question during Freddi’s time. I want to thank you very much for your great work.

Mayor: You'll tell your grandchildren that Reuvain.

Question: [Inaudible] a report out yesterday says that a quarter of New York City renters have not paid any rent since March and you have repeatedly supported allowing renters to delay payments for long periods. Does this report cause you to reconsider your refusal to decrease the interest rate for late property tax payments, from what critics call loansharking levels, considering that renters haven't paid in landlords don't have money?

Mayor: Again. I want everyone who can pay the rent to pay the rent. There are a lot of people still employed in New York City. There are a lot of people working remotely. Everyone can pay the rent, you owe it to this whole city, to your community to pay the rent so that your building can be kept up for everyone's benefit. Folks who simply can't pay the rent should not be put out on the street. They should be given an opportunity to pay over a longer period of time, and I think the State still needs to give us better rules to allow for that. It's a very different matter than what we're asking of folks in terms of their commitment to their city and the payments they have due to the city. We've tried to be flexible in hardship cases. We've tried to make accommodation, but Reuvain, we've got to keep the City of New York going. If you want a restart, and I know you do we have to have the resources to pay for everything that keeps this city going. We cannot let that go. It's too crucial to the future. Go ahead.

Everybody. Let me just conclude, first of all, with a real, thank you to our guests today, to Iesha and Brian for everything you're doing in the community and what a difference it's going to make. And then I want to say a special farewell. As you can hear folks, a number of the journalists are saluting Freddi Goldstein, my Press Secretary, job well done after four years. Thank you for your extraordinary efforts, cool, smart efforts on behalf of the people of New York City. Never, never flappable. And Wiley Norvell, our Communications Director. After nine long years – thank you, Wiley, for your amazing contributions to the City of New York and your vision and your amazing creativity, which has been exhibited throughout. The team will carry on. I want to welcome again, Bill Neidhardt, my new press secretary, who has come to us from an extraordinary movement, the Bernie Sanders campaign, and has done great work all over America and been through the fire and back and ready for what he's going to do here in New York City.

So everyone, look, I'll conclude today with a simple point, and I think the word that comes to my mind after we've talked today about the community, and the community creating safety, and the community addressing issues, the word I want to use is ownership. I think a lot of times this gets forgotten. A lot of times the public discourse is around the notion of, well the government is going to do something for you or to you or some outside forces going to address the issue or there's some on, off switch for very complex societal challenges. That's not how it works. It actually works when people take ownership. It works when communities find their own solutions. Now sometimes government can help a lot. Sometimes government can support it, foster it. Sometimes government can spark it. Sometimes, government has to get out of the way and let the people do what the people do best. But I have a lot of faith in the people, and I know people in the Harlem community are going to find a path forward. They have. This is one of the historic amazing communities of this city, of this nation, legendary for a reason. They have fought through challenges before, they will do it again. But ownership, New Yorkers, taking on a challenge and deciding that we can get somewhere together, and that's been the history of the coronavirus. The reason that we're able to talk today about a much safer, healthier city, because you all took ownership and you all believed this was your city and you made things happen and that's how we go forward. Thank you, everybody.

2020-07-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone – and time now for our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio every Friday at 11:05 am here on the Brian Lehrer Show. Our lines are open at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Our lines are actually not that open because we gave out the number before the news and they all filled up. But when people finish up, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, or you can tweet a question, use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How you doing?

Lehrer: I’m doing all right. And let's start with schools. Your plan for a blended – you call it a blended school reopening system. Two or three days at school, two or three days at home. So many questions from people in different situations. I'm actually going to start with a caller from yesterday and turn part of her thought into a question for you. So, here's 30 seconds of Hoda from Manhattan, a working mother calling in yesterday.

Question: I don't understand how we were able to provide child care for essential workers, no problem, and there was no COVID outbreaks. And I don't understand why we are not advocating for brick-and-mortar full-time school for students knowing that they are not the high-risk population, knowing the impact that it has to their mental, emotional learning wellbeing, and the detriments that this has to the economy. And as a working mother, I have fought for years, for years, to get to the position that I've been in. And now I'm being forced to decide between my career, my livelihood, and the care for my children.

Lehrer: Hoda in Manhattan, calling in yesterday, Mr. Mayor. And I've heard similar things from some other parents. How do you address that group?

Mayor: Well, I really feel what Hoda is saying because – I do – that last part, and I understand people work their whole lifetime to reach a certain level of achievement and they don't want it to slip away. I feel that. And I also understand how tough it's been for parents trying to educate their kids while trying to hold down a job, or even the parents – especially the parents who lost their job, how tough that's been to not have a livelihood anymore. This is a really difficult time, Brian. And we just got to look at it in the face, this is the farthest thing from business as usual. So, look, our goal here has got to be health and safety first. I don't think I've heard anyone debate that point, which means we've got to do social distancing, which totally changes the math of how we do kids in schools. We got a lot of overcrowded schools.

Now, you go back to February before the coronavirus is here, you know, we knew a lot of our schools were overcrowded. Now, you take an overcrowded school or even a school that's just at its maximum, and now everyone has to stay six feet apart, immediately you are going to have to have fewer kids in that school. And if you're going to have a lot fewer kids, in some cases, many fewer kids, you are going to have to go onto some kind of split schedule. So, that's the reality. And we just don't have enough alternative places to go that we can make work. Two months to get ready, thank God, gives us time to get a lot done, but it doesn't allow us to, you know, create things out of thin air. Like, we have to work with the school infrastructure we have. We are going to try and create as many child care options as possible going forward. Our child care centers are reopening on Monday, this Monday. And I also am hearing a lot about parents creating their own kind of collectives and, you know, situations where they'll take turns, supporting kids, but we're going to have to do everything we can to help people through it. But we just have to focus on safety first. And that's what is dictating how many kids can be at a building at a certain time.

Lehrer: You mentioned alternative spaces. I think we have an alternative spaces call – Sam on the Lower East Side, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sam.

Question: Hi –

Lehrer: Whoops –

Mayor: Sam, you there –

Lehrer: No, he's not, actually, his line just clicked off. So, but I saw his question summarized and it was, can the City use a lot of the movie theaters that are closed – we talked about closed movie theaters last hour – as alternative spaces? And, you know, I could add to that, what about a lot of businesses that are closed, so there were more spaces, so more students at a time can be accommodated per day?

Mayor: We're going to look at anything and everything. You know, Brian, I think it's important to remember, we don't know if this crisis, as it is currently, is going to get better, is going to get worse. We don't know when there'll be a vaccine or a cure. Obviously, the sooner that happens, then we're going back to the traditional model. So, we're dealing with a lot of variables. We definitely are looking at alternative spaces, but primarily spaces that are already outfitted to be usable for schools. I think one should not minimize what it would take to turn a movie theater into something that actually could be used effectively for kids. And there's a host of things that go into a school building working, but wherever we can find an alternative space that we can get our hands on, that we can convert properly we're going to do that.

And, look, the first thing is to get ready for September. We've got two months, but if this is going to be a more prolonged crisis, we will keep making adjustments and we'll keep bringing in more and more options as we go along. Again, my hope is it's not a prolonged crisis and we actually resolve things in the course of the school year, which I think the most likely scenario right now, when a vaccine would be available. But we're going to look at anything that we can really practically put into play for September.

Lehrer: The caller, Hoda, who we played from before in another part of her call said, she was wondering if the teacher's union is an obstacle to what she considers doing the right thing, because teachers are concerned about their safety, and that's understandable, but that concern is winning politically over parents concerned about their kids' stunted development or their families' livelihood. What would you say to that?

Mayor: I don't know why Hoda comes to that conclusion because I've announced the vision and we've been actually working closely with the UFT and the CSA, the two major unions representing educators, as well as DC 37 and unions that represent staff in the buildings. The fact is we did the survey of parents, so we know exactly – and I worked for the parents. The parents have spoken – 400,000 survey results, 75 percent of them want their kids back in school. Again, we're not going to put kids in school in a way that's unsafe. So, we have to observe social distancing. That's the – you know, look, you know there's this fight between President Trump and the CDC. CDC standards are very clear and we agree with them. There has to be social distance and it has to be face coverings, hand washing stations, we're going to do all of that.

But the buildings that were already at capacity or overcrowded, those buildings by definition, again, we're going to have to do some kind of split schedule, just no way around it. That is not about teacher unions, that's about health. Where we can find alternative spaces, we will. Now there's another end of the spectrum and it bears noting, Brian, there are some schools, some public schools that actually don't have a maximum capacity and those schools will be able to take proportionately more kids. And there might even be some schools that can do five days a week in the short term in-person. But it's all done depend on the size and the enrollment of the school. And then if we can find nearby alternative spaces that actually add to the equation.

Lehrer: You mentioned the CDC guidelines. As you know, President Trump argues that the CDC guidelines for reopening, like with staggering and physical barriers and sophisticated ventilation systems, are so expensive that they will prevent schools from reopening that could safely, and he points to a number of countries in Europe that have full school reopenings without guidelines like that, and don't seem to be causing a spike in cases among the parents. What do you say to the president?

Mayor: Well, the president has never been a real fact-based kind of guy. I think – I don't understand how he's doing his reasoning here. The measures are common sense measures. They don't stop us from reopening schools. We're planning to reopen schools. They do affect how many kids can be in a building at a time and that's just smart. And again, it is about protecting everyone. It’s protecting the families of those kids and the educators and staff in the building and their families. And we also have to recognize a certain number of people are not going to be ready to participate at first. And we understand that. Some teachers are going to have legitimate health exemptions. A number of parents are not going to want to send their kids at first, we're going to need remote learning in any scenario. So, I don't follow the president's reasoning at all here.

And also pointing to other countries that had very different realities doesn't make sense. We, in New York City, we are a bigger, more densely populated location than almost any place on Earth. And so, we have to be particularly cautious, but then for the rest of the country, you know, unlike a lot of parts of the world where the disease has been in decline, in so many states in America, it's surging and school is two months away or less than some places. So, no, I don't follow. We have to do a health and safety first approach. That's all the CDC is saying. It's not an impossible approach. It takes real work, but it's the smart approach.

Lehrer: Liz in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi, Liz.

Question: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I am calling, I have a few different issues that I'd like to discuss and I'll be very – as quick as I possibly can. So, with regard to safety, you know, I'm thinking, you know, one of my kids' schools has a lot of these outdoor space. I have a 10-year-old and a 16-year-old, right. The 10-year-old, like, I could see some things happening in that school space where it could be safer with some of the things you're talking about, but my other daughter – my daughter goes to school in one of those kinds of prison-like, you know, I forgot what era that was, but you know, the one that's right by Marie Bertram, like Marie Bertram style – very few windows you know, it's massive, there's 4,000 kids. So, my question is about, like, do you have exposure scientists who are going to help you – each school understand, like, what's really possible in their particular, actual, real life setting with scientists and not like what happened with, you know, UFT reps and principals going around and kind of coming up with what they think their plan could be. You know, a friend of mine is like, I'm not an epidemiologist, which is exactly why I didn't answer your survey because I'm not an epidemiologist. So, that's one issue.

The second issue is around remote learning. And so, I understand that students in summer school this year are using the platform, iLearn. If families opt for remote learning in the fall in full or in part, is that what we are opting into? I've heard that lessons delivered via iLearn are pre-prepared and limit teachers' ability to individualize instruction for students. This will only heighten inequities between those of us – sorry, those who are able to attend in person and those who are not. Will children be reporting to a teacher within their schools if they select 100 percent remote learning or will this involve a separate pool of teachers?

Lehrer: All right, let me get the Mayor to answer both of those questions. Two very different questions. One about facilities, one about the vulnerable students and whether the remote learning systems are really as individualized as they need to be.

Mayor: Yeah, Liz, these are really important questions and they are very different, but let me do my best quickly to answer. First, on the question of keeping the schools safe and the health guidance. So, the health guidance does come from the epidemiologist and the health experts whether CDC or State Health Department or City Department of Health, working with the Department of Education. All of this has really been looked at very carefully over months and those basic standards, the standard of cleaning that's going to be necessary every day, the hand washing stations, the hand sanitizers, the number of kids in the classroom, the use of face coverings. We're still working on what we're going to do with entry each day and how we're going to do screening. We're going to have more to say on that next few days. But there's a huge effort being made to get the health care piece right and consistent. That would be the same for every school. The principals are not expected to do original research. They're expected to follow what the health authorities are telling them. The survey, just to note this, is really about parents expressing their decision about their children. They have rights. If a parent is ready for their child to come back, and about three-quarters are now – and, Brian, a survey that gets 400,000 responses, I think you would agree, that goes beyond any normal concept of sample size, that's the people speaking directly. A vast majority want their kid to come back. But anyone who is not ready, they will have that choice.

Now, to the remote learning. It'll be available for everyone at any point – something the Chancellor emphasized yesterday. If you want, in-person learning, tell us before the school year, and there'll be a process for people to sign up. If at any point you're in remote learning, you want to come back to in-person, you can do that on a quarterly basis at any point, sign up for the next quarter. But parents who want remote will have it available. It will involve more – the Chancellor spoke about this this week with me – more direct teacher contact. Remember when we did the in-person – excuse me, when we did the remote learning for April and May and June, it was all on an emergency basis and the first time it’d ever been attempted on such a vast scale in New York City. We had a huge number of kids that didn't even have the devices. And we had to address the digital divide. I mean, everything was done on an emergency basis. Now there's been a chance to reset and figure out how to do things better and more thoroughly, and to lay in remote learning plans for the whole year ahead that can be deeper in effect and reach kids more deeply. So, that will be in place. I don't know the specifics of the names of the different remote learning programs. So, Liz, if you give your information to WNYC, we'll have someone from the DOE get back to you and tell you what that approach is going to look like.

Lehrer: Liz, if you want to do that, we can take your contact information off the air. Sharon in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Sharon.

Question: Hi, thanks for taking the call. Mr. Mayor, I have two questions. I am a business writer by trade and have a degree in public policy analysis. And I'm concerned about the long term life of the city. But not human life, but the vibrancy of the city itself after the pandemic. And I'm wondering if you have anybody or a committee of people, who are looking beyond your own term at the two to five year framework of what the city may look like at a time when retail can be open, but it isn't. When we have office towers, skyscrapers that are empty? When we have 500,000 people already who have left? What do you think the fabric of the city might look like? And, but more importantly do we have anybody like a panel of people, economists and strategists who are actually considering this problem? That's my first question. And my second question is I'd really like to hear how you personally feel about what has happened in New York City in recent months?

Mayor: Thank you very much, Sharon, let me do them in that order. The first question, yes, of course. So Sharon, we've had so much to focus on in the last four months, right in front of our face and dealing with crisis after crisis. But of course there's a whole team of people working on the future of the city. Whether it is our Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development, Vicki Been and her team, and the folks at the Economic Development Corporation, the Fair Recovery Task Force that we've named, which includes leaders who have decades of experience helping New York City through other previous crises and helping to bring it back. There's a huge amount of work being done. And top of that, every sector of our economy is represented in advisory councils we put together -- larger businesses, smaller businesses, culture, entertainment, you know, a whole broad swath of our economy and our life in the city. Leaders and experts from those communities, those sectors meet weekly with the administration, talking about right now problems, but also projecting ahead years. What are the kinds of things we're going to need to do to bring the city back? And we've heard tremendous commitment from business leaders, that they are grappling with, you know, what amount of work will be in person versus remote, short term versus long term. But where there's absolute consensus is the city can and must come back. The city has overcome before and has such intrinsic strength in a globalized economy that it will be strong again, the future. And people will want to reengage in person, once we get past this disease. Which I bluntly believe will happen at some point in 2021, that's the most likely scenario for a vaccine. And then we'll go through the process of rebuilding and restoring our vitality. But there's tremendous faith in the business community that I've heard. We are going to have to do some new things, but we're going to find a way as we always have.

To your second question, Sharon, what have I felt? It's been extremely painful but not hopeless. So humanly, it's so painful to try to find a way to protect people and help people against such a difficult foe and obviously so much unknown. That's been the worst part of all this. There's no one who still fully understands this disease. And we don't, we've never had all the tools we needed, started with the tragic reality of not having had the testing when we needed it. But the way it's affected everything, every aspect of life. The fact that we were talking earlier in this broadcast about a crime spree, which is clearly related to the coronavirus. And it's just been domino falling after domino falling. It’s been very painful humanly for me as a leader and a person, but also feeling the lives of the people I represent and lead, just seeing so much pain out there and being out in communities and feeling it.

But it's not hopeless because here's what I think the media respectfully misses, the ingenuity, the fight back, the spirit of New Yorkers, the way they just create things. I've been out in communities. I've been amazed at what people have done to help each other and to survive this and uplift each other. I do not hear hopelessness at the neighborhood level. I hear purposefulness. So in the end I just have tremendous faith in New Yorkers. I don't live in the world of elites and elite institutions. I never have. I believe if you just go out to neighborhoods in the city and just talk to people, it restores your faith very quickly that they're going to fight through. And the last thing I'd say, Sharon is when I started my career in public service, I remember vividly some days I spent in the South Bronx the first half of the 1980’s. And if you had looked at that community then, rubble strewn lots as far as the eye could see, you know, fires everywhere, vacant buildings everywhere. I mean, you would have said, this was like a post-apocalyptic movie and you could never come back from it. You go to the Bronx today and you know, it's been this extraordinary renaissance and you can't even see what was the reality 30 or 40 years ago. So we can come back from anything. New Yorkers are just that strong and that's truly what I believe.

Lehrer: So on that personal and optimistic note, we are out of time. Thanks as always Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.

2020-07-13 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. 

Let me always say that whenever I tell you a fact, whenever something's reported to us, there's always more information that comes in later. But the fact that for the first time in months, we have a 24-hour period in which no one in this city died from the coronavirus, that is so striking and so moving. And it's a statement, again, about how the city fights back, how people do not ever give in. It's something that should make us hopeful, but it's very hard to take a victory lap because we know we have so much more ahead. This disease is far from beaten. And we look around the country and we see what so many other Americans are going through, so many other states and cities hurting so bad right now. So, no one can celebrate, but we can at least take a moment to appreciate that every one of you did so much to get us to this point – 24 hours where no one died. Let's have many more days like that.

And it's a reminder, of course, that this disease is such a formidable foe. That it's been months and months since we've had a day like this, and we cannot let up, we cannot allow the slightest opening for the coronavirus. And so, I can tell you with satisfaction because of all the hard work you've done, we've gone through now three phases and things are going well. And I can tell you more people are going back to work. More people are using the subway again, and they're doing it safely. I can tell you, our health care indicators are staying in the right place. We'll talk about that in a moment, but we constantly have to look at all the information we have, to look for trends, to look for dangers, and to address them rapidly. We can't ever ignore a warning sign. So, I want to talk about one of the things we're seeing today.

Even though we have overall seen a huge reduction in the presence of the coronavirus in this city, we do see one trend that's worrisome for young adults. We see the infection rate rising, and the particular group we're concerned about is 20-year-olds to 29-year-olds. Now we see from 30 to 39 years old, some increase as well, and we take that very seriously. But particularly amongst this younger group, 20 years old to 29 years old, we see a problem and we need to address it. And I understand for so many younger adults, it has been a really difficult time, cooped up, disconnected, away from loved ones. There's so many things affecting people. And I understand that people are just yearning to break out of that, but we've got to keep telling everyone, particularly our younger adults, how important it is to stick to what has worked, the social distancing, the face coverings, getting tested. And so, we're going to double down an effort to reach younger adults, digital media, messages from influencers, a night of action outreach all over the city at outdoor spots where people gather, mobile testing vans, mask giveaways. We're going to do everything to reach younger adults, to remind them they're not impervious. And I think many of us can remember when we were in that age range, you feel, too often, impervious, but everyone is susceptible to this disease. And, of course, everyone unfortunately could spread it to someone else they love. So, we're going to double down on making sure that younger adults really follow these precautions that have worked so well for all of us.

And speaking of precautions that have worked well – unquestionably, one of the biggest game changers has been face coverings. Whatever it is from the most homemade to the most elaborate, the face coverings have made a world of difference in fighting back this disease. We've given guidance before, we're going to give more guidance today. We want to go the next step. More and more people are now gathering in indoor locations. A lot more work sites coming back. So, it's not just, you know, a supermarket or a pharmacy like it used to be. It's more and more people going to work. It's more and more people in retail settings around other people. It makes sense that even if you're trying to keep some distance, it's hard to do. Even if you're trying to keep that six feet, it's never easy in a lot of places. So, here's the new guidance. If you're indoors and there's people around anywhere, even if you're in a big space indoors, and there's people in some part of that space, keep that face covering on. We've talked before about if you are more than six feet away from people, but what we're finding is, you know, you start out more than six feet away from people, but you end up coming in contact with them or getting closer to them in the course of the day. So, the guidance we're now going to give formally to all New Yorkers is, when you're indoors, not in your place, where you live with your family or the other people you live under the same roof with, but if you're at work, if you're at a store, even if there seems to be a lot of space, just keep that face covering on all the time. It's a good precaution. Anytime there are people around, keep it on.

Now, as we said from the beginning to get to the heart of the problem, beat back this disease, it's always about testing. So, today we're announcing we're opening ten new testing sites in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. This is free, walk-in testing. Eight of them are open already, others coming soon. I want to thank our community testing partners who have been a part of this effort, the Acacia Network, the Institute for Family Health, and the Union Community Health Center, all stepping up to help their fellow New Yorkers get the free testing so we can continue to fight back this disease. So, everyone, if you haven't been tested, go get tested for free. If you haven't been tested in quite a while, go get tested for free. It helps you. It helps your family. It helps everyone. And the fact is, as we are telling people how important it is to get tested, we are running into, just particularly in the last week, a fundamental challenge all over this country. More and more people getting tested, that's a great thing, but the outbreaks around the country are causing a huge strain on the testing labs. This was not a problem a few weeks ago, but it's become a real problem. Now remember we, from the beginning, have lacked testing, and this is something that frustrates me deeply. Our federal government never had testing in place from the beginning. They still don't have enough.

So, we now see in New York and around the country delays in getting testing results, and we need to beat that back. We can do some things to improve the situation here, and we're going to use every tool we can to fix it. But the federal government has to step up now because it's now becoming a national crisis. We used to have almost no testing. Now we have more testing, but if you can't get the results in real time, it doesn't help you enough. I talked about, earlier in this crisis, the Defense Production Act and the fact that the president had to invoke it at that point to get us PPEs, to get us ventilators, all the things we needed. Well, now we need it again because we need the lab capacity, we need the chemical reagents. We need the different pieces that allow these labs to do their work and do it quickly. And that will only happen if the federal government steps up.

So, Mr. President, again, the Defense Production Act is there. Mr. President, all you have to do is say, 'I am now invoking the Defense Production Act to expand lab capacity in the United States of America, to make sure we have everything we need to get tests to people quickly.' You can do that with a stroke of a pen. We need it, not only here in New York, we need it all over this country. Everyone, you know New Yorkers are ready to play their part. You know your City government is ready with our Test and Trace Corps and all the testing sites, but we need the federal government to play its role and it so often hasn't. How about this be the time that it finally steps up.

Okay, let's talk about today's indicators. First, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for some suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 – today's report, 56 patients. Second, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold is 375 – today, 279. And third, percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent – today's report, two percent. So, we continue to show that progress. Let's stick to it. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to questions from our colleagues in the media. And please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have with us today, Senior Advisor Dr. Varma and Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Long. 

Moderator: We have Gloria from NY1.

Question: This is a question about evictions and I was wondering what you're doing, or if there's anything in the works to prevent mass evictions in the next couple of weeks or months, as people continue to go without work and without being able to pay the rent, I know that there's an Albany component to this, but for people here in the city, if they are evicted, they will become homeless here in the city, therefore making it a problem for your administration. So, how are you preparing to prevent this?

Mayor: Yeah. Gloria, it's not a problem for my administration. It's a problem for New York City. It's a problem for all of us if people are evicted through no fault of their own and end up homeless, it just doesn't make sense. The State needs to act. I've said it for months now. The State has to give folks who can document that they just don't have an income – the ability to stay in their apartments, pay back the rent in the future when they have an income again. Look, I also think that there's been many calls for the stimulus to involve rental assistance and to address the fact that there's a fundamental breakdown here. People who just can't pay to stay in their home. That is the best solution. I am concerned about the stimulus because no one knows where it's going, but if you really said, how do we solve this problem at its root, it would be to have rental assistance money in that stimulus. But in the meantime, Albany needs to pass that law or rule that would allow for folks to stay in their apartments, if their problem's an economic one, to stay in their apartments and payback later. If someone has the money, they should pay the rent, but if they don't have the money, they should not be evicted, and what we will do is continue to provide the legal assistance as we have for free for anyone facing eviction. Anyone who's facing eviction can call 3-1-1. If there's any way we can help stop it, we will.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Suzannah from Crain's.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, Crain's did an analysis of COVID-19 contracts that found only five percent went to minority and women owned business enterprises. In light of those findings and the comptroller's survey that can MWBE's consider the City's procurement process burdensome, mysterious, and generally unhelpful, what will you do to lend support to those businesses?

Mayor: Thank you, Suzannah. It's a really good question. The procurement process is too complex. There's no question about it and it grew out of years and years of valid concerns, because a lot of it, if you know about New York City, you know, 25, 30, 40 years ago, there was massive corruption in the contracting process and a very elaborate set of checks and balances were put in place, but it's become cumbersome and we've got to make it both smart and effective, but also simpler. So, that's something we're working on right now. We've got to get more money in the hands of MWBEs right away, and that's something our Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity is working on right now. I know Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson in particular feels passionately about this and is working with agencies to immediately speed the amount of money that will go to MWBEs. The beginning of the crisis, it was literally a hand to mouth reality with the PPEs and everything else, wherever we could get supplies, whatever company had them. But now we've got to refocus our efforts on equity and we have to do a lot more with the MWBEs. Do you have a follow-up?

Question: Yeah. I also wanted to ask about the Defense Production Act. With the health emergency largely over in New York, how would you have the president use those funds?

Mayor: Suzannah it's for the whole country. Right now we've got a nation that needs more and more testing and unfortunately we're experiencing the opposite reality now where the labs, not just for New York, but around the country are absolutely overloaded and they cannot keep up because we don't have enough lab capacity in America. Look what we've seen over the last four months. We didn't have testing. We didn't have test kits. We didn't have ventilators. We didn't have PPEs. It's a real sad statement on America that our ability to protect ourselves when a health crisis was allowed to atrophy so badly. I hope this is the ultimate warning sign that we heed and we build up a huge medical capacity in this country to protect ourselves. But right now with the Defense Production Act, the president can order companies to convert their capacity to lab space, to producing the reagents and the other elements needed to speed up testing. This is a national emergency. And even though things have gotten a lot better in New York City, we're far from out of the woods and look what's happening in so many other states. They're suffering. So, the president needs to use all of his powers to address this issue.

Moderator: Last one for today. Next we have Steve from Westwood One News.

Question: And good morning, Mr. Mayor. I hope you can hear me now.

Mayor: There you go. You sound good, Steve.

Question: There we go. Thank you very much. I wanted to talk to you about the testing issue and I've actually been personally affected by this. It's now 12 days since I took a coronavirus test at a CityMD in Brooklyn, and I still don't have the results nor can they find out why I don't have the results yet. I'm curious, and if Jay and Ted can weigh in on this, you know, the City and the State are continually pushing as many people as possible to get tested, saying everybody should get tested, but isn't that impacting or one would presume that that impacts the contact tracing and the effectiveness of contact tracing, if we're flooding the system with people who may not have come into contact with anybody who is a known positive, does this make the most sense now? And how is contact tracing being impacted by this backlog?

Mayor: I'll start quickly and turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Long. But it's a great question, Steve. And, first of all, I'm really sorry you're going through that. This was not a problem, again, a week or two ago, we were in much, much better shape. I'm not saying everyone got their tests back as quickly as they should, but you know, just a few weeks ago, things were moving pretty smoothly and we had kept increasing the amount of testing effectively, and now we're up at 40,000 tests a day, which is something to applaud. We want that capacity. We want it to keep growing as we build toward the future in this city. But now we've hit this log jam. Now again, in New York City, we think we're going to be able to do some things to address it locally, but we need the national solution going forward because really we should be expanding testing everywhere on a much, much bigger scale. And that's what we've seen work around the world. So that's where we have to go. So we have to crack the code on this problem one way or another, but for our reality, it's really cropped up very recently. Dr. Varma, Dr. Long, why don't you jump in?

Executive Director Dr. Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps: Yeah, this is Ted. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah.

Executive Director Long: Okay. Excellent. I think the Mayor hit all the key points. This is a major national issue with our testing and lab capacity across the board, but we need to do – be doing as much testing as we can to keep the virus suppressed in New York City and we're thinking about creative solutions in order to make that happen. One thing I will also say is it at New York City Health + Hospitals, at our 50 testing locations across New York City today, our turnaround time is much, much lower. So please come and visit us and we would be happy to offer you a test for free. Dr. Varma, I don't know if you want to add anything.

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: No, nothing critical to add, I mean, I think it's just really important to emphasize that we want to make testing sort of a routine and normal part of people's daily lives, because we know there is a risk of people transmitting the infection, even if they don't have any symptoms, so we do really want to keep pushing on that, that issue at the same time that we're working to build more capacity.

Mayor: Thank you, doctors. Go ahead, Steve, did you have a follow-up?

Mayor: Yeah, I do have a follow-up. You know when we look at the daily figures from coronavirus, yes, New York has come such a long way and we're down to very low figures here, but we seem to be stuck in this arrange of more or less on either side of 60 new hospitalizations daily in New York City for coronavirus and it makes me again, wonder if you know, we've been stuck in that range since mid-May, is contact tracing working? Shouldn't that number be coming down even a little bit each day at this point beyond 60.

Mayor: Yeah. Let me give you an important fact to go with that, Steve. It's a very good question. And I'll start again, either doctor or both want to jump in, they should. A number of your colleagues asked a really good question and I asked this question internally, as well, of the percentage – I mean, excuse me – of the patients who were going in for COVID-like symptoms, which is that report you get every day, when they were tested, when the test results came back, what percentage actually had confirmed COVID? So, the recent information we have from a few days ago is 11 percent. So if you take it against today's figure, you know, when you look at today, we have 56 patients in the most recent day who went to the hospital with COVID-like symptoms. 11 percent or so of them actually had COVID after the test was taken. So six people let's say. So, you know, I would say that that says something very powerful. When we were at the height of the crisis, that percentage of the number who went into the hospital and then finally, we got the test back and we got to confirm what their situation was, that was like 70 or 80 percent were coming back as COVID positive. So, no, I think it actually shows that something is definitely working with test and trace, definitely working with social distancing, and wearing masks. And even as we've expanded the economic activity, the numbers are staying very low and that's a good sign, but long, long way to go. Doctors, you want to add?

Executive Director Long: Yes. Thank you, sir. So I think again, the Mayor hit all the key points, but I want to emphasize two things. The first is that since mid-May, we're doing three to four times as many tests, every single day of New Yorkers, so we're catching a lot more of the cases that we would not have necessarily caught before. And in terms of how that powers our tracing operation, as our city has reopened, as people have gone back to work, we have not seen a spike and I'll give you a specific example here. In our tracing operations so far, there've been a group of contacts or people with known exposure that by the time we've called them, this is a group of more than 1,300 people, they were already actively symptomatic. So if we had not have called them, if the program didn't exist, if we did not reach out to them, they would have gone out and infected, take the average number, three more New Yorkers each. So because the program exists, because we had testing, and because we have tracing, we were able to intervene for those 1,300 symptomatic people immediately, get them to isolate or quarantine, and prevent what could have been potentially 4,000 more new cases of coronavirus as the city has reopened in New York City. The program is working. It will continue to work and we're going to continue to enroll many more people in the program. Dr. Varma, I don't know if you want to add anything?

Senior Advisor Varma: No, nothing more for me. Thank you.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you so much, doctors. In a day when we recognize that we have fought back this disease as well, which if you went back to March and April, you might've thought it would overtake us, it would be impossible to fight back, and yet New Yorkers have fought back. We talk about not a single death in 24 hours. It should be a message to every one of you that your efforts have meant something and they must continue to the day that we are free of this disease. Thank you.

2020-07-14 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. In a couple of minutes, we're going to talk about the fight against the coronavirus. We're going to talk about some really extraordinary efforts that are helping this city to move forward and helping us support people who keep us safe and protect our health and are bringing back the city strong, and there's something there to feel very good about.

We continue the fight against the coronavirus, and this city has been nothing but heroic in fighting back against this disease. I'll go over to health care indicators in a few moments, but I can tell you, again, it's a very good day and we continue to make progress because of all the efforts of you, so many New Yorkers, who are doing so much. And we have to be there for New Yorkers in this moment, the people who serve us, the people who are doing so much to bring back the jobs and livelihoods of folks in the city. It is so hard to make sense of what we're going through. But remember, it's not only the worst health care crisis in a century, it's the worst economic crisis in 90 years, since the Great Depression, that's what we're dealing with right now. And there just aren't enough resources to go around to help people. We've got to find more anywhere we can so that folks can get back on their feet. And that's where the good news comes in. The Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City has raised $54.5 million for COVID-19 emergency relief – $54.5 million to help people move forward. Amazing response from so many people, over 9,000 donors, some big, some small, but all united by a desire to help New York City come back, to help our heroes who fought through the worst of this crisis, to get them food, to help the health care professionals, the first responders, everyone who was there for us to get them the supplies, the things they needed, the care packages to show that we love them and we needed them and we cared about them. And here to tell you more about this really extraordinary effort, this outpouring of love and support from New Yorkers, our first lady, Chirlane McCray.

First Lady Chirlane McCray: Thank you, Bill. These dollars raised are a reflection of how much New Yorkers care, how much people want to help everyone who's suffering, everyone who's in pain. It's a huge and a blessing for our COVID-19 emergency relief fund to have raised $54.5 million. Toya Williford, the Executive Director of the Mayor's Fund and the entire Mayor's Fund team have been working incredibly hard – incredibly hard for months now to raise and process these funds. The real headline though is where these funds are being directed – to feed health workers, to save businesses, aid immigrants, and support our youth. Before I introduce the other speakers who will provide more detail, I'd like to highlight two important programs the Mayor's Fund has helped to fund and coordinate. The first is the Restaurant Revitalization Program, which will initially benefit 100 local restaurants by providing up to $30,000 to bring back approximately 1,000 displaced workers at $20 per hour plus tips. In Spanish –

[First Lady McCray speaks in Spanish]

Neighborhood restaurants are priority, because they're social and economic anchors. They provide meals, employment, and they're places where families gather for celebrations. After months of little to no business, these restaurant owners and their employees are hurting. Last week, I had an opportunity to visit one of these struggling establishments, the Tsion Cafe, and what a neighborhood treasure. It has a long history of service in the neighborhood. And as I walked through the door and saw the wonderful Ethiopian art and sat in the back garden, I felt totally at home. I had the vegetarian platter and food was terrific. After all the tribulations they've been through, it was wonderful to be there with the owner and founder, BJ, and her husband, Padmore, and the whole staff. And, as BJ said, the Restaurant Revitalization Program is a win-win for all and restarts a virtuous cycle for the community. Restaurant jobs at higher wages lead to families getting more support, more spending in the neighborhood, and a fast recovery for everyone in the community. But I'd like to hear directly from BJ about what this program has meant for her and for her community – BJ?

[…]

Mayor: Thank you. Excellent.

First Lady McCray: Thank you, BJ. I'm sure your message and your remarkable story will inspire others as we move forward with phase three of the recovery. And I hope everyone knows that what we are doing is not about getting back to normal. The Restaurant Revitalization Program is helping businesses leap forward with new opportunities, new standards, and support for workers. It's with that same spirit, that our is creating micro grants for domestic violence survivors.

[First Lady McCray speaks in Spanish]

Domestic violence is too often minimized or ignored, and the pandemic has brought new horrors for those who shelter in place with an abusive partner. Violence inside the home has a devastating and long-term effect on children and families for generations. These micro-grants will help mitigate some of the safety, economic and housing challenges exacerbated by COVID-19. These grants are of critical importance and if the last six months are any indication of what's up ahead, we know this is not going to be easy, but we have to build our city with opportunities and support for everyone who needs them. And a particular focus – we must have a particular focus on the most vulnerable New Yorkers.

In Spanish –

[First Lady McCray speaks in Spanish]

For more about these and other announcements, we're now going to hear from Toya Williford, our hardworking and never-daunted-by-a-challenge Executive Director of the Mayor's Fund. Toya?

Executive Director Toya Williford, Mayor's Fund: Thank you, Madam First Lady. The Mayor's Fund could not have achieved its goal of serving New Yorkers hit hardest by COVID-19 without the diverse cross-section of organizations and people who came together to support their neighbors, giving whatever they could afford to help New Yorkers weather one of the most challenging periods the city has ever seen. Their donations made vital programming possible for our city's most vulnerable communities. Programs like the Immigrant Emergency Relief Fund, which has so far provided 13,000 households across 180 ZIP codes, representing 41,000 New Yorkers with one-time emergency financial relief. Programs like the Summer Youth Employment Summer Bridge Program, for which we raise millions of dollars from the philanthropic community to add to the tens of millions in public dollars invested to ensure that 35,000 young people received online career exploration support, project-based learning programming, and most importantly stipends. I'm happy to say that the program will start in just two weeks. We also collected goods and services worth millions that include not only lifesaving personal protective equipment for our health care professionals and essential frontline workers, but also personal care products, phone chargers, iPads, and children's clothing and toys, among other items for New Yorkers in need. And finally, and most humbly, we received cash donations from more than 9,000 individuals across the country who, despite facing a national economic crisis, gave donations ranging from $5 to $5,000.

No relief effort in the history of this administration has ever seen this level of grass roots support. We've come a long way since March, but we're not finished yet. The Mayor's Fund is committed to our mission to ensure a fair and equitable recovery for all New Yorkers. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Toya. Thank you, Toya and everyone at the Mayor's Fund, it has been an extraordinary effort and a labor of love, and you guys have done a great job to our special guests BJ, thank you for joining us and thank you for the wonderful work you do in the community. And of course, Chirlane thank you for leading the way and inspiring these efforts. And you can see a lot of people are coming together to help New York City move forward. And it is, you could say endless need on the one hand, but there's also endless desire to help. So whether it's folks helping our small business owners back on their feet or going out and buying things from their local store to help them come back, whether it's the efforts to help our immigrant brothers and sisters that you've heard Toya talk about, all the work for our health care heroes that happened in March and April, and we need to continue to honor our health care heroes. There is so much desire to help in the city in so many ways. So thank you to everyone who supported the Mayor's Fund, and that help continues to be needed as we fight back.

And talking about fighting back, let's look at our daily indicators and again, today, very good news continued progress in this city thanks to all of you. Indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19 threshold is 200 – today's report 46. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU threshold at 375 – today's report 294. And percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19 threshold 15 percent – today, once again, two percent. So that's really good to see. We continue at that really low level. Congratulations everyone. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're also joined today by First Lady Chirlane McCray, MOIA Commissioner Bitta Mostofi, Mayor's Fund Executive Director Toya Williford, the Public Private Partnership Czar Peter Hatch, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, and ENDGBV Director of Family Justice Center Operations, Jenise Jenkins. The first question is today goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: [Inaudible] everyone. My first question has to do with daycare centers, Mayor, they opened yesterday. How many of the 3,000 opened and how many kids attended and does that tell you anything about the school year?

Mayor: So – excuse me – Andrew, I'll get you the exact number. In fact, we'll see if we have it in the course of this press conference, but we know that the daycare centers were getting ready for weeks and weeks to open. And they were going through a detailed process with Department of Health. So, they knew the potential was there. They were getting ready. From what I've heard a lot are ready to move immediately, or very soon, we'll get to that number. But I want to also emphasize that is one piece of the childcare equation, and we're going to be doing more in the coming days to build out childcare in this city and ensure that parents have maximum options. I'll have more to say on that in the next couple of days.

Question: Question has to do with schools yesterday. Governor Cuomo said that the threshold for a greenlight is actually five percent on the positive testing. Your daily metrics has it at 15 percent overall. I'm wondering if you agree with the State standard of five percent and whether you think that is indeed achievable by the August deadline for the Governor? 

Mayor: Look, I think one of the things that you've seen the State and City agree on is to be cautious. I mean, there's a reason why we have fought back from the worst of the coronavirus crisis, and it was because there was unity on being really careful and cautious. And so, I think a standard that emphasizes safety is a smart standard. Right now, we've been well below that standard for weeks. I want to keep us there and it really depends on everyone doing their share, wearing those face coverings and keeping the distance and really being smart about this disease. So, I am very hopeful that based on that standard that we're going to be ready in September.

Moderator: The next question is for Matt Chayes at Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Matt.

Question: How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, man.

Question: What would you say to a young person in the suburbs who's reluctant to move to the city due to coronavirus and all that is going on?

Mayor: I would say – it's a great question, Matt – and I would say, look at the history of New York City has fought back from literally every major crisis and gotten stronger. Whether you go way, way back to the Great Depression or whether you look at 9/11 or the Great Recession or Hurricane Sandy – I mean, New York City has a clear history of fighting back and literally becoming a better, fairer place, and we intend to do a lot in the next year and a half to ensure that. So, I think this is going to be a place where big, important things are happening where the community is coming together to make this city better. I also would note the obvious Matt, you know, there were people who were putting us down around the country back in March and April. But as I said, quoting scripture, the first shall be last, and the last shall be first, you know, the –when you look at where we were and how far we've come now, we're not out of the woods yet, we have more to do, but clearly the people of this city have shown tremendous discipline, tremendous sense of teamwork and unity. People have helped each other. I mean, what a place of compassion that people have helped each other to come back. You go around the city, you see stores opening, you see the outdoor dining, you see, you know, the youth programs coming back. I mean, it's inspiring. So, I think this is going to be a place where in fact, there's the most prospects going forward because we've handled things the right way. We have an incredible health care community that's done such great work. I would argue, in fact, this is the place you want to be for the future.

Question: And secondly, to what extent is there greater homelessness among youth on the LGBTQ spectrum in the pandemic and what is the city doing to address the problem?

Mayor: I'm really worried about that problem, Matt. Something I've worked on, Chirlane's worked on for years now was recognizing the LGBT youth homeless and runaway youth who have been put through so much. A lot of them kicked out of their homes by their own families, which I – it just disgusts me that that would ever happen, but it does. So, we've been expanding shelter capacity for years, and what we've found is the more we make opportunity available to protect people, that folks come in off the streets and, and take that help. I think it's been a really tough time because there's been so much dislocation. So, what I would say to you is, you know, this is a case of whatever it takes. If there's more we have to do to reach those young people, we'll do it because, you know, they've been through so much.

Moderator: The next is –

Mayor: Hold on one sec, hold on, Chirlane wants to add.

First Lady McCray: Yeah. I just want to emphasize that our shelters are open for runaway and homeless youth and that information and connection to resources can be found on the government website, nyc.gov/unity at – we are doing as much as we can to make sure that these young people do not fall through the cracks.

Mayor: Amen.

Moderator: Next is Erin Durkin from Politico. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I want to go back to some of the things you, one of the things you discussed yesterday, the spike that's been seen among young people. I'm just wondering, have you done any analysis as to what might be driving that? Where these cases are being infected?

Mayor: I'm sorry, Erin, just clarify. You mean the 20-to-29 year olds?

Question: Yes, yes.

Mayor: Yeah. We are trying to figure out more. I'm going to let Jay Varma speak about in a second, but I do think we've seen this concern around the country, Erin. One question of course immediately is as the crisis continues, how much do people remember to stick to the rules? We've asked a lot of people with the face coverings, with the social distancing, the shelter in place, it's a lot, and let's face it, it's harder in many ways on younger people. And I think that's some of what's happening here and elsewhere that we've got to double down our efforts to remind people they're far from impervious, and of course it's not just their own health, it's the impact that could have on others around them. Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Yeah. Thank you for the question. We haven't seen any particular pattern or connection between these cases that would explain the rise. What we have seen is that the pattern of cases doesn't exactly match the same pattern that we've seen before. So in other words, we're seeing cases in parts of Manhattan, in parts of Brooklyn among that age group, that doesn't exactly overlay with our poverty and racial disparities that we've seen in the past. That to us, that this would imply it really is closely related to you know, all the things that we would expect that people are now moving around more, they're now socializing more, and it really emphasizes the importance of strengthening those messages as the mayor said about wearing face coverings, staying away from large gatherings, keeping distance, and observing good hygiene.

Mayor: Thank you doctor. Go ahead, Erin.

Mayor: And my second question is just about, if I understand correctly, we're still in what you've referred to as a moderate transmission phase. I think young people have gone up, older people have gone down overall. It's pretty flat. Is this kind of where we're going to stay indefinitely? Or is there any prospect of actually driving it down further and getting to a, you know, low to no transmission phase or is that unrealistic until there's a vaccine?

Mayor: Well, Erin, you have clairvoyant powers because we were having this exact conversation yesterday afternoon and Dr. Varma was a part of it. Look, we're at a state right now where – if you meaning, if you took our reality right this moment, and you did continue it long-term, in terms of our ability to protect people we could do that very well. So, I'm going to answer your question in two parts. If we were at this exact level, we would be able to protect people, we have plenty of hospital capacity, our Test and Trace Corp can every single day follow up on the number of cases that come in each day. We could continue to move our city forward at this level, but obviously our goal is to do better. And I do think the prospect is there, Erin, of doing better for sure. Our original vision of what it would take has been modified by reality a bit because what we're finding is in fact, we can sustain our health care system even with several hundred new cases a day, but our goal is to go lower and I do think it stands to reason that the farther we go with educating people, the farther we go with ensuring that we take every precaution against what's coming up ahead, I'm pretty confident that that we can get better. I'm talking about before there is a vaccine. I think we can, but that's not said, Erin, lightly, because we also are very worried about resurgence and we're concerned about where resurgence may come from, and one of the areas that I was concerned about, of course, as people coming in from out of state. So, I'm very happy to hear the Governor's decision to be forceful about ensuring that people who come in from out of state have to provide us information so we can ensure they quarantine. I think that's going to be a really important step to keeping things under control. Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: I think you touched on all of the critical elements, which is that we are keeping ourselves at a level that our public health care system and that our health care system can manage very effectively. But we don't want to rest at this level. We're trying a number of different ways to strengthen all of our, our detective work and our case and contact management to do everything we can to drive cases down. We also do have to accept the reality as the Mayor noted and as the Governor has noted that we're going to constantly be at risk of cases being imported from other parts of the country. So, everything we can do to protect against that is going to be critically important.

Moderator: The next is Chris Robbins from Gothamist.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. I guess my first question is, could you sort of clarify what the mask guidance is when you are outdoors at a restaurant or a bar, should people be wearing masks if they're six feet or more apart? Should they be wearing masks all the time if they're outside at a restaurant or a bar? What are the basic rule of thumb – rules of thumb for that sort of behavior? Just to, to spell it out really clearly.

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Chris. It's a great question, and just, as I turn to Dr. Varma, a reminder we've said from day-one with face coverings when you're talking about the group of people you live in the same household with that's different, cause you're already in such direct contact. So, if you're sitting at a restaurant outdoors with the people you live in the same household with, that's different than if you're with folks you're meeting up with who you don't normally come in contact with. So, Dr. Varma will answer. I also want to emphasize what we said yesterday, when indoors, please, everyone, if there's anyone around, anyone you might come in contact with, keep that face covering on just on a regular basis, because we know it's hard to always judge whether you're six feet away or whether someone's going to be in close contact with you or not. So, we are emphasizing now take it up one more notch of safety and keep that face covering on indoors whenever anyone's around. But Dr. Varma to the outdoor bar-restaurant question.

Senior Advisor Varma: You know, our default recommendation always is that it's going to be safer for everybody to be wearing a face covering as much as they can whether indoors or outdoors when they're around other people. But of course, we also have to accept the reality. If you're drinking, if you're eating food, you simply can't be wearing a face covering. So that's why the critical thing is to be, you know, if you're with your family members, then of course, there's no reason to be wearing a face covering because you're spending time with them indoors normally elsewhere. If you're with friends or people you don't normally socialize with, we're trying to keep those gatherings as small as possible. So, we have to accept the reality that when people are sitting at a table, it's not practical for them to wearing face coverings. But we do of course, want to encourage people to be using them as much as possible when they're in any situation where they're not surrounded by their immediate friends and family.

Mayor: Go ahead, Chris.

Question: Thanks. Second question for you. An MTA executive said yesterday that congestion pricing has been delayed at least a year from when he was supposed to start at the beginning of 2021. You know, given the City's reliance on outdoor spaces, given some people's reluctance to go back to taking mass transit, given that more and more people are going back to work, what specifically is the city doing to limit the number of private automobiles in New York City, especially in Manhattan? Are you looking at HOV restrictions? Are you looking at other sort of restrictions that were put in place? I know HOV restrictions were in place after September 11th, but could you talk about what specifically the City's plan is if congestion is only going to – where it's projected to keep growing, but we can't have congestion pricing?

Mayor: Yeah. So, it's a very good question, Chris. First of all, you know, again, I want to see progress on congestion pricing. It was something we all worked on for a long time. It was something as you know, I had qualms and concerns about, but we got to a really good plan basically a year and a half ago now, and I want to see it move forward. So we've all seen massive dislocation here, but you know, I'm going to work with the state and the MTA to make sure that we do move it forward as quickly as possible because we need it also for the future of the MTA and its ability to continue to support itself.

Mayor: But look, we'll look at different alternatives. I certainly agree with you. The HOV lanes can be very helpful. So, we're going to look at all sorts of alternatives. But what I mentioned last week, we are seeing actually more of an increase in mass transit ridership than we are seeing cars coming in to Manhattan using the measure of the East River bridges and the Harlem River bridges, and so that's interesting to me, I think you're right to say a lot of folks are not going to be comfortable with mass transit right away. But I also think the real question is of those coming in, how many are choosing mass transit, and I'm actually impressed by what I'm seeing because people, I think know that the subways and buses are being kept clean and real precautions are being taken and the face coverings are being provided. So, I do not necessarily see people choosing cars in much greater numbers over mass transit, but you're right, that we better be ready for every eventuality. So, we're certainly going to look at HOV lanes among other things.

Moderator: The next is Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: That's good, you call them it just then, because I was actually going to follow up on Chris's question about the congestion pricing delay. You know, Mayor, the Governor blames the Trump administration for delaying approval of congestion pricing, but the State has not even begun the environmental impact statement required by the federal government. So, I would ask you, Mr. Mayor, as someone who obviously knows the politics and speaks to people involved, who is to blame here?

Mayor: Gersh, I don't want to cast blame because I need to get more facts on exactly what's happened, but we need to move it forward. And I also remind everyone without any presumption, I will just state a fact there is an election in four months, and so the fact that things could change very soon in terms of the federal government's views on congestion pricing and the federal government's willingness to help New York City, we got to keep that in the front of our minds, but I want to get a better look at the situation and understand how we move it forward. That's what matters most? Go ahead.

Question: My follow up – I'm sorry, Mr. Mayor, that doesn't really speak for itself because you're – if you don't want to cast blame, that's fine. The State has not begun its environmental impact statement. Are you urging the Governor to start the environmental impact statement required by the federal government?

Mayor: So, Gersh, again, I want to get the full facts on why they're doing what they're doing, but what I want to make sure happens is that congestion pricing moves forward as quickly as possible, and I'll have more to say after I get more information on the current state of play.

Let me conclude with this. Folks are clear that we have to find a way forward and we always do in New York City, but it comes from actually finding our way to each other, making that common cause and resolving that we're never going to let ourselves go backwards. That's what we have done throughout the coronavirus crisis. That's why we can actually say today that we're in much stronger shape than tragically so many of the parts of the country. Never forget what we can do together. We keep proving it every day in New York City. Thank you, everybody.

2020-07-15 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. Here's what you see all over New York City – New Yorkers determined, determined to bring this city back from the coronavirus crisis, determined to get our city started again, determined to keep our streets safe. Wherever I go, I meet New Yorkers who are standing up taking back their streets, making clear to everyone that their neighborhood is their neighborhood, it will be a safe place for everyone.

Now, part of what we all have to do together is keep building this city back. We have to have that faith. Some of it is very material, what it takes to come back and restart the city, some of it is about faith and belief and commitment. So, what we owe to the people of the city here at City Hall and the City government is to keep moving forward every way we can, every way that's safe, and keep building momentum for this city to come back fully. And I have absolute faith that we will. So, here is a very different subject, but one that's very, very important to the future of the city. The way we decide what this city will be in this future, the way we plan our future, the way we decide what we will build and won't build, how we're going to build affordable housing, how we're going to create jobs, it all comes back to how we plan the future of our city. And we talk about our City Planning Department, our City Planning Commission, think about it as what it will mean for the future, not only look of the city, but where there will be opportunity, where there'll be that next affordable apartment, where there'll be that next job.

That work has to begin again. So, since the coronavirus hit in March, the City Planning process has been suspended. The part of the process that most everyday New Yorkers haven't necessarily heard the details of, but absolutely crucial to all of our lives, what's known as ULURP, the Uniform Land Use Review Process, that needs to start again. So, the City Planning Commission will start remote meetings in August. Those will be open to the public and then they will start a deeper process in September to restart ULURP projects, and review will start with community boards at the local level once again. So, it's time to re-engage the City Planning process and move this city forward. And anyone who wants to learn more about the upcoming meetings can go to nyc.gov/engage and learn how you can participate remotely.

Okay, as we turn to our indicators, one point before that, because of course the indicators depend on what we know is so important in fighting back COVID, that's testing, testing, testing. We, in the beginning of the week, talked about what was clearly a national challenge, the delay in getting test results. In the last few days, we have seen some improvements. This is preliminary data. This is not the final word, but what we are seeing now in the last few days is the test result time is starting to increase rapidly in New York City. So, that's good news. We had a real trough there for a while. Again, the national lab capacity, it was being stretched. Right now, based on the latest information, the average – this is not everyone – but the average for test results is down to three days for those results. We're pushing the labs to step up. They're doing a great job of meeting the demand. And the fastest testing option is through our Health + Hospitals hospitals and clinics, our public hospitals and clinics. And if you want to get a test visit nyc.gov/covidtest.

Now, let's do the indicators. And again, good news today. Indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold of 200 – today, 66 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375 – today 303. And number three, percentage of the people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent – once again, two percent today. So, that shows the hard work of all New Yorkers. Keep it up. Quickly, a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have with us today Council Member Cornegy, Director of Anti-Violence Programs and Capacity Building at the Center for Court Innovation Ife Charles, Director of the New York City Department of City Planning and Chair of the City Planning Commission Marisa Lago, Deputy Commissioner of Mental Hygiene Dr. Hillary Kunins, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. 

Moderator: We have Michael from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, guys. How are you doing?

Mayor: I’m good. How are you?

Question: I’m good. So, a quick question on the uptick in COVID cases among young people, 20 to 29. Is there any more information on this? Erin asked about this yesterday, and I'm wondering, has the tracing corps found any connection to the protests, any connection to, you know, some of these elicit parties I think there were reported on today? Any clues as to, kind of, what's driving this at this point?

Mayor: I'll turn to Dr. Varma. And again, I think we – and we're seeing this, Michael, around the country. I do think the crisis has hit younger people in a really challenging way, and they've been just yearning to get out and they're used to, you know, a very outward, focused life. And I do think you're seeing around the country, like when the bars and restaurants reopened, you know, first and foremost, it was younger folks going out. I don't know if we can parse exactly parties, protests, whatever, but I do think it's part of the reality of what young people are responding to after a long period of time where they had very, very limited options. But Jay Varma, tell us again if we have any more detail, either from our own research locally or nationally on that.

Senior Advisor Varma: No, nothing more for me to add. I mean, I do think that we're going to continue to learn more as we do these investigations and understand what the connections are. And, for now, that the real, or the highest priority, is to keep strengthening our messaging to people from every background, particularly those who are between 20 and 29, about the importance of wearing face coverings, keeping social distance, avoiding large gatherings. And also, of course, trying to get tested as frequently as possible, especially if you feel like you've had an exposure.

Mayor: And I want to just do one addition to this point for Jay to answer. Dr. Varma, you obviously have studied different outbreaks all around the world. Is there also potentially a problem of younger people feeling somewhat impervious?

Can you hear me? Okay, there you go.

Senior Advisor Varma: Can you hear me now?

Mayor: There you go.

Senior Advisor: Okay. Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, this is actually something that we anticipated would happen, you know, very early on. Before I got to New York, I was actually in Africa working on a continent-wide strategy, and we knew very early on that the disease has much more severity in people who are older, but that the sacrifice would need to be made by everybody in society. So, by definition, we knew it was going to be more challenging for younger people, because they need to sacrifice a lot even though their individual risk of getting severe diseases low. And so, we see that situation, I think, everywhere in the world where there is a certain amount of what we call epidemic fatigue where you're being expected to change your behavior in every aspect of your life. And so, it's one of those challenges that we're just going to continuously have to face in terms of messaging and outreach and being very responsive to the needs of people in all age groups, because this is a sacrifice that we're all going to have to make.

Mayor: Well said. 

Moderator: Next we have Jillian from WBAI.

Question: Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing today?

Question: I'm well, thank you. I have my first question is for both you and Council Member Cornegy, one of the best ways to affect change is through employment and small businesses are the largest employer in New York City, but there's a huge crisis in their closings that predates the virus. Commercial tenants have no rights, especially regarding leases and the only real legislation that could help, one of the most vetted bills in Council history, is the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which the Mayor used to support when he was in the Council. Why is this bill still languishing?

Mayor: Hey, Jillian, just clarifying because different bills have different names over time. I assume you're talking about commercial rent control, right?

Question: No, it's commercial rent arbitration.

Mayor: I'm sorry. Commercial rent arbitration. Okay. So as you remember in the State of the City, I said, we need to once and for all, try to address the legal problem that's existed with commercial rent control because I did support that idea originally and then came to feel after talking to a lot of legal experts who were very sympathetic to small business, that it just wasn't legally tenable under our current laws, and we were trying to figure out a new approach. I need to get up to date on the rent arbitration issue. So I'm – I promise you, I will give you a clear answer on that, but in the meantime, what we're trying to do is help small businesses to get access to everything that's out there. It's not enough, but there still are grants that we've created loans, the federal programs, different philanthropic programs. We're trying to help them with legal services, and this is something that predates COVID – that if a small business is having a conflict with a landlord, we can get them free legal services to protect them through small business services, obviously doing everything we can to stop them from experiencing the fines, and then we're helping specific businesses to get up and running in every way we can obviously, especially what we've done recently, the restaurants, but many others as well, but on the rent arbitration issue, I will come back to on that.

Council Member Cornegy: We introduced several bills in my first term, one was the commercial tenant harassment bill, which like the Mayor mentioned does provide a recourse for commercial tenants, the first in the country. If they're harassed by their, by their landlords and forced to move and it provided also money for legal expenses, and then we also created the Chamber on the Go, which actually takes the city services right to the commercial corridors throughout the city and provides access to capital and technical assistance, and in regards to the bill that you mentioned, I believe that is being reintroduced by another one of my colleagues.

Mayor: Go ahead Jillian.

Question: Okay, well, I'm going to follow up because nothing that you guys have talked about really addresses the lease issue. Capital is great. Legal services are great, but they don't talk leases and small businesses need to plan and they need to be able to plan for more than a year or two ahead. So that's – this bill is the only one that lets them do that, and so if you need to take a look again, but it's been introduced since the eighties. So, you know, I mean we're past the point of crisis now.

Mayor: Yeah. I would also say Jillian and I appreciate the point, and again, I will get you an answer on that, but I want to come back to the underlying reality. We have small businesses going through immense stress right now. I'm very, very worried about the small businesses that may not be able to make it through, and I think that's disproportionately happening in communities of color. At the same time, I have a lot of faith and respect that a lot of small business owners are going to find ways to fight back. There's a lot of resiliency in entrepreneurship. What is the unknown right now, Jillian, is what is the market going to be like as we are coming back? I mean, this recovery is going to take years. I think it's safe to say that the commercial rental dynamics are going to be very different and what I am hoping for, and this is not to say, you know, hope replaces legislation, but I want to make this point. I'm hoping that landlords out there understand that if they're disrespectful to their tenants, if they try and remove their tenants or not give them an opportunity to pay over time or whatever accommodation can be made, I don't think it's likely you're going to get new tenants right away. So, it's just a common sense point. Everyone's going through this crisis together. It's going to take a while to rebound. The best thing is for landlords to show a lot of understanding and respect for the small businesses, help them get through because it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do for the city. But also, I think it's a smart thing to do because if you, if you do not work with a small business, you kick them out. I don't know who's going to replace them right away. So, I hope landlords are thinking both compassionately and pragmatically in that case.

Moderator: Next, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry? How are you doing?

Question: I’m okay. I'd like to ask you a question about the city revenue since the last, since you produced the budget. Do you have any new indicators about how the revenue is doing compared to projections?

Mayor: Where we left it? And I believe it was May 25th or 26th, $9 billion loss between fiscal ‘20 and fiscal ‘21. Henry. I'm very worried that we'll get worse. We tried to do a conservative estimate, but I'm worried that it's going to get worse. I'm also very worried about potential state cuts to our budget. So I do not have an update for you in the coming weeks as we see what happens particularly with the stimulus, you know, we'll be speaking more and more about where things are going, but I think, you know, the $9 billion to begin with is just a staggering figure and a very sobering one. Go ahead.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Suzannah from Crain’s.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask about Phase Four reopening. New York City's currently the only region in the state that's not entered the Phase and come Monday, we're approaching that two-week point that separated phases previously. So I wanted to know when we can expect to enter Phase Four, what are the metrics do we have to meet to do that?

Mayor: Suzannah, Phase Four is being deliberated right now between the city and the state. I want to give you an update tomorrow or worst-case Friday of where we are. This one is a little more complicated for several reasons. First of all, of course, some of Phase Four is already spoken for in that, for example, with the sports teams that are starting up without audiences, that's already been decided by the state. Other pieces of Phase Four have been spoken for to the other way. For example, a number of colleges and universities have already announced that they're not going to do in person classes or activities. So, this one's a little different from the other ones in that a number of pieces have already been determined, but at the same time, there's still a substantial amount of activity that needs to be adjudicated, and I know the state is looking at this the same way we are. We're looking at this national reality of the uptick and looking at very soberly. How many states are going through a horrible uptick right now? And we all agreed on, you know, the concept and phase three of holding back the indoor dining. So we got, decide how we feel about the different pieces of Phase Four, and if we really are ready for Monday or, you know, a different approach or different timelines, so we'll have an update for you in the next 24 to 48 hours. Go ahead.

Question: And when we do enter Phase Four, it seems like it might be a bit more of a piecemeal process. Are there certain industries that you expect to be left out and will those be brought back and sort of a Phase Five?

Mayor: Well, that's exactly the question we're deliberating. You know, these phases I think are thoughtful, but they're not, you know, they weren't handed down on stone tablets, you know, on a mountain top. I mean, they're based on what we're experiencing and we make adjustments as we go along. So, it's perfectly conceivable and the going back to Phase Three, again, the indoor dining, you know, that's on hold until a point that we feel it's acceptable. We have not put a timeline to that. So, we may say for Phase Four, some things are going to float while we figure out what makes sense. But it's going to be specific to each of the pieces. Again, you already see some real decisions having been made about Phase Four practically, either by the state or by the organizations themselves. So, I'm not going to be shocked that we have a kind of split situation. I'm not going to be shocked if we have a defined timeline for delay, or we say, hey, this piece is just going to have to wait until we get further information. But again, we'll come back with something more solid in the next day or two.

Moderator: Last one for today. Next we have Fred from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: How are you doing?

Question: Good, thank you. A quick question about school-based health centers. Of course, they remain closed in New York City like the schools themselves. However, outside the city hundreds of them are open, and I talked to some of your folks yesterday. They said they're working to get them open with all deliberate speed as quickly as possible. I wonder if you could elaborate on what is keeping them from opening up. Obviously, they don't necessarily need to. There are hundreds of them they're sponsored by NYU and Montefiore, and federally qualified health centers. You would need to open all of them clearly, but, but many physicians and many public health leaders are eager to get at least some of them open to catch up on vaccinations, serve other primary care needs in underserved communities.

Mayor: Thank you for the question, Fred and I always liked to be open when I don't have the exact details on something. So I don't know what the current thinking is and how it correlates with the effort to get school open, you know, which is now about eight weeks away. So let me see if Dr. Varma or Deputy Commissioner Kunins has an update on that. Either one of you?

Moderator: Dr. Varma?

Mayor: Dr. Varma, if you're talking, we can't hear you or Dr. Kunins, if you're talking, we can't hear you?

Moderator: Oh, I think Dr. Kunins is jumping in.

Acting Executive Deputy Commissioner of Mental Hygiene Hillary Kunins, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Mr. Mayor – no, no update. We will have to get back to –

Mayor: Okay, Jay, is that the same for you? I'll take that as a yes. Okay, Fred, we owe you an answer back on that later on today.

Moderator: Fred, you have a follow-up?

Question: No, I look forward to hearing from you and your office elaborate on and getting a little past just we're doing it as quickly as possible, but really elaborating on what some of the specific impediments are [inaudible].

Mayor: Yeah, and thank you for the question, and obviously we've wanted to get as many community-based health options strengthened as we go forward, so I appreciate the question. We'll get you an update. Thank you, everybody.

2020-07-16 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, today, we're going to talk in just a moment about what we need to do to keep coming back as a city, and the single biggest piece of that equation is reopening our schools. That's going to have such an impact on the lives of families of 1.1 million school children and it's going to have impact in so many ways – not just the education of those children, the ability for them to keep growing and developing, but also for parents who need to get back to work, for folks who need their livelihood back. There's so much we need to do and we have to do it the right way. And we're going to talk today about ways we can further support families as we come back and as we reopen our schools.

Now, to the point about reopening schools and providing support for our children, our families, our parents. Look, we know, because we have one of the biggest surveys that's ever been conducted in this city – 400,000 people responded – parents from all over the city, every corner of this city, 75 percent said we want schools open and we want our kids to go to school in September. And we've talked about how we'll do it, for now, with a blended learning approach, with a typical child goes two or three days a week to school in the classroom. But so many parents have also said that they can't make it work if they don't get more childcare. We have been working at – since we saw the results of that survey and we obviously knew this was an imperative, we've been trying to find every way to create new childcare and to build it from scratch, honestly, because we're having to create something that didn't exist before on this scale to accommodate a new need and a new reality. We initially said, how much could we do? And we thought maybe we could do 50,000 childcare seats. And then we realized with a blended format, that actually turns into a hundred thousand families that can be served. We're going to use every conceivable space, community centers, libraries, cultural organizations, whatever we can find in communities. We're going to have one approach for early childhood, another approach for K-to-eight. And the goal will be to start by serving 100,000 kids and giving those families, those parents that balance in their life, that relief, that support, but then we aim to go farther. Now, we've got a little under two months until school begins. We've got a lot to do and nothing like this has ever been attempted on this timeframe, but we're going to find a way to do this and hopefully much more.

Here to talk about it is the woman who has led the charge in so many ways. I want to thank her, because in her role, she doesn't get the credit she deserves, and she's a very modest human being, but she's actually been one of the most central figures in our fight against the coronavirus as our Budget Director, keeping this city able to function and pay the bills and make sure services are provided to the people of this city, including food for every New Yorker who needs it and all the additional expenses around the coronavirus. She helped lead the way and expanding our testing capacity and now is helping to lead the way on the expansion of childcare. She used to be a Deputy Commissioner at the Administration for Children's Services, so it's something she knows well. I want to thank her for her extraordinary work and invite to speak our budget director, Director of OMB, Melanie Hartzog.

Can we hear you? Start again, Melanie, and make sure you're un-muted. We don't hear you yet. Technology – there you go.

Director Melanie Hartzog, Office of Management and Budget: Thank you, sir. So, just be very quick about this. Our plan is designed to provide full supervised coverage on a child’s remote days. We're building out a program, as the Mayor mentioned, to serve a 100,000 children, including preschoolers and school-age children – that is kindergarten through eighth grade. First space is critical. We'll be exploring all viable space options to accommodate children and youth, looking at both public and private locations that meet our program's needs. Second, is programming and staffing. We'll be seeking to expand our contracted early childhood portfolio as well as community programs and our afterschool providers that are under contract with the Department for Youth and Community Development. Programs will follow the Department of Health and Mental Health’s guidance, which is based on New York State requirements of 15 children per room. We want to ensure that both staff and children participating are safe and therefore we will provide funding within the programming for PPE. We are framing these remote days, as the Mayor mentioned, as learning labs, partnering with libraries and cultural institutions to provide care and programming. And it will include activities like arts, recreation, tutoring, local field trips, where possible, and, of course, social and emotional supports. And finally, we will have some availability by the start of the school year, we are building it, as a Mayor said, as we're going with capacity increasing on a rolling basis.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much, Melanie. Thank you to you and your whole team for all the hard work you've put in. And this is going to take a lot of creativity and a lot of effort, but, again, right now, we can say that 100,000 kids will benefit, more than we had before, and that's really important, and we're going to keep building on that all the time. So, a lot to do, but we will be incessant about creating opportunities for families so that those who do choose to have their child go back to school will have all the support possible.

With that, I'm going to turn to our indicators. And again, a good day because of your hard work, everyone. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 – today's report, 65. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375 – today's report, 332. And, once again, most importantly, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19 – and, again, emphasizing, this is now based on about 40,000 tests a day and growing – so, we're getting the biggest sample we've ever gotten in the history of New York City in this crisis – threshold, 15 percent – today's report, again, two percent, a very good number. A few words in Spanish –

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're also joined today by OMB Director Melanie Hartzog, and DDC and SCA Commissioner Lorraine Grillo, and also Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. My first question has to do with phase four reopening. You alluded to yesterday being in deliberations with the Governor. It's scheduled to start on Monday, that's four days away. So, what can you tell us about phase four and will it include any indoor spaces, like museums?

Mayor: So, appreciate the question, Andrew. It's so important. The – what I’ll tell you is this, we're still working out the final plans with the State. The State is feeling cautious. The City's feeling cautious. We really want to get this right in light of what we're seeing around the country. I want to emphasize – this is the X-factor now – to see so many other states going in the wrong direction is causing us a lot of care and how we approach this decision. So, we'll have more to say on it as early as later today or tomorrow, but I'll give you what I think makes sense as the basic outline. I think the separation here is between outdoor and indoor. I think the outdoor activities can proceed, do make sense. Of course, we need distancing. Of course, we need face coverings. But when you think about the things that are outdoors that are part of a phase four – obviously, the sports events without audiences, those are already approved. Think about the zoo. Think about the botanical gardens. Think about outdoor film and TV production. The outdoor elements I feel good about and confident about so long as we are clear about the standards and, of course, everything needs oversight and enforcement. The indoor is causing me pause. The indoor should proceed only with tremendous caution and very strict rules. If there's going to be more indoor, it has to be when we are certain it will work and with, you know, really distinct rules about how many people can participate and what precautions. And there can't be a slippery slope there, because, as we've seen, indoor is the challenge and we have to be really tight about it. So, I think there's a substantial elements of phase four that can move ahead. Others, we have to be very careful about and deliberate about.

Moderator: The next is Courtney Gross from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I hope you're doing well.

Mayor: How are you?

Question: I'm good, as good as one can be under the circumstances.

Mayor: Amen.

Question: Two questions. The first, on the childcare – I mean, you say you have 100,000 slots, or preparing for a 100,000 slots, will those 100,000 slots be available by the time school starts and how much space do you actually need? And then I have another topic.

Mayor: Sure. Let me – the answer is yes and the goal is to have it all online. Look, we know we're dealing with the great unknown here, Courtney, but the goal is to have everything ready for September. We'll roll in as much as we can and keep going from that goal on. Both Melanie Hartzog and Lorraine Grillo have been doing extraordinary work. Lorraine has, and everyone at School Construction Authority constantly does miracles in terms of finding space and converting space rapidly. So, this is the dream team. If these two are on the job, I have tremendous confidence it will happen. Melanie, Lorraine, you want to say anything other – anything other about the specifics of what we're doing for September?

President and CEO Lorraine Grillo, School Construction Authority: Sure, happy to. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep.

President Grillo: Okay. Yes, our teams are on the ground dealing with, as you said earlier, sir, not-for-profits libraries, business communities, business groups, individuals. We are everywhere throughout this city and we will find space. And in addition, while I have you on the – I do want to put out the website to anybody who has existing space. It's www.nycsca.org/realestate/sites. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much.

Moderator: The next question is for Yoav from The City.

Question: Okay. I wanted to ask something about that ULURP announcement. Vicki Been has said that one of the key criteria for which projects are going to move forward is an emphasis on economic and racial equality. And I'm just wondering if you can say more about that, is that how you're going to prioritize which projects move forward?

Mayor: Look, as always, the City Planning Commission looks at a number of factors and what's best for the future of New York City. I have long believed that City planning should not just look at abstract planning principles, but practical realities that matter to New Yorkers, like affordable housing and job creation. But yes, of course, everything we're doing in the government right now is about addressing disparity and inequality and using the tools of government in every way possible to help communities that have been, for so long, left out and the bore the brunt of this crisis. So, that will certainly be a factor of what we do, going forward.

Moderator: The next is Abu from BanglaPatrika.

Question: Hello. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Abu. How are you?

Question: Good, thank you so much. I have a quick question. Number one, you know, it's been a long time – the New York City Department of Finance parking [inaudible] or parking [inaudible] we have a lot of tickets. They are not even some – some people they're not even able to pay. What is your solution to them?

Mayor: It's a good question, Abu. And I don't know enough about what's happening right now with parking violations. So, we'll get you an answer later today. Look, obviously, a lot of agencies had to change what they were doing or restrict what they were doing because of the coronavirus. We're trying to bring back as many functions as much as possible while making sure we're fair to folks in the meantime who might've been affected. So, we'll get you an update on that. I don't know the specifics. Go ahead.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. The next is Steve Burns from WCBS 880.

Question: Thanks. Good to be with you, Mr. Mayor. Wanted to first ask about daycare, the announcement here it seems like you're hoping to have most of the capacity available when it's needed by September, but not sure about it yet. So, I wanted to see if there are any plans – what the plans are for a selection process, application process, who may get first dibs – just how that's all going to be decided.

Mayor: Yeah, great question, Steve. I'll start, and then Melanie and Lorraine can add. Look, we are creating this rapidly. It was very important to get a sense of how many parents wanted their kids back, and until we had that, we didn't have enough information to really test demand. We got that information in the last couple of weeks. We now realize there's huge demand. We're building capacity rapidly. It is amazing the creativity you're seeing with the leadership of Melanie Hartzog and Lorraine Grillo, the number of locations they're finding, the way they're thinking about quickly converting those and having those ready. So, I have a lot of faith in our ability to hit that 100,000 mark and then keep going. As to applications, et cetera, that's some stuff we still have to work through, but, again, Lorraine or Melanie, you want to speak to that when we're going to have the next steps in the process?

Director Hartzog: Sure, I can start, and Lorraine can jump in. Just in terms of how we'll actually stand up the capacity through community-based organizations, our goal is, as I mentioned leveraging our existing contracted providers, and so we're, there is outreach happening as we speak today to each of these kind of base organizations asking them if they have additional capacity and if they do, we will amend their contracts quickly to be able to provide that additional capacity, if need be get licensed quickly with our partners at Department of Health and do any outfitting of the space that's necessary, thanks to the leadership of Lorraine. And Lorraine, if you'd like to add a little bit more to that.

Commissioner Grillo: Thank you, Mel. Actually, you've really said it all. We are we all working throughout the city. There is no one specific place we're concentrating on. We're concentrating in all five boroughs. So hopefully we will be able to find adequate space in every single borough.

Mayor: Right, so Steve really broad-based approach, and we want to keep building that capacity. Again, Lorraine's point about – we need anyone who has space that might work for childcare to let us know of their willingness to work with us or Lorraine, what is that email or website they can go to?

Commissioner Grillo: Yes, sir. Can you hear me?

Moderator: Yes.

Commissioner Grillo: Hello?

Mayor: Yes.

Commissioner Grillo: It is: www.nycsca.org/realestate/sites.

Mayor: There you go. So please, to our colleagues in the media, if you could spread that around, because we want to make sure that everyone who wants to help us build up this childcare capacity gets involved quickly, and I think there's a lot of people who have sites, who have property who actually would like the opportunity to do good for the city and obviously bring in some revenue at the same time. Did you have a follow-up, Steve?

Question: Yeah, just real quick. On a second topic, the MTA has said it may run out of emergency funding by the end of the month. I know its funding isn't necessarily your jurisdiction, but is the city working on any contingency plans should the MTA need to institute some cuts? And they said those cuts could be massive on a scale we haven't seen before. Is there anything the city has in mind to mitigate that should it happen?

Mayor: It's a great question, Steve. It is not our jurisdiction. You're right, but we care deeply. I care deeply about what happens with the MTA. It affects all 8.6 million people I represent. This has to be solved with federal stimulus money. There is the hope and prayer to that will happen in the next few weeks. I'm still far from certain about that, but that's the only solution that will really, really work. I've been fighting for it. I am having conversations with federal officials today to try and continue to push the stimulus effort. But I have confidence. The state will do everything it can to come up with the best possible alternatives if the MTA gets into that kind of trouble, but we don't have those resources at this point. So, this is about both the state doing all it can to be creative under the circumstances and us fighting like everything. We got to get something done in Washington for the help we deserve and need.

Okay. Everybody, as we conclude, look, that's why I make a point about the big announcement today in terms of childcare, because it's a big announcement because of the big impact it means for the people of this city, for the lives of everyday people, and I keep bringing things back to the lives of people in every neighborhood, the city, the people I serve, the people whose lives I've really gotten to know, and I know this is the kind of thing that truly matters. Parents who have been struggling for months to somehow find a way to keep their livelihood while educating their children, or God forbid, they've lost their livelihoods, still trying to do the best they can by their children, but worried to death about how they're going to pay the bills. Ah, we've got to do better. We altogether a fought back this disease in an extraordinary manner. We got to keep doing that, but we got to give more ability to parents who need to get back to work that capacity, and the childcare will make all the difference in the world, and here's where the can-do spirit of the city comes in. In the last few weeks, as I said, it became clear, a surprising number of parents wanted their kids back in school and we needed to do something about it. This team here at City Hall immediately said, we will do it. We can do it. You heard from Melanie Hartzog and Lorraine Grillo, they and their teams have had an extraordinary spirit, no sense that there is a barrier, just the ability to get things done. This is a classic New York City attitude. We will make things happen no matter what. So, we're telling you today, this day in July, that there'll be childcare for 100,000 kids, and we aim to go farther. That families will get that childcare regardless of ability to pay, and that we will make sure that every parent who needs help, that we're going to constantly look for every option to help them, because in New York City, we don't stop. We keep creating, we keep fighting back this crisis. Thank you everybody.

2020-07-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Let me note upfront, this city continues to fight the battle against the coronavirus and fights it well. All of you have a lot to be proud of. In a few minutes I'll talk about phase four and the specifics of how we're going to approach it. But the good news is we are on track for Monday, for phase four, with some specific approaches and modifications. 

This is good news. We are moving forward with phase four on Monday. Now the State of New York is finishing some work today into this afternoon on the specifics, and they'll have a formal announcement later on, but I can give you the broad outlines now of what we've talked about with the State and where we agree that we can move forward safely. And it's all about safety. We want to bring people back to work. We want people to get their livelihoods back. We want to bring our city back, but safety and health first always. So, phase four, let's focus first on outdoors. And, again, outdoors has proven to be the area where we're seeing a lot of things work successfully. So, we're going to restart the low risk outdoor arts and entertainment activities. This means things like botanical gardens and zoos, for example. They can reopen, but at reduced capacity, 33 percent capacity. Production of movies, TV shows, that can proceed. The, obviously, something that matters to a lot of us – sports coming back but, again, without audiences. This is something that's been announced previously, but to emphasize that is part of phase four as well, that sports comes back. We'll get to watch it on television. I think it's going to be a great relief to a lot of us, and then particularly to all the baseball fans out there, and I'm one of them, we are so happy to see baseball coming back next week.

Now, outdoors looks very good. Indoors is where we have concerns. Some indoor activities can exist with the proper restrictions, but there's going to be care when it comes to indoors. Each and every situation is going to be looked at very carefully, very individually. So, some will not resume in phase four, certainly not right away. And that continues to be, first of all, indoor dining. That could have started earlier. We've said that's not happening. That continues to not happen. That is very high risk. And we've seen that around the country. Museums, not yet. Malls, not yet. Still closed for now. We've got to strike a balance and we've got time to look at the evidence, watch what's happening around the country, watch what's happening here in this city, and make further decisions on some of these pieces and we'll do that very carefully with the State of New York. But, look, if you just think back four months ago and think about how horrible the situation was, what we were fighting through, the pain that New Yorkers are going through. And then you think about the day when the four phases were announced and it was made clear that they could move in this kind of progression every two weeks. The fact that we are here is because of the hard work of all of you. And now that we've gotten this far, I'll say it now, and I'll say it many other times, let's hang on to it, let's stay focused, let's stay disciplined. We've got to keep bringing this city back, but that's going to take all of us playing our part.

Now, phase four, again means more and more people going back to work. And it is a reminder of the power of opening up the parts of our economy that we can do safely. And that brings me to something that's clearly been a real success, which is what we've seen with our restaurants. Incredible, incredible response to the Open Restaurants program. Now, 8,600 restaurants participating and that means a lot more jobs have come back. That means a lot of people are enjoying these restaurants and it's giving us hope and it's giving people energy to see this crucial part of New York City back. And look at that beautiful scene in Little Italy. That just gives you a lot of hope. So, the Open Streets element of this is also crucial. I'm going to talk about those pieces coming together, but let me make, first, an announcement on the Open Restaurants program, which has been such a great success – the sidewalks, the curbs. The Open Restaurants program has worked, it has brought back jobs, it has been safe, and therefore we will extend this initiative. The restaurants will be able to use the sidewalks. They'll be able to use the curbs through September, through October. We're extending this to October 31st.

Now we're also going to do more with the Open Streets and combining the Open Streets and the Open Restaurants for the good of everyone. So, today we're announcing 40 more blocks of Open Streets that will have dining Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. You're going to see that also in Chinatown, Manhattan, which has been an area that was so hard hit by this virus very early on. So, we're thrilled to see this'll be a big boost to Chinatown, but 40 blocks all over the city. And this will be starting immediately beginning this weekend. So, I know the weather won't entirely cooperate, but when the weather's good, I think a lot of New Yorkers will be out enjoying this wonderful opportunity, but again, do it the right way, do it the right way. Follow the rules, keep the distance as needed, wear those face coverings, help us keep moving forward.

A couple of things to conclude – one, a topic I come back to often, Alternate Side Parking. So, we've had Alternate Side Parking off for much of the time of this crisis. We do need to bring it back when it's important to clean up some more. So, we're going to bring it back for next week and I want to emphasize because there's been some confusion and we're really going to work hard to get this right for people – for folks that have Alternate Side Parking – so it will be on next week, if you typically just move your car once a week on your side of the street, then just do as you would normally would do Alternate Side Parking. If you're on one of those streets with multiple times a week and you see the image on your screen, if you're on the street with multiple times a week, we're trying to move off that going forward. In that instance, just move it on the last day indicated on the sign on your side of the street. Remember your side of the street is what matters and the sign on your side of the street. So, as you see on the visual, ignore the first day, go to the last day, and that's the one time we need you to move your car during the week when Alternate Side is in effect. And we're going to do a lot more to explain that to the people of the city and particularly folks on those blocks going forward.

Okay, let's do our indicators. First, number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold of 200. Today's report, 75 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375. Today's report, 314 patients. And people tested citywide, number three, tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold is 15 percent. Once again, today, two percent – a very good number, really striking consistency. And that is a credit to all of you. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

Yes, Commissioner, baseball sounds the same in Spanish.

[Laughter]

Commissioner Shea: [Inaudible]

Mayor: That's right. You can say that. Everybody, we will now turn to questions from our colleagues in the media, and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Just a reminder that we have with us today, Police Commissioner Shea, Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg, Small Business Commissioner Doris, and Senior Advisor, Dr. Varma. With that, I'll start with Marcia from CBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor, my question has to do with your restaurant program, your Open Streets and Open Restaurants program. I know you're expanding it, but we've been getting complaints from a number of restaurant owners who say they've been getting hit with compliance notifications, threats of fines or penalties, and they're not getting enough direction from DOT on how to fix the issues. Is there anything you can do to provide better guidance and anything you can do to help these restaurants who desperately need to stay open?

Mayor: Absolutely. Marcia. Look, I've talked to a lot of restaurant owners. I understand their concerns and we're acting on it right now. We don't want to find anyone in the restaurant community, any small business – we don't want to ever see a restaurant that gets into this program not succeed. We want to help them succeed. So, Marcia, what happened is – look, the original guidance, which was done really with a sense of urgency. And you remember, we did something very unusual. We let people self-certify, it took like five minutes to do the form and you were up and running. The fact is we learned some things in the process about areas where we had to do a little bit better on safety. And we came back and said, hey, guys, we have to tighten up these pieces. And we're working with those restaurants to do it. It's not contentious, it's cooperative. But the message I've sent to DOT and all our agencies is, help restaurants get to a positive solution. Now, if a restaurant bluntly refuses, which I don't think is the case hardly ever, that's a different matter. But what I've heard is, restaurant owners want to get it right. The agencies want to get it right, they're communicating more and more, and that we're going to resolve things. So, any restaurant owner that is having a problem that you don't feel you're getting the right cooperation, please call 3-1-1. We'll connect you with Department of Transportation, Small Business Services, the folks who can work with you to resolve the problem, because we want to get these problems fixed.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you today?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How are you doing?

Question: Okay. I wanted to ask you about the Governor's order that people can't go up to a bar – an open-air bar and just get a drink without dining. A lot of the science says that actually eating spreads the virus more readily than drinking. I don't want to start a fight between you and the Governor, but when you're opening these restaurants and you want to increase the action, will this hinder the growth of these jobs?

Mayor: Look, Henry, first of all, I respect the State's decisions in the middle of this crisis. And in terms of what impact it might have on jobs, I think it's important that we hear from the restaurant community on that. Obviously, that is a concern. But what I want to emphasize is, overwhelmingly, restaurants and bars in New York City have been in compliance. We've been out there constantly with a variety of agencies, particularly the Sheriff's Office that's done great work here, and constantly documented the levels of compliance, which are very, very high. Sometimes things have to be corrected, but people tend to follow the instructions quickly, whether it's customers or the restaurant and bar owners. So, we have not seen a really profound problem with compliance here. There's always some images that raise concerns, but if you really look at the facts and the details it's quite clear that people in New York City take this virus very, very seriously and the people who own the businesses do too. And there's a good article in Politico today that goes into some of those details about the fact that New Yorkers really have stayed in compliance. So, look, I respect the State's decisions, but I want make really clear how much I appreciate that people have done the hard work on the ground to open these businesses and try and make them work the right way.

Moderator: Henry, do you have a –

Question: I do have another question and it's a completely separate topic. I'm wondering why the concept of the commuter tax has completely disappeared from your discourse in anyone else's discourse when the City is facing a fiscal crisis?

Mayor: It's a very fair question, Henry. Look, the commuter tax was there for a long time. It was fair. It was really about asking people came in and use the services of this city to help contribute to them. But I also understand the really challenging politics in Albany. I think the huge mistake was ever letting it go away. It's a very hard thing to get back, but what I think is gaining traction as an alternative to address the State and City fiscal crisis – like deep, deep crises that can only be compared to the 1970s – is the idea of taxes on the wealthy. I mean, wealthy people are doing very, very well despite this crisis where working people are suffering on an unprecedented manner. You have to go back generations to find a time where so many working people were unemployed and suffering so deeply. So, I think it is the right time to ask more of those among us who have done very, very well.

Moderator: Last one for today. We have Henry from PIX 11.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor I'm want to shift gears with this last question of ongoing conversation about schools. We've been speaking with a number of teachers' worry. They don't have enough of a seat at the table. We know you've been speaking with the union, but teachers are worried they're not – their voices aren't being heard quite enough. Are you concerned about you're going to see a strike in the extreme, but at least one where a lot of educators are saying, listen, I'm not going to do anything but online – your in-person plans be damned. Are you concerned about that?

Mayor: First of all, it's a great question, Henry. I appreciate it because we want people to have confidence. We want teachers, educators, staff, parents, kids, everyone to know that the focus is on bringing back schools in a healthy, safe manner. We've got two months to show people over and over again, how that's going to be done, and it's going to be done based on the data, and if at any point the data tells us we need to change direction. We will, but we've been working incessantly with the two main unions of educators and the union to represent staff. But we welcome more and more educators into that discussion. I'll have that conversation with the chancellor. We certainly want to hear the voices of grassroots educators their concerns, answer their concerns, or if they're raising new things we need to address. We want that.

Some folks are concerned because they have preexisting medical conditions. Those folks will get an exemption obviously. We know there'll be a certain number of our educators who will not be able for health reasons to be in school, and those educators will be devoted to our remote learning. But Henry, there's a lot of educators who want to come back deeply. I've talked to a lot of them. I've been out in communities. A lot of teachers will come up to me and say that they are a teacher and they want to talk to me about it, and I constantly say, do you want to go back or not? And I have not met a teacher yet who doesn't want to go back because they're devoted to the kids and they know the kids just can't get as good an education remotely. But yes, we want to hear those voices and we want to really be respectful of their concerns, and I think, I think you're going to see the vast majority who are healthy will want to be at their posts because they want to help our kids move forward. Go ahead, Henry.

Question: Drilling down into kind of a tangential issue to one that you mentioned, I know you figured out the medical exemption form this week. I've seen how teachers can go online and fill that out. What sort of processes are being discussed for educators that aren't vulnerable themselves, but have a vulnerable person in their home, such as an infant child or a diabetic spouse, or what sort of work-arounds are you doing for those tangential people in educators' lives?

Mayor: We want to know in those cases, the specifics and want to be respectful, but it's all case by case. But look, everyone's devoted to health and safety. It was painful to shut down the schools. But I said at the time when we did it that I didn't think we'd be able to come back this last school year. I was very adamant as we went along, it was not the right time to do it. Now because the City of New York has been so successful in fighting back this disease, I'm hopeful that in two months, you know, with a lot of hard work and a constant obsession with health and safety, we will be ready, but any individual who's got a specific problem they need to bring it to the attention of their supervisors at DOE, and we want to look at that because we want to make sure they and their families are healthy.

We also have an obligation and remember, Henry, we're dealing with something very unusual here. Rarely in life do you get to hear the voices of so many everyday people? You know, we had 400,000 parents who responded to our survey and 75 percent overwhelming majority said, we want our kids back in school, and I work for those parents. I worked for them. I have to respect their needs and concerns, and their kids need an education, and no one is pretending that remote learning is as good as what happens in the classroom. So, we're going to work really hard to get this right. But anyone who has an exceptional situation, we really want to hear that and we want to work with them.

Well, everyone, as we close, let's just talk about this day as we get ready for Monday. So Monday, Phase Four, what a striking reality, after everything we went through again in March and April, all the pain, all the challenges, all the loss, the fact that we are now looking at the fourth Phase, of four and it will start on time, and yes, there are some pieces that won't be ready. But the fact that there are also pieces that will move forward is a testament to what all of you have done, and, and a lot of times, you know, I talked to people from around the country, a lot of them are going through really hell right now, and they ask what was different here? Why were you able to come back? And I always say, it's because of the people, it's because of New Yorkers is because of your strength and your resiliency, it's because of your commitment. You know, a lot of people thought that how could this place, this crowded, energetic place possibly do shelter-in-place or social distancing or face coverings? Well, you proved to the world, it could be done the right way, and that's why we are now on the verge of Phase Four. So, any time anyone suggested doubt, I always say to anyone who has a lot of doubt about this place, you obviously don't know New Yorkers. You obviously don't know the power and the passion of New Yorkers, and you don't know what New Yorkers are capable about if you doubt – capable of, if you doubt New York City. If you really know New Yorkers, then you have faith in this place and our future, and I want to thank everyone for your hard work and let's go on now to Phase Four.

Thanks, everybody.

2020-07-20 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. We've got a lot to talk about today. First day of phase four, and obviously a very hot day. We're going to talk about the heat advisory. 
W
e should talk obviously about the momentous nature of this day. And I got to tell you, I think a lot of us would have said that it would have been a really, really big challenge, maybe an unlikely possibility that New York City and its comeback from the coronavirus, having been the epicenter of the crisis in the very beginning, that we would get to phase one, phase two, phase three and now phase four exactly on schedule. And we have. And again, credit to all of you, the heroic efforts of New Yorkers fighting back this disease, have made this possible.

So, phase four begins today. A lot of wonderful things. We see sports coming back, baseball back this week, professional baseball, Major League Baseball. That's going to be incredible. Media production starting again, a big part of the life of the city, a big part of people's livelihoods. Some wonderful outdoor activities opening up again, botanical gardens, zoos at more limited capacity, but they will be open and that's going to be great. So many things are moving forward, heavy emphasis on outdoors, but when it comes to certain indoor activities, that's what we keep holding back. So, we're holding back indoor dining, museums, malls, things that we're still not certain can be done right. And a reminder that even though we think there's a lot of evidence of a huge difference between outdoor and indoor and outdoor always being better. And that's why we extended the outdoor dining all the way to October 31st. Let's take maximum advantage of that. It's an amazing thing. But outdoors doesn't mean that people should forget all of the tough lessons that we've learned. And overwhelmingly let's be fair, overwhelmingly around the city, folks who own restaurants, bars, and their customers have been responsible, have been smart, have remembered to follow the rules, but not everywhere.

We saw some real troubling overcrowding in Astoria this weekend, we will not tolerate it. Let's really clear. It's not widespread, but where we find it has to be stopped. There's one restaurant in Astoria that was a focal point for this overcrowding. They've been shut down. And no one wants to shut down bars or restaurants. But if they do not cooperate in our efforts to contain the coronavirus, they will be shut down. We don't want to give out summonses. Everyone's hurting right now, financially, economically. But if we have to, we'll give out summonses. So, there'll be heavier enforcement efforts by the Sheriff's Office and when needed, by the NYPD as well, around bars and restaurants. I want it to be very, very clear when we agreed to let this part of our life come back, it was not meant to be business as usual. It was meant to be with the understanding we all gained the hard way, of why we need social distancing, why we need face coverings, why we need to understand some limits to stop this disease and to never let it come back. So, you'll see, as I said, a very aggressive effort to enforce. And look, I think it's as clear as this – we don't want to shut down restaurants. We don't want to shut down bars, but if we have to shut down a few of those, it is a hell of a lot better than seeing the coronavirus start to surge again in this city.

And we know in other places it was a reckless disregard in the way that bars and restaurants were handled. That was one of the causes of a resurgence of the coronavirus. We will not let that happen here. So, everyone, remember, we've got to keep to those rules, keep educating everyone around you. Face coverings, social distancing work. Now that's the importance of doing that, including when you're outdoors.

And while we're talking about outdoors, let's talk about this very hot week we're going into. And particularly today, today is a day to be very concerned about the heat index could reach 100 today. So everyone remember as we get into these very hot temperatures, take it seriously. Do not minimize the challenge. Stay hydrated, stay cool. When you can stay in air conditioning, check on your neighbors. If you know there's a neighbor who might be a little more vulnerable, a senior or someone with a health condition that might make them more vulnerable, check in on them, make sure they have enough water or anything they need. Now there's going to cooling centers, open all over the city. They'll be smart in the terms, the way they run them. There'll be social distancing, face coverings within the cooling centers, but they'll be available to anyone who needs them for free. And you'll see on your screen, a variety of efforts, outdoors and indoors in our parks and all around to keep people cool. Anyone who needs to know about that? You can call 3-1-1 for locations near you, or go to nyc.gov/beattheheat, get all the information you need.

Okay. I'm about to turn to our daily indicators, but before I do, we have an important milestone in our city's recent history that I want to note. And it's a good one. There is good news, no matter what challenges we face, New Yorkers, keep creating good news. And here's one about Citi Bike. This is quite amazing, just in the last week, a hundred millionth Citi Bike trip in New York City, a hundred million trips on a Citi Bike, all about making sure people can get around, can get around in a way that is friendly to the environment, no emissions, no pollution. This is a fantastic development and also the 1,000 Citi Bike station installed. So, Citi Bike being expanded. This has been proven to be a really good thing in the midst of this pandemic. It has been a great option for a lot of New Yorkers who wanted a different way to get around. And we're going to keep expanding in the Bronx, in Upper Manhattan, folks at Department of Transportation are working every day to make sure there's more and better options. And they are safe options.

Now as do our indicators. Number one daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200, today's report, 74 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375, today's report 311. And number three, percentage of the people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold of 15 percent, today's report once again, two percent. So a very good day. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

With that we will turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all just a reminder that we have with us today Deputy Mayor Been, Commissioner Criswell, Sheriff Fucito, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. With that, we'll start with Andrew from NBC.

Question: Always nice to be in the lead offs, but I just try to get on base here. Hope everybody is feeling okay. Mayor, my first question has to do with schools. Israel has readjusted its policies for fall reopening where students in kindergarten to fourth grade will return full time, five days a week. And that's based on medical evidence that children under ten, very, very rarely spread the virus. I'm wondering, is New York considering a similar plan for the DOE to fully reopen from kindergarten through fourth grade and go to the blended learning for the higher grades. And if not, why not?

Mayor: Andrew, great question. You excel in the lead-off spot. Since it's baseball week, we can keep these analogies going all day. So, I would say we will look at any and all options, but, one, we're very careful and cautious here. We’re the place that was the epicenter. Thank God we've made a lot of progress. We're not going to let it slip away. There's a lot of people in Israel, in a small country, but nowhere near the kind of density we're talking about here. So, I think our approach would be particularly cautious. We also have just the space realities in schools to think about. So, although I've seen those reports and I know our health leadership has seen those reports, I would say, that's not on the front burner right now. We're going to see how things go and see how we evolve over time. But right now, the blended learning approach that we've described is plan-a.

Question: My second question has to do with mask usage. The MTA today is stepping up a program to distribute masks and encourage masks on trains and buses. Their latest numbers show 90 percent compliance on subways, which may sound high. But if you have 200 people on a train, that's 20 people not wearing a mask. I'm wondering what you think of that number and whether you think even stronger measures need to be taken, not only in transit, but in stores and all across the city to enforce mask usage.

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew, what we're finding is the best measures are the free masks constantly distributed, the constant reminders, the educational efforts including the in-person education efforts, you know, the messages spread out in a variety of ways. That's where I would stay now because I think that's what is getting people overwhelmingly to comply, but we just need to do more of it and better. But again, we're going to watch every step along the way. And if we need to do something more aggressive, that's always an option.

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: I'm thinking of schools you know, particularly in districts that are incredibly overcrowded already. Is there a plan to perhaps find outside siting for school, whether it's libraries, large unused spaces, trailers, which I know are very controversial? So, if there is the plan, what would that plan be?

Mayor: Yes, Katie, that's exactly what Lorraine Grillo and folks at School Construction Authority are looking at right now. Where there is additional space that could work for a school, that's going to be the first priority. Obviously, a lot of space is being found for childcare as well as we announced last week. For a space to work for a school, obviously, it has to be pretty nearby and it has to be available quickly, etcetera. But, yes, absolutely. That is what's being done right now. Trailers – may be some, but as you said, never a preference.

Moderator: Next, we have Maya from Patch.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Maya, are you a baseball fan?

Question: I am a Yankees and a Mets fan. I have to play both sides.

[Laughter]

Mayor: The most controversial statement we're going to hear during this press conference. You are a rarity.

Question: [Inaudible] in Queens, I'm from New York City. I've got to support both of them.

Mayor: Alright, I admire that.

Question: My question is about the scenes that we saw in Astoria this weekend. I know that you promised an enforcement blitz. People were sent out from the Sheriff's Office and [inaudible] there, but a City Council Member Constantinides and residents of Astoria have been raising this issue to the City for weeks now and say that if the City had acted sooner, that potentially we wouldn't have seen the scenes that we saw from this past week and this past weekend, and that Steinway is not an isolated thoroughfare for all of this. So, my question to you is why did you take so long to act when you were being notified by officials and 3-1-1 complaints about this issue for weeks?

Mayor: Yeah, Maya, I don't know all the details of the specific information that flowed to the Sheriff's Office or any of our other agencies, but I can tell you this much. I know there's been a lot of presence out there in recent weekends. I know, overwhelmingly, we found compliance around the city. This particular problem in Astoria obviously has grown and it particularly occurred very late at night and I think that's part of what was under-recognized. I'll be the first to say that. I think there was activity earlier in the evenings, but did not recognize that it was so late at night when some of these problems were occurring. But, again, one restaurant has been shut down. If others have to be, and we don't want to, but if others have to be, we will. And we're going to have a lot of presence out there and that's always going to be a solution and people have to get clear that this is dangerous if they don't do it right. So, you know, we've given lots of warnings. Now, if we have to do fines, if we have to do shutdowns, we will.

Question: Follow up on that specifically. What would be your response to City Council Member Constantinides and the people who have been raising these issues of late-night parties for weeks?

Mayor: Again, Maya, I don't know the specifics of what they raised, to who. I have a lot of respect for him. I just don't know the specifics so I can't speak to it, but anytime that any community members or elected officials raise something, our enforcement agencies are supposed to get out there and do it. And if they miss something, then they got to do better quickly.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering if there's a target date for decision on when indoor activities, specifically malls, can reopen? I'm wondering what the specific criteria you're looking at to determine when malls can reopen and whether you think a decision on the reopening of malls will be made at the same time as indoor dining and museums all at once or separately? Maybe Dr. Varma could comment on the criteria aspect of the question, and I have a second question.

Mayor: Yeah. Sydney, I'm going to accept that, but, I just want to caution, that was many questions in one question. So, please, let's be tighter about that. Look, I think the answer is simply this, indoor activities, by and large, we do not have a set timeline, because there's so much concern about certain types of indoor activities. And, right now, we're all about keeping New York City safe and being smart and being cautious about it. So, from everything I've ever heard from the State, and certainly our own deliberations, we do not have a “deadline” by which we're looking to make a decision on indoor dining or malls. We certainly will continue to look at what would make them more safe when the moment came, but no specific timeline we're working from. We want to keep watching the overall situation in the country and the overall situation in the city and how all these other things interact, including most obviously when people start to come back more in September to school and work. Dr. Varma, do you want to add?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: I concur entirely with what the Mayor said, and I would just emphasize that we understand completely this is presents an incredible challenge for the businesses throughout the city, but we've seen what has happened in many other places around the world, particularly places that have done an exceptional job at controlling this epidemic have had to repeatedly open and close indoor bars, restaurants, other shopping facilities because of resurgences. So, I think the approach that the Mayor has laid out about being as cautious as possible, while we recognize it doesn't provide this certainty that people need, I think it does provide us with the important understanding that we need to be very cautious because of the experience seen throughout the world.

Mayor: Go ahead, Sydney.

Question: And I'm wondering how parents will be able to enroll their kids in the free childcare in the fall you announced last week. Will it be through a lottery system? Or – and will there be a certain number of slots per borough?

Mayor: Yeah. There's definitely going to be a spread all over the five boroughs. We're working out the specific criteria for people to sign up. We'll have a lot more to say on that shortly. And again, Sydney, we start with 100,000 seats for our young people, we want to expand that. So, that's an initial allotment, but we hope to do more as we go along, but detail's coming soon.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Nolan from the Post.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Nolan. How you doing?

Question: I'm all right. How are you?

Mayor: Never a dull moment, Nolan.

Question: If I could just follow up on one of the questions about the enforcement action in Astoria, why has it taken City Hall so long to lower the boon on businesses that have been repeatedly in violation of social distancing [inaudible]?

Mayor: Nolan, look, again, I think I've said it a bunch of times, I'll say it one more – our goal is not to shut down businesses that are struggling to survive in the middle of a pandemic, and our goal is not to put people out of work who need a job, but we must obviously focus on health and safety. So, we've tried to use education and we've tried to use warnings and overwhelmingly that has worked – been a few places where it hasn't. Enough warnings, enough education has happened, now it's time to take more aggressive action. But it wasn't our preference given everything it would mean to the people involved.

Moderator: Last one for today. Next we have Seth from City Journal.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Seth. How you doing?

Question: I'm fine. I'm here batting ninth, you know –

[Laughter]

Mayor: There you go. I'm glad you brought it together, but, Seth, just because you're batting ninth, doesn't mean you can't have a great question.

Question: No, no. I hope you've cut the infield shift. Yeah. The other day there was a march heading up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square Park – like a defund-the-police march. And it wasn't that many people, but, you know, nevertheless, they were allowed to block traffic and, you know, the police said, well, they've been told not to bother any protesters. Now, we’re going on like seven, eight weeks of this. And I know you've said, well, this is an emergency, and this is – there’s just of such total import that, you know, the protests have to be allowed to continue, but it's not really a mass movement. It's like a few people being allowed to block the streets. So, at what point is this just become you picking winners?

Mayor: Respectfully, I don't make the decisions about how each protest is handled, the NYPD does that. The NYPD, long before I came along, had a very developed approach to determining when a protest was of the size or the type that they should be given the street to march on, or stay on the sidewalk, or whatever it is. These are longstanding approaches. So, the local commander makes the decision in each case. I didn't even know about that one you're referring to. I think that's a classic example of the local commander on the scene decides what they think is safe and what they think makes sense overall. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. And then to follow up, I mean, for years now, you've said that if there's any encampment in the city, you will shut it down – any homeless encampment of any sort – tents – and that this represents a departure from past practice. But, you know, I guess this relates to my other question, there is an encampment next to City Hall Park, but you're permitting it to stay up even though, you know, the bulk of the protests wound down weeks ago. Isn't this a contradiction?

Mayor: It's a great question, Seth. And no, it's a different reality. So, let's go over the history. I think it's something New Yorkers don't know, so I'm glad you raised it. For the 20 years before I got to this office, encampments were tolerated in this city. Unfortunately, there are places where people, you know, for weeks, months on end would turn them into permanent dwelling places all over the city, and they weren't safe, and it didn't make sense. So, we stopped that practice all over the city and we will continue to. Here we have a complex situation, because it is interconnected to the right to protest. We're balancing the facts – you know, the factors, I should say – we're balancing the right to protest with the safety considerations. That's looked at every single day and the NYPD will ultimately decide what it thinks makes sense in that location, in terms of balancing, again, people's rights and safety. And we'll evaluate that and make a decision based on the facts on the ground.

So, everyone, as we conclude, want to go back to – we had a bunch of different topics today, but I want to go back to the heat, because I don't want anyone to underestimate it. So, again, today could be up as high as 100 degrees. Please, everyone take this seriously. Look out for your family. Look out for your neighbors. Remember, if you need information, call 3-1-1, or go to nyc.gov/beattheheat. But we want to make sure that everyone is safe today. The cooling centers are there, the spray apparatuses in the parks, all sorts of great things. This is a day to be safe and it's also a day to appreciate that everyone together got us to phase four – sure didn't look like that would be the case a few months ago, but everyone has done this. It's a day to appreciate your fellow New Yorker and all the hard work and keep going so we can beat back this disease once and for all. Thank you, everyone.

2020-07-21 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning everybody. You know this city has fought so valiantly against the coronavirus. And here we are now in phase four, a real important step for the city, that we've gotten this far, this fast. And yet so many New Yorkers are struggling and this disease has had so many painful, powerful, negative impacts on the people of this city. And we have to keep focused on the folks who still need food, the folks who still need to make sure that they can keep their home. There's so much to do as we fight our way back, as we restart this city. So we're going to talk about a couple of the key things we're doing to make sure that people get what they need as we fight our way through this crisis.

Now, when it comes to the things we have to do to help New Yorkers through this crisis, you know, when I talk to people all over the city, one of the deepest concerns of course, is people worry that they won't be able to keep their home, that they won't have a roof over their head for their family. That there's so many people who now don't have any money to pay the rent because their jobs are long gone. And they don't know when they're going to come back. And they're worried about being evicted. We are about to go over a cliff here in this city, in terms of people potentially losing their housing and we have to stop it. We need help from the federal government. We need rental assistance money for the people of this city and people all over the country who are facing this challenge. We need the State of New York to pass the laws that will give people the ability to pay the rent when they finally have an income. But make sure no one is evicted simply because they can't pay the rent. We have so many things we have to do, and we're looking for every possible innovation.

So one important new approach comes out of our Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity, leaders of color here in our City government who are coming up with new ideas all the time for addressing the challenges that we are facing with the coronavirus. Particularly the challenges of disparity that we've seen with this horrible disease. And all the impact is having on the neighborhoods of this city. So one very powerful approach, which we're going to now go deeper into, is the Landlord Tenant Mediation Project. And the idea is to try and resolve problems outside of the court system, find a way to keep people in their homes in a better way. And here to tell you about it, Commissioner who has done so much to make sure that New Yorkers have affordable housing and is fighting through this crisis to keep them in their housing, Commissioner for Housing Preservation and Development, Louise Carroll.

Commissioner Louise Carroll, Department of Housing Preservation and Development: Hello everyone. I want to thank Mayor de Blasio for his partnership in bringing this program to life. I also want to thank the First Lady and Deputy Mayors Thompson and Perea-Henze, for their leadership of the Racial Inclusion and Equity Task Force. Too many families wake up and ask themselves if they can afford this month's rent. While some families can pay July's rent, others are concerned about how they're going to afford it. And what will happen to them if they can't pay? There are others who are already behind in their rent and they live in constant fear of losing their homes. As members of the Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity, we are continuously working through ways that the City can use pandemic resilience to address long standing racial disparities in our neighborhoods. COVID-19 created a level of uncertainty about the future in all of us, but especially for people of color who are more likely to be seriously ill, more likely to work in vulnerable occupations and more likely to suffer loss of income or to lose their jobs entirely.

To date over 2 million New Yorkers have filed for unemployment benefits. But as the extra $600 a week boost from the federal government expires at the end of the month, and the eviction moratorium, and mortgage foreclosure ends, many will have difficulty making ends meet and many will face the threat of being taken to court or possibly evicted. The consequences of eviction can be devastating for families and the lessen in the tenant’s ability to get future housing. We don't want that as a city. Also at the time when many people are staying home for public health reasons, stable housing, good housing is crucial. Today, we're helping families find a little peace of mind about what's ahead. For New Yorkers hit hard by the pandemic this citywide Landlord Tenant Mediation Project will be a valuable resource. It will help tenants solve issues with their landlords without the threat of eviction and without going to housing court. Through this project, the City will partner with community dispute resolution centers in all of the five boroughs to offer free assistance to tenants, struggling to pay rent as a result of COVID-19 pandemic. This recognizes that business as usual is not enough. We don't want to put residents through the trauma of the eviction process just to get help.

The Landlord Tenant Mediation Project will be just one more tool of the many tools that our tenant portal provides. And it will prioritize the 27 neighborhoods that we've identified as the hardest hit by the coronavirus. As we enter this new stage of recovery, we are determined to be better than before. We cannot do it alone. More than ever. We need the federal government's help to spur our economy and to give tenants the rental subsidies that they need and that they deserve so that they can come through this crisis intact. In the meantime, we're going to continue to do everything that we can to help New Yorkers stay housed. My agency has been charged with working on the Mayor's affordable housing plan, and we're way past the halfway mark of providing 300,000 units of housing for New York City residents. But by making this a fairer and more equitable city, we can only move from the stronger. And for this reason we're prioritizing the most vulnerable. And giving them the help and the tools they need to negotiate their rent with their landlords and to stay stably housed.

Mayor: Thank you very much Commissioner. And Commissioner, thanks to you, to everyone on the task force. I want to thank as well, Sideya Sherman, who's the Executive Director of the task force and is with us remotely today. This work will continue to deepen because we have to find ways to keep people in their homes. And as I said, this crisis is causing stress on people in so many ways. Another thing we're seeing as people have lost their incomes, it's become harder and harder for people to afford the basics, including food. Think about it. This extraordinary city that as recently as February, was in as top economic state as it had ever been in our history, now we have over two million people who are experiencing food insecurity and need help. It's shocking to see, it's painful, but New York City has really rallied to the defense of our fellow New Yorkers who need food. And I want to thank all the community soup kitchens, food pantries, all the restaurants who have participated, everyone who's been part of the Get Food NYC program. An amazing effort and all the City agencies that have come together in common cause to make sure that whoever needed food, got it anywhere in New York City for free. That has been our commitment from the beginning of this crisis.

Now we've reached a milestone and it's one that should make us simultaneously proud as New Yorkers that we stepped up for our fellow New Yorkers, but also sad because so many people have needed so much help. We've now reached a point where we've distributed 100 million meals for free to New Yorkers in need. So that gives you a sense of just how big the challenge has been. Now we are going to continue this initiative for as long as we need to because New Yorkers can never, ever have to wonder where their next meal is coming from. That's not acceptable given the values of this city, the sense of fairness and compassion. We're going to be there for whoever needs food, always. But again, as the Commissioner said, we need help. And as the Congress is gathering in Washington to discuss the stimulus, here's another example -- provide stimulus funding so cities and states can provide food aid to people who need it. Make sure that all of the different ways that we get food to folks in need are funded fully, can't have any New Yorker, any American go without food in the midst of this crisis.

Now let me turn to one more topic before we do our daily health indicators. And I want to come back to a topic, we talked a lot about in recent weeks for very good reason. And that's our young people and all our young people have been through in this crisis and the fact that we have to be there for them and give them new and better options as we move forward. Look, we want our young people to have positive options, to have places to go that are safe and nurturing and get them on the right path, and get them away from a lot of challenges that they face. So what that means is more community centers, more recreation centers, more positive places for young people. And that's particularly true for kids and families who live in public housing.

So, we're announcing today a $22 million investment in creating community centers, reviving and renovating community centers in key locations around the city. And this will include at the Monroe Houses in the Bronx; Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn; Wagner in Manhattan. This is money that was in the NYPD’s budget, now has been shifted to these youth-focused programs. We're also using additional funding through to the Department of Youth and Community Development to expand services at Ocean Bay in Queens to make sure there's more available for our young people. So, all over the city, we are committed to doing what really will help young people not only through this crisis, but on the right path in their life in general. And let's give them these positive options. This is one of the best investments we will ever make as a city.

Now, to our health indicators. Indicator one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 – today's report, 52 patients. Indicator two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, threshold 375 – today, 297. And number three, number of people – I'm sorry, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent – once again, two percent. New York City, well done – a credit to all New Yorkers who continue to stay focused in fighting our way through this crisis.

A few words in Spanish –

[ Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish: ]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, Commissioner Carroll, Commissioner Garcia, Dr. Mitch Katz, Executive Director of the Racial Inclusion and Equity Task Force Sideya Sherman, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How are you doing today?

Question: I'm okay. Thank you so much for asking. I wanted to ask you about the Partnership for New York report. It lays out the concerns and a roadmap of how to get the city back on its feet economically. So, I was wondering, who you talking to about that and how are you planning to increase funding and finances in the event the stimulus money isn't in forthcoming?

Mayor: Well, first, we all have to fight for that stimulus money. And I want to tell you, a lot of folks in the private sector, a lot of business leaders have joined in that fight. They've been reaching out to members of the Senate to really push the point that, for New York City and the whole country, the stimulus is crucial to get people what they need, the basic services, but also to revive our economy. The private sector cannot thrive without the stimulus either. It has to be there for cities and states, or we won't be able to provide the basic services and business will not be able to come back. So, I met last week with the co-chair of the partnership. We have a lot of common ground we want to work on together. Our Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Vicki Been is talking to leaders of the business community constantly. We want to work together with all parts of the city, that's why we have these advisory councils from each sector of city life and the economy to help us build that bigger roadmap. And so, we'll have a lot more to say on that in the coming weeks, but there's a real spirit of cooperation. And there's a spirit of hope, Juliette. People know New York City as strong and has come back many times before and we'll come back again.

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: Hey, Henry. How are you?

Question: I'm good. My question has to do with how prepared the City is for a rebound, or boomerang or, you know, a second wave of this epidemic, which the Governor says it's inevitable. I mean, what kinds of other preparations are being made and how confident are you that the City will be prepared for this?

Mayor: Yeah. We are entirely better prepared than we were when we were first trying to understand this virus and had never confronted it before and had to learn through painful experience. The world is better prepared, Henry. I mean, there's just so much more knowledge now than what we had in February or March. But look, we know from the game plan we had put in place that if we were faced with a resurgence, we know how to expand hospital capacity, we know how to tighten up restrictions in terms of making sure the disease doesn't spread. We have the game plan and we've obviously gone through a trial run with it, because we lived it. So, you have to be ready for some kind of resurgence, because we've been doing very well for quite a while now, and you always have to be ready for some challenges. But it's quite clear how you would walk back some of the stages if you needed to. I don't hope to, but if we needed to. And certainly, another big feature is we have the Test and Trace Corps. We didn't have that in the beginning. We now have, by far, the biggest such initiative in the country, it's reaching people constantly. That's an X-factor in our favor now, if we do deal with a resurgence.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Mr. Mayor, good morning.

Mayor: Good morning, Rich. How are you?

Question: I’m doing okay. Mr. Mayor, just about the encampment next to City Hall. What makes that legitimate at this point? I mean, there's been all of this graffiti that's been sprayed, even on the David Dinkins Building. I mean, would you like to see that encampment end? Do you think they've made their point or is this just going to be going on for good?

Mayor: Rich, look, first of all, the graffiti is just not acceptable. And I want to be very clear, graffiti on public buildings will be removed, period. We've been dealing with budget challenges. We can't do everything that we used to do in terms of private buildings, but graffiti on any public buildings we won't allow it, we will remove it. Again, there is a balance we always strike between the right to protest and especially public safety. And I always put public safety first while respecting constitutional rights. That decision will be made by the NYPD as things emerge. We're looking at the situation every day. But again, I think we look at the specific facts of what's going on and then decisions will be made day by day.

Question: Okay. If I may follow on that though, I mean, how do you – why is this still called a protest? It's an encampment and they seem to be just staying there and not doing really any protesting as far as – maybe you have a different definition?

Mayor: Rich, that's part of the important point to understand. And again, we're trying to assess regularly. We do – it's an American value to respect the right to protest. I've also said we don't allow encampments around this city. We haven't for years, unlike the past. It's something we have to assess because this is not like the other types of situations we've seen historically. We have to assess it day-by-day to determine what's really going on, and, again, what's the safety need, first and foremost. So, that is a daily assessment and we'll just play it day-by-day.

Moderator: The next is Julia Marsh from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone else on the call. I'd actually like to follow up on, on Rich's question, and Errol Louis got at this last night, you've said the graffiti is not acceptable on the Dinkins Building. You know, which honors the city's first and only African American mayor. But it's been up there for a month now and whenever the Black Lives Matter mural in front of Trump Tower is defaced, it's cleaned up immediately. So what is the timeline for cleaning that graffiti and why hasn't it been cleaned yet?

Mayor: It is, it will be clean. There are some challenges just technically with the surfaces, as I understand, I'm no expert on this. But it will be cleaned. That's the bottom line. It will be done because it's important. I agree. It should not be there. It will be cleaned.

Question: Okay. But what's the deadline? And again, why take more of a precedence to cleaning the Black Lives Matter mural than this building named after our first and only African American mayor?

Mayor: Situation's very different. And again, the cleaning off the graffiti in this case, as I understand it, with the particular stone, one thing or another, comes with a lot more work and complication than one would think. Paint on the street is a much simpler matter, but the bottom line is we're going to clean the graffiti off. It shouldn't be there on public buildings. It won't be there. Nor should anyone deface the Black Lives Matter mural, which is a statement of recognizing the value of people in this city, in this country who have not been given the respect and value. No one should deface that. And we won't allow that either.

Moderator: The next is Emma Fitzsimmons from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, can you hear me Mayor?

Mayor: Yeah. Emma, how are you doing? Welcome back.

Question: Thank you. I've been hearing a lot about delays in testing for COVID testing and a family member of mine actually had a fever and he got tested and we're still waiting for results more than two weeks later. So how do we sort of continue to make progress on this when people can't even get basic test results?

Mayor: Yeah it’s a big issue. So Emma, real quick, I'd say this, first of all, any New Yorker who wants to get tested, go to Health + Hospitals, those results are coming in much more quickly to those hospitals or clinics. You can call a 3-1-1 for those locations. That's typically a few days' turn around. What's happening with the private labs is a real delays because of the huge uptick in testing around the country and the resurgence around the country. We are having some success with the private labs here in New York City in terms of expanding capacity. But Emma, I think the real solution is the President needs to invoke the Defense Production Act, needs to have a nationwide effort to expand lab capacity with federal support, federal direction, including producing the chemical reagents needed for the testing. Unless there's federal intervention, I fear this will be an ongoing problem.

Moderator: The next is Emily from NY1.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Emily, how you doing?

Question: I'm well, thank you. Just actually following up on Emma's question about the time it takes to get these tests done. Is there nothing the City can do? I mean, conceivably someone who gets tested on Tuesday, can contract COVID on Wednesday and not know – you don't get a negative result and not know they're positive going forward. This really appears to be a crucial problem in combating the COVID?

Mayor: Yeah, I think it is a real problem, Emily. I mean remember the diagnostic test gives you a point in time. And you know, you could have a very different reality even a few days later in any situation. But what's important is to get the test back to people quickly. Again, first thing I'd say to folks, go to Health + Hospitals, because they've been able to make those times a lot quicker than some of the private entities. But what I would say to people is it is crucial to get tested. The quicker you go to get tested, the quicker you're going to get results back by definition. So folks that have been delaying it, it just makes sense to go get tested, call 3-1-1 for those locations. But I think we really need to ask the fundamental question, I mean, if there's a national resurgence going on and we don't have enough lab capacity nationally, we can't just sit around and admire the problem. This is another thing that the Congress should act on in the stimulus, is put the money in for greatly expanded national testing. We're at now up to 40,000 tests a day. We'd like to be much higher than that, but we need the funding and we need the federal government to step in and enforce the production through the Defense Production Act.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Do you have anything else?

Question: No.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Question: Hey, good morning all. Mr. Mayor [inaudible] Streets program, who's responsible for making sure –

Mayor: Your voice skipped out for a minute, which program?

Question: I'm sorry. Under Open Streets. I'm wondering, who's responsible for making sure that the barricades that are blocking the streets stay in place and aren't removed or damaged or permanently set aside? So for example, on 34th Avenue in Queens, the barricades are in place as they should be, but on Underhill and on Carlton Avenues in Brooklyn, the [inaudible] are broken or missing, cast aside. So is the precinct responsible, DOT or there spot checks? And I have a second –

Mayor: It's a very good question. I appreciate it, Matt. It is – look, we rely on local partnerships in many cases. They are supposed to first and foremost, keep those situations secure. If there's a problem they're supposed to alert the local precinct or DOT. But yes, there are regular checks and if we need to do more of them, we'll do more of them. So I appreciate you mentioning those locations. We'll have DOT follow up on those today. And any New Yorker who sees a problem with the Open Streets. If for some reason the barricades are not up call 3-1-1, please report that right away so we can fix it. But it's a combination of the local sponsor first, and then yes, the precinct, DOT, others are supposed to keep an eye on it as well.

Okay. Everyone, let me just close up here with this point. Now this is a city that is always there for its people, the City of New York, our City government, we do not give up on New Yorkers. We are always there for New Yorkers. If someone needs food, we're going to make sure they have food for free. If someone is trying to stay in their apartment, we're going to do everything we can to help them. We need to see each other through this crisis. So the City of New York throughout has said, we are not going to let New Yorkers be harmed. We're going to protect their health, their safety, make sure they have food, make sure they have a roof over their head. That's been our commitment, but meanwhile, our federal government has not been there for us. So once again, once again, a debate on a stimulus begins in Washington. Let's get it right this time. Here is a chance for the Congress and President Trump to right a lot of wrongs and provide New York City and cities and states around the country with the help we need. So we can get back on our feet, serve our people, protect our people, and restart our economy. That's what we need. Let's see if they can get it right this time. We all need to fight for that stimulus because once and for all, this may be our last best chance to get the help we need so we can move forward. New Yorkers, you have done your share. Let's see if Washington is going to do its part now to bring us back. Thank you very much, everyone.

2020-07-22 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We have some really important topics today, and they're all about the safety of New Yorkers, the health of New Yorkers, the future of this city. And overwhelmingly these issues revolve around our federal government. Because right now there are so many ways in which we could use the help of the federal government, and we're not getting that help when we ask for it. And then there are other times where we're not asking for the federal government to stick its nose in and create problems for us, and that's where the federal government seems to be fixated. So we have a real problem here and a real imbalance that we need to talk about. 

Now, when we talk about all the ways the federal government could be helping us, what's been so shocking throughout the coronavirus crisis is all the times we asked for help. Cities and states around the country, asked for help and could not get it. So the exact opposite reality, we wanted help. We needed help. It could only come from the federal government, but it did not come. We're talking about testing and that's been a reality throughout. Now, we're talking about the horrible problem with the labs being overloaded and the federal government is doing nothing to address that. We're also talking about the horrible crisis that cities and states are going through because we have fewer and fewer resources and more and more need, more and more people hungry, more and more people who need health care support, more and more people tragically losing their jobs without income. They need our help. We are running out of resources. So I have repeatedly asked the President and numerous federal officials for help with a stimulus that would support city and state governments. We still see no evidence of how and when that's going to happen. There are negotiations going on. That is a start, but we see no firm commitment for the President or the Senate Majority Leader to a stimulus that would actually help cities and states to provide basic services and restart our economies. That has to happen. And it has to happen quick. We also need support for everyday New Yorkers, everyday Americans, who are just plain, running out of money. They got those additional unemployment benefits. That is running out. It must be extended because families all over the city are simply going to have no money for food, for rent, for medicine, for anything, unless those benefits are extended. So we need a stimulus. We need it quickly. And we need it to include a very clear, strong extension of those unemployment benefits.

Now, another area where again, we would have wanted federal support and federal devotion to truth, but in too many cases we've seen federal interference is with our census. And it's time to really refocus on the census because this is going to determine so much about the future of New York City. The census will determine, with the official count of how many people are here, will determine what level of representation we get in the Congress, how much federal aid we get, you name it for mass transit, for education. For so many things we depend on, billions of dollars hanging in the balance. And what have we seen throughout? Efforts by the Trump administration to complicate the census process, to make it harder for people to participate, to make it something that for many people became something they feared participating in, all of that to drive down the participation that would bring out the truth of how many people are in New York City and other cities and states around the country.

We are fighting back and we will not let these efforts to interfere and stop us. Now, remember, the Trump administration just now, is once again attempting to subvert a process that's been going on for generations, by trying to suggest that non-citizens could not be counted in this census. This makes no sense given everything we've seen in the history of the census. This is a specific effort once again, to inflame people and separate people and divide people. But it has no basis in history and the things that we have done historically, as a nation to count our people. We're fighting back. The best way is to fight back on the ground. So first of all, everyone out there, if you haven't filled out your census, please do so. It is simple. You go to my2020census.gov, my2020census.gov. It is ten questions. It takes about ten minutes. It is very clear, the positive impact you will have by doing this. What you will not see, thankfully, is questions about immigration status, income, criminal history, taxes. You will not even be asking your social security number. It is fast. It is easy, but so far, we're not seeing the numbers we need. So far only 53 percent of New Yorkers have responded. We need to get that number a lot higher. We're going to be doing a lot of outreach next week, a census week of action. So you'll be seeing a social media campaign and a lot of activity out in the streets. We have got to get these numbers up and anyone who wants to help during the census week of action, wants to help get your fellow New Yorkers to be counted. We need your help. And please sign up at nyc.gov/censusweek.

Okay. One more point before our daily indicators, and this is a good news story, and it's not coming from the federal government, sadly, but it is coming from the State government. I want to commend our State Senate. They did something very important yesterday, passing the online voter registration bill. This is such good news. Look, a lot of people are so deeply, deeply desiring to be involved in the democratic process, but they're also worried. Given the pandemic, they don't want to go out to a poll site. People want to be involved, but it's been so hard in this state for so many years. State Senate has done something profoundly important by allowing people in this legislation to register to vote online. It will bring so many more people into this process, including a lot of people who have felt shut out lately. Older folks who have not felt comfortable going out to poll sites or going out and getting registered in person. A lot of younger people who haven't registered as much previously. This will make it a lot easier. It's a positive message to immigrants to get involved in the process, new Americans, who we want to bring into our democratic process. So this is great news. I want to thank the lead sponsor Senator Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn. Congratulations, Senator, and thank you to the State Senate. And please to the Assembly, you've done such good work for New York City and New York State. Please pass this legislation so we can get so many more people involved in the democratic process.

Okay. Now do our daily indicators. And again, I've said, you know, we've not seen the help we need from Washington. We got some good news from Albany, but the best news is always here in New York City. And it's because of you. So good day today on our daily indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200, today's report 66. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375 and today it is 300 patients. And number 3, percentage of the people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent, once again today, two percent, a very good number. And I thank everyone for all you are doing. Quickly in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all, just a reminder that we have with us today, Police Commissioner Shea, Corporation Counsel Johnson, Commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs Mostofi, Director of New York City Census 2020 Menin, Senior Advisor Dr. Varma, and Special Counsel of Democracy NYC Laura Wood. With that, we'll start with Marcia from CBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor, for weeks and weeks, you have been defending the right of the people who have been occupying City Hall Park to have freedom of speech and to be there. Yet today, early in the morning, there was a pre-dawn raid to get rid of them. What changed your mind? What factors played into your decision to clear them out?

Mayor: Marcia, very good question. And it's something that I've been evaluating over the last few weeks, working with the Police Commissioner and his team. And what we saw change over the last few weeks was the gathering there got smaller and smaller, was less and less about protests, more and more became an area where homeless folks were gathering. I said repeatedly, we do always respect the right to protest, but we have to think about health and safety first and the health and safety issues were growing. So it was time to take action. That was a decision that we made yesterday.

Question: My follow up question is this, you know, I'm also wondering whether you were getting pressure, but also the question of the optics. There was a lot of graffiti down there. No efforts were made to remove it yet. There was the dichotomy really, when people tried to mar the Black Lives Matter murals and with paint, that was cleaned up right away. So did you feel pressure to show that there was equal justice and that you were going to try to get rid of graffiti on public buildings everywhere?

Mayor: There is equal justice and each situation though, is different. And this was a particularly complex situation down here. Look, I made very clear that graffiti on those public buildings in this area is being cleaned up right now as we speak. It's not acceptable, it will be gone. But it was a complicated situation down here. And one we had to handle smartly. A lot of careful examination of the facts, a lot of thought to make sure it was done the right way. And I think it was done the right way. I think the NYPD handled it properly. It's something we thought about carefully and decided this was the right time.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning Mayor de Blasio. Coming off of Marcia’s question, I'm curious – I know the concern from a lot of the people here was that this was an encampment for homeless people to stay in. It was a safe space for them. Did the Department of Homeless Services or HRA, where they here during the cleanup as well? To see if they could redirect services to the people living here?

Mayor: Yeah, Katie, it's a good question. And there's been regular efforts by Homeless Services to engage folks who are there. They've been out there again today. We want to make sure that as many people as possible will accept the shelter we have for them and hopefully turn their life around and not go back to the streets. That's something we've worked on consistently during this situation. And we will. And I want that to be clear. The homeless outreach efforts have deepened in fact, during the pandemic. And we've found a very striking number of homeless folks, willing to come in and stay in the shelter as a result of this pandemic. So these folks too, will be afforded that same opportunity.

Question: My second question is about small businesses. I know that there was a lot of reporting around the businesses in Astoria over overcrowding. Other businesses have complained about the lack of guidance and the kind of confusing regulations from City and State agencies as well, about what they can do to set up. My question is, you know, obviously nobody wants businesses to break the rules. You don't want large gatherings. But when you see a large gathering on Steinway Street, and you also realize that there's only four streets in the entire borough of Queens that have Open Restaurants, does it make you think, you know, instead of just a punitive punishment of these restaurants, maybe there's an actual need or demand for both clearer guidance and regulation of businesses, and also more open space for people who are cramped up to hang out in?

Mayor: Yeah, look Katie, I think it's right to say every place we can keep adding responsibly and safely, we want to. We've been continually expanding the Open Streets program, combining it with the Open Restaurants program. More and more restaurants are joining the Open Restaurants program. I think it's over 9,000 now. It's been very few places where we had this bad a problem. Overwhelmingly we've seen compliance, overwhelmingly when people went to educate and remind people, folks, you know, really listened to it, followed the guidance. We had a particular problem in Steinway Street, which was worse than what we'd seen in other places. And we had to deal with it aggressively. And also send a message to others that they have to act responsibly. But remember, it's been very few businesses that have needed to be closed down. We'd like to keep it very few because we don't want to take away people's livelihoods. But we got to just send a message to everyone. Every business has to take responsibility. People have to take responsibility to keep each other safe. And yes, we will be looking for other places to expand the program, to give people more options. And we will definitely have enforcement out there where needed.

Moderator: Next we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: I'm going to start with my first question straight off of that one on Steinway. One of the restaurant employees yesterday asked why is it that in the early days of social distancing, whether it was your police department or the City in general, would ask individuals to comply. Whereas now the focus is on these businesses. Is there no thought to sanction some of the people who are participating in these large crowds? Some of the restaurants feel like they're being blamed for everything.

Mayor: Yeah. Look, Andrew, it's a fair question. But I would say this, we've had very few places where we saw a problem as bad as what we saw on Steinway Street. And I think that is indicative of something. It really is in part the standard of the restaurant or bar sets. We know this long before the pandemic. I mean, this is why we have a Nightlife Office to work with bars, to work with restaurants, to be out there in communities and say, Hey, everyone has responsibility here. Vast majority of these businesses are responsible and are good neighbors. Some have not been well before the pandemic and a few during the pandemic. They need to understand there'll be consequences. And it's a reminder everyone else to take their responsibility. But look, we did start out with more of a focus on individuals. We found it was a mixed bag, honestly. And you know, Andrew, we've never been through a pandemic or at least not in the last century, trying to figure out the tactics that work. But the individual approach had its real limitations. But now I think the right way forward is constant education, giving out those face masks, et cetera, where there's a business that continually does not follow instructions, they need to feel consequences. And yes, in some cases, individuals as well, but that would be only when absolutely necessary.

Moderator: Andrew, do you have a follow up?

Question: Yes, my second question has to do with schools. Some of the private schools have indicated to parents that they're planning to return five days a week, full time, full schedule. How concerned are you that this will exacerbate the gulf between the haves and the have nots? If it plays out that some of the wealthier schools in the city will be providing education that your own Department of Education will not be able to provide. And if you're concerned about that what will you do about it?

Mayor: Well, Andrew, you know, I'm always concerned about the tale of two cities. And I think, you know, clearly private schools represent privilege in many cases, but I also think there's a reality, just the math. The space that they have and the fewer number of students they have compared to our public schools. Our problem is a space problem, a math problem, too many schools that normally have too many kids to begin with in them, and then you need six feet of distance between kids. We can't possibly do five days a week in that condition. So, I am concerned, always, about disparities in this crisis, but I think this one is more particularly about just the realities of each type of school. And, look, what I need to make sure they do – and all types of schools do – is exactly what our public schools are going to do, which is to put health and safety first. And if they're going to go to five days, they have to make sure it's being done in a healthy manner. And we're certainly going to be closely monitoring that situation.

Moderator: Next we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have some questions on the clearing of the encampment this morning as well. My first question for you and for Commissioner Shea is, you know, was the choice to clear the plaza now prompted by concerns that federal agents might come in and do it for you?

Mayor: No, this is something that's been discussed over several weeks, really looking at how this gathering had gotten really small – I think it was about 50 people at the time it was cleared. Again, growing concerns about health and safety. This issue with the federal agents is a couple of days old, but the assumption that the moment would come when we needed to do something has been with us for many days. And we were waiting to really understand the facts and the specifics and came to the conclusion this was the right time. Go ahead.

Question: And then just for the follow-up, when you were Public Advocate and Mayor Bloomberg made the decision to clear Zuccotti Park in a similar, you know, late night fashion, your response to it was that you called it needlessly provocative and legally questionable. I'm wondering what was different about this decision?

Mayor: Well, I think it's a very different situation. The reality here is that again, this had become less and less about protests, more and more homeless individuals who are gathered there. People have asked in the last few days, your colleagues rightfully, you know, how I feel about the broader question of homeless encampments. And I said, we don't allow them in New York City. And we don't, we haven't in my administration. They were allowed for many years. I think they're very, very unfair to everyone, including homeless people. So, as it became more of that and much less about protest, the health and safety issues came to the fore. I remember vividly Occupy Wall Street. That consistently was a political situation and a protest situation. It was not this at all. So, I just think they're apples and oranges.

Moderator: Next, we have Erin from Politico.

Question: My question is about the clearing of the encampment. We heard from the Mayor, but can we hear from the Police Commissioner, just in terms of, you know, what the operation entailed, were people arrested? And also, the Mayor – I believe you said yesterday, you were deferring to the NYPD on when to clear it. Now it seems like you've made the decision. Can we get who made the decision?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll just start and pass to the Commissioner. This is something we always do together. And we talked it through last night and made the final decision about 10:00pm last night. But go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah, and there was constant communication. And what I'm telling you is what I believe to be accurate at this point in time, you know the total number of people was, I would put it around 40 to 50 people when we initially went to the park. A lot of planning went into it to make sure the safety of the officers and the safety of the people that were in that park – and the very good news is, I'm not aware of any injuries to anyone. So, that's paramount, I think in this case. We went in with attorneys, we went in with video – I think as the Mayor said earlier, this really started weeks ago in terms of outreach, outreach with different agencies trying to help people. But ultimately the decision was made that we were going to clear the park. When we went in earlier this morning, we did have attorneys. We gave verbal warnings. We allowed people to leave. We had egress for them to leave on their own.

A number of people did leave without incident. And that was fine. A number of individuals did not want to leave. The result was one arrest for attempted assault where a brick was thrown at an officer. Luckily that officer had a shield. It left a dent, I’m told, in the shield, but nobody was injured. And that person was quickly taken into custody. Another six individuals were taken into custody and the charges against them, my understanding is, absent warrants or things of that nature. They will be released on minor summonses. So, one arrest and probably six summonses. The team is still out there now, and with other agencies, just cleaning up that area. We did recover a number of bricks, sticks, brooms, some drug paraphernalia in some of the tents that were left. We gave people the opportunity to take their property. Again, this is on video. Some people chose to take that property or the property was just discarded. And we’re working with Sanitation to clean up that area and get it back to normal for the people in the city.

Moderator: Last two. Next, we have Emily from NY1.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Commissioner Shea, may I ask you to speak just a little bit more about the decisions that went into the weighing of use of force when it came to dismantling of that Occupy City Hall encampment, just because police are being so closely scrutinized over overuse of force.

Commissioner Shea: Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, any situation, we always start with one thing in mind, whether it's a domestic violence call, whether it's, you know, certainly a different situation like this or anything in between. We don't want to use force. I mean, that's where we start every situation from. That [inaudible] to a conversation about the escalation and other training that we receive. We certainly, though, prepare and we have to be aware of intelligence that we have and other things of that nature. So, I couldn't be happier really with how this one turned out. I mean really, you know, no injuries, no real use of force to speak. I mean, there was some tugging and back and forth that I reviewed on some of the video from last night, where people were trying to punch officers, but they had shields, they were protected. And ultimately it was – you know, I think I would categorize it as one for the win column, and you know, another step towards getting back to normalcy here in New York.

Mayor: Go ahead, Emily.

Question: And another one, please, for the Mayor. We, obviously, as a city altogether are working very hard to keep the coronavirus at bay. Aside from the delays in the diagnostic testing results, do you see other areas of concern where the infection rates could potentially creep up again in the city because of this or that offense or –

Mayor: No, it's a great, great question. So, what I'd say is first, we need the federal government to get the testing really shaped up. We just need a much more consistent approach to testing, particularly the lab capacity. Second, we need to keep tightening up the follow through on anyone who travels to New York City. So, I think we have a good plan. We have to keep deepening that plan in terms of the – that the State has laid out, which states to be following through on with folks coming from out of town. We're getting good cooperation from the Port Authority, for example. We just got to keep following up more and more, making sure we get every single person who comes in and reminding everyone it's their moral obligation and their legal obligation to observe that quarantine for everyone's benefit.

And then it is as we continue to expand our economy and restart, always keeping, you know, a health and safety first approach, looking for any problem areas, any particular places, if we see any focal point, acting on it quickly, and that could mean a single building for example. And that's how we've set things up with our Test and Trace Corps to be very aggressive if we see any evidence of a particular local focal point. I think it's doing all of those things and just constantly watching the data. And this is the unfortunate lesson, Emily, from some of the other states. They did not make the decisions based on the data. We're making every decision based on the data. And if we see upticks, start talking about them, and start adjusting people's approach, and if necessary, obviously, adding new restrictions, which we don't want to do, but we'd be ready to do if needed.

Moderator: The last one for today. We have Nina from ABC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, thank you for taking our call. We're first time callers. Very excited. I have two questions for you. One is, we've been trying to help restaurants that have been blocked in street dining because the DOT would not relocate bike racks in front of their establishments. Has there been any help? We've been particularly trying to help a century-old restaurant owned by a family in the Village that can't reopen, hasn't been able to for three weeks. Is there any help that you can provide for these establishments to move these or relocate these bike racks so they can join the street dining and survive?

Mayor: Yeah. Nina, thank you for the question. Welcome to our morning briefings. I know you've been doing work on the question of Gene's Restaurant, which is a real institution and has been around a hundred years, and we don't have that many restaurants that we can say that about. So, we want to help them. And what we will do is work with the restaurant to open up some more space there. The details of that particular location actually allow us to move around where those bike racks are in a way that will open up the space they need. So, I'll break some news for you and say, yes, we are going to help Gene stay alive and continue to be a great neighborhood institution. And, look, this is something we're going to do with the – as part of the Open Restaurant effort, which we've now extended all the way to October 31st. We want to make sure they can maximize the number of customers they have between now and October 31st to help them stick around, hopefully for another a hundred years.

Question: [Inaudible] news, Mr. Mayor, thank you so much. I'm on my way there. And I'll be able to tell him, and I'm sure he will shed a tear because he has every time we've talked to him about the predicament he was in. My last question is about some nurses who have permits to park in no parking zones. These are for frontline workers that have been working with COVID patients. They can't take public transportation obviously. And they park on the street and then to their surprise, even with these permits a few weeks ago, they got thousands of dollars’ worth of tickets that they didn't know about because they weren't able to park near, for example, Sloan Kettering, even though they have these lottery given decals on their windshields. Will you be able to help them – because it's really weeks of their salary that they risked their lives – forgive these tickets?

Mayor: Yeah, I'm really – again, thank you. You're two-for-two today, as we prepare for baseball season. Thank you for raising that too, Nina and I always like to thank members of the media when you raise something that helps us do our job better or help people in need. So, thank you for raising both of these situations. Yeah, I don't want to see these nurses suffer who are doing so much for us. These are our health care heroes. If you can help connect them to our team here at City Hall, we’ll trace back what happened here. I have every reason to believe that we can resolve this and not make them – not see them penalized for doing the extraordinary work they're doing. And, you know, it's a big, complicated city, but we got to remember our humanity first. These nurses were there for all of us in our toughest hour as a city, and we got to be good to them. So, thank you for looking out for them and get us that information, please.

So everyone, as we conclude, look, I just want to emphasize the times we're living in, I mean, this is going to be looked back on as one of the most challenging, one of the most complex times in our history, but there's also going to be a recognition that the people stood up, the people did the right thing to fight back the coronavirus, the people stood by each other, and the people fought for their rights in a democratic society. And, look, we have seen in the last two years, our democracy under threat, we've seen our democracy undermined in ways we could not have imagined, and people are feeling the pain of that. And when you look at a situation like Portland, Oregon right now, it scares you to see the President of the United States doing something that's just blatantly unconstitutional. But I always have faith in the people and people want to be involved and they want to make their voices heard. And I want to emphasize to everyone, if you want to make your voice heard, well, of course, register, vote, get involved, and it's going to be easier now, hopefully with the help of the Assembly. As early as today, you'll be able to do that online and that will be good for everyone. But also, the census.

 Look, if you're frustrated about what's happening in Washington, or you don't feel like your voice is heard or you don't think our city is getting its fair share, there's something you can do about it, which is to fill out that census form. So many people for months have said to me, ‘I want to do something I want to help, I want to create something or, you know, in some way, contribute to what's going on.’ And there's been so many great examples of that from New Yorkers. Well, here's something everyone could do and it only takes ten minutes. Go online, fill out that census form. One person can do it for the whole household. So, please go to my2020census.gov, my2020census.gov. Take that ten minutes and help New York City's voice be heard, help all New Yorkers be counted. Thank you very much.

2020-07-23 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, we are now in the heart of summer and people are more and more out and about this city. We see some really good, positive signs. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We’ve got a long road ahead, but let’s be thankful. Let’s be proud of the hard work of New Yorkers. You see people out and about. You see the economy slowly, but surely, starting to come back. It's going to be a long time, but more and more people are coming back to work. More and more businesses are starting to open. Great things happening, like our Open Restaurants initiative. The outdoor dining has been a huge hit. A lot that we should be proud of and a lot of work to do to build upon it, and a lot of new things we’re going to bring into the equation. In a few minutes, we’ll talk about our public pools, starting to open again. Some of them are going to be open as early as tomorrow, and that’s good news for this city.

So, as we continue to fight back, build back, we recognize the tools that we need to keep doing that. And one of the biggest pieces of the equation is our test and trace program. You’re going to hear a lot more about test and trace in a few minutes, but I want to frame things for you about what it has taken to get into phase four, and how far we’ve come. Because, really, when you think about it, for us to go through phases one, two, three, four, it took a lot of commitment from a lot of people, and certainly not just in the City Government, but folks in the private sector, nonprofit, so many people who worked hard to keep bringing us back. And so many people who worked hard in partnership to make it work for people. We had a great partnership with the MTA and the State to improve the subways so people could feel more comfortable, the buses so people could feel more comfortable. And we’re seeing now some really striking progress. One example, when you compare the time right after the pause was put in place and the worst of this crisis to now, subway ridership is up 75 percent; bus ridership up 57 percent; Staten Island Ferry ridership up 70 percent. These are really striking figures. And what’s interesting is, for a long time, bus ridership, which is so important in this city, that was actually ahead of subway ridership. Traditionally, subways, obviously, a lot more people use. For the first time in a while, we now see subway ridership surpassing bus ridership overall, which means more and more people are feeling confident that they can go into the subway and stay safe. We do see more activity in terms of car traffic, but not as much, by any stretch, as what we’re seeing with mass transit – an increase of 23 percent of the East River Bridges; 17 percent on the Harlem River bridges. So, we definitely recognize that real activity, real progress is happening, and all of these pieces have to come together for it to work.

Now, testing – from the beginning, we’ve talked about testing. We’ve talked about the fact that, if you have enough testing, if you have the right testing, then you can really fight back against this disease. And the testing underlies the core principle that we’ve used in New York City successfully to fight back, the focus on data, the focus on science – real numbers, real results that tell us what we have to do. We see that, that's been used around the world, that approach works. When it hasn't been used, the results have been very, very painful. We are going to keep expanding testing, because we need more and more people that have access to it. So, we're announcing a new partnership with the urgent care organization Medright, four new testing sites, three in Manhattan, in Inwood, Midtown, and the Garment District; one in Clinton Hill, in Brooklyn. And this, with other actions, will allow us to expand testing in New York city to 50,000 tests per day. This is the number we've been wanting to get to for quite a while. We will now have that capacity.

Now, I talked about test and trace. This is crucial. This is the big strategic piece of the equation. Obviously, something we have to build from scratch – now, the largest test and trace corps in the nation. And it's extraordinary what is happening as a result of having that ability to confront the disease. When you see it pop up, to actually be able to address it person by person – what a difference that is making. And here to tell you more about that, a man who's leading this effort with a great team. And thanks to his great work – Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you, sir. I wanted to start by saying thank you to New Yorkers. As we sit here today, we have the lowest rate of new cases of coronavirus than we've had since the beginning of the pandemic. So, every time that you wear a mask when you go outside, every time that you stayed at home when you're sick, oftentimes a great personal or family sacrifice, and every time that you pick up the phone when one of our tracers of the Test and Trace Corps calls, you've earned where we are right now with the lowest levels we've seen of coronavirus. Now, for the past month and a half, one thing that has not changed is that the levels have been low. We've maintained that low level. One thing that has changed is the city is starting to wake up. Now, you're going to work. Your office building is open. Construction is happening. You can go to the zoo. You can eat outside at a restaurant. Across all of the phases of reopening, the Test and Trace Corps has been there to support you and suppress the coronavirus. And I'm proud to say that today, our rates of new cases of the coronavirus through all of those phases of reopening have not had an uptick whatsoever. They've been completely stable. That's good news.

Moving forward, the Test and Trace Corps. is going to continue to suppress and drive down the coronavirus to keep New Yorkers safe. And I'm going to start with telling you two of the key metrics that we strive towards in order to achieve that goal. The first is, we need to be reaching 90 percent of all new people in New York city diagnosed with the coronavirus. Second, is that we need to, for 75 percent of all new cases, or people newly diagnosed with the coronavirus, be completing intake with them and monitoring them so that we know that they're isolating, keeping themselves safe and keeping other New Yorkers safe. And we know that we've had the opportunity to offer them resources. More than 6,000 New Yorkers now we've paired with our resource navigators to give things like food delivery, help with medications, even help with eviction notices or paid sick leave. We want to help New Yorkers to keep New Yorkers safe.

I'm going to talk to you about our current data now. Right now, as we sit here today, we've reached 89 percent of all new coronavirus cases across New York City. That's a substantial improvement since when we started the program. So, we're right there at that 90 percent benchmark that we need to be at to keep New York safe. Now, the second benchmark that we've set for ourselves is the 75 percent of new cases that we need to know are isolating so they're not going out and potentially infecting other New Yorkers. For that number, 71 percent of people that we've reached are completing our intake process – have completed our intake process and we're monitoring, knowing that they're isolating. However, 64 percent of all new cases are currently – have completed our intake and are being monitored and we know are isolated in therefore. So, we have more work to do there, but we're going to do that work. And we're working as hard as we can to keep New York safe. To give you some raw numbers, to show you the scope of what we've done for New York so far, the Test and Trace Corps has identified more than 17,000 new cases across New York City, and those new cases have given us more than 17,000 new contacts or people they have exposed to the coronavirus when they were infectious.

Now, I want to drill down on one really important number today. There's a group of contacts or people that we know have been exposed to people newly diagnosed with the coronavirus that, by the time we call them, are actively symptomatic with symptoms consistent with coronavirus. So, if our program did not exist here today, if we hadn't called them, if we hadn't intervened, they would have gone out and they would have infected other New Yorkers. Now, how many they would have infected – right now, our number of cases day to day is stable. So, they may have gone out and infected one more New Yorker each. But, right there, our ability to intervene and to get them to isolate has potentially prevented thousands of new infections, assuming they infected one of the other New Yorker. Each other models have shown that one infectious person or case can actually with coronavirus infect 2.5 other people. If they'd gone out there and infected 2.5 other people each, then we've potentially prevented, by not allowing that to happen, more than 5,000 new cases of the coronavirus across New York City since our program began on June 1st. Our ability to use the program to intervene, to catch people early in their infectious state before they've even been tested is the reason we exist and the reason we're going to continue to work so hard to keep New York safe and to find people before they can infect other New Yorkers and give them what they need to get themselves and their families through this, with all of the resources brought to bear at our hands.

I want change gears and talk about something you've been reading about a lot in the news recently. It's a very important issue. It's our lab turnaround time, as we're seeing across the rest of the country right now, other cities and states are horrifically seeing what we've felt and lived through an April in New York City – there are surges of coronavirus. Because they're having more cases, they're doing more testing, and that means that some of the national lab companies are therefore doing more testing for them that otherwise could have been done for us in New York City. Because of that, we saw an increase in the number of days that it was taken for people to get their labs back. Knowing that this day might come, we've already planned a few steps ahead. One strategy that we've employed this week is something called pooling. Pooling is where if you have multiple different samples of coronavirus tests from patients, you run them all at the same time. And if that overall sample is negative, then you don't need to run each one individually because you know that each one individually is negative. So, it saves a tremendous amount of time. Through using strategies that we've had in our pocket for this sort of contingency, we've been able to now drive down the turnaround time for labs, we've cut it in half. The median turnaround time for labs right now across New York City is two days.

I’m going to change gears again and tell you about something that we're really excited about and something that we're going to continue to do and bring to New Yorkers to have us all fight coronavirus together. It's called our hyperlocal response. We're doing a lot of testing, more than 30,000 tests a day. And we can, as the Mayor said, do 50,000 tests a day now in New York City. However, we've learned that there are certain communities that have people that are more often testing positive, and they also have lower testing rates. Those are the communities where we need to bring testing to them and to get the communities activated so that people can come out and get tested. So, we started this two weeks ago in Tremont, ZIP code 10457. We set out to do 2,500 tests in that community. We've now done 2,800, surpassing our goal. But importantly, what we did is we brought in mobile units. We activated trusted healthcare facilities that are already there. We even brought in a new machine that can give you a coronavirus test back in less than 15 minutes. We did all of that, working with community-based organizations to make sure we were doing it right. And they brought people out and activated the community, and therefore it was a big success from the ground up. We want to use that same mentality in the next two communities, moving forward, to build off of the success we've had in Tremont. So, I'm happy to announce today that we're going to be going to Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and the Rockaways and Queens next, bringing our machines that will give you a result back in a matter of minutes, bringing our mobile vans and building up all of the resources there, working with our community-based organizations so that we can come together community by community where we're needed the most and fight coronavirus together. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Ted. Fantastic report. And thank you to all the good people at Test and Trace Corps who are doing this important work. Now, everyone, just a couple more quick things. And I mentioned at the beginning, it's summer and people are more and more out there doing great stuff. And one of the things that's going to be wonderful, it’s opening up again some of our public pools. Now, I said weeks ago, we wouldn't be able to, for a variety of reasons, open all of them, but we're opening up some key pools around the city. And this is going to be wonderful for neighborhood residents and particularly young people, especially as it's gotten so hot. So, tomorrow, eight public pools will open up for the first time this summer – tomorrow, Friday, the 24th. And there'll be in all five boroughs – the Mullaly Pool in Highbridge in the Bronx; Sunset Park in Brooklyn; Kosciuszko Pool in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn; Wagner in East Harlem; Liberty in Jamaica, Queens; Fisher in East Elmhurst, Queens; Tottenville in Staten Island; Lions in Tompkinsville Staten Island. All these pools will be open and then next week, next Friday, seven more – and we'll be announcing those again in the course of next week. Look, we're going to be careful with them. There'll be rules, there'll be social distancing. There'll be smart efforts to keep people safe, but it's also going to provide a lot of wonderful relief for residents of those neighborhoods and folks from all around. So, we're really excited that our public pools will be opening up again, starting tomorrow.

And now, let's go to our daily indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 – today's report, 69. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, threshold 375 – today's report, 297 patients. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID, threshold of 15 percent – and a number of you will be very familiar with today, two percent, and a very good number it is.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Ted Long and by Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: I am good, Juliet. You're a good lead-off hitter. So, we welcome you.

Question: Well, let's try to get a base hit here. You've said many times that encampments are not allowed and yet I've been seeing them and receiving photos from listeners of encampments that are very large. One listener tells me commercial tenants cannot get into their building. They call the precinct, they're told to call 3-1-1 and nothing happens. So, is there a way to be more proactive about this situation?

Mayor: Yeah. Juliet, it's a great question. I appreciate it. Overwhelmingly, we've been successful in recent years, making sure that encampments did not continue in New York City, as they did for decades. When we see them, we stop them, and sometimes it does take a couple of days, but we've managed to do it successfully with very little reoccurrence. Please let my team here at City Hall know the locations. Anyone who tells us about an encampment, we're going to have it addressed right away by Homeless Services, Sanitation, PD, whatever it takes. Go ahead.

Question: Okay, great. Thank you. I will do that. About the pools – great news about the pools. So, can you talk about the specifics? How many – how many will the pools limit? What are the regulations when people get there? How does this work?

Mayor: Yeah, it’s a great question. Look, we're going to be careful about not overcrowding, now, you know, in the pools – it’s a good situation, and doctors will attest that chlorine is our friend in fighting the coronavirus, but we still have to be really careful about crowding, really careful about people being in too close contact. Smart about – we're going to have distance lines, limited number of people in locker rooms, social distancing when not in the pool, face coverings, really careful limits. But, you know, having 15 public pools up and running in the heart of summer is going to be really great, even with those limits. And we're going to do our best to get as many people the opportunity to experience those pools.

Moderator: The next is Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: How are you guys doing this morning?

Mayor: Hey, Gersh. How are you?

Question: Good. A couple of quick questions about schools, Mr. Mayor. Thousands of public school parents have signed a petition asking you to create open streets in front of all the City schools for either classroom space or to free up classroom space in lunch rooms and gyms. Closing those streets to car traffic would also simply make kids safe from being run over. So, will you do it?

Mayor: Well, we're going to look at that. We're going to look at everything, Gersh. Outdoor space could be really valuable, and wherever it is, whether it's the street, or some schools have courtyards or other areas – definitely want to look at how we can use outdoor space. Now, remembering that that works for some parts of the school year. It won't work for when it gets cold or won't work on bad weather days, but we're going to look at that for sure. And there's a lot of work going on, including listening carefully to school communities what they think will work, but we still have obviously a good amount of time before school begins and we’ll plug in some of those ideas as we go along.

Question: Okay. Just a very quick follow up on that. You know, the Department of Education has been saying for weeks that it has no plan devised yet for the 150,000 students who rely on school buses. So, if there's no plan, you might see tens of thousands of parents driving their kids to school every morning, would carry the aforementioned risk of children being struck by automobile drivers. So, what do you think? When are we going to get a plan for how to move kids around?

Mayor: Yeah. No, I don't agree with that characterization, respectfully. School buses are clearly part of the mix. We have to do it safely. Everything's about safety and health first. A lot of work is going into figuring out how to do that the right way, but that work will be done in time. We'll have announcements, school buses will definitely be part of the lineup as per usual.

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor? How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Henry? How are you?

Question: I'm good. Actually, that's actually my first question – is how do you assess your political standing in this city since the advent of the virus, and all of the political hits you've taken, the criticism you've taken? How has this affected you and how do you gauge and measure this impact on you? I mean, how seriously you take it?

Mayor: Yeah, I thank you for the question Henry. I know it's an honest question. Look, I don't think we're in a political moment. Honestly, I think we are in a crisis that is all about just getting things done for people. And look, the mayoralty in New York City is one of the offices with the greatest ability to get things done at any public office in the nation. And my job is to do exactly like, the things we're talking about today, to make sure we have a lot of testing. We have strong a Test and Trace Corps. We're getting schools ready in a safe and smart way. We're getting as much support for communities like opening up the pools. There's nothing about the, you know, the backdrop and the critiques and all that changes the basic work of just serving people and getting things done.

Question: Okay. My second question is a little bit more limited in scope. It's about testing. I know a lot of people who are still waiting ten days for tests. And you're saying that it's taking two days, are these Health + Hospital tests? I've also heard that the instant tests, if you will, are only about 70 percent accurate?

Mayor: So, Henry the first point is we had a really bad stretch where the national crisis and the strain it put testing was clearly affecting everyone, including New York City. We've pushed back on that with a variety of new plans with the labs and with expanding the work that Health + Hospitals is doing. So, we had a really bad stretch. It's now getting much better. And that citywide average is when you combine all testing around the city, it's come back down to a much more acceptable timeline. We hope to keep it that way. On the rapid turnaround test, Dr. Long or Dr. Varma, let's just do a quick explanation of what we know about it, what works, what doesn't and how we use it. Go ahead.

Executive Director Long: Sure. I'll get started and I'll turn to Dr. Varma. So I appreciate the question. The rapid turnaround test is really good at figuring out who has coronavirus. So a positive test result from it is very helpful in terms of making the diagnosis. A negative test result from it is not necessarily definitive with the type of rapid turnaround we have now. So we are doing an additional confirmatory PCR test to make sure that we're getting the completely accurate information to all New Yorkers as we do it.

Mayor: Good answer, Jay, anything to add?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: No, just to highlight again, the point about the testing turnaround time. You know, one of the challenges of course, is that the turnaround time for results varies depending upon which laboratories do those tests. So as the Mayor has noted we have been working very aggressively to reduce the turnaround time at commercial laboratories. People may still be experiencing some delays, but they should start to see those resolved fairly quickly.

Mayor: Okay.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Mr. Mayor. Good morning.

Mayor: Hey Rich. How are you doing?

Question: You know, you often say that the State and the City work closely together but very often the Governor doesn't seem to provide public evidence of that assertion. Does this criticism sting? Is he nicer in private?

Mayor: Rich, your use of the English language was very elegant there. You have a career in diplomacy ahead. I don't get lost in, you know, what different politicians say, I just don't. And it kind of connects back to Henry's question. This is now about doing the work serving people in this city, doing what I know is right. That's what I was sent here to do. I am so used to the noise and the backdrop as just a thing you got to work through. So, I don't really get lost in whatever any public official is feeling that day or whatever message they're trying to put out. I just want to get the work done. And when it comes to getting the work done, the City and State have actually done pretty well together.

Moderator: For Dr. Long and Dr. Varma, I'm just a little bit confused about this two-day median turnaround time, because I asked Dr. Varma on Tuesday during the technical briefing, and he said he didn't have that data. And I'm wondering what it came down from? Dr. Long or Varma cited that it was much worse. So, what has it come down from?

Mayor: What was the worst average a week or two ago? Do either of you have that number exactly? Go ahead.

Executive Director Long: So, a week or two ago, it was a little bit more than double. However, the issue was that there were some labs where it was actually more than a week of wait time. So as labs have gone on to use strategies like pooling, their numbers have precipitously dropped. And enough of them are using strategies that have caused a drop like that, such that this citywide average has gotten much, much better. However, to your point, there are still some labs that are not yet using pooling or their turnaround times are much higher. They do plan to start using pooling as soon as possible. And that's what we're pushing on from our perspective. But it is true that there is a lot of variation between what lab one would do and lab two would do. But we want to get to the place where all of them have the fastest turnaround time possible. And we're pretty close.

Mayor: Amen.

Moderator: The next is Alejandra from AM New York.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Alejandra. How are you?

Question: Good. How are you doing? So yesterday you said that you wouldn't make a final decision about reopening schools this fall until September. And so I was curious to see – you spoke with Governor Cuomo about [inaudible] before making that decision, because I know the State wants to make a decision by August?

Mayor: Again, I'm not going to get lost in the day to day dialogue. The State is going to make a decision, as I understand August 7th on the broad authorization for school to move forward. And we respect the State's role in this obviously. But between August 7th and the first day of school, you're talking about a month. And a lot can happen in a month. So I keep emphasizing this, health and safety first. We're going to follow the data. We're going to follow the science. Let us hope and pray and do the hard work to be in as good a situation as we are now or better at the time that school opens. But again, the final decisions will be made as we get right up to it, based on the data we have in front of us. But parents should be planning on the reopening of schools because that's the direction we are building toward.

Question: Okay. So just to clarify your office didn't reach out to the Governor's office at all anytime yesterday or the day before you –

Mayor: We talked – our teams talk multiple, multiple times a day about everything. But again, I want to emphasize the difference between the decision that the State will offer for all schools in the state in the first week of August, versus what we have to decide, all of us together as we get right up to the point of school beginning.

Moderator: Last question for today, it goes to Emma from – sorry, two more for today. The next one is Emma from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mayor. I have two questions for you. The first is about the COVID testing. I'm actually still waiting for results for a family member of mine, it’s been 17 days. This is a private lab, but when you say that the two day, the two day wait, is that the median or the average? And does that include both hospital sites and private labs like Quest Diagnostics?

Mayor: Yeah, let me have Ted and Jay answer. But let me say 17 days is just plain unacceptable. So actually, if you'd be kind enough to, if you're willing, let our team know what lab that was so we can follow up, that should not be happening to anyone anywhere. So something else is wrong with that picture, but you guys want to – you Jay or Ted speak to the methodology?

Executive Director Long: Yeah. I'll start and then turn it to Dr. Varma. I also just really do want to say I'm so sorry you've had to wait 17 days. That really is unacceptable. And I would be happy to personally help to follow up on this if you'd allow me. We need to get answers way faster than that. A couple of thoughts – one is that we all use different labs. The number that we've shared is the median across all labs citywide. And at New York City Health + Hospitals, we have a variety of lab arraignments that we use. So our wait times have actually been some of the lowest throughout the whole ordeal. So if you do have the opportunity to bring a family member to one of our more than 50 in New York City Health + Hospitals sites we would love to see you. And I'd love to make sure that you get the lab turnaround time that you need for it to keep your family safe. There are a couple of labs in particular that are moving towards pooling now, some of the larger ones. When they do that, it will have a substantial impact. And that will happen – our aim is within the next week. Dr. Varma I don’t know if there's anything you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: No, nothing else to add.

Mayor: Okay, great. Go ahead. Emma.

Question: Big picture here. You and Governor Cuomo both said this isn't going to happen, you know, at the height of the pandemic here. And people have been waiting even at hospital sites sometimes ten to 14 days. We're hearing widespread reports of delays. So how did this happen in New York City after you and Governor Cuomo, both committed that this wasn't going to happen?

Mayor: You mean the wait times?

Question: Yes. Wait times for testing.

Mayor: Emma, I would say two things. First of all, it was – we had good turnaround times for the vast majority of the time that we have had a substantial amount of testing. We had a real dislocation with, again, the growth of the national crisis over recent weeks. It took up lab capacity that we were using. A lot of labs were overwhelmed, and we had to reset the equation with the kind of techniques that Ted and Jay have talked about. So, I think we've been – Governor's been consistent. I've been consistent. We want fast turnaround time. We want maximum number of people tested. And that has been working overwhelmingly until we hit this glitch. But we are telling you now that in many ways that has been resolved and people can have confidence and better turnaround times, particularly if they go to Health + Hospitals.

Okay. Everybody let me close up today where I started, just recognizing that we have come a long way. Now, there's not a single person I know who is overconfident or takes our situation lightly, but I want to keep reminding you, the reason that things have moved forward in New York City is because the people get it. The people feel it, people reinforced with each other, the importance of wearing those face coverings. People reinforced with each other social distancing. We have talked to so many people who are starting up their businesses again and doing things in their communities. And they're always thinking about safety and health in doing that. That has been what has worked for this city and the fact that we have devoted ourselves fully to a test and trace approach, that means that anyone needs that support. It's there for them. And we're constantly looking to make sure that if someone is infected by the disease, they don't infect someone else. This is why New York City keeps moving forward. And this I believe is what's going to sustain us until the day that we get a vaccine. Again, I will always say thank you to the people in New York City, because you're the heroes here. You're the people who have made this much success. Let's go even farther. Thank you, everyone.

2020-07-24 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, I want to talk to you about a couple of quick updates today, but I especially want to focus on our young people. The kids in this city have been through so much in the last few months, and I've talked about it a lot, because I think it's something we really need to focus on. Every one of us has dealt with the strain of this crisis, but our young people, imagine, for so many of them, trying to make sense of this, dealing with a lot of pain around them. The reality of being cooped up, not getting to see their friends, so many challenges – but look, there's some good news starting to emerge here, because with every step we take forward, we're able to open up more and more opportunity for our young people. You go back to March and April, things were very dire. We didn't know what we'd be able to do this summer, but because we've made so much progress, thanks to all of you, we're now able to do a lot more to engage our young people positively and productively this summer and, of course, beyond. So, I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the ways we're going to help them not only have a fun summer, but also have a summer where they grow and they develop and they prepare for their futures.

But before I do that – first, something we should all be celebrating, because this is another sign of rebirth and renewal, opening day of baseball. For so many of us, this is one of the great symbols each year that tells us, you know, good things are ahead – little delayed this time, but, you know, it did happen and I think it's a blessing. For all of you, whether you're a baseball fan or not – I'm a huge baseball fan, but even if you're not, it's something to celebrate. So, congratulations to the New York Yankees, winning their first game of the season. And Dr. Fauci was there, and I want to really celebrate him – a great new Yorker, a great Brooklynite. Look at that, I think he's 79 years old – good form there, Dr. Fauci, that looks pretty good. So, what a great moment for New York City to see a New Yorker celebrated there and the first game of the season in this way and how much he has done for us. It's been absolutely amazing. Well, today, opening day here in New York City. Dr. Fauci thew out that pitch in Washington, but today it's opening day in New York City. Four o'clock at Citi Field, the New York Mets take the field. And yeah, it'll be different – there won't be fans in the stands, it'll feel a little weird, but still what a wonderful thing. And I'm wishing a great season for the Mets as well. And this is something we can really feel good about as New Yorkers, baseball is back.

So, now, let's go back to our young people. And you know, sports is going to be a part of their summer again, because, finally, we're able to open stuff up, and the things that we do to support our young people, like we know baseball is a great tradition. Another tradition in this city is that every summer we do a lot to help our young people have a better summer and to support them. Summer Youth Employment, a longstanding tradition in this city that's done a lot of good for so many tens of thousands of kids each year. This year, the Summer Bridge program, a specially designed program for the reality that we're dealing with now – it begins on Monday, and 35,000 teens and young adults will benefit. And then, they’ll get the kind of support and training that's going to help them with their future. So, this is great for them now, but also for what it means for where they're going. The young people who will be part of this program, they'll be building career skills, there'll be a part of workshops. They'll really be learning and they'll get compensation to help them and to help their families in the middle of everything we're dealing with. A lot of the young people come from public housing, a lot were referred by social service organizations. These are kids who need the most support and the most help, and they're going to get it through the Summer Bridge program.

Now, another great thing – play streets. You know, when you think about all the things that kids have been through, and, again, not being able to get as much physical activity and play, not being able to see their friends as much, a lot of things have been on hold. Well, we're going to open up something – again, a good New York City tradition that has been so great for kids – Play Streets coming back. And that is going to be an important step forward for kids and families to have something to enjoy. We're also going to be opening up 1.5 additional miles of Open Streets, which have been something great for our communities as well. So, more and more opportunities for kids to engage. And on the Play Streets program, the Open Streets with kids, what we're talking about is having a lot of specific things for them to do – arts and crafts, and sports activities, reading corners, dance classes, everything done the smart way. And here's an example, that, that you see on the screen is a touchless obstacle course. So, that's an obstacle course for the age of COVID, but it's still going to give kids a lot of fun and a lot of exercise, and it's going to be great for them.

So, this is the reality of today, but we're going to make it work. We're going to make it work with the right face coverings, social businesses, all the things that we need to do while still giving kids a really rewarding experience. Now, a lot of great activities as you see there. We're going to do them a little bit differently in many ways, but still so many great activities for kids. And I want to thank the partners who would be running these streets for us and providing these great activities for the kids. Street Lab, thank you; Fresh Air Fund, thank you; and the Police Athletic League, thank you. Great activities coming this summer for our kids.

Now, a small, but important matter – I bring it up regularly – and this is an announcement that's actually going to have longer ramifications. Many, many New Yorkers care deeply about alternate side parking because it affects so many people's every-day lives. So, first, for next week, alternate side parking will be suspended next week through Sunday, August 2nd. So, no, alternate side parking anywhere next week. But then, after that, starting Monday, August 3rd, we're going to resume alternate side parking on an ongoing basis. So, we're going to take another step towards something a little more normal, go back to having alternate side parking on a regular basis. That will go all the way from Monday, August 3rd to Saturday, September 5th – the Saturday right before Labor Day. So, for the whole month of August, and the beginning of September, alternate side, parking back the way it was, but with an important change that we're now saying, if you're on one of those streets that has multiple times a week that you have to move your car on your side of the street, we want to address that issue, make it easier for you, make it clear you can only do that one time a week, going forward, and you do that on the last day. We're going to get a lot more information out. But, again, if you're on a street that you have to park your car or honor alternate side multiple times during the week on your side of the street, it will be during this period for this next month only once per week and it will be the last day noted on your side of the street. We'll get a lot more information out on it. And this is – again, why do we do alternate side parking? We do it to be able to clean the curbs, keep our streets clean, keep our sidewalks clean, keep our communities clean. So, we're going back to it, but we're going to try and do it in a way that makes sense and makes it easier for the people of this city.

Now, everybody, I want to tell you, in the midst of this crisis, so many people have been helping out New York City. It's really wonderful. It's really powerful to see. And I want to always give thanks to folks – a particular thanks today to Bank of America that donated $250,000 to provide 100 high school students with college and career readiness and paid internships in the fall. So, this is the kind of thing we want to see our colleagues in the business sector do more and more of, support our young people. Here's a tangible way of doing it. So, thanks to everyone at Bank of America. And then, just want to note some other donors who have been really great and generous. One is a proud New York City public school graduate – his name is Jo-Vaughn Virginie Scott. You may not know that name, but you may know the name of the rapper, Joey Bada$$. So, that's who actually made the donation. We are so appreciative for that. And it's great to see a New York City kid, remember his city and give back. Crown Castle, Meevo, and Jessica Seinfeld and the Good Plus Foundation all have made generous donations. So, again, so many people helping out – always like to show our appreciation for the people helping New York City come back.

Now, let's do the indicators. And let me tell you, a lot to be proud of again today. So, this is such an example of what New Yorkers have achieved together. Day after day, we see this progress. So, daily indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for a suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 72. Indicator number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s threshold 375 – today's report, 295. And percentage of people testing citywide who are positive for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent – today, once again, two percent. That's very extraordinarily consistent. Let's keep it that way and let's see if we can go even farther together.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We have with us here today Transportation Commissioner Trottenberg, Sanitation Commissioner Garcia, Senior Advisor Dr. Varma, and Assistant Commissioner of the Summer Youth Employment program and workforce development at the Department of Youth and Community Development Daphne Montanez. With that, we'll start with Jillian from WBAI.

Question: Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Jillian. How are you?

Question: I wouldn't be a true New Yorker if I didn't mention that I was raised by a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan. So, let's go Mets –

Mayor: Wait a minute, I thought you were about to say you are continuing your connection to the Dodgers, but you're saying the Mets as the inheritors of the Dodgers –

Question: Yeah. They were the replacement, essentially, in the early sixties, late fifties – before my time. So, I have a question regarding the open restaurants program. Last month, I brought up the pre-pandemic problems of noise crowds and illegal sidewalks in neighborhoods that are bar and restaurant [inaudible] and how little help those communities got from City agencies. Specifically, I asked how the new plan would ensure laws are enforced so that there weren't going to be free for all’s, but that's what's been happening. We know last Friday in Astoria was not a one-off, because of weeks of prior complaints, nor is it the only area where this happened. There were pictures posted Saturday night from the Lower East Side, so the very next day, that were a similar scene. It’s happening all over. I know you don't want to shut down businesses, that that health and safety are your priorities, but you have organizations like the nightlife –

Mayor: Question – what’s your question?

Question: I’m getting there – Nightlife Office bids and Hospitality Alliance with clear conflicts of interest involved in coordinating. So, it's a little fox henhouse.

Mayor: I don't agree with that characterization. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Jillian, you’ve got to get to a question. Seriously. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] giving responsibility to a more neutral entity [inaudible] that's the question –

Mayor: Your voice cut up a little bit, but I think I got it. Look, I just don't – I don't agree with the assumption that the folks we worked with in the industry, we've listened for their thoughts, their advice, but we still obviously are going to do what government has to do and balance all the different pieces of the equation. I think this is a very unusual situation. Health and safety has to come first, unquestionably, and we need to do everything that will help avoid that kind of crowding. What we found was, overwhelmingly, people were in compliance – just the facts are the facts – where we sent inspectors out, where we sent educators out, overwhelmingly people on compliance or they moved into compliance quickly. We have had some troubled areas. You're right about that part of our story, right about the Lower East Side – we've got do better there, but it's still not my impulse to say wide-scale shut down businesses or wide-scale fines, because I really think that backfires in terms of what we're trying to achieve of getting people back to work. So, more and better education, more focused enforcement. And we have made clear if people really ignore the warnings, then, of course, some institution sadly will be shut down, fines we’ll use, but we are still striking a balance, and I still believe overwhelmingly compliance has been consistent in most of the city. Go ahead.

Question: In a different area, there was quite a bit of blowback from [inaudible] last week about the Small Business Survival Act, which is now called the Job Survival. The Small Business Congress said that you actually were playing dumb, that you knew the difference, because, in fact, you had actively supported the arbitration bill when you were running for Public Advocate and then you switched and then the revenue talking points started becoming the norm. I'm trying to edit my question so it's slower – it's a shorter. They call this all a distraction, a red herring, because the real estate industry is opposed to giving small business owners those basic lease [inaudible] fairness issues. I was a little surprised when you said that you felt landlord would do the right thing, because there's not really a track record of that, even after 9/11. So, has your memory been refreshed and please explain how an economic progressive can take such a laissez faire position, especially given the plethora of empty storefronts across –

Mayor: So, I appreciate the question. I will note the editorialization within, I don't do laissez faire. I never have. I have consistently been opposed by REBNY throughout my career. So, I just would like to get the facts straight. What I said to you was – and again, I want to be honest about, I don't remember the specifics. I do owe you an answer on that, and that's true, and I'll make sure we do that today. The arbitration idea is very interesting to me in the context we're in. I remind you that I think everything has been thrown for such a loop that I – again, what I said, I stand by, I would hope that this is not business as usual, this is not like the normal realities with landlords. I would hope landlords would realize both morally and practically that if they throw out a tenant, they're not going to have someone to replace them anytime soon. But I do want to look at the arbitration issue again, I'll give you an answer to that. I told you about the legal problems with commercial rent control that I truly believe are there under the laws of this nation and this state. And I said in the State of the City, we want to see if there's a way to find a new model. But I will definitely come back to you on the arbitration question, because I think that's an interesting point.

Moderator: Next we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey. Good morning, Mayor. I wanted to ask you another small business question. I know obviously there's rental and eviction problems for residential tenants, but the City had a commercial rent program that funded lawyers and allowed – you know, would help small business owners renegotiate leases and that kind of thing by paying for that. But that was cut in the budget. So, I'm curious, if you would want to reinstate some of that to help small businesses, because, you know, a lot of people predict that there will be just a cascading closure of businesses.

Mayor: Yeah. That is not only a good question as an excellent question, Katie, because that is one of the things that, as we were going through with the many, many items in the budget, I increasingly feel that that piece was not clear enough, because apparently it was a program that was on a timeline and slated to end, I think, it was after three years and it should have been discussed differently in the budget process rather than just allowed to lapse. So, we're going to go back and look at that one again and see if there's a way to revive it. I think that's exactly the kind of thing we should be doing now and I think that might have been something we missed in the budget process.

Question: My second question is short. I was reflecting that I ended up going to Citi Field on opening day. You know, if you're there, you get the old Queens cheer. So, I'm curious, will you be involved at all in today's ceremony or the opening day?

Mayor: No, no plan to. I don't know what the Mets are doing today or what the Yankees are going to be doing, but I do all I care about is their back, and I just think it's good for the city and good for all of us to see another step in the right direction.

Moderator: Next we have Marcia from CBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. My question has to do with testing. The City has partnered with Urgent Care facilities that cannot provide COVID test results in a timely manner. How is that rectified and should testing capacity be increased in other areas that can provide more timely service?

Mayor: Yeah. Great question, Marcia. Look, it was right to partner with the urgent cares. It gave a lot more people opportunity. For a long time, that was working perfectly well. We ran into a national testing crisis because of the surge around the country. We're taking steps to address it. As you heard yesterday, the wait time for getting results is now down to a few days again. Unquestionably, our public hospital system, Health + Hospitals has done the best job lately in terms of test turnaround. So, my message to all New Yorkers is, if you're going to go get those tests, go to a Health + Hospitals facility, you'll get the fastest turnaround. But I do believe the issue is being addressed now, here and now in New York City and we're going to be able to stabilize those response times. That said, we need a national solution to make sure we don't slip back again. We really need the President to use the Defense Production Act and get testing labs built out all over the country. So, we'll keep working on local solutions, but we need a national – we need a lot more national help on this as well.

Moderator: Next we have Dave Evans from ABC 7.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: There you go. Go ahead.

Question: Hey, I wanted to ask you – I think it's around the first question. [Inaudible] you've talked in the past about the need for police not to do social distancing, and to focus more on serious crime. But have we now gotten to a point where we see some of these overwhelming crowds, in Astoria, on the Lower East Side, that now police need to step up and start enforcing the rules.

Mayor: Dave, look, again, you're naming two neighborhoods. We're looking at the whole city. We're looking at, you know, 10 or 15 areas that have a lot of bars and restaurants and where we've seen – there's clearly been a problem in Astoria, there's clearly been a problem on the Lower East Side. Not as much in the other places. I still think the fundamental education efforts, the civilian ambassadors and then particularly the Sheriff's Office have been really effective overwhelmingly. But where we need to go and use tougher measures like shutting down in institution, we will. And I think, look, the bar and restaurant world did see places starting to be shut down. I think that message is spreading that they’ve got to be responsible. But where we need to bring in the NYPD in particular situations, absolutely, we will. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. My second question is along the same line. This weekend, it's going to be nice – nice, warm evenings on Saturday and Sunday. What do you expect? What are you planning for with enforcement?

Mayor: A lot of enforcement. We absolutely are planning to have a lot of people out, again, the civilian folks doing the education, the face coverings, a lot from the Sheriff's Office, PD as needed. But we are very focused on getting the point across to people that everyone's got to take this seriously and help each other by following the rules.

Moderator: Next, we have Emily from NY1.

Question: Good morning, Mayor de Blasio.

Mayor: Hey Emily, how are you?

Question: I’m well, thank you. Hope you're well too. We’re of course, heartened by these three daily COVID indicators that show good progress and stabilization in the city, but I wondered if there's any data, however minor, that points to a potential resurgence, if you think – and if you think of resurgence is inevitable?

Mayor: I think inevitable is too big a word in this case. I think it is something we have to be prepared for Emily. I'm really concerned about people coming here and I want us to keep working with the State and the Port Authority to tighten up that quarantine program constantly. It’s a brand-new thing, obviously, it's a complex thing, but I want us to make that stronger all the time. I'm really happy about the size and the capacity of the test and trace program because that's one of the big X factors here in making sure that we can contain any problem we have. So we have to be ready as more and more activity occurs, but, I do think the difference here than other parts of the country is New Yorkers have shown tremendous commitment, partly because we walked through hell and we went through so much, but partly because New Yorkers actually have a sense of looking out for each other and thinking as a community that's real deep and we've seen it in crisis after crisis, and I think this is one of the reasons why you're not seeing a resurgence so far. Go ahead.

Question: And there's nothing in the data beyond those three indicators that's concerning to you and to your advisors in the least? I hear you entirely on improvements to the testing turnaround times, but the numbers are still good all around?

Mayor: We are watching the data all the time, every day, we're having these conversations. We're looking at different measures, not only our own State uses some other ones, but they're all consistent. Again, the concern we should all have as people coming in, in larger numbers from outside so far, we haven't seen huge numbers for obvious reasons because people aren't traveling as much, but we got to be really tight about that. And we got to be tight about the fall with the flu season. We’re going to be talking about that a lot in the coming weeks. But no, if the question is, are there any indicators causing a particular alarm right now? No, they've been actually strikingly consistent and favorable and it again, because New Yorkers are really out there doing things the right way.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Joe from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you about a story my colleague Sally wrote. It was about a report that I think was spearheaded by Deputy Mayor Been, and it had some former city officials, Carl Weisbrod, Alicia Glenn, Jennifer Jones Austin, who came up with a bunch of ideas about you [inaudible] reopening. And, it was sort of never made out of the draft phase. Seems like it was quashed from within City Hall. I'm just wondering if you read it and you know what you thought about it? If so, you know, why it wasn't released?

Mayor: Yeah, that was an informal group as I understand it. I'm going to certainly look at what they put together, but that was a group of, you know, really good hearted people trying to offer ideas, obviously very early on when we were focused first and foremost on getting through the crisis, but now are more and more bringing in ideas from a lot of different people, Joe, to figure out the big steps, and I'll be talking more with each passing month about how we're going to bring the city back on a much bigger level.

Moderator: Last one for today. We have Abu from Bangla Patrika. Abu are you there?

Mayor: Abu, can you hear us?

Moderator: We're going to go on to Chip from Bonfire.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I have a long question for you, but it's only one. You know the virus has shaken up a lot of people and kind of made them reassess their goals and aspirations for the future and what's important to them. You know, and after years in migration to, cities like New York, the virus may be pushing a younger, more affluent people out of the cities and into the suburbs. And this out migration is going to suck away revenues from the cities, leaving the tax burden on working class men and women who really can't afford to leave. And so my question to you is what would you tell people who are thinking about leaving New York City for the suburbs or rural areas?

Mayor: Well, Chip, I appreciate the question. It's an important question. So I've had a number of business leaders I've spoken to lately spontaneously use the same line, and they've used it, you know, half-jokingly and half very seriously, and they've said, ironically, New York City is the safest place in America right now in terms of dealing with this disease. The fact is this city has come back in an extraordinary fashion and the – what New Yorkers have done, everyday people have done, what our health care institutions have done, the caliber of our professionals in public and private service. You know, everything has kind of come to the fore. There's a reason we were able to come back from that and I think for a lot of people they are looking at that, and they're saying New York City is a very special place and they're seeing it actually in a new light. If you go back to February, Chip, we had the most jobs in our history, 4.6 million jobs. We obviously were in many ways at the best point we had been in our history in terms of our standing in the world, global economic capital, surging tech community, that didn't go away.

It is true some people may, for the short term decide that they would prefer to live elsewhere, but I think what you're going to see is quickly as we come back, many, many people will sense opportunity. Maybe the opportunity for them is that they can, you know, buy a home or buy a condo or a co-op a little cheaper. Maybe opportunity is they can invest in creating a business a little more easily. But what you're going to see is some people will stand back, other people will surge forward. We saw it after every crisis we've had. And again, people had left us for dead after the 60’s and 70’s, after 9-11, after the Great Recession, consistent pattern. The strength of New York City and the appeal of New York City comes to the fore and people start investing and people start coming here. And that reality of younger folks, particularly folks who are, you know, creative and entrepreneurial, wanting to be where the action is, that has not been changed. It may be paused a little while, but it hasn't been changed. So, give us time and we will prove the doubters wrong once again.

And with that, let me just conclude on this note, everyone, as we come back, let's really be there for the young people in the city, where I started today, let's support our young people. They've been through a lot. It's obvious they are our future, but we also, the love we feel for the young people of this city, we got to remember we got to support them in a special way. They're trying to make sense of the world. It's much harder to make sense of when you're younger. And if they know we have hope, they will feel hope. So there's real tough issues. There's things we have to overcome, but let's be proud of how far New York City has come. Let's be proud of where we are going because we've always found our way back to a better place, but let's communicate that to our young people. If our young people see we believe, they will believe. Let's do that all the time in this city. Thank you, everybody.

2020-07-24 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC and time now as every Friday at this time, for our weekly Ask The Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AskTheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How are you?

Lehrer: I'm doing okay. Thank you. Gale, in Queens, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi, Gail.

Question: Good morning. Thank you. Mayor de Blasio, I really appreciate what you do. You have a thankless, impossible job, and I don't necessarily always agree with you, but I do appreciate your spirit.

Mayor: Well, thank you, Gail. I appreciate you for saying that. That is kind of you.

Question: Well, I just think you have an impossible, difficult job and that's how I feel. I need your help with something. It's the Get Food New York program. First of all, thank you for the program, it's a godsend. I've been using it almost from the beginning, but I do have a problem with it. There needs to be a diabetic option. The food that I receive – which is very nice – I receive the prepared food and it is very nice. However, it's based on processed carbohydrates. Every bit of it is either white rice, white flour pasta, bagels. It's just wrong for people who need a diabetic option. And as we all know, diabetes is one of the factors that increases the likelihood of someone contracting COVID. Please help –

Lehrer: Or having serious, serious effects at the very least. Mayor, can you help Gail with the choices in that program?

Mayor: Absolutely. And Gail, I'm so glad you called because one of the good things that happens on this show is that people help me see something that – where there's a gap or a problem that we have to address. So first Gail, will you please give your information to WNYC because we'll have someone follow up with you today, and I'm certain we can get you different options. I mean, we've been trying to develop in this program, obviously, choices that people need, you know, halal food, kosher food. We, obviously, have vegetarian options, but what we're learning is a lot of the historic approach to food needed to be modernized and made more healthy. We've been doing that in our school food program, but we have to make sure it's thoroughly done here in this emergency food program. So, please give your information to WNYC. I'm going to work, based on this call, to make sure that we have a clearly stated diabetic option for folks who need it.

But the other thing to note is the sheer magnitude of the program, because as you said, you've been part of it from day one. I announced this week, it's been a hundred million meals provided for free to the people in New York City by the New York City government. And, Brian, how powerful a point against the backdrop where in Washington they’re still discussing whether there needs to be a stimulus or not. I mean look at that for a moment. It's gotten so tough for so many New Yorkers that we did a hundred million free meals already in just four months and the need is growing all the time for Gail and for so many other people. So, the thank you, Gail, that's really helpful feedback.

Lehrer: Politico New York has an argument now about how – I mean, an argument, it's sort of an argument. It's an article that kind of is based on the premise that you're reaching out now to business leaders in the city for help with things like this, but that you haven't built the relationships with them over the years because of your focus on inequality and wanting to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and things like that. And so you're having to develop those relationships starting from way behind. Did you read that article and what's your reaction?

Mayor: I didn't, although it was summarized to me. So, I think, look, there's an underlying truth in the fact that my focus has not been on the business community and the elites. And bluntly – I mean, my predecessor certainly focused that way and many mayors have. And I think that's, unfortunately – I think this is a profound problem. And I am tempted to borrow a quote from Karl Marx here when he says –

Lehrer: They’ll love that on Wall Street –

[Laughter]

Mayor: Yes, they will. But, you know, there's the famous quote that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. And I use it openly to say, no, I actually read that when I was a young person, I said, well, that's not the way it's supposed to be. The business community matters. We need to work with the business community. We will work with the business community, but the City government represents the people, represents working people and, you know, mayors should not be too cozy with the business community. Governors should not be too cozy with the business community. Respect them, listen to them, sometimes they have great ideas, sometimes they offer real help. There are more and more people in the business community, to be fair, who are seeing the problems and the inequalities, and actually are starting to speak up about it more. But I want them to act.

There was a New York Times article about Davos a few years ago. It was very telling and they said, you know, everyone was talking about the income inequality at Davos and they were all wringing their hands. But then when speakers got up and said, okay, so you need to raise wages and allow unionization of your companies, or you need to raise taxes on the wealthy, those ideas were immediately dismissed. And that's been my experience. I've met with business leaders from day one, and I do have – some folks I've really found some good common ground with, and they really want to help New York City. But a lot of folks have just sort of hit a wall when I say, guys, you're going to have to pay more in taxes, and we're going to have policies that favor working people more like rent freezes, which we've done now multiple times, and things that really have to shake the foundations of our inequality. And there is a tension there, but in terms of the comeback, I'm talking to a lot of business leaders. I'm looking for where we can find common ground. And I know a lot of them do want to help New York City. And I do appreciate that.

Lehrer: Derek in East Harlem, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi, Derek.

Question: Hi, Brian. Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing, Derek?

Question: Good, thanks. I live in East Harlem and at the behest of the city's massive marketing campaign, I got tested for COVID on July 7th at the NYC-run site East 111th even though I'm asymptomatic. Like I said, I got tested on July 7th, but I didn't get my results until yesterday, which is July 23rd and well over two weeks later. So, I'm hoping you can help me understand what would explain this massive waiting time. And I'm wondering if through the citywide issue. And like I said, it's also worth noting that I'm white, but I can't ignore the fact that East Harlem is a predominantly Hispanic and Black community with a poverty rate that's higher than the citywide average. Are other areas of the city grappling with the same wait times?

Lehrer: Thank you, Derek.

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Derek. Derek, actually, you could help everyone. If you’d give your information to WNYC and let us do a follow up with you. That's a ridiculous wait time. It should never have happened. So, there is no explanation for that. Something is wrong and we need to go trace back what happened and what happened at this particular center. That is abhorrent even compared to some of the challenges we faced in recent days.

Lehrer: But you know that’s a fairly common – this is not your fault, but I think it's a nationwide, you know, backlog because of the rises in other states. But I have friends who've waited six days, ten days. So, this is an issue. And, so, go ahead and finish your answer, and then I'm also curious to hear if you think that this is making it harder for the city to do whatever phases of reopening you're trying to work on.

Mayor: Yeah. So, a couple of quick points. One, we, first of all, are seeing the problem, particularly in the urgent care centers, more than we've seen in our public ones. Our public hospitals and clinics, but we're still seeing individual cases like Derek's, that just don't make sense and must be fixed and there's something structural that has to be addressed. And sometimes it's just plain bureaucratic problems that have to be overcome. We, for weeks and weeks, we kept expanding testing and we actually were able to sustain, you know, pretty fast turnaround times – two, three, four days kind of thing. It got really bad for a week or two as the national uptick occurred. You're absolutely right. And a lot of labs that we had depended on were being overwhelmed by demand from other places as well. Some of that has been addressed now by getting the labs in New York City to use different approaches that make it more efficient. This was described in our press conference yesterday morning with our Test and Trace Director, Dr. Ted Long.

So we now think the citywide average, if you take all the different testing centers, the citywide average is back down to the point where the typical person gets it within a few days. But, no, the problem – to Derek's question, the problem has not been localized to any particular community or communities of color in particular or more wealthy communities or anything like that. It has been specifically because of that horrible uptick that happened around the country. But we think we have now stabilized it. That said there will not be enough security on this issue and, Brian, to your question, yeah, we need to get results on a timely basis. If we have occasional fluctuation, it doesn't change our core strategy, but we do need to get results in a timely basis to be maximally effective.

The federal government has to – has to use the Defense Production Act at this point to kind of nationalize the approach to the laboratories. There has to be much more laboratory capacity created. There has to be industries converted to doing the chemical reagents – producing the chemical reagents needed for the testing. This is, I mean, right now, look, the surge around the country – the testing demand will have to go up for months and so the federal government has to step in and create more national capacity, or we'll often be dealing with this problem. I think we're in better shape here in many ways than almost any place else in the country in terms of being able to speed up testing and having the lab capacity. But this is a bigger problem for the country that has to be addressed.

Lehrer: I know you got to go in a minute. Have you changed your thinking at all or does it keep developing on how you open schools based on the studies coming now from Israel and South Korea, that show middle and high school kids are spreading the virus at home after school, more than the younger kids. And anything else you want to say on anything as we wrap up?

Mayor: Yeah. It's an important question. So, we are watching those studies carefully, watching the experience in Israel. Israel's experience is different than ours. They came back real quick. They got burned as we've seen in many states in this country. So they – we really are basing it on our own reality. No plan right now to treat different age levels differently, but that might change with time. The central plan right now, I talked about it a lot in different press conferences this week, the central plan is, we're coming back in September, the goal is to maximally have kids in the classroom. It will depend on each school's physical capacity to see how many days in the classroom, but a typical kid will be in a classroom two or three days. We announced that we're building out a very aggressive childcare program to try and help families that need childcare. We'll start with 100,000 seats for kids and we're going to build from there. But what we're seeing is we got a lot to do over the next six weeks, but the basic contours, which the CDC has been real clear on to their credit – and the State, the City, everyone agrees – social distancing in all classrooms. We're going to convert every interspace in the school building into classrooms. We're going to have face coverings on everyone, hand washing stations, hand sanitizer stations, a whole host of measures to keep each school safe and remote learning will be a constant. It will be a constant during the week at some point for every kid and anyone who would prefer for their kid to be at home the whole time can have remote learning, you know, the whole week.

But we did do a survey of parents, Brian. We got 400,000 responses, which is pretty stunning, and 75 percent want their kids back in school. And we're going to do that and we're going to do it safely. We're going to do it carefully. And we're going to watch the health care situation and always that's going to be the ultimate decision point is, are we able to hold the health care situation where we are now? Then, of course, we could open school. If it gets better, even better. If it gets worse, we're going to be real honest about that and be careful and decide how that affects the final decision.

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, we always appreciate you coming on and answering listener's questions and mine on Ask the Mayor. Thanks so much. Talk to you next week.

Mayor: Take care, Brian. Thank you.

2020-07-27 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. It's Monday, beginning of week, and what are we beginning with? Heat – intense heat. It’s going to be a very hot week, particularly the first half of the week. And I'm going to talk about in a moment the heat advisory and what we're doing to address it. 

Now, that said, after really huge challenges in March and April, all of us together were able to rebound and restart summer programming for young people. I want to thank the City Council for the leading role they played in helping us put that together, but we also have to do more. We have to create more and better space safe spaces for young people. Think about it for a moment. If you're a young person in New York City, you need safe places to go. You need places to grow and develop. You need places for recreation and culture. We don't have enough of those spaces. We need to create more. So, today, we're going to talk about one of the examples of that kind of investment that's going to make such a big difference right in the heart of Brooklyn, in a community that needs this support. And remember, what's so important here – this is about our priorities, and this is an example of resources we took from the NYPD budget and are putting into young people, reprogramming our resources to help young people, to put them on the right path, to stop problems before they begin. So, today, we're going to talk about the new recreation center that will be created at the Nostrand Playground in Flatbush, Brooklyn. And it's going to be amazing. It's going to have an indoor pool, and a track, and a kitchen for community cooking lessons, and all sorts of wonderful amenities that will help community members to have great, great options, especially our young people. And we're going to begin a process of engagement with the community this fall on how to specifically create the center in a way that will be most helpful to the community. And now, I want to thank and celebrate and let you hear from the two driving forces behind this great project. Both of them put a huge amount of – excuse me – a huge amount of time and energy into envisioning this and bringing it to life. And I can attest to the many times they spoke to me about the need to get this done and we're getting it done now. So, first, I want to turn to Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte.

[…]

Thank you so much. Thank you, Assembly Member. Thank you for fighting for us in Albany and fighting for justice every day. And since you said exactly correctly, that Council Member Farah Louis has been extraordinarily persistent in making sure this came to fruition. I want to congratulate you Council Member, thank you for your huge focus on young people in particular and all that you and the City Council has done, but particularly your achievement today with this recreation center. I'd love to hear from you.

[…]

Thank you. And you will make sure we expeditiously move this. I’m share you will. I'll be hearing from you. Alright, now, going back where I started at the very beginning today, we're celebrating this good news about the recreation center, but we're also dealing with a huge challenge today, and that's the heat we're all facing. And I want everyone to recognize, take this heat situation seriously. Everyone, look, New Yorkers do a great job of looking out for each other. In this situation, please look out for the people in your life, look out for the people on your block and your building. Seniors in particular, make sure they're okay and they have what they need. Everyone's got to stay hydrated. People should not be out in the heat any longer than they have to be. So, take it seriously today and tomorrow – we're talking about temperatures and heat index nearing 100, so this is serious stuff.

Now, the City will have cooling centers open today and tomorrow across all five boroughs. To find those cooling centers – and please, if you need them, take advantage of them, they're a good, safe place to be – you can go to www.nyc.gov/chillout. And, of course, you can call 3-1-1. Anyone who goes to one of these centers, you're going to find there’s social distancing, there’s face coverings. We’re taking very seriously – we have to continue to fight against the coronavirus, but, right now, the heat's front and center. So, you can go to one of these centers and know you'll be safe in every way. And we opened up public pools – a number of public pools this Friday. We have eight more coming this coming Saturday, August 1st. And we'll talk about that again later in the week. But already, we've seen the pools that have opened, a huge number of New Yorkers coming out to enjoy them and appreciate them. And again, doing it safely with all the right social distancing. So, the pools are going to help a lot, and more coming up and opening up this Saturday.

Okay, let's go to our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 – today’s report, 54 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, the threshold 375 – today, 286. And number three, most important, number of people testing positive citywide for a COVID-19, threshold, 15 percent –and today, it's – again, this is the best number we've seen, we've seen a few times, but we're back at it again today – one percent in New York City. That's absolutely outstanding and that's because of all the hard work all of you have put in. And I keep saying it, everybody, please do not let up. I was out and around the city this weekend, I saw a lot of people with face coverings, not as many as I'd like to see. Everyone, remember how important those face coverings are. Keep that social distancing, help the people in your life to remember how important it is.

Let me do a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We have with us here today Assembly Member Bichotte, Council Member Louis, Police Commissioner Shea, Parks Commissioner Silver, Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. With that, we'll start with Andrew from NBC.

Question: Good morning, everybody. Hope everyone is doing well. Mayor, my first question is about schools. Our understanding is that Jumaane Williams, the Public Advocate, today, calling on a one-month delay in the start of the school year, and then, after that, asking that the DOE open it for kids under 10 only. I'm wondering your reaction to that plan and to clarify when exactly will parents know what the plan is at their school?

Mayor: Andrew, what was that last part – when my parents know?

Question: Yeah, because there've been some confusion about you saying you wouldn't make the call until September. So, maybe you can clarify that – but essentially your reaction to Jumaane Williams’ plan to delay the school year. And then, if you could clarify, when exactly parents will know what the plan is at their individual school?

Mayor: Sure. First, appreciate the Public Advocate's suggestions. We'll certainly look at them. Right now, our intention is to open on schedule and to open with all grade levels, but, again, with blended learning – some part of the week kids in school, some part of the week kids online, and then for those kids and families who prefer just online, that will always be an option available to all families. If they want to do all remote at any point, they can do that. So, to the bigger point, Andrew, the fact is – I think I've said it a number of times, I really want to try and nail this point. We, right now, have a plan – plan a is open – open in September, maximum number kids in schools, blended learning. We've talked about it now for weeks and weeks. Every individual school is taking that basic plan and refining it according to their own space reality, and their ability to accommodate kids. And they'll be speaking with their parent community over the next weeks and give them exactly a sense of how the system will go. So, parents will have ample time, weeks ahead of school opening, to know exactly what the schedule will be. We're putting more and more childcare options into play. All of this is moving intensely in a crisis atmosphere. We're creating as we go along. We've got six weeks to put together and we will. But again, remember, the health realities that we see around the country and we see around the world. Today, at late July, we're doing very, very well in New York City. You heard one percent testing positive. We have to hang on to that. Six weeks from now as a long time. So, the logical thing to do is – and we're going to hear from the State in about 10 days or so, they're going to give the basic decision, then we're going to keep building from there. And then, we're going to inform parents of what their specific plan for their school will be. And then, ultimately, we have to see exactly what the health care situation is in the days leading up to school beginning. So, I was a public school parent for the whole time of my kids being in school – right now, parents should plan very clearly on their kids being in school if they want them to be in school. If they prefer them to be remote, that's great, but we're all going to be watching the data, the science, the health care indicators until we get very close to school beginning, and it would be irresponsible not to, Andrew. It would be irresponsible to make a decision in July or in August for something that's going to happen to September. That's what we've learned from looking around the country, make the final decisions based on the facts at that time. Go ahead.

Question: Just as a follow-up to that, what do you think of the idea of delaying the school year for one month so that you really know that the precautions are in place and that you have enough teachers? Because part of what we're hearing is you'll make the plan and then it may be that you don't have enough teachers to make that hybrid plan actually work. So, does it make sense to skew the start of the year to make sure you have the bodies in place and to make sure you have the procedures in place?

Mayor: At this point, no, Andrew, it doesn't add to the equation to delay. Again, we've surveyed parents, they desperately – a huge majority wants to get kids back into school for the right reasons, to help them learn again, and for their social development, because they know it's a safe place, and there's food available, and health support available. So, that is the plan, but we'll watch every step along the way, huge amount of energy and effort is going into working through the pieces. We're working very closely with the unions, representing all the folks who work in our schools. And we have a plan, and if something happens that causes us to need to adjust that plan, we'll talk about it. But, right now, we are moving forward with our plan.

Moderator: Next we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good Juliet, how you been?

Question: I'm fine, thank you. I wanted to bring up the encampment issue. A listener sent me photos of an encampment at Prospect Park Pavilion at Plaza West next to the Green Market. He says he contacted 3-1-1 five times, nothing happened. Called the local precinct, told it's not a police matter. I hear similar stories from others who reach out. So is there a way to have a proactive, consistent response to identify and dismantle these encampments?

Mayor: Yeah. Juliet, thank you for raising that. One, yes, that's what we've had for years. That's why when I said years ago that we were getting rid of the encampments, we set up a system to very systematically make sure they're identified, they were addressed, including offering all the people involved the opportunity to come into shelter and get the services and support they need. So Homeless Services plays a crucial role, obviously, Sanitation, NYPD, any and all agencies we need, some - and Parks Department plays a role and it's worked overwhelmingly. Again, we've had a lot of dislocation in recent months, but we are going to make sure that this is put together clearly and strongly. It is a citywide strategy. To your specific example, I'm glad you're raising it. We're going to go deal with that today. I don't – whenever I get these reports of someone at a precinct said something, I really appreciate if you ever get specifics. I want to make sure the Precinct Commander knows that someone in the precinct said that. Of course, it is a police matter. It's first and foremost the Department of Homeless Services matter, but police are there to assist if needed and no one should ever blow off a problem in the city government, and certainly I want to know why 3-1-1 didn't respond more effectively. So we're going to go do a little bit of investigation and Juliet if you could give us any details you have, that'd be really helpful, but we will address that site today.

Question: Yeah, okay, but my experience with people that I speak to reporting these to me, the responses are very inconsistent. I've seen personally where encampment material is either completely removed, and where there is follow up by the NYPD with local residents on a daily basis, and others where the material is just piled up down the block so that people who return to that spot, just take it back and lay it back out. So, what is the better way to do this? You know, when your office calls out there is the response, but it seems like unless that happens, it's very inconsistent.

Mayor: It should be consistent. It's obviously the former, not the latter. Remove the material and offer the services and not allow the encampment to come back. But Juliet to be fair, we have managed now for years to make sure that we're not the kinds of encampments we had in the past, which were large and numerous in New York City. We'll fight them back every time we'll give people the services they need, but you're actually right. I want a consistent approach and the consistent approach is there's no possibility of the encampment reasserting, but I will tell you having asked many, many people this question, they are a rarity in this city and we want them to be nonexistent.

Moderator: Next, we have Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Thanks. In your State of the State address in February, which of course was the—

Mayor: State of the City.

Question: State of the City, thank you. You said you would be building seven new recreation centers. Does this new one fall within that seven? You know, what's the status of that? Has COVID made that goal unachievable?

Mayor: No, in fact, Dana, we are, we are doubling down on that goal. In the months after the crisis struck with the coronavirus, a lot of things were on hold, but in fact, we made the decision in shifting capital funding from the NYPD to youth centers and recreation centers. That allowed us to reinvigorate the effort because look, we've had to make a lot of tough decisions in our budget and a lot of things couldn't move forward, but finding money from one agency and applying it to another one so we could get this going again that opened the door. So not only in terms of the Nostrand Playground in Flatbush, but also a number of the others that we announced in the last few days around the five boroughs and particularly around NYCHA developments. No, that plan is now back on track.

Thank you, everyone.

2020-07-28 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We all know that beyond the huge health care crisis we've been dealing with, with the coronavirus, we know there's been a massive toll in terms of what's happened in our neighborhoods, our small businesses, our communities. Think particularly about small businesses that are part of the life of our neighborhoods that we depend on so much, how many of them are threatened right now. And that's particularly true in communities of color. We need to do everything we can to help save small businesses, neighborhood businesses, all over the city and help bring them back as we fight back against the coronavirus. So, I want to talk about that and I'm joined by some very special guests today, and we'll talk about that as well. But first I got to talk about the news out of Washington.

The Republicans in the U. S. Senate presented their version of a stimulus plan. But I have to say to Majority Leader McConnell, not much of a stimulus there. In fact, I would call it a nonstarter. This plan literally provides zero support for state and local governments that are fighting through this crisis, that are struggling just to keep basic services going, to provide the health support people need, to make sure that our first responders and our health care heroes will still have their jobs to keep serving us. It slashes – literally this stimulus plan from the Republicans, slashes unemployment benefits at a point where people need them more than ever. It ignores entirely the extent of the hunger crisis. And we know right now in the city, almost two million New Yorkers need food at some point or another in the week. And we're providing food for free to all New Yorkers who need it – 100 million meals served so far for free. The Republican Senate plan just doesn't work. And it certainly fails places that have been hit hardest by the coronavirus like New York City.

So, again, this plan will not work. It is a nonstarter. It literally misses the opportunity to help us fight back, fight this disease, restart our economy. This plan will not help us do that. And we need to see something much better. Once again, the President of the United States remains silent on the topic. We need to fight for a much better, much clearer stimulus. And in the end, think about it now, think about the first responders, the health care heroes, think about the teachers, think about the sanitation workers, all the people we depend on who, right now, don't know if they're going to have their jobs in the future. The very people who fought through this crisis and saved us, don't know what the future looks like not only here, but all over the country. And there is no new revenue coming. So, unless this stimulus happens in Washington on the level we needed to, we won't be able to save the jobs that deserve to be saved. We won't be able to restart our economy. The analogy that I would say is, this is like the Republicans in the Senate saying they have a firetruck and they go to a burning building and they parked the firetruck in front of the burning building, but they refuse to hook up the hose and put out the fire. That's what this plan says to us. It says they aren't interested in actually solving the problem.

Now, a couple more points before we go to our indicators. Very quickly reminding everyone heat advisory continues through today. So, said it a few times and I'll say it again. Be careful. Don't stay out in the heat too much today. Look out for your neighbors. Look out for senior citizens in particular or anyone with a health condition that's challenged by this heat. Anyone who needs help, you can go to nyc.gov/chillout and find out where those cooling centers are. We have public pools now opening up, sprinklers in parks, lots of things to help people cool off. And, of course, you can always call 3-1-1.

Now, let me do one more topic before the indicators and it's something real troubling. We have seen too many times in the last few days painful realities, people injured, and even worse, lives lost, by folks who were just trying to have an enjoyable experience and rented a Revel scooter. Our hearts go out to the family of a young man who died in Queens last night. We've had two fatalities in less than a week. This is an unacceptable state of affairs. So, the City has the power to regulate, to restrict, and even prohibit Revel scooters. We spoke to the company this morning, to the CEO of revel made very clear that it's an satisfactory and unacceptable situation. Revel has made the decision to shut down their service for the time being. And that is the right thing to do, because no one should be running a business that is not safe. And, unfortunately, this has been proven to be not safe. We will work with Revel. We will not allow them to reopen unless we are convinced it can be done safely. I just want people to know that that service will now be shut down as of today.

Finally, turning to our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 – today's report 63 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, threshold 375 today – 295. And finally, percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent – today, the number we've been at for most of the last month or two, two percent in New York City. So, again, well done New Yorkers, but stick to it, please. Let's stick to a disciplined approach and keep that number low. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all we have with us here today, Sideya Sherman, Executive Director of the Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity, Elizabeth Velez, President of Velez Organization, Small Business Commissioner Doris, Maggie Austin, Senior Advisor and Director of the Mayor's Office of Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises, and Senior Advisor, Dr. Varma. With that, we'll start with Henry from PIX11.

Question: Good morning, Mayor. Thank you.

Mayor: How are you doing Henry?

Question: I wanted to get into the stimulus a little bit, or the lack of state and local funding stimulus. You haven't been quite specific about what job cuts, what service cuts you've said they're broad based across the board, something this big has to effect across the board. When do you need to get specific? It seems like rubber's meeting the road in Washington.

Mayor: It is Henry. Look, let's go back a step to see what the House of Representatives did. I want to commend Speaker Pelosi and our house delegation. The House did it right. And by the way, many weeks ago passed a stimulus that provided really ample support for cities and states around the country and would allow New York City to get fully back on our feet and do the things we need to do to protect people and keep our workforce strong. The Senate has countered with nothing, nada. They have countered with a plan that does not even give any help to state and city governments, even though it's abundantly clear all over the country, blue states, red states, there's been a massive revenue loss and these local governments are just going to have to lay off a huge percentage of people if they can't get any money. What we've said in New York City, October 1st is the day that we will have to implement – and I hate it and I hope we don't ever have to do it – but implement layoffs of 22,000 city employees affecting every single agency. So we need this stimulus very quickly, next few weeks to avert that. But if we don't get help, we are literally out of options and we would have to move forward with those layoffs as bad as that would be from New York City. Go ahead, Henry.

Question: Are we still around the $9 billion number? And when will you have to lay out a plan to meet that October 1st deadline? When do you and Speaker Johnson need to get in a room and figure that out?

Mayor: Well, it’s a different reality, Henry. Yes, the $9 billion in revenue loss over the last Fiscal Year in this, that is still the number and I've said very honestly, I pray it doesn't get even worse, but I fear it might because we're seeing very uneven realities with any economic reality, especially given how bad things are and the rest of the country. We're just not seeing the kind of economic rebound that will give us hope of improving our revenue. In fact, it might get worse. But no, the plan was voted in the budget. There's no need to come back with the Council. That's something that was already determined in the budget, but with the understanding we're going to move heaven and earth to avert it both by trying to win that stimulus, and also by working with our unions to see if we can find alternative savings.

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have two questions, the first has to do with small businesses. So, you know, I've spoken to the small business owners or across the city and the common denominator, regardless of which neighborhood or their race is they're having issues paying rent and with insurance. You know, if you run a restaurant that now the capacity that you have with an open restaurant seating is, you know, a 10th of what you could have inside. You're clearly not going to meet the margins you had. So is there anything the city can do and will do beyond, you know, the programs you announced it today. I'm sure your mentorship is fine, but you know, I think it just comes down to dollars and cents for a lot of these businesses. So, what can the city do to help with those financial issues?

Mayor: So, Katie, it's an important question, but I want to first say, I don't agree with you on the restaurants that are using the outdoor space. A lot of them are reporting they actually have more seating outdoor than they had indoor before and there's certainly a lot of them are seeing tremendous customer response and are getting a lot of revenue, thank God, I'm hearing this directly from restaurant owners. I just want to correct that. But I'm sure in some cases, as you say, it's the other way around, I respect that too. In terms of helping them, look, we put forward initially loan and grant programs. Those were immediately snapped up and the federal government came in with a very, very extensive program. As I said, it has helped some of our businesses, not enough of our businesses of color, not enough of our smallest businesses.

We're trying with all the specific policies we talked about today to add more and more to what we can do and this is going to add up to real money because for a lot of businesses, I'm not talking about restaurants now, I'm talking about the whole range of businesses. Again, a single contract for $500,000 can make a huge difference in the middle of this dynamic. So these new pieces directed at people of color businesses, women owned businesses are going to make a big difference. But we also are trying to do a lot locally with all the other tools we already had, Commissioner Doris will speak to that, but remember nothing at this point can replace federal funding and guys, you can ask it a thousand ways, but I'm going to keep coming back to it. We are in a profound fiscal crisis. We're running out of money all the time. The federal government needs to step in with a truly aggressive, truly accessible plan to help small businesses for a lot of these businesses to survive. Meantime, we'll do everything we know how. Commissioner Doris, you want to add?

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Sure, Mr. Mayor, thank you so much. I really appreciate the question. You know, as the Mayor said, we have over 9,000 restaurants in our outdoor seating program. But also, I think the value point that we have to really add here is the insurance industry did not cover the cover pandemic as a covered event, and that is a challenge. It’s a major challenge for a lot of our small businesses who are not able to use their business interruption insurance to get the resources that they need from their insurance company. So, I hear you on insurance, that is a challenge. I know the State is looking into it, the Federal Government as well, but that's a huge challenge right now for our small businesses. On top of that we have been you know, our hotline, 25,000 plus calls to that hotline, webinars, trainings, everything we can, we've connected small businesses to over $75 million in grant and loan programs and we will continue to do that. So, certainly, want small businesses to connect with us at the at SBS if they have challenges, but understand the need. But when you see these structural challenges within the insurance market and then the necessity for federal aid and assistance is really a tantamount to them coming back. Even though we are seeing the rise in businesses coming back, if you move through the phases, the challenges is still there. So absolutely agree with you, Mr. Mayor, we're doing everything we can, but this requires a massive federal response and we'll look forward to seeing that come out of the federal government in order for us to do we need to do here.

Mayor: Jonnel, remind everyone of the phone number that small businesses can call.

Commissioner Doris: Sure. It is 8-8-8-S-B-S-4NYC.

Mayor: Thank you very much. And that – look, I want to emphasize any small business with any kind of challenge or problem, including an insurance problem, a legal problem, a problem in the lease can call that number and we're going to try and intervene to help them. That's why Small Business Services exists. And so any small business owners out there struggling, wondering if they're going to make it, call that number and let's see if we can find a way to help you through.

Moderator: Next we have Michael from the Daily News.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor. You mentioned, I think 22,000 layoffs looming. Could you break down that number? I mean, where are those layoffs going to be seen agency by agency?

Mayor: No, Mike, I can't break that down today. Look, our goal, again, is to avert them all with a proper stimulus and what I'm hoping and praying here is there's going to be enough public outrage over the Senate proposal, that it will push things back in the direction of the House bill, which will give us the kind of resources we need to avert those layoffs. We're also going to work with labor to try and find alternatives, to try and find savings, and that's going to be a union by union effort. So, you're going to see different outcomes depending on the union and the agency. But no, it's not time to outline the specifics. I can only say the number is 22,000 and it will affect every agency.

Moderator: Next we have Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. The Daily News reported several weeks ago that people receive parking summonses for expired inspection stickers, even though the expiration dates since March were extended by the Governor's executive orders. But the Police Department issued instructions to traffic enforcement agents to stop issuing the summons, but, in the meantime, the City's response was that anyone who receives such a summon should plead not guilty. So, I want to know why the City wouldn't simply administratively dismiss every summons instead of asking them to take the affirmative step of pleading not guilty, since it's inevitable that some will be unaware of this directive and will just mistakenly pay the summons.

Mayor: That's a great question. I'm going to give you a compliment today. I think you're right. I mean, I want to hear the nuances from lawyers and others, but I think that makes more sense if we can do that, because, clearly, we don't want people – I mean, no one has any money, we don't want people to have to pay a fine if they don't have to. And we're dealing with an extraordinary exceptional situation. So, let me see if we can move to that approach.

All right. Well everybody, look – as we conclude, I just want to say that we got to remember in this crisis, the ability of this city to bounce back, to fight back, to come back, this is a trait of all New Yorkers. We have done it so many times before. Just the things we've talked about today, We talked about lot of challenges, but we're talking about those challenges in the context of the city that is being looked at across the nation as a heroic city for fighting back against the coronavirus, the way we have for our healthcare heroes, our first responders, everyone who got us through those horrible, horrible months of March and April, our hospital system that held, and then the comeback we've made to the point today, where thank God you see health data that gets better and better all the time because of your hard work. We need to do that on every front. We need to do that to help bring back our economy. We need to do that to address disparities. We need to do that to help our small businesses and what we've talked about today, reorienting more and more of the city's resources to small businesses, particularly in communities of color, making sure that we take our resources and we redistribute them to where they're needed most. That's a New York way of doing things and that's part of how we fight back and part of how we come back. So, so long as there's New Yorkers, anywhere around, you're going to see that spirit of never giving in and finding a way to help our fellow neighbors come back strong, and that's what we're going to do for businesses of color all over the city, through these new initiatives.

Thank you, everybody.

2020-07-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Look, we are close to starting the month of August. That'll be the sixth month dealing with this extraordinary challenge of the pandemic, all the pain, the suffering, the challenges, the dislocation. It’s happening here in the city. It's happening all over the country. And you would think that that would be something that would cause everyone from the federal government on down to cities and towns around this country, everyone to think about how we could pull together, unify, focus on our common enemy, the coronavirus. But no, what do we see from our federal government? Unfortunately, not only has the federal government missed opportunity after opportunity to address the coronavirus but worse, right now, we see our federal government involved in the systematic attack on democracy. What we've been seeing in Portland, Oregon, and the different protestations of the president arguing that he was going to send federal officers and troops into American cities even if they're not welcome, the efforts to undermine freedom of speech, the efforts to discourage people from voting – and not just from the federal government. We've seen in states all over the country, systematically, over recent years, efforts very reminiscent of what people fought against in the 1950s and 60s, trying to win the basic right to vote for people of color. We see systematic efforts to deny the right to vote, particularly aimed at people of color and young people. So, this backdrop, this reality, that right when we should see the most enlightened positive approach, we're seeing very underhanded approaches that hurt our democracy. This is what we all have to fight against. In the City of New York, we use our power to fight against it as well.

So first we need to put this in context. This might be a little bit of a shock to all of you. It's a shock to me, just the calendar, the reality as we're about to enter August. There are two very important dates coming up, and they are a lot sooner than I think we realize. October 31st and November 3rd. October 31st and November 3rd. The first one, October 31st, is the day that we have a deadline for filling out the census, the last day for New Yorkers to be counted. November 3rd, I think I can say this without any fear of contradiction, the most important election in our lifetime. We've heard that phrase a lot of times, guess what? This is actually the one, the most important election in our lifetime. Both those dates, the census deadline and Election Day are less than a hundred days away. So, this is a crucial, crucial time for this city and this country. And we need to do everything we can to make sure that everyone is counted and everyone is heard and everyone votes.

So, first of all, the right to vote – more important than ever right now, and that's why the City of New York supports the New York Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit which demands an extension of the voter registration deadline. Look, this is a constitutional right that people have a right to vote, but there's a problem in this state, a 25-day cutoff before the election. If you haven't registered by that point, you don't get to vote. That makes no sense in the middle of a pandemic. It means a huge number of people are going to be disenfranchised. We need to make it simpler than ever to vote. So, we need to win this case so that thousands and thousands of people who would be disenfranchised, instead participate in November, and are able to have an impact on bringing this city and this country back in the midst of this pandemic. Absolutely crucial that people be able to register right up until Election Day.

And then as I mentioned the census – now, again, this is a constitutional provision that says every American must be counted. And yet we see incessant efforts to undermine that from the president and the federal government. Look, again, why does the census matter? Because it determines how much federal funding we get, it determines whether we're going to be able to have the kind of mass transit we need, the kind of education for our kids we need. It's very tangible, let alone the fact that determines how much representation we have in Congress. The president is suggesting that he has the power, he alone has the power to exclude undocumented people from that count. Well, Mr. President, you don't have that power. That power resides in the U. S. Constitution, not in the Sharpie in your desk. The Constitution says everyone in the country needs to be counted. And that's what we intend to do. And this week we're in the middle of a Week of Action all over the city at the grassroots to get people to answer that census, to be counted. I'm going to be out in Queens later on today myself, reaching out to my fellow New Yorkers, telling them how important it is to get counted. I want to encourage everyone to be a part of this. And now to tell you about it, is someone who's done extraordinary work building a huge grassroots effort to get the people of New York City counted, and she has brought energy and creativity to the task. And I really want to thank her for her amazing efforts and her amazing team that she's assembled. I want you to hear from our New York City Census Director, Julie Menin.

Director Julie Menin, NYC Census 2020: Well, thank you so much, Mr. Mayor, and it's great to be with all of you here today. So, I want to give a quick update on where we are in terms of the census. The city's self-response rate as of yesterday is 54.1 percent. So, to put that into context, we are eight points behind the nationwide average. In 2010, we were 14 points behind the nationwide average. So, we actually are closing the gap between the city's self-response rate and the country’s. But with that said, we have a long way to go. And so, as the Mayor said, we have launched a Census Week of Action. We are in the streets all over New York City in safe, socially distant activities in parks and playgrounds. And that hard work I think is really paying off because we've seen incredible self-response rates in the past couple of weeks in particular, three times the national average, but we really need all New Yorkers to participate.

We have phone banked 1.2 million New Yorkers. We have done peer-to-peer texting to 5.8 million New Yorkers. We have 16 different ad campaigns in 26 different languages. But I do want to say that COVID is perhaps the starkest reminder about why the census matters. If more New Yorkers would have filled the census out in 2010, we would have had more money today for Medicaid, for our health centers. And in addition, the New York City Health Department utilizes the census data in an emergency. So, whether it was the measles outbreak last year, where they looked at census data to determine vaccines, hopefully one day there will be a vaccine for COVID, so this is a time where New Yorkers need to fill the census out and really lean into that.

I also want to mention what the Mayor talked about, about interference by the Trump administration. Just last week New York City joined as a plaintiff along with the lawsuit that is led by Attorney General Tish James. We're a plaintiff on this suit because the Trump administration is once again trying to patently, unconstitutionally interfere with the census. And so, we need to put a stop to that. But it doesn't really stop there. Most recently this week, Republicans in Congress are seeking to block the Census Bureau's requests for additional time to conduct the census. So, we're again seeing this interference and that's why we really need all New Yorkers to stand up and fill the census out. If you haven't filled it out, it's very easy – 10 minutes, 10 questions. You just go to my2020census.gov to be counted. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you, Julie. Thank you, again, to you and your great team for everything you're doing, and let's finish strong here. And I just want to say to all New Yorkers – look, I can't tell you how many people have said to me, so much going on, so many challenges, how can I help? What can I do? Everybody, if you want to help, get counted, help others get counted. All you need to do is take those few minutes to make sure your household is fully registered in the Census and get other people in your life to do the same. It makes a huge difference – something everyone can do.

Okay. Speaking of things that everyone can do, we see amazing efforts around the city, grassroots efforts to fight back against the virus, to build back communities, to envision transformation, because, I'll say it again, we are not just going to come back as a city, we're going to come back stronger, better, fairer. I had a wonderful Zoom conference last night with an extraordinary group of leaders led by Congress Member Adriano Espaillat, leaders of northern Manhattan and the Bronx. The group is called Uptown West Bronx Vanguard, and really impressive work laid out to me – a vision of how to address a lot of the most pressing issues that the communities are experiencing. And we're talking about communities have been through a lot in this crisis and before, now, want to fight those disparities and come back stronger – tangible, real proposals – very moving proposals, particularly in the area of mental health. So, I want to thank everyone in the Vanguard group for what you've put together. Our task force on racial inclusion and equity is going to follow up with you to find ways to get going right away on addressing the issues of folks in Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx. But there's nothing more powerful than community people offering their own vision for change. So, thank you for your good work, everyone.

Now, let's go to our indicators. First, the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 – today's report, 84 patients. Daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, threshold 375 – today's report, 290. And the percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent – today, again, two percent. That's been our number generally for many, many weeks, and that's a very good number.

Finally, a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We have with us here today New York City Census 2020 Director Menin, Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Mostofi, Test and Trace Corps Executive Director Dr. Long, Laura Wood, Special Counsel of DemocracyNYC, and Senior Advisor. Dr. Varma. We have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Hey. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. How are you today?

Mayor: Good, Andrew. How do you feel?

Question: I'm hanging in there. So, my first question has to do with schools. Our understanding is the DOE is going to be, or has asked for an extension to submit its plans for each of the 1,800 school buildings until August 14th. And our understanding is that the State will indeed grant that extension. That doesn't seem to leave a whole lot of time between August 14th and the scheduled first day of school, September 10th, for parents to plan. I'm wondering if you can address that and what you make of that?

Mayor: Yeah. Andrew, that's not my understanding. My understanding is that the main plan for the whole school system is due on Friday and it will be submitted on Friday. A lot of work has gone into that plan over the last few months, we're going to be ready. Now, we're talking about individual plans for 1,800 schools. There's no place else in the State that comes close to having to put together individual plans for 1,800 schools. They will be submitted two weeks later. My understanding is school districts around the country are doing the same – excuse me, around the state are doing the same thing, submitting the individual school plans after they submit their district plans. But look, this work is moving intensely. We are going to show the people in New York City more and more in a very visual manner, the work that's being done to prepare schools, we're going to get parents their specific schedules in about two weeks or so everyone knows exactly what they're dealing with, has time to make arrangements. We – a ton of work is going into getting this right and a huge amount of listening to educators, to parents, to school staff, to figure out what they need, so everyone could be safe. Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: My second question has to do with the statewide crackdown on bars and restaurants with all the violations, suspended licenses. Our understanding is that the State Liquor Authority has essentially doubled the number of inspectors. They're all kind of secret inspections. I'm wondering, have we reached the point of gotcha on this situation? Are these violations amounting to anything particularly given what your Test and Trace Corp says, which is there has not been even the slightest uptick ever since New York went to outdoor dining and drinking?

Mayor: Yeah. The first, let's go over the bigger facts because I think it's important. So, the last 24 hours, the most recent report we got from the State, 198 new cases that's very striking compared to where we were for a long time. And obviously we've been at one percent to two percent in citywide testing now for many weeks. So clearly the big picture is positive because the vast majority of New Yorkers are doing the right thing. The vast majority of restaurant and bar owners are doing the right thing. The vast majority of their patrons are doing the right thing. There's no question in my mind about that. Now we do need to be vigilant when there's a problem. In fact, the State Liquor Authority works with our City Sheriff Office. They do combined operations and where a bar or a restaurant is consistently not following the rules, there should be consequences, and, Andrew, I think it sends a message to all the other folks to fly right. But notice the open restaurant program now is well over 9,000 restaurants, but we're talking about the number of bars or restaurants that have been shut down is really a handful comparatively. So I think it proves the point. Most people are getting it right, but enforcement is still needed.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from The Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor and everyone else on the call. I just want to step back for a minute and ask a bit of a broader question. Mr. Mayor, more and more at these briefings you've challenged the premise of questions posed to you by some of the biggest news outlets in the city, insisting that there's a fallacy in the very question rather than answering directly. Do you think that maybe you simply have a very different perception of reality in this city than most New Yorkers?

Mayor: No, I think I have a perception of life in this city because I've spent so much time with my fellow New Yorkers. Look, I respect deeply the free press, and I've said to you, in fact specifically Julia and many others, thank you for raising issues that we needed to know about or problems we needed to address. But I've been in public life 20 years nonstop in this city, all over with the natives of the city, talking to people, listening to people, watching their lives, understanding their lives. I see the world from the perspective of how can I help people? How can I address their problems? The media has a different imperative and that's fine. Everyone has a different role to play. But when I hear a question, if I think it's not factually based, or I think it's a misinterpretation of what's going on, I'm going to say it, and I actually think that's doing right by my fellow New Yorkers to let them know my perspective. They elected me to make decisions on their behalf. I want to let them know what I think if a question doesn't make sense to me, I'm going to say it. Go ahead.

Question: Yeah, just to follow up on that. You said that, you know, you've spent your life talking to people, listening to people, watching their lives, that's actually exactly what journalists do and whether it's the New York Post and New York Times, WNYC, the Wall Street Journal, Hamodia, Bloomberg, nearly every reporter who's been on these calls you object to the premise of their question, so how can you square that?

Mayor: I just said it, Julia. I have – if I think something's not factually correct, or a misinterpretation of reality, my job is to tell people the truth as I know it.

Moderator: Next we have Rich from WCBS880.

Question: Mr. Mayor, good morning.

Mayor: Hey, how you doing Rich?

Question: Well, a little frog in the throat there evidently. So I want to ask you about a New York Times piece which finds a number of workers in it calling the contact tracing program, a disaster. What's your reaction to that?

Mayor: It’s ridiculous. You're always going to find some individual employees who have a gripe. The question is what is that initiative achieving? It's extraordinary. It's by far the largest test and trace program in the United States, thousands of good people doing the work, reaching their fellow New Yorkers. As you heard the presentation from Dr. Long last week, depending on which estimate you use, between 2,000 and 5,000 further infections have been stopped because of the presence of test and trace. It's playing a crucial role in addressing people coming in from outside the city who need to be followed up on and quarantined. No, I think it's achieving – Test and Trace Corp is achieving extraordinary things, and I thank God we had it, thank God we have it. Because imagine what is happening in places where you see these massive surges, they rushed ahead without the data and science, they didn't have that kind of test and trace capacity. There's a direct correlation there, Rich. They didn't have the ability to track people and make sure that they were getting the quarantining or support they needed. And lo and behold, you saw an explosion of cases. So no, I think we're in a good place with it. Go ahead, Rich.

Question: Okay. A second question is about the DOE, which is apparently cut funds for a so- called Bridge Year Program, meaning high school seniors, apparently, will not be able to take college classes which evidently they were under this program. Is there any chance you think that could be revived or does the fiscal situation dictated it has to be cut?

Mayor: Yeah, Rich, there is a lot of different pieces at the Department of Education. So I'll be honest with you, I need to check on the status of that. There were some things that weren't going to be doable either from a budget perspective or logistical perspective, but obviously we want to do the best we can for our seniors. They're going to go through a lot this year. Let me find out more about that and we'll give you an update today.

Moderator: Last question for today, we're going to go to Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How are you?

Question: Okay. I'd like to ask you about the Senate bill on a stimulus and how inadequate you feel it is?

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Question: How inadequate you feel it is. The – I'm wondering, you know, what you're doing in terms of being the leader of the largest U.S. city in terms of building a coalition with Republican mayors, Republican governors, they're all in the same boat that New York City is to one extent or another. Where is the coalition building going on that can persuade the Senate to move its bill in a more generous direction?

Mayor: It's a very powerful question. Henry. The coalition-building has been going on since well before the House passed its bill. I've been a part of numerous meetings with U.S. Conference of Mayors, and I want to say, people should understand this, a lot of Republican mayors have been a part of leading this effort and we have strategized together. It's been very productive and the goal really, honestly, we understand the challenges 10 or 12 Republican senators who could be moved most productively and getting grassroots efforts in those states. So the whole effort has been to support Democratic and particularly Republican mayors in key states, get the message out, build from the grassroots, build support from the business community. I mean, I have to say I'm shocked by sometimes the allies you have, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has weighed in favor of state and local aid. Build the broadest national coalition, but the real focus Henry has been in the states where those swing votes are with the senators and trying to build the voices of everyday people in those states, business leaders, clergy leaders, unions, everyone coming together to put pressure on those senators and the work with my fellow mayors, I've been really impressed by everyone's coordination and there's been no daylight between the Democratic and Republican mayors in terms of pushing for this stimulus.

With that, everyone. Let me just finish, and since we're talking about the federal government, I'm going to pull it back to the census, and again, this is our Census Action week. I need everyone to get involved in this. Look, parallel this to what we've done on the coronavirus – this city should be so proud, and I hear as I'm talking to all those mayors around the country, they're in awe of what the people of New York City have achieved. That we were the epicenter, we went through hell and yet we've come back so strong because people are all in this together and let's do the same thing with the census. If you're angry, every time you see New York City not get its fair share, fill out that census form, get everyone in your life to fill out that census form. If you are angry when you see a tax on our democracy, fill out that census form. If you want to make sure New York City gets the maximum support for restarting, rebuilding, fill out that census form. If we all put our energy into it, the way we had fought back the coronavirus, we can actually do something extraordinary and help secure the future of New York City. So, everyone, let's do that together. Thank you very much.

2020-07-30 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. When we wake up to news that’s almost impossible to comprehend, and today is one of those days, and I'm going to talk about this and I'm going to talk about how troubling it is, but I'm also going to remind us that we're going to have to fight through everything that's being thrown at us, just like generations before. This is an extraordinarily difficult time, layer upon layer of crisis, but we won't give up in the midst of this. And I have to say, sometimes you see things that just are astounding, even with all the shocks we've experienced recently. So, the news this morning, the single largest drop in the gross domestic product of this nation in its history. That's what we've lived through over these last five months. It's almost impossible to comprehend. As recently as February, a thriving economy, this city, in many ways, the strongest it's ever been, and look what we all have been put through. And look at the human cost, look what's happening in every neighborhood of the city to hardworking families. Look how much people have been through, and there's so much more ahead. That's the honest truth. We, of course, need to recognize, first of all, the impact on lives, the impact on families in terms of those we've lost. Our nation now has lost over 150,000 people. And as people are grappling with that pain, as people are trying to find a way forward in their lives. One of the few things that helped was that unemployment support from the federal government – that is expiring tomorrow. People depended on those $600 checks, and now they're gone. So, it's sobering. It's painful. We cannot be defeated by it, but we have to look at it squarely in the eye and deal with it.

What we need right now more than ever is the federal government to remember the lessons of history and step up and invest in the American people, invest in people here in New York City, do something decisive. And instead, we see the exact opposite. The Senate majority, blocking a new stimulus bill. This is – you know, we often talk about paralysis and Washington, gridlock in Washington – this is not gridlock, this is sabotage. Literally standing in the way of a stimulus when people in this country are in desperate, desperate shape, and it can't go on like this. We all, every one of us, regardless of our party affiliation, regardless of what our lifestyle is, our place in the economy, where we live, whatever it is, we all with one voice need to say the federal government must provide a stimulus immediately to save this country and save this city. And we are not seeing that from the U.S. Senate. So, now, this is where I would normally call upon the chief executive officer of our country to do something. That's exactly what it would take. Literally, a few sentences out of Donald Trump's mouth would change the reality in the U.S. Senate. All he would have to do is care enough to say the Senate must provide that unemployment support to every-day Americans. The Senate must put the money in to revive our economy, bring us back, help cities and states be whole. If he just said that, it would happen – and he will not say a word. But is he saying today? He’s suggesting that the fall election should be postponed. Now, let's be plain. This is the act of a tyrant, a president who in the midst of crisis has not taken responsibility for the lives of his people – the fact that folks are losing jobs right and left, people are hurting, he's taken no responsibility for that, he's only trying to save his own skin. And he knows he's going to lose the election, so he's calling for it to be postponed, which has never happened in the history of the United States in times of war or peace, depression, you name it. We do not postpone our national elections.

So, I think a lot of people, even some people had supported President Trump are going to look at that and say, no, that is abrogation of responsibly, but, more importantly, that's in the assault on our democracy and it cannot stand. We need to have that election on time. We need to have the election so the American people can make their decision. That election has less than a hundred days away. A new government is less than six months away, potentially, that could help us to move forward. So, that election must happen. But, in the meantime, every one of us needs to fight for that stimulus. And think about, again, the human reality for so many families, what it's going to mean to no longer have the support they were getting. Just to think about what people will not be able to afford. There are families right now, working class families, even middle-class families trying to choose between food or medicine or the basics of life. And those choices are going to get tougher and tougher. We're going to be there – we're always going to be there for the people that city, so we're always going to provide free food for anyone who needs it, we're going to provide free health care for anyone who needs it. But the burdens are getting greater and greater. So, what can we rely on? We can rely on each other in New York City, because we've proven time again that New Yorkers stand by each other, support each other. This city will do everything we possibly can to help the people in the city. And I know in every neighborhood there are people helping, helping each other through. And we're going to have to lean hard on each other to get through this crisis.

Now, while our federal government isn't acting, I want to give credit to New York State, because they're doing something that's going to reach a lot of people. And eligible New York State residents will have an opportunity to get additional unemployment benefits, up to 20 additional weeks of unemployment benefits. That's crucial for a lot of families. So, anyone who qualifies for this, please take advantage of this right away. You can go online at labor.ny.gov and get that support. And we have to, here in the city, keep helping people to survive, to move forward business by business, job by job, person by person. We know that our recovery will depend on building back jobs and it will be painstaking work. Our federal government used to know this. A great New Yorker, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, use that concept of giving people jobs in their hour of need, that was one of the most foundational ideas the New Deal. That's how we got out of the Great Depression. One day, I want to believe our federal government will get it again and fund a massive jobs program so people can really get the employment they need and their families can come back and our economy can come back. But, in the meantime, what we need to do is prepare people for the jobs that are starting to come back, even if it's much slower than we want and working toward the day where people get back on their feet. So, our Department of Small Business Services is, right now, providing free training to get people ready to come back into the economy. There are areas of the economy that are still strong and will grow again. There are jobs that need to be filled. We need to get people ready for them. And here to tell you how we're going to do it, our Commissioner for Small Business Services Jonnel Doris.

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Thank you, sir. As you said, Mr. Mayor, New Yorkers have been going through a hard time and many have lost their jobs of no fault of their own. We know that this is in our immigrant community, our people of color, and also our young people who are getting hit the hardest. But we're here to help at SBS, and we've been doing that throughout this pandemic. We're here to provide the training, the resources that they need. We've already connected and worked with 37,000 New Yorkers. We will continue to work with additional New Yorkers as they call into our hotlines and seek the support that they need. We are training them in in-demand skills for our tech industry, health care, industrial, media and entertainment industry. We are working with them in home health aide, in commercial drivers as well. We're also working with our workforce one centers, 18 workforce one centers across the city who have been working virtually to assist New Yorkers to get jobs that they so critically need.

Since mid-March, we have worked with over 500 employers to fill 9,800 jobs. Whereas we're currently working with those employers to fill 3,600 jobs. So, listen, if you're a New Yorker and you need assistance and you need support, please make sure that you visit us on our website nyc.gov/workforce. But before I turn it back to the Mayor, you know, this work is critical work and our essential workers have been doing an amazing job, getting us back to where we are now. We had some job seekers who came into our virtual workforce one centers who were looking for support and help and we were able to help them. John, who was looking for a pivot in his career, didn't have a job, was seeking help and support, came to our workforce one center. He's now employed as a transport and nurse – transport- nurse in our Health + Hospital care system – that's happened. As of April, we're continuing to do that to hundreds of New Yorker. Also, Maria, at foreign-born New Yorker who was seeking also work, who was out of work because of COVID, was able to come back and get support from my workforce one centers and get a job and is not working in our Health + Hospital systems as well, and also working with patients who are tested positive, the elderly, in particular, for COVID-19. So, look, we're here to help and assist you no matter what your concerns and needs are. You can call 3-1-1 or you can meet us nyc.gov/workforce.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Jonnel. Appreciate what you and everyone at Small Business Services is doing to help people get back on their feet. So, this is something we're going to be talking about for a long time – how are we going to bring back New York City, how we're going to bring back jobs, how we’re going to get people connected to jobs, how are we going to help people get into the industries that will grow again. We have a lot of work to do ahead in the city and we're going to be talking about a lot over the coming weeks and months. But we continue to face the immediate challenges. And right when we're dealing with this huge difficult news on a national scale, we've got an immediate challenge right here in Brooklyn that I want to bring to your attention. We got a warning this morning from Con Edison, and there is a problem in Southern Brooklyn. I really want to urge people to act quickly. We've got to protect our electricity supply for all New Yorkers. We've got to make sure we avoid any disruptions in our electricity. Right now, there is a problem with some of the equipment in Southern Brooklyn. And so, if you live in the following neighborhoods, I'm going to you to pay special attention, and I'm going to ask for your help. So, residents of Bay Ridge, Fort Hamilton, South Park Slope, Greenwood, and Sunset Park. Again, Bay Ridge, Fort Hamilton, South Park Slope, Greenwood, and Sunset Park. If you live in those neighborhoods, your electric supply is in danger right now. There's something you can actually do to help us address this, which is to avoid using major appliances, avoid washers, dryers, microwaves, limit air conditioning use as much as possible. Hopefully, this is something that gets resolved in the course of the day, but every-day people can make an impact here and we really want to make sure you did not have your electricity disrupted. So, everyone, please take this warning seriously, please act on it, and we will do everything in our power, and we will push Con Ed hard to resolve this situation quickly.

All right, going to go now to our daily indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 – today, 87 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospital’s ICU’s, threshold 375 – today, 299. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide for COVID positive, the threshold 15 percent – today, again, this good number we've been at for a long time, two percent.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator We will now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're also joined today by Commissioner Doris and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question for today goes to Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to follow up on what you have said about the stimulus just now. What are you doing in terms of working with the congressional delegation, other elected leaders to prevent everything that you were talking about? What have you been doing in terms of reaching out to them? What are they saying? And what is the city's plan, from you personally, to do whatever is needed so that these benefits can be extended?

Mayor: Yeah, it's really – what we talked about yesterday in some length, it's not about our congressional delegation. Our Congress members have been all over this doing everything they can and obviously the House under Speaker Pelosi passed an exemplary stimulus bill months ago. This is about the US Senate. It's about particular Senators who are really the swing votes here, and it is obviously about President Trump. So what we have seen, it's been shocking how the President's been unwilling to call for a serious stimulus, unwilling to call for aid to cities and states. He's been brushing off the stimulus lately as if it doesn't matter at all. And again he's in freefall. He is guilty of so many fundamental errors in this, both the health crisis and in the economic situation, that now he's trying to distract by talking about canceling an election. So clearly we do not depend on him to do anything. It comes down to the US Senate and so where I've put my energies in recent weeks is working with fellow mayors, including Republican mayors, to focus on those key senators, to mobilize mayors in their states, to put pressure on them, to mobilize people in their states, to get the business communities, labor, clergy, everyone pushing those senators because they are the difference makers.

Moderator: Next is Derick Waller from ABC7.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. This is Derek with Channel Seven. How are you doing?

Mayor: I’m doing good, Derick, how are you?

Question: I'm doing great. And my first time calling in here, very exciting.

Mayor: Well, we're happy to have you Derick.

Question: I have a question because some neighbors who live on the Upper West side reached out to me and I understand that the Department of Homeless Services has, you know, rented out a number of hotels. I know the reason is for social distancing, certainly nobody wants to have an outbreak of coronavirus in a homeless shelter, we understand that. The concern that was raised to me was that there was a lack of community involvement in placing some of these shelters, and specifically the issue is that someone learned, I guess, did some research and found out that there were some level two sex offenders staying at least at one property, and you know, neighbors were concerned about that, basically that they feel like they were left out of the process. And my question is, was there any way, you know, without, you know, dealing with privacy laws, I guess, was there any way to make neighbors feel like they had more of a say in that process? And –

Mayor: Okay, Derick. Okay. Let's – look again, I want everyone to try and get to the question. So look, you started, I think exactly at the right place. God forbid that anyone ends up homeless, but people are both homeless and dealing with the reality of this disease in a shelter system that was meant, obviously, to be able to have a certain number of people and we've months ago decided we had to spread people out because of social distancing. That meant we had to have more space. We should always work with communities, but in a crisis environment, there's not always time to do, you know, the idealized community outreach, but any community concerns must be addressed. And so what I've always instructed Department of Homeless Services to do is when communities raise concern, meet with people, hear their concerns, make adjustments, address the issue. Now there's one case, I don't know if it's where you're referring to here or somewhere else, there was one case this week where a really bad mistake was made and someone who was a sex offender who should not have been in a shelter was, and that was caught quickly and immediately fixed. That's not acceptable. We can't have that happen. It must be avoided at all costs. So anyone who's concerned that that happened, they are have a right to be concerned and we have to make sure it doesn't happen again. But in terms of hearing communities, I think the best that we can do in a crisis atmosphere like this is get people into safe shelter settings, where we're not going to run the risk of spreading the coronavirus and then work with communities to make it as fair and appropriate for the community as possible. Go ahead, Derick.

Question: I think that really answered my question. Yeah, I think that people were just concerned that they didn't have a say here, so thank you very much.

Mayor: Thank you, Derick.

Moderator: The next is Marcia from CBS.

Question: Mayor, I know you made an impassioned plea to President Trump to deliver money for local aid to localities and stimulus money, but when talking to Congressman Peter King about the inability of the delegation to deliver for New York, he said it's a very tough sell with Republican Senators because they're very upset about a number of things in New York City, including the fact that you painted the Black Lives Matter mural in front of Trump Tower. I wonder if you regret that and if you think that the President is regarding it as provocative, that the Republican Senators are regarding it as provocative, and if maybe you think you shouldn't have done it?

Mayor: No Marcia, not at all. Respecting millions of our fellow New Yorkers, people of African descent who have been disrespected for so long, this is necessary in this moment. It was exactly the right thing to do to paint that mural and we're going to keep sending that message constantly that Black Lives Matter in New York City. They need to matter all over the country. That has nothing to do with the stimulus. The stimulus should be acted on for every part of this country. You heard the statistic this morning, as scary as all hell that our economy is going through a such decline, has nothing to do with politics anymore, who likes who. This should be, from my point of view, the Republican Senators should be thinking about the self-preservation of this country, not politics and pass that stimulus for everyone. Go ahead.

Question: My second question, Mr. Mayor has to do with the barricades that are up around Carl Schurz Park in your backyard. A number of people have complained that they can't get to the park and that there haven't been any protests there for a long time and they wonder why they can't be taken down. Would you consider asking the NYPD to take them down so people can use the park?

Mayor: I've had the conversation with NYPD, Marcia, that they should balance all the factors. We want to make sure that, yeah, as much as possible, people can use all spaces, we got to make sure it's safe and done the right way, and I know they're working to sort that out. So we'll keep working on that over the next few days.

Moderator: The next is Gersh from Streetsblog. 

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Gersh. How you doing?

Question: Fine, can’t complain. I'm just looking at the question here. So this morning your Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg was on a Zoom call with City Law, and she said that your suspension of alternate side of the street parking has actually made it more difficult for the DOT to install bike lanes, and as a result, they're not being installed as quickly as they might have been in the past. You made the change in alternate side of the street, because in your words, you want it to lighten the burden on car owners. Now with what Trottenberg is saying, it seems that in lightening that burden, you've actually endangered cyclists and prevented her from doing her job you say you want, which is to increase cycling. So, A, did you talk to Trottenberg about that? And B, how will you solve this new problem you created?

Mayor: Look, Gersh, this the first I’m hearing. I've been with Polly with numerous meetings and calls, and she's never raised that to me. If that's a concern, I want to hear about and we'll work on it. Obviously, one thing that, Gersh, I will constantly remind you is this administration has greatly increased the number of bike lanes in this city, seeing the explosion of Citi Bike usage in our time. We created Vision Zero from scratch in this city, and it's been working to protect people. We know where we're going and we want to keep doing more of all of this. There also is a really legitimate problem when people who do own cars have to constantly move those cars around, have to circle around looking for parking. I don't like that one bit. If we can minimize that we, need to. But we'll look at all the factors and figure out how to balance them. Go ahead.

Question: Then in a related question, you know, Commissioner Trottenberg in the same Zoom call admitted that compared to London and Paris, New York City has done virtually nothing to expand pedestrian cycling during the coronavirus crisis. Now you and [inaudible] Transportation Committee, members of which clearly recommended efforts on the scale of other world-class cities. So when will we see some of those plans rolling out?

Mayor: Again, New York City is just a different place I've said to you before. We're going to make decisions based on our particular reality. I am certain, you are attempting your best to interpret what Polly said, but I'd like to hear it from her respectfully directly, and to not hear your interpretation. I think the fact is we want to keep expanding every conceivable option and alternative, and we've seen how effective things like Open Streets have been. We keep expanding that we keep expanding bike lanes. We want to see how far we can take both of them. We’re – obviously did something that I was surprised didn't get more attention by putting a group of bus ways in place, starting with 14th Street in the new ones we announced. This is the direction we're moving in. So I think everyday people can see these changes and feel these changes, and my goal is to see how far we can take all of them.

Moderator: We time for two more for today. The next two Suzannah from Crain’s.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask about property taxes. When do you think we can expect to see data on how much property tax revenue the city received as of the July deadline?

Mayor: I don't know that answer Suzannah, but we'll get it for you. Obviously there's a pretty regular system for when we have that number. We're all worried about every form of revenue declining obviously, because people are going through so much, there's so many challenges, but we can get you that information soon. Go ahead.

Question: And my follow-up, do you have any sense of whether the revenue was significantly lower than usual?

Mayor: I am concerned across the board. I don't have the specifics on that, but I'm concerned across the board, we see a cascading reality. People are hurting more and more and that's affecting revenue deeply and that's affecting our ability to serve people and to employ our workforce, to provide those basic services. This is a really, really tough situation. It's – again, it's like – it’s as clear as it could be, why this is exactly the scenario where you need a huge federal stimulus to stop this from continuing to cascade downward, and that's why I'm so worried right now, you know, the famous historical analogy from Ancient Rome where Emperor Nero was fiddling while Rome burned. That's what President Trump is doing right now, and he should be the one, the loudest voice for a huge stimulus to save us from this cascading reality, not just New York City, everywhere and again, he is silent and he is dithering in this moment. So I am very, very concerned that we're going to see declined revenue, especially based on the information that we heard this morning.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor. I was wondering in regards to the expiration of the unemployment assistance, do you have anything concrete on how that will affect the city? You know, how many New Yorkers number one are going to lose it. How much money it might take out of the economy and for instance, any estimate of how many more people might be from food insecure or rely on free food when this goes away.

Mayor: It's a great question, Erin, and obviously as recently as the last few days, we really were hoping and praying that the federal government was going to avert this. I honestly thought the Republicans would believe it was not only the morally right thing to do, but just out of sheer practicality, they would not want to see the American economy crash more. I'm shocked they can't get it together to do this. Maybe today's news will actually force their hand. So we all were working from everything we're hearing in Washington on the assumption that it would be an extension, and now that you know, the last few days have been very, very troubling. We'll get you whatever estimates we have. But I would say to you, huge impact on the people in New York City – will definitely stress so many people in terms of their rent and the potential eviction. This is again why we need the leaders in Albany to act on a plan to allow people to stay in their homes and payback that rent later when they are able to get income again, if they've lost their income, we have to have that. We need that soon, and I'll keep talking about that. When the legislature comes back, that's a priority they have to address, especially because of loss of these benefits, and on the food side, I think undoubtedly more people will become food insecure. We think that's over 2 million people right now. This will probably mean hundreds of thousands more, and I will only say to every single New Yorker, again, if you need food, we will provide you as much food as you need for your family for free, constantly, all you have to do is call 3-1-1, and we'll show you where you can get it. Or if you can't get to a site, we'll deliver it to you. So that is a pledge the City of New York makes to all his people. No one will go hungry in this city. Go ahead Erin.

Question: Okay, great, and then my second question is, is just sort of a broader question. You know, we're in Phase Four, Phase Four is the last phase. There's nothing else planned. Obviously a lot of things are still closed. There's no timeline for things like indoor dining or malls or museums or anything like that. But my question is essentially, are there any milestones on the horizon, any targets, anything that we're attempting at this point to progress towards now that we've gotten through all the phases, but we're still kind of in a holding pattern?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question. Erin, I'd say a couple of things. I think we have a natural inflection point coming up after Labor Day where we expect to see more economic activity, even given today's very troubling news. It still makes sense that there's always some pickup after Labor Day people coming off the summer. We know a lot of people were trying to restart their businesses and want to take a little more time. I think you'll see some of those folks come back now. We're working hard and we've got a lot more to say tomorrow on the opening of schools and that's going to be an important moment and that will be both important, especially for kids and families, but also will have an impact on the whole economy. So that's an inflection point. I think the other very obvious inflection point is a vaccine, which, you know, some believe will be the fourth quarter of this year, some believe will be the first or second quarter of next year, but it's in the scheme of things pretty soon, that will be the profound difference maker. But what we're going to do in the meantime is start to lay out the vision for how to bring back the New York City economy in stages, and the things that we will have to do before. There's a vaccine, and then once there is a vaccine to rebuild our economy so not the same boundaries as the phases, but we want to start laying out plans for how each industry can start to come back slowly but surely, and then really have a rebound once there is a vaccine.

So with that, look, everyone I'll just finish on that point because it flows right into it. No one could possibly you can't overstate this crisis. I, you know, there's, there's never been, I mean, it really has never been this much put on the City of New York at one point in the history. We've been through wars, we've been through depressions, we've been through 9/11, Sandy, obviously before this, the Great Recession we've been through so much, but we never had so many pieces happening simultaneously, and it could cause anyone to worry that, that there may not be a turnaround up ahead, but I'm going to keep saying, I am absolutely convinced. The history tells us that New York City always comes back because of New Yorkers. There are a lot of places suffering, but there's no place that has New Yorkers except New York City. There's no place as this much creativity and ingenuity and entrepreneurship and energy. There's no place on earth that has what we have, and it is painful that so much of that is being held back by the reality we're living in now, but it will come forth again and we will rebuild and we will address some of the underlying issues that we should have addressed a long, long time ago. So it's sometimes hard to have that hope, but I think history gives us some very good examples, but also what we see every single day, give a New Yorker, even the slightest chance to make a comeback and they'll make that come back. So we're going to find a way, it will take time, but we're going to find a way in this city, and anytime you hear people saying that there's no end in sight and there's no way out, please remind them. We've been through so many challenges before so many times where it actually felt like there was no end in sight, but we found a way forward. That's what New Yorkers do. Thank you, everybody.

2020-07-31 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, this morning, we're going to talk about the most important piece of reopening this city, restarting this city, the thing that matters so deeply to our children and our families, and that's starting our schools up again. And it is something we all feel deeply about passionately about because it's about our kids and it's about their futures and it's about their health and safety. So, we're going to talk about that today to give you a sense of what will come up ahead in September. But first I want to take a moment because it's an important time of year for so many New Yorkers. So, I want to wish our Muslim sisters and brothers a safe and blessed Eid Al-Adha. And this is a celebration that is so important in the Muslim community. It will be different this year, obviously, because of what we're all facing with the coronavirus but the community is strong. Like every community in New York City, people are sticking together, helping each other out. So, I want to say to everyone, Eid Mubarak, wish you a wonderful holiday.

Now, when we think each year about going back to school, this is a very, very important time of the year, it's a time filled with anticipation in normal years, anticipation, hope, possibility, worries, anxiety. We all know what that felt like when we were kids. And I can say this as someone who was a public school parent for the entire education of both of my kids that back to school time was always a very, very special time each year. Now this year it's filled with so many other strong emotions and this year it's filled with a whole different reality because this year it's about health and safety first. That's what we're going to be talking about today. Everything we do is going to be focused on health and safety – health and safety for our kids, our families, our educators, our school staff. And every one of us who's going to talk today is going to talk from the perspective, not just as leaders, but as parents – what we would need and expect for our own kids is exactly the way we've approached this here today. I'm not going to do anything when it comes to New York City public schools that is anything less but then – the standard I would set for my very own children. I want to know, every parent wants to know, every day are your kids safe? We have to make sure that everything we do meets that standard constantly. And if it isn't safe, we don't do it. It's as simple as that. So, a huge amount of effort has gone in to getting our schools ready, months and months of preparation. We are sparing no expense. We're going to do whatever it takes. And we understand the anxiety. We understand the fear because this city has been through so much, because we look around the country and we see really, really troubling things happening. But we also have to remember how this city has fought back.

So, every place in the country is different, every place has different approaches, but in this city over five months, we went from the worst possible situation to now being in one of the strongest situations in our nation. We fought our way back because we were all disciplined and smart about it. And now we're ready to reopen schools the right way and to serve our kids. And our kids have been through so much. Let's remember, we have to think about the needs of parents, educators, staff, all the time. We have to make sure everyone's safe, but we also have to remember our kids and what they've been through, the challenges, the trauma, the dislocation. We owe it to them to give them anything we can to help them move forward after what they've been through. And I know for a fact – and I've talked to a lot of educators about this – that when kids are in school, there's the greatest possibility that they can learn better, that they can continue to grow and develop socially. There's so many reasons for a child to be in school, including the food they get, the health care they get, the emotional support they get. This is why it matters so much, but it has to be done safely. Now, the people have spoken. We surveyed parents – 400,000 responses to our survey, 75 percent want their kids back in the classroom, and that is exactly what we are going to do.

The plan – the essence of this plan is safety for everyone. And I need people to hear that because I know there's tremendous concern out there, but whether you're a student, parent, educator, staff member, your safety is the essence of this plan. And I can prove that by showing you all the different things that have gone into this plan and the fact that we're going to have an extremely rigorous standard for opening schools, or, if necessary, closing schools, because we are putting health and safety first. So, what are we doing? You've heard some of it before – we're using blended learning. Kids in school when they could be in school, remote when they can't, remote learning for any child, any family that prefers remote learning all the time. Social distancing guidelines in every part of the school, in the classroom and every other part of the school. Face coverings for everyone, free priority testing for everyone in the school community, making sure that teachers, kids, staff all have the personal protective equipment for free.

We are going to go to the farthest extent and what we're going to do is the thing that has helped New York City come back the whole time, which is focus on science, focus on fact, focus on data. And so, we are going to hold New York City to a very high standard, our schools to a very high standard. We will not reopen our schools unless the city infection rate is below three percent. So, every day I go over the daily indicators with you, number of people testing positive for COVID-19 citywide, unless that number is below three percent, we will not reopen schools. That number is below three percent, we will move ahead with our plan. Now, let's be clear, I'm very hopeful when I say that because New York City, thanks to all of your good efforts, has been under three percent since June 10th, six weeks in a row now. That's extraordinary. And today's indicators are very strong again. We know we can do it, but I want to hold that very tough, tough standard, because I want to keep us all focused on what we have to do to keep safety first. And this is a way of proving that we will do things the right way, setting a very tough bar, but also one I am convinced we can achieve.

So, look, we have to remember, nothing is more important in New York City than protecting our kids, helping our kids grow, helping them learn. They are our future in every sense, every family feels that. That's the path we've been on over seven years. That's what we're going to keep doing. As I turned to the Chancellor, I want to say the Chancellor and his team have worked incessantly to get this right. They've looked at examples from all over the world of what will keep the school community safe. And they've made a series of choices of how to do things from a health and safety lens first, while also making sure we can educate our kids. And I want to thank you, Chancellor, and your whole team for the work you're doing. Please give us an update.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. First, I want to acknowledge what we all know to be true. March was extremely challenging for all of us – the entire city, the doctors, our scientists included. We're learning about this disease in real time in many cases with information that just wasn't known. It was one of the toughest times that we have faced as a city and as a school system. I also remember the fear and the confusion and the worry. So, it's important to me that we build on everything we've learned over these past five months and everything we have been through since then. We are approaching reopening by centering health and safety as our foundational approach, basing our policies on the expertise of health professionals, period. We are focusing on the science, not science fiction.

So, here's what that looks like. In New York City, tens of thousands of New Yorkers are being tested every day. And we will be asking staff to get tested in the days prior to school. The City will prioritize free testing for school-based staff with 24-hour turnaround time results at any of the 34 City-run testing locations. School-based staff members are also encouraged to opt into monthly COVID-19 testing, which is critically important. We are thoughtfully opening schools with physical distancing and cohorting of students requiring face coverings and thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting throughout the day and night. If an illness does occur, we will respond quickly, communicate clearly during investigations and promptly to share decisions to quarantine classrooms, or if necessary, close schools. This approach means that we are well equipped to mitigate risk and share critical information with our school communities. You'll hear in a moment about the different scenarios we've mapped out in partnership with our colleagues at NYC Test and Trace Corps, and the procedures that will be followed if someone tests positive in a school.

But I want to speak directly to families and members of our school communities and affirm this – your health and safety remained our highest priority. I know how hard this is. I've been a public school parent. I've been a teacher for over a decade in a classroom. I've been a principal. And I know what it feels like to want to do the best you can in education for your child or for your students while ensuring that their health and safety and your health and safety is also being attended to, that's why we're taking this approach. That's why we won't settle for anything, but the strictest and most rigorous processes for coming back to school, we have your back and that will never change.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. And I want to – I really want to emphasize that everything the Chancellor says, everything the Chancellor's team has been working on is about the health and safety of our kids and the whole school community. They've also been putting a lot of time and energy into thinking about the emotional needs of our kids, the mental health challenges our kids have gone through. So, I wanted to just give a special thank you to you, Chancellor, to Deputy Chancellor Lashawn Robinson and her whole team. So many people at the Department of Education are really thinking about what our kids will need after going through this trauma and how coming back to school is an opportunity to really address that trauma and help them and support them. So, I want to thank you, because that's a really important part of this equation as well.

Now, when we plan with a health and safety-first perspective, we think of it very, very rigorously. That's why we're setting this really tough, rigorous standard to determine if and when we reopened. And again, right now, we are clearly meeting that standard, but we also have to be realistic when we plan. We plan for every eventuality, including when there's a problem, what you do about that problem. So, we need to be ready if a child in a classroom becomes sick, if a child in the classroom was identified as positive with COVID-19, we need a plan for that. If it happens in more than one classroom, we need a plan for that. I want to emphasize the goal of this approach is that kids in a single classroom stay together as much as possible the whole school day with very few adults in contact with them. The whole idea of this plan is to limit the amount of movement in the school, limit the amount of people coming in contact with each other, keep kids as much as possible in the same group all day long for everyone's protection, but it also allows us, if there is, God forbid, a case to be able to act on it a lot more effectively. So, here to tell you about what we do, if there is a case in a school is the Director of our city Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps: Thank you, sir. As a parent myself, the safety and health of my son is always my highest priority. We've designed a tracing operation for our schools that puts the safety and health of our teachers, students, and kids like my son at the center at all times. And I'm going to walk you through some of the high points today.

Now, for a positive case, it could be reported by a parent teacher or another student. Importantly, a positive case must be laboratory confirmed. For any laboratory confirmed positive case, we have a simple rule that we use that rule – that rule is that any – the entire classroom, meaning all of the teachers – the teacher of the classroom and all of the students in the classroom will quarantine for 14 days after when that positive cases identified. Before that positive case would have been reported, if there is a child that's symptomatic in the school, we have the child or the teacher that's symptomatic in the school leave the school as soon as possible to prevent transmission of the virus to anybody else in the school. The same way any good health care policy starts with prevention, if the child or teacher is symptomatic at home, we require that the child or student stay at home and not come to this school and potentially risk infecting other people in the school. The next step in either of those two scenarios is that we want the child or the teacher to get tested at one of our more than 200 sites across New York City, free of charge.

Now, we've talked about what we want to do before the child or the teacher comes into the school. We've talked about our simple rule – again, if there's a case in a classroom, the kids, students and the teacher are going to quarantine for 14 days, no matter what. Now, what we do in addition to having that rule come into effect is we do an investigation. The investigation is done between the Department of Health and the New York City Test and Trace Corps. That investigation we'll have one of two outcomes. If there's a single case in a school – again, the rule was invoked, the classroom, meaning the students in the classroom and the teacher are going to quarantine for two weeks, 14 days, no matter what, and in addition that investigation may find that there are other close contacts of the case in the school. Those other close contacts will also quarantine at home for two weeks. During the investigation, if it's relegated to one case, the school will remain open, and when the investigation concludes the classroom and any close contact to a quarantine for two weeks.

Now, if there's more than one case in a school, and it's not in the same classroom, during the investigation by the Test and Trace Corps and the Department of Health, the school will close for 24 hours. The reason for that is we want to keep everybody safe while we do the investigation. When the investigation concludes, one of two things will happen. The first outcome could be that the classroom, again, all of the students and the teacher, would quarantine for two weeks – that's the rule that's going to happen no matter what – and any close contacts identified from either of the two or more cases would also quarantine for two weeks, but the school can reopen. That will be outcome number one. The second outcome would be that if we believe there is transmission or risk of transmission in this school between those more than one cases, then the school has already been closed for at least 24 hours during the investigation, the school remain closed – both the classrooms, which happens either way per our rule, but also the rest of the school to ensure that everybody in the school can be safe. And then, everybody in the school quarantine for the 14-day period.

Again, as a parent myself, the safety and health of our teachers, students, and kids like my son, Dave, must be at the center of everything we do. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Dr. Long. Everybody I'm going to go over the indicators now, and this really puts a point on the progress we've made and the progress we've got to stick with to be able to open schools effectively and then go on from there as we restart and rebuild. So, indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 – today's report, 65 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU's, threshold 375 – today's report, 268. And here is the most important one, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold is 15 percent – today's report, one percent. So, again, that's the lowest we have been and that is credit to every one of you. And let's double down on that, that's how we move forward, is keeping number low.

I'm going to say a few words in Spanish, but before I do, I want to refer to a feature that you'll see over the next 95 days, because we're dealing with a lot of challenges and a lot of difficulties and a lot of trauma, as I mentioned, but we also have to remember that there's always rebirth and rejuvenation. And one of the things that's amazing about our democracy is that elections offer us a chance to decide where we want to go. And that will happen for our city and our country in 95 days.

So, let me say a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We have with us here today Chancellor Carranza, Deputy Chancellor Robinson, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Long, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. With that, we'll start with Rich from WCBS 880.

Question: Good morning, all.

Mayor: Good morning, Rich. How are you doing?

Question: In all, I'm doing okay. You know, I'm looking at this and thinking about the numbers, you know, 1.1 million kids and 1,800 schools and thinking you know what – you know, the risk here, obviously, is – obviously, at some point somebody is going to come down with something. Are you guys kind of holding your breath going into this? I mean, it just seems like such an amazing undertaking.

Mayor: It is. It's an amazing undertaking for sure, Rich. But I'm going to say the most obvious thing, this is a city that is no stranger to big, challenging, heroic tasks. And this is what it's going to take. It's going to take everyone thinking about doing something historic. And I have absolute faith in our educators and our school staff that they are up to this challenge. And I know, we know for a fact that parents and kids are ready. So, yeah, you could certainly say this is going to be tough and it's going to take a huge amount of work, but let's look at some facts that are reassuring. I mean, look at the report from the last 24 hour on cases, 312 cases for all of New York City, of which only a handful required hospitalization, because, remember, it's not just the number of folks I give in that hospital figure, but it's the number of folks who turn out to actually have COVID-19. That number – the most recent day we have information for was 11 percent only of the ones who were in the hospital actually turned out to have COVID-19. So, Rich, I say that to say, this city has beaten back this disease to an extraordinary degree. Now, we must go farther. And this is something I talked to Dr. Ted Long about literally every day about how we're going to use the Test and Trace Corps and all the other tools we have to keep squeezing this disease further and further. But you've seen in recent weeks how extraordinarily this city has fought back the coronavirus. So, Eich, that gives me hope. And the decision which I made to set that three percent bar was both a statement of rigor, but also a statement of belief that we can meet that goal because we've shown over weeks and weeks that that's where we are. So, big, tough job, but one this city is ready for. Go ahead, Rich.

Question: So, just to follow up on the same topic, the teacher's union – is the teacher's union on board in all of this? I mean, obviously there's been some pushback, but teachers – you know, there are a lot of – there's a lot of fear among teachers, especially the older ones. Are you hearing about that?

Mayor: Yeah. And I'll turn it to the Chancellor. Look, we've made it an absolute cardinal rule that all these specific plans that have been talked through with the teacher's union constantly. The Chancellor can give you a sense of just how intensive that work has been together with the two educator unions, with the unions representing staff. We have to do this the right way. It has to be health and safety first and you can only do that by talking to people who do the work. We know that folks who have real and meaningful exceptions, like preexisting conditions, we're obviously going to make accommodations for. And we know there's a lot of fear and concern among all the people who do the work, but we also know there's a lot of heroism, Rich. I mean, when we kept those regional enrichment centers open for the kids of essential workers, a lot of educators step forward, ready to serve, a lot of staff stepped forward ready to provide those meals to families that needed them. Educators are incredibly committed people. They do this work, not for fame and glory, certainly not for big payoff – they do it because they love kids and they want to support kids. So, there are so many teachers who want to get back to the classroom because they know they can help kids best in the classroom. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mayor. Rich – so, yes, we are actively engaged with all of our unions around what a return to school will look like. But I especially want to call out President Mark Cannizzaro from CSA and, and Michael Mulgrew from UFT, because we have workshopped on occasions for four-plus hours teams from each of our organizations, really going through the minutia of every single decision. Now, do we agree on everything? Absolutely not. But we do have a process where we're actually kicking the tires and we're actually pushing the envelope. The rigor that the Mayor spoke about also comes from those conversations where we want to be able to keep folks safe. That being said, there is no one larger than New York City – we're the largest school system in America, but I, on a weekly basis, have conversations with my colleagues of the 10 largest school systems in America. And I can tell you that just two weeks ago, of the 10 largest school systems in America, there were only two cities that could even have the consideration of opening for in-person instruction – that was Chicago and New York City. As we sit here today, the only school system that is maintaining that low rate that the Mayor just talked about is New York City. So, these kinds of conversations are very localized. There's a lot of activism that's happening for good reason. We want no one to get sick, but we also have been very clear, and our Mayor has been very clear that the health and safety of our children and those who serve our children are foundational as we think about what in-person learning will look like. And our union partners are absolutely at the table with us, helping us to define and design what that looks like.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, Chancellor, and everybody on the call. I have a couple education questions for you today. The first is that we have a school like the Manhattan New Explorations in Science, Technology, and Math that would have a reopening plan with all instruction happening remotely. Then, you know – so I'm wondering if that would be allowed. And then what you think about schools like Stuyvesant, who have a model for just one day a week, and are all the logistics really worth it for just one day of in class instruction?

Mayor: I'll just start with a broad point before turning to the Chancellor. There are definitely going to be schools with exceptional situations either because of the, you know, huge size or because they have an approach to education that might fit better with online. But, overwhelmingly, the model here is the blended approach with two or three days in school each week, which is really going to benefit kids. This is all about – why do we even have a school system to begin with, to help our kids support our kids, prepare our kids, especially after again, everything they've been through the last five months. So I'm sure there will be some exceptional situations and the DOE will consider those. But I want to come back to what I think the vast majority of people are going to experience, which is a blended approach that really does offer real support and continuity for kids. Go ahead Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: So great question, in our model, we've built – we've put forward several models that we've asked schools and principals to really work with their community to consider, and again obviously understanding that we want students to have as much in-person instruction as is possible, given the circumstances of health and the security of our students and staff, notwithstanding, but another incredibly important aspect to that is we want to give some consistency to parents. Now we've said before, we're really choosing from a portfolio of imperfect solutions. So the perfect solution would be a vaccine we're back to what we were before, but absent that parents need to have some semblance of security. When are the days of the week that my child will be in person? When are the days of the week that they will be in remote learning so that they can plan what their work schedules would look like or childcare would look like. The Mayor recently announced that we're looking for over 100,000 seats for childcare it's because we understand that not everybody will have a place for that remote learning to happen. So we're trying to meet that need as well.

That being said within the modeling that we've proposed, there is a process for a school to seek an exception to the established models that we've put forward to this date. We haven't received any exceptions. We welcome any of those schools to submit an exception request and the documentation for that exception, and then we will work with them on the consideration of those exceptions. But again, it's also important to understand, Stuyvesant is a very large school. So if whatever they're going to propose, it has to be able to be implemented so that it doesn't disenfranchise or negatively impact any particular group of students inadvertently.

Moderator: Julia do you have a—

Question: Yeah, I do, on education, but a little bit of a different topic. We went through with Dr. Long, you know, what happens in the schools if someone gets sick. I'm wondering if you're going to make that information public, you know, how many people are sick and which school when there was some criticism that the DOE wasn't transparent enough about cases back in the spring.

Mayor: Absolutely, everything will be public once it's confirmed, and the spring was a situation we were dealing with absolutely the great unknown, everyone was trying to make sense of something they had never dealt with before and, and trying with real sincerity to make sense of it and do things right. But this time we are going into the situation with a whole lot more knowledge and a lot more time to prepare, and we do intend to be very transparent about what we learn school by school.

Moderator: Next, we have Andrew from NBC.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my call. My first question, Mayor, you said that you're going to spare no expense open schools safely. Respectfully though wouldn't there be a much more ambitious, bigger, bolder plan out there, such as securing the streets around dozens and dozens of schools to set up outdoor classrooms, using parks for outdoor classrooms, using rooftops for outdoor classrooms? Why wasn't a bolder, more outdoor-oriented initiative set up for this reopening?

Mayor: Andrew, it's a fair question, but it's a question I think honestly misses part of the equation. I would remind you that outdoors might seem really appealing in September or June, but it's not going to be as workable say in November, December, January, February, March, second on any given day, of course you could have rain. It's unpredictable to say the least. I do think schools are looking for when they can use outdoors to make that a part of the equation, and we're going to be definitely looking to enhance that opportunity wherever we can. But my common sense first answer to you is it's not a reliable option. You can't plan on it every day. Chancellor?

Chancellor: I think you're absolutely right. Mr. Mayor, I wouldn't add anything else to that.

Mayor: Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: Well, since you talked about unpredictable weather, I assume you've seen the hurricane forecast and the possibility that a hurricane could actually be headed our way for next week. I'm wondering whether you plan to activate the Emergency Management Center and what precautions and concerns you have at this point?

Mayor: So our Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell and I were communicating this morning about this very question. So far, the projections look pretty favorable to us. The chance of us having a substantial impact is minimal, and this would be in the early part of next week, but we're watching this hour by hour, Andrew, anytime we see a hurricane coming. Look, every one of us that went through Sandy, we never minimize the warning that our hurricane may be coming. I think we'll know a lot more in the course of the next 24 hours, and we'll have plenty of time in that case to give people appropriate instruction depending on what we learn.

Moderator: Next, we have Jillian from NY1.

Mayor: Jillian, can you hear us?

Question: Hey, can you hear me?

Moderator: Yes.

Mayor: There you go. Hey, how are you doing?

Question: Okay. I'm good, thanks. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good. Thank you.

Question: So I wanted to ask it, it seems that there is no requirement for ongoing testing at any specific interval for teachers or for students, I see that it's recommended. I'm curious why that isn't required given what we know about asymptomatic spread, particularly among young people and given the fact that Major League Baseball is testing people every two days and that system is already not working out as well as everybody hoped. Why not require testing?

Mayor: Yeah, I mean, Major League Baseball is obviously a very different world for a lot of reasons, and their reality is they're moving constantly between different cities, including in places that are having a horrible upsurge in this disease. We are talking about New York City, which thank God is doing quite well because of everyone's hard work. We want the maximum testing. We're talking of course about hundreds of thousands of educators and staff members, 1.1 million kids. We wanted to figure out the balance point of what was the right way to do things and attainable too, and we think a strong message that says to all the adults, you know, go get tested, it's free. We're going to make it a priority – you will be prioritized for being tested. That that's the right approach, and we know a lot of people want to get that testing, and so that's what we're going to keep doing – constantly making it available for free, and we think a lot of people take us up on that. Do you want to add either one of you?

Chancellor Carranza: No, sir. You covered it.

Mayor: Okay, thank you. Go ahead, Jillian.

Question: And then my second question is, is probably one for the Chancellor and it's – can you walk us through a little bit how this would work in a high school or even a middle school setting where kids typically aren't programmed to be together for the whole day? So you might have math class with a different set of kids. Then you have English class with, or at the very least you'll have a different teacher for math and English. So I'm trying to understand how you can limit exposure in that way, because even if you kept all the kids together, if you have different teachers cycling in, and then those teachers go with other kids – obviously that could lead to many classrooms being closed if there is an exposure rather than just one. So can you walk us through the logistics of that?

Mayor: Let me start and pass to the Chancellor. You know, Jillian, just to put it in context again, with New York City at the level we are now and the level we would require to reopen our schools, I do think whenever we're able to keep a classroom together, so some people are calling it a pod, some people calling a cohort, but the idea is, you know, that small group of kids stays together throughout the day, and then the goal as much as possible is just plug in a teacher or teachers into that it really does limit the number of people that come in contact, and it makes the tracing obviously a lot clearer if you need to do tracing. You're right, the higher you go up, the more kids historically have moved around buildings where I had different teachers, but we're right now, re-engineering that as much as humanly possible to limit the number of people who interact with each other, and remember, everyone's wearing a face covering, everyone's six feet apart, constant cleaning. This is not like the scenario we experienced in March. It's not like a lot of other things we see around the country. This is a very rigorous approach. If you're in that building, you have to follow all those rules. If you're not feeling well in the morning, you have to stay home, and I want to emphasize that we're saying that all parents, if your child is sick, you must keep your child home. There's layers upon layers of precaution in this, but to your question, and I'll turn to the Chancellor, we really are actually working to not make it like traditional middle school or high school where there's so much movement where we're really working right now to limit that. Go ahead.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Jillian, great question. So the complexity of programming, especially at the secondary level, middle schools and high schools is not lost upon us. There's a myriad of different concerns. I think there are, there are two main topics that I want to just reemphasize that the Mayor has talked about and that Dr. Long has also talked about, the concept here is to limit the interaction between groups of students and large groups of students. So because we're limiting the interaction and I just want to be very transparent with everyone, that's watching school, in-person school, this fall will not be the same as it was last fall. You just cannot have that kind of an environment given all of the safety requirements, the social distancing requirements, all of the things that we have to do to be preventative as the Mayor has talked about. So I just want to set the level of expectation. It will not look the same, but we think that the benefits of being in person with teachers are really important for us to be able to have this alternate way of going to school, and the really good thing about New York City is we have incredibly, incredibly innovative and out of the box thinkers in terms of our principals and teachers and school leadership teams that are right now grappling at how do we keep this concept of limiting interaction, but also get to as much of that middle school, high school experience as we can.

Mayor: Amen.

Moderator: Next, we have Liliana from Univision.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my call.

Mayor: Good morning.

Question: My question would be for the Chancellor. If he can give us a brief description of this plan in Spanish for our Hispanic public?

[Chancellor Carranza speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: Go ahead Lilliana.

Question: Could you also send a message to the parents who still worry about sending their kids to school?

Mayor: You want that in Español?

Question: I would love to.

[Chancellor Carranza speaks in Spanish]

Moderator: Next. We have Christina from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi Mayor and Chancellor, thanks for taking my question questions. The first is if there is a three percent or greater than three percent rate and schools cannot open what's the plan then, is there a childcare care plan, much like the rec centers that we've had up until now?

Mayor: So again, so the three percent I want to make sure I understand is on a seven-day rolling basis, so seven-day average to open schools, and that would also be the standard we'd hold if at any point we saw it go above that number. That would be a reason to close schools across the board. So very rigorous, careful standard. The obvious plan B is everyone goes to remote learning. We obviously had to figure out how to do that under very, very tough circumstances before, and I've learned a lot about how to do that childcare, we're working to develop that plan. The plan we put in motion again is for 100,000 kids and we are working to develop that further. So that plan is going to move forward no matter what, because the other thing to remember, Christina, you, I'm sure I've thought about this a lot given the publication you work for, we have to also prepare ourselves for a very nonlinear experience. The school year proceeds over, you know, 10 months, and the fact is we don't know what it's going to look like for that whole period of time. Our hope and dream is a vaccine real soon – everyone gets vaccinated, we're back to full strength, but we may have times where things get better, we have times that things go worse. We have to be able to go into full remote, if necessary. We need to be able to come out of full remote. So the childcare is going to be ready in any situation and again, we hope to build upon that and add more seats. Go ahead.

Question: Thanks, and the second question is the CDC guidance, and maybe I'm not reading it correctly. I'm not a public health official. But the CDC guidance seems to suggest closing down entire schools and not just classrooms when there is a case within a school community. So what health guidance is this plan based on and why not? Both the stricter route of closing down entire schools.

Mayor: Let me start and I'll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Long. So first of all, remember that our version of this whole approach is based on what New York is doing, which is obviously in so many ways more rigorous than what's being done in other parts of the country. We are layering all these health and safety measures in place simultaneously. We're also very devoted to that pod approach, so that we're going to have kids limited in who they come in contact with. And that means if you have a case that, you know, God forbid you have a case, but if you have a case in a classroom, it gives us the real potential to keep that from spreading outside that classroom by isolating everyone who has been in contact with a classroom. But if you've got a school, for example, with a thousand kids in it and you are able to limit the reality just to one classroom and quarantine all those folks, it stands to reason that everyone else, you know, 900 plus other students should not have their education shut down if we're able to effectively handle that situation. Dr. Varma, Dr. Long, you want to add in terms of the approach we're taking here?

Senior Advisor Varma: Great, thank you very much. I think it's important to recognize that the guidance that comes from CDC and most other public health agencies is focused on cases who were infected and anybody who meets the definition of a close contact. Here in New York City we're actually taking what I think is one of the most rigorous approaches that I've seen anywhere else in the world. We are, first of all, we're going to do all of the measures that the Chancellor and the Mayor and Dr. Long had described to prevent infections. But we're also going to act very swiftly and promptly if there is a case, take the cautious approach to quarantine the classroom, potentially if there's more than one place, quarantine more than one classroom and take the time to really investigate rigorously, and I think that really does strike the appropriate balance between ensuring that kids continue to receive that the education that's so important while also making sure that our protection measures are as strong as they are anywhere in the world.

Executive Director Long: And I would add that the CDC guidance has an array of considerations for precaution which all make a lot of sense and we're achieving or surpassing nearly all of the considerations that the CDC lays out there. So the CDC guidance is very helpful and we are definitely taking that into consideration as we design an extraordinarily rigorous program with all precautions.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next we have Sonia from 1010WINS.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. Is a vaccine the only thing that can return schools to pre-pandemic conditions and what happens when there is a vaccine, will every student and staff member be required to get it? And what happens if the infection rate becomes something close to zero without a vaccine?

Mayor: Fantastic questions Sonia, you know, I think you're reading our minds. We've asked a lot of these questions and what I say is this, the goal you're absolutely right. The goal of everything we're doing is to drive down the level of infection even without a vaccine. So the entire concept of building out a massive test and trace operation, sticking with social distancing, sticking with face coverings, all of these precautions is so that we don't just stay in place, I mean we're at a remarkably low level right now, but we think we can push this down lower even without a vaccine. Is it conceivable to get to a near zero without a vaccine and open up schools even more? I think it's conceivable, I think it's difficult, but I think it is conceivable. This is my view, I want to hear – the doctors will obviously I'm sure offer notes of caution, but what I can say definitively, Sonya because we've had multiple conversations on this in the last few weeks is, so let's say that lately we're averaging around 300 identified cases per day in New York City, we were down even below 200 a few days ago - one of our days – we think we can really drive that down substantially with a lot of work and also people sticking to the discipline and really focusing on the quarantine for folks coming in from out of state. So the more we do that effectively, it might really open up some additional options with schools. Nothing would be as clean and clear as a vaccine, but you know what, we might find some options. As to what we would do if we have a vaccine? We haven't figured out all of those protocols yet, but I think we're going to be very vigorous about saying when a vaccine is here, that we need people to get it so that we can once and for all turn the page in our school system and in our city. Dr. Varma, Dr. Long, you want to add to that?

Executive Director Long: Yeah, just a couple - please, after you Dr. Varma?

Senior Advisor Varma: Okay. Yeah, I think the only point that I would try to emphasize is that we are planning for every possible scenario. We are in constant and active discussions with CDC and other vaccine experts around the country to really understand what are the leading candidates and what are the issues that are going to be need to be addressed right now in the next few months well before there is a vaccine so that we can make sure it becomes as available to New Yorkers as possible as soon as one or more become available.

Executive Director Long: And the only thing I wanted to add is actually just, I agree with the question and the premise that you're coming at this with. So since the epidemic started, we now have the lowest levels of new cases, hospitalizations, ED visits that we've seen and we're driving it down even further. So I almost want to agree with you that the purpose of the Test and Trace Corp and everything that New Yorkers have earned is to keep the virus suppressed, but further drive down the levels as much as we can together, and I think we've seen that over the last couple of months.

Mayor: And for all of you viewing at home, an ED visit is an emergency department. We call it emergency room, non-doctors, so always have to watch out with the educators and the doctors on their non-civilian terminologies. Sonia, did you have a follow-up question?

Question: Thank you, that answers my question.

Mayor: You're good? Okay, great. Go ahead.

Moderator: Last one for today, we have Jessica from WNYC.

Question: Hi Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Jessica, how are you?

Question: I'm okay. So my question is – one of them – is why use the three percent threshold when the five percent is so widely accepted?

Mayor: Because we have a particular challenge here in New York City. We were the epicenter. There's tremendous concern, tremendous trauma that people have been through, and also the conditions of this city. We're one of the most densely populated places in the country. We fought so hard to come back from this disease. We're going to be very cautious to not let there be a resurgence. We see resurgences and other places, and we've tracked the pattern carefully, and it's why we are being really rigorous about not allowing a certain types of indoor entertainment, for example, and continuing to be really rigorous about social distancing and face coverings. We're going to stick to that. So by setting this three percent goal, we're sending a message. Health and safety first, we need to stay tough and discipline to get to the point we can start schools and then to keep them open, we believe we can do it. Absolutely believe we can do it. But if you got to three and a half percent, four percent, five percent, you'd have a level of cases each day that we don't think is appropriate for having schools open. We also don't think is appropriate in terms of what would happen to the trajectory for the whole city. If we're at that kind of level, we would want our school shut down as part of a larger strategy to contain the virus and stop a resurgence from growing. Go ahead, Jessica.

Question: Right. So my other question is – my understanding is that if there are two different cases in two classes, and the classes quarantined while they are investigating, what would trigger a school closure? What are the kinds of things that investigators will be looking at to determine how widespread this is in a school?

Mayor: I'll start and I'll turn to Dr. Long. Jessica, look again, we're trying to build this pod approach, this, you know, cohort classroom, whatever you want to call it, that kids are really, generally speaking together, and with very few adults to the max extent possible. We're trying to right now perfect that, and as the Chancellor said, it is very different than what we're used to and we got to get our kids and families ready for that. It will feel different. It's not forever. It's for a few months we hope until there's a vaccine. But the reason I say that is, again, it is thoroughly conceivable that you could have a case and then that's in one classroom. And then another case comes up in the same classroom. And that that can be contained to that cohort and not spread to the rest of the school. It is absolutely, in the way we're setting things up, absolutely attainable because students are not going to be in regular contact with people outside their pod in the vast majority of cases. So you have to, in the same group, you look at one way. If you have two from separate groups, that's when the level of concern increases, that's when we're going to be even more cautious. Go ahead, Dr. Long.

Executive Director Long: Well, yes, actually the Mayor covered all of the key points. I'll just add a couple of notes. First we want to have, again, a clear and decisive rule that 100 percent of the time if there is a case, be it the student or the teacher in a classroom, that classroom will be immediately quarantined for two weeks, everybody in that classroom, then when we're doing the investigation, if there's more than one case in two different classrooms, let's say there's two cases. If we can know through that investigation, that one case was linked to a parent that had traveled and the other was linked to another parent that had traveled to another state, and both of those parents respectively also been diagnosed with the coronavirus, then we know how the chain of transmission worked for each of those two respective cases and by having immediately quarantined the classrooms, we believe that we have achieved control and that we can reopen the rest of the school. Now in a different scenario, if there's two students in two different classrooms, but we can't know for sure, and that's where the investigation comes in, where they contracted the virus from, there could be transmission going on in the school. So we, before we even started the investigation had already in that scenario closed the school temporarily to make sure that there wasn't any further transmission, so we took immediate action to keep everybody safe. But if we can't know for sure that there's no further transmission going on in this school, then we will determine that was outcome two, and what I talked about earlier that will keep the school closed and everybody in the school quarantined for 14 days. So that's the two types of scenarios with those two outcomes being either closed the classrooms and keep them quarantined along with close contacts or close the school if we believe there's a risk of transmission going on in the school.

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Please.

Chancellor Carranza: Just to add a non-medical perspective to that question as well. So when we talk about closing the school, we're talking about closing the physical environment of the school, but it also triggers immediate remote learning for those students. So they're not, not learning, but they're just not doing it in person. So I just want to make that point because it's not like snow days of the past, they will continue learning, but they immediately switched to a remote learning mode.

Mayor: Exactly and really important point that at any point any family can choose to move to remote learning. And this is something, and again, this is how I want to close and it picks up on the question that Rich Lamb asked in the beginning about just the sheer extent of this undertaking. I mean, this is a massive, massive effort, but this is the place that can do it. In New York City people are not afraid of hard work and they're not afraid of a challenge. And so we're creating a system where literally as many kids need remote learning, it will be there for them while simultaneously creating the maximum opportunity for kids to be in the classroom because we know that's where kids learn best, get the support they need emotionally, get the food, get the health support, there are so many positive outcomes that come from a kid being in a classroom with a compassionate trained adult who is there to support them.

So we're going to be moving on those tracks simultaneously. It is a big, big endeavor, but we're up to it in this city. And why do I know that? Because I've seen what this city has done many times before and I've seen how heroically New Yorkers have fought back the coronavirus to the point that everyone around the country is looking to the model of New York City as an example that it can be done. I'm particularly moved by the heroism of our educators and our school staff who when asked to immediately turn on a dime and create a whole new system in the spring, they did it. And they did it with tremendous energy and real commitment to our kids. I'm moved by our parents and family members who did everything they knew how to help kids keep learning and to support them. I'm moved by our kids. I'm moved by our students. They've been through a challenge that no New York kids have ever been through before, and they've stuck with it and they're keeping their spirit together. They're keeping focused on the future. They need our help and support. They expect all of us adults to do everything in our power to give them the best possible future, and not to be afraid to go the extra mile for them, they expect us to stretch and reach and go as far as we can to help them move forward, especially after everything that they've been through. So that's what this plan shows. We're going to be there for the kids in New York City and we're going to do it with a focus on health and safety first. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-03 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody and happy Monday. It is a beautiful, beautiful day in New York City today, and it is a good day to remember how far we've come as a city, the hard work everyone has done together to move this city forward, to fight back against the coronavirus. 

I want to tell you, I went out in Brooklyn this weekend just to get a look at what was going on with our Open Streets and our Open Restaurants initiative. Chirlane and I walked around Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. It was absolutely amazing, just restaurant after restaurant filled with people, but the right way, outdoors with the right distancing. Folks are doing a good job of obeying the rules, but also were having a great, great time. And it was so good to see the life and the energy. It just felt like a beautiful New York City summer moment. But it also was a reminder that a lot of restaurants have been able to survive because of this initiative. And a lot of people have been able to get their jobs back. And that's what's so important here, helping people through this crisis, helping them get their livelihood again. So, here's where we are at this moment. It's pretty amazing. We have well over 9,000 restaurants in the Open Restaurants program, and that continues to grow. Now, we've looked at these restaurants and the number of people they employ so we could come up with a projection of how many jobs have been saved. And I want to tell you just in the last few months, because of the Open Restaurants initiative, we now estimate that over 80,000 New Yorkers have gotten their jobs back. Think what this means for their families. This means hundreds of thousands of people by extension getting support when they need it most, with everything going on out there, getting these jobs back, giving people a chance to handle this crisis and get through it. But also bringing back the joy and the hope we have seen with this beautiful initiative.

So, I want to give you more good news. The Open Restaurants initiative, the Open Streets program, has been amazing. So, we're going to be doing this again next year. Look at what we have been able to achieve together to improvise something amazing. These restaurants will be back again next year on the street, as we've seen, tremendous success, starting June 1st next year. And I wanted to say it now because I want people in communities to look forward and see that we're going to keep coming back strong. I want the folks who own the restaurants to know that they're going to have that additional revenue going forward. The folks who work in the restaurants to know that whatever else we have to weather, we have seen that this experiment worked. So, expect to see that wonderful outdoor dining back next year. We may even extend it further earlier in the spring. But we'll start with June 1st for now. And I just want to thank everyone in the restaurant industry for the way they fought back. I want to thank all the community leaders, all the business improvement districts and civic associations, all the local precincts. Everyone who's helped make this work because it's been one of the things that's really given people hope. So, thank you to everyone, congratulations. And let's finish strong this year, but look forward to it next year, hopefully under much, much better conditions.

Now, as we have continued to fight back against this disease, one of the things that we've seen is the amazing heroism of so many people. Remember those tough, tough times in March and April, what our first responders did, what our health care heroes did. But remember all the people who continue to do that work and continue to fight back the disease and take care of their fellow New Yorkers. So, we wanted to do something really good for more and more people to thank them. The Mayor's Fund has a wonderful initiative called the Food for Heroes program. That reached a lot of folks early on, particularly our health care heroes. We want to expand it. We want to provide additional free meals and love and support for the good people who work in our nursing homes, for our Sanitation workers, for folks who are essential workers, and often don't get enough thank-yous and enough respect and appreciation. So, to all those good and noble folks who take care of our elders in the nursing homes, to all the folks who keep this city clean and help us deal with whatever storms come our way at the Sanitation Department, thank you, and we're looking forward to getting those free meals around to make your day a little bit better.

And while we're saying thank-yous, a number of folks keep stepping up and it's been a wonderful thing despite the crisis, how many people have stepped up and wanted to help New York City. So, just some thank-yous today to people in organizations who really went above and beyond. I want to thank the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Minsun Kim and the Korean American Heritage Museum, Miller Druck Specialty Contracting, CubeSmart Self Storage, Starbucks, and Transfix. All of them have stepped up to help New York City. And we are very, very appreciative.

Let's talk about our indicators. First of all, number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200, today's report, 67 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375, today's report 262. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent, today's report once again, one percent. And that is fantastic. And that is because of your hard work and New Yorkers sticking with it so we can keep fighting back this disease. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We have with us here today, Commissioner Criswell, Commissioner Trottenberg, Toya Williford, the Executive Director of the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. With that, we will start with Marcia from CBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor, last Friday, you and the Chancellor unveiled a big program to reopen the schools come the fall. The Governor and State officials have criticized it saying it was more of an outline than a plan. And that then the unions have pushed back, saying that there was a lack of nurses, there's a lack of testing, and a whole host of other things that they object to that they say will not keep teachers safe. What's your response to that? And how are you going to change your plan so that everybody gets on board?

Mayor: You know, Marcia, this plan has been worked on for months with our union colleagues, literally daily. It's the most extensive approach in the country in terms of protecting health and safety. What I announced on Friday is we will not open schools unless we are below a three percent citywide infection rate. And if we ever go above that for a seven-day period, we're going to close schools. So, we're taking a very stringent approach, focused on health and safety. We provide a very clear roadmap to the State and we're going to keep providing a lot of additional information. Remember we have 1,800 separate schools. So, we will be providing plans for each. And look, I know that step by step, we're going to continue to improve this plan. It is a big undertaking, but it's all about health and safety first. That's how we've approached it.

Moderator: Next, we have Rich from WCBS 880.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. Good morning.

Mayor: Hey Rich. How you doing?

Question: I'm okay. I want to follow up a little bit on Marcia's question about the school. I mean, you put out a whole series of protocols on Friday, then it seems like the Governor is kind of taking pot shots at that. I mean, doesn't that – aren't you irritated at that?

Mayor: Rich, I am past the point of irritation. I just focus on the work and I focus on what I need to do for my fellow New Yorkers. And look, I was a public school parent for the entire education of both of my kids from pre-K to 12th grade. I'm thinking about the parents, I'm thinking about the kids, I'm thinking about the educators. How do we keep them safe? I know we're doing that work every day. We're putting really stringent approaches in place, and we're working with the people who represent our educators and staff to get it right. So, I'm focused on the work and I'm focused on the people I serve. Go ahead.

Question: Okay, Mr. Mayor, Dr. Birx, who is you know, in the White House Corona staff, the whatever it is, is now sending out warnings saying that the virus is extraordinarily widespread. Is this too little too late? I mean what goes through your mind when you see the, let's call it an evolution of thinking coming out of the White House?

Mayor: Rich, you sir, are a diplomat to call that evolution. I think five months later is way too late. Look, I was here when we had the Ebola crisis and it was so different working with President Obama and his team, where you had the national government focused from day one, giving clear, smart guidance, helping localities to do what only we can do. It has been such a struggle with this administration in Washington, starting with the fact that we never had testing when we needed it. And we still don't have the kind of testing we need. No, they've never gotten it right. I wish they had listened to Dr. Fauci a lot more and a lot earlier. But we, in New York City, have learned that we're going to make things happen no matter what. And really New Yorkers have given the whole country a lesson, Rich, by being so tough and disciplined and smart about this. And we've proven that if you help people to realize the right way to do things, the face coverings, the social distancing, all the things we've done, that people will buy into it and make it work. And that's what New Yorkers have done.

Moderator: Next we have Christopher from Gothamist and WNYC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. First question for you is about some parties that were happening this past weekend. There was seemingly a large one underneath the Kosciuszko Bridge in Brooklyn, and another one on a boat that had docked in the Lower East Side. Has the Health Department been tracking how these parties may or may not have been impacting cases in the city? Are there many clusters linked back to large parties in New York City and are contact tracers finding cases that went back to parties like these?

Mayor: Thanks for the question, Christopher. First of all, whenever we find something where people are not distancing properly and not using face coverings, gathering in too large numbers, whatever it may be, the Sheriff's Office has done an amazing job intervening as have other agencies. So, job one is find those things, stop them. Overwhelmingly, we've seen compliance to be fair. Overwhelmingly, New Yorkers, including bars, restaurants, everyone has done this right. But where we see something wrong, we got to go in and stop it immediately. But in terms of what we've seen the follow through, generally – and I'll turn to Dr. Varma – but I'll say generally what we are seeing is not so much, again from outdoor activities. Indoors remains the bigger concern and overwhelmingly we've been blessed here in New York City that we have not seen a lot of clusters and people have handled things right. But I think it's fair to say our greatest concern has remained with indoor activities. Go ahead, Dr. Varma.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Yeah, I think that – Mr. Mayor, I think you covered all of the important points here. We haven't seen any specific activities traced to large gatherings repeatedly. We do interview patients and ask them about attendance at gatherings. We find that you know, in the past few weeks, anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of people report being at any type of gathering that may have been a risk for this infection. But we haven't seen any large clusters specifically associated with any of these events. That said, we need to remain extremely vigilant for any types of these events. And one of the most important things New Yorkers can do is to continue to get themselves tested even if they don't have symptoms because it is always possible that they could acquire infection somewhere, and the sooner we can identify it, the better off we'll be.

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: My question is about schools opening. And I'd asked you this question a few weeks ago about the use of non-school space, particularly in districts that are already overcrowded. So, can you give an update, you know, just especially for parents who want to know if their child is going to be going to school in a library or in some cultural institution – how many spaces have you secured and what will that look like?

Mayor: Yeah, we are definitely building that out right now, School Construction Authority is all over that. We will have more to say in the coming days on that as we secure more spaces. And it really depends, obviously. We prefer spaces, strongly, that are very near the school because it's hard to support the ongoing effort if there's too much disconnect from the school and any kind of auxiliary space. So, moving apace, we are definitely finding some spaces for that and for childcare, and we'll have much more to say on that in the coming days.

Moderator: Next we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry – how you been?

Question: I'm good. The Red Sox took one on the chin yesterday. I'm surprised that you've been able to smile this morning –

Mayor: Henry, first of all, it's a damn good game. So, as a baseball fan, I will just say, I relish a good game. Also, it really helps to have pitching if you're a Major League Baseball team, which my team apparently does not have much of, but kudos to the Yankees. I think they are World Series bound from everything I can tell right now.

Question: I think the pandemic has made you a much more generous baseball fan than you have been over the past several years.

Mayor: It's brought peace to my soul.

Question: Quite remarkable, really. That could be the news, but I doubt it. My question here is about the borrowing authority from Albany. Has there been any progress on that at all? Is that a dead issue or is it still alive? Where does that stand?

Mayor: There hasn't been any immediate movement, Henry, but I think it's a very much a live issue. Look, we are weeks away, tragically – just weeks away from having to follow through on what we voted on in the June budget. You know, the Council voted and I constructed with them a budget that we hoped and prayed would not have large layoffs. And we were working very hard with our colleagues in labor to try and avert that. And we're fighting for a fair stimulus plan in Washington, but all of those things are still question marks. And I know folks in Albany are watching the situation. So, I don't think it's off the table. And I think it could be one of the things we need to avert those layoffs. Go ahead.

Question: The Comptroller, the City Comptroller, has come out with a report on the budget that's somewhat critical of the budget making. It talks about at least a half-a-billion dollars in risks. You've got a Financial Control Board, which is going to be controlled pretty much by the Governor. And you've got a situation where the City's credit rating is already on a negative watch. How worried are you that the State might erode some of your budget authority and that the City's credit rating might take a negative hit, which would increase our costs of borrowing?

Mayor: Henry, look, last year, the City's credit rating went up and for decades, this City has become stronger and stronger – up until February – stronger and stronger economically, more and more fiscally responsible and strong. We have the greatest reserves we've ever had in our history, as of February. So, I think in terms of the rating agencies and all, they're looking at all governments right now with concern, but ours has been one that's been particularly strong. I think the budget was a sound budget and a smart budget, given what we're going through. The fact that we said, as painful as it is, and it's something that I do not want to do, but we said out loud very clearly that we will institute layoffs of 22,000. Think about this for a moment, 22,000 people. It's a huge, painful number, but that will happen October 1st if we cannot get the kind of support we need. That's obviously fiscally responsible, but it's something that I hope to avert for the good of everyone in this city. So, no, I think it's quite clear. I think the Legislature understands very, very strongly what New York City is doing to take the right measures right now. And that's a crucial part of this equation, too. So, we're going to find our way through, we're going to do whatever it takes, but really, Henry, what we need is that stimulus to be acted on immediately in Washington, that could change everything for all of us.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next, we have Gersh from Streetsblog.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call, appreciate you taking the question. So, two weeks ago, I asked you about the Department of Education's plan for the 150,000 students who rely on safe school buses to get them to school. You said, "school buses are clearly part of the mix, we have to do it safely." But now your administration has put out a reopening plan that acknowledges that buses will only carry one-quarter of the normal capacity and that parents should drive their children to school where possible, which as, you know, is the opposite of safety given that six children under the age of 12 were killed by drivers last year. So, what do you think will happen to street safety if tens of thousands of parents are driving their kids to school every day?

Mayor: Gersh, we are dealing with a pandemic. We don't have the ability to do what we normally do with school buses because we have to provide social distancing. This is something that will go on for a matter of months but only for a matter of months. And this is a choice that we have to make in light of the realities we face. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. I'll ask an unrelated question then as a second one. So, you talked about Open Restaurants, which is great that you're announcing it so early so the restaurants can plan. A lot of restaurateurs are already tweeting at us saying, well, why stop the Open Restaurants at all and why wait until June 1st to restart it? There are plenty of restaurants saying they'd love to do this all year long with blankets or as, you know, because of global warming the planet is, the city is warmer, you know, in winter. So, why stop this?

Mayor: Yeah. We're looking at that right now, Gersh. What I wanted to say, first of all, we started it to test it. It was an extraordinary success. Then we said, we'll go to October 31st, which I think is clear in terms of whether you could get a whole lot of time in that way if you're a restaurant. We're going to look at whether we can go farther this year. That's still an open question, but I think it's really important for the restauranteurs and everyone in that industry, and everyone in communities to know it's coming back next year so they can plan. And it's been an extraordinary success. We're going to see how far we can take it.

Moderator: Next, we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah, good morning, everyone. I had another school related question. A colleague of mine has a story out today describing problems and challenges that students have had with online learning and summer school. Together, those include, you know, the teacher being unknown to students, sporadic live instruction, students not particularly keen to do live online office hours when those are available. I was wondering if you could share your assessment of how summer school has gone and if there are any takeaways for the fall semester. Thank you.

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Shant. I haven't gotten a particularly new update compared to what we saw in the spring. And honestly, Shant, there's no one I've talked to in education from the Chancellor on down who relishes more online learning. We are trying to maximize in-person learning for the good of our kids because we know it makes a world of difference. Online is a tool we will use when we need to use it, but it's inherently imperfect. So, do we learn each week how to make it a little bit better? Absolutely. And that direct contact with students and their teachers helps, but nothing replaces in-person learning. Go ahead.

Question: I mean, given that it sounds like there'll be, you know, some form of online learning as part of the fall semester, could you share what some of the takeaways have been for you and the DOE since online learning started? You know, you talked about learning a little bit every week, any specific examples come to mind?

Mayor: Yeah, absolutely – more contact with students with either guidance counselors, teachers, individual contact, even if it's less than it would be in the classroom helps. You know, that any time there is that ability of a student to express what they're dealing with and what help they need, or for a professional to notice the kind of support they need that helps. So, you know, you always want to maximize that, but it will never be as good as in person. That's why our plan calls for maximizing in-person learning so long as we can do it safely.

So, everybody, look, let me finish with this. You know, we, as a city, again, a lot to be proud of, of how people have fought back over these last months. The most important thing, be there for each other. New Yorkers are so good at this. I saw it after Hurricane Sandy, and it was one of the most moving things I've seen in my life, how people were there for each other in neighborhoods, how people saved each other, no matter what was going on and stood up for each other. Let's bring that spirit to everything we do. That's how we're fighting back against the coronavirus. And that's how we'll bring New York City back. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-04 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. New Yorkers always rise to the challenge. So, here's a challenge. We're going to get by the coronavirus crisis, but then we're going to spend years and years ahead dealing with the reality of global warming. But this city is clear about what we need to do, and I'm confident about our city and our people. We take the threat seriously and we're going to do what it takes to address it. 

Now, talking about our future. Look, we've been through a very tough five months, but I keep talking about why people should never bet against New York City and our strength and our people and our talent. And now we have a really interesting piece of news today that speaks to our future. And a lot of folks have been asking the question, will the business community continue to invest in New York City? What will our future be? Well, we've got a piece of information now that I think really speaks to it and it’s a decision made by Facebook to make a major commitment to its presence in New York City. This is extraordinary. And that company has leased all, all of the office space in the James Farley Building, the former Post Office building, the largest Post Office in Manhattan. All of that space now will be part of Facebook's growing presence in New York City. That will take their job total to almost 10,000 employees in New York City. And this is one company, one company in a crucial sector that has been growing for years and years in New York City, our tech community. As recent as February, over 350,000 people employed in the tech ecosystem in New York City, a big part of our future and what a vote of confidence in our future that Facebook has made this decision. This is the first major new lease for the post-COVID era. And you can see that's a huge facility. And it will be part of our economic rebirth.

So, to everyone, look, the bottom line about New York City has been true for generations. It's more true than ever. Extraordinary talent here. Extraordinary creativity. If you want to get anything done, come to New York City because this is where it happens. And this is where you will find the talent to make it happen. Businesses all over the country, all over the world are going to be realizing that more and more, but seeing Facebook take the lead will send a message to all the others that this is a smart time to start the reinvestment in New York City.

Let me go over indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200, today’s report 73 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold is 375, today's report 271. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent, today, once again, lowest we've seen, one percent. That is fantastic. And that is because of your hard work. Keep going. Now a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We have with us here today Commissioner Criswell, Jainey Bavishi, the Director of the Office of Resiliency, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. We have Jillian from WBAI.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, good morning.

Mayor: Hey, Jillian, how are you?

Question: I'm well, I owe you an explanation about the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Mets because you were confused. National League. That's the answer. They're the only National League team in New York. And they started playing in ‘62 out of the Polo Grounds.

Mayor: No, I agree. There's no question, a lot of Dodger fans converted into Mets fans. But when you said it at first, it sounded so Dodger specific. Some maintain their loyalty even to Los Angeles, but you're right, a lot, a lot changed into Mets fans. A lot of New York Giants fans turned into Mets fans when they went to San Francisco. So, you and I are aligned.

Question: Well, that's all true. My question focuses on COVID test results and the delays, and is relevant to the school reopening plan. The Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board says that our current COVID indicators, you know, hospitalization rates and infection rates actually lag. And they advocate testing wastewater for COVID because it reveals virus presence in real time, before symptoms are evident, or if the virus returns. It's globally accepted technology. It's inexpensive. And they say that New York is in a specifically good position to do this because we have these 14 wastewater treatment plants that are distributed in a specific way so it can get really, really hyper-local. You can test sewer lines. I'm wondering if this is something that they're going to consider, or they're going to expand into the current system of testing? And if not, why not?

Mayor: I’ll turn to Dr. Varma. I think this is very much the path we've been on and it's one of many indicators and different types of evidence we're using. And I think we have a good series of things we look at to keep ourselves current. But, Dr. Varma, you want to speak to that?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Thank you very much for the question. I would echo what the Mayor says that the indicators that we're using right now are actually very well validated for our work here in New York City. Specific to your question about the monitoring of wastewater, sludge, sewage. This was actually something that New York City scientists, you know, in the New York City Department of Environmental Protection are working on very closely right now. I do agree that there have been studies that have shown its value. It's important to keep in mind that all of these studies are what we call retrospective. They're looking back in time to compare what was found in sewage to what was known in human health at that time. It can be very challenging to make sure that those are used for decision making in real time. But I can reassure you that this is something that we are working on very, very closely. There are a lot of complex scientific issues related to how you measure it, how you compare it to human health, and then of course, how you make decisions. But it is something that we're eager to work on and hopefully validate and use.

Moderator: Next, we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Julia, how are you?

Question: Good. Just yesterday we saw a federal judge order the Board of Elections to start counting some ballots that were received without postmarks, which will further delay the process and may even throw the results of some races into question. What are your thoughts on the way New York has handled mail-in ballots from the June elections? And what does that pretend for the presidential election in November?

Mayor: Well, look, the Board of Elections can do better and must do better. That's my view. I've long, for years, Julia, you know, had deep concerns about the Board of Elections and how it's structured. I think we need to move to a different approach, just create a modern, management-focused agency to do this work better in the future. But that said, I am certain they can learn from this and be prepared for the general election. Three months is a long time. You know, there are whole states in this country that do everything with mail-in and it works perfectly well. It can be done. So, I think what the Board of Elections needs to do is look at exactly where the challenges were and come up with a very systematic plan to address them and be ready for the general election. Go ahead.

Question: Thanks. On a different topic – do you know when the last time school bus companies were paid? And from a logistics and personnel standpoint, do you believe that bus companies are ready for the planned start of the school year in five weeks?

Mayor: I will get you – our team will get you the details on what's happened with payments. There's been a lot of negotiation because I think an issue that either you or some of your colleagues raised very early on was what's a fair level of payment in light of the fact that the schools weren't open and we've been very rigorous about that fact. We have to watch out for the taxpayers here. But I'm very certain based on the briefings I've gotten that school bus service will be ready up and running. As we talked about yesterday, it will be for fewer kids because we're going to have to distance within those school buses for safety reasons.

Moderator: Next, we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor. My first question is something that you were asked recently, but you said that you weren't fully up on it and you were going to look into it. So, I'm wondering if you have, and that's in regards to the NYPD blocking off blocks, barricades, you know, prohibiting people's access. In response to your comments yesterday I got a ton of complaints from people saying, you know, we can't get down blocks, we can't get to businesses, we have to show ID to get to our own homes. And in particular right around Gracie Mansion, people are apparently not having access to the waterfront area that's there. So, is this something that you can or have any interest in directing the NYPD to do differently?

Mayor: NYPD has been making adjustments over the last few weeks and reducing some of the precautions that were put in place previously and that's happening all over the city. I can certainly say around Gracie Mansion, people have access to the water constantly. There are some particular times when there's protests and those measures are put in place temporarily. And certainly on the blocks where there's police precincts, there's been some temporary measures, but everything is being reduced as time goes by. Everything that's been done has been temporary.

Moderator: Last two for today. Next, we have Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, there's been discussion about residents of the Upper West Side being unhappy about hotels in their neighborhood being used as homeless shelters. Also, a friend of mine stayed in a Midtown hotel last week and said that considering the clientele there, he didn't feel safe going up and down the elevators or walking in the hall. And he wonders if maybe the City had rented some rooms there that night. So, my question is, will the City make public on an ongoing basis, a list of the hotels being used as homeless shelters and/or COVID quarantine locations, so that prospective hotel customers can know beforehand?

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

Moderator: Last one for today, we have Reuven from The City.

Question: Day camps have been open for weeks now. The City has told me that they are tracking COVID cases that are tied back to those camps, but a Health Department spokesperson has told me that they will not release those figures, although also added that there were only a few cases that tied back to those camps. Can you tell me why the City is not releasing that data, especially if it could help to inform parents who are seeking to place their kids in day camp or looking for information regarding what they should do for the upcoming school year?

Mayor: Sure. No, it's a good question. And, look, we've said very clearly about our school system, our public school system, we're going to be very transparent when there are cases. I do think with the camps, we're talking about organizations that are not part of the public sector and there probably are some real legal issues we have to navigate there and confidentiality issues, including about the health status of individual kids, where there are privacy concerns. But I think it's a real fair question. Let us come back to you on that one, both about the structure that we're taking with information and what we're doing to keep those camps safe, going forward and give people the information they need. I appreciate that question and we will get you an answer today.

Everybody, as we conclude here, the bigger point here is New York City has gone through so much, not just in these last five months, but lots of other challenges and crises. And we are not – when we look down the barrel of these kinds of realities, New Yorkers stand tough and firm, it's who we are. And I think this is part of why our rebirth will be so strong because we have inherent resiliency as New Yorkers. So, right now we are dealing with huge challenges, but the future looks very, very different. The future looks very much better. The future is one of economic recovery. The future is one of sustainability and building a city that will lead the world in addressing climate change and a city that will do the work of creating equality and fairness, like never before. That's a future all New Yorkers are ready to be a part of. And that's where our focus is going to be more and more in the weeks and months ahead as we overcome this disease. Thank you so much, everyone.

2020-08-05 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. I am going to always talk about the amazing energy and discipline, focus that New Yorkers have brought to the fight against the coronavirus. But I also hear from a lot of New Yorkers that they are worried about where things go in the future. They’re seeing what's happened around the country. Everyone keeps hearing about this danger of a second wave, a resurgence. There's a lot we need to do to keep deepening our progress. New York City right now is being looked at all over the country as an example of an extraordinary comeback in terms of the coronavirus. But there's more we have to do to deepen that progress, and we're going to talk about that in just a minute, but first, of course, Tropical Storm Isaias, what a powerful storm it was, and even though it was only here for a few hours in New York City.

Now we've talked about the storm and the approach to the storm was a focus on safety preparedness, being ready for any eventuality. That's the same approach that we're taking when it comes to health and during the coronavirus crisis, the whole approach in this city is to throw everything we've got at it – all different City agencies, the people of New York City, most importantly, and this is one of the things we've learned in this crisis, how important the people are, the buy-in of the people and the people that city, all of you have done an amazing job, and here is a fact that is striking. Since June 10th, fully eight weeks ago, New York City has been under three percent for our citywide infection rate the entire time. It's two full months. So that's extraordinary that we've been able to maintain that level. I expect us to maintain that level and in fact, drive it down further.

Now we don't need to dwell on the national situation. It is not encouraging the lack of federal support. We still don't know if there's going to be a stimulus. We certainly haven't seen the federal support on testing. We've got 35 states now that have dangerously high infection rates. There's a lot to be concerned about. What we need to do is do everything that we have learned to do in New York City and do that right, do that consistently. But also, we have to focus on people coming in from outside New York City, when you've got 35 states with a problem, I think it couldn't be clearer why it is so important that there are clear rules in place for folks traveling in or folks who have gone out of the city and come back, and they've been in one of those 35 states. New York State was right to put a 14-day mandatory quarantine in place. We need to make sure that quarantine becomes stronger every day, that that law comes to life more every day.

So, starting today, we're going to do something new in New York City. We will have checkpoints at key entry points to the city. Travelers coming in from those states will be given information about the quarantine, they will be reminded that it is required not optional. They'll be reminded that failure to quarantine is a violation of State law, and it comes with serious penalties. In fact, under certain circumstances, the fines can be as high as $10,000. So, this is serious stuff, and it's time for everyone to realize that if we're going to hold at this level of health and safety in this city and get better, we have to deal with the fact that the quarantine must be applied consistently to anyone who's traveled. So, this checkpoint effort is going to be a new, important piece of that. And here to tell you about it, and someone who's doing an outstanding job protecting New Yorkers and to him and all of his team at the Sheriff's Office, extraordinary work. Sheriff Joe Fucito.

New York City Sheriff Joseph Fucito: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. The Sheriff's Office in coordination with other law enforcement agencies will undertake quarantine checkpoints at major bridge and tunnel crossings into New York City. As Sheriff, I understand the absolute serious nature of this pandemic. We need to ensure visitors and New Yorkers returning home are taking the necessary precautions to limit the spread of this disease. The entire team will strive to ensure that the deployment balances the critical public health and welfare needs of the residents of the city with the legal protections, entitled to all people. For further transparency, I wanted to go over the parameters of our actions. The primary purpose of the quarantine checkpoints are to address a legitimate public safety objective. Compliance with the quarantine is our objective and checkpoints are an effective means of ensuring travelers are on notice and can take precautions to protect our beloved city. Our team has developed a uniform procedure that will be applied to all New Yorkers. Procedures are in place to protect New Yorkers rights while limiting intrusions on the privacy of motorists.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Sheriff, thanks again to you and your team, and look we've got to do this in a way that really makes clear to people how important this is, but the idea is we don't want to penalize people. We want to educate them. We want to make sure they're following the rules. We want to make sure people who need support, they get support, and this is so important. Most people, of course, haven’t quarantined in their life, and if they're thinking about it, maybe they're wondering, well, how do I go about it? How do I get help? What if I need medicines? In fact, one of the crucial elements of the Test and Trace Corps is having that ability in place to protect people and get them the support they need. So, here to talk to you about how the Test and Trace Corps plays a crucial role in our efforts to quarantine folks traveling in from other places, the Executive Director of Test and Trace, Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps: Thank you, Sir. We've all been working incredibly hard to drive down the new cases of coronavirus in New York City, and we've been very successful. But as we sit here today, a fifth of all new cases of coronavirus are from travelers coming into New York City from other states. We want you to come into New York City, but we need you to safely separate for two weeks, when you arrive to keep New York City safe. In order to help you do that, we're going to give you a call. When we call you, we're going to start with talking about what the mandatory two-week quarantine period is, and then we're going to ask you, how can we help to get you through that two-week period? We're going to offer you things like free food delivery, help with medications, direct connections to doctors by the phone, or even a hotel stay. These are really critical pieces that we want to do to, in order to educate you and to help you get through that period of time.

Now, in terms of what you can expect from us when you're buying your plane ticket, when you're arriving in New York City, when you're checking into your hotel, or when you're buying a ticket to come to one of our destinations here, there's going to be an online required link for a traveler form. The reason that form is important is that's how we get the information to be able to reach out to you and call you and ask how we can help. We're also going to be deploying our teams. Tomorrow, we're going to be deploying teams to Penn Station to stop travelers, to ensure that they've completed the travel form. And if they haven't, to walk them through it and to complete it with them right then and there. We at the Test and Trace Corps are working as fast as humanly possible to set up a system to support you to get through that two-week period. We've made more than 86,000 phone calls to travelers coming into New York City from the designated high-risk states. And we've sent more than 20,000 text messages to date. And if we can't get through to you on the phone, we've deployed teams that are now knocking on your door to check in with you and to make sure that you're safe. We know that it's not easy to get through a two-week period of safe separation, but it's incredibly important. And we are going to do everything in our power to help you. Thank you, Sir.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Dr. Long. Well, everyone look, the bottom line is we're all in this together. As always, New Yorkers have done an amazing job fighting back this crisis, this disease. But look, here's one more thing you can do. If you yourself traveled to one of those 35 states and come back, quarantine. If you know someone in your life who has gone to one of those states or coming in from one of those states, tell them how important it is to quarantine. If anyone needs help, they can contact the Test and Trace Corps. It’s as simple as calling 3-1-1. There is so much help available, but the one thing we all have to do, including just talking to people in our life and saying this quarantine is serious. This is how we protect ourselves and each other. So, everyone let's get that message across to people in our life. Let's do what we've done already. All of us together, fighting the disease back. And let's do that with the same spirit that's taken us this far. 

Now, speaking of how far we've come, looking ahead, important milestone today, 90 days until the election. So, literally I will say it with no fear of contradiction, certainly going to say it for my life, that this is the most important election in our lifetime. And it's crucial that everyone gets involved, that everyone participates. Sometimes people have said, Oh wow, you know, it doesn't make a difference, why should I bother? There's never been a more consequential election. There's never been a more important time to participate. So, everyone register to vote. If you haven't already, register to vote. If someone in your family or your life hasn't registered, tell them to register to vote. And make a plan to vote. Let everyone you know, know that they have the power to make a difference. And this is an unprecedented moment. Let's get everyone involved in deciding the future of our city and our country. 

With that we'll turn to our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200, today's report, 66 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375, today's report 286. And number three, percentage of the people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent, today's report two percent. That's the number we've been at for most of these last two months. And it's a very good number. A few words in Spanish —

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all we have with us here today, Sheriff Fucito, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Long, DoITT Commissioner Tisch, Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. We have Juliet from 1010 WINS. 

Question: Hello. Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Good morning everyone. How are you doing?

Mayor: Hey, Juliet. How are you?

Question: Actually, I did want to ask, first of all, about your now checkpoint program. How are you identifying people in cars? Is it just going to be by license plate or are people going to be pulled over and asked for ID? How does that work?

Mayor: It's a great question, Juliet and I'll turn it to the Sheriff. But I want to emphasize, look, we do have two separate challenges. Folks who are visiting New York City, for whatever reasons, visiting family, you know, just coming to visit in general, coming here for some appointment, whatever it may be from one of those 35 states, who live in one of those 35 states. And then the other problem is New Yorkers who go visit family or go visit friends or whatever in one of those 35 states. We have two separate realities that we have to address. Important thing is that the checkpoints I think, are going to send a very powerful message that this quarantine law is serious and important and crucial and people have to follow it. So, even if we're not going to be able to reach every single person with a checkpoint, I think it's going to help really get the message across. But Sheriff, why don't you describe the approach? 

Sheriff Fucito: Hey, Juliet, how are you? So, I think it's important to note that we're not looking to target out-of-state residents. In fact, what we're looking to do is educate people who have spent time at COVID-19 hotspots, regardless of their residence, when they come into New York, whether they're returning or they're going to be staying here for a period of time. The only way to have an effective checkpoint is having a random component to it. The courts have looked at checkpoints for public safety reasons, for regulatory reasons. And that seems to be the standard that they're looking for to avoid discrimination. It is so many vehicles, like, let's say it's every sixth vehicle or every eighth vehicle. We determine something in the beginning of the day and we stick to that pattern throughout the day. And that is how the checkpoint would be conducted at different locations. 

Mayor: Go ahead, Juliet.

Question: Okay. So, just to follow up on that, would it be then at random locations, or would you have them at locations regularly? Are you concerned that there'll be like a backup of traffic if you're doing this in the same place on any regular, you know, on a regular basis?

Mayor: Yeah. It's a very fair question. And I'll start again, turn to the Sheriff because I know he's thought a lot with other agencies, with DOT and others, about how to position this. We certainly do not want to back up traffic in a major way. And we are definitely talking about moving around locations, limited periods of time. But enough to both reach a lot of people and to send a powerful message to many, many more. But we wanted, you know, it will be a constantly moving situation. Sheriff?

Sheriff Fucito: Sure. Juliet, of course traffic is also an important component. We don't want to back up traffic when it's unnecessary. So, with the Sheriff's vehicles, we have, many of them have license plate reader technology so we can identify a vehicle. Let's say it's the eighth vehicle that crosses the bridge and we identify that vehicle. And the deputies would conduct a stop, introduce themselves and explain the nature of the stop. And go into what's needed to, the information that they need to file. And information they need to know about the quarantine when coming into New York. So, there is a random component and we're looking at a full-fledged checkpoint where it is viable. And we're also looking at individualized stops where we think it would be more suited to avoid having a traffic condition.

Moderator: Next, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good Henry. How are you?

Question: I'm good. I'm good. I want to ask you a couple more questions about the quarantine. How many people are going to be deployed around the city to do that? I'd like you to fill out the details of this quarantine a little bit. Are you going to cover all the bridges and tunnels? Are you going to — how many people are going to be deployed doing this? And you're going — and if I'm not mistaken, you're going to offer hotel rooms and food delivery to people to lock themselves up for 14 days? Can you explain this a little more?

Mayor: So, I'm going to separate that into two pieces. The first with the Sheriff and the second with Dr. Long. So again, this is a new approach and we're going to use it for as long as we think makes sense. And as extensively as we think makes sense. But I think to begin with having people see that these checkpoints are starting to happen around the city is going to send a powerful message. But it's something that we will start at a certain level. If we think it's an important tool and it's really reaching people effectively, we might keep expanding it. If we think the word has gotten across and we're really seeing a high level of compliance, we might need it less. But we're going to have to do it for a while to see what makes sense. So, let's go to the Sheriff first in terms of how much of a deployment you're doing, how many days a week, etcetera, go ahead Sheriff.

Sheriff Fucito: Sure. In the beginning, when we are obviously deployed, we are going to be very visible, but with any law enforcement model, we have to be flexible. The Sheriff has many responsibilities as you know. We do certain things involving bar and club enforcement in the evenings. We have our court duties. So, it's a balancing test. We have to make sure that we assign the right amount of resources. So, at certain points during the day, we may have 20 Sheriff units assigned to doing checkpoints. That number may reduce as the evening progresses. It may increase. So, flexibility is what we're going to be working with because that's the model that we worked with for many years. 

Mayor: And then to Dr. Long, just to give a quick summary of the kinds of support we provide to someone in quarantine. 

Executive Director Long: We want to give you anything that you need to get through this two week of mandatory quarantine period as easily as possible. That includes things like food delivery, help with figuring out your medications and getting them delivered, a direct connection to a doctor on the phone. Or even a hotel stay, if that's what you need to safely separate to keep your family and New Yorkers safe. 

Mayor: Go ahead, Henry.

Question: Well, I had a second question about a different topic, but I still don't feel like I — how are you going to enforce this? If I arrive on the George Washington Bridge, how are you going to know where I'm spending the next two weeks?

Mayor: Henry, I'll start and then Dr. Long will add if he wants. Look, there is no question, you know, first of all, this is a nation that balances individual rights and privacy with realities like public health needs. So, we always have to honor that balance. We're not going to be in everyone's apartment monitoring them. But what we can say is, one, let's look at the history of New York City. People really have heeded the warnings here. And this is a fact. We have seen it in terms of the most important thing that we can talk about, the results, the facts, the low level of number — the low number of people who are testing positive right now. The clear improvement in the health care situation. The very few number, very small number of people going into hospitals with serious COVID problems. And the fact that it's been going on for most of two months. This is because New Yorkers listened and are following the rules. And I think the more people hear how important it is to quarantine, the more people will do it. The more people who hear that there is support, the more people will feel more comfortable with it. But undoubtedly Henry, we've got, you know, we've got to be aggressive about getting the word out. We've got to make clear to people there are consequences. And that's another piece of the equation. No one wants to be fining anyone in this environment, but if we have to, we will. I think as with most things in life, if people think and see more and more activity, more and more reminders, more and more people that they know are paying attention to it, understanding it's serious, understanding we have an obligation to each other. Understanding there can be penalties. All of this adds up to create more and more adherence to the law.

Moderator: Next we have Brigid from WNYC. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Brigid, how are you? 

Question: I’m doing okay. Glad that storm is passed. 

Mayor: How are the Rockaways, Brigid?

Question: Really, really very windy, extremely windy, huge waves, pretty scary. But okay now. I'm following up on your announcement yesterday, you know, Dr. Barbot was among the highest ranking Latinas in your administration. She was forced to make a public apology to the NYPD for a conversation that was reported in tabloids. One of the only members of the administration to publicly apologize for a mistake during the pandemic. Is there anything you regret about how she was treated?

Mayor: Look, I have a lot of respect for Dr. Barbot and I appreciate what she did for this city. That the bottom line is if someone, anyone says something that wasn't the right thing to say, it's important to just clear the air and move forward. And that's what happened. But I think the bottom line of this administration is we've all gone through an incredibly tough situation, arguably the biggest crisis in the history of New York City. Everyone contributed to moving forward, but now we got to look to the future. The past is in the past, we got to look to the future. And we have huge challenges ahead to consolidate our progress on the coronavirus, to get through what's going to be a lot more activity in the fall and still keep the coronavirus at bay. And then eventually make the transition to something more normal. We've also got flu season coming on, which is a big challenge. We need to be ready for those things. I have not a question in my mind because I've seen his work, that Dr. Dave Chokshi is going to be the person who can lead us forward and get all the different pieces of the government coordinated in common cause. And that's what we need to focus on.

Moderator: Next, we have Derick from ABC-7.

Question: Hi, good morning.

Mayor: Hey, Derick, how are you?

Question: I'm doing well. And I just wanted to ask about reopening because I actually spoke this morning with the CEO of a major gym chain here in the city, and he was, you know, basically expressing some frustration that they're still closed. And he mentioned that they've actually spent a ton of money on this air filtration system that can remove coronavirus particles from the air, similar to what, you know, the Governor's talked about with malls reopening. Does that change the calculation here? I mean, at some point, when do you think gyms can reopen, especially given that they're taking these steps, like removing the particles from the air, what do you think?

Mayor: It's a fair question, Derick. I appreciate the question. Look, we don't want to see any business have to be closed that doesn't need to be. We don't want to see people out of work. Obviously, you know, gone to a really great extent to try and help a lot of businesses back. There are certainly indoor locations that historically have been particularly sensitive and I'll turn to Dr. Varma, but I'd say this, I think one of the things that we need to work with the State on, because I think both the State and the City are both very worried about the ramifications of certain indoor locations and we're still trying to perfect what those ground rules would be going forward. I do think it's a fair question. If there is a particular air filtration system that might be the game changer, we need to leave space for that consideration. So, that's something we can look into and come back with a more specific answer, but Dr. Varma, why don't you speak about, you know, how we strike that balance going forward and what kinds of things we'd be looking for before we make such a decision.

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Great. So, thank you for the question. I mean, I think I want to emphasize that we are consistently open to learning new information both about how the disease is transmitted, but even more importantly, how best we can prevent the disease. One of the challenges that we face with what we call engineering control, air filtration systems, ventilation systems, ultraviolet light, is that they absolutely can be effective at reducing the transmission of viruses like coronavirus, but it doesn't prevent the most common way in which the infection is transmitted, which is close face to face contact or distance within or around six feet of somebody else. Because, again, the virus goes directly from one person to another person, that doesn't pass through the air system at that time. So, air filtration and purification systems in the current technology are really meant to prevent transfer of the virus over a longer range. So, we need to learn more. We need to see how these devices work in real world settings, whether in fact they do help prevent a little bit of these other forms of transmission. But until that time, we also have to go with what we know, which is that the highest risk settings are anywhere where people are indoors and in close contact to each other for a continuous amount of time.

Mayor: Go ahead, Derick.

Question: Just so – one follow-up question, I don't know if you've had any conversations recently with Governor Cuomo about the timeline for some of these indoor places that were originally included in phase four for reopening. For gyms, for example, do you think it's going to be weeks or months?

Mayor: Well, first, Derick, I'd say there's absolute unity between the State and City on the things from phases three and four, where there were exceptions made. We're not ready on indoor dining. We're not ready on gyms. We're not ready on malls. So, it's the exact reason I think Dr. Varma laid out, they're just – these are the most sensitive elements of the equation and we have all worked so hard to get to the point where we have one of the lowest infection levels in the United States of America. No one wants to risk that especially, Derick, when we're about to see a huge uptick in activity after Labor Day. There's real concern about that. To your question, and it's a very fair question. Is it weeks or is it months? There's not a specific timeline. I can say that much with assurance. I don't think we're talking about the next few weeks by any stretch. I think it's a post Labor Day reality from my point of view to assess it after we've seen what happens after Labor Day. And I think the specific point though to your – to the person you talked to who said they had that specific equipment, that piece we should process in the next few weeks with the State, are there exceptions that can be made if those filtration systems really are extensive enough? I think that's a fair question that we should try and resolve in the month of August.

Moderator: Next, we have Mark from CNN.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Mark. How are you?

Question: Good, good. So, I had a couple of questions related to Dr. Barbot. Was this a situation where either you or someone in your staff asked her to resign and if she didn't, would you have fired her?

Mayor: Look, Mark, I always prefer, if we've gotten to a situation where we got to make a change that there'd be a real conversation with someone. Everyone's mature adults. Some things just don't work out. Sometimes it's time for a change in leadership, especially as we're getting ready for a whole host of new challenges. And that's the point we got to this weekend. And I think, you know, always the gracious thing to do is to ask someone if they would prefer to do something in terms of a resignation. So, I believe in that. The important point here was I knew with Dr. Dave Chokshi that we had someone who could hit the ground running and help us move forward and address the things we had to address going forward. So, you know, you always wish things would work out perfectly, but we're human beings. And in professional life, just like in the rest of human life, sometimes things don't work out. The important thing is to respect what someone has contributed and then focus on the future. That's what New Yorkers want. Obviously, Mark, they want to know if the work is going to get done and the product's going to be there. They want to keep that infection level low. They want us to keep moving forward in our restart. And whoever's going to get that job done, that's what they need, and I know that's Dr. Chokshi.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. The other question I had was, again, also on Dr. Barbot, if you're saying it's time to make a change, what specifically did she do wrong or did she not do? And were any of her decisions that have come over the last few months, did that result in any negative effects like loss of life or an increase in infection rate?

Mayor: I'm looking at it that way. And I don't – look, again, I respect Dr. Barbot. I named her Health Commissioner. So, let's begin at the beginning. I named her. I think she did some important work and some good work. I need a series of things to happen a certain way for where we are now and where we're going. I determined that it was important to have new leadership and, again, any chief executive gets to that point at some point with some agencies. It's just part of life and it’s part of running a huge operation. I have 380,000 employees. There's going to be times when you decide it's time for a leadership change, but you can also have a lot of respect, and I do for Dr. Barbot and her contributions. She's a very devoted public servant. Her whole career, starting as a pediatrician in public health, has been about serving people and helping people. But this was about where we go from here. So, I think that is just a normal thing that one does as a leader is determine, which people make sense to run which agencies, what kind of team dynamic, how are you going to move forward? And then you act on it. And what was very important to note was we had gotten through stages one, two, three, four, or phases one through – two, three, four. We had gotten our city to one of the lowest infection levels in the entire country. It was the right time to make a change

Moderator: Last two for today. Next, we have Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Dana, how are you doing?

Question: I'm all right. This one is for the Sheriff – I'm just curious, given the end of the eviction moratorium tonight, you know, if you have any plan regarding evictions, if you've gotten any guidance from the State about when to resume them.

Mayor: I'll just start before the Sheriff and say this – you know, I think it is such a mistake to not have clear guidance that we should avoid any eviction that is for economic reasons. Look, if someone is getting a steady paycheck and they can afford the rent and they’re not paying the rent, that's one thing. If someone's destroying property, that's another thing. But the vast majority of people right now are folks who can't pay – the ones who are having a problem are folks who can't pay because they don't have a paycheck. I, again, call upon the State, whether it's through legislative action by the Assembly or executive order to affirm that anyone in that situation where they simply can't pay should be allowed to create a payment plan and pay back their landlord in the future when they have the resources over time. Because if people are evicted for solely economic reasons, we're going to end up with potentially thousands of people who, unfairly, have their home taken away, and then guess what a lot of them end up in our homeless shelters, which is not fair to anyone. So, we need bigger action quickly to avert this crisis, but Sheriff, go ahead on this specific question.

Sheriff Fucito: Sure. So, just a little clarification. Although the sheriff is authorized to do evictions in New York City, most of the evictions done in New York City are done by City marshals. The evictions that the New York City Sheriff's Office conducts are usually ones involving public safety. Even during the pandemic, we conducted evictions where buildings were in danger of collapse and the tenants, for whatever reason, refused to leave and they had to get a court order to remove them. So, obviously this was not about them paying rent, but it was about public safety. And as the Mayor said, any of the types of orders involving public safety will continue. When it comes to economic reasons, the courts are being very, very sensitive to all the issues related to COVID-19. The sheriff or the marshal is at the very end of the process. Talking to me about a problem like this is like talking to your mailman about who sent you the letter. We are at the very end of the process. The people that need to be involved in the dialogue are the judges and the landlords, the people that are pushing the process are in charge of it. And that's really where the dialogue has to begin. Judges have to be more understanding, but I can't tell the judge what to do, but the court system is recognizing it. The State Legislature has to be understanding. They may have to put limitations on how evictions should be done. These things have to be done way upstream. We, the sheriff or marshal, is very, very much at the end of the process.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Last question for today. We have Ayana from PIX-11.

Question: Hey, happy Wednesday, Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Ayana, I think you're the first person to ever say happy Wednesday to me. So, I appreciate it. And it is a beautiful day. So, thank you.

Question: You're welcome. My question is following up on the eviction moratorium that is set to expire – do you have an update on the City's Landlord Tenant Mediation programs? Are those centers getting up and running? And just overall resources available from the City to help folks out who's still struggling to pay the rent.

Mayor: Thank you, Ayana. Such an important question. Yeah, the mediation effort we talked about just, I think, a week or two ago, that was something that was pre-existing and we're building out to be bigger. So, that's right now available to people. But also, I want to emphasize, if you are facing eviction and you do not have your own lawyer or you do not feel you know the facts, please call 3-1-1 because our Office of Tenant Protection can provide people with a lot of different types of support. If someone needs a free lawyer or legal advice, we can get it for them. I really think, Ayana, we need a bigger solution here, which would be for the State to enact that payment plan approach with a clear mandate that anyone who has a roof over their head right now and just can't afford the rent should not be put out on the street, give them another alternative. But in the meantime, the City will always be there for people in any way we can. There's certain different types of services we can provide, there are some narrow situations where we can get some financial assistance, but definitely the legal help is always there just by calling 3-1-1. Go ahead, Ayana.

Question: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you.

Mayor: Okay, thanks so much. Well, everybody, look, going back to this key question, how do we keep ourselves safe? We have come so far – again now eight full weeks where we've kept the level of infection below three percent in New York City. Look around the country, all of the states, all of the cities that at one point were belittling New York City or looking at us as the place that couldn't handle the challenge, well, unfortunately for everyone, the tables have turned. Now New York City is the place that is showing everyone else how it is done. And that is because of New Yorkers. That's because New Yorkers stepped up and showed incredible strength, resiliency, teamwork, compassion for each other. Now we need to do the same when it comes to people who are traveling. Look, if you're a New Yorker and you go to one of those 35 states to see family or whatever it might be, and you come back, show the same strength and discipline you've shown in so many other things, do this for yourself. Do it for your family, do it for your neighbors. Quarantine. If you need help, we'll give you that help.

If you're someone visiting, we always appreciate when people come to our city. We're always an open, welcoming city, but I want to say this to any visitor – be as good as New Yorkers, be as devoted to the health of other people as New Yorkers, respect our laws. We have a very clear law that says you must quarantine. If you come here, you must quarantine. It is not optional. We do not want to fine you. We do not want to penalize you. In fact, we want to help you quarantine. But if you don't respect our laws, we will penalize you because this is about protecting the health and safety of New Yorkers. So, if you come here, please respect what the good people of this city have done. Join us in fighting back this disease. Thank you.

2020-08-06 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. You know, these last five months, New Yorkers have been fighting this battle against the coronavirus, fighting the battle against the economic crisis, the hunger crisis, all the things we've been dealing with at once, and I know people have felt often alone. This has been a tough, tough time. So many challenges in everyone's personal life, family life, work life, you name it. But I also mean that people felt alone because New York City's had to stand on its own. We have not gotten help from the places we need it from, and most expected from. That begins from Washington, D. C. It is, unfortunately, a statement of fact that the many, many times we asked our federal government for help, we didn't receive an answer. We didn't get the help we needed. We didn't get it when we needed it, and that is reminder of how important it is to have strong representation in Washington fighting for us, and that is a reminder that right now, in these coming weeks, the amount of representation we're going to have in the Congress going forward will be determined. It will be determined by the census, as well as a host of other key decisions of how much funding we're going to get. So, we're going to come back to that in a moment because it sounds abstract, but it's not abstract at all. This is literally one of the most important things that's going to happen to New York City in a long time, whether we can maximize this census count or not. So, when you think about all the things you wish we had gotten from Washington, and we're still fighting for at this hour, as the stimulus discussions go on, think about our levels of representation. Think about how much we would be damaged if we had even less, and that's a motivation right there to focus on the census.

We'll come back to that in a moment. But first back to the economic crisis, back to the pain that so many families are feeling. So many New Yorkers simply can't pay the rent. It's not their fault, that they didn't ask for a global pandemic, but if you don't get a paycheck, if you don't have a paycheck, what are you going to do? The last number I heard was 1.3 million New York City residents had filed for unemployment benefits in the course of this crisis. 1.3 million people – that represents families, so millions more effected by that. If you don't have a source of income, how the hell are you going to pay the rent? It's as simple as that, and on top of that, people are trying to get food, medicine, you name it. So, there have been eviction moratoriums over these last few months and that's been right because the last thing we want to see is a lot of people put out on the street, the last thing when I see is people flooding into our shelter system, but the eviction moratorium expired at midnight last night, and that is a huge problem for the people of New York City, and it must be addressed, and I'm going to say again, in these next weeks, you're going to hear a lot from me calling upon our State government to create a new system, to allow those who simply cannot pay for lack of income, to be able to have a payment plan model that will take them into next year, allow them to pay off the rent over time when they finally have resources. But no one should be put out on the street because they can't pay. They literally can't pay. So, while we're fighting that battle in Albany, right now I want to tell all New Yorkers who are threatened with eviction, that if you need help call 3-1-1, because we want to get you help. We can get you legal support and that really can help stop an eviction. Here to tell you about it is someone who's devoted his life to keeping people in their housing, our Commissioner for Social Services, Steve Banks.

Commissioner Steven Banks, Department of Social Services: Thank you very much. Look, as the Mayor said, eviction cases are now being filed. No actual evictions are moving forward right now because of an order of the court, but we're not waiting. We reached out to 14,000 people who had eviction warrants pre-COVID, to let them know that legal help is available. So, if you're somebody that's got an eviction warrant, as the Mayor said, call 3-1-1 and we can help you. We've also been paying back-rent through emergency renter grants. A sad fact is tens of thousands of people can't pay their rent. They were struggling before COVID, and now, as the Mayor said, they've lost their jobs, they've lost the ability to pay their rent, and to add insult to injury the Republican leadership in the Congress and the Senate has allowed the cutoff of the $600 a week in unemployment supplemental funds that was so essential for keeping people in their homes. But, you know, behind these cold numbers are devastating human costs. I remember when I was a housing lawyer at Legal Aid, how heartbreaking it was to talk to families in shelter who had been evicted in cases in which a lawyer could have kept them in their homes, and the impact on children in these cases is particularly harsh. And that's why New York City did something about this to prevent evictions through the first in the nation, Right-to-Counsel law. It drove down evictions pre-COVID by 41 percent while evictions were going up all over the country, and that's why it's critical that we've got legal help in place to address this new crisis. So, call 3-1-1, if you need legal help. But as the Mayor said, there's so much more we can do. We need help from Washington. We need help from Albany to extend the moratorium, and in the federal stimulus bill, we clearly need to provide rental assistance to help struggling families pay their rent in this period of time that the Mayor spoke so directly about. Mayor, I'm going to turn it back to you.

Mayor: Thank you. Thank you very much, Commissioner. I want to thank you, Steve, everyone at Social Services for the work you're doing. Those 14,000 New York City families right now, who are on the brink – thank you for not waiting, but for reaching out to them to offer help, to do everything in our power to keep them in their homes. But look again, the bigger solutions reside in Albany with a law to allow people to have a payment plan, the best solution resides in Washington, D.C. Rental assistance for everyone who's lost their job so they can keep their home and landlords have the money to keep up their buildings. But we're in such a broken situation in Washington right now, and yes, there is an election coming and a chance to address that. 

Okay, let's go to our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients, today's report 75 patients. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375, today's report 303. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent, today's report, the best ever, one percent. That's an amazing number. And that's again, because of you. Because of your hard work, stick to it. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that. Let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Good morning, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Commissioner Banks, Commissioner Criswell, Deputy Director of the New York City Census Amit Bagga, and Senior Advisor. Dr. Jay Varma. First question today, it goes to Marcia from CBS.

Question: I know, but I need to, I need one of the union guys –

Mayor: Marcia, can you hear us?

Moderator: Marcia, you're on the line.

Mayor: You're live. Marcia?

Moderator: We can circle back to Marcia.

Mayor: Okay. We'll come back.

Moderator: The next is Arthur from FOX 5.

Question: Thank you so much for taking my question. I have to have two, Mr. Mayor. I hope you are well. My first question is, what do we do to track tourists who are coming to New York City and perhaps may not be staying in? The honor system, as we know, does not necessarily work. Is there a way perhaps to use cell phones to make sure that that individual is remaining in quarantine and not putting others in danger? Because we have learned of some cases where tourists come to New York City for two, three days. They're not coming just to sit in a hotel room for two, three days, and then to leave. That they have been out – they've been on, people have been posting on social media that, 'Hey, look, I'm in New York City, I'm doing these things,' when they are coming from a state that should be in quarantine.

Mayor: Arthur. Very, very good question. Thank you. First of all, let's be clear. There were 15 states that thank God are not under that quarantine order. So, people visiting from them would not have to go through that. But the ones – the majority, clearly, do. And so, what we said yesterday, we're going to be pumping up this. It has to become clear that this is serious business and it comes with consequences. Both for people, for our health, for our community, but also for the individual. If they don't follow those rules there can be serious penalties up to $10,000 per person. We do not want to fine people in this environment unless we have to, but if we need to use that tool more, we will. And the City and State have been on the same page. This really matters that we get this quarantine, right. So,, what we announced yesterday, checkpoints at entries to the city, it will be random. It will be moving, but I think it'll get the message across. What we're doing at the airports, working with the State and the Port Authority, what we're doing at the bus station, Penn Station for travelers coming in from those states. Getting people to the point of contact, getting them to fill out those forms and then following up aggressively with them. We're going to be doing a lot more. We're going to engage every business and institution to be a part of this. But now we've entered a phase where it has to be ubiquitous, Arthur. You have to feel it wherever you go. And people have to start seeing that if they don't follow it, there'll be penalties. So, we can, we can stay in touch with people. And I think most people just, if they're reminded and if you stay in touch, they do follow the rules. Really most people do. But for those who don't, we're going to have to start showing the consequences. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. Thanks. Hopefully monitoring social media can be part of that solution. My other question, if I can shift gears, is to Open Streets. There are a lot of people who feel like looking at other cities that have taken advantage to evolve their city, to create more spaces that are livable, that we're not doing enough to preserve those. That barriers that are put up are run over. And there's still this tug of war, that we're not making the most of this moment. Do you agree with that or are there plans to sort of solidify the gains that have been attained during this pandemic to make the streets more livable for New Yorkers and not just all about cars?

Mayor: Yeah. Unquestionably, Arthur. Look, it's been a very good experiment. We had to structure it carefully, but once we have – I think here's what I've heard back. I'm sure there's been some cases where there were mistakes and some cases where people didn't abide by the rules. But overwhelmingly what we've seen, Open Streets, Open Restaurants when we combine the two, overwhelmingly a success. So, we're going to build upon it now. We're going to keep adding everything we can in the short term. And this is a model that has tremendous promise for our future, particularly in the warmer months. So, we'll be coming out with more and more on that. The bottom line is the future of New York City is more and more about mass transit, biking, walking, less and less about the car. Any spaces we can open up, particularly in the nicer weather we're going to be working to do that. We're also the single biggest city in the country, one of the most densely populated places in the country. So, we can't do everything that some other places do, but we can do a lot. And that's what we intend to do.

Moderator: Next is Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How are you?

Question: I'm fine. Thank you. I wanted to follow up on the checkpoints. I was wondering if you'd be collecting information from these checkpoints, making them public, as far as Test and Trace results or the number of people that are being put in hotels. And also, do you think COVID tests will be required for anybody coming in here from out of state?

Mayor: So, a couple of things, one – the checkpoints and everything that's part of Test and Trace we will regularly report. We have the biggest, strongest Test and Trace program in America. We also have the most transparent program in America. We regularly report on the results. I think it's very important. This will now become a bigger part of that because we want to show that if we have people working directly or with the State and the Port Authority, airports, train stations, bus stations, checkpoints, that all of that's going to add up to a lot of contact and that contact is going to take follow up. We want to show you how that's going. It will take time to build up unquestionably, Juliet, but we want to show you that for sure. I think the most important thing is that people from those 35 states quarantine. We always want people to get testing, but really think about it this way, they're quarantining. That's what – that's the action that matters. They're not going to be in circulation with other people. So, the test is less important than following through on the quarantine order. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. My next question is for you and Commissioner Banks. Homeless shelters are being emptied out. Residents are getting relocated into hotels. What is the City doing to retrofit shelters to keep residents safe from the virus so that they can return to the shelters?

Mayor: It's a great question, Juliet. And, actually, I just want to modify one part of your beginning. You're saying people are being moved out. That really happened earlier in the height of the crisis. You're exactly right to be saying now what's going to be the next step to bring folks back to shelters as is appropriate. So, the Commissioner will talk about it, but I want to emphasize, at the height of the crisis, there was an honest and real problem of folks being in close quarters and we needed to spread them out for their health and safety. That was our concern for all New Yorkers, including folks who unfortunately lost their home. That's why we went into some hotels, but that is a temporary reality. We're going to be coming back from those hotels over time into the shelter system. So, Commissioner, can you give a sense of that approach?

Commissioner Banks: Absolutely. And just for context, I appreciate the question and thank you for that context, Mayor. Just go back a little bit in time. There was an apt headline that said we were facing a ticking time bomb in our congregate shelters. And remember that our congregate shelters are only a part of our overall shelter system. We've got about 55,000 people in shelter now and about 17,000 adults who normally would be in congregate shelters. And we said in order to defuse that ticking time bomb, we implemented a massive emergency relocation of human beings from those congregate shelters throughout the city, more than 10,000 in about eight weeks. We've now got a total of 13,000 single adults in hotel rooms in different parts of the city. We were able to get hotel vacancies. And in some of the congregate shelters, we're now able to implement appropriate social distancing for some individuals who can't appropriately be served outside of that kind of environment.

But I think we're going to be guided by the health guidance. We're guided by health guidance in implementing this massive relocation of human beings in a very short period of time. And we'll be guided by the Health Department and Health + Hospitals in terms of when it's time to return, but I can assure you, we will return when it is safe to do so. That is – this is not a permanent state of operations to be in commercial hotels. We were working very hard, we have a plan to get out of commercial hotels. Before COVID, we had driven down the number of commercial hotels the City was in and we were continuing to make progress in that plan. We opened more than 60 hotels in the last eight to ten weeks in order to deal with this crisis.

Mayor: Yeah. And just to finish this, Juliet, this will unquestionably – we're going to be coming back to where we were, and I want to keep reminding people the extent of the challenge in this sense. You can listen to different people, Jay Varma and I talked about this a bunch of times, is it five months? Is it six months? What is that exact number of months it's going to be until there is a vaccine and people are widely vaccinated? That unquestionably is going to be the watershed moment, but it's finite. That moment is coming. I think the consensus is it's coming in the first months of 2021. So, as much as we have a real issue that we have to deal with, and when we put people in hotels, we have to work with the communities to make sure everyone is safe and secure – the original impetus was to save lives and that remains an imperative, but this is not forever. This is for a limited period of time.

Moderator: Next is Reuven Blau from The City.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor for taking my question. Industry City City Councilman Carlos Menchaca opposes the City's expansion plan. As you are aware, there's an unwritten rule of this, the Council that lawmakers defer to individual members on projects in their districts. Some are now calling on the Speaker and to kind of step in and push through the development plan. I was wondering where do you stand? And do you think the Speaker should kind of step in and save this plan that you put forward?

Mayor: Look, I was a City Council member so I have a particular understanding of all the realities here. I respect the Speaker and I respect the Council. I'm not to tell them how to do their business, but I will say this, that history was for a reason. Of course, a local member knows something particular about their district. It was never codified. It's not a hard and fast rule. I think you're right, it's more of a tradition. But I do think we have to think about some of the overwhelming dynamics we're dealing with right now. We're in the middle of a pandemic and we've got to get people back to work. We've got to find every way to get the livelihoods back to people and need them. So, that needs to be taken to account. So, I won't get into the inner workings of the Council, but I think it's important for them to look at the whole picture. 

Moderator: The next is Nolan from the Post.

Question: Hey, everyone, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Nolan. How are you doing?

Question: I'm well, Mr. Mayor. In June, you announced that your administration would be rolling out a new busway on Main Street in Queens. It's now August, the busway hasn't been rolled out yet. And the Transportation Department announced that they were canceling a key community meeting. Is the busway dead? And why is – the project remained unfinished?

Mayor: Nolan, it's a good question. And I know at the time that we announced it, unlike the others, to the best of my knowledge, there were some very particular local concerns and we were trying to see if we could make adjustments to address that. That's a very fair question. I'll get you an update on that. Obviously, we intend to move forward, but we also – sometimes we hear an unintended consequence that wasn't fully realized to begin with and we try to make that adjustment. So, we'll get you an update on that quickly. Go ahead.

Question: More broadly on questions about the city's infrastructure and the post-pandemic pre-vaccine era, cities around the world, whether it's London, Paris, Milan, Mexico City, have all rolled out ambitious plans to expand busways to expand bike lanes. The City has nothing comparably ambitious. Every time you've been – every time this question has been put to you, you've said, one of the reasons is New York's exceptionalism. What about New York's exceptionalism means that we can't get the same infrastructure improvements that London and Paris, both old cities, dense cities with millions of people living there, can enjoy?

Mayor: Yeah, respectfully, I don't think any two cities are comparable. I think the way we are built and concentrated is different really than almost any other. And we intend to keep building. I would just disagree on a fundamental reality. This is a city with one of the great mass transit systems in the world. Our job is to strengthen that mass transit system. That's what we were all working on before the pandemic, and obviously getting congestion pricing done, getting long term funding for the MTA was crucial to that, building out Citi Bike, building out a Select Bus Service and busways, building out NYC Ferry. We've been doing this on many, many levels to give people more options. I just don't accept the notion that there's one way to do things. And I also think it's a little bit easy for people to look to other places and say, you know, that looks so wonderful, but I would ask people to look right here at all the different pieces that have been built over recent years and a lot more has to come. So, we, right now, are dealing with the health care crisis, getting our economy restarted, getting our schools back. That's where our focus is. But soon we're going to be saying more and more about the future planning for the city's economy, future planning for mass transit. There's a lot to come, but my focus right now is on the steps we need to take to restart. I think that's where the most important priority is.

Moderator: Next is Chris Robbins from Gothamist.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Two questions for you. The first is about evictions. Have you directed the City's marshals to not carry out evictions right now? And have you spoken to the Governor directly about this problem because it doesn't seem to be going away. And what is the long term solution here?

Mayor: Well, it's a great question. In terms of long term solution, Chris, there's been constant back and forth with the Governor's team. I've been very, both in our private conversation with public conversations with Albany, that we must have a resolution and the Governor's a piece of it and the Legislature's a piece of it. The best thing to do would be, when the Legislature comes back, which as I understand it could be this month or next month, pass a law creating a payment plan so anyone who simply can certify, you know, objectively and factually that they just don't have an income source, can stay in their apartment, sign onto a payment plan, and pay back the rent when they do have an income source. That's how we could, I think, fix a lot of this problem. Obviously, the rental assistance from the federal government would be an even more profound solution, but it doesn't look in reach at this moment. Now that might change – whoops – it might change in a few months because Washington might change in a few months.

On the question of marshals – very good question. We're looking at that right now – we want to make sure – we got to follow State law, but I also want to make sure we are being as smart and flexible as possible to avoid economic evictions. There may be some evictions under certain circumstances for totally other reasons that are pertinent, but the economic ones I want to see us avoid.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I'm wanting to check in about the checkpoints since they were, in fact, actually supposed to be rolled out yesterday, hoping you can just give us an update on how exactly that went. Where were they? How many people did they stop? What kind of reactions did they encounter?

Mayor: Erin it's a great question, and I cannot tell a lie. I should have had that report here for you. And we probably should have had the sheriff on the line to report. We don't. I will get that certainly in the next few hours and we'll have the sheriff follow up with you. But I do think the checkpoint process is both going to reach a whole lot of people directly, but also send a broader message to New Yorkers with many, many other tools we're going to use. This quarantine situation is serious and must be abided by, so we'll get you those numbers.

Question: Okay, great. Thanks. And then my second question, I just want to follow up on a couple of the previous questions about, you know, transportation and pedestrian options. Because there was a report earlier this week from the Regional Plan Association saying that, you know, there's going to be gridlock as more people turn to cars. I guess I'll phrase the question maybe in human terms, as you might put it, you know, because I think this is a conversation a lot of families are having. You know, to use myself as an example. I don't have a car, I've never had a car, never wanted one. My husband has suggested recently that maybe we should get a car because, you know, taking the subway brings some risk. It's not something we want to do all the time and we're kind of stuck in the neighborhood. You know, biking, isn't safe everywhere. There's a limited number of options. So, to someone in that situation would you tell them that they shouldn't buy a car? Would you give them an argument as to why there are other options that they should utilize? Or would you say, sure, go ahead and do it if it's right for you? What's your advice to New Yorkers?

Mayor: My advice to New Yorkers is, do not buy a car. Cars are the past. The future is going to be mass transit, biking, walking, and there's so many options right now. And there'll be more and more as we go forward. I'm never going to own a car again. I can tell you that much. Now, Erin, it is a very honest question and people are concerned about their health and safety. I fully understand that, but here's why I would say, especially don't buy a car now, the crisis – what defines the end of this crisis? A vaccine that works and the vaccine being delivered and people being inoculated on a wide, wide scale. Remember, you're in a city right now, many regard as you know, the safest city in America right now in health terms. We're down to a one percent infection level. You know, we have a handful of people going into the hospital at any given day related to COVID.

The crisis will be over. Will it be four, five, six, seven months? I don't know the exact day, but it will be over. And I think the greatest likelihood is it'll be over in the first months of 2021. And then a whole lot of action will happen to restore things. It won't happen overnight, but it'll happen steadily. I just think cars don't make sense in New York City with all the other options, let alone the for-hire vehicles and everything else, and the fact that this is a crisis that has an inherent time limit. So, I would note, Erin, people really have been coming back to the subways and buses. It's not a torrent, but it's been steady, very steady increases. And I think when you add all that up plus, tragically, a lot of people do not have a job to go to yet, and that will take a while to restore and a huge number of people are working from home. So, I don't think we're going to see overwhelming numbers of folks on mass transit for those reasons. And I also don't think you're going to see overwhelming car traffic for those reasons. So, I think we can build up what we have, but I would not tell any New Yorker to buy a car unless there's a really urgent reason for it. Go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today is Ben Evansky from Fox News.

Question: Mr. Mayor, thank you very much for your question. Just – first question on the checkpoints. Do you see any constitutional problems with that? How do you balance the two between constitutional rights and stopping people, asking them these questions?

Mayor: It's a very good question. We thought about that a lot. And the sheriff has been – I think his remarks yesterday was really clear, or the day before. He was really clear that we want to do this in a respectful way that is based on information. It's not punitive. It is letting people know that there's a new law in effect that is an emergency law based on health and safety. And we need people to understand, whether they're coming from one of those 35 states or a New Yorker who went to visit one of those 35 states, that they're obliged by law to quarantine, and we need their information so that we can get them the support in that. I think it is going to be in a smart, straightforward way, but I will tell you, we cannot take the risk of this virus reasserting. We've had now two months of incredible success. God bless the people in New York City. We're not going to let it slip away now. Go ahead.

Question: And second question. Governor Cuomo was discussing ways to try and persuade rich friends, millionaires to come back to the city. Is the City keeping track of how many residents have left since the pandemic and the crime wave? I'm hearing a lot of anecdotal evidence [inaudible] the Governor, obviously yesterday or the day before – is the city keeping track of this?

Mayor: Yeah. Yes, but I want to put things in a very quick perspective. We are having a problem in the last few months. There's been an uptick in crime, but it is a problem directly related to the coronavirus. Just as I said, you're going to see the crime situation turn around because the NYPD is employing new strategies, working more closely with communities, because the summer will be over soon, because the coronavirus crisis will be over soon. So, I do not hear a lot of people making decisions based on that. I think there's a pretty strong understanding out there, people are paying attention to, this is a temporary reality caused by a perfect storm of problems. But the issue of folks who left because of the virus, I think you'll see a certain number of people who leave and after an appropriate time, after there's a vaccine, will come back. I think you'll see some people who maybe decide they want a different kind of lifestyle. I think a lot of those people will be replaced by other people coming in. For decades now, as people have left New York City they've been replaced, and then some, by more and more people coming in.

So, I think that pattern will start again over the next couple of years, but to the point about the folks out in the Hamptons, I have to be very clear about this. We do not make decisions based on the wealthy few. I was troubled to hear this concept that because wealthy people have a set of concerns about the city that we should accommodate them, that we should build our policies and approaches around them. That's not how it works around here anymore. This city is for New Yorkers. This city is for people who live here, work here, fight to make this place better, fight through this crisis. So, there's a lot of New Yorkers who are wealthy, who are true believers in New York City and will stand and fight with us. And there are some who may be fairweather friends, but they will be replaced by others. But we must build our policies around working people. And if our federal government fails us and doesn't provide a stimulus we should immediately return in Albany to the discussion of a tax on wealthy New Yorkers. Because as we see from the stock market, while everyone else is suffering, the rich are getting richer, and it's time to look that in the face and say, you know what, wealthy New Yorkers can afford to pay a little bit more so that everyone else can make it through this crisis. That's where this conversation should be centered.

Okay, everybody, look, just want to wrap it up. Coming back to the most foundational idea, something we all feel in our hearts. What do you think about, what matters most to you – your family, your home, where your life is centered, where your heart is. So, home. We told people, for months, stay home. We told people for months, fight back this crisis, fight back this virus, stay home. Guess what? New Yorkers did stay home. And home became more important than ever before. And now we see thousands of people may lose their homes for no fault of their own. They didn't do anything wrong. They didn't ask for a pandemic. It wasn't, they weren't working – it's not that they weren't working hard enough. They had their jobs taken away by a global crisis. We must protect people's homes. So, we have mediation programs to help tenants and landlords get on the same page and keep people in their homes. We have the legal support to keep people in their homes. We need action in Washington. We need action in Albany. We cannot let people lose a roof over their heads. And so, I can tell you one thing with every fiber in our beings, the City of New York will fight to keep New Yorkers in their homes and to make it through this crisis. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-07 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. We have a lot to go over today. I'm going to go through it all very quickly. First, most important – look we are now five months into the coronavirus crisis. The most central thing we can do in New York City is keep ourselves healthy, keep the infection rate low in this city. If we get that part right, and New Yorkers have been heroes, fighting back against this disease, we keep this at a low level. Everything else becomes possible. Restarting our city, restarting our economy. It all depends on this. So, we're going to talk about several things today, but one very, very important piece of the equation is the offense here. The force that we've put together, the fight back against the disease, the Test and Trace Corps. We're going to talk about the latest on that and how it's helping us keep that infection level low.

But I want to first talk about a couple of other really important pieces that are happening today that we need to talk about. First of all, question of evictions – this is on the minds of thousands and thousands of New Yorkers. People just trying to keep a roof over their head. Look, we have some good news today and I want to thank Governor Cuomo. He signed an executive order extending some of the protections against eviction for tenants as a result of COVID-19. Now we need the court system to play the role. So, I'm calling on the State court system. Please aggressively follow up on this executive order to protect tenants who simply can't pay the rent because they lost their income due to the greatest crisis in generations. We need the court system to come in and then we need the State in general to address the bigger questions here. These eviction moratoriums. It should not be something that just has to be renewed all the time. This needs to be ongoing for the extent of this crisis, and then for several months thereafter, as people hopefully consistently get back on their feet and have the money to pay the rent, but really what we need as part of the stimulus, we need tenant assistance. We need rental assistance to help people get by and we need the state to pass a law, giving tenants the ability to pay the rent when they can, if they don't have any income, what can they do? But for those who don't have income, giving them the opportunity to go on a payment plan and pay back when they do that's right for tenants and landlords alike. We need state action on that front.

But now back to the central issue that has been gripping our lives for the last five months, how we fight this virus, how we keep it from spreading, how we stop a resurgence, New Yorkers have been heroes, you've been amazing. The whole country is looking with admiration in New York City for the way we fought back, and Test and Trace is a crucial piece of the equation. Again, this is this army of over 3,000 hardworking people out there every day in communities on the phones, finding people, helping people, reaching people, literally stopping thousands of new infections with their work, and it's an army that's growing, and part of the magic here is not just to say we need you to get tested, but also if you are testing positive to get you to help you need, if you have to safely separate from others. So amazing hit rate, so far amazing success. 92 percent of all positive cases have been reached. Thousands, we now estimate over 5,000 potential coronavirus cases, averted, meaning 5,000 more people that would have been infected were not because the folks who tested positive were safely separated from the folks around them, but we got a lot more to do. We know big, big things coming on. Flu season's coming colder weather people more indoors, school coming back. A lot of hits, so Test and Trace will be more important than ever, and when Test and Trace calls you, it means someone is calling not only trying to stop the disease from spreading and protect you and your family, but they're trying to give you help that if you need to safely separate, we will be with you every step of the way, and the leading the charge, the leader of this piece of the effort, making sure that people get smart, compassionate, resourceful care for whatever they need to get through that period of isolation and get healthy again, the Director of the Take Care Initiative of Test and Trace, Dr. Amanda Johnson. Welcome doctor.

Director Amanda Johnson, Take Care New York: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. As the Mayor mentioned, the Take Care arm of the Test and Trace course responsible for ensuring that New Yorkers have what they need to safely separate. To date this program has looked like helping New Yorkers connect with a hotel so that they have a physical space and the amenities that they need to prevent spreading the virus to their loved ones, their roommates, their family, their friends, and for New Yorkers who choose to complete isolation and quarantine at home we'll deliver you the services that you need to do so from the comfort of your own home. We are really pleased to announce that starting next week, we'll actually be able to deliver you the supplies that you need to complete your safe separation in the form of our Take Care package.

So I'm going to walk you through the contents of this package, some of which are going to be familiar to you. So having the weathered the storm over the past five months you'll know that this is a medical grade mask that you can use to protect yourself from the other people who reside in your homes, and we've also included hand sanitizer for you. Nothing takes the place of washing your hands as frequently as possible, but I just want to take a moment to remark on how impressive it is that we're being able to deliver a hand sanitizer and masks at a time where we would not have been able to do so five months ago. We also have antibacterial wipes so that you're able to clean the surfaces so that you reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to people who share your household. We're also including two items to help you with monitoring your health during the time that you're isolating quarantining. One is a disposable thermometer. This is really important because your contact tracers going to call you and ask you about your symptoms, and we specifically want to know if you've registered any fever over the past day. This will help us ensure that when it comes time for you to exit your safe separation, you're able to do so at the appropriate time. We've also included a medical device in the kits that we're going to be sending to cases – so the people who have been confirmed positive for COVID. This is a pulse oximeter. It gives you two very useful pieces of information. One of which is your heart rate. The other is your oxygen level – the level of oxygen saturation in your blood, this information is really important because a low oxygen saturation can be an early warning sign that you need to seek additional medical attention. You can have a low oxygen saturation without even feeling breathless, so we're really pleased that we're able to include this so that you have the information you need to be able to escalate care when the time comes – when and if the time comes. We've also through the generosity of a couple of donors, been able to include a couple things, to make the duration of safe separation, more engaging, and more productive. So we're really appreciative to Kind for the inclusion of a couple of Kind bars in the Take Care package, and we'd also like to thank Microsoft for providing information about how to access online workshops and training. I know that was a lot of information but we've also included a booklet in the Take Care package so that you can go over the resources that are included and also find information about how to connect with other services that you might need during the time of your safe separation. This package is going to be translated into 13 additional languages as well.

We understand that being able to safely separate comes down to more than just tools. It's about building relationships with your contact tracer, with your resource navigator, so that they can help you get the services that you need to safely separate, particularly if you choose to do so at home. We're really proud of the work that the 15 community-based organizations who form our core of over 200 resource navigators – the relationships they've built to help people get the services they need while they're safely separating at home. These tireless 200+ resource navigators have fielded over 8,000 calls to people who have needed services, people who have reached out to us during this really critical time. They've been able to connect individuals to about 5,000+ city services, including prescription medication delivery, as well as mental health services, and we've been able to enable 2,000 individuals to receive food delivery in their homes.

I want to take this moment to extend my appreciation to all the New Yorkers out there who have been participating in the Test and Trace Corps so far. So if you've gone out and you've gotten tested, if you've picked up the phone, when your contact tracer has called you, if you've given information about your contact so we can help them know their status and help them safely separate, I am indebted to you, and I'm also very grateful for everybody who has made the sacrifice to safely separate at home or hotel so that we can break the chains of transmission and stop the virus in its tracks. Thank you so much, and I'm going to turn it back to the Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dr. Johnson, excellent report, and look, everyone, just think about what Dr. Johnson has been over there. There's a very, very comprehensive, extensive effort to get people whatever support they need. We're not saying to people, hey, you're on your own. Quite the opposite. We're saying we're going to be with you every step of the way. In fact, if you engage with the Test and Trace effort, you're going to have a lot of support, a lot of compassion, a lot of creativity to get you the help you need, and it just makes so much sense that if folks know they're going to be supported, they will do more to safely separate from others, and that will stop the spread of disease. This effort is going to be even more important as we go into the fall. So thank you doctor for your great work and your team's work.

And look, we are ever vigilant about this disease. So we also are recognizing that while we're serving the folks in this city who need to safely separate, we're also very keenly aware of folks traveling in or New Yorkers who have been to one of the 35 states, where there are problems coming back. They need the Test and Trace Corps too. They need support in quarantining. They need information, and we're going to do that in a lot of ways. One of the things we're doing is our checkpoints, and we announced them earlier this week, and this is crucial. This is both to help people give them information, let them know how important it is. If they're in the situation, according to state law, where they should quarantine that this is how you do it, and this is the help you will receive. But it also will spread the word to all New Yorkers and all visitors that this is really, really serious. So the checkpoints began with that clear message, positive message: we're here to help, but we got to make sure everyone takes this seriously. I want to thank everyone at the Sheriff's Office. They've been doing an outstanding job. The first stops were about 200 vehicles just as a test run. That number is going to grow greatly this weekend. But unquestionably, it will help to reach thousands and thousands of people as individuals. But I think millions of people get the message because of these checkpoints that these quarantines must be honored for the good of all.

Let me take us now to our daily indicators. And again, this makes the point how the discipline, the focus, the hard work of New Yorkers, everything we've been doing including test and trace, especially is keeping these numbers low. So first, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold, 200 patients, today's report 79 patients. Number two, daily the number of Health + Hospitals ICUs, 375 patients is the threshold, 302 is the number today. And most importantly, people testing positive citywide for COVID, threshold 15 percent, today's report one percent. Excellent number and congratulations to all. And a few words now in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

With that we'll turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all we have with us here today Dr. Amanda Johnson, Director of Take Care in the Test and Trace Corps, Deputy Mayor for Operations Anglin, Parks Commissioner Silver, Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell, Sheriff Fucito, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. With that, I'll start with Dave Evans from ABC 7. Dave, are you there?

Question: Yes, I'm here. Can you hear?

Mayor: There you go. How you doing Dave?

Question: I'm fine, Mayor. Hey, I wanted to ask you, first of all, a question about the schools. It sounds like we may have some news from the Governor later. I don't know how Earth shattering it's going to be, but I just wanted to see your reaction in that it sounds like it's going to be a region by region thing? What the metric is for each region of the number of people with the infection rate, So we could have the schools in Albany, I guess, open and maybe the schools in New York City not open? But the word is to proceed and act as if we are going to have schools, in-classroom school this fall. But if that metric kicks up and we have a lot of people infected then I guess he gets to pull the plug in September. Is that your understanding of what's going to be happening?

Mayor: Dave, you know, appreciate the question and it's on everyone's mind. I'm not going to comment until we get the formal, formal decisions from the State. But there's been a lot of close collaboration between the State and the City on the notion of tough thresholds in general, during the coronavirus crisis. There's been real unity on the notion that we were going to be very careful and tough in deciding when to proceed through each phase. You know, we went through phases one, two, three, four on time, but with exceptions. And the City and State were unified on those exceptions. On the schools, you know, I've already said, I want to whole New York City schools to a very tough standard. And that is that three percent standard over a seven day period, if our average goes above three percent infection in New York City, we would not open schools. If it happened during the school year, we will close them. So, you know, I believe we're all going to be unified on that and vigilant. We need to open schools because we know, just extraordinary number – we have 1.1 million school kids. And three quarters of our families have said they want the kids back in school. They want that support. They want the kids to do better educationally than they can do remotely. They want everything that goes with school, the social development, the mental health services, physical health services, food. It’s our obligation to do our very best for parents and families. But we're going to work with the State to figure out what's safe. That's what counts most. Go ahead.

Question: So my second question is also to do with schools. I think today is the day that parents have to decide if their kids are going to stay home and learn completely online and not go into the classroom. But my question is, I know you probably have heard this before. It's kind of difficult to make that decision, isn't it? If the parents don't really know what the classroom situation is going to look like this fall? Like how many days, how safe it is, all those things?

Mayor: Well, I'd say a couple of things. And I was a public school parent for the entire education of both my kids. So I certainly can relate to the many, many things parents are going through now and made so much worse by the pandemic. It's really tough for parents. But I also think New York City parents are realists. They understand we've gone through a disruption like never before, and it's not going to look like a normal year. Here's the deal, people have until the end of the day to indicate if they want to go with all remote from the beginning. We'll talk about that Monday. We'll give an update once those numbers are tabulated. Of course at any point, parents can make that decision. And they can go to remote pretty much instantly along the way if they need to. But we also know, again, a survey 400,000 parents is unheard of, to get that kind of response rate, that most parents by far want the kids back in school. They understand it's going to be blended learning for the short term. And Dave, I'll keep saying, this is not forever. You know, five months, six months, seven months. I don't know exactly when, but there's going to be a day when there's a vaccine and kids have it. And things go back to normal. This is, I hope only part of our school year, we're talking about, that gets affected by the coronavirus. But thinking through the perspective of parents, I'd say this. You know, right now if you choose to have your kids in school, you know it's going to be some days a week. In the course of the next couple of weeks, you're going to get all the details about your school's schedule template, and then your individual child's schedule. You know that we're going to be providing childcare for as many people as we can. And we're going to continue to try and build that number up. And parents are going to use all the resources at their command. Their family, friends, fellow parents are all going to work together. It will not be easy, but I think most parents feel strongly that even sometime in school is a lot better for their kids than none.

Moderator: Next we have David from the Queens Daily Eagle.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, two questions about homelessness. Yesterday you talked about continuing to house thousands of people experiencing homelessness in commercial hotels for the duration of the crisis, to limit COVID in congregate shelters. Commissioner Banks said there've been 13,000 adults moved into two bedrooms, that's 6,500 rooms. DHS says its average is $237 a night with services. That's more than $1.5 million dollars a night, $46 million a month. And it's a stop gap solution. So officials in your administration have talked about converting hotels for permanent residential use either relaxing SRO law, or turning the hotels into permanent supportive housing sites. So will the City do that? And what is the long term housing plan for people staying in hotels?

Mayor: David, look, you've done your research. I appreciate that. Yeah, the goal here continues to be to deal with the short term, which I'm just going to use a round number. Let's say it's six months-ish. While we're dealing with this crisis until people are vaccinated, then once we get through that, we're going to of course, start to move out of those hotels and go back into the shelter system. But we're going to constantly try and reduce the number of people in shelter with all the other tools we have. We'll have a lot more to say on that in the coming weeks. But I think we're going to have an opportunity here to be creative and continue to get people to other better housing. Yes, if we have control of a facility and it's no longer needed for shelter, the goal is always to convert it to permanent affordable housing. But we also have to have enough shelter available by law and morally for folks who need it. So different pieces of the answer. But I think the simple point is job one is get folks out of the hotels they've been in temporarily. Back into the shelter system once it's safe. Go ahead.

Question: So would you support changing the SRO law to allow those hotels to be converted to permanent use?

Mayor: Well, again, the ones that there are buildings we control already and that's where we're looking to, or want to control, want to purchase, where we're looking to do permanent affordable housing. I think in terms of SRO law, I have to to check that. And I think there's some open questions there. That’s something we'll come back to you on. But I will say to you, and this has been raised by a lot of folks, you know, are there times when the City can actually buy a building, take over a building, turn it into permanent affordable housing? That's what we've been trying to do more and more. That's actually showing some success. Let them be run by community based nonprofit. Not by folks, you know, trying to make a profit often off the misery of others. So that's our main thrust, but I will come back to you on the SRO law.

Moderator: Next we have Marla from WCBS 880.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have two questions, one concerning education. The City Comptroller was talking about holding classes outside. How feasible would this be to do in New York City?

Mayor: Marla it is something we want to take advantage of for sure. The Chancellor has been very clear about that, but it's not a reliable solution. You got a couple of problems. You got rain and storms. You got cold weather. I think it's fair to say in September, October, you might have some opportunities to do some things outside. I think it's fair to say in May, June, but a lot of the year it's just too cold. Some folks have said roofs, a lot of the roofs just wouldn't work the way they're configured for kids to go up there. It wouldn't be safe. This is about safety and health first. And just the reality that you got to have a certain amount of reliability and consistency when you're running a school. But that said, schools are welcome to be flexible, that if there's good weather and they've got the right opportunity, the way their school's set up and they can get kids outside. We're going to work with schools in each and every situation and take advantage of as many days as we can. Go ahead Marla.

Question: Mr. Mayor, there was quite a bit of blow back on social media yesterday about your advice not to buy a car. With your critics saying you aren't doing anything to discourage people from driving. And it does appear anecdotally that more are driving as they try to stay off mass transit. And one of the questions was you get driven around in a chauffeured car. How are you going to get to the gym in Brooklyn once it reopens?

Mayor: You know, Marla, that's just not pertinent to what we're dealing with right now. Right now we are dealing with a crisis where the job one is to give people confidence again in mass transit. And I want to say the City and State work together to show that the MTA could be a lot cleaner, subways, buses, people have been coming back. Citi Bike has been a big part of the solution. People are coming back to Staten Island Ferry, New York City Ferry. This is the way forward. I've been clear for years, I'm not going to have a car in the future. I don't think cars make sense for the future of New York City. People may use them in the short term because of the crisis. Fine. But this is a crisis again, that could be over in a half year, give or take. Then we got to continue to deepen our commitment to mass transit and other options because that's the future of the city.

Moderator: Next, we have Debralee from Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Question: Hey, good morning. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes Debralee, how are you?

Question: I'm well, thanks. Good morning to all. Mr. Mayor I wanted to ask you about concerns raised by staff and teachers and administrators, specifically at MS 324 in Washington Heights. Which services about 1,400 students. And the concerns that they raised, they say are emblematic of many of the campuses across the city. They formed a school safety committee and they're expressing concern that a previous 2018 building facilities report from the DOE, the City and independent engineer evaluation since, point to the campus’s ventilation system as inadequate. And while individual classrooms have AC, that the filtration systems just don't exist. And again, altogether, the system is ineffective. And that's from an independent analysis made by the City. And repairs have not been issued, have not been done since then. And as they enter into now, the final weeks of preparation, their concern is that they are in fact not ready. What is the City doing to address these concerns specifically, despite the fact that there are reservations on the part of parents? The buildings themselves, what is the DOE and the City to help prepare the facilities to be able to receive students?

Mayor: Say the number of the school again, Debralee?

Question: MS 324 in Washington Heights. It services about 1,400 students.

Mayor: Thank you. I'm going to follow up with a Chancellor today on that specifically. Look, the bottom line here is we have been working on all fronts to make schools safe. There are a variety of ways to do that. Do not forget for a moment, every classroom will be socially distanced. Every part of the school will be socially distanced. You're talking about a classroom, we'll have ten kids, 12 kids in it, you know, very small number with distance. Everyone will have a face covering, students and adults alike. Cleaning incessantly, hand sanitizer, hand washing stations, incessantly. There's a lot of pieces to how you fight back the disease. So we absolutely want to make sure that the circulation systems are in good shape. If there's a specific problem in a school, we're going to deal with that. And we'll be open about that. There's going to be a lot of different pieces that come together. So thank you for raising this and we'll look into it immediately. But rest assured that there's a lot of pieces that create safety for our kids. Go ahead.

Question: And as a follow-up to that [inaudible] has been the concern ongoing for parents and families about not having adequate technology resources, even as they face the choice between being online or facing a hybrid model. Can you speak to what the City and the DOE have done in the last few months and for that matter, what parents can do in these last few weeks of preparation, to be able to access resources? Because many of the parents that we're speaking to still continue to be stymied by access to online learning resources.

Mayor: So, let me say the most important point is getting devices and getting service in the hands of every child who needs it. There was a Herculean effort by the DOE – I give them a lot of credit, 300,000 devices distributed in very short order while setting up remote learning for the first time at a vast level. Look, everyone who has a complaint has a right to complain. Everything we have to do better, we have to do better. But let's stop and appreciate our educators and the DOE and all the companies got involved. They were asked to create remote learning for 1.1 million kids in a matter of weeks from scratch. It had never been anticipated to have to do it on this level, this quickly in the history of New York City. But they did it. Imperfect, yes, but they did it. 300,000 devices distributed in a matter of weeks. One of the most actually direct ways of addressing the digital divide we've also seen in New York City's history. But any kid who doesn't have a device will get one for free, any device that’s not working will be replaced. Anyone who doesn't have service, will get service. The same methodology for letting the DOE know if you need it, is there, and anyone who's not sure can simply call 3-1-1. But that's going to be an ongoing effort. I've heard a few people say, ‘Oh, what if a device breaks?’ We'll replace it. It's as simple as that.

Moderator: Next, we have Emma from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mayor. I know I've been harping on this issue, but I wanted to talk with you about testing again. You had asked me to go to a City site if we needed testing again, and we did. We've been waiting for the results for two weeks. So, it seems very critical to the school's plan to have testing with short turnaround times. What do you say to parents whose kid has a runny nose or a fever and they want to get tested?

Mayor: Well, first of all, I appreciate the question, Emma. It’s so important. I'm very sorry what you've been through and I honestly don't understand where the breakdown is. Which site – could you, do you mind saying which site you went to?

Question: Yeah, we went to Highbridge Pool, which is a Health + Hospitals run site, but they send their testing to Quest Diagnostics’ lab, which apparently is the one with the slowdown.

Mayor: Right. That's where the problem is. So, I spoke to the CEO of Quest yesterday. We had a very productive conversation. You and others went through something absolutely unacceptable. It was directly related to the massive overload that occurred all around the country. The combination of the huge uptick in the disease in other parts of the country and actually also, ironically, a lot of businesses coming back and putting very intense testing programs into place. So, what happened was, Quest just got overloaded all over the country and they are spread thin. They have resolved a lot of that. What we agreed on is over the next week or two the Quest turnaround for New York City will get to four days or less. On that, you know, we obviously want one day, two day. That's always our goal, but four days or less we can work with. But the CEO was quite clear that the worst is behind them. They've added a lot of capacity and we should not see that problem again. But, again, I'm sorry to you and anyone who went through that. Go ahead now.

Question: Thanks for that. I appreciate it. But in terms of, if it is four days, you're just expecting if a child shows any symptom related to COVID, they would keep their child home for those four days until they can confirm that they don't have the virus?

Mayor: Correct. Yeah. Any time you see symptoms, we want, in fact, we insist that families – I'm saying this as a parent, I would abide by this in a heartbeat and I expect every parent to abide by it – if your child's sick, if your child is showing those symptoms, keep your child home, keep your child home until they are well, and also let's get that test. And if it comes back negative, great. If it comes back positive, you got to go through the whole course of that pause until you come back

Moderator: Next, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: I'm doing okay, Henry. How about you?

Question: I'm doing pretty well. I want to get back – I mean, have you heard from the Governor on what his decision is going to be, or is he withholding this as a big surprise?

Mayor: I haven't heard from – as I've said, Henry, first of all, he said he'd given an announcement at some point today. The day is young. There's been a lot of communication. Our teams are talking constantly, really constantly, on a whole host of things. And I do understand the Governor has to think about the differences between the regions in the state. That's a real obligation that I fully understand, but I'm sure we'll hear it more in the course of the day. And we welcome tough standards because that's what we believe in here. I said, proactively, we want to hold ourselves to that three percent standard. That's much lower than any other standard I've heard around the country. But we believe New York City is up to that because of how well we've done over the last two months, keeping the infection level down. Go ahead, Henry.

Question: Okay. But the Governor has also said that the two major considerations are the parent and union buy-in. And from reporting that I've done and others have done, the unions are still extremely skeptical and fearful really about the health consequences of subjecting teachers to the classroom. And parents are also skeptical, number one, that the remote learning experience has really been improved to the point where it's going to engage students and on the other hand, they've got concerns about the health consequences of sending their kids to school. So, in light of all that does it cause you any concern that the Governor will decide not to go along with your plan?

Mayor: Henry, I'm not going to speculate. I appreciate the question. It's an honest question. Just not going to speculate it. Doesn't get us anywhere. The Governor will come to his final decision. We will work with it. Now, the parent buy-in, this is a known fact. I, again, respect everyone, but I ask everyone when we bring you an exceptional piece of information, please give it its due – 400,000 people responding to a survey and 75 percent say they want their kid back in school. I've talked to a huge number of parents, myself. Everywhere I go, I make sure to talk to parents and I've actually talked to a lot of educators too. I get, overwhelmingly, that people want to come back. No one underestimates the challenges, but they're New Yorkers. They're tough. They're strong, they're resilient. They see all these other good people out there fighting for their fellow New Yorkers, our health care heroes, our first responders, teachers are incredibly devoted people. I tell you, a lot of educators have said to me, ‘I know I can't do as much for the kids remotely, I want to be there in person with them because I can't help them if I'm so far away from them.’ And I really honor that about educators.

So, I think what we have is a huge level of parent buy-in based on what we've seen so far, but we're going to have facts for you on Monday because parents will get to make that decision by the end of the day for the first round. And that will tell us a lot. And then we've been working with the unions daily to address a whole host of issues. And there's still a long time on the clock here to keep addressing those issues. So, I feel strongly we can bring the pieces together because it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do for our kids. It's the right thing to do for our city. And we're going to keep working to make sure it's safe.

Moderator: Last one for today. We have Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I would like to ask you about your comments yesterday opposing the Governor's interest in accommodating the wealthy New Yorkers who wanted to leave. You frequently mentioned how bad the city's financial straits are right now. Isn't losing these wealthy people and wealthy taxpayers going to hurt the budget even more?

Mayor: It's a very important question. And I appreciate it. What I'm trying to say first of all, is let’s focus on working people. Let's focus on the millions upon millions of people who do their jobs every day, or are fighting to get their jobs back who need help, who are the backbone of the city, the heart and soul in New York City. They're not going anywhere. They're not fleeing. This is New York and these are New Yorkers I'm here to fight for. The wealthy have become more global in many ways not because of this crisis – long, before, much less rooted. They will come. They will go. Some are true New Yorkers. We got a lot of homegrown millionaires here. That's great. I know a lot of them really care about New York City and do a lot for New York City. God bless them. The folks who want to be a part of this community, God bless them. And if they've done well in life, congratulations. Now let's help out other people.

But I am not going to beg anybody to live in the greatest city in the world. There are plenty of people who want to live in New York City. There are plenty of people who will come here no matter what. This crisis will be over soon. And here's what we found, we actually analyzed this, in recent years some millionaires and billionaires have left, some millionaires and billionaires have come in and started to grow roots here in New York City. And here's the most important fact, New York City has bred more millionaires every year in recent years than ever before because up until February, our economy was booming and people from all over the world wanted to come here sensing opportunity, and they will again. So, I am convinced that by focusing on restoring this city and doing what's right for working people in this city, it will be a better and better and fairer place. And I actually think that's where creative people want to be, entrepreneurial people want to be, and that's our path back. Go ahead.

Question: And in regard to your desire to raise taxes even further on the wealthy, the wealthiest one percent of New Yorkers already pay more than 40 percent of the total personal income taxes paid in the state. How much is enough?

Mayor: Look, I'll simply go back to – if you want to talk about fair taxation in America and when America worked most fairly and equitably, unquestionably, it's the period after World War II up through the 1960s. We saw a huge amount of economic growth. We saw much less income inequality. We saw everyday people getting a piece of the pie and working their way to the middle class. We saw a huge amount of government investment in health care, infrastructure, science, research, education. And the highest tax rates that wealthy people ever experienced were under the administration of that well-known left wing, socialist General Dwight Eisenhower. So, I honestly believe that we had the model right at one point and we lost our way and we need to go back to a model closer to that time where the wealthy truly pay their fair share and our country can invest in its people.

Everybody, look, let me close today with this, we talked about a lot of different topics. The most important topic always is fighting back this disease. The people have done this in New York City. You're going to hear conversation all the time about what the government did, the city, the state, the federal government – that matters, but much more important is what the people do. The buy-in of the people, the strength of the people, the belief of the people that we could fight back. New Yorkers have shown it. We got to be there every step of the way to support people. This is why Test and Trace is so important. Giving people the help they need, giving them the support. If you need to safely separate, knowing you're not alone, you're going to get all the help you need. And the people also can remind each other, including any of our friends who are traveling or a family members coming here, that this quarantine for folks who have been out of state really matters. So, I have faith in the people. No one wants to see this city go back to where we were in the beginning of this horrible crisis. But, in fact, New Yorkers have proven it doesn't have to be that way because of your hard work. Let's keep doing it. Thanks, everybody.

2020-08-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. And as I'm sure so many of you have heard, and we're going to talk today about our kids, our schools, our parents, our families, because it's official, the State of New York has cleared a New York City public schools to start in September. So, we are getting ready every single day. We're going to talk to you today about all the preparations being made to keep people healthy and safe, to make sure we can educate our kids as best possible under the toughest conditions, but so many good people are working overtime to get ready for the beginning of the school to serve well over 700,000 students who will be joining us at least part of the week in-person. And we're going to go over the details of that plan in just a moment, but first we've got an immediate situation we should talk about for a moment, and that's the heat advisory that will be in effect today. So, the hot weather is back, and I say to everyone – pay attention to mother nature, respect mother nature, take these advisories seriously. So, today, we expect heat index values up to 97 degrees. And this heat advisory will be in effect today through Wednesday evening. So, we have three days of it. And the message, as always, stay safe, stay cool. Take the steps to protect yourself, particularly if you are vulnerable. So, City cooling centers will be open across all five boroughs, starting at noon today. We will have cooling buses available to provide additional relief. We're going to make sure when people come to a cooling center that we deal with the other challenges we face. So, there will be social distancing, there will be face coverings. Anyone to needs place to get to that is cool today, tomorrow, Wednesday, you can go online nyc.gov/chillout, or, of course, call 3-1-1.

The Cool Streets initiative will also be open today. And it's very important to know, great alternative for families and kids to get out there, there's sprinklers, there's other cooling options. And then, lastly, as I say every time, New Yorkers are good compassionate people, look out for your neighbors. If there's someone in your building, if there's someone on your block you know as vulnerable, a senior or someone else who might need some extra help and checking in during the hot weather, please look out for them.

Okay. Now, let's talk about schools. I have to tell you, I've said this for years, I feel it deep in my heart, not just as mayor, I feel as a parent – first day of school is a magical day and there's an incredible sense of renewal and energy and possibility each year as school begins. Again, it's literally maybe my favorite day of the year, but I think for a lot of kids, a lot of families, a lot of parents, it's an extraordinary day. This year is going to be different. We all know it. And I'm going to say it now and I'll say it a lot of times in the coming months, we are up against a challenge, but it's not a challenge that's going to go on forever. At some point, likely in the course of this school year, there will be a vaccine. That vaccine will be administered to kids and families all over New York City, and then we can start getting back to something more normal. But for the foreseeable future, it's going to be a very different kind of school year, but it does not take away the excitement, the energy, the possibility, and the meaning for our kids. Our kids have been yearning to reconnect with school, with their friends, with so many teachers and other mentors they depend on. We're going to do it differently. It's going to feel very different, smell it, look very different – focus on face coverings for all kids and adults, social distancing at all times, constant cleaning. There's a lot of things that will change, but what will not change is our fundamental commitment to our children. And our educators, our school staff every day, every year, that's their commitment. No matter what times we're in, they focus on the safety of kids, they focus on the wellbeing of kids, they focus on the development of kids and the education of our children. That's what they do for a living. That's the path they chose in life. And I want to just thank our educators and everyone who works in our school buildings. It doesn't matter if you work in the cafeteria or you're a custodian – whoever you are, you contribute to that school community and you care about kids. People made the choice to go into that field because they believe in you people, they want to help them. And young people need those positive adult role models and that support and they're finally going to get it again as school comes back. Now, if you look around the country, you see a challenging situation. I am the first to acknowledge it. And if you look at what's happening in other places, it probably causes you a certain amount of concern and a certain amount of doubt. But we're not those other places. I feel for them. I hope and pray that their situation improves soon, but we're not those other places. New York City is different. Everyone around the country can see how different New York City is. In New York City, we have proven that we could beat back this disease now for a fully two months, and we're going to keep doing it. In New York City, the virus rate has been under three percent for two months running, extraordinarily low. In New York City, over 700,000 kids are planning to come back as soon as school begins. We're different and we're ready. So, we're the only major school district in America – the only major urban school district planning for in-person classes this fall. And look, we've been very clear – we must do it safely, we can do it safely. We've set very stringent standards. We have to meet those standards. If at any point the situation changes, I'll be the first to say it. But so long as we can meet those standards, we're going to be ready to serve our kids in September.

Now, I want to speak as a parent. I know for the entire time our kids were growing up, for Chirlane and I, literally most important thing every single day was the health and safety of our kids. I know every parent is thinking that. As a parent, we're moving forward. I can tell you I've given the order to move forward only if we can do it safely and effectively in a way that keeps our kids healthy. I know we can. I've seen the preparations, they are outstanding, and we are going to keep doing that work. We've got a whole month before school begins and we are going to keep doing that work every single day. Now, we talked about a survey we did of parents weeks ago, and we said roughly a three-quarters of our parents wanted their kids back in school. Well, now, we gave parents a very specific opportunity to decide, did they want to opt out in the first instance and have their kids do remote. The facts now, based on the actual opportunity for parents to make a decision came back almost exactly the same as our survey, striking consistency. And now we know 74 percent of our students planning to participate in in-person learning, blended learning, starting next month. A lot to do, and I'm going to turn to the Chancellor with tremendous gratitude to him and his team. They have been working endlessly since March to get ready the schools in a way they know is safe. Everyone involved, thinking about health and safety all the time. And we're asking them to do a massive logistical task, but every step along the way people have said we can do this. And with that great spirit, we're moving forward.

So, I want to thank you, Chancellor, and would welcome your update.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, I know that every family wants the best for their child. They want their kids to be safe. They want them to be healthy. They want them to be happy. And they want their children to always be learning and growing and getting to getting ready to take on the world. Our schools play such an important role in that, especially now when our children of our city have been through so, so much. For us, health and safety leads the way always, first and foremost. Our vision for the fall is a safe, strong, and supportive learning environment and an excellent education for every one of our students. Schools will be in session five days per week. Students will be learning five days per week, no matter where they are. We know a lot more now about how that's going to work because healthy and safe in-person learning means knowing how many people we need to plan for in buildings. We know that nearly three-quarters of our students, over 700,000, will begin the school year in a blended learning mode. This means that they'll learn in-person in a school building part of the school week and continue learning remotely from home for the rest of the week. As the Mayor indicated, as of now, 26 percent of our families will begin the year in fully remote learning mode. This is consistent with what families told us earlier in the year about their preferences. Additionally, we know that, as of now, we can expect about 85 percent of our teacher workforce or about 66,000 educators to be teaching in a blended mode as well. About 15 percent of our teachers have requested a reasonable accommodation to work from home. Those who are granted that accommodation will exclusively teach remotely, but they are – they will still be engaged and devoted as ever to educating the children of New York City, because that's who they are. These are educators who, in a matter of days, completely transformed teaching in the biggest school district in the country back in March. They have grit, they have compassion, and a dedication to their students that amazes me every single day.

With all this information at hand, we continue to develop school level plans for every public school in New York City, the nation's largest school system, and that is thanks to the tireless work of our principals. Each one of our principals is blazing an entirely new path for their schools, leading teams of fellow dedicated professionals, hustling all summer to make sure that families are on track to get the information that they need. To all of our families and students and all of New Yorkers, I want to say, thank you. It's been your hard work that has made it even possible for us to consider in-person learning. You continue to show what it means to persevere, to keep your eye on the prize, and serving the young people who not long from now will be the ones that will be leading our city.

Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. So, so much work going into getting ready for next month. And what I have seen day-in and day-out is an extraordinary team at Department of Education. These are folks who have devoted their whole lives to kids. And today, we're going to introduce a newly christened member of the team in a new role, but he is not new to the DOE in any way, shape, or form. In fact, started out from the very beginning of his education as a kindergartener at PS 31 in the South Bronx, has worked his way up over 37 years in the Department of Education. So, talk about a homegrown talent – my pleasure to introduce our new First Deputy Chancellor Donald Conyers. Welcome and congratulations, Donald.

First Deputy Chancellor Donald Conyers, Department of Education: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. It's an honor to be here this morning. When I began my experience in New York City public schools in 1968 as a kindergartener at a Public School 31, I could not know that I would be 52 years later having the opportunity to serve all of the schools as First Deputy Chancellor. That morning in 1968, my mother, who was also a New York City public school teacher sent me into the classroom and it changed the course of my life. By the time I graduated from Beach Channel High School in the Rockaways in 1979, public school had already shaped who I am both in my experiences as a student and in the powerful form of my mother. I'm a mama's boy and always have been. My story is emblematic of what public schools can provide for children – opportunity, pure and simple. It has been a change factor for me and my entire family. Education is the key to advancement, and my entire career has been about ensuring that the children and other families reap its benefits too. I left the Department of Education for four years to go to college and returned in 1983 and began my service to the system that has served me so very well. My career, as the Mayor indicated, 37 years so far began as a special education teacher in Midwood, Brooklyn. Then it was back to the Bronx, as an assistant principal, and the principal, and then a superintendent – all before coming to central and toting that wealth of experience with me, all tied to learning leadership and achievement.

The First Deputy Chancellor's job is to execute the Chancellor's vision and to help make our schools the best that they can be. The job is to be the connective tissue that links every school to the things that they need from our superintendents, executive superintendents, and central offices. My job is to guide challenge and support our principals and schools just as I was challenged, guided, and supported. I'm still in touch with my elementary school principal, Carol Russo, and my 10th grade geometry teacher, Donna Davis. I talked to my mother, affectionately known as Molly, who's now retired for more than 30 years as an educator. I talk to her every week. Through them, I learned that every – that you can believe in people to make everything better. That is why I'm here for our children today. And I thank you, again, Mr. Mayor, for the opportunity.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Donald. Congratulations. And I want to give a shout out to your mom – mom, you've done good with Donald. And also, your teachers way back when, who you're still in touch with – I love that story. And this is what New York City public schools are all about, that sense of connection that people feel, that sense of every kid being special and every kid being precious – that's what we're going to start again with a lot of energy and passion next month. So, thank you. And congratulations.

Now, let me turn to a very different topic, but also right in the front of our minds, because as much as every New Yorker absolutely should feel proud of our response to the coronavirus and the fact that this city has led the way in the nation in coming back, we have so often been on our own and we should not be happy about that, and I know no one is. Why has New York City had to so often fight it alone, go it alone? Because our federal government hasn't been there. The federal government hasn't been there from the very beginning. And now, as we are facing these huge challenges, huge economic problems, budget problems, once again, the federal government is failing to get the job done. So, while the stimulus talks are stalled in Washington, we are going to keep going. And we're going to turn to our colleagues in Albany and talk about the things that will help New York City to move forward, keep the services for people all over the city that we depend on. Every New Yorker depends on the City government to serve them every single day. We've got to keep that going. We've got to keep our public employees on their jobs. And to do that, we need the State of New York to help us with a long-term borrowing plan – a fiscally responsible, smart plan that will help us bridge this moment in history. By the way, it happened before, right after 9/11 – the State Legislature urgently, immediately gave New York City that borrowing authority so New York City could keep moving forward. And that's exactly what happened. In fact, the city came back stronger than ever. That is what is going to happen again in the coming years, if we get that help and support. So, again, let's work together to bridge this moment in time and come back stronger.

Let's talk about our daily indicators now. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 patients – and today's report, 53. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals, ICU threshold 375 – today, 285. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold, 15 percent – today's report, excellent, one percent. Once again, New Yorkers keep showing toughness and resolve to beat back this disease.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. Joining us today, we have Schools Chancellor Carranza, First Deputy Chancellor Conyers, Emergency Management Commissioner Criswell, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. And with that, I'll start with Andrew Siff from WNBC.

Question: Hey. Good morning, Mayor, and everyone on the call. Hope you're doing well. When your school's plan came out, the teacher's union found fault with the problem of not having a nurse in every school building. I'm wondering, with the coronavirus response plan involving a student who doesn't feel well going to the nurse, does this plan really makes sense if you're missing hundreds of nurses?

Mayor: Andrew, great question. We are working on that right now, and I'm hopeful we're going to find a solution in the coming days. It's a real concern. I think there's a number of ways we can get the personnel we need. And on top of having the medical personnel available to each school, we're going to have a very strong presence in our schools, from the Test and Trace Corps as well, to make sure in the event of any case that there's immediate follow-up at the school level. So, more to say on that in just the next few days. Go ahead.

Question: My second question, and maybe the Chancellor can weigh in on this timetable. You've got 700,000 kids now who have indicated a willingness to attend in-class, but if you talk to many of those families they'll say with a giant asterisk, I don't even know what the schedule is. I don't know how many days my kid will be there. I don't know how many cohorts there are. So, when will families be told what the exact plan is for their school?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to the Chancellor, because, as a parent myself, I've had this conversation with the Chancellor's team many times and said parents need to know. So, starting next Monday, the 17th, you'll start to get those announcements going out to schools. Many families and kids will have those announcements next week, the remaining we'll have them the week after. Chancellor, do you want to add?

Chancellor Carranza: Just very briefly. So, typically, in a typical, normal school year, those schedules go out in the weeks before the start of the school year. Obviously, this isn't a typical school year. Just keep in mind that just this Friday was the window for requesting accommodations for staff. That's new information now that principals have to program their buildings. This Friday was also the deadline for indicating complete remote learning for families. So, now, principals have that information as well. So, as I mentioned in my comments, principals are really burning the midnight oil and feel a sense of urgency to get that information to families. And, as the Mayor has said, that'll be starting on Monday.

Moderator: Next up, we have Ayana Harry from WPIX.

Question: Hi, good morning. I hope everyone is doing well. Was hoping the Mayor and Schools Chancellor to talk a little bit about the process of finding alternate sites for remote learning. I've seen some sites put out there from cathedrals to, you know, large Chinese restaurants. What's that process looking like, and what are some of the creative spaces we might see students learning in this year?

Mayor: Thank you, Ayana, I'll start and if the Chancellor or First Deputy Chancellor want to add, they'll jump in. Look it's also a conversation we're having constantly. School Construction Authority leading the way, Lorraine Grillo and her team, and the focus really, Ayana, has been on facilities that fit education best. So, for example, we've been working with the archdiocese and the diocese to use some former Catholic school buildings. Those are the ideal facilities for expanding out. We also need facilities that are close as possible to the schools that kids normally go to. So, we're finding some success. There's a separate effort to also find space for childcare, to support parents who need kids in childcare on the days their kids are not in person learning. So, it's moving aggressively, but I think it's fair to say for school facilities, the things that are most like schools are needed for a variety of reasons for childcare, there's a little more flexibility. Want to add?

Schools Chancellor Carranza: That was well done.

Mayor: Thank you, I got my grade for the day. Okay, go ahead, Ayana.

Question: Nope, that's it. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next up we have Reema from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor and Chancellor Carranza. I wanted to ask you about ventilation. You – you know, you said that you guys are taking a lot of health and safety measures and we've seen the various plans you've put out. But it seems like a lot of people still have questions about exactly how the DOE is going to be able to improve ventilation systems at schools. We know that hundreds need you know, some sort of fixing or upkeep. And so I wanted to know just, you know, how you're going to be able to do that in the next month and are you going to be releasing new inspection reports to sort of, you know, prove to families and teachers that that work has been done?

Mayor: Yeah. Great question. Bottom line is we're on a war footing here and everyone in the school building is working with extraordinary energy, including the custodial teams, School Construction Authority, everyone, to maximize health and safety in the building, and ventilation is absolutely a part of the puzzle here. Look, there's a small number of classrooms that there's been some issues with, if the classroom is not ready, that classroom simply will not be used. So I want to affirm that to all parents, if any classroom we feel is not fit, we simply won't use it. We'll just segment it off and keep going until we do feel it's ready to go. But the bigger point is this, with a month to go, and the focus on health and safety now has been out there for months previous, the whole school team is working to improve every piece of the equation, including not just what we can do with ventilation systems, but one of the things that doctors have said to us. It's really interesting, Reema, from the very beginning that top medical folks have said, the best thing to do in good weather is open the windows. And we will be doing that in classrooms to the maximum extent possible on top of other types of ventilation.

Chancellor Carranza: I would only add that we're very cognizant of the month, but this has been happening all summer where our maintenance crews have been upgrading the ventilation and ventilation filters. And as the Mayor said – and I want to double down on what the Mayor said – if there is any classroom that is not fit, we will not use that classroom, i.e. why we're exploring alternate locations as well.

Moderator: Next up, we have Liliana from Univision.

Mayor: Liliana?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask Chancellor Carranza if he can give us this update in Spanish for our Hispanic community?

[Schools Chancellor Carranza speaks in Spanish]

Mayor: Liliana, you have a follow-up?

Question: Yes, so I know you already answered this question, but if also can give me this answer in Spanish is for the teachers and parents who still are worried about the ventilation in the classrooms?

Mayor: Please?

[Schools Chancellor Carranza speaks in Spanish]

Moderator: Next up we have Rich Lamb from WCBS Radio.

Mayor: Rich Lamb, you out there?

Moderator: One moment, please.

Mayor: We're experiencing technical difficulties.

Moderator: We lost Rich Lamb.

Mayor: All right, we'll come back to Rich. Yes.

Moderator: Next up is Shant from the Daily News.

Mayor: Shant?

Question: Yeah. Good morning, everyone. One of the follow-up on the ventilator issue, just because it seems like something that could either put parent's minds at ease or raise some serious concerns. I mean, my colleague over the weekend did an analysis finding about 650 out of 150 – excuse me – 1,500 buildings surveyed by city inspectors last year had at least one deficiency in their exhaust fans. Can you put a number on how many fans – or how many buildings will have their fans fully fixed by the start of the fall semester? And I guess I want to, you know, the corollary to that is if it's not a 100 percent fixed, how can you say that we're different and we're ready? Thanks.

Mayor: Thanks, Shant. Appreciate the question and look, let me use the parallel issues were raised about some classrooms or their issues that had to be addressed. Another piece of the equation, and that's been out there recently, that was a few hundred classrooms against a grand total of 58,000. So, I think we have definite issues as always as a huge, huge system, 1,800 schools, there's always things to fix, but from what I have seen with the issues we face, they are, thank God, isolated. If there are specific exhaust fans that need to be fixed, that's going to be a high priority. We have a month before school opens, everyone's focused on health and safety. But I think the point from your question and Reema's question previously is we need to show the public constantly that progress and those numbers, and we will do that. Go ahead.

Question: So, I mean, I guess to be clear, should people take it to mean that a 100 percent of schools will have their ventilation systems fixed by the start of the fall semester? If you could clarify that? And yeah, I'd love to hear from Dr. Varma on this issue. What is the role of ventilation and clean air in indoor schooling?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to Dr. Varma. So, Shant, here's how it goes. We have to believe, first of all, that the whole school system is ready to go and that's why we set this very rigorous standard of a three percent infection rate. So, we're setting a high bar on top of which we are demanding that every school do social distancing, face coverings, constant handwashing, get the ventilation systems moving, get the windows open. It's just – it's an endless series of steps to protect. Any specific classroom that we do not feel is ready by the open day of school will not be opened up. If there's a bigger problem in a school, we will make that adjustment as well. But because everyone is focused on health and safety and getting ready, and I emphasize a month is a long time, particularly when in some cases you have teams working around the clock, we're going to – I believe – have every school ready. There may be some classrooms or some specific parts within a building that still needs some work, but overall, I think we're going to be ready. But we should be transparent about that. I think it's helpful to be transparent about that.

As I turn to Dr. Varma, I would only say one of the things I've learned from Dr. Varma with great appreciation, is this notion of layering all sorts of approaches to protect our kids, and Dr. Varma is a parent too. We've talked about it from a parental perspective, how you want everything firing on all its cylinders, again, whether it's hand washing, face coverings, distancing, open windows, you want it all, which puts us in effectively, you know, 180 degrees different from where we were when this crisis began when it suddenly burst upon us and we couldn't put any of those methodologies in place. This is an entirely different reality than what we had back in March. Go ahead, Dr. Varma.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Thank you for the question. I think that as the Mayor has highlighted, we have to first start with the most important question. We should only open the schools if we have this epidemic controlled in the community. And we feel very confident right now, at this moment, based on all of our measures that New York has good control of this epidemic, and we're going to obviously continue to watch that closely from day to day. The second is, okay, if the schools are now going to be open because we have the epidemic control, what are all of the different measures we can put in place that when added up together, make the school as safe as possible? As the Mayor just highlighted, we have lots of interventions, some more effective than others, but they really work best when they're all added up together. The first is anybody who's sick should stay out of school and there's going to be a number of ways that we're going to work with parents and their families to keep track of their kids. As a parent myself, we've been guilty, my wife and I, of sending our kids to school in the past when they may not have been as healthy as they should have been because they needed to go to a certain class. So, we need to change that culture for everybody, myself and everybody else included.

The second is in the classroom. We know that the majority of transmission occurs within a short range, that is people who are in close proximity to each other. So the ways to reduce that transmission are all the efforts that are going on, reducing the number of people in the classroom, maintaining that six feet of distance from each other, and then really very importantly, being strictly adherent to the wearing of face coverings because that can reduce the number of droplets that transmit over that short range. Now added to that is the value and benefit of ventilation. And I think you've already heard that, you know, we all concur and agree that fresh air is the single most important thing, and if you can't get fresh air because of the temperature or the design of the room, the next best is to improve the centralized heating ventilation system and with or without the use of air purifiers as well. So I think all of these measures have to be added on top of each other and I don't think there should be unnecessary fear about ventilation, you know, not being adequate because I think all of these things have to be in place together and ventilation is one piece, an important piece, but really not the only piece.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next up, we have Derick Waller from WABC?

Mayor: And is Rich still out there? You won't forget him?

Moderator: We won't forget Rich.

Mayor: Alright. Derick?

Question: Alright. Good morning. Hi. I have a specific question that was sent to me from a teacher who wanted to remain anonymous, but basically one of the issues he says is that the learning system that's being used on these tablets he says is problematic, and he says, I'll read it verbatim. He says, "the iLearn and Edmonton Systems DOE is making everyone use are complicated. They're not even an app for them. So, the kids who have only a phone or a tablet are forced to do their work using the web browser on the phone or iPad." So, could we talk about that concern that perhaps the technology is complicated to use?

Mayor: I'm going to start as the layman and then let the two educators jump in. Look, we have all been trying to make the most of remote learning, but Derek, I'm going to say this as a layman and a parent, I don't know anyone who thinks remote learning is as good as in person learning. And that's, before you even talk about the fact that different kids have access to different levels of technology, no matter how much we're trying to get the best available technology in the hands of every child, there's still a huge digital divide. And it hurts kids who either they don't have the right devices or they have the right devices, but they're not a 100 percent sure how to use them, some parents can help, some can't help. Look, I would just say, no matter how much we have to keep trying to perfect the approach to more remote learning and make it better. What's clear is under these kinds of emergency conditions, we have to also recognize that in person learning is always better. We're not talking about remote learning that we had years and years to perfect as something we would use for a whole school system. This all had to be done under wartime conditions. But I do know that nonetheless my colleagues are working every day to try and improve it. Now that's my framing, now to the specific question of the specific approaches being used and the issues being raised. Go ahead.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, sir. I'll start and then I'll ask our First Deputy Chancellor to also add. So, we've learned a tremendous amount since we pivoted to remote learning in March and those lessons we are continuing to put into place. We've also gathered lots of great practices from the field and including our teachers, especially our teachers that have shown us a lot of different ways of organizing what that remote learning looks like. I will say that there are multiple opportunities for teachers to use different platforms. Google Classroom is being used ubiquitously across all of our system as well. So, there are some options, and what I would say to my colleague teacher that asked a question, there are multiple platforms for you to explore, and there is help in the teach hub on our website. So, I would encourage you to look there and there's more work that is being done every day to try to make it as seamless and useful, not only to teachers, but to students as well. Donald?

First Deputy Chancellor Conyers: Thank you, and I would add – thank you, Chancellor Carranza – I would add to that, that in addition to all the support provided that we are also working with remote learning champions and our BCOs to ensure that both – [inaudible] – BCO is a borough citywide office which supports schools throughout the city. These BCOs, thank you, Mayor – these BCOs have remote learning champions that we're going to be dispatching so that if a school has an issue such as the one described, we will be able to tap in with the school and provide support, and as the Chancellor indicated, there are various platforms that are being used ubiquitously, presently.

Mayor: Thank you.

Question: And then I just want to ask one more question about the budget, because I know that obviously you had to make hard choices with the budget this year. The person who said that they cut summer school hours by more than half due to budgeting. Is that true? And then teachers were dismissed because of budgeting as well? Is that – can you talk about if that's accurate and if the budget is going to impact the staffing levels in the upcoming school year?

Mayor: Derrick, it's a real important question. Let me start and turn to the Chancellor. Look, no we clearly said from the beginning, no matter how tough the budget situation has been, we've tried to keep our city workforce intact, to deal with all the challenges and help keep the city moving forward, and one of the things I've said about the stimulus all along if New York City and cities all over the country, don't have their workforce, it's not going to allow us to restart. We need our workforce to provide the services that people depend on. That's the foundation of restarting your economy. But no, we have obviously kept our teachers and educators in place. Summer school was very different this year. Obviously, it couldn't be in-person. It was a very, very different approach. But our goal here is to keep all our city employees in place, but we have a very tough deadline coming up on October 1st, and we either need a help from Washington or Albany to avert having to lay off any of our teachers or other employees. Go ahead, Richard.

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor. So, I just want to emphasize what you've said about the austere budget environment that we as a city and a state are facing, and it has an impact on every operation of this city, including the school system. However, it sounds like the question is more towards staffing levels for summer school, and this is not uncommon. There is a projected need for how many teachers you'll need based on how many students will be taking summer school, and then as that becomes a reality, in other words, as summer school starts, sometimes you're right on the money. Sometimes there's not as many students that choose to take summer school as had indicated. So, then you cut back on how many folks are actually teaching in summer school. It sounds like it's much more of that readjustment based on the actual numbers, but there were no layoffs, no one was dismissed. It's just the reconfiguration that happens when you're doing a summer school program.

Moderator: Next up, we're coming back to Rich Lamb from WCBS.

Question: Testing, testing, testing. Do you have me?

Mayor: There you go, Rich. Twice is a charm.

Question: Alright. I think my mic was on, but whatever. So, here's a question – I'm pulling out to 30,000 feet here from the specific questions. So, you know, with all the moving parts of this hybrid school year, you know, the blended learning in-person, remote, one-way hallways, all the health items that you've talked about, is it reasonable to expect the first day or the first week will be a kind of a scene of confusion in the schools?

Mayor: That's very important question, Rich. Look, I think it's important to get our expectations, right, and when we've had our ongoing conversations with the unions representing educators and the unions representing staff, everyone is concerned that they want to provide the very best experience for kids, but they know we're doing it under very adverse circumstances. So, I want a level set here. Will it be the same as the opening day of school has been in recent years? No, of course not. I want to give everyone credit the Chancellor, the First Deputy Chancellor, everyone in our school system in recent years, opening day of school went very, very smoothly, but now Rich, we're going to be doing something for the first time on a vast scale. So, the first days, the first weeks are going to take getting used to, are going to take adjustments. Look, a lot of work is being done to get it right, to communicate with parents and kids, to make it as smooth as possible, and obviously there'll be a lot fewer kids in each building and that in some ways will make it simpler, but everyone will be dealing with a new system. So, I think it's going to take a certain number of weeks to really get it to move smoothly. Chancellor?

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor, thank you. So Rich, I'd like to appeal directly to our families. It is going to be more critical than ever that we work very closely together to prepare students for what the first day, the first week, first couple of weeks are going to look like in school, and what you can do specifically is to start talking now to your children, especially your younger children, about why it's important to wear a mask. Why it's, it's not only a service to themselves, but to others to wear a mask. It's an act of friendship. It's an act of love. For our older students, to start inculcating in them. The fact that this is not going to look the same as it was before. Lunch is not going to look the same. They're going to be one way, hallways, where you'll walk in one way you must social distance as you're entering and coming to school and why that's important. All of those things that parents can do at home to start preparing students for what this very different school year will look like will be an incredibly powerful message and partnership as we really launch into this very different new school year in the fall.

Mayor: Did you have a follow?

Question: It's not really a follow, but just an additional question. Is there any – what kind of plans are there for outdoor use, you know, tents and that sort of thing. I mean, you hear about it in maybe milder climates but is there also any plan to use trailers? I mean, obviously you've got a space problem here?

Mayor: Yeah. I'll start and turn to my colleagues, Rich. We want to make maximum use of the outdoors in any way we can. So, every school has been encouraged to make their own choices. The school leadership knows their school best to determine how and when they can do it. Trailers might help in some situations. I think there's a lot of cases where that's not a solution just because of availability of space or availability of trailers. Again, we're looking for every space nearby that might work, like those former Catholic school buildings. But the bottom line is we're going to get our hands on everything we can get our hands on in the next month, and then we have time even after that to keep adding capacity, but in good weather, outdoors is definitely something that can add different options for schools.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Maybe the First Deputy Chancellor would also like to add something to this, but the conversation around outdoor spaces is something that we've been asked a lot about and absolutely we've given schools the opportunity to explore what that might look like in their own school environment, their neighborhood, adjacent buildings. That's part of the planning in terms of what we're looking at in terms of, I call it swing space, but additional space for schools that need more space. But as a teacher, if I put my teacher hat on and now I've set up my classroom and let's say, it's outside, it's under a tent, I've got all of my materials. I've got everything set up to go outside as a teacher, and it works great for three, four days, and then I have Hurricane [inaudible], he sees a deal that comes in and the imagine you have to break that down, and then the question becomes then where do you put that? Because all of the indoor space has already been allocated for classroom spaces. So, when the Mayor and I talk about it, it's absolutely an option. It's not an ideal option. We're talking about it from that very practical lens of if you – if it's not a good option on any particular day, then where do those students, where do those teachers, what are those materials? Where does that, where does that go? And if you already allocate everything else, it becomes problematic in that way.

Mayor: Donald?

First Deputy Chancellor Conyers: I would just add that while I agree wholeheartedly with the Chancellor and the Mayor, there are opportunities for physical education for those classes already programmed. So, making use of the outdoor, but to go beyond the schedule, we then transgressed the 33 – or go beyond the 33 percent model, for example, causing a problem.

Moderator: And for our last question today, we go to Bobby from NY1.

Question: Hi guys, I wanted to ask a question about preschool. Obviously, things are different for the older kids than they are for the younger kids. Preschoolers have never been to school before, in some cases, and they have issues with transitioning. How are we going to treat that? Will parents be allowed into the classroom at all? Even in the first days of school?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question. So, I think, you know, nothing is more priceless to me than our youngest kids and what we've done with a Pre-K, 3-K – this is a challenge for sure to make sense of it in this situation. Now I'll let the educators speak to it. I can say two things definitively. One, we have to be very careful about parents coming into school buildings. That's not going to be something we allow under the vast majority of situations, just because of the health issues we're dealing with. So, what we would have done normal times, we're not going to do now a second. I can tell you many scenes from the childhoods of my children, where I thought in their youngest years, they were going to have a horrible separation experience and I was ready to stick with them and help them through, and what quickly became apparent is they couldn't wait to see their friends, and they said a very quick goodbye to me and ran into the classroom. So, I think what we learn as parents is our youngest kids are incredibly adaptable. They yearn for that social experience. They love to be with their teachers and their friends. I think we'll find that folks are going to find a way to make it work. The first days as always will be a little bit challenging, but then we'll find a way to make it work. So that's the layman's view. Educators, what do you say?

Chancellor Carranza: I would take the layman's view. That's exactly what it's going to look like. We see that already with some of our youngest learners in our rec centers where they've been very adaptable and they've done a good job. Donald?

First Deputy Chancellor Conyers: Yeah. Nothing to add, sir.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Okay. I also wanted to ask about testing. Obviously, testing is important now that we're trying to remain below that threshold, the five percent threshold. I wonder, you know, what are we doing in terms of encouraging people to get tested? Maybe this is a question for Dr. Varma. At this point, should people go get tested if they don't have symptoms, should people get tested more than once? Should they be going as often as possible? Because that's going to affect the percentage of positive tests that we get back?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to Dr. Varma. It's a great question. The answer is we definitely want to keep encouraging people to get tested, especially those who haven't been. We have a lot of testing capacity – it's continued to grow, and the striking thing has been, as we've added more and more testing capacity and more and more New Yorkers getting tested, the numbers stay so consistent, and that says so much to us. So, the basic answer is yes, people should keep getting tested, but go ahead, Dr. Varma to the specific questions.

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah. Thank you for the question. We continue to believe very strongly that we need to expand testing throughout the city, and that means not just increasing our capacity, but actually actively encouraging people to seek out testing. The reason that is so important is that we know this infection can be spread by people who don't currently have symptoms or don't feel like they have symptoms, and one of the only ways that we can get ahead of this virus is making sure we identify those people as quickly as possible separating them safely, identifying their contacts and separating them as well, and so the only way we can do that is by having New Yorkers continuously and regularly seeking out as much testing as possible. Now, the question about percentages, one of the advantages to actually having widespread testing for, with, or without symptoms is that it helps ensure that the numbers that we report on confirmed cases are a much better reflection of actually what's going on. One of the reasons we haven't sort of publicly every single day talk about our number of cases is because we always worry about whether they're a real accurate measure of how much is going on with the community, but the greater percentage of the population you're testing, the more reliable that data becomes. So, we really do encourage New Yorkers to continue to get tested, whether they have symptoms or not, and it's going to be particularly important as more and more offices, schools, and other parts of New York return back to normal.

Mayor: Hey, Jay, would you just add one more piece to the question because it can be very helpful for New Yorkers to hear this. If someone got tested, when do you think they should get tested again? What's it just a good rule of thumb for someone asking themselves, Hey, it's been a while. Should I go back again?

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah. You know, there is no formal guidance as yet, but it's something we're working on, but the rule of thumb that I follow myself and I encourage others to do is to make sure you're tested at least once every month. That's kind of a good rule of thumb. You know what I mean? In an ideal world, we would have, you know, readily available tests that people could even just give them in their homes, but we're not in that world right now. So about once a month is practical and then to consider getting tested immediately if you are exposed to anyone, if you have recently traveled back from a place that has a high rate of community transmission and then it's also something to consider if you may be visiting a relative or a friend who has a vulnerable condition.

Mayor: Excellent. Thank you, well, look, everyone, as we conclude today just a simple statement about our public schools. First of all, I want to say a profound thank you to all our educators because they are working so hard, and I want to emphasize a lot of them have given up a lot of their summer to get ready for serving our kids again this fall. I thank all the educators in New York City for the hard work you're doing. I know you love our kids. You want to be there for them, and thank you to the parents and to the kids who have persevered through everything. I also want to thank you. What we have here is a great New York City story of strength and resilience, and it's also a reminder of what our public schools mean to begin with. Once upon a time, there were no public schools, and then the idea began to take root, and the idea was an egalitarian one, it was about everyone having opportunity. It was about every child, regardless of income, getting an education, every child being able to fulfill their potential. The more the idea of public education grew, the more it became the foundation of democracy and this city, I'm proud that we've been able to take it even farther, creating a whole new grade with Pre-K for All, and now going even farther with 3-K, all for free, helping more and more kids to actually get that strong foundation. We're not going to stop no matter what's thrown at us, but we are going make sure it's safe. That will be the number one consideration. I'll finish simply by saying, when I think of public schools, I think of our values as New Yorkers. I think about the idea that everyone deserves an opportunity and no one gets left behind. That's what our public schools do for our kids every day, socially, emotionally, educationally, in terms of the food they provide, the healthcare they provide, the mental health and physical health. You name it. The schools are where so many of our kids get the support they need, and you heard the beautiful story from Donald about him coming up and the teachers who influenced him every New York City public school student has a story like that, of a teacher who was there for them and changed their life, and that's why it's so important that we be ready in September for another strong school year in New York City to serve the kids we love. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-11 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, let's talk about something really important today. Let's talk about New York City's comeback. Let's talk about how we are going to re-devote ourselves to making this a city that works for everyone. We have a lot of work to do, but the focus has to be on creating not just a strong city, a resilient city, but also a city that truly focuses on working people. And we're going to be doing that now. One of the things we're going to talk about today is protecting tenants, making sure people can keep a roof over their head. But we have a lot of work ahead to make sure we build an equitable economy, a bigger vision of an economy that is sustainable and fair and available to all. We want an economy that everyone gets to participate in. So, we've got a lot to talk about today, and going forward, but first we have a really important reminder – the heat. The heat is still with us. It's with us today. It's with us tomorrow – heat advisory in effect. So, look, every time I talk to you about these kind of weather situations, what I'm saying to you is take it seriously. Do not ignore it. Do not underestimate it. Particularly if you're at all vulnerable, be careful. This is serious, serious heat – heat index values up to 97 degrees. And that will be today and through tomorrow night. So, we have our City cooling centers open across the five boroughs and they are safe places to be because they're cool, but they're also safe because we're practicing social distancing and having the face coverings – everything. So, it's a good place to be. If you need help, if you need to know where, go to nyc.gov/chillout or call 3-1-1. That is available for free for anyone who needs a cool location. And look, New Yorkers always look out for each other. There's no one more compassionate than a New Yorker, and, in a crisis, especially, that's true. So, look out for your neighbors. Look out for seniors. Look out for anyone who doesn't have air conditioning, see if they need any help. And anyone who needs a place to go, we have for them.

Now, let's go back to the things we're challenged by now and what it means also as we go forward. So, if this was just the coronavirus crisis, if it was just a health crisis, that would be one thing, but we all know it's so much more. And the economic crisis has had such a painful impact on so many New Yorkers. So many people without a livelihood. So many people can't afford the basics anymore. So many people who don't know how they're going to keep a roof over their head. We need to be there for them. And there's so much more we need to see done in Washington and Albany to help tenants. But, right now, we want to do everything we can in the city. So, we're launching the first ever tenant protection portal. Now, this is one stop shopping. This is a place where you can go for free and get all the help you need to protect yourself. You can get a lot of information. You can get access to free legal services. You can get to a real human being who will talk through your options, your rights, the different ways that we can help you. I don't want to see anyone lose their apartment because they can't afford the rent, because they just don't have a livelihood anymore. So, I want to say to anyone, if you need help, this is the place to go to get that help. You can go online or any time you can call 3-1-1 and simply say tenant helpline. But the point is, there are real people who work for the City of New York whose job is to protect tenants, to talk to tenants, to help you find every tool, every resource to protect yourself and your family. And we are here for you, again, always for free.

Now, we could be in so much better shape if the federal government would include rental assistance in the stimulus, stimulus talks had been bogged down, but what we know is there's still a chance for the federal government to do the right thing. And what they should do is include rental assistance. We need the State government to do the right thing. When the Legislature comes back, we need them to pass a bill that allows tenants to have a payment plan so if you can't pay the rent now because you just don't have any more income, stay in your apartment and get that opportunity, going forward, when you can. That's the kind of help from Washington and Albany that would keep people in their homes right now and that's what we’re fighting for.

Now, we also – as we deal with this economic crisis, we're constantly thinking about the heart and soul of our neighborhoods, and that's our small businesses. So many small businesses have been through so much. And look, to create a small business takes hard work over years and years. To sustain it isn't easy, but what we all know is the gratitude we feel for those mom and pop stores in our neighborhood that really help define the character of our neighborhoods. We have to help them to keep going. And so, we're going to bring back an approach that worked in the past, and we're going to make it work again for small business owners who need help. And I'm talking about the commercial lease assistance program. We're going to renew that program – $1.5 million of funding restored to help small businesses, providing them free legal support. And I emphasize – free legal support to help them address issues with their landlords, to help them find a way through. This is an initiative that worked in the past, over 900 cases were resolved. And what it meant was, overwhelmingly, small business owners of color and women-owned small businesses, immigrant-owned small businesses benefited. Now, this was something that had worked in the past, in a very tough budget situation had been put on hold, but I want to give credit to an unsung hero for banging the drum and raising the issue and saying, wait a minute, we’ve got to bring this back because small businesses need it. And I'm talking about Assembly Member Charles Fall of Staten Island, who reached out to me and my team numerous times and said, guys, there's something we got to do here, there's something that got left out that needs to come back. So, when our colleagues in the media raised something we didn't see and it gets fixed, I like to give them credit, but equally with our elected officials. So, to talk to us about why this is such an important program and with great gratitude, I introduce Assembly Member Charles Fall of Staten Island.

[…]

Thank you, Assembly Member. And thank you for being eagle-eyed about the fact that this was something that needed to be acted on. Really appreciate you looking out for the small businesses in Staten Island and everywhere across the five boroughs. And now, to tell you how it works – the man who, with his team, has done so much to help small businesses over these last few months and help them to fight back and hang on. The Commissioner for Small Business Services, Jonnel Doris.

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Assemblyman, for your commitment to our small businesses. Look, what we're hearing every single day from our small businesses, you know, the challenges that they're having with rent right now. And I think that's a critical component of running a small business – about your overhead. How do you manage that? And this is program is one of the programs that are critical to keeping our small businesses running, making sure that they have the resources that they need, but also have the support. And I think that's what SBS is here to do, make sure that we support our small businesses. So, Mr. Mayor, thank you so much, again, for restoring this particular program. We will continue to do what we've done in the past with the commercial lease assistance program that is helping our small businesses with lease renewals, lease reviews, tenant and landlord harassment issues, lease amendments assignments, etcetera. We know that foreign-born New Yorkers particularly make up more than 50 percent of the small businesses. And this program really focused in on those small business owners. And also, we provide services due to that in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Bengali, Haitian Creole, Korean, Arabic, Urdu, French and Polish. We make sure that we are speaking the language of our small businesses and getting them the assistance that they need.

So, we're thrilled to continue this program and to make sure that we get to as many small businesses possible across the city. And listen, before I end – you know, I call them the Santana Sisters – they own My Wellness Solutions both in Harlem and the South Bronx. And they've had some challenges when it comes to their particular establishments, and we were able to step in – a business that’s been in business for 10 years. We were able to step in to make sure that they continue even during this pandemic, even before the pandemic, but even now, more importantly, that they continue to serve their community. So, we're able to help them, reclaiming their security deposit when they move to another location, also help them, you know, with maintenance issues that they're having with their landlord. And most importantly responding to real estate tax demand that they were having, the challenges that they were having, providing the legal support that they needed with their landlord. So, sir, you know, this business was saved. This business was not only saved, but this business is thriving right now. We are very excited that we have this program back up and running and we're able to provide these services to our small businesses.

So, if you're out there, you're a small business owner, and you need support, please make sure you reach out to us at nyc.gov/business and our hotline, which, by the way, has received over 28,000 calls and we've helped those businesses along the way in a series of issues as it pertains to reopen, financial assistance, and also our commercial lease assistance program – 888-SBS-4NYC. Again, 888-SBS-4NYC. Thank you so much.

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner. And look, it is all about saving jobs. It's all about saving people's livelihood. And we've got to build not only a way back right now, but a long-term future for this city that is sustainable. And we're all in this, having to work together to find a way. So, I'm happy to talk about something that's being announced today that is definitely a step in the right direction. We have 30 of the largest employers in the New York City area have come together to create the New York jobs council. And the CEOs of this firm have taken a pledge to join together, to create 100,000 jobs for low-income New Yorkers. And this is something that will build up over time, but it's a wonderful pledge, because it says let's focus on coming back. Let's focus on the folks who need opportunity the most. There'll also be a focus on CUNY students, CUNY students getting apprenticeships and ultimately jobs. And that commitment is $25,000. So, look, this is what we want to see, the private sector stepping in, showing that they're going to play their part; the public sector doing everything we can here in New York City. Now, let's get the federal government in the game with that stimulus and we can keep building and building. That's what we need to fight for. Because, again, New York City, we have everything here, and we have the ability to come back, and we have the ability to come back strong, and, in fact, stronger, but we need everyone to be a part of it. So, I want to thank all the companies, all the CEOs who are part of this job's council for their commitment.

Now, let's talk about the indicators today. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold, 200 patients – today's number, 61. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375 – and today's report, 297. And finally, number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent – and today's report, two percent. That's the number we've been at the most over the last two months. That is a good number. Keep doing what you're doing, New York City. Now, let’s do a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let’s turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Commissioner Doris and the Deputy Director of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, Ricardo Martinez Compose. Some quick housekeeping, we're also joined today by Senior Advisor Jay Varma. Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Mayor, good morning, and hello to everyone on the call. Mayor my question is about schools. I want you to drill on this. Yesterday, you said 700,000 families plan on attending blended learning, but in reality, only 131,000 families proactively opted for blended. The rest of that number is your office assuming that those folks would be in blended learning, can you clarify that discrepancy? It seems like right now, among those who responded to the survey, those who opted for entirely remote learning, vastly outnumber, those who selected blended.

Mayor: Andrew. I understand how you could get to that conclusion, but I just will tell you, I think that's absolutely the wrong way to think about it, and I'm saying this, not just as Mayor, but as someone who was a public school parent for many years – if you're offered an opportunity to opt out, parents, get the word in so many ways. I assure you, this is the most important thing in their lives. Their kids they're offered the opportunity to opt out. They don't take it. That's a conscious act for the overwhelming majority of parents has been talked about a lot, for months and months, and we have a survey done before that, that tracked almost exactly what the numbers we got from this opportunity that we offered parents. Everything we're seeing continues to track that about three quarters of our parents want their kids back in school. So we're going to keep moving because we have two sets of information that confirm that and it's our obligation to make sure that we give those kids a great experience, even with the challenges and a safe experience, but no, no, no, folks – parents, if they wanted to make clear they didn't want to be a part of this, they would have done it. I assure you.

Question: The Governor's reaction to your school's plan so far. Yesterday, he described it as skeletal, and he also said the DOE is required to have five sessions with parents after the plan is out, and he indicated that the plan may A, change significantly and B, not happened at all. I wonder what your response to that is.

Mayor: I appreciate the question. I haven't seen his exact comments or what his education officials are saying. I can tell you that we are constantly in contact with parents and we will be throughout there's a whole month ago until school begins, and if there are specific adjustments or improvements, we'll make them, that's not a problem. We're constantly adding health and safety features to this plan. So, you know, we're full speed ahead. The state has said “go” to school districts all over the state and we have the most elaborate, sophisticated safety approach anywhere. We're the biggest school system in the country. We have layered upon safety measure after safety measure, and we'll keep building.

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. Andrew addressed part of this question. I want to understand why you asked parents whether they were going to opt out instead of asking parents, are you choosing to opt in because logistically and logically, it would make sense to have a clear idea of who was choosing to opt in rather than asking people who can opt out at any time, whether they choose to opt out.

Mayor: Respect to the question, Henry, I just disagree with the logic. Again, I was a public school parent. I think it was absolutely sensible to do it this way. The historic consistent obligation of the government is to provide free public education to kids and parents have been yearning for it. Kids have been yearning for it. We knew this before we gave a survey. Then we gave a survey and got three-quarters of 400,000 responses, which is an astounding level – three-quarters said they wanted their kids back. Everything that we've seen suggests that's accurate. Then we say, okay, we want to formalize those who don't want to come back in the first instance so we can plan, and we got a number that hits almost exactly the one we expected. I think it's quite consistent. I think there is a misunderstanding about how deeply parents get that their kids need to be an in-person learning for every reason, the support they get from educators, the ability to keep moving their education forward in a way you can't do remotely, the physical, mental health care available in schools, the food, the social support, the mentoring. There's just so many reasons. Parents understand that. Go ahead.

Question: Well, I don't have the time or opportunity to really address all of the assumptions in your answer, that are just purely assumptions. I need to ask you another question.

Mayor: Let me interrupt you just one point Henry, one point. I appreciate, and everyone has the right to their opinion, but the folks who have been doing this work for so long, they're the educators who put together this approach have devoted their lives to kids. Their profession is education. I want to be careful that you don't hear my answer something that would ever be called assumption. This is based on the work of our educators and their work with parents. So I just, we can, we can debate another time, but I want you to know that no, no, no, this is based on the work of professionals who have devoted their lives to kids.

Question: And respectfully the fact that as you've often said, you're a parent of public school children, does not necessarily qualify you to be clear on how many students are going to show up in September based on the data that you have so far. 

Mayor: Again, a survey that 400,000 people respond to that is social science. That is not assumption. So we'll respectfully disagree, but I want you to remember that part of the equation.

Moderator: The next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Related question. Do you expect that the number that you gave out yesterday to 736,000, do you expect that that is going to be the in-person enrollment or given the parents are given the opportunity to switch to remote at any time, do you expect that number to fall?

Mayor: So it's a great question, Erin. I think what I would say I feel and the educators feel is that parents have been since March thinking about what they wanted to see in September and what they wanted for their kids, and then watching of course, every step of the way. Again, I believe by the beginning of August, parents were pretty clear about what they wanted. I certainly can say, again, this is parental experience that does matter because I've spoken to so many parents over the years. This is not the kind of thing people don't pay attention to. This is central to their lives. So I think you guys see a very similar number to this in a month when we start up. Now, the big X factor, Erin will be the health situation. If the health situation is what it is roughly now, I think you're going to see a very similar number. If the health situation gets appreciably worse, we've said that we go above three percent, we're shutting down in-person learning. If the health situation gets better, I think you're going to see people now wanting to go the other way, and folks who opted out, looking for the first opportunity now to opt in with their kids. Go ahead.

Question: And then, you know, then the next step being childcare, when people get their schedules next week, finding out what days they do and don't have in-person education, can you provide any more details at this point as to who's going to be eligible for these childcare seats, when they're going to be available, whether people are going to have to pay for them, any other details?

Mayor: Yeah, so great question. One, they all will be free across the board. So I want to emphasize the childcare that we will provide for at least a 100,000 New York families will be free. Second, it will start consistently with the beginning of school. Third, there will be an application process and we're going to announce that in the next few days, hopefully, very soon, and look, we want to obviously make sure that the parents who need it the most get it. There are parents who don't have a choice, particularly if they are going to work or going back to work, that others who that may have more flexibility because either they're unemployed, God forbid, or they're working from home. We want to make sure the folks who really don't have choices, get the first opportunity.

Moderator: We have time for two more today. Next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I had a question about the testing of students for COVID once the school year starts, it looks like they're going to have the option of using the same facilities that teachers have and the city is encouraging any sick student to get tested. So I'm wondering particularly about families whose primary language is not English. The process is a little bit complicated for – especially for securing results in one's native language. So I'm just wondering how the city – how will the city work with Test and Trace to ensure that every limited English proficiency parent receives access to instructions and testing results in their primary language?

Mayor: That’s a great question, Yoav. First of all, Test and Trace, the folks over 3,000 members of Test and Trace have been hired largely from the communities most deeply affected by the COVID crisis, including immigrant communities, a lot of different languages spoken. Second, they brought in, you know, nonprofit organizations that represent those communities to help. So there's no question there's a lot of resources available to help someone navigate the process. We're going to have Test and Trace very deeply involved in the schools, especially at the beginning of the school year, for exactly that kind of follow through. But remember, there's going to be another message in all languages we send out to public school parents that if a child is sick, keep them home, and that's going to be a strong, consistent message. And if a child is sick and has not yet gotten test results, keep them home until you can confirm it's negative, you're treating it like that 14 day at home period because we have to work from an abundance of caution.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Jillian from WBAI.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Jillian, How you doing?

Question: I'm well. Before I ask my first question, I want to preface it with something that your Press Office has repeatedly told me over time that they do not call on reporters over consecutive days, but clearly that is what is happening. Having said that, it's actually good that I didn't get called yesterday because I think to be the only person who wants to ask about small businesses and what a day to do it. So –

Mayor: [Inaudible] Jillian, Jillian, just to say to you, every day is different depending on which reporters call, if there's not enough reporters calling in that sometimes affects things. If there's a lot, obviously we try and spread it out over the course of the week, but go ahead.

Question: Okay, well, so given the announcement about this refunding of this program for small businesses and legal services, legal support, rent is one thing, but leases are quite different. And while legal support is helpful, it's kind of a Band-Aid because you're not really going to the issue of creating a level playing field for small businesses. There is no mention of fair lease terms. There was no mention of details like who's going to be covered. Is it only first floor businesses? There are just so many questions and there's no discussion about the arbitration issue. And by the way, I recently saw footage of a presser that you were at in 2009 supporting the arbitration bill. So I'm wondering, you know, are we doing another Band-Aid still?

Mayor: I would say a couple of things very quickly. One, the big solution with the commercial side like the residential side is rental assistance from a stimulus. That's the one place where the resources would exist to do it right. And that would be going to the root cause. But in the absence of that, providing the legal services, and I can certainly say Small Business Services, when you call them, the idea is for them to resolve the small businesses problem no matter what it takes, with whatever tool we got. So this is one piece of many, many things that small business services can do to try and help people. But to the arbitration bills, I said to you I think a week ago, your question was a good one. The bill as written, I don't think works. I think there's another approach that could work with arbitration and mediation, and that is being worked up right now. And if we can get that right, we will hope to be announcing that soon. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. Well, we're not talking about commercial rent control. We're talking about arbitration. That's what I was saying that I saw footage of you for, but I want to move on because I have a different question. On Friday it was reported that the Governor's communications director would be taking a job with Facebook strategic responsive team. I'm sure you grasp the optics of this, which aren't really very good, and at the least, and also, you know, maybe the potential for the revolving door at work. When are we going to learn new details about this lease? What incentives, if any, what tax breaks and what agencies were involved in this?

Mayor: Yeah, it’s a good question and what I've heard initially is that there were not certainly any tailored incentives. I'm not sure there were any incentives invoked at all, actually. Certainly the city side from everything I've heard had no incentives on the table at all, but let's get you an update date on that. Look I have – I've been very public about it – I have a huge critique of some of the things that Facebook has done, and I have a big concern in general about companies that have such a big impact on our public discourse and our privacy, and I think a lot has to change. But that said, we're also trying to bring back New York City's economy, bring back jobs from New Yorkers, and the fact that Facebook made the decision to have such a strong presence here is a vote of confidence in the future of New York City. We'll confirm it to you in detail today, Jillian, but my understanding is no incentives were involved.

So, everyone, as we conclude, look, I think it's really important to think about it this way, when it comes to New York City, it comes to the people of the city have gone through so much. And when it comes to bringing back our city, here's what we will not allow, we will not allow business as usual. We will not allow the recreation of the same inequalities that we had before this crisis began and that came out so desperately, so painfully during this crisis. We saw sharp, horrendous disparity does not have to be that way. So what we know is New York City has to come back. New York City is a beacon to the world. New York City stands for a kind of egalitarianism, a sense of everyone has value, everyone has opportunity. This idea is more important than ever, but we got to make it real for our people. We got to make sure that everyone has that opportunity and that starts with the smallest mom and pop stores. That's why we're so focused on making sure they survive this crisis. In the end, the way to come back is to be sustainable, and a lot of people hear that word, they think about climate change, they think about the environment and that's true as well, but I mean sustainable in terms of fairness, decency, humanity. An economy that includes everyone is sustainable. An economy that leaves out so many is not, here in New York City. We're going to build back the right way. Thank you so much.

2020-08-12 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. So, here's what we know after almost two months – New Yorkers are listening, following the directions, doing things right. And that's why for now – fully two months – we've had one of the lowest rates of coronavirus infection anywhere in the country, consistently below three percent over that entire timeframe. Now, how do you keep it that way? You keep it that way with vigilance and keep it that way with quick action if you see any kind of problem. We know New Yorkers take this disease very, very seriously, and they act when we tell them there's something they need to know. So, today, we're going to talk about something we need to address in one neighborhood in Southern Brooklyn, and we need to address it quickly. And this, in fact, it's going to be an example of the way we keep this infection rate low, by getting out there strongly into communities, making sure people know that testing is free and available, telling everyone you need to get tested, and following up consistently on those test results. Our Health Department, our Test and Trace Corps, everyone is focused on making sure that we get people tested and then we follow up individually whenever there is a positive case.

Now, we know that we have to focus very, very locally, because, when we see a challenge, the idea is to drill down and find out if we can identify the specifics of it by doing more and more outreach, more and more testing. And when we see any kind of trend that's unusual, that's when you double down, that's when you throw in more focus, more resources. So, right now, we're looking at Sunset Park in Brooklyn. This is a neighborhood I know very well. I actually used to represent it long ago when I started out in public life on the local school board. This is a community – a wonderful, vibrant community that, right now, we're seeing an uptick in. It's over a very limited period of time. It's a very limited number of cases. But we found it by doing exceptionally focused testing, what we call our hyperlocal testing. This is part of the test and trace program that says we have certain neighborhoods we want to know more about, we go and do extra testing. We now have a warning light. We have a sign there's something going on that we want to know more about, we want to delve into further. And the way we do that is by getting out into the community deeply, communicating with people at the grassroots, literally knocking on doors, talking to local organizations and leaders with a simple message – everyone needs to get tested. We want to get everyone tested as quickly as possible to see what is going on and if there's something further we need to do.

Now, this is a very finite area. This is a neighborhood of about 38,000 households, a specific piece of Brooklyn, and it's an area we can literally saturate. And that's what we're going to do, starting today. You will see door knocking, phone calls, lots of activity through local organizations. Our idea is to saturate Sunset Park over the next few days, literally reach every member of the community we possibly can, get as many people as tested as possible, as quickly as possible. Here to tell you about it and to explain why this strategy is so crucial to keeping our low infection levels low is our health commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, sir. As the Mayor said, we are constantly scanning the field to strategically direct personnel and resources. We’ve set criteria that will help us break the chain of transmission through a hyperlocal approach to outreach testing and enrollment in services. The first neighborhood targeted was the Treemont section of the Bronx, now followed by Sunset Park. In these areas, we've launched popup testing sites and community days of action. We've also enlisted key community partners, faith leaders, and primary care doctors to activate their networks, drawing community members and connect people to interventions that will keep communities safe. After every positive test, the Health Department has resource navigators standing by to immediately connect people to services that will allow them to safely take care of themselves, including food, prescriptions, and hotel services. In two weeks, in Sunset Park, we have tested over 3,300 New Yorkers. While the data we have thus far is limited, the early returns to support our targeted approach and show that we're drawing in the people who will most benefit from those tests and services. Thus far, we have identified 228 positive cases.

In a way, the ZIP code-wide rate was like the beep of a metal detector that told us where to dig. Now that we're getting deeper, we're finding what we're looking for and able to help the people we've identified. So, we'll turbocharge our activity in the days ahead. We'll bring two mobile testing vans, each of which can do 80 to 100 tests per day based at, first, 44th and 6th Avenue from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, Wednesday through Friday of this week and all of next week too; and second, the Brooklyn Herald Gospel Center at 809 44th Street off of 8th Avenue for Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. And starting Monday, we will extend our rapid point of care testing at this neighborhood at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. We'll look for additional brick and mortar options for testing sites and partner with local health care providers to maximize resources, that includes local urgent care clinics. AdvantageCare Physicians is one provider in the ZIP code that will be more actively testing in the area by appointment. And we'll be stepping up our outreach, just as the Mayor said. We'll carry out robocalls in the 11220 ZIP code, flyer, door knock, and canvas the area. The Sunset Park community is going to see even more of us in the days ahead. This is what a data-driven hyperlocal approach looks like, one that strategically deploys testing resources and enrolls people in the critical services needed to allow New Yorkers to keep their friends, families, and neighborhoods safe. And catching those sparks before they ignite will help us to prevent a resurgence.

Most importantly, everything is being done by four and with the community. We're proud of this approach, and we're thankful for the partnerships that we've developed. New Yorkers continue to be the key to our response.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dave. And yeah, that is the key – every-day New Yorkers. Look, it's up to the government to do a lot here, but the real heroes here are every-day New Yorkers. The people who have beat back this disease are the folks who have put on those face coverings, the folks who really – are really careful about social distancing, the folks who listened to us, when we say, hey, you’ve got to get tested now, this is important. There's a lot of people like that, but it really, really is necessarily to go out to communities, engage them in multiple languages, with a lot of compassion and a willingness to support people and show them that if in fact they have tested positive, we're going to be there for them to help them navigate it. So, that's what test and trace has been all about. And someone who has helped to build an effort that reaches deep to the grassroots with compassion and understanding for all our communities is the Chief Equity Officer of Test and Trace, Annabel Palma.

Chief Equity Officer Annabel Palma, Test and Trace Corps: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, it's always great to be with you and definitely in the trenches helping to get New Yorkers back on their feet. As the Chief Equity Officer for testing and trace, I'm leading a mission to fight the disparities exposed by COVID-19 and to help our hardest-hit communities to recover, such as Sunset Park. A powerful tool in our kit that we have is the hyperlocal response strategy, the one that the Mayor mentioned earlier. With our partners at the Department of Health and in the community, this tool will let us laser focus on areas with high need, this way we can make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. We are making progress in our focus neighborhoods, in Treemont, the Rockaways, and Sunset Park. And we'll be in more neighborhoods in, in the near future, so stay tuned. And we need all New Yorkers to do their part and get testing.

To keep moving forward, we must listen to what data and communities are telling us. In Sunset Park, that we need to fine tune and expand our efforts now to stay ahead of COVID and its transmission. Starting today, in Sunset Park, we are going to double down and reach deeper into our neighborhoods. We will be making [inaudible] calls to every resident, every single household. We'll reach everyone with robocalls and we will knock on every door. In addition to flooding the zone with outreach, we are also expanding our testing capacity with more mobile testing units and extension of rapid point of care testing. We are bringing testing to where the people are, and I got to experience this firsthand on July 31st, when we went out to the Rockaways and got tested myself. And we had an influx of individuals come out and participate in our day of action. In addition to flooding the zones with outreach, we’re – sorry, and then we're going to follow up and keep following up and we will not stop until we make sure that all New Yorkers have been tested.

Every step of the way, the Test and Trace Corps is working with trusted messengers in your neighborhoods, like community-based organizations, faith leaders, local leaders, because we need the help of the community ultimately to win this fight. It is up to you to make sure that we can get ahead of this. If you test positive, we will connect you with all the resources and support. We need to safely separate from [inaudible] until you recover free and safety. That includes connecting you to the resource navigators on the spot at a rapid testing site and mailing a test, a take care package with PPE and other supplies to the door of everyone who test positive and their contacts. And so, today, I'm asking all New Yorkers to make sure that they get tested, but especially our residents, our New Yorkers in the Sunset area.

Together, we will know the transmission, stay ahead of COVID and protect the most vulnerable. It starts with us. It starts with our neighborhoods. It starts with you, New Yorkers. You have proven to be able to get ahead of it. You've heard the Mayor say time and time again, we've gotten to where we are because of you. And so, you need to continue to do your part and we want to make sure that you stay healthy.

[Chief Equity Officer Palma speaks in Spanish]

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Annabel. Everyone, you hear the message loud and clear. We're going to focus on any place that needs that extra attention, and we're going to send in a lot of support, and you're going to see a lot of presence out there in Sunset Park over the next few days. So, when we talk about test and trace – two T’s, test and trace, but we also have a third T –tenacity. We are going to be focused when we see even a warning light, even a hint of a problem, we're going to send in what it takes to address it and to find out the next steps that we need to take to keep people safe.

Okay. Now, speaking about keeping people safe, one more day, we have the heat situation continuing. So, I want to keep reminding people, do not underestimate this heat. Be careful if you go outside, don't go outside more than you need to. Stay hydrated. But especially folks who are vulnerable, take this heat very, very seriously. We’ve just got one more day. The heat advisory goes through 8:00 PM tonight, then, hopefully, we will have relief. Heat index values will go up to 97 degrees. Now, remember, if you need a cool place to be, we have cooling centers available in every borough for free. Everything is for free. They do have face coverings and social distancing. So, they're safe in every way. If you want to know a safe place to go to get cool, go to nyc.gov/chillout, or call 3-1-1. And, remember, look out for your neighbors, something New York City – the people in New York City do well – the compassion, the kindness towards neighbors, the folks on your block, the folks in your building, particularly seniors. If someone needs some help, if someone needs to get to one of these cooling centers, look out for them, we have the help there for them.

Okay, let's go over our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report 81. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, threshold 375 – today's report, 296. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent – and today's report, only one percent.

Let me do a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we turned to our colleagues in the media, and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Chokshi, the Chief Equity Officer of Test and Trace Annabel Palma, Commissioner Criswell, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first today goes to Al Jones from 1010 WINS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Al. How are you doing?

Question: Very well. A friend of mine – a reporter friend was in Williamsburg this morning and he said he watched bus after bus pickup children, not a single mask, people walking into stores with no mask. So, I'm just wondering, if enforcement is not there, or if it's just not enough, is a bump in COVID-19 cases almost inevitable.

Mayor: I'll start as the non-doctor and let our doctors speak to it as well. It obviously depends on a lot of different things Al, but the bottom line is no nothing's inevitable, but what is clear is we need people to wear those face coverings. We need people to observe social distancing. If we've gotten to a place where that's not happening, we need to reach out to that community and work hard to get it right, because again, New Yorkers overwhelmingly have paid attention, and that's why we have the amazing results we've had for months now. But it is also about being vigilant, just like we're talking about today. If we see a problem with Williamsburg, we'll address it with community leaders and we'll get more activity there from testers test and trace as well. Dr. Chokshi you want to add or Dr. Varma, anything to add.

Commissioner Chokshi: Sir, I think you covered it.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead Al.

Question: That's it. That's it, sir.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Michael Garland from the Daily News.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Michael. How about you?

Question: I’m good. So the first question I have is on where do you guys spoke about just before on Sunset Park? Do you have any sense of what is causing this increase in cases in that area? You know, gatherings, travel – what do you think is leading to this?

Mayor: It's exactly the right question, Michael, and that's what we're going in to find out. Right now, we have, again, it's a warning light. We see something, it may be aberrant or it may be something more. Now remember what we're talking about here is Sunset Park is kind of the geographical center. That's why we're focusing our energy there, but some of the testing that happened in Sunset Park was not Sunset Park residents. So it's not that we have a perfect, beat on exactly what's happening yet. The idea is to go and do much more testing to see if it either clarifies that that was an aberrant reality or shows us something that we can follow up on more distinctly. So we're going to be out there intensely to get that answer quickly. Go ahead.

Question: The second question is about the city's fiscal situation and, you know, talk of layoffs. I spoke with somebody yesterday who's pretty knowledgeable on this who said – who feels like there's a bit of fear-mongering here, that the kind of breadth of layoffs you've been talking about is not really what's necessary. There are other cuts that could be found in the city's budget, and I was wondering if you could address that? I mean, do you – I think 22,000 is the number you've been putting out there. Is there, is that – does that still hold and are you kind of looking at a range of other places you could cut? I mean, I know the budget just passed, but I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit?

Mayor: Yeah, I mean, remember we took this budget down from what we projected in February to where we ended up, you know, we cut the budget by billions and billions of dollars already, and I want to be very clear. The overwhelming cost of local government is personnel, right? I mean, where we put our money as into the people who provide service to New Yorkers, whether they're first responders, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, educators, you name it, that's where the greatest impact comes from in terms of serving people. But that's also where the costs are. If you got to keep cutting and keep cutting, it has to, at some point reach personnel, that's just pure logic of budgets, and it's very sad logic. I don't like it one bit and I want to avert this at all costs. So that 22,000 number is painfully real, Michael, that's for October 1st, here's the reality. We all hoped and prayed there'd be a stimulus – that appears to be dead now. We're going to Albany to ask for appropriate long-term borrowing capacity that would stave off the layoffs. If we don't have that, we're going to keep working with labor, looking for every solution, every kind of savings. But if we don't have something else that stops it, we do plan 22,000 layoffs on October 1st. It's a massive, painful number. It resembles the kind of things we have to do decades ago, but the job here is to try and avert it if we can.

Moderator: The next is Gloria from NY1.

Question: Good morning. I want to follow up on Michael's question regarding the fiscal situation and the layoffs. We know that the agencies have received guidance on preparing for this. My question to you is the 22,000 layoffs. Do you expect them to be spread across all city agencies, including the NYPD?

Mayor: Every agency has to come back with a lot of savings. Every single agency. There's more than one way to do it. As I said, we're going to be, in the meantime, trying to get the long-term borrowing. We're in the meantime working with labor unions to see if we can find other types of savings with them. But if none of that is working, every single agency will experience cuts. Every single agency will have to save a lot of money, and generally that will take the form of layoffs.

Question: And so what are you doing in terms of the unions? Are you in the process of renegotiating those contracts, and are you telling the unions, you know, w we're going to have to lay off city workers if we don't renegotiate these contracts?

Mayor: We've been having this conversation with unions literally for months, Gloria, it's not new to them. In the lead up to the June budget, we did attempt to get the borrowing authority from Albany that would have allowed us to put in the budget that the borrowing would address the problem. When that wasn't possible we put in the budget that there would be 22,000 layoffs. It is not a surprise to any municipal labor union. We've been in constant conversations with the biggest unions that represent the vast majority of the workers, and everyone takes it very, very seriously. So our job is to find savings. I wouldn't call it renegotiate contracts, because that sounds much broader. It is to find the kind of savings that could avert the layoffs, and I know the unions take this seriously. No one wants to see layoffs, but again, the best solution is to get the appropriate kind of borrowing authority from Albany, just like this city got after 9/11, so we can avert having to cut city services and having to end up putting out, you know, we're talking about tens of thousands of families that would be affected. I don't want to see that happen, and I don't want to see New Yorkers suffer the loss of services. So we're going to do everything we can to avert that.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Good morning to all on the line here. Mr. Mayor, so New Jersey schools apparently are going to reverse their reopening plan. Let me see – Murphy's office told CBS News this morning. He'll announce a plan later today to facilitate remote learning. The reason you know, a city like Elizabeth says it doesn't have enough teachers willing to go into the classroom. Now, the reason I bring it up is not for a comment about New Jersey, but to ask you about how does New York know, and I haven't seen any union leaders at any of your conferences about this, how do you know that you're going to have enough teachers who were willing to go into the classroom? I know that the Chancellor said that was something in the mid-eighties, but I don't know where that number came from. Is it just a subtraction from the teachers who are, who want to do all remote, or do we know for sure affirmatively that they'll come in?

Mayor: Rich, first of all, our educators are extraordinarily devoted to our kids and they understand there's just no way to serve our kids as well, remotely as when they're in the classroom, and even if they're in the classroom a few days a week, they're going to get so much more support, and I'm not just talking about academically, I'm talking about emotionally, I'm talking about mental and physical health, I'm talking about food. I'm talking about everything. Kids who go into the school building are going to get every form of support, and that means the days when they're doing remote learning are going to be much more effective. But if you didn't have any in person contact with adults, you're talking about really much less impact, positive impact for kids, and that's what we're cognizant of. We are here to serve our kids who already have gone through so much.

So the answer to your question is the 85 percent is based on a simple concept. Educators were given an opportunity to say if they had an accommodation they needed for health reasons, they could declare that, about 15 percent did, those are being reviewed right now. But the others are going to be at their schools in September. So that's why we know the staffing we have. We're going to augment that with additional staffing. That's been ongoing conversation with the unions, the best ways to do that. So we're going to watch every factor. I don't know the situation in New Jersey or Elizabeth. I can say in New York City, we have teachers coming back and we're going to have the resources to serve our kids.

Question: Okay. Completely different topic, and I have to ask you this one. So the president was, was on a broadcast last night, and said that he left New York four years ago. It was a wonderful place. You could see signs of badness, but it was a wonderful place. That's – those are his words, and he attacked you for doing a horrible job. So I thought maybe you'd want to respond to that.

Mayor: Richard, you are a kind – you believe in equal time. I like that. So when President Trump left New York City, I had been mayor for years, and I'm glad he recognized that what we did in this city was continue to make it the safest big city in America, add more jobs, improve our schools. It was a wonderful place. Then it was a wonderful place in February. We had the most jobs in the history of this city, February, this year. It's still a wonderful place and a place that's fighting back against this horrible disease. The sad reality is no one has done more to setback, New York City than Donald Trump because he failed New York City and he failed America with his handling of the coronavirus. If we had had presidential leadership, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now. So yeah, New York City is dealing with some tough times and guess what – a former New Yorker helped bring it to us by failing to address the crisis staring us in the face.

Moderator: The next is Abu from Bangla Patrika.

Question: Hello, hi, Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, how are you doing Abu?

Question: Thank you so much for asking. Mayor, I want to know about the commercial rent problem and the residential as well, because yesterday [inaudible] they will help the people who cannot pay the rent. Could you please explain how you can help?

Mayor: Yeah. It's such an important question. Look, first of all, let's separate eviction from not being able to pay the rent. Anyone faced with eviction, if they don't have a lawyer, if they don't know what to do, and I'm talking about the people who just don't have any money, Abu, have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, have no way to pay the rent. If you think you're about to be removed from your apartment, please call 3-1-1 so we can give you guidance, legal support, different things we can do potentially to work with the landlord. Please, if you fear you're about to be put out of your apartment and your family's not going to have a roof over your head, call 3-1-1 so we can help you. The bigger question, the folks who may not be, thank God, in that situation, but are dealing with the fact that just simply can't pay the rent. There's two solutions to that. The best one is through a stimulus direct rental assistance for people all over the country. Another helpful piece would be for the State of New York to pass legislation and I hope they'll do it in the upcoming legislative session – which we're hearing could be very soon in Albany – to allow a payment plan. It's a simple concept that if you don't have any money, you don't have any more livelihood, you lost your job in March or April, can't pay the rent, that you can make an arrangement with your landlord for a payment plan, that it would be legally allowable and repay when you do have an income again, but keep your apartment in the meantime. So that's what we need the help from Albany to make that the law.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have a question for the Health Commissioner and the Contact and Tracing Team. I'm wondering how many of those people test positive, in Sunset Park and even in Tremont that you also mentioned an outbreak there, how many of those people actually gave their contacts to the contact tracers and how many of those peoples in both neighborhoods have begun isolating themselves?

Mayor: It's a great question, Jeff, and I know our colleagues here may have that at their fingertips. They may have to get back to you today, but what we do know, I'll start and then turn to my three colleagues. The fact is what we've seen is we can reach a very high percentage of folks. There is a recognition out there that participating in contact tracing is important. So I have to say so far, we've seen a high level of cooperation. It's not perfect by any stretch. Sometimes it is hard to track people down, but I do want to say when we started out we didn't know what the basic attitude in New Yorkers would be. It's been positive and surprising how much people do engage in the process, who wants to jump in, or, you know, starting here, and then Dr. Varma, who wants to jump in?
Chief Equity Officer Palma: We have to get you the numbers for Tremont, for those folks who tested and were contacted. But as of July 29th in Sunset Park, we had 104 cases and 80 of them completed the intake process. The 80 cases that completed the intake process gave us 130 contacts. And out of those contacts that they gave us, 82 percent of those contacts were household contacts, meaning they were individuals who lived under the same roof with the individual that tested positive.

Mayor: Thank you doctors. Do you want to add anything?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. I would just underline the point that it's so important when a case is identified that we have contact tracing that's done to interrupt the chain of transmission. So this is how our outreach efforts link to our testing efforts and link to our contact tracing efforts and together that allows us to be proactive and prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Mayor: Go ahead, Jeff.

Question: Yes, thank you. Mr. Mayor, the second question is what's the delay with the economic recovery roadmap that you promised a few months ago? And do you have any goals for what you'd like to turn over to the next Mayor of New York City, have you, you know, put any sort of mileposts in place that you'd like to see when you leave office?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question, Jeff, and that's exactly the way I'm thinking about it. You know, we're about 500 days until the end of this administration, and I like everyone to think on the kind of countdown system, and of course there's another example of that right here, that we're all very focused on. The idea is to work backwards from the last day and say, where do we want to leave things on a host of issues, but also what kind of blueprints do we want to leave in place? Now, you've probably had an opportunity over time to spend some cozy time with the OneNYC plan. That right now is our comprehensive roadmap for New York City and that was completed not long before the pandemic. We have to make some serious adjustments to that plan in light of the pandemic, but it still is the broad framework, and that's where we would begin. My goal with the new administration is be able to hand them, you know, a really clear set of specific plans that they can work with as they choose and show how we're going to keep building this recovery.

So then to your original question, look, we've got a bunch of different pieces we're going to bring together here. We're going to bring together everything we are hearing from the Sector Councils that got going very early on in this crisis, representing different industries, different parts of the economy, different parts of life in New York City. What we're going to get from the Fair Recovery Task Force, what we're going to get, which has been ongoing from the internal group that was put together, the Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity. All of these strands are being brought together. We're going to have a series of updates and reports as we go along. But I think when we get into the fall, the goal is to start laying out specific planks for the rebirth of New York City, and then try and provide really specific blueprints to the next administration as they prepare to come in.

So everybody, look, I want to just talk about the way we have attempted throughout this crisis to give people facts, to focus on data, to focus on science, and again, want to commend New Yorkers. This is what people wanted. We've been in pain watching the rest of our country. We've been in pain watching Americans suffer with this crisis in many cases because there wasn't a focus on data and science. There was no focus in the White House. There was no focus, unfortunately, in too many state capitals around the country, and what happened is when you deny the data and the science, the danger grows, but meanwhile, New Yorkers insisted on those facts, insisted on being led by the data in science, but more than that, New Yorkers decided to do something with that information. And this to me is the formula that works, give people the facts and then empower the people to act. And a lot of times, I think when we look around the country, there's been a misunderstanding. The idea of telling people, you can “liberate” yourself by not wearing a face covering or not social distancing was in fact damning people to become sick and endangering their families. The actual idea to empower people is to tell them you can be the agents of change, you can be the difference makers, and that's what we've done in this city. We said, here are the facts, here's the reality. Now we need you to play your role, only you can do that, and New Yorkers have answered that call. So every time we give you an update and we tell you we need New Yorkers to get in the game and help us out, I hear New Yorkers paying attention to that and following through, and that's what's going to see us through this crisis and beyond. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-13 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. 

I want to talk about our schools for just a moment. It's on the minds of millions of New Yorkers. I want to give you a quick update. And I want to start by saying, I paid a visit yesterday to an amazing public school, Village Academy in Far Rockaway. And what I saw there was very, very encouraging to me. I went with Chancellor Carranza and we spent time with the principal, Dr. Doris Lee. And she is the founder of this school in Far Rockaway in a community that's had many challenges. She decided to create a school for the children of that community, no matter what disadvantages they may have experienced in life, she believed that that public school could be the place that would be transcendent for them. That would allow them to reach their potential. And you could hear the warmth and the heart in what she does, her devotion to her kids. So we went through the building because we wanted to see all the preparations that were being made.

And this is happening in public school buildings all over New York City. But what I heard was even more important because it wasn't just about the physical preparations, the cleaning and the social distancing and the face coverings and the hand sanitizer. It was about the devotion to kids, to our children, to what they need, and the fact that we have to help them through this crisis and beyond. And I listened to Dr. Lee talk about why it was important to open our schools. And she said something very basic. I just want to quote it. She said, I feel like my children need me. And if there's a possibility to open safely, I want to take advantage of that possibility. Listen to the positive, powerful thinking of one principal that representing educators all over New York City, who first and foremost care about their kids and want to be there for them.

So, we saw a lot of professionalism [inaudible] not just from the principal, for the whole team, working in the school. And here as an example for you and your screen of something very powerful, electrostatic cleaning. We've seen this used in other places, including our subways. The custodian there [inaudible] he is able to go through that classroom and every classroom, in one to two minutes, create an entirely clean environment where the technology he has and go through a whole school quickly. And that's going to happen every single day. That's one of a number of measures that are going to be taken to keep our kids safe. Now that's the physical part of the equation, making sure the schools are clean, making sure they're ready, very few kids in the classroom. I already talked about the amazing commitment of educators. Let's talk about another piece today.

I want to announce something very important. And it's something that educators care about. They've been asking about. Parents have been asking you about it. I want to confirm it announced that every single New York City public school building we'll have a certified nurse. This is very important for people to hear and understand. We're taking every precaution, but there's a tremendous value to having a health professional present. We're working with the Health + Hospitals team to put this together. They did an amazing job at the height of the crisis, bringing in additional medical personnel, health care heroes. They're going to do it again and make sure we have enough nurses for every single public school building. So, to all the folks who have been raising that concern, I hear you loud and clear. And that will be in place. We have a whole month until school begins and we're going to be ready to do great things for our kids.

Now, let's go over our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold 200 patients – today's report, 70. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICU’s, threshold 375 – today, 282. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent – today's report, one percent. Again, that's our favorite number, besides zero, and it's something all New Yorkers should be proud of. Let me say a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

I want to say one quick programming note before we turn to our colleagues in the media, that for tomorrow we will not have a morning press conference, but we will be back again at our regular time on Monday. With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q&A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson; Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza; Senior Advisor and Director of our M/WBE program Maggie Austin; Director at the Mayor's Office of Workforce Development Amy Peterson; Chief of Staff to Deputy Mayor Laura Anglin, Sherif Soliman; Gary LaBarbara, President of the Building's Council; and Senior Advisor Jay Varma. And with that, the first question today goes to Andrew Siff from WNBC.

Question: Mr. Mayor, let's start with schools here. What I'm wondering is, with regard to the principal's union and their concerns, what do you think the harm would be in delaying the in-person opening to the week of September 21st? If that would allow everyone to start remote for the first two weeks, so no one would have a different situation than anyone else and then you'd also alleviate the concerns that these thousands of principals have that they're being rushed to open and they're just not ready.

Mayor: Look, Andrew, I always listen when my colleagues and labor raise a concern, when folks who are experts in their field, raise a concern. I've been talking to a lot of educators, a lot of parents, but I've also sat down with Michael Mulgrew with Mark Cannizzaro to hear out their concerns. But I think the most important point is that I really believe our schools are crucial for our kids, there is nothing that replaces in-person learning, our school coming back as part of how our whole city comes back and we've been planning for months to start the day we were already planning on as we would have normally. So we'll keep discussing the concerns and trying to address them, but we have a whole month until school begins to address these concerns further, and as the Chancellor and I said earlier in the week, we understand that it's going to take a lot of flexibility this school year, everyone understands that. New Yorkers are practical. Parents understand it. It's not going to be perfect because we're going to be having to make a lot of adjustments, but I was out there in Far Rockaway yesterday, and as telling you, when you listen to a principal who is captain of her ship and says, yeah – she said in front of all the media – she is going to take a lot of flexibility. We're going to have some things we're going to have to work out, but we're going to make it work for the kids. That is the attitude we need and I think that's how we're going to get it done. Go ahead.

Question: You mentioned today that you now have a nurse for every building, I'm wondering what was the mechanism of making that happen? Is there an existing pool of nurses who were ready to be assigned? Our understanding was there were some 400 schools that didn't have regular certified nurses on a daily basis. So how are you able to solve that problem? And will those 400 additional nurses be ready as well on September 10th?

Mayor: Yeah. It's a great question, Andrew. I just want to say, you know, it's amazing what happens when you experience teamwork. Health + Hospitals came to the rescue here, and if you just think about things rigidly, you might not see that potential solution, but as we talked about the fact, you're right, there were schools that didn't have nurses historically, and we needed it for this situation. We're all talking about how do we make it work? And Health + Hospitals came forward and said, hey guys, in the middle of the worst months of the pandemic, we went and found certified nurses, brought them in on a contract. We can do that for the schools as well. So they stepped forward and said, we will take care of this for our sister agency, the Department of Education, we'll hire them, we'll get them to you, we'll take care of it. And that's why it's going to happen and they did it on a matter of days’ notice back during the worst of the crisis, they've got a whole month to get it in place, they'll get it done. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next step. We have Jillian from NY1.

Question: Hi Mayor, thanks for taking my question.

Mayor: I feel like I saw you yesterday afternoon.

Question: I know, long time no see, strange in this universe. But so you know, to go back to something Andrew asked about, I know that you cited this principal who we were with yesterday in Queens, who's the captain of her ship, but we're not just seeing this pushback from the CSA. There's also been letters signed by the vast majority, or perhaps I think all of the principals in District 15 in Brooklyn, where your children actually attended school, and District 13 nearby dozens of principals saying they're not ready, that they can't get answers to questions they need, that things are being handled piecemeal. You know, what would you say to them? And I mean, perhaps they feel the same about this nurse announcement, which we've just gotten, you know, sort of a little bit of information about right now, what would you say to their concerns, these captains of their ships, that they're not ready to move forward?

Mayor: I would say when you're a month away from school opening, it's understandable there's going to be questions to still be resolved. I'd say in the middle of a crisis that we've never experienced before anything like it and our whole lives, of course, there's going to be challenges, but in the end, let's go address those challenges. Let's go take on those questions. I am certain that principal's hearing now that every school will have a certified nurse, that that's not a hard thing to adjust to Jillian. They'll be able to figure that one out quick. They've been asking for it and we're doing it. I mean, again, I don't want to get confused here about this central point. Our colleagues in labor have been putting forward a series of requests and needs. We're going to have different views on each one, but where we can get something done, we're just announcing it. We're saying you raised this concern, we're answering your concern and that's what we're going to keep doing. But again, a month is a long time and I see a lot of educators who are focused on kids and getting ready. Go ahead.

Question: And then, you know, on the issue of the nurses, did I hear you say to Andrew that these will be contract nurses hired by H + H? And if so, do you have any concerns about how you'll be able to hire all of them? I know there were some vacancy issues as recently as March, obviously we're out of the, you know, the most dire times of the pandemic, but how many do you need to hire? And do you intend to hire this way and are they contract workers?

Mayor: Yeah, I don't have a question about this one. They hired thousands and thousands of nurses at height of the pandemic in April. And we're talking about hundreds needed here. And again, we're a month out. So no question in my mind they'll have them, we'll have them for the whole school year. I mean, obviously the goal here is to get to a vaccine, get everyone vaccinated and go back to normal. But the plan of course is to be ready to handle the whole school year. So H + H has done it before under much tougher conditions. They're absolutely confident that they can get that number of nurses in place and have them when we need them.

Moderator: Next up, we have Derick from WABC.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor, good morning. Just piggybacking on the discussion about schools. I will tell you, obviously we had Principal Lee yesterday who, you know, had – which said what she had to say, but I've heard from some administrators and some teachers who, you know, frankly, are not on camera, not in front of the Mayor who have a different perspective, and they say, they feel like they're not prepared, and one teacher actually said that, he says the custodians at his school are ill informed. They don't know what's going on. So, you know, obviously you say we have a month out, what kind of conversations have been going on with custodian, custodial staff about their responsibilities? You know, keeping these schools clean every day?

Mayor: Yeah. So it's a great question, and the custodial staff – and you saw a great example yesterday – custodial staff are doing this work right now. They have been for a while now to get the schools ready. We're going to show you more and more examples of the hardworking folks who are changing the air filters, cleaning the rooms, opening up windows that previously weren't openable, there's so much work happening right now. And again, I – the important thing to recognize is I honor and respect the labor movement and honor respect anytime the labor movement standing up for their members and raising concerns. I also know that our kids need to be in school. Our parents are very, very concerned that our kids have already lost a lot of their education that they've gone through a lot of trauma. We've got to get them back into school buildings, where they can get so much more support. I don't know a single educator who disagrees with the fact that in-person learning is much more powerful and effective than anything could be done remotely. So we've just got to do this for our kids. Our parents have spoken, the vast majority of them want their kids back in school. I like a can do attitude. I like an attitude that says we're going to find a way, our health care heroes in March and April found the way, our first responders found a way through the worst of the crisis, our educators have gone to find a way. We have to support them. We have to give them answers. If custodial staff need more guidance and answers, we're going to have to do that. We will do that, but again, a month is a long time and we've made a lot of progress already, and we're going to make a lot more in the next month. Go ahead.

Question: Question, are water fountains being disabled?

Mayor: The – it's a great question, and the Chancellor will speak to that. I just want to emphasize as I turn to the Chancellor, everything is being looked at a new, so at the school in the Rockaways, you know, again, you have one side of the hallway you're supposed to go one direction, another direction you had a classroom, never seen anything like in my life, a classroom with 10 desks in it, because only 10 kids were going to be in the classroom. Kids are going to have lunch at their desks, not going to a cafeteria anymore for the duration of this crisis, the electrostatic cleaning, I've never seen that in a school before. There's a lot that's going to happen we've never seen before. So where we have to put new things in place like hand sanitizer in every room, you know, we're going to do that. Where something has to change, we're going to change it. So to the water fountains, go ahead, Chancellor.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So all of the facilities and all of the things associated with facilities, including the water fountains, including the wash – the hand washing basins are all being reviewed, and it's a school by school analysis because some schools have newer models, for example, where you had the hydro refills, or you can fill up your container with water, it doesn't touch anything. Those are okay, they'll still be disinfected on a regular basis. There may be other water fountains that are much more of the traditional ones that you and I had when we were in school, where you turn to the faucet and take a drink. Those may come offline as well. Then instead, there'll be other types of water stations that we'll put in. So again, there's a school by school analysis that's being done and then we're making decisions based on what the medical experts are telling us is best practice for this kind of a situation.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up, we have Rich Lamb from WCBS radio.

Question: Hey there all on the call. How are you?

Mayor: How are you doing, man?

Question: So I have a sort of a follow up question to what I asked you yesterday. In regard to the numbers of teachers who are actually going to be available for, in person teaching, and in other words, I think you did the math. If I – as I remember it, it is subtracted, you said the 15 percent who wanted to all remote and then assume that the rest would come in, but do you have any affirmative assurance that those teachers indeed will come in?

Mayor: So let me – what you said was a little bit off. Let me clarify Rich and the Chancellor jump in if he wants to add. About 15 percent asked for a formal medical accommodation. The 15 percent certified that they had a specific medical problem. Those as with any other employment will be reviewed to be confirmed. But let's just take that number as a working number of 15 percent, so you have 85 percent of your staff. This is their profession. Again, health care workers, first responders, sanitation workers, construction workers, it's your profession. It's what you do. You want to make sure that safety precautions are being taken, absolutely, and I've listed for you just in the last minutes, 10 or 12 major safety precautions that have been taken that we didn't have last school year that we have now. But this is what people do for a living. This is what they get paid to do, and more importantly, this is what they do because they're devoted to kids. So unless folks have a medical accommodation, their job is to come in and serve our kids, and I'm convinced that's what they're going to do, because that's what they've done. Their whole lives. Chancellor, you want to add anything?

Chancellor Carranza: I would only add Mr. Mayor that even for those teachers and administrators that do have a medical accommodation, they will still be serving students, they'll be doing it from a remote location, but they still will be engaging in supporting students in instruction five days a week.

Mayor: Go ahead, Rich.

Question: Okay, so just one other question with all of the questions and doubts and difficulties that have been raised, how do you rate the chances of actually opening the schools on September 10th?

Mayor: Yeah, you know, there's a funny thing, Rich. Sometimes people think that if you raise enough questions and doubts folks will run away and hide. That's not what I do. That's not what New Yorkers do. We just don't surrender. The – think about the option here, we’re in a city that has the lowest infection rate in America, we've got a huge majority of our parents begging us to give kids help and support again. We've got kids who desperately want to get back to school and want to start learning again. We have all the tools we need to create an extraordinarily better and safer environment. Now we could say we have all that stuff, but let's take the easy way out and just shut everything down. I'm not going to do that because people raised doubts. I'm going to listen respectfully the concerns and figure out how to address those concerns one by one. But if people say, look, it's not perfect, therefore we don't want to participate. That's not New York. New Yorkers do not need perfection. New Yorkers are pragmatic. New Yorkers are tough. Also every other profession has kept going through this fight and I know educators are devoted to our kids.

So we're going to move forward. If at any point to the another part of what I could bring out of your question, Rich, if I don't think it's safe, if the Chancellor doesn't think it's safe, if our health leadership doesn't think it's safe, we'll be the ones to shut it down. And that's why we set the three percent goal. We said, if it goes above three percent infection rate for seven days, we're shutting things down, it’s a very rigorous standard. So far New York City has not come near that standard, thank God. But no, no, no, I want to be really clear. I'm going to be vigilant, and all the other leaders, this team are going to be vigilant, but if we think from everything, we can see that we can do this safely. We owe it to our kids and families to do it. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up. We have Marcia Kramer from CBS.

Question; Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I need to ask you again about the schools, because although you talked about nurses and you talked about the cleaning, the unions raise an awful lot of questions in the letter to you to yesterday, not only about ventilation systems and [inaudible] sanitation, but also support for communities if they have a higher positivity rate than the city standards, the hot zip codes. Will you have sufficient staff for both in person and remote teaching? Do you have sufficient bandwidth to support remote instruction? And what about special guidance for students with special needs? These are – there are dozens of dozens of questions that they say they haven't had answered. What do you say to them? They're scared. They're worried. And they have real questions.

Mayor: Yeah. So let me separate scared and worried from have real questions. They definitely have real questions, and again, I've spoken at length with Michael Mulgrew and Mark Cannizzaro about their real questions. I think a lot of what they're raising are things we can address and we want to address them together. Now, all the rhetoric, all the noise, notwithstanding, the Chancellor will talk about this in a moment, every single day, the Chancellor, the First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan and members of the team have been talking to those two unions every day on the specifics of the plans, troubleshooting problems, addressing concerns, and we're going to do that for the next month. And by the way, whenever the school year starts, it's not like in the past, magically everything was perfect. You keep working on it from opening day forward to keep making things better. When in the middle of a pandemic, it's not business as usual, things that are not going to be perfect, but we can get it right. So for people who have fear, I understand fear. We've been through a lot. I understand the trauma that a lot of people have been through, but the fact that there's a lot of outstanding questions doesn't scare me. We're going to deal with the questions and we're going to keep making progress every day. Chancellor, I think it'd be helpful if you could just give a flavor of how frequently the conversations occur between your team and the labor unions who represent the educators.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, sir. So I think that there are questions that are, that are being publicly asked is just a sign of how transparently we are working in good faith with our labor unions. I know that I speak to the leaders of the labor unions, daily – mostly daily. I know that members of my senior team are daily, hourly, in communication with other officials in our labor unions as well. So again, as issues arise, we put them on the table, we talk through those issues and some of these issues are very weighty issues. So for example, when you have a blended learning scenario and you have teachers that are teaching in person, then who's teaching the students that are in remote learning. And if you have a group of students that are in blended learning, they're in-person learning for two, three days out of the week, then what happens to those other two or three days that they're in remote learning mode? Who's teaching them. Those are contractual issues. Those are work issues. So there are a lot of thorny issues. But the one thing that I can say that we are absolutely on the same page about is making sure that the health and safety protocols that we put in place are agreed to, that we're comfortable with – we're always going to be looking to do more because health and safety is a paramount concern to all of us. So we continue to iterate on those questions, and as our union partners, speaking with their members, bring up other issues, they bring them to the table, and then we have the conversation about it.

I can say also that, you know, I understand – I've been a teacher, I've been a principal. As a principal, the weight I felt of responsibility for my communities was vast. Not unlike the weight, I feel as a Chancellor right now in charge of this entire system. So I get it and I understand why you want definitive answers, but just think about all of the moving pieces associated with the beginning of this school year and how different that is. But I also want to give tremendous credit to New Yorkers because if it wasn't for the work that New Yorkers have done, not politicizing the wearing of face masks, staying indoors when we had to stay indoors, washing our hands, social distancing – if we as New Yorkers hadn't done that, we would be like every one of the other nine largest school systems in America that cannot even consider in-person learning because their positive rate of community spread is so high. We are unique amongst the 10 largest school systems in America because our rate is so low. Just today, one percent, again, that is something that gives us the opportunity for many of our children who need the in-person instruction from their caring teachers. It gives us the opportunity to actually do that. So again, we're going to continue to be very transparent and honest as we work with our partners – in fact, in two hours, we're meeting again with our partners and working through a whole list of issues. We're going to continue to do that because the children of New York City deserve that opportunity.

Mayor: Go ahead, Marcia.

Question: Mr. Mayor, my question is this: what are you going to do if teachers and principals decide that their questions haven't been answered and they decide not to show up?

Mayor: Marcia, this is a professional reality. I think you're not necessarily understanding their professionalism by asking that question. People have a job to do. If they don't have a medical accommodation, their job is to be there for their kids, and they understand that. So people are going to complain, and that's not saying that derogatorily, people are going to raise concerns, they’re going to raise fears. That's all normal, and again, absolutely we saw this in every other field. We've had real concerns, real issues raised by healthcare workers, by first responders, you name it, but New Yorkers show up. So there's not a question in my mind, people are going to show up because it's the right thing to do for our kids.

Moderator: Next up, we have Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, it's been more than a week since the city set up checkpoints to enforce a two-week mandatory quarantine, and when you announced this program last week, you said the checkpoints would be set up at bridges and tunnels all across the city. But for the last week, the checkpoints have only been at Staten Island crossings with the exception of one day. So I'm wondering why the city only seems to be targeting Staten Island with these checkpoints, and do you have an update on the number of stops you've made over the last week?

Mayor: Sydney, we'll get you the update on the exact number. It is a very initial effort. That's going to grow a lot more over the coming weeks. I spoke to Sheriff Joe Fucito yesterday about this. Look, there's one obvious reason for Staten Island, which is that a lot of the traffic coming in from the rest of the country, including from some of the most affected states like Florida comes up from the South and comes through Staten Island into New York City. So that's one of the reasons why you're going to see a lot of activity there, but you're going to see activity also, I spoke to him about this in the Bronx with folks coming down 95 the other direction. You’re going to see activity around the tunnels into Manhattan from New Jersey. So you've got a lot of different pieces that are starting to grow. We'll get you the numbers, but what's most important to recognize is that these checkpoints, you'll start to see them more and more, and they're going to keep rotating around, and the idea is to educate people that the quarantine is the law. Go ahead.

Question: Just the second question on schools for you and Chancellor Carranza. So the city can reopen schools if the infection rate stays below three percent, but I'm wondering what happens if the infection rate say on one borough is at three percent or higher? Will schools on that particular borough not be able to open or be forced to close down?

Mayor: Sydney, look, it's a very fair question to say, what if we have major variations geographically, we have not been seeing that. I don't – again besides the Chancellor, Dr. Varma might want to weigh in. I think I'm on firm ground saying now we have a lot of experience with the coronavirus and we have not seen kind of big, consistent variations on the scale of a whole borough at all. We're going to be very cautious here. If something starts to go in the wrong direction, we're going to be talking about it very publicly, because part of what we'd want to do Sydney, is tell people to take additional actions to stop any growing rate of infection. So of course, to your question, we would look at different scenarios, but I don't think that's what we're going to deal with. I think it's either going to be pretty much the city as a whole is doing well, or God forbid we're going in the wrong direction. I believe that will be more widespread. So let me just see – Dr. Varma, why don't you speak first and then if the Chancellor wants to add?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great, thank you very much for the question. I do think this is a really challenging issue and we've spent an enormous amount of time thinking about this. I think that the challenge with using – the advantage of using a sort of geographic restriction would be that yes, you could tailor your response to only the people in that community. The dilemma of course, is that we have a city in which the teachers, the staff and the students often don't come from a narrowly defined zip code, certainly in some situations they do, but in many they don't. So we have to recognize that we have a very fluid environment where people are coming in from lots of different places. So we define – you know, obviously that applies to New York City within New York State as well. So our policy decision to date has been to really focus on strengthening our measures for – first for prevention, but also for detection and response in every single school and use the school as kind of the unit of reference. And that's what you saw with the guidelines that were released before, about how we would handle an individual school in one classroom, cases in multiple classrooms. So again, thinking of the students and the thinking of the school as the unit in which we're going to plan and investigate.

Mayor: Okay. Richard, you want to add?

Chancellor Carranza: Nothing to add, sir.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead.

Moderator: Next up, we have Erin Durkin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. One more on school, and then I'll go to a different topic for my second. Marcia actually alluded to this, but I didn't hear a direct answer. If there are teachers who don't show up without a medical accommodation, they just say, I'm not putting my health at risk, I’m not coming in in-person. What will happen to them? Even if it's a small minority, will they be fired or what will happen?

Mayor: You know, Erin, again, I'm going to say something very broad and then anything Richard wants to add. We're not, we're not going to answer questions about a negative scenario when we're working with our educators as professionals and they're responding as professionals. Right now, all over New York City principals are getting ready, assistant principals, teachers, everyone's getting ready to do their job. You can have deep concerns. You can raise tough questions, but people are still going to do their job. So I'm not going to get into a hypothetical that I just don't buy into. I believe that the educators are devoted to their mission. You want to add Richard?

Chancellor Carranza: Nothing more to add sir.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead Erin.

Question: Okay, and then my second question was about the citywide layoffs. With regards to the NYPD we've reported that the NYPD has not been directed to do layoffs, even though yes, they will have to cut costs in other ways, is that accurate? Is it true that the NYPD will not specifically to doing layoffs? And if so why?

Mayor: No, that's not accurate. The – every single agency, God forbid, this happens. I want to start at the beginning. The folks in Washington failed us by not passing a stimulus. I'm going to hope and pray. They get their act together and come back and do that. That would be the best solution. The next stop is Albany, and I know we're going to go united with so many of our brothers and sisters in the labor movement to say New York City must have the borrowing authority to avoid these layoffs of working people who serve all of us. Hopefully Albany hears that joins with us, we get the borrowing authority we need and deserve, and that stops the layoffs right there. If that doesn't work, we then are going to continue to work with our municipal labor colleagues to look for savings that would avert layoffs another way.

So we're going to do all of these things, Erin, but say nothing else worked on October 1st. There's going to be layoffs on a huge level. Again, the projected number is 22,000, which is painful and astounding. Every agency will have to come up with savings. Now, look, savings can take more forms than just layoffs. That is a true statement, but to get to the kinds of savings we're talking about here, layoffs, unfortunately have to be part of the package in some form or another. But I, my sincere hope while we're planning for this very painful eventuality has just about six, seven weeks away. My sincere hope is that we can find a way to avert it.

Moderator: For our last question, we'll take Reema from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Hi, everyone on the call, and so about nurses can you, can you specify, I know obviously everyone knows the city has been through a massive financial crisis and continues to be. So I'm curious about how the city is going to be able to pay for these nurses. That's my first question if you could answer.

Mayor: Health + Hospitals to their great credit is covering this cost Health + Hospitals. I want to give Dr. Mitch Katz a lot of credit. He's an extraordinary leader and manager. He's found a lot of ways to make Health + Hospitals more effective and modern, and he's found lots of ways to save money. So this is something he is doing for the New York City public school system out of his budget. I also have to brag on him. He is a proud graduate of Sheepshead Bay High School, and a Brooklyn kid who's giving back to the school system now and its hour of need. So that is going to be covered by Health + Hospitals. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. My second question is we know obviously that this year and that this might be more for the Chancellor. We know that this year is going to be really different, and one thing that we've heard from nurses is just exactly how their jobs are going to change inside of school buildings. You know, if you could just elaborate a little bit about that, like, will they be the one staffing the isolation room and what's their day to day going to look like?

Mayor: To a Chancellor Carranza, and if Dr. Varma wants to join in at all, just want to offer it to both of you.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, sir. I'll go first if that's okay with Dr. Varma. So the role of the school nurse is to be the school nurse. So that means that in our conversations, the school nurse will not be manning the isolation room. Instead, there is a building safety committee and every one of our schools that building safety committee will be empowered to make the decisions because it has multiple stakeholders around what is a rotation. It'll probably be something where there'll be a number of individuals that would manage an isolation room if the need arises. Now, let me be clear about what manning an isolation room means. That means that if a child or an adult is experiencing any symptoms of being sick, they will obviously, with the appropriate PPE, be put into a room where they would wait for somebody to pick them up or take them home. That means that the person doesn't have to be a medical profession. They're not administrating any medical interventions. They're simply waiting with that individual until somebody picks them up. So they would obviously have the appropriate PPE, and then also they don't have to be in the room. They could stand at the doorway. Again, it's just to make sure that there's supervision and that somebody attended to the child in that room. So the building safety committees will be authorized to identify who's going to be, who's going to rotate. We all know how schools work. We don't want one person just doing that, but it will be different kinds of shifts if you will. The nurses will be obviously the medical expert on the campus, and we also have situations in New York City schools where we have partnerships with community-based organizations, health organizations. So some of our schools have a rotation of nurses and doctors that actually work through the community schools model as well. They will be utilized as well. So, while, the top line right now is that every school will have a nurse in their building. There are in fact, some schools that will have multiple medical professionals in their building as well, and I don't want that to get lost as well. I don't know if Dr. Varma would like to add anything?

Senior Advisor Varma: No, nothing else for me. I think you summarized it well.

Mayor: Great. Thank you so much. Well, look, let me, let me offer this last thought, as we close out today, and I want to get back to what we talked about earlier, which is the question of addressing so much of what this crisis dredged up. The coronavirus crisis has spoken to us in so many ways. So many painful, tragic ways. Every family in New York City has been affected in one way or another. I believe that is a literal, true statement. Every single family in some form or another has been touched and pained by this crisis. But in the middle of all, this came a recognition of the deep disparities and the unfairness that pervades our society. It came when we announced the reality of what we were seeing in terms of who was being lost in which communities were hardest hit, it came even more in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. There's been so many revelations throughout this city, in this country, in the course of this crisis, none of us asked for the coronavirus, but it is also creating a transformative moment...

I’ll tell you early on in this administration, when we created Pre-K for All, the idea became clear that we were actually doing something that had never been done before. That every child, no matter what their background, no matter how much money their family had in their bank account, every child would get the same start at the same starting line, and every child will get a chance to fulfill their God given potential. That never existed before.

Thank you.

2020-08-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. I want to talk, in a moment, about the first day of the new school year. And it certainly symbolizes a new beginning every year. It's a time of great hope and possibility every year. This year, it's going to take on so much greater meaning as we fight back from the coronavirus crisis, as we make sure our kids have the bright futures they deserve. We're going to have a lot to say about that in a moment. But first I want to talk about a great New Yorker who we lost in the last few days, Claire Shulman, former borough president of Queens. This is a true New York story. Claire Shulman always wanted to do something to help people and she had a passionate what-you-see-is-what-you-get way about her. And she would make things happen wherever she went. She started out as a PTA president in Bayside, and she let people know that the school had to be better for her kids and everyone's kids. She became a nurse and served people in need, and she brought that compassion forward and everything she did in her life – this is someone who came up from the grassroots. She wasn't part of a political dynasty. She wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She was just someone who wanted to serve her fellow Queens residents, and she did so with extraordinary tenacity and an understanding of what life was like in the neighborhoods of Queens. Extraordinary tenure, 16 years as borough president, making sure that Queens got its fair share and making lives better for so many people in her beloved borough. So, for everyone in Queens today who knew Claire Shulman or heard about what she did for all of you and for all of New York City, we mourn her passing, and her family is in our thoughts and prayers today.

Now, as I said, Claire Shulman got her start in the PTA, so let's go back to education. She was involved in the PTA. I was involved in PTA in my kids' school. So many parents get involved because we care. We want to see the best for our kids. And every day here at City Hall, every day at the Department of Education, we think about the children that we serve. We think about the families we work for and what we owe to them. What we owe to them is the very best possible start of the new school year. And what we owe to them is every effort, every effort imaginable to make sure our schools are healthy and safe for our kids, for our families, for our educators, for our staff, for everyone as we move forward. So, I want to show you a little bit of what's being done. We have just under a month until school begins. But I want to show you what's already been done and is being done as we speak to get our schools ready. So, I have a little video I want you to watch.

[…]

So, that just gives you some indication of the preparations underway already. I want to thank everyone who's a part of this, all the custodial service staff that's working so hard, and I've met a lot of these men and women. They care deeply about our kids. They are doing this work because they know how important it is to get it right. Everyone at the School Construction Authority, who's working hard all the time to improve our school facilities. Folks have been working now for months and months, and we still have weeks ahead to continue to improve and focus every inch of the school on safety and health. Now, look, the message in that video is whatever our schools need they're going to have. We're going to send them the supplies in great bulk before school begins and then constantly resupply as needed. This is about everything, everything a school can need, whether it's the hand sanitizer or the wipes or soap, you name it, face shields, surgical masks. Whatever our educators need, whatever the staff needs, whatever our kids need, we're going to make sure it's there. So, this is about being ready. It's about moving past fear to resiliency, getting ready to have a school year where our kids get served in a safe way and putting in place the precautions needed.

Now the point that we keep making, whatever the school needs, it will get, and we are establishing a new hotline for principals. Principals will get the information later today. The hotline will be up and running this week so that principal can call if there's anything they need. If they need additional PPEs for their educators, if they need additional cleaning supplies, it will be immediately delivered. Any principal can call with any request and there'll be action right away to get it to them. Everything our educators need, of course, will be provided for free. Their health and safety is crucial here. So, I want people to be clear – and I know the Chancellor feels this deeply – that we need our educators and our staff to know that all of this support will be in place for them ahead of school opening and then if anything comes up where there needs to be rapid response, we can do rapid resupply to schools, just a phone call away. Now the Chancellor is not only going to give the order. The Chancellor himself is going to go out and do unannounced spot inspections of schools to make sure that everything's in place before and during the school year. We're going to have ongoing monitoring by a number of Department of Education officials, unannounced safety checks to make sure that things are right for the whole school community.

Now, let me turn to another very important matter as we fight the coronavirus. Obviously, everything we're doing right now is to beat back this disease so that we can start moving forward as a city, so people could get their livelihoods back, so people can have the assurance that we're getting safer. This is about, of course, our schools, it's about small businesses, it's about every part of our lives. What we need to always do is if we see a problem act on it very, very quickly. I talked to you a few days ago about a concern we had about Sunset Park, Brooklyn. And since then there's been a massive outreach effort. 7,300 doors have been knocked, 77,000 robocalls, 35,000 live calls talking to residents of Sunset Park. Over the last few weeks, we've done 5,200 tests, almost 800 of them through mobile vans, just in the last few days. Here's what we know at this point. We do not see a cluster situation at this point in Sunset Park, based on the information we gleaned over the last few days from this intensive testing. We do see individual households with specific problems and those households are being engaged intensely to ensure that they quarantine, that they safely separate. And what we're finding is actually a very, very strong response. The vast majority of households, readily working with our Test and Trace team to safely separate because they understand the extent of the challenge and they're working with us to keep the disease contained so it doesn't spread in the community as a whole.

Now we've got to continue this focus on testing in Sunset Park. So, this week at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, there will be free testing available to all members of the community, including antibody testing, and the City will provide a shuttle bus in Sunset Park to get folks to the Brooklyn Army Terminal for free testing. There will be pick-up and drop-off at 6th Avenue and 44th Street, as well as 7th Avenue and 60th Street. It will be going from 9:00 AM to 6:30 PM every day, this week. And everyone will be kept safe, obviously, with face coverings when they're on that bus. And the important thing here is, if you live in Sunset Park and you haven't yet been tested, or you haven't been tested recently, please take advantage of this free testing. It will help us all. We'll keep giving you updates. But we do know, again, that we do not have a cluster situation there at this point based on the information we have. And we do know that with our intensive outreach, to those who – families that have at least one person who's tested positive, we're seeing about a 90 percent compliance rate with safely separating. And again, we are doing constant follow-up with those families to make sure that continues to be the case.

Now, meanwhile, right in the same neighborhood, you know, we gave a lot of warnings in the last days of last week. I think a lot of people heard that there was a problem in Sunset Park. So, you’d think it would be the last place that anyone would choose to do an illegal gathering that would put other people's lives in danger. But unfortunately, that's just what some people did. A small number of people in the scheme of things, but enough people to be worried about. Several hundred gathered in indoor spaces. Exactly what we cannot have. Two illegal raves, in fact, in Sunset Park. The Sheriff's Office stepped in quickly, broke up these raves. They are holding accountable those who organized them. It's just unacceptable. I want to be abundantly clear. You cannot organize a large gathering that's going to put people's lives in danger, or you will suffer the consequences. And I want to command everyone at the Sheriff's Office. They've been vigilant. They've really been heroes throughout this crisis. They broke up these two gatherings quickly. And I'll say to everyone, we all understand that people are feeling cooped up and looking for things to do, but whatever you are looking to do, you have to do it the safe way. You cannot take the chance of endangering other people's lives.

Now, we’ll get some updates as we continue to battle back this disease. We do see day by day, week by week, some real improvement and some specific steps towards our reopening. And a couple of things today that are notable because they are things that people love and they're starting to come back to life. A little step towards normalcy. And so, the State announced some additional standards over the last few days. For some people, this is truly a passion – bowling, bowling alleys will reopen at 50 percent capacity and that's happening today. And then next Monday, museums, aquariums, and other low risk cultural spaces can open at 25 percent capacity. And this comes with a whole host of precautions. There's timed ticketing, staggered entry, everyone has to wear face coverings, constant cleaning. So, the State rules are very stringent, as they should be, but it is a good step forward to give people some other options, but safe options so we can keep moving forward.

Let's go over today's indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients, today's report 57. Number two, daily number of people in Health + Hospitals ICUs, threshold 375 patients, and today's report 264. And three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold 15 percent, today, once again, one percent. That is my favorite testing number besides zero and again, commend all New Yorkers for the progress we've made. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues and media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Chancellor Carranza, the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Ted Long, Sheriff Joe Fucito, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. This is Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and to the Chancellor. My questions are about the school reopening. My first is specifically about District 75 students. I haven't seen much in the reopening plan that speaks to the specific needs of those students, particularly those who have one-to-one aides, need more classroom space and other accommodations. So, can you speak a little bit about that? If you have a – even an inclusion class where half of the students require a one-to-one [inaudible] or something like that. How does that work out? So, if you want to talk a little bit about that.

Mayor: Yeah. And, Katie, you've asked this – and I appreciate that you've asked this kind of question several times. It's a really important area. Doesn't usually get enough attention. But for any families, any parents with kids with special needs, nothing could be more important. And they're dealing with so many challenges before the coronavirus and even more now. So, I do really appreciate that you've raised it persistently, and, Chancellor, why don't you speak to that?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yeah. Katie, thank you. So, there are a number of detailed plans that are happening and they're mostly those D75 schools and in particular schools that have the specialized programs. In addition to that, for example, D75 five schools had two additional models that they could implement, which would give additional time in-person for students that are the most fragile. Every building’s floor plan when those dimensions were given to principals, there was special attention paid to those classroom situations where you would need more space. And we've given not only principals, but also the building engineers the latitude to adjust those plans to accommodate for those individual needs. There are literally tens of thousands of these kinds of scenarios. So, to incorporate every single one of those individual scenarios into comprehensive plan, it's obviously just not feasible, but that work is happening at the school sites, and we are supporting what's happening from a centralized perspective, as well, with additional wherever they need to be able to get into in-person learning.

Mayor: Go ahead, Katie.

Question: Yeah. And then, also a little bit about back to schools, if a student chooses the all remote option or even a hybrid, who's their teacher when they're remote? Is it someone from their school? Is it someone random? This question has come up a lot in terms of, you know, who will be teaching? And if a teacher chooses the remote option for health reasons, who will they be teaching, that sort of thing? I think there's still a lot of unanswered questions.

Mayor: There are. And I'll start and then pass to the Chancellor. Katie, this is – everyone acknowledges it's a work in progress. It's a – that said, a work in progress where a lot has already been put together and more will be over the course of the next month. And then some of this will be determined in the actual doing of it, like so much of the rest of life. We are in a full-blown crisis. This is – as I say, this is a wartime situation. Not everything will be perfect, but our job is to do the best we can for our kids and our families. And I have a lot of faith in our educators. They know a lot about how to be resourceful and creative. But, with that said, you're absolutely right, the more answers we can give people the better. So, Richard, why don't you at this point in time, talk about where we are as we continue to develop these plans?

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, Katie, again, some critical information that's just recently now become available. For example, the number of students that have chosen remote learning, for example, critical number for principals to be able to program their schools. Also, the number of teachers that have requested medical accommodations, also critically important because now we know who can be in person, who won't be in person. Your assumption is right that if a teacher as requested and is granted a medical accommodation need, they will be in remote learning mode. They’ll be working, but there'll be a mode of instruction will be from a remote location. So, our goal has always been that students that are remote learning will have teachers from their school or a teacher from their school. There'll be some continuity. Obviously, that is our goal, but that's not a guarantee, because it's going to depend on how many teachers at that school are in remote mode. How many are in person learning? Obviously, if you have less students per class, you need additional staffing. So, we are in the throes of all of those detail planning processes right now. We're working very closely with our unions, both our administrator union, CSA, and our teacher's union, UFT. We're working through all the logistics about how that's going to work, but our goal continues to be that students will have instruction in remote learning mode from teachers or a teacher in their school, wherever possible.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Luis from New York [inaudible]

Question: Hello. Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you, Luis?

Question: Very Good. How are you?

Mayor: Moving forward, always, brother.

Question: That's excellent. Considering how the end of September is just six weeks away. Will street fairs and other similar items be given the okay for October. I mean, as long as our health metrics remain as good as they are today?

Mayor: Luis, look, we'll look at that, but I think the likelihood, again, is that we are really trying to focus people away from gatherings. And I also think the vast majority of organizations that host them don't want to do them in this environment. We've seen a huge number of organizations make their own decision, that they don't want to do gatherings this year and want to wait until we've moved forward further in addressing the disease. So, we'll say something formal on that shortly, but that's what I'm seeing on the ground.

Question: Okay. Regarding the Governor's loosening on New York City's reopening restrictions, aside from the obvious fact that our health metrics have been stellar for weeks any idea what else might've moved the Governor to take this recent turn in direction?

Mayor: Look, as I've said many times and it's something that really should be noted, acknowledged, the State and the City have been an overwhelming agreement in terms of each of the steps we've taken. And I know the Governor and the State take a very cautious approach and I commend them for that. I think the specific actions last few days were about pinpointed re-openings with lots of protections in place. So, that's where we need to continue to focus, being very careful that if we open anything up that we've put all the right restrictions on it and limits on it. And if we can’t do that, then it's probably not something to open right now.

Moderator: The next is Julia Marsh from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning. Happy Monday, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Happy Monday, Julia, how you doing?

Question: Good. A couple of questions for you this morning. The first is about the Parks Department. As you know, the budget was cut by $85 million, many green spaces are overgrown and strewn with trash, especially in the outer boroughs. So can you address what the [inaudible] city's doing to ensure these spaces are maintained, especially during COVID when it's one of the few safe public spaces to get some exercise and fresh air?

Mayor: It's a very important question. I appreciate it, Julia, it's a tough one. Julia, the budget cuts you've seen already, unfortunately may only be just the beginning. And I'm praying and hoping we can all avert further cuts, further layoffs, but that, you know, we've, I think all come to realization there's not going to be a federal stimulus right now. Which is really sad to say. We have got to focus on getting long term borrowing from Albany so we can avert the kinds of layoffs that would make the situation you'd talk about even worse. So I know Parks Department is going to do everything it can within the limits to keep parks clean. We obviously over the last couple of weeks, a lot of personnel were drawn off to deal with the impact of the storm. Those folks will now be able to return to other things. But I am, I'm certainly deeply concerned. I mean, I love our parks, spend a lot of time in our parks. It's going to be a struggle to keep them as clean as we want them to be if we have to go through with more layoffs.

Moderator: The next is Mark Healey from Rockawave.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing?

Question: I'm doing well. The question is for Chancellor Carranza. For students in integrated classroom teaching programs, how will the DOE implement the services of both content, teacher, and special-ed teacher when the student will be home for a part of the time?

Chancellor Carranza: So, thank you. Good question. So we are right now, developing with the UFT and CSA, what that team teaching approach is going to look like. So it's obviously going to be more than one teacher. It could be up to three teachers working in a group so that they have a handoff. What we have established is at the beginning of every day, school day, there will be a dedicated time for collaboration and coordination amongst teachers that are doing the in person and teachers that are doing the remote learning as well. So that we have a continuum of education, which is our education speak for everybody's on the same page in terms of the learning plan for the student. So those are being worked through as we speak. And that's part of what we're trying to make sure is clearer as we get to the first days of school.

Mayor: Go ahead Mark.

Question: We had Donald Conyers on our podcast last week, Mr. Mayer. And I was curious as to why you chose Mr. Conyers to be the First Deputy [inaudible] and Chancellor Carranza chose Donald to be the first ever deputy, First Deputy Chancellor and why do you think that his position is needed at this time?

Mayor: So I'll start Mark and pass to the Chancellor. I mean, this is a model that this Chancellor developed, which I think is the best structure we've ever had. You know, in the time, since we've had mayoral accountability, mayoral control of education, what we needed to do was strengthen the work of our superintendents, strengthen our sense of what was needed in each local community. And this is the work that the First Deputy Chancellor is charged with achieving. And Donald is someone who has literally devoted his entire life to the public school kids of New York City. He was a public school kid in New York City, himself, amazing success story. But he really understands this school system upside down and backwards. And understands what each school needs, each principal needs, you know, to be able to succeed. So I think that's why he is in this crucial role at this crucial time. Go ahead, Richard.

Chancellor Carranza: Yes. Mr. Mayor. So for all of the reasons that you said, I want to be really clear that when our previous First Deputy Chancellor Cheryl Watson-Harris was selected as a superintendent of Dekalb County in Georgia, created the vacancy, we advertised a position. There were a number of applicants both internally and from across the country. Donald Conyers for all of his sterling resume, competed, interviewed, went through several interview panels with not only other administrators, but parents and students. So he competed for that position and he earned that position. Now the First Deputy Chancellor position is a critically important position because especially with Donald's experience having been a former principal, being a teacher, having been a superintendent in New York City, he understands the implementation of policy and how to make sure that schools are not only getting what they need, but there's also an air of accountability in terms of us being able to hold ourselves accountable, to make sure that we're serving our schools as well. So it's a critically important role. I think sometimes as New Yorkers, we become a little blasé about, well, it's just the school system. No. If Brooklyn, just Brooklyn, one of the five boroughs was its own independent school district, it would be the fourth largest school district in America, just Brooklyn. We're not even talking about Queens which would be four or five. So it's an immense, immense organization. And you need to have people whose eye is very much focused on the implementation of policies. And as the First Deputy Chancellor Donald's role is to make sure what's happening in schools is actually being implemented. And that the organization is functioning in support of students.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: This could be for the Chancellor and you, or both of you would be great. Why are teachers not mandated to get the COVID-19 test? My understanding is they're just being asked and I'm wondering why it's not a mandate?

Mayor: We want to respect the members of the unions here that are our educators. We've been working with the unions to figure out the best approach to testing. So far I'd say the discussions have led to a simple model that says it is available for all educators and all staff for free. And that we are strongly encouraging them all to take that up and that we want to do that on a regular basis going forward. But we're continuing those discussions to figure out the right way to actually put together the plan. One thing I can say for certain, any and all testing that our educators need, we'll have it available for free. Go ahead, Richard.

Chancellor Carranza: No more to add, sir. That's exactly where we are.

Mayor: Okay. So, as we wrap up today, look, I just want to say, first of all, again, a thank you to all New Yorkers. As we start another week, we start with amazing facts on the ground of how far this city has come back from the coronavirus. And every one of you, it's just those simple things. Every time you practice social distancing, every time you're putting on the hand sanitizer, every time you're wearing a face covering, it's working. Let's stick with it and let's see it -- every one of those small acts as a step toward our future. Really is amazing. It's almost unfathomable, but it's true how every single little small thing that every single one of eight million people has done day after day after day has added up to this result that we're now one of the safest places in America when it comes to fighting the coronavirus. And that should allow us to focus now more and more on our future. Because we are proving it can be done. And we are proving that we'll be able to move forward in the city. And that reminds me again, of how we have to focus on our kids. They are truly our future. They've been through so much. Now is the time to start giving them back what they need. The education, the love, the support, the mentorship that can only happen in a public school building. So, I want us to be about our hope, not our fear, our belief in our kids, our belief in our future, and recognize that the things we're doing really, really are moving us forward every day. And, in that spirit, we're going to prevail. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-18 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Something all New Yorkers should be proud of – people all around this country, all around this world are looking at New York City right now. And New York City is regarded as a major success story in the fight against the coronavirus. We were down for the count, we were the epicenter, and we have come back in a remarkable fashion because of you. I want to always be clear. The credit goes to New Yorkers. It goes to every single one of you who did the hard work of fighting back this disease. And we have been, throughout, guided by data, guided by science. We've done this the right way because we actually paid attention to the facts. We've talked to you about the facts and you listened and you acted. So, this is what we need to keep doing. We need to be vigilant. We need to be focused on continuing this fight until it's done.

Now, what I want to talk about today is a new phase that we're announcing, in the way we're going to provide you with the information to keep fighting this fight, to give you the best, most accurate information about what's happening, and to do it in a way that helps you recognize what you have to do because that's what's been the key ingredient. Now, the success we've had is absolutely connected to the level of testing that we've achieved. And it's been hard work. And it's often been lonely work for New York City because we haven't gotten the support we needed from the federal government. But New Yorkers have been getting tested and we want to double down on that because it's been crucial to our success. So, we need everyone to go get tested and we are today doing a special effort, a special outreach effort, a special blitz – Get Tested Tuesday. Everyone who has not yet got tested, especially who has not been tested at all, please get tested. If you haven't been tested in a long time, it's a good time to get tested. We have testing locations available at, check this out, over 200 sites across the five boroughs. There are lots and lots of options. Every single one of them will give you that test for free. It is easy. It is safe. So, we want to get this word out in every way we can. I'll be out there flyering today to let people know how important it is, to engage my fellow New Yorkers. But today, Get Tested Tuesday, a great day, if you haven't done so, to go out there and get that test.

Now, we, obviously, are focused every hour, every day on keeping the infection level low in New York City. That's what's been working for us and New Yorkers are doing great, but we have a real concern about travel. We have a concern about people coming in from outside, from the states and the areas that have been most deeply affected. We have a concern about New Yorkers going to those places and then coming home. So, look, let's start at the beginning. We've come so far and we need to, once and for all, defeat this disease. I'm going to urge all New Yorkers at this point to avoid travel to any of the states that are having a particularly bad problem with the coronavirus. Now, again, I understand for some people there's an emergency situation, a family crisis, or something they have to do for business, and they don’t have a choice, but I just want to urge people, if you have a choice, go to a place – if you're going to travel, go to a place that is not on the New York State list of states that are experiencing a profound coronavirus problem. If you have a choice in travel, don't go where the problem is for your own safety, for your family’s safety, for all New Yorkers’ safety because, of course, if you go there, there's a chance you bring that disease back. Now, if you do go, take the law seriously. You have to quarantine upon your return. So, we're focused on New Yorkers who travel and come back and we're obviously focused on folks who come in from outside New York City for whatever reason, that everyone has to focus on the mandatory 14-day quarantine.

Now the Sheriff's Office, as a lot of you know, has been doing extraordinary work to address this law, to make sure people know it is their obligation, been out there at checkpoints around the city, reminding people that it is the law to fill out that questionnaire about their travel, to give us a way to contact them and then to comply with the quarantine. And I want to remind everyone that failure to comply with the quarantine is a Class-B misdemeanor. It's serious stuff, but clearly, it's been talked about a lot in recent days. A lot of people haven't gotten the message. A lot of people don't necessarily take it as seriously as they need to. So, we're going another step today. Today I'll be signing an executive order and that will require hotels and short term rentals to have travelers from the restricted states fill out these forms before giving them access to their room. So, I want to be very clear about this – under this executive order that I'm about to sign any hotel, any short term rental must get that form from the traveler complete with the contact information and if they don't have that form from the traveler, they should not give them access to their room. Period. This is going to be now a rule here in New York City, because we have to get serious about the fact that there's a real danger here. We have to confront it. We have the right tool to confront it, which is the quarantine, but now people have to take that seriously. So, this executive order would be another step to make clear to everyone how serious it is. And there are real consequences for those who don't comply.

[Mayor de Blasio signs executive order]

Okay. Now, the executive order will add another tool to our arsenal, the ways we are going about making this very clear to folks. And, again, this is going to be part of a series of stepped up actions to make clear just how serious this quarantine is. And you're going to see the sheriff and his team out there a lot around New York City. They're doing an extraordinary job. Here to tell you what else we'll be doing to make sure that people quarantine appropriately, Sheriff Joe Fucito.

New York City Sheriff Joseph Fucito: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to make a very brief statement. Keeping New York infection rates low is one of the most critical public safety and health initiatives facing the city, and we must continue to do our part, to keep each other safe. For New Yorkers, I offer simple advice, avoid traveling to areas with high rates of coronavirus and if travel is necessary, comply with the quarantine requirements. For travelers to New York City, the new executive order is designed to safeguard the health of all residents. The Sheriff's Office in coordination with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene wants to have a measured response that gives visitors all the convenience to complete the state travelers forms and comply with the quarantine and all the authority of law to ensure it's obeyed. Failure to comply with the Mayor's emergency order is a Class-B misdemeanor and noncompliance with completing the form or following the quarantine mandate is a crime. In addition to criminal penalties and monetary fines, you may be subject to civil commitment until you comply with these important provisions of law. For travelers, this is a threshold moment. What you do and how you act can save someone's life. So, please take a moment and put a stranger's needs before your own desires. Thank you for your anticipated cooperation and please be governed accordingly. Now, the Mayor has asked me to describe a little bit of what our enforcement actions will consist of. We are going to continue to have checkpoints throughout different entry points into New York City. And we're also going to investigate large gatherings that are illegal even before COVID-19 hit New York City. It is important to note that we must work together to stop the coronavirus and that means following social distancing mandates. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Sheriff. Again, thank you to you and your team. The work you're doing literally is life saving and we're so appreciative for it. Now, everyone, again, what's important is to use the laws, use these rules to fight back this disease, keep the infection rate low. That’s what's going to save lives, that's what's going to allow us to bring back New York City, to give people back their livelihoods. It all connects. So, we are doing all this to get us to a better place. What we're absolutely certain of is that the information we share with the public has been crucial. The public, in this case, has been so deeply desirous of more and more information, more clarity. People all over New York City want to know what's going on, they want transparency, they want clarity. It's helping them make the right decisions. So, one of the things that we've been focused on throughout this crisis is how to present the best possible information to all New Yorkers.

Starting today, we're going to provide a bigger timeframe for the information we provide. We're going to show the last four weeks of data together. It'll be broken out into categories that make it a lot clearer what's going on and where we stand in the battle against the coronavirus. Now, right now, New York City makes more data available in a more transparent fashion than any city in America. And I think that is directly related to the success we've had. The fact that people take that information and they act on it. So, we will continue to improve it and update it. And one of the areas we've looked at is our indicators. Now, basically from the beginning of this crisis, we've used more or less the same type of indicators. But as we've looked at the situation, we recognize that there is a changing reality. Some of the thresholds we have set in the past, need to be tightened up because we need to go farther. It's great that we fought back the coronavirus this far, but we're not done. We want to push it down even more. So, we're going to be changing some of our approach to the indicators to make clear what we need in this moment and to give you the most accurate information. Here to tell you about the changes, our Health Commissioner, Dave Chokshi.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. From the beginning, core components of our response have been transparency and data. We set indicators that we have watched like hawks. However, thanks to what New Yorkers have done the context has changed. With lower transmission we need more precise indicators that allow us to zero in on how COVID is spreading. So, we will be making changes to the data on the Health Department's website starting today. First, we will keep hospital admissions for COVID-like illness on our dashboard as a general marker of disease activity. But we will add the percent of patients with COVID-like illness who actually test positive to make this indicator more precise. As we head into flu season, we need to be able to distinguish flu patients who often have COVID-like symptoms from COVID patients to have an accurate read of what is happening in our communities. Precision is the name of the game. And so, we will also change reporting of the percent of COVID tests that are positive to include two decimal places. For example, you'll see 1.80 percent rather than two percent. And we'll lower the threshold for positive test results from 15 percent to five percent. The higher threshold was an appropriate benchmark for reopening as we transitioned to lower levels of disease transmission. The new lower milestone will alert us earlier if we need to be concerned. We will also add an indicator on new daily cases reported in the city. We'll use a seven-day average to smooth out day to day fluctuations in this new indicator. Along with the percent positive results, this will give us a more complete view of COVID circulating in our city. We want to see the absolute number of new cases remain as low as possible. Other indicators do not have the utility that they once had, like the Health + Hospitals ICU capacity.

I do want to take a moment to emphasize how much removing this indicator means to me. Having served at H + H during the peak, I remember how tested our ICU capacity was. It's a marker of our progress that we're able to change out this indicator. The current context is also informing updates to our website. To date, we have shared aggregate numbers that span the duration of the pandemic, which we will continue to do, but we recognize that there's interest in knowing what is happening in the more recent past, both at the city, as well as the neighborhood level. So, we will present case and fatality numbers and rates for the most recent four-week period. Our website will also soon feature antibody test results by ZIP code, with the capacity to organize the data by age, borough, neighborhood, poverty, and sex. We will be the first jurisdiction in the nation to present our antibody data this way. While there is still much to learn about the science of COVID-19 antibody testing, it is an important element to consider when understanding the epidemiology of COVID.

Finally, I just want to recognize the staff at the Health Department who work incredibly hard to make this data available to New Yorkers. Sound data is the lifeblood of our response and it can save lives. So, thanks to my staff and thank you to all of you for getting this information to New Yorkers.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dave. And Dave, to you and your whole team, thank you. This is really good work and I know work you've put yourself into immediately to figure out what is the best way to give information to all New Yorkers and the best way to present our reality as it continues to evolve. And thank God it has been evolving in a good direction because everyone's hard work. So, here are our newest indicators.

Indicator one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – so, again, the threshold remains 200 patients, today's report only 44 patients. That's great. And now we'll be talking every day about the actual percent testing positive for COVID-19. That is 13.3 percent. So, again, folks come into the hospital, present symptoms, might be COVID, we're using the overall number of the people who present symptoms, but then we're also giving you the updated number once the tests are provided to see what we came up with. So, 13 percent actually testing positive for COVID-19 within that group.

Okay. A new metric now, number two, new reported cases over a seven-day average. Okay, so this is brand new. We're setting a threshold here of 550 cases [inaudible] over time, of course, daily counts of how many new cases of people testing positive for COVID-19. This one works simply, we take seven days of data and divide by seven, come up with a daily average and report the most recent daily average. So, threshold of 550, today's report 328 cases.

And then finally, percentage of people tested positive citywide for COVID-19, new threshold, five percent. So, again, we've gone from 15 percent down to a much more stringent five percent. We think this is now the right threshold for our current condition, where we want to keep beating this disease back even more. Happy to say today's report, 1.56 percent. So, these new indicators I think will give us a really good clear picture. And today that picture is a very positive one thanks to all of you. Okay. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by
Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Sheriff Joe Fucito, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Andrew Siff from WNBC.

Question: Hi, everyone. Nice to be back in the lineup today. Thank you very much for calling on me. My first question is about what you just talked about and the new cases. I'm wondering, has Test and Trace connected any coronavirus case whatsoever to an out-of-town visitor in the last couple of weeks. Since you put in the checkpoints, since people have been filling out forms at the airport, is there even a single solitary case that has been traced to an out of town visitor?

Mayor: So, appreciate the question, Andrew. The reality with the checkpoints is obviously very new. I want to emphasize that. The work we're doing to reach travelers has been ramping up day by day, but, Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Varma might have the facts in front of them. If not, we'll get it to you today, for sure. But I can assure you, making sure that we are vigilant about people coming in from the states where unfortunately this disease is raging I think both doctors will affirm to you how crucial a strategy that is. So, Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi – why don’t you start, Jay, and we’ll go to Dave.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Sure. Thank you very much for the question. I think we'll have to look into your specific question about whether a person who was identified immediately from quarantine has become a case. But just to give you a frame of reference, over the past month, about 15 to 20 percent of all of the cases in New York City have occurred in people who recently traveled to somewhere outside of New York City. So, we – that is one of the reasons the Mayor has been so forceful in his approach to making sure that we identify people who've traveled and that we monitor them to make sure they don't develop illness and spread it here in New York.

Mayor: Dave?

Commissioner Chokshi: I agree with that. Nothing to add, sir.

Mayor: Okay, great. Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: Second question has to do with schools. You have been talking about how there's a lot of time to resolve the questions that principals, teachers, and parents have, but, with each passing day, there's less than a lot of time until the scheduled first day of school. As things stand today, how would you assess the likelihood of in-person classes taking place on September 10th, especially in light of what you're seeing in other places, whether it's elementary and high schools in other States, or even the university of North Carolina, which resumed in-person classes and then had to shut down after a quick spike?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question. It's an important question, Andrew. First of all, I know that people are going to be concerned when they watch other states, but please be careful about apples and oranges here. A lot of the stories we're getting are from states that have not controlled the disease. Many of them – not all of them, but many of them did something very unwise, ignored the science, ignored the data, opened very quickly, and, unfortunately, a lot of people are suffering as a result. So, I just want to emphasize, if you're talking about schools and places where the coronavirus is raging, unfortunately don't be surprised if you see a bad result. We, again, are one of the strongest places in the country right now when it comes to fighting the coronavirus. We have one of the lowest rates of infection anywhere in America. We are far, far below any standard set internationally, nationally for the level of infection you would need to get below to be able to open schools – you heard it today, 1.5 percent. So, by that measure, we do not compare in the least to what's happening in other places. Second, we're throwing in the kitchen sink here, Andrew, to keep the schools safe. I cannot even give you the whole list because it's so long of all the measures being taken to make sure schools are safe and clean and healthy – one measure layered on top of another, on top of another. So, when you say each day, we're getting closer – well, that's a true statement, but I'll tell you what's happened the last few days. We guaranteed there'd be a nurse in every public school building – that wasn't true in the past, it will be true now. We have a hotline now, it'll be available to all principals, for rapid resupply. We've described the amount of supplies are being laid in before the first day of school. We have the electrostatic cleaning, we've never had that before – that's going to be in every school. There's a lot of pieces that have been put in place in just last few days. We also have the facts about how many teachers are going to be ready, how many students are going to be ready – that's information just from the last week or so. So, a lot is coming together. Everything's focused on September 10th and there's time to resolve a lot of outstanding questions. So, I'm very actually impressed by all the work that's been done by our educators, by the folks at Department of Education, working with the unions, even when there's disagreements, people have been working together to solve problems and we'll keep doing that right up to opening day.

Moderator: Next up we have Peter Haskell from WCBS radio.

Question: Hi, Mayor. This is Marla Diamond, actually from WCBS. Yesterday you promised that there would be ample PPE, sanitation, and ventilation and all City schools, but we're hearing apprehensive parents and educators saying they don't trust the DOE’s ability to handle in-person learning. And now, more families are often out of blended learning. What can you say to those who have lost confidence, the DOE to handle schools reopening?

Mayor: Well, first of all, Marla, I talk about what we're hearing from parents overall and they're being very, very clear. We did a survey of 400,000 parents – I mean, that's an astounding number of parents and students, in fact. You know, we reached out to all DOE families, got 400,000 responses, 75 percent said they wanted in-person learning to be a part of their child's experience. We gave parents the opportunity to opt out, the numbers are very similar to what the survey says. I think what's clear here is the vast majority of parents are speaking loudly and clearly – they know their child will get a lot more from in-person learning, even if it's a few days a week. They want it to be safe. So, Marla, here's my message to parents – I'm a parent myself, I'm watching these preparations like a hawk. I would send my kids without hesitation to a New York City public school, because I see so many measures in place. Social distancing measures – I was out in the classroom in Far Rockaway, a classroom with only 10 desks in it. Imagine what it will mean that you're having 10 kids to a classroom, for example; social distance at all times; everyone, adult and child, with a face covering; cleaning constantly, including the electrostatic cleaning. There are so many measures place – kids are not going to the cafeteria for lunch, they're eating at their desk. There are so many measures here that are being taken. So, my message would be the PPE’s – of course, there'll be the PPE’s. We used to – in March, April, we had a horrible challenge with PPE’s. We don't anymore. Thank God we're getting a good supply now. Any teacher, any staff member, whatever they need, they'll get with PPE’s. There'll be plenty available for each school. We want kids to come to school already wearing a face covering. We want kids wearing a face covering wherever they go in school, out of school, but any kid who needs one will get one upon arrival at school. So, I think that's a lot of measures that are being taken, and, Marla, again against the backdrop of a city that has gotten progressively safer, thank God. Go ahead.

Question: Mayor, where will the City get the money to keep schools well stocked with PPE and cleaning supplies past the start of the school year? Where do you – how can you assure that they'll get this given that the City is in a fiscal crisis and you're talking about thousands of layoffs?

Mayor: Marla, first of all, health and safety first. So, anything related to the health and safety of our children and families is going to go to the front of the line in terms of how we invest. Second, look, we need action to avert a host of challenges in this city. Looks like the stimulus is dead right now, and I'm appalled that it's dead, but I'm going to still hold out hope that at some point Washington will get its act together. Albany – longterm borrowing, that immediately would avert layoffs and keep us stable so we can keep doing this work. So, I'm going to keep focused on where we get the help and relief so we can move forward. In the meantime, the health and safety of our kids and our families – literally job-one.

Moderator: Next up, we have Marcia from WCBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Marcia. How are you?

Question: So, I'd like to talk to you about restaurants. So, 25-to-27,000 restaurants in New York City who are afraid that come the fall, when it gets cold, they're not going to be able to stay open. They're not going to be able to make money. Many are afraid that they're going to fail. There's a recent survey by the New York City Hospitality Alliance that said that 83 percent of these restaurants couldn't pay their rent in July. I wonder if you have a plan for indoor dining that will allow them to stay open, if you've talked to Governor Cuomo about allowing them to reopen, or are you afraid that come the cold months we're going to have more business failure, which will adversely affect the City's economy?

Mayor: Well, Marcia, it's a huge concern. There's no question. Now, look, again, it all starts with health and safety. It starts with keeping the infection rate low. And what we've seen around the world – and I'm going to have Dr. Varma jump in in a moment, because he's really studied this. Unfortunately, bars, indoor restaurants, nightlife have been a huge nexus for the coronavirus, particularly resurgences of the coronavirus. So, I'm very cautious on this point. I know the Governor's very cautious on this point. There's been a lot of communication between City and State. We're both going to be very, very careful about any kind of indoor dining. Right now, I'm going to look at the glass half full outdoor dining has helped almost 10,000 restaurants to bring in a whole lot more revenue. Takeout and delivery has, you know, been a part of what restaurants could do from the very beginning of this crisis, that will continue no matter what. And the most important thing, Marcia, is to get to the point where we have a vaccine and then we can really come back. But we're going to be very, very careful. Dr. Varma, why don't you explain some of our caution here?

Senior Advisor Varma: Thank you for the question. I think as the Mayor said, this is a really difficult choice. We, all of us who are New Yorkers love the dining and restaurant scene here in New York City. But we also value our safety. And when you look at the data really from across the world, there is no doubt, one very common setting in which infections occur – and not just individual infections, but what we call super spreading events where one person can transmit to five, 10, 15, or 20 people – and those are settings where there was indoor dining and drinking. And the reasons for that are clear, we know that any place that is indoors is riskier than any place outdoors and we know that anywhere where you can't wear face protection is riskier than a place where you can. And, of course, when people are eating and drinking, they can't wear that type of facial protection. We just saw just in the past 24 hours, that Hong Kong, for example, is experiencing its third wave. And what was their first step that they took? It's to limit indoor dining and restaurants. So, we are really watching what's going on around the world. And as Commissioner Chokshi and the Mayor had said earlier on, we're using that data to guide us. So, that's really what we need to do to maintain the stability of case counts that we have right now.

Mayor: Go ahead, Marcia.

Question: Mr. Mayor, my second question has to do with the opening of gyms. I know the Governor said that gyms could reopen and that they could reopen as early as next week or, you know, September 2nd, but you have said you simply don't have the inspectors to do it. What is your plan for allowing gyms to reopen? And when do you expect to have enough inspectors so that you can inspect the places and guarantee that they're safe?

Mayor: Marcia, that's a great question. This is all about health and safety first. We will make the decision, because one thing that the Governor's executive order – we're waiting to see, of course, the final wording, but what was put out in the press release certainly makes clear local discretion in a lot of this. So, based on the reality in New York City, we won't start before September 2nd and we're going to move those inspections as quickly as we can, but I want to be real clear the priority, especially given the proximity of September 2nd to September 10th – priority is going to be on the inspections we need to do for childcare centers in schools. So, we're going to work through how to balance that, but there's no question in my mind, most important thing we can do with our health inspectors is focused on childcare centers in schools.

Moderator: Next up, we have Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I hope you're doing better than your Red Sox.

Mayor: Reuvain, we've been trying to work together – you had to do that to me, didn't you?

Question: Sorry. Sorry. I'd like to follow up on the recent public discussion on whether government should be looking to accommodate wealthy New Yorkers and keep them here. It's particularly timely now, not only caused the City's financial straits, but those who left in March are reaching the 183-day mark where they may be able to say that they're taking residency elsewhere. So, you've opposed the idea of trying to appease the wealthy and your press secretary recently mocked the New York Times article on the subject tweeting, “kick rocks, billionaires.” So, my question is, as someone who believes in heavily tax in the wealthy and redistributing their money to poor people, won't help those poor people if the wealthy New Yorkers are kept here and pay their taxes here rather than to another city and state?

Mayor: Of course, and a reality here is I think a lot of folks who have done really well want to be in New York City. There's a lot of folks who are wealthy and are New Yorkers and are proud of New York City and want to be in New York City. There's a lot of people that came here from all around the world and want to be here. I think that's going to continue no matter what. We've also, as I said, a few days ago, a lot of people in recent years, New Yorkers became wealthy because the economy was so strong. So, I think what you're going to see is a natural reality that lots of people continue to want to be here, but we cannot create a reality – here's what really worries me – where the discussion is, you know, let's be so careful never to say something about the disparities in our society, or income inequality, or the fact that wealthy are not paying their fair share in taxes – let's not mention that out loud because it might spook them, it might offend them, and then they'll move someplace else. That's no way to go about addressing the challenges we face. I think, in fact, and you've seen it in a lot of the corporate sector in recent years, more and more, very successful people are recognizing that the disparities in our society are unsustainable – and that's before the coronavirus, which made those disparities even sharper. So, in fact, I think there are a lot of wealthy people who recognize that if we continue on the path we've been on, it's not going to work. But the notion that we can't talk out loud about the disparities and the fact that, in fact, the wealthy are not paying their fair share in taxes and they should be paying their fair share in taxes now more than ever, we've got to be able have that conversation. And I think they can handle that and they'll make the decisions about where to live based on where's the best place to live, and this is still the greatest city in the world. I have no question about that. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up we have Jillian from WBAI.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Jillian. How are you?

Question: I'm well, thank you. So many questions, so little time. I wanted to follow up on something that I asked about a few weeks ago. The State announced it would be expanding a pilot program to test wastewater for COVID, as an “early warning system.” As I noted last time I asked, experts say the current indicators are lagging and the City's especially well positioned to use this technology because of our infrastructure of the 14 treatment centers and where they're located. And I understand we've already been testing for other bacterial and viral outbreaks for some time. I'd like to hear from Dr. Chokshi, because I felt like Dr. Varma – sorry, was rather dismissive of my question. So, to what extent is the City undertaking this real time level of testing and when will the public have access to the data?

Mayor: So, I’m just going to jump in before Dr. Chokshi. I have a really good memory, Jillian, I do not believe in the least Dr. Varma was dismissive of your question. I thought he actually answered your question, I remember when you asked it. So, Dr. Choksi, why don't you start and then, Dr. Varma, just like in a debate, if someone's name is invoked, they get their opportunity for rebuttal. We'll get Dr. Varma as well. Go ahead.

Commissioner Chokshi: Sure. And thank you for the good question. I think it highlights what is the theme from this morning, which is we have to look at multiple sources of data for as many early warning signals as possible. That's why we've changed some of our thresholds. We've added degrees of precision to all of the indicators, you know, that we're already following. But to your point about wastewater epidemiology specifically, it is something that the Health Department is actively looking at. We have a group of environmental health experts who do sampling of water, of air, of many other parts of our environment to figure out the different signals that we have, not just for COVID-19, but for other diseases as well. There are some technical challenges, specifically with using wastewater for COVID-19. And so, we're in touch with the CDC and many others around the world who are trying to evolve those methods. So, it's something that we will add to our [inaudible] of indicators and early warning signals.

Mayor: Dr. Varma?

Senior Advisor Varma: No, I just want to emphasize it's not – the data that is being presented today by the Commissioner and the Mayor, the information that we have validated – it's not just information that comes in and we try to make a decision based on. Its information that we've looked at carefully to understand how we make critical decisions. I'm absolutely a believer in taking every possible data source that we have available to us and using it, but we should only use it to make decisions if we actually have real evidence of its effectiveness. And so if you go back and look at the studies that have been done on wastewater, whether it's for polio eradication or for, now for COVID, they have to correlate what happened in the past with what's going to happen in the future. And you have to make decisions based on that and see how they work. And that's really one of the challenges that we have. These are all great studies that have looked back in time, but they haven't actually shown a direction in changing your policy based on that. So it's just a long way of saying that we're absolutely looking at this and working on this as the Commissioner has said. But before we introduce it into real time decision making, we have to trust the information is telling us what we know it's telling us.

Mayor: Go ahead Jillian.

Question: Thanks. A lot of questions – yeah. Can you hear me? Okay. I'm getting a lot of questions from listeners, friends, even my family about the glut of apartments that are now on the market. I think they're estimating about 13,000, the highest number in 14 years. And with construction resuming, the glut will inevitably grow. The majority of both the existing and future units are luxury or market rate, but the Emergency Tenant Protection Act doesn't really distinguish when it's invoked between, you know, rent levels. So the median household rent for the million stabilized apartments is about $30,000 a year and about 60 percent of section eight units are stabilized. Can you give any details if you have a contingency plan in case this happens and the vacancy rate is nullified? And what's going to happen to the 20,000 plus controlled apartments because they are seniors living on fixed incomes mostly, and they're controlled by the State auspices?

Mayor: It's a very important question, Jillian. I think I can say this with assurance, especially given the Legislature we now have in Albany. And I worked long and hard with countless others to ensure that we finally had a Democratic State Senate and we've got two leaders in Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Carl Heastie in Albany who are both clearly progressive in fighting for the needs of tenants. So it's literally inconceivable to me that there would be any diminution of rent stabilization or rent control. I think it's a fair question to say, could we be in an unprecedented situation? I think that's a very fair question. I thought what you were going to say is with all of these vacancies occurring are rent levels in the market, going to start to go down. I do think rent levels are going to start to go down. I think you're seeing evidence of it already. But it's a fair question, could it be a legal trigger? Even if that is possible, I don't have a doubt in my mind that the Legislature will immediately create continuity with our current approach to rent stabilization and rent control. We absolutely need that in New York City. If there was any question about that, I, and many others would be in Albany fighting for it immediately. But I'm quite confident they will help us continue to protect tenants.

Moderator: Next up we have Debralee from Manhattan Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone.

Mayor: Good morning, how are you doing?

Question: I'm well, thanks. And wishing you all well as well. I wanted to follow up on some of the earlier conversations and expand the conversation to parents who have had their children abroad, because of concerns with COVID over the summer, but perhaps because they were simply following tradition and having their children visit with family members outside of the country. And I'm specifically thinking about the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and other countries that have in fact allowed for families to visit. And they are now preparing for their children to return. In other years they perhaps have waited until just before school started to have the children return to expand on summer plans and have them enjoy time there and certainly provide for childcare. What guidance is the City providing to these families and how much of an outreach is the City planning, if it hasn't already to really bring home the messaging on quarantine and also again on specific health guidelines for these children who have been away?

Mayor: That's a great question. And look, Debralee, you're – you know, you understand life in New York City and our neighborhoods. This is a big part of it. And it's something I think a lot of New Yorkers live and experience, other New Yorkers are not aware of. It's true in my own family, going back a generation that my mom used to go some summers to Southern Italy to be with her family there. Lots of young people, certainly a lot of our communities have the opportunity to send their kids to their grandparents, for example, for the summer. And they do it. And this is the kind of thing you're absolutely right, we need to plan around. So I'm going to turn to Dr. Chokshi who, as a parent himself thinks about this. And as the husband of an educator thinks about this. But I think it's an important point, if a child is coming back from a place where there is a coronavirus problem, it's really no different than someone coming back from one of the states in this country where there's a coronavirus problem, and there needs to be precautions taken. Go ahead, Doctor.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. That's exactly right. And I think that the key point is the one that you just made. Whether someone is coming back from Texas or the Dominican Republic if it is a place with a higher level of coronavirus transmission, then it's very important given the focus on health and safety, given the rigorous approach that we're trying to take to protect our educators, as well as our students, that those returning students and family members, follow the quarantine. And that's part of the reason that we have a built in flexibility to the school reopening plan as well, to allow for people to, for some period of time or for a longer period of time, stay at home and receive instruction and start the school year in that way.

Mayor: Go ahead, Debralee.

Question: And this is also something that is perhaps germane to some neighborhoods more than others. This speaks to many of the restaurants in the area, particularly those that are availing themselves of the newly opened outdoor spaces. I have not seen a presentation specifically directed at this, and if I need to be redirected, please, please let me know. But hookah is something that is pretty prevalent in a number of the restaurants that again are concentrated in the Bronx and Northern Manhattan. What are the specific guidelines that are being offered? And if folks need to find out more, how are they being directed? Because I found that a lot of restaurant owners are simply providing these services in the same manner that they did before without specific instruction in this new time and space. And that seems to be for other residents quite a source of concern.

Mayor: So Debralee, just to clarify the question – you're saying because of the health concerns of someone, of people like sharing a hookah pipe or something like that?

Question: Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure that that's something that has been – when we talk about restaurant spaces, if that specific service that's available in restaurants and bars has been something that's been delineated by the Health Department as, are there specific differences in how people should be using hookah, if at all? I just, that particular service, other than just drinking and eating, it's something that happens in many restaurants and people may not necessarily know that there perhaps should be a directive around it? Or you know, a specific guideline? I'm not sure that people know whether there should be any differences in how it's used or how they avail themselves of hookah. And it obviously is something that is shared at a table with patrons.

Mayor: Okay. So, I'm going to ask the doctors, Dr. Chokshi or Dr. Varma, either one of you have some guidance on this?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. This is something that we are actively looking at with respect to not just hookah, but use of tobacco products, you know, outdoors. Whether it's e-cigarettes, cigarettes, or hookah and other water pipes. They're really two health risks that we have to consider very seriously. The first is, as you pointed out in your question, the risk of coronavirus transmission, if a pipe is being shared, if another tobacco product is being shared. And the second is the direct effects of tobacco themselves, both for the person who may be using it as well as others in the vicinity who are being exposed. So I think for now, what I would say is that we're actively looking at it and my message to New Yorkers would be to make sure that we focus on being cautious, particularly around the risk of coronavirus transmission and the direct effects of tobacco.

Mayor: Dr. Varma. Anything to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: Nope, nothing else for me.

Mayor: Great. Go ahead.

Moderator: For our last two, we'll start with Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning all. How are you doing Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: I’m doing well Juliet. How about you?

Question: I'm fine. Thank you. So my question, regarding how you count coronavirus patients -- are they strictly just Health + Hospitals numbers? And if so, how do you quantify patients that are in the private hospital systems?

Mayor: No, no, it's everybody and Dr. Chokshi, do you want to speak to that?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. The simple answer is it's broader than Health + Hospitals. It's all hospitals in New York City.

Question: Okay. Okay, good. I wasn't sure of that. And also, I did want to ask the Sheriff, he was mentioning some of the penalties regarding not filling out the quarantine form? He mentioned something about civil commitment. What is that?

Sheriff Fucito: That's a practice that's been around for over a hundred years, that where the court can compel you to be quarantined. So if someone is so egregious in disobeying the Department of Health's recommendations, by court order, they can be committed to a hospital until the quarantine is complete.

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead.

Moderator: And for our last question, we'll go to Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing Red Sox aside? Yankees are doing well, Red Sox are doing poorly.

Mayor: Are you adding – you're adding salt to the wound. This is not our year. Not our year, I've come to that conclusion.

Question: Adding salt to the wounds. No question about that. Let me ask you a question about data, first of all, because the antibody zip code equation, if you will, is really a lagging indicator. Why can't we see test results per zip code? Why can't we know the infection rate as it's happening more or less per zip code, so that we would know when we've got an outbreak in a local area such as Sunset Park?

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi.

Commissioner Chokshi: Thanks for the very good question. And as part of the updates to the website that we've described exactly what you're asking for will be a part of the information that's shared. So, case rates broken down by borough, as well as zip code, as well as testing rates. And so, all of those are broken down geographically. And another part of the update is to offer more recent data, the most recent four weeks that we have also broken down in, in that geographic manner.

Mayor: Okay, everybody, look, I just want to close out with this simple idea, the message today and so much of what we've talked about is about science and it's about data. And you know, there's a lot to like about science and there's a lot to like about data. And there are some voices in this country trying to deny the power of science and data, but here in this city, we honor it. We recognize that the facts have actually set us free. The facts have been what has allowed us to make the right choices. So, there's a famous phrase – knowledge is power. New Yorkers have knowledge of what's going on. And they act on that knowledge. We make it a point to keep letting people know exactly what we're seeing. Put out that information constantly to empower people to do the right thing, to protect themselves, their families and all New Yorkers. And then New Yorkers do their job and they do it so well following through. So, we're going to continue to give you the very latest information so you can continue to do the great work you're doing and continue to make this city one of the envies of the nation as we beat back this disease. Thanks, everybody.

2020-08-19 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. New Yorkers have been nothing short of heroic in fighting back against the coronavirus. In fact, when you think about what you have done in the last few months, people all over this country look at and they honestly are amazed, and I think it is a statement on the ability of this city, the ability of the people, the city to do extraordinary things. Now we have so many challenges that this crisis has brought forward, but that same spirit of doing what others may see as impossible or very, very challenging, we New Yorkers take on challenges all the time and we overcome them. So I want to talk to you today about the challenge we're seeing and it's been made so stark by the coronavirus. The challenge of disparity, the challenge of income inequality, it has come up so sharply in the course of these last few months, but it's something we've been grappling with for a long time, and this needs to be a moment when we resolve to make more fundamental changes. The coronavirus itself and the economic crisis that's come with, it has hit so hard in communities of color. It's hit immigrants so hard. It's hit small businesses so hard. We have so much work to do to create something better and fairer, and that's what we're going to do. We are committed to a just and fair recovery.

I need to give you an update about the situation, a couple of neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and this goes back to everything that we are doing with the Test and Trace Corps, everything we're doing when we identify a problem, how we address it rapidly, another thing that New York City is doing on a level unlike any other city in America, we now have the capacity through Test and Trace, when we see a problem to address it fast and with a lot of energy, a lot of personnel, a lot of impact. So last week I alerted everyone to the situation in Sunset Park. I was out in Sunset Park, Brooklyn yesterday [inaudible] Tuesday, and I was out there with a lot of volunteers. Some of whom you see here reaching out to people, telling them how important it is to get tested. And this outreach effort has been going on for a while, but intensely over the last week. Now what the Health Department saw in the last week or more was an uptick in the number of COVID-19 cases. The outreach effort meant to get ahead of that, to instantly ensure that more and more people got tested, that we found where there were specific problems and address them, obviously, by making sure people safely separated and the situation was contained. The increased testing gave us more information, more data to work with, more contacts to follow up on.

What we know so far, thank God, limited community spread and not a cluster situation in a Sunset Park, and we'll talk more about that – I also want to mention a situation in Borough Park, Brooklyn, that we're focused on as well, because we've seen an uptick in just in the last few days and particularly a group of 16 cases that came out recently that we see as an early warning sign. Again, we want to be always acting out of an abundance of caution, and we saw this in the Sunset Park situation by assuming there might be a problem getting in there fast with a lot of energy, a lot of personnel, it makes a lot of difference. So we're taking the same approach with Borough Park. Some of these 16 cases are linked to a recent wedding, a large wedding, in fact in the community. So, we are working immediately to galvanize community leaders, to work with Test and Trace Corps, had a good call last night with a group of community leaders from Borough Park. They certainly understand the urgency of situation. We want to get the message out that people need to be tested, that people need to wear face coverings, that we need to avoid those large gatherings that can cause a bigger problem. We're also mobilizing a large response, mask distribution to houses of worship, engaging community organizations, whatever it's going to take, helping people understand that if they do test positive, they can safely separate and get a lot of support to do it. And anyone who's concerned that if they test positive, what's going to happen next, we want them to know that there'll be a lot of support for them to get through what really is in the end, a brief period of separation, and we're going to have community members and community organizations that are going to play a big part in that.

So, again, overall New York City is doing so well and you'll hear today's indicators are pretty extraordinary as an evidence of what all of you have achieved, but we've got to stay vigilant about the basics, the social distancing, the face coverings, obviously avoiding large gatherings. This is really important that we take seriously that reality because that will help us stop the spread of this disease. Now I want you to get an update on all of these kinds of outreach efforts because they're so crucial to our success and I want you to hear from the Chief Equity Officer of Test and Trace, she was with me in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, yesterday and did a great job engaging residents directly. I want introduce to you again, Annabel Palma.

Chief Equity Officer Annabel Palma, Test and Trace Corps: Thanks Mr. Mayor and I'm here to share that our massive efforts to connect to the Sunset Park community and to New Yorkers as a whole continues. We have knocked on over 9,000 doors, made live and robo-calls, we’ve handed out PPE, we have we have handed out flyers, connected to community residents, and we will continue to do all in our power to deliver the resources necessary to the Sunset Park community to fight against COVID-19. We've extended our rapid testing, deployed our mobile units, had success getting people tested in Sunset Park, and this has proven to be great progress between our point of care and mobile testing. We have tested over 6,500 New Yorkers to date with this effort, and over 1,700 New Yorkers are from Sunset Park. We started to see that effort pay off. Most recent data shows the percentage in positivity in the 11220 zip code stands today at 4.2 percent. This means our efforts are working. We are finding positive cases, monitoring them, and asking them and helping them to safely separate. Together we can prevent a second wave of COVID-19 in New York City.

This administration has a strong and committed responsibility to keep New Yorkers safe, but we cannot do it without you. We need your help. Please get tested. We have come far – too far to go through what we went through in the beginning of this pandemic, we owe it to our loved ones, we owe to our communities, we especially owe it to our first responders who were crucial in getting us through the most difficult times. And it seems that it was long ago that our hospitals were busting at the scenes with, with patients coming in with COVID-19, and I'm not trying to sound any alarms, as you heard the Mayor, we are doing great, but we need to continue to work together. It is up to us to make sure that we don't let our guards down. We need New Yorkers to continue to get testing. We, you know, we cannot stress enough the importance of face covering, of wearing a mask. This will continue to save lives. We know it's hot out there. We know it's uncomfortable, but again, it is so necessary to make sure we keep ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities protected. COVID-19 is still real and it's a real threat. We want to let Sunset Park know you've been doing a great job at coming to our sites are getting tested and we encourage you to continue to make sure to tell your loved ones, your neighbors, to where our mobile sites are, where our testing sites are, and for them to continue to get the testing.

[Chief Equity Officer Palma speaks in Spanish]

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Annabel and what I saw with Annabel directly and other members of the Test and Trace Team was really intensely engaging people and folks have a lot of questions and it was really important for people to hear, hey, testing is quick, it's easy, it's free. There was a wonderful testing tent right there in the middle of the park itself, in the middle of Sunset Park, and a great team out there, you know, right in the middle of the community where people normally go, they created a testing center there to make it easy for people, and we're going to be doing a lot more of that. So thank you to you and everyone at Test and Trace.

And now I'm going to do something we do every day, but it's not going to be like every day, because not only do we have the new indicators we talked about yesterday, but you're going to see something that is striking in terms of indicator number three, but let me go over them in order. First of all, number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 today's report 64 patients. But again, we're now telling you the number that have actually been confirmed positive for COVID in the most recent day of testing, that number is just 8.7 percent. That is very good.

Now, number two, the new second indicator, new reported the cases on a seven-day average basis, threshold of 550 cases, today's report 320. Number three, percentage of the people testing positive citywide for COVID-19. Again, we have moved the threshold now from 15 percent to five percent, as we continue to tighten up, we continue to fight back this disease. We now told you we're doing everything down to the decimal points so you can see more specifically what's happening with the testing. The number I'm showing you here today is the lowest number we have had since this crisis began. This is the lowest infection rate in New York City since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. Today's number is 0.24 percent. This is extraordinary. Now, we all know every day can vary. We all know there's no single perfect measure, but the fact that with expanded testing and more and more outreach all the time, you now see a number as low as 0.24 percent for the New York City infection rate. This is striking and this should be a clarion call to all of us to double down and go farther because the more we can do to beat back this virus, the more we can bring back this city. So, congratulations to all of you, because this is your achievement. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we turn to our colleagues in the media, please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Small Business Services Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Chief Equity Officer of the Test and Trace Corps Annabel Palma, and Senior Advisor. Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. A couple of questions. First of all, could you tell us a little more and maybe the health experts, a little more about the situation in Borough Park. I heard you mentioned 16 cases, but is there an overall number of cases, number of tests, positive rate that's gone up and there's been a theory out there that that neighborhood might have some herd immunity. So, does this kind of knock that down?

Mayor: I'll start as the layman and I'll turn to Dr. Varma. Look, again, I met with community leaders last night to talk about this. First of all, it's a great question, Erin – and I don't think we have any evidence of herd immunity anywhere in New York City. I think that is – we're nowhere near that point from what we know. And I understand that something has gotten around out there and, sort of, folk wisdom in many communities, but I want to note that we don't have proof of that, and we should just work out of an abundance of caution, not rest on that laurel, if you will. Second, the number of cases we've seen, you know, an uptick that's noticeable and there is a nexus to one particular event that we're looking at carefully and doing the disease detective work on through test and trace – that's what's causing the particular concern, an event that was larger than it should have been and one that we're following up on right now. And hopefully we'll find there was not a substantial spread, but this is why we do the test and trace work, to get ahead of something like this. Dr. Varma?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: So, I think it's important to understand that there's a difference between, sort of, immunity and what people, you know, what was commonly referred to as herd immunity. You know, immunity means that if you've been infected, you might be protected from infection, either partially or completely for some time, a few months, a few years. We're learning more and, you know, the latest information from CDC is that most people who have an infection are protected in some way for up to three months after that initial infection. The problem is, we don't know how much protection people have after that and whether that means they're fully protected or not. So, I think, you know, what we're seeing in the situation in the neighborhoods where we see higher infection rates is that, you know, everybody should still consider themselves potentially at risk of infection. It's just safest to plan that way. If we learn and discover in the future that people with a prior infection are fully protected for a lifetime, that would be wonderful, but we really need to plan around what we consider to be the most credible, you know, scenario right now, which is that people who have been recently infected are probably very likely protected for up to three months. But anything beyond that time, we just simply don't know.

Mayor: Jay, speak to the larger question of herd immunity in the context of New York City or any of our neighborhoods, because I know we've all talked about this quite a bit. Could you sort of give the definitive answer on whether herd immunity could exist in New York City right now?

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah. So, this concept of herd immunity is that once you reach a certain level of immunity across the entire population, that you may get individual isolated infections, but you won't get outbreaks, because if I get sick and I cough on somebody else, or I cough on three people, if two out of three of them are immune, then this infection just won't continue to spread anymore. What we have from our antibody survey is that somewhere between 25 to 30 percent of New Yorkers broadly across the entire population of New Yorkers have demonstrated some prior infection with this virus. You know, they have an antibody test that indicates that almost certainly they were infected at some point – that is not a level of antibody coverage that we currently think would mean people are fully protected. There's a lot of discussion going on about, well, is the antibody testing that will indicate protection? Are there other measures that you need to use? But from our perspective, the only way to continue to keep infections low, like we have right now, is to focus on all the things we're doing, face coverings, social distancing, limits on gatherings, good hygiene. And it may very well be that there is some percentage of the population that is currently immune that's also helping keep our infection rates low, but I don't think we should be complacent and rest upon that until we know more.

Moderator: The next is Gloria from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you first a question on the 9/11 tribute memorial, sort of, back and forth that we have been seeing in the last couple of days. I don't believe you have spoken about it. So, I guess, first, I just wanted to get you to weigh in on what's been going on here now that we know the ceremonies back on. Did you know that they were going to cancel? And now that there's a second memorial that's going to happen, you know, why haven't you been involved, it seems, in this in this process?

Mayor: Yeah, Gloria, first of all, that whole process, the decision is not something that involves City Hall at all. Literally, no one from the 9/11 Memorial reached out to me, no one consulted with us, they went and did what they did. And I know their intentions were good. They were trying to address this crisis and really focus on health and an abundance of caution. I think what they did was a mistake, initially, because it's such an important moment for the families who lost loved ones, for so many people who want to remember on that day. And the notion of keeping people safe is obviously crucial, but I think what would have been smarter is what they ultimately decided to do, which is basically to keep the same ceremony, keep the same very moving tribute in light – adjust, make a few health modifications and distancing modifications like we do with so many other things. So, to me, I think it's now been resolved more sensibly. But, no, I want to be clear, some people thought that I had something to do with it, my office had something to do it. We were not consulted in the least. If we had been, I would have told them stick to the original plan, but, you know, let's do some health and safety modifications.

Moderator: The next is Aaron Cooper from CNN.

Question: Hi, thank you very much. I just wanted to ask about people moving out of New York City permanently. We've talked to some that have left and some others that are considering it or thinking about it. Do you have any estimate on how many people the city could lose? And how bad is this going to hurt? And then additionally, some of the people we've talked to have been blaming your administration for making the quality of life worse, including increasing crime or homelessness. How do you respond to those kinds of concerns?

Mayor: Sure. Aaron, look, first of all, this is something this whole crisis has now played out over six months. It is way too soon to know what the long-term impact will be. It's understandable that some people have the means to do so when elsewhere. The vast, vast majority of New Yorkers were here and the vast, vast majority of New Yorkers are going to remain here. And now, Aaron, we are one of the safest places in the whole country when it comes to the coronavirus, as you heard today, 0.24 percent infection level. We've got a lot of work to do to keep it that way, but I think everyone with eyes to see can see how strongly New York City has come back in terms of health care. And you can see that the economy is starting to come back, but we have a long way to go. The things that make New York City great are going to continue to attract people here and keep people here, there's no question. So, we do not have a specific estimate because I think it would be a fool's errand to try and estimate now something that you can't really understand until we see the bigger playout of how we address this disease, ultimately, with the vaccine and how we bring the economy back, what kind of stimulus we have, what happens in the election in 76 days? All these factors I think will determine. To the other point, I think it's just politics, honestly. As recently as February, Aaron, we had the most jobs in the history of New York City – 4.6 million jobs. We had driven down crime to levels that we had not seen since the 1950s. Our school system was showing greater success than it ever had in its history. That was February this year and those are the policies of my administration. What we got hit with was an absolute perfect storm, a health care crisis, an economic crisis, a budget crisis, a social justice crisis, a crime uptick all at once and all interrelated. But this too shall pass, and when it does the strength of New York City will come to the fore again. Go ahead.

Question: Thank you.

Moderator: Aaron, do you have second question?

Question: No, I'm great. Thank you very much.

Moderator: Thank you.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mayor de Blasio. I wanted to go back to the small cluster you were noticing in Borough Park. You mentioned that some of the stuff –

Mayor: Katie, just to be very careful. My apologies, the term cluster is a really a weighted one. We're seeing, again, some cases – we're seeing more cases, but we certainly do not want to call it a cluster yet. We don't have that evidence.

Question: My apologies, the uptick or the 16 cases – and you mentioned that some of those 16 cases can be trace to a large wedding in the community. My understanding is that large weddings are not allowed. I know we saw this at the beginning of the pandemic, where there were still in certain communities in the city funerals and other large gathering. So, will there be disciplinary action? Is there an investigation into those large wedding to see whose it was and will be, you know, any kind of action against that large wedding, which I was under, the impression is not allowed?

Mayor: You're absolutely right. The rule now is that – I think I'm up-to-date on this – that gatherings can be in a gathering hall, catering hall, for example, up to 50 percent capacity, but no more than 50 people. And from what we're hearing, this was certainly substantially more than that. That's just not allowed. We're going to figure out what to do to address the situation retrospectively, but I'm really honestly much more concerned about the going forward right now. We've got to identify the folks who were at that wedding and follow up to make sure if there was any spread it's contained. And that's why we do test and trace. It's as simple as, if someone might be infected, get them tested; if they are, safely separate them; make sure it doesn't spread any further. You do that fast enough, effectively enough, you really contain the spread. So, that's the goal here, but we are doubling down, starting today, through the Health Department with catering halls to let them know that those standards must be kept. We'll certainly be doing inspections. We're working with community leaders, who I think could have been extraordinary allies in this whole effort of trying to keep people safe. Dr. Dave Chokshi was on the call I did last night with community leaders. He's going to direct the Health Department to do the follow-up with these catering halls and I believe that that follow-up will be felt very clearly.

Moderator: The next is Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hi Dana, how are you?

Question: As far as the potential for 22,000 layoffs, have you determined whether that those potential layoffs will in any way impact your or the First Lady's staff?

Mayor: Oh, unquestionably, there will be layoffs at City Hall. There's no question about it. For my staff, her staff, everyone, there's going to be layoffs. There's going to be a huge fiscal impact on every agency of the City government. And again, our job is to work together to try and avert it because last thing we want to do in the middle of an economic crisis is lay off a bunch of people and not provide as much service. And you think about all of our agencies, what that would mean for the city, how it would set us back. So, you know, I don't have a lot of hope right now for a stimulus. We'll keep fighting for one before the point that layoffs would happen. Maybe, you know, there'll be a surprise here, a good surprise from Washington. But I think the more likely possibility is to avert layoffs are to focus on long term borrowing in Albany, where I think there's more and more recognition that long-term borrowing is a necessary solution. And obviously working with labor to find savings. And a lot of our labor partners are working with us intensely on that.

Moderator: The next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Good morning, everyone. I was wondering if you and Dr. Varma could clarify the use of the term cluster? For what it's worth, you know, during the conversation this morning, did Google coronavirus cluster definition. And one of the first things that comes up is a paper on the CDC website that says we defined a cluster as greater than, or equal to five cases. So I don't know if this definition, if there's a universal definition, if it's a case by case, can you just speak to that place?

Mayor: Sure. It's a great question, Shant. I'll start as the layman and Dr. Varma will be your expert. I just want to say at the beginning, one of the things I've noticed throughout the coronavirus crisis and I think Dr. Varma will affirm this. We've talked about it many times is, there's not the kind of ideal consistent national, international definitions here that we would like in many ways, because people, the medical community, the scientific community still doesn't fully understand the coronavirus. And there's very different interpretations in different places. But I want to say here just on a common sense level, a cluster is when we have a bigger and more sustained problem. Remember testing is such a valuable, crucial part of the equation, but it's always somewhat arbitrary because it depends on who got tested on any given day. And that's not ubiquitous. That's not, you know, we don't have a situation as you've seen in the few places, where there's been near universal testing. There is a certain arbitrariness. What we look for is do we see a sustained problem? And particularly, do we see a problem that relates to a specific source that is a bigger problem. Not, you know, a few cases, but something more bigger and more sustained. And that thank God so far is not what we're seeing in the case of Sunset Park. What we're seeing in case of Sunset Park to date is more isolated to individual households where the spread was just within the household, not in the larger community. So that's my preface. Now, Dr. Varma, you can give a more erudite answer.

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah. I think the answer is that different groups in different public health agencies use these terms differently. I think as the Mayor has noted, really what we try to use the term cluster when we're referring both to a specific number of cases that we think is concerning, combined with a link to some specific events or exposure that they have in common. So what we're seeing in, for example, in Sunset Park and what we've been seeing, for example, in Borough Park is an increase in the number of cases above what we would expect. But we can't link it right now to a single common exposure.

Moderator: Last question for today is Yoav from The City.

Question: On the gyms and the indoor fitness centers. I've been speaking to people in those industries and they're wondering what the metrics need to look like in order for you to be comfortable to open them up? Because as things stand there's just a message from City Hall that it's a dynamic situation. We're going to keep an eye on things, but in their minds that the city has really done everything it can, the people of the city. Today's 0.24 percent positive rate is a good example. So, are there specific metrics that the coronavirus numbers need to meet in order for you to decide to open them up? Or what more needs to be done by the industry to make you comfortable?

Mayor: I appreciate the question. I want to make sure there's not a misunderstanding here because I spoke to this on NY1 on Monday evening. You know, the Governor, the State has put out a vision. I haven't seen the final wording of the executive order, but certainly the press conference, excuse me, the press release gave a lot of the details. And to the credit of the State, we had a lot of conversation between the City and State on this. They deferred to the City on a number of key decisions. But the bottom line was you could open them on August 24th or September 2nd. We said September 2nd for the obvious reasons of the inspections. That this is exactly when we're in the middle of doing a huge number of Department of Health inspections with childcare centers and schools That's our priority right now. So we're choosing the later date and we're certainly going to continue to prioritize childcare centers and schools for inspection. And then as those are completed, turn the attention of the department over to the gyms. So with a variety of restrictions in place from the State, and we will have our own restrictions, they will be opening up. But we want to do it in a very careful, safe manner. Because you know, this is one of the areas where if we don't get it right, we could see a resurgence. So we're working out of an abundance of caution.

Okay. So, everyone, as I close up today, I just want to say this – you know, I gave you a number earlier today, 0.24 percent and that number will change tomorrow and the next day and the next day. No one ever should rest on a laurel, read too much into one indicator. But just even to see the possibility that we could get that low, that all this hard work is paying off. Because remember, if you keep fighting that disease back, getting that number lower and lower, then more and more can open up and people can live better and better. And we can really restart New York City fully. This is an example of what New Yorkers do. New Yorkers are the greatest comeback artists in the history of the world. New Yorkers always come back. We have been down so many times before and counted out so many times before. But New Yorkers always come back, but we will not come back the same. We don't want to come back the same. And that's what's crucial here. The values of this city, historic values, and the values that are being expressed right now, the deep desire and the rightful desire for change. We are not going to repeat the inequalities of the past. That's just the bottom line here. You can come back and do better. You can come back without simply replacing the same reality that wasn't working well enough. So, this is what I want to emphasize – what New York has done the last few months is going to be written in the history books as one of the most extraordinary examples of a whole people coming together in common cause. Now let's continue that work in the name of fairness and equality. Let's continue that work in the name of ensuring that every community gets the same opportunity that is in New York city value. Thank you, everyone.

2020-08-20 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning everybody. New Yorkers have achieved so much together over the last few months. It's been really tough. It's been painful in so many ways, but what people have done in the city, it's been amazing. It's as if everyone is on one big team together, 8 million people all pulling in the same direction. And it's been -- all the tough things people were asked to do, shelter in place, social distancing, face coverings, folks have done it. And with a remarkable spirit, a can-do spirit. And that is why we have driven back this disease day after day after day. That's why the whole country is looking at New York City and saying, how did they possibly do it? And we had the secret ingredient, New Yorkers. That spirit, that sense of teamwork, discipline, strength, the can-do spirit, New York City is known for, the unity that people have shown in this crisis. That is what we are going to bring to our next big opportunity to move forward. And that's reopening our schools.

Yesterday, Chancellor Carranza and I were out in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. We went to New Bridges Elementary School. I saw inspiring things there. Here's a school in the community, here's a school of and by and for the community. You see there, the work that's being done right now to prepare this school weeks and weeks before school begins, all of the health and safety measures being put in place. The team there, the custodial services team, the administration, everyone was working together for a common cause. And the principal, Kevyn Bowles, he's known as Mr. B to the folks in the school community. He said amazing things. You see him right there. He said he has been running previously one of our regional enrichment centers. These were the centers set up for the kids of essential workers in the middle of the crisis, March, April, May. He said in his center, people worked together. Kids did wear their mask consistently. There was distancing. There was cleaning. He said there was not a single new COVID case in that center. And were talking about during the worst weeks of this crisis. And then one of his colleagues, Mya Wilson, who is the culture coordinator for the school. She's someone who loves the kids, loves the community. She's been working all summer. And Mr. B said, you know, a lot of these members of the team, they wouldn't normally work all summer. They've chosen to do this. So I turned to Mya, I said, Mya, you gave up your summer to do this work, to get ready for kids to come back to school. I said, why, why did you make that sacrifice? She said, the simplest answer, the most powerful answer. She said, because our families are worth it. Our families are worth it.

That is a spirit, the Chancellor and I, everybody at the DOE is bringing to this endeavor. We work for the parents and the kids of New York City. And we owe it to them to get it right. And we will. So everyone is working together to make sure the PPEs are in place. The signage, the cleaning, the disinfecting, you name it. That work is going on literally every single day. And I want to commend all the public servants who are doing this work. And if you see the folks in your community who are getting schools ready, thank them. Whether it's a principal, a teacher, someone from custodial services, someone from School Construction Authority, unsung heroes in this effort, thank them. They're public servants who are doing exactly what every one of us would want them to do. They're showing up and they're getting things done for our kids. That is what is going to move us forward. And I saw the dedication of our educators throughout this crisis. I know people choose that profession because I love kids. And here's going to be a moment to bring back our schools and address what everyone's been through. It's been tough. We've talked before about the trauma that kids have gone through. It's been tough for so many kids. And being at home with their families and their communities they haven't had the support they normally get in school. They haven't had the mentors, they haven't had the guidance. They haven't had the educators helping them stay on track. And a lot of them haven't been able to see their friends and we need to help our kids begin the pathway to life coming back to normal. We need to support them. They've already lost so much. We need to be there for them and help them move forward. And we can, because this city has really fought back this disease and that's what matters. That's the foundation of all things.

So, what today we're doing is making very clear to parents, to students, to educators, to staff. That this effort to get schools ready is moving forward every single day. We're throwing everything we got at it. And here is a pledge, putting this out today, Back to School Pledge. And it's a detailed list of all the things that are being done in every single school to get our schools ready. So every parent, every New Yorker can see exactly what is being done and the level of comprehensive effort, layer upon layer to make sure we will have the safest school year ever. Because there's never been this much investment in all the health and safety measures. And as I've said before, it's going to be tough. And we have to recognize there'll be a lot of imperfections and a lot of transitions. But we also have to aspire to greatness because we need to help our kids get back on track after everything they've been through. And I have absolute faith in the greatness of New York City public schools.

So a couple of things you'll see when you look at this pledge. Every school will have all the personal protective equipment needed, of course, for free. All the hand sanitizer needed for every classroom, all the masks. We want kids to come to school wearing face coverings, but they'll be there for free for any kid who doesn't have it every single day. In every public school building, there'll be a full time nurse. Every school will be cleaned every day after school. And during the day in many ways as well. And the electrostatic cleaning, this is the cutting-edge technology to address the coronavirus. Every school will have it. So, we are going to work in a spirit of trust and unity to get this done. And the person who leading the way and with tremendous positive energy and spirit as always, is our Chancellor Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to echo your sentiments on Mr. B and New Bridges yesterday for a moment. What an incredible experience, it was to see a true professional and his team in action, preparing for the school year with optimism and energy and ready to welcome students back. What they showed us yesterday is what every parent deserves to see, deserves to hear and understand from their school. What is it that's happening in our schools? What is moving beyond just the plan on paper, but to actually implementing what it looks like in the school? What PPE and cleaning supplies are available? We saw that yesterday. How will desks be organized, maintaining social distancing? We saw that yesterday. What are the new rules to keep us safe? We heard about them yesterday. And that's our pledge to the families in New York City, to make sure that they know what this year will be like, not in the abstract, but the firm details.

We're a few weeks away from the first day of school and PPE deliveries are happening every day, as we speak. Families are getting their schedules and schools are organizing their classrooms. We saw the PPE deliveries yesterday at New Bridges. And that's going to continue to happen every single day. I know how overwhelming this may feel, but I want to reiterate something that the Mayor has said. And that I also have said, that if it's not safe, we won't reopen. I know how overwhelming it is. And so much will be different this year, but so much will also be the same. That a child's school is a safe place, a welcoming place, a place to learn and to grow. Schools will be in session five days a week, no matter where the students are, whether they're in person or they're remote learning. Our vision for the fall is a safe, strong, and supportive vision for every one of our students. And to families. I'm going to ask you, please, as partners start preparing our children now for what this new fall will look like. Wearing a mask, social distancing, making sure that they know their supplies are their supplies, understanding that just because they can't hug the other children doesn't mean that they're not friends. It just means they're looking out for them as they're looking out for each other. So again, more information will be coming. And our back to school pledge is our commitment to what we have promised for a safe, secure, healthy start to the school year.

Mayor: Thank you, Richard so much. Look, everybody, you hear the heart in the voice of our Chancellor. One of the things I said when I became Mayor is that we would have chancellors who were educators. And Chancellor Carranza has been a teacher and a principal and the superintendent all the way up to the chancellor of the biggest school system in the country. He also is a parent and he thinks like a parent. So, I want to be clear. I think like a parent every single day as well. We are going to make sure these schools are safe and ready. And if we don't think they're safe and ready, they won't be open. But right now, look what you see. Tremendous preparation and the health situation in the city continues to get better because of your hard work. So we're going to move forward together on the countdown to the opening of our schools.

All right, let's talk about our indicators. Okay. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients – today's report, 77, and the confirmed positive rate is just over nine percent. Number two, new reported cases, seven-day average, threshold, 550 cases – today's report, 305. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19 threshold, five percent – today's report, 0.88 percent. Another very good strong day.

Now, a few words in Spanish –

Before we turn to the media, just a programming note that we will not be having a press conference tomorrow, but we will be back Monday morning as usual. And now, please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all we will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Chancellor Richard Carranza; Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi; Kathleen Daniel, Census 2020 Field Director; and Juan Rosa, Northeast Director of Civic Engagement for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. First up, we're going to have Andrew Siff from WNBC.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Mayor, I was wondering when you held up that pledge this morning, who's your intended audience? You have said repeatedly that the vast majority of parents want in-person learning. Are you trying to convince teachers who were afraid to come back to work? Who are you – who do you feel that you need to make the case to at this point with 21 days to go?

Mayor: Yeah. Andrew, look, I think the parents of the city, the kids in the city have already spoken. We survey them. We gave them an opportunity with a lot of outreach to decide if they would prefer all remote learning and we have vast majorities who have spoken. And I will tell you as a parent, parents think all summer about what is going to take to go back to school the right way. They're very, very aware and they've made their choice and we owe it to them to get it right. So, first of all, the message is to everyone we work for – the parents, this city, the kids of this city. A lot of parents and kids have heard some of the things that we're doing on health and safety, but we wanted to pull it together all in one clear place. We wanted to make clear to all parents, to all kids, to everyone in this city how specific and serious our commitment is. And this is for every single school. So, what do you see on this page is going to tell you a lot about the approach. It's also important – of course, I want everyone else, I want our educators, our staff, I want everyone to see the same exact information and to understand that the Chancellor and I are making our decisions based on health and safety and we're putting it here in really clear terms. So, this is for everyone. Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: Council Member Brad Lander, and some parents and other groups today are planning to really step up their call for as much outdoor learning as possible. I know you've talked about weather worries with regard to this topic, but have you and the Chancellor taken any proactive steps to set up any outdoor space for learning anywhere?

Mayor: Sure. Look, I think for all the elected officials, parents, everyone has been saying let's maximize outdoors – we agree. We'll have a lot more to say about this in the next few days. And yes, we are helping and supporting schools that want to go in that direction. But we're going to talk about the way to approach it citywide. But the weather is still the weather, Andrew. I want to be clear, there's a lot we can do without doors and there's some things we can't do and we always need a fallback for any outdoor option because of weather. But yeah, we're going to work with every school community to maximize outdoor use.

Moderator: Next up, we have Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How are you?

Question: I'm good. My question has to do with the enforcement of these checkpoints. Apparently there haven't been any fines or violations of this enhanced quarantine effort. Why do you think that is?

Mayor: I think it's like so many other things. It's a great question, Henry. So many times we start an enforcement effort with education and giving people a chance to get acclimated. And, you know, really, especially in a crisis like this, we do believe a lot of people understand this is literally life and death to get this right and it's about stopping this disease. So, there's a high level of motivation out there for people to get this right. But I think the education has now happened. The procedures are now in place to do a lot more enforcement and we're now going to be in a position if we need to give fines, we will. I don't want to give anyone a fine, but, if we have to, you'll start to see fines. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. It's just surprising that with all of these people who are being stopped no one would be a find or no one would be found in violation. My second question goes back to what I asked yesterday, which is why can't the City give us a seven-day rolling average ZIP code by ZIP code of where the infection rates are locally, hyper-locally?

Mayor: Yeah. And I'll let our Health Commissioner, Dave Chokshi, speak to that. Again, I think Dave said that that is what we are doing or are going to be doing. We want – I mean, it's very important for people to see the information. And the seven-day average, I appreciate you that out – one of the things we want to emphasize is the seven-day average is a clearer way of understanding things. And we're trying to do that in a lot of things, including the new case numbers and the way we're looking at that three percent threshold around schools. Go ahead, Dave, speak to that ZIP code by ZIP code – the information we'll be putting up online.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, sir. And thank you for the good question. We do have ZIP code by ZIP code data for the last four weeks – the most recent four weeks, broken down by week. That includes not just the infection rate but also our testing rates and some other information. So, the different ways of slicing the data are important because they help us answer questions. And together with the indicators that the Mayor reports out on every day, we have a good, comprehensive picture of what's happening with the coronavirus in New York City.

Mayor: Good. So, Dave, you think you should follow up – and your team to make sure Henry gets that information he's looking for. Go ahead.

Commissioner Chokshi: I’d be happy to.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next step, we have Luis from New York [inaudible] –

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Luis. How are you?

Question: Pretty good. The other day you said your executive order would be part of a series of stepped up actions. Any chance you could elaborate on what those might be? Can you give us a hint if you can't tell us outright what they are?

Mayor: There's more coming, for sure. Look, I think it refers back to the question Andrew said – I mean, we now need to go into the phase of greater enforcement when it comes to – Luis, I want to make sure we're saying the same thing, you're talking about quarantine, right?

Question: Yes, sir.

Mayor: Yeah, that – again, it was a brand new thing. When the State made this decision, that was absolutely the right decision to say we have a series of states around this country that are, unfortunately, really in trouble when it comes to the coronavirus. We have to have people quarantined if they come from those states or our own people go out and visit those states. That's the right thing. And we've all been putting in place the mechanism from scratch to create a viable quarantine structure. And our Test and Trace Corps has done really, really extensive work – obviously, a presence between state and city at airports, train stations, bus stations. We're working with the hotel industry as part of the executive order – many more pieces coming – you know, the checkpoints – but there will be more enforcement and we're going to deepen the effort to get every part of the private sector that works with people traveling to be a part of this and to help us on the front end to make sure that people are signing up those forms. Look, the best of all worlds is for someone to have filled out that form before they even come through the border into the five boroughs. So, that's what we're moving towards, but we'll have a lot more to say on that in the next few days.

Question: Thank you for that answer. That same day, Dr. Varma stated that 15 to 20 percent of all cases in New York City occurred in people who traveled outside of New York City. Might be to be available about these people? I mean, regarding their mode of transportation, where their travel was for business or other purposes or these families or individuals, anything along those lines?

Mayor: Yeah. That's a great question. So, first of all, we'd be happy to give you some of the data we have so far. I'll have the team follow up. It's initial data, obviously, this is still very new and it's imperfect data because we're still perfecting the ways to track each and every person who comes here. But I think a couple of things – and Dave will join in. I think you're not seeing obviously a huge amount of tourist travel or business travel compared to what there used to be. I think a lot of his family-related travel. I think a lot of it, more than we would have expected, was New Yorkers going out to see family elsewhere and coming back. And obviously, more car travel than would have been the case in the past. But we'll get you more details on that, going forward. I do want to emphasize that, you know, in a funny way, as New Yorkers, we might think a little differently. If you go and visit someone in South Carolina or Texas or Florida, you might think a little differently than if it was a resident of one of those states visiting here. But there's really functionally no difference. If you have spent time in one of those states, you have to quarantine. If you don't want to quarantine, honestly, don't go visit those states – it’s pretty straightforward – in the middle of this crisis. Dave, do you want to add on what we're seeing.

Commissioner Chokshi: Sir, I think you covered it. I don't have anything to add.

Mayor: Alright, thank you.

Moderator: Next up we have Marla from WCBS radio.

Question: My question is directed toward Chancellor Carranza. You warned of 9,000 layoffs at the DOE if the State decides to hold aid to schools and say this is game over for in classroom learning. Can you expand upon that and tell us a little bit about game over?

Chancellor Carranza: So, as the Mayor has talked about there – we are in a fiscal crisis and no one wants anyone laid off, as we look to come back to in-person learning, especially with less children in each classroom, which requires more staff. Obviously, any potential layoffs would impact our ability to do that in-person. Again, this is not something that we want. This is not something that we should even be dealing with at this time. And as the Mayor has said, there are other ways of dealing with this particular dilemma. That being said, it's also very important that we're very transparent with our parents, with our community about the challenges that would be imposed upon the school system if we had to make cuts of this magnitude. So, I just don't think it defies credibility to say that, you know, a significant impact, financial impact would not impact what we do in terms of in-person learning.

Mayor: Yeah. Marla, one other point. I really want – I think everyone really hates to think about layoffs. I hate to think about layoffs, but I need people to understand a layoff is a pretty permanent action. I mean, it's, you know, could you one day hire people back? Yeah, but let's be clear. Our fiscal situation is bad now, and it probably gets worse next year. So, as we strive for stimulus funding, for long term borrowing authority from Albany, for the unions to work with us to find alternative savings, I need everyone to understand it's not a furlough. We got to be clear. A layoff is a permanent action, and you're talking, having thousands and thousands of fewer employees in a lot of agencies. It will change the nature of the City for the long term. And that's why we want to work so hard to avert it.

Moderator: Next up we have Kala from PIX11.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. It's about ventilation. I've had so many teachers and principals reach out to me about the ventilation and concerns within their building. I know that you address this every day, but they specifically want to know, will reports of what is fixed in each school and the classrooms specifically that are not usable be made public? And if so, when will that be?

Mayor: Yeah. Kala, great question. Am I saying your name right? Kala?

Question: Kala, like California.

Mayor: Okay, Kala. Thank you. Yeah, I think that's your – the concern you're raising is right on. And the answer is exactly that, yes. What we're going to be doing is giving a constant scorecard and update about each school. And a lot of work has happened over the summer to get the schools ready. And now it's time to start showing people the results of that work. Interesting thing, Kala, is some of it is more advanced and technological. Some of it's really old school – opening up windows, some school classrooms had windows that were sealed shut. We're opening them up because what the doctors tell us is fresh air is actually one of the very best ways to fight the coronavirus. Just get as much, in the nicer weather, obviously – get as much air into the classroom naturally. But yeah, we're going to update on the ventilation systems, filters being changed, all that school by school.

And you'll see in this pledge, Richard and I feel strongly we've said it to the team, if there's a classroom that for some reason the ventilation situation's not right, we've got to take that classroom offline until it can be fixed. If there's a building, we thought wasn't up to snuff, we'll hold that building back and find an alternative space. Now, I think that would be a rarity, honestly, where a whole building would have that kind of challenge. But if we find that, we will address it. But, Kala, one more point, three weeks. I know everyone's understandably anxious, but when folks are working nonstop and a lot of teams out there working on these issues, three weeks is actually a long time to get a lot of stuff resolved. There's always, before every school year, a big intense push to opening day. But yes, we're going to display publicly the status of each school. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. And then, of course, I think we all need something to look forward to. What can you tell us about Halloween in the city, the Macy's Parade which is my favorite, and, of course, the tree at 30 Rock?

Mayor: Great question. I share your love for the Macy's Parade. It's pretty amazing. I think everything is going to be different is the simple answer. Each one is taking, you know, going to have different versions of what they do. We'll get you more details. I think some is going to be virtual. It might be some small in-person pieces, spread out pieces. It's not going to look at all, of course, like what we are used to. But the important thing is that traditions will be kept in some way. I mean, remember what happened with, for example, Macy's and the fireworks on July 4th. It was different, but it still maintained the tradition, it still meant a lot to people. The same with graduations in the schools, the beautiful virtual graduation that was telecast with so many people participating as a labor of love for our kids and families. So, yeah, you’re going to see versions of those events, but nothing like what we're used to. Let's all work together to make sure they come back strong next year.

Moderator: We're going to approach our last two, starting with Paul from Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Paul, how are you?

Question: I'm well, Sir, how are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: I'm asking about restaurants specifically regarding a letter from a State Senator Andrew Lanza and Rep. Max Rose. They're asking for the Governor to essentially consider Staten Island separate from the city regarding indoor dining. They point to concerns about your own leadership. I just wanted to see if you'd like to respond and if you're in favor of considering Staten Island separate.

Mayor: Hey, you know, Paul, it wouldn't be New York City if people weren't criticizing their mayor. So, it's part of life around here. Staten Island is part of the five boroughs, part of the city. We're all connected. We're all dealing with the same challenge. The State and the City have had a lot of unity on these issues. A lot of caution, a lot of care about how we do things. You heard the other day, Dr. Varma talk about the history around the world, including right now in Hong Kong, where they just shut down bars and restaurants. Hong Kong had been, you know, successful, in the scheme of things, in fighting back the coronavirus but now they're seeing a problem because it's one of the places where you have indoor dining, indoor bars. It's one of the places that's most sensitive in the whole equation.

So, I think every piece of this, you know – the whole city is going to be treated as one. I believe the State has always seen it that way as well. And it's about health and safety first. Now, all the people in the restaurant industry who understandably are concerned, for all the people that depend on those jobs and we want them to have those jobs, look, from the very beginning, takeout and delivery have kept going. We added outdoor dining, which almost 10,000 restaurants have taken advantage of. In fact, more are taking advantage of it all the time. That will be coming back next year. So, all the investments that a restaurant is putting this year, they'll be able to carry through to next year. We are working all the time to see if there's things we can do to provide more relief. The best thing we can do is actually fight back the disease. If we kept pushing back the disease that would open the door. So, it's a little bit of chicken and egg. You take too many chances, you move too fast, you make the wrong decisions, the disease comes back then you're, of course, not going to have indoor dining. So, I think the cautious strategic approach is actually the best way to get to indoor dining again one day. But, you know, all of us are in this together. Go ahead, Paul.

Question: And just to follow up on that regarding, again, indoor dining, do you have a timetable? I mean, we've been in phase three since early July. Is there any sort of date you're looking at where a decision might be made on this?

Mayor: No, we've been really clear and I'll have Dr. Chokshi chime in as well. We are looking at it all the time because we know it means so much to everyday New Yorkers and particularly the folks that depend on it for their jobs, but we have to see a lot more improvement in fighting this virus before we could consider it because it's literally one of the most sensitive pieces of the whole equation. So, no, there's not a timeline, but we're always asking ourselves the question, what would it take and can we get to that point? Dr. Chokshi, do you want to add?

Commissioner Chokshi: Mr. Mayor, I would just add, you know, as you said, I have a lot of sympathy for, you know, for the challenges here. I think about some of my own patients whom I've cared for at Bellevue who are restaurant workers. So, I understand that. But at the same time, the health and safety of those very same people as well as all of the rest of New York City are paramount in our approach. And we have seen, you know, in many places around the world, how indoor dining has been tied to outbreaks and in some places resurgences as well. So, it's an area where we have to be careful in weighing the different factors.

Moderator: For our last question, we'll go to Steve from Westwood One News.

Mayor: Hey, Steve. We've got a – we have a tech problem. Let's try that again. Steve, can you hear us? No, we cannot hear you, Steve.

Moderator: Next up, we'll go to Amy Zimmer from Chalkbeat.

Mayor: Amy.

Question: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. So, Mr. Mayor, you started this presser by talking about the regional enrichment centers. And, you know, we heard that they were serving maybe 20 students or 80 students at a time, and schools will be serving hundreds and hundreds at a given time. And you mentioned the educator who volunteered to be there. So, that's another key difference. So, obviously, educators, a lot of them do want to go back in September, but a lot of them are afraid to go back. You know, they might live with high risk relatives, for instance, and they don't want to be there. So, I'm just wondering if it's fair to make the comparison between what's been happening with the – at the rec and the school reopenings and how scalable the experience of the rec centers are.

Mayor: Yeah, Amy, I appreciate a question. I get the point. I was making a very specific point that what the principal said was, you know, first of all, you're talking about the height of the crisis. We are so much healthier now than we were in March, April, May. And you're talking about the kids of essential workers who are out at the front line, the health care workers, the grocery workers, you know, first responders. And his point was, first of all, no one in the school got sick, which said a lot. And second that they were able to consistently get kids to wear masks and to distance. So, you know, a lot of the talk out there has been, ‘oh, can you get kids to follow these rules?’ And here's a guy who was doing it for months. He said, you know what, even with younger kids, yes, you can. He is an educator. He said, of course, when we constantly are teaching kids the right kind of behavior, we can get them to wear masks. So, it was just a clear statement about what educators can achieve.

But, look, to the bigger point, and I'll offer, and then, of course, if the Chancellor wants to chime in, public servants are public servants. You know, first of all, as I said, educators chose the profession because they love kids and they care about kids and they know kids are suffering right now. They need support. They need what educators can give them. They need what positive adult role models and counselors and folks who give them mental health support. They need that desperately. It cannot be done the same way remotely, even slightly. We may be talking about a vaccine in, you know, five months, six months, seven months. We may be talking about the whole school year we don't have a vaccine. Imagine kids going another full year without the best quality education that can only be provided in person and the support that educators and school staff give. I'm very worried about that, what that would mean for them, for the kids and for the future of the city. So, now it's time to say, you know, public servants rise to the occasion and answer the call. Our transit workers did, our first responders did, our health care workers did, grocery workers did. Public servants, show up and serve people. That's what our constituents depend on. That's what parents and kids believe we are here to do, and certainly taxpayers as well. So, it's a moment to be there for our families. I really echo what Mya said at the school, our families are worth it. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: I wouldn't add anything, Sir.

Mayor: Okay, thank you. Go ahead, Amy.

Question: Okay. So, for the next question, it's for the Chancellor. Last night at the PEP meeting, you said that delaying the start of school sounds like good practice but that the State could withhold money from the City for not holding the mandated 180 days of instruction. So, it's our understanding from [inaudible] guidance that districts can request a waiver for this requirement. And we just wanted to know, has New York City requested a waiver or is it considering to do so then the City could delay the start of school?

Chancellor Carranza: So yes, last night, what I was talking about is that the more time we have with educators and to practice the safety protocols, to set up classrooms, that's always good practice. That was really the context of my comments. We are in conversations with the State Education Department. I've also been meeting with the other superintendents of the big five school districts in New York State. And we're also collaborating around what that's going to look like. So, there are active conversations about what that could be but again nothing definitive yet. We'll have more to say as soon as we have some more definitive information.

Mayor: Okay, as we wrap up today, everyone, I just want to finish where I began. Extraordinary unity, teamwork, spirit, sense of purpose has pervaded this city over the last six months and that’s why we have made the progress we've made on health care. We're going to bring that same indomitable spirit, that New York spirit to the work of opening our schools safely, opening our schools in a way that really supports our kids and families. That's what we're all going to do together. And I have a lot of faith in our educators. I have a lot of faith in our school staff. They know how important it is to be there for our families. In the end, think about it, when we support our kids, when we really give them what they deserve, we build the future of the city. There's been so much talk in the last months, rightfully, about the disparities that have been clear in this crisis. One of the best ways to fight those disparities is to keep uplifting and supporting the children who go to our public schools. If we're going to change New York City for the better. We're going to create a more fair and equal city, it starts in our public schools. So, we are doing the work to be ready and to be ready safely in September. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-21 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It’s our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, 11:05 am on Fridays. My questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our phone number is 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. And good morning, Mr. Mayor, since I took the last three summer Fridays, it's been around a month, so, thanks as always and welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you so much, Brian. I hope you got a good chance to rest and relax after all this madness and hope you're feeling good.

Lehrer: Thank you very much. And it certainly is madness. And I want to ask you first, just kind of a how-you're-doing question because such intense times in the city, some of the issues we'll get into with the virus looming and affecting finances, the teacher's union now threatening to strike, and the police union allegedly already engaged in a work slowdown, principals saying don't open my indoor spaces. Restaurant owners saying do open my indoor spaces. The most intense time in so many years. What's it like being mayor right now?

Mayor: Well, I appreciate the question. I think your summary kind of catches a lot of the dynamic now. I'm happy to talk about the police situation because I actually don't agree with that characterization. I think it's worth talking about, I don't think it's a work slowdown, I think of something different. But look, it's really, really tough, but, you know, when I talk – when I think about what I'm experiencing, I really do think about what every-day New Yorkers are experiencing. And I've talked to so many people about their lives, obviously starting with the people who lost members of our family. I mean, I – so many people have been through pain and confusion and frustration and fear. There’s just tons of fear out there. So, I try to take that in and not be defeated by it, not be depressed by it. I try – because I think what a leader needs to do is sort of feel what people's lives are, but not be overwhelmed by the real pain, but somehow find us a way forward. I think leaders need to find a path. It's like a classic way of thinking about what we do. Imagine being, like, lost in a forest, you got to find a path out. We're going through something incredibly painful and difficult. And so, what I try to center on is just what's the next positive step, what's the next thing we can do.

And I got to tell you, as bad as it's been, the fact that the health care situation has turned around so profoundly and the fact that people listened and did something, I mean, that actually gives me a lot of energy. It gives me a lot of hope. And I just look at what New Yorkers have done with a real kind of awe. So, it's very painful for all of us. It's very difficult to take it all in as Mayor, but there's also a lot that gives me hope and I owe it to the people of the city to show that path and show there's hope. I think that's one of the most essential parts of what I do.

Lehrer: And it is amazing that the positivity rate for coronavirus tests hit a low of something like one-quarter of one percent –

Mayor: 0.24 percent, that was a few days ago.

Lehrer: Earlier this week. Rory in Queens, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Rory.

Question: Hi, I was calling, I wanted to talk about schools reopening and budget cuts. And seeing as that there's budget cuts and I saw on the news the other day that, you know, there are 9,000 jobs at risk in the Board of Education, that coupled with the fact that the teacher's union and the principal’s union, both wanting remote learning, wouldn't it be smarter for us to just go full remote in September, keep everybody safe, save the money that we wouldn't be putting into [inaudible] and electricity and just opening schools and keeping them clean in general, take that money and put it into advancing our remote learning for our teachers which is what they've been looking for. And it's a constant thing I've been hearing because I feel like we're pushing too fast to reopen schools. And what we should be focused on is bettering our remote learning education because like it or not, we still do have a partial remote learning environment now. It's hybrid. It's not fully going back. And I don't think we're focusing enough on that. I feel like a lot of problems could be solved by just going full remote and focusing on, like, remote learning and keeping jobs, these teachers’ jobs.

Lehrer: Got you, Rory, let me get a response for you from the Mayor. Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: I appreciate the point. And there's a real logic to what you say, but I want to tell you why. Of course, we've thought about all that, but [inaudible] disagree. First of all, let's just talk about the human dynamics of our school system. Why did three quarters of our parents when we surveyed hundreds of thousands of them want schools to come back in-person? Why have now we, you know, as we have given parents a chance to opt out, we have 700,000 students coming back? Because for so many working class parents, for so many immigrant parents, parents in communities of color, single moms leading households, they need their kids to be in school in person because of their lives and the fact that they have to find work. They're trying to get back to work because they want their kids to get an education and you can't do the same remote. No one claims – the unions don't claim remote learning comes anywhere near in-person learning. Even part of the week in-person provides so much more than remote learning ever could, including the emotional support, the counseling, the mental health support for kids who have been traumatized. The unions actually say, and I've challenged them on this, they say officially, they don't want to go all remote. I think some of their actions are contradictory, but they say they don't want to go all remote. But I want to say, I work for the parents. I work for the kids of this city. I am very, very clear – in a city that's overwhelmingly people of color and working class people and low income people, that the absence of in-person learning is hurting those kids. They have been held back already the last four months, and I'm not going to damn them to another year of less education than they deserve. It's up to all of us to give them the very best we can, even with the challenges.

So, to the budget cuts, our job is to avert those cuts. And there's multiple ways to do that. Obviously, if we could get a stimulus in Washington, that is the best that is not working right now. It may work later in the year. I certainly believe if Joe Biden's elected there will be a stimulus quickly. We are working to get long term borrowing in Albany so we can avert those cuts. We're working with the unions to come up with alternative savings from labor so we can avert those cuts. So, there's many, many irons in the fire to avert the cuts. But in terms of how we spend our money, there's nothing more sacred than serving our children and building their future. And we cannot do that well enough with remote learning. We just can't.

Lehrer: On the remote learning that will take place even in the hybrid model that you're planning. I've heard from parents and teachers who are frustrated that there wasn't more effort put into training on remote instruction this summer. The New York Times said here in New York and elsewhere, it was a lost summer, as some people characterize it, a lost opportunity as plans have focused on weather and how to reopen buildings. But all public school students will spend a substantial amount of time doing remote learning in the current plan. So, has there been a citywide effort to train teachers on remote learning? How many teachers have participated if so?

Mayor: I don't know the exact number, but I'll happily get it to you. Yeah, there's the remote learning process began know literally in crisis, no notice effectively and had to be put together on the fly and still some very good work did happen in the spring. The efforts to continue to train teachers and improve remote learning, continue. They have continued throughout the summer, but I also want to be honest about there's only so far you can go with remote learning. The problem we are seeing is remote learning skews according to dynamics of disparity. Children who are already advantaged, children of wealthier families, children who have parents who are working remotely and professional jobs and can be home to support their kids as opposed to parents in working class jobs who have to be on a job site. The rich get richer when it comes to remote learning. I believe this profoundly, I've talked this through with our educators so you can continue to make it better, but you can't make it as fair as it needs to be. It's structurally impossible. The fact is for many, many kids they don't have adults in the home who can help them. They don't have a situation where they're going to be able to manage the whole process on their own. Some do, but many don't. And if we're really going to get at what we're here to do, which is to fight disparity and to prepare our kids. That's why we have to keep true to i- person, but we are trying to improve remote constantly. We will keep trying to improve remote. Teachers are doing their damnedest with remote. It's just structurally flawed in the very, very being of it.

Lehrer: Yes, but are you kind of acknowledging –

Mayor: You can’t have kind of direct contact, even in the best situation you need to with kids.

Lehrer: But are you kind of acknowledging that there wasn't that much training on maximizing the quality of remote this summer? Because even under the plan, it will be half remote? Were you able to hear that?

Mayor: Of course, as I said there's been ongoing work to improve remote. What's that? I'm sorry.

Lehrer: For some reason there's a little – yeah, there's a little delay on the line today that we don't usually have. But so, you know what, let me, let me go onto another caller and we're going to try Q in the Bronx. Q you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Let's hope this works technically. Hi there.

Question: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. And [inaudible] the time to ask this question and have this comment because it's very important. With all the focus with reopening schools, I feel like there's been a neglect of addressing the ancillary effects of opening the schools, which is public transportation. So, this is the question for the Mayor and also in your listening audience, like the MTA, Sarah Feinberg, or the Chancellor Richard Carranza. Now I'm a person of color who attended elementary and high school in New York City. So, I know that many students of color travel to their schools by buses and trains. And I've ridden the buses and trains during the height of the pandemic. And now when the pandemic's a little less in New York City. And my line is as most lines are very crowded and kids being kids, no fault of their own, often you know, they like to corral and they're, you know, yelling and shouting at each other. Because they're just being kids. And masks are expensive. So, I often find when I'm riding public transit, most of the people who are not wearing masks or teens. And so, I want to know, I don't want to criminalized for not wearing masks, but I want to know whether it's the schools, the DOE, or the administration or the MTA, what can be done to provide these kids with masks? Not just in school, but in public transit. So perhaps the schools can give masks to students two or three masks a day, so they can wear a mask going to school and coming back? Because like I said, being a native New Yorker, I know you can't just throw a bunch of extra trains on the rail system because that causes congestion.

Lehrer; Let me jump in just for time and get a response to you. Mr. Mayor, are you able to hear Q?

Mayor: Yeah. And I think it's a great question. And I appreciate it very much. First of all, we're going to be giving out free masks everywhere. And we have been, but even more. This is true beyond the question of school opening. It is something we've done in the MTA. We need to redouble at. We'll be doing it in schools, absolutely free masks for all kids who need them, as many as they need. I would remind you that, you know, a single masks can last for days. It's not like you have to change your mask, you know in the morning and put on a new one at night. So long as it hasn't been in any way altered

Lehrer: But wait, isn’t would you disagree with – I’m sorry I know we have a delay on the line. I wanted to follow up on what you just said on masks. Isn't it true that once you're out in public with a mask, you have to consider it contaminated and then wash it or use another one?

Mayor: No, that's not been the standard. The fact is you can, you know, if a masks gets wet, if a mask gets torn. If a mask gets old, I mean there are reasons to get rid of a mask. Not that it's inherently -- no, not at all. We, and I've been talking to doctors about this from the beginning. I've never heard anyone say a single use, disqualifies a mask. We're going to keep however, providing them for free constantly. Every school is going to have plenty, in different sizes for different ages of kids. So, I think it's a very fair point that we have to do extensive, extensive efforts to constantly – not to enforce, just to educate and provide them for free.

Lehrer: Q, thank you for your call. And when I saw that the caller’s name was Q, I said, maybe this is Q from Q Anon. So, I'm really glad that it wasn't Q from Q Anon, since that person doesn't really exist. Sharon, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Sharon.

Question: Hi. I have two questions. The first is, and Brian, I'm hoping you'll help me pin the Mayor down on a sort of yes, no, on this. Does he foresee any reasonable possibility of a return to indoor dining this year in the city? And my second question is now that gym re-openings have been put up to the local authorities, do we – when can I expect that? And I would like to just share that I'm a member of the JCC in Manhattan, and a lot of older people rely on this for very important rehab. And right now, I am paying $125 a week that I cannot afford on my credit card for physical therapy to rehab two injuries that I could be doing with the proper machines myself at the JCC. So those are my two questions.

Mayor: So, the State and the City, both given what we're seeing on the health front, we're very careful, cautious about reopening gyms. But the State created the order. We're following the order. Gyms will start to reopen September 2nd. There'll be limits on the number of people and limits on the kind of activities. But the reopening September 2nd. Indoor dining, there's not a plan right now. There's not a context for indoor dining. We're never saying it's impossible. But we do not, based on what we've seen around the world, we do not have a plan for reopening indoor dining in the near term. And in fact, the example that Dr. Jay Varma, my senior health advisor gave to the media this week, Hong Kong started to have a resurgence directly related to indoor dining and bars. And have to close them down. We know what an unfortunate nexus they've been for resurgences. We’ve seen it in Europe lately as well. We're just not doing it now. We'll keep looking, but we're not doing it now. We're going to focus on outdoor and obviously, you know, take out delivery. Those options will keep going, but not now for indoor.

Lehrer: Did you get the yes or no question answered the way you wanted to Sharon?

Question: Yeah, it sounds like it's not going to happen until something really changes with the virus. I'm very sad for the hundred thousand people who rely on it for their income.

Lehrer: Sharon, thank you very much. The restaurant owners, Mr. Mayor say, if you can open –well, I heard, I don't want to put words in people's mouth. So, I heard somebody say on their behalf if you can open schools and we have a one quarter of one percent positivity rate in the city now, then you should be able to let the restaurateurs open with the, you know, limited percentage indoor dining. And that they could do that safely. You want to give them one more response?

Mayor: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I asked the health experts this constantly. Please, anyone who feels this and cares about the health and safety of New Yorkers. And obviously we do care about the huge number of people that work in the restaurant industry. I want them back to work. That's why – look, we moved outdoor dining, had never been done before. We've gotten almost a hundred thousand people back to work. We're going to do it again next year. That's what we could do. And that's been safe, but indoor dining, look right now at what's happening in Hong Kong. Look right now, what's happening in Europe. Unfortunately, it's proof positive that a lot of the problem comes from going back to the normal reality we knew with indoor dining. I wish it wasn't true. It just is true. And they, in the end, there's a night and day reality between say a school and indoor dining schools. Schools we are obligated to provide our kids an education. And we can't do that effectively without having them have some in-person instruction. And we do have the context to do it. And we can make sure everyone's wearing a mask. And we have tons of safety precautions that we run as the public sector and we control. We don't control what happens inside a restaurant or a bar at every hour. We know people don't wear masks in restaurants and bars, by definition, you're eating and drinking. You don't wear a mask. The chance of transmission goes up greatly. I wish it wasn't true, Brian. I'm not happy about it, but it's just the truth. And New Yorkers actually prefer the blunt truth.

Lehrer: As we run out of time for this week we have so many questions coming in and so many of them are in on education. So, let me combine two questions that I have and get one last response for you on this. One parent writes why not, and I'm going to paraphrase a longer question. Why not go remote for the first semester and save up money to be able to test every student and every staff member before they go back into the schools for the next semester like Los Angeles is doing? And the other question is what about the neighborhoods with positivity rates that are above five percent like Sunset Park?

Mayor: First of all, Sunset Park is not above five percent right now. The latest testing as we do more and more, we're getting a better picture. It's 3.5 percent now and declining. That looks like that was a very limited problem and limited to certain households. So, I'm pleased to say we're seeing real progress there. Los Angeles, from what we're seeing, that was a very big announcement without a lot of specifics behind it. There does not appear to be an actual, tangible plan in Los Angeles to actually test the kids and the staff in real time. And they're working with an all remote system. That sounds like a very vague, if not noble vision there. We are talking to the unions right now about the amount of testing that we can provide and when. And I want it to be as much as we possibly can do. And we have a huge amount of testing available. We have over 200 test sites. We're providing everyone a test for free. Parents, students, teachers right now. So, we actually do have, it's not a matter of cost in the first instance. We have the capacity to test a lot of people and do it on an ongoing basis. And we're working with the union right now to figure out the best way to do that. So, no, we do not need to go remote in order do testing. We can be doing testing in a lot of ways, right this minute and in an ongoing way.

Lehrer: Thanks as always, Mr. Mayor. There's never been a tougher time in my memory to be Mayor of New York. Talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you.

2020-08-24 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. You know, throughout this fight against COVID-19, over these months, New York City has proven what can happen, what people can do when they get together and show the strengths, show the discipline, show the resiliency for which New York City's been famous for a long time, and is once again famous throughout this country for what people have done here. But one of the things that has worked is not only relying on the strength of New Yorkers, but looking at what's happening around the world and learning lessons, looking at what works and emulating it – in many cases, going even farther. We have leaned on science. We've leaned on data. We've leaned on research. We believe those things matter here in New York City, and that's been the basis of our strategy and it's worked. And it is that willingness to learn, to learn from both the mistakes and the smart moves made elsewhere – that has been an underpinning of everything that we've done here. And to be creative, to recognize that we can make adjustments, we can change course when it makes sense and be willing to try things that we think will move us forward. You're going to see that creativity and that ability to constantly make adjustments and improvements. As we approach the beginning of our school year.

Now, I want to talk about the approach we've taken and the focus on health and safety. Look, I want to speak not only as your mayor, but as a parent. I'm going to speak to my fellow parents – the focus has been on health and safety. This is what we think about every single day. This is what we work on every single day. I know the Chancellor feels that just as deeply as I do. And, obviously, we want to protect our educators and our staff as well. We have the strictest, safest approach to school reopening anywhere in the country. We have held the highest standards. And we've looked all over the world. In fact, the standards for reopening New York City public schools are amongst the strongest in the entire world. I'm going to go into some of the details today so that you get that perspective on just how much we have done, just how far we're going to make sure that our schools are safe.

Now, we've looked at what has worked in a variety of countries, and we've created a new gold standard here in New York City, literally taking the best ideas from each country in the world and combining them into one strategy for safety and health for all. So, let's give you a sense of some of what we've seen around the world and how New York City matches up.

First of all, I made clear, we have a three-percent test threshold – in other words, if more than three percent of New Yorkers are testing positive over a seven-day period, we don't open schools; or, schools that are already in session, we closed the schools if we reached that level. Now, we've been nowhere near that three percent threshold for months now, and that's great news. But I want you to understand, that three percent threshold is the toughest in the world. The World Health Organization advises a five percent threshold, as does the State of New York. We've gone even farther with three percent as our standard. Masks – we're requiring masks, face coverings for all adults, all children in the school building – that is one of the strictest standards in the world, stricter than the World Health Organization; the same standard held in Japan and South Korea. With testing, we've made it available for free for all New Yorkers. We've encouraged all school staff, all educators to get that free testing and students as well. That free testing being available and encouraged for all surpasses most nations in Europe. We have a fully developed contact tracing system for our schools, all ready, in place, and ready to go – a vast contact tracing apparatus directly focused on our schools, that matches some of the best practices we've seen in Japan and Germany. And today, we're going to be talking about something really wonderful, a new option for outdoor learning, which matches the success we've seen in Italy, Denmark and Norway. When you take all these pieces together, there's no place that's combining these elements as strongly as we are. And that's why we believe we have one of the best standards in the entire world to make sure everyone is safe.

Now, let's talk about something that is a great example of the creativity and the adjustments we want to make. And I want to say, parents have asked about it, educators have asked about it – what can we do outdoors? So, today, we announce a new outdoor learning plan – a new outdoor learning plan that's going to open up a lot of wonderful possibilities for our kids and for our educators. So, we heard those voices that said, could we do something different under these circumstances? The answer is yes. And this will apply to our public schools, our charter schools, private religious schools, learning bridge schools, you name it – one standard for all. Now, we know outdoors is one of the things that we know works. Being outdoors – it’s great to be outdoors, in general, but we also know that the disease doesn't spread the same outdoors. We've seen that over and over. So, we want to give schools the option to do as much outdoors as they can. And, look, today – starting today, we empower our principals to determine the maximum amount they can do outdoors. It's up to them to figure out how to use school yards and anything on school property that's outdoors, but we're going to go farther. The Department of Education is going to work with principals to open up more space if that's what they want, if that's what they think will work for their school community. In certain cases, we can close off streets for a period of time. In certain cases, we can make space available in local parks. It really depends on the circumstance of each school. But one thing we know for sure, we're going to focus on the 27 neighborhoods, hardest hit by COVID-19. We're going to prioritize, making sure that they get options for outdoor space. Those neighborhoods have suffered so much. We owe it to them to make sure they get every possible advantage, going forward. So, they'll be the first priority for outdoor space. We're also going to focus on schools that don't happen to have their own outdoor space and look for good options for them.

So, we heard the voices of folks who called for this change. We're acting on it, we're acting on it quickly. Look, I'll remind everyone. We never know what the weather brings and that's why outdoor learning – I've said it before – is not a perfect solution and it won't work every day, but it will certainly add a lot of flexibility to what we're doing and a great alternative for many schools. And here to talk about this new outdoor learning plan and someone who's shown creativity, flexibility, persistence throughout – our Chancellor Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This is exciting. You and I both know how seriously we take the safety of all of our students and our staff and the scorecard that you spoke about really illuminates that commitment that we have to the health and safety of all our students and our employees. As we get closer to reopening, we continue to implement our plans, all the while, keeping health and safety front and center. I'm excited about outdoor learning as a supplement to the school day. Before COVID, as a teacher and a school leader, I always knew how important it was for my scholars to get some time outdoors. And now, in partnership with our sister agencies, that will be possible for more schools, even if a school doesn't have a yard. Now, this is really important – in partnership with our sister agencies. We all wear the same uniform in service of the citizens of New York City. So, we will work closely to make sure that we facilitate and make this as non-bureaucratic as possible. Not only do we know that the virus spreads less easily outdoors, but we know our students need time to run and play and explore and create – and that happens outdoors. We will be able to maintain the vibrancy and the richness of the school and school experience while maintaining physical distancing thanks to this initiative of outdoor learning. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Chancellor. And Chancellor, I liked everything you said. I particularly like the part about not being bureaucratic. And this Chancellor's someone who cuts through the bureaucracy and makes things happen all the time. So, a message to all principals – if you want to do some good, creative things, outdoor learning, you're going to get fast support from the Department of Education and City agencies to make that happen right away. And again, want everyone to look at this great global scorecard we put together, give you a sense of how New York City has taken the best ideas from around the world, putting them together so that we can have the safest and healthiest schools for our kids, starting next month.

Now, we have been able to keep moving forward in this city. We're talking about schools and all the areas of our economy that have been opening up. We're talking about a lot of progress. Why? Because we've been able to beat back to the disease. We've been able to keep that rate of infection below three percent consistently since June, because of your hard work. This is everybody in it together and it has had a huge impact. And I want to emphasize, when we talk about countries around the world, very few countries had the kind of low infection rate New York City has now when they reopened their schools. Very few had this low a level of transmission of disease, but they still successfully reopened their schools. So, that's something that we can take some inspiration from, and obviously know that we have to stick with what's working and what we're doing so well – the wearing masks, which has proven to be incredibly helpful and effective, observing the social distancing, and, of course, regularly getting tested.

Now, here's something real interesting, and it's going to be a little curve ball. If you know me and how I feel about the sport – I love baseball. You're going to see baseball and testing come together here, because a team that sometimes I've had some differences with because I grew up rooting for another team – well, today I'm a Yankees fan, because they're doing something great to help us fight COVID-19. And I really want to thank the entire Yankees organization for stepping up. The Yankees have offered to get front and center and the effort to encourage people to get tested. And we're going to show you a public service announcement, just a moment, but what's great is there will be a special promotion for Get Tested Tuesday – again, every week we want to encourage people haven't gotten tested, or haven't been tested a long time, get out there and get tested. It's free. It's easy. It's quick. Get tested Tuesday is the day to do it. And on this Tuesday, tomorrow, August 25th, there's a special Yankees gear giveaway. The first 4,000 people who get tested at Health + Hospitals sites at our public hospital and clinic sites. The first 4,000 we'll get free Yankees gear. Let's show you about this – what this great promotion is all about –

[Yankees video plays in background]

Alright. A great message from the Yankees. I want to thank everyone at the Yankees who participated in that video. And I have a line here that was written for me. It's one of the cheesiest lines you've heard in a long time, but together – it says here – now, because of the coronavirus, we are all on the same team. So, whether you're a Mets fan, a Yankees fan, or a fan of another team, get out there and get tested on Get Tested Tuesday.

All right, let's go over our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients – today's report, 66, with a confirmed positivity rate of just a 5.8 percent. Number two, new reported cases, seven-day average, threshold 550 cases – today's report, 239. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold percent – today's report, 2.05 percent. Okay, let me do a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma. First up, we're going to have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you today?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How was your weekend?

Question: Oh, very good. Thank you. Thank you. So, my question – my first question regarding your school announcement on the outdoor activity, what's the security? How will this be secured? Will it be NYPD? School safety agents? How will that be handled and will there be limitations on where this can take place in order for them to be – to have security?

Mayor: Yeah. Great question, Juliette. I'll start and the Chancellor can add. Juliet, first of all, it's up to age principal and, you know, they work closely with our whole school community to determine what they want to do. In some cases, they may say, you know what, we're good with just what we have in the school – we have a courtyard, we have a school yard, we can work with that. If they want to close off a street, for example, during part of the school day, that will depend of course, on what kind of streets are around them, if they're the kind of streets that can be closed off – for example – they're not a bus route, for example. In that case, it will be working with department transportation. If there's some support needed, of course, school safety is always there. If NYPD is needed at times, but I don't think typically it will be NYPD. I think it will be DOT and school safety, working out what makes sense. And Parks – if they choose an area in a park, of course, Parks Department will work with them as well.

Chancellor Carranza: All I would add, Mr. Mayor, is that part of why there's a process for schools to submit is that we have our sister agencies, some of whom you've already mentioned DOT, NYPD, DSNY, FDNY, Parks – all of us working together to make sure that when the plan is submitted, that all of those details are accounted for, because, first and foremost, we want to make sure that our students and staff are safe and secure. But we also are encouraging you know, our schools to think of different kinds of places. You mentioned public parks, adjacent streets, all of those are fair. So, we look forward to receiving those requests.

Moderator: Next up, we have Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Good morning, Mr. Mayor and Chancellor, I wanted to ask regarding the outdoor learning plan, is the City going to devote any funding to this? And I guess what I'm wondering is how will you make sure that schools with wealthy PTAs that can buy tents and supplies and what have you won't get an unfair advantage here? Thanks.

Mayor: Great question, Shant. I appreciate that a lot, because this is an area that we thought about and I’m going to turn to the Chancellor with simply this introduction, that one, a lot of what you'd need to do, we really won't cost much at all, can be done pretty easily right around the school itself. But if there are additional costs we're going to be supportive in every way we can, but we welcome PTAs that want to chip in. But we want to make sure it's done fairly. So Chancellor, why don't you talk about that vision?

Chancellor Carranza: So, the interagency, sister agency working group that I've referenced now, several times is critical to this. We're leveraging each other's resources to be able to approve the plans and then support schools that make this decision. But I really appreciate the question that's predicated on equity. We do know already that there are PTAs that have been fundraising for tents and other kinds of supplies for their schools. Look, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. If there's any time for all of us to come together and help each other, this is the time. So I'm asking that if a PTA has done their fundraising and they've raised more than enough for their school let's identify another school that doesn't have that fundraising capacity. Let's help them out too. Because they are our students as well. And if you don't know what schools those are, we'd be happy in the Department of Education to help identify. We've already identified some of the spots in our city that had been most impacted by the coronavirus. So again, we have lots of data to help with that. But I'm encouraging PTAs, let's help each other. Let's help a sister school as you do what you're doing for your school as well.

Mayor: Go ahead, Shant.

Question: Yeah, I was wondering if when you said, you know, well, if there are additional costs, we'll be supportive any way we can. Can you put a dollar amount, even if it's just an estimate on that? And also, can you and Chancellor Carranza speak to the timing? I mean the school year is obviously starting next month. How will principals and the DOE have enough time, you know, to figure out that they want to participate, let alone take all the steps necessary to set up things outdoors, if needed?

Mayor: Shant, on the first point again, I don't think the costs are particularly extensive. If you're talking about and schools have done this for a variety of needs previously. Sometimes they close off in adjacent street, it’s not an unheard of thing. It's pretty simple. And obviously schools use nearby parks for different field trips and all. Whatever it takes in terms of personnel helping them out, I think we can do that in a smart way. But in terms of timing again, principals have a lot of experience with different types of outdoor activities. This is not something mysterious to them. They're very resourceful. I think they'll be able to do a lot and some of it for the very beginning of school, some of it they might phase in as they go along. Chancellor?

Chancellor Carranza: I would only add sir, that principals have already been looking to identify outdoor space. It was part of their initial survey of their schools with the square footage. So many principals have already identified space that they're using. This just opens many more opportunities and options for school communities as well. What's important is that we aim to have -- we would like principals to submit their requests by Friday, August 28th. All of those requests that are submitted by Friday, August 28th, we will have decisions back to them by September 4th, Friday, September 4th. Which is a one week turn around. It'll probably be much quicker than that. And again, what we're really looking for is health and safety to make sure they're feasible plans that can be implemented. And we'll keep students and staff safe.

Moderator: Next up we have Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. This outdoor education plan seems really intriguing, but it is another thing for schools to plan for. So, kind of similar to Shant’s question, you know, there are principals who've come out in recent days saying they're not ready and it's about three weeks from the start of school. And parents really need the plan. Is there any chance there's going to be a delay and do you see a benefit in letting parents know sooner rather than later, if school is going to be pushed back?

Mayor: Brigid right now, you know, we've been really clear about our start date. It's the one that's been on the calendar for a long time. We are doing a lot of work to get ready and, you know, and the ramp up to any school year, a lot happens in the final weeks. This time the work has been happening over months. So, I feel confident that principals are doing a great job. We expect to give them a lot more information in the next few days to fill in the blanks and get moving. We expect schools be communicating with their parents throughout this week in terms of the schedules. So, I think the pieces are coming together. Go ahead.

Question: And Mr. Mayor, you've appeared with several of your top commissioners during this crisis and deputy mayors, but we haven't seen any of First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan. And I was just wondering where he is?

Mayor: He's about 15 feet away right now in his office. We could get him to come in and wave. Dean Fuleihan has been doing absolutely outstanding work. And as you know, Brigid, like so many First Deputy Mayors, the work they do is first and foremost directed within the administration and working with all the agencies. But Dean has really been leading so much of the work with the Chancellor to get ready for school. And he has been involved multiple hours per day on that in addition to many other things he does on budget and policing, some of the other issues. So, we'll be happy to bring him out for a guest appearance, but he is doing a hell of a lot of good work as we speak.

Moderator: Next up we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, everybody. My question is for – my first question is for Chancellor Carranza. Which percentage of the public schools here in the city are ready for students and staff to enter from a ventilation and air quality standpoint? I know you said those details were coming, but I was curious if you have them.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So, we're still working through those details. They're active. I would say inspections that are happening. So we're compiling all of that data. Obviously, when you think about how many windows there are in 1,800 schools you're talking hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of windows. So, to make that comprehensible, put it in one place and as a Mayor has mentioned, we want to make sure that schools also have a school by school report as well. So that will be forthcoming very quickly. What I can say is that as I've visited schools, I'm very impressed with the work that our custodial engineers are doing, that our teachers are doing. There are teachers already in setting up classrooms. So there's a lot of work that's happening on the ground.

Moderator: Next up we have Steve from Westwood One News.

Mayor: Did we have a problem the other day with Steve as well? Steve, we got to get you some better technology brother.

Moderator: We're having some technical difficulties. We'll go back to Steve. We're now going to go to Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you. Good morning.

Mayor: Hey, how are you doing?

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How's it going?

Question: Good. How are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: I want to ask about this plan that you're rolling out today. It sounds like you spent the first portion of the announcement, reassuring teachers and students and parents about how good the standards are for going back to school here in New York. But it also sounds like now you are looking once again to principals to come up with yet another plan on their own with just weeks to go before schools actually open up. When does the City actually step in and say, this is how we're going to do it, this is how we're going to pay for it, this is what it's going to look like - instead of looking back to the educators for them to set it up themselves?

Mayor: Well, I respect the question, but I would argue and I'm going to let a former principal speak here, I don't think principals see it that way. I, again, we respect labor unions and the advocacy they provide for their members. But I've talked to a lot of principals directly. I know the Chancellor talks to principals all the time. They are the captains of their ship and they want to make these decisions, I assure you. It's not a burden to be given more options. We've said we'll support them in it. Some principals may have a very expansive vision of outdoors. Some may not. It's really their decision. We're not going to mandate it to them, and as we've said, they have to have a fall back anyway, because the weather is always the x factor. Richard?

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Gloria, I would just remind everyone what I said earlier that as principals have been submitting their building utilization plans there are a number of principals that have already identified outdoor learning is one of those options. They haven't been denied that. This gives principals more options as principals are talking to and meeting with their school communities. I received many emails from principals that have said my community would like to know if we can shut this street down or if we could set up tents in the park, all of that has gone into really supporting what principals have been asking us for. So, it's not like no one has thought about this and surprise, now you can have outdoor learning. Principals have been asking for this. Now that being said, I think I don't want to bury the lead here. What's really important about this announcement is that we, our sister agencies and the Department of Education are taking on the bureaucracy to streamline the approval process. That I think if you ask anybody, especially a principal will say, “hey, if you can get all of the obstacles out of my way, I have a good idea, my community supports that idea, just get the obstacles out of my way,” I think they would tell you that is a huge benefit, not an imposition on their time.

Moderator: Next up we have Yoav from The City – sorry, continue your second question.

Mayor: Sorry about that, Gloria, go ahead.

Question: Thank you. I want to ask about another part of the overall school plan that we haven't gotten an update on yet, and that is childcare. Obviously, with parents needing to go back to work, trying to decide if they, their children can do in-school instruction or if they have to go fully remote, what is the status of that plan? What is the status of how many seats will be available and when can parents expect to hear from the city as they try to get ready for the school year?

Mayor: Yeah, we're going to have more to say in just the next couple of days on a childcare. Status is still a hundred thousand seats will be available for free. I want to say that again, a hundred thousand childcare seats for free. The fact is this week, you're going to see families getting their schedules for their kids, and that's going to tell families, obviously the last piece information they need to figure out what they need in terms of childcare. I would remind you, and it's a sad reality, Gloria, a lot of folks are at home, whether they want to or not. There's a lot of folks at home because tragically they're unemployed. There's a lot of folks at home because their workplaces are doing all their work remotely, but there's clearly parents who absolutely need that childcare. So our goal is to make sure it is prioritized for the families that need it the most, the folks who do have to go into work, are not working remotely, and really need that support. We'll be talking about that application process in the next few days.

Moderator: Now we'll go to Yoav from The City.

Mayor: [Inaudible]

Moderator: We’re going to go to –

Question: Hi, good morning.

Mayor: Go ahead, hey Yoav.

Question: Okay. Thank you. I want to ask about some of the industries that feel like they're in a state of limbo right now, because there's no timeline, the City is giving them no timeline for when they can reopen, and the City has set no metrics to meet, you know, that would trigger these industries to reopen. This includes indoor dining at restaurants, dance and yoga studios and a few other sectors, and I guess I'm just wondering, you know, for these small business owners who are kind of hanging on by a thread here, what can you do to give them any sense of when and how they can reopen because they can't continue like this indefinitely and they've been given no timeline for when they can reopen?

Mayor: Look, obviously the most important thing to say off is I really do feel for them, and I've never for a moment felt anything but sympathy that these folks have built these businesses, often family businesses, that took immense hard work are suffering so much right now. That's why, you know, from the very beginning, the City and State, and we've talked about the dining establishments, we made sure that takeout and delivery kept going. We came up with the plan for outdoor dining and threw a lot into it to make it work and create tremendous flexibility. We're going to start that again next year. So they can count on that. But you know, Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Varma are both here, they will tell you that unfortunately, indoor dining, bars, restaurants, nightclubs have been the nexus for so many of the problems around the world, including some of the resurgence that you're seeing in Europe and in Hong Kong right now.

So we don't have a specific timeline because there's such sensitivity around that sector. We're going to keep looking. We're going to keep looking at what it would take to feel that we could do that again. And I'm going to keep hoping and praying that the vaccine comes real soon, and hopefully that's a matter of months, but we don't have a sharp, clear line yet, Yoav, because of the challenges that come with that industry, we'll look at the dance and yoga again. But everything we're looking at is with the perspective of health and safety first and keeping our infection rate low.

Moderator: For our last question, we're going to go back to Steve from Westwood One News.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. I hope you can hear me now.

Mayor: How are you doing Steve?

Question: I'm doing well, and that's as a native New Yorker. I want to say I've showed that perseverance pays off and I hope people take that to heart.

Mayor: You're an example to us all, Steve.

Question: Thank you very much. I do want to revisit a topic that has been touched upon here today and in the last few days in your briefings, you know, there's, so-called “Exodus of New Yorkers” and that's specifically upper middle-class New Yorkers, and these record number of apartment vacancies around the city. You know, the other day you said that people will always want to be in New York, but the folks who are leaving are taking a significant amount of wealth with them at a time when New York needs every penny of tax revenue and consumer dollars, and those folks seem to be reacting to this idea that New York is in a death spiral and they say the things that normally keep them here no longer available to them, so why should they stay? I guess what I want to ask you is what's your plan to stem this tide, to appeal to New Yorkers this sense of civic responsibility, to take ownership of their neighborhoods, because you know, complaining louder about weeds not getting cut and trash piling up, isn't going to change the reality of the fiscal situation in the city?

Mayor: Steve, look, I will harken to a conversation I had just yesterday with a someone who's been very successful in real estate and is a proud New Yorker. And, you know, what he said to me was unquestionably, the City is coming back and anyone doesn't understand that isn't paying a lot of attention, that we have such strengths that, you know, the vast majority of people who were here in February are still here. Relatively few people went anywhere. A lot of those people will be back. Some people may decide that they want to go somewhere else for a period of time, and as the situation in New York City improves, they'll come back. Some people may not, and I guarantee you there'll be replaced by others who bring a lot of creativity and talent. People have wanted to come to New York City for generations. That's not changing.

So, I don't understand honestly, how any New Yorker can participate in the discussion about these fears about the future of New York City. I don't mind having fear. I don't mind having questions, but if you don't think New York City is coming back, then you don't know New York City. And it's just to me really counterproductive when people talk about what's wrong when there are so many things right, including the fact that this city is now the envy of the nation in the way it fought back from this disease, and I think it's not accidental. It's about who New Yorkers are and how strong the people of this city are. So, of course, we'll be back. If folks miss the theater, if they miss, you know, the indoor dining, those things will be back, they'll be back next year at some point, I think that is overwhelmingly the case.

So, I think we're going to make a strong comeback. I think there'll be people who see opportunity that in a new reality, they're going to build something. There's going to be people who come in and say, I want to be part of the rebuilding. So, I have a lot of confidence in the future of this city. Go ahead, Steve.

Question: Yeah, and to follow up on that, I think anyone who has ever written New York's obituary has been proven wrong in the long-term – and there've been many people who've done that over the decades, but you know, I'm seeing a lot of City Council members, for instance, now going to their constituents and saying, listen, it's going to be a rough road ahead for a long time, we need to take ownership of our community and they're sponsoring park cleanups and asking businesses to take ownership of their curbs and clean the curbs and that sort of thing. I'm just wondering, you know, where's that messaging from the city as a whole? I know you've got a lot on your plate right now, nobody denies that. But I think, you know, to draw upon that strength that New Yorkers have, which has always – you know, we can persevere, we've come back from so much adversity from the 70s on through today, time after time. I’m just wondering what's the plan to get New Yorkers, to take ownership of their neighborhoods and fill the void where the City agencies aren't able to provide the services that they were able to prior to coronavirus.

Mayor: Well, I think that's a really good point, Steve. I was actually out in Southeast Queens on Saturday and talked to the Council Member there, Daneek Miller, who in fact had just come from a neighborhood cleanup, he talked about exactly what you're talking about, how many neighborhood people are coming forward, they understand it's a tough time, they're pitching in. So, absolutely, we're seeing this all over the city, just like in the beginning of this crisis, we saw people come out in droves to help our healthcare heroes, to applaud them, to bring them food –New Yorkers do this. I think you're right, that the more we can make it a call to arms and a message the better off we'll be, and you're also right, I’ve got a lot on my plate. So I think what's fair to say is these last months, the focus has been on beating back this disease and getting ready for school and continuing to reopen the economy.

I think when we get into the fall, that's exactly the right time to really talk about the future of the city, the bigger vision for our economy and for our people, the bigger vision of how people show that kind of ownership and what we need to do – what everyone needs to do to bring the city back. So you are right, and I'd say the timing is that's something that you're going to start to see as early as September.

Everybody, what a good segue to conclusion here to say we know. We know that New Yorkers are undaunted. I really appreciate what Steve said about the folks who have written the obituary of New York City in the past, they’ve been proven wrong many time, they'll be proven wrong again. New Yorkers don't give up, and as we get ready for the fall, as we get ready to open our schools up and embrace our children after everything they've been through, we remember why we do what we do because we have a love in this city. There's a compassion in this city. There's a caring for each other, and particularly for our kids, and we are going to do a lot of hard work to help our children move forward. And I said this a long time ago, when we started Pre-K for All, kids can tell, kids are really perceptive – they can tell when you care about them; they can tell when you're going the extra mile for them; they can tell when you're investing something in them. We are going to invest in our children this fall and our future. And I'll finish with the simple, beautiful message that Richard and I heard a few days ago in Crown Heights. Thank you again to Maya who said this, when I asked her at – one of the people who works in the school office in the school we visited – and I said, why have you worked all summer, you gave up your whole summer to get the school ready? And she looked at me calmly and she said, our families are worth it. And that's what we feel about all the families and children in New York City, and that's why we will be ready. Thank you so much, everybody.

2020-08-25 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. You know, as you go around New York City lately, you know, there's more and more activity. We're beginning to get up some real momentum as we head into the fall. We've got a lot to do, long way to go, but, all over the city, people are starting to go back to work, people getting ready for the fall and New York City public schools are getting ready to start soon and to be ready to serve our children. So, we're going to talk about all of this and another very important piece, which is something everyone is anticipating, the entire nation anticipating an election that will say so much about our future – only 70 days away now.

But first, I want to talk about preparations for the new school year. And so much effort is going into getting our schools ready. I really want to emphasize to everyone the work that's been done now for weeks and months to prepare our schools for our children and all the hardworking folks who do this work. I think it's so important to appreciate the folks who do custodial services and the folks who run our school buildings, our administrators, our educators, our food service workers, you name it – everyone's getting ready for the school year with great intensity. Now, the most important thing is the health and safety of our school community. We think every single day about what we need to do to keep our school community safe throughout. And when we think about what is working around the world, and we talked about this yesterday, taking the best practices from around the world, combining them into an approach that is New York City's own that's one of the very most rigorous in the entire world. Now, yesterday, we talked about outdoor learning and a very straightforward plan to facilitate outdoor learning – again, the choice of each principal and what works for their school community. But we want to make it easy if a principal wants to go in that direction. And, of course, outdoors is wonderful in every sense, kids have always loved being outdoors and learning outdoors. It's great in terms of health and safety as well. But let's talk about where most learning will occur in the school building, and that of course is indoors. And then when you talk about indoors, then you talk about ventilation and how important it is to get this piece of the equation right. Then, a lot of questions about what is being done to make sure ventilation is strong and high-quality for our kids, for our school community, and that's what we want to talk about today.

Today, we're announcing School Ventilation Action Teams. So, we're marshaling the resources not only of the Department of Education and the School Construction Authority, but other agencies as well coming together to make sure that every school is ready, the ventilation systems are working, that windows are open, even if they weren't open in the past, because there's nothing as powerful as fresh air when it comes to fighting this virus. The School Ventilation Action Teams will be part of a massive cross-agency initiative to make sure every school is ready and every school is safe. And I want to thank – as I was thanking the folks in every school community, let me also thank the School Construction Authority for the incredible work they do, and the professional engineers that they hire and bring in who will be part of this effort. They're already out in the field, checking – and I want to be clear about this – not just every school, every classroom. Professional engineers and other experts, looking at every classroom, going through each one with the same checklist to make sure they're ready. This is what it takes to guarantee that our schools will be safe and we will make sure every school is fully inspected, every classroom is fully inspected, and we're going to hold a high standard. And if anything our engineers look at and our inspectors look at they don't like, work will be done to fix it. So, that's the effort that's going on right now with a variety of agencies working together in common cause. And I want to thank all of the agencies involved because they understand nothing's more precious than protecting our children and our school communities. And here to tell you more about this important new effort is our Chancellor Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, we have always said, and we hold ourselves to this word, the health and safety of our school communities is our number-one priority. We are proud of the work that has already been done all summer to advance this priority. Now, in addition to our own Department of Education safety checks, every single space will also be inspected by the School Ventilation Action Team. Each action team is made up of independent ventilation experts and professional licensed engineers that are contracted by the School Construction Authority to walk through each and every room where learning will happen. FDNY, Department of Buildings, and our hardworking DOE custodial engineers will also continue to contribute to inspecting and walking through each space to make sure that it's ready for use on day-one. As you have said, Mr. Mayor, each classroom in our schools must pass a checklist with important details like room size and occupancy to ensure proper social distancing, windows and whether they can open, and if we have more work to do on making sure they can open, an examination of supply fans and exhaust fans. Each action team will give us their honest, professional opinion, and they will report back to the Department of Education, which spaces have a clean bill of health and which have issues that must be addressed. The DOE will take those findings and do one of three things. Number one, if room is fine and ready to go, we've been at work on ventilation all summer, we expect this to be by and large the most prevalent result of these inspections. Number two, the room needs some repairs or adjustments, we will make all the necessary changes to ensure sufficient ventilation in that room before the first day of school. Or, number three, take the room offline until repairs can be made. Again, we're in motion already, ready to make good on these promises. We have purchased over 10,000 portable air filters for nurses’ offices, isolation rooms and any rooms that these inspections reveal need additional circulation. And I repeat, if inspections find that entire school or particular rooms do not have adequate ventilation, then we will not allow anyone to use those spaces until they are made safe. These inspections started this morning and they will be completed by next week, September 1st. We will begin pup posting the results later this week and we will have all results online by September 4th, well in advance of the first day of school.

All students or staff will be teaching and learning in safe spaces with proper ventilation. That is our promise to you. The science is clear – well, ventilated buildings are safer buildings and these actions – and these actions and these action teams will help us make that happen. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. Look, everyone, just an extraordinary effort underway on so many fronts. Again, yesterday, we told you about the standards that we're holding for New York City public schools are the highest in the world in terms of health and safety. And these action teams are going to make sure that every room is looked at carefully. And again, not just Department of Education and our custodial staff – School, Construction Authority, Fire Department, Buildings Department, we're getting a great assist from the Health Department as well. Everybody pitching in, in common cause, to make sure our school communities are safe. So, thank you, Chancellor, to you and your team for this extraordinary effort.

Now, before I go to our daily indicators, I just want to spend a moment on something that's getting a lot of attention lately. A lot of people are weighing in, a lot of people are offering their opinions, and it's something that we care about deeply, all of us – the future of this city we love. And it's interesting, I've talked to so many New Yorkers, what they think is going to happen in the years ahead. And so many New Yorkers that I've talked to believe in this place. A lot of them have been through tough times before and are ready to keep fighting for New York City. There was a particular opinion piece put out recently by a hedge fund manager. And if you ever want to see an example of a tale of two cities, what I'm about to tell you is that a hedge fund manager who has presented a very, very dire image of the future in New York City and says he doesn't want to be a part of it. Well, I think a lot of people looked at that and were really troubled by it. And one person decided to weigh in and I'm really glad he did. I want to thank him. You may have seen this piece yesterday in the New York Times – Jerry Seinfeld, and the title of what he wrote is ‘So You Think New York is Dead?’ and then right below it says, it's not. I also want to give the Times credit for understatement – it says by Jerry Seinfeld, and then underneath says, Mr. Seinfeld is a comedian. I think that understates the reality – he’s one of the great comedians of our time, but he's someone who loves New York City as well. And I want to take a moment to thank Jerry, because this is what a true New Yorker does, stands and fights and works to make this place better, no matter what's thrown at us. And I just want to give you two points from what he wrote, because I think it's powerful. He says – and this is in response again to this hedge fund manager who wants to leave us – Jerry Seinfeld says, we're going to keep going with New York City, if that's all right with you; and it will sure as hell be back, because of all the real tough New Yorkers who unlike you, loved it and understood it stayed and rebuilt it well. That's the vast majority of all of you out there because that's what we've seen time and time again. After the crises that this city experienced in the 60’s and 70’s, people stayed, fought, rebuilt. We went through so many challenges after that. Tough times in the 80’s and 90’s. Then we went through 9/11, people fought back. Hurricane Sandy, people fought back. Great Recession, people fought back. New Yorkers, fight back. It's what we do. So to all the people really love this place, to all the real New Yorkers, of course we're coming back. And I believe we'll come back stronger and fairer in many ways. Because we're going to learn from this moment in history and make ourselves even better. That's what New York City does. So thank you, Jerry. Well said, brother.

Now we're going to do some indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold under 200 patients. Today's report, 57 and with a confirmed positive rate of just 8.77 percent. Number two, new reported cases, seven day average, threshold 550 cases, today's report 234. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19 threshold, five percent. Today's report 1.42 percent. Again, why are we at 1.42 percent? Because of New Yorkers, because of something no other place has, New Yorkers who have fought back and really been tough in this crisis.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q and A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Chancellor Carranza, School Construction Authority Commissioner Grillo, Senior Advisor and General Counsel for Democracy NYC Laura Wood, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Aundrea from CBS News.

Question: Good morning, everyone. My question is about school opening. Specifically the logistics, first about school nurses. Now it takes six weeks of training before they can work in New York City schools and you still have hundreds of vacancies. How do you do that? And set people up for success with such an important position? Because people are just really questioning the logistics of this whole process.

Mayor: Well, you know, Aundrea I would say, first of all, when you look at what it takes any year to get school up and running, it's a huge logistical undertaking. I really think – I understand why people wouldn't stop to think about it, Aundrea. But every single year, when we begin the school year in New York City, an extraordinary, massive effort is undertaken to get schools ready. And this year it has been much, much deeper. It's been going on for months with a lot of extra components added to ensure safety. So in the past we have not had a nurse in every public school building. Now we will. And as I described a week or two ago, it's because of our colleagues at Health + Hospitals who have stepped up, who are getting those nurses for us, actually footing the bill as well to their great credit. And making sure they are trained and ready working with the Department of Education. So we are in obviously a pandemic. We're doing things in a fast, effective way to be ready. But those nurses will be ready. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. My second question – I don't feel like I got a full answer on my first question, But I have a second question as well. And it's concerning outdoor learning. How is the City expected to evaluate all schools? That's public, charter, private, religious schools. How are they expecting to evaluate the outdoor learning plans and get them up and running with so little time? Especially when you have to interface and coordinate with the DOT, Parks, and Sanitation to make sure the plans are feasible?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start and turn to the Chancellor. Aundrea, this is not a new thing in many ways. I understand why there's been a discussion about it. I know a lot of people have been enthusiastic about the idea. But it's not new. Principals have used outdoor learning in the past on a school by school basis. And I'm thinking back to the elementary school my kids went to. Streets were closed off for all sorts of things. Play streets are an idea that's been out there for a long time and used for a long time. So it's not mysterious to school leaders to think about this option. And when you think about what we're talking about, you got your school yard, your school courtyard it’s the things the principal already controls. You've got the streets next to the school. If they will work, DOT has a long history of knowing how to shut those off if they need to. You got Parks, which again, often coordinates already with schools. This is something everyone's committed too. And I'm convinced we can make it happen. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: I would only add Mr. Mayor, that when schools and school communities submitted their models of what their in-person learning would look like, many of those models use of outdoor space. So there are hundreds of schools that have already had their outdoor space learning models approved. But we have an all hands on deck approach to reviewing and making sure that the safety precautions, the FDNY, NYPD, Department of Transportation, Parks, everybody is all hands on deck to really flatten the bureaucracy to make sure that these plans get approved. And I'm happy to report that since the announcement yesterday, as of this morning we already have 243 schools that have submitted applications for outdoor learning. So there is a real hunger and a real enthusiasm for that. And our commitment again is to turn these around as soon as possible, which some of them will be turned around today.

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Good morning Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good Henry. How are you?

Question: I'm good. I have heard that in some schools, students in class will actually be using the same computerized instruction that kids are simultaneously getting at home. And I'm just wondering, I know you're a public school parent, but do you acknowledge that the experience of going to school under these circumstances is nothing like the experience your children enjoyed when you were a public school parent? There are going to be intermittent classes. They are going to be confined to one room. They're going to be wearing a mask all day. The teacher's constantly going to be on them to get that mask over their nose. They're going to be eating lunch in that room and talking loudly to each other and laughing and eating. And so that if they're infected, that will be a risk –

Mayor: Henry, that doesn’t sound so bad to me, people laughing and eating. I think that sounds pretty good.

Question: – the experience of going to school under these circumstances, pedagogically in terms of learning is nothing like a traditional school. And in light of all this why do you push for this you know, hybrid system so strongly? It's not as if it's the same kind of experience that in class --

Mayor: Yeah. Henry, you've made your point. You've made your point, brother. Look, I just disagree with you respectfully. It is because I'm a public school parent. It's because of the experience that I've had with my own children and so many other parents and kids that I've met over the years that I think this is so important. Respectfully, if you say, Hey schooling during a pandemic is different than schooling during normal times. Yeah. I agree with you, but that's – we're not presented with, could we just push a button and have normal times? We have a choice and the choice was, do you have children in a school where they can get the support of educators? Where they can have a positive adult presence in their life, the mentorship, the tutoring, the guidance, the mental health support, the physical health support, the food, you name it. Even if it is two days a week, three days a week, even one day a week helps. It all helps compared to nothing. And the more needy a child is, the more it helps that they get something rather than nothing. Because remote learning just can't do for a kid what in-person learning can do. Of course it won't be as good. But I think your question honestly, presents a little contradiction. If the kids are in the classroom and they're laughing and they're having a good time because they're together – yeah it's not as fun perhaps as some of the other things they've done before, but I believe there's many, many parents. I know it for a fact from the surveys, from the choices parents have made, who would rather their kids get some in-person learning than none. There's many, many kids who would much rather have some time back in school with their friends, with their teachers, then none. It's a choice, but I think it's the right choice in terms of what will support our kids. And Richard, to Henry's point about what will be in the classroom, how the classroom will work and his concern about any time the kids are doing anything online,
I think if you'd speak to that and clarify that.

Chancellor Carranza: So we've built tremendous capacity since March, when we pivoted in a matter of days to remote learning. And there's a lot of capacity that's been built. And by that, I mean, teachers have gotten better at using the online environment. There's resources that we've developed, not only as a school system, but in sharing with other school systems, there's more curriculum. Students have devices. Parents have gotten some support as well. So there's a lot of capacity that's been developed to really take it to the next level now. Which is something we've all said we want it to do is how do you personalize instruction for children at a much deeper level? This is an opportunity to do that. Whether it's an in-person environment and to continue to personalize and individualize what the student needs. If a student is already mastered material, how do we enrich and push them farther? If a student needs to catch up, how do we tailor that and use the technology to help them catch up as well? There's a myriad of opportunities here. So we don't look at this from the dystopian view that this is going to be doom and gloom. We know that when students have the interaction with well-trained caring teachers and other students, that that socialization is incredibly important. Now to the Mayor's point, and I want to emphasize this. When you look at the indicators that the Mayor talks about at every one of his press conferences, it is those indicators that have made it possible for us in New York City, unlike any of the other ten large school systems in America, to even consider in-person learning. Because New Yorkers have done their part to put us in a position where this is possible. That is the big, I would say difference between what we're attempting to do in New York City and what others can’t even imagine, because they don't have the hard work that we've done to put us in this position.

Mayor: Go ahead Henry.

Question: Alright, thank you. I appreciate that. But you didn't address the question of kids sitting in their desks with their computers or laptops or mobile devices out, following the same class that students are doing at home. I mean, what's the efficacy of that? Why have students commuting if they're in high school, miles and miles on the subway to sit in a class, open up their device and follow the same class as somebody at home?

Mayor: I'll turn to the Chancellor for expertise, but I'm going to give you the common sense answer. Whatever different technologies use, whatever lesson plans are used. It is a world of difference when there is an adult supervising your work and they are to support you and tutor you and guide you. It just makes a huge difference. A professional educator, there are many, many parents who want to support their kids at home and just can't. They have to work or, you know, remotely, they have to work in-person. They don't have the tech skills, they don't speak English, whatever it is, there is nothing that replaces a professional educator being in your presence when you're a kid. But to the specifics of how technology will be used, if you could just express that so people can understand it, Richard?

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So Henry, I'm sorry. I don't know where you got your information. It’s just not accurate. An in-person blended learning teacher will be teaching children in-person. They will have lesson plans. They will have unit plans. They will be progressing through the curriculum based on the State standards. That's their job, to teach children in an in-person, not to sit them in front of a computer. Now, when I spoke about maybe a child needs some additional support, they've lost ground academically. Sure. You can have some intervention work that happens with a computerized program or something that's adaptive to help meet the students where they are and accelerate them. That could happen. But the teacher will be teaching children. Now, the teachers that are teaching in a remote setting, they will be teaching remotely. And as we have spoken, there will be a 30 minute period at the beginning of every day where the blended in-person, teacher and the remote teacher are coordinating. They're collaborating to make sure that the children that are in-person are pacing at the same pace as children that are in remote. And that there's coherence in terms of what they're doing. It's a very complex process, but our teachers are up for this because they also understand how important it is to have that in-person experience for children. Not only for the academics, but for the socialization, the social emotional learning, the trauma informed supports, all of those other things that we know are so critically important in the developmental life cycle of a child.

Moderator: The next is Christina from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi Mayor and Chancellor. Thanks for taking my call. My first question is can you provide some more information about who exactly will be conducting these walkthroughs? How many people are going to be dedicated to this effort and how long each building might take?

Mayor: Yeah, let me get Lorraine Grillo into this too, who runs the School Construction Authority and does an extraordinary job with her team. So Lorraine, why don't you start in terms of describing what a building walkthrough is like and how you use the different professionals to do the work?

President and CEO Lorraine Grillo, School Construction Authority: Sure. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm happy to do that. We have over a hundred teams of professional engineers walking through every single space within the building, including bathrooms, public assembly spaces, and all the classrooms. Their job is to examine all of the ventilation possibilities within the building to see what's working. If something isn't working to put it on this report, that will then go to the Department of Education. There will be teams of at least two to four professional engineers in every single school. That effort, we really don't know exactly what the timing is. It began today. But we anticipate that we can get this done by September 1st. So I would say depending upon the size of the school, the age of the school, the condition of the school, some will take longer. Some will be shorter.

Mayor: Go ahead, Christina.

Question: My other question is how are you making the determination that a classroom or a school space is safe and that ventilation is appropriate? It's my understanding that the Education Department has already been doing walkthroughs and assessments. And I have been told of at least one school where teachers raised concerns and they were being told that it was safe. But now it seems like the City is taking a completely new approach. So how are you determining that ventilation and air flow is appropriate and why take this new approach now, if you were already doing walkthroughs?

Mayor: Yeah, Christina, I appreciate the question. I would contest a new approach. I would say we just keep adding more as we go along. There's been work being done the whole summer. I think Lorraine could help all of us by talking about the ongoing work that happens in summers to get schools ready. Again, a lot of what we're doing is based on what would happen to any year, but we're adding to it because we want to reach a very high standard given what we're doing with the coronavirus. So this is a final push before school opens. There's a lot of activity each year before school opens, but we're adding elements to make sure we're just going that extra mile to get everything right. And if there's a concern raised in a school, we want to follow up on it. And we, for example, as the Chancellor said, if we don't like a specific classroom, if we think it needs more work, we hold that classroom out. And it's quite doable. But the goal is with this much time still in a lot of ability to affect the situation, to have every single one ready in time. So Lorraine, could you talk about what you do in a typical summer now, what you're adding in this situation?

President Grillo: Sure. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah. We've been working all summer, as you know, as you just stated, looking at things like supply fans and exhaust fans and whether or not obviously the Department of Ed, Division of School Facilities have been looking at changing filters and the like. The real concern was for example, windows over the years that have been locked closed, we have them reopened so that there's air flow. The goal here is to have air flowing through these, through these classrooms. We have in some schools, classrooms that have no windows. So we have to make sure that the air filters are working. All of those things to make sure that there is good air flow throughout the buildings. We have been working with the Division of School Facilities on any repairs that they deem are unnecessary for DOE – for SCA to do. Again, as the Mayor said, this is one more review of these spaces, A, to make sure that they are adequate, the ventilation is adequate to take care of health and safety of our children and our teachers. And to reassure parents that we are doing absolutely everything we can to make sure that those buildings are safe.

Mayor: Thank you. Yes, go ahead. Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: I would also like to add, and I want to thank Lorraine Grillo and her team. They've been fabulous and fantastic at making sure that our spaces for learning are safe. But I also want to address the question in terms of teachers. We are working very closely with UFT. In fact, we have a building safety working group that has already been walking buildings and classrooms that have been identified by the teacher's union as being problematic. So we're taking a united approach to going in and making sure that those classrooms are safe. So I want to encourage any teachers that feel that there is an issue, make sure that your union knows so that that's on that list and we are doing those walkthroughs with them as well.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Julia from the Post.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor and Mr. Chancellor and Commissioner Grillo. I understand what you just said, Mr. Mayor, that some of this work has been going on throughout the summer, but I'm wondering why we're waiting until now about 16 days before students are supposed to return to the class to do this kind of more comprehensive inspection of ventilation systems? And what happens when it gets cold in the winter, are we going to keep the windows open and just blast the heat?

Mayor: So the fact is, again, in the much of the summer, every year, a lot of work is done to get the schools ready. It makes sense to do the inspections as you get closer after all that work has done. But we understand because the coronavirus we're holding a very high bar. So I think that describes it. This is exactly the time to go and confirm that everything is ready. If anything needs some last minute work, it'll get it. If anything isn't ready and needs to be held back, it will be. In terms of the winter. It's a good question. You know, obviously Julia, I hate to say it, but the winters aren't the winters we used to know. So we're going to have a number of days throughout the year where you can have the windows open in a way that works, because this is global warming in action, unfortunately. But you're right. There’s going to be some days where it's really cold and we're going to have to be smart about that. Lorraine, if you could jump in about how, as you're preparing and your team is preparing these classrooms, you're thinking about what to do on the days when it's really cold out, whether you keep windows open under that condition?

President Grillo: Well, yes. You know, we're working very closely with our engineering group to look at that. Basically again, it's really looking at our HVAC systems to make sure they're up and running. And where we need to make changes is we have a block of time now to make those changes and to make those systems work better. Again, there are going to be spaces within the buildings that need long term or long term upgrades. And that's what we're going to be doing.

Mayor: Go ahead Julia.

Question: And then on a different topic. The Comptroller is calling for an end to the emergency contracting system you put up during the height of the pandemic following reports that a number of COVID-19 related contracts worth tens of millions of dollars have been canceled or not fulfilled by vendors that lack the capacity or relevant experience. One example is the donor to your political campaign, who was mentioned yesterday, Charles Tebele who sold computer accessories before getting into the PPE business. And then was unable to fulfill a big $90 million contract. So will you answer the Comptroller's call to end this emergency contracting system? A yes? And if not, why not?

Mayor: Julia, first of all, I don't know if you have all the facts about what has happened up to now. I think you've painted a picture that gives a misimpression. The emergency contracting, we had to, all our agencies had to work together to get whatever PPEs we could for a period of time. We worked with a variety of companies. My understanding is the companies we worked with were able to produce a lot for us when we needed it. So I don't think your characterization paints an accurate picture. But the larger point is I haven't seen the specifics of what the Comptroller put forward, but I would say the obvious, this crisis isn't over. We are doing really well as you heard with this morning's indicators, we're very hopeful about New York City. We're also watching very mindfully as we see the situation in much of Europe where they're seeing a resurgence and obviously the challenges we're seeing in much of the rest of this country. So we are far from out of this crisis and I think we need all the tools and all the flexibility we can to make sure we have what we need when we need it. Go ahead.

Question: [Inaudible] made by the Comptroller, not me.

Mayor: Yeah, go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Matt Troutman from Patch.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I have a question about the upcoming tax lien sale on September 4th. Advocates and some elected officials are raising concerns about it going forward, particularly on the pandemic and apparently without significant outreach. Do you plan to extend the deadline again or cancel it?

Mayor: Well Matt, at this point, the sale is scheduled. It had been postponed previously, and I want to emphasize this is properties that had gone into arrears before the pandemic. So these are not situations caused by the coronavirus. These are situations that predate the coronavirus. The challenge, of course, anytime you put off something that would bring a revenue in is you need that revenue for everything we're talking about – for healthcare workers, for, you know, educators, first responders, everything we're trying to do now, in really tough fiscal times, I believe the dollar figure projected is $57 million. That’s a serious amount of money. So this moment, you know, I think when you add up all the factors and especially that it does predate the crisis, this is scheduled to move forward. Go ahead.

Question: Okay, and just to follow up, you say $57 million is a serious amount of money, but a lot of advocates and again, elected have raised the concern that this could potentially put small homeowners in some serious difficulty. Is $57 million than enough for doing that?

Mayor: Again, we're talking about a situation that, you know, if folks didn't pay what they owed before the crisis and got to the point that their property would be in a tax lien sale, I think we have to think about the fairness for everyone involved. I mean, there's a huge number of people out there, no matter how tough things are, they are and have been paying their taxes – folks who are working to in every way they can keep going, and they depend on government resources. I mean and all the support we provided in terms of food and healthcare, all the things we've done for free for the people of this city – that has to be paid for. There's no stimulus in Washington. There's no long-term borrowing from Albany yet. It's very hard to turn down that amount of revenue when you think about what it means for the people, the city and the services we need to provide for them. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and Chancellor. The Chancellor mentioned that 243 principals have already submitted their outdoor learning plans. I'm wondering if the Chancellor can give us an example, so the principals who have yet to submit, get an idea of what it might look like. For example, a school that's across the street from a city park, a school that is adjacent to a play street. Is there a concrete example of a plan that is likely to take shape?

Mayor: I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. I mean the most obvious ones Andrew, again, using your schoolyard, courtyard, anything that the school already has, which in the past, for example, might've been used for recess and other types of activities, the decision to use that for different types of classes, again, that's something a principal can do and they control the space already, or the other obvious, which has existed in many schools, what used to be a play street, [inaudible] a street adjoining, and I'm picturing in my mind, the school that my kids went to elementary school on Carroll Street in Brooklyn, you know, there was a small side street and it was just closed off as a play street. You can equally close off the street for class activities. So those are just two obvious examples, but Chancellor, you want to add?

Chancellor Carranza: So, Andrew, we will get you some concrete examples. I just wanted the number this morning. I haven't looked at what those applications look like, but I do think the examples that you've given and that the Mayor have given are most definitely going to be included in what principals are submitting. We've heard, and as I mentioned yesterday, we've had several conversations, principals with very creative ideas. They just needed help navigating the bureaucracy, and I say that very lovingly, the bureaucracy of making sure that the plans are improved. Our approach is to really flatten the bureaucracy, put it all in one place so that we can get decisions made very quickly, and I'm just very excited that we already have 243 of our colleagues that have wasted no time in getting their plans in.

Question: My second question has to do with outdoor dining versus indoor dining. Danny Meyer tweeted yesterday that the outdoor dining, as nice as it has been, is not a sustainable business model. You've heard the question from restaurants about when indoor dining might return, and you've said that there's no plan, but there hasn't really been an explanation for why, for example, the Northern tip of the Bronx, you can't eat indoors. Whereas one block away you can eat indoors in Westchester when the medical data is the same on that same street. I'm wondering if you can answer that and answer why there isn't some kind of a framework for restaurants to plan around.

Mayor: Look, I understand the question, Andrew. I wouldn't ask them – you have every right to ask, however you want, but I wouldn't ask it in terms of the block before the Westchester border. I'd ask it in terms of all five boroughs and all types of neighborhoods because we create the policies for everybody, and outdoor dining has been something that's really worked for almost 10,000 restaurants and, you know, brought back tens of thousands of jobs, and I think it is helping, and obviously delivery, takeout are helping, but it's not the same as having indoor dining. The problem is we talked about a lot, and I think I'll let Dr. Varma in here in a moment, the evidence around the world is so consistent, and again, I'm sure Dr. Varma will talk about what's happening in Europe right now, what's happening in Hong Kong. It's very eye-opening. So we haven't been able to set a firm standard because we see a real problem and challenge here and what we need to do first and foremost, Andrew, is focused on the health and safety of New Yorkers, and I'm bringing back our city smartly and not allowing the mistakes we've seen in so much of the rest of the country and the rest of the world. So Dr. Varma, do you want to explain a little more of that?

Senior Advisor Varma: Sure. Thank you for the question. I think what the Mayor has been highlighting here are really two critical factors that go together. One is the likelihood that indoor dining could lead to outbreaks and a resurgence, and the second is the vulnerability of the city itself. So we know from the experience everywhere around the world and also from the United States that indoor dining is a very high risk activity, and there's a reason for that. One is that you can't wear a mask while eating. Of course, there are other factors as well. You know, the duration of time you're spent in that place, your proximity to other people, the fact that you have social networks that then bridge across other places. So that's really what a lot of our concern is, that this is a high-risk activity, and the second of course is the vulnerability of New York City. We've been through an extremely traumatic time for everybody, with thousands of deaths, and we need to be cautious about introducing a high-risk activity into a place that we know is vulnerable.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Kala from PIX.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, this is Kala from PIX 11. Thanks for taking my question. I know that you've encouraged people to get tested before going back to school, and I know that you've said it is free across New York City, but where are we on mandatory testing that's being demanded by the teachers union as they are threatening a strike if they don't get it?

Mayor: Kala, thank you for the question. Again, reminder now I think a lot of New Yorkers know this strikes by public sector workers are illegal in New York State, and I don't think the people of this city ever feel good about public servants not being there when people need them. So let's just talk about the other piece of the equation, which is testing. We want to have the maximum testing we're making it available for free over 200 sites, priority to educators and school staff. Look, we're continuing to talk to the unions about the best way to do it. They've had different views over different times, but you know, we believe that the smart thing here is just everyone who's involved in the school community right now, you can be arranging to get a test for free. We're going to be adding more tests, capacity around schools. We think this is the best way forward, and again, surpasses what you see around the world because in so much of the rest of the world, there was not a systematic plan to make testing available for school communities for free on an ongoing basis. That's what we're doing. Go ahead, Kayla.

Question: And then also I understand that you're saying inspections with the Ventilation Action Team started today on 1,800 schools, but is it possible for 100 teams to really go through these 1,800 schools in just one week and will they work through the weekend? And also one more part to this. I know that the windows in schools is a big focus, and typically windows only open, you know, two to four inches. Will they be open wider for student safety, and the schools that don't have windows, what’s the solution?

Mayor: It's a great question about the windows because again, you know, Dr. Varma’s talked about this before – nothing is as good as fresh air, so the windows count for a lot. I'll let Lorraine Grillo speak to the windows and how much you open the windows, but also the point about what 100 teams can do with the number of schools we have, and Kala I want to emphasize that you're talking about schools again that have been worked on throughout the summer. So these teams are going now to look at the work that's been done and confirm that things are ready and if they see anything outstanding that they want to followed up on, it’ll be followed up on, but I don't want people to have a sort of misunderstanding – the work has been going on for quite a while. Now this is the run through to make sure everything's ready to go. Go ahead, Lorraine.

President Grillo: Yes. thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes, in answer to part of that question, yes, these teams will be working throughout the weekend. They will work, whatever hours are necessary to get this work done in a timely fashion.

As far as the windows are concerned, I believe, and I'm not absolutely sure, so I'm not going to give you the exact height of each and every window, but I will tell you that there is much more flexibility since we've been doing our work over the summer. We can get you the information on how high these windows will be opened.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor. Well, one question related to the schools and it actually also relates to the answer that you and Dr. Varma just gave on indoor dining, saying that it's not safe, it's high risk because there are no masks and you're in the room and you're in there for a long time and there are social connections, et cetera. It sounds like all of that would also apply to students eating lunch in a classroom. So why do you think that can be done safely, when indoor dining can’t and you know, are there any steps in place to mitigate the risks of eating in the classroom?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question, Erin, I appreciate it, and it's one of those common sense questions that New Yorkers deserve a clear answer to. So I'll start, and then Dr. Varma feel free to jump in. So, let's compare the two activities because I think a lot of people have sort of said, “oh, look, these two things, maybe there's a similarity,” I don't think there's a similarity at all. When we talk about schools, this is something that is mandated for our children to get an education for free and a quality education. We know that we are struggling with an all remote format to give kids what they need and deserve. So we have an imperative, legal imperative, moral imperative, educational imperative to give kids the best education we can. We know that means having at least some time in-person, versus indoor dining, which is obviously a very optional activity, and some people do a lot who have the resources and others can't do it all because they don't have the resources. Indoor dining matters because it's part of the culture of the city because of a lot of jobs, because we admire the people who have created these businesses, but you can't compare the legal and moral imperative of public education with indoor dining they’re really, to me, two very, very different things.

And then the question of what's different between a public sector facility and a private sector facility. In the public sector facility, a school, we have a custodial staff, we have educators, we have principals and assistant principals. We have all sorts of people looking to make sure things are done right, and who are held accountable to the public in an open way. In a restaurant, it's owned by a private owner. We don't have someone in inspector sitting in that restaurant all day. We don't know what happens in that restaurant, unless we get a look at it from time to time. They're very different models in terms of how much you can do to monitor and keep things safe.

And then finally for the period of time, kids are eating lunch, which is not a long period of time. Yes, they'll have their masks off, but they are distanced because the desks are distanced different than diners who are often very close together, and they're supervised by adults whose job is to make sure that the distance is kept. Again, something we don't have in restaurant settings, Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: I think the Mayor actually highlighted all of the critical points. The only slight addition I would add would be to note that this is the model that has been used in many places around the world. Some places have said that they were either going to have kids sitting at their desks or they'll sit outside, but in most places because of the climate, people are in fact sitting at their desks and, and to date at least there isn't any evidence that those specific lunch sessions have led to outbreaks.

Question: My second question is about the layoffs that are potentially coming. Would you support freezing wages, potentially reducing slightly wages as some private sector companies have done before going forward with these 22,000 layoffs?

Mayor: It’s a very important question, Erin, I appreciate it because look, there's a lot of things that we can and should do short of having layoffs. Layoffs are horrible, layoffs mean, you know, a family doesn't have an income anymore. The people that city don't benefit from the service of that public worker. We want to avert them. We all wanted to see a stimulus. There's just no way to believe in or depend on a stimulus right now from the federal government. What we can do, and I want to say I’m very pleased that the City Council is stepping up and supporting the long-term borrowing. You know, we need our colleagues in Albany to agree to the long-term borrowing. That is the cleanest fastest way to avert the layoffs, but we're also going to work with labor. So the kinds of things you talked about, Erin, those are fair ideas, but by and large, those are the kinds of things you can only do through collective bargaining.

The way the laws are up in this state, in this city, the city has the authority to lay off workers directly, but not to do things like the furloughs, for example, but I think a lot of unions, if there's no other choice would be receptive to that. So look, I hope we can avert this the better way, which is to simply get the long-term borrowing in place quickly. But we continue to talk with labor about all options, and I have to say again, the overwhelmingly the spirit in the labor unions has been to try and work with us and find every, every way of averting layoffs and what we have to move really quickly to make that happen.

Okay, everyone. Look, as we conclude today, I just want to come back to the point I made earlier about New York City and our comeback, which is already starting to happen. We've been through hell. But this city never stops. We never give up. I appreciate it. I held up that, that op-ed from Jerry Seinfeld because it just really speaks to, I think so many New Yorkers’ hearts that we know what it is to fight through things. That's what New Yorkers do, and right now there is a comeback story being written here in New York City. It’s only starting now, it's going to go on for months and months ahead, but it will be one for the ages. This will be a story of perseverance and people being there for each other, people supporting each other, no matter what, and look. In the end, who are we as New Yorkers? We’re people who work really hard, we can all agree on that. We work harder than any place in the country. We think big, we dream great dreams, and then we make them happen. That's what New Yorkers do, and that's why we’re coming back. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-26 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. You know, we've talked about this for weeks, for months – the grit, the strength of New Yorkers; the amazing ability in this crisis to keep fighting back no matter what has been thrown at us; the compassion; the decency. So, those are the things we should celebrate. We're going to talk today about some of the challenges too, the trauma, the pain, so much of what people have been through. We’re going to particularly focus on our kids and everything they are dealing with in the midst of this crisis. But before we get to that, I want to talk about what we're doing to try and beat back this disease once and for all, because, in the end, it's the first, second, third topic every day – is how do we fight this disease? How do we get to a point where we can really get back to normal in this city? And I want to be really clear about the fact that the work that's being done now to ensure that people who travel to this city really understand the laws of this State, and this City, really understand they have to quarantine. And this is true for someone coming in from outside New York City, it's true of a New Yorker goes to visit family, or, for any other reason, travels to one of the states that's really having a tough time with COVID-19 – whatever reason, whoever the person is. if you traveled to one of those states or come from one of those states, you come here, you really have to quarantine. It's the law, it's for everyone safety.

One of the great efforts to make sure everyone understands this and to enforce this has been done by our Sheriff's Office. And I was out yesterday in Staten Island by the Bayonne Bridge with Sheriff Joe Facito and his team. And they're doing an amazing job, getting the message out and making sure people know we have to take it seriously. So, we have 31 States still where their COVID-19 infection level is still too high. So, anyone coming from those states has to fill out that traveler health form, has to quarantine. Now, we have been able to keep the infection level low here, but we are watching very carefully and with great concern – the number of travelers start to increase. And, right now, we think about 20 percent of the COVID-19 cases in this city are associated with people who have traveled. So, I want to be clear, the Sheriff's Office is going to be out there in force. They've done 3,000 vehicles stops already. They'll be doing a lot more. They're getting a lot of compliance from motorists. And I want to commend everyone – everyone's paying attention and doing the right thing. There's only been indeed so far for two summonses. And, at the same time, what the really good folks at the Sheriff's Office are doing is handing out masks for free. So, they're educating people. They're reminding them of the law. They're helping them to stay safe. And if someone won't comply, then they're ready to provide the penalties.

Now, I just want to say to everyone, since we all know the most important thing we can do together is beat back the coronavirus, the best thing to do is if you don't need to travel to one of those affected states, just don't – don't do it now, wait until they end up in a better situation. But if you do need to travel or you have traveled recently, please follow the rules for the good of everyone – yourself, your family, your community. And, again, Sheriff's Office will be out there, reminding people how important it is and making clear people understand it is the law.

Now, let me go back to our kids and the challenges they face – and not just the kids, the entire community – and that means parents, that means, as kids go back to school, educators, school staff, everyone's feeling the pain and the challenges of the last six months. And that means we have to address the mental health needs of our school community, starting with our kids. And we have to remember that there is no health without mental health, something our First Lady reminds me all the time. When we talk about keeping people safe, when we talk about keeping people healthy, we need to see that as not just protection from the coronavirus, or physical harm, but protection for people's mental health as well.

And so, today, we announce the Bridge to School plan – and the Bridge to School plan makes clear that, from the very first day of school, the mental health needs of our kids and our school communities are going to be front and center. And it's support for students, teachers, principals for the whole community. And I need everyone understand, when we talked earlier in the week about the comparison of New York City's approach to opening schools with the entire world – we looked literally at examples from around the world, we took the best, strongest practices from different countries, combined them into a gold standard here to make sure our schools are healthy and safe. When we looked at that, we put mental health right there in the mix, because we knew our kids couldn't be healthy unless they were getting that mental health support. So, that gold standard continues to be built every day, and here to talk about what we're doing to support our kids, someone who I think everyone knows has been a champion for the mental health needs of all New Yorkers and has reminded us every single day that we have to focus on mental health. It's been swept under the rug for too many years and now it's getting the attention it deserves. And that's in large part due to our First Lady Chirlane McCray.

First Lady Chirlane McCray: Thank you, Bill. When we brought social and emotional learning to every New York City classroom last year, it came from a really simple idea – children learn best when they're healthy in every way and when they have a sense of emotional wellbeing. Now, most of us adults remember that when we were in school, we didn't have math or science on our minds all the time. Our young people today don't either, they're learning to manage relationships and thinking about their friends, their siblings, and their parents. On the first days of schools, some of our students are going to feel upbeat and joyful. Some will feel lonely. They might be afraid of getting sick. Some may be angry or are afraid about not having their usual school activities. Many students are worrying about whether their families will have a stable place to live or if there'll be enough money for a new shirt or sneakers. And in New York City, we know that educating our kids – really educating them – means helping them deal with all those feelings that are part of their life. It means helping them process their emotions positively, constructively. It means helping them build relationships and resolve conflict. It means helping them grow into healthy, happy adults. Social and emotional learning means creating a curriculum where learning those skills is just as important as learning how to read or learning how to do math.

As simple as it sounds, that is a radical idea. By bringing social-emotional learning programs into every classroom, last year, we created the most comprehensive program in the nation. We saw even in less than a year, the amazing difference that it made to teach those skills, how children were more engaged in learning, how they improve the classroom environment, and how it improved the academic performance of the children. And now, after what our children have been through during these last six months, social and emotional learning is more important than ever. Most of our youngest and middle schoolers have been isolated from their friends and have gone without the usual school activities. Our high schoolers are witnessing our country have a long overdue reckoning with racial injustice. Many are participating in it themselves, challenging our country to be better. And sadly, many of our young people are in pain, grieving the loss of parents and loved ones to this virus.

So, on the first day of school, our students will be carrying more than the usual weight of their backpacks. They'll be carrying the weight of myriad emotions experienced over the last past – over the last six months. Can our educators ignore those feelings and just pull out a textbook? No, it's not enough. It's just not enough. That's why today we're releasing the Bridge to School plan to support students, educators, and all across the city. It expands on the groundbreaking work we've already done. And I thank Chancellor Carranza and the entire DOE team for leading the way. Bridge to School offers guided language activities and community-building exercises to support our students’ mental health, especially in those first days of school when it's critical to help our children process what they've been through. As we've seen over and over again in this crisis, we are all in this together and never is that more true than when it comes to supporting our children. And that's why as we get ready for a new school year, even in the face of so many challenges, I feel hope. We have the best school leadership, the best educators, the best staff, and the best parents in the nation. And together, we're going to make this a successful school year for our children.

Back to you, Bill.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chirlane. And you could hear, everyone, the clear hope and belief in our kids, the belief we can do right by them, and the understanding we can only do right by them if they're there with loving, caring professionals who can help them and support them. And this is part of why the Chancellor and I have been so adamant about the value of bringing kids back into school, because so many of these kids need support that just can't be provided remotely. It needs to be provided by – provided by extraordinarily committed professionals. And we're going to help those professionals to be ready to be there for the kids.

Now, Chancellor Carranza has done an extraordinary job getting ready in every sense, and he knows the power of addressing kids’ emotional needs and thinking about the mental health piece as well. And he's also reached out to a lot of partners, a lot of folks who want to help make this work, including the Robin Hood Foundation, and other great partners. And here to tell you about the support we're getting for this initiative, our Chancellor Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As a lifelong educator, I know that students are much more likely to learn and feel safe and rebound from tough blows when they feel connected to their teachers and their peers. Supporting students socially and emotionally improves not only their academic progress, but prepares them to succeed in life. Even before this pandemic, the majority of our students faced trauma every day. Poverty is traumatic. Homelessness is traumatic. Fear of deportation is traumatic. Yet schools can do so much to help students learn how to manage their stress and find refuge from their pain and anxiety. We've demonstrated this in New York City, as our First Lady and our Mayor have spoken about. Now, after the added trauma and upheaval of this pandemic when safety required that we abruptly close our buildings and limit our in-person interactions through social distancing, rebuilding those personal connections and honoring our students' lived experience is more important than ever before. That's one of the biggest reasons why we're going to such lengths to welcome students back into our schools this fall physically and virtually, while strengthening our social and emotional supports to student learning. Our students are the heartbeat of our schools and we have worked so hard to build and strengthen social emotional supports in New York City schools for the entire time I've served as Chancellor and throughout this administration as well. That includes historic efforts that the Mayor and First Lady and I announced just over a year ago, to provide all elementary school students with rich education and social-emotional learning, and every middle and high schooler with restorative practices aimed at strengthening community, building character, and creating the conditions to heal.

So, today, we're pleased to announce new ways that we will be providing these vital supports to our students and our staff, tailored to address the disruptions that we have confronted in the recent months. Foremost among these initiatives is curriculum that we are calling the Bridge to School plan, that will provide all schools with social-emotional learning lessons and activities designed for the first few weeks of school. As students re-enter their school communities, re-entering buildings, in many cases, that they abruptly left in March, or navigating a brand new building, these materials and lessons will help students build coping skills and process grief and reconnect and allow students to orient themselves to learning online or in classrooms during the first few weeks. In addition, with the generous support of the Robin Hood Foundation, the Gray Foundation, and the Tiger Foundation, and with the incredible support of the fund for public schools, we have been expanding access and training in trauma-responsive educational practices. Every New York City principals started this training this summer and we are going to expand to offer it to all school staff at the school year begins.

Finally, in partnership with Child Mind Institute, we will launch a helpline for educators and school staff to call to consult on best practices and classroom strategies for assisting students with their mental health and wellness. Staffed by mental health professionals, this hotline will help schools get immediate answers to urgent questions and concerns that they have for their students. So, together, through these efforts, we will build and we will strengthen our connections to restore our school communities this fall, whether students are on-site or online to help New York City school students build a strong and healthy future. As a largest school district in the country, by far, and the only urban school district in a position to reopen its public schools, our focus on SEL is another way in which we are setting the gold standard during this unprecedented time.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. And thank you for all the work you and your team are doing. And thanks again to all of the partners who are giving us so much support in this crucial moment. And again, it all comes back to the extraordinary effort in this city to fight back this disease. And every New Yorker is participating in some way, and that's why we have gotten as far as we've gotten. And what we're focusing on now is neighborhoods that need particular attention to make sure we keep the infection levels low there. And we've seen that when we apply the focused efforts of our Health Department and our Test and Trace Corps, it makes a huge, huge difference. So, I want to talk to you about a couple of examples lately. And, obviously, a week or two ago, I talked to you about Sunset Park, Brooklyn. And that was an area where we had a particular concern. We saw some evidence that caused us concern. We sent the Test and Trace Corps in, in a very big way, and with folks who spoke multiple languages and could connect with the community. This is part of what we call our hyper-local strategy, really focusing on specific areas, even specific blocks, where there's a concern. In the course of this blitz in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, our test and trace team knocked on over 16,700 doors, made sure that folks in community got testing to the level of 8,500 new tests and just that one community. And now, as more and more people have gotten tested, we're seeing a clearer picture and it's a better picture. So, now, the seven-day rolling average for that community is 2.5 percent. So, it's more than the citywide average, but, thank God, not by a lot. And this is a really good sign that, that additional outreach, that additional testing allowed us to get a fuller picture and also encourage folks who did need to safely separate to do so. And that support was there for them. We've applied the hyperlocal strategy as well in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and that's continuing now. And, again, we saw some concern there at a particular location. That follow-up has been intensive. Good news, again, seven-day rolling average for that community is 2.5 percent. So, again, we see results that give us some comfort, but more work is being done. There have been a number of cases identified. And so, the test and trace effort is going deeply into that community – and free mask distribution as well to make sure everyone knows how important it is. So, two examples that are working – a lot more to do, but, again, they work best when we go deeply into communities, engage people often in their own language and get people to join us in being vigilant and following through for the safety of all.

I'm going to talk about our daily indicators in a moment, but I want to just take one moment before we do a talk about an extraordinary anniversary today – 100 years – the women's suffrage movement fought for so long. And on August 26th, 1920, a hundred years ago today, the 19th Amendment to the constitution finally adopted, and it gave women the right to vote. But we, I think, all now know our painful history, not all women, only white women – women of color excluded, and they had to fight for many decades more. And to give you a sense of how recent this was, my mom was actually born before this amendment was passed. Chirlane’s mom was born after the amendment was passed, but it was many decades before her rights were fully recognized. So, I want people to realize this struggle is very, very much in our recent past, and we need to keep learning the lessons and fight for truer equality in this city, in this country. And a small step and an important step forward today – the unveiling of the statue you see on your screen – Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth represented as the great historical figures they were. But what's interesting here is it's not just to celebrate this crucial anniversary. It's also the first time there has been a statue of real life historical figures who are women in Central Park. Central Park has plenty of statues of men. It even has some statues of fictional women. This is the first time that actual women who changed the world are being honored and represented. So an important day for this city and more such statutes will be coming in the future to actually represent our whole history.

Okay, with that, let's turn to our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to hospitals for a suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients, today, 71. And the confirmed positive rate for COVID-19 among those patients, only 2.78 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven day average, threshold 550 cases. Today's report 233. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent. Today's report, 0.83 percent.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

With that let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. We will now begin our Q and A. As a reminder, we're joined today by First Lady Chirlane McCray, Chancellor Richard Carranza, Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Senior Advisor Jay Varma, Test and Trace Chief Equity Officer Annabel Palma, and Sheriff Joe Fucito. With that, we'll go to Rich Lamb from WCBS Radio.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and all on the line.

Mayor: How are you doing Rich?

Question: I'm doing okay. So here's a question generally, a little bit more general on the schools. So the one million 100,000 students, 75,000 teachers, I think 1,800 schools, is it reasonable to believe that even if you're able to open schools on September 10th how can it last very long with that many kids involved, that many teachers? There's got to be some cases that will arrive? Do you expect shutdowns, you know?

Mayor: Yeah. Rich it’s a good question. Look, we are looking at what we see around the world. Of course, they'll be instances where there'll be an infection and it has to be addressed in a specific classroom. So this is the way we've set this up. If a kid tests positive, that specific classroom is handled, not the whole school. If you have multiple instances in a school, that's a different matter. But again, you know, part of why it's so important every day to pay attention to these indicators, to the science, to the data is it shows us we've been able to beat back this disease. And so I think it's fair to say, you're going to have schools where you won't have cases for quite a while. The good news is if we need to, in any instance, address a specific case it's a limited period of time. We all know the quarantine period is two weeks. And then people are back in action. So yeah, we'll have challenges undoubtedly, but I think we see a lot of good examples from around the world of those challenges being managed well and us being able to provide kids what they need. And today's an object lesson. You cannot provide social emotional learning, you can not provide mental health support the same way remotely as you can in-person. And our kids deserve that support. Go ahead, Rich.

Question: So the second question is about the stops from the people from out of town. How do you arrive or how has the 20 percent figure been arrived at? In regard to the you know, the cases to being connected to those who've come in from out of town or those who have traveled and come back?

Mayor: It's a great question. And I'll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi to give you a sense of where we're getting that indicator from. Go ahead, Dr. Varma first.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Sure. Thank you for the question. [Inaudible] don't do interviews. So any time a person is newly diagnosed with coronavirus they're interviewed by our Test and Trace team. As part of that interview, they are asked about their travel history. Now it is very difficult to know with 100 percent certainty that a person who traveled definitely got it at the location that they traveled to. But based on the history that they give and the other exposures that they report, we then try to assign a case to whether it did travel or not. So as the Mayor's reported, that number is around 20 percent and it's been at that rate for the past few weeks.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi, want to add?

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: No sir. That's exactly right. Nothing to add.

Mayor: Great. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up, we have Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and all on the call. How are you?

Mayor: Good Juliet. How are you doing?

Question: I’m okay. My question involves the upcoming Labor Day weekend. There won't be a West Indian Day Parade per se, but what is happening with the J’ouvert celebration? And what are the plans to protect the public during those celebrations?

Mayor: It's an important question. I know that as per usual NYPD has been working with community leaders and that's been one of the powerful realities in recent years, Juliet. That there has been such clear, coordinated planning between community leaders and elected officials, clergy, and NYPD all working together to keep those celebrations safe. Now this year is entirely different. You won't have the big organized events that are the core of all that. Everyone, I think understands the danger of gatherings, but we still have to do important work to make sure people are safe in every sense. So we'll get you an update on the specific planning, but again, what has worked in recent years will, I think work in a very different situation here. It is that close coordination with the community.

Question: Okay. So then the assumption is there will be a kind of plan and how will this work on the street? Because in past years, you know, there were corridors set up with barricades and lights. And given social distancing issues will that be happening like that? Well again Juliet, remember that not only the parade, one of the biggest events all year in New York City, but you had the J’ouvert celebrations had specific organized events within them. None of that is happening obviously. So it's a very, very different reality in terms of what normally draws people from all over the Tri-State area and, you know, specific events that people come from for. You're not going to see that this year. You will, of course, see people, you know, of considering it's a very, very important point in the year for folks from the Caribbean. You'll see some celebrations I'm sure, but we have to make sure they're done safely. And that's the plan that has been worked through with community leaders and continues to be. So we'll get you an update on that in the next few days so you have a sense of how that's going to look.

Moderator: Next up we have Michael from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good Michael, how are you?

Question: I'm good. A couple of questions on the UFT’s demand for a mandatory COVID tracing. I'm wondering if you could talk about what is the reason behind not requiring this? Is there kind of a logistical or legal consideration? It would just kind of seems like a pretty reasonable demand. I know the administration, your administration has said it's kind of come late in the game, but it kind of seemed to make sense, common sense. I was wondering what are the reasons behind not doing that?

Mayor: Well, look, Michael, I think the first thing to consider here is we're looking at the practices from around the world we talked about, you know, trying to set a gold standard of taking health and safety practices from around the world and combining them into one very coordinated plan here for the New York City Public schools. And I really think at this point we have the strongest plan anywhere. It has not been the guidance around the world or the practice to do mandatory testing. Equally honestly, it was not something the union was looking for or was comfortable with for quite a while. So we're going to continue in dialogue with them about the best way to keep everyone safe. And we're moving forward. There's no question we're moving forward together. So I think what I would like to emphasize is what we've been talking about for weeks and months now. We now have a very high level of free testing available in New York City. Any New Yorker can get it anytime for free over 200 locations. And we're going to be really amplifying that in the next days, as the timeframe becomes particularly pertinent to the opening of school. Where in the lead up to school, we want the maximum number of educators and staff to get tested. We want the maximum number of kids to get tested. And the best way to do that is to keep encouraging it and giving out that message that it's available and free. And then obviously Michael, we want people to keep getting tested thereafter. But we think this system is the best way to get it done. Go ahead.

Question: My second question has to do with the First Lady's announcement today. First Lady, you said the social emotional learning has improved things in classrooms. And I was wondering if you could explain for us, how is that quantified? Is that quantifiable? Is there a way you measure that? Can you elaborate on that a bit more?

Mayor: Let me say one thing and pass to the First Lady and then pass to the Chancellor. I just want to give you part of why – I don't know, Michael, if you were there the day we announced this last year. It seems like a million years ago. And the educators who were there and it was not only the Chancellor, Michael Mulgrew was there and other educational experts all pointed out that this has been the great ignored area in American education. And that in fact, things like having an orderly, productive classroom and opening up kids' ability to learn very much connects to their social and emotional wellbeing and addressing those issues. So I believe there's a growing consensus in American education that it really matters. I think some of that is based on research. And some of that honestly is based on the common sense recognition by educators. They can tell when kids’ emotional realities are being addressed, that it's a more productive and more disciplined and positive classroom. But over to you Chirlane.

First Lady McCray: Yes. Bill, you're exactly right. Social emotional learning has been championed by progressive educators all across the country. And it's an evidence based approach to learning that has been championed by folks at the Yale Child Studies Center, at Harvard. It is actually not very new. It's just that we've taken a long time in this country to integrate it within our curriculum. I can tell you that educators are for the most part, have been very excited about having the tools and the training to actually put into practice what they know intrinsically. That we have to make sure that our children have a sense of wellbeing before they can actually learn. Otherwise they can't focus on reading. They can't focus on math. They can't focus on anything if they're distraught, if they're sad, if they're worried about other things that are happening. So I have anecdotal information. I’m sure the Chancellor can give you some more – a better sense of what he has seen in the schools. But this is not new. It is evidence-based and we would not have put it into practice if we didn't have a strong sense, a good sense that this was the best thing for our children.

Mayor: And the Chancellor will speak. And Chancellor, I know you're passionate on this topic. I'll give you a one hour time limit on your answer. Okay.

[Laughter]

Chancellor Carranza: Okay. Hi, Michael. So prior to March the indicators you wanted some – what does the data look like? I think the First Lady and the Mayor have been very articulate about the broader philosophical, but pedagogical reasons why this is so important for our young scholars, but we were seeing record number reductions in suspensions, record number increases in attendance. We were seeing many more children that were taking advantage of social-emotional supports at their schools, including being able to speak about what their emotions were, you know, the mood meters. The First Lady and I have both visited classrooms where children are able to describe in very concrete terms how they're feeling today, and that's important because all of these things work together in addition to some of the policy changes that we made in terms of restorative practices and not criminalizing student behavior in school. All of those things work together to create an environment that is not only uplifting, but is supportive. This is even more critical at this point, because if you think about what happened in March, children left their school in March and have not seen their friends, have not seen their teachers, in some cases, probably still have some of their materials, their backpacks, or a book or something at the school. Think about students in the transitional grades that finished in March in one school and are starting at a different school this school year. That's traumatic for children. So the ability to be able to not only talk about that, but to be able to work through those emotions and have principals and teachers that are trained in being able to facilitate those conversations is just critically important for students to make this kind of transition, and that's why we're so excited about this announcement today.

Mayor: You kept it under one hour. I'm impressed. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hi, good morning, everyone. My question is for the Chancellor and if the Mayor wants to comment, so Brooklyn City Councilman Mark Treyger tweeted a little while ago that he's heard from different administrators at schools, and they said that the ventilation inspection is actually – that the teams are actually just putting toilet paper on yard sticks to test for ventilation. I guess you could see if there's air flowing, but I just wanted to see if that's correct, and if it isn't, could you explain a little bit about what does it look like when someone goes in and tests for ventilation? If you could just explain that a little bit?

Mayor: Chancellor and then Dr. Chokshi or Dr. Varma might want to add in as well. Go ahead.

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. Thanks Katie. So there are a number of different processes that are happening to check the ventilation. We spoke yesterday about the teams that are going in. These are licensed, certified engineers that are using equipment. They're looking at CO2 levels. They're looking at air flow, they're looking at what the HEPA filters look like. We also have Department of Facilities and SCA that are making sure windows set have previously not been able to open or on purpose were locked down, are now operable. You can open those windows. So it looks a lot of different ways, and, and what I would say is, look, there's, I don't think one elected official in New York City. It doesn't have my cell number. It doesn't have my email number. If there is a concern that you're hearing about, call me, send me an email, and I guarantee you, we will be on it. We have said on numerous occasions that we are – the primary concern for us is the health and safety of our students and our staff, and that is especially true as we talk about the facilities inspection says it has to do with ventilation.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi or Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, Mr. Mayor, I'll just add briefly, you know, when we look at the science around what works with respect to adequate ventilation to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, so much of that has to do with this simple idea of improving air flow. So just as the Chancellor has spoken to, there are many different ways that one can do that. We're particularly interested in making sure that that windows are open where they can be to increase the circulation of air from the outside as well as making sure that the indoor ventilation systems are maximizing air flow as well. So we'll continue to partner with the Department of Education as we follow the science on this topic.

Mayor: Dr. Varma, anything to add? We can't hear you if you're adding. This may be the classic on-mute situation. Dr. Varma, anything to add? Alright, I'm going to take that as a no. Katie, I think it's important to note that, you know, we're now in the third month of the work on ventilation, the first run through by custodians was June 3rd. The work has been ongoing over the summer by the custodial teams and the School Construction Authority. The action teams now are reviewing every school, every classroom as a final check before liftoff, and so the whole idea here is to, you know, make sure that every classroom is ready, and again, if we think any classroom is not ready or needs more work, it will be held offline until it is ready. Go ahead, Katie.

Question: Can I get a quick follow-up that doesn't count as my second question or no?

Mayor: So the rule is pretty clear. You get a second question either following on your first or brand new topic, whatever you like.

Question: Okay. I don't want to pile on about the toilet paper, but I will ask instead about perhaps a more important question about a little bit more details on the training for teachers specifically for the social-emotional trauma that children and teachers have experienced as well, given how many teachers died of COVID, but when will that training happen? I know that you began part of it last year, but will it look different? Is it separate? Because I just reached out to a bunch of teachers sources. They haven't heard anything about it yet. So if you can give a little update on when they can get specifically trained and also how this will look with remote hybrid, mixing that?

Mayor: Yeah, good question. I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. The reality, Katie, with some of these things is we start immediately, but it is ongoing by definition. It's constantly crucial and there's no profession, where there's constant professional training, updating of the training more than in education, and we certainly value that here in the city, and we're going to make sure that these resources are available to teachers whenever they need them. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so Katie, principals have already been trained – all 1,600 principals have been trained over the summer. Teachers are on summer break, so it's not surprising. They would say they haven't been trained yet. They will be trained. There is training that happens before students start. So teachers will also be trained. They will have access to the curriculum. That curriculum will be available on day one with a resource guide and lessons – for remote and for hybrid. So, they'll be in multiple formats so that teachers can utilize them in both ways, and we're going to continue to train not only teachers, but we're going to train school staff as well. So teachers, this is coming the materials are ready. Principals have already been trained, and this is going to be hand-in-glove with what we're doing academically this year with our students.

Mayor: Chirlane.

First Lady McCray: Yes. I don't know if Chancellor mentioned that nearly 5,000 teachers have been trained already – the training and SEL began last year. But this additional training you know, this is where the principals have been trained and we will continue the training that was started last year and expand on it so that teachers will have additional tools, additional ways to integrate social-emotional learning into the curriculum going forward.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Jake from Gothamist.

Question: The latest data from DOH indicates only 50 percent of tests are coming back within a three-day median period, and so the city considering using the rapid saliva tests that the NBA and Illinois have tried, especially with congregate settings such as schools.

Mayor: It's a great question. I appreciate it. I'll start and turn to the doctors. Jake, first of all Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Varma confirm, the last I heard that we were coming in under four days as an average for the city, in terms of test turnaround, they can give you the latest on that. Clearly we've had, to date, you know, faith that the diagnostic tests have been the best quality tests available, and when we have quick turnaround, you know, that's been the optimal choice. We are hopeful that faster tests could be reliable, and that's really been the question could we depend on them and believe in their results. So that is – that picture is improving for sure, and that could make it part of the strategy more and more going forward. So, Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Varma, you going to have to give an update.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. I'll start. So then the median test turnaround times most recently have been around three to four days, and you know, what I'll say about that is just to echo that it is something that is a focus with respect to ensuring that those turnaround times continue to improve because that's very important for controlling the spread of the coronavirus. As part of that, again, as the Mayor mentioned briefly, we are looking at every single option available with respect to testing innovations. It's very important that we ensure when we do that, that we use rigorous standards of review to ensure that you know, that the tests that are used while getting us faster results, faster turnaround times also adhere to you know, to quality standards with respect to the performance characteristics of the test. So all to say, we want to continue our expanded testing approach, continue working on addressing turnaround times and looking pretty closely at a series of testing innovations, including saliva and other ways to bring innovations to bear.

Mayor: Dr. Varma. Are we having technical difficulties there? I guess that's a yes. All right. Where we are. We heard him earlier. We can't hear him now. Let's fix that for tomorrow.

Alright. Everybody, look, I want to just finish where we began about our children. As a parent, I can tell you this. Chirlane and I went through so many times when you could feel the emotions of your child, and you know, when your child is going through a lot parents, family members can feel it and they want to help, and they want to reassure, and they want to give kids a sense that things are going to be all right. That's now for all of us to do for the children of New York City. It is so important to show them that we can overcome this crisis. It's so important to show them that they will be able to move forward with their lives, that their education is coming back. That the love and support that they get in the school community will be there for them. You know, kids are very, very perceptive and they can tell when something's wrong, and they can also tell when the adults around them have confidence and hope, and so it's up to all of us to let our kids know that it is going to be all right, that we are going to fight back together and that we will always be there for them. That's for every New Yorker to do for our next generation. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-27 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. So, we know throughout this whole crisis we faced over the last six months, we know that, as New Yorkers, we're not just thinking about the physical reality, the health reality, the pain that people have been through, the challenges that people are facing, we're also thinking about right and wrong. The people of this city have real strong values and we live by those values. We care about fairness. We care about equality. We're compassionate people in New York City. We want to make sure that everyone gets a fair shot, everyone is given the respect they deserve. That's what goes through our minds in the decisions we make here at City Hall, but also the way everyday New Yorkers live their lives. So, we're working right now every hour of every day to get our schools ready for their opening next month. And why is everyone working so hard? Because it's the right thing to do. Because it's the right thing to do for our kids, it's the right thing to do for our parents. Why is everyone working so hard? Because our families are worth it. That line that I heard, that message I heard from one of the administrators at New Bridges School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, our families are worth it. We owe it to them to get it right. We owe it to our educators to get it right. We owe it to everyone in the school community to recreate that precious place. And I always say the school, the classroom are an extension of the home for so many kids. It's the other place they live so much of their lives and it's where they go for so much support, so much encouragement. This is about New York City today, but it's also about New York City's future. So, we are focusing on doing everything we can do to get this right. And we will do everything in our power.

Now yesterday, saw something very inspiring at Bronx Collaborative High School – went to visit yesterday with the Chancellor. And one thing we wanted to see, we just wanted to see one of the Ventilation Action Teams work, doing what they do, checking to make sure everything's ready. And the way they look at a classroom and using specific standards regarding airflow and the kind of quality air that we need to make sure everyone in the classroom has. Now that classroom right there, where you see me standing in the Bronx with the Chancellor, that's a classroom that normally would have 24 to 28 students in it. This year, it will have nine students. So, social distancing is going to be taken very, very seriously. In fact, we're going to have the kind of low class sizes we could only have imagined – not that we ever wanted to get them this way, I assure you. But it's important to recognize very few students in the classroom and ventilation being checked for every single one to make sure it's right.

Now, the action teams are following up on work that's been done literally since the first week of June by the school custodial teams and School Construction Authority and by the DOE School Facilities Department. All of them have been working together, not just the last few days throughout June, throughout July, throughout August to get things ready. What's happening now is a final run through, a final set of inspections to make sure everything's right. And I liken it to the checklist before you lift off. We're making sure everything is right and anything that needs work, it will get that work. So, here is what's happened just in the last two days – 370 buildings, 370 school buildings have been fully inspected and that's happening more and more every day to make sure the buildings are already. And I'm going to say it again, if any part of the building, if any classroom is not ready, we will not use it until it's healthy and safe for everyone.

Now, I want you to hear from the experts. I want you to hear from the people who are doing this extraordinary work. So, I'm going to turn to someone who's been just a superstar, she has led the way with the School Construction Authority, building new schools, rehabbing schools, creating so much for the kids of the city, putting in those air conditioners all over New York City. So many things the School Construction Authority has done. So, you're going to hear from her, the President of the School Construction Authority, Lorraine Grillo, and the School Construction Authority Senior Director for Technical Standards, a guy who really knows this stuff and the details of this work to make sure each room has the ventilation it needs – George Roussey. So, Lorraine, George, we welcome your report.

President Lorraine Grillo, School Construction Authority: Wow. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. I just want to say that in my 26-plus years as an employee of the School Construction Authority, I have never seen such an unprecedented effort. 370 buildings visited in two days. So, before I get to those statistics, I just want to say, I am so impressed by the SCA staff and our consultants who have been working tirelessly to get this done. 370 completed inspections, 247 more scheduled for today. So, as a result of those inspections, we have final reports on 99 of those buildings. And here's what we found, 92 percent of the rooms in those buildings are just fine. For the other eight percent, there are small issues that came up. To give an example, a school in Brooklyn where we found two rooms that still had windows nailed shut. That is going to be taken care of today. So, we're really excited to see what the results of the rest of these inspections are. But I do want to reiterate what you just said, Mr. Mayor, about this being a comprehensive effort. Our custodians have been working tirelessly over the summer on all different issues. They will have the ability to do CO2 testing in the buildings when the students arrive. They have done things like replaced air filters, they have done deep cleaning, all of those efforts together with the SCA’s capital work and these inspections to make these buildings safe for our kids.

I do want to, if I may, mention something that I've been hearing about that people are concerned about, “tissue tests.” The tissue test is actually taken directly from the CDC guidelines on infection control. And this is something that's widely used throughout the country. So, what I will do right now is turn it over to my colleague, George Roussey, who is really a professional engineer and an expert in this area. George, if you will –

Mayor: George, can you hear us?

[Inaudible]

Senior Director for Technical Design George Roussey, School Construction Authority: Alright. So, as Lorraine indicated, the tissue test is a qualitative method to see that the systems are running. So, they're actually going into every space to see that the mechanical systems are actually running. If they don't see any air movement, then they know that that particular area has to be fixed. We're also checking for operability of windows and other pieces of mechanical equipment. So, I mean, they're – I think they're going to, the teams are going to two schools a day. So, they're really hitting every classroom as far as, you know – it's actually every space where there's students and where teachers are going to be. So, they're hitting all those spaces. So, I don't know what more I can add to that. It’s just that it's a comprehensive investigation. I can’t say comprehensive, but it's a look to see, to make sure that all the systems are operational. And as the Mayor indicated, if they're not operational, they won't be used until they're able to determine how to fix those units. And we've been working with DSF all summer, giving them information, and assisting them where possible as they need to get the schools operational.

Mayor: Thank you so much, George. Lorraine, did you want to add?

President Grillo: No, I – what I did want to say was, as George indicated, I mean, this is part of our role, that we have been advising school facilities along the way on air filter changes and repairs and things of that nature. So, we've been working very, very closely with the team.

Mayor: Yeah, and let me just ask – Lorraine, you said you have 26 years. George, how long have you been at SCA?

Senior Director Roussey: So, I've been with the SCA since 1990. I guess, almost when it was formed. And I've been the head of Technical Standards, which is responsible for all the disciplines, since about 2004.

Mayor: All right. So, I want to put that together and say between the two of you, you have a half-century of experience with the school buildings of New York City and George, as Senior Director for Technical Standards, obviously, no one knows more than you about what it takes to make a classroom work and be safe. And Lorraine, no one knows more about our school system than you, because you've literally built a lot of our school system and rehabbed a lot of our school systems. So, I want to thank both of you because I think it's very important that the people of our city see the extent of this effort and understand that we're all saying very clearly, if something is not right in any classroom, we're going to hold it back until it is right. But the best way we can make that clear to the people of the city is to put it all up on the DOE website. So, that will happen in the next few days. We're literally going to list the status of every single school as they go through the inspections. And we'll be adding to the list every day as more inspection results are analyzed and completed. You'll see the specific schools that have passed, and they're all ready to go. You'll see the schools that still need work. If they need to work on two classrooms, for example, that will be indicated. And, again, everything will be put out publicly because we have confidence in this process. We want people to see it and we'll make adjustments. We want everyone to understand if there's a classroom – we have this during a regular school year, even when there's not the challenges we face now – if there's a classroom that's for any reason, not right, we hold it back regularly and we work around it. And we'll certainly do that here. But I think as you heard from George, a lot of the challenges we face actually are easy to fix. And we'll keep our team on that every single hour up until school begins.

Now, I, also – so, thank you to both of you – and I also want to say, I had a very inspiring experience yesterday up in the Bronx, first of all, hearing from the principal, Dr. Brett Schneider, who really – and he’s there in the back of the photo there, next to me – very inspiring leader of the school who believes that the school community can make decisions and make things happen for the good of all, and has been engaging with parents and educators throughout to figure out plans that will work. And it's quite clear, he feels empowered, his community feels empowered. I want to thank the Chancellor who created a system that empowers school communities to figure out what works for them. But Dr. Schneider said something so powerful, he spoke with a lot of confidence about what could be done. And he said, “We cannot operate from a place of fear.” I really appreciate that. As a leader he’s saying to everyone, we have to keep moving forward, our kids need us, we're going to find a way to get it right. And that spirit is extraordinary. And it also is a reminder of the why – why all this effort, because of the power of education, the power of public education. That gathering you see there was with a group of parents. And the parents spoke, each very personally, about what the school community meant, what it meant for their child to go to a school building, the help they would get from teachers, from guidance counselors, mental health experts, what they could only get in school that they could not get remotely.

So, I'm a believer in public education, nothing more important to the future of this city and this country than quality, traditional public education. And we got to get it right for our kids. And every day they're not in school for a lot of kids, it causes tremendous challenges because of a lot of things they don't have in their lives. So, when we talk about fairness, when we talk about equality, we have to understand so many kids who need some extra help, who need some support, who are dealing with immense challenges only get that help in school. They cannot get the same help remotely. That's why thinking about this in terms of fairness and equity is so important. And when you hear the voices of parents, I mean, it was not surprising to me, but it was riveting how deeply the parents felt their kids needed in-person learning and how in-person learning would allow them to once again, gain that momentum in their lives that's been sorely lacking these last few months. So, that's what I heard. And it was passionate, it was heartfelt, but I want you to hear it too, from a parent who really speaks from the heart about why it matters, knows this as a parent herself, knows it as a teacher as well in our public schools. And what she said yesterday really moved me. So, I wanted you all to hear from her. My pleasure to introduce Monet Elzey. Welcome, Monet.

Monet Elzey: Good morning. Good morning, everybody. My name is Monet Elzey. I'm a parent of two children in the school system, Chami and my son, Bobby. Chami is 17 and Bobby is 12. I feel the same way as the Mayor. I want my children back in school. I feel like it's very important to me as well as me being a teacher – hands on, I love working with children. It's a gift to have these children back in school, getting the things that they need to learn, that hands on, you know, looking in the books, interacting with the teachers, you know, and me, myself, interacting with the children. I love seeing when the children come in in the morning and they say, “Good morning, Ms. Monet.” And the remote is a beautiful thing, but I like my children in the classroom where they can get the work that they need done and be happy at the end of the day and say, “Mommy, I learned this today.” And I'm blessed to have that opportunity for my children to be able to go to school. And the teachers teach them and they learn different things every day. And I'm happy for that as myself and my children.

Being a teacher for me is a beautiful thing. As I said, I love working with children and giving that opportunity when the children walk through the doors and you teach them, whatever is needed to be teach – from kindergarten to first grade. I teach first graders and it's a phenomenal experience, a phenomenal experience. And I enjoy it every day. It makes my day. It makes my day when I get up and I get into the classroom and I see the smiles and I see the happiness and I see how they endure. Everything that they endure every day and when they come home and they and their mother say, “Oh, Johnny learned this and he was happy to read his book and he's reading his book in the morning and on the weekends.” That makes me feel good as a parent and as a mother, I mean, as a teacher, I'm sorry. And I guess that's about it. I mean –

Mayor: Tell folks what your kids are feeling going back to school.

Elzey: Well, as I said yesterday, my daughter really wants to get back in school. She is an honor student, and she has lupus and she has juvenile arthritis, and it's important for her because she gets the exercise that she needs with going to school, and, you know, being in that setting, being around other children and going to different classes. And as well as my son, it’s the same thing, being outside with other students, you know, the recreation that they do at the gym – going to gym, being able to be around their friends. And, you know, they can't be around their friends, right now, remotely. So, it's good that they interact with their friends and, you know – like you learn every – everything from each student, each child, and my children want to get back in school. You know, I’d for love them to be back in school. It's an experience for me and an experience for them. And I'm really wanting everything to go as planned for them to get back in school come September. And I love it 100 percent.

Mayor: Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Monet. And everyone, look, I just want to thank Monet, because, obviously, you can hear her commitment to our children and what she does to help them every day. But she mentioned what her daughter faces every day, dealing with lupus, dealing with a physical challenge and the pain that she often has to face. But one of the things that was so moving yesterday was hearing that your daughter, even when she's in pain, wants to go to school, because she feels in school, she's moving forward, that she's learning and growing. She feels encouraged when she goes to school, she does not want to miss it, and the school community supports her. And that's what I think was so clear with all the parents we spoke to yesterday, and a grandparent as well, that the kids feel supported and loved in the school building and they need that so they can keep moving forward.

So, we're going to keep doing this work, and we've talked about the physical work to get schools ready, but we're also doing the work to help the administrators, to help the educators, the teachers to get ready to do this work in what's obviously a more complex reality than we normally face because of the crisis we're in. Over the last days, a tremendous amount of work has been done at the Department of Education, working with the United Federation of Teachers to work through the issues of curriculum, to work through the issues of instructional guidance in a context that's unprecedented, this blended learning model. And it was important to create a framework, to create an agreement that would allow everyone to move forward and now do the work of finalizing plans for school to begin. And then, of course, refining them as the school year progresses.

So, today, I want everyone to know that we've come to an agreement with the UFT on instructional guidance that will bring clarity to all educators and flexibilities to principals as they prepare how they're going to work with their teams in this new environment. And it really helps to clarify how work will be done with kids who are in school, kids who are in blended learning and are outside of the school that day, and, of course, kids who are remote full time. Now, look, students are going to get support every single day. Under any choice a parent makes for their kid, the kids are going to get support every day. They're going to get an education every day. But what was important was to determine a good working model for professionals to work together, to maximize what we could do for our kids. That time in the classroom is particularly precious and that's, I think, going to be the highest impact time, but taking a team approach to make sure that kids are being reached every day in the best way possible. So, this agreement really respects our professionals, our educators, and respects their need to be able to have time to plan and time to work out their collaboration in the interest of everyone. It clarifies, of course, that there will be planning time every day for teachers, 30 minutes, at the start of the day to work out the team approach for that day and to work through how to maximize the use of technology for the good of all, while still getting the unbeatable impact of in-person learning. This is a great step to help us get everything ready and here to give you a sense of what it means and how it's going to work, the Chief Academic Officer for the Department of Education Linda Chen.

Chief Academic Officer Linda Chen, Department of Education: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Before I begin my remarks today, I want to recognize all of our educators and their efforts since March to transform teaching and learning for all of our students. And, specifically, today for our principals and assistant principals. As a former principal in the system, I know what it's like to open up school, but certainly cannot say that I've walked the footsteps that you are currently walking. I greatly appreciate the unwavering commitment of our school leaders and also appreciate your candor and what you're experiencing in the midst of ever-changing landscapes. And while today's announcement may not answer every question you may have, it does endeavor to address some essential questions you've been asking to move forward. We have been working around the clock with our labor partners to be able to deliver conditions, to ensure that there is continuity of instruction for all of our students while also having everyone's health and safety at the forefront.

So, to everyone, our principals and their staffs out there doing tough work in planning each and every day, our whole city – our entire city commends them for their work. To our school leaders, our teachers – they're all top notch. They've taken a totally unprecedented situation and they've tackled it with creativity and tenacity. As they do, they bring us more questions about what this means for the various roles that make up the school community. And this year, asking key questions about what this means for teachers in the many modes in which they'll teach and impact our students. Blended learning students, learning in-person on-site at schools; blended learning students, learning remotely from home; and thirdly, fully remote student learning students, learning from home every day. We're happy to have worked closely with our labor partners to provide more of those answers today in the form of the new instructional guidance the Mayor mentioned. The guidance provides clarity to our principals for how to program teachers and students in all modes of instruction, blended or remote. And it delivers on our promise to families, consistency and support in the learning experience every day, no matter where a student is learning from. [Inaudible] the hours in a day, a remote student will receive live instruction to the ways that teachers can come together to coordinate and collaborate across classes of students.

Today's agreement moves us forward by providing a shared educational vision and the foundation for a strong start to the school year. We know our principals and school staffs have been working very hard all summer to get ready for September. Today, we're excited to take this next step for all of our students and provide additional clarity and support for our dedicated educators who will make this upcoming school year the greatest one yet. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Linda. And appreciate your hard work, and your team, and everyone who worked with us through, again, all summer long, getting these pieces into place, and this agreement is going to help us move forward.

Okay, everyone just a quick run through, of course, of our indicators. And we do this every single day, and today we have a good report. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today, 52. And the positive COVID rate among those 52, only 7.4 percent. Indicator number two, new reported cases on the seven-day average, threshold 550 cases – today's report, only 222, less than half. And indicator number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today’s report, 1.39 percent.

Let me say a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we're going to turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Commissioner Chokshi, Commissioner Trottenberg, CEO of the School Construction Authority Lorraine Grillo, Executive Director of the Office of Special Enforcement Christian Klossner, the Chief Academic Officer at the Department of Education Linda Chen, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Hey. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. Today, Jumaane Williams is planning to, again, echo a call that others have made to delay the start of the school year. He says actually that a lot of your methodology and efforts over recent days have been commendable, they're just taking place too late in the summer, hurdling towards an arbitrary opening date of September 10th. I'm wondering if you have considered as a backup plan pushing back the start of school either a few days, or a few weeks?

Mayor: Andrew, I appreciate it. I've spoken at length with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. He prepared a very extensive proposal about school opening and the Chancellor and I talked about it with him in detail, and I appreciated his analysis. Both the Chancellor and I had a different view of what would work, but I give Jumaane and his team credit – they looked at it very seriously and they offered a counter vision. But what I would disagree on his analysis is that, again, this notion that everything's happening in the last days, when, in fact, the work has been going on for months and months. And, you know, there's a difference between spin and reality. I know there have been voices out there saying that somehow everyone at Department of Education, you know, principals, custodial services, School Construction Authority have somehow taking the summer off – it's the exact opposite. People have been working harder than ever this summer throughout. They didn't get a lot of headlines for their day-after-day effort. They didn't get a lot of positive attention for all the groundwork they were laying, but these folks have been working hard all summer. I've talked to principals and custodial folks who gave up their summer to get their schools ready, did not expect it to be business as usual. They thought they owed it to the kids to go the extra mile and they have. So, I'd like all of that hard work to be respected. And what we've said today, the ventilation action teams are doing a final run through in light of the specific moment in history we're in, they're going farther and double checking everything again. And if something needs to be addressed, it will be. Final point to why school opens on September 10th, because, again, I remind everyone the law that exists in this state related to how many school days we need to achieve, the fact that our kids have been waiting to have their education resume and in-person education is irreplaceable. There's reasons for why we are committed to continue to move forward. And this is the vision that I am confident that we can have all the pieces in place so we can start serving our kids. Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: Today, Ritchie Torres, and some others in the Bronx used statistics from your office that 18 percent of families lack access to the internet and 46 percent lack access to broadband. Do you accept that premise in those numbers? And, if so, how can you address that inequality with only days to go until hundreds of thousands of folks are doing remote learning?

Mayor: I think we should separate the question of the digital divide, which is a hugely important issue and we have to do so much more in our society to address – and a separate discussion for another day is the frustration I feel with some of the companies that we've given franchises to, who were supposed to do a lot more for broadband access in the city and haven't. But what we have done, the City of New York, the Department of Education, is just go direct to the families, provide them with the technology, provide them with the – both the devices and the internet service. So, that has continued throughout and it's been free and available to all. It started in April, and has gone on continuously since, and it continues – again, any family that doesn't have yet a device or service, we will get it for them. But it's also a reminder, Andrew, that there's nothing that replaces in-person learning. You know, when you talk about all the challenges, because you can have a device, you can have service, but a kid may still not feel real agile about using it or family members may not. It's just not the same thing as having highly trained professionals, educators in-person guiding a child, there's just nothing that replaces that.

Moderator: The next is Alex Zimmerman from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, everyone. So, I want to first just ask on the new guidance for schools – is there a specific amount of live instruction that students should be getting either in the fully remote or in the blended remote setups?

Mayor: Linda, do you want to speak to that?

Chief Academic Officer Chen: Sure. Alex, yes. This is something that we learned from our families from the spring and also in the summer. We delineated some minimum and maximum times for live instruction. I'll go into those numbers in just a minute because they reflect what's developmentally appropriate across grade levels. But I do want to also take the opportunity to address live instruction. So it's synchronous meaning at the same time. So when we talk about that, it's similar to if you think about in the physical classroom, where the teacher is teaching a lesson to all of the students simultaneously. And that might be sometimes what people call a mini lesson. And there are other times where a teacher is working with small groups within the physical classroom, or the teacher is walking around the classroom and pulling alongside students individually or in pairs and providing that support. So when we think about synchronous and live instruction, that's what we're talking about within the virtual space as well. So there will be some times where a student is on with all their classmates, with a teacher on the other end with video. There will be small group time. There will be individual time. Sometimes those things we call office hours where there's one to one support. In addition, we can leverage technology as well to have live interaction between students and teachers. And between students with each other as well. That could be something as fundamental as simultaneously interacting in a chatbox, to things that are more elaborate and innovative that many of our teachers have been using in terms of applications. Those would all be the kind of work we're talking about synchronously or at the same time or live. So in terms of your specific question regarding times, we also want to make sure the parents know in advance when students would need to log on.
And that is also something that we reached an agreement with the UFT regarding. And lastly, the times for kindergarten through second grade, we're looking at starting at the beginning of the school year. So you'll see in the guidance that we not only consider developmentally appropriate differences, we also looked at the gradual increase of synchronous or live time over the course of the school year. So as we think about September, we're looking at the goals across kindergarten through second grade of 65 to 95 minutes. Third through fifth grade, 90 to 110 minutes. Grade six through eight, 80 to 100 minutes. And grades nine through 12, 100 to 120 minutes starting in September.

Mayor: Go ahead, Alex.

Question: Second question here is just the plan that the DOE has given the schools seems to suggest that students in the in-person learning framework will have different teachers than those who are providing the remote instruction. And so that creates like the very obvious math problem of the DOE has the same number of teachers, but students will be split into multiple places. So, you know, how from a staffing perspective is the DOE going to be able to have two sets of teachers in those different settings?

Mayor: That's a good question Alex. I’m going to Linda to give you details. But I just want to sort of give you the statement of principle. Again, none of us asked for a pandemic to say the least. But when we found that this was what we were facing we made a firm decision that we had to do the best we could for our kids. And so this is the model that allows us to hear the voices of so many parents and kids like Monet has said, who want to be back in school, need to be back in school. We're hearing that particularly strongly from parents of kids with special needs parents of kids who are English language learners. So many voices telling us it's so important to have the kids in the classroom. But we know it's going to be imperfect by definition. So I just want to say to all the educators, we are asking you to use your extraordinary skills and your professionalism and your training to work, to adapt, to figure out the best ways forward in a really imperfect environment. And honestly, that's what I've seen educators do throughout my whole life in public service and as a parent. I think educators constantly figure out solutions with each other, work with families. They're going to put their heart and soul into making this work. I don't have a doubt in my mind. But everyone understands, this is not a reality. Any of us would have wished for, but we're still going to make it work the best we can for our kids. Linda, why don't you speak to the specifics?

Chief Academic Officer Chen: So, Alex, yes, you're right. We are, as the Mayor said, in this context of a pandemic, we are dealing with a mathematical problem with variables that change from day to day. And so we know that that's what we can count on. What this agreement does do is really look to how can we have clear labor agreements as to how we can do that? And how we can provide continuity of learning for students first and foremost, in the context that we have? And that is why you see in the guidance, examples of collaboration. The Mayor spoke quite a bit today to the importance of community and collaboration. And that is what this agreement is about as well. It is leveraging dedicated time that teachers will have to collaborate between teachers in the cases where a student would have a teacher who is onsite and in-person, as well as the teacher they would be working with on the days at home in remote mode. And that is really what the guidance does. This allows – and I think you're absolutely right. Staffing has been and will continue to be something that we are monitoring closely. And we are concerned about. Absolutely the math would indicate to you that is going to be a variable we need to solve for. The agreement helps principals have the tools they need to figure out more precisely what those staffing needs will be. And more precisely how the DOE can support them in those efforts. You've heard the Chancellor say many times throughout the past months, around how we have been working on also a deployment plan. There are certified teachers that are not in school buildings that support teachers and principals. We have a plan to be able to deploy those folks, the guidance and the agreements that we came to with labor that are released today, help principals to be more precise in what those staffing needs will be. And therefore our ability as a system to be able to support them in meeting those needs.

Mayor: Thank you so much. And Alex it's just to conclude, I mean, what it does is it, and I've had this conversation with a number of principals directly. This gives them a framework to work with. They know the teachers who are coming back to their school building as Linda said, a lot of educators are now going to be put into play from other parts of the DOE who are not currently in a classroom. They'll go into a classroom. Of course, substitute teachers, teachers who are in our regional enrichment centers. We're talking about thousands of reinforcements will come into the equation now because there's now a framework that allows principals to precisely delineate what they need to do, day by day, hour by hour. So this really will help us move forward rapidly. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Emma Fitzsimmons from the New York Times.

Question: Hi Mayor. I wanted to ask about the schools reopening. It seems like you're, you know, increasingly isolated in sticking to opening on time. You know, Speaker Johnson, Jumaane, the Governor has sort of said he had questions about sending his kids if they were school age. So, I'm wondering what local leaders agree with you that we have to start on time? What business leaders, local leaders, national leaders, who is sort of on your side except for, you know many of the parents who want to go back, but who are quite scared?

Mayor: Emma respectfully who's on my side? The clear majority of parents, that's who I work for. I've been around politics a long time. It never surprises me when people criticize. The more daring and difficult thing is to actually create and produce something for the people we serve. And overwhelmingly parents want us to provide in-person learning for their kids. We saw it in the early surveys. We've seen it every day since, as we've given parents choices and options. You hear it distinctly and clearly in the voices of so many parents like the parents we met with yesterday. So honestly I respect my fellow elected officials. I truly do. I listened to them. I work with them. But if all of them say one thing, but the majority of parents say another thing, I'm with the parents. It's their children. We are here to serve them and their children. Those are the voices who matter. 

Moderator: The next is Julia from Post.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. On schools, do you have a deal with the UFT to return on September 10 or not? And if not, what remains to be worked out?

Mayor: It doesn't quite work that way. It's a fair question, but I want to understand, the school system is part of our obligation to the people of this city. It's no different than policing or Fire or Sanitation. We have an obligation to provide a service to our people. They have said, the parents of this city have said they need in-person learning to the maximum extent we can provide it. That's our job to serve our people. So unions of course, we will advocate for their workers and ask for whatever changes they think are important, but that's not how governance works. The government actually decides what we need to do to serve our people. And again, we're under a legal mandate to provide a certain number of instructional days to our kids. And we know we just know, and I have not heard anyone in the unions disagree with this statement, that in-person learning is much more effective than remote learning. So we'll keep talking. We. all the unions are talking daily with the DOE. This agreement that we're announcing today, obviously came from hard work in recent days, collaborative work to get to an agreement. We'll keep talking and we'll keep moving forward.

Moderator: The next is Kala from PIX.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. You mentioned the childcare issue with 100,000 seats open from the City. Can you give us more information? You said more will be coming in the next few days.

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Kala. So in fact, I’ve been in some meetings this week about the details. The application process has already been worked on by the Department of Education to identify parents who need childcare. We're working on how to prioritize that. Obviously the greatest concern is going to be for parents who need to be at a workplace, as opposed to parents who can work remotely. Particular concern for single parents. And, you know, there's a lot of single parents whose kids go to New York City public schools. We're going to be looking at parents who are in particular, in economic distress. You know, there's certain criteria that have to be put together to prioritize. Because everyone knows we're not going to have all the childcare seats we would ideally like, but we're going to have a lot. So that prioritization is being worked out. Application process is being worked out and we'll have an announcement on that very shortly.

Question: Okay. And a follow up to outdoor learning. I spoke with Council member Mark Treyger who said to ask other PTAs to help the less fortunate in regards to outdoor learning is the height of hypocrisy for the DOE and your office who's talked about ending the tale of two cities. And so can you tell us how many schools have been approved for outdoor learning? I know Mr. Carranza mentioned – yes?

Mayor: I think that's two different concepts, I could offer. What the Chancellor said was hundreds of schools had immediately upon the announcement, immediately applied for outdoor learning. I don't know if Linda has a new number today, but I know yesterday it was already hundreds. We expect that there's going to be very rapid approval. There may be specific things that need to be addressed. For example, if a principal wants a certain street closed off, is it a street that can be closed off? Is it the kind of street that doesn't have so much traffic or a bus route or something that could be worked out? But we expect a very high level of approval very quickly. That's a very different issue than whether a PTA provides some funding. Again, principals -- I don't know if you happen to see yesterday in the Bronx, the principal already had reserved part of the football field by the school for outdoor learning. So remember principals have sports fields, they have their playgrounds, they have their courtyards. There's a lot of areas where they already control. It has nothing to do with the PTA. And if they want a street closed off, that doesn't have anything to do with the PTA either. If the PTA wants to do something additional and special, we welcome it. But I would actually say it is exactly about fighting the tale of two cities to say that if a PTA in a wealthier community has the ability to put together substantial resources, it's only right to ask that they share with a school nearby that doesn't have some substantial resources so that they can get some of the benefit too. That's actually what we believe in. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is David Cruz from Gothamist.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good David. How are you?

Question: Good. We're hearing that teachers will be asking students to bring their devices for in-person learning days and work on those devices inside the classroom. So how will this be a good use of the in-person model?

Mayor: I'll start as the non-educator and turn to a great educator who can give you more. But to me as a parent, I mean, right now there's technology in classrooms by definition. I mean, kids have technology in many cases themselves. Classrooms use technology. It's part of the learning process. But what is irreplaceable is the human element. The impact of an adult, a guide, someone who helps kids understand how to get the most out of what a technology, no different than out of a textbook or, you know, a ruler or a protractor or a calculator or anything. The key is a teacher in-person because we're human beings. We're social beings. A teacher in-person can reach a child and help them understand something. notice that they need extra help, give them guidance, make sure if they need other types of support, like mental health services it's there. So I'd like Linda to speak to it. And Monet, I'm going to welcome after Linda, if you'd like to speak to this as well. You're very welcome because I think the point, like it's not about if they have a device with them. It's about what teachers do for them. Go ahead, Linda.

Chief Academic Officer Chen: I couldn't agree more with what the Mayor just said and I know that our educators are thinking about that. How do we maximize that precious in person time and bringing devices – devices again, are there to support learning. So it might be something in an independent small group work that might be done with a device, but it really is maximizing the in-person learning time and that is what we are doing for the in-person. I would also say that sometimes in order to be able to connect students to better do their asynchronous work on a device that also helps where the student brings it with them and so the teacher understands what it is that they are working with and how to help them problem solve as well.

Elzey: [Inaudible] teacher, I think that the devices they do help, but I think like in-person is much better because you get to interact with the child, you get to find out what they need help with, what levels of work that you have to help them with to get a better understanding on what is needed, the material that you need on paper. Computers are excellent, but in-person is the best thing I feel as me being a teacher and a parent, hands on is the best thing for me.

Mayor: Thank you. Thank you very much. Do we have another from David? David?

Question: Yes I do. So the CDC is saying that there should be a MERV 13 filter in classrooms is the best way to filter contaminants. So my question –

Mayor: Just repeat it. I couldn't hear the beginning of your sentence.

Question: Oh sorry. The CDC is saying that there should be a MERV 13 filter in classrooms as a way to fight off or just till trial contaminants. So my question is what type of filter is the DOE using and is there a breakdown it can provide over the number of schools using specific filters?

Mayor: Thank you for the question. I had trouble hearing the term of art you were using from the CDC, but I know who to turn to at least. So Lorraine and George, you can speak from the schools and the physical perspective, Dr. Dave Chokshi, Dr. Jay Varma can speak about the CDC side of things. So Lorraine, George, you want to start?

President and CEO Lorraine Grillo, School Construction Authority: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I – it is my experience that over the summer many of our custodians have replaced filters throughout, a number of different types of filters have been used. I believe MERV 13s are certainly one of those choices and I believe there are HEPA filters. George, maybe you can contribute to that a bit?

Senior Director Roussey: Yes, we've provided all that information to DSF for them to make those replacements. So you use MERV 13 when you - for any we recirculation air and our new buildings all will have them.

Mayor: Both of you, Lorraine, George, if a school needs that particular filter, you can make it available or our school facilities has them?

President Grillo: Right. School facilities has been working on that throughout the summer. So yes, I believe that they do.

Mayor: All right. We can confirm that back and doctors, you want to speak about the CDC side of this?

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Sure. I'm happy to start, Jay, so that the CDC guidance was updated last week. The updated CDC guidance specifically refers to the use of HEPA filters which stands for High Efficiency Particulate Air Filtration systems, and so that's what Lorraine alluded to and I know the Department of Education has incorporated that into their –

Mayor: Jay, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Nothing else for me.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi there. My first question, I just kind of want to go back to basics. Can someone outline the nuts and bolts, the highlights of what is actually in this instructional guidance that you announced, for instance, does it speak to – will remote students get teachers from their own school? Will it be the same teacher doing remote and in person or is it two separate teachers? You know, what are the elements of this that are important to teachers and students?

Mayor: Yeah, I appreciate that. Erin, I'm going to start and pass to Linda. Look, again I always like to break things down to their most fundamental level. What this makes clear is how teachers can work together as a team to make sure there's as much consistency in the learning as possible. It is a complex environment, unquestionably, but again, and you understand the power of in-person learning, we want to maximize that while understanding that it's a blended model, understanding there's going to be some kids who are all remote, we have to find a way to do best by everyone. A lot of that comes down to helping principals plan out the use of their team and helping team members communicate and coordinate so it's as seamless as possible. That's the underlying principle here, but Linda, why don't you try and make it as much a day in the life as you can or as tangible as you can?

Chief Academic Officer Chen: Sure, the driver here is to ensure that there is continuity of learning for our students and with that, since there are different contexts that they will be learning in whether it's onsite or at home as part of a blended learning cohort or full time remote learning, we want it to be very clear through this guidance for students in their various contexts. What are the teacher's roles and responsibilities in accordance with the mode that the students are learning in? That way it's very clear to families, to students, as well as teachers themselves, what those expectations are. We – as I mentioned earlier – we learned a number of concerns from families around live instruction, and that was something I delineated earlier, and that's also part of what this agreement does is solidify and be explicit about those minimum and maximum times that a family could expect. But also that is paired with what we call asynchronous or those types of the work that students are doing on their own based on their schedule and the schedule of their families. We know that this – there's a lot of partnership with families here when students are learning remotely, and so that the agreement also delineates how there will be provisions for teachers to collaborate and coordinate instruction. That's part of the day. It also delineates dedicated time during the day for teachers to be able to – parents to be able to have access to teachers as well, because we know there's a lot of coordination with families as well. And in terms of the asynchronous work, we also have agreements around how that curriculum and the standards and the materials teachers would have to support this continuity of learning for our students would take place as well. So those are all the top lines of what is in the agreement.

Mayor: Go ahead, Erin.

Question: Okay. I'll go to a different topic. About restaurants, you've said that there's no plan to allow indoor dining anytime in the foreseeable future. So I'm just wondering, is there any reason not to extend the outdoor dining beyond October 31st, you know, with the understanding that it may not work well for a lot of people because of the weather, but for those who do want to do it, you know, is there any reason not to just allow it and perhaps make a decision sooner rather than later, so folks can out their plans?

Mayor: Sure. It's a fair question, Erin. I mean, it's obviously still August, so, you know, we're over two months until the end of the planned timeline, but I think it's a fair question. We're looking at that right now. We're trying to get a sense from the restaurant community, how much interest there is in going longer. You know, it does come with obviously a certain amount of follow-up that we do if something like that is happening, a certain amount of monitoring has to happen. So it does matter that we understand together with the restaurant community what the ground rules will be. But there's definitely openness on our part to going longer if we think it will contribute something. We're also talking about next year. I announced to begin that we would have outdoor dining next year, starting June 1st going to October 31st, we're talking with the restaurant industry about whether we should move that forward a month or two. So that conversation is going on as well. And look, we're continuing to look at the indoor question. It's a very challenging question because of what we've seen around the world, but we're continuing to assess and what matters most is our health situation. If we continue to improve on the health front, like that's the gateway to being able to consider things that we can't do right now, is just continuing to have proof that we're pushing back this disease and we'll know a lot more in the next months plus as more and more people come back to work, as schools begin, you know, we'll get to see a lot about what our long-term health picture looks like, and that's going to help inform our decisions going forward.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Linda from FOX5.

Question: Oh, great. Thanks so much, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me okay?

Mayor: Yeah, Linda, how you doing?

Question: I'm great. Thank you so much. My apologies to start off in case somebody has already asked you this I'm working from home today and there were some technical difficulties, but my question is there are some principals in the Bronx, specifically the South Bronx, they said that they sent you a letter as well as the DOE because they're concerned about the outdoor spaces for outdoor learning because of the increasing crime and the increasing drug use. In fact, a few days ago, there was a woman that was shot to death in front of the district school’s PS01 in District Seven. So they want to know if the city has a plan because in certain areas, because of the increase in crime and the drug use, they think that will be a huge distraction for the kids to be learning outside. Do you have any plan to address that issue because they don't want to be outside?

Mayor: Yeah, no. I appreciate the question. The Chancellor spoke to this yesterday when we were up in the Bronx. Linda, first of all, it's a very painful reality that in some of our communities there's been this uptick in violence and, you know, job one of course is to fight that back. I do believe it's related to fighting back to the disease, the whole crisis we're in here begins with the coronavirus, so every day we're fighting back the disease and reducing the impact of disease is another step towards getting safer overall. And obviously we've moved a lot of NYPD resources around. NYPD is working very closely with community leaders in places that have experienced the uptick in violence. We've got to go at the root cause of that.

But for the specific concern of the principals, which is real, that the answer to the Chancellor gave, I’ll amplify it, it's an option if a principal wants to use outdoor learning, it is not a requirement in the least. And clearly principals can work within their school building to achieve what they need to. And as you've seen, I don't know if you've been to any of the classrooms we've visited, but the ones that I've been to, one had nine students to the classroom, another one had 10, and another one had 11, three different boroughs, three different schools. Just to give you a sense that we're going to have a situation where kids are going to be learning in safe spaces, small number of kids in the classroom. But the goal of course from the very beginning was to accommodate all kids who will be in school, within the school building. So that's how the planning has been proceeding all along. Outdoors is optional. Outdoors is additional if a principal wants to take advantage of it, go ahead.

Question: Is it [inaudible], obviously here with these particular principals, they think the outdoor option is just not doable, it's way too unsafe, but they also don't want to be in the school either because they're saying the safety protocols just aren't there, your response to that?

Mayor: No, I respect all our educators but I just disagree and I think you've heard earlier today, I don't know if you were able to hear the report from Lorraine and George, but again, you've got a really dedicated professionals who've spent the whole summer, School Construction Authority, a division of school facilities at DOE, the custodial engineers in the schools. I mean, I've been deeply involved in our school system for a couple of decades now, and I've seen how much devotion there is normally, but this year has been like a call to arms for all the folks who prepare schools, they've been putting immense work into making sure they are healthy and safe and again, it begins with things we've never seen before, nine kids in the classroom, 10 kids in the classroom, the classroom that we were in yesterday, nine versus normally 24 to 28, everyone with a face covering, cleaning every day including the electrostatic cleaning, hand sanitizer in every room. These are extraordinary layered precautions. So I know that this is going to add up and make our school facilities very safe for our kids and I think adults have to show strength in respecting that our parents desperately need their kids to get this support and it's up to all of us to serve our parents and serve our kids.

Well, with that, everyone, look, it also comes back to the whole reason we have public schools and I want to speak to that, but before I do just a quick programming note to let folks know that there is not a morning press conference scheduled for tomorrow, but we will be back on Monday. So everyone can be aware of that. But let me talk about public education as we close because nothing to me has been more important in my life's journey, and I think a lot of people could say, that I am blessed, my wife, Chrilane, blessed to have had a public education that gave us so much. We all can think of the educators in our lives. I can remember teachers, principals who did so much for me. I know Chirlane feels the same way. I saw it with our children. The transcendent impact that great educators make, and they can do some of that online, but only some of it, the real way to reach a child is in-person with all your heart and soul, and that's what educators do. But I think we need to think about why public education matters so much. It is one of the great foundations of a good society, a decent society, a compassionate society, a democratic society. We are also aware at this moment of history that we value our democracy more than ever. Well, you know what, nothing is underpinning of democracy more than public education and the idea, the egalitarian idea, the idea that everyone matters, that everyone is served no matter who they are for free, what is more powerful than that?

So, in the end, I don't just think of public schools as buildings. And I don't even just think of them as collections of people or folks who happen to have a job in education. I think of them as communities that represent the best of us, that provide hope, that really give people a sense of how much goodness there can be in the world, and when I listened to those parents yesterday, they talked about for a lot of kids, the best part of their day, the best part of our lives is when they walk through the door of that school building, no matter what other challenges that confront. One of the parents talked about kids in shelter and say, when they walk through the doors of the school, they leave the shelter behind and they can imagine a life beyond the shelter. Another parent said something beautiful and said a lot of kids are dealing with a lot of pain right now, a lot of kids are dealing with a lot of poverty, but when they walk into that school, that is the light of their day. That is their hope and we owe it to our kids to give them that hope. Thank you, everybody.

2020-08-28 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, and if it's Friday, it's the day for Ask the Mayor here on the Brian Lehrer Show – my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio, Fridays at 11:05. Our phone number 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0 – or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag, #AsktheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How are you doing today?

Lehrer: I'm doing all right, thank you, and I want to begin with some questions about schools. September 10th is getting very close, obviously, and just yesterday, I see you announced there would be separate teachers for the same students for their at-home and in-person days in the blended system you're planning. Our education reporter is getting indications that the principals in many cases, won't have the staffing for that or the money for that extra staff and Chancellor Carranza promised substitute teachers and other reinforcements, but gave no indication who is coming, and when, so here's my first question. Increasingly people are saying this isn't ready, even if it's right and it delay is inevitable. Are you now considering a delay?

Mayor: Look, Brian, we have been planning on September 10th for months and months. It is exactly when school begins every year and yeah, there's additional things we've had to work out this year to say the least, but step-by-step, these things are being resolved via announcement yesterday of the agreement with the UFT – that basically is going to allow for a team teaching approach that is going to make it very consistent and well-coordinated, how different teachers work together to serve kids, whether they're in the classroom or at home on that day. I do hear the concerns of the principals and that answer is coming to them very, very shortly, because as was true before the beginning of every school year, there's a last minute push to align the staffing levels, get the right people in the right places. We are going to have thousands of additional teachers available between the DOE personnel right now, certified teachers who don't teach in the classrooms, they’re coaches, or teachers, or administrators, whatever they may be, who will be brought into the classroom, the folks in the ATR pool, substitute teachers that we used every year, many of whom are ready to go. So that pool is ready and it's going to be plugged in now to each school, and by the first day of school, every one of our schools will have the teaching compliment they need.

Lehrer: And all of these teachers who are going to do the remote track will be trained sufficiently to be remote educators?

Mayor: Well, remember every single one of them has been doing remote since March, even though none of us expected it, none of us preferred it to in person. It is the reality that every existing teacher in the DOE has now had four months of remote teaching under their belt.

Some of them continued over the summer doing it. A lot of work has been done to keep training the teachers. It will be ongoing. I mean, we're doing something on a scale that's never been done before, and teacher-professional development happens throughout the year in a normal year. It's obviously going to keep happening now to keep improving the remote teaching. But I will tell you, teachers are taking a lot of this upon themselves in a good way. Educators, throughout this experience have been sharing best practices with each other, working together to figure out creative approaches. There is a tremendous spirit of ingenuity among our educators. They want to get it right for our kids and they are figuring out and we're going to keep providing the support to help them do it better. But again, you know, Brian, I don't think anything replaces in-person learning. So I actually think those hours in the school building are going to be far higher impact, but we will keep helping teachers to improve the remote no matter what.

Lehrer: I do understand the Chancellor has submitted a waiver request with the State that would allow a delay if you choose. Is that right? And if so, where does that stand?

Mayor: Well, we've got a lot of moving parts here, Brian, because the State last school year was very clear that funding would be consistent even if we went remote, that the fact that we had to be remote would not be held against us, and we need those answers again this year. So the central thing that the Chancellor is talking to the State about is we have a lot of kids who are going to be all remote. We don't know, obviously at some point what our overall situation will be. We, we hope and pray for a vaccine quickly, but we have to be ready to move in different directions. We need to know we're going to be held harmless in terms of law and funding if a lot of our kids are remote or if we ever have to, at some point in the future go to all remote.

Lehrer: Well, what do you know, as of now, because if I have this right Chancellor Carranza says, if Governor Cuomo goes through with a possible 20 percent funding cut to schools, that the city will start all remotely on September 10th, and is that is that right, and when would you know?

Mayor: There's a different question there. The waiver question is to confirm that for kids who are going all remote, they will still be treated as having reached the mandatory 180 days, and again, if we ever have to take the system at any point to all remote, that that we are going to be given the same funding, the same legal – be given the same legal credit, if you will, for that educational time is a different question than the budget question. Right now we keep fighting against any budget cuts from the State, and I know the legislature is deeply concerned, and most importantly, we're working to get the long-term borrowing that would allow us to handle our own budget challenges, and God forbid the worst state cuts to handle those as well, and there was much more momentum now in Albany to get that long-term borrowing done, but we're far from complete.

So the question of what the State is going to do is absolutely unclear both in terms of the budget and the long-term borrowing, but that's not affecting what we're doing right now. Right now is just full speed ahead.

Lehrer: So this would not affect the opening of schools on September 10th, to be clear?

Mayor: No, because the State has to date been slowing down its reimbursements, but we have not experienced a full blown cut, and again, even God forbid, if there was a cut scenario, we could compensate for that with long-term borrowing, as you know, the City Council Speaker Johnson has come out strongly in favor of long-term borrowing. The City Council has on its agenda for its next meeting, a vote in favor of long-term borrowing. We're seeing more momentum in Albany. That piece would answer all of the short-term funding questions. We've got to get that done, and by the way, the labor unions are deeply involved in the effort too, to get long term borrowing. There's a lot of energy in this effort right now.

Lehrer: Let's take a phone call on schools. Regina in Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Hi Regina you're on with the Mayor.

Question: Hi Brian. Hi Mayor. My question is about the new podcast, Nice White Parents in the podcast, the Mayor's response or lack thereof on true integration was critiqued. With students’ heavy reliance on technology this year, do you Mayors foresee any challenges to accessibility and majority-minority schools that will further create a divide between BIPOC students and their wealthier white student peers?

Mayor: I don't know if I could hear all of the questions, so I may need a clarification, but I think what I'm hearing is am I concerned about disparities in education and the difference with remote and in person? I mean, absolutely. I'll give an answer and if I've missed the question, just confirm, I, I think one of the greatest arguments for in-person education is that it actually addresses disparity much better than remote education.

Question: Well, I was referring to the podcast Nice White Parents, where they typically talk about—

Mayor: I don't know what you're referring to. I'm sorry. I couldn't even hear what the name of it.

Lehrer: Are you aware of the New York Times podcast, Nice White Parents about school integration and lack thereof in Brooklyn and around the city?

Mayor: No.

Lehrer: So you haven't, you haven't heard – nobody's pointed out that podcast to you. I'm surprised.

Mayor: There's a lot going on, Brian. I don't want to hear about every podcast, but go ahead, go ahead and Regina, if you want to frame a follow-up question, go ahead.

Question: Yeah, I'm in the podcast, they primarily talk about how your public schools are largely segregated and they – and so with the pandemic and largely potentially being online, I would suspect that there's going to be a lot of problems with accessibility in underprivileged communities. I was wondering if the Mayor has anything to address that and if this may be a good time to address integration of schools?

Mayor: Thank you, and I'm sorry, I just couldn't understand from the beginning, now it makes sense. At first yes, in terms of what I think is profound disparities running through our society –it’s the entire reason I ran in everything we've been doing from day one is to deal with the tale of two cities – I think as we go through this school year, we're going to have to intensely focus on kids who are not getting their fair share. Again, the best way from my point of view is for those kids to be in-person learning as much as humanly possible, because I think that's when we can address those disparities best. For kids who are remote only, I think it's really, really tough. Of course, extra efforts are being made to get kid, tutoring, guidance, et cetera, online if they need extra help. And this is particularly true for English language learners, special ed kids. But the remote context does not allow that to be done at all as effectively as in-person. That is the truth. So our central effort here is to show people safe, well-functioning schools to maximize the number of parents who feel comfortable getting their kids back to those schools, particularly if they have greater needs that need to be addressed.

On the bigger question, we've made a series of steps to address the need to diversify our schools and address segregation in the city. Now remind you, some of them have not gotten the support I think they deserve, like ending the standardized test for specialized high schools and ensuring that they represent this whole city, which they clearly don't. I've put that out very forthrightly and a lot of opposition came back. But we are going to be doing a lot more to address some of the barriers to a more diverse classroom. It's been working at the local level. That's where we found the greatest success, from the ground up. But I also will say, as I've said, Brian, on this show before. I really wish people would look at the foundation. The foundation is not the school system. It is housing, it's jobs, it's economic segregation. It's a segregated city. The school system can’t solve that.

Lehrer: People can be moved from neighborhood to neighborhood as Kamala Harris pointed out in her debate with Joe Biden. Right?

Mayor: And I have been really clear about the fact that in some neighborhoods where communities are close together, there's a lot of that we can do and are doing. In other neighborhoods, it's a lot harder. I don't think something like large scale school busing is a good idea for that purpose. I just don't. I've said that many times. I think we can do a lot to make our schools more representative and inclusive, but I really think that debate – I will believe it is an honest debate, when people talk about the economic underpinnings and the housing underpinnings more. And not just act like the schools can solve the problem alone. They simply can't. We can make a lot of progress, but I'll argue with anyone at any time, it cannot be the schools alone. You want to do real – I don't know what Nice White Parents is about. So then people in predominantly white neighborhoods, let's desegregate the neighborhoods and you will desegregate the schools. That is the better way to think about this from my point of view.

Lehrer: One more follow up that relates to the podcast, Nice White Parents. You announced outdoor learning just this week and set a deadline of today for principals to submit their plans. I'm going to ask you if you think everybody is going to meet that deadline, if that's realistic? But the outdoor learning plan is being criticized as another driver of race and class disparity. And your call for lesser funded schools to ask wealthier PTAs to share resources with them, A is it too fast to expect results on that for September 10th on such a complicated and fraught request? And doesn't the history of those kinds of requests suggest it's just not going to happen to a meaningful degree? This is a sort of Nice White Parents issue.

Mayor: Well, again, I just want to say if we're going to have a serious discussion in this city, I mean, I find it – I mean, you have to be real blunt, Brian. You're talking about Nice White Parents, there's a podcast. Everyone's feeling very good about themselves, that they're talking about the issue. You really want to change things in this city? Then everyone better change a lot of the way we live more foundationally. If you just talk about it and feel self-satisfied, God bless you. That's not actually going to change things. What changes things is redistribution of wealth. Tax the wealthy at a much higher level, make sure that working people who in this city are overwhelmingly people of color get higher wages so they can afford better housing, help us create the affordable housing and neighborhoods that so many times there's been a NIMBY effort to stop. And the NIMBY effort has sometimes come from people, I would've thought were more to the left, not just people more to the right. So if we're going to have an honest discussion in the city, which a lot of times bluntly, elite outlets and elite context don't want to have this honest conversation. You really want to break down segregation in New York City? Then let's deal with the economic reality. The economic reality is pervading the racial reality as well. And I just feel like this is a lot of cocktail party comfort going on rather than people honestly dealing with this issue. Help me tax the wealthy, help me redistribute wealth, help me build affordable housing in a white communities, if you want desegregation. If you do not want to do all those things, then you're not serious about desegregation. To your question – yes, go ahead.

Lehrer: Well, I was going to say, understood. But the immediate question is what do you say to critics of the outdoor learning plan, who say it takes a lot of money and it's going to be another driver of disparity from school to school?

Mayor: Brian, I'm losing patience respectfully, because there's so many people who don't know what the hell they're talking about. Love to criticize, and don't even bother to do the basic research on what's going on. I've been asked in press conferences repeatedly. We were on a football field in the Bronx with a principal at a high school in a community of color. And he said, it's my high school, this football field’s next to my high school. And I'll use this football field. It doesn't cost him anything. Principals can use their schoolyards, their courtyards. They want to close off a street next to the school. So long as it's a street, we can close off. It's not a bus route or something. It doesn't cost them anything. I answered this. The Chancellor answered it. People aren't listening, Brian. You guys, if you’re serious, listen. If you're serious about answers –

Lehrer: I think people say it’s the tents.

Mayor: Give me a break. The tents are one piece of a much bigger equation. And this is again, if we're going to have a serious discussion or just a superficial discussion. If you want to have a serious discussion, what we said is we got a lot of requests from principals, could they do outdoor learning? We said, yes, you can do outdoor learning. By the way no one said the deadline was today. We have corrected the journalists who absolutely mangled that. The deadline was, if you got it by today, you'll get an answer for next week. If you want to put in an application in next week, you'll get an answer the week after. It's fine. But there's lots of ways to do outdoor that don't cost a thing. And a PTA that does have a lot of money should share. We said the same thing with parks conservancies. Again, let's stop the cocktail party madness. If you actually are serious and you're a wealthy PTA, share with a school nearby that doesn't have a lot of money. That is addressing the tale of two cities.

Lehrer: Turget, in Manhattan. You on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Turget.

Question: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I have a restaurant on Upper West Side, HDFC building. And I'm a restaurant who closed the dining room a couple of months ago. Now the I asked the HDFC core, they can lower my rent? They cannot because they have obligation on the City. And I have 40 employees. I'm doing the takeout and delivery. And I need the help. Otherwise we are going to be closed by the end of this year, if they cannot help us. Because we've finished all the PPP money, everything. And we’ve been there 40 years, Upper West Side, and we need help.

Mayor: Turget, look, first of all, would you please make sure to give your information to WNYC because we want to see if there's some way we can help you and help the building owners to work out an accommodation. There's a bunch of different things we can do to help you to tide over. Our Small Business Services Department constantly is working to mediate between landlords and small businesses and they can get you other types of support as well. So please give your number to WNYC. But I think the bigger answer here Brian, is we're right now trying to figure out, you know, obviously for some restaurants, the outdoor dining has been tremendously helpful. We're trying to figure out how we can maximize that going forward. We're trying to figure out if there is some fair standard that is healthy and safe, but also allow indoor dining to come back. We're working on that right now. It’ll be a very rigorous standard if we get to it. But we're trying to answer the very valid question people are asking. But I want to also remind people, you know this of course should have been done in a federal stimulus to provide help for small businesses again. The one ray of light here, I don't know what's going to happen in the election nor do you. But I do believe if there's a Biden presidency, that will be a major stimulus very, very quickly. So I would say to a small business owner, you know, where they're fighting to hang on, to keep hanging on, we're going to try and help you, case by case all we can. But I want to believe with an election now 68 days away or whatever the number is, that there may be bigger help on the way that could really provide a lot of small businesses with the ability to get to a vaccine. And I think a vaccine is probably at some point in the spring at this rate. So I'm hoping we can help people hang on to that point.

Lehrer: I gather you have an announcement to make today that the city is going to start granting sports field permits for certain groups? Is that right?

Mayor: That's exactly right. Brian in the middle of all the challenges is some good news. So I actually was a Little League coach in baseball with my kids. And the folks from the sports leagues that do so much good with our kids, they've been appealing for the ability to open up. We're going to grant that. We're working on the exact day right now. I think it's going to be September 15th, but we are working on the exact day. But what it means is Parks Department will provide permits for baseball, softball, soccer, flag football, non-contact lacrosse, and cricket, which is very popular in lot of our neighborhoods. I want to thank Council member Justin Brannan who’s been really pushing us to do this. And an old friend of Eddie Albert from the Prospect Park Baseball Association who has been giving me a lot of insight about how we could do it. But it will come with full adherence to State and World Health Organization guidelines.
So face mask, whenever people can wear them, social distancing when not playing, limit on the number of spectators. And this'll be like schools. We will keep allowing this as we stay under that three percent citywide test positive number. Which thankfully Brian, we've been well below now for months. But that will be the standard.

Lehrer: And just to be clear, is this just for youth sports or also for some adult sports?

Mayor: Well, again, the first focus is on youth sports leagues. That's where most of the applications are from. But to the best of my understanding, it will be across the board. Because the point here is we needed to figure out healthy standards. And with these standards in place if folks follow them, we can keep it healthy. It's obviously an outdoor activity. Now Ill also say bluntly, any league that doesn't follow them, we're going to have a three strikes and you're out. That if a league of teams in the league violate these standards and we see that happen three times, then that league will not be allowed to continue.

Lehrer: Cynthia in Manhattan, you’re on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Cynthia.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Hi Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I'm calling on behalf of my partner, who is an Instacart worker. He purchases and delivers groceries to New York City and the boroughs. Ever since the outdoor dining started occurring there's been a lack of parking. So him and a lot of the other workers are experiencing a lot of citations. They are forced to double park, park in commercial zones. And I'm not at all advocating for getting rid of the restaurants. Like not at all. I'm just wondering if there can be some leniency or some kind of pardons for these citations until things normalize? We've appealed, you know, through the process. And like, and I, we say the exact same thing that I’m just telling you. And they just get denied. So it just feels like at this point, like he's just working to pay off these citations.

Mayor: No, I really appreciate the question Cynthia because we don't want to solve one problem and create another. So first of all, will you please also give your information to WNYC so our team can follow up with you today? Look, I appreciate the way you said it. Because the outdoor dining has brought back tens of thousands of jobs, and it's been very good for this city and for saving these restaurants. We want to keep that going, but we don't want to penalize folks who are doing grocery delivery, which is more depended on now than ever. And they're also, we want to keep their jobs intact. So let me see what we can do to figure out a solution here. It's a very fair question. And yet you're actually the first person that I can remember raising it to me. I'm glad you did, because this is the kind of thing we have to make sure that we're addressing the whole equation. So get, you know, follow up directly, but we'll also come back with a bigger policy on this.

Lehrer: Cynthia, hang. Amil in Queens, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Amil.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and Brian. The Mayor placed a hundred plus inmates from Rikers Island in a local upscale hotel in Fresh Meadows. The Wyndhan Garden in at $200 a night. Not informing the neighborhood beforehand, no community involvement, using the pandemic as his excuse to do this. This has been going on since June and was told it was a temporary situation. In the beginning they were unsupervised leaving the hotel panhandling in the area, stealing in CVS and vandalizing cars in the adjacent parking lot. When will they be removed so our neighborhood can get back to the way it was? An upper middle class neighborhood that were safe to walk the streets day and night without feeling threatened.

Mayor: Well, first of all, I don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable in their own neighborhood. And we're going to – and if there’s specific problems at that site, we've got to address the problems. So please give your information to WNYC so our team can follow up with you. I will only say that some of the facts you laid out don't jive with what I understand. We had a crisis in March and April, where we had a lot of people in an unsafe situation in jails. We had to be careful in the middle of the intense time of the pandemic, not to have a huge amount of infection in the jails that could have killed people who were in there even for minor crimes. We made a careful decision. We worked with the DAs, we worked with the State. The State [inaudible] but I don't have any knowledge of a single location with a hundred former inmates. That just doesn't jive with what I know. What we'll do is follow up on whatever's going on in the neighborhood with Homeless Services, NYPD, whatever it takes to create a safer environment. But I don't know of any place where there's that kind of concentration of former inmates. So we'll check that fact.

Lehrer: We’ll take you information Amil.

Mayor: Brian, can I give you an update? I'm sorry to jump in. I have one thing I said wrong, I need to fix. You asked about adults and the permits from the Parks Department. And if my memory serves you are a softball player yourself? And I have been too, so I think it was a noble question. And what I'm told is the permits are just for the youth leagues, but any field that is not taken is as always available first come first serve to whoever comes upon it. So adults will still have those opportunities for the fields that are not reserved for youth leagues.

Lehrer: Got it. But the permitting – and yes the long lamented WNYC softball season would have had its last permit on the North Meadow of Central Park on Monday. We know that’s gone.

Mayor: But there'll be a new season and a new location in 2021, right? Let's hold out that hope.

Lehrer: We hope. But the permits that are, that people can start applying for today, the actual permits are for youth sports to be clear?

Mayor: Yes. And that conversation with the youth leagues actually has been going on for months. The Department of Parks asked for initial interest, and then we've been trying to figure out really what we could do, healthy, you know, in a healthy and safe manner. So the leagues have been getting ready in the meantime. They'll be able to start up this coming month.

So the leagues have been getting ready, in the meantime. They'll be able to start up this coming month.

Lehrer: The caller [inaudible] in Queens, obviously there's been a situation on the Upper West Side. That's been much in the news homeless men from, I guess, a troubled shelter population of some kind put in hotels in that neighborhood, and it's looking now from the news this week that you'll get sued by one side, if you don't relocate them back to shelters and sued by the other side, if you do. So, where are you on that today?

Mayor: It's a typical day as mayor of New York City, I would say. It's really straightforward to me. We had a healthcare crisis. I just mentioned the fact that we had to get people out of our jail system. It was too crowded in the midst of the height of the pandemic. Equally, we had to get people moved out and spread out in our shelter system. There's a lot of concern, a lot of valid concern. We sent in our health professionals to determine, and they also affirmed we needed to use different spaces, more spaces. That's why we went into hotels on a temporary basis. We don't want to be in hotels. We'd never wanted to be in hotels. I put out a plan three years ago about how we are going to consistently get out of hotels in this city as part of addressing homelessness. and we've actually moved that quite extensively. This is a temporary situation. So what I've said, and I don't care who sues me is this was always meant to be temporary. As the health situation continues to improve, and thank God our shelter population has gone down so there's more space, we will start taking people back from hotels, into the existing shelters, but only as it is safe and healthy. I also want to say a lot of people on the Upper West Side have, despite some of what you've seen in tabloids, a lot of people in the Upper West Side have said, “you know what, we understand these folks are homeless. It's not their fault, there but for the grace of God go we, and we're going to help them and show compassion for them,” and yeah, there's quality of life issues, we're all going to work together to resolve those too, but I don't want to present it as just one voice of the Upper West Side. I think a lot of people have put Upper West Side have really tried to support folks who have fallen on hard times while at the same time, want to make sure of course the neighborhood is safe and the quality of life is protected.

Lehrer: Thanks as always Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thanks. Take care, Brian.

2020-08-31 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. New York City continues on our road back. New York City, every day, taking step after step as we fight back this disease and we start to bring back our economy and our lives. And really, again, I'll say it every single time. The credit goes to all of you who have done such a remarkable job, doing what we needed to do to fight back this disease. And you're going to see, once again, with the day's indicators that it's working. So, a lot is happening now, a lot of work being done as we speak to get things ready for the start of school, good work being done by thousands and thousands of City employees to get everything ready for our kids. So much other important work going on. We see real progress – again, businesses bringing back more employees, museums opening up, our youth sports leagues opening up, so many things that show little by little we're taking those steps in the right direction.

Now, I've said many times, for us to really come back – for this city, this state, this nation to come back, we have to have a strong public sector. We have to provide all the services that people need as part of our recovery. That's why it's been so important to fight for a stimulus from the federal government. We haven't gotten that and that's put us in a really tough situation where we had to in our most recent budget prepare for something we really don't want to do, which is widespread layoffs of City workers, which would literally take us in the wrong direction. It would be horrible for those good, hardworking City employees and their families, and horrible for our city. But time has been ticking and there has been no resolution from Washington, and we've looked to Albany as well, so far without result. So, today, was the day when layoff notices were going to be sent out. Now, our municipal labor unions have come to me in the last few days in the asked for more time to see if they can resolve this issue. They've come in good faith, and I've worked very closely with municipal labor now over the last seven years in partnership, and they've asked for an opportunity to convince the State Legislature to reconvene immediately to address long-term borrowing. I think it's a fair request, but it's one that has to be acted on very, very quickly. And so, what I've said to our colleagues in the municipal labor movement is we will hold, but it will be on a day to day basis. We won't send off the layoff notices today, but each day we will reassess, because we have to address our fiscal crisis. Again, no one wants to see a single layoff, but we have to address our fiscal crisis. So, I am hoping that this pause will lead to more progress in Albany because of the intense commitment of labor to getting this done. And I want to say, in the last few days, we've seen more and more signs of support for long-term borrowing. I want to thank our colleagues in the City Council. They're preparing to vote on a resolution in support of long-term borrowing in a matter of days. I want to thank Speaker Cory Johnson and UFT President Michael Mulgrew – they authored an op-ed recently in the Daily News, making the case for long-term borrowing. Many, many unions have been reaching out to Albany, telling them how important it is for New York City, but not just from New York City – the New York State Association of Counties has weighed in and made so clear that all over New York State there are localities that need help with long-term borrowing, given this horrible, horrible reality thrown at us by a pandemic no one ever expected. So, we'll pause now, and we'll do the work together to convince Albany that we need them. We need them to step up and pass long-term borrowing. That's what would avert the layoffs instantly and that's what we’ll be working on over these next few days.

Now, while we're doing this work to try and preserve our workforce, to try and protect the services that people need, try and keep our budget strong. There's so many other things we have to do at the same time, all in the midst of this incredibly challenging moment in history. So, what we do every day, of course, number-one concern every day is a health and safety of all New Yorkers. And when we focus on public safety, we do it in a way that regards both the importance of protecting people's lives and the importance of bringing police and community together. I've said literally since the time I ran for mayor that safety and fairness must walk hand in hand. There's no contradiction between a safe city and a city that is about justice.

Now, let me turn you to another crucial matter – obviously, less than two weeks until the beginning of school. So much work going on – we've talked about all of the work that's happened since June by our custodial engineers in the schools, the School Construction Authority, Division of School Facilities at DOE – so many thousands of people working together to get our schools ready, June, July, August – now, as we get ready for September. So, to-date 1,321 school buildings have been inspected. And that is about 88 percent of the buildings that needed an inspection. We will be continuing those inspections today and tomorrow, and then we will have gotten through the entire school system. We'll be publishing the results of the inspections on a rolling basis to update parents and the community on where each school stands. So far, what we're seeing is overwhelmingly, because of the hard work that's been happening over the last three months, that schools are ready. But we'll be very clear if there's any specific school with ongoing work that needs to be done, any even individual classroom that has work that needs to be done. And we'll be publishing that shortly.

Now, we're also moving ahead in some other key areas. Last week, we talked about the outdoor learning plans. The response from principals was outstanding. So many of them had ideas ready to go. And I want to make really clear that principals at any point can put in an outdoor learning plan. We said to them, any plan that was put in last week will get an answer by this week, but they are invited to continue to put in plans at any point. So far, 247 schools have had their outdoor learning plans approved. And again, that will be on a rolling basis. And another ongoing effort that started in the spring, but it will continue, is to make sure that all children who need devices to participate in the remote learning that they'll be involved in, whether it's in a blended learning format or all remote format, we want to make sure that every child that needs technology gets it, who needs internet service gets it. So far, in the New York City public schools, 324,000 iPads have been distributed for free to kids who need them. And that distribution will continue as there are needs. We want to make sure our children get what they need and get it quickly.

So, we continue this work every day with the folks working in the buildings, with our administrators, with our educators, with our custodial teams, with our building staff, the food service staff, you name it, everyone's in this together and we are working constantly with the unions that represent the people that do the work. We're all working to resolve issues and get ready for what will be one of the most pivotal school years – I think, the most pivotal school year in the history of New York City, and we have to get it right for everyone.

Let's talk about our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients. Today's report, 47 patients – that's one of the lowest we've seen in months. And the positivity rate among those patients, 12.5 percent. Indicator number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, that threshold 550 cases. Today's report, 222. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent. Today's report, again, one of our lowest, 0.59 percent. Again, outstanding work by New Yorkers now as we come off the summer and move into the fall, double down on those efforts to stay safe because they are clearly working. And we can get safer – I want to drive that infection rate down much further, because we'll be able to do more and more and open up more and more as we do that. So, it's not just stay the course, it's double down. Let's go farther at making this city safe.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let’s turn to our colleagues in the media. And please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, School Chancellor Richard Carranza, Commissioner of the Office of Labor Relations Renee Campion, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today will go to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How are you?

Question: I'm fine. and too all on the call. So, my question to you is, why aren't you on board for a mandatory testing for teachers, students? Don't you think that's at least a baseline or a blanket protection applied to everyone for safety?

Mayor: Well, Juliet, I appreciate the question. You know, you remember about a week ago, we laid out what's being done around the world. And the approach that's being taken in many, many nations, including nations that are very much like ours and nations that have had lost success in fighting back the coronavirus. And the mandatory approach has not been the way that that's been done in other countries. And it's something that we've looked at, but believe for a variety of reasons, it is not the best way to get to where we need to go. What we're trying to do is to constantly make testing available for free, over 200 locations around the city, constantly encourage everyone to get it. We're going to have regular testing in and around our schools. We're having ongoing conversations with the unions about the best way to do it. But the important thing here is to put together a variety of measures. And again, that's what we talked about last week. It's the social distancing. It's the face masks, it's the constant cleaning. So many things that really make us the gold standard for bringing school back. Because we're layering every approach on top of each other. And then the regular testing available to all and encouraged for all. That to me is the best way to get it done.

Moderator: Next up we have Todd Maisel from AM New York.

Question: I've spoken to a number of pub restaurant owners who say that if indoor dining is not restored after the October 31st deadline of the outdoor dining, that 99 percent of the restaurants will be closed. We'll all be drinking at Applebee's. They say the COVID numbers are so low that by then we should be okay. Do you agree?

Mayor: Well, listen, I think New York City has so many great neighborhood restaurants that I don't think in the end, we're only going to be going to Applebee's. I really don't. I believe it's been really, really tough on folks who own restaurants, who put their life into those restaurants. It has been really tough on the people who work for them and are trying to get their livelihoods back. We're working every day. Our Health team is looking at this issue all the time, and we're going to be working closely with the State on this as well. Is there a point, is there a way where we can do something safely with indoor dining? So far we have not had that moment, honestly. We’ve been really straightforward about it. We have not had the opportunity to do it safely. We're going to keep looking for sure. Now I would say to you, I've talked to a lot of restaurant owners as well. I think some are in really tough shape. I think others because of takeout, delivery, outdoor dining are going to be in a position to keep going for a while. I do expect, pray for and expect a vaccine in the spring that will allow us all to get more back to normal. But, I will absolutely tell you at Todd, we're going to keep looking for that situation where we could push down the virus enough, where we would have more ability to address indoor dining. We'll have more to say on that in the coming days. But it's going to – it would take a huge step forward to get to that point. That's the truth.

Moderator: We're now onto Dan from ABC-7.

Question: Good morning, Mayor. Thank you for taking my question.

Mayor: How are you doing, Dan?

Question: Good, thank you. I have two quick questions for you – when it comes to education, do you have concerns about taking online attendance during this pandemic? How will that be measured and will that information be released publicly?

Mayor: Yeah, look, I think it's a real challenge and I'll certainly let the Chancellor speak to this. I've been real clear about the fact that our mission over time, of course, is to bring back our public schools fully. We're going to need some real success on the health care front to get there to that day. But nothing replaces in-person education, nothing replaces the ability of educators to reach kids right there in front of them. And obviously you take attendance much more effectively in that situation. I think we saw a mixed bag in the spring. We saw some really extraordinary work by our educators under incredibly tough circumstances to put together remote learning and make it worthwhile for kids. But we also knew we were not reaching every kid, we were not reaching them every day, and there were challenges with attendance. I think we'll do better because there's been more time to prepare. But I think it's an intrinsic problem with remote learning. Chancellor, do you want to add?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yes, Sir. So, different from March, we've had much more time to prepare. We've actually been able to build out the capacity to not only get devices into the hands – the Mayor announced this morning, how many hundreds of thousands of devices are in students' hands now. That wasn't the case in March. In addition, we will be monitoring attendance, we'll be tracking it, we will make it public. And there's going to be more to say about that this week, as we give more specific guidance as how we go forward, as it pertains to attendance.

Mayor: Go ahead, Dan.

Question: Thank you so much. My second question for you is, can you discuss the City's plan to inspect gyms virtually? Will this be an effective way of ensuring that they're safe and in compliance at the same time?

Mayor: Yeah. Dan, look, it is a necessity in this moment. We worked with the State on this. The State's decision related to gyms, which I know they took in good faith, but their timing happened to correlate exactly to the moment where we were getting ready to open school and open child care. And we needed to focus the Department of Health inspectors first and foremost on those locations, there's a lot of locations. So, the gyms are coming back with serious restrictions under the State rules. So, we know those restrictions are going to help protect health and safety. But we worked with the State on the virtual as a way to get started because the timing was just so tough that the virtual inspections at least will allow our health inspectors to get an initial sense of things, make sure the things are okay, or if there's a problem, address it immediately. We'll then be doing ongoing in-person inspection as those inspectors’ time free up after school and child care gets going.

Mayor: Well, everyone, as we close up today, just to say this, look, we've covered a lot of different topics today, and it just shows how much is going on in the city, how much we are working on simultaneously to bring this city back. I mean, think about what we would have all been talking about a year ago today, versus what we're talking about today. Everything simultaneously that we're trying to address in the context of the greatest crisis this city's ever faced, and yet here's the good news. The good news is New Yorkers, keep fighting back. You can see it with your own eyes. You can see more and more happening in our city. You can see people out there starting to reestablish the life of this city. You can see people doing the right thing to make us healthier and safer, and you can see it in these indicators we go over every day, and they're objective and they tell us we're doing the right thing.

So, people should be proud of that. But also remember that this is a historic reality about New York City. We have faced crisis before, everyone knows that. We've faced change before. I actually think there are few places in the world better at dealing with crisis than New York City. And there are few places in the world that handle change better than New York City. We are always ready to improve. We're always ready for something new. New Yorkers are not afraid of change. New Yorkers are not afraid of new ideas. We're not afraid to be bold. And so, that's why we can say we will defeat this disease. We will come back. We literally will back stronger and fairer. I believe it. We have learned powerful lessons and the people of the city want to see change. We don't dwell on nostalgia. We're going into a new world, but we actually can make it a better world. And there is no place better at that than New York City. Thank you, everyone.

2020-09-01 Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. I want to start with a personal statement as I'm joined here by leaders of labor unions that represent so many of the hard working people who make our school system run, take care of our kids, educate them and protect them, feed them, so many good people work every day in our schools to uplift our kids, and there is nothing more precious than taking care of the children of New York City. Parents, families entrust all of us with their children every day during the school year, and they need to know that we care about those kids just as much as they do, and we do. So I want to thank my colleagues in labor, who I know are committed to our children and committed to this city, and you'll hear from them in a moment, and they will also make abundantly clear, their job is always to defend the interests of their members. That is the power and the importance of the labor movement and we have all worked together in a constructive manner over these last days to determine the best way forward for our school system.

The fact is whenever people gathered together, and we've all known each other a long time, there's going to be disagreements. There's going to be tough issues to work through. It's a very complex moment in history to say the least. Real powerful issues had to be discussed and resolution had to be found, but everyone did so in a constructive spirit because there's a lot of mutual respect and a lot that we've all been through together, and we have a common, deep concern for the city. We also believe profoundly in the New York City public schools and the meaning, the idea of public education and how precious it is, how crucial it is to our society. I'd say now more than ever a moment when democracy is threatened, public education actually more and more as the underpinning of our democratic society. So a lot was on the line here to work through, but I'm pleased to report that we've come to an agreement to move forward, to address real concerns that have been raised about how to do things the right way, how to do them the safe, healthy way, how to make sure people are prepared for the school year under absolutely unprecedented conditions, and I want to emphasize that.

We have a huge obligation to get the health and safety part right which is why we have literally set the global gold standard. We have said New York City is taking the best practices, the strongest methods from all around the world and applying them all together here in our public schools, the highest standard anywhere in the world, to protect our kids, our families, our educators, our staff. We also have extraordinarily complex issues that we have to work through, as we're asking educators, as well as parents and kids to make sense of blended learning, something we have never done before, never been done on this scale anywhere before. So these challenges required a thoughtful approach and what we've agreed to is to make sure that the health measures are in place, to make sure there is time for the appropriate preparation for our educators, to make sure that we can have the smoothest beginning of the school year, even under extraordinarily challenging conditions, and to move forward in a spirit of unity.

Let me give you an update on how the timing is going to work under this plan. So, the normal school year, educators, staff are in their buildings by the day after Labor Day and that will be true here as well, Tuesday, September 8th. The school days, the instructional days were slated to begin September 10th. We're going to hold that for a few days. We're going to allow preparation days for our educators and staff to get ready under these unprecedented circumstances. So, September 10th and 11th, September 14th and 15th will be days devoted to preparation, to really making sure that blended learning can work for everybody, that everyone understands their role, everyone has had a chance to practice together and coordinate. There's been an opportunity to communicate with families. And then starting on the 16th of September, we will have a three-day transitional period, only three days. For those three days, instruction will begin remotely for all students. During that transitional period, there will be instruction for students, but there'll also be additional preparation for educators and staff. And then on September 21st, Monday, the school buildings open full strength, we go to blended learning as has been described previously.

We have students coming into the buildings. What would have happened on September 10th now happens on September 21st. So, it's blended learning, some kids in school one day, other kids in school another day. The buildings will be open and operational and taking kids into for that crucial in-person learning. And one of the things I want to say we affirmed in these discussions is nothing, nothing replaces in-person learning. Our educators have been clear that as important as it is to provide the very best remote learning we can to address the digital divide, provide free devices and internet service for kids, do everything we can to make remote work, nothing is as powerful as in-person learning. So that will begin on Monday, September 21st.

The point that I raised earlier about safety, one of the reasons we're confident in our ability to keep everyone safe is we now have over 200 testing locations in New York City, many of which are very near our public school buildings, some of which are literally across the street from a public school building, but we'll be augmenting that with mobile testing vans, with testing tents at school sites, we're going to make testing available every month in every school, and it's going to be made available in a way that maximizes the ease for everyone in the school community to get tested, who needs to get tested. We'll be doing a monthly medical monitoring process that's been worked through by our health leadership, Dr. Jay Varma and Dr. Dave Chokshi, along with medical leadership representing the United Federation of Teachers, and they've agreed on a plan that will make sure that testing happens on an ongoing basis, but I want to emphasize in a way that is convenient and easy and straightforward for everyone in the school community, and of course is free. So that on top of everything else that we've laid in place, ample supply of facemasks and PPE, constant cleaning of our schools, including electric static cleaning, social distancing throughout the school day, pods so a small number of students and staff stay together. A host of measures to keep everyone safe, again, the strongest standard in the world.

Mayor: Before I turn to the Chancellor, I will simply say this, that everyone here – and you’ll hear from each of us – everyone here is committed to children and committed to working families. And we know that families have gone through so much. Over a million families lost their livelihood just in the last six months. So many people are hurting in this town, so many people are hoping to get back to work. So many single-parent households where the ability to send a child to school is crucial. Everyone knows kids have been through so much, so much trauma that can only be addressed with consistent help from highly-dedicated, highly-trained adults, our educators, our mental health experts, everyone who is going to be there for our kids, and that includes all the other folks who work in the school community. [Inaudible] That’s all going to be happening again on Monday, September 21st. So, with that, I want to again, thank all my colleagues for coming to this agreement so we can move forward together. And it’s my pleasure now to turn to the man who’s been leading this extraordinary effort to bring back the New York City public schools after this crisis. Our Chancellor, Richard Carranza –

Schools Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to add my voice in thanking the leaders of our unions, our labor partners for never walking away from the tough, tough issues that we’ve been grappling with. So, I want to thank them for staying engaged and working through all these difficult issues. For six months now, we’ve been charting a path for public education and we’ve been working night and day with our labor partners to make sure our school leaders, our educators, our nurses, custodians, food service workers, school safety agents – everyone that is in a school building is ready for the new school year.

Sometimes that means taking a few extra days to prepare, which is what we’re announcing here today. Teachers, who usually get two days of professional development at the beginning of the school year, and we all know this is going to be a school year unlike any school year we’ve ever started, will now get nine. And we’ve heard from our educators, we’ve heard from our school leaders, we’ve heard from everyone in our schools that have said we need some more time. Students who haven’t been inside a school building in half a calendar year – think about that – will have a chance to reconnect with their school, meet their teachers and classmates, and make sure that they have the tools that they need to be successful for this school year. There’s a lot of ground work that’s already been done to lay the groundwork for this successful school year. This will strengthen and improve and make it so that we do have the safest start of the school year.

What we’ll do in the next couple of weeks is build on the success that’s already been put in place and adapt where necessary. But it’s going to be more important than ever that we remember the two words that we pivoted to remote learning with in March – flexibility and patience, with each other, with our students because we’re all taking on something we’ve never taken on before. So, we know this school year is going to be like any other school year we’ve ever had and we’re excited about tackling these hard, hard issues but doing in a way that keeps our students, our staff, and everyone associated with our schools health and safe.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. And now, I want to turn to the labor leaders who represent the people who do the work every day to educate and protect our kids. And I’ll start with the President of the United Federation of Teachers – and I want to just say at the outset, again, Michael Mulgrew and I have known each other a long time. We've been through many, many conversations in the last days, but even more importantly, over years and years. And it's very true, he is a strong, strong voice for the people he represents. He's also someone – I remind people always – who taught in the classroom, who feels out importantly the work of public education affects children and families. So, we understand what it means for this whole city. And I want to thank you, Michael, for – it's been tough discussions, but very productive discussions throughout. And I want to thank you. My pleasure to introduce Michael Mulgrew.

President Michael Mulgrew, United Federation of Teachers: I want to thank the Mayor. Thank you, Bill. This is what I would hold up as an example for other places to look out on how people are supposed to get things done. They're not easy, but I sit here today, talking to the parents, to all of my members – the teachers, the guidance counselors, the para-professionals, all the therapists, and I can say to you now, because we have our independent medical experts have stamped this plan and we now can say the New York City Public School system has the most aggressive policies and greatest safeguards of any school system in the United States of America. And we would not be here at this point, if it wasn't for everyone who was at this table right now, as well as many others who have worked tirelessly to get us here. This has been a difficult time for our city and what you – the things that we're going to still have to deal with are going to be difficult also. But I think it's incumbent upon all the leaders in the city and all the leaders inside of each school to take this spirit of making sure that we're working together, to make sure that what we're doing is in the interest of everyone who walks into that school building. Every teacher calls their students their kids – they never call them their students, because they're their children. The principals call them their children. We take very seriously the responsibility to keep them safe. We take it very seriously when we're talking to their parents, that we want them to know we're doing everything in our power to keep their children safe. But we also want to make sure that we're doing everything in our power as a city to keep the people who are doing that phenomenal work in our schools every day safe also. And that's what we're here today to announce, but we're also announcing at the same time that we all understand we now have another difficult road to go down. The amount of work that is going to have to be done over the next couple of weeks, just to get all of our schools prepared and ready to go and then make sure that we're all doing everything in our power to keep each and every school system safe and school safe – but, if there's a problem, all being there together to say, we will bring relief quickly, and we will make sure that no school is being left out there to struggle on their own. That is the commitment and the announcement that you are hearing from all of us today.

It's not going to be easy, but I'm very proud to say that we did this at this moment, but now it's up to all of us to be there to support each other, to support our kids and to make sure that we are the ones keeping the largest and best school system in the United States open, running, and safe. So, I thank you – all of my colleagues who are here today.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much, Michael. And I affirm largest and best school system in the country. And we're seeing just heroic efforts by our educators, by our staff, everyone at the DOE to get ready for school, to serve our kids and families. And our administrators are being asked to create whole new approaches and they're showing tremendous capacity, tremendous leadership as they do that. And I want to thank everyone who provides that leadership at our school level and here on behalf of all our administrators, the President of the CSA Mark Cannizzaro.

President Mark Cannizzaro, Council of School Supervisors and Administrators: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Chancellor, and Michael, and Henry for your partnership. This certainly has been a team effort, a total effort, and there has been some real difficult and challenging conversations at times, but we're here where we need to be at this point, and that's really, what's, what's critical. You know, we talked about safety and we've been talking about safety issues for many, many months. And to hear that we've come to an agreement to make sure that our children and our educators are going to be safe is such a relief and makes me feel good personally, as well as professionally. And in addition to that, you know, time is always the commodity that educators are looking for and asking for – our days are so busy with students in and out – our children in and out of the buildings – and with so much to care for, there's always a need for more time in order to plan things effectively and appropriately. And although the task before us remains monumental, and time will not be a luxury right now, at least there is the time to start to think about things and make sure that we're able to provide the program for our students that we need and we're able to do it in a safe and conducive environment. And I'm just proud that we are here at this moment and we are going to continue to work together. And I just have to echo what Michael said – there are going to be schools that need some additional help and need some support and we are going to be there to support them, to make sure that we're all able to open successfully and provide a program that our parents and students and staff members are all proud of and want to return to and feel that it is in everyone's best interest. So, come November when it's time to opt back in, we're going to have many parents looking to get into this school system who have previously chosen remote. So, thank you all so much. And I look forward to the hard work that's ahead.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much, Mark. And finally, I want you to hear from a man who represents folks who do such crucial work, and they often don't get the recognition they deserve. So, I just want to say thank you to all the people who work in our schools who are members of DC37 AFSCME. I want to do a particular appreciation – offer a particular appreciation for our food service workers. These folks, everyone, you know, all through the summer, we were able to say – unlike, unfortunately, so many other places in this country, we were able to say that no one in New York City will ever go hungry, that anyone who needs food will have filled no matter how many members of your family, no matter how tough your situation we'll provide food for you in every neighborhood. And that was in large measure because of the heroic efforts of the food service workers who went there every single day, made things happen for our families, protected them by providing them the nutrition they needed and kept the school buildings safe in the process. To them, and so many other good people who work to keep the school safe throughout the summer, they are a reminder to all of us what that hard work and that teamwork meant.

I also want to say, as I introduced Henry Garrido, that his union plays such a crucial role in the city in so many ways, far beyond just the school system. But also, his members depend on the school system for their kids. And so, this is a moment to recognize that we're all in this together in so many ways, but a special thanks to all those folks who worked so hard over the summer to keep things going. My pleasure to introduce the Executive Director of DC37 AFSCME Henry Garrido.

Executive Director Henry Garrido, DC37: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. And let me thank you for your diligence and the work – thank the Chancellor, my colleagues Michael and Mark on this incredible effort. But most importantly, I want to thank the members of DC37 who have sacrificed themselves throughout this whole process. You know, we've lost 151 of our members due to the pandemic. So, for us, the safety of the kids, the parents and the safety of the workers was the most thing. And both as a parent and as a leader representing, as the Mayor said more than 150,000 workers in the city, and almost 100,000 retirees whose children are in the school system, this was really important to us.

You know, there was a silver lining about this whole pandemic – has been that the war has recognized the work of people – every-day people who do work, you know, cafeteria workers, nurses, and people who sometimes get overlooked, right? Early childhood educators who did a tremendous job of keeping the kids is struck that even when the most challenging time. And so, we are here for them, and we are pleased to announce that the reopening the schools. I would – I will say to them we want to make sure that you are protected and that you are recognized for the work that you have done. It is imperative that we get back in the process of fully reopening the City of New York. And we believe fundamentally that the work that has been done will continue, but this plan that we're announcing today takes into consideration that monumental task opening the school system. As the Mayor said, more than 10,000 of DC37 members have continues to work throughout this process, serving more than a half-a-million New Yorkers every single day. Many of them actually worked throughout holidays that normally are scheduled during the school year. You know, the 4th of July, they continue to prepare food for many New Yorkers who are suffering from food insecurity. And so, you know, I give my most thanks and my pledge to continue to defend them.

I would just say to finish up, this was certainly not an easy thing to do. We understand some of the fears that our members are feeling right now. We understand the fear that the parents, you know, are feeling. And some measures, as a parent myself, we understand the implications for our children. But we must get this right, and the only way we're going to do that is if we all work together, parents, educators, leaders, to make sure that the school system continues to function is protected. Thank you for the opportunity and looking forward to reopening the schools.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Henry. And, everyone, you hear the common sense of resolve and the ability of all of us to work together, to get something done for our kids and our families. And it is made possible by the underlying fact that the people of this city have worked so hard for months now to fight back this disease. So, as we're talking about all these issues that we're all working on together, let's again, give thanks to every-day New Yorkers who put on those masks, kept social distancing, did things right, and allowed us to be at this point where we can take this step forward. And with that, I want to go over today's indicators before we turn to the media, because this really says why we're here to begin with. So, indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 52. And again, within those 52, the number of confirmed positive for actual COVID-19 is 15 percent. Indicator number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases – today's report, 227. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, that threshold is five percent – today's report 1.33 percent citywide.

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let us all know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin today's Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, Chancellor Carranza, Dr. Chokshi, Senior Advisor Jay Varma, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, CSA President Mark Cannizzaro, and DC37 President and Executive Director Henry Garrido. First question today goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: [Inaudible] everyone in attendance. Good morning. Unless I’ve missed it, I haven't heard anyone mentioned COVID testing, which, as of yesterday, the UFT said mandatory COVID testing was an absolute deal breaker here. So, Mayor, are you going to require that all teachers and staff and students be tested?

Mayor: So, Andrew, you know, I know you a long time, I respect you. I think you did miss it. It was said very clearly, there's going to be a monthly medical monitoring program. We're going to ensure every single school has this program. It will be governed over by our health leadership. We have to assess a certain number of kids in each school every single month. And yes, that will be done on a mandatory basis. Go ahead.

Question: You said mandatory wasn't your approach. You looked at other countries, that wasn't the best practice. So, what changed your mind? Was it the threat of a teacher's strike?

Mayor: Look, Andrew, again, we've all been working together. And what we've found here was a way that made sense, because it was being done over time on a monthly basis, a sample from each school, and a way worked. Each union will bring its own approach to this and the way we'll approach the kids, we're all working together to figure out the details, but what I know for sure is that every single school will have testing. It will be done every single month. It will be rigorous. We're going to be looking constantly for any signs of a challenge we have to address. And we're doing that right now, of course, in neighborhoods around the city. And anyone who tests positive, of course, will be isolated and it will trigger the test and trace apparatus. So, we found a way to do this in a way that makes sense and is attainable for a school system this large.

Moderator: The next is Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and to everyone who's there – congratulations. My first question is about the tweet that Council Member Mark Treyger sent last night, which may be not as relevant now, or maybe different given your announcement – but he tweeted that he was receiving more of the school leaders were informed last night that their schools could now use school money to purchase PPE for students and staff, which is a shift from what you've said previously, saying that PPE would be bought for each school centrally. So, I'm wondering, can you explain what guidance schools are being given and if it's changed?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to the Chancellor. Look, we've said from the beginning that we're going to make sure every school has what they need. And, you know, the list I gave you earlier, the extent of the cleaning, the extent of the PPE that's already been provided – this is unprecedented, obviously, and the Chancellor and I have been out in schools showing you and your colleagues exactly what's already been put in place and will be continued. So, Chancellor, you want to speak to that?

Chancellor Carranza: Yes. Thank you. Let me be very clear, we do not do policy by Twitter. And let's just be very clear about what we've said to schools – we will provide schools every day with a 30-day supply of all the PPE they need – masks both for adults and for children, for disinfectant, we will be cleaning the schools they will have the appropriate gowns if they're manning an isolation room. Every day, there will be 30 days of supply there and we will replenish it every day so there's constantly a 30-day supply – point, end of sentence, no question. That will happen. What we clarified for schools is, we've also been getting requests from schools can we purchase certain things? Some schools have said, we want to personalize masks with our school logo on them. Can we purchase those? Of course you can purchase those. So, what we're doing is giving schools absolute guidance on what they can do. And of course they can use their resources if they choose to use them that way to do and go above and beyond. But let's just be very clear, we will have all of that PPE, all of the supplies every single day purchased centrally so schools don't have to make that expense.

Question: Thanks so much. And another question that's about schools that somewhat tangential, Mr. Mayor – the Board of Elections managed to – excuse me, secure the Garden and the Barclays Center as early voting and election day poll sites, which take a little pressure off surrounding areas. But given all the other challenges faced in schools, will the City allow them to be used for early voting and election day school sites this year?

Mayor: It's a great question, Brigid. And I'll first say we've been so focused understandably on getting everything ready for this absolutely unprecedented start a school this year, that election day still seems a way off. Although I will note, it's only 63 days away. In the scheme of things, it seems like a ways off. We have to make sure that people are safe. We have to make sure that our schools can function. Now, granted, our schools are going to have a lot fewer kids in them than is normally the case. So, that does affect the equation, but I'll turn to Richard, because I want to hear the latest from him on the discussions in terms of election day and the Board of Elections.

Chancellor Carranza: So, as we continue to engage with the Board of Elections – listen, I was a government teacher, I believe in democracy, but I also believe that kids should be in school in the safest possible environment, especially during a pandemic. So, we continue to engage with the Board of Elections in finding alternate locations to be used as voting locations. We'll have more to say about that. But I think as I've had conversations with many of the gentlemen at this table we all agree that we should be limiting the amount of human beings entering school buildings, to the absolute minimum necessary to carry out our mission. And our mission is to educate kids.

Moderator: The next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah, good morning, everyone. I still don't quite get how the COVID testing will work. So, if you could share some more detail on that, I'd appreciate it. I guess the main question is who exactly will be tested like, you know, if someone shows symptoms, do they get a test every month? Is there another way to select everyone who will get tested? Because I gather every month there won't be everyone at one specific school getting tested, but maybe only some of those people. Could just provide some details on that?

Mayor: Sure, Shant. I'll start with saying, you know, we're going to go over the broad strokes today. More information will be put out in the course of today and the next few days. But our health care leadership worked closely with the health care experts, for the UFT, on a common vision. And, again, it is every school that is doing this testing monthly. It is random. I want to be clear about that. So, it's a mix of members of the school community will be tested every month. Every union is going to work out their specific approach to it, but let's have a Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi just give very top lines on how this medical monitoring will be carried out.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. This is Jay Varma, I can start. I think the first most important thing is to remember that any child who is sick, first of all, should not be attending school and any child who is sick and has COVID symptoms should be taken to get COVID testing. So, the program, the medical monitoring program that you're hearing about today is really focused on the people who are physically present in the school. And so, therefore not people with symptoms. And the purpose of this is to really give us really good insight into how many people may be infected at any one time who don't have symptoms, because we know that's one of the challenges of this disease. And so, we are going to be working very closely with students, with parents with all the teachers, and the staff to develop a robust approach to developing a random sample of each school. And they will then have specimens collected in the school and then testing performed to give us results immediately that we can act on.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi, do you want to add anything?

Commissioner Chokshi: That's exactly right. The one small thing that I will add is beyond the medical monitoring program, we want to continue to emphasize that testing remains available for all students and all staff free of charge.

Mayor: And I'll say, before we go back to Shant, I am reminding all parents, I'm reminding them also for their kids, over 200 locations right now in New York City where you can get a test for free. And this is something we're saying to all New Yorkers especially today, it's Get Tested Tuesday. If you haven't been tested or you haven't been tested in a long time, it's a good thing to do. It's simple, it's fast, it's easy, urging all people to do that. And parents, as we get closer to that day when kids will walk through the door of the school building, we urge them to make sure every child is tested. Please go ahead –

President Mulgrew: The doctors were very clear with us. They said, the most important thing that we are going to do is making sure that we're following the rules of social distancing, that PPE is being followed, that the cleaning is being followed, and ventilation is in place. But they said that we also, it was necessary they felt, because of the size of our school system, that we have a medical monitoring program. How it is done is the doctors are giving us the criteria in terms of the randomness of it. But it's basically a monthly program. What we're trying to do is not wait to see symptoms in a school. We want to see if there's a possibility, what you do with a medical monitoring program is that you're keeping everyone, you're checking everyone at all times, and if they, God forbid, there is any sort of a problem we can deal with it quickly so that we don't have a problem, a bigger problem. And that is the whole idea behind it. And we have seen this work and it's important to note also that when in areas as the city has been very successful already, if a school is inside of a ZIP code that has an uptick, what they did in Sunset Park with the flood zone, the schools will now be under the same scenarios that if they're inside of a ZIP code, but there is no evidence of COVID in the school, the school will also have an increase in testing of everyone at the school building itself. So it's clear from – I just want everyone to understand, what we're doing is saying all the things that are most important, the PPE, the social distancing, the cleaning, the ventilation, we have that, but we're going even a step further by saying, we're going to monitor everything because we're going to make sure that if there's any signs, that there could be a problem that we're in there as quick as possible and stopping it very quickly, because that's what we owe each and all of our school communities.

Mayor: Go ahead, Shant.

Question: Yeah. Thanks for that. So, just one more thing on the testing, is there like a percentage of students and staff at each school that will have to be tested every month so that, you know, it's a good random sample? And, yeah, I guess other than, you know, one last thing, just, you know, this extra preparation time of the 10th through the 15th, as well as the transitional period, starting on the 16th, can you say what exactly will happen then that otherwise would not have been happening had schools open on the 10th?

Mayor: Shant, those were really different questions, respectfully. So, we're going to stick to our ground rules. I'm taking your first question. I'm sure we'll be talking more about the transition time and the preparation time in the course of other Q-and-A, your first question on the percentages in each school, Dr. Varma or Dr. Chokshi, do you want to go over that?

Senior Advisor Varma: Sure, this is Jay, I can start. So, what we have worked out is that the size of the sample will vary depending upon the [inaudible] so we're going to be assigning percentages somewhere between ten and 20 percent to be sampled again, dependent upon the size of the school.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Jen Peltz from the AP.

Mayor: Go ahead, Jen, can you hear us?

Question: Yes. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep. Yes. Well, we heard you for a moment. Jen? City Hall calling Jen – can you hear us?

Moderator: We can move on from Jen. We'll get back to her.

Mayor: [Inaudible] Jen. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hi, good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask a question about busing. I know it had been reported that the City had not signed any contracts with yellow school buses and there were concerns, I heard, from teachers and parents given, you know, the different challenges, different remote schooling. One week a student is in school twice a week, one week their in for one day a week. And particularly with students who have special needs and very specific needs, what is the plan there? Will it be up to the bus driver and operators to understand a specific student's schedule? And have you signed any contracts with – I mean, how will kids get to school if we don't know what the deal with the buses is?

Mayor: Thank you, Katie. I'll start and then I'll turn to First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan. Look, the important thing to remember here, we're dealing with an unprecedented situation and, obviously, a substantial number of kids will be all remote. So, that changes the reality of busing. Plus the buses are going to be – have to be different internally for social distancing. So, we have a lot of moving parts here. But we have to do our best to serve every child, every family. And that starts with kids with special needs, unquestionably. We're working with all the companies to get ready as is true in the lead up to every year. And we're going to have to, you know, make adjustments as we go along to get it right, I'm sure of that. But there's been a lot of preparation to get ready to do everything we can do for families. So, Dean, you want to give a couple answers there?

First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan: Yeah. I mean, just to amplify what you said, we're working with all bus companies. They are participating now. We're going through inspections. We're happy to give updates on that and they have their [inaudible] and we're preparing for this, for the blended day operation and we think we're going to be, we'll be fine on that. On contract – so we're finalizing. We're finalizing final terms and conditions, but all bus companies are participating in working together.

Mayor: Go ahead, Richard.

Chancellor Carranza: I'll also add that we are absolutely in our planning, prioritizing students with individual education plans. So, our special education students are obviously a priority for us and we prioritize those routes for those students as well. So, there is a priority that we're working through as well.

Mayor: Thank you, oh, wait, Dean, go ahead.

First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan: And if I may, as is the theme of everything we're talking about here, we're also completely – health and safety will be the primary piece of what happens on buses. So, PPE, cleaning all the protocols, face masks [inaudible].

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Katie.

Question: My second question is about, I guess, a concern from principals over the different staff accommodations and the number of staff required in schools. I know that students who choose one – let's say they choose all remote. They can opt back in, in November, but the staff accommodations are through the end of this calendar year – fiscal – calendar year, sorry, I'm getting my years mixed up. So, how will that work? You know, if suddenly it works out great and parents want to opt their children in, in November for full in-person learning, but you still have some teachers who have health accommodations through December 31st. How does that look? What the plan there?

Mayor: Yeah, appreciate it, Katie. I'll start, I'll turn to Richard, and turn to Mark. Look, you’re raising a really important point, Katie, that this could go any number of ways. And I certainly can say, as a parent, I think you're going to see kids, given our confidence that we all will work together to make things effective and safe, healthy, I think you will see kids that later on say, ‘Hey, I'm ready to go back.’ Parents are going to be ready to go back. We do have to be planning ahead for that. I think we also are dealing with all of the unknowns out there in the world, including a good unknown, when will there be a vaccine. And when there is a vaccine and everyone is vaccinated, then you're talking about going back on the normal schedule. So, there's a lot of moving parts here. What's crucial is making sure that we have the staff necessary for each school starting with the DOE employees who are – were last year, not in classrooms, but our classroom able, you know, and they're trained and ready and they can go into a classroom. We obviously have a lot of substitute teachers we can draw on and others beyond that. So, continuing to build out that pool, but we would certainly have time when you look ahead to that November date. Go ahead, Richard.

Chancellor Carranza: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. And I'm going to ask somebody, who's actually programmed schools in New York City to weigh in as well. So, this is also one of those least best options that we have because the best option is obviously everybody's back in school and we're off and running, but with changing circumstances, like Katie just mentioned, you just mentioned, students are remote, they decide they want to be in blended. That has a staffing implication, but it also has a programming implication. It also has a geographic, where do you locate that classroom implication as well? So, what we're doing as we speak – and listen, no one's going to disagree that one of the hardest jobs right now in America is to be a principal of a school because you're juggling so many different contingencies from not only the academics to the curriculum, to the planning of when kids arrive, and how do they walk into the building? How do they go through the building? And then also understanding that, I just need more teachers if I'm going to have more children that choose a blended learning model. So, our goal is to be as flexible as possible. And it starts with what the Mayor has talked about.

We've identified everybody with an underlying pedagogical degree that's licensed to teach in the State of New York. And I've been very clear with folks from the beginning that this conversation about in-person learning that, you know, what you did last year you may not be doing this year because all hands are on deck in terms of instruction for our students. We're all educators. That's why we became educators because we love teaching children. So, I think as things start to become a little bit more solid in terms of those numbers and we get closer to that in blended learning we're going to be ready. And if we have to move some folks around, we're going to move some folks around, but it's also why it's so critically important that my colleagues that are joining us here at the table are at the table because that's how we solve a lot of these issues that could be very thorny. Mark –

President Cannizzaro: That's a great question. And that, you know, the challenge of staffing appropriately has been one of the things on our mind for quite some time and it will continue to be. The commitment here, you heard us talk earlier about, you know, working together and when individual schools identify problems, all of us coming together and working it out. And that was really one of the things that I was referring to when I said that we’re going to need this team approach. We're going to need, you know, more people in the classrooms than we've had in the past. And Mr. Chancellor, thank you for recognizing the difficulty of being a school principal. It is one of the most difficult jobs in America. I think it was that before the pandemic and it's exponentially grown, but together with our teachers and our support personnel we're going to identify the needs that we have. And then we're going to bring them up to the Chancellor and the Mayor's team, and we're going to, you know, expect, and we know that they've made the commitment to get us the folks that we need. So, although we know this is going to be tenuous and difficult, we're confident that we will have what we need in order to, you know, have teachers – appropriate teachers in front of children on a daily basis.

Mayor: Please –

President Mulgrew: We have a staffing challenge and you've heard the commitment from all of us here. The story of the public school systems across the entire United States and what the federal government has done will go down as one of the biggest national disgraces, as far as I am concerned. Every school system, my work as an AFT vice president, every school system across this country is facing these challenges and the federal government completely failed to act. Yet, everyone at the federal level had no qualms about standing up at press conferences and saying how important it was for the schools to open. Shame on them all. Every single one of them. But the teachers, the parents, responsible elected officials are figuring this out. But let's be clear, the failure of the federal government to act has put us all in a very difficult position, but we're doing what we're supposed to do, and we will keep people safe, but shame on all of them.

Moderator: We're going to go back to Jen Peltz from the AP.

Question: Hi, can you hear me this time?

Mayor: There you go. How you doing, Jen?

Question: Good, thanks. So, Mr. Mayor, I'm reflecting on the press conferences of recent weeks and the message that you've emphasized that months had been spent planning to open school on September 10th, that a lot was happening. And now, obviously, it’s being pushed back to prepare more. How confident are you that the City and the teachers and the principals won't just be in the same place in 11 more days after the start. And what happens if the teachers and principals still aren't comfortable on the 21st?

Mayor: Jen, again, let me make clear how much conversation has gone on in recent days to really work through all the individual issues. Everyone here is a very serious professional and serious – those who represent their members are serious about that, but they're also people who are deeply committed to the education of our kids and the needs of our kids and the needs of our families. So, I want to be clear, we're here in unity because we worked through the pieces and determined that this was a timeline that could address the outstanding concerns. It is a revision that still allows us to keep things moving forward on a tight timeline, but with additional preparation time. It's a good balance. And I'm convinced that everyone's going to move forward. And if we find any challenge along the way, we'll resolve it together. Go ahead.

Executive Director Garrido: Mr. Mayor –

Mayor: Oh yes, please. Henry –

Executive Director Garrido: Sorry, Jen. With respect to – with all the respect to the teachers and principals, I want to also emphasize the important role that school nurses are going to play in this. And also parent coordinators who will probably be the first call that parents will be making to, if they have questions about this. And so, this plan requires all of us, together, to put our best effort forward, not only principals and teachers, but everybody in the school community. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village also to educate a child. And so they're important roles. Imagine you being a school nurse and all the kinds of questions are being asked about testing, about conditions, about symptoms, about children, right? And also just add to this that we represent the contact traces of the Trace Corps which will be also have been monitoring the general population. And the great work that they do and collaboration. So it's important to also think about them because it requires an entire group for us to make this work.

Mayor: Thank you, very important point that Henry is making. Test and Trace Corps is going to be crucial directly connected to our schools, constantly ready to move on anything they have to act on. And Henry, thank you for representing those folks who are really doing crucial, crucial work for this city. Go ahead, Jen.

Question: I guess I would address that same question to the other union leaders there if they're still there. You know, what assurances if any, do they feel they have and can give parents and kids that this isn't just moving the ball down the road?

President Mulgrew: Okay. So this is Michael Mulgrew. So what this agreement does at this point and what you're hearing announced today, it's very clear to every school now. These are the supplies and equipment that each and every school has to have. It's an agreed upon list. Any, we can walk into any school and check to see if it's there. If it's not there, we can get that taken care of immediately. Then there is the list of here are all of the procedures that you need -- have to work out on how they work inside of your school. That's going to be part of the work that we're doing. When the schools go back into place. We could say that you need to do social distancing, right? But how many entrances are you using for your school? Which way are you moving children in and out? When is bathroom time? All of these things have to be worked out in an individual school level. But there is a definitive list of what those things are. And then you have the testing components, which will get out to people. On top of that, we have an instructional plan. The majority of our instruction is still going to be remote. And we are all, which we haven't really spoken about. We're all making sure that we were proud of what happened between March and June, but we want it better. And we know we can do it better because we've learned more than we believe anybody else. We've seen school systems across the country, just buy these for profit educational platforms. They're all collapsing. They're not working. So we have to put all of that into place. But what the schools will now see is definitively what they need to get done. Now it's our responsibility to help them get there. Certain schools will have greater challenges because of the age of the school and the configurations of the school, but that's why none of us are getting any time off. And we will not get any time off because this is just going to take up constant, constant phone work, getting out to schools, doing different things. You know, the union and the Department of Ed and people from school facilities have been going into all of the schools now for weeks. So all of this now is there for us to move forward. So if there's an individual that has a problem, which we will have. We'll have to address it. But there's no longer a disagreement about what a school  needs to have. And that is the key to what we're saying today.

Mayor: That's exactly right. Go ahead Mark.

President Cannizarro: All of the – I agree with all of those points. And then the additional piece about being able to have the teaching staff and the support staff come in on September the eighth and some of them, some of the Henry's folks in already, and be able to coordinate and talk about the logistics and troubleshoot. Because as many things as we prepare for at this table and in our meetings that come up as potential problems, once we are all together and talking through things, we're going to identify more things. And we're also going to identify the solutions for those things. And teachers and principals and assistant principals and all of our educational administrators working together in a building to troubleshoot those things. And then the networks our folks have from building to building where they have discussions about what they're doing and the great ideas that come up. You know, we used to hear the term, the answers are in the room. Well the answers are in the room, but we need to get the people in the room. So that’s what we're doing with this agreement. So in addition to the safety, we are getting the people in the room to work out the logistics. And again, this is not going to be perfect, but it's going to be the best we can possibly put forth and we'll get better every day. Thank you.

Mayor: Well said. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Kala from PIX.

Question: Hi there. If you guys can – congratulations, first of all, on this monumental deal. I think a lot of teachers have already texted me on how happy they are and how secure they now feel going back to school. Can you tell me the timeline of how this deal came through? And if it was in fact earlier this morning?

Mayor: Kala, I’ll keep it broad. Look, we've been talking over certainly the last three, four days, very intensely. And everyone's been in communication with each other. Again, these are longstanding relationships. Even when there's disagreements, there's still a lot of common ground on the bigger goals for this city and for our kids and families. So I'd say the last three, four days were particularly crucial. A lot of the details worked through, especially yesterday. Go ahead.

Question: And if you can give me an update on where we are and hiring nurses, as well as substitute teachers?

Mayor: Sure. I will start and then the Chancellor and perhaps Dean Fuleihan and will join in as well. Look, we, again want to thank Health + Hospitals, our public health system for stepping up. They are doing, start to finish the hiring process for the nurses, the additional nurses we needed so that we could have a nurse in every public school building. That is moving along on time. Again, they're also covering it as part of their budget, which is deeply appreciated. In terms of additional staff, the folks that work for the DOE -- but again, were not in classrooms last year are being organized to go into classrooms this year. And on top of that, we've always used a lot of substitutes. A lot of those folks that we brought into play now. So Chancellor, you want to add?

Chancellor Carranza: So exactly what you said, Mr. Mayor. I think our Deputy Mayor may have some more details, but we're moving aggressively. Our goal obviously has always been that we would have nurses on the 10th. That continues to be the goal that we've set. So understanding this will be the 21st now for blended learning, I have every confidence that will actually happen.

Mayor: Dean Fuleihan, you want to add? You may be on mute. This is an ongoing theme.

Deputy Mayor Fuleihan: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yes.

Deputy Mayor Fuleihan: Okay. We'll get the specific numbers. But no, we are on track to have the available nurses in every one of our buildings.

Mayor: Great. Thank you.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Julia Marsh from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. I'm wondering if testing of students requires parental consent and what happens if the parents don't give consent for the students to be tested?

Mayor: Yes, it does. If they're under 18 obviously. It does involve parental consent. From what we've seen so far we think we're going to get a very strong, positive response when parents hear, and this is something we all talked about, the importance of the testing being in or near the school building, the importance of parents understanding it's the self swab test. It is the Q-tip not the long apparatus that goes farther up your nose. I did that one. I don't want to do it again. I liked the Q-tip. I think parents will feel much more comfortable with that. It's free. But we'll go about the process of getting those consent forms with the school team, the parent coordinators, everyone will work together on that. And I think we will, if anyone has concerns, we'll literally sit down and have our team sit down and talk it through with them, get them the answers. And I think parents will feel good about that. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. And could you just answer my last, the last part of my question about what happens if they don't give consent?

Mayor: So, Julia, look it's a conceivable reality. I don't think we're going to have that happen as the honest truth, because this is a monthly sample, there's time to reach each child. Not everyone needs to be ready to be sampled on the first round. I think there'll be parents, if they have a concern, a real conversation with them. If they need to talk to a doctor, if they need to talk to someone in their native language, we'll make that happen. So again, I'm going to work from the position that we will get it done. If we really have a parent who's recalcitrant, we're going to have to decide in that case what to do. And that may end up being a situation where the child is not in school. But I don't think we're going to see that.

Moderator: Last question for today. It goes to Emma Fitzsimmons from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mayor. I've wanted to ask, what do you say to parents who had planned their lives around September 10th and who are now scrambling to make new plans? Why wait until this close until the first day of school?

Mayor: Well Emma, I understand I'm a parent. You know, my kids went to New York City public schools from pre-K to 12th grade. So I certainly understand as parents we're trying to plan what it means. First of all, I'm going to state the obvious. For the hundreds of thousands of kids who are going to go all remote, this doesn't change anything. For all the parents whose kids were going to be in a blended learning, it does mean a few more days where they're going to have to figure out some kind of accommodation. But I think what matters here is that we were juggling a lot of important factors. Really perfecting the health and safety approach, making sure that the folks who do the work really felt confident that everything could be ready. Recognizing the complexity of what educators have to prepare. This is something that, you know, our labor partners raised and really were looking for some kind of solution to. We agreed this was the right way to get things done. It is a very modest change. Remember again, on a transitional basis, instruction begins on Wednesday the 16th, and that'll be three days of all remote instruction, transitionally. And then again, the full blended learning begins on the 21st. So it is a change. It's not -- I do empathize with parents, but it's a very modest change to resolve outstanding issues. So we could all move forward together. Go ahead Emma.

Question: And can you talk a little bit more about why now, why this morning? I know you said you've had discussions in the last three or four days. But we had a story run this morning about how you'd been so determined to stick to this timeline. So why did your thinking change?

Mayor: Well, look, first of all, it's very important to have a goal and something that gets everyone working towards that goal. And certainly in terms of moving our school system forward, all that work that was done over the summer about custodial services, school facilities, all the work that's been done at the Department of Education headquarters. The goal was the goal that was historically set. Everyone knew that the Thursday after Labor Day was the time. And so everyone was working towards that. And that was the right thing to do. But we heard real concerns raised by our labor partners. And we needed to work these through collaboratively. And it didn't happen overnight. Like every other negotiation, it doesn't happen overnight. But when we saw a clear path forward, the moment we saw it, the moment we agreed on it, that was the time to announce it.

Executive Director Garrido: I think for all of us, it was important to open the schools system, but it was more important to get it right. And to get it to the point where, you know, children, parents, educators, and support staff are all in sync. And so the preparation for the schools, the extra time that has been allotted, it's critical to get the entire school community prepared for this very monumental task. So I think to be fair, this has been an ongoing discussion among all of us. Whether the talks intensified in terms of fives in the last few days, but it's been going on for quite some time now.

President Mulgrew: And I would just add in that we wouldn't be here today, if the Mayor by listening – the Mayor is really engaged in this process, in this whole conversation about how do we get to the place where we can say, because you and I have been discussing this – where we can say we have the most aggressive policies and the greatest safeguards of any school system in the United States. How do we get there? And also do it in a way that the schools will actually be prepared. And if we need to push a little bit, it's not enough where it will really affect the children of New York in the way that they were affected when we had the complete shutdown. And that has been a goal over the last few days. And I give the Mayor a lot of credit for saying let's -- if that's going to be our goal, let's try to figure it out. And that's why we here today. We will have a stronger instructional program because of what we're about to do over the next two weeks. We will have more schools, much better prepared to deal with all of the safety aspects that they're going to have to deal with. This is not an easy task and challenge that we are, we all know we're facing. But we also know that our members take that pride in being there on behalf of the families that they serve and their children. But this is not easy to do. And I give the Mayor  great credit for really listening and trying to figure out how to get there. And then changing the goal to make it even a better thing. When you saw it was a possibility, you said, let's try to make it happen.

Mayor: Thank you, Michael. And thank you. I want to thank Michael, Henry, Mark, everyone who worked – look again, lots of conversations where real concerns are raised. I just want to make this clear to all the people in the city. Real concerns were raised. You know, I'm glad we don't have every single one of our conversations live-streamed. But sometimes there's choice language, but if they were live-streamed, what would be clear and I think what people would be moved by and impressed by is that the concerns raised by our labor partners. They were not parochial. They were about the health and safety of all. They were about how to get the best quality education for kids. They're about respecting the professionals who are trying to navigate absolutely unprecedented things. I want to emphasize that an earlier point Michael made. We did not have the support of our federal government in this or any other part of this process. We never got testing. We never got a stimulus. You name it, we didn't get it. We were all left in a tough spot. And when you're in a tough spot, of course there's tensions, there's challenges. But what increasingly happened, particularly in the course of the last week was folks said, look, let's talk piece by piece about what it would take to get this right And really see through each other's eyes what we need to get done. How to keep each person that does this precious work, safe. How to make sure that people can go into the schools and feel prepared because we're asking them to do something that's like conducting a symphony every day, right? I feel for the principals, the educators, the staff, everyone's going to have to do a whole lot of things differently and creatively. But the point that was made also by Michael, about the alternative that we've seen in so many other places where unfortunately kids were left in a situation where they weren't going to get the kind of education they deserve. Parents were left a situation, they could see with their own eyes, that their kids were not getting a quality education. We won't allow that here. We have too much reverence for public education in this city to ever let it fall apart and be less than it should be. This is why New York City is great. I keep saying the future of this city is based on the New York City public schools. I think the future of America is based on public schools all over this country. So for the nation's largest school system to come together in unity and say, we are going to get it right. And it won't always be easy and there'll be tough moments along the way, but we're going to get it right. That's a statement. This is one of those only in New York moments. People, all different viewpoints, all different backgrounds, but we're coming together in common cause for our kids.

And again, I'll close with a point that I try to make every day because it's worth saying every day. The reason we can make this announcement today is because of the people in New York City who every day have been fighting back this disease. Now let's be inspired by this moment of unity and go farther fighting back this disease because we can go farther. And we can make the city safer and together we're going to move forward and particularly move forward on behalf of our kids. Thank you, everybody.

2020-09-02 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. So, the calendar keeps moving. Time keeps moving on – a lot of important things coming up ahead. And I want to take this opportunity to get everybody thinking about what we have to do as New Yorkers. 

What we're doing every day here in the city, which is the fact that we we've come so far in beating back the coronavirus and we've got more to do. And what we've learned in this crisis is nothing is more important than your health. We all kind of knew it before, but now we know it more than ever. If New York City is healthy, all things are possible. If our people are healthy, we can come back strong. We know – and this crisis has made it very, very clear – that there are profound disparities in terms of who gets a lot of health care, who gets a little bit of health care. There's even people who get almost no health care – that doesn't conform with the values of the city. We believe everyone deserves health care in New York City. We believe health care is a human right. And our task force, leaders of City government agencies, leaders of color in key agencies all over the City government, when they looked at the disparities that have been made clear by the coronavirus crisis and the mandate was, what can we do right now to start addressing those disparities? They came back with a clear mandate for this administration. They said, let's move up. Let's speed up our efforts at providing guaranteed health care for all New Yorkers. Now, we announced this a couple of years ago when we said that every single New Yorker, if they didn't have health insurance, we'd helped them get our City public option health insurance, if that was what worked for them. And if that didn't work for them, we’d give them an NYC Care card. We give them the ability to have a primary care doctor and a medical home and pay only that which they could pay regardless of documentation status, regardless of income. That's what NYC Care is all about. This is something that has never been done in this country, but it's happening right now. In fact, it's been sped up. So, today, we announced that the rollout of NYC Care to Manhattan and Queens, these were two boroughs that it was supposed to take several more months to reach, but the extraordinary team at NYC Care made it happen much quicker. As of today, we are ready to move forward with NYC Care throughout Manhattan and Queens – all five boroughs will now have NYC Care four months ahead of schedule. So, it's extraordinary, and it's not only something to be proud of as a New Yorker, it's not only something that's available to you if you're one of those 600,000 people who hasn't had health insurance coverage in this city, it's also a cornerstone of our comeback as a city. Every New Yorker that has health care will be in a better position to stay healthy throughout this crisis and help us beat back the coronavirus. Health care for all is one of the ways you stop this pandemic and any pandemic.

So, for everyone, if you're out there and you don't have health insurance and you can't get health insurance, call 646-NYC-CARE – again, 646-NYC-CARE and you can sign up in all five boroughs as of today. Now, this is an amazing effort. I want to thank everyone that Health + Hospitals who made this possible, but particularly the team at NYC Care. And I want you to hear from the leader of that team, she has done this work with extraordinary passion and she's been doing it for years on the national level, brought her talents back to New York City from which she comes to make this the first city to guarantee health care for all – the Executive Director of NYC Care Marielle Kress.

Can you hear us? There you go.

Executive Director Marielle Kress, NYC Care: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. Yes. Hello. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak. And thank you, Mr. Mayor, for your leadership on this issue. I am so proud to lead the team at Health _ Hospitals of people who are implementing the largest program in the nation of its kind to guarantee health care access to all New Yorkers, regardless of where they were born, their immigration status, their ability to pay, their insurance status. I can't overstate the impact of the peace of mind that I've heard from people that I talk to that comes from knowing where to get care, knowing that you have someone to help you navigate the system, knowing that there's a primary care provider that's there who cares about you and all aspects of your life and health and the human impact that I've seen is so great.

I want to tell one quick story about a member that we have, who became a member in November, 2019 after coming to this country a number of months before and was a kidney transplant recipient in his country and came to this country, was receiving medications from his home country and didn't realize that he had access to guaranteed care here in New York, in the Bronx, where we started. He got connected with a primary care provider. And then, very unfortunately, contracted COVID-19. And when he got sick, he called his primary care provider and she encouraged him to go to the hospital where he was intubated at Bellevue Hospital for 21 days. And so, this story really shows that having this access, knowing who to call when you're sick, knowing where to go is the difference between life and death. And I am so incredibly proud to lead the team of folks who are implementing this at Health + Hospitals. I've seen the national effort to make access to health care easier for folks. And I just wish that all across the country in the future, we can have this model, because, unfortunately, we left out so many folks, so many hardworking, tax-paying Americans who do not have access to health care because of their documentation status. So, thank you, Mr. Mayor, for your leadership on this issue. I am so proud to say that it's available in all five boroughs and please call 646-NYC-CARE today – 646-692-2273 to get access today. Thank you so much.

Mayor: Excellent. Thank you so much, Marielle, to you and your team, something you should be very proud of. Again, first city in America now, in all five boroughs to guarantee health care for all. And this is needed more than ever with what we're dealing with the coronavirus. And when you think about NYC Care, this effort was put together over the last two years – unprecedented. Well, another effort that was put together, but only over the course of a few months, and also unprecedented, was the New York City Test and Trace Corps – extraordinary effort, the largest in the country, the most comprehensive, the most effective to make sure that, God forbid, if someone gets the coronavirus we're able to trace everyone in their life who might've been exposed and make sure everyone who needs support and needs to safely separate, needs medical care, gets it and gets it for free. So, test and trace continues to do amazing work, working closely with Health + Hospitals and our Health Department. And one of the new strategies they developed in the last weeks was what's called a hyper-local strategy to really go into a neighborhood where either we see an uptick in the disease, or we see low testing rates, or both, and address that rapidly and turn it around by really flooding the neighborhood with free testing and outreach in multiple languages and getting people the support they need. It works. It works. And we just saw this in Sunset Park. We told the people of this city a few weeks back, that there was an uptick in Sunset Park test. The trace and trace team went in intensely with folks who spoke multiple languages of the community, put up testing opportunities all over the community, including literally right in the middle of the park in Sunset Park. We saw in the week of August 12th, the positivity rate go up and it got at one point as high as 4.2 percent, but we were able to knock it down quickly with this rapid effort. And now, today, the latest measure from Sunset Park, 1.30 percent positivity rate in that community. So, that's an amazing example how quickly you can turn things around if you put the effort in the right place. So, right now, that effort is underway in Borough Park, Brooklyn. We have seen an uptick. We're addressing it rapidly with more testing, with more outreach, more free masks being provided, reminders to folks how important it is to get tested, reminders how important it is to practice social distancing and to limit gatherings. That effort is going on intensely as we speak and working with community leaders and community organizations who have really helped to lead the way. And a special thank you to the Hatzalah ambulance corps, which has been in the lead of this effort, educating members of the community and letting them know how important it is to pay attention to these crucial rules and get tested.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps: Thank you, sir. Earlier in August 4.2 percent of Sunset Park residents getting tested, came back positive for the coronavirus. One of the highest rates across New York City. In response, what we did in Sunset Park was we did more than 10,000 tests. We knocked on more than 20,000 doors and we made more than 400,000 phone calls. Importantly, we did all of that with the community in Sunset Park. When we brought in our new community mobile testing units, we asked the community where should we put these? And that's where we did testing. And that's what made a difference. So working with the community in Sunset Park, as the Mayor said, we've been able to drive down that rate of positive tests from 4.2 percent to 1.3 percent. Working with Sunset Park we were able to cut it down by two thirds, which is a substantial accomplishment.

And now we're going to apply all of those principles to our next hyperlocal response, Soundview. This one's personal for me. I'm a primary care doctor in the neighboring community at Morrisania in the Bronx. I know well from my patients that the Bronx is a diverse place. And I know well from my patients, that the way to make a difference in the Bronx is to know your community. And in particular, that starts with speaking the language of your community. Right now if you come today to Soundview in the Bronx, you can come get one of our rapid tests. You'll have your result back within 15 minutes. Then if it's positive, we have a group of tracers in-person there that speaks seven languages, that will talk to you in your language. Help you figure out what you need to get through this. And also in that same moment, ask you about contacts or people you may have exposed to the coronavirus when you were positive. Then that same day in Soundview we’re going to call your contacts and we are going to bring them in for testing. The secret ingredient to our substantial success in Sunset Park has been keeping this a local effort. We will be working very closely with the community in Soundview and we will succeed together. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Ted. And thank you to you and everyone at Test and Trace for the really extraordinary effort and going wherever the need is and getting there quickly. That's going to make all the difference. All right, it's time to talk about our daily indicators. Indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients, today's report 72. And the percent positive amongst those patients positive for COVID-19 is just about 13 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven day average, threshold 550 cases, today's report 244. And number three, percentage of the people testing positive citywide for COVID-19. This is the one we look at most carefully every day, threshold five percent, today's report 0.79 percent. Very good day for the city. And again, that's because of everything you are doing. And I thank you for that. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

With that, we turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: With that, we'll now begin our Q and A. As a reminder we're joined today by Dr. Ted Long, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps. Kathleen Daniel, Census 2020 Field Director, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, and Marielle Kress Executive Director of NYC Care. Our first question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Wanted to check back with you on the layoff situation? Where that's at? And also the MTA has borrowed from the Federal Reserve to help shore up its finances. The State of Illinois has done the same. Is that something you would do or to consider to help the city's financial recovery?

Mayor: I’ll talk about borrowing in general. I think it's important that people understand. The Federal Reserve option is short-term borrowing. It needs to be paid back quickly. It really in some ways is robbing Peter to pay Paul. It just forestalls the inevitable for a short period of time. What we need is long-term borrowing. And only Albany can authorize that. Now to your question, how are we doing? I see some progress, Juliet. Not enough to give you a definitive answer, but I know that labor leaders are having intense discussions with the Legislative leaders in Albany. They understand that the layoff clock – I'm very sorry to say this Juliet, but it could start at any time, depending on what the situation is in Albany. So the labor leaders asked, the Municipal Labor Council asked for, you know, some time to get Albany to definitively come back to address long-term borrowing. We're waiting for a resolution of that. And if it's a positive resolution and Albany declares that they're coming back to address this issue, we'll continue to hold off on layoffs. And if it turns out that we can't get such a declaration from Albany, unfortunately we will have to move ahead with the notices.

Moderator: Next up is Courtney from NY1.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good Courtney. How are you doing?

Question: I'm good. I want to follow up on that question about the borrowing. Do you have, I mean, there's been this October 1st deadline for layoffs. But you know, we're on September 2nd. Is there a concrete deadline that you need to hear from Albany about whether they're coming back and how much money potentially – has that number changed at all of how much money you would like to borrow at all?

Mayor: So it's a good question, Courtney. I want to say two things to you. One when we say we're going to hold on a day to day basis, you know, a few days is manageable. The longer a delay goes, it means either you get the borrowing to stop layoffs, or God forbid you don't get the borrowing. It will ultimately mean more layoffs if we have to delay much longer. Again, a few days, either way, not decisive. But if you start talking about weeks and you don't get the borrowing? Unfortunately, tragically for this city, it means even more layoffs. So obviously we want to avoid that. So we're waiting to hear more from folks in Albany to give us a clear picture so we can make those decisions.  Now Courtney. There was another piece to what you said, please remind me?

Question: This doesn't count as my second question, right?

Mayor: No, I’m asking you for clarification. It does not count.

Question: Okay. I asked how much – if the number has changed at all of how much you were looking to borrow?

Mayor: Well, the point there, Courtney is the billion dollars for this fiscal year is what we need to stop the layoffs. But then a reminder, the next fiscal year starts July 1st with the same billion dollar hole implicitly. Because that's just part of the permanent budget. So if you got a billion dollars and you stop the layoffs now, but you didn't have the billion dollars next year, then the layoffs would happen next year. So that means really practically you need $2 billion to stop this year’s layoff, stop layoffs from happening in the next fiscal year for that same group of people. Then there's the question of the State cuts. We don't know what's going to happen with the State of New York. We do know the State of New York is under tremendous fiscal stress and they didn't get and we didn't get the federal stimulus. When you think about that, that is probably immediately several billion more certainly between this fiscal year and next fiscal year. So the number we put forward, the $5 billion, I wish I did not have to tell you that money would all be potentially needed. But it very well might be, especially if there's not a federal stimulus. I also want to affirm Courtney, I've said it for many times, but it's important to say again. We would only take as much of that borrowing authority and use it only as much as needed. If we got a federal stimulus, we would not want to borrow any more. Who wants to borrow if you don't need to borrow. Right? The fact is, and we have a great example. City of New York went to Albany right after 9/11, got $2.5 million in borrowing authority. Long-term borrowing, 20 year plan, only ended up using $2 billion of that authority. So granting us the ability gives us the ability to manage an ever changing situation. But our clear purpose here is only to borrow that which we need, not a single dollar more. Go ahead, Courtney.

Question: And then now on another topic I know about more than two weeks ago, we asked you about the homeless situation in certain parts of Manhattan, especially in Midtown and the Upper West Side. You said you were going to go visit those areas and that you were going to start the process of quote, immediately moving some homeless individuals back into shelters. Wondering if you have visited those areas we spoke about including Midtown and the Upper West Side to check out the situation for yourself? And whether you have any update on potentially moving homeless individuals back into congregate shelters?

Mayor: I did not say immediately. And it's really important. Because I made clear that we need the space in the shelter system. So what I said and I mean it, is this was always temporary. We moved folks into those hotels because there was a health care crisis, a pandemic that caused us to need to make sure that coronavirus did not spread through shelters with a lot of people in them. It was absolutely a temporary measure. We want – we don't want to be in hotels. We set that policy almost three years ago. We don't want to be in hotels. And the goal is in fact to get out of hotels everywhere. So what I said was we're going to start that process, but it requires having safe spaces in our shelter system to move people back to. As that becomes available, we will act on it. I've been to some places looking at the situation. I've talked to a lot of different people about what they're seeing, but I want to do some more of that. Over the next few days, I'll have more to say after that.

Moderator: Next up we have Marcia from WCBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor. This is question for both you and the Schools Chancellor. Now that you're reopening schools, I wonder what happens to the grab-and-go meal program, you know, that so many people need? And how adults who pick up the meals will be able to get them? And how kids who learn remotely will be able to get the meals that they're entitled to?

Mayor: A great question, Marcia. And we'll get further clarification out to people about how it's all going to work. But I think the simplest answer is this – we want to make food widely available as we have throughout this crisis. Anyone who needs food will have access to it. We've had the school-based food program. We've had the community-based food pantry, soup kitchens. We've had the delivery. We're going to continue a whole host of efforts to get people food. Obviously, any kid that comes to school can get the food they need for themselves and for their family. We're going to keep that going a variety of ways. But we'll get the details out to the public shortly because as school operations begin, we'll have to make some modifications. So we'll let everyone know how that's going to work. Go ahead.

Question: Mr. Mayor, my second question has to do sort of tangentially with the census. You know, people that we've been doing stories and other news organizations have been doing stories about people who are moving out of the city. And people who move out of the city reduce the number of people who are in the population and could affect the number of people that – the number of elected officials we get into Congress. And it could affect the amount of money we get in federal and state aid. I wonder, are you concerned about the people who are fleeing? And are you concerned that that affects both our representation and our money? And are you concerned that the crime rate is driving people out as well?

Mayor: Marcia, first of all, much more crucial to that question is what we talked about earlier. There’s 28 days to go, we've got literally millions of New Yorkers who should be filling out that census form. It takes 10 minutes and I'm talking about people who are not going anywhere. That is the central mission. So let's speak about this bigger reality. I do want to sort of throw a caution flag here, Marcia. I think many people, particularly in your line of work, are deeply focused on this question. And I honestly don't think the whole picture is being looked at. I will guarantee you that we've got eight million plus people who are not going anywhere. So what we're really talking about is a small number of people. I can't give you the exact number. But a small number of people who are choosing for now, to go someplace else. Now, there was an article the other day that talked about people leaving and then compared it to the number of people coming in. And there are still a lot of people coming in too. So we just got to stop this painting of a picture that's not true. The vast, vast majority of New Yorkers are standing and fighting. They are loyal to this city. They're going to stay here no matter what. I told you guys about – what I think a lot of you saw, the Jerry Seinfeld piece in the Times last week, which I thought said it beautifully. Some people will go away for a period of time and then come back. Some people may leave us permanently and they will, sooner or later, be replaced by other people who want to be here. So, the question around representation to me, the much more profound question, is people filling out the census because we have more than enough people, if they filled out the census, we could get our fair share of funding and representation. But I really think – I just think this meme is getting to be just inaccurate and unfair to the vast majority of people who are staying. In the 60s and 70s, people left in much, much greater numbers than anything that's being talked about now. And guess what a huge number of people came and replaced them and created the city we have today. So, we just got to give this some perspective. New York City will come back. There'll be a huge number of people who want to be in New York City, and we will be strong for the future.

Moderator: Next up we have Christina from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, this question is for the Mayor and Chancellor, thanks for taking it. Lots of people have called on the City to build a solid remote learning infrastructure because we know that most instruction is going to happen remotely, even if and when buildings reopen. So, why wasn't the City immediately prepared to start with all remote learning on September 10th instead of delaying the school year? What specific things have been done to make remote learning better?

Mayor: Okay. I would say, first of all, it's not if or when it's, when. We've made very, very clear that on a transitional basis, the first few days of remote instruction will start on September 16th and then in-person learning will start on September 21st. We’re moving forward with that period. There's just no if to that, it's just very, very clear and it's happening now. The work that was done last year to create remote from scratch was miraculous. Work has been done throughout the spring and throughout the summer to improve it. There's no question that the remote learning kids will get this month is much better than what was available in the spring and it will continue to improve. So, I just think it's a misnomer to suggest that that work isn't happening every day, both on the system wide level and the work of individual educators who are constantly working together individually to improve their approach. Chancellor, jump in.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yes, Sir. I would only add that – what you said is correct, but I would only add that part of why we needed some more time was that when teachers report back on the 8th and then the nine days of professional development they'll have, part and parcel of that is additional training, additional orientation, new tools, new curriculum, new platforms. So, all of those things are what’s been planned for and, obviously, to have more time to familiarize our teachers with that, and then also to orient our students to that remote learning protocols and the guidelines are also why that time is not only needed but will be very, very useful in making sure that we have a robust remote learning environment this year.

Mayor: Go ahead, Christina.

Question: My follow up question has to do with childcare. Many community organizations that were running recs have closed down, gearing up to reopen for September 10th. And I know the plan for Learning Bridges was to kick them off around the same time that school was starting. So, what's the start date now? When will people have childcare options?

Mayor: We're obviously orienting the childcare to the physical start of school. So, September 21st and we'll have more to say very shortly on the specific details and the application process, etcetera, but that's going to be key to the start of school physically on Monday, September 21st.

Moderator: Next up, we have Rich Lamb from WCBS Radio.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: How are you doing, Rich?

Question: I'm doing okay. So, Mr. Mayor, do you think without the delay or the extension, whatever you want to call it, of the school year being moved a little bit farther down that if teachers walked out, what would have happened? Were you being told that that was a real possibility?

Mayor: Rich, look, I want us to move forward. I'll just state the obvious. We sat here yesterday in unity, the Chancellor and I, and the heads of three crucial unions representing the folks who work in schools. There are other unions as well, and I want to thank all of them for the work that they do, their members do on behalf of our kids. We're in a place of unity. I’ll only say what I've said before, the laws of the State are clear that public employees cannot strike. But the more important point is that we all came together and addressed valid concerns and issues and got to something that made sense and allowed us to be unified. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. Another education question, if you will. So, it's kind of been asked before, but I’m wondering how many extra teachers have to be hired, how many have you located, do you have any idea, and how are you going to afford this given the state of the budget of the city?

Mayor: Yeah, Rich. It's a fair question all around. The answer is thousands and that begins with folks who work for the DOE right now and have not been in the classroom but are qualified to be in the classroom. There's thousands of them to begin with. There's thousands of substitute teachers that are used every year. We'll peg the number shortly, but we're talking about two pools of multiple thousands of people that can be brought into play here. Yes, it will cost some money. But, look, as we have moved forward, we have to make sense of a very challenging situation. But it really comes down to our priorities. And I think educating our kids properly, keeping them safe, moving them forward, helping families that need to get back to work, helping restart our economy – there are so many reasons why the investment that we'll make to get schools going is worth it. It has huge ramifications for what the City will need in the next few months. And like every other decision, we'll have to make adjustments to achieve that outcome. But, you know, this is the right thing to do. Chancellor, do you want to add on the folks that we brought in to augment the school teams?

Chancellor Carranza: No, Sir. I think you covered it.

Mayor: All right, go ahead.

Moderator: Next step is Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I'd like to ask you about the indoor dining. Day after day, we hear how New York's getting better and better with the numbers and other states, some of whom we require quarantine from, so they're not doing as good as us, are allowing more and more dining. So, what is it about indoor dining that's just – it seems like there's no timetable, for no benchmark for?

Mayor: It's a fair question, but I think your question points out part of the problem. A number of states moved ahead with indoor dining and found that it contributed to their either ongoing problem or resurgence. So, unfortunately what we see around the country, what we see around the world is there's a direct connection. Now to be fair, it is more profound, even, if you're talking about indoor bars, indoor nightclubs, those are even more profound problems than indoor restaurants. And we are treating indoor restaurants separately. I know folks in the restaurant industry have asked this question, a very fair question. And the answer is, yeah, we see it as very different – indoor bars, indoor nightclubs have been particularly intense nexuses for resurgence around the country and around the world. Some of what we're seeing in Europe right now, that's a very big concern. Spain is a very big concern. It is being directly related back to those kinds of settings.

But indoor restaurants are still sensitive. They may not be as much of a challenge as bars and nightclubs, but they're still really sensitive and they have been linked to problems around the country, around the world. I think the answer that I want to give today is that we've been honest with the restaurant industry about the challenge, but I've also heard back that folks just want a final answer as soon as possible so they make their plans up or down. I think it's our responsibility to give them as clear an answer, in the month of September, as possible of where we're going. If there can be a timeline, if there can be a set of standards for reopening, we need to decide that in the next few weeks and announce it, whether it's good news or bad news. We're also working really closely with the State of New York. The State, like the City, both have – we've both taken a very cautious approach here. So, we'll keep looking at it. I think we owe the industry as clear an answer as humanly possible soon. But it's always going to be about health and safety first. That's why we've been so careful on this issue. Go ahead.

Question: And with the weddings, even those that keep to the guidelines of 50 people, it officially says that – I mean your office released this, that there can be no eating indoors. I mean, they're talking about most wedding halls, have a capacity of maybe 500, 600 people. If there are 50 people, there is a – what is the specific problem with the eating?

Mayor: So, let me turn to Dr. Dave Chokshi, our Health Commissioner, because his agency is leading the efforts to address weddings and catering halls. Go ahead, Dave.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for the question. The issue with higher risk activities that occur indoors, I would say occur along, you know, two major dimensions. The first is the size of the gathering that's happening indoors, hence the limit of 50. And then the second is paying particular attention to when masks are not able to be worn for the entire duration of when someone is indoors. And so, that's why, you know, we're particularly concerned about weddings, other large events that combine those two things where you have both a challenge to maintain a distance and potentially a larger number of people as well as the possibility of masks not being used regularly.

Mayor: Thank you very much. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up, we have Jake from Gothamist.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor –

Mayor: How are you doing, Jake?

Question: I'm doing all right. How are you? That meme you were talking about of people leaving the city, I kind of want to move past this, like, over blown discussion of whether New York City is dead. But there is like a lot of concern about the lack of vision or big ideas from your administration. So, can you name two or three big forward-looking initiatives that your administration has committed to that will help [inaudible] get back on its feet?

Mayor: Jake, respectfully, that's also an attempt at a meme. This is not how it works. The big idea is bringing New York City back safely. Right now, we're the envy of the nation that we have rebounded from being the epicenter, to being the safest place around in terms of the coronavirus. The big idea is bringing back our school system, largest in the country so we can take a major step towards functioning normally, and we can help our kids and families. Everything we're doing is to get this city back. And we already – we’re at our all-time high in terms of economic strength. This February 2020, 4.6 million jobs. So, I truly believe that what we need to do now is reestablish the strength we had. And then we're going to be talking a lot, starting this month about how to bring back this city not only all the strength we had, an incredibly diverse and dynamic economy, a global economic powerhouse, but also going to do it in a way that is more fair and address the disparities on many, many levels. And so, what's a big idea? A big idea is guaranteeing health care for everyone. We announced this almost two years ago. We've now implemented fully. The fact that some people don't want to make it a major issue or focus on it, doesn't make it less important. It's a huge seismic idea to guarantee health care for everyone and people who are receiving that health care know it. So, I think we're on the right track to bringing this city back with all these things we're doing.

So everyone, look, I’ll just finished with this and I want you to know, I did an interview yesterday on CNN, and the same thing happened that I've heard on many interviews I've been a part of – the journalists, from the national perspective, asking, with a certain amount of amazement, how New York City has come this far, how we went from worst to first, from being the epicenter of the crisis to now one of the safest places in the country. And I always say it's because of all of you. It's because of the extraordinary discipline and strength and resiliency of New Yorkers. And I have to say, my fellow mayors have asked me the question as well, with a kind of an amazement in their voice – how is this possible? And what I like to tell people is, first of all, if you know New Yorkers, you understand this is part of who we are. There's just no crisis that truly overwhelms New Yorkers. We've come back from so much. I saw what we came back from in those tough times, the 80s and 90s, when we had the huge crime problems, the AIDS crisis. So, many things going on, we came back. We came back after 9/11, we came back after Superstorm Sandy, we came back after the Great Recession. You see it enough times, you know, it's just in our DNA.

But the amazing thing here is, it's the combination of individual actions that has led to this result. And so, every one of you, every time you put on a mask, you're doing something for the city and for everyone else, every time you practice social distancing, every little act has added up. And today we're reminding people that you can do something else great by filling out that census form. But what I know about New Yorkers is they always step up, New Yorkers are always there for each other, and it's going to happen again. So, I'll conclude with this, if you read articles or you go online, you go on TV, and you hear people saying it's over for New York City or people are leaving in droves and all, I hope a little smile will come across your face because the naysayers have said this for decades and decades, they've been wrong every single time, doubting Thomases. I don't know why people like to do it. I'd much rather talk about what's right when New York City than put New York City down. But I'll tell you one thing, the people putting us down, the people predicting our doom will be wrong again, and it will be because of all of you. Thank you.

2020-09-03 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. I want to talk to you about the days coming up this long weekend. In most years, we all look forward to this time of year so much. Most years, we think about Labor Day weekend as just one of the most joyous times of the year. And that is true in every community of New York City. It's particularly true in our Caribbean community. It's a time of amazing celebration. This year is going to be very, very different. We want to speak about that in a moment. But I want to say at the outset, as we go into this long weekend, during this year of the pandemic, we want to make sure we protect each other. We want to keep everybody safe. The best way to celebrate who we are as New Yorkers is to make sure we get through this weekend safely. And we continue our fight against the coronavirus. And today we're going to talk about the ways we're going to keep everyone safe this weekend.

But before I go into that, I got to talk about something that is very, very troubling. And that's what we heard last night from the President. The President of the United States, a New Yorker by birth, threatening to take away federal funding from this city while we're still in the grips of this crisis. It just makes no sense. It's a time when we should be seeing solidarity with New York City, support for New York City, understanding for New York City and we're seeing the opposite. So I want to speak directly to the President. Mr. President, we asked you to help New York City and you weren't there for us. We asked you for testing at the beginning of this crisis, never came. We asked you for a stimulus to help us get back on our feet. You didn't lift a finger. We asked you for the truth about the coronavirus, so we could all move forward together. And you refused to tell New Yorkers and the American people what was really going on. So you failed us and now you want to punish us? It makes no sense. By the way, your words don't carry much weight on this topic because the Supreme Court has spoken. The President of the United States can't interfere with federal funding for cities and states just because he feels like it. We have laws in this country. So if you persist in trying to deny the funding, that's keeping New York City going in the middle of this crisis, we will see you in court. And once again, we will beat you in court. Why don't we stop the words and get on with some actual action to help New York City and help the people of this country? That's what we actually need.

Now, let me go back to what we're doing to prepare for these days ahead. And everybody again, when we talk about Labor Day weekend, it immediately brings up positive images. Things we love. We love going to the beach and we love family gatherings and barbecues. And again, all these wonderful celebrations of our Caribbean community. We think about the origin of the holiday. We think about the labor movement, all it's done for this city in this country. Labor Day weekend says something very good. I want to make sure even in this year of crisis, we keep it good. So first I want to talk about all the folks who may be traveling this Labor Day weekend. If you are traveling, if you're coming to New York City from one of the states you see on your screen, these are the states that according to the laws of New York State still require a quarantine for travelers coming to New York. And if you're a New Yorker and getting ready to travel this weekend for pleasure, or to see family members, look, I would urge you not to go to one of those states. That's the simplest thing I could say. Right now at this moment in history with all the challenges we're facing, the best thing for any New Yorker to do is avoid going to one of those states or territories. If you must, then you must respect the quarantine upon your return. And if you're someone traveling from those places, visiting New York City, visiting family, friends, whatever it may be, you have to respect the quarantine. Because we've come this far. The city has come so far. We have to keep fighting this disease and we have to hold on to the progress we've made. So my number one messages, you don't have to go to one of those states, please don't. If you do go to one of those states or come from one of those states, you have to quarantine, nothing to discuss. It's the law.

Now let's talk about this weekend and the things will be happening here in this city. So of course families will be gathering. People will be taking time to appreciate each other's company. And that's a good thing. But what we can't have is large gatherings. This is a time where we've really learned the hard way. Look what's happened around this country. Look, what's happening in other parts of the world where large gatherings are the cause for a resurgence of this disease. We can't let that happen. And a lot of the reasons that people gather just aren't happening this year. The amazing West Indian parade, one of the great events in New York City each year is not happening. The J'Ouvert Festival is not happening. What you can do is celebrate those amazing events and all the celebrities and stars who are part of them. You can celebrate that virtually. And then know that next year, God willing we'll be back on Eastern Parkway, but not this year. And I want to say to everyone in communities where there have been historically gatherings, please, for the safety of yourself, your family, your community, if there's a gathering, it has to be kept to under 50 people. And it has to be kept smart, cannot take a chance with people's health.

Now, a few days ago, we had a call with leaders of the Central Brooklyn community, elected officials, clergy, members of the Cure Violence movement, and Crisis Management system, folks who do amazing work every day representing our communities and supporting their communities. And it was a call filled with unity. Members of my administration and leaders of the NYPD joined, and we all talked together about how each and every one of us in our own ways, will be protecting the community as we go through this weekend. I want to thank everyone who was a part of that leadership call. I want to thank all the organizations who will be out there in force, starting today. Leafleting in neighborhoods, letting people know, it's a simple message. This leaflet says no large gatherings are permitted for people's health and safety. This message is being spread all over Central Brooklyn by a lot of great community organizations and local leaders. I want to thank each and every one of them because it makes a huge difference.

The number one best strategy for making sure people understand how to stay safe is hearing voices from their own community. And that's happening in a very big way starting right now. We also are going to have a strong NYPD presence, working in conjunction with community leaders, listening to the community, figuring out the best way to approach safety, being there to support the community, and keep everyone safe. So we're making sure that it's a smart plan. And I want to introduce to you now the architect of that plan and he's done extraordinary work in his role as Chief of Patrol and he is someone who really understands our communities and listens to our communities. And that's why he has had the success he has had. The Chief of Patrol the NYPD Fausto Pichardo.

Chief of Patrol Fausto Pichardo, NYPD: Mr. Mayor, thank you. And thank you to the over 8.6 million New Yorkers, to the folks from the days and the weeks leading up to this weekend. And I'll echo the Mayor’s sentiments – powerful voices in the community, grassroots organizers, local community leaders, pastors, clergy from every denomination, certainly our Crisis Management system and our electeds, small businesses. Working together to move not only this city forward, certainly this weekend. And as we prepare for this Labor Day weekend, we all can appreciate that the landscape of what the city will look like is different. One thing that will not be different is that our officers will be there every single day, just like they have been in the past. So you'll see police officers on foot and increased presence, not only in Central Brooklyn, but throughout the entire city. You'll see them in cars, you'll see them on foot, in uniform. And quite frankly, some members from other divisions may not be in uniform. And that's what the overarching goal to keep every New Yorker safe. So I ask and implore everyone in the city to continue what you've been doing, to be safe, to be responsible. So together collectively we'll have a great and safe weekend and we can certainly celebrate next year on Eastern Parkway, just like we've done in years past. Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Chief. And that call we had a few days ago and I have to tell you nothing more powerful than working together to address a challenge, listening to leaders of the community. And one of the strongest voices on that call and that's – she's been a strong voice so many times, a Congress member who represents so much of Central Brooklyn and is a proud daughter of Jamaica herself. Now I have to tell you what Congress member Yvette Clarke said to all of us and to leaders of the NYPD is, as you're out there in these next few days, really listened to the community. Work with the local commanders who know the community, focus on the Neighborhood Coordinating officers and the Community Affairs officers who know the people in the community. If we all keep communicating and working together, we can have a very good result this weekend. And everyone on the call heard her voice loud and clear. And that's exactly the plan we're going with. So, I want to thank her as always for her leadership and proud to introduce to all of you Congress member Yvette Clarke. Congress member, can you hear us?

[...]

Thank you so much Congress member. And that is the perfect point, you're making that we've come so far through so much hard work. We're not going to let it slip out of our grasp now. We're going to keep working. And thank you, Congress member for your leadership and everyone, I know we can have a great and safe weekend together. And I know that because New Yorkers always find a way to create something good, even in the midst of a challenge and to improvise even under the toughest circumstances. And when it comes to improvisation and making something happen, one of the great examples over these last months has been the Open Restaurants program. It's amazing to see folks in the restaurant community, how resilient they've been, how strong they've been, and how much they embraced this program and made something happen. So now I'm happy to announce that we now have over 10,000 New York City restaurants that have participated. Amazing number, over 10,000 New York City restaurants participating in the Open Restaurants program. So that's wonderful for those businesses that we want to help in every way we can to keep going. It's wonderful for the people, communities who love to see those restaurants open and love the outdoor dining.  But let's talk about the folks who now have been able to get their jobs back. Over 90,000 New Yorkers got their jobs back through the Open Restaurants program. An amazing achievement. I want to thank all of the business owners who did this hard work.

Now we want to keep coming up with ways of supporting your efforts. And so something we're going to be doing this Monday, Labor Day, we're going treat Labor Day as a weekend day. And that means that the Open Restaurants and Open Streets will proceed the same way they normally would on one of these summer weekends. So Monday will be Open Restaurants on Open Streets, like a weekend, extra day of business. And hopefully it's going to be a great day of business for our restaurants. And we also want to let folks know that the Open Restaurants and Open Streets program has been an amazing success. And we want to welcome any of the sponsors locally, if you want to apply for additional days, we want to hear from you because this is something that's really worked. And I think this is another thing that we need to make part of the future of New York City.  I’ve already said that Open Restaurants are going to come back next year. Open Restaurants on Open Streets has been a great success. We need to continue that not just next year, continue these approaches well into the future because they are working.

Mayor: We’ve already said that open restaurants are going to come back next year. Open restaurants on open streets has been a great success. We need to continue that not just next year, continue these approaches well into the future, because they are working. Now, another crucial initiative has been to help restaurants and some of the hardest-hit communities. Our Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity, leaders of this administration, leaders of color in City agencies all over the administration, they're looking at ways to address the coronavirus crisis immediately, particularly in the 27 hardest-hit neighborhoods. And one of the things that they came up with was the Restaurant Revitalization program announced in June to help restaurants in communities of color to survive and keep employing people in their communities and keep their cultures alive. And they've been doing that in an amazing way. I want to thank the Mayor's Fund, which has been front and center in this effort, working in partnership with the organization One Fair Wage. And with the leadership of the task force, now the revitalization programs already awarded $2.3 million to nearly a hundred restaurants. 71 percent of the restaurants not only are in communities of color, but are owned by either women or people of color. And again, not only helping to employ people again and keep the restaurants alive, but also participate in getting free meals, tens of thousands of free meals to New Yorkers who need it. So, this is a great example of doing something amidst this crisis. Again, New Yorkers, creating, in the midst of this crisis, to help each other.

Let's go to our indicators. One, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 84. And the confirmed positive rate among those patients is only 4.6 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases – today's report, 253. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report, 0.8 percent. I like any day that begins with a zero in particular. Let me say a few words in Spanish. Before I do, since we’re going into this holiday weekend, just want to remind people that we will not be having a press conference tomorrow morning, but we will see you again on Tuesday, the day after Labor Day.

A few words in Spanish –

With that we'll turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Chief of Patrol Fausto Pichardo, Chancellor Richard Carranza, Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps., Dr. Ted Long, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Dave Evans from ABC.

Question: Hey, Mayor. This is Dave. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Dave. How are you doing?

Question: I’m okay. I'm down on Staten Island right now. But I wanted to ask you – and also, if Congresswoman Clarke is still on the line. I don't know if she's still there or not.

Mayor: We'll see if we can get her back. If we can, otherwise we'll connect you with her separately, but go ahead.

Question: Alright. I just wanted to get her reaction to what the President has been tweeting out about trying to hurt New York with its federal funding. And then I wanted to ask you along the –

Mayor: Dave, we lost you for a moment there. You wanted to ask me what?

Question: I wanted to ask you if you [inaudible] –

Moderator: Dave, we’re having trouble with your connection. 

Mayor: C’mon Dave, what's going on. We've had this problem more than once. Get – stay in one place.

[Laughter]

Question: I keep moving around –

Mayor: Stay still. Stay still, Dave.

Question: The reason why it's unconstitutional in your theory is because budgeting money is part of what Congress does, not what the Executive Branch does.

Mayor: Well, that's absolutely the case, Dave. The budget – the Constitution is quite clear about budget authority resting in the Congress, but I’d go even further and say when the Congress determines a budget, it is meant to impartially distribute resources, regardless of politics, all over this country, according to the needs of the people. And we've been down this road before where the President threatened to take away funding for an arbitrary and political reason. I mean, look, this is clearly a campaign stunt. This is clearly the President just trying to score political points, but the problem is the Constitution doesn't agree with them and the Supreme Court doesn't agree with them. The Supreme Court has spoken to this issue that you cannot hold back federal funding over a political difference, or even a policy difference once it has been allocated by the Congress. So, I think this is another one of his blusters that’ll go nowhere. But if he really tries it, we will go to court and I guarantee you we'll beat him again. And we'll let you know if Yvette is brought back, if we can get her. But do you have another question, Dave?

Question: No, that's all. Just to if the Congresswoman is still there. That was my second question, if still there.

Mayor: Do we have her back? Let me check the team, do you have her back?

Moderator: I think we do have the Congressman back.

Mayor: Congressmember, can you hear us? The team is working diligently. Can you hear us, Yvette? One more time, Yvette Clarke, are you out there?

Moderator: We can circle back to the Congresswoman.

Mayor: Okay, Dave, we're going to get you back for that second question with the Congressmember. Who's next?

Moderator: The next is Michael Garland from the Daily News.

Mayor: Go ahead, Mike.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing, man?

Question: I'm doing okay. A couple of questions. The first one is on school ventilation inspections. My understanding is they were supposed to be finalized early this week. Have they been? And what are the results of those?

Mayor: Yeah, the Chancellor spoke to this yesterday at the press conference that we did in the afternoon, Michael. Almost all of them were done by yesterday. I think there's a few being finished today. We're going to get the results out publicly. Overwhelmingly, what we're seeing is classrooms – overwhelmingly – the last number I saw was in the high 90 percent that are ready right now. But we'll get you the formal count. Some, if there's a problem, obviously, there's some time to fix them. But we've been really clear, if for any reason the classroom's not ready for the first day of school, it'll be held back. If there's a building with a problem, we either fix the problem or we even hold that back. But overwhelmingly we're seeing good results right now.

Question: Thank you. The second question is on kind of this issue of, you know, people leaving the city. And, you know, people I've spoken to about this who are in the process of leaving or considering it are, you know, they're uncertain about their kids' futures – most of them I talked to. You know, this has to do with schools and kind of continuing to be able to get their kids a good education. You know, there's some concern about crime and there's also concern about the possibility that property values will go down. And I know you addressed this yesterday, but, you know, there's this kind of idea that going around, you know, in the blogosphere, the Twittersphere that people are kind of like sellouts if they leave. You know, are you sympathetic at all with people's decisions to leave? And are you concerned – I know you said yesterday people would come – people would come to the city, but are you concerned with the short-term erosion, further erosion of the city's tax base?

Mayor: Michael, I take the long view on this. And again, it's so clear – I mean, the history is not even slightly gray here, it's abundantly clear. You go back, you look at the sixties and seventies, we had massive, let's be blunt, white flight from the city. That's when the phrase was coined. Well, guess what? The city regained its strength. The city became more diverse. The city grew. The city, as of February, had reached a point where we had the most jobs we ever had in our history – 4.6 million jobs. We've had a highest population in recent years we've ever had in our history. I mean, if you look back in those times, you would say, there's just no way the city could have come back after having lost millions and millions of people – came back stronger and better than ever. Now, one of the great cities on the earth. And again, you could say the same exact thing after 9/11, after Hurricane Sandy, after the Great Recession, the city comes back stronger. And there's no lack of people in this country, in this world who want to come to New York City. And there's no lack of New Yorkers who want to stand and fight. So, I would say to you very squarely, there’s over 8 million people, this is our home, we're not going anywhere, we're going to fight for it. The folks who maybe are newer here who didn't take – you know, really have roots here or didn't feel connected here, if they leave. I think they're making a mistake, because I think we have very, very good days ahead. But I talk to New Yorkers all the time. They're not going anywhere. They’re not even thinking about going anywhere. It's just, this is their home. And obviously, people see, for example, you mentioned the schools – the heroic effort to bring our schools back, the heroic effort of our educators in the spring, going all remote, the remote heroic effort now to bring our schools back. People are proud of that. People are proud this city fought back the coronavirus. They're proud to be New Yorkers. They're not going anywhere. And lastly, property values – seriously? Chirlane and I bought a house in the year 2000, in a neighborhood that, 10 years earlier, there were tons of houses available. This is true all over the city. By the time we got to year 2000, we could barely afford our own neighborhood and that's been true for New Yorkers all over the place. Property values have skyrocketed for decades in this city. So, if we have a period of time where they stop skyrocketing, or even they declined some, it's against a backdrop where a property values went up in an astronomical manner over years and years. And New York City is going to be a very good bet for the future. Those property values are going to be strong, no matter what. So, anyone who leaves, I truly believe they'll ultimately regret it, but I want to focus on the people who are staying in fighting – the vast majority of New Yorkers.

Moderator: The next is Allison Kaden from PIX 11.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah, Allison? How are you doing?

Question: Good. How are you doing? I want to talk a little bit about indoor dining. You have some elected officials – City Council, from the State – talking about, if you're going to save restaurants, you have to bring back limited indoor dining. There's even a lawsuit that's been filed. I know you haven't given guidance yet. You're saying you're going to wait, but people want answers. They want to know what's going to happen and when.

Mayor: Allison, I totally understand. I run a big organization, I understand why anyone would answers, and we're trying to be honest with them. I could have pandered and told people something that wasn't true. I'm not going to do that. The health leadership of this city that has guided us through this crisis is very concerned about indoor dining. The State has also been concerned about indoor dining – all over the world, we've seen a problem. Now, again, let me be very clear, restaurants are different than bars and nightclubs. Bars and nightclubs have been even more of a problem. So, we will treat restaurants separately. I said, this week, we're going to come to a decision in the next days, definitely in the month of September, give the guidance based on all the facts, all the data, and then restaurant owners can make their decision. We have Open Restaurants through the end of October. We're looking at whether we should extend it. We have it picking up again in the spring. We're looking at that date. We have delivery. We have takeout. Some restaurants, obviously, with all those tools that are going to be able to keep going. Others are in really desperate shape, and I want to see how we can help them, but it has to be health and safety first. It has to be, how do we defeat the coronavirus? That's the first consideration. So, we will have more guidance, but the guidance will be based on what is in the interest of 8 million-plus New Yorkers who have to beat this disease. Go ahead.

Moderator: Alison, your second question?

Question: Nope, that was it. Thank you so much.

Mayor: Thank you. And then you guys, let me know if you got – you got the Congressman back? Now you got Dave back?

Congresswoman Yvette Clarke: I’m back.

Mayor: Okay. Let's see if we can get Dave back for his question. Dave Evans also –

Question: I'm here, Mayor.

Mayor: Look at this. This is a miracle of modern technology. Well done to the team today, putting it together. Yvette, Dave has a question for you about President Trump's comments. Go ahead, Dave.

Question: I'll be brief. I'm listening to the Governor also at the same time. So, Congresswoman thank you for coming back, but I wanted to just get your reaction to what the President said last night about hurting New York City with federal funding. And also, I've been told $7 billion is what we roughly get from the federal government in New York City. I thought that figure sounds a little bit low, if you could correct that figure. And also, your reaction to what Trump said.

Congresswoman Clarke: Absolutely. You know, this is more of the same – the threats, the lack of character, him targeting New York City alongside many of the other major municipalities is a partisan move on his part. He's already said that he's focused on blue states. You know, first of all, yes, the City of New York in the upcoming budget, under the Hero's Act, we have targeted for the municipality close to a $12 billion so that we can make sure that the City of New York is made whole after all that it has done to navigate us through this through this pandemic. I certainly believe the figure that he has been quoted – is saying in the press is an accurate. But, again, you know, we need to stay focused on navigating our city through this crisis. He does not have the authority to defund any cities in this nation. And we will certainly use every authority we have in the Congress to make sure that he does not begin manipulating federal agencies in terms of how the funds that we're due are disrupted in any form or fashion. So, listen, we are unfortunately dealing with someone who has demonstrated a lack of capacity to lead. And in this climate, we need leadership that will navigate our nation through this pandemic, make sure that our economy is made whole and get us to a point where we're united as a nation, not divided along the lines of blue states and red states.

Mayor: Amen. And Dave, one last point, you just heard from a member of the United States Congress, and it's a reminder that Donald Trump has a founding fathers problem – the Constitution so clearly states that the Congress gets to make the decisions on the budget. And so, it may be hard for Donald Trump to hear because he has abandoned New York City to move to Florida, but here's a real New Yorker, Yvette Clarke, and a member of the Congress, telling you in-line with the United States Constitution that Donald Trump doesn't get to make that decision  the decision’s already been made. And New York City will get the funding that is slated for us so we can serve the people of this city. Thank you, Yvette. And thank you, Dave. Go ahead.

Congresswoman Clarke: Mr. Mayor, before we hang up, I’ve got a lot of friends out there, and let me thank you for reminding me to remove the lipstick from my teeth. Thank you.

[Laughter]

Mayor: Your fan club’s looking out for you, Yvette. Very good. All right, go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Julia Marsh from the Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Julia. How are you?

Question: Good, so I'm sure you saw Speaker Corey Johnson yesterday called from immediate return to indoor dining. Governor Cuomo was asked about it just now and he said that they're going to contact the Speaker today and that it's up to Corey Johnson to get the NYPD to do enforcement on indoor dining if that's what they decide to do. Given that the Governor's going to Corey Johnson on this, do you feel sidelined? Do you feel like you've waited too long to make a plan to return to indoor dining?

Mayor: I’m totally at peace that what we've done is focused on the health and safety of all New Yorkers, which is why the city is now the envy of the nation in terms of fighting back the coronavirus, having such a low infection rate, thank God, being able to bring back our economy, bring back our schools. Our health care leadership I think has been absolutely right to be careful and cautious and focus on the data. So, we'll keep looking at the issue. And I said, we'll have more to say in the coming days on it, but I feel very confident that we've done the right thing to protect the people of this city.

Question: Okay. Okay. But this is ultimately going to be a decision by the Governor. So, do you feel sidelined given that now he's discussing with the Council Speaker about reopening these restaurants [inaudible] –

Mayor: He can discuss with anyone he wants to. As I've said, literally, it feels like hundreds of times from this chair, the City and State are in constant dialogue every day, multiple levels. And there's been a lot of harmony on the basic direction. And the State has been right there with us in understanding the challenges that come with indoor activity, especially indoor activity, where people don't wear masks like in dining. So, I'm just not taking the bait, Julia. We are going to make decisions together as we always have, and we're going to do what's in the interest of the people of the city to keep them healthy and safe. And that is what's been working.

Moderator: The next is Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Hello, Mayor. I don't think any of us can easily balance listening to both you and the Governor at exactly the same time, but we're doing our best. And to Julia's point a moment ago, I – one of the things the Governor said just now was you don't have enough sheriffs for them to do the compliance when you do go to indoor dining. He's saying you need three or four thousand dedicated members of the NYPD who will be doing restaurant compliance, otherwise you're inviting a problem. Your response to that.

Mayor: Again, I'm not going to comment on whatever the Governor says on any given day. What really matters is the ongoing dialogue between the City and State. Everyone knows our budget situation right now. We, obviously, want to make sure we have people from this City government in the right places at the right time doing the work. The Sheriff's Office has done an amazing job, absolutely outstanding job, with restaurant enforcement, with quarantine enforcement. NYPD has a lot on its hands and they're dealing with so many challenges and fighting back the challenges we face. And, meanwhile, our central concern, of course, is where is the federal government with the stimulus? Well, nothing yet. Where is the State government with long-term borrowing? Nothing yet. In fact, there's a threat of cuts from the State government that will cause us to have to cut even more New York City personnel. So, I'm just not going to engage that. Let's get to the work of figuring out what is healthy and safe for New Yorkers. And then let's get to the work of giving us the resources to actually protect people. And what Albany needs to do is give us that long-term borrowing authority. Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: My second question has to do with the schools with regard to the COVID testing, which was an essential part of your deal with the UFT. Our understanding is it doesn't really start until October, but the students return September 21st. So, are you not risking all kinds of asymptomatic spread on those first days? Or do you have some plan to get a representative number of students and faculty tested before the 21st?

Mayor: We’re going to do what surpasses the standard around the world, even in the countries that have had the best efforts to fight back the coronavirus and the best efforts at reopening our schools, we're going to make free testing available on a priority basis, fast turnaround, for all our educators and staff in our school system from this day forward. We're going to constantly encourage them to get that testing. I know the unions will as well. We're going to encourage parents to get their kids tested. We now have over 200 sites where people can get testing for free. This is an extraordinarily comprehensive effort. And then part of the agreement, we'll start the systematic testing in October. And I think that combination is going to give us what we need.

Moderator: The next is Jillian Jonas from WBAI.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Jillian. I want you to see, thank you for your suggestions.

Question: I know, I saw it yesterday. I wanted to thank you for the – I wanted to thank you for the shout out. It's totally not necessary, but I have to mention WBAI because the station needs all the help we can get.

Mayor: Fair enough. It's a noble cause.

Question: It might be a noble cause, but it might be a pointless one. I don't know. Anyway, also yesterday you talked separately about disparities and then later ferries. The CBC reports that taxpayers are subsidizing, per ride, those ferries around $10, almost 10 times the New York City transit, subway, and bus rides. The ferries recouped just 24 percent of [inaudible] costs last year, the lowest of all transit systems in the city, and an expansion could require bigger taxpayer subsidies, as much as $25 per ride. The Daily News analyzed CBC data and reported a majority of ferry riders are white with an average median income of between $75,000 and $99,000 a year. Meanwhile, there's no data that proves low-income New Yorkers are being served by the ferries. Then in July, the City cut $65 million from the Fair Fares program, which serves those low-income New Yorkers. Isn't this the quintessential example of the kind of disparities you say have to be corrected?

Mayor: No. The – you're mixing a couple of points together in a way I wouldn't agree with. Jillian, the issue around Fair Fares, which has been a very good initiative, is that people weren't taking the subways and people weren't using that subsidy. That's what happened there. But, look, no, the ferry ridership has been coming back very, very strong and it is part of bringing back New York City. And I think one of the things that is constantly missed in this discussion, first of all, look at where the ferry routes are now and look at where they're going to be. They're already in places like the Rockaways, Red Hook, Astoria near Astoria Houses, Soundview in the Bronx, places that needed a lot more mass transit. We're going to be going to Throggs Neck. We're going to be going to Coney Island. We're going to be going to Staten Island. This is the future of New York City, to have more and different types of mass transit. We're not using our waterways the way we need to. So, this is an investment in the future. Anyone can raise any concern they want about the here-and-now, but I'll keep saying to them, you're missing the forest for the trees. The future of this city is to get people out of their cars and, more and more, get people into mass transit. And we're not going to do that if we don't use our waterways. So, I'm very confident that we're moving in the right direction. And as the system builds out, it's going to go much, much more deeply into communities that are underserved. And that includes a lot of communities of color, a lot of lower income communities in this city that are desperate for this service. Go ahead –

Question: If I remember correctly – if I remember correctly, you were opposed to Fair Fares for a long time before it finally was enacted, but [inaudible] –

Mayor: I'm a just – I want you to get your question, but I just want to correct. Never was opposed, I said from day one it’s a good idea. Originally, what I said is, given that it was the MTA and given what the City was going through fiscally, even then, I wanted the MTA to cover the cost. And we ultimately came to an agreement with the Council that the City would do that. It was a major priority for the Council. So, no, I've always said it's actually a very good idea. It's one, I think, the State should have covered, but we ultimately made the decision to move forward.

Question: Fair enough. What's the status of the Brooklyn Queens Connector?

Mayor: Well, everything's been slowed down by the reality of the coronavirus. Just before the coronavirus hit, the beginning of the EIS process had started. I need to get an update because I know that was disrupted by the coronavirus about how and when that will start again. Now, obviously, we're going to continue to do the work to prepare. The decisions will have to be made by-and-large in the next administration given the time that's been lost here. But I still think, again, the idea is to maximize mass transit in New York City. We've added, in addition to NYC Ferry, a lot more Select Bus Service, we've added the new busways, which I think are going to be tremendously helpful, we greatly expanded Citi Bike and bike lanes. All of this has to keep going. And I think light rail is an important part of this equation. It has been all over the country, very successfully. So, again, a lot of the decisions will have to be deferred to the future, but the more we can build out mass transit in the city, the better off we're going to be.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Abu from Bangla Patrika.

Question: Hello, Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Abu. How are you?

Question: Good. Thank you so much. My first question is to you, and next question is to Yvette Clarke. The first question is –

Mayor: Yvette’s not here anymore, I'm not sure – or is she? Still with us?

Moderator: [Inaudible] with us.

Mayor: Okay, I’m sorry. Abu, go ahead. She is still with us, go ahead.

Question: Yeah. Okay. So, my first question is since the school is going to be open do you have any idea of what would be the difference between in a physical class and the student who will be in the home? What kind of different – both will be, you know, in terms of the education, in terms of social, you know, evaluation?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a really important question, Abu. Look, we're going to serve every child. That is the mandate of public education. We believe in that. I believe in that fundamentally. The fact is it's harder to do remote for everyone. It's harder for educators. It's harder for kids. It's harder for parents, but we're going to do our best job possible and continue to always improve it. It did improve a lot in the course of spring, it will continue to improve. It is harder to evaluate a child remotely. It's harder to provide counseling and emotional support. It's harder to provide, obviously, mental health and physical health services that can be provided in a school. So, we will do our best to achieve as much parity as we can, but I've been very honest, we have much more ability to serve children in person. And, look, yesterday a great example, the school I was in, in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, just a perfect, perfect beacon of what a community needs and why a school building can be such an inspiring place for children. We can't do all that online, but we'll do the very best we can. Go ahead, Abu.

Question: [Inaudible] could answer. The President of the United States stopped all kinds of immigration activities, I mean, issuing visa, issuing any kind of, you know, immigration process, and all this stuff is stopped by the executive order. And the immigrant community is suffering. You know, nothing is going to be happening. A lot of people are stranded here in the United States and they don't know what is their future? What is your comment on it? And, Yvette Clarke, do you think you can do anything in the Congress?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start it, and I'll pass to Yvette to talk about. I know this is a very deeply felt issue for her as a child of immigrants herself. Look, it's – ironically, and I don't know if the president could understand that, but what he's doing is un-American. This is a country of immigrants. This is a city of immigrants. He's literally trying to break up families and destroy what has worked for America for generations. It worked for my grandparents who came here from Italy, people bringing their extraordinary energy and talents to this country from every corner of the world. That's what has made America great. And this president is single handedly trying to stop that. But more humanly, as you said, he's stopping families from being united, which has never been allowed previously in recent history, at least. And it’s just horrible on a human level that we would ever have a policy that stops families from coming together who want to be a part of this nation. So, let me, turn to Yvette who can talk about what she thinks and what the Congress might be able to do about it. Go ahead, Yvette.

Congress Member Yvette Clarke: Well, thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. And thank you for raising that, Abu, because, of course, the City of New York has been a longstanding gateway for immigrants to embrace the American dream. Part of that has been family reunification. And Donald Trump and his administration have totally disrupted what has been a historic pathway for individuals to seek the American dream, whether it's those who are seeking asylum or those who have been lawfully trying to unite with their family members, by applying for visas. You're absolutely correct, this administration has slowed down that process, has made it more difficult for individuals to even afford to purchase the services of the USCIS. We have been very focused on this in the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, we don't have shared values in the U. S. Senate. And so, right now, things are somewhat at a standstill. We're able through our offices to do some limited work with the USCIS. Unfortunately, though, for the most part the Muslim ban that was put in effect, the closing of the borders due to the excuse used by him, of course, the spread of the COVID-19 which ironically, now no one wants us to travel to their nations, but all of this amounts to a xenophobia, a political agenda that Donald Trump believes will gain him favor with a certain segment of the population. We will continue to push for the reunification of our families for the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security to do their job, their mandated job. I don't anticipate a major uptick in that work to take place, unfortunately, before the general election. This is the reality that we're living in. We've been living in it for quite some time, but it's gotten worse as we've approached the election season.

Mayor: Isn't that the truth? Thank you very much, Yvette.

Moderator: The last question for today, it goes to Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hi, Dana, how are you?

Question: I'm all right, thank you. On long-term borrowing, I'm just curious for your thoughts on why it makes sense to take on more overhead in the form of annual debt service since, you know, there's a widespread expectation that the revenue that would support that service, the personal income tax, is poised to decline over the next few years.

Mayor: Dana, it's a very important question, and I'm glad you asked it because I think we need to have a fuller conversation about this. So, again, let's go back to the history. In the aftermath of 9/11, a really tough time for this city, then-Mayor Giuliani went to Albany, got the borrowing authority, long-term borrowing authority, 20-year pay repayment basis. Asked for $2.5 billion in authority. Michael Bloomberg came into office over time, used $2 billion of that $2.5 billion, did not use the full authority, and that has been paid back steadily. But think about it as with anything in life, if you're paying back over 20 years, you can handle the payments when you're talking about, of course, a budget on our scale. Now you're right if you say, hey, what about the next few years with revenue? We do expect challenges with revenue over the next few years, but not the kind of challenges that would stop us from paying back a modest amount of borrowing over, what we are asking for, a 30-year term. Our request to Albany right now is the ability to borrow up to $5 billion over a combination of years. I think this is really important to recognize. We've asked for $5 billion. We do not want to use that authority if we don't have to.

For example, if a stimulus was passed and made us whole, we wouldn't borrow at all. If we only needed to use a small amount of the borrowing, we would use a small amount. But when you're talking about repayment on a 30-year basis, the debt service is quite modest. It does not change the fundamental reality of the budget. We're talking, this year, about an $88 billion budget. It is a small amount. So, what I would argue, Dana, and this is to connect the dots I think that underlie your question – okay, well you could, well, just keep cutting, just keep cutting, and, you know, you might have more challenges ahead, you might have less revenue, just keep cutting. I argue to you that if you keep cutting, you're actually going to set the city back. If we don't have basic services that are strong, we're not going to be able to bring back our economy as well, and actually amplify our revenue and strengthen our revenue, speed our recovery. Also, if you go to layoffs, you're putting more families in a horrible place. You're putting people out of work. We want to avoid that at all costs. So, my argument is, look, anyone who tries to make – you have not, but I'm saying people would like to immediately jump to the 1970s and compare to 40 or 50 years ago, fundamentally misunderstand how strong New York City is today, how strong we were as recently as February – again, all-time high in jobs. We have a very extraordinary, really, economic profile, diverse, strong economy at this point that will come back. But if we don't invest in keeping City services strong, it will actually hinder that comeback. That is what I fundamentally believe. Go ahead, Dana.

Question: Thank you for that. On a completely different topic, the Park Slope Y is reopening September 8th. Are you planning to go back? Are you comfortable working out in a gym at this point in the pandemic?

Mayor: It's not about comfort. It's just – I'm not planning to go back right now. Someday, someday, but not now.

All right, everybody. Look, everyone, as we started, I'll finish. Thank you, especially to Congress Member Yvette Clarke, my old friend who is talking to you today has talked so powerfully about her community as we get ready for this holiday weekend. Everybody, again, let's make Labor Day what it's always been for us, an extraordinarily warm, positive part of the year. Let's make it safe. And you know what? New Yorkers really care. I mean, this is what we've found in this crisis. We've asked the people of the city to do extraordinary things, to do heroic things, to look out for each other in amazing ways. Whether you're talking about our health care heroes, our first responders, the folks who work in grocery stores or pharmacies, our educators, New Yorkers just look out for each other. They're there for each other. Neighbors look out for neighbors. This is who we are. So, this weekend look out for each other. Be careful, be smart, help each other out. Let's avoid large gatherings. Let's avoid anything that could spread this disease. Let's be safe. Let's understand this is a weekend to really focus on health and safety. This city has shown time and time again that no one cares more than New Yorkers. No one has more heart and passion than New Yorkers. So, let's use that heart and passion to keep each other safe. And with that, everyone, a very happy, healthy, safe Labor Day weekend. Thank you.

2020-09-08 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everyone. I hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend. I hope you had a chance to relax. We had beautiful weather and hopefully everyone got a well-deserved break after everything we've been through. And look, I want to talk today about the ways we to keep ourselves safe, going forward, and that means being really smart about folks who are returning from some of the states where there's a real challenge with the coronavirus, where folks have to quarantine when they come back here in New York City, whether they're folks who don't live here or folks returning from visiting family or whatever it may be. We're going to talk about that in a moment, because I really want people to focus on that reality at this crucial moment. We're going into the fall. We have to really consolidate our gains in fighting this disease.

I'll come to that in a moment, but first let me talk about this weekend in another perspective. Look, this weekend that we just had, usually, in addition to all the other family celebrations and folks enjoying the last weekend – in a lot of ways, we feel, the last big weekend of summer. One of the high points each year is the celebration of Caribbean culture, the parade on Eastern Parkway and the J’Ouvert celebration. This year, we had a very different situation. There was not going to be the big events. It was very important, in fact, to protect people's health and safety and not have those big events and have a clear message to the community that health and safety comes first. And that's exactly what the leaders and members of the community did. You see here pictures of members of the so-called God Squad, an amazing group of clergy and community activists who go out into communities in Central Brooklyn to preach peace and to help avoid conflict. They do amazing work. I want to thank all the members of the God Squad. I want to thank all the community-based organizations that were out over the last few days, keeping the peace in central Brooklyn, the elected officials, the clergy, the Cure Violence movement and the Crisis Management System. And, of course, the men and women of the NYPD were out as well and working closely with community members and community leaders. And that was the key to this weekend. So, a situation where there was a lot of concern given everything that had happened, but, in the end, people did a great job on the ground. We had one incident – and it was a very troubling incident where one individual shot five people in Crown Heights in the early morning hours, Monday. One of those people was a six-year-old boy, and that's deeply troubling. Thank God, none have life-threatening injuries. But except for that incident, overwhelmingly, we had a peaceful weekend in central Brooklyn and it really is because of the hard work of everyone. So, thank you to the community. Thank you to the NYPD. Thank you to everyone for working together in these trying times to protect the peace.

Now, back to the question of how we protect ourselves going forward. So, we're going into the fall, a lot more activity expected, and we have a lot of challenges to face right here in New York City in terms of beating back the coronavirus. But we know travel – all over the world, all over this country, we've seen travel is a crucial part of the equation and being smart about restrictions on people who travel is one of the keys to fighting the coronavirus. So, I want to make sure if you're one of those folks listening to my voice now, or friends, family, coworkers, anyone in your life, if they've come back from one of those 33 states and territories up on the screen now – if you're coming back from one of those 33 States or territories, you’ve got to quarantine for two weeks. It is the smart thing to do. It's the safe thing to do. It will keep you and your family and your community safe, and it is the law. So, again, whether you're a New Yorker coming back, or whether you're someone visiting either coming from one of those 33 places, you have to quarantine. Now, we are doing more and more to make sure people understand that – more and more activity at airports, at highways, bridges, tunnels, you name it. But here's another new piece – and the Sheriff's Office has done an outstanding job. I want to thank Sheriff Joe Fucito and his whole team. They have a new approach at the Port Authority bus terminal, where they will be pulling over buses before they arrive. And this is buses that are coming specifically from states with a high rate of COVID. And they'll be giving out those traveler health forums to get people right away to sign up so we can make sure they quarantine. So, the officers are literally be going on the buses, talking to the passengers, giving out those forms, making sure that people fill them out. This is so important to keeping us safe. Now, again, expect a lot more activity economically going into the fall, school's opening, we are keeping a close eye also, of course, on the flu season – a lot going on. We have to get this part about travelers right. So, again, thanks to the Sheriff's Office and thanks to all of the agencies and all the travel companies that are helping us with this, because they understand how important this quarantine is as well.

Okay, well, as we talk about the fall coming back and school coming back, obviously the particularly crucial piece of the life of this city, this is a time where we see so much happening to get ready for the school year. You have educators going back today to their schools, getting ready for the school year. But throughout these last weeks, in fact, going all the way back to June, you've seen hardworking folks getting the school buildings ready, whether they're folks from Department of Education, school facilities, School Construction Authority, the custodial teams in each school – everyone's been working hard, they've been working nonstop. And now, the ventilation inspections we've talked about over the last few days, they've been completed for all 1,485 public school buildings. Again, 1,485 buildings fully inspected. And that includes 64,550 classrooms. And what we can say today is 96 percent of those classrooms have passed and are ready to go. Work will continue on the classrooms that need a little more to be done before school opens. There's time, obviously, to make the improvements before school. And this morning, we will put the inspection data up on the Department of Education website, so you can see exactly what's going on in your school. And again, I'm going to affirm what the Chancellor and I have said many times, if any classroom is not ready, it will not be used. It would only be used when it's ready. But, thank God, the overwhelming majority of classrooms are ready right now.

So, as we've said, this is all about health and safety first. The approach we're going to take to reopening our schools is to be there for our kids, be there for our families, give them what they need, but always do it from the perspective of health and safety first. Here to talk to you about these inspections and all the work that's being done to get school ready, our Chancellor Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Let me just say that September is my favorite time of the year. And you can feel that energy of the new school year and getting it going again. No doubt this year will be very different in so many ways, but I know that today educators, students, and families across the city are getting ready for the school year to begin and across the city teachers and staff and principals are in their buildings, bringing those buildings to life. We've been busy in buildings as well. We've completed ventilation inspections in every single New York City public school building. And because – and you've heard us say this – the Mayor and I say this before – health and safety comes first, always. Today, we are not only telling our families that, but showing them that fact. Every family will be able to see the results of the inspections that we have done in their child's school. Just visit schools.nyc.gov and you'll be able to see the list for each school.

Here's what we found overall. Of over 64,000 classrooms surveyed, we found that the ventilation is 96 percent in good working order, in 96 percent of those classrooms. Where we need to take a little more action on the ventilation issues, we are. And, in fact, repairs are being completed on an aggressive timeline. In fact, many buildings that were surveyed – remember, that was just a moment in time have already been fixed. So, rooms in need of repair are safe for one individual, and that's important to understand as well. Any repairs that aren't complete before the first day of full-time teaching and learning will not be used. It's as simple as that. Now that there are 10 buildings that we've identified as needing repairs across the board, we're prioritizing these buildings to get all systems up to par by the 21st of September, meanwhile, staff at those buildings will be temporarily working from home.

Look, I've been a teacher, and I've been a principal, and I'm a parent. We're leaving no stone unturned to protect our students and our educators and our families. That's why we're being tremendously aggressive in all of our health and safety protocols from ventilation to face covering, to physical distancing, to nightly cleaning and frequent hand washing and sanitizing. It's why we will reinspect and make all information available to the public as well. These next few days are about getting everything ready for the incredible school year that lies ahead. So, we're happy to have people back in the buildings today, preparing for this new school year.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. Thank you to you and your team. I have to tell you everyone, the Chancellor's team had been working nonstop. There's been work weekends, nights, nonstop for months and months – extraordinary dedication to the children and families of New York City. So, thank you Chancellor.

And so, as we get ready for school, a lot going on, and we really have been listening to the voices of parents in these last months. We survey the parents of the city, there's been a constant dialogue, listening for what parents are feeling and needing. And what they told us was, look, parents have gone through so much, families have gone through so much over the last six months. Parents need to get back to work. Parents need to make sure their kids are getting the best possible education. And for so many of them, that means that they really need their kids in a school building getting the support of educators. Parents have been stretched so thin trying to be teachers and breadwinners simultaneously. They need relief. Kids are so anxious to get back with their friends and get back into everything great about school. So, we have been working from the beginning with imperative, the voices of the people, telling us what they need, and that has now gotten a whole series of pieces to come together, listening to the voices of the people and preparing for opening day. So, when in-person classes resume on Monday, September 21st, a lot of families will then be able – family members will be able to get back to work. They'll be able to do things differently in a better way. Now, some families clearly need help to do that and they need childcare. And we've talked about this now over recent weeks, the program we've put together from scratch – this didn't exist before the last few weeks, but it's called the Learning Bridges program. And the idea is to provide free childcare, quality supervised childcare and learning for kids from the preschool ages up to eighth grade. Now, the program will begin on September 21st and it's going to be highly prioritized. I want this to be clear, it's something we're going to start and continue to build as we go along – highly prioritize, according to who has the greatest need. And you'll hear more about that in a moment. But beginning September 21st, 30,000 kids will have access to a seat the first day of school, 70 percent of families with that priority level will have access by the end of September. And we're reaching 100,000 seats in December, all of them free. Now, this work has, again, been extraordinary over recent weeks. So many people have gotten involved to do this work – School Construction Authority, OMB, DOE you name it – agencies and individuals putting our heart and soul into creating something that didn't exist, but to make it ready for our kids and our families. And I particularly want to help – excuse me, want to thank everyone at Department of Youth and Community Development – DYCD. They've done amazing work for our kids in so many ways before this with afterschool programs and so many extraordinary supports for young people. Now, they've taken the lead in this exciting new element we'll be bringing to the equation. Here to tell you about Learning Bridges and everything that we'll be doing for our kids and families, the Deputy Commissioner for Youth Services Susan Haskell.

Deputy Commissioner Susan Haskell, Department of Youth and Community Development: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As you said, when in-person school begins on September 21st, most schools and preschool programs will begin on a blended learning model. So, students will, week to week, attend some school days in-person and some days remotely. And we know that working parents will need a helping hand. So, Learning Bridges will provide support by offering free childcare on remote learning days for families whose children are enrolled in blended learning. And in preparation for Learning Bridges, we have been working hard with our agency partners to identify suitable spaces throughout the five boroughs, including community centers and cultural institutions. Whenever possible, outdoor activities will also be available.

So, one of the questions we get is what will Learning Bridges look like for my child? For a preschooler, a typical day will include center-based play, social emotional skills development, early learning and physical movement. For a student in K-to-eight grades, you'll have support for your remote learning activities. It will also be balanced with physical fitness and STEM activities, creative arts literacy, and because it's difficult for anyone to learn on an empty stomach, meals will be provided for free, and snacks, at the programs. And, as you know, and as you've heard, ensuring the safety of all New Yorkers is a priority of the administration and Learning Bridges is no exception. So, we want to assure parents that activities and programs will be offered in a safe and welcoming environment. To keep young people safe and healthy, the programs will follow New York City and New York State Department of Health guidelines, particularly as it relates to COVID-19. In terms of applying for the Learning Bridges program, all families who previously expressed interest at the DOE website will automatically go into the enrollment process and others can complete an online survey by visiting the DOE website at schools.nyc.gov/learningbridges to learn more.

Offers to participate in the Learning Bridges seats will be made throughout the fall as programs are matched to a DOE school. For the K to eight component, DYCD will follow up regularly with parents and guardians who've expressed interest. So, DYCD, DOE, and community-based partners – we look forward to providing the safe, engaging space for students to learn this year. And on behalf of Commissioner Chong and Chancellor Carranza, we thank you, Mayor, for making this a priority for families.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Deputy Commissioner and congratulations to you and everyone at DYCD. This has been a Herculean effort but also a labor of love, because I know how much all of you care about our kids and our families. So, thank you.

Now, let's go over our daily indicators. Okay. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals or suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 56. And the percentage confirmed positive, 11 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold, 550 cases – today's report, 231. And number three, percent of people tested positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report, 1.49 percent. Okay. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: [Inaudible] our Q and A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Chancellor Carranza, Commissioner Grillo, the Deputy Commissioner for Youth Services Susan Haskell, the Deputy Chancellor for Early Childhood Education Josh Wallack, Sheriff Fucito and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today, it goes to Courtney Gross from NY1.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good Courtney. How was your weekend?

Question: It was lovely. Thank you. On the ventilation inspections, now that they are complete, the four percent that have not passed inspection, what is the actual number of classrooms for – that have not passed inspection and how much work needs to be done in those classrooms to get them up to par? I imagine the Department of Education has already kind of, you know, needs more space considering all the social distancing that needs to happen. How problematic is it that four percent of classrooms do not pass these inspections?

Mayor: I'll start and then turn to Richard and Lorraine. Look, I think the fact that 96 percent are ready to go is the most important thing here. Clearly that means you're going to have a lot of schools that are all ready to go. You're going to have schools that just have a handful of classrooms they've got to work out. Remember schools are using a variety of spaces, different than any time previously, Courtney. The order from the beginning that the Chancellor sent out was looking at every kind of space in your building. Obviously more recently, a lot of schools have applied for and been granted permission to use outdoor spaces. There's lots of different options to make it work. So that's the first point to say in the second point to say is a lot of these classrooms will be repaired and ready to go by the 21st. Chancellor, do you want to add?

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, Mr. Mayor. So if you think – there were 64,550 classrooms that were [inaudible], just think about how many walkthroughs that was. So 96 percent is 61,568 classrooms that are ready to go. The four percent is approximately 2,800 classrooms, and I'll let Lorraine add some more detail, but a vast majority of the work that needs to be done in those classrooms is what I would consider minor and not capital. So there are little things that need to be done, but keeping our promise, we said, we would make sure that everybody has functioning ventilation.

Mayor: Can you hear us Lorraine? You may be on mute. There you go.

Commissioner Lorraine Grillo, Department of Design and Construction: Can you hear me? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Absolutely, an answer to Courtney's question. The 10 schools that we just talked about amount to 837 classrooms, but I will say work has already begun, and four of our classrooms – four of our buildings we believe have been completed and are being re-inspected today. So that is a large portion over 200 of those classrooms.

Mayor: Courtney, just to conclude you heard Richard do the math. The fact is that we have several thousand classrooms that need work, but remember we have 1,400 school buildings we're talking about here, and when you average it out, obviously in some buildings, as I said, some will have no problem. Some will have one or two classrooms, some will have more, but there's time to resolve a lot of those and have them ready. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. what I wanted to get back to your characterization of the weekend as is overwhelmingly a peaceful one and yeah, I just want to say, you know, yesterday five people were wounded, including a six-year-old boy and his mother are there celebrating J’ouvert. There were additional shootings over the weekend and this all comes amid a spike in crime. So how can you characterize this as an overwhelmingly peaceful weekend?

Mayor: Shant, I was talking about very clearly and I think you heard me, I was talking about Central Brooklyn and I was talking about the deep concern that folks had would there have been issues in the past, around J’ouvert, and then on top of that, the concerns we have now because of the coronavirus, and there was tremendous concern how all those pieces would add up and whether community members would hear the plea from their community leaders to not turn out because the big events weren't happening. I want to be very clear. The community leaders, the clergy, the elected officials, community groups, cure violence, crisis management system, as well as NYPD really did a fantastic job in the days leading up, telling people this is not business as usual, this is not something to turn out for. Let's focus on health and safety and overwhelmingly that's what the people in the community did. There was one bad incident, for sure, and as I said, thank God, no lives were lost. But compared to the concern folks had we saw minimal, thank God, minimal violence, but much more importantly, we saw an extraordinary community effort to keep the peace. That's what I'm talking about.

Question: Okay. I'm going back to Learning Bridges. Just want to say, ask will kids in the Learning Bridges be in the same pods they're with in school, and if not, will you, will the city expand contract – the contact tracing to include kids in the Learning Bridges? That's an excellent question, and we actually talked about this a week or two ago in one of our meetings. Let me turn to Susan and to Josh Wallack to give you the details on that. You want to go first?

Deputy Commissioner Haskell: Either way. Yeah to answer your question about matching schools, to Learning Bridges programs, the goal there is to maximize group stability. We recognize that not every classroom group is going to be a match for a Learning Bridges classroom. Exactly, but we are absolutely going to integrate the tracing and reporting on students and Learning Bridges programs in close coordination with their school groups so that we can stay on top of that.

Mayor: Thank you. Josh, you want to add?

Deputy Chancellor for Early Childhood Education Josh Wallack: I'll just say – Susan hit the main points. I think it's both. I think we are going to do everything we can to keep groups together, and this program is part of the Department of Education and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Test and Trace operation. So we will be doing everything we can to make sure that they remain in those groups and that we are tracking our progress as we go.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How was your weekend?

Question: It was good. Good – it's over. That's the bad part.

Mayor: That does happen, Henry.

Question: Can you tell me a little bit about what kind of epidemiological projections the city has for the fall? What do you anticipate in terms of increased infection rates in the City of New York, going into the fall?

Mayor: Let me start and turn to Dr. Varma. I mean, we talk about this all the time. Anticipate is an interesting word, Henry. It’s not an unfair word, but I want to tell you that we don't assume that things are going to be exactly the way we want it to be, nor do we assume the worst we prepare for the worst, but now it's been, you know, months of tremendous stability. I think our job is to maintain that stability and then drive the infection rate down. Unquestionably, the biggest factor is New Yorkers who are observing social distancing in so many ways. It's not perfect, but it's really impressive. The use of face mask is really impressive and a lot of precautions being taken in workplaces and so many parts of the city. So that's the biggest piece of the equation, but also, you know, being very careful about what we open when, how we do it, the precautions we take, like the immense amount of measures being taken to ensure the safety and health of everyone in the school buildings. So right now I'd say we think we have a good opportunity to stay stable and then to fight the disease back more. But the next, you know, month, six weeks are crucial because there will be so much more activity to keep a very tight lid on that and obviously move our test and trace resources effectively and quickly as needed. Jay, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Great. Thank you. I think there may are covered all of the really essential points. I think I would just add a little bit more detail to the notion. There are areas of concern and there are areas to be maybe cautiously optimistic. The areas of concern is, as the Mayor noted is as we are progressively opening up more, the situation around the rest of the country is not necessarily improving, and of course we know that during the winter months people move progressively indoors and there was also the overlap of other respiratory viruses. So those are the areas of concern and the models that had been we've analyzed and looked at all predicted those could potentially create problems. For a sort of cautious optimism are, we've seen that in the Southern hemisphere, the flu season has been dramatically reduced by all of the COVID-social distancing and mass wearing measures. So our flu season it's possible it could be more mild than we anticipated, and also of course, our testing and tracing initiatives continue to perform at a very high level, and those really represent a critical safeguard.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Hazel from CBS.

Mayor: Hazel, can you hear us? You may be on mute. Hazel.

Moderator: Hazel, do we have you here?

Question: Can you hear me now?

Mayor: There you go.

Question: Okay.

Mayor: The mute button is always the problem.

Question: I know, it really is. Getting back to school questions here. A lot of parents are still struggling to figure out how they're going to get their children to school. Will there be buses running for all the students who rely on yellow buses for transportation, and are the safety protocols in place for those school buses?

Mayor: Yeah, all the – we'll have details in the next day or two, but all the school bus companies are moving forward with their service. A school bus service will be provided obviously with different reality because you're not going to have as many kids on the buses, but at the same time, you're not going to see as many kids going to school on each given day. But there will be comprehensive school bus service, again, I'll hold on the details because there's a few more things we're pulling together and we'll have a public announcement very shortly.

Moderator: The next is Christina Veiga from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mayor, Chancellor, thanks for taking my question. My first is having to do with the ventilation reports. I'm wondering how parents or teachers should make sense of them. I don't really see any indication of whether each classroom was deemed safe. It's just kind of a list of the mechanical components of ventilation and whether they're working or not. So if you go to one of the school buildings that's been closed, for example, there's nothing really there that makes it clear to me why this building has been deemed unsafe compared with another one.

Mayor: Well, again, I'll do my best just to start and then Chancellor or Lorraine Grillo can jump in. The – look, think about everything we're doing - this school building – and obviously all of it with close coordination with Department of Health and Test and Trace Corp. We've been showing you examples now over weeks of the cleaning that's being done, the the different PPE, hand sanitizer being put in place, all these different measures, the ventilation issue, was there proper air circulation in combination with all the other health and safety measures? And what this inspection regimen was trying to determine is which classrooms had that. And if anyone didn't have it yet, they were held back for additional work. So I don't think it's a lot more complex than that. It's either the ventilation is what we needed to be by the engineering standards that are in place or it isn't, and if it isn't, more work needs to be done. Chancellor or Lorraine?

Chancellor Carranza: I would only add that this will continue to be updated, especially as repairs are completed, and then refining, you know, when we talked about, you know, over 64,000 classrooms that are visited, we wanted to get that information out very, very quickly. But it will continue to be updated as repairs are completed.

Mayor: As I turn to the CEO of the School Construction Authority, I just want to note, this is what school construction authority does endlessly is make sure that our school buildings are what they need to be, including normal times doing a whole rehab of a school building, in some cases building new ones, whatever it may be. So when you really want to know how a school building works, Lorraine Grillo is the person to talk to him. So how would you answer that question, Lori?

President Grillo: Well, thank you, Mr. Mayor. I would answer it almost exactly as you answered, which is this was one component of what we've been working on all summer long into – including electrostatic cleaning and all of the other components go with keeping those buildings safe. This particular effort was, as you said, to see if the ventilation in a particular room is operating properly, and that is what this is, was meant to do, and so that information room by room is clear. If there is no ventilation, you will see that room will be closed. Very simple.

Mayor: Go ahead, Christina.

Question: I'm just curious whether there have been like tests of the actual air exchange rate and whether that information might be shared? I know the CDC is recommending at least twice an hour, and additionally, I'm curious whether pre-K and CBOs, or community organizations, are having their ventilation checked or whether are the Learning Bridges programs are also having the ventilation systems checked?

Mayor: Lorraine, you want to speak to that?  

President Grillo: I cannot speak to the CBOs. I will tell you that anywhere there is a New York City school building, those classrooms are being checked, every single one, and I also would like to say that we're working closely with our partners in the unions who have been working on random testing, as you mentioned, the CO2 rates, the CFM rate, those kinds of engineering type words, they have been working on that as well. So we, we exchange information. We talk about it constantly and any red flags we bring to one another. So I think you can feel very confident that the union, as well as SCA and school facilities have been working very hard to make every classroom safe.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today.

Deputy Chancellor Wallack: Josh Wallack, I can jump in on the community based organizational question.

Mayor: Yeah, go ahead, Josh. I'm sorry.

Deputy Chancellor Wallack: So thanks for the question. I just want to say that we are working very closely with our community based partners across the city. We’re are putting out guidance for them so that they understand the standards for ventilation that we expect. Of course they have – they're in their own space with their own landlords. So it's not quite the same, but we'll be working very closely with them to make sure that they have a safe and healthy places for our children, and we'll work with their landlords to make sure that is done.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you, Josh. Go ahead.

Moderator: We still have time for two more left today. The next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask about the childcare seats. I understand correctly, you're saying they're only going to be 30,000 in September. You know, and you had previously announced there would be a 100,000 which now it sounds like it won’t happened until December. So what accounts for that? Why weren't you able to get to a 100,000 for the school year start and you know, what are parents supposed to do who don't get one?

Mayor: Yeah, so Erin look, we said the goal was a 100,000 and we will get to a 100,000. Starting something from scratch is a huge endeavor. It just did not exist before it had to be created and all those agencies I mentioned before have been hard at work making it happen, and making sure it's healthy and safe, but those are the numbers of when we can get to each level, it will all be for free. It will be prioritized. So the parents who need it most will get the first seats and then we'll build out from there. But just a matter of how much had to be done so quickly to ensure that it could be safe, it could be free, it could be available. Go ahead.

Question: Alright, thanks. And then, you know, my second question is just about your approach to development in the city. You know, last week we saw - excuse me - the project on the Queens waterfront, it doesn't look like it's going to happen at this point, and a lot of people in the industry kind of observed that you aren't pursuing as much of an aggressive agenda as perhaps you once did. I wonder if you agree with that characterization, and if so, you know, what's the reason for that?

Mayor: Erin, I think it comes down to, we call them like we see them. Each different site, each different neighborhood has to be looked at individually. That case, I think the city was very clear about the fact that it was a private application. It was not a city rezoning, and the developers did not offer enough to make it worthwhile to the public. I mean, I've said from before I was Mayor, you know, we need to drive a hard bargain and ensure that the public's interest is represented in these decisions. And the areas where I've been aggressive is where we get a lot of affordable housing and a lot of public benefit, things like parks and open space where we get a good deal for the people. That's where we move forward, and where we don't, we don't. So I really think it's a case by case basis and that's how we'll proceed from now.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning. I was getting nervous that I wasn't going to get called on, but I have two very important questions –

Mayor: We don’t want you to be nervous, Katie. Patience is a virtue.

Question: I refreshed the WebEx. It's a whole process. The first question that I have is for the Chancellor is in regards to staffing levels at schools. I know I'd asked it last week. A lot of people spoke, but I don't think it was really answered, and my question, if you have the specific total tally of requested teachers and the principals had to request them. So the number of teachers that are requested and then what's what the pool we're working with? Just the number of DOE subs and redeployed office staffers there are because we've heard from some principals that they just simply still do not have enough teachers and don't know when they're going to get them.

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah. So Katie let me be clear. As principals are working through the programming at their school sites, you also have to keep in mind that there are still families that had previously indicated a blended learning environment that are switching to a remote learning environment. So the number keeps moving in terms of how many students principals need to program for. So obviously that impacts the number of staff. Now, do we have numbers? Absolutely. We're looking through those numbers, but what we're trying to do is verify what it actually looks like in terms of how many teachers for what school. That being said, we've already identified underlying teaching credentials for centralized staff. We've also looked at all of our subs. We've also looked at our ATR educators as well. So we can get you more details on all of those numbers. But again, this is not an exact science and it's not a one size fits all. So it's a little bit of a moving target, but we're working through that. We should have some more details very soon.

Mayor: Yeah, let me just add Katie. I mean, again, what we start with here is thousands of DOE employees already in place, able to teach, not yet applied to schools, that process will happen in the next few days and then the substitutes who we rely on throughout the year, obviously, some of whom who have been involved in our regional enrichment centers but there's thousands of them as well. So we have a really strong pool to turn to. We're making the final decisions on the exact number that we need to bring on board and then how to apply them to each school, that is going to be done literally over the next few days. Now in a non-COVID school year, a lot of adjustments are made up to the opening day of school, normally, even sometimes in the days after school begins. So it's not unusual for a principal to know that there's a certain amount of adjusting at the beginning, but what we can say for sure is we're going to bring in thousands more educators and make sure that principals have what they need so they can move forward. Go ahead.

Question: Great. Thanks. And I guess since Lorraine Grillo's on the call too, I'll ask, I know that there had been plans for some schools to utilize like ancillary space outside of the building, particularly in districts that are already overcrowded when there isn't a pandemic on top that. So can you give an update? Are kids going to be going to school in libraries and museums and, you know, warehouses? I don't know. I mean, probably, hopefully not warehouses, but could you give an update?

Mayor: We’re not thinking warehouses.

Question: Could you just give an update on that? And when parents will be notified because you know, school starts, I guess it starts later than usual, but any update on that?

President Grillo: Well, if I may, Mr. Mayor, to answer that question, Katie, we've been working with Department of Education and their space planning group to find those spaces that are, as you mentioned, with schools that are overcrowded. I would not - cultural institutions is unlikely. I don't know that we've had any agreements with them, but I will tell you there are a number of private and parochial schools who are either closed for good or closing this season. We've taken advantage of that. Our partners at CUNY and areas where they're not occupying. So we're working very, very closely with a number of different groups.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Lorraine, and look everyone as we close up today, here we are now going into the fall, a lot going on as you can hear in the course of this press conference, but again, it comes down to this. New Yorkers have been heroic over the last six months. New Yorkers have fought back against this disease. This city is now the envy of the nation, it's to so many people it’s absolutely miraculous that this city has come back the way we have, and just been so disciplined in fighting this disease. And so here's what I say as we start the fall, let's go farther. We have it in our power to do so. Yeah, there will be more activity and there will be new challenges, no doubt, but we've also proven what we can achieve, so why don't we achieve some more? Continuing that discipline, continuing to make the smart moves that everyday New Yorkers are making. We'll keep being careful about each decision we make and we'll keep putting health and safety first here at City Hall, but I'll tell you again, everyday New Yorkers are the ones who are winning this battle. We have it in our power to beat back this disease even more and that's what I want us to devote ourselves to over these next few months, because I'm convinced this city has shown the whole country how it's done, and if we keep leading, I think a lot of other people will take inspiration from that. If we keep leading more and more people be able to come back to their jobs. If we keep leading, we can take those big steps towards a better life again. So, as we start the fall, a profound thank you for the last six months, let's keep going. Let's go even farther. Thank you, everybody.

2020-09-09 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, right now, so much is happening in this city. So much work is going on to get ready for the weeks and months ahead. So much is coming back to life in this city and our focus, as always, as we bring New York City back – our focus is on health, it's on safety. That is the key to everything else. We get those pieces right, everything else falls into place. Now, right now, so much effort going on to prepare for a safe, healthy school year. So much is going on to continue to work to fight back the coronavirus and lower that infection rate even more. So much is going on to make this city safe, to make our streets safe.

Now, safety and health, as we've said, that's also the core to everything we're doing in terms of getting our schools reopened. And we need to make sure that kids are safe, adults are safe wherever they go, and that the school system works for every family. And so, one of the big questions that's been out there is school bus service, how we bring it back. And today, we announced that school bus service will be back and will be available to all children who need it. Now, this will start from the first day of school. On Monday, September 21st, we'll have 100,000 bus seats available. There'll be 6,000 special education routes, 2,500 general education routes. We're working with 60 bus companies to have everything ready in time, including extensive safety measures. That means there will be mandatory masks for everyone, adults, and children alike on the buses. That means there'll be social distancing. That means there’ll be windows open and nightly cleaning. Every bus company will be provided with the PPE they need. And we're starting with a supply of 300,000 masks, 10,000 face shields, 30,000 bottles of hand sanitizer and electrostatic sprayers for every bus garage. And we're going to keep those supplies up constantly as we go forward.

Now, families will start to get notified today of the bus routes for their kids. Every route has now been completed and confirmed. So, family notifications begin today. All families will be notified by the end of the week. So, parents will have the information they need to get ready for September 21st, the first day of school. Now, we've talked a lot about our school buildings and making sure they are safe and healthy. A lot of conversation has been properly on the question of ventilation. I’m going to show you a video in a moment that will give you a sense of the hard work that's being done and the great work of so many public servants who care about our kids who are making sure ventilation is working in every school building. But I want to give you another update. First, we announced over the weekend that there were 10 buildings – 10 school buildings – and, again, this is out of well over 1,400 school buildings for our public schools – but 10 in particular had real challenges. We were holding back those buildings to see what could be done to fix some of those challenges. Happy to report now that in four of those 10 buildings, repairs have been completed and the buildings have been re-inspected and passed inspection. So, four more buildings coming back online and those inspection reports will be up on the DOE website later on today.

Now, again, I want to give you a sense of the hard work that's being done to improve the ventilation, inspect it, make sure it's right. Let's look at this video, they'll show you what's happening in our schools right now.

[Video plays in background]

Well, you can see there – and I really want to commend all the men and women who do this work, who care so much about our schools, care about our kids, care about our educators – thorough, thorough work by people who know their stuff – the engineers, the custodial service personnel, everyone who makes sure the school buildings are ready. What you saw is happening and has happened all summer in every single one of our school buildings. And that's why we will have our buildings ready in time for our kids.

Now, let me give you another update on something we're doing that is so crucial to fighting the coronavirus, and, again, is going to the grassroots, because that's where we make a difference. You know, the Test and Trace Corps has done such important work, reaching out to communities, really making sure that people know testing is available, take advantage of it, and particularly focusing on communities where the testing levels have been lower than they should be, and Soundview in the Bronx is a great example. I was up in Soundview yesterday, the test and trace team – a great experience talking to neighborhood residents, letting them know that testing was available. I want to tell you, people responded to this, knowing that the testing was available in their community, that it was free, that it was quick and easy. Folks want to take advantage of that opportunity. So, it was so important to be out there with people. And this is what the test and trace team does every single day. This is this hyperlocal effort, as we call it, focusing really intensely on particular communities. This has got to go on in Soundview all through September 15th. It’s been going on for the last week. We'll continue September 15th. And the idea is, get that testing rate up. And it's all sorts of media outreach, of course, but grassroots outreach as well, knocking on doors. We've had now almost 10,000 doors knocked on, 4,000 direct conversations with people in the community, leafleting out in the streets. And the message is simple – get tested, because it makes a difference, and it helps you protect yourself and your family. Now, the hyper local effort continues wherever there's a need. Borough Park, Brooklyn, and another area where we still have concerns. We're addressing – a lot of outreach going on, efforts to make sure people know how important is to where the masks and to limit gatherings and to practice social distancing. And, of course, to get tested regularly. Let me now turn to the management, leading these efforts and doing a great job with this very grassroots approach, the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you, sir. COVID is an invisible enemy. To fight COVID, we must do as much testing as we can [inaudible] in New York City, and we can't afford to develop any blind spots. The community in Soundview had one of the lowest per capita testing rates of any community in New York City, before we started our hyperlocal effort there. Now, since we've started our hyperlocal effort in Soundview, we've knocked on 10,000 doors, made 49,000 phone calls, and completed 1,600 tests for the coronavirus there. And the way that we've brought people out to get tested is by keeping this a local effort. We've worked directly with community-based organizations, such as the Mexican Coalition for the Empowerment of Youth and Families, and SCO Family of Services. Now, we're going to continue to build on the principles that made us so successful in Sunset Park, where we were able to drive down the percent of New Yorkers testing positive in that community by more than two-thirds through our hyperlocal effort there. Now, in Soundview, if you come to our site of the library, you can come in, get a test [inaudible] you'll have the result back within 15 minutes. And if it's positive, we have a team of tracers in person there that will do immediate contact tracing. They speak seven languages. And any contacts identified, they will reach out that day and bring them in for testing that day as well. And then, before you leave the building, if you tested positive, we pair you up with a resource navigator to work with you, to see if you'd benefit from things like free food delivery or even a free hotel stay.

Moving forward, we're going to continue to work with the community in Soundview, to drive up the test and levels to where they need to be, to keep the community and Soundview safe and all of New York City safe. Thank you, sir.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Ted. And, Ted, I want to thank you and your whole team at test and trace. It's just great to be out in the community and see the Test and Trace Corps in action, see how intensely people care about this work and how important it is to just have those direct conversations with people to let them know that testing is there for them and it's free and it's available. It makes all the difference in the world.

And this leads us to our daily indicators. And every day, it's actually a privilege to be able to tell you this information, because it's further evidence of the amazing efforts of New Yorkers that have taken us forward. So, indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 79. And the percentage of patients confirmed tested positive for COVID-19 is only 3.8 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold, 550 cases – today's report, 220. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold is five percent – and today's report, 1.04 percent. Another very good day.

A few words in Spanish –

With that, we turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Executive Director at the Test and Trace Corps Ted Long, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. For the first question today, we'll go to Rich Lamb from WCBS radio.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Rich. How are you doing?

Question: I'm doing all right. So, I heard Dr. Varma, I think, mentioned yesterday and I looked it up a little bit – the transmissions in the flu season in the Southern hemisphere are apparently vastly reduced from previous years. Does that seem to predict anything for New York City? I wonder what his opinion is about that.

Mayor: Yeah. I'll start and turn to Dr. Varma. Yeah, it's a great question, Richard. It's an important one. We are seeing some hopeful signs. So I know Dr. Varma well enough to say he will probably tell you, we have to be careful not to over-read what we're seeing there or be too optimistic because we have to see how things play out here, but you're exactly right. The fact that people are so extensively wearing face coverings and practicing social distancing is not only a way to fight the coronavirus. It's also a way to fight the spread of the flu, and I have to say being up in Soundview in the Bronx, working class community, a community of all different kinds of people, lots of immigrants. I was really struck by how many people were wearing those masks and how seriously New Yorkers take this. So, with that, over to you, Dr. Varma.

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Yeah. Thank you for the question. So, as I [inaudible] yesterday, we are cautiously optimistic that all of the measures that we're taking right now to prevent coronavirus transmission will have an impact also on flu transmission, and that's where the evidence comes from what you've seen in the Southern hemisphere. There was also data earlier this year from Hong Kong and Taiwan. With that said, I would also really urge New Yorkers though, to make sure they get a flu shot that year. We're going to be doing a lot of community outreach to make sure that everybody of all ages knows that flu shots are one of the really most important ways that you can try to keep yourself safe and healthy this year, and it's also going to be particularly advantageous for us because we know that, you know, flu symptoms and COVID symptoms are similar, and the more we can keep you out of the doctor's office or the ER due to flu the better we can handle any issues related to COVID.

Mayor: Go ahead, Rich.

Question: Okay, different topic. I'm just wondering in regard to the schools, how many families, I think we heard something about this yesterday from the Chancellor, but I wonder whether they've been able to quantify it, how many families seem to be switching from in-person to remote learning and what does that mean regarding the number of extra teachers that need to be recruited?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. So we, as we talked about yesterday, Rich, we're fine-tuning the exact number of teachers we will need, but I'm quite confident we'll have the teachers we need. Remember, we have thousands of DOE personnel who are ready to teach in a classroom, even if their roles last year were something different. So those thousands of educators are being mobilized and move into, moved into classroom setting. We also have many thousands of substitutes that we've worked with in the last who can be mobilized as well. So there's a real talent pool to be tapped into. We'll be ready with those talented educators ready to go. The Chancellor will give you the latest on the number of students we expect in school buildings versus in full time remote. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Mayor. So, at this time, 61 percent of our students have elected blended learning, which means in-person learning and 39 percent have elected full remote learning. So that – and that’s stabilized. So that means that two thirds of our student body will be at least for some portion of the week in person learning this coming school year.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead.

Moderator: Next up, we have Andrew from WNBC morning, everyone. Last week, the Chancellor indicated that there would be a 30-day supply of PPE in every school, every day. We did hear from a number of teachers yesterday saying they showed up. There were no face coverings, no PPE. I'm wondering if you can address that. If you think this was just some scattered outages or if perhaps schools are not yet stocked?

Mayor: I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. Andrew, we had some schools that should have honestly been caught, but there was a specific reality about them that are in some state-owned facilities, and once the mistake was realized, they're being resupplied today with the PPE, it's very easy with the amount of PPE we have on hand to get a school supplied immediately. So there was a handful of schools missed. There's no question about that. That's being fixed right now. But overall and I've seen this around the school system and talk to a lot of folks involved, overwhelmingly the PPE is in place and any time there's a problem, we can supply it right away. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, so just exactly what the Mayor said. In addition, some of our facilities are leased facilities. So when PPE was going to be delivered, in some cases the landlord did not accept those deliveries, but this is why, you know, we have more time and we've been spending all day yesterday addressing any issues where there wasn't a PPE and principals have been great about communicating that to us. We'd been in very close communication also with our unions. So, we're the information flow is strong and we're addressing those issues as they become identified.

Mayor: Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: So, my second question has to do with indoor dining. Yesterday, the Governor said, essentially, he's ready to give it the go ahead as soon as you tell him what your specific enforcement plan is. So, have you had a conversation or your office with the Governor's office in last 24 hours and how close are you to announcing an enforcement and compliance plan for indoor dining?

Mayor: Andrew, a lot of conversations over the last few days between my office and the Governor's office, everyone is working together trying to figure out what's safe. There's been a lot of conversation among the healthcare leadership to make sure that whatever is done is done safely. I want to emphasize this. We've seen problems around the world with indoor dining. We take it very seriously and particularly problems with bars and nightclubs. Those need to be handled in an even more stringent fashion. But bottom line is we are making progress. We all need to come to an agreement on what will be safe, what the standards will be. Not just the enforcement, it's much more than that. It's how something should happen, when it should happen, what standards, what would indicate if there was a point, just as we've said, what schools – we've had a threshold that allows us to open schools and a threshold that if it were surpassing the wrong direction, we would close them. We have to really do that fine-tuning on indoor dining to see if we can get somewhere I'm hopeful. We will have an announcement as early as this week. But there's more work to be done, and then obviously we do the enforcement here on the ground and our resources are being stretched in a lot of different directions, but we'll have to figure out a way that we feel confident about the enforcement. So whatever vision we come up with we can make sure it is carefully handled every day here in New York City.

Moderator: Next up is Luis from [inaudible].

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you today?

Mayor: Hey, Luis, how are you?

Question: Good, good, good. A number of times since August you've outlined measures taken towards enforcing the DOH traveler form compliance. There've been checkpoints, hotel involvement, and recently you spoke at buses at the Port Authority yesterday. The Governor’s talked about students coming back to colleges from some of the high-risk states, and he mentioned the outbreaks at colleges across the nation. So, I'm wondering, is there any future plan to involve colleges with the travel form compliance?

Mayor: I think it's a very fair question, Luis. We have been working in fact with a whole host of private and public entities to get the travel compliance, right. Not only public agencies, but travel companies, airlines, bus companies, Amtrak a host of rental car agencies. You name it. So yeah, I do think it makes sense to increase our coordination with universities. I think the – from what I've seen here in the city, the universities here have been really careful and meticulous. I think some of the problems you're seeing in other parts of the country, unfortunately correlate to a very high infection rate and mistakes that were made previously. But here my strong sense is our universities are being real cautious, but yes, I think the answer is simply, yes, we want to coordinate with them carefully in terms of people traveling to the city.

Question: Thank you, sir. That's it. Take care.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up is Marcia from WCBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I'm intrigued by what you said about indoor dining and the fact that you seem to be working hard and diligently to come up with some way to reopen New York City restaurants for indoor dining. Can you, can you expand on that? I think it gives [inaudible] an awful lot of people who need the jobs, need to work, and are afraid of going out of business?

Mayor: No, listen, Marcia, I appreciate that point a lot. I've talked to plenty of restaurant owners and folks who love their local restaurants and last thing we want to see is anyone lose their business. It's been horrendous for the restaurant industry. That's why we did outdoor dining. That's why we try to do a lot of things to support the industry, but look for a long time, what we saw around the world was that indoor dining unfortunately could spark a much worse situation in terms of coronavirus. We're seeing it right now as one of the contributing factors in some of the resurgence in Europe. The question for us has been, is there some way to do indoor dining that can be truly safe and with standards that are very tight and that we have a clear sense of under what conditions we would allow it, and then also under what conditions we would not allow it if our situation where the coronavirus changes.

So, Marcia, I think the really important piece of this is our opportunity to do more than indoor dining's directly related to how well we do on the health picture overall. If we keep fighting back the coronavirus, more and more options open up. If the coronavirus starts to resurge, you're not going to see a lot of things, including indoor dining. So we're trying to figure out with the State right now, what is that balance point? What are those conditions that would be acceptable that would keep us safe? What is the kind of threshold that we would need to work with? And it's been productive conversations. I don't want to say anything more until we see if we can get to a final agreement. But we are trying our best. You're right. Diligently is the right word. We're trying our best to see if there's a way we can give some clarity to the restaurant industry so they can have some option to keep going. But remember, it will all be dependent on how we're doing with the coronavirus overall.

Moderator: Next up we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor and Chancellor, I wanted to ask about the bus contracts and the bus service. You said there’ll be busing for a hundred thousand students on the first day. Last year, yellow buses served 163,000 students. So, I want to ask about those 63,000 students, is that merely a reflection of the number of kids who are learning remotely full time, or are there some students who are eligible for bus service who won't be getting it?

Mayor: Yoav let me start and I'm actually going to turn to our First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan who is with us who's been really deeply involved in getting all this ready and working through the details with the companies. But let me start with your core question, which is why is the number different? You – what you said the end there is the reality. We've got not only kids who will be all remote, but because of blended learning, we've got days where, you know, one child will be in school and then the next day a different child will be in school. So obviously you need a lot less in the way of bus service than you would if everyone was going at once. The kids in blended learning, both in-person and remote, and the all remote kids – if everyone's going at once, you need a lot more bus service. If all you're dealing with on a specific day is the kids who are actually in school that day, you need much less than you would have needed last year. But let me have Dean Fuleihan give you a little more of an update.

First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan: No, that's exactly correct. We are providing service and we will make sure that every child that's doing a part of the blended learning in school is served. The difference between last year and this year is exactly that, is the number of students who will be going completely remote. And I would add, I don't believe - that I believe the number, but we’ll make sure to confirm this last year was closer to 140,000.

Mayor: Go ahead, Yoav.

Question: Thanks. On another busing issue there, the DOE began piloting a GPS system for buses this past winter, the initial plan was going to be to roll that out at the beginning of this school year. I'm assuming that was derailed by the crisis. Just wondering what the status of that is, are –is the DOE still looking to implement system-wide GPS tracking system?

Mayor: I’ll start and then turn to Dean. Yoav, we really – this is something I care about. I was the public school parent. My kids rode the bus. This is something, you know, for years it was a massive frustration for parents to not know what was going on with their kids, if there was some kind of problem or delay, and it's also on a managerial level so much better to have that kind of tracking. So, Dean, what is the latest on that?

First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan: So, we do have – you're absolutely right on the question. It has been delayed because of what happened during the pandemic. It will be operational starting the next school year. We do have GPS – we do have tracking systems on the bus, but they don't provide the kind of information and immediate response that we intended to give to parents. And we will be again, gearing that up, but it will not be available at the beginning of this year.

Mayor: Okay. So let me wrap up here at this point. I want to go back to the video that you guys saw earlier, and I want to come in Michael Gonzales, the Deputy Director of School Facilities, K298 Brooklyn. I love that video. When I first saw it, I really wanted to make sure that the people of this city got to see it, because you could tell how devoted Michael is to his work, and there are a lot of people, thousands and thousands of people like Michael all over our school system who want to get it right for our kids, want to get it right for our families, want to get it right for our educators and staff. And you know, there's a lot of criticism and concern in the world every single day but I like to celebrate, the people who do the hard work. The everyday New Yorkers who keep the city going, the everyday New Yorkers who do small and heroic things all the time, it never gets in the media, but it really should, because what you just saw is someone who really cares, making sure everything is right for the people he serves. And so, thank you, Michael, thank you to all the folks in our schools, custodial teams, all those engineers who did those inspections, everyone, school facilities, school, construction authority, everyone who's been working hard to get it right for our kids and our educators. I know you all care, and I thank you for what you've done for this city, and now we're going to move forward to a safe and healthy school year. Thank you, everybody.

2020-09-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. You know, this month, September 2020, is shaping up to be one of the most important in the City's history. So much is going to happen this month that's going to say so much about our future, and we're going to be talking throughout the month of September about what New Yorkers are doing to help this city move forward and what we need to do to keep moving forward.

Well, as I said, this month – now, in 2020, this month will be so important to everything that happens in the future of this city, because we are talking about the beginning of our rebirth. That's what September 2020 will be. We're coming off the summer. Kids are coming back to school. Businesses are reopening. We're fighting back the coronavirus. We are leading the nation in showing that we can get it right. 

Alright, now let's go to some important news from the last 24 hours. Again, absolutely crucial to the future of the city is bringing back our economy, bringing back people's livelihoods, making sure that folks have an opportunity after all we've been through to put things back together and move forward. And our restaurant industry is a huge part of this city, it's part of our culture, it's part of our identity, it's part of what we love. Also, businesses built by people who work so hard to create them and an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. So, what a good thing that indoor dining will be back. That is very good news for this city, but I have to emphasize – and I think, throughout, you've heard me say with every part of the life of this city, that every part of our economy, we have to put health and safety first, we have to be careful. So, as indoor dining starts to come back, it will come back with rigorous safety measures with real limits, with careful inspections, because we have to get it right. A lot of conversation over the last few weeks with the State, this was something where a lot of work had to be done to make sure that we balanced the needs – the real needs of the restaurant community, the workers, the owners, the communities that love the restaurants with that thing that we want the most, the ability to beat back the coronavirus. Every New Yorker I've talked to starts with wanting to defeat this disease and recognizing how far we've come. And when I talk to people from around the rest of the country, there's a certain amount of awe at how far New York City has come in terms of beating back this disease, going literally from worst to first, and we've got to keep doing that. So, one of the things that I push very hard and my team pushed hard in these discussions with the State was tight restrictions and smart rules and careful assessment of how we are doing. So, we're talking about, to begin with, a maximum 25 percent capacity in restaurants, tables at least six feet apart. There will not be seating at bars in terms of the bar tops. And then a bunch of additional safety measures, temperature checks at the doors, of course, PPE for all employees provided, regular information kept to make sure there can be testing and tracing as needed. These precautions are going to be necessary, because, unfortunately, what we've seen around a lot of the world is indoor dining has had a direct connection to some of the resurgences we've seen, particularly most recently in Western Europe. So, we have to keep a close eye on this. And I believe firmly that we need to watch our overall trajectory of this disease. And if we get to two percent infection rate on a regular basis on that seven-day average, at that point, we need to immediately reassess indoor dining. Hopefully, we never get there. Hopefully, in fact, we go in the other direction and get better and better all the time. So, it's great that indoor dining is back, but we're going to be very careful – and our health team will certainly emphasize this – we're going to be very careful to make sure it's done right.

Now, talk about doing things right – one of the biggest stories in the last six months of how we have successfully fought back the coronavirus, one of the most essential elements of the whole strategy was also one of the simplest – a face covering.  And most people – I certainly use the paper masks, those blue masks, that's what I see mostly when I go around the city, the most popular choice. Those simple paper masks or the cloth masks that people use have been one of the biggest difference-makers in fighting back this disease. We didn't know that in the beginning – the health community, the scientific community did not recognize in the beginning of this crisis how crucial this would be, but, thank God, it was recognized and, thank God, New Yorkers have taken to face coverings as well as you have, because it's made a huge difference. Now, we want to get clear today about the ground rules for face coverings, because since it is literally possibly the single most important element of the strategy, we want people to really get what to do right. And you're going to hear from our Health Commissioner, but I'm going to tell you just to begin with, think about the face covering, just look at it regularly. Is it in good shape? Has it been soiled? Is it torn? Is there any reason it's time to replace it? Keep an eye on it. Think about how crucial it is to make sure that it's in good working order. And those paper masks, those surgical mask – those can work for days and days, but not if they get wet or dirty. And after something like five days, it's a good time to change them. So, you're going to hear now from the expert, who's going to emphasize these rules. And, as our Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi has really emphasized to me the simple power of face coverings, but how important it is to make sure people use them consistently and use them the right way and maintain them well. So, here to hear directly from him, our Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. If there's one thing that the past seven months have taught us, it's that we are truly all in this together. Your health is connected to my health and the choices we make from staying home, to observing our distance, those things protect our fellow New Yorkers. As we head back into the cooler months, now is a good time to remind everyone about a few basic facts regarding face coverings. A face covering can include any well secured disposable mask or cloth that covers your nose and mouth. A disposable mask – like this one – can be reused. But you should immediately replace it if it becomes damaged, dirty, or wet. For a cloth mask or face covering – like this one – I have some simple recommendations. Use it for a day, hand wash it with soap and water. Make sure you dry it completely after doing so and rotate your supply.

Have more than one so that you can alternate them. Most importantly, choose a face covering that fits snugly against the sides of your face and that completely covers your nose and mouth. Don't share them and store them somewhere where they won't be touched. And don't use a mask with an exhalation valve as it allows unfiltered air to escape.

Since we're approaching the first day of school, a word about masks for children as well. First, if you have a child under the age of two, as I do, it's important to know that a mask or face covering is not recommended for them. For older children, check to make sure the mask fits snugly over the nose and mouth and under the chin. If you're able to find a mask that is specifically made for children, I'll note that all children will be given free masks in our public schools, but we're asking parents to ensure that kids wear masks outside of school, as well.

As with everything, and, as the Mayor has said, we're constantly monitoring the science and we will update you if research determined something different about what's best with face coverings. Face coverings, although simple, are such a vital component of reopening and slowly phasing things in like indoor dining. On that, we're pleased to be able to say that indoor dining will be available in a few weeks. Look, I know how important this is for people's livelihoods. I think about the cooks and the waiters whom I've taken care of as my own patients, but we must make sure our restaurants are safe for them and for our communities. Like our school guidelines, the restaurant restrictions are stringent to ensure that if we see the spread of COVID intensifying above that two percent test positivity threshold that the Mayor mentioned, then we'll have to reassess indoor dining. Capacity will be limited to 25 percent. There'll be temperature checks at the front door. Tables will be spaced at least six feet apart. And one member of the party will provide contact information to our tracers, should they need to reach them.

I know everyone is asking the same question, is it safe? The short answer is that we're able to take these gradual steps because the level of COVID has stayed low. All of us have a role to play in keeping that level low and it comes back to distancing, mask wearing, hand washing, getting tested and staying home if you're ill. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dave. And everyone, look, you heard from the city’s doctor. What Dr. Chokshi is saying is, let's get this right and let's always focus on the facts, the data, the science. That's what's gotten us this far in New York City. That's what's going to take us forward. So, I want to thank you, doctor – you and your whole team for always making these decisions with us based on what we are seeing, the pure hard facts, and those facts will actually give us what we need to protect the people of this city. And that leads us perfectly to our daily indicators. Indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 78 patients. And the confirmed positive rate for COVID for those patients is 10 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases – today's report, 213. Number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, the threshold is five percent – today's report, 1.09 percent.

Now, a few words in Spanish –

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Commissioner Chokshi, Deputy Director of the New York City Census Amit Bagga, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Erin from Politico.

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q and A as a reminder, we're joined today by Commissioner Chokshi, Deputy Director of the New York City Census Amit Bagga, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: A question about indoor dining. Dr. Chokshi sort of threw out the question that everyone's wondering about – is it safe? I just didn't hear a direct answer. I'm just wondering, you know, as a map for guidance, do you think that this is a safe activity for people to engage in? Would you recommend people go to their restaurants indoor when this happens? And also that two percent trigger has the governor agreed to that? It sounds like that's a reassess as opposed to a front trigger, like with the school. So what exactly is the policy on that?

Mayor: Okay, let me speak to the second part and then they can speak to the first part there about his advice to people, how to approach indoor dining and look, again, I'm someone who loves deeply going to the restaurants of our city. I am thrilled at the notion that restaurants can start to open up indoors, but I'm first and foremost concerned about the health and safety of all New Yorkers and moving the whole city forward, and that's why I take a very cautious view here. So Dave can talk to you about the individual experience. I'll talk to you about the overall situation. We had good conversations with the State. I will be very clear, the City took a very conservative position on this matter, and I'm the person who believes we need to be conservative and cautious. So from my point of view, I think you're right, Erin, to say there was not a hard and fast rule in the state guidance. It was an acknowledgement of an infection rate between two and three percent triggers a reevaluation of the whole situation. I think it should be that if we get to two percent, we pause because if we're already at two percent, it means something's moving in the wrong direction and we need to take quick measures to stop that from growing. So I want to be very clear about that: job one is to beat back this disease successfully, so all of New York City can come back to life. Go ahead, Dave, in terms of the individual diner experience.

Commissioner Chokshi: I would echo that caution that you're mentioning, Mr. Mayor, for the individual dining experience as well. So the things that will make it more safe are the ones that that we've described, but it's very important that there is a strong adherence to those measures. The most important ones are ensuring that there is sufficient distance between tables, at least six feet, making sure that people are wearing their masks and face coverings, except when they're unable to, because they are eating and drinking, and really importantly, making sure that we take the steps to protect the staff who are in restaurants, you know, who are there almost every day for their occupation. So all of those things taken together will help make it a more safe dining experience, and then we have to continually monitor as the Mayor has said,

Mayor: Thank you, Dave. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Dana.

Question: As far as schools reopening, I mean, what, what, what should parents expect in terms of how many positive cases – I mean, invariably there will be some positive cases, right? So how many should be expected during the first few weeks of school and what numbers would constitute like a success or a failure? Like how many is okay and how many, you know, becomes problematic?

Mayor: Right. Two very fair, very fair questions, Dana, that everyday people will have every right to think about and ask. But I think both are hard to give you a very tangible answer to for real reasons. First what do we expect? We don't have a perfect way to expect here. It really depends so much on individuals. You've got, I think folks in the school communities who are really going out of their way to be careful you know, we're emphasizing strongly that people need to watch for symptoms get tested in advance. I think people are doing that. So I think you're going to see a lot of care taken in terms of health and safety, and that makes me hopeful that although you're right, of course there will be some cases it's normal that there would be – that, you know, we'll see a good experience here.

In terms of, you know, what kind of standard to hold for the whole system, I think we're going into something that is different than any experience that we've had before. Of course there will be days where, you know, you'll find a case in the classroom in the classroom has to be shut down. There'll be even some times when a school has to be shut down, but it's a temporary reality, and then people come back and proceed. I think you'll see many schools where that doesn't happen. So there's not an easy way to have a standard. What really matters here is to keep everyone safe, to make sure kids get the best education possible, to provide that support, to working families, that they are desperately asking us for to make sure that kids get both a good education and have a safe place to be. That's the mission, and I'm convinced that we can go through with that mission in a safe fashion.

Moderator: The next is Michael Gartland from the Daily News.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Michael, how you been?

Question: Okay, the question I had was on indoor dining and it seemed from kind of how things played out yesterday that when you made your remarks yesterday morning, that it wasn't clear that indoor dining was going to be announced by the Governor's Office, and I was wondering if you could tell us when exactly like, did the Governor's Office reach out to your administration or you to let you know, we're going to announce this today?

Mayor: Sure. That, as I said, the conversations at very high levels have been going on for weeks. So I do want to be clear on this – lots of back and forth between the City and State, comparing different options, comparing different models. I'm very clear if city consistently took a conservative position on health and safety, and we believe that we should be very careful here because of the history around the world, and Dr. Chokshi has been one of the leading voices saying, be careful. Dr. Varma as well, be careful because of what we're seeing around the world that should give us pause. But there were very productive conversations that went on for quite a while after my press conference yesterday, I'd say sometime in the hour or so after that, the State made clear that they felt they were ready. We expressed our view as the City and they went forward with the policy. Again, very happy there will be indoor dining. That is a very good thing, but the most important mission here is to keep this whole city safe. So as we proceed with indoor dining, we're going to constantly be careful and cautious, and if we see a problem we're going to call it out because we have to keep the city safe and we have to keep the city moving forward.

Moderator: The next is Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning. Mr. Mayor. So my question again is about indoor dining, and I know that the Governor yesterday said that it excludes bars, but under the Governor and the State and the City's guidelines, bars have to serve food. So I think the question is what will happen after October 31st too, you know, bars that can’t open indoors by September 30th, but what happens to those bars? They're not restaurants. I mean, some of them are serving like hotdogs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but will they have an opportunity to have some guidelines about how they could also open?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Varma. Look I – we've expressed concerns consistently to the State about indoor dining with restaurants. We've expressed even deeper concerns about bars and nightclubs. If restaurants have been a challenge around the world, bars and nightclubs have been a profound problem around the world and the cause for so many resurgences, and we're just not going to allow a resurgence here, if there's anything we can do to stop it. So my view and my understanding is that bars are entirely separate here. Yeah, of course they can do the outdoor dining as long as that's available and they can do the takeout, but that they're going to be treated differently in terms of indoor, but Dr. Chokshi and then see if Dr. Varma has anything as well.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, that's exactly right. Bars and nightclubs are in one of the highest categories of risk when it comes to coronavirus transmission, and so we have to proceed with the utmost caution there. When we look at the weight of the evidence that we have about how this has worked around the world, and, you know, we're paying particular attention to the resurgences that we're seeing in Europe. In Spain and France, in Italy and the UK, many of those cases can be traced back to bars and nightclubs. That's true more broadly across the world as well, including in Asia. So these are all reasons for us to make sure that we bring a very cautious approach to that.

Mayor: Yeah. Dr. Varma, you want to add anything?

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Nothing for me to add.

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: Good Henry. How about you?

Question: Doing pretty well. My question has to do with the budget and the looming layoffs and your resistance to the Citizen's Budget Commission, which you feel is to austere in their point of view, but what's more austere than cutting back – cutting the [inaudible] in Parks, or cutting the police department or the EMT personnel. I mean, what they're calling for basically is to reduce the workforce by roughly 9,000 people, which is less than half of what's atritted every year. They're calling for some union agreements that would contribute to their health insurance premiums like everyone else does. And they're talking about a minimal property tax increase of they're claiming two percent would raise almost $700 million. So maybe you could make it one percent and raise $350 million. And I – you've got their resistance, the CBCs resistance to the borrowing authority. Maybe if you had them helping you leverage support for the borrowing authority you could get that done as well.

Mayor: Listen, I don't – I respect a CBC, worked with them over the years. Don't happen to agree with them on many things and I don't think they are the kind of force that changes hearts and minds in Albany. The fact is the things you talked about, the workforce of this city allows us to provide services to people that make this city strong. We have plenty of evidence of it because up until February, the city was extraordinarily strong, strongest economy we've ever had, most jobs we've ever had. So many things were working and it was because we had a strong public workforce. The notion of wanting to continue to cut back the public workforce, that is austerity thinking. That is the philosophy of the Citizens Budget Commission, and a lot of other corporate voices and other voices in this city, and I think it's a misunderstanding of what allows the city to be strong. Public service employment has worked for this city, but the fact is if we need to find the resources, a property tax would be absolutely horrible - that property tax increase – people can't afford a property tax increase in this city, no way, no how. So many people have been hurt by the coronavirus crisis, lost their jobs. So many families stretched thin. We are not raising property taxes in New York City. So I reject that out of hand. I reject the notion that a smaller public workforce is a good thing. I believe fully in getting as much savings as possible from the labor community and we've proven that can happen with health care savings, and we're going to do more.

But here's, what's just broken in this whole discussion. The amount of borrowing we've asked for us is $5 billion that would be used over two fiscal years, when you compare that to an $88 billion budget. When you think about that borrowing being paid back on a 30-year term, I mean, there's not a real serious investigation here of what this means, because if people are going to be serious about it, that borrowing is going to have a very limited effect on the immediate financial reality in New York City, but it's going to have a huge effect on our ability to serve the people and restart our economy and keep people from losing their jobs. So – I'm sorry, I – this one is just really straight forward. It's not the 1970s, it's nowhere near the 1970s. We just need to have an honest conversation about what a small financial addition, the $5 billion in borrowing is, but what a big impact it could make at this crucial moment, moving us forward as a city, and then hopefully an actual federal stimulus is out there, possibly in a new administration, which then would make the borrowing moot. And I want to emphasize that, if the right stimulus comes along, we don't need to borrow, we don't want to borrow. The only reason we're going for borrowing is for lack of other options, but if those other options appear, we don't need to borrow. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Julia from the New York Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to go back to something you said about indoor dining. You said about an hour after your press conference yesterday that State called to make clear that they were ready and we expressed our view, was your view that you didn't think the city was ready for indoor dining and will you yourself dine indoors on September 30th or shortly after?

Mayor: So one, again, the idea of indoor dining coming back is a good thing. Our concerns were around a couple of areas, one the start date, given so much else that's coming back right now, concern that we pace things that we make sure that as we bring back one part of life of the city that we have time to see the impact of that, and then bring back the next and the next and the next. So there is some real focus there on trying to get that piece right. And then again, the threshold point. I mean, I think the two percent is the kind of level at which we really would need to take action. So that was the back and forth, and, you know, my team and I expressed our real thoughts and concerns there. As for indoor dining, I'm sure it will be done properly, and of course I’d be comfortable dealing with it because if it's done the right way for everyone, you know, that's what we want to see happen.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Alex Zimmerman from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to go back to the positive cases that were confirmed by the city yesterday in two different public schools. I'm wondering what the total is now in terms of the number of schools that have at least one confirmed case. And what is the plan to release this information publicly gone forward?

Mayor: Alex, obviously school hasn't begun yet. We're going to find out each day when there's new cases and take appropriate action, including testing trace activity, but we've said very clearly once school begins, there is a regular process for updating the public on what's happening in each school. That's been delineated previously, if it's a specific classroom that has to be shut down or even something bigger, we'll report that daily.

Question: But I mean, there are teachers and schools now, so it does seem important to know like what the city's plan is to release this information publicly given that the city is confirming some cases, and just a follow-up to that is you know, I'm just curious, sort of what the process is here in terms of being notified of positive cases. Like, is it up to the person who tests positive to tell their principal? Like, what if they don't do that? Like, what is the – how is the city supposed to be made aware of these cases in the first place?

Mayor: I'll start and Dr. Choksi can add. Obviously it's a combination, the individual gets directly notified but we have a protocol to make sure that we can tell when there's a case in the school and act on it. Go ahead, doctor.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. That's right. We have multiple information streams. Certainly, you know, if, if someone self reports, that's something that we'll take in to our system. We have other ways of finding out about positive cases, positive test results because all of those get reported to to the Health Department as well. So we take those multiple information streams and we move as quickly as possible based on that information to start with the investigations and the contact tracing after that.

Okay, everyone, first of all, just want to note because of course the 9/11 Memorial, there will not be one of these press conferences tomorrow, and we'll be focused on remembering the folks we lost. But you know, it's also another moment to say, you think back – think back to that generation of New Yorkers, you think back to those heroes, you think back to the compassion of everyday New Yorkers in that moment of crisis. People all over this country and all over this world watched, and they were in awe of New York City. There was incredible feeling for New York City. There was respect. And people grieved with us, but they also admired New York City in that moment of crisis. And now we find ourselves in a new and different crisis. And once again, people all over this country, people all over this world are looking at this city with tremendous awe. How has a city that was the epicenter of the crisis now become one of the safest places in the entire country? It is because of you and you are doing as that 9/11 generation did. You're showing that strength, that resiliency, that feeling for your fellow New Yorker, that compassion, you're doing something. And it is day after day after day our calling to overcome this disease and bring this city back to its fullest potential and its potential as always as great. But we look at the heroes of 19 years ago and today a new generation of heroes is bringing this city forward. Thank you.

2020-09-14 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. We are beginning a very important week in this city, and it's going to be part of something historic. This week, and obviously, especially, next week, we’ll launch one of the biggest efforts in the history of this city, bringing back our public schools. We, this city, went through so much back in March, April, May, and now we have fought back, we have fought this disease back, New York City getting back on our feet, recovering strong, and one of the great parts of that recovery is going to be reopening our public schools. So, this is a decisive week. We're going to focus on getting things ready for our kids so we can make sure they get the best education possible, and we prepare them for their future. And we're going to be ready to serve families who have gone through so much. We’re going to be ready to take care of the needs of our kids, not just the educational needs, but the health needs, the mental health needs, everything our kids require, at this point, after everything they've been through. And we're going to do all of this with a focus on health and safety first, and so much effort has gone in over the last month to get our school system ready. But, really, we need to remember, it's not just the outstanding effort of tens of thousands of professionals, it’s also your outstanding effort in fighting back against this disease, doing all the right things to push back this disease in New York City, to fight the coronavirus, so we could get to the day that our school system could reopen, our jobs could come back, we could be on a strong path to recovery. This is because of the people of New York City.

So, the plan we're going to talk about today – and we're going to update you on all of the things that are being done to focus on health and safety in our schools, to make sure we launch strong and we're going to be using the resources of the entire City government. Everyone is involved in this mission, it's common cause. We are all working together. Everyone who works for you to make sure our schools start smartly, effectively, safely, in a healthy manner. So, as everyone knows throughout this whole crisis, what's been the key to fighting back the disease, testing. We always talk about it – testing, testing, testing. If we had had it in the beginning, what a difference it would make. If the federal government had led the way, what a difference it would have made, but we didn't have that. We had to build on our own and we have in this city. So, now we're testing more people than ever. And we're focusing that testing on all the good people who work in our school system, educators and staff of all kinds. We're going to be focusing that testing as well on our students.

So, what do we know so far? So far, almost 17,000 school-based staff have taken advantage of priority testing that's been made available to them in the last few days. So, this is priority testing. They get quick results. Of course, it's free. It's convenient. It's fast. 17,000 of our school staff members, educators and other staff, have taken advantage. And so far, of over 17,000 tests, we have 55 positive cases, 55 out of 17,000. That is a positivity rate of 0.32 percent. So, that tells us a lot. That tells us how much all the efforts to fight back this disease are working, and it tells us that the folks who work in our school system have been really careful and diligent, and so few have ended up with a positive case. We're going to continue that throughout this week intensely. And so, the more people we test, the more we'll know. The more people that test, the more adjustments we can make, and we can keep things moving forward.

But let's talk about an obvious reality. Some people will test positive. Those 55 people out of 17,000, they tested positive. That rate, I just told you is 0.32 percent, we could see something like that consistently. Some people will test positive and those folks will immediately get support. They'll be helped to get home, to safely separate. The contact tracing will go into effect right away. And after two weeks, those professionals will come back to work and they'll complete the entire school year. The same will happen with some students. Some students will test positive at some point in the year and they'll go home for two weeks and then they'll come back and they'll complete the school year. We have to remember that for the very small percentage of people who test positive for the coronavirus, it is a very temporary reality. People will go through that period of safe separation, quarantine, come back, and get right back into their job, get right back into their studies, and continue forward. So, we know that we can work with the incredible team, the educators, the school staff, the folks who are devoted to our kids. We can work to make this work. And even when there'll be some ups and downs, we'll make the adjustments, we'll make sure that we keep things moving forward.

Now, we do want parents to get their children tested. And this week there is priority testing available for students as well as school staff at our centers. Again, it is fast, it is free, it is convenient, and you get your result quickly. So, I want to show you where these locations are. There are 20 Health + Hospitals locations in all five boroughs, free priority testing. All you got to do is say you work for the public schools or you’re a public school student, and you get priority results come back within 48 hours. And anyone who needs more information can go online, nyc.gov/covidtest. Now, testing – again, testing has been the key to every effective strategy. Testing is one of the crucial reasons New York City is coming back as strong as we are. And we are going to be very careful when we do testing related to our schools to follow up immediately.

So, we've created a new COVID Response Situation Room for our Department of Education. As I said, this is a group effort. It's a number of agencies working together to make sure that whenever there is a positive test, there's an immediate answer. So, this situation room will provide rapid response. Each and every test result where there's a need for action, it will go right to the central command headquarters. The quick decisions will be made, action will be taken. And this will be open from 5:30 AM to 9:30 PM, Monday through Friday, and on Sunday from 11:00 AM to 9:30 PM. So, this is going to be a constant operation with a group of dedicated staffers and a dedicated hotline. So, a principal or a school administrator can call, alert the Situation Room team to a situation in their school. That will immediately activate contact tracing and all the appropriate steps to make sure that anyone that does need to be isolated will be isolated quickly.

Now, this'll be a constant effort. It will be the Department of Education team. It will be the Test and Trace team. It will be the Department of Health. Everyone together in one room to make decisions, and here you see right now this situation room. And it's being led by one of our most effective operational managers here in our administration, someone who has proven herself time and again, to be able to run big, effective – big, effective plans, big, effective operations. She did it at the School Construction Authority, and it's part of why she knows so much about our school system. She's now doing it as our Buildings Commissioner. And she'll be leading the effort in this situation room. My pleasure to introduce to you, Commissioner Melanie La Rocca.

Commissioner Melanie La Rocca, Department of Buildings: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This is an entirely unprecedented undertaking. We're bringing together the Test and Trace Corps, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the Department of Education under a single roof to ensure no cases slip through the cracks. We will act quickly, and we will get it done right. We have to. This is about one thing, and one thing only, keeping our students, teachers, and school staff safe. And the process is very straightforward. A principal calls our designated hotline to report a suspected case or an individual that's been sent home or was absent with COVID-like symptoms. We're inputting that case and we're going keyboard to keyboard giving DOHMH the case to verify the test. This is immediate. We know with documentation, this can be a matter of minutes. We're also monitoring and verifying cases through DOHMH investigations and the Test and Trace Corps routine contract contact tracing. We have established a strict threshold for quarantine, classroom closures, and building enclosures. And we will take appropriate action in each and every case, and it will happen fast and efficiently. In every case, we're communicating to principals, regardless of the outcome, and sharing information with our school communities. This builds on what we know has helped New York City fight back against the virus, rapid testing and tracing. We're now applying it to New York City schools. Together, we'll keep our kids and staff safe throughout the year and start the school year off right. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner – very much appreciate what you and this great team of professionals is doing in that situation room to make sure there’s safety and health first in all of our schools. Now, as we get ready for the school year, just one week away, so much is being done to make sure our schools have what they need. We've talked to you before about all the different supplies, the PPE, the cleaning supplies, all the work that's been done on ventilation, the work that's being done to create outdoor learning, so much extraordinary effort by our educators, our school staff, our custodial team, School Construction Authority, Department of Facilities at the Department of Education, all of these team members working together in common cause. As we get ready in this final week of preparation, we're going to also be sending more educators into our schools. So, today I'm announcing an additional 2,000 educators will be deployed into our schools immediately. And that is members of the DOE team who are certified teachers. They'll be sent into our schools to help schools that need some additional support. We'll be hiring substitutes. We are committed to an additional 2,000 educators immediately, and we'll keep working with each school to make sure what they need is what they get, and that we're ready for opening day.

So, we see this whole plan, the situation room you've just heard about, all of the preparation to get the schools healthy and safe, the additional educators – it is part of a key concept that New York City is going to set the gold standard, the gold standard for health and safety in schools, the gold standard for showing that you can bring our education system back no matter how tough a crisis we have been through. This school system, this city went through so much in March and April. There's still so much pain from that experience, but New Yorkers don't stay down, we get back up, and we're showing that we can take the best ideas from around the world, the best approaches to health and safety for schools, we have the best educators, we have a committed team, and we're going to come back strong. So, these additional 2,000 educators will help us to get off to a very strong start.

Now, I'm going to turn away from education for just a couple of quick updates and we'll do our indicators as well as always. But we know the city has come a long way and we know we also are going to be smart and cautious with every step we take. So, we're trying to be measured, focused on the data and the science with every move we make to make sure we come back, but we come back safely and there are some things we still can't do. We still can't have the kind of large gatherings that are some of the high points of this year and any year would normally have, the parades and the major community events. Those kinds of things still have to wait. We're looking forward to a lot of them coming back in 2021. Now one of the most beloved events every year is the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And I always want to express my appreciation to everyone at Macy's. They are extraordinarily civically minded. They care about New York City. We saw what they did on July 4th with an amazing fireworks display. Even with all the challenges we're up against, they found a way to do it in a way that celebrated our country and our city, it gave us hope, but did it safely. And they're going to do the same thing again with the Thanksgiving Parade, it will not be the same parade we're used to. It will be a different kind of event. They are reinventing the event for this moment in history. And you will be able to feel the spirit and the joy of that day on television, online. Not a live parade, but something that will really give us that warmth and that great feeling we have on Thanksgiving Day.

So, I want to thank everyone at Macy's. They are going to be talking to you later on today about the specifics of their plan. And I want to say to everyone in the Macy's organization, thank you for your incredible commitment to New York City. Thank you for always giving of yourselves to make this city a better place. New York City, the City of New York and Macy's, have a long tradition of working together, and in this case, it's really important to keep these traditions continuing to make sure that that history is unbroken. And we saw that on July 4th. We'll see that on Thanksgiving Day. We'll keep going forward, and then next year, again, I look forward to things coming back in all their greatness so we can enjoy them together in person again.

Now, let me go to our indicators. And as I go into the indicators, let me say on Saturday, we had a really good sign. Saturday’s positive testing rate for New York City was just 0.24 percent. That is tied for the lowest number we have seen since March. So, a good sign on Saturday and let's keep driving forward. Again, we see real evidence this city can keep pushing back this disease. So, let's go over these indicators today. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients, today's report 69 – and just about a three percent confirmed positive rate for those patients. Very, very low. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, that threshold is 550, today's report, 261 cases. And number three, percentage of the people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent, today's report 0.91 percent. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media, and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Commissioner Melanie La Rocca, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Ted Long; Dr. Daniel Stephens, Deputy Commissioner for Family and Child Health at the Department of Health, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. With that, our first question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: I'm doing well, Juliet. How you doing?

Question: Okay, thank you. So last week I visited a high school where they're using a program called Go Guardian. And it allows remote students to tune into the classroom in real time. So my question is if there is such a technology that does that, why are you choosing to have additional features with a sort of a separate remote stream for the remote students?

Mayor: Thank you Juliet. As always I appreciate your question. It is a common-sense question that really relates to what everyday people want to know. And I appreciate that. Look, I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. I think the first answer to say is we're going to be using a variety of methodologies. Different things work for different kids in different situations. So sometimes it will be more live type education. Sometimes there'll be something that's a different type of approach, but that can work really well for a child who's learning. So we're going to mix and match. And we're also going to, as per usual, in the first weeks of school, we're going to try different things and make adjustments based on what works and find the best approaches. So this is again, an unprecedented endeavor. It will take some time to figure out what we think is the most effective set of tools, but we're going to keep working on it. We saw that in the spring, educators did an amazing job, trying different approaches, figuring out what worked for their kids. And I really trust the instincts of our educators. So let me now turn to the Chancellor and he can give you a more clear, detailed answer. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Yes. Thank you. So I think you hit the nail on the head Mr. Mayor. There are a variety of modalities that students will be learning in this coming year. You observed one of them. I will tell you as a pedagogue, the best learning experiences is where you have a well-trained caring teacher in the presence of students, so that you have that back and forth. You can clarify, you can expand upon, you can add additional commentary, help guide the conversation. That's not always possible in a live streaming situation. That being said, we do know that there are educators in our system that have developed that capacity and have been doing it for a while and are really good at it. We don't want to stop them or get in the way of that. So that's why we provided the opportunity for them to have this kind of flexibility. But in terms of that being our long-term strategy? Again, there's an awful lot of preparation that goes into that. Obviously, you saw that there's another platform that you use for that kind of a learning environment. And quite frankly, we think and continue to feel that the children in New York City deserve to have the caring well-trained teachers in their presence. Obviously keeping everybody safe and that's going to be our primary strategy as we go forward.

Mayor: Thank you, Richard. Go ahead, Juliet.

Question: Okay. Just switching gears here, Mr. Mayor. When would you be able to announce a comprehensive plan to restart the city's economy? You know, I'm referring to the letter from the partnership and if you'd be, you know, announcing something in conjunction with business leaders or labor leaders so that there was a path forward that New Yorkers can see or follow?

Mayor: I appreciate the question a lot Juliet. Look, I think this has been a matter of following a path so that we could get to that day. We first had to fight back the worst of the disease. Then we had to stabilize the situation. We had to go through those phases – phases one, two, three, four. We got through them on time. Every single one of them, we have never had to take a step back. And Juliet that's so important because there've been too many places in this country and even around the world, similar to the United States that unfortunately have had to freeze up again or go backwards. We're not letting that happen here. So this has been a methodical strategy to keep moving forward. Now the next crucial moment, reopening the schools, something I know parents feel, kids feel, the larger community of New York City believes the reopening of schools is one of those signature moments in our recovery. So we're going to move through that. And then the next few weeks, you're going to hear a lot more about that vision of where we go from here. Because we've succeeded as a city to go through all those steps. Now we can dream bigger. We can go farther and it will involve all aspects of our city. We've been talking to the labor community, the business community, the arts community, you name it from the beginning. A number of different venues where we brought in their voices. In the coming weeks we're going to show you the next big steps in that roadmap. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up we have Andrew from WNBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. My question has to do with the staffing situation in schools. You mentioned today that you're going to be supplying 2,000 additional teachers. But we're one week away from in-person and we've been hearing from principals, parents, and teachers that the staffing situation today is a mess. They don't know who's teaching remote, who's doing in-person. How certain are you today that school will actually open one week from now?

Mayor: Of course it will open Andrew. Again, every year you got to go into the beginning of the school year, make adjustments. In a year where there is no pandemic there still are weeks that go on in the beginning of the school year, where final adjustments are being made in staffing. This year, extraordinary effort has been undertaken to make sure that schools have what they need. It's never going to be perfect, but it will be what schools need. And this balance between the remote and the in-person, it's complex, it's unprecedented. But I have faith in our educators that they'll get it done. So, the 2,000 additional educators we announced today, there'll be moving in immediately. And I think they're going to make a big difference. Go ahead.

Question: My second question is on behalf of my colleague Melissa Russo. As you'll recall, a few months ago, the Governor was making it clear he was in charge, not you, of decisions about whether to open or close schools. Has that changed and has the State Health Department signed off on the City's plans that the Governor was making a big deal about you submitting?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll certainly turn to the Chancellor and he can give you his insights from talking to State officials constantly throughout the last weeks. But yes, there was a process for all school systems to submit their plans to the State. The State did not request any major change in our plans. We've been approved. Obviously, the level of the virus in the city has gone down in the course of this time. And one of the central concerns the State had was to make sure that we weren't dealing with a worst situation disease. Thank God we're dealing with a better situation. So we are all set now to keep moving forward. Richard, would you like to add?

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, I think you're right on point, sir. I would only add that in all of our discussions with the State officials, various agencies of the State, New York City continues to have the most rigorous plan, not only in the State of New York, but across the country as well. So everything that needs to be signed off on has been signed off on and more.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up we have Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I would like to ask you a couple of questions about the Open Restaurants program. First of all, we know that the indoor dining is going to resume on September 30. What specifically is taking place between now and September 30 that we have to wait another couple of weeks?

Mayor: Look, I think it's the whole overall picture Reuvain. And again, I really want to say this clearly – we went from having the worst situation in the country, the epicenter of this crisis to firing our way back. Stabilized our health situation, went through phases one, two, three, four successfully, on time, held each one. And we are able to restart the biggest school system in America when most school systems have given up trying to do that. And our economy and you can see it. You can see the level of activity out on our streets. You can see the amount of traffic and that's a double-edged sword, but it certainly indicates a lot of activity. More and more people have been using mass transit. Everything's moving forward, but we have to watch each step carefully. And these next few steps are big steps, bringing back the whole school system, starting to have indoor dining which has been a very sensitive matter around the world. And some places, a lot of places have had missteps with indoor dining. So, I think it's smart to do it carefully, slowly, step-by-step, make sure it's working. Look, my hope is that we can keep expanding indoor dining because we keep driving down this disease. But at this immediate moment, we have to be very smart about each move we make and make sure it's based on the data and the science. Go ahead.

Question: Also, you've mentioned that even after the pandemic is over next summer you would like to bring back the Open Restaurants. So, my question is, is that only for the sidewalks or even for the streets and considering that it will kill parking spaces?

Mayor: Thank you for asking. I think the whole thing's been a success. And I – we're definitely bringing it back next year. And I think we should make this a permanent feature in New York City. Look, you've got – Open Restaurants were a stunning success, 10,000 restaurants, you know, 90,000 or more people got jobs back. Communities have loved Open Restaurants. Open Streets have been a great success. The combination has been beautiful where you have an Open Street and Open Restaurants and those weekend days have been amazing. It's been joyous. All of that I think should become permanent in New York City. Because you know, this horrible crisis has taught us some things and some things came out of it where people created something new and good even in the face of adversity. So, I think this has been a great victory for New York City and we should continue it going forward.

Moderator: Next up we have Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi everyone. I just wanted to get clarity on where these 2,000 additional educators are coming from? What roles had they been filling up to this point and why are those roles no longer necessary?

Mayor: Yoav, I’ll start and I'll turn to the Chancellor. You're talking about Department of Education employees who do play other roles. You're talking about substitute teachers, many of whom have been working in our regional enrichment centers. But folks who are ready and willing and able to serve in classrooms and bring a lot to the table. To begin it's really important to make sure that we support every school. So, these 2,000 additional teachers will be crucial to getting every school up and running the right way. Again, we'll continue to make adjustments as we go along, as we learn more. But I want to remind everyone, this is one school year, the most challenging school year in the history of New York City, but one that really has to be extraordinary to help our kids come back. And we're going to start strong by getting these educators into play. And then again, we'll continue to make adjustments going forward. But what's most important is that our schools can be there for our kids, given everything our kids and families have been through. It's really important that we are there for them and have the support they need. Go ahead Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Well said, Mr. Mayor. I would just add that we are in a pandemic. We are the only large school system in America that is in a position because of the medical indicators to be able to have in-person learning. But that also means that we can't be all things to all people. And I think there's a healthy dose of just realism that needs to be not only recognized, but also talked about. So, there are some really good things that New York City schools have done. The literacy coaching, the early childhood literacy coaching, the master teachers. These are all certified teachers that by the work that they're doing outside of schools is an indicator that they are excellent teachers. We need them in our schools because we are coming back in very challenging circumstances and they are teachers at the end of the day. So that means that we're going to stop doing some things. And it doesn't mean that the things that we're stopping doing weren't good things or aren't good things. It's just a matter of prioritizing what we need to prioritize right here and right now. So many of those folks that will come back into schools are coming from some of those programs, some of those initiatives, some of those support services for teachers and administrators and the schools that we're pausing because the number one priority is having a safe, organized in-person learning experience for our students who we know need it. So, in a pandemic, it's all hands on deck. We're also working with a number of our partners and we'll have more to say about that in the coming days as well. But we also listened to our schools and we've heard that there's a need for staffing. And again, I want to thank the Mayor and the City for pulling out all the stops to allow us to be able to do this.

Moderator: For last two, we'll go to Kevin from WCBS radio.

Question: Good morning, Mayor. Just to go off your announcement, how are these 2,000 teachers going to be deployed? Do some schools get priority? I know we've talked a lot about full staffing and some schools struggling to actually do that to start. But for the 2,000 that are deployed from the onset, how are they deployed exactly?

Mayor: Good question, Kevin. I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. So, we have a variety of situations, talking about roughly 1,600 public schools, some multiple schools in the same building. So, number of buildings, number of schools is different, but let's say roughly 1,600 public schools is our universe. We have hundreds of public schools that now already have the teaching compliment they need. And we have others that need more help. Very typically, schools that let us know they need just a couple of teachers. So, that's a very common request we've gotten from a lot of schools. Hundreds of schools have said they just need one or two more, for example. So, we're to be able with this 2,000 additional educators to fill a lot of those gaps and it will be on that priority basis just like you're saying. A school that already is settled and has what they need, of course, that's great. A school that has a greater level of need, a school that needs three teachers versus a school that needs two teachers ,we're obviously going to lean into the one that needs more. And we're going to move these folks in immediately. And principals are very good at plugging in new talent. They do at the beginning of every school year, they do it when they have to use substitutes. We have a lot of really capable principals. They know how to move around their personnel. So, they're going to get their compliment of teachers today and put them into action right away. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor, you answered it right on – nothing to add.

Question: And staying on the topic of schools, there's over 100,000 students who are homeless and they've gotten iPads at the moment. They're getting busing, but what other resources will the City be making available for these kids who, in many cases, you know, we're struggling already, especially when it comes to remote learning. How do you make sure that they're not left behind?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a great question, Kevin. So, look, first of all, very important to clarify to people when that measure is put forward of the 100,000 kids, it is kids who are in shelter, but it's also a lot of kids who are in a home with their family, but unfortunately in crowded conditions like a doubled up a family home. So, I just want to be clear – homeless, when you use that phrase, it might be a little misleading to people. Thank God, a number of kids do have a home within that group, but it is, in many cases, a very crowded home and we want better for them, going forward. What we do for kids who have those kinds of needs is a lot of extra support. The schools that have a lot of kids dealing with challenging home situations get additional resources, counseling, teaching, tutoring, resources. We have initiatives in our shelters to provide support. It's not perfect. It's a very tough situation, made tougher by the pandemic. But for years under this Chancellor, it has been a priority to focus on the needs of those kids. Chancellor, you take it from there.

Chancellor Carranza: Yes. I think the question actually illuminates the urgency with which we feel in a safe environment, students need to come back to in-person learning. It allows our guidance counselors, it allows our social workers to continue to make the connections with our sister agencies and other community-based organizations that support services. It allows us to have a real check with students to make sure that they have the food that they need, the technology that they need, the support system that trauma-informed supports that they need. So, you just made a beautiful case of why it’s so urgent that how, because we're able to do this, that we have in-person learning. Those supports will not only continue, but with the addition of nurses in every building, we're going to – we're strengthening that support system for our students. We call them our most vulnerable students, not only students that are in temporary housing, but students that are students with disabilities, our immigrant children, our students that are learning English – all of these students make up a significant portion of our 1.1 million students in New York City and that's why we feel such a sense of urgency to make sure that we're able to continue to serve them and increase what we're doing for them to the greatest extent we can.

Mayor: Thank you, Richard. Go ahead.

Moderator: For our last question, we'll go to Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: I'm doing well, Henry. How was your weekend?

Question: It was good. It was good. I wanted to ask you about the reaction of UFT President Michael Mulgrew, who issued this extremely angry video. I'm wondering whether – first of all, whether you saw it and how you would respond to the substance of it in which he really complained that a lot of classrooms have not been cleaned, especially District 75 classrooms that were in State-owned facilities, but he felt the City DOE should have cleaned up. And he was incensed that when he asked about this some DOE officials said wasn't really their problem, because the facility was owned by the State.

Mayor: First, thank you, Henry. I did not see the video. What I can tell you is, I've been in constant touch with Michael Mulgrew over the last days, and my First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan has been, I know our Chancellor has been – any concern he has, the union has, we're working on immediately. I share frustration about those 17 buildings. I have to be straightforward about that. You know, this team at the DOE and all the people I've talked about – School Construction Authority – they did an amazing job with well over 1,400 buildings, getting all those inspections done, getting things ready. The 17 buildings State-owned or owned by other folks in all of the activity they didn't get the attention they deserve. They should have. They've gotten that attention now. I'll be getting an update in the next couple of hours and I believe all of those buildings have been addressed, but I'll be able to say more on that later today or tomorrow. But it obviously should have been in the first wave, that was a misstep, but it can be fixed. So, I haven't seen the video, but I can tell you for sure, Henry, what I've said to President Mulgrew is give us any situation that is not what it should be, and we're going to address it immediately, because it's a massive, massive operation – again, well over 1,400 buildings, if something's wrong, even in a single classroom, we want to know about it so we can fix it right away. Go ahead, Henry.

Question: Alright, thank you for that, Mr. Mayor. My second question has to do with this letter that was issued by the Partnership for New York City last week. Today, there's been another letter, you may not be aware of it, that the Partnership sent to the Trump Administration – actually, directly to the President – along with a similar business groups on Long Island and Westchester, calling for the President to support significant fiscal aid to State and local governments and to the MTA. So, my question to you really is, number-one, I'd like to know what your reaction is to the fact that they've sent a second letter to the President of the United States imploring him to release federal funds. And then, I'd also like to hear you respond to the letter that was directed to you.

Mayor: Well, first of all, I'm very pleased to hear that they're using their power and influence to try and move the President on the stimulus. The thing we've all needed for months and months and months is a federal stimulus to help cities and States back on their feet. And I've been making this case from the very beginning. The House of Representatives did the right thing. The Senate has not, because of Mitch McConnell. Donald Trump has not lifted a finger to push that stimulus forward. Let's be real about that. So, hopefully people who he does have a relationship with and who he might listen to differently, because they're business leaders, them weighing in for a stimulus is very helpful. I commend them. We don't know if that's going to happen though, Henry. In fact, tragically, since the House voted months ago, there's almost no real indication that the Senate takes this seriously or the President takes it seriously, or they're going to act. They've said no many, many times to aid for cities and states. So, therefore, I'd say to the Partnership, use your power and influence in Albany to help us get long-term borrowing. You say you want to help New York City recover, the thing we need immediately is the long-term borrowing capacity so that we can, in fact, bring back some of the services that have been cut back because of the fiscal crisis. Everyone, we lost $9 billion in revenue. When you don't have $9 billion you had before, you are going to see cuts, you are going to see painful cuts, you're going to see services not there that used to be there. But if we want to move forward as well as we can and should, we need to get those services back and we need to protect our workforce, which has been heroic. Let's remember something – I think our colleagues in the private sector maybe don't fully understand the strength and the ability of public sector workers, but I've seen only heroism. Whether you're talking about first responders, health care workers, our educators bringing the schools back, we need to make sure we can protect our workforce and God knows we have to avoid layoffs. So, what I would say is, if they really want to help us, help us get that long-term borrowing in Albany. They could have a big impact on that. And I'll work with them. I'll work with the business leaders. We've been working with them throughout. But, let's be clear, if the stimulus isn't coming, we must have support from Albany, or else all those services people are talking about are going to be endangered and we can't have that.

Everyone, as we conclude, I'll go right back to that point about the people who serve us. And I want to just commend our educators and all the folks that custodial teams, everyone who over the last months have been preparing for the opening of school. I want to commend everyone who's going to be in that situation room with Commissioner La Rocca, all the folks are working night and day – our health care team, extraordinary effort, the test and trace team – everyone's working in a common cause. Now, these are public sector workers who give of themselves every single day to protect the people of this city. And they're giving their all right now to bring schools back safely and to help this city forward. And I want to honor – I want to honor that hard work, that commitment through thick and thin. I also want to honor our parents who have gone through so much, who are really demanding and pleading for school to come back so that our kids can get the best education possible and so parents can get back to work. Parents have been through a lot, but they've held the line and I say, God bless him. I want to commend our kids, our students who have been through so much, but they're ready to come back strong and they want to see their friends and they want to see their teachers and they want to move forward with their lives. This is something to celebrate about this city – the strength of our people and the strength of the people who work for us. And we will come back as a city. In fact, we're going to come back more fair, more just, more equitable, because we can. We have it now within our grasp. And there's a sense of mission – people ready to give their all to bringing back the greatest city in the world. So, today, is another step in that direction and tomorrow will be, and the day after that, and New York City will come back strong. Thank you, everybody.

2020-09-15 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well look, we focus every day, we have these gatherings to update you, we talk about health and safety and that's what it's all about. That's how we protect the people of this city, protect you, protect your family, your community. And that's how we bring New York City back strong. So think about how much has been achieved fighting back the coronavirus. Still a disease that is so dangerous, a disease that we still don't know, everything we need to know about, the medical and scientific community don't know everything they need to know. But nonetheless, this city, all of you have fought back this disease in such an admirable fashion, and we're going to keep fighting it back further.

But now we have a new challenge, a new challenge upon us this time of year, every year at this time. But this one is different. It is a powerful disease. It's one we should never take lightly, but it's one that we do know how to fight even more because we have a vaccine. And of course, I'm talking about the flu. And we're wearing these buttons today, all of us, because we've gotten our flu shot, we're going to talk about how important it is that you get your flu shot too, and your whole family. So look, a lot is happening. The economy is starting to come back, more and more people moving around, schools coming back. And of course, flu season, beginning in earnest. So it's really important that we take it seriously and we get ahead of it. Now, the flu we're used to it, you know, the coronavirus is still very new in our lives. The flu has been around a long time. Even though we're used to the flu, we should not underestimate it. It can be deadly. It is for too many people. It has to be taken seriously. And again, we have a tool in the vaccine that makes all the difference. So yesterday we started a major citywide effort, multi-language ad campaign to let New Yorkers know it's time to get the flu shot. To let them know how important it is to do, especially this year, while we're also fighting the battle against the coronavirus. And we want people to know that it's easy and it's available and it's free and it can make all the difference. So I want to show you a video that's now playing that lets New Yorkers know just how important this is.

[Flu vaccination ad campaign video plays:]

So that says it all. And look, it's a reminder of all of us. When you get the flu shot, you're not just protecting yourself, you're protecting your family and your whole community. We got to realize this is something we do not just for ourselves, but for everybody else. Here to tell you more about this huge outreach effort, it's going to reach every corner of the city, our Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you Mr. Mayor. Now sometimes the advice from doctors I know can be complicated but today my advice is so simple, it can be summarized on this button right here, get your flu shot. This year's flu vaccine could be the most important one that you ever get. Now the flu can be deadly even in normal years. And we know 2020 is anything, but a normal year. COVID is still circulating and flu presents many of the same symptoms as the coronavirus. We don't want the health care system to expend time and resources on preventable illnesses even as they continue to handle COVID cases. Just as we wear our masks to protect one another, the flu shot not only protects you, it also helps to protect others as well. Most of all, we want to protect New Yorkers who are especially vulnerable to the flu, such as babies and our senior citizens.

So here's what we recommend. New Yorkers older than ages six months should get a seasonal flu vaccine. As the Mayor said, it is especially important for adults, age 50 and older, pregnant people, children age six months to five years, and people with chronic diseases. As a doctor, as well as a father, I wouldn't ask New Yorkers to do anything I wouldn't do myself. I get my flu vaccine every year. And I'll be sure to get my baby daughter immunized as well. While this year's vaccine  may be the most important one in our lifetimes, the City is working to make it the easiest one you ever get. New Yorkers can find out where to get vaccinated at nyc.gov/flu. You can also call 3-1-1 or text flu to 8-7-7-8-7-7. And today I'm happy to join the Mayor to announce this media campaign to encourage vaccination, which will appear everywhere from bus shelters to neighborhood businesses like laundromats and bodegas. The campaign will tell New Yorkers what I'm saying today. This year's flu vaccine could be the most important one you'll ever get. You may be hearing me say that a lot in the coming months. My goal is to match the moment's historic importance and help vaccinate more New Yorkers against the flu than have ever been vaccinated before. You can help. Join us in encouraging flu vaccination by using the hashtag #FightFluNYC. Thank you.

Mayor: Well, thank you so much, Commissioner. And look everyone, again I have people all the time saying to me, what can I do to help New York City? What can I do to help us come back? Here's another example of something everyone can do. Just go get that flu shot. It only takes a few minutes. It's easy. It's quick. Make sure the people in your life know how important it is. This is something we can do to protect all of us and to move us forward. Now, look again, it comes back to what everyday people do that matters. And we've seen that with the coronavirus. It's been outstanding, how people have all played their own part in this battle to fight back this disease. And we know that a crucial, crucial element of this effort has been our Test and Trace Corps because Test and Trace Corps connects with everyday people to help them do the things they need to do to fight the disease. And I know people have been grateful for that support, for that direction, that understanding that the Test and Trace Corps brings them of how to deal with the challenge.

Now we've been testing constantly to see what the results are of Test and Trace Corps. We've been studying, researching to understand how this strategy is working. And what we're seeing is really, really encouraging. Having the biggest strongest Test and Trace Corps in the country out there in communities all the time, following up on cases all the time. It's making a world of difference. So our latest estimate is that the presence of Test and Trace and the extraordinary outreach to communities has prevented up to 15,000 potential coronavirus cases. That's an extraordinary number. People who were protected themselves, from this disease and also were not therefore going to end up spreading it to others. So that's striking. And another striking fact is that Test and Trace Corps is every day learning more and more how to connect with people and support them and get people to be a part of the solution. So currently about 80 percent, 80 percent of all positive COVID cases who are identified to the Test and Trace Corps have completed the intake with the Test and Trace Corps. That means they're working together with Test and Trace to do the right thing and to prevent the spread of this disease.

So this is really exciting. It surpasses the original benchmark goals that were set. And it proves that New Yorkers want to work with this effort to keep everyone safe. Now there's another key piece. And I was in Soundview in the Bronx a few days ago, as part of this hyper-local effort outreach to communities that need to do more testing, getting more and more people involved. It's an exciting and powerful effort. And again, everything happens at the grassroots. The two-week hyper-local outreach effort in Soundview, in the Bronx, striking. When that effort began, the testing levels of positive for coronavirus were about 2.4 percent in that neighborhood. By the end of the two-week period testing more and more people, the rate went down to 0.82 percent. So it just continues to prove the more people get tested, you get more information, but also you help prevent the spread of the disease. So that is something we're going to be doing wherever we see a need. We want to make sure that people are tested. And then if someone tests positive that we get every single one of them involved with Test and Trace to take the next steps the right way.

So we're going to extend that hyper-local effort now to Southeast Queens, to communities again, that have lower testing levels than we want to have. We're going to be out there in Ozone Park, South Ozone Park and Richmond Hill. Getting the message out, making sure people get tested. Strong grassroots effort. There'll be rapid point of care testing, the rapid test where you get the immediate results, that will be available at the Ozone, excuse me, the Ozone Park Library. Rapid testing available at the Ozone Park Library starting this Friday. Of course, fast, easy, free. Now the hyper-local effort continues in Borough Park in Brooklyn. The testing center now open at Fort Hamilton Parkway and 41st Street. An area I know very well in my old City Council district. So that effort continues to deepen in the community. Getting people tested, continuing to make sure people are wearing masks, distributing free masks, and continuing to remind people avoid large gatherings, particularly indoors. Obviously this is a time where it's particularly important. More and more economic activity, more and more people going back to work, schools reopening and the high holidays coming. Very important to remind people to avoid those large gatherings. So that work is going on right now in Borough Park. Now to give you a little more about the hyper-local strategy, why it's so important and why it's working, the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you sir. To keep the virus suppressed Test and Trace must engage every community in New York City. Our hyper-local response is our directed and focused approach to engaging communities at higher risk. Drawing from our success in Sunset Park, where we were able to drive down the percent of people testing positive by two thirds, now in Soundview we've achieved the same thing. The percent of residents testing positive for coronavirus in Soundview today is two thirds lower than it was in mid-August before we got started. And we've done that through knocking on 12,000 doors, making 50,000 phone calls, doing 2,600 tests and working with community-based organizations, such as the Mexican Coalition for the Empowerment of Youth and Families, and SCO Family of Services. We've even at that site had in-person contact tracing to do it immediately upon any positive result. And we've engaged 100 percent of people with a positive result in Soundview to-date with our teams speaking seven languages.

Moving forward, our next type of hyper-local response will be in Southeast Queens and Ozone Park. Starting this Friday, you can come to our new site at Ozone Park. You can get tested and have your result back within 15 minutes. If it's positive, our team of in-person contact tracers will get contacts from you right there. We'll call them that day and bring them in for testing. And then before you leave, we'll pair you with a resource navigator to ask how we can help to keep you and your family safe. We look forward to working with the community in Southeast Queens and Ozone Park, and we look forward to having the same success that we've had in Sunset Park and that we've now had in Soundview. Thank you, sir.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Dr. Long. So look, thank you to you, the Test and Trace team, everyone at Health + Hospitals, everyone at the Department of Health, working together to make this work right down to the grassroots. And an important update on Test and Trace. We have a new hotline, so it's easier than ever,  if you have a concern to reach out and talk to an actual human being about the questions you have. That hotline for the Test and Trace Corps is 2-1-2-COVID-19, couldn't be easier to remember. 2-1-2-COVID-19. And it's one place you can call, you can get information about testing sites, where you can get free testing near you. You can get advice from medical staff directly, information about how to quarantine properly, how to safely separate. If you need other types of help, like mental health counseling, because so many people going through so much, you can get help through that number too. So 2-1-2-COVID-19, the place to call if you have concerns as we fight this virus.

Okay, let's talk about our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 66 with 4.4 percent confirmed positive for COVID. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550 cases – today's report, 259. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report, 1.05 percent.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Chokshi, Chancellor Carranza, Tests and Trace Executive Director Dr. Ted Long, Dr. Mitch Katz, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Rich. How have you been?

Question: I’ve been all right. So, with the deadline in 16 days, given whatever progress you may have made with unions and negotiations, how would you rate the chances for averting those 22,000 layoffs that could happen on October 1st?

Mayor: Rich, that's a fair question. I try and stay out of the ratings game. I think – I'm very worried about the challenges we're facing right now, but I do want to thank our union partners, there's been very serious discussions, constant discussions. I know everyone's working hard both to move our colleagues in Albany to act on long-term borrowing. I know our labor leaders have spent a lot of time and energy talking to Legislators about how important it is to do long-term borrowing. And I thank them for that. But also, they're talking to us about ways to find additional savings so we can avert layoffs. So, we are not out of the woods at all. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but at least incessant is going on with labor to see if we can find a better path.

Go ahead, Rich.

Question: Okay. And in regard to the flu, of course, there have been reports that it it's been crushed in the southern hemisphere, basically by the precautions that have been taken as a result of COVID-19. I wonder whether the doctors think that that could be a factor here, and I guess it's a take-no-chances situation that they're – they're saying they're urging the flu shots, right?

Mayor: Rich, you have your facts right. I'll turn to Dr. Chokshi, but I'll only say this. We are heartened by the news from the southern hemisphere that actually seems like the same precautions that work against the coronavirus work against the flu. But you said it right, Rich, it's a take no chances, abundance of caution, strong vaccination effort, because, you know, we need to stay ahead of this. Go ahead, doctor.

Commissioner Chokshi: That's exactly right. Mr. Mayor. The only thing that I would add to it is that this abundance-of-caution approach is particularly important for our most vulnerable New Yorkers – our children, our senior citizens, people with chronic diseases. And so, although we are seeing reasons for optimism with respect to influenza in the southern hemisphere, we just can't leave it up to chance, and we have something that works in a safe and effective vaccine.

Moderator: The next is Bob Hennelly from the Chief Leader.

Question: Yes, Mr. Mayor. I figured it out. We have the technology. 

Mayor: Welcome, Bob. Welcome to our gathering, Bob.

Question: Yeah. [Inaudible] for these six months, because I hadn't figured out how to join in. I guess I wanted to follow up on my dear colleague, Rich Lamb's question, regarding the layoffs. So, that October 1 contemplated the 30-day advisement happening in September 1. So, I just want to make sure for our readers that the Chief Leader that I am correct that you would still have to – those notices had been printed up and they'd be mailed out, at which point there would be a 30-day window. So, at any point where you have to pull that trigger – and I assume that could still come any day, is that correct?

Mayor: Yeah. Unfortunately, Bob, it is. And the 30-day window, as I understand the civil service law, the unions have to be notified 30 days out. Then, there's a period of time in which the individual workers have to be notified. Again, this is nothing any of us ever wants to do. I don't want to see us go down this road. It would only be a last resort. But you're right, from the moment that we say there's no other choice, it's a 30-day period from there. Go ahead.

Question: Of course, then as a consequence, you would be then budding into the holidays. And as [inaudible] said – that would be just yesterday when we spoke with them – that could really be problematic. That would turn you into like a major Grinch.

Mayor: It's – look, Bob, I don't want to see anyone suffer. We have been fighting to bring this city back. And I think people know for a long time about my relationship with labor unions and working people, I don't want to see anyone suffer. In fact, I think we need a big strong public workforce to keep moving forward as the city, but I have a budget I have to balance and I've gotten no help from Washington – that is a fact, the stimulus that was supposed to come, never came. I've been asking Albany for months for something very fair and simple – long-term borrowing, which the City has received in past crises. Hasn't happened. We're running out options. Now, I do believe labor's working real hard, Bob, to help us in Albany and to come up with alternatives. So, I'm going to hold out hope that that's how we can solve this.

Moderator: The next is Emma Fitzsimmons from the New York Times.

Question: It seems like there's almost a fundamental disagreement about whether workers should be returning to offices in Midtown. These companies, especially, you know, people who own big office buildings, they want people to return. Do you want to wait and see how schools go first? It sounds like that's what you're saying.

Mayor: Well, I'm saying something that is about sequencing, Emma. The – we – again, we went through phases one, two, three, four on time, that set up the reality now, and we knew after Labor Day there'd be a lot more activity. You can see it all around the city. And, of course, schools coming back – huge piece of the equation. It takes, you know, a couple of weeks to see the first round of impact, a couple more weeks to see secondary impacts. I think it's fair to say, we're going to know later in October, exactly what the impact has been of all of this new activity. I am hopeful, because New Yorkers have really been disciplined, but I think it's important to sort of watch each step and see what happens. That being, said I commend business leaders who are starting to bring back their workforce. I was at the opening of One Vanderbilt yesterday, the ribbon cutting, and one of the companies involved in that effort, SL Green, has brought back their entire workforce. I think that's great. And we're going to start a plan as to when and how we bring back the City workforce that is working remotely now. It's time to start moving more and more, but it should be sequenced do we see the impact of each action and make sure the data and the science confirmed that it's time to take the next step.

Moderator: The next is Julia Marsh from the Post.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Actually, just following up on what you were speaking about, about SL Green, bringing back their workforce. And Mr. Green told us that he'd like to see you lead by example and bring back your workforce. You said you're working on a plan. Can you give us a sense for what the timeline is for that? And do you encourage all other private employers to bring their workforce back?

Mayor: Yeah, I think everyone should start the process now of determining how to do that. So, for us, again, Julia, I think you'd agree, I'm not like most employers – 380,000 or so employees. When we move, it has a very, very big impact. So, we have to be smart about our sequencing. But for a lot of, sort of, smaller and mid-level employers, of course, start to bring people back as soon as you feel ready. We want to make sure that this city comes back to life unquestionably, but for the big strokes, like opening schools or going through those big phases, or, certainly, the return of the larger City workforce, those we're going to sequence carefully to make sure they conform to what the data and science is telling us about how we keep the coronavirus at bay in this city.

Moderator: The next is Kala from PIX.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I am wondering, after the announcement of 2,000 teachers being added this week, the principals union had announced that that was a fraction of the 10,000 that they requested. So, how many more teachers do you plan on hiring? And if they're not hired by the start of school, then what happens?

Mayor: Kala, first of all I respect the union a lot. I’ve spent a lot of time in recent weeks talking to Mark Cannizzaro about his concerns. I also know that – I’ve never met a manager that didn't want a bigger budget and more personnel. So, it's not surprising to me that they've put in a big request. What we've said is we got to make sure to balance the real challenges we're facing – everyone knows we're facing all sorts of challenges, budgetary, and otherwise – with the fact that we need to make sure there's the appropriate number of educators in each school. So, we have had a rigorous process over the last few months to get that right. We announced yesterday 2,000 new educators going into the schools immediately and we're going to then compare notes with the principals and the superintendents, see if that allows us to fill the gaps that exist. If there's still some gaps, we'll take another step. But I think this 2,000 will solve the problem by and large. Go ahead.

Question: And can you clarify, what's the timeframe for Test and Trace to reach out to teachers who need to quarantine based off a positive test at their school? There are several teachers who were saying that they were never contacted by Test and Trace I guess in a timely manner to feel safe at school.

Mayor: Well, I'll turn to Dr. Long, but I'll say this, the whole concept is to move very, very quickly. That's why we have the situation room that we announced yesterday. And, obviously, if any educator says they weren't contacted right away, please, we need to know that. If that's something – if there's ever an instance where there wasn't right communication, we need to know that right away. So, I'm going to ask you sort of civically to please inform our team here if you hear anything like that so we can find those individuals and find out what happened, but overwhelmingly what you're going to see, because of the presence of the situation room, is very, very rapid connection between any school staff member and Test and Trace, same day, immediately getting to work. Dr. Long, do you want to add?

Executive Director Long: Yes. Sir, you covered all of the high points. The two things I would highlight is one, 98 percent of all of the teachers that have gotten tested at our prioritized sites have had a test result back within 48 hours. And as soon as we get the test result in the situation room, it's instantaneous, we reach out right away. There's no delay.

Mayr: Go ahead, Kala.

Moderator: That was Kala’s second question.

Mayor: Oh, that was, I'm sorry. My apology.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask, so yesterday you were asked if you were certain schools will open in person on Monday and you said yes. But the UFT and the union leaders said that they don't believe that some schools are ready for in-person education on Monday. So, I wanted to get your take, especially given the uncertainty for parents who might not know – I mean, we're getting down to the wire, we're six days out, and there's a lot of confusion. So, what is going on there?

Mayor: I honestly, Katie, do not believe there's a lot of confusion. I understand the unions will advocate and they will raise concerns, but a friendly reminder, everyone, the Department of Education, City Hall, we are the people providing the services to our parents and our kids. And we've made very clear what all the preparations have been. We've been talking about it for weeks and weeks. School is opening on Monday the 21st. There's one building I know of, and we've talked about it openly, that is going to need alternative sites. That’s the MLK building in Manhattan. Everything else is moving forward. There was a group of 17 buildings on State-owned properties that didn't get the inspections in the timely manner they should have. Those will all be inspected, and we'll have answers today on all of them. The problems that have been raised about individual classrooms, for example, those are being resolved, but if there's some classrooms in the building, they simply will be held offline if needed. So, I think it's pretty straightforward at this point. Go ahead.

Question: So, my second question is I guess about the bureaucratic technicality or whatever of teachers receiving health accommodations. I know when firefighters and police officers, they usually go to sort of agency-sanctioned doctors to get these accommodations if they're out on any kind of LODI, line of duty injury, or something like that. But with teachers it seems that it's just any of their private doctors. So ,is the DOE going through each accommodation request – I'm not accusing teachers from fraud, of course, or faking it, but there is this process already in place for other City employees, and I'm just curious if it's the same, that is in place for teachers seeking health accommodations because in some schools, many teachers have sought this. So, what is the process?

Mayor: I'll let the Chancellor speak to it. Of course, there's a verification process. The Chancellor can start. And, Chancellor, if you think any of the health team here should add, that's your call. You start –

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So there – you're right. There absolutely is a process where teachers could apply, or any employee could apply for an accommodation based on medical – underlying medical conditions. We've consulted very closely with the Department of Health. So, there is a process of evaluating those requests. Teachers have been informed if they do qualify for an accommodation or not. And it follows very strictly and very closely with the process that other agencies and entities have put in place. I'm not sure if Dr. Chokshi would like to add anything to that.

Commissioner Chokshi: Nothing to add.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, there, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to follow up on some of your comments about encouraging employers to bring back their workforce. I kind of just want to clarify the technicalities of that because if I understand correctly, please, correct me if I'm wrong, it's still capped at 50 percent of the workforce, right? So, are they even allowed to bring back their entire workforce? And if they're not, is there some kind of timeline for, you know, those regulations [inaudible] –

Mayor: Yeah. I'm speaking to the broad strategic direction here. Of course, employers are going to follow all State and City guidance. My point is that I think as we've gone through these other phases, I mean, just think about the pure momentum and logic of this, the goal is to keep coming back, but always to do it safely. That's what governed phases one, two, three, four. That's what governed the decision to come back with our school system. And then we'll continue from there, keep building up, but it has to be done safely. So, of course, following all rules. And as I said with the City workforce, which is a big workforce, we're going to do that carefully and in a timely manner based on the data and science. But what I'm simply saying is I think employers should start at least making those plans now getting ready to bring back – those who can, within the rules, bring back more, I think it's a good thing to do, but everyone will figure out the right timeline for themselves, obviously. Go ahead.

Question: All right. And then I want to go back to something you said yesterday with regards to people who test positive that, you know, for the vast majority, it's a very temporary reality. But there've been a lot of studies showing that in many patients, in fact, some indicating a majority of patients, there are long-term health effects from the coronavirus. And I'm wondering, is the City doing anything, A, to quantify kind of, the, you know, long-term health burden that might come from a disease, you know, that's been so widespread in the city would be to, you know, provide services to these people, make sure they can get the care they need when they're still dealing with symptoms?

Mayor: It's a very good question, Erin, and I appreciate it. And I'll just say something up front and then turn to Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Varma, Dr. Katz, anyone who wants to jump in. Look, we know coronavirus, it's been devastating to this city. What happened particularly in the beginning in March and April, the lives we lost and the horrifying experience that a lot of people went through. We also know the vast majority of people, thank God, went through much, much less. And today we see something different. Today we see a very low rate of infection in the city. We see very few hospitalizations, which would be one of the ways, of course, of measuring severity. It's why it's important that we tell you every day, the number of hospitalizations, but also the percentage that test positive for COVID. And you can see how very low that's been.

There still are people suffering from it. You're absolutely right. We don't ever want to miss the fact that for some people it's a horrible experience, but clearly the facts keep telling us, thank God, that for most people it is not. But your question’s a really good one. And I have heard from a lot of individuals, their concern and their feeling that they are experiencing long-term impact. So, it's something we have to start dealing with for the future of the city. So, again, we'll start with Dr. Choksi and then if any of the other doctors want to join in, please do.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, Sir. Well, you made the key point, which is that our overall goal is to prevent as much suffering as possible. The best way to do that is to prevent as many people from getting infected with COVID-19 as possible. We do know, to your very good question, that people, some people who have been infected with the virus do show signs of persistent symptoms, things like fatigue or shortness of breath, joint pain, you know, these are things that can be can be very significant, you know, for the people who are experiencing them. It's an area where we're still watching the science unfold to understand precisely why that's occurring. And so, we are in regular touch with our clinical colleagues to make sure that we're understanding what they're seeing and starting to track it as much as possible. The final note that I'll say– and Dr. Long may have more to say about this – is that we know that many of the health care systems across the city are setting up dedicated services and clinics for people who are experiencing persistent symptoms from COVID-19 including at our public health care system, Health + Hospitals.

Mayor: Let me invite any other doctors who would like to jump in. Okay. Thank you and look, everyone, as we conclude today, I think the important thing to think about here is what has allowed us to come back and what's going to allow us to deal with the challenges that we face ahead. It's been an incredible spirit of solidarity in this city. And it's interesting, one of the most diverse places on Earth, a place where you could say, how on Earth could people get on the same page and work together, and yet that is what makes New York City so exceptional. It does not stop us from getting together that we happen to come from every corner of the world or that we speak hundreds of languages. People actually do get together on the same page. And we've seen a sense of solidarity, people looking out for each other, looking out for their neighbors, the whole city coming together. And certainly, from the City government, we have that same sense of City agencies all working shoulder to shoulder in common cause, and it doesn't really matter which specific uniform of which agency they're wearing. There's been a spirit of we're all in the same fight together. This is a city built on the labor of working people. Its greatness comes from everyday people, neighborhood people, grassroots people. That has always been our strength, a lot of them unsung heroes, but that strength, that resiliency is going to bring us back. And there is a palpable sense – you go out in the neighborhoods in this city, like I was in a Soundview in the Bronx a few days ago, people actually do feel like they're in this together and they're fighting for each other and that is what's going to bring us back strong. So, thank you, everybody.

2020-09-16 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, we all know the last six months we've been through so much in this city. Coronavirus has touched every single family and has, in so many ways, upended lives. And we talk every day here about the health reality about fighting back against this disease, making this city safer and healthier all the time, helping to bring us back in a way that emphasizes health and safety. So, let's talk today about the people we're depending on the people who have been heroes throughout this process, our City workforce, our public servants, the people who have stood up for this city through thick and thin, put us in a position now to be the envy of the nation in terms of the battle against the coronavirus. One of the lowest infection rates anywhere in America and our public workers have led the way. And our public workforce is crucial to restarting the city and moving us forward. We have so much to do, and yet we are also facing an unprecedented budget challenge. Literally unprecedented.

Now, I have to tell you, here we are in the middle of September, I couldn't have imagined no action by Washington, D. C. up to this point. I could not have imagined. Honestly, if you go back to May, June, July, I thought it was an article of faith that there would be a federal stimulus. There hasn't been, and I see no indication there will be for the remainder of this year. I truly believe that our colleagues in Albany would have acted by now on long-term borrowing. I still believe that can happen and hopefully very soon. But right now, we don't have that support and we have to keep making tough choices to move the city forward, to keep our budget balanced. That's the law, something we have to do, but also protect our workforce at the same time.

Now, I'll tell you something over the last seven years, we've proven that you can be fiscally responsible and make investments in this city that reach working people, that reach every neighborhood, all five boroughs; can invest in the public workforce and you get so much back for that investment. And there's so many indicators of that. Look, at the investments in our Health + Hospital system. Look how crucial that was when this crisis came in terms of protecting New Yorkers and then allowing us to come back. Look at the investments we've made in our children through initiatives like pre-K, 3-K. Look at how much that has yielded for this city. The investments that we have made consistently to improve life in the city, also before this pandemic gave us the strongest economy we've ever had and helped us to keep moving forward. So, we've got to protect our investments while at the same time being fiscally responsible, that's the balance we've always struck.

And we decided to create record reserves, put aside money constantly to prepare for a crisis. We never knew this would be that crisis, but we were ready with huge unprecedented fiscal reserves. We created a new Capital Stabilization Reserve to give us further protection. We found billions of dollars in savings every year, including health care savings, working with our partners in labor. All this work happened years and years before the pandemic and all this work continues right now and will continue in the future. So, in the worst days of this pandemic also was the time we have to put together the budget for the year we’re in now. We achieved the largest savings plan in the history of this administration. We continued to find billions and billions of dollars in new savings. This current fiscal year budget is $7 billion less than what had been projected in February. And, look, even with the crisis we saw in the years leading up that New York City was regarded by the larger financial community as a very smart bet. In fact, our bond rating was increased last year, upgraded. So, we have to remember that all those strengths have been historic, and we will continue to build on them. In fact, we find new ways continually. We actually created a rainy-day fund, something no previous administration had ever done. So, we keep layering year after year, these additional protections.

But now dealing with the biggest jolt to our lives, to our families, to our neighborhoods, to our economy, to our budget that we have seen in generations. We lost $9 billion in revenue. And that's why, as I said, it led to a $7 billion cut in this year's budget. And a constant focus on finding additional savings and efficiencies, and we will be talking about this constantly from now until the last day of this administration. Now, look, we've already had to make some tough cuts that have affected the city and the services we provide. We're trying to do everything we can to stop from those cuts becoming worse. We do not want to take away jobs from public employees. We do not want to take away services from communities that need it. We're going to try and do everything we can and keep fighting for that stimulus from Washington, keep fighting for that long-term borrowing from Albany, but also keep making additional moves here. So, the Mayor's Office has focused – my office directly, the people who worked directly for me here in City Hall and in the offices that make up the Mayor's Office, we focused on savings. And over the previous budgets, we found $12 million in savings within our budgets. We've had a hiring freeze, we've had constant focus on downsizing teams, wherever appropriate. And today is a day where we have to take another step. So, I'm announcing that as of October 1st every Mayor's Office employee will be taking a furlough. And that obviously it includes myself.

This is something I want to be clear about. Everyone will be taking a week's furlough. This is a step you never want to see for good hardworking people. The folks who work here throughout this crisis, they have not been working 35- or 40-hour weeks, they've been working 80-hour weeks, 90-hour weeks, 100-hour weeks because they believe in this city and they've been fighting for all of you. So, it is with pain that I say they and their families will lose a week's pay, but it's something we have to do. It's something I have to do. And with these furloughs and with the additional savings and cuts that we achieved in the June budget, the Mayor's Office budget will now be 12 percent less this fiscal year than it was last fiscal year. So, we're showing that at the very top of the operation more important actions are being taken every day and that we will make the choices we have to, to keep this city going forward. But, again, I want to thank all of the folks who do this work, and it was not a decision I made lightly to have to do this, it is painful for them and their families, but it is the right thing to do at this moment in history. Now, we'll keep fighting for those bigger changes. And I want to ask every New Yorker to join in that fight, pushing your federal representatives to help us get that stimulus, pushing your representatives in Albany for that long-term borrowing. We need to find bigger solutions, but this is another step today to find every answer we can right here within the City government.

Let me talk today about another challenge that we have faced. And as I said, this crisis, the coronavirus has affected every neighborhood, every person, every family, and it's had a lot of different impacts, health, first and foremost, the people we've lost, the families who have gone through pain, but it's not just the horrible losses within families or the people who have lost jobs, it's also that we've seen something very ugly, very negative throughout this crisis. And that's discrimination, hatred, bias directed at our Asian American communities. And so wrongly, so unfairly. These are communities that contribute so much to this city. Our Asian American communities are part of what make New York City great. In fact, sadly communities in this city in places like Chinatown, Flushing, Queens, and Southern Brooklyn, were feeling the effects of this crisis even before many other New Yorkers were because they were suffering discrimination.

People wouldn't go to their stores or the restaurants, that was painfully wrong. And I tried to show through my own actions that that kind of discrimination was wrong and wasn't acceptable and wasn't consistent with the values of the city, but we still see, unfortunately, hate crimes directed towards Asian Americans. We see verbal attacks, physical attacks. We see people blaming a community here for a virus that originated far away, and that people here had nothing to do with at all. And yet, somehow, they're being blamed and that's unacceptable. We will not allow it and we'll fight back against it. So, that's why the NYPD has created a permanent Asian Hate Crimes Task Force. That's dedicated to working with the community to make sure every attack, every incident of bias is reported, and acted on. The best way to stop these things, besides educating people and leading by example, is to show that there will be consequences, and how the NYPD is devoted to this work. And I want you to hear about the details from the leader of the Asian Hate Crime Task Force, NYPD Deputy Inspector Stewart Loo.

Deputy Inspector Stewart Loo, NYPD: Thank you, Mayor de Blasio. Good morning. I'm Deputy Inspector Stewart Loo of the NYPD’s newly formed Asian Hate Crime Task Force. It's an honor for me to be here today to talk about something and announce something that I find very special and positive. If I may, I'd like to start with a quick quote from Martin Luther King that I found relevant to current events and today's topic. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” And yet too often today's times we see actions and rhetoric filled with hate and discrimination only to be [inaudible] with using more hate and more discrimination. I think we all stand to benefit by reflecting on the wisdom and the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. To touch on what the Mayor said, COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on all of us. It's affected our health. It's affected our finances. It's affected our overall well-being. Some of us have even lost loved ones, but it's been a little worse for the Asian American community. Since the pandemic, Asians have faced a concerning increase in unprovoked racist, verbal attacks, some of them leading to physical assaults. They have become victims of crimes for no reason other than the fact that they are of a certain race. This is the impetus for the formation of the Asian Hate Crime Task Force.

There are many unique obstacles in helping an Asian crime victim, whether it's language barrier, cultural differences, fear of retaliations, general reluctance of making a report, or distrust of the police. This task force will bridge that gap. And we have already done so successfully on a number of occasions. Just to be clear, this task force is a support unit under the overall Hate Crimes Task Force Commander Mark Molinari, which investigates all hate crimes. Underneath him, the Asian Hate Crime Task Force is myself, two captains, two sergeants, and 25 of the world's greatest detectives, skilled and dedicated Asian American investigators who are fluent in a variety of languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, [inaudible] Tagalog. Okay. And more important, to help solve these crimes, the task force serves two purposes. The first one is it brings awareness to the problem – awareness leads to education, which I believe ultimately will lead to prevention. And the second one, it sends a clear message, a clear message from the leadership of this city and that messages that we support justice. We know the hardship you're going through. We care and we are doing something about it. So, I encourage anyone who is a victim, or knows someone who's a victim of a hate crime or any crime for that matter to come forward so we can help prevent this from happening again. The only thing right now, that's more contagious than COVID is hate. So, I ask everyone to do their part and stop the spread. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Deputy Inspector. I want to thank you and the whole team you're working with for the great work you're doing, it's such an important work. And Deputy Inspector, you heard the passion with which he spoke about this work, but he also in describing the members of his team and all the languages they speak, the rich heritage they bring to this work, it's a reminder of today's NYPD that represents every community of this city. That is a more and more diverse force reaching deep into communities with a strategy of neighborhood policing. And this fits perfectly the strategy. We want to be shoulder to shoulder with Asian American communities fighting hate, and the NYPD is leading the way. So, Deputy Inspector, thank you for your great work and thank you for invoking the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because that's one of his most powerful quotes, because it reminds us, as angry as we get, when we see hatred and bias, we have to overcome it with something more positive, and we do need to educate, we do need to change hearts and minds. So, another important initiative to fight against prejudice, to fight against racism, to fight against bias is being created by our Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.

This is another part of the Mayor's Office that does such important work, working with communities, working at the grass roots to help educate everyone, but particularly our young people. And so a new contest, and it's a beautiful one, it’s called Heart Work Against Hate. And the idea is to invite young people, to submit positive messages, positive images, ideas that will help us create respect and unity in this city. It's the most diverse place on earth, where there is a lot of sense of common cause especially now, as we fight this virus. We've got to keep showing those positive messages, messages of love will win the day. And so we're inviting these young people to submit their best ideas, their messages, and then we'll choose some that will be showcased on the office's website. And we'll use social media to spread the word all over the city. We're going to let the youth of this city speak to the future. We want to let them speak about the city they want to create, in a city that works for everyone.

Okay, let me switch gears now – a couple of things I want to say that relate to again, our public workforce and the important work they do. So, we have more work to do, even with huge budget constraints, we have more work to do to keep working on the quality of life every day in this city. And we know with a tight budget that it's been tough in terms of what we've seen in some of our streets and parks. And, we want to improve the cleanliness level. So, we will be restoring approximately 65 litter basket pickup trucks through the Sanitation Department every week. That'll be a 24 percent increase over current levels. And that Sanitation – the Economic Development Corporation they'll restart a great initiative, it's called Clean NYC, working with the DOE Fund. A lot of you have seen out there, good, good men and women out there turning their own lives around, but doing great work, helping communities to be clean. We're going to be extending that effort in a number of neighborhoods and parks around the city. So, those efforts, and we've found some additional changes that we've made in our budget to allow for those. But we're also recognizing there's a lot of people beyond the City government, a lot of community-based organizations, elected officials, a lot of folks in the private sector are sponsoring their own cleanup efforts with their own employees or with volunteers from the community. And that's fantastic. I'm seeing that happen more and more all over the city. Want to thank everyone who's doing community cleanups. We need your help. We're going to keep doing everything we can to get the most done from the public sector, but everyone else who is contributing, it makes a huge difference. And, of course, I want to thank all the good men and women at the Sanitation Department who do this work every day for us. No matter what the situation they're always there for us. I remember after Sandy, the heroic role they played bringing back the city. I remember what has happened in snowstorm after snowstorm. Whatever's thrown at the Sanitation Department, they respond and they're going to help us through this crisis as well.

And while I'm thanking and appreciating public workers, these folks don't work for the City of New York, but they sure do serve every one of us, our postal workers, everyone who's part of the United States Postal Service. Thank you. You know what? We need you more than ever. You, in fact, are not only our lifelines for so many people, you bring medicines, you bring the resources that people will wait on regularly when they need help. You bring information. You keep families united. The work you do is absolutely precious. And dare I say, you are also guardians of democracy because more and more people are going to be casting their votes through you. So, to all of you, thank you. Thank you for everyone who works for the postal service. There may be all sorts of debates and controversies in Washington, but here on the ground in New York City, we just appreciate all of you and we need you, and we're going to do everything we can to help you be strong.

Okay, let's go to our daily indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19 that threshold is 200 patients, and today's report is 75, with a confirmed positive rate for COVID amongst those patients of 11.54 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, that threshold 550, today's report 277 cases. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold is five percent, today's report 0.87 percent. A good number thanks to all of you. Few words now in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues and the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hey guys, we'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Deputy Mayor Laura Anglin, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, OLR Commissioner Renee Campion, Deputy Inspector Mark Molinari, Deputy Inspector Stewart Loo, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. With that, our first question today goes to Hazel from WCBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: How's it going, Hazel?

Question: Good, good. I have a question for you and for Chancellor Carranza. We were at P.S. 63 on the Lower East Side yesterday, where we found classrooms with broken windows, others that wouldn't open more than maybe three inches or the windows were screwed shut, and they had very poor ventilation. Now, these are classrooms that teachers tell me they reported for poor air circulation years ago, issues before a COVID-19, yet these classrooms were given a passing grade by the ventilation action team and students will be in these classrooms on Monday. Now, we've received similar complaints from several other schools. We had a teacher literally in tears yesterday, worried about students and teachers getting sick and getting a family sick. So, my question is, will the City go back to P.S. 63 and other schools and fix these issues in classrooms where teachers feel the inspections were flawed?

Mayor: Hazel, I appreciate you telling me about this. I don't want to see any classroom online that shouldn't be. If a classroom isn't ready for our kids and our educators, it shouldn't be used. So, we will absolutely send the team back to P.S. 63 today to see exactly what happened. And if any classroom is not up to snuff, it'll be taken out of circulation immediately. And it will not be used until it is fixed. So, I welcome any reports, anything that needs to be fixed we will either be able to fix it immediately in time for Monday or we will not use that room until it is fixed. It's as simple as that. Go ahead.

Question: My second question that's the principal's union still saying 2,000 additional teachers is not enough. Some teachers are now concerned that they're being assigned to teach subjects they've never taught before. For example, teachers finding out – PE teachers finding out they're now teaching math, and they just have a few days before school starts and little time to prepare. How do you respond to the critics that say, this won't be the best education for New York City public school students?

Mayor: Look, Hazel, I've been around our public schools a long time as a parent, as a public servant, and I can tell you that there's constantly adjustments that have to be made, but this year more than ever, because we're in a pandemic. And we're asking everyone to use their skills, their talents to help our kids. Of course, people are only going to be asked to do things they can do. We're not going to ask people to do things they can't do, but we are going to ask everyone to dig down deep to serve our children. Our children are hurting, Hazel. They have missed months and months of in-person instruction last year, they've been through a lot of trauma, they need the support of educators, they need positive adult role models, they need people to help them. And I have not met a single person in our labor unions or anywhere else who says that we can serve our children as well remotely as we do in-person. And we're not starting from, you know, scratch here. We're talking about kids who already have been set back months and months. So, we're only going to ask people to do what they can do, but we’re going to ask them to do a lot, because our kids deserve it. Chancellor, would you like to add?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Mr. Mayor, I think you covered that right on.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: For our next question, we'll go to Andrew from WNBC.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Mayor, for weeks, you've been saying that there were going to be enough educators, but our understanding – and maybe we'll get the Chancellor to weigh in on this as well – is that late last night, the DOE concluded there will not be enough to guarantee live instruction on the blended remote days. So, I'm wondering what you say to parents who have been told you'll get live instruction every single day and have now been told, maybe not.

Mayor: I'll start and turn to the Chancellor. Andrew, look, we are starting up a huge endeavor to serve our children and our parents. From the very beginning, parents of this city spoken said they wanted their kids back in school. And we've heard this from parents of all backgrounds, every neighborhood, every walk of life, but we've particularly heard this from parents who are less privileged, whose kids need more help, whose kids are dealing with a lot of challenges and desperately want the positive environment of the classroom again. So, we're starting on Monday. We've said repeatedly, it will not be a perfect start, we'll be making a lot of adjustments in the weeks after we begin to continue to improve things. But the important reality here is to say, we're going to start by providing the best education possible in-person, the best education possible remotely. We're going to keep making improvements as we go along, we're going to keep adjusting and figuring out what we need in terms of staffing. We've come this far. We're going to keep doing what we have to do to make it better every single day. It's not static, Andrew. It's not like what happens on the first day – by the way, this is true in a typical school year – what happens the first day is not the same as how things are two weeks or three weeks or four weeks later after a lot of things have been worked through. Even in a regular school year without a pandemic, they're adding staff into schools even a few weeks into the school year. So, we're going to make adjustments, but, over time, we're going to be continuing to improve the quality both in classroom and remote. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, sir. What I would add is – I would amplify what you just said. This is the start of the school year. We're going to continue to make adjustments. But also, all of the variables keep adjusting as well. How many students are in-person? How many students have chosen remote? How many of our staff members are seeking medical accommodations and what does that look like? And then, the space issue. So, there are constant variables at play here. And what we've chosen to do is be honest and transparent with the public and say to folks our goal has always been synchronous instruction every single day. But as we look at the first day and know that we're working through some of these staffing challenges, we're being honest with the public, nobody's hiding anything here. So, you're almost darned if you do and darned if you don't. But we're going to be transparent with families and let them know that this will be some of your education remotely will be asynchronous. And that can still be very rigorous assignments, very rigorous lessons that students complete. And as we continue to ramp up, as you've said, Mr. Mayor, we're going to continue to add capacity to provide and meet our goal, which has synchronous instruction every single day.

Moderator: Next up is Michael Gartland from the Daily News.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Hey, Michael. How are you?

Question: I’m alright. So, on these furloughs you talked about at the top of the press conference, why – why now? I mean, you've been talking about borrowing for months now and, you know, the fiscal hawks and, you know, some of the State lawmakers we've talked to said, you know, we need to find more savings before we take that step. So, I mean, why wait until now? Why not – why not kind of take this step earlier on in the process?

Mayor: Michael, look, first of all, as I said, for months, I think many, many people, including folks who are pretty objective about politics and government thought there would be a stimulus. I think we're all shocked that hasn't happened. Based on lots of conversations with leaders in Albany and members of the Legislature, I thought they were going to move forward long-term borrowing. They did it after 9/11, they should do it now. But since it hasn't happened, were looking for every possible way to make the moves that we can make while continuing the conversations with long-term borrowing, while continue conversations with labor over savings. But, Michael, I don't think you would like it if your boss said, hey, Michael, you're going to lose a week's pay. I don't think it's something that we want to do to anyone, especially people have been working so hard. These folks have worked nonstop. A lot of the people in this building have worked every single day since the pandemic began. I don't want to take money away from them and their families, but it's at the point where we have to show that we're going to do anything and everything to get through this. Go ahead. Michael – Michael?

Moderator: Do you have a second question?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: There you go.

Question: Yeah. I'm sorry about that. Does it give you some leverage, moving forward? Have you gotten any feedback on that? As far as the borrowing in Albany, and as far as – you know, the negotiations, I know you you've been in with labor leaders as far as, you know, figuring out some things there to find savings?

Mayor: Look, the work we're doing with labor has been going on nonstop and they've been, you know, productive and respectful conversations. I think a lot of the folks who lead our municipal unions understand this is about saving the city and our future. But we're taking this action because it's the thing we have to do now. I certainly think it says to people, you know, everyone's trying to do what they can, everyone sacrificing in some way. Let's all keep working together. I mean, I hope it does send some of that message.

Moderator: Next up is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. I’d like to ask you –

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: How are you doing?

Mayor: How are you doing, man?

Question: Okay. So, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about this furlough program. Do you think you’d extend it citywide to the entire workforce? What the intent of this action today and how much money will you really save doing this?

Mayor: The amount we save by this action is somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars, combined with the other actions we've taken. As I said, the Mayor's Office budget is now 12 percent less this year, this fiscal year we're in now compared to the fiscal year that ended in June. I think everything's on the table – to your original question, everything's on the table, Henry. We're talking to labor about any and all ways to save money. We're going to be looking at all options at this point, because, again, the things that we needed the stimulus, the long-term borrowing, they're not here. And times a-wasting, we're going to look at every option to address the situation. Go ahead.

Question: I'm wondering why you have gone this route instead of any – several other ways that you could raise money that are, you know, just as draconian, perhaps, but would raise a lot more money. A one percent property tax increase, which the City has power over would raise about $750 million. It would cost the average homeowner about $75 a year. Why not look at other possibilities?

Mayor: I just don't believe a property tax increases the right thing and I won't do it. And I just won't do a property tax increase. That's off the table, period. People in this city are hurting in a way that is unprecedented. The only thing that compares, you have to go back to the great depression. The last thing we're going to ask people to do is to have to pay more – working people, middle class people, struggling to keep it together and over a million people have lost their jobs. We're not going to ask them to pay more in property taxes – off the table. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up is Reema, from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, everyone. Good morning. I have a couple of questions. My first one is about the budget. So, obviously we know that with schools, there are new costs the City is shouldering while reopening. For example, the PPE, the cleaning supplies, but with the 20 percent of school aid being withheld from, you know, the recurring payments from the State, we know that districts outside of New York are already cutting staff and making other cuts. So, I'm wondering how is New York City able to pay for these new costs with essentially 20 percent less in payments coming in?

Mayor: Well, Reema, obviously what we get from the State is one part of the resources to go to schools. And again, our fight is going to be to make sure we do get that money, eventually. But the bigger answer to you is the team at Office of Management and Budget manages our money very carefully. A lot of other parts of the state are in a really horrible situation, and I feel for them, and they don't have a lot of flexibility. We at least have some flexibility, because our team manages our client cashflow well and we have resources that continue to come in. That's not true of a lot of other places, the way that they get their revenue is just different. But the bottom line here is, we're going to keep doing everything it takes to serve our kids – well over half-a-million kids who need our help and deserve it, and parents are demanding that we serve them. And we're going to keep fighting for the long-term borrowing, we're going to keep fighting for the stimulus and all of the things that would make things right. But, in the meantime, we have to serve these kids. Go ahead, Reema.

Question: Okay. My second question is about the protocol for when somebody tests positive for the coronavirus, like a school staffer or a student or someone. So, the teachers union and the principals union both brought up [inaudible] delays in informing schools about positive tests. We know last night we got a list from the DOE about which schools so far have staffers who've tested positive. But the City's protocol says the City needs to confirm a self-reported positive case. And in the spring, we know this meant getting confirmation from DOH, which slowed down the process of closing schools at first. So, could you explain – or, can somebody maybe from the Health Department explain exactly how the City is confirming tests? Like, we've heard it can take as little as minutes, but how does that confirmation process work and how is it being done any more quickly than this spring?

Mayor: I appreciate it, Reema. It is being done a lot more quickly, a lot more effectively, because we have the situation – what I'd like to do, if the team here thinks we can pull it off, is get Commissioner Melanie La Rocca on the line and have Reema come back as soon as Melanie joins us, because she can give you a very precise answer to how the process is working and why it's so much quicker. I've talked it through with her, but I want you to hear it from her. It is a very different situation than March. March was horrible for everyone. We didn't even know in February that the pandemic was already spreading in the city because we didn't have testing. By the time we got into March, we had a much bigger problem than anyone knew, and we were all trying to do our best. This is a situation today where we've had six months to prepare. We have a situation room that's able within minutes to verify those tests, but I want make sure you hear it directly from Melanie. So, we'll take a timeout on Reema, get Melanie, and we'll go to the next question in the meantime.

Moderator: So, next up is Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, everybody. My first question is for the Chancellor. Chancellor Carranza, can you talk more specifically about what the DOE has done to close the digital divide over the summer to ensure that all school families will have access to internet for reliable remote learning today?

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, Brigid, what we've done is we've distributed over 340,000 Wi-Fi-enabled devices. We've also worked with the internet providers, and they were very helpful in March by providing free Wi-Fi service for students in temporary housing, low-income students, etcetera. We are working with them to continue that service to our city during this academic year as well. But in addition, we've also purchased some hotspots – a good number of hotspots. I believe that number – we'll verify it, but it's over 40,000 of these hotspots that we are also assigning to students that we know don't have internet connectivity as well. We've also set up on our website, a place where students or families can go and indicate that they need a device or they need internet connectivity. Also, they can call 3-1-1. And then, I know that our schools, as they're preparing for the start of the school year, have reached out to families and students to make sure that they do have a device, they do have kind connectivity. And if they don't, then we're in communication with them to provide them those either devices or connectivity. 

Mayor: Just a quick follow-up on that Brigid. This is, you know, we've been through a horrible crisis, but even in the midst of crisis something striking happened where everyone pulled together. DOE did an amazing job mounting this effort to get devices and internet service to hundreds of thousands of kids that didn't have it. They did that within a matter of weeks. A lot of companies really stepped up and helped us in that. It was an extraordinary effort in the midst of crisis, but it also ended up being one of the biggest efforts in New York City history to address the digital divide. And really one of the most profound actions that's ever been taken to address the digital divide. So even in the midst of crisis, something positive happened and I really want to credit the Chancellor's team for what they did to pull that together. Go ahead, Brigid.

Question: And for the Mayor and the Chancellor. I know we've talked some about this this morning, but of course we're still hearing from schools that they haven't gotten the additional staff that they need despite, you know, this thing 2,000 teachers are arriving. We know it's the beginning and things will evolve, but I'm wondering where some of these are [inaudible] when they're were arriving and how are you keeping track of the schools that have these needs?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to the Chancellor. One thing that this Chancellor did and I give him a lot of credit for it. He created a much stronger system. First Deputy Chancellor, Executive Superintendent, superintendents, a really smart system for having leadership that connects down to the grassroots and backup to the Chancellor. So that system is working every day, determining exactly what each school needs. Again as the Chancellor said, as you get different numbers coming in about which students will be where et cetera. As I said yesterday, we have hundreds of schools that now are reporting that they do have what they need. We have others that definitely need at least a handful, more teachers. Those teachers are being assigned. They're arriving today, tomorrow, the next day, some will arrive even on Monday, but honestly that happens even in a regular school year. But that's going to be constant. And if we identify greater needs, I've said it before. I'll say it again really clearly. If we need to go beyond those 2,000, if it turns out there are additional needs and we've gotten all the folks that we have in the DOE who are classroom ready and they're all out in their assignments. If we need to go deeper into our substitute pool, we will. There's thousands and thousands of substitutes ready to go and we can bring them on and we can bring them on in a longer term manner. So whatever that true number is, as we keep working school by school to define the final need, they will get what they need. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: I would only add sir, that the superintendents are working very closely with schools. So we are monitoring what the actual needs are of schools in terms of staffing as they're putting their models together. And I mentioned earlier in another response about all of the changing variables that principals are having to juggle with right now from enrollment to accommodations, et cetera. So superintendents are really the vehicle by which they're communicating that up to us from a human capital perspective. And then as you said, we're assigning licensed personnel to be in schools. And that's a process that's been going on this week. We've narrowed the list of schools that have some really difficult staffing challenges, and we're obviously concentrating on them. But as was also mentioned one of the variables is that teachers have to be teaching in their area of expertise. So all of those things are happening as we speak and will continue to happen even after the first day as the new school year gets started.

Mayor: Excellent.

Moderator: Next up is Luis from New York [Inaudible].

Mayor: Luis? Luis, can you hear me?

Moderator: Luis, we are waiting for you?

Mayor: I'm not sure he can hear us. Do we have, in the meantime, do we have Melanie La Rocca on?

Moderator: We do not have Commissioner La Rocca, almost. In the interim –

Mayor: Okay. We're getting – all these pieces will come together like a ballet. Okay. Luis, can you hear me? Why don't we go to the next person and bring back Luis as well?

Moderator: In the interim, we'll go to Abu from Bangla Patrika.

Mayor: Abu, can you hear me?

Question: Yes.

Mayor: There you go. How are you doing? How's it going?

Question: Good. How are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: Okay. My question is as you mentioned, the hate crime and all this stuff going on, as you know, the highest office of the nation and the [inaudible] the United States is telling this disease, Chinese disease – he’s calling again a Chinese disease and you are telling about the discrimination And stop the discrimination. What is your comment on it? And do you talk too many times to the president – I know we know it's a strained relation between you and the president, but did you ever tell him to stop Chinese disease, calling it Chinese disease?

Mayor: You know Abu, the times I've talked to the president, honestly, were in the very height of the crisis and I was trying to get us medical supplies and PPE and testing. So that was the focus then. I also think, unfortunately, this president is making a very conscious choice. When he says something as awful as that Abu, it's a purposeful effort to divide. It is part of a political strategy. There's been a lot of demagogues over time who have tried to divide people ethnically and racially and by religion. And it's unfortunately a very, very old part of human life that there are people who will do that, no matter how painful it is, no matter how wrong it is. So no, I don't think anyone's going convince him – this is a guy who remember back in the 1980’s called for the execution of the Central Park Five. Even though they were innocent, he wanted these young men executed. Thank God they are alive and well today and out of prison. In fact, it was this administration that settled that case once and for all. But no, he's not going to change. And he just has to be defeated. Go ahead.

Question: Also, my question is since coronavirus happened the [inaudible] ICE, you know, they paused deportation, but they announced again, aggressively deporting people. Catching the people and deporting. And New York City is a sanctuary city, what kind of assistance you are going to provide the people who need you know the help?

Mayor: Yeah. I'll tell you Abu, it's a great question. And I do think despite the bluster, and we see this pattern constantly coming from the president and from Washington of all the horrible things they're going to do to us, that never happened. Of all, you know, they're going to have massive raids, all these things they threatened that they don't do. And thank God they don't do them because they're wrong and they're counterproductive. And they would hurt people. It would be bad for this city in this country. But what we've seen in reality is that people in our immigrant communities, I really believe have heard the message that New York City is a place that respects all immigrants, regardless of documentation status. That our police department, our school system, our public hospitals, none of them will allow ICE agents on their property. The NYPD will not ask documentation status. We provide the legal support for free to folks who are immigrants who are endangered. We want to keep families together. We hate when families are separated as part of what again, ICE has become a political wing of the Trump administration in so many ways. So I do think that message has spread deeply in our immigrant communities. And people know they will get help and respect. And even things like the way we provide support, we've been providing free food to everyone, regardless of documentation status. We provide free health care. Our guaranteed health care initiative is for all New Yorkers, regardless of documentation status. Hundreds of thousands of people who legally are not allowed to have health insurance, they still can get health care for free through Health + Hospitals. I think a lot of folks feel that, and they know they are respected and protected here.  Okay, let's go back and see, who do we have now?

Moderator: Do we have Commissioner La Rocca on? We're going to go shortly to Luis from New York Gold.

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: There you go. It's all working.

Question: Okay, great. Thank you. Hey there, Mr. Mayor. Regarding street fairs, I spoke with one of the city's largest organizers the other day, and he backed up that what you said to me a month ago. That is these folks are mostly interested in what's best for New York City. And that's a good thing, right? So Mr. Mayor, even though you haven't specifically referenced it lately, I figured the regular street fairs are a no go at this point? But as any thought been given to the holiday fairs and markets?

Mayor: It's a very good question, Luis. Basically I think you're right and I'll check on the latest in terms of our announcements, but in general, as every month has passed we've made the decision not to extend the kind of permits that existed in the past, because we can't have those kinds of gatherings. We need to keep streets clear for a lot of other things that are happening. So, and I think what we've seen overwhelmingly is folks who used to do different events, prefer themselves to do something different, something virtual or something alternative, or just to cancel for a year. The vast majority of organizations, their focus is coming back next year, hopefully in a much better environment. So we will say more on those kinds of holiday markets soon, but I think what's fair to say is everything is going to be decided based on the data and the science and, you know, health and safety first. And we got to be really careful with anything like that. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. So about keeping the streets clear, you mandated that city space be prioritized for outdoor dining and Open Streets, just as you said. And yet you've stated that outdoor dining would be taking place again next year. So, sir, I asked you as long as our health metrics are just as good, if not better than those of today, can you assure the street fair organizers and the thousands of participating merchants that your administration will work towards helping them get up and running in 2021?

Mayor: I can say this, what we've learned from this whole crisis is to make decisions based on the data and the science. That's going to be what determines everything. I do believe as you indicated that we should have Open Restaurants next year. That's the plan, that's were we are going. I think it should be made permanent. I think Open Streets has been a great success. We should be doing that every summer. And combining them has been an extraordinary success. We should do that every summer. I think that's the future of New York City. In terms of the street fairs, we've got to just make sure the time is right. So my hope is that you'll see a vaccine by spring and it is, you know, distributed and people are vaccinated by a late point in the spring, hopefully at the latest maybe even sooner. And then that season, when you see a lot of the big events in the summer, that we will be back to normal. That's my hope, but I don't want to assure anything until we get a lot closer. But I certainly want folks who have those street fairs to understand, like all the folks who have the great events in this city, our goal is to see them back next summer. Go ahead.

Moderator: For our final question, we're going to go back to Reema because we're now joined by Commissioner La Rocca.

Mayor: Do we have Reema? Reema can you hear me?

Question: Yes, I can. Thank you.

Mayor: Why don't you restate your question and then we'll have Commissioner La Rocca answer it.

Question: Okay, great. Sorry. My internet is spotty. So if I go out, just let me know. Okay. Commissioner, thanks so much for coming on. So my question was, you know, the teachers union and principals union have brought up concerns about delays in informing schools about positive coronavirus tests. The City's protocol says the City needs to confirm a self-reported positive case, but we know in the spring, this meant getting confirmation from DOH, which slowed down the process of closing schools. So can you explain how exactly the City is confirming tests this time around?  Like, we've heard it can take as little as a minutes. And just how is it being done any more quickly this time around?

Commissioner Melanie E. La Rocca, Department of Buildings: Sure thing. Thank you for the question. So we put together an actual literal space. So we have DOHMH, our Test and Trace colleagues, DOE in a space. We’re doing inputting calls from principals. So we want to get principals on the phone with us. So we're talking with them, understanding exactly the scenario. And then once we've got the basics of the information, we're passing that along in the system to DOHMH. DOHMH actually has a team that they've assembled, who are doing nothing but verifying the cases we're sending to them. So this team is dedicated. They're onsite and they are doing this all day throughout our hours. So we're open 5:30 to 9:30, Monday through Friday. And 11:00 AM to 9:00 PM on Sundays. That's all that team is doing. So we are putting ourselves in a place where we are ensuring that we have faster turnaround from our colleagues in DOHMH.

Mayor: Let's stay there for a second Commissioner, 5:30 AM to 9:30 PM, correct?

Commissioner La Rocca: That's correct. Monday through Friday and 11:00 AM to 9:30 PM on Sunday. And so we, again, we very much encourage our principals to contact us. They've -- we've shared the information on how to reach this room. This is really a tool that is meant explicitly for principals to help guide them through the process. Now, we know that principals have lots of questions. That's why our team is there. We want to get them the answer. And the answer may not always be that the case is a verified case. But that's what our job is. We're going to get them answers to the questions they have.

Mayor: And you had nine confirmed cases yesterday?

Commissioner La Rocco: Correct.

Mayor: Okay. And just one more to finish up on Reema’s question. I think the original question was about the turnaround time? How long it takes Department of Health to confirm when you've been sent the documentation on a test? How long does it take for that situation room and the people in the situation room to confirm a positive test?

Commissioner La Rocca: Sure. So, we know for New York City residents, the turnaround time is quick. It can be a matter of you know, tens of minutes. So, we know this is a very quick turnaround and we know that the dedicated team they've put in place is ensuring that.

Mayor: So Reema, the answer to your question is minutes. The whole system is predicated on the verification of the test being as quickly as humanly possible, in many cases, just a few minutes. And then immediately taking the next steps. And we need that to go very fast. And that's why we have a situation room that's supposed to make those decisions immediately, act on them. And we have one person in charge and that's Commissioner La Rocca, who is someone who knows how to make decisions quickly to her great credit.

Okay. Everyone, as we close up, look, I just want to say you see a lot of people pulling together. You see a lot of people doing whatever it takes. You heard just then that situation room, making sure that there's action to keep our students safe and our educators, our school staff safe. That's an operation going from 5:30 in the morning to 9:30 at night. Folks are there nonstop to make sure that you're safe, your family's safe. The folks who worked for the City are sacrificing all the time because they believe in this city. The folks here at City Hall, I've been amazed. People worked again every single day since the crisis began. Our first responders, our health care heroes, our educators, the selflessness, the sacrifice that you see among our public workers is outstanding. We're going to be making some other sacrifices here at City Hall as I announced earlier. But this is what we all do. We are here to serve the public. We're going to do whatever it takes. And that's how we're going to see ourselves through this crisis. That's the spirit of this city. We're going to do what it takes to bring this city back. And I guarantee you, this city is coming back and coming back strong. Thank you, everyone.

2020-09-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We're here today to talk about our public schools. I want to give you important updates and I want to start by saying, you're going to hear from Chancellor Carranza, you're going to hear from the president of the UFT, Michael Mulgrew, and the president of CSA, Mark Cannizzaro. We've all been talking, and I'm going to give you a sense of those conversations, but one of the things that has been essential to not only the conversations we've had in the last 24 hours, but what we've talked about over the last months is our belief in the power of public education, and it really is important to frame this upfront. We're in a country right now that's going through a lot. We're in a city that's going through a lot. We're in a democracy that is struggling and everyone can see. The hope, the hope the city, I hope of this country, the hope of our democracy, is to protect and preserve public education. This is what has always been the foundation of a fair and just society.

Everyone here at this table is devoted a lot of our lives to proving the power of public education, to uplift every young person knowing they will be our future. And what animates all of us is a belief that it has to be fair and equal. That a child who is the most disadvantaged deserves just as much, even more, than a child who was born with all of life’s privileges. Every one of us has seen the power of an educator or any member of a school community reaching out to a child and giving them that helping hand, that support, that love. Everyone here understands a school community is an extension of the family and the home. I can tell you that in my many years, as a New York city public school parent, I often felt like the elementary school my kids went to literally felt like another room of our house. We felt so close to the school community, to all the teachers, all the educators, everyone. It was a part of our life and it was what made our lives better, and our children felt that love all the time, and I've talked to countless parents who feel the same way. Now, we all know how important it is in the midst of this crisis to have every tool available to help our children and we will always, as long as we need, provide remote education at the highest quality possible, but we also know nothing replaces the in-person experience. There are some out there who suggests that remote education should be our future and I want to say, no, it can't be. It is our educators working with children live and in-person in the classroom, that is where all of our future possibilities spring from because that's where children are truly and moved.

So, this morning, I start with our clear, strong dedication to our public schools and to in-person learning. But I also want to be clear and very straightforward about the fact that real concerns have been raised by my colleagues and look it's true, labor and management will have differences. People have different responsibilities to their members or in my case to all the people of this city, but they are my colleagues, Michael and Mark. They are people I've known for many, many years, and we have worked together to address really complex issues many a time. Yesterday morning, they reached out to me and they said they had real concerns about specific things that had to be done to make sure our schools could start effectively, start safely. That although they acknowledged that some real progress had been made that not enough had been made and more had to be done to make sure that things would be as strong as they needed to be. Now you can imagine a conversation like that is a tough one and a complex one, went on for hours, but we worked together in a respectful spirit to work through each and every issue. I literally made a list of 20 different concerns that we're going to work through to address because they were real concerns, because they were honest concerns, because the knowledge they have in the school system is really extraordinary, and they would talk to their members all the time and they were bringing back information that had to be heard and acted on.

So, as a result of that meeting, we talked through what it would take, step-by-step, to get things right for in-person learning and of course remote learning as well to serve our children and families as best as possible while protecting everyone in the school community. We believed from day one, we could ensure health and safety first, but also ensure the best quality education. You know, if someone said, let's focus on health and safety and we don't care about our kids and families, I would have rejected that. If someone said, oh, let's focus on in-person learning, but without health and safety, I would have rejected that. We said, we have to do it all and we have to do it right. So the fact is that we talked about the different types of schools, their levels of readiness, and how we could work together to make adjustments that would best allow us the right kind of start.

So, here is the updated approach we will take, and it involves several phases. They move quickly and therefore we'll be able to serve children and families well, but they will include some adjustments compared to the previous schedule. So, here's what we'll do, beginning this Monday, September 21st, 3-K and pre-K, early education sites will be open, pre-K and 3- K classrooms will be open. District 75 schools, schools that serve our special education kids, kids who need a lot of support and love, those schools will be open. We then will have the next phase on Tuesday, September 29th, when K-5 schools and K-8 schools will open. And then on Thursday, October 1st, middle schools and high schools will open. Now this means the in-person learning. Obviously remote learning has begun already. The orientations have begun. Remote learning will continue throughout for all students as these phases come into play. But again, September 21st, this coming Monday, 3-K, pre-K, special-ed, and then – that means District 75 – then on Tuesday, September 29th, K-5 and K-8 schools. Thursday, October 1st, middle schools and high school.

Look, we are doing this to make sure that all the standards we've set can be achieved. Talked about over those last weeks what we gleaned from looking around the entire world, literally the best practices around the world, and that meant that we had to have social distancing throughout schools, cleaning constantly, face coverings on students and adults alike, a host of measures that had to be put in place all system-wide. We're continuing to deepen those efforts because we have to meet that gold standard for the good of all in our school community. Now, given the realities of teaching children in person in an unprecedented situation, and I'll emphasize this before turning to my colleagues, unprecedented, no one's ever tried to do this here in this country on this scale. It's just never been done before. Just like going to all remote in March was unprecedented, creating a blended learning approach while still in a pandemic, but serving people and helping to bring back our city, that's unprecedented. It's incredibly complex, but it can be done and it will be done.

I announced several days ago that we would add 2,000 additional educators to support our schools as they restored in-person learning. The meeting yesterday really focused on where there were still needs and where we had to beef up that number, and we went through a very specific process to determine what was the right additional number of educators needed. And I want to thank my colleagues for that, because people rolled up their sleeves and went through the whole system to determine the need. So, I'm announcing today in addition to the 2,000 educators that we announced several days ago, we're going to add 2,500 more. 2,000 originally, 2,500 more, grand total of 4,500 additional educators being added into our schools and classrooms immediately. We have, thank God, a number of different reservoirs of talented individuals ready to go. Several thousand who work for the DOE right now and other roles. We have substitute teachers, many of whom have been serving over the last month in our regional enrichment centers, many of whom have served in our schools before, thousands ready to go. We're also working with the City University of New York, which is going to help us find graduate students, adjunct professors people who know how to teach, people who are pursuing education degrees, young people who are planning to be teachers and here's a chance to start using that love and passion and ability in a classroom. Between all those sources we're quite confident we can get the 4,500 teachers we need and have reserve beyond that.

So, this is a huge undertaking. It is difficult. It's challenging. It's not the easy way. It is in fact the hard way, but it's the right way. I want to thank all my colleagues for doing the hard work to see this through and we'll continue to do that work literally hour to hour to get our school system up and running well. Now, I want to talk – turn, excuse me – to the man who has been engineering this effort with an incredibly dedicated team at the DOE. I cannot begin to tell you the long hours these folks have been working, weekdays, weeknights, weekends, it never stops, but they've been fighting through to get the schools up and running well and safely for all. I'll turn now to our Chancellor, Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think about how far we've come since March. And I think about that a lot. And how resilient, not only our students and staff, but our families have been over the last six months, adjusting and adapting at every single turn. And I'm proud of all of our students, staff, and families. And I want to thank you. And I want to thank President Mulgrew and President Cannizzaro. Again, it was truly incredible to be in that room and listen to that conversation about how we're going to make sure we do this right. So all of our work up to this point, we know people are working hard and we're going to continue to build on that work that's been done at our school sites as we move forward. Today's announcement means that all of the planning our schools have done up to this point will continue and we're giving schools more staff, more time and more support. And this helps us to have the strongest possible start to the most unconventional school year any of us have ever experienced. And I know that I have 100 percent confidence that our educators will rise to the occasion. Our students will have new teachers coming on board and we'll have lesson templates and plans set up to hit the ground running. We'll offer even more opportunities for professional learning to strengthen remote practices. And we're going to make sure that through all of it, our students have access to their guidance counselors and social workers. Because the learning starts for all students on Monday. While only some learners are coming in person on the 21st, all learners will begin day programs remotely on Monday.

In a normal year reopening the nation's largest school system is an incredible feat. I used to watch this from afar in awe. This year, what we're achieving is truly unprecedented. Our staff have shown tremendous patience and leadership. And I'm grateful for all of them showing up and keeping our students front of mind, every single day. I'm also grateful to our nurses and custodians and food service workers who have shown up throughout the pandemic and continue to do so. They are my heroes. And I know so much has changed, but our fundamental mission has not -- high quality public education for students of New York City. And we truly believe that given where our city is, this is possible in a blended learning environment with all of the safety precautions in place. This will help us do that.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Chancellor. And now turning to our labor colleagues. Again, we all have talked constantly. We're going to be talking a lot more in the days ahead as we complete this phase of the mission. I want to thank both of them for their extraordinary commitment. So I'll start with someone who, again, I've known a long time and has always told it like it is to me. And been really clear about both what is a problem, but also what is a solution. I'll turn to the President of the UFT, Michael Mulgrew.

President Michael Mulgrew, United Federation of Teachers: Thank you. I want to first thank the Mayor and the Chancellor for a very, very forthright conversations that we had yesterday. And a lot of people would not have handled it in a responsible way. I know a lot of people would have been worried about different things, but to say, if we're going to do this, we must make sure that we get this right. We want our school system up, running, and safe. And we want to keep it up, running, and safe because that's what the families, the children of this city deserve. And this is an unprecedented challenge. Most people would run away and find a way out to not deal with taking on such a responsibility. So I thank the Mayor and the Chancellor for really being partners – partners in trying to make this work, but partners who are not afraid to say, we need to do, we need to step back. We need to figure out a couple of things. We now have seen after a 10 day period, that there are some blanks that we have to fill in. And we're going to do that because we have a promise, a promise to every parent, to every teacher, to every guidance counselor, to every student that walks into our buildings that we are doing what needs to be done to make sure that you have your education. But it is also safe.

To the teachers, to all of the guidance counselors, the paraprofessionals, the therapists, the secretaries, to the principals and the assistant principals, it's been a tough two weeks. But your voice, your advocacy about what you need, the evidence of that work is here today at this table. Everyone understands that what you're doing and what you're attempting requires a bravery, requires you being our heroes right now on behalf of our children. And I've always told people that you all are the guardians of the children of this city. You've been through more than almost any other school system throughout our history. And you've always risen to protect our school system and to protect our children. And that's what we're all doing here today. We are protecting our schools, our children, and their families, and ourselves against this horrendous situation that we face, which is known as our pandemic. But we're doing it in a way where we have each other's backs. So, for me, yes, I thank everyone here at this table for our really tough, but constructive conversation yesterday. This is the leadership that you need to see more often across this country. But again, the true piece about today is we are here making sure that we're going to -- the responsibilities that the system owes you, owes every single person in a school building, whether you work there, or you're coming to class, we are going to make sure that it is in place. So, I thank you all. You truly are the heroes and the guardians of the children of this city.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Michael. And now I want to turn to Mark and say that in our meeting yesterday and in other meetings, Mark has laid out very specific concerns and real life situations that he brings back from talking to his members, that have really illustrated both the things that are working and the things we just have to do better. And again, always helping to point us to the solutions that we have to reach together. So I want to introduce the President of the CSA, Mark Cannizzaro.

President Mark Cannizzaro, Council of School Supervisors and Administrators: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And Chancellor, thank you. And Michael, thank you also for your comments. Look, we would all rather not be here today, having this announcement, and making this announcement. We would much rather be talking about opening school on Monday to all of our students. I know that our school leaders and teachers and all of our staff, as well as of course, and probably more so than anyone else, our parents and students would much rather be walking into school buildings on Monday morning. In any form that we can possibly put together, whether it's this remote form where some of them are coming or not. However, it wouldn't be safe. It wouldn't be safe. Our folks have been telling us and the teachers and the school leaders and all the folks that are working in the schools have been letting us know that right now, currently they're understaffed. They need some other items. Some schools, you know, need some more safety tools. It's varied across the city. But opening Monday to everyone would not have been safe for our students. And this is something we've been speaking about over and over again. And I do appreciate, I know you've heard this a couple of times around this table, but the conversation we had yesterday was real. It was deep and everybody listened to each other. And I was happy to hear that. I was happy to see that. And my hope is that we've come to a solution. Now we'll be able to staff up. We have a week or so to get people into buildings. We have a week or so to match them with the schools. And I look forward to working with the DOE so that we can have these folks provided and we could open safely and efficiently and effectively for our children. Thank you.

Mayor: You very much, Mark. Well, everyone, look, we're all working together and we're going to keep working together, every single hour, literally to get things right. So, I want to thank all my colleagues because we are devoted to getting it right. We will. And we're going to move forward quickly from this point on starting with Monday, with the kids who will be coming back to school.

So, let me do a few things before we go to questions from the media. And the first thing that reminds us all of why we're even able to have this conversation. Because we've all worked together to fight back the coronavirus. And I want to put that in perspective. There's a lot of places in this country, couldn't even get to first base because unfortunately they have not listened to the science and the data or didn't act accordingly. And their situations don't even allow for consideration of bringing school back. But the people of this city really worked hard at it. So today's indicators again, show how much progress we have made.

So, indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 patients, today's report 85. And among those 85, the positivity level for COVID-19 confirmed at 9.52 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold of 550 cases, today's report 285. And number three, and most importantly, number of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold of five percent, today's report again the envy of the nation, 0.87 percent. Let's say a few words in Spanish. And then say one more thing. Before we go to Q and A. In Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

So, those words in Spanish every day are a sign of respect and a sign of outreach to millions of New Yorkers who speak Spanish as their first language or one of their languages. And it's important now that I say something in another language, because this is New York City and we are the most diverse and wonderful place in the world. And we celebrate each other and we respect each other. So now I'll turn into another language and say, Shanah Tovah, and wish A very, very happy new year to all Jewish New Yorkers and all of us look forward to this new year. And, in fact, we all want a new year, whatever religion or to celebrate. So, this is the first -- we will be very happy to have it. So, Shanah Tovah to all. With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. And please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will now begin our Q and A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Chancellor Carranza, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, CSA President Mark Cannizzaro, First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, Commissioner Melanie La Rocca, Dr. Mitch Katz and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Mayor: Juliet?

Question: Yes, I'm here. Good morning all and good morning Mr. Mayor. Yeah, I'm doing okay. How are you?

Mayor: We’re making it happen.

Question: All right. So, my question is this to you and for anybody there on the panel. Given that you're phasing this in now and there seems to – appears to be still safety concerns, what is the most pressing safety concerns that you're seeing? Or is there a repeated problem that is surfacing as you pause on this program?

Mayor: I appreciate the question Juliet and I'll start, and my colleagues can add. Look, we have a pretty rigorous checklist to say the least of things that we have to address. And we've talked about a lot of them. And I feel good about the vast majority of schools on these things, the PPE, the cleaning, the ventilation systems. There's still specific issues that have to be addressed. But I think the thing we all came together on and said really had to be nailed was the staffing level. That this was the area where the specific number had to be agreed on together. And we had to take a bigger step. And this was something that kind of cut through a lot of other conversations. And bluntly, a lot of other bureaucracy, was just putting the different key figures in one room to have one conversation and really determine what that number was. Because the staffing allows for everything else to work. That would be my answer. And let's see if my colleagues want to add.

President Mulgrew: What we've seen is that everyone here is listening to all the school communities about what's going on. So, at first we had the ventilation issues, which we still have some, but we are – there's clearly, I can report that the City really is on top of them now, in terms of all different independent people going in, checking our school ventilations. And those things while we still have some issues, those things are being worked out right now. The COVID testing, the situation room that was set up over the weekend and went live on Monday. We have seen a major improvement in terms of testing results. We still have a little work to do on the contact tracing, but Dr. Katz and his team have been phenomenal on how that has to work. You know, trying to explain to people the difference between going to an H + H testing facility versus going to a private facility. That's – those are nuances that are really hard for people to understand. But there is a difference on how a case would be reported at that moment. And then it's the proper PPE. Thank God that we have a pretty decent stockpile of all the PPE that is needed. But getting the right PPE in the right school setting is something that should be basically worked out by the beginning of next week. So it's really been more of an exercise -- not an exercise. It's been constant monitoring and listening. And saying, okay, we, you know, this school system is bigger than most cities in the United States. And just think about making sure that everything's right in every building inside of a city. And that's what we're doing right now as a school system. So it really it is about different things at different school communities. But saying that we're here to listen, and we're also here to do our jobs and to make sure that we're doing everything that when you voice a concern and it's real, we're going to be there to help you get through that and make it right.

Mayor: Juliet, go ahead.

Question: Yes. Okay. So, regarding staffing now, remote learning is going to continue. Do you have enough teachers, staffers, you know, however, you're working this out to do the remote learning?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to the Chancellor. Yes. And I want to be clear, remote learning can't do what in-person learning can do, but remote learning has to be as good as it can be. And it will continue to develop and get better as we go along. I truly believe when you're trying a massive, massive endeavor, you have to get started to figure out how to make improvements. You can't do them on a drawing board. You have to get into the work and start figuring out what works and what doesn't. So, yes, we're going to everyone, but I expect with each passing week, it will improve. Go ahead Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: I would only add that as we look at remote learning, remote learning has always been a part of the equation for this school year because of the circumstances that we are with a pandemic. So, we – that's the whole point of this week doing the orientation with remote learning, making sure that we have connectivity, make sure students can get on. We've also curated, working very closely with the UFT, a whole series of curricula that is based in a virtual library, if you will. Where we've set up Google classrooms for teachers that perhaps have never done virtual learning before, so that they can go in, it's a one stop shop. So again, those things will continue to be not only curated and developed, but promulgated. We also have plans and conversations where we're working on very specific things that teachers will do to assist in the development of materials for remote learning. Again, our goal is always to the greatest extent possible, give students real – we call it synchronous, but real people online at the same time. And as we ramp up the school year that that's going to continue to get better. But we've been very honest to say, there has to be some flexibility at the start because we're all trying on a new pair of shoes here in a very different environment.

Mayor: Well said. Okay, go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Dana from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor –

Mayor: Hey, Dana, how you doing?

Question: I’m all right. I'm just curious what changed. You know, experts and union leaders have been saying for weeks now that you'd need more educators. I mean, did this have anything to do with complaints about blended learning students not getting live instruction at home? I'm just curious what was the straw that broke the camel's back here?

Mayor: Yeah. Dana, it's a great question. And I'll tell you, you know, as I referred to a few minutes ago, sometimes you have to put the right people in the room and recognize that as earnest as everyone's efforts have been, and they have been throughout the Department of Education, certainly in every school, the information flow about exactly what was needed where, needed to be improved. And when I heard Mark and Michael talk about specific school staffing needs that still were not being resolved in time enough – look, they’re leaders, I'm a leader, we're managers. I heard an honest concern, and it just was clear to me that we did not have a clear enough number and that we had to agree to a number that folks who had the ability to hear exactly from every school, what was going on in a different way than the DOE bureaucracy hears, that they had to help us figure out what the true number was and how long it would take to put that number into play. Dana, it's really important to recognize here, there's a lot of talent available. There's a lot of talent available for good reasons, there's so many people who are devoted to our kids and want to teach, there's a lot of talent available for an unfortunate reason that the economy is so bad, that there's a lot of people who have the abilities and are desperate for the opportunity to work. So, we know there's a pool, but we had to get to the true number and the true timeline. And that's what happened in that discussion. It just became clear we had to make an adjustment.

President Mulgrew: Schools are highly resilient entities. Most businesses would collapse if they had to deal with what goes wrong in a school every day, and the school figures it out. When it became apparent – and this where I give the Mayor the credit – when it came apparent, one of the things every school has, is what's known as basically a snow day scenario, when there'll be a number of children, but a lot of staff or – when you don't have enough staff to deal with the number of children, you put children in large gatherings and put teachers in front of them. When it became apparent, the snow day scenario cannot be used in the pandemic. you cannot put large numbers of children in a room, in an auditorium, and therefore you had to have a teacher in front of every classroom. When the Mayor saw that it was clear, at that moment, he said, this is not acceptable, we are not going to let children in schools be put in that position. So, we have to figure out how we're going to get to a better place, because this is not acceptable. And that's really what happened at that moment. And that was something that when you have an understanding of how the schools actually operate and all of their resiliencies and contingency strategies that they have, and some of those tools are being taken away from them because of the pandemic then we have to recognize that we have to figure out a different way to help and support them, because they don't have the tools that they always had in terms of emergencies and things that pop up.

Mayor: That's right. And I want to add one more thing, and I want to reference what Michael said. It is exactly – it was one of the crucial parts of the conversation. And then something Mark said about when school buses arrive, being able to handle the kids coming off the bus with new realities. Now, of course, we're going to have a lot fewer kids coming off the bus than we normally do, but it was another one of those things that made clear, we've got to account for that more strongly and having additional days for a little more of a phase-in to get that right, this is exactly the kind of just blunt, direct observation from the field that I truly appreciate, you know, just hearing directly from folks who are hearing from the folks at the frontline and laying out what needs to be fixed. And we now figure that – we can now figure out the ways to specifically fix each and every one of these challenges. Go ahead, Dana.

Question: Thank you. On a related note, one of the reasons you were wary of opening indoor dining this month is because you wanted to cushion between that and the reopening of schools. Will this prompt you to push the restart of indoor dining back further into October?

Mayor: No, look, that's a good question, but that's a decision the State made. I understand that decision. As you know, there was some things we had concerns about and we'll continue to look at that really carefully, but particularly the concern I have there is the threshold and making sure when it comes to indoor dining, that we are keeping the city below a two percent level of positivity and, so far, thank God, we are. I am heartened every single day – literally, Dana, one of the first things I do in the morning is check the morning indicators every day. And, you know, it is striking how well we're doing now. We got to keep doing the hard work. But, no, I think we will be able to keep all these pieces moving together.

Moderator: The next is Gloria from NY1.

Question: Good morning. Mr. Mayor, I just want to ask us the three of you, and with all due respect, part of what you just said is sometimes you have to put the right people in the room. We have been hearing about staffing concerns from both unions and teachers for weeks now. You have to put the right people in the room and you're talking about the information flow. So, what can you say to parents today that are watching this and feeling like you are planning by the day, that there hasn't really been a good plan put in place and that you haven't been responding to the very concerns that the unions have been raising for days? What's going on – what happened here?

Mayor: Gloria, I think our parents – and I was one for a long time in our public schools – they're a lot more pragmatic than you might imagine. New York City public school parents understand we're dealing with an incredibly difficult situation, a really imperfect situation. They understand the real life of the city. Who are the parents of New York City public schools? They are overwhelmingly working class people and lower income people and certainly some middle class people as well. There are overwhelmingly outer-borough residents, they are people who understand the realities of life and they're not shocked when something this difficult has to be adjusted from time to time. But, in truth, of course, I heard those concerns that were raised by the unions and I heard the DOE’s response, and I think there was truth on both sides. It's not shocking that you're going to hear folks who advocate for their members asking for something, and then folks who do that work day-to-day of the administration saying, we think we can get this done with less. Their job is to try and get it done with as little as possible for all of our sakes as taxpayers, obviously, and to try and make it efficient and effective. But when I say put the right people in the room, sometimes you got people who are earnestly trying to figure out the right way to do things, but something's not connecting and it's not unnatural. It happens in life and particularly happens in big complex situations and particularly happens in a crisis atmosphere like a pandemic. I've been through it now for months and months. Sometimes you need to cut through it and say, well, wait a minute, I heard you say this, that sounded like too much. And then they'll say, no, what you said was too little and okay, but where is the problem and how do we fix it? And how long will it take? And we just worked it through and came up with a number that we all agreed was viable and doable. And that's why we're moving forward with it. Go ahead.

Question: I guess I just want to pose the same question to the union leaders sitting beside you and ask them directly if they feel that you have been responding to their concerns. Again, staffing is not something that we have been hearing about just this week.

President Cannizzaro: So, obviously we had some disagreements early and yesterday we sat down and the Mayor listened to our concerns.

President Mulgrew: And, in terms of the staffing, yes, we've been speaking about it. But now that the schools – we’re actually in the buildings and schools were trying to schedule which students who are actually coming in, which students were going remote, then we, instead of an abstract or a hypothetical that we knew was going to prove true, it actually started to come into actual numbers of teachers that were going to be needed. And once that became apparent, then it was all right, now it is time to move. The plan itself, and I want to be clear here, the plan that we all agreed upon is the right plan. It is the most aggressive with the greatest number of safeguards. That also means it is highly complex to say the least. So, this is our way of saying, in order to stick to the plan, we have to do this. It's not like, oh, we're changing the plan. No, this is our way of saying, in order to stick to the plan, we must do this.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS.

Question: Good morning. My head is spinning a little bit from all of this. I'm thinking that this sounds an awful lot, like everybody's in a room with a Rubik's cube, trying to figure out how to work this out. Doesn't all of this point in the direction of having eventually to go remote because it's just too complicated to do the blended or in-person?

Mayor: Rich. I appreciate the analogy. Now, people do solve Rubik's cubes, but I want to say, it is really complex. It is tough. If what we wanted to do was the simple, easy thing. We all would have said, hey, let's go all remote, and we know we'll be cheating kids and cheating families. And we know we will be, once again, ignoring the facts that in-person learning is so much better for kids. We know we'll be increasing disparity. That would have been a given. Who does better with remote learning? Families that are privileged, families that have access to all the technology, and everyone is used to working with the technology and people have free time to devote to helping their kids because they're not working a frontline job, because they're not working two jobs. I mean, look, one thing I appreciate about everyone here is everyone has a commitment to social justice. Everyone spent a lot of time with the children and families of New York City. And there wasn't a moment where people said, oh yeah, all remote, that will be just as good or that will be just as fair. It's not. So, we did make the harder choice.

But what I look at here, you can be glass half-empty, Rich, or you can be glass half-full. The way I have kept going throughout this crisis is to always look at what is working. We're moving forward on Monday. There will be kids going into a classroom on Monday, and then the following week, the rest of the kids will go in and the problems are honest problems that deserve an honest solution. We spent hours together yesterday. We, again, we went item after item and Richard and I, Dean Fuleihan we'd pushed back on something, we said, well, why not do it this way? How about this way? Well, wait a minute, that sounds like the wrong way. And people worked it through and got to a point that we said, you know what, that's fair, that makes sense. But it still keeps us moving forward. So, complex and tough, you bet. But we believe, and we know we can do it. Go ahead, Rich.

Question: I'm just wondering whether the union leaders wanted to respond to that as well.

President Mulgrew: Of course, it's complex, but that's why we understand and we agreed to a plan. It's how do we make sure we're sticking to the plan? And, of course, in every phase that we do as we implement, because it's not five school buildings, you know, it's close to 1,800 schools, totally. That as each school comes up with what the issues are, then it's up to us to make sure that we're there with them and helping them figure it out and moving as a school system. Throughout the shutdown between March and June, thousands of teachers in many conversations that I had with the teachers across the city said to me over and over again, if I could just see my student for one or two days a week, the remote instruction would be so much more effective. And I heard that, but I also heard that the need to actually be with their students when they knew they were struggling was really what was at the essence of each of those comments. And we do have a very – as we all know, New York City has a very large student population with so many different challenges. And those ties to those families are so tight that this is what is driving us. And that's the passion that I'm hearing from so many of the teachers across the city, saying, we need to figure this out, and if it's safe, we're good to go, but you have to make sure you're doing everything to make sure that we're safe. And that's why we're here today.

President Cannizzaro: Yeah. So, I think this is more complex than anyone really understands. Not only do we have a staffing issue, a serious staffing issue that we're trying to mitigate against, but we also have numbers that are changing every single day. Students opting from in-person learning to remote learning, teachers and other staff members receiving accommodations that hadn't previously been approved and are now being approved. Our folks have been reprogramming their school buildings, I'm sorry, every single day, if not twice a day, since May or June. So, there has been so many things, so many moving parts. And when my folks continued to tell me that they still don't have the staffing that they need, to me that was the big red flag that if we can't, if we have students entering buildings without a teacher that is simply not going to work. And yesterday, we had a real honest conversation about that and how that wouldn't be good for the system. And we feel that we open this system in a week or so, and we do it right, it's a heck of a lot better than opening it on Monday and not doing it right. So, that's what that was all about. But yes, it's certainly complex, more complex than a Rubik's cube.

Mayor: Amen.

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor –

Mayor: Go ahead, Rich. I'm sorry –

Chancellor Carranza: Just got one thing. So, I really appreciate the perspectives that you've heard here, but what I want to really emphasize is that all of us feel that the children in New York City are worth it. We could have taken the easy way out. We know some school systems across the country that are putting a camera in a classroom, and you see the teacher walk by the camera. That's not in-person instruction. But I will also tell you that I get a lot of emails. And one in particular was from a mother who also happened to be a frontline medical worker who in March trusted her child to be in one of our regional enrichment centers. And she wrote me this email to thank the City for providing that regional enrichment center experience. And what she said was that she was scared because of what was happening in March. Yet her child blossomed, did great in that regional enrichment center because she had face to face contact with a teacher, with peers.

And with all of the safety precautions that were put in place, there wasn't one issue at that regional enrichment Center. So, she sees why it's important for us to have face to face instruction, in-person instruction. For me, that's the parent's perspective that doesn't always get elevated and we all agree, they're worth it. So, we're going to – even if it's complex and there's a lot of moving pieces and I got to tell you, one of the hardest jobs in America right now is being a principal of a school because of all of these moving pieces, our children are worth it. And that's why we're doing what we're doing.

Mayor: Amen. Amen.

Moderator: The next is Julia Marsh from the Post.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. I absolutely agree with you that our New York City public school parents are pragmatic, but what can you say to them about the absolute whiplash that they're experiencing right now, especially those working class parents who need their kids to go back to school and can't afford child care? And can you guarantee a hundred percent that there will not be another delay after this one?

Mayor: Julia, again, I've spent just so many years talking to parents in this city. And I think they understand we are going through a pandemic. They understand that everyone is working nonstop, trying to fix these really complex problems. And they will – I know they will find a way forward. They always do. We have made a move here, of a few days, to get it right. I think what my colleagues are saying, the plan is the right plan, but we have to make sure it's implemented properly, is exactly right. And that's what parents would want of us. They would want us to get it right. So, it's never easy. I do sympathize and I feel for any parent class to make new arrangements for a few days, come up with something new. It's always hard. I understand that. I've been in that situation myself, you're struggling to find child care. You're struggling to find options. It's not easy, but I know that people will do what they have to do. And then we'll be able to provide that support. I thought what Richard said was really powerful and that's what I hear from parents. So, look, what I can guarantee is if we keep fighting back this disease, we start schools and we go from that point on and we never stop. The one thing we all have to work on is to keep this disease at bay. That's the – ultimately the biggest challenge. These problems we're discussing, we're going to solve. The real challenges to keep the disease at bay so we can keep having that impersonal learning. Go ahead.

Question: And then, you said the biggest – the straw that broke the camel’s back here was the number of the staffing levels. We're now at 4,500 – that's still half of what the principal's union said we needed. So, could you and the union leader address whether or not you agree that now 4,500 is adequate, or does the principal's union still think there needs to be more teachers?

Mayor: I'll start and I'll turn to Mark. I mean, look, again, we're all leaders and managers. We're all used to hearing from the people we supervise what they think they need – and I know it's honest, but we're also used to pushing and saying, hey, is there a way we can do that, that maybe is a little more efficient? Is there a way to be a little more creative? We all do that all day long, constantly. And the people of this city and the taxpayers would want that of us. But we also have those moments, every single one of us, we’ll say, okay, you know, now, we agree that really does have to happen. Now, the other piece of the equation is what Mark said, we've got about 25 percent of our educators who've received an accommodation. They're all – I believe that process is almost entirely completed at this point. But, you know, that is a real factor. We have had changes in the number of students, there's been adjustments made. But, in the end, what we did yesterday, that was different – was said, okay, let's open up the hood together, all at the same table and go through exactly what we believe is needed, nail a number, commit to that number, mobilize that number, and now we can move forward. We could always learn something new that might cause an additional adjustment. But I think given what we just saw, the sort of everyone looking at it together and agreeing on a number, I feel good that that's the number that makes sense.

President Cannizzaro: I think there are two things. One is that change to some of our students who are in a blended remote model, experiencing some asynchronous learning until such a time when we're able to ramp up even further – that helped with the reduction of one. And the 4,500 number is to get through the 29th, with the K-to-five group. There may be additional when we get to the middle and high school – well, there will be additional need when we get to the middle and high school. So, you know, just those two points of clarification.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Lisa Rozner from WCBS TV.

Question: Yes. Hi, Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing?

Question: Good. Good. So, I have a question for you. We spoke to a Bay Ridge mom yesterday. Her 10-year-old had her first day of remote learning hijacked with pornography. She's in the sixth grade and this happened five minutes into it. Can you tell me how this happened? Do you know, do you know if it was an outsider or a student? What are the security protocols you're putting in online classrooms so this doesn't happen again? And how are you training teachers?

Mayor: Well, Lisa, I did not hear that until now, and I'm troubled by that and I'm sure every parent would be troubled by that. And I'm very sorry that happened. I will see if the Chancellor or the First Deputy Mayor have any information about that. I mean, we've put very strong cyber protections in for our school system. We had a meeting about that a week or so ago and I know there's very powerful protections in place. I don't know how something like that could happen to an individual student and that obviously worries me and we have to address it. So, Chancellor, and I'll see you after you have Dean has anything to add.

Chancellor Carranza: So, I learned about it early this morning as well. So, this is under investigation. There is no evidence at this point that it's an external hack. It's more of somebody internally within that school that decided to not play by the rules. So, it's being investigated and we should have more to say about that later today.

Mayor: Okay, great. Go ahead, Lisa.

Question: And then, can you talk a little bit more than about the security protocols that you're training teachers for? Especially if you're going to be all remote, starting on the 21st.

Mayor: Look, again, the security precautions have been put in place system-wide and there's always a training provided to our employees to be careful – in all agencies – to be careful about, you know, the rules of the road to how to be secure when it comes to dealing with online work. So, again, I'll turn to the Chancellor, see if you want to add anything about those protocols, or the First Deputy Mayor. Go ahead.

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. So, I'll just add that security, especially in a cyber environment is very, very important. As the Mayor has mentioned, we've been working very, very closely with the city and the experts. We have put up firewalls, if you recall, back in March, when we pivoted – we actually took the Zoom platform down, because we were very concerned with external vulnerabilities. We've now completely – it's back up and running because we've built in the kind of security that, that is very, very much what we feel state-of-the-art in preventing an external hack. Now, teachers also have guidelines and principals have protocols that they put in place as well. When you have mischievous students that decide not to follow the rules and how they deal with that. But, again, at this point, we feel very secure about the external threat being mitigated. And now, it's really – this is what all of this orientation is all about. How do you create your virtual classroom? How do you instill what the working rules of engagement are going to be, etcetera, etcetera.

Mayor: Thank you. Dean, anything to add?

First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan: No –

Mayor: You're good? Okay, go ahead.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, everybody here. I have two questions, obviously. The first is about teaching staffing. I feel like I've been asking you this question for weeks. It hasn't changed. It's been alerted to you, the DOE, by the unions for weeks that they need staffing, and now we have 4,500, but the CSA president said to me 10,000. I may have failed every math regent in high school, but I know that that doesn't add up. So, can you explain the staffing shortages and ensure that schools will open in-person to the new timeline you just announced an hour ago with those staffing – with schools staffed up?

Mayor: Yeah, again, Katie, I think we're doing heard from Mark, that in addition to the changes that we've seen in the specific compositions of schools, the fact that we changed the model to synchronous learning for the initial period to relieve some of that pressure, there have been specific adjustments made, and, of course, the 2,000 teachers that we announced a few days back, but we agreed that more were needed and we're moving those into place. And the important point here is that there is a ready reserve of educators who want to do this work and are ready to deploy immediately and do this work. So, as you just heard, the original concerns that came from the CSA were changed based on the reality on the ground. Some of what we thought could be done were changed, those assumptions were changed by the reality on the ground. We're going to keep working to get it right, but this is a number we all agreed on would give us what we need to get started. Please –

President Cannizzaro: So, there were – it's a combination of changes. So, I understand this has been a second question, driving at the numbers. So, right now, what you're looking at is, there have been policy changes in terms of our ability to do synchronous and asynchronous instruction. That has – it was a very creative way to start dealing with some of the staffing challenges. That absolutely helped mitigate some of it. At the same time, this number is specifically what we think we need to get moving right now on pre-K, 3-K, District 75, and K-to-eight education. We're going to do another analysis later in the week on middle schools and high schools. But it's a combination of policy changes, being creative with ways we can deliver effective instruction. As the Chancellor said before, we are not going to be a school system that puts a camera in the middle of a classroom and you see a teacher every once in a while, walking in front of the camera. We will not give that type of horrible instruction to the students of New York City, no way. Those are just school districts who have just mailed it in and have not – it's about them – politics – it's not about effective instruction. And we're going to keep moving on making sure that the staffing is right, but it's a combination of policy changes, how to come up with really creative instructional ways to deliver effective instruction, and constantly analyzing the need, especially now, as we move. We want to see what the middle schools and high schools at doing now with these new tools that we're providing them and then we'll analyze to see what the need is at those two levels of our school system.

Mayor: Go ahead, Katie.

Question: My second question is about the quality of instruction from substitutes, from grad students. What's going to happen? You know, teachers spend a lot of time on their lesson plans. They work lesson plans out through the year, what are they going to teach. If you have teachers – you don't even know – some teachers – there could be teachers that starts in two weeks, they don't even know yet where they're going to be. How does that work? And also, Mayor, I've heard from public school parents who live in the outer boroughs, who are Black and Brown, and they are maybe sick of being told they're pragmatic and tough and they're very upset about these changes. So, what's your response to that?

Mayor: Again, Katie, you can raise the concerns and I respect it, but I'm telling you, I've spent my life working with the same parents and I know people understand what we're dealing with here and that our job is to get it right, but to get it safe and to make sure we can provide a quality education. Look, I've spoken to so many parents who want exactly what Richard said from that very powerful example you gave – a frontline worker who the one thing she needed to know was that her child would get that support in the classroom. It's our obligation to make it work, but we have to make it work under extremely adverse circumstances. And we have to make sure it's safe for everyone. It's not easy to do, but I am absolutely convinced that everyone's working together to get it done and we will get it done. It's as simple as that. Go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Michael Gartland from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Michael. How are you?

Question: I'm good. I wanted to get back to Katie's questions and Gloria’s questions. You know, I hear similar things from parents. I'm a public school parent myself, and, you know, I guess you've known that this is going to be an issue for a while now. And you said today that you guys are just getting in the room yesterday with all the, kind of, key players. Why did it take so long to do that? And do you feel like at this point you owe public school parents an apology for all this kind of – one of the questioners described it as kind of a whiplash scenario that public school families have been experiencing.

Mayor: Again, Michael, I'll try again. So, again, I love this school system deeply. I really do. It's been such an important part of the life of my family. I mean, for me, it all springs from that. My kids went pre-K-to-12 New York City public schools – everything good that they got from our public schools, it would take all day for me to list it all to you. I feel a tremendous devotion to the parents of this city, because I've walked in their shoes, and I feel a personal devotion to the educators and the staff of our schools, because I've seen what they've done for my own family, but I've also seen what they've done for thousands of thousands of others. I've spent so much time in the schools over decades that, to me, this is the wellspring of so much of what is good in New York City. It has to work. I know everyone here, and thousands and thousands of other people have been devoted to getting it right, but it's extremely difficult. So, yeah, of course we heard the concerns. We all worked on those concerns. And as you listen carefully, you'll hear even folks who are strong advocates for their members say, yeah, there were adjustments and changes, like that change on synchronous learning. That was a change to try and address the reality we were facing as we saw more and more information coming in, more and more of the reality, we made adjustments. The numbers keep changing, because we're in a pandemic. The reason the numbers keep changing is all because of the pandemic reality. It wouldn't be changing in a normal school year. So, I have to say, I think I can say this on behalf of the Chancellor, and President Cannizzaro, and President Mulgrew, and everyone is working so hard every day at the DOE, and all the folks working in our schools – everyone is trying, everyone's given it their all, it's incredibly difficult, but, you know what? It's going to happen. It's going to happen. And I think parents, again, can see that they know everyone's trying against adverse circumstances. And I think the vast majority of parents appreciate that we're trying to bring back schools for their kids rather than giving up. And I think there's a lot of places that did give up and we won't give up. Go ahead, Michael.

Question: Second question has to do with this IBO report that came out this morning on this $32 million in additional cost per week to fund the schools. So, I'm wondering, I guess – one, do you view that as an accurate assessment from the IBO? And two, how is the City accounting for that kind of additional expenditure? Is that factored into the – baked into the budget or does it have to get baked into the budget? If you could just give us a sense of, kind of, the budgeting on like additional costs with all these extra teachers that the schools need.

Mayor: Sure. I'll start, then I'll turn to Dean Fuleihan, because in addition to being our First Deputy Mayor and someone who's been working literally every hour to make sure that our schools come back strong, he also happened to formally be our budget director. So, he can speak to the whole picture. But I'll start by saying this, what I've said to the team is we're going to provide the resources it takes. This is essential to everything. You heard what I said at the beginning, how much I believe that public education is the essence of so much of what we have to do in this city any year. But in this year in particular, we have got to get it right for our kids. They lost a lot in the four months of last year when education just wasn't the same. They lost a lot of ground and the kids who needed the help the most lost the most ground. We have to get it right. It's worth it. The story that Richard said so powerfully, it's worth it for that family. It's worth it for all families. It costs money, but it's worth it. The simple answer is, it's a budget priority and some of the expenses were accounted for an initial projection and, if there's new ones, we're going to have to find that within the DOE budget, we're going to have to make other cuts and changes if that's what it takes, but it's a budget priority. Go ahead, Dean.

First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan: No, that's exactly correct. We have existing resources that we're applying to these additional – to the additional staffing and we're making available an additional $50 million to make sure that this is completely accomplished and we’ll obviously find savings and we'll reflect those in the future financial plans.

Mayor: Okay. Thank you very much. Everyone, look, as we conclude today, I'll just say what I truly believe why, to me – and I would use a word like sacred and you might think that's too strong a word, but for me, it's not too strong a word. Our public schools are sacred. They are the foundation of what's good in our society. And this city, for generations, has believed that every child deserves the same opportunity and really strive to make our public school system what it should be for every single child. And we still have work to do for sure, but I can tell you honestly, over the last seven years, the devotion to getting it right in the whole of the Department of Education and with our colleagues in labor has been extraordinary. And everyone wants to get right for every child. They don't want to leave out kids. They don't want to leave out a child because of what ZIP code they live in. They don't want to leave out a school that was historically lacking investment. I mean, this is something we really need to understand that pervades this whole discussion today. The fact that for a long time in this city, some schools got it all, others didn't. Some communities got it all, others didn't. Public education did not get the full investment it deserved, but we are now living up to our ideals and actually trying to make public education everything it can and should be. So, I want to say thank you to all the educators and all the school staff and everyone at the DOE. I want to say thank you, because they won't stop fighting. They never stopped fighting. They're trying to do it right for our kids and families. And I want to say, thank you to our kids and families, because they've been through hell, but they keep trying to get it right and they don't give up, because they're New Yorkers. And I want to say it as squarely as this, the future of New York City depends on our public schools, period. That's why we are doing what we are doing, because we owe it to the future of this city. Thank you, everybody.

2020-09-18 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. And if it's Friday, it's Ask The Mayor day, my questions and yours at 11:05 for Mayor Bill de Blasio. 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AskTheMayor. And Mr. Mayor, it's been a few weeks, two weeks ago I was off for a long Labor Day weekend. Last week you had to be in Lower Manhattan because it was 9/11. So I hope you've been well. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I thank you, Brian. How are you doing?

Lehrer: I'm doing all right. We live in complicated times and I don't envy you your job.

Mayor: Thank you. True statement.

Lehrer: Let's begin with schools. Actually. I'm going to see if we have schools callers. Because I'm going to let the parents do it and the teachers do it and the principals do it. I don't see anyone right up on the board. Oh, okay, here. Ellen in Brooklyn. Ellen you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi there.

Question: Hi. I wanted to ask the Mayor about the delay in schools. Specifically, he is citing the staffing shortfall as being the driving force behind this decision. But that staffing shortfall due to the change in model has been well known. And the principals have been talking about this for some time. This seems very late to make this decision. The school my children attended is a joint District 75 and District 15 school. So that's special needs and not special needs. And that school does not know if it's opening on Monday. So I – it's Friday. I don't know if my children are going to school on Monday. Why has the Mayor waited this long to make this decision? How are we supposed to manage like this?

Mayor: Ellen, thank you for the call. And if you're in District 15, that's obviously my neighborhood. And what I want to make clear is we are starting Monday, all District 75 classrooms, all pre K, 3-K classrooms are opening up. And that means next week, there'll be about 90,000 kids in classrooms in New York City. And then the following week, obviously hundreds of thousands more. This has been a real challenging situation. So I want to be clear. I do feel for any parent who is trying to make sense of this under particularly horrible conditions we're dealing with generally. But this is exactly why we ended up in this bind. We've been trying to restart the entire school system with in-person, with blended, with remote, fully remote, all those options. Get the staffing right to the right places with changing numbers constantly in terms of who is going to be in school, who's not, both staff and students. It's been a greater challenge than anyone foresaw, even though we tried to make the adjustments and tried to put the resources in place in advance.

So look, it's painful, but we're going to get there and we'll get there quickly. And we're going to make sure it's done right. We're going to make sure it's safe. And so I ask everyone for some patience here. I do feel the frustration that parents are feeling. But when we're up and running and very few school systems in America are up and running with in-person education and doing it safely. When we're up and running, it will have been worth it.

Lehrer: People who I've been hearing from, other parents similar to Ellen, are frustrated that these phase-in plans came so late. And people have been asking, why didn't you see the need for this coming over the summer and announce it this way in the first place like Boston did with their phase-in plans? People say Boston. What would you say to those scrambling parents? Why didn't you see –

Mayor: I would say – no, I mean, look, I'm responsible. So I'll take any criticism Brian. You know, there is a mayoral accountability for education. So I'll take full responsibility. That said, what I've tried to do over months, working with the team at DOE is say that, you know, we have to stay to a rigorous timeline here because it means so much for parents and families. And we've been providing the resources and making the decisions to do that. I do think the sheer complexity here is like nothing we've ever experienced before. We've laid in the most rigorous health and safety standards anywhere in the world. That did take a lot of time and energy. We never have had to do this particular approach before. We've never been in the middle of a pandemic trying to start school. It got harder and harder as we went along to try and make the different adjustments.
As I said, the staffing situation got complicated because it was often changing, what would be the exact number of staff and students available in each school. So there were real challenges here that we foresaw, but in practice were even more difficult than anyone realized.

It's all because we're dealing with a pandemic that's thrown us every conceivable curve ball. But that said, we will have kids in school starting Monday morning. And then the following week, everyone else comes in. It's a delay, but it's a small delay in the context of the whole school year. So of course I would have liked it all to have worked like clockwork exactly the day we planned it. But I'll tell you, there's no large school system doing anything like what we're trying to do. In terms of the sheer extent. We are going to have over a half a million kids in in-person learning in a matter of a few weeks. I still think that's the ultimate goal here. Because parents are saying to me loudly, they – so many of them are done with remote learning alone. It is not enough for their kids. They need in-person. And as frustrating as it is, whatever will get us to that mix of in-person learning along with remote – parents, many, many parents really need us to get there.

Lehrer: So let's take a call from a teacher next. Nina in Queens you are on WNYC, with the Mayor. Hello, Nina.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Brian, for taking my call. Mr. Mayor, I really want you to know what is actually happening in the schools. I work in a high school and we have teachers and students that keep changing their plans. And a lot of teachers are getting accommodations to stay at home and students and parents keep moving, you know, either from accommodations to in-school learning or in-school to accommodations. And it's really impeding our ability to be ready. And you know, you and the Chancellor asked schools to come up with a plan for their schools, for their communities. And many of us did and our plans were rejected. And you know, I need you to know that our school has 55 minute classes. We used to have 65 minutes. Now they're 55. Now they're 45 minutes. So the kids that are actually coming to school, you know, two days a week, one week, three days a week, the next week, are actually getting less time with their teachers because you haven't provided us with the blended, remote learning, you know, the blended teachers. So the plan is really shortchanging kids. And if you had listened to us, if you had listened to what schools really needed, we, we could be doing a better job to serve our students. You know, we should have been spending the summer improving our remote learning plans. And now we're short on teachers. We don't have enough teachers in our classrooms coming to our schools. And you just – I'm really frustrated because you and the Chancellor do not listen to principals and teachers who know their communities.

Lehrer:  Let me get a response for you from the Mayor. Mr. Mayor you hear Nina’s frustration.

Mayor: Nina, I respect first of all, whether we agree or not, I respect and appreciate the work you're doing. And I respect and appreciate your perspective. But again, you think from your perspective, people aren't being listened to. I just fundamentally disagree. The Chancellor was a teacher, was a principal, has spent a huge amount of time listening to educators, as well as parents. I have too. I truly believe we're trying to do something extremely difficult here, but I believe it is based on that most foundational concept that we asked the stakeholders, the ultimate stakeholders, the people we serve, the parents and the children, what they wanted, what they needed. And they said they needed in-person learning back. And in-person learning matters. And I've talked to so many educators who agree, knowing it's an incredible challenge to make all this happen. But even sometime in school does so much for children. And especially for kids who are struggling, especially kids who are experiencing the disparities in our society. And are less privileged. That time in school with educators is absolutely crucial. If it's not the perfect amount of time or the perfect structure to begin with, we're going to keep working on it literally every week to make it better. But we could have done what I think would have been the easy and immoral thing and gone to all remote. And all remote, maybe some families it works well for. And I think particularly for more privileged families it works better, but for many, many children, all remote would have meant a year without anything close to a proper education. And that's just not right. Especially in a city that has driven back the disease so effectively. So I truly believe we can do this. I believe we will make adjustments and improvements all the time. Where we start in September is not where we end. We're going to keep working to making it better. But we've been listening to people and trying to make the adjustments based on that feedback.

Lehrer: Do you think teachers are just in revolt over this and they won't ultimately go back. And they'll find more and more reasons to delay? Some of them have been sending me the Cynthia Nixon op-ed in the Times this week, comparing safety protocols on her current TV show on the set, to those in her son's New York City public school. The TV crew and production staff would be tested before they started work. And then tested one to three times a week. Actors who need to remove their masks would be tested every day. By contrast, she wrote teachers and administrators could choose to be tested for coronavirus before the school year began. And that people entering the school could decide whether they wanted their temperature taken. First, is that factually accurate? And second, what do you say to teachers who still don't feel that that, and she went on to air purifiers, unlike in the schools and all this stuff. And you know, and there was a article that's gotten widely passed around about how an open window does not ventilation make for coronavirus purposes. Teachers don't feel safe. And I get that. I don't know if they're going to go back.

Mayor: Well, Brian, you're talking about tens of thousands of people. So I would really urge you not to –

Lehrer: Yes.

Mayor: – assume, because you've heard some voices and most likely the ones with the deepest concerns that that represents tens of thousands right now.

Lehrer: That’s fair.

Mayor: I'm sorry. It already happened, Brian. Right now across New York City, tens of thousands of teachers this minute are in their classrooms preparing, many of them to see kids for the first time on Monday. So I think the proof is in the pudding. They are back. They are doing the work, they're devoted to kids. The vast majority of educators, just like our health care workers, first responders, transit workers, everyone who showed up no matter what the risks and showed up under incredibly adverse circumstances. Our educators overwhelmingly are people who want to be there for the kids. In fact, have been pained that they couldn't be there with their kids over these last months. And they know that we've been working hard to try and achieve safety. And they certainly know their unions have been advocating for them. And look around the world, you've seen school systems open with higher positivity levels in their cities and in their countries than we have now in New York City. And successfully keep their school systems safe. And we are layering in many more safety precautions. We've thoroughly reviewed the ventilation situation. We are doing social distancing throughout schools. You're talking about ten kids in the classroom, 12 kids in the classroom. Everyone in the school, unlike almost any place in the world, everyone in the school has to have a mask on at all times, adults and students. This is the most thorough layering of health and safety measures anywhere in the country. And then I would argue almost anywhere in the world. And we know it can work because we've seen it around the world. We took every best practice out there. So I think what you're going to see is the vast majority of teachers are going to say, we're going to go and do this. And we’ve got to keep working to make it better. And they'll raise concerns and they'll expect to see adjustments and improvements. But they're truly devoted to their kids. And they know that kids are being cheated by all remote and especially less advantaged kids are being cheated.

Lehrer: On less advantaged kids. One more question on schools, then we're going to go on to some other things with some other callers. Gothamist has a story after months of preparation, DOE has yet to ensure all homeless students can participate in remote learning. And it says among the lingering problems, most shelters still don't have Wi-Fi access and some have inadequate cell reception. Children aren't allowed to stay in their shelter units without a parent. Some of them have to go to work during the day. The City's new free child care program will have limited capacity. That's pointing out particular things that advocacy groups for homeless children are raising. What do you say to those?

Mayor: Well, one in terms of the child care capacity, which begins with capacity daily for 30,000 kids and is going to go up to a 100,000, priority is given to kids in shelter. So in fact, we can accommodate a whole lot of those kids. Remember the most sensitive reality is for younger kids, not so much need in terms of high school kids and all. But for younger kids, especially they will get that priority status for that free child care. And second look, DOE you can criticize Department of Education all day long. They have been fighting through a pandemic and they actually turned around and put up remote learning in a matter of a week and kept it going even when it wasn’t perfect. And now they're opening the largest school system in the country when many wouldn't even dare to try, they have been fighting the digital divide intensely. This is something Chancellor Carranza feels very deeply, very personally, and in fact, when he and his team within a matter of weeks got 300,000 devices out to kids and families around New York City who had no technology that included – with internet service included. I mean, that was one of the biggest actions to address the digital divide in the history of New York City and it was done in an emergency context and people deserve a lot of credit for that. So any place, Brian, any kid who doesn't have a device can still get one for free, they just need to call 3-1-1. Any location where they're not getting access, we will work to add access to that location. If it's a homeless shelter doesn't have it, we need that reported in through 3-1-1 and we'll go work to get the access up immediately. But that has been going on literally since April ensuring that each and every child gets a device for free and the service to go with it.

Lehrer: Actually let me throw in one more here that someone wrote, why can't teachers teaching all remote kids teach from home? I guess the teachers have to go in to teach the remote students from the classroom without students in the classroom. Is that accurate?

Mayor: Well, again, I want to be careful not to get into the technicalities because a whole lot of different approaches are being taken here and different protocols, school by school. But what I'd say is that educators are working together, they're working as a team, when they think about the kids in the school building that day, the kids in blended learning are home that day, the kids that are all remote, there's a team approach being taken. There is a certain amount of communication and coordination that needs to happen with that. There is obviously things that have to happen in person that are different than what you could do remotely. So I think the bottom line here is what we're seeing from educators as they're going above and beyond because they want to serve kids. We saw it during the forced all remote of the spring, that it was amazing how much educators gave of themselves and worked out solutions together because everyone had to improvise. You know, I almost feel like when someone has a complaint –

Lehrer: But the specific question is why can't teachers who are teaching to remote kids work from home themselves?  
Mayor: Again, it really depends on the circumstance and what's going on with that school and their approach. I don't want to speak to a generality. I'll finish the sentence though. The complaints get heard very loudly. I don't see enough celebration of the fact that teachers continually create and work together because they want to reach kids better, and that's their central concern. How do they reach their kids effectively?

Lehrer: All right. Well, shout out to all the teachers. I know you support this, who seems like doing triple the work right now that they normally do. Here is a restaurant dining question from Thomas in the East Village. Thomas you’re on WNYC with the Mayor.

Question: Hello, Brian. Hello, Mr. Mayor. I hope you're both holding up well. I'm calling about the sidewalk dining, which I think is great. I love how it looks, but in my building, we're having a real problem because the restaurant right across the street plays live music about two feet in from there open door, six nights a week, five hours a night, and anywhere from a five-year-old girl can’t sleep to a senior citizen can’t talk on the phone and we really haven't been able to have the police or anybody else help us, and I think as a case of unintended consequences and something has to be done to control live music blaring out like this, and I’d like to know what you can do to help us, Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Thank you, Thomas, and I hope you're holding up as well. This is a fair concern, obviously. Thomas, please give your information to WNYC. We'll follow up. I mean, look, I believe fundamentally in what we've done with outdoor dining, I think has helped save a lot of restaurants, a lot of jobs. I think it's been great for the city as we come back, but all dining establishments have to be respectful of their neighbors and, you know, to have outdoor dining doesn't necessarily mean to have live music, obviously. So we have to make sure that is done respectfully in a way that works for the community. We actually have an office, our Nightlife Office does a lot of mediation to make sure that these kinds of issues get resolved favorably and community members are listened to. So certainly they'll be part of resolving this and I'm going to be hopeful that we can find an outcome here you'll feel comfortable with.

Lehrer: So September 29th for the higher grades for school, September 30th for indoor dining at restaurants, I think you see too much resistance to reopening schools and that there was too much pressure for reopening indoor dining. Do you think politics and the media are getting it backwards from the COVID safety and general public interest point of view?

Mayor: Well, it's a good question, Brian. I mean, again, October 29th –

Lehrer: September – September 29th.

Mayor: Is the K-5s and the K-8s. I'm sorry – September that’s it has exactly. September 29th, K-5s, K-8s. October 1st is middle school, high school.

Lehrer: Alright, so I was a little off on that. Go ahead.

Mayor: Yeah, just by two days, but I just wanted to clarify that. So I'm going to do it one more time so we're all tight. Pre-K, 3- K, District 75, special-ed, this Monday, the 21st. Tuesday, the 29th, K-5, K-8. Thursday, October 1st, middle school and high school. I think the importance of bringing back our schools needed to be looked at more deeply. I think the fact is that it is – kids went through so much those last months. You know, they missed a lot of education. They went through a lot of trauma. They need the support of loving, compassionate, trained adults in a school setting. We're talking about a generation of New York City kids that if we don't start helping them now, we let another year go by before they got that support and that contact, we'd really be damning the future of the city. And I think that has been underrated in the dialogue, let alone the fact that bringing back our schools as part of our rebirth and we need to move forward. The city has done an amazing job. The people of this city have done an amazing job, keeping the health care situation strong, beating back to the disease. We've got to keep moving forward because it's the only way to bring back people's livelihoods too, and their hope. I think some of that's been underestimated but the indoor dining, look, I think it's wonderful in terms of jobs, and I love our restaurants. I truly, truly do. It's so much part of our identity. I think the putting health and safety first, sometimes that got lost in the discussion. I think we ended up in a pretty good place, but I've been clear, we're going to watch our data, our scientific data really carefully to make sure that each step is one we can sustain, and we're going to be very public about that, Brian. If we think anything is not working and there's a health and safety problem, it's my job to call it out early so we can make the adjustments.

Lehrer: And when people who eat indoors in a restaurant need to leave contact information for test and trace in case somebody who was there at the time that they were there comes up positive?

Mayor: There's a protocol, and I'll be always careful when I don't have every detail. There's a protocol, I think it's – if I remember correctly – one member of each party at least has to. There's a protocol for keeping information, for sure. And I certainly want to encourage restaurant owners to be rigorous about that because it really is important for test and trace. You know, I think our restaurant owners have to be really careful, like all New Yorkers, but we've seen around the world where people weren't careful, that indoor dining was a nexus for the spread of the disease. So what I think is crucial here and I think the State was right and we agreed with this part, the small startup, you know, 25 percent capacity, lot of careful health and safety restrictions. Let's keep careful information. Let's see how that goes. If it's going well, of course let's keep expanding. But at the same time, we have to see how it interacts with everything else, opening schools, and the obviously increased level of activity we're seeing in the city in general. But thank God there's increased activity in the city. I mean that again is a sign of rebirth. We just have to watch literally daily how all these pieces are coming together, and if it's allowing us to sustain our progress on health care for the people of this city.

Lehrer: We’re out of time for today, thanks as always Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian, take care.

2020-09-21 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. This morning, the Chancellor and I, the First Lady, we were given the opportunity to see pure joy, pure hope, pure possibility at the Mosaic Pre-K Center in Elmhurst, Queens, to see kids ready to get into that school and see their friends and get all the blessings of a pre-K education. Teachers, educators, staff, everyone ready to go, ready to serve those kids and families, excited to get back to work the way they know works best, right there in person with kids, parents feeling such excitement as well. I talked to a number of parents and the word I heard the most was excited. And I said, you mean the kids are excited? And the parent was like, no, I'm excited too, because I know this is good for my child. So, there was an air of energy and spirit. And the Chancellor and I have had the pleasure of going to opening day many times, and this is probably one of the best days of the year, maybe the best day of the year, but this year was special, this year was powerful because we've had to overcome so much. The first time our kids are going back into a school building in large numbers since the middle of March, and to see those children so engaged, so happy to be there, it was truly inspiring, truly inspiring.

We talked with some amazing professionals, Beth Tekverk, who is the director for early childhood there, and Nancy Calabrese, the assistant principal, and a lot of other great, great, great professionals. And all the conversations were filled with energy, focus, purpose, but one conversation sticks with me. A pre-K teacher named Sarah, and she used to have a different profession and she decided she wanted to do something particularly rewarding so she went into teaching just a few years ago. And she was out there expressing her enthusiasm, talking to her fellow teachers, talking about how great a day it was. At one point, she just said out loud, let's get this party started. It was that sense of, like, we're doing something important here, we're doing something great here, let's do this, and it's going to be exciting, it's going to be fun, it's going to be positive. And I was just – I heard that, and I said, there's the theme for the day. Something great is happening today in New York City.

This week, 90,000 kids will go back into classrooms between 3K, pre-K, and our special-ed classrooms in District 75. Next week, hundreds of thousands more. But what we also saw was a real devotion to health and safety, a devotion to social distancing, a devotion to the temperature checks, all of the smart measures to keep people safe. And the masks, everyone was wearing a mask. And those four-year-olds were wearing their mask with no problem at all. That's one of the things that was most striking. They were – we saw them out there in front of the school for a while, in the school, they were wearing those masks. It was natural for them. That's going to be crucial to everyone's health and safety. Even four-year-olds, three-year-olds can do it. I want to thank all of the team at the Mosaic Center. I want to thank all the team at the DOE, everyone at the Tweed building, all the educators and staff out in the schools. Everyone's working hard. But I also want to thank all the other agencies that are helping, the Department of Health, and Health + Hospitals, Test and Trace, Buildings Department, Fire Department, you name it, School Construction Authority. Many others are chipping in to help because everyone believes this is one of the most important things we can do for our children, our families, and our city.

So, as we get ready now to see a lot of kids coming back to school, here's a message to parents – you're being sent, or you have been sent already, forms to fill out every morning. The health screening forms for your kids. That means you check their temperature and just give the status. It's really important to do that every single day. We'll make it easier. You can do it online. You can send in a piece of paper. Remember, every parent, we need you to do this, this is something we’re requiring of every parent, check your child's temperature in the morning. If they have an unusually high temperature, please keep them home. Let's make sure they get well. But by doing that, we're going to help everything keep moving forward for everybody.

Okay. So, today and this week, we have 734 schools that are opening for live instruction, in-person instruction this week, 734 schools. And on top of that, 1,050 community-based early childhood education programs. So, again, think about this. That's a huge number of schools up and running with the kids coming in, educators ready, 734 schools, 1,050 community-based early education programs. So, what does it take to keep building this out and keep moving? Well, first of all, we've all learned that sometimes the best thing to do is to have a war room and the DOE has a great war room up and running at the Tweed building. I visited with the folks in the war room. The visual I'm seeing here is of actually the situation room at the Buildings Department. That's a different thing, but the DOE war room where the Chancellor and his whole team gather together constantly to check on all the key needs, makes sure each school has what it needs. They go literally school by school. And then on top of that, the situation room at the Department Buildings, and this brought together a lot of professionals from key agencies, from DOE, from the Health Department, from all – Test and Trace – all of the agencies all in one room led by the Buildings Commissioner Melanie La Rocca, who is a great leader at Buildings but before that was a great leader at the School Construction Authority, knows our school system well. I want to thank all those agencies, DYCD, Youth and Community Development, also a key player in this effort because of childcare. Everyone together in one room. When there's an issue, when there's a problem to be addressed, everyone can address it in common, and that's a great tool.

And speaking of childcare, the childcare program also starting now, the Learning Bridges initiative, free childcare, supervised learning for kids from preschool up to eighth grade. This is meant to help working families, to help families dealing with some of the greatest needs. It will be determined on a priority basis, which families need the help the most, but this is now building out, and, again, free to all. We have 3,600 preschoolers will be in the Learning Bridges program from the beginning and families can apply and as seats continue to open up, they'll be assigned to them. You can apply at schools.nyc.gov/learning bridges. Again, schools.nyc.gov/learning bridges. And if you have any questions about the status of your application for childcare, go to learningBridges@schools.nyc.gov.

Now, let me turn to another important initiative that's all about supporting and helping our young people. And we know young people have been through so much, the Chancellor and I've talked about this a lot – very, very tough year, 2020, for the young people in New York City. And we're not going to ignore the challenges they're going through. We have to take them head on and we have to protect this generation that's been through so much. And who's been through the most? Our children of color who have gone through this crisis in a disproportionate way and felt the pain of their families and their communities the most. And that's particularly true for young children of color, particularly young boys, because they have been put through so much in the crisis – but before, because of the challenges and problems of this society that we must address head on. One of the things we can do most is provide mentorship – provide not just role models, but mentors who really provide support and guidance to children and particularly young boys to give them a sense of all of their greatness and all their possibility. So, there's a great set of initiatives that have been put together to make sure that we provide that support. And this program we're launching now is called the Mentors Matter initiative. It says it all, mentors matter. They make a huge difference in the lives of children. They elevate kids and give them hope. And this is going to be a difference maker for a lot of New York City kids. So, here to tell you more about it, as someone who's devoted to our children and their future, the Executive Director for the Young Men's Initiative, Jordan Stockdale.

Jordan?

Executive Director Jordan Stockdale, The Young Men’s Initiative: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As a former East Harlem middle school teacher, I can understand the challenges our students and families are facing during this time, during this crisis. We know that many Black and Brown boys struggle with school and have the highest dropout rates in education and rates of educational disengagement. We know that mentoring and particularly mentoring from adults who look like us can provide a transformative experience that propels us to our potential. That's exactly what the young men's initiative is about. Helping our young people reach their potential through funding, evidence-based mentoring and employment programs and programs to help our justice-involved brethren. Today's announcement, the Mentor's Matters initiative has three parts. First, a hundred black men and YMI will partner to expand its Junior 100 program to at least 750 Black and Brown male students this year. The program will provide mentoring and educational enrichment as well as expose students to career opportunities and offer financial scholarships for postsecondary education. Second, we will expand CUNY Tutor Corps to offer academic tutoring and near-to-peer mentoring to 3,600 additional DOE students. CUNY students who are with it within the New York City Men Teach program will be prioritized for this paid opportunity. These students are all males of color who are succeeding in their college programs and who are ready to impart wisdom on a slightly younger version of themselves.

Lastly, YMI will issue $500,000 in grants to local community-based organizations that offer tutoring, mentoring, and social emotional support to at least 4,000 students during this difficult time. The application period for the funding opportunity opens September 21st and closes October 5th. You can learn more at nyc.gov/ymifunding.

Mayor: Thank you very, very much. Jordan. Thank you for all you are doing. And everyone who's going to be a part of this initiative, just want to say thank you. It takes a lot of heart and a lot of love and a lot of commitment to help bring along our young people. But they feel that sense of investment and concern. They feel when adults believe in them, they really can tell – and they can tell when they are not believed in and that's one of the problems – the negative signals that our society for too many years, decades has sent to young men of color. This initiative is part of turning that around and showing they are loved and they are believed in and it makes all the difference. So, thank you. Thank you very much.

Okay, let's talk about our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients and today's report 51. And the positivity rate among those patients is 11.5 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases – today's report, 316. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold is five percent – and look at that chart, look how this has stayed so low thanks to your efforts. That's a beautiful representation of what the people of New York City have achieved. So, today, one percent even – literally 1.0 percent. Let's keep it at that level or even drive it down further. We have shown we can do it, let's keep going.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Chancellor Carranza, Commissioner La Rocca, Dr. Katz, Corporation Counsel Jim Johnson, Census Director Julie Menin, the Deputy Chancellor for Early Childhood and Enrollment Josh Wallack, Jordan Stockdale, the Executive Director of the Young Men's Initiative, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Last week, before you push the start of school back, I asked you how confident you were that things would begin on time, and you said, of course, things were going to open. We now know, after your meeting with the labor leaders, it got pushed. So, I'm going to ask it again with regard to next week, now that you have the situation room, the emergency command center, the new protocols and the labor leaders’ conversation. How confident are you that September 29th will be a go for the higher grades?

Mayor: Very confident, Andrew. We have seen some really, really good results over the last few days. And this morning, strong liftoff, and you heard it's a huge number of schools and early childhood programs and they're starting strong. So, I feel very good about the trajectory we're on.

Moderator: The next is Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Brigid. How are you doing?

Question: I'm good. Just some follow up questions on schools today. I want to just start with Learning Bridges, the childcare program that was supposed to be priority for DOE employees. We've been hearing from some teachers who actually have to teach today that they haven't gotten the updates they need to the program and our own inquiries haven't really gotten any response. So, I'm just wondering, beyond the email address you shared, is there some – can you tell us more about what's happening and what advice you have for teachers who are maybe scrambling for childcare today?

Mayor: Yeah. Brigid, look, we want to make sure that we accommodate as many people as possible. It's a brand-new initiative that was built in response to the pandemic conditions. And, you know, we've dealt with the challenges we've dealt with everywhere else, having to create the social distancing and find the appropriate space, make sure it's healthy and safe. So, everything's harder in a pandemic, to say the least, but the team has really worked hard to build out tens of thousands of seats for kids in childcare, in Learning Bridges. And that process will continue and will keep growing over these next few months. So, I'm going to turn to the Chancellor and to the Deputy Chancellor Josh Wallack, and they can talk about how we're going to do everything we can to accommodate teachers and to make sure people have someone they turn to, to get the answers to their questions.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, I'll start and then I’ll ask Deputy Chancellor Wallack to add. There are 3,600 early childhood Learning Bridges Seats that are available right now. So, notifications should have already started going out and I'm going to ask Deputy Chancellor Wallack to talk a little bit more detail about what folks can do if they're looking to find out where is my application. Josh?

Deputy Chancellor Josh Wallack, Department of Education: Thank you. That's absolutely right. We started this week with our preschool slots and, by the beginning of next week, we will have services available for tens of thousands of families. We'll be up to 30,000 Learning Bridges slots across the city, sites in every borough – we have 57 operating today and there’ll be more by next week. I think if families are asking questions, offers will be going out this week – more every day. We are, as the Mayor and Chancellor said, working nonstop to get these sites stood up and we will have thousands more stood up with each passing day. So, if you have a question about your particular application and you email learningbridges@schools.nyc.gov, we will get you an update very quickly. And as the Mayor and Chancellor said, we are setting – we are setting up the seats first for the families that need the most priorities – do include families in shelter, families that are working in our New York City school system and others – other families of essential workers. And so, we're working to set those up as quickly as we can. We will get you updates as fast as we can. And we will stand this up over the coming weeks.

Mayor: Josh, let me just – let me just push this question. One more point – on this specific thing of employees of the DOE, teachers, staff, getting an actual specific answer. Can you just give us a sense of the kind of turnaround time, whether they're going to get a specific email back or a call from someone? What's the time turnaround, because, obviously, people are worried right now to get those things resolved. What kind of turnaround time?

Deputy Chancellor Wallack: Absolutely. So, the turnaround time if you email learningbridges@schools.nyc.gov, we'll get back to you with a status update within 48 hours. And children of DOE school and program staff are a priority group, so will be among the first families to be served when we do have seats in your area. And we will let you know where we stand on that and what that prospect looks like when you email us.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Brigid. Brigid, can you hear me?

Question: Now I can hear you, can hear me? Great can either the Chancellor or someone talk a little bit more about this new building captain's role that was announced today and what DOE staff's responsibilities will be. Is it something beyond just taking attendance? We've been getting some questions from folks trying to understand what this role is all about?

Chancellor Carranza: Sure. Brigid. So I don't know what announcement was made about building captains. There really is no announcement. Every year at the start of school we have central staff several layers deep that are assigned to a school site to assist, to problem solve, to assist the principal. They're not there to take attendance. What they're there to do is to facilitate problem solving because start of school, you always have things that will happen. This is no different. So we have a building captains that have spread out across all of the sites that open for in-person learning today. Their role is to be there, to assist, to help facilitate anything whether it's a procurement of more PPE or it's helping with organizing and making sure that they have all of their supplies again, they're there to assist. They're not there to take attendance. Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Yeah. Hi everyone. I wanted to ask about the number of teachers that are going to be needed for middle schools and high schools, trying to figure out why that number is still an unknown at this point. At what point do you intend to come up with a number and is that going to leave you enough time to do all the hiring that's necessary?

Mayor: Yeah, Yoav, look, I think it's understandable anyone would say, why is this so complex? Excuse me, and I think what we have to understand is the realities of the pandemic, meaning we have had an extremely unusual circumstance. Teachers applying for medical accommodation, that's been on a rolling basis. Families deciding whether to opt in, opt out, that's been our rolling basis. The work being done in each school we've had really good results in terms of number of schools and classrooms ready to go we had only one building that wasn't. But still you've had to make adjustments around classrooms, and then when you add in that you have the realities of in-person education, blended remote education, full time remote education. It's a lot for everyone to mix and match all these factors. They never had to do anything like this before, so we all want it to be resolved and it will be resolved. But I do want to say to everyone in the school system, they've been dealing with extremely complex dynamics, but what has been made clear to the principals is they can hire people to fill those vacancies, and if they need help, there are DOE employees being applied to their schools, people – certified teachers being sent in where there's a gap. There are substitute teachers being hired. There are education students being hired and I see the pieces coming together. That's really the simplest way to say it. It's been a lot of complexity, but it's moving. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. I guess on a different issue, I wanted to ask about the food reserve that you established back in April with the $50 million. So our understanding is that a decision was made essentially to begin distributing most of that food in part, because of the need at pantries. But it also seems like the decision was made that a food reserve of that nature is no longer necessary, and I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, get given kind of what seems like an increasing number of kind of emergencies and natural disasters. Are you planning on continuing some kind of reserve along those lines?

Mayor: Yeah, Yoav, it's a great question. I appreciate this question because it gets back to why we established it to begin with. I try to always tell people what I'm seeing, but I also try and help people see the good along with the bad. There was a point in March where I was getting increasingly concerned about the supply chain around the country and what it meant for New York City, and I specifically ordered the creation of the food reserve. I will happily tell you Yoav, that my fears were not realized, that the supply chain held there were, there were some glitches along the way, but nothing profound, a supply chain held. The bigger problem we had in New York City was people buying in large quantities and stores taking more time to get stocked, but not that there wasn't a constant flow of food and other supplies coming in. So it makes sense when we have immediate needs to draw off that reserve to some extent, but we should keep we're, we're not done yet as a city or as a nation with this crisis. So we do need to keep a certain amount of reserve and we will for sure.

Moderator: The next is Mariah from the Washington Post.

Mayor: Mariah. Can you hear me?

Question: Yes. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yep.

Question: So I'm working on a story about the families that have actually chosen remote learning and I was, I was wondering if you were surprised that so many families, particularly in the Black and Latinx community chose to do remote and why you thought that might be?

Mayor: You know, Mariah, it's a good question. I think the whole impact of this crisis is part of the reason. Communities of color have been hit the hardest here and have gone through hell, and if so many families have lost family members – it makes sense that there would be real concern and real caution. At the same time, I will tell you, obviously the vast majority of our school children are from communities of color and we have hundreds of thousands of families like we saw this morning in Elmhurst, Queens that want their kids back in school. So I am not surprised at all that a lot of people wanted to start with remote out of an abundance of caution. I'm not surprised by the many, many people that want their kids back in school for many reasons, including, you know, that they have to get back to work or they really think it's best for the kids' education.

But in November, there is the opportunity for families to then decide if they want to bring their kids back into the school setting and I think some families want to see, you know, at least a month or more of evidence before they make that decision and we're going to be able to show them something that I think will be compelling, and I won't be surprised if a number of families make that choice in November to come back in. Go ahead Mariah.

Question: Yeah, and one of the, one of the things that I've heard from several families is they said that they think that you're putting the economy ahead of their children's lives and that they think that you're using their children basically as guinea pigs, and I'm curious just to hear your response?

Mayor: Mariah, I obviously, if you know the work I've done and the Chancellor has done, and the Chancellor's literally devoted his entire life to kids, and we've talked about this question a hundred or more times someone who has devoted his life to children, if he had said, you know, I'm not comfortable opening schools, that would have been very, very crucial and it's been the opposite. He feels, I won't speak for him. He's sitting right here. You'll chime in, but he feels strongly the value of in-person education.

I feel it as someone as a public school, parent, myself – as someone who worked on education issues now over the last 20 years that we really ended up cheating a whole lot of kids in the last months of last year, not because anyone meant to, but because remote just couldn't give them what they needed, especially less privileged kids, and the notion of doing that again for a full school year to me was really, really unfair.

But Mariah, we set it up as an optional system and that's where I think it's really an unfair criticism. If we said, oh, you have to come to the school building, you know, in September or you don't get an education. People could make that point, but we've said to parents, it's your choice. It's your choice, and if you want all remote, it's there for you. But we heard, remember we surveyed parents and overwhelmingly, they said they wanted the choice. They wanted school buildings open, and I think the people spoke. The parents had said, no, we want remote. That would have been a very different discussion, but a clear majority wanted school in person for their kids. Go ahead, Richard.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I would only add, I agree with everything that you said that the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that the best environment for a child is in a school environment with a well-trained caring teacher and the support systems that come with in-person learning the benefit that we have in New York City. Having been the epicenter of the epicenter in March, but through the hard work of my fellow New Yorkers, we've been able to suppress this virus to a level that makes it possible for us to have in-person learning. We can't squander that opportunity. Children are in pain. They've been traumatized. I get a lot of emails but I'll never forget the email that I got from a parent who has a child with disabilities, who talked about explained to me in great detail, how her child had regressed and how her child was being harmed by not being able to be in-person, not receive those services in-person and how overjoyed she was that there would be an opportunity for her child now to be back in school. So again, we hear from a lot of parents, but it just breaks my heart as an educator, the thought of any child not being served, and as the Mayor has said, this is a choice system that we set up. So parents can make that decision, and we honor that decision. But I can tell you, we saw a whole bunch of parents this morning, the Mayor and I, who were overjoyed with their children, having the opportunity to be in person again, and teachers that were overjoyed to welcome children back strange times for all of us. But that's one thing that just doesn't change.

Mayor: That's for sure. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Bob Hennelly from the Chief Leader.

Question: Good morning.

Mayor: Hey Bob, how you doing?

Question: Very good, sir. I was speaking with Harry Nespoli, Chair of the MLC, and he mentioned that there was a thought among the unions that considering all that's going on now that you consider taking off the table layoffs until after the election, because there could be such a radical change to the atmospherics.

Mayor: Bob, thank you for the question. I think I'm a huge fan of Harry Nespoli. We have worked really closely together for years now and, and under his leadership, the MLC has really worked with us to find savings, including health savings that have been crucial. I understand what he's suggesting to you. I fear that we have to think about this beyond just the election, and so I think the problem we're all experiencing here is that help just hasn't come from where we expect it to. We expect it to come from Washington and the stimulus we expect to come from Albany in the form of long-term borrowing – it hasn't. The clock is running. Now, our labor colleagues have really been stepping up trying to address the situation, all the working with us on other savings. I don't think we can keep putting off things, you know, constantly we have to find some kind of solution as quickly as possible, and that's what we're still trying to do with labor.
Go ahead.

Question: Council members, Borelli and Cornegy did a press conference emphasizing the bipartisan support for a concept known as early retirement incentives, which would save hundreds of millions of dollars because so many of them are senior civil servants – are at the highest end of the salary scale, two, it would be eligible for those in the cohort that are most eligible from COVID exposure and possible death, and three would avoid blowing up the young civil service families, most likely to have small children when you lose your healthcare in the midst of the pandemic, and by the way, tend to be far more diverse because all the good work you've been doing with reaching out to a diverse nature of the population to fill these positions in the civil service.

Mayor: Well, Bob, I appreciate that point and you're right – across the city of workforce, we see more diversity and obviously notable in many places like the NYPD, which is now majority people of color. We need to keep ensuring that the DOE continues to become more diverse in its workforce. So you're right, this has been a central concern, and it does bring us back to the earlier time of question. I think early retirement as a policy is something we have to put into play. So I agree with those council members. In fact, I've spoken to the leadership of the legislature in Albany and many members of legislature, and there's a strong consensus that early retirement will have to be part of this package. Now, the problem is Bob, how much will it achieve given the savings we need? That's still a real open question and it only saves you money if you're going to not replace the line, and this is the reality, if you provide the early retirement option, but then you need to go back and fill that same role with another person and pay their salary. You're not saving money. So it still comes down to how many jobs we're going to be able to save going forward and the services we need to provide to the people. So definitely a piece of the solution, it’s not the whole solution, but early retirement will definitely be a piece of the solution.

Moderator: We still have time for two more for today. The next is Reema from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor and Chancellor Carranza and everyone on the call. So my – I have two schools related questions. My first one is just a follow-up on Learning Bridges. I heard the answers from the before. I just wanted though to press a little bit further. I'm just wondering, you know, we knew that this was a general timeline for instruction to begin and I'm wondering why weren't seats opened up, why aren't more seats ready for teachers who are going back to work, who don't have children in pre-K, but still need child care. Like, why has there been a delay in providing those folks with seats starting today?

Mayor: Yeah, Rema, I'll start and I'll turn to Deputy Chancellor Wallack. The fact is, again, Learning Bridges was being created from scratch on a very, very tight timeline and making sure that we could build this out aggressively, quickly, safely. It's been a really challenging endeavor, but we're getting there and the numbers are really going to grow. In terms of the specific timing, obviously the central focus has been students. We clearly want to support the professionals of the DOE that need to have their kids somewhere, but the central focus has been on families and their kids and aligning Learning Bridges to when school programs began and that's where the numbers would be, not as much, of course, with the children of DOE staff. So I think that's the central reason it moved with the opening of each level of school, but the Deputy Chancellor can add to that.

Deputy Chancellor Wallack: No, thank you. I’ll just underscore it. The fundamental purpose of the program is to give a safe and nurturing environment for children to be in while they are – who are not able to be in school buildings or programs because of social distancing requirements, and so we brought our preschool programs on that day so that students who are not able to be in their home preschool program, will have a safe, nurturing place to be the rest of the week, and next week, we will bring the school age seats on and we will have opportunities available for close to 30,000 children by next week. I think the other piece to keep in mind is that again, we are targeting certain neighborhoods, neighborhoods that were hardest hit by the pandemic and certain groups. And again, those are families in temporary housing, families residing in New York City Housing Authority development, children in family foster care, or child welfare services, disabilities, children of the essential workers and children of DOE school and program staff, including the staff of Learning Bridges itself.

We'll be working to bring these sites on as quickly as possible. We are trying to match them with particular schools so that we can keep cohorts of children together, and that's another complexity of standing a program like this up in a pandemic that we just need to keep that in mind. When we launched Pre-K for All, we put seats everywhere and any child could go to any seat. In this case on an even tighter timeline we're trying to stand up sites that are matched to particular schools, so we can keep cohorts of kids together. And that being said, we'll still have tens of thousands of seats soon. We're going to be reaching out to families and you'll hear from us within 48 hours and email us. And over the coming weeks, we'll have many, many more opportunities available. We want to serve everybody who needs it. We're going to get there. We're going to get there over time

Mayor: Go ahead, Reema.

Question: Thanks. My second question is about devices for kids. I'm hearing from many schools, principals, teachers, and a couple of parents who have said that their schools have not been able to provide devices for everybody who's requested one for this fall and it seems that some of, you know, a couple of people have said they just can't afford it from their budget. But the other issue I'm hearing about is that school leaders themselves just weren't aware until about mid-August that they'll now be responsible for fulfilling these requests, that it's not going to just come from the DOE and then that sort of delayed their ordering of devices. And now the schools that have been able to afford it are just waiting on delivery, and so it sounds like, you know, there's a chunk of kids at their schools who might be able to use like a parent's cell phone or something, but then there's a number of kids who they're not even sure are going to be able to log on as they wait for the device to come in and it's for a variety of reasons it sounds like broken devices, or they've decided they don't want to share with two siblings anymore. So I'm just wondering here, I know that chancellor talked a little bit about this last week, but can you explain from your understanding, you know, why this device gaps still exists and how is the DOE helping schools figure this out quickly as we start the school year?

Mayor: Okay, I'll start, Reema, and pass to Chancellor. Look, I am certain when it comes to technology, that there'll be times where we got to replace a child's technology or something went wrong with a shipment. Those things are clearly going to happen, and we want to address them every single time, and the Chancellor will speak to the transition of coming back to school, and what was the responsibility of schools versus DOE central. But I want to make sure we put the horse before the cart here. You're talking about, and I find it strange, honestly, the question about the child who either their device isn't working or something was wrong with internet service or they couldn't get a device. Those are all inherently valid questions, but I rarely hear the focus be on the fact that New York City did something that I don't know if it's been done on anything like this scale anywhere else and said, any child who needed a high quality device and the internet service with it for free would get it and that happened in a matter of weeks in the spring, in the middle of the pandemic. And I gave the Chancellor's team a lot of credit. That was a Herculean effort. The sheer egalitarianism of that effort was striking. There was no means test. There was no quibbling. It was just, if you need it, we're going to get it to you, and that spirit continues now. It is different when you have a whole school system up and running than when you're doing everything remotely, but I do want to come back to the sheer consistency of the effort to make sure that every kid has in real time what they need. So go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Hey, Rema, and congratulations on your award. Hadn't spoken to you since you got it. Congratulations. Look, we estimate there's over 900,000 devices, including the 320,000 devices that we've already loaned out to students that the Mayor was talking about, when we pivoted to remote learning. We have more devices that we've stocked for those circumstances in which students need either they have a broken device or for whatever reason their circumstances have changed. We notified schools in July that they would be handling the distribution instead of a centralized distribution that we had in March. Now, just to remind folks, we had to do a centralized distribution and a delivery method because we were all staying at home and schools were not open. So it just makes sense now that schools will be open for in-person learning that they will be the distribution sites. That being said, we also continue to order devices as well. And families, I'm going to encourage families to be in touch with their school communities. In fact, last week, when we had the orientation days, they were precisely for this reason, so that families could connect with schools if they needed a device or they needed anything else, the school would be aware and prepare to provide that for the student. So again, stay in touch with your school communities. We're working very closely with our schools and we will not let a student that needs a device, not have a device.

Mayor: Amen.

Moderator: Last question today goes to Kala from PIX.

Question: Hey there, good morning. The DOE log-in page was down at 9:00 am this morning for 10 minutes, effecting Zoom and TeachHub, and you guys had tweeted that you were able to fix it, but what do you say to remote learning parents and students who are frustrated with technology? Because we heard about some issues last week also with a school working outside because their internet wasn't working for orientation.

Mayor: Look, I'll start and pass the Chancellor. We've really been focused on the whole range of issues around technology. We obviously spoke about getting kids devices who needed them. We've been focused on cyber security. I want to thank everyone who's been a part of that effort to protect the DOE on the cyber level. We also been in touch with the key providers, Zoom and others, to make sure their capacity was sufficient for handling the restart of New York City public schools and all the companies involved have been confident. There's clearly going to be problems sometimes, but structurally, I think we're in good shape. Chancellor, you take it.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, sir. I really appreciate that, the context. Yes. At nine o'clock, for about 10 minutes, there was some difficulty with the log-in page. It was very quickly remedied, it's up and running. So Zoom, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, all the other platforms are up and running and we're monitoring that. I think it's a good example of how it's all hands on deck. We had, the Mayors referred to the war room where any issue is immediately escalated so that we are able to get on it. We got on it within 10 minutes. Everything's working. I'm also going to encourage any parents or students that have any questions to go to schools.nyc.gov/techsupport, and that's for any question, whether it's a log on question, whether it's an ID question, a student ID, student email, you'll be able to get the support that you need there. But again, I think the systems are working, we're identifying any glitches and resolving them immediately.

Mayor: Let's turn to a better topic at the ending, which is our parents, our kids, the fact that this morning we saw again, pure joy. Pure hope, pure possibility. If you want to be inspired, just go outside one of our schools as kids are coming in to start the day, as teachers are welcoming them, as parents are saying goodbye to their kids and wishing them a good day in school, and it's enthralling because you see this city fighting back, coming back and you see our kids getting what they need. They yearn for that chance to get into school again. I mean the kids this morning, they were really, there was something to watch. They were ready – four-year-olds – they were ready. They were filled with the energy. And you know, we all know anyone who's brought a four-year-old to school, is sometimes you get tears and sometimes you get hesitation. I don't know. Maybe these kids felt cooped up over these last months because I didn't see a lot of tears. I didn't see a lot of hesitation. I saw kids ready to go and I saw educators ready to go and school staff ready to go, and it's an inspiration for this whole city. So we're going to start this week strong, and next week's going to be even bigger, and we're going to go on from there and keep bringing this city back. Thank you, everybody.

2020-09-22 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: …out with kids, with parents, with teachers and school staff. Everyone yesterday morning that I was with in Elmhurst Queens, they were – the only word to say is they were pumped up. They were ready for the school year to begin. It was inspiring. It was uplifting. And, as you can see, children are – they always amaze me, they always inspire me. They are just ready to find the good and the positive, and the kids yesterday, going into that pre-K center, they were just excited and happy to be someplace that's warm and positive and with teachers who love them and care about them. And the whole school community, you could see the excitement all around. It's really, really inspiring – that's the right word. And this is a tough year, obviously – the toughest, in many ways, we've ever experienced, but kids were ready for the joy, for the excitement. Parents were relieved to see something coming back to normal, a little bit, something positive. And I think parents need a little relief too. And it was great to see that the educators were there to embrace their kids and continue to help the kids grow and learn and develop. So, it was inspiring and it was just another part of New York City coming back and coming back strong. Everyone in the school community deserves a lot of credit yesterday, all over the city. I monitored the situation and talk to the top leadership in the DOE, in our educator unions. What I heard consistently was, the first day of school at 734 public schools and 1,050 community-based organizations with pre-K and 3-K – almost 1,800 sites, and things aren't off really very well, very smoothly, thanks to the great work of our professionals who are there for our kids. And thanks to parents who worked with them as well. I want to give a special thank you to folks who don't get enough credit, but I saw them right there yesterday in Elmhurst doing a great job and I heard about their work all over the city – our school safety agents. Everyone that works for school safety, thank you. You played a crucial role yesterday, making sure everything came off smoothly. You were there to make sure kids were getting the temperature checks. You were there to make sure that everyone was safe. Thank you – a special thank you to school safety agents and everyone at school safety. You are part of the glue that makes our school system work and you do a great job yesterday.

Okay. Now, the temperature checks – and you see a great image there. Again, kids are so flexible and adaptable, they don't mind getting their temperature checked. And this way of doing it is so quick, it only takes seconds. This is an important priority – we want to make sure everyone's healthy and safe in our schools. So, there's a daily health screening. Now, look, the best way for this to happen is for parents to do what is required of them to take their children's temperature in the morning and record it on a health screening form. You can do that online or you can do that literally on paper and make sure your school has it. You can send it in online or put it in your child's book bag. They can bring it with them, show it to the folks at school when they get there. But in the event that that doesn't happen, the backup is the temperature checks. So, those will be something you see regularly at schools, making sure kids are screened and checked on. Obviously, any kid that has a high temperature, we're going to separate them and get them the help they need. But what we're seeing again is a lot of parents are immediately focusing on doing what we need them to do. They are taking temperatures in the morning. More and more, I'm sure we'll do it and fill out those health screening forms. It's going to help everyone in the school community. The more you do that, the better. And we're sending home free temporary – excuse me, free thermometers for any parents who need them. We'll be sending those as well.

Now, obviously, another crucial part of the equation, not just for our schools, for our whole city is testing. And we've said from the very beginning, what matters – testing, testing, testing, it makes all the difference. So, it is Get Tested Tuesday. So, I'm going to remind everyone, if you have never gotten tested, this is a great day to get tested. It's fast. It is easy. It is free. If you never gotten tested, get tested. If you haven't been tested for a long time, get tested. If your child's about to go back to school next week, get them tested. School personnel – many have been tested. Anyone who hasn't, it's a good time to get tested. Look, we know that when people get tested it tells us what's really going on. It tells you what's going on and what you can do if you need any help. And that's what test and trace is all about. For those who do test positive – and, thank God, it's not a lot of people in this city – but for those who do test positive, Test and Trace is there for you to make sure you get the help and support you need, you know what to do. If you need anything special to get you through a period of safe separation, it's there for you. And, of course, always free, available, simple, and in many, many languages. So, we want to keep reminding people how important it is to get tested. And so, today, we will have a testing locations at over a dozen public housing developments in the city. And again, you see the locations there – all five boroughs. These are some of our larger housing developments and a lot of the different parts of the city. Free, easy, on-site testing with community-based folks helping to lead the way. So, really want to encourage people who live in those housing developments or nearby, come on over and get tested. It'll be a really good thing to do for yourself, your family, and for your city.

Now, look, what we've found is the more we focus testing where the need is greatest, the more impact that makes. So, this is the hyperlocal effort that Test and Trace is focused on. It's made all the difference. And one of the areas now that been already involved in the hyperlocal testing effort and the outreach effort is Ozone Park, Queens. There's been free rapid testing available. This is the point of care testing with a fast turnaround testing, quick answers – and that's been available and continues to be available through October 2nd at the Queens Public Library in Ozone Park. And there are medical interpreters onsite – they speak Spanish, Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi, and Cantonese. So, really ready to serve the needs of that particular community. So, whenever we see an area we need to focus on, we've seen consistently what happens – a lot more testing, happens a lot more outreach, a lot more communication, and we see good results and we're going to keep doing that. So we're continuing that effort and ozone park Queens. We're continuing the effort in Borough Park, in Brooklyn – testing center open at Fort Hamilton Parkway in 41st Street. Again, crucial for people to get tested in that community. And we have other areas where we need to really focus more and we're going to see expanded community outreach efforts into neighborhoods where we are seeing some upticks in the last day. So, here are some areas we're concerned about Kew Gardens, Midwood, Flatbush, Far Rockaway and Williamsburg. All these are neighborhoods where we've seen some upticks lately. We need to apply a lot of energy and focus to these areas. You're going to see a lot of activity in the community to remind people of the basics, how important it is and what we call the core four – four things that you can do that makes such a difference – wear a mask, socially distance, wash your hands, and stay home if you’re sick. Four things – I can do this for things

[Laughter]

Dave, you have to – you have to train me on that. Four things that you can do that makes such a difference. And we're going to work with community leaders, community organizations, trusted members of the community to get that word out, particularly any place where we see an uptick. We saw a challenge some weeks ago in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, huge hyperlocal effort made all the difference, numbers came right back down. We saw that in Soundview in the Bronx. Now, we're going to be focused on these communities to make sure those numbers get back down where we need them to be.

Now, again, a reminder to everyone, the weather is starting to get a little cooler. It's now turned from summer to fall pretty rapidly as you can feel. So, now, we have a particular challenge around indoor gatherings and we have to keep reminding all New Yorkers, large indoor gatherings are not acceptable. There are clear rules from the State on this. Large gatherings are still a problem both legally and in terms of the health problem they create. So, we need people to avoid that. We do not want to spread this virus. We want to continue New York City's success. And here to talk about what we're going to do to continue that success and how we're going to really delve deep into communities to help make sure that no upticks get very far, our Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, sir. Well, from the beginning, we’ve said we're watching the indicators like hawks both citywide as well as at the neighborhood level. We're now seeing signals that COVID is spreading in some neighborhoods faster and wider than the rest of the city, as the Mayor mentioned. But as we've done in Sunset Park and Tremont, in Borough Park, in Soundview, now in Ozone Park, and elsewhere, we're launching a targeted approach that applies more pressure where there is growth in COVID-19 rates. We're doing this to communicate the urgency we feel and that we need everyone to feel about following guidance to prevent the spread of COVID and to protect one another. So, specifically, in the days ahead, we'll launch robocalls and WhatsApp messages, communications with houses of worship, core-four palm cards to businesses, distribution of masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer. We’ll place additional ads in community newspapers and we'll offer new point-of-care testing resources in these six neighborhoods at both Urgent Care and community provider offices. We aim to be seen and heard, so sound trucks will broadcast core four messages in these neighborhoods as well. Because this must be done by, for, and with the community, we'll enhance our partnerships with community-based organizations so that they can activate their networks to best reach New Yorkers. And all of you can do something about this as well, reaching out to your family members to your neighbors, to your colleagues. All of this is building on activity that has already happened, including calls, neighborhood outreach, ads, and interviews with news media. But where more COVID cases are seen, more outreach and activity will be applied. We have the tools to hold COVID at bay. We do this by avoiding large indoor gatherings, as well as the core four – particularly wearing face coverings if you're older than two, maintaining at least six feet of distance from others, hand-washing, and staying home if you're ill. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Commissioner. Listen, everyone, this is such an important message. Let's do the basics. Let's make sure we do not let this disease back in the door here in this city, because we've come so far and we've fought so well against it. And one of the last things that Commissioner Chokshi said, you know, kids – kids are so important in this equation. They have done an amazing job with the masks. There was a lot of concern that young kids wouldn't wear a mask. I was so struck yesterday in Elmhurst, every child wearing their mask, wearing it comfortably. We need this for the whole family. We need everyone wearing those masks. It makes a world of difference. So, let's get the word out and let's work together to fight back this disease as we have done so successfully.

Now, let's do our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19. The threshold is 200 patients – today's report is 59, and the percentage confirmed positive for COVID-19 is 10 percent. Number two, the new reported cases on a seven-day average, the threshold 550 cases – today's report is 333 cases. And number three, percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19, threshold is five percent – today’s report, 1.14 percent. 

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Chokshi, Chancellor Carranza, Commissioner Melanie La Rocca, Corporation Council Jim Johnson, Special Counsel to DemocracyNYC Laura Wood, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, and the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps. Dr. Ted Long. First question today goes to Al Jones from 1010 WINS.

Mayor: Hey, Al. Can you hear me?

Question: I can. Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Good morning, Al. How are you doing?

Question: I'm doing well. The Comedy Clubs – the Governor says opening them is too risky. Senator Gianaris is now floating a plan that would have them opening with 25 percent occupancy if they serve food and drink, 50 percent if they don't, 100 percent if they're outdoors – I don't know how that's to go, but I'm just wondering, do you think it's about time that that segment of our economy open up?

Mayor: It's a good question, Al. Look, we're doing this step by step and stage by stage, and that's what's been working. Remember, months and months of progress in the city because we've done the steady, smart approach based on the data. So, that's what we're going to keep doing. We'll look at that one. Honestly, it hasn't been one of the areas we focused on a lot, but it's an important part of life in the city. It's something we're proud of. Outdoors works so long as it's the right size group and there's distancing. Obviously, we always prefer outdoors. But, in terms of indoors, it's something we'll talk about. Dr. Chokshi and the team and I will work with the State. We'll come back with an answer on that soon.

Go ahead, Al.

Question: Sure. One more too – this is on schools. Back in the summer, 25 percent of the parents were opting for remote only. Now, that number is approaching 50 percent. So, what does that tell you about parents’ apprehension about the in-school setting being safe for their kids?

Mayor: Al, it's natural that parents – look, I was a public school parent. I absolutely think it makes sense that parents wanted their kids back in school. That was their aspiration. As the weeks passed, I think parents just being careful, cautious, it's understandable that they wanted to make sure they got the answers to their concerns. Now, look, we tried to put out a lot of information, a lot of clarity. I also honestly think there was a lot of misinformation coming from all over that probably made parents more apprehensive. But I think what you're seeing now is parents watching carefully and wanting to see what goes on and then they're going to make their bigger decisions. Remember, in just a matter of weeks, parents have the opportunity to opt back in. So, certainly, from some parents I've talked to their decision was to hold back initially, but if they saw what they hoped to see, then they would like to get their kids back in. And from what I saw yesterday, we're off to a really strong start. And I think parents will be encouraged by that and will move back in short order.

Moderator: The next is Marcia from CBS,

Question: Mr. Mayor, I'd like to follow up on that question having to do with teachers. I know that middle school and high school students are going to be returning to classes on Monday. I wonder where you are in terms of having enough teachers, hiring enough teachers, you know, how many do you need? And to follow up on Al's question: is the fact that people more people are opting for remote making it more difficult for you to find enough teachers to staff all the classes?

Mayor: Okay. First a factual point, Marcia, and I really want to make sure we always get this right. Because of Yom Kippur it’s actually Tuesday, the 29th, is the first day back for K-5 schools and K-8 schools, and then Thursday, the 1st, is the first day back for middle schools and high schools. I just want to make sure everyone knows those facts.

Look Marcia, in terms of the hiring process, it continues. I think there have been a lot of changes, but the fact is with more and more information coming in, the hiring is now speeding up much the way we need it to we're getting to the point, and we saw it yesterday, where we had everyone we needed across again, 734 school sites, 1,050 community-based sites. We had the staffing we needed more and more people are signing up. I feel good about the staffing situation as we go into next week. Go ahead, Marcia.

Question: Yes. Mr. Mayor, I guess the follow-up question is this: will everybody who goes into an in-person learning situation, be learning directly with the teacher or will some of them have to do remote learning on their iPads, even though they're in a classroom because of the teacher shortage. Are you at all worried about that and how – what's the number? How many people do you have to hire so you won't have to do that?

Mayor: Yeah. Marcia, the – first of all, no, on your first question, the answer is no. Our kids are going to go into classrooms, staffed by adults, ready to teach them in-person. We're going to have for the kids in blended learning, on the days they're not in school, there will be online learning. Obviously, a lot of schools are already doing a synchronous model for a lot of that learning. That's going to keep growing as we go through the next few weeks. But no, the bottom line is we've had till now a changing situation in terms of number of teachers available, number of students available the need to blend in, in-person learning blended, remote learning, full time remote learning never been attempted before nothing this complex has ever been attempted before in New York City, it has caused some real challenges in getting the numbers right.
But what we saw in the last few days is we surged a certain amount of personnel to make sure the needs were filled. That strategy is clearly working. I think that's the important thing. This was not on paper Marcia – this was real world. Across almost 1,800 sites they got their staffing pattern right, they had the people they needed. We're going to take that same model and apply it to next Tuesday, and next Thursday. We'll be able to publicly say what the grand total number is soon as we keep developing that model out. But the approach works and I feel good that we'll have the people we need when we need them.

Moderator: The next is Michael Gartland from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Michael, how are you?

Question: I'm all right, thanks. So, I wanted to just go back to Marcia's question from earlier. I was wondering if you could tell us what will happen if we don't get enough teachers in time? We had this 2,500 new teachers you announced, I think it was last week coming in. But I mean, these are teachers that you have to recruit, hire, train from outside the existing pool of teachers and substitutes in DOE, right? So if we can't get to that the number that we need, what's kind of plan B there?

Mayor: That’s a fair question, Michael. But I think what we are seeing more and more as a fundamental confidence that the numbers are coming in the way we need them to. Again, we all tried to make sense of this very complex equation of in-person learning, blended learning, including remote blended, full-time remote, the number of teachers varying as the medical exemptions came in, the number of students varying. You know, I feel for our principals, I feel for everyone at DOE trying to make sense of that very complex equation. But what we are finding is the thousands of educators who now work at the DOE, who are certified, ready to go, we’re working in other kinds of jobs, not in classrooms. They're moving into the classrooms. That's working smoothly. The substitute pool was over 5,000 who have been substitutes in our system, who are already certified. They're moving into place, we're finding more and more of the teachers who have taught previously want to come back into the profession. Young people planning to be teachers in the middle of their degree programs. There's a lot of different pieces here. Adjunct professors who are at CUNY who don't have work anymore, but are obviously trained teachers. The numbers are now coming in much stronger. So there's confidence, and I had this conversation in detail with the entire leadership of the DOE over at the Tweed Building yesterday. There's confidence those numbers are coming forward the way we need them to, and there's a lot of people looking for work, which is the other X factor here because of this very tough economy, and we will have the people we need. We're always looking for redundancy to answer your question, Michael, we want as a lot of redundancy, we need substitutes obviously for just daily substitute work on a day by day basis, when someone just happens to be sick, but the numbers are coming in quite strong now. Go ahead.

Question: My second question has to do with Donald Speight. I don't know if you saw this story we ran this weekend about him. He was an HRA employee, veteran HRA employee. He worked at one of the food stamp offices in Brooklyn, I think he directed it actually, and he died from COVID in April, and the reason I'm asking is about him is he requested work from home in March and his family says he was, you know, kind of put off and eventually granted the work- from-home and three days after being granted it got sick and subsequently died from COVID, I think about a week and a half later – within two weeks about. And his daughters are left parentless and they're trying to secure their father's pension benefits now, and I'm wondering, you know, so they're kind of two issues here: the work-from-home coming in, I think from his family's perspective too late and, and the pension benefits, and I'm wondering if there's anything the city can do or is doing to address kind of the situation that this family has been left in after, you know, Speight from, you know, the accounts I heard was a very devoted city worker, you know, living in Bushwick, I believe.

Mayor: Okay. So, look, it's a very sad situation obviously, and we immediately have to make sure the family gets what is due to them in terms of the support and the benefits. So I'll have our team here at City Hall, follow up on this right away to make sure that's happening. I did not see the story and I don't know the history, honestly, Michael we want to make sure everyone is treated fairly. We want to make sure that people who have legitimate needs medically are heard and it's addressed quickly. We were all trying in the first days of this crisis to make sense of a lot of complex things, but the most important thing now is to make sure that family gets the help they deserve, and we'll follow up on that immediately.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880

Question: Good morning to everybody on the call, good morning Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing Rich?

Question: I'm doing all right. Except that I read this morning that the number of confirmed cases the coronavirus has gone up more than 15% in the last 10 days across the United States and other countries are seeing what they're now calling a second wave. Do your people think there's a second wave developing, especially after your having told us about those six neighborhoods where they're seeing an uptick?

Mayor: It's a really important question, Rich. I'll start, and I want Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi to weigh in as well. Look, we're watching the situation very carefully. We have a different situation than the other parts of the world that are having their second wave for a couple of reasons. What we saw certainly – look, take the European countries as an example. We saw, unfortunately in a lot of those countries very lax guidelines around indoor dining, bars, nightclubs, that really hurt them. I've read some stories about Spain that were really troubling about having let the situation go from, you know, something very strict to something very loose quickly, and that really has burned a lot of countries, and a lot of people have suffered because of it. There seems to have been a lot of problems with young people gathering. We've seen some of that in New York City, but nowhere near like what has been seen in so many other countries, there are problems with travel. I don't think the travel dynamics have been the same here. There's obviously been a really devoted approach to quarantine here, and a lot of messaging about that I think has had an impact. So, I really think we're in a different situation, but that being said, we are watching carefully because when we see this many neighborhoods with a problem it's causing us a lot of concern for sure, and we have to immediately address it. Let's start with Dr. Varma.

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Great. Thank you very much for the question. I would, you know, echo what the Mayor has said which is that we have done a tremendous amount to keep our rates low, and that includes in addition, obviously, to the Test and Trace Corps, it includes all the very the cautious reopening of steps. But these local problems that have been neighborhoods that Commissioner Chokshi has highlighted can always extend into other areas. So that's why the hyperlocal response that you're hearing is absolutely so critical and we are monitoring the data every day to ensure that those efforts are in fact working because what we've seen from the experience in Europe and Israel and in parts of Asia is that when these second waves occur, they always start as small problems that expanded to big ones. So our aggressive approaches are absolutely critical to prevent that from happening.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. Just one point that I would add to it, which is when we do look around the world and around the country the other common thread to some of the resurgences that we've seen is when people are not wearing masks and when they are attending large indoor gatherings of different types. So it makes it crucially important for us to focus on those things, because we know what has worked in New York City over the last few months but we can't get complacent about those things. So we have to remain vigilant, particularly around masks and avoiding large indoor gatherings.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Rich.

Question: So just back to the question about the schools in regard to people switching to remote from in-person or blended, however you want to look at it, has there been an acceleration in that recently? Has it stabilized or is it is it getting faster and faster?

Mayor: Rich from what I've heard, and I haven't gotten the last 24 or 48 hours’ specific numbers, but what I've seen previously is it was pretty steady over the last week or two, there were still parents deciding up to the last moment, it's understandable, and definitely a number of them were choosing remote. I, again – I'm a parent. I get it. If parents weren't sure what was going on, it would make sense that a lot of them would say, hey, I think I'll do remote to begin. Obviously, a lot of other parents as we saw yesterday in Elmhurst and all over the city are like, no, I need my kid to be in school for a lot of reasons, and it's what's right for the child. And, you know, they saw something very important yesterday with 1,800 sites up and running. That means literally every neighborhood in New York City, people were seeing with their own eyes, and everything's been kind of talk and theory and sometimes noise over these last months. Yesterday was proof. Yesterday was the facts on the ground. Parents saw kids going into school, safely, the right way, and that message is going to spread. But what I think again is going to happen in a number of cases is a number of parents are going to watch how the first weeks go and then they know they can have another bite at the apple to decide literally in a matter of weeks if they want their kids to come in then, and it's our job to show everyone how effectively our schools will move forward and how safely, and to make sure everyone feels that sense of encouragement.

Moderator: The next is Nolan from the New York Post.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Is this on?

Mayor: Yes, you are. Nolan, how you doing?

Question: I'm all right. I need another cup of coffee. I just want to follow up on some of the questions that you've gotten this morning. You said you have a fundamental confidence that the numbers are coming in the way you need them to, with regards to teacher staffing levels. What is the number you're shooting for you? You haven’t –

Mayor: Yeah, no, I haven't – Nolan, I like to be straightforward when there isn't yet a final number, because what we found out in the previous dynamics was there was so much complexity going on that we had to cut through it and get the numbers right, case by case, school by school and that process clearly needed work. And now what I saw going into yesterday was it had finally aligned the way we needed it to, and remember originally we had hoped to be up and running September 10th, 11 days later 1,800 sites up and the staffing was right. So the model needed work. There's no question about that. It got resolved. It was proven now on a large scale, that same model is going to work for next Tuesday and next Thursday, we got a lot of work to do, but we finally have the design we need to do it. We will be able to tell you a final number, but it's going to need a little more work to get to that final number that we can say, that's it once and for all, and when we have that, I'll certainly announce it.

Question: Separately on the issue of indoor dining, city restaurants have been asking for details for weeks. Boston has a plan to allow restaurants to set up heaters and to extend their indoor dining plan into the winter time –

Mayor: You mean outdoor Nolan? Just to make sure.

Question: Outdoor dining, excuse me –

Mayor: You need another cup of coffee, Nolan, you need another cup of coffee.

Question: Another cup of coffee. So on the outdoor dining, when is there going to be a plan for outdoor dining in the winter time for city restaurants?

Mayor: Yeah. Very soon, in fact it's on the agenda I think even later on today to try and resolve that. We're going to work obviously with the city agencies, with the State. I want to see what we can do to address that fairly because I want to give every possible opportunity to our restaurants to succeed and survive. Now it comes with real health and safety concerns that have to be addressed that are different than what we have during warmer weather, obviously, because with warmer weather you have much more possibility of open air. So there's some still some real issues to be worked through, but we'll have an announcement on it soon. I think the good news here is that restaurants now, thank God, you know about 10,000 restaurants and outdoor dining, it's really helped a lot of them keep going. Takeout and delivery has been strong for a lot of them. If very soon they'll start to have indoor dining, if that goes well, that will expand. We've announced that outdoor dining we'll be back next year so that restaurants can plan on it. But the last piece, your right to fill in as those rules around the continuance of outdoor, what makes sense? What doesn't make sense? How will that work? And we will have that announcement very soon.

Moderator: Last question for today, it goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi there, I'm wondering if we can just get a little more detail on the neighborhoods you mentioned having upticks as well as the large events that you're concerned about. So are there numbers of new cases or percentage rates in those neighborhoods that are making you particularly concerned? And what kind of violations are you seeing as far as the large gatherings we are talking about, weddings or religious services or parties or what kind of stuff are we talking about?

Mayor: Yeah, it’s an important question. Let me have Dr. Choksi give you those details.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes. Thank you so much for that question. You know, as you mentioned, we are – we're worried about the the neighborhoods, particularly with respect to some upticks that we're seeing in cases in those neighborhoods with respect to specific numbers. I would say we look at a whole panoply of different indicators in some instances it's because we see the proportion of cases going up, in others it's because of the percentages of test positivity that are going up in specific neighborhoods and we take all of those and create, you know, a comprehensive picture of of where we need to be focused with respect to our hyperlocal efforts. So those are the things that we are using to narrow in on where to guide the hyperlocal efforts that were mentioned. With respect to indoor gatherings, it's another very important question, and the rule is simple, regardless of whether it's a wedding or some other large event, if you're having large gatherings with many people indoors and particularly if masks are not being used regularly, those are the things that we know both from New York City as well as around the world, can lead to further transmission in communities. So those are the things that we're trying to prevent going forward.

Mayor: Go ahead, Erin.

Question: Okay. And then my second question is about testing in schools. So the mandatory, random testing of 10 percent or 20 percent of the school population is now supposed to start right around the time that school itself is starting. Can you tell us any more about how that's going to work? How are you going to be choosing people, you know, did they get tested right there in the school? And what happens if someone refuses and just basically the nitty gritty of how it's going to work?

Mayor: Yeah, that's being worked out as we speak. I'm going to turn to Dr. Chokshi in a second, because he is not only a crucial figure in this effort, but as you all know, his better half is and assistant principal, so he's really familiar with the specifics of how we need to approach things, but what we're working on right now is how that medical monitoring will be done in every school, every month, it'll be different days depending on the school, obviously, we're not going to do them all on the same day because it takes a lot of capacity to do it. So it will be spread out over the course of the month. If your school starts testing on October 2nd, then it will start testing the next month on November 2nd, if your school starts testing on October 10th, the next month will be November 10th and every month thereafter and there'll be a sample between 10 and 20 percent of the people in the building. So that means teachers, staff, students, and we're going to be reaching out to parents to let them know about this, obviously get their permission and then just keep proceeding from there. Dave, do you want to add?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes sir. I think you covered all of the high points. The only thing that I'll add is, you know, to one of the specific parts of your question, yes, that testing will be available on site at the school. So that's how we intend to operationalize it.

Mayor: Yeah and that's, I'll take that and pull it back one more time, Erin, really important point for all New Yorkers to know, for parents to know in particular, right on site. We have testing we can bring right to the schools, mobile vans. We can set up testing tents. Some schools actually are right next to clinics. We can use those clinics. So we're going to make it very convenient and easy for the school community. But again, it will be a sample of each school community, each month, on a regular basis.

Okay, everybody as we conclude today, I just want to really point out the last few questions have gotten at something really important, which is holding the line here in New York City. Everyone should be proud, it's astounding. You see the charts when we go over the indicators, and you see how everyone in this city has together kept this infection rate really low, made this one of literally the safest, healthiest places in the whole nation and kept it that way where you've seen a lot other places go in the wrong direction in this country and similar countries around the world why has New York City succeeded so much? Because of you and because of your discipline, your strength, your resiliency, but we got to hold that, especially as thank God, we see more and more jobs coming back, more and more people starting to do more, move around more, thank God school's coming back. But with that comes the need to stay tight and disciplined about our approach.

So my message today is simple. We have made amazing progress. We have to protect that progress. Everyone has to protect that progress and we're going to be out there reminding people how important it is. That just the simple things like wearing a mask, what a difference they make. But everyone, every single person can lead by example. New York City's leading by example right now in our nation. We're showing people what it means to make our decisions based on data and science and get it right. I need every New Yorker to lead by example and keep those masks on and practice that social distancing and do the smart thing so we can all move forward together. Thank you very much.

2020-09-23 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: You know, every day I talk about the people of this city and the extraordinary job all of you have done fighting back the coronavirus. And, generally, we've been able to give you really good news because people have done what we needed, what all of us needed. We've had an infection rate at one percent or lower for weeks and weeks. Literally, one of the safest places in the entire country when it comes to the coronavirus. That's the good news that we've seen that extraordinary consistency. And when we had a few problems in some neighborhoods around the five boroughs, we were able to act on it quickly. Neighborhoods responded and we saw things resolve. But now, we have a bigger problem on our hands. We talked about it yesterday, but we've got a lot more information in the last 24 hours. And the situation particularly in Southern Brooklyn is causing a lot of concern here. We have a lot to do because we're seeing a serious uptick in multiple neighborhoods simultaneously. And it's something we have to address with a very aggressive public health effort right away. And truly want to be clear, this is something that can be addressed. We have the tools and the measures. We need a lot of cooperation from all the neighborhoods involved, but I want to be very clear. This is something that requires urgent action.

So, yesterday we spoke about some of the neighborhoods, including Midwood, Borough Park, and Bensonhurst. We see now that this constitutes a larger cluster. We're calling it the “Ocean Parkway Cluster” – a series of neighborhoods one after another. We're also seeing upticks in some other neighborhoods, Williamsburg, Kew Gardens, and Edgemere, Far Rockaway. All of these places are areas of concern. When you take all those neighborhoods together, they now make up about 20 percent of the cases, confirmed positive coronavirus cases in New York City. This is something, again, we're going to address immediately. We have been working with community leaders and institutions for weeks a week, but now we're going to greatly increase our on the ground education efforts and enforcement efforts to address this situation. And I want to be clear this, again, can be addressed effectively. We need everyone to be a part of it. And if there are particular institutions, organizations, businesses that are not being responsive to the need to protect everyone, we're going to be clear about the enforcement needed there. My hope is that everyone will work together to address this problem.

So, here's what we need to be particularly careful about, any large indoor gatherings, any large indoor gatherings, that's the place of greatest concern. We need to address those. So, of course, the Health Department leading the way, our Test and Trace Corps, lots of different parts of the City government involved in this effort. But because there will be a need to have an enforcement element, the Sheriff's Office will be involved, NYPD will be involved as well. So, this situation will lead to immediate actions today. And to give you a sense of the strategy, both what's been unfolding in this strategy over the last few weeks, and what's going to happen now in the coming days, I want to turn to one of the leaders of all of our efforts to fight the coronavirus and someone who knows the communities of Brooklyn well, very personally, the CEO of Health + Hospitals, Dr. Mitch Katz.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, NYC Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you so much for all the support you've provided to the public hospital system. We are very, very grateful. I'm so distressed by the large increase in COVID infections in these four neighborhoods, including the Ocean Parkway area, which is where I grew up, where I went to synagogue, where my brother currently lives. We want to be sure that the message is getting out and reaching those who need to hear it. Our engagement through the Test and Trace Corps has been extensive. We've talked to community leaders, physicians, elected officials, and residents. Here's what we're doing in the neighborhoods that are most affected. We've called the leading physicians in Crown Heights to improve outreach plans in that community and drive home our messages about physical distancing, wearing a face covering, staying home if you're sick, practicing good health and hygiene. We've made over 200,000 robo-calls to Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Borough Park, Midwood, Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Forest Hills, and the Rockaways.

We've distributed thousands of pieces of COVID information material to these neighborhoods. We've distributed over 13,000 masks across Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Williamsburg, Brighton Beach, and Flushing. We've placed nearly 60 newspaper ads in community papers to get the word out. We've talked to 20 synagogues in Borough Park and Bensonhurst and shared palm cards and 10,000 masks. Moving forward we're going to do even more. We're going to continue to meet with high-level religious community members. We'll be doing robo-calls in Yiddish and English. We will engage businesses and affected neighborhoods to deliver masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, and palm cards. We will engage community-serving providers in isolation, quarantine, close contacts, and reporting requirements. There will be sound trucks going through neighborhoods with the major messages. We know that there are four simple ways to prevent COVID from being spread – stay home if you're sick, physical distancing, wearing a face covering, and practicing hand hygiene.

And I want to add a little bit of a very personal note. My father-in-law died two nights ago in Israel from COVID. And I know many of us have lost people that we love. And then the added burden of this is that then we can't engage in the usual rights that we would engage in at times that are really hard, like bringing large numbers of people together for a funeral. We weren't able to do that for him. It had to be a very small service in Israel. These things are extremely hard but they're what's necessary for us to get through COVID. In the absence of our doing the right thing, we will need to be in a lockdown type situation as occurred in Israel because they haven't been able to control the spread of the virus. I spoke to my mother-in-law this morning. She can't even be with her own other son because of the lockdown. We don't want that. We want people to wear masks. We want them to stay apart, to not have any large gatherings because we don't want to, again, have to close down businesses. We don't want to have to have more restrictions. There are easier ways for us to go on with our lives. So, thank you again, Mr. Mayor, for all you’ve done.

Mayor: Thank you. And, Mitch, I just want to say for all of us here as at City Hall, offer my condolences to you and your family. So much happening, and you've been in the lead of the effort to fight the coronavirus in the city for months and months, but it's so sad to remember that this horrible disease keeps coming home to so many families, including your own. So, my condolences to you, and thank you for expressing, in very personal and passionate terms, to the people of the city, why we need to get this right and why we need to protect everyone. So, again, you will see a very intensive effort over these next days in these next weeks, with the goal of all working together to push back this disease and make sure everyone is safe.

Now, obviously, what we're talking about today in terms of fighting the disease, it's a painful topic and it's going to require, you know, very dedicated focused actions to get us through. But as we know about this pandemic, it is hitting us on so many levels at once. So, many crises wrapped within the bigger crisis. And one of them, of course, is the challenge this city faces because of the economic crisis, because of the budget crisis. We have to keep taking actions to address this situation. None of them are pleasant. None of them are things we would want to do at all in normal times. And we're going to work hard to get past this so that people don't have to suffer. But, unfortunately, right now, further action is needed in terms of the City's budget. Last week, I announced furloughs for officials of the Mayor's Office, myself included. Today, another furlough action. And it's – again, it's a difficult one because it will affect real people and their lives. It will affect their families. And these are people who've been working nonstop for months, trying to protect all of you and look out for the whole city.

It's something very sad when the people who have worked this hard have to then sacrifice further, but that's what it's called of all of us [inaudible] us to do. So, I'm announcing a five-day furlough for all managerial employees of the City government, and all employees not represented by organized labor. That affects 9,000 – over 9,000 employees and City agencies and will save about $21 million. So, again, a five day-furlough for all managerial employees. That furlough will start taking place next month. It'll stretch out between October and March, same schedules we talked about for the furlough for City Hall employees. Again, something that's very painful to have to announce, has real human consequences, but it is necessary. And we continue our conversations with the labor unions. We continue our conversations with Albany, trying to get relief. We don't have results yet. We need to keep finding savings to keep bridging us, to give us a chance to get to something better than layoffs. No one wants to see layoffs, but, unfortunately, they're still on the table. So, this at least gives us a little more relief while we continue those conversations and try and find a larger solution. Look, what would really solve this – a federal stimulus, and is shocking that it still hasn't happened. And the hope continues to dim for anything in the next few months. And then, long-term borrowing in Albany, I continue to say it is a straightforward, time-honored option. It is something that makes so much sense to stop this uncertainty and we're going to keep fighting for that as well.

Okay, everybody, let's go to our daily indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 72. And the confirm positive rate for COVID amongst those patients, 9.72 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550 cases – today's report, 326. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold of five percent – today's report, 0.75 percent. So, again, even while we're fighting certain challenges, we see at the same time, overall, the hard work of the people of this city having a real impact.

Let me say a few words in Spanish –

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Katz, Census Director Julie Menin, Dr. Chokshi, Chancellor Carranza, Commissioner Campion, Commissioner La Rocca, the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps. Dr. Ted Long, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Hi, good morning, everyone. With regard to this uptick and the new clusters, I'm wondering, yesterday, when you disclosed the different neighborhoods, you didn't make the connection to Orthodox Jewish communities. Even last night, when you dubbed it, the Ocean Parkway cluster, it seemed somewhat like you're dancing around the commonality in these neighborhoods. Is there a hesitation on your part to be more specific about what might be contributing to the spread?

Mayor: Andrew, look, we're saying exactly where the problem is. We're working with community leaders – we have been for weeks now. We're getting out information, we're getting out masks, we're doing everything that we know how to do to stop the problem. So, I think we're being very clear about where the challenge is and we want to work with communities to solve it.

Question: [Inaudible] related to how this might impact schools. We had asked this on a more theoretical sense a few weeks back when there was a spike in Sunset Park, but when you see 4.71 percent in Bensonhurst, just a few days before kindergarten, elementary schools are set to open, might that impact the ability of schools in some of these neighborhoods, might that prevent them from opening in-person next week?

Mayor: As of now, the answer is no. It's something we obviously are all keeping a close eye on. The real issue, since we have a constant look at what's happening in each school, is to watch for upticks in the specific school community. The school community is often very different from the neighborhood around it. And this is something we have to be really clear about at all levels, particularly when you go to the higher grades, but really at all levels, the kids who go to the school often don't come from the surrounding community. Sometimes, they do come from the surrounding community. The real question is, what's happening in that school. And we have a lot of ability to see that, we have ability to know what's happening with test results, if kids are staying home sick, all sorts of things. So, right now, we feel very good about our ability to keep moving with our school openings. But the most important thing here, Andrew, is to address this problem at the community level. Immediately, we saw in Sunset Park how quickly things can be turned around. We saw it in Soundview. We need to see it here in these communities and I think people will help us get the job done.

Moderator: The next is Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I'm curious – you know, speaking of the uptick of COVID-19 cases do you have an idea of how many cases are in the yeshivas in Brooklyn, and have any of these schools been closed? And additionally, what kind of outreach is being done with some of the rabbinical leaders in these communities? Because it has been, since the start of COVID-19, you know – I know that these are – a lot of the communities tend to be a bit insular. So, speak a little bit about the outreach you're doing to ensure that the message is getting across about the threat.

Mayor: Absolutely. I'll start, and I'll turn to a Dr. Katz, and any of the other doctors who want to add in. We have, just in the last few days, two yeshivas that have been closed because of coronavirus challenges. Health Department has taken those actions via commissioner's orders. The outreach to the community has been nonstop. I think Dr. Katz gave you some of the flavor of that – rabbinical leadership, elected officials, community organizations, very widespread, sounding the alarm. And I think a number of community leaders are themselves sounding the alarm, because this uptick has come on very intensely. So, we will look at each and every gathering place, if there's a place that violates the State rules and the City rules, of course, that has to be addressed, and, if someplace has to be shut down, it will be. Dr. Katz?

President Katz: I think you've covered it, Mr. Mayor. With the Health Department, we're working very closely, watching what's going on at all schools, including yeshivas, and making sure that there are no large banquets, which are, as you spoke earlier, sir, large indoor activities are a huge problem for COVID transmission.

Mayor: Go ahead, Katie.

Question: And my second question, I'll pivot to schools. I know you've answered various versions of this question, but I'm curious – and I'll have to ask the Chancellor also – answer the question – you know, given the staffing challenges that is inherent in the school's reopening plan, why did the City agree to this plan with the UFT and the CSA if there was this challenge of staffing, getting thousands and thousands of additional teachers. I mean, was that present when you were agreeing to the plan or was it just something that, I guess, was perceived to be fixable?

Mayor: I appreciate the question, Katie. Look, I'm going to try and give people the flavor of the situation before turning to the Chancellor. I think there is a reality in an atmosphere of crisis, which is what we've been dealing with now for seven months, that you're trying to work with old formulas for new situations, and it's a hard thing to do. And, I think, looking back, we all needed to move off the old formulas more quickly. The fact is, if you think about staffing every year, the first few weeks of the school year in a normal year, there's still staffing adjustments being made, there’s still teachers being hired. Schools often start the school year without every single teacher in place. But then, when you add the challenge of three – really, three levels of education simultaneously – the kids who were in the classroom, the kids were in blended, but not in the classroom that day, and the all-remote kids. When you add in the challenge of teachers who got medical accommodation, when you add in the moving target of how many students will be in the system in-person – and, again, that's, for now, another bite at the Apple in November, if parents wanted to get their kids back in – it's a very complex formula. And I think, in retrospect, a very different approach needed to be taken. That said, what we saw on Monday was 1,800 sites up and running – 1,800. I don't want this to get lost in the dialogue here. Between the District 75 special education sites, the public school pre-K, 3-K sites, the community-based pre-K, 3-K sites, and those were all staffed properly, and the beginning was actually strikingly effective and smooth – a credit to everyone at the DOE and the cooperation with the unions. We need to repeat that again next Tuesday, repeat it again next Thursday. And we see the way to do that now. We had to learn through experience how to adjust the model. Now, we have the tools we need to get it done. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Katie, really good question. Look, I think all of us, the Mayor, Mr. Mulgrew, Mr. Cannizzaro, myself – the easy way out would have been to do other things that we just know are not educationally sound. So, for example, could you set up a classroom and a camera and then, you know, watch as a teacher walks back and forth, you know, out of the camera range, that would have been a lot easier to do, but we know that fundamentally that's not educationally sound. And, quite frankly, the months and months and months that our students have had remote learning, we know that that has traumatized many of our students. Many of our students have regressed in their academic progress. So, when we said, because we are in a position medically in New York City to be able to consider in-person learning, then what we're not going to do is couple coming back to in-person learning with just bad practices. So, does it mean it's challenging? Absolutely. Does it mean that it's harder than if you did other things? Absolutely. But all of us are on the same page that if we're going to do this, we have to do it right and we have to do it so that it's fundamentally uplifting and it's beneficial to our students, both in-person and in the remote learning mode. That's why we're grappling with these difficult challenges, but they're not insurmountable, as the Mayor has pointed out this week with our youngest and some of our most vulnerable students already coming back in person.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?

Mayor: Good, Henry. How have you been?

Question: I’m okay. Can you get back to me in about three minutes – I’m kind of multitasking here and I've got a bunch of other things I've got to –

Mayor: We have that ability, Henry. We are an agile operation. We'll reserve your place in line. Go ahead, Mitch.

Moderator: We'll get back to Henry. The next is Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for taking my question.

Mayor: Good morning, Jeff. How are you doing?

Question: I'm good. Thanks for asking. I wanted to ask about this uptick we're seeing in the Hasidic neighborhoods. I'm wondering what happened that we saw this decline over the summer and are now seeing this uptick. I'm wondering, was there a drop-off in outreach efforts or, you know, was there sustained efforts in this community, and I'm wondering how far the City is willing to go to, beyond outreach, to enforce the guidelines in these communities. I mean, you took some strong actions during the measles outbreak. I'm wondering how far the City is willing to go to stop this outbreak?

Mayor: That's a great question, Jeff. We're obviously going to do whatever it takes and I think the measles parallel is a very good one, but this is obviously a much tougher, more pervasive problem. As I said, we've taught shut down two yeshivas. No one wants to shut down the yeshiva. That's never something we want to do, but the Health Department deemed it was necessary, and if others have to be closed, they will be, and any situation that's not safe has to be addressed. I think the outreach efforts have been consistent. I think the challenge as with everyone, everywhere is over months and months, of course, there's some fatigue in every community about being constantly asked to follow these rules, but we've got to keep redoubling the effort. So let me turn to my colleagues and see if they want to add, but I think the biggest answer, the clearest answer I can give you is we'll take whatever measures are necessary to stop this from spreading.

President Katz: I think sir, I would only add high holy days – before the high holy days, we typically, as a people come together for more celebrations before those days the opening of schools, especially the yeshivas have made a difference, the weather getting colder I think it's something we all have to be aware of because being outside is very safe, but as the temperatures drop, more people are coming inside, and then as you say, the general fatigue, they're also people coming back and forth from other countries such as Israel makes a difference. They've been, I think a number of factors that have brought us to where we are.

Moderator: The next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Moving to schools. I saw that Michael Mulgrew said the other day that there's about 3,000 additional teachers needed to open in person learning for middle and high schools. You've been reluctant to release the number largely because it's kind of a moving target, but obviously internally you guys are working off some figure. I'm just wondering if you can confirm Margaret's figure and perhaps say more about why you were reluctant to share it in the name of transparency?

Mayor: No, because I think there's always a tension between transparency and accuracy. I don't want to give you a number and it proves to change once again, and I've been very, very clear with everyone involved, both at City Hall and Department of Education as their responsibility to once and for all resolve this issue. As I said earlier, Yoav, I grant everyone involved. They've been working nonstop for months through a crisis. I think they've all really, really had – been dealt a tough, tough hand, and then extraordinary complexity and an ever changing situation. I don't belittle any of that, but I think it calls upon everyone to think in new ways and make adjustments and kind of find a model that rises above some of those constant moving parts and gets us to resolution. That was done for Monday because 1,800 sites were up with the teachers they needed. So clearly the team at the DOE got it right for Monday, and I give them a lot of credit. They now have to get it right next week. And when we are certain we have a final and definitive number. That's when I will say it publicly talking with our union colleagues regularly, but I'm going to reserve the timing until we are 100 percent certain and everything's locked in.

Moderator: We'll go back to Henry from Bloomberg. Henry, do we have you?

Question: Thank you very much. On these infection rates in these particular neighborhoods, you must have seen this uptick happening before the high holidays, and so I'm wondering why it wasn't disclosed before the high holidays and whether or not you've detected any increase because of congregations meeting during the high holidays?

Mayor: I'll start and I'll turn to Dr. Katz and Dr. Chokshi. We saw pieces of the equation and acted on them, I've been talking about Borough Park for weeks, where we've had additional testing, additional outreach. That was what appeared to be the core of the problem, and then last week we saw the problems start to emerge in the Rockaways. That's where a largest yeshiva, I think it's over 2,000 students was shut down by Department of Health, and a lot of other measures were taken. The fact that this is now coalesced the way it has, that was based on information we've seen in the last days in particular. We had seen it more localized before that, Henry, and it was being addressed, but now we have a much bigger challenge, and so everyone is mobilizing for something we haven't done previously, this goes, we’ll go far beyond what we had to do in Sunset Park. This'll be a much deeper mobilization into the community to stop this trend.

Let me turn to Dr. Katz and then Dr. Chokshi.

President Katz: Yes, Mayor you have it, right, and Henry, if you look at the numbers, it's really the last week that has been so dramatic, and you have to remember that we have to act based on high quality data, some of the neighborhoods, the number of people being tested as relatively small. So you need enough information to be sure of what we're saying. Certainly these have been messages we've been out in the community for weeks with but we're here today with a more dramatic message because of really what we've seen over the last week.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, you both have covered the facts and the high points well. I'll just reiterate in the last week that the emphasis was on Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Midwood area based on the data that we had seen there, which was which was shared both with the community as well as with the public. But just as the Mayor and Dr. Katz have said we're seeing this evolve just in the last few days and particularly in the last 24 hours with respect to the information that we're collecting, and it's so important for us to take swift action when we see that and that's what we're putting into motion.

Mayor: Go ahead, Henry.

Question: I want to get back to an issue that Andrew raised about infection rates in hyperlocal situations and how it might affect school attendance, and you said, well, a lot of students come from all over the city, but elementary schools and pre-K are pretty much neighborhood based. So is there any thought about using a different standard when a hyperlocal infection rates zoom up and local elementary schools are in the crosshairs of the virus?

Mayor: When we believe that's happening, we'll certainly – look, this is all about health and safety. If we think there's a danger to a school community, we're going to act, but again, I'll speak from personal experience – remember talking about Borough Park and Kensington. Those are neighborhoods I represented in the City Council. I was deeply, deeply involved in the specific neighborhoods house. I happened to be a community school board member in that community, and I can tell you for a fact that in Kensington, in Borough Park, the local public elementary schools, our children made up of children who come from some of the surrounding area, but also from farther out because of the nature of the community, because you obviously have a lot of families who don't send their kids to public schools and therefore other kids come into those public schools. If we see anything in the data we're getting from school communities that tell us there's a problem, we're going to act, unquestionably. Again, we have a lot of data sources within each school community, but if we don't see that, we want to make sure that schools move forward. So it's going to be based on data and science, it’s going to be based on actual specific indicators we're seeing in each school.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Jacob from the Jewish Insider.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, thank you for taking—

Mayor: Jacob?

Question: Yes. You hear me?

Mayor: How are you doing?

Question: Great. Thank you for taking a question from someone who actually lives in the community and complies with all the guidelines. Can you share with us what guidance you have provided in those conversations with representatives of the community, ahead of the holidays, especially now where you're going to see an increase in gatherings and how do you regain trust with people? Why should they believe that you're going to enforce where you failed in the spring?

Mayor: Well, respectfully, Jacob, I don't agree with your assessment. We have been constantly communicating with community leaders. I've been on any number of calls myself. My team has been talking to community leaders nonstop throughout, and the message has been really clear. We've got to get people to where mass, we've got to get people to practice social distancing. There was a lot of enforcement in March and April, no one wants to have to do it, but it was done where it was needed. It did have some impact for sure, and now we see the most tangible data we've ever seen about a specific problem. So again, I took the message and I'll turn to Dr. Katz to add, but the message I think, has been really clear and consistent throughout, that we've got to avoid large gatherings that exceed the state rules. We've got to have people practice, social distancing. These messages have been pervasive, but I do believe when it comes time to exercise enforcement, that that has had a real impact. Dr. Katz?

President Katz: Jacob, thank you for following the guidelines, and we know that there are many people in our community who are following the guidelines, but many who are not. Many who don't see that how critical they are to our being able to continue life as we know it in New York City, certainly as the Mayor has said, the most critical aspects are wearing a mask, social distancing, no large indoor gatherings. And our hope was that that we could convince people both to protect health and to keep businesses open to follow these rules, and as the Mayor has said if that proves impossible, then we will have to go to stronger actions of enforcement.

Mayor: Go ahead, Jacob.

Question: Yeah. If the optic continues in the coming weeks, would you consider specific measures to these particular neighborhoods instead of just punishing the entire city and as a result put the Orthodox community in the spotlight as a prime target for the spread of COVID?

Mayor: Well, Jacob, again, I respect you and respect your publication, I want to differ with some of your word choice. This is to help people and respect and support the community because what's more important than saving lives. I’ve said this back in March and April, every one of our faith traditions speaks about the value of each individual life. And in fact, it was outstanding in the early time of this crisis how faith leaders in every community stepped forward and told people how important it was to practice these safety measures. In fact, faith leaders were the ones who said we shouldn't go forward with the kinds of gatherings that might create a danger. So I would say to you that what we know works is a lot of communication, what we know works is making it easy for people to wear masks by distributing them for free, which we're going to be doing intensely in these communities, what we know works is leaders of the community setting a good example, and many leaders are doing that. I really appreciate it. This is something we're all in together. Every part of the city is interconnected, but when we see a specific part of the city that's going through a challenge, we'll give everything we've got to educating people, giving them the masks, helping them through it. We want to do it productively, cooperatively. If some people don't want to be helpful to their neighbors, then we'll take stronger action. But I do think like you, the vast majority of people want to help and want to protect each other and I think they'll all be part of helping us resolve this.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Jake Offenhartz from Gothamist.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Jake, how you been?

Question: I’m okay. Going back to the yeshiva enforcement, I think one of the schools you mentioned that was closed Darchei Torah on the Far Rockaway, they actually kind of refused to close after they were ordered and it took an extra day. We heard this morning, actually, that there's another Yeshiva that let parents know about a case, but so that they're not planning on quarantining and there's no information, not in the city's report card, there's been no data submitted by this yeshiva. So I was hoping you – kind of just detailed, like, how are you monitoring this? How is the city actually tracking cases inside the yeshivas? And in instances where these schools are not complying, like, what is the city doing besides urging or ordering or propose in some cases when they're refusing to do so?

Mayor: Yeah, I want to be careful in that assumption because that hasn't been our experience. Jake, first of all, if you're hearing about a specific location, please share it with our team to make sure we're hearing exactly what you're hearing. The case in the Rockaways, there was I think some initial confusion and miscommunication, and then once that was resolved, a school did shut down in the course of that following day. But look, no one wants to shut down the school. I understand that. Everyone hopes to find a way to avoid it. It's incredible dislocation for families and kids, but as we've made clear that the schools have to be shut down, I've seen over the course of months compliance, we certainly saw that during measles as well. So let me turn to Dr. Chokshi to talk to you about how that is handled and then Dr. Katz. Go ahead, Dr. Chokshi.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We're informed about cases at yeshivas through our [inaudible] reporting system as well as direct communication with school leaders and others in the community including health care leaders, you know, physicians and other clinicians. We take all of those sources of information and we paint a whole picture about what's happening in an individual's school. We do that through our disease detectives who initiate an investigation as rapidly as possible, usually within minutes to hours of learning about cases. And then based on that, we're in direct communication with school leadership to gather additional information so that we can rapidly make a recommendation about what makes most sense to preserve the health and safety of people who are at that school. And based on that, you know, in some cases when it meets a threshold, we do recommend a school closure, we have conversations with school leadership, and if it's warranted we will rapidly issue a Commissioner's order related to that school closure as well. And that's what happened in the two cases that that the Mayor has already mentioned. Again, I think the big picture here is that when we do see these signals, these cases emerging, we rapidly investigate and then we take action based on that.

Mayor: Thank you, Dr. Katz, you want to add?

President Katz: Just to clarify that the school in Rockaway closed and sent kids home the very same day they got the Commissioner's order from Dr. Chokshi.

Mayor: Thank you. Okay, go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Juan Manuel Benitez from NY1.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good Juan Manuel, how you doing?

Question: Very good. Thank you. Mr. Mayor about the uptick in COVID cases in some communities in Brooklyn and Queens, beyond the outreach that you're talking about are you – why not, if you had this issue for a long time already in specific communities in Brooklyn and Queens, why not announcing more forceful measures to control this uptake, knowing that it could spiral out of control really quickly?

Mayor: I'll start Juan Manuel and I'll turn to Dr. Katz. Again, what we saw, let's go over what our whole experience has been, for three, four months, the city across the board has been keeping the infection rate very low. Every community. We saw a specific problem in Sunset Park. That was readily resolvable with aggressive measures, testing outreach, mask distribution, worked very quickly. Same with Soundview in the Bronx. We didn't have an experience where it didn't work. In Borough Park we took the same measures. We did not see an immediate negative uptick that was the kind that was as Dr. Chokshi said, verifiable and that showed us the kind of numbers that would lead to more serious action. It's literally been a matter of the last days where we've started to see the kind of consolidated numbers that tell us we have to do something much more.
So I do think this is a case where following the pattern of everything we experienced previously, the actions were being taken by the Health Department, by test and trace, everything according to the game plan that had been working. But now we're dealing with a different reality and a more pervasive reality, and we're going to take fast, aggressive measures to address it. Go ahead, Dr. Katz.

President Katz: I think you've said it very well. We are hoping that today serves to the community to redouble its efforts on wearing masks, on social distancing, no large gatherings. In the absence of us seeing a rapid, rapid change in the infection rates, we will have to take more stringent measures.

Mayor: Thank you. And everyone, as we conclude today, look, we're giving you some sober news. We're giving a clear warning that we've got a challenge we have to face. I think New Yorkers always liked to hear the story straight up and know exactly what is going on. So what we're saying is we do have a problem, but it's a problem we can address together. It's going to take fast action and commitment. But look, we were the epicenter of this crisis. This whole city, every neighborhood was in it together, and we all fought back together and we can do it again. We've got to remember never to let our guard down, never to let the coronavirus back in the door in this city and to what has helped us all along, our devotion facts, our devotion to data, our devotion to science, that's, what's gotten us this far and the fact that the people have listened and acted. So here's another example where we're saying the data, the science, are telling us we've got to make a really fast, intense move, and I believe people will hear it and we'll act, and we will be out there in force to help make sure this happens to support people, to help make sure that we overcome this, like we've overcome every other challenge in these last seven months together. Thank you very much.

2020-09-24 NYC Mayor de Blasio

President and CEO James Patchett, Economic Development Corporation: Good morning, everyone. Mr. Mayor, Commissioners, honored guests, deputy mayor – my boss – I'm honored to kick off today's event. I'm James Patchett, the President of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. I want to start by talking about the significance of where we are today. Next to me is the Alexandria Center for the Life Sciences. Alexandria symbolizes New York City's journey to become a life sciences hub. And it's now home to the new Pandemic Response Lab, or PRL, which is serving a critical purpose in the city's fight against COVID-19. The lab, which was just opened last week, is dedicated to processing COVID-19 test results for Health + Hospitals in 24 to 48 hours. Every result the lab has been sent so far has been returned to patients within 24 hours. This is a major achievement for New York City, and it's a testament to our innovation and our creativity. It exemplifies the best of our city. And while we'd love to have you in the lab, for health and safety reasons, we're hosting the event outside.

From the very beginning of this, it's been clear that we cannot rely on the federal government or global supply chains to solve our challenges. That's why we took matters into our own hands. We built over 8.4 million face shields in New York City and 4 million gowns for hospital workers. We manufactured our own bridge ventilators and over half-a-million test kits for New York City. There were days where without those test kits, we would have been unable to serve patients when they came in to be tested. And that's why we're taking testing into our own hands too. We have the capability, the talent, and the ingenuity to do it right here in New York City. And as long as we're living with COVID-19, rapid, accurate testing is absolutely essential to keep our people safe and reopen our economy.

So, in June, we set out to build our own lab and we did it in a matter of weeks. It was a true multi-partner cross-sector collaboration. It was led by my team at EDC with incredible partnership from Health + Hospitals and the Department of Health. It uses a technology licensed from NYU Langone Health. Brooklyn-based Opentrons, a robotics company focused on the life sciences, worked with diagnostic experts from [inaudible] clinical, Health + Hospitals, and the New York City Test and Trace team to launch PRL. The lab is up and running. By the end of this month, it can do 10,000 tests a day. And by November, we will be able to do 20,000 a day. PRL will build the city's existing capacity and provide faster results dedicated to New York City residents and will provide New Yorkers with good paying jobs. It's already employing close to a hundred people and we expect it to be to 150 by November. I'm incredibly proud of our team who worked tirelessly to make this lab of possibility. And I'm proud about what this lab says about our city.

Creating lab capacity right here is another example of the creativity and innovation of New York City businesses and institutions that can make the impossible possible. We have proven time and again, that we can do things right here in New York City, and PRL is just one component of the city's larger strategy to reopen and recover. This pandemic reinforced the direct connection that exists between public health and the economy. Safe reopening through innovations in testing, and a series of policies that directly connect the health of New Yorkers to the health of the city's economy will create a healthier, stronger, and more inclusive New York City. I'm now pleased to introduce someone that I've gotten to know quite well throughout this crisis, someone I've spoken to probably a hundred times in the last six months, and, naturally, in these extraordinary times, someone I had not met in-person until 15 minutes ago. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce Dr. Jay Varma, who brings tremendous expertise to his role. From Ebola to HIV, Dr. Varma has built new public health systems and let epidemic responses here in New York City, as well as in Asia and Africa. I have a deep, deep respect for his work and his vision.

Jay?

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Great. James, thanks for that introduction. And it's one of those unusual things that we finally get to meet in person. And, of course, it's an incredible opportunity to meet here at this particular moment, given how important this new facility is – it’s for New York and for our immediate coronavirus response. You know, when reports to the novel coronavirus first emerged in January, I was far away from New York City. I was actually based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, working at the African Union, working to develop a strategy to prepare the continent for what we knew would be a devastating epidemic. For that strategy, I drew upon lessons that I had learned fighting epidemics from around the world, including, as James mentioned, the Ebola response here in New York City and in West Africa. Some critical questions – how do you train disease detectives to detect a disease early and to trace contacts effectively? How do you keep health care workers safe from being infected in the middle of a dangerous epidemic? The tools we use to protect health are actually the same here in New York City and around the world. The problem is that they're not evenly distributed. And over nine months into the coronavirus pandemic, we see how much suffering has been here in New York City because of this disease, but we've also shown how the city can fight back with public health, with science, and with partnerships. To win that fight here in New York City, we've drawn from the vast talent and infrastructure and community engagement, and we've built an extended our collaborations with public health leaders in Europe, in Asia, and, in fact, in Africa. We need to continue that work. We all breathe the same air. Viruses don't need visas to cross borders. And climate change is rapidly accelerating the emergence of new infectious diseases. So, we have the opportunity to share the lessons that New York City has learned with other cities and countries. New York City can partner with academia, with private sector, and with partners both here in the United States and around the world to train public health and health care personnel and to innovate public health practice and to research and develop new solutions.

You know, the critical questions remain that we can help and work together to solve. How do we forecast and model outbreaks similar to what we do with the weather? How do we detect and control outbreaks faster? How do we get diagnostic tests actually into the hands of the people, as opposed to always being restricted to, say, a laboratory or a doctor's office? And how do we build the next generation of diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments, and make sure that they're equitably distributed to all? How do we ensure that equity is not just a word we use, but something that actually means something in to the daily health of people? So, New York City is really poised right now to lead and innovate the next generation of public health solutions and to train the next generation of public health leaders here in New York City, nationally, and around the world. We need that for our own health insecurity and for the health and security of everyone around the world.

And so, I just want to close by saying I've had the tremendous honor to work, you know, with the team at City Hall and directly for the Mayor since early April. And I have really gotten a chance to see firsthand the commitment to mobilizing every possible resource to strengthen the health response to this crisis. And now, of course, to use those lessons to help New York City [inaudible] more resilient and the rest of the world more resilient.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. You know, listening to Dr. Jay Varma. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with him months ago, where he talked about his experiences in China – in fact, in Hubei Province. And he talked about how diseases that just a few years ago might have stayed contained in a very local area, now in a more globalized world, travel, not just in one province or in one country, but literally to continents all over the world, and that this is a new reality we face, and we need new solutions for this new time. And when you speak with someone of Dr. Varma’s experience, it can be sobering, it can be humbling, but it was also a call to arms that this world has to handle our new reality differently. And we did not ask in New York City to end up being the epicenter of this crisis in this nation and one of the places that was hardest hit in the world, we never wanted that distinction, but it has forged us in fire. It has educated us. It has strengthened us. It has made us particularly well suited to confront this challenge and the challenges that will come to be the place that creates the solutions, to be the place that understands the problem like nowhere else, that understands what it means for every-day people of every background, from every corner of the world, because, in fact, in New York City here in this global city, we have communities from all over the world in one place. And the solutions we create here can save lives everywhere.

So, I want to thank Dr. Varma for having played such a crucial role in our fight against the coronavirus. I want to thank James Patchett and his whole team for the amazing work that they have done constantly innovating, constantly fighting back, creating in New York City what did not exist just a year ago, but drawing upon the strengths that is New York City, drawing upon our extraordinary creativity and drive and energy and talent to create solutions right now that our national government did not provide to us, but that we created for ourselves. And in that is the essence of what we're going to talk about today, because that shows us our future.

I want to thank everybody at the Alexandria Center, because this is one of the places building the future of New York City. I want to thank John Brennan-Badal and the team at Opentrons. Thank you so much for the extraordinary effort in operating this Pandemic Response Lab. Again, creating from scratch a solution. I can't tell you how many times talking to national health care leaders, talking to our federal health care leaders, asking them why we couldn't get more testing, asking them why we couldn't get faster lab results, why the largest city in the nation wasn't getting what we needed nor were cities and states anywhere else. And what I heard time and again was a sense of resignation, a cursing the darkness, too many words about what our country couldn't do instead of what we could do. But here in New York City, we have taken a very different approach. We have focused every day on what we could create, and the people here around me, all of them deserve great credit, and all their teams, because they would not be defeated.

Over these last six, seven months, time and time again, New Yorkers resolved to get the job done, and, in fact did get the job done. So, this is the right place to talk about where we move from here. And I don't want for a moment to forget what we experienced. It's unforgettable, very sadly – March, April, one of the worst times in the history of this city. Those we lost – and every single one of us knows people we lost, families who lost loved ones. I don't want to minimize how bad it has been and how long it will linger with us. The pain of a million lost jobs, the confusion, the fear. I don't want to ever forget the emptiness of the response from our federal government. I don't want to ever forget all the times we asked for testing and weren't giving it, all the times we asked for help and it was ignored. But I'll tell you something, New York City didn't back down. And there were heroes everywhere, and every day we should reflect upon those heroes, particularly our health care heroes, because they couldn't imagine running from the fight. And we saluted them as New Yorkers, and we need to keep saluting them, because they saw us through. But they also exemplified the spirit of New York City for the world to see.

So, we remember that we were the epicenter of this crisis, unquestionably, tragically. And now we note with pride as New Yorkers that we went from being the epicenter of the crisis to becoming the envy of the nation – day after day at one percent positive rate or less – day after day, our economy starting to come back, our schools starting to open. Things that many doubted, they're happening one after another, because of the resolve of the people of this city. And this is the X-factor – you will not find New Yorkers any place else, but New York City. All of you are the X-factor that made this possible and will make our future greatness possible. The sheer resolve and discipline every single day, doing what it took to protect each other. Those simple acts like wearing a mask and practicing social distancing – times 8 million people, one day, after another, after another has brought us back and will continue to make us stronger.

But now, we look to the future, and we recognize that we are in a transformative moment. Sometimes in the middle of history, it's hard to see it. But I remember the stories of the Great Depression in my family. I remember every time we gathered for a holiday around the table, inevitably, our elders would talk about that time that, to them, defined their lives, because everything came unglued, and it looked unsurmountable at times. They told the story of New York City in those years and how people banded together and fought back. And now, we look back at the 1930s and understand it was a profound, transformative time that in the pain, despite the pain came, solutions that today still govern us, that today still provide the underpinnings safety and security and decency in our society. That was a pure historic transformative moment. And this is too – we are living in it. I've talked to you many times about my father who fought in World War II – and we say the greatest generation, they deserve that title. But now, a new greatest generation must emerge, because we are in that type of fight – a fight for the ages. And I am convinced that the people of New York City have already shown the ability to create that greatest generation again. There's no question in my mind, we are rising to the moment and we will rise further.

So, today, we lay out the foundations of our recovery agenda. Today, we present a vision that focuses on public health and social justice. These will be the pillars of our future. And here's what we have learned – public health is economic health. It's not something we fully understood before this crisis. Let's be clear, public health is economic health. There is no economic health without public health. And, thank God, we invested in public health long before we ever heard the word coronavirus. Thank God, billions of dollars were invested in Health + Hospitals to make it strong. We did not know why that would be so important in the context of the pandemic, but, thank God, our Health + Hospital system was ready. Thank God we invested in guaranteed health care for all New Yorkers, because we've seen in countries all over the world that the strongest and best responses have been where there is a thriving, universal public health system – and our nation still lacks that our foundational problem, but in New York city, we have built our own version. Thank God, we understand there is no health without mental health. This crisis has pointed out as well, mental health challenges loom just as large as physical health challenges. And this city has devoted itself to truly providing mental health for all. Thank God, we have some of the truly greatest teaching hospitals on the earth. And, thank God, we have a growing life sciences industry, and you see it here at the Alexandria Center. And this is just the beginning, because we are destined to be one of the great life sciences capitals of the world. We can transform New York City into a living laboratory, a place where great innovations occur, great innovations are achieved and put into practice immediately to benefit all people. New Yorkers don't just believe in theory, we believe in practice, and here we can take ideas and put them into action. And, as we do that, we will create more and more jobs and we will bring our economy back stronger than ever. There are so many industries that have been historically strong in this city, and there are some that have come up stronger in recent years, but there is a potential here that is vast to do good and do well at the same time.

So, let me offer four core principles for this public health vision, this vision of recovery through public health. One, we must continue our momentum and then build further progress in the fight against COVID-19. Two, we must invest in innovation to make us a stronger hub for public health research. Three, we have to create new high-quality jobs that improve the health of our people. And four, we have to focus on historically underserved communities, the places that didn't get the investment, because we have to right that wrong and recognize that we are truly all in this together and if one community of New York City is not healthy, we all are not healthy. In the coming weeks, we will provide detailed plans to realize this vision. And as you see these plans, there will be an obvious focus on the immediate challenge. We have to overcome COVID for everything else to be possible. And so, we must our COVID testing. We will create a new citywide rapid testing program, and that begins today, kicking off a rapid testing design competition to bring the best ideas forward, because rapid testing will be one of the keys to overcoming this crisis. Quick, reliable testing is what will help get more and more New Yorkers back to work safely. And this lab, with the ability soon to process 20,000 tests a day, will be a key part of that solution. We know after so many painful examples, we know not to wait on our federal government. There is, to this day, still not a full and reliable national testing infrastructure. It does not exist, but here we will create what we must create to protect our people and move us forward.

We must prepare for the day when a vaccine is ready, because the vaccine is step-one, but implementing it, getting it to the people quickly and effectively is the second and necessary step to overcome the coronavirus. And we'll take lessons from the H1N1 crisis to quickly distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. And we have to understand that the future of New York City and the future of our economy then depends on taking everything we've learned and building rapidly upon it. New York City must be a global hub for public health research, for development, and for the practice of new ideas and approaches. We must do it, because we can't depend on anyone else to do it. We must do it because we have the talent and ability to do it. Here in New York city, we can serve this nation in this world in a way that no other place can. And, in the process, we will establish a new strategic approach to health care that is truly inclusive, because we know, for generations, health care has gone to those who can afford it. And we saw the disparities laid bare in this crisis. And that cannot be, it is not only morally wrong, it will hold us back, it will hold us down. And so, we here – we'll create new strategies, show our nation, our world, what it means to truly provide health care for all. And we will bring together partners because the talent is already here, right this minute. We'll bring together partners who may never have worked together, but they will work together now in common cause – doctors and nurses, academic researchers, industry innovators, health care nonprofits, and economic development organizations at the community level. Folks who may have thought their missions were different will now see their mission as one, because health care must reach the people. It's not good enough if it's a great idea or it's only for the few who can afford it. Our vision is great new ideas that reach into every corner of every neighborhood of this city and then can be used all over the world.

We will revolutionize our health care workforce by launching a public health corps. We have seen already in just a few months, what test and trace has been able to achieve. We've seen what it means to have public health workers who can go within minutes out into communities and make a difference and educate people and help people and guide them – what a difference it makes. We will build on that example. We'll take this model and these talented, committed New Yorkers and build something lasting. And that will build the communication and the trust needed to bring every neighborhood into the future of health care, because we've also learned powerful lessons about how much information matters, how important it is for people to see what they need to do and believe in it. We'll create dedicated research and development facilities that not only create cures, but then ensure the cures reach the people – that those cures will be provided on a broad scale and we will deploy those new approaches and then track the impact on communities to ensure they worked for all. And think about what it means then for our future. It means that we will fundamentally change the health outcomes in the communities of this city – that will make us stronger. It means, God forbid, another pandemic arrives on the scene, no city will be more ready than New York City. It means that the models we create will be sought after and people from around the world will come here to learn how to do it.

And while we're talking about our future, and while we're talking about health, let us never forget the pervasive unyielding health crisis that is global warming. We will all be involved in that struggle in every corner of the world but, again, we understand that global warming has powerful health ramifications. We understand that we can't keep our people as safe as they need to be if we don't fight global warming, and so here in New York City on Governor’s Island, we will create the centerpiece for the global fight against climate change. On our Governor’s Island, where New York City, as we know it today began, you will find the greatest minds, the ideas being generated, the hope being created that we can overcome global warming. We have here New York City so many innovators, so many people who want to create new models that are sustainable, that want to be part of the solution, that want to see a healthy city, that want to fight the larger threats we face. The level of commitment in this crisis has been extraordinary and it will only grow, and we will prepare New Yorkers to fight against the health challenges of tomorrow, whatever those health challenges must be and will be, we will train New Yorkers to fight against those health challenges. We will train New Yorkers to create a greener city and a greener world. What we do here can be the model, and I believe we will be the climate solutions leader, not only of this country, but of the entire world. So, the simple point here is we can do this. We can create something new. We can take what we've learned and build upon it. So we will make sure that these partnerships grow. We will make sure that these lab facilities grow, that these innovations come more and more frequently, and we will remember that only works. If it works for everyone, it only works. If every community benefits and I will say for the record, we understand everything is interrelated. We understand that you can't be healthy if you don't have quality housing, we understand you can't pay for medicines if you don't have a job, we understand that people need green space and places to exercise. We understand that people have to get to work and opportunity with a quality mass transit system that also helps us move away from the American addiction to the automobile, all these pieces interrelated.

But what we have learned in these last seven months is it begins and ends with healthcare. That is the indispensable piece of the equation. So here's what we know, in conclusion, we know that New York City has a long history of being a beacon to the world. We must be a beacon to the world, again, as we face these new challenges, and that means, again, that core component, New Yorkers rising to the challenge. It means drawing out all the talent that is here, because it is breathtaking. The energy in this place is unsurpassed, and you can feel it if you are someone visiting for a weekend and you can feel it if you've lived here, your whole life, the energy is like nowhere else in the world. There will be a rebirth. There will be a renaissance for New York City and anyone who wants to be a part of that, I invite you to the table and this great effort to create solutions that never existed before for the challenges of today and tomorrow. Everyone who wants to be a part of that mission is welcome, and the one thing we know is it must be for everyone. We must see the transformational moment and build every day solutions that reach every person, and finally it bears saying New York City has had many great eras and New York City has had many setbacks. I often quote the truism “it doesn't matter how many times you've been knocked down – it matters how many times you get back up.” So I predict to you today, and not only will New York City get back up, the New York City will go farther than it ever has, and the best is yet to come. Thank you. Few words in Spanish.

[The Mayor speaks in Spanish]

With that. We will turn to our colleagues in the media, Dave. Yeah, I think it'd be good to get the microphone.

Question: Mayor, it's good to see you. I wanted to ask you, first of all, just the nitty gritty here. I got tested last week at CityMD. It took four days to get the test back, which I was kind of surprised that it took only four days. But if you could just compare what the citywide average is, do we know for most of, you know, the testing that's going on in other locations? And then compare that to, I think we said sure, 24 hours here, and I did have a second question.

Mayor: Let me – I'll call up. Whichever of our good doctors wants to speak to the latest numbers. I think Dave – we've seen a real skew between the private labs and the public labs. Now this facility here will focus on our Health + Hospitals testing, and that's been essential for so many communities, and obviously the focal point of a lot of what we've done is we've been opening schools. The public testing has been pretty good in terms of fast turnaround. The private has really varied the cost according to the national dynamics too much, and this is why I say we still don't have a coherent national system here. So I do want to keep encouraging all New Yorkers to take advantage of the opportunity at our public testing sites. But which of you, Dr. Katz, you want to speak to public and private how we're doing.

President and CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz, NYC Health + Hospitals: Thank you. Well the same week that I read an article that in France, it took a week to get the result of any of your PCR tests, all of the Health + Hospital facilities, we're delivering it within 48 hours, and with this lab, we're going to soon be at 24 hours be able to turn around the test. So right now, in general, if you go to Bellevue, one block away, 48 hours would be the average time you'd have to wait as the Mayor said. Depending upon where the test is being sent from other centers, we've heard four days, five days, six days.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: And I can just round that out with the citywide numbers. So the majority of tests are coming back within 48 hours. Now that's citywide across all different testing sites. Three quarters of all tests are coming back within four days and we are seeing for urgent care centers in particular like the CityMD sir, that you went to, it's generally within four days for urgent care centers.

Question: And my second question along the same issue, how's this, Mayor, going to help you, do you think, or hope at least with schools, more schools opening, with the school’s opening next week.

Mayor: Dave, look, anything that improves testing improves the willingness of people who get tested. I mean, just think about it. I think there's been legitimate feeling that folks got discouraged if it took too long for the result to come back, because it's less pertinent. If it comes back after a longer period of time, and by the way, for all of you have been tested, I've been a strong proponent of the easier, less invasive test. The self-swab we call it where they pleasantly run the test around inside your nostril rather than the more elevated test, how we say. So I think literally it's been a tactic to sort of make the testing simpler, less invasive to make sure everyone knows it's free, readily available, but it has to come back fast for people to want to do it. So this is an encouragement to people to see those public testing sites coming back in a day to days that is going to encourage, and that's going to help us continue to open schools, the more people get tested, everything interrelates.

Question: A friend who works in the nursing home industry said there seems to be a discrepancy between the city and state over whether the DOB inspectors have to submit to screenings. The state is requiring that all inspectors in nursing homes submit the screenings, but the DOB inspectors are refusing to, and the chief inspectors told them inspectors are to self-monitor health exempt from onsite health screening on regulator's not visitors. So what's happening now is they can't get any inspections done because the inspectors are refusing to submit the test. Can something be worked out between the State and the City in that regard?

Mayor: I have not heard that previously. I'm concerned, obviously I want see if Dr. Chokshi wants to offer anything. That's not a problem that's been raised to me at least, but we'll look into it right away. We obviously want to keep everyone safe. Doctor you want to add?

Commissioner Chokshi: No, I'm not aware of this specific issue either. What I will say is in general nursing homes, because we know the risk of transmission is so much higher. We have you know, an abundance of caution approach with respect to screening in nursing homes, but we can certainly look into the specific issue with inspectors and find that out.

Question: My second question – it's for the Commissioner also. Has there been a single documented case in New York or across the country of someone who had antibodies, a significant number of antibodies and then subsequently tested positive again for the coronavirus?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes. The short answer is yes, there, there are documented cases of re-infection. Essentially someone who was infected some period of time ago, it could be several months ago who recovered and therefore has antibodies and then was subsequently reinfected with the coronavirus. I want to be very clear here. We're talking about an extraordinarily small number of cases right now, and it's an area where the science is still emerging for us to understand just how common that phenomenon of re-infection might be.

Question: Any ballpark how many?

Commissioner Chokshi: We're talking about in the single digits that have been reported thus far.

Question: Thank you, Mayor. First of all, thanks for doing this in person. It's a nice change of pace from the virtual format. But going back to your vision for the recovery, when you talked about investing in public health infrastructure and creating jobs, because you speak to the funding that would be involved for this, do you see taxpayer dollars involved? And if so, any ballpark figure, like any more specifics?

Mayor: Let me speak to that, and I want to also say I had meant to provide the daily indicators. So just a quick programming note, and then I'll answer your question. Just want to give everyone the indicators for today on hospital admissions we are at 56 individuals for today – 56 patients with a confirmed COVID positive rate of 9.72. New reported cases on a seven-day average, 320 overall testing in the city, 1.20 percent.

To your question. So a couple of things are going to happen here. One, as the city makes decisions about our investments, our capital funding, we're going to prioritize these investments in healthcare as the core of our economic development strategy. So we will spark as we have sparked before with life sciences, for example, or a great example from the previous administration with Cornell Technion-Roosevelt Island, we're going to make investments that spark activity in health innovation, public health. But there's also a tremendous amount of resources that will be available going forward, because I am convinced the federal government will start to invest deeply in addressing the danger of future pandemics, the academic community, the opportunities for research grants, obviously the private sector, which is looking to deepen its efforts in this area because everyone understands this will be the nexus of our future. So we'll make smart and targeted investments, but I believe there's going to be a lot of other resources that will go where the action is, and we have to make this, that place, and James, you want to, where's James, you want to add?

President Patchett: Since I think you asked also about testing specifically funding for testing. So I will just say just to give you an example, we were, we were paying over a hundred dollars per test for national reference laboratories. This lab we're paying $28 per test. So we've cut the cost by about obviously about 75 percent or more using this lab, and our new rapid testing competition that we launched today. We're looking for tests that costs between $5 and $10 and can be completed within 15 minutes. So we're talking about rapidly scaling up testing, using our existing funding for testing, which is a mix of federal and city funding but cutting the cost dramatically, and in this case, by more than 90 percent for rapid testing in here today already by more than 75 percent.

Question: For Dr. Katz. since folks in the communities, you enumerated yesterday, gathered for the Jewish holiday over the weekend, do you expect the positivity rate to rise, you know, as we test going forward?

President Katz: So we're, we're particularly concerned for those of you who don't know the Jewish traditions. We're in a very special time right now between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, there are not a lot of celebrations, right? This is for us Jews, a time of reflection. What we're particularly concerned about is going into the Sukkot holiday, which is a very different – it’s a festive holiday where people typically meet together to celebrate, and so that's why we're going to redouble our efforts in all of the Brooklyn neighborhoods we're going to be out with our cars and with their megaphones attached with messages in Yiddish and in English, reminding people that we can continue to have our celebrations and our meetings, but we have to, as you are doing, be wearing a mask and as we're all doing, be socially distant, and if we do those two things, we will be able to. Dr. Chokshi and I with the Mayor are watching very closely the numbers. We look at them every day, sometimes more than once a day. We look at the testing numbers, we look at the case numbers and we're prepared if we need to take more stringent actions in order to prevent infections and prevent the nightmare that we all experienced in March and April we'll do so.

Question: And if you lived in one of those neighborhoods and you were inclined to worship, would you intend services indoors?

President Katz: I would attend services indoors, but I would be wearing a mask and I would not be sitting next to someone who wasn't part of my family, and that's what we're asking. We're not asking that people not celebrate the holiday. We're asking that people wear masks and we're asking that people be socially distant.

Question: Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I was just wondering, you know, this rapid testing, can you say more about this rapid testing competition and are you considering rapid testing models that are already existing? Like the one that Yale developed? And can you give us, I know you said more detailed plans will be coming in further weeks, but can you say anything more about what this rebirth entails? What's going on in Governor’s Island? Any specifics that you can provide us would be greatly appreciated.

Mayor: Okay. That's a little bit sprawling, but let me do my best here and I'll have James speak to the competition and Claire give you a little more flavor of what's happening on Governors Island. Remember we talked about Governors Island back in what feels like ancient history, back at the time of the State of the City at the beginning of the year, this is a crucial piece of the vision and again, we've got to understand that we need to be the place, this city needs to be the place where that innovation happens. And that's both, I believe a moral statement, but also a statement of how we achieve our rebirth. So just to summarize it for my colleagues, I think this is where you take New York City's inherent strengths and the call to action of the moment, and you combine them strategically. The whole world is going to need answers to the health care crisis. The whole world needs answers to the coronavirus crisis, but also how we prepare to stop any pandemic in the future. The whole world needs answers to the crisis of health care disparity. If we are the place where those answers are being created and tested and proven, a huge amount of investment comes our way, a huge amount of jobs are created equally with fighting global warming. If we increasingly are the place creating the solutions, an immense amount of energy, investment, job creation happens here. James, you want to start on the competition?

President Patchett: Morning. So, yeah, we're putting out a paper on this shortly. The competition is launching today. We have a website that we'll have today. The – we're using the model we used for the pandemic response lab, except we're doing it publicly and open to everyone because – so the approach we used here was, we said that we put out a set of criteria and we said the city was prepared to make a financial commitment to the lab results and that was all we needed to get a substantial amount of interest. We had close to 10 proposals, but this was in – we knew we did it more directly targeted people who we knew were advancing this technology and could do it in New York City. This is at least national and we'd be open to global responses as well. The amount of innovation happening in rapid testing, it's happening very rapidly.

So we're open to any response. The goal is test that cost less than $20 [inaudible] sorry, results that can be gotten in less than 20 minutes and test the cost $5 to $10. And so it's, you know, it's the city's commitment to use these at scale. You know, our belief is that this – the most important thing to again, to economic reopening, is testing. Today we're doing that by using PCR Testing. It still going to take 24 hours realistically to do that at the city’s scale that's necessary. The thing that bridges to a vaccine is rapid testing at a significant scale. Corporate partners are interested in this. The city itself has interested in this. Every employer wants to have rapid testing, it’s the difference between being able to – knowing if you can go into a restaurant safely or not, and you're doing it at that speed is essential to economic opening and that's why this is an open call to innovation anywhere. This includes tests that are – there are a few that are already FDA approved, but there are significant number more that are coming within the next few weeks and we want to look at all of those options and we already have criteria for evaluating them.

Question: For a follow up I want to –

Mayor: Hold on the second part, Claire Newman's the president and CEO of the Trust for Governors Island. I want her to give you an update on where the vision stands?

President and CEO Claire Newman, Trust For Governors Island: Thank you. As we've been talking to collectively about the plan for Governors Island, what we've heard loud and clear, and it relates so much to what's being talked about today is the intersection between the issue of the threat of climate change and public health and economic vitality. And so what we've heard is there's a clear need within the sector to bring together under one roof issues of science, issues of real on the ground solution making, alongside policy and communications so that we can leverage the talent in New York City and everything that the city has already done in the fight against climate change and begin to continue to build the political will to really see these changes implemented. So attracting a cross sector anchor to the island, educational or research, can help to seed a broader cross sector response to the issues, including commercial activity, including advocacy, and most importantly, nesting that all in public engagement and public education.

Question: Yeah, and for my follow-up I wanted to ask about the furloughs. You know, the DOE informed some un – I mean non-unionized teachers that they would have to take a week of furlough. Can you explain who in the DOE is getting those furloughs? Does that – and then can you explain why you think that’s necessary with all that teachers are going through right now? NYPD officers required to take –

Mayor: Again, I’ll make sure to get you a response from our Labor Relations Commissioner Renee Campion to give you the real specifics. But look, overwhelmingly our public work force is unionized and the furloughs do not affect unionized workers. This is all management level, and folks who are not represented by a union. The fact is that we just have to find savings everywhere we can and the furlough is one week of pay that will be spread out over time to lessen the blow, but again the goal here is to find savings – the bigger savings we need, we have to work through with the unions, because that’s where the vast majority of the workers are, but we’ll have Renee give you the breakout.

Question: Mayor, I just wanted to clarify, and I apologize if I heard this date and missed it, when will the lab be ready to do the 24-hour turnaround [inaudible] –

President Katz: It opened last Monday. We are already doing 24 hour turnarounds. Every test that we’ve had at this lab to date has had a 24-hour or less turnaround.

Question: When will the 20,000 tests per day –

President Katz: Oh, I’m sorry. So we’ll have 10,000 by the end of September and by November we’ll have 20,000.

Question: So my question for the Mayor, near the end of your speech you talked about anyone who is involved in the future of New York, I welcome you to the table. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounded somewhat like an answer to the letter you got from the business leaders who are saying, where’s your vision for the future? You’re saying here, I’ve got a vision for the future, but come to the table and help me build it because we didn’t hear a lot of the specifics today aimed at what they are looking for, which is how do you get folks back to Manhattan? How to do you get Broadway open? How do you get New York City looking like New York City, and you’re saying today, science and health is the future, I’ll have more details soon, but come join me and help flesh this out? Am I’m wrong?

Mayor: Well I’d say it’s a little different but it’s, I think your directionally in the ballpark, we want everyone at the table. And again, this vision is not just about Midtown Manhattan, this vision is not just about the theatres on Broadway, this vision is about five boroughs. It’s about working people. What did we see in this crisis? The crisis affected everyone, and who got hit the hardest? Working people, lower income people, people of color, immigrants, so the notion of elite solutions to non-elite problems is arcane. So I do want to work with everyone, but I want to be honest about – if someone brings a perspective to the table that is just about Midtown, or just about our traditional industries, or just about serving the consumers who have the most money to spend, that’s not going to work. So we’re offering a direction saying, come be a part of this, everyone, but it includes as I said, community based organizations, local economic development organizations. It’s not just the big famous names, it’s everyone.

Question: Just as a quick follow-up to that, but your five boroughs solution in terms of specifics, what is it that we're sort of waiting to hear? Is it a number of jobs? Is it a construction timeline?

Mayor: All of the above, we want to lay out how we get there. Like every other blueprint in the world, we want to lay out how we get there. To me, you start with a big vision strategy in all great endeavors, and then you put together a blueprint and it gets more and more specific as you go along. So what we'll give you in the coming weeks is the next steps on how we get there and then we're going to learn by doing as with everything else. Okay, Katie, and then I've got two more and we are done. Go ahead.

Question: Oh, okay. I wanted to ask following up a bit about what Andrew asked about the economic recovery. I know you said it's not about Midtown, but looking at the people who work in the tourism industry, which has been hit the hardest, whether if it's at LaGuardia and JFK or if you're a stagehand or an usher, it's not the elites, as you say. So does the city have a plan for helping people within this industry, whether they work on Broadway or off Broadway or at an airport or at a hotel? Because again, those are not, as you say, elites living in Midtown, they tend to live in the outer boroughs and they are people of color –

Mayor: 100 percent. But I think the point today is everything depends on health care, that remember, this is both how we overcome the immediate crisis, which then allows us to restore our economy and our lives, but it's also the future of our economy will be more and more about health care. So yeah, of course we want to bring every sector back and again if Vicki or James wants to add, you're more than welcome, but I would just frame it this way, these are not mutually exclusive concepts, but direction and strategy have to actually land somewhere. If – and I don't, again, I never blame you guys for wanting and talk about whatever individual concern you have or constituency you're concerned about or piece of the equation. That's normal, that's healthy. But what I'm trying to get clear is a strategy means a direction. You have to choose a direction and that direction can't be everything. We believe this direction is what gives us a stronger foundation for the future, it's also how we come back now. Vicki, you want to add?

Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, Housing and Economic Development: Thanks Katie. So of course we're concerned about every single sector, and of course, we're very concerned about the way that this economic crisis in COVID has affected Broadway, have affected our theaters, et cetera. But key to that is exactly the kind of testing, quick testing so that we can use that to make it safe for people to come back to those places. That's key. And what we're saying here is these are foundational aspects of every single sector. We've got to have the basics of public health in place so that we can bring those sectors back quickly, safely and fairly, right? But that involves a whole range of things, testing, making sure that we've got, you know, a plan to disperse the vaccine as soon as it's available, all of those things. But it also means things like making sure that our streets are clean and all of that. But the key focus is everything's got to be based on bringing people back safely and that requires investing in public health.

Question: Okay and my second question speaks to the health care equity issue that you talked about. I know Dr. Katz is here. There are parts of the city has been noted multiple times throughout the pandemic that are lacking in hospital space and it's a serious issue. There was a plan to expand Elmhurst Hospital, it's now delayed because of COVID. So going into what could be a second wave or something, I mean, are there concrete plans to actually create more space in parts of the city that do not have enough hospital beds aa we saw during COVID?

Mayor: The first thing I want to say is our job is to stop a second wave, stating the obvious that they're there does not have to be a second wave like we're seeing in lots of Europe, for example, if we continue to be tight and disciplined and fast to respond to problems. As I bring up Dr. Katz, I'll say, think that for the right now crisis, it is the ability to expand hospital bed capacity in hospitals as they are. We're obviously not building new hospitals from scratch, but we can expand rapidly if needed, but our goal is to not end up in that situation.

President Katz: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Two thoughts, first overwhelmingly the problem with staffing, right? Having enough intensivists, having enough intensive care nurses, having enough respiratory therapists and the second level problem was the equipment. Physical space was never for us the limiting factor. But I think also to your point, we're opening a COVID center thanks to the Mayor, that's just blocks away from Elmhurst and that COVID center's going to have capabilities for advanced radiology, so that people have respiratory issues can be evaluated, testing. So we do see to your point – to the truth of your point – there do need to be more centers, not necessarily inpatient beds, but definitely more places. Also the Mayor challenged us to open NYC Care back up to the entire borough so that everybody is assured that they can have that connection to a primary care doctor, free care, pharmacy late in the night and the weekends. So

Question: That contradicts what you said [inaudible] needed more space [inaudible].

President Katz: No, I think I said in April that it wasn't going to be space. It was going to be people and equipment, but I understand it's complicated.

Mayor: Yes, you definitely did say it was about people. People was the biggest part of the problem in April. Go ahead.

Question: So with the lack of tourism, there's several hotels that are closing and laid off thousands of workers. What are you doing to help that industry? And you have a lot on your plate. Are you designating anyone to help specifically with the revitalization to help these hotels?

Mayor: Well, obviously our Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development, Vicki Been is working with all sectors, in fact has had – I don't think hundreds is an exaggeration – from the beginning hundreds of meetings and Zooms in one thing or another with the sector councils we put together and with leaders of different industries to discuss what they're going to need and how we can help. The situation in the hotel industry is very, very painful. But again, I think we see a couple of big strands here. The way back from New York City is through becoming healthier all the time and continuing to build up the things that will bring people here. So the best that we can do for the hotel industry is get ourselves on that strong, healthy footing and continue to create the things that people need to come here to be a part of. In terms of their overall situation, it's very, very troubling, but we can't do – as is true with other industries – we can't do what we would love to do, which would be direct support financially. We can't do that. That's beyond our reach. What we can do is try and bring back the bigger picture. Do you want to add Vicki?

Deputy Mayor Been: So, and it's certainly a multipronged approach, right? We're trying to get people back out into their neighborhoods, get them into restaurants. Obviously that's been incredibly successful where we're telling people, take a staycation, you know, celebrate your anniversary here in our hotels. That kind of thing. We're working very closely with New York City and Company, which as you know, is doing this All in NYC campaign to try to get people again, out doing the things that we can do as local tourists and looking forward to the time when we can start bringing people from other states and other countries to enjoy all that New York offers.

Question: And then the second question is this is great to do these press conferences in person. Will you be doing them daily moving forward?

Mayor: We're going to have to see what goes on with the coronavirus and everything else. Just premature to answer that right now. Nolan, you are last for today. Come on up guys - guys I've said a limit, and when I say a limit, it's the limit. Go ahead. I said, we had two more guys, come on.

Question: Mr. Mayor on behalf of my colleagues –

Mayor: All right. If you want to call it here, we can call it here. Guys, we've had really clear, consistent rules, either live by them, or if you don't want to participate, you don't have to.

Question: Mr. Mayor, we all got on the train. We all took risk when it comes to public health to get here. I mean, it's just –

Mayor: Nolan.

Question: These are long standing members of the press corps as am I.

Mayor: Guys look. 

Question: I mean –

Mayor: This is your – do you want to ask a question or not?

Question: I really – sure. So on April 26th, you announced a fair recovery task force, a couple of weeks later, you announced a series of committees that were going to develop individual policy proposals. It's now the end of September, we still don't have any details about a recovery plan. What have you been doing for the last four months?

Mayor: Again, we have been bringing back our economy in phases, phases one, two, three, four on time, and we stuck with it. We have been bringing back our health situation, which is foundational to everything else and why we are now one of the safest places in the country. We have been bringing back our schools. That's what we've been doing. Go ahead. Can't hear you. There you go.

Question: To follow up on that point, there have been detailed plans that were developed by the Deputy Mayor, Vicki Been, with the help of Alicia Glen and the former head of City Planning. Carl Weisbrod, there was the Transportation Surface Commission, which came back with a whole host of its own recommendations. They've loudly complained. All of those were sidelined. And again, it's the end of September and you're saying you have a vision for the revival of the city, but again, there are no details. There is no handout today that I can give back to my [inaudible] that says Mayor de Blasio has punch list of 20 things he would like to do.

Mayor: Nolan, respectfully, as we just said really clearly, here's the bigger vision. You're going to see a paper today on some of the specific pieces that are happening immediately. You're going to see a bigger plan. This is bringing back a city of over 8 million people. It is something that has to be done the right way. So again, we have continued to bring back our city, now we're talking about a bigger vision. We're going to lay out specific plans. We're going to go from there. It's everything has to keep building. And I think it's a pretty clear strategy because again, I think what I would urge you to just focus on for a moment is, do you hear a strategic vision of where we need to go? I think it's a very clear strategic vision of where we need to go, and then over the coming weeks, pieces will get put in place the planks to make it come alive. Thank you.

2020-09-25 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. And with new coronavirus clusters now showing up in New York City, just as indoor dining is scheduled to resume next Wednesday and the public schools are scheduled to complete their reopening by next Thursday, with Governor Cuomo, chastising the City for being behind other places in the state on police reform and much more. There's a lot to ask the Mayor about in our Friday Ask The Mayor call-in, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our lines are open at 6-4-6- 4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, or you can tweet a question. We'll watch our Twitter feed go by, just use the hashtag #AskTheMayor and good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. And Brian I understand we have an anniversary here. Is this right? 31 years you have been on the air?

Lehrer: That's right. It started September 25th, 31 years ago today. That's right.

Mayor: I commend you and I thank you. I think a lot of people in this town really depend on you and your show to give them perspective on what's going on. So I want to thank you for 31 good years.

Lehrer: Thank you so much. And I see you have a little news to break about outdoor dining. Want to make that announcement?

Mayor: Where better to break the news then on your 31st anniversary show? So yes, we have an important announcement. You know, Brian, we've had in the midst of crisis, some really good and powerful things happen. People innovated and created. And that was particularly true in the restaurant industry. And we depend on this industry so much in the city. It's part of who we are, it’s part of what we love. So many jobs. We want to save these restaurants. And so I'm announcing that we will make the Open Restaurants initiative permanent and year round. And this is something that a lot of folks in the restaurant industry have said, could we find a way to build upon the success? I want us to go for the gold here. I want us to really take this model and make it part of the life of New York City for years and generations to come. This has been, I think, an extraordinarily positive experiment and it's worked. So we're going to take the Open Restaurant idea that restaurants can use the part of the surrounding sidewalk. And if they choose, can use part of the street as well. We're going to make that permanent. We're going to make it year round. We already have well over 10,000 restaurants participating. Almost 100,000 jobs have been saved. And we hope, I believe this is going to make it a lot easier for restaurants to survive. And I think there'll be a lot of participation.

I also want to note just a couple of quick things, Brian. We're going to make the combination of Open Streets and Open Restaurants, which has been a huge hit. And that you've seen on weekends that we've had streets closed off entirely. Restaurants could expand well out in the streets, creates kind of a festival atmosphere. That also will be made permanent. We have 87 streets citywide participating. We want to continue that and even go farther. I think this will really help us as an important part of how we recover as a city. And obviously indoor dining beginning next week. We want to make sure that goes well as well. But the bottom line here is that we want restaurants to do well. We want them to be able to use seating in surrounding sidewalk areas, other storefronts areas, if they can come to agreement with the folks in those storefronts as well. We want them to have the right kind of heating over the winter. We want them to be able to enclose their facilities if that's what works for them. But obviously with the restrictions on seating. Or keep them open and heated, and then they can be fuller.

And this is something we're going to get to work on right away making it happen. And we're going to work with the City Council. Some of this will be – will require legislation, other pieces or administrative. But this is a-go. We want this to be something the restaurant industry can depend on. And just we want to see them thrive in the future. And I think this is going to help a lot.

Lehrer: If you enclose an outdoor dining space, doesn't it become indoor dining?

Mayor: Correct. And that goes to the capacity levels that would apply to indoor dining. So you have a choice. Let's say you have a restaurant Brian, you have that area outdoors. If you say, I want to fully enclose it, it'll be easier to heat it, it'll be a better atmosphere. Great. But you do it with the limits currently in place. Right now that means 25 percent capacity. Hopefully that will grow as we continue to fight back the virus. If you say, conversely, I like it the way it is now, I'm able to fill more seats. Then you have to keep it more open for the flow of air and figure out obviously a way to keep the heating sufficient as well. So that's a choice for restaurant owners. They could do either way.

Lehrer: Let's take a phone call Daniel in Bay Ridge you are on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Daniel.

Question: Hi. Thank you. Mr. Lehrer, and your honor, I would like to specifically ask -- you have bent over backwards for restaurants in New York City and yet comedy clubs and small venues that serve food and drink and have proposed the same capacities and same limits are denied. Even the conversation with the Mayor's Office of Nightlife were denied, even returned emails or phone calls are denied even your honor, considering us. And it's not that anyone is asking as Emilio Savone and the owner of the New York Comedy Club said, no one is asking to cut the line here. We would like to be considered to be reopened at the same capacity as these restaurants. You're not talking about a huge difference. It's one person standing at the front of the place on stage with a microphone and a plastic cover between them and the audience. We want to make a living as well your honor. How do we do that?

Mayor: David listen, I appreciate it very much this question. I want to say, I think there's a little bit of a misunderstanding here because I said – I was asked this actually several days ago in my morning press conference. And I said, we absolutely want to address the issue of the comedy clubs. And that's one of the things coming up next on the agenda. Comedy clubs are a big deal in this city. I happen to know a lot of people in the industry. I love this industry. It's a part of what makes New York City so special and we need comedy clubs to come back. So there was never an intention to not hear those voices. If somehow those meetings didn't happen – I believe you, if you're saying they didn't happen, that's wrong. I want to apologize for that. They should have. And I'll tell my team to have those meetings immediately. But more important, we have a regular strategic call with our Health leadership to go over each and every category. And comedy clubs are now coming up after we've dealt with a lot of other really big pieces of the equation. Most notably schools, child care, the restaurant industry, all the reopenings phase one, two, three, four. It's time to address comedy clubs and figure out a way to do it right. So that set of decisions will be made literally in a matter of days. And we're going to work with the State as always. But I do want to see this industry come back.

Lehrer: With the positivity rate, going up in some city neighborhoods as high as six percent, is it still time for any indoor dining?

Mayor: It's a fair question Brian. We're watching this very, very carefully. I think we have a little bit of a divergence here. We see a set of communities where the positivity levels are just plain too high. And a very aggressive effort, a lot of presence out in those communities as we speak educating folks, providing free masks, where necessary doing enforcement. We've had some yeshivas that had to be closed. It's four right now already. There's a lot of work to do to make very clear that we have to arrest this problem before it gets worse. And it's putting people's lives in danger. But the rest of the city, we're seeing extraordinarily low levels of the coronavirus and that continues to hold. So I think the big answer to you right now is our overall framework is holding and working. We're going to watch carefully as schools reopen, as more and more people are coming back to work, and you're seeing a lot more activity on the streets and all. We're going to watch all that carefully. But right now, overall, the city's doing very well.

Lehrer: Reading neighborhood stats from NBC News. The increase in positive COVID cases was largest in the Gravesend/Homecrest area where the positivity rate hit six percent yesterday. Other problem areas include Midwood, just under five percent, Edgemere/Far Rockaway just over four percent, Kew Gardens just under four percent, Borough Park 3.5 percent, Bensonhurst/Mapleton, 3.1 percent. Sheepshead Bay three percent, Flatlands/Midwood three percent and Williamsburg 1.6. Considering the population in most of those neighborhoods, and you already mentioned closing some yeshivas. Do we have enough Yiddish speaking contact traces? And will public schools in those neighborhoods where there are cases that numerous still be opening next week?

Mayor: So there's a very rigorous outreach effort in the community in English and Yiddish. And that's everything. That's robo calls that sound trucks, a lot of in-person activity. There's a substantial number of Yiddish speakers who have been brought into the effort. Test and Trace has been hiring directly from the community. We are going to keep doing that though. I think this is an indicator we will be fighting for a little while here. We are going to keep bringing on more people who can speak and connect with the community. But we have a lot of community leaders deeply engaged with the City government to address this issue. So they are people who are trusted in their own community including doctors and nurses from the community who are really sounding the alarm here. We say a variation of this problem with Measles last year. It was addressed with a lot of community support and participation. So I think we will see the same pattern here. The second part of your question Brian, from what we are seeing so far in the schools where remember all staffs are back in their schools. So that’s well over 100,000 staff in the schools all over the city, all levels. And then in the course of this week with pre-K back, 3-K back, special education District 75 back, upwards of 90,000 students coming through the schools, we are seeing continually low levels in schools and we are tracking it schools by school. So we do not see a nexus yet where public schools in those particular communities are having issues. And a lot of the times again, the kids in a particular school do not come from the immediate surrounding area. They come from other places. But we are going to watch school by school. We are also doing testing outside some key school locations to keep an eye on the situation very specifically.

Lehrer: Liz in Brooklyn you on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Liz.

Question: Hi Brian. First I want to thank you for mentioning all the neighborhoods that are above the Mayor’s three percent threshold for reopening. I think that's a really important thing to point out. And it's really hard to get that data you know, just for a regular person in the public, to know what zip codes are above or, you know, whatever percentage they happen to be. So one, I'd like to ask the Mayor to make that data available. Some other data I'd love to have be available to the public is all of the cases in all of the schools. That's not something we have accessible to us right now. With regard to testing, 41,000 or it could be just 40,000 of the teachers that were supposed to be going into buildings as I understand it, have not been tested or we don't have their results. For the 100 cases that were reported yesterday. And they're is, you know, could be as many as 400 cases, 300 of which are undetected in the schools right now. In LA all teachers and students are going to be tested. And just, I know that the Chancellor has said, well, we don't have the infection rates of LA. But we parents of New York City would really like to have the most top notch possible Test and Trace program which they, it seems have in LA. That is partnered with Stanford.

Brian, I have a couple more things to say, so please forgive me. I'm part of a group called Parents for Responsive Equitable Safe Schools Press NYC. And we have a letter campaign going to the Chancellor – I mean, to the Chancellor, the Mayor, and here's what we are asking for. One an honest reckoning by the Mayor and DOE that they have ignored failed the children and families of our school. We need to be shown that their top priority is protecting human health during a pandemic rather than opening school buildings at any cost. We want to see a commitment to full remote instruction until they prove schools are safe and provide evidence from experts. In addition to the LA testing model, we want to know that all air exchange rates in all of our rooms, hallways, bathrooms are six or higher, which means, you know, every ten minutes they're being exchanged. You know, that is absolutely not anything that any classroom teacher or principal knows right now.

Lehrer: And Liz, I'm going to jump in just for time, because this is taking a long time and I do want to give other people a chance. But Mr. Mayor Liz has put a number of specific things on the table there, including the very last thing, the air exchange rates, and whether you have a standard of six, I think she called it or air exchange every 10 minutes for public school rooms.

Mayor: Okay. There's a lot there. So I'm going to go very quickly through it, Brian, but I think it's important to answer these points. Because I think there's some that are very helpful, important. Some of them are actually misleading. Liz, I do thank you. Obviously you care deeply about this. I think there are some facts here that are not accurate. Starting with the situation in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is all remote and they say they will be testing people. And I respect that, but we don't have evidence of that being something yet fully reaching the levels that are being suggested. So I’d be careful to not assume too much. And they're working on an entirely different model than we're working on anyway.

Lehrer: But that's the standard, right? Is that before they do reopen, they've announced that they're going to test everybody who would enter the school. Is that not correct?

Mayor: Again, what I've seen and I don't pretend to be an expert on everything LA. What I've seen is that they are going to be doing all remote for the foreseeable future. And they're really, I'm not seeing a specific plan to come back. So I want to question that entire assumption and everything someplace else, you know – we all have the tendency as humans to believe things, other places are better. I would just be careful. They were not even in a position to consider in-person learning. So look, on things like ventilation, air exchange rate. This is being governed over by the Health authorities of this city who have led the way in bringing the city back from the coronavirus. Everything is done with the Department of Health, looking at the standards around the world of what works. And Brian, this is what I think has been lost in this entire conversation. I understand for sure why people are afraid and worried. And that's why we gave for parents absolute positive choice. It's you can go all remote if that's what you prefer. And we gave for educators and staff, if they had a medical accommodation need, they could apply for it. And the overwhelming majority of those have been approved.

So this is a respectful, humane approach, but it also recognizes the fact that we need to and can make schools safe by layering every measure we've seen around the world, we literally set a gold standard here. A lot of places, most places that have even been successful in reopening schools do not require masks for every child and every adult. You saw an opening day, even down to four year olds, people wearing their mask and wearing them effectively. A lot of places are not doing the social distancing. We're doing ten kids in the New York city classroom. Could you have ever imagined that being the norm? That's what we have. Daily cleanings, ventilation, every single room online was checked, rechecked, outside experts brought in to make sure it's sufficient ventilation.  

So we're going to continue to do all of these measures and in fact, we did have an initial group of 17,000 teachers and staff who were tested and the response on that, the positivity rate was 0.32 percent. 17,000 initial tests yielded 55 people with positive coronavirus tests, which is far below anything we've seen anywhere. So we're going to keep doing this. We do put out a lot of public information. Liz, you should leave your information with WNYC and we'll have folks follow up and show you all the Department of Health information by zip code, showing positivity levels. The information Brian quoted on these problems in certain neighborhoods. We put out that publicly and we're going to put that out daily so long as we're having those problems with neighborhoods, we're going to highlight it publicly. We want people to see it.  

So the, the fact is we will be transparent, you know, next week is when school is up and running full strength. We're going to be putting out regular reports on the number of cases in schools, but we are seeing actually very few and we're seeing good coordination between the schools and our situation room to identify a case and move on it quickly, get test and trace involved. So I just disagree with the underpinnings of Liz's analysis, although I think she makes some good points. The underpinning is why don't we go all remote, no going all remote we'll deprive the kids of this city of the education they deserve, including the kids who need it the most. It will exacerbate disparity, and it will not help this city and our children to continue to be all remote for those who choose it, it is there. But I'll tell you, there's a hell of a lot of parents who want their kids in school, and we owe it to him to do that and to do it safely. 

Lehrer: Let me follow up with another schools issue with in-person learning scheduled to start in a matter of days, exactly how many additional teachers have been hired to address the staffing shortage, which was a major contributing factor to the latest delay and how many more need to be hired by next week? 

Mayor: So, Brian, we've got a process now. I've been meeting at the war room at Department of Education daily with the Chancellor's team and they're doing extraordinary work and they're working nonstop. We've got arguably the most complex hiring challenge any city agency has ever faced because of remote and blended in-person, blended at-home, changing numbers. But what's happened is what you saw on Monday, that every school had the staff they needed pre-K, 3-K, District 75 special-ed, 1,800 sites far beyond what any other school system in America has, just those 1,800 sites would go farther than any school system in America, all had the staff they need. That work is being completed now for Tuesday when K-5 and K-8 schools open, and for Thursday when middle school and high school open. So what I'm going to do is when we have everyone assigned, every seat filled, we'll announce that number, the final number, but we want to not have a situation where as we make these adjustments and we find ways to create effective models and efficiency and one thing or another, we get to a better number all the time. I'm going to announce it when we get to the final thing. The most important reality here is to have every school has the compliment they need for opening and I feel very good about the effort. A lot of effort has been put in. I feel good about the direction it's going in. 

Lehrer: Well, if you won’t release a number of how many more teachers you need to hire or get in place by next Tuesday or next Thursday, are the chances greater than zero that you will have to delay in person school again over staffing? 

Mayor: There's no reason to delay. That's the easiest way to say it. I'm monitoring this constantly, talking with the union leadership every day. We're all watching the specifics together because this is unprecedented. It's never been attempted before. I feel very good. The pieces keep coming together hour by hour, and we are ready to go for Tuesday and ready to go for Thursday. 

Lehrer: You're saying there's a zero chance that staffing would be a cause for further delay?  

Mayor: You know, Brian, the problem – I don't do hypotheticals because we are dealing with a health care dynamics and everything else. I'm not going to do that. And I'm honestly, I don't think that's productive. 

Lehrer: I'm just saying there is a zero chance that – staffing – 

Mayor: The truth is, the truth is that we are getting the people we need in place, period.  

Lehrer: And now we are out of time and I know you have to go to. Thank you as always Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week.  

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.

2020-09-28 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everybody. Today, we are holding a hearing, and the signing of three bills that expand protections for workers, consumers, and commercial tenants. These bills are Intro. 2032-A, 2083-A, and 2049-A. Now a little bit of quick history. In 2014, I signed into law historic reforms that ensured that hardworking New Yorkers would get paid sick leave. And this was something that had been worked on for years and years and we were finally able to achieve for hundreds of thousands more New Yorkers in 2014. And it was a matter of justice and making sure that hardworking people could actually live a decent life. Now, in this pandemic, we know there's so many people who cannot afford to lose what little pay they have, and if you're sick and you are threatened with losing a day's pay because you're sick, it's an absolutely unacceptable situation. We want to make sure people are well and we want to make sure people get the pay they deserve. So, today we extend our Paid Sick Leave laws by aligning them with recently passed New York State laws. And we provide our Paid Sick Leave to workers in smaller businesses and ensure paid sick time – that there's more paid sick time for employees in larger companies.  

Now, another group of folks who have really been hurt deeply during this pandemic have been our commercial tenants. Many are struggling to pay the rent because they were forced to close for a period of time, or they cannot be opened at the same capacity. So, they're in a really tough situation. So many businesses that we all depend on in our communities, that employ so many New Yorkers, including restaurants, barber shops, nail salons, and they're critical to us all and to our future. We have to provide them with some extra support and protection as well. We have legislation on that today.  

Finally, another piece of legislation focuses on our hotel workers, and they've been at the frontline of this crisis. They’ve borne the brunt. Our hotel workers helped the city respond to this pandemic in so many ways, including helping New Yorkers who have to isolate from their families in hotels, helping folks who need to get out of congregate settings for their health and safety. And we know this industry has been through so much. So, today we're got to provide stronger protections to hotel workers and also additional consumer protections for hotel guests in our city.  So, all of this revolves around respecting the needs of hard work in New Yorkers and acting on these needs in this unprecedented time.  

Let's first talk about Intro. 2 – excuse me – 2032-A. Again, this aligns the City's Paid Sick Leave law with the recently enacted New York State Paid Sick Leave expansion. Now, here are the changes. It will expand Paid Sick Leave to small businesses with four or fewer employees and with income of less than $1 million per year. And these employers must now provide up to 40 hours of unpaid sick leave. Now, small businesses with four or fewer employees with an income of over a million dollars must provide 40 hours of paid sick leave under this law. And then largest businesses, those with over a hundred employees, must now provide up to 56 hours of paid sick leave. 

Intro. 2083-A, this amends Local Law 55 of 2020, which temporarily prohibits the enforcement of personal liability provisions in commercial leases or rental agreements involving COVID-19 impacted tenants. And this extends the sunset date of this protection from September 30th, 2020 to March 31st, 2021.  

And Intro. 2049-A, this establishes protections for displaced hotel service workers in the event of a sale or transfer of hotel. New owners will be required to provide existing employment and maintain wages for a period of 90 days. At the end of the 90-day period, the new employer would perform an evaluation of each worker. Intro. 2049-A also establishes consumer protections and notice requirements for service disruptions for guests of hotels.  
I want to thank many people who have been involved in moving these key pieces of legislation, our Corporation Counsel Jim Johnson, our Department of Consumer Worker Protection Commissioner Lorelei Salas, Small Business Services Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Speaker Corey Johnson, the Council member who sponsored Intro 2032-A, Council Member Andy Cohen, who is chair of the Consumer Affairs Committee in the Council; and the sponsor of Intro. 2049-A, Council Member Mark Levine. And now I'd like to turn to the sponsor of Intro 2083-A for her to provide her comments on this very important legislation. We thank you for sponsoring it. 

Everyone, I’m going to do a few words in Spanish, summarizing what we're doing today before I sign the legislation.  

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, let's sign this legislation – 

[Mayor de Blasio signs Intro. 2032-A, Intro. 2083-A, and Intro 2049-A] 

All right, all three of these bills are now law. Thank you to everyone who's participated today and everyone who worked hard on these pieces of legislation. Congratulations to all, and this hearing is now adjourned. Thank you.

2020-09-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, we've got really important things to talk about today and want to make sure that people of the city understand exactly what we are seeing in communities around this city. So, we're actually going to do something different today and talk about our daily indicators upfront, but it's also important to say we're going to provide a new piece of information from this point on, because it's really important to understand what's happening in the context of the whole city while we're dealing with specific challenges in specific neighborhoods. We'll talk about that as well, but let me start with the notion, something we've talked about before, the seven-day rolling average, that means looking at the tests that we're getting back from New Yorkers all over the city. That's what gives us our daily percentage, that positivity number we talk about each day, but now looking at not just in a daily context, but in the context of a seven-day rolling average – this gives us a more accurate look at the whole picture from the whole city. Obviously, this is particularly crucial with the discussion of what we're going to do, going forward, with our school systems. So, based on the seven-day rolling average right now in New York City, our positivity level for coronavirus is 1.38 percent – 1.38 percent on that seven-day rolling average, well below threshold. Now, we still obviously have a serious problem, and the problem is primarily in nine ZIP codes, and that is affecting the overall daily number, as opposed to the seven-day number. The daily number is being very much affected by the challenges we're seeing in those nine ZIP codes and we must address those intensely. And we're going to talk about that. So, for the first time in months, you're going to see a daily number over three percent – and, obviously, everyone is concerned about that. That is something we all have to work on together to address and something that says to us we have to be on high alert to make sure we fight back this challenge. I know we can do it. I've seen in communities around the city where we started to see upticks, the ability of the community, working with the Test and Trace Corps., Department of Health, the whole City government to beat back and outbreak. We need to do that again on a bigger scale, and, we can, but the fact is for the first time in quite a while the daily number is over three percent and that is cause for real concern.

Okay. So, we'll talk about what we need to do in those nine ZIP codes, but, at the same time, we'll talk about the fact that in the rest of the city now, it's important to know there are 146 ZIP codes in New York City. So, in general, what we're seeing in the other 137 ZIP codes is we're doing well in those, generally speaking. Some areas we have to work on, but the central problem is the nine ZIP codes with a particular problem. Okay. This, of course, means based on the seven-day average, we are moving continually forward with our schools. We'll talk more about the opening today of our elementary schools, but let's now go over the indicators upfront with the inclusion of the seven-day rolling average. So, first of all, daily indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients – today's report is 71 patients, confirmed positive rate for a COVID-19 of 16.4 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average threshold is 550 cases – today's report is 338. And percentage of people tested positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent, today's report 3.25 percent. So, again, we have not seen a day like that in quite a while, and we don't want to see days like this. But, again, the seven-day rolling average for the whole city, 1.38 percent. So, keep including that number, going forward, so you can see exactly where it's going and we're going to do everything possible to push that number even farther down.

Okay. Now, on the problem we're having – as I said, nine ZIP codes where we have a problem. Each ZIP code is different. Some we've seen some noticeable progress, but, overall, unfortunately, we have not seen enough. In fact, in some ZIP codes, the numbers have been going up. So, this is an inflection point. We have to take more action at this point and more serious action. And we will be escalating with each day, depending on what we see happening on the ground and the test results we're getting. It's crucial to stop the spread of the virus in these nine ZIP codes and everywhere in the city. So, my first message today is the thing that everyone can do – go get tested. To everyone in those nine ZIP codes, it is crucial we get a true picture of what's going on. We need a lot more people to get tested. We need the whole truth. Typically, as more and more people get tested, we see, of course, a more accurate picture. A lot of times we see the numbers go down when we see more people tested, but we need that for everyone in the city at this point. It is crucial that people not let up on getting tested. If you've never been tested, we need you to go get tested. If you have not been tested for a while, we need you to go get tested. We need a clear picture of what's happening in the city and the more testing that happens, the clearer picture we get. So, we're going to keep telling everyone that message reminding you, it is free. It is fast. It is easy. We're making it easier all the time. We're using the self-swab testing – not the long contraption that goes up your nose – a simpler testing, thank God. And, again, free, fast locations all over the city.

Now, in the specific areas of greatest concern, those nine ZIP codes, there'll be a lot more community outreach today, a lot testing on the ground, testing centers being set up in those communities. You'll see hundreds of Test and Trace Corps. members out in the communities, hundreds of additional City agency personnel, handing out masks for free, encouraging testing, getting people good information, pushing back against misinformation. And, today, two additional enforcement measures immediately. One, anyone who is not wearing a face covering will be offered one, will be reminded it is required. And anyone who refuses to wear a face covering will be told that if they don't put one on, they will be fined. And anyone who is still refuses, will be fined. So, that will happen aggressively, clearly. Our goal, of course, is to give everyone a free face mask and get them to wear it. We don't want to fine people. If we have to, we will, and that will be starting on a large scale today. Second, Department of Health has ordered nonpublic schools and childcare centers to close if they don't follow the Commissioner's Order on health safeguards, and the Commissioner will speak to that in a moment. So, we put out new safeguard measures. We want to work with every nonpublic school and childcare center to get it right, so that they can keep going using the right safeguards. But those that are not able to, or won't, will have to be closed down by the Commissioner. Again, our goal here is to cooperate with the community. And I want to say, we just had a very productive Zoom call with a number of key leaders of the community, some of the most prominent leaders of the community. Dr. Katz and I spoke with them to give them the update on the numbers, on the enforcement measures, we experienced tremendous cooperation and support that community leaders have been now for days telling members of the community how important it is to wear a masks, to abide by social distancing – even in synagogues on the holiest day of the year that we just had passed, Yom Kippur, we heard many, many reports of a lot of social distancing, a lot of masks wearing. We want to see that amplified today by community leaders and the reminder that everyone should get tested and that we all need to solve this problem together. And we're seeing tremendous support and cooperation from community leaders and institutions. I want to thank them for that, thank them for joining with us a few minutes ago on the call and we're going to stay in constant contact.

So, those are the immediate steps. I have to affirm that if we do not see progress quickly, there are additional steps, and the Commissioner has laid this out at the end of last week. If necessary, we will have to prohibit gatherings except for very small gatherings. If necessary, we will have to close nonessential businesses. No one wants that to happen if it can be avoided. If it does have to happen, we would obviously try and target it as carefully as possible, but it is a situation at this point that's very serious and we have to have all options on the table. I'm going to turn to Dr. Mitch Katz, with a thanks to him. He has been leading this effort, working with community leaders, and I've heard tremendous respect from those community leaders for Dr. Katz and for his compassion, his concern for his community, his understanding of the community and all the time and energy is put into working with community organizations and leaders to help get the right message out. So, with that, we'll get an update now from Dr. Mitch Katz.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for all you're doing to keep us safe. You know, that South Brooklyn is where I'm from, where my older brother and sister still live. And so, I'm very concerned about the infections that have increased in Brooklyn, and in Queens. We fought so hard as New Yorkers. We can't give up the progress that's allowed us to reopen our city. Last weekend, and over the weekend, we did extensive engagement in the communities where we're seeing the greatest increases. We spoke to community and religious leaders. We handed out masks. We distributed literature. Over the Jewish high holidays, we made sure that more than 300 synagogues had the masks they need. And, as we heard today, Mr. Mayor, people heard that and multiple leaders reported that in their synagogues everyone was wearing a mask and that people were keeping their distance. So, I know that work has been happening and has been successful. It's all part of the four simple steps that every New Yorker can take – the core four – stay home if you're sick; keep physical distance between yourself and others and limit indoor gatherings; wear a face covering; practice healthy hand hygiene. And, as the Mayor said, get tested so we have a full picture. We want to be sure that this message is getting out and reaching those who need to hear it. I'm happy we haven't yet had to take any sweeping actions, but as positivity rates rise, we become more and more concerned that we will have to, if we're not able to decrease these infections. Over the weekend, we continued our education efforts that we started last week. We're going to keep building on them. We're going to increase testing sites and testing capacity, augmenting engagement, and adding more people on the ground. We have moved 11 mobile testing sites into these cluster areas. We're tripling capacity to Health Department COVID express testing sites. The Crown Heights and Fort Greene locations will now be able to test a lot more people per day. Tomorrow, we're going to add new rapid testing capacity at community provider offices in Orthodox communities. We're also adding rapid testing capacity at three of our Health + Hospital locations, one in Queens and two in Brooklyn. 11 community-based organizations have partnered with us to do street level outreach, mask distribution, and education, going to increase this ability to do it in Yiddish, working with additional organizations. As you said, Mr. Mayor, there'll be 350 people on the ground today, including our Test and Trace Corps., community engagement specialists. We have seven sound trucks out across the cluster area and we're making rowboat calls to all households in the cluster area. We're using every tool and we're open to suggestions of other tools. If people have ideas on how we decrease infection, we want to increase testing and increased compliance so that we can all stay healthy so that we never have to have the tragedies that we had in March and April, and that so many of us have been affected by them. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for all you're doing to keep us safe.

Mayor: Thank you. And, Mitch, thank you. Really appreciate the intensive effort that you've been putting into with your team, working with the community. And, again, there's been a lot of communication over the last a week and more, and the central message has been let's all work together to solve this, to turn this around. We know we can turn it around, but everyone has to be a part of it. But we also know that there have to be very tough measures ready to go and that we will use them as quickly as needed. And here to talk about the specific constructions that he has provided to the community, our Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And, as the Mayor said, we are deeply concerned about the alarming increase in COVID-19 in the ZIP codes in Brooklyn and in Queens. The Health Department is making every effort to address what's happening in these communities. For weeks, we've worked with community members through providers, organizations, the media and other partners. We have heard from them and we value their feedback. As Dr. Katz mentioned, we’ll bring even more testing capacity using all of the resources that the entire city has at its disposal. We intend to shore up safety protocols in every corner of these communities, as well. As you know, last week, I issued a Commissioner's order to nonpublic schools in six Brooklyn and two Queens ZIP codes for the safety and the health of nonpublic school students and staff. We did this swiftly out of concern for what we were seeing. After issuing the order we heard from community members and educators. Based on their feedback, we amended it so that it would be more appropriate for the context of these local schools while staying consistent with State guidance, and, most importantly, safeguarding health. The order requires nonpublic schools to maintain at least six feet of distance between individuals, unless it creates a safety hazard, and, based on community feedback, if barriers have been erected between people; to wear face coverings in school buildings at all times, except in cases of medical exemption; to coordinate with the Health Department and the Test and Trace Corps. on investigations, namely to identify, isolate, and prevent the spread of COVID-19, and follow the protocols established by the Department for opening and closing of classrooms and schools if a student or staff member is confirmed with COVID-19, following all the guidance for exclusions and close contacts. We will continue to update the order if conditions and circumstances compel us to do so. Any school found to be out of compliance will be issued a violation.

But I would like to thank community members, leaders, local press, and many others for what they have done to ensure that people have the facts when it comes to COVID-19. This is so important for us all to work together for every single person, leaders, and every-day New Yorkers to consider yourselves ambassadors for what we all have to take on together. One fact in particular that I would like to point out, which is something that I've said before, but wish to say again, there is still no evidence of herd immunity in any community.

Finally, the best way everyone can help is to follow the core four, avoid large gatherings, especially indoors; wear a face covering; keep social distance; and stay six feet apart. Thank you again, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you, Dr. Choksi, and thank you for your leadership. I know you've been engaging the community intensely, you and your whole team, and I thank you for that. I think those conversations are leading to a lot of support and cooperation at the community level, working with the Health Department's instructions. And that, again, is key to turning this situation around. Now, again, we're going to keep talking as we have now for months about the focus on health and safety, this is what we need to do to protect our fellow New Yorkers. This is what we need to do to help our city come back from this crisis. And we now experience a challenge, we're going to fight to overcome that challenge. But, in the meantime, so much continues in this city. And, in everything we do, we have to focus on health and safety. So, today, is a crucial day, again, in the history of the city and the fight against this disease and the effort to bring back our city – today, the first day of school for elementary school students, kids in K-to-five schools, K-to-eight schools. And you see the image today, the Chancellor and I were at the Island School, a tremendous school in the Lower East Side. I want to thank everyone at the Island School, particular shout out to the principal, Suany Ramos, who did an amazing job, watching her organize everyone and greet all the kids, and she knew their names, each one, it was just beautiful to watch. But the energy in the building was palpable. The kids really ready to be back in school, their parents ready for them to be back, the teachers and the staff, ready to have kids back and to support those kids. There's a lot of love in that school. So, congratulations to everyone at the Island School. And I think for Richard and I, it was striking and really moving just to see a classroom – yeah, it didn't look like a typical New York City classroom. In some cases, it was nine kids, for example, not the full classrooms we're used to, but still a classroom of kids focused on their teachers learning and the energy of their teachers that they were picking up on was so positive. So, I want to thank everyone at the school and we are going to continue moving forward, because nothing helps a child as much as being in the presence of an educator and other caring adults. And that can only happen in our school buildings. So, this coming Thursday, October 1st, we will move forward with middle schools and high schools as well. In the course of this entire week, as many as 500,000 kids could walk through the door of a New York City school. So, this is a huge step and one that has been called for and welcomed by so many families and we're going to do it carefully and we're going to do it safely. And there's been a tremendous focus on health and safety at the Department of Education, working closely with Department of Health and all our other partners to get it right for our kids and our families and our educators and our staff. And I want to thank you, Chancellor – to you and your whole team for that effort, that constant focus on health and safety. And, obviously, our kids are there to get a good education and the best education happens in-person. But we know, because of a blended system, a lot of kids, some of the time, will be in-person, some will be at home certain days, learning online. Other kids, all remote, for now – in November, families will have another opportunity to decide if they want to go back to in-person learning. But, let's be clear, all of this is unprecedented. All of this is incredibly difficult and complex. Everyone is doing their best. I thank all the administrators, educators, the staff – everyone's trying to make it work. And when you get to an actual school, you see tremendous spirit, a willingness to find a way to make it work, a lot of creativity. We've seen tremendous creativity at the school level. And let's be honest, the first days will take some adjustment. There will be a transitional reality and the first days are not going to be everything we want him to be. It's going to take several weeks with the in-person, with the blended online, with the fully remote – it's going to take time to get them all to the level we want to get them to, because it's an unprecedented and massive endeavor. But I have total faith in our educators that we will get there and be able to provide a great school year for our kids. With that, I want to turn to the Chancellor to give you an update as we all celebrate another step forward in the reopening of New York City public schools. Chancellor?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And good morning to everyone. It's a pleasure to join you – everyone on the call here today, as we kick off the first day of in-person school for our K-five and K-students. As you recall, last week was the first day of school for everyone. But, today, was the first day for in-person learning for our K-five and K-eight students. Mr. Mayor, you and I had the opportunity as you mentioned this morning to welcome students and faculty and families at the Island School this morning. And I also want to add my voice to Principal Ramos and her incredible teacher, paraprofessional, food nutrition, custodial staff – everyone that welcomed our students. The excitement was unmistakable, and it was such a joyful reopening, something that I experienced last week on the first day of pre-K in Queens and in every other borough across the city. I can't wait to experience that again on Thursday. And I'd like to take this opportunity to invite Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Katz, if they’re available, to come join us and have some of that love.

So, we've come such a long way over the past six months. And we would not be here without the hard work of New Yorkers to beat back this disease and the dedication of our entire school system. I am deeply grateful for our students and families, teachers, principals, and staff, for their commitment to each other and this city, during this time of crisis. They have shown remarkable perseverance, not only continuing learning from home and getting all of our buildings ready for another opening, but they're extraordinary contributions to each other and helping them – helping each other problem solve and be creative. This week, students all across New York City will be walking into safe classrooms to receive in-person education and interacting with their teachers, peers, and others in face-to-face experiences that our children have sorely missed and one that is so important for our students, teachers, and families. We are keeping a very close eye on our indicators and won't hesitate to take quick action where that's necessary. The Mayor, Commissioner Chokshi, all of the doctors and I share a commitment to keeping the health and safety at the center of and above all else what we do for our children and staff. Despite all that's new about this school year, one thing never changes, and that's the health and safety of our students and staff and the academic excellence that we strive for every student that remain our highest priorities. We are all hands-on deck to serve our students from the classroom, to monitoring the safe entry and exit from the building. While we created more flexibility for our teaching force, the safety and health of our students while they learn in-person is of paramount concern for us. If a principal needs their staff on-site, they are required to report to the building. The number-one job we all share right now is serving our students, and, oftentimes, that need will be inside of a school. It is the responsibility of our staff to show up for our children each day and ensure a safe school community, whether in-person or remote, after months of struggle and months of shared work, New York City students are safely kicking off this 2020 school year in-person learning together – a historic moment that we'll look back on for years to come.

Now, this morning, as the Mayor and I visited the Island School, I need to share an anecdote that I think encapsulates why this is so important and even despite the complexity why it's important to us. As I was visiting the school, I had the opportunity to chat with a third grade young girl, and she was bubbly and she was excited and she could – was brimming with energy to get to her classroom. And she was showing off all of her stuff that she had brought. And as she left to go to her classroom, one of the staff members whispered in my ear, this child and her sister had been in three foster homes for the time that they've been with us at the school. In fact, their mother has lost custody three separate times. The only stable environment they have are the people that love and care for them at this school. You see, my friends – that's why it's so important that while we can do this safely, we do what we do for our children, because our children need us. We need them. And we owe it to the children of New York City.

Mayor: Amen. Thank you, Chancellor, very, very much. And when you spend time with kids and you spend time with families, you remember what this is all about, and we want to support our families. Public school families made clear how important it was for them to have in-person learning come back. They also made clear, a lot of them need all the support we can give them. And so, I want to talk to about the childcare initiative, the Learning Bridges initiative, give you an update on that, because this is free, a safe care and supervision for students on the days they're learning remotely within the blended approach and for families that need help, for folks who are working and don't have a choice and don't have the ability to take care of their kids themselves, for families that are dealing with particular challenges, essential workers or families in shelter, families in public housing – we've made a priority to make sure that they get the support and we're going to keep building it out and provide for as many people as possible. So, right now, by the end of the week, there'll be 30,000 seats available as part of the Learning Bridges approach. And we will keep building that out in the weeks ahead. And we'll keep you updated. Anyone who wants to apply for that free childcare for the days when kids are not in school can apply at schools.nyc.gov/learning bridges.

Now, one more point about our schools, and again, it's about health and safety, and this is about testing. And starting next week, we're going to be doing regular testing for the coronavirus in all of our schools. And we'll be doing a monthly medical monitoring approach. Every school, every one of our public schools will be a part of this – a different day each month for each school. There'll be testing – taking a sampling of the school community, students, educators, staff, everyone. So, we want to make sure that students are signed up for the testing. Obviously, they need parental permission. We want to get all parents to understand how this is going to work, that it will be part of making sure school communities are safe. It will provide us a lot of valuable information, overall, but also obviously the results for each individual will be given to them. So, parents will get the results for their kids within 48 hours and they'll know exactly what's happening. What we're asking parents to do is to help us out by sending back those consent forms as quickly as possible. So, they'll be sent home in the course of this week with a family letter and a frequently asked questions chart along with that consent form. We're asking parents to go ahead and send it back, or, if they have concerns, raise them, and we'll get them answers, but we want as many kids as possible to get into this testing approach as quickly as possible.

Look, this is how we stay ahead of things. The more testing the better. So, I'm going to pick up that point one more time, whether it's parents getting their kids tested, whether it's our school personnel get tested, whether it's people in communities experiencing a higher level of the coronavirus or in any other community, the answer keeps coming back to where we started months ago, testing, testing, testing. The more testing, the better. We're providing on a vast scale. There's plenty available now for New Yorkers to take advantage of for free. It is always free, fast, easy – again, the self-swab test, the one was just moving the device around the nostril, not the longer device that many of us found troubling. It's easier now than it's ever been. So, we want people to go out there, get that test, help us all move forward.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Good morning, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Choksi, Dr. Katz, Chancellor Carranza, Susan Haskell the Deputy Director of Youth Services at DYCD, Deputy Chancellor of Early Childhood and Enrollment Josh Wallack, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Yes. Good morning to all. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good morning, Juliet, hanging in. A lot going on, but we're going to fight our way through. How are you doing –

Question: Great – a lot going on, yes. So, my question to you and perhaps the Health Commissioner is, who will be going into the private schools in the affected ZIP codes to make sure they are in Department of Health compliance?

Mayor: Go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Chokshi: Sure. Thank you very much for the question, Juliet. We have a multi-agency team going into the nonpublic schools with a particular focus on the ZIP codes of concern. So, the multi-agency team includes people from the Health Department, it will include colleagues from the Test and Trace Corps, as well as from enforcement agencies, including the Office of Special Enforcement.

Mayor: Go ahead, Juliet.

Question: Okay. Thank you. A follow up on that, and then if you don't mind, so is there – is this starting tomorrow and is there any sort of grace period with compliance, and also who was handing out the masks or the tickets if people are refusing to wear masks?

Mayor: So, I'll start, and I'll turn to the Commissioner. Juliet, there's been a lot of dialogue, a lot of information all through last week, as we saw this problem start to emerge, meetings with community leaders constantly. Again, Dr. Katz, his team, Dr. Choksi, his team, and many other members of administration have been in constant touch with community leaders. A lot of public information was put out, obviously, in the course of last week. I think the message has been sent clearly, and we have seen – the good news, Juliet is we've seen an uptick for sure in mask usage. We've seen an uptick in social distancing, as you heard, even on the holiest day of the year in synagogues, people were practicing social distancing more than ever, which is very important. In terms of the schools, there's been a lot of dialogue, as Dr. Choksi mentioned, back and forth to help make sure the rules made sense and were effective. So, I don't think anything's a surprise to folks at this point because that predicate has been laid down very, very clearly. We're moving forward now, today, with the enforcement on face coverings. As early as tomorrow, we may have to take additional steps, additional restrictions, but we're going to make that decision in the course of today. But in terms of the agencies, every agency, literally, that has personnel to offer will be a part of this, obviously, Department of Health and Test and Trace, but Special Enforcement, Sheriff's Office, NYPD, and then other agencies that have enforcement personnel are being asked to send them in as well, hundreds and hundreds of people, hundreds of Test and Trace, and then hundreds more from other City agencies as well. Do you want to add doc?

Commissioner Chokshi: No, Sir, nothing to add.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Hi, there. I'd like to just follow up. Good morning by the way.

Mayor: Good morning, Rich. How are you?

Question: I'm doing okay. So, just to follow up on what Juliet had to say, in regard to the additional restrictions, the additional measures, what would those be and what would the trigger be for them?

Mayor: Well, as always, Rich, you got to the heart of the matter there. I'll start and I'll have Dr. Choksi weigh in and Dr. Katz as well. Look, I think the fact is we are watching the numbers constantly, and we want to see more and more testing. This is something where if you're going to make tough decisions about, for example, whether businesses can be open, whether yeshivas can be open, you want to make sure you have the very best number. So, we're strongly encouraging, and have been since last week, the maximum testing in the community. But we're watching the specific numbers by ZIP code and even finer than that by census tract, to understand exactly what is happening. We're going to look at those new numbers that we get in today, see what it's telling us, if there's been an impact yet from a number of the efforts, and then make further decisions. As was laid out on Thursday and Friday, the additional options include business closures in certain areas and, obviously, a wider scale closure of community institutions like yeshivas and childcare, and a limit on gatherings. Those are all on the table. None we want to do, but all on the table, if we don't see enough progress quickly enough, Dr. Choksi –

Commissioner Chokshi: Sir, that's right. I'll just briefly add, first none of these things are actions that we take lightly, as the Mayor has said, given how significant they are. However, we do know that there are actions that work from a public health perspective and the ones are what we have talked about, making sure that we expand testing and we have effective contact tracing as we do, but also making sure that there's as much distancing and mask wearing as possible. And so, any additional restrictions that do need to be put in place would be to further those public health goals, which really the ultimate goal is to interrupt the spread of the coronavirus.

Mayor: I want to turn to Dr. Katz, to the question Rich asked, because I think it's important to talk about how much acclimation has happened with the community as to the extent of the problem, what can be done about it, what the consequences might be, and just what that dialogue has been like. You've been leading this effort and you've put a lot of time into that dialogue. I think it'd be helpful for people to hear about it.

President Katz: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We've been talking since last week and I want to be very clear, as the Mayor has said, our goal is to enable people to do the right thing. It's not to catch people doing the wrong thing. When we're going through a private school, our focus will be, this is what you need to do to stay open. Not that we're closing you down because of what we see now, if we see, for example, kids too close together, or they're not the sneeze guards between the desks, we're going to say if in order to stay open, you have to change this. The goal will always be on trying to enable people to comply. Same with the masks. When we met – talked this morning with a group of Jewish leaders about the masks, that we were going to fine people, as soon as they understood that what we were saying was we would be handing a mask to someone, we'd be saying, ‘please put on the mask, I don't want to fine you,’ they were completely supportive of that. So, again, I think the key has been, Mr. Mayor, the engagement, which you've initiated since last week, and showing that our whole focus is health. It's not about catching people.

Mayor: Well said, thank you. Go ahead, Rich.

Question: Okay. Now, I don't want to be Debbie-Downer here, but I have to ask you this – so you had mentioned a three percent figure as a trigger to close the schools. Now, is that the rolling – the seven-day figure and how close – I mean, what are you optimistic that we're going to avoid that?

Mayor: Well, no, you're not being a downer. It's really important to clarify. I said very clearly at the time we announced the standard that it was a seven-day rolling average. That is a much more accurate measure than going by any one day, to say the least. And it's a momentous decision, obviously, and we wanted it to be based on consistent information. So, from the very beginning, I said, seven-day rolling average. The three percent obviously is a measure we put forward to be out of an abundance of caution. We're seeing a different situation than we've ever experienced to have an outbreak specifically – and, again, the numbers speak for themselves. Nine ZIP codes out of 146 in New York City. So, the geography is very specific. This is not like what we've seen previously. But yeah, the number today on the seven-day rolling average for the entire City of New York, Rich, is 1.38 percent. So, today, well below that three percent threshold. We will watch carefully over the next days, we'll report this number daily. If we see a trend line, we will talk about it very openly, but again, all roads lead back to testing. The more people get tested, the more accurate the number, and we want the true number. We want to really encourage people to get out there in every community and get tested.

Moderator: The next is Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I want to actually follow up on Rich's question. Just to be totally clear, when it comes to school closures, would you consider closing schools in these ZIP codes where we're seeing these spikes? And is there a way to determine that by that, you know, geographic ZIP code? Would it just be the seven, excuse me, the three percent for the seven-day average or is there another threshold? Can you just clarify the decisions are going to be made citywide or by these places where you might see spikes?

Mayor: Thank you. It's a very important question, Brigid. It is – it has always been a citywide measure. So, I want to state that really clearly again, announced from the beginning, talked about consistently, three percent, seven-day rolling average, citywide. That's the standard we've held from the beginning. And we continue with that. The question of neighborhoods, so, what we're seeing, again, nine ZIP codes, not even the full ZIP codes in a number of cases, nine ZIP codes, and, obviously, another fact we're looking at closely is what is our situation room telling us. We are not seeing an uptick in cases in the schools, in those ZIP codes. So, we obviously have the ability to look carefully at what's happening with testing. We've sent additional testing to schools in those ZIP codes to public schools. We are not seeing an uptick in any way in the public schools, in those ZIP codes. We also have, again, an unusual situation, one we did not anticipate, of an outbreak in a specific community in this fashion. And it's a known fact, there is not a lot of interconnection with our public schools in these particular areas. So, so far, we do not see any evidence that would suggest otherwise, and we'll continue with one standard only, the citywide standard.

Moderator: The next is Marcia at WCBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for taking my question. Mine has to do with education and with schools, the schools that still have to open on Thursday. Right now, there's about seven schools, seven high schools, including Tottenville and Susan Wagner High School in Staten Island and five others who have suddenly had to move to remote learning because they didn't have enough teachers. What do you say to these schools about getting enough teachers eventually? How many more teachers do you have to hire and how many more teachers do you have to hire so that the people from the Department of Education who are going there to fill in can go back to their jobs at DOE? And –

Mayor: Okay. Marcia, Marcia, it's a lot of questions. Let me stop you there –

Question: [Inaudible] –

Mayor: Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, you can't do four questions. I can't keep up with them. Let me answer your core question and then you'll have a follow-up. First of all, as I said, I want to express appreciation to every educator who's dealing with an absolutely unprecedented situation. No one has ever had to figure out, no principal, no teacher, no one's ever had to figure out how to do in-person learning with blended learning for kids who are home that day with full-time remote all at once in the middle of a pandemic with the safety measures. It's incredibly complex and everyone is working their way through it. And what I've seen now in the schools that I visited, the Chancellor reports it to me from the schools he's visited, is everyone's working together to solve problems and move forward. They're not clinging to what is wrong. They are figuring out what is right and what they can do together.

Now, several schools have been reported to be “going all remote” and the Chancellor will speak in more detail, but I know some of those reports have been absolutely inaccurate, that schools are getting the support to be able to do the maximum they can do in person and to have that blended approach. So, the notion of a school suddenly going all remote out of the blue is just – that's not been the experience we've had up to now. We will continue to send as many educators in as needed. You're right, some have come from the DOE central staff. And if they're – if and when they're no longer needed, they'll go back to other responsibilities. But getting the largest school system in the country up and running in the most unprecedented moment in our history requires everyone's effort. And it will take several weeks, to say the least of transition, to get things to work well. It makes sense. It's an incredibly difficult transition, but people are making it happen. We will keep providing the educators each school needs. It's as simple as that. And when that process is complete, in a typical school year, honestly, it takes weeks to get down to their final teaching roster. When we have the final teaching roster for every single school, we'll add it up and we'll give you the grand total of what we had to add, but we're not going to do it day by day because it's a moving number on purpose, because that's the reality of opening school every year. Chancellor, to the question of schools saying that they have to go all remote, could you clarify for everyone?

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Marcia, so especially at some of the larger schools, we've given them flexibilities. So, when a school says, they're all remote, that means no one's on campus, everyone is home and they're logging in and they're doing their work from somewhere else. Some of our schools have some portion that they're doing virtually, which means students come to the school and they're doing some work virtually, but there are adults there, they are receiving services there. They're receiving counseling services, social work services, they're eating lunch there, eating breakfast there. So, there's some virtual aspects of their day, but they're not fully remote. Now, as the Mayor has mentioned, as we build capacity and get more and more teachers onboarded, more and more substitute teachers onboarded, you're going to see that this will stabilize much more. What you see on the first day is not going to be the same as what you're going to see on the first week, at the end of the first month, etcetera. We're going to continue to build capacity, but especially in some of those schools, they do have some flexibilities because they need to meet the needs of their students.

Moderator: The next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I'm just wondering, you said, or the Health Department said, last week that if infection rates did not improve by Monday night, they would go forward with this closing of the businesses and banning gatherings. I'm just wondering why the decision was made not to do that at this juncture. I know you're still considering it, but why at this point, are you not doing it?

Mayor: Well Erin you can actually see the information that was sent to you and other members of the media and publicly. It does not say what you summarized. It said that by Monday night, Tuesday morning, we could take any and all of these actions. And it was very explicit to say it was not a guarantee but we wanted people on notice that depending on what we were seeing any, and all these actions could start as early as morning. What we have decided to do, first of all, go ahead with the action in terms of enforcement on face masks, which I announced earlier. That is happening as we speak with City agency personnel out in the key communities. In terms of the situation we talked about in the guidance related to the yeshivas and child care centers. Again, a lot of dialogue has led to an obvious commitment from a lot of these locations to make the changes needed to ensure everyone is healthy and safe. If they don't, it's been made abundantly clear that they will be shut down. There'll be regular inspections. So that piece was based on actual inspections, actual dialogue with the institutions where we saw some movement that was positive. We're reserving our rights on the additional steps, which would be the closing of businesses on some scale and a broader closing of community institutions. We do not want to do that if there's any way to avoid that. We're going to take a look at today's new numbers when they come in and determine if we think we have to start that effort. And if so, we would announce that by morning. But it's going to be step-by-step based on the data. I want to see if Dr. Katz would like to add anything to that? Hold on. We're doing a little switch out there.

President Katz: No, I think the only thing I would emphasize, sir, is how much improvement there was in mask wearing in the affected communities over the weekend. That I really felt that we, that we had turned the tide. I know it's difficult because the tests that we're seeing positive today are really reflecting people's actions last week. And so there is a catch up period of time. But I think if what you had seen, sir, over the weekend was no improvement in mask wearing we would have been in a very different position and taken much different actions this morning.

Mayor: Correct. Go ahead, Erin.

Question: Alright, thank you. And then my second question is you addressed the schools, but indoor dining is scheduled to open tomorrow. And you know, we've heard you speak about the risks of that several times and saying you would want to shut down you know if the rate went up. So is that still full steam ahead or is anything going to change with regards to indoor dining because of these spikes?

Mayor: Yeah we are going to keep an eye on that situation. And again, looking now at the seven day rolling average on the positives, 1.38 today. We're going to watch that carefully over the next few days. And I’ll say, we'll publicly discuss that each morning. I want us to keep a close eye, obviously right now, indoor dining is going forward tomorrow. But I want us to keep a close eye on the situation and see what's happening in the whole city, which could be a very different thing than what's happening in those nine zip codes. So right now that is what we're seeing a real aberrant reality in the nine zip codes in terms of numbers versus the rest of the city. We have to take that into account. We did not anticipate a situation with that kind of separation of numbers. So we're going to -- bottom line, indoor dining will go forward tomorrow. We're going to watch carefully and report publicly. And if anything looks more problematic, we'll talk to the State and we'll decide together if any adjustments have to be made.

Moderator: The next is Christina Veiga from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. The first is, so we know that schools will have to close if we go above the three percent seven day average positivity. When could they reopen? What would be the standard, how many days at what threshold would we need to see?

Mayor: Let me say, first of all, I want to emphasize – I appreciate the question, Christina and I'll turn to Dr. Chokshi as well. But I want to emphasize and Dr. Varma is on with us as well, I would note, remotely. Look where we are now at 1.38 percent, it is I still believe with intensive effort in the nine zip codes that we can turn the situation around quickly and keep that citywide rolling average, seven day average, well, below three percent So overwhelmingly, that's the first thing to focus on. Can we keep it well below three percent with our actions? Yes. I'm convinced we can. If we were to at any point go over, we would address the situation at that time. But again, the goal would be against the backdrop of constantly trying to push down the number. So if we had a moment where we had to do any kind of closure, it would be temporary to say the least. We would want to get that number back down, ensure it was staying back down, and then we would continue with our schools. So theoretical because we're not near that point now. And if at any point that were to happen, we would keep it as temporary as possible. Dr. Chokshi or Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Commissioner Chokshi: Sir, you covered all the important points. One to underline is the idea that the goal of any time there is a halt of, you know, any activity is to mitigate, to suppress virus transmission. That will work over the course of days to weeks. And that's the purpose of undertaking that activity. And so we would continue to follow the numbers to understand when any restrictions would be lifted.

Mayor: Dr. Varma?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Nothing else for me. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you, Christina. Go ahead.

Question: I didn't hear an exact threshold? It just seems like, you know, the cutoff for closing schools is pretty exact, so people are wondering what it would take to reopen it understanding that any closing at this point is still, you know, we're not there yet with the rate to close. I'm just wondering, is there a more exact standard for reopening? You also mentioned monitoring school communities and not seeing a rise within school communities. And I'm just wondering how, like, what are you monitoring exactly to be able to say that since we're not doing testing yet until October? What are the data points and how do you know that it's not affecting school communities?

Mayor: A lot of people are, have been tested already and are being tested of their own choice. A lot of our school – our educators, our staff, our kids. But we also have set up testing in and around schools in the zip codes. You'll see a lot of that today, and it will keep rotating to different schools in the coming days. The reason we know is we know when we have positive cases, we can track them by where a teacher or staff member or student lives. We can track them by which school they go to. We're not seeing a nexus to the nine zip codes. Just based on everything that we have coming in. And this has been going on for weeks now that the situation room has been up. We're not seeing a nexus to those neighborhoods. We're going to watch every single day. Because if we see something, we want to act on it quickly, but we don't see it. To your previous question, again I want to emphasize, I would really urge people to not assume anything yet. The seven day rolling average at 1.38 percent and a massive effort is being made to address the challenge we're having. And that challenge is in nine zip codes out of 146. So let's be careful not to assume an outcome. But if we were to ever have to say, it's time to close the schools, the simple way to say it is until we see that average go down below three percent and are convinced it will stay below three percent. Now, again, I'll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi can help you maybe a little bit more with the technicalities. But you can see these trend lines usually pretty clearly because they don't happen – one of the things Dr. Varma taught me a while ago is this stuff doesn't happen overnight. If you get to that level, you see it coming up and then if you're moving out of it, you will see that happening in stages. But the goal is to be under the three percent in a way that is consistent. Dr. Varma, you want to add a little more to that?

Senior Advisor Varma: Sure. I want to touch on the two points that were raised in that second question. One is this question about when to reopen and the second is the question about how do we know whether or not there are cases occurring in schools right now? Related to that question, I think the Mayor covered it exactly. What you would want to see is you would want to see that the rate was below three percent. And Dr. Chokshi said it may take several weeks to see that impact. So you'd want to see not just that you're below three percent, but that the trend is declining. And we know that that process takes time. Onto the first question that you had raised as part of that, about how do we know that there are not cases occurring right now? So the answer is that we actually have the most extensive testing program anywhere in the United States, between 30,000 to 40,000 New Yorkers are being tested every day. Most of them are adults, but some of them, in fact are children as well. So we really do have a robust way for people to get tested and find out if they're sick. The monitoring program that will occur is just an added layer on top of all of the other measures that are being used for health and safety like masks and physical distancing and ventilation.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Kala from PIX.

Question: Good morning, everybody. This question is for the Chancellor and the Mayor. The City Council subpoenaed the DOE for detailed data attendance from March until June, that's the time when schools were shut down from COVID. As far as I know you haven't provided that info just yet. What is the holdup? And will you meet today's deadline?

Mayor: Okay. Kala, first of all, just, I want to set the record straight on this. I have said more times than I can count to the City Council that they never need to use a subpoena for anything, that we will provide information. And I've said to folks at the Council that if you ever feel my agencies are not doing what they need to do, just tell me. They all have my cell phone, I assure you. Just tell me, and I will get you the information personally, if it comes to it. So there was no need for a subpoena. We want to make that information public. And the idea underneath this, of trying to understand exactly what happened with attendance. We know it was a very difficult circumstance, having to go to all remote and deal with the reality of the pandemic. The Chancellor and I were pretty honest about the fact that it was a really imperfect situation and none that we wanted to repeat. And that's part of why we've been so adamant about going back to building up in-person education again. But we want the whole truth out there because it's important to examine it and learn from it. So whatever the Council needs, we will get them. I am honestly not up to date on the specifics and if it's something that we have to do today, we'll do it today. But I want to emphasize that we want them to get the information they need. Chancellor you want to add anything?

Chancellor Carranza: Mr. Mayor, that information has either already been released this morning or will be released today.

Mayor: Good, go ahead, Kala.

Question: Okay. Earlier this morning, when the UFT was visiting schools, Michael Mulgrew said something to the effect that City Hall had dropped the ball in this conversation of going back to schools. So my question is he said that you didn't come to the table until July. Do you and the Chancellor wish you started the conversation of reopening schools earlier?

Mayor: I don't know specifically what he's referring to and I'll let the Chancellor speak to it. Again. I know the Chancellor's had literally endless conversations with the UFT and the CSA. Our First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan has. I've gotten more and more involved over the last months. You know, I don't know where there was a lack of dialogue. I think everyone was dealing with the extraordinary complexity of this kind of three part education system, blended in-person, blended at home, and fully remote. I do think there was a problem of sort of clinging to past procedure and approach that everyone needed to break out of and understand that we were in, you know, an absolutely unprecedented situation. I think that's an area where we all could have done better. But not because people weren't at the table and weren't in dialogue all the time. That part doesn't make sense to me. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: I would only add that we've been in constant daily, sometimes hourly, most definitely weekly conversations and work sessions with all of our labor partners since March. That has not stopped. It has not wavered. We will continue to be in that kind of communication mode throughout the entirety of this pandemic. Because it does require as the Mayor said for us to work in a very different way and really problem solve in real time. Which makes it as circumstances change, you have to pivot and you have to make different changes. And the only way to be able to do that is to be in constant conversation. So I'm actually very proud of the kind of working relationship we've been able to afford. It's not always perfect. Brothers and sisters don't always like each other, but we respect each other. And today when we saw the smiles on childrens’ faces, it's all worth it.

Mayor: That's for sure. Go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today, it goes to Jeff Mays from the New York Times.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Manor. Just a couple of questions for yourself and the Health officials there. I'm wondering if you could tell us exactly how many cases have been detected in that Ocean Parkway cluster, since it was identified? And would you also be able to tell us specifically which Hasidic and Orthodox groups is the City working with to help tamp down infections in some of these zip codes?

Mayor: Let me start with Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Varma on the statistics over the last days to answer your first question. And then Dr. Katz and I can talk about the people we've been working with over the last week in particular. But Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Varma, you want to talk about what you're seeing in the numbers?

Commissioner Chokshi: Sure, Mr. Mayor. I can start and thank you for the question. So I will clarify, you know, the areas that we are looking at are broader than what was originally named as the Ocean Parkway cluster. It is zip codes of concern both in Southern Brooklyn as well as in parts of Queens. But what we do know is that in those areas over the past two weeks, which is the timeframe that we've really been monitoring this as carefully as we have. The cases there account for 25 percent of the overall city's cases, despite accounting for seven percent of the overall citywide population. So we do have the specific absolute number of cases, and we can follow up about that as well.

Mayor: Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: Nothing for me.

Mayor: Okay. Jeff I'll start and Mitch will follow up on the other part of that question. So for example, on the call we were just on, big citywide organizations were a part of it. Jewish Community Relations Council of New York City, New York City Board of Rabbis, umbrella organizations that are particularly strong in the Orthodox community, like Agudath Israel. I saw representatives from a variety of neighborhoods, Midwood, Borough Park, Williamsburg. I know folks have been involved over the last week from the Satmar community, the Bobover community, the Lubavitcher community, among many others. The Sephardic community has been very actively involved in these discussions and working with Dr. Katz. So from everything I've seen, it's very broad ranging. If you look across the neighborhoods in the nine zip codes, it is a variety of communities across the spectrum, a variety of people, a variety of different communities within the larger community. And to the best of my understanding pretty much every piece of the larger community has been represented. Go ahead.

President Katz: That's great, Mr. Mayor, over the weekend, one of the colleagues we've been working with sent us a picture of the Bobovoich wearing a mask with his shtreimel and that picture had gone viral all over the city. So I feel like we've reached all parts of the Jewish community. Also the mask distribution was to 300 different synagogues, which I think shows, you know, how both the dynamic diversity of the Jewish community and our intention to reach all parts of it.

Mayor: Yeah. And I will say Jeff, that image of the Bobov rebbe wearing a mask was very deeply felt by a community that's obviously very spiritual. That was a very important sign.

Look, everybody, we've been very upfront about the challenge we face today. We're giving you a lot of facts, a lot of data, a lot of hard numbers about what's happening. It should cause us all to be on alert. It should cause us all to redouble our efforts. The answer here is to remember what worked, what has worked for New York City. What all of you have been doing? Social distancing, the mask wearing, being smart, being disciplined. We need to do it again. We need to double down. We know how to fight back this disease. We fought back a lot tougher situation than what we're dealing with right now. We were dealing with a challenge in every zip code, not nine zip codes, every zip code in March and April. And we fought it back and we will fight this back. But it's going to take everyone's effort. So again, anybody, everybody can help. Go get tested, put on that mask, remind the people in your life to do the same. And we're going to fight this outbreak back and we're going to move New York City forward. Thank you. everybody.

2020-09-30 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. I want to give you an update on the efforts that are being made, intense efforts, to address the specific upticks we're seeing in COVID rates in certain communities in the city. Now, again, this is nine ZIP codes where a huge amount of energy is being focused, both from within the communities by community leaders and institutions, and also all elements of the City government starting with our Health team. And that's nine ZIP codes, again in a city of 146 ZIP codes. But we need to focus a whole lot of resources and we are in those areas, particularly the Test and Trace Corps, Department of Health, front and center with large a number of personnel right now, we'll go into those details. What we are finding initially as the more there is communication with members of the community about the importance of wearing masks, the more there's free mask distribution, and obviously a sense that there are consequences to not wearing masks, the more we are seeing people pick up on that and wear a mask, and that's going to be part of how we turn the situation around.

Let me go into that. And then you're going to hear from Dr. Katz, but first I want to talk about our daily indicators as we did yesterday. I think it's important to give this update upfront and there are some important insights in these indicators. So I wanted you to hear them as we begin. So daily indicator, number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients, today's report 87 with a confirmed positive rate for COVID of just under nine percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven day average, threshold is 550 cases and today's report is 354. Number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID, threshold of five percent. And again, this is the citywide number, today's report 0.94 percent. And we are now also going to be talking about the seven day rolling average. So you have that perspective, today the seven day rolling average number is 1.46 percent. So, that's the citywide picture.

This is the first of probably several times I will say today. It is so important for everyone to go out and get tested. We need to get a very clear picture of what is happening around the city. We need to get a very clear picture of what's happening in these nine key ZIP codes and several others we're concerned about. The answer as it has been from the beginning, testing, testing, testing. The more people get tested, the better picture we get. We make sure we're seeing based on a bigger sample size what's going on. So again, if you have not been tested in a while or never been tested, we need you to go get tested. Obviously, if you have symptoms, we need you to get tested. Free, quick, easier than ever. So this is the key to us addressing this situation as always, the more people get tested the better.

Now let's talk about the neighborhoods. You see on the slide, the neighborhoods and the current numbers in six of the eight neighborhoods, we do see the numbers continue to go up. We have seen some fluctuation by neighborhood. We know, and we've seen it previously in other areas like Sunset Park and Soundview, the numbers can change rapidly in the right direction. So we're going to keep working daily, hourly to make that change. But right now, in six of the eight neighborhoods, we see unfortunately, an increase. And now the neighborhood of Kew Gardens has surpassed that three percent level. We're watching carefully. We're continuing to monitor four additional ZIP codes that are lower, but we want to be very careful because we've seen some increases. We want to arrest the problem in those areas as well. And we'll be continuing to send resources to them as well. That includes Rego Park, Kensington/Windsor Terrace, Brighton Beach/Manhattan Beach/Sheepshead Bay, and Williamsburg.

Now, today we'll have a number of initiatives today. 400 plus police officers will be out in these communities, providing information, providing free masks, reminding people that they are required to wear masks. And obviously in the case where there is noncompliance, issuing summonses. 400 from the NYPD, 250 compliance officers from other City agencies, and approximately 300 members of the Test and Trace Corps. So almost a thousand City employees will be out in these target ZIP codes doing distribution of masks, information, and when necessary compliance work. Yesterday, team distributed successfully thousands and thousands of masks. We saw good compliance when folks were encountered, when there was a discussion, we saw a very high level of compliance. No summonses were necessary yesterday. We would love to see that continue, but obviously prepared to issue summonses as needed. Sheriff's Department, also yesterday visited over 130 nonpublic schools to ensure that rules were being followed.

So that's a key piece of the equation. There's going to be by the Sheriff and Office of Special Enforcement intensive outreach, going to businesses as they have been over the last few days, going back to businesses where there are instances of noncompliance. A reminder businesses can be fined or shut down. So there'll be individual work throughout the community, going business by business, hopefully finding good conditions. Where there are not good conditions, if they have not been the problem before, there'll be a warning. If there has been a problem before, a business can be fined or shut down on the spot. So that effort will continue with those compliance agencies.

And then rapid testing – the rapidly increasing, I should say the amount of testing in the area, 11 mobile testing sites have been moved into the cluster areas, tripling the capacity of the Health Department's express testing sites. And a new initiative, which Dr. Katz will explain, a positive phrase being used, block parties. These are areas where streets are closed off and a high level of testing can be done in mobile testing units. And we want to encourage community members to come out and participate with that. That amount of testing will continue to be increased daily over the coming days in these neighborhoods. We're also working with community-based organizations of all kinds to get the word out, multiple languages, let people know how important it is to get tested, how important it is to wear masks and socially distance. We have robocalls being made. We have sound trucks out in communities spreading the message in multiple languages. All of this can help, will help, is helping. Now. It's also really important to note that community leaders have been extremely helpful in this effort. I want to thank the many, many community leaders. I've been on numerous group conference calls and calls with individual leaders of the community over the last week. I know Dr. Katz, Dr. Chokshi, many others have spent a lot of time working with community leaders on the right way to address this challenge. A special thank you to a beloved member of our team, Pinny Ringel, who works here in the Mayor's Office and has done extraordinary work with the community. I get many thank yous from community members for his tremendous outreach efforts to help people know what they need to know and how to act on it.  So a lot of work with community leaders and institutions and tremendous support from those organizations, getting the word out that real action needs to be taken by each and every member of the community to help address this challenge.

A special thank you to elected officials who have stepped up. And there is an op-ed today in the community newspaper Hamodia which I have known for many years and been interviewed by many times. And it's very clear. It's a very powerful, straightforward op-ed about the importance of wearing masks, of following the rules, getting tested, so many key messages addressed well and powerfully in this op-ed. So I want to thank State Senator Simcha Felder, Assembly member Simcha Eichenstein, Assembly member Daniel Rosenthal, Council member Chaim Deutsch, and Council member Kalman Yeger. All of whom joined together with a unified voice to say to the community how important it was for everyone to be part of this effort to turn back to this challenge. With that I want you to hear now from the man who's been leading this effort in so many ways and working so closely with the community. And Dr. Katz I have to tell you, there's a lot of concern. There's a lot of need, but on many, many conversations I've had with community leaders, they take time to say thank you for your involvement because they know you know the community, you care about the community. It's very personal and real for you, but also the leadership you're providing as one of the health care leaders of the city is appreciated by all. So thank you for that. And we welcome your update.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals:  Thank you Mr. Mayor. We're very pleased that in these neighborhoods yesterday we had more than 350 people on the ground, handing out masks and distributing literature, reminding people of the four core ways that we stay safe. We stay home if we're sick. We keep physical distance between us and others. We limit indoor gatherings. We wear a face covering and we practice healthy hand hygiene. And that's to protect ourselves, to protect our parents and our grandparents. As the Mayor has said, testing, testing, testing. And he has told us to do everything possible to increase the amount of testing that's available so that we have a full picture. And if people are infected, we can safely isolate them and get them the treatment that they need. So the Mayor mentioned the 11 mobile testing sites, rapid testing sites at three Health + Hospitals sites in Queens and Brooklyn. An enhanced capability at two Health Department sites.

But I'm very excited – the Mayor alluded to this as a kid, a block party was the most exciting thing in South Brooklyn. The day of your own block party, which for me was East 19th street between W and X. But of course, because we had bicycles, we had the ability to go to everybody else's block parties. And we so much enjoyed them. And I think it's a very positive use of that phrase because now we're going to do block parties where we're going to shut down portions of the street and sidewalks and set up large testing tents. We will be able to test up to 500 people in each tent or site. And anyone who gets tested will get their results back in 24 to 48 hours. We're going to keep announcing additional block party sites so that we can saturate the ZIP codes. They will be supervised by clinical staff who will also be able to offer people self-administered tests. New Yorkers will be able to pick up a test, take a swab on the inside of their nose themselves for 10 seconds, put the swab in a tube, seal it and hand it to somebody who is supervising at the table. They will get the results in 48 hours.

We're also partnering with our community boards to implement these micro-sites. Each microsite can manage a hundred tests per day. And finally, we are distributing rapid testing machines to trusted providers in the affected neighborhoods. Sir, as you know, I was on the phone last night with a group of physicians who take care of patients in these neighborhoods. And they were saying, get me testing, get me testing. And because of your commitment, I was able to say, we're going to provide these machines to doctor's offices so that they can do a rapid point of care. Each machine uses a nasal swab test, delivers results in 20 minutes or less. And these are PCR tests. One of the concerns that the doctors raised are, are you using antigen tests, because we are worried about false positives? And I said, no, these are pure PCR tests. People felt very happy knowing that. The virus is insidious. Many people are asymptomatic and don't know they're infected and can spread the disease. Increased testing helps us to identify these people. So Mr. Mayor, thank you for giving us the resources that we need to do the job.

Mayor: Thank you very much. Dr. Katz. Thank you to you and your whole team. Everyone on our health care team is working so hard and working so closely with the community. And again, the message today is go out and get tested, whether you're in one of these key ZIP codes or any place else in New York City. Get tested, so we can get the full picture of what's going on and you can get the full picture of what's happening with your own situation. The testing, again, in this city, results are coming in much faster than they were several weeks back. And it is an easier process than ever, so important. So again, constantly people say, what can I do to help? How can I help New York City? You can help New York City by going out and getting tested today and taking that brief amount of time to make a big difference.

Now, a lot happening in the city today. And another important topic, obviously, as we continue to come back as a city, continue to bring jobs back, continue to bring people back. They're bringing people their livelihoods back, is the restaurant industry, which has gone through so much and stood so tough through this crisis. Obviously important news, in the last few days, we announced that outdoor dining, our outdoor restaurant initiative Open Restaurant initiative will be made permanent. That our Open Streets initiative and that combination of Open Restaurants and Open Streets will be made permanent. These have been a huge step forward, not just for the restaurant industry and the hundreds of thousands of people who work in it, but for the city as a whole. This is a new approach that will make this a better city. And some people like to allege that New York City is a quote unquote ghost town. I would urge those people to go see the booked solid outdoor dining all over the city. That's been such a success and I congratulate everyone in the restaurant industry for achieving that and bringing it back all those jobs.

But now this is the first day when you'll start to have indoor dining again. Now let's be clear. This is something that was worked on very carefully by the State and the City. And we'll start at a low level, 25 percent capacity. It's crucial of course, to bringing back more jobs and helping businesses to survive. But health and safety as always come first. So there will be very clear conditions and restrictions and rules here. And a lot of communication has happened with the restaurant industry to make sure everyone understands that temperature checks must be conducted at the front door for anyone going in for indoor dining. That tables must be spaced six feet apart, and bar tops are not going to be allowed for seating. So there's clear conditions about the kinds of PPE that must be available for employees. Obviously crucial that information is kept carefully by the restaurants in case there is God forbid, a situation where follow up is needed, that the Test and Trace Corps will have the information needed. So I believe the restaurant industry has heard these messages loud and clear. And of course we will have a lot of information out there over these next days to the industry. And inspectors out going forward.

But the inspection effort is going to focus now on these ZIP codes in Brooklyn and Queens, where we're seeing the particular uptick. So I want to make that clear today. There's going to be a very rigorous inspection effort in those ZIP codes. And we're going to be looking carefully to make sure every restaurant is following the rules. Look if we see the kinds of violations that create problems like employees not wearing a mask or a violation of the 25 percent limit. If a restaurant has more than 25 percent capacity, whether it's diners or if we see alcohol being consumed at a bar, those are the kinds of things that will lead to immediate summonses. And again, we want to have a situation where everyone follows the rules and no one is penalized. We certainly don't want to see any restaurants shut down. But we need to be very rigorous everywhere in the city, but particularly in the ZIP codes in Brooklyn Queens where we're having a problem right now. So you will see Health Department inspectors and other personnel out in those restaurants starting today and tonight. And they'll be very focused on making sure everyone is following the rules. Also work going on with Small Business Services and other agencies to get the word out. We want to support this industry, but it has to be done safely. And I know as always restaurant owners and employees have questions as we continue to move forward. Anyone who needs information can go to nyc.gov/restaurantopening – I'm sorry, restaurantreopening my apology, nyc.gov/restaurantreopening to get the information you need. It has been a long journey back, but it has been working. The industry has played a crucial role in the rebirth of this city. And we're going to make sure that continues.

Now, let's talk about another reopening, school reopening. Again as the Chancellor and I have said more times than I could count, it's about health and safety. By the way, as you see in that picture, our kids are doing their share. And when the Chancellor and I were at the Island School yesterday on Houston Street, we saw it. We saw it the week before, out in Elmhurst at the Mosaic Pre-K Center. Four-year-olds, five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds, every age, kids wearing their masks and doing it very naturally, honestly. And adults as well and social distancing being respected. We also saw kids really happy to get back in school with the teachers they love, with their friends. And we saw a lot of adults with tears in their eyes too, tears of joy that they could see the kids they love again. And then seeing everyone reunited was really, really powerful. I want to just give you an update on yesterday, a big step forward, because we had as of yesterday 870 schools open in New York City. So we went through the first step with pre K 3-K and District 75 Special Ed schools. Yesterday, K-Five, K-Eight schools. As of this morning, 870 schools open in New York City with in-person learning for the children. Yesterday went very well. We checked, I had meetings at the Department of Education, talked with our labor partners, consistently got the message that things went well and smoothly. Thank you to all our educators and staff. This was a big, big effort. And the folks at Department of Education, including everyone who works at the Tweed Building headquarters, I want to commend you all. This was a tough effort, a big complicated effort, but yesterday we moved forward in a very big way. Now at a level that no other school system in America is, with 870 schools open for in-person learning. But tomorrow we go much farther. middle schools and high schools open at which point tomorrow morning there'll be 1,600 schools open, 1,600 public school buildings open and serving children and families in New York City. In addition to over 1,000 community-based pre-K and 3-K sites. So a really extraordinary number of schools will be open and ready to serve, and they're doing it the right way. Thank you to our educators, to our staff, to all the DOE leadership, to our parents, and to our kids. Because you're all together making this work.

Okay. Now, we'll do a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all, we'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder today, we're joined by Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Katz, Chancellor Carranza, Commissioner Doris at the Department for Small Business Services, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Andrew from WNBC.

Question: Good morning, everyone. Mayor, I wanted to ask, the UFT has made it known in a letter that if you can't turn the numbers around in some of these dangerous ZIP codes, they would like key schools – I think as much as 80 of them – as many as 80 of them to be closed while the numbers are this high. I'm wondering, how close are we to that point where you would need to close down schools in these targeted ZIP codes?

Mayor: It's a good question, but I want to give you a clear answer, Andrew. I've obviously talked to our union colleagues. I'm familiar with their concerns, but what we're doing is making our decisions based on data, based on science. And we have something now that we did not have back in March or April, which is the situation room that is watching every school, every day. We have very precise data on what is happening in each school. We'll obviously have asked the question, what are we seeing with the schools in those ZIP codes? What are we seeing with members of the school community who work in a school in any part of the city, but live in those ZIP codes? And the answer is the same. In both cases, we are not seeing any unusual uptake among any of them. I will say it again, we have a very unusual situation here where we have an uptick in a discrete set of ZIP codes and we are not seeing an interconnection to our public school system. So, we will watch it very carefully, daily, hourly. And if at any point we determine we need to close an individual school or any number of schools in that area, we will. But, today, based on the facts, it is not warranted. Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: My second question has to do with your new enforcement efforts in the in these ZIP codes. You mentioned this morning, I believe you said 400 NYPD officers will be part of this mix. Yesterday, Governor Cuomo pointed again to the fact that so many NYPD officers don't wear their masks themselves. I'm wondering if this point you find that perhaps some of the reticence on mask wearing from the fact that New Yorkers see poor modeling from their own police officers who are out on patrol, not wearing masks day after day.

Mayor: Obviously, I've had this conversation with Commissioner Shea, and I know he's sent very clear instructions repeatedly to men and women of the NYPD. And from my observation, going around the city, the vast majority are, in fact, wearing masks. But I think the answer is simple, our officers should be held to the same standard as all citizens, all public servants, unless there is a good reason, like stopping to drink water or having to do something in which a mask interferes with them doing their job. Our officers should be wearing their mask. If they don't, there should be penalties, it’s as simple as that. And the NYPD has the tools to implement those penalties and they should. I don't want to see that happen, I would just prefer all our officers to follow through on these instructions that the Commissioner has given. But if anyone doesn't, there should be penalties.

Moderator: Next step is Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: I'm giving you – I'm giving you a promotion today, Reuvain. I'm going to help Hamodia have more subscriptions –
 
Question: Thank you. Thank you. I actually – 30 seconds ago, H + H tested texted me that my COVID test was negative.

Mayor: Congratulations.

Question: Thanks. I wanted to ask, you mentioned that the – these hundreds of people that are going into the neighborhoods, part of what they're doing is to provide information and combating disinformation, but you didn't elaborate on that. So, I'm wondering if you or the doctors can elaborate on what sort of disinformation these people are combating.

Mayor: Yeah. I'll turn to Dr. Katz with this simple point – I think throughout this crisis – now, seven months – you have heard all over the city all over the country, people saying, oh, you don't need to wear a mask; or, oh, COVID is a hoax. And I think Dr. Katz got a very personal and inappropriate example of that, what he experienced last Friday. And I'm sorry, he experienced that. He did not deserve that. But we've heard that everywhere and then we have to combat that with just the pure scientific facts. Dr. Katz?

President Katz: Thank you, sir, for the opportunity. The most common and most pernicious misconception I've heard is that the virus has changed, that it's not as lethal as it used to be. And that is not at all true. What we do know is that because we've been much more successful at protecting people in nursing homes, we have not had the number of sick people who very disabled. So, the COVID cases are somewhat younger, but, as sadly occurred with my father in law who died, he was 72. COVID was not any gentler than it was in March and April to him. And so, we have to keep reminding people, the virus has not changed. The epidemiology is a little different with younger people being infected, so that the numbers do not look as bad. But even young people have succumb to this virus. A second one I hear a lot is herd immunity, that we don't need to wear masks because we have herd immunity. There's no neighborhood that has herd immunity. And so, people definitely on need to wear a mask. And then finally, I've heard that the tests are not accurate. And I think actually what that is, is confusion about the different types of tests. The PCR tests that we're offering at all our sites, whether it's Rapid PCR or whether it's a PCR, people are getting in 24 to 48 hours, the results of – those are accurate tests and people should believe the results. I'm glad your test was negative. And I'm also pleased that you got it – you got the result by text. That would have been an unimaginable thing for Health + Hospitals to accomplish three years ago. So, I'm very glad that not only you got the result, but you got it in a modern way.

Mayor: Excellent. Thank you. Go ahead, Reuvain.

Question: Yeah. Thanks. The test was at the park there last Friday, by the way. My other question was about the testing rates. I know that in many of these ZIP codes, there are very high antibody rates. And I'm wondering if that's leading to fewer tests? Are people with antibodies less likely to test? And is that somehow affecting the positive test results?

Mayor: I'll start as the layman and turned to Dr. Katz and Dr. Chokshi. Look, I think the truth is, there's a huge percentage of New Yorkers in every neighborhood who have never been tested. And it is a very good question, I appreciate the question, whether if there's a high percentage of people who have tested positive for antibodies, they're not going back and getting tested – that would be understandable, but, remember, we don't have all the facts on this disease and simply having tested positive at some point in the past is not a reason to never get tested again. Dr. Katz and Dr. Choksi can elaborate on that. I would go to the simple point, Reuvain, that there are so many people who have never been tested once or haven't been tested in a long time. So, I think there's plenty of people to reach out to, to help us get a clearer picture. And what I'm saying to everyone in these ZIP codes and to everyone in the whole city is, help us get the truth. The more people get tested, the better picture we'll have. There is nothing to be afraid of in getting tested. It only helps us get to the truth more quickly and not just see a small number people and get a misimpression from that, but get the biggest cross section of the community possible. Dr. Katz?

President Katz: The Mayor has said it right. The groups we really want to go for testing are people who've never been tested or haven't been tested in a long time. People who had documented COVID infections within the last two to three months, that is a group of people where if they're currently asymptomatic it's not helpful to us for them to get tested. But the vast majority of people who have never been tested or have not recently been tested, they haven't had COVID, those are the people we want to go out and get tested.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi, do you want to add?

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, sir. I'll add briefly, but first let me say thank you to Reuvain for what you have done to combat the disinformation that we're seeing as well. And it very much relates to your good question about who should get tested. I agree with the points that the Mayor and Dr. Katz have made. What I would emphasize is that because we are we are not seeing any evidence of herd immunity in these neighborhoods, that means, unfortunately, there are still so many people who are susceptible to the virus and those are the ones that we want to get tested, because, let's focus on the facts, we are seeing an increase in cases among those susceptible people. So, hence all of our focus and efforts around ensuring that testing is as widespread and available as possible.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next up is Juan from NY1.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing?

Question: Very good. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, are you planning on going out and dining indoors today or any time this week?

Mayor: So, what I'm going to do, for sure, in the coming days is continue, as I have, to enjoy outdoor dining first while the weather's still good. I have had great experiences, starting with Melba’s up in Harlem, and I was up at Mario's on Arthur Avenue, which was fantastic – hundred-year-old restaurant. So, my outdoor dining experiences have been amazing. I'm going to keep doing that for the foreseeable future. And then, of course, shift to indoor when the outdoor isn't as prevalent because of the weather. So, important thing – and I'd say to all New Yorkers, if you have the resources, please get out there and support our restaurant industry today, whether it's outdoor or indoor, get out there and support our restaurant industry.

Moderator: Next up is Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone. I have a question – an education-related question for you, Mr. Mayor, and the Chancellor. I've heard from parents who say that despite their children having IEP’s, that mandate speech and other related services, their schools have told them that they just don't have those teachers. So, I'm curious if you want to speak about how prevalent this is across the city given the fact that this is a vital service – I don't think you’ll argue with me on that – and why the DOE is not providing it?

Mayor: I'm glad you raised it. And I'm not only not going to argue with you, Katie, to your great credit, you've raised these issues constantly and I appreciate you being a champion for the families who need this support. They've gone through a lot before the pandemic and it's even been harder for them during the pandemic. So, the Chancellor will have the details, but, I want to affirm, we have to get it right for each and every one of these families, even with all the challenges we are facing. Chancellor?

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yeah. So, Katie, first and foremost, any family should be communication with their school community, so whether that's a principal or it's a specific coordinator by IEP services, they should be doing that as we speak. If you can share any information specifically about any of those families, we'll make sure that we are in touch with them ASAP. They are part of the highest priority of students that we know have been disproportionately affected due to remote learning. So, we're doing everything we can to make sure that they have the services, and, especially if they've chosen in-person, that they have those in-person services as well. So, again, as the Mayor and I have talked about where we are we starting this massive system, so it's taking a little bit of time to get all the pieces in the right place. But we want to make sure that the students that need the most support get it as soon as possible.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Katie.

Question: And my second question is about mask compliance in neighborhoods, particularly the nine higher ZIP’s. How do you guys calculate this? I don't know if there's – there's not the data on it. It seems purely anecdotal when you know, Dr. Katz and others say that they've seen better mask compliance. Is there like a way that you quantify this? Do you count? Do you do like a ticker where you spent a few hours? Could you explain?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to Dr. Katz. It is exactly based on City officials being out and keeping track of what they are seeing and the interactions they have. And, again, today we're going to have almost a thousand City employees out in these target neighborhoods to make sure we are providing that support. Go ahead, Dr. Katz.

President Katz: So, yes, it's people actually watch – they station themselves, two observers at a corner, they watch people go by and the raw numbers do show improvement. I'll give you a minute to plug wearing your mask correctly. So that was – I noticed an interesting thing that the observers not only are get data on, are people wearing masks, but are they wearing it correctly? Which is two different problems. People who are not – who are wearing the mask, but are not wearing it correctly, they're trying, but obviously they don't know the goal is that the mask needs to cover your mouth and nose. And contrary to the belief of some New Yorkers, you actually can talk on a cell phone while wearing your mask. I have talked to the Mayor many times wearing my mask on the cell phone. So, please, now that we've convinced people to wear a mask, it does need to cover your nose, and, yes, you can speak on the telephone while wearing it.

Mayor: I will affirm Dr. Katz's point. I've talked to Dr. Katz many times on the cell phone while wearing a mask. It absolutely can be done and it really needs to be done for everyone's health and wellbeing.

Moderator: Next up is Julia from the New York Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: Good morning, Julia. How are you?

Question: Good. Just following up on Andrew's question. You're going to kind of wait until the weather gets cooler to dine indoors. Are you concerned about the message that signals to other New Yorkers and the help that the industry needs right now, getting back to its feet, if you're not willing to do it?

Mayor: No, I didn't say not willing and I'm not concerned about the message. I'm saying I personally just prefer outdoor dining, and so long as it's available, I would always choose it. I think there's lots of people who are going to love the opportunity to dine indoors and they'll have that opportunity. So, the important thing is that the restaurant industry is coming back, coming back strong, that folks who have the means – and a lot of people don't right now, but, thank God, many people do – should go out there and support restaurant workers and restaurant owners. And if you prefer outdoors, go outdoors. If you prefer indoors, go indoors. Go ahead.

Question: There's a video of a large gathering on a street in Borough Park last night, without any social distancing and it appears very little mask wearing. Are you and the health officials on the call aware of the incident and was there any enforcement?

Mayor: I am not. I'll turn to my colleagues, but what we will do in any case like that is follow back to who was involved, how can we reach those people? Or, if we expect any recurrence, to make sure we have personnel out to address it in advance. But, doctors, any sense of this?

President Katz: No –

Mayor: Okay. We'll look into that and make sure our team follows up with you with a further detail.

Moderator: Next up we have Jillian from WBAI. 

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, how are you? 

Mayor: I'm good, Jillian, but we have a problem with your innovation here. We have a little confusion, a little confusion at the federal level. 

Question: I'm digging the question marks. So, I want you to know the first question is being asked, in all due respect, the State just froze pay raises for a third time and you've extended the City's furlough to include managerial and non-represented employees. Going a step further, you have a history of awarding your staff lucrative raises as well as hiring more special assistants. Between 2016 and 2019, three of four years amounted to cumulative raises of more than $2 million alone. And the number of special assistants has increased by more than a hundred percent since you took office. These raises are usually awarded at the end of the fiscal year, which just ended in June. Given the City's financial situation and the prospect of mass layoffs, can you say with certainty, no raises will be given within the next year and will you be reducing the number of special assistants, many of whom earn more than $100,00 a year? 

Mayor: So, Jillian, let me try and address that, different pieces you're raising there. The State has an entirely different structure than we do in terms of the way they freeze pay raises. They have different labor rules than we have. Those kinds of things in terms of the vast majority of our workers would, of course, have to be done through collective bargaining. In terms of the Mayor's Office, as I announced, I think it was last week or the week before, not only are we doing the five-day furloughs for me and all other appropriate Mayor's Office personnel, but the budget of the Mayor's Office has gone down now 12 percent since the June budget, meaning from last year to this year, down 12 percent, and we're going to continue to find savings. So, what we have done is actually reduced the number of jobs here overall. There's no raises being given that I know of. There's no plan to give raises. There are people who take on new, entirely different jobs, and that's a different matter when you go into an entirely new job, but no, there's no plan to give raises at all. Go ahead. 

Moderator: Next up, we have Michael from the Daily News. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: Good morning, Michael. How are you? 

Question: I'm good. Thanks. So, I wanted to check in on the situation with the layoffs we were talking about a few weeks back. Where is the City on that? I know you've been talking to labor leaders. You know, I think the deadline that was given a few weeks back was October 1st, which is tomorrow. So, where do things stand now with that? Have there been any breakthroughs? I know early retirement was one you've been talking about, borrowing from the State quite a bit. Could you just kind of tell us where things are now and what needs to happen moving forward? 

Mayor: Michael, so, we're having very productive conversations with labor. I'm not going to speak about breakthroughs until they break through, but when we get something, of course, we're going to tell you right away, but very productive, very specific and substantive conversations with our labor partners, a lot of help from labor pushing the State Legislature to act on long-term borrowing. And we're seeing that that is having a real impact. So, we continue to focus on that effort. Early retirement, clearly something we want to be part of the package, a lot of details to work through, but we see a lot of good possibility there. So long as there is continued progress, so long as we continue to see movement toward the goal, that's where we're going to put the energy, and it's not about tomorrow or any other day. It's about if we can get this done in a positive way, I've said from day one, I do not want to turn to layoffs if there's a better option. And right now, I think we still have the possibility of a better option. Go ahead. 

Question: So, based on that, do you not feel like there's kind of a time parameter fixed to layoffs at this point? 

Mayor: Michael, it's a fair question, but let me put in perspective. Everything can be adjusted according to what the real possibilities are. Look, let's start with the stimulus. As I said to all of you, for months, I thought it was essentially a given. I have more recently felt it was essentially not a given until next year. Now in the last, you know, 48, 72 hours suddenly dialogue is happening again in Washington. Who knows? Long-term borrowing, again, we're hearing more and more support for that in Albany. That changes everything. I said that from the very beginning, we've tried to achieve that back in June. There never would have been any layoffs if we had gotten that back in June or any talk of layoffs. But what's important here is so long as there are more productive options available and more positive options available, we're going to pursue them. If at some point it's quite clear that none of these things is happening, no stimulus, no borrowing, no labor savings, nothing, then we will have to move forward layoffs with an adjusted figure. But that's just a hypothetical. We'll – let's see if these, I think very promising options, play out in our favor for all of us. That would be what's best for the people in New York City and all the people work for this city.  

Moderator: For our last question, we'll go to Abu from Bangla Patrika. 

Question: Hello, Mayor. How are you? 

Mayor: Good, Abu. How are you? 

Question: Good. Thank you so much. My question is, there's a report came that the – because last time when, you know, because of the COVID in New York City hospitals have occurred and a second round of surge came [inaudible] how prepared you are to handle the situation? 

Mayor: Well, Abu, give me a little more there, when you – help me understand what you mean about how prepared are we. Abu? 

Question: Yes, there’s a report, which is the, because of the finances, financial situation of New York City hospitals, if second surge came, it will be a big problem because of the financial crisis, city financial crisis. So, are you prepared if anything happened like a second surge, then the city can handle the hospitals?  

Mayor: Yes. The answer is, yes. Look, we are in a very different position than most places in this country and even around the world. It's a sad reality and Dr. Varma may want to weigh in because he and I have talked about this many times. Places that have much stronger national health care systems than we do in this country managed to, unfortunately, allow the disease back in the door by making, I think, some of the wrong decisions about what to reopen and how to reopen and when to reopen it. We have been very conservative. So, even though we're dealing with a problem in certain ZIP codes, we also have immense resources we can throw at that problem and help to contain that problem. As you see, right now, again, today's indicators, today's testing number for the whole city, 0.94 percent, our seven-day rolling average, 1.46 percent. There are places all over this country, all over the world that would love to have those numbers. So, this is about containing the problem and not allowing that larger surge.  

But if, God forbid, we saw something bigger across the city, we already have put tremendous resources into Health + Hospitals to strengthen them for whatever is ahead, Department of Health, Test and Trace Corps. These will be the spending priority under any scenario if we had to confront those challenges. But Dr. Varma, just jump in on the point that the difference between the approach this City, and to the credit of the State, the State have taken versus what we've seen in other places that unfortunately led to resurgence. 

Senior Advisor Varma: Great. Yeah. Thank you very much for the question. I think what's really been critical in New York is first of all an all-of-government approach. You see all of the health agencies, all the agencies that have any intersection with health really working in concert to take this problem seriously. So, that's number one. Number two is you see a commitment to continuously driving disease down. You know, a number of other jurisdictions both in the United States and other parts of the world have essentially said, well, you know, we're just going to have to live with a fairly high level of virus, there's no other way to get through this. The reality is the fastest way to restart your economy is to control the virus. And what you've seen in New York City, up until fairly recently, was very low levels of virus because of all the interventions that have been taken. And the third, of course, is the combination of that sort of all-of-government approach, a commitment to continuously driving cases down. It’s only possible when you have tremendous partnership with the average person on the street, as well as all of the community groups. And I think the tremendous unified messaging that you get from government, from community leaders about the importance of social physical distancing, of wearing masks, of limiting gatherings, all of those combined together, I think they really put us in a position that really rivals many of the large cities that you see in Asia that have also done a tremendous success at this disease. 

Mayor: Thank you very much. Go ahead, Abu.  

Question: Yeah. Second question is, you know, since today, the indoor dining opening and then the [inaudible] and also, they're scared, some communities, the community as well, that what could happen because there is a, some the owners and some people they're reckless. Can you please specify besides the shutdown if someone breaks the rules, shut down the restaurant or any other store – what is the exact, what is the specific, you know, action the City will take if someone breaks the law? 

Mayor: I'll start and Dr. Choksi can speak to this as well, obviously because the Health Department plays a crucial role here. Look, the general approach we've taken throughout the crisis, because, unfortunately it is a health care crisis and an economic crisis simultaneously, is we never want to fine people, if we can find a way around it to achieve the same goal without the fine. We never want to shut down a business if we can get the issue resolved without shutting down the business. This is something the City is very sensitive on. I can't speak for the federal government or the State government. I can say the City believes the best outcome is to solve the problem, not take money away from restaurant owners and restaurant workers or shut down a business that may not survive if it’s shut down. But that said, with the challenge we're facing now in these key ZIP codes, we have to take a very strong approach. So, there has been lots of education to the restaurant community of what they need to do. We expect a lot of compliance today. I think people are very sensitive to the realities and very willing to comply. If we find noncompliance, we're going to have to be aggressive both terms of fines where appropriate, or even if we had to get to a shutdown, we would go in that direction. But the goal is to avoid that if we can solve the problem and ensure it stays solved. So, that's my preface, Dr. Choksi on the specific approach –  

Commissioner Chokshi: Absolutely. And as the Mayor has emphasized, when it comes to indoor dining and other aspects of reopening, our focus is absolutely on health and safety. Health and safety for the entire city, but also for the specific setting that we're talking about. And when it comes to indoor dining, you know, I have to say as a doctor who has taken care of many patients who are restaurant workers and cooks and other people who will be spending time in those settings, that is very important for us to think both about the health of people who will be going to restaurants, but also the people who are working in them. And so, the many layers of safety that are part of the inspections and the enforcement that we'll be doing are critical to safeguard that health. That involves making sure that we focus on the capacity limits, so 25 percent of normal capacity, ensuring that there's adequate distancing between the tables within the restaurant, making sure that there's robust signage so people know exactly what their responsibilities are when they're there, a cleaning log for every restaurant as well, as well as symptom screening, both for workers and temperature checks for people who are going to dining establishments. So, all of these things taken together will help us reduce the risk for indoor dining. 

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner. And, everyone, as we close, look, here's the bottom line. I like to be repetitive when it's a good and important message. Please get tested today. That is the message. Wherever you are, whoever you are, wherever you live, please get tested. This is how we beat back the disease previously. Remember we were the epicenter and we fought back, and testing was crucial. We have a problem now, we're going to overcome the problem. I have no doubt we will beat it back, but we need everyone to go out there and get tested. I'll tell you something, it's a simple way to think about it, more testing equals more truth. We get the real picture of what's happening, and it helps us address it. So, again, a thank you to all the community leaders in these ZIP codes, in these communities that are dealing with this challenge, thank you to all the leaders who are stepping up and sending a message that tells people how to stay safe, how to protect their families, how to protect our community. Wear those masks, practice that distancing, get tested. And that's how we will come back and beat this back once again. I have no doubt about this city's ability to overcome because we have shown it time and time again. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-01 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. And this morning, congratulations are in order. As the principal of the One World Middle School said to all of us in the Bronx this morning – we did it. We did it. You did it. New York City did it. This is an absolutely amazing moment, fighting back this pandemic. And this morning, 1,600 New York City public schools opened, kids coming to school for the first time since March. And it was a joyous moment in the Bronx this morning, the energy was amazing. The kids, ready to be back in school with their teachers they love, with their friends, parents so happy to see their kids back in school. So, relieved. The teachers, the educators, the staff, incredible joy at seeing kids again, at being ready to be there to help our kids move forward. We did it, New York City, and everyone should be proud of this moment. This is an example of what makes New York City great. We did something that other cities around this country could only dream of because we have fought back this pandemic so well for so long, because we had the will and the focus to bring back our public schools for the good of our kids, our families, and all of New York City. This is a key moment in our rebirth. And a lot of people said it couldn't be done and it was tough, but we did it and we did it together. So, congratulations to everyone.  

This morning, amazing Principal Patricia Wynn, who founded the school 10 years ago, she said she was up at 3:00 AM because she was so excited and so happy to welcome kids back. And she kept telling everyone they should be proud of what they achieved by getting us to this day. And then as I was leaving the school, she turned to me very purposely, and she said, thank you, now keep us open, please. And that is the crucial message that I want everyone to focus on, that we're going to work every single day to take this achievement and build on it, to make our schools better all the time, to keep strengthening everything we're doing for our kids and families, and to stay open all the way through. That is the mission. We've got a lot to do. And we have to constantly work at addressing the health challenges around us, but we have achieved something remarkable today and now we will build upon it. And I want to tell you, a beautiful moment with the young woman who is an ambassador, they call them ambassadors of the school, each grade has a group of ambassadors who greet visitors coming to the school. A young woman named Farhana, an eighth grade ambassador, she greeted me, she had a little speech she gave about what the first day of school meant to her and her classmates. And the most important thing she said to me is, we are so excited to be here together again. That is the spirit of what we're seeing this morning in schools all over New York City.  

Now, as I said, 1,600 public schools open, over 1,000 community-based pre-K and 3-K sites open, all receiving kids today. In the course this week, as many as half-a-million kids will go through the door of a New York City public school program. And that is something that speaks volumes. And I want to turn to the Chancellor now and say, this victory was won on the ground in every single school and every single pre-K and 3-K center by the educators, by the staff who were working all summer to make this happen, by the parents and the students who kept the faith. But I want to thank the Chancellor and your whole team – and we've spent a lot of time together the last few weeks at the war room at the Tweed Courthouse headquarters of the Department of Education. And I will tell you, the Chancellor and his team have not gotten a lot of sleep these last weeks. They – if you send them an email at midnight, you get a response at midnight, you send them an email at seven in the morning, you get a response at seven in the morning. They have been on it seven days a week. And this achievement is something you, Chancellor, and your whole team should be very proud of. We've got a long way to go and a lot more to do, but this is a crucial moment. Chancellor, please give us an update on what you're seeing today and where we're going. 

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and good morning, everybody. Happy first day of school, times three. So, we have a lot to celebrate today. As the Mayor said, congratulations to our teachers, our principals, paras, school nutrition workers, school safety agents, and most assuredly our school custodians who have done everything in their power to make sure that schools are open safely and securely and with good sanitation and safety protocols. As of this morning, schools in every grade have opened their doors for children across the city. There's magic that happens in a classroom when you see an adult in the classroom with children, and it's been so uplifting. It's all worth it, all the sleepless nights are worth it. Classrooms and school buildings are buzzing again. And for the first time since March, students are in those schools eager to learn, and dedicated educators are ready to teach. This is a monumental milestone for our city. I want to thank everybody. And I've just mentioned everybody that I want to thank, but I want to thank parents as well, because you have made it possible for us to reach this point. I also want to thank the incredible and tireless staff in our schools and our central and borough offices who have worked literally night and day throughout the summer, and some of whom stepped up and out of their traditional day to day roles to support schools at this moment. Many of them are in schools today, supporting schools and making sure they have the adults necessary to make sure students have a good experience. This wasn’t easy, no one knew the challenges that this disease would bring and the grief and sadness that we've all had to grapple with. But finally, our students, despite so many challenges and obstacles, proved that they can persevere and take learning to new heights.  

I also want to thank my fellow New Yorkers. We are the only major school district in the entire country to safely reopen our schools for in-person learning. Now think about that for a minute. The largest, most complex school system in America is the only one that has opened their doors for in-person learning. This is a testament to my fellow New Yorkers and following the medical advice to make it possible for us to do this. I want to emphasize how crucial physically being in school is for our families. I've shared before the stories of children and some of whom haven't had a stable environment at home but have that in their school homes. This is critically important, especially for our most vulnerable children. A school community is sometimes the steadiest part of their lives and we have the people and the resources that they can rely on. These were the children that the Mayor and I were constantly thinking about while school buildings were closed. And I know that our educators and administrators were too. They've told me about their stories and what they hoped for their children. Seeing the faces of our children light up when they're reunited with their peers and their teachers and the principal, was a joyous experience that should serve as a reminder to all of us why this past week has been so important and why our hard work has been worth it.  

As I said earlier this week, despite all that's new about this school year, one thing never changes, the health and safety of our students and staff and the academic excellence for every student remain our highest priority. It's not going to be perfect right at the beginning, but we will continue to perfect and get better and build capacity as we go. Day one will not look like week one, will not look like month one or first semester. We're going to continue to get better. Our custodial staff has never been busier and our educators in the classrooms had been trained to enforce the strictest health and safety protocols. And I'm glad to report that in every school that I have visited this week – I have unannounced visits – I have seen students with their masks fully on, nose, mouth, full face, and keeping them on. And I've seen educators educate students as to why it's important and reminding them that this is what they do to not only protect themselves but protect their fellow friends and humans in the classroom. We're keeping a very close eye on our indicators and won't hesitate to take quick action where necessary.  

So, I want to end my remarks this morning with a message of gratitude. This was and is a colossal undertaking and it wouldn't be possible without every single staff member, every family, and all New Yorkers. As our principal, Principal Wynn, asked us today and asked the Mayor, implored the Mayor, keep us open. We can only do that with your continued cooperation and help. We wouldn't be here today without you and I want to say once again, thank you. And for the last time this school year, happy first day, 

Mayor: It's even better the third time, right Richard? Everyone, I want to note quickly – Richard made a point – it's been amazing seeing the consistency with which the students are wearing masks. Obviously, the teachers and staff as well. And the students this morning, I was watching as they were going in the door, at the One World Middle School and having a mask that just seemed natural to them at this point, getting the temperature check, just doing the elbow bumping. Kids are so adaptable, and it's been amazing to see how they've gone with it, because what they cared about was getting in the door, seeing their teachers, seeing their friends, feeling a little bit more like life was getting back to normal, the energy of being in school. And a lot of the kids said that they were tired of being cooped up at home. They wanted to get away from a screen. They wanted to see actual friends and teachers and human beings. And it makes all the difference in the world. And the energy of the teachers is astounding. And it communicates immediately to the students how important they are, how valuable they are, how much potential they have. That's why, among so many other reasons, it was so important to get our kids back in school. But yes, congratulations to everyone. Special shout out to everyone at School Facilities and School Construction Authority, all the folks who've done amazing work to make sure the PPE were there. All the custodial teams in the schools who are doing great work, keeping the schools clean and ready. A Herculean effort, but you can see across the system, it is working. Thank you to the school bus drivers. Thank you to the school safety agents, to the crossing guards, to the folks that work in food services. Everyone is contributing to this amazing victory today. And our educators, thank you for sticking with it and thank you for the joy and the passion you bring to this work.  

So, now let's get on with moving forward. And one of the things we need to do to move forward is make sure that we have rigorous and consistent testing for the coronavirus in our schools every month. So, a reminder to all parents, please fill out the forums authorizing the tests at the school for your kids on a monthly basis. This is going to allow us to keep a constant eye on what's happening at each school and make sure we can keep everyone safe. So, we need all families involved. If you have any questions you can talk to the school and we will get you the answers you need in whatever language you need it in. But those consent forms have been sent home. We are going to start testing next week. And again, a reminder to parents, and I'm saying this as a parent, there's going to be real questions understandably. Is it free? Yes, it's free. Is it quick and easy for your child? Yes, it will be at the school building or right near the school building. Is it going to be that long instrument that goes up your nose? No, it's the new version. That's basically like the equivalent of a QTIP going around your nostril. It's simple. It is not invasive. It's quick. It takes literally seconds. And then your child goes on their way. You get the results for your child and we all get to know what's going on and make sure we're moving forward safely. So, please, parent, fill out those forms. Let's get them back right away. 

Okay, now that's tremendous good news. And it's the most important news of the day, but we also have to obviously deal with the challenges we're facing now in 10 ZIP codes around the city. And these are real challenges and we're taking them head on, we'll go over the indicators and what's happening on the ground in these communities. Ten ZIP codes, where we have a clear problem. We have a group of other ZIP codes where we have concern, again against the backdrop of 146 ZIP codes total in the city and overwhelmingly the rest of the city is doing very, very well and the numbers show it, but we've got real work to do so let's go over these indicators. First, number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 patients, today's report is 75 patients with a confirmed positive rate for COVID of 22 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases, today's report is 394. Number three, percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19, threshold is five percent, today's report is 1.59 percent for the day. But again, now we're also talking about the seven-day rolling average, which is even more crucial. 1.52 percent for the seven-day rolling average.  

Now, everyone, what we need to do again is a number of measures we're going to act on in the communities most affected, but the message to people in those communities, the message to all New Yorkers is, get tested. We need the best possible look at what is happening in every part of New York City. We know we got this far by people going out and getting tested. And by being quick to act when we saw a problem, as we had some weeks ago in Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Soundview in the Bronx, anytime we've seen on the issue, we go at it, attack it, address it, and turn it around, but it all keys in on the need for people to get tested. So, if you have not gotten tested lately or never gotten tested, please, wherever you live in New York City, get tested today. Fast, easy, free. If you live in one of these affected ZIP codes, imperative – if you haven't been tested, go get tested. It will help us understand exactly what's going on and how to address it. So, let's talk about the clusters we're seeing in Brooklyn and Queens – largely Southern Brooklyn, Central Queens, and obviously part of the Rockaways, Far Rockaway area. These are the areas where the positivity rate above three percent. Yesterday, another ZIP code, Fresh Meadows, Hillcrest surpassed three percent in Queens. So, we're now at 10 ZIP codes. We have been watching carefully, some other ZIP codes – Williamsburg in Brooklyn, had been low. We have seen an increase, but not yet over three percent. We're watching that carefully, a lot of action on the ground in Williamsburg to address that. 

So, we all have to buckle down at this point in those 10 ZIP codes and go hard at this challenge. Now we have six others we're monitoring carefully because we've seen some increases – Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, these are all Brooklyn now, Kensington and Windsor Terrace, Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Sheepshead Bay. And then in Queens, Rego Park and Hillcrest, Jamaica Estates, Jamaica Hills. These ZIP codes, we're keeping a close eye on and sending more support into, but again, the same message for people who live in these ZIP codes, go out and get tested right away. Obviously, follow all the basics, the face mask, the social distancing. We need that. Now on the ground in the 10 ZIP codes right now, 1,000 City personnel who have been out there doing education efforts, free masks distribution, inspections, a huge amount of masks distributed, schools were visited, nonpublic schools were visited, businesses were inspected – 130 warnings issued yesterday, 16 violations. So, again, the warnings, if not heeded, lead to violations and can also lead to the closure of a school or business. But we are seeing, thankfully, overwhelmingly, a growth in compliance. We're seeing more and more masks usage. We're seeing more and more adherence to the rules, but still not enough so we have to keep pushing further. And you will see these thousand City personnel out again today aggressively. And it's going to be very, very clear, every opportunity has been given for people to follow the rules as they've been laid out, anyone not following them now, subject to fine, any business, not following now, subject to closure. This is what you'll see more and more today and tomorrow as we continue to deepen these efforts.  

I think by now, it is clear for anyone who was resting on the assumption there was herd immunity, there has not been herd immunity in New York City. We have to treat this seriously. We have to address it. Now that being said, we have something very positive. In addition to the fact that more and more people clearly are adhering to the rules, much more mask usage over the last few days, and we see it increasing all the time, for example. Testing expansion is also key. The mobile units, the mobile – the popup testing areas we talked about yesterday, the testing machines being brought into the community and given to neighborhood health providers, now well over a thousand new tests per day being provided. We're going to know a lot more in the next 24 hours from all of that. But the testing levels, the capacity for testing in the community will be growing greatly over the next few days. It is imperative that community leaders, community institutions, and everyday New Yorkers heed the call and go out and get tested and send the message of how important it is to get tested. 

With that, I want to turn to Dr. Katz, who's been leading the way and working so closely with community leaders and, again, emphasizing how much support and cooperation he's gotten from community leaders in getting these messages out. And Dr. Katz will now update us on this expanded outreach and testing effort – Dr. Katz.  

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, NYC Health + Hospitals: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. And as you say, we've been incredibly happy with the changes we've seen in behavior. A major, major increase in the number of people wearing masks. And I want to thank the community for hearing our plea and for responding so responsibly. We still have some work to do. Usage is not yet where we need it to be. And people have to remember to include their full mouth and nose in their mask the way our children do. As the Chancellor was saying, our children can do it. We can all make sure that we have our masks on correctly. I do want to remind people that masks are needed both outdoors and indoors, especially in places of business. So many stores in our city, our small stores, there's not a lot of room. It's important that people have the masks so that we don't infect each other, or the people who work there. Wear a mask when shopping for groceries, at the department store or picking up take-out. It protects the workers and other customers.  

This Friday begins the celebration of Sukkot. It's a very important holiday in my tradition. It's a time when, typically, we want to spend with both our family and other families. Fortunately, the sukkah itself is typically outside. There's no roof because part of the celebration is being able to be directly under the stars, but it's very important that if families are coming together to enjoy being in the sukkah, that they are not huddled in one part of the sukkah together. When my family of four eats with other families, it's always outside and it's the four of us on one end, a big space and the other family at the other end. And it does not prevent us from having a great time. It's good to be near the people who are part of your own pod, but it's good to keep a distance from people who are not part of your own family. We can still enjoy each other's company. We can still tell stories together. We can listen to music. We don't have to be all in one spot. We can wear a mask whenever we're not eating. If we do those things, we'll be able to still enjoy our festival without risk of infecting anyone.

Our teams are out there distributing masks, palm cards, and sanitizers. You'll find them in the Borough Park Library and Fort Hamilton, out in the Rockaways. And several other places. Our 11 mobile testing sites have been busy, continue to test hundreds of New Yorkers every day. We started our first block party yesterday, and I expect it to get busier as the neighborhood learns about it. At full capacity, we'll be able to test 500 people a day. And when all six sites are up and running, we'll be able to test 3,000 people a day. I thank all the community groups who are working with us that are distributing face coverings and giving people the necessary literature. We know that neighbors and peers are credible managers messengers and we are grateful for their help in spreading the word to community members. We're going to keep taking all these actions. I again, thank the Mayor for giving us the resources to do this so that we can protect all New Yorkers. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Mitch. And thank you again for your leadership and all the efforts of everyone at Health + Hospitals, Test and Trace, Department of Health, everyone who's out there getting the testing done and getting the word out to the community. And thank you again to all the community leaders who are helping us do it.

Okay. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

With that, we turned to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We will not begin our Q and A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Chancellor Carranza, Dr. Katz, Dr. Chokshi and Census Director Julie Menin. First question today goes to Kala from PIX.

Question: Good morning to everyone on the call and congratulations on 1,600 schools. Today's an exciting day. It's nice to see the city like this. So after the UFT spoke this morning, they said that they were considering taking the city to court. And I want to know if you're considering shutting down schools in those ten zip codes that we talked about earlier by Monday, if the numbers do not improve?

Mayor: Kala thank you, first of all, I can hear in your voice, that you're feeling the excitement of this day. And I thank you for that. Kala look, we are monitoring constantly what is happening in each and every school. And so it's not about big numbers. It's about what's specifically happening each school determines how we approach each school. So this is why we have the situation room. And I'll give you a live example here. The situation room is looking at every positive test case we get in our entire school system. They are looking at it from the perspective of where a teacher or a staff member or a student lives, their home address, what their work address is, school address. And we're seeing no indication of any upsurge in those ten zip codes inside the public schools. I keep saying there appears to be a real separation between what's happening in the neighborhoods versus what's happening in the public schools. They really do have a different constituency. The other thing that's crucial to note is we are constantly testing at the schools in those zip codes, and we've been working with the unions on this. And so for example the unions wanted to see us test at some schools in one of those zip codes in that area. We went to FDR High School. We went to P.S. 164, between those two locations, 178 members of those school communities were tested. 178. Out of that 178 only one came back positive. So that's astoundingly low. So we're going to watch the situation very, very carefully. Now the bigger question of course, is what happens in these communities overall in the coming days? And what does it mean for all of us? We're watching and the decision will be made based on the facts of whether we need to do a fuller shutdown in those communities. But so far again, we see a real separation between what's happening in some of those neighborhoods and what's happening in the public schools nearby. Go ahead, Kala.

Question: Okay. And then, you know, I've been on this call every day since we started this journey on reopening schools. And you've always said, there's nothing like in-person learning. But my question is what's the point of these students going back to the classroom to be taught by teachers who were actually virtual? So they're still staring at a computer, but inside a classroom. After speaking with the CSA I thought the number of teachers needed was already supposed to be sorted out. So what happened and why aren't there enough teachers?

Mayor: Kala I'll start and I'll turn to the Chancellor. Overwhelmingly what you're seeing in our schools today, 1,600 schools around New York City, is adults teaching kids in-person and supporting them in lots of other ways as well. There's a whole lot of individual support being given on the educational level, let alone the mental health support and the physical health support. The food programs, so many things that happen in a school community. The situations where a child is looking at a screen while in a school building or not the majority by any stretch of imagination, but even when they occur, they still occur under the supervision of an adult who's there to help them and support them. It's an entirely different situation than a child alone at home, looking at a screen or with a parent who's doing their best to try and help, but is distracted by having to work at the same time. Or doesn't happen to speak the same language or whatever it may be. So the presence of educators and caring adults has a really magical impact, no matter what the specific situation of what's going on in that classroom at that moment. Chancellor?

Chancellor Carranza: Well, just to add to what the Mayor said, I think it's really important to be clear about the learning modalities that are taking place. Fully remote means fully remote. Student is somewhere, whether it's home or some other environment not with the direct supervision or the direct assistance of an educator or an adult, an educator in a building. What is happening in, as the Mayor mentioned in some very minimal circumstances is that as we continue to build our teacher pool, our substitute teacher pool, as we continue to bring people in that are educators, to be able to man classrooms there are circumstances where students will have a virtual experience in the school building. Now the power of that is very much what the Mayor said. There are services and supports that happen in school buildings that are just not possible outside of school buildings, the guidance counseling, the social workers, the socialization that students have. It's even very important to recognize the trauma that not only students, but adults have had and undergone since March, as we've dealt with this crisis. The mere fact of being together, being able to process – this morning, the Mayor and I were able to see a classroom where the teacher was taking students through a social emotional learning protocol, where they were talking about how do they feel coming back to the school building? They hadn't been there since March. What are they thinking? Where are they on a chart? That ability to be able to have those kinds of experiences are uniquely experiences that students have within a school building. The instruction, the learning, the learning modality is but one of many facets of what makes an education an education. So as the Mayor and I have continued to say, we will continue to build our capacity. We will continue to build that experience for students as we go forward.

Mayor: Yeah and Kala to your other point about staffing. I'm going to say it again. We are dealing with an absolutely unprecedented situation, three types of learning happening simultaneously, biggest school system in the nation by far, in the middle of a pandemic. This is an extraordinary balancing act. And I've said, I think what had to happen months ago was resetting the entire personnel process and breaking out of the way it had been done in the past and doing it an entirely different way. We learned that lesson the hard way, but what we've been able to do with a lot of great work by folks at the Department of Education is rebound, get a lot more staff into play, get the schools up and running. Over these next weeks we're going to make a lot of adjustments to get the staffing levels to be exactly what we need them to be and the right people in the right places. As always happens at the beginning of the school year. And I've talked to the union leaders about this as has Richard. It takes weeks in a normal school year for all the staffing realities to sort out. It will take weeks here too. But we're up and running. When everything is said and done and everyone is in their final assignments, at that point, we'll give an update on exactly how many additional staff were needed for this extraordinary situation. But what our educators and staff prove today is they could get the largest school system in the country up and running. You're seeing it with your own eyes and we'll keep making those adjustments to make it better literally every week.

Moderator: A quick programming note, we're also joined today by Dr. Long and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The next question goes to Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good Henry. How are you?

Question: I'm okay. You know, I spoke to Avi Greenstein in Borough Park Rabbi, who is the Executive Director of the Borough Park Jewish Community Council because they're having a mask giveaway and it's being done completely by themselves with a donor who paid for 400,000 masks to be given away. And he says he's had no contact with any senior official in your administration. And he is a little perplexed by it and a little bit angry about it. Because this is the Community Council. They have the contacts and the community. And after all that I've heard about you reaching out to the community, I was really surprised to hear him express this bewilderment about how there has been no contact with his organization.

Mayor: Henry?

Question: And yes. So can you explain, here's the question –

Mayor: I get the question. Henry, I have sat in the offices of the Borough Park Jewish Community Council, many times over the years. This is an area I represented in the City Council. I know the organization well, I've supported the organization in many ways. One of my top aides who has been working with the community constantly, Pinny Ringel lives within walking distance of that organization and has been in communication with them, has invited them on the conference calls we've been having with our Health leadership. We'll get you the chapter and verse. I don't know why the organization keeps claiming they haven't been engaged when they have been engaged. But I will tell you any community organization that wants to be part of the many, many ways that we're communicating from especially our Health officials and with Dr. Katz leading the way. They're all welcome at the table and they have been welcome at the table. So we'll go double – redouble that invitation to that organization again today. Go ahead.

Question: Well then you're, you're basically calling him a liar, but he's –

Mayor: Henry, don't put words in my mouth respectfully. I'm saying there has been outreach. We asked the question when this was raised previously, and again, the liaison to the community who lives in Borough Park, affirmed that he had personally outreached and invited them into the calls when we were having. I don't know what else to tell you. So if you need to see the email exchanges, we'll get it to you. Go ahead.

Question: He said that if you would, if you had informed him that Dr. Katz would be in the neighborhood to have that news conference in which he was insulted and humiliated, he might've been able to intervene and stop that situation from happening.

Mayor: Henry again, we would welcome it. We would welcome his involvement.

Question: The communication is definitely failing to one degree or another.

Mayor: Henry, respectfully, I'm going to challenge you. I really don't think that's fair. You talked to one person.

Question: Challenge him.

Mayor: I know – you talked to one person and Dr. Katz will now talk about his experience, dealing with dozens and dozens of community leaders and organizations. And people have been welcomed and embraced and appreciated. And they've been very appreciative of Dr. Katz's role and everyone else's role trying to work together to get them information. Go ahead, Dr. Katz

President Katz: Well, again, I'd say, you know, one of the great things about my community is the tremendous diversity in every way, including opinion. And we will reach out again. I have been on the phone with so many different leaders, but again, Borough Park is a place where there are hundreds of synagogues, right? People may think of the Jewish community as being one thing, but we are not. And so if there are people who feel left out for whatever reason, we're happy to redouble our efforts as the Mayor has said.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead.

Question: The next is Matt Chayes from Newsday.

Mayor: Matt?

Question: Okay. Good morning. Thanks for taking my call. I appreciate it. And Mr. Mayor, can you tell me why you've used the Sheriff for duties like quarantine enforcement and not the NYPD?

Mayor: You know, the Sheriff's Office has done an incredible job. They really have. And they obviously did not have the responsibility Matt for day to day law enforcement at the neighborhood level that the NYPD does have. But they have been great about swinging into special assignments. And it's really been a good division of labor. And it's obviously been working. Go ahead.

Question: My second question is how many NYPD officers have been fined for failing to wear a mask? And yesterday you said, this is a quote, the NYPD has the tools to implement those penalties, referring to them not wearing a mask, and they should. What precisely is the internal penalty? And if you don't know, do you want to know?

Mayor: Yes, I do. There's obviously a range of disciplinary penalties that can be used by the NYPD. For this particular offense. We'll get to that right away. It's simple. And I appreciate the question, Matt, because it's just, again, these are the folks who enforce the law. They also have to live up to the law and people need to see them living up to the law. So I want us to get those numbers out of how many people have been panelized. Not because I take joy in it. I don't. I'd love it if not a single officer have to be penalized. And there are going to be times, as I've said, we're officers literally have to have a mask off, particularly if they're eating or drinking, and there could be other legitimate reasons. But if there's not a legitimate reason, they should have a mask on like everybody else. If they don't, there should be a penalty and you should see the results. So we'll get that to you.

Moderator: The next is Yehudit it from Borough Park 24 News.

Question: Oh, hi. Hi, good morning. I just want to say at first that I love the block party idea, which really puts a positive spin on a difficult situation. But I just wanted to ask of course New York City’s Test and Trace Corps is doing its best to stop the spread of COVID and we really appreciate everything the City is doing. However, I've just heard that some New Yorkers who have tested positive for COVID-19 with all of its terrible and uncomfortable symptoms, sometimes feel bombarded by Health inspectors from the Test and Trace Corps who they report sometimes visit their homes multiple times in one day. And sometimes make as many as eight calls to them. And I was just wondering, first of all, are these home visits safe? And also, are so many of them necessary? Like for instance, could they, could the information be gathered via email or text?

Mayor: Let me start and turn to Dr. Katz. So, I think it's a very good question. The goal here, of course, is, if someone tests positive, to make sure that they can safely separate and they have all the support they need. It is important, by definition, to, one, check-in, make people know that they can ask questions, get help if they need it for free; second, to make sure people are honoring the quarantine. And that is obviously the law of this state. Sometimes, if we're not reaching someone by phone, a home visit makes a lot of sense to find out what's going on. And then, of course, it has to be done safely with distancing, with masks usage, etcetera. But keeping the quarantine is a crucial part of the equation and it helps to save lives. I hear your point, there has to be a balance, and if people feel it's too much, we have to make sure that that isn't happening where it isn't necessary. If no one's responding, that's when there is extra outreach. Dr. Katz?

President Katz: Thanks very much for the feedback. I think the Mayor has said it well. We want to make sure that people have the resources they need in order to quarantine. If they're positive, we want to make sure that they have the medicines they need so that they don't have to go out to the pharmacy. We do want to check on them, especially if they're not answering telephone, to be sure that they are quarantining. But I'll take the feedback back and look to see whether or not there have been cases where there were multiple people coming to be sure that there's not a problem with communication among the different members of the staff.

Moderator: The next is Erin from Politico.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. My first question is with regard to schools. So, now that the middle schools and the high schools are actually open, how many additional teachers have you in fact hired to staff these now open schools?

Mayor: As I said, Erin, we're going to tote that up and get you that number when everything is complete. Like I said, I've talked to Chancellor and his team, and even the unions acknowledge that it takes weeks typically in the beginning of a normal school year, without a pandemic, to sort out all the staffing, to get everyone finally in place. There's some movement around between schools, some extra people come in, this is all very normal. This is now made obviously more challenging by three different types of learning simultaneously. So, now that we have started across the board, which everyone should be very proud of, we're now going to be making those adjustments over the next few weeks. We'll get to a final lockdown roster for every school. And then we'll be able to tell you what we had to add from the summer to make this happen. But the bottom line is, we've been able to get the staffing we need and get it where it is needed and kudos to everyone in the DOE for making that happen. Go ahead, Erin.

Question: Okay. I have a question with regards to these clusters. I'm just wondering, when you look at the increased overall and the City's infection rates, is that entirely explained about what's going on in these cluster neighborhoods? Or, beyond those neighborhoods, is there also, you know, some degree of an uptick being seen citywide?

Mayor: I'll start and I'll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi. Look, what we're seeing is broadly two different realities – 10 ZIP codes that are having a real serious challenge that we're addressing intensely with the community. And then, the other ZIP codes of the city overwhelmingly are not having that reality, continue to have a very low level. We want to keep it that way. So, again, I want everyone in the ZIP codes that are not affected to keep their guard up, continue with the mask wearing and social distancing, continue to get tested while we apply intensive tools to this area. But I do think it's two distinct realities so far. Go ahead, Dr. Varma.

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah. Thank you very much. We are definitely seeing, as the Mayor has reported, an increase in the number of positive cases, that's primarily being driven by the neighborhoods that we've identified, both the high priority ZIP codes, as well as the other areas of concern around there. As people know, during the period before this recent increase in cases, we had somewhere around 200, 250 new cases every day, and that number has increased considerably. We continue to work vigorously throughout the city to keep those case numbers down as well, because, obviously, we are quite concerned that even if the problem is primarily occurring in selected areas of the city, we're all connected. We all breathe the same air. We do business with each other. We see each other in other places. So, we have to maintain vigilance everywhere we are.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Chokshi: The only thing that I would add is that when we looked at the numbers, the 10 neighborhoods that are of greatest concern represent 27.5 percent of the new cases over the past two weeks citywide, while they represent about seven-and-a-half percent of the of the overall population of the city. So, primarily, it is concentrated in the areas of greatest concern. But, as Dr. Varma has said, we want to bring this concerted focus to those areas to prevent further spread across the city.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Sydney from Staten Island Advance.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. At this point, do you and the Chancellor know how many schools will have students returned for in-person learning, but taught by a teacher remotely who isn't in the classroom listening – who isn't in the classroom, and, you know, they're listening to them on a device like what's going on at Tottenville High School, at Wagner High School on Staten Island? And will this in-person virtual setup be norm for certain schools for the rest of the year?

Mayor: Basically, the answer is no, Sydney. This is something we continue to work on as we bring in more staffing. I'm not saying it won't ever happen, as needed, but I want to be very clear – the goal is to keep staffing up to help every school get to the point that, you know, can do the maximum in-person learning directly with educators. When they do need to turn to a virtual approach, even with the kids in school, we're making the point that there's still a lot of adult support educationally and otherwise being provided to those kids in the school. But the goal is to keep providing the staffing, keep increasing the amount of in-person learning, keep increasing also on the remote side the amount of synchronous learning. All this will build up over the coming weeks. Chancellor?

Chancellor Carranza: Just to add – only to add to what the Mayor said, that these are the exceptions, not the rule. And, again, schools have differing circumstances. So, I actually applaud the principals in their ingenuity and creativity and making sure students are going to have instruction and that it's content specific instruction that's high quality. Again, as we continue to build our teacher pool you're going to see even in those situations where that'll be mitigated. But this is not what we want. This is not going to be the standard. And, again, this is the first day and it will look very different as we go forward.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: Yeah, you didn't say how many roughly you think are, you know, doing this type of setup. Can you answer that?

Mayor: Chancellor, if you have that at your fingertips, otherwise we'll get that back to you.

Chancellor Carranza: No, again, this is the first day, so we're working with our superintendents to gather all kinds of information, including the innovative models that are being used across the city. So, we will have more to say about this later.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Christina Vega from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mayor. Thanks for taking my question, this is for you and the Chancellor. Typically, schools release attendance data daily. We haven't seen any so far for this week. Anecdotally at the schools that we've shown up to we've seen fewer kids than expected. So, are you worried about attendance? When will we see numbers? And is it possible that parents aren't filling out remote-only forms, but not showing up?

Mayor: Okay. I'm not worried, Christina – and I'll turn to the Chancellor, but I just want to give my personal frame – not worried, because we're in the middle of an absolutely extraordinary moment. And again, I want us to separate business as usual and a normal school year from opening the largest school system in the country in the middle of a pandemic – it's two different realities. So, what we're going to see here – we have been seeing is, getting the attendance information, making sure it's accurate, getting it out is slower than it's been in normal situations. We've obviously got multiple levels of attendance that has to be taken between in-person, blended at home, full remote. It's a much more complicated reality. We want to get these numbers right. It's going to take more time than usual. So, I'm not worried, because I think everything will sort out over the next few weeks. I think it is natural – as a parent myself, it's natural that some parents are waiting and seeing they want to watch how the first days go before they make a final decision of what to do. I also think it will be natural – I've talked to a bunch of parents who, as they've seen these first stages of schools, are starting to say, so when do we get to opt back in if we want to? And I think that's going to be a big discussion towards the end of this month as parents have that opportunity for their kids to come back in. So, what we all have to have in my view is a little bit of sense of kind of the organic reality – parents will watch for the coming days and weeks and then make more decisions. And I think you'll see the attendance keep growing as people see consistent success with the schools. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: I think, Mr. Mayor, you hit the nail on the head. Again, we have multiple models that are being implemented this year. So, that means programming and then setting up the attendance taking, there are multiple tracks, as we know. So, all of that requires a change in how we gather our attendance. But we'll have much more accurate figures to report in the coming days.

Mayor: Go ahead, Christina.

Question: My second question is, you keep saying that you're monitoring closely the coronavirus cases and whether there are any links to schools. So, I'm wondering if you've found any evidence of transmission happening within any school communities. And the city has said that schools will be shut down if there are – apart from reaching the three percent seven-day rolling average, if there are outbreaks – recurrent outbreaks within schools, but I don't know that there's been any data publicly released about any possible cases of those. So, have you traced any outbreaks and how will the public know? Or, will this data be shared publicly?

Mayor: Yeah. The data will be shared and I'll get an update on the, you know, how that's going to be done. But here's the bottom line, what we've seen – and the situation room has been very productive. Again, it's DOE, it's Health Department, Health + Hospitals, Test and Trace, great leadership from our Buildings Commissioner Melanie La Rocca, and her team. We're just getting constant updates from them on what they're seeing and, typically, we're finding a fairly low number of cases, again, with a school system that's going to have up to 500,000 kids in-person this week, and well over 100,000 teachers and staff in the buildings. We're seeing relatively few cases each day. We have seen some cases where a classroom had to be quarantined, a pod had to be taken out for two weeks, but relatively few. We've seen a decent number of cases – and get you exact number – where a building had to be closed for 24 hours and then they've consistently come back up and running. So, we'll get you the update on where we stand. The only situation in the whole time now since the situation room has been up, which I believe started just about two weeks ago – the only situation where we have a school where there were two cases that were not related that lead to a longer shutdown just happened the last 24 hours. It's the JFK program, it is a District 75 special education school in Queens. It has 262 students in their blended learning program and 88 staff. So, that school, as of today, is shut down for two weeks. That's the only one the entire time that has experienced that. And what's going to happen, I think, in a case like this, is what we've been telling people all along – those two weeks, kids, of course, will get instruction remotely. Then the school will be back up. Everyone who was quarantined will come right back and we'll continue with the next 10 months of the school year. So, we're going to – or, nine months of school year. So, we're going to continue to use that approach. It's very precise. And the situation room has really proven to be a great methodology and tremendously helpful. Please, Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Also, Christina, there is a positive cases map that is live on our website and it has all the active cases and closures in real time. So, you can find that on our district website.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Chancellor. Well, everybody, as we conclude today, first of all, just a programming note to remind you, we will have our next press conference again on Monday. In the meantime, and every day, look, New Yorkers have proven we can fight against any situation, we can overcome any situation. Now, we have tremendous good news today with the opening of all our schools, and that is an achievement every single one of you contributed to and should be proud of. And we have a challenge, but New Yorkers are not scared of challenges. We have 10 ZIP codes where we have a distinct problem, another six where we're concerned. We're going to throw everything we’ve got at those areas to turn it around. The crucial point is to keep moving the city forward, to keep doing what has worked, to ensure that as we reopen, as we restart, that we sustain it. And we've all known there'll be ups and downs along the way, but, again, it's how we fight those challenges together – that's what really matters. So, if we do everything we're capable of, we'll be able to keep our schools open our businesses open and keep the city moving forward. I know that's what all New Yorkers want. I hear it all the time. I believe that they truly are willing to do what it takes. So, let's pull together and work again as the team we have been that brought this city back before and let's continue this progress. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-02 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. And if it's Friday, it's time for Ask the Mayor at 11:05, actually 11:06, and we can take your phone calls for Mayor de Blasio, my questions and yours for the Mayor of the City of New York at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0 – or you can tweet a question @BrianLehrer, just use the hashtag, #AsktheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.  

Mayor Bill de Blasio: It is good to be here, Brian, and it is good to be in a city where all 1,600 public schools are open today, Brian.  

Lehrer: And we will get to that in a second, and of course we will talk overwhelmingly about city issues as we do, but do you want to make any comment about the president having a coronavirus? 

Mayor: Look, I think it's another reminder of why what so many of us have been saying is right, wear masks, practice social distancing, take it seriously, and of course this president didn't do that, unfortunately, and we've all paid the price. But look, I wish him a speedy recovery, obviously, for the good of all. But it is clear that people need to follow these guidance – this guidance for everyone to be safe. I mean, this is just the object lesson of it.  

Lehrer: Does it affect New York in any way that this happened? 

Mayor: I only can say that I don't think there's a direct impact. I think it is a moment of reflection that we all need to realize the truth has been clear to us for months, and if everyone would just follow that truth, we could actually work our way out of this crisis together, even faster. I think it's just the ultimate example of that.  

Lehrer: So on the schools, yes, all 1,600 New York city public schools, if that's the number open as of yesterday and congratulations, because I know you fought very hard for that whether people are, you know, disagree or agree with the process. So –  

Mayor: Thank you. I appreciate that very much, Brian, and look, I'll just tell you one thing, being out there yesterday I was at the One World Middle School up in the Bronx and in the end, sort of after all the debate among humans and adults, you get to kids and you just see what kids are feeling, and the joy they are feeling at being back in school with teachers they love, with their friends. I mean, it was really extraordinarily meaningful to see the human reality of our children right there where they want to be and what a difference it makes in their lives. And I sort of – it's funny – we get into all these other topics, but a lot of times we forget the feelings and the needs of our children. It couldn't have been clearer yesterday why they needed to be back in school. 

Lehrer: And maybe the virus has accomplished something unique in human history, Kids are happy to go to school.  

Mayor: Exactly.  

Lehrer: Also on Wednesday, as you know, indoor dining became legal again, but all of this is happening just as there are now 11 zip codes in the city with more than the three percent positivity rate considered a sort of danger zone threshold for it starting to grow exponentially again, and I see that you've called on all New Yorkers to get tested. Do you really mean everybody? 

Mayor: Yeah, I do, because this is how you get to the truth. What we found throughout this, you know, this is amazingly clear historical lesson, testing, testing testing. In the beginning if we had testing, we could have approached this entirely differently, where we really went deep into testing, it worked. And we had neighborhoods before this recent outbreak, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, Soundview in the Bronx, were having real challenges, heavy testing got us to the truth of what was going on, where to pinpoint our efforts, and also give us a better picture of what was happening with the people. So there's no question that testing in the first instance, and of course the basics, the social distancing, the mask wearing, have been the keys to success in New York City. If everyone goes out and gets tested, particularly those who never have, or those who haven't for awhile, it gives us a clearer picture and helps us know what to do.  

Now here's a fascinating statistic I just got, so I'll give you some news that I just received Brian. So we cut out the city into two parts, the 11 cluster neighborhoods, and then all the other areas in New York City, and we looked at the seven-day average, this is the information as of yesterday. The overall reality for the city was 1.5 – 2 percent on a seven-day rolling average. If you looked at the 11 cluster neighborhoods, it was very, very much of concern, 6.43 percent averaging across those 11 neighborhoods. If you looked at the entire rest of the city, another 135 zip codes around the city, 1.08 percent. So the City of New York right now outside those 11 neighborhoods, 1.08 percent, just exactly where we have been and very, very favorable, the kind of low level positivity that any place else in the country would want. These 11 neighborhoods we need to throw in everything we've got, and it's particularly important that people get tested in those neighborhoods. 

Lehrer: Do you have a shutdown plan for if the rolling seven-day average rates do go above three percent, citywide, which you called your trigger point for closing schools? Why has the DOE not released a specific shutdown plan for when the city's rate – I should really say if the city's rate, hopefully it will never happen – goes to three percent? 

Mayor: I would strongly stick with that word, if, in this case, I mean it, look –  

Lehrer: Of course. 

Mayor: And I mean, it – I mean it more, not just as a matter of hope, Brian, I mean it as an analytical matter. We have been watching the seven-day average and it's always was the standard for the schools. I said at the very beginning, we took a voluntary move here. The State of New York, said five percent. We said, no, we want to take an even more conservative measure of three percent, but on a seven-day rolling average, that gives you a more accurate read. So yesterday's seven-day rolling average I just referred to - 1.52 percent citywide. Today is 1.53 percent citywide. We will know a lot more in the next few days, but what I think we see is we're hovering around the level – right now – that's literally half, you know, only 50 percent along the way to this standard that would cause us a larger concern citywide. That's because of what I told you, if you look at the vast majority of the city right now, most neighborhoods are at one percent or less. So what we need to do is really focus on these 11 zip codes with everything we got. I don't think there is a scenario of anytime soon – based on what we're seeing, just pure numbers –  where we're talking about a need for larger shutdown. In these neighborhoods, we're doing more and more intense enforcement and I don't want to see a shutdown in these neighborhoods but we've been very clear now for several days and community leaders have heard it and they know it, that that is a live possibility if we don't see a turnaround on these numbers soon.  

Lehrer: The teacher's union says that the all or nothing approach, closed or open city wide based on a city wide three percent push hold for a week running, doesn't work for them and you should start looking more at school by school or neighborhood by neighborhood decisions. What's your response? 

Mayor: Well we've been talking – I've been talking to the head of the union and our team constantly. I understand the concern, but here are the facts, and, you know, we said any school that has even a single positive test, we take action. And if the school has two positive tests that are unrelated to each other, and don't have a determined origin outside the school, we'll even shut down the school just based on two positive tests, and we did that in fact yesterday with a school in Queens, a small, a special education District 75 school. But when it comes to the 11 zip codes, I'm watching constantly through our situation room, are we seeing any evidence of a problem in the schools, in those zip codes? So far, no, we're seeing very, very few people, kids, staff, educators in those schools testing positive, nothing out of the ordinary. We're testing at a lot of schools. We're giving mobile testing directly for the folks in the school community – I mentioned two schools yesterday in the 11 zip codes that a UFT asked us to do testing at, and we got 178 test results, one came back positive. So we're watching those schools constantly and we see anything start to move, then we'll look at them individually. I will absolutely be ready to act school by school as needed. 

Lehrer: One other question about this, and then we'll start taking some callers, there's a new study from NYU that suggests you're not planning enough testing for the public school students to prevent meaningful spread. Reading from the times coverage of this, it says the city is currently planning to test a random sample of 10 to 20 percent of people, including students and adults, in each city school once a month, starting next week. But in order to reliably detect outbreaks and prevent them from spinning out of control, New York may need to test about half of the students at each school twice a month, researchers at NYU estimated experiences in Germany, Israel, and other countries suggest outbreaks could spread quickly despite the city's relatively low rate of infection, according to the researchers. So will you ramp up testing? Do we even have the tests to that amount? 

Mayor: Well, look, I think the important point here is to realize we're in a city that has a high level of free available testing, over 200 sites. This is a city that is emphasized now for months and months that we want people to get testing. We’re making it easy and available for folks. So that's an X factor here that I'm not sure the study has taken into account. The other thing to look at is all the measures that we put in place that school systems around the world did not, including ones that opened successfully. We literally took the most stringent health and safety standards around the world and combined them into one gold standard. There are many school systems that have succeeded, but don't require masks for all their staff and all their kids. We literally – you've seen the pictures, Brian, everybody walks into a New York City public school has to be wearing a mask and have to keep it on all day. We have social distancing – you have nine kids, then kids in the classroom, you've never heard of that in New York City before. You have constant cleaning, all of these things mitigate against the spread – and our public health leaders have said, as much as they do think it's great that we're going to have regular testing, they're much more concerned about the proactive preventative measures than about testing happening once a month, their point is do the things that stop the spread of the disease rigorously. No school system in the world is doing as much - that I've seen – taking all of these measures and applying them simultaneously to stop the spread in the school community, and that's why so far we've seen – our situation room has been up and running for weeks – we're seeing very, very few cases in our public schools.  

Lehrer: Mike in Jackson Heights, you’re on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Mike – 

Question: What?  

Lehrer: Mike you're on the air.  

Question: Yeah, hi, I have a question regarding outdoor dining. If the restaurant goes out of business who is responsible for taking away the area that they set up? That's one of my questions. The second question is with the lack of parking in the neighborhood, I noticed some restaurants are building up the dining – outdoor dining area – on both the main streets and the side streets, and I got a ticket for waiting for my order from the restaurant trying to support the local restaurant, I got a ticket for double parking just for waiting for my order to be. So we’re kind of trying to help the restaurants to be in business, but at the same time, they are forcing us not to help them by –  

Lehrer: Whoops, Mike’s line just flipped off but I think he got his question out.  

Mayor: Yeah, I think I got the basic concept. Mike look, first of all, outdoor dining, we now have over 10,000 restaurants in the city participating, that has helped us bring back. That's pushing on towards a 100,000 jobs come back because of this. And now outdoor dining will be permanent New York City, and particularly the combination of open streets and outdoor dining, which has been absolute success. That's going to be permanent. And I think it's going to bring back the industry and just make life better in this city. So we really want to support the restaurant industry. I have not heard of a lot of restaurants that aren't going to be using their outdoor dining facilities, if they didn't, of course, it's their responsibility to take it down. But that so far has not been an issue I've heard about. In terms of things like the parking space has taken up, 
I believe this is a good trade off, that what we're getting for our community and for people getting their livelihood back and for the good of the city, even if it takes up some parking spaces, I think it's been a very good trade off. So to me, this has been an example of people creating something in the midst of a really tough time, New Yorkers creating something really good, and that's why it's going to be continuing to be permanent.  

Lehrer: Well, we're almost out of time. Did you see the study indicating there's very little COVID spread on mass transit either in New York this summer, as people started to return in some numbers or in other cities? 

Mayor: I did. And I'm going to be talking to our public health team about what the larger ramifications of that may be. Now it's one study and we never take one study as the final word on anything, but it's hopeful. And it is interesting that more and more people have been coming back to mass transit with a very high level of mask usage. And we, again, the city overall, we've been extraordinarily consistent on having a low level of COVID positivity for months and months. So that's a hopeful sign and I do want to commend New Yorkers. The reason mass transit is working better and healthier is because people are actually following the rules and wearing those masks. And that's where it begins and ends. 

Lehrer: We're going to do a segment on that probably next week on that study. But my question about that is that it assumes a low infection rate has already been achieved, which it was in New York over the summer. And I think the other cities that they cited. So if more people on a subway car have the virus, if it starts spreading again, I don't know if they're indicating it would not spread on the subway? 

Mayor: Well, it's a fair question, but I want to come back to what our public health team says constantly. That the fundamental behavioral change that the people in New York City achieved. It doesn't mean COVID left our borders, you know, packed up and went away. It does mean we fundamentally, we all bent that curve profoundly by our actions. And it means keep doing it, in fact, do it even better. I mean, there's a lot of people wearing masks. I want everyone wearing a mask, I want them wearing it the right way and covering their nose and mouth and being really, really consistent about it. I want everyone being as careful as they can be about social distancing. And just the basic things, the hand sanitizer, the handwashing. The more you do that, the better. COVID will still be out there in the atmosphere. But it's amazing the ability of motivated people to keep it in check, even as you see how much more activity there is on our streets, Brian, since Labor Day. I mean, and you see people out there, outdoor dining and you know, you see a lot of places in the city looking more and more like they're getting back to normal. And yet the overall number isn't moving in this city, that's a good sign that people are taking matters into their own hands and continuing to beat back this disease 

Lehrer: Thank you as always Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week. 

Mayor: Thank you, Brian. Take care.

2020-10-04 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everybody. You know, over these last weeks, we had some moments as New Yorkers that we could celebrate after everything we've been through. We saw a really extraordinary fight back against the coronavirus and months of low levels of positivity. We saw, last Thursday, a great moment for the city where all our public schools were open, but we've had challenges throughout. And when we have challenges, it's important to lay them on the table and be upfront about them – that's what all New Yorkers want. So, today, unfortunately, is not a day for celebration. Today is a more difficult day. And I'm going to be giving an update that gives me no joy at all. In fact, it pains me to be putting forward this approach that we'll need. But, in some parts of our city, in Brooklyn and Queens, we're having an extraordinary problem, something we haven't seen since the spring and we have to address this issue for forthrightly. That's why we're here on a Sunday after several days of continuing to review all the data and look at everything from the point of view that it’s gotten us this far as a city, always relying on the data and the science. What has become clear is that there are a number of neighborhoods now that have continued to have a high level of coronavirus positivity, and that requires stronger action than we've had to take for many months. I want to emphasize there's been extensive efforts over recent weeks in these communities – extraordinary outreach efforts, close cooperation with community institutions and community leaders across the ZIP codes involved. An immense amount of City personnel have been out educating, providing free face masks, enforcing where enforcement was necessary. All of these things have been going on for weeks, in addition to a huge expansion of testing in these communities. These efforts have truly been extensive, but, in the end, were not enough to turn around this situation. So, what we are now reporting is we now have nine ZIP codes in Brooklyn and Queens that have been above a three percent positivity level for seven consecutive days or more. And that measure tells us that we have to take more extensive action. It will be very difficult. I want to emphasize this again, it gives me no joy in saying this because it will be very difficult for the people who live in these ZIP codes of all communities. It will be difficult for people who have done so much to fight back through this crisis, but it is necessary to stop the spread of the coronavirus in these communities and beyond, and it's necessary for the good of all of New York City, which still overall continues to have a very low positivity level. We have to keep it that way. So, we have to take strategic action now to protect everyone, over 8 million New Yorkers who are depending on this virus to be held in check.

Now, the proposal I'm going to go over – we've presented it initially to the State of New York. I want to emphasize that everything I'm about to say will require the support and approval of the State of New York. And we're going to be working intensely today and tomorrow on the details with the State and, assuming we get through all this quickly and it is approved, we'll put this into effect on the timeline I will describe. So, the plan is to rewind in these nine ZIP codes – to rewind, to go back to address the problem by using the tools that we know work, which is to ensure that non-essential businesses are not open and a variety of activities are not happening. Again, no joy in saying that, but, that, unfortunately, we do know is what is necessary to stop the spread of the coronavirus. So, this would begin this Wednesday morning coming – Wednesday, October 7th – require the closure of nonessential businesses in these nine ZIP codes, and I want to go through them now. It's Edgemere, Far Rockaway 11691; Borough Park, 11219, Gravesend, Homecrest, 11223; Midwood, 11230; Bensonhurst and Mapleton, 11204; Flatlands, Midwood, 11210; Gerritsen Beach, Homecrest, Sheepshead Bay, 11229; Kew Gardens, 11415; and Kew Gardens Hills, Pomonok, 112469 – those are the nine ZIP codes that have over three percent positivity for at least seven consecutive days.

Now, on top of that, out of an abundance of caution, we will be moving to close schools as well. And by that, I mean, starting Wednesday morning, public and non-public schools. Again, this is the strategy that worked for us in the spring and summer, which is limiting activity in a community to stop the spread. That's how the City came out of an extraordinarily difficult crisis in the spring, a much tougher situation than what we're dealing with now. And one that was in every corner of the city, we fought our way back with these restrictions and with social distancing, with a mask wearing. We have to do it again in a pinpoint area, but it is crucial that we do it in a rigorous fashion to stop the spread within those communities and beyond. So, again, pending approval from the State of New York, starting Wednesday morning, public and non-public schools would be closed in these areas. In addition, dining, both indoor and outdoor dining would be closed in these areas. Of course, as was true throughout the crisis, restaurants would still be able to do a delivery and have pickup by their customers.

Now, again, the goal here is to prevent the spread. The goal here is to do everything we can to stop something bigger from happening right now. The schools, I want to emphasize, we have seen very little coronavirus activity in our schools. We have a situation room that's been monitoring constantly. This is not because we have seen a number of specific problems in our schools, our public schools, we have not. This is out of abundance of caution. And in coordination with a larger strategy that mirrors what we did successfully with spring of a larger shutdown to ensure we stop the spread. Now, again, everything is based on data and based on a scientific approach. As we get questions from media, you'll hear from our healthcare leadership. They have been looking at this data constantly, looking for what it tells us and what actions are necessary. The specific benchmark of three percent positivity or more, for more than seven consecutive – seven or more consecutive days – has been crucial in their deliberations.

So, that's what's going to happen in those nine ZIP codes that already have reached that level. But now, I want to emphasize, we have more work to do beyond, because there are 11 additional ZIP codes that are areas of real concern. These 11 ZIP codes have not yet reached a level of three percent positivity for at least seven consecutive days, but they are edging up toward that level and we are concerned. So, again, in these areas – we're going to do in all these areas, the original nine I mentioned and in these 11 ZIP codes, we're going to do a huge amount of ongoing outreach. We're going to have continued enforcement. We're going to have continued mask distribution. But these ZIP codes will not require those larger restrictions yet. And, hopefully, they will not at all, but we are going to be watching them very carefully. Let me go over these 11 ZIP codes that are on this watch list. Bedford Stuyvesant, West Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, 11205; East Williamsburg and Williamsburg, 11211 and 11249; Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Sheepshead Bay, 11235; Bergin Beach, Flatlands, Marine Park, and Mill Basin, 11234; Crown Heights East, 11213; Kensington and Windsor Terrace, 11218; Rego Park, 11374; Fresh Meadows-Hillcrest, 11366; Hillcrest, Jamaica Estates, Jamaica Hills, 11492; and Auburndale, Fresh Meadows, Pomonok, Utopia, 11365.

So, in those 11 ZIP codes, there'll be intensive outreach efforts, testing efforts, not the full-scale restrictions that we're calling for in the first nine, again, pending State approval. But in these 11 intensive outreach to test and to enforce, in addition, we believe we should close down higher risk activities – and that means indoor dining, gyms and pools, that those activities should be restricted as of Wednesday morning, but other activities can continue. The other lower risk business activities can continue, schools can continue, etcetera. Now, beyond the nine ZIP codes that we have particular challenges in, and the 11 on our watch list, those 20 ZIP codes, beyond them, there are 126 other ZIP codes in New York City that, right now, thank God, overwhelmingly, are doing well. We always want to be vigilant. We want the maximum testing by all New Yorkers. We want to make sure that people are wearing masks, practicing social distancing. We need to be vigilant in every corner of the city, but I want to emphasize the vast majority of New York City is holding steady right now with low positivity levels and we want to keep it that way. And these actions that we're taking in Brooklyn and Queens are to protect the whole city.

Now, I want to emphasize, none of this is easy. It's difficult. It's challenging. It will require sacrifice. We're talking about the people who have been through so much, businesses that have struggled to survive. This will not be easy at all for families who depend on their livelihoods. But it's something that we believe is necessary to keep this city from going backwards towards where we were months ago. So, I want to emphasize that throughout we've been in constant contact with community leaders, elected officials, clergy, folks who have been working so hard to try and turn the tide in these communities and these ZIP codes. And we will continue to work with them because we're all in this together.

Now, in terms of what it would take to turn us around, let's emphasize – the way forward is to double down on the basics, the core four, to focus on the face coverings, the social distancing, the hand washing the staying home with your sick. Those basic approaches make all the difference in the world. We have a standard we're setting for what we believe is the clear measure that would tell us that these communities can no longer – will no longer need restrictions and there are two versions. The first, the faster one, is a 14-day pause, which would require that the last seven days be under three percent positivity. So, this is the more hopeful version, that if a community can work together with us and we all are able to beat back the disease and we can keep the disease under three percent positivity for seven days, that we would reopen that community after a total period of time of 14 days. Again, this is our vision we're presenting to the State. This is what we think is the best-case scenario. The other scenario that we believe is quite plausible is a 28-day pause, four weeks. And by the end of that pause, by the last day of that pause, the community is below three percent based on a 14-day average.
Those are two very viable ways for a community to come out of these restrictions.

So, we will continue with the huge quantity of City personnel out in force, and we'll keep adding to it in all these ZIP codes – again, passing out masks, giving people information, enforcing and enforcing rigorously, and increasing the amount of testing. And when it comes to testing in the ZIP codes most effected, on Friday, for example, we had almost 2,000 new tests on top of what we had previously at over 20 locations in these keys ZIP codes. We're going to continue to amplify that, continue to add testing capacity in these communities. We're going to continue to ramp up inspection enforcement as we have been. There's been over 2,000 inspections to-date of businesses and community institutions that have yielded 26 violations and 883 warnings. So, the enforcement has been going on, will continue to go on. But, look, no one – no one wants to see the community, any community have to go through this closure of businesses and community institutions. There’s a lot of people in these ZIP codes, we're talking about nine ZIP codes with hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in the many different kinds of communities. Everyone affected in common. We also know within these ZIP codes are many people who today are observing a holiday. And I want to say I'm sensitive to that fact. It was so important to get this information out as soon as this plan was formulated, that I chose to announce it now to give people the maximum amount of time to make adjustments. And we chose to have the implementation begin Wednesday morning to give time for that a transition. We'll be talking today with a number of community leaders, tonight with community leaders who are coming off the holiday and onto tomorrow morning, while we continue our discussions with the State as well. But the important thing was to give people time to adjust, to give our schools time to get ready, but at the same time act aggressively, because we've learned over and over from this disease that it is important to act aggressively. And when the data tells us it's time for even the toughest and most rigorous actions, we follow the data, we follow the science.

Now, some may ask, does this signal a larger resurgence in New York City? I've asked the health care professionals here with us their assessment – their assessment is no, it does not have to signal that. If we contain the situation in the nine keys ZIP codes and the 11 on the watch list, we can stop this from spreading more deeply into New York City. We can stop this from being a “second wave” in New York City. But in these communities, it is a very troublesome reality that must be addressed very aggressively.

So, I'll conclude before giving the daily indicators by saying that it is so important to understand, and there'll be lots of questions and lots of concerns, but it's so important to remember where we were in March, where we were in April, how difficult it was, how tough it looked at that time, how difficult it was to believe we can overcome it. And yet we all did. Why? Because people worked together, people heard the guidance, follow the guidance. We can use the exact formula again to beat this back. We'd beaten back something tougher before we're going to beat this back again.

Let me go over the daily indicators for the City as a whole. Indicator number one, daily number of people are admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 patients – today's report is 70 patients. The confirmed positivity level for those patients is 27 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, the threshold is 550 cases – total, today's report, 464 cases. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19 today's report is 1.54 percent. And on the seven-day rolling average, 1.72 percent. Let me do a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. We're joined today by Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps. Ted Long, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma. First question today goes to Steve from WCBS radio.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Good to be with you today. I wanted to ask first, I think the question on a lot of people’s minds is, why Wednesday? Obviously, if it's problem now, it's been a problem for seven days, why wait another few days to get this underway?

Mayor: Steve, several things. One, again, we are presenting this right now to the State of New York. We're awaiting their approval and support so we can move forward. But we do think communities need some time to adjust, that's been the case with many other restrictions in the past, that there was a bit of wanting and transition time provided – really important for communities coming off the holiday tonight to have some time to make adjustments, really important for store owners to have time to get ready and adjust their approaches, really important for schools. I'm talking now in particular for our public schools, some kids haven't gotten into school yet. We want to at least get them one chance to connect with their teachers, get materials, get devices, whatever they need for the period of time when they're going to be remote. So, we're – these are very, very aggressive actions, but we thought a few days of transition was necessary here. Go ahead.

Question: And yeah, just to follow up, I believe this was the first time the City is looking at a specific, individualized closures versus entire measure for the whole city. So, does that concern you, that people in these ZIP codes, like, just be incentivized to travel and do their business elsewhere in the city?

Mayor: Steve, we got to watch every situation we're facing here. We understand this is uncharted territory. Look, I think all of our previous assumptions were based on our experience in the spring where the situation was consistent across the whole city. We saw obviously some real disparities in terms of impact, but the coronavirus was affecting every single part of the city intensely. We did not anticipate a situation where it would be so narrow in the scheme of things, only a small number of ZIP codes out of the whole city. So, this is something we haven't dealt with before, but we think this is the best way to address it given the facts and the data we now have. To your point, we're going to watch carefully to see if we see any larger spread and address that. But I would say to everyone, including folks who live in these ZIP codes to practice those safety measures, because wherever they may go so long as they are really being careful with those measures, washing hands, and the hand sanitizer, and the face coverings and social distancing, we believe we can contain the situation for the city as a whole.

Moderator: Next up is Dana, from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I was wondering if you could, sort of – could you have any numbers on how many people live in these nine ZIP codes or the number of businesses that will be impacted and how – secondly, how likely is it that the 11 additional areas of real concern will ultimately be subject to these same restrictions?

Mayor: So, I'll start with this – in terms of number of people, we'll get you a more specific estimate, but my understanding is well over a half-a-million people in these areas. The number of businesses we’d need to count on. I know for these nine ZIP codes, Dana, it's just about a hundred public school sites and about 200 nonpublic school sites. But, again, our hope here is that working with the community, we can keep this to a brief duration, that this can be something that can be turned around in a matter of weeks and then people can continue on with their lives. Go ahead.

Question: Thank you. And I guess, secondly, how much is this sort of an effort to satisfy the teacher's union, which has been calling for the closure of schools in these hotspot neighborhoods?

Mayor: Again, Dana, the facts are quite clear. We've been in constant touch with the teacher's union and we are not seeing a problem in the schools, in these communities. There were a couple of small exceptions. We are not seeing anything that suggests that there's a deep connection, honestly, and the health indicators of the public schools and these surrounding communities. And we are doing this out of an abundance of caution. If we're going to the extent of, again, with the State's approval, closing non-essential businesses, it stands to reason that we would close down both public and nonpublic schools as well – that's in the nine ZIP codes. In the 11 on the watch list, we want to keep overall activity going unless the data tells us otherwise. So, in the 11 we're only calling for the closure of the most high-risk businesses. But, in those areas, other businesses will continue and schools will continue.

Moderator: For our next question, we'll go to Gloria from NY1.

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to follow up on Dana's question so that for folks who are listening to you right now who are in the 11 areas that you are concerned about, but not exactly fully pausing yet, what will be the trigger, so to speak, for these areas to become areas of real concern that might, in fact, push that full on pause.

Mayor: Gloria, it’s a very important question. And I want to emphasize that the data we're working from has been a clear when a community does go above that three percent testing level. And this is also based on more and more testing being poured into the community, more and more testing locations, more and more efforts to get people tested, continuing to get a larger cross section of the community tested. When it goes above three percent for seven consecutive days that tells us something particularly worrisome. The goal here is to do everything we can to keep these other 11 ZIP codes below that level. Now, no one's here to do hypotheticals. We obviously are concerned that a number of those ZIP codes might end up above that three percent, seven-day threshold. But that's a very clear indicator – three percent, seven consecutive days, we're going to publish the data daily so people can see what's going on. Based on the conversations over the last 48 hours with our health leadership, I would say we certainly are concerned that some of those in the 11 could end up in that top tier that requires more restrictions, but by no means does it have to be all of them. And the more people work with us, the better chances some of those ZIP codes could avoid needing those deeper restrictions.

Question: Okay. And, Mr. Mayor, if I may, I just want to ask the question about how you came to deciding to do this in this way, the Wednesday pause, and I just wanted to ask about the obvious, you know, if you are somebody who lives in Far Rockaway, but say, goes to work every day in Crown Heights, is that not just going to create a problem here, that people are still going to be moving around, even if some essential businesses close and that we will see a community spread, maybe in a matter of days, if not weeks here?

Mayor: It's a fair question. I'll start and I'll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi. Gloria, this is what I say – first of all, unlike where we were in the spring – I think there’s a profound difference – the level of consciousness among New Yorkers, and the fact that New Yorkers are acting on the information they have, is the strongest we've ever had. People really are overwhelmingly practicing social distancing, washing their hands, wearing their face mask. You see it all over the city, and I think this announcement will cause people to double down further all over the city, recognizing we got to tighten up here. So that's Point 1, it's a very different environment where spread is limited most intensely by what people do, by what individual New Yorkers do. We're obviously going to watch carefully to see if people moving around from community to community is having an effect, but to date, we do not see that happening on a wide scale. We see a situation where it's pretty definable where our problem is, and we want to keep it that way. Dr. Varma then Dr. Chokshi.

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Great. Thank you for the question. It's a very important question about how much movement you should restrict from people. I think the most important points to consider are first we're seeing widespread transmission in the ZIP codes that we're proposing that return back to pause, and the most important thing we can do is reduce the amount of nonessential contact that people have outside of their homes. So that's really the single most important thing we can do at this point, combined with all of the other measures, including mass wearing, physical distancing, and our Test and Trace program. So it becomes a question as you raise about whether or not we need to restrict the movement of people in or out of those areas, and that presents really very important human rights considerations, even during the period of pause, when we made tremendous progress in bringing these case numbers down, there was no restriction on people moving between neighborhoods or outside of the city or even between states. So we don't believe that it is an essential feature of this proposal that we're putting forward right now. We simply have the public health evidence to indicate that the measures that we're proposing right now have a very high likelihood of succeeding.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, I would just emphasize one additional point here, which is when we see a certain threshold of evidence for community transmission. That's when we put in place the community measures that are being described, particularly for the nine ZIP codes of greatest concern. However, whether you're in those nine ZIP codes or the other 11 ZIP codes or elsewhere in New York City, to prevent individual transmission, the individual measures that we've talked about are of the utmost importance. We have emphasized the importance of masks and face coverings. But I also want to make sure that we appropriately emphasize the importance of physical distancing or social distancing as part of that, and that becomes critically important for us to halt the patterns that we're seeing right now.

Moderator: Next is Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. My first question is I haven't heard any mention of houses of worship – will they also be closed in these ZIP codes and potentially in the other tier two, I guess, watched ZIPs?

Mayor: Not at this point, we're going to obviously watch the situation very carefully, but given that there are restrictions in place on occupancy, and I do believe we're seeing a lot of recognition from community leaders across the spectrum, across the whole faith spectrum of the importance of social distancing, mass wearing in houses of worship. They would continue to be open, but with restrictions.

Question: Thanks, and my second question is just, I guess, going off of Gloria's question, how can you contain this? If you had, you know, for example, the neighborhood of Forest Hills, is it between two ZIPs that are now closed? If you have students who live in a ZIP that has now been restricted, but go to school in another and vice versa – how realistically can the city actually contain this? And do you think that you, I mean a week ago you were well, as of Tuesday, when you actually first spoke with the press about this, it seems that you were downplaying the severity of this, said it was only in insular communities, said these people didn't go to – people who were infected didn't go to public schools. Do you think you acted fast enough on what you saw and what your health officials saw was a rising spike throughout?

Mayor: Obvious reality is that we continue to not see evidence of a problem in the public schools. So I said, Tuesday remains true today. We are not seeing a crossover of this situation to the public schools in these ZIP codes. We're just not seeing it. We have a situation room that is gathering data every single day, we've been over it constantly. There's a lot of testing going on outside schools. It's yielding a very different reality in the public schools than in the surrounding communities, and we know that there's a certain amount of disconnect between those two realities normally. So no, that piece remains very clear, and the overall situation in the city remains very positive. The question you asked to begin with, I'll turn to my health colleagues – the way to handle a situation when the data says it is time for more restrictive actions than take more restrictive actions. That's what we've always lived by. When the data says you don't need those restrictive actions anymore, you stop using them. Earlier in the week, it was not clear it was time for this level of restrictive action, which comes with a lot of impact on people's lives, and I feel horrible for people who have a business has been struggling for example, and will need to be close for a period of time. You don't do that lightly – only do it if the facts really demand it. I also want emphasize, you said the words “now closed”, that is not accurate, and I want to emphasize – we're putting this proposal forward, telling the people of this city, what I believe, and the healthcare team believes needs to happen. This can only happen with state approval. So we're going to now work with the State to get approval for this plan so we can move forward with it.

Now, I’ll turn again to Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi on the question of how you stop a spread to other areas and how important it is to address the immediate problem as part of stopping that spread. Go ahead.

Senior Advisor Varma: Yep. So the challenge of course is how do you stop transmission, you know, in a place where again, people will mix in in many different ways. So we know that the single most important measures are the ones individuals can take, as Dr. – Commissioner Chokshi has said – wearing a mask, keeping physical distance, watching your activities that you do, limiting gatherings and good hand hygiene. But there comes a time as the Mayor has said, when you need to develop and implement stricter community control measures, we try to do these in the least restrictive way possible, and I think the Commissioner can describe in detail all of the activities that we have been doing for several weeks to try to reduce community transmission. But the simple fact is once you get to a level where there's widespread transmission, you need to reduce the amount of contact that individuals and households are having with each other, and when you do that in selected geographic areas, you can have a direct impact on the amount of disease. We are watching the data carefully, literally many times every day, we're sitting in debating and discussing data points. We're finding how we do the analysis to see whether or not there was transmission to other parts of the city, and then we would of course take action based on what the data tells us.

Mayor: Go ahead, doctor.

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you. What I would add to this is that what the Mayor has asked of us is to ensure that every time we see an early warning signal that is indicated both to the leadership of the city, but also to the public as well, and that's what you have witnessed from us over the last few weeks and months. When those signals do occur, we have a range of actions that we can take, and as Dr. Varma was explaining these occur on a spectrum. We always start with ramping up the outreach and engagement that we do for affected communities reaching out to community leaders, to local healthcare providers, making phone calls, knocking on doors, doing all of those things. In concert, we ensure that we calibrate up all of the testing and tracing that we're doing in those communities as well, and that has a direct impact on trying to hold spread because when you test and you contact trace, you can get people to isolate and quarantine and break the chains of transmission. Beyond that there has been increased enforcement as well particularly focusing on the places in the community where spread occurs and that has also ramped up over the last few days and weeks, and then if those measures are not yet sufficient to stop the spread or when we take the community mitigation measures that we've described today, and so that's the full spectrum, but always taking swift and decisive action every time we see a signal that more needs to be done.

Mayor: And I want to emphasize that Dr. Chokshi not this week we're ending, but the previous week made very clear to people in these communities in Brooklyn and Queens, that there was the potential for much greater restrictions, and we tried to use every tool working with the community to see if it was possible to avert that because again, we know the huge cost that has in terms of people's lives. So that warning was duly given an immense amount of effort, took place in the last two weeks to address the situation, a lot of cooperation from community leaders of all kinds, but it simply wasn't enough to avoid these restrictions that we're proposing to the state. It's a different scenario than what we saw in other situations. Over the previous few months, we had a problem in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, Soundview in the Bronx, we had a problem in Southeast Queens – followed the same playbook for all of them, and later on for Borough Park and then Far Rockaway and Edgemere, and what had worked in the previous situations did not yield the same result this time, and that's why we have to first warn people of the potential for more restrictive measures, and now we are in fact, proposing them.

Moderator: Next up is Robert from AM New York.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good. How are you doing Robert?

Question: Good. Thank you. So just to clarify about the closing of schools in these nine areas could you explain how that's going to take place? Well, I presume that these classes are going to shift over to our learning?

Mayor: That's right, Monday and Tuesday, and again, this is pending final confirmation with the state, but Monday and Tuesday would be regular school days. The kids who are in blended learning, who would be going to school should go to school. Again, an opportunity for them to connect with their teachers, get additional guidance. If they have not yet seen their teachers, because they're on a rotation this is a chance for them to connect with the teachers before they go remote, get devices, if they don't have devices. So right now the Department of Education is alerting principals in these schools that if there's any children who don't have a device, we want to make sure they get it in the course of Monday and Tuesday, so they can bring it home. Of course, with internet service just really giving the schools a chance to prepare under a tough situation to maximize the positive impact of remote learning. But then those schools would go all remote again, for as little as two weeks could be more like four weeks, depending on what happens in the specific ZIP code.

Question: Okay, and just to follow up on the enforcement here earlier today, the Governor announced a new taskforce focused on mask enforcement and social distancing enforcement, and I was wondering if you can explain how that is going to work with the city in expanding mask and social distancing enforcement in these hot zones.

Mayor: Right. It was just announced Robert, so I don't have the details, but whatever the state is doing, we'll of course we'll work with them. We want the maximum education, maximum masks distribution, maximum enforcement. I mean, we've had a thousand city personnel out in the key ZIP codes over the last few days in a very, very intensive enforcement effort. We are finding some places where enforcement is needed, but really not that many in the scheme of things. But we will keep pounding away with that, and we'll certainly work with the state in every way possible.

Moderator: Next up is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Thank you. Oh, I was just wondering – to follow up on the schools question. Could Chancellor Carranza speak in a bit detail on how he and you expect this to affect learning for cans in the nine ZIP codes and just what the city might be doing to kind of facilitate this transition?

Mayor: I'll start and turn to the Chancellor. Look, the Chancellor and I've been really clear that there is nothing as powerful as impersonal instruction. So we understand it will be difficult for families who have been waiting and finally, just beginning to taste in-person instruction again, to have to wait longer. But we do know that educators can work wonders and are extraordinary in their ability to create solutions and having a few days to get ready and to make sure that they can maximize the remote learning and make it as good as it can be for the time that kids have to be remote, I think will make a difference here. Go ahead, Chancellor.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, sir. So that's exactly right. So those 48 hours, those two days are going to give us crucial time to make sure that students have the devices that they need for the remote learning tenure that they will have. That will allow us also to communicate with families. It’ll allow us to set up schedules for remote learning with teachers that we're doing in person learning as well. So a lot of those logistics will start in earnest now where we're communicating with building leaders in these ZIP codes. So again, a lot of moving pieces, the good news is that we've already done this before. And our planning always has included the eventuality that we would one day need to pivot to remote learning. So, we've planned for this as well. So, we're very, very much prepared and ready to go.

Mayor: Go ahead, Shant.

Question: Yeah. And I was wondering if in the same vein that you, kind of, illustrated two possible scenarios for what happens next to the nine ZIP codes, can you do something similar for the rest of the city because I'm sure a lot of people have to be worried this could be the beginning of a second wave? Do you have, sort of, scenarios on the table where one is, things are contained, there's no second wave, and two is, maybe there is a second wave just – and how that would play out in the city?

Mayor: Shant, it's an important question, but I don't want to do hypotheticals at this point because we're being very clear there does not have to be a second wave. The fact is that these communities are experiencing a problem. We have nine ZIP codes out of 146 in New York City where there's a real problem. We have 11 others where there's a growing problem, we're worried might become deeper. We're going to do very strict actions with the support of the State to ensure it does not spread further. So, I want to emphasize, we do not start from a scenario that this causes a bigger spread. We start from the scenario we need to contain the situation and absolutely we can avoid a bigger second wave in New York City. But it will take everyone's effort, as people did so virtuously before, to ensure we keep this situation contained. Of course, in the meantime, we'll prepare for different eventualities, but I think what's most important to do right now is recognize we have a distinct problem and address that distinct problem forcefully.

Moderator: We're down to our last two questions. And with that, we'll go to Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, everyone. I'm just looking for a little clarification on how the public schools got swept up into these targeted closures. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like everything that had been said in the previous weeks was that you were looking specifically at individual schools, you weren't seeing any concerns among the public schools, and that any way you were relying on that three percent citywide threshold. So, what happened here?

Mayor: Again, Yoav, I spoke to it earlier, but I'll happily repeat. We do not see a nexus to the public schools. This is an action being taken out of the abundance of caution. We need to be aggressive to stop the spread from in these nine ZIP codes and beyond the nine ZIP codes. Therefore, we're suggesting and proposing very aggressive actions, including going back through phases one through four, in terms of non-essential business, and really reducing the amount of contact that people have in the community overall, the amount of travel within the community. We're talking about rewinding here. If we're closing down all non-essential businesses, it stands to reason we need to close down both public and nonpublic schools as well. That's in the nine most effective ZIP codes. In the 11 that are on the watch list, schools continue, public and nonpublic, business continues except for the highest risk activities. So, that's why we're acting strategically. We're looking at the whole picture of the neighborhood and acting out of an abundance of caution. Go ahead.

Question: Well, I guess, I also want to ask about the – I understand why you would want to limit the highest risk categories like gyms and indoor pools and the like, but I'm just wondering what are – you know, we have this huge contact tracing apparatus, where have they been seeing that the transmission coming from, because, you know, the indoor dining, the pools and the gyms are relatively new activities, and I can't imagine that they're responsible for the bulk of these transmissions. So, where are they seeing the transmissions happening?

Mayor: Let me offer a layman's quick overview and then turn to the Dr. Varma and Dr. Long. I think the point here, again, we're looking at the whole picture of a neighborhood, and if there is a chance that a neighborhood can be turned around with outreach, education, enforcement, the support and buy-in of local institutions and leaders, all the doubling down on the core four, if those measures can turn around the situation, Lord knows we do not want to close down businesses that have been through so much. So, so long as there is a chance that we can have a turnaround, we want to take that chance. The Test and Trace, obviously, goes after each individual case, and there's a variety of ways that the disease spreads. But I want to emphasize, we are trying to make sure that we turn around the situation in these 11 ZIP codes, use rigorous measures when it's proven that they are absolutely what's necessary. And the standard we've set is seven consecutive days above three percent, and if a neighborhood has not reached that level, we're going to still try and see if we can turn it around without having to resort to the higher restrictions. Go ahead, Dr. Varma then Dr. Long.

Senior Advisor Varma: Thank you for the question. So, to emphasize, again, that the most important measures that we have to control this infection are the individual measures combined with the testing and tracing, and then combined with community measures which are either limited if we can get away with it or more restrictive if there's widespread community transmission. So, the efforts that we have taken in these communities are what are really necessary to reduce as much mixing of people outside their households as possible. You're absolutely correct that the highest risk activities that were just recently added such as indoor dining and gyms, are not the primary contributors because they've only recently started, these things occurred earlier, but we need to also try to reduce any new opportunities for transmission to occur. Once transmission becomes widespread, you need to limit the number of high risk settings in which people can interact. In terms of the risk factors that people have for transmission, I'm going to turn to Dr. Long who can describe what we've been seeing from our testing and tracing data. I would just sort of conclude by saying that one of the challenges, and one of the reasons we have to move to more restrictive measures is because there becomes a point where testing and tracing is not enough to control transmission. And this is the lesson that has been learned from all of the jurisdictions around the world, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, that have done this well. They have used individual measures. They have used testing and tracing, but when there is a resurgence in a local area, they have to add these community restrictions.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Yeah, I think you covered the important points. I would add that we are seeing transmission, especially among close contacts and household members. Now our interventions thus far across New York City have worked and can work. We don't want to do restrictions. In Sunset Park and in Soundview, our interventions drove down the percent of people testing positive by the exact same amount, two-thirds. We’re employing all of those efforts into the 11 ZIP codes that the Mayor described. We've handed out 800,000 masks, contracted with 39 CBOs. The amount of testing that we've done on Friday alone, this is looking at all of the ZIP codes now, double the amount of testing in the highest risk ZIP codes from the previous baseline. So, we are hoping that we can employ the same efforts that have been successful in multiple other communities so that we don't have to do further restrictions. And we have been successful, and we will succeed here overall, too.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: For our last question, we'll go to Sydney from Gothamist.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, thank you for your time this morning. So, the Governor earlier just announced he was going to focus on enforcement and a State task force to enforce these rules as you're announcing new restrictions. So, I'm wondering if you could elaborate on any coordination with the Governor on this new partial rollback here and how enforcement would play a part, and why not announce the details of the plan until it is approved by the State in coordination with the Governor?

Mayor: So, Sydney, for the first part, I think we all believe in enforcement. Enforcement has been crucial to what we've been doing throughout. It's really the range of activities. It's education. It is community buy-in. It's providing the free masks, enforcement, for sure, consequences, Test and Trace. You need to do all these things simultaneously and we'll continue to, and even with restrictions in place, by definition, we're going to do a lot of enforcement. I think the bottom line is that we want the State to know, in a very public manner, what we believe will allow us to contain the situation in these nine ZIP codes and protect the 11 ZIP codes that are on this watch list. The thing I've learned now over these seven-plus months is that it is very important, once we have come to a conclusion of what is needed to be very public about it. The people in New York City deserve to know, and it's important that the State of New York hears what we're calling for and understands what we're saying to everyone openly. This is what is necessary, but based on the data and the science, based on the health care leadership of this city of very experienced leadership, looking at the situation and determining what can contain the spread. So, we've been talking with the State always, but in terms of this proposal, which really has been generated by the data that's come through in the last day or so, it was very important to me to put it out to all the people of the city, so they could hear the direction that we think is necessary. Go ahead, Sydney.

Question: Okay. And then my other question is, how many public schools and non-public schools are in these nine hotspot ZIP codes? And you said that transmission isn't – doesn't appear to be coming from public schools, but is it coming from the nonpublic schools?

Mayor: My initial point I'd make to you, which is important here is that in the public schools, Sydney, we've had an extremely intensive monitoring effort. And this is what we call our situation room that, daily, gets reports from public schools all over the city and looks at when there is a positive case, everything we can learn about that case. Obviously, Test and Trace Corps gets involved with school immediately and of late we've, of course, been watching to see if we've seen any unusual number of cases in these ZIP codes, either from the schools in the ZIP codes, folks who live in the ZIP codes and go to school someplace else, work in those ZIP codes, or go to work in a school in a ZIP code, even if they live somewhere else. We're looking at all these permutations. We're testing outside of specific schools in these ZIP codes. Consistently, what we've found is no evidence of spread in the schools.

In fact, I mentioned in the press conference the other day, two schools in one of these ZIP codes that were tested, it was 178 tests between those two schools of teachers and staff, and only one came back positive. That has been consistent as we've done more and more testing, just very low levels. In the nonpublic schools we've had, I think it is four yeshivas that had to be closed in these ZIP codes, but a very intensive monitoring effort by the Department of Health across the nonpublic schools that generally has not been yielding larger problems. And we've been getting a high level of cooperation from those schools, working with us on the Commissioner's order and the specific standards the Department of Health is holding for those schools. So, so far we're not seeing a nexus to schools in a substantial way, but when it gets to the point of needing to put those bigger restrictions on a community, we know that people going back and forth to school, people who work in the schools, everything contributes to the overall reality of the community. And you want to reduce the level of activity in the community. You want to reduce the amount of people moving around, coming in contact with them. That's what worked in the past. So, again, for the nine ZIP codes, only for the nine ZIP codes, that's why out of an abundance of caution, we're urging the State to agree to close the public and nonpublic schools as of Wednesday, hopefully for as little as two weeks, maybe as much as four.  And to your question, it's just about a hundred public schools in those nine ZIP codes and just about 200 nonpublic schools. And, again, for the City system, that means there's another 1,500 that are not affected by this.

Okay. Everyone, as we close up today, look, I just want to emphasize what history has taught us – that we, in this city, went through so much, in the spring especially, epicenter of the nation. We learned extraordinarily difficult lessons, but people learn them deeply. This city won't go back. We have moved forward by depending on science, by looking at the data, by acting on the science and the data consistently. We're doing that again. We're calling on the State of New York to help us take another step that is dictated by the science and by the data so we can protect everyone. And I'm very aware of the challenges this will cause. And I'm very aware that for people in these nine ZIP codes, there'll be a tough period ahead, but I know we will overcome. I know we'll all work together. And I know what has worked for this city is the strength and resiliency of New Yorkers and the fact that people do work together. We are all in this together. We have overcome much worse than this challenge, and we will overcome this one as well. Thank you, everyone.

2020-10-05 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everybody. Yesterday, I announced a major counter offensive against the spread of the coronavirus here in New York City. Now this is a City that has come so far since the beginning of this crisis back in March and April, and we have shown how tough we can be in fighting this virus. And after all the progress we've made, it's tough to have to think about any rewind, any pause, even if it's in part of our city, but we have to do this now. We have to recognize what the data and the science are telling us and it’s time to move forward and fight back, because a rewind, a pause is all part of fighting back against the disease. It is what worked for us before and it will work for us again.

Now I am very clear after everything we've been through in these last months, that the great lesson is take action as soon as the data and science indicate that it's time, when the data and science tell you something, act on it. The sad reality and so much of the rest of the world, and even the rest of this country, is one of the data and the science were ignored. We are not ignoring it. We're proposing a very tough plan of action right now to address this situation and to ensure that it does not turn into a second wave all across New York City, we still have time to avert that problem, and that's what I want us all to focus on, stopping this problem right now. So, the City of New York has presented a plan to the State on how we address these clusters. We've gone over the plan with the State. I spoke with the Governor earlier today. We've laid out the foundation for how to stop this spread dead in its tracks and it is part of learning from what worked before and applying it in a very pinpoint manner.

Now, the State has agreed on the need to close public and nonpublic schools in the nine highest risk ZIP codes. So that will happen effective now tomorrow morning, that's an update now. The State determined they would rather have the schools closed tomorrow morning. So, at the end of the school day today those schools will be closed public and nonpublic in the nine ZIP codes. And again, we're going to work hard to turn around those nine ZIP codes so that in the coming weeks, kids will be able to come back to school. We've also presented a plan for closing down non-essential businesses in those ZIP codes. We're continuing to work with the Governor's team on that plan. The proposal I put on the table is the basis of discussion, nine ZIP codes, close all non-essential businesses. The Governor's team are considering evasive alterations they want to make to that geography or to the approach, but until we hear otherwise, our plan is to move ahead Wednesday morning with enforcement in those nine ZIP of all non-essential businesses. We will continue to work with the State in the meantime to get to a final resolution. Now, the important thing here is to remember the State has a role to play, the City has a role to play, but the biggest role will be played by all of you, by everyday New Yorkers in these nine ZIP codes and beyond.

So, it goes back to the basics. And I want to really urge people, if you live in any of the areas of concern, the nine key ZIP codes or some of the other ones that are on our watch list, please limit your activity, stay home when you can stay home. Of course, if you're sick, especially stay home. Wear the face coverings. It's just something we need people to do consistently, indoors, outdoors, everywhere, obviously, make sure you honor social distancing, avoid gatherings, real basic things. Wash your hands, use hand sanitizers. We need people do all this. And really, especially at this moment, we've got to get the clearest possible picture what's happening in these nine ZIP codes and literally everywhere else in the city. So I want to redouble our efforts to get people tested, more and more free testing has been made available all over New York City. If you live in one of those nine ZIP codes, imperative that you get tested. If you’ve not been tested recently, if you've never been tested, go out and get tested. It's free. It is quick. It's available all over the city and wherever you live in New York City. If you have not been tested recently, it's so important that we get a clear picture. The more New Yorkers that get tested, the better.

Now in terms of testing, what I've indicated to you, we do not see a citywide resurgence. We see a challenge in certain key ZIP codes. We do see an overall citywide number rising in terms of positivity, but that is largely based on what we see in those keys ZIP codes, not a bigger citywide trend. That said, there is a lot more activity now, obviously, since Labor Day, we've seen a lot more economic activity, more jobs, more travel, schools coming back, there's a lot going on. So it is very, very important that people be tested in the light of everything happening and that's how we will make sure we stay at an acceptable level. Anyone who needs to know where to go to get tested, you can go online nyc.gov/covidtest, or you can call 2-1-2-COVID19 to find free testing locations and there is definitely one near you.

Now, an update on the areas of greatest concern in Brooklyn and Queens, we still have nine ZIP codes. That number has not changed in the last 24 hours, nine ZIP codes that have been above three percent positivity for seven consecutive days or more. We have a watch list that I talked about yesterday, 11 ZIP codes. We're adding one more to the watch list, and that is ZIP code 11375 in Forest Hills, Queens, because we've seen a rise in the positivity level there. Now, again, those watch list ZIP codes do end up in the category requiring the greatest restrictions in less and until they have seven consecutive days above three percent positivity in their testing, we hope that does not happen. And the best way for that not to happen is to follow all those basic health and safety rules I talked about earlier and again to everyone in those areas, in those 12 ZIP code areas that are not now in the most restricted category, please go get tested so we can get the truth about what's happening in your neighborhood. The more people get tested, the better picture we get.

Okay, speaking of testing, there's an extensive effort right now, moving testing resources into all the affected areas that will continue to grow every single day. I want you to hear about this specific effort to mobilize testing resources and to get them where they're needed the most. I'm going to turn to the Executive Director of our Test and Trace Corp, Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you, sir. Testing is important because it gives us a line of sight into exactly where the coronavirus is and it gives us an opportunity to intervene to stop its spread. Now in New York City, we've built a massive testing system. We per capita test more people today than European countries like Germany and Asian countries like South Korea. We're leveraging and focusing our testing system in on the ZIP codes, the communities where we're seeing these clusters. If you look last Friday alone, if you look at our nine tier one ZIP codes, the baseline level of testing that they had before, on Friday in a single day, we doubled the number of tests being done in those communities. We're going to keep doing that and that's been a critical way that we've achieved the success that we have in communities like Sunset Park and like Soundview, where we've been able to drive down the percent of people testing positive by more than two thirds.

Our numbers over the last three days are, we did 1,900 tests, new tests on Friday and then over the weekend we did an additional more than 1,500 tests. Now I want to tell you a little bit about how we've been able to build up our testing resources so quickly because we have a few innovative and novel strategies. First, we've brought in our 13 mobile units and put them in strategic locations. Next, we've created six block parties, which is where we cordoned off part of the sidewalk, bringing a large team, and then we can test 500 people at each site per day in those instances. Next, we built out for rapid testing sites where you can come in and get a test result back within 15 minutes. We also created a new type of model, we call it the microsite model. In this model you come, pick up a self-swab kit, do the self-swab yourself, hand the kit back in, and you're done in a matter of minutes. You can go on your way. In addition, we're doing testing specifically at our schools. We've done eight schools a day since last week and today we're ramping up to test – doing testing at 12 different schools. We're going to keep doing that. Finally, we're building out rapid testing at eight additional sites, but this is a special effort. What we're doing in our additional sites is we're working with community providers in our high-risk communities. So, if you are going to your trusted doctor, we want your doctor to have one of our machines so that you can get a test done and a result back in 15 minutes. Now we're going to continue building up our testing resources as we move forward so that we can have the same success we did in Sunset Park and Soundview working together with our communities. We will suppress the coronavirus. Thank you, sir.

Mayor: Thank you very much, Dr. Long, and everybody look, this is going take an intense effort by all New Yorkers, but I want to remind you again, what we went through before we saw tremendous sense of unity and teamwork from New Yorkers. We saw everyone working together, want to emphasize we are all in this together. Every one of these ZIP codes and in the whole city, we all have to work together. That's what's going to get us through this and it starts with everyone getting tested.

Okay, let me turn to another matter, which is very much related to new developments that has a huge impact on this city's present and future – that's the census. We have very important news that the higher court circuit court of appeals federal court ruled that the Census Bureau must continue to count until October 31st. We are pushing to ensure that actually happens. There is a possibility the Trump administration will appeal this to Supreme Court. In fact, unfortunately it's probably a likelihood, but we're working on the assumption we could have as many as four more weeks to do this work. So, want to emphasize everyone how important it is to respond to the census now – it is still alive, it is still happening. New York City now has a self-response rate of 61.1 percent, very close to where we were in 2010 without a pandemic, but we want to get that number up quite a bit. Please go to my2020census.gov. It is so important that you get involved and you get your whole family involved. Everyone involved. We need this and also want to remind everyone while you're thinking about the important things to do for today and for the future, 29 days, till the election, the opportunity to register to vote. We have only a few more days want to remind people how important it is. If you have not registered, get out there and register to vote, be a part of determining the future of the city, state and nation. All of these things we're talking about now are things everyone can do. Every single New Yorker can participate in the census. Every single New Yorker can sign up and vote, who's eligible to vote, and of course, everyone who needs a coronavirus test can get a test. All those actions are things that you can do that will make a big difference for this city right now and well into the future.

Okay, so now let me talk about our indicators. Give you the overall picture for New York City. Indicator number one: daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – threshold is 200 patients – today's report: 67 patients with a 13.4 percent confirmed positivity rate for COVID-19. Number two – new reported cases on a seven-day average threshold is 550 cases – today's report 490 cases, and number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19 – threshold five percent – today's report is 1.83 percent, and the seven-day rolling average is 1.75 percent. Okay, a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, would turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. We’ll now begin our Q and A. We're joined today by Health Commissioner, Dave Chokshi, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Ted Long, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. With that, we'll go to Andrew from WNBC.

Question: Hello to everyone on the call, good afternoon. With regard to the businesses. Can you clarify what the difference of opinion is right now between yourself and the Governor? He seemed to illustrate to us that his problem was with the ZIP codes, that by closing businesses in those ZIP codes, you may be punishing large sections where there are no cases. Is that your understanding of how you and the Governor differ on this issue, right now?

Mayor: This one is an ongoing conversation. Andrew, we had a good conversation this morning. I think there's a legitimate concern from both the City and State's perspectives about how to balance the factors. Why is that the Governor's – based on the guidance I'm getting from our health leadership, the folks who've been fighting all the way through this crisis, that the ZIP code is the best available measure we have, because if you look at these ZIP codes throughout them, you're seeing either very high rates or unfortunately growing rates in the peripheral areas of the ZIP code. So, say for example, one part of the ZIP code is having a particularly intense problem that does not mean the other areas of immediately it in the ZIP code are just plain fine. Unfortunately, what we're seeing is some crossover to other areas as well, surrounding. So overwhelming, these ZIP codes are areas of concern across the board. It's not as clean as you know, the western half of the ZIP codes really troubled on the eastern half is just plain fine and perfect. No, we're seeing the whole ZIP code in many cases, having some degree or another of a higher level of positivity. We also think it's important if we've got an area that's really intense in terms of high positivity to surround it with the protections we put in place. So, it doesn't spread to even more ZIP codes. So, from my point of view, this is the best usable measure. Census tracts are interesting, but very hard for people to make sense of. I think one of the things that Governor pointed out is what of an area around his ZIP code is a problem, but not the whole next ZIP code over, I think that's a valid concern, but right now what we propose and we think it's the one, you know, available strong option is to say here's nine ZIP codes that unfortunately the problem is pervasive enough that fuller restrictions make sense across the board. Hopefully only for two to four weeks, not forever, thank God, and if the State wants to modify that in some way, obviously that's the state's ultimate decision button, unless they come back with a specific modification, we're preparing to act as early as Wednesday morning, we need some plan ready to go, and that's the plan we have. Go ahead. Andrew.

Question: You just stated that two to four-week timeframe for businesses. Is it fair to ascertain that the first schools that might be a possible timeframe as well? And if it ends up on the four-week side of things you're talking about, possibly these kids not coming back into the classroom until right before Thanksgiving?

Mayor: I think two to four weeks based on what we laid out yesterday, what we've put forward to the State and we believe this makes sense. According to the science is two weeks minimum. So you have a period of time to make sure that the results are real, and if you see one of these neighborhoods go under three percent for seven consecutive days, that's a really clear indicator. Great. We can move out of the restrictions or the other alternative for weeks whereby the last day of the four weeks, they were under three percent. Those are two very good measures. Either one of those could work. What I'd say is, you know, let's be optimistic if everyone works hard, everyone gets tested. We hope to stay on the earlier side of that. If that happened in these areas. So school would be coming back at the end of the first week in November, if it was four weeks, are they becoming back in late October if it was two weeks.

Moderator: Next up, and we'll add that we're also joined by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, is Reuvain from Hamodia.

Mayor: Reuvain, can you hear me?

Moderator: Can you hear us?

Mayor: Sounds like you've got to come back.

Moderator: We're going to move to our next, and next up is Marcia from WCBS.

Mayor: Marcia?

Moderator: We're having a few technical difficulties. We're orienting ourselves. Next step is Erin from Politico.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Hi can you hear me.

Mayor: Yeah. Erin, how you doing?

Question: Okay, great. I'm doing all right. Hope you're okay. I just want to get some clarity here. You're saying you will go ahead and move ahead with this shutdown as of Wednesday morning, because we all thought we just heard Governor Cuomo saying was that he was not going to authorize the shutdown of nonessential businesses, at least as of now. So do you have the authority to do that?

Mayor: Now, Erin, let me make it very clear. I appreciate the question. I'm saying until there is a different plan, we are preparing to implement this plan. We presented a plan to the State of New York. Overwhelmingly what we're seeing is the state of, with the basic concepts. The State agrees with the need to close down schools in the nine ZIP codes. The State has agreed on the need to restrict activity in the nine ZIP codes. We have specifically proposed doing it by ZIP code, starting Wednesday morning, closing the non-essential businesses. The State is reviewing that right now and might come back with modifications, but we're going to be ready to move as early as Wednesday morning. If the State comes back with a modification, we'll of course follow that modification. I do not expect, Erin, the State to delay for long. I don't think anyone has an interest in delaying, but they might modify the plan in some way, in which case we'll adapt accordingly.

Question: Okay. So, I mean, but just to be a hundred percent clear here, if they don't come back with a modification, but don't come back with anything else, and when leave the status quo in place, will you be able to act on this?

Mayor: We obviously will follow state law, Erin, and if the State does not authorize restrictions. We're not going to act, but I find that very unlikely at this point. Governor has been very clear, you know, we have a problem. It's not just a problem in Brooklyn and Queens. It's a problem in Nassau County, in Rockland County, in Orange County. This is becoming a bigger problem for the City and the State, and the time to act is now. So, you know, here's a hard proposal, a specific proposal. We will certainly if follow any guidance the State gives. But one thing I would say is what we cannot afford to do is delay. The data is telling us very clearly, very loudly that it's time to act. So, we can't put the final enforcement into place until the State has given us the sign off, but I fully expect the State to act quickly.

Moderator: We’re going to try Reuvain again. Next up is Reuvain.

Question: Hi. Can you hear me, Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: Yeah. How are you doing?

Question: Good. Hi, how are you? So, I would just like to ask you about the timing of your announcement yesterday. There was a holiday that was from Friday night until Sunday night, Orthodox Jews have no access to media, to electronics. None of us knew about this announcement until Sunday night. I'm just wondering since your proposed announcement anyway wasn't going to kick in until Wednesday, why was this not done at a time when the Orthodox community was able to hear the same way everyone was, instead of hearing it on the media maybe Sunday night or Monday morning.

Mayor: Appreciate the concern. And as I said yesterday, during the press conference, I was sensitive to the fact that the community was in the middle of a holiday, and I’ve acknowledged that, but I have an obligation to the people of the whole city to announce this plan as soon as it was ready. We had to get to work immediately with conversations with the State. We had to give people a warning of what it would mean. All those parents thinking about their kids' school schedules, they needed as much warning as possible. We needed to give a warning to the many, many people live in the ZIP codes who were not observing the holidays and needed as much time as possible. And, obviously, made clear yesterday that we want to immediately get into conversations with community leaders last night, this morning, and ongoing to keep working this through. But it was an urgent reality where it was imperative to get the word out as quickly as possible. Go ahead.

Question: I want to ask the doctors if they can explain why this percent positives stat is the stat that's being focused on rather than, say, case rate in the particular ZIP code?

Mayor: Absolutely. Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi, do you want to jump in? Dr. Varma, are you out there? You may be on mute.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: – on mute. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, sorry, I was trying to unmute. Yes, thank you for the question. So, there are, in fact, you know, two important measures. One is the number of cases that are occurring in any community. And the second, of course, is the test positivity rate. The reason that we prefer the test positivity rate is that it provides us with a better sense of the overall prevalence of disease in the community. Because, as we know, the absolute testing numbers will vary depending on the amount of testing that's done. We do like to use both numbers, as you can tell from the areas of concern, those are based not just on test positivity, but also our concern about the rate of case growth occurring in those communities. And Commissioner Chokshi can explain the Health Department has a very sophisticated statistical method to look at the actual case numbers and try to get a sense about whether they're an aberration due to testing numbers or whether they actually represent a significant and important increase.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And Dr. Varma is exactly right in that we do focus on multiple ways of looking at the data. I'll just add one other piece to this, which is that specifically looking at the cases often gives us, you know, the earliest signal that that we may need to be worried about our particular area. And so, at different points in time, we may have an emphasis on one measure versus the other. You know, as we continue to monitor the areas of concern, just as Dr. Varma was saying, the test positivity is the best measure for us to figure out precisely what's going and whether – what's going on and whether we're improving or not. And so, we have to look at the data in different ways at different points in time to get the complete picture of what's happening.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next is Brigid from WNYC.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor. For more than a week, the Governor has been stressing the importance of local enforcement to stop mass gatherings during the city and ensure masks usage in public and has essentially laid the blame on localities for not conducting sufficient enforcement. I'm just wondering if you think that criticism is fair. Is that what has led to these spikes?

Mayor: No, I don't think that's what happened here, Brigid. I think what happened was that something unprecedented developed based on our experience now over seven months. There's been intensive efforts to educate all communities, huge amount of masks distribution and consistent enforcement happening. We – literally, if we're talking about the last few weeks, we've had instances of closing the yeshivas down, closing down stores, there's been all sorts of enforcement actions taken, as there were actions taken previously – bars, restaurants, stores – there's been enforcement throughout. I think what is different this time is that the approach that we use, for example, in the month of August in Sunset Park – we had a really substantial uptick, we applied more outreach, more masks distribution, more enforcement and more testing. We turned that around in a very quick timeframe. The same thing happened in Soundview in the Bronx. The same thing happened in Southeast Queens. We were applying the same measures first in Borough Park and Brooklyn; then, in Far Rockaway and thought we were seeing similar outcomes, initially, and then saw something very, very different. So, the fact is that we've been working the same approach all along. This last week, in light of the increases, we had over a thousand New York City employees out, whether it was NYPD, Office of Special Enforcement, Sheriff's Office, Health Department, and many other agencies, doing constant education and enforcement. And remember, enforcement requires a legal reason. For example, the closure require certain legal standards being met before you can close a school or a business. And our officials were out looking for those standards and did not find very many situations where that was needed. So, I think what happened here was the spread had deepened in a much more pervasive manner than we saw in any other community previously and has now surfaced in such a manner that we must take much more rigorous actions. It's far beyond just a matter of enforcement. We need to actually have restrictions now – schools closed, businesses closed, using the tools that worked in the spring again. Go ahead.

Question: Just to follow up on that, you know, the Governor was saying that the NYPD and Department of Health are empowered now to, for example, use a summons for people who are not wearing masks. And so, I'm just curious, given – you know, given these spikes and this renewed focus, this need to sort of go beyond education, in the Governor's words, is there anything that will be changing about enforcement and how it will be conducted, going forward?

Mayor: Yeah, I think the difference here is, first of all, what we saw last week – wherever there was an instance to enforce it was taken, but, again, within the law and in a way that was going to achieve the goal. I'm very, very clear that if I can get someone to wear a mask rather than just give a fine for its own sake, I want someone to wear the mask. If someone refuses to wear the mask, they’re getting a fine. That's been our approach all along. The reality, the law with businesses, etcetera, if there's a problem that could be immediately corrected, you offer the opportunity to correct. If it's not corrected, you immediately fine or shut the business. So, we've kept to that standard throughout and very successfully in most communities. The difference now, Brigid, is it's time to go far beyond the traditional approach to enforcement that worked in June, July, August. We have a different reality here in Brooklyn and Queens, and it seems also that way in several of the suburban counties. It's time now for the kinds of restrictions that got us out of an even worse situation in the spring. So, the difference now is, once you say you're closing non-essential businesses and closing schools, the enforcement of those rules is very, very clear. If anyone tries to violate those, as we saw some back in March and April, for example, that's very quick, rigorous enforcement. There's no question that case. If you're open, you're not supposed to be open, you're shut down immediately.

Moderator: Next is Rich from WCBS Radio.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Rich. How are you doing?

Question: Good. I'm glad you can hear me here. It seems like it's a little bit of roll of the dice. Anyway, so I thought I heard the Governor say that the State was taking over the enforcement in these hot zones, if you will. That the NYPD somehow would be under the command of State Police or the State in some manner or form. Is it your understanding? Or, what does –

Mayor: That is not my understanding. That's not how it works legally. The Governor is putting forward a particular vision. We agree, we want an aggressive enforcement vision. We're going to work together with the State. I told the Governor this morning, we had 1,000 personnel out throughout the week, last week, doing enforcement rigorously. Look, again, I hope the State will agree to immediately is that we need stronger restrictions and that will allow us to really turn the tide here. We can't wait. We need these strong restrictions. And the enforcement of the strong restrictions again is very clear. But no, the City, the City personnel worked for the City, but we’ll be working in close coordination with the State. We agree with the idea of very rigorous enforcement. NYPD will coordinate with State Police as they do on so many other areas and we'll move forward together.

Question: Sounds very cooperative. So, Mr. Mayor, at one point the Governor said, why don't you ask the Mayor why he didn't work out a plan with the State first before announcing it publicly. Is that – is that an accurate assumption on his part?

Mayor: It's very clear, and I spoke to it yesterday, Rich, that I have learned over these last seven months that the best way to approach things is once we come to a decision here in New York City, and that is based on the data, based on the science, based on the views of our health care leadership who've been fighting all the way through this crisis, and so successfully, that the best thing to do is announce it to the people, to let the people know what makes sense. And that is the best way to achieve the goal. So, we informed the State before I made my public statement, but what I found – this is a very dynamic situation that we need to move very decisively very quickly – is the best way to ensure there is action is to put the proposal on the table publicly.

Moderator: Next we have Sydney from the Staten Island Advance.

Mayor: Hey, Mr. Mayor. Last week, you announced fines will be given to people refusing to wear face coverings in the ZIP codes with high infection rates. But I'm wondering if there's any plans to deploy that kind of enforcement at large gatherings in other parts of the city? Over the weekend, about 2,500 people attended a Trump rally on Staten Island, and many of those attendees were seen not wearing these coverings and a pack together in a large crowd. So, I wanted to see if you plan to step up enforcement and fines if people are spotted not wearing face coverings at large gatherings, like the one on Saturday, given the City's infection rate is on the rise? And do you think that rally should have been held in the first place just, you know, given everything that's going on right now?

Mayor: Look, Sydney, I think everyone's got to recognize right now that we need people to wear face mask, we need people to socially distance, and we need people to avoid large gatherings. I respect everyone's first amendment rights, but I would urge everyone to recognize this across the political spectrum. What we're focused on, of course, Sydney, is the places where we are having the most trouble, those nine ZIP codes, and then some of the others in the watch list. That's where we put in the intensive efforts to give people masks. And if they refused to take a mask and wear a mask, we're going straight to fines – that's where we'll focus our resources. But I'd ask everyone, all New Yorkers right now to realize we are in a situation we should be very concerned about, all of us, where our focus right now is in certain ZIP codes, and, in the scheme of things, it is a distinct part of the city, it's not all of the city. But, if we don't all deal with this together, we could be running the risk of that second wave. None of us wants to see that happen. So, I'd ask everyone to start altering their behavior in light of that reality. Go ahead.

Question: Have you figured out when you plan to take your one-week furlough?

Mayor: Sydney, I think we are going to get that all done in October. We're still working on a few of the technicalities. I think for a number of City workers, they'll spread it out, but I think, in my case, we're going to do it all in October. And, again, I will still be working on my regular constant schedule. It will just be reflected in my paycheck.

Moderator: Next is Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, good afternoon, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering how many sheriffs are currently out for enforcement of COVID rules in the hotspots and how many additional police officers you plan to add to them?

Mayor: Yeah, Julia, will get you updated numbers on the sheriffs. So, we've had a lot of participation from the sheriff. We moved the sheriff off a lot of the other COVID-related activities onto the hotspots – Office of Special Enforcement as well, and, as I said, a number of other agencies. As of last week, the average day was about 400 members of the NYPD, but that will keep increasing as we have to go into more ZIP codes.

Question: And then how do you feel about the Governor saying that people should be ticketed on the street for not wearing a mask, period? They've had plenty of education. They've had plenty of warnings.

Mayor: Well, again, that's something that, to me, the first question is what gets someone to wear the mask? Unquestionably, offering someone a mask and letting them know they're be about to be ticketed has proven to be very effective with a lot of people. If someone refuses, they should be ticketed, absolutely. But we need to focus those efforts on where the problem is most extensive. I think if you look at New York City as a whole, New Yorkers are doing a pretty damn good job of wearing masks. That's how we got out of the crisis to begin with and how we sustain such low levels of positivity for so long. But in the places where there's been a problem, I think it's simple – if someone's not wearing a mask, they're offered it; if they refuse, they're ticketed. If they take the mask and put it on, they keep going on with their lives.

Moderator: For the last question, we'll go to Jeff from the NY Times.

Question: Hey. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor. Couple of questions – I'm wondering about, you mentioned Rockland and Orange County earlier. I'm wondering if you think they're being put to the same standards as the City, you know, given their hotspots, or having similar and worse outcomes as New York? And I'm wondering, what is the standard for the other 11 ZIP codes? Do they have – how much time do they have before you begin the same process of considering closing schools and businesses?

Mayor: Yeah. Jeff, I appreciate the questions. First of all, I'm just sort pull out some charts here – but, first of all, on the surrounding areas – look, we understand this is now a regional problem. We understand that the spread has been caused by people connecting not just in Brooklyn or adjust in Queens, but across different areas. There's a Nassau County problem. There's a Rockland County problem. There's an Orange County problem. Everything interconnects, it should be dealt with as a whole. It's up to – excuse me, localities and the State to determine what's right for them. But what is not even a question anymore, is there a connective tissue here? Is there something in common? Is there something we have to address altogether? Absolutely. So, I think if we really want to stop this from spreading more deeply and affecting the whole metropolitan area, those counties need strong restrictions, whatever works best for them as well. In terms of the areas that are not part of the nine ZIP codes, but that are areas are being watched carefully and where there’s a real concern – thankfully, Jeff, a number of have not yet gone above three percent. And the effort now is going to be to keep them from going above three percent. And we still have hope that a number of these ZIP codes can be – with a lot of testing, we're going to put testing resources in, we're going to urge everyone get tested that we can stop these ZIP codes from rising above that level. The two we’re most concerned about right now are Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Sheepshead Bay, which is ZIP code 11235; and Rego Park, which is ZIP code 11374. Those two now are five consecutive days above three percent. So, we hope that pattern breaks literally today. But if those two go past seven consecutive days, they would go into this higher-level list where we'd want to see greater restrictions. But let's hope and pray that is not the case. Go ahead, Jeff.

Question: Mr. Mayor, about the three percent threshold, I'm wondering if – you know, if you have this three percent threshold for closing positive cases in the ZIP code and the threshold for reopening schools is under three percent positive in the same ZIP code. Are you concerned at all that there will be the sort of risk of back and forth opening and closing between business and schools. I wonder, you know, how are you going to balance that three percent standard that you've set?

Mayor: Jeff, it's a good question. I would say though that the history is that these patterns are pretty clear and they move pretty consistently over substantial periods of time, that if you can turn a ZIP code, for example, that's gone above three percent – if you can turn it in the right direction, get it below three percent, typically, that will be a sustained reality. And that, again, is the story of all of New York City. We were in a horrible situation. We far away back together. People really adapted to the changes they needed to, to make it work, sustained it for months on end. Again, three areas before we saw a problem, Sunset Park, Soundview in the Bronx, Southeast Queens – all three follow the same pattern, apply additional testing, test and trace activity, masks distribution, education, and it worked consistently and quickly. And they went back into a positive situation, meaning a good situation where the disease went back down and stayed back down. So, what we've seen is generally pretty consistent and helpful tendencies here. This one's been different, but I do believe if we sustain the effort and get a lot of buy-in from people across the spectrum in the community, keep getting people tested regularly, keep getting people to wear a face mask and practice the social distancing. We can get these communities down below three percent and then keep them below three percent. We can then reopen schools and keep them open.

And that is a good note for us to close up on today. Everyone, look, what we're about now is actions that are needed right now to stop this problem before it gets worse, to protect the city from a larger second wave. If we act aggressively right now, we can do it. I have absolute faith in what New Yorkers can do once they have a clear direction – here it is. It's time to take resolute action in these nine ZIP codes and protect the whole rest of the city and turn this around. It's something that will take weeks. It does not have to take months. It does not have to take years. It can take just weeks if we all work together. And we all realize that let's put aside whatever different views people have, we should have common cause right now – get people tested, get those masks on, work together to beat back this disease once and for all. So, this is what we need to do, and I know New Yorkers are up to the task. Thank you, everyone.

2020-10-06 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We are at a crucial moment in this city, crucial moment in our fight against the coronavirus. Now for seven months, the city's waged a battle and I want to say to all of you, New Yorkers have been heroic in this struggle, fighting back against the coronavirus consistently. Now we have a challenge. We see a rise in cases in certain parts of our city, and we have to get ahead of this. We have to bring everything to bear we can. We’re going to have to be tough about it and that's why I put forward a plan to address the situation and yes, it involves tough restrictions, nothing we want to do, but the kind of thing we need to do and do quickly to get ahead of the problem, to keep this problem limited, to address it in a matter of weeks and not let it spread further.

So, look, we know so much more now than we did at the beginning of this struggle back in March and April when we had so little testing, when we had so much less knowledge about this disease, our fight was very, very difficult, and yet this city did fight back and get to a much better place. Now we have the advantage of much more knowledge, much more testing, and much more understanding amongst the people of the city of what they have to do and they've shown it time and time again. These realities should be great advantages as we fight back these specific problems in specific areas. But again, it will all come down to you, to everyday New Yorkers doing the right thing for yourselves, for your families, for your communities, by practicing the basic rules, basic vision that has worked for us over and over again, the wearing the mask, the social distancing, just doing the smart, basic things that have everyone does together, we turn the tide in our favor.

So let's give you a picture now of what's happening right now in this city. We have a new map that provides a sense of where the challenges are, where the hotspots are, and right now, again, we have nine ZIP codes where we have seen the positively level for the coronavirus above three percent for seven consecutive days. It remains nine ZIP codes. Then we have our watch list and that's tier two where we're watching areas that are in danger of entering that top tier of a particularly troubled ZIP codes. We have a new ZIP code we're adding to that watch list and that is 11206 South Williamsburg, that brings the watch list total to 13. So, again, we're staying stable with nine in the top category where we need the most action, the most restrictions, 13 that are being watched, and those 13 do not need to end up in that top category. They do not need to experience those deeper restrictions. So, you can see the number of days consecutive over three percent, thank God, not yet into that category, but we're warning people in those communities to really buckle down, to take all the right precautions, to take it seriously. You do not want to see these restrictions in your community. You can do something about it. You don't want to see small businesses closed in your neighborhood. You can do something about it. Right now, there is time to turn things around. That's why we're providing this information to the public in an urgent manner.

So, in terms of the nine ZIP codes I've proposed, I think the way forward, clear sharp restrictions applied quickly. Now obviously with our schools in the nine high risk ZIP codes, those schools, both public and non-public are closed as of this morning. This will be for several weeks, the faster we address the problem on the ground, the faster the community participates, the quicker we can get those schools open again, and as little as two weeks, hopefully no more than four weeks, but we all have a lot of work to do. Now, again, we chose to close the schools out of an abundance of caution, thankfully in our school system, including in the effective ZIP codes, tier one, tier two, we are not seeing any unusual problems, anything out of the ordinary in our schools, thank God. And we continue to do testing outside of schools and in schools, in those effective ZIP codes, testing teachers, staff, watching for problems. I'll give you example, just the last few days we've gotten 1,351 test results from 35 schools in those nine top ZIP codes and only two positive tests among the 1,351 results we've gotten so far.

So, get – excuse me – our educators, our staff school communities are doing a great job. They're doing the right thing. They're being smart about things. Folks understand the hand-wash and the hand sanitizer, the social distancing, the face mask. If sick, they're staying home, people are doing this the right way and it's proven by the testing we're seeing at our schools. So we're going to keep that testing going in the 13 ZIP codes on the watch list, constantly moving from school to school each day, to keep a clear picture on what's going on. Now, the plan related to the nines ZIP codes, obviously presented at the State. We had conversations yesterday morning. I spoke with the Governor and our teams have been talking throughout the day yesterday, constructive conversations, productive conversations that are going to continue into this morning, and we need obviously a clear decision in the course of today. So, we can move forward. The plan I've presented is the template to address this. The State is looking at that template. We understand is their ultimate decision. They can modify as they see fit, but the important thing is to come to a decision quickly so we can get going. We are prepared to implement as soon as tomorrow morning in those nine ZIP codes once we have the sign off from the state.

Now, in the meantime, again, what everyone can do, you're going to have this constant question, how long do these restrictions have to be in place? And I'm going to be talking to a lot of people in the community, I have been already, and my message is the same, you can keep it to a matter of weeks, but everyone has to participate. Everyone has to be part of the solution. If we all do this right, which we did before in much tougher circumstances, we contain this problem to a limited part of the city for a limited period of time, then we reopen in those places and keep moving forward. If we do it wrong, it keeps spreading into surrounding ZIP codes and that endangers the whole city. We cannot let that happen. So, everyone has to be part of the solution.

Now, today is a Tuesday and as always, we talk about testing on Tuesday, get tested Tuesday, look again, what works? Testing, testing, testing, we can say it so many times. You cannot say it enough times, because there's still a huge number of New Yorkers who've never been tested even once. It helps this whole city to get tested because it gives us a picture of what's going on and helps us understand where our challenges are and what to do about them. So again, if you have never been tested, please go get tested right away. If you haven't been tested a long time, please go get tested. It is fast. It's easy. We need New Yorkers, not just in those nine ZIP codes or those 13 on the watch list, but everywhere to get tested. The faster we get the truth, the faster we can act. Now, everybody we're expanding testing capacity throughout the city, constantly getting it where it's needed most, but remember we have over 200 sites all over the city. Everyone has a place near them. Always free, always quick. If you want to know where to go, just go online, nyc.gov/covidtest for locations or call 2-1-2-COVID19, and again, all tests is free.

Now I mentioned the importance of testing at the schools. We've been doing the testing of staff and educators outside schools, and in schools. Starting later this week, we're going to be starting the systematic medical monitoring of schools all over the city. We'll be doing that for every school once a month for the duration of this crisis and it's a way that we get more information, get to watch carefully what's happening. Keep everyone safe. This begins in some schools this Friday, we want to make sure that everyone is participating, that means educators, staff. It means students, everyone. Now, obviously educators and staff are overwhelmingly, ready, willing, and able to get tested, but we need a sign off form. We need a consent form from parents to get a kid tested at their school. So families can now complete the consent form online. You go to your NYC school account and you get that at mystudent.nyc. So just go to mystudent.nyc, your own account, enter in the information on the consent form that automatically makes sure the school knows that your child can be tested.

And look, to all the parents out there. I'm a parent. I want to say this to all of you. This is such a good and smart thing to do. The school community is working very closely with the Department of Health and the Test and Trace Team to make sure everyone is tested, tested quickly, safely, obviously for free. It's a great way to know what is going on in the school and keep everyone safe. You will get the results for your own child, this is a random sample in the sense of it's not every child every month, certain children some month, other children another month. But whenever there is a test of your child, you'll get those results quickly and that's important for your peace of mind. So, all families should participate and sign up on that consent form. The school will be reaching out to you about it as well. If you have any questions or concerns, and obviously we'll talk to people in whatever language they speak to help them understand how this works and to encourage them to sign that form.

Now, families always have questions about testing, want to know more, want to know how it works. Is it fast? Yes. Is it safe? Yes. Is it quick and easy for your child? Not too cumbersome, not too difficult for your child, yes, but we want to not just tell you that we want to show you that, so we've put together a video with one of our eight Health + Hospitals pediatrician and a young volunteer to give you a sense of how things will work. Let's look at the video.

[Video plays in background]

All right, well, thank you, first of all, to Dr. Katie and all our colleagues at Health + Hospitals and everyone who's going to be part of the school testing program. That video really says it all. And look, parents, I want to say to you, as you can see, are very energetic, young volunteer there, had a cool hairstyle too, that he did not have a problem with that test because it's not the long instrument they used to use. It is the much shorter, simpler, just a quick rub around the inside of the nostril and it collects the sample really easily, really quickly. I've had this newer kind of test. It is much better, much simpler. That's what we'll be providing the kids and its as quick and easy as you just saw there.

Now let's talk since we're talking about kids, we're talking about schools, let's talk about what we need to do to make sure that kids continue to be educated during this pandemic. Now that we have our whole school system open, our buildings open, we have kids in classrooms, we have kids obviously in the blended approach where they're in class part of the week at home, working online for the rest of the week and other kids in all remote, but what does it require? It requires every child has the technology they need. Now in the spring there was an absolutely astounding effort to get technology in the hands of kids who needed it, an emergency effort that was really admirable, and I commend everyone at the DOE and all the partners in the private sector who helped make that possible, 350,000 iPads were distributed beginning of March, and it was one of the greatest efforts to address the digital divide in this city's history. Overall, the Department of Education has 950,000 remote learning devices available for students, some obviously are kept in schools, others are given to kids to take home. That supply has been extraordinary and has reached so much of our needs, but we still have additional need for 100,000 more iPads according to the surveys we've taken from parents and families. So, the additional 100,000 iPads are being procured, now they will be provided to students starting next month. Again, any student who still needs an iPad will get one, or if their iPad broke or there's any problem, we'll replace it. We need the remote learning, whether it's part of the week or all week for a child to work, we need them to make sure they get the technology they need, and we will.

Okay, let's go to our indicators now for the whole city. Indicator number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19 threshold is 200 patients. Today's report is 70 with a confirmed positivity rate for COVID of 21.4 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases, today's report 501 cases. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19 threshold is five percent, today’s report 1.90 percent, and the seven-day rolling average today is 1.65 percent. A few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that we'll turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all we'll now begin our Q-and-A. We're joined today by Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi, Health + Hospital CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, and Jeff Thamkittikasem, Director of the Mayor's Office of Operations. With that, we'll go to Gloria from NY1.

Mayor: Gloria?

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, how you doing?

Question: Thank you. I wanted to ask you about something that the Governor said yesterday, and I want to get your reaction because I believe there's a little bit of confusion going around, and I saw that you mentioned the amount of testing that had been done at schools that are in the cluster ZIP codes. Part of what the Governor said yesterday was that the virus transmits, and that's a direct quote from him, “in schools because different communities come together in schools and therefore it is a place of transmission.” I'm wondering if I could get you to weigh in on that as well as the medical experts on the line about whether or not the city believes that schools are a problem as it pertains to the spread of the virus.

Mayor: Let me start and I'll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Choskhi. Gloria, that is not what we're seeing. We're going by the facts. We're going by the data. We've had the situation room up now for most of a month. Literally every single day reviewing data from every single school, 1,600 schools in the school system, all reports of potential coronavirus being followed up on and on top of that targeted testing initiatives at the schools. What we're seeing in the school system in general is a very low level of coronavirus activity. Now, I'm going to tell you that the facts that I know, but I want to start with the why, why would that be? Because the schools are now so concentrated in terms of the safety and health measures, what we're doing, we've talked about this gold standard we set, just think about everywhere in the city, everywhere in your life.

Here, we have a place where everyone is wearing a mask scrupulously. I've seen this with my own eyes, from the youngest child to the oldest educator, everyone's wearing a mask together. Everyone's practicing social distancing, nine, ten kids in a classroom. We've never seen anything like that in New York City history. Cleaning constantly, ventilation, you name it, all of these approaches layered on top of each other. That makes it a particularly safe location. Clearly folks who are not feeling well, staying home, been a lot of testing before school began, there’ll continue to be more testing. What we saw with the tens of thousands of educators and staffs that we have tested so far, it was a positivity level below one half of one percent. So, the facts keep coming in, and I told you this recent batch of tests at schools in the nine ZIP codes, 1,351 tests of educators and staff came back with only two positives. So, I think the schools are proving to be very safe to the credit of everyone at DOE, everyone at Test and Trace and Department of Health. And this is what we want to continue, because this is crucial to the future of the city is to keep our school systems safe. So, Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi, would you offer your reflections?

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Sure, I can start. Yeah, I think the Mayor actually covered everything quite comprehensively. We need to remember that we have many lines of defense to keep our schools safe. We actually have lines of defense that are very similar to what you would have in a healthcare facility, you know, we have people wearing masks. We have people maintaining physical distance. We have extensive hand hygiene, we have environmental cleaning, and then of course we have guidance that's being followed up and tested that people stay home, and avoid going to school if they have any symptoms of illness. Those are critical lines of defense, and it's not just New York City. We have seen evidence from everywhere around the world, and this is a disease that if people take the appropriate precautions and the institution enforces compliance with those precautions, our kids can get an education and our teachers and staff can remain safe. That is in controvertible. I know an issue that keeps coming up also is about testing. You know, I'm a real zealot when it comes to testing, because I think it's absolutely critical to controlling our epidemic around the city, and we have evidence from that from around the world. But testing again, isn't our first line of defense in the city. What we're instituting is a medical monitoring program, because it's going to help us understand how much undiagnosed infection is there and are our prevention measures working the way they should. So I just wanted to make sure that we highlight and understand where testing falls in the hierarchy of those lines of defense.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Nothing to add to what's already been said, sir.

Mayor: Thank you, doctor. Go ahead, Gloria.

Question: Okay. Thank you, and if I could, Mr. Mayor, ask you about this back and forth regarding the nonessential businesses. It seems like there was a disagreement about whether or not the city should do this by ZIP code. The Governor seemed to suggest yesterday this was a flawed approach. You know, the virus doesn't travel by ZIP code, it does not recognize ZIP code. So do you have an understanding of what the Governor's problem is with your plan and are you working on that, and do you think that maybe there is a way to do this, that isn't just ZIP code focused, since there is a recognition that yes, people do move around, that people are not confined to one specific area or ZIP code, and that there – maybe there's a smarter way of doing this?

Mayor: I'll start and I'll turn to Dr. Chokshi. Look, we obviously, over the last few days, talked through different models. The Governor had an impulse that I share to say, was there some way to, for example, use census tracts – we found that to be not as helpful as I would have liked because we saw again that we had not only within a ZIP code particular high levels, but we saw it starting to spread to the other areas of the ZIP code. So, the idea here is to of course, focus on the places that are having the toughest situation, but also surround them with activity to make sure that we do not allow spread. So, if you are restricting in the places that are really, really the toughest, you also want restrictions in the immediate surrounding perimeter, and that's why the ZIP code model actually, the more I looked at it, the more sense it made. It was a way to stop the spread from going into more and more neighborhoods, and ZIP code has the advantage, Gloria, that it's not something like everyone knows what the ZIP code is of every building that they go to or every school or whatever, but it's easy to find out. People certainly know their own household ZIP code. It's easy to find out if your store, if your school are in that ZIP code or not, and that was an advantage compared to other demographic or geographic measures we might use.

As to the Governor's team, they – again, good conversations yesterday. They'll continue today. We're looking forward to a decision today. Best of my understanding they did not present a specific alternative. I said, look, here's what I propose. This would work. We all understand what the ZIP code is. This would work. Let's go. We have to act decisively. If they have a different model, it's their call and we'll work with whatever model they choose, but we have to move quickly. Dr. Chokshi.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes. Mr. Mayor. Just to add briefly to what you've said – what we have to do is match up the epidemiology of the virus, you know, understanding how it is transmitted, the speed with which that spread can happen, with the practical considerations around how to implement these difficult local restrictions and you know, that's how our team has landed on the ZIP codes as the best geographic way to set the boundaries for what we're moving forward with. I'll say two more things. One is that we know that we have to move swiftly that you know, this, this virus has such a formidable foe and so the plans that we have proposed to the state are meant to be able to be brought into action as quickly as possible, and the second point is just to emphasize one thing that the Mayor said, which is that we have been in dialogue with our counterparts at the state, including health officials at the state level to explain our reasoning you know, to explain why it is that we selected the particular ZIP codes that are of greatest concern, and I think there is a lot of shared understanding about the urgency of the situation.

Moderator: We're also joined by Dr. Ted Long, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps. With that, we'll move on next to Jen from the AP.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Jen, how are you doing?

Question: Fine, thanks. I guess my first question would be have the hospitals at all started to prepare for a potential surge in patients? Are any of those plans being reactivated?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start. I'll turn to Dr. Katz. Jen, what we're seeing so far, and, you know, we obviously are very careful and cautious in our assumptions. What we're seeing so far is actually the number of hospitalizations has not moved much. Although the positivity levels for coronavirus have increased, but still low compared to what they were in the past, so meaning within – among the folks who were in the hospital – but we certainly have to be ready for a higher level of hospitalizations. I would say right now, if this is our starting point, we're in a much better place than we were obviously in the spring, because whatever is happening now has not moved very quickly in terms of hospitalizations. But yeah, we have to be ready in case of any scenario. So go ahead, Dr. Katz.

President and CEO Mitchell Katz, NYC Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. The 11 hospitals of Health + Hospitals have been a great barometer of the city activity for COVID. We saw many of the trends ahead of anyone else in the last round. I'm very pleased that right at the moment, there are only two patients in the 11 hospitals who currently are on a ventilator due to COVID. So, it is very low, but we nonetheless course have plans for how we would deal with the surge if it were to happen. Every single hospital based on its experience of what works, and frankly, what didn't work in March and April, has a new plan. We know the details, what wards we would open, who would get, who would staff those wards, what the correct order of it, how we would transport patients. There was a tremendous amount that was learned in dealing with the epidemic in March and April, and we'll be prepared if there is another search.

Mayor: Go ahead, Jen.

Question: I also wondered whether – it's a bit of an offbeat question, I guess – but in trying to refine strategies for containing this latest flare up, has any thought been given to tailoring restrictions by some factor, other than geography, such as people's level of risk, like age group?

Mayor: Jen, I'll start and I'll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi. I think one of the things we learned last time, obviously a really, really bad situation in March and April, but we learned a couple of things: move as fast as you can, be decisive, it's much better to put too many restrictions in place and solve the problem quickly then to delay putting restrictions in place. So I think when you parse too much, just as a common sense matter, when you parse too much, you run the risk of too many avenues being left open for the spread of the disease. I think if you say let's really buckle down for a concentrated period of time again, weeks, if done, right, and make sure you're grabbing the whole area that needs to be addressed. You have a much better chance of stopping this problem in its tracks before it reaches the rest of the city. That that's my layman's interpretation, but Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi, you want to speak to that?

Senior Advisor Varma: Sure, thanks. I think, you know, the Mayor has summarized it quite well. These restrictive social measures are a bit of a blunt instrument. We reserve them for only situations where our individual measures and our testing and tracing can't keep up with epidemic spread and they have to be applied in an area broader that we might like just simply because of, of the complexity of how societies work and people interact. What you're asking specifically about is an approach that in public health terms, they use the term, the shielding or cocooning, which is it possible to have the most vulnerable people kind of avoid high risk activities and in a way quarantine themselves so that people who are at lower risk and continue their activity, you know, that, that has a lot of theoretical strength to it. But the practical experience for many places in Europe that attempted this early on has really not borne out, and that's because we are all connected to each other. If you're let's say elderly and have medical conditions you need people to help you, and those people are in connection to other people. So, you are really just one or two degrees of separation from other people, and it's really not very effective to try to shield a very large population this way.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thanks for this very good question. I'll just add briefly to say number one, it's absolutely right that geography matters. We know this from our experience with the coronavirus globally. Geography does matter, and that's why the plan that we have proposed focuses on geography in that way. But in addition to what Dr. Varma said there are other ways, you know, that are not mutually exclusive with thinking about geography as a way to address risk. Particularly, you know, higher risk settings whether it's a healthcare setting, you know, a nursing home or other areas where we know, you know, there are higher risk activities, particularly things that are indoors. Those are also places where we can bring to bear additional ways to protect people in those higher risk settings. You know, ensuring that that the bread and butter of our prevention strategies, you know, the so-called “core four” are, are practiced and adhered to in particular, in those settings.

Moderator: Next step is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good Henry, how are you?

Question: I'm okay. I've got a couple of questions here. With students who are in these affected areas can still go to schools outside the affected areas, if I'm not mistaken, and if so, does that create an elevated risk?

Mayor: I'll tell you what I think, and Dr. Chokshi can jump in after me. I don't not believe, Henry, I do not believe it creates an elevated risk for a couple of reasons. First is that we see the schools taking extraordinary measures to keep kids and staff safe and it's working. So if kids will be going into a very safe environment and remember the second factor, the screening – we're telling every parent, it is their obligation to screen their child every day. If there’s symptoms, your child stays home. If there's a temperature, your child's is home. If the kid gets to school and there's a temperature to child goes to isolation, is sent home. So there really are safeguards to ensure that if an individual child is even symptomatic that, that is addressed right away. Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. No, I would just briefly emphasize, you know, particularly today as Get Tested Tuesday, we do have a, a simple and clear message for anyone who lives in the affected areas in particular, which is to get tested immediately whether you're a student or someone else who is in that ZIP code, and we think that will also add the layer of protection as the Mayor mentioned.

Mayor: Go ahead, Henry.

Question: Okay. So, thank you for answering that. My other question has to do with, just bear with me here for the – I kind of lost it. Let me see if I can—

Mayor: We can bring you back if you want?

Question: Bring me back in about a minute or two, thank you.

Mayor: You got it.

Moderator: Next up is Derick from WABC.

Question: Hi, good morning. I had a question about this incident that happened last night in Borough Park, the warehouse where the FDNY was seen sawing their way inside, there were reports of 500 people inside, and that it's our understanding that despite some fire safety violations there were no summonses issued for violating any of the COVID-19 orders. Could you talk about that? Should there have been summonses issued in that situation?

Mayor: Derick, I am waiting to get the full details. I've only gotten a basic report this morning. The most important fact here is, first of all, there never should have been a gathering like that, and the folks who organized it did something harmful and that has to be addressed and we'll address it, certainly in terms of those individuals. Second, the important point, the FDNY got there to address the situation and disperse people, but in terms of summonses and other consequences, I'll get you an update on that. Obviously, something like that cannot happen, particularly in the middle of a crisis where certain ZIP codes are showing of a particularly high level of this disease, and it's a danger to everyone. People have to be smart to not let something like that happen, and there will obviously be consequences. Go ahead.

Question: And then my second question is related to schools. You had mentioned a short time ago that just a couple of coronavirus cases are linked to the schools. I think you said two out of 1,300 tests were positive in those nine ZIP codes, and so based on that information, why go ahead and shut down the schools if by your own admission, you know, people are following the rules, they're wearing masks. If there's very few cases in the schools, then why close the schools?

Mayor: Yeah, Derick, it's a very fair question. This is an imperfect reality, obviously. The fact is across the whole city, the schools are doing a tremendous job and the numbers bear it out, and it is striking testing, you know, staff and educators in the nine ZIP codes at that level, 1,300 tests plus, and getting only one positive back or two positives back. I mean, that's amazing. So in a perfect world, we'd say, hey, let's just keep things going. But I think the reality is if we're really trying to restrict movement and activity within the ZIP code, if we say here are nine ZIP codes out of 146 in New York City that are particularly problematic, we really want to bring the level of activity down. So, let's close the public and nonpublic schools. Let's close the non-essential businesses. Let's encourage people to stay home. Don't go out unless you have to go out and go back to the reality. We had more in the spring, but in a concentrated area, it just stands to reason that even though the schools were doing quite well, we just want to reduce the amount of overall activity for a few weeks, hopefully only, and really stop this spread quickly.

Moderator: We're going to go back to Henry for his last question.

Question: Thank you very much. Actually, that last question and the first question that I asked you pretty much covers the subject of that question. But I have another question for you, which goes back to the continuing theme of the relationship between the City and the State, this governor and your administration, and whether or not just latest split on how do geographically define the areas of risk is another example of how not being on the same page might make just pandemic more problematic.

Mayor: Look, Henry, I think it's pretty straightforward. First of all, again, mayors and governors, not just in New York, but all over the country, will have differences. We have different jobs to do, different interests to look out for. My job is to look out for the people in New York City, nothing else – my job is to look out for the people in New York City. So, right now, I see a problem in Brooklyn and Queens. I want fast action. I want the State to take action because of the emergency status we're in. If we were not in this emergency status, I'd be taking the action myself would be ready to do that right away. I also want the State to look out for New York City, because there's a larger problem in other parts of the state and the metropolitan area. We see other clusters, whether it's Nassau County, Orange County, Rockland County, I want them acted on for the good of the people in those communities, but also to stop the interplay between different parts of the state that could be exacerbating this crisis. So, my job is to look out for the people in New York City. And I think that reality, you know, city, government, state, governments, federal government often don't see eye to eye have different worldviews, that's normal. But I think if you asked the question here, where have we ultimately gotten? I think the vast majority of times, the City and State have gotten to the right place together. Sometimes we start with different perspectives, but we end up getting where we need to get in the vast majority of cases. So, look, my job here was to put out to the people of the city the reality, that it became clear that we had a bigger problem that required restrictions, no one likes restrictions, but it was time to say it out loud. My job was to say that to propose action, because we need the State's approval. The State has every right to ask tough questions or look at the model and see if they want to alter the model. That is their right under the law. It's just important they do it quickly and decisively so we can all move forward. So, really, the proof's in the pudding, Henry, so long as we keep getting somewhere, so long as we keep making the decisions together and getting to results, that's what ultimately matters.

Moderator: Next step is Marcia from WCBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing good?

Mayor: Good, Marcia. How have you been?

Question: My first question has to do with enforcement. And I know yesterday, the Governor made light of the amount of enforcement that New York City has been doing. And today on NY1, Commissioner Shea was asked about whether he would give a stricter rules to the police officers in the communities about being strict about giving more – more of fines and sentences – fines and things like that. I wonder if you think that more fines for not mask wearing is something that you should be doing, whether you should step up enforcement, and whether you're going to provide NYPD manpower to the Governor's task force?

Mayor: Yeah. No, I spoke to that already. You know, last week, Marcia, we had over 1,000 City personnel out in the most affected communities, including NYPD, Sheriff's Office, Office of Special Enforcement, Health Department, Sanitation Department. They were all out doing enforcement, as well as doing education and mask distribution. It was 400 officers each day last week. We're going to keep increasing that. And as we have additional ZIP codes we need to deal with, we’ll literally keep increasing as much as we have to. Absolutely, we've been doing enforcement for weeks and weeks. In fact, we've closed down businesses, closed down yeshivas, issued summonses, you name it. But what I think is clear here is this is a problem beyond the normal enforcement approach. This is a problem that requires larger restrictions for the community, because we tried in the past and had success in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, in Soundview in the Bronx, in Southeast Queens. We tried an approach that was heavy on outreach, education, masks distribution, of concentrated testing, and enforcement wherever needed – and that worked. In this instance, we saw this problem grow, tried the same strategies, tried more enforcement, it was not turning the tide the way it needed to, because you can only enforce in so many places at so many times. We're now at the point where we need restrictions, hopefully only for a few weeks to really turn the tide here. Go ahead, Marcia.

Question: I also wonder, Mr. Mayor, whether there – because there's a lack of secular education in some of these troubling communities that leads to a lack of compliance, because they don't have the secular education, maybe they don't understand it. Do you think there's a correlation between the lack of secular education and the lack of compliance?

Mayor: I can't – I can't speculate on that, Marcia. I think what we have to do throughout all these ZIP codes is work with everyone. I mean, we've seen tremendous support from community leaders and community institutions. We've seen intensive efforts to educate people on the importance of mask wearing, the importance of social distancing. We've seen masks distribution drives. I think there's plenty of good messaging coming from community leaders and institutions telling people how important it is. I think there are some voices in many communities, not just here in New York City, we're seeing it all around the country – there are some voices telling people not to wear masks, telling them coronavirus is a hoax. You saw a very painful example of that when Dr. Katz and our other health care leadership gave a press conference a week or two ago, and it was interrupted by a community resident, literally saying the coronavirus is a hoax. So, we have some of that out there. But, overwhelmingly, the community leadership has sent a message that's very consistent with what our health leadership is saying, and everyone is working together to try and solve this problem.

Moderator: Next step is Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning, all. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Juliet. How are you?

Question: I'm okay. Thank you, thank you. So, you just said a couple of minutes ago that schools and some of these non-essential businesses might be closed for a few weeks. What criteria will you use to reopen and how – excuse me – how systematic would that criteria have to be maintained in order for everything to reopen?

Mayor: Yeah, it's a very important question, Juliet. I appreciate it. Look, what we tend to see with the coronavirus – and I've been trained by our great health care leadership here to look for these patterns – there really are pretty clear patterns. When there's an upswing, it tends to go up over a period of days and weeks. When starts to turn in the right direction, you also see that emerge over a period of days and weeks. So, the two-week scenario is the ideal. And I'm not saying it's likely, but it's the ideal. It's the one we want everyone to shoot for, where from the moment the restrictions go into place, two weeks later you can come out of the restrictions. If the full two weeks has passed and the last seven consecutive days that ZIP code was under three percent positivity seven days in a row, that would indicate a trend, obviously. And that's what we be comfortable lifting the restrictions. Now, again, all this is ultimately the decision of the State of New York, but I'm going to keep being very vocal about what we think will work and what we need. We want those restrictions to just be as long as they need to be, not a day more. So, that's the ideal scenario. The other scenario we put forward is a 28-day scenario, four weeks, where if you can't meet that first standard, second standard is go four weeks, if by the last day, the 28th day, you're down below three percent, again, that should show us that enough of the trouble has passed, that we can lift the restrictions. Now, Juliet, people have to take this seriously. If they don't do the work, if the people in every community don't do the work, it could go on longer, and no one wants that. So, ideally, with a lot of, you know, buckling down, a lot of real teamwork and effort by people in communities, you can get this done in just a few weeks, maybe more like three, four weeks, but our goal is weeks and then get the restrictions off. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. Thank you. Also, has anyone in these ZIP codes – in the nine ZIP codes, has anyone been given a summons for not wearing a mask?

Mayor: Yeah. We'll get you those numbers. As I said, there's been a whole range of summons activity and enforcement activity, whether it is yeshivas that were shut down, stores that were shut down, people who were given summonses for not wearing a mask or anything else. But remember, this is an area where we've been adamant, because we know it works. The goal is to change behavior, never, ever wanted to penalize for the sake of penalizing. We've wanted to change behavior. We distribute the masks. If people take the masks and wear the masks, that's what we care about. If someone refuses, that's going to be a penalty right away.

Moderator: We're on to our last two. First, we'll go to Narmeen from PIX 11.

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing?

Question: Good, doing well? I want to also – on what Juliet had said – we'd also like to see the numbers on the summons and fines in those nine ZIP codes. So, if your office could get that to us, we'd really appreciate it. But I also think that there's maybe some confusion or maybe some clarification needed for City residents about what City inspectors for compliance of things, like mask wearing, should or does look like. And I want to give you an example – we were in Borough Park for some time in the vicinity of 14th Avenue and 42nd street. And our observations showed minimal masks wearing. We drove around about a 10-block radius and we only saw a handful of people maybe wearing masks. When they saw our cameras come out, people would take it out of their pockets and put it on. We did not see NYPD vehicles with those loudspeaker messages that we saw last week. And we didn't see any obvious signs of City officials going around giving those summons. I mean, this seems to be an area that is in clear defiance of what the Governor and you are talking about.

Mayor: Look, that's not the way I would define it, because we have been working with community leaders and community institutions, getting a lot of support. We've definitely seen an uptick in mask usage, but it's not where it needs to be. We have had loud speaker messages out now for the last week or more. We're going to continue that, of course. There's a lot of ground to cover. So, I respect that you were in a very good location, that's an area I used to represent the City Council, so you chose well. But, look, we're talking about nine ZIP codes. That's a lot of ground to cover. So, we have our folks out over a very broad area, getting this message out all the time, taking the enforcement action. But I want to be clear, again, I think there's a dissonance that has to be addressed very bluntly here. We did all the same measures in a number of communities, and it worked, and things turned around quickly – again, Sunset Park, Soundview, Southeast Queens. We put out the free masks. We did the education. We did the outreach. We did the intensive testing. We were able to turn the situation quickly. We're not seeing that in these nine ZIP codes. It's past the point where enforcement solves your problem. So, people can keep focusing on enforcement. If there's a role for enforcement, it's past that point. Now, the facts on the ground make clear we need restrictions. Enforcement would have worked as it did in the other places. If it had worked that same way as it did in the other places, we wouldn't be having this discussion. We need something stronger and we need it quickly. We need restrictions to stop this problem. Go ahead.

Question: Mayor, have you found it any of those nine ZIP codes to be any more challenging when it comes to enforcement for any of your City inspectors, any ones that stand out that you believe the City has to work, maybe, harder on?

Mayor: I have not heard that specifically. I think what we've seen is that the more education, the more outreach – yes, we've used those sound trucks, the more messages from community leaders, the more impact it makes. But we are fighting against a situation – as I said, there are some parts of the community where there are negative messages being put out, telling people not to wear masks and that coronavirus is a hoax and all that. We are fighting that problem. We are fighting the problem of people, of course, having had the fatigue of being through this crisis now for seven months. And that's understandable. It's hard to keep your guard up for so long. But what we do know is more and more, we're getting support and help from all facets of the community and that restrictions, unlike any of these other tools, restrictions are crystal clear. If non-essential businesses are closed, if public and non-public schools are closed, it's really obvious if someone is violating and you can take instant action on that. That's the kind of measure we need now.

Moderator: For our last question, we'll go to Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hi, I wanted to ask, coming off the businesses question – I know yesterday, you said that you would close down essential businesses. It's contrary to what the Governor and the State – what the Governor said he wants to do. So, if the Governor does not approve the City's plan to close non-essential businesses and these nine ZIP codes, will the City still move forward and enforce the closure of these businesses?

Mayor: So, Katie, I've been really clear, I'm going to be clear again. I don't know how many times I said on Sunday, pending the State's approval, and I say it again yesterday. I also said we would be ready for Wednesday morning. We're not going to put out a plan, seek approval from the State and then not be ready to implement it. We are ready to implement it, starting tomorrow morning. We are waiting for an answer from the State. We cannot act until we get an answer from the State, it’s as clear as that. And I'm urging the State to move quickly and be decisive. We were at a moment where we need action. We're not going to defy the State. I've never suggested that in the least. I said, I put a proposal on the table to the State. We will be ready to implement it, but we are waiting for sign off.

Question: Oh, thank you. So, what kind of outreach is being done now? Because I know last night you were asked that this is a pretty confusing situation. I think you said that it isn't, but I think for a lot of businesses in these areas, it is confusing. So, what kind of outreach is being done? Is SBS involved? Are people telling businesses? You know, people might now forget what's non-essential and they might forget if their businesses is essential or what can open. So, what kind of outreach is being done if that does happen?

Mayor: Yeah. No, I want to say, I really have empathy for business owners. They've been through so much, this is the last thing they need. It's the last thing they want to hear. I appreciate that. And I want to see these businesses survive, and the notion of even having to close them for a few weeks is painful for everyone. I have empathy for them and I agree, they don't have the clear information they need. I want to get them the clear information they need, but we had to get this situation addressed. And so, I put the proposal out publicly to move the ball, to get things to happen, because my job is to protect people in this city. And we're going to have a decision soon, I'm convinced of that. We will educate everyone in the communities immediately when we have that decision. Clearly, the word has spread. So, by putting the proposal out on Sunday, it gave people a chance to hear it and get ready for it. We will – then, the second we have a final decision from the State, we'll start educating communities. We'll make clear to people what's expected of them. I want to be very, very clear, we do not want to harm anybody. We want to help stop this disease from spreading to more and more of the city. So, we'll get the word out and then we'll start enforcement. Once we've gotten the word out to everyone, we'll start enforcement right away. And at that point, it will be very, very aggressive, because when those restrictions are in place, it'll be crystal clear what's expected of everyone.

Everybody, as we close down today, I just want to say this. Look, this city has come so far, and we came so far by focusing on the data, by focusing on the science. This is what has differentiated New York City from so much of the rest of the United States, and even from a lot of other countries around the world – devotion to following what the actual facts tell us to do. We saw a problem in these last days. It, unfortunately, consolidated. It was time to say we needed stronger restrictions. So, our decisions are based on the data and the science, but in the end, what really changes things, what protects everyone is when the people get involved. New Yorkers are the people who turned the tide last time under the toughest circumstances. New Yorkers will do it again. So, it's the science and the people. And I think this is what was never understood, unfortunately, in Washington D.C. and a lot of places around the country – devotion to the science and then belief in the people. Once you educate the people, it's up to the people to then take those lessons and act on them. And here in New York City, New Yorkers did that. We're going to do that again and we're going to keep this city safe. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-07 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Look, we have a couple of tough weeks ahead – two, three, four weeks that are going to be really tough in this city as we fight back against a new threat. And we’ve got a lot of material to cover today, but I want to start with the most important point – we all have to work together. We are all in this together. This city was the epicenter of this crisis in the United States of America. We fought back together. People stood shoulder to shoulder. You think about our health care heroes, you think about our first responders, they served everyone, they came from every part of the city. Everyone worked together to overcome this. So, now, we're going into a tough stretch. We have a new challenge. It is a challenge we can and will overcome. But I guarantee you, there will be people who try to divide us in this moment of challenge. There will be people who try to create disunity when, in fact, we need unity. Don't let them do it. What we need now is voices of all communities to come together and say, this is all of us – one New York City, fighting this fight together for the good of all. Let's support each other. Let's work with each other. Let's listen to each other and overcome this challenge.

So, look, the next few weeks are going to be critical. We have the opportunity here to keep this outbreak small, to address it, to stop it, to turn it around. It's up to all of us. And that's why on Sunday, I proposed a very rigorous plan to address the outbreaks we were seeing in certain parts of Brooklyn and Queens. I put it out there publicly, because we needed immediate action. The State of New York took that plan, they used it as a basis for their decisions. They made some important modifications, which we'll talk about today. But the bottom line is that concept that I put forward, that we need to address this rigorously and quickly, and the faster we address it all together, the faster we can stop this problem and get back on the right track, that is the basis of what we are working on now. Now, it will not be easy. I'm not here to tell you – when I say two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, I'm not here to tell you it'll be easy. It will take hard work and discipline. And, certainly, there will be sacrifice. And I feel for anyone in the communities affected whose livelihood is going to be put on hold – that's a huge problem. And I do feel tremendous empathy for the small business owners whose businesses will be shut for a period of time. I feel empathy for all the parents who want their kids in school. But, again, let's realize, if we act quickly and decisively, we can overcome this for all of us, for the whole city. And what are we being governed by? The facts, the science, the data tell us what's happening, and we act on it. That is the one thing that has worked in this country and all around the world. So, we to stop this outbreak dead in its tracks for the good of all New York City. And, remember, we need to do it to save lives. The farther the coronavirus spreads again, the more vulnerable people will be reached. We cannot let that happen.

Now, I understand that there are people who disagree with this plan. And it is a democracy and we appreciate there's always going to be disagreements. But it's crucial that those who disagree still respect the fact that the State and City have made a decision for the health and safety of all. People have and will protest, and we understand that there is a place for peaceful protest, but the NYPD will not tolerate people doing harm to others. There'll be no tolerance for assaults, for damage to property, for setting fires – anything like that is unacceptable. And when the NYPD makes clear to anybody that they need to act in a way that's appropriate, given the challenge we're facing, you must adhere to the instructions of the NYPD. If you don't, as in every other situation in this city, there will be consequences. The NYPD will give people warnings, will make the ground rules clear, but people have to follow those ground rules, or else, again, consequences come next.

Now, for us to overcome this, we're going to have to do some things we haven't done before. So, we are dealing now with a new approach – the zones that the State has put forward. And this is based on the information that our Health Department derived, which, originally, we proposed in the form of ZIP codes. The State has come up with a new model, and I’ll go over that now, and we're going to act quickly to implement this with the State. Now, again, this was based on the facts that developed over many days, the data. And what the State has put forward is cluster areas, color-coded. Southern Brooklyn is one; two, in Queens – one in the Forest Hills-Rego Park area, another in Far Rockaway area – designations red, orange, and yellow. We'll go over this. I know the Governor will be speaking to it in more detail later as well. I want to note that the State maps do not include two areas that we remain concerned about – Crown Heights and Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. So, our Health Department continues to monitor those situations very closely. We have seen, unfortunately, the aggressive spread of COVID in those neighborhoods. We're going to keep working in those areas with the community, with all of our tools to make sure that we keep the situation contained in those parts of the city. And we're going to continue to discuss Crown Heights and Williamsburg with the State to make sure that we're taking every precaution to stop the spread of COVID in Brooklyn and Queens.

Now, the red zones – the idea of the red zones, these are the areas with the biggest problem. And it is crucial in those areas that non-essential businesses be closed. This is very much like what we experienced back in March, April, the worst of this, when we had to reduce the level of activity greatly. In that case, it was the whole city. In this case, it's in particular areas. The closures will continue for a minimum of 14 days. And this is the concept the State has put forward. What I originally proposed was a 14-day way out of a specific designation, or a 28-day. The State is starting with a 14-day measure and a reevaluation after 14-days. And the State has made very clear they're adding additional penalties for individuals that do not adhere to these new requirements and the City and State together will be enforcing those penalties. So, for example, on mass gatherings, the fines for mass gatherings in violation of State rules will be up to $15,000 a day. The fines for not wearing face coverings or not maintaining social distancing can be as high as $1,000 a day. So, these are additional tools. Again, no one wants to see anyone fined if it can be avoided, but it is a very serious situation and people need to adhere to the new rules. The faster we address this challenge, the shorter the shutdown will be. And we’ve got to keep that in mind – for everyone who feels that the shutdown will be harmful or difficult for their life, remember, we can overcome this quickly if we work together. This can only be a matter of weeks. And then, we have to continue to learn from this experience to practice the social distancing, wear the face masks, do all of the things that will ensure this never happens again in New York City.

Okay. Now, back on the topic of the red pause zone. So, red, defined as an area with three percent positivity over a seven-day average, and the geographic boundary depends on the density of cases. So, in the red zone, all schools would be closed. In this case, they already are – all public and non-public schools. As of tomorrow morning, Thursday morning, all non-essential businesses in the red zones will be closed as well. Mass gatherings will be prohibited. Restaurants will revert to a takeout-only status and houses of worship will be allowed to have 25 percent maximum occupancy and a maximum of 10 people inside. That's the red zone. Now, the orange zone is being treated as a warning. If red means a pause, a full pause, orange zone under the State rules will be a warning zone. And it basically comprises about a five-block radius around the red zone. As of Thursday morning, schools in the orange zone will be closed as well. So, again, as of tomorrow morning, schools that fall within those orange zones, both public and non-public, will be closed. In addition, high-risk businesses, including gyms, will be closed. Gatherings in the orange zone must be 10 people or less, whether they're indoor or outdoor. Restaurants will be for outdoor dining only in the orange – excuse me – in the orange zone, maximum four people at a table. Houses of worship will be allowed to be at 33 percent capacity with a maximum of 25 people inside. Finally, the yellow zone is a cautionary zone. It means an area of where we're seeing a challenge, but, thank God, not as deep a challenge as other areas where we hope to be able to turn it around with the cooperation and involvement of the people of those communities. We see more cases, but we believe with the right approach we can stop the yellow zones from turning into orange or red zones. The schools in the yellow zones will remain open – public and non-public will remain open in the yellow zones, but will be subject to mandatory weekly COVID testing. All businesses remain open, but we urge caution and we ask business owners to be very scrupulous about people wearing masks in their businesses, practicing social distancing, not letting too many people into the business, if there's a line, socially distancing the line – all the things we learned back in the spring. Gatherings in yellow zone must be 25 people maximum, whether indoor or outdoor. Indoor and outdoor dining permitted, maximum four people at a table. And houses of worship will be allowed to have up to 50 percent capacity in the yellow zones. Now, people obviously want to get as much detail as possible. We're getting information constantly from the State, updating it. We'll get it out to the people. We're going to create an online tool to let people know by typing in their address exactly what zone they're in – we’ll announce when that is up. We're going to be doing an outreach effort, education effort, full force of the City government will be out there in communities affected. We want people to know – obviously, a particular focus on the red zones and then the orange zones – what's going on. We immediately will have 1,200 personnel on the ground today in addition to the State enforcement teams. We'll keep increasing that number as needed. We are bringing in canvassers as part of the Test and Trace Corps. to go out and provide information to communities and focus on business corridors. Department of Transportation is reaching out to all the participants in Open Restaurants in the red and orange zones to update them. Small Business Services and the Nightlife Office will be reaching local chambers of commerce, community groups, business improvement districts to update them. The NYPD and Department of Transportation will put up electronic signage to announce the new restrictions at key intersections in the affected areas. Also, New York City office of management – emergency management, excuse me, we'll be taking action, doing robocalls to all households in the red and orange zones, regarding the restrictions, and, of course, where to get tested. We're going to keep reminding people how important it is to get tested so we get a real look at what's happening and hopefully start to see the turnaround in these communities. So, robocalls to all affected households, robocalls to affect the businesses, and houses of worship. We'll be sending out text updates to everyone signed up for NotifyNYC and anyone who wants those updates should sign up for regular information. And this will take a lot of education and outreach, but also a lot of enforcement. We'll be working closely with the State. We’ll increase the number of inspectors because of the number of areas we need to reach. Obviously, the Police Department will be playing crucial role here. And all of the closures have to be addressed, the gatherings have to be addressed, masks wearing – we'll be working on all these fronts. But, obviously, given that we have now for weeks been warning of this potential, we hope and believe the vast majority of residents of these communities will join us in addressing the problem, will follow these rules, as people have all over New York City and will help us overcome this challenge quickly.

Now, we're concentrating testing in these areas. We've performed over 10,000-plus tests in the last week in these zones. And we'll be expanding testing capacity in the red and orange zones – so important that people get tested. I want to emphasize we have to get the maximum number of people tested in the red and orange zones. It is free. I'm going to keep saying that – it is free. It is safe. It is quick. There are locations all over. This is one of the ways that we speed ourselves out of this challenge, is to make sure we're getting a clear look at what's happening. The more people get tested, the better. So, please, in these areas and throughout New York City, please get tested. Go to nyc.gov/covidtest for locations, or call 212-COVID-19, and you'll get locations. There are locations all over the city, 200-plus locations, specialized testing going on in the key communities, always free, always quick, easy. You will get results quickly and we can help move all of us forward with this testing.

Let me go over today's indicators. And this, again, is now for the whole City of New York. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 79 patients with a positivity rate confirmed at 23.7 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, the threshold is 550 cases – today's report is 512. Number three, of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report is 1.39 percent citywide. And the seven-day rolling average citywide, today's report is 1.74 percent. So, again, many, many parts of the city continued to do well, but we all have to work together to keep it that way.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Good morning all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Katz, Dr. Chokshi and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: [Inaudible]

Mayor: Andrew, Andrew? We're not hearing you well. I don't know if you can – Andrew, can you hear me? You're coming in really cut up. Can you hear me?

Question: Can you hear me?

Moderator: Can you start over with the question please?

Question:  Yeah, good morning to you as well. To what degree are you aware of all the protests that took place in Borough Park and other communities last night and regardless of the protests themselves, what do you say to members and leaders of the Orthodox community who believe that these lines are unfairly singling their communities out, that this isn't about a general spread it's about their communities specifically?

Mayor: I'll take them in the reverse order. This is about protecting everyone's lives, Andrew. This is about all New Yorkers, and when you look at the communities in Brooklyn and Queens, it's lots of different kinds of people. Remember, we're talking about two of the most diverse places on earth, Brooklyn and Queens. So, within these areas are many kinds of people and we want to protect everyone. This is based on data and science. I'll let Dr. Chokshi talk about that in a moment. But on the other question, I'm aware of the protest that occurred. I spoke to Commissioner Shea and his team this morning. Again, very clear that we are dealing with a health emergency. The State has laid down very clear rules. Everyone must follow those rules. The NYPD will be enforcing those rules. We want to be respectful, but I want to be very clear when the NYPD issues an instruction, as with any other situation in the city or any other protest, if the NYPD issues and instruction, people must follow the instruction. If they don't follow the instruction, then they are liable for whatever consequences occur. Go ahead, Dr. Chokshi about why these specific areas.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Well, as we've said over the last few weeks and months, we will go to where the data takes us with respect to where we're worried about spread of the coronavirus. It's why we went to Tremont in the Bronx in July. That's why we went to Sunset Park in August, and it's why we've been communicating about the areas of concern across Brooklyn and Queens that we have over the last few days and weeks. We are concerned as you know based on two major indicators that we follow. The first is when we see a rapid increase in cases in a particular area, and then the second is the percentage of tests coming back positive, and those are the things that we look at on a day-to-day basis, quantitatively matching it up with the areas where we're concerned.

Mayor: Go ahead, Andrew.

Question: With the maps themselves, are they going to be finalized today? Will they be searchable by address? One of the things we're hearing from people is you might have a street where a business on one side of the street has to close, and on the other side of the street, doesn't have to close. There's a lot of confusion out there about whether people are in red, orange or yellow. So, how soon will people be able to punch in an address to determine exactly which zone they land in?

Mayor: Yeah, we're working on that right now with the State to get it a hundred percent clear. What the Health Department here originally proposed was zip codes, because even though it was not perfect, it was still a clear methodology. The State has come up with a different approach. We're working with the State to get very clear the exact boundaries, and then put that online and make it searchable by address. Again, enforcement will start tomorrow. When we send out agencies to do enforcement, we're going to alert business owners. If they are in one of the zones that requires closure or modification, we'll alert them, and we'll obviously give them the chance to immediately act on it. If a business owner refuses, they would be liable for penalties. But I think what everyone wants to do here is comply with these rules to make sure that everyone is safe, and I think the vast, vast majority of business owners throughout this crisis have complied with rules once they understood them. So, we'll get that information out as we get clarity from the State and then in the enforcement effort, there'll be a huge education effort to let people know which zone they're in and obviously give them an immediate chance to abide by the rules. We don't want to penalize it unless we have to. What we'll penalize is where people openly attempt to defy rules.

Moderator: The next is Emma Fitzsimmons from the New York Times.

Mayor: Emma?

Question: Hi, good morning, Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, how are you?

Question: I'm good. Thanks for taking my question. Can you talk about the Governor's restrictions on houses of worship? Are they necessary, do you think they hold up in court?

Mayor: Yeah, I do think both – I think they are necessary and they do hold up in court. They're based on facts, data that's been looked at very carefully. We warned people well over a week ago that we were entering into a dangerous situation. We need to do this for the good of everyone.

Now, I want to emphasize, Emma, in the spring leaders in all communities, all faiths and I commented many times on this – really admirable efforts by faith leaders across the spectrum telling their own congregants how important it was to stay home, turning to other types of approaches for worship and really respecting the fact that this was about the health and safety of the communities they represent. I expect we'll see that again, that the vast majority of leaders will want to be part of the solution for the health and safety of their own communities. So, we know that we've got to get out of this and we've got to get out of it quickly. No one wants to see a full resurgence, a second wave in New York City. If we get a second wave, then a lot more will be shut down for a lot longer. No one wants to see that. So, I think the Governor's plan is the right one and we will work with the State to enforce it.

Moderator: The next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I know you said that assaults will not be tolerated while people are protesting the new restrictions. I wanted to ask about a specific incident reported last night in which a photographer was said to have been beaten unconscious by a crowd. Are you aware of that specific incident? And yeah, just any additional thoughts on preventing the situation from spiraling out of control?

Mayor: Yeah, Shant, I am aware of the incident. I spoke to the Police Commissioner about it earlier today. Look, just – assault is not going to be accepted. Assault on anyone ever, and I want to make very clear to everyone, even folks who disagree with these new rules to get us out of this crisis: respect the laws, respect the specific instructions of the NYPD and if anyone doesn't there will be consequences. So, if anyone commits an act of assault, of course there'll be consequences for those who are found to have perpetrated that act. But I think what people have to understand here is this is a very, very sensitive moment for the future of all of New York City. If we right now respect these new rules and quickly work together, we can overcome this problem in a matter of weeks, and then communities can go back to where we were just weeks ago, which was actually very good compared to what we experienced in the spring and was the beginning of our restart. We want to keep that restart going, but we need everyone to be a part of it, and that's what I'm going to keep reminding people of.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Hi there, Mr. Mayor and everybody on the call. Mr. Mayor, so crowds are burning masks in the street. It seems like a clear message and a possible threat to public health. Now are you, I know that you have said there'll be consequences, but are you prepared to hand out tickets here? Are you prepared to make arrests? This seems like a very serious thing.

Mayor: Yeah, I appreciate the question, Rich. Clearly again we have to get everyone to understand the seriousness of these new rules. So, we're going to be enforcing across the board. If a business is open where it should not be, there'll be told to close immediately. If there is resistance, the business will be shut down and there'll be penalties. If people refuse to wear masks, there'll be penalties. Across the board, this is what we're going to have to do. We understand the frustrations that people are feeling because no one wants to see us have to go back towards the restrictions that we had in the spring, but unfortunately they are necessary and they're necessary here, in Brooklyn and Queens, and as you saw yesterday, they're necessary in other parts of the state as well. We have to stop this problem from growing. We have to stop a resurgence of this disease. We've seen – right now in Europe is unfortunately the most painful example of how they let their guard down, and now they're seeing full blown, resurgence, full second wave in a lot of European countries. We can't let that happen here. So, we will enforce and I would urge everyone to understand is follow these rules for your own good, for your family's good, for your community's good. Go ahead. Rich.

Question: Okay, Mr. Mayor. So the, the Mayor's new system – the Governor's new color coded system, red, orange, and yellow seems extraordinarily confusing and sort of adds an element of confusion, it would appear to try to enforce this stuff, and I'm just wondering whether you think the Governor is usurping your authority as Mayor? I mean, do you think he secretly wants to be Mayor of New York City?

Mayor: This moment in history, Rich, I wouldn't urge anyone to want to be Mayor of New York City. It is a very, very challenging moment, but I'll tell you something again I have absolute faith in the people of New York City that we're going to overcome this. We overcame something much tougher in the spring and we're going to overcome this as well, but we have to work together. We have to ignore those voices of division. We have to really unify here to get this done. The Governor under the law has a right to make these decisions, I said at Sunday, we proposed a plan of action. That plan was the basis of what the State decided, not only for here, but for other parts of the state as well. I think it's important that the State acted and I'm glad the State acted. The – I thought that the ZIP codes were clearer, they weren't perfect, we admitted it, but they were clearer, but we're going to work with this specific model. And you know, we'll get out there and we'll explain to people the color coding, we'll get out there and explain the map. We're working on the final details with the State. But the bottom line is they have a right to decide. They decided, that's what matters, and we're going to go out there and work with the State to implement it.

Moderator: The next is Matt Chayes from News Day.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?

Mayor: Good, Matt. How you doing?

Question: I'm doing all right. I have two questions. The first is can you detail your plan if you have one to check whether houses of worship in the zones aren't secretly being attended in defiance of the rules?

Mayor: Well, Matt, obviously these are new rules now, we're going to go out there, make sure everyone understands them and then go and enforce. You will remember, Matt, back in the spring, again, we had an outstanding cooperation in all faith communities, and you'll remember there was a point where the vast majority of houses of worship in fact had fully shut down. We're not even talking about, you know, small groups, we're talking about people had shut down entirely across the board, and then there were a few houses of worship in different faiths, but very few, that tried to open up and do services anyway, no matter how bad the situation was in the city, they tried to defy the rules. We sent out enforcement to those has a worship to shut them down. So we have history of doing this across different faiths, but it was rare because the vast majority of faith leaders understood that they needed to follow the rules, and I expect that again. I think you'll see overwhelmingly adherence to these rules. Go ahead.

Question: On a different topic, you said this morning a couple minutes ago that there would be consequences for arson assault, battery, et cetera. Why were there no arrests last night? And do you think the NYPD made the right call in not arresting people who were burning things, attacking people, et cetera?

Mayor: Yeah. Again first of all, the NYPD in every situation works with the specific reality of specific facts. Clearly when the NYPD sees something that they believe is worthy of a summons or arrest they proceed to do so, and that will be the reality going forward. I haven't spoken to the Commissioner about every detail of what happened last night, but I did speak to him about the approach that will happen going forward, and it's quite clear if large numbers of people are gathering, there will be a large police response, there will be ample information, education. People will be told very clearly how they need to comport themselves. NYPD will give clear instructions, and if people don't follow those instructions, there will be consequences.

Moderator: The next is Julia Marsh from The Post.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, hope you're well. Just following up on that, I mean, you know, again, you've said that there's no tolerance for setting fires or harm to others. There's video after video of fires in the streets, of a man being beaten unconscious for advocating wearing a mask, of that journalist getting harassed. I mean, what kind of message does it send about following the rules if there were no consequences last night and does this lack of action by the NYPD invite the Governor to take over enforcement?

Mayor: No, to the last question, Julia, of course not. NYPD is the finest, strongest police force in the United States of America. They can enforce on this situation. They've dealt with much, much tougher situations, I assure you. This is an emerging new reality. Obviously it's important to make adjustments to any new reality. The individual who's assaulted, if charges are pressed, there will be consequences for perpetrators once they're identified as in any other assault and certainly going forward, if anyone's assaulted, the perpetrators will be held accountable. If anyone sets a fire that will be grounds for consequences, you will see it very clearly. Go ahead.

Question: How is this an emerging new reality if you're supposed to be, have been wearing masks for months, and you're never supposed to set fires in the street? And I wonder if the Sheriff's Office is still taking the lead on these enforcement issues or is it the police now?

Mayor: We're going to be using all agencies because of the magnitude of the area we have to cover. Sheriff's Office, Office of Special Enforcement, other agencies did an outstanding job when we were dealing with pinpoint realities. We're now dealing with a large geography. Obviously there'll be involved, NYPD will be involved. What is different is new rules and people reacting to new rules. That is a new reality and we're going to address it very forthrightly. Commissioner is very clear that there will be consequences for anyone that does not follow NYPD instructions or anyone who breaks the law. It will be quite visible and clear.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Erin from Politico.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. The Governor said yesterday that he is going to require 400 city personnel to work for his task force to do this enforcement. I know you said the other day that you didn't think that approach was legal, at this point are you going to be providing those personnel? And, and if so, are they NYPD or who they going to be, and how is this approach going to work?

Mayor: They were NYPD yesterday. They’ll be NYPD today. There'll be NYPD tomorrow. What our personnel worked for the City of New York, but we'll work in cooperation with the State. We share common goals with the State. The State has put forward a plan. We're going to work with that plan. We're going to support that plan, but all our personnel work for the City of New York. It's clear as that. Go ahead, Erin.

Question: Alright, thank you. And then secondly, I mean, you said you expected the houses of worship to overwhelmingly follow these rules, but I mean, based on what we saw overnight, as well as many of the statements from, you know, leaders, elected leaders, religious leaders, and others, there seems to be some pretty open defiance of this plan. So, I mean, is there any basis for your belief that there will be compliance and is there a particular plan for, you know, enforcement of – I know you spoke to it with respect to protest, but what about with respect to houses of worship?

Mayor: Erin, I'm going by a couple of things. First of all, there's been a lot of communication over the last few weeks with community leaders and I want to very intensely separate leaders, faith leaders, of all different faiths from political leaders who sometimes have a political agenda. It's just an obvious reality. If you say to me over years in public service, do I see a difference between clergy and politicians? Of course, clergy tend to be very responsible. They think about the big picture. They think about the health and wellbeing of their congregants. We saw extraordinary, extraordinary agreement among the clergy of all faiths in the spring, working together to ensure that people were safe, even though it meant something that all of them did not like doing one bit, which meant closing their houses of worship. Here we're talking about houses of worship still open, but with restrictions. I have never seen a situation where a clergy did not work with local government to protect people's health and safety. I've seen plenty of situations where politicians and people with other agendas said what they wanted to say for their own needs. But I really want to say our faith leaders have distinguished themselves time and again, as being very responsible, very mindful and wanting to work with local and State authorities. I don't expect that to change here. Maybe there'll be a few, but overwhelmingly I expect a lot of agreement that we all have to work together to solve this problem.

And let me conclude on that point everyone, look again, this will be tough. It's really important for people to understand, we're going through a tough time now in certain parts of the city, we're all going to work together to overcome that challenge. We are not going to let it overtake New York City. We still have time and we certainly have the wherewithal to stop a second wave from hitting New York City, but everyone has to take it seriously. Everyone has to work together. Everyone has to be committed and disciplined, and if you hear voices of division, if you hear coronavirus denialists, if you hear people out for their own agenda and trying to hurt everyone else, stand up to them. We have to stay unified to overcome this challenge. So I have a lot of faith in the people of New York City. I have a lot of faith that the great majority, the vast majority of New Yorkers want to do this right. Why do I have that faith? Because time and time again New Yorkers have shown how much they actually care about each other, how much they'll stand up for each other, how much they'll do the right thing to protect New York City, and we're going to do it again. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-08 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Look, we are going to go through a tough few weeks here in New York City. I want to start with just that obvious truth. We have come so far in the course of these last months, we're dealing with a real challenge now in some parts of our city, and it's going to take hard work to overcome it. And there's a lot of questions that need answers and a lot we have to work through, but I do know for sure New Yorkers have the strength and the wherewithal to overcome this challenge. And, again, the way we do it is with unity, the way we do it is with understanding we're all in this together. We are all going to have to work to get through this challenge to make sure that New York City does not experience what so many other parts of this country have experienced when they had a full-blown second wave of the coronavirus. What we're seeing right now in much of Europe, deeply troubling – full-blown second wave. It can be stopped. We need to stop it together. And that means speaking in a unified voice, respecting each other, working with each other to get done. It won't be easy. There will be things we have to work through. There will be things we're going to have to figure out. That is the truth whenever you're dealing with a crisis. But we can overcome this challenge. The data and the science make very, very clear, we can stop this challenge from turning into a full-blown second wave, and we must – we must. Our businesses have been coming back now, our schools are back. We need to protect this progress all over New York City, and the way to do that is to focus on the areas having a challenge, work with them, support them, work together and overcome it.

So, yesterday, I went over the basic plan of how we're going to begin the pauses and the other activities in the new zones that were determined by the State of New York. And this goes into effect today. I want to go over some of the basics here of how this is being approached. We're going to keep getting people answers as we go along. We want to try and make this as clear as possible and as quick as possible. This is a turnaround that, if we do it right, could only take a few weeks. If we don't do it right, it could go a lot longer. So, let's work together to get it right. Now, there's a lot of questions out there, obviously, and our job is to help people understand the specifics as much as possible. So, let's go over the basics again. The State of New York determined a plan based on three color coded zones, red, orange, and yellow. The red zone is a full pause zone – that means all schools public and non-public are shut down, non-essential businesses are closed, no indoor or outdoor gatherings. Now, the orange zone is a “warning zone.” That means schools are closed, public and non-public, but most businesses can operate but with certain restrictions. The yellow zone is what is called by the State the cautionary zone, and that a situation where those areas are being watched, we're working on it, we want to make sure they do not end up with more challenges. Businesses are open, schools are in session, but there'll be a mandated COVID testing in the schools regularly and a lot of activity out in the communities to provide people education, and support, and free masks, and, obviously, enforcement. Now, the pause period begins today and in effect for a minimum of 14 days, we're going to work with the State at that point to reassess where we stand, if we need to go longer. Again, I've asked the doctors this repeatedly, can this be overcome in 14 days? Yes, with extraordinary effort, it can be, with consistent effort it can be. If we don't have that extraordinary effort, it might go longer, and none of us wants to see that happen. We're going to continue to remind people, it is ultimately all about each and every one of you. So, folks in the red zone in particular – red zones, orange and yellow as well, it is so much about what you do – it’s wearing masks, it's social distancing, it's all the basics that are going to help us come back and we need each and every one of you to be a part of it.

Now, how were these zones determined? They're determined by the data. They're determined by the facts. They're determined by the test results. People have commented on this, but I want to go back to what the doctors tell us. I want to go back to the science. This is based on sheer numbers and facts. And these areas are examples within New York City of the extraordinary diversity that makes up the city. Brooklyn, Queens, two of the most diverse places on earth – a number of areas of Brooklyn, Queens affected. What they all have in common is the numbers told us it was time for real restrictions to turn the tide, and that's what the State and the City fully agree on. Now, how do you know what zone you're in? This is a very fair question. People need answers – where you live, where you work, where you go to school, which zone is it in? So, we've created a new online tool for people to know their status and which zone they're in. The new zone finder online is now live – you can go to nyc.gov/covidzone, and you simply enter in your personal address, your home address, for example, or your business address, your school address, and it will tell you what is happening at that address, what specific restrictions are in place, what closures are in effect. This was put together really quickly with information we received from the State, so we had to quickly act to make it clear and available to all New Yorkers. And I want to thank everyone at our IT Department, DoITT. I want to thank everyone at Department of Health and at the Office of Operations for their extraordinary work. Congratulations to all of you putting together this so quickly so all New Yorkers could get this clarity.

Now, clearly, we need to do a lot of outreach and we need to get out there and explain to people what's going on. So, there'll be a lot of outreach in communities. We want to make sure that even with the challenges we're facing and the valid questions people are going to have, that we get out there in force to help people know what's going on, answer questions, resolve challenges. Look, the goal here is that everyone follows the rules for their zone. As always, when we have to bring consequences to bear, we will. The first thing we want to achieve is compliance. If we get compliance there do not have to be forced closures, there do not have to be a fines and penalties. But if we don't get compliance, then those consequences will happen very, very quickly.

Now, let's talk about school closures. This is a key component of this plan. So, on Tuesday, we closed 108 public school sites in coordination with the State, now closing additional 61 public school sites today. They've been – the families have been alerted as of last night, 61 public school sites, and, again, for a two-week period. The school sites that were closed previously will remain closed for that two-week period. Even if they don't end up under the new state rules, if they don't end up being in the red or orange zone, we're still keeping them closed, because based on our data, it was the right thing to do. So, we'll continue that for two weeks. And, again, same rules will apply to public and non-public schools. After two weeks, there'll be a full evaluation. So, the earliest we could talk about – and I emphasize the word earliest – for the schools that closed on Tuesday, the earliest they could come back is Wednesday, October 21st. But, obviously, we'll be talking about it in advance of that to tell people what direction things are going in, if it looks like a reopening could happen earlier or that will be further delayed. In the meantime, of course, all kids will have remote learning.

Now, testing – obviously, such a crucial piece of this. So, let's talk about testing in schools. For weeks now, we've been preparing for the medical monitoring that will be happening in every single New York City public school. That will be happening monthly. I want to make very, very clear – all staff, all students, we need full participation. It is a requirement of being part of the in-person school community. So, we're sending out additional guidance to parents to make that very clear. And we have sent out the forms to parents, both online and in paper, to sign up to get their children tested. This is good for everyone to know what's going on in each school. And, of course, every family will get the test results. You saw the great video the other day, how easy it is now, these tests are very quick, very easy. They're free. They're at the schools. We're sending out the information, again, urging all parents to sign that consent form, get it back immediately. Lots of parents now are responding. I want to thank all of you. We need everyone to respond. This medical monitoring, the surveying begins tomorrow, Friday, in some schools, and then it will grow out over the coming weeks.

Now, families, of course, have questions. We want to answer the questions. We want to listen to any concern a parent has an answer it. If they need to talk to medical personnel, connect them to medical personnel. We want to make it easy and clear. We're happy to have that conversation, whatever language a parent speaks. So, our job is to make sure the parents really understand why it's important and get their questions answered. And to help parents know that we want to answer their questions and to help give them clarity about this approach, we've put together a new video featuring our very own Health Commissioner. And I like to remind people, he is not only our Health Commissioner, he is a parent himself and his wife happens to be an assistant principal in our schools. So, he knows a whole lot about our schools and kids. So, here's the new video featuring our Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi.

[Video plays in background]

Well, I really appreciate Dr. Chokshi making that video and making it so clear. And he is the City's doctor. So, I think for all parents to hear directly from him is so important. And, look, this is for the regular testing, we'll be doing every month, every school within the Department of Education. And the State will be putting out their plan as well for a different approach. And that is the weekly testing for the schools in the yellow zone that the State determined. So, those schools that fall within those yellow zones, we'll have weekly testing. It's a different effort entirely from what we just described, the ongoing monthly in every school, all over the city. The weekly testing just in the yellow zone schools will begin next Friday, not this Friday, next Friday, the 16th. And that is going to be another crucial approach to help us know exactly what's going on and how to address things best. So, again, it all comes down to testing. And I want to keep emphasizing this for all New Yorkers – remember, remember the single biggest challenge we had in March, in April was lack of testing. In fact, we now know what we didn't know in March, that the virus had already spread widely in February. We couldn't know it because there was no testing in the amount we needed in New York City. We didn't have the ability to provide our own tests to people. There's plenty of time to talk about that history in the future. But what we do know is, where there is a lot of testing, it helps our health leadership to pinpoint the response to act quickly. The more people participate in testing, the more impact we can have. So, this is why as we have added more and more testing over the months, it directly correlated with our ability to turn around the situation and all those months where we've kept the positivity level for this virus so low. We need more and more testing than ever. And, in fact, even amidst the challenges we're facing now, some good news, that last week we conducted the highest number of tests since this crisis began. Last week in New York City, the most tests given to New Yorkers since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis – 250,000 tests for the whole city. We need to keep going. We need to keep making sure more and more people in every neighborhood participate in testing. Now, the good news is, the turnaround time for the results has now become the shortest we've ever seen. For citywide average turnaround, including for urgent care facilities, we're now at around a two-day turnaround. With results on average for test taken at Health + Hospitals facilities and Health Department facilities, meaning all public facilities, that turnaround is down on average to one day. So, that's a great improvement. So, everyone, testing, testing, testing – if you have not been tested, get tested. If you haven't been tested in a while, get tested. If you're living in one of the areas most affected, get tested. And if you need to know where, go to nyc.gov/covidtest or call 212-COVID19 to find those locations.

Now, let's talk about another crucial piece of fighting back against this danger of a second wave. And what we're seeing in these areas, we need, of course, in addition to clarifying rules and educating people and providing masks, we obviously need enforcement. So, we had teams out in the red and orange zone areas, 2,000 inspections yesterday, 36 summonses, 7,000 inspections since last week that led to 104 violations being given. Now, again, where we need to shut something down, we will. We've done that even before the State's declaration, we've shut down the stores when needed, we've shut down schools, both public, and non-public when needed. Wherever we need to, we will. And the rules now and the restrictions are even more clear. We're not looking to do anything painful for people. We know this is tough. We want everyone to work together and cooperate. We know for small business owners, particularly, it's going to be a really tough time, but we have to follow these rules and we will enforce them.

Okay, let's go over the daily indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 89 patients with a confirmed positivity level for COVID of 22.7 percent. Two, the new reported seven-day average for new cases, and that threshold is 550 cases – today's report, 526. And three, percentage of people tested positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report is 0.33 percent. And on the seven-day rolling average, today's number for the seven-day rolling average is 1.56 percent.

Let me say a few words in Spanish, but just before I do want to make sure people know that we're not having a press conference tomorrow and we'll resume next week. Monday is, in fact, a City holiday. So, the next scheduled press conference will be for Tuesday.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. Today with us we have Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps. Dr. Ted Long, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, Jeff Thamkittikasem, Director of the Mayor's Office for Operations, and Laura Wood, Senior Counsel and Advisor to DemocracyNYC. With that, we'll go to Gloria from NY1.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I want to ask you about the events that have taken place over the last two nights, specifically, if you think that was what's been, you know, failed communication, prevention strategy that has been coming out of your office and the Governor's office about these clusters is in some ways to blame for what we have been seeing in the last two nights? And just to, you know, respectfully, Mr. Mayor, I just want to ask, you know, what's going on here? You have what seems to be like a mob of people last night, attacking a journalist, a bystander the previous night, seemingly zero action from the police. They're not in this press conference today. How are you getting a hold of this situation?

Mayor: Gloria, first of all, I saw the video of the attack on Jacob Kornbluh – absolutely unacceptable. Disgusting, really. I mean, here's a journalist – you know, a journalist who really cares about doing the work of informing people what's going on and here's a mob of people attacking them. It's just unacceptable. There need to be consequences for that. The situation here, overall, is a very difficult one, because we're having to tell many communities of people that after the success we've had as a city, in some communities, we're going to have to turn back to where we were in the spring. No one wants to hear it. I understand, but we have to do it. The City and State are united on this. I do expect a clearer response, going forward. I think there were some issues, yesterday, honestly, in terms of both the NYPD’s and the approach of the City's legal team, understanding the State guidance and getting it right once and for all – that has to be corrected. We need a much clearer approach and I expect that to be corrected today before anything that happens this evening.

Question: Thank you. I wanted to – there seems to be some confusion on the schools as well and I just want to make sure I'm understanding this right. You said all of these schools, even if they are in the orange or yellow zones, they're also closed, not necessarily just the ones that are in the red zone?

Mayor: No, it's an important point. I appreciate the question, Gloria. We've delineated based on the State guidance the schools that need to close in the red and orange zones. I want to clarify – again, I put forward a proposal on Sunday, what I believed was the right thing. Obviously, it became the basis for what the State did, but the State had a different way of approaching the specific geography, naming it, etcetera. In the red and orange zones, those schools close for at least two weeks. We have alerted any school that hadn't already been closed, was alerted yesterday they needed to be closed today. Now, there are some schools that were in our original list of closures because our data, then based on ZIP codes, said it was important to close the schools in those areas to protect against a resurgence. We're going to keep those schools closed too, because the City believes fundamentally those schools have to be closed as part of the overall strategy. Generally, of course, there's a huge amount of overlap between the ZIP code strategy we put forward and the zone strategy the State ultimately chose, but where a school was previously told to close, it will keep closed for the two weeks starting now and then we will – or starting, I'm sorry, starting today, to close – and then we will assess at that point whether it makes sense to reopen them.

Moderator: Next up is Jen from the AP.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Jen. How are you doing?

Question: Okay. My first question is about nursing homes. Given what happened in spring here and elsewhere in the State, is there any talk at this point of beginning to institute restrictions on visitation or take other steps specific to nursing house?

Mayor: Yeah, that's a great question, Jen. Obviously, we've seen – and I'll let the doctors speak to this – that the nursing homes have been one of the most sensitive, if not the most sensitive part of this whole crisis from the beginning. So, we're going to look to the State for guidance on that. The State regulates nursing, obviously. The State is determining these rules. We will work with them in every way. We tried through the worst of the crisis to support nursing homes with PPE and any other support we could give and we'll continue that. But in terms of restrictions, that's a decision the State has to make. We have to be really, really careful with our seniors living in nursing homes and the people who work there. So, Dr. Varma, would you like to – or, Dr. Choksi, would you like to add to that?

If Dr. Varma, you're on mute if you're speaking.

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Got it. Yeah – no, I'll make a one or two quick points and then maybe pass it over to Commissioner Chokshi. You're absolutely correct that our nursing homes are a critical place where we need to strengthen our prevention measures always and maintain them as much as possible. For reference, there has been continuous and ongoing testing going on in the nursing homes not just of the residents, but also of the staff that work there. And so, our nursing homes have been a continuous place where we've been working to strengthen and improve surveillance and testing throughout. At this point, the nursing homes do not appear to be a contributing factor at all to the resurgence that we're seeing in various parts of Brooklyn and parts of Queens. But if, of course, it remains an area in which we are continuously communicating and working closely on.

Mayor: Go ahead, Jen.

Question: I think – I guess my second one would be –

Mayor: I'm sorry, Dr. Chokshi. I apologize. I jumped too quick, Jen. Dr. Chokshi, do you want to add?

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: No, sir. Mr. Mayor, I think you guys covered that at once. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Jen.

Question: Okay, great. I guess thinking about the objections to the new restrictions in some of the places where they're being implemented, do you worry about citywide whether there's a level of fatigue after the spring - it is going to make it really hard to persuade anyone to go through it again? And if so, what do you do about it?

Mayor: I would say no, if the question is, do I think we can beat this back and do I think all New Yorkers will be a part of beating it back? I'm absolutely convinced we can beat it back and the vast majority of New Yorkers will participate, they've done it before. The vast majority of New Yorkers are continuing to follow these rules, even as things got better. So, no question in my mind after everything we went through and also just the toughness of New Yorkers, the fact that people in New York City do think communally, people in New York City do think about their neighbors, they do think about something bigger than just themselves, we've seen it in crisis after crisis. So I'm very confident we can beat this back but at the same time, of course, there's going to be some fatigue, and of course it gets harder to do this with every month. And, in some ways, it does lead people to let their guard down a little bit, and that always leads to the potential of the disease coming back into our lives. But what's very different here than other places that are seeing these widespread resurgences, I think that we've had particular devotion to the data and the science here. We talk about every day, we put it out very publicly. There's a wide level of understanding amongst New Yorkers. New Yorkers never really let down their guard and continued to be cautious and continued to follow the rules overwhelmingly. So, of course, there's some fatigue, but not the kind of fatigue that has to lead to a resurgence. We're sounding the alarm and I believe the vast majority of New Yorkers are going to hear it and act on it. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up, we'll go to Marcia from WCBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: Good Marcia. How are you?

Question; I’m great. I have a question for you. It has to do with what appears to be different levels of policing, depending on where the demonstration was. For example, two weeks ago in Washington Square Park, there was a heavy police presence, police in riot gear on bikes, a lot of arrests, but the last two nights in Borough Park there's been very few police officers present. The picture shows a little less police presence or gentler or decision to deal with the community that way, no arrest either night, and I wonder why there appears to be a difference in the response to – in Borough Park compared to previous demonstrations?

Mayor: Well, I would say, first of all, Marcia, I want to say – the framework of what I've seen with my own eyes now for months. The vast majority of demonstrations in the city of all persuasions all across the political spectrum over the last six months or more have been peaceful, and the NYPD has had a presence, but has stayed back, and of course, let peaceful protest continue. That's been the norm for decades in the city. That's how it's been the vast majority of times. Anytime, unfortunately, where there has been violence towards individuals, towards property, of course, violence towards police officers, unacceptable, all of that unacceptable, there's been more response. What we have here is something where we absolutely must have consistency of response. We have to ensure that all communities are treated the same way.

I think we had a difference last night than the night before. The night before was something that was not expected in terms of a crowd and there was very limited police presence. Last night, my understanding is there was much more police presence, but as I said earlier this morning, we need to get very clear. We're in a different situation now it's the first time we had the re-imposition of restrictions since this crisis began, that comes with additional legal tools for the NYPD, the lawyers all have to get on the same page, the NYPD has to get on the same page with the lawyers, and I expect from tonight on a much clearer approach to enforcement. It's crucial all New Yorkers understand that everyone's going to be treated the same, in fact, where there's restrictions in place, the bar goes up, meaning it's going to be even more important to ensure that people are safe and the NYPD intervenes whenever there's a problem. Go ahead.

Question: But Mr. Mayor, people are saying that there hasn't been an evenhanded approach, that there was a lot of violence in the last two days, you saw fires, you saw people assaulted, no arrests, and the video that we have shows a very light police presence compared to numbers of other situations where there's been a heavy police presence. And I guess the question also is what's going to happen tonight? What – we know the rules are now in effect, if it means that you can only have 10 people in a synagogue and there's no mass demonstrations. So when – if there's a demonstration tonight, what are you instructing the police to do? And what do you say to people who say that there is an uneven response?

Mayor: Again, Marcia, I disagree with you on the level of presence based on the reports I received that there was much more police presence last night than the night before, but what I think is absolutely right, is we need a very, very clear message to all the communities affected and to the people in New York City about how tonight is going to be handled. Again, instructing the NYPD and the Law Department and the legal experts on this to get together, come up with a single clear standard, put it out publicly today, so everyone knows exactly what will happen. We must have consistency in our approach to these issues in every part of the city and that's what we'll do.

Moderator: Next up we have Michael from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Michael, how are you?

Question: I'm good. So, I got a couple of questions. The first one has to do again with the situation we saw last night in Borough Park over the last couple of nights, and so I wanted to ask you why haven't any arrests been made in this attack that was caught on tape? And just to piggyback on that you know, there've been charges that the response in Borough Park has been anti-Sematic at which, you know, doesn't seem to be borne out by the facts, but I'm wondering what you think of those kind of criticisms that this kind of charge of anti-Semitism has been as being lobbed at the city?

Mayor: That trying to save lives, Michael, we're trying to save everybody's lives in every community. We're trying to protect people from a virus that took the lives of tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and that shut down this whole city. This is only about the data and the science, and we're applying it evenly to all communities with respect, with understanding, there's been dialogue for weeks and weeks with community leaders, engaging them, warning them of the danger, trying to get everyone involved to help address it, and overwhelmingly people have gotten involved, have worked together, and I expect that the vast majority of people will keep working together to overcome this.

Moderator: Next up, we have Ari from The Forward.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Ari. How are you doing?

Question: I’m been doing all right, thank you. I want to ask about this question of legal issues between the city's legal team and the Police Department. I've been watching your press conferences and the rules seem fairly clear. So, what are the issues between as you described it, the city lawyers and the NYPD? What is not being communicated or what needs to be communicated, what needs to be determined?

Mayor: Ari, it's a fair question. I'm not going to get too far into the weeds, but I'll just give you the overview point. I do understand we've had a situation where we have gone through different phases of this crisis. For the last month, we had a sustained period, three, four months where things were pretty stable and the question of how protests should be handled again across the political spectrum. We've seen every kind of protest, what we saw on Staten Island over the weekend, to what we've seen in Washington Square Park, whatever you name it, we've seen the whole spectrum and what those rules of engagement were in a period of time when we were in a much better situation with the coronavirus, but still obviously dealing with all the normal questions of health and safety and order and what are the right rules of engagement?

Now, we have something new. We have specific zones delineated not just by the city, but by the State of New York in response to a health emergency. I think there still needs to be clarity about what that empowers the NYPD to do, not only vis-a-vis various specific things in these rules like stores, for example, but specifically on the topic of protest. I do understand there's a nuance there. Again, I think that should have been resolved yesterday. It needs to be resolved today. So, my clear instruction that I've sent out through my team is NYPD, Law Department, everyone else pertinent, same page. If we need any consultation with the State, do it now, announce it this afternoon exactly how things are going to go down, apply those rules consistently, let the people see that consistency across any and all communities. Go ahead, Ari.

Question: Thank you. I also wanted to ask about something you mentioned as well earlier about trying to communicate the rules about the new restrictions to the affected communities, especially to the Orthodox communities. There's a lot of widespread frustration of these communities with the restrictions, there's a lot of skepticism about the state testing results. There's a widespread assumption that the community has herd immunity. What is the plan other than speaking to community leaders to communicate the science and the necessity of these restrictions, or is it – or are you leaving it to the community leaders to try and make that case for the importance of the restrictions?

Mayor: Well let me say this the – first of all, there is no herd immunity. We've been over this, but I think it's really important to say, and I want a Dr. Chokshi to speak after me about that. Second of all, the tests are absolutely crucial. They tell us a lot, this whole assumption that somehow the tests are faulty, just isn't true. The test tells us what we need to do to be able to protect people and that's been true throughout this whole crisis. We have deeply engaged community leaders. I know Dr. Katz is not with us now, but he has led the way in conversations with so many community leaders over weeks now, giving them answers and yes, depending, particularly on committee leaders to turn around and reach their constituents, that they are the known and trusted voices in their community. We want them to help get the word out, but obviously the Health Department, H + H, Test and Trace, everyone's been out there on the ground in multiple languages, spreading the word directly, and we constantly try to answer people's questions and the best answers come, of course, from the health care professionals, both the city health care leadership, but also we've engaged a lot of community health care providers, doctors, and nurses, and other health care providers in the communities, of the communities, to speak out as well and educate people directly at the grassroots. Dr. Chokshi you want to add?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. Thank you. And thanks for the question, which allows us to – yes, reinforce some of the facts for the situation. Number one is there is no herd immunity in any of the neighborhoods where we're most concerned or any other neighborhood in New York City. This is so important to ensure that people understand that unfortunately the coronavirus continues to be very infectious, continues to spread and so we have to take the precautions that we are embarking upon. Number two is that we know from multiple different types of data that there has been an increase in cases, there has been an increase in the proportion of tests coming back positive in the areas that we are most concerned, particularly in the red and orange zones in the State designation. And that's why, you know, we have been communicating those results over the last few days, but also the last few weeks as we started to see uptakes in those numbers that had us very concerned.

With respect to outreach, I'll just add one thing to what the Mayor said, which is to emphasize that beyond all of the outreach that has been done to community leaders and faith leaders and leaders of private schools and other core institutions in these communities, we have worked very hard in partnership with the trusted clinicians, the health care providers who have been taking care of people in these neighborhoods. And what we hear from them is along with us, you know, a growing sense of concern and alarm, because they know what will happen if we don't get this growth in cases under control, like all of us who have been doctors over the last few months, we've seen so much suffering and tragedy, and this is our chance to try to prevent as much of it as possible. So, we've done that in a way that communicates our guidance, you know, our public health evidence, as well as our clinical guidance. We do webinars with health care providers. We also work with them to ensure that testing is as accessible and available as possible. And so, for example, the Test and Trace Corp. has delivered testing machines to those trusted providers so that patients who are coming to them are also able to get tested as rapidly and as expansively as possible.

Mayor: Thank you very much, doctor.

Moderator: Next up is Chris from Gothamist.

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor, first question for you is what are the city’s contact tracers seeing in these hotspots ZIP codes in these areas? How many people testing positive or responding to the contact tracers? And has the city pinpointed exactly where the virus is spreading? Is it in schools, is it in large indoor events? Is it in – what specifically is it causing the spreads?

Mayor: Let me – Chris, I appreciate the questions. I'll turn to Dr. Long to describe the specific efforts of Test and Trace Corps, and what they're experiencing, and then Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi can join in on the bigger point. I just say, as the layman here in the crowd, I don't think it's as simple as everything's coming from one place or another. I think we are seeing obviously with the number of areas of Brooklyn and Queens effected, something that transcends the narrow reality. For example, you know, at various times we've seen a situation where maybe there was a specific school or a specific event that was an area of concern. We've talked about that in the past, this is something much bigger and it's not just New York City. It is throughout the metropolitan area, and there's been obviously an interplay between Brooklyn and Queens with areas of Nassau, Orange County, Rockland County, even New Jersey. So, this one, I think, is a bigger reality and we have to address it very aggressively and quickly to ensure that it is contained. So, Dr. Long first, followed by Dr. Varma, and Dr. Chokshi.

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you, sir. So, in terms of contact tracing, what we're seeing a lot of transmission among close contacts and among household members. In particular, in terms of the results we've seen when we add to the actual tracing is we've, we have contracts with 39 community based organizations to get the word out about what we're doing, why it's important and how working together will suppress the coronavirus if we do this together with our communities. That's resulted in – 80 percent of people, when we call them, are picking up the phone, we're reaching 80 percent. Across the rest of New York City, we're reaching a higher number, 90 percent. So, we have a little bit more work to do there with our communities. But interestingly, among the communities of concern that we're referring to here, we called in every single day, every case that we talked to, everybody we knew was diagnosed with coronavirus, and they actually are more compliant, meaning they confirm more often for us, 98 percent of the time – all cases confirm for us that they are isolating appropriately at home, are not going out there risking transmitting the virus to others. So, we have a bright spot there that our communities, when we're able to get through to them, they do understand the concern here. Our CBOs are educating them about why this is important and that we can work together.

Mayor: Go ahead, Dr. Varma, Dr. Varma, are you on mute? This is a running joke here. Do we have him or not?

Senior Advisor Varma: Can you hear me now?

Mayor: There you go.

Senior Advisor Varma: Okay. Yeah, just a few additional points, because I think this is a very critical question. You know, in addition to the data that the Ted reported about the contact tracers, I think another trend that we're seeing is that the proportion of people that are reporting that they recently traveled as a risk factor has declined over the past few weeks, and this is an implication then that we're getting more transmission locally here in New York City, as opposed to imported, and then related to that, also the proportion that don't actually recall any specific factor that might have caused their transmission such as having a known contact or, or having been to a recent gathering has also increased slightly, and those two things are what has led us to be concerned about both local transmission, as well as specifically in these areas, what we call widespread transmission when there are enough ways in which you can get affected that it's difficult for people to recognize what the specific factor is, and that's what really triggers our need to do these much more aggressive community measures.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Chokshi: No, sir. Nothing to add.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead, Chris.

Question: Okay, thank you, and my second question is about, I know that you said that the NYPD is working out differences in policing, different of protests across the city, and making sure that they are adhering to guidelines, but what's happened over the past few nights is violent, and our reporter was out there last night, the night before – this is violence happening against individuals in sight of the NYPD, and so I'm wondering, have you spoken directly to Commissioner Shea about this? Did you talk to him last night? Did you talk to him this morning? And do you think it's acceptable that these actions are happening in view of the Police Department and nothing is being done about it?

Mayor: No, obviously I don't. So, Chris, I spoke to Commissioner Shea multiple times yesterday. I spoke to First Deputy Mayor fuller hand this morning. There is something here that needs to be fixed right away, and that's why I'm being abundantly clear. It will be fixed today and made public. Violence is unacceptable, regardless of who commits it, it's unacceptable. What I saw – the attack on Jacob Kornbluh was unacceptable and there clearly need to be consequences for the people involved, and I don't know why that hasn't happened already and it needs to happen. So, we will get this right. I understand it's a very complex situation, again, under a new set of rules, but we still need to get it real clear, real public to everyone. So, everyone knows to expect, and that will happen today. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next up is Reuvain from Hamodia, and these are our last two questions.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I'd just like to ask you about the protest gatherings – mass gatherings are illegal now, but during the summer you said that you would give an exception to the rule against gatherings for protest. Those, of course, were anti-police protests – these are against the government restriction. So, I just wanted to know if the same rule applies that gatherings for purposes of political protests are allowed?

Mayor: Again, Reuvain, fair question. What we've had throughout is a difficult balance that the NYPD and the City of New York tried to strike between the health care realities and the American right to protest, the constitutional right to protest, and we have dealt with that in different periods of this crisis, and we've seen different realities throughout. 

We are now in a new situation. We're in a situation where we have state-mandated restrictions in particular areas to stop a resurgence, and that resurgence, if it is not stopped, will overtake the whole city and a lead to across the board set of restrictions on all of New York City. This is something we have not confronted before. We need to get very, very clear on the legal issues once and for all in light of this reality, and again, be very public about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in light of this new reality. Go ahead.

Question: I'd like ask you in the red zones. I believe the houses of worship, but limited to 25 percent of capacity or 10 people, whichever is fewer. Now, there are houses of worship that have a capacity of 50 people, and there are those that have the capacity of many hundreds. How does it make sense to limit, you know, a house of worship that has hundreds and hundreds of people in occupancy to just 10 people?

Mayor: Again, look, the state is determining these rules and they are doing it. I'm certain from a perspective of an abundance of caution, because we have an immediate urgent challenge that I remind you if addressed aggressively by everyone, not just government, by people in the community could be resolved in a matter of weeks, and then the restrictions could be lifted. So, I will let the State speak for itself about how it determined these rules, but I want to affirm the underlying understanding that I have on the State's approach, which I agree with, which is we need to quickly work together to stop this from becoming a bigger problem for all communities, and that can be done in a matter of weeks. So, to be rigorous to stop it now is smart policy – it’s the sane approach to protect people's lives.

Moderator: Our last question will go to Henry Goldman from Bloomberg.

Question: It's good to see you, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you doing Henry?

Question: I'm doing well. I hope you are too.

Mayor: Thank you.

Question: The seven-day rolling average of new cases is approaching 550. It's now at 526, the line graph is going up. What happens if the new reported cases hit 550 or exceed it?

Mayor: Yeah, let me give again, I'll be the layman who offers the simplest explanation and then Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi can jump in. You see three measures now that we're talking about regularly, that we really have resolved are the clearest, most helpful, and obviously there's some real difference in the measures at this point. We thank God we know there could be some big challenges ahead, obviously in terms of hospitalization, but right now it remains overall low. The case numbers have gone up a lot, but that is also due Henry to a lot more testing than we've ever had. As I announced – a quarter million tests last week, we've never gotten to that level before in the daily percent positive. Obviously the most compelling number is the seven-day rolling average on a daily positivity. That's at 1.56 percent today for the whole city. We want that to go down for sure, but compared to so much of this country and compared to much of the, that would be considered, you know, an outstandingly low percentage.

So, overall, I think we are very clear about our direction, our ability to keep things in check. But what we do know is certain areas of city need deep restrictions to ensure that we don't have a bigger problem. So, I would say if it was not such a localized problem, we'd be having a different discussion. If all of these indicators were moving in unison, we'd be having a different discussion, but right now we know the thing we need to know, which is where's the problem. What do we have to do about it? And that's what we're acting on. Dr. Varma?

Commissioner Chokshi: Allow me to start Mr. Mayor. This is Dr. Chokshi.

Mayor: Go ahead, Dr. Chokshi, and thank you for the question Henry. Yes. we are watching the indicator with respect to newly reported cases very closely, and as you've observed, it has gone up in recent days. As the Mayor said, this is primarily due to what's happening in the areas that we are most concerned about, and that we have been communicating about – anywhere from about 25 to 30 percent of the of the cases in the entire city are concentrated within those areas of greatest concern, and so that represents what's happening with the citywide numbers as a whole. I'll say each indicator tells us something a bit different. This one in particular, the newly reported cases, is a way that we can see the overall level of infection, but then we have to match it up as a Mayor was saying to what's happening with test positivity, but also with our understanding of what's happening geographically, and so that's, what has, you know, painting that whole picture through the different indicators is what's led us to taking the actions that we're taking the localized restrictions in the areas of greatest concern, ramping up all of our testing citywide, continuing to watch the other indicators, not just in those areas of greatest concern but also in other neighborhoods, citywide as well.

Mayor: Thank you, doctor. Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah, I would just briefly note that, you know, the reason we originally settled on these milestones and the threshold was because we wanted to use them like warning lights – you know, signals that would tell us that we needed to take stronger action, and I think the important aspect here to understand is that we actually took action and very strong action, even before these warning lights flash, because for all the reasons that you've heard from the Mayor and from the Commissioner we really focused and identified early on that this was largely being driven in one geographic area, and that's what led us to take our actions.

Mayor: Good. Go ahead, Henry.

Question: My other question has to do with access to the city data. For more than a month, I've been trying to get the data on seven-day average infection rates and new cases by ZIP code. This is obviously data that the city has, and yet you don't release it on request, nor do you post it on your website. It would be very helpful and transparent for the people of New York to know, ZIP code by ZIP code, what the seven-day infection rate is, and what the level of new cases is on a seven-day rolling average, you have the data, why wouldn't you share it with me and the rest of the public?

Mayor: All right, let me start and turn to Dr. Chokshi. Henry, look again, we put out data constantly to the people of this city, and I want to thank our health care team. They've done immense work from early in this crisis to put out lots of information. This was one of the first places in America to identify and acknowledge the disparities we were seeing in the impact of the coronavirus and to talk about things like the reality of those we lost, who probably died from the coronavirus, even though other measures were saying that they weren't officially people who had died of coronavirus. I think the Health Department has been outstanding about going the extra mile for transparency. So, I really do feel we've put out a lot of data and consistently are putting out data by ZIP code and broken out clearly. On that specific question. Dr. Chokshi, could you speak to that?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir, and thank you for the question Henry, and thank you for your interest in our data. We strive to be the most transparent jurisdiction certainly in the entire country, if not the entire world, with respect to the data that we are sharing with the public. That's why we have cases, hospitalizations, deaths, you know, by geography, by age, cumulatively as well as over a more recent period as well. We were the first jurisdiction to have shared our antibody test results as well, but allow me to take your specific question, which is how do we think about sharing recent neighborhood level data? And you know, one of the things that we have been sharing, particularly as we've been more concerned in these specific neighborhoods is 14-day averages. Just one, you know, small technical note – because some of the numbers are so small. We think it's a better measure of what's happening to look at 14-day averages rather than a seven-day averages, although they tell us different things. The final thing that I'll say is that we are in the process of making additional updates to our website, which will have more refined versions of a recent data at the neighborhood level, and you can expect that in the coming day.

Mayor: Dave, would you please do a follow-up with Henry just to make sure that everyone's communicating on exactly what he's asking for and if that is part what you're going to be able to do in the next few days, and let's obviously announce it when that data is ready.

Okay. Everyone, look, I'll conclude with a point about what we all have to do here together. We all have to work in common cause, and we all have to lead by example. This is a reality where we have a threat, we have a challenge. We've had them before in the city. We've overcome them – many different kinds of challenges. But what is clear, time and time again, is when people get united to fight a problem, we are able to fight that problem back. We are able to overcome it and people have to show that they are all in the battle together. So every time you put on a mask, you are joining in common cause with your fellow New Yorker, every time you practice social distancing, every time you use hand sanitizer, all these basics really matter, and we owe it to each other, and this is a place where every kind of person in the world joins together, and with shocking harmony, I always talk about the fact that if you put this mix of people, almost any place else in the world, that it might not be the great success story New York City always has been, but here we make it work, and not only in good times, here we come together to overcome challenge after challenge – people gathered together across all backgrounds after 9/11 or after Sandy or all the challenges we faced. So, here is a time for unity and a sense of common cause and everyone who participates helps everyone else. We do that, we will stop this problem we're having – we'll stop it before it spreads, and we'll protect this city. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-09 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It’s the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone, and now it's time for our weekly “Ask the Mayor” segment – my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio, Fridays at 11:05, okay, it's 11:06 – 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or tweet a question, use the hashtag #AskTheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How you doing?

Lehrer: I'm doing all right, thank you. So the streets of Borough Park were restless on Wednesday night, including violence against at least one reporter, an Orthodox Jewish man himself from the Jewish Insider, Jacob Kornbluh, who had reported on resistance to social distancing. How were things last night?

Mayor: Definitely a different situation last night, so I want to speak about that, but let me speak about Jacob. First. I spoke to Jacob yesterday morning and Jacob Kornbluh is a very respected reporter who really tries to let his community and all New Yorkers know what's going on. What happened to him was absolutely unacceptable. It was disgusting to watch. It was troubling to watch. It was painful, and I checked in with Commissioner Shea earlier and an arrest is expected in that case shortly, and obviously that just can't happen. You cannot have someone assaulted for trying to actually report the news to everyone that situation and other situations led to the need. I spoke about in my press conference yesterday to clarify the rules, this is a different situation than we've ever encountered. We went through the initial crisis. We things got better. This is the first time we've had to reimpose restrictions. So we worked with our Law Department to get very clear and guidance was sent out to all police officers yesterday afternoon, it's been made public, making very clear what is allowable and what is not allowable during this state of heightened restrictions as part of the larger state of emergency we're dealing with, and last night was much quieter. We did not have any major problem in any of the areas affected.

Lehrer: As with any such incidents. I don't want to paint any largely peaceful protest with the actions of a few fringe individuals. If that's all it is, how much is that all it is as far as you can tell, and as far as what you would anticipate?

Mayor: Well, look, we're talking about a very big swath of Brooklyn and Queens, overwhelmingly, Brian, people have respected the need to address this problem. There's been a lot of communication over the weeks, leading up to the imposition of these restrictions. There were a lot of warnings that things were going in the wrong direction and a lot of urging of people to buckle down with social distancing and wearing mass more and more people have been doing that. Community leaders, overwhelmingly you know, well respected community leaders, faith leaders, civic leaders in those communities have spoken up. Elected officials have said, we all need to work together. We all need to address this very few people have been speaking against this. They tend to be, as you said, I think fringe is the right word, a small group of folks you know – right on up to people denying there even is the coronavirus, which is particularly troubling and unhelpful to everyone. But the vast majority of community leaders and institutions have been very much engaged in trying to get everyone to accept these rules, and hopefully it only for a few weeks, and there've been in the scheme of things, very few people protesting.

Lehrer: Gothamist reporter Jake Offenhartz has video that he describes as police joking around Wednesday night with the same men who just beat up a reporter. There's also a still photo making the rounds of NYPD officers in masks, posing for a shot during the protest with a smiling and maskless populist protests leader Heshy Tischler. What the heck were they doing there, Mr. Mayor?

Mayor: I want to see those and I'll make sure that anything that's public domain. I want to see today and I want to discuss with the Commissioner. That's just not acceptable, obviously. Anybody who is inciting negativity, division, violence, who's openly disobeying the laws of the City and the State, obviously that's not someone to fraternize with. So I have not seen those images, but we will address that situation based on, you know, the specific information for sure.

Lehrer: Santos in Park Slope, you’re on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Santos.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I'm also, I know where you live, so I guess we're homeboys here, but I'm calling for a very serious matter. My wife has dementia and she would be going to a senior –it's not only seniors, but it's a day program for people with dementia, et cetera, as it's called the New York Memory Center, it's on 11th and 4th – no 14th and 4th. Anyway they've been closed down since the I guess since the beginning of the pandemic, when we had the whole close-down and they're basically hanging on by their fingernails. This is the only chance for my wife to have any kind of socialization and like her, there are many, so I'm wondering this is not a medical unit. This is a socialization unit, and I was wondering when these programs will be opened up?

Mayor: Santos, what street do you live on in Park Slope? I'm in St. Mark's – St. Mark's Avenue between 5th and 6th. Okay. So let me, would you please give your information to WNYC? I hear you loud and clear, and I really want to make sure that we can provide some help for you and your wife, and obviously those kinds of day programs, everything involving, for example, senior centers, a lot of things have been kept close out of tremendous sensitivity. What happens with seniors in this disease, but that's starting to be changed now, as we have in general in the city done better, fighting back to disease, notwithstanding our current challenge. So I want to help you find some kind of support for your wife that works in this moment and give us your information. I'll have my team follow up with you directly.

Lehrer: And I guess the larger question is kinds of facilities can open and what kinds of facilities need to close with respect to COVID safety, right?

Mayor: Yeah, and look, we learned very painfully Brian that – we saw horrible things in nursing homes, obviously in particular. We closed down the traditional senior centers where seniors often went for lunch and different activities. Those still have not reopened in that form. There's tremendous sensitivity about folks who are older and folks with preexisting major conditions because of the nature of COVID, and we want to be really careful about that. But again, before, you know, the last few weeks we had made really steady progress fighting back this disease, we're going to resume that progress. I don't have a doubt in my mind, and we've got to start opening up as much as we can safely, and with whatever restrictions, like for example, we had cooling centers over the summer that a lot of seniors went to and – but they were very careful about the six-feet distancing and the mask and all that went very well, very safely. So we've got to figure out how we can start to restore some of these carefully over the coming months.

Lehrer: Joseph, on Staten Island, you're on WNYC with the Mayor.

Question: Hi, how are you? First of all, I got to say that I'm a big fan of your show and I love it very much, and it's a lifeline to New Yorkers, and I want to tell the Mayor I'm a big supporter of him, and I had been for a while. I have a question because I'm a retired teacher. My wife is currently a teacher and she's teaching remotely, okay, and we had some struggles with that. But we went out, we bought a new computer, we bought a desk, we set up a whole office for her, and now we find out with five days to go that the lump sum back payment for teachers that we were supposed to get in about a week is not going to come and we spent that money on preparing the office. So I was wondering what the Mayor’s position, I know the city is under a fiscal strain, you know, fiscal stress, but it seems like the teachers are always the ones that bail out the city and, you know, we need the money and, you know.

Mayor: Hey, man, Joseph –

Lehrer: Hey man, let me clarify, and tell me if this is an accurate classification for our listeners. As part of the contract with the teacher's union, there were supposed to be retroactive payments for work done in the past and so they came to very much expect that that money was going to be paid. And because of the fiscal strain on the city, you're canceling some of that money that had already been negotiated. Is that a fair telling?

Mayor: Well, it's postponed. It's not something we can do now. And look, I want to first say to Joseph, thank you for what you and your wife had both done for New York City and for our kids, and I'm hearing your story very humanly and personally, and it's painful. I'm very sorry you're going through that, and I'm very sorry for everyone because teachers are working so hard, educators, school staff, everyone's working so hard, they've done something truly heroic bringing back our schools for our kids. The problem is, I just need to put this in context, you know, when I came into office, the teachers had not been given a contract for years and years. The back pay issues had been ignored by the previous administration. We in 2014, one of the first things we did was came to – we come to a contract with the teachers, which included that back pay, and we've been paying it ever since.

The problem now is three things have not yielded a solution that we needed after the coronavirus hit, we lost $9 billion in revenue, the city situation has gotten more and more precarious. So I said, look, the federal stimulus is what will save us here. We'll all work for the federal stimulus. That House did its job, the Senate didn't. Then we went to Albany, and we asked for long-term borrowing. We thought we were going to get honestly, never gotten anything, no – no light at the end of that tunnel. So then we went to the unions and said, we need some kind of savings. We need something that's going to get us out of this jam so we can avoid layoffs because if we don't get something, federal, State, or from labor, we have to move to layoffs, which would be the single worst thing for Joseph and his wife for educators all over the city, for kids, for families, the worst thing in the world would be layoffs. We did not get those savings from the unions. Here was something we could do to stave off a crisis and stave off layoffs to withhold that payment. Obviously people should get that money eventually, but we can't afford it right now given that nothing else has come to support us. So we've said we're not in a position to make that payment right now. The union invoked immediately it's right to go to arbitration. They do have that legal right. That arbitration is happening immediately. The arbitrator will decide what happens with those payments. That is the legally binding right of the arbitrator.

Lehrer: I guess they're arguing that this is different than any expenses going forward. This was money that was already negotiated so that people were depending on.

Mayor: And I do fully understand the frustration and the pain that it causes. The problem is if I don't find some way to get relief for the people of this city and for our city budget, the next step is layoffs. And that – look we announced in June, the potential is as many as 22,000 layoffs. That would devastate our city agencies, that would devastate a lot of families, that would set back our city's recovery. So this is a case of a very unfortunate choice I have to make, but literally we have run out of options. We did not get a stimulus. We did not get long-term borrowing from Albany. We did not get the savings from the unions. This is something we have to do. We're, you know, a bad, bad - if when you think about it, it's a bad situation for everyone. This is not something I want to do, but what would be even worse is if I had to authorize layoffs.

Lehrer: Question from a listener via Twitter. A listener asks, I live in Forest Hills. We demand data that proves COVID is spreading in schools, otherwise open our schools. What do you say to that listener in Forest Hills?

Mayor: I appreciate the concern, obviously, I was a public school parent and I've been putting everything I had into getting our schools open. I want to tell that listener, first of all, if we all do this right, we're talking about a pause of two weeks, you know, I hope no more – worst case in three or four weeks. Then, you know, school is back and we go through the whole rest of the school year. But I am following the lead of our health leadership, our Commissioner of Health and my Senior Health Advisor, the Head of Health + Hospitals, they all came to the same conclusion that we saw a very troubling uptick in a number of communities, that it was starting to spread to the surrounding communities, that we needed to reduce the amount of activities and that meant schools, that meant businesses, everything needed to be brought down quickly mimicking what worked in the spring when we had these widespread restrictions, just reduce activity, reduce travel, reduce people being outdoors rapidly, and if we did that fast enough and intensely enough, we could stop the spread from effecting the whole city and then reopen in these areas quickly. So I feel total empathy with a parent who's frustrated, but again, my hope is this is a very brief measure to get us through this problem and then get us back on track and most of the city, thank God, continues to this day – I'll tell you the indicators for today on overall testing, Brian, right now the overall testing in New York City last 24 hours, 1.16 percent positivity and our seven-day rolling average overall test in New York City, 1.66 percent. Those two measures, if that became the norm in New York City, we could certainly live with that. So the overall situation is very good, but in these specific areas we have a real danger we have to address. That's why we're taking this action.

Lehrer: Jonathan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Jonathan.

Question: Hi, thank you so much for taking my call, Brian and Mr. Mayor. I really appreciate everything that you both do for the city. I'm a public school teacher at a high school here just off Union Square and I've been teaching both remote and working with students in-person. And I'm concerned with our approach to high school in specific, public elementary and middle school students stay in the neighborhood for the most part, while high school students often travel all over the city, and I have kids coming from all five boroughs to our school. I'm wondering why are we allowing high school students to continue going to school in-person while they could be traveling from higher to relatively lower transmission neighborhoods, and do you think there could be a better approach for high school students that continues to support their needs while minimizing the likelihood of spread?

Mayor: It's a very fair question, Jonathan, and we're watching this very, very carefully. I talked to our health leadership constantly about the experience with students all over the world. Generally, what we've seen is, obviously with this disease much better reality with young people than with older people, but still there is a concern particularly about the high school aged kids. So what we've been doing is watching every school, 1,600 schools daily and doing a lot of testing around schools in the affected areas, and I'll give you a really amazing statistic, because this says something about what is, thank God, not happening our schools. We don't want it to happen. In 44 schools in the effected ZIP codes having the biggest problems right now in Brooklyn, Queens, 44 schools had testing in school. This is of staff and educators, 2,155 test results, we had only three positives. That’s a staggeringly good results.

So we're not seeing spread in schools. We're not seeing any unusual number of students or staff anywhere in the city testing positive. What I think is fair is the school environment has been made extremely safe, and I thank you and all educators and everyone in the schools, because with the social distancing, the face mask wearing by everyone, the cleaning, everything has been working in the schools. So we need to bring down the level activity in the areas most effective, that's why we're closing schools, both public and non-public there. But for the rest of the school system, we are not seeing anything that suggests a bigger problem, and we're trying to go by the science and the data here, and the data is telling us that so far, even at the high school level, we're doing okay and we obviously want those kids to have, you know, the positive influence of you and other educators to help them in this really tough moment in history. So, so far the overall system is doing very well.

Lehrer: And some parents emphasize that you're closing some schools where there have been no COVID cases at all. So what do you say to them about why that makes any sense?

Mayor: Same point, Brian – it's again, I think I can attest to after having been the person who stood up for the opening of schools against much opposition, and I said we had to open up our schools for our kids, especially the most needy kids, the great disparity we see is kids who needed the most help were suffering the most with remote learning and needed in-person education, and we did it. But in these particular neighborhoods where you're seeing positivity levels that have gone up, I think the average among them, according to what the Governor just said was 6.6 in the red zones today - 6.6 positivity versus what I just told you from New York City as a whole, a 1.16 today. We've had neighborhoods in those red zones go up as high as, you know, eight percent, nine percent. We've got to address that. That means shutting down activity across the board, and that's why we had to do it. But again for – I believe hopefully as little as two weeks, could be three or four, but a very limited period of time, bring down those schools, get the situation under control, reopen then immediately.

Lehrer: You and the Governor are both getting a lot of criticism now for the conflict between you and the chaotic and ever changing response by each of you individually, as people see it, rather than better planning. For example, an article in The Times today, after reporting on Borough Park, says other Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Windsor Terrace, parents railed – or rallied against the sudden closure of schools. And it says even as officials and religious leaders acknowledged the need to take action before the virus outbreak explodes into a full scale second wave, they bristled at the haphazard way the new restrictions were announced, giving some schools less than a day to shutdown after months of working diligently to open. And then it gives two examples, referring to Justin Brannan, Councilman whose district encompasses Southwest Brooklyn. It says many of Mr. Brandon's constituents send their children to Bensonhurst’s Academy of Talented Scholars, a school Mr. de Blasio closed on Tuesday that will remain shuttered, even though it falls outside of Mr. Cuomo’s school closure zones. And it says, conversely, in Windsor Terrace, students that were to start their third day of in-person learning at public school 130 on Thursday woke up to the discovery that their school was closed though Mr. de Blasio was prepared to let the school open, Mr. Cuomo’s office put the school in an orange zone, which required the restriction. So –

Mayor: Brian, I don’t know how long you want to keep making the point, but you've asked the question before about why some schools have been included and I answered –

Lehrer: No – well, the question this time is really about the chaotic nature of the rollout of this –

Mayor: No I disagree. Brian, it's just look, again, let's remember the last few weeks and you can editorialize, which is you're right, but I just think you have to differentiate fact from editorial. What did we say two weeks ago? This very day – this very day, the Health Commissioner said publicly for everyone that if there was not improvement in those communities quickly, amongst the things that might have to happen is the closing of public and non-public schools and non-essential businesses. People had a lot of warning. There were a lot of conference calls. There were a lot of meetings. There were a lot of explanations from our health leadership publicly and privately to community leaders, and we said these numbers, the data and science, what differentiates New York from the rest of the country in many cases, adhering to the data and science, acknowledging it publicly, constantly telling people what might have to result, and acting on it.

I agree if you say, well, the State and the City, did they have the same exact vision? No, you're absolutely right about that. On Sunday, I said, we're at a breaking point. We have to act. I don't have the unilateral power to act or I would have. I thought ZIP codes were a cleaner option. The State decided on a different model, that is their right. I would have liked it if it could have been one model instead of two different versions, but ultimately they were very similar. The State took our model and modified it pretty modestly, and then we had to act immediately. We didn't have the luxury of saying take your time, because there's a crisis. This is about saving lives and stopping the spread of this disease to the rest of the city. So I wish it was clean and easy, but this is very difficult stuff to manage. When you say ever changing, respectfully, the crisis is ever changing, Brian, it's not static. So when we got new information, we warned people. We tried to take all the steps for weeks. We were in Borough Park trying to get people tested, trying to encourage mask wearing, it didn't work the way it worked in other communities. I've said publicly, Sunset Park, we did the same approach, it worked. Soundview in the Bronx, Southeast Queens, every time it worked, turned around a problem, it didn't work in Borough Park and surrounding communities. So we gave people a warning and we acted on the morning. So I just would say the City and State, we have some differences, but we ultimately get pretty much to the same place and that's why overall, New York City was able to come back and we've been able to move forward, and this is going to be I think, a very brief, let's pray, a very brief setback.

Lehrer: We will all pray together for that one. We'll talk to you next week, Mr. Mayor. Thanks as always.

Mayor: Thank you, Brian. Take care.

2020-10-13 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. 

Look, we are coming off of a long weekend and it's a time that we reset and we prepare for a lot ahead. I hope everyone got a chance to get a little bit of rest and relaxation this long weekend. I can tell you, our City workers, our City agencies were hard at work this weekend as they have been throughout, protecting all of us, making sure that every effort is being expended to fight back the coronavirus. And there's been so much that's been done in recent days, the outreach efforts, the testing efforts, the enforcement, so much to make sure that we overcome the challenges we're facing now. And I'll go over a few facts with you, but I do want to let you know, there's some really encouraging news when it comes to the testing that's been done in our schools. That's a bright spot I'll talk about in a moment. But first, let's talk about the place where we're having the biggest challenge, which, of course, is in the red zone areas in Brooklyn and Queens. We're now on day-four of the pause in those areas and we are seeing some results. We've got certainly a lot of work ahead, but we are seeing some leveling off, beginning in the communities that have been most affected. And it's really about everyone in the community participating, it's about everyone understanding that it's all of our business to fight back this disease together and that individual buy-in and participation is the single most important tool – we've learned that long ago about the coronavirus. When people decide to make a difference, it counts for so much. So, this week will be absolutely decisive. I just want everyone to understand, this is a decisive week in our battle against the coronavirus. This is the week where we can start to turn the tide in those red zone areas and contain the problem that we're seeing there. I fundamentally believe this challenge can be contained. I fundamentally believe that we can stop this problem we're seeing in Brooklyn and Queens before it grows, that we can stop it from turning into a larger second wave in New York City. There is absolutely still time to do that, but it's going to take everyone's participation. So, all those efforts we're talking about – the outreach, the education, the testing, the enforcement, that's all going to be going full bore this week. And we're continuing to work with community leaders to encourage maximum public participation – all of this effort to turn back this disease.

Now, in terms of enforcement, very robust efforts have begun and they will deepen. Over the weekend, we had over $150,000 in fines through providing of over a hundred summonses by City agents in the red, orange and yellow zones. So, that enforcement effort will continue. But again, what we really want to emphasize is the positive – getting tested. This is the single most important part of the equation. We need folks to get tested. We are seeing an uptake in community testing. We want to encourage everyone to get tested this week. If you have not been tested recently, particularly in the red zone, orange zone and yellow zone areas, go get tested. There's lots of testing locations available. It will make a huge difference to everyone. Now, we know, as these restrictions are put in place, we know that obviously – a burden for everyone in the community. We want this to be a very brief period of time, only a matter of weeks. And many folks are feeling the effect, but particularly our small business owners. We really feel for them. And this was a tough part of the decision, obviously – I feel a lot for the small business owners who have fought through this crisis – seven long months, now into eight. And they've gone through so much, we need to help them in every way we can. At the same time, first and foremost, we have to protect everyone from this disease. So, there's a lot of questions among small business owners. How do they navigate this particular moment? And we've launched an online tool to help business owners get answers and all individuals in these zones get answers. The tool is online nyc.gov/covidzone. You can get answers there about what rules apply, where, what information you need and how you can get other answers that you need. And to give you a sense of the effort to reach out, to educate, to support small businesses, I'd like you to hear from our Small Business Services Commissioner. He is leading the way, helping small businesses through this crisis with his very dedicated team. So, let's turn now to Commissioner Jonnel Doris.

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. As you mentioned, from the beginning of this pandemic, we've been there on the front lines with our small business owners and the communities that they serve. They are the backbone of our city, employ the most employees in the city. And, certainly, we want to make sure that small business come back so our city again continues the resurgence out of this crisis. Here at Small Business Services, we have been into neighborhoods. We've been speaking to our businesses, but also we've recorded a message sent it out to over 200,000 individuals and small businesses. We sent out email communication and other types of communication to all small businesses in the red zones, the orange, and also a yellow – all the zones, to make sure that they are aware of the services that we can provide. We also met with business leaders, business improvement district leaders, merchants associations – again, trying to make sure that they have the necessary information that they need to get out of this situation and also to do it in a way that is aligned with our health experts. We've worked with the Department of Health and also the Office of Nightlife to, again, connect those businesses, who've asked for it, and for the support to connect them to the City services. We're conducting webinars in Spanish, Cantonese, English this week, again to inform our small businesses of all of the requirements, restrictions, and also the resources that we have here at SBS. We have spoken to small businesses concerning access to capital at this time, as many of them may need an infusion of cash to help and assist them. We've done that through our hotline and also to help them to navigate the lease challenges that they may have with landlord through our CLA program. Look, you are our highest priority here in the city. We want to make that you come back to our neighborhoods, continue to thrive, and we give you all the necessary information that you need.

So, before I end, I do want to say that – you know, it's important and imperative that you, as a small business owner, if you need assistance, that you do reach out to us. I was out in the Rockaways this past weekend, speaking to small business owners who've been impacted in the red zone and to hear that from them and the concerns that they have. We'll be out in Sunset Park and other places around the city where they’ve been impacted. But we want you to also know that you can reach us. You can reach us at nyc.gov/business, and you can also reach us at our hotline 888-SBS-4NYC. We've already had over 47,000 calls to that hotline. We will continue to monitor it, but we want to make sure that you understand that the New York City Small Business Services is here for you. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Thank you, sir.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Commissioner – 888-SBS-4NYC. I want to repeat that number because it's so crucial to any small business owner. Look, if you're having challenges, and there are many obviously, right now, but, as the Commissioner said, there's lots of solutions as well. There's lots of help that Small Business Services can provide it. And you mentioned the issue with leases – they've had some real success working with small businesses to renegotiate leases with landlords, to account for the challenges of this moment. So, any small business owner out there, if you're having a problem, you don't know where to turn, turn to the Department of Small Business Services, no matter what the issue is, they will try with every tool they have to help you through this crisis.

Now, let's talk about testing again. I mentioned at the beginning that we have seen some real good news in terms of testing in schools. And this has been a very positive reality from the beginning of our experience, bringing back our public schools. Look our educators, our staff, our parents, our students, everyone should be very proud of themselves, everyone at the Department of Education, because we brought back the nation's largest school system – was not easy, but we've done it. And one of the things that's been crucial is having lots of testing available. The testing we're doing, the careful work that's being done through our situation room to watch what's happening in every one of our schools. This has made a huge difference. Now, we've started our monthly sampling in every one of our schools, and this has just begun, it's going to grow, but we're seeing a very encouraging results and results that are consistent with what we've seen with the detailed testing efforts outside of schools. In even the hardest hit areas, we've seen very good results. We've seen good results through our situation room, but now we have a new measure, which is the beginning of this mandatory testing in every school. And this started Friday, and the first results are very encouraging. Testing took place in 56 schools, 1,751 adults and students tested, and we got only one positive test among almost those 2,000. So, that's really, really encouraging. And it says how important it is to constantly keep a lookout and constantly focused on testing. And so, in that vein – I want remind all parents, please sign and submit your testing consent for your child. Remember, the testing is quick, it's easy, it's free. It's available right there at the school or near the school. The results will be sent home to you so you'll know any time your child has been tested, what the results are. But it's good for everyone as well to keep this testing program going forward. So, families can either sign that form – paper form, or go online at mystudent.nyc, your own account and sign that consent. And, obviously, we need all the adults to sign consents as well. Teachers and staff can go on to sign their consents on the DOE website at healthscreening.schools.nyc. So, look, this has, from the very beginning, been the key issue, getting enough people tested and constantly acting on results. Good start in our schools – let's keep going. Let's go deeper. Everyone, please sign up right away.

Now, in terms of the concerns that families have, public school families have a lot of questions – good, important questions. We've been trying to answer them along the way. We want to give other opportunities for parents to get answers to their questions. So, tonight, from 6:30 to 7:30, a special event called NYC Office Hours. Just like your doctor has time you can go to the doctor's office, we'll do it virtually here, NYC Office Hours, with Dr. Jay Varma, who has a lot to offer in terms of information and insight. He'll be answering questions online and it can come from, obviously, parents, but also students as well about all the measures being taken to keep people safe and the concerns that people have. You can watch it on the Mayor's Office YouTube channel, Facebook, Twitter. You can submit your questions with the hashtag – #NYCofficehours. Get those questions in and Dr. Varma will give you answers.

Okay, let me go over today's indicators for the whole city. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 patients and today's report is 59 patients with a confirmed positivity rate for COVID-19 of 24.5 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases. Today's report is 520 cases. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide who are positive for COVID-19, threshold is five percent, today's report 1.9 percent. And today's seven day rolling average indicator is 1.48 percent. And again, a reminder, everyone, please get tested. It is a really crucial moment. We need everyone in the city who has not been tested to get tested. Anyone hasn't gotten tested recently, get tested. This is so important that we see exactly what's happening in the city. So please make it a point today. It's Get Tested Tuesday. It's a good day to get tested.

Now, a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Chokshi, by Commissioner Doris, Census Director Julie Menin, Sheriff Joe Fucito, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today, it goes to Andrew Siff from NBC.

Question: Perfect timing. A plane is going overhead, but we'll be able to ask that question momentarily.

Mayor: You sound good Andrew. We can hear you pretty well.

Question: Yeah. Mayor, I wanted to ask you said that this is a critical week in terms of the red zones and the new pause. Do you believe that you'll know that we'll know by the end of this week, if that two week minimum closure that you indicated is achievable?

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew, I think by the end of the week, we're going to have a very good idea of what's going on. If people do what we're all capable of doing, go out get tested where the mask, follow social distancing, by the end of this week, I think we're going to have a clear sense of whether this is working and whether we're in range to relax these restrictions after about two weeks. Obviously, it's a decision we'll make with the State. But that is definitely a possibility if everyone does what they need to do this week. Go ahead

Question: Question, you did indicate that there's been a leveling off. What's the statistical basis for that? What are you seeing? Is there a reduction in any of the neighborhoods, whether it's Forest Hills, Borough Park, where's the leveling off taking place?

Mayor: Yeah, so first of all, you're seeing it in the citywide indicators and you're seeing it also in the indicators as I've reviewed them with our Health team. And we've continued to review by our original construct with zip codes, just for consistency, with what we saw earlier. We're just seeing areas that were going up not going up anymore. It's not across the board. It's not perfect. We have a lot of work to do. But we're seeing a leveling off in the sense of not consistent increases and different results for different areas that encourage us because we see some starting to come down a bit.

Moderator: The next is Narmeen from PIX.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mayor.

Mayor: Good, how are you doing?

Question: I'm doing well. I'm wanting to first touch on those small businesses. I know you said there's all this help available through this hotline and I'm sure they're very thankful for that. But are there specific conversations about direct financial assistance coming from the City to help these small businesses? I know many have brought that up to us when we've been talking to them.

Mayor: No, I understand how needy they are after everything they’ve been through. Again, it goes back to our overall situation as a city. We're obviously in a very, very tough situation with our City budget. What we need, which would help everyone is a federal stimulus. As you've watched, those talks are on again off again. It's hard to believe there'll be one before the election. But my hope and prayer is that there will be one early in the new year. And that's where there should not only be aid to cities and states, there should be direct aid to small businesses. A much clearer and better aid program to put small businesses back on their feet so we can all move forward together. That's the best solution by far. But in the meantime, what the City is trying to do is use all the other tools at our disposal, whether it's helping small businesses renegotiate their leases or helping them tap into whatever funding streams are available out there or loan programs or anything that would help them to keep going. That's what Small Business Services is here for. Go ahead.

Question: Also wanted to ask you, you mentioned last week of other areas that were creeping up in concern for you. Does the Governor's map, color-coded map cover those areas of concern for you? I don't know if this is for you or the other Health officials on the call as well. Or are there ones that you believe might get the numbers, maybe the map get expanded to rather?

Mayor: We are watching that situation very carefully and we're going to analyze the data today and update people tomorrow based on it. The important thing to recognize here is that as we apply measures, it obviously has an impact. And we saw it before, you know, back in the end of the summer in places like Sunset Park, Soundview in the Bronx, Southeast Queens. We saw that when you go in with a lot of testing, a lot of outreach, it makes a real difference. I believe that same model ultimately is what wins the day here in addition to needing a lot of engagement of community leaders and institutions. And obviously in this case, the use of restrictions. So I'm very hopeful that we can turn the tide, but we're going to watch all the surrounding areas. And if we see any area of concern, we're going to talk about it publicly and obviously engage the State on it as well.

Moderator: The next is Sean Lee from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hi Mayor. Good morning. Hi. We've been hearing anecdotally from parents that the kind of back to school has been quite messy, including some that say they've been showing up to schools and there's been broken thermometers. You know, they haven't been able to actually take temperatures of kids correctly. How has the City been dealing with, in addition to testing you know, concerns that from parents?

Mayor: Yeah look, in the lead up to schools opening, we heard real concerns about making sure there were enough thermometers in place and they were all functioning. We sent a lot more supply out to schools. We've really been focusing on those wall mounted thermometers when the kids come right in the door and the thermometer is right there for them to use, and no one even has to touch it. Those have been real successful. In the beginning, right before school opened, there were real concerns. I'm not hearing those so much now, honestly. I think we were able to address that overwhelmingly, but any school that's having a problem should let our situation room know and they'll make sure to get the supplies out they need. I think overwhelmingly what I've heard from parents in school communities is that people have now gotten into the habit of either filling out those health screening forms, which is really the best thing to do every morning, either online or on paper. Or the kids knowing if they don't have that forum, they go straight to the thermometer when they come in the door. So I think that's been working well. I really want to give a special shout out to our School Safety agents who have really stepped up and play a crucial role when kids are coming in the door. Making sure every child has gotten their temperature checked. That's been a really helpful contribution to this effort. So thank you to all of our friends at School Safety for helping out in such a big way. Go ahead.

Moderator: Sean, do you have a second question? I think we're having some technical issues with Sean, that we can get back. The next thing – Sean, do we have you?

Question: Yeah. Sorry. no, I'm good.

Mayor: You are good? Okay. Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: Hey. Good morning everyone. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. My question involved early voting because it begins October 24th where you can go to the polls to cast your ballot. So if this shut down in the hot zones continues past the two week periods, will people be able to go to their polling places?

Mayor: Well, Juliet you, once again, you have a great pension for asking the important and practical question. And that's a very good question. This is something we're going to have to sort out. We obviously have a new situation here trying to make sure there is not a resurgence. So that's something that we will talk through with our Health officials and with the Board of Elections to figure out the best way to approach it. Obviously thankfully people have more than one opportunity. They can vote by mail if that's their preference. So, we know that's a fallback and early voting is available, but then of course there's voting on Election Day itself. So, there's more than one way for people to address this depending on what we see.

Question: Okay, great. Because people have been asking us about that. So, you know, when we get that answer, that would be great. My second question involved this current pause period. When you're satisfied that the numbers are down, are you concerned that behaviors will relax and that mask wearing will stop, large gatherings will resume? You know, people will have this whole sense that oh everything is fine, and we can just go back to our old behaviors?

Mayor: Yeah, absolutely. Juliet. I'm very concerned about that. And look, my hope and prayer here is that now that we've all been truly given an example of the dangers of letting this disease reassert, that everyone will be devoted to keeping it at bay. You've seen what's happened, unfortunately in Europe, you've seen what's happened in other parts of the United States where folks relaxed a lot and governments relaxed and unfortunately the disease reasserted, and you've got a full blown second wave. We cannot let that happen here. So I think the answer is, you know, when we get out of this immediate problem to keep intense education efforts, outreach efforts, free mask distribution, testing efforts and keep making very clear to people that there will be enforcement, particularly in terms of large gatherings. That's something we're going to have to do throughout.

Moderator: The next is Julia from the Post. 

Question: How are you doing? 

Mayor: Hey, Julia. 

Question: So, speaking of a different kind of testing in our public schools, a lot of parents feel like there's a total lack of information from the DOE so far this year. There's still no grading policy, no attendance information, no dates for State tests for middle school or high school tests, and no decision on screened school admissions. When can parents expect some basic answers on fundamental school issues now that we're weeks into the school year? 

Mayor: Yeah. Julia, fair question. I think the bottom line here is the first thing we had to do was get the nation's largest public school system up and running in a healthy, safe manner and work through very intensive logistics to make that work. We've obviously been dealing with the specific challenges lately in these zones, but now more and more attention is going to be turned to the very questions that you're raising. I think parents, again, understand we're in uncharted territory for this school year, hopefully only this school year, but we will get answers out to parents in the coming days and weeks on all those topics. And we'll make clear to them how to proceed, even though we're dealing with very, very unusual circumstances. 

Question: And then also on schools, do you have a breakdown of the student to staff ratio for testing that you just gave? And we've been trying to get out of the DOE for about a week now, the response rate on consent forms. Is that something that you either have or can get us? 

Mayor: I don't have either of those at my fingertips, we'll get that information as it comes in. Obviously, we want people to understand what's happening, but I'd say, understand that all of this is new. We all understand, we're trying to do things that have never been done before. We expect, in any situation like this, with every passing day, more and more people get information, they get their questions answered, and you see the level of engagement going higher and higher. So, this is all nascent. I think we're going to have a much better sense of how this is working over the next few weeks as we're able to really engage parents more deeply. Our parent coordinators, lots of other school personnel are reaching out to parents individually. So, we'll have information, but I think it won't give us a clear picture for the next few weeks.  

Moderator: The next is Yehudit from Boro Park 24 News. 

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?  

Mayor: Good, how are you?  

Question: Good. Thank God. Okay. So [inaudible] understand that preventing large gatherings is the key to breaking up the hot zone clusters, but I'm wondering what is your response as Mayor of New York City to what happened last Tuesday when Governor Cuomo first spoke to Jewish leaders and seemed to want to work with them and said that he would limit the houses of worship in the red zones to 50 percent capacity, but then a few hours later in a press conference, he kind of shocked the same Jewish leaders by sharply changing what he had said and dropped the maximum capacity to 25 percent maximum or 10 people. And so, I know you had nothing to do with this announcement, but I was just wondering as Mayor of the city and a former city Councilman for Borough Park, what is your response to the feeling of the Jewish leaders who feel kind of stabbed in the back by the surprise drastic reduction in the maximum capacity of synagogues right before our last days of our fall holidays. 

Mayor: Look, I understand the concerns that community leaders have. And I understand why people are really trying to grapple with a really tough situation here. And you're right, I did represent the community and have worked very closely with the community and understand why there's so much concern. That said, look, I put forward a vision of how we could address this situation. The State – I do respect the fact the State gets to make the ultimate decisions here in this time of emergency. And we're going to work with the State's rules in a constructive way, while always talking to community leaders and working with them to try and make it work together. It's in everyone's interest to address this problem as quickly as possible so we can take these restrictions off and get life going in a more positive direction. So, I understand the concerns, but ultimately, I think we can all overcome this challenge together. 

Question: Thank you. And then also I was – you know, obviously, compliance was an issue and we're all trying to get the numbers down. But yesterday Borough Park residents felt a bit [inaudible] by people from a wide variety of different agencies, giving out sometimes contradictory citations to what Governor Cuomo had said. There were – people reported seeing people from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Department of Housing, the Department of Environmental Protection, Department of Buildings, and even the Sanitation police were giving out citations. And sometimes they were giving out citations for offenses that Governor Cuomo did not sign in his executive order. For instance, that essential businesses must check customer's temperatures before admitting them into the stores. And so, we were just wondering is this bombardment of several agencies giving out mass citations kind of seemingly indiscriminately going to continue, or what is your response to that? 

Mayor: I appreciate the question and what would really be helpful if you can follow up with our team here at City Hall any specific instances so we can trace them back and make sure we understand exactly what happened and any modification that’s needed. Look, I've said this for days now – I mean, remember it was two weeks ago that we said even more that we said that, you know, there was a real danger growing from the numbers, from the data that we were seeing and warning the community there was a problem, and engaging community leaders. And then it got to the point where that danger manifested, and we had to call for the restrictions which the State ultimately did. So, there's really been an effort for weeks and weeks now to engage the community and overcome this problem. I did say there'd be a lot of different City agencies out because we do need a lot of enforcement. We do need a lot of outreach and education, so you will see a variety of agencies out, but I take your question to heart. The agencies all need to be working from the same set of rules. And if there's ever any example where that didn't happen, then we have to address that. 

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Yoav from The City.  

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you about the ZIP codes that were kind of areas of concern when you first identified all those neighborhoods by ZIP code. There were about 12 or so. I might've missed it earlier in the presentation, but I guess I'm wondering how those are doing, but particularly is the City and State going to get on the same page before any restrictions are imposed in those ZIP codes to decide, is this going to be done by cluster map or by ZIP code? Like, are you translating that before any restrictions are made?  

Mayor: Yoav, absolutely. Look, we felt that ZIP code was a clearer, more accessible way of judging things. But, again, in this emergency, the State gets to make the ultimate decision and they felt that the color-coded zones were more effective and we're working with that. So, whatever we see – we've kept paying attention to the ZIP code data because it gives us consistency with what we had weeks ago. And we're looking at those overall trends, but whatever emerges, one, of course, we're going to work with the State’s system for restrictions, and, two, any new decisions would have to be made with the State, unquestionably. Go ahead. 

Question: And also, just on the daily indicators, the reported COVID-19 cases, the seven-day average, it looks like on a day when you didn't have your press conference on October 9th it was very close to the line. I mean, essentially it looks like the city is poised to hit that line of 520 that you said. I'm just wondering, does that trigger anything automatic or what is the significance of crossing that line?  

Mayor: It's 550, is that number. The indicators are meant to give us a public measure that we all talk about openly, helping the people of the city to see where things are going so we all understand what to do in response. And I really want to thank our health care team and everyone who has focused – all of our folks who work to get out information and work with you in the media, the whole team at City Hall, because this has been what I really think should have been the model for the whole country, constantly putting out facts, putting out the data, letting people see for themselves and letting people know what they have to do in response to that data. Now, here we have three indicators we go over every day. And what you've seen is a little difference among the indicators, Yoav, the case numbers have gone up the most, but that's because, of course, very much intensified testing. I talked about a week before last, we had our highest testing week ever, 250,000 tests. That's, of course, going to increase your case number by definition.  

But what's interesting is the hospitalization numbers have been surprisingly stable. We're still keeping a close eye on that. And then the most important one, the positivity rate, we have seen some real concern, but also over the last week or so, we've not seen a major increase in the city positivity on the seven-day average, which is what matters the most. And that's a good sign. A lot of work to do. But I think the bottom line here is to see the three indicators in unison. If we saw something with all three of them, that really suggests a bigger challenge we have to address. In this case, what we're seeing is a challenge that we can address on a more localized manner. That's why I called for these restrictions. I think they are working. We've got a long way to go, but they're working. So, we used indicators citywide to tell us what's going on citywide. But the local indicators told us we needed immediate forceful action. And since we've applied that action, we're seeing a positive impact and some leveling off on the citywide level. And that's what we have to keep doing.

Alright, everyone, look, as we conclude today, I want to talk about tenacity for a moment. Folks in this city, every single day, show how tenacious New York City is, how strong the city is. It's amazing how people take whatever's thrown at us and turn it into something good. And you are seeing a lot of signs of New York City coming back strong. You're hearing a lot of people who are fighting back against the naysayers who like to talk about New York City never being the same again. Well, anyone that knows New York City history knows that we always come back and we come back better. I want to emphasize how we need to remain confident in ourselves as New Yorkers. There'll be plenty of people trying to put us down, but those folks also end up watching New York City come back and overcome the challenges in a way most places can't even imagine. So, right now we've got an immediate challenge, but you see New Yorkers closing ranks and rising to the occasion. Help us do that, everyone. Remember what got us past the worst of the coronavirus. Remember the strength and discipline you all showed, the devotion to social distancing, to wearing those face masks. Remember how important it is to get tested. Everyone does what we're capable of as New Yorkers. We're going to overcome this immediate problem, and we're going to continue our progress coming back. Thanks, everybody.

2020-10-14 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. Today, we're going to talk about, first and foremost, our situation and fighting COVID in this city and the work our health team is doing, working with folks at the community level all over the city. And what we're seeing – we'll go over the indicators in a little bit, but what we're seeing, thankfully, is some leveling off, certainly in the city overall, some leveling off in the communities that have been most affected. So far, the overall picture is steady and that is good news. We need to see more progress, obviously, in the zones of greatest concern. We need to keep an eye on other neighborhoods, surrounding areas, make sure that the situation is contained. But what we're seeing overall, in terms of the city indicators, suggest that we are making some progress. Now as I've said, this is a decisive week, truly decisive. We have to stop a second way from hitting New York City and we have the power to do it, but everyone has to be a part of this. And so, everyone, a reminder of how important your own role is in this. And a reminder that the City will be out in force in the areas most affected making sure that we are supporting people who are trying to do the right thing, and folks who are not doing the right thing, of course, there will be enforcement. But we have a chance this week to turn the tide and we all have to do that together.

So, let's talk about what we have found, always, was crucial to the equation and that's testing. From the very beginning, we knew that testing was everything in terms of fighting back this disease and those basics like wearing a mask, like washing your hands, all the basic things. So, we're going to go out there in these coming days and emphasize to all New Yorkers how important it is to do these basic things, to get tested, and to follow those core – that core advice our health leaders have been giving us now for months. Now, one of the things we'll be doing is a new campaign, and we'll be getting information out across the city, reminding people, for example, how important it is to wear a mask indoors on a regular basis. Now, look, unless you're with people who live under the same roof with, it's really important to wear that mask regularly. If you go to work, if you go to a store, if you are any place with people you don't live with, wear that mask, it makes a huge difference. It's the simplest tool. It's made such a difference for this city. So, we're going to remind people, especially with colder weather coming on, more indoor activity, that people cannot let the guard down, need to keep that mask as a central part of our strategy. That plus social distancing plus testing will be the key to stopping this threat of a second wave and moving us forward.

Now, again, testing will be crucial. We're going to continue to remind people how important it is to get tested, how many places you can get tested, how crucial testing is to stopping a second wave. Testing is what allows us to know what's really going on and where to put our energy and how to stop a problem when we see it. Our Test and Trace Corps is out in force, and you're going to see new guidance from our Health Department and our Test and Trace Corps about when to get tested, because we've had this question many times from folks. A little bit of a lack of clarity about when to get tested and how often to get tested. So, we're going to go out with a full bore public information campaign to get it right. And here's the bottom line. The bottom line is get tested as frequently as appropriate. We're going to go over the guidelines here. They're going to be available, but it's really important to recognize testing as central to the strategy. So, for example, if you are someone really at the frontline of protecting the city, a health care worker, a first responder, an essential worker definitely get tested at least once a month, if not more often. Teachers and school staff, at least once a month, if not more often.

Now, what about folks who need to get tested immediately? The guidance we're putting out makes it clear, if you have symptoms of COVID-19 get tested right away. If you live or work in an area with an increased positivity level, increased transmission of COVID-19, get tested right away. And we are seeing people listening to that guidance in the red and orange and yellow zones and more and more people getting tested. If you live in one of those areas, go out and get tested. It will make a huge difference. If you had close contact with someone who has had COVID-19 recently, get tested. If you have been at a large gathering, get tested. These are really simple indicators, simple reminders of when it's important to get tested. If you're coming back from one of the states with a high level of COVID-19, well, first of all, you need to quarantine for 14 days, that's the State law, but also you need to get tested once you get back here. All of this will help us. All of this will help us turn the tide and stay safe and then get even safer so we can open up more, and finally get past this disease once and for all. So, everyone, the bottom line is get tested. It's safe, it's fast, it's easy, it's free. Go to nyc.gov/covidtest for locations or call 212-COVID19, or you can text ‘COVID TEST’ to 855-48 to find the free testing locations near you.

Okay, now a big moment coming up for the city. We are now under three weeks until the election, millions of New Yorkers anxious to make our voices heard. So, I want to remind people as we get closer and closer, that if you are going to vote by mail, you have to request an absentee ballot. So, time is getting a little short here. The deadline to request an absentee ballot is October 27th. But we're urging people to ask for it as quickly as possible to make sure you get it smoothly. And then once you have that absentee ballot, it needs to be postmarked by the day of the election, or you can drop it off at any of the election sites, early voting sites or election sites, by November 3rd. So, really important – again, if you need an absentee ballot, apply for it right now. Now, we want to help everyone to participate. Some people want to do it with absentee ballots, some people want to go on Election Day, but there's a lot of people who want to take advantage of in-person early voting. And this is obviously a new thing in this city and state and a very good thing. Something a lot of us have worked for, for many, many years. It's finally here. So, early in-person voting begins on Saturday, October 24th. So, just 10 days away. And obviously if you want to vote in person, the early voting gives you a great chance to do that with fewer people, less crowding. It’s quicker. If you need a ride to get to an early polling site, we've got a nice opportunity here, a partnership between the City of New York and the taxi hailing app, Curb. And we want to thank everyone at Curb for being a part of this. This partnership is to help people get to their poll sites if they need to take a taxi. And Curb is offering $5 off for the first 5,000 people going out to vote for early voting, who participate. All you got to do is download the Curb app and use the code VOTEEARLY between October 24th and November 1st. So, we want to make it easier for people in every way possible to vote.

Okay, now let's go over to daily indicators. This is for, again, the whole City of New York. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold of 200 patients. Today's report is 76 patients, with a confirmed positivity rate for COVID-19 at 25.3 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases. Today's report is 512. Number three, percent of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold is five percent. Today's report, 1.13 percent. And today’s seven-day rolling average, 1.46 percent. So, there you see some leveling off, some good news, but we've got a lot of work to do to keep it that way and then make it much, much better. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Good morning, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Test and Trace Executive Director Dr. Ted Long, Democracy NYC Senior Advisor Laura Wood, Census Director Julie Menin, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. Bob Hennelly from the Chief Leader.

Question: Good morning, everyone.

Mayor: Hey, Bob. How are you doing? How's it going?

Question: Thank you. Good, good, good. I just wanted to ask you, early on, just a few weeks ago [inaudible] he had mentioned that he had asked you to hold off on layoffs until after the election. It would appear as a practical matter that a 30-day notice would, given now, would certainly put us past the election. Can we tell the civil service and our readers at The Chief that, that, that notice won't go out between now and the election? I mean, do you have any sense of it? Can you comment on the status of this?

Mayor: Now, Bob, it's an important question. Look, this obviously connects to the news from Friday about the arbitrator’s decision and then the follow-up agreement we reached with the UFT. You're talking about $450 million that came off of this fiscal year's budget, that provides us a lot of relief, that gives us some breathing room to now continue to work with labor and other unions on other savings, to continue to work obviously for a stimulus in Washington and for long-term borrowing in Albany. So, we do have a little more time now, the fact that we've, you know, enabled to put together $450 million. And I want to emphasize, I feel for every educator, every UFT member who obviously – people have done so much to get our schools going, so much to help our kids, but we really got into a spot here where we didn't have resources and we needed to find some way to address it. The arbitrator had the right to make the decision. Then we work together beyond that to come up with a bigger vision, going forward. That gives us some relief. So, we are not out of the woods, Bob, by any stretch of imagination. We don't know what the election results going to be. We need to find more savings from labor, but in terms of any immediate action, we have some breathing room now. Go ahead, Bob.

Question: Awesome. There is concern that, assuming the best case from the standpoint of the union is that Mr. Biden wins, that we could be in a prolonged period of time where his winning is not the same thing as, say, assuming office and the Democrats getting control and sending aid to New York City and New York State. So, there's a growing movement in progressive circles for the suspension of the rebate of the stock transfer tax. As, you know, for many years, the State of New York, going back to 1981, has refunded that money incredibly to the same Wall Street interests that had been getting fabulously rich throughout our national tribulation. Would you consider that this is something that needs to be revisited right now?

Mayor: Yeah. Bob, look, I think at this point – you framed it very accurately – the rich had been getting richer during this COVID crisis. It's shocking how many New Yorkers, how many Americans don't have a job, are struggling to make ends meet while folks who are doing very well are doing even better. If ever there was a time in history to right that wrong and make sure that was true progressive taxation, it's now. So, I think we need to increase taxes on the wealthy across the board. This is something I'm going to fight for in Albany, for sure. It is time for higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires. I think absolutely the stock transfer tax has to be reassessed now because it's unbelievable that, you know, there's threats of layoffs to tens of thousands of working people and the very fabric of this city and people who don't have a job and don't have enough for the basics in life, and somehow we're not acting in the most obvious way to demand more of those who are doing very well. We've got to solve that. So, I know a lot of legislators in Albany want to see progressive taxation. I'm going to work with them. I think this is the right time to get it done.

Moderator: The next is Shant from the Daily News.

Question: Yeah. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Going back to the situation in the COVID hotspots. I know you said that the picture is steady, but can you just give some more detail? Is the idea that the infection rate is plateauing? Is it going down? And can you, or maybe Dr. Varma give some specific numbers on what the infection rates are on the nine or so ZIP codes? Thanks.

Mayor: Thank you, Shant. I don't know if Dr. Varma has it all as fingertips. I'll turn to him in a moment, but I can say this much to you, I’ve been evaluating it regularly with our health care team – the overall city situation, you see the indicators like everyone, clearly there's been some good leveling off, particularly on the seven-day rolling average for positivity. In terms of the zones, which we originally looked at in terms of ZIP codes, the State came up with the zone system. What we're seeing there is a number of them have started to move in the right direction. Some have not, some are breaking even, some are even still going up, but when you composite of them, I would say it adds up to some leveling off. And, obviously, the effects of more and more wearing masks, social distancing, people are honoring more of these rules. We need more compliance, enforcement is helping, more testing is helping. We certainly are seeing more and more people from community coming out and getting tested, I think that's a big piece of this. So, what I would say is, leveling off as the right phrase – more to do. But when you add those areas together, we see pretty consistently that, thank God, they're generally not getting worse. And that's what matters right now, the first step to turning the tide. Go ahead, Dr. Varma.

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Thank you for the question. Yeah, we'll have to get back to you about the specific test positivity rate. I can – we've been looking at it recently, I just don't have today's numbers in front of me. I would definitely echo what the Mayor has said. There are basically a couple of different measures that we look at to assess the state of the epidemic. The first is the number of cases that are being diagnosed. And what we saw is, you know, a fairly sharp peak over the last several weeks that has, as a Mayor has said, leveled off at this point. And that's also in the context of a very dramatic increase in the total number of tests that are performed. Dr. Ted Long, who’s on here, can discuss about the tremendous efforts at the Test and Trace Corps. has done to get testing pretty much available anywhere you stumble around the streets in those neighborhoods and available to lots of people. So, a leveling off in the total number of cases diagnosed, despite of rapid increase in the number of tests performed, as well as the leveling off in the test positivity. I would caution, however, and the Mayor knows that, you know, the way we in public health speak is, this is not a level that we want to stay at, of course. It’s a good sign that we're not seeing a continuing rapid increase, but the only way we get in control of this epidemic is, of course, to bring case numbers back down to way – the way they were in late July, early August. So, we are cautiously optimistic that efforts we're taking are having an impact, but we're nowhere near out of the woods yet.

Mayor: Dr. Long, do you want to talk about the increase in testing?

Director Ted Long, NYC Test and Trace Corps. Thank you, sir. So, over the last two weeks, we've brought in more than 20,000 new tests through our mobile units, through our new block parties, through our new self-swab stations that we call micro sites. That's focusing on the clusters that we're talking about here. Citywide, we've also seen a reflection of our increased number of tests. You know, we hit the highest number of tests in one day since the epidemic began – 52,000 tests in one day last week citywide.

Mayor: Did we lose Dr. Long? Oh, we just cut it off. Okay, good enough.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everybody on the call.

Mayor: How's it going?

Question: I'm doing okay. I'm doing all right. So it seems that remote learning now has topped 50 percent, up to 52 percent is where it apparently stands. And it seems like that number is going up. And we know people can opt back into the in-person teaching next month, but it seems like it's going in the other direction. What do you make of that? What do you think, if anything, that signifies?

Mayor: No I appreciate the question Rich. I'm thinking as a parent here. Look, I think when you've talked about seven months plus of people being bombarded with news about COVID-19, of course parents are going to be very careful, very hesitant. We opened up schools, it took some time to get it right. I think people were hearing a lot of messages that might've been discouraging. I don't think those messages were always fair or accurate, but that might've been discouraging to parents. I think it makes sense that a lot of parents are going to bide their time, watch what's happening, wait to see what happens, talk to other people they know whose kids did go to school. I mean, I don't know if you're out there or saw any of the experiences that I had on the three days where we opened up different kinds of schools, but clearly there's a lot of parents and a lot of kids who really wanted to be back in school, a lot of educators and staff who wanted them back. I think over the coming weeks as the good news stories spread, and they are often not going to spread the mainstream media, they'll spread out the grassroots, it will be word of mouth. A lot of parents will then look at that opt-out opportunity and want to take advantage of it. I mean, the, excuse me, the op-back-in opportunity, I should say. The opportunity to send their kids back into the school buildings. But they're going to want to make sure that they understand what it's like. And this is natural. So over these next weeks, we're going to show parents exactly what's going on in the schools and why we are really pleased with what we're seeing in terms of the health and safety levels. And then Rich, I think a lot of parents are going to say, okay, now is the right time for my child to go back in. Go ahead.

Question: So you know, I haven't been following it step-by-step but how many of the schools have been like closed down as a result of a kid getting sick or a staff member? I really haven't heard those numbers you know, closings and reopenings and shutting them down for a couple of weeks or a day. Is there a way that you're tracking that and do you have any sense of what it is?

Mayor: Sure. This is what our situation room does every day. And I get reports actually multiple times a day from the situation room. And I know we put out a lot of that information regularly, so Rich it’s a really interesting story. So we have about 1,600 schools. And right now there are two that were shut down for a 14 day period and both of them are actually about to come back online in the coming days. We've only had two the whole time that needed that longer shutdown. We've definitely had some individual positive cases. We have definitely had some classrooms that had to be shut down. That kind of pod approach, where you could just shut down one classroom and the people who were in it. But overall it's absolutely amazing, how few we've had to shut down. How low the positivity levels have been among members of school communities. And then the situation room has been a big positive here, and I want to thank everyone who's a part of the situation room, led by Commissioner Melanie La Rocca and her team at Department of Buildings, working with Test and Trace, DOE, Department of Health, a lot of agencies. Because that's really helped to make sure that everything is acted on quickly by Test and Trace, and that it's a very organized, methodical approach. So I think so far we're seeing very good results in terms of the vast – I mean, you have two schools closed out of 1,600. You couldn't ask for better results than that. Go ahead.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Paul Liotta from the Staten Island Advance.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to see – we had this story yesterday regarding a cluster that I was referring to as community spread in our 1-0-3-0-7 ZIP code. I just wanted to see if the City could say how it had determined that it was community spread and not related to a cluster?

Mayor: Paul, we're looking at every situation around the city all the time. And again, when we get to something where we think we have enough information to declare it publicly and act on it in a certain way, we'll do that. We want to make sure in every case, we're looking at that there's a big enough sample size information, that we're getting it accurately. So what I'd say is when we see something in any borough that we think needs attention, we're going to focus on it. We're going to do things like we did previously very effectively in places like Sunset Park and Soundview and Southeast Queens, which is send in more testing, send in more outreach, more mask distribution. We're prepared to do that anywhere where we have a problem. Go ahead.

Question: Understood. Thank you. And the other question I had was that the Health Department said that Staten Island has a mask adherence rate of only 45 percent. I just wanted to see how that number was determined?

Mayor: I don't know the methodology and I’m going to see if Dr. Varma has something to add here? What we've done in some places is obviously send out teams to do mask distribution and to educate people and also keep track of what they're seeing. So it may be that kind of approach? We do know, and we've seen it around the city, we definitely have more work to do on people wearing masks in different parts of the city. Overall, the city is doing very well, I think on mask usage, but there's been some slippage in some places. We got to do better for everyone's sake. Dr. Varma, you want to talk about the methodology there?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Sure. So the methodology that the Health Department uses is one that we've discussed, And actually other people have used in other settings as well. It's based on people who are just, you know, regular people who we train to make observations of what people are seeing on the streets. And they go to certain locations at certain specified times and then have an approach to, you know, a standardized definition that they use to categorize people into whether they are, you know, wearing a mask correctly, whether they're wearing a mask but not wearing it correctly. You know, most commonly, you know, you see people maybe have it over their mouth or on their chin. Whether they're holding a mask or whether they are not – don't have any obvious efforts that their appearance that they're wearing, don’t have any mask of any sort whatsoever. So, you know, obviously it doesn't capture every moment in time in every person. And it also has the limitation of being restricted to people who are visualized on the street. But it is a methodology that we've used in other neighborhoods as well to provides us with comparable and useful data to get a sense about [inaudible].

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Jacob Kornbluh from the Jewish Insider.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Is it fair to say that if the increase in testing provides a city a more accurate sample of a positivity rate that you would reverse your restrictions in certain neighborhoods in the red zone as swiftly as they were imposed?

Mayor: Yeah. Let me speak to that, Jacob. But first of all we spoke a few days ago. I want to see how you're doing today?

Question: I'm doing fine. Thank you.

Mayor: Okay. I appreciate the work you're doing. And Jacob, what we talked about initially was a two week period. So, you know, we're coming up on a week so far. That there was a good scenario that we hoped would be the scenario, where over the course of two weeks we saw enough turnaround to end the restrictions in some of the areas. Now, obviously Jacob, every area is not necessarily the same. When you think about red, orange, yellow zones, different areas, different boroughs, they're not all the same. So some may move faster than others, hopefully in a better direction. But yeah, if the question is, if we get better and better test results, is that what's going to lead us to decide that we can reduce and remove restrictions? The answer is yes. It is imperative that we get the truth. And the way we get the truth is by the maximum number of people getting tested. It literally every additional person gets tested, you get a better, more accurate read on a neighborhood. And we want to know what's happening because if we don't need restrictions anymore, we want to take them off. If we need to keep them there, we need to know that too. So there's a direct and absolute correlation between the number of people who get tested, the accuracy therefore of the testing and the decisions we make. Go ahead, Jacob.

Question: Can you share with us, if you have considered any other practical solutions regarding prayer services that you believe that the community wouldn't feel like they're being singled out?

Mayor: Look, Jacob, that's a very honest question. I just want to say, remember in the beginning, when we were dealing with this problem in all communities, March, April, you know, across the board, the message was that we had to not do a lot of the things we were used to in every community. Including worship services of all faiths. And faith leaders across the board, acted on that. And there were a few you'll remember back then, there were a few often very, very small institutions that tried to defy it. And we had to take action to enforce. Then we went through months where thank God we did not have to have those kinds of restrictions. Now we're in a very particular situation. We are threatened with a full blown second wave in New York City. If that happens, Jacob, the entire city would have to go back to the restrictions we knew in March and April. I think everyone agrees. If we had to close down businesses across the board, schools across the board, you know, really go backwards, it would be horrible for all of us. So there are stringent standards in place because of this reality. But the bottom line is we want to work with people. Obviously outdoor worship has worked for some. Coming up with creative ways to have fewer people in worship services and have services more often has worked for some. There's different approaches. We want to work with any community leader, any organization that wants to talk to us about ways to be creative, we want to work with them. But I think the best thing would be to everyone to work together, to maximize testing, maximize mask usage, maximize social distancing, so we could get the restrictions off across the board. That's the goal I want to work with all community leaders on. And my team has been doing that. Every one of my team has been working closely with the community. Special thanks to Dr. Mitch Katz and to Pinny Ringel who have really kept in constant touch with community leaders. I think if we all do this together, we can get by this and hopefully very quickly.

And as we close today, everyone looks, that's the message. This is a decisive week. This is a crucial week for New York City. This is the time to turn the tide. So, everyone, do what you have done so well, just those basic rules make such a difference. And again, think about how bad a second wave would be and let that motivate you to go the extra mile. To keep that mask on even when it isn't always fun and easy, to keep that social distancing, to remember to get tested. Again, testing is a lot easier than it used to be. It's a lot simpler. It's free, it's in a lot more places than ever. Get out there and get tested. And that's a big part of what will help us stop this second wave. So, I know we can do it. We fought off worse before we will do it again. Thank you everybody.

2020-10-15 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. Let's talk about the fight we are waging this week, this decisive week, the fight we're waging against a second wave of the coronavirus. And I say again, there does not need to be the second wave in New York City. We can stop a second wave in New York City if we act decisively now. So that comes down to all of us. So right now we're going into our second week of the pause in the red zones and the other zones that have been established by the State. We do see again, today's results indicate some leveling off, some improvement and that all these grassroots efforts, all the education, all the face mask distribution, the enforcement, the testing, it's all having an impact. We've got more to do, but tens of thousands of tests have taken place in the areas of greatest concern, that's helping. We're encouraging everyone to go out and get tested. We are seeing a plateauing now of the test results, and that is a very good sign.

But much, much more to do. And again, think about what a second wave would mean for all of us. A second wave would mean a lot shuts down. We go backwards. No one wants that. So we can stop this once and for all in these areas of Brooklyn and Queens, where there's a concern and therefore protect the whole city. And that's what we're going to do. The testing again, always crucial to our efforts. So we are just flooding the zone with testing. We're saying to everyone, whoever you are, wherever you are, get tested, particularly in these zones, but well beyond, the whole city, get tested. Certainly if you haven't been tested in a while, or you've never been testing. Get tested. Here to tell you about these extensive testing efforts, especially in the zones of greatest concern is the head of our extraordinary Test and Trace effort, Dr. Ted Long.

Executive Director Ted Long, NYC Test and Trace Corps.: Testing is important because it gives us the line of sight that we need in order to suppress the coronavirus. Now in New York City, we've built out a massive testing regime. We do more tests per capita every day than European countries like Germany and Asian countries like South Korea. As the Mayor said, what we've done is we've focused our testing resources in on the three clusters. And in the last two weeks alone, we've conducted more than 17,000 new tests in the clusters. Now we've accomplished this by building out 32 new sites in the clusters. And among those, 18 of our new sites are specifically in the red zones, in the areas of highest need, highest risk.

Our sites will look like mobile testing units, self-swab stations where you can come get a kit, actually perform the test on yourself, hand the kit back. You're done in a matter of minutes. And we've built those out collaboratively with our community boards, with houses of worship to make sure that they're accessible to everybody. And we have our rapid testing sites where once you come in and get the test done, you'll have your result back within 15 minutes.

I'd like to announce today that we're opening another large rapid testing site at the Kew Gardens Hills Library. It's open as we speak. Now, I want to take a moment to say thank you to everybody that has come out and gotten tested. Testing again, gives us the line of sight that we need to fight the coronavirus. And for the 17,000 people that have come out into our clusters to get tested, each of you is proven once again that New Yorkers know that we're in this together and that we will succeed together. Thank you sir.

Mayor: Thank you very much Dr. Long, and thanks to everyone at Test and Trace because your devotion to making sure that people get testing is just wonderful. And everyone, again, unlike some places in the world, we have really gone the extra mile to make testing available widely, to make it simple, to make it fast, to make it free. Everyone needs to take advantage of that for the good of all. The better look we get at in all of New York City, the better we'll know what we need to do to fight back the second wave and make sure it does not reach us.

Now, of course, in addition to testing we always need enforcement. I want to say at the outset, the vast majority of New Yorkers throughout this crisis have done a great job wearing masks, practicing social distancing. That's true in all sorts of neighborhoods around the city. And as these problems have emerged in some particular ZIP codes and zones in Brooklyn Queens, we've seen a huge amount of support from community leaders, institutions. And people recognizing that it's important to participate, to wear the mask, to practice social distancing. But there's always going to be a few people – and this is true everywhere, there's going to be a few people who don't get the memo and we need to really push hard on. And so we continue a lot of inspections, a lot of enforcement activity. 1,700 sites were inspected yesterday by City inspectors, 25 summons issued. And in the last two weeks, just to give you the overall picture, there's been 18,000 sites that have been inspected. You're talking about schools, stores, community institutions, every kind of location. 18,000 sites have been inspected. 288 summonses issued in some of those in the many thousands of dollars. So there's a serious, serious effort here.

And what we always hope is that the education efforts, the outreach efforts, the free mask distribution really carry the load here. And obviously the emphasis on testing. But where enforcement is necessary, it continues. It continues deeply. And I want to thank all the men and women of our City agencies who are doing extraordinary work. It's so important to understand this, that when you think about an effort this extensive, to go into areas of concern, to educate people, to work with them, to answer their questions, to give out the masks, to get people tested, to enforce, it takes a huge amount of effort. And all these City agencies you see on your screen, their enforcement agents have been out. You've had a tremendous grassroots outreach by all of them. It's been hard work. It's been long hours. It's not always easy, but they've all been out there doing the work to keep all of us safe. So I want to thank the employees of all these agencies for the big impact they're making on this city.

Now, again, we're going to use all these tools. All of these tools help us, and I want to come back to testing because it really is the essence of everything. Testing to get us the information we need to stop a second wave, testing to then drive back the disease further in this city, to go even further than we've ever gone before reducing the coronavirus. Testing is the pathway to the day we have the vaccine and we overcome this disease once and for all. Now we need more and more partners in this work. And we've had incredible partnerships, public hospitals, private hospitals, clinics, a lot of private health care organizations. It's really been a very positive story, how many people have come together to provide testing. But now we have new partners who do such important work and they particularly serve folks who are covered by Medicaid and they have tremendous outreach capacity. And this is going to be another part of getting more and more people tested and getting them tested more consistently. Yesterday, we talked about clear ground rules for how frequently people should get tested and a real focus, a reminder to all New Yorkers, if you haven't been tested in a while, you should be. If you're in one of those categories of people that there's a particular urgent need to get tested, you need to do it right away. We need all the partners we can get to keep spreading that message and make testing available and easy. So I want to thank our colleagues at Fidelis Care, at Healthfirst and at MetroPlus Health. All these plans are participating with us now to maximize testing. Between the three of them they serve over 1.2 million New Yorkers, many in the hardest hit communities. And they are going to be using all of their outreach ability to get people to testing, to help focus them on where the best testing sites are, to encourage people to do it, to answer their questions. And if anyone tests positive and needs support, they're going to help us, working with Test and Trace to get people safely separated and get them the support they need. So continuing to build that extraordinary network of people working together to protect this city.

Okay, now here's another part of the equation. We've talked about masks a lot. Masks has been an amazingly positive part of this equation. We have learned over the months that there's literally no tool more important than having that face mask on, but the face masks have caused a challenge for some New Yorkers. And we're talking about 180,000 New Yorkers who are deaf or hard of hearing, having a mask over their mouth obscuring the ability to see their mouth limits lip reading and facial expressions that makes it harder for people to communicate. I want to tell you, this is an example of people coming up with solutions that I really appreciate. Our Mayor's Office for People With Disabilities, and there you see the wonderful Director of that Office, Victor Calise who has done amazing work on behalf of people with disabilities. Well, our Mayor's Office teamed up with our Department for Citywide Administrative Services and Department of Education and now are delivering 100,000 clear face masks, like you see in the picture there, that will protect everyone but also allow people to communicate despite all the challenges of this crisis. And this is particularly true for our school staff who work with kids who are deaf or hard of hearing. We're going to make sure they get the masks they need so they can continue the absolutely precious, crucial work that they do.

A couple more things before I go to our indicators. There are so many people who have stepped forward. I talked about these amazing partnerships to get people tested, to help people all over the city. There's a lot of folks, a lot of organizations, companies, people who have stepped forward and just wanted to help the people in New York City in a variety of ways. So it's a great opportunity today to say thank you to companies and organizations that have done great, great work and want to be there for the people of New York City who have put their energy and their talent and their money and their material where their mouth is. So thanks to Uniqlo, thanks to the Committee of 100, Perrigo, Trinity Church, Emigrant Bank, the Huamin Foundation, and Bombas all have joined together to help protect people and help fight through this crisis together.

One last thing before indicators. Today I'm wearing a purple tie and I'm doing that for a purpose. Today is Spirit Day. And this is about an important message, an important idea that I think has been made even more pertinent by the crisis we've all gone through together. You know, for a long time, we've been talking about the challenges faced by LGBTQ youth. And so many examples of discrimination and bullying and negativity directed at our young people. And we have to protect our young people. We have to be there for them. This is something our First Lady has focused on with an extraordinary team of dedicated folks who put together the Unity Project. This is something that should be of concern to all of us, our precious young people, our future. Yet some are being singled out and treated so negatively. We can't have that in New York City. And particularly after what we've all been through together in this pandemic, I hope we learn a new spirit of unity and understanding. We've all got to work toward that. So Spirit Day today represented by the color purple is a day to focus on stopping bullying against our young people. And to make sure that all of us model positive behavior and all of us step up if a young person is having a challenge and that in our schools, in our communities, any young person, any member of the LGBTQ community is suffering from bullying, let's stand up for them. Let's give them the support they need. Let's fight bullying and all its forms. School is back, and it's a good time to focus again on the fact that bullying will not be accepted anywhere in New York City.  

Okay, daily indicators. Number one, again, this is for the whole city. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19. The threshold is 200 patients. Today's report, 88 patients, and a confirmed positivity level for COVID of 18.6 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day a?verage, threshold 550 cases, today's report 499 cases. And number three, percent of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19 that threshold is five percent, today's report 1.31 percent. And the seven-day rolling average is 1.49 percent. Okay, a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, let us turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Good morning, all. We will now begin our Q-and-A, as a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Chokshi, by Dr. Ted Long, and by Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Gloria from NY1. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you about some of the reporting my colleagues have been doing regarding some of these yeshivas that appear to be operating despite the rule right now, and specifically to ask you about what the Governor said yesterday, threatening to cut funding from the City if enforcement wasn’t ramped up. 

Mayor: Well, Gloria, two very different topics. So, the yeshivas, we are working with all the yeshivas to make sure they understand the rules and follow the rules. There is a gray area that we're waiting for more guidance from the State on, in the area of childcare and what the rules are related to childcare. So, this is something we're talking with the State about right now to resolve it. I think everyone needs clear standards. We don't have enough clarity on childcare. And as soon as we get that, we want to make sure that everyone understands it and follows it. 

On the various efforts to talk about our funding. Look, you just saw, in the presentation, the numbers of how much enforcement has gone on, how much outreach is going on, and how much testing is going on. Here at the local level where the rubber hits the road, there's an extraordinary effort going on. People can talk in Albany, people can talk in Washington, but here where the real work is being done – I mean these thousands of City workers, out doing this job. They deserve the respect, that they are out there working very hard and selflessly to protect people. And these efforts in outreach and education and enforcement and testing, they're very real, they're very tangible. They're having a very big impact. I, honestly, Gloria – I'm very used to bluster from Washington and from Albany. I've heard a lot of it. I understand bluster when I see it, but here we have a job to do, the job is to protect New Yorkers. That's what I'm focused on every day. And I am deeply concerned that there is a threat here of a second wave. My job is to stop that second wave, not to play games, not to focus on threats, but the threat we should be worried about is the threat of a second wave of the coronavirus in New York City. That's what all levels of government should be talking about together, together, and not using wordplay, but actually supporting each other to get this work done. Go ahead. 

Question: [Inaudible] you. Do you think the Governor is being a little bit punitive here, and when you're talking about bluster, do you think that this is hurting your efforts and then distracting from what the City should, and the State, should be focused on right now? 

Mayor: Again, Gloria, I'm used to bluster from Washington. I'm used to bluster from Albany. I don't focus on that. I focus on protecting people. I focus on what's happening in our neighborhoods and you know what? Focusing on the people – I've found this a long time ago, don't focus on politicians, focus on the people. The people are working with us to solve this problem. You do see a leveling off here. Thank God. That's because of a lot of hard work, a whole lot of hard work, all those folks in Test and Trace Corps, and all those other folks who have been out there turning this tide. Let's honor and respect them and stop these other games. Go ahead.  

Moderator: The next is James Ford from PIX. 

Question: Thanks for taking my call. Good morning. This is kind of a follow-up on the previous set of questions. I mean, today – this afternoon, Dov Hikind and a variety of other Orthodox Jewish leaders are going to be holding a rally on the steps of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. They say that you and the Governor are targeting the Jewish community and they're conducting this demonstration under the hashtag, #EndJewHatred. That's their – I'm just taking it right from their press release. Just what do you say in response to these claims by these Orthodox Jewish leaders and the supporters who will be on the steps of the library today? 

Mayor: I want to just talk about what we should be focused on, James. This is a community that I know well, and I care deeply for. I have a lot of love for this community and I always have, and I'm working with my team with so many members of the community who are trying to address this problem. They're not trying to politicize it. They're not trying to create, you know, tension and division. They're actually trying to address the problem together. And I can certainly say all my colleagues, Dr. Katz, Dr. Chokshi have been on so many calls, so many constant efforts to work with the community. And we see so many community leaders coming forward, so many community institutions coming forward to address these problems together. That's what we should be focused on, this danger of the second wave is – it would affect all of us. It's not about one community or another. But no, come on. We are facing a threat. Let's address the threat together and overcome it. And then we can be proud as New Yorkers that once again, we fought back the coronavirus. Go ahead, James. 

Question: And a question from my colleague, Kala Rama, there are no snow days for the academic year. I want to make sure I'm clear on that. And for – if those days where there is heavy snow, everything goes remote, what guarantees can the City give that every student has full remote learning access on those days? 

Mayor: James, look, first of all, yeah, you're right. Instead of the traditional snow day reality, we – you know, necessity became the mother of invention back in March. And we had to create from scratch a fully remote capacity for our school system. So, we have that when we need to use it. And then, you know, if there were a blizzard, that's what we would activate, and every student could participate. But, look, in terms of access to the technology, I can't say it enough times, we've been saying since March and April, that any child who needs technology, we're getting it to them, and anyone who needs it can call 3-1-1. And we've been distributing for months and months, hundreds of thousands of devices. And now we will – since school came back, we were able to distribute a lot of devices that were in schools. We know we have to purchase more and that's already been started. So, any time a child needs something, they should notify their school, or the parents should notify the school. A lot of times the school can address the problem right away with just the technology they have available. But if there's other folks who need them, we're going to get it to them. And it's as simple as that. 

Moderator: The next is Andrew Siff from NBC. 

Question: Mayor, good morning. For a couple of days now you've described the cluster zones as leveling off. And you've also described this as a critical week. We're now at Thursday. Is leveling off enough to end the shutdowns after two weeks? 

Mayor: Andrew, we're not there yet to know the final answer. I told you by the end of this week – and that means to me, Sunday – that we will have a good picture of whether we're in striking range of pulling off the restrictions next week, or whether we need more time. I can tell you the obvious, leveling off as the first step in the right direction. The first thing we all had to do was stop the growth of the virus, stop the increase in the infection rate and, you know, start to turn it around. That is clearly happening, but there's more to do. There's more to do. So, good start, a lot more to do. People have to get tested. They have to follow these rules. And then at the end of this week, we'll have a better picture of what next week will look like. Go ahead. 

Question: Portions of the cluster zones, whether it's in Brooklyn or Queens, that are giving you the most trouble at this point, or even micro clusters as the Governor talked about it yesterday, that might prove to be the biggest obstacle. 

Mayor: Look, Andrew, we are working with every community and I think what we're seeing across the board is community leaders stepping forward, community institutions stepping forward, more and more people wearing masks, more and more people getting tested. The testing numbers are really impressive. We need to keep building them. I look at it, that so long as we are reaching folks at the grassroots and change is happening and the numbers are moving, we can achieve a turnaround in every one of these communities. They may not all happen at the exact same time, but we can turn this around in every community.  

Moderator: The next is Emma from the New York Times. 

Question: Hi, good morning. So, I had a question, it seems like one of the side effects of the Governor, sort of, taking control of the hot spots is that you no longer provide updates by ZIP code. And one of my colleagues says that the City hadn't updated the tracing figures since September 19th. Can you provide that information that I think that New Yorkers are sort of hungry for? 

Mayor: Well, Emma, it's a very fair question. We want to make sure that we're providing clear and accurate information. I do think, again – look, we're in an emergency status right now. That's not going to go on forever, but that's where we are right now. And the City has to defer to the State on some of these matters. And when there's a different measure being created by the State, there is the valid question of whether we're going to create more clarity and more confusion by having different numbers out there. I'll work with our team to figure out how best to put out the information consistently in light of the new structure of the State put together. But we want to be accurate. We want to be clear. We want to be timely, but we also want to make sure that it aligns to how the State is presenting the information. Go ahead. 

Question: Thank you. And I have a question for Commissioner Chokshi next. Can you talk about whether New York City has seen any people who've been reinfected, whether that's something you're looking for or expect to see, and perhaps there was someone who didn't have a positive test early in the pandemic that has been reinfected. Is that possible? 

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi –  

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes. Well, thank you for the question, Emma. And I also wanted to say, I'm glad to hear that you had a good experience at our rapid testing site. And thanks for helping us spread the word about it. With respect to your question about reinfection, it's an important one, because we are seeing some cases of reinfection that are being reported in the scientific literature including here in the United States as well as elsewhere around the world. With respect to re-infection in New York City, we are actively looking at that. As you may be aware, we have to really get into the details of specific cases to understand whether successive positive tests represent a real reinfection or not, because it's possible that someone could test positive multiple times, but not actually represent a real re-infection of the virus. So, it is something that our Health Department is looking at, but we have to do it in a rigorous way to get to true reinfections. 

Moderator: The next is Juliet from 1010 WINS. 

Question: Hey, good morning, all. And good morning, Mr. Mayor. This afternoon, the Brooklyn Diocese is back in court, in federal court, asking that churches be reopened because they have maintained social distance and the 25 percent capacity. Is there any way, given that their cooperation and behaviors have been on the mark, that they can reopen earlier than a two-week shutdown? 

Mayor: I think the way to think about this, Juliet, is we are trying to stop a full blown second wave. Again, I think it sounds to a lot of people like an abstraction. I just want to take you back to March and April and just think about what that felt like, and do we dare want to go back to that? And, unfortunately, we're seeing around the country, we're seeing around Europe, they have lo and behold, unfortunately, gone all the way back to full shutdowns in some areas. We cannot let that happen here. So, if for a few weeks we're asking people to do something exceptional to help stop a problem from growing and stop it from spreading, I think that's fair. And I think the courts will understand that this is our health care leadership saying there's a clear and present danger, it must be addressed aggressively. And if we all address it aggressively, it's just for a few weeks and then we can go back to having a lot fewer restrictions.  

Moderator: The next is Reuvain from Hamodia. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. There's a feeling among some in the city that they're caught in a fight between you and the Governor. There's a New York Times article says that you've spoken to the Governor personally one time in the last month. I'm wondering if you can confirm if that's true. Has the Governor ever invited you to one of his press conferences and what you say to people who just feel that there's this fight between you and the Governor and they're caught in the middle? 

Mayor: I think people should stop focusing on this. I think it's just a moot point. The City and State work together all the time, every hour, every day. The Governor and I talk sometimes, a lot of times the work is done between our staffs – that's perfectly normal. Sometimes we've been together for press conferences, a lot of times we do our own thing. It's just – let's stop rehashing the same point. What matters is getting something done. Overwhelmingly, we agree on the broad strategies. And, guess what? The City and State are going to have differences sometimes, that's been true forever. In a crisis, you try and obviously minimize differences, get on the same page, but you're still going to have some inherent differences of views. It’s just, the State does a different thing than the City does, but we ultimately get to a lot of agreement, move forward together. That's where it really matters here.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Erin from Politico. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I want to follow up on the question regarding the Governor's statements yesterday, that he would withdraw the City's funding over this disagreement on enforcement. I mean, you refer to it as bluster. Does that mean you think this is an empty threat, or do you have any kind of genuine concern? You know, considering that the City has already lost $9 billion that, you know, this could be harmful. And, you know, second to that, it seems like the two of you have a fundamental disagreement on the standard for enforcement. He actually said yesterday, the childcare center, they're not allowed to operate as childcare centers, so they should be shut down. And, you know, he doesn't want any warnings, whereas you want warnings. He says, just go straight to enforcement. So, is there a reason you sort of fundamentally disagree with that approach? 

Mayor: Again, everything I understand from our health leadership is we do not have written standards from the State, which is – we're a nation of laws, we have to have written guidance to determine how we handle a situation. We don't have it yet for the childcare centers. I'm sure it's something we'll resolve, but, look, the focus should be on getting the work done. And I think all over this city, all over the state, what people is for leaders to focus on solving the problems. And the last thing that should happen is to take away resources from a place that is suffering through so much. So, in the end, and I think the Legislature will agree, that the focus should be on solving the problems, stopping the second wave, addressing the recovery of the city. That's what everyone should be focused on.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal. 

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask, I don't see Chancellor Carranza on the call, but I wanted to ask hopefully, he or someone at the DOE listening, when we, reporters and just the public, can get the school attendance numbers. And by that, and also because if you have the attendance numbers, we should be able to get enrollment numbers. I know a lot of people have been asking. So, I just wanted to ask you if you have any insight into when we can get that.  

Mayor: Yeah. I know that work is being done to get those finalized. I don't have the exact date but, Katie, my impression is that'll be next week. Obviously, we're dealing with the reality unlike any year we've ever been through, but what's important is schools are up and running. Parents are now getting to see what's happening. They're going to have a crucial moment coming up in the next few weeks to make a choice of whether they want all remote long-term or whether they want to opt in to blended learning. And parents will have an opportunity of seeing weeks of school underway to make that decision, but we'll get the attendance information out as soon as it's really firmed up. Go ahead. 

Question: I also have another education question to ask. You know, I know the DOE has been updating it's a map of which schools are shut down because of coronavirus cases. They have it broken down by entire school or for classes, but I've heard from parents in some schools who say that their schools have been shut down because of COVID, but they're not on the map. And they're concerned about transparency issues about just the actual school. I know you said the other day, I think two schools have been shut down, but that isn't true. It has been more. So, again, Chancellor Carranza isn't on the call, but is there any concern that these maps are just not updated frequently enough where there is some sort of transparency issue here with these schools and these cases, right? 

Mayor: Respectfully, Katie, when you say, I said something that's not true, I would ask you to ask it is a question. So, let me help you. Yes, it was true because I was not counting any school that was shut down because it was in one of the zones because that's moot, it's in the zone. It was shut down anyway. Two, is the number. I was at the Department of Education at six o'clock yesterday and confirm this number, two. If you exclude the red and orange zones, there are two schools shut down for a 14-day period in the entire city as of 6:00 PM last night. There are some schools that are shut down for 24 hours or 48 hours for investigation. I don't know of any case in this whole time – I've not heard anyone say that a school is shut and that it has not publicly acknowledged that it is shut.  

So, if you have evidence of that, I would really appreciate it because we want to make sure if anything was not handled right, that we fixed that. But what we've seen out of 1,600 schools, very, very few required, a longer shutdown, some of required a one-day or two-day shutdown. And then they're back up and running. The vast, vast majority of schools have continued with no shutdown. And the testing in the schools continues to be extraordinary. I will give you an example. This is from yellow zone test sites over the last three weeks – 3,100 test results and four positives. This is all testing of teachers and staff in those schools. I mean, everything we're seeing so far, is the testing of the schools is coming back very, very well, very, very, very low positivity levels in schools. But whenever a school does need to be shut down, whether it's for a day or for a longer period of time, we want that information to be out to the school community. So, if you have any example where that didn't happen, please let us know. 

Okay, everybody, look simple as this – crucial week. This is the week to stop the second wave. We know how to do it. We've done it before, we can do it again, but it really takes focus. And, again, just in some of the questions you heard there, there is the possibility that maybe people are discounting second wave and what it could mean. Look no further to some states of this country or to countries in Europe, you do not want to experience the second wave. You do not want to see a full scale shutdown again in New York City, and it does not have to be. We can stop this and we can turn around and we can do it quickly. So, everyone let's get this done. Let's get this problem out of the way and go back with the extraordinary progress we were making in terms of restarting this city. That's what we need to go together, and I know we will. Thanks, everyone.

2020-10-16 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. And as usual on Fridays, we began this 11 o'clock hour with our weekly Ask the Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can tweet a question. Just use the hashtag #AskTheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How are you doing today? 

Lehrer: I'm doing well. Thank you for asking.

Lehrer: Natasha in Queens you are on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Natasha. 

Question: Hi, how you doing, Brian? How are you doing Mr. de Blasio? 

Mayor: I'm doing well Natasha. How were you? 

Question: I am doing good. I am a bus rider from Queens. And as you know, the City's COVID response has involved transportation. And while initially the subway service declined, people did feel more comfortable riding the bus, and we're still seeing an increase from our central workers and also our middle and low income communities. So in June you announced your Better Buses Restart where you stated that you were proud to offer New Yorkers faster and more reliable options, by promising to speed up buses with 20 miles of new bus lanes by the end of the year. So as you know, the bus lanes can't be added during the winter months because the torch that’s used to add the directions won't work in colder weather. So the DOT can only add the street treatments from March to November. So that leaves us with just a few weeks left this year to paint the remaining miles of bus lanes before the weather gets too cold. So my question for you, Mr. Mayor, is that with the 750,000 riders that it will affect across the boroughs, will you keep your promise and complete the remainder of the bus lanes from your Better Buses Restart by November 1st? 

Mayor: Natasha, I appreciate the question. I also appreciate your obviously great knowledge of the topic and you know what you're talking about. I want to get you the update on exactly how far we have gotten. When we announced that we felt very confident we could achieve that whole goal on a timeline. The truth is I haven't gotten a progress report in the last few weeks. So I want to, but the last I heard Natasha was this was moving along very well. There was a couple of local issues that were being worked through that still had to be resolved. But that overwhelmingly the plan was moving on pace. So let me get you and everyone an update on that. If you leave your information with WNYC, I'll make sure we get you an update in the course of the day.  

Lehrer: Natasha, thank you for your call on that. Do you have an opinion on safety of the subways at this point in the COVID pandemic? I don't know if you saw that study that came out from the Public Transportation Association. You know, Sam Schwartz, the former traffic commissioner, Gridlock Sam in the Daily News, who was involved with it. And apparently as they look at the New York City subways and subways around the world, they're not finding 
many COVID cases linked to subways. And they have various explanations as to why that might be. They're fairly well ventilated. One is that they haven't been that crowded. So of course that if they get crowded again, it could become more of a risk. But I'm curious if you've looked at that and want to stand here and say to people, take the subways again, it's safe or any version of that? 

Mayor: Oh, absolutely. I want to tell people that the subways – I think there's been an amazing positive story with the subways. I think that report was important because look, the fact is that folks needed to know the subways were going to be very, very carefully cleaned. And this is something, you know, the City and State, MTA, the Governor and I, we all teamed up and agreed that there needed to be a very different approach to the cleaning. And that's why the unprecedented act was taken to close in the late night hours to do that very deep cleaning every day. And I think that's been a very, very positive development. I think more and more people do know and should know that the subways are cleaner than they've ever been honestly. And we are not seeing, I agree with what Sam Schwartz has raised. We're not seeing a nexus to the subways, certainly at this point. So I do encourage people to feel comfortable that they can feel better about subways and buses than ever before. And as we are recovering, it's clear, you know, even though we got some immediate challenges we're working through in some areas of the city overall, there's a hell of a lot more activity in September than we've seen at any point since March and people are coming back to the subways and buses and are feeling more confidence. And there's a good reason for them to. 

Lehrer: Let's take another call. Richard in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi Richard. 

Question: Oh, hello? 

Lehrer: Hi Richard. Now we got you. Go ahead. You're on with the Mayor. 

Question: Hey, how you doing? Thanks for taking my call. I am a small time landlord. I have, you know, a building, a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn. And I rent the top floor out to some people. And one of the people in the top floor is – she's trying to basically use the fact that the eviction moratorium is happening to basically extort money, you know from us. And she is harassing the other tenant. And know leaving dog feces and all of this kind of stuff. And she's just trying to make it an unbearable situation that she can then turn around and say, give me $30,000 and I'll leave. And I have nobody to, I have no recourse with this. I have no court I can go to, the courts are closed. And I don't know what to do. 

Mayor: Richard, I'm really sorry you're going through that. And we want to see if our folks, including our lawyers can help you work that through. I'm going, look the, I think the honest truth – 

Question: It's become somewhat of an emergency situation. I mean, she's really, we're making an unbearable living situation for everybody here. And the other thing is she has money to pay. It's not, she's not like broke. She has a job. She just wants to rent strike and try to enrich herself from the pandemic at my – 

Lehrer: At his expense. He's saying, yes? 

Mayor: Richard, if you'll leave your information with WNYC, we'll have one of the members of our legal team follow up with you today. I think there's two questions here. The first one is, you know, the difference between all those moratorium time ideas, obviously were about people who could not pay. It was never supposed to be about people who had the ability to pay. And like I've said this so many times, I fundamentally believe in protecting folks, you know, a million people lost their jobs. So many people have no ability to pay. Those folks should not be put out on the street, but folks who can pay need to pay. And the court systems are coming back more and more actually, not all that obviously, but more and more court activity is happening. That's a really good thing. But the other thing is if someone's threatening another person, you know, that then takes on other ramifications. And so there may be a law enforcement issue here as well. So Richard will have one of our legal team talk to you today to get the details and see if there's some way we can help resolve this. 

Lehrer: Richard, hang on. We will take your contact information. Let's take another call. Alexa in Queens, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Alexa. 

Question: Hi Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. So I am the Community Board Six Chair. That covers Rego Park and Forest Hills. We have been, you know, taking this coronavirus crisis extremely seriously from the beginning. There have been some upticks in our district and 1-1-3-7-4 Rego Park, as well as in the surrounding neighborhoods that are outside the scope of Queens Community Board Six. But 1-1-3-7-5 has not had a demonstrable increase in coronavirus cases as far as we can tell. There are some limitations to the data that's presented on the Mayor's website, the Governor's website and red zones have not really covered with the numbers. I would say that it's not New York smart, if he would like to think that it is. But we are – I'm here advocating for our residents who have had rollbacks in their businesses. Some that have just reopened that are now in a red zone without the data to back up why that is. I'm advocating for public school parents who had to take out their students from schools in zones that did not have even a two percent data for coronavirus positive cases. And I'm here to just say that the miscommunication and lack of coordination between the State and the City has had a very negative effect on the residents of my district. 

Mayor: Yeah. Alexa, first of all, thank you for the work you do, because being a community board chair is a huge amount of work and not compensated. So, thank you very, very much. Look, I really do appreciate the points you're making because the goal here, of course, is never, ever to have to close down a school or a small business unless it is about stopping a second wave. And that's what I just want to put this in real quick context, we are threatened with a full blown second wave here in New York City. We are seeing it in other parts of the country. We are seeing it in a lot of Europe. It's absolutely troubling to see how far these places are falling backwards. We can't let that happen here. So, our Health Department got to a very strong view that there were some areas that if we didn't take aggressive action, we would be threatening a second wave that would engulf all of New York City. And this is why I'm focused on a hundred percent, stopping that from happening.  

Now, I – Alexa, you're, obviously, right that it would be nice if there had been one consistent approach from the beginning. That's sometimes hard to do between different levels of government. I'm not excusing it. I'm just being honest. And I've talked about this publicly before, you know, the federal government and state government are not always on the same page, state government, city government. It is not helpful, but it is often a reality. But I think that the thing we need to do now is just get through this as quickly as humanly possible, because we have a chance to get this done in the next week or two, if everyone does what they should do with masks and social distancing and following these rules, and make this something that was a quick period of time, even though it was difficult for folks, it was quick, and then we never have to go back to it. That's what I'm trying to achieve. And so, you know, the decisions were made by the State. They do have that right under the state of emergency determined by the Legislature, but everyone, and this is where the City and State absolutely are aligned, we want to get through this as quickly as possible, so long as it's safe, and reopen as quickly as possible. 

Lehrer: Alexa, thank you very much for that. Related, Mr. Mayor, you know, the national news, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, is increasingly about rising cases and hospitalizations nationwide. We've had the spikes in the mostly Hasidic neighborhoods of the city, but you reported yesterday they might be abating, and you were just indicating something like that now. What can you tell us about where we really are? 

Mayor: Yeah, look, Brian, I will state, and I'm sure you will agree with this, that the first thing to be is cautious and driven by facts and data and science. So, when I say we're leveling off, and this is a conversation I've had with our health leadership, I'm saying that guardedly. We see some improvements. So, for example, if you look at today's citywide indicators, our overall testing – we're doing a lot more testing we've ever done since March – our overall testing for today in New York City is 1.02 percent positivity. And then our seven-day rolling average number is 1.56 percent, and hospital admissions for the day 77. These are numbers that certainly indicate something is plateauing on a citywide basis. In the communities most affected, there are still some that are not moving the right direction, but a number of them have either leveled off or started to go, you know, towards better numbers, lower numbers. So, when you composite all of it, we're a lot better off than we were a week ago. The point is we have to consolidate those gains this week, next week, to get out of these restrictions. Hopefully, you know, there is a chance to get out of these restrictions as early as later next – the latter part of next week. That's my goal. And based on the numbers I'm seeing, we're still in striking range of that. 

Lehrer: Am I right that the weekly testing in the city schools that are in the so-called yellow zone, which is hot, but not as hot as the red zone, were supposed to start today, but it's being delayed? 

Mayor: No, the – a week ago we started testing, mandatory testing across schools all over the city. Last Friday, for example, we did 56 schools, and that's everywhere. Separately, we've been doing testing in the yellow zones throughout, and now starting today, we're going on to a new system, just in the yellow zones, based on the State guidance, where we're going to be doing weekly testing in every school, not monthly, which is our larger system for the whole city, but weekly. But let me give you an example, in the yellow zones over the last three weeks – so, this is literally specifically testing at school sites – we have 3,229 results, individual test results, from schools in yellow zones over the last three weeks and only four cases that came back positive out of 3,229. So, again, the story of the schools continues to be a really good one. But yeah, from this point on, it will be weekly testing in every school, in the yellow zones. And then for the rest of the city, monthly tests, 

Lehrer: Channel seven had a story that weekly testing in yellow zone schools was being delayed. You're saying, that's not true. 

Mayor: No, it's starting today. And it goes, you know, it rolls across the yellow zone in the course of a week. In the course of the week, we will do all schools in a yellow zone and then the following week we'll do it again. Each one will be on different days, but we're going to keep doing that until these restrictions are lifted. 

Lehrer: Let me squeeze in one more for you, Mr. Mayor, partly because I think you will like how future-looking it is and also, selfishly, because coincidentally, it happens to set up our next segment. So, Irene in Manhattan – 

Mayor: Happy to oblige. 

[Laughter] 

Lehrer: Irene in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. This is not a set up. I know you don't know anything about our next segment. Irene, hi. 

Question: Hi, thank you very much for taking my call. I manage some small apartment buildings in the city, and, fortunately, many tenants have renewed, but many have left. And of the ones that have left, the apartments that are vacant, excuse me, I can't rent them out. And the couple that have been rented, are like recycled New Yorkers. I guess, people who can't take their apartments anymore and they just move, like musical apartments. We are not seeing any new people moving to the city. It doesn't matter what rents we charge. We lower them and lower them, no one is looking for apartments. So, I'm hoping that you, Mr. Mayor, and the rest of the City and the State of New York have a plan to lure people back to New York City because people are just not coming back.  

Mayor: Sure, Irene, I appreciate the question a lot. And I think when you think about what the city and this country has been through in the last few months, it does not surprise me. I'm not belittling your point at all. I think it's a really important point. I just want to say, I don't think it's the moment you would have seen people coming back yet. This is just to give you the sense of the plan. The plan was this, one, you know, defeat the disease here, which we did very, very effectively through the late spring and through the summer. And now we have a challenge in Brooklyn and Queens and we're beating back that challenge. Again, I'm increasingly hopeful about that, that within the next few weeks, we can get those situations back to normal and continue pushing back the disease. I think that is prerequisite to everything. Again, right now, the daily testing number in the city today, you know, 1.02 percent for the whole city. That's a really good sign that we're going to continue the progress we made. That's going to help bring people back. I talked to one person who split their time between Miami and New York and moved their family back from Miami to New York and said because New York was a hell of a lot safer in terms of the coronavirus. You know, we're going to make progress by being one of the places in the country that gets safest well before the vaccine. The second, bringing back our schools was crucial. It was crucial to the quality of life and what families needed, but it's also crucial to showing our rebirth, and our rebirth is intensifying. And third, a plan for the future of our city and our economy that attracts investments, creates jobs, brings people back.  

We're seeing already tech has been a big part of our city's recent history. We're seeing a lot of the big tech companies, very overtly investing now in space in New York City and saying, they're going to have a bigger presence going forward. The next big piece is health care. What I talked about a few weeks ago is a vision for New York City's future, where we are the health care capital of the world, we're the public health capital in particular. We’re the place that helps the rest of the world stop the next pandemic from ever happening. We're the place that helps address health care disparity and shows people in this country and around the world, how to do it right. We have the chance to be a great life sciences biotech capital, and that's been something that's been bubbling up, but never consolidated. Now is our chance to do that.  

So, I think the answer, Irene, is to create a whole new reality for the New York City economy, where a lot of talented people gravitate here, creative people, entrepreneurial people, because we have the hospitals, we have the universities, we have the infrastructure to be an even greater economic capital than we've been. And it’s sort of, rise from the ashes of this crisis, because we've learned more about how to deal with health care challenges than anywhere. And I really am optimistic that people will start to come back, not this year, starting next year and beyond, that folks will not only come back. You'll see a whole new wave of people, sensing opportunity in New York City and realizing it's a great time to come in and become stakeholders here and get a piece of the pie here and build from there. I'm very optimistic about that. 

Lehrer: Thanks as always, Mr. Mayor. Sure hope you're right about that. Talk to you next week. 

Mayor: Thanks so much, Brian, take care.

2020-10-19 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. I want to take a moment to appreciate all the public servants who have helped us fight through this crisis, fight back the coronavirus, and bring this city back. And there's a lot of them who have served at the frontline, our health care heroes, our first responders, our essential workers. There's a lot of folks who you've seen up here in these press conferences, our health leadership, who've done an outstanding job. And so many other leaders who have spoken to you about what we need to do together to overcome this crisis. And one thing I'll say is in this moment of history, arguably the greatest crisis New York City has ever faced, we've seen so many people step up. We've seen so many people dig deep and find strength, even when they were tired, even when they had been working nonstop, we've seen it throughout. In fact, the story of our public servants is a heroic story, and one that I hope will get the attention it deserves. There's a lot of people have played really crucial roles that the public really didn't get to know, but I saw every day their outstanding efforts to keep this city moving forward, no matter what was thrown at us.  

So, today we celebrate two of those individuals and we celebrate them by giving them new, crucial roles in this administration as we continue to build the leadership to go through something that's absolutely uncharted territory. We've never seen a situation like this in our city's history before. We need extraordinarily talented, committed people to help us through and help us rebuild and help us fight whatever else is thrown at us up ahead. And I have tremendous confidence that we have extraordinary talent to draw upon. So, let me tell you about where we have found our path so far and what it means to where we're going. What we've done throughout is focus on keeping this city strong in terms of our health care response, in terms of our workforce, but also in terms of our approach to our budget reality, which allows us to pay for all those public servants, to be really careful and smart in how we use our resources so that we have the ability to keep our workforce strong and keep providing the basic services that are the foundation of restart and recovery. The person who we have turned to throughout that process for leadership is our Budget Director, Melanie Hartzog. And she and her team at OMB have done an amazing job figuring out a path, always being creative and resourceful, determining how we could have the resources we need, no matter what was missing. Particularly that federal stimulus, we all were waiting on that never came or the FEMA support that's actually been declining when it should be increasing. Melanie Hartzog led the way to making sure that we had the resources we needed, but she also played an absolutely crucial role in the strategic work of the team at a point where we had to find other types of resources we didn't have.  

Remember we started this crisis with essentially no testing or very, very little, and the federal government not able to provide us what we needed. We lacked PPE. There were so many things missing and Melanie Hartzog is one of the unsung heroes who created a way for us to get what we needed, who helped us build up that testing system from scratch, helped us make sure we had what would allow us to weather the storm. She played a crucial role in all the elements of our response. And in light of that and her extraordinary efforts across the board, and her deep knowledge of every City agency as budget director, including her own work earlier in her career in the Administration for Children's Services and her deep connection to social service agencies and the work they do – for all these reasons she is the perfect pick to be our new Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services. I have known Melanie for many years, going way back to the time when I was in the City Council. And sometimes we were on different sides of an issue, but I always recognized her extraordinary intelligence and her commitment and her deep feeling for the people she serves. And when you think of a budget director, sometimes maybe you think of the green eyeshade, and you think of someone who thinks just about the accounting or the numbers. Melanie thinks about the people, and that will stand her in good stead as our new Deputy Mayor. So, it's my pleasure to introduce Deputy Mayor Melanie Hartzog. 

Deputy Mayor Melanie Hartzog, Health and Human Services: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and especially thank you for this opportunity to continue to serve New York City as we navigate one of the most difficult crisis that the city has ever faced. I've spent my entire career dedicated to improving the lives of New Yorkers, starting in the office of the Bronx Borough President, serving Mayor Bloomberg, and now Mayor de Blasio, and as the Executive Director of the Children's Defense Fund of New York. I have seen the transformative impact government can make in our communities. When policy is crafted to lift everyone up and create opportunities for all, especially in health, our city becomes stronger. Throughout my life, I've seen how providing health care and education opportunities, especially for children, can build a more just and successful society. Growing up, poverty was a constant struggle for my family. Homelessness, unemployment, and hunger are struggles that I'm all too familiar with. My mother and her family came to this country from Guyana, seeking the opportunity to build a better life. And I'm proud to embody my parents' hopes and dreams that their children would have a better future and commit to helping others achieve the same. I'm honored to take on this role as we continue to rebuild and fight back COVID-19 with a focus on ensuring that our city is healthy and fairer, a city where it doesn't matter what borough you're from, what economic background you have, or what color of your skin is, a New York City that provides opportunity for all. Before I finish, I just want to sincerely thank the incredible team at OMB that I work with day-in and day-out for all of their work during this crisis. I know the office is in good hands with Jacques at the helm, and I'm honored to serve as a Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services. And in this role, I will continue to help create a fair and safe future for all New Yorkers. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.  

Mayor: Thank you, Melanie. Well deserved. And I know today your family is very proud and I know today that people who will benefit from your leadership are going to feel the effects of someone who truly cares, truly understands playing such a crucial role in our City government, particularly as we navigate this crisis. Now, we have another major announcement and as Melanie leaves her role as OMB Director, we need a very strong, smart presence in that role to continue that work at one of the most challenging times in New York City's history, when it comes to our budget and our fiscal dynamic. And one of the things I saw with Jacques Jiha, over these last seven years that we've been working together, was a keen, keen mind, tremendous experience, a common, even demeanor no matter what was thrown at us, an ability to dig deep for solutions. As our Finance Commissioner, he has been, throughout this administration, resourceful and creative. And he also is someone who not only thinks about the numbers but thinks about the humanity. There are some people who, their story just epitomizes what we truly believe in as the American dream. That true idea of equality and opportunity. And Jacques is truly one of those people. So, it is my great pleasure to introduce our current Finance Commissioner, but soon to be our Office of Management and Budget Director, Jacques Jiha. 

Director Jacques Jiha, Office of Management and Budget: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to start by thanking my family and close friends who have always been there for me in good and bad times in particular, my wife, Marie, and my daughters, Kimberly and Christine. I also want to sincerely thank the talented women and men of the Department of Finance. You are the unsung sheroes and heroes of City government. It is because of your hard work that the City can pay for everyday services. Your professionalism is unmatched. And so, I'm proud to have been your commissioner. Mayor de Blasio, thank you very much for this great opportunity and the confidence you place in me. Special thanks, also, to First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan. I will work as hard as I can with my eyes wide open on the goals and objectives we set for the city, with my ears open to the diverse voices of our stakeholders, and with my heart dedicated to always do right by the citizens of this great city. For me, this is a moment of great joy and great honor. When I first came to New York from Haiti in 1979 as a young man, I worked as a parking garage attendant on Fulton Street, not too far from here, while I attended Fordham University in the evening. Today, I'm appointed to the position of Budget Director for the City of New York. What a journey it has been. This can only happen in New York City, a city that has given me so much, from the opportunity to earn a PhD in economics, for the opportunity to become Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Black Enterprise, and New York City Finance Commissioner. Of course, with great honor comes great responsibility and commitment.  

Today, this great city is facing some difficult challenges. I owe it to this city to do what I can to help lead the fiscal recovery. The crisis at hand is challenging, but we have overcome similar challenges in the past. In partnership with our stakeholders, in particular the labor unions, we will continue to make tough choices to balance the City's budget and financial plan with minimum disruption to services while maintaining our competitive position. Mayor de Blasio, as a record of strong fiscal management and record reserves, we'll continue to build upon the foundation of fiscal responsibility laid by this administration. There is a rough road ahead of us. We'll have to make some tough and, at times, disruptive decisions. We are counting on the cooperation of our federal and State partners to minimize such disruption. While our focus to solve the fiscal crisis will be on working with our labor union partners to identify the saving actions that are under our control, we need a second round of federal fiscal stimulus, including federal aid to states and localities and all the authority from the State to borrow long-term so we could speed the City's economic recovery and avoid layoffs and cuts to vital services. Rest assured that as we make tough budgetary decisions in the months ahead, we will remain committed to protect the most vulnerable among us. Again, thank you, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: Thank you, Jacques. Congratulations to you and your family. Melanie, congratulations to you and your family. Great new leadership to help us move forward. And speaking of moving forward, let's talk now about how we're doing in the city overall, how we're doing in some of the areas that have had particular challenges in recent weeks in Brooklyn and Queens. I'll go over the citywide indicators in a moment. I think the big top line here is we still do continue to see a leveling off in some of the areas of greatest concern. That's good news, but we've got more work to do. We want to keep making that progress. And I want to emphasize, everyone wants to get out of the restrictions as quickly as possible. It does take hard work. We learned that back in March and April, but it can be done. We've learned that as well. So, to everyone in those red and orange zones, continue to dig deeper. We need to have people wearing those masks, practicing social distancing, all of the basics. And we want to keep this period of restriction as limited as possible, but we still need to make more progress overall. We're talking constantly with the State to figure out the exact timing of each move we'll make, but we do, overall, need to see more progress before we can remove restrictions. Now, there is an area where we have seen particular progress and that is notable and appreciated. That's in the central Queens red zone. Those numbers have gotten substantially better. So, that's an area that we're pleased about. Want to see folks in central Queens consolidate that progress. That's a good example to everyone else in the red and orange zones that we can turn this around and turn this around quickly with a strong united effort. 

So, as I go into the indicators, again, I'm going to state it very clearly – the goal is to stop a second wave of the coronavirus in New York City. We can stop a second wave. Right now, the numbers suggest we are stopping a second wave, but we have to remain vigilant. And this next week or two will be crucial to make sure we consolidate our progress and retain the progress we had previously, because remember through so much of the summer in New York City was the envy of the country. We can be that again very soon if we all do the work we need to do. So, let's go over the indicators for today citywide. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients. Today's report is 76 patients, with a confirmed positivity of 16.4 percent for the coronavirus. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases. Today's report is 471. Number three, percent of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent. Today's report 2.17 percent. And today's seven-day rolling average indicator is 1.62 percent. I’ll do a few words in Spanish –  

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: We will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder we’re joined today by new HHS Deputy Mayor Melanie Hartzog, new OMB Director Jacques Jiha, Dr. Chokshi, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question goes to Dave Evans from WABC. 

Question: Good morning, Mayor. Can you hear me okay?  

Mayor: How are you doing today?  

Question: I'm great. First of all, congratulations to Melanie and Jacques. But I wanted to ask you about the numbers in the red zone, in Central Queens specifically. Do you see the lifting of restrictions this week that we could see schools open, at least in that area, businesses back open this week? 

Mayor: Dave, still a little early to tell again, if you're talking about the red zones and the orange zones overall in Brooklyn and Queens some more work to be done. It looks like another week or two of work, overall. If you're talking about Central Queens, we've seen some notable progress there. We're going to be talking with the State about how we analyze that. We want to see obviously a couple more days of data before any final decisions. I think it's a little early to project or predict but still it is possible that we could see some action later on this week, based on our conversations with the State. 

Question: My second question is a little bit different subject, and that is, I know you watched over the weekend, the Governor rolled out what his plan is for when, and if we will, when we do get a vaccine and it's a pretty elaborate plan, but this morning on GMA, he was talking about his doubt and the doubt that so many New Yorkers have with this administration, that it's going to be something that they can trust as safe and effective. I just wanted to see your thoughts on that, and if we do get here in a few weeks, a month or so, a vaccine, are you going to take it? 

Mayor: Look, absolutely. My assumption, Dave, is a vaccine that is created by the medical community, that's gone through appropriate trials and certainly validated by our health care leadership here is something I absolutely want to take. We don't want any political actions when it comes to vaccine. We want the real thing that's going to serve our people, and that's based on the validation of the medical community. I do think it's a real issue. There's a lot, unfortunately, a lot of distrust and a lot of concern out there, but I think what will happen is when there's a vaccine we can believe in, a lot of people will want it. Others may wait a while, but the more people who get it, the more people will want it. That's my broad assumption.  

Moderator: The next is Shant from the Daily News. 

Mayor: Yeah. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask about the cover story in today's Daily News, the subject of which was an apparent disparity in, you know, rates of using in-person learning between well-to-do students with low-income students. Without taking too long to say just one example in District 15 in Park Slope, at the seven wealthiest schools, 71 percent of families were found to have opted to for in-person learning. But the 11 poorest schools, it was significantly lower, 41 percent. So, I wanted to ask, you know, given that you repeatedly framed the need to resume in-person learning in terms of helping the most vulnerable New Yorkers, what do you make of that disparity and any thoughts on ameliorating it? 

Mayor: Yeah. Shant, thank you for the question. I think it's way too early to tell what's going to happen here for a variety of reasons. We certainly see a number of parents choosing to send their kids to school right now, and we see a number of parents holding back, waiting to see a little bit more what's going on. We, obviously – parents know there's going to be an opt in period coming up to make a decision to come back in. There's a lot of different pieces. So, I think what many parents are doing is watching, learning, talking to other parents who have sent their kids to school, making their decisions. So, I just think it's way too early to tell. I absolutely believe that one of the most powerful reasons to have reopened schools is to serve the kids who need the help and support the most. We see that happening every day across New York City, and we're going to continue to reach out to any family that has concerns and answered their questions, and by the way, parents are seeing – and some of this has been reported including today – they're seeing the extraordinary results, the extraordinary facts around how few cases of the coronavirus we're seeing in our schools. These are facts that are becoming clearer and clearer. They're spreading more and more, and I think that's going to give parents a lot of confidence across all communities.

Moderator: The next is Marcia from WCBS. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?  

Mayor: I am doing well, Marcia. How are you?  

Question: I'm good. Thank you. So, my first question has to do with this planned wedding of the Satmar in Williamsburg. I know that they're saying that the indoor service is going to be family only. It's unclear what's going to happen outside. I wonder what plans you have for having the NYPD presence in the area, sheriffs in the area, just in case people show up, making sure that they’re social distancing, making sure that they're wearing masks, etcetera. 

Mayor: Yeah, that's a very, very important question, Marcia. Look, let's start with the good part. The State and City worked together here to raise the concern. The good news is the decision was made by the folks who were putting together the wedding to have that much smaller service and to do the rest of virtually. That's very good, very helpful. We will have a backup plan ready for sure. But I am heartened by the fact that the message was heard, that it's not business as usual, that we're dealing with a crisis and we cannot let this coronavirus spread further, and different approaches are needed at this moment in history. I think the decision to have the wedding virtually is a very, very good one. Go ahead, Marcia. 

Question: So, Mr. Mayor, I know that a number of rabbis have had conversations with Governor Cuomo. I'm sure they've had conversations with your office as well. They're looking for plans to ease the restrictions. I think that the Governor has said that maybe as early as Wednesday might be able to ease the restrictions. Do you have some guidance so you could give members of these communities about when they can reopen some of their religious schools when they can reopen some of the businesses? How soon can we look for a lifting of restrictions? 

Mayor: So, Marcia, first of all, we're going to do all that together with the State. We've had a series of very constructive conversations about how to approach this. I had a detailed conversation with the Governor on Friday about these zones and how to think about them going forward. The fact is we need to see some more progress in most of these areas, in red and orange zones. As I've said from the beginning, this can be as few as – a little a time as a few weeks, and this is really what I want to emphasize to people who are in those red and orange zones. We can get out of this in just a few weeks, if everyone does what they need to do. We want those restrictions off to say the least. I know the State does as well, but we've got to bring the numbers down. So, everyone needs to get tested, who hasn't been tested recently. People need to really observe those rules of social distancing, the face mask wearing, and if we do that, we can move quickly. But, again, I'd say overall, those communities need a little more time. The one that's been – where we've seen the most progress is Central Queens. We'll be talking with the State about that over the next few days.  

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880.  

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor, and everybody on the call. Hi, I'm doing okay. So, Mr. Mayor, you mentioned which community or communities have done the best in the red zones, which ones are the most problematic, which ones are the worst?  

Mayor: Well, look again, I don't want to, for a moment, miss the fact that so many people, Rich, are working really hard. They're working hard to adapt to these restrictions and working hard to make sure that they follow social distancing more and more people wearing masks. 

We see a lot of good work and a lot of great cooperation from community leaders and organizations. I think we still, the one that – the key issue is we need more testing. In general, we need more and more people get tested. I would say that is more of a problem in Brooklyn than in Queens. That's one of the things I want to see real improvement on this week is that – let's get a true picture of the community and the reality and folks who haven't been tested, getting out there and getting tested will really, really help us move forward. Go ahead. 

Question: Okay. Mr. Mayor, just wondering, everybody talks about COVID fatigue, do you have it?  

Mayor: I think we all have it, Rich. I think it's tough. You know, we were in February for God's sakes, we were all living such a different life and a lot of things were going really well in New York City, and suddenly our lives were just massively disrupted. I miss a lot of life before. I know so many people do so we're all tired of being in a crisis situation, but I am really encouraged by the fact that we've come as far as we have, and I'm encouraged by the fact that this is a crisis with an end. You know, sometimes, Rich, I have referred to the family dynamics I grew up in and because my parents were World War II generation, you know, they were in the middle of crisis, they didn't know when it was going to end. I really remember those stories and certainly the Depression before it, like there was no timeline, there was fear that it could go on for a long, long time. Here, as painful as it has been and difficult it has been, we are pretty certain that at some point in 2021, there is a vaccine and it's widely distributed and we really get to turn the page, and that, that's what I cling to, knowing that, you know, we just have to fight our way through.  

Moderator: The next is Julia Marsh from The Post. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?  

Mayor: Good, Julia, how are you?  

Question: Good. A question on indoor and outdoor dining, is the City doing anything to help eateries with the cost of installing, buying, and maintaining heaters for outdoor dining? And we were supposed to reassess upping indoor dining to 50 percent capacity on November 1st, how do you think that's looking? 

Mayor: On the first point, I don't know of an overall plan, Julia, I'll have our team follow up with you. You know, anything we can do to help any small business, including obviously restaurants, we will and there's loan programs and other things out there that might be applicable. Small Business Services does a lot of real direct work with businesses to help them figure out what they can take advantage of. So, I would say to any small business, any restaurant, that's not sure they can afford something and wants to think about what their options might be, turn to Small Business Services, that department will help you. In terms of what might happen over the next few weeks and we'll be talking with the State regularly about indoor dining. I think the most obvious answer is it really depends on the numbers. The more we can beat back the problem we're having in some parts of Brooklyn and Queens, the better off we'll all be, the more we can keep pushing down our overall number, and our seven-day average number has been pretty good, I want us to keep us pushing that down, the better chance we have of going farther, but it's just premature now to project, we need to get farther up the road and we need to work with the State on that.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Henry from Bloomberg. 

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?  

Mayor: Doing good Henry, how you been?  

Question: I'm okay. The report that you gave today lacks any data about these areas, and I can't determine whether or not the city is doing better or worse. The average infection rate has risen to 1.62 percent, and that's higher than it was during your last report, October 15th when it was 1.49 percent. So, without the data from Brooklyn and even from this area in central Queens, what are we supposed to do? Do you have any numbers that would suggest one trend over another?  

Mayor: Yeah, absolutely. Henry, first of all, the citywide data, which we're going over regularly, I think when I've said the word leveling off, over and over again, that's exactly right. The number you see today is, you know, kind in the middle of where we've been the last week or two, the highest I remember for a rolling average, seven-day average is about 1.75, as you said, we were down at 1.49. We're right in the middle there, and what it means is some stabilizing. Now remember if you're around 1.5 percent give or take, that puts us far ahead of the vast majority of the country. We got used to being down closer to one percent. We want to go back there and even go far beyond that. But right now, citywide, we do see a leveling off and it's at a number that certainly signals something good. In terms of the communities, as I said, it's something we continue to assess with the State. We want a lot more testing. It's one of the things we all would like to see more to get a clearer picture. But again, I remain hopeful that in all the red and orange areas that we're talking a matter of weeks, that we can resolve these issues, particularly if people go out and get tested. Go ahead. 

Question: Okay. Mr. Mayor, I've requested for several weeks now, a ZIP code by ZIP code breakdown of the seven-day or even a 14-day average, a daily report that would be posted on the web. The Health Department says this is possible. They haven't delivered it yet. The Press Office is actually asking me to renew my request directly to your office and to you because the Health Department Press Office is a little bit frustrated about getting this done also. Can you give us a commitment that the public will be able to see on a granular ZIP code basis what the rolling average is, whether it's a seven or 14-day average? You have the data, why can't it be released publicly? 

Mayor: Henry, look, we've got an unusual situation here and we've been open about it. And I said, there's been a lot of communication with the State. The State determined a different approach that is certainly made it important to be careful about the information we put out, so it doesn't create confusion, and it doesn't create a situation where there's two different interpretations going on publicly that make it hard for people to know where to go. So, we're being very, very clear on the big picture, what people need to know, that those decisions are going to be made, the City working with the State. We'll have more to say later this week on whether there's any immediate restrictions that can be adjusted. As I said, I think it's going to be a few more weeks in most areas. But I do not want to put out information that then causes you and everyone to constantly be further confused by the differences of the information. What I'd like us to do going forward is get consistent on this ZIP code measure. I think it is the easiest way to do things going forward and we'll certainly have that conversation with the State and I'd like to get to the point that you're talking about, but I want to be very mindful in this moment where so many people are concerned and worried about, you know, their lives, their livelihood, that we give clear and consistent and not information that might confuse further.  

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Yehudit from Borough Park 24 News. 

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?  

Mayor: Good, how are you?  

Question: Good. Thank God. So some of the essential business owners in red zones such as the restaurant owners in Brooklyn, Borough Park, are being bombarded with citations, even after they say they put in health protocols that they know of such as keeping entire staffs masked and installing floor markers to show where people should stand to stay socially distance, and [inaudible] temperature [inaudible]. And then some of the business owners told me that when they ask for what the violations are being written, that some of the agents aren't even a 100 percent clear, they can't really articulate it. So, I was wondering if the Mayor would consider number one – if, well, some of the – some of the businesses are saying they get up to 10 visits a day. So, number one I'm asking is – is that maybe over kill? And also, would the Mayor consider perhaps mass emails or some other way of communicating the – if there are enhanced restrictions for the essential business owners so that they know what exactly what they are, because they don't seem to know exactly what more they're supposed to be doing?  

Mayor: You know, I appreciate it and I've heard a couple of these concerns. Look, essential businesses remain open, non-essential businesses are the ones that are affected with the standards in the red and orange areas. If there's any confusion about that, we need to communicate that better, and we will in multiple languages, we want to make sure everyone understands that essential businesses remain open. Now, essential businesses, you'll remember, throughout this whole crisis still had to maintain crucial health and safety protocols. So, I don't want there to be confusion on that point. You can be an essential business, absolutely allowed to be open, but you still have to observe these fundamental protocols about how to keep people safe. You're a non-essential business, depending on the standards red and orange, you have to follow those standards. Now on the question of any inspector giving a judgment that appears to be contradictory with the rules, we need to know about that. If someone – if you know of cases like that, we need to hear about them. If you'll please share them with our teams so we can follow up. If someone feels that they were given a judgment that wasn't consistent with the rules, they should certainly call 3-1-1 and let us know that. We really, really want to make sure we get this right, but the bottom line to remember is, a business that is supposed to be closed, needs to be closed, hopefully only for a brief period of time and then open for the long haul, we all hope and pray. And a business that's allowed to be open because it’s essential, still of course needs to follow basic health and safety rules. Go ahead. 

Question: If they have those things in place that I mentioned, the floor marks and the masks on the staff and the temperature logs, they say that they never were informed the essential businesses of other things they're supposed to be doing. So, they're having 10 – sometimes 10 inspectors a day they say come in and they don't know exactly what else they're supposed to be doing. Is there any way you could email perhaps the essential business owners, what else they're supposed to be doing? 

Mayor: Absolutely. We will, I think – I think over communication is definitely better in a moment like this. So what we will do for businesses in the red and orange areas is send out again, we'll get Small Business Services involved and our other agencies, send out again a list of reminders of who could be open, who cannot, what the rules are for the businesses that are open, where they can call with questions, we welcome those questions so we can clarify things and help people understand. Look, if perhaps someone didn't understand as an essential business, the health and safety rules previously, because they hadn't had an inspection, we want to go the extra mile to inform and educate. The goal here is to make things right, to make things healthy and safe, and that's what we'll focus on. So, yes, we will send a message out to all stores in the communities to let them know what those rules are. 

Well, everyone, as we conclude today, look this today is, as I started, a reminder just how good the people are who serve us. I want to thank all our public servants. I want to thank all the people who work for the City government. I want to thank the ones who have gotten their attention they deserve and the respect and praise they deserve, and I want to thank all the folks who don't get that limelight but deserve it just as much for their amazing efforts. And I also want to remind people, that the people who serve you, you know, do it with such devotion. I can't tell you how many people have been working pretty much every day since this started and extraordinarily long hours, but they just stay as committed as ever, and I admire all of them, and the fact that a lot of talent keeps developing within our City government to serve our people and the two great people that we have named today to these crucial roles are examples of folks who came up through public service and have so much to offer, and now are going to be doing so much more for the city. So, I'll conclude with a simple point, I believe in New Yorkers. I believe in the ability and the talent and the drive and the energy and the compassion of New Yorkers. There is no place in the world that has New Yorkers, only New York City, and this is why we will come back and we will come back strong. Thank you, everyone.
2020-10-20 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. This has been, to say the least, an extraordinary year, an extraordinarily difficult year and painful year on so many levels, but also a year where New Yorkers have done amazing things to support each other and protect each other. And New Yorkers have been so vibrantly thinking about the kind of city that we need to be, going forward. People have really gotten involved and talking about how we have to address the disparities and the challenges, the unfairness that's still too much of life in this city that has to be overcome. And this is something that people are feeling, obviously, all over the country. And now, after months and months and months of all the frustrations, all the questions, all the challenges, two weeks from now people get an opportunity to decide the future direction of this country and to express everything we feel and use our democratic process to determine our course forward.

So, we're now in the final days before the most important election of our lifetime. We're going to talk today about some of the things that are so important to get people ready to fully participate. And particularly the fact that early voting starts this Saturday. So, it's really happening now and want everyone to know all the details, how to engage and get questions answered, make sure that everyone knows how to participate fully. But before that, let me give us all an update on what's been happening in our efforts to fight back the virus. And we're going through some challenges, but we're also seeing some really, really positive developments. And I want to talk about the importance of testing. Look, we've said it from the beginning, it just proves more and more true all the time – the more people get tested, the better we know what's going on and the better we can act. And from the beginning, we've said to people how important it is to just not doubt or question the testing process, but go out there and participate. It's very fair for New Yorkers, New Yorkers always asked tough questions, but really a lot of people talk themselves out of getting tested when it would be better for themselves and all of us for people to just go and experience it and participate and help us get the truer look on what's happening at this – over this whole city. So, that's why we have Get Tested Tuesday as a reminder to folks to folks who have never been tested – and there's still a lot of folks who've never been tested – or folks who haven't been tested in a long time, how important it is just to get out there and be a part of this. And it will actually give us the information we need to move this city forward.

And we're in the middle of a set of challenges, but they're challenges we can overcome. I've talked very openly about the fact there is a threat of a second wave, but we can stop that second wave. Absolutely requires people to participate and one of the best ways to participate is by getting tested. Now, in our school system, our public schools, we, from the beginning, determined that we would have a regular dealer testing program, a mandatory testing program every month, every school. And as we have started that testing program, we've just seen remarkable results. And this is a testament to everyone in our school system, the extraordinary work – our staff, our educators, parents, kids – everyone has done to make sure our schools are safe. So, now, after we've had testing in hundreds of schools, 16,000-plus test results have come back, only 28 students and staff have tested positive in our entire school system after more than 16,000 test results have come back. That is a positivity rate of 0.17 percent. This is really extraordinary. I want to emphasize, we all focus on our challenges and our difficulties, but let's take a moment to celebrate what the people of New York City have achieved – a 0.17 percent positivity rate – that's unbelievably good. And that means that all of those precautions that have been taken in our schools are working. When we said we were taking a global gold standard approach to our schools, that's exactly what's happened. You go into a school building, you see so many health and safety measures layered one on top of another, but the proof is in the results. And these are amazing results. And this really bodes well for the future of our schools and our ability to fight and overcome this disease.

Now. I want to remind all parents, all staff, the entire school community, we really want everyone to get involved in testing. And to do that, we need people to fill out those consent forms. So, again, a reminder to everyone, particularly parents, go online, fill out that consent form. Go to your account with the school system and do it that way or you can fill out a paper form and send it back into school. But this testing is working and it’s helping us keep our schools safe and is helping our city move forward.

Now, back to this historic moment – 14 days, two weeks to go. And, in fact, if you are really itching to vote, you can vote starting as early as this Saturday, October 24th. And early voting will continue from this Saturday, all the way to November 1st. Remember, voting is considered an essential service, just like the essential businesses that stay open. Voting sites will stay open throughout the city. All early voting and Election Day sites will be opened as planned, every borough, every neighborhood. And, of course, if you prefer not to vote on election day or not even to early vote, you can still vote by absentee ballot. That deadline is coming up soon. So, we are really pushing the Board of Elections to get clear information out, to not make some of the mistakes they've made previously and make this an easy, positive experience. But we're not just pushing them, we're doing our own work here at City Hall to get the word out, to encourage people, to give people answers, to make sure folks know that voting can be easy and safe. And our whole DemocracyNYC team has been deeply involved in getting people engaged more than ever before and showing people that everyone needs to participate. So, here to talk about this effort, my Senior Advisor and General Counsel to DemocracyNYC Laura Wood.

Senior Advisor & General Counsel Laura Wood, DemocracyNYC: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As the start of early voting approaches, we want to emphasize that voters don't have to choose between their health and their right to vote. And the DemocracyNYC team is working hard to make sure that New Yorkers know how to vote safely. To that end, with the Department of Health, we have developed a how to vote safely during COVID fact sheet. Starting this week, the fact sheet will be available at city COVID-19 testing sites citywide, including in the hotspot areas. And it can be downloaded at nyc.gov/votesafe in 13 languages – the top 13 spoken citywide. For those who choose to vote in-person, voting safely largely reflect the core four – wear a face covering; keep your hands clean; try to keep six feet apart from others, avoid crowds; and, if you're feeling sick, pick a different day to vote. And this year, that is easy, because you can avoid crowds by voting early. Early voting, as the Mayor said, starts this Saturday, October 24th and runs for nine days through November 1st. That includes two full weekends and five weekdays with early morning and evening hours available.

Additionally, DemocracyNYC, in partnership with the civic engagement commission has developed PSA’s on voting by mail, early voting, and voting rights at the polls. Starting this week, we will be running targeted ads in hotspot zones about voting absentee and early voting. These ads will run on broadcast, streaming, and social media platforms through November 1st. Lastly, we are making sure that New Yorkers have safe transportation options to get to the polls. As the Mayor announced last week, we've partnered with Curb to offer $5 off yellow and green taxi rides during the early voting period. If you want to take advantage, you can download the Curb app and use the code “vote early” from October 24th through November 1st.

Today, we're announcing a partnership with Citi Bike. New Yorkers can get 50 percent off Election Day rides, up to $10, from 4:00 AM to 11:00 PM on November 3rd. Use the code “2020 Vote” on the Citi Bike app to access the discount. Again, I want to encourage everyone to take the time to make a plan to vote, choose how and when it's best for you and make your voice heard. With that, I'll turn it back to the Mayor.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Laura. Thank you to you and everyone at DemocracyNYC. And I know for all of you, it is a labor of love to spread the word and get people engaged and make sure voting is easy and safe. And we're going to do that to make sure all New Yorkers get involved.

Okay. With that, everybody let's go to indicators. Okay. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients – today's report, 62 patients with a confirmed positivity rate of 19.7 percent for COVID. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550 cases – today's report, 496. And number three, percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold 5 percent – today's report, 2.52 percent. And today's seven-day rolling average number is 1.58 percent. A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today, we have Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, Laura Wood, Senior Advisor and General Counsel of DemocracyNYC, and Census Director Julie Menin. With that, we'll go to Narmeen from PIX 11.

Question: Hi, Mayor. Good morning. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Narmeen. How are you?

Question: I'm doing well. I'm wanted to touch base with you a little bit more about those daily indicators and whether you've had any more conversations with the Governor about what could potentially be coming tomorrow about those zoning changes and the maps changing at all. I know a lot of folks are waiting to hear what would come.

Mayor: Yes. Look, we are also waiting to get the final word from the State, but we're hopeful about Central Queens. Obviously, we have to look at data every single day and sometimes you have a variation in the data that causes a concern, but if we continue to see what we've seen for the last few days I have every expectation that the State is preparing to act to remove restrictions in Central Queens. But, again, pending final confirmation, pending final look at the data. We got some more to do in some of the other neighborhoods, but I have to say, again, what we're seeing in Central Queens reminds everyone that we can move through this quickly; that if folks go out and get tested, that we can get through this quickly; if folks do the social distancing and wear the masks, we can get through this quickly. So, hopefully, we get good news on Central Queens soon, and then the other areas soon thereafter. Go ahead.

Question: Mayor, sticking to that a bit, I know you were a bit reluctant to talk about a ZIP code by ZIP code understanding of how the numbers are doing in other red zones. But I wonder if you can give us a better understanding of how other parts of Brooklyn and Queens are doing outside of Central Queens? Are we seeing a continued leveling off? Is it slightly going up? Is it going down? Is it where you want it to be?

Mayor: Yeah, we're definitely seeing a leveling off all over the city. As you saw, that seven-day rolling average number – knock on wood. We have every single day more work to do. And again, we're not out of the woods in those red and orange zones, but, in general, the city continues to do well. And the key here is across [inaudible] to encourage more testing. We have a lot of areas where I'd like to see more testing. We definitely want to keep reminding people – I know there's fatigue out there, but how important it is keep wearing the masks. So, that work is going to deepen. We're going to address these immediate problems and then continue to do that outreach all over the city. But over [inaudible] –

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Mayor: Good, Jacob. How are you?

Question: I'm doing great. So there was a report and I just wanted to see if you can confirm that you met with Orthodox Jewish community leaders yesterday, and the report says that both community leaders and yourself expressed certain regrets on the approach they took early on. I wanted to see if you can expand on that – whether you think that the community and city government is on the reset.

Mayor: Well, I think we absolutely need a positive reset, Jacob. It was a very moving meeting, a very productive meeting, a group of leaders from Brooklyn and Queens, some of whom I've known very, very well for as much as 20 years and a very honest meeting. We really took our time to talk through everything that happened from the beginning of the pandemic and how painful it's been for everyone and how confusing it's been. But I think what the meeting really helped me to appreciate is that so many people in the community have suffered and they need to know that we, as the city government understand their suffering, understand the difficulties the community has gone through, understand the fears that people have rightfully of discrimination, and that we need to hear each other more and understand each other more. I did express my regrets – look, I think in the beginning of this process I thought we had done some good work to communicate with community leaders about how important it was to all work together, and I thought I saw really good results from that. Honestly, I did see really good results from that. We had amazing support from community leaders and institutions, and I said at the time, including doing really tough things like closing houses of worship voluntarily at the height of the crisis in March and April.

But, you know, I look back now and understand there was just more dialogue that was needed. I certainly got very frustrated at times when I saw large groups of people still out without masks, but I think more dialogue would have been better. So I certainly want to express my regret that I didn't figure out how to do that better, and obviously, you know, that one night in Williamsburg, I let my frustration and concern get away with me and I should have been more careful in my language and I've expressed my apology for that before, but I think it was a good, honest conversation about how hard it is to get people in the community to understand in an ever-changing environment why the information coming from the government is something they can have faith in when there's been so many changes, so many mixed messages – so many mixed messages from Washington D.C., and I think the, the number one takeaway from the meeting was more dialogue, more communication is the way forward. Go ahead, Jacob.

Question: You mentioned mass testing and that the numbers are leveling off in certain red zones. Do you have a specific indication where mass testing has indicated a better sample of what the real positive rate is? Or is it just leveling off because we are seeing people comply more carefully with the guidelines?

Mayor: Look, I think it's honestly a bit of both Jacob. I think what we learned long ago in places like Sunset Park and Soundview is when you alert people to a problem and you educate and you do mask distribution, things like that, it really does help get folks to be more disciplined. We certainly see in the red and orange zones, more and more people wearing masks more and more people practicing social distancing – that really helps unto itself. But I think obviously, you know, anytime you get more testing, you get a better look at things, and in a lot of the city, I think folks were getting to pretty low levels of testing, and, you know, there's still, as I said, a lot of New Yorkers never got tested at all that actually makes it harder to understand what's going on. So I think we clearly are seeing an uptick in testing now that we've sounded the alarm and it does not surprise me at all – the more testing, the clearer picture, and typically what we found is the more testing, the better of the picture becomes.

Moderator: Next up is Bob from the Chief Leader.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: How are you, Bob?

Question: Okay. I'm a little bit concerned. I did see this study from the New York School of Global Public Health that looks at a TWU Local 100 and the status of the workforce. They're, they're reporting that based on their survey, which does reflect the demographic of the workforce, our essential, brave workforce – one in four TWU Local 100 members working for the MTA may have contracted COVID, and 90 percent through getting the virus at work. This is the first of its kind, it has some limitations, but I'm wondering – this doesn't show that we really need more attention, even as we struggle with the election and the rest – looking at the occupational consequences of living with this virus.

Mayor: Yeah, Bob, that's a really good point. There is no question, you know, so many frontline working people showed up and put themselves forward to protect everyone else and help everyone else and keep the city going and keep, you know, in the case of our transit workers, because of them, all of the other essential workers were able to get to work and keep the city going and starting with the health care worker. So the transit workers played a really heroic role, but we do need to look really carefully at what the lasting impact is and support people. Right now we're obviously trying to overcome the crisis in front of us, but I think you're right, that this is going to be an important issue going forward in the city. How can we help those who did so much for us? Go ahead, Bob.

Question: As a follow-up, one of the things that comes out of this survey that's of concern and kind of ties into the overarching theme of the election, is that the members responding are evenly divided with like 31 percent to 32 percent not having confidence in any vaccine that the government might offer. Can you talk about, and we’re dealing with this now, the challenge of, of having – you know, this is a town and first responders remember the EPA guarantee about the air being safe to breathe in Lower Manhattan. How can government rebuild this trust it is suffered quite frankly, through this crisis?

Mayor: Bob, you, I've known you a long time and you often ask profound questions, and this is one of them. I'm going to start and turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi, cause we all were talking about this yesterday. I guess I'd say simply this, there is been for years and years a degradation of trust in all institutions in American society with very few exceptions, and if we wanted to have a longer discussion, we would go back to the Vietnam War and Watergate and all the things that started that in motion and the truth that came out that didn't use to come out, and I think it's gotten a lot worse in recent years, and I think history is going to show that that lack of trust was deeply intensified during the time of the Trump administration, but that is not a permanent feature. It's something we can overcome, and I think what you find is that people actually do have a lot of trust in that, which is most local to them. Maybe it's at the neighborhood level, maybe it's their labor union, you know, maybe it's a clergy member or faith group, but there are still places where people have trust. We've got to rebuild a bigger trust. It's going to take a lot of work, but I do believe it can be done.

But on this specific issue of the vaccine, your parallel to 9/11 is a very, very good one. That was actually – that decision by the EPA was one of the most tragic decisions in recent memory in the history of this city, and it still hasn't been examined enough, but it's an exact example of why people question government across the board. When it comes to the vaccine, I think people will believe it more if it's really consistently validated by health care professionals. There is still a lot of respect for the health care profession. So I think if you hear a consensus of health care leaders, that will be the single most important factor in giving people comfort in taking the vaccine. I think the second will be watching friends, neighbors, family take it, and then see if it works and they feel good about it, and then, you know, slowly but surely getting more comfortable with themselves. That's my kind of common sense view, but let me have Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi speak to this as well.

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Sure, I can go ahead and start. No, I think everything that the Mayor said is, is right on target, and I can tell you from my own personal experience working on you know, devastating outbreaks throughout the world, that that loss of trust in institutions and science is really what helps fuel and propagate epidemics. So when it comes to something as important as a vaccine I do feel confident that, you know, the scientists working in FDA and in fact, the scientists working at the companies that are developing this are really committed to making sure that any vaccine is safe and effective. Nevertheless, we have seen the possible influence of pressures on organizations and institutions. So it's very incumbent upon us as you know, the health officials that are, that are cast with helping New Yorkers, you know, fight this virus, making sure that we independently and accurately also assessed and endorsed the quality of the information, and then of course, for people to have discussions with their trusted advisors –obviously their family and friends and colleagues, but also their medical providers, and, and I do have a lot, a lot of confidence that if there is that independent assessment outside of the federal government and industry that we will be able to gain the trust when there is a safe and effective vaccine developed.

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi, you want to add?

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, thank you. I'll just add one brief point here, which is a first to underline yes, how important and how much of a pillar this idea of addressing trust will have to be to our vaccination strategy for COVID-19 in New York City. The piece that I wanted to build upon is the idea that health care providers, clinicians will be a central part of this, and in fact, in the study that you cited, Bob, one of the things that that rose to the forefront was the idea that people still do trust their doctors as someone who has practiced primary care for several years you know, there's no substitute for the relationships that are developed with ones patients going through thick and thin with them for, you know, momentous decisions like these. So a big part of what we will do is not just the overall, you know, citywide, public messaging about the science, about the validity of the studies that we're looking at, but really working hand in hand with trusted community physicians and other health care providers as well.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: Next we have Yoav.

Mayor: Can you hear us?

Question: Yeah. Can you hear me?

Mayor: There you go.

Question: Okay. Yesterday you mentioned that you had some concerns about the level of testing in the Brooklyn cluster. The only data that we have available is over a four-week stretch. So I'm wondering if you can just perhaps provide more specifics on what's happening there, and if you have any more recent data or your team, would you guys be able to provide it? So we have a more clear picture of what's happening?

Mayor: Yeah. We'll keep providing, you know, any data we can with the clear point I made yesterday that we want to make sure there is not further confusion. The City put forward a vision of how to address this immediate problem. State had a different approach. We're aligning to the State's approach. We really want to make sure that alignment is clear going forward until this immediate problem is over. When this is over, I want us to resume what we've done with our data, but in terms of testing and this was actually a topic. Last night at the meeting I had with community leaders we've seen some really positive examples of high levels of testing, and Williamsburg is a good case study here in Williamsburg. There's been a lot of focus on testing, a lot of community support for testing and lo and behold, you see those numbers have stayed stable and lower.

We have some parts of Brooklyn where we just need to convince people more. That testing makes sense and testing is safe and testing is reliable, and the conversation last night, it gets to the same trust point was really helpful in the explanation of why people, in some cases, don't trust testing all the different things that have been spread to discourage people from testing. Some of it aligns to the reality of, we saw back with the measles crisis as sort of the anti-vaxxer movement, a variation on that, just discouraging belief in science, belief in anything the government is doing. Some of that is ideological. Some of it is folks hearing rumors that if they got a negative test, it wasn't going to be counted, and therefore, why should they go out and get tested? We have to actually do a better job of addressing each and every one of these concerns, and Dr. Katz, who was a part of the meeting last night was really struck by that point that if folks don't believe that their test result will be accurately reflected that actually discourages testing instead of encouraging it. So we have to go a lot deeper into the community to say to everyone. In fact, Williamsburg's a great example. The more you get tested, the better look we get at what's happening in the community and the greater likelihood that the proof is there that restrictions can be removed. Go ahead.

Question: Well, to be honest, I don't want to waste my second question on a follow-up, but I was thinking, you know, more specifics as far as, you know, what neighborhoods and what the numbers show. I wanted to ask about a different issue, which is the City's creation of a nonprofit, and it looks like a purchase of Reliant, the bus company. Just wondering why it makes sense during a financial crisis to make a move that appears to be intended to save money over the long term, but where all of the investments are going to be on the short term.

Mayor: Let me tell you about my experience with the schools that certainly led me to believe this was good policy, and we saw this with the work of our Custodial Services team as well. When we had, that was the first experience we had of saying, how do we have such crucial services in our schools that are not part of the public sector, and it led to all sorts of problems, the history around, you know, going back decades around the problems with Custodial Services was pretty clear. We created a public nonprofit approach that really improved the Worker Custodial Services and became the template for what we looked at here with school buses.

With school buses, and I go back, you know, not only as someone who was a school board member in Brooklyn long ago, but also as a public school parent, the whole reality of school buses has been, you know, many, many companies, all different, question marks every year about how the school year would begin whether the service would be there. Obviously the threat of strikes, so many different pieces, and the question always was could we create a more rational approach? So having school bus service increasingly under a nonprofit umbrella is very much in the immediate interest in New York City and the long term interest in New York City, and I believe firmly, it will lead to more reliable school, bus service, safer school bus service, less disruption, and ultimately will save us money. So I think it's a very smart direction for the City. Go ahead.

Moderator: Next, we have Erin from Politico.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask about the testing in schools. So only 20 percent approximately so far of parents have returned these consent forms. So how is that working when you're, you know, if your number comes up and this random choice, and you haven't filled out the form at this point, has anyone been forced to go to remote because they're not getting tested or are you just skipping over them and hoping they'll figure they'll fill it out eventually, and you know, why is this number so low at this point?

Mayor: Erin, very good question. Your, your second option is exactly what's happening and that's what was the plan from the beginning? We knew it would take time for parents to focus on this. We knew there'd be valid questions that we had to answer. So right now we've had plenty of folks to be tested, not a problem at all. We're going to keep getting more and more consent forms – they've been coming in steadily. I don't see a problem in the short term. I think what's going to happen is, you know, you just need an available pool depending on the school, it's 10 percent to 20 percent of students, and staff, educators, the whole community, and so far, we've had plenty of folks to get tested as we go forward. We have to keep getting back more and more consent forms, no doubt. But I think we're on the right trajectory. Down the line, if we have a problem, we'll address that, then we've been very clear about how that would be addressed, but that's not a problem right now. Go ahead.

Question: Alright, thank you. And then we haven't talked for a while about deaths from this disease, but, you know, with this latest spike, I just wanted to get the update, obviously it's thankfully so much lower than it was once, but what are we seeing on average in terms of, you know, New Yorkers who are still dying from this disease in terms of the numbers and it, you know, has it gone up at all with the latest outbreaks?

Mayor: It's a crucial, now the most essential question really, and I appreciate it. I'm going to just say something and turn to Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Varma. You know, I try to be always the person who puts things into as plain English as possible as a layman, but this is what struck me as I've looked at this challenge over these last weeks, the number of hospitalizations daily really hasn't moved a lot. The number – the percentage of COVID positivity among the hospitalizations, hasn't moved a lot. The citywide seven-day average hasn't moved a lot. These are really hopeful signs, but what's been extremely striking and thank God that the number of deaths has not been increasing markedly, and, you know, we're dealing with something very different here, obviously, then we dealt with in March and April, but our profound concern is to not let this challenge gather steam and not allow a second wave in the door. So, so far it has been absolutely better than what we went through, but we still have to stay very vigilant. Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thank you for the very important question. The Mayor is right that we are not seeing an increase in in overall deaths and that's been true over the last several weeks to several months, you know, the total number of deaths per day is averaging in the in the single digits, and we do have this specific sample on our data page for the Department of Health. Of course any death is something that we hope to avoid and so we will not, you know, we will not end our efforts to try to prevent as much of that suffering as possible to save as many lives as we can. One really important consideration to point out about this is that we know that hospitalizations and deaths lag in increase in cases. We saw that earlier this year, and we're seeing it, you know, around the world in places that are experiencing much more significant increases. And so that's why it's so important for us to stay focused on the cases, the test positivity, things that are earlier indicators so that we can avert as much of that suffering as possible.

Mayor: Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Varma: Nothing else for me.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Time for two more. Next up is Alejandra from AM New York.

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: Good, Alejandra, how are you?

Question: I'm good. Thanks. I just have one question, another reporter asked my second one. There are a handful of City Council Members calling for a moratorium on shelter transfers until there's a COVID vaccine. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, and if you would consider imposing a moratorium until there's a vaccine available, or at least in total positivity rates in Brooklyn and Queens are lower?

Mayor: Thank you for the question, Alejandra. Look, in everything involving our shelter since this crisis – our shelter system I should say – since this crisis hit, we've turned to our health care leadership, we've turned to our Homeless Services leadership to determine how to keep people safe and made the decision, obviously, you get a lot of people out of congregate shelter and into hotels. We have a very different reality now, we're watching it constantly, but right now we have a very different reality, thank God, a much better health care reality. And even though the process of going back to congregate shelter will be a long one. I think on that level I don't expect to see a lot of changes in terms of going back to congregate shelter anytime soon.

But in terms of going, for example, a situation like we're talking about now, getting out of a hotel to get people to an actual shelter with services, I still think that makes sense. In fact, it's the safer option because the services are there, the health care is more available, and we also have to remember, you know, we have to be able to pursue more than one goal at once, and the hotels just are not the ideal option for homeless people. It's not the best way to support them on their path, you know, out of shelter and to affordable housing. So I would not think in terms of a blanket approach, I think we have to put the health care considerations front and center, and we have to be particularly careful about anything that might involve going back to a congregate setting, and none of the things that have been talked about in recent weeks have to do with those congregate settings. Those are whole different topic that we have not addressed so far. Thank you, Alejandra.

Moderator: Last, we'll go to Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Mayor: Katie, can you hear us. Hello?

Question: Can you hear me?

Mayor: Try again.

Question: Hello. Can you hear me? 

Mayor: Now I can hear you.

Question: You got me. Great. Thanks. I wanted to go back to something that Yoav had asked, and it is regards to the data, you know, there has been a discrepancy between the City and State data since COVID began, there were always difference numbers. They said it was down to some sort of delay. So I guess the question is why now that you have parts of the city shutdown due to rising COVID rates, why now would you stop releasing this data that could be the difference between a child going back to school or not? It seems that again, it's sort of, you're afraid we're going to be confused, but I guess we've been confused since March because it's always been this. So why not just release the data as you have it so we all know what's going on?

Mayor: Yeah, I understand the question, I would just disagree that because there's been a difference in the data before we should take an action now based on that, I would say, no, we have a very specific and very brief reality. Literally a matter of weeks from everything I can see. I presented a plan. The State came in with another plan. We're aligning to the state plan. I want to get through this period. Again, I'm hopeful very soon we're going to start to come out of restrictions in central Queens, and then in the other parts area over the next couple of weeks, clear the slate and then what I want to do is go back to a focus on providing the data regularly by ZIP code and make that the coin of realm, and we're going to have that conversation with the State as well about the virtue of that approach because I just think it's easier for everyone to make sense of. But I want us to get through this immediate period without creating even another level of confusion, and then we're going to clear the slate and start over and put out the data on what we think is the most accurate basis. Go ahead.

Question: Thanks. And my second question is a follow-up to something that Erin asked, it is in regards to the permission for, I guess, the – to get tested in schools. I know it's a 20 [inaudible]. So is there a concern that there are students who could have COVID but are not being tested because those consent forms are not filled out? And if so, I mean, is our percent positivity rate in schools, could it not be completely reflective of the reality of in our schools?

Mayor: Well, Katie, I understand the question, but I would say, you know, the results we're seeing in the schools, first of all, are just extraordinarily clear and consistent. We're talking about the monthly testing that we've now started. We're talking about the new testing we're doing in certain areas based on the State mandate. Everything has been coming back the same, very [inaudible]. You remember, even before school began, we started with several tens of thousands of teachers and staff, we tested ahead of school, consistently we’re seeing incredibly low positivity rate. We're also encouraging families to go get tested outside of school and making that free and available any time. So I do not have the impression that, you know, the approach we're taking is missing any kind of bigger reality. I think it's so consistent the numbers we're getting back. We're going to encourage parents in every way to sign those consent forms. I do think some parents have questions they need answered. They need to talk to doctors, we're facilitating that, or they need to speak to someone in their own language, we're facilitating that. There's legitimate things we have to work through with parents, but I think what you're going to see is the vast majority of parents over time are going to sign up. They're going to think it's something that is good to do, and if some choose not to, that's their right, but I think the results right now are really speaking themselves.

Okay. Everyone look, as we conclude, again, two weeks to an extraordinarily important day for this city, in this nation, and I think we have to think of it this way, that we've been through so much, we now have to really look forward. We have to look forward to the changes ahead and the hope ahead. I often get a lot of wisdom from the person I share my life with, and our First Lady said to me the other day, think of three things, election, stimulus, vaccine, and I think she's right, that those three key moments are going to really help us forward. And I think we're going to see hope by the people coming out and expressing themselves. I think there will be a stimulus not soon enough and big enough, but there will be a stimulus sooner rather than later. And there will be a vaccine. I don't know anyone in the health care profession who doubts that there will be a vaccine and it will happen in 2021. So, let's focus on the future and let's focus on the rebirth and let's see this as the first step to that rebirth together. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-21 NYS Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Look, from the very beginning of the coronavirus crisis, this city made a decision. We decided to focus on the science. We decided to be – to be driven by the data. We decided that the facts actually mattered. We would make our decisions based on the data and the science, and we would stick to it. And that's what we continue to do. We didn't have all the information in the beginning we should have had. We didn't have the testing capacity we deserved, but we knew that the direction was right. And the more we've learned, the more information we've gotten, the more testing we've gotten, the better we've done as a city. So, this is all what has sustained us. But we've also known from the beginning this was a crisis with an end in sight, because from the very beginning it was clear that the scientific community would band together and eventually there would be a vaccine. So, we know that the vaccine will be the difference-maker and we know that time is coming near. And so, New York City is working very closely with the State of New York to prepare for that day. And we have a lot to do. It's one thing to think about a vaccine or talk about a vaccine. And it's a very different thing to actually reach millions and millions of people. That's going to take a lot of hard work, a lot of logistical work, a lot of communication and education. But that preparation is happening right now. So, we'll be ready for that day.

Now, the vaccine will be a crucial part of our rebirth. The vaccine will open up the doors to our bigger economic recovery. We need to be ready and then we need to move quickly. And that's what we're going to talk about today, how we will make that happen. We don't have the exact date. No one has the exact date when the vaccine will be ready. But what we do know is it will be sooner rather than later. What we do know is that we have to have a plan that is fair and prioritize. And what we do know is we have to make the vaccine available to people, regardless of ability to pay. It has to be free for those who need it. So, the vaccine plan is being prepared by this city with those assumptions in mind. And there's some things that we know that are good, and there's some things we know that are not so good. Right now, we know that we have a very mixed message, mixed reality in Washington D.C. and that it's hard to rely on our federal government the way we would have in past years. That means it's all the more important that we are self-reliant and self-sufficient here in New York City, working closely with New York State. The good news is that despite the confusion that comes out of Washington, we have a lot of history to work with. We have lot of knowledge of how to use vaccines positively as a public health tool. This city has a long and illustrious history of reaching people and protecting them, protecting them with vaccines. And in this case, that takes on such greater value and greater meaning than ever before, because it will also be the gateway to bring in life back to normal and to getting people their livelihoods back and their freedom back. So, this opportunity, this moment goes far beyond anything in recent memory in terms of the impact of vaccine would make. But history does teach us a lot about how to go about giving out a vaccine effectively – and Dr. Chokshi will talk about that in a moment. We have to make sure a vaccine is safe. We have to make sure it's effective. We won't do anything until we're certain of those facts. And we have to make sure that we have a sufficient supply. And, as the supply grows, we're going to work on the priorities it will take to manage that supply properly.

So, first of all, the first phase, when we have a sufficient supply, will be to focus on those who need the vaccine the most – the frontline workers – the folks we depend on – health care workers, first responders, essential workers, the folks who are making this city run no matter what. And, of course, the most vulnerable New Yorkers, the folks who are in greatest danger from this disease – that's the first phase. The second phase is the general public and making the vaccine available widely. And the good news, again, is we have a public health infrastructure in this city that is so battle-tested, certainly in years before having done huge vaccine efforts, but particularly in the last seven months. Our public health apparatus in this city has learned such powerful lessons, has gone through such tough battles, but has done it so effectively. So, we all wish we hadn't gone through this, but I'll tell you something that everything that we've been through up to now has prepared us like never before to deal with the greatest challenges. And I tip my cap to everyone in our Department of Health and in Health + Hospitals, Test and Trace, all of the folks who have been part of this work because they've walked through the fire and they've learned so much in the process.

Now, of course, when we get to phase two and we're talking about widespread vaccination, we're going to use everything we have – our hospitals, our clinics, both Health + Hospitals and Department of Health clinics. We're going to use community centers, schools, you name it. And we're going to engage everyone in the health care world, public and private, including private physicians, pharmacies, urgent care centers, community vaccination efforts, whatever it takes. There's going to be a lot information out, a lot of education, a lot of giving people the answers they need, listening to people, taking their questions, getting them answers from clinicians who can really help them understand, doing it in many languages, getting that information out through trusted community leaders. It's going to be a huge, huge effort, but we can make it work. And here to give you a sense of what we will do and what we learned from our own history in this city, our Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Imagine a virus arriving in New York City and a Herculean effort is launched to vaccinate millions of New Yorkers in a matter of months – one of the largest campaigns in history. The Health Department organizes employees, medical providers, and volunteers, goes door-to-door in apartment buildings to educate community members and partners with clinics across the city to handle lines of people waiting to be vaccinated. Well, this very event occurred decades ago in 1947 for smallpox in New York City. Turning to COVID-19 and the present, I do want to state at the outset, we are certainly not approaching the challenge of distributing a COVID vaccine in New York City with arrogance. This virus has humbled us before, but the New York City Health Department has a record from smallpox to influenza of mounting successful vaccination campaigns. We have the tools, the staff, and the experience at the ready to serve this mission and a commitment matched to the magnitude of the challenge.

Coordinating closely with our State and federal counterparts, we can leverage our well-established vaccine network to provide services across the city at hospitals, community health centers, urgent care clinics, and pharmacies. In fact, we are already doing this, starting with our historic flu vaccination campaign this season, And with our new first deputy commissioner and chief equity officer, Dr. Torian Easterling, we will ensure that equity is at the center of our response. Trusted local clinicians and community-based partners can address skepticism and help us navigate a history of health care provision that has two often failed Black and Brown New Yorkers in particular. Trust is an essential ingredient for turning a vaccine into a vaccination. The models exist – for instance, we have employed community vaccinators during flu season. At a church in Greenpoint last week, a neighborhood identified as having low coverage, dozens of community members were vaccinated in a matter of hours. The Governor has announced detailed plans, including ensuring that any vaccine distributed in New York is sufficiently vetted and the State has outlined thoughtful questions to the federal. We await those answers as well. In the meantime, we are activating our resources to prepare for an eventual first phase of distribution. This includes first closely tracking the science to understand when we will have a vaccine that is safe and effective. Second, enrolling and educating doctors and other clinicians. Third, adapting our databases to track orders and uptake. And forth, developing detailed operational plans related to vaccine distribution, storage, and administration. In other words, we're marshaling the entirety of our public health infrastructure to meet this challenge.

We have the expertise and we have the experience, but most of all, we have New Yorkers, communities, and individuals who have pulled together so many times during this crisis. I know they're going to rise to this occasion in history just as they have for generations. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dr. Choksi. And I want to thank you – I think what our Health Commissioner said is reassuring, and it's encouraging, and it's true – that history, that really is something we all should feel proud of and we should feel encouraged by. The fact is, New Yorkers, not just in this time, but generations before have shown the amazing ability to handle any and all crises and to band together. So, I think you're going to see in some places, perhaps around this country, around this world, a high level of resistance to the science, the data, the engagement of the vaccine, I think here, we're going to do a lot better than a lot of other places, because we've been talking about the science and the data from day-one, because there is a lot of faith and trust in our health care team and the grassroots health care providers who are out there and every community. This will take real work. I want to be clear, it's going to take real work to turn the vaccine and the vaccinations as Dr. Choksi said. But I sure like our starting point in this city and I think this is going to be an example of New Yorkers really doing the right thing to protect each other.

And speaking of doing the right thing, it is so important to keep doing what's worked in this city. And people really have been great overall in terms of social distancing, mask wearing, and better and better at getting tested. And, you know, we're going to keep getting this message out. Remember, we don't expect most people to see a vaccine until at least a few months into 2021, but testing is here and now and everywhere. So, keep getting tested because it tells us so much, it helps us so much. It also gives you so much in terms of knowing what's going on with your health and your family's health. And testing is expanding continually, we're seeing more and more New Yorkers taking advantage of it. And in the cluster zones where we've been particularly focused in the last couple of weeks, numbers are coming in strong – over 23,000 tests since September 30th. And those test results continue to be encouraging. We continue to see in Brooklyn and Queens improved results, we still – excuse me, we still have a ways to go. But that big-picture reality, the City of New York is clearly leveling off. We're seeing better numbers for the whole city. We're seeing real improvements in some parts of those zones. Other areas have more work to do, but still most have shown improvement. And it absolutely correlates to the number of people getting tested. The more people get tested, the better look we get, and, in many cases, the quicker we're going to be out of restrictions because we get a better look at what's happening with the whole community. So, that is good news for sure. We’re waiting on an update from the State of New York. I think the Governor will be speaking soon on what is going to happen next with the red and orange zones. And we're going to be working closely with the State to implement whatever decisions they make.

Let me talk about one more topic before I go to our indicators. And this is a topic that is on the minds of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, and they happen to be the youngest New Yorkers. And it is for many of them the most exciting night of the year, and that is Halloween. I think back – I'm having lots of memories flood my mind right now of carving pumpkins with my kids and going out trick or treating with them and having trick or treaters come to the door of our house in Brooklyn. And it is one of the most joyous nights of the year. And this year, it's going to be different, but it's going to happen. So, I want to make very clear – Halloween is happening in New York City and Halloween will be safe in New York City. We want to do it differently. As with everything we've experienced this year, we understand it's not business as usual, but it can go on and it can be fun and it can be exciting for our youngest New Yorkers. And they deserve it – they deserve it after everything they've been through. So, let's talk about what makes sense for trick or treating this year. First of all, the most important thing we have learned throughout this whole crisis, outdoors is better than indoors. So, with trick or treating, should all be outdoors, only outdoors – no trick or treating inside apartment buildings, for example, do everything outdoors. Second of all, a costume – the mask you have in a costume is not the same as the kind of mask we use to protect ourselves and each other. So, for a child wearing a costume, put a mask on top of the costume on the outside of costume to protect them and protect everyone. No indoor gatherings, no indoor parties. And do things in small groups – again, basic rules we've learned – small groups are better than bigger groups. Maintain social distancing. When folks are laying out the treats in the bowl for kids, stand back, give them some space. And it's much better that any candy be, of course, in a bowl, not handed individually. So, real common-sense things. These are the smart rules that will keep our kids safe, keep our families safe. Also, Commissioner Chokshi told me there was one additional rule, it is a legally binding mandate – parents, you cannot take candy from your child's bag. Okay? The Health Department is watching. Okay. Thank you, doctor. So, everyone let's have a great Halloween. Let's make it safe though – outdoors and safe.

Okay – our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report 77, and a confirmed positivity rate for COVID of 29.8 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases, today's report 493. Number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, that threshold is 5 percent – today's report 1.56 percent. And today's seven-day rolling average number is 1.68 percent.

A few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, we'll turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today we have Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, and Health + Hospital CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz. Our first question today goes to Andrew from WNBC.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. I know we're waiting for the Governor to make it official, but assuming he, in particular, relaxes restrictions on Central Queens, places like Forest Hills, what would the City then do to enforce the ongoing progress that you've made in those zones? And what have you seen in terms of how enforcement has changed?

Mayor: Yeah, Andrew, I want to respect your question, but I'm going to say, I wouldn't start with the word enforce. I would start with the fact that a lot of people have been educated in this crisis from the beginning. But especially in these red and orange zones, the fact that this disease could come back, that restrictions could be put in place again – I think that's been a real wake up call to people, and I think a lot of folks are going to act differently from this point on. And that's what we really need to encourage and support first and foremost – the social distancing, the mask wearing, being smart about the number of people in gatherings. So, we're going to educate, we're going to support that. Of course there will be enforcement efforts as well. But I don't think we're going into the same situation we were in, you know, a couple of months ago. I think folks are going to be sobered by this experience and you're going to see a different approach. Go ahead.

Question: The Boston School District decided to go all remote because their percentage level went above their threshold, which I believe was 4 percent. I know you've had good success with your blended program so far in New York City, but how confident are you that in-person school will be able to continue going forward?

Mayor: Andrew, I will never pretend to know what the future brings, but I will tell you that based on the experience we've had so far, I'm very confident. We've had really extensive testing and the results have come back consistently as a very, very low positivity rate in our schools, obviously much lower than what we're seeing in the city as a whole, and the city as a whole is lower than almost any place in America. You know, schools are moving forward, kids are learning, so many kids, parents, educators are so happy to be back in school. So, I really like where we are and I think we're on a good track.

Moderator: Next up is Rich from WCBS Radio.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everybody on the call.

Mayor: How are you doing Rich?

Question: So – I'm doing all right. So, I'm just wondering what motivated you to talk about your vaccine plan today? What what's the immediate need for that since we're a while from getting the vaccine, I guess?

Mayor: Well, we've been working on this obviously for a while and it was helpful to hear the State’s plan, the outline that the Governor put forward, which I think was a good one, but we want all New Yorkers to know that we're getting ready right now. There's – the doctors will tell you the we may be in a situation where it's relatively soon where the first supplies are available for that Phase One for the first responders and health care workers and the most vulnerable New Yorkers. So, that's a lot of work just to get ready for that phase. We want people to know that work is being done. What the State put forward, I think it was very helpful, but of course it comes down to localities to turn it into action. So, we're showing people how we're going to approach this and we'll be giving a lot more detail as we go along. Go ahead.

Question: Okay. yeah, and so one other thing, following up a little bit on what Andrew just said, in regard to the schools. Last time I checked in with you, you only had to close two schools and I'm just wondering how many schools have been – had to have been closed at this point?

Mayor: So, okay, I'll get this precise as best I can, Rich. Let's put aside schools that are closed in red and orange zones. Of course those schools are reopened once those restrictions are lifted. So, for the rest of the schools, the city, well over 1,400 schools, the latest information I have from last night is five schools are on a 14-day shutdown. One of those is coming out of its shutdown tomorrow. So, then that would be four, and we have a number of schools who have been 24-hour shutdowns and then cleared, and they come right back online. We've had classrooms shutdown in two-week quarantines, but what has been very striking and was a question we had in the beginning, Rich, was how often would a school need to be shut down for two weeks? It has been a rarity. Right now, again, five today out of over 1400, one of them about to come out of that status and go back online. So, the good news is that's a rarity and we want to keep it that way with intensive measures to keep the school safe, all the cleaning, the face mask wearing, the social distancing. We see it really working in our schools.

Moderator: Next, we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask just – I realize you're laying out these plans about the vaccine distribution process, obviously no vaccine yet in sight. The Governor talked about this a few days ago, as you know, and he talked about it as it specifically being a State-led effort. So, I guess because of the number of times we have seen different plans or disagreements or different approaches for me when the Governor about how to handle different parts of this crisis, what can you tell New Yorkers today so that they can feel confident that when this vaccine does arrive, that the City and State will actually be on the same page about how to get this done?

Mayor: Again, I just will say at the outset, I had this conversation with the Governor on Friday and we both agreed on this point, overwhelmingly the City and the State have agreed. I think it's become a fascinating topic to a number of you to talk about when there's a disagreement. I would challenge you to look at all the times when there was an agreement which is overwhelmingly the case. So, if there's ever something where I think I have to do or say something to defend the interests in New York City, I'm going to do that, but overwhelmingly the City and State have agreed, and the State's plan is a good plan, and we're in communication with the State. We're working with the State. We have to implement it, and this is the reality throughout this crisis. I wish this would be discussed a little bit more, a federal government, a state government can come up with a vision or rules, but it's always localities that have to implement them, and state governments don't do that. That's true everywhere in the country, city governments, local governments, county governments, run schools, run policing health care system. States don't do that. We have to put it into action, but we feel a lot of agreement with the plan the State has put forward, and our health care leadership is working closely with the State to make it come to life. Go ahead, Gloria.

Question: Thank you, and my other question is about some of the daily indicators in the last couple of days, I believe you said today, we're at 493, the threshold being 500 for the number of cases. I believe the positive of the seven-day rolling average was in the twos yesterday, seems to have gone to gone down today. It seems like we're getting close to some threshold numbers particularly that three percent, which would trigger a shutdown of the schools. I wonder if everyone can just speak to that. Where are we in terms of that? Is there something that is driving up those numbers and are you going over plans or how you would respond if we get close to that 500, and that three percent?

Mayor: As I said the other day, I was asked, I, I want to, unfortunately I have to tell you, I think one of those facts is not accurate, which is the number that I gave yesterday for the daily testing was in the twos. It was one of the only ones we've seen in the twos recently, but the rolling average was in the mid-level one range. So, the rolling average has been really consistent in the last few weeks in the neighborhood of 1.5 to 1.75. Today's seven-day rolling average, 1.68. We've been in that kind of general neighborhood for a good amount of time now, and that is a leveling off. But with the threshold question on the new reported cases, I was asked this last week and I said, or earlier in the week, and I said, look, that number doesn't live in isolation, we're looking at all three indicators. Yes, the case numbers went up, but they went up in part because of intensive new testing efforts. But you see the hospitalization levels, still pretty stable, the positivity levels among those hospitalized still pretty low, and most importantly, the seven-day rolling average, certainly in a zone, in a range, we can work with. So, no, I think the news has been good and shows that leveling off, and no, we do not need to plan any additional steps beyond what's being done with the restrictions right now, because the numbers are telling us that we are leveling off in a good way at this moment.

Moderator: Next up we have Dana from the Times.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hi, Dana. How are you doing?

Question: I'm all right, thank you. Given the somewhat dissonant messages coming from you and the Governor regarding vaccine plans, and who's in charge of implementing them, do you think some sort of joint press conference might reassure New Yorkers who are skittish about getting a vaccine?

Mayor: I'm happy to do whatever will be helpful to New Yorkers, but again Dana, I talk to a lot of people. I used to tell you this, everyone in the media, this when I went and had many town hall meetings, and I don't have the benefit of having those town hall meetings the same way, but I sure talk to a lot of people. I really don't think every day New Yorkers are particularly concerned about this concept, which is so interesting to the political class and the media of when the City and State have a disagreement, because again, the City and State have overwhelmingly agreed. I just said, you know, we, we have been working closely together on the vaccine plan are a hundred percent comfortable with what's been put out with the State, but again, I, unless people want to ignore this fact that localities have to do the implementation and we have to figure out a way to do that, the State doesn't come in and do that. They don't have the personnel to do that. They're not structured that way. We have to do that. So, it's actually our responsibility to tell people how we're going to make that work and to work with the State to make sense of it, but anything that helps get the message across I want to do and the moment when we have a vaccine it’s going to be a profoundly important moment. So, I'm certainly going to be talking with the Governor and his team about the best way to get the message out and we'll work together on that. Go ahead.

Question: Thanks Mr. Mayor, and then on an entirely different topic, Friday is the deadline for federal departments to submit their list of proposed budget cuts to so-called “anarchist jurisdictions,” to the Office of Management and Budget. Have you separately calculated how much federal funding New York City is at risk of losing?

Mayor: We are not at risk of losing funding. I just want to be as clear as a bell on this. What President Trump is attempting here is blatantly unconstitutional. You know, we had our Corporation Counsel Jim Johnson here few days back talking about the constitutional underpinnings of how money gets distributed. The Congress makes those decisions, not the President, the President can't reach into what's been allocated and take it away because he disagrees with one part of the country. So, nothing has actually materialized in a meaningful way to affect our funding. I think this is an election ploy by the President to try and rally his base. It will not work. It will not hurt our funding, and if they do anything tangible to stop our funding, we'll see them in court, and I guarantee you, we will beat them in court.

Moderator: Next up is Reuvain from Hamodia.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I understand that the Governor – he has a press conference scheduled soon – there's a possibility that he may announce that he's allowing schools to open, assuming there's a rigorous testing program, which would be overseen by the City. So, my question is if the Governor indeed does announce that how soon would the City be ready to implement such a program and with students who have already been sick previously, still need a negative test?

Mayor: I'm going to turn to the doctors on your second question. On the first question we have not been given any details from the State as to what they intend for schools. We have a huge testing apparatus, and we're going to work with the whole community to help ensure that people are tested. Depending on what the Governor specifically intends, we may need some material help from the State, either in terms of testing capacity or funding, we may need something to help us achieve it quickly. But in terms of the overall ability to move a lot of testing quickly, we're in a strong position.

In terms of the standards, and again, we don't have any written guidance from the State to work with yet, but in terms of the standards, Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Varma, why don't you jump in?

Commissioner Chokshi: Sure, I can start Mr. Mayor. To the second part of your question, Reuvain, the most important thing is if a student is not feeling well, if they have symptoms and they're feeling ill, they should stay home. That is first and foremost. If they have not gotten a test than they should be they should be tested. The only exception to that is if they have gotten a test within the last 90 days, and it was positive. In those cases, we do not recommend that the student get retested. But most cases will be of a student feeling ill, making sure that they stay home, and if they haven't gotten a test in the last 90 days to make sure that they do go get tested.

Mayor: Dr. Varma, you want to add?

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: No, nothing.

Mayor: Okay. Go ahead, Reuvain.

Question: Councilman Chaim Deutsch tweeted that there was a store that received in his district – that received the summons simply for having their doors open. They were just open for takeout, and I'm wondering if you're familiar with this incident, and if in general, there's a feeling that some inspectors are just looking for technical violations and flooding places with tickets even who are following the rules. I'm wondering if you're familiar with this particular incident or the complaints in general?

Mayor: Reuvain, I'm not familiar with that incident, but I'm going to make sure we follow up on that incident. I don't want to see any store penalized on a technicality that isn't about health and safety, obviously. So, we'll follow up on that case, but let me talk about the bigger situation. The meeting I had night before last with community leaders. You know, I think there was a tremendous concern that there was enforcement that was arbitrary, and we don't want that. This is something we'll be talking with the State about of how to strike the right balance. We all understand we need enforcement especially when there is willful decision not to follow the rules and to put people's lives in danger. But you know, the vast, vast majority of store owners don't do that nor any other community institution. As we've worked with the community overwhelmingly, we've had support from community leaders and organizations to make sure everyone is healthy and to follow social distancing and work with these rules and work together, to get people tested and to get out of these restrictions as quickly as possible. I really want to see us get ahead of these restrictions for everyone's good, and so if the enforcement is becoming the kind of enforcement that you know, I've talked about for years, where it was to arbitrary towards small businesses in general, long before the coronavirus, we don't want that, and we don't want to penalize people who are struggling to keep going during such a tough time. So, we'll be talking with the state about how to create that balance properly.

Certainly my message to all my agencies will be, I don't want to see people penalized if it isn't something that's truly important, and I also heard from the community leaders, a real concern about discrimination, and I want to speak to that because that's absolutely unacceptable. We cannot in this moment have any enforcement or anything else that is unfair or unequal. Concerns were raised about whether stores of one background were being treated differently than stores or another background. We can't have that. That's just not acceptable. There's – I want to tell you it's, to me personally, offensive that anyone would show discrimination towards the community in this moment, and all of us need to understand that we're fighting a challenge together, shoulder to shoulder, and so we're going to send a very clear message to all agencies to make sure that enforcement is fair and is equal for all and anything that might trigger discrimination, we have to fight vibrantly intensely. We cannot allow discrimination against this community. It’s a community that is suffering through this crisis and we all want to work together to help every community to get out of this crisis together.

Moderator: Next, we have Marcia from WCBS.

Question: Mr. Mayor with the Governor moving to eliminate some lockdown restrictions in Queens, I wonder how – what your prognosis is about how long it will take to eliminate all the lockdown restrictions in all the mini-clusters.

Mayor: Marcia, I want to start, and I'm asking people to loyally report this, I want to start with a really clear sentence. I've said it from the day I proposed a course of action to address this crisis. The State has to make these ultimate decisions. I will always say what I think is important to protect the people in New York City, but the State has to make these decisions and we respect that that's the State's law and rule, and we're going to follow their lead. I am hopeful based on the numbers that this is only a matter of a few weeks, but again, we have to every day see those numbers, those numbers have to keep coming back better and better consistently, and the State has to believe in those numbers too. So Marcia overall trend, I'm seeing some real progress and I'm particularly seeing an uptick in testing, and that's been really good, and some of the neighborhoods that never needed to go into red and orange zones, like Williamsburg, for example, are places where there was a particularly high level of testing. Absolutely need to see people get tested. State will decide, but I like the numbers we're seeing now. We're moving in the right direction. Go ahead.

Question: My follow up question is this, are you seeing any uptick in any other communities that could also be potential mini-clusters? And if so, what are you doing about those?

Mayor: We are not seeing anything like what you've seen in the current red and orange zones. We definitely see areas where we need a lot more testing and we will be sending more testing into different communities in the city where we are not seeing the kind of testing levels we'd like, we definitely see areas where we want to do more education and mask distribution. But we are not seeing anything that parallels what we've seen in these red and orange zones.

Moderator: We have time for two more. First we’ll go to Michael from the Daily News.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Michael, before you get started, I want to – I owe you credit that you raised some important issues to us a week or so ago, and I'm glad you did. I want to thank you for that. I think, you know, we followed up on those two issues and I think we were able to make progress on both of them.

Question: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. I appreciate that. I had two questions for you, one has to do with the upcoming early voting and I'm wondering what your senses and feeling is on how this will proceed as far as just the nuts and bolts of it? Are you in contact with the Board of Elections on issues like, you know, do they have enough poll workers? I know, you know, the NYPD talked about kind of some of their preparations yesterday. What's your sense of that at this point? And what other preparations is the city itself taking aside from, you know, what the NYPD is doing to ensure that early voting goes smoothly?

Mayor: Yeah, Michael, we're obviously doing a lot to try and educate people and answer concerns and questions. I'm going to be early voting myself, and I want to really encourage people to take advantage of early voting. I think Election Day is going to be a huge, huge turnout, and you know, we obviously don't want to see people more in lines than need to be, and we want to see everyone vote and sometimes long lines discourage people. So taking advantage of early voting, taking advantage of voting by mail and that deadline's coming up soon, we're going to encourage all that. We're going to try and do a lot of public education through DemocracyNYC because public education has not been a strong suit of the Board of Elections. We're obviously going to be responsive to any help the board needs. Obviously I wish – as you know – I wish we ran the board directly because I think we could get a lot more done in terms of making the process smoother, but whatever the board needs in terms of support to make this work, we stand ready.

Question: My next question has to do with the you know, the vaccine plan you just outlined, and I was wondering if you could give us some more specifics. I don't know if you mentioned it or it was the slide mentioned it but you know, there was mention of that the cold storage, where is the city is at in terms of, you know, how many facilities do you have set up as far as infrastructure goes? What specific preparations is the city taking to ensure that that's, you know, we'll be ready to go once that vaccine's ready to go?

Mayor: Yeah, I appreciate that question, Michael, look, this is exactly what I'm saying about, you know, here's where the rubber hits the road at the local level. We have to do all that real logistical work to make sure that the idea of a vaccine turns into the reality of vaccination and it's a lot of work and it can only be done locally. So as you heard from Dr. Chokshi that our Health Department has a lot of experience with this and that's going to really come in handy now. So Dr. Chokshi, could you talk about some of those logistics and how we're going to store the vaccine?

Commissioner Chokshi: Absolutely, sir. So for the different potential COVID-19 vaccines, there are three different ways that we would think about cold storage, which is also sometimes known as the cold chain. The first is refrigerated vaccine, that's you know, two to eight degrees Celsius. The next is frozen storage so that's a few degrees below zero, and then there's what's called ultra-cold storage, which is several degrees below zero beyond that. So we have to look at first how vaccines are making it through the clinical trials process to understand which ones will be available sooner rather than later, and match those up with what we know exists with respect to different cold storage locations. For example, we know that hospitals and clinics can very easily satisfy the first two dimensions of what we talked about with respect to storing vaccine, but the ultra-cold storage is one where there are more limited options with respect to being able to store that type of vaccine. So we're in regular communication with the manufacturers of the vaccine to understand exactly how the cold chain process will work for all dimensions from that refrigerated side to the ultra-cold side.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: For our last question, we'll go to Julia from The Post.

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, hope you're doing well.

Mayor: How you doing Julia?

Question: I'm doing good. On the vaccine plan, you and the Commissioner expressed a lot of confidence about being able to roll it out smoothly, but I wonder if you take any pause or learn any lessons from two things, one, the fact that you've only been able to get 20 percent of parents to fill out consent forms for testing, and two some of the troubles you ran into with the measles vaccinations last year?

Mayor: Julia it's a smart question. I appreciate it because we do try to learn from every situation. Both of those topics are pertinent, but I would say to you, what we learned from the measles situation was a strong, small, a very small number of people spreading an anti-vaccine message definitely is something that we have to deal with. But we also learned that we could overcome that with a lot of information, particularly from trusted voices, from community voices, from health care providers. So I would say the measles example is cautionary for sure, but it had a happy ending that we figured out how to get the word through in a way that people heard and believed and acted on, and obviously that's why we were able to end that crisis. The situation schools is nascent. We're still in a time where everyone's getting used to the new reality of schools. We've seen a steady, positive response from parents in terms of signing up for testing.

Again, I talked about this, I think it's going to take more dialogue than might have been true in something in the past because there's so much confusion, and a lot of it has come from the national level. There's so many unanswered questions that we need to talk to people. We need a parent, if they want to talk to a doctor, we're going to help them do it. If they need to talk to someone in their own native language, we're going to let them do that. You know, we want to help people get their questions answered and that takes time, but as those conversations happen, more and more people are signing up. I think also, final point, the vaccine, because it is the decisive element here - a test tells you what's going on, but it doesn't solve your problem, a vaccine actually solves your problem and people know that from the flu and so many other examples. Once people see it is safe and it's working, I think word of mouth takes over and more and more momentum builds and more and more people want that vaccine. Go ahead.

Question: Okay, second question is on testing and kids and students. I know you've cited, you know, the incredibly low positivity rate, I think it's like 0.17 percent in schools, but according to this State, the city's reported actually 2,000 positive cases for city kids, whether they're at home in school, in private school, in religious school, that gives us a two percent infection rate since September. Does that give you any pause that in-person, specific DOE rate, is a fraction of the overall number of kids affected? And do you know if it's that high for a specific reason such as yeshivas?

Mayor: No, I respect the question, but I have to say this is a case of stretching statistics in a very inaccurate manner. The fact – that if you're looking over all of September and all of October, and that's the number of cases you've had in that entire time, that means at any given point you're positively level was very low. And the fact is we're talking about not only over a million public school kids, but then hundreds of thousands of more charter school, public – excuse me – private school, religious school, and it's a huge universe in which so, you know, I'll get the exact number, if you take every kind of student in New York City, but you're talking, you know, 1.3, 1.4 million kids, to have that few cases over two months is an incredibly low positivity level. And I think it actually is a number that says how well we're doing. Dr. Chokshi, why don't you weigh in on that too because I think I'm counting accurately, but let's hear it from a real doctor.

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, you're right, Mr. Mayor, that the only one point that I would add to this is that the best scenario is when we are able to identify cases before they go into school. And so that's what that testing represents is a number of kids who are being tested in the community as well as through our school based testing program. And so each of those cases that is identified before someone shows up in the school setting means that we know that they'll be able to stay home, to isolate, and that helps us to interrupt the spread of COVID-19.

Mayor: Dr. Varma, and I turn to you on this point, you've really led the way looking at school systems around the world and what we needed to learn from them, and then comparing our results to school systems, not only in the United States, but around the world. So based on the information you just heard, what would you say?

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah, thank you for the question. I think there's a couple of important points. The first as the Mayor has has noted, the approach that we're using is really among the most rigorous that you see anywhere in the world. I have personally reviewed protocols used for many countries in Europe and in Asia, and can attest to that. Second, we've received a number there've been a number of published and their internal reports coming from various parts, not just from the United States, but elsewhere in the world, which also continues to bear out, whether you look at the U.K., you look at Germany, you look at Australia, it bears out that when you have all of these measures in place, schools can in fact be made safely. And the third thing is, is to extend on the Mayor's point about comparison numbers. The – it's important to understand what the testing in schools, the school testing survey tells you, and what it doesn't tell you. The most relevant comparison point is if we took, you know, randomly sampled a hundred New Yorkers off the street, how many of them would have infection if we tested them? And that's because that's analogous to what we're doing in the school, where we're taking a random survey of the school population and testing them and what we see so far, again, we always have to be cautious, what we see so far is that you are less likely to encounter somebody with infection in a school then you would be outside the school and not just by a little, but by a lot. And that isn't evidence of the fact that what we're doing in our schools, telling people to stay home if they're sick, making sure they wear a face covering, doing all of the measures that we know, those have measures are working right now. We can't rest, of course, on our laurels. This is something you have to do every single day rigorously, but everything we see right now is reassuring and very much in line with what we see elsewhere in the world.

Mayor: Thank you so much doctors. Let's conclude today with this point that we're preparing now in this city to continue to lead the nation in addressing the coronavirus. We were the epicenter. We overcame that. We became one of the safest places in America. We had a problem in some parts of our city. We went at it aggressively and we're making progress. We said we could reopen the largest school system in America, and we did it, and we did it safely as you're hearing from the doctors. Now we prepare to ensure that people get vaccinated in a safe, effective manner and that's going to be a model for this country as well, and for the world. We're going to be the public health capital of the world because of everything we went through, everything experienced, but all the triumphs that New Yorkers achieve, we're going to have the ability to say here, in this heroic city, we figured out how to do it right and we can teach the whole world how to do it right, and that is going to be one of the pillars of the New York City of the future. That's going to be one of the things that makes us strong, that creates new jobs, that gives us new meaning as a city that we will beat this disease and then help others ensure that no disease ever does this to any city anywhere again. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-22 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. To say the least, there are so many families in this city that have suffered during the year 2020. So many families, so many kids who have gone through so much and the trauma, the pain, the challeng1es, they still are having such a huge impact on our families and children. And the City of New York believes it's our responsibility to help those families, to help those kids. We believe that's what we're here for as public servants to actually alleviate people's suffering and help them move forward. That's what the City believes, but the federal government is doing something very, very different. Just at the moment when we need help the most, just at the moment where our families are suffering the most, you would think this would be when the federal government would offer a helping hand the most. Remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our own New Yorker, the New Deal, when people were having the toughest time, the federal government stepped up, helped in unimaginable ways, helped people get out of that crisis. You'll want to believe your federal government is going to do the right thing for you and really try and every way to help us in everything we do for everyday New Yorkers, but we've experienced just the opposite. And I'm not just talking about the beginning of this crisis when there wasn't enough testing or when we couldn't get PPE from the federal government or any other things that we could go over, I'm talking about the recent actions of the Trump administration to literally cut off funding that would help us provide health care, that would help us keep people safe. A totally political action that would actually undermine the lives of New Yorkers, just when they need help the most.  

What we've seen from President Trump, threatening funding for New York City and other cities, it's morally wrong. It's legally unacceptable. It's unconstitutional. And we're going to fight it. We've seen this not only directed at New York City, but at other cities that are trying to help their people, Seattle and Portland, that are trying to do the work of bringing their cities out of this crisis. Also being threatened with their funding being taken away by the federal government. So, here's the bottom line – I said weeks ago, if the Trump administration persisted in trying to illegally take away funding from New York City, we would take them to court and we will beat them in court and here to tell you what we're doing in coordination with our sister cities, the man who will lead the way, lead the charge with his team at the Law Department, our Corporation Counsel, Jim Johnson. 

Corporation Counsel Jim Johnson, Law Department: Thank you, Mayor. In a couple of hours in Seattle, we will file a complaint that is pushing back on, and seeks a court's judgment on, the Trump administration's decisions to withhold funding from cities that they have, without cause and without law, determined to be anarchist cities. We're bringing this action because they have taken concrete steps. They've actually taken this anarchist designation and started to include it in applications for federal grants. We're not going to wait for them to include it in more. We're moving now. There are three reasons why this is wrong. First off, they're stepping way over their bounds. Congress controls the power of the purse, not the Trump administration. And yet they're stepping into the congressional space. Second, they're moving in a way that is arbitrary and capricious. There is no basis in law, there is no basis in fact, for this anarchist determination, and yet they are going to use it to determine who does and who does not get federal funding. And third, it violates federalism because it steps into a space, or at least they're trying to step into a space, that is uniquely for the cities to decide – how we decide to police our streets, how we decide to spend our funds. And because those don't line up with what this administration believes that it should do, that is the Trump administration, they're deciding to withhold funds. And for New York, the amounts that potentially are at risk could exceed $12 billion. We will see them in court. The papers will be filed in Seattle later on today. In our western sister cities, we have seen the deployment of federal troops in battle dress uniforms. And that is the appropriate place for this suit to get started. And we will be with them all along the way. We expect to prevail in court, and we expect to see victory. But there is going to be no victory unless we push the fight. And that's what we're starting today. 

Mayor: Thank you so much, Jim. And thank you to you and your whole team for this crucial work. We're not going to let the rights in New York City be trampled, and our court system time and time again has shown it actually believes in the U. S. Constitution. And we are confident of victory in this case. Now, let me talk about the situation right here in this city when it comes to fighting this disease. Again, we're doing this work every single day and we're working closely with the State of New York. Our job is to fight back the coronavirus with every tool we have and we're going to remain vigilant. Even when we make progress, we don't let down our guard. Now, we do have some progress in Brooklyn and Queens. There's still work to do. I'm going to say it many times. There's still real work to do, but the two weeks of restrictions in place had a big impact. And we saw people really changing their approach in a lot of ways that were really helpful. So, again, we never, ever want to put restrictions in place unless we have to, but we had to and, in fact, they had the impact we needed. So, we see significant progress in Queens where all the Queens red and orange zones are now yellow zones by the State's standards. And that means as of today, businesses in those areas can reopen, very important that those businesses can now reopen and get back to the work of earning their livelihoods and moving forward out of this crisis. It means indoor dining can resume with appropriate restrictions in those areas. It means houses of worship can increase their capacity to 50 percent in those yellow zone areas. And it means schools will be back with in-person classes on Monday. So, that's good news all around. 

Now, we're always going to keep watching all over the city and we'll keep working with the State to look for any areas that need additional work. We've seen some additional numbers in Ozone Park that led the State to put Ozone Park into the yellow zone. That means we'll get expanded outreach and testing into that area and we'll keep a close eye. But overall, the situation in Queens we've seen some really good progress. Now we’ve got to consolidate that progress and keep moving forward as a city. Brooklyn – in Brooklyn, there's more work to be done. There is progress but we still have work to be done. The red zone areas have remained stable. As I've said, I think it's going to take another week or two to get those areas out of that red zone status. Orange zone areas in Brooklyn are shifting to yellow, and yellow zone areas that previously existed remain unchanged. So, progress in Brooklyn, but we need more, a lot of work, a lot of discipline needed to overcome the challenge and to make sure we get out of the restrictions altogether. But to anyone out there who's frustrated – I don't blame anyone who's frustrated by the restrictions. Look at the fact that progress did come. It did come quickly in Queens, a lot of progress, some real progress in Brooklyn. Stick to it and we overcome this quickly. Anyone's got questions, obviously, there are a lot of questions, you can go and use our online tool that will give you clear answers about what's happening in your area. That is one of the ways to get the information you need. And we want to make sure that anyone who needs further information about what addresses in each zone, that online tool can help you.  

Look, everyone, I want to thank everyone who's worked so hard to overcome the challenge in these zones. I've talked to a lot of folks affected. I know it's been tough, but I want to thank everyone. We've seen a lot of leadership. We've seen a lot of tremendous effort at the community level. Folks banding together to overcome the challenge. Now, the coronavirus affects us physically, and we have seen – we do not take this disease lightly at all, we understand the huge devastating impact it can have. And we understand it as a physical challenge, but we've also come to understand the massive challenge, the mental health challenge, that has come with the coronavirus crisis. It's been a painful education to see how much, how difficult this has been for so many families in this city. We know that mental health is just as important as physical health. And we know that mental health challenges affect all ages, but our kids have been particularly vulnerable in this moment. Imagine if you're still trying to understand the world and then the world's turned upside down and you see all these painful challenges. We need to help our children. And we particularly need to help our children in the neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by COVID. So, we formed a task force – leaders of color in City government in all agencies, the Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity, with the goal of taking actions right now – right now, to address disparities, to reach the neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by COVID, to help everyone in 27 key neighborhoods in New York City. But there's a particular focus on children, because we know how much kids have gone through. So, today, we're announcing a new plan to reach our children. So many kids, thank God, are back in school and we can reach them better than ever and address their real mental health concerns. And here to tell you all about it – first, we're going to turn to the co-chair of our task force, our First Lady Chirlane McCray.

First Lady Chirlane McCray: Thank you, Bill. And good morning to everyone. Before we talk about our young people, I want to acknowledge today as Go Purple Day, a part of Domestic Violence Awareness month. It's a day we draw attention to the bravery and strength of survivors, but also the work we all must do to support them and stand by them. I encourage everyone listening to visit nyc.gov/nychope to learn how you can be a better ally to those who need them. And I want every survivor in our city to know there is always help and there is always hope. You know, one of the points I always make about mental health care is it works best when every individual plays a role, every individual and every agency, and we move beyond our silos and collaborate with each other. Today's announcement is an excellent example of how that is now happening with agencies coming together to support our young people.

And I thank everyone at the Department of Education, the Department of Health, Health + Hospitals, the Mayor’s Office of ThriveNYC, and the Mayor’s Fund for their work and their compassion. I also think our Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity for bringing all the pieces together to continue the fight for our communities hit hardest in this COVID-19 crisis.

Last month, I visited P.S. 130 in Brooklyn with Chancellor Carranza, and I spoke with some of the second graders during their first week of school. We talked about what was different this year, like wearing a face covering in class. And we talked about some of the emotions that the children have – some were happy, some were sad, some were nervous. And we also talked about their hopes for the new year. Every time I talk with our young people, I'm reminded that in New York City, we have the most exceptional and resilient young children in the world. But growing up is never easy. Our children carry more than book bags in the class. They carry insecurities about making friends. They carry trauma, anger, anxieties. And if we want our young people to grow into happy, healthy adults, school cannot be about academics alone. We need to support the whole child. And that's why we came in six years ago, determined to make mental health a priority and wellness a priority in every school. We've made great progress. The Department of Education, the Department of Health, and Thrive has significantly expanded mental health services in classrooms and communities.

Last year, we took a major step forward by bringing social and emotional learning to every school so that students can learn to identify and regulate emotions and other skills that will help them throughout life. And today, we're making another step forward by increasing the level of direct mental health support for thousands of students in the neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19. Children who have experienced trauma can join a group therapy session with others who have had same or similar experiences. Children who have suffered through their parent’s loss of livelihood, or the threat of eviction can talk about it with a specialist who facilitates the conversation and keeps coming back, building a relationship with these young people. And when a student has lost a mother, a father, or another loved one to this virus, they can be immediately referred by a teacher, a principal, or another school staffer for ongoing therapy and treatment. Someone will be there for these students as long as they need it. Think about what this means for our children, their parents, or caregivers, the teachers, and the classroom to have that kind of emotional safety net during this difficult time. That is what today is all about, being there for our young people and supporting them in every way possible. Thank you.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chirlane. And thank you for being there for our young people. And also, thank you for being there for survivors of domestic violence and standing up for them. Now, I want you all to hear a little more about this important initiative in the schools, reaching our young people, really helping them through this crisis, helping them to realize their potential, again, no matter what's been thrown at them. And I want you to hear from a really energetic and creative leader at our Department of Education – she is our Deputy Chancellor for School, Climate and Wellness. It's my pleasure to introduce Deputy Chancellor LaShawn Robinson.

Deputy Chancellor LaShawn Robinson, Department of Education: Thank you, Mr. Mayor and First Lady. I want to reiterate the sentiment shared by our First Lady, regarding the tremendous challenge that our young people have faced over the last seven-to-eight months. Our children dealt with abrupt separation from their teachers and counselors, distanced from their friends, various forms of loss in their families, and more. Now, that our children have returned to school, we have an opportunity to help them heal emotionally as a crucial part of helping them fully engage with their education. We've always believed that our young people are resilient, but also know that they are carrying a tremendous burden and we must do everything we can to provide them with care, love, and support as they deal with this trauma. We must also give them tools to understand what they are feeling and why. The initiatives that announced today will provide students who attend schools within our hardest hit communities with high-quality, easily accessible mental health care. This will provide schools with additional capacity to identify students who are struggling to heal and cope before they are in crisis and respond quickly if a crisis does occur. Our educators are doing heroic work, providing high-quality education in a new environment. These resources provide crucial backup to our educators, and adds another caring adult, ready to support our students.

We have come so far as a city and we know we have a long way to go. Thank you to the Mayor, First Lady – who is one of my personal champions and heroes – and to the Chancellor for putting the wellbeing of our young people first, always. By bringing together the incredible mental health and educational resources the city has to offer, we can continue to help our young people heal and thrive.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Deputy Chancellor. Everyone, look, if you wanted another reason why it was so important to reopen the largest school system in the country, you just heard it. For so many of our kids, they need that support. They need that love and compassion. They need trained educators and mental health experts to be there for them. And that can really only be achieved best if they're there in person. So, having our schools open is opening the doors to kids, getting the help they need and moving forward with their lives after this horrendous crisis. Thank you to you, Deputy Chancellor. Again, thank you, First Lady. This is such important work for our children.

Now, let me go over today's indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 103 patients with a confirmed positivity level of 24.2 percent for COVID. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550 cases – today's report, 523 cases. And number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report 1.77 percent. And today's seven-day rolling average number is 1.76 percent.

Let me give you a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by First Lady Chirlane McCray, by Deputy Chancellor LaShawn Robinson, Corporation Council Jim Johnson, ThriveNYC Director Susan Herman, Dr. Charles Baron, the Chief Medical Officer of Behavioral Health at H+H, Dr. Daniel Stephens, the Deputy Commissioner for Family and Child Health at the Department of Health, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.

Question: All right. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Mayor: I’m doing well, Juliet. How are you today?

Question: I'm fine. Thank you. So, it's great to hear about mental health for students, but what about adults? You know, there are parents who are trying to juggle remote learning and working at the same time. There's people who lost their jobs or lost family members, but what's available [inaudible] for the every-day New Yorker who's just trying to cope and get through this pandemic as far as mental health help is concerned.

Mayor: Yeah. Juliet, I really appreciate that question, because this has been such a painful, challenging part of this crisis. And boy, I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with people, sort of more revealing than ever – people being more open than ever about the challenges they’re going through. And I think even in this crisis, a small silver lining may be that that more and more people are willing to talk out loud about the mental health challenges they're experiencing. And this is what Chirlane has been working on for years, de-stigmatizing, getting this conversation to be out in the open and getting people help. So, I'll turn to Chirlane, and then any of the other leaders – Susan Herman, or Dr. Baron, Dr. Stephens want to add in – but I would say, you know, it all begins with 888-NYC-WELL as the entry point. And I'm sure Chirlane will talk about that. Go ahead.

First Lady McCray: Yes, I can't emphasize 1-888-NYC-WELL enough. That line – that helpline is not just for crisis, it is for anyone who's going through a difficult time, or if they're going through – if they have a loved one who's going through a difficult time. Trained counselors answer that that line, and you can also text, and you can go online and chat, and provide information. They provide counseling – brief counseling. They can connect people to a therapist or other mental health professionals. It really is one-stop shopping. So, I always advise anyone who's going through anything to start with 1-888-NYC-WELL. I would also remind you that in New York City, we now have guaranteed health care. And that means that anyone who doesn't have insurance or anyone who doesn't have enough insurance can take advantage of NYC Care, which will also connect them to a mental – having a primary care doctor will also connect someone to a mental health professional. So, there really are many places for people to turn. There are – and I think that NYC Well is the greatest to start, because many people aren't aware of resources within their own neighborhoods, and the folks who answer those lines actually have the best resources to determine what someone can take advantage of the easiest and in an affordable way.

Mayor: You know, I really want to turn to Susan Herman. Susan Herman has been leading the Thrive initiative extraordinarily well. And when Susan took over as my senior advisor and as the Director of the Mayor's Office for Thrive, no one knew a pandemic was coming. So, she and her colleagues have been asked to do so much more than never was originally imagined. And Susan, if you could tell us about an answer to Juliet's question – you know, some of the things you think New Yorkers need to know about, access to mental health care, and particularly the amount of calls and texts and everything coming into 888-NYC-WELL, we've obviously seen a real uptick. Could you speak to that, Susan?

Director Susan Herman, Mayor’s Office of ThriveNYC: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. What there's – the First Lady said well, I think it all begins with contacting NYC Well, but during the pandemic and this profound need that we have all observed, we've really tried hard to not just spread out the awareness of mental health resources. So, you can call NYC Well, you can text, you can chat, you can also get on their website. And one of the things that we've seen is an enormous rise – a huge jump in the people that have looked on – looked at the NYC Well website just to get resources themselves. So, you can access that information in a number of ways. But we're also trying hard to reach out to people in need. So, we've had special campaigns to call veterans, by veterans, mostly, and also by other New York volunteers. We've had special campaigns to reach out to seniors who may be experiencing much more loneliness and isolation than they were prior to the pandemic, and we know that that can lead to significant depression. While we reach out to people, we check on food insecurity, we check on housing insecurity, but we very much ask questions about their mental health and how they're doing. So, we've reached out to about 15,000 veterans and hundreds of thousands of seniors across the city. We also, on our website – on the ThriveNYC website, have resources broken down by categories of people. So, you can look on the website and see mental health resources for students, people who have been involved in the criminal justice process, veterans, older New Yorkers. We have something for everybody and something just for – things for all New Yorkers. So, there's plenty of resources there. Certainly, we'd like to have more, but we are trying as much as possible to get the information out to all New Yorkers.

Mayor: Thank you, Susan. We really want to emphasize, so many of these resources are free. You know, it's just really important to say – of course, 888-NYC-WELL is free. As Chirlane pointed out, guaranteed health care for all New Yorkers who need it through Health + Hospitals. If people can't afford anything, then the care is free. Do not think that mental health services come with extraordinary costs. We provide so much of this free, obviously for our children for free. So, anyone that needs help should not hesitate. Let me just see quickly if Dr. Baron or Dr. Stephens want to add anything.

Can you hear me? You may be on mute if [inaudible] you speaking. Dr. Baron, Dr. Stephens, do you want to add? I don't think we're hearing them. Okay. We'll give them another shot around if we have another question. Go ahead, Juliet.

Question: So I guess I'd also like to ask you how your dealing with mental health for yourself. I saw an account where you take a couple of walks during the day. Is that like to clear your head or how were you dealing?

Mayor: Thank you for asking Juliet. I think it's really good of a – you're a good person and I know you asked that in a good spirit and everyone should ask each other. One of the things Chirlane talks about is just asking people, how are you feeling? How are you doing? It really helps. For me, yeah, walking is very calming and a lot of times when I'm dealing with complicated decisions, I actually prefer to walk during a conference call. I find that it – the process of walking is calming. It's clarifying. It helps you think stuff through. I have long said, and Chirlane and I practice this, whenever a couple is having any kind of issue they have to work through or any kind of disagreement, you're better off walking together because actually the very process of walking helps you communicate better and calm down a little bit. So, yeah, it helps a lot, but it's been tough, Juliet, especially in the beginning months for all of us. I mean, it was so many unknowns. I got to say that was in many ways the worst part of this crisis was that, you know, we were trying to fight back and trying to save people and a lot of times we did not have the knowledge that we needed to have, nor did the whole medical community have the knowledge they wished they had. We didn't have the resources we needed. It was really painful and of course that affects your humanly, when you feel that, you know, there's so many unanswered questions, it affects everything. It affects your emotional wellbeing, but you have to keep going. And so, you know, we all find our way to just stay focused. I find a good walk, goes a long way.

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?

Mayor: I’m doing well, thank you for asking as well, Henry, how are you doing?

Question: I'm doing well, I also don't begrudge, you taking walks to clear your head and deal with all the stuff you've got to deal with. But let me get to my questions. My first question has to do with this legal action that you're taking. Am I correct in assuming that no denial of funds has occurred yet? And can you give me a little bit more detail about what these concrete steps are that have that you say have forced your hand to initiate this legal action?

Mayor: Yeah, Henry, I'll start and I'll turn to our Corporation Counsel. As with many of the politicized threats of the Trump administration, a lot of times you see, you know, a lot of threats that don't amount to a whole lot, and we have seen it over and over again. I remind you, there was one point where they said there'll be massive ICE raids. They didn't happen. There was one point where they said, they'd send in federal troops or federal officers, that didn't happen. They said they would take away our funding because we didn't ask the documentation status of immigrants, that and funding wasn't taken away. This has happened over and over again. Sometimes it's just a threat for the President's political gain, and then they move on to something else. Sometimes they actually try to follow through as was true with the immigration executive order and they're stopped in court, and that's the case here that we fundamentally believe if they take any more tangible actions that the court system will stop them. But as a layman, I'll say before turning to an actual lawyer, that we did see them taking more and more moves that might have had an impact on funding and that was the appropriate trigger for legal action. Go ahead, Jim.

Corporation Counsel Johnson: Thank you, Mayor. So the steps that they took include these. First, the President actually issued a memorandum, which we call the “anarchist memo”. Second, the Attorney General engaged in an actual designation process for three cities, the three cities that are suing Portland, Seattle, and us in New York. And the third, one of the agencies is actually embedded in its noticed of funding opportunity, a requirement that a city essentially that is a city that is designated in an “anarchist city” would not be eligible for that funding. As I mentioned before, we're not going to wait additional times for them to embed this provision in any other grants or any other opportunities for the city. We need the funds. We don't want to see them threatened any further and we're acting now rather than waiting until they move further down the track.

Mayor: Thank you, Jim. Go ahead, Henry.

Question: Well I had other questions, but I've got a follow up on this. When you – the anarchist designation. Is this a term of – is this a legal term in any kind of congressional legislation or any kind of federal law, or is this something that they have made out of whole cloth?

Mayor: They entirely made it up. Look, this is a figment of Donald Trump's troubled imagination. The only anarchy in this country is coming from the White House and it's not anything we've seen from any Democratic or Republican administration ever before, and its madness. I was driving around the city yesterday and looking at all of the incredible activity in the city and people coming back and people working and people, you know, outdoor dining and everything else, I was thinking of the President calling this place a ghost town, when in fact this is a vibrant city, you know, rebounding from a horrible crisis. This President just makes things up. So this is a city that is strong and is moving forward. Those words are his words, just to create a political gain. He uses the government for political gain in a disgusting fashion, but to the legality of him using that phrase, I think our Corporation Counsel can quickly make clear how little it means. Go ahead.

Corporation Counsel Johnson: Henry, you were absolutely right to say that it's made up out of whole cloth. As we say in our complaint, this is a fabrication. There's no statutory basis for it. There's clearly no constitutional basis for it and the court will see that it should make really short work of this and reject the characterization and the consequences that come from it.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is James Ford from PIX.

Question: Good to see you all. Thanks for taking my call. Follow up about the legal case. Potentially the Trump administration potentially only has a matter of weeks left in it, what is the – certainly you can't assume that this administration is ending, I do understand that, but why this timing? Why are you filing it now? And who is the lead city of the three? If there is one?

Mayor: Go ahead, Jim.

Corporation Counsel Johnson: It’s being filed in Seattle, but we were all co-plaintiffs in the action. And in terms of timing, it was just two weeks ago that they took the concrete step that I referenced, which is the notice of funding opportunity indicating that they're serious. And the, the administration actually will go to January – through January 19th or noon on January 20th, and there is no question just as Congress can act during the lame duck that the administration could take additional acts during the period if the election were to go in a way that President Trump wouldn't like. So rather than waiting and hoping, we are acting.

Mayor: Go ahead, James.

Question: And then regarding this mental health initiative that is targeting the hardest hit areas. What is this taskforce doing in the red zones where schools are still closed?

Mayor: Yeah, look, James, that's a very temporary reality. So Deputy Chancellor's coming back to join us again and she can talk about how we help kids when they're in school, as well as how we help kids even when they're remote. But remember that red zone reality we've said from the very beginning should only be a matter of weeks. You know, we have the vast, vast majority of our schools open and moving forward. So really I'm hoping when these last zones are resolved over the next few weeks, that we never have to have restrictions again, and we're going to just go straight through to the vaccine without ever having to experience it. Now we have real work to do. We have to be vigilant, but in the meantime, I think your question is very important, not just in terms of red zone, but how do we help kids if we're not seeing them in person, it's not as good as being able to see them in person, I'm very clear about that, but there's still a help we offer no matter what. So Deputy Chancellor, you want to talk to that?

Deputy Chancellor Robinson: Yes, thank you so much, James, for your question. Very important question. Before the start of the school year, we partnered with the First Lady and the Office of Thrive to release additional resources to schools through our Bridge to School plan. We have also trained over 45,000 educators in trauma informed care over, 1,600 school leaders in trauma informed care as well, and really worked to prepare the school system to receive our young people and our educators during this pandemic. We've increased adult Social Emotional Learning within our school system and partnered with the Child Mind Institute for additional resources. That information has been shared with schools and those supports are out there being utilized as speak. We have also worked to increase tele-therapy within our school system as well to ensure that every child in a red zone, orange zone, a yellow zone across our school community, whatever the case may be, and now more targeted support, and our 27 hardest hit communities are supporting children and adults every step of the way.

Mayor: Thank you very much. Go ahead. The next is Yoav from the city.

Question: How are you doing everyone? I had a question for Dr. Herman actually. The city was planning to pilot co-response teams responding to 9-1-1 calls in two high need precincts. That pilot was paused because of COVID. I'm just wondering what the status of that is. San Francisco is also dealing with coronavirus, but they just implemented – or they're launching a huge initiative to have firefighters and other workers who are unarmed respond to calls for people in mental health crisis. So even though they're dealing with the same coronavirus crisis, they're able to launch this huge initiative. My question is, respectfully, why isn't New York City able to launch that pilot in two precincts?

Mayor: Let me start and then turn to Susan. Look, first of all, tremendous respect for San Francisco and the way they've handled this crisis and Mayor London breed has done a great job but a very, very different reality. They're very different scale, a very different experience with the size and extent of the crisis. So, you know, what we were dealing with over months and months caused us to have to pause a lot of good things that we wanted to do. But I'll simply say this way, we're re-engaging that issue right now, and we're going to have more to say on that for sure soon. Susan, you want to add?

Director Herman: I would just add that the scale of the problem in New York City really required many people to be focusing on things that they might not usually be focusing on, so the co-response teams were functioning during the many months of the pandemic, but were functioning differently. They were functioning, the social workers were functioning mostly virtually and now have gone back into the field. Officers, many of them were redeployed, now have been coming back onto the co-response teams. And as the Mayor said, we are actively looking at that pilot and many ways of serving people when they have great need. So we are fully engaged and working on this issue.

Moderator: The next is Bob Hennelly from the Chief Leader.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Yesterday you went into some detail about what you're doing to prepare for the distribution of a COVID vaccine and you mentioned that the essential workers, first responders, and health care professionals will be part of the first phase of the vaccines deployment. While no vaccine has been identified, I can't help but feel that we're not addressing a very basic issue surrounding what's at stake from first responders and health care professionals, who would in essence be a – basically Guinea pigs for a vaccine produced, and what quite frankly, has been a process corrupted by President Trump's machinations. Could you comment on how you think we're workers are going feel about this and then also have your Corporate Counsel, Mr. Johnson, comment on how did we be entering a new phase here where, would the City of New York compel first responders to take this vaccine?

Mayor: Okay, we'll get Jim to come on up. Let me start, we'll start with Dr. Varma as well. First of all no, we've made really clear that we are not going to accept a vaccine unless it is thoroughly vetted by the medical community. So Bob, I know you're a long time and I know you used a phrase there that was a little bit provocative, we're not going to treat anybody as anything less than valued public servants. We're not going to do something that unless we're a hundred percent sure. So that means the State and the City together are going to be vetting any vaccine to make sure we're a 100 percent clear. If we're not a hundred percent clear, we're not going to give it to anybody. We obviously need to make sure that once we have a truly effective vaccine, that it's as widely utilized as possible. And I believe the vast majority of people in the vast majority of public servants are going to want a vaccine to protect themselves and their families. In a second, Jim can talk about legalities as we know them now, but I think the most important part of your question, goes to Dr. Varma on what we're going to do to make sure that any vaccine is appropriate before we'd even consider distributing it in New York City. Dr. Varma?

Senior Advisor Varma: Great, thank you for the question, and, you know, I'll start by saying we absolutely understand the concerns that people have. There's been obviously a lot of discussion about this process and ensuring that it's not just done quickly, which is sort of the “Operation Warp Speed” terminology, but then in fact whatever vaccine that becomes available must be safe and it must be effective. So there's been a lot of movement as you know, to make sure that this any vaccine that that gets developed is not just vetted by the federal government but also includes a thorough review by the State and the City. The Governor has announced a task force of experts. We on our health leadership team here I have also been planning on how we're going to review and evaluate that information, and so we feel strongly that we would not incorporate any vaccine into our health and safety measures until we feel confident that it's something we would use ourselves, we would use on our families, and that we would of course use on our most valued civil servants who are healthcare workers and our first responders.

Mayor: I would say, obviously, Bob, when we get to that point, if we truly believe in it, a number of us will lead the way and take it to show people that when we're advising it's something we truly would do ourselves. We will actually do that ourselves. Go ahead, Corporation Counsel.

Corporation Counsel Johnson: Just very briefly. As the Mayor's remarks and Dr. Varma's remarks made clear, there's going to be – there would be a tremendous amount of process involved before decisions are taken about the administration of the vaccine. The idea of a compulsion for a vaccine is not something that is, as far as I know, on the table.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: And then also, I think Katie Honan had a Wall Street Journal piece that was headlined a “New York Aims to Bring Back 25 Percent of City Workers by Year’s End.” I would like to know if you could give us a sense of the concrete criteria that goes into this determination, if that's accurate, and then moreover, what role do you see the city's public unions playing in helping you through this process to guide themselves their members feel comfortable with taking this step?

Mayor: Yeah, of course, Bob, we work closely with so many of our municipal unions on these issues all the time. We have not made a final determination. We need to continue to consolidate the progress that we've seen in Brooklyn and Queens, and we need to continue to drive down our number citywide, but we do want to start to bring back city workers before too long, and we would do it in phases. I think the fact is that there's important work to be done, and it's important for the city to move forward, to have people start to come back, but we're going to do that in a way that we're convinced is safe and only do that when we're convinced it's safe.

Moderator: The next is Abu from Bangla Patrika.

Question: Hello, Mayor how are you?

Mayor: I'm doing well, Abu. How are you?

Question: Good. Thank you so much. I would like to ask you about [inaudible] which is regarding the children mental issue, because I found, and we are receiving a lot of phone calls from the parents that the student school student who are – it's been a long time that they are staying in the home that they are suffering by mental anxiety and other stuff. So what is your program to help the kids who are living since March in the home and they don't have that space to play in the home, they don't have that much space to go out. So do you have any suggestion or do you have any program or do you have any, anything you can say about the parents who are suffering [inaudible] doing that with their kids.

Mayor: Yes, Abu. I'm going to start and then turn to our Deputy Chancellor. Look, the best thing we can do for our children is fight back this disease, lower the level of infection, New York City, so we can go farther and farther in terms of getting kids back into school settings. That should be a mission for all of us that every time we do the right thing, you know, wear masks, practice social distancing, all those basics, we are speeding up the day when we can do more and more for our children.

The second point is that parents are going to have an opportunity in the coming weeks to opt in to in-person learning, to blended learning, and I've talked to a number of parents who are interested in the chance to get their kids to school, but they wanted to see how the beginning of the school year went. Obviously, what we're seeing is a tremendously successful reality in our public schools, in terms of health and safety, very low level of positive tests. I think a lot in parents when they get that chance to opt in and we'll take it so their kids will get that opportunity to be outside the home, will get the socialization and opportunity to be with their friends, will get the loving attention of trained adults. I think that's going to be an important moment. I'm going to give parents a lot of information and give them a chance to make that decision for their family, but in terms again, of what we continue to do, and I think it's a great point, how we're going to help parents to understand what they can do for their kids, even if their kids are in a remote setting. Deputy Chancellor, you want to speak to that?

Deputy Chancellor Robinson: Thank you so much, Abu. We understand that schools must be places of healing and learning, and that's been a core focus, and then we have also heard from families, you know, looking to be able to provide greater support. In the spring, we were able to act fast, last year, we announced Safe Resilient NYC in collaboration with Thrive, and we were able to add additional supports for schools, including Sanford Harmony which is a social emotional learning program, restorative practices, and we were ready to support families right away, back in the spring. We also trained parent coordinators and Trauma 101 and also supported parent leaders across the city as well. Really working with families to understand how to notice trauma within young people and then be able to act quickly with their own children.

So we've taken a number of steps to support families directly. Our parent coordinators have been trained and have participated in our trauma sessions. So our school communities are prepared their safe places for our young people. We've answered the call to be able to provide this support, and with this new initiative announced today, it’s even greater support in the communities that need it most. On the ground support, trained, licensed clinicians that can be able to support young people and group sessions continuing to train educators and parent coordinators and working closely with families, and we look forward to continuing to build upon the success of the past while we increase mental health supports more and more each day.

Mayor: Well, I'm going to have the Deputy Chancellor note if there's website or phone number that parents should call if they're just trying to get guidance on these things, but I'm going to remind you that anybody a parent non-parent a young person, older person, anyone can call 888-NYC-WELL, any New Yorker for free can call 888-NYC-WELL, if they're not only having their own struggles with mental health challenges, but if they want to talk to a trained counselor about how to help a loved one, how to help a child, there's – just want everyone to get in their minds, that this is the go-to location for any kind of concern about mental health, because what happens NYC Well is they can either help you address the issue immediately or connect you to the support you'd need. Also, they can do that in an amazing range of languages and it's 24-7. So when in doubt on a mental health issue, reach out to 888-NYC-WELL, and then for parents, is there a specific place to turn?

Deputy Commissioner Robinson: Absolutely. Please, please reach out to your parent coordinators at the school. They have been trained along with school leaders who have also been trained in trauma informed care. They are resources right at the school level and can connect families with resources.

Mayor: Okay, go ahead Abu.

Question: My second question is last week in Bengali television called Time Television, there was a panel about the drugs, alcohol and other stuff, and then the doctor, he said, marijuana is the gateway of all the drugs, and in New York City, whenever we are working, we are getting the smell of marijuana and the police [inaudible] the people are smoking marijuana. Is it legal or illegal? Or what, what kind of action you are thinking to take since it's a gateway of all drugs?

Mayor: Yeah, No, it's not legal in New York state, but we handle the enforcement differently. We do – NYPD gives out summonses for sure and addresses those issues, and we want to make sure that anyone who has an issue with substance misuse also can turn to 888-NYC-WELL, and get help. Families can turn there to get help, but in terms of, excuse me, in terms of enforcement, it's illegal, but it's handled through summons now. Go ahead.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Chris Robbins from Gothamist.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. You talked earlier today about how successful in-person learning has been in schools. Can you give us an update on school attendance? Is there a reason why DOE hasn't been putting those figures out and when will the DOE release guidance on what counts as attendance?

Mayor: An important question, Chris. That information is going to come out very shortly. We have a very unusual situation and what has been the hesitation to make sure that the numbers are accurate in what has been an ever-changing situation? Obviously, school started as a phase-in and started on different dates than was originally intended. But thank God, school's got opened and got opened well. We have kids who are in school, blended, home, blended remote. We have kids who are full time remote schools are still adjusting to having three different things happening simultaneously and getting the attendance right for all of them, and then one more thing when we put together the formal numbers in the next few days and get them out, you have a phenomenon we did not anticipate, which is parents who are still in a blended status. Some days they're having their kids go to school, some days they're not, and they haven't really a hundred percent decided if they want to stay in that blended status or go to remote, and again, the last piece of the equation, which is coming up in the next few weeks, the other way around the parents who have been fully remote, who now want to send their kids back. So the honest truth is it's been a very challenging playing field to get clear numbers on. We're going to give the best numbers we have shortly once we've confirmed them, but you will see this interesting phenomenon of parents who are their kids are in blended, but clearly not yet fully using the blended status the way we expected, and that's something that we want to resolve in the coming weeks.

Moderator: Last question for today, goes to Emma from the New York Times.

Question: Hi, good morning. I was wondering if you could give more specificity, Mr. Johnson, about the $12 billion list of things that the city could lose. Other outlets have reported it could be mental health counseling for elderly New Yorkers, transit funding, health centers for COVID patients. What are we looking at here?

Corporation Counsel Johnson: Of the $12 billion encompasses a full range of needs of the city that includes grants from HHS. That includes grants that actually go to law enforcement. It includes grants that go to, they would go to transit. So it's, it's a large number, and particularly when you consider that our operating budget is about $97 billion, $12 billion covers a tremendous amount.

Question: Okay, in terms of what prompted this, was it the transit funding? You said something happened two weeks ago. Was it this idea that we could not apply for transit grants?

Corporation Counsel Johnson: It is the notice of funding opportunity, which was a notice that was related to a transit – Federal Transit Administration grant. But it was the fact of the filing of the notice, the fact of including this provision in that notice that told us the potential for conditioning federal funds on this designation had moved from simply potential to a reality, and we've decided that we were going to move so within two weeks, which is actually fairly quick for lawyers, we're filing a complaint.

Mayor: That is a true statement. That was quick for lawyers. Emma, just to finish this last point is just blatantly unconstitutional. It's not even close, and you know what, as much as Donald Trump has tried to tear down American democracy, it's still alive. The court system is still rendering judgments based on the law. I mean this is just unbelievably unconstitutional. Also, this is a city that's the most important largest city in the United States of America. We're making a really heroic comeback. You'd think a President of the United States would want to help us and praise us instead of playing these games. But there's not a judge anywhere that's going to look at New York City and look at the work being done and the work to keep people safe and claim that that is “anarchism.” It's just ludicrous, and the courts are going to see through this very, very quickly.

As we close everyone, look, here's the thing. It is a heroic city. I've talked about this a lot. You know, we're in the middle of this crisis. Now we're going to look back years from now and just think about the pure heroism of New Yorkers, how they fought through this crisis, and we shouldn’t just think about our healthcare workers, or our first responders. We should praise them always, but we should think about everyday New Yorkers. We should think about parents and kids who've been through so much and really, really found a way to keep going. We should think about our educators and our school staff and our mental health professionals who have been there to support our kids and families. But the important thing to remember is children need to know that it's going to be all right, whether they're a little kid or whether an adolescent, they need that reassurance from adults that it's going to be all right, and that's our job. All of us, we're all in a sense, the role models and the big brothers and sisters for all the children of New York City, let's show them that we can get them to a better place and that we cherish them and let's show them that it will be all right, and I firmly believe this city will come back, and our children who are always our future are going to be part of that heroic come back in New York City.

Thank you, everyone.

2020-10-26 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We need to always make sure that we're doing what we can to reach our young people. So, we knew that this would be a very, very tough year. We knew back in March when we had to close our schools instantly and go to all remote, and we knew in the months leading up to the opening of schools that this would be extremely difficult to do something that few school systems in America have even attempted – to reopen in a safe, healthy manner, in a way that really would give kids both the advantage of in-person education and the health and safety they need and all the adults in the building need. Well, right now, we have evidence, and it's overwhelming, and it's outstanding evidence that through the amazing work of our colleagues at the Department of Education and all the folks in our school buildings and our school communities, our schools are safe. It has been proven over and over again. The latest information we have from our random testing program and hundreds and hundreds of schools is the positivity rate based on that testing program is 0.15 percent. Extraordinary achievement for our public schools. So, we are seeing more and more evidence of just how safe our schools are and more and more evidence that kids are benefiting from in-person education. We know now a lot more about what our attendance situation is. We're going to go over those numbers now. Here's a crucial number – and this number is one that I think needs to be understood as a work in progress. So far, we've had 280,000 kids who have attended school in-person. Now, there's a lot more who could, and we want to address that situation. That 280,000, of course, that's a huge number unto itself, and many, many more kids attending in-person than in many parts of the country, but a lot more kids could be attending in person. And we want to make sure that their families know, and they know the school is safe. Attendance, so far, the percentage attending each day, has averaged around 85 percent. Given the pandemic and the extraordinary amount of upheaval – that's not a bad number, but we want that number to go up. So, we have work to do. We have work to do to help parents and kids know they can come back safely, work to do to increase attendance percentages every day. And we'll be doing that work day by day, family by family. But we also have an opportunity now to give parents a chance to opt back in. Now, that they've seen school up and running for a month, they've gotten a chance to see how schools are working. Parents have a lot more information and I understand any parent that wanted more information before making a choice – well, now that we've been able to show how our schools are working, it's time for an opt-in period. It's time to give parents and kids a chance to come back into school if they're all remote right now. So, the opt-in period will begin next week on November 2nd and will go through November 15th. And here to tell you all about the opt-in opportunity is our Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. 

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As you and I have said time and time again, we're proud of our students, our educators, and our families. They have all shown heroic optimism and determination to achieve in the face of unthinkable obstacles. And their efforts are beginning to bear out in the data we're beginning to share today on attendance. All that said, we know we're not yet where we want to be with attendance. We've raised the bar since the spring and we expect students to meet that bar. It's our job as a system of educators to make sure that we do. We've made progress each week and we're confident we'll keep getting better. So, we will do so by doing the following – setting clear expectations with families, leveraging attendance teachers to connect to students to understand what may be going on, and removing any barriers to participation in making sure that students can be present mentally, physically, emotionally, ready to learn. We're keeping a close eye on this and will continue to drive support to schools as they need it. We'll also be closely watching the opt-in period for schools, starting next week. And, as a reminder, any family who wishes to switch from remote to a blended learning environment can do so by simply filling out a form online and making their choice apparent. We will also make sure it's available at schools and in multiple languages, and registration can be completed over the phone as well. The pandemic has caused so much uncertainty in every aspect of life and for families who needed a bit more time to feel comfortable sending their children back, now is that time. This will be the only time to opt in. Let me repeat that – this will be the only time to opt in, which is a change from what we originally had said over the summer. We think that this is better for the sake of stability for all students, for families, and educators. So, we urge any family who is considering it to take advantage of this opportunity to do so now. We've seen the tremendous benefits of in-person education, the joy that, Mr. Mayor, you and I have observed on the faces of teachers and students and parents, even behind their masks. And the direct access to mental health support for those who have experienced trauma in the past several months is just unparalleled in-person. We're lower than we anticipated in being in terms of in-person learners and know that families initially had hesitations. We've always known this, but now we can prove it. There is no replacement for in-person learning and it's safe to do so. We invite all families who want to return to in-person learning to do so during this opt-in period. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: Thank you, Chancellor. And thank you to you and your whole team. This school system, the largest school system in America up and running every single day and kids are getting the help they need. And that's what matters. And we're going to get a lot of information out about that opt-in period. We want to answer the questions the parents have. And again, we've shown over this last month and more how safe our schools can be. We've shown how effective it is to have kids back in-person and the joy that kids and adults both share in the school community, having everyone back together. But we know there's a lot of questions and we want to answer those questions. We want parents to get the answers. And whatever language they speak, we want parents to have access to medical professionals if they have questions. And all that information – and the places they can turn for answers will be available through the Department of Education. So, we're going to have about two weeks for parents to sign up and we want to make sure it's a two-week period where parents get all the information they need.  

Okay. Now, parents who want to, obviously, know what's going on in their own school. We've been getting requests for clarity about the COVID testing data school by school and we're now going to be putting that up regularly for parents and the whole city to see. The COVID testing data will be available at the DOE website at schools.nyc.gov/covidresults. And it will have test results for every borough, for every school that's been tested and a complete case map for all known cases in New York City public schools. And that would be available at schools.nyc.gov/casemap.  

So, look, I can say this as someone who was a public-school parent for a long time, when you are a parent in our New York City public schools you are entrusting the school community, all the adults in the school with your child, the person most precious to you in the world.  You're entrusting the people who work in our schools to get it right. And, I have to say, our educators and our school staff have been outstanding. We have shown parents that we will keep their kids safe, this further information will make it really clear how things have played out, and we want to answer all those questions so that parents can make an informed decision as they have this opportunity to opt in to our public schools one more time.  

Okay. I'm about to turn to our daily indicators, but I have to comment for a moment, because when we talk about indicators, we're talking about the fight against the coronavirus. We're talking about informing you what's going on, because every single one of you has been involved in this fight. There are over 8 million soldiers in New York City fighting the coronavirus. Every New Yorker is a soldier in the battle against the coronavirus and every New Yorker has contributed. So, here, we take the attitude, we can fight back this disease. We can control it. We can show what happens when people do the right thing, and we've shown it over and over again for months. Even when we've had challenges, we've shown the power of involving the people, educating them, getting them the testing they need, the support they need, and how it turns the situation around. Having said that, how strange to hear the chief of staff for the White House, Mark Meadows, putting up the white flag of surrender yesterday and expressing just pure defeatism, basically suggesting that our federal government can't do anything more to stop this pandemic. I've never heard something so ridiculous and so counterproductive for one of the leaders of our national government, rather than rallying us and saying, yes, we can – saying emphatically, no, we can't. So, Mark Meadows literally said, “We're not going to control the pandemic.” That's outrageous. We have been controlling the pandemic right here in New York City. We have been proving that if you engage the people and you provide the testing and the masks and the support, you can stop this pandemic from growing. We have been fighting back a second wave. We have opened our schools successfully, because we said we could and we did the things necessary and we engaged the people. So, look, I think the lessons learned here should be used around the whole country – the importance of masks, social distancing, test and trace, the importance of testing being available broadly and for free. How about the White House talks about those lessons and applies them everywhere? How about the White House listens to Dr. Fauci when he says mask-wearing should be mandatory nationally, take the onus off of localities and make it a national standard so we can get out of this pandemic together. That's what would actually help move this country forward.  

Okay, let's go to our indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients. Today's report 75 patients with a confirmed positivity rate for COVID at 28 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases. Today's report 551. And number three, percent of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold is five percent. Today's report, 1.74 percent, and today's seven-day rolling average, 1.73 percent. A few words in Spanish – 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, let’s turn to our colleagues in the media. And please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today, we have Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Deputy Chancellor for School Climate and Wellness LaShawn Robinson, Senior Advisor and General Counsel to Democracy NYC Laura Wood, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. Hazel from WCBS.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you? 

Mayor: Good, Hazel. How you feeling?  

Question: Good. Good. This question is for you and the Schools Chancellor. I just wanted to get your reaction to reports that families dealing with broken school-issued devices or unreliable internet, in turn, their kids aren't able to log on for remote learning. We're being told that those families are being told by school administrators that they'll be notifying child services for remote truancy. Now, some of these parents say they've notified their schools about having tech issues, but they were still contacted by DOE attendance officials for an explanation as to where their kids are. 

Mayor: Yeah, Hazel, I’ll start and pass to the Chancellor. I, obviously, am very distressed to hear that. Look, we all understand it's a very difficult time. We all understand that it's hard to have the same kind of communication when people are not in person. But if a family reports a technology problem clearly that means they're trying to solve the problem and they want their child to be engaged in education. That is not a situation of neglect. That's a parent or a family trying to solve a problem. The left hand and the right hand at the DOE have to be able to know what's going on. So, if a family is not in touch at all, that's a problem. And, of course, the DOE has to reach out and find them because that kid, by law, is supposed to be getting an education. But if a family is trying to solve a problem, we should be working with them and not giving them the impression that we are judging them negatively. Go ahead, Chancellor.  

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Sir. Hazel, let me state unequivocally without any exception, there should be no reporting to ACS of any student that's having difficulty with technology. What should be reported is to the school that they're having difficulty with the technology and it's our job to follow up and make sure they get the right form of technology. That being said, it's also important to understand that as we look at attendance, it's important for folks to reach out to families where we haven't seen students logged on, or we haven't seen a positive history of being online or checking in with us. Because we want to know, are those students safe, but we've sent out guidance last spring. We've also updated that guidance this semester to school sites, making it very clear that technology issues should not be one of the reasons for a report to ACS. And we'll continue to follow up on those. If parents are getting those kinds of calls, we just need to know about it. Our superintendents in the districts should know about it. Principals should know about it, and we will follow up. But I want to be very clear, that is not the policy of the DOE. 

Question: My second question is following up on the city-wide school attendance report you just released today. Just curious, how does this overall attendance compare to pre-COVID days? 

Mayor: I'll start and let the Chancellor and we have Deputy Chancellor Robinson with us as well. They can speak to it. It's lower than what we had pre-COVID. Some of that is understandable because of the dislocation that's occurred. But we need to get it back to the number that we had before. And that's clearly our mandate, to get attendance back to the levels it was before COVID so we can reach, you know, kids and really get them the help they need. Go ahead, Chancellor. 

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, I'll start. And then Deputy Chancellor Robinson, if she wants to add. So, it's important, Hazel, to understand as well that when we pivoted to remote learning last March, that was very quick. It was in the middle of the pandemic where we were the epicenter of the epicenter. So, obviously, we had to alter what our attendance was, our policies, taking into account all of that immense change. What's important to understand about this year is that we've strengthened, and we've made it much more rigorous. We've raised the bar on what counts for attendance this year. So, it is a much more rigorous process. That being said, pre-COVID, the overall attendance over the last five years has been about 91 percent. And obviously this 85 percent is lower than that, but keep in mind as well that there are really three attendance buckets that are being assessed every single day. In-person learning is one of those attendance facets. Then it's the blended students, students that have in-person learning on a part of the week and then the other part of the week, they have the remote. That attendance counts as well. And then you have the fully remote students. So, it's literally three buckets of attendance every single day that is being, not only accounted for by schools, but then reported up by schools. LaShawn, did you want to add anything? 

Mayor: LaShawn?  

Deputy Chancellor LaShawn Robinson, Department of Education: So, you covered it. Pre-COVID, it was 91.6 percent [inaudible] –  

Mayor: Thank you very much.  

Moderator: Next we have Shant from the Daily News.  

Question: Good morning, everyone. I wanted to follow up a bit more on the story about ACS contacting families where kids haven’t been able to log onto virtual learning. I mean, I get you’re saying you’ll look into the, sort of, ACS side of the equation and make sure they’re responding appropriately but could you say some more about the logging-on side. You know, my colleagues found some of the iPads students have received are glitchy. There is still an issue with getting Wi-Fi especially in shelters. Will you take any steps such as committing to get Wi-Fi installed in shelters?   

Mayor: I’ll start and turn to the Chancellor. Yes, the instruction I have given to the Law Department and to Social Services is to ensure that every shelter gets Wi-Fi, to send teams out to literally go shelter by shelter and simply ensure that, not just for that student but for the whole shelter, Wi-Fi is in place. We’ve got to stop this and make sure everyone has what they need. In terms of devices, I want to keep emphasizing, one, any parent, any kid with a problem should call 3-1-1 and let us know immediately. Two, schools have to really do this work as well to make sure that all the devices they have are distributed and if there is any child in a school that doesn’t have one, but there is one in the school building going unused, they have to make that match. And we’re getting more devices in all the time to ensure that we can reach everyone. Go ahead, Chancellor.  

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, yes. I want to emphasize and repeat, it is not the policy of the DOE to report families to ACS for technology issues. It is the policy of the DOE to account for our students and make sure that our students are safe and that they're well. My reading of the article, the parents didn't say they were reported to ACS. There was a threat that they would be reported to ACS. That's unacceptable. So we're following up on that as well, because there should be no threats of being reported if the only issue is a technology issue. Obviously if there are other issues, there are other things that we have as mandatory reporters, a responsibility to do. So that being said, we will again, reissue the guidance to make sure that all schools are clear about what it is that we're doing to make contact with our students. How do we report that? And then how do we hold ourselves accountable to make sure that we resolve any of those technology issues that may be reported by families or students.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Shant.

Question: Yeah. So can you give a sense of how many shelters have wifi? Is it 0 percent? Is it 50 percent, something else? And also with the iPads, it was strange to read that, you know, some of them are glitchy. I mean, were these brand new iPads that were given out, were they maybe refurbished?

Mayor: Yeah, I'll start. I don't – first, on your first question, we'll get you the exact numbers, but my instruction to all involved is to get the wifi in these shelters immediately. We'll get you an update on that today. On the glitches, I would caution – we did a massive distribution, hundreds of thousands of iPads. You know, we're talking about kids, you know, every single kid in their household, things happen to technology. It's just not a shock that some of them might have problems either coming out of the factory or along the way. But the important point is we want to solve those problems. And sometimes that might just be providing some assistance over the phone. And sometimes that requires a new device, but whatever it is, we're going to do it.
Go ahead.

Moderator: Next, we have Gloria from NY1.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I noticed that one of the medical, one of the indicators rather, you mentioned today, we went over that 550 threshold. I believe you said 551. What does it mean? And is there anything that would be triggered as a result of that number at this point?

Mayor: Yeah, I talked about this last week and I want to emphasize again. No, we are looking at those numbers in combination. When we see, thank God, the hospitalization number still on the lower side, both in terms of overall patients and the positivity. When we see the citywide positivity number stable and we've talked about that leveling off over the last few days. That means the overall picture is still good, but we have to be very, very vigilant. We have to constantly be vigilant against a second wave. We've seen progress in some of the zones of Brooklyn and Queens. That's good news. So that one number alone doesn't change what we do. It’s also in part, a result of a hell of a lot more testing. And that testing is a very good thing. If all of the numbers moved in unison in a different way, that would be a real concern, but not that one number alone, given the actions we've already taken.

Moderator: We have time for one more. And with that, we'll go to Derek from WABC.

Question: Hi, good morning. I will make this quick. We are reporting from a private school in Forest Hills that reopened this morning. And the principal was talking about the fact that, you know, now that they're in a yellow zone, they have to do the mandatory weekly, random testing just like public schools have to do. And this may be a question better for the Governor, but while I have you, I want to know to your knowledge will private schools get any help paying for these mandatory COVID tests?

Mayor: Yeah, Derek here's what I know so far, our City Department of Health will work with any non-public school to help them get the actual test materials, you know, the tools for the test, if you will. We'll make sure they get that for free and provide them the support to work out how they would administer it. Each school will have their own approach. A lot of schools are going to use their own school personnel or own school nurse, for example. But unquestionably any non-public school with a question can turn to the City Department of Health, get support, get help, and get the actual tests. Go ahead.

Question: About charter schools. I have someone who reached out to me, he's an administrator in a charter school, and he was concerned because even though the public schools have to do this weekly random testing, the charter schools, I guess don't have that requirement. And just want to know why that is, especially when some of the charter schools do share the same building as a traditional public school?

Mayor: I'll turn to the Chancellor, I want to remind you a lot of charter schools went all remote. So that obviously changes the equation. But again, we're ready to work with any school that is in-person to ensure that they maximize testing. And obviously for parents, for staff, for kids, testing is also widely available for free in all communities outside of school hours. But go ahead Chancellor.

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you. So it's a little baffling, the question. I think obviously the executive orders cover all schools in the zones but if there is a charter school, that's co-located with a Department of Education school, they're considered part of the building. They are part of the random testing. So we'll dig a little deeper into that as well. And it would be helpful if we knew what charter school so we could clarify for that administrator as well.

Mayor: Thank you very much Chancellor. Look everyone as we conclude today, I just want to say this, again look at what the city has done. Look at what our schools have done. It's amazing. And it is about the everyday heroism of New Yorkers. And, you know, some history is written by famous names, but the most profound history is written by everyday people. And they may not get famous for what they did individually, but they'll I hope, be rightfully famous for what we all did together as New Yorkers. Every time someone wears a mask and every time someone practices social distancing, all the basic things, every time someone gets tested, it helps us move forward. But there's also been a heroism, you saw this weekend. Almost 200,000 people coming out early to vote because they care. And because they believe in our democracy. So this is what gives me faith that we'll get through whatever's thrown at us. We have some challenges right now, unquestionably but that incredible by every day New Yorkers is what’s going to ensure that we prevail. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-27 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, we, as New Yorkers – we know we're all connected to each other. We pride ourselves in being a place that really feels a deep sense, an amazing sense of connection to people not only in our own neighborhood, our own city, but all over the world. That's been one of the great blessings of New York City. But in the pandemic, it's also clear that being connected to each other all over the country, all over the world, creates a real challenge. We know that as New Yorkers we've worked together to overcome this virus, to fight it back. We also know we have to be really careful and vigilant to protect ourselves, to protect our loved ones, to protect our city going forward. And so that question of being interconnected comes into play in a big way. In this city there's been a clear understanding of how important it is to wear masks, practice social distancing, take those smart precautions. We know in a lot of the rest of the country and a lot of the rest of the world, that hasn't been the case. And we see skyrocketing levels of coronavirus in so many other places. So, now comes a big challenge ahead – the season of the year when people travel the most. And it's a time we cherish. The holiday season is such a special time for all of us. It's going to be very different this year. We all know that. And yet we're going to feel that pull to want to be with our family, want to be with our loved ones. We're going to feel that pull to do what we would do in a normal year, but it's not a normal year. So, the holidays would normally be a time to go see people in other places. But this year we have to think differently. This year, when we, ironically and painfully, we want to see family the most, we want to see loved ones and friends the most, we're feeling that lack of connection, but this is the year where we have to do things differently because we do see the level of infection rising all over the country, all over the world. We have a real threat of a second wave here in New York City, and we've been fighting it back, but we can't take it lightly. So, most importantly, I want to recommend to all New Yorkers, it's not business as usual. I hate to say it, but I have to urge all New Yorkers, do not travel out of state for the holidays. Do not travel to a state with a high infection rate, do not travel to a country with a high infection rate. Realize that by doing that, unfortunately, you could be putting yourself and your family in danger and also the risk of bringing the disease back here.  

Everyone's going to make their own decision. And I know there are painful choices, especially if you haven't seen family in a long time, and you're worried about older relatives in other places, I get it. There's going to be tough choices to make, and everyone has to make their own choice. But my recommendation based on the information I've received from our health care leadership is to avoid travel this holiday season, to stay safe, to keep us all safe. And for those who do travel, recognize how important it is to get tested and recognize there's a very strict quarantine in New York State. And if you go elsewhere, you will have to observe a two-week quarantine coming back. There's a few states that's not true for, but only a few states. The vast majority of American states now are on the New York State quarantine list. Obviously, we see what's happening in a lot of the countries in the world. If you travel, the overwhelming likelihood is you need to quarantine for two weeks upon return. And we've got to take that seriously. Now, that's what I'm urging all New Yorkers to consider. And it's tough and it's painful. But hopefully what we know about this virus is, it is only for a brief period of time, more and more good news coming, it looks like, about a vaccine soon. This hopefully will be the only holiday season that gets affected by this horrible disease. But that's my advice to everyday New Yorkers.   

But now let me urge the federal government to act as well because what's been shocking is the inaction of the federal government throughout this crisis. But here's an opportunity right now for the federal government to finally get it right – growing coronavirus crisis around the country and around the world, holiday season coming, lots of travel planned. Guess what? This is a moment for the federal government to take a decisive act and actually make sure that if people do travel, they are safe. This is a moment for the federal government to create a mandate that anyone who gets on an airplane has had a negative coronavirus test within the previous 72 hours. A simple, common sense standard. You have to have proof of a negative result to get on an airplane. This is so smart for everyone who travels to protect each other as travelers. It's so smart to reduce the potential spread of the disease from place to place. I remind you, you can expect airplanes to be very full going into the holidays. A number of airlines are now talking about, they want people in the middle seats to make the most money possible. You've got people all the time in Washington talking about bailing out the airline industry. Guess what? It's not about the airline industry. It's about your health, your family's health, this city's health and safety, the country. That's where we should be thinking about. A federal mandate that says no one gets to go on that airplane unless they can prove they've had a recent negative test result will keep us all safe. So, this is what we will be fighting for. And this is for both international and domestic flights, because we see challenges from many, many places. Further, we need to build upon some really great efforts that have started to have testing available right in the airports for folks coming off planes in New York City at LaGuardia and JFK. Those projects have started. It's a great initiative. We want to go farther. We want to make it easy and clear that anyone coming off a plane should immediately get tested as well. We know testing has made all the difference. Why don't we use that tool that we know works to protect people who travel and protect all of us? I know New Yorkers believe in being tough and rigorous in fighting this disease. This is the kind of thing that would help us so much.   

All right, now, talk about our health and safety. We have another challenge. We focus constantly on the coronavirus. We can't take our eye off the ball when there are other problems developing, and one of the painful side effects of the coronavirus has been that the blood supply for New York City has been reduced greatly. There just aren't the blood drives that used to happen in companies and government offices, and civic groups around the city used to do these blood drives and make sure that there was a blood supply to protect New Yorkers in hospitals, protect people having operations. The blood supply has continued to go down in this crisis. So, it is so important that New Yorkers step up. We've asked a lot of you throughout this crisis, but I'm going to ask again, anyone who can donate blood, we need you to do it now. And I always hear from New Yorkers saying how can I help, what can I do to help this city, what can I do to contribute? Here's a way – for those who can, here's a way to help by donating blood. So, to fight back this shortage, we turn to our friends at the New York Blood Center who are always there for the people in this city. And all they're doing is asking you to lend a hand, or more accurately an arm, and provide that blood that will make such a difference that literally could save a life. So, to make a blood donation, they have locations all over the city and extended hours, the New York Blood Center, reach them nybc.org. It can make such a difference. It can be literally a lifesaver.   

Okay, let's go over our daily indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for a suspected COVID-19. That threshold is 200 patients. Today's report is 60 patients with a confirmed positivity for COVID, level of 21.6 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold is 550 cases. Today's report, 528 cases. And number three, the percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold is five percent. Today's report, 2.48 percent. And that's obviously a number we're watching carefully. That's a number that would obviously cause us all concern, but then let's look at the more essential number, the seven-day rolling average, that comes in at 1.66 percent. That is very much the range we've been in in the last few weeks. That's a number that is fairly stable. We want to keep it that way and then push it back down. A few words in Spanish –   

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]  

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media, and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.  

Moderator: Good morning, all. I will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Ted Long; Laura Wood, the Senior Counsel for Democracy NYC, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS.  

Question: Hey, good morning, all. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?  

Mayor: I'm doing well, Juliet. How are you?  

Question: I'm fine. Thank you. So, I know you were asked about this yesterday, but the numbers are again up. The new reported cases, seven-day average, 550 to 528. Yesterday, I think it was 501. And then the percentage testing positive, you just said is a cause for concern. So, what is the concern now, you're seeing these numbers rise and what do you do moving forward?  

Mayor: Juliet, we take it all real seriously, and that's why we talk about every day. The goal here – and I am absolutely convinced we can meet this goal – is to stop a second wave from happening here in New York City. We've got to stop a second wave, and we sounded the alarm weeks ago when we saw the upticks in Brooklyn and Queens. I called for the restrictions, we worked with the State, we did those restrictions. Those have had a big effect. You've seen those numbers go down in those Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods. We have more to do, but that plan has been working. There's also been a lot more testing lately. That's a very good thing, but it's not shocking that brings out more positive cases by definition. We're going to watch these numbers really carefully, but, again, that seven-day rolling average is the truer number. So far that has stayed pretty stable. Thank God hospitalizations remained relatively low. Thank God the number of deaths remains very low, but we have to be vigilant. And, Juliet, that's why I'm talking about the tough reality of the holidays that we can't let all of our progress slip away because lots of people travel here and lots of us travel elsewhere and that spreads the disease rapidly. We've got to be really clear that we're coming up on another decisive moment with Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we have to make the tough decisions to keep everyone safe. Go ahead, Juliet.  

Question: Okay. Thank you. A different question – last week, you mentioned a plan to possibly bring back 25 percent of the City workforce by year's end. So, is this part of an economic recovery plan, when will you announce specifics about that, does this include furloughs, wage freezes, layoffs, all of the above?  

Mayor: Okay. A lot of different pieces there. The most important piece is the health and safety question, Juliet. Clearly, for so many reasons, we'd like to get more of our City workforce back to their offices, but we have to do that carefully. Still, hopefully, we can do that, at least partially, later in the year. But it first depends on what's happening with the health situation in the city, what these indicators are telling us. We can't make that decision yet. We have to see how things end up resolving in Brooklyn and Queens. We got to watch these indicators to make sure that we're not seeing the spread from other areas. We'll look at that over the next few weeks and make a decision to see what we can do this year. But the central question here is about keeping the city healthy and safe. And that's the best foundation for our economic future as well.  

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg.   

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today?   

Mayor: Good, Henry. How you been?  

Question: Good. I had a couple of days off, so I'm pretty good.   

Mayor: All right.  

Question: Let me ask you this on the schools, the attendance in the schools, and the impact that may have on instruction. I know you've said, you know, that it's still a starting up period and people aren't sure what they're doing, but there's been pushback by parents about limiting the time they have to opt-in. And teachers are saying, if parents do opt-in the staffing isn't there to handle both the blended remote and the in-class instruction. So, how is the City going to handle any eventuality, the low attendance or an influx of new attendance, which would put added stress on the teachers?  

Mayor: Henry, I think the first common sense answer is that if you've got the world right now divided up between in-person learning, blended remote learning, and then full-time remote learning, if you adjust the numbers, you can adjust the personnel accordingly. It's not static. The most important thing is that every family that wants their child in school deserves that opportunity. We've always said we would give them another opportunity. That's going to happen now between November 2nd and November 15th. But we really need to start settling things and making final decisions about how things are going to be laid out, the final levels of staffing, etcetera. So, parents now have gotten to see the school year in action. They've gotten to see how safe it is. It's time to make some decisions. Look, if the situation changes very substantially, we'll certainly consider if we need other opportunities in the future. But right now, we've given parents the information they need. It is time for people to decide. And then we'll adjust the staffing accordingly. Obviously, if more kids are in school you can put less time and energy into some of these remote elements and focus more on in-school. We'll get the staffing aligned the way we need it. But the most important thing is to give parents a chance to decide if they want to come back in. It's time for that. And remember any parent at any point who decides they want to go all remote, they retain that right. That choice is always there. They can convert their child to all remote at any point, but we just got to know once and for all, how many parents want their kids in school so we can move forward. Go ahead.  

Question: Okay, the rate or the number of new cases continues to rise as you just reported, how secure is the hospital capacity in the city? 

Mayor: I'll start and see if Dr. Varma or Dr. Long want to add, we feel good right now. The – 
thank God, as I said, the level of hospitalizations remains low and not just the hospitalizations, but the amount of COVID among those hospitalizations. We really learned a lot the hard way dealing with an unprecedented crisis in March. So we know now how we can expand capacity if we need to within our hospital buildings, but so far, you know, and let's be very vigilant, as I say this, will all need to be vigilant about this, but so far we're seeing very little impact in terms of additional hospitalizations. Dr. Varma, Dr. Long, you want to add? 

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Sure, yeah, just to emphasize what the Mayor has said, we always remain incredibly cautious about how to interpret changes of these. We know that it can surprise us. What we've seen so far has been an increase in cases, which is concerning and that we're taking action on, but our increases in hospitalization have not been as dramatic as they could have been. There have only been slight increases over time which is to be expected. So in terms of hospital capacity, we have also been working very actively to make sure that all of the lessons learned from the first devastating wave of this epidemic or applied now. We've learned a lot about how to manage bed capacity, about how to manage staffing, and very importantly, how to actually treat this disease more effectively. So we remain optimistic that if there is unfortunately an increase in hospitalizations, that we will have the resources and staffing to do that. But its something we remain extremely vigilant to watch and take care for, especially given the situation throughout the U S and Europe. 

Mayor: Dr. Long, you want to add? 

Executive Director Ted Long, Test and Trace Corps.: Yeah, I think sir, you covered all of the important points. I would add two things. One is then we have an indicator we share every day, so that we're completely transparent with exactly where we are with hospitalization. So you're knowing in real time exactly what we know and two, as a doctor that was on the front lines in our public hospital system, during the surge in April, we're planning 10 steps ahead and we will not go back to the way it was. We were planning everything very far in advance this time.  

Mayor: Thank you, Go ahead.  

Moderator: The next is Dana from the New York Times. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Now that research is showing schools are not a major place of transmission, particularly elementary schools, are you given any thought to increasing the three percent threshold for closing schools citywide? 

Mayor: It's a fair question, Dana. I think the answer is not yet. We are going to look at that though, meaning the question of how to treat our schools going forward given the fact that they have been so successful in limiting this disease and we are seeing that in many, many places around the world. The reason we've been successful is by adapting this gold standard of the mask wearing, the cleaning, you know, the distancing, everything that we've been doing. So we do need to really be mindful of what's worked and, and lean into that success, but we also have to keep looking at the data and what it tells us and talking with all the stakeholders. So I'd say for now that that standard will stay stable, but we are going to keep looking at the school situation because it has been a really a bright spot and is telling us a lot.  

Moderator: The next is Kala from PIX. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I don't know if you can answer this question for me because the Chancellor's not on the phone, but can you talk about the grading system that's being incorporated this year? I know the Press Office released some data on kids that would not be failing, and it would just say course in progress, but we had a lot of viewer questions on that and what that means for their children. Does that mean that no children will be held back this year? 

Mayor: Kala, what it means is that kids have to complete their coursework, but we understand it's been a really tumultuous time and kids and families are dealing with all sorts of challenges. So the goal here is of course, kids finish all their coursework on time, the normal way, but we’re giving flexibility here to make sure that if there is extra time needed, there's still time to get it done. Schools are going to be held accountable. Superintendents are going to be held accountable for creating systems that any kids who have not done their work, get it done in a timely fashion. If they don't get it done after a certain period of time, unfortunately, they don't get any credit for that class, but it's a different standard for a pandemic than what we would hold normally. Go ahead. 

Question: Part of the problem with getting the work done is that connectivity issue, as we've seen, there are thousands of kids who still need iPads and connectivity. I know we touched on this yesterday, and you said that you were getting Wi-Fi in all homeless shelters, the Legal Aid Society pointed out that there is no plan in place, or they haven't seen one yet. Can you elaborate on your plan to get that done and a timetable of when that will be done? 

Mayor: Thank you for the question. There is a plan in place. We'll certainly go over it publicly. The idea here is to go through every shelter where there's kids. Obviously we have shelters that are adults only that doesn't count, but shelters where there are kids, get Wi-Fi in place. Some shelters that's going to be easier than others, depending on the physical reality. I want to make sure the kids have options immediately so they can study wherever they need to. So we'll lay out the plan and what it's going to take, what we're going to do short term, what it's going to take to get every single shelter done. That's a commitment we make. Our it department, DoITT, is leading the way working with our Department of Social Services, and we will make sure every shelter has services. It’s as simple as that.  

Moderator: The next is Katie Honan from the Wall Street Journal.  

Question: Hey, good morning. I wanted to ask a question about teachers staffing and given that there will be like an open enrollment period for more students to have in-person learning, but the teacher accommodations for remote teaching run through the end of the year. What is the city and the DOE going to do if there is a discrepancy in that time period? And I know you haven't released the teacher shortage numbers, but I don't know if that will ever kind of be made public. 

Mayor: I guess the point here is we expect now, since parents really have gotten a good look at what's going on in the schools, they obviously are hearing how safe they are, how few cases we're seeing in schools, extraordinary success, it's time for parents to decide what works for them, and if they would prefer all remote, that's great. If they prefer blended, that's great. If they want, you know, to go into blended now and try it, they still retain the right at any point to say, you know, after all I want to go to remote, they can do that, and they can do that at any point. So there's a lot of choice, but we need a truer measure of what parents want. This is why we're creating this one open enrollment period, if you will, and then we'll make the staffing adjustments around it. Clearly we have the ability to address the staffing issue. It's been happening all along. We'll just make the adjustments, but we need a truer number to be able to do that. Go ahead.  

Question: So, right, but if there aren't enough teachers, I guess that's the question – you know, with this, there are teachers who are having remote accommodation. So, if there's a sudden, huge influx of students requesting all in-person schooling, and however many thousands of teachers are still remote. I mean, what is – will there be more hiring? Will there be additional bonuses for substitutes like that has been happening in October? Is there a plan for that? 

Mayor: We will make the adjustments based on what we see. Remember, there's the open enrollment period, and then there's time before it actually takes effect, because schools have to prepare to receive those kids. So, kids wouldn't come in until the end of November, beginning of December. So, there’s time to make adjustments. Again, if, for example, let's say a lot fewer kids are doing time at home, you'll shift resources in the school over to in-person learning. There's lots of ways to go about it and we'll make the adjustments. We don't have the exact numbers in front of us, because we have to see what parents want. But I am convinced from our experience in September, October, that we can make these adjustments. We are doing this with great confidence that we can make the adjustments needed depending on what parents decide. 

Moderator: We talked for two more for today. The next is Bob Hennelly from the Chief Leader.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.  

Mayor: Hey, Bob. How are you doing?  

Question: Good. Thank you. Later today, the MTA and TWU are planning a press conference where they're going to roll out what appears to be an innovation, which would workplace testing, which is telling you that public health advocates have been praying for. [Inaudible] your contemplating returning the civil servants back to the city at some point, is this something that you guys think should be explored in light of the importance of testing so far in the City’s successful, the State’s successful effort to keeping this contained? 

Mayor: Bob, here's what I'd say – right now, I think a broad focus on testing is working for us, and we want to keep that going, just constantly telling people get tested, get tested regularly, it's free, it's nearby, it's easy. We're going to keep that message, of course, going to our public workforce. And we're still not at the point, as you heard, where we have a specific timeline to bring back more public workers, but whoever you are, where ever you are, we want you to tested. I think, Bob, the big part of the equation that'll be interesting here is – one, matching up workplaces with local clinics and just easy testing connections like that and encouraging the maximum testing. Two, is when we get rapid testing in a more reliable and consistent fashion. I think that opens up a world of possibilities, but we're still not there yet. So, one way or another testing is certainly going to be a part of how we will address having more workers coming back. But I think it really depends on what happens with the availability of rapid testing and which approach we will take. Go ahead. 

Question: As a follow-up, in terms of – you have many, many agencies, you're employing well over 300,000 people, is there a central clearing house within your administration to coordinate the way that these different agencies go about this process? And could we hear from your subject matter experts about what are some of their prerequisites they think would be necessary to start the process, like key data points that that might inform the entire process? 

Mayor: I’ll start and then turn to them, Bob. I'd say that the obvious clearing houses, DCAS – our Department of Citywide Administrative Services, and Commissioner Lisette Camilo, and her team have really done a lot of the work when it comes to standards we want to hold across all city agencies. And  they did a lot of crucial work and helping us fight back the coronavirus, getting PPE, all sorts of crucial work early on. So, that's a natural place to turn. On the question of how we're going to make these decisions, we're going to be very vigilant. We have to be careful that we keep a second wave at bay. We're doing that right now. We're not going to take chances with that. We're going to watch carefully what's happened around the country. This is why I'm really focusing on people limiting travel, and, if they do travel, honoring the quarantine, because that's one of the big X-factors now is this travel piece with the holidays coming. So, we're going to be very cautious in our decision-making. I'd like to see more people back in their offices, but only when we are certain it’s safe. Dr. Varma, do you want to add? 

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah, I mean, I guess I would just amplify the message that you've just delivered, which is that there is always this tension in public health with this disease, which is that we only have very blunt tools to control it that involves individual measures, testing and tracing, and then community restriction. But, of course, those also come at a consequence. They come at a consequence to people social and emotional wise and clearly to their individual and the City's financial health. So, we are looking at the situation around the country and around Europe with incredible alarm. And we are, you know, always cautious about what we do here, because we know how still we're connected despite all of these restrictions. So, the decision's going to have to be made, as the Mayor said, based on us really looking and evaluating the data and trying to understand how strong our defenses are and will continue to be. And then, of course, balancing that with the need for people to feel a return in some way to the activities that are important not just to them, but to the city as a whole.  

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Erin from Politico. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I'm just wondering as far as the red zones in Brooklyn that are still under the shutdowns, I know it's the Governor making the call, but I think we're due for an update maybe tomorrow. Just wondering what your prediction is at this point, would you think that restrictions are ready to be lifted or are they going to be in place for a while longer still? 

Mayor: Yeah. Look, Erin, I'll say, first of all, you're right, the Governor is going to make that decision, the State's going to make that decision. We respect that. I'd say based on the numbers that we've heard from the State and what we're seeing ourselves, they're all tracking in a good direction by and large. I don't know with all of the red zone areas will be treated the same. I just don't know how the State is thinking about that. Again, we're – you know, when this is over, this immediate phase, we're going to go back to the focus on ZIP codes and differentiate by ZIP code. But if you're looking at that whole red zone, certainly some of the areas that made a lot of progress, I'm hopeful, we'll have some good news there. Others may take a little bit longer. But certainly, what we originally thought was going to be true with this whole trajectory with Brooklyn and Queens, that it was going to be ultimately somewhere in the two-to-four-week total range, that appears to be holding true. And I'm very hopeful over this week, next week that we can get all those areas out of those restrictions. Go ahead.  

Question: Alright, thanks. And then, with regards to the holiday travel, I'm wondering, are there any specific plans to, you know, increase enforcement of the quarantine? And also, I think you usually travel to see family over the holidays. I'm wondering what your plans are this year.  

Mayor: Thank you for the question. Let me just do – I'm going to answer those, but I want to do one point off the previous question you asked. A very important story here, and a good story, that in the areas of Brooklyn and Queens where we were seeing a problem, there was a lot of appeal to the community to get tested. And what we have found – I want to thank all the community leaders in Brooklyn, Queens – all the community organizations really, really supported this testing effort. We've seen a huge uptick in the last few days. We saw it originally in Williamsburg, and I want to thank all the leaders there. But then, we've seen it spread really consistently to other neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. So, much higher levels of testing are playing a profound role here in helping us figure out the best way to address this crisis and overcome it. So, I want to thank everyone involved for that. On your second questions there, Erin – first of all, me, personally, it's painful – you know, we really – and this is why I say it to all New Yorkers, but I'm feeling it myself – we cherish traveling at the holidays and seeing our family, it's been such a big part of our lives, but right now we have no plans to do so. You know, it would be beautiful if things changed between now and, say, Christmas, but, right now, with the reality we're facing, I can't see traveling to family and other places. I can't see it working for anybody. You know, it's sad. It's very sad. So, it's something I'm sort of girding myself for. I really, really love it and I really care about it, but I’ve got to tell you – I'm sort of telling myself what I'm going to tell everyone else – this may be the one year in our life where we have to change all of our patterns, change everything we normally would do, our customs, and just take a deep breath, and know that next year will be better. On the quarantine, absolutely you're going to see a lot more enforcement. We have to, Erin, we really have to – I think people have gotten the message that quarantine matters, but I think they need to get the message that if they violate quarantine, there will be consequences. So, we're going to be amplifying that and doing more and more enforcement. There's no time of the year like the holidays in terms of travel, and, unfortunately, that's coming exactly at the point where the disease is kicking up and we can't take that lightly. We have to be really, really aggressive in addressing that.  

Okay. Everyone, as we conclude today – look, we are so used to the beauty of the holiday season in this city. New York City is magical during the holidays. Millions of people come here to be a part of it in a normal year. And we all travel around to see family around the country, around the world. It's a beautiful time of year. This just isn't our reality this year. We’ve got to think differently. For everyone's protection, we’ve got to think differently. So, we're used to everything happening here and everyone coming here, but let's think of it differently this year. We can still be the center of things, but we're going to have to be the center of things together, just ourselves, with the people you love who are right here, with the people who are your friends, your family right here. The best thing would be to keep it local, stay nearby, keep it safe. It is not easy. None of this has been easy, but New Yorkers have shown a lot of toughness and that toughness has saved lives. And let’s do the smart thing this holiday season. Let's stay nearby and let's protect each other. Thank you, everybody.

2020-10-28 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everyone. Look, we all know we're in the middle of a health care crisis and we all know all of you have played a heroic role in fighting it back. But we also know that this crisis has had a huge impact on people's lives, not just in terms of their health, but in terms of our livelihoods. We have seen so many families lose their livelihoods. We've seen so many people lose their jobs. We've seen so many small businesses struggling to survive. It's been an extraordinary challenge. And what we've found is we need to find new solutions. We need new ways to help everyone. I want to focus on small businesses that have been through so much. For us to bring back and protect our small businesses we have to do some different things. And a great example – and it was one that, you know, we had to learn by doing – was with our Open Restaurants program. There was an example of cutting a lot of red tape, doing something that hadn't been done before, offering opportunity for restaurants to use outdoor space, bring back their employees, turned out to be a big hit, turned out to be something that really worked for New Yorkers. Let's apply that same idea to small businesses, retail businesses, all over the five boroughs that so much need additional business to survive. But it's hard to do if you have a small space and the restrictions in place. Let's liberate the outdoor space for them as well and help these small businesses to continue. 

So, today we announce our Open Storefronts program, modeled on what worked with Open Restaurants and Open Streets. Here's an opportunity that'll reach over 40,000 small businesses in this city and will allow them to sell their wares outdoors right in front of their businesses to have a lot more people able to come and buy, to be able to expand their staff, the number of people they employ. We're going to do it the same way we did with Open Restaurants, a simple application, very little red tape. We want to cut through the red tape. We want to make it easy for people to move forward and people can – store owners can go online right now and start applying, nyc.gov/openstorefronts and have an opportunity to get this going immediately, and so important to have the ability to have a lot more business ahead of the holidays. And everyone knows this is such a crucial time of the year for every small business. We want them to be able to maximize it. So, we're making this opportunity available right now. I want you to hear from two people and the first of them is a small business owner. She has a great story of someone who built her business from scratch, who had a dream, and made it come alive. But also, is dealing with all the challenges right now and needs new opportunities to keep her business going and to employ people from her community. My great pleasure to introduce to you Rosanna Medina. Welcome. 

Rosanna Medina: Good morning. Good morning, thank you, Mr. Mayor and Commissioner Doris for this opportunity. My name is Rosanna Medina and I'm the owner of Fajas La Grenua. It’s an undergarment business that seems to enhance the beauty of the women's empowerment. So, we believe that every customer deserves to feel unique and authentic. This is why we work on some shapers as reducing postpartum, postsurgical. And as a Latina [inaudible] I went from carrying my luggage around the Grand Concourse to opening a storefront in the Bronx and Washington Heights with the help of my husband and my daughter. Like many other retail businesses, the pandemic caused me to close down all my stores and operate sales online. It was very difficult, but with the help of SBS, we be allowed to apply and receive the PPP loan and legal services. I know like many, many other retail businesses the pandemic, you know, cause us to do that situation, in June we decided to reopen our store, following the City social distance and the health regulations. But the biggest challenge was finding a way to accommodate our large clientele in our store. And I think, and I believe the storefront program will be a huge help for us. It will allow us to process more transactions, will allow us to sell my shapewear, my merchandise as well. I am excited to continue to sell all my products in a safe and – in a safe environment and a good way. Thank you SBS for all the help you have given to us. We will continue to count on you and the City's support to economically support this pandemic. So, I hope that the storefront program can be too. Thank you, again. 

Mayor: Thank you so much, Rosanna. And congratulations on building a great business and fulfilling your dream. And now I hope that this new initiative is going to allow you to really expand the business, get more people hired, bring in more customers. And I hope you thrive with this Open Storefronts system we put in place. And now I want you to hear from our Small Business Services Commissioner Jonnel Doris. And look, I want to say Small Business Services has really done an amazing job reaching out to small businesses, offering help of every kind, listening to small businesses, and thinking about new ways of doing things. And Jonnel was front and center in the effort to create the Open Restaurants and Open Streets efforts and been one of the driving forces behind this notion of re-imagining public space, thinking differently about what we have done, because this crisis is telling us we have to do things differently all the time. More creativity, less bureaucracy, more outreach and support for small businesses. That's what Jonnel and his team have been doing. So, my pleasure to introduce to you Small Business Services Commissioner Jonnel Doris. 

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Well, thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. And, Rosanna, wow, what an amazing story. From carrying your luggage on the street to owning two storefronts both in Washington Heights and in the Bronx, employing nine New Yorkers and bringing opportunity for those families. This is what Small Business Services is all about. We are here to assist our small businesses to get the resources they need to really advance their dreams, but also reach their potential and really bring our city back. We cannot come back fully as a city without our small businesses. And so, we're excited about this program, our Open Storefronts program. Listen, throughout this pandemic, our small businesses have been showing their tenacity and their drive. They've been showing their grit, that New York grit that they have. And certainly, we want to make sure that we're here as the city to support them. And we have done that. We're certainly looking forward to this program and it's just going to add to our Open Restaurants program, which amazingly popular and a lifeline for our small businesses. And this program will be the same for our retail facilities, particularly now, as we go into the holiday seasons when these small businesses – 70 percent, 70 percent of their sales come from this time.  

So, we're making this more accessible, we're making it – giving them the opportunity to get out in front of their stores and also engage their customers, do transactions right in front of the store, and also allow them to free up space, also inside, really, to keep it safe and keep the traffic moving as we need to. So, if you are a small business, we want you to know that SBS will continue to be here for you. You can reach us at our hotline at 888-SBS-4NYC. We have helped scores of small businesses either with financial assistance or our hotline, which we've already helped 42,000 small businesses to answer questions that they need, and the like. So, listen, if you need resources from us, if you need assistance from Small Business Services or to understand better this program, please feel free to reach out to us. We will have our mobile unit across all five boroughs. I'm going up to the Bronx today. We're very excited about it. We'll be on Southern Boulevard and we will continue across the five boroughs to bring the resources directly to our small businesses for this particular program, our Open Storefronts program. So, once again, our telephone number, if you need to reach us by our hotline is 888-SBS-4NYC, or you can reach out to us for all of our resources at nyc.gov/business. Thank you, Sir. 

Mayor: Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you for all that you and your team are doing and this new initiative with Open Storefronts, again, will make a difference for tens of thousands of businesses. A lot of their employees are going to have new opportunity. And of course, a lot of customers who can't wait to come back to their favorite businesses. So let's make it official with this executive order.

[Mayor de Blasio signs executive order:]

You are Commissioner, I commend you. There it is, democracy in action, right there. Thank you so much. And as we finish talking about Open Storefronts, I want to remind people again, holidays are coming, great opportunity to patronize your local businesses. Look, everyone, we all appreciate the amazing stuff available online, but let's really double down on our local businesses here in this city. Let's give them the business they need to survive. We really hope and pray that this pandemic will be addressed by next year with a vaccine. This is going to be the toughest year for small business. This holiday season is something they really need to be good and strong for them, but we all can make a difference by buying local. So please do that. And since we have a guest with us Rosanna, tell us again, Fajas La Grenua, tell us where you're located again?

Medina: Okay. This is Fa La Grenua. We're located at 554 West 181st Street in Washington Heights. And on 133 East Fordham Road in the Bronx.

Mayor: All right, so for all those folks looking for a great place to do some holiday shopping, Rosanna and her team are ready for you. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much.

All right, everyone let's do our daily indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients. Today's report 105 patients with a confirmed positivity level for COVID of 22.8 percent. Number two, new reported cases on seven day average, threshold 550 cases. Today's report is 552 cases. The number three, percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19 city-wide, threshold five percent, today’s report 1.39 percent, with the seven day rolling average again, at 1.75 percent. That's a number we've been very close to now for the last few weeks, 1.75 percent. I’ll say a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish:]

With that we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: Hi all. We'll now begin our Q and A. With us today we have Rosanna Medina, Commissioner of Small Business Services Jonnel Doris, Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, DOT Chief Operating Officer Margaret Forgione, Senior Counsel for Democracy NYC Laura Wood and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. With that, we'll start with Rich from WCBS 880.

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey Rich. How are you doing?

Question:  I'm doing all right. Just, so in this new proposal you have for the outdoors, presumably and the sidewalks, will there be a series of rules? You've got a lot of tents and that sort of thing so that people aren't going to get wet and whatever it is out there.

Mayor: Let me start and I'll turn to Commissioner Doris and the Chief Operating Officer for DOT Margaret Forgione. Look Rich, what we want to make sure is we're maximizing space, but obviously also being smart about keeping people safe. So the perfect world is where you have more space and the advantage of the open air. Think about the shopping experience, a lot of what people do, they don't necessarily have to take a lot of time to look at stuff, it's not like sitting down for a meal. We've had plenty of great examples of people shopping outdoors in the city in a lot of ways. So we want to make sure it's safe. We want to make sure there's a flow of air but also give a lot more space. And I think we can strike that balance. Commissioner?

Commissioner Doris: Yes, absolutely. So, you know, businesses can erect temporary signage. They also can use umbrellas that are collapsible to protect them from the elements as well, and also tents. But at the end of the day the business would have to bring this equipment back in. We believe that the way that we've constructed it and also the way that as the Mayor mentioned, as easy as it is for you to sign, should take a few minutes. The rules are very straightforward. And it sort of aligns with what businesses are already selling inside. Essentially they'd bring it outside. So this is a very, very, very simple process. And just like our – we do with Our Open Restaurants program again, to make sure that it's accessible for our small businesses.

Mayor: Let's get the COO of DOT into this. Margaret, what would you like to add?

Chief Operating Officer Margaret Forgione, Department of Transportation: Good morning. I would just like to add that the most critical thing is that each business must maintain an eight foot clear path for pedestrians to pass by. You have to make sure the sidewalks are still unimpeded while allowing for this new use by businesses on the sidewalk.

Mayor: Thank you very much.

Moderator: Next is Marcia from WCBS.

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. This is sort of a follow up question to your Open Restaurant announcement today, Open Streets announcement today. I'm wondering a lot of restaurant owners are chafing at the fact that they can only have 25 percent of their tables indoors. I wonder at what point you might be able to move that to 50 percent, which is what happens in all the other suburbs surrounding New York City?

Mayor: Marcia, that's obviously ultimately a decision the State will make. We're going to be working with them very closely. We’re all, the City and State together watching very, very vigilantly what's happening around the country, where we're seeing a horrible uptake of this disease. And we've had challenges here in the city, obviously in Brooklyn and Queens, although that situation is better, you still see the overall impact when you look at our daily indicators. So we're watching very carefully, Health leadership of both the City and State are talking to each other. I think the State's idea is to come to some initial thinking about that over the next week or so. But again, as with all decisions on whether to expand or contract activity, it should be based on the data and the science. Go ahead, Marcia.

Question: Okay. Just a follow up question. So I'm hearing from you I think, that you're concerned about increasing the number of people who can eat indoors because of the possibility there could be a second wave and the increase in the number of positive test rates?

Mayor: Marcia, absolutely number one thing I'm concerned about right now is stopping a second wave in New York City. This city looked to have been the epicenter of the crisis, fought all the way back to become one of the safest places in the country. Now threatened with a second wave that's, you know, fully affecting so much of the country. We can't let that happen here. So we have to be really smart about the choices we make. And the State ultimately decides but I think what we're all aware of, and I know the State feels the same way is we cannot allow a second wave in New York City.

Moderator: Next is Dan from WABC.

Mayor: Dan?

Question: I spoke with some landlords who say they're experiencing more than 50 percent vacancies during the pandemic, and they don't see that changing anytime soon. The Small Property Owners Association says hundreds are having a difficult time paying their mortgages and their property tax is based on rates from two years ago. There has been some help for renters in New York City. What, if anything is being done to help building owners survive moving forward?

Mayor: Look we need a bigger type of support for building owners, for renters, for small businesses, all of them deserve relief. This is a global pandemic. It is no one's fault. Everyone deserves help to find a way through. That can only come in one form, which is a federal stimulus. Now look in six days, we're going to know the most important thing, who wins the election, the presidency, the Senate. That's going to, I think determine how and when there will be a stimulus and how big it will be. But I believe that stimulus should work to make whole everyone, so that we can restart our economy and move forward. That's the only place it can happen. Go ahead.

Question: Thank you Mayor.

Mayor: You good?

Question: Yes. Thank you so much.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: Next is Yoav from The City.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you, I think a caller asked you Friday about fitness studios not being able to open yet. And just wondering what the plan is for that because that sector is, is still struggling. And as far as I know, hasn't been able to open yet.

Mayor: Yeah. It continues to be discussed with our health care team. We're not there yet. For the very same reasons that I talked about a few minutes ago. We do have an immediate danger of a second wave in New York City. We fought it back so far effectively, and I want to thank all New Yorkers, because everyone's been a part of that. Folks in Brooklyn and Queens in some of those affected neighborhoods have been a part of that. They went out, they got tested in record numbers. They're wearing face masks, it's making a huge difference. But we are not out of the woods. So any of the issues still to be resolved in terms of reopening or expanded opening has to be looked at through the prism of the health care situation. And so we're going to be very careful to make sure there is no continued danger of a second way before we make a lot of new expansion decisions. So that's going to be based again on the data and the science Yoav.

Question: Okay. I guess along the same lines, you know, when you heard that your barber shop was closing, you said, we need to you know, see what we can do to stop this kind of stuff. And here today you're announcing that stores that are already open can expand. So I guess there doesn't seem to be the same kind of urgency and creativity being employed for a sector of the industry, the commercial space that, you know -- it's almost November and they still haven't been allowed to open. I'm just wondering about people's livelihoods and why there either isn't more urgency and or creativity to figure out a solution other than just to say, they have to remain closed?

Mayor: I disagree with your assessment. There's tons of urgency, but the urgency is first and foremost about protecting people's lives and keeping this city moving forward and keeping our economy growing. And we have to stop a second wave to do all that. Yoav, I would simply say it's first thing first. The first mission is to stop a second wave. Or if you have a second wave, a bunch of things are going to close. That's against everyone's interests. So I disagree with you. It has lots of urgency and there's lots of creativity. This is why we're talking about something like an Open Storefront initiative to bring stores that can do their work outdoors, outdoors. And give them the right to do it. Because a crucial factor here is outdoors versus indoors. I'm going to turn to Dr. Varma, who I think speaks passionately about this. Look what I've learned from our health care leadership, outdoors versus indoors, huge factor. Where people can wear a mask versus where it's less likely or less effective to wear a mask, huge factor. When you think about something like fitness studios, I want them to come back, but we have to bring them back when it's safe and when it makes sense. And they unfortunately are indoors and they come with challenges that we have to address. But this is all about the big picture, which is stopping a second wave. Dr. Varma, could you speak to that?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Yeah. Thank you very much. I think the Mayor has highlighted a lot of the critically important issues. One of the areas that makes us particularly concerned about group indoor fitness activities is the fact that it's been associated with a fairly large outbreaks that has been well-documented in other parts of the world. Most recently there was a large outbreak associated with a group fitness class in Canada. There's a very well documented one that's happened in Korea. So it's one of the many reasons that gives us pause, particularly given all of the issues that the Mayor has highlighted. There was a dramatic resurgence of this disease throughout the rest of the United States and throughout Europe. And so there will continue to be a lot of pressure for us to be able to keep cases down here in New York against that. So additional activities that are known to be potentially high risk give us a lot of pause.

Mayor: Thank you very much.

Moderator: Next we have Julia from the Post.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor: I am well. And Julia, I want to wish you well, I know you'll be off duty for a little while, but I hope everything goes beautifully and we'll see you back soon.

Question: Thank you very much. And good luck continuing to steer the city through these difficult times, and I wish you and your family stay safe and healthy.

Mayor: Thank you. Thank you.

Question: We saw the results of a federal assessment test for fourth and eighth graders. 73 percent of eighth graders were not proficient in math. And 74 percent were not proficient in English. So those aren't, you know, the best numbers. I'm wondering if you think your administration is preparing kids to be you know, proficient enough to graduate? And this is 2019, so pre-COVID.

Mayor: Yeah. Julia, I need to get briefed on those results. Some of the national testing in recent years has been more accurate, some of it's been less accurate. There've been some real issues about the consistency of the testing, but I need to hear about the details of this so I can give you a better answer. But, look, what I know is this, we still have a lot of work to do to improve public education in the city, I'm the first to say it, but I know for a fact that we've seen over the last seven years our graduation rate go up really substantially, the test scores on the State tests have gone up consistently. We're doing a much better job of closing the achievement gap and we're seeing that particularly with the youngest kids who have benefited from pre-K and 3-K we're seeing more and more kids take part in advanced placement courses, as we've made that truly consistently, equally available all over our school system. There's a lot of signs of real meaningful progress, but there's definitely more work to do. So, we'll take a look at these specific outcomes from these tests and have more to say on that soon. 

Moderator: Next we have Juan from NY1. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: How are you?  

Question: I'm very good. Thank you. I want to ask you about the new program that you just announced. How are you going to ensure safety? Are you going to have more police presence? And what would you say to drivers already struggling to find a parking space? And I'm talking about NYPD presence, because you're going to have all these businesses with all the items that they are selling outside on the street. 

Mayor: Well, let me have, again, Commissioner Doris and COO Forgione speak to you about this, because the way this is structured I do not think is going to create the problems you fear. I think it's going to use sidewalk space more effectively and people are going to want it, I really believe. I think there's going to be a real desire of people to go and take advantage of this opportunity to shop locally. I don't think it dredges up the kind of safety concerns you're pointing to, but, Commissioner, do you want to start? 

Commissioner Doris: Yeah, certainly. So, you know, we do agree, Mr. Mayor. You know, businesses will be utilizing the space right in front of their stores. So, you know, there is going to be a pathway for the customers and also pedestrians to pass. We believe that businesses [inaudible] employees that are normally inside will be able to come outside and work with the customers so that, you know, if there's concern about, you know, crime, etcetera – I don't think we are too concerned about that, because employees will actually be out there working with the customers and overseeing their goods and various services that are going to provide. We have not heard in the lead up to this to concerns around safety in that context. We do have our BIDs, who will be working with – Business Improvement Districts – as our partners. We have 76 of them across the city that we're working with, our chambers of commerce that we're working with to help those retail businesses survive, but also really execute on this program. And we'll be tapping in to their resources as well. 

Mayor: Hey, as we turn to Margaret, let's see – can we get the image back on the screen of the actual sidewalk layout. Do you guys have? Let's see if our ace team can get that for us so that when Margaret speaks, she is referring to the actual schematic. Is that – no, the actual sidewalk, the look of the – there you go – almost there – Margaret, where we're going to set this up for you. Okay, Margaret – now, I don't know if you can see it, Margaret, but this is the schematic of how it would look with the sidewalk layout. Can you speak to that and safety considerations? 

Chief Operating Officer Forgione: Perfect. So, the focus of this program is sidewalk only. We're inviting the stores to come out and set up their wares on the sidewalk directly in front of their storefront. They can set it up for about five feet directly from the building, five feet out as well as five feet high. As I mentioned before, at all times, an eight-foot clear path for pedestrians needs to be maintained. In terms of the curb lane that you refer to, the only time a store will go out into the street is when the store is already part of our Open Streets, Open Restaurants program, where the street is already being closed to traffic so that restaurants can come out. In those cases, the business can join in that format, but we think that the vast majority will just be sticking to the sidewalk directly in front of their building. So, that being said, we don't anticipate a lot of safety concerns. The key thing, again, is to keep pedestrians moving. But you won't be seeing an impact in the roadway from this program. 

Mayor: Thank you very much. Go ahead. 

Question: Mr. Mayor, so we've seen in the last few days an increase in the numbers of new infections in the city. I believe that some of those numbers are going beyond the line, the standard you had implemented in the past. What's a new metric that you're going to use? Do you know that in the past and in New York City has been a little bit – a few weeks after whatever was happening in Europe and we see how Europe is doing so badly right now, reimposing lockdowns in many European capitals and many regions of the continent. What's a new metric and do you foresee similar actions being implemented in New York City as the ones that we we're seeing right now in Europe? 

Mayor: Thank you. Very, very important question. So, let me start and then I'll turn to Dr. Varma. I want to just go over these indicators really clearly in light of your question. We have three indicators and what we're most concerned about is when we see them all move in unison. The one that we've talked about several times the last week or two is the case number, which has now hovered right around that threshold several times the last week or two. But remember, that is also against the backdrop of a lot more testing than we've ever had in this city. And we've been encouraging testing. So, it's natural, if you have a lot more testing, even if your positivity level stays low, you're going to have a higher number of pure positive cases. If this were happening in concert with the other two indicators, we would be very concerned and we'd be taking additional actions. But because it is different from the other two indicators, that has been determining our actions. Also, because we know the problem was localized to a relatively small part of Brooklyn and Queens, and we've seen real progress in those areas – that's what tells us a lot. Also, the two other indicators – on the hospitalization level, still well below the threshold and [inaudible] still a much lower positivity level for COVID than we saw in the spring. On percent positive citywide, the seven-day rolling average, being the truest measure, again, that has been in this area somewhere between 1.5 percent, 1.75 percent now over the last few weeks. It's been pretty consistent, leveled off. We want to push that down, but the big point here is we are making some progress fighting back the second wave. We’ve got to do a lot more. The concern about us being a few weeks behind Europe, I think that was when we didn't have all these precautions in place and these strict rules in place, and also when there was a lot more travel interaction – there’s obviously very little travel from Europe now. We've been watching this closely. But it doesn't reduce our vigilance. We're still really concerned that we're going to make our decisions very carefully. Dr. Varma? 

Senior Advisor Varma: Great. Thank you. I think the Mayor has highlighted, you know, all the really critical points about how we look at all these indicators together with one big picture. I would try to highlight maybe two points. One, just to explain a little bit about the why we chose that threshold of 550, kind of what it means to us. And then a second, a little bit about the context related to Europe. We chose that number of 550 after looking extensively both at our data, as well as data from many other places around the country that had different stages of reopening. And what we found was that there was often a consistent pattern when the increase in your number of cases across certain thresholds, you know, compared to where you were at your lowest point, that that was a worrisome sign of a resurgence. The good news of all of this is that, you know, we detected those resurgences in local parts of the city earlier than this indicator tracked. And so, we were able to start taking action. Of course, the bad news is that we're hovering at a level that we don't really want to be at. You know, we would love to ideally drive case numbers back to where they were in August. But that is the origin of the indicator, it was something to indicate to us that there's a warning sign that case rates might be increasing over time and cause a second wave. The second point briefly about Europe is that we have done things that Europe hasn't done. You know, Europe did have a lot of reopening and I think the issue of pandemic fatigue probably hit there stronger. We've been really modeling our efforts after those successful large East Asian cities and taking action when we hit a threshold of like two or three percent in certain geographic areas for test positivity. In a lot of European countries, they have waited until their test positivity levels rose to much higher levels before they took action. Thank you.  

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: We have time for two more. With that, we’ll go to Reuvain from Hamodia.   

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I would like to ask you about special needs children who are particularly devastated by the school shutdown in the red zones. Parents say that the children are regressing every day. I have a cousin who's a special needs child and he calls me every other day saying, can you ask the Mayor to open my school? I was just wondering if – it's possible Governor Cuomo may open them any day, but it's also possible that with the second wave we may see shutdowns in the future. So, I'm asking what any special allowance has been made for the special circumstances surrounding the special needs schools? And maybe allowing them to be open even when others are closed. 

Mayor: Yeah. It's a very good question and a very important question. When we opened our public schools, the first thing we did was focused on our school programs for special needs kids, our District 75 schools, because, unquestionably, this is where the in-person learning has the biggest impact and there's the greatest need. And I feel for the families, for sure – they’re dealing with so many struggles to begin with, we have to be responsive to them. So, the first thing I'd say is, we're obviously waiting for the State's next round of decisions on the red zones. We've seen a lot of progress in Brooklyn. I'm very hopeful that it will be some relief soon and that will help address the problem. The State gets to make that decision. We want to make it carefully with them, obviously, but I am hopeful, based on the sheer data we're seeing that some relief is coming very soon. Second, I think we need to think, going forward, about even when we're dealing with restrictions, do we have a different approach to special needs programs because of the dire need? How do we do that? How do we protect those programs? What precautions do we need to put in place? This is a conversation we're going to have with the State, because I think this was something unanticipated, that there was a particular need here that might have to be handled differently. Obviously, Reuvain, this uptick happened very intensely. The most important thing was to stop it. I want to thank everyone in the community who has helped, everyone who’s wearing a mask and social distancing, everyone who’s getting tested. It's making a huge, positive difference. I want to thank so many community leaders, organizations, members of the community have really stepped up. It's been fantastic. The best thing to do is keep that going so we don't ever have to add restrictions again. But I think your point is fair, we need to rethink the approach to special education in the light of the times when we need restrictions. Go ahead.  

Question: There've been multiple reported instances of summons being given to either schools that were closed and maybe had a few administrators in the building just doing administrative work. There was an incident of a store that posted a video of an inspector giving them a summons, even though they were open only for curbside delivery. And the inspector said, I'm just following orders. In the case of the school, the inspector said, well, I have a list. And it seemed that she believed that there was a list to give summons to, not to check if they were open. So, I'm wondering if you're aware of these instances and what's being done to prevent them in the future. 

Mayor: I'm not aware of those specific instances, but I want anyone who's got information like that, if you could help us by getting it to our team here at City Hall. We want to follow up on that. If someone was given a summons appropriately, we need to act to address that and fix it. They should not be penalized if they're doing the right thing. If an inspector misunderstood the rules – look, to be fair, inspectors are being asked to adopt a whole new rules and do different kinds of work than they normally do. Some might misunderstand a particular piece, we want to fix that. So, I don't want to see anyone given a summons who shouldn't be. We know some people unfortunately have been overtly breaking the rules and they do need to receive summonses. But if it's a mistake or a misunderstanding, let's see if we can address it and get us those details. We'll follow up right away. 

Moderator: For our last question, we’ll go to Michael from the Daily News.  

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?  

Mayor: Good, Michael. How have you been?  

Question: I’m all right. The question has to do with open storefronts. And I apologize if I missed something from Margaret before. Is it allowed on streets or is it only allowed on streets when an adjacent business has an open streets permit? Could you just kind of detail that a bit more? It was unclear to me when you talked about it before. 

Mayor: Yeah. No, I appreciate it, Michael. I’ll start and turn to Margaret. Michael, I don't know if you are in a place where you can see the screen, but we have it back up. This is about sidewalks. This is – it's different – it's inspired by what weren't with open restaurants, but structured differently to focus only on sidewalks. The exception, of course, is when we have a whole street closed off because the open streets, then the stores can expand further. Margaret, you go ahead. 

Chief Operating Officer Forgione: Yes, Mayor, that's exactly right. The program is focused on the sidewalk. So, the vast majority of stores will put their wares out on the sidewalk in order to participate in the program. If there is already an open street, open restaurant on the block, they may join that. They may work with the partners that are already closing the street in order to come out into the curb lane. 

Mayor: Thank you so much. Look, as we conclude today, I just want to say thank you to all New Yorkers who care about their city, care about their country, are out there voting right now. Six days until the election, I want to thank everyone who sent in an absentee ballot, everyone who is early voting, everyone has gone and go out the old-fashioned way on Election Day. Every bit of it's good and all of it is appreciated. I want to thank those good people working at the polls, volunteering to help out this city. We've seen it throughout, you know, people just step up for each other all the time. I want to thank everyone. When we sent out a call and we tell people go out and get tested, New Yorkers have done a great job getting tested. Yesterday, we talked about the need for people to give blood and protect folks who are in hospitals and protect our blood supply. People answer that call every time we put it out. New Yorkers adjust, go out and make things happen, and they care about their fellow New Yorkers and they do so much. And so, I just want to thank everyone. This is why this city is coming back strong, because of every one of you who steps up and makes a difference. And that makes a difference. And that, to me, is why I remain so confident about our future. And as we announce new opportunities today for our businesses to be open and thriving during the holidays, again, help this city, help your fellow New Yorker, buy local this holiday season. It will make a huge difference. Thanks, everybody.

2020-10-30 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Time now, as usual on Fridays for our weekly Ask The Mayor, calling right after the 11 o'clock news. My questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our lines are open for your Mayor questions at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. You can also tweet a question with the hashtag #AskTheMayor and we'll watch our Twitter feed go by. And good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How are you doing?

Lehrer: I'm doing okay. And unfortunately, let's start on the troubling rise that you announced yesterday and the virus positivity rate to a 2.7 percent rate for the previous day. And it's up to 1.9 percent as a daily average for the week. It's at I guess a three percent threshold. So another whole point, where the policy is that you would close the schools and more businesses too. Do you have any new daily numbers yet today?

Mayor: Yeah, let me go over today's indicators and they are actually somewhat better than what we saw yesterday. And let's always note that the up and down of every day’s testing, you expect some variation there. The truest measure is the seven-day rolling average. So just a quick run through, hospital admissions are down, 68 is the number today. That's good, down from 81 yesterday. The amount of positive cases, percentage of positive cases for COVID, down. It’s 18.9 percent compared to 26 percent yesterday, among those hospital admissions. Reported cases down, 514 today compared to 532 yesterday. Overall testing down, it’s 1.5 7 percent for the one day testing period, 1.57 percent compared to 2.7 yesterday, which was really a striking figure, but looks aberrant now. And then the overall testing, this is the key one, the seven-day rolling average. 1.87 percent, down from 1.92 percent yesterday. So a little bit of stabilizing, a little bit of better news today, but we've got a long way to go. And the key point Brian is look what's happening around the country. Look at even more shockingly what's happening in Europe. We need to take this very seriously. If we're going to stop a second wave here and I know we can stop a second wave, but it's going to take a lot of discipline and recognizing we're not going to be able to do everything we'd like to do in the short term. But we have to hold the line and stop a second wave here in New York City.

Lehrer: And you're warning people against indoor Halloween activities. By the way, listeners, after the Mayor, we're going to have a call in on what you're going as for Halloween and your zoom parade or whatever you're doing, how you are staying safe, but also how you're having fun on Halloween. That'll be after the Mayor. But you're warning people against indoor trick-or-treating and other gatherings on Halloween tomorrow. But also about Thanksgiving and Christmas. Could you repeat that here so everyone hears it?

Mayor: Yeah. Thank you, Brian. One, there's definitely a great way to celebrate Halloween and that's stay outdoors, stay in small groups, socially distance, wear a mask. In fact, with children it is important to on top of the costume, put the mask over the costume. So they really are protected. You can do, you can go trick or treating. You can be outdoors celebrating, but small groups, smart precautions. But no indoor gatherings. That's just too dangerous. Avoid indoor gatherings, avoid parties. We can not have large gatherings at all. And for the holidays, I hate to say it and I'm going to apply the same standard to myself. And I'm saying it with, you know, the pain I think everyone would feel. We're so used to going to see our loved ones at the holidays, but this is not the year for it. Pretty much everywhere else in the country is doing worse than us when it comes to the coronavirus. So by definition, if you go to one of those areas, you're running the risk of contracting the disease and bringing it back with you and spreading it here. So I strongly believe New Yorkers should stay here in the city for the holidays. Keep it simple. It’s just for this year, there's going to be a vaccine next year.

And I further would say on a policy level of Brian, you know, it's this it's time for the federal government to do something they should have done a long time ago and not let anyone on an airplane who has not had a recent negative test result. I really think we need a new federal law or regulation immediately because it's crazy that people are traveling and it's clearly spreading the disease and it could be stopped with a simple rule in place. So that's the advice I would give to Washington, but also the advice I'd give to your listeners about what we all need to do personally.

Lehrer: Just one little thing on what you said and then we'll go on to callers. And I also want to ask you about schools, with what might be changing in terms of when families can opt back in. You said wear a mask over your Halloween mask. You can also wear it under your Halloween – probably wear it under the Halloween mask, right? Under the costume?

Mayor; Well, the advice has been, I think the doctors are suggesting that over is better protection. And I think they're also concerned about, you know, making sure that people can breathe well and one thing or another. The important point is a mask per se, a typical store-bought Halloween mask is not enough protection. That's the most important point. And as I understand the advice our doctors are giving is they think over probably works better, both in terms of protection and comfort. But the important point is do not rely on a classic kind of plastic superhero mask or something like that. That's not going to protect you.

Lehrer: That's right. So when you're wearing your Giuliani on the bed with Borat’s daughter mask, put your cloth mask or your surgical mask –

Mayor: Everyone's going to be wearing that this year, obviously.

Lehrer: I think so. All right. Let's take a phone call kind of on this, I guess. Ann in Manhattan you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi Ann.

Question: Good morning. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. It's a pleasure to speak with you. I have a question about masking. I know the MTA has told me it's up to bus drivers to make sure bus passengers wear a mask although they don't do it. But as a senior and now former poll worker, I'm wondering if your office has any way of enforcing masking and other safety measures at the polls? Because the Board of Election is not doing it. I wasn't able to complete my poll worker assignment at the spring primary election because some of the other poll workers weren't wearing masks. Although the Board of Elections had assured me everyone would be masked and socially distanced and so on. And when I called the Board about it later the man in the poll worker office just said, what can you do? So I guess they decided what they could do is fire the messenger, because I inquired recently about training. I was told that after serving for several years, I'd been dismissed. Although they said it was for another completely unrelated reason. So I have two questions. First of all, can the City enforce masking at the polls and will it? I mean this is a question of safety, not just for poll workers, but for everyone trying to vote in-person in this election. And when I voted early yesterday, at least five workers who were still not wearing masks or wearing them incorrectly. And also is there anyone you can suggest I might contact for help getting reinstated the poll worker? At least after the pandemic, because I feel like this was really just retaliation for raising a sensitive issue.

Lehrer: Ann, thank you.

Mayor: Thank you Ann.  Very, very important point you're raising. First of all, please give your information to WNYC and we will follow up. As I think Brian, your listeners know the City of New York does not control the Board of Elections. I wish we did because it's ludicrous what's happening with the Board. And I want to just say as clear as a bell, the Board, I used the phrase of the day on NY1, when it comes to the Board of Elections, it's time to end it, not mend. It. This is a entity that is beyond repair, beyond reform. It must be torn down and rebuilt. And the State Legislature is the only place that can happen. There's legislation right now in Albany that would at least help by empowering the Executive Director of the Board to hire a more professional staff. That would help but really we need a total overhaul because the Board just doesn't work. And to Ann's point, Ann we'll follow up on your specific case and see how we can help you. I'll have our legal team and our Democracy NYC team follow up with you.

On the point about masks. Look, first of all, the best thing we can do anywhere is distributed free masks. The MTA and the City have been working together on that. And I think it's actually been very successful with buses and subways. But there's clearly, always more to do. So job one is the positive. Give out masks all the time. The enforcement – I understand the point about the bus driver. I'm sure that could be tough. But poll sites, a whole other ball game. It should be very easy to enforce there. We're going to follow up today. There's not – should not be any such thing as a poll worker, not wearing a mask. When I went to my early voting site, they did a great job of asking everyone to make sure they had their mask on right before they entered the site. That needs to be the norm everywhere. We will enforce that for sure. And we're going to have a big operation on Election Day with lawyers and City officials volunteering their time, Election Observation Corps to make sure there's no intimidation of voters, no attempts to suppress, particularly in communities of color. But I'm also going to instruct them to look out for situations where the Board personnel are not enforcing those mask rules, because that's a problem. It's a fundamental problem. The only thing I'll note is there are some people with a valid medical exemption. We understand that. But beyond that, if you walk into a poll site or work in a poll site, you have to have a mask on. That's really straightforward.

Lehrer: Schools, Mr. Mayor. Originally, there were going to be two re-entry enrollment periods for remote learners who want to join the hybrid in-person model. Then you decided no, only one more chance to re-enter, which would be for the next two weeks, starting Monday. Now I read the Chancellor suggested, Chancellor Carranza suggested maybe there would be a later window in addition, after all. You know these constant changes in policy keep driving parents crazy to no end, what's going on and why?

Mayor: Yeah. I first want to clarify what the Chancellor said was just a common sense point that we're dealing with an ever changing reality with our health indicators as we talked about earlier with a vaccine. There could be big changes, absolutely would call for a re-evaluation. But let me tell you why we changed the immediate policy. And I'm going to give you a very straightforward answer and the Chancellor and I are going to emphasize this next week when we speak to the people about the details. Look what's happened in the schools is we have a certain number of people who have chosen full-time remote. We have a certain number of people who have chosen blended learning and their kids are going to blended learning. Then we have a surprising number of parents who are sort of on the cusp. They really haven't declared either option formally. And we have kids who are signed up for blended who participate more remotely on the days that they are supposed to be in school. We need to clear all this up for everyone's benefit. Because one of the realities Brian is that we have school seats that are sitting there during the day when a kid is supposed to be in school at that seat and the kid is instead of going remote that day. That's creating a dysfunction we have to address because we can't have a seat going to waste. There's plenty of kids who would like to be in those seats. So we're saying to parents, look, we did not anticipate this. We didn't see this coming. It's a different reality. We want everyone now to declare themselves. If something really profound changes out there with the coronavirus, that could lead to a different opportunity. But right now it's time for people to make a decision. The schools are safe. It has been proven over and over again. Parents need to decide. And with one crucial reminder, if you decide to go all remote, then that's where you're going to be until something changes on the health front. If you decide to go blended, come in and actually fully participate. If at any point you decide down the line, you would prefer to go to all remote instead, parents always retain that right. So, blended still offers you that opportunity down the line, but we've got to get people to choose and act on it so we can actually array our staffing properly and get kids best engaged. 

Lehrer: Hang on, Mr. Mayor and everybody, it's amazing that this hasn't happened yet since we've been broadcasting from home, but I'm getting a delivery right at this moment. So, just one second, everybody's – 

Mayor: Live radio, everyone. Live radio. Okay. 

[Laughter] 

Lehrer: You can leave there right outside the door. Thank you so much. There you go. 

Mayor: You handled that beautifully, Brian. 

Lehrer: There you go. It's a delicate situation. And I taped a tip to the outside [inaudible] – 

Mayor: I hope it’s a good package.  

[Laughter] 

Lehrer: Anyway – a follow up on the schools. A question from a public school parent, with kids who – I guess this parent has kids who are currently all remote and says the school told them they better sign up for in-person fast because the slots are filling up and if they sign up too late, the kids might be transferred to a different school. Is it just first-come-first-serve for all families until a school reaches its smaller than normal capacity because of social distancing? 

Mayor: That's not how we would look at it. And it’d actually be really helpful, Brian, if your team could pass that information on to the folks that you work with at City hall, because that is not the policy. The policy is that we open the door wide for anyone who wants to come into in-person learning in a blended approach. And we're going to adjust accordingly depending on the number of people who come in. And, again, we want to make sure that anyone who says they want blended – actually wants blended – is going to use it so that we're using each seat to the fullest. But, no, I don't anticipate a situation at all, where someone has to go to a different school. We just will work with whatever number of kids want to come back and adjust the schedules accordingly. 

Lehrer: But you are saying, if I understood your initial answer, that the plan as of now is to only have this one re-entry period, but things may change again, and you may have another one after the new year. 

Mayor: Yeah, Brian, let's be really clear. ‘Things may change again’ is like the story of the coronavirus. I've never seen a more moving target crisis than this one because it constantly – the facts are evolving. Based on what we know right now, this is it. This is the one chance for parents to make a decision because what happened again, Brian, objective facts on the ground. We have too many parents who are kind of straddling the fence and too many kids who are not showing up consistently enough. And we need to resolve that once and for all. We can't leave that gray. It is causing an issue we have to address. If a major change happens, most notably a vaccine, but it could be other major changes, we'll certainly look at the situation again. That's what the Chancellor was referring to. But right now, based on the facts on the ground, one opportunity between November 2nd and November 15th to formally decide, would you rather have your kids back in school – and I emphasize proven safe schools, and I'll give you one new fact for the day. Breaking news, Brian, we now, on our surveys of schools, our testing surveys, we're doing every month in every school, 1,200-plus schools, 63,000 tests have yielded only 69 positive individual cases. So, basically coming in at one out of a thousand staff and students are coming back with a positive case. Schools are incredibly safe. Parents who appreciate in-person learning should take this opportunity to sign up and get their kids back to school. 

Lehrer: Okay. Mr. Mayor, thanks as always. Happy Halloween, be safe. 

Mayor: Happy Halloween, be safe, stay outdoors. No indoor parties. Stay outdoors. 

Lehrer: Talk to you next week.  

Mayor: Take care.

2020-11-02 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, here we are. We're starting one of the most important weeks arguably in the history of this country and this city. This week where this day decisive election will happen – and we're all getting ready in so many ways. And everyone is feeling the intensity of this moment. We've been waiting a long time for the chance to express our views, make our voices heard, make our votes count. And New Yorkers have done something amazing in the course of the last days – we've seen early voting on an incredible level. You know, this was a city, a state where we fought for a long time to finally get early voting, one of the last places to get it in this country. But look at how New Yorkers have taken early voting. Look how involved people are. Look how engaged. Over 1.1 million New Yorkers have voted already in this election. This is amazing – over 1.1 million. No matter what the challenges, no matter how long the lines – and I can speak about that from personal experience – the people of this city wanted to be heard, and they went out and did the right thing, and a lot more to come tomorrow on Election Day.  

So, we're going to talk about the election for sure, but, before we go into that, I want to remind us that elections ultimately are about what we value, what we care about most. And elections express what our priorities are. And in this city, there is no higher priority, nothing we value more than public education. This is one of the places where public education is most cherished and has determined the destiny of millions and millions of children, because we go out of our way to make a great public education available for all. Now, we also know that public education is a foundation of our democracy. So, it's so important that every child get the very best possible education. And we decided, for that reason, that it was worth moving mountains to reopen our schools – huge amount of effort went into it. And I want to thank all our educators and staff, all our parents, all our kids, everyone who was committed to reopening our schools in-person. What a difference it makes for a family and the child that make that choice to have in-person education. And the year is off to a strong start and a safe start. And that was job-one, to make sure our schools would be safe. And we now have lots of evidence of how extraordinarily safe they are. And I thank, again, everyone who's been a part of that.  

Now, we have an opportunity for parents who want their children back in school, but had not yet chosen blended learning – they have an opt-in period. And every one of you has a chance to choose – if your child is now in all-remote learning and you want child to benefit from in-person learning, you have an opt in opportunity, starting today, going through Sunday, November 15th. And it's very simple and straightforward – anyone who wants to opt in can go to schools.nyc.gov/returntoschool2020 and sign up. And if there's questions and concerns, please talk to your principal, talk to your parent coordinator. The DOE has lots of folks available to answer your questions. We want to make sure that for those for whom in-person education is best and for those who have been waiting for the opportunity, that they know all about this opt-in period, get all their questions answered, and are able to take full advantage of it. So, we know the power of our educators to help our children forward. We know all the great things that happen in a school community for parents who have been waiting for that opportunity. Here it is – today through November 15th.

Okay. Let's now talk about our indicators for today. Let me comment on them as we go along. So, number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold is 200 patients – today's report is 80 patients. Again, that's a number closer to what we saw earlier, a few weeks back – and the confirmed positivity level of 16.8 percent. So, those both, in the scheme of things, are pretty good numbers for today. Now, here's the number that is causing us concern for sure – the number of cases. Number two is the new reported cases on a seven-day average threshold of 550 cases – today's report, 593. As I've said before, that is an area of concern. Some of that comes from just a lot more testing, and a lot more testing as a good thing, and I want to keep encouraging people to get tested on a very high level, but we are watching that number carefully. And the most important number, as always, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report, a worrisome number, obviously, 2.08 percent. But the rolling seven-day average, a better number and more consistent with where we've been in the last few weeks, 1.81 percent. So, still that number suggests some consistency with where we've been last few weeks. We want to turn the tide now with all the outreach and the face mask wearing and the social distancing and the testing. We want to start knocking down that seven-day rolling average, but we're keeping a very close eye on the situation because we're obviously at a point where that has gone up in recent weeks and we take that very seriously.  

A few words in Spanish – 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. We're joined today by Dr. Sarah Sayeed, Chair and Executive Director of the Civic Engagement Commission, Dr. Dave Chokshi, the City's Health Commissioner, First Deputy Chancellor Donald Conyers, Senior Advisor and Council for DemocracyNYC Laura Wood, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. With that, we have Rich from WCBS 880. 

Question: How are the schools doing? How many schools do you know of? I mean, you may not have a handle on it, but how many schools do you know, have been closed for a couple of weeks? Is that number of mounting staying stable? How does it look? 

Mayor: Right now, there's 21 that are closed for a two-week period. Although I remind you that number changes every day, because some come out of that period of quarantine, and others might go in. Now, remember, that's a meaningful number. I don't want to belittle for those school communities. That's a challenge and an inconvenience to say the least, but I do want to remind you that's 21 out of 1600. So, by any measure, the vast, vast majority of schools are open on any given time. When we see a situation where a school needs to be closed, we work out of an abundance of caution and, so far, that's served us really well because as we know, the schools overall have been extraordinarily safe, and so I think our cautious, you know, health and safety first approach is really working for us. 

Moderator: Next up is Katie from the Wall Street Journal. 

Question: Hey, good morning, Mayor de Blasio. How are you doing? 

Mayor: Good, Katie. How are you? 

Question: I'm great. I'm great. My quesion is in relation to the uptick in COVID cases. I mean, is there any sort of from the Tests and Trace, is there any link to any action in the last couple of weeks? I don't know if it's early voting. I know it's only been a week, but is there any indication now that the uptick is related to specific events or one specific event, or is it just more of a widespread increase in the city? 

Mayor: No, that's an important question. I'll start, and I'll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi. Look, I think the common sense answer here is that what's happened at Brooklyn and Queens, even though it continues to get better, clearly that's where one of the multiplier effects is here. We've seen a lot more testing in the areas affected in Brooklyn and Queens. That's really, really good that obviously increased the case numbers though, the positive cases, and you know, in a case like this, the infection spread through a community, through a family, it's going to have a bigger impact than just a short term. I don't see a nexus to early voting at this point, I think it's the combination of the impact of, you know, a relatively meaningful slice of Brooklyn and Queens, and then it's also what we're seeing around the country, the larger increase and some of that, less of that than other places, but some of that manifesting through travel Dr. Varma then Dr. Chokshi. 

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Great, thank you. We have answered this, talked about this a little bit last week. So, first of all, we know that about 10 percent of our cases in the past few weeks have been related to travel. Most of that is domestic travel and some of that is international travel. Now, for the remainder of the 90 percent, we can't always track down a common source of infection, but what is common about the different settings that people report and what we find from our investigation of, of small clusters is basically the same themes that we expect and, and ties into our prevention messages any setting that is indoors, where people do not wear masks continuously, and don't always maintain six feet of distance. So, as we said before, indoor activities are more dangerous than outdoor activities and six feet of distance and wearing a mask is the best way to stay safe while indoors. So, what we've seen in clusters that have been associated with workplaces or any other type of indoor settings is those common themes. So, we just, we need to really continuously message to everybody about how important it is to adhere to those prevention measures. 

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi. 

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you. I just wanted to add one, important point, which is that, specifically around voting – voting is an essential activity. It is good for our health and it's safe. Particularly when you follow our guidance, specifically around, making sure that you are wearing a mask or a face covering as usual, ensuring that you keep that six feet of distance, including when you're in a line, and minimizing your time and doors. So, for example, one thing you can do is look at your ballot ahead of time to keep the flow going through the polling site, as well as to minimize your time there, and then of course, make sure to use good hand hygiene, wash your hands or use hand sanitizer. 

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.  

Moderator: Next is Reema from Chalkbeat. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?  

Mayor: Good Reema, how have you been? 

Question: I'm good. I'm good. So, a couple of questions for you. The first one, on Friday, the Governor said schools closed in red and orange zones could reopen if students or staff return, first testing negative, and then after that, it sounds like there has to be, around of testing with a quarter of the school's population tested on a weekly basis, and then those schools could close again with a number of positive results. So, I'm wondering when is the city going to open the schools, I think it's about a couple dozen in those areas, and how will the testing plan work? 

Mayor: Reema, really good question, and we are looking at that right now. I mean, the State rules came out late on Friday. We're obviously assessing them. They're different than what we've seen previously, but look, I think the first question here is what's going to happen with the red zones in Brooklyn. We're watching the numbers very carefully. The state's going to make that decision, but by the numbers, I think it's fair to say. You could well see some changes to those red zones in the course of this week, and that's obviously the best solution here to have those red zones turned to yellow and then the school reopening protocols, very straightforward so that we're assessing the rules, we're assessing that timeline, and then we're going to make a decision in the next couple of days about how to handle it. Go ahead. 

Question: Okay. I'm going to switch topics just slightly here. So, with the City’s new opt-in policy or the window that you mentioned in your remarks earlier, we were thinking that there could be an influx of new students into the school buildings just after the holidays. So, when people might be having large family gatherings, there might be traveling and given that the infection rates are trending upward or seem to be – do the city's health experts think that it's wise to have more students coming into buildings just in that window of time? 

Mayor: Let me start and turn to Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Varma, look, it's a very fair concern. I want to emphasize that, sort of take your question and go to the root of it. First of all, we're going to strongly urge people not to travel. It's difficult, it's painful, I hate saying it, but we're going to urge people not to travel for the holidays, to stay local and to not run the risk of people bringing back the disease, before you even discussed the schools, to the city as a whole to their families. Second, if anyone is sick, we want them to stay home. If anyone's symptomatic, we want them to stay home. If people travel someplace else and they come back, they have to observe the quarantine. So really if we do all that, right, hopefully what you're raising is not going to be a particularly large challenge. But look, I think it's time, obviously, given how safe the schools have been, and given that there are parents who definitely want an opportunity to get back into the schools with their kids, it's time to give them that opt in period, but we're going to be really careful about everything we do in the schools continuing to hold very, very high health standards. That's what's worked for us. Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Varma? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, well I think the Mayor covered the major points here. I would just underline too, the first is that in addition to all of those layers of safety that the Mayor described that have, thus far, you know, kept children's safe, a very important one is ensuring, testing and so we have very widespread, you know, available testing in communities that everyone can take advantage of as well as the testing that we're offering in schools as well through that random sample approach. So that's the first part of it. The second thing is just to say that, you know, one thing that is often lost in this conversation is just how important school attendance is to the health of children, to the health of students, but also for the health of families. So that's why it makes it so worthy for us to take this very rigorous approach to safety, which also helps to improve the health of students and families.  

Mayor: Dr. Varma?  

Senior Advisor Varma: Yeah, and I would add to all of that by saying that if we continue to see higher rates of transmission in New York City, like we are right now, it is certainly possible that more members of the school community might get infected. But what we know from our studies and our evaluation right now is that those infections are not being transmitted in the school. That is, you know, just like any New Yorker might be at higher risk potentially of getting infection, anybody needs to make sure they're taking all of the important precautions that we talk about. But what we found so far is with our rigorous protocols that, you know, we can keep people safe and make sure the school isn't the place where people are getting infected. But we just need to make sure that everybody, whether they're part of the school community or not takes all of these precautions in every setting that they're in.  

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: Next is Reuvain from Hamodia. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Many people have called – 

Mayor: How you doing?  

Question: Hi. Many people have called for alternate side parking to be suspended in red zones. The residents in these areas have been asked during this shutdown to stay home and keep their kids home from school for weeks, although the school shut down specifically is ending now, keep the businesses closed and stay home from houses of worship, how could people have been expected to go out and move the car? So, I want to know, will you suspend the alternate side parking in red zones and dismiss the tickets that were already given in these zones? 

Mayor: Reuvain, look, this is an issue we've dealt with throughout the crisis when we suspend alternate side, obviously we do it citywide as a whole. We don't historically have a lot of experience breaking it up by different areas. Look, I'll look at the concern for sure, including the concern about the tickets, but I'd say right now we do not have a plan to address alternate side differently than we have in the past. Go ahead. 

Question: You recently announced the Open Storefronts Program, Councilman Deutsch has suggested that you apply it to non-essential businesses in red zones. You've mentioned repeatedly how outdoor gatherings seem to be much less of a problem than indoor gatherings, in fact, even the large protest in the summer did not seem to spread the virus because they were outdoors. So, considering how much the small business owners have been struggling, will you allow this Open Storefronts Program to extend to non-essential businesses and restaurants in red zones?  

Mayor: Well, first of all the Open Storefronts Initiative, you know, we're going to do this for the rest of the year, see how it goes, hopefully if it goes well, it's something we can build upon. The goal here is to ensure, as you said, that businesses can be outside and can take advantage of more space, more customers, and in a safer manner. Given what has happened in the red zones, I think it's a fair question. We did not initially plan it for use in red zones per se. We planned it as a bigger initiative. It's a fair question, although again, I want to note my hope and prayer is that in the course of this week, you're going to see the red zones compress and fewer and fewer areas needing those kinds of restrictions. This is – once again, I'm happy for us to consider and come back with an answer over the next couple of days. 

Moderator: We have time for two more, first up is Yoav from The City. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, we've written about New Yorkers who are struggling and at risk of losing their things or property that's in self storage units and the Department of Consumer Affairs has exempted the self storage sector from regulation in New York. So that means there's no cap or standards on fees, rent increases, et cetera, and also nowhere for people to complain if they think their things were wrongly auctioned off, and currently many people are at risk of losing their stuff, especially with unemployment as high as it is. So, there are some elected officials who are calling for DCA to oversee this sector and create some rules. Just wondering what you think of that idea should the industry, which is expanding and very profitable, be regulated in New York City?  

Mayor: That's a good question you have, and I won't pretend to be an expert on it, but I'll tell you, when you say here's an industry that may not be sufficiently regulated, that concerns me a lot. Let me find out currently whether the division of labor is there between the City and State, and if it makes sense for us to take a bigger role in that. I certainly don't want to see people's belongings mistreated and people as consumers treated unfairly. So if that's something we need to do something more about, let's figure out between the City and the State who should handle that. We'll come back with an answer quickly.

Moderator: Last we'll go to Luis from New Yorkled.  

Question: Hey there, Mr. Mayor, how are you?  

Mayor: Good, how you been?  

Question: Good, good, good. The Sheriff's Office did some amazing work in October shutting down at least eight illegal parties, bars and/or clubs, but I'm curious about the people at these gatherings. There were over 500 for the last one, nearly 441 prior and hundreds of all for all the others. Now I imagine these might qualify as super spreader events, especially considering the indoor setting circumstances. So are these citizens being reprimanded or at least identified in any way or are they just being like, oh – 

Mayor: It's an important question, Luis, thank you. The Sheriff's Office has done an outstanding job breaking up a number of events over time. I think an important story here is that in New York City, compared to a lot of other major cities in the world, you've seen less of those events proportionally. That's the good news. I think people have taken seriously the rules a lot more here than a lot of other places, but still you need enforcement and you need consequences, and the sheriff has done that. They broke up two major parties this weekend, two major Halloween events, effectively gave a number of summonses, including some of the highest-level summonses, the $15,000 summonses. So definitely people are being held accountable, but I think your question is a very good one, what is done to help the folks who are there know that they need to get tested, and let’s see if Dr. Choksi or Dr. Varma have any information on how that follow-up is done, and that's an area we need to focus on going forward, making sure that people know if they're at that kind of event. Well, obviously, we'd like to believe they knew already they shouldn't be there, but that they get reminded how important it is to get tested after. Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Varma, you want to jump in? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir, just to pick up on the last point, the most important thing is for anyone who has been at a large gathering it's important to get tested immediately. That's important because it helps us both ensure that anyone who has a positive test, who is a case is isolated so that interrupts the spread of the virus, but it also allows our contact tracing to commence and make sure that we identify contacts for, you know, for that exposure as well. But the most important thing is we have to focus on prevention. As the Mayor said, the Sheriff has done a great work in breaking these large events up but particularly as we get into the colder months, we have to ensure that we spread the word about preventing those large events and those gatherings from happening in the first place. 

Mayor: Dr. Varma, you want to add?  

Senior Advisor Varma: Nothing else from me. 

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Luis. 

Question: All right, thank you. With New Jersey and other neighboring states not subject to the new and old travel advisory rules, yet still with worsening COVID numbers, I'm wondering how much does that complicate things for these Sheriff's Office checkpoints and for you? I mean, on the one hand, you're trying to protect New Yorkers and fend off a second wave. And on the other hand, your hands are kind of tied. Isn't that frustrating? 

Mayor: No, it's not actually, I appreciate the question, Luis, I'll tell you why, because we understand the interconnection of the immediate states and although their numbers have gone up, like ours have gone up, they don't bear any resemblance to other places in the country where the numbers have skyrocketed. So, I think it's fair to say, we still remain particularly concerned about travelers coming in from other parts of the country, other parts of the world, where there's just massive amounts of increase. That's a much bigger concern than some of the travel more locally. I – look, I think we're going to have to step up all of our quarantine efforts going forward especially because people – the holidays, because people are going to be indoors more because it's colder. So the key to me is that folks understand they have to be serious about quarantine and that there's going to be real consequences and we have to make that real vivid. That's the central point to me.  

Okay, everyone, look, as we conclude, just want to emphasize, we're, you know, on the dawn of a new era in this country, obviously something is going to happen tomorrow that's going to frame the future of our lives, whatever it is. We are – all of us concerned about what happens tomorrow night and, in the aftermath, we have to be ready, but we also have to feel that we'll be able to manage it, whatever it is. I want to remind you that when you're looking at the great unknown as we are now, remember what history teaches us about New York City and New Yorkers, how resilient New Yorkers are, how this city more than any place, can handle whatever's thrown at us. So, yeah, there may be some challenges ahead, but we know how to handle anything and everything in this city and our people are good and our people are compassionate to each other and we will find our way through. So, we'll keep you constantly updated to what we're seeing and hearing and, and the adjustments we need to make to address these times we’re in but again, I always put my faith in New Yorkers because we always find our way through. Thank you, everybody.

2020-11-03 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. 

Let's go to our indicators. And, obviously, the indicators are all about a challenge that we are facing together. And here's a good example, New Yorkers having banded together to fight the coronavirus with extraordinary success. And now, we face a challenge and we're not going to back down in the face of that challenge. We're going to push these numbers back down again. So, let's go over them today. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 patients – today's report, 83 patients with a confirmed positivity level of 31 percent. So, the number of patients, again, staying in a range that we've generally been in, in recent weeks, that positivity level, a little higher than I'd like to see, obviously. So, we're keeping a close eye on that. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, the threshold is 550 cases. Now, we're over that today, and, again, a cause for concern – 605 cases. We are watching that very carefully. Some of that, again, is because of a lot more testing, but it's still a cause for concern. Number three, most important number, percentage – I'm sorry, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent. Okay, today's daily report is clearly [inaudible] it's 0.38 percent. We've seen that from time to time when a surprisingly low number of test results have come in for the day, that can vary by day. That that number will change and go upwards as more test results come in. But the truest number is always the seven-day rolling average number – this number 1.589 percent, this is actually a little better than it's been in recent days – not where we need to be, ultimately, but a little bit better. So, that's the most important news of the day, that number certainly says that there was some real hope that we can continue our progress.  

All right, let me finish on the topic of the elections in Spanish.  

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Good morning, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, by Dr. Chokshi, by Laura Wood, the Senior Advisor and Senior Council for DemocracyNYC, and by Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today goes to Matt Chayse from Newsday. 

Question: Hey, good morning, all. How are you?  

Mayor: Good. How are you doing, Matt?  

Question: I'm doing all right. So, my first question is for Dr. Varma, or Dr. Chokshi, or both. Gentlemen, to what extent are you seeing fatigue with the pandemic restrictions and how are you combating that, if you are seeing it?  

Mayor: Go ahead, doctors. 

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Okay. This is Jay, I can go ahead and start. I mean, I think that – I think probably the easiest place to start is with our own personal lives. You know, I, myself, my wife, my three kids, I mean, this is a very challenging experience for everybody. And so, I think, you know, we personally, you know, are focused on what are the things that we can do day-to-day to make ourselves happy and comfortable. What are the things that give us pleasure that may not be the things that we would normally do, but those are the things that we can do in our regular life? And I do think that throughout the city you do see, you know, both the combination of people experiencing fatigue. You know, you see parties that people are having that need to be broken up. And we, obviously, want to crack down on those and minimize those as much as possible, but we also have empathy. We know that people are experiencing these challenges. So, what we've been really working on is trying to increase the amount of awareness and campaigns that we can do particularly about the importance of wearing a mask indoors, particularly during this time right now when we know people are likely to gather indoors, we want to advise against large groups, but we know that they might happen. And so, really the most important thing is just to wear that mask and maintain your distance.  

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi, do you want to add? 

Question: Yes. And thank you for the thoughtful question. I think Dr. Varma said it well, you know, particularly our focus on empathy. Pandemic fatigue is very real, and it's something that we have to both keep in mind with respect to what New Yorkers are going through every day, but also understand it as a threat to our progress with respect to how we need to continue to combat the coronavirus. One of the concrete ways that we're really thinking about this as part of our own response is to make sure that we make the small accommodations so that we don't find ourselves in situations where we have to make larger accommodations or restrictions. So, one of the ways that we did this, for example, over Halloween, was to make sure that, you know, kids could still have fun, they could do things outdoors, you know, make sure that people were gathering safely in smaller groups. So, not restricting everything, but allowing people some outlets, but doing it in a way that prevents further spread of the virus, because we all want to avoid those more draconian measures.  

Moderator: The next is Emma Fitzsimmons from the New York Times. 

Question: Hi, good morning, Mayor. I had a question for you about the stimulus. You've been talking a lot about what a Biden presidency would mean for New York City. Have you had any talk with Biden and his campaign? Do you have any guarantee that New York would benefit from a second stimulus? 

Mayor: I spoke with the vice president on the day, obviously, we all memorialize those lost on 9/11 and the conversation was obviously broader, but I did talk to him about the need for New York City to come back, and especially in that site, a place that epitomizes both those we lost, but also the strength and resiliency of New York City, you know, we talked about New York City's come back and how important that was for the country. I've spoken to a number of people in his world about stimulus, and I know there's tremendous support for it, and I think you've seen Emma in his public statements, and also the statements about from people close to him about him looking at the example of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and really understanding he's in a similar historic moment to what Roosevelt was in 1933 – in the midst of the depression. I think all signs point to not just a stimulus, but a huge stimulus, the kind of stimulus that Nancy Pelosi and the House passed, for example. So nothing more important in this election today than the future of a stimulus that could really put New York City and this country back on its feet, and I'm absolutely convinced that's what Joe Biden will do. Go ahead, Emma. 

Question: Thank you, and I know Biden is very close with Governor Cuomo. What's your relationship with him? Like I know you're more sort of the Bernie wing of the party but is he – well, I guess, how would you characterize your relationship with Biden?  

Mayor: I've had limited contact over the years. I mean, perfectly cordial on a personal level. I remember speaking to him when he was in the vice presidency and we talked about some of the issues facing the city and the offered some really helpful advice. You know, we've had obviously some ideological disagreements, but look, I think he's the kind of person to his great credit that believes in a big tent believes in representing everyone in this party, in this nation, and I look forward to him being our president and Kamala Harris being our vice-president. I think New York City will have a very, very welcome ear in the White House when Joe Biden's there. 

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg. 

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?  

Mayor: I'm doing well, Henry. How about you? 

Question: I'm doing okay. Hanging in there. I'm going to go back to the issue of who's getting tested and what this data means for New Yorkers, and there was a report in the New York Times over the weekend that testing seems to be a lot more prevalent in affluent neighborhoods, which are showing the least incidents of infection, and when that happens, obviously that skews the city-wide averages, and again, I'm wondering how effective is this data point if most of these people are a lot of these people are being tested who have very little chance statistically to be infected by the virus? 

Mayor: I will start and turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi. Henry, I'd say, first of all, I think if I had a general wish for what we do going forward is that New Yorkers in general, across every neighborhood, every background that people just got tested more, you know, we gave some really important guidance from the Health Department a few weeks back about, you know, getting tested monthly and, and situations that should cause people to get tested more quickly. I think everyone needs to get tested more, and that would be the best thing for this city. So we get the truest picture, but also remind you that where we concentrate our testing resources is where the need is greatest, where we're seeing issues and problems. So I'm not sure that that report accurately portrays the way we shift our resources toward the problem. I don't think we're getting an inaccurate view because those who are, you know, the healthiest are the ones getting tested because we're actually moving the resources where the problem seems to be greatest. Go ahead, Dr. Varma. 

Senior Advisor Varma: Sure, yeah, let me highlight a couple of things I want to first pick up on, on where the Mayor left off. We made a very conscious decision starting in April that we were going to make New York City you know, reach testing levels that are absolutely essential to be able to control the virus, and that means basically getting to places that aren't seen in the US and honestly, most places in, in other economically similar countries, and when we decided to allocate those resources, we intentionally put them in the areas that are both hardest hit and, or areas where there are limited access to health resources and where we thought people would be highly vulnerable. So we have very intentionally done that and consistently used our data to target an increased testing in areas where we find that the actual acceptance of testing isn't as high on the assumption that the more likely you are to effectively trip over it in your neighborhood, the more likely you are to take the time out of your day to have that done. So we can't correct you know, decades, or if not centuries of inequality, where there may be people in wealthier areas that are actively seeking out more testing over time. But we have intentionally put our resources into the places so that people who have higher degrees of vulnerability or less economically advanced can get those, and then I would say the second point is just about the data. I think it's probably worth not taking all the time on this, but we can certainly schedule another time to discuss in detail, but just to reemphasize, this is just one part of many different data points, and the fact that we have been able to collect this data at very, very high levels across every neighborhood – it has proven very good at helping us to identify areas of higher versus lower transmission. 

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi, you want to add? 

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, sir. I'll just add one point on this, which is to, to say that the hyper-local response that both the Mayor and Dr. Varma described is something that we have refined over the last few weeks and months, particularly with respect to how testing resources can be deployed. So we've both expanded what you can think of as more stationary testing sites in the community but made it so that they are accessible to New Yorkers wherever they live. But then we've added a host of more mobile testing options, whether it's a mobile testing van or pop-up sites that we can bring to areas that have a higher rate of cases or lower rates of testing or partnering with community physicians to actually give them the testing supplies, the testing kits that they need. So that's given us a layer of, of being very nimble with respect to pushing our testing resources where they need to be on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. 

Mayor: Thank you.  

Moderator: The next is Jessica Gould from WNYC. 

Question: Hi, happy Election Day. 

Mayor: Happy Election Day. How are you? 

Question: I'm all right. It's cold outside and we're hearing from teachers and students that in classrooms, it's also cold inside, and we know that windows are left open to improve ventilation, but as it gets colder and colder is the plan to keep those windows open or is there another option for ventilation that will help people stay warm in the winter? 

Mayor: Jessica, it's a real important question and a very common sense question. I thank you for it. So the head of the school facilities efforts at DOE, Kevin Moran and his team, had done a great job on this. It really depends on the school and the classroom. There are schools where they'll be able to keep the windows open and adjust the temperature effectively. There are schools where they've added filtration systems, so they don't need to have windows open. There are schools or individual classrooms really where they'll have to put air purifiers in the room. It's all tailored to each school in each classroom, but this has been on our minds from the beginning of the school year. So generally I think the fact will be that if a school can't keep the windows open and keep the room temperature at an acceptable level for the kids and the teachers, then that's the kind of place where we either put in additional filtration systems or put in air purifiers as an alternative. Go ahead.  

Moderator: We have time for two more today, the next is Gersh from Streetsblog.  

Question: How are you guys doing? I really appreciate you taking the call. Mayor you're all right?  

Mayor: I am doing well. Happy Election Day, Gersh.  

Question: It's always a happy day, yes. Okay, Mr. Mayor, I'm going to change gears a bit and follow-up on the recent sidewalk retail announcement that you had made. You know many safe streets advocates want more space for pedestrians, not less, because sidewalk space is already limited in New York City, especially after every afternoon and around 4:00 pm, when sidewalks typically get covered by garbage bags that could be put in curbside spaces. So you had an open streets plan that gave pedestrians a lot more space, but obviously it was limited to about 80 miles of street. Do you have a larger permanent plan for pedestrians, perhaps reserving curbside spaces for garbage so pedestrians aren't squeezed on garbage covered sidewalks? 

Mayor: Well, look, Gersh it's sure is an interesting idea. It's something I'm certainly happy to look. The – I want to emphasize that I do hear you loud and clear about keeping sidewalks available and we are obviously one of the great walking cities in the world, and that's part of what makes us, you know, a very special place. So we have to protect that. Now, we know there's less activity in some parts of the city than there were before – there was before the pandemic. That we'll come back over time. We know that during the pandemic, getting people outside is even more important. So I'd say that what we're doing here with the open retail, we're going to do that through December 31st, see how that goes, the open storefronts, that really responds to the moment and I think that's necessary, and then we'll see if it's something that people are part of our future. We know open streets are part of our future. It's been a huge success. We know open restaurants are going to be a part of our future, that's a huge success, and that will take up some of the curbside areas. But you know, what you're proposing is obviously a much bigger idea. Look, I think we have to look at a host of things going forward because as we come back from the pandemic and we will, we need to learn some of the lessons here. Open streets, open restaurants have been a revelation and certainly points in the direction of being even more creative as we go forward. Go ahead, Gersh. 

Question: So let me follow up on that. You know, you've talked a little bit about open streets being a permanent part of our city scape. I don't know if you're aware of this, but you know, some of the neighborhoods where there are very successful open street programs like 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights in Corona, the DOT – you're own DOT – has gone to the local community boards in some of those communities, and the DOT is facing an amazing amount of resistance from some of those community boards where there are a lot of car drivers, certainly not the majority, but a plurality of people, own cars. Are you preparing some sort of way to get past some of that knee jerk reaction, negative reaction to a simple change like an open street?  

Mayor: Yeah, Gersh, you and I have been down this road, you know, I say this sympathetically, we've been down this road many times with Vision Zero. As we were adding bike lanes, other changes and Select Bus Service, we've often had opposition of community boards. I don't want to stereotype community boards, a lot of good people, well meaning people serve on community boards, you know, they give their time and energy for free. It's a big deal, but we've had a lot of community boards that have been kind of knee jerk, opposed to some of the progress we needed. And I've said very consistently I'll listen. My team will listen, but you know, we believe in Vision Zero, we're going to keep making Vision Zero changes. We believe in bike lanes. We believe in open streets. We believe in open restaurants. That's where we're going. So community boards are there to advise – and sometimes they point out a specific change in a specific location that we can do and make it better – but we have set our direction and I know it's what's right for New York City, and that's what we're going to keep doing. 

Okay, great. Look, as we conclude today, here's the bottom line, New Yorkers have done something amazing in this last week or so with early voting. Absolutely beautiful. You know, again, look at the story of 2020, so many challenges, so many problems, but so many heroic actions, big and small by everyday New Yorkers, fighting back the coronavirus, now one of the safest places in the country, opening up our schools. Now you see New Yorkers voting in record numbers in the middle of a pandemic, 1.1 million people already, and we expect a hell of a lot more today. I'm very proud of the people in that city. I'm proud of the spirit. I am proud of the sense of ownership and responsibility that people are taking. I have great faith in the people, and this is why the city is going to come back strong because of our people. So I'll conclude with a simple point, it is always been up to you, New Yorkers, to make this place great, and you never failed to do so, today you have a historic moment. So if you have not voted yet, make your voice heard. I have faith that what you do will change this city and this nation for the better. Thank you, everybody.

2020-11-04 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everyone. Okay, let's talk about what we talk about every day – our indicators. And I'm going to talk a little bit about them as we go along. Today’s indicators – although, the most important indicator, I feel some satisfaction about, I don't like what I see on the other front. 

So, I'm going to talk about this – first, number-one, daily number of people admitted the New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold of 200 patients – today, a much higher number than we've seen typically, 114 patients, that's cause for concern. The positivity level, 25.8 percent, that's cause for concern. Now, remember the silver lining is, of that 114 patients, again, only about a quarter actually have COVID-19, and that is a level we can manage. But the fact that, that has gone up worries me. We're keeping a close eye on that. Number-two, new reported case in a seven-day average, that threshold, 550 – again, this case number is going up and that's a concern, 628 today. Some of that explained by the hotspots in Brooklyn and Queens. Some of that, explained by a greatly expanded testing, because testing is now on a much higher level. We're now up to – have the ability to do over 75,000 tests a day in New York City. That’s the highest we've been throughout this entire pandemic. So, you're going to have more positives if you do more testing. Still, that number is worrisome. And now, most importantly, percentage of people who tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report, the daily report, 1.54 percent. That's not bad. Seven-day rolling average, 1.74 percent. Again, that's sort of been lately the new normal, that range 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 percent. Not where we want to be. We want to get lower. But to the extent we’ve stabilized around that level, that's something that we can handle for now. But, again, that's not where we want to be for the long-term. We're going to have to really buckle down to push that number back down.  

Okay. A few words about the election in Spanish – 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, we turned to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today is Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, and Senior Advisor and Council for DemocracyNYC Laura Wood. Juliet from 1010 WINS.  

Question: Yeah. Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor. So I wanted to follow up also on the stimulus given the fact that maybe nothing comes from Washington. I know you've been working out deals with the unions, but what is the plan for cutbacks and layoffs? Would you do a percentage across the board for every agency? Is it a percentage of layoffs? How would this work? 

Mayor: Juliet, first of all, look, we got some major assistance from the unions in terms of delaying payments and not having to do them in this fiscal year. That's now over $600 million. That's a very big deal, that certainly gives us the ability to get to February. So again, presuming a Biden presidency and it's way too early to say that. But if you presume that I feel very strongly, there will be a stimulus that will help us in a big way. If there isn't a Biden presidency, I think it's an open question, but we're certainly going to fight for it again. I think they'll be a lot of pressure on President Trump if he were president again, but what we'd have to do, we'll continue to look for savings in every way we can, and then if we could not find enough again, the last resort is layoffs. I've said before, the plan we talked about in June, every agency would be effected in different ways because each agency is different, but every agency would be affected. You'd be talking about really substantial pain that would be caused to people who serve the city. I don't want to see that. I don't want to see the services lost that we need for our comeback, but Juliet, if we have to, that's always the last resort. Again, it's premature to judge because first let's find out the results of this election. Go ahead. 

Question: Okay. Well, back in the 70s, the city's real estate industry paid their taxes forward to help the city stable bankruptcy. Have you considered that kind of a tax plan as an option for the city's financial recovery? 

Mayor: The simple answer is no, I'm not saying it's an impossibility, but have not considered it. I think a lot has happened with property tax over the years and one of the things I've been clear about is of all the choices on the table, the one that I do not support, I would never support an increase in the property tax rate. I think it's absolutely wrong for this moment in New York City history. Paying forward is certainly something we could look at, again, I think we're in a different environment. I think the most important point Juliet at the comparisons to the 1970s are bad comparisons. I'm not – no disrespect to you, but a lot of people have raised them, I wanted strongly advise it's a bad, bad parallel. It's not accurate because the 1970s fiscal crisis came after New York City was already in decline for a decade two and had really handled his finances horribly. We've had the opposite now. New York City has been on the upswing for decades as recently as February, one of the great global economic powers, over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican, much stronger fiscal discipline, much stronger reserves. It's just night and day. It's going to take a while for us to come back, no doubt, but what New York City has is strong and eternal at this point. It's not going anywhere and we're going to come back strong. I don't have a doubt in my mind, so we're going to do whatever it takes to keep the city moving forward. But again, let's not do too many hypotheticals when the number one factor is what's going to happen in Washington, and you know, there's actually a vote count that's going to tell us that soon. Go ahead 

Moderator: Next up is Aundrea from WCBS. 

Question: Good morning. I want to go back to the stimulus question, Mr. Mayor, and I know you said you didn't want to do hypotheticals but I know with the COVID situation there were a lot of scenarios that were run in terms of how to deal with it. So in terms of the economic recovery, is there a situation where the city can recover without federal assistance? Is that something that you all have considered? 

Mayor: Aundrea, I would say this simply, without federal assistance, you're talking about a much longer, slower recovery. It makes no sense to have the nation's largest city, one of the most vibrant parts of the American economy, such an important place for this whole country, it makes no sense to have us have to struggle our way through without help. This has not been what we know in our history. In the Great Depression, the federal government came to the aid in New York City, helped us back on our feet. We helped lead the national recovery. Even the 70s, the State of New York stepped up and helped save New York City. The notion of us having to go it alone, it just makes no sense, it's not good for the States, not good for the country, but if there isn't support for New York City, we'll come back anyway. It'll just take longer and there'll be harder without federal support.

Moderator; Next is Nolan from The Post. 

Question: Hello? Is this working? 

Mayor: Yes, it is working [inaudible]. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I want to follow up on the questions about aid. Mitch McConnell's expressed very little interest in providing any aid to the City or the State or the MTA. If he remains in charge of the Senate, the negotiating partner really hasn't changed, so why do you think the outcome would change? 

Mayor: I don’t think Mitch McConnell works in a vacuum. I think if – first of all, if there's a Democratic president who's working incessantly for a stimulus, and I know Joe Biden would, second, a Democratic president who was a member of the US Senate and really understands how to move that body and come up with a solution that will work. Third, now let's look ahead to 2022 and the Republican Senators up for reelection, guarantee there are going to be some who will be deeply concerned about a stimulus for their states because, you know, they're on the line now, it's going to be their responsibility. There's clearly a context. I'm not saying this, Nolan, to be falsely optimistic. I'm saying it because I think there's a path, it's not as good a path as if there'd been a Democratic Senate, but there's absolutely a path. Go ahead. 

Question: And to the second point your administration has claimed, I think it's upwards of $600 million in labor savings so far, most of that was by moving those costs onto the FY22 Budget without any expected surge in revenues, so I mean, so you're basically banking on, on a federal rescued to make those payments come true, was that a wise strategy?  

Mayor: Look, the notion of keeping our services strong so we could recover absolutely is as wise as it gets. I mean – first of all, the way we come back is through investment, not austerity, let's be a hundred percent clear. Austerity as an approach has failed everywhere, just across the board. The way you come back – it's amazing, you know, it's 90 years later, but we're still learning the lessons of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, you come back through investment, and so having city services be strong so that people are ready to invest in this city and keep rebuilding this city – that's the essence. Also think about those thousands or even tens of thousands of city workers and their families who are depending on their jobs for their livelihood, I don't want to take that away from people. So, bridging us to next year to see if we could get the kind of federal support that by any normal equation should happen, I think it's actually absolutely the right thing to do. 

Moderator: We have time for two more. First is Michael from the Daily News.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: Hey Michael, how’ve you been? 

Question: I'm good. So regarding federal stimulus and just assuming, you know, we get it at some point, can you talk about how that would be delivered from your point of view? Is there a concern – what I'm getting at here, is there a concern that a stimulus wouldn't come directly to the city that, that it would, it would pass through this state and, you know, the Governor would have control over that before it got to the city, I was wondering if you could kind of just get into how that works mechanically? 

Mayor: Every mayor in America is going to answer the same way I would, it doesn't matter if they’re a Democrat, Republican, or independent. The answer is you bet there's concern. We need – and by the way county officials would say the same thing – we need resources to go directly to localities. First of all, it is a hundred percent more efficient. The money actually flows. You get to use it right away. Second of all is more reliable. There's not some of the interesting dynamics that happen at the state level where money gets siphoned off and sent somewhere else. So yeah, a stimulus has to have clear support directly to cities and localities. Now, House of Representatives passed the stimulus that tells us everything we need to know, and I spoke to Speaker Pelosi several times about this. She has been absolutely fantastic on this issue. It helps that she is a daughter of a mayor, and so she understands directly, but I am firmly convinced that the Democratic Party believes in stimulus funding going to localities and states. I think that's unquestionably the direction that Democrats will take. So the House, the Democrats in the Senate, and if Joe Biden is president, I'm certain Joe Biden will as well, and that's what we need. 

Moderator: Last, we'll go to Henry from Bloomberg.  

Question: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?  

Mayor: I’m doing well Henry, how about you? 

Question: I'm doing okay. Didn't get too much sleep and I'm hanging in there. Seems to be the topic of the day, which is your hope and expectation for a stimulus from the feds, and you make points that are very salient and logical perhaps politically. But the fact is that even the Democratic Comptroller of the State of New York counseled against state aid canceled against the borrowing authority, saying that the city has more than enough resources in its – you know, in the savings that have been budgeted and the arguments that will be raised against the city in giving aid – it seems to be predicated on, you know, what are you doing for yourselves before we do something for you? And I'm just wondering whether you've considered some kind and I'm not talking about austerity, but some kind of savings, including taking into account, let's say attrition instead of threatening layoffs that might strengthen your argument or your position with people who are resisting aid to New York? 

Mayor: Henry, I'll try and make this quick and simple. I mean, right now I think everything with Albany is an abstraction. The next time the legislature is due to come back is in January, and usually they don't act until April 1st with the budget. So, we don't have any assumptions about the legislature acting anytime soon. The question is in Washington and the stimulus, which is a very different reality. The dynamic – look, we're in the middle of an account of an election, so first of all, that's going to tell us what we need to know the most. The ultimate issue is who's president and whoever's president is going to set the agenda and have the ability to move things. If Donald Trump had really fought for a stimulus, there would have been a stimulus, period. Joe Biden will, unquestionably. That's going to be the reason there is one. It has nothing to do with the specific budget issues here in New York City or anywhere else it has to do with the totality of what's happened, the massive impact on our people, the huge loss of jobs, the huge loss of revenue for cities and states, that's what's driving this, and the decision in Washington really hinges on who's president.  

But what we've been doing is lots of work with labor to find savings, constant savings, over many budgets, you know, constantly hundreds of millions of dollars regularly in savings of all kinds. Attrition has been a factor. We need to do a better job talking about that and showing it. But clearly that's been a factor where a lot of these savings are coming from. Obviously, we did furloughs for senior management folks. We've been doing a lot of the things that are needed to get through, and I think there's going to be a Democratic president, and I think there's going to be a stimulus and that's our way forward, and if for some reason there isn't, we certainly know how to make tough choices to save even more. But the problem is those tough choices come with a reduction in services that the city needs to recover, and that should not be done lightly. That's truly a last resort.  

Okay, everyone, look, as we conclude we're going to be seeing over the day or maybe several days or even several weeks, how this election plays out, but I really feel this from my heart. The thing we know already is something that we need to appreciate, because it really, in many ways is the foundation of our future. People came out and voted, people, cared, people got involved in a way we have not seen – in a level we haven't seen in a long time. That's actually what matters for our future, our democracy that was threatened a lot during the last four years. Democracy is actually alive and well, this vote count is proceeding, openly transparently. It was a clean election. There was no fraud. It happened the way it was supposed to happen. This is crucial. So this is what gives me faith. It gives me faith in this country, and it certainly gives me faith in this city, that so many people came out to vote and Election Day went so well because the people in the city care and when you have that, all things are possible. That's why we've been so successful in fighting back the coronavirus, and that's why we have a bright future, because the people of this city care and they do something about it, and that makes me hopeful.  

Thank you, everyone.

2020-11-05 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. So, now, while we're waiting for the votes to be counted and we’re waiting for that process to unfold, we've got a lot of work to do right here in New York City – got to go right back to focusing on the number-one challenge we face, which is the coronavirus. While the national picture sorts itself out, we're going to keep doing what we have to do to protect the people in New York City. So, let's do the overview for a moment. For the summer, basically a whole summer, the city made amazing progress, fought back this disease to very low levels, became one of the safest places in the country in terms of our health care situation and low levels of coronavirus infection. We started to see some challenges in September, going into October, particularly in Brooklyn and Queens. We saw a belt of Brooklyn, a belt of Queens where there was a pronounced problem and an interconnected problem within neighborhoods. That problem has been largely addressed – not entirely, but much, much better situation Queens, increasingly a better situation in Brooklyn. Still some work to do, but unquestionably we're in a much better place than we were even just a few weeks ago in Brooklyn, Queens. And important improvements in terms of how people are responding, a whole lot more people going out and getting tested, a lot more people wearing masks. We've got more work to do, but that's been good news. So, overall, we have proven time and time again that we can address a situation, bring it back down. In the case of Brooklyn, Queens, it took some very strong measures. In other parts of the city before that, we saw him in August into September other measures were used at a lighter level, lower level that worked really well. Sunset Park, Brooklyn is a great example – really the first place toward the end of the summer where we had a problem. We did intensive testing, intensive outreach, masks distribution. It worked well, it worked quickly to bring down the problem there – same with Soundview in the Bronx, same with Southeast, Queens. That approach worked and that approach is what we will employ anytime we see a problem, going forward, when we see it isolated to a smaller area and not part of a bigger trend. So, we have one of those situations now in a couple of ZIP codes in Staten Island. We see the kind of increase that makes us concerned that needs that very hyper-local approach that we used in Sunset Park, in Soundview, in Southeast Queens successfully. We're going to apply that in Staten Island as well. And it's in a couple of places. And, again, this is, at this point, a pretty narrow problem, isolated primarily to two ZIP codes – some concerns in a few others ZIP codes, but the real issue we're focused on now is two ZIP codes – 10305 and 10314 in Staten Island. So, we're going to send out a lot of activity now to address this. Fully expect the community, community leaders, elected officials, clergy, everyone's going to get involved as we've seen everywhere else so we can address this problem.  

Here to give you an update on this hyper-local focus and the outreach effort we'll be doing in Staten Island, the head of our Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Ted Long. 

Executive Director Ted Long, NYC Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you, sir. We never want to see an uptick in any of our communities. However, we've built out a massive testing system, so across New York City, if there is an uptick or an increase in the level of the virus anywhere, we will know about it early, and we can then intervene immediately and decisively. Our intervention is our hyper-local response. As the Mayor said, this is a proven strategy that we've used in Sunset Park and in Soundview. In each of those communities, we brought in substantial new testing, contact tracing, and substantial new outreach. And in each of those, we were able to drive down the percent of people testing positive by two-thirds through our actions. Now, we're going to apply those same proven principles to these two ZIP codes in Staten Island. In particular, we've built out 10 new testing sites in Staten Island across the island. In addition to that, we're now building out several very large rapid testing sites, including that the ferry terminal, where you can come in, get your test done quickly, have a result back within 15 minutes. And then, if it's positive, you'll join with one of our in-person contact tracers who will interview you in your language and ask you who could you have exposed to the virus when you were contagious? Or, who are your close contacts? We then will reach out to those close contacts that same day and offer to bring them in for testing immediately. Then, before you leave the building, we're going to pair you up with one of our resource navigators where we're going to ask, what would it take to keep you and your family safe and have you stay at home to get through this? We will offer you things like free food delivery, a free hotel stay, help with their medications. Even now, we will offer you a free service where we're going to come and offer to walk your dog for you so that you can stay safe and stay inside.  

In addition to testing and contact tracing, we also are doing substantial new outreach. We're going to have 70 new boots-on-the-ground staff members that are going to go around in these communities, talk about what's going on, talk about how to get tested and to help you to get tested, and even give you a mask, which is one of the cornerstones of everything we do – prevention.  

Now, I want to say something specifically to Staten Islanders in these communities. We never want to see an uptick in any community, but, in this case, in your case, we've caught it early, and we will do everything in our power to deploy resources and join the fight with you by your side. We're in this together with you and we will succeed together. Thank you, sir.  

Mayor: Thank you very much, Dr. Long. And thank you to everyone at Test and Trace Corp. So, look, you're going to see this intensive effort play out over these next days. And we fully expect it will work in turning around the situation. We want to stop it early and get it right. And look, we'll talk in a few minutes about our overall indicators, but what's abundantly clear is when the people of this city apply themselves to the challenge, we can overcome anything, and specifically the challenges related to the coronavirus. So, we have a challenge. We're identifying it, we're acting on it. Everyone, join with us, help us in those ZIP codes. Go out, get tested, wear masks, do all the things that will help us push this back and move forward.  

Okay, let's go to another topic, which is so important. And it really is because New Yorkers did so much to fight back the coronavirus so successfully, that we ended up in a unique place in this nation. We're already are, obviously, the biggest city in the nation, the largest school system in the nation. A lot of people wondered, would it be possible to open up schools? Well, in fact, all of you made it possible by doing so much to fight back this disease. And we were able to open up our schools and our schools have been exceptional. I want to thank all the educators, all the staff, the parents, the students, because everyone's been working together. Everyone's been doing great at getting tested and we continue to see a really safe situation in our schools. So, now, what we have to do is make sure that every one of those precious seats in our schools gets used to the maximum. We really want to respect the families who want in-person learning for their kids. 

We want those kids to get as many days in school each week as possible. So, this is really important. Every family's had an opportunity to choose throughout. And for the families who prefer remote instruction, that's great. If that's what works for them, we're going to have it available constantly, obviously, and we're going to make sure it's as good as it possibly can be. But for families that want in-person learning, our job is to make sure that every day that opportunity is given to the maximum number of families who want it and that a child goes to school the maximum number of days in a week. So, that's crucial to think about as we're now in the opt-in period for parents who started out in remote learning and now want their kids to be in in-person learning. Again, you have this week and next week, up to November 15th to opt in. 

And the goal here, when everything is said and done, is to ensure that everyone has the right plan for their child. And really, it's either to be an all remote or to be in blended learning, but we want real participation in blended learning. So, we'd be talking more in the days to come about how to make sure that every child who is in blended learning is getting that maximum opportunity to participate. And look, in the end, I want a situation where everyone is clearly delineated, either as being in remote or being in blended and then fully participant in blended. That's what we'll be working on in these coming days. So, reminding people, again – opt-in period is till November 15th. And all you have to do is go to schools.nyc.gov/returntoschool2020 for any parent, any family that want to make that choice, you have that opportunity now.  

Okay, let's go over our daily indicators. And, again, today we see a mix of features. I want to talk them through. So, number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 – today's report, 95 patients. So, we went down a little bit from yesterday – that's good. And I want to see that number go down some more to where it was for many months. Confirmed positivity level of 23.7 percent – again, higher than we've seen recently, but still low compared to where we were in the spring, for sure. Okay. So, finishing, just saying on hospitalization in general – area of concern, but a hell of a lot better than what we experienced in the spring and still well within the boundaries of what we can address and handle. We don't want to see anyone in the hospital, but what this tells us is our hospital system is doing fine accommodating the challenge. Number two, new reported cases, seven-day average, threshold 550 – again, today, we're noticeably above that threshold – that's an area of concern – 633 cases. Some of that because of more testing, for sure, but we need to see that number start to go down. Even with more testing, we want to see that number go down. And, obviously, number three, most importantly, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID 19 threshold, five percent – today's report – the daily report actually is a better one, 1.43 percent. But the number we look at most carefully, seven-day rolling average, 1.1 – excuse me, 1.81 – 1.81 percent. That number puts it pretty much right in the middle of where we've been for the last few weeks, a level that we can work with, but a level we want to push down. At least it shows, again, a leveling off in the city, but it's a number that we still want to do a lot better on over the coming weeks.  

Okay. A few words in Spanish. And in the Spanish, I'm going to talk again about the thing that's on everyone's mind, which is the outcome of the election and the vote counting process.  

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, we are going to turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Good morning, all. We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Ted Long, the Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Chokshi, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Gloria from NY1.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: Hey, Gloria. How are you doing? 

Question: Good. Thank you. I wanted to ask you about the Staten Island increase, first. I guess I'm wondering, for you and for the for the health officials, if there are any similarities in some of these communities that you are tracking between what you're seeing in Staten Island now and what you saw in parts of Brooklyn and Queens? And if you could just speak to a passable trigger of the restrictions. I know the Governor has a role to play there, but just where you're at from your end. 

Mayor: Yeah, thank you, Gloria. Very, very good and important question. No this is different than what we saw in Brooklyn and Queens. I'm the layman, we'll let the doctors jump in, but this is different than what we saw in Brooklyn and Queens, which were extended areas, interconnected areas, a bigger phenomenon, a bigger trend. This is more isolated, less of an uptick for sure, much more like we saw in Sunset Park and Soundview, and we think much more addressable quickly, not something that at this moment would trigger restrictions. That's obviously the State's decision, but by the numbers not something that would trigger restrictions, something that we think can be handled quickly with a lot of community involvement. Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Varma, you want to add? 

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, sir. The only point that I would add to the second part of Gloria's question is that another aspect that we really focus on is how sustained the issues and the problems are. One of the reasons that the Mayor felt strongly about making sure that we act quickly in this case is just as we saw in some of those other examples that Dr. Long mentioned, Sunset Park, Tremont, et cetera, when we do act quickly and bring to bear our testing resources, as well as that community engagement, we can try to prevent those more sustained increases that we've seen in parts of Brooklyn and Queens.  

Mayor: Thank you. Dr. Varma, you want to add? 

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Nothing from me.  

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Gloria. 

Question: Okay. Thank you. And then my other question is on school testing, not COVID testing, but the specialized high school exam and the high school admission process. I believe the test was supposed to be this weekend but it's been delayed and I don't think we have a timeline, similar situation with high school applications. Do you have a date for when the city might administer the test or outlined, you know, some of these changes are – some of these kids get ready to make some of these, you know –  

Mayor: Yeah, Gloria, we're going to speak to it soon. Obviously with something like administering a standardized test, we're in a whole different reality now because it's hard to do it in person, and it historically it has been done in person and very carefully regulated. So we're sorting that out right now. Don't have a specific date, but we will speak to that, you know, in the next week or two, we're going to have updates for people on how we're going to handle that going forward. 

Moderator: The next is Paul from the Staten Island Advance. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for taking my question.  

Mayor: How are you doing Paul? How are you doing? 

Question: Hello sir, how are you? I’m well how are you? 

Mayor: Good, man.  

Question: I just wanted to get a sense – I mean, obviously we had that mask wearing slight controversy, I want to get a sense if there was any info on – from the city's perspective as to what is causing this outbreak in Staten Island?  

Mayor: I'll let the doctors speak to it, but Paul, I think, look, we know everyone's fatigued, let's be clear. We know it's been a very long road, eight months, going into nine, and we constantly have to remind people how important it is to do the basics, to get tested, to wear masks, to practice social distancing. So it's never a surprise where we see some areas where we've got to address a challenge. Important thing is that people engage and answer the call, and we've seen that time and time again. We saw that in Sunset Park, we saw that in Soundview, we saw that in Sunset - excuse me – in Southeast Queens, took longer because Brooklyn, Queens obviously much bigger areas were covered, but we did see ultimately a lot of people do what needed to be done and we saw the situation get a lot better. So I'm absolutely convinced folks in these ZIP codes in Staten Island will do the same. Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi, you want to add? Can't hear you if you're speaking. 

Senior Advisor Varma: Oh, yeah, sorry. No, I think as we discussed in the increases that we've been tracking in other parts of the city we unfortunately don't have a single common event or single common exposure that explains the increases. You know, there are many factors that are going on right now all at the same time, and there are similar factors that you see in other parts of the country and other parts of the world. As the weather gets colder people move indoors and we know indoors is a higher risk than outdoors. As people continue to try to maintain these measures, they get tired, they become a little bit more relaxed about wearing masks in certain places and about maintaining that distance. So we have found no specific explanation that we could target immediately, and that's really why we need to move to a very aggressive attempt to improve adherence to all of the important measures, and of course use our tests and trace resources and help support people through the difficult task of isolation and quarantine, if necessary. 

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi, anything to add? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. I just wanted to add that even, even though there is not a specific exposure event or explanation as yet, just as Dr. Varma said, what we can do about it is very clear and specific. You know, six feet and a mask is what can separate us from further increases, you know, what can separate us from a second wave? And so making sure that we remain vigilant about distancing, mask wearing, washing your hands, staying home if you're sick, getting tested, these things work, we've seen them work in communities around New York City, we've seen them work citywide. I know it's hard for us to to maintain that vigilance and that discipline, but particularly for the areas that we're talking about in Staten Island, it is important and urgent for us to recommit to them. 

Mayor: Amen, Paul, go ahead.  

Question: Yeah, thank you so much guys. Just kind of, I think this is for the Test and Trace Corps, just regarding Staten Island, obviously a very different part of the city than the rest of the boroughs, what unique challenges does that present to the test and trace process? 

Mayor: I'll say also what unique solutions will you be using in Staten Island, Dr. Long? 

Executive Director Long: Yeah. So the way that we approach community outreach is we really do think about what each community needs and what community based organizations and trusted voices are there. So what you can count on is any community that we go into, which is Staten Island or any community across New York City, we're going to look at who the trusted voices are, we're going to ask to work with them, we're going to work with community-based organizations, we're going to get the word out in the way that people want to hear it through different media outlets that they're used to, that they trust, and that's going to be our approach on Staten Island. And that's exactly what we did in Soundview, what we did in Sunset Park and how we were successful there. 

Mayor: Yeah. Paul, look, and Staten Island – I mean, people in Staten Island are so concerned for their community, deeply engaged in the community. You know, a borough where there's tremendous love for their neighborhoods. We're going to turn to elected officials, clergy community-based organizations, you know, health care providers, you name it, and we found when you bring together that coalition, you reach deep, deep into communities and it makes a huge difference. So that's what you will be seeing in these next few days in Staten Island for sure. 

Moderator: The next is Erin from Politico. 

Question: I'm just wondering, you know, you've talked a lot about preventing a second wave and the importance of making sure that doesn't happen. Do you have a definition that you're going by of what exactly that means, you know, how we would know if we were in a second wave?  

Mayor: Yeah, Erin, a very important question and I think the indicators speak for themselves. I mean, we've given you those threshold numbers. I think one way to think about this is if you are surpassing all three, you clearly have a serious issue on your hands. Look, I think it's fair to say, we know what the first wave looked like. It was horrendous. We know what it looked like to bring the disease way, way down, that was June, July, August, the city did an amazing job. We've seen an uptick, but remember for a lot of the summer, we were one percent, you know, 1.5 percent kind of range sometimes pushing up higher. Now we find ourselves between 1.5 to two percent on our seven-day rolling average. It's not a massive change, but it's worrisome and we have to deal with it. What we cannot see is a huge number of people going into hospitals every day with a really high level of positivity for COVID. What we cannot see is going past that two percent on a seven-day rolling average to three percent, four percent, pushing up towards five percent. If all that's happening at once, that’s when, you know, unfortunately you're facing a second wave. Go ahead, Erin. 

Question: Okay, and then, you know, I'm just wondering, as far as the upticks in Staten Island, you talked a bit in Brooklyn about, you know, some of the disinformation that was out there, and I'm just wondering, are you seeing any of that here? And is there any kind of nexus to, you know, basically politics in terms of where people are getting their information from and what their political leanings are and sort of, you know, any thing that might be influencing behavior? 

Mayor: It's a really fair question, Erin, I would say we don't have sufficient evidence to say that. I mean, remember the pattern we've seen. What we saw in Sunset Park, we saw in Soundview, what we saw in Southeast Queens, certainly we wouldn't ascribe a political reality of that. I think it is the fatigue's a big factor. Again, just people needing to be reminded how important it is to wear masks and do social distancing. People needing to have testing made really readily available. When testing is made available and it's made simple, people really do engage it. So I think that's the essence of what we're dealing with here. There may be other factors. I think we've seen from time to time indications of other factors, more philosophical factors, but I don't think we can say that is the central problem here. I think we just need to go in really let people know what's going on, give them the option to get tested, give out a lot of face masks, do the things that have worked before. 

Question: The next is Dana from the New York Times. 

Question: Hi my first question is for Ted. I was wondering if he could tell us any more about how many people have availed themselves of this dog walking service, how many, you know, how much it's cost, that sort of thing?  

Executive Director Long: That’s a great question. I don't off the top of my head know how many people have taken this up, but it's called Wag, with an exclamation point at the bottom, but I’d be very happy to research it and get back to you.  

Mayor: Okay. It's got a good name.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Abu on from Bangla Patrika.  

Question: Hello, Mayor, how are you?  

Mayor: Good. How are you? 

Question: Good. Thank you so much. Mayor, the question is if someone had detected COVID-19 and if he lived with his family, and if [inaudible] doesn't have enough room to live separate, what is the other option? 

Mayor: I'm going to turn to Dr. Long, who will enthusiastically tell you about the options available? But if someone – look, Abu, we know this is a challenge all over New York City. You know, we're one of the most densely populated cities in the country. Lots of people live in multi-generational families together, and honestly, particularly in the communities that have been hardest hit by COVID, that's the reality. So if a family member tests positive and needs to safely separate from the rest of the family, we will support them in doing that. Even if it means giving them a hotel room for free, so they can do that and be safe themselves and not spread the disease. Dr. Long, you want to tell people how they can learn about that.  

Executive Director Long: 212-COVID-19, call the number and we'll give you all of the information you need. Now to build on that a little bit, this a really important issue. It is hard for people that have been diagnosed with COVID to go home and to separate themselves from their family members, especially if they may share one bedroom or one bathroom. So our goal has been to give you as many options as possible to keep you and your family safe and to prevent you from going out and potentially infecting other New Yorkers. We'll deliver you food for free. Again, we'll walk your dog for free. You can come to our hotel for free. We'll pick you up for free and we'll give you medical care in the hotel as well. Because we give you whatever we, whatever you've told us you need in order to safely stay at home or to come to our hotel the outcome of that is we have some of the best compliance rates with people that are cases being, having been diagnosed, isolating and contacts, quarantining, or not leaving their homes of any place that I'm familiar with in the whole world. 98 percent of our cases tell us that they haven't left their homes or the hotel since we last talked to them, and 96 percent of our contacts tell us that they haven't left their homes or a hotel after we last talked to them. Those numbers show that almost a hundred percent of people that are potentially contagious are staying at home or doing the right thing for New York, and it's just another example of New Yorkers helping New Yorkers, and our goal, our role here is just to help them to get through this for them and their families. So thank you for your question.  

Mayor: Amen. Go ahead, Abu. 

Question: The second question is, since the [inaudible] you know affect the community, do you have any statistic on how many businesses closed in the city or since the city has been open, how they are doing, the businesses? 

Mayor: Abu, it's a fluid situation. Obviously – look, we know so many businesses have been hurt, smaller businesses are the most vulnerable, some tragically have closed permanently. A number, I think have a chance to come back, and the number one factor that would help them is a stimulus. The stimulus we should have not only puts the city government, state government back on its feet, but puts the people back on their feet. The stimulus we should have would provide a lot more support to small business owners and would provide a lot more support to renters. So, there's a lot of businesses, I think if they got the kind of support they deserve quickly, could come back. So we don't have a sense of the final outcome because we know a lot of businesses will make an attempt to come back and if they get support, they can. We do know it's going to be tough, tough for small business under any situation, particularly in communities of color. 

We do know we've lost some businesses permanently, which is horrible for those families and their employees, but it's just too soon to draw bigger judgments because the biggest x-factor out there is the stimulus and the stimulus will be decided by the vote count, and we all anxiously await that. 

This is the perfect segue to my conclusion, which is we all do anxiously await the vote count, but let's be proud of the fact that people got out there and voted and participated, and this is part of a pattern. People deciding to do something in the midst of crisis. It was a decision to vote in record numbers, despite the pandemic, just like it has been a decision by New Yorkers to where masks, practice social distancing, get tested. New Yorkers decided that we needed our schools open and have been coming out to make that work and make that safe, and our schools being so safe is because New Yorkers, whether they're kids, parents, educators, staff, are getting tested and keeping schools safe. So you look across the spectrum, all the small businesses that have fought to stay open. Those restaurants have done so much for the city. Participating in Open Restaurants, helping us have hope for our future. These are all decisions, big and small, by everyday New Yorkers, but they add up to something that really has an impact on all of us. So step by step, we're going to move forward as a city, and again, it all comes back to the people. The people have been deciding that New York City will move forward, will come back and I have great faith in that future. Thanks, everyone.

2020-11-06 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: Good morning again, everyone. And it's time as usual at 11:05 on Fridays for our weekly Ask The Mayor segment, my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0, 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can use the hashtag #AskTheMayor and tweet a question, we'll watch our Twitter feed go by. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC. Oops. Do we have the Mayor? 

Mayor Bill de Blasio: No, my mistake, I was on mute. There we go. You know, it's like all the Zoom calls where people are on mute and they don't realize. Good morning, how you doing Brian? 

Lehrer: And sometimes Zoom mutes me by itself. So there you go. Liz in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Liz. 

Question: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I have a quick question about the opt-in. And as a parent who is supposed to figure out if I'm going to opt my child into school, in-person school, without the ZIP code data, I can't make that decision. If you don't provide me with daily at the very least seven-day averages ZIP code data, I can not determine whether or not it's safe for my child to school. 

Lehrer: We're going on the localized COVID rates. All right. Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Yes, indeed. It's a good question. I understand your point about the ZIP code data. Although I want to say we've seen in the schools overwhelmingly, massive amount of testing happening in school, and much, much lower positivity level than anywhere in the city or anywhere in the country in our public schools. That's been proven now, you know, for weeks and weeks and weeks, very consistently, but the good news is we are going to be releasing ZIP code data again, starting next week. So you'll have that, the opt-in period goes until the 15th of November. You'll have that data starting on Monday and that can help inform your decision. But I think what's happening in the schools, bluntly, has been very different than what's happening in surrounding neighborhoods and in the city consistently, even in those zones where there were problems in Brooklyn and Queens, schools had a much better situation in terms of the disease consistently throughout.  

Lehrer: Alright, on the opt-in, we want to clarify something from last weeks show. I had asked you about a parent who told me their kid's school said sign up quick or all the spots will be filled, and the kids will be assigned to something other than their usual school. You were surprised, and now that school has clarified to that parent that that will not happen after all. So we don't want to mislead anyone or cause undue fear, but what's the policy on that if all or a large percentage of kids in a given school opt-in? 
  
Mayor: It's a really important question. I'll give you the once over here. Look, here is an opportunity for parents to really make a decision, we're now into November, you know, school has been going on for a good amount of time. Obviously they've been very safe. People now understand what it's like in the school community. A lot of parents chose blended learning and their kids are going to school and they're having a very good experience. A lot of parents chose remote and that works better for them and that's great. Well, we've got to resolve as two things. One, the parents who want to come back into the schools, having the opportunity now, that's now through the 15th, and two the kids who are signed up for blended, but aren't showing up, we need to resolve that. We're going to put out very clear guidance so everyone will see it next week about what we expect if you're in blended, you know, the whole idea of being in blended is for your child to show up and we need that so that we can make sure every seat is filled. Kids are learning and if a parent actually doesn't want blended and would prefer remote, that's cool because that means we can give more days in school for the kids who want to be in school and the families who want the kid in school, they can actually have more days in classrooms, we want to give them that.  

So that's what we're trying to make sense of right now, and really communicate better with parents and get everyone in the right spot for them. But if you had a substantial number of people who chose opt-in, the first point is that might be compensated in part by kids who are currently signed up for blended, but actually are not attending, and those kids being clarified and ending up in remote. So I think there'll be some balancing out there, but if an individual school, for example, Brian had a lot of kids who wanted to come back – if I were a parent, I would certainly be doing that – then we're going to adjust the schedule accordingly. We're going to first make sure that the kid signed up for blended really intend to be in blended. If not, we're going to move them over to remote with, you know, talk it through their families, move them over, and then if we have to adjust school schedules, we will –  

Lehrer: Meaning hypothetically, if it had to be every three days instead of every other day, so they could still socially distance, that kind of thing?  

Mayor: Yeah, for now, and I would say, I think you're going to see potentially examples in both directions. I think you might see some schools that when everything gets sorted out, everyone truly becomes real blended or real remote that you've se some schools have been able to offer days in school to their kids. Some that might have to offer fewer, but then the more powerful question over the horizon is right now, of course, we're dealing with a very challenging time of this virus, but at some point we're going to have a better medical situation, whether it's vaccine or just a decreased infection rate, and then that's an opportunity to do even more. And at that point, we might even have an opportunity to do another opt-in period if the health care situation changed profoundly in a good direction, but for now, I think we're going to see the numbers. 

I'm not going to be surprised that they even out Brian, where you get a certain number of kids coming in, a certain number of kids going out to remote and schools are pretty much the way they are now, but where we can give kids more days in school, we will, if for some reason we have to make an adjustment to spread out because a lot of kids want to be in school, we'll do that. But it's all – look it all could vary depending on the health care situation, and I’ve got to give you, Brian, an update on today's indicators because it actually is a reminder of what we have – the work we have to do – 

Lehrer: Thank you. 

Mayor: Because although the hospitalization level is better at 78 folks today, the new report of cases is not good, 702, overall testing 1.81 percent today, and a seven-day average now at 1.96 percent, that's a problem. That's a problem. That says that we are now really threatened with a second wave in New York City if we don't quickly get a handle on this, and that says that we really need to emphasize the mask wearing, the social distancing, avoiding gatherings and sadly avoiding travel and large family gatherings for the holidays, because we just cannot allow a second wave here. It's just so dangerous on so many levels. 

Lehrer: The Governor announced a new policy for people coming from any state besides New Jersey and Connecticut, we're just too integrated with New Jersey and Connecticut to enforce something like this from there, but that in negative COVID test would be required within three days before travel to New York from anywhere else. Is that your understanding and will that be enforced and airports or other entry points? Do you know? 

Mayor: First my understanding is he covered all – exempted all the bordering states, so it's New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and also by extension Pennsylvania. So second, you’re right, you have to get a negative test before you leave the state and you have to get one within several days of returning. That's the way to avoid quarantine. If you don't do those things, you go through the full two-week quarantine and I've spoke with the Governor about this yesterday, there's going to be greater intensity in the enforcement of quarantine, because again, we are now really threatened by a potential second wave. So we've got to make sure that quarantine is something that people take very, very seriously, and we have to enforce that rigorously to make sure that happens. 

Lehrer: One more opt-in question from Jean in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC, Jean. 

Question: Hi. thank you. It's actually not an opt-in question, but it is a school question. I have two grandchildren in the public schools here in Brooklyn, in second and fourth grade, and I'm sorry to tell you, but the education they're getting they're doing hybrid or blended, it's terrible. It's just doesn't compare to what my own children got who went to a PS 31 and 321 in Brooklyn in the second and fourth grade age. So my question is what planning is being done to help all these kids catch up after this year, after this is over? I don't think my, my grandchildren are getting an adequate second and fourth grade education – 

Lehrer: Also, Jean, can you, give one example of how not since they are in the hybrid learning to school – 

Mayor: And which school please? Which school?  

Question: Well, I don't want to condemn the school, but they're in Kensington there in PS 130.  

Mayor: Okay, I know it well, go ahead.  

Question: My daughter reports that her second grader is very bored. He's a very good reader. He gets his work done in like five minutes of the remote learning more. They're very happy when they're back in class and I don't know how that's going, but they only go two or one day a week –  

Lehrer: So it's a remote learning critique, Mr. Mayor, which we get so much. 

Mayor: Oh, we do hear it so much, and remote learning is, you know, I want to thank our educators and parents who are trying their damnedest to make remote learning work, but remote learning is just profoundly imperfect, and that's why we want to get as many kids back in the classroom as many days, a week as possible. And really the hope here, Brian, is with opt-in to get folks in who want to be in clarifying with the blended parents and kids who are not yet attending, you know, if you want to really be remote, let's just get you over to remote. If you really want to be in class to show up, let's get everyone in the seats and maximize the opportunity for every child that wants to be in school. I think what Jean is talking about is an unfortunate residue of the challenge we're facing. We have to overcome it by trying to make both the in-person and the remote better throughout the school year. We can make it better. We saw improvement in the course of the spring, as we were trying to acclimate to remote.  

I know we can make it better, but I think for kids like Jean’s talking about, it's really important for parents, to the best to your ability, to talk to the teachers or the principal about what your child is or is not getting and see if we can make adjustments because remote does allow, for example, for a kid who's doing well, they can be easily given additional assignments and additional support even remotely. So, parents, you know, really engage your schools on that, but the truth is we have to make it better while also acknowledging that the cure here really is to get past this virus and get all our kids back in schools, and then we are going to be playing catch up. Jean is right, we're going to be playing catch up and we have to lay those plans in now for next September to really try and supercharge the situation as best possible.  

Let's just celebrate America for a moment. Mark Kelly winning Arizona is very important, two Democratic senators from Arizona now, looks likely to go Democrat in the presidential election as well. That's a huge change for this country with lasting impact for Democrats and progressives, but also for New York City. That's a big deal, that suggests a Senate that's going to be even tighter. If it's a two vote margin in the Senate, and I don't even know if it will be because those two special elections in Georgia are going to be very, very hotly contested in January. But I agree with the Governor, Vice President Biden becomes President of the United States, there will be a major stimulus even with a Republican Senate. We know a couple of times it came close to happening in the last few months, even with the current leadership. If the Senate just a two vote margin, I don't have a doubt in my mind that the Vice President’s team will be able to pull some senators over and get us something substantial, not the same as what we would have gotten with a Democratic Senate, but it's something substantial to help us get back on our feet. So I remain very hopeful on that front Brian 

Lehrer: However, the Citizens Budget Commission projects the City and the State and the MTA face budget deficits of some $88 billion over the next four years, and fiscal experts say, there's no way the feds will send that much money our way, but your labor deals merely move $600 million or so from this year to next year, do you not need to find real savings to deal with the long-term problem beyond what you have? 

Mayor: I don't agree with the assumption that the federal government will not come in to address this. I think that's a faulty assumption. Right now – 

Lehrer: $88 billion?  

Mayor: Well, again, in federal terms, honestly, over multiple years, that's not a lot of money. For putting one of the biggest states in the country and the nation largest city back on their feet, so we can lead a national economic recovery, no, I assure you. Look, how much has been spent on wars, Brian, I mean, for God's sakes, you know, this country spends hundreds of billions of lightly on wars, let's recognize there's an opportunity here to really rethink our spending priorities, pull away from so much military spending right there. You're going to have a huge amount to deal with, but also take the lesson of the new deal and invest now to get the cities and states back on the feet. It will pay off many times over in terms of the economic activity and the revenue it will generate. So no, it's not fair to say the federal government won't put us back on our feet. We should not be doing austerity measures, which is what the Citizens' Budget Commission is calling for. We should not be putting people out of work. We should not be decimating city services. We should be fighting for the best possible stimulus and keeping those services and that employment level high for the good of the city. And in the future, there are tough choices to make, we'll make them, but we should not be deciding that in advance when there's a chance of a federal government doing right by us and now we have a lot of the preconditions we need if this election comes out the way it looks to achieve that bigger change. And by the way, there's more Senate elections in two years, and that's another chance to get that majority and go even farther. 

Lehrer: Thanks as always Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week.  

Mayor: Take care, Brian.

2020-11-09 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. We're dealing with an immense challenge this morning, because we see the presence of the coronavirus in the city and is trying to reassert itself. And we have to do everything in our power – while we're waiting for that help from the federal government to finally come, we need to do everything in our power to stop the coronavirus from reasserting in New York City. We have to stop a second wave from happening here. It is getting dangerously close. I've been telling you for weeks that we had the ability to stop a second wave. And, for weeks, actually our numbers were higher than we wanted, but they had leveled off. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing a real growth in the positivity rate in this city and that is dangerous. So, we have one last chance to stop a second wave. It's as simple as this – this is my message to all New Yorkers today – we can stop a second wave if we act immediately, but we have one last chance and everyone has to be a part of it. Just like you fought back the coronavirus after March and April, brought the city back, made it one of the safest places in the country. We have to do that again and we have to act urgently. Citywide positivity now – the positivity level above two percent and it's been increasing. That is a problem. We have gone well past the threshold for the number of cases we set. The case numbers continue to increase – that as a problem. We're seeing household transmission, we're seeing community spread, we're seeing things we have not seen in a long time and we have to stop them. So, we're going to be talking to you about what we're doing everywhere in the city, but there are still parts of the city that are particularly of concern. There are still some areas of the city that need special attention, special effort. And we're going to talk about that in terms of the neighborhoods and the ZIP codes. We're coming back now with the ZIP code information that's going to allow us to focus on where we need to do the most work, the most testing, the most outreach, the most mask distribution. And it's important for us to understand, it's a problem everywhere, but it's a particular problem in certain neighborhoods.  

So, to give us that information clearly, so every single New Yorker can participate, our Department of Health is now going to resume putting up data by ZIP code. You'll be able to see the positivity levels by ZIP code, the trends that are happening, the test results, transmission rates, the things that really will tell you exactly what is going on. You can go to nyc.gov/health/coronavirus. The whole idea here is to take this information and turn it into power, take this information and fight back with it, use it to tell us what we need to do. And our Health Commissioner is going to address this, but one more thing – and I'm going to highlight – he's going to make this point. I need everyone to listen loud and clear. He is New York City's doctor – listen to the point he's going to make that one of the most crucial things that'll happen in the next two months, of course, is the holidays, and the holidays we associate with travel and the holidays we associate with big indoor gatherings, big meals together – that, unfortunately, this year can't be the case, because if you look at the numbers that we're going to go over now, you're going to see loud and clear we're in a dangerous situation and we have to change our habits. We cannot take the risk of going back to larger shutdowns of our city, our economy, more and more restrictions. We cannot take that risk. We have to change what we do in light of this situation. So, here to give you an update and give you the guidance you need to help us stop the second wave, the City's doctor, our Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi.  

Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. From the beginning, science and data have been the lifeblood of our response. The numbers help us decide how we intensify outreach and where we direct our resources. We also know that an informed and watchful city is one of our best defenses against COVID-19, which is why we're pleased to announce we've updated our website to offer even more timely information to New Yorkers. The new page on our website includes a new summary of the latest data, seven-day average of percent positivity by ZIP code, more refined age breakdowns, and testing turnaround times. The site will be live today and we invite all New Yorkers to see what is happening in their communities. Something that will be apparent to anyone reviewing the data is that numbers are rising steadily in neighborhoods across the city. These numbers must serve as a warning to us, as the Mayor has said. The virus starts local, but, as we're seeing around the country and around the world, it doesn't stay local unless each of us takes the action that we need to, to protect ourselves as well as others. 

Now, the timing of this increase should give us pause, because it comes at a moment that I want to acknowledge is precious to so many of us. It's precious and yet laden with risk this year – the holidays. I understand that after all we've been through, there is a need to find comfort through celebrating with family and community. But I want to be clear, the holidays this year cannot look like years past. Many of the things that make the holidays so special also carry the most risk. We know the virus spreads through social gatherings, even small get-togethers. And the cooler weather means drier air, conditions that we know for most respiratory viruses, like the coronavirus – more contagious. That's why today we're posting our holiday guidance about safe celebrations that will protect the health of those who are most dear to you. As the Mayor said, please, if you don't absolutely have to, don't travel. This will help protect not just your loved ones, but also other New Yorkers. Don't host a party and avoid gathering in groups.  

Mistletoe maybe off limits this year, but holiday cheer is not. You can enjoy virtual gatherings, seasonal traditions, whether it's a football game or admiring holiday decorations from a distance or eating some of your favorite holiday foods. Finally, the core four and testing remain the cornerstones of keeping our city safe, during the holidays, but also every day. Mask up, maintain distance, wash your hands, stay home if you're ill and get tested. Six feet and a mask are what helps separate us from a second wave of hospitalizations and avoidable suffering. And as you'll see on our updated website, about two-thirds of all test results are returned within 48 hours, helping us interrupt the spread of COVID-19. If you have symptoms, test positive, or are in quarantine, you should wear a mask while you're in your own home. This helps prevent spread to family members as well as roommates. Otherwise mask up anytime you are outside your home indoors or out. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: Thank you, Dr. Chokshi. Six feet and a mask – that says so much, that simple phrase, and that makes all the difference. Now, look, we've got a lot of work to do. We got to do it everywhere, but let's also remember, we see particular places where they have challenges. For weeks, it was parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Those areas, thank God, have gotten a lot better – still work to do, but they've gotten a lot better. But, as we talked about in the end of last week, now we're having some challenges in Staten Island. So, we're going to focus a lot of resources there to protect the people's Staten Island and to stop this second wave. We are going to see a Day of Action tomorrow in Staten Island. And this Day of Action means a lot outreach, a lot of mask distribution, a lot of testing. There'll be an outreach effort at the ferry terminal and other locations around the island. And, of course, it's Get Tested Tuesdays. So, we're going to encourage the maximum number of Staten Islanders to get tested. Here to talk to you about this effort, the head of our Test and Trace Corps, Dr. Ted Long. 

Executive Director Ted Long, NYC Test and Trace Corps: Thank you, sir. The purpose of our Day of Action is to test as many people as possible. Testing is our line of sight into the fight against the coronavirus and every single New Yorker, every single Staten Islander that comes out and gets tested on Tuesday, you've strengthened our ability to win that fight. Now, what we're going to be doing in Staten Island on Tuesday is we're going to have 75 volunteers and staff roving around the island. There'll be at the ferry, there'll be at Staten Island Mall, there'll be at Brick Town Center at Charleston, and there'll be at Forest Plaza. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to get tested. Again, come to any of our sites for a fast, easy, and, of course, free test. You will help us to win this fight. We'll see you on Tuesday. 

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dr. Long. So, everybody, look, the basics make such an impact. So again, Get Tested Tuesday. This is – now that we're giving you this warning that a second wave is out there. We’ve got to beat it back. I want to emphasize to anyone who has never been tested, get tested this week. If you haven't been tested in a long time, get tested this week. This is the time we need to know better what's happening neighborhood by neighborhood so we can stop the second wave. So, if you want to know what you can do, go out there and get tested.  

All right, now, again, want to remind people with the holidays coming, the best solution is not to travel. If you can possibly avoid travel, you should. And I know it's painful. We miss loved ones that we haven't seen in a long time. I'm feeling it. I know what it feels like. I wish I could go see my loved ones. This is going to be the first holiday season for my family that I can remember my entire life where I won't see some of the people who I'm closest to in this world, but that’s to keep everyone safe. And so, if you don't need to travel, you can avoid travel, that comes first as the best option. But if you travel, New York State has now issued new guidelines. And if you travel, you will have to quarantine for 14 days. And we mean it. We're going to be very strict about that, unless you follow State guidelines and you get tested before your trip, then a few days after you return. So, there is an opportunity to avoid the 14-day quarantine if you test before traveling back to New York City and after returning to New York City. But if you don't follow those specific guidelines, you have to quarantine for 14 days. We have to take it seriously. We have to enforce it. We will enforce it, because this is how we use every tool in our power to stop a second wave from hitting us here.  

Okay. Now, let's talk about the daily indicators and it will be quite clear the challenge we face. So, three indicators – the one that, thankfully, maintains at a certain level that we are handling well is, number-one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19. That threshold is 200 patients. Today's report, 71, with a confirmed positivity level of 29.58 percent. So, look, right now, that number remains at a fairly low level, but note that that positivity level for COVID continues to rise. And, obviously, with the number of cases growing, we are very concerned that there will be more and more people going to the hospital. It's a level we can manage right now, though I'm thinking about the human reality. Anyone who goes into the hospital is dealing with a serious problem. We can't see that continue to rise. But, right now, thank God, still at a lower level. But here's where the news gets much worse – number-two, the new reported cases on a seven-day average – that threshold of 550 cases. For a long time, that seemed like a threshold we would never surpass. We then did surpass it in the last week or so, but now much higher – 779 cases. That right there shows you the magnitude of the problem. Some of that's explained by more and more testing, and more testing is good, but some of that is explained by the fact that the positivity levels are going up and is a problem. And that's what you'll see in number three, percentage of people testing city-wide positive for COVID-19 – threshold five percent. Today's report, 2.36 percent – very worrisome. Seven-day rolling average, 2.21 percent – highest we've seen in a long time. We can fight these back. There's still time to fight them back, but those are numbers that should have us all alarmed and ready to act with everything we got.  

Okay. We'll do a few words now in Spanish – 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, we turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Hi, all. We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today is Dr. Dave Chokshi, the City's Health Commissioner, Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma, and Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Ted Long. With that, we'll go to Andrew from WNBC. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. With regard to these higher numbers, has your Test and Trace Corps learned anything about how these cases are spreading? It seems like all of these months into test trace, we don't get much in terms of specifics. Are they small family gatherings where people are inviting a couple of friends over indoors, and that's where the spread is taking place? Do you have any evidence of any outdoor spread anywhere in New York City? 

Mayor: Andrew, first I'll start and then let the doctors weigh in. I understand your question entirely. We're all, you know – we all would in a sense prefer to know a very specific source of the problem, but that's not what we're seeing here. It's not like there's a specific building, a specific gathering. You know, what we've seen overall is that where really good precautions are taken, we don't have a problem. Our school system continues to be a great example of that. I think what we're seeing is something much more generalized. Test and Trace has been out there working intensely, and what we're seeing unfortunately, is broader community spread and clearly some of it related to what's happening around the country and travel, but something broader than that as well. That's why the way to fight is for everyone to double down on the things that do work. Dr. Chokshi, you want to add? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you, sir. Yes, the only thing that I would add is that we do have information, you know, not just from the tracing efforts from Test and Trace here in New York City. But we now also have a robust evidence base, you know, with respect to the science about how the coronavirus has spread across the entire world. What we know from that evidence base, from the science is that is that it happens any time that that people gather, but particularly when they gather without masks and indoors, and so that's true of social gatherings, as I mentioned. It's true, anytime people are congregating for other reasons, whether related to a work or more socially and it's true you know, particularly during the cooler months because the air is drier and because people are more likely to gather indoors. So even when we don't have those specifics we do know the specific things that people can do to avoid the spread. 

Mayor: Yeah, and Andrew, that combination – gathering indoors without masks plus cold weather, which makes people want to be more indoors, obviously – that combination is a real problem. That's why we're going to keep emphasizing wearing the masks all the time and avoiding large gatherings, particularly indoors. That is such a crucial point. Dr. Long you want to add?  

Director Long: Yeah, so I appreciate that question. What you're going for here too is have we seen the same type of super-spreading events as the Mayor said, localized to a pinpoint location that have plagued other cities, other countries. Because New Yorkers have taken the precautions that they have we had one of the best control rates in the country, and we've not seen anywhere close to the same degree of that type of spreading event in New York City. To be concrete for you, about 10 percent of our cases that we're seeing here, we track back to travel. Five to ten percent, we tracked back to specific gatherings or events. We have detailed information on every single case that we get, the we're able to talk to, to able to interview, and we act on the information to know where we need to deploy our resources, where we need to do messaging, where we need to do specific testing outreach in terms of different workplaces. So we act on that every day, and I appreciate your question. 

Mayor: Go ahead, Andrew.  

Question: So my next question has to do with the city's plans for upcoming holiday events. Are you prepared Mayor to take more aggressive actions, such as not allowing the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree or making sure that any Thanksgiving-related gatherings do not take place? What new steps will you announce? 

Mayor: We're going to look at all that Andrew. I think again, the first concern needs to be making sure we do not have large indoor gatherings and that we get people wearing masks all the time. There really are not many major outdoor events at this point. But we'll look again to see what's out there and if any additional precautions are needed. But again, the key problem here is indoors and not wearing masks. Let's really emphasize that if people avoid indoor gatherings and wear a mask, that's going to be crucial to turning this around. Go ahead.  

Moderator: Next is Shant from the Daily News. 

Question: Yeah, thanks for taking my call, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, I mean, following up on Andrew's questions, I'm wondering if you can maybe outline some possible scenarios in the weeks ahead. I mean, I, in previous weeks, when you talked about a second wave, you warned of more severe restrictions coming back. Certainly in the red and orange zones, there was a crackdown on parts of the reopening. Can you say what you have in mind in terms of scaling back the reopening, if the second wave does come and is there a timeline here? Is it like we'll know in a week, a month, anything like that? 

Mayor: Shant, very good, common sense questions, and I appreciate any question that’s the kind of thing an everyday New Yorker would ask, and the first thing I want to say is let's be careful about trying to predict exact timelines because in a sense that takes away the role of the people, meaning it is not something that happens to us and we have no impact on. That's the whole story of the difference between March and April, when this horrible virus appeared in this city out of nowhere, versus the way people were able to fight it back through their own actions, their own behavior, and we need them to do that again. So the more that people wear masks, practice, social distancing, all those basics, the more we're able to fight back that second wave. So I can't give you a timeline. It will actually depend on how people respond to your reporting and everything else we put out there – if they take decisive action, that can make a huge difference. 

But it is important, I think, to lay out the danger in terms of new restrictions, because I think it will make it very visual, very real to people what we're up against. God forbid this continued and we had a full-blown second wave, it means a lot more restrictions. It means – unfortunately it could mean even having to shut down parts of our economy again, which would be horrible for this city. Horrible for the livelihoods of people. It could mean having to shut down schools. There are obvious, real dangers here, and we don't want to see that happen. So that's why I'm telling people there's one last chance to stop that, and we need everyone to participate. Go ahead, Shant. 

Question: Yeah. Thanks for that, and I guess switching gears to the incoming Biden administration. Could you say whether you've reached out to that administration yet, and just any thoughts on what your strategy will be for getting, you know, the funding that you've been calling for for months and months from Washington?  

Mayor: Yeah, I'm reaching out later today to folks in the incoming administration, start those conversations. Look, I’m tremendously hopeful about the kind of stimulus that a Biden administration would do, but even the fact that there will be a Biden administration is now really creating energy in Washington for stimulus even quicker, and if it's a good one, if it's a fair one that really focuses on what people need, but also what cities and states need to get back on their feet, that could be a blessing for sure, but we'll be talking with the Biden team, emphasizing those three things I talked about at beginning: we need clear national leadership to fight back the coronavirus, a single clear message about where we need to go as a country and what people need to do, we need a pathway to a vaccine we can believe in, and that people will want to take, which is crucial, and of course that stimulus. That's what I'll be focused on. 

Moderator: Next is Jeff from the New York Times.  

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. I'm wondering – we reported today that city health officials felt that some of the infections were coming from clusters linked to workplaces, such as construction sites and offices, and I'm wondering if you agree with that and what does that mean about the city's effort to restart the economy, get people back to work. Is there enough focus being placed on the clusters that are being found at offices and construction sites and things of that nature? 

Mayor: Yeah, again appreciate the question, Jeff. I think what the approach the city is taking is really could be described as abundance of caution, looking at some areas where we want to make sure there's focused testing and follow up. Again, as you heard from Dr. Long, unlike a lot of places, our problem has not been specific sites really driving a lot of our challenge, but we want to be real careful, and that's what I think describes the essence of the city strategy. Dr. Chokshi, you want to add? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir, just to add briefly to that. That's exactly right. We have to look at all places where there is a greater risk. But again, the actions are the same, whether you're in a workplace, whether you're at a social gathering – there are things that we know that can reduce the risk particularly wearing your mask and keeping your distance. We'll keep looking at this data, you know, not just on a week to week basis, but on a day-to-day basis and any place that we do see a concentration of cases, whether it's because it's happening at a zip code or because it's happening in a particular setting, that informs how we think about fighting the coronavirus going forward.  

Mayor: Go ahead, Jeff. 

Question: I guess just a follow-up, Mr. Mayor is, you know, if we don't know where the infections are coming from and we're having trouble analyzing them, isn't it a little too late? I mean, should you, at this point already be imposing some restrictions on non-essential businesses because the rates have continually been rising for the last few weeks. 

Mayor: Jeff, a very fair question, and it's something we've talked about a lot internally in last few days. I think it's fair to say after a lot of discussion, first of all, a discussion also with the State of New York that has to make a lot of the ultimate decisions here, but look, the way I've asked it to the health team is, you know, where are we this minute in terms of our ability to move forward as a city? What kind of trajectory on, what can we do about it? Well, where we are, right this minute is more cases than we want for sure. But at the same time, Jeff, the city is clearly functioning across the board. We have gotten a lot more activity back, a lot more jobs back. We're hovering now about around 4 million jobs in New York City. So we've had a real major comeback in terms of employment, much more to be done. Obviously school is open, a lot of things are happening that people need, and if we stayed right where we were now we could sustain ourselves.  

So then the question is where are we going? We fear, of course, that we're seeing this kind of increase. But the question I always ask the health team is can it be turned around with the right effort by the people and the government obviously leading the way? And the answer is yes, but we have a brief window. We have to make that turn around quickly. So I think the simple answer is no, it's not yet time for those broader restrictions. I pray it will never be that time, but if we don't act very quickly, then those restrictions could become a reality. 

Moderator: Next we have Erin from Politico. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, I'm just wondering, you’ve specifically said in the past that indoor dining should close when we’re over two percent on the seven-day average, which we now are. I know it's not your final decision, but is that going to happen? And you're going to try to make that happen. 

Mayor: What I said is that two percentage should be re-evaluated and I think it should be re-evaluated now. Again, the goal is to stop this trend in terms of higher infection rates and push it back down. But certainly we're at a point where I think it makes sense to take another look given what's happening. Go ahead Erin. 

Question: Okay, and then, so I believe it was Dr. Long said earlier that five percent of cases are being tracked to a specific gathering or event. So I know you only have that information for a minority of cases, but can we get some examples of what are these gatherings and events that cases are being tracked to? 

Mayor: Yeah, and I'll start as the layman here and say that, remember until very recently, thank God we had a very low number of daily cases. So what we've seen over the months is sometimes that's just a family gathering, even, you know, 10 people get together, 15 people get together and that can actually spread the disease among family, and we have to understand that this is the cumulative effect, when you have a city of eight million people, a lot of very small gatherings can be the problem. We are always watching to see if any of the bigger ones, particularly the indoor ones have sparked more of a problem, but let me have Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Long speak to that. 

Commissioner Chokshi: The way the Mayor described it is right. You know, one of the things that we can say is that when we do the contact tracing that Dr. Long will speak about in more detail we can understand the patterns of transmission. So I can give you a concrete example. Let's say there is a small social gathering, one of the things that we are discouraging actively right now. But let's say there was that small social gathering where someone was infected with the virus, but didn't know it. They develop symptoms a couple of days later and they got tested. And then at that point, understood that they were infected with the virus. That original gathering, those people who were there would have gone into other locations and because of that exposure, you know, had spread the virus to some others. This is something that we have seen happen in a way that actually leads to an increase in cases in a geographic area, just link back to that sequence of gatherings over time. So that's why it's important to follow this guidance and particularly to focus on gatherings indoors and mask use. 
  
Mayor: Dr. Long, you want to add? 
  
Executive Director Long: Yes, all the important points have been covered. I'll just emphasize that when we do contact tracing, we don't just look for a single close contact. We look for the setting or the type of place where you were where you were likely to receive the infection. That's why we look at things like workplaces, and we have granular detail on the type of workplaces. Anytime there's more than two case – two or more cases in a specific type of setting or workplace, we document that. We look at that and we intervene based on that. With your question about gatherings and events. The Mayor's example is actually right on. We do detect even small gatherings, we're able to clarify with our contact tracing interviews, what happened, who was there. And then we could reach out to other people, maybe other cases that we link it together. And then maybe additional contacts beyond that. So, our contact tracing scheme really enables us to look at the likely source of infection and take concrete action, ranging from bringing testing to different types of settings, to understanding what we need to change in our messaging. Like the fact that with the indoor transmission we're seeing now, it is more important than ever to wear a mask indoors. And we know that clearly from our data here. So that's the key message we see from all of our data in totality. 
  
Mayor: Thank you. 
  
Moderator: Next is Nolan from the New York Post. 
  
Question: Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me? 
  
Mayor: Yes. How are you doing Nolan? 
  
Question: I'm well, Mr. Mayor. You said at the top or reemphasized at the top the importance of everyone wearing a mask and everyone keeping six feet apart, as ways to stop or slow sort of the rate of infection across the city. On Saturday we saw a lot of celebrations. The celebrations included a lot of people in masks, but very few people keeping six feet apart. Are you guys worried that all the celebration Saturday and Sunday could fuel this increase in cases? 
  
Mayor: We're always looking at that and any other situation like it, Nolan. I would say overwhelming – I had this conversation with the doctors this morning. The huge difference between outdoors with a mask versus indoors without a mask. This is really what we're seeing decisively. Those outdoor gatherings, always something to keep an eye on, but if people have a mask on and they're outdoors, we haven't seen too much ill come of that. Increasingly the concern is more and more people indoors, fewer and fewer people indoors wearing – or not fewer and fewer, but not enough let's say, wearing a mask, that's overwhelmingly where our concern is. 
  
Question: And the appearances of a double standard. This concern has been raised a lot over the summertime. I was raised again by lawmakers in Southern Brooklyn where the enforcement actions continued against businesses. Whereas there didn't seem to be much in the way of social distancing enforcement for the outdoor gatherings after the election. What do you say to them? 
  
Mayor: Again, we are seeing a profound difference when people are indoors. We're seeing a profound difference when people don't wear a mask. I think everyone needs to be careful all the time. And particularly Nolan, if these numbers we are reporting today, continue to grow, then people are going to have to get used to the more and more restrictions. And going back to some of the ways we had to live in the spring. But I want to emphasize the biggest concern right now, whether it's in a store or a business or a home is when people are indoors. And the biggest concern particularly is when people don't have a mask on. We did not know in the beginning, back in March, April, the scientific community didn't know what incredibly crucial role masks would play. Now we do. So that's where we're going to win or lose this game. If we are really focused on people, keeping those masks on and particularly being careful indoors. 
  
Moderator: We have time for two more. First is Fred from WNYC. 
  
Question: Yes. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I know you addressed this partially, but in terms of what sort of triggers we might say – we can't lay out a timeline but you said two percent will trigger reconsideration. We've blown well past the 550 rolling average. So, are we setting new trigger levels? Or are we doing away completely with trigger thresholds at a city level and focusing them more exclusively on the kind of micro cluster neighborhood level? Can you talk about that schedule? 
  
Mayor: Yeah, Fred. Thank you for the question. I actually answered this last week. I think it was on Thursday, but I'm happy to do it again. The three indicators really tell us so much. We have one where, unfortunately, in the last couple of weeks, we've gone by it now, gone by it a lot. That's the cases. We have another one, hospitalizations that actually have remained again, reasonably low, but still worrisome. You know, well below the 200, positivity rate low, well below where it was in the spring among those patients. But still worrisome. And then we have the citywide positivity rate, which really has moved in the wrong direction the last few days. I said last week, three percent is obviously a key, key indicator. That's what we've put forward as the indicator to watch in terms of our school system. So what I would say, will unfortunately indicate if we're in a full-blown second wave would be if those case numbers remain high, if the positivity level goes above three percent on a sustained basis. And if the number of hospitalizations goes up around or beyond that 200 patient-a-day threshold. That would clearly define to me that we are in the second wave. Go ahead. 
  
Question: Can we just flesh out a little more some of the enforcement efforts? For instance, you said you're going to get really serious about holiday enforcements. It's my understanding from people contact tracers, I've spoken – the travel, they're so overwhelmed with local cases making calls, they've more or less ceased doing the monitoring of the incoming travelers, which they had been doing. And also, on the restaurant enforcement, which is a different group, perhaps because of restaurant inspectors or, you know, come from a different place. But now that there are more and more of these out outdoor, semi-indoor, outdoor sidewalk places, I wonder if you could talk to how we are in terms of personnel and enforcing this? So, two different categories. 
  
Mayor: Yeah. Fred, very important. So, on restaurants, obviously Health Department leads the way. That's going to be a continued focus. But I think your first point is a particularly one, the travel and quarantine. You're right, the Sheriff's Office played a really big role in the travel enforcement. They've had to do some other very important work in the last few weeks, but we're going to be shifting more of their energy back onto the travel enforcement, for sure. And quarantine enforcement is going to greatly intensify. This is something we've been talking to the State about as well, with the holiday travel. Again, we're praying people will really, really limit it this year or just not travel at all. But we're going to have to have much more vigorous enforcement in terms of travel and quarantine and clear consequences for folks who break quarantine. So that's something that between Sheriff's Office, Test and Trace, Health Department, we're going to be putting a lot of resources into that. And I think the message right now is people need to understand the quarantine has to be taken seriously. The State has given people a way to avoid it if they follow very specific rules. But otherwise we're going to hold people to the quarantine standard. And there'll be real penalties if they do not live up to that standard. 
  
Moderator: For our last question, we'll go to Yoav from The City. 
  
Question: Hi everyone. You mentioned there's going to be a day of action on Staten Island tomorrow because of the increased positivity rates. I'm seeing about eight ZIP codes there that are above three percent. If you look at the Bronx, there are seven ZIP codes that are above three percent. What are you guys doing for the Bronx, as far as new actions? 
  
Mayor: Yes, very, very fair. Let's give it quickly an overview. And then my colleagues can speak to some of the specifics. Yoav, a couple of things. One, we had Brooklyn and Queens really, really high numbers, much higher than what you're seeing on the chart today, by ZIP code, when we originally raised the concern, we saw even higher numbers than that. Really good news story, that with a lot of work, a lot of community participation, a lot of help by community leaders, organizations, a lot of testing, that number has gone down in the vast majority of Brooklyn Queens neighborhoods that were affected. We are seeing still a few problems in Brooklyn and Queens. But nowhere near what we were seeing before. That's good. We're not seeing in a problem in Manhattan. That's good. We are seeing a bigger problem now in Staten Island. It has been growing. We're going to put a lot of resources into addressing that. 
  
And then the Bronx, we see some ZIP codes, but I want to emphasize we differentiate a ZIP code, Yoav that went up to above three percent one day, but then goes down the next day. That's different than if you see a clear pattern over multiple days. So one of the things we're going to be very careful about is are we seeing a pattern? Are we seeing uneven results? Are we seeing enough testing data to be persuasive that we have a clear trend line? It's going to be clear on the Department of Health data when there's a sufficient amount of testing versus when there isn't. And I believe Dr. Choksi you said the numbers 260 tests per hundred thousand residents in a ZIP code is the way we are weighing that. So Dr. Choksi, with that preface why don't you start then Dr. Long on the ways we're going to go out to those neighborhoods in Staten Island first and foremost, and now parts of the Bronx as well to really try and turn the tide? 
  
Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you, sir. And you've covered a lot of the high points, but what I would say is that this is part and parcel of us using our data to drive action. Ultimately, you know, the data is our window into what's happening. But based on the data, we have to both motivate our fellow New Yorkers to take action, as well as provide resources at a local level to help people do the right thing with respect to interrupting the spread of the virus. So when we look at it, one very important point that the Mayor said is that we have to look at it with respect to patterns. Understanding sustained increases over time, which are more worrisome than fluctuations in data. And that is something that we have seen in Staten Island over the last few days, which has helped motivate the day of action. Beyond that, we also look at not just percent positivity, but numbers of cases and understanding how the case rates are changing over time as well. We combine that with data on hospitalizations to have the whole panoply of indicators that helps us figure out where we need to go and how intensive our response needs to be. 
  
Mayor: Go ahead Dr. Long. You want to add? 
  
Executive Director Long: Yes. I very much appreciate that question. One of the big points we want to drive home is the same thing that Dr. Chokshi just said. We're guided by the data in terms of defining our actions. In Staten Island we're going out, getting people to get tested. Tomorrow we have ten sites that are new in Staten Island, including a large new rapid testing site opening at the ferry on Thursday. Looking back at what we've done so far in places like Sunset Parks, like Soundview when we brought in that level of testing, we were able to drive down the virus by two thirds. Same thing happened in the clusters in Brooklyn and Queens. We brought in 32 new sites into the clusters. 18 of those in the red zones alone. Queens has seen substantial improvement. So has Brooklyn. So, we ahead of now are already doing this in the Bronx. And you can see with the data that we're going to be putting out later today, exactly how we're guided in terms of what we do. In the Bronx we've 25 new testing sites, including a large, massive one at Edward L. Grant. And we're opening up more massive testing sites in the Bronx too guided by the data that you're going to see. And that's one of the mainstays of how we're going to drive down the virus is by bringing testing to people. 

Mayor: Go ahead Yoav. 

Question: Thanks for that. On the school's issue and correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think there's about 45 public schools in, I think they're in red zones that the Governor said on Friday could be opened. And you said you were going to take a look at it. What’s the plan for those schools? Are you going to try to reopen them? 

Mayor: Yeah, there's a first of all, just updating you on the numbers. It was 45 before the State changed the red zone maps. So, the red zone map has now greatly decreased. That's a really good thing. As you saw the State's most recent action late last week, a number of red zone areas of Brooklyn were taken out of red, went into yellow. A bunch of red – excuse me, a bunch of yellow zone areas in Brooklyn and Queens went out of yellow zone, went to green, all good. So now in the much smaller red zone area of Brooklyn, which is just a handful of ZIP codes, there are 22 schools, 22 public schools in the remaining red zone areas. Again, we're going to stand back, continue to hope that the progress in the red zones takes those areas out of the red zone altogether, at which point we'll reopen those schools. In the areas that have gone from red to yellow, those schools will open on Thursday. Wednesday is a holiday, obviously for Veterans Day, those schools will open on Thursday, the ones that are now in yellow zones in Brooklyn that had previously been in red zones. So that's about again, 20 plus schools that will be opening on Thursday. 

Okay, everyone. Look, as we conclude today, I want to go back to something that Dr. Choksi said a really, really simple thought. I love nothing more than when a few words can remind us what we need to do, how we have to keep everyone safe, six feet and a mask. Five simple words, right? Six feet and a mask. That's what's going to make the difference here. So we're up against a real challenge. Every one of us is, we're showing you the numbers neighbor by neighbor – we're showing neighborhood by neighborhood. We're showing you City numbers. We're showing you the data. We're showing you the science, and we're telling you, there is a danger of a second wave hitting New York City. And we have to act immediately, immediately to turn this around. Everyone can be a part of it, every single New Yorker can be a part of it. And if you are fearful right now, if you're worried, I don't blame you at all. But I do remind you, you did this before. You overcame something horrendous, horrible, overwhelming before in March and April. Remember what we went through, but you overcame that. You did that. Because you put on those masks, you practiced the distancing, you made the changes and you fought back the disease. We did it before. We need to do it again right now. Thanks, everyone.

2020-11-10 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. We have been through so much over the last eight months in the city. From the beginning of this crisis, we understood we'd be in for a very, very tough time, but we also knew that New Yorkers would work together, would look for every possible solution, every way to handle something harder than we'd ever dealt with before. And that's what New Yorkers did. That's what everyone did, came together, found a way forward, created something out of nothing, found solutions we didn't even know we had. And that's how we've gotten to the point we're at now. We've got a lot more to do to overcome the coronavirus and then to rebuild our city, to bring back our city – and really important to say, not just to bring it back to the way it was, not just to recreate a status quo that wasn't good enough, but to go farther to see that this city can do even better in the future. And that's what we will do. We have to, we just have to, we have to create something better, and we have to learn from this crisis. It pointed out such horrible disparities that we have to address, but it also brought issues to the fore in a new way. And nowhere is that more true than on the topic of mental health.   

In this crisis, New Yorkers have suffered. Families have gone through such trauma, such dislocation, so much pain. Think of the families of this city. Think of the families that lost a loved one, particularly a cherished elder, in this crisis. Think of the children who are trying to understand how their lives could be so disrupted. Think of what they're going through. Think about the parents, worried for their children. And think about what it means if someone's dealing with a mental health challenge already to then deal with that mental health challenge in the midst of this kind of crisis, think of all the people out there who feel alone, who feel desperate. We have to address their needs, and we have to do it in new ways. So, today we're going to talk about how we will fundamentally change the approach to mental health emergencies in this city. And to tell you about this change, I will introduce you now, the strongest voice for mental health reform in this city and someone who has really changed the conversation profoundly and shown us what is possible when it comes to treating mental illness and reaching all New Yorkers, our First Lady Chirlane McCray.  

First Lady Chirlane McCray: Good morning, everyone. And thank you, Bill. As Bill said, this has been a day a long time coming, long time. And I'm proud to announce that starting early in the new year, we will launch new Mental Health Teams that will respond to 9-1-1 health calls, mental health calls, across priority neighborhoods. Like all breakthroughs in mental health care, this is a testament to teamwork and partnership. I thank everyone at the FDNY’s Emergency Medical Services, Health + Hospitals, and the Mayor's Office of Thrive NYC for their hard work and compassion. Thank you to the Department of Health and the NYPD for their partnership as we bring this pilot to life. And I thank all of the advocates and experts who have shared their ideas and helped inform this plan.  

Today's announcement is another example of how we continue to transform mental health care in this city. This is the first time in our history that health professionals will be the default responders to mental health emergencies. Treating mental health crises as mental health challenges and not public safety ones is the modern and more appropriate approach. And that is because most individuals with psychiatric concerns are much more likely to be victims or harm themselves than others. Of the more than 170,000 mental health calls to 9-1-1 last year – and I'm going to repeat that number – 170,000 mental health calls to 9-1-1, an estimated one call every three minutes, the majority concern, people who just needed help. Our goal, overall, is to prevent these crises from happening. But when they do, we want to provide better and more compassionate support. That's why we have retrained tens of thousands of NYPD officers in crisis intervention, helping them to better recognize signs of emotional distress and how to deescalate tense situations. With these Mental Health Teams, we will test the model where we relieve police officers of those responsibilities, which in many cases they should never have been asked to shoulder.   

Each team will have a member of emergency medical services and a mental health professional. We will start by piloting these teams in two high-need communities. These are neighborhoods that have been underserved for far too long and have been hit hard by COVID-19. In these communities, too many New Yorkers have not received the primary and preventive care or ongoing care that they've needed. When we were planning this announcement, I thought back to an email that I received some months ago from a mother in Brooklyn, it was one of the most difficult messages a mother could ever write. She told me about how her son had struggled with his mental health, about his breakdowns, and how they'd become worse. And I'll never forget her last line. “I'm exhausted,” she wrote, “but I do not want to give up on my son.” We don't want anyone to feel like they have to give up on a family member or a neighbor or a loved one. That's why knowing where to turn for help and support and feeling comfortable with the kind of care that is provided is so important. And remember, by acting early, we can often prevent a crisis long before it ever happens.   

So, don't wait. If you, or a loved one notices a troubling change in behavior or warning signs like extreme mood swings, changes in eating or sleeping habits, or long-lasting sadness. There is support available. Professional help is available anytime of night or day, that's 24/7, through NYC Well and NYC Care. Guaranteed, no matter what language you speak, it doesn't matter if you're insured or not insured. No one is turned away. Whether your family is in a moment of crisis, or you just need someone to talk to, to process these feelings, you are not alone. Thank you.  

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chirlane. And what you said at the end there is so powerful, the story of that mom. And a reminder to us all that help is always there. This is what our First Lady has worked on, to create that help for everyone, to make it available, and make it available for free. We can't say that enough times. When you call 888-NYC-WELL the help you get is free. And we need innovations like that to keep reaching people. And that's why today's announcement is so important. Helping people in a time of crisis and emergency with a new approach. Now we're going to lean on our first responders from the FDNY to help bring this idea to life, to achieve something different and important, first in a few neighborhoods and then with the goal of going all across our city. This is a major innovation. This is a big change in how things are done and helping to lead this effort is a great innovator who has really helped move the FDNY forward on a number of fronts. I'm thrilled she's here with us today to talk about the way she and her department will be pivots to this whole process. The First Deputy Commissioner for the Fire Department of New York City, Laura Kavanagh.  

First Deputy Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, FDNY: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. There is a mental health crisis in this country. Here in New York City, part of the remedy to this crisis is how we respond to and treat patients with mental illness. This new program will greatly improve mental health care for New Yorkers in need. The FDNY takes great pride in helping to lead the way on the Mayor's new initiative. Members of FDNY EMS are the best caregivers of any 9-1-1 system. They've been at this for a long time. They know how to get there quickly, make good assessments, and have always provided the highest level of care. The FDNY has the best emergency medical system in the country. That doesn't happen on its own. It takes hard work and dedication from our EMTs and medics. The department supports their efforts through improved training and by adding resources where they are so needed. So, we will be adding the expertise of trained social workers to our EMS response. These new EMS Mental Health Teams will specifically focus on mental health emergencies. Pairing mental health professionals with well-trained members of EMS will provide better patient care and better outcomes.   

The FDNY is partnering with Health, H + H, NYPD and, Thrive New York City. Together we will identify two communities with high levels of 9-1-1 mental health calls and local resources. The safety of our members and of the public is paramount. So, in those cases where the police are needed to protect lives, they will also be a part of the response. Over the next few months, all five agencies with input from advocates, community-based providers, as well as our members in EMS and their union representation, will develop the right protocols, provide training for these new teams, and be ready to work on the ground in February. We have a lot of details to work through, but I'm confident that working together, we will ensure a strong health-centered response to what are truly health emergencies.  

Mayor: Thank you so much, Laura. And look, this is a brand-new approach and it's taken an extraordinary team to pull it together. And let's be clear, it's a health-centered approach, which means that we need health care leadership to design the approach, train everyone involved in how to do this best, and we've gotten that leadership from a leader of our public health system, Dr. Charles Barron, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for New York City Health + Hospitals. I want to thank him and his team for helping to lead the way with this brand-new approach. Dr. Barron, we welcome you.  

Deputy Chief Medical Officer Charles Barron, Health + Hospitals: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Health + Hospitals is very pleased to be a part of this exciting new collaboration providing new mental health services to the most needy of our city. Health + Hospitals has always been the city's health safety net and providing high quality mental health care is a critical part of Health + Hospital's mission. Whether it's in our behavioral health clinics, our emergency rooms, our inpatient services, or any other level of care that we provide through our extensive system of hospitals, we provided behavioral health care to people in crisis. We understand how to assess need, to deescalate tensions, and to make sure that people are getting the right level of care and where they need it. We are looking forward to working with our partner agencies to learn and help conduct trainings for the new Mental Health Teams to participate in ongoing case conferences and to help design and develop these. We are pleased to work with EMS to share our experiences and support in this exciting new initiative that will greatly benefit those who most need it in those in crisis and ensure that people in distress in New York City are getting the care that they need. Thank you.  

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dr. Barron. And again, everyone has worked hard on this. This is something people feel passionate about in our whole mental health team. And I want to give a special thanks to someone who's on the phone with us today, Susan Herman, Director of Thrive NYC. Susan, thank you for all you have done to bring all these pieces together. It is not easy to get all these different agencies that have so much on their plate already to come together in common cause, but this is the kind of change innovation we need. And I know that you have made it your business to bring everyone to this mission and to make sure it's done right. And that's one thing that we emphasize. This is something new. We have to get it right from the beginning so that it can become something much bigger for the City of New York and for people who need our help. So, special thank you to Susan Herman today.   

All right, let me now turn to a very different topic, but one that is also an example of City agencies going above and beyond. And you know, we're at a point where we sometimes take for granted the way our City employees have just done extraordinary things. We're in the middle of a crisis, we all have to get used to fighting back against the coronavirus, but it's time also to take stock of some of the mountains that have been moved by public servants, who really wanted to be there for the people. And let's look at our Department of Education where they had to create in the middle of a crisis, whole new approaches, remote learning, a whole new approach to in-person education that now has become the gold standard of the nation. It's really astounding to see the incredible work done by everyone, the educators, the school staff, the folks who work at DOE headquarters because they had a herculean task and they managed to actually bring all these pieces together with the help of a lot of other agencies too. I want to thank all the other agencies that helped, but our schools now, that gold standard for health and safety, extraordinarily safe. And this is a time that we've delineated to the parents of this city and our students to make a decision that works for them on whether in-person learning or blended learning, as we call it, whether that's better for them or whether remote learning is better.   

So, here is the opportunity to make that choice in our opt-in period. Now the opt-in period will go through this Sunday, November 15th. And, again, we now have a body of evidence of what's happening in our schools, especially the safety. There's been an astounding level of testing, and I want to quote these numbers again, the latest numbers, I have – 107,900 test results from students and staff in New York City public schools, only 172 cases. And this is going all the way back to the middle of September. That is a 0.16 percent positivity rate, unbelievably good. So, parents, if you prefer blended learning for your child, if you prefer for them to spend part of the week in in-person learning in a school, you have until Sunday, November 15th, and all you have to do is go online at schools.nyc.gov/returntoschool2020. Now we're going to make clear to everyone, going forward we have a simple, positive expectation. If a family chooses blended learning, we want them to take full advantage of that opportunity. That means the child is expected to be in school on the days that are assigned to them for in-person learning. We're going to the new period, we're going into now, at the end of November, beginning of December, we're going to hold to that simple standard. If a family prefers remote, fully understood, and we will accommodate them in remote, but if they prefer in-person learning, blended learning, we want them to take full advantage of it.  

And the idea is straightforward. We want every child to benefit the most, but also if a family actually doesn't choose to use the blended learning, we want those seats to be available for other kids who really do want and need that in-person education. And we want to give them as many days per week as possible. It turns out if some parents decide blended is not for them, that means those seats could be used potentially more often by other children who do want – whose families do want them in school. So, we're going to work hard to make that all come together the right way. And starting at the end of November, we're going to reach out to families. If a family has got a child in blended learning and it's going well, and the child's attending class regularly, that's great. If for some reason, a child is still not attending at the end of November, beginning of December, each school will have a conversation with that family to make sure blended learning is the right choice, and once and for all figure out for them, what works best because what we want in the end is the best choice for each family. And we want every seat to be filled the maximum amount of time possible so children who do want to be in school, get the very best.   

Okay, now let's turn to our daily indicators, and I'm going to talk about these as we go along. Because again, we're seeing a lot of important information here, a lot of concerns that we need to talk about. So, number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, that threshold is 200 patients. Today’s report, 92 patients, confirmed positivity level of 29.4 percent. So, what do we see here? 92 patients is higher than many days in the last few weeks. It still remains a level that the city can handle. Of course, we don't want any patients in our hospital for COVID. And that positivity level too, that's higher than we've seen in recent days, but it's a lot lower than what we saw in the spring. So, this indicator is telling us, be concerned, but so far still not seeing the bigger surge either in terms of the number of patients or the positivity level. And we need to stave that off through our actions.   

The next one, this is an area of tremendous concern, the new reported cases on a seven-day average. Threshold, 550. Unfortunately, we far surpassed that, 795 cases. Again, I'll keep saying our testing capacity has gone up much, much higher. You know, a few months ago we had about 50,000 tests a day we could do. Now we're up around 80,000 tests a day. So, some of this is just more testing and more New Yorkers getting tested, but some of it obviously indicates a problem and that will be obvious in our positivity rates. Again, number three percentage of people testing, citywide, positive for COVID-19, threshold is five percent. Today's report, very worrisome, 2.88 percent for the day. Let's look at the seven-day rolling average. That's the truest figure. That's 2.31 percent. Not someplace we'd want to be, still time clearly to turn back the second wave still. If we do the work possible for all of us to do, we can turn this back, but this is a warning sign if ever I've seen one that we have some work to do quickly to make sure the city stays safe and we do not have that second wave. Okay, I'm going to say a few words in Spanish, and I'm going to go back to the first topic that we talked about, which is the effort to help those with mental health challenges –  

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]  

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. And please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.  

Moderator: We will now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by First Lady Chirlane McCray, by Dr. Chokshi, by First Deputy Commissioner of the FDNY Laura Kavanagh, by Dr. Charles Baron the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the Office of Behavioral Health, by Thrive NYC Director Susan Herman, by Donald Conyers the First Deputy Chancellor of the Department of Education, and by Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. First question today, it goes to Narmeen from PIX 11.  

Question: Hey, good morning, everyone. Good morning, Mayor.   

Mayor: How are you doing today?  

Question: Doing well, thank you. I wanted to understand one – kind of a two-parter. In terms of talking about the language of “second wave” or “not a second wave,” I feel like New Yorkers are hearing a little bit of differing language from different leaders, from yourself and perhaps you know, the head of the Health Committee at the Council. And I wonder if you can provide some clarification for New Yorkers who might be confused about the language they're hearing, but also sticking to that, do we have a bit of a different methodology happening right now when identifying this micro cluster strategy that we saw take place in Brooklyn and Queens, and now we're seeing areas of Staten Island like Tottenville have seven percent, Richmond Hill from yesterday's numbers, 4.43; Hollis, 3.8; for East New York at four percent. It seems like we've kind of surpassed that threshold that we had in the past and not seeing restrictions go into place just yet [inaudible] –   

Mayor: Sure. Important questions. Let me say it this way. First of all, this a conversation that we've had with our health care leadership. So, respect greatly our colleagues in, you know, the City Council, State Legislature, other folks, but I want to really focus our attention on our health care leadership on the proven professionals who are making these assessments. Everyone's very worried that a second wave is near, but the question I have asked literally every day is, is there still a chance to fight it back, is there still a chance to stay where we are right now, basically? And, let's talk about that. It is so important to understand. Where is New York City right now? We went through phases one through four. We reopened so much of the life of the city, the businesses, the employment, people got their jobs and livelihoods back, schools opened. There's a lot of activity out there. Can we sustain this if we can fight back this second wave and end up where we are or better? Yes, because right now you can see it with your own eyes. Life in New York City is going on. It's working. Thank God the hospitalization level is still relatively low. Our hospital systems are doing fine. We are protecting people. Thank God, very few people passing away. So, if you said, could we continue like this and keep fighting until we got to a vaccine that we could believe in? The answer is yes. And the fact that Joe Biden will be our next president is really important here because I think it maximizes the chance that we'll have a vaccine that will work and that will be trusted and that people will be ready to take. And that will be part of our comeback obviously. But that's why it's so important to understand we believe we still can fight back the second wave. We saw amazing evidence of the ability of New Yorkers to hear the message and do something about it back in March, April, May. So, we believe we can still fight this back. If these indicators keep going up across all three areas we talk about, then that's a different discussion, obviously, but there's still a chance to turn this around.   

On the question of the approach to the ZIP codes, you are seeing something that's different, but I want to remind you why it's different. With Brooklyn and Queens, we saw very high numbers, numbers that went far beyond what you're seeing today, in a number of those neighborhoods, and numbers that indicated a much bigger problem, a whole swath of Brooklyn, a whole swath of Queens, interrelated communities, and a problem that had spread intensely. What you're seeing today in the ZIP codes is a challenge for sure, but it's much closer to what we experienced back in the late summer when we had the problem, for example, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, or the problem in Soundview in the Bronx. And we're able to go in there with more testing, more mask distribution, more outreach, and turn it around. We still think that can work in these communities. So, we want the ZIP code data out. We want to inform people. We want to empower people with that information, but we also want to put it out there with the understanding that if we act quickly and if people go out and get tested, we are convinced we can still turn things around in these neighborhoods. Go ahead.  

Question: Mayor, thank you for that. Also, yesterday, Dr. Long talked about tracking these numbers, what contact tracers found in terms of ten percent being tracked and linked to travel another five to ten percent linked to indoor gatherings. I'm curious about the other, kind of, 80 percent. What are we finding that those are linked to? Is it community transmission or do we just not know for sure just yet?  

Mayor: Yeah. It's another important question. I thank you. What has been really striking and we went over it after yesterday morning’s press conferences. Again, we have not had major events or major gatherings be the cause of spread that we've been able to identify. So it really is something much more generalized. I’ll turn to Dr. Varma and Dr. Chokshi, great question. You know, where is that other 80 percent coming from? And maybe you could define a little bit more what this kind of community spread means, you know as we're still fighting back a second wave, what it means to have this kind of generalized situation? Go ahead, Dr. Varma. 

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Thank you for the question. And I realized this is very challenging for people to understand. So first of all, just an explanation, you know, it's very difficult, even when you have relatively low-level transmission to know for sure how any one person got infected. There are some situations that are very obvious. They live in the household with somebody else. There are other situations that are pretty obvious, like they live or work in a congregate setting where there's a very high risk of transmission, such as a nursing home. But for many other situations it can be difficult. So now one of the difficulties that we have right now and one of the reasons we're so concerned is that the proportion of cases that we can assign to a common risk factor like attending a gathering, being in one of those congregate settings, having recently traveled, that proportion of unknown attributions of people that can't attribute your source has been increasing over time. So that is one of the major warning signs that we have been tracking and been concerned about. So, in addition to what Dr. Long had said yesterday about association with gathering that's around five percent or so we still see somewhere around five or five percent or so of our cases that are associated with congregate settings. Like for example, nursing home facilities. We see around ten percent of our cases are due to travel. It's possible, of course, that that could be an underestimate because people don't always faithfully report it. But we normally think it's right now, it's about ten percent. That's down from what it was before, when it used to be as high as 20 percent. But then the vast majority of the remainder is somewhere probably around 50 percent or more we don't have a way to directly attribute their source of infection. And that's a concern. 

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi, you want to add? 

Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Well, Dr. Varma explained it well. There's just one piece that I do want to add to this, which is sometimes when we discussed this, we skip over what we already know with respect to the epidemiological characteristics of the virus. Which is that the most common reason for someone to get infected is through encountering someone else who is infected, but they don't know it yet. Meaning they're asymptomatic. And those cases of transmission are more likely to occur when someone is indoors and particularly when someone is indoors and unmasked. So even as we continue to elucidate the phenomenon here, in terms of how transmission is occurring, the actions are very clear. Particularly with respect to maintaining social distance as well as keeping your face covering on at all times, but particularly indoors. 

Moderator: The next is Katie from the Wall Street Journal. 

Question: Hey, good morning, Mayor de Blasio. I just have a quick question – of your major announcement today with the pilot program with mental health experts coming in, what are the two neighborhoods that will be piloted? 

Mayor: So, I think that is still being finalized, but I'll turn to Chirlane and turn to Susan Herman, if you want to speak to that? 

First Lady McCray: The neighborhoods have not been selected yet, but they will be high need neighborhoods. They will be neighborhoods where there are an abundance of calls being made to 9-1-1 attributed to mental health crises. We have a planning process in place and the neighborhoods will be determined over the course of the next couple of months. 

Mayor: Susan, you want to add? 

Director Susan Herman, Mayor’s Office of ThriveNYC: I couldn't have said it better. We'll be working with the Department of Health, Health + Hospitals, FDNY and certainly the NYPD to select neighborhoods that have already shown high levels of 9-1-1 emergency mental health crises over the years. Places that have local resources and places where we have programs in place that can bolster this response. So we will know these neighborhoods soon. 

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Katie. 

Question: Thanks. And my second question is about the COVID-19 outreach on Staten Island. I'm curious, it’s a brief two-parter. I have a colleague there on Staten Island right now, I guess she said that in a lot of the testing sites, there's just nobody really there compared to some of the other testing sites that had set up in other areas that saw an uptick. I don't know if that speaks to outreach being done. And my second part of that is, you know, given the – do you think and maybe Dr. Long can answer, is there any sort of connection to like political ideology on Staten Island in terms of perhaps not believing that COVID is as serious as it is? Or an aversion to wearing masks based on some political ideology knowing the recent demographics from the presidential election? I don't know if you have any thoughts on that? 

Mayor: Let me just speak to the – combined the two points and then to see if Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Long is not on, but Dr. Chokshi might have something to add. We've seen in – when we first went into Sunset Park, when we first went into Soundview, there is a ramp up that is needed. People need to hear the news that there's a need to go out and get tested, and it really matters to get tested in this particular community. They have to hear that testing is available nearby. That it's, you know, easy to get to. They can get through it quick. It's never surprising to me when some locations have, you know, fewer people come to them initially, I think it builds up, but that's what the outreach effort is all about. On the question of ideology. I think that's not something we have an easy way to trace. But what we have seen across every kind of community, remember we've now had experience – the original experience, Sunset Park, Soundview, Southeast Queens. Then the experience in Brooklyn that became a lot of Brooklyn, a lot of Queens. Places with very different specific beliefs. We saw ultimately high levels of testing everywhere. Once the word spread, once the outreach occurred and particularly the more we engaged community leaders and community organizations, the more and more people got tested. Dr. Chokshi do you want to add? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll just add briefly to it to say exactly as the Mayor has said. We know this virus doesn't respect any boundaries, whether they're geographic or you know, with respect to political ideology. And really our job particularly as a doctor, is to make sure that we bring to bear everything that we possibly can to prevent people from getting this horrible virus. With respect to the outreach on Staten Island, you know, today is the day of action. I want to ask all of you to help us get the word out as well, with respect to the testing sites that have been made available there. The community organizations that we're working with, including Community Health Action of Staten Island, Project Hospitality, the Child Center of New York, all of them have helped us to get the word out. We're doing robocalls, we're working with the Borough President's office as well. And so it's an all hands on deck effort particularly today, but then continuing through the rest of this week as well. 

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS 880. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and all on the call. How are you doing? 

Mayor: Good Rich. How are you doing today? 

Question: Well, I'm doing all right. Mr. Mayor, so in regard to the virus and the increases you've seen. Is you know, is there a point, and I'm not a mathematician or an epidemiologist obviously. But is there a point of no return where you've got the momentum that can't be turned around, the exponential increase just to, you know, leads you to believe you've got to stop things for a while, go into a pause? 

Mayor: Yeah, look. Two points. Rich. First of all, I'm glad you said the point for a while, because even though we are absolutely focused on alerting everyone to the dangers of a second wave, what it would mean for us, the need for everyone to where masks, practice distancing, all the things that we are urgently trying to communicate here. It is also important to remember that if, God forbid, we did have to have restrictions the goal would be only for the period of time they were needed. And even, you know, in these last weeks, we've seen an example of that. Brooklyn and Queens had a really serious problem in certain neighborhoods. It took some weeks to turn around, but it did turn around and you've heard the announcements from the State this week. You know, now all of Queens is out of the more serious restrictions, Brooklyn almost out as well. 
So that's an example of, you know what goes up must come down. If we do end up with a problem, we can fight it back and overcome those restrictions as well. 

But here's the measure I think is straightforward Rich, to your question. Look at these three indicators. Obviously if that hospital number goes up to or above the thresholds we're talking about, that's a very, very clear indicator of something that's gotten much worse and that's going to create more of a challenge for our health care system. Right now, our health care system is doing very well, but if we saw that number go up above the threshold that would be basically a doubling of where we are now. That's a tremendous concern. Case numbers are already too high. Positivity, the official threshold is five percent, at that level certainly you would be seeing serious restrictions, but even at three percent on the seven-day rolling average, that's when we would have our schools go all remote for a period of time. So, I think these indicators actually tell you very, very clearly when we're getting to that point that you would define as the second wave having fully arrived. Again, what our health care leaders are saying is it can be stopped, but it's going to take everyone doing the right thing to stop this second wave.

Moderator: The next is Gloria from NY1. 

Question: Mr. Mayor, good morning. I’m wondering if you could speak to this announcement you're making today. I understand the City had originally supposed to launch this pilot and there had been a delay. And I'm also wondering about the potentially violent – what I'm trying to say is unfortunately the people who in the city who have been killed by police because they were having a mental health episode and maybe they had a weapon or police deemed them to be dangerous somehow. How is the program going to address that specific kind of call? If it’s a person that is you know, having some sort of episode, but that is also somehow maybe armed or might have a weapon or someone has been determined to might be violent. Will the NYPD still be involved somehow? 

Mayor: Gloria really important question. And let me start by saying, this is part of why it took a lot of careful patient work with public safety leaders, health leaders, mental health leaders, physical health leaders to really think through how to get this to work the right way. And how to come up with an entirely different model and then try it out in a place where there's tremendous need. And again, the hope is that's going to prove its efficacy, and then we can go a lot farther with it. So, these are the very questions that were asked in this very careful process. I'm going to turn to, in order our First Lady and then our Director for Thrive Susan Herman, and First Deputy Commissioner Laura Kavanagh. Each might bring a different perspective here to that question, but we really worked carefully to make sure that everyone will be safe. 

First Lady McCray: It's very important to recognize that of the more than again, 170,000 calls were made last year, 170,000 mental health calls were made to 9-1-1 and the majority of them involved people who had no – there was no indication of violence at all. There is a myth out there that people who suffer from a mental illness are violent. And that is one of the things that we've worked very hard to dispel with the work that we've been doing around mental health. Now, in those cases, when someone calls and it is indicated that that someone has a weapon or has a violent behavior, an NYPD officer will be dispatched along with the mental health professional and EMS to – but the health professionals will be in charge of coordinating the effort. The NYPD officer will be there as backup and to ensure the safety of everyone involved. 

Mayor: Susan. You want to add? 

Director Herman: Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think the – I'd like to explain, Gloria mentioned the pilot that was discussed. I'd like to try and explain that the co-response teams that a lot of people are familiar with now of police officers and clinicians typically act in proactive ways to either prevent a crisis from occurring in the first place, because someone has signaled that they're worried about somebody's violent behavior, or they help stabilize people after a crisis. We had planned a pilot where these co-response teams of officers and clinicians would respond in 9-1-1 calls. We put that pilot on pause. We're holding off on that to see if a much more, even more health centered approach to these kinds of mental health emergencies would be successful in New York as it has been elsewhere. And we believe that working together, developing the right protocols as the First Lady mentioned, we can make sure that when it is a truly dangerous situation, the NYPD will be there as they always have. But we will still have these new teams of physical health and mental health experts to manage the situation as well as possible. But the NYPD will be there when we know that it's an absolutely dangerous situation. 

Mayor: Okay, Laura, you want to add? 

First Deputy Commissioner Kavanagh: I would just echo that, that we are talking about the non-violent mental health calls, which are the vast majority of mental health calls. And in the cases where violence could be a possibility the police will be responding with us as they have before. And that will not change. It is of great importance to us that our members are safe and the public is safe as well. 

Mayor: Thank you very much. Go ahead, Gloria. 

Question: Thank you. I wanted to – on a different topic here, Mr. Mayor, I know you've put out guidance for the holidays and you are asking New Yorkers and not to travel, but I'm curious if there's more specific guidance given the wide availability of testing that we have now, I've heard from people who are planning to gather, but you know, are going to test before they gather. They're going to make sure, you know, if they're going to see an older relative that they're testing, that their relatives are testing. Even though these people might not be all be part of the same household, but they live in the same city. Is that something you are advising against? 

Mayor: I'll start and turn to Dr. Chokshi. Look, Gloria, I'm going to again, speak personally. You know, I'm not going to see some of the people I love the most for Thanksgiving and Christmas and it pains me. It really does. It's the – I think literally the first time in my life that I will be missing some of the people that would always be there. And I hate that. And I really -- just it’s agonizing. But the thing we have to think about deep down is the greatest gift we can give to those we love is keep them safe. And the greatest gift we can give each other is to end this coronavirus era once and for all. And if we inadvertently spread it, what Dr. Chokshi said earlier, that a lot of folks or Dr. Varma said – a lot of folks who spread the disease don't even know they have it. And even between the time you take a test and get a result, you still can contract it. I would urge tremendous caution. Focus on virtual celebrations, small celebrations, just with those in the same household to the maximum extent possible, really, really be safe. Because this, I really believe in my heart, Gloria will be the last time, these holidays will be the last time we have to deal with the coronavirus in this way. By next holiday season 2021, I thoroughly believe we'll be in a whole new reality where the vast majority of people will have been vaccinated and life can be a lot more normal. Dr. Chokshi do you want to add? 

Commissioner Chokshi: The Mayor said it well. The way that I would encapsulate it is, we have to think about safe, safer, and safest. And, certainly, when it comes to our holiday guidance we're emphasizing what the safest options are for New Yorkers around celebrating the holidays. With respect to travel, that is to not travel. If, for whatever reason, it is it is absolutely necessary to travel during this period, then the safer route is to make sure that you follow the New York State quarantine requirements and do that diligently, you know, as is laid out. And we do encourage testing, you know, more broadly not just around that the quarantine requirements, but for all New Yorkers to get tested as we head into the cooler months. 

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.  

Moderator: The next is Bob Hennelly from the Chief Leader. 

Question: Good morning, everyone. On this major pivot announcement of 9-1-1 mental health crisis is being diverted, at least in this limited project, I wanted to ask you and your subject matter experts about the rationale for the shift. Is it the working assumption that by having unarmed first responders respond, we can de-conflict that initial interaction between the at-risk person and the responders? 

Mayor: Bob, I'll be the layman who goes first. And then, the many experts here will speak to the details better. Again, I think we’ve got to see the forest for the trees – 170,000 mental health calls to 9-1-1 each year, the vast, vast majority are people who pose no threat to themselves or anybody else. We unfortunately have remembered those tragic moments where someone – you know, where a call came in, someone had a knife, someone had a gun, someone had a history of violence. Those are rare, very rare. They get a lot of media attention, understandably, but they're very rare. So, the vast majority of cases, you're talking about – you have an opportunity for a peaceful outcome with a health-centered approach. And that's what we are focusing on here. And, obviously, if you have proven professionals addressing people, they’re going to be best able to get to a good outcome. 

First Lady McCray: The Mayor said it exactly right – someone who is suffering, someone who has maybe been a victim of harm, or is thinking about harming themself is a very delicate position and we want that person to be treated with compassion and sensitivity. The vast majority of people in a mental health crisis need that kind of handling to get them connected to the appropriate care. And it requires the right kind of training and people who know how to de-escalate tense situations – and that's not what we've had. And when it's not done properly, when these people are not encountered and handled properly, it can be traumatizing for them. We don't – we do not want to make a bad situation worse for anyone. What we want are very good long-term outcomes. And when people that are in crisis, it means that they need to get immediate care and then usually some long-time care as well. 

Mayor: Let me see amongst our other colleagues, Susan, or Dr. Barron, First Deputy Commissioner Kavanagh, if anyone wants to add. So, Susan, you first, do you have something you want to add? 

Director Herman: Yes. Thank you. I think the operating assumption here is that we are trying to see these situations for what they are, which is typically an emergency that has a mental health emergency that has developed over many years where people who need help haven't gotten the help they need, people haven't known where to get help or people haven't stayed in treatment because it's been too hard to access. If you start to see these as truly mental health crisis, you want to center your response in a public health or a health-oriented response. We will continue to provide terrific coordinated service between the NYPD and EMS throughout the city. But in these two precincts, we are hoping and we want to see that leading with a health response will get people better assessed and to the care and the level – the appropriate level of care that they need faster. So, we're trying to see these situations for what they are.  

Mayor: Dr. Barron? 

Director Barron: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think that everyone is so far as really characterized this correctly. It's really an addition to some of the services that we've already been doing through 9-1-1, through EMS, and the NYPD. The vast majority of these are non-violent episodes and having a mental health professional to assess the situation and begin to determine what is needed and rapidly get them to that situation, or being able to even provide a lot of de-escalation, or clinical intervention and establishing a relationship can really change the outcome of a mental health crisis for a person and their family and support system. So, I think it's more of an addition to do that. And, certainly, if there are violent situations then they will be able to assist the police and FDNY in really handling this in an inappropriate way.  

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Bob. 

Question: Yeah. Well, just in the name of FDNY EMT Yadira Arroyo, who was killed a couple of years ago, allegedly by an individual with mental health problems. I’d like to find out from the administration the degree in which you've consulted with the unions – EMS unions, you know are really are subject to vast pay and benefit disparity now and I've already born such an oversized hit from the coronavirus. 

Mayor: Look, Bob, I remember very, very well painfully the loss of Yadira Arroyo and the heroic way she served this city. So, we're very, very aware that all those services in the frontline need to be protected. And, in fact, there was a lot of discussion to think about the right way to do this and First Deputy Commissioner Kavanagh was deeply involved in that, so I'll turn to her.  

First Deputy Commissioner Kavanagh: Yeah, like I said before, and, as the Mayor echoed, 
the safety of our members is paramount and the members of EMS and the members of the union are going to be intricately involved in planning this process over the next few months so we can ensure their safety as we ensure the success of this program and the safety of the public.  

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: The next is Juliet from 1010 WINS.  

Question: Oh, hi. Good morning, all. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today? 

Mayor: All right, Juliet. How are you doing? 

Question: I’m okay, thank you. Given the news about Pfizer and Biotech’s results for the vaccine, have you further fleshed down your plans to distribute that here? And are you concerned over whether the Trump administration, you know, what their distribution plan would be if this happens late [inaudible] – 
  
Mayor: Yes, I'm concerned, but I'm a lot less concerned than I was a week ago, because I think at some point I think the adults in the room will prevail and there will be a recognition in the Trump administration that there has to be an orderly transition and that's going to help ensure that whatever happens with the vaccine is done more consistently. Clearly, the person who's going to be have the biggest impact on the future of a vaccine in this country is Joe Biden. As our president, he's going to set the framework. And, again, I think he'll create the trust we need so that people can believe in the vaccine and buy into it. In terms of our ability to distribute the vaccine, again, with a priority first on health care workers and first responders, and those in greatest need. I'll turn to our Health Commissioner, because Department of Health will lead the way. And, again, they have a lot of experience, including heroic experience over the course of decades in the city in acting on vaccines quickly. So, Dr. Choksi, presuming we actually had a substantial supply come into this city, why don't you reaffirm your readiness to use it and get it to the right folks. 

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you for the question. In a sentence, we are ready. When a safe and effective vaccine becomes available, we stand ready to coordinate with our clinicians around the city with hospitals and other health care settings, as well as with our State and federal counterparts to distribute the vaccine. I'll just comment briefly on the announcement from yesterday, which, although preliminary with respect to the results from the Pfizer [inaudible] vaccine was certainly encouraging to see with respect to the efficacy of that vaccine. It continues to be tested in a large clinical trial and we have to follow the science to make sure that that it is both safe and effective. The other thing to keep in mind with respect to that particular vaccine is that it requires what's called ultra-cold storage – you know, minus 70, minus 80-degree temperature. And that is something that we had anticipated and that we have built into our plans with respect to how it would begin to be distributed across New York City. 

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Juliet. 

Question: Okay, great. Thank you both. So, on a much lighter note there are reports that the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree has been selected upstate and will be here in early December. So, I'm wondering if there will be a ceremony or a tree lighting? And even without tourists, how do you plan to handle crowd control if, or probably when people want to come and see it? 

Mayor: Well, that is a really positive report, Juliet. This is something really special each year for this city, and, I don't know about you, but I still have a kind of childlike wonder when the light's gone in that tree each year. You know, it brings back something very special for me. And we want that to be a great experience, especially in the middle of everything people are dealing with. We'll get you an update on how we're going to handle that. I think people understand that we have to be really careful with the danger of a second wave, but we're going to take extra precautions to make sure that if people are trying to go by to see it, that we can keep it to the right number of folks at any given time. We'll get you an update on how we're going to handle that.  

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Marcia from WCBS.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?  

Mayor: Good, Marcia. How have you been?  

Question: So, my first question has to do with the COVID numbers going up. I wonder if you – as an impetus to get people to cooperate, if you could talk about the kinds of restrictions that people could be looking at with the numbers of 2.8? Are you looking at changing what goes on in indoor dining? Are you looking at closing small and non-essential businesses? Are you looking at schools? And I wonder, when you look at what New Jersey is doing, which is not to close things, but to restrict hours, if that is something that you would also look at as a possible response to increasing numbers? 

Mayor: Thank you, Marcia – really, really important question. I think you're exactly right, that it helps people to visualize both victory but also challenges, and it helps people understand. Look, the victory side of the equation, I want to make clear, we still can fight back the second wave, hold on, keep life in this city, going the way it is and get to the point where the vaccine is here. That's still possible, but it is getting tighter and tighter and we need to fight back with everything we’ve got. And that means everybody is responsible. So, those personal choices around the mask wearing and being particularly careful indoors, social distancing, what kind of gatherings you have or don't have, travel – you know, all of this are going to be the personal choices New Yorkers make. It will all add up. And this is the whole ballgame. So, to your question, look, the seven-day rolling average, Marcia, is really where we need to look. That's at 2.31 percent. If that keeps going up, obviously if that goes above three percent, then our schools go all remote for a period of time. That's a tremendous concern right there. If that goes above three percent and continues climbing, the State obviously will make the ultimate decisions, but I think there'll be a real concern about whether we can continue to have businesses open on the same scale they're open now. You could see restrictions in certain industries. You could see a full-scale closures. You could see limits on hours. All of those things are possible. We’ve got to understand that if it starts going in the wrong direction, then there is that danger of our hospital system, again, beginning to get strained more and more. And, of course, the most horrible dilemma, the most horrible consequence, starting to lose lives again on a larger scale, particularly our elders. So, this is why I say to people, this is our last chance right now to stop a second wave. If we aren't able to stop it, there will clearly be lots of consequences that will remind us too much of where we were before. Go ahead, Marcia. 

Question: So, my second question has to do with education. We've spoken to teachers and classrooms without HVAC systems and that they rely on so-called window ventilation to keep the air circulating in their classrooms. So, on cold days, when they have to keep their windows open, the students are sitting on the radiators to stay warm and students are so cold that they can't focus on learning. And many of these classrooms don't have the option to close the windows because they have poor [inaudible] air filtration systems. I wonder what the City is going to do to address these issues? 

Mayor: Yeah. Marcia, I mean, thank God, first of all, we've had very few cold days so far. And as you know, today is amazingly warm. So, generally, that hasn't been the problem in most schools, but we know colder weather is coming. We are getting those air purifiers out to lots of schools, any classroom that needs them, will get them. If there's specific problems, Marcia, if you could let our team know to make sure that we're following up those schools, if there's anything they need to do differently. But a number of schools will be able to have windows open a bit and still keep the temperature good. Those that can't, they need those air purifiers. We're going to get them to them and mother nature generally giving us a little bit of time here to work with so we'll have time to get them in place.  

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Gersh from Streetsblog.  

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you?  

Mayor: Good, Gersh. How are you doing? 

Question: Well, remote learning, again – it’s the only thing I got to say. Remote learning, disaster. We can talk later, maybe offline. Anyway, following up on yesterday – 

[Laughter] 

When you said you would turn off with President-elect Biden and his team – so, question one, have you done that? And, more important – everyone has a laundry list of things that he or she wants from the President-elect’s team. You said your key issues were coronavirus – coronavirus, recovery, and stimulus. What about congestion pricing, which doesn't even require a dollar from the federal government? Have you talked to the President-elect about that?  

Mayor: No. I will at some point talk to the Biden team about that, but I want to be real straightforward with you, Gersh, my focus right now is three things – a clear coronavirus strategy for the country, and that will help New York City intensely, especially since we see the problem greater around the rest of the country than here and we're concerned about travel. So, clear strategy, a vaccine that people can believe in – if they believe in the President's vision and the efficacy of the vaccine, that means more and more New Yorkers will take it more quickly. That's what we need. And a stimulus that'll help New York City back on his feet. I'll keep you all posted on different conversations along the way. I've talked to a couple of members of his transition team, let them know this is our focus that we want to work closely together. And there's a lot of receptivity to focusing on those items [inaudible] we will absolutely focus on congestion pricing as well. Go ahead. 

Question: Okay. Second question is actually a follow up on Rich's question. So, as you know, your Department of Transportation spent considerable effort and time and money to build the Central Park West protected bike lane last year and this year, which has providing safety for delivery workers and residents. So, why have you allowed the New York City Police Department to seal off Central Park West at Columbus Circle to motorists and cyclists, force forcing delivery workers on a detour onto dangerous Broadway?  

Mayor: Let me look at that situation. I'll speak with the NYPD about it. Obviously, in the days after the election, there was an assumption that that exact site would be a focal point for protest and they had to prepare for it. I think things have turned out differently, and better, in terms of there not being a prolonged problem. So, that's something we should reassess right away. I'll have that conversation today with the NYPD.  

Okay. Everybody, look, as we conclude today, it's just important to understand that we're going through a lot. We've been going through a lot for eight months, tremendous challenges, and they've been painful, and so many families have felt the pain. But we also know we're in a time that's changing us. And it's, in many ways, even though it's painful, it's also showing us things that we can do better and that we will do better. New Yorkers have shown so much strength, compassion, and resiliency, but also there's been a clear call to do things differently. So, today, we talk about how we're going to approach mental health differently. And every day we're going to be talking about things that we can do to create a city that's more fair, that hears the voices of our people, that responds to everyone. This is a time of transformation. We didn't expect it. We didn't ask for this crisis to hit us, but it has also created an opportunity for transformation. And that is the mission that we need to embrace as something that the city can do. And it will allow us to change the city for the better for generations to come. Thank you, everyone.

2020-11-13 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: Good morning again, everyone. And it's time once again for our weekly Ask the Mayor segment Fridays around 11:05 am – okay, it's 11:06 am – my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet a question. We'll watch our Twitter feed go by. Just use the hashtag, #AskTheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, welcome back to WNYC.  

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. How you doing? 

Lehrer: I'm doing okay. Thank you. And my questions will be mostly on schools and indoor dining and the pandemic and new questions about police reform. First, the weekly average for the coronavirus testing positivity rate was 2.6 percent, if I saw it right, as of yesterday. That's getting very close to the three percent one-week average that's supposed to trigger a citywide public school shutdown for in-person learning. Do you have a new number as of this morning? 

Mayor: Yeah, let me go over our indicators for today for the city just overall real quick. Our hospital admissions are now at 121, hospital positivity rate for COVID is 28.8 percent among those admissions. New reported cases, this is the seven-day average, 916. The daily number, not the seven-day number, the daily number of New York City has gone up markedly from yesterday 3.09 percent. But the number you're referring to, and this is the number that is decisive, the overall number for the city, seven-day rolling average. This is the number we look at the most. This is the number we make the decisions around schools on, that is 2.83 percent. So, that is a high number. That's the number that's gone up since yesterday. It is still below three percent, so schools remain open, but that number has gotten quite close to three percent today and we are making preparations as a result in case that number does exceed three percent, and in the event that we do have to temporarily close our schools. 

Lehrer: So, if it takes the same jump tomorrow that it took from yesterday to today, the weekly average would be at three percent and you would make this announcement tomorrow, right? 

Mayor: Yeah. This is – look, quick context here is very important, and I'll give you the specifics that people need to know. The context is we set a high bar to bring our schools back and we all worked together, and we did. And New York City has not only one of the – not only are we one of the few big cities to have our schools back, but they've been extraordinarily safe. But they are extraordinarily safe because we set a high bar, because we required tremendously strenuous measures in the schools to keep people safe. And we said, we'd only open if infection levels were low. And if they went above three percent on the seven-day rolling average, we would close the schools temporarily. But I want to emphasize temporarily. If we get to that point, then the goal is to bring them back as quickly as possible. And New York City has a really great track record of fighting back the coronavirus. So, if we get to that point, Brian, let's say it is over the weekend, we'll immediately alert parents that school would then be closed in that instance as early as Monday. So, people should get ready. I want to now speak to parents understanding this is such a challenging situation for parents in general, everything with the coronavirus. When schools were shut, extremely difficult for parents, even open it's still been a really, really tough situation. And this is not something any parent you know, wants to have to deal with, but we should get ready and parents should have a plan for the rest of the month of November. I think that's the safe way to think about it, have an alternative plan for beginning as early as Monday for whatever will help them get through this month if school is not open.  

I want to note, and it's important exceptions, Brian, that our community-based organizations that provide pre-K and 3-K, those will continue to be open as opposed to the public school buildings. Those community-based organizations will continue to be open. Even if we go beyond the three percent. Our Learning Bridges program, which is the childcare program that's being provided for free, that will remain open with a priority being given to essential workers. So, there are options that will be available if we get to that point, but I want to urge parents to have a plan ready that they can put into effect as early as Monday. And we will make an update – give an update to folks tomorrow morning, as soon as the indicators come in and Sunday morning, as soon as they come in, to let people know where we stand.  

Lehrer: Wow. There's so much to follow up on there. Let me ask you a couple of things. One, why the difference for the 3-K and pre-K kids, if they're in a public school building, as opposed to, if they're in a private community group building? 

Mayor: It's a different reality, they're much smaller facilities. And this whole concept is based on safety. Look, remember when we put these standards together, we had just gone through the hell of the spring. And the understanding we had was we could never let that happen again in New York City. And if we were going to open our schools unlike every major city in America, if we were going to open our schools they had to be safe, consistently safe, but again, they have been because we held that high, high bar, and we're going to keep doing that. But these other programs are much smaller, many fewer kids. It's just a different reality. 

Lehrer: Is there also a union, non-union staffing difference? 

Mayor: There's unions who represent all these different pieces of the equation, but they're just different structures. A public school building in New York City by definition is a larger group of people. And we want to keep everyone safe. Remember our public school buildings, we have food service workers and school safety agents and teachers and administrators, we have kids. And our obligation, of course, is to the parents to protect the kids. So, we set a standard, a safety standard, that really has been the reason why we've been able to get as far as we've gotten. And now we may be in a tough situation, but again, how quickly can we come out of it is the question? My hope is that if we all do what we have to do in the city as a whole, that this is something we can overcome in a matter of weeks, if we get to this point. 

Lehrer: But I do want to ask about the UFT's role in this. So, just to finish – follow up on the question I asked a minute ago, is it UFT staff in the school buildings, obviously, yes, and is it non-UFT staff in the community group buildings, even if they're in other unions? 

Mayor: Yeah. They're not UFT, they are other unions – 

Lehrer: And –  

Mayor: But this standard, the three percent, I want to make clear is something the City decided, it's not part of any collective bargaining agreement. And this is a standard we set of when we thought we would know the difference between we could keep things as safe as we wanted to versus something that was getting more challenging. Now, let's see what happens in these coming days and weeks in this city, because I think we have a chance here, obviously, to turn things around, we're going to be making a series of other decisions with the State, obviously, and people's behavior is the biggest element of this. When New Yorkers actually have tightened up in the past, it has had a huge impact. When folks have gone out and gotten testing, obviously when they wear the mask, etcetera. So, our goal here is to figure out how to quickly, if we get to this point, get schools back and then figure out where we go from there because the world's changing, the vaccine is coming now. That is definite. Therapeutic treatments are now starting to be used that are much more effective. The hospitalizations, thank God, are not resulting in as many folks in ICUs, or as many people passing away. There's a lot of changing circumstances here. So, my hope is that we're going into a much better time after we get through this immediate challenge. 

Lehrer: And with all of those things, you know that many critics, Scott Stringer, Maya Wiley, the New York Times Editorial Board are saying, you've got the plan backwards. At three percent, indoor dining should be stopped, not just curfew to 10:00 PM, but the school should stay open, something you've been the biggest champion of in the past because cases in schools have been very few, it's like a 0.1 percent positivity or something [inaudible] –  

Mayor:  No, it's 0.16 percent positivity. 

Lehrer: Yeah, so that low and the in-person experience has been so important for the kids whose families are choosing it, so why doesn't the current policy have it backwards? Why don't you say the three percent number looked right originally for schools, now we realize whatever else we do, we should keep schools open? 

Mayor: Because we have to always focus on health and safety first. Folks who, you know, want to offer their critique, that's fine. But I'm telling you, you know, we've had to manage this process from the beginning, focused on health and safety, and that worked with the schools because we were so cautious, and we set a standard and we asked everyone to trust in it. And part of keeping trust is staying consistent. And –  

Lehrer: Why is that the standard? 

Mayor: The standard was based on what we understood at the time to be the numbers that would indicate that we are reaching a bigger problem. And, in fact, we now have a better situation with health care overall, thank God, but there is a bigger problem we're facing right now, that's obvious, here and around the country. We're going to keep fighting to avoid this. There's still a chance these numbers could turn and that's job one – 

Lehrer: Some of the [inaudible] – 

Mayor: If they don't turn then we're going to figure out what we have to do going forward. But I'm very clear about the fact, we set a plan out there, we said to everyone in school communities, believe in this and trust this, everyone came forward. It was, in effect, a social contract and it worked, and people trusted in it and people were safe. And we've got to keep that faith because we will be bringing the schools back. And when we bring the schools back, if they do go down, when we bring them back, people are going to have to believe in that situation as well. This is not just about what happens this week or next week, Brian, this is about a school year that has seven months ahead, and we've got to get it right for the long-term here. 

Lehrer: Some of the suspicion is that the teachers’ union rules the roost here, and an informal agreement you have with them to stick to this three percent, they would rather have everybody out of the schools under these circumstances. But here's a clip of epidemiologist Celine Gounder, from NYU and a member of President-elect Biden's coronavirus task force interviewed yesterday – I'm sorry. I may have said her name wrong – Celine Gounder – as interviewed yesterday by WNYC News.  

Dr. Celine Gounder: Well, I think unfortunately what's happening is you're seeing business interests and union interests having more sway politically than the public health and science here. And I think if we consider schools to be an essential service, and if we want to keep schools open, it means that we're going to have to do everything possible to keep community transmission suppressed. And that's not what we're seeing in terms of policies right now. 

Lehrer: So, she says too much political influence by the teachers’ union, with respect to closing, too much political influence by the restaurant lobby, with respect to staying open. 

Mayor: I appreciate her analysis, it’s just not accurate. The decision we made was made with our health care leadership and not with the unions at all. I mean, literally the three percent decision, I remember vividly the meeting in which we decided it. It was not a proposal from the unions. It was not a collective bargaining matter. It was our health care leadership working with me to determine what we thought was a standard at that time. And I will say things in many ways have improved. Our knowledge has improved and many things we know now are better and clearer. That's the good news. But at the time we said that was a standard that meant something bigger was going on. And that was the appropriate time to pull back both in terms of the safety of everyone, that school community, and what it would mean as part of an overall strategy for the city. 

So that's just not accurate because the origin of that three percent concept came from the health care leadership in our internal discussions. And on the business community, it's not – I don't know who she thinks that influence is. I think this is about people's livelihoods. That's the other balance that people need to take into account here. Folks have suffered intensely in this crisis. A lot of the federal support has worn off. There's not the same support that people need. They've used up their savings. I'm very cognizant, even though the State makes the ultimate decisions here on the industry issues, I'm very cognizant of the fact that we have to keep people's livelihoods in mind here while managing the overall crisis. So, no, I think there's a lot more going on here than that. 

Lehrer: But if restaurants and bars and gyms are such major vectors then it's not in the interest of long-term recovery to keep that spread going, if you keep them open, right? 

Mayor: Well, I think they have to be reassessed for sure. I think the State was right, Brian, to reduce the hours on restaurants. And, you know, obviously we're talking about bars that serve food as well, not the kind of bars that we think of when we just think of people going out drinking, but those hour reductions, I think, were a smart step. Obviously, indoor dining has to be reevaluated. I said that even when we'd go over two percent on a seven-day average, I think it has to be reevaluated now. I think of those pieces, but the question is really how we balance the bigger factor. I don't want people to think that indoor dining and gyms are the magical solution to all our problems, because in fact, our Test and Trace operation is not showing, you know, the kind of impact from those locales that you've seen in other places around the country. We have something much more generalized here. 

But the question really is, how do we get out of this overall situation as quickly as possible? And what we do know is more people getting tested and more people practicing those basic approaches like mask wearing indoors and outdoors makes a huge difference. And also, Brian, crucial – folks should not travel for the holidays. It's painful. I feel awful even saying it. I feel awful for my own family that we're not going to be traveling but they should not travel. They should not have large holiday gatherings. That's really going to be one of the most decisive pieces. We talk about restaurants or gyms, but much more decisive will be if we can successfully limit travel and limit indoor gatherings. 

Lehrer: Patrick in Brooklyn you are on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Patrick. 

Question: Yeah. Hey, good morning, Brian. Good morning Mr. Mayor. I had a quick question about the remote blended learning model number two, which is what my niece is in. And she goes to school one or two days a week, depending on the week and the rest of the days she's remote. But the teachers don't have any kind of curriculum set up or any kind of classes set up for her when she's not in school. So, between three and four days a week, she's at home with maybe 45 minutes of schoolwork to do. And I can't get through to anybody at the school to change anything. And I work from home and it's extremely difficult to keep her gainfully educated at this point. 

Mayor: Yeah, no, but then Patrick, that's – go ahead. I'm sorry. 

Question: Oh, sorry. I was just wondering if there's like a method to, or any suggestions to the school that I could make, like in order to sort of help this problem along? 

Mayor: Yeah. Please do give your information to WNYC so our Department of Education folks can follow up with you directly and address that situation for you and your family and your school. Look, that's clearly not what's supposed to be happening. And I've talked to a lot of parents, a lot of teachers. We, I think know that this is an imperfect reality to say the least, having some kids remote, some kids in blended, everyone trying to do their best to make it work. But that, what you described should simply not be happening. And we have to fix that for you and your family. And look, we're going to, we've now had, you know, a month or two of school, but the vast majority of the school year is ahead, there’s a lot we have to do to keep improving education under whatever status we're dealing with. And that work is happening all the time because we're all learning how to do something in a brand new environment. 

Lehrer: And this weekend also happens to be the end of the two week period for families to opt back in for in-person blended learning for the rest of the school year. As that deadline is upon us, how many more families signed up? Do you have a number? 

Mayor: I don't have the latest. We had a meaningful number for sure, sign up. But what none of us could have anticipated is that this signup period is now overlapped with this sudden surge first around the country and now hitting us. So, you know, we'll complete that on Sunday. We're going to implement that. If schools remain open, we'll implement that on November 30th. If they shut down again, the goal is to get them back up very quickly. Look, the Chancellor and I said in the beginning of the school year repeatedly that unfortunately we had to have models for education that ran the gamut from if we, God forbid had to be all remote for a period of time, we would. Straight on through to the day when we go back to a five day a week for everyone. And every step in between. We've known, we might have to turn the system on or off at various points. My goal here, if we do have to shut schools is to do it for as brief a period as possible and come back up. And then all those parents who want blended learning, who signed up will be accommodated. And we'll keep making the adjustments as we go along. 

Lehrer: How does the threshold changing over time affect the opening and closing of schools? So for example, if the seven-day average is 3.1 percent on Sunday, and you announced the shutdown for Monday. But then the three-day average goes down and it's 2.8 percent, two days later, do you reopen the schools on Wednesday or how would that work? 

Mayor: Yeah, we're going to come out with a policy in light of everything we've learned. We are now going to come out with a policy on what reopening would look like, if in fact we do have to shut down. We obviously want to make sure that when we reopen it's on a sustainable basis. So if we shut down, the goal is to reopen and then stay reopened, obviously. So that is where we have to make sure we – lord knows we don't want daily fluctuations. We don't want to be, you know, shut down for two days and then open for two days and shut down for two days. We don't want something like that. We want something more sustainable. So we're going to look at the standards, we'll look at everything that we've learned. And we'll put that out quickly. And then that will be how we proceed. 

Lehrer: But I saw you say yesterday if I understood it correctly, that you might not enforce the same threshold on the way down as on the way up? So if that's accurate, why would three percent be unsafe today? But four or five percent could be declared safe on the way down in a few weeks? 

Mayor: It's – I don't think that's an accurate reading of what I said. I said, we're going to look at everything that we have learned from this, and we're going to figure out what standard makes sense in this moment. We're in a different moment. We're in a different reality, both because of the surge around the country, which is clearly affecting us because we have the holidays, which are a huge challenge because of travel and gatherings. Those are our big problems. But on the plus side, we have much better therapeutic capacity to address the disease. We have not seen the kind of uptake so far in ICU admissions that would have been expected. We do have a vaccine coming. There's a variety of new factors. Brian, this is really hard to explain to anyone who hasn't lived through every day and hour of the decision-making process during COVID. But the one thing we learned a long time ago is this disease and the ramifications of this disease, everything changes all the time. So we need to make sense of where we go from here under the conditions now, which are very different than the conditions in August or September. 

Lehrer: Marie in Manhattan. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Marie. 

Question: Good morning, Mayor. Good morning Brian. The SHSAT is mandated by the Hecht Calandra Act. And there are 30,000 to 40,000 students that are waiting to hear when the registration will open. Do you have any idea when that's going to happen and when the test will be administered? 

Mayor: Yeah Marie it will be administered. The timing we're working on and the conditions for doing it because obviously, you know, historically many of the standardized tests are in-person and that's not a scenario we are likely to do, especially with what we're talking about right now. So we're going to work out that time and we're going to work out the methodology. We'll have an announcement on that and certainly in the next few weeks. But you know, we've got to first deal with this immediate challenge right now that we're talking about. 

Lehrer: Juno in Brooklyn you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Juno. 

Question: Hi Brian. Hi, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for taking my call. I'd like to ask the Mayor why the City isn't sharing data from DOE priority testing sites with schools? Mr. Mayor, you've said all along that we need to depend on the science. And there should be a comprehensive city-wide effort to coordinate this data. So if I get my kids tested at a DOE site and they're positive, our school and the DOE should be told that, and likewise, if they're negative. But my understanding is that they aren't. And that this info isn’t factored into the school infection rates that the City is publishing? And that that info isn't being shared, it's just engendering more mistrust. We need to be able to depend on this data. And I say this – I’m a parent of a second and a fourth grader in blended learning. I desperately want schools to stay open. We know that the data shows that they're safe, but there are real concerns among parents and school staff about whether the statistics that the City is publishing are real. And those concerns in turn are engendering another push to close the schools. Please don't close the schools. Close the bars, close the gyms, invest in data gathering, Test and Trace, prioritize our kids and then decide if schools should close. 

Mayor: Well Juno, I appreciate it. And clearly we've invested a huge amount in Test and Trace. And this is part of why we were able for so long to fight back as a city, reduce the infection rate, get our schools open when other cities couldn't and keep our schools safe. And we're continuing to build out Test and Trace, no question there. In fact, as we send Test and Trace out to schools, we've gotten very good results. As we send Test and Trace out to communities that have had challenges – we saw this in Brooklyn and Queens, we actually saw a remarkable turnaround. I'm hoping the same thing is happening as we speak now in Staten Island as more and more testing and outreach is being done. But to the question you raised, which is really important, about the data. We've been, I believe truly transparent about what has been found in each school and that's governed by our situation room. And that's when we made decisions about whether, for example, a classroom had to be shut down for a quarantine period or even a whole school. And that information has been readily provided to school communities. 

I think I understand your question to be, are we also taking into account when students are tested away from the school site and making sure that is fully acknowledged as part of the data for the school and the actions taken for the school? Generally, my impression is yes, but I will go and double check that. I'd like you to give your information, please to WNYC, so we can follow up with you directly on what you've experienced. But generally, that's been a yes. I know there were at least a couple of situations where that didn't happen the way it was supposed to. And we ordered our Department of Health and Department of Education to better coordinate and Test and Trace to better coordinate their efforts. That even if a New York City public school student was tested anywhere that we would get that information back into the school and the situation room. So I do know that's an area that had to be tightened up, but I believe it has been. But I want to make sure of that, so please give your information. And I agree that transparency, I mean, this is just like the indicators for the whole city we're talking about now. Transparency has been one of the things that's empowered New Yorkers to act. Department of Health puts out a huge amount of information, including the ZIP code by ZIP code data again now. The schools have been putting out a lot of information. That has actually been working to keep our infection rate low and it now needs to work again. 

Lehrer: We're almost out of time. I gather you want to react to a story on the news site The City today on COVID equipment. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I just got word of this too late so I’m not going to be able to do them justice, but what do they report? And what's your issue with it? 

Mayor: Look, I don't want to characterize their report except to say, I think it's questioning the work that was done on an emergency basis in March and April and after, to get the protective equipment for the first responders of the city, our health care workers, and the supplies we needed for our hospitals. And I think there's a tremendous amount of misrepresentation in that article. We had to put together a massive effort to somehow overcome all the breakdowns in the global supply chain and get the PPE where they were needed and get the supplies, the ventilators, anything that was needed. And it actually thank God, worked. And I – the public servants who did this, they worked literally nonstop for months. And they managed to get things to every New York City hospital and clinic that was needed. And it was herculean while literally the private sector structure was falling apart before our very eyes. So, I really want to emphasize, I think that article misrepresents the efforts of a lot of public servants that actually saved a lot of lives. 

Lehrer: And finally given the big news that you broke here today, parents should be ready to make alternative plans for their New York City public school kids as early as Monday, given the direction of the COVID positivity rate on the tests. I just have to ask you this one last thing. I assume, Governor Cuomo, who likes to overrule you and I think could on this, do you have a commitment from him not to do that? 

Mayor: Look, I won't speak for the Governor. I will say the Governor and I had a long conversation about this and our teams have been talking, particularly in the last 48 hours, as we've seen these numbers moving. And I certainly think there's a recognition by the State that we set a clear standard out of an abundance of caution. And we've got to keep faith with our school communities and be consistent about that. But again, I won't speak for them. I will say there's been a high level of communication and coordination. 

Lehrer: Thanks as always Mr. Mayor, talk to you next week. 

Mayor: Thank you, Brian.

2020-11-16 NYS Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. So, we’ve been talking about it for days now – we are in the midst of trying to fight back – fight back against a second wave of COVID taking on New York City. And we need to remember our ability to fight back, the power of all New Yorkers to fight back. We're in the middle of something really tough right now and we see such painful realities all over the country, but New York City continues to be strong and New Yorkers are doing the right thing. Let me tell you just about testing alone. This last week, almost 300,000 New Yorkers went and got tested. On Friday alone – this last Friday, almost 75,000 New Yorkers got tested. That is crucial to our ability to fight back this disease. That is New Yorkers taking matters into their own hands in the best way. And I'm also seeing all over the city, an extraordinary amount of mask usage. We need to keep deepening that. Dr. Chokshi will talk about that in just a moment. But look, the things we've talked about from the beginning, starting with testing, that's what works. So, I'm going to keep saying it to everyone – if you haven't been tested, get out there. It's available. It's free. It's easy. It's quick. If you haven't been tested at all, get tested. If you haven't been tested in a while, get tested. It makes such a huge difference at this moment. And so many New Yorkers are responding and I think New Yorkers understand after the heroic efforts of these last eight months, that it really makes a difference what each person does. So, we're going to keep talking about this. We've seen such horrible problems around the country. We know everyone's going through a lot of fatigue, but New Yorkers are tough and New Yorkers are resilient and we can keep fighting back this second wave. It will not be easy. If anyone says, look at what's happening around us, isn't it overwhelming, the challenges we face? We face profound challenges, that is true. But the way to respond to these challenges is not to give up and not to be mesmerized by the extent of the problem, but to remember our ability to fight back, that's the only thing that's going to make a difference.  

So, we're going to talk about the things that matter – testing, obviously; mask usage. Tough things we're going to ask people, like not traveling for the holidays. Again, it pains me to suggest it, but it's what we need. People really should not travel for these holidays, really should keep family gatherings as small as possible. It won't be easy, but it's the best way to stop this upsurge that we've seen lately.  

Now, let's talk about our schools. It's on everyone's minds. I'll go over the indicators in a moment. But, today, New York City schools are open. Tomorrow, they will be open as well. We've got a fight ahead to keep them open, but I'm not giving up and you shouldn't give up either. Every day that we can keep our schools open is a blessing for our children and our families. So, we set the three percent standard, and that was part of how we were able to open our schools to begin with. I remind people, if you go back to August, September, many, many Doubting Thomases. Many folks said New York City public schools would never open, the largest school system in the country. I am proud to say that so many of us believed they could open and they needed to open it and we could do it safely, and we did do it safely. Now, a lot of the same people are saying, look how safe our schools are. Well, that's a blessing. They are safe. It's been amazing. And thanks to parents and students and educators and staff and our health care workers who have done so much to keep our schools safe. But we made a promise that we would set a gold standard for safety in our schools, that we would provide every conceivable measure, whether it's face coverings for all students and staff alike, social distancing, ventilation, constant cleaning – so many measures – 10 kids in a classroom, typically – things you couldn't have imagined. All of those measures together have kept our schools safe. But we also said that we would hold to a three percent threshold. We said that to give people confidence that we will put health and safety first, and we have put health and safety first, and we will put health and safety first. So, we're sticking to that threshold and I believe there's still a chance to fight back this disease and keep our schools open for a good while ahead. But if that is not our reality, if, in fact, we surpass the threshold, then we will have the immediate effort to get schools back and get them back quickly.  

In the meantime, our Learning Bridges Initiative, our childcare will be available for essential workers and for anyone in particular need, according to the priorities we've set. And we're going to make sure to accommodate those who have those great needs. But, remember, we're not to that point yet. Our schools remain open and you can help them remain open by participating, by going out and getting tested if you haven't, by wearing a mask, by practicing social distancing, by helping everyone in your life know to avoid indoor gatherings, particularly without masks on. So, again, it gets back to what you can do, particularly as the weather gets colder, the bar's being raised on us, that what we have to do is more and more to fight back. But, again, this is the place that fought back before and succeeded. So, here to tell you about how important it is to wear masks and the other measures that we need to implement right now to fight back this second wave, our Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi. 

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As New Yorkers, we all know someone who has been affected by COVID-19. For some of us, it has been a firsthand, often painful, sometimes lingering experience. For others, it's someone near to us who suffered because of the virus, perhaps a neighbor, a friend, or a relative. Or, it may be someone we know, even if we don't know their full name – the bus driver, barber bodega owner, and the people who write the news that you read every day. What those fellow New Yorkers went through must be a reminder of what's at stake right now. Many of us are experiencing pandemic fatigue. Look, I get it, but we can't let COVID fatigue turn into compassion fatigue. Trying to prevent more suffering is why I won't be traveling or seeing people who are so close to me this holiday season. We do have some difficult weeks ahead, and what we do, what we say and the choices that we make, they all send a message. Making that decision not to host a holiday gathering and telling your loved ones why conveys a message of care and caution for those who are closest to you. 

We have suffered so much from the spread of the virus, but we have to remember that positive behavior spreads as well. One important action that we're asking all New Yorkers to take is to mask up both outdoors and indoors, anytime you're outside of your own home. That includes when you're getting together with people whom you know well, whether they're friends or relatives beyond your immediate family. The virus takes advantage of our familiarity and often transmits in smaller social gatherings, such as birthday parties, or friends gathering to watch the big game. That's why our new Health Department campaign, indoors or outdoors, keep your face covering on, is reminding New Yorkers that COVID-19 can spread easily indoors, particularly as the weather becomes colder. So, unless you're younger than two, or you have a medical condition that prevents wearing your face covering, please wear it indoors and outdoors, and make it into an everyday routine just like putting on your jacket or coat before you head out. The CDC recently affirmed that face coverings protect those who wear them and that mask in someone else's home or wherever you may encounter them is yet another message of care for those around you.  

In the days ahead, spreading these positive actions must be more contagious than the virus itself. That's how we're going to get through this together.  

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dr. Chokshi. And that's a clear message to us all, everything we need to. And, remember, there's so many reasons for hope. The extraordinary efforts of New Yorkers over these months should give you hope. The fact that there is now real progress on a vaccine and we can see the day when the vaccine starts to be distributed, coming closer and closer, and this city is ready to distribute that vaccine quickly once we get it. Obviously, the new leadership that we look forward to in Washington to help us out of this crisis. There was a lot of reasons for hope, but let's win this battle before us right now. And let's fight this immediate challenge by everyone doing what we all need to do to keep the coronavirus at bay.  

And now, perfect segue to going over our indicators for the day. So, number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, the threshold is 200 patients – again, interestingly day, 92 patients. Now, that's, that's a number we'd like to get lower, obviously. And we are always watching to see where this number will go, because it is a lagging indicator, but it still remains at a level that the hospital system is handling well. This confirmed positivity rate, though, continues to go up. That's obviously a concern – 44.2 percent. So, we're watching that carefully. New reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550. We've obviously gone far past that – today's report 1,057 cases. Very worrisome on its face, do juxtapose that though with the massive amount of testing that's now happening. Again, when 75,000 people get tested in a single day – that was Friday, the highest testing level we've had in the entire time of the coronavirus. Of course, you're going to see a more positive cases because we're finally getting more and more people tested as we've wanted to for a long time. So, some of that's explained by more testing. Obviously, some of that also shows the challenge that we're facing. And then number three, percentage of the people testing citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report is 1.68 percent and the seven-day rolling average 2.77 percent.  

Now, a few words in Spanish – 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know name and outlet of each journalist.  

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today is Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Dr. Ted Long, Executive Director of the Test and Trace Corps., Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. And with that, we'll go to Rich Lamb from WCBS 880. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: How are you doing?  

Question: I'm doing all right. So, let me just ask you a question about the school situation, the closure, and the three-percent trigger. So, given the Governor's recent statements about the three-percent trigger, and you must be aware of them, given the disruption an in-person shut down would cause and given the extremely safe environment that schools unexpectedly are since you made your three-percent pledge, how is it breaking a commitment or a promise to keep the schools open in the face of new facts? And why is rational flexibility not called for here? 

Mayor: Rich, I appreciate the question, I really do. And it's something that we've talked through a lot. I've talked to the Governor multiple times about it. Our teams are talking, our health teams are talking in the city and between the City and the State. But, remember, it comes down to this, there is a second wave bearing down on us. We're trying to beat it back. We said we would make health and safety the priority. We said we would hold this standard. That was part of how we convinced everyone that it would be safe to come into the schools. Now, we did expect our schools to be safe. The only way I differ with you is to say it is not unexpected that our schools are safe. We expected them to be safe. We've been very, very impressed by the work everyone's done. They’re extraordinarily safe. With that said, we set a standard. We asked everyone to trust it and believe in it. It's important to keep consistency with that. If we surpass that standard, and that is not a given, but if we do, then the conversation we're having with the State is how to quickly come back at what it's going to take. And, you know, the Governor spoke about this morning, we've been talking about additional testing measures, additional things that we could do to come back quickly. But it is important to recognize that we are dealing with a serious threat of a second wave that has real ramifications for all of us. And if we do have to shut down, we would work to come back very quickly with additional safety measures. Go ahead, Rich. 

Question: Okay. So, let me follow up just by asking very directly, couldn’t the Governor overrule you on this? 

Mayor: Of course, the Governor has the power in so many areas because of this crisis and his emergency powers to make a range of decisions. But we've talked it through, our teams have talked it through, and I think there's a broad agreement that keeping faith with everyone, that the standard we put forward, being consistent about it, and then raising the bar for a comeback, but finding a way to come back quickly is the path forward.  

Moderator: Next, we have Katie from the Wall Street Journal. 

Question: Hey, good morning, everybody. My [inaudible] about mask wearing, which we all know is very important. And this is part of outreach campaign from the Health Department. But I know this has been asked of you multiple times [inaudible] have a reluctance to wear masks, police officers. I know I covered a protest two weeks, many, many, many, many officers did not wear masks. They got mad when you asked them to put one on. So, I'm curious if the City is sort of doing more outreach or at least checking with its own employees to ensure that the City's employees are practicing what you're preaching terms up safety for the rest of us here in the city. 

Mayor: That's a good question, Katie. And they have to. And we've had this conversation with City agencies – and many City agencies many times. They have to – I think there has been some real progress, I think there has to be more, and I think there has to be consequences for anyone who doesn't wear a mask. So that work continues. Sometimes particularly in public safety work or in health work, there may be a valid reason, but overwhelmingly all public servants should have those masks on, period, and they don't there should be consequences. 

Question: Thanks, and my second question is about the testing being used and the [inaudible] schools. You know, we've seen the numbers fluctuate hugely, right, over the last few days, which is confusing to parents and teachers and administrators. So do you think we're trying to capture the second threat and the positivity rate, but when something can be sort of easily missed by huge groups of people [inaudible], I mean, is there a better way to make a decision that could affect, you know, more than a million students and everyone works there [inaudible] especially if you can certainly have a rush of people testing to skew a figure that was high a week ago. 

Mayor: Okay, let me start and get Dr. Chokshi into this too. The truth is what we find when more and more people get tested. This has been what we've called for from the beginning. Obviously in the early months, we just weren't given the testing capacity we needed by the federal government, but now that we have more and more, thank God, we'll keep telling people the more people get tested, the clearer picture we get, if more and more people got tested and the positivity keeps going up that tells you something profound. If more and more people get tested and positivity level goes down, that is important and reassuring. So I would say, I think the positivity level is the truest measure, but we look at other measures as well. There are almost a million students, but let's be clear, you know, right now we're trying to make sure we understand who truly wants to be in school and who wants to be in remote. It's been about 300,000 students that have been in school. That community of kids and families is deeply affected, and I certainly can relate to it because I was a public school parent. I feel what they're going through now, but it's also the community of people that demanded of us that we ensure that the schools were as absolutely safe as they could be and demanded tough standards, and again, to me, it's absolutely crucial to keep faith with them. Dr. Chokshi want to speak about the testing piece? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes. Thanks Mr. Mayor, and you covered the high points here. I'll just reiterate that percent positivity; the test positivity rate is one of the most important measures. We've seen that in New York City, but that's also the experience of other municipalities, states, you know, countries around the world, and that's because it helps us understand what's happening over time with respect to how the epidemic is growing and spreading. The reason for that is that if we do see cases increasing then that is likely to be reflected in the test positivity rate. We know this because the more people that get tested particularly when you have cases on the upswing that means that the percent positivity will go up concomitantly as well, and unfortunately we do have we do have predicates that we can look at around the country right now, where percent positivity rates continue to climb as those epidemics get worse. So as the Mayor said, that's one of the measures that we use in the panoply that we follow. You know, we're particularly looking with concern at the number of cases that are growing over time as well. But for the single measure that gives us the most information the test positivity rate is a good one.  

Mayor: Go ahead.  

Moderator: Next is Kala from PIX 11. 

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. I just wanted to – hi. I just wanted to know, after speaking with the Governor, would you be considering the Governor's suggestion for in the future setting a threshold within the schools and not the communities or the cities as a whole, because he keeps saying, and he's going back and forth a little bit, but the schools are now not the issue, it's restaurants and gyms. 

Mayor: I don't think that's everything he's saying to be fair. I think the Governor's looking at the wholeness of this crisis, just like we are and restaurants and gyms, there's some particular concerns, but we've got something much, much bigger than just restaurants and gyms we're dealing with. But to your core question, yeah, we're going to look at different approaches, including what's happening in the schools, across the board, and then what's going on in specific schools and what we can do to ensure they are safe, including potentially additional testing. There's a lot of good discussion going on about how to strike that balance, but it all is against the backdrop where job one is to fight this thing back, and so I do – I think all of these questions are very, very valid, but I want to remind people, you know, every single time people do the things we're asking of them, they help us get to the heart of the matter, which is this disease can be defeated. We do not have to give into it, and that's where I want the first energy to be on it. Is everyone doing everything they can do to stop this? Is everyone wearing a mask to the maximum extent possible, doing their distancing? Has everyone unfortunately canceled their holiday travel because we need that, we need those smaller gatherings, local gatherings. I understand everyone wants to say, well, what is the government doing? These are fair questions, but we also have to ask ourselves, are we doing the maximum to fight this disease back? The more we do, the more we can keep open for the life of the city. Go ahead, Kala. 

Question: I know you mentioned Learning Bridges. So I wanted to know what's going to happen with D-75 special needs schools, if schools shut down, and also what's the plan to keep remote learning attendance at an acceptable percentage, because we've seen this as a problem in the past when we shut down in March, and then of course at the beginning of the school year. 

Mayor: Yeah, Kala it's a challenge, obviously when we can't see kids in person it is much harder in many ways to ensure attendance, I'll turn to the Chancellor on this as well. But we did find over time more and more ways to connect with families and create continuity and attendance, and we're going to keep expanding those efforts for sure. What was the first part of your question, Kala, I'm sorry? 

Question: I wanted to know what's happening with these 75 schools. You said Learning Bridges is open, but what about special needs? 

Mayor: Yeah, we’re working on that too, because I think it's fair to say all in-person education matters for our kids, but probably the kids who have the greatest needs and benefit the most from in-person education are our special needs kids, and so that's an area where we really want to figure out how we can protect, you know, those kids and their needs, and if we do have to shut down, get those back quickly, that would be a high priority. Chancellor, you want to speak to any of those issues?  

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Yes, sir, I think you hit the top lines, but again, we're prioritizing all of our most vulnerable student populations, which includes our youngest students, but also include students in our D-75 schools, as you've mentioned. We've also learned quite a bit since we pivoted to remote learning in March, and part of that is a really robust system that schools have and borough offices have to track students and to intervene when we haven't heard from students, being able to be in-person learning since September 21st has also provided schools with the ability to make contact with students and have our teachers and our guidance counselors and social workers also involved as well as our parent coordinators in making contact with families as well. That won't change if we unfortunately have to pivot to all remote learning for a short time period, we'll just keep on making sure that we're tracking and we're intervening and looking for, and staying in touch with students as we go forward. But as the Mayor did mention all of our vulnerable student populations, it's much more difficult for them in an all remote-learning settings. So, we're being very, very cognizant about the interventions to make sure that we're serving them in the unfortunate that we have to for a short time pivot to in-person – remote learning.  

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: Next is Marcia from WCBS. 

Question: Mr. Mayor, I want to make sure I understand what you're saying about schools and coming back. I point out to you that when there were red zones and orange zones, the Governor allowed some schools to come back if they increased testing. So are you saying that if you had to close schools, when it goes to three percent, you will try to evaluate the schools and the ability to test and that you might be able to come back, even though the numbers might be over three percent, because you will be able to test more students, and that you would be able to make sure that the number of positive rate in the schools is below three percent? 

Mayor: Yes, you hit the nail on the head. 

Question: Could you, you know, say exactly what you mean? 

Mayor: Well, you said it really well, but I'll add to it certainly if you want. Yeah, I mean, look, the State put forward that standard for the red zones and that model could make a lot of sense here. We're obviously going to talk it through with the State, as the Governor said this morning, and I've said, we need to keep a bond of trust with parents, with educators, with staff, we're going to be talking to all the stakeholders, but that is certainly one of the models that could work to say we'll do additional testing requirements, school by school, as part of the pathway back. 

Moderator: Next is Alex from Chalkbeat.  

Question: Hi Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask a question about remote learning more broadly. Obviously the school year was always going to be about remote learning to some degree, you know, even under the hybrid plan, the vast majority of students would be learning remotely on most school days, and now that we're sort of staring down the possibility of wider school building shutdowns, I'm wondering if you can give a pretty specific accounting of what the city has done to improve remote instruction since the spring?  

Mayor: Yeah, let me start Alex and turn to the Chancellor, but I want to make a point, I think I disagree a bit with your frame. Do not forget that here it is, it's November 16th. It's very early in the school year. That's a hopeful reality for me. That means we have a long way ahead both to constantly improve the work we're doing, including the remote work, but also we have a long time ahead to maximize the possibility of our kids coming back, and I don't mean just in terms of a temporary shutdown this immediate problem, I'm saying the bigger picture. We now have vaccines emerging. That's the biggest factor here, obviously, in terms of our ability to not just bring back some kids, but potentially bring back all kids in the course of the school year. We have new leadership in Washington that I fundamentally believe is going to improve the fight against COVID and improve the level of trust people have in the vaccine, et cetera. 

So, this ball game has just begun. The majority of the school year happens after January 1st, you know, basically three or four months before, and almost six months after January 1st. So I'm planning with the Chancellor and the whole team, not just for one scenario, but multiple scenarios. We said it in the very beginning. We might at various points have to go all remote, then go back to a mix, and then one day, I hope in this school year, we're going to be able to get to the point where we restore a five day a week education across the board. So everything is a point on the continuum, but to your question about how to improve remote, this is every day effort working with principals, working with teachers, working with the unions to figure out how to improve it and what we're learning. Even in the spring, under duress, we found people made some really great improvements and innovations that work is happening every week. Go ahead, Chancellor. 

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so this is a question that I think we continue to answer and look, we've built tremendous capacity since we pivoted to remote learning in March and we're building upon that capacity. Teachers have ever undergone many hours of professional development, we've developed and made available digital curriculum and digital supports for students, teachers and parents. We're continuing to invest in the technology. So we've distributed over 300,000 devices. We're going to continue to distribute more devices as a need becomes apparent. We're working with the internet providers on providing Wi-Fi. We're providing LTE enabled devices for students in temporary shelters. We're continuing to make sure that the scheduling that's happening in school is based on the continuum learning for students so that the teacher that's teaching in-person is coordinating with the teacher that's doing the remote learning, who is coordinating with those teachers that are doing 100 percent remote learning – why? To make sure that students are getting a continuum of education that is not different based on the venue that they're receiving their education. In addition to that, we're wrapping around the academic work that's happening with trauma informed curriculum and pedagogy. We've got tens of thousands of teachers that have been trained in that. We're looking at how do we then continue to move the education for students, whether it's in person or remotely, within a grading policy that makes sense, given the pandemic that we're all facing. So there's a ton of work that continues to be done and that we've done, but again, this is all – and the Mayor has been very clear about this – you can never replace in-person learning. There is a magic that happens when there is a caring well-trained adult in the classroom with the student that you can never replace and it's a fool's errand if anyone is trying to equate the fact that well, remote – it, you know, you have work to do in remote because, you know, we hear all of these stories. We're educators. We understand that, but it's important to also understand that we're trying to make it the best we can and we're doing better and better every single day, but we're not satisfied yet. 

Mayor: Go ahead Alex.  

Question: Yeah. I mean, I'm wondering if you could just speak a little bit more specifically though about like, what the city is really doing to improve remote teaching? Like, I understand that you guys have, you know, bought hundreds of thousands of devices, but that's kind of a separate question from the quality of what's actually delivered on those devices. And so I'm just wondering if you could speak a little bit more specifically other than, you know, trainings which I understand have been made available, but are also often optional. Like what the City's – like, what the DOE’s strategy really is here to improve the quality of remote teaching? I understand your point about it not being as good as in-person teaching, but the fact of the matter is, you know, the majority of instruction that's happening this year is happening remotely.  

Mayor: The majority of instruction that's happening so far this year. And again, I've just wanted to keep us – Alex, I'm not negating your question, it's a very fair question. I just want to remind everyone we are on a continuum and it, you know, the frustrating reality of the coronavirus is it, everything changes all the time, which makes it really hard for us to make sense of, but don't miss the forest for the trees that, you know, our ability to profoundly address the situation has improved greatly in just the last few weeks because of the election and because of the announcements related to a vaccine development. We have a very different reality in a few months. So I just don't want us to get lost in this moment in time, but your question is fair, I'll start and pass to the Chancellor. I think Alex, this is a combination of the things that DOE centrally is doing, and that includes making sure there's enough devices and that includes providing for the training, and that includes using the supervisory structure of the executive superintendents and the superintendents to do quality control school by school and keep pushing them to hope, you know, creatively improve their remote learning and listening to the concerns we're getting back from parents and students. But ultimately a lot of this happens of course at the school level, principals and educators determining the adjustments they need to make. And I see a lot of determination out there to do that, to keep improving, and Chancellor, you want to speak to that? 

Chancellor Carranza: I think we've answered this question multiple times. I think you are right on the money, sir. I mean, every day we want to do better than the previous day, we respond every single day to whatever challenges arise from remote learning. We're developing more digital curriculum. We're adding more digital curriculum. We have more training, more supports for not only teachers, but also students and parents. We're solidifying our platforms. I mean, it's – I'm not really sure what else we can answer. We, like every school system across the country, are really working hard to make it as a positive and strong experience for students and for teachers every day possible. 

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.  

Moderator: Next is Shant from the Daily News. 

Question: Yeah, good morning everyone, I guess like all my colleagues, I'm also wondering about the situation with schools. I think one thing that hasn't – I haven't heard come up yet is the question of the union's role here. What's your read on what the UFT wants? Do you see them, you know, kind of sticking to this idea of shutting across the board, shut down if the three percent threshold is reached? Do you think they're more flexible, amenable to a targeted cluster? And yeah could just bring us up to speed –excuse me –targeted shutdown, and can you just bring us up to speed in your latest discussions with them? 

Mayor: Shant, you know, I want to respect the fact that we have a lot of conversations and the private conversations don't want to characterize past a point and obviously they can speak for themselves, but I can say is for months now, I've had multiple calls each week with both Michael Mulgrew and Mark Cannizzaro, the President of CSA, the administrator's union, and they've been very productive joined by the Chancellor and the First Deputy Mayor. We do these multiple times a week. We get a lot done. There's been ongoing dialogue. I think there's a tremendous concern for health and safety for everyone in the school community. There's also a consistently an understanding that in-person learning achieves much more for children than remote. And so we're having that conversation and I believe that unions are having a conversation with the State as well. Everyone's talking, trying to figure out the best approach. I think the simplest beginning is to say we set a standard, I think it was a fair standard of what would require a shutdown, but now we're all working together to figure out what's the quickest way back and the best standards for that quick turnaround. Go ahead, Shant. 

Question: Yeah, thanks for that. So switching gears to the Biden administration, obviously all eyes are on the numerous crises in the city now, but yeah, just looking at it too, you know, maybe the end of your own term, would you take a position in the Biden administration or any other role in Washington looking ahead to this the new Democratic White House? 

Mayor: I appreciate the question, look, I've got 14 more months of work to do, and I can't tell you what it's been like these last eight months have been all encompassing like every hour, every day, and that's where I'm going to keep my focus is getting us out of this crisis and getting the city on with its recovery, and we will recover, I don't have a doubt in my mind. And the fact that there is a Biden administration is going to help us to speed up our recovery. So I will be right here until December 31st, 2021, and then, you know, I'm certain the future will take care of itself.  

Moderator: For our last question, we'll go to Alejandra from AM New York. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I have another education question. So now that the opt-in period for blended learning has ended, when is the soonest that we can get updated enrollment numbers or blended learning, and does the city plan on releasing numbers – or I’m sorry – enrollment numbers for Learning Bridges? 

Mayor: On the first point, the Chancellor can jump in here, obviously we want to get those numbers out on the opt-ins quickly. I think that will take at least a few days to make sure we have the final count right. And then as I talked about last week, we really want to work with parents to make sure that all the parents who are in blended really have their kids taking full advantage of it in classrooms. And then on Learning Bridges, we've seen, you know, so far steady uptake in it, not the numbers we were expecting. I'll have to get back to you on exactly when we can give you an update, but we can do that soon. My hope is both of those we can get a sense of this week. Chancellor you want to add? 

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, sir. So the numbers on the opt-in we will have this week, we're busy crunching those numbers right now, and we'll know a school by school as well as the borough by borough, and then obviously system-wide.  

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead, Alejandra. 

Question: Yeah, no, that’s it. Thank you.  

Mayor: Okay, great. Everyone look I'm going to conclude where I was earlier in this gathering. We've got to understand that with a second wave bearing down on us there's an opportunity to fight and there's an opportunity to beat this back. This is our last chance to fight and beat it back. Whatever happens here, New Yorkers are going to be strong and resilient and whatever happens here, thank God we're finally on the pathway to a vaccine and the bigger changes we need, but I don't want anyone to give up now when we still have a chance to beat this back. I'll talk to you about the indicators before, we see some areas where there's real concern, but we also see a lot more people getting tested. That's a very good thing. A very important thing. We see, thank God, the hospitalization is still a lot lower than one might've thought. That's a very good thing. We see our hospitals handling this crisis very well having learned tremendous lessons from the spring. 

We are in this fight right now. So when it comes to New Yorkers and their ability to fight back, there is no such thing as a foregone conclusion, there is no such thing as saying New Yorkers are going to lose because we just assume they're going to lose. No, we have a chance to do something here, historic, but it all comes down to each of you. I think we understand that every individual action matters. We probably understand it in New York City better than anywhere else in the country. Obviously a lot of places have gone through such a tough time, and they also got a lot of mixed messages from Washington and sometimes from their local leaders as well. And there also often wasn't enough devotion to data and science. What we tried to set up here was a simple concept, we're going to show you the numbers all the time, we're going to treat you like the adults you are and respect their intelligence and say, here's what's really happening, now it's your time to act on this information and New Yorkers have done it. We're asking you to go farther. We're asking you to wear this mask all the time. We're asking you to go out and get tested. We're asking you to change your holiday plans, to protect your family and all of us. And I know New Yorkers will answer the call and we can fight this back together. Thanks, everyone.

2020-11-17 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everyone. We are facing down right now a second wave that is trying to assault New York City – a second wave of the coronavirus. We see all over the country, we see a lot of places really, really struggling. But New York City continues to hold on. New York City continues to fight back. And, today, we're going to talk about all the things we need you to do to join that fight, to be part of holding off this second wave, because it still can be done and we need to all work together to get that done. Now, look, it comes down to the basics. We'll talk about it, getting tested – nothing more important at this point than everyone getting tested. And, of course, the simple steps like wearing a mask, it's having a huge impact and New Yorkers are answering the call and we need even more. So, it's as simple as this. Nobody wants to see a second wave hit New York City. No one wants to see a lot of restrictions. There's something you can do about it. It's up to you. You can make a difference right now, and that's what we're calling on everyone to do. 

Now, I want to give you an update, because it points out, once again, the power of every-day New Yorkers to make a difference. In the last days, more and more people are getting tested – that is having a profound impact. It's helping us understand exactly what's going on so we can best address it. So, we're going to go over the indicators in a few minutes. But let me now announce the good news that, once again, our indicators prove that we're below the threshold that we set regarding our schools. And that means that not only are schools open today in New York City, schools will also be open tomorrow in New York City. So, another day where we've stayed below that threshold because of everything that you have done. And, remember, this is a one piece of a bigger puzzle that explains why New York City has managed so far to do so much better than the rest of the country, because of the huge levels of participation of every-day New Yorkers, because we put in place the things that would make a difference. The fact that so many people are getting tested is because there is so much testing available for free. And now, we're seeing record participation. The fact that when someone tests positive, we go and immediately find their contacts and make sure that they get the proper support and they're addressed is because we have the largest and most effective test and trace corps in the country. The fact that we're talking to each day about how to keep our schools open is because we opened our schools to begin with, unlike most of the major cities in this country. And the reason we were able to open our schools is because New Yorkers work together to drive down that positivity level to a point where we could safely open schools and everyone's been participating in the things that have kept schools safe. Everyone has been wearing their masks in the school community. Everyone's been taking the precautions. Parents have been keeping kids home if they’re sick. All the things we've asked people to do, they're doing, and we need to keep doing that to do our very, very best to keep schools open and keep this city moving forward. So, it all comes down to what you can do. All those little small acts add up. When you do each one of those acts times 8 million people, it has a huge impact.  

Now, let's talk about testing because this is, I think, one of the best examples I've seen in a long time of the power of New Yorkers to make an impact. Last week, over 300,000 New Yorkers went out and got tested – 75,000 on Friday alone. That has changed the reality. That has helped us to get a much better take on what's happening. And as more and more people are getting tested, we’re seeing the truth of what's happening and that's allowed us to have the confidence and to stay under the numerical threshold so we could have our schools open again today and tomorrow. It is so important that everyone get out there and get tested. And for the folks who test positive, we immediately provide a lot of support and we do that contact tracing. And we know that that contact tracing has stopped a lot of other people from getting infected. So, you see every time someone gets tested, it gives us the good news that they're okay, or if it's the unfortunate news, they test positive, it still gives us the ability to act as quickly as possible to stop the infection from spreading. So, this is where everyone needs to get involved. So, it's Get Tested Tuesday. This is a great day for folks who have to get tested. If you haven't in a while, go get tested. If you've never gotten tested, go get tested. If you get tested and Test and Trace Corps. needs to talk to you, you want to have that conversation, because it's going to help protect your family and your community and your city. So far, we've had tremendous cooperation from folks working with Test and Trace Corps. And that's a very, very good story, but we’ve got to do a lot more now. So, we're going to have a testing blitz to get more and more New Yorkers tested. And here to talk about it is the head of our Test and Trace Corps., doing a great job with his team, Dr. Ted Long. 

Executive Director Ted Long, NYC Test and Trace Corps.: Thank you, sir. The fight against COVID begins with testing. In April, we were the epicenter of the COVID crisis. Since then we have built out a massive testing system and that has enabled us to achieve one of the lowest and sustained levels of the virus of anywhere in the country. Every time you go out and get tested, you're doing your part to stop the spread of the virus. Now, as the Mayor said, we're seeing new cases rise across New York City now. It is more important than ever to come out and get tested to fight back. What we're doing, working for you, is bringing testing to you. Since October 1st, we've started 240 new locations across New York City to bring testing to you wherever you, wherever you live. We've done that through starting self-swab stations where you come in, actually do the test on yourself, done in a matter of minutes, and then we'll call you with the result. Or, by deploying our mobile fleet where we're needed across the city. The result of all of that is that we can now do 60,000 tests per day, which we did last week, and 300,000 tests a week.  

Moving forward, we're continuing to innovate. We, this week, have unveiled our new weatherized mobile units, which were former ambulances, where we're able to park them and do testing through the window. We'll be able to use these units throughout the winter to continue doing testing and to bring it to where you live. We've mobilized the first part of this fleet this week. We're in Brooklyn, we're in our NYCHA developments – we're at the Marcy Houses or at Cypress Hills. In addition to that, we're continuing to build out two large new rapid testing sites every week. Today, we're going live at 51-30 Northern Boulevard in Queens. And then, on Thursday, we're going live at Mount Loretto with Catholic Charities in Staten Island. At these rapid testing sites, you come in, have your test done, you'll have your result back within 15 minutes. And, as the Mayor said, we'll have a team that will do accelerated contact tracing with you immediately, right there on the spot, ask you who you could have infected when you were infectious with the coronavirus, and then we'll call them, your contacts, that day and offer to bring them in for testing immediately. No delay.  

Finally, I want to make the point that today is Get Tested Tuesday. We're in East New York, we’re on the streets with our teams. We're here to help you find a fast, easy, and free way to get tested. Please come out and we look forward to seeing you in East New York today. 

Thank you, sir. 

Mayor: Thank you very much, Ted. And thanks to everyone at Test and Trace Corps. They're working so hard and they're making a real difference. So, testing matters so much and everyone can participate and help this city move forward. But let's also talk about another area where we need everyone to do all they can do, and that's when it comes to fighting the flu. Remember, the flu is always an issue every year. We talk every year about getting our flu shot and we wear the big buttons that say I got my flu shot. That would be important in any year. Flu is dangerous. We want to protect people from the flu. But the combination of the flu season overlapping with the fight against the coronavirus, that's been worrying us for a long time. So, we've been saying from the beginning, we need to have the strongest effort to get people, to get that flu shot. And we need people to answer the call and I have good news, which is that New Yorkers really have been answering the call. So, so far, more than 1.5 million New Yorkers have gotten the flu shot already. It's a huge increase from what we had even last year and other recent years. So, people are hearing about the importance of getting a flu shot and they're doing something about it. And I just want to make it really clear, this is the most important flu shot you will get in your life. If ever was a time to get a flu shot, it is this year, because the flu and the coronavirus are happening at the same time. And we have to protect everyone and we have to protect our health care workers and our hospital system. When you get that flu shot, you're not only helping yourself and your family, you're protecting a lot of other people at the same time. So, everybody, this is another example of something that you can do easily for free. Of course, it's quick, it's available in so many locations and it makes a big difference. So, as simple as this, if you haven't gotten the flu shot yet – look, it's simple. call 3-1-1. You can text, you can go to nyc.gov/flu, in this case – F-L-U – flu. So, the fact is you can find a location immediately. You can go out today, get that flu shot, be done in a matter of minutes, and it's going to help everyone. So, really want to urge people that recognize what an impact that can make.  

Look, when we do what we can do as New Yorkers, he gives us the time we need to get through due to the bigger changes that we expect to happen really soon. We have now two vaccines we're hearing very promising news about. A lot moving on that front, a lot moving to prepare, to distribute those vaccines, get everyone who wants it – those vaccines as quickly as possible. We're waiting for that day. But, in the meantime, by going out and getting a coronavirus test, by going out and getting a flu shot, your getting us the chance to get through safely to the time when we have the bigger solution, which has the vaccine.  

So, now, let me go over today's indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID 19, threshold 200 patients – today's report, 102 patients. So, again, interesting, the number has gone up from where it was a few weeks ago, but still not going up intensely. That is a good sign. We continue to see a good situation on hospitals in terms of our ICU – is not seeing a great expansion of the number of people ending up in the ICU. We're watching this literally every day, but if there is a silver lining, right now, it's that this piece of the equation is acting differently than the other piece of the equation. And this, in many ways, is the most important in terms, of course, life and death. If we can keep hospitalizations low and keep people out of the ICU, it means we're saving lives. That's the good news in this indicator. The news I'm watching that I don't like as much, of course, is the confirmed positivity rate among the people who go into the hospital. That's now at 45.19 percent. That's gone up a lot. That was down, you know, at least half as much or lower for much of the time the last few months. On the other hand, the crucial question there, again, is do people end up in ICU? Do they end up with their lives in danger or not? So far, thank God, we've seen a lot of stability in our health care system and people making it through and that's crucial. On the – number two, new reported cases on the seven-day average, threshold 550. Again, we've gone way past that in these recent weeks, 1,117 cases. Tremendous concern, but also related to the great increase in the number of testing. And if this number goes up because more and more people getting tested, but our positivity levels do not go up intensely, that's a good sign. That testing continues to tell us a good truth. We're watching to see what the correlation of those two pieces is, but what matters is, every single person getting tested. So, let's go to positivity. Number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report is 3.2 percent, but today's seven day rolling average is 2.74 percent – 2.74 percent. So, again, a number higher than we want, but a number that we have seen is being positively in a good way affected by the high levels of testing. The more we test, the more we are finding that there are, thank God, not a massive increase in that positivity level. We need people to go out there and get tested. It makes a difference.  

Let me do a few words in Spanish. And, again, we want to talk about the flu and the focus on the flu shots. 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Good morning, all. We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Ted Long, by Dr. Chokshi, and by Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today, it goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS. 

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you today?  

Mayor: I'm doing well, Juliet. How are you?  

Question: I’m okay, thank you. Well, the Rockefeller Tree is now in place, and I was wondering how people will be able to go see the tree without being in a large crowd? Or, is there a plan for public viewing for the tree?  

Mayor: Yes, we are working on that right now and we'll have an announcement very shortly. We certainly cannot have large crowds. We want to give folks an opportunity to go by and see it, but, you know, with all the right precautions, distanced and wearing masks and no large crowds. We'll talk about the way to regulate that. We're particularly concerned, obviously, once it's lit that that's going to be a time when more and more people want to see it. So, we will have that plan out very quickly, next few days. And, obviously, the focus will be on keeping everyone safe.  

Moderator: Next is Matt Chayes from Newsday. 

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?  

Mayor: Good, Matt. How have you been?  

Question: I've been all right. Thank you for asking. For Drs. Choksi, Long, [inaudible] all of the above. Can the current rise of the citywide infection metrics be connected back to those zoned hotspots that were identified by the State in late September or October? 

Mayor: I'm only going to say as a layman, that certainly started some things in motion. That was a good swath of Brooklyn and Queens. But, obviously, you know, since then we've seen a lot more. So, which doctor wants to jump in? 

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: I can start Mr. Mayor. This is this is Dr. Chokshi. And thanks for the question. The Mayor is exactly right, you know, we did see increases in cases and the infection rate in those cluster zones earlier. What's happening in the city – it's important to distinguish – is beyond those cluster zones. So, the increases in cases, as well as what we're watching with respect to that percent positivity, is a broader based phenomenon. And that's why it's really important for all of the things that we're talking about to occur across the entire city.  

Moderator: Next is Amanda Eisenberg from Politico.  

Question: Good morning. Can you hear me okay?  

Mayor: Yeah, Amanda. How are you?  

Question: I'm doing well. How are you?  

Mayor: Thank you.  

Question: Great. So, I had a question about the rapid testing – and this could be for yourself or Dr. Long – but I was wondering why contact tracing is being done immediately on-site? I was wondering if there's something that contact tracing hasn't been able to identify that they're looking to do on-site versus maybe after the fact. 

Mayor: I’ll start – I always like to give the layman's interpretation – and Dr. Long can jump in. Remember, that, for a long time, rapid testing was a question mark. And the quality, the availability did not allow us to use as much as we ideally would have wanted. That situation's getting better. And, obviously, if you can get a result and have a conversation with someone right there in front of you, you're going to have a much greater chance of having effective communication, timely communication, and acting quickly to find those contacts. I had a great conversation with some of the Test and Trace Corps. members in Staten Island when I was out at the pop-up site, the testing site at the Staten Island Ferry. And these are extraordinarily devoted people who feel urgency about reaching each contact immediately and making sure that they're getting tested, they're getting the help they need. So, I think if you can do that right there with the person in front of you, that's the ideal. Dr. Long? 

Executive Director Long: I completely agree with the Mayor. The two principles of contact tracing are – one, building trust; and, two – speed – how fast can you intervene to get somebody that's been exposed to quarantine? And I'll give you the example of Soundview. , in Soundview we had in-person contact tracing there, Amanda, that spoke seven languages and I practice in the community adjacent right there in Morrisania. So our ability to talk to people in Soundview in their language, do immediate contact tracing, and then bringing anybody that they exposed oftentimes that same day for testing so that they could quarantine and get tested right away, enabled us to fairly quickly drive down the percent positive by two thirds in that community. We saw the same thing in Sunset Park and now we're taking the model based on that success and applying it everywhere. But it is something that we've seen to be very effective. So that's why every site where we're using rapid testing, we are now building in accelerated contact tracing. 

Question: Is this a model that you're hoping to expand out? And I know Dr. Long, you just mentioned that you're doing it at certain sites, are you looking to continue expanding this maybe to Health + Hospitals facilities or other ways to reach people and find out maybe who they've been in contact with that aren't immediate family members? 

Executive Director Long: Yeah, thank you for the question. What a lovely idea. Yes, we are doing exactly that. So at any site where we have rapid testing, because we need to have the result back in order to do the contact tracing right there on the spot, we will be doing accelerated contact tracing. So as we expand our rapid testing, we'll be expanding that symmetrically. Thank you.  

Moderator: The next is Henry from Bloomberg. 

Question: Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?  

Mayor: I'm hanging in there, Henry, how you been? 

Question: Good, I guess every day that it's below three percent, you're a happy man. 

Mayor: Very true statement. I wait for those indicators impatiently every morning and a good day to day, but again, a good day because people did the hard work and went out and got tested. So that makes me proud in New York City, but the floor is yours, Henry. 

Question: Here's my question. It has to do with that three percent threshold which is such a – it's a kind of a – it's a manufactured number in a lot of ways, and it it changes with the denominator and the denominator is the number of people who are tested. So isn't it really not a very good indicator for determining the risk of infection in the schools? Isn't a better number, the amount of new cases that are appearing in the city every day, or some other way, some other standard, other than expanding the denominator by testing 65,000 people a day? 

Mayor: Right, I'll start. I'd like Dr. Varma to jump in after me. In one way, Henry it's fair to say everything with the coronavirus has been the best choices available, they are not perfect choices in general. We are still trying to understand this disease. When we set each of the kind of markers we've set, the threshold levels, the six-foot distance, everything is based on the best available data and science, no one is saying it's perfect, but we have to set standards. And the three percent standard was out of an abundance of caution. There's no question about it and we stated it as such. Remember that you go back to July and August a tremendous number of people were concerned that schools couldn't open safely. That was the growing assumption. And I kept trying to fight back against that because I thought it was not fair. I thought it wasn't true, but I understood that lots of people were afraid and it was important to give people faith. So we did all these extensive precautions in the schools, most notably having everyone wear masks, kids and adults alike, which all over the world is not the standard even in school systems that have successfully reopened. And we did intensive testing and cleaning, and, you know, the ventilation work, you name it, but there was still a tremendous concern and I said, look, we'll set this rigorous standard at three percent. We'll do all these other things we promise to do. You can trust us, but people were trusting us with their health, with their child's health, we had to show it would work, we have shown it was work, but keeping faith with people that when we set a standard, we mean it. we live by it, it is important.  

The – I don't think it's fair to say that positivity is not our best guide, Henry, I'll tell you why. It is, the denominator point is crucial in that we want the largest number of people tested possible because that tells us the truth. Let's say 75,000 people got tested today, 100,000 people got tested today, and the percentage of the positivity went shooting upward. That tells you a very painful truth. But if –as more and more people get tested, the numbers keep going lower and lower, that says something very important in a good direction. So I actually think that the maximum number of being tested is the greatest truth and the positivity level tells you more than just the raw number of cases because it really tells you how expansive the impact of the coronavirus is. But I want – Jay can give a much more erudite explanation of why positivity is the ultimate measure.  

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Yeah, thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I think the – you know, one way to think about this is that all of our indicators are bad and some are less bad, you know? And the reality is everything we measure has imperfections associated with it. But what we've learned in this epidemic, not just here from, you know, New York City, but looking at data from around the country and around the world is that there are a few key metrics that are useful to it, even though they have imperfections. So the case rate, the number of new cases diagnosed every single day is a measure of the amount of new infections that are occurring, but it's not accurate because we know some people don't get diagnosed, but the trend over time is very consistent, and so that's why you follow it. The test positivity is a marker for what we call prevalence. So what that is like, because one person who is newly infected stays infectious for several days, it gives you an idea about how many people have this active infection at any given time. Again, it's a proxy for that, it's not a perfect indicator because we know that if you test more people, you're going to potentially lower it because the true prevalence is lower than that. So I think the only way to sort of answer this is the fact that you have a few options. You can take all of these indicators together as a composite and make a decision based on those, which is how we make our decisions for the city. But when it comes to the schools, as the Mayor has said very clearly, we needed to instill trust. And so we needed to come up with an indicator of what we think represents the high level of transmission in the community, and that three percent is proven useful in that regard, because as we see, as we get closer to that, it's really measuring the transmission in the community right now. 

Mayor: Go ahead, Henry. 

Question: All right. Thank you very much for that, I guess was very helpful to me. My second question is a question you've been asked often, and I'm still going to ask it, which has to do with the quality of education in remote education. There are literally thousands of students who don't have effectively operating devices. The internet is spotty to say the least not just for homeless kids and poor kids, it's spotty for a lot of people who don't have broadband and the city has been trying, but very slow in trying to meet the demand for this stuff. And then beyond that, you have these staff problems in which a lot of parents are reporting, my kid doesn't have a social studies teacher for remote, my kid doesn't have an English teacher for remote, my kid has a one hour with the gym teacher during the remote days. It's a lot of this is not working well and I keep hearing these kinds of glossy descriptions of you know, we're doing the best we can, or, you know, kids are really enjoying this blended program. I'm not hearing this. The more parents I speak to, the more teachers – frustrated teachers I speak to, there are very serious problems with the quality.  

Mayor: Look, I – sometimes when I hear that kind of question and I don't mean to at all underestimate the meaning of the question, because I do feel it. I feel it for everyone. I understand the frustrations of parents. I understand the frustrations kids. The frustrations to educators. But sometimes that question sounds like, you know, why is the coronavirus here? And, and that's, you know, the reality that we need to just come to grips with, the coronavirus changed everything. It created impossible equations in many cases, just like the previous question that Dr. Varma answered, we don't have the perfect model for any of these things, because we have been still trying to adapt in an ever-changing situation with very imperfect resources. And, you know, if this was just one thing I've talked about before, if it was, you know, just a health crisis that wasn't also wrapped in the economic crisis and all the other problems, we might be having a different discussion, but this is all of those things and a disease that we still don't fully understand, that the medical community doesn't fully understand, it has thrown us plenty of curve balls. That doesn't excuse anything, Henry, it just puts in perspective that everyone's trying their damnedest at the Department of Education right down to the school level to figure it out. But it's a very hard equation. And so what I have heard consistently is that there are better and worse experiences with remote. I know very few people who are fully satisfied with remote, but I think that is first and foremost because there's no way remote could be as good as what happens in a classroom. I know it is evolutionary, meaning I know every day schools are trying to make it better, and the DOE central operation is trying to make it better, and I truly believe it gets better with every passing month, but I think it's an imperfect equation. 

I would say on the internet service point. Again, your question is honest, but I – if you listen to the question that sort of points out, let's, let's have a little serenity prayer here, what can we fix and what can we not fix? The broader problem of internet service in our society and the disparities in internet service and the imperfections of the technology, I can't fix that today. The specific problem of a family needing a device, I can fix that. And I would disagree with you Henry, that that wasn't addressed aggressively, when 300,000 devices we're putting kids' hands for free. I'm sorry. Let's not denigrate that achievement. I give the DOE a lot of credit. They did that very fast. They made it work. They're a high quality, top of the line devices, handed over to people for free. That's pretty enlightened where I come from. Now, there's more to be done and I get it. Some kids - the service was wrong, we have to switch the service. Some kids machine broke. We had to give him a new –yeah, I get it. But I don't want to act like there hasn't been a massive effort here to put the technology in people's hands and anyone who doesn't have it just has to call 3-1-1 and they will get it. They absolutely will get it. Hopefully very quickly, in some cases there may be a supply problem that has to be addressed, but they'll still get the device, and that's at least something to keep people going, keep kids getting educated while we try to solve the bigger problems. Go ahead.  

Moderator: The next is Jeff Mays from the New York Times. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, hope you well.  

Mayor: How you doing, Jeff?  

Question: I'm good. Thanks for asking. My question today is about the limit on private gatherings. I'm wondering how the city is going to enforce the Governor's limit on private gatherings? Do you expect that the Sheriff's Office will be responsible for this? Commissioner Shea, I believe said today that the NYPD would not be breaking up Thanksgiving gatherings. You've been very forceful and repetitive and telling people not to say not to gather and not to travel to, you know, keep their gatherings small, so what are you going to do to make sure that that happens? 

Mayor: I think the important point is to educate people. I really do. And, Jeff, look I remember you said a few months back that you grew up in Coney Island. So, you know, life in New York City, I think New Yorkers, New Yorkers are tough, New Yorkers are creative, sometimes New Yorkers bend the rules, but ultimately the vast majority of New Yorkers have heard these messages and acted on them, and you can just see it on the streets. The again –is it perfect, the amount of masking usage? No, but is it one of the best levels in the country? Absolutely. And when we have said to people here are restrictions that we need to protect everyone, overwhelmingly people abide by them. So I think the education on the front end, telling people how important it is not to travel, if they do travel to follow very closely the state guidance about how they come back and either go through the right testing or quarantine, keeping their gathering small. I think these these warnings, these standards, really do affect behavior. For everyone? No, but for a very, very substantial number. So of course when it comes down to individual families, we're not going to enforce on family gatherings. We will on bigger gatherings. You've seen the Sheriff's Office, it's usually thank God only a few a week, but the Sheriff is out there and they have to break up some bigger gatherings and penalize the people who put them together, those have been relatively rare. But of course, when it comes down to the family level, our best effort is to educate people and know that most people will listen and most people will follow the guidance. Go ahead, Jeff. 

Question: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. My other question is about the three percent threshold for closing schools. I'm wondering if you do – if we do hit that threshold schools do close, is there any thought that you will reevaluate that threshold? And I'm wondering if Dr. Chokshi and others could talk about what a new threshold might be? 

Mayor: That absolutely, there are discussions happening right now, Jeff, with the State, with a variety of stakeholders in our school system, and remember we have many different types of unions representing our food service workers and the folks who keep the buildings clean, the folks that provide the school safety, educators, all forms of staff, administrators, we're talking to all of those stakeholders. We're talking with parents and parent organizations and obviously most especially with the State that ultimately has the key decision-making ability and we're talking through the right way to handle this. And if we hit that threshold, not a foregone conclusion, but if we hit that threshold, how we can turn around and come back as quickly as possible and what it's going to take. So those conversations going on, I'll turn to Dr. Chokshi and I'll just say before turning to him, we can't give you any details, Jeff, would love to, if anything had been settled, but it's still in discussion and it's a lot of stakeholders and we have to get it right. But what we can tell you is we want to figure out how to take advantage of the strength of schools, which have been they've been incredibly safe and everyone has done what was asked of them, which is a blessing, but also recognize that we have some new challenges because of what's happening around us with the coronavirus and figure out the right approach to this next phase. Dr. Chokshi? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. The only point that I would add is that the Mayor has, you know, very clearly charged us to bring the most current scientific understanding and take a very data-driven approach to thinking through these important questions. And I will just point out that, you know, as the only large school district around the country to have been able to successfully open our public schools, we are at the vanguard of contributing to that scientific understanding and knowing precisely how that a rigorous approach to health and safety that commenced with at the beginning of the school year can continue, but how we can also build upon it for for the possibility of a school reopening if we do hit that threshold.  

Mayor: Go ahead.  

Moderator: The next is Andrew Siff from NBC.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. So taking a look at the numbers a little more closely here, it looks like that Saturdays daily positive percentage was over three. Sundays was over three. Today is over three. And yet the seven-day average is 2.74. I know that what you guys do is you sort of backfill as you go, because you get more testing data. I know you said that it's not a foregone conclusion that you'll hit three percent, but to your health officials, are they giving you a probability and essentially a forecast that it's likely that tomorrow or Thursday, most likely you will hit that three percent? 

Mayor: It's a fair question, Andrew, but I will tell you there's been a lot of unpredictability in this whole process over these months, and one of the things I've found talking with my health colleagues is that folks are quick to say, there are some X factors here. And the biggest X factor is how many people come out to get tested. We saw that surge on Friday, which is clearly affecting things. I mean, that's just staggering that 75,000 people came out. I think those numbers are going to stay high and that is going to affect the outcome. So it's, it's impossible to say anything more than this. I've warned parents on Friday, get ready, because I think that was the responsible thing to do, to say, look, this could happen, there's a decent chance it will happen. Get ready, have your plan be ready for how you want to make sure your kids are taken care of right if we have to close the schools for a period of time. Obviously, also very clearly said, the goal if we even had to close, is to come back as quickly as possible, and we hope for a quick turnaround. But I wouldn't get into the probability business because every day depends on the sheer number of people getting tested and what it tells us. I mean, that is – those are facts on the ground. And several times we were absolutely certain, you know, a certain number was going to be hit and then it didn't happen, and we just got to recognize it really depends on what everyday people do. Go ahead. 

Question: Second question has to do with holiday travel and general advice to New Yorkers. You have urged people not to travel for Thanksgiving. You've urged them to avoid gatherings. Have you considered and or are you planning to ask New Yorkers to reconsider whether they should be going into the office? Are we close a time where you'd recommend that people work from home, if at all possible? 

Mayor: We're considering a whole range of options and working closely with the State. Look, I think everyone needs to be aware that we're dealing with a challenge. I never have any hubris about this, Andrew, because this city was hit so hard in the beginning, we went through so much pain, but I'm very proud of New Yorkers at how far back we have come, at how well we did this summer, and even as we faced recent challenges, remember Brooklyn and Queens was a huge challenge. It was beat back, which is extraordinary, and a lot of changes happened on the ground. A lot more people got tested, a lot more people wore masks, a lot of participation from the community. We're seeing that again now on a really big scale. Again, this testing number we're seeing now says a lot about the level of participation. 

So I say that Andrew, to say, we know we're dealing with something really tough right now. We know a second wave is bearing down on us, but we also know New York City has consistently performed better than other parts of the country because of the sheer level of participation of the people. So we still have time to fight back a second wave and you look at that hospitalization number, and that to me is the really interesting part of this equation that that's still remains lower than one might've expected, and we need to keep it there. So the answer to your question is everything's being discussed, but it's all being discussed with an understanding that there's a chance to fight back the second wave still, and we've got to figure out the right combination of features that will give us the best opportunity to beat it back while also trying to, of course, protect people's livelihoods and protect our kids' education.  

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Nolan Hicks from the Post. 

Question: Morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?  

Mayor: Good, Nolan. How have you been?  

Question: I’m alright. Previously you and your health experts have said that you've linked approximately 10 percent of the coronavirus infections in the city back to travel, and another 10 percent back to large superspreader events, which leaves 80 percent of those – 80, another 10 percent— 

Mayor: That second 10 percent is not accurate. You finish, but I'm going to just tell you your second assumption isn't accurate. Go ahead. 

Question: Well, it was 10 percent linked back – we'll haggle over the 10 percent, whatever, but there's 80 percent of the infections that you guys have not provided much of any information, and I'm wondering what sort of details can you provide about the outstanding forfeits of cases? Are these people who, if a direct connection can't be drawn to something were engaging in risky activities in the run-up to becoming positive, where they dining indoors, where they're going to gyms, what sort of information can you provide about their behaviors and the run-up to contracting the disease? 

Mayor: I'll start, and I suspect several of my colleagues may want to get in on this one. Nolan, the question is one that makes a lot of sense because people want firm, specific answers and understand that we would like things to be sort of clear and neat, and that's just not what the coronavirus usually gives us. So to clarify, the way you started, the 10 percent related to travel that is accurate, the 10 percent, that next number of what I remember was between five and 10 percent, Dr. Long will give us the specific was related to specific sites, but it's not accurate to use the phrase “superspreader events.” None of the sites resulted in that many cases, and that's the interesting thing, Nolan, we just don't have sites or activities that led to anywhere near the number of cases you would think. We're talking about sites that led to single digit cases, typically, maybe a few cases, double digit – a few instances, double digit cases, but nothing that gets even close to the word superspreader and nothing related to large events of late. The different – a few moments back in the summer, but not of late.  

So, the challenge here is just how diffuse this is, and when it’s this diffuse, it isn't always as simple as, Oh, you know, I went to a restaurant or I went to a gym. A lot of times there isn't an obvious place because there's a substantial amount of community spread, and it doesn't always fit neatly into a package as it were. So I think what we're seeing here is something more generalized. As we make decisions with the State, we are still thinking about what the larger data tells us about places that might present challenges, but the specific is an immense amount of information has come out of Test and Trace, and it's not showing, by and large, specific, actionable situations, and, and that's something we all need to understand. So let me see if Dr. Long wants to add any clarification, then offer Dr. Varma, Dr. Chokshi a chance if they want to add anything. 

Director Long: Yeah. Thank you, sir. This is an important clarification, as the Mayor said, we are not seeing 10 percent of cases related to superspreader events. We're not seeing superspreader events. What we're seeing is five to 10 percent of cases we're able to link back to gatherings or small events. The Mayor gave the example of last week of a family gathering. We are seeing things like that. But the reason this point is really important to drive home is because as the Mayor also said, you go outside, you see New Yorkers wearing masks, New Yorkers are making sacrifices to prevent super spreading events and they're very successful, and that's why, even though we're seeing a rise in the new number of cases, we still have one of the lowest rates of the coronavirus of any city, especially any big city in the country. It's because of all of the sacrifices that New Yorkers have made and are willing to make same thing with coming out and getting tested. New Yorkers are proactive here.  

To give a backdrop to this, we do know a fair amount about what's going on in terms of people that are contracting the coronavirus. Contact tracing by definition is a forward look, we look for contacts that we reach out to. It is not about where somebody got infected. What we do, it's in terms of figuring out where somebody got infected is we look for first off, clusters. So if you've a person that went to a restaurant and a gym hard to know whether they got infected in the restaurant or the gym or somewhere else, but if you have multiple people that spent time in that gym, we do an investigation. This is where I'll defer to Dr. Chokshi, the Department of Health, does an investigation offers a notification to that facility. We've done thousands of these to date, and we have – we keep very close look in detail on these different small clusters as they develop. 

But before I turn to Dr. Chokshi, I just want to really draw the drive the point home: while we look into where cases were likely infected the purpose of contact tracing is a forward look to identify, contact, and prevent them from going out and infecting others, and we've been very successful there, and that's one of the key reasons how we've achieved one of the lowest levels of the virus, and two, I think it's important that New Yorkers have earned where we are now, and that's why we haven't seen super spreading events is because of the sacrifices New Yorkers have made every single day. Dr. Chokshi? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you, Dr. Long. Just to take the baton there. Dr. Long is exactly right. We do cluster investigations in places where there are multiple cases, and the purpose of that is not just to find out what high-risk settings are. But also to make sure that people remain protected, both the individuals who may be cases associated with a specific cluster, but also for us to ensure that people are following public health guidance across a range of different settings. But before we get too deep into the details, I do want to just pull it back to make sure that we're sending the clear messages, you know, to the general public which you know, Dr. Long stated for contact tracing the goal is to help people who need to isolate or quarantine to do that, because that helps us to break the chains of transmission and the Test and Trace Corps has been quite effective in being able to do that, and is a major part of why our cases are not increasing to the same degree that we're seeing in many other places around the country. We have to keep those efforts up, but redouble them with a focus on what we know both from our own experience, but also from the broader scientific understanding that we have about what are high risk settings, and I'll just highlight two categories. One is high-risk settings, particularly where people are indoors and not wearing a mask, and so that's why we want to start a campaign this week to make sure that people are wearing masks indoors as much as possible anytime you're outside of a household, and it's a big part of making sure that particular settings where it's more likely for someone to be indoors and unmasked are as safe as humanly possible. The second part of it is around smaller social gatherings. As the Mayor has mentioned before this is again around the country, a major source of transmission of the virus, and a big part of the reason that we have been very clear about our holiday guidance to try to prevent further spread. 

Mayor: I want to turn to Dr. Varma, but just a point off of what Dr. Chokshi said, look, we've had this very robust Test and Trace capacity here. We had to create it ourselves. When we go back to look at the whole history of coronavirus, a big question's going to be what would have happened if the federal government had created a national Test and Trace plan and funded it and organized it everywhere? How different the trajectory of the coronavirus would have been in this country. Remember we put ours together in May and June. If that work had been done around the country, we very well may not be going through this extent of second wave right now, everywhere. So an opportunity I think is going to be recognized after the fact that was the lost opportunity for the country, but thank God, New York City did act. Dr. Varma, you want to add to any analysis here? 

Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: Yeah just two really quick points to emphasize. Absolutely what the Mayor just pointed out that one of the reasons that you see coronavirus rising throughout the country is because there are many places that are not imposing restrictions, and of course we have the changes in seasonality, but what you see in New York is that while the cases have been increasing and they worry us, that rate of change, that trajectory has not been as steep as it's been in many other places. Some of that is absolutely attributable to all of the behaviors that everybody's following, but some of it is also attributable to this very impressive and large Test and Trace program that we have that other places around the country are consistently asking us for guidance on what to do. So it's just very important, I think, to emphasize that we need to continue our efforts of testing and tracing and need people to participate in them because it is one of the things that's helping keep the rate of change slower than it would be otherwise.  

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: Last question for today, it goes to Arthur from FOX 5. Arthur, do we have you? We can swing back to Arthur. We'll go to Yehudit from Boro Park 24 News. 

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?  

Mayor: Good, how are you?  

Question: Good. So on Friday, Governor Cuomo said that COVID is not really spread in schools, but in bars, restaurants, and gyms, and Dr. Varma has said that the COVID transmission is actually surprisingly low, especially in the elementary schools. So I'm just wondering, just in terms of priorities, why wouldn't the city focus on closing the bars, restaurants, and gyms and prioritize keeping the schools open for the 1 million public school children as many European countries have done? 

Mayor: I appreciate the question. First of all, the decisions on the bars and restaurants, gyms, obviously, you know, the, the central reality there is the State’s role, and that's why we're having constant conversations with the State about what that correct mix of actions might be. I've talked to the Governor about it several times. Our teams are talking constantly. We're all cognizant of wanting to protect people's livelihoods, which have taken such a horrible hit this year. We want to be fair to people after everything everyone's gone through. So that's in our minds, but obviously what's going to keep us safe as most important and following the data, following the science.  

So those conversations I'm sure are going to result soon and some clarification. On the schools, look again, we have about 300,000 kids so far who have attended school in the public schools this year as things get better and they will get better because a vaccine is coming and, you know, we're finding out more and more every day about how to fight back this disease. We're going to see more and more kids come back to school over time, but for the 300,000 or so, who are now there, we want them to stay in school. I'm the person who wanted to open schools against all odds. You know, there's plenty of people told me not to do it. I believe it was the right thing to do, and it would really benefit our kids and families. It has – I want to keep them open. If we have to close them, it would be temporarily, to reset the equation, given the new conditions we're in. You're certainly right that elementary schools have been a particularly bright spot and that's important. But I'd say that what we learned was having very stringent standards for our schools, kept them safe, and if we're entering a more challenging period, what is that next level of health and safety measures we need to take to respond to the moment we're in, and that's what we're sorting out right now with the State and with other stakeholders. Go ahead. 

Question: Okay, and then also I'm wondering, how does the three percent threshold affect the city's private schools? And if they're allowed to stay open, I was wondering if they will be given resources for testing of students, teachers, and staff? 

Mayor: A very important question. The three percent was a standard that I set with the health team related to our public schools. The State will set the ultimate guidance related to non-public schools. We do support in a very material way the testing efforts of non-public schools. The Department of Health has been in touch constantly with a variety of non-public schools, offering test kits that we get from the Stat, so we provide them for free offering the support to help schools, to figure out the best way to do testing, and we do that in a very hands-on manner to help non-public schools. Ultimately every non-public school is responsible for its own testing approach. We're very clear that, something we've looked at very carefully legally, that that is their legal obligation. But we'll support it in the ways we can. We'll try and be helpful in the ways we can, and I will tell you when our Department of Health has engaged non-public schools, and there's been a rigorous dialogue about the best way to get things done, we've seen some really good results, and I want to credit Dr. Chokshi, who’s been deeply involved in a lot of these conversations and his First Deputy Dr. Torian Easterling, and also Mitch Katz got deeply involved with a number of the school conversations, and so many others. We found a lot of common ground, even if you know, there's imperfections, at least everyone is communicating and trying to figure out how to keep our kids safe, and it doesn't matter what kind of school it is, we want to keep our kids safe and our families safe.  

Everybody, as we conclude today, look, the thing to remember here is that every day matters. Every single day matters, and every day we hold the line, keeps people safe and saves lives and helps us hold on to that day that's coming soon when there's going to be a vaccine, and look, we can literally say those words now. The day is coming soon when there will be a vaccine, we know the vaccines have now been developed. They've been tested and proven. More work to be done to finalize them and get them distributed. But that work is happening every hour of every day. So let's hang on, let's do all that we can do to hang tough. So I conclude with the same basic point, go out there, get tested, wear that mask, take the precautions, and it's going to make a huge difference for the city. So we can get to that day when the vaccine arrives and we turned things around. Thank you, everybody.

2020-11-18 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everyone. Everyone has been working so hard to fight back the coronavirus. New Yorkers continue to do the right thing, getting tested. So much going on, but this morning we had bad news. We spent some time confirming it and double checking it, because it is exactly on the number of 3.00 percent. But unfortunately, as of today, on our seven-day rolling average for corona virus positivity, New Yorker City had exactly 3.0 percent, and, as a result, we do need to close our schools for the coming days. No one is happy about this decision, we all in-fact are feeling very sad about this decision, because so much good work has been put into keeping the schools open – and opening them up to begin with, let's start there – opening the schools when almost no other major school system in America opened making them so safe. But we set a very clear standard and we need to stick to that standard, and I want to emphasize to parents, to educators, to staff, to kids that we intend to come back and come back as quickly as possible. We are working right now with the State of New York, and that was a lot of what we talked about this morning. I had a number of conversations with the Governor and our teams have been talking throughout the morning on exactly what it would take to come back and bring our schools back quickly. And it will be a higher standard. I want that to be clear. We have a stringent health and safety standard right now. We're going to have to raise that up even higher to be able to bring our schools back but that's exactly what we intend to do. We're going to have to focus even more on testing. And I want to emphasize, testing is going to be crucial to the successful reopening of our schools and everyone has got to get engaged even more on testing. I guarantee you that part of that plan will be an even heavier emphasis on testing and therefore want to say to everyone in the school communities, starting with parents and kids, we need to get those testing consent forms even as we're in this moment of pause. We need to get ready to come back. We need everyone to get those testing consent forms in so we can get into a deeper testing regime.

The State – the Governor and I spoke several times. Obviously, he has laid out some of the additional measures the State likely will be taking quite soon in New York City. Additional restrictions across the board that will affect a number of different industries, a number of different parts of life in this city because we are dealing with a bigger problem all over New York City and state, all over the country, the region. We have to do more to fight back this second wave. So, the State has made very clear additional restrictions are coming and coming soon. But we're focused on now is making sure that we are working with all families to get them the remote learning they need in the interim, that we're putting more stringent measures in place so we can get schools back up and running soon, that we can protect New Yorkers across the board working with the State to take the right steps to make sure that we address the kind of activities that might create a particular danger and keep people safe. It will come back every single time to the basics, to the mask wearing, to getting the tests. We're going to keep going deeper on that.

But I want to affirm, before I turn to the Chancellor, I want to affirm that as much as we are unhappy today that this moment was reached, we are resolved to keep fighting. That is what New Yorkers do. And we will overcome this moment. Remember, thank God we're having this conversation with the backdrop of not one but two vaccines now on the horizon and the fact that we expect to get a lot more support from Washington going forward on a variety of fronts. So, we're going to fight this back. This is a setback but it's a setback we will overcome. And I know our Chancellor and everyone at the DOE today is sad that this moment has come but now are resolute about making sure we serve families and kids in the meantime and then getting back up and running with our schools as quickly as possible. Let me now turn to our Chancellor, Richard Carranza.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: So, thank you, Mr. Mayor. You're absolutely right, this is not a happy for us in the Department of Education. It's been an eventful and very challenging year in so many ways and to say the least. And our schools have opened and been remarkably safe with a 0.19 positivity rate. They've also been safe havens for our children, and we know our students need that interaction so we feel a deep sense of commitment to making sure we can open for in-person learning again as soon as it is physically safe to do so. Just this morning I was visiting at P. S. 73 in the Bronx and I want to give a shout out to Principal Vivian Bueno. And the smiles and the interaction of her teachers and the students and the love and support that those teachers were showing for those students is something I cannot wait – and I know you can't wait, Mr. Mayor – to see again very soon.

And we carry that same urgency with us today as we announce this temporary closure. And I want to emphasize that we are looking at this as a temporary closure. We will get students back in buildings as soon as we can safely. This is our number priority and our number one focus to get our students back in person as soon as possible. We're committed to making sure that our students have what they need to be successful and I want to remind everyone that is listening here today that school is still in session. We are pivoting to remote instruction rather than the in-person instruction that some of our students have been receiving. So, school is still in session and students will still continue to learn and be supported by our teachers. And I also want to remind families that we will continue to communicate with families about device support and tips for remote learning.

In addition, free meals for all students will still be available, and this is critically important. Principals will work with their staff to make sure that there are windows of time to pick up materials at buildings over the next several days and as needed throughout this time period. We have focused on these challenges before and we've learned a great deal together. New Yorkers have proven that they are ready and willing to do this fight against this virus. We need to ask you that again it's important that we follow all of the safety protocols. With the holidays coming, please, we understand but it's important more than ever that we follow the advice of our medical professionals so that we're able to get back to in-person learning as quickly as possible. That is how we will get our schools back open in person learning. So, again, I'm grateful for the tireless efforts of our educators, staff, and I know our students and families as well. So, please let's follow the advice, let's follow the guidance, let's take on this challenge as we've done all along and together, we'll get through this and we'll all get back to in-person learning as quickly as possible.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Chancellor. And everyone just to put in perspective, we made a decision to have the most stringent standards in terms of the, as I like to call, the gold standard that we put together to bring back schools, the health and safety measures we put in place. They obviously have worked. They've kept our kids, our educators, our staff safe but we also said the three percent standard mattered. Now to put that in perspective and to remember that New York City is in the middle of a battle, we are at three percent. New Jersey, our neighbor, unfortunately, now is at eight percent. Chicago, third biggest city in the country, 16 percent. We are in the midst of a challenge and we cannot let this challenge deepen but we also need to take heart from the fact that we have held off this second wave as well as we have so far, and there's still more work to be done. That's why we will need additional restrictions, that's why we're going to need everyone to participate even more – everyone to get tested, everyone to pay attention, and act on those core four precautions we're asking everyone to be a part of. It will make a difference. So, we have a challenge. We're going to fight back this challenge.

Let me go over today's indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19. Threshold, 200 patients. Today, 114. So, we've seen some increase there but again, thank God that number still remains lower than the other indicators proportionally, and we still see our hospital system doing well. But the confirmed positivity rate continues to go up again. It is at 43.86 percent among those patients. Okay, number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average. Threshold, 550 cases. Today's report 1,212. Again, much, much higher than we want it to be. Number three, percentage of people testing citywide positive for COVID-19. Threshold five percent, today's daily report is 2.75. But the number we've looked at the most consistently is the seven-day rolling average and that is literally exactly 3.00 percent. I'll say a few words in Spanish –

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder we're joined today by Chancellor Carranza, Dr. Chokshi, and Senior Advisor Dr. Varma. First question today goes to Jen Peltz from the AP.

Mayor: Jen?

Moderator: Jen, do we have you?

Mayor: We'll try one more time there. Jen Peltz, can you hear us?

Moderator: We'll circle back –

Question: Hi, thank you very much, sorry about that. I think I'm actually going to withdraw my question and allow my colleagues. Thanks a lot though.

Mayor: All right, Jen.

Moderator: Next, we'll turn to Emma Fitzsimmons from the New York Times.

Question: Good afternoon, Mayor. So, we've been waiting a while for this announcement. Can you explain the delay? Do you want to apologize to parents who have been waiting anxiously for an answer? Were you trying to find a way to keep schools open?

Mayor: Emma, look, I think parents know and they've certainly watched me and the Chancellor, that we always have been trying to find a way to keep schools open throughout. This morning getting the data exactly on the nose of 3.00 percent, we wanted to make sure it was 100 percent accurate and there was time spent confirming that. There was time spent working with the State on what it would mean, what the next steps would be. But it also got to a larger discussion with the Governor and his team about what we're going to have to do overall in terms of restrictions for New York City, and what it would take to bring back our schools. And we will have an update in the next couple of days on the plan to bring back the schools, what additional standards will be needed, as I said, certainly involving more testing. We warned parents days ago that this moment might come but we had to be 100 percent sure we were accurate this morning, and we had to have that conversation with the State. They have the ultimate authority. We had to have that conversation with them to get everyone on the same page. Go ahead.

Question: We were also wondering about devices. How many kids still don't have devices? And what are you going to be doing in the next few weeks to make sure remote learning is better. I think that the Chancellor said that the system still needed 77,000 devices like iPads.

Mayor: Yeah, I'll turn to the Chancellor and say the iPads continue to be delivered. We can get the update from the Chancellor, but we continue to work literally student by student. If there is a problem with service, we've had a lot of concerns about our kids in shelter. We have had technicians going out to the shelter working family by family making sure their service is working. And that doesn't end, Emma. That continues throughout the school year. Whenever a kid needs a new device or there's a problem with a device that service, that support is going to be provided. Anyone having a problem should call 3-1-1 still. But Chancellor, why don't you talk about the numbers and also the effort today to make sure kids who needed devices got them going home.

Chancellor Carranza: So, thank you. So, Emma the issue continues to be the supply-side issue. So, New York City along with every school system in America, probably in the world, is ordering devices from every manufacturer. We have, in many cases, been at the top of the list so we have approximately 40,000 devices that have either arrived or will arrive by the end of this week. We have lists that have been prioritized that schools have provided to us given the information that families have provided to schools. So, we're getting those devices out as soon as we get them. We get them set up. We have the LTE cards installed. So, that number is closer to about 60,000 devices that we know in the orbit of students that have said that they need a device. And again, we've ordered a little over 100,000 devices to be able to be prepared to meet that need.

In the interim, though, schools have had some time to prepare – have prepared paper packets of assignments and different kinds of things that students have to complete to bridge that time gap between a student that needs a device and actually gets a device as well. So, again, it's going to be incredibly important to families to stay very, very close to their schools. They can also go onto our Department of Education website, schools.nyc.gov, and there is a link there where they can also connect with any support that they need for either logging on or their email account or any of the kind of issues as well. This will be a continuous process of getting devices into the hands of students. We know that schools have also assigned some of their own in-school devices for students to take home during this time as well. So, all of that is happening as we speak. It's happened as well and we continue to, as we receive those devices, get them back into the hands of students.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Rich Lamb from WCBS880.

Question: Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, and everybody on the call. Mr. Mayor, it appears that you and the Governor are using two different sets of numbers in regard – how is that possible at this point and why can't you get on the same page? [Inaudible] make sense –

Mayor: Rich, the State and City, throughout, have had a different system. It's not news. It's been reported before. I'll have Commissioner Chokshi speak to it, and it's not surprising that different levels of government might have different approaches. They lead us in the same direction consistently. The State and City strategies have been very highly aligned throughout, but each entity and this is true with federal government or any other part of government is going to have its own approach. What we know is that we put forward a standard related to the schools-based on the city's way of counting testing, and that is based on the day the test was taken, not when the test result arrives, the day the test was taken. We simply believe that's the best approach. That's the standard we use with our indicators. That's the standard we set related to our schools and the State understands that and we all have communicated and they understand that's the approach that we're taking. Go ahead, Commissioner.

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes, our commitment is always to provide the most accurate and valid data that we possibly can because we know what momentous decisions are made based on the accuracy of that data. One of the major differences, as the Mayor has already pointed out in the way that we count test positivity, the percentage positive positivity is by ensuring that we count based on the date that a test is taken rather than the date that we learn about the result from the test. This becomes particularly important when we are seeing an increase in cases as we are right now, because it allows us to see the trends over time, and that's one of the key things that we have to discern to make good decisions based on the accuracy of the data.

Mayor: And, Rich, just to say, I think it's important – the State of New York and the City of New York, both squarely fall in the health care conservative philosophy. There's just not a doubt about it. When you look at the whole history of the coronavirus and the whole country, New York City, New York State have been amongst the most cautious, data-driven, science-driven entities, jurisdictions in the whole country, and both our standards are interpreted with a very focused approach to protecting people's health and safety. Ours are particularly conservative as the Commissioner have just pointed out, but again, the State and the City have really followed the same path as you know, a lot of other places have not, and unfortunately to their peril. Go ahead, Rich.

Question: Mr. Mayor also, could you give us a sense of – you're talking about more stringent standards and you did say more testing in the schools, but does that mean you would roll back those – rolling number would actually have to be lower than three percent for you to bring the schools back? Is that essentially what you're saying?

Mayor: No, it is not that – what I'm saying to be clear, I appreciate the question, Rich. We're –look, we understand that there's a bigger problem in this country and it's affecting us. We also understand our schools have been extraordinarily safe. To protect school communities, we're going to have to put a different, additional measures in place. We're talking right now with the State on what those should be. One thing I can tell you up front [inaudible] be an even heavier emphasis on testing, and one thing that I'm going to be adamant about is that when we reopen everyone who comes into that school building, all the kids have to have a testing consent on file so we can test them whenever we need to, because testing is going to become more of the norm and that's been crucial to protecting everyone, but exactly the point Rich that we were having conversations with the State in detail today about what that reopening standard will be. I expect that announcement to be at some point this week of what the reopening standard will be, and then we're going to apply it as quickly as we can put the pieces together so that we can get to that reopening. But those details are being worked on. The one thing I can say for sure is a lot of testing will be necessary.

Moderator: The next is Christina Viega from Chalkbeat.

Question: Hi, Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. I would love to hear a little bit more about how long this might last. We keep hearing that this is temporary, but we're also hearing that the requirements to reopen are still being developed. So, can you give us a sense of what – how long this might last?

Mayor: Absolutely. I think speaking to my fellow parents about how to prepare – you know, I said last Friday get ready for this and get ready to have alternative arrangements. I know that's not easy. It's very tough for parents and for some parents, single parents in particular, really, really tough. I don't say it with anything but sorrow, but we gave people a warning to think about it for the remainder of this month. So, certainly, through Thanksgiving school will be closed. We're going to see with the State how quickly we can finalize those standards and then what we'll have to do to meet those standards. That week after Thanksgiving is the earliest, but we're not yet able to say that will be then or a point thereafter, but we have real work to do, which I think we can do quickly to finish those standards and then put together the action plan to make them come to pass. Again, heavy emphasis on testing, and we're going to be deploying a lot of our testing capacity towards the schools under this new model, even much more than we've done previously, but certainly parents should assume, obviously we're closed for the rest of this week and the days leading up to Thanksgiving. In the meantime, we'll fill in that blank, Christina and make very clear what the plan is to come back. Go ahead.

Question: Thanks, and my next question is about you know, the last time we had a city-wide school shut down, there were the emergency rec centers in place. I know you've said that Learning Bridges will remain open, but can you talk about how enrollment is going to work in those and how much space you have and whether people will be able to attend full time, because those were set up only to serve children on a part-time basis when they weren't in schools?

Mayor: Correct, and this is a different model. You're absolutely right Christina, but I think it will help us achieve some of the same things. So, I'll get the specifics in front of me. I know there was some city testimony earlier to give some of the details on what attendance has been so far, but I can tell you, the bottom line is essential workers will have a preference for the Learning Bridges seats for their kids, and there's other folks who are prioritized. Families in shelters, for example, and families that have particular challenges. So, we're going to make those seats available. We have seen surprisingly little uptake on the Learning Bridges seats so far. Obviously this moment will mean more people will want them, but we don't know how many, but we certainly feel confidence based on the experience we had with the regional enrichment centers that we'll have the seats for essential workers who need them, and then if we need to keep adding, we can quickly ramp up toward the number we originally projected. But so far, Christina, it's actually been very low enrollment in the scheme of things. So, there's certainly a space available right now for the families who are going to need it right away.

Moderator: The next is Katie from the Wall Street Journal.

Question: Hey, good morning. Mayor de Blasio. My question, I guess, following up from Christina's question is why wasn't there a reopening plan [inaudible] first created or came up or agreed upon by the city at other entities? It seems I know that we had a [inaudible] decided, but shouldn't every possibility have been explored, but [inaudible]?

Mayor: Yeah, Katie perfectly fair question. I think – look, we set a very stringent standard with the three percent – extremely conservative standard. We've now seen a lot of changing conditions. Some things that have been much better than I think a lot of people projected in terms of the safety within the schools, the very low positivity level, but then we've seen this unfortunate resurgence around the country which has added additional challenges. So as we were going about the work of our schools, initially, honestly, this day seemed far off, thankfully. As it has come closer, there's been a lot of moving parts and a lot of changes. What we do know is under any scenario to turn to a new system, it takes a little bit of transition time and we know it has to be a more stringent system. So, these next days, none of us is happy about, but these next days will be that retooling time to figure out how to most quickly get school back and with whatever standards we need and to work with the State to make that come to life. But I think there's some cases where when you're dealing with changing situations, you actually need the best information, the most recent information, and now we certainly know what we're up against and what it's going to take to bring back our schools. Go ahead, Katie.

Question: My second question is about [inaudible] threshold [inaudible] date when it comes in, looking at this updated number [inaudible]—

Mayor: Yeah, Katie, can I just stop you for a second? Your voice is skipping a lot, so I'm not getting your whole sentence. Could you try again?

Question: Sure. So, my point is about the City's data. It gets back-filled with [inaudible] we [inaudible] city two percent or three percent [inaudible]. How can this threshold [inaudible] when you're updating the numbers we actually hit it last week [inaudible] and if that [inaudible] coming in, but does it again give the most accurate measure to do this thing that affects so many people when the numbers fluctuate and [inaudible]?

Mayor: Yeah, I could hear, I could hear most of it. I think I got enough and I'll start and turn to Dr. Chokshi. Look, let us all acknowledge that none of these measures is perfect by any stretch. You're exactly right that even when we provide a morning update there still is information comes in after, but we tried to create the standard that whatever the numbers were that morning, that's what we were going to be governed by. In the end, these are still choices. They're not perfect choices, but they're directional choices. We wanted to take a very cautious approach to protect the health and safety of kids and educators and staff. That was from the very beginning – the Chancellor and I said more times than we could count that we would be prioritizing health and safety in the reopening of schools, and that's what we did, and that's what we did by setting that three percent threshold. So, the standard we said is the day that we hit that based on the indicators we have that morning was when we would act, we did not expect it to come down to exactly 3.00 percent, but that's what happened. But I think the important point to say is that – the question is direction. The question is what is the basic approach you're trying to take? And clearly, we have seen an uptick steadily. Unfortunately for the last few, clearly, we saw that this kind of level was being reached. That's why we were warning people late last week. It's not perfect, but it does tell us where we are and what we need to know. Commissioner?

Commissioner Chokshi: The Mayor covered the high points. We're always striving to find the right balance between providing the most recent data as well as the most accurate data. If we were purely going on having, you know, the utmost accuracy, then that would mean that we would be reflecting the reality from several days ago. So the balance that we strike is making sure that we're providing a picture of the most recent and most accurate data together, but I just want to underline another thing that the Mayor said, which is let's not miss the forest for the trees here and really focus on what are the concerning signals in what we're seeing with test positivity and with cases as well, which really demands all of us to redouble our efforts so that we can focus on what's most important over the coming weeks, doing the things that we need to do to try to get schools back open as quickly as possible, as well as protecting our fellow New Yorkers.

Mayor: Thank you.

Moderator: The next is Narmeen from PIX 11.

Question: Hi, good morning – it's not even morning anymore, it's afternoon, sorry about that. You know, the Governor said that if New York City gets to three percent, then we go to the orange. Now, I now understand how that the City and that the State determine their numbers differently, but whose are we going by at this point to determine when we will go to orange, that point seems to be a bit confusing. Mayor, and also, should we get on the same page when it comes to determining some big changes for the city?

Mayor: No. What I mean, I totally understand why it feels confusing and we have tried intensely to put information forward to help people understand. Again, it is always true – I've never seen a situation where, you know, federal government, state government, local government were always perfectly, seamlessly on the same page. It is not the reality because they're all built differently. They all have different missions. The question is not a sort of a legalistic are we always say exactly the same thing at the exact time. The question is, are we moving in the same direction? That has unquestionably been the case. Again, I give the Governor and the State credit, they've been cautious and conservative and data-driven, science driven throughout this process. That's what we've strived to do as well. But it is also understandable that our job is to protect the people of New York City. We're going to collect the data and the way we think makes the most sense, we're going to take the measures that we think are important, and we've done that consistently. So, we said, here's what we want to do. We told the State in the initial submissions about our schools, here's our safety plan, here's our plan for cleaning, for testing, for ventilation, for social distancing, mask wearing. And we said, we have this three percent standard and it's based on our data. And the State has, across the board, consistently deferred to local jurisdictions on a lot of the decision-making about school systems, which is consistent with how school systems are handled in general. They're not run by any state, they're run by localities. But on the question of the zones and the phases before that, that we talked about, those have always been the State's domain to make the ultimate decisions on. We proposed an idea to the State when we saw Brooklyn and Queens happening that focused on ZIP codes. They came back with a variation on that. That variation proved to be very effective. They came up with the red and the orange and the yellow zones – it worked. Brooklyn and Queens were surging in the wrong direction – those neighborhoods. I put forward my proposal, the State turned it into something that they thought was going to be particularly effective. They applied it, we worked with them, and we pushed down the positivity in Brooklyn, Queens in those neighborhoods very clearly. And, really, there was a sea change. The same history applies to the phases – phases one through four. The State determined when we move from phase to phase, we worked with them to make that happen. It worked – every phase was done on time, two weeks between each one, and we progressed through them. So, there's been a lot of coordination – there continues to be. But now, the numbers that the State will use to determine if we go into an orange zone or a red zone, that's their numbers, and we respect that. And they're being very clear about get ready for that, because that's something that is likely to happen – at least orange zone – likely to happen based on their numbers and the timeline they've laid out. Go ahead.

Question: We've been talking a lot about children and testing in schools, and while the random testing has been occurring there, I do have a question for you in terms of children who have been remote. What's your recommendation to families, while you're urging all New Yorkers to continue to get tested, what do we do with our children who are in remote? They're obviously not locked up in their homes. They've been out and about as well.

Mayor: Get tested. I'll turn to Dr. Chokshi, who is a dad and happens to be married to an assistant principal, so you can do it better than me. But I'll start – everyone got tested. Whether you're doing remote learning or in-person, everyone gets tested. Go ahead.

Commissioner Chokshi: I don't have much to add to that, sir. I agree with that recommendation. If children are getting remote learning, they should also get tested. And the reason is, the one that you mentioned, Narmeen, you know, people are interacting out in the community. And we also know that there is transmission that occurs within households, you know, among family members. So, we're encouraging everyone to get tested. This has been our consistent message over months now, but it's particularly urgent as we see a spread continue to increase.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Moderator: The next is Michael Garland from the Daily News.

Question: Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Michael. How are you?

Question: I'm good. So, a couple of questions on the school closure. We'd heard that for a long time some of your top health advisors had been questioning the threshold, you know, given the fact that the three percent citywide threshold is – is where we're seeing something different than what we're seeing is for transmission in schools. And I was wondering if, you know, Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Varma could address that, if you could address that. What has been going on behind the scenes as far as the discussion on the use of that three percent threshold and whether it's – you know, I mean, clearly, we're closing schools now, so it's applicable, but, you know, I mean, can you tell us about that? You know, we're hearing there's been some debate within your administration about the use of that.

Mayor: Yeah, Michael, there's definitely been some debate, but healthy debate. You know, everyone – so many – I shouldn't say everyone, but to so many of the folks in this discussion are parents themselves, or aunts, or uncles, or grandparents or whatever it may be and cherish public education. Also, our health care team is a very cautious, conservative team, and they're built that way. And so, the whole conversation has been filled with that natural tension that we've followed a cautious, conservative strategy. It has served us well in terms of the focus on data and science, leading us to decisions that brought the City back from being the epicenter, that allowed us to open our schools, that allowed us to keep the schools safe. But you, sort of – you know, you live by a standard, and sometimes, you know, it feels better and sometimes it feels worse, but it's still a clear standard. And so, that three percent was a really conservative standard. And, of course, we've all felt some pain that the last thing we wanted to see is the schools close, but there's been resolve about the fact that the game plan so often has worked of sticking to those tough standards. And that's why I'm resolved about the fact that to bring schools back, we can do it – we've done it before, we'll do it again – but we have to come up with even tougher standards. Dr. Chokshi?

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Well, look, as the Mayor and the Chancellor have said, this is a tough day from the education perspective. But I would just say, as a doctor, it's also a tough day from the health perspective, because we know how important education is to a younger New Yorkers, not just for their development but, frankly, for their health as well. And so, you know, as the Mayor has pointed out, I think we have to be forward-looking in this moment. One of the things that I love about being a doctor is not just being rooted in science, but also, you know, having the humility to say we have to learn from experiences, we have to learn from evidence as it emerges so that we can make the best decisions on behalf of the people that we're trying to serve. And I think our focus, going forward, will be on ensuring that we bring to bear the rigorous safeguards, but also standards that help us to maximize the health of the children of New York.

Mayor: Dr. Varma?

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Thank you. And I think what the Commissioner and the Mayor have said is really spot on. And I'll go ahead up front with my own biases – you know, my three children attended New York City public schools for seven years, so I have a deep and strong connection to them. And I've also said, my life, working around the world, trying to prevent infectious diseases. So, this is a very difficult decision, and we made it with, as the Mayor has said, intense debate about how do we ensure that we have the most rigorous health and safety precautions possible, and how do we make sure that we're also delivering the education that we can to the kids, and establishing the trust that's needed from parents, from, from the staff from the whole community about this. And so, we did intensely debate and have continued to debate this. And I think the value of that debate is that we're going to look at ways at which we can strengthen and revise our protocols so that we can get the schools back to in-person learning as quickly as we can.

Mayor: Amen. Go ahead, Michael.

Question: The other thing I want to ask you about is just, kind of the – a little bit of the tick-tock on what happened from 10 AM this morning to 3 PM today. We'd heard that, you know, earlier this morning – that the Schools Chancellor had reached out to, you know, the unions, or the administrators and said, you know, schools are going to shut down. And then, soon after that, basically pulled it back and said, well, no, hold on, we're in a holding pattern. So, you know, I mean, given the delay we've seen, like with this briefing today, you know, what was going on as far as the discussion? It seems like, you know, there was discussion right up to kind of, you know, when it became public as to what, you know, your administration is going to do on this. Can you kind of fill us in on that?

Mayor: Sure. Michael, I think the two key elements – one, as I said, the data came in right on the razor's edge, that caused some understandable pause. We wanted to be 100 percent certain. You know, coming in at 3.00, we wanted to make sure 100 percent that, that was accurate. I wanted that checked again before coming to a final conclusion. And also, I wanted to have a thorough conversation with the State, including several conversations I had with the Governor, because it was about what happens immediately as a result, what does it mean for getting schools back, and how are we going to get schools back quickly? I was important to talk that through before either he or I addressed the public. And we had several good conversations and we agreed on the kinds of things we're going to have to do. And now, we have to codify that and make that a formal announcement. But that's what we really wanted to think through, because it's the natural next question. Are school is going to come back? We believe we can get them back and get them back soon. What's it going to take? It's going to take some additional measures and we believe we can achieve them, but we've got to codify them and make them real. And we also talked about the restrictions that are coming, And, again, no one is happy about the notion of any other restrictions to our economy or to our lives, but the numbers are speaking loudly and additional restrictions are coming. We talked about what the State is thinking about, how the City could implement it. And so, all of these pieces interconnected, but, clearly, a lot of folks have asked, you know – talked about schools, talked about other parts of our economy and different things happening, different activities. All of those things about to be affected, obviously, by this growing challenge and we're working through with the State exactly how much and when, and that's what those conversations were about.

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. And the next is Jenna DeAngelis from CBS.

Question: Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor. Can you hear me?

Mayor: Yeah. How are you doing?

Question: Good? How are you?

Mayor: Good.

Question: We're faced with the second wave and more people getting tested, but are running into incredibly long lines, especially at Urgent Cares. So, what's your recommendation to those who are facing this issue, especially if they have symptoms and may be worried about being in line or taking public transportation to get there?

Mayor: I've got some simple advice and I'll have Dr. Chokshi amplify it – turn to our Health + Hospitals sites. You know, just by calling 3-1-1 you can find a site near you. Overwhelmingly, our Health + Hospitals – we have the hospitals, we have the clinics, we have the pop-up sites. They generally have not had longer lines. They've had very fast turnaround with results. So, it's right there for people as a great option. Doctor?

Commissioner Chokshi: That's right, Mr. Mayor. I'll just add to it by saying that we're working every day through the Test and Trace Corps., through Health + Hospitals, as well as the Health Department to expand our capacity for testing for New Yorkers. But we already do have many options that are available. You can find them by going to nyc.gov/covidtest, or calling 212-COVID-19 to find the most convenient testing site close to you.

Mayor: Go ahead.

Question: So, for those who don't live near a Health + Hospitals site, and they think they've been exposed and have symptoms, are they supposed to stay home and order an at-home test, stay local and wait in the lines, or take the train to another location? Because that's an issue that some people have expressed to us.

Mayor: Very good questions. Go ahead, doctor.

Commissioner Chokshi: Thank you. These are very important questions. And I just want to pull out – you know, particularly, you're talking about people who are experiencing symptoms. Those are absolutely the most important people that we want to get tested, to get tested quickly so that we can take steps to make sure that they isolate – that helps us break the chains of transmission – understand who their close contacts were so that they can also quarantine. So, to your specific question itself, they should find the closest site to them from any of those resources that I've mentioned. If they do have to take public transportation to get there, they should, of course, you know, make sure that they are wearing a face covering to and from that. But the most important thing is to get tested very soon once you're experiencing symptoms.

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.

Moderator: Last question for today goes to Jake Offenhartz from Gothamist.

Question: Hey. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor: Hey, Jake. How are you doing?

Question: I'm okay, just trying to get a clear picture of what happened today really. Did you make clear to the Governor that you planned to close schools, because he seemed pretty surprised by this during the presser when – he went out.

Mayor: I spoke him before. I didn't see his presser, but we had, you know, a number of conversations in the course of the day. We've been talking over the last several days about this possibility, obviously. And this specific exact moment that the press release was going out, he might not have known about because we had to get information out to schools before they left, but he understood it was coming, for sure. Go ahead, Jake.

Question: Okay. And, I mean, on the testing discrepancies between the City and the State, you're saying that, you know, the City and the State are really closely aligned. I think for a lot of parents and people in New York, it doesn't really seem that way. It's been a pretty head spinning day. We heard from parents this morning who heard – was a real that schools were closing? And there were delays in your briefing repeatedly, several hours in which we heard nothing from City Hall. Then, Cuomo held his own briefing. He said the City positivity rate was 2.5 percent, acted surprise, as I mentioned. I'm not really hearing anything in your presser today that suggests this was mishandled or perhaps not fair to parents –

Mayor: Jake –

Question: So, I mean –

Mayor: Go ahead, go ahead.

Question: Were you going to disagree with the premise? I mean, I suppose, is it fair to say that nearly nine months into the pandemic there are still issues with the way that the City and State are not on the same page? And do you think that's hurting New Yorkers?

Mayor: No, is the simple answer. And, again, I don't – you do know me well, Jake, and there are times where I'm going to question the premise. And I think when I question the premise, it's to try and help truly answer the point. This is a very big decision. We had to make sure it was right. But, again, you know what, when a decision happens, you guys rightfully are going to say, well now, okay, what's next? And what's the plan to bring it back, and all those. And we had to get clear and make sure City and State really had talked all that through. It doesn't always happen on, you know, the exact timeline that we normally keep to, because it's complex stuff. Very good, very productive conversations. We have warned people. I mean, New Yorkers are smart. They've been watching these indicators for days and days unfortunately go up. I gave a very explicit warning on Friday, that people have to get ready with alternative options for their kids. The vast majority of every-day people are smart and they understand when they're given a warning like that, that they have to get ready. But, again, today, the information coming in right on the razor's edge, really important to confirm that, really important to talk through with the State the exact next steps. I found the conversations very productive, very consistent. And I would say, if you just take the eight months, I will put the whole thing up – again, there – sure, there are a few times where disagreements – absolutely. If there were never any disagreements, that would be very surprising to me. But if you go directionally, have the City and State both been data and science driven? Yes. Compared to a lot of the places in the country, extremely data and science driven. Have we consistently got to the same directions? Yes. Have we worked together, in a sense that a lot of times the State will come up with a concept, we have to implement it – we found a way. There's got to be tensions, but the job's been getting done. And we came back from the worst of this disease, overcame that, became one of the safest places in the country, opened up the nation's largest school system, made it extraordinarily safe, but we also are living by those cautious conservative standards, and we hit this day, and we're falling through. But now, we turn to the exact focused strategy for how to bring them back.

And I'll conclude on that to everyone. Look, there's going to be – obviously, so many parents right now are saddened, are frustrated that their kids can't go to school tomorrow. So many kids want to be in school. So many educators want to be there to greet them. But now, we put ourselves to the work of overcoming this challenge and we apply ourselves with everything we've got. And that's what New York City has done time and time again. I know our schools are going to come back. Why do I know it? Because they come back from a lot worse than this. We were told a thousand times we couldn't reopen in the summer. Richard and I, wherever we went, were told we were crazy to talk about reopening schools. We did it. We will do it again. If it takes tougher standards, we will live by those tougher standards. But this is how we will deal with the immediate term. I want to turn people's attention to what comes thereafter, because there are fully seven months ahead. After this month, there are seven more months ahead in the school year. And during that time, we will get the vaccine, and we will distribute the vaccine, and we will make the city safer and safer and more and more kids will be able to come back. We are going to be able to do a lot more in this school year.

So, today's a tough day, but this is a temporary situation. Our schools will be back and our school year will get better and better as we go along and this disease will be beaten in the course of this school year, I have absolute faith. And we will make this a year that works for the parents and kids of this city. That's what we're committed to. And to, everyone, keep fighting, because if you're hearing this news today and you're feeling at all let down, that the thing to do is to fight even harder. Make sure everyone's getting tested. Make sure everyone's wearing the mask. Everyone's practicing social distancing. Be smart about the holidays. This is what's going to allow us to overcome this moment, bring our kids back to school, bring our city back.

Thank you, everyone.

2020-11-19 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: We're going to talk about several things today, but we should start by noting the most serious news of the day – that now, unfortunately, we now know that over a quarter million Americans have lost their lives during the COVID crisis, and it's important to pause and reflect on that. A quarter-million of our fellow Americans gone just in the course of months, and this crisis has been so staggering for all of us, and now a second wave bearing down on us in the city and the need to fight back, the need to have tough restrictions so clear now. We'll talk about that, and we're also going to talk about the things we have to keep doing to learn from this crisis and to recover, and to recover and have a better and fairer society, when we do. There's so much to talk about in terms of the disparities that have come up in this crisis and the things we have to do differently, so we're going to talk about that in a moment as well. 

But let me talk first about our schools. I want to say at the outset, all the families, to all the parents, to all the kids, that it’s a tough day. It was a tough decision yesterday. It was not something anyone could possibly be happy about, and I do want to say how much I feel and understand the frustration of parents that they want – so many of them want their kids to be in school, and that's what I fought for in opening our schools back in September against all odds. We will bring our schools back. This is the most important point. We will bring our schools back, but we're going to have to reset the equation. What's happened just in the matter of days, and you see it in the indicators we go over each day, is something is changing, it's changing rapidly in the city. We certainly see what's happening around the country. We've got to reset the equation. We have been safe – New York City has been extraordinary. The way we came back from being the epicenter of the crisis to being one of the safest places in the country, we got to keep it that way. We got to fight back the second wave. Our schools have been safe, extraordinarily safe. We got to keep it that way. We can't just stand pat with a strategy that worked before when conditions are changing, we need to reset the equation. We need to come up with even more stringent rules to make schools work and testing is going to be absolutely crucial. 

A lot of people's frustration emanated from the fact that they thought there was another kind of disparity. They looked at schools closing, and a lot of people say, what about restaurants?  Well, the Governor made clear yesterday that it's just a matter of time before indoor dining will close and other types of things, gyms, other things – anyone who heard those words, orange zone yesterday, the orange zone rules are clear and New York City will, before long, be in that orange zone status. I talked to the Governor at length about this yesterday, and that means those restrictions are coming. So, for everyone who honestly might feel somehow a little better, if they knew that indoor dining was going to be closed or gyms were going to be closed. I'm sorry to tell you that for the sake of those business owners and everyone who loves those gyms and loves indoor dining, it's just a matter of time. It's very likely to be in the next week or two, and I think you're going to see that across the board, that there's going to have to be a lot of tough choices to move us forward. 

But with schools, I am absolutely convinced we can work with all the stakeholders, work with the state, get to new tough standards and reopen, and we're going to let you know, in the next few days, what that looks like, what that schedule is, what it's going to require of all of us, because it will require all of us to participate, and parents, I'm going to tell you right now, we're going to need you to play an active role in helping us reopen schools, and that starts with getting those test consent forms in. A lot of parents have answered that call. I'm going to emphasize again, if you're someone who says, I really want schools open, the next thing you have to do is file that test consent form immediately. You can do that online. Get that in, so we know your child's ready to be tested because testing is going to be a crucial part of where we go from here to get schools open again. 

In the meantime, we will provide support to families in a variety of ways. Obviously Learning Bridges, our childcare program will be open. That's on a priority basis, starting with essential workers and families in greatest need, but that will be available to help a lot of families. Devices for our kids. We've been continuing to provide free devices for all the kids who need the technology they need to learn. Any child who does not have a device or it's not working, or the service isn't working, you just have to call 3-1-1 and we will get you a device or a new service as quickly as possible. In many cases that just takes a day or two. 

For families that need food, and as this crisis unfortunately deepens again, and the federal support hasn't come, the stimulus hasn't come, a lot of families need those grab and go meals from our schools, they will be provided continually at our schools, even as schools are closed for a period of time, the food service folks – I want to thank the food service workers who are doing amazing work – they will continue to provide food for families who need them, and that will be free, of course, so that will continue, and as the Chancellor always says, all children are learning today and we'll continue to learn in this all remote phase, and we will continue to do this work to get our schools back as quickly as possible. 

So that's the picture with our schools. Let's go back to the question of how we're going to respond to this crisis more broadly and how we're going to come back from it, because remember we do have – every day we've got better and better news on vaccines. We have a new administration in Washington. That's going to totally overhaul the approach to COVID and make it, I think, much better and clearer. We're ready to distribute the vaccine right now in the city, right? As we speak, we're ready. So, we have to turn our focus constantly also to that recovery that come back, but how to make it a fair comeback. We can't repeat the status quo that was in New York City. That's not going to help us. We got to do something different, and COVID uncovered extraordinary disparities, but they weren't just healthcare disparities. Let's be very, very clear about it. The racial and economic disparities go a lot farther than just health care. They go to the fundamental reality of how wealth is distributed in the city in this nation, and if you talk about structural racism, just follow the money. It's quite clear, no matter how hard people of color have worked, they do not get their fair share of the wealth they create, and that's something we have to do more to change in this city, in this country, and that's what our city task force – we've had great leaders in all of our city agencies that have focused on this issue. Leaders of color in every city agency who will have used their experience, their creativity to come up with new solutions, our Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, and First Lady Chirlane McCray have led the way with the task force coming up with a variety of new approaches, and one of the ideas that is most powerful is what we term as equitable ownership, meaning making sure that there actually is a kind of redistribution of wealth that will change people's lives more profoundly, and that means that people of color get to own in this society, that they get a much greater share of the pie and what is rightfully theirs. That hasn't been the case, and that's why initiatives like special approaches to supporting minority and women owned businesses were created years ago, but they haven't done enough and we need to go a lot farther, and the way to make the MWBE concepts come alive is to up the ante all the time. We've been doing that for years, but we need to do it again, and when it comes to the ownership stake that we need women and minority owned firms to have one of the areas to look at is in affordable housing, because there's going to be a lot of investment going forward in affordable housing. One thing the city will never stop doing is investing in affordable housing. There's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of construction to be done, and firms led by people of color need many more opportunities to have a piece of that pie. So, our Department of Housing Preservation and Development has been leading the way with a new approach, and I want to thank everyone there for their creativity, their energy, and here to talk about what equitable ownership will look like in affordable housing is our Commissioner for HPD Louise Carroll. 

Commissioner Louise Carroll, Department of Housing Preservation and Development: Thank you, Mayor de Blasio, and thank you also to Deputy Mayor Thompson and the First Lady for your leadership on the Task Force for Racial Inclusion and Equity. Lots of businesses have grown in the city from startups to wealthy companies. Many of them grew by doing a lot of work with New York City government yet rarely have we seen minority and women owned firms, MWBEs get this kind of opportunity for success. This is wrong, and this administration is working very hard to change that. Minorities and women-owned businesses, they form 85 percent of the population. If they don't prosper, the city doesn't prosper. Most MWBE firms are part of Black and Brown communities that have been hardest hit by COVID. These firms hire and train workers in their neighborhoods. Many workers have lost jobs due to this pandemic and these workers need help right now. So, dollars spent with MWBEs, when will enable people to get back on their feet. This is part of how New York City will recover from this pandemic. More than that, money spent with MWBEs will help repair the damage caused by decades of exclusion of people of color from business opportunities and jobs, and even more, more than that, when MWBEs and community not-for-profits own property, it is harder to dislocate them from their community or gentrify them out of their community. That is why starting now, HPD, when we award sites for affordable housing development, we will only consider teams that have an MWBE or not-for-profit partner, and that partner, must own at least 25 percent of the project. In the past and MWBEs and not-for-profits have been included in development teams, but when it comes to the money, it just wasn't there. We are putting an end to that. From now on and MWBE or a not-for-profit must both have a meaningful ownership stake in a project as well as a financial stake in a project. 

New York City is a great place. It has helped so many people from every corner of the country and indeed every corner of the world, people like me, get a foothold in their business or launch their careers. The people in this city have gone on to help others. They've gone on to invent things and build things and are admired everywhere, but it all starts with opportunity. When we open the doors of opportunity to all people, we unleash a flood of talent, and what that does is benefit all of us. We know that many people in the city see real estate development as something that happens to them as opposed to something that's happening for them. We're determined to change that in our housing policies. Our new policy is effective immediately. It will be in a request for proposals that HPD is issuing tomorrow for the development of vacant land in the Bedford-Stuyvesant part of Brooklyn. But this is just the beginning, there's more to come, and I thank you again, Mr. Mayor, for your leadership on this important issue. 

Mayor: Thank you so much, Commissioner, and Commissioner, you said a lot of important things there, but I want to harken back to the point you made about the city's greatness and who contributes to our greatness and who gets recognized and who doesn't get recognized. If I remember correctly, your family's originally from St. Lucia? 

Commissioner Carroll: Yes, sir. 

Mayor: And you know, you came to this city and brought your skills and talents, and now you're creating affordable housing for all New Yorkers. This is the New York story – that everyone has had opportunity, but not everyone has had equal opportunity, and that's what we need to fix, and actually making sure that the money is distributed fairly and putting tough rules in place to do it. It makes a world of difference. So you heard from the Commissioner – her story is an example of exactly what we want to foster and support, and you heard about the new approach, but now I want you to hear from someone who can tell you what it means for the businesses that will have the opportunity to grow and to reach out to their communities and bring more and more people into that opportunity, and it really is important to understand on a human level, what it means every time a minority and women owned business gets a contract. What literally happens to create empowerment in that community. So here to speak about it, and her story is one of great success. She is the CEO and founder of RF Wilkins Consultants, Francilia Wilkins Rahim, we welcome you. 

Francilia Wilkins Rahim, R.F. Wilkins Consultants: Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for having me. I also want to thank the First Lady and Deputy Mayor Thompson for all of the amazing leadership on the Task Force of Racial Equity and Inclusion. And, last but not least, I want to thank you, Commissioner Carroll. Thank you. You know, it was only June when myself, the New York Real Estate Chamber and the Black Business Collaborative came to you on behalf of black business owners across New York City. We came to you and many other agency officials. We were concerned. We were concerned, because COVID was impacting 40 percent of Black business businesses across the United States. We were concerned, because when we looked at New York City, we saw that Black businesses were not having equitable access to New York City contracts. When the collaborative came to you, we wanted to see a shift. We wanted New York City contracts to reflect the Black population across the city. We wanted Black developers to have ownership across affordable housing development. We wanted oversight over agency-wide procurement. And, Commissioner, you heard us. So, thank you.  

You know, the truth is, challenges for Black businesses did not start with COVID. For far too long, we have been able – not able to have an equitable access across contracts. Every day, I speak to developers and business owners who say, why should I even try to participate and bid when I will be overlooked? Why should I try to access a development team when I may just be leveraged as a M/WBE check? You know, when I look at these things, I understand the concerns. These developers would share that Black businesses hire Black subcontractors, Black developers hire Black subcontractors, who in turn hire Black workforce, who, in turn, come from Black communities – a lot of the communities where affordable housing is being developed. 
So, it only makes sense that affordable housing developers look and represent and feel and understand the communities that development is happening in. 

You know, to conclude this, I just kind of go back to my story. In 2011, I founded R.F. Wilkins Consultants. At that time, I had no money. I had no relationships. I had very limited access. Today, we hire a diverse community of people. Mayor, you just talked about the New York story, and the New York story has been my story. Not only do we have hire a diverse community of people, but we have implemented some of the most difficult logistic project management and compliance projects across the State of New York. Every day is difficult, but I truly stand on the back of the Black business owners who came before me. Today is not only about contracts, it's about nourishing the Black ecosystem. It's about nourishing Black businesses and activating the next generation of leaders who will hopefully see more Black businesses, more Black business participation. There's still so much more to do, but we have business owners who are ready for a piece of the economic pie. We have a forward-thinking Mayor. We have agency commissioners, like you, Commissioner Carroll, who will ensure that Black businesses are not lost in the implementation of M/WBE programs. Every step towards equitable participation for Black businesses, every step towards acknowledging the disparity – and the disparity Every step towards supporting Black business growth is a step in the right direction. So, Mr. Mayor, thank you, thank you, thank you for your commitment. And we look forward to partnering with you in the future and continuing to support the growth of Black businesses. 

Mayor: Thank you. Thank you so much, Francilia. And what a powerful presentation. I can see why you succeeded. And I really appreciate your energy and I appreciate your hopeful message, even in a tough time. But Francilia’s story, another great New York story. It’s a reminder that great story can't just be for some people and then the ladder gets kicked away and others don't get to participate. It has to be for everyone. It has to be for all the generations coming up. And when we actually act with that spirit of fairness and equity, amazing things can happen. And one of the things I felt as I was listening to you was, you were already seeing the future, that we, again, we are going through so much, but we've got to get one foot into the future. And if we do the smart approaches to share the wealth in a better way, a lot more people are going to prosper and it's going to bring this city back a lot stronger. So, thank you for helping us light the way, Francilia.  

Okay. Everybody, let's conclude with our indicators and go over these now. First, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients – today's report, 115 patients with a 34.45 percent confirmed positivity level. Again, we're watching this really carefully. This is the indicator that has been different than the others. Very concerned, to say the least. Haven't seen as much growth there as expected, that’s a good thing, but we are watching very, very carefully. So far, again, our hospitals are doing quite well handling the challenge. Number two though, is a different matter, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550 cases – this number just keeps growing and this worries me a lot, 1,255 cases. Now, we want to keep testing everyone. And again, I'm going to constantly remind people get out there and get tested. And that will account for some of the growth of those numbers. But, clearly, the trend goes beyond simply the fact that more and more people are getting tested, got keep a close eye there. And now, the percentage of people tested citywide positive for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report, 2.36 percent. Today’s seven-day rolling average 3.01 percent.  

Okay. A few words in Spanish, back on the topic of how we ensure fairness and opportunity for all the people of this city. 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today is HPD Commissioner Louise Carroll, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, and Francilia Wilkins Rahim, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. With that, we'll go to Andrew from WNBC. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. Mayor, you spoke repeatedly this morning about new tough standards and more stringent rules that you'll need to get the schools back open, but other than getting a higher percentage of kids, educators, etcetera to get COVID tests – and you mentioned the need to get consent forms – what possible tough standards are you talking about? You're already disinfecting the buildings, you're already requiring masks and PPE, so what standards are you talking about? 

Mayor: Andrew, we're working that through, but we want look at geographical issues, we want to look at test positivity levels, we want to look at a lot of things. I don't think it's entirely helpful – your question's totally fair, but I don't want to start, you know, just surmising and throwing things out randomly. We're looking anything and everything that can contribute to making it safer in an atmosphere where the positivity levels around us are growing. And this is the X-factor we’ve got to keep in mind. When we came up with the original plan in August, the City, as a whole, was doing very, very well. And yet, you remember, so many people said, don't open schools, it's too dangerous to open schools. We said, we'll put together a gold standard, the cleaning, the ventilation, the social distancing, the mask wearing, all these things – the testing – and we'll prove to you that schools can be safe. And we did. Now, we see a gathering storm and we're fighting back the second wave. We are pausing. We are resetting the equation. We need to come to a new agreement with the State, with the people of this city, with parents, with all the folks who work in schools on what's going to work for this new time. But, clearly, more testing is crucial, and clear standards that everyone can understand, and being really clear that we want to take the bar even higher. We said we had a gold standard and it was, now we’ve got to find out how to even add to that by looking around the world, figure out what's worked, what would be additional elements, because we do see the impact, unfortunately, COVID is having a lot of communities. And for schools to be open, we have to be absolutely certain we can keep our kids and our adults in the school system safe. Go ahead, Andrew. 

Question: Are you being unreasonably optimistic when you suggest to parents and families that this might only be a short-term shutdown? At the same time, you're saying that indoor dining and gyms are about to close, that all of New York City is about to be designated in orange zone. And we know with Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up and seemingly uncontrolled, small gatherings taking place indoors, shouldn't we expect that the seven-day average will go much higher than three percent? Couldn't this school shut down last into January or even longer? 

Mayor: Every question you had – you had a lot of points in there, Andrew – everything you said is a fair concern. I didn't hear a single thing that’d I'd say, how dare you – no, I thought all of that was fair, but I'd say a couple of things. One, New Yorkers are clearly getting the memo that we are in a tough new situation. People are acting accordingly. You see really extraordinary levels of mask usage out there. I am certain a lot of people have canceled their travel plans. I am certain a lot of people are going to keep their holiday gatherings very limited. I think people are making those adjustments right now. And, in fact, these other limitations, coming with the orange zone are going to help us knock down the disease. That's the whole point of these kinds of restrictions. They help turn things around. We've got to set up a structure led by our health care leadership that we believe will keep the school safe. Now, we've got a running start, because we've had schools be extraordinary – extraordinarily safe so far. So, we know something that we did not know in August and September, we have a body of evidence of what works. Now, you're adding to the equation a tougher dynamic, but we believe we can compensate for that tougher dynamic with additional measures. That's what we need to do quickly, put that into play, and then go make it work. So, yeah, a tough environment around us, but I really think as the other restrictions come into play and as New Yorkers change their behavior, we have the opportunity to start driving these numbers back down. 

Moderator: Next is Reuvain from Hamodia. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. As the public schools are being closed now, and we know there may be some more closures coming with New York City being put into an orange zone soon, are there any exceptions going to be made for special needs students for whom the remote learning is really not feasible? 

Mayor: A very important question, Reuvain. Thank you for that. This is one of the topics we're going to be talking with all the stakeholders and with the State. Unquestionably, the kids who have the greatest needs are our special needs kids and the kids for whom in-person takes on even greater value is our special needs kids. Their families need it. So, this is part of the discussion of how to come back quickly with a special focus on special needs kids. Again, my plan is to come back in a matter of days with an update to the people of this city of how this is going to look. But I can tell you right now, we need to prioritize special needs kids. Go ahead. 

Question: And now that the public schools are closed citywide, and, as we said, the whole city might go into an orange zone, would you consider a suspending alternate side, considering, you know, that the parents can't bring their kids to school? The kids are home from school all day. 

Mayor: First of all, I think from what the Governor said yesterday, and the numbers certainly reflected – I don't think it's if the city is going into an orange zone, it’s when the city's going into orange zone. Again, I'm being very straightforward to all the folks. I've heard the comments about, you know, how could indoor dining still be open and gyms? And I wish they could stay open, I really do, because I feel for the business owners, I feel for the people who have put their lives into building up a business, I feel for the people who care about those businesses. But, Reuvain, it's not if, it's when. And by any normal count, just looking at the State's own number system, we're talking a week or two before we're in that orange zone status. I'm sorry to say that, but that's the blunt truth. In terms of alternate side, we're going to look at that again. We don't have a determination on that. We're not in the situation we were in, in the spring. It's, thank God, not that kind of dislocation happening in the city, but we're certainly going to look at alternate side parking and reevaluate situation as these changing dynamics occur. Go ahead. 

Moderator: Next is Emily from NY1.  

Question: Good morning, Mayor de Blasio.  

Mayor: Good morning, Emily. How are you?  

Question: I'm well. How are you? Did you watch Governor Cuomo's news conference yesterday? 

Mayor: It did not. I got a summary of the different announcements he made, but I didn't watch the actual news conference. 

Question: Have you been in touch with him today? And when you spoke with him yesterday, you noted, of course, that you had several conversations with them about new restrictions for the city, what he looks to do with the city. Did you tell him the schools were closing or did you ask him? 
  
Mayor: I let him know – we had very good conversations, we had an under number of conversations yesterday – I let him know that first we had seen the number come up. We were checking it again because it was literally exactly 3.00. So I told him we were quickly making sure that number was accurate. And then I told him that that would activate the closure. And we talked about what would happen next and what it would take to bring the schools back. But we also talked about the orange zone. He made very clear to me that by everything they were seeing, it was moving in that direction and essentially given that New York City would end up in the orange zone and that we all needed to prepare accordingly. And we talked about the interplay of that reality with the school's reality, just what I was talking about earlier, that hopefully that's going to help us continue to drive down the numbers overall and what it would take to bring schools back. 

So I think it was a very good conversation, very clear. And, you know, at the time he was going out to his press conference was just about the time that we had to make our announcement because we had to let schools know. Once we had concluded all of our recheck and our discussions with the State, we had to let schools know, so they could take the actions they needed to to give out whatever devices they had available, give out whatever materials they needed to give to kids and prepare for the shutdown. So that's how it played out yesterday. 

Moderator: Next is Nolan from the New York Post.  

Question: Good morning, everybody.  

Mayor: Hey, Nolan, how you? 

Question: I’m all right. Mr. Mayor, this three percent standard has been around for a long time, and I know you keep promising that the State and the City are working together to develop a plan to reopen the schools at hitting the three percent threshold. Why wasn't one already crafted? 

Mayor: Nolan, look, it is obvious question and I will just tell you in the real-world dynamics, we're dealing with that we've all been trying to see if we could take every conceivable action to avoid the closure to begin with and that's where the focus has been. All the actions in terms of testing, public education, outreach efforts, zones, anything that could help us not get to this point. And obviously there's been a lot of other things we had to prepare for as well. So what I have learned sometimes is sometimes it is hard to imagine the next phase until you get there, you do your damnedest to plan ahead, but you can't always do that. We have a really ever-changing situation here, but the conversations are quickly progressing. Think some of the lines are already becoming clear what it's going to take. And again, we need a little time to reset in any scenario, to get to this new approach we need a little bit of time to reset the equation. So either way you slice it and we give people the update and the next few days that will then take a little bit of time to implement it and make it work for our schools. Go ahead. 

Question: And sticking with the three percent threshold, one of the concerns or one of the factors in the decision making apparently was if the workforce would show up to schools provided the three percent was hit. You have repeatedly said there was no formal agreement between the city and the teacher's union over the three percent rule. Was there an informal agreement? Was there a gentleman's agreement? Was there some sort of understanding that you and Mike Mulgrew that if three percent were to happen, the schools were to close and that it was an invaluable agreement [inaudible]? 

Mayor: No, it's just – I appreciate your question, but it's just not how things happened. Look, what we saw after September was a workforce that wanted to be in the schools, and in fact, one of the interesting things I think has not been represented sufficiently in the public discourse is how intensely teachers felt the impact of being around kids again. I heard this constantly that it was one thing, you know, in July or August, to think about it, people were obviously concerned about the health dynamics, but once they got into school, then we heard from a huge number of educators and staff they wanted to stay there. They felt it was their mission. So in fact, even the first day when I was out in Elmhurst at a pre-K, you could just – the excitement among the adults was extraordinary.  

No, the deal was we had a call back before the final decisions about school opening with our health care leadership, I remember very vividly the discussion of the three percent and the feeling that we had to set a very strict standard. We had to have in effect a social contract with the people of the city, with the educators and staff, with the parents, we said, we will protect your children. We will protect everyone in the school community. We're so certain we can do it, we're going to set this gold standard in terms of all these precautions, and we're going to put a very tough standard on when we close. We wanted it to be a tough standard and people heard that, and it was actually one of the things that encouraged people to come back and to participate in the field comfortable. We weren't going to change that, once that standard was set, we were going to live by it. But Nolan, remember the reason we're having even the discussion is because unfortunately the second wave has been bearing down on us. That's not a fiction. That's a fact. And the three percent is a very real number. So it was not a collective bargaining issue. It was not a deal with the union. It was something our health care team and I decided separate from any discussions with the union, because we thought it would be the thing that would give people confidence that they could come back, and it did. Go ahead. 

Moderator: Next is James from PIX 11. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and to everyone on the call. 

Mayor: Good morning, James. 

Mayor: Good to see you. Look at the end of last week, you let parents know that they should prepare for schools to close and eventually, obviously, they did. Now you're saying restaurant and gym closures will almost certainly happen. So what's your specific message of preparation to owners of restaurants and gyms? And how do you feel about the economic effects of those closures? 

Mayor: I feel very, first of all, humanly very sad for these business owners, a lot of whom I've talked to. Here we are talking about how to support small businesses and MWBEs, and that is our future, so the notion that for another period of time, they may have to be shut down. It’s very painful. It's horrible for them. It's horrible for their employees. And I always come back to the family, mom and pop store that people put their whole life into. I don't want to see this happen to them, but you know, the facts, the science, the data are just screaming at us right now that we have a huge challenge and we have to beat it back. James, remember our hospital system is strong right now. Thank God we're not seeing the ICUs is flooded. Thank God the number of people we're losing is stayed low and we need to fight to save every life. 

But the overall numbers of cases keep growing and we've got to do something different to fight this back. So the state standards are clear. The Governor did exactly the right thing. He said, look, everyone, this orange zone status involves real restrictions, it's coming. You can just see by the chart of the State numbers, it's coming. It's, you know, a week or two away by my account and it's – what do you do to prepare? I say to the business owners, you know, I would say no, that this is a very strong likelihood, prepare, and I hope them the very for them the very best in the meantime and that they can do anything they can to tide over. We'll help them in any way we can. Anybody who needs help can call our Small Business Services Department. They'll always try to find ways to help a business. And the other thing I'd say is unlike any discussion we had before a few weeks ago, now we have vaccines. There's light at the end of the tunnel. We have different leadership coming in Washington. Hold on in any way you can, because in a matter of months, we're going to be in a much, much better situation. So there's hope. Go ahead, James. 

Question: Thank you. And can you explain the process by which the school closure announcement was made yesterday? I mean, the news conference kept being moved back in time until it happened mid-afternoon with the closure announcement. What happened leading up to that announcement? Why did it take all day? Was there maybe a chance that you and others involved, maybe even the teacher's union were considering possibly not closing? 

Mayor: James again, I wouldn't say all day. I understand everyone's impatience on such an important matter. You're talking about a difference of four or five hours, which really isn't earthshaking in the end and parents had been warned in advance and they heard the news, you know, by around two o'clock so they could prepare for the next day. And I don't – I'm not saying that with anything but sorrow and understanding that it's a burden for parents, but again, one, we had the irony of the number landing exactly on the razor's edge at 3.00, and we needed to go back and make sure that was accurate. Two, we needed to have real conversations with the State about what would happen next and that, as I said, what became not just a conversation about what happens next with the schools, but what would happen next with the whole city. And the Governor and I talked through what he was thinking and what he was preparing to say about orange zones, and it made very clear the direction that we were going to go in. So we needed to, it became a much bigger conversation. We decided it was important to get all those pieces clarified and then go out with a lot of the answers in place, and that's what it came down to that we had a lot to work through, we worked it through, and then we announced it. Go ahead. 

Moderator: Next we have Jacob from Jewish Insider.  

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, you said that we might go into a full lockdown if the rate goes up – 

Mayor: Yeah, Jacob, I'm going to stop you. I'm sorry to interrupt. Orange zone is not full lock down. I really want to be careful about that. Orange zone is definitely a better status than a red zone and not a full lockdown. So I just want to make sure we don't overstate. Go ahead. 

Question: Right, but I was saying that once you go into an orange zone and you reach the peak and you get into a red zone, that means a lockdown, so my question is that if that is the case where you not look any more at certain ZIP codes and neighborhoods, but as a New York City as a whole? 

Mayor: I think first of all, I want to respect the State's role in making the ultimate decisions, but what I'd say to you is, I think right now we're moving rapidly away from – right now, away from ZIP code focus in to something broader. And again, this is all evolving with the facts and the data, the ZIP code information we provide still has a lot of value because it's directing where we're sending testing, where we're sending outreach, and we still have a lot of ability to hopefully contain problems, neighborhood by neighborhood. And the ZIP code information is going to have tremendous value going forward as we fight against the disease. But right now, again, it is an overwhelming likelihood, and I think it's this close to a certainty, that New York City will be in that orange zone status in a week or two, that's as far as we can tell right now, the whole city. 

So I don't think for the immediate future, it's going to be done on anything more regionalized from what I'm hearing from the State so far. I do not assume we have to go to red zone. This is something we, again, I keep telling people if it's a fight and I think a lot of people are fighting back. The orange zone alone is going to have a very big impact and if people are really smart about not traveling and really careful about holiday gatherings, I do not think it's a foregone conclusion you end up in a red zone. So, you know, people are concerned about ending up in the red zone can do something about it with our own behavior, and we've proven before how much impact that can make. Go ahead, Jacob. 

Question: So some people are confused, you know, with the reopening process, the closures with the ongoing bickering between you and the Governor. Can you look people in the eye and say, all decisions that are made are done with the main objective of defeating the virus, or until we have a vaccine not to meet any metrics or any goals? 

Mayor: I couldn't understand – I'm sure I can look people in the eye, but I couldn't understand where you were going there. Could you just state it a little more simply? What is the question? 

Question: That all the decisions are made or not to meet any certain metrics or any deals with the labor unions, but the main objective is to actually bring down the infection rate, defeat the virus, or until there's a vaccine?  

Mayor: Yeah, Jacob, look, first of all, I respect the question, but let's be real here. We were the epicenter of the crisis. We fought back based on decisions made by the City and State, both, and again, a lot of directional unity. Sometimes we had disagreements. That's fine, but the broad direction was very conservative in terms of health care, very strong focus on science and data, brought this city back, made it one of the safest places in the country. Then we said, we're going to open schools. I couldn't tell you, the thousands of voices that said you can't open schools. It won't be safe. We did it. We made it safe. Then we said, look, there's going be a standard of what it would lead to a closure schools. We kept to that standard. Folks who say that's anything but a focus on science and data are not looking at the facts. Now, again, I've asked – I've been asked this question, where do we get the three percent. I can happily have some of the participants in the original conference call talk to you. The three percent decision was made with our health care leadership before school started, and of course with our education leadership out of both abundance of caution and a belief that we needed a social contract with our parents, with our educators, with our staff, that we need to show we meant so much business in terms of opening school safely, that we would stake our claim at a level lower than anybody. Lower than the World Health Organization or the State or anybody. That's how confident we were that we could open schools safely, keep them open. We made that decision. I'm absolutely convinced Jacob, it was part of what allowed us to open schools and gain people's confidence. And it will be part of what allows us to reopen schools that we kept faith with what we said. It was not about any specific union or all unions. It was about a much bigger consideration of what would work for the city. And I was on that call, our health leadership, our educational leadership, I remember the specific call. That's how the decision got made. Go ahead. 

Moderator: We have time for two more. First, we'll go to Matt Chayes from Newsday. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. For Dr. Chokshi or Dr. Varma – consistency or promises aside, as we speak here in now, what is the scientific and epidemiological basis for the three percent threshold versus a higher one? 

Mayor: And I will say, as they get into this answer, Matt I certainly remember Dr. Varma’s voice on that call. He and I had quite a dialogue on that call about the three percent and what it would mean in terms of case numbers, et cetera. I believe Dr. Chokshi was on that call too, the day we decided the three percent. So go ahead into it. First, Jay, and then Dave. 

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Great. Thank you very much. So we'll go back in time. So when we were making the decision about what threshold to use as the Mayor had said, we were very concerned about making sure that our school system was the safest possible. And quite honestly, we chose an extremely conservative approach. And at the time we were making that decision, there was a very conscious reason to do that. We needed to make sure that our school system was safe so we could open it up for in-person learning. We chose three percent because based on what we predicted to be the number of tests that we would be doing in New York by the time the schools were opening, we believed that that was a reasonably good threshold to estimate how much transmission there might be broadly in the community as a whole. And because we didn't know at that time how safe we can really make our schools, we were concerned that this would mean that teachers, students would be – have undiagnosed infection, coming into schools and potentially transmitting it to other people. That was one concern. 

The second concern is as part of our approach, our rigorous approach, we chose a very conservative standard for closing classrooms and closing buildings. And we were concerned also that as the transmission in the community rises, this would result in a lot of disruption to classroom and building closures. So those two considerations together, us not knowing how well we would do at protecting transmission in the schools. And second, our concerns about the disruption of a classroom and building closures were the reasons for that threshold. Now we know more. The beauty of science is that, you know, you change your views on things when the science and the evidence changes as well. So I think that gets to the point that the Chancellor and the Mayor have made, that we are going to work very actively to focus on this new phase and how we can modify our proposals to adjust for a new phase of the epidemic. 

Mayor: Dr. Chokshi? 

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, sir. Well, I think Dr. Varma explained it quite well. The one point that I will add to it is that you know, the other thing that is different now compared to a few months ago is we have further layers of protection that we have built into our approach for schools. So you know, I know that there has been a lot of focus justifiably on the percent positivity as you know, one of the key indicators and thresholds. But really I think of it as one of three you know, overall pieces with respect to how we should think about this epidemiologically. So the first is what's happening citywide. That's what the test positivity tells us. The second is what's actually happening within the school. And so that's why the school testing regime that we've put in place gives us valuable additional information as Dr. Varma said. The third really important piece is the situation room that the Department of Education, the Test and Trace Corps. and the Health Department and others have really collaborated on to make sure that we act very quickly when cases are identified within the school. So those three pieces working in concert, give us a much different instrument to be able to understand what's happening with spread. But then most importantly, to take micro targeted actions that help us keep students safe. 

Mayor: Go ahead, Matt. 

Question: Okay, so going forward to you, meaning Dr. Chokshi and Dr. Varma think the standard should be higher? 

Mayor: Well, I'm just going to say one thing as we lead into them. We are right now, unquestionably going to be having higher standards and working with the State and other stakeholders on that. And I think it's self-evident from the numbers we're seeing why we need to change the approach, but doctors, you can go into detail. 

Commissioner Chokshi: Sorry about that Jay. I'll just start briefly to say yes. You know, the short answer is yes. There will be higher standards. And that's our commitment both because of what we have learned over the last few months, but really importantly, because the broader context that we're in is that we do see cases on the rise across New York City. And so we have to redouble our safeguards in schools as well as in other places. 

Mayor: Dr. Varma? 

Senior Advisor Varma: Nothing more for me to add. 

Mayor: Okay, great. Go ahead. 

Moderator: Finally, we have Marcia from WCBS. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everybody on the call. I guess the question that I have is the number of people today who've been critical of the way the closing of the schools was handled, most notably Jumaane Williams and Mark Treyger, the head of Education Committee, who said that we're being led into chaos because there were no plans to reopen. But also that there were no plans to really make sure that people who didn't have devices or didn't have internet connections had them. And what both the Public Advocate and Chair Treyger said was that the sad thing was that we entered the school system, opening them, knowing that there were tens of thousands of people, kids who did not have devices or internet connection and we are closing schools with the same situation. So what would you like to say to them and their criticism of the lack of a plan and the lack of equipment? 

Mayor: I think they just don't have their facts, right. And I'll let the Chancellor join in on this. You know, I appreciate that there are professional critics in this society, but I really think there has to be recognition of the work that people did to close the digital divide, to do something that had never been done before, back in April, as the pandemic was horrendous, to put these devices in the hands of kids. And I don't quite understand why the same question keeps being asked when in fact, the evidence is that immense work was done to provide devices, to address any problem with devices, to provide service if they need a different service. That work has literally been done now, family by family, for kids in shelters. Sometimes it's true that we don't have as many devices as we want to. But the bottom line is it's just been an endless effort to provide free technology to any family who needs it. And that's never stopped, and it's been consistent. And I think it deserves respect and the people who've done the work have really put their heart and soul into making sure kids got what they needed. Go ahead, Chancellor. 

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I will only add Marcia that you know, since March we've delivered – ordered and delivered over 350,000 devices. As students have devices, sometimes it's their own devices. It's devices they've gotten from the school and those devices break. Then it becomes a need for another device. We've ordered over 100,000 devices again. We have about 40,000 of those devices that are arriving on a daily basis. And we're inserting LTE cards into those devices so that students are able to connect to the internet. So this is a constantly moving number. It's not a set number that remains static and then nothing happens, so you fill it, or you don't fill it. So this is a constantly evolving situation. And the other thing that I would mention is that there is a real supply side issue here. We are not the only school system in America, actually in the world that is ordering computers and devices. So the manufacturers are having a hard time filling these orders. And while we've been prioritized and we're getting these devices ahead of many other systems because of our size, it's just important to recognize that as the Mayor has stated, we are literally putting a computer device in the hands of every one of our 1.1 million students, with also understanding that devices break, with also understanding that sometimes there's connectivity issues, with also understanding that not all families have come forward and said, I need a device. So I'm just going to remind folks that you can go onto our website, schools.nyc.gov. It's very simple there to request a device. You can also call 3-1-1 and you can also make sure your school knows that you need a device. Any of those methods, we'll make sure that we get you the technology that you need. 

Mayor: Go ahead, Marcia. 

Question: So another question that they ask is that if you knew going into opening the schools, that there was a possibility of a second wave and a possibility that you would in fact reach that three percent, why was there no plan to figure out how you were going to come back once you reached that number? 

Mayor: Marcia, it's just there have been a lot of different pieces we had to account for. For a long time, we were doing really well in this city. For a long time, it looked like we could hold off a second wave. We're still battling the second wave right now. And where we are in the city is so much better than other parts of the country. So our focus was not on what to do if, our focus was getting our schools up and running, unlike any of the large urban school systems in America. It was getting our schools up and running, making them safe, supporting our kids and families. That's where we've been putting our time and energy. And in recent days, this the first time we had to confront the notion that we might hit this standard. We've been working to set a new standard in a new environment, not a theoretical one, we could have said a long time ago, but a one that actually fits this moment and the facts we know now, and the better information we have on what works. And we're going to come out with that standard in a matter of days. And it will take a few days to apply it. But our goal is to come back as quickly as possible with even higher standards and make it work. So I, you know, the what-ifs I don't get lost in. We've got work to do right now, but what we do know, which we didn't know back in August, we now have proof positive, we can keep our kids, our educators, our staff safe. And we're going to reset the equation for the new facts we have. And make them safe again and get our schools back. 

So, everyone, as we conclude today, look, everyone's been through so much, I know. And it's, everchanging, you know, a lot of times the questions I get, whether it's from the media or everyday New Yorkers, it's the same point. Why is everything changing so much? Let me tell you, I wish the coronavirus would ever give us a stationary target, but it is the most moving target situation I've ever seen in my life. That's the coronavirus, always changing, always clever unfortunately, trying to outwit us, but we need to outwit it. So, we do that by doubling down on what works. The testing, the mask wearing, being smart about avoiding those large indoor gatherings, avoiding travel. This is how we fight back. The schools have been shut temporarily, but only temporarily. They will be back and there'll be safer than ever. The city is going to go through some tough times in the coming weeks, but we'll fight back. And the vaccine is coming. We couldn't say that even just a few weeks ago. Now we can say it with 100 percent assurance. So, let's double down on this fight. Let's overcome this moment. And I have not a doubt in my mind that New York City will come back and we will be stronger for this painful experience and we will make it a better city. Thank you, everyone.

2020-11-20 NYC Mayor de Blasio Ask the Mayor

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. And now as every Friday at this time, it's time for our weekly Ask the Mayor segment. My questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 6-4-6-4-3-5-7-2-8-0. Or you can tweet a question, just use the hashtag #AskTheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you, Brian. How are you doing today?

Lehrer: I'm doing all right. Thank you very much. And I cringe a little to ask this question after the way you had to answer it last week, but do you have any news for us on positivity rates and any actions that they will demand?

Mayor: Yeah, let me just go through today's indicators. Just getting them in front of me here. The hospital admissions, at this point they continue to be higher certainly than we wanted to be, 115 today. And the positivity level for COVID 34.45 percent. Again, we still do see a surprising lag there. We are watching that carefully. That could be a good thing. But we still need to know more. ICU's are doing well, thank God, not too much of a crowding situation there. New reported cases, this again is worrisome as all hell. It's 1,255 now, just for a single day, 1,255. Overall testing 2.36. That number sometimes goes up as more results come in. Overall testing seven-day rolling average is now at 3.02. So those are the indicators. The overall situation on restrictions that are coming, I've been very overt about the fact that the Governor has said an orange zone is coming to New York City. By our projections based on the State data Brian, that will happen soon after Thanksgiving, probably the first week of December. And that means a variety of restrictions, including closing indoor dining and closing gyms among other things. And again, I don't say that with anything about sorrow, for the people who work in those places who need them for their livelihood, the people who own those small businesses and try to make them work through this. But that is what's going to happen. And then on schools, we're going to have an update certainly before Thanksgiving. I think in the next few days, we're going to have an update on the reopening plan and what it's going to take.

Lehrer: So let me ask you about businesses and something about schools. And then we'll go to the phones. Crain’s has an article today on a theory from the business community, that New York City because of tests and contact tracing has reliable data on what is causing the infection spikes. For example, Randy Peers, President of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce is quoted saying if the City and State are going to make shutdown decisions, businesses want to see the evidence behind the decisions. Similarly, a quote from Robert Bookman, a lawyer for the industry group, the New York Hospitality Alliance says since indoor dining in New York was allowed. There has been zero contact tracing evidence thus far of any restaurant related spread. And they have the name and contact info of somebody – Oh, the quote continues, I apologize. He's saying they have the name and contact info of someone from every table. That's the end of the quote. So Mr. Mayor, the question is that's a claim from the business lobby, but do you have any data that contradicts that?

Mayor: We have the – I want to do a two-part answer, I think it is really important here, Brian. We have a massive body of evidence from around the country and around the world of the vulnerabilities created by people being indoors without masks on. And that obviously means indoor dining because you have to take your mask off to eat and drink. And in gyms, it's about the amount of exertion, the amount of air coming in and out, even if you try and wear a mask and that can be hard in the gym. That has been proven many times over. In terms of specific situations up to now? We've been very overt about the fact that the Test and Trace Corps is not seeing specific major problems coming out of those sectors. That's not the question though. The question is where are we going? I don't – look, this is painful to talk about Brian, and the city's been through so much, but when we have 1,255 new cases in a 24-hour period, and when you and I were talking, as recently as you know, first half of September, that number was, you know, 200, 300 kind of thing, something's going on here, we have to address. And the only way we can address it is by putting restrictions in place. We know this. We know this from what we did in March and April. We know it even as recently as what we did in Brooklyn and Queens. Which were very high positivity levels. And by putting restrictions in place, we were able to bring those right back down. So I agree with the State on this. We need restrictions. It's about what we have learned over and over again in this city and around the state and around the world. It's just clear that restrictions are the only way to turn back this kind of a surge.

Lehrer: So to be clear, what you're saying is our own Test and Trace data do not reflect that COVID is spreading in restaurants, but experience from around the world tells you that it will if we continue to go down that road while cases are increasing outside?

Mayor: That's a pretty good summary. I would say, look at it this way, we see a very painful trend now. The trend couldn't be clearer. There's a second wave bearing down on us. The reason I still think we can fight it back is because our hospitals are holding very, very strong. And it's not manifesting as a lot of folks going to the ICU still, thank God. I'm knocking on wood and praying as I say that. But we can see the handwriting on the wall. The State can see the handwriting on the wall. And you've seen the restrictions have been put in place around the country. We have to start using restrictions to fight this back. And so the orange zone approach is the next major set of restrictions we can put in place. God forbid we have to go even farther than that and go back closer to where we were in March and April. But these are the next things we can do that have been proven to work. So it's not a matter of, do you wait until it's, you're clear – I mean, I'll parallel it to the schools. We were doing very, very well in the schools. But we said that if we didn't have a level at which we said, wait a minute, this is going to cause a reset. Where, you know, we could end up not doing so well in the school. So we put that three percent down to say, if we get to that level, we need to reset the equation. And we're going to come back with stricter standards. The same when you think about the restaurants, when you think about the gyms, right now thank God they have not been a major nexus of the problem, but the rate things are going, unfortunately they well could be. And they are the places where people come into close contact without their masks on or where they're breathing heavily, the kinds of things that spread COVID. We cannot wait until it's too late. We have to start putting restrictions in place.

Lehrer: Joseph on Staten Island. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Joseph.

Question: Hi. Question is isn't it true that these proposed shutdowns is just because you want to destroy Thanksgiving and Christmas and your attack on our way of life here in America?

Lehrer: You are kidding right?

Question: And you just really want to get rid of –

Lehrer: Joseph, really?

Question: – the way of life that we actually enjoy?

Lehrer: Really Joseph? Where did you get that?

Question: Is that true? Just be honest, Mr. Mayor, just be honest.

Mayor: Oh, I'll happily be honest, Joseph.

Lehrer: Wow.

Mayor: I'll be very honest.

Lehrer: Let me just say Mr. Mayor. That's not what he told our screener he wanted to ask you. You had an actual question theoretically, but wow.

Mayor: Yeah. Well, Brian, some people like to play games. But Joseph, listen, I'm sad that you even think that's possible. I have a family. I love my family. I want to get together. I'm not going to see a lot of my relatives this Thanksgiving or this Christmas that I cherish getting together with, have my entire life. But it's what we have to do is stay safe. And next year, Thanksgiving is going to be back to normal. I truly believe that. Christmas is going to be back to normal. I believe that what we're all supposed to do is protect each other and keep each other safe. So I want businesses to survive and I want them to thrive in the future. I care for the people who built those small businesses with their bare hands. I care for the people who work there and their livelihoods are in danger. But I especially want to save lives and protect everyone and protect us from much greater restrictions if we don't act now. It's the same thing I said about the schools. We kept them safe. We proved we could open schools. By the way, Joseph, I don't know what your political beliefs are –

Lehrer: Oh yes you do.

Mayor: But I caught a lot of hell for opening schools in September. I wanted to open schools because kids needed it. Families needed it. I believe we could do it safely. We did do it safely. But I also said if at any point we worry from the facts, from the data, from the science that we need to take additional precautions we're going to, and this is the exact same thing. So I want people to live their lives. I want people to have their freedoms. But we've also got to protect people and we've got to save lives. And that's the balance we're striking.

Lehrer: Well, we know that theory is actually going around some corners of right-wing social media. That there is this liberal plot to try to destroy Thanksgiving and Christmas and otherwise use COVID as an excuse to force businesses to close because they hate business and all of that stuff. So –

Mayor: For the record, I love Thanksgiving and I celebrate Christmas with my family, like so many other people. And I want it to be part of our lives going forward. But we have to keep people alive so they can celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas going forward.

Lehrer: You shouldn't even have to dignify it with a response. Lori in Manhattan, you are on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello.

Question: Hi, good morning, Brian. Good morning, your honor. As a mom to a current eighth grader, just to follow up regarding schools, he is in public school. I'm looking forward to applying to high school. When will you and the DOE announce what's going on regarding applications? And what will the criteria be for screened and specialized slash performing arts public high schools? Thank you so much.

Mayor: Thank you, Lori. And Lori, I just want you to know seriously. I remember vividly when my kids were going through the application process, which is pretty nerve wracking. And a lot of anxiety and anticipation with that. We need to answer those questions clearly with the specialized high schools, we're going to have the test. The problem is we can't have the test the way we normally do, obviously because of COVID. So we're trying to figure out an alternative, but we'll announce that soon. That will stay within the, you know, the standards that we need in terms of getting people results and answers by the end of this school year, of course. So everyone knows what's going to happen for next school year. We have a big problem when we try and think about admissions beyond the specialized high schools, because the things we normally focus on, the things like, you know, grades. Obviously, the grading policy has had to be modified. We don't know what's happening with the State tests. And I'm someone who's very dubious about high-stakes testing to begin with, but it's been a part of our lives. But even now we don't know what it's going to look like, or if it's going to be possible. There's a lot up in the air. So we are going to answer those questions soon. We have to answer them soon so we can put things in motion so everyone will get their answers by an appropriate point in the spring. And get their final assignments to their new schools. But we're still working through the right way to do it in what has been in a pretty much an ever-changing reality. We will have those answers soon Lori.

Lehrer: I think we have a whole other question on middle and high school admissions from Nina in Harlem. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Nina.

Question: Good morning Mayor de Blasio. My name is Nina Warley and I'm a junior at LaGuardia High School in Manhattan, as well as a leader at Teens Take Charge, a youth led organization fighting for educational equity in New York City public schools. My peers and I have submitted a FOIL request that corroborated with testimony from students across the city to show that screens perpetuate segregation. Despite the fact that Black and Hispanic students make up 65 percent of the school population, in highly screened schools like Eleanor Roosevelt, the class of 2025 is only five percent Black and Hispanic. In addition, this pandemic has hit low income communities of color at disproportionate rates, making it even harder for Black and Brown students to gain admission using these current screens. Will you stand against screens, stand against racist policy and ensure that every single public school student has access to a quality and equitable education for this year's admission cycle?

Mayor: Thank you Nina very much. I appreciate Teens Take Charge a lot. I've watched your work. It's actually been very important work to us in terms of what we've done, for example, on social emotional learning. So I really want to thank you for what you and all the other students are doing. Look, that example you gave is just unacceptable, obviously. We have to figure out a better way going forward. And you know, this is why I felt, and I know specialized high schools are different than screened schools. We have to act on both. And it's different venues in terms of where we act. But the same concept applies. What's happening in the specialized high schools, very similar to what you just said with Eleanor Roosevelt. Stuyvesant was about three percent. You said five percent at, I think Eleanor Roosevelt. Three percent Black and Latino in one of the recent Stuyvesant admissions. It's just not acceptable and it can't be what we do in the future of the city.

So we're working right now to figure out what is the way forward to change that? The status quo is broken. It needs to be changed. We're also dealing of course, with the practical reality of what do we do in the middle of COVID with all admissions? How do we make it work? So we are going to come forward with a plan to do the best we can to address that in the here and now. I think more work is going to be needed obviously in the years to come. But, but to the core of what you're saying, I agree with you on the core point. There's just not an acceptable balance in both the specialized high schools and the screen schools, and we have to do something different

Lehrer: But when on the screens? You've been in office for seven years. I know you need Albany for the specialized high schools. Do you need them for the screens? And if not, why isn't it done already?

Mayor: We made a number of changes over time and we've also moved a number of other initiatives. And I think the bottom line is Brian, everything has been about greater equality. That's why the whole vision of the schools was called Equity and Excellence. That's been – don’t for a moment miss the fact that pre-K and 3K, that AP Advanced Placement courses for all, including the high schools that never had any because of structural racism. So many of the things we've been doing, changing the way we distributed resources to schools to create more equity for schools that had been underfunded. It's all been pointing in the same direction. It's now time to deal with the screens. And again, we're going to come forward with a vision. I don't think it'll all be settled in one year. But we're going to come forward with a vision of the next things we know we need to do to address the screens and make them more equitable. And whether it's in my time or whoever comes after me, we need to finish the mission on the specialized high schools and come up with a different model. And maybe there's a compromise out there that everyone can live with. But this current model is just unacceptable.

Lehrer: Also on equity and the schools. We go back and forth as people have been doing all week on whether it was the right decision to close the schools for now, but maybe worse than any opening or closing decision it's being discussed at around 60,000 kids still do not have the devices or in some cases it's internet access for remote learning. But again, this has been going on since March and you're the inequality Mayor first focused on reducing educational inequities. So who failed to close this digital divide in this long a time period? And what are you doing about it? 

Mayor: I respect the question. I just think this has not been a fair discussion. Remember, unlike pretty much anywhere in this country, we said from the moment we knew we had to close schools in March that we would provide for free, highest quality technology to any student didn't have it and within the course of just weeks, we got 300,000 devices in the hands of our students. And then we said from that point on, we would continue to, if a device broke, if the service wasn't working, if there was a problem in a homeless shelter, whatever it was that we were going to keep doing this and pay whatever it took to get it done, that's been the standard. The problem has been two things, I think. One, sometimes there's just not enough supply of devices. This has been a problem all over the country as the whole country has gone to remote learning. The Chancellor spoke to this yesterday. We are constantly reordering, but we have to wait for the companies to provide the product and then we immediately get to the students. The second thing has been, we hear the complaints, but I keep saying, just call 3-1-1.  

If you need a new device, so long as we have one in stock, we're getting to you immediately, or as soon as it comes in. If you're having a service problem, we'll switch your service. I mean, it's really a very responsive system. We've had some kids in shelters who had a service, had a device, but the service wasn't working in the shelter, we sent technicians in to put them on a new company, different service, which does work better. We're doing that literally family by family in shelter. We're literally reaching out to every family and saying, we want to confirm your service is working? If it's not, we're going to switch you to a new provider. That's as hands-on and focused as it could possibly be, but we can't always overcome the lack of supply immediately. Anyone who needs – I must say it again, any New York City public school student is having any kind of problem, doesn't have the device, doesn't have the right service, just call 3-1-1 and as quickly as we can resolve it, we're going to.  

Lehrer: Michelle in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the mayor. Hello, Michelle. 

Question: Hi there. Thank you for taking my call. Hi, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: Hi, Michelle. 

Question: Hi, I just wanted to – just kind of curious. I listen in every Friday as a public school teacher who was on her lunch break at this time, I get to hear this segment and I often hear you just talking about the blended learning and the return of students to classrooms, and you tend to frame it as a big success. And although I understand your heart is probably in the right place, I just wonder if you know what an average day looks like inside the school for a kid who was doing blended learning? 

Lehrer: What did you have in mind Michelle?  

Mayor: Michelle, yes, go ahead. 

Question: Oh, well, but I think I can tell you what I know about the day based on the fact that I'm doing this. Kids are sitting in classrooms, because we had an option for students to go blended or stay all remote, it really took double the staff to be able to teach all these children. And so, as a result, the kids who are in school on the days that they're in school at least where I'm teaching, sit in classrooms with headphones on, masks on, in front of a zoom screen, and usually with Wi-Fi that is not the greatest and windows open, so they're kind of wearing coats and hats and gloves – or not gloves – but, you know, scarves, will be sitting and doing remote learning at school. And the teacher who's present in the room is not a subject area teacher. They are not delivering direct instruction. They're simply there almost as a proctor, it's like a study hall, and so it's just a real far cry from what we think of when we think of kids going to school – 

Lehrer: Michelle let me take you one more step for the may have before we get a response, what would you recommend to improve it? 

Question: Well, what I would have recommended from the beginning, I think was that if there had been some uniform decision, for instance, to go all remote I think a lot of resources could have been used to bolster that and to make that as powerful and meaningful as possible, rather than attempt to do this, like blended, everybody gets a little something, and then in a way it just has done nothing but create more chaos for families, for teachers, for administrators, I've seen just a lot of unnecessary chaos and it's painful. And I just have a hard time week by week after week, listening to this sort of celebration of what it has meant to bring children back to school when going back to school looks like something out of a dystopian novel. 

Lehrer: Michelle thank you. We're going to get you a response from the Mayor right now.  

Mayor: Yeah, Michelle, respectfully, you do know a lot more about the day-to-day life than me because your teacher and I thank you for being a teacher, but dystopian novel, I'm sorry, I'm just not buying that, respectfully. Why do we have so many parents right now saying, please get our schools back open again? Because they value what their kids are experiencing in school with educators, with counselors, with everyone who can help them, and we've been very open about the fact that it's not everything we want it to be by any stretch, but we're just going to disagree on two things. One, should we have gone all remote, no. If you wanted to go all remote, I respect that. I didn't think it was the right thing to do. I didn't think it was fair to our kids, especially the kids that need help the most. I think if you went from March of 2020, theoretically, all the way to September 2021 and a kid never got in a classroom with an educator and with caring adults who could help them, I think would've been a massive mistake. And the two months that we got in, I think helped a lot of kids to get re-centered, refocused, gave them some hope, gave them support and love they needed. I would not trade that in. We, it was a right thing to do and we're going to bring the schools back. So I disagree with you on should we have gone all remote.  

I also think that in the end for kids to go someplace where they could get some structure, and again, I know there's a lot of in-person teaching going on. So it's not everything you've described, respectfully. I know this for a fact. I've had talked to enough teachers and principals to know this. There's plenty of in-person instruction happening in our schools, and yeah, there are other times when kids are doing remote work in a school classroom, but I still rather they be in a school classroom where there is a lot of support. Even if it isn't the subject expert, there's still a lot of support. And we did put a lot of resources into bringing in more teachers, but I don't, you know, I'm not going to be ashamed of trying to get kids to help they needed. It was exactly right. They couldn't get that help at home, even the most loving parents could not provide the support that trained educators could. So we're just going to disagree on that one. 

Lehrer: There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today by the reporter, Jimmy Veilkind, who we played a clip of with the governor on yesterday show because he, I'm sure you heard that moment, where he was giving the Governor a hard time about – 

Mayor: No I didn’t, just for the record I didn’t.  

Lehrer: Oh, you didn’t? That's fair. 

Mayor: Pay a lot attention going back over the media of the day, but go ahead. 

Lehrer: That’s fair, but he was giving the Governor a hard time for confusing parents on Wednesday when you were supposed to be making an announcement and having a news conference, and that got delayed for hours, and meanwhile, the Governor went out and said he did overrule you and the schools are going to open, but then of course you announced schools were going to close – 

Mayor: No, Brian, wait a minute. He never said he overruled. And that that's just not accurate, I mean that much I know –  

Lehrer: Well, he said he overruled with the orange zones in the previous weeks, but – 

Mayor: Wait, wait, whoa, wait, I've got to get this - hold on, if you're going to change the facts in the middle of the question, let's be clear my friend. I want to be clear the Governor and I spoke many times on Wednesday morning. It is not a happy conversation to say we have to close schools. No one wanted to, we had a number we needed to reconfirm because it was so exactly on the line. We wanted to check it and we needed to talk about what would come next. I don't – I didn't see the press conference to be fair, but I did see enough of the transcript to know the Governor reiterated that New York City has set a standard and we lived by that standard, and we closed down when we hit three percent. So, I just don't know if you're portraying it right. 

Lehrer: That's fair. But the article today says the Governor offered you a pathway out, which was to go by the State standard instead of the City standard which wouldn't have had us at three percent yet, and you declined. Would you confirm that or refute it? 

Mayor: Let me say two things. One, I'm going to be very careful not to get into extensive private conversations with the Governor. I think it only confuses matters and I want to respect the relationship and the communication. But two, we were very overt in the press conference on Wednesday about the fact that this State does have a different test compilation system. It is true. People said, well, how on earth could that be? And the fact is New York City for decades has had its own approach with our Department of Health, which is a pretty legendary organization and is here to protect New Yorkers, and we love the State of New York, we love, you know, the CDC, but we protect our own our own way, and that's been the case for a long, long time. So we have a very cautious, conservative data-driven approach and our numbers are what govern us and the Governor I talked about the fact that there were different State numbers, but I said in the end, look, we've set a very clear standard here and we need to stick to that standard. And he understood, and he amplified that point. I want to be fair to him and I appreciate it. He said many times the city set a standard and he understood why the city was sticking to that standard. 

Lehrer: Scott in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello Scott. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Hey Brian. So bear with me for a second. I just got to run through this and it's about eviction. And I am – have a notice of a motion for eviction in early December and the lawyer filed with under pre-COVID, which it was - but I was, you know, I've been doing everything I can to, you know, in this economy to, you know, get a job, blah, blah, blah, not making excuses for myself in that sense, but, and you know, I've applied for a one-shot deal and I got denied twice. Legal aid won't give me a lawyer because they they say I earn too much money, which is ridiculous. And I'm wondering, I don't know what to do. You know, I thought that evictions were placed on hold and the HRA is not – they can't help me. You know, I'm facing homelessness and, you know, early December, so I don't know what to do. Can you offer any advice? I don't know if you have any questions for me, like to my situation, but – 

Mayor: Scott, I can definitely offer help. We have a tenant protection office, which literally will work with any individual and will work with you specifically to figure out what we can do to help. We do not want anyone evicted. Look, those who have enough money to pay should be paying the rent. Those who can't pay the rent or are suffering some other kind of hardship because of what their landlord is doing to them should not be evicted. And if you'll give you your information to WNYC, it’s a very aggressive office, we have lawyers that can help, let's see what we can do to help you and keep you in your apartment. 

Lehrer: Scott, we will take your contact information off the air. And have you – 

Mayor: And Brian, for anyone, just to reiterate to anyone who is having the eviction problem, they should call 3-1-1. We have been providing free lawyers to counsel people, or even represent them if needed. We have a very, again, very vigorous tenant protection office, anyone facing eviction now should call 3-1-1 and we can provide them help for free. 

Lehrer: And as that caller is facing his hard time and as we are running out of time on this segment, this will be our last Ask the Mayor before Thanksgiving, obviously, and even in normal years, it's the time that the problem of food insecurity get some attention. This year it's off the charts, in the city and elsewhere, as I don't have to tell you, and as we've been discussing since the start of the pandemic shutdowns on this show, maybe you saw the images from Dallas on TV this week of miles of cars lined up as if in traffic jams, but they weren't waiting for the congestion to clear, they were in food pantry lines. So my question for you is, what is the city doing at this point to meet the need and anything specific for Thanksgiving?  

Mayor: Yeah, it's such an important question, Brian. I really appreciate that. Look, what we've said from the beginning of the crisis is we're not going to allow any New Yorker to go hungry, period. And we've put a huge amount of resources into that. So the bottom line is anyone who does not have access to food and needs it, can call 3-1-1 or go to nyc.gov/getfood. And there – we are supporting soup kitchens, food pantries, we have grab and go meals and available at public schools, even while the are temporarily closed, we are still distributing meals, not just the kids, but the families, to anyone who needs it during daytime hours on school days. And if someone needs home delivery, there are a lot of people just can't get out for physical or medical reasons, we will provide direct home delivery if that's what's needed. So I really want to emphasize, I'm with you, this is a painful time for people to be going hungry. We are not going to allow it and we want people to have food on Thanksgiving. So anyone that needs help just pick up that phone and please call 3-1-1. 

Lehrer: Mr. Mayor, I hope you have a happy, socially-distanced Thanksgiving. My family will be doing Zoom Thanksgiving, by the way, my kids and I usually go to my parents in Queens, but I'll be staying home, my brother will be staying at his home and we're gathering virtually, and we're all okay with that. You want to say anything about what your family is doing as you put out the public health call for others to separate as much as possible? 

Mayor: Yeah, well, we're not – people who were going to come from out of town are not coming, that's for sure. And we're not traveling for Thanksgiving or Christmas as we often did. We're still figuring out exactly how to do things, but, you know, I believe it's either do it by zoom or do it with real, careful distancing, very small groups, essentially the people in your own household, and if you bring in a few others, be very careful and practice the distancing. And look, it's a tough time, Brian, to think about what we're thankful for, but we should be thankful that so many people are doing such good work to protect us and our health care workers, our first responders, the way New Yorkers are protecting each other. So many people are, you know, just wearing that mask or they're helping to protect each other, that's something to be thankful for. And we're going to get through this, and I think we can conclude on a very clear point, Brian, that you and I, proud progressives, are celebrating Thanksgiving and we will be celebrating other holidays and we want people to be able to enjoy them, but we most importantly need everyone to be safe. 

Lehrer: I know you're responding there indirectly to a caller from earlier who some listeners right at this moment may not have heard, who actually accused the Mayor of wanting to destroy Thanksgiving and Christmas. So, no, he shouldn't have even have had to respond to that. Mr. Mayor, thank you as always talk to you in two weeks since we'll be offer for the Friday after Thanksgiving. 

Mayor: All right, have a good Thanksgiving too, Brian, happy Thanksgiving to you and all your listeners.

2020-11-23 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. Well, it’s so important to keep our focus on the future. And so, today, we're going to be talking about where we go from here and the path forward for this city and to recognize that there is a strong path forward, relies on also recognizing everything that has been achieved by the people of this city. We obviously have gone through so much, but we have fought back every time. Right now, we're facing the challenge of a second wave, but do not forget all those months where we fought back after the first wave, don't forget the way our economy has started to rebound, the jobs started coming back. And I'm going to talk about some new numbers that are important for you to hear that I think will give people some encouragement, because everyone's been working so hard to protect people's livelihoods and bring them back and it is having an impact. I'm going to talk about our schools, which we closed for the safety of all, but are coming back with a plan to intensify our safety measures and bring our schools back.  

So, we need to reference all those facts and remember what we're capable of as New Yorkers and how that's going to move us forward. At the same time, we could recognize the real challenge we face with this second wave bearing down with COVID cases rising, all the things that we need to do to stay safe. So, let's talk about schools. I know it's on everyone's mind and it's on my mind as well all the time. We can and we will bring back our schools. It will take a lot of work. And I just want people to understand that from beginning, bringing back to the schools this next time will take an extra effort. It can be done. It will be done. And then, in the months ahead, we'll be able to do so much more as we start to feel the effects of a vaccine reaching the city. And, hopefully, that starts in the next month or two. But, in the meantime, to bring schools back, we have to take our core vision, which is health and safety first, and intensify it. The data and the science govern all our decisions. We saw these numbers rise. We made a decision based on the standards we put forward months ago. But now, a new reality is coming into play, the strong, strong likelihood that, in a matter of days, the State of New York will determine that New York City is an orange zone, according to State standards. Now, I'm not going to speak for the State or the exact timing. I'm just taking their numbers, looking at them and acknowledging the clear trajectory. And basing on what the State has said already, there is a likelihood, as soon as next week even, that New York City will be declared an orange zone. Once that happens, we will be in a position to take additional measures to reopen schools. And there's a clear protocol for that. It involves a lot more testing. It's a very conservative, cautious approach. Again, a lot more work, but we will go through that hard work together. I know how much parents want their kids back in school. I know how much educators and staff want to be there to serve kids. It will take a lot more testing, a very aggressive approach, very proactive approach, but we can do it. Testing has to be done, in fact, in advance of kids and staff coming back to school and constant testing throughout the school year, much more than we've even been doing already, and we've been doing a lot.  

Remember, in New York city, first of all, we opened our schools when almost no major city in America did. But, second, we put a strong testing approach into place and the situation room to act quickly if anyone in the school community tested positive and, when necessary, to close the school. That whole approach was working and working very well. We're going to now build upon that, intensify it and make sure that there's testing constantly. Now, I'm going to say it again as I said several times last week – if you're a parent, you want your kid back in school as soon as they reopen, get that test consent form in, because that will be absolutely required for any child to come into the school to have a test consent form on file. And that includes all those who opted back in to blended learning over the last few weeks.  

Now, how will this work? Well, a lot of details have to be worked out between the City and the State, but we can say for sure that we're going to focus on the most important and most vulnerable elements of our education system. So, first of all, our special needs kids. And the families with special needs kids have been saying very, very clearly how much they need in-person education. I couldn't agree with them more. So, when we come back, the first thing we're going to focus on is getting what's called District 75 schools, special-ED schools, back and up and running across all grades. Next, the youngest grades, early child education, such a difference-maker for children, bringing that back. 3-K, Pre-K will be a high priority followed by elementary school. And we'll keep building from there. So, this is an initial vision – a lot of work to do to make it come together, but I want to give people a sense of how things are going to go in the coming weeks and the focus we're going to have as we build out this plan. Again, parents, this is going to require a lot from you. You've got to get those test consent forms in. You're going to have to help us with the testing of your child before we come back to school. It's going to be something that everyone has to participate in, but we can do it. I don't have a doubt in my mind we can do it. And our schools will come back with this plan and then more and more as the vaccine comes into play in the coming months.  

So, anyone who believes in the power of bringing the city back, remember, you can do something about it. I just talked about what parents can do. Everyone can contribute to this city coming back, and it comes down to this, as always, wearing this mask consistently and practicing social distancing. But also, the choice we all have to make now at the holidays. I've talked about this. It's a painful reality. We're going to have to do something very different this Thanksgiving, very different throughout the December holidays. Do not travel if you can possibly avoid it. If you travel, it just greatly intensifies the exposure you could have and the risk you would take. Even if you're getting a test, you're still going to be exposing yourself to the challenges that come with travel and to a lot of places in this country that just are not as safe as we are. And I’ll keep urging people, please don't travel. Please change your plans if you've made them. And if you do travel, take every conceivable precaution. And if you come back and you test out, that's great. But if you don't test out, honor that quarantine, we need you to. And, again, everyone, small holiday gatherings. If it's folks from outside the home, practice social distancing, wear masks. There’ll still be joyous gatherings. Or, if you do it virtually, it will still be a joyous gathering. But let's just protect each other. I said it on Friday on WNYC, let's protect each other this year so we can all be together next year. Let's protect each other this year, so people will still be alive next year for when holidays are in-person again.  

Okay. That is a quick update on the school's front. Now, let me talk to you about what's going on with our economy and our budget. And this is crucial. We have some new information here that's really important. And we knew from the beginning that this virus was going to wreak havoc on people's lives, first and foremost, in terms of their health. And we mourn everyone we've lost, but we also feel such pain for everyone who lost their job, everyone lost their livelihood. So much pain in so many families. But we have now real data, real evidence of the power of a stimulus, of what the federal government can actually do to help people, because we now have a better sense of what the previous stimulus packages did for New York City. Our Office of Management and Budget has totaled up everything, the impact of those individual checks that were sent to people, the $1,200 checks, the unemployment benefits, the PPP loans for small business – all of that combined, the impact on New York City has been $40 billion. This is new information. It's very important information. When you combine all those previous stimulus programs, $40 billion reached the people of New York City. And that is part of why we have been able to make it through, even with all the challenges. Now, it's also proof positive of why we need a new stimulus quickly, because all of those good investments are now wearing off and people are running out of money and they're running out of time and we need another stimulus and this is exactly the right time for it. 

Now, I want to give you an example of what that has meant first, in terms of our economy, then we're going to talk about our City budget. Go back to February – it's amazing to think this is not ancient history. February 2020, this year, New York City was arguably at its all-time economic high, the peak of our economic strength in our entire history – 4.7 million jobs, all-time high, 3.4 percent unemployment as of February – record low. That was just 10 months back, that we had this extraordinary strength. Along comes the horror of COVID, decimates our economy. Between March and April, the immediate aftermath of the worst of what we went through, almost 900,000 jobs were lost in this city. But then we started to feel the impact of that federal stimulus, that $40 billion we're now recognizing the full impact of. $40 billion came into the city over the course of months. People worked hard to bring their businesses back. Everyone worked hard to bring down the COVID levels and open up the space for economic recovery. As result of all those efforts, at the end of the spring, going into the summer, now over 300,000 of the jobs that were lost have been recovered. So, it's an amazing beginning. We lost 900,000 jobs, but 300,000 are back already. We’ve got a long way to go, but so important that this city's ability to rebound is already in evidence. Now, unemployment is still way too high – 13.2 percent, way too high. Not something we can ever accept. Many people suffering, a long way to go – parts of our economy that’s going to take a long time to bring back, but you now can see the impact of a stimulus, the way it kept people afloat, the way it helped people bring back their businesses and the way it could do that again, and the sheer impact of New Yorkers doing the right thing and fighting back this disease and opening up the space for us all to recover. 

As we face the danger of a second wave of COVID, again, there couldn't be a more important time for a new federal stimulus. And it is going to be the difference-maker – it’s the only thing that could be the difference-maker. New Yorkers are doing a hell of a job fighting back this second wave. We're in real danger here, but people are fighting, they're doing the right thing. But, again, we're running out of time on the economic side as well. We need that stimulus to keep people going – and that means now. This Congress that's in Washington right now could pass a stimulus to help New York City and the whole country. And then, the new administration could do even more in January and February. And that's going to mean everything starts to move. People have the money for the basics. It's going to help jobs come back. It's going to help us expand our reopening of our schools. Everything gets a boost from a stimulus, protecting all our essential services. It's the difference-maker.  

So, now, let me talk about what we have achieved in part with the help of that stimulus money and other federal support and what it means for where we go from here. And this now takes us to our City budget. Lord knows, we had to make extraordinary changes between February – I put forward a preliminary budget for this fiscal year in February, what a different world that was by April, when the next budget submission was due. We had to change everything by June. We ended up with a budget that looked very, very different from what we thought it would. We had to cut a lot and there's a lot of things that we thought were important, but we just couldn't do. And a lot of savings have to be found and found quickly. And a lot of jobs were either cut back or not filled. We were able, through those actions, to keep ourselves going, to keep essential services happening for the people of the city to help spur that recovery. We've got a lot more to do. So, today, we're releasing our November financial plan. This is something that happens each year. Normally we wouldn't be highlighting it as much, but it's important because there's some major changes and it speaks so powerfully to the impact of federal support. So, the budget now for New York City, for Fiscal ‘21, the fiscal year that we are in now, will now be $92 billion and remains balanced. And that is because of federal support. Overwhelmingly, the money that came from that first stimulus, that ended up in people's pockets, some of that turned into revenue for the City as well, but also the direct grants that came to the city through stimulus, and, of course, FEMA aid, which has been absolutely crucial. We have depended on FEMA so intensely in this crisis. And even though we're still not seeing the kind of reimbursement that we deserve or any other city deserves, and that still needs to be addressed, the FEMA aid is coming in and is playing a huge impact. And that is all about the things that we have focused to protect people, feeding people, making sure no New Yorker went hungry, making sure we could build a strong Test and Trace Corps., which has been crucial to holding back this disease, everything we had to do to get our schools open, all the things we've been doing, all the health and safety measures. You've heard about them, the gold standard we set for our schools, layering health and safety measures one on top of another, that all costs a lot of money. But that FEMA aid helped, the federal grants helped, and now we're in a position to say that we could pay for these dire needs because we got federal support. If we could get more federal support, it would be transcendent. It would help take us forward into our recovery.  

At the same time, we have to do things constantly to tighten our own belt. And we have the furloughs that we moved for City officials, senior officials, management. Everyone was asked to sacrifice. New Yorkers are all hurting. It was important for your leaders and the people who run the City government to sacrifice as well. So, we did the furloughs. The savings that we've found, we have a whole set of agreements we've come to with our labor partners that result in savings. But in addition to that, $1.3 billion in new savings being announced in this November plan. And that is for both this current year Fiscal ‘21 and for next year Fiscal ‘22. So, the budget reserves – these reserves continue to be strong and we are going to continue to protect them. And that's something that has been a crucial, crucial part of our work as well, and has helped us work our way through. We made a big focus for years on reserves, kept them strong. We're going to continue to have a strong reserve as we go forward.  

Now, what I've told you is at least some good news. There's some good news – a lot of federal money came in. There's some good news – it really helped families keep going. There's some good news – it helped us, the City government to keep going. But there's not only good news, to say the least. There's some bad news on the budget front as well, and that's what we see for the next fiscal year. Right now, an almost $4 billion gap looming – $4 billion now, but, of course, that gap could easily grow. If there's not a stimulus, we're going to see less and less revenue coming in. If there's not a stimulus, the State of New York is going to be in dire, dire shape, and, unfortunately, might have to pass on cuts to localities. So, as much as I'm happy to give some good news, I have to also frame the reality that comes into play very soon. Again, almost $4 billion that we don't have to keep ourselves going next fiscal year. And we have to present a new budget in January that will be adopted in June for the new fiscal year. And, right now, we don't have a way to close that gap without federal support. That's why it's so crucial that we see action at a federal level.  

And I'll conclude this before going to our indicators with this simple point – new administration coming, thank God. Vaccines – now here. Thank God, that's huge. The way forward is clearer than ever. With a stimulus, all of these pieces come together. It's the perfect time. Without a stimulus, we struggle. We struggle in many ways and the suffering continues. And we know that it's at some of the most dire points, that some of the greatest things are achieved. Sometimes, in a moment of crisis, people rise to a higher level. That's what happened in the Great Depression. That was what led to the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We need this again. We need this Congress to act. We need our new president to act in this crisis to find a way forward beyond anything we've seen previously so we really can come back strong.  

Let me go over today's indicators. Number one daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients – today's report, 100 patients. Confirmed positivity, 43.27 percent. So, again, that positivity rate has gone up. That's the number – excuse me, the percentage amongst those patients who actually are proven to have COVID – that number has gone up a lot in recent weeks. That's a real concern. The 100 patients, too many, but, again, we see an interesting gap here in that, that number – it does not grow consistently so far. We are not out of the woods, but, again, an interesting and important point. That number has not been growing as markedly as we might have expected, and ICU's have not been as full as we might have expected, but we are far from out of the woods. Now, number two, this is clear as a bell and, again, continues to be a huge challenge – new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550, that's been blown by many times over here, and we're now at 1,381 cases. So, very, very tremendous concern there, but some of that accounted for by more testing and we encourage constantly more testing to get us the truth about what's happening. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent – today's report, 2.95 percent. The seven-day rolling average, 3.06 percent.  

Okay. Few words in Spanish – 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, we turned to our colleagues in the media. And please let me know the name of the outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q and A. With us today we have Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, Budget Director Jacques Jiha, First Deputy Budget Director Ken Godiner, Deputy Director for City Revenue, Policy, and Planning Francesco Brindisi, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. Emma from the New York Times. 

Mayor: Emma, can you hear us? 

Question: Hi. Good morning, Mayor. Yes. Sorry for the delay. 

Mayor: No worries. How are you doing? 

Question: When you talk about – I'm good. So, can you talk about this nearly $4 billion budget deficit? What do you say to critics who say you need to do more to address it now? And are layoffs still on the table? 

Mayor: Yeah, Emma, we're constantly doing the work of tightening our belts. That's what the furloughs were. That's what the $1.3 billion in savings, new savings over two fiscal years we're announcing today. That's what the savings we found from our labor partners. All of it is about getting us through to a stimulus, so we can move forward. If there is no stimulus, we're going to have to make extremely difficult choices. And again, Emma I think it's really important to recognize our own almost $4 billion, it’s a $3.8 billion deficit for the upcoming year, could be magnified if there's no stimulus, the State will be put in an awful place as well. And that's going to mean additional cuts. So, at $3.8 billion could go up really quickly. 

What are we going to do? We're going to have to consistently cut things back. And it's not something we want to do Emma. We do not want to take away essential services from New Yorkers. We do not want to lay people off. If we don't have any other choice, that's what we have to do, obviously. So, unfortunately, it's impossible to take layoffs off the table for next year. We're trying to avoid any layoffs for this fiscal year. And, certainly, with the unions we've come to agreement with, we will avoid layoffs for this fiscal year. But we haven't come to agreement with every union obviously. And the real challenge that we're looking at now is just the sheer totality of next fiscal year. So sadly, and no one wants it, but sadly layoffs could well still be on the table going forward certainly for next fiscal year, if we do not get that stimulus. Go ahead. 

Question: And in terms of the labor deals, what do you say to critics who say that you're kicking those costs down the road, that you're kicking the can down the road? Why push those back to next year? 

Mayor: Because we, first of all, we need relief immediately to be able to continue to provide City services and to be able to keep people employed. I value every single of our public servants and our employees as people who help other people. I also recognize they're breadwinners for their family. We do not want to put people out of work. We do not want to reduce services exactly when we're trying to come back and when people are in such dire need. So, this was a way of getting us to next year. But we've said all along, the only way we can actually make all of this come together is with the stimulus. Because we didn't – New York City didn't create the pandemic. New York City did not create this crisis. We received the pain of this before anyone else. And the federal government was supposed to protect us. Obviously, that didn't happen. The federal government was supposed to help us out of the crisis. Some of that happened, but not enough. This is an international and national crisis. So, for us to just keep hanging on is the right approach to get to the day where there's actually the federal support we deserve and which I absolutely believe is within reach. So, we can move forward. But if we get what we deserve, we won't lay off anyone. We'll keep doing the work of serving people. 

Moderator: Next is Juan from NY1. 

Question:  Good morning, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: How are you? 

Question: I’m very good. Thank you. So, knowing that the holidays are coming, that even the State, Governor Cuomo yesterday said that he's expecting a spike in new cases, knowing everything that is going on with this second wave, do you think it's realistic or pragmatic to think that New York City is going to be able to reopen schools before the new year? 

Mayor: Juan look, it's tough, but we know that our parents who have their kids in school in blended learning, want their kids back in school. We know we established an incredible success with safety. We showed that gold standard really worked in terms of keeping schools safe. We've got to give parents this option again, but it'll take a lot of work. It’ll take a whole lot of work. So our goal here is to put that together, no matter how much work it takes, no matter how much testing it takes, we're going to need a lot of parent participation. And this is crucial, and I'm saying it to all the parents of New York City. If you want your child in school, you really have to help us out with those consent forms. If we say, we need your child tested in advance of school opening, whether that's something we provide at the school building or someplace else, we need parents to follow through. But there is a path and we want to get schools open as quickly as possible.

Moderator: Next is Shant from the Daily News.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I was just quickly reviewing, you know, some of the State's guidelines for reopening schools once the orange zone designation is in effect. And I mean, it just looks like a huge logistical challenge, entailing testing opportunity on school grounds or facilitating testing from other places. Making sure you know, the right population is being tested. So, can you say if the City is laying the groundwork for that logistical challenge now? And what steps are taking place? 

Mayor: Yeah, Shant. I've been on a number of calls with our health care team, Test and Trace, all the folks who have done great work putting together our testing capacity. Our Deputy Mayor Melanie Hartzog has been in the lead of that. Our Director of Operations, Jeff Thamkittikasem has been in the lead of that with so many other colleagues. Absolutely what we're doing is turning our capacity to how we would build that out. We're going to have to even add more capacity to do this. But the point I would say is it can be done. It absolutely can be done. We proved with the monthly testing program and with the weekly testing in the yellow zones, it can be done. We proved we can keep schools safe and the situation room I want to thank Commissioner Melanie La Rocca and her whole team. They've done an amazing job with the situation room. We've proven that works. Our stakeholders all agree that that's been a huge success. It's going to mean more testing. It's going to be a big logistical effort. It's going to take a lot of parent involvement and we have to do it in stages, most likely. Starting with special education, but it can be done. And, Shant, the other thing I'd say is this is a point along the way. We're going to fight back this second wave. We're going to get through the holidays into a time where we're going to start to feel the impact of the vaccine. It will take months and months, obviously for the full impact to be felt. But with every passing month, once we have the vaccine, with every passing month, I really believe we can make things better. So we're going to be constantly doing the work of bringing our schools back farther and farther and getting more and more kids back in the classroom. So, no time like the present to start that work. Go ahead. 

Moderator: Next is Maya from Patch. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing? 

Mayor: Good, Maya. How are you today? 

Question: Good. Thank you. I've been told that some local lawmakers have had trouble getting new testing sites approved in their districts. And that they've made many suggestions that were ultimately rejected. Can you talk about the criteria that you use to determine new testing sites and especially given the hours long lines we've been seeing both at City sites and urgent cares, what you're doing to streamline that process? 

Mayor: So, Maya on the lines you know, and I'll let Dr. Chokshi get in on this one obviously. I would say until very recently we saw – we didn't see lines for quite a while. Then we saw them more at the urgent cares then we saw them at Health + Hospitals. Obviously, we're having a particularly intense moment because people are preparing for the holidays. So, I don't think this is necessarily going to be the norm going forward. But what we've just been doing in general is expanding testing capacity to the maximum we can. There are obviously some limits. You need the test materials, there's staffing, there's processing, you know, you can at any given moment, you can only go so far. But we're trying to constantly push farther to see how much more we can do each day. As for finding sites I mean, we're obviously led by the data and the science and you see the ZIP codes now every day, you know, where we're trying to put our emphasis. Elected officials are trying to serve their community. That makes sense. And sometimes what they ask for really fits the overall priorities. And sometimes it doesn't. We work with them in each case. I'm looking forward to us having more and more testing with every passing month. And that's going to help us answer more and more of those requests. Dr. Chokshi you want to talk about the lines and how we're addressing that? 

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll just start by echoing that it's exactly right, that the City sites are ones that we hope more New Yorkers will take advantage of. We do know that there have been some longer lines at City sites as well, but on the whole City sites do have capacity for you know, for this major upsurge in demand that we're seeing. There are a few things that we have done to try to address you know, the particular increase in demand that we've seen in recent days. One is making sure that for those units, those testing units that are mobile, we're bringing them to the brick and mortar sites where we see longer lines. So, essentially shifting supply to match up with demand. The Test and Trace Corps and Health + Hospitals who have been leading all of this work are also making sure that we're distributing self-collection kits to people who are waiting in those longer lines so that they can actually perform the swab on their own, drop it off to decant you know, some of the people who are waiting there. We continue to increase the number of both brick and mortar sites, as well as those mobile units that I described. And also bringing more testing to the major transit hubs ahead of the holidays, including JFK, LaGuardia, Penn Station, Port Authority. So, we'll continue to try to smooth out the supply with the demand. I do want to just say, you know, ahead of the holidays, we are clear, public health guidance is the safest thing to do is not to travel. And that is also a very important message along with our message to get tested. 

Mayor: Thank you, Doctor. Go ahead, Maya. 

Question: Yeah. I also wanted to ask about some of the areas where the COVID positivity rates have been spiking. Some officials have told me that they haven't been getting very much data at some point no data, from officials with the contact tracers, Department of Health on where cases are coming from. I've also been told, they found out about those local upticks themselves from the public data page and that they weren't notified in advance by the City. So I'm wondering what you're doing to keep local lawmakers informed about those localized spikes and possible transmission sources in their districts? 

Mayor: Thank you for the question Maya. I'm going to start and turn to Dr. Chokshi again. I really do appreciate – I was a local City Council member. I was a school board member. I totally understand the sense of, you know responsibility they all feel to their local communities. And that's a really good thing. I would say, first of all, we're putting up that data publicly for everyone to see including elected officials. They know it's there. They know they can draw upon it. They know they can ask whatever questions they need from it. We don't necessarily have a separate operation that constantly updates the elected officials as to what is up online visibly. They know where to find the information. In terms of specific sites. Again, what we've said over the last few weeks, when these questions have come up is we really don't have a lot of substantial sites where we've had a lot of cases. What we are seeing primarily is a handful of cases in specific sites, not the kind of dramatic numbers that you've seen in other parts of the country associated with individual sites. And where there is a concern, the Department of Health shuts the site down. So, it's quite obvious when that has happened. People can see it because the business, or whatever it is, has been shut down. But, again, that's not the norm. So, what I'd say is, with Dr. Chokshi and the Health Department I do think we can redouble our efforts, for example, if a store gets closed or a school gets closed, redouble our efforts to allow – you know, make sure an elected official is notified, but I think most of this stuff is pretty clear and if any elected official has questions about it, we're always making people available to answer them. Dr. Chokshi, do you want to speak to that? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, Sir. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. First, yes, I'll say that our data is transparent and available, refreshed each day at the ZIP code level on our website. And we have had specific conversations with a number of elected officials and their staff to make sure that people know how to navigate the site, how to distinguish between various elements of the data that we have there. In addition to that, second, we have very regular conversations with both elected officials, but also other leaders in the community, whether they're faith leaders or people who lead nonprofit community-based organizations. Those are happening on, you know, at least a weekly cadence and sometimes even more frequently. But with that said, certainly, you know, if there are specific officials who would like even more information or for us to make sure that they have the most up-to-date information about what's happening in their community, we are 100 percent committed to engaging with all of them. And then the final thing that I'll just say briefly with respect to sources of spread, beyond what the Mayor has already said, is that we know, again, both from our experience here in New York City, but also around the country, around the world, a major source is smaller social gatherings. And that is something that is of the utmost importance as we head into the holidays, knowing that people from different households may be gathering, may be convening. It is so important to stay safe. First, avoid those types of smaller social gatherings, if at all possible. And if you do have to have them make sure that you're following rules around distancing and wearing masks, because those have been major contributors to spread. 

Mayor: Thank you, Doctor.

Moderator: Next is Reema from Chalkbeat.  

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing today?  

Mayor: Good, Reema. How are you?  

Question: I'm good. I'm good. Thank you for asking. So, my first question, I wanted to just ask about reopening. I think you may have addressed some of this, but – and some of it might be my confusion. But you mentioned that the City would be able to take additional measures to reopen schools if the city becomes an – like, a State-imposed orange zone, which to my understanding, I think as people have outlined means extra testing in schools, and then there's a bunch of other rules to actually get back into the building. So, I'm wondering since the city isn't in an orange zone at this point, but you are, it seems looking – you're looking at ways to reopen with increased testing, why can't the City start taking those measures right now. 

Mayor: That's what we're ramping up to do, Reema. But let's be clear about how the piece is going to come together. You're not confused. Let me give you some positive reinforcement. You are not confused. These times we're living in are confusing, ever changing reality with COVID, and very difficult standards have been set to address things. We recognize and appreciate the State's role. The State has set out its vision around orange zones, the way they manage orange zones. This came in part from the original proposal I put forward when we saw the problems in Brooklyn, Queens. I had a different approach, and I might do things a little differently, but the State has the right to apply it the way they see fit. They came up with these color zones, and the orange zone has a clear set of criteria of how you get into it and what it means to open schools within it. We know we'll be in an orange zone again, as early as next week. The planning and the logistics it'll take, which was referred to an earlier question, real challenging stuff, but it can be done. So, we're ramping up right now, retooling our testing operation to go focus on the schools that we would reopen first. And again, that begins with District 75 with our special education schools, because it is much more intensive testing. We're not going to try and open everything simultaneously. We would do this in waves. But it does require a lot of new work and we need the time to get ready to get things in position to do that. I think it's all going to line up because again, I think the orange zone – sadly, I wish there wasn't going to be one, you know, I wish I wish we were doing better in terms of COVID, but it's coming, it's coming soon. So, I think the pieces are going to line up pretty consistently. Go ahead, Reema. 

Question: Okay, my second – and thank you for the positive reinforcement. My second question is about Learning Bridges. We know, you know, the City has said that there hasn't been a lot of uptake in Learning Bridges, and we've heard that the hours and locations can be inconvenient. And then there were – I believe there was a report in CBS today that kids with disabilities are being turned away from these sites. So, does the City understand why there's been less enrollment than expected and what are you doing to make sure that the program is more convenient for the families who actually need it? 

Mayor: Thank you, Reema. The – first of all, I have not heard of anyone turned away. So, I'm not negating that report, I just have not heard that having had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about Learning Bridges. I've not heard that. The capacity of learning bridges has been consistently expanded. We have been expanding it with the assumption that once we saw that school, unfortunately, had to close for a period of time that we would need even more. But what has been clear is there has not been the uptake we expected. I want to emphasize any parent who wants to take advantage of Learning Bridges, you know, it's quality childcare in a safe setting. It's first and foremost now for essential workers as we are doing with this danger of a second wave. But also, there are prioritized slots for families in shelter and others who have particular challenges. And then if there's more beyond that still available, anyone can apply. And anyone who wants to apply can call 3-1-1 and learn how to apply and get their name in.  

But I think the important parallel here, and I imagine you saw this, Reema, we thought in the spring and summer that our regional enrichment centers were going to be a lot more full than they were. As you know, never saw the kind of enrollment we expected. We ended up having to cut back a number of those centers because there just weren't people using them. Why? I don't think we have a perfect picture. I think, unfortunately, one of the reasons why is very much about COVID. So many people are home. A lot of people who, thank God, still have a job are working remotely. A lot of people who don't have a job to date are home for that reason. I think for many families, there's been a decision to keep their kids close, rather than taking them to childcare or some other kind of option. I think that's part of what's happening here, but the bottom line here is for families who qualify Learning Bridges is something we will provide for sure. And we'll do it for free. And if we have to keep expanding it, we'll keep expanding it. And obviously we're working really hard to get to the point where schools are back open and that's going to be an option a lot of families will, of course, prefer. 

Final point, Reema, on that report you gave, again, I had not heard about that, but presuming it is accurate and not wanting to ever belittle a situation like this, if a child was turned away, a family qualified, their child was turned away, that's just wrong. And we won't allow that. We'll track down that situation and make sure that that child gets a seat in Learning Bridges for sure. Go ahead. 

Moderator: For our last question today, we'll go to Katie from the Wall Street Journal.  

Question: Hey, good morning, Mayor de Blasio. Can you hear me?  

Mayor: Yes, Katie, how are you today?  

Question: Good, thanks. Happy Monday. I wanted to ask you a question. I hope you got a chance to read it. It's from a colleague of mine writing about the hundreds of deceased New Yorkers who are being stored in morgue trucks in Brooklyn. This is, you know, most from COVID, but some other people who died during the height of the pandemic. And I'm curious, you know, when he spoke to officials at the Medical Examiner's Office, you know, this was sort of due to, obviously they were very overwhelmed. This was unprecedented, but we are curious, you know, they use a lot of temporary measures to kind of get through the peak of the pandemic. And are there any plans from you to increase money to OCME if there is a second wave. You know, God forbid there are increased deaths because of this, but I don't know if you have any plans to increase the funding there or make any changes. 

Mayor: Well, thank you for the question, Katie. It's a sad, sad, but real question. You know, we've made clear whatever we need to do to support the Medical Examiner's Office we will. A lot of extensive efforts were put into place back in the spring, very, very tough time and tremendous support we got from the federal government. That's one of the places where the federal government really did step up and help us. And I'm very thankful for that. But the sad reality to that story, I haven't read it, but I got summarized to me is, you know, those who we lost, their families are still trying to determine the best way to provide services for them. And just have been struggling because of the pandemic and other challenges. So, we're trying to work with each and every family of those we lost who are in that situation to make sure that they can have the kind of services they want to have at the right time. But we'll provide the support we need to. I don't see, thank God – I don't see anything like what we went – happened in March and April. We haven't seen some of those particular warning signs yet, thank God, but we are very, very vigilant but we'll make sure the Medical Examiner’s ready either way. Go ahead. 

Question: Thank you. And my second question is about, you know, the upcoming closures in the orange zone. You know, this has been asked multiple times, I guess, throughout this whole pandemic, but the small businesses and just business in general that will be affected the most by these closures, I know obviously everyone's waiting for a federal stimulus, but is there anything more the City can do to help these businesses? I hear from a lot of business owners who are really desperate, there's no other way to put it because of – just everything is falling down on them. They can't pay rent, their revenue has completely been cut. So, is there anything more the City can do to offer assistance financially, especially, to a lot of these businesses? 

Mayor: Katie, it's a question – it has been asked a lot of times. It's also a fair and important question. There's a lot we can do to help each business. It is not what we ideally would like to do. You know, the thing that would help businesses the most is to get an infusion of direct assistance, cash assistance to keep going, because you're right with the orange zone will come restrictions again, and businesses will have an even tougher time. And, you know, we – no one likes to see that. They're going to suffer as a result of that, but this is what we got to do to keep everyone safe and to beat this back because we saw in the late spring and in the summer, when we beat back the disease, then businesses can reopen. That's good for everyone. That's what we're trying to achieve once and for all. With a vaccine coming, I really want to believe, you know, this could be the last great battle we're going through right now before the COVID war is over. So, you know, if we can get through this immediate challenge and then the vaccine starts to arrive, it will take time obviously to be fully implemented. But if the vaccine starts to arrive, we get better leadership on COVID in Washington, we get the impact of the stimulus, we're going to see each month get better, even if it's well into next year, before we get to something like normal.  

But I think the bottom line is any business with a challenge should talk to Small Business Services. Sometimes there are very particular things we can do that really help, dealing with a lease issue, legal help, loans, getting rid of fines that were unfairly given. There's all sorts of things that can be done. We don't have a ready supply of money to simply deliver to them, even though I would love to and they deserve it. It did come from the federal government initially, we need to see it happen again. That's the only true solution, that small business support will be a key part of the next stimulus.  

Okay, as we conclude, look, we've talked about a lot today, but it comes down to something real simple. We’ve got to fight back the second wave. We still can. We get through these holidays, we have a chance to really turn the corner, but it's up to every one of us. The fact is that the reason New York City got strong again over the summer was because of each and every one of you. You have to make that choice again. So, really, please be very thoughtful and mindful about these holidays, do everything you can to stay safe, help us turn this last corner so we can beat this disease once and for all, and bring our city back. And when we do, I don't have a doubt in my mind that all the energies, all the pent up energies of the city will surge forward to give us an extraordinary recovery, but we need every one of you to be a part of it. And then we need our colleagues in Washington to do the thing that they should have done a long time ago and give us one more big stimulus to get us on that clear path to recovery. And I know it can be done and we've got to fight for it. Thank you, everybody.

2020-11-24 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everyone.

So, the first thing we want to talk about today is a major new development, which is something that will allow more and more people to stay connected in times like this, obviously, or with the people they love, even if they don't live here or stay connected to the world and to the things they need and to the opportunities they deserve. We've had a digital divide. We've had a huge disparity of who gets access to the internet and who doesn't, who gets reliable, fast broadband service, who doesn't, who can afford it, who can't, but more and more, we understand that we have to create a society in which everyone has equal access. And so today we have a major announcement. After a lot of work by many City agencies we've come to an agreement that is going to require Verizon to build out its Fios footprint to reach now an additional 500,000 households here in New York City. This is going to be a requirement of this agreement. 500,000 households that do not get this service now have to be reached. And the priority will be put on the communities that have been most underserved. And there's a specific guarantee that each building in public housing, every NYCHA building, will be reached with this service, will be part of this Fios footprint. It has taken a lot of work and there's been some real struggle here and some real challenges, but we've gotten to a point where something real and tangible is going to happen for people, particularly working people and folks who have been left out and many people worked on it, but no one worked on it with more passionate and resolve than our Corporation Counsel. So, I want him to speak to this. My pleasure to introduce Corporation Counsel of the City of New York, Jim Johnson.  

Corporation Counsel Jim Johnson, Law Department: Good morning. And thank you, Mayor. This morning, most of us participating on this call got our news from a high-speed connection to the internet. We may have spoken to a family member in a video chat, or even helped a family member get online for a meeting or class. And that's not been so easy for many New Yorkers due to a lack of franchise investment in our least connected communities. And so, in 2014, the City began these proceedings against Verizon because Verizon had failed to meet the terms of its cable franchise agreement that had been inked during the Bloomberg administration. And the goal of that was to build out its network. But the City's goal is to make sure that the digital divide is shut down, closed. And so, we brought this case and we now have resolved it so that more New Yorkers will have access to this vital tool. And the pandemic has only underscored how critical this need is. It's needed for us to draw close together with family members, it's needed for children to study. This resolution could not be more timely.   

Many of the neighborhoods that have the most to gain from the settlement are those that were hardest hit by COVID-19. Those are the ones with low, median household incomes and the fewest options, sometimes no options for affordable broadband. At a minimum Verizon will make connections available to 125,000 additional households in those community districts, just in those community districts. And more importantly, overall, the settlement ensures that a half-a-million households that previously lacked Verizon broadband access because of their corporate failure to invest in the infrastructure, they'll now have the option of fiber broadband. And it will also create critical cost competition in areas where today only one provider exists. And when there's a monopoly, there's often higher prices and we want to drive the prices down. The settlement also ensures transparency. The terms of the settlement call for Verizon to report on a quarterly basis on how they are making progress. And the City is going to make public the list of newly eligible households so people will know when services come to their part of their community. This is an important settlement because it highlights the City's commitment to holding franchisees accountable, to meet their commitments to the public. It also contains enforcement terms, and we will both monitor compliance and ensure enforcement as we go forward. Thank you, Mayor.  

Mayor: Thank you very much, Jim. Everyone, now, as we think about this new announcement, again, it goes back to the fact that even though we're working to get everyone the access they deserve, thank God, a lot of families do have that access. And that means they have the opportunity to stay in touch virtually. And boy, has that been important during this crisis. So many people – that's been their only way to stay connected. And, particularly for a lot of our seniors, it's been absolutely crucial, who couldn't go out and could expose themselves to this disease. And so, we want to remember that as we now approach the holidays, that, again, it will not be easy, but we’ve got to stay safe. And I’m going to keep telling people, please, if you do not need to travel, don't travel. Unless there's a really, really crucial reason, don't travel. It's just going to only add more exposure to this disease, more chance that you might get it, your family might get, it might be brought back here inadvertently. So, I'm asking everyone again, please avoid travel, celebrate with your loved ones and other places virtually. And here to amplify the things that we need to do to protect each other and stay safe in this holiday season, our Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi. 

Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thanksgiving is two days away. I know many New Yorkers are making tough decisions about how to connect with family, friends, and loved ones. Let me start by saying clearly, it is not too late to cancel your travel plans. Now is the moment to make a difference in this next wave of the pandemic. COVID-19 numbers are rising across New York City and throughout the country, but New Yorkers know how to work together. Because of New Yorkers’ hard work and care, we’ve flattened the curve before and we can continue to slow the spread now. It is so important that New Yorkers follow our new guidance for the holidays – stay safe, stay home, do not travel this holiday season if it can be at all avoided. Stay safe, stay home is our clear message to New Yorkers this season. You'll see it on ads that will run on subway live boards, Link NYC, the Staten Island Ferry and on social media all the way into January. And, look, I understand this isn't easy. The holidays center around togetherness. My wife and I usually host Thanksgiving for our extended family. I have fond memories of our Thanksgiving from last year, which was the first time that my daughter tasted solid food surrounded by many doting relatives. Just as an aside, her first solid food was a Korean sweet potato because she is, after all, a Queens baby. So, I am sad that this year's Thanksgiving will be different – mostly virtual, like so much else, but it is necessary. We know gathering in groups, even small groups, is causing the virus to spread. Please be cautious and stick to your core groups of family members and select friends. Here's one way to think about it. You bring everyone you've been around with you to your holiday celebration.  

Now, while the holidays may look different, there are ways to keep their spirit alive, particularly at a time that is so difficult for New Yorkers. We have collectively suffered during this pandemic with the loss of family members and neighbors, separation and economic hardships. First and foremost, I urge you reach out to your friends, family, and neighbors, particularly those who you may have noticed are struggling. A simple phone call goes a long way. And we can be creative in how we connect with our friends and family. We can, of course, still enjoy the holidays together. You can take a walk in the park or go for a bike ride, enjoy the fresh air, relax and try to get in some exercise. You can plan a virtual trivia game or plan to cook the same family recipe, even if you're doing it in kitchens that are in different states. But for all of these activities, please remember to practice the same-old new rules, wear a face covering both outdoors and indoors; keep six feet of distance and gather outdoors whenever possible; wash your hands frequently; and stay home if you're not feeling well. And get tested, particularly if you plan to travel or to gather with others.  

This Thanksgiving, as the Mayor said, the best way to express our gratitude for our loved ones is by keeping our celebrations small. And finally, I want to salute our health care heroes and our essential workers, many of whom will be working over the holidays. Do your part to help keep them safe. Thank you. 

Mayor: Thank you very much doctor. And now, we've given you all our best guidance. Everything that the science and the data, the health care reality is telling us, but we know people sometimes will have to travel. And we do understand in those cases the most important thing is to do it safely, to really follow the guidance, follow the rules. And we're going to make sure that people are reminded constantly throughout this whole holiday season if you travel, there are very clear rules you have to follow. And you're going to see the presence of the City of New York when you travel, particularly through our Sheriff's Office. You're going to see that there are really clear rules to be followed and they will be enforced. And you're going to know that if someone does not follow those rules that there are real penalties, substantial financial penalties that will be applied. No one likes that, no one wants to do that in the holidays, but we will do it to keep people safe. So, here to tell you about all our efforts to make sure people travel safely and follow the rules that will keep us all safe, our Sheriff Joe Fucito.  

Sheriff Joseph Fucito: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good morning, everyone. And happy holidays. As the Mayor stated, the City of New York provides tremendous support for people, tremendous education, but there has to be enforcement in order to keep everyone safe. So, I’ll go over just some highlights of how we're going to be keeping enforcement regarding the compliance with the travel quarantine and the standing emergency orders. Sheriff teams will be out in-force as the holidays approach. There will be vehicle checkpoints at key bridges and crossings throughout New York City. Sheriff will also be conducting checkpoints at curbside drop off bus stops – so, out-of-state buses coming into New York City, when they drop off at the curb, they will be met by sheriff teams. The T2 team and the sheriff would also be serving Department of Health general orders for travelers arriving in New York, advising him of the quarantine and what they have to do in order to comply with the quarantine. In addition, the Sheriff's Office will be sending out emails. We'll also include robocalls and text messages if you sign up with the New York State traveler website.  

If you violate the travel quarantine, there will be consequences. Violation of a self-quarantine travel regulation may result in deputy sheriffs serving you a mandatory quarantine order issued by the Health Commissioner. In cases of violation, Deputies could serve you with a civil summons that carries a $1,000 fine. As a practical matter, and as the Mayor stated previously, the Sheriff's Office would be concentrating on large-scale gatherings. Our actions in the last several months have reinforced this point. Deputy sheriffs are investigating massive events that violate a panoply of criminal, fire, building, health and other regulatory laws at locations such as illegal fight clubs, underground raves, and illegal gambling dens. These activities were illegal and sometimes deadly before COVID-19, and the public safety hazards regarding them have been amplified exponentially by the pandemic.  

In a city of 8.3 million people, the best and most pragmatic method for deputy sheriffs to save lives is to maximize enforcement at these types of dangerous gatherings. That is the overall view of how our enforcement is going to be moving forward in the months to come. And I give it back to the Mayor. 

Mayor: Thank you so much. I want to thank you, Sheriff Joe Fucito, and your whole team for what you have been doing. It's been absolutely crucial and we really appreciate the way you've been out there, no matter what, keeping people safe. And I know you're going to continue to throughout the holiday season.  

Let's now talk about our indicators for the day. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients – today's report 113, with a positivity level for COVID of 40.83. So, again, seeing pretty stable reality there. That number is higher than we want it to be, both the positivity and number of patients, but we're not seeing the huge expansion that some of the other numbers might suggest. We're keeping a close eye on that. That is a very interesting and important factor. Number two, though, we see something that's exactly the opposite of what we want, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550 cases – today's report 1,476 cases. Again, we have to do everything we can to turn this around. And that depends on every one of us. And number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent – now, today's report on the daily, that information is still not ready. The number that came out today was clearly artificially high because it was based on very limited test results. So, that number is going to be updated as more results come in. We'll get the accurate number out later on today. But the seven-day rolling average we have confidence in, that is 3.17 percent. I’ll say a few words in Spanish – 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Chokshi, by Sheriff Fucito, by DoiTT Commissioner Jessie Tisch, by Corporation Council Jim Johnson, and by Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today, it goes to Juan Manuel Benitez from NY1. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor: Good morning, Juan Manuel. How are you? 

Question: Very good. Thank you. So, this morning on the radio, Mr. Mayor, you said that when we get into December, we're going to start working to reopen our schools. Can you clarify? That means that you're going to start the process of thinking of how to reopen the schools in the city? Or that you are really going to start reopening a specific number of schools in the month of December? 

Mayor: Juan Manuel, I spoke to this yesterday, I’m going to say it again. We're going to be in an orange zone in December. The orange zone rules for opening schools are clear, they’re very stringent, but we can meet that standard. It’s going to take a lot of work. And, as I said, parents are going to have to be really involved, but we can do it. We're going to start with the special education schools, the District 75 schools, work our way up – Pre-K, 3-K, and elementary. It's going to take a lot of work that we've never had to do on this level before. So, we're going to be shifting a lot of testing resources over. But we will keep reopening schools and we want to fight back this second wave and especially as we fight it back successfully, we'll be able to speed up that process. Go ahead. 

Moderator: The next is Matt Chayes from Newsday. 

Question: Hey, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you? 

Mayor: Good, Matt. How are you doing today? 

Question: I'm doing okay. Last night in your interview with Errol Louis, you said that you're going to be checking on people constantly. And this was a quote, and if people don't follow the quarantine, there'll be substantial financial penalties and we're going to make that very vivid. So my question is how will enforcers decide whom to check in on among those returning from out of town travel? 

Mayor: Well, I'll start and I'll see if the Sheriff wants to add. The idea here is – or Dr. Long may want to add as well. The idea here is it's quite clear that you have to follow out, fill out excuse me, that traveler form. That the only way to not participate in quarantine is to follow the State rules and do the testing before you come back and the testing after you come back. But if you don't do that and you don't succeed with that, you have to be in quarantine. And so what we're making very clear is we're going to be constantly monitoring people. If they're not in quarantine when they're supposed to be, we have to apply penalties. This is not, you know, this is not a drill. This is not a test. This is the real thing, what's bearing down on us and we have to be stringent about it. So let me see if the Sheriff or Dr. Long want to add? 

Sheriff Fucito: Yes. So the Test and Trace team does a significant amount of outreach to people and follow up. They make sure that people are following the quarantine. They do other types of investigation. And then if they feel that there is a violation, they may ask the Sheriff's Office to get involved, to look a little bit further. And then in the last several weeks we've been issuing, we've been serving mandatory quarantine orders. So if the Test and Trace team feels that you violated the quarantine and they have evidence of it, then they'll elevate it, that it will be a mandatory quarantine. And if you violate the mandatory quarantine, then there would be a legal action taken against you. Most likely civil action, where you'd be served with a civil summons. But we have made arrests and charged somebody with a misdemeanor for violating the quarantine. 

Mayor: And why don't you just help people understand what the kind of financial penalties are there? 

Sheriff Fucito: Sure. So the financial penalty for the civil violation is a thousand dollars. So if you violate the quarantine and every time you violate the quarantine, you could be fined a thousand dollars. 

Mayor: So that means each day? 

Sheriff Fucito: Each day, each day. 

Mayor: Okay. Dr. Long, you want to add? 

Executive Director Ted Long, NYC Test and Trace Corps.: Yeah. Thank you, sir. I just want to make two additional points here. And this is reflecting what you said just a moment ago. We want to do everything in our power to help you in order to quarantine. We've made 2.9 million calls to New Yorkers offering services, including our free hotel program. And in addition to that, the only way to not serve the 14 days of quarantine, which is the right thing to keep New York City safe, is if you get tested before you come back, that's negative. And then on the fourth day, when you are back. In order to help you do that, we're doing something innovative. At JFK today at the Jet Blue terminal we are handing out self-test kits to you, as you get on the plane that you can use before you come back to make it very easy for you to test out of the quarantine requirement. And to prove that you're negative to keep New York City safe. So, we're doing everything that we can in order to help you to get through the quarantine. Thank you, sir. 

Mayor: Thank you. And to emphasize if people test out because they had a negative before they came back and they had another negative when they got back, that's ideal. That's wonderful. But if people test positive, they're going to be in quarantine. If they don't follow the testing regime, they're going to be in quarantine. If they violate the quarantine, you just heard what the Sheriff said, there will be financial penalties. And there'll be repeated if people violate multiple days. And we don't want to see that happen, but if it has to, it will. And we're going to be very clear about those consequences and what's going on with them. Go ahead. 

Moderator: The next is Gwen from WNYC. 

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, can you hear me? 

Mayor: Yeah, how are you doing? 

Question: I'm doing all right. Thanks so much for taking my question. You know, I wanted to ask a follow-up about this wedding in Williamsburg? When specifically, did the City learn about this wedding? Was it before it happened? Was it during, or was it after? And you know, it's right next to an FDNY fire station house. There were thousands of people here. Was the FDNY not aware that it was happening? Do you think $15,000 is enough of a deterrent? And can you and the Health Commissioner give us specific – 

Mayor: Wait, wait, lots of questions. Hold on. Let's stay where you were. You can, you'll have a follow-up, 

Question: Alright, I know. I have many question. 

Mayor: It just is we can't do justice to so many at once. We’ll find out – well, I know, okay. Let me say what I do know. We did not know before or during, that much has been established as we've investigated what happened. I don't have a full answer on if folks in the firehouse knew. We also don't know the final number of people. The reporting suggests a certain number. I'm not sure that is the number. What we do know is unquestionably it was too many people. Whatever that number, whether it was hundreds, thousands, it was too many people. And it appears that there was a very conscious effort to conceal what was going on. And that's what makes it even more unacceptable. A $15,000 is a very serious fine, a cease and desist order has now been placed on that building. If there were further inappropriate activity, that is the precursor to the building being shut down permanently. We don't want to see that happen to anyone, but we need to be very, very clear that if folks are doing something dangerous we can't allow it to happen. Go ahead. Can you hear me Gwen? 

Question: Hi. Hi again. Sorry about that. Can you give New Yorkers specific examples that your Health Commissioner has found of large indoor gatherings like this that have led to confirmed cases of COVID? Can you give us examples of those? 

Mayor: So I'll start and Dr. Choksi, Dr. Long can jump in. Let's be clear that we've had enforcement on large gatherings. I want to thank the Sheriff and his team. They've been very aggressive and effective at breaking up large gatherings. But over the last week or two, we’ve been asked a lot of different questions about what Test and Trace has found. What they're finding is a much more diffuse pattern of where tests are coming from. That they're not at this moment coming from the larger gatherings, as far as we're seeing. Now, you go back some months, we definitely saw some connection to larger gatherings. But even if we're not tracing specific cases back to the larger gatherings right this minute, we know how dangerous they are. We know they have the potential to spread the disease really intensely and quickly. And that's why we have to protect against them. And by the way, it's the law. Dr. Chokshi, Dr. Long, you want to add? 

Commissioner Chokshi: Yes, sir. Well, the Mayor said it well. I'll just add our goal is always focused on prevention. The more that we can ensure that large gatherings do not happen because there is very clear cut scientific evidence of how large gatherings can spread the coronavirus. That means we can interrupt further transmission. The Mayor is right, there have not been, you know, large, super spreader events in recent weeks. And I think that is in large part because New Yorkers are heeding our guidance and because our law enforcement colleagues are doing their jobs well. But my plea is, as we see more people becoming infected, more people who are coming into our emergency departments and hospitals, it is unconscionable for people to have those larger events when we know that they facilitate spread. 

Mayor: Dr. Long, anything to add? Dr. Long, can you hear us? 

Executive Director Long: Yes sir. 

Mayor: Okay. 

Executive Director Long: If you can hear me now, yes. 

Mayor: There you go. 

Executive Director Long: Thank you, sir. So the only thing I would add, I think you actually said it, the important point. Which is that we've not seen large events, we've seen a series of smaller events. It's important as Dr. Chokshi said to prevent those from happening in the first place where people are exposed. But one point I want to make is that contact tracing is forward-looking. And as we've detected these smaller events, we've been able to effectively intervene to break the chains of transmission by reaching out to the people at the events. We just announced our recent numbers yesterday for our contact tracing across the city. Despite having cases that have gone from around 200 a day to now 1,300 plus a day, we're reaching 95 percent of every single case across New York City. And completing interviews and getting all of the information we need to do contact tracing for 81 percent of all cases across New York City. New Yorkers are coming together, getting tested and participating. And that's making an incredible difference and is how we're doing, how we're holding the virus at bay as a city. Thank you, sir. 

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: A quick programming note before we go forward, we're also joined by Chief Technology Officer John Paul Farmer. The next question goes to Nolan from the Post. 

Question: Good morning everybody. 

Mayor: Hey Nolan, how are you? 

Question: I'm all right. If I could just follow up on Gwen’s questions about the wedding at the shul in South Williamsburg. The fines is $15,000. The building has the capacity for 7,000 people. That's two bucks a head. How has that truly at deterrent? 

Mayor: I think a $15,000 fine gets people's attention, but I think the cease and desist order is crucial here. From this point on, if there's any further illegal activity in that building, the building will be closed down. I think that's a pretty clear deterrent. Go ahead. 

Question: And on the larger question of enforcement, you've been depending on the Sheriff's Office, on the Sheriff's department and your Office of Special Enforcement to do much of the work of enforcing social distancing regulations around the city. We have a wedding where thousands of people showed up apparently without City Hall getting wind of it. We have a party seen as so rampant, New York Magazine splashed it on their cover this week. What does that say about enforcement in the city? It kind of feels like a joke. 

Mayor: Well, Nolan, it's been very, very consistent. It's a big city, over eight million people. It's a huge geography to cover and yet consistently when there's been a problem, the Sheriff's Office, Office of Special Enforcement, they've done outstanding work. They've shut down lots of events. I think it's quite clear, you know, you're going to see some things that unfortunately still happen, but overwhelmingly I give them a lot of credit. They've been able to identify things and act on them quickly. 

Moderator: The next is Andrew Siff from WNBC.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everyone on the call. Issue of reopening schools are, I know you've talked about the phased reopening, starting with the special needs kids then pre-K and 3-K, then elementary school. How soon could we see that happen? Could you start reopening special-ed schools as soon as next week? And if not, why not? 

Mayor: Right now, Andrew, is something I'm going to talk through with the State, with the Governor about the – right now, the rule is we would have to wait for the orange zone to be designated. We all agree. Governor said, I've said it, orange zone is coming to New York City. No one's happy about it, but the numbers are very clear. That requires a very specific approach to school reopening. We can start that clock when the orange zone is declared. I'm going to talk to Albany about whether there's any way to speed that up in light of the fact that we're already shut down now. But whatever way you slice it, once we have satisfied the State's time requirements, we'll be opening. In the meantime, we are going to get that testing in place because it's a big endeavor. You have to test the school community in advance of reopening and you have to do regular testing in the school. So we're going to shift in a lot of our testing resources into it. That's why we need that phased approach also, but we're going to do it. Our schools are going to come back and as I said, I believe from December on each month should get better. As we get past the holidays, as we start to feel the effect of the vaccine, and we'll be able to keep opening up more and more, and then hopefully more and more days per week for kids as we go along.  

Moderator: The next is Yehudit from Borough Park 24 News. 

Question: Hi, good morning, Mr. Mayor, how are you?  

Mayor: I'm doing well. How are you?  

Question: Great, thank you. Yesterday you were talking about the great help that the federal stimulus would be and last week we were reading about how the MTA is currently $1.4 billion in debt. And so, in addition to waiting for a federal relief package, other possible solutions the board's considering are cutting weekday subject subway service in half and eliminating the jobs of more than 9,000 transit workers. Some say to raise fares and tolls and some actually say to lower fares and tolls to increase ridership. I was just wondering if besides for waiting for the federal aid package, what steps do you think that the MTA could do to get out of debt and maintain service at a level that New Yorkers need? 

Mayor: Well, it's such a powerful question, but I have to say, I don't think anything replaces the federal stimulus. This just the – the sheer cold math at all. There's no way the State can come up with the kind of money the MTA needs to avoid some of the problems it's facing. We're all struggling right now because, you know, certainly I can say from the city perspective we’re constantly spending more and more to protect people, to get them health care, to get them food. There's so much need, the State is struggling as well. So we need the federal stimulus. If we don't have the federal stimulus, I fear you will see less MTA service and that just won't be good for the city, but I also appreciate the MTA has a horrible situation. And I think this is why we should remember, stimulus equals recovery, stimulus equals economic recovery, that's why we need it. Go ahead. 

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Paul Liotta from the Staten Island Advance.  

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor.  

Mayor: Hey Paul, how you doing? 

Question: I'm well, sir. Thank you. I just had a question regarding hospital capacity on Staten Island, with the State reopening the field hospital, I just wanted to see if the city had any intention of providing assistance to hospitals on Staten Island? 

Mayor: Yeah, Paul, absolutely. I mean, I'm very concerned about the situation on Staten Island, and I know Staten Island went through so much in the spring. We focused, of course, in getting the PPEs to hospitals in the spring and working with both hospitals regularly on their needs. We've got to be very careful this time to make sure that Staten Islanders get what they need. So we'll be talking to the hospitals about their PPE supply, about staffing, whatever it is they need, we'll work with the State as well to make sure Staten Islanders are safe. This time is much as we are deeply concerned about a second wave, one thing we can say for sure, Paul, is all our hospitals learned a lot from the painful experience in the spring. They're all better positioned to fight the coronavirus this time, but we will definitely – the city will definitely be there to help Staten Island's hospitals in any way we can. Go ahead. 

Question: Thank you. And with the dangers of this upcoming weekend, I'm just curious what role the NYPD will play in enforcement? 

Mayor: Look, we are going to constantly remind people that if they're traveling, they have to follow the rules we just talked about. That's going to be primarily the Sheriff's Office handling that. We're going to be very careful about large public gatherings, the kinds we were talking about a few minutes ago, with hundreds of people, anything like that. We will obviously intervene to stop. You know, just think about it, as it gets colder and colder if people are indoor by the hundreds or thousands, that's just unfortunately a breeding ground for COVID. So, we'll be out there, but again, never – we understand that each individual family is going to make their own choice. We've given them the best guidance. They're going to make their choice. There's certainly not going to be any enforcement in terms of families. It's going to be travel and it's going to be large events that we're watching out for. 

So, I would just ask everyone this holiday season, practice that kindness, practice that decency. David Dinkins showed us such a fine example of it and it's a time for everyone to look out for each other and express some love to your fellow New Yorker, and that's what he did, and we will be forever grateful to him for that. Thank you, everyone.

2020-11-25 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everyone. And I want to start by wishing everyone – all of you, all of your families a very Happy Thanksgiving. It's going to be a different Thanksgiving. It's going to be a tough Thanksgiving, but we still have a lot to be thankful for every one of us. And we have to be thankful for each other and the way we've all protected each other, taking care of each other through this crisis. We have to be thankful for the fact that 2020 is almost over and we're going to get to turn that page on the calendar soon, which we cannot be happy – more happy than that. It’s going to be a beautiful day when we finally can say goodbye to 2020. But, in the meantime, let's celebrate and be thankful for something else. This city faced with an extraordinary crisis unlike anything we've ever experienced, we asked the people of New York City to answer the call, go out and get tested. Nothing will be more important than testing. Said it from the day-one – day-one, that testing was the difference maker. I've constantly said to people, please, please go out and get tested. And New Yorkers have heard and they have done something about it. Right now, I'm reporting to you that we have now had over 1 million tests given in New York City. Over 1 million New Yorkers went out and got tested in the time we've spent fighting the coronavirus. That’s a staggering number and it's just the beginning, because the way forward is going to be with more and more and more testing. And remember this had to be built from scratch. It didn't exist back in January, February. We didn't even have the right to do local testing. The federal government didn't even give us that right. But once we were finally given the authorization, this city surge to the head of the nation and create a vast testing apparatus, a vast test and trace corps., and it's making a huge difference. So, thank you. To every single New Yorker who got tested, thank you. And go get tested more – get tested every month. If you haven't been tested at all, go out and get tested. It makes such a difference. And we're going to need it to keep fighting back this second wave that is bearing down on us more every day. We have to fight it back and testing is the key. So, thank you to everyone that did get tested. And, everyone, let's keep it getting tested.  

Now, I'd say the second wave is coming on strong. It's affecting every element of our lives. We’ve got to keep fighting against it. So, many people are suffering as a result of the coronavirus and feeling this uptick. And nowhere is that more true than with our small businesses. They have gone through hell this year. We're talking about small businesses people built with their own hands, with all their sweat and all their tears to make it finally work. And now, we're seeing these businesses threatened. We've lost so many, more are threatened. We have got to help our small businesses in every way possible. The City has done everything from grants and loans – we did that even before the federal government – to giving out free PPE to keep stores and their customers safe, to opening up streets and sidewalks for outdoor dining, for open storefronts, for retail, all the things that make a difference to help a small business. We really need the big X-factor – of course, a federal stimulus to put money right in the hands of small businesses. And we're going to keep fighting for that. And that's still possible. We’ve got to keep fighting for that. But, in the meantime, there's something every one of you can do right now to help the small businesses in your neighborhood. I'm going to ask you to not do things the way so many people have gotten used to, which is going online, but instead to shop at your local business. Now, some of them obviously can sell online too, and that's great. But I mean, most importantly, go local. Go local. Shop your city. Shop your neighborhood. It makes a huge difference. People are constantly asking what will help? What can I do? I'm asking you to do something that's so simple, but so powerful. The money you have to spend – and a lot of people don't have as much as they used to – but the money you do have to spend these holidays, keep it in the community. Buy from a neighborhood store and it will help that business, that family to make it through this crisis. Our small business services department's been doing so much with every challenge thrown at them to keep fighting back. And here to tell you more about this bi-local effort, our Small Business Services Commissioner Jonnel Doris.  

Commissioner Jonnel Doris, Small Business Services: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And on behalf of the 240,000 small businesses in this city, we appreciate certainly everything you've done, pushing us ahead and pushing us forward to address the needs of our small business community. It's been a long road, as the Mayor mentioned, for our small businesses, and we are committed to making sure that the resources they need, they get to get them back on their feet. Our small businesses have been creative and resourceful during this pandemic. I've visited small businesses in every borough. And, as a former small business owner myself, their innovation and commitment really inspires me. We will continue to help them at every step of the way to make it easier, faster, and better for them to do business in the City of New York. And let's be frank, COVID-19 has had an adverse impact on Asian, Black and Latinx communities in our city. And that includes businesses in those neighborhoods, as we have seen, have been hit the hardest.  

We have delivered over 108,000 services to small businesses in our city. We have helped 4,600 businesses receive $113 million in financing. But there's still need out there. There's still more need and we have to do more. As the Mayor stated, we all have to do our part. We have to play our role in helping our small businesses comeback. Today, we're announcing a city-wide campaign to highlight local businesses called Shop your City. Shop your City encourages New Yorkers to spend their hard-earned dollars locally. These winter shopping months could be life or death, break even or not for small businesses. But together, we can redirect our resources to keep our dollars circulating in our communities and to find what we're looking for in these diverse businesses. We are taking this campaign on the road and we're going to do a five-borough tour starting this Saturday, Small Business Saturday. So, we want to remind everyone to shop your city. 

Today, we're also building on the work of the Racial Inclusion and Equity Task force announcing the investment of $37 million to support businesses across the city in LMI communities. First, we invest in $35 million in zero interest loans to LMI storefront businesses. Second, we are working with 11 community-based lenders to reduce business debt. And third, we are making sure community organizations have the funding they need to support small business owners. And across each of these new initiatives, we are making sure that help goes to the businesses who needed the most by focusing our efforts in low to moderate income communities.  

These new programs will bring us the much-needed support to our small businesses across the city. But if you're a small business out there and you need support and you have not been able to get that support that you need or get the resources that you need, please reach out to us at our hotline 888-SBS-4NYC. Or, get us at our website, nyc.gov/SBS. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. And remember to shop your city. 

Mayor: Thank you so much, Commissioner. I liked the sound of that. Now, I want you to hear what this means for our small businesses. I want you to hear from a small business owner who can tell you, every one of you, how important it is when you spend your money locally, what it means for a small business and their ability to survive, how much they need you. They need you to take this action to keep them alive, to keep their families and their livelihood. So, here to tell you about her experience and about what she is doing to continue to serve the Williamsburg community, the owner of wonderful cafes and restaurants – Portenas and Mercadito. My pleasure to introduce Carmen Ferreyra. 

[…] 

Mayor: Thank you. Thank you very, very much, Carmen. And thank you. I can hear how much you've been through and I know you're tired, I know it's been a lot, but thank you for also reminding people how much strength and resiliency there is in our small business community. And you fought your way back and you're employing so many people. Thank you. Thank you for that. You're helping keep them – keep these families in their livelihoods. So, what a good example of the strength of our New York City small businesses. Everyone, please, please take encouragement from this example and shop our city, buy local. You can make a difference. Here's the chance to do it.  

All right. Now, Thanksgiving is upon us and people are going to celebrate. And I've said, please – and our health leadership has said, celebrate safely, focus on the people closest to you, and small gatherings and virtual gatherings and avoid travel to keep everyone safe. It makes such a difference. So, look, it's going to be different this year, but some things, even with differences, any gathering, we're going to feel – it doesn't matter if it's in-person or virtual – we're going to feel the warmth and love of family and friends. And another thing that we have depended on for generations is the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. I want to thank Macy's. They have been extraordinary this year. They had to deal with so many challenges, but they still managed to give us a wonderful 4th of July. And now, they're going to give us a wonderful Thanksgiving. It will be different. It will be smaller. It will be made for TV. It is not a spectator event in person. We’re letting people know it's going to be a very limited area and we're not asking people to show up. And, of course, there will be plenty of measures to make sure there are no crowds, but you will be able to see it on television. It's going to be exciting. There will be floats. There will be balloons. Spoiler alert, if there’s any very young children in the room right now, you might want to escort them out of the room, because I'll say there will also be a very important visitor from the North Pole at the end of the parade. So, it's going to be great also because Macy's went to the extent of making sure that some of the other parades that we didn't get to have this year got some representation. So, they'll have some wonderful performances from the West Indian Day Parade, from the Puerto Rican Parade, things we normally look forward to all year – and from the cast of Hamilton. It's going to be something very special. So, thank you to Macy's and thank you for coming up with a plan, working with all of us, City and State, to make sure it was a safe, smart plan for this moment. And I look forward to next year when the whole, giant, special Macy's Parade can come back in all of its glory.  

Now, another important point about Thanksgiving, I'm thankful to all New Yorkers, but I want to offer a special thanks to everyone in our schools, to our educators, to our school staff, our food service workers, who, right now, continue to provide crucial support to families who need that food. They're doing that every day, even when schools temporarily shut down. I thank them. I thank everyone in the school community, school safety, the crossing guards, the custodial engineers – everyone. You did something people said couldn't be done, you got the school system open again. We are closed temporarily. We will be back. And next week, we're going to announce the details of how we will come back. It will be in stages. We will find a way back through this pandemic, because we proved we could keep our schools safe. But we're going to have to come back a different way given some of the challenges we're facing with this second wave bearing down on us. So, next week, we will put forward that plan. And it’s going to take a lot of engagement with parents. We need a lot of help from parents to make it work, but I know parents want their kids back in school and they'll be our partners. So, that will be coming next week, that update, and then we'll start to implement it in the weeks ahead.  

Now, another important point, I mentioned those food service workers in the schools. And there's other people – I want to express my thanks to everyone in the food pantries and soup kitchens all over the city, everyone in the City government, everyone who's helping to provide food to New Yorkers in need. No one – no New Yorker should go hungry at Thanksgiving. So, anyone who does not enough food for tomorrow, please, all you have to do is go online nyc.gov/getfood or call 3-1-1. If you need food, we'll direct you to one of the school sites or a soup kitchen, a food pantry. Or, if you're someone who cannot get out of the house, we can deliver directly to you. But we want to make sure everyone has a meal they deserve for Thanksgiving. And every New Yorker is safe and sound on Thanksgiving Day.  

All right, let me do the indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients – today's report is higher, and this is something we're watching very carefully, 141 patients. So, that's a concern. That number has stayed down for quite a while. It's going up. Positivity level 45 percent confirmed positive for COVID. Again, overall, our hospitals are doing very, very well, but that jump is a concern. We're keeping a close eye on that. 

Number two, new reported cases, seven-day average threshold, 550, as we all know we're well, well past that, 1,447 reported cases in the last 24 hours and now – I'm sorry, on the seven-day average, my apology on the seven-day average. And then number three, percentage of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent, today's report 2.74 percent and the seven-day rolling average 3.05 percent. So continues to tick up, but knock on wood and let us pray, ticks up slowly and that's what we have to do. Stop that growth, turn it around. That's all of our business. A few words in Spanish.  

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]  

With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: We’ll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Commissioner Doris, by Dr. Ted Long, and by Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Juliet from 1010 WINS. 

Question: Yeah. Hi, Mr. Mayor, and a happy Thanksgiving to you and your family as well. 

Mayor: To you and your family is also Juliet, very happy Thanksgiving to you. 

Question: Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that. Actually my question is there was just a tweet from a Corp Counsel, it said we made important updates to our charts detailing all activity restrictions in COVID cluster zones. Is this something new or some new information about these zones? 

Mayor: I'm not exactly sure about the tweet you're referring to, but we're going to keep people updated as any changes occur. Obviously the State is making adjustments as new information comes in. People have gotten a good sense of what those zone restrictions are, but we'll keep updating them and clarifying them as we go along. Go ahead, Juliet. 

Question: Okay, and the other question is regarding, I know you said you're making the announcement next week, about schools, but can you shed any more light on the logistics for the additional testings when the – testing when the schools reopen, you know, on site or mobile locations every day, once a week, what's – how is that going to work? 

Mayor: So, first of all, every child will have to have a consent form on file because testing will be more frequently. Right now, the norm in the schools has been once a month, that's going to increase. We're going to work out the exact amount, but that's going to increase. We want to have every child able to be tested at any point. We're going to focus first on special education schools, District 75, and then early childhood and elementary school. We're going to also work with the State in terms of the different zones and how to address those. So there's a lot we're working through. I spoke to the Governor in detail about this yesterday. We're going to come back with the plan in a few days and then start implementing it.  

Moderator: The next is Katie from the Wall Street Journal. 

Question: Good morning, Mayor de Blasio and happy early Thanksgiving – or happy Thanksgiving to you, which is a holiday to me.  

Mayor: Early, doesn’t matter, it’s still happening. 

Question: My question my question is about what you had hinted to what could be the reopening plan. You said it would open in phases, starting with District 75 students. This question is, I guess these 75 students have been exempt from the city's testing plan. They have not been tested. So will that change when reopening begins?  

Mayor: We're working on that right now, Katie. We want to make sure whatever we do is very sensitive to the reality of our special needs kids. Different kids have different situations obviously, but that's something we're working on right now with the State, for sure, and the other stakeholders. Go ahead. 

Question: Thank you. And my second question also relates to school reopening, I've heard from parents whose students have – whose children have IEPs but they are not in District 75 schools. Most – the majority of students with IEPs are not in D75, but they obviously want to get as much schooling as possible. Would you ever consider some sort of reopening where you would, you know, allow specialized programs in general education buildings to reopen early as well? Or does it have to be within each building? 

Mayor: That's another, it's a very good question. I know you care a lot about this topic, and I appreciate that very much, Katie, because it's so important to keep it front and center. It's a really fair question. I think given the sheer logistics here where we're starting – starting, is let's go school by school because it's the way we can at least get started. Start with those D75 schools themselves. But again, the goal here is to quickly move to early childhood and elementary. That's the way we're conceptualizing it right now, but we'll certainly going to look at the point you put forward.  

Moderator: The next is James Ford from PIX. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor and happy Thanksgiving Eve. 

Mayor: Happy Thanksgiving to you, James. 

Question: Thank you very much. I'm quoting you here, if you don't mind? 

Mayor: I'm in trouble.  

Question: It's going to be profound. So regarding Thanksgiving Day Parade, you said that plenty of measures to make sure there will be no crowds will take place. Can you elaborate on that? How are we going to keep people away from the parade route? And if they even get close, how will they stay socially distanced?  

Mayor: Yeah, remember it's happening over the course of about a block. So it's a very limited area. It's quite easy for the NYPD to segment it off and just say to people, hey, this is not a place to gather. It's going to be all televised. That's the best way for people to see it. Look, this was a compromise. Macy's was fantastic and we worked closely with the state to figure out something that was safe, that was really compact, but also could bring the joy of what they do, not only to us, the whole nation watches this parade, and it's a great representation of New York City. So the simple answer is it's a very small area. It's going to be clearly demarcated so that people know it's not a spectator event and I think we'll succeed in keeping that small. 

Question: I appreciate being able to quote you straight to you. Thank you, sir.  

Mayor: [Inaudible] let’s do it again, James.  

Question: Also – I'll try not to, instead, I'll ask a question from my colleague Kala Rama, she says she wants to know, look, it may be premature, but will a COVID vaccine ultimately be a requirement for students to return to the classroom? 

Mayor: Now at this point that is not the plan. It's a perfectly fair question, but that is not the plan. The first of all the vaccine, you know, we could get as early as next month, obviously, which is fantastic, but it will take time to get the quantities we need. We're looking now again at opening in stages, but consistently. Lot of testing, the schools have proven to be very, very safe. So over time I think as the vaccine gets distributed much more widely, that's going to allow us – it's going to certainly help us to keep a school strong and get more and more kids back in the schools. There's even a possibility at some point in the school year, going back to five-day if the vaccine is widely distributed enough, but for now the plan is to rely on testing heavily and phase in the reopening. 

Moderator: The next is David Cruz from Gothamist. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, how are you?  

Mayor: Good David, happy Thanksgiving.  

Question: Happy Thanksgiving. So you've hinted at the bigger role testing will play when schools reopen you. You mentioned the plan is to test the entire student body, which is roughly – or more than 300,000 students, as well as faculty on what seems more than once a month. And that's a considerable amount of testing. So can you explain what logistical hurdles the city has raised in and resolved with the State and school labor unions in realizing and sustaining this higher demand for testing?  

Mayor: Well, David we haven't resolved the whole package, but there's been very good conversations. As I said, I've talked to the Governor in detail about this. I've certainly spoken to our labor colleagues. I think what is starting to emerge is a picture that is just a focus on more testing and other measures to just intensify. We already had a gold standard for keeping our schools safe. It worked, we want to go even farther given the second way of bearing down on us. We want to beat the second wave too. And the other restrictions coming are going to certainly help us do that. But the – I think the simple fact is we are going to sort out the pieces, get everyone in maximum agreement, announce a plan starting next week and then implement it in phases, and we'll make adjustments as we see it play out on the ground. And that's the other thing we always learn dealing with COVID, you know, it's one thing to have it on paper. It's another thing on the ground. We're going to figure out the right way to make it work. Go ahead, David. 

Question: And a question from my colleague, Jake Offenhartz. Last night, your office sent sheriffs to a Hasidic event in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, after going into the building, they found roughly 300 unmasked men celebrating a post wedding ceremony. They ultimately left the scene without taking any enforcement action and we were told by Sheriff Joe Fucito that the reason for this is that religious gatherings are allowed to happen at 50 percent occupancy regardless how many people attend. So was this an error by the Sheriff's Office or is it true that hundreds of people without masks are in fact allowed to gather inside for religious reasons? 

Mayor: David, the standards for religious gatherings set by the State are well-known. My impression from the briefing I got this morning was that the Sheriff found what was there within the standards. So I don't know if that report is accurate, honestly, the way you described it or Jake described it. I need to confirm that what I got back was the Sheriff following State guidance saw a religious gathering within the State limits and appropriate. But we'll get you more details to confirm that.  

Moderator: The next is Marcia from WCBS. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and happy Thanksgiving to you and to your entire family. 

Mayor: Happy Thanksgiving, Marcia. We, you know, we're not going to be able to go to Massachusetts this year, but – that's an inside joke – but we're, we're going to enjoy it anyway, right? 

Question: Mr. Mayor, my first question has to do with schools. I wonder if in laying out these plans, you'll be able to open schools even – or some schools, even though the positivity rate is over three percent because parts of the city certainly are below three percent. And so I'm wondering when you talk about phases, is it not only the phases in terms of the age group, but also phases in terms of parts of the city that have lower test rates? 

Mayor: That's exactly what we're talking through with the State, but remember, because we're adding additional measures, you can have schools open. I mean the State guidance is clear and this is what's happening already around the State and it’s even happened here with non-public schools that if you follow the additional measures, even when you're in an orange or red zone, you can be open, but it is about additional safety measures. That's what we're talking about in general, phased in approach, as I described. And we're going to talk to the State about what will be done on a city-wide basis, what might be done on a more localized basis. 

Question: So Mr. Mayor, since you've told people that you're not going to go to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, I wonder exactly what you are going to do for Thanksgiving, whether you're cooking, you have a special dish, a specialty, what you like to eat for Thanksgiving? Do you like cranberry sauce, stuffing, Turkey, vegetarian Turkey, what's going on in the de Blasio household this holiday season? 

Mayor: Let me tell you, Marcia, first of all, you do not want to ask me to cook, a bad thing would happen. I love eating. I have no ability to cook. When I retire I'm going to work on cooking, but not now. I am just a total traditionalist, Marcia. I am into Turkey, sage stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce. I think it's like an amazing meal. It's kind of funny that most of us have it only once a year because it's like the perfect meal but that's what I'm into. And we're going to have a very small gathering and it's not going to feel normal in the least. And I've said, I'm really, it is very – look, we all have to find the good Marcia, but it's going to be just plain weird to not be with some of the people I'm closest to and that's sad for all of us. But I also am just profoundly clear, we just have to get through one Thanksgiving this way and then the next one will be better, so that keeps me going.  

Moderator: The next is Jillian Jonas from WBAI. 

Question: Hey Mr. Mayor  

Mayor: Hey, Jillian how you doing?  

Question: How are you? I'm okay. I want to wish my condolences about Mayor Dinkins. I remember how close you were. 

Mayor: I was and thank you, that’s very kind of you Jillian. 

Question: Yeah, so my first question kind of piggybacks off of the Gothamist question, but it is actually something I've been thinking about for a while. You've talked about how your priority for COVID safety enforcement is more about education. But with that wedding in Brooklyn, and now this event that they were talking about, it really underscores what I've been thinking, which is what about the attendees? How many chances do they get at this point some eight months into the pandemic? Clearly the organizers of the wedding and their participants were aware because of their efforts to hide it. And by now most people simply know better. Dr. Chokshi said as much yesterday. So, basically, you're not Kristi Noem and we're not in Sturgis so, what is the City going to do about this behavior? 

Mayor: Jillian, I give you points for a colorful question there. Yes, we are not – this is not South Dakota, but look, I think it's exactly right to say, everyone knows the rules by now. And so not the event last night, which again, what I've heard from the Sheriff was, it was within the proper limits. But let's go back to that wedding a few days ago, which we certainly confirmed was a wedding, that there was an effort to conceal it from the City government, and it was clearly too big. How big we don't know exactly, but clearly too big. A $15,000 fine and the cease-and-desist order had been issued. God forbid, anyone violates those rules again in that building, that building will be shut down, period. It will be padlocked. And we don't want to have to do that, but we will because of the very point you're making, people should know better by now. I will say this is a little sad to me because when we were going through so much, a few weeks back in Brooklyn, actually the Williamsburg community responded intensely, led the way in terms of getting people tested, which was great and helpful, and a lot of education was done. I don't know why we see suddenly this slippage back in the wrong direction, but we're not going to tolerate it. We have to address it. Go ahead, Jillian 

Question: So, does that mean you're going to fine the attendees, the people who get caught, not the organizers? 

Mayor: What we said from the beginning is, because of the scale of things and everything else, we focus on the people who organize the events, and we focus on the location. And the fines are really substantial. And if there's a second offense, we're closing it down, we're padlocking it. I think that makes the point as clear as anything could be that if people can't even use their building anymore, including, God forbid, a house of worship. I don't want to have to do that to people with a house of worship. But if we have to – we did that back in the beginning of this crisis, we would do it again. So, I just – look, you started exactly in the right place. People know the rules, they should follow the rules. If they don't, we're going to have to be very, very rigorous in terms of the consequences. 

Moderator: We have time for two more for today. The next is Yoav from The City. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor, I guess I wanted to stay on the same issue as far as fining or not fining individuals who kind of attend a massive event, like the wedding that was planned in secret. And at the same time, as you're not issuing fines to attendees, you're threatening travelers who come to the city who don't follow the rules with fines of between $1,000 and $2,000. So, can you just comment on that discrepancy please? 

Mayor: Well, they're two really different things. Yoav, I think the point about the fines, remember we're talking about $15,000 fine in the case of the organizers of events or people who run a building where an event happens. There’s obviously – we have issued fines to individuals before, and I'm not saying it's an impossibility. I'm saying the way that we focused our enforcement, the way we thought was going to be most effective was to put much bigger fines on the people who put together the events because they're really the ones who have the original sin here. But quarantine is an entirely different reality. It's not, you know, one hour or one day. It is a two-week period that people are supposed to observe, and they have to observe it. And it's also, remember, it's with folks who have very particular realities, folks who either have a positive test or been exposed to some of the positive tests or coming from someplace with high levels of COVID. So, those are really high indicators that trigger quarantine. So, look, we're going to keep doing very aggressive work to stop the events. We're going to keep doing aggressive work to make sure people observe quarantine. There's going to be consequences. There's going to be financial penalties, no one likes financial penalties in the middle of this crisis, but we'll keep doing it. If it comes down to needing to go farther with individual fines, we always reserve that, right. That's certainly a tool we have. If we have to use it. Go ahead, Yoav.  

Question: Okay, thanks for that. And I just wanted to see if I could get a better understanding for why there wasn't a school reopening plan in place when the city hit a three percent threshold. You've said that there were, kind of, a variety of, I guess, conditions that made it tough to have a plan in place. But, I mean, the fact is the conditions that the city – that the rates were increasing and that they would be at three percent at closure that was known obviously. And if anything, the conditions seemed to have been better than one would have thought because the positivity rate was so low inside of the schools. So, just want to see if I can get a clearer notion for why there was a plan in place, because it seems like certainly between last week and this week that a delay in getting the schools open right now is hinging on the City's ability to formulate that plan after the fact. 

Mayor: Yeah, Yoav, it's a really fair question. And I will say honestly, I have to hold myself responsible. The better situation would have been clearly to have that plan all worked through in advance. But I think what really happened was as with everything COVID we had a moving target. We were trying to see if there were measures we could take to avoid ever going past the three percent. That's really where our energy was going, deploying the testing, trying to take actions that we thought might avert the original, you know, measure being hit. And honestly, we were putting tons of energy, all of us, into trying to keep making the schools better, trying to address the huge numbers of questions that came up with blended learning, with remote learning, and so many other things. I think we didn't have a plan-B and we should've had a plan-B, but I also understand why we didn't because we were really dealing with so many day-to-day, hour-to-hour issues, and trying to find a way to avert getting to that three percent. No, in retrospect, clearly it would have been better. But the important point is getting to the three percent meant something. It meant there was a problem. It meant that we were dealing with this second wave bearing down on us. That's a real thing. We did see a number of schools have to close individually more than we had seen before. Something was happening unquestionably. And so, the three percent did serve a purpose. It said we had to reset, and we had to come up with more stringent rules. And that's what we're doing right now. That's not easy. There's some big, complicated questions as we just talk about. Are we going by zone? Are we going by different levels of schools? There's a lot to work out. In a perfect world though, unquestionably, it would've been better to work it out in advance, but even as we're doing it now, Yoav, it ain't easy. We will get it done though. And we'll announce it next week. Go ahead.  

Moderator: The last question for today, it goes to Reuvain from Hamodia. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. 

Mayor: [Inaudible] 

Question: I don't believe anyone's asked the question to doctors today's [inaudible] everyone was talking about the vaccine and you know, how that may finally bring an end to the pandemic. And my question is, I mean, there are so many people in the city already, certain areas close to 50 percent of – more than 50 percent that have antibodies. The purpose of a vaccine I believe is to build antibodies. And my question is why people with antibodies are not being treated differently. If people who have the vaccine will eventually be treated differently, whether it's being allowed at the schools or whatever, why are we not doing that with antibodies now? And I just want to – even though antibodies and cells may wear off after four months, there've been studies that show that once you have antibodies, you might actually be immune for a very long time. 

Mayor: That's a smart question. I'm only going to say to Dr. Varma then Dr. Choksi, I'm sure you could spend all day on this topic but give us the brief version of an answer. 

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Yeah, no, thank you very much for the question and I'll do my best to keep it brief. I think the basic answer is that even though there have been studies looking at duration and degree of protection from prior infection, we really don't know enough to actually plan public health policy based on that. You know, when we plan policy, we always plan around the most credible, sort of, worst case scenario. And so, what we know right now is that a prior infection may give some people protection, but we really don't know the duration of that and the degree of it. And so, what we are really planning around is the assumption that people can potentially be reinfected and that's the way we make our plans. The news about vaccines is great. We do have to recognize, of course, however that these are all still preliminary studies. And that we're going to learn a lot more over the next couple of months as there's follow up both on the studies, as well as from people who get vaccinated in real life. 

Mayor: Dr. Choksi, make it brief and effective. 

Moderator: Sorry, we don't have Dr. Chokshi today. We have Dr. Long. 

Mayor: That's my bad, I'm sorry. Dr. Varma gets the last word then. My apology. And listen, to everyone as we get ready for Thanksgiving, I'll just finish on this point -- again, people have done so much for each other. This has been the story of 2020, a painful difficult time, but also New Yorkers, really, really standing up for each other, really helping each other, showing tremendous compassion. I'm thankful for all of you who have helped us through this really difficult year. I want to ask you, please do everything you can in the weeks ahead and the remainder of 2020, do everything you can to help us move forward. Stay safe, wear the mask, get tested, buy local, buy local, help our small businesses keep going. That's so important. Do the things that will help us move forward. And the last thing I'm going to say is next year is coming. Thank God. Next year is coming. Next year will be better. Next year we will all be together in one place for Thanksgiving and all the holidays. We're going to fight our way through. We're going to get there together. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Stay safe for this Thanksgiving season. Thank you.

2020-11-29 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good morning, everybody. I hope everyone had a joyous and safe Thanksgiving. And even though this Thanksgiving was definitely different, I hope you got to feel the warmth and the love of your family and friends. However, you did that, I hope you got to feel it, and I hope it will help sustain you in the weeks ahead. We're here today with a major announcement regarding our school system. And I want to start with just a moment of reflection on what we have been through up to now. You go back to the summer, Chancellor Carranza and I were adamant that we believed reopening our schools was the right thing to do, that our kids needed it. Parents had a lot of concerns. Educators and staff had a lot of concerns. A lot of people said it could not be done, but we believed it could be done and it could be done safely. And we became one of the few major cities in America to reopen our schools, in fact, by far, of course, the biggest school system in America. What we did a lot of people looked at with amazement and that's a credit to our educators and our staff, everyone at the Department of Education, our custodial services team, food services, school safety, everyone who was a part of that. They believed they could do it. And they did. And we kept our school safe and we did it in real-life conditions. We prove that schools could be extraordinarily safe because we put a tremendous number of health and safety measures in place, created that gold standard of combined health and safety actions that worked. What we didn't know back in July and August, we do know now that these steps work, and they keep kids safe and they keep the whole school community safe.   

But we also said at the time that we would set a strict standard and we would live by it. And if we hit three percent, we'd have to reevaluate the whole situation. We did, of course, hit three percent. We did a temporary closure of our schools. And then we went about the work immediately of resetting the entire equation and trying to determine a path that would be sustainable. Regardless of the challenges we faced, we needed something sustainable that could link us up to the time when we would have the vaccine widely distributed. And so, we focused on increasing the health and safety measures, doubling down on the things that work, making them even more stringent and exacting. Had conversations with our stakeholders, conversations with the State. I've had a number of conversations with the Governor. We've been working through, how do we take all those good lessons of health and safety and amplify them with new measures? So, that is exactly what we now will put in place. We will have testing that is going to go from monthly in every school to weekly in every school. We will have a consent forms required for attendance. I want to emphasize this. Students will not be able to attend school unless they have a consent form on record period. This is something for everyone's health and safety. And as we open school in phases – and I'll go over to phases in a moment – wherever possible, we will, in schools that have the ability, go to five-day-a-week instruction. This is for the students who already were in blended learning or the ones who opted in recently. For any school that does have the space and the ability to move to five-day-a-week in-person instruction, for those kids that will now be the preferred model. So, we'll have in-person instruction for those who are part of that approach, remote for all other kids.  

The situation room will also, of course, continue to do its extraordinary work. And this has been one of the big X-factors. The situation room has allowed us to keep each individual school safe with very exacting follow-through on every reported case and quick action to address what the ramifications of the case would be. Whether it means in some cases, the classroom needs to be closed for a period of time or even a whole school. That approach has worked, that will stay strong. Obviously, all the social distancing rules, mask wearing everything that's worked before, but with these new measures. So, that is the basic approach. And now here's the important news. Beginning the week of Monday, December 7th, New York City public schools will begin to reopen. We will begin with elementary schools K-5 and our pre-K, 3-K public school centers. And then later that week on Thursday, December 10th, our District 75 special education programs. So, New York City public schools will be reopening in phases starting on Monday, December 7th.  

Now, we are focusing on the younger grades – let's be clear – focusing on the younger grades on that Monday, all K-5 programs, whether they're standalone or part of a bigger school, those grades will come back. And those pre-K, 3-K centers. Why? Because we know, first of all, studies consistently show that younger kids are having less of a negative experience. And there's less concern about the spread when it comes to younger kids. Also, the demands that our parents are going through. And I feel for all our parents who are experiencing so many challenges right now, how important it is for them to have their younger kids in school, how important that is at that age, both educationally and socially, but also in terms of how parents juggle all the challenges in their life. And then District 75, they have a little bit of extra work to do to get District 75 programs back up and running. But as I said, Thursday, December 10th, District 75 schools, special needs programs. So crucial. We want to be there for those kids and their families that go through so much. We've heard from those families, they need this back. So, we will get that up and running. Now that's going to be the vast majority of the city, those levels. We're going to address in the future of middle school and high school, but we're not ready for those yet. That's just the plain truth. We will work to get to that day, but we're not there yet.   

I do want to address schools that happen to be in the orange zone areas of the city, and that’s just a small part of the city right now. But we will work to open those schools as well. Following the very clear State guidelines. The State guidelines require a lot. We will work to meet those goals and reopen those schools as early as the week of December 7th. Some particular work that has to be done there, but we're going to go to that work immediately and see what we can do to get as many of those open as possible. Look, whatever happens ahead, we want this to be the plan going forward, because we now believe we know what we didn't know back in the summer. We know what works through actual experience. And we know that if you put a heavy emphasis on testing and you continually reinforce those health and safety measures, you monitor carefully with the situation room, we know we can keep our schools safe for the duration and link up to that day when we have the vaccine that changes the whole reality for all of us.  

Here to speak about why this is so important and how we are going to make it work, someone who believed from the beginning that we could reopen the nation's largest school system and has been a strong voice throughout for finding the way to keep it open and do it the right way, our Chancellor, Richard Carranza.  

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. When we made the painful decision to close schools temporarily, we did it with the health and safety of our students and staff at the forefront of our minds. We are seeing cases rise across our city, which is why we're increasing testing in tandem with continued rigorous interventions. And as you've mentioned, our situation room is performing heroically to act on positive cases when they do arise. Our schools have been remarkably safe and it's important that we're taking good care to keep them that way while New Yorkers do everything we can to stop the spread. Getting our children back in school buildings is one of the single most important things we can do for their wellbeing. And it's so important that we do it right. With these new measures in place, I and the entire team is confident that we're on track to safely and successfully keep our schools open for the duration of this pandemic. I, once again, will add my voice to yours, Mr. Mayor, and implore upon all New Yorkers, please follow the medical advice, please limit your interactions, please wear your mask. If you want schools to open and stay open, it's upon all of us to do our share, to keep them open. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.  

Mayor: Thank you very much, Chancellor. And we're going to be talking about that a lot. A lot of people have been saying, rightfully – a lot of parents, we've heard your voices loud and clear, you wanted schools back open, but we're going to ask everyone to be a part of that, everyone to participate to make it work. And we'll be talking about that this week and beyond.   

Okay, now, in that very same vein, what can you do? Every parent, we need you to get that consent form, for testing, in. I want to be very, very clear for any child to be in a classroom going forward they either will have to have a testing consent form on file or an appropriate medical exemption from a doctor. If folks have a concern, they need to talk to a doctor, we will facilitate that through Health + Hospitals. But literally every single student who will be in person will need that. We'll get you the exact number, but it's in the neighborhood of about 330,000 kids who will qualify to be in person, but it can only work if everyone has a consent form on file. So, parents, if you are one of the parents that really wants your kid back in school and you already were in blended learning, or you signed up during the opt-in period, here's what you need to do. You have to go online, please do it right away. Go to mystudent.nyc, fill out that testing consent form. The other acceptable option is for the child to bring it on their first day of school when we come back. But we need this to happen to keep everyone safe. This was a crucial part of resetting the entire equation that this would be a strict rule. And every parent who cares about getting their kid back in the classroom, help us by getting that form in.  

Okay, let's go over today's indicators. One, the daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for a suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients. Today's report, 130 patients. Confirmed positivity level of 48.12 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550 cases. Today's report, 1,636 cases. And number three, percent of people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent. Today's report, the daily is not yet ready because we've had an aberrantly low number of tests come in. Obviously, it's a holiday, so we don't feel we have an accurate measure. We'll put that up as soon as we have something accurate, we do have a clear picture on a seven-day rolling average. That is 3.9 percent. Okay, let's have a few words in Spanish.   

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]  

With that let's turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.  

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today is Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. With that, we'll go to Jillian from NY1.  

Question: Hi Mayor. Thanks for taking my question today. I guess I'll start with – it seems like we're no longer using the three percent threshold as something to close schools. Will anything replace that? Is there a figure at which you'll want to close schools citywide again, or is this an entirely different approach?  

Mayor: Jillian, it's a new approach because we have so much proof now of how safe schools can be, and this has come from real life experience in the biggest school system in America, right here in New York city, and so when you combine all the measures we've had before that – gold standard of health and safety measures, plus the situation room, plus the new testing and other standards we're putting in place, we feel confident that we can keep schools safe. We'll continue to work with the State on any other standards going forward. But, right now, we think this is the best way to move ahead because it's been proven. Go ahead.  

Question: And as far as middle and high school goes, I know you're saying that there's no timeline for that. What's the reason for that delay? Is it to scale up the testing capacity or is it, are you going to use that space potentially for other grade level students? I know that's been suggested – what's the reason for the phasing in?  

Mayor: Jillian, you're right. The amount of testing is a crucial piece of the equation. So, since we're moving to weekly testing, that's going to take a lot of capacity. We wanted to make sure we can do that consistently and well, and that's why it's important to go by phases. Also, again, the need levels for District 75, for younger kids, the need is even more intense to be there in school, and we know that the health realities for the youngest kids have been the most favorable. So, all of those reasons are why we're doing it. Now we look forward to the day when we can move to middle and high school, but we're just not able to do that yet.  

Moderator: Next is Eliza from the New York Times.   

Question: Hi, can you hear me?   

Mayor: Yeah. Eliza, how you doing?   

Question: Hi, I'm okay. How are you?   

Mayor: Good, thank you.  

Question: First I have a math question that I have a broader question. How many kids are actually eligible to go back the week of the 7th? Because I know we're, you know, it's not the whole universe of 300,000 because middle and high schools won't be open.  

Mayor: Yes. The 330,000 or so is everyone – you're right for elementary, K-to-5, for Pre-K, 3-K, for D-75, we're going to confirm that number to you. I believe it's around 190,000, and anyone from that universe will be able to come back, again with the consent form on file.  

Question: Great, and so I just wanted to ask, I mean, we're going to have maybe, you know, 200,000 to 300,000 kids who have five days a week, which is fantastic for those families. Are you concerned that we have a third of the system now with semi-regular school and you know, many, many more kids, hundreds of thousands of kids that have all remote indefinitely? Do you have concerns about the sort of disparities there between the two parts of the system?  

Mayor: I'll start now turn to the Chancellor. Of course, we want the data to come soon where everyone could be back in the classroom together. That would be the optimal. But we really tried to emphasize the rights of parents and families to make a choice from the very beginning of the first thing the chancellor did, was did a survey of parents to find out what they wanted going way back to the summer, and we have adjusted as we've gone along, according to the needs of parents, to the maximum extent possible while putting a health and safety first, obviously. Let's be clear. Some schools will be able to go to five days a week, right away. They've already some have already done it. Some have been planning for this moment. We'll be able to do it right away. Some will need more time to get ready, so it's not all going to happen on the first day. I want to be very, very clear, but the model now for Pre-K, 3-K, for K-to-5, for D-75, for any school that can do it, that has the right space and staffing to move to five days a week as quickly as possible – for some that will be as early as Monday, December 7th.  

To your disparity point, Eliza. Yes, I'm very concerned about that, but I also know that if we do this right, we'll be able to serve the families who want to be in person better, and for the families that are remote, the day will come when the health situation changes substantially, particularly with the vaccine, and then we're going to rework the equation again, that will be another time when we reset the equation and offer people new opportunities. Go ahead, Chancellor.  

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, Mr. Mayor, I'll only add that our goal Eliza always is to serve as many students in person on as many days as possible. That's our goal. Understanding some of the physical constraints with some of our school buildings, understanding that not everyone will have the space – we obviously are very concerned about any kind of disparity and are working very hard to make sure that we're really solving for those disparate circumstances. That being said, this is another reason why it was so important for families to indicate whether they wanted in-person learning, and we set a hard deadline because that has actually given principals now the opportunity to look at how many students are actually coming and because they have solid numbers, they're able to, in many cases, reprogram and get more days of in-person instruction in place. So again, we will always have as a goal to serve as many students on as many days as possible, given the parameters, given the geography of the buildings, et cetera.  

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.   

Moderator: Next is Reema from Chalkbeat.  

Question: Hi everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon, I guess almost. I just wanted to make sure I understood just now that there's going to be weekly testing. At what point would the schools close again or what would you know? I know that that that's obviously not your hope at all, but what would be the trigger that would cause the system to close down again? Or would it be a completely different approach this time?  

Mayor: Yeah, Reema. Very good question, and the answer is completely different. We – to get the school system open, we set a particularly stringent standard and the Chancellor and I, and the health team talked about this a lot. There was a lot of concern. There was a lot of doubt. We certainly understood why people were so concerned. It was something we had never done before, but throughout September, October, into November, we proved that our schools could be safe. The previous approach doesn't apply anymore. It's a new approach now, where we're doing much more testing, we’re requiring the consent forms, and we now know also the situation room, which was only an idea when we started, that that's been an extraordinarily powerful tool. So with all those pieces coming together we’re convinced we can keep schools safe and do it in a sustainable manner. So this is a whole new approach now. Go ahead, Reema.  

Question: Yeah, I guess just to follow up on that. So, to be clear, will it work in the way that it's been working with the school by school closure? So, if, for example, in your weekly testing, if you have a number of people who test positive, then would that trigger like a closure or a building closure? Like how would that work at this point?  

Mayor: The way the situation room has been working up to now, that will continue, and there’ll always be an investigation. If they find something that requires a temporary closure, there's always an investigation to determine the larger ramifications and then acting accordingly on what the situation room and our Test and Trace team finds. That's been tremendously effective. We're going to stick with that. Go ahead.   

Moderator: Next is Sydney from Gothamist.   

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for taking my question. I want to ask about the testing mandates, the weekly testing mandates. Could you detail how much more testing that would actually be compared to what you all are doing now, and does this have enough locations and supplies to carry out that testing and how will those locations and supplies be added to meet the new mandate?  

Mayor: This is part of what we have really had to focus on in the last week or so is perfecting this approach. A lot of conversations over the last few days over this weekend to make sure that everything was lined up. The answer is yes, part of what we found is because we've been expanding testing capacity constantly in New York City that we now had a lot more, we could utilize in schools. Again, we're going from a monthly requirement to a weekly requirement, but we're also going to do it to begin in many fewer schools because we are not yet ready to move forward middle or high school. So, the answer is yes, we have the capacity and the logistical reach to do weekly testing in every one of the schools that will be open, and we think that's going to make a huge difference in terms of helping us assure everyone that we can keep them safe and keep the school community moving forward. Go ahead.  

Question: Okay, and then my other question is also on testing will all the students who return the week of December 7th be tested before returning, and then will the weekly testing be all the students or a certain percentage. Could you detail that as well?  

The weekly testing will be modeled on the approach that has been used on the monthly basis up to now. So it'll be 20 percent of the kids in the school. That will be done on a weekly basis. There will not be pretesting. It will be done every week that school is in session. For a school in the orange zone, we'll follow state rules and whatever additional measures we have to follow as a result, we will.  

Moderator: Next is Steve from WCBS Radio.  

Mayor: You say Steve, Steve. Steve, are you there?   

Moderator: Steve, are you there, Steve?   

Mayor: I don't hear Steve.   

Moderator: Steve, we'll come back to you.   

Mayor: Let's get back to Steve.  

Moderator: Let’s go to Jen from WNBC next.   

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor I'm speaking with you from here at 30 Rock where the Christmas tree is up and it's going to be lit this week. So, I'm hoping you could give us some information about how—  

Mayor: Wait a minute. We lost you Jen. Jen, are you there? We're going to come back to Jen. Okay. At least we know our topic. Okay. One of those days.  

Moderator: We're going to try Steve again. This is Steve from WCBS Radio.  

Question: Hey, is this working now.   

Mayor: There you go, Steve, how you doing?   

Question: Good. I hope you had an alright. Thanksgiving given the circumstances.   

Mayor: Definitely, how about you, Steve?  

Question: Yeah, it was all right. A lot of video calls, a lot of phone calls. Did the best we could. First, I wanted to ask about any more chances for parents to opt in. Obviously, the last opt-in period was in the context of numbers rising. We were getting close to three percent. So, it seemed like the overarching kind of feeling was what's the point right now, schools are just around the corner from closing. So, for parents who see this new plan and see some amount of confidence in this new plan, would there be any opportunity for them to get back in on this?  

Mayor: It’s a great question, Steve. First, is important to note that even with the backdrop you've talked about over 30,000 parents decided they did want to opt in during that period. And we're going to honor that, of course, I think the simple answer is, let's get this new approach going, let's work our way up through it and get the health situation addressed, particularly through the vaccine, which could be coming as early as December. And, obviously, will take some months to play out, but we need to see what's going to be happening with the vaccine. When the health situation clearly improves, that is obviously the right time to do another opt-in, because then we're going to be having a whole different set of circumstances where we'll be able to accommodate more kids. But a lot has to be worked out between now and then. Go ahead, Steve. 

Question: Sure. So, another question kind of related to that old three percent threshold. I know back when previous plans were announced, you had organized labor partners sitting next to you there from UFT, CSA. I wanted to know how big of a role they played in this new plan. And, you know, obviously, they may not be as satisfied as they were before, because there's not that hard threshold that they had liked. 

Mayor: Look, we've worked very closely with both those unions and DC 37 and the Teamsters who represent school safety, the custodial unions, everyone throughout. And I think one of the things that's been very clear is, folks wanted school to keep moving forward and be open so long as it can be done safely. There's been a lot of consultation. One of the crucial things we heard from our union partners was more testing and required consent forms or medical exemptions. That's been crucial to this plan. So, look, I think as per usual people are going to be watching carefully and raising whatever concerns they have, but there's been a lot of good dialogue about what it would take to make this work. And a lot of focus on the situation room – I think that the success of a situation room – and I want to do a shout out here to Commissioner Melanie La Rocca, the Buildings Department, who's led the way with a great team at the situation room. One of the things our labor partners have really focused on is that that has been a big, really good X-factor in this equation and one of the things that gives them faith that we can keep things safe. 

Moderator: We're going to go back to Jen again – Jen, from WNBC.  

Question: Thank you. Apologies for the audio issues here. In any case, what I was saying, Mr. Mayor, was if you could please give us a sense of how the City is going to control crowds around the tree and will that include any street closures here around 30 Rock? Thanks. 

Mayor: Thank you, Jen. Important question. First, we've been working with the State on the right way to approach this and we have agreed on a ticketing plan. Details will be announced later on today or tomorrow. And the idea is we're going to really limit the number of people by using a ticketing approach. Obviously, we'll have substantial presence out there from NYPD and other agencies to keep people safe. We expect some efforts to make sure there's ample space like we did in previous years where we closed off some lanes of traffic. But, again, remember, we want to make really clear to people not to come out in large numbers and to be really smart about distancing. So, we're going to adjust those plans to achieve that goal. 

Moderator: We have time for two more – 

Mayor: Wait. Do you have a follow-up, Jen? 

Moderator: Sorry – 

Question: Yeah, just one quick follow-up. So, there will be street closures, but it sounds like you're encouraging people not to come out and see the tree in large numbers at end to wear masks, obviously, and distance from others if they're here? 

Mayor: Jen, 100 percent. Look, let's take a parallel of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, which, you know, came off very successfully. The message I put out, Macy's put out is this is not a spectator event like it's been in the past and we all need to stay safe and we need to avoid crowds. And people really honored that. I'd say the same thing here. If you get a ticket, great, go see it. There will obviously be distancing. People will be wearing masks. If you're, you know, walking by the area, great, you'll see it. But what we do not want and can't have is large crowds of people trying to get close. It's just not safe. It's not like – I don't need to tell anyone, but I'm going to say it again, it's just not like holidays we've gone through before. Let's get through 2020, let's turn the page. In 2021, we can all get back there to celebrate the tree the right way. But this year is, less is more. 

Moderator: We do have time for two more now. First, we're going to go to Katie from the Wall Street Journal. 

Question: Hey, happy Sunday, Mayor de Blasio and everybody. My first question is about the capacity of teachers for more in-person education. I know there were so many teachers who got remote accommodations through the calendar year. So, if you and the Chancellor want to discuss the teaching, staffing, and then what you will plan if you need to make changes. 

Mayor: Thank you, Katie. I think the important point here is, as we move to five-day a week construction, it actually will simplify things in the schools and I think teachers and, certainly, both of the unions, UFT and CSA, have been excited by this prospect. It's going to allow things to be simpler and more manageable at the school level. I'll have the Chancellor speak to it, because he's been the teacher, he's been a principal, he's been everything in the school system. So, go ahead, and talk about that. 

Chancellor Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Katie, it's a really good question. And part of the timeline that the Mayor had talked about in terms of some will be ready to go right on December 7th, some schools will need a little bit more time – that's part of the calculus involved with reprogramming schools. So, in some cases where you've had one teacher and three students, now there's an opportunity for that school to reprogram and maybe have seven or eight students, which is still medically advisable in that classroom. And then, it frees up another teacher to perhaps take more students and create another classroom based on how many parents and students have chosen in-person learning. That's the kind of school by school, classroom by classroom analysis that our principals will be doing – some have already done. And then, that will determine how we reallocate, if you will, what teachers are doing not only in-person, but in a remote setting as well. So, I would also agree with what the Mayor has said in that in some cases, this is going to simplify – instead of having three different modalities – in-person, blended and then fully remote – in some cases you'll have just two modalities, which then is less complicated to program as well. It's not going to be completely easy. It's still a Herculean task for our principals and our school communities. But this is an exciting opportunity for those families that have chosen in-person to have more days of in-person learning.  

Mayor: Go ahead, Katie. 

Question: Thank you. And my second one, I think it was sort of already asked, but we were collectively confused by the answer and it's about the – you know, the two-case building closure policy and other policies that had been in place for closure. How will that change? Will it change? And, if so, what will it change to when – you know, if there are inevitable cases of COVID in buildings? 

Mayor: Yeah. Katie, I'm confused by the confusion you're expressing. So, let's try again. Maybe you can just outline to me – what I said was the situation room will continue to operate the way it has. So, tell me what the issue is – you need clarification is. 

Question: Oh, I mean, will it still be – you know, I think it's two cases will close the building for an amount of time. Will that remain the same? 

Mayor: There’s more to it than that and there always has been. There's a bunch of different scenarios, Katie, throughout. And the most important point is, when there's a case, there's an investigation, and the investigation leads to different outcomes, depending on if cases are linked or not, or where they find the origin of the cases to be. So, it's not just one size fits all. It's based on the specifics of the investigation. We’re going to take that same approach and continue to apply it, because it's worked. 

Moderator: Last is Shant from the Daily News. 

Question: Yeah. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. You know, I know that you're saying it's – you're going to rely on the situation room to evaluate potential school closers, but I'm still trying to just kind of grasp the shift away from, you know, tying school opening to, you know, a specific COVID threshold citywide. I mean, is it – is this now more of an art than a science? Just any thoughts in that vein? 

Mayor: Shant, it's a fair question. But what I'd say is the biggest X-factor here is that we learned through experience what it would take to keep schools safe and we proved it over and over. The combination of all the safety measures in the schools, plus the situation room, and then the determination that with additional testing, that would be such a careful conservative model that this would now be the sustainable model. The idea of the hard number made a lot of sense back in the summer when we had not yet experienced all this. Now that we've experienced it, we think this approach using all these measures to make it work is the sounder approach. I've had this conversation with the Governor, our teams have talked, we all agreed that we have a different reality than what we had in the summer and that this is now the way forward and the best way to protect everyone. Go ahead, Shant. 

Question: Yeah. Thanks for that. So, I mean, you know, in light of everything that's happened the past few weeks and you and your team coming up with this new approach, do you at all regret shutting down schools on November 19th? 

Mayor: Shant, let me just say, I know parents really were concerned and were very frustrated and I felt bad about it, for sure, and I didn't want to do it, but I felt we had to keep the commitment we made and we had to come up with something new and it took a lot of work to figure out what would really be sustainable, because, again, now the goal, Shant – this is to your previous question as well – is that this will be the model for the duration, that this is what is going to take us through to when we have a vaccine and when we can start to then open up a lot more in our schools. We do not want a situation where there were constant changes. We're trying to get to something as consistent as possible based on real experience, which really has opened up the possibilities for us, because we learned so much. No, I felt very bad about it. And I felt, you know, pained. I didn't want to do that to kids or parents, but I felt we had to keep our commitment and we had to come up with something stronger and more stringent and more sustainable. And I really believe this plan will be the way that we can move forward from this point on.  

Okay, everyone. Look, I'll finish with this point. It all comes down to you in the end. This is what we've learned over and over from the coronavirus, is that government has such an important role to play setting the standards and giving people constant updates and guidance and leaning on the data and the science constantly, but nothing works without the people. So, we need you to make this new approach work. This is the approach could take us all the way through to when we have the vaccine widely distributed, it's still possible to bring back our schools for a huge number of kids five days a week in the spring, if all goes well with the vaccine. But to get to that point, we had to keep people safe in the meantime. So, we need everyone – please focus on the social distancing and the mass gathering – mask wearing, excuse me – limit gatherings, do all those things. But also, parents, if you're in that group of parents that is signed up for in-person learning, we need you fill out that test consent form. If you have any questions or concerns, our school team and our Health + Hospitals team will always be available to talk to you in multiple languages. But we need parental involvement to make this work, to bring back the schools, starting on Monday, December 7th, and then keep them open for the duration as part of bringing this whole city back and serving our parents and families. Thank you, everyone.

2020-11-30 NYC Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. I hope everyone had a really restful and positive holiday weekend. I hope you had a chance to spend time, whether in-person, or virtually with family and friends. And really get a break from everything we've been through. And I hope that you are taking the opportunity now in the holiday season to support our small businesses, our local businesses. I had a great opportunity to go to the Strand Bookstore on Saturday and do some of our holiday shopping there. Chirlane and I went to support an amazing New York City small business. And there's so many more like it. So again, it is holiday time. People don't have as much as we had last year, obviously. And a lot of families won't be able to buy much this year, but if you are going out to do holiday shopping, please focus on those local stores. And let's help keep the money in our community. 

So we've talked about buying local on Saturday. Yesterday, I outlined the plan to start reopening our schools next week. Today, we are going to focus on the thing we need the most to get us through to the vaccine. And that's testing. Testing from the very beginning has been the core to every effective strategy. And testing is what we are doubling down on now in New York City. We have the highest testing capacity we've ever had since the coronavirus began. We're going to talk about how important it is to get tested and then what to do after you get tested. So look everyone in the aftermath of Thanksgiving. if you traveled and obviously, I kept discouraging people from traveling. But if you did travel, it's important to really follow the State rules now. If you went through the procedure to test out of quarantine, that meant you got a test wherever you traveled to. You're going to get another test now upon your return within the right time frame. If you go through all that, you get negative tests, that's great. You don't have to quarantine. But for everyone who doesn't do that, you do have to quarantine. And it's really important. And we take it very seriously. We're going to be constantly focusing on educating people on the importance of following the quarantine if you traveled. But there also will be consistent enforcement and consequences for anyone who doesn't follow the quarantine rules. But again, the best way to address everything is through testing. So, whether you traveled or you didn't travel, we're encouraging people to get tested. 

And to make it easier. We have more and more Health + Hospitals testing locations, more mobile sites that were moving around, 25 new locations opened in the last week. We're continuing to make it easier. One of the things I've heard from so many people is they really want to get tested, but they're concerned about long lines and the turnaround time for the test. Well, again at our public hospitals and clinics and mobile sites, the Health + Hospital sites have been really good about quick turnaround times and providing people great service. But we do want to address the wait time. So now H + H will be posting updates three times a day on Twitter. You can follow at @NYCHealthSystem and get updates about each site. And it will direct people to where the waits are the least. So, you can go to the place that works best for you. Also, later today, there'll be a new online tool, TestAndTrace.nyc, will give you wait time updates at 51 Health + Hospitals sites. So, you can really plan carefully where you want to go get tested. 

But the bottom line is get tested. There's still so many people who have never been tested or only been tested once. This is how we fight back this second wave by getting tested. Now, what happens when you get tested? Well, if you test negative, that's great. If you test positive, you get to work with the nation's largest and best Test and Trace Corps. That's going to help keep you safe, your family safe, your friends safe, everyone you came in contact with safe. And it really works. And making sure that when people do test positive, that they know how to safely separate. That is the key. But we're not just telling people, Hey, go figure it out. We're saying no, we're going to help you every step of the way. We're going to be right there with you and provide you all the support you need. And it's free. Here to talk to you about this amazing effort and how it continues to grow. And I want to thank her and her team for all they do, and thank her for leadership, the director of the Take Care of division of Test and Trace, Dr. Amanda Johnson. 

Director Amanda Johnson, Take Care New York: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good morning, New Yorkers. I'm pleased to be back here to talk to you a little bit about COVID-19 and household transmission. As well as how the Take Care program can help you prevent the spread of the virus as we face the second wave. COVID-19 transmission is common in households, and it happens fast among families and roommates who are living together. As I mentioned before, emerging evidence from the CDC shows us that the vast majority of secondary infections occur within the first five days. Household transmissions will continue to be a significant factor in the spread of COVID-19 here in New York City where people live together in small spaces, and where we are going to be spending even more time indoors as we approach the colder months. At least one in five cases investigated by our own contact tracing program in recent weeks has been found to be due to household transmission. The implication of this is clear and urgent. If you have symptoms of COVID-19 or you've been exposed to someone with COVID-19, don't wait, separate. The Take Care program can help you with either a free hotel room, which includes free meals, medication delivery, and onsite clinical supports. Or the resources that you need to safely separate at home. Call 2-1-2-COVID-19 for assistance now. 

And in these challenging economic times, as we've mentioned before, don't let concerns about missing work be the barrier. If you test positive for COVID-19 or have been exposed, you have the right to seek paid sick leave without fearing consequences from your employer and regardless of your immigration status. Again, call 2-1-2-COVID-19 to learn more. As a city, we've done a good job. We've been wearing masks and more New Yorkers are getting tested all the time. We need to add a third step to this equation, to protect each other from the spread of COVID-19. Keep wearing your mask, continue getting tested often. And if you have symptoms or have been exposed to someone who was sick, don't wait, separate. 

To reach as many New Yorkers as possible, and with our simple message of don't wait, separate, we've launched a city-wide campaign, including digital broadcast and print in multiple languages. Many New Yorkers have already headed this call. To date more than 3,000 New Yorkers have been served by our hotel program. We've sent over 65,000 Take Care packages to people's homes. And our resource navigators have reached out to more than 51,000 New Yorkers who are quarantined or isolating in their homes to help them connect to resources such as food, medication delivery, including methadone delivery, medical care, and paid sick leave. We still have work to do. And it all starts with you. Remember, if you feel sick or have been exposed to someone who has COVID-19 the Take Care program urges you don't wait, separate. Thank you. 

Mayor: Thank you very much, Dr. Johnson. And listen to everyone. I mean, what the doctor went over is a very compassionate, kind approach to helping folks. And this is the New York way. We don't just leave people out there on their own. We're really going the extra mile to make it possible for people to get all the support they need and get through this very brief period of time when they have to separate. But here's what it's doing. We already know Test and Trace Corps has saved thousands and thousands of people from getting infected. And it's more important than ever. But what really matters is your cooperation. So again, if you feel those symptoms, if you go and get tested and it's positive, the important thing is to reach out, to get the help you need, to accept the help when it's offered, to communicate. Because Test and Trace Corps and the Take Care initiative are there to help you and make this go well so we can all turn the page and move past the coronavirus. 

All right, before we go to our daily indicators, just a quick update, something that New Yorkers care about a lot, and we love a lot. And it's part of our tradition, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. This is something that in normal years, we all go to see in-person. This year, I'm going to tell you to watch a different way. And on December 2nd, live and on television, this coming Wednesday, you're going to see the ceremony, the tree lighting. And that's the best way to see it. To feel that moment that we cherish every year when the lights go on, and it's another reminder of the beauty of the holiday season. And this is going to be a challenging holiday season in a lot of ways, but it's still going to be a beautiful one in so many ways. Because so many people care for each other and are looking out for each other and are taking that spirit of holidays and making it come alive in so many ways. So tune in on Wednesday to see the tree lit. Now that's the best way to do it. I know some people are going to still want to go in-person. And I'll tell you up front, please if you can make the decision to watch it on TV, that's so much better. But if you choose to go in-person, there's going to be a lot of specific rules in place to make it much safer than normally would be the case in a typical year. There will be a reservation system, groups of no more than four people at a time will be able to go up and view the tree. It's a timed socially distanced approach. And obviously it means it will be limited, the number of people that can get close. This is what we got to do to protect everyone. And if you want to see the wait times there'll be available at rockefellercenter.com. A different approach, but an approach that will keep people safe. And I keep saying it, I'll say it again so we can get through the next year. Next year, I look forward to so many of our traditions coming back so we can be there in-person and enjoy them the way we always have, and that we cherish. But let's stay safe this year. So everyone can get through to next year and enjoy those traditions together. 

Okay, let's go over our indicators. And I will say at the outset, we had lower testing levels over the last few days, meaning many fewer New Yorkers went to get tested. So some of our numbers may be skewed by that. I just want to offer that caution up front. We had a few days with much, much lower testing levels, obviously because of the holidays. We'll get a better sense in the course of this week, as testing levels return to normal. But let's go over the indicators. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, threshold 200 patients, today's report is 96 patients. Confirmed positivity level for COVID of 47.06 percent. Number two, new reported cases on a seven-day average, threshold 550 cases. Today's report 1,620 cases. And number three, percentage of the people testing positive citywide for COVID-19, threshold five percent. Again, knowing that we had some abhorrent testing levels today's report for the daily 4.69 percent, for the seven-day rolling average 4.03 percent. Let me say a few words in Spanish. 

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish] 

With that, we turn to our colleagues in the media and please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist. 

Moderator: Hi, all. We'll now begin our Q-and-A. With us today is Senior Director of the Test and Trace Corps Dr. Amanda Johnson, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, and Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. With that, we'll go to Juliet from 1010 WINS. 

Question: Hey. Good morning, Mr. Mayor, and everybody out there on the call today. My first question is regarding the school testing. What are the logistics for the weekly testing now for the schools? Is it going to be in schools? Outside? Do people get tested and bring their form in? How is this going to work? 

Mayor: Yeah, Juliet. We – first of all, I want to wish you – I hope you had a really great Thanksgiving with your family. And, Juliet, look, the idea here is to go to weekly testing, 20 percent of the school community. And that testing will be at the schools. In some cases, there are clinics and other facilities very, very nearby that could be used, but typically it'd be right at the schools. And that'll be done on a weekly basis. Go ahead, Juliet. 

Question: Okay. And another topic – there have been reports that there have been large parties every weekend, hundreds of people attending, and probably not just in Manhattan. They have been shut down, but is there any sort of proactive thing that's going on to prevent these gatherings from occurring in the first place?  

Mayor: Yeah. I want to thank the Sheriff and the whole team at the Sheriff's Office, but also a lot of other agencies have been participating as well. There's constant monitoring sites that have been problem sites before. And then, of course, any complaint that comes in, and that's key. The Sheriff's Office can be in a lot of places, that can't be everywhere. It really matters if someone sees something like a large gathering, call 3-1-1 immediately, and that will get action, because we have been shutting down those events when we find them. I would say, if the Sheriff were here, he would tell you that we do not believe there's a really large number of them. We think we're getting a lot of the ones that happen, but they still do happen and we've got to immediately shut them down whenever we see them, and that's what we'll do. 

Moderator: Next is Narmeen from PIX11. 

Question: Mayor, can you hear me?  

Mayor: There you go. How are you?  

Question: I’m sorry. Good morning. I'm doing well, thank you. I just want to follow up on Juliet's question in regards to – Mayor, the Governor has said a few times that the Department of the Sheriff is not quite as large enough to handle what we're seeing in terms of enforcement. Do you believe – do you have that same sentiment? Is there any discussion of having an expansion of the Sheriff's Department in any way? 

Mayor: Narmeen, I think they've done an amazing job and they've been where we needed them to be. And, you know, other agencies are helping with their uniform personnel and in certain situations, of course, we use NYPD as well. So, no, I think the Sheriff's Office has done a great job moving resources where they're needed and it's made a big difference. Go ahead. 

Question: Mayor, my next question has to do with rapid testing. I know as the City has expanded its testing efforts and expanded its sites and surely so many New Yorkers taking advantage of it. We've talked to a number of infectious disease experts over the past few weeks who've cautioned about the overuse of rapid testing, the margin of error that exists sometimes with false positives and false negatives. I wonder if there's any concern on the City side of whether that skews our numbers in any way, and maybe even in some cases sends out somebody with a false negative out into the public. 

Mayor: Yeah. Narmeen, it’s – rapid testing from the beginning has been an area where it's a very appealing concept obviously and the question of accuracy has been real from the beginning, although there's been some real improvement. I'll turn to Dr. Johnson, obviously Test and Trace is on the front line of this, and Dr. Varma, for them to comment. But I'd say that, you know, we are careful about rapid testing and we still don't see it as the same as the diagnostic PCR tests. Dr. Johnson? 

Director Johnson: So, we've been incorporating rapid testing specifically into our point of care testing sites, part of our hyper-local response, because we know that when people are armed with information, they're going to behave differently. We've taken great pains to ensure that as we bring new testing technologies into the fold of services and testing modalities that we're offering, that we believe that they meet the standards that we need to continue to protect the city and get people the information they need to safely separate and continue contact tracing. To that end, we've also included both the rapid test along with the PCR tests so that people can follow up if there's a discordant result. And so, you know, I think this is a debate that we've had as we've continued to incorporate new modalities, and it's not unlike arguments that we faced when we've thought about the point of care testing for HIV and Hepatitis C. I would consider it another tool in our [inaudible] rather than one thing that we're going to lean on to the exclusion of other testing modalities.  

Mayor: Dr. Varma, do you want to add? 

Senior Advisor Jay Varma: Sure. I think Dr. Johnson has covered most of the important points. I would just make two quick points really quickly. The first is that not all rapid tests are equal. Some of them use different types of technology and produce different types of results. And, as Dr. Johnson said, we have taken a very cautious, but appropriately cautious approach to making sure that we validate each of these tests before use them, and we feel competent about the use. And the second thing I would mention is that, you know, the landscape is changing dramatically so that, you know, what we know today may change tomorrow. So, as we learn more about these tests, we're going to continue using them. And one of the things we have learned is that it's very, very important for the person using the test to be fully trained in how to read the results. And we found that as long as we have that training in there, we can get results that we believe in.  

Mayor: Thank you. 

Moderator: Next is Henry from Bloomberg. 

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing today? 

Mayor: I'm doing well, Henry. How was your Thanksgiving? 

Question: It was very nice. Thank you. My questions had to do with the school restarting and the fact that so many students are not going to be participating in in-school instruction. So, what is the City doing to improve and serve and teach these you know, the vast majority of students who will be at home trying to get instruction? 

Mayor: Yeah. It’s a really important question, Henry. I'll turn to the Chancellor in a moment, but just to say this – we've always said from the beginning that nothing is as good as in-person education. The thing that I think will be very helpful with the new plan is that we will be able to move a lot of schools for the kids who did choose, for the families that did choose in-person, we'll be able to move to five days a week, or at least more days a week in a lot of schools. And that's going to help a lot for those kids, but for the kids who are all-remote, there's constant work going on to try and make it better. The most important work I would argue is what we all need to do to just get by this crisis in general, what everyone can do, the testing and the other precautions, to link up to the time when we get the vaccine and then get it widely distributed. Because even in this school year, we have the real possibility of bringing back a large number of kids once the vaccine gets pretty widely distributed. And, remember, you know, we're still in November now, there are seven months of the school year ahead. The vast majority of the school year is still ahead. So, I don't want to leave that out of the equation, but that could be a huge difference-maker down the line. But, the meantime, this is a constant effort, whether it's at DOE headquarters or school-by-school to try and find every way to improve on remote learning. And I do think in the schools that go to the five day a week, they'll actually have in many ways an easier using their staff towards that goal as well. Go ahead, Chancellor. 

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, Henry, I will only add that everything the Mayor said is right on target, but we are continuously building capacity by building out curriculum, building out the platforms that students and teachers used for instruction as well, as well as the resources. And, you know, the true experts on remote learning are the teachers that are doing it. No one's ever had to do this before. And our teachers actually have developed a lot of capacity. So, part of what we're doing – it's not sexy sounding, it's not big newsworthy, but we're actually taking what teachers are doing and sharing those best practices with other teachers, while, at the same time, building our device distribution network and getting more devices, while at the same time making sure that we have a trauma-informed approaches, because, you know, all of all of the city has been, you know, impacted by the trauma of the pandemic. And then, at the same time, develop more of those curricular resources and instructional resources so that students that are fully remote feel like they're part of the school community and feel like they are getting to the greatest extent possible as much of an experience of being connected to their school community as possible. 

Mayor: Yeah, the thing to note before your next question, Henry, the Chancellor and I went up to a middle school the first day middle schools were open and Chancellor, remind me, is it One World in the Bronx that we visited?  

Chancellor Carranza: Yes, yes.  

Mayor: One World Middle School and just an amazing place. But what I want to emphasize, Henry, is even that was day one, and of course the school had been through the spring having to be all remote. But it was really amazing watching the principal and the teachers how they had tried to create a consistency of the whole school community between the kids there in person, that we were standing in the classroom with versus the kids that were home, remote, and trying to get a lot of commonality going. I think we really have to honor how much our educators have innovated to make remote as, you know, vivid and positive as possible for kids, even though it's imperfect, I think there's been a lot of amazing innovation that deserves respect. Go ahead, Henry. 

Question: Well, I guess my next question is that to hear this kind of optimistic description of the way things are proceeding, and then the disconnect between that and the complaints and the disappointments I hear from teachers and from parents and students, I’m trying to figure out, you know, is – why is there such a disconnect when we reporters speak to parents and teachers and students about the quality of this remote instruction? The fact that a lot of people don't have devices or the internet doesn't work well enough. I don't know. I guess my question is, are you missing something? I mean, who is wrong here? Where is the – 

Mayor: Henry look, I mean, I really do appreciate the openness of the question, but I'm going to push back on a values level, I don't think anyone's wrong. I think a parent or a kid who, you know, either wishes that remote could be as good as in-person, which is a very fair feeling and, you know, painful for all of us. We wish everyone was in person too, or see something specifically that needs to be improved, we got to act on it every time because this is not like a model we have lived with for years and years where you can say, you know, why, if we know how to do this so well, and we've done it for so long, there's something wrong. Now this is a model still in evolution because it's never had to be done on this vast scale in it's in an ever-changing landscape, but I'm trying to emphasize, I don't think it's two different perspectives. 

I think it's looking at all the educators out there who are constantly trying to make it better despite its imperfections. And I want to give credit to the Chancellor and the DOE on the devices. Again, I don't know about the rest of the country, but I would challenge you to look anywhere and everywhere. I mean, it's over 350,000 devices have been given out for free, you know, brand new top of the line devices. Service, if it's for any reason not working as well as it should be, literally the DOE will switch the provider to another provider for free. They'll go as we've had in homeless shelters, into the shelters to work with families, one by one to get the service right for them. I'm sure there are still some people who need help, but all they have to do is call 3-1-1 and then as quickly as possible we're going to get them the help. So I truly believe there's an amazing effort going on to try and make it better every day, and that's what we have to do in the middle of this crisis. Chancellor, you want anything? Are you on mute?  

Chancellor Carranza: I think you covered it all, sir. Thank you.  

Mayor: Thank you. Go ahead.  

Moderator: Next is Rich from WCBS Radio.  

Mayor: Hey, Rich? We're having tape delay day here, Rich, are you there? 

Moderator: We're having some trouble with Rich. We're going to come back to him. Next is Nolan from the Post.  

Question: Good morning everybody. 

Mayor: Hey, how you doing?  

Question: I'm all right. How are you?  

Mayor: Good, thank you.  

Question: On the restoration of five-day-a-week learning, do you guys have some measure of how many schools will actually be switching back the five-day-a-week learning? How many schools have capacity to add students to five-day-a-week learning? And will there be some opportunity for parents now that their kids can go back to school Monday through Friday to get their kids back into in-person learning?  

Mayor: Okay, the Chancellor can help us on the first question, but what I'd say based on the meetings – that the war room meetings at DOE I’ve been a part of, I'd say most schools of the ones that we have announced, let's be very clear elementary, K-5, pre-K, 3-K centers, District 75 special ed., most will be able to get to five-day over time, some as early as Monday, December 7th, some will take more time. There will be schools that can't get the five-day, but certainly can improve the number of days that kids will be able to come. Why? Because we now have a specific number in the categories I talked about, it’s about 190,000 kids, and we also have to be really clear that kids have to show up or else we're not going to keep that seat for them, and that's something we talked about back during the opt-in. So we now are just doing the math and seeing what capacity we have in schools, it's evident that that's what we will be able to do now on a pretty broad scale. 

In terms of the last part of your question, the plan we have is to stick with what we've got now in terms of the people who were originally blended or signed up during the opt-in. Those are the folks who are going to be able to have their kids go to in-person learning. When the health situation improves and particularly when we start to see some vaccine distribution on a broader scale, and we think we're in a much better environment, then we'll do an opt-in because we'll be in a position to do an entirely different approach to our schools. But for now this will be the universe of folks whose kids will be in in-person learning. Chancellor, you want to add on the first question of how many of the schools? 

Chancellor Carranza: Yeah, so we're in the process right now of working with principals and they're doing their analysis, they now know how many families have additionally opted for in-person learning, and that taken into consideration with the students that were already coming in person, and then obviously super imposing that on the space availability that they have in their building. So, they're doing that analysis right now, and we hope to have a much more detailed information later this week.  

Mayor: Go ahead, Nolan. 

Question: Secondly, the State Assembly is going to be holding a hearing examining mayoral control, comes after Mike Mulgrew said he'd like see an end to it. I wonder if you believe you're handling the school's reopening has put mayoral control at risk for the next administration? 

Mayor: No, not at all. Other way around, Nolan. I talked to Michael Mulgrew and he simply reiterated the position that he has held and the union has held for I think a decade or more. There's nothing new there. The legislature made the decision originally to create mayoral control. It worked, it has been renewed constantly. Since it began, it has always been renewed. What has happened because of mayoral control? Graduation rate in New York City has gone up about 50 percent, five-zero, 50 percent. Education has improved. We can see it by so many measures. We achieved pre-K and 3-K because of mayoral control. I could not have done it without mayoral control, guarantee it. And being able to reopen the nation's largest school system in the fall, we could not have done that without mayoral control. There's just no way. So, you know, so many families benefit because schools were open and now they're going to be open again on Monday. That's because of mayoral control and I think a lot of the legislators in Albany see that and recognize that. So I think mayoral control is going to be an important part of our future, and it's about accountability holding one person accountable, so things actually happen and happen quickly. Go ahead. 

Moderator: Next is Gersh from Streetsblog. 

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving holiday. I hope you did. 

Mayor: I appreciate that Gersh. I hope you did as well. 

Question: Well, thank you, Mayor. I did indeed. A couple of quick questions. So, your administration has done a lot for pedestrians during the COVID crisis, as you know, you created Open Streets, you allowed restaurants to set up in the curbside space to keep sidewalks open for social distancing, and you even have a pilot program to allow buildings to put their garbage in the curbside space and set up the sidewalk. So now it's Christmas time, which we all know is the most wonderful time of the year, but it's also a time when sidewalks become crowded with trees that are being sold. So, I'm wondering if the administration is going to build off of Open Streets and Open Streets Restaurants to create some sort of open streets Christmas plan, so the tree sellers can use curbside spaces instead of crowded sidewalks? 

Mayor: Well, it's an interesting idea, Gersh. I'll tell you in my personal experience, is that the way it's been set up over the years with folks selling Christmas trees has worked pretty well in New York City and, you know, it's kind of part of the magic of the season, but we'll certainly look to see if there's any ways we need additional space. You know, I think you're right, the way you opened up, we have found, and I will give you credit. You and others were urging this from the beginning that we've been able to really innovate and have some wonderful new experiences by using our public spaces differently. So that's something I think we're going to keep looking at, keep evolving all the time. I don't know if we need it immediately with the Christmas trees, but it's something we'll look at it right away. 

Question: But just a very short little follow-up you mentioned the Rockefeller Center plan, but I didn't hear whether that also included vehicular restrictions as you did last year. You know, I think you closed a couple of lanes up 5th Avenue and some of the side streets to cars. Is that part of the plan or [inaudible] I just didn't hear it? 

Mayor: Yeah, no, you didn't hear it because I didn't mention it. I know there will be – well, let me say it carefully. What I understand at this moment, our team will confirm it to you today, is that 49th and 50th Streets between 5th and 6th Avenues will be closed off like last year, and there will be some lane closures as well, but – in terms of the avenues. But the idea here, again, different from last year is to not allow crowding. So that's where I have to get a fuller update on how it's being approached because we have a reservation system to see the tree, small groups, socially distanced, different reality, and we do not want to see a bunch of crowds forming. So I think that's going to affect how the streets have to be handled, but we'll get you that update today. 

Moderator: We have time for two more— 

Mayor: No, you still have Rich out there.  

Moderator: We're still working to get Rich back. 

Mayor: We have time for three more of you get Rich, okay. 

Moderator: Gloria from NY1. 

Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask you a question specifically about schools in Staten Island. We just want to get some clarity – Staten Island and parts of Harlem, if I'm not mistaken, that currently have schools that fall into the orange zone. So with schools opening next week is there a plan to get those schools to test out of the zone or what happens to neighborhoods that are in these zones in terms of schools going back? 

Mayor: That's an important, yeah, important question. Thank you, Gloria. Look, obviously the vast majority of New York City right now is not in an orange or red zone. So, for the vast majority of neighborhoods, what we announced the timing for the schools to open next week, K-to-5, Pre-K, 3-K, and District 75 Special Education. That's moving on the schedules we announced. The only orange zone I believe is right now is in the South Shore Staten Island. Of course, that can change daily. What we're going to do there is make sure that we follow all state guidance. We intend to work to reopen those schools, hopefully as early as next week, but we have to follow all state guidance. We have to focus of course, to make sure every one of those school communities is safe. So that's the plan. That's how we'll proceed from here, and this plan again, that I laid out yesterday is what we intend to use for the duration, all the way to the vaccine. Go ahead, Gloria. 

Question: Okay. Thank you, and my other question is about some of what you said this morning on CNN regarding middle and high school students going back on. I know this has been, you mentioned this throughout the morning, but you seem to suggest that plan is still in the works. What is the expectation here and could high school and middle school students really be looking at, perhaps not going back to in-person until this year is over with all the holidays and everything else that's going on— 

Mayor: Yeah, at this moment. That's, that's what I see that the focus will be over the next few weeks, up until the Christmas break, getting elementary, District 75 Special Education, and Pre-K, 3-K up and running making that go smoothly with a whole lot more testing, and then you know, we're going to come back after the holidays. We're going to be able to assess the situation, then. We're going to keep building up our testing resources. I want us to move to middle school and high school as soon as we can, but we have to do one step at a time. 

Moderator: Rich Lamb, if you're out there, you'll be our last question, but in the interim, we're going to go to Dana from the New York Times.  

Question: I'm Mr. Mayor.  

Mayor: Hey Dana, how are you? 

Question: I'm okay. Thank you. I'm curious whether you think we're in a second wave or whether we're not, and even how you define a second wave. Yesterday, the Governor said we're not in a second wave. The second wave is a mutated virus. What are your thoughts on sort of our status? 

Mayor: Dana, I think these are fair questions, but everyone who's involved in this work has a right to their own interpretations. What I would say – I was asked this weeks ago, my interpretation is looking at our indicators and particularly looking at all of our indicators that means hospitalizations and going deeper into that, what's happening with ICU admissions, what's happening with the quality of care that we can give people. How many people are we able to save? Certainly, compared to the spring, we're getting actually some very good news from our hospital system, and even though we did see some increase in admissions nowhere near as much as we might have feared to date to date, obviously we're going to watch it every single day. We're also seeing a huge uptick in ICU admissions, and we're seeing much more effective treatments and many more people coming out of the ICU, even if they've been intubated, coming out alive and making it through. So I'm watching all of that and I'm also watching the way New Yorkers are participating and they still are. I mean, the mask usage has been very strong. People have been going out and getting tested in record numbers. We need them to keep doing that. So I think a second wave is still bearing down on us, but I think we're fighting it back, and the question is, can we marshal our forces and get everyone involved and keep fighting it back? Go ahead, Dana. 

Question: Thanks, and secondly, as I'm sure you're aware at the Los Angeles has imposed some very severe restrictions, I'm curious how likely you think it will be that New York City will enter some sort of similar lockdown in the coming months. 

Mayor: Look, obviously, as I've said, many times, that's the state's decision. Ultimately, this is a conversation I've been having with the Governor in recent days, but I think we have a chance here still with lots of testing, with lots of precautions, lots of masks wearing, we have a chance still to avert some of what we've seen in other parts of the country in terms of restrictions. But we have to recognize that if we don't beat back this wave where it could very well end up with them. So I don't have exact odds for you at this moment. We know it is something that may end up happening. We know we have to be ready for it. But so far again, I want to accent the positive. The fact that folks are getting tested. The fact that max usage is high. The fact that our hospitals are doing as well as they are, these are all really important indicators of how we're faring. 

Moderator: For our last question we'll go to Rich from WCBS Radio. 

Question: Mr. Mayor, I apologize. I lost the feed for a few minutes, so I hope I'm not repeating somebody else's question. But I'm just wondering if there's, you know, given the sort of partial opening you're going to do on December 7th on the schools, is there any scenario under which you would again, closed the whole system or is it purely going to be a school by school, or grade by grade? 

Mayor: No, Rich. It's a very good question and it's not repetitive because I want to really make it clear to people. The Chancellor and I have worked on this with our teams and with the health leadership. This approach is what we want to use for the duration. Unlike in August, September, when we came up with the original approach, you know, then we did not know what the specific reality in the schools would be until we took all of our plans and put them into action. We were confident we could keep people safe but it's been amazing. It's been extraordinary how safe our schools have been, and that's because of all those layers upon layers of health and safety measures and that situation room – key, key part of the equation. That's been really great at making sure each school handled any case it had really quickly and effectively. 

So, we know that schools can be kept very, very safe. We also know of course, how much parents want kids back in school and how much kids need it. So, what we worked to do was come up with a new approach. We needed to reset the equation to something new and sustainable. This approach, now with more testing, with mandatory consent forms, we believe we can sustain and take it through to the point when we have a vaccine, and then as I said, when we get to that point and when the vaccine has been distributed enough that we really think the situation is much safer than that is also the time when we can bring a lot more kids back and do another opt-in. Go ahead, Rich. 

Question: So, I guess just to follow-up, it sounds to me like you're saying, no, you would not [inaudible] the whole system again?  

Mayor: Right, the goal here – look, Rich, you know, obviously with the coronavirus, the level of unpredictability has been extraordinary. So, I want to be always careful to note that, but our plan is to use this approach all the way through to the vaccine and not have to shut down again.  

All right, everyone, look, it's a perfect note to conclude on because the vaccine is coming and this is I think the most wonderful holiday gift for all of us. We know it's here. The question of course will be how quickly can it be made available in large quantities and how quickly we can distribute? Well, the one place you want to be is in New York City in terms of the ability to distribute a vaccine quickly and get it to people that need it in every corner of the city, our Department of Health is ready, Health + Hospitals is ready. We have an extraordinary apparatus that can get that done. So, we need to get to that point, and again, every single New Yorker can help us get there every time you wear a mask and every time you get tested, every time you take those precautions, you're helping us link up to that moment when the vaccine is widely available. So that positive day is coming. That day when we get to live a much better life is coming. Let's all do what we can do now to get ourselves there safely together. Thanks, everyone.